part 1
Showing posts with label news/politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news/politics. Show all posts
The New Year has begun with Muslims around the world being taught a lesson in the crudity of racial equations: 400 Palestinian lives equal four Israeli lives.
Reeling from having learnt that over a million Iraqi and Afghan lives equal 3,000 American lives, the logic of this racial mathematics is certainly no new thing. After all, the first U.S. Constitution engaged in just such calculations of human worth, and Katrina demonstrated their ongoing effects. But the lesson has the power to shock every time: the images of Palestinian bodies being pulled out of the rubble in Gaza that flood news reports are unbearable to witness.
Surely the lesson cannot be lost on President-elect Barack Obama. That such violence can be waged on so defenseless a population with the support of the Bush Administration is unconscionable. That Obama chooses to remain silent is nothing short of cowardice.
Why is Israel able to continue its deadly assault on Palestinians in Gaza? Because western governments (and their Arab quislings) are willing to allow the carnage to carry on into day three, four, five ... After all, these governments enabled the Israeli blockade of Gaza for the last year and a half, they aided and abetted Israel's criminal meting out of collective punishment to the population for daring to vote for Hamas.
The mainstream media faithfully reported as true every lie told by the Bush Administration about Iraq. Now the media upholds the fiction that Hamas is responsible for the violence waged by the Israelis. Israel probably calculated, and rightly so as has turned out to be the case, that the support it enjoys from these governments could withstand whatever murmurs of regret politicians might be moved to express by anti-Israeli demonstrations in their capitals.
The current Israeli attack is being attributed by some commentators to the machinations of Israeli politicians jockeying for power in the upcoming elections in that country. But there is another consideration that is far more important. Of all the Middle Eastern countries, it is Israel that stood to lose the most with the incoming Presidency of Barack Obama later this month.
Obama promised to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and committed his administration to pursuing diplomatic and political solutions ahead of military ones, not only in Iraq, but also in other conflicts within the region. Iran has been strengthened by the U.S. defeat in Iraq, while Israel was out-maneuvered by Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006.
The writing has been on the wall for the Israelis. The carte blanche given to that country by past U.S. administrations to destabilize the region and pursue its territorial ambitions could no longer be counted upon.
The worldwide enthusiasm for the election of Barack Obama signaled a global desire for change, people around the world are sick of the lies and wars, of the guns and bombs.
A return to the rule of law and an end to the Iraq war is what Obama promised, not only to the American electorate, but to the entire world. The election of the first Black President was an ecstatic moment for people of colour around the world, as it was for those white populations sickened by the racism and violence of American empire-building. People around the world took Obama up on his promise of hope, daring to believe that political change was coming.
Whether President-elect Obama will, or can deliver what he promised is a question people of colour passionately debate with eyes wide open. The hope that a Black man will stand up to the racial calculations that turn the ‘native' into a ‘thing', as Frantz Fanon put it, is palpable among many Muslims.
Obama's public comments that he will welcome pressure from movements for social justice won him some time and a measure of credibility. Surely there is no greater cause for social justice than that of the Palestinian people. And Obama is the first U.S. President who seems to understand the nature of the Palestinian crisis prior to his election, as some who know him, including Ali Abunimah, have pointed out.
In one fell swoop, the Israelis have destroyed whatever momentum Obama might have mobilized for a peaceful resolution of the blockade of Gaza and the siege that Gazans and Hamas have endured. Israel has pushed Obama into a corner with this attack, intensifying the suffering of the Palestinian people and making it all but inevitable that retribution will follow.
A state of war with its neighbours benefits Israel's ambitions in the region, even as it secures support for Zionist lobbies in the western world. During the U.S. election campaign, Vice-President Elect Joe Biden had warned that Obama would be tested early in his presidency. Few expected the challenge to come from a staunch U.S. ally and not from those contesting U.S. power.
Obama's silence on the Gaza crisis grows more curious by the day; it has already cost him much political capital. He appears weak and ineffectual even before his inauguration, one more symbol of hope capitulating to the realpolitik of the ‘special' U.S./Israeli relationship.
As a community organizer in Chicago, Obama understood the racial calculations that shape the everyday lives of Black people in the U.S. With a Kenyan father who was a Muslim, Obama surely understands the consequences of such racial calculations at the international level. Palestinians have paid a heavy price for their resistance to Israeli power. As a law professor, Obama most certainly understands the terrible toll of surviving the crimes of an occupying power bent on genocide.
Unfortunately, Obama is missing in action in this first challenge to his Presidency. The Israelis have used his own words to justify their aggression, and Obama has responded with a deafening silence. This does not bode well for the future.
U.S. and Israeli elites have a long history of buying off quislings to further their interests. Obama needs to act quickly to prove he is not one of them.
Near Nahal Oz, Israel -- The Israeli "all-out war" on Gaza has entered its fourth day leaving more than 363 dead and 1,800 wounded. Israeli troop movements on the Gaza border point to an imminent ground battle in the upcoming few days. On Monday, the Israeli military declared the Gaza border, where tanks, artillery and troops are massing for a possible ground offensive, a closed military zone.
Reporters are being barred by Israel from going into Gaza to cover the carnage. Many have been relegated to reporting from behind Israel's declared military zone, some report from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv and rely on phone dispatches by stringers in the Gaza Strip. The best television coverage I've seen so far comes from Al Jazeera; the most provocative comes from Hezbollah's Al Manar. The Israeli coverage on IBA TV and Ch 10 reminds me of FOX News during the Iraq War with a focus on military strategies, graphics and interviews, with Israeli government spokesmen and generals.
At Beit Agron, the Israeli Government Press Office has not yet issued my "visiting journalist credentials." I went there in person three days ago, thinking they would be processed and delivered to me the same day. As I waited, a steady stream of international reporters applied for and received theirs. The press office liaison hands a British journalist his credentials and smiles, "don't forget to report that we were first attacked by Qassam rockets; they're hitting us we're not hitting them." The office wall is adorned with rockets fired by Hamas on the Israeli town of Sderot. A Korean journalist poses in front of them and does a "stand-up." The polite but evasive liaison keeps making excuses for the delay in issuing my press card. He keeps uncovering additional material that is missing in order to complete my application. He finally tells me that he won't have an answer for me until the next day... I won't bore you with the details, but I am Palestinian American.
I've been zigzagging my way between Israel and the West Bank to avoid IDF checkpoints. When we enter the Palestinian territories where emotions ran high, my Palestinian driver almost has a fit when he finds out that my cameraman is an Israeli. The Israeli strikes on Gaza are being broadcast in grisly detail almost continually on Arab satellite networks. In Bethlehem, an angry mob attacks the fortified Rachel Tomb Compound with stones and set tires on fire, but they are quickly dispersed by the Palestinian Authority riot police. Most West Bank towns have demonstrations and riots, and the Palestinian Authority forces keep them under control while Israeli soldiers watch and fire tear gas from a distance.
"Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is a Zionist dog," screams a demonstrator in Hebron.
Many demonstrators are angry with Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas. They are blaming him of collusion with Israel. They are also angry with Egypt for not opening Rafah's border crossing to let in desperately needed medical supplies and food, which have been all but depleted by the ongoing siege on Gaza.
Two miles away from the Gaza border is the Israeli soldiers' staging area, and foreign journalists gather in anticipation as if it is minutes before the start of the Super Bowl or the start of the Olympics. No one talks about the death and destruction that will follow. IDF spokesmen keep saying that a ground force invasion was a distinct possibility but had not yet been decided upon. As I write helicopters hover overhead, their sound reminds me of a scene from Apocalypse Now.
Jamal Dajani produces the Mosaic Intelligence Report on Link TV
By BOB HERBERT, The New York Times
I’ve got a new year’s resolution and a new slogan for the country. The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years.
Look around you. We have behaved in ways that were incredibly, astonishingly and embarrassingly stupid for much too long. We’ve wrecked the economy and mortgaged the future of generations yet unborn. We don’t even know if we’ll have an automobile industry in the coming years. It’s time to stop the self-destruction.
The slogan? “Invest in the U.S.” By that I mean we should stop squandering the nation’s wealth on unnecessary warfare overseas and mindless consumption here at home and start making sensible investments in the well-being of the American people and the long-term health of the economy.
The mind-boggling stupidity that we’ve indulged in was hammered home by a comment almost casually delivered by, of all people, Bernie Madoff, the mild-mannered creator of what appears to have been a nuclear-powered Ponzi scheme. Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
Somehow, over the past few decades, that has become the American way: to pay for things — from wars to Wall Street bonuses to flat-screen TVs to video games — with money that wasn’t there.
Something for nothing became the order of the day. You want to invade Iraq? Convince yourself that oil revenues out of Baghdad will pay for it. (Meanwhile, carve out another deficit channel in the federal budget.) You want to pump up profits in the financial sector? End the oversight and let the lunatics in the asylum run wild.
For those who wanted a bigger house in a nicer neighborhood, there were mortgages with absurdly easy terms. Credit-card offers came in the mail like confetti, and we used them like there was no tomorrow. For students stunned by the skyrocketing cost of tuition, there were college loans that could last a lifetime.
Money that wasn’t there.
Plenty of people managed their credit wisely. But much of the country, including many of the top government officials and financial titans who were supposed to be guarding the nation’s wealth, acted as if there would never be a day of reckoning, a day when — inevitably — the soaring markets would crash and the bubbles explode.
We were stupid in so many ways. We shipped American jobs overseas by the millions and came up with the fiction that this was a good deal for just about everybody. We could have and should have taken the time and made the effort to think globalization through, to be smarter about it and craft ways to cushion its more harmful effects and to share its benefits more equitably.
We bought into the dopey idea that you could radically cut taxes and still maintain critical government services — and fight two wars to boot!
We were living in a dream world. The general public, and to a great extent the press, closed its eyes to the increasingly complex and baffling machinations of the financial industry, which kept screaming that oversight would ruin everything.
We should have known better. It didn’t require a genius (or even an economics degree) to understand a crucial point that popped up some years ago in a front-page article in The Wall Street Journal: “Markets are a great way to organize economic activity, but they need adult supervision.”
Did Alan Greenspan not understand that? Bob Rubin? Larry Summers?
Now that the reality of a stunning economic downturn has so roughly intervened, we at least have the option of being smarter going forward. There is broad agreement that we have no choice but to go much more deeply into debt to jump-start the economy. But we have tremendous choices as to how we use that debt.
We should use it to invest in the U.S. — in a world-class infrastructure (in its broadest sense) to serve as the platform for a world-class, 21st-century economy, and in a system of education that actually prepares American youngsters to deal successfully with the real world they will be encountering.
We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity, puts large numbers of additional people to work and eases the competitive burden of U.S. corporations.
We need to care for our environment (if long-term survival means anything to us) and get serious about weaning ourselves from foreign oil.
And, finally, we need to start living within our means and get past the nauseating idea that the essence of our culture and the be-all and end-all of the American economy is the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods.
It’s time to stop being stupid.
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