The Ostrich Brief: Oil and the Left
February 21, 2007
If there is one thing the Left is good at, it is its capacity to explain away any issue in the world using “oil”. On the leadup to the Iraq war I wrote elsewhere:
A carefully orchestrated media campaign set the terms of the debate – WMD; regime change; and democracy promotion. The conspicuous absence of oil in the mainstream discourse allowed plenty of room for non-conformist posturing; to triumphantly expose this egregious oversight without having to identify the sources of policy. “No blood for oil” read the popular slogan – this was a war for the control of Iraqi oil.
While the prognosis is accurate, the provenance of the policy is invariably misplaced. Any policy bearing on oil is identified, by default, with Big Oil. That there was no evidence that the industry lobbied for the war was of little significance. With its tendency to frame analysis in economic terms alone, the antiwar movement entirely overlooked alternative motivations for the war. In most instances this was deliberate, since, with the neocon vanguard of the Israel lobby beating the war drums, few wanted their reputations stained by incurring the reflexive charge of anti-Semitism that invariably accompanies mention of Israeli involvement. Instead, most reached for sanitised meta-theory: “It’s imperialism, stupid”, read one explanation. True, once again; but insufficient. Imperialism is an abstract notion; mere structure – it requires agency for its imposition.
This left many perplexed: means were confused for ends (oil); and structure for agency (imperialism). A potentially powerful movement was thus reduced to a caricature of itself with empty slogans and cliché-ridden analysis that made the job all the more easier for the ruling elite. The antiwar movement ensured its own irrelevance.
At a moment when Douglas Feith’s role in manufacturing the case for the war has been exposed, even by the Pentagon itself, there is no excuse for the Left not to own up to its mistakes. But here comes a new war, and once again, Israel and its powerfuly lobby in the United States are the only forces urging it on. Clearly the Left couldn’t be so blind that it would let the neocon puppet masters get away with another war for Israel?
Here is Noam Chomsky, the intellectual stalwart of the antiwar movement:
But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world’s energy resources…That’s been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources…Control is the source of strategic power…And that’s been understood as far back as George Kennan and the early post-war days when he pointed out that if the United States controls Middle East resources it’ll have veto power over its industrial rivals…So Iran is a different situation. It’s part of the major energy system of the world.
And then we have this exchange on Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that is related to this current intensification of focus on Iran, the possibility of a US strike on Iran?
ANTONIA JUHASZ: Oh, most certainly. You know, to be clear, oil is about a lot of things. Oil is about profit, and it’s about the money that the oil interests in the United States, which of course also include members of the Bush administration, can get.
For all his priceless contributions to our understanding of power and its abuses, Noam Chomsky has one blindspot which unfortunately can no longer be overlooked. While his book The Fateful Triangle remains the most comprehensive account of Israeli crimes, he conveniently shifts all the blame to the United States. In Chomsky’s summation it is the United States that makes Israel — its proxy and strategic asset (incidentally, this view is shared by the leading Israeli lobby groups AIPAC, ADL, CPMJAO, AJC etc) – commit all its crimes. In order to sustain this argument, Chomsky has to then deny the power of the Israel lobby in the United States. With Israel and its lobby as the only actors pushing for the current escalation against Iran, Chomsky is left with the unenviable task of putting together an argument, however tortuous, so long as it doesn’t include Israel in the role of instigator.
Chomsky is right to suggest that Iraq would not have been invaded, had its primary export been “lettuce and pickles”; he is wrong, however, when he suggests that the war is merely a continuation of long standing policy. The evidence he adduces is a six-decade-old statement by the State Department that recognized Middle-East oil as a “stupendous source of strategic power” and “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”. The only recent example he offers is a post-invasion quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski asserting the strategic importance of Iraqi oil. For this precise reason, in fact, Brzezinski opposed the war which he has referred to as “a historic, strategic, and moral calamity…driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris” – as did prominent oil-men, such as James Baker, Bush Sr., and James Carroll (Shell). The reasons Chomsky offers in support of his argument were equally valid in 1991, yet he doesn’t explain why Bush Sr., and Baker did not occupy Iraq. In the case of Iran, however, his boilerplate explanation sounds downright ridiculous.
The control of Iraqi oil and its subsequent privatization is a neocon idea conceived at the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The aim, articulated first in a Project for the New American Century policy document, was to flood the market with cheap Iraqi oil in order to break the OPEC monopoly – and, “to bring down the lynchpin of Arab power, Saudi Arabia”. Big Oil, on the other hand, has pragmatic interests; it has no qualms about dealing with authoritarian regimes so long as it ensures stable access. Access, rather than control being its priority, Big Oil preferred regime change; it supported the war insofar as it allowed it the opportunity to snatch lucrative contracts back from its Russian, French and Chinese competitors.
On Iran and Iraq, to put it mildly, its time the Left moved beyond Chomsky, if its is to be effective.
Antonia Juhasz on the other hand is a third rate analyst, whose only claim to fame is that she does oil better than anyone else. For that, the Left loves her. If you are constipated, rest assure she’ll discover exactly how Oil or a “big corporation” are manipulating your bowels — anything, so long as it doesn’t point to the real — and obvious — cause of the problem. She made the rounds of all Left-wing media with her vacuous interpretation of the ISG document, ensuring that a potentially useful rift in the elite consensus remained unexploited. In the case of Iran, it would seem, she is equally keen to divert attention from the real source of present policy: Israel, its Lobby, and its neocon vanguard.
Divine Tragedy: Live and Blood
February 21, 2007
Back in ’99 while I was studying in Peshawar, our department at the University would get frequent visitors from the nearby Thelessimia hospital looking for blood donors. One friend, Fasi Zaka, would always ensure that someone was there to donate. There came a time, when literally every person had donated, and in the end, even I had to overcome my irrationally exaggerated fear of needles (from a history of unending childhood illnesses) and donate. After that I made a point of donating blood atleast once every four months for as long as I stayed in the city. It was an incident surrounding one of these donations, that left me profoundly upset for a long time.
One day at the university I saw a man sitting near the cafeteria carrying a child of about 9 or 10. When I passed by a few hours later, I noticed that the man and the boy were still there. When I asked what brought them there, I discovered that the kid had cancer of the bone marrow and needed an immediate blood transfusion. It is only then that I noticed that the kid also had severe birth defects; he only had one leg, he didn’t have a nose, and his lips were severely deformed.
I asked them to come with me, and we took a cab to the hosptical. I had to struggle not to choke up during the ride; I was so saddened by the kids condition. While I was donating blood, I noticed that the kid was watching a cricket game on TV with such interest that it made me ponder the vagaries of providence that bestow health and well being in such an indiscriminate manner. As if the loss of his anatomically deficient existence were not enough, he now had a terminal illness to contend with — all cruelly juxtaposed with a remarkably alert mind.
Noticing the kids obvious interest in sport, I put my tennis cap on his hat as I was leaving. His last act only aggravated my mental turmoil further: I was moved by the dignity with which he politely declined to accept a gift from a stranger. I shook his hand, and said something to the effect of “a good sporstman never goes into the field without his cap on” and put it back on his head. He gave me a shy smile as I left.
The brave kid must have passed away by now, and if there is a better world out there, I can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. It is still hard for me to recall that moment with equanimity. [While I can't speculate on the cause of this child's deformities, in Iraq, they are very common now due to the extensive use of Depleted Uranium munitions -- especially in the South -- as well as in Bosnia and Kosovo due to the NATO bombings]
Today I was talking my good friend Ann, and we ended up talking about music and our favorite vocalists, which in my case included Ed Kowalczyk of Live. To introduce her to their music I found The Dolphin’s Cry on YouTube, and it immediately reminded me of that incident, since I had returned home that day to play that Live record, The Distance to Here, from which the song originates, over and over in order to overcome the angst.
Here are two songs from the brilliant record. The song that I liked the best is only available with an oddly incongruous Japanese animation video, so I am not posting it here. It is called The Distance, and if you would like to hear it, you can go here, but make sure you keep your eyes shut, since the silly video kills the mystique.
Literary Genres In the Service of Empire
February 20, 2007
A while back, I had posted an excellent interview with Hamid Dabashi (based on one of his articles) on the role of comprador intellectuals in furnishing the ideological pretexts for neocolonial domination. A couple of days back, the Independent revealed that Norma Khouri, authhor of a sensational fake memoir that turned into a bestseller, is the subject of a new film:
She duped the literary world into believing that she fled Jordan with a fatwa on her head after her best friend was murdered in an “honour killing”. Now Norma Khouri is the star of a film that tries to help her to clear her name, but ends up painting her as a compulsive liar.
Khouri’s “memoir”, Forbidden Love, published in 2003, sold half a million copies in 15 countries. The book, which recounts the fatal love affair between her Muslim friend Dalia and a Christian army officer, tapped into the apparently unquenchable appetite for “confessional” autobiographies.
But, like increasing numbers of books in that genre, her story turned out to be fabricated. Khouri, far from being a Jordanian refugee, had lived in Chicago since the age of three and had an American passport. She was not a virgin, as she claimed; she was married with two children. And Khouri never had a friend called Dalia who was murdered by her father.
Ludicrous as it is, this type of nonsense nevertheless serves a purpose in the Anglophone world and Europe: It is used to assert the cultural superiority of the “West” which rationalizes the “civilizing missions” in the form of war and conquest. Just the aforementioned fraud was cited by three different authors to bolster their Islamophobic screeds: Phyllis Chesler, in The New Anti-Semitism (p.174); John U. Hanna in Cancer in America: The Enemy Within–The Latent Islamic Invasion Into the New World and Its Adverse Affect on America, (p.96) and Seth Mydans in Amor fatal en el Islam: Norma Khouri relata en un libro el drama y la constante amenaza de muerte a las mujeres musulmanas, (Epoca, February 28 2003).
There are other genres, like Fiction, which are also used in this culture war for historical engineering. Hamid Dabashi has already dealt with Reading Lolita in Tehran, but that is only one in a series of similar nonsense masquerading is literature. Others include Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter; Jean Sasson’s plagiarized hoax, Princess; Iran-Contra Felon, Oliver North’s The Assassins; and Joel Rosenberg’s Last Jihad are only a few that come to mind [I'll add more later, when I think of others].
Sick of their cause being appropriated by native informers and official propagandist’s, Iranian feminists have issued this riposte: [Thanks Homeyra]
A Genre in the Service of Empire: An Iranian Feminist Critique of Diasporic Memoirs
In a time of pending war against Iran, after the catastrophic consequences of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (with more than 655,000 deaths in Iraq alone), a particularly lucrative industry of Iranian and Muslim women’s memoirs has mushroomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. These women’s memoirs have assumed center-stage in appropriating the legitimate cause of women’s rights and placing it squarely in the service of Empire building projects, disguised under the rhetoric of the “war on terror.”
As feminist scholars of Iran and its diaspora, we suggest that these memoirs and their authors must be understood not only in terms of the politics of reception in the United States but also in terms of the U.S. imperialistic project that is informed by the historical Euro-American colonial discourses of civilization. At a time when the neo-colonial and imperialistic projects seek to build a case for military attack or “regime change” in Iran, we ask, how are these memoirs complicit with these projects?
We identify this memoir genre as a part of industries of knowledge-production that reinforce and fuel the gendered and raced context of global capitalist relations, where the binarized notions of “freedom” and “progress” in the “West” are juxtoposed to “backwardness” and “barbarism” in Iran and in the rest of the Muslim world. Identified as an authentic and authoritative site where the “silenced” Iranian woman finally finds a voice with which to speak, these memoirs reproduce reductive but familiar narratives which pin the constructed “Third-world woman” against her male counterpart while setting the stage for what is presumed to be her salvation.
In this context, the patronizing language of women’s rights as human rights presumes and actively constructs the category of the oppressed “traditional” Iranian woman, often unaware of her own imprisonment by Islam and patriarchy. The “sombre” woman, in this narrative, must be trained to realize her rights as an individual, imagined as a “modern woman” who embodies an idealized middle class norm of Euro-American consumption.
Once the favored tale of “civilizing missions”, the contemporary rescue fantasy now has a new twist. Rather than being spoken for by ambassadors of “civilization”, Iranian women are able to speak for themselves courtesy of international publishing houses. Women selected according to the resonance of their experience within this narrative become the mouthpiece for the “authentic” Iranian experience, making the current construction of the “rescue fantasy” more insidious than ever.
These memoirs have proved widely popular in the mass market, while the mainstream media legitimizes their authors as “Iran experts” and “women’s rights activists,” thus ignoring the well-informed and critical Iranian feminist scholarship in Iran and its diaspora. In fact, we are not the first to challenge the construction and mobilization of gendered “victims” in furthering imperialistic projects. We draw from a rich body of feminist scholarship such as those of Roxana Bahramitash, Inderpal Grewal, bell hooks, Minoo Moallem, Negar Mottahedeh, Ella Shohat, and Gayatri Spivak to call for a critical analysis of women’s participation in these industries and question the taken-for-granted notions of civilization, terror, freedom, democracy, and fundamentalism. We ask why this critical scholarship is ignored, while others have been tokenized and granted generous media coverage?
As an example, we call attention to the way that Hamid Dabashi’s astute critique of the memoir genre, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire” (al-Ahram, 1 – 7 June 2006, Issue No. 797), was maliciously attacked and his arguments deliberately distorted by North American neoconservative outlets as an assault on Iranian women’s struggle for autonomy, freedom and democracy. That Dabashi’s critique was singled out while the works of women feminist scholars were ignored is a telling example of the sexist assumptions and essentialist gender and racial binaries that underpin the genre’s popularity. Assuming a monolithic category of “woman,” such binaries grant authenticity of voice to certain women such as Azar Nafisi, who are assumed to represent all “Iranian women,” while denying legitimacy to Hamid Dabashi, who becomes the ideal type of the “misogynistic Middle Eastern man.” Furthermore, by dividing the world into binaries of East and West and assuming an inherent notion of Iranian-ness, both the promoters of this genre and nationalist elites tokenize certain Iranian writers and make them the representatives of a homogenously imagined Iranian people and culture.
We deplore the marginalization of critical engagements with this genre and declare that the version of the romanticized and Orientalist portrayal of Iranian history and women’s struggle depicted in the recent memoir industry is not only a gross distortion and undermining of Iranian women’s active participation in political and cultural spheres, but it also deliberately represses working class and rural women’s hardships, hopes, desires, and aspirations.
In today’s Iran, women are at the forefront of literacy, educational, artistic, journalistic, and legal advancements. In a social, literary, and political tradition of resistance that extends from generations of peasant and working class women down to Tahereh Qorrat al-Ayn, Shirin Ebadi, Shams Kasma’i, and Forough Farrokhzad, Iranian women continue to struggle for their dignity and civil rights. Iranian women took two monarchic dynasties to task and they now hold the Islamic Republic responsible to address their demands. Any military or economic sanctions against Iran will only set Iranian women back in their achievements, and cause nothing but hardship and tragedy (as disastrously evident in Iraq today).
We are firm believers that historically, any militarist mobilizations, nationalist or imperial have been to the detriment of Iranian women’s lives and their struggles against misogynistic laws as well as their aspirations for welfare and democracy. We object to militarism imposed by “local” and diasporic nationalists, religious or secular fundamentalists, or neo-colonialists and imperialists. We consider any bullet fired at the direction of Iran, or any other country, targeted against the historical struggle for freedom, equality, dignity, and democracy.
A longer version of this article will soon be available at www.diasporawatch.com
Niki Akhavan, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA
Golbarg Bashi, Bristol University, UK
Mana Kia, Harvard University, USA
Sima Shakhsari, Stanford University, USA
The Cost of Free Speech: Hedges Speaking Truth to Power
February 20, 2007
One of the virtues the United States frequently prides itself on is the purported freedom of speech one enjoys within its borders. While the constitution guarantees this freedom, it finds little use in the mainstream of American politics and media. In fact, the freedom is only utilized when one’s views are in alignment with the reigning orthodoxy. If the same freedom is used to challenge the established views, one soon discovers that free speech has associated costs — meaning, it is not free. The following incident illustrates this well.
Chris Hedges is the Pulitzer prize winning war correspondent for the New York Times who is one of the rare individuals who put principles before institutional or fraternal affiliations. On May 20, shortly after Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” stunt marking the “end” of the Iraq war, Hedges was invited to deliver the commencement speech at Rockford College. Hedges chose to devote his speech to the horrors unfolding in Iraq, bringing to bear his experiences from the more than fifty wars he has covered in different corners of the globe, to highlight its human cost and to warn against such military adventurism. Here is how the gathered crowd of parents and graduates responded:
Hedges is the author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Losing Moses on the Freeway – his latest book is American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. You can hear an interview with him on his new book on yesterday’s Democracy Now!
Lifting the Veil on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
February 20, 2007
Every once in a while, a native informer comes along who is willing to affirm his or her own inferiority in order to help the West rationalize its neocolonial grip on the South. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the latest, and one of the more ambitious among them. This 38-year-old Dutch citizen of Somali origin has built a career on her criticisms of Islam, the religion she renounced after the 9/11, for its “brutality”. Through her unrestrained attacks on Islam, her close friendship with far-right Dutch politican Pim Fortuyn and rabid xenophobia, she rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment all the way into the Parliament [on a ticket from the right-wing People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)] only to leave for the United States after an uproar over lies she had told to obtain asylum. Presently, she works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. In 2005, Time magazine named Hirsi Ali as one of its 100 Most Influential People of the World.
As her new book, Infidel, scales the charts to reach the New York Times Bestseller list, let us look at who this intrepid feminist really is.
Inaction is a Weapon of Mass Destruction
February 20, 2007
Mass Destruction (No Roots)
by Faithless
Whether long range weapon or suicide bomber
Wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether you’re Soaraway Sun or BBC 1
Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruct
You coulda Caucasian or a poor Asian
Racism is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether inflation or globalization
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether Halliburton, Enron or anyone
Greed is a weapon of mass destruction
We need to find courage, overcome
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
My dad came into my room holding his hat
I knew he was leaving,
He sat on my bed told me some facts.
Son, I have the duty, calling on me
You and your sister be brave my little soldier
And don’t forget all I told ya
Your the mister of the house now remember this
And when you wake up in the morning give ya momma a kiss
Then I had to say goodbye
In the morning woke momma with a kiss on each eyelid,
Even though I’m only a kid
Certain things can’t be hid
Momma grabbed me
Held me like I was made of gold
But left her inner stories untold
I said, momma it will be alright
When daddy comes home, tonight
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
The skin under my chin is exploding again.
I’m getting stress from some other children
I’m holding it in.
We taking sides like a politician
And if i get friction we get to fighting.
I’ll defend my dad he’s the best of all men
and whatever he’s doing he’s doing the right thing.
It’s frightening, but it makes me mad,
Why do all of these people seem to hate my dad?
And if that ain’t enough now i get these spots.
I go to sleep every night with my stomache in knots
And what’s more, i can hear momma next door
Explore the radio for reports of war.
And all we ever seem to do is hide the tears.
Seems like daddy been gone for years.
But he was right, now i’m geared up for the fight
and he would be proud of me.
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
My story stops here, lets be clear.
This scenario is happening everywhere.
And you ain’t going to nirvana or far-vana,
you’re coming right back here to live out your karma.
With even more drama than previously, seriously.
Just how many centuries have we been
waiting for someone else to make us free?
And we refuse to see
that people overseas suffer just like we:
Bad leadership and ego’s unfettered and free
Who feed on the people they’re supposed to lead
I don’t need good people to pray and wait
For the lord to make it all straight.
There’s only now, do it right.
‘Cos I don’t want your daddy, leaving home tonight
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
Travel, Terror and Fisk
February 19, 2007
The day before I was to leave for Brazil last summer the BBC announced with much fanfare that yet another terror plot has been foiled. The thuggish figure of John Reid was on BBC declaring that death on an “unprecedented scale” would have been caused had the bombers succeeded (clearly reading from official talking points, since the exact same phrase was repeated by officials over the next few days).
I arrived at the airport to find impossibly long ques, and it took ages before I arrived at the airline desk. The day before it was announced that people will not be allowed to carry anything on board except their travel documents. I was dreading the twelve hour flight since I wouldn’t have anything to read, and airline entertainment is notoriously bad (I actually had to endure Mission Impossible III). I picked up the days Independent at a shop (I was reminded that I can’t take it on board), and immediately looked for Robert Fisk’s article. The Lebanon war was still raging at this time and while Robert Fisk’s coverage had been characteristically brilliant for the most part, his treatment of Hizbullah was seriously flawed. However, on this particular day, Fisk was in fine form; his article was like a 10-ton hammer demolishing the propaganda edifice erected by the collective might of the British State and its propaganda organ: BBC (joined in this instance by the rest British media; liberal and conservative alike).
While I don’t care much for the Independent, it does have some redeeming features: two of the finest journalists in the world, Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn, and its frequently brilliant front pages. On this day, however, its front page competed with the Sun in its sensationalized broad brush with which it tarred all British Muslims with the caption: “The Enemy Within?”
The timing of this “terror alert” was crucial: this was a time when the British State, along with US and Israel, was alone in opposing a ceasefire in Lebanon, and Blair was under attack, even from within the ranks of his own party. Unfortunately, few, other than Fisk and a limited number of discerning individuals, were courageous enough to make this connection. Here is Fisk at his muckraking best:
If You Want the Roots or Terror, Try Here
I would love to have the Met in Beirut to counter terror in my part of the worldPublished: 12 August 2006
When my electricity returned at around 3am yesterday, I turned on the BBC World Service television. There were a series of powerful explosions which shook the house – just as they vibrated across all of Beirut – as the latest Israeli air raids blasted over the city. And then up came the World Service headline: “Terror Plot”. Terror what, I asked myself? And there was my favourite cop, Paul Stephenson, explaining how my favourite police force – the ones who bravely executed an innocent young Brazilian on the Tube, taking 30 seconds to fire six bullets into him – had saved the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians from suicide bombers on airliners.
I’m sureIndependent readers will join me in watching how many of the suspects – or “British-born Muslims” as the BBC defined them in its special form of “soft” racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?) – are still in custody in a couple of weeks’ time.
And I’m sure it’s quite by chance that the lads in blue chose yesterday – with anger at Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara’s shameful failure over Lebanon at its peak – to save the world. After all, it’s scarcely three years since the other great Terror Plot had British armoured vehicles surrounding Heathrow on the very day – again quite by chance, of course – that hundreds of thousands of Britons were demonstrating against Lord Blair’s intended invasion of Iraq.
So I sat on the carpet in my living room and watched all these heavily armed chaps at Heathrow protecting the British people from annihilation and then on came President George Bush to tell us that we were all fighting “Islamic fascism”. There were more thumps in the darkness across Beirut where an awful lot of people are suffering from terror – although I can assure George W that while the pilots of the aircraft dropping bombs across the city in which I have lived for 30 years may or may not be fascists, they are definitely not Islamic.
And there, of course, was the same old problem. To protect the British people – and the American people – from “Islamic terror”, we must have lots and lots of heavily armed policemen and soldiers and plainclothes police and endless departments of anti-terrorism, homeland security and other more sordid folk like the American torturers – some of them sadistic women – at Abu Ghraib and Baghram and Guantanamo. Yet the only way to protect ourselves from the real violence which may – and probably will – be visited upon us, is to deal, morally, with courage and with justice, with the tragedy of Lebanon and “Palestine” and Iraq and Afghanistan. And this we will not do.
I would, frankly, love to have Paul Stephenson out in Beirut to counter a little terror in my part of the world – Hizbollah terror and Israeli terror. But this, of course, is something that Paul and his lads don’t have the spittle for. It’s one thing to sound off about the alleged iniquities of alleged suspects of an alleged plot to create alleged terror – quite another to deal with the causes of that terror and to do so in the face of great danger.
I was amused to see that Bush – just before my electricity was cut off again – still mendaciously tells us that the “terrorists” hate us because of “our freedoms”. Not because we support the Israelis who have massacred refugee columns, fired into Red Cross ambulances and slaughtered more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians – here indeed are crimes for Paul Stephenson to investigate – but because they hate our “freedoms”.
And I notice with despair that our journalists again suck on the hind tit of authority, quoting endless (and anonymous) “security sources” without once challenging their information or the timing of Paul’s “terror plot” discoveries or the nature of the details – somehow, “fizzy drinks bottles” doesn’t quite work for me – nor the reasons why, if this whole panjandrum is correct, anyone would want to carry out such atrocities. We are told that the arrested men are Muslims. Now isn’t that interesting? Muslims. This means that many of them – or their families – originally come from south-west Asia and the Middle East, from the area that encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq, “Palestine” and Lebanon.
In the old days, chaps like Paul used to pull out a map when faced with folk of different origins or religion or indeed different names. Indeed, if Paul Stephenson takes a school atlas, he’ll notice that there are an awful lot of violent problems and injustice and suffering and – a speciality, it seems, of the Metropolitan Police – of death in the area from which the families of these “Muslims” come.
Could there be a connection, I wonder? Dare we look for a motive for the crime, or rather the “alleged crime”? The Met used to be pretty good at looking for motives. But not, of course, in the “war on terror”, where – if he really searched for real motives – my favourite policeman would swiftly be back on the beat as Constable Paul Stephenson.
Take yesterday morning. On day 31of the Israeli version of the “war on terror” – a conflict to which Paul and the lads in blue apparently subscribe by proxy – an Israeli aircraft blew up the only remaining bridge to the Syrian frontier in northern Lebanon, in the mountainous and beautiful Akka district above the Mediterranean. With their usual sensitivity, the pilots who bombed the bridge – no terrorists they, mark you – chose to destroy the bridge when ordinary cars were crossing. So they massacred the 12 civilians who happened to be on the bridge. In the real world, we call that a war crime. Indeed, it’s a crime worthy of the attention of Paul and his lads. But alas, Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened.
Personally, I’m all for arresting criminals, be they of the “Islamic fascist” variety or the Bin Laden variety or the Israeli variety – their warriors of the air really should be arrested next time they drop into Heathrow – or the American variety (Abu Ghraib cum laude) and indeed of the kind that blow out the brains of Tube train passengers. But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice. And I have to say, watching his performance before the next power cut last night, I thought he was doing a pretty good job for his masters.
I wasn’t allowed the book on board, but in the end, I ripped the page with Fisk’s article on it and stuffed it in my pocket.
It’s So Hard Being a Nazi
February 19, 2007
Israeli army embarrassed by video broadcast
Last Updated Tue Mar 19 19:52:12 2002 | CBC.ca
JERUSALEM – The Israeli army has expressed a note of contrition after a television station aired a videotape showing an army assault on a Palestinian home in which a mother of five children died.
When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem’s hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel’s Channel 2 broacast the tape last weekend. The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell during the army’s March 8 assault on the Aida refugee camp. The army wouldn’t comment and foreign journalists weren’t allowed inside the camp.
But Israeli media were allowed to ride along with the soldiers, and they went right into the Hawarjeh home. An Israeli camera recorded the army blowing off the door, and found Huda Hawarjeh bleeding on the floor.
The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh’s story about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers doing little to help her for an hour while she bled to death in front of her five children.
Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the hospital but couldn’t.
Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the Bethlehem area that day.
The Israeli army allows the media such close access on the understanding it can embargo anything it doesn’t want broadcast.
The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo anyway.
The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn’t like what they saw.
Channel 2 showed Hawarjeh begging soldiers to allow an ambulance through. The camera captured the terror of the woman’s daughter, and her brother’s attempt to stop her from showing the soldiers her fear.
After the woman was finally taken out, one of the soldiers looked into the camera and said: “I don’t know what we’re doing here. Purification, maybe. It’s dirty here. I don’t know why a good Hebrew boy should be here, so far from his home.”
The soldiers tore the home apart, evidently looking for weapons.
Another daughter begged them not to demolish the home’s wall. Soldiers commonly smash walls to move into adjacent houses.
Israeli spokesman Ranaan Gissin said the government was disappointed by the decision to air the tapes. “I would have expected a little bit more self-censorship on the part of the Israeli media,” he said.
Ma’ariv, Israel’s second-biggest newspaper, ran the story on its front page on Monday, under a banner headline that read “Gaffe!”
The army, after trying to suppress distribution of the pictures, admitted the soldiers’ actions pushed the boundaries of public acceptance.
“Our action is so difficult to be done that it is to the extremities of acceptance,” said Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli Defence Force spokesman.
He called what happened in the Hawarjeh home “a mistake.”
Another Saudi Peace Initiative
February 16, 2007
When I used to live in Dubai (a place described by one friend as Xanadu-meets-Disneyland) the parking lot of the American University would fill up with Rolls Royces and other expensive cars with Saudi and other Gulf state registration plates whenever Ramadan would end . They would be there to celebrate the end of the holy month by helping themselves to Eastern European prostitutes at the nearby exclusive nightclub.
One of the reasons they were so upset with Hizbullah, when it chose to confront Israel last year, is that Saudis had invested billions in Lebanon to turn it into another Dubai, with easy access to luxury hotels with associated hedonistic appurtenances. It turned out to be a bad investment: the regions endemic instability ultimately resulted in another war, and Israel proceeded to destroy billions worth of property.
It appears there is no place on the Mediterranean coast that is safe enough to invest not-so-hard earned petrodollars in, save Israel itself. But the Saudis – a proud arab nation; champions of the Palestinian cause; and self proclaimed leaders of the Muslim world — couldn’t really do business with a criminal regime which is brutalizing the mostly Arab-Muslim population of Palestine, now could they?
Jerusalem Post reports:
Plans by Saudi Prince Al-Walid bin Talal to build an eight-story hotel in Tel Aviv together with the Abulafia family of Jaffa are in their early stages. But too much publicity could doom the project.
Bin Talal – the world’s eighth-wealthiest man and the wealthiest Arab, according to Forbes - is eyeing a beachfront property facing the Opera Building on Herbert Samuel Road to build a 150-room, Oriental-style hotel. Bin Talal’s regular architect, London-based Basil al-Bayati, is said to be in charge of planning for the project.
Israel Gudovich, an Israeli architect who once was Tel Aviv’s city engineer, said the plans were still in their very early stages. “We will know more in two weeks, when I meet with Basil al-Bayati in London,” he told The Jerusalem Post Thursday. Gudovich said press coverage – “this Israeli excitement” which saw an item on the project make headlines in Yediot Aharonot‘s business section on Thursday – could scare the project away.
City engineer Chezy Berkowitz confirmed that initial discussions had taken place, but said reports that architectural plans had been submitted to the municipality were incorrect. “No plans have been submitted for approval to planning committees,” he told the Post , adding that the start of construction was months away.
Another glorious peace initiative by the ever helpful Saudis. At a time when academics, churches, trade unions, businesses and activists are campaigning to end the creeping genocide of the Palestinians by bringing economic and political pressure to bear on Israel through a campaign of cultural, academic and economic boycott, the Saudis ensure that visitors to Israel are not deprived of exotic whores or luxury accomodation.
Al Jazeera’s Professionalism
February 16, 2007
Al Jazeera, the celebrated Arabic satellite channel, was established in 1996 through a grant of $150 million by the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who still underwrites most of its operations. This kind of generosity never comes without a tradeoff; while consumers of the vapid corporate-owned mainstream media know this well, it is mostly overlooked in the case of public broadcasting. The tradeoff in the case of Al Jazeera is the consistency with which it overlooks Qatar’s own collusion in American Imperial adventures, and its egregious overtures towards Israel, to reserve its criticism only for other Arab regimes.
Having said that, it is important to point out that for the most part, the criticism directed at it is unfair. While Al Jazeera International may only be a marginal improvement on BBC-Fox-CNN, the Arabic Al Jazeera still retains the kind of critical edge missing from most Western media. However, it is Al Jazeera’s close relationship with the Emir that turns this into less of a professional news organization than a family business. The following incident illustrates this point.
“Fat Fuck” Comes Through
Ron Suskind’s brilliant new book, The One Percent Doctrine, is a must read for a deeper understanding of the so called “War on Terror” (You can watch him discuss his book on Democracy Now!). Two of the facts therein are of immediate relevance to Al Jazeera. One, we discover that American forces were actually ordered to bomb the offices of the channel in Kabul; the attack was deliberate, not a mistake as Americans had subsequently claimed (pp.136-138). Two, the Emir of Qatar used his prerogatives to break Al-Jazeera’s confidentiality agreements and personally passed on information to the CIA that led to the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad and Ramzi bin al Shibh (pp.138-139). Tenet’s words of gratitude? “The fat fuck came through” (p. 139).
Al Jazeera Does War on Terror
Yosri Fouda, a senior correspondent for Al Jazeera, scored a scoop when he was given an exclusive interview by Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Ramzi bin al Shibh, the alleged financier. He was contacted in London in April 2002 and given instructions to travel to Karachi via Islamabad, where he interviewed the two. The tapes of the interviews were supposed to be delivered for a broadcast to coincide with the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (pp. 102-104).
Fouda returned to Doha on June 14, and related the incident to Muhammad Jasim al-Ali, the editorial director of Al Jazeera. Fouda and Jasim al-Ali then went ahead and told the story to the channel’s vice chairman, and next morning to the chairman Sheikh Hamad bin Thamer al Thani, a cousin of the Emir. Everyone agreed on keeping the story in utmost secrecy.
The story, sure enough, had been passed on to the Emir (“fat fuck”), and shortly afterwards, he contacted CIA Director George Tenet to reveal all the details, including the probable location of the apartment (where Fouda had been hosted) (p. 139). Shortly afterwards the CIA and Pakistani Police raided the apartment and arrested bin al Shibh. Another operation in Rawalpindi and the cooperation of a “hero” (a close associate of KSM who led the CIA to his hideout to claim the modest reward of of $25 million) subsequently led to the arrest of KSM (pp.204-206).
