Did I ever write about Uri Gordon? (looks like I did, here) As an Israeli anarchist/peace activist, he has this (among other things, I'm sure) to say about the Gaza bombings:

As Qassam attacks by Hamas or some other Gazan militia inevitably continue throughout the aerial bombardment, the army moves to Stage Two. A column cuts through the middle of the Gaza Strip. Advance positions are taken. Yet the opponent fails to come out fighting. And so the living city is rent asunder, in a war-game with no strategic objective, only to spend ammunition looking for the enemy with zero casualties. As they tunnel their way through living-room walls into Gaza City, Israeli conscripts throw explosives ahead to protect themselves from possible ambushes and mines. Hamas store weapons in mosques and apartment buildings and carry out dozens of punishment beatings on alleged collaborators. Most of the dead are civilians, maybe a third are children. Thousands of homes are destroyed. Ambulances and hospitals are fired upon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the 10 metre-high walls that surround Gaza, Israeli war-resisters meet a brick wall everywhere they turn. Jewish Israelis have a knee-jerk nationalist loyalty when they perceive Israel is being attacked.

The response is essentially: What do these bleeding-heart peaceniks expect us to do when we are attacked? They didn’t protest Hamas’s rockets which have been pounding Israel for the past 8 years whilst the children in Sderot wet their beds in fear (Sderot is the Israeli town next to Gaza which has suffered most from Hamas rocket attacks). What do these Europeans know? They just hate Israel and Israelis and don’t think our lives are worth anything. All the hatred in demonstrations against Israel across Europe, with calls to kill the Jews, just shows me that, if we don’t protect ourselves no one else will come to Israel’s defense.

The fears of annihilation, fed by well-fanned collective trauma, are close to the surface and easily manipulated by politicians and pundits. Dehumanization of the enemy helps explains the simple indifference to the shameless attacks on Palestinians in Gaza by all three major candidates currently competing in coming elections.

In the name of the Jews, the Israeli state drives Palestinians from their lands, imprisons them and punishes them with blundering brutality. The Revisionist policy dreamed up by early fascist Zionists of “Facts on the Ground” is a total success – Israel’s perceived choice today is between Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The Israeli elections are seeing the meteoric rise of Avigdor Leiberman whose party, Israel Beitenu, promises to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel and Leftists of their citizenship if they fail tests of loyalty to the state. This isn’t swear-word fascism – this is the real thing. Still on the table is Kadima’s “realignment” plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from the “Palestinian” side of the segregation barrier. This is a de-facto annexation of 6 per-cent of West Bank territory which, crucially, would leave the in two landlocked islands, an internal enemy non-state which can now be disciplined on the same terms as Gaza.

The last six decades have seen the (at least) fifth ethnic cleansing event to take place on this soil. But so far it has been ethnic cleansing with somewhere to run. In Gaza it was verging on something different. The Gaza war was an intentional threat to commit ethnic cleansing with nowhere to run. The Israeli state was threatening to commit genocide and everybody knew it.

Read more...

Best acceptance speech EVER.

Read more...

Change we can what? pt. 2

Obama's first television interview as president was hosted by Al-Jazeera's Saudi rival, Al-Aribiya. From The Arabist:

...Arabiya is problematic - this is the channel dubbed Hibriya (The Hebrew One) because of its coverage of the Gaza crisis and that generally defends the views of Riyadh, Cairo and other problematic US allies. This confirms that Obama will not, like Bush since 2006, go against Egypt and Saudi on domestic issues and there won’t be a rethink of the US relationship with these. But if you thought that would happen, you’re stupid.

Marc Lynch provides a good context (and the aftermath), and the Angry Arab is, well, angry:

First, if the Bushama really wants to be different from Bush he would have selected AlJazeera and not al-Arabiyya. I mean, CNN does not know that Bush spoke to Arabic TV stations regularly, and Rice was a fixture on Al-Arabiyya TV. And they selected Al-Arabiyya because it is "friendly" to US interests and because on Al-Arabiyya TV US officials get softball questions. If Obama wanted to be different he would have chosen Al-Jazeera because it is the Arabs' favorite channel. Al-Arabiyya is the US government's favorite channel, and the US under Obama does not seem to want to respect the choices and preference of the Arab population.

And Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing in MERIP on "The Continuity of Obama's Change" hit it in half a sentence: "US diplomacy is hamstrung by being more pro-Israel than Israel itself."


Edit 31.01.09 -- Wajahat Ali in the Guardian writes:

In his historic interview with the Al-Arabiya TV channel, President Obama's inclusive and respectful rhetoric towards Muslims attempted an elegant coup de grace to the divisive, insecure and arrogant bravado of the Bush administration. For many Muslims worldwide, however, the sincerity of such honey-coated words will only be legitimized by a responsible and balanced foreign policy that is no longer rooted in selfishness and historical amnesia.

Read more...

Change we can what?

From the Foreign Policy section of the "Agenda" header on the official White House website:

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Obama and Biden will make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a key diplomatic priority from day one. They will make a sustained push -- working with Israelis and Palestinians -- to achieve the goal of two states, a Jewish state in Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security.

...

Ensure a Strong U.S.-Israel Partnership: Barack Obama and Joe Biden strongly support the U.S.-Israel relationship, and believe that our first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel, America's strongest ally in the region. They support this closeness, and have stated that the United States will never distance itself from Israel.

Support Israel's Right to Self Defense: During the July 2006 Lebanon war, Barack Obama stood up strongly for Israel's right to defend itself from Hezbollah raids and rocket attacks, cosponsoring a Senate resolution against Iran and Syria's involvement in the war, and insisting that Israel should not be pressured into a ceasefire that did not deal with the threat of Hezbollah missiles. He and Joe Biden believe strongly in Israel's right to protect its citizens.

Support Foreign Assistance to Israel: Barack Obama and Joe Biden have consistently supported foreign assistance to Israel. They defend and support the annual foreign aid package that involves both military and economic assistance to Israel and have advocated increased foreign aid budgets to ensure that these funding priorities are met. They have called for continuing U.S. cooperation with Israel in the development of missile defense systems.

No mention of Palestinians? No mention of the basic human rights that Gazans under Israeli occupation live without day after day? The near total impunity with which Israelis maim and kill Palestinian children? The economic war waged on Gaza's citizens that denies them even the ability to provide their families with daily bread? And then to read this hypocritical bullshit on the Iraq page:

President Obama and Vice President Biden believe that America has both a moral obligation and a responsibility for security that demands we confront Iraq’s humanitarian crisis -- more than five million Iraqis are refugees or are displaced inside their own country. Obama and Biden will form an international working group to address this crisis. They will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find sanctuary. Obama and Biden will also work with Iraqi authorities and the international community to hold accountable the perpetrators of potential war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. They will reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq.

Does America have a moral obligation and responsibility for Gaza's humanitarian crisis? After all, we politically green-light any attack against the Palestinians in the name of Israeli 'self defense.' But maybe our blank-check economic aid that helps fund the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the blockade of Gaza (including, until a couple of days ago, humanitarian relief) is to blame? Or is it because our military assistance and privelleged defense contracts provide the Apache helicopters, bunker-buster missiles, and white phosphorous bombs (made in Arkansas) that have devastated Gaza's infrastructure and killed 1300 people? God knows that Palestinian internal refugees won't find sactuary inside their own country (or how should I phrase that?) and that Israeli perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide won't be held to shit. Would Obama or Biden ever even consider thinking about the possibility of entertaining the notion of intervening militarily to suppress potential genocidal violence against the Palestinians?

Read more...

Some of you may read Juan Cole's recent post on the uselessness of protests, cardboard signs, and marches in front of embassies and state capitals to affect political decisions. And then you'll think to yourself, 'golly, didn't the Greenhorn just march in OKC? What was he hoping to accomplish with that?' Well, not much really. Every angst-filled leftist college kid should take to the streets at some point in their academic career, right? I just wanted to see it in action, experience the discontent, nay, anger of the Muslim, Arab-American, anti-Zionist, peace camp, etc., communities in Oklahoma. Plus, solidarity never hurt anyone, and if a silly march of 200 causes some Israel-fanatic Okie to reconsider what is happening in Gaza as perhaps constituting an international war crime or a serious human injustice, then I'd say it was worthwhile.

Read more...

Must read: Avi Shlaim, "How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe"

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

Read more...

The Greenhorn mans the ramparts

rally_protest_peace vigil for Gaza
sponsored by CAIR
Oklahoma state capital, OKC
5 January 2009



















































































































video: here

Read more...

A new site on the Gaza invasion has just been launched: Gaza Siege. Breaking news, research reports, backgrounders, the whole thing. Go there now.

Read more...

Gaza, pt. 3 -- The Jordanian position

As Israel's ground offensive into Gaza begins, Electronic Intifada has published a collection of images from protests around the world. The photo to the right is of a demonstration in Amman on December 31st. My one regret about this past summer is that I never got to experience a protest/demonstration (the pinnacle, of course, being tear-gassed in the West Bank), though the closest I got was the last ten minutes of a Palestinian hip-hop concert on July 4.

Speaking of Jordan, Juan Cole posted several summaries of editorials from Arabic Jordanian newspapers. Here's one that especially caught my attention:

Fahd al-Khitan also writes an article in Al-Arab al-Yawm..."in light of what is happening in Gaza, Arab moderates should stop marketing illusions about peace." He says that Jordan has done its utmost on the political and human level to declare solidarity with Gaza and condemn the Israeli actions. He adds:"We should conduct a profound review of the political discourse by rehabilitating a previous position, which the state had adopted; namely, supporting the right of the Palestinian people to resisting the occupation and not being satisfied by saying that negotiations are the only way for achieving peace because this path has failed to achieve anything since the peace process was launched 17 years ago. This position should be translated into direct and public relations with the Palestinian resistance movements, alongside continuing official relations with the Palestinian Authority" . . .

An editorial over at 7iber by Jordanian Observer makes a case against annulling the treaty.

We are a country of 5 million, we have very few resources, and to put it simply and clearly, there’s no way in hell we can win a war against Israel. The reason Jordan has remained quite a safe country (considering the fact that we live in a war zone), is not exactly a miracle. It’s because we’ve accepted the presence of the Jewish nation as a fact and let’s face it, it’s not going to go away anytime soon, and if you think otherwise, you are either impacted by your emotions, or grossly overestimate the abilities of the very country you’re criticizing.

And this is why I can’t support the riots that have been breaking out all over the place. I couldn’t be more angry about what’s happening, but I frankly think you’re a hypocrite if you tell me you’re willing to sacrifice your freedom and safety to go into a battle, to go into a war, that you KNOW there’s no way you can win. I like the fact that I live in a safe, secure country, where I can go about my daily life without fear of having my house brought down over my head.

What's equally interesting and revealing are some of the comments on that particular post.

Jordan was always meant to be a recpeticale for expelled Palestinians. It’s sort of like Gaza. israel never wanted Jordan or Gaza. To them, it’s one big blob of human misery, a vast refugee camps of expelled Palestinians in the 1948 and 67 wars. Jordan to them is the same. No reason to invade. No oil, no water, no natural resources of significance, millions of refugees….let me repeat…millions of refugees. Why in the world would Israel want to occupy a land that’s full of expelled Palestinians.
.....

"– It’s because we’ve accepted the presence of the Jewish nation as a fact and let’s face it"

No we did not. again, stop putting words in our mouths. You accepted. The regime accepted it. A rigged Parliament with a rigged election accepted it. Do a referendum today on the peace treaty on on the presence of a racially driven state next to us and you will find the overwhelming majority of Jordanians are against it inasmuch as every decent self-respecting human being was against Apartheid South Africa and White Rhodesia. There is a difference between accepting and being forced to deal with a racist colonialist Israel.

And how in the world do you accept to live next to a state that pisses allover Arabs. Have you no dignity? What sort of peace treaty creates a national security threat for one country, Jordan, while reliving another, Israel, from its ethical and legal responsibility? I am talking about the Palestinian refugees. Fact is, any peace treaty that does not abide by international laws is null and void. Do you think the world would have honored a peace treaty between Whites and neighboring Black African countries whereby they are obliged to take in expelled South African Blacks or suffer an invasion form White South Africa?

And one more, from ArabianMonkeyTales:

Flag burning, calling for cutting off relations - ie communication, and sporadic protesting without true activism is useless to everyone. Jordanian officials and any Arab official who care about the Palestinians and peace in general need to truly get their act together and step up, stand for something and sincerely and diligently take action towards it.... every waking moment of their life until resolution is achieved.

The burning of the Israeli flag in our parliament achieves nothing other than an outburst of emotion. What a farce this kind of action is. Calling to cancel the Jordanian-Israeli peace agreement is an even bigger joke. Wanting to expel the Israeli ambassador solves nothing. That is not diplomacy, and it's certainly not a conversation for peace. Then what? Does anyone calling for such ridicule ever ask that? Do they stop to imagine what's next after they kick up a seasonal tantrum?

Read more...

Don't understand what the fuss in the Holy Land is all about? Lawrence of Cyberia offers a simple but eloquent analogy of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Read more...

Gaza, pt. 2

Robert Fist, "Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony":

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.

Read more...

Gaza, pt. 1

The latest edition of Middle East Report Online has an editorial piece on the Gaza campaign, situating the bombings into the context(s) of the ceasefire agreement, Israeli elections, Egyptian complicity, Palestinian infighting, international law, Obama's politics of change, and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process:

In the meantime, the Israeli attack prepares the political battlefield in anticipation of an Obama administration-led peace process. Assuming that Obama’s effort follows the phased approach of Clinton, and continues to freeze out Hamas, Israel is protected from the concessions of a comprehensive settlement. As long as Gaza remains separated from the West Bank, and the Hamas-Fatah divide festers, no peace process can gain traction. This is true regardless of which party wins the upcoming Israeli elections, for Israel will be able to claim that the Palestinians have no single political address, and Hamas will have every motivation to sabotage any attempt to strike a deal with Mahmoud Abbas alone. The siege of Gaza would then stretch on indefinitely, with Hamas duly weakened.

Another path is possible, of course. Obama could quietly drop US rejection of the 2006 Palestinian election results, and work to help the Palestinians form a national unity government. As the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation is advocating, he could call the siege of Gaza by its rightful name -- collective punishment -- and demand that it cease. He could throw the weight of Washington behind Security Council action toward that end, and toward a genuine halt to settlement and separation wall construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He could enforce the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, and terminate US supply to Israel of F-16s and Apache helicopters, paid for with US military aid dollars, because they have been used to harm civilians in the attack on Gaza. The measure of Barack Obama will be how far, if at all, he travels toward such a dramatic transformation of US policy on the question of Palestine.

Is it true that “change is coming” when Obama enters the White House? We hope so. Yet the conventional pro-Israel tilt of his campaign indicates otherwise, as does the composition of his foreign policy crew. Obama appears poised to content himself with more energetic US engagement in the sort of flawed negotiations of the Clinton years, the sort that put ending the occupation last, as if the developments of the Bush years had not rendered that approach utterly untenable.

Sara Roy (probably the foremost authority on Gaza in the US academy, and one of my main sources for thesis research) writes in the London Review of Books on the effects of Israel's siege of Gaza during the ceasefire.

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

For more on the November siege, see Jonathan Cook's "The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza," and a couple of links I posted around that time (here and here).

Read more...

Season's greetings from Jordan

*JOYEUX NOEL*
wishing 4 u the happiness and 2 ur family :-)

- Jumana

Read more...

MAYBE the funniest thing on the internet right now.

Read more...

Here's what a pro-Israel bar none theology gets you...

From CommonDreams.org (nods to Dr. Swedenburg):

Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live.

Read more...

Conflicts and their causes (Economist)

Read more...

The Terminator Watch feature has been updated: new T:TSCC and T:S trailers for your viewing pleasure.

Read more...

LHC, pt. 3

Ever wondered what would happen if you were stuck inside the LHC when the beam was fired? Wonder no more:

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski's skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned - as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don't know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Here's a handy New York Times interactive feature on exactly what the LHC does and what it's looking for.

For citizens against the LHC, take action here! Run By Walter L. Wagner, a biologist-turned-physicist who protested the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in New York when it went online back around the turn of the century.

Possible doomsday scenarios created by the LHC (which Wagner also thought would have been the outcome of the RHIC's experiements) as outlined by the folks at Neatorama:

Micro black hole: Basically it's a region in space where gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape. Planet-eating black holes are created when massive stars collapse on itself (and by massive, we mean massive - even our Sun isn't big enough to create a black hole if it collapsed. You'd need 10 times the mass of the Sun.)

There is a remote possibility that micro black holes can be created in the collisions at the LHC. These black holes are small: about 10^-35 m across (the so-called Planck Length) and puny in mass (less than a speck of dust). These black holes would evaporate in 10^-42 seconds in a blast of Hawking radiation. Even black holes with the mass of Mt. Everest would have a radius of about 10^-15 m across. It would have trouble "eating" a proton, much less the entire planet. (Source: Pickover, C. (1997) Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide)

Strangelets: These are strange matters that, like the Ice-nine in Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, would turn all matters it touched into strange matters and eventually all of the planet will be transmuted into strangelets.

The problem with strangelet doomsday scenario, besides being very bizarre, is that no one has ever seen a strangelet. It remains a hypothetical particle. Previous particle accelerators that operated at lower energy than the LHC were actually better candidates to producing strangelets, and so far, we're still here.

Magnetic monopoles: These are hypothetical particles with a single magnetic charge (hence the name) - either a north pole or a south pole, but not both. Magnetic monopoles "eat proton."

Actually, physicists have been looking for magnetic monopoles for a long time - and so far they've never found it. By calculations, magnetic monopoles are actually too heavy to be produced at the LHC.

Vacuum bubble: It is actually a very interesting idea in quantum field theory. It states that life, the universe and everything aren't the most stable configuration possible. Perturbations caused by the LHC could tip it into the more stable state (called the vacuum bubble) and all of us "pop" out of existence.

On an unrelated SkyNet-watch note, "[s]cientists have created the first 'humanoid' robot that can mimic the facial expressions and lip movements of a human being" just by watching its subject. HH! Start saving for that M4 SOPMOD now, though jump at the chance to pick up an M-14 with the ol' 7.62mm rounds -- the increased stopping power should prove useful.

Read more...

Rising food prices are upping the cost of sheep for slaughter during the Eid season in Jordan. From the Jordan Times:

Concluding the pilgrimage and commemorating Abraham's willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son, the purchase and slaughtering of sheep and other livestock is a vital aspect to the holiday feast, the most important in the Muslim calendar.

But in light of rising fodder prices in addition to increased prices of other basic commodities, traders said citizens have been more hesitant to make purchases.

With the youngest and lightest Jordanian-raised lamb, around 25kg, being sold for JD90, nearly the price of a full 60kg sheep a year ago, traders and customers alike expect to have a lighter than normal holiday.

I wrote about this over the summer. I've provided a link to that post for your convenience.

With fuel prices on the way down, why are basic commodity prices still on the way up? Will investigate and report back soon.

Read more...

Read more...