The Fanonite

From Jim Lobe: ‘Earlier this week, colleagues sent me a lengthy — but quite eloquent — statement by Mohammed about his experience that, with his permission, I am posting on the blog. I found his thoughts about Shylock’s appeals in the “Merchant of Venice” to his Christian persecutors as Mohammed himself was undergoing what must have been a very traumatic and deeply disillusioning experience at the hands of his fellow human beings to be particularly compelling. You can judge for yourself.’

SUMMARY OF EVENTS IN THE DETENTION, INTEROGATION & TORTURE OF PRIZE WINNING INTERNATIONAL JOURNALIST, AGE 24, GAZA NATIVE MOHAMMED OMER BY ISRAELI AUTHORITIES, JUNE 26-27, 2008.

Note: This is a compilation of his first hand account of the events of June 26 and June 27, 2008. On June 28th as this is being transcribed Omer is again in transit to a European hospital in Gaza due to chest pains and difficulty breathing and swallowing as a result of the following.

07:00, THURSDAY JUNE 26, 2008:
Mohammed Omer arrives at the Jordanian transit center to catch the bus which will take him across the border to the Israeli transit center at Allenby, just west of Amman Jordan in the Occupied West Bank. Omer was returning from a multi-country speaking tour on the situation in Gaza in Europe in addition to receiving the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Award for Journalism with co-recipient Dahr Jamal. Omer at age 24 is the youngest person in history to receive this prestigious award. He arrived in Amman from France Saturday June 21, 2008, eager to get home for his brother’s wedding next Thursday. Israeli authorities refused him transit forcing him to remain in limbo on a Jordanian transit visa for five days until word arrived he’d be allowed to go home.

Boarding the bus that crosses the border between the Occupied Territories and Jordan, the following transpired.

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Dahr Jamail in Le Monde Diplomatique: On Israel’s brutal treatment of his fellow winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize, Mohammed Omer.

On June 16 I was the co-recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism with Mohammed Omer in London. Omer is a 24 year-old Palestinian with whom I felt, and feel, honored to have shared this award. During my brief talk while accepting the award, I told the audience I could not think of anyone else I would rather share the award with. Omer’s work from his Gaza homeland has been a beacon of humanitarian reportage; his work serves as a model of peace and attempted reconciliation with Israel for the youth in his occupied territory.

Unlike me, Omer’s journey to London to receive the award was next to impossible. When I heard the news that I was a co-recipient, I simply booked my flight from San Francisco and boarded my plane. Omer – whose home has been crushed by an Israeli bulldozer and who has seen most of his seven siblings killed or maimed by the Israeli army which occupies his homeland – struggled even to get an exit visa. The veteran journalist John Pilger, who handed us each our award, described his journey: “Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out.”

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Gareth Porter of the excellent Inter Press Service with the latest in the Israel Lobby’s campaign to nudge US towards another war. You can hear Porter discuss his article on Antiwar Radio here:

Also see this interview with him from The Real News: ‘US House Res. 362 suggests the use of force with new bill’

Let me note here that I used to be a regular listener of Democracy Now and several other Leftist news programs. I am no more. It has been clear for some time now that the Israel Lobby and its neocon spearhead are the only entities pushing for war, yet you wouldn’t hear it said once. Even when statements have been made to that effect, such as Seymour Hersh’s comment on DN that ‘Jewish money’ was behind the war drive, Amy Goodman made a point not to pursue the point. These days I mostly turn to IPS for its excellent analysts (Porter, Khody Akhavi and the indispensable Jim Lobe), Antiwar.com, the Real News Network and Counterpunch for reliable news and commentary.

New arguments by analysts close to Israeli thinking in favor of U.S. strikes against Iran cite evidence of Iranian military weakness in relation to the U.S. and Israel and even raise doubts that Iran is rushing to obtain such weapons at all.

The new arguments contradict Israel’s official argument that it faces an “existential threat” from an Islamic extremist Iranian regime determined to get nuclear weapons. They suggest that Israel, which already has as many as 200 nuclear weapons, views Iran from the position of the dominant power in the region rather than as the weaker state in the relationship.

The existence of a sharp imbalance of power in favor of Israel and the United States is the main premise of a recent analysis by Patrick Clawson and Michael Eisenstadt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) suggesting that a U.S. attack on Iranian nuclear facilities is feasible. Chuck Freilich, a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center on Science and International Affairs, has also urged war against Iran on such a power imbalance.

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‘Israel’s treatment of an award-winning young Palestinian journalist is part of a terrible pattern’, writes John Pilger.

Two weeks ago, I presented a young Palestinian, Mohammed Omer, with the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Awarded in memory of the great US war correspondent, the prize goes to journalists who expose establishment propaganda, or “official drivel”, as Gellhorn called it. Mohammed shares the prize of £5,000 with Dahr Jamail. At 24, he is the youngest winner. His citation reads: “Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless.” The eldest of eight, Mohammed has seen most of his siblings killed or wounded or maimed. An Israeli bulldozer crushed his home while the family were inside, seriously injuring his mother. And yet, says a former Dutch ambassador, Jan Wijenberg, “he is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel”.

Getting Mohammed to London to receive his prize was a major diplomatic operation. Israel has perfidious control over Gaza’s borders, and only with a Dutch embassy escort was he allowed out. Last Thursday, on his return journey, he was met at the Allenby Bridge crossing (to Jordan) by a Dutch official, who waited outside the Israeli building, unaware Mohammed had been seized by Shin Bet, Israel’s infamous security organisation. Mohammed was told to turn off his mobile and remove the battery. He asked if he could call his embassy escort and was told forcefully he could not. A man stood over his luggage, picking through his documents. “Where’s the money?” he demanded. Mohammed produced some US dollars. “Where is the English pound you have?”

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Pepe Escobar on Obama’s recently appointed Senior Working Group on National Security

‘The Bush Administration steps up its secret moves against Iran,’ reports Seymour M. Hersh. You can also hear him speak about this here:

As Alexander Cockburn points out, however, none of this is news. This story had already been broken by Andrew Cockburn on Counterpunch a few months back.

Operations outside the knowledge and control of commanders have eroded “the coherence of military strategy,” one general says.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Under federal law, a Presidential Finding, which is highly classified, must be issued when a covert intelligence operation gets under way and, at a minimum, must be made known to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and the Senate and to the ranking members of their respective intelligence committees—the so-called Gang of Eight. Money for the operation can then be reprogrammed from previous appropriations, as needed, by the relevant congressional committees, which also can be briefed.

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Media: Photographs 1 & 2 | Video 1 & 2 | Excellent Report

Yesterday London was filled with Zionists celebrating 60 years since the rape, massacre and transfer that constituted the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the ‘birth’ of Israel.

Feedback from the protest suggests that Zionists were very abusive to demonstrators Talking Virtually to Myself saying:

The bizarre thing was was that the Zionists, the supporters of one of the worlds most powerful and influential countries… were angry and shouted abuse at the protestors! I was thinking, hang on, in your shoes I would smile smugly, and would not bother with such alteractions. So the question is, why were they intimidated? maybe these protests have an effect after all….

Several photographs on Indymedia also confirm the rather disgusting confrontation of peace activists by emboldened Zionists.

One, the scribbler, commenting on her blog:

In Trafalgar Square, looking at the sea of blue and white flags and realising that although a Palestinian demonstration outside South Africa House was trying to do it’s best to spoil our fun, there were more of us and we were louder. They didn’t have a chance of taking the moment away from us. Additionally, we had Ed Balls, the Minister for education, Nick Ferrari, the broadcaster, The Chief Rabbi etc - talking to us, NOT them.

G-d THAT felt sooooooooooooooo good.

If you were there, you know exactly what I am referring to. If you weren’t, I don’t think this description can fully describe what it felt like.

In short - today, on the streets of London, I was a Jew and a Zionist and I could wave my Israeli flag to my heart’s content - because no one would dare to stop me.

To sum up ladies and gentlemen - Today, London was mine.

Trust a Zionist to feel satisfaction in strength, power, nationalism and the silencing of Palestinians.  It seems like London was occupied and owned and just like land grabs in Palestine no-one dared to stop it.

With another commenting on my Israel’s 60th Birthday blog:

It was utterly disgusting to see Moslems shouting and displaying banners that contained nothing but lies! There is no point the Arabs complaining about Israel. Israel is a light unto the nations, the Arabs/Moslems are a dark cloud of doom.

With all this in mind we might ask why the left as a whole didn’t engage in shutting down this imperialist celebration of triumphant colonialism and racism.  If there’s a next time the trade unions and anti-war movement should stand in solidarity with our comrades and prevent their intimidation.

Zionist dreams of clearing “Greater Israel” of all Palestinians continue to be played out via insidious and violent means, but they won’t be realised, writes Jonathan Cook:

In 1895, Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to “try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.

Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine — separation and transfer — were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.

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Dahr Jamail, John Pilger, Mohammed Omer

Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza,’ Mel Frykberg of IPS reports.

I had met Mohammed only recently in London where was awarded the prize. What most of us had found so admirable about him is that despite the dire conditions in Gaza he retained his good humour and an infectiously positive disposition. He is the voice of Gaza’s voiceless, and now the Apartheid regime gives him his own scars. As Philip Weiss observed today ‘Israel is beginning to sound more like the old Soviet Union than South Africa in some of these stories.’ He adds: ‘The incident is sickeningly reminiscent of a strip-search story told by Hedy Epstein, an 80-plus-year-old Holocaust survivor from St. Louis, who has made it a mission in her 80s to visit Palestine. Here is Hedy telling about her 2004 humiliation, on youtube. They called her a terrorist.

Omer, a resident of Rafah in the south of Gaza, and previous recipient of the New America Media’s Best Youth Voice award several years ago, was returning from London where he had just collected his Gellhorn Prize, and from several European capitals where he had speaking engagements, including a meeting with Greek parliamentarians.

Omer’s trip was sponsored by The Washington Report, and the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv was responsible for coordinating Omer’s travel plans and his security permit to leave Gaza with Israeli officials.

Israel controls the borders of Gaza and severely restricts the entrance and exit of Gazans allegedly on grounds of security. Human rights organisations accuse the Israelis of using security as a pretext to apply collective punishment indiscriminately.

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The outstanding scholar Edward Said is featured in the following documentary On Orientalsim discussing the themes of his work namely Western anti-Arab racism and what it means for the Middle East.

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