During a Memorial Day event at Long Island National Cemetery, Cub Scout Kyle
Maebert places American flags. (Photo: AP)


The Day of the Dead
by Cindy Sheehan
http://www.truthout.org/052509A


     I was on an airplane flying to Orange County from Sacramento to attend the
al-Awda Conference, which is a Palestinian Right's Conference (al-Awda
translates to "The Returning"), when the pilot's voice filled the cabin to make
an announcement that I think went unnoticed by most of my fellow passengers, but
I heard it.

     As the plane was on the approach to John Wayne airport, the Captain came on
the intercom to remind us all to "remember our brave troops who have died for
our freedom." Even in this post 9-11 paranoid paradigm, if I wasn't belted in
for landing, I would have popped out of my seat at 13D and charged up to the
cockpit to let the pilot know that my son was killed in Iraq and not one person
anywhere in this world is one iota more free because he is dead.

     As a matter of fact, the people of Iraq, the foreign country thousands of
miles away where my oldest child's brains, blood and life seeped into the soil,
are not freer, unless one counts being liberated from life, liberty and property
being free. If you consider torture and indefinite detention freedom, then the
pilot may have been right, but then again, even if you do consider those crimes
freedom, it does not make it so.

     Here in America we are definitely not freer because my son died, as a matter
of fact, our nation can spy on us and our communications without a warrant or
just cause, and we can't even bring a 3.6 ounce bottle of hand cream into an
airport, or walk through a metal detector with our shoes on. Even if we do want
to exercise our Bill of Rights, we are shoved into pre-designated "free speech"
zones (NewSpeak for; STFU, unless you are well out of the way of what you want
to protest and shoved into pens like cattle being led to slaughter), and
oftentimes brutally treated if we decide we are entitled to "free speech" on
every inch of American soil.

     If you watch any one of the cable news networks this weekend between doing
holiday weekend things, you will be subjected to images of row upon row of white
headstones of dead US military lined up in perfect formation in the afterlife as
they were in life. Patriotic music will swell and we will be reminded in script
font to "Remember our heroes," or some such BS as that.

     Before Casey was killed, a message like that would barely register in my
consciousness as I rushed around preparing for Casey's birthday bar-be-que that
became a family tradition since he was born on Memorial Day in 1979. If I had a
vision of how Memorial Day and Casey's birthday would change for my family, I
would have fled these violent shores to protect what was mine, not this
murderous country's. Be my guest; look at those headstones with pride or
indifference. I look at them now with horror, regret, pain and a longing for
justice.

     I can guarantee what you won't see this holiday weekend are images of the
over one million Iraqi dead. Say we assign, in an arbitrary way for purely
illustrative purposes, an average height of five feet for every person killed in
Iraq and then line those people up from head to toe. That gruesome line would
stretch from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon... 950 driving miles up Interstate
5. If we count the Iraqis who have been forced to flee, we would have to go back
and forth between Los Angeles and Portland another four times.

     There are obscene amounts of people who have been slaughtered for the US
Profit Driven Military Empire who do not count here in America on any day.
People in Vietnam are still dying from the toxins dumped on their country by the
US, not to mention the millions who died during that war. Let the carnage
escalate in Afghanistan while we protect our personal images by turning a blind
eye to Obama's war crimes. Are you going to feel a lump of pride in your bosom
when the coffins start to be photographed at Dover for this imperial crime of
aggression? Will you look at those flag-draped boxes of the lifeless body of
some mother's child and think: "Now, I am free." Is it better to be dead when
Obama is president?

     A tough, but real, aspect of this all to consider is, how many of the
soldiers buried in coffins in military cemeteries killed or tortured innocent
people as paid goons for the Empire? To me, it is deeply and profoundly sad on
so many levels. If I have any consolation through all of this, I learned that my
son bravely refused to go on the mission that killed him, but he was literally
dragged into the vehicle and was dead minutes later - before he was forced to do
something that was against his nature and nurture.

     Casey will always be my hero, but he was a victim of US Imperialism and his
death should bring shame, not pride, as it did not bring freedom to anyone. I
will, of course, mourn his senseless death on Memorial Day as I do every day.

     However, we do not need another day here in America to glorify war that
enables the Military Industrial Complex to commit its crimes under the black
cloak of "Patriotism."

     From Palestine to Africa to South America, our quest for global economic
domination kills, sickens, maims or oppresses people on a daily basis, and about
25,000 children per day die of starvation. I am not okay with these facts and I
am not proud of my country.

     I will spend my reflective time on Memorial Day to mourn not only the deaths
of so many people all over the world due to war, but mourn the fact that they
are the unseen and uncared for victims of US Empire.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Sheehan, who was killed in Bush's war
of terror on 04/04/04. She is the co-founder and president of Gold Star Families
for Peace and the Camp Casey Peace Institute. She is the author of three books;
the most recent is "Peace Mom: A Mother's Journey Through Heartache to
Activism." Following an unsuccessful challenge to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,
Sheehan launched a radio show on 960AM in the San Fransisco Bay Area that can
also be heard on Soapbox.com.

*********************************************************************

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From Albania, freed Guantánamo prisoner watches detainee debate
unfold


As Congress worries about the dangerous prisoners, a Chinese Uighur
asks: Why not release those deemed innocent?
By Besar Likmeta
http://freedetainees.org/5565 <http://freedetainees.org/5565>


Abu Bakker Qassim, a Chinese Uighur who was freed from
Guantánamo in 2005, has tried to rebuild a new life as a chef
in Tirana, Albania.

Besar Likmeta - photo

Tirana, Albania - While President Barack Obama made his case Thursday
for the transfer of Guantánamo Bay detainees, one of the terror
camp's former prisoners was studying recipes in a restaurant kitchen
here, doing his best to learn the chef skills that will support his new life in
this new land.

Abu Bakker Qassim is one of five Chinese Uighurs released to Albania in 2005,
after US authorities feared that repatriating them to China would expose them to
persecution and human rights violations.

Seventeen of Mr. Qassim's Uighur compatriots remain in Guantánamo, even though
they have been found innocent of wrongdoing and have been cleared for release.

Although an increasingly heated debate in the US focuses on how to
handle dozens of remaining suspected terrorists held at Guantánamo,
the Obama administration faces an equally sticky dilemma over releasing the
innocent Uighurs.

The president has gotten resistance from Congress, with some arguing
that the Uighurs – guilty or not – could pose a security threat.
Other countries are skittish of taking the men, worried of angering
China, which wants them returned for trial.


A detour in his path

When Qassim left his home in China's Xingjian Province in 2000, his
dream was to reach Turkey, or, preferably, Western Europe.

After setting up a shop in Kyrgyzstan for a year with little success, he joined
a larger group of 17 would-be migrants as they set off through the neighboring
Central Asian republics.

In 2001, just days before the start of a US bombing campaign aimed at
overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the Uighurs arrived in
the Afghan city of Jalalabad.

Four days after their arrival, Jalalabad was bombed. The Uighurs left to seek
sanctuary in neighboring Pakistan. They could not know that, after an arduous
march through the mountains of Tora Bora, the villagers who would greet them
warmly on the other side of the border had, only a few days earlier, been
blanketed by fliers from US aircraft, promising that whoever "hunts an Arab
becomes a rich man."

Though they had no knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks, the men were
handed over to the Pakistan authorities for the promised reward of
$5,000. They would spend the next four months in jail in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

"In Kandahar, the Americans realized we had nothing to do with Al
Qaeda, but they still shipped us to Guantánamo," Qassim contends.
"At that point, we understood that we were flying into hell."

Qassim spent the next five years behind steel bars.

From Cuba to Albania

Qassim and four other Uighurs were not released until May 5, 2006, after a US
federal court ruled that their detention was illegal. The release came only
hours before an appeals court was expected to order that they be freed.

The Bush administration worked intensely to find a host country for the five men
in order to prevent the appeals court from freeing them on American soil. After
more than 100 countries refused, the US found a host in Albania, its small ally
in the Balkans, says Sabin Willet, a
Boston lawyer who defended the Uighurs.

Qassim and the four other Uighurs were flown to Tirana on a Friday. The federal
appeals court "was scheduled to hear their case on the
following Monday," Mr. Willet says. "They were absolutely sent
to Tirana to avoid that hearing."

Not safe to go home

Of the 241 inmates still in Guantánamo, the US says that roughly 60
– including the 17 remaining Uighurs, as well as detainees from
Libya, Uzbekistan, and Algeria – cannot be returned to their home
country because they risk persecution at the hands of local authorities.

"The remaining Uighurs would pose a threat to no one, and Abu Baker
is an example," Willet says, referring to Qassim. "He has lived
peacefully in Tirana for more than three years, while the other Uighur
men in Gitmo have essentially the same background as Abu Bakker and are as
peaceful as he."

Human rights campaigners say that when the US has returned former
detainees to countries with poor human rights records, they have faced
threats, torture, and persecution.

"If I was sent to China I would most likely end up in jail or
executed," Qassim says.

Still trapped

Although overwhelmingly Muslim, Albanian society is strongly secular,
and conservative Islam is often frowned upon. When Qassim and the other Uighurs
arrived, they wore long beards, prompting concern from locals.

"At the beginning, people looked on us as terrorists, but I think
the Albanians have come to understand that we were no such thing,"
Qassim says. "They were suspicious of our long beards, but now the
beards have gone and so have their doubts."

One of the Uighurs relocated to Albania has since been granted political asylum
in Sweden but the other four, including Qassim, are doing their best to move
forward with life in Albania.

They have worked as volunteers for a local nongovernmental organization, planted
trees in the city, and taken cooking lessons at local restaurants. One of the
men received a scholarship to study computer science at American University in
Tirana.

Qassim hopes to open his own restaurant soon. Although he is settling
into calmer times, he says that being separated from his family for a
decade has not been easy.

"My wife was pregnant with twins when I left 10 years ago," he
says. "I speak to them on the phone, but hardly have any hope left
of being reunited."

Qassim has been working to push for the release of the Uighurs still
imprisoned in Cuba. He has written President Obama to urge him to
release the men. He says he has faith that they will be freed soon.

Their release will be "good news for us, but also for the American
people," he says, "because it will lift the doubts that
Guantánamo has created about American democracy."

===

The US has cleared the Uighur prisoners at Gitmo of wrongdoing, but China calls
them "terrorists." Seventeen Uighurs are seeking political asylum in Sweden,
Canada, the US, and Germany.


Diplomatic memos reveal Chinese effort to block Guantánamo prisoner's asylum bid
By Ritt Goldstein
The Christian Science Monitor
from the May 12, 2009
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0512/p06s13-woeu.html?page=1


Dalarna, Sweden - Newly revealed documents provide a rare glimpse at the
diplomatic pressure used by China in its unsuccessful efforts to stop the
Swedish government from granting asylum to a Uighur prisoner released from the
Guantánamo prison.

Resettling the remaining 17 Uighur prisoners is widely viewed as a critical
milestone in the Obama administration's plan to close the prison camp. If
Sweden's example is any indication, the imprisoned Uighurs present a
foreign-policy Gordian knot.

The men are members of a largely Muslim minority in western China. They have
been ruled innocent, but are considered terrorists at home. And while they are
among the 30 of Guantánamo's 241 remaining prisoners who have been cleared for
release, they remain behind bars.

The formerly classified Swedish government documents show how foreign-policy
concerns could be contributing to their ongoing detention. Given China's rising
economic and political clout, much could be at stake for countries who agree to
offer homes.

The memos from the Swedish Foreign Office note how China viewed it as "
'impossible to understand' that Swedish authorities had given a visa for this
terrorist," and how "very 'unsatisfied' " China was that Sweden's Migration
Court had granted Adil Hakimjan protection.

The memos detail contacts between the Chinese Embassy and Sweden's Foreign
Office, and highlight escalating Chinese pressure involving the potentially
precedent setting case of Mr. Hakimjan, a Uighur merchant. Hakimjan's Stockholm
attorney, Sten De Geer, recently obtained the documents under Swedish freedom of
information law.

China's impatience with Hakimjan's asylum bid was obvious in the memos. "The
Chinese Embassy in Stockholm has, a number of times, contacted the [Swedish]
Foreign Office, both in this case and also referring to the more general
question if Sweden is going to receive any Uighurs when the camp at Guantánamo
is going to be closed," wrote the Foreign Office's China desk director in one of
the documents.

Hakimjan, who was captured by a bounty hunter in Pakistan in 2001, was released
from Guantánamo in 2006 and now lives in Sweden. A court there upheld his bid
for political asylum in April.

Germany is now considering a US request that it accept nine of Guantánamo's
Uighurs. Seven others are being considered for resettlement in the US.

China wants Uighurs returned for trial

Although the Uighurs have been cleared of wrongdoing, China views them as
domestic terrorists and wants to see them returned for trial.

Following Albania's acceptance of five Guantánamo Uighurs in 2006, Albania
suffered " 'a big diplomatic and economic hit,' " according to a Pentagon
official quoted in a Feb. 18 Los Angeles Times story. The Times's Pentagon
source added that "no one wants to do that again."

China denies that it unduly pressured the Swedes. "Saying so-called Chinese
pressure is a block on the closure of Guantánamo Bay is ridiculous," Zhou Lulu,
press officer for China's Stockholm embassy, said in an interview. "As we said,
the Uighur terrorist suspects should be returned to China for a fair trial, but
not sheltered for further terrorist activity, nor detained without trial – that
is an international obligation for all countries."

Addressing the Chinese position, Amnesty International spokeswoman Sharon Singh
observed that "since the Uighurs have been persecuted in the past, it's a bit
dubious that the Chinese would hold fair trials for these men."

According to the documents, China repeatedly branded Hakimjan and the other
Guantánamo Uighurs as "terrorists." Two of the memoranda, dated from February,
detailed China's requests that information it provided on Hakimjan be turned
over to Sweden's Justice Department, which was stated as done.

Subsequently, in late April, Swedish courts ultimately upheld Hakimjan's bid for
political asylum.

Mr. De Geer, Hakimjan's attorney, says the memos underscore the "fierce urgency
for now is that Europe loudly reaffirm its unwavering commitment to a
fundamental value system based on respect for, and defense of, human rights." He
further observed that the "imminent fate of Guantánamo's Uighurs will constitute
our litmus test."

For Washington, the resettlement of those found innocent of wrongdoing, yet
remaining at Guantánamo, is key to the prison's closure.

The Obama administration's intent to resettle seven Guantánamo Uighurs in the US
has raised domestic debate, with critics casting Uighurs as Islamic jihadists
intent on forming terror cells. This is despite the fact that the Bush
administration cleared all of the Uighurs of wrongdoing in September 2008.

Canada was earlier approached by three Guantánamo Uighurs seeking protection,
with the outcome of the cases uncertain. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs
and International Trade declined to comment on the status of the cases.

Seema Saifee, attorney for two of the Uighurs seeking sanctuary in Canada, says
that the "determination to offer refugee protection to the Uighurs must be made
according to Canadian law and regulations, not politics."

Roots of China's angst over the Uighurs

Uighurs are facing similar issues regarding their homeland, China's Xinjiang
Province, as those endured by Tibetans, says Central Eurasian expert Gardner
Bovingdon. He says China's playing of the terrorist card is part of "its
strategy for exploiting the 'global war on terror' to serve its particular
political purposes in Xinjiang, and also abroad – wherever Uighurs exist in
diaspora."

Professor Bovingdon, of the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana
University, explains China's efforts as attempts "to nullify Uighur political
activism inside, and outside, Xinjiang." He views such efforts as part of a
campaign "to delegitimize" Uighur groups, noting Chinese attempts to "depict
Uighur separatists, and even Uighur dissidents" who are nonviolent and do not
explicitly advocate independence for Xinjiang, as "terrorists."

China's actions arise from a concern over the possibility of a "post-Soviet
'breakup,' political domino effect that involves foreign intervention," with
this potential scenario occurring "in the name of humanitarian protections,"
Bovingdon says, adding that China is concerned that this could conceivably
provide a shield for Uighur or Tibetan secession.

China's Stockholm embassy spokesperson previously told the Monitor that no
government "wants fragmentation of its own state."

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, sees
Chinese "pressures" as emphasizing the "need to ensure that the other Uighurs –
those still in Guantánamo as well those four remaining in Albania, – are
protected from the risk of being deported to China."

Reflecting widely felt European sentiment, Commissioner Hammarberg then
addressed the implications presented by the long incarceration of men found to
be innocent.

"US authorities have the primary responsibility for correcting the damage they
brought on these persons, and should offer them permits to stay. However,
European countries should be prepared to receive some of these wrongly detained
people as well."

Referring to US Attorney General Eric Holder's recent request that Germany
accept nine of the Guantánamo Uighurs, Hammarberg says, "It is encouraging that
Germany appears to be ready to welcome a group of them."

Jens Ploetner, spokesman for the German Foreign Office, addressed the issue of
Chinese "pressures" only by saying that the "German Foreign Office is aware of
the Chinese concerns." He added that Germany is "at the beginning of an internal
discussion within the German government and with our partners," adding, "no
concrete decision has been taken yet."

Mr. Ploetner also added, however, that as Germany was among the first of those
to call for the closure of Guantánamo, "it is therefore only logical that we are
now looking into ways how to support the efforts of the new US administration to
close the camp."

Enduring stigma from Guantánamo

Hakimjan, the Uighur who is now trying to rebuild his life in Sweden, says he
feels blighted by the terrorist label. After he was released from the prison, he
said he sometimes felt as if someone "put a hat on my head with the writing
'terrorist,' and it's extremely difficult to take off this hat and throw it
away."

In an interview with the Monitor following Sweden's recent decision to provide
him with protection, one of the first things Hakimjan said was that "I hope the
world now realizes I'm not a dangerous person and that my friends are not, as
well."

*********************************************************************

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Friday, May 22, 2009

Internet Threatened by Censorship, Secret Surveillance, and
Cybersecurity Laws - by Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/ <http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/>


At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is
democracy's last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without
which all others are threatened. Activists call it Net Neutrality. Media
scholar Robert McChesney says without it "the Internet would start to
look like cable TV (with a) handful of massive companies (controlling)
content" enough to have veto power over what's allowed and what it
costs. Progressive web sites and writers would be marginalized or
suppressed, and content systematically filtered or banned.
Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality
must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free
and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning
democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting,
relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones
ahead.
Censorship Attempts to Curtail Free Expression
The First Amendment states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof; or
abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the
people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a
redress of grievances."
Nonetheless, Congress and state legislatures have repeatedly tried to
censor free speech, allegedly regarded as indecent, obscene, hateful,
terrorist-related, or harmful to minors. However, the Supreme Court, in
a number of decisions, ruled that the government may not regulate free
expression, only its manner such as when it violates the right to
privacy "in an essentially intolerable manner" - a huge hurtle to
overcome, including online, because viewers are protected by simply
"averting (one's) eyes (Cohen v. California - 1971)."
In 1998, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) passed, but was blocked
by federal courts as an infringement of free speech and therefore
unconstitutional and unenforceable. In 1999, the law was struck down at
the Appellate Court level, but it stayed on the books. In 2002, the
Supreme Court reviewed the ruling and returned the case for
reconsideration. It remained blocked. Then in March 2003, the Appellate
Court again ruled it unconstitutional on the grounds that it would
hinder protected adult speech that's likely what it was about in the
first place.
Other litigation followed at the District and Appellate levels until on
January 21, 2009, the Supreme Court killed COPA by refusing to hear
appeals to affirm it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this
way: "After 10 Years, an Infamous Internet-Censorship Act is Finally
Dead." At least that's the hope, but censorship attempts never die. They
just reinvent themselves in new forms made all the easier when powerful
corporate interests and their congressional allies support them.
In 2000, the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) became law, and
the Supreme Court upheld it - to regulate online content deemed
"indecent (or) harmful to minors." The law requires schools, libraries
and other public institutions to install blocking software to prevent
minors from having access to it.
In 2006, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) passed the House but
not the Senate. It also would have mandated schools, libraries and other
public institutions to prevent minors from accessing "commercial social
networking websites (and) chat rooms."
Its language was broad enough to apply also to sites like Amazon, Yahoo,
Wikipedia and others and would have made the FCC a gatekeeper/censor. As
the Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, the law was
reintroduced in the Senate in January 2007 but never passed.
In February 1996, the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed - to
regulate alleged indecent and obscene online content in violation of the
First Amendment. Under the law, classic fiction would be banned as well
as any material deemed offensive. In June, 1996, a three-judge federal
panel partially struck it down for restricting adult free speech. In
June 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling in Reno v.
American Civil Liberties Union.
The Act was Title V of the 1996 Telecommunications Act titled Broadcast
Obscenity and Violence that applied broadcast standards to the Internet.
Under Section 230, Internet services operators aren't considered
publishers and thus have no liability for the words of third parties
using their services.
In 2003, Congress amended CDA by removing struck down indecency
provisions. In 2005, a three-judge Southern District of New York panel
rejected Barbara Nitke's obscenity provisions CDA challenge (in Nitke,
et al v. Ashcroft). The Supreme Court upheld the decision.
In 2005, the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice
Reauthorization Act (VAWDOJRA) became law - and another blow to online
free speech by prohibiting "any device (like a modem) or software that
can be used to originate....(anonymous or other) communications that are
transmitted, in whole or in part, by the internet" for the alleged
purpose of harassment, even if only vigorous constitutional debate was
intended or ordinary free speech.
In October 2007, the House passed the Violent Radicalization and
Homegrown Terrorism Act called "the thought crime prevention bill." It
was introduced in the Senate, referred to the Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee, but never voted on or passed.
If it ever becomes law in its present form, it will establish a
commission and Center for Excellence to study and act against "thought
criminals" (including online ones) for alleged acts of "violent
radicalization (and) homegrown terrorism" defined as follows:
-- "violent radicalization (to mean) adopting or promoting an extremist
belief system (to facilitate) ideologically based violence to advance
political, religious or social change;"
-- "homegrown terrorism (to mean) the use, planned use, or threatened
use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or
based and operating primarily within the United States or any (US)
possession to intimidate or coerce the (US) government, the civilian
population....or any segment thereof (to further) political or social
objectives."
In other words, this law, if passed, will criminalize whatever the
government wishes to include under the above two categories, including
constitutionally protected speech online or elsewhere.
Another ongoing censorship issue involves craigslist - a worldwide
online community network featuring classified ads for "jobs, housing,
for sale, personals, services, local community, and events."
On May 5, South Carolina Attorney (AG) General Henry McMaster notified
its CEO, Jim Buckmaster, that unless an "erotic services" section is
removed in 10 days, "craigslist management may be subject to criminal
investigation and prosecution." Other AGs in Rhode Island, Illinois, and
Connecticut issued similar threats even though all of them are baseless.
Previous courts have held that Section 230 of the Communications Decency
Act (CDA) protects "interactive computer service" providers like
craigslist and lets them be self-regulating and free from liability. The
law clearly states that they shouldn't be responsible for third party
content because they didn't do enough to comply with individual State
standards that may violate the First Amendment and federal law.
In craigslist's case, it's gone way beyond its legal obligations. In
November 2008, it agreed to technical and policy changes to curb the use
of its site for illegal purposes by third parties, including requiring
telephone and credit card verification for "erotic services" ads to
reject ones deemed illegal.
Earlier, craigslist screened out 90% of these ads. Nonetheless, it's
being unfairly targeted by AGs interpreting Section 230 and First
Amendment rights as they please. Federal law, however, protects
craigslist, but not against ambitious AGs harassment for their own
political advantage and self-interest.
On May 20, craigslist announced that it filed suit against South
Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster seeking "declaratory relief and
a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he has repeatedly
threatened against craigslist and its executives." Craigslist is on
solid footing. It's in full compliance with the law, but McMaster's
persistent threats forced it to sue in federal court.
These and numerous other congressional and other attempts aim to censor
protected speech, including online. Expect more of this ahead, some
legislation to be enacted, at times upheld by the courts, and, as a
result, our liberties to be chipped away incrementally and lost - unless
a line in the sand is drawn and defended by enough of the committed to
do it.
On February 29, 2008, one skirmish turned out successfully when a
federal judge let the anonymous whistle-blowing WikiLeaks resume
operations after a week earlier ordering its US hosting company and
domain registrar (Dynadot) to shut down and lock out its site. In his
reconsidered ruling, District Judge Jeffrey White conceded he was having
second thoughts regarding "serious questions of prior restraint (and)
possible violations of the First Amendment." He added that "the court
does not want to be a part of any order that is not constitutional."
Even so, one triumph doesn't mean victory. The struggle for unimpeded
free speech continues.
Secret Unconstitutional Surveillance, Including Online Data Mining
The right to privacy is sacred even though no constitutional provision
specifically mandates it. Nonetheless, the First Amendment guarantees
free and open speech and beliefs. The Third Amendment the privacy of our
homes against demands to be used to house soldiers. The Fourth Amendment
against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment against
self-incrimination and privacy of our personal information.
Also, the Ninth Amendment states that the "enumeration of certain (of
the Bill of) rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other
rights retained by the people." In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the
Supreme Court held that the Constitution protects privacy in a case
affirming the right to use contraceptives and that banning them violated
the "right to marital privacy."
In Justice Arthur Goldberg's concurring opinion, he cited the Ninth
Amendment in defense of the ruling. Earlier High Courts also affirmed
the constitutional right of privacy on matters of marriage, child
rearing, procreation, education, termination of medical treatment,
possessing and viewing pornography, abortion, and more as well as
overall privacy protection.
The 14th Amendment's "liberty" clause also relates to privacy by
stating: "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or
property, without due process of law...." Courts have broadened the
meaning of "liberty" to include personal, political and social rights
and privileges. Thus, invasion of private spaces is unconstitutional.
In Olmstead v. US (1928), Justice Louis Brandeis stated:
"The makers of our Constitution understood the need to secure conditions
favorable to the pursuit of happiness, and the protections guaranteed by
this are much broader in scope, and include the right to life and an
inviolate personality -- the right to be left alone -- the most
comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. The
principle underlying the Fourth and Fifth Amendments is protection
against invasions of the sanctities of a man's home and privacies of
life. This is a recognition of the significance of man's spiritual
nature, his feelings, and his intellect."
George Bush institutionalized lawless spying invasions of privacy on
Americans and others. Barack Obama continues the practice under the same
federal agencies, including the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and NSA. On April 15,
The New York Times headlined: "Officials Say US Wiretaps Exceeded Law."
It cited the NSA's practice in recent months of intercepting private
emails and phone calls of Americans "on a scale that went beyond the
broad legal limits established by Congress last year...." Briefed
intelligence officials and lawyers called it "significant and
systematic....overcollection" in violation of the law.
The Justice Department acknowledged the problem but said it was
resolved. For its part, the NSA said its "intelligence operations,
including programs for collection and analysis, are in strict accordance
with US laws and regulations." The Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, in overall charge, downplayed the The Times story,
referred to "inadvertent mistakes," and claimed efforts were immediately
implemented to correct them.
Nonetheless, the issue remains unsettled, and new details reveal earlier
domestic surveillance, including wiretapping a congressional member
without court approval, and systematically doing it against many
American citizens.
Tom Burghardt writes often on these issues for various publications, web
sites, and his Antifascist Calling blog...."Exploring the shadowlands of
the corporate police state." In calling "Spying on Americans: 'Business
as Usual' under Obama," he reported that working cooperatively with
private corporations, the NSA collects vast amounts of "transactional
data such as credit card purchases, bank transactions and travel
itineraries....sold to (the agency) by corporate freebooters." It's then
data-mined for "suspicious patterns," a practice begun pre-9/11 but
expanded greatly since then.
More than just financial transactions are monitored. According to
investigative journalist Christopher Ketchum, "as many as '8 million
Americans are now listed (as) secret enemies....who could face detention
under martial law (and subjected) to everything from heightened
surveillance and tracking to direct questioning" and possible
internment.
Nothing under Obama has changed in spite of serious privacy, civil
liberties, and other constitutional issues. Director Rod Beckstrom of
DHS' Cyber Security Center resigned in March because of NSA's "greater
role in guarding the government's computer systems" and its concentrated
power without checks and balances.
According to Electronic Frontier Foundation's senior staff attorney
Kevin Bankston: Obama's "Justice Department (is continuing) the Bush
administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet
surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the
much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a 'secret' that
cannot be reviewed by the courts...." because doing so would harm
national security.
Worse still is the DOJ's assertion that the US government is immune from
illegal spying litigation even when in violation of federal privacy
statutes, an unprecedented claim exceeding the Bush administration
citing "sovereign immunity." Obama is going Bush one better by saying
the Patriot Act immunizes the government from being sued under
surveillance provisions of the Wiretap Act, Stored Communications Act,
and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's (FISA) enhanced warrantless
wiretapping powers in cooperation with complicit telecom providers. In
other words, Obama's DOJ absolves itself and its corporate allies of
accountability under existing federal statutes that prohibit illegal
spying on Americans.
On April 26, Burghhardt reported that "The Pentagon's Cyber Command
Formidable Infrastructure arrayed against the American People" will be
headed by the NSA's director, Lt. General Keith Alexander, to protect
the military's networks from hacker attacks, especially from countries
like China and Russia. How this will "affect civilian computer networks
is unclear. However, situating" it alongside NSA at Fort Meade, MD
"should set alarm bells ringing (because of NSA's) potential for
(greater) abuse....given (its) role in illegal domestic
surveillance....(and its) tremendous technical capabilities."
"As a Pentagon agency, NSA has positioned itself to seize near total
control over the country's electronic infrastructure, thereby exerting
an intolerable influence--and chilling effect-- over the nation's
political life." Recent history shows that "NSA and their partners at
CIA, FBI, et. al. have targeted political dissidents," including
anti-war protesters, environmentalists, and others for their activism
and beliefs. Greater NSA powers will "transform 'cybersecurity' into a
euphemism for keeping the rabble in line (and) achieving 'full spectrum
dominance' via 'Cyberspace Offensive Counter-Operations.' "
Directed against ordinary Americans, democratic freedoms will be
severely compromised. No matter as "the Obama administration (prepares)
to hand control of the nation's electronic infrastructure over to a
(rogue) agency" - with General Alexander telling the House Armed
Services subcommittee that America needs a digital warfare force for
defensive and offensive cyber operations. More resources are required to
do it, not for public security, but for imperial conquest and containing
dissent at home - in violation of constitutional freedoms and
international law.
In a follow-up May 4 article, Burghardt explored the secret,
unaccountable world of FBI data mining through its Investigative Data
Warehouse (IDW) containing over a billion documents, including many on
US citizens. They come from our personal records and history, including
what's obtainable online through illegal spying.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) Kurt Opsahl,
"The IDW includes more than four times as many documents as the Library
of Congress, and the FBI has asked for millions of dollars to data-mine
this warehouse, using unproven science in an attempt to predict future
crimes from past behavior." This illegal spying violates our
constitutional right to privacy and endangers our freedom by generating
unsubstantiated threats based on pure supposition.
Besides the FBI, it's virtually certain that other, perhaps all 16,
government intelligence agencies conduct similar spying illegally, and
as such, endanger everyone's freedom.
Earlier on July 14, 2008, an ACLU press release headlined: "Terrorist
Watch List Hits One Million Names" based on government reported figures.
They include: "Members of Congress, nuns, war heros and other
'suspicious characters' (like anti-war and environmental
activists)....trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with
little hope of escape."
According to the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program director, Barry
Steinhardt, this data base represents "what's wrong with this
administration's approach to security: it's unfair, out-of-control, a
waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an
afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of
(people) in this country. Putting a million names on a watch list is a
guarantee (it) will do more harm than good" besides being ineffective to
catch real criminals.
Given the current scope and intent of FBI data mining, with millions
under surveillance, its potential for abuse far exceeds where it stood
less than a year ago - because the Obama administration supports it. No
longer is anything about us private, including:
-- all our financial transactions and records;
-- every check written;
-- every credit card or other electronic purchase;
-- our complete medical history;
-- every plane, train, bus or ship itinerary;
-- our phone records and conversations; and
-- every computer key stroke.
Our entire private world is now public - if spy snoops decide to invade
it.
Key Internet-based companies, like Google, do it routinely - the company
UK-based Privacy International ranked worst in its September 2007 "Race
to the Bottom" report. It stated:
"....throughout our research we have found numerous deficiencies and
hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of
other organizations." It tops them all "as an endemic threat to privacy.
This is in part due to the diversity and specificity of Google's product
range and the ability of the company to share extracted data between
these tools, and in part due to Google's market dominance and the sheer
size of its user base."
It's also unmatched in "its aggressive use of invasive or potentially
invasive technologies and techniques." It's able to "deep-drill into the
minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices" irresponsibly. Its
attitude toward privacy is blatantly hostile at worst and benignly
ambivalent at best. Specifically:
-- Google retains a large amount of user information with no limitation
on its subsequent use or disclosure and with no chance for users to
delete or withdraw it;
-- it retains all "search strings and associated IP-addresses and time
stamps for at least 18 to 24 months (retention) and does not provide
users with an expungement option;"
-- it has other personal information, including hobbies, employment,
addresses, phone numbers, and more, and retains it even after users
delete their profiles;
-- it "collects all search results entered through Google Toolbar and
identifies all Google Toolbar users with a unique cookie that allows
Google to track the user's web movement;" it also retains information
indefinitely with no expungement option;
-- it doesn't follow OECD Privacy Guidelines and EU data protection law
provisions;
-- users have no option to edit or delete obtained records and
information about them; and
-- they can't access log information generated through various Google
services, such as Google Maps, Video, Talk, Reader, or Blogger.
In 2004, Google also acquired the CIA-linked company Keyhole, Inc., that
has a worldwide 3-D spy-in-the-sky images database. Its software
provides a virtual fly-over and zoom-in capability to within a one-foot
resolution. It's supported by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital CIA-funded
firm that "identif(ies) and invest(s) in companies developing
cutting-edge information technologies that serve United States national
security interests."
In 2003, its CEO, John Hanke, said: "Keyhole's strategic relationship
with In-Q-Tel means that the Intelligence Community can now benefit from
the massive scalability and high performance of the Keyhole enterprise
solution."
In 2006, former CIA clandestine services case officer, Robert Steele,
said:
"I am quite positive that Google is taking money and direction from my
old colleague Dr. Rick Steinheiser in the Office of Research and
Development at CIA, and that Google has done at least one major
prototype effort focused on foreign terrorists which produced largely
worthless data....I think (Google is) stupid to be playing with CIA,
which cannot keep a secret and is more likely to waste time and money
than actually produce anything useful."
On April 29, Willem Buiter's Maverecon site headlined "Gagging on
Google" and said:
"Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what
the Taliban are to women's rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat
that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the
right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses
made by others of their intellectual property."
This company should be rigorously regulated, "and if necessary, broken
up or put out of business." With about half the global internet search
market, it threatens enhanced "corporate or even official Big
Brotherism."
For example, Google Street View, an addition to Google Maps, "provides
panoram(ic) images visible from street level in cities around the world.
The cameras record details of residents' lives" on all sorts of personal
matters that no one should be able to snoop on, then save, without
permission, for whatever purposes.
The company also invades our privacy through tracking cookies or
"third-party persistent cookies" to assist interest-based advertising, a
practice known as behavioral targeting. In the wrong hands, this
information can be used "to put a commercial squeeze on people, but also
to extort and blackmail them." And in government hands, it enhances "a
pretty effective and very nasty police state."
Can Google be trusted to use this information responsibly? "Of course
not." It's a business run by "amoral capitalists," out to make as much
money as possible by any means necessary. Google and other Internet
search engines "should not be trusted because they cannot be trusted."
However, because of its size and dominance, Google is "the new evil
empire of the internet," a "Leviathan" that must be tamed.
Cybersecurity Legislation
On April 1, two bills endangering a free and open Internet were
introduced in the Senate:
-- S. 773: Cybersecurity Act of 2009 "to ensure the continued free flow
of commerce within the United States and with its global trading
partners through secure cyber communications, to provide for the
continued development and exploitation of the Internet and intranet
communications for such purposes, to provide for the development of a
cadre of information technology specialists to improve and maintain
effective cybersecurity defenses against disruption, and for other
purposes."
S. 773 was then referred to the Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Committee and thus far not voted on.
-- S. 778: A bill to establish, within the Executive Office of the
President, the Office of National Cybersecurity Advisor (aka czar). The
bill was referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee and not yet voted on.
Accompanying information said Senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe
introduced the legislation to address:
"our country's unacceptable vulnerability to massive cyber crime, global
cyber espionage, and cyber attacks that could cripple our critical
infrastructure."
We presently face cyber espionage threats, they said, as well as
"another great vulnerability....to our private sector critical
infrastructure - banking, utilities, air/rail/auto traffic control,
telecommunications - from disruptive cyber attacks that could literally
shut down our way of life."
"This proposed legislation will bring new high-level governmental
attention to develop a fully integrated, thoroughly coordinated,
public-private partnership to our cyber security efforts in the 21st
century" through what's unstated - government affecting our private
lives by threatening the viability of a free and open Internet.
During a March Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee
hearing, Senator Rockefeller said that we'd all be better off if the
Internet was never invented. His precise words were: "Would it have been
better if we'd never have invented the Internet and had to use paper and
pencil or whatever!" Left unsaid was that without a free and open
Internet, few alternatives for getting real news and information would
exist, at least with the ease and free accessibility that computers can
provide.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Jennifer Granick expressed alarm
about the risk of "giving the federal government unprecedented power
over the Internet without necessarily improving security in the ways
that matter most. (These bills) should be opposed or radically amended."
Here's what they'll do:
-- federalize critical infrastructure security, including banks,
telecommunications and energy, shifting power away from providers and
users to Washington;
-- give "the president unfettered authority to shut down Internet
traffic in (whatever he calls) an emergency and disconnect critical
infrastructure systems on national security grounds....;"
-- potentially "cripple privacy and security in one fell swoop" through
one provision (alone) empowering the Commerce Secretary to "have access
to all relevant data concerning (critical infrastructure) networks
without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule, or policy
restricting such access...."
In other words, the Commerce Department will be empowered to access "all
relevant data" - without privacy safeguards or judicial review. As a
result, constitutionally protected private information statutory
protections will be lost - guaranteed under the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, the Privacy Protection Act, and financial
privacy regulations.
Another provision mandates a feasibility study for an identity
management and authentication program that would sidestep "appropriate
civil liberties and privacy protections."
At issue is what role should the federal government play in
cybersecurity? How much power should it have? Can it dismiss
constitutional protections, and what, in fact, can enhance cybersecurity
without endangering our freedoms? S. 773 and 778, as now written, "make
matters worse by weakening existing privacy safeguards (without)
address(ing) the real problems of security."
In late February, Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis
Blair, told the House Intelligence Committee that the NSA, not DHS,
should be in charge of cybersecurity even though it has a "trust
handicap" to overcome because of its illegal spying:
"I think there is a great deal of distrust of the National Security
Agency and the intelligence community in general playing a role outside
of the very narrowly circumscribed role because of some of the history
of the FISA issue in years past...." So Blair asked the committee's
leadership to find a way to instill public confidence.
On February 9, Obama appointed Melissa Hathaway to be Acting Senior
Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security
Councils - in charge of a 60-day interagency cybersecurity review, now
completed.
On April 21, NSA/Chief Central Security Service director, General
Alexander, told RSA Conference security participants that "The NSA does
not want to run cybersecurity for the government. We need partnerships
with others. The DHS has a big part, you do, and our partners in
academia. It's one network and we all have to work together....The NSA
can offer technology assistance to team members. That's our role."
But someone has to be in charge. It may or may not be NSA, but no
matter. At issue is our constitutional freedoms. Any infringement on
them must be challenged and stopped.
Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@....
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The
Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at
10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished
guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy
listening.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13641
<http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13641>

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An international aid group has suspended its aid operations
in Sri Lanka due to restrictions placed on it by the government.


Aid Group Halts Sri Lanka Operation
Al Jazeera
May 21, 2009
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/05/200952011230183260.html


The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told Al Jazeera on
Wednesday, a day after Sri Lanka's government declared victory over the Tamil
Tigers, that "additional restrictions" meant it
had no choice but to halt its activities.

About 265,000 ethnic Tamils were displaced in the military's
recent offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, and many
of them have been sent to overcrowded camps in the country's north.

"Since last weekend there have been additional restrictions
imposed on aid organisations, including ICRC," Paul Castella, the head
of the group's Sri Lanka operations, said.

"The authorities have said that because of security they had
to restrict access to certain areas.

"What is the take of these civilians and what the conditions
are we don't know because we are not granted access to the area."

Doctors detained Separately, rights groups have called on Sri Lanka to
release three Tamil doctors detained after government forces overran
the LTTE's last outpost in the country's northeast.

During the final stages of the conflict, journalists were prevented from
entering the war zone and the international media came to
rely on the reports of Thurairaja Varatharajah, Thangamuttu Sathyamurthi and V
Shanmugarajah, three Tamil doctors working in the war zone.

The men were arrested on accusations that they gave false information about the
number of casualties to the media. Police said that they
can be held for up to 90 days.

Yolanda Foster, a Sri Lanka expert at the human rights organisation Amnesty
International, told Al Jazeera: "Two of the doctors are now
being held in the terrorist investigation division in Colombo but no
formal detention order has yet been issued.

"That's a key concern because without a formal order, the relatives of the
doctors do not know where they are.

"If they are not to be charged formally then they should be released."
The third doctor is believed to be detained in hospital after being injured
while escaping fighting on Friday. However, this has not yet
been confirmed.

Frank Donaghue, who heads Physicians for Human Rights, said:

"We call on the Sri Lankan government to release the doctors
immediately, and to respect their rights to legal counsel and to receive medical
care as well as family visits."

"The Committee to Protect Journalists has also called for the doctors to be
released.

"This is a chilling example of the intentions of the Sri Lanka government as it
pursues its all out military solution in dealing
with the [Tigers]," Bob Dietz, the group's Asia programme co-ordinator, said.

'Outrageous'

Mahinda Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka's minister for disaster
managment and human rights, confirmed that the doctors had been "handed over" to
the police.

"The Criminal Investigation Department has issued detention
orders for the three doctors and investigations have commenced about
possible collaboration with the LTTE," he told Al Jazeera.

Mads Gilbert, a doctor at the Norwegian Aid Committee who
has worked in conflict zones, told Al Jazeera that the doctors had
fulfilled their humanitarian obligations and that it was "outrageous" that they
had not yet been given full protection they are entitled to under international
law.

"They should immediately be handed over to the UN or ICRC and be protected from
any interrogation or punishment from the Sri Lankan
government."

He said that the doctors should be afforded witness protection since they are
some of the few who are able to talk of alleged war crimes by the government.

"They are instrumental to know what is going on ... The most simple thing is for
the government to execute them ... then they have
silenced them completely," Gilbert said.

"These doctors are a threat to the government since they can
tell the truth to the world."

Fears persist

President Rajapakse announced victory over the Tamil Tigers, who had fought for
decades for a separate Tamil homeland, on Tuesday.

State television broadcast images of what it said was the body of Velupillai
Prabhakaran, the LTTE chief, a bid to discredit claims by the Tamil Tigers that
he was "alive and well".

Despite the government's declaration of victory, pockets of
fighters are thought to still be active in Sri Lanka's east and
officials suspect that sleeper cells are hidden in cities across the country.

Security forces were on high alert on Wednesday as the government declared a
public holiday to mark the Tamil Tigers' defeat.

Meanwhile, concern has grown over the the high numbers of civilians killed and
how the government will reach out to the country's Tamil
minority.

Speaking in Geneva, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, said that any serious
allegations of war crimes "should be properly investigated".

"I remain concerned about the welfare and safety of the civilian population," he
said.

The European Union has called for an independent inquiry
into alleged human-rights violations carried out during the war.

Political solution

The UN has said that between 80,000 to 100,000 people were
killed in Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war.

Under international pressure to reach out to the Tamils, Mahinda Rajapakse, Sri
Lanka's president, has vowed that a political
solution to the island's ethnic divisions would be found.

"All should live with equal rights. They should live
without any fear or doubt," he said in his victory speech.

"Let us all be united."

He also called upon Sri Lankans, especially Tamils who fled
the country, to return and help it rebuild.

"There are no minority communities in this country. There
are only two communities, one that loves this country and another that
does not," he said.

Ranil Wickremesinghe, the opposition leader, who has been criticised by the
government for his conciliatory approach towards Tamils,
called for national reconciliation.

"We have to have a discussion among ourselves, among the political leaders who
represent the communities, and come up with a new Sri
Lankan identity," he said from Brussels.

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Halal: Buying Muslim
By CARLA POWER
Thursday, May. 14, 2009
Time.com


FRESH LOOK: Malaysia-based El Hajj markets skincare products such as
moisturizer and facial cleanser to pilgrims headed to Mecca
Palani Mohan / Reportage by Getty Images for TIME


Khalfan Mohammed has long been buffeted by culture shock while staying in
five-star hotels. As a devout Muslim he has learned to ask
staff to remove the minibar's alcohol. He loathes lobbies with loud discos and
drunken guests. When traveling with his parents, it is the bikinis that rankle
most.

"It was quite shocking for my mother to sit in a restaurant with
undressed people," the Abu Dhabi-based businessman says. "My mom and dad are not
used to seeing people in public wearing their underwear." To avoid such
embarrassment, the Mohammeds took to renting furnished apartments.

No longer. On a trip to Dubai last year, Mohammed stayed in the
Villa Rotana, one of a growing number of hotels catering to Muslim
travelers.

In the lobby — all white leather, brick and glass, with a small
waterfall — quiet reigns. Men in dishdashas and veiled women glide by Westerners
who are sometimes discreetly reminded to respect local customs. Minibars are
stocked not with alcohol, but with Red
Bull, Pepsi and the malt drink Barbican.

Time was, buying Muslim meant avoiding pork and alcohol and getting your meat
from a halal butcher, who slaughtered in accordance with
Islamic principles. But the halal food market has exploded in the past
decade and is now worth an estimated $632 billion annually, according to the
Halal Journal, a Kuala Lumpur-based magazine. That's about 16% of the entire
global food industry.

Throw in the fast-growing Islam-friendly finance sector and the myriad
other products and services — cosmetics, real estate, hotels, fashion,
insurance — that comply with Islamic law and the teachings of the Koran, and the
sector is worth well over $1 trillion a year.

One reason for the rise of the halal economy is that the world's
1.6 billion Muslims are younger and, in some places at least, richer
than ever.

Seeking to tap that huge market, non-Muslim [Zionist] multinationals like Tesco,
McDonald's and Nestlé have expanded their Muslim-friendly offerings and now
control an estimated 90% of the global halal market.

At the same time, governments in Asia and the Middle East are pouring millions
into efforts to become regional "halal hubs," providing tailor-made
manufacturing centers and "halal logistics" — systems to maintain product purity
during shipping and storage. The increased
competition is changing manufacturing and supply chains in some unusual places.

Most of Saudi Arabia's chicken is raised in Brazil, which means
Brazilian suppliers have built elaborate halal slaughtering facilities.
Abattoirs in New Zealand, the world's biggest exporter of halal lamb, have
hosted delegations from Iran and Malaysia. And the Netherlands, keen to maximize
Rotterdam's role as Europe's biggest port, has built halal warehouses so that
imported halal goods aren't stored next to pork or alcohol.

Such arrangements cost, of course, but since the industry's anchor
is food, business is booming, even in the economic crisis. "What
downturn?" asks Nordin Abdullah, executive director of the Halal
Journal. "You don't need your Gucci handbag, but you do need your hamburger."

Not just hamburgers. Drug companies such as the U.K.'s Principle
Healthcare and Canada's Duchesnay now sell halal vitamins free of the
gelatins and other animal derivatives that some Islamic scholars say make
mainstream products haram, or unlawful. The Malaysia-based company Granulab
produces synthetic bone graft material to avoid using animal bone, while
Malaysian and Cuban scientists are
collaborating on a halal meningitis vaccine.

In the Gulf, the Burooj real estate company is carving out a niche, not just
because it deals exclusively with Islamic banks, but
because it designs spas and swimming pools that segregate the sexes. For Muslim
women concerned about skin-care products containing alcohol or lipsticks that
use animal fats, a few cosmetics firms are creating halal makeup lines.

The burgeoning Islamic finance industry is using the global economic crisis to
win new non-Muslim customers. Investors are attracted
by Islamic banking's more conservative approach: Islamic law forbids banks from
charging interest (though customers pay fees) and many scholars discourage
investment in excessively leveraged companies. Though it currently accounts for
just 1% of the global market, the Islamic finance industry's value is growing at
around 15% a year, and could reach $4 trillion in five years, up from $500
billion today, according to a 2008 report from Moody's Investors Service.

Those who define the halal market in the traditional sense — as a
matter of meat, and no more — see the industry stopping at Islamic
food standards. But the movement's more bullish advocates envisage Muslim cars
and halal furniture built in accordance with Muslim finance, labor and ethical
principles. Citing the kosher and organic industries as successful examples of
doing well by doing good, some entrepreneurs even see halal products moving into
the mainstream and appealing to consumers looking for high-quality, ethical
products. A few firms that comply with the Shari'a code — the religious laws
that observant Muslims follow — point out that already many of their
customers are non-Muslim. At the Jawhara Hotels, an alcohol-free Arabian Gulf
chain run by the Islam-compliant Al Lotah conglomerate, 60% of the clientele are
non-Muslims, drawn by the hotels' serenity and family-friendly atmosphere.

Dutch-based company Marhaba, which sells cookies and chocolate, says a
quarter of its customers are non-Muslims, mostly people concerned not about
religious edicts but about food safety. "People are always looking for the next
purity thing," says Mah Hussain-Gambles, founder of Saaf Pure Skincare, which
markets halal makeup.

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The Old Testament and the Genocide in Gaza
By Gilad Atzmon
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/01/08/gilad-atzmon-the-old-testament-and-the-\
genocide-in-gaza/


"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five
of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to
flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you." Leviticus, Chapter 26,
verses 7-9

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and
drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy them totally. Make no
treaty with them and show them no mercy."
Deuteronomy 7:1-2,

"…do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord
your God has commanded you…"
Deuteronomy 20:16


There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains
some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a
call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwager has found in the Old
Testament  600 passages of explicit violence,  1000 descriptive verses of God's
own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands
others to kill people.  Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned
activity in the Hebrew Bible.

As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and
extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide
conducted momentarily in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF is
using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to
`destroy' the Gazans  while showing `no mercy' whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself as a secular state.  Ehud Barak is
not exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi's wife.
Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn't actually Judaism per se
that directly transforms Israeli politicians and military leaders into war
criminals. Moreover,  early Zionists believed that within a national home  Jews
would become 'people like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical. In
that very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic secular Jews
may have managed to drop their God, most of them do not follow Judaic law, they
are largely secular, and yet they collectively interpret their Jewish identity
as a genocidal mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible
from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry.  They are there,
in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the land and to lock up, starve and destroy
its indigenous habitants. Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders
and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza two nights ago were following
Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave alive anything that breathes."
And yet, one question is left open. Why should a secular commander follow
Deuteronomy verses or any other Biblical text?

Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within the left are insisting upon telling
us that Jewishness is not necessarily inherently murderous.   I tend to believe
them that they themselves consider their words as genuine and truthful.  But
then one may wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no
comparison? The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As far as we can
see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and political Jewish collective
around and as it happens, it has proved once again this week that it is
genocidal to the bone.

As far as genocide is concerned the difference between Judaism and Zionism can
be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with
genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the Zionist context,
Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of themselves i.e., the  `Jewish
people'. This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution. It
taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the Jewish state.  `The
Israeli' is Israel's God.  Accordingly, the Israeli kills in the name of  `his
or her security', in the name of `his or her democracy'. The Israelis destroy in
the name of `their war against terror' and in the name the `their America'.   
Seemingly, in the Jewish state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as
soon as he finds a `name' to associate with.

This doesn't really leave us too much room for speculation. The Jewish state is
the ultimate threat to humanity and our notion of humanism. Christianity, Islam
and humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal fundamentalism
and to replace it with universal ethics. Enlightenment, liberalism and
emancipation allowed Jews to redeem themselves from their ancient tribal
supremacist traits. Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been breaking out
of their cultural and tribal chain.  Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull
many Jews back in. Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice
available for Jews.

The merciless offensive against the Palestinian civilian population did not
leave any room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace. Clearly
the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving a volatile racially orientated
identity an opportunity to set itself into a national state.  However, the
nations' duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state before it is too late.
We must do it before the Jewish state and its forceful lobbies around the world
manage to pull us all into a global war in the `name' of one banal populist
ideology or another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so on). 
We have to wake up now before our one and only planet is transformed into a
bursting boil of hatred.

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Afghan was taken to Guantanamo aged 12-rights group
By Sayed Salahuddin
http://freedetainees.org/5648


KABUL,  (Reuters) - An Afghan who has spent over six years at the U.S.
military's Guantanamo Bay prison was only around 12-years-old when he was
detained, not 16 or 17 as his official record says, an Afghan rights group said
on Tuesday.

Interviews with the family of Mohammed Jawad, who like many poor Afghans does
not know his exact age or birthday, showed he was probably not even a teenager
when he was arrested in 2002, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission
said.

He was picked up by Afghan police in connection with a grenade attack in Kabul
in which two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan interpreter were wounded. He was
transferred to U.S. custody the same day and flown to Guantanamo in early 2003.

Commissioner Nader Nadery said in addition to being a minor at the time of his
detention, Jawad was tortured and abused by the Afghan police and while at the
Guantanamo detention centre, located at a U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The Commission is seeking his release and repatriation, and in the course of
looking into his case found out he was probably considerably younger than his
records showed.

"We asked his mother what was the big event close to his birth that you can
remember, any change in the president etcetera, and she said that he was born
around six months after his father's death," Nadery told Reuters.

"We tried to explore more when his father died, and his father died in a battle
in Khost," he said.

That fighting was in 1991, according to a petition submitted to the Afghan
supreme court this month on Jawad's behalf, aiming to force President Hamid
Karzai to seek his release.

Nadry said the commission checked Jawad's mother's story, interviewing other
relatives and officials including a soldier who commanded Jawad's father.

Major Eric Montalvo, a Pentagon-appointed U.S. Marine Corps lawyer representing
Jawad, said his client — who may still be a teenager if his mother's dates are
correct — should be released.

"We have a child of Afghanistan that was wrongfully taken from this country and
he needs to be returned. He was tortured, he was abused over seven years of
custody," he told a news conference in the Afghan capital.

Nadry said the commission had raised Jawad's case with the Afghan and U.S.
governments in the past, without success.

Since joining with Afghan troops to oust the Taliban in 2001, the U.S. has
arrested thousands of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda militants in Afghanistan.
Some were then transferred to other places, including the Guantanamo Bay prison.
(Writing and additional reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison; Editing by Sophie
Hares)

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Young Tourists Pick Somalia, and a 3-Nation Ordeal Begins
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/21/world/africa/21benaouda.html


WITH a blend of naïveté and a love of travel, Saifa Benaouda flew
into Somalia last December from Dubai, where she and her boyfriend had gone for
an extended vacation. Barely 17, Ms. Benaouda, a feisty and independent
high-school student, did not mention the Somalia trip to her mother, the leader
of a moderate Muslim organization here and herself a bit of a rebel when she was
younger.

"We were only going to be there two weeks, and I thought I'd tell her after
about my adventure," Ms. Benaouda said in an interview. Their
timing, in a world obsessed with terrorism, could not have been worse or, in the
eyes of the authorities, more suspicious.


They arrived in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, just as Muslims from
various countries, some trained by Al Qaeda, were streaming into Somalia in
response to a call from Islamist forces that controlled much of the country last
year. The Islamists were briefly battling with Ethiopian troops who had
intervened to take back Somalia for a
weak Western-backed interim government.

Ms. Benaouda (pronounced ben-OW-da), a Muslim, disavows any political or
religious motive for her venture into Somalia, and says her boyfriend is also
not political. She contends that they learned of the fighting only after they
got to Mogadishu and found a country she did not like and more adventure than
she wanted.

With fighting raging nearby, they rapidly found themselves fleeing south toward
Kenya, along with hundreds of other people. On the way, she said, an American
woman — the wife of Daniel Maldonado, who pleaded guilty in Houston federal
court Thursday to receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization —
died in her lap. Ms. Benaouda took over care of the woman's three small
children, ages 7
months to 9 years old, surviving by eating rice and drinking muddy
floodwater and hiding in the bush when military helicopters buzzed overhead.

At the Kenyan border, she said in the interview, she was detained by
soldiers, including three who had American flag patches on their
uniforms. She ended up in Ethiopia, where she was held for several weeks and
interrogated, she said, by Westerners.

AFTER criticism from human rights organizations, led by Cageprisoners
and Reprieve, which were instrumental in Ms. Benaouda's eventual
release, the Ethiopian government acknowledged recently that it was holding 41
men and women it suspected of fighting with the Islamists. American officials
have been allowed to interrogate the suspects, American officials have said,
including Amir Mohamed Meshal, from New Jersey, who is expected to be released
soon from prison there.

Ms. Benaouda said she got the travel bug from her Moroccan father, who
died eight years ago. When the family traveled — she is the youngest of four
children — they avoided tourist spots. Her Finnish-Swedish mother especially
sought more exotic places.

"When we went to Morocco, we didn't go to Casablanca, we went to the mountains,"
she said.

Last year, Ms. Benaouda and her boyfriend, Munir Awad, a 25-year-old
Swedish citizen of Lebanese origin, decided they wanted to visit a Muslim
country during Ms. Benaouda's winter school break.

They chose Dubai but were quickly disappointed: too many Asians, too
many modern, tall buildings, too much shopping. "We wanted something more
authentic," she said. They met a man from Stockholm who was going to Somalia,
and they decided to go, too.

When they arrived, their baggage was missing. They were told they had to stay
inside to be safe. She said they were treated badly because of their lighter
skin. Then the fighting broke out, and they fled toward Kenya.

Along the way, she and her boyfriend became separated, and she joined up with a
group of women and children, including the American woman, who apparently had
malaria. "She was hallucinating," Ms. Benaouda recalled. "She was saying goodbye
to her kids, telling them she loved them."

After the woman died, the people in the convoy wrapped her body in a
mat, and put it on the roof of the car. The children had fallen asleep, and when
they awoke Ms. Benaouda told them that their mother had gone in another car.

Ms. Benaouda said she learned only recently, from Cageprisoners, that
Mr. Maldonado had been interrogated by the F.B.I. in Kenya this year, and then
sent to Houston to face trial. (The children were ultimately sent to their
grandparents in the United States.)

After nearly three weeks on the run, Ms. Benaouda said, her group
reached the Kenyan border, where they were surrounded by soldiers — including
the three with the American flag patches — pointing rifles at them. "We thought
they were going to shoot us," she recalled. "We began screaming."

Ms. Benaouda, who had begun to suspect, correctly as it turned out, that she was
pregnant, was glad to meet someone who spoke English.
She did not tell them she was pregnant, though, only that she was
Swedish. She and her companions were handcuffed and blindfolded and flown to
Nairobi, Kenya, where they were put in jail, she said. Then she and the others,
including Mr. Meshal, were deported to Mogadishu, by then under the control of
Ethiopian troops. After a few days there, they were sent to Addis Ababa, the
Ethiopian capital.

But her ordeal did not end there. She was interrogated again, she said, for as
long as six hours on one day, mostly by two women, one of whom spoke English
with what she said was an American accent. They demanded her e-mail address and
password. She told them they were rude, but gave it to them. They showed her the
names and photographs of some men and asked if she knew any of them. She did
not. They demanded that she name any extremists she knew in Sweden. THEY said
her boyfriend had recruited jihadists in Denmark in 2004.

"I told them they were stupid," she said. "I told them they were full of bull."
Her boyfriend was not yet a Muslim in 2004 and had never been to Denmark, she
said she told them.

Her challenging manner earned her the nickname Crazy Inge from the other
prisoners, she said. Ms. Benaouda said she spoke out because she had been
brought up in Sweden, where women speak their minds.

"She's crazy, but I love her," said her mother, Helena, who sat in on the
interview but allowed her daughter to speak freely. Mrs. Benaouda, who started a
Web site dedicated to her daughter's release
(www.releasemychild.se), said her only conditions were that her daughter not be
photographed or described physically.

Ms. Benaouda gave her only other interviews to the Swedish newspaper
Svenska Dagbladet and Cageprisoners (www.cageprisoners.com), which is based in
Britain. After several weeks, during which Ms. Benaouda kept a diary on pieces
of toilet paper, the Ethiopians told her she was free to go. But she had learned
that her boyfriend — whom she called her husband — was there, too, and refused
to leave without him.

Finally, the Ethiopians said if she did not go to Sweden, they would send her to
Mogadishu. She agreed to go home and arrived there in
late March. Her boyfriend is still being held in Ethiopia. While there is no
telling whether there are similar adventures in store for
Ms. Benaouda as she exercises her wanderlust, her immediate future
promises to be uneventful. Her passport was taken by the American soldiers, and
her mother said she had no intention of signing the parental consent form that a
minor needed to get another one.

Correction

The Saturday Profile, about Saifa Benaouda, a Swedish Muslim who went to Somalia
last December as the country was becoming a magnet for Islamic extremists,
referred incorrectly to Daniel Maldonado, an American Muslim convert in Somalia
arrested on the Kenya border and deported to the United States in February on
terrorism-related charges. Mr. Maldonado pleaded guilty in Houston federal court
last Thursday to receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization. He is
not "currently on trial."

===

Letter from Daniel:

In the Name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful
Praise be to Allah, Peace and Plessings on Muhammad
Asalaam alaikum wa Rahmatullahi wa Barakatuhu,

To all my dear and beloved brothers and sisters in Al-Islam;
I hope and pray this letter reaches you all in the best of imaan and
health.

To Proceed;

"Then it occured to them after they had seen the signs (of his
innocence). (That it was best) to imprison him for a time." (Surah Yusef 35)

Sheikhul Islam Ibnul Taymiyyah said: "What can they do to me?! My
garden and my paradise are in my breast, wherever I go they are with me. If they
kill me, I become a martyr, and if they banish me from my country, I go abroad
as a tourist, and if they imprison me they allow me to have solitude (to worship
Allah)."

Indeed this was written for me before I was born, decreed and settled.
The Prophet (saws) said: "Oh Allah, make me pleased with your decree, so that I
may know that whatever has befallen me was not to miss me, and what has passed
me by, was not meant to be in my lot."

He (SAWS) also said: "Wonderful is the situation of the believer All
of his affairs are good (for him)! And this is only for the believer. If good
befalls him he is thankful, and that is good for him. If harm afflicts him, he
is patient, and that is good for him."

I am sure there is quite a bit of talk concerning me, and my past, and
present situation. And I am sure that many of you rush to defend my
honour, and for the I am truly greatful. I do remind you though, it is Allah who
says: "And be not distressed because of what they plot" (Surah an Naml 127)

All of the above does not mean I do not feel the sting of this trial of mine No!
By Allah! This has truly been the most painful days of my life! I have lost the
most beloved person in my life; the mother of my children, my best friend, my
companion, my beloved wife, May Allah accept her! I lost nearly all of my
friends in war, some I helped patch up their wounds one day, just to have them
killed the next… Now my children are not only without mother, but without father
as well… But this is no reason to give up or give in! Rather, this is a reason
to Praise Allah more and seek patience in Salah. Allah says: "Oh you
who believe! Seek help with patient perseverance and prayer; for Allah is with
those who patiently persevere." (Surah al baqarah 153)

The next verses speak volumes to me after I have lost my wife (May Allah accept
her), lost all I own, wandered the jungle with nothing to eat for 14 days, and
now have had my children taken from my life after imprisonment:

"And say not of those who are slain in the way of Allah: `They
are dead'. Nay they are living, though you perceive not."

"Be sure we shall test you with something of fear , and hunger, some
loss in goods or lives, or the fruits (of your toil), but give glad tidings to
those who patiently persevere- who say when afflicted with calamity: `To Allah
we belong and to Allah we shall return".

"They are those on whom (descend) blessings from the Lord."
(Baqarah 154-157)

In light of the above I can only say:

"This is what Allah and his messenger had promised us, and Allah and
his messenger had spoken the truth." (surah al Ahzab 22)

My dear and beloved brothers and sisters; The life of this world is
passing, while the Hereafter is racing towards us! Do not feel bad for me, for
even a prisoner can attain Paradise! Although he has no orphan to give to, and
no person to feed, He has reassurance in those words of Imam Ahmad:

"Whatever is lacking in the life of this world will be less for reckoning."

So I thank and Praise Allah! And I thank all of you for your prayers and kind
words. It is an honour to be able to say I am your brother! I love you for the
sake of Allah oh Ummah of Muhammad!

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COURT SAYS SUSPECTS CAN BE INTERROGATED WITHOUT LAWYER

MAY 26, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124334529081854421.html


Montejo v. Louisiana
http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/07-1529.pdf


The Supreme Court overturned a long-standing ruling that stops police
from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present, a move
that will make it easier for prosecutors to interrogate suspects.

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson
ruling, which said police may not initiate questioning of a defendant
who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present.

The Michigan ruling applied even to defendants who agree to talk to the
authorities without their lawyers.

The court's conservatives overturned that opinion Tuesday, with Justice
Antonin Scalia saying "it was poorly reasoned, has created no
significant reliance interests and [as we have described] is ultimately
unworkable."

Justice Scalia, who read the opinion from the bench, said their decision
will have a "minimal" effects on criminal defendants. "Because of the
protections created by this court in Miranda and related cases, there is
little if any chance that a defendant will be badgered into waiving his
right to have counsel present during interrogation," Justice Scalia
said.

The Michigan v. Jackson opinion was written by Justice John Paul
Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time. He
dissented from the ruling, and in an unusual move read his dissent aloud
from the bench. It was the first time this term a justice had read a
dissent aloud.

"The police interrogation in this case clearly violated petitioner's
Sixth Amendment right to counsel," Justice Stevens said. Overruling the
Jackson case, he said, "can only diminish the public's confidence in the
reliability and fairness of our system of justice."

The decision comes in the case of Jesse Jay Montejo, was found guilty in
2005 of the shooting death of Louis Ferrari in the victim's home on
Sept. 5, 2002.

He was appointed a public defender at his Sept. 10, 2002, hearing, but
was never indicated that he accepted the lawyer's help. Mr. Montejo then
went with police detectives to help them look for the murder weapon.
While in the car, Mr. Montejo wrote a letter to Mr. Ferrari's widow
incriminating himself.

When they returned to the prison, a public defender was waiting for Mr.
Montejo, irate that his client had been questioned without him being
present.

Mr. Montejo was convicted and sentenced to death. He appealed, but the
Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence.

Michigan v. Jackson
http://supreme.justia.com/us/494/344/case.html
<http://supreme.justia.com/us/494/344/case.html>

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Iranian Regime to Display Unmanned Aircraft on Army Day
Thursday 16 April 2009
http://www.iranpressnews.com/english/source/057586.html


TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran is due to display a home-made Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)
on the occasion of the Army Day on Saturday, a senior Iranian commander
announced on Thursday.

Lieutenant Commander of infantry division 30 of the Iranian Army's Ground Force
General Sirous Razmgir made the remarks in the northern province of Mazandaran.

Noting that independence and self-reliance have always been two important
slogans of the Iranian army forces since the Islamic Revolution, Razmgir
reiterated, "Designing war through Iranian method, forming air force combat
units and recently building Jamaran destroyer have been some of the Islamic
Republic's army activities to attain the goals of the Islamic Republic and the
Revolution."

He also referred to the building of a lighting system to facilitate work at
night which is unique in the world, and added that his division has succeeded in
building a calculating system to decrease the time of digital firing of shells
and bullet.

Pointing out that the Iranian army has discarded 90 percent of its old
communication and telecommunication systems, the Iranian General said, "The
Iranian army is now equipped with a wireless system that is able to send SMS and
no other country enjoys such a system."

The Iranian Army Air Force also plans to display 13 types of its operating
aircrafts during military parades to be staged on the occasion the Army Day.

Military sources say that the air show, which will be the largest in Iran's
history, will serve as a further demonstration of the Islamic Republic's
military might.

During the parades where all units in the Iranian army are represented, the Air
Force fleet will comprise 140 different aircrafts, including fighter jets,
tactical and reconnaissance planes and tankers, the Iranian Air Force public
relations office announced in a statement on Monday.

Aircrafts like F4, F5, F7, F14, Airborne Warning aircrafts, Saeqeh
(Thunderbolt), Azaraqsh (Lightening), Suko 24, Mig 29, Booing 707 and 747, C130
and P3F will fly over the Iranian capital Tehran on the Arm Day.

Earlier in February Iranian Deputy Defense Minister General Ahmad Vahidi said
that Iran will produce more modern military planes after its success in building
'Saeqeh' (Thunderbolt) and 'Azarakhsh' (Lightening) fighter jets.

"We have built some fighter jets, including Azarakhsh and Saeqeh, in our country
that could fly and it is natural that we won't stop and will take the necessary
steps for their development," Vahidi said.

Saeqeh, a joint product of the Iranian Air Force and the Defense Ministry, went
on display as part of the Iranian air force's fleet during military parades on
the Army Day last year.

Vahidi also announced that Iran has produced spy planes with the flying range of
1,000 km.

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Whose Environmental Crisis?
what Islam Offers the Earth
by Shireen Pishdadi
http://www.seehearspeak.com/?p=380)


i. humanity, modernity, and the environment


The story we call the environmental crisis is nothing more than a human crisis.
If we pay attention, we will hear in it our own story, echoing back to us from a
deep horizon. Learning to listen is so important now because, in a way, we have
all recently been blinded.

Everyone learns to see the world through the lens of culture. For tens of
thousands of years, those countless cultures—all of them—cultivated the natural
curiousness of children about creation into knowledgeable adulthood. At their
root, they taught people to see the environment as enchanted, brought to life by
a Creator. Creation was not called `nature,' or the `natural world,' then. Nor
was the immense knowledge of the world people acquired and passed on named `the
natural sciences.' Most importantly, cultures accumulated a continuous treasure
of beneficial knowledge piled generation upon generation as a whole and
recognized the living connection between everything on earth—beneath its soils,
above its skies, and in its sweet and salty waters. They further connected this
with the spirit of life that ran through it all from a Living Source beyond in
the realm of the Unseen. Never would they flatten the multi-spherical cycle of
creation into a one-dimensional chronological line. Never would they sever
worldly creation from its otherworldly origin, splitting life in two, calling
this part "sensible," and therefore real, and that part "insensible," and
therefore irrelevant.

Because of their holistic understanding of the world—themselves in creation and
creation in them, come to them from a Life-Source apart—they understood that
they were to live in it, work from, with, and on the portion of it in their
immediate grasp, and take care of it so that it would remain there for them and
their children, grandchildren, and furthest descendents. They also knew that
their offenses against creation were violations against the Creator and would
inevitably be met with creational disaster directly affecting their vicinity, if
left uncorrected. They called this Divine Judgment, or the Judgment of Heaven.

Such was the wisdom of man. In only the last few centuries, however, this most
basic intelligence and outlook has been lost to us. Steadily, but abruptly, we
have accepted to wear lenses that cut life from its Source and ourselves from
our own environments. And because of this, we have generation-by-generation
killed-off the native curiosity of our children and forgotten how even to live
in our own localities. In the place of the continuum of human knowledge
bequeathed to us by our predecessors, we have assumed an incapacitating reliance
on mechanized world-spanning control systems…for the very bread we put into our
mouths, the water we drink, the fire we kindle, the land we live on, the shelter
we repose in, even for the cloth to cover our own nakedness. This humiliating
dependence on collectivized, dehumanized enterprise has disabled our still-human
hearts. For even if we claim belief in the Creator, we can no longer see the
Provider as actually providing. We look on these interlocking control
structures—what modern people have accurately called for short, "the system" —as
giving us our provision.

This has proven a most fatal error, for it forfeits our prime human birthright:
Freedom to verify the single thread of truth running through all reality:
Tawheed, Oneness: That God is One apart, the sole Creator, who is Beauty; that
all else is one fellowship of creation, serving, willingly or unwillingly, His
purpose by design; and that God has made creation, including man, changeable so
that he can make of himself, his society, and his environment a living witness
to the commandments of the One. This is `ibadah, man's totality of worship,
which thus encompasses all of his earthly activities, which in the end must
cycle back into a continuous esthetic of beauty, reflecting the infinite
splendor of the sublime Creator. Herein reside the two qualities upholding the
delicate interlace of our earthly and heavenly human architecture: Dignity and
rectitude.

To replace in our hearts faith in God, the All-Living, with a dead matrix is
surely the ill-fated exchange which the Surah of Al-Kahf decries: Now, behold!
We [God] said to the angels: Bow [your faces] down to [receive] Adam [into life
and honor him]! So they [all] bowed down, except Iblîs [Satan], who was of the
jinn. Thus he rebelled against the command of his Lord. Will you [human beings]
then take him and his seed as patrons apart from Me [God] while they are an
enemy to you? [How] woeful a substitute [this is] for the wrongdoers [who are
godless in heart]! (18:50)

What a devilish transaction, indeed? It strips men of their mutual khilafah, or
responsible vicegerency of God on the Earth in their turn, making lords of a few
and slaves of the many, reducing us to the base exploiters and ravenous
blood-letters the angels saw in us, perhaps on the pattern of the unknown,
divinely destroyed vicegerents of the earth our kind may have succeeded. Now,
behold! Your Lord said to the angels: I am placing upon the earth a [human]
successor [to steward it]. They said: Will You place thereupon one who will
spread corruption therein, and who, [moreover,] will shed blood, while we ever
exalt You with all praise and hallow You? (2:30)

Believing that the system provides instead of God causes man to abandon his
amanah, his divine trust, to care for all creatures. It renders him unconscious
that all beings on the earth—the animals, plants, elements, and minerals—the
earth, mountains, and sky themselves—are consciously alive by the touch of the
Divine, communicating and complying with the momentary command of the One
Sublime, though we may perceive their discourse and actions not. Indeed, We did
offer the trust [of volitional faith] to the heavens and the earth and the
mountains. But they refused to bear it and were fearful of it. Yet the human
being bore it, [but could not uphold it]. Indeed, he was most unjust [concerning
his own trust] and most ignorant [of the outcome]! (33:72)

It tricks man into substituting mere crumbs falling from the lowly table of
market-interest for the opulent grace of the divine, and thereby to upset the
Heavenly mizan, the delicate balance of creation, that God originally set and
then bequeathed to our care. Thus it is He alone who has set the balance of all
things, so that you might not transgress the just balance (55:7-8).

It transforms man's constructive impulse of `imarah, inspired improvement and
facilitation of the wholesomeness of the earth, into greed-driven development
that ruins creation and destroys its naturally paired state of beauty and
utility. Thus in the place of human sharaakah, what the Prophet, sallallahu
alayhe wa sallam, called the believers' shared partnership in the earth's
abundantly free flowing water, game and vegetation of the wilderness, and air,
the multitudes are subjugated by the monopolies, cartels, and interest-based
financing of the few. The result is the inversion of the divine gift of
tas-kheer, the rendering by God of all things in the land, sea, and sky as
cultivable, serviceable, and utile for the express purpose of the renewable
benefit of man in his brief worldly sojourn. Instead of the princes of God on
earth, we human beings become the subjects of the material, time-bound, and
valueless, indentured in the servitude of a "brute-ocracy," a network of
modern-day vampires who live on the blood of common victims.

We have willingly turned ourselves over to the care of unseen people. So the
Creator in the Unseen has willed to turn us from His meticulous care to their
ruthlessly methodical exploitation and carelessness. The modern world has told
us the greatest fairy tale in history, that we no longer have to worry about the
Judgment of the Creator in the world for our trespasses because "rational" men
have recently learned to take away His Life and the wise men of `natural'
science now control the world and shall find an answer to every problem,
including death.

But alas for the words of men. How often they are empty, like their hearts, and
how easily they are deceived. So corruption prevails in the land and the sea.
Nor even have the spheres of the heavens been saved from all the evil that the
hands of humanity have earned. This, God has allowed, so that He may cause them
to taste something of that which they have done. Yet even so, this test for man
is no mere punitive measure from God. Rather, it is so that they may return to
their proper posture of vicegerency in penitence to Him (30:41).

For the results of man's wholesale assault on creation (especially our
oppression of our own selves) remain grievous violations against the Creator.
And though our ways must change, His Way does not. Erupting mountains, quaking
lands, melting glaciers, burning woods, tidal destructions, breached skies, and
breaking levees—these catastrophes of creation are happening everywhere and with
increasing rapidity because such is the Judgment of God. And even as our
unnatural human behavior is no longer local but global—and, true to the
understanding of the ages before our modern one—so to the ensuing creational
disaster remains commensurate with the environs of our corruption. Steadily,
they are engulfing the whole earth.

Whose Crisis Is It?

The mainstream media presents the dimensions of our impending environmental
disasters as a "natural" outcome of a system of human life now so "advanced" as
to be hopelessly intricate, complex, and overwhelming. This is no accident. This
message is meant to make us throw up our arms and ask: How can a common person
like me work outside the system?

Yet this question is itself telling of a deeper problem. We exist in such a
state of disconnection—with creation, with one another, with the sacred, with
God—that we falsely see the system as separate from ourselves; in fact, that we
see ourselves as existing either outside of it or able to enter and exit it at
will; that we come to see the system is an inevitable Leviathan of history; that
we submit to the notion that power properly belongs to the system almost
metaphysically; and that we personally are spiritually separated and emotionally
divested of the system so that there is nothing we can or ought to do to change
it. On the contrary, even we Muslims are now increasingly telling one another
that we can bend the system, through clever political activism, to our
interests, if we are "smart" like others have been.

This is more than nonsense. It is delusional. The truth is, we Muslims, we human
beings, are now profoundly steeped in our disconnections, nearly totally
dislocated from the sacred, disoriented about our mission in the world,
disengaged from the orphan and widow of war, detached from the wretched poor,
and derelict in our divinely appointed vicegerency over soil, sea, and air, and
the life and forms they support. The Qur'anic verses and Prophetic statements
detailing man's responsibilities—not as cheap splintered activism but as rich
integrating belief—as God's earthly deputy are too numerous to utter here. But
it is even now being evermore widely perceived by those who have the courage of
their knowledge.

"Materialism and reductionism engender the idea that humans are disconnected
from, and above, nature," says Bruce Lipton, author and cell biologist. Let me
whisper the horrifying truth in your ear: It is true. We have been reduced and
disconnected, even as the ethos of the times has reduced and disconnected all
things from their natures (read: fitrah) and meanings—unjoining what Allah, the
one and only Creator, has Himself joined, the necessary result of which is to
become accomplices in desecrating the planet—a crime, says the Qur'an, that
makes failures of us all. Ungodly are all those who break the covenant of God
after it has been solemnly pledged [before Him]; and who cut [off the
relationships] that God has commanded to be kept joined; and who spread
corruption in the earth. It is such as these who are the losers [of an
everlasting Paradise] (2:27). How egregious an offense is our acceptance of this
division that desacralizes the earth. There shall be no altering of God's
creation. That is the upright way of religion, but most people do not know it
(30:30). This is nothing more than the plan of Satan against man, to cause us to
sever creation from its sacred nature, and thus cut ourselves off from the
blessing of God in all things. Satan swore: "And I shall, most surely, lead them
astray. Moreover, I shall, most surely, fill them with fancies. Thus, I shall
command them: And they shall slit the ears of cattle [in false ritual]. And I
shall command them: And they shall [seek unnatural] change [to] the creation of
God." But whoever takes Satan as a patron, apart from God, has most surely
suffered a manifest loss (4:119).

It is time we call this massive attempt to change the sacred nature of creation
and divide man from his own spirit by its proper title. Separation, thy name is
secularism! This is the root of our moral crisis, the unspoken cause that is
undoing the ecology, after it has succeeded to undo us—and, yes, I do mean us
Muslims.

Yet it is the blessing of God, that society is not some separate, solid mass
(nor are we, for that matter, claim physicists). Educator Paulo Freire describes
the critical thinker as one who "perceives reality as process, as
transformation, rather than as a static entity.…one who does not separate [his]
thinking from [his] action…without fear of the risks involved...[for] the
continuing transformation of reality, in behalf of the continuing humanization
of men." This is important as far as it goes. But the Qur'an adds to this state
of constant deployment of one's intellect and action in the world, an
overarching vision of the true reality, the Hereafter, and the implications of
one's ultimate humanization there, before Allah, and in Paradise.

As far as how we can work outside the system, the answer requires a paradigm
shift: Working on ourselves is working "outside" the "system." Once we
understand the problems as systemic, we must admit the obvious: We have seen the
system, and it is us! Together, we are the system. So changing ourselves is
changing the system. And even so says Allah: Indeed, God does not change a
people's condition until they change what is their souls (13:11).

It is an ayah, a divine sign, that the greatest of people after the prophets,
the Sahabah, or Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam,
were not above criticism, nor infallible, nor did they always make sound
decisions. Nevertheless, a just civilization, unprecedented in recorded history,
grew at their hands—because they followed this Divine imperative to change what
was in their hearts, and because through their inner work they reworked their
intentions to impeccable sincerity. Hence, regardless of their mistakes and
imperfections, God, as He promised—and promises still—changed their environment,
gave them victory, until Islam spread its sanity, security, and fecundating
mercy across the globe.


iI. missing the muslim paradigm,

or Viewing the world and seeing it


god made islam for the precise mission of empowering man to rekindle his sacred
inner light and then resacralize the earth. That is the paradigm Islam still
offers us in this time of environmental crisis. This comes into clear relief
when we consider the basic principles prevailing in the West today that have
unraveled the ecology, and since the West is where most of the consumption and
pollution in the world is taking place and where most of the initiative to
counter its disastrous impact has begun.

A defining premise underlying most environmental conversations today is the idea
of "scarcity," the notion that the earth and its resources are insufficient for
man, that it cannot support 6 billion people in an advanced stage of
civilization. This is in sharp contrast to a raft of studies (as well as Islamic
history), both of which show that small scale but diverse agriculture is not
only highly productive and sustainable, but, in fact, superabundant and
virtually perpetual.

Obviously, a paradigm of scarcity engenders vastly different attitudes among
people, and consequences, than one of abundance, upon which Islam rests; namely,
that God is all-genrerous Giver of plenty. To each—those [who are hasty for the
world] and those [who strive for God]—We extend something of your Lord's bounty.
Yet never is the bountiful gift of your Lord confined  [17:20]. In fact, the
violence that has characterized Western history stems largely from a fear of
economic scarcity relentlessly propagated in the culture. This is well
represented today in the barbaric idea of the need for enforced population
control of the "other," which is gaining currency.

The perception of "limited" resources is actually false since all resources are
renewable, but on varying time scales. Some may take ages to build up, but they
are nonetheless renewable. Earth's problems are not with its resources but with
the way commercial interests abuse them, which betrays a thoroughly corrupted
two-fold premise:

  The first assumption is that the only socio-economic value is increase of
wealth, measured as profit and loss, or GDP (gross domestic product). This is
the impulse that enslaved science to the profit motive, giving us technology
that is completely wasteful because in the capitalist paradigm waste (planned
obsolescence, for example) increases production and consumption. Polluting
technology is economically productive in this model, for the same reason: They
generate more backend "industry" (to clean up toxic by product, for instance).
This is why the motor engine has had no significant evolution (beyond
combustion, for example) in a century. Our homes, offices, and schools are toxic
boxes that guzzle energy in the same way our cars do, and so on. The
technologies behind them all are scientifically completely primitive, though
their production technologies (eliminating the role of paid employees) have
evolved enormously. This stark dichotomy is economically productive for a few.

Assumption two of our corrupt commercial paradigm is the belief that life is a
zero-sum phenomenon. Thus for one person to win, another must lose. This is
premise is factual only in a socio-economic system in which there is an elite
exploiting all others. True sustainability amounts to a negative profit for
mega-industries whose philosophy is perpetual growth for the purpose of
consolidating power in structures that subsume the governance apparatus of
people and all their institutions. And just as history witnessed the
principle-based and sustainable agriculture of the Muslims competitively undo
vast land monopolies and liberate millions of serfs, transforming their fiefdoms
into small-scale farms owned by their laborers, so today sustainability can undo
the system of perpetual growth and channel its resources into the justice of
liberated and sovereign people and communities.

True sustainability and justice, a win-win cooperation, is a realistic model as
centuries of Islamic civilization have demonstrated. And for those who don't
know, this was a highly scientific, technologically advanced, ecologically and
economically sustainable, and global civilization. For those not familiar with
the 900 plus years of Islamic civilization that was inherited by the West, there
is currently an abundance of "fringe" science (not supported by academics or
industry) demonstrating that we can be sustainable and just without returning to
the Stone Age.


The Qur'anic Cornerstone of Hyaa', or Shyness

All religions have their essential trait, and hyaa', or shyness, the Prophet,
sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, said is the defining character of Islam. Part of
this shyness is the internal disposition of "refraining" (istihya'), or holding
oneself back from doing something. From this character comes trove of good
qualities that Islam builds in the psychology of its followers, including
modesty, reserve, humility, and reticence. But from the font of hyaa's positive
traits, one in particular emerges as a central Islamic ethic: Moderation, the
disposition to limit, control and restrict one's soul from wandering into a
state of extremeness or slipping into excess. This gives rise to perhaps the
most fundamental of all human ecological principles: Conservation, which is of
the very essence of the Islamic worldview. Creation, with all its natural and
cultural resources is to be preserved and managed with utmost understanding and
care.

It is for this reason that our predecessors in faith demonstrated the greatest
humility and restraint in preserving languages, cultures, and the learning of
others. What I have found unique about the Muslim civilization is not its
science, technology, or agriculture, all of which are still unprecedented in
recorded history. Such activities are, in any case, basic to humanity and
evidence abounds with the great achievements in these fields of long past
civilizations. Nor is military power exclusive to any one civilization, as
empires have risen and fallen with a regularity that ought to chasten us all.
Rather, it is the paradigm of conservation that is distinctive in Muslim
civilization (though this characteristic of ours has nearly disappeared under
the global hegemony of Western culture).

Muslims conserved everything good, as it formed part of their perspective:
Water, land, soil, ecosystems (words, pleasure, beauty) were dealt with
extensively in establishing laws to ensure both their conservation and social
justice beginning 1400 years ago. And do not succumb to manipulated statistics
and manufactured implications of the fact that the global population is at its
highest ever. There are historians, such as Andrew Watson, who have put forth
evidence that the cities of the Muslims matched our major city populations of
today. Although the world population may have been less then, keep in mind that
their numerous highly populated cities were each solely supported by a
sustainable yet abundant local agriculture coming from their well-to-do (not
impoverished) rural sector (which also engaged in global trade). Yet today we
have a global agricultural sector—whose families are impoverished and whose
monolithic corporate model is unsustainable—mainly supporting a fraction of the
global population.

Languages, cultures, religions, autonomous communities and families—Muslims
preserved all of this as a part of God's creative diversity, not man's—whereas
the West, in its manifestation as a Christian and then a secular civilization
has not only been responsible for turning communities worldwide into corporate
factory plantations, but for successfully wiping away fully 3,000 of our 6,000
global languages in just a few centuries. Our Muslim predecessors, on the other
hand, recognized that preserving peoples and their cultures was conserving
knowledge. Thus they kept them free for all people to learn.

History, the conservation of man's story, was, in fact, turned into a rigorous
discipline by the Muslims, who developed meticulous systems of recording. No
other civilization that we know of has conserved on the scale of Muslims,
ecologically and intellectually, historically and esthetically, and, above all,
spiritually (everything from the Qur'an, to the prophetic way of life, to
humankind's primordial religious rites, to marriage and family hierarchies, to
the devout technologies of spiritual elevation, to dress, to ablution and
hygiene—all from Allah, the actual Preserver). Even though Muslims had all the
corruption that is part of human nature, abundance and conservation (not
scarcity and wastage) were the premises of their—our—worldview.

Diversity was respected and cultivated by Muslims, whereas today's civilization
is defined by mono-cultures in every respect from agriculture to education.
Mono-culture, the utilitarian reduction of diverse and complex systems to
hegemonic and controllable systems, is a core issue at the very foundation of
the environmental disaster.

Eco-systems thrive because of abundant diversity. Languages and cultures
exist(ed) abundantly, when they formed themselves naturally out of their
localities (for people are part of eco-systems, even if it is as a destructive
force): That is, languages, say, of Alaska and the Amazon, have to be very
different, for they communicate very different "environments." Each language
embodies a unique worldview and nurtures a singular culture that then cultivates
a people's special knowledge, attesting to the infinite knowledge and abundant
creative diversity of God. In other words, language, among other things,
connects people to their land and holds the wisdom of how to survive and thrive
as part of their eco-system harmoniously and sustainably. Thus, every language
that goes extinct is an environmental disaster of the first order because it
takes with it unfathomable amounts of knowledge that may be as old as the
rainforests we are bulldozing for monocropped corn and soy.

"Monoculture" is an act of violence against people and the earth. For to wrest
people from their languages, as was done to colonized peoples, is to sever them
from their dignity, knowledge, culture, and roots. This is precisely how free
peoples are enslaved mentally, before they are enslaved economically or even
physically. To monocrop land not only strips bare an eco-system and destroys the
land, but it also allows for imported work-slaves or immigrants to labor the
land, as it requires no knowledge on the part of the worker. Monoculture is a
paradigm of consolidation and control, and is a defining tool of the secular
worldview in its quest for lordship of man over man.

What Is the Environment Telling Us?

To break out of the secular worldview, a most important question to ask is what
does it mean to say "environment"? Does the environment start outside our front
door? Does it start where we end? And where might that be? If it is as the
Qur'an tells us—that at the moment of our death the angels remove our souls from
inside our bodies. Then could one not say that we inhabit our bodies, therefore
making our bodies an environment?

And how does the materialist idea that the environment is "out there" lead to a
different set of attitudes than the Qur'anic principle that we are all connected
by virtue of a common divine language? These "ayaat," or signs, of Allah, the
Qur'an tells us, are not merely outside of us, extending to the horizons, but
are also inside of our bodies, within our very souls. We shall show them Our
signs in the horizons and in themselves—until it becomes [utterly] clear to them
that this [Quran] is, indeed, the [divine] truth (41:53). As the pendulum of
Western Civilization swings between its poles of Christianity and secularism,
nature never recovers inherent meaning, and life's meanings always remain
subjective. People go from the extremes of dominating and exploiting nature to
"saving" and worshipping it.

The Islamic paradigm holds the environment—that is creation as the whole
universe and everything in it—as a language of symbols not much different than
the sounds and shapes that form spoken and written languages. God compares both
the Qur'an and creation as Books of Revelation that we must read and reflect on.
This language is translated as "signs" (or ayaat, meaning the verses of the
Qur'an and the clues of the created world). These divine indicators, coming from
the Arabic word ayah, do not stop at our physical beings, but penetrate deep
into our own souls. And so it is that we ourselves are as much a part of nature,
that is creation, as our souls are part of our bodies.

Then let us observe nature, or the environment, as a guide, and seek a lesson in
its activity, or reaction, keeping in mind that this can be done both by
meditative reflection and scientific deliberation. Although we are a society
that claims to be scientific, discovery has moved on, while society remains
stuck in the dogma of an antiquated material reductionism, everything being
brought down to some disconnected bit of matter. Quantum physics, however, has
now shown us quite clearly that the whole universe is actually interconnected
and immaterial, in fact, and thus our beliefs actually do affect the universe.

Moreover, photography has illustrated the magnificent reality that the structure
of a brain cell is the same as the structure of the universe. We are the
micrososm. The universe is the macrocosm. We may not be able to see our effects
far into the universe, but we can certainly see how our beliefs impact and
affect the world we live in. On the one hand, we are an intimate part of
eco-systems, and play either a harmonious or a destructive role. There is no
neutrality as long as we are in the world. On the other hand, the environment is
a mirror of us, and we must see that it is telling us that we are spiritually
corrupted and destroying ourselves. In the end, the earth (through our
corruption and by Allah's command) can very easily wipe us out of existence,
with the earth eventually rebalancing itself and continuing on. In other words,
the earth does not need fixing. We need fixing.

      The Qur'an itself brings forth many lessons of past environmental
disasters, from local to global scale crises. What it communicates to us is that
anytime there was an environmental disaster, it was, in fact, brought about by
people's own hands, inspired by their false beliefs—regardless of how wealthy,
powerful, or technologically remarkable the society was.

And very truly, We had established them in [prosperity and power] as We have not
established you. Moreover, We had endowed them with [the faculties of] hearing
and sight, and hearts [to comprehend]. Yet neither their hearing, nor their
sight, nor their hearts availed them in anything [good], for they were [set on]
disavowing the signs of God. Thus, the [very punishment] at which they used to
mock whelmed them from every side (46:26).

             When the Judgment of God comes down, and the very earth rises up
against man at God's command, it does so because of what a people's hearts and
hands have sent into the world. There is much, in particular, to be learned by
all of us, East and West, regarding the moral complex of environmental
catastrophe from the Qur'anic account of Prophet Noah, who said to his people,
which the West now foolishly takes as but an invented tale. Allah says: Seek
forgiveness from your Lord. Indeed, ever is He most forgiving. He shall [avert
drought and] send [rain from] heaven upon you in abundance. Moreover, He shall
provide you with wealth and children, and make for you gardens, and make for you
rivers that run (71: 11-12). Yet, the Qur'an tells us, they belligerently kept
to their ignorant ways at the behest of their elites—Do not ever leave your
gods!….So they were drowned (71:23 and 25).

Thus Noah's message represents the lesson for us as a global civilization on the
brink of disaster, and the solution: Break the humiliating and oppressive
shackles of servitude to men who cannot even create a flea, and return to the
humble but dignified servitude to the One who Created us. If we do, the earth
shall flourish and us in it. If we continue our abuse, the earth, loosed at
Allah's command, shall destroy us.

What we should remind ourselves is that the environmental crisis is a human
crisis and that it stems directly from the wrong relationships we hold with God,
and one another and other creatures vis-à-vis God's Divine Law. Shirk,
associating anyone with the divinity of God, is equivalent to oppression as the
one who rejects his own origins, nature, and truth is only oppressing his own
soul. Hence, w are left with an obvious question: How can goodness emanate out
of one who is oppressed by his or her own hands?

iII. the solution envisioned

we are a people filled with emotional baggage, psychological confusion, and
spiritual degradation, suffering from a plethora of physical symptoms. And yet
fixing ourselves is the ultimate sacrifice. Perhaps that is why we choose to
ignore our own spiritual work, abandon our parents, send our children to be
raised by strangers, alienate or divorce our spouses and instead focus on other
people's problems, decontextualizing political, social or environmental issues.

How can we, who have no sense of our own or our children's holistic health and
deep well-being, fix the problems in the world? We cannot. Instead we become
attached to our work, our organization, our own selfish success. Our principles
get lost somewhere in between working within the economic and political confines
of the system and the overpowering drive for gratification, competitiveness, and
control.

The prescription to this malady requires first of all that we re-establish our
rightful relationship with God, as He has revealed it to His prophets, and not
as arrogant humans have conjectured. Out of this relationship, we are required
to re-establish harmonious relationships with each other as families and
communities and with our eco-systems. There is great wisdom in the realization
that the globe is one huge eco-system made up of many localized eco-systems. We
must learn from this and follow the Middle Way: Embrace diverse, localized
eco-communities even while being one global community. What follows is some of
what it will take.

Sustainability in Thirds?

It is no under-statement to say that local communities form a third of the
solution to the globe's problems today. We must return to the Middle Way as a
global civilization built of functional families and empowered communities. Do
not assume that technology and globality are at odds with locality and
sovereignty. Again, there is a tremendous amount of wisdom in the idea of local
communities.

Hakim Archuletta, a Muslim healer, speaks to the medicinal properties of local
plants when he reminds us how the health world is remembering that eating a
predominantly local palette is conducive to better health, honey being the best
example of a food filled with specifically effective antibiotic properties for
myriad local sicknesses. Aside from the imperative function of local languages
and cultures, we are relearning that the divine meaning of `neighbor' is the
living connection between the people around you. For the suburbs have shown us
only too well that proximity has nothing to do with neighborliness. Rather,
neighborliness is a relationship that God has enjoined, and by reinstituting it
we address poverty, alienation, and conflict in the most powerful and effective
way. No way of life exalts the neighbor, and raises the human conscience to the
connection between man's sustenance and the fruit of earth and the work of his
own hands, as does Islam—and these twin imperatives are intimately related and
not merely spiritual or altruistic.

             Agriculture is neighbor power and, thus, communal freedom. For it is
the economic force of a local community. Without a local agricultural sector, a
community has no economic grounding. It may be, in part, for this reason that
our Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, instructed us never to give it up:
"Should the Hour of Doom come, and one of you has a palmshoot in hand, let him
[continue to] plant it."

Agriculture is also the most effective means for not only slowing down climate
change, which is industry's insidious profit goal, but it can rebalance the
environment and bring back abundance. Where Al Gore dreams of a "low-carbon" or
even "carbon-free" world, a truly enlightened environmental activist, like
Indian physicist Vandana Shiva, pines for a "carbon-rich" future—one in which
agriculture systematically builds organic matter into the soil, capturing it
from the atmosphere. Furthermore, and don't be deceived by the simplicity, when
a people own the land and resources they live on, they will care for it.

This points up the problem of proposals like the highly touted Kyoto Protocol, a
treaty that sells clean poor-world sources to the rich, industry-run north.
Shiva sums up the proposals of people like Gore and the government-industry
alliance this way: "Climate treaties and such discussions take place in the
stratosphere—in congressional committees, exclusive global confabs peopled by
CEOs of vast business empires…[who] operate under an industrial paradigm—and the
solutions they concoct…mimic and don't challenge that paradigm."

Another third of the problem comes when eco-communities form and then find that
they have to arrange hierarchies of their own. They require local courts and
laws covering a complex of social issues. All this must either come from man's
myopic, limited, fallible desires and conjectures, or from Divine Guidance.

Islam's socio-economic principles establish a foundation of justice, freedom,
equity, and very importantly, a license to creatively form unique communities
that diversely manifest a crucial handful of harmonious and foundational divine
principles (as opposed to endless, contradicting top-down regulations). This
mirrors the rest of God's creation, abundantly diverse yet founded on a few
sound principles. In other words, there is not only one desirable form of
government, one functional economic system. We don't have to settle for the
"least of evils" between the three materially-based social systems of the West,
two of which are now defunct. Look to past Muslims as an example and remember
how to think for yourself.

We have a wealth of wisdom to excavate from Islamic civilization and to learn
from so as to apply the Sacred Texts to our lives today. That knowledge-trove
covers every aspect of life, from politics, economics, education, and the
sciences to agriculture. Listen, again, to Haq:

"Diffused throughout the body of a single hadeeth collection, one finds
concerns, expressed with a degree of urgency, pertaining to the natural
environment, its status, its relation to human life, and what we may call
environmental ethics. These concerns do not appear as isolated issues in their
own right, to be sure; rather, they are fully integrated into a host of
naturalistic, moral, and practical principles that form the core of righteous
conduct. [There are] separate books on animal sacrifice, agriculture and land
cultivation, medicine, hunting, and water and irrigation. The "Book of
Agriculture" is rich in material concerning the environment, speaking of the
nobility of sustainable cultivation of land and encouraging it with moral force.
Issues of land irrigation and the strict law of equal sharing of water are found
in the "Book of Distribution of Water"….Also, spread all over one finds a very
large number of reports concerning the treatment of animals and pasture, as well
as what one may call animal rights. And in the "Book of Generalities"…one finds
a reference to the important principle of hima—land protection and
consecration—which is there linked, in its very essence, to the question of
social and economic justice."

The Last Third: How to Get There from Here?

The final third of the solution must be aligned with the way of the prophets,
asking for neither rewards nor recognition from people or society. When we
expect no monetary assistance, awards or gratitude, we will not have to
compromise our principles. More often than not, the prophets received the
opposite for their efforts; namely, poverty and rebuke from the people. But
these are the tests that build our character and purify us. Good character and
courage do not come about just by thinking or talking it. They grow by
exercising those muscles against the resistance of adversity. Yet we Muslims
have become a sedentary people, both physically and spiritually, and we are
forcing our children to follow suit, for which cause we see much rebellion among
them. Do people think that they will be left simply to say: We believe! And they
will not be put to the test? Yet very truly, We have tested all those who came
before them. Thus God shall, most surely, distinguish those who speak the truth
about their belief. And He shall most surely distinguish the liars" [29:2-3].

Here are four practical, personal actions we can all take to ultimately change
our conditions and that of our community and environment.

1. Cultivate Self-Awareness

We must start at the beginning within the sphere of our control, personal and
family activism, following the wisdom of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa
sallam, who was commanded to begin with himself and then his family. Moreover,
enjoing the Prayer you're your family [O Prophet], and persevere patiently with
it. (20:132) Beginning with ourselves, as with this example of the Prophet,
sallallahu alayhe wa sallam, requires a reconnection to our bodies. Archuletta,
the Muslim healer, explains this in great detail. The gist of it is that we must
become aware of our bodies and be present in the moment, which requires
practice, for this is how we learn self-control and how we can develop quiet
introspection so as reconnect to our inner voice.

Scoff not at this as some hippie-dippie prescription. Rather, cultivating
self-awareness brings us down to intention, and that is truly where the
environment, and its rescue, begins, inside us. O you who are mantled! Rise and
forewarn! And your Lord thus extol! And your garments thus purify! And shun thus
idolatry! Nor shall you give anything in search of self-gain. Moreover, with the
commandments of your Lord have patience (74:1-7).

I am reminded of a very insightful saying: "Children are our teachers." They
teach us to be patient, selfless, present, thoughtful and many other things that
we have grown very deficient in. All are very difficult things to do—and they
get more difficult as we age. But these are all things that are required for
good character—and cultivating people with good character is our goal here, for
nothing else will rid us of the earth's impending global catastrophe, except
Allah ridding the earth of us!

2. Re-Embrace Our Children

So instead of giving our children up to be raised by a "system," we must embrace
them fully with all its challenges and hardships. This is necessary for both our
spiritual development and because every new generation represents hope for a new
opportunity for change. We must allow them the opportunity and freedom to be
whom they choose out of their own experiences and the call of their hearts under
the guidance of Islam, trusting in the watchful Eyes of Allah. This is far
better than our current fashion of imposing on them our shallow expectations of
prestigious careers and fears of social rejection. I am not talking about
choosing between a "useless" liberal arts degree and "get-rich" medical school.
I am talking about expanding our horizons to see the moral integrity of creating
the things we use, cultivating land, and investing in real connections with each
other beyond socializing, by which I mean the glue of lush economic connections.
Expanding our children's horizons will allow them to think in ways we have been
unable to (or don't want to) break through to. They may well be the ones to live
the life we are unable (or don't want) to live. Maybe they will understand and
implement the Islamic imperative to take what is good and leave what is bad.

3. Reconnect with Creation

Another essential ingredient is to reconnect with "nature" so as to develop in
our children (and maybe ourselves) a natural "bodily" reverence for life that
many of us are only able to intellectualize. But this must be guided by sound
belief in the Oneness of God, and by inculcating them with the principles of the
Qur'an and the prophetic way of His Messenger. For if we conserve no befitting
servitude to God, we shall preserve no wholesome care for His creation. The two
are inseparable, our observing the rights of God and the rights of God's
handiwork, the environment. Put another way, if we behold not the beauty of God,
we shall hold not the beauty of the creation He fashioned for us and all
"others." Or we may say that God is the Truth who created all things with the
truth. To violate His Truth with falsehood is to necessarily corrupt creation.

We can nurture our children's connection to nature by giving them the toys of
creation instead of planting consumerism's seeds in them from birth. Have them
spend a significant amount of time outdoors playing with mud, sticks, trees,
water, and animals, and keep them away from media. We must cultivate in our
children a love for work, such as making things by hand. This can also be
integrated into a curriculum and at home. It is a great deficiency and point of
criticism that we Muslims have come to see ourselves "above" the labor of
self-sufficiency, valuing instead desk servitude, jobs that may give the
delusion of social prestige but contribute nothing to our communal wellbeing.

We can learn about creation by cultivating the land. We can develop life-skills
by learning how to make and mend our own things. These skills move us from
brainless consumer to original human. They give us an authentic sense of
creativity, independence, purpose and connection. The Qur'an speaks profusely
and profoundly about earth, vegetation, and animals. Hadeeths abound about
cultivating land and the rewards it brings in this life and the next. Past
Muslims were scholars and they cultivated land. Today, we look at farming as we
do the labor of making and fixing things, as lowly. And yet it is these very
activities that liberate people from wage slavery to autonomy.

Said the Prophet, sallallahu alayhe wa sallam: "There is none among the
believers who plants a tree, or sows a seed, and then a bird, or a person, or an
animal eats thereof, but he is regarded as having given a charitable gift [for
which there is great recompense]." Another hadeeth tells us that these rewards
extend from this life to the next.

4. Reconnect Our Education with Life, Namely, the Qur'an

Our education has to be reconnected to life. Our learning must become
contextualized so that we move from learning "facts" to critically understanding
the world we live in and being able to function in the world with wisdom and
integrity.

That is to say, we must address the needs that come with our life as spiritual
beings not fully of this earth. Humans are always looking for upliftment, for a
high, for power and control to give them purpose and meaning. Even though we
kill our hearts from a young age, we are driven for a need to "feel," which
comes from our increasingly adrenalin-driven activities and furious search for
wealth and worldly status. What we are really searching for is transcendence,
truth, spiritual fulfillment.

So most importantly we must read and reflect on the Qur'an. There are dozens of
Qur'an classes online and probably at most mosques, but we need, in addition to
learning meanings and commentary of the Qur'an, to program our own
implementation of it, as our scholars have detailed it for a millennium and
more. Yet this will only be consolidated and meaningful if we add to this our
own reflection on its meaning in our lives, times, environment, and the
universe—with wide-open creativity.

I have begun a program where we read a few ayaat, look some words up in the
dictionary, and then reflect and ponder on them. We then write and share a few
paragraphs about our own reactions and thoughts. It has been most enlightening
and enjoyable. Two important things come from this program: (1) It exercises and
strengthens muscles we don't much use, namely, our reflective ones; (2) it
strengthens the minds of our hearts, for when we reflect on the awesomeness of
creation, and experience that feeling of awe, it slowly pumps the life back to
the heart—the very modus operandi of the Qur'an—so that we can know how to feel
awe of Allah, the Exalted. Rather, this [Book] is but a [revealed] Reminder and
a clear Qur'an—to forewarn whoever is [truly] alive [of the nearning
Judgment]—and so that the word [of God's torment] against the [inveterate]
disbelievers is fulfilled (36:70).

This kind of program ought to become a family priority, along with the normal
studies of Qur'an, hadeeth, and Arabic. Contextualizing Islam into our
lives—something that we are not currently doing, but which can be done very
easily through critical dialogue with each other. Family and friends can share
their reflections and discuss them. Challenging each other is very important in
the dialogue to move it past chit-chat to discovering our own deep-seated
beliefs and allowing our ideas to grow and change. In addition, we should set
goals to achieve together—for Allah tells us to compete in good works: Examples
are memorization, keeping a Qur'an Reflection Journal, fasting, praying nights,
and giving regular charity from the things we ourselves grow and make, and
countless other things. For in the end, it is spiritual upliftment and good
character that will help us to stand strong for justice and plant seeds for real
change.

Islam tells us that all the prophets were shepherds, a job most of us now look
down on with contempt. But as a scholar who recently passed away once said, he
came to understand through years of observation, reflection, and cultivation of
land, there is a profound wisdom in the healing of the earth as the cure for a
world filled with horrifying human oppression.

Our challenge is to learn to see ourselves, the animals, plants, minerals and
all the beings of the earth again, as they truly are, fellow creatures
worshipping the same, sole God who created them and us, and who sustains us.
That is why it is so important that we once again learn to listen. For, as we
have seen, it is only the words of the Qur'an that can put life back into our
hearts and cure our blindness. Then, when we look into its unfailing mirror, we
shall, indeed, see clearly the fairest of creation.

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Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli
army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault
on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions


How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
Avi Shlaim
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine


The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through
understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May
1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials
bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June
1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the
Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an
utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too
harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush
administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and
who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its
pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond
the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in
the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and
everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater
Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the
Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and
brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the
Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip
of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were
never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development
but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical
phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers
of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods.
The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it
impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to
establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish
settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable
obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the
symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000
in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled
25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce
water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the
local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per
cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the
strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to
resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral
Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the
houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement,
conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The
withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world,
Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a
two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on
the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state.
Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and
it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of
Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to
the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal
with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the
West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen,
mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a
fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from
Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any
independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all
access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into
an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed
unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and
breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this
prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of
authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to
promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it.
Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes
to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian
people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with
the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for
the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a
Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically
elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist
organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the
Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and
foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the
international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but
against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for
their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the
notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with
the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that
Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with
democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal
people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than
any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to
call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme
following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter,
it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In
March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to
negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to
negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian
factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to
weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel
began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their
religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American
neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian
civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national
unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to
pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a
series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader
sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because
the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to
weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new
ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the
Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and
thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election
is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main
contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top
brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order
to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against
Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on
apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from
President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily
obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at
the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a
free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but
the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt
as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and
Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless
Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli
Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the
shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with
self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim,
"crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the
fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it
has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and
Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements
near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June.
The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological
impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its
government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence
but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally
disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the
withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand,
in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222
children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as
much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and
unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained
the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of
the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the
ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear
violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities.
Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel
restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas
canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to
Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza
could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did,
it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly
forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its
spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel
established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this
directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that
Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces
are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors
have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence,
their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its
spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by
a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is
not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas
government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from
taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and
of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5
million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's
insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an
eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400
Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of
Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks
from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that
Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing
their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There
is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The
problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most
elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve
security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has
repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the
Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel
has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace
plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and
compromises.

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.


• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of
Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of
Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.

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Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef says detainee treatment "bad stain" on U.S. history

Under conditions called "harsh" by Red Cross, 240 detainees remain at Gitmo


Ex-Taliban claims abuse at Gitmo, Bagram: 'They were beating me'
From Stan Grant
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/05/24/gitmo.taliban.prisoner/


(CNN) -- As one of the right-hand men to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Mullah
Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the first Taliban leaders arrested when the United
States began military operations in Afghanistan.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, says
U.S. war efforts are "failing."

  As a detainee, he was held both at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base and at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- spending more than three years in Guantanamo before he
was released in 2006.

Now free, Zaeef -- who claims he is no longer a Taliban member -- alleges the
military engaged in abusive treatment both at Bagram and Guantanamo. He says he
is still bitter about his time there. Closing Guantanamo Bay, he told CNN, is
only part of the justice those detained there deserve.

"It was a bad stain on American history," he said. "If they are closing
Guantanamo for justice, they have to bring the people who are torturing people,
who abuse people, to justice."

The military has classified those like Zaeef as "enemy combatants," although the
Justice Department in March said it would dispose of that classification. The
U.S. military in Afghanistan said it was not authorized to comment on Zaeef's or
any other individual case.

"I didn't see a worse situation in my life than Bagram," recalled Zaeef. "They
were beating me, they put me in the snow, in the cold, until I was unconscious."
Watch Zaeef describe "no rules" at Gitmo »
More than 600 prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a controversial
facility where prisoners are held for years without criminal charges and,
critics allege, without access to legal representatives. The Red Cross has said
conditions there are "harsh." Currently, 240 detainees remain at the facility.

President Obama has announced plans to close the military detention center,
saying it has made the United States less safe and set back the country's "moral
authority." His plans, however, have met with opposition as determinations are
made on where to send the detainees housed there.

In Guantanamo, Zaeef recalled, "there was no rule, no regulation for [treatment
of] the detainees."

Sayed Sharif Yousofy, who works to get prisoners released from Bagram, said he
would like to see both facilities closed.

"Some prisoners are released after four years without any conviction of a crime,
which is not fair," he said. "These prisoners are not treated according to the
convention of human rights, either in Guantanamo or Bagram."

Preliminary intelligence assessments show more than 14 percent of detainees
released from Guantanamo either returned or are suspected of returning to
terrorism, the Pentagon said earlier this week. Zaeef -- who was Afghanistan's
ambassador to Pakistan under the Taliban regime at the time of the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks on the United States -- said he believes the statistics,
as detainees are often angry when released.

"Anyone in the world, to be deprived of any kind of human rights, any kind of
justice -- he becomes angry, so he will try to get revenge," he said. While
detained, he said, detainees sometimes lose everything -- homes, property, money
-- and "they have nothing after that."

While he claims to no longer be a Taliban member, he said he supports the
insurgents and believes the United States will never be victorious in
Afghanistan. "There is no choice" for the Taliban except to fight, he said.
"There is no other way for them."

"Ideologically, they [the U.S.] are failing" in Afghanistan, he said. "I think
they are not able to win the war."

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MI5 agents hound Muslim students in Britain
By Our Special Correspondent
Wednesday, 27 May, 2009
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/fron\
t-page/mi5-agents-hound-muslim-students-in-britain-759


LONDON, May 26: "Have you met Bin Laden? Do you know where he is?" Believe it or
not, these questions were actually asked by MI5 agents to Pakistani students
enrolled at one `prominent university in Scotland'.

Zin Derfoufi, writing in The Guardian on Tuesday (MI5: Leave young Muslims
alone), makes a strong case against the high-handed methods used by the MI5
agents to unearth potential terrorists among the Muslim youth.

"In a few cases, which includes, one prominent university in Scotland, these
agents were even knocking on the doors of Pakistani students' residences asking
them foolish questions like: "Have you met Bin Laden? Do you know where he is?"
As if they would say yes, even if they did. As if it were a casual game of
Where's Wally! Well, he's certainly not in my backyard!"

Mr Derfoufi said he himself had been heavily involved in student activism and
politics, "I've been engaged since I was in the sixth form, where I was elected
by my fellow students as the president of their students' union. Since then,
right through to my involvement in my university's students' union, the National
Union of Students and the Federation of Student Islamic Societies, a union of
Muslim students, I have come across many cases of harassment, bullying and
intimidation suffered by Muslim students at the hands of the very people who are
supposed to be protecting them".

These, he said, included cases of security agents harassing Muslim student
activists, members of the university students' Islamic Society (Isoc) and
general Muslim students, threatening to send them to prison if they did not
cooperate, barring them from leaving the country, making false accusations that
they were somehow linked to people who posed a threat to national security,
getting them to spy on each other, attending and recording Isoc lectures and
seminars and pressuring university staff to spy on Muslim students.

"To date, we have had an innocent man fatally shot in the head, one shot in the
arm, many sent on rendition flights to be tortured and countless innocent
international students who, if they haven't already been unfairly booted out,
are currently facing deportation. Innocent people's lives have been destroyed,
their livelihood and aspirations shattered, their faith in the system smashed
and a whole community alienated. The current strategy is not working."

Mr Derfoufi says the tragic events of 7/7 marked a key turning point for the
Muslim youth in the UK.

According to him, before 7/7 the word terrorist or extremist conjured up images
of a middle-aged, big-bearded radical preacher given asylum or residence in the
UK, preying on the ignorance of young people — exploiting legitimate grievances
to recruit them to some seemingly noble cause.

"One that involves damning and bringing down western democracy — the very same
democracy that facilitates his right to attack it and the very same country
whose benefit system he (typically) feeds off," he said describing a conjured up
image of pre-7/7 terrorist.

As opposed to this image, the perpetrators of 7/7, Mr Derfoufi said, were young,
British-born Muslims "they were people like us". "They did not fit this
stereotype." And since then, he said, the security services had been hell-bent
on "disrupting" terrorist cells in the UK, trying to use the Muslim community to
weed out any would-be attackers.

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Justice for James McLintock (and action)
http://www.cageprisoners.com/campaigns.php?id=877


(Action Below) James McLintock, a Scottish Muslim convert (otherwise known as
Mohammed Yaqub), is suspected to have recently been arrested by Pakistani
authorities on allegations of terrorism. Whilst returning home from the
North-Western district of Peshawar in late February 2009, he stopped for food at
a local restaurant, and his driver returned only to find him missing. His case
has re-emerged after some obscurity following his parading across Pakistani
television on Monday 13th April. The family remain in touch with the British
Embassy, who claim to have received unconfirmed reports that he has been
detained, though refusing to comment further.

A father to eight children and prolific charity worker, known for his efforts in
educating local orphans, McLintock- a man previously detained and released
without charge- looks to be the victim of a political `tit-for-tat' between
London and Islamabad, following the bungled arrest and deportation of 11
innocent Pakistani students.
Background

Born into an unremarkable middle-class Catholic family in Dundee, McLintock read
Zoology at Edinburgh and Dundee universities in his late teens. After a period
of religious revival and Old Testament study, he stumbled across a copy of the
Qur'an and became Muslim. Flying to Pakistan some years later in the late
1980's, McLintock was persuaded to join the US-backed Mujahideen's struggle
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1995, he moved to Bradford and
married his wife Soffia, working for the charity Islamic Relief and starting a
family. Keen to bring up his children in a Muslim country, he again relocated to
Karachi, continuing his charitable activities by setting up schools for refugee
children.

A white convert in Pakistan during the beginning phase of the "War on Terror",
McLintock was immediately conspicuous to Pakistani security agents, who arrested
him in North Waziristan in late 2001. Despite protestations of his innocence, he
was placed blindfolded in solitary confinement for five weeks whilst Pakistani,
American and British intelligence agents interrogated him. He was released
without charge when it was established he had no links to terrorism. He was
again held for questioning in November 2003, whilst in the UK visiting his
parents, being held overnight before being released without charge.
Having been arrested again- without any charge- his family fear the worst, and
his whereabouts remain unknown. Though the British Embassy has confirmed that
they have received reports of his detention, they have not confirmed any
information and have not taken any action to secure his release.

===

Take Action
http://www.cageprisoners.com/campaigns.php?id=877

===

In an exclusive interview, his wife speaks to Cageprisoners about the traumatic
ordeal the family are enduring.


Interview with James McLintock's Wife
http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=29021


Cageprisoners: Could you please introduce yourself?

Soffia Mohammed: My name is Soffia Mohammed and I am the wife of Yaqoub Mansur
(James McLintock).

CP: Could you please give us some background to Yaqoub's life?

SM: He converted to Islam when he was 16. He read the Qu'ran on his own during
school. He came from a Christian family and had one sister and one brother and
his father was a university lecturer. After he accepted Islam, he actually left
his studies in order to go to Madinah and study Islam. I met Yaqoub when I was
25 and he was thirty. We now have 8 children together, the eldest, Abdullah, is
13 and the youngest is 1 year and 5 months.

CP: When did you decide you wanted to move to Pakistan?

SM: When Abdullah was still very young we had a long conversation about the
education of our children and we decided that we wanted to move to Pakistan in
order to give them the best education we could in terms of Islam and secular
subjects. This was in 1986.

CP: Your husband set up a NGO in Pakistan, did he do that immediately or was he
involved with other work prior to this?

SM: Initially, he was involved with this type of work in and around the cities
of the north. He has always been involved with aid work and helping the less
fortunate since he arrived in Pakistan. In 2005, he established his registered
charity. He was involved with that work prior to that. He was deeply committed
to helping people at local and national levels.

CP: What activities does the charity engage in?

SM: The main activity is running educational programmes for orphans, over here
they call them madrassas - essentially they are schools for under privileged
children. He was very keen that the children not only study Islamic education
but other subjects as well. The main target is to get to under-privileged people
who do not have much money for proper education.

Also he was involved in crisis relief work, so, for example, when the earthquake
happened in Kashmir, he was there helping with food, clothing and shelter. He
helped to raise a lot of money. When there was an earthquake in Balochistan, he
was also raising money for those affected. He also covered water projects such
as building wells in villages and other such projects. This is what his life was
about.

He really did cover a wide range of activities all over the country in order to
highlight the importance of the basic needs that people have. This was his life
– reaching out to the impoverished.

CP: Prior to the current disappearance, your husband was detained quite soon
after 9/11. Could you please tell us more about that?

SM: To be honest, the first time that I had found out that he had been detained
was through the newspapers. It was not unusual from him to be away from home for
long periods and it was in the news that I first heard about it. It was while he
was in the North West Frontier Province that he was taken and he was detained
for 40 days by the Pakistani authorities, but he was cleared without charge.

The whole time he was kept in the country and was never taken outside of it.
While he was detained he was interrogated by the Pakistanis, the American
agencies and MI5. They were trying to say that he had some links to Al Qaeda,
that was why they arrested him but fortunately after 40 days they released him.
There were no charges but the detention was in the context of Afghanistan. A lot
of the people who were being detained at the time were being taken for money.
The Pakistani security forces were taking anyone foreign and selling them to the
Americans. When they saw my husband, a white man, they immediately said to
themselves that they would get a lot of money for him.

CP: After his release, did he just go back to his life? Was he ever involved
with any organisations prior or after the arrest that would make him seem
suspicious?

SM: He has spent his whole time working for his charity. He was completely
devout to that cause and he was not involved with any other organisation or
group. Of course, internationally there is a lot of nonsense about madrassas
being havens for terrorism, so I don't know if that is linked to his detention,
however he was just an aid worker and that is it.

CP: Can you please give us the details of this most recent arrest?

SM: He had already been gone for a week as his work involved going to his
schools and checking them. He was on his way home from Peshawar on 25th February
2009, when he stopped at a restaurant to eat and his driver was with him and
went to pick him up from the restaurant only to find that he had disappeared.
Since that day I have had absolutely no news at all about him. The British
embassy has only said that they have unconfirmed reports that he has been
detained but cannot give any further information.

Over the last month, I have had a private investigator working for me to try and
locate him and he has friends all over Pakistan who are trying to use their
resources to find him. He was a very popular man and there are literally people
everywhere trying to find him. No one is giving us any information.

I do believe that my husband has been detained because the British embassy told
us that they have unconfirmed reports. Had he not been detained, they would have
simply told us that they have no information, but they were willing to say that
they did have some reports.

CP: What help have the British authorities given you and your family?

SM: None – they haven't contacted me at all. The British embassy just said that
they would inform me if they ever hear anything. I sit here all day waiting for
a call. They have given no support at all!

CP: What impact has this had on your children?

SM: Of course, it has had a devastating effect on my children. Some of them are
old enough to understand and they are really devastated. Some of my children are
completely unaware of what is happening with their father. I just keep telling
them that he will be back from work soon.

The children are very young but they react to body language. Some of them have
started acting very angry towards me by saying that I am lying to them. They are
used to being on the phone with their father even if he is away. They refuse to
go to school and do their work. I don't know how to approach this situation. I
told my eldest son that his father is being questioned and he has stopped
eating, he has gone into his own world.

Yaqoub was their best friend in the world. They have no relations in Islamabad,
hardly any friends. The entire social life was their father. Whoever is doing
this to us has no compassion or mercy. At least, I should be told whether or not
he is alive.

CP: How have you been dealing with this?

SM: For me, this is really too much. In Islamabad, I am classed as a foreigner
and don't have any friends really. Yaqoub was really my only friend. All I do is
weep - that is all I can do. It is only now two months down the line that I am
pulling myself together for the sake of my children. I don't want to have a
nervous breakdown and so I keep a positive face on for the children. The only
thing that is keeping my children going is that I am keeping up appearances in
front of them. When they do finally go to school, I sit there weeping.

Believing in God as a Muslim, I ask Allah to support me in this time of
hardship. I am getting stronger. I know one lady who has been dealing with this
for four years and she is really strong, I've hardly being going through
anything compared to her and so I am trying to be strong. He was my other leg
though; without him, I feel disabled.

CP: What message would you like to give the public?

SM: I would like to ask the public to think about what crime this man has
committed. Is it a crime to have a registered charity, to help people? He left
his own country in order to help others. He came to this country in order to
help - that is all he did. Is that a crime? It should be heroism.

I want people to come out and support him. He was a real example to people on
how to help the poor and impoverished. He is a great father to his children.
What kind of terrorism is this? It is terrorism to vanish people from society!

I want people to think about how they would feel if their loved one disappeared.
We don't even know if he is alive or dead. We just want people to help and
understand.

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Reminding President Zardari
By Saeed Qureshi
http://www.uprightopinion.com


President Zardari has to do two things post haste. He has to reveal the names of
the assassins of Benazir Bhutto, the late chairman of the PPP and his spouse. He
is on record of publically confessing that he was privy to the identities of her
assassins. Then what prevents him from bringing these criminals to justice?
Horrifically the party in power whose chairperson was mercilessly slain has not
gotten a simple FIR registered with the police so far. Such a high profile
murder and so callous of indifference exhibited by her own party to even start a
probe is simply stunning.  Secondly, he has to expunge the pernicious clauses
from the controversial 17th amendment, including the 58-2/B that he had publicly
promised to do within 24 hours immediately after taking the highest office in
Pakistan.

Ever since Benazir Bhutto was killed at the end of the PPP's public rally at the
Liaquat Garden on December 30, 2007, the party despite being in power has shown
no serious inclination or any visible interest in probing this broad day light
murder case. A lousy and dullard investigation team of the British intelligence
agency Scotland Yard initiated some preliminary, lack luster inquires of a very
perfunctory nature and then departed never to come back. Also, the United
Nations team's hasty departure left a million questions unanswered.


Their mandate was, ostensibly, limited and their findings were based on the
information provided by the government minions and Pakistan's
intelligence outfits. The investigation which was unproductive must
have cost quite a hefty amount to the tax payers of Pakistan. It looked to be
just a customary ritual that was performed with no willful passion or
seriousness perhaps to remain confined to a hopelessly limited agenda handed out
to them by the invisible powers.

A leadership that is, downright, up to the neck in corruption and does
not harbor any qualms of conscience about the shameless way they
repeatedly lie and backtrack from their   solemnly held out commitments to the
nation can be simply categorized as the scum of the earth. I doubt even the
sensibility and prudence of late Benazir Bhutto to bypass the established
democratic traditions and give a blank cheque in the form of a will to her
spouse to hold the reins of the party after her death. Even if the heaven was
going to fall and she had a definite premonition about her end, such a will that
is reminiscent of the family dynasties and hereditary monarchies would not have
been the only option left out to her. In the first instance a will was not
necessary at all. The PPP is not a family asset or property to be bequeathed to
a member of the family.

The bequeathed lucky person was no one else than her husband Mr. Zardari who
assigned himself the role of an interim chairman of the party till his
adolescent son Bilwal Zardari completes his education and takes over the party
as a de jure chairman. To take a custodian's role and to nominate his young son
as the ultimate head of the party is in line with the nasty tribal dastarbandi
system or a kind of the preemptive nomination by a king to nominate a successor
to the throne. What a pity and what a cruel joke with the theme of a party that
proclaimed that democracy was its politics. The party cadres accepted both the
will and the succession as a gospel truth and as a sacred creed that was beyond
questioning. Since its inception in 1967, the party is being run on mere
nominations and there have never been elections within the party to choose the
office bearers. The other political parties barring the religio-political
parties are sailing in the same boat.

The aforementioned was just beside the point. The cardinal point is that it's
high time for President Zardari to honor his manifest pledge of transferring
powers to the prime minister. Thus far, armed with the deadly and powerful
weapon of 58-2/B, he looks as a prototype or a clone of President General Pervez
Mushrraf. The 17th amendment has to go and that was the election slogan of the
PPP as well. President Zardari has never spelt out any reasons that could
justify his complete silence or side tracking of the most pressing task of the
revision or the annulment of the 17th amendment including the definite removal
of the draconian 58-2/B.

In there is a political party or any other  force in the political wilderness of
Pakistan to remind and convince President Zardari and his party to make a
difference between the governance of a military head of state  and the chief of
a grass root political party? Why president Zardari and his party are bent upon
proving themselves to be morally bankrupt and to be audacious on top of that?
The stony silence and utter disregard evinced by the rank and file of the party
in power is simply disgusting and would not stand in good stead for the future
of this one time most robust and leading popular political party of Pakistan.
Should Pakistan still reel under the presidential rule or move towards a
parliamentary system of government? Time might be running out for both these
options.

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Thousands of children gather in East Jerusalem, Israeli forces prevent
introduction of paints
Maisa Abu Ghazaleh
Palestine News Network (PNN)
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5086


PNN exclusive / Maisa Abu Ghazaleh – An 8 year old told PNN, "I didn't sleep on
Friday night thinking about the trip to Al Aqsa Mosque..."

"...I was so excited to participate in the festival, to draw, to express my love
for this place."

Some 3,500 Palestinian children made pictures of Al Aqsa Mosque as part of the
ongoing "Jerusalem as Capital of Arab Culture" festival.

Using all the colors set out, the children rendered Al Aqsa as they saw it:
bright as the sun, surrounded by military jeeps.

This was part of the Aqsa Fund's child program that included a "march of flags
of Al Aqsa Mosque," described Sheikh Ikrima Sabri. Children and their families
were brought from Palestinian cities and towns within Israeli boundaries,
including from the Triangle, the Galilee and Haifa.

Head of the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Sabri said today that the celebration of
this festival "shows the importance of Al Aqsa to generations upon generations."

Advisor to the Islamic Movement, Sheikh Ali Abu Sheikha, said that "the festival
contributes to the defense and protection of the blessed Al Aqsa Mosque in the
light of the emergence of campaigns used to target our holy sites."

Abu Sheikha condemned Israeli forces for preventing the introduction of large
quantities of the paper and water colors for painting.

The "Jerusalem as Capital of Arab Culture" project has faced major difficulties
since it began at the end of March with several activities banned and others
shut-down.

"We challenge the occupation with this festival" said Abu Sheikha, "and the
children insisted upon its success."

Thousands of children and their parents walked together in the "march of flags"
before dispersing into smaller groups around the Mosque for painting.
Israeli forces attempted to stop the children from entering the Mosque grounds
but the thousands were chanting and kept moving.

"The aim of this part of the festival is to do something for the suffering of
the children, and to see the cracked walls of the Mosque that are deepening due
to excavations by the Israeli occupation," said Sheikh Abu Sheikha.

Sahar Salameh, a 13 year old girl, told PNN, "I constantly come to the Al Aqsa
Mosque to protect it and defend it, and drew the Dome of the Rock today."

===

Israel seizes four Gaza fishermen
Wednesday, May 27, 2009


Gaza – Ma'an – Israel's navy seized four Palestinian fishermen off the coast of
Gaza on Wednesday, according to the Palestinian-International Campaign Against
the Siege.

A statement from the group said Israeli warships surrounded Palestinian fishing
boats off the northern coast of Gaza and then arrested the four. The arrests
come a day after two other fishermen were seized from their vessel off the coast
of Rafah, at the southern end of the Strip.

The statement denounced what it said were escalated attacks on Gazan
fishermen and also called on Israel to return confiscated fishing boats.

An Israeli military spokesperson said he had no information on the reported
detentions.

===

French cyclists bike to Palestine on solidarity mission
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
12:17 PM


Jericho – Ma'an – Two French pro-Palestinian activists have arrived in the West
Bank after cycling through France, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus in a drive to raise
the profile of the Palestine issue.
After visiting Jerusalem and Bethlehem the pair went to Jericho on Monday
morning to meet Mayor Hassan Saleh, who welcomed them and encouraged them to
continue their tour to witness Israel's policies.
The duo said they came bearing a message of solidarity, stressing that they
wanted to "stand on the side of justice and peace."
The two plan to spend several days in the Palestinian territories to gain an
impression of daily Palestinian life.

===

Israeli court orders continued imprisonment for three Hamas leaders
Wednesday, May 27, 2009


Bethlehem – Ma'an – An Israeli military tribunal sitting in the settlement of
Ofer rejected a petition on Tuesday to release three Hamas lawmakers from
prison, instead remanding them to six months administrative detention.

Ma'an learned that Attorney Fadi Al-Qawasmi had petitioned for the release of
Nizar Ramadan, Azzam Salhab and Ayman Daraghmah.

The three were abducted by Israeli forces in a series of pre-dawn raids in the
West Bank on 19 March. Israel seized 10 Hamas political leaders from the West
Bank that morning in an  apparent attempt to pressure the group to release
captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Gaza.

Administrative detention is a practice in which Israel holds prisoners without
formally charging them with any crime.

Meanwhile sources said that Israel's intelligence services transferred Hamas
lawmaker Khaled Tafesh of Bethlehem from the Negev desert prison camp to a
detention center in Ofer for interrogation. Tafesh was also detained in the 19
March sweep.

There are more than 11,00 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails,
including about 40 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).

===

UK MPs on hunger strike over no Gaza entry
Sun, 24 May 2009
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=95847§ionid=351020202


A group of British lawmakers en-route to the Gaza Strip have gone on a hunger
strike after Egypt prevented their aid convoy from entering the besieged sliver.

The Convoy of Hope was expected to cross the Rafah border-crossing on Saturday,
but reports say that Egyptian authorities have delayed its entry to the
territory.

The 40-truck convoy carrying humanitarian aid, led by at least 150 people
including European lawmakers was set to deliver to Gazans medical aids, wheel
chairs and programs enabling the visually disabled to use computers.

Cairo however denied them entry, saying that only 20 people, minus aids, are
allowed to cross Rafah -- Gaza's only border that bypasses Israel.

The Gaza Strip has been under a tight Israeli blockade since the democratically
elected government of Hamas took power at least 23 months ago.

Egypt has kept the Rafah border crossing closed even during the three-week-long
Israeli onslaught on the region which killed at least 1,350 Palestinians, and
left over 5,000 others in dire need of medical attention.

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Iran sends six warships, logistic vessels to Aden Gulf and high seas
05-25-2009
http://www.isna.ir/ISNA/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-1345465&Lang=E


TEHRAN (ISNA)-Iran's Navy Force Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said
on Monday Iran has sent six warships and logistic vessels to Aden Gulf and high
seas noting the move was unprecedented in the history of Iran's navy force.

The important measure represents Iran's potent military capabilities for
confronting any sort of outside threat across its coasts, he said as expressing
hope navy force could make more progresses on technology of arm by local
experts.

===

Tehran proud to support Hamas, Hezbollah
Mon, 25 May 2009


Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani


A senior Iranian official says Tehran is proud to stand by regional resistance
movements, Hamas and Hezbollah, regardless of what labels the US uses for them.

"We are proud to defend Hamas and Hezbollah. We are not trying to hide it. They
are fighters in the path of God, and you can call them whatever you like,"
Parliament Speaker, Ali Larijani said in Tehran on Monday.

"Hezbollah is not a terrorist [group], it defends Islam's honor. Hamas is not a
terrorist [group], it is there to defend Palestine," he added.

Larijani then went on to say that the idea of Iran abandoning the two resistance
movements was a 'bad US dream'.

In an apparent overture, President Barack Obama sent out a video message to Iran
on Nowruz (the Iranian New Year).

In the message, he brought up Iran's support for the Lebanese Hezbollah movement
and the democratically elected Palestinian government of Hamas, implying that it
must end.

During his Monday speech, the Iranian parliament speaker said it was the US that
had created the region's real terrorist organizations.
"You were the ones who held secret meetings with terrorists in Iraq, under the
impression that we would not find out. You offered them support if they agreed
to turn their guns on Shias and Iran," he said.

It is well known that what became the group that was to become al-Qaeda and
Taliban in Afghanistan were created, armed and financially assisted by the US
and some of its Arab allies, most notably Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis have never denied such charges.

Comments made by the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, at a recent
congressional hearing, also confirm that Washington had in the past supported
the Arab fighters against the Soviet Union whom eventually morphed into
al-Qaeda. She also said that Washington was directly involved in creating and
promoting the Taliban in the 1990s in pursuing Islamabad's and Washington's
perceived strategic interests (at the expense of Afghanistan).

A 2006 article published by The New Yorker also suggests that the US military
and Israel provide PJAK separatists (offshoots of the internationally-recognized
terrorist group the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK), with equipment, training
and intelligence to destabilize Iran.

===

Iran wants US to break ties with Israel
Wed, 06 May 2009
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=93809§ionid=351020101


After an unexpected call by the US on Israel to join the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran emphasizes the need for taking practical steps.

Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad-Ali Hosseini, who represents Iran
at the Preparatory Committee of the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review
Conference in New York, both embraced and questioned the nuclear
nonproliferation plans announced by the new US administration at the conference.

While describing President Barack Obama's stance on pushing the
world toward nuclear nonproliferation as containing "new aspects",
Hosseini questioned the truthfulness of such statements made by
Washington.

Earlier on Tuesday in what appeared as a sharp reversal of policy
toward Israel, Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said
Israel should join the NPT.

"Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel,
Pakistan and North Korea, ... remains a fundamental objective of the
United States," she said.

The US president for his part said in his message to the meeting
that "the United States believes that the NPT's framework is sound;
countries with nuclear weapons will move towards disarmament, countries without
nuclear weapons will not acquire them, and all countries can have access to
peaceful nuclear energy."

Describing Washington as having frequent "changes of heart", the
Iranian diplomat said, "it is only natural for the international
community not to be fully optimistic [about the remarks]."

He said that the international community is of the opinion that
Washington "must take practical steps toward nuclear disarmament."

"The halt of US cooperation with the Zionist regime could be regarded as a
practical step," Hosseini told IRNA on Wednesday.

"Any measure taken by the US regarding nuclear disarmament should be verifiable,
irreversible and transparent," Hosseini added.

Following the call by Washington, former Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon's chief strategist, Dov Weisglass, said Gottemoeller's
comments were very alarming.

"If these statements indicate a change in American policy on this
issue, I believe this may be the most worrisome development for
Israel's security in many years," he told the Army Radio.

Israel, the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East,
maintains a policy of ambiguity over the question of whether it has
nuclear weapons and has so far refused to sign the NPT.

President Obama has made a pledge to "strengthen" the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty by providing resources for international
inspections and establishing "real and immediate consequences for
countries caught breaking the rules or trying to leave the treaty
without cause."

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US jails men in Hamas aid case
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/05/200952716493166404.html


Shukri Abu-Baker insisted he had not acted on Hamas's orders [Reuters]

A US court has sentenced the former heads of a Muslim charity to 65 years in
prison for providing aid to the Palestinian group Hamas.

Shukri Abu-Baker, the charity's ex-chief executive, and Ghassan Elashi, its
former chairman, were two of five Holy Land Foundation employees convicted last
year of giving more than $12m to Hamas.

"I did it because I cared, not at the behest of Hamas," Abu-Baker told a Texas
court on Wednesday, according to a Dallas Morning News website report.

Holy Land's co-founder, Mohamed El-Mezain, who is related to Mousa Abu Marzook,
a Hamas leader, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for providing aid to the
group.

The others, Mufid Abdulqader, the brother of Hamas political leader Khaled
Meshaal, and Abdulrahman Odeh, the charity's New Jersey representative, were
convicted on three counts of conspiracy.

Odeh was sentenced to 15 years while Abdulqader, the foundation's fundraiser,
received 20 years.

'Inspired faith'

"I do acknowledge the verdict in this trial," Abdulqader said during the
sentencing hearing.

"I believe in the system. My faith has not been shaken, it's been inspired. But
it is un-American to ignore suffering and starving women and children."

Abu-Baker and Elashi were convicted of a combined 69 charges, including
supporting a specially designated "terrorist" organisation, money-laundering and
tax fraud.

Abdulqader and Odeh were convicted on three counts of conspiracy.

The Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Muslim charity in the US, was itself
convicted on all 32 counts.

An earlier trial ended in October 2007 with one man acquitted on 31 charges but
jurors unable to agree on verdicts for others.

'Political' case

Prosecutors said the charity was spreading Hamas's ideology by funding schools,
hospitals and social welfare programmes controlled by the group in the
Palestinian territories, and permitting it to divert funds to the activities of
fighters.

The charity's supporters countered that the government was politicising the case
as part of its so-called war on terror and ignoring the foundation's charitable
mission in providing aid to the poverty-stricken Palestinian territories.

Government officials had raided Holy Land's headquarters in December 2001, and
George Bush, the then US president, later announced the seizure of the charity's
assets as "another step in the war on terrorism".

But defence lawyers said their clients had been put on trial partly because of
their family ties to members of Hamas, such as Abdulqader's brother Meshaal, who
is in exile in Syria.

As grounds for an expected appeal, lawyers for the men are expected to challenge
testimony given by an anonymous Israeli government agent, whose evidence was
kept secret from the defence.

===

Two Holy Land Foundation defendants sentenced to 65 years
By JASON TRAHAN - jtrahan@...
The Dallas Morning News
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/052809dnmetho\
lyland.209bc6fd.html


The five defendants in the Holy Land Foundation case were defiant Wednesday
while being sentenced for their roles in funneling money to overseas terrorists,
expressing disbelief that American law could criminalize the feeding of needy
Palestinian people.

Three maintained their steadfast innocence.

===

Video

Holy Land Foundation defendants sentenced
May 27th, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/052809dnmetho\
lyland.209bc6fd.html

===

The judge in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history disagreed,
handing down sentences to two that will likely mean they'll spend the rest of
their lives behind bars for financing the terrorist group Hamas. The others were
given sentences ranging from 15 to 20 years.

"Your function in life was raising money to support Hamas," U.S. District Judge
Jorge Solis told one of them in words that were repeated in some fashion as each
defendant learned his fate.

"You stated it was to help people, but the motive was to support Hamas," the
judge said. "You state that you are innocent, but the evidence shows the
opposite."

If the federal judge, the FBI and prosecutors were expecting contriteness, they
were sorely disappointed.

"We gave the essentials of life – oil, rice, flour," former Holy Land board
chairman Ghassan Elashi said before receiving his 65-year sentence.

"The [Israeli] occupation was providing them with death and destruction. The
Holy Land Foundation was to assist the Palestinians in their steadfastness
against the brutal apartheid regime.

"I would like to declare my innocence of all the charges," he said.

108 charges

Last fall, all five men were convicted on 108 charges that they funneled more
than $12 million to the Palestinian group Hamas after the Clinton administration
in 1995 declared it a terrorist group for sponsoring suicide bombings targeting
Israelis.

The convictions were a major counterterrorism victory for the Justice
Department, which has failed to get guilty verdicts on the most serious charges
in other similar trials around the country.

"Today's sentences mark the culmination of many years of painstaking
investigative and prosecutorial work at the federal, state and local levels,"
David Kris, assistant attorney general for national security, said in a prepared
statement Wednesday. "These sentences should serve as a strong warning to anyone
who knowingly provides financial support to terrorists under the guise of
humanitarian relief."

Holy Land prosecutor Jim Jacks noted the defiant nature of the men's remarks
while arguing for maximum penalties for the charity's former leadership.

"There's been no acknowledgment by any of these defendants regarding their
connection to Hamas," Jacks said. "They haven't been deterred. Their entire
sentencing presentation is they're being punished for providing charity. It's
important for the court to impose a sentence that says this is not a case about
punishing people for doing nice things."

The government acknowledged that the former Richardson organization, once the
largest Muslim charity in the U.S., did provide aid to Palestinians. But the
evidence showed that they sent money to Palestinian charity offices controlled
by Hamas. U.S. law prohibits any aid, even humanitarian, going to any designated
terrorist group.

Hamas, the evidence showed during trial, parlayed that aid into support for its
violent agenda to destroy Israel. That included funneling aid to family members
of suicide bombers, ensuring a steady stream of new suicide recruits, testimony
showed.

Plea for leniency

Defense attorneys hoping for leniency fought an uphill battle with Solis on
Wednesday, who repeatedly disputed arguments that the defendants broke no laws
and did not support Hamas.

"You did support Hamas in violation of the law," Solis told Elashi. "If the Holy
Land Foundation did have a face, it was the face of Hamas."

Nancy Hollander, attorney for former Holy Land CEO Shukri Abu Baker, tried to
use the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri to persuade to judge to go easy.
Al-Marri pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to provide material
support to al-Qaeda.

"This is a man who admits he came to the U.S. as a sleeper agent and the
government believes 15 years is sufficient," Hollander said.

Solis retorted that "raising millions of dollars to fund terrorism, that's a
different situation." He said that al-Marri is an example of someone who wanted
to "commit 'an' act of terrorism, as bad as that is. This is support over
years."

He sentenced Abu Baker to 65 years.

Mohammad El-Mezain, former Holy Land endowments director and a Muslim prayer
leader who delivered fiery speeches on confiscated videotapes in the case, spoke
passionately about his devotion to charity, which he said was "more important to
me than any political agenda."

"We did it all in the name of America," said El-Mezain, who received 15 years.
"The Holy Land Foundation was no different than any other Jewish or Baptist
charity."

Reactions

Dennis Lormel, who created the FBI's Terrorist Financing Operations Section and
now is a security consultant, said after the sentencings that the punishments
were appropriate.

"Holy Land and the five guilty principals fully deserve the sentences handed
down," he said. "Anyone criticizing the U.S. government in this matter should
redirect their criticism to where it's deserved. Hamas is a terrorist
organization that clearly exploited the vulnerability of charitable giving for
their organizational benefit as opposed to the benefit of the Palestinian
people."

Mark Briskman, head of the regional office of the pro-Jewish Anti-Defamation
League, lauded Solis as a "no-nonsense judge who gets it."

"The implication of this trial is significant, and the sentencing handed down by
the judge indicates that seriousness."

Kay Guinane, program manager for the Charity and Security Network, a project of
the government watchdog group OMB Watch, predicted more trouble for U.S.
charities doing international outreach, which is already suffering because of
the Holy Land prosecution.

"The ... sentences handed down in the Holy Land Foundation trial indicate that
this situation is likely to get worse," she said.

===

The Holy Land Foundation sentencing
THE PEACE AND JUSTICE FOUNDATION
Jumada 2, 1430 AH (May 28, 2009)


Assalaamu Alaikum

(Greetings of Peace):

"As a Jew born in Palestine, I am shocked by the sentence imposed on people who
helped Hamas. Although I am both opposed to Hamas ideology and consider
terrorist acts endorsed by Hamas as criminal deeds, I am forced to acknowledge
that Hamas is essentially a political and a social organization that caters to
the needs of thousands of people, because no one else does that. The U.S. court
did not prove that those who sent money to Hamas did so "in order" to commit
terrorism, although they might have known that a small percentage of that money
might be deflected to improper use. But if this is so, all aid to Israel should
also be considered as criminal, because Israel also commits crimes under
international law. The court ruling is disgraceful, racist and thus in stark
opposition with American values."

Elias Davidsson
Bonn, Germany


This report comes to our readers from Dallas, Texas. (I would like to welcome
the new members of our online distribution list in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.)

I chose to open this report/analysis on the HLF sentencing with an observation
made by a non-Muslim reader of The Dallas Morning News' report for a reason. Not
just because that thought-provoking observation comes from a reader who happens
to be Jewish, but because his observation is right on point!

(The respondent's opinion also happens to mirror a sentiment expressed by an
African-American police officer who engaged me in a few minutes of conversation
outside of the courthouse after the proceedings ended yesterday.)

On Wednesday, May 27, five middle-aged Muslim men – each with extensive,
multi-generational family ties - were given harsh sentences for providing
material support (according to government prosecutors) to an organization that
Israel and the American government doesn't like (Hamas).  The maximum sentence
possible under the so-called "enhanced terrorism guidelines" was given to three
of the men. Ghassan Elashi, 55, received 65 years (on 35 counts); Shukri Abu
Baker, 50, received 65 years (on 34 counts); Mohammad El-Mezain, 55, was given
15 years on a single count. (He was earlier acquitted on 31 other chargers.)

The other two brothers, Mufid Abdulqader, 49, and Abdulrahman Odeh, 49, received
20 years and 15 years respectively (each on three counts).

The government, for its part, could not have had a better pro-prosecution jurist
than U.S. District Judge Jorge Solis, who seemed to relish the opportunity to
castigate each of the defendants repeatedly for being "supporters of Hamas." In
one memorable exchange, in response to Br. Elashi's contention that HLF had only
"one face" (not two as the government argued), Judge Solis shot back, "If the
Holy Land Foundation did have a face, it was the face of Hamas."

For those who have already read The Dallas Morning News report on the sentencing
by Jason Trahan ("5 decry jail terms in Holy Land case," 5/28/09) – or any other
mainstream news report on the issue – I can assure that you lack a complete
picture of what happened and why; because more often than not mainstream media
reports (both print and broadcast) are pro-government in their editorial bent.

For example, Mr. Trahan began his report by stating all five defendants were
defiant, and then in the very next paragraph noted that "three maintained their
steadfast innocence" (as if the others did not). In truth, all five (directly or
implicitly) maintained their innocence.

The writer also noted, "Last fall, all five men were convicted on 108 charges
that they funneled more than $12 million to the Palestinian group Hamas after
the Clinton administration in 1995 declared it a terrorist group…"

Left unsaid was the fact that the Clinton administration's political decision
was a favor to the state of Israel; and further, that last fall's convictions
came after a FIRST TRIAL that ended badly for the government - despite the
enormous amount of time, energy and resource that went into it!

Another example of Trahan's pro-prosecution bias was the following statement:
"Hamas, the evidence showed during trial, parlayed that aid into support for its
violent agenda to destroy Israel. That included funneling aid to family members
of suicide bombers, ensuring a steady stream of new suicide recruits, testimony
showed."

Left unsaid was the fact that the defense provided evidence, during the trial,
that the "Hamas controlled" Zakat committees that received HLF support did not
favor the families of "suicide bombers," as the government tried to suggest. Nor
did Mr. Trahan deem it important to note that the same zakat committees that
received material support from HLF also received material support from USAID
(through the end of 2004), as well as other international relief organizations –
i.e. from the UN and European Union.

Once again, Mr. Davidsson:


"I am forced to acknowledge that Hamas is essentially a political and a social
organization that caters to the needs of thousands of people..."


This was precisely the point made by the British MP George Galloway, in his
address in the Washington (DC) area a couple of months ago. He noted that he was
not "a supporter of Hamas" – noting that he had had a long and close
relationship with the late Yasser Arafat – but that he supported the right of
the Palestinian people to choose their own government, and the people chose
Hamas!

It is also a widely known FACT that the reason why the Hamas-controlled zakat
committees were favored by international relief organizations was because of
their effectiveness on the ground, getting relief to the people who needed it
most, and the absence of corruption! ("I am forced to acknowledge that Hamas is
essentially a political and a social organization that caters to the needs of
thousands of people...")

To be more precise, Hamas is the head of the government of Occupied Palestine
and a resistance organization – whose armed resistance to a brutal occupation is
supported by clearly established international law!

One of the gravest mistakes being made by Muslim leaders and organizations in
America, Arab advocacy groups, and human rights activists of varied stripes, is
our collective failure to make this point LOUD and CLEAR!

===


The Holy Land Foundation, Pt.2
THE PEACE AND JUSTICE FOUNDATION
Jumada 2, 1430 AH
(May 28, 2009)


(The Aftermath)


Assalaamu Alaikum (Greetings of Peace):


In part two of this report, I want to touch upon what the Muslim community and
its leadership did right, and what it did wrong in Dallas.

First, what a segment of the local community did right: it made certain that the
main courtroom and the overflow courtroom were full of supporters throughout the
proceedings. This helped to bolster the spirits of the brothers in the dock (and
their families), and it sent a message to the government that these brothers
were not alone. This was a good thing (alhamdullilah).

It is also my understanding that the families of these brothers are being taken
care of (in terms of their material needs). This is also a good thing which must
continue for as long as necessary.

What the community and its leadership failed to do, however, was to put people
on the street, in front of the federal building, in the kind of numbers that
could not be ignored. If this had been done, the image of a huge crowd of
Muslims and non-Muslims, in support of the accused, would have dominated the
print and broadcast news reportage on the sentencing. This would have also had a
very powerful psychic effect on the community itself. (But alas, this ended up
being a missed opportunity.)

Many of the leaders who came together shortly after the guilty verdicts in the
case, several months ago, were not present at yesterday's sentencing. This also
was a missed opportunity, as "leaders" often set the tone for others to follow.
(Given what I myself experienced on this trip, I can't help but wonder if this
can be attributed to petty tribalistic politics, fear, or a combination of both.
ALLAH knows best.)

Last night a town meeting was held at a large masjid in Richardson, Texas, to
discuss the verdict and the struggle ahead. A large crowd of Muslims along with
a significant number of non-Muslims attended; but it ended up being another
missed opportunity and a huge disappointment for me (for a couple of reasons).

As I sat listening to each speaker I wondered, `when are we going to get to the
action plan for the days, weeks, months, and years ahead?' Unfortunately, the
much needed action plan never materialized. We ended up with a pep rally and
fundraising initiative for the appeals process (for the lawyers, and the
organization which, insha'Allah, will oversee the lawyers); a missed opportunity
of the highest order!

My presence was recognized at the very end of the program, and I was given two
minutes (I probably took three) to share a few thoughts. I thanked the community
for filling the courtroom; I quickly referenced the Ft. Dix (NJ) case, Dr. Sami
al-Arian, the newly erupted Newburgh, NY case, and the "many, many other cases"
which, along with the HLF case, represent one of the major challenges
confronting Muslims in North America.

I mentioned the propaganda challenges that we face, and I ended with a reference
to the British MP George Galloway (and the CDs that I had in hand from his DC
area address on Palestine.) I also announced that if anyone present wanted to
receive a copy of what I would compose later on the case – with recommendations
for the struggle ahead – that I would be at a table in the main lobby, where
those interested could get a copy of the CD and register their e-mail address.

An "Action Plan"

As I sat listening to the speakers at last night's forum, I outlined some of my
own thoughts on a piece of paper. It began with the following; Muslims in
America must do two very important things:

(1) MEET THE PROPAGANDA CHALLENGE

(2) PUSH BACK (both on the legal front and in the court of public opinion, with
a well organized and sustained campaign of PUBLIC ACTIVISM)

With respect to the propaganda challenge, Muslims (and other people of
conscience) must do a much better job of educating this nation on the genocide
taking place in Occupied Palestine. We must educate the nation on how the
constitutional fabric of this potentially great, but deeply disturbed, nation
called America is being ripped apart by this issue! We must also have the
courage to enlighten the public on the "elephant in the room" called HAMAS!

Muslims must also FREE THEMSELVES FROM THE ILLUSION that attorneys and courts,
indeed, the judicial process itself, will be the panacea for what ails us! It
cannot even be our salvation in the courts! As the late Bill Kunstler, one of
the most celebrated defense attorneys of his time (and someone very familiar
with the legal hurdles confronting Muslims), once wrote: "Political cases cannot
be won on legalities alone!"

I learned this a looong time ago. It's high time that others learned this as
well. The courts of the land will NOT be our salvation. We must struggle on ALL
FRONTS, with an understanding that the most important "court" for us in this
struggle will be the court of public opinion!

To the concerned citizens of Dallas (Muslims and non-Muslims), we are planning
to hold a very important initiative in Washington, DC, on Friday, July 3, 2009.
We expect to have the participation of a number of grass-roots activists and
organizations, and members of families (from around the country) who have been
impacted by the Post 9/11 "war on terrorism" madness.

From this initiative, insha'Allah (God willing), which will include a
demonstration followed by a mini-conference, we are hoping to see emerge a well
connected, well organized and imaginative campaign of "pushback," that will not
only be in the Muslim community's best interest – but in America's best interest
as well!

We are convinced that in order for REAL CHANGE to come to America…it can only
come through WE, THE PEOPLE.  I hope you will join us.

In the struggle for peace thru justice,


El-Hajj Mauri' Saalakhan

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Sanctions Proposed Against Eritrea
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Atheo News


The UN's Inter Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) asked the Security
Council to impose 'tough' sanctions on Eritrea Thursday due to its call for the
ouster of the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia. Eritrean President
Isaias Afwerki is quoted saying "this so-called [Somali] government is not a
government in terms of legitimacy. It cannot even influence one very small
neighbourhood in
Mogadishu, let alone Somalia."

IGAD, an East African assembly dominated by pro-Western governments including
Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Djibouti also called for an immediate air and
maritime blockade on Somalia  as well as travel bans and freezing of assets.

Responding to the accusations that Eritrea has been arming Somali rebels Isaias
said "we don't interfere and we don't want to see any terrorism prevail in
Somalia."

"Leave this for the Somalis," Isaias said contending that solutions imposed from
the outside are doomed to fail.

Meanwhile Dr. Abu-Bakr Iman Omar, leader of Somalia's Islamic Party denied media
and intelligence reports of foreign Al-Qaeda involvement in the resistance,
saying Western classification of "Al-Qaeda" accuses all Muslims of joining this
organization just because they pray. "But if they are talking about this
organization that is present in mountains which are very far from us, then this
is a
lie. Neither Al-Qaeda nor its elements are present in the country."

Western sources cite intelligence reports of pro-Al-Qaeda elements, some of them
Sudanese and Pakistanis, distributing videotapes of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin
Laden in some areas that are under the Islamist rebels' control.

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Saberi 'had classified document'
BBC NEWS
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8048012.stm


A lawyer for US-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi says she was convicted of
spying for the US partly because she had obtained a classified document.

Her lawyer said she had access to a confidential Iranian report on the US war in
Iraq - but had not used it.

The lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, said the report had been prepared by a research
centre of the Iranian presidency.

Ms Saberi was freed on appeal on Monday, after four months in prison in the
Iranian capital, Tehran.

She was originally sentenced to eight years but her term was cut on appeal to
two years suspended. She denies the spying charge.

'No bad intentions'

Mr Nikbakht did not say how had gained access to the document, prepared by
Iran's Centre for Strategic Research.

"Because she did not have bad intentions and did not use it, she was sentenced
to a two-year suspended jail term," he told Reuters news agency.

Ms Saberi, whose parents live in the US, is now able to leave Iran. She has been
banned by the Iranians from working as a journalist there for five years.

On Tuesday, in her first public comments since being released, and she thanked
people around the world who had supported her.

Her case had attracted international attention. The White House in
Washington said Iran's decision to free her was a "humanitarian
gesture".

She originally faced a less serious accusation of buying alcohol, and later of
working as a reporter without a valid press card.

The spying charge was introduced later, and she was tried and sentenced behind
closed doors.

Ms Saberi worked as a freelance journalist for news organisations, including and
the US-based National Public Radio.

===

Iran Freed Saberi; When Will US Free Jassam?
by Jeremy Scahill
http://freedetainees.org/5680


Last week, we reported on how retired U.S. Army Col. Ralph Peters penned an
essay for a leading neocon group calling for future U.S. military attacks on
media outlets and journalists. In the journal of the Jewish Institute for
National Security Affairs (JINSA), Peters wrote, "future wars may require
censorship, news blackouts, and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan
media. … [A] media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober
patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow's conventional wisdom. The point
of all this is simple: Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win
clean, win dirty. But win."

Of course, what Peters is advocating is not new, nor does he need to propose it
as a policy for "future wars." It is already a de facto U.S. policy to target
journalists. The U.S. has consistently attacked journalists and media
organizations in modern wars. In the 1999 U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia,
Gen. Wesley Clark, then the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, ordered an air
strike on Radio Television Serbia, killing 16 media workers, including make-up
artists and technical staff, an action Amnesty International labeled a "war
crime." Richard Holbrooke, who is currently Obama's point man on Afghanistan and
Pakistan, praised that bombing at the time.

The U.S. bombed al-Jazeera in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, attacked it
multiple times in the 2003 Iraq invasion, and killed correspondent Tarek Ayoub.
On April 8, 2003, a U.S. Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home and
office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists operating in
Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the 15th-floor Reuters office,
killing two cameramen, Reuters' Taras Protsyuk and José Couso of Spain's
Telecinco. In a chilling statement at the end of that day in Iraq, then-Pentagon
spokesperson Victoria Clarke spelled out the Pentagon's policy on journalists
not embedded with U.S. troops. She warned them that Baghdad "is not a safe
place. You should not be there."

Last week, a Spanish judge reinstated charges against three U.S. soldiers in
Couso's killing, citing new evidence, including eyewitness testimony
contradicting official U.S. claims that soldiers were responding to enemy fire
from the hotel. One year ago, former Army Sgt. Adrienne Kinne told Democracy
Now! she saw the Palestine Hotel on a military target list and said she
frequently intercepted calls from journalists staying there.

As I have reported previously, Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana was shot by U.S.
forces near Abu Ghraib prison when his camera was allegedly mistaken for a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The U.S. listed as "justified" the killing of
al-Arabiya TV's Mazen al-Tumeizi, blown apart by a U.S. missile as he reported
on a burning U.S. armored vehicle on Baghdad's Haifa Street.

There have also been several questionable killings of journalists at U.S.
military checkpoints in Iraq, such as the March 2004 shooting deaths of Ali
Abdel-Aziz and Ali al-Khatib of al-Arabiya. The Pentagon said the soldiers who
shot the journalists acted within the "rules of engagement." And Reuters
freelancer Dhia Najim was killed by U.S. fire while filming resistance fighters
in November 2004. "We did kill him," an unnamed military official told the New
York Times. "He was out with the bad guys. He was there with them, they
attacked, and we fired back and hit him."

The Obama administration has recently paid a lot of lip service to freedom of
the press, particularly around the case of Iranian-American journalist Roxana
Saberi, who was released May 11 from an Iranian prison. Yet the U.S. military
continues to hold journalists as prisoners without charges or rights in
neighboring Iraq. Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for Reuters, has
been a U.S. prisoner in Iraq since last September despite an Iraqi court's order
last year that he be freed.

As the Los Angeles Times reported:

"His case represents the latest in a dozen detentions the New York-based
Committee to Protect Journalists has documented since 2001.

"No formal accusations have been made against Jassam, and an Iraqi court ordered
in November that he be released for lack of evidence. But the U.S. military
continues to hold him, saying it has intelligence that he is `a high security
threat,' according to Maj. Neal Fisher, spokesman for detainee affairs.

"The Obama administration harshly criticized Iran for its imprisonment of Roxana
Saberi, the U.S.-Iranian journalist who was convicted of espionage and sentenced
to eight years in prison before being freed last week. Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Iran's treatment of Saberi as
`non-transparent, unpredictable, and arbitrary.'

"Washington also has called upon North Korea to expedite the trial of two U.S.
journalists being held there on spying charges.

"Yet the United States has routinely used the arbitrary powers it assumed after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks to hold without charge journalists in
Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists
points out.

"None of the detained journalists has been convicted of any charge, said Joel
Simon, executive director of the group, undermining the United States reputation
when it comes to criticizing other countries on issues of press freedom.

"'The U.S. has a record of holding journalists for long periods of time without
due process and without explanation,' he said. `Its standing would be improved
if it addressed this issue.'

"Reuters has expressed disappointment at Jassam's detention and has said there
is no evidence against him. …

"Jassam was detained without a warrant `as the result of his activity with a
known insurgent organization,' Fisher alleged.

"No evidence against Jassam was presented at his court hearing in November,
Fisher said, because the military intelligence against him had not yet been
verified.

"Under the wartime rules in place at the time, he said, `there was no
requirement to link the military intelligence with rule of law type of
evidentiary procedures.'

"After the court ordered Jassam's release, Fisher said, fresh evidence came to
light that suggested he was a `high security threat.'"

This reminds me of how the U.S. held al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Hajj at
Guantanamo from December 2001 to May 2008. He alleges he was tortured at
Guantanamo and that he had been interrogated over 130 times (as of 2005) with
his interrogators insisting in 125 of those interviews that he link al-Jazeera
to terrorism and al-Qaeda, which he wouldn't. "He is completely innocent," his
lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said during al-Hajj's imprisonment. "He is about
as much of a terrorist as my granddad. The only reason he has been treated like
he has is because he is an al-Jazeera journalist. The Americans have tried to
make him an informant with the goal of getting him to say that al-Jazeera is
linked to al-Qaeda." Al-Hajj was eventually released after an international
campaign and the tenacious work of his lawyers.

When you hold up Iran's handling of Roxana Saberi against the U.S. handling of
Jassam, the comparison is striking. So too is the level of outcry from other
journalists. Loud voices demanded Saberi's freedom. Web sites were established.
Some 400 people reportedly joined a hunger strike in solidarity with Saberi. The
same is not true for Jassam, who has spent many months in U.S. custody without
charges. It is time for journalists, particularly U.S. journalists, to break
their silence and demand Jassam's release. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad released Saberi
pretty swiftly after her arrest on espionage charges (and subsequent conviction
and sentencing). Obama should follow Iran's example and release Ibrahim Jassam.
But, in the absence of outcry and protest from other journalists, Obama has
little to lose by ignoring Jassam's case.

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The folly of Mamma Mia: Wouldn't Mia Farrow be better off helping her own
dysfunctional family?
By Sue Reid
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1180662/The-folly-Mamma-Mia-Wouldnt\
-Mia-Farrow-better-helping-dysfunctional-family.html#


For almost a fortnight - until her doctor stepped in 24 hours ago warning she
was about to die - the gaunt face of Mia Farrow has stared straight at the
camera as she has grown increasingly thin.

The actress has been on hunger strike as part of a campaign to highlight the
starving and sick orphans in Africa's war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.

Every day she made a new film appearance on YouTube, charting her physical
decline as she lived on a diet of water and no food. 'I'm just an actress,' she
said one morning last week (having, apparently, crawled out of her bed in a
darkened room to appear in the video clip).

Natural and adopted: Mia Farrow in 1978 with some of her children Mathew, 7,
Sasha, 7, Soon-yi, 7, Lark Song, 5, Fletcher, 5, and Summer, 3

'I'm not presuming anybody will care whether I starve to death. But I can't be
among those who just watch. I honestly couldn't think of anything else to do.'

Mia Farrow believed her extraordinary stunt might chivvy Barack Obama into
action.

She says he could, with a wave of the Presidential wand, insist that Western aid
workers - now expelled from Darfur - return to the country to help children
there.

It is an idea that has just received a robust rebuff from the Sudanese
government. 'Ms Farrow is like George Clooney, who also got involved in the
Darfur question. He is good-looking but ignorant. She is ignorant, too,' said
Khalid al-Mubarak, a spokesman at the country's embassy in London.

What Mia Farrow thinks of Mr al-Mubarak's opinion is anyone's guess. She has
always loved children, or so she says. Only five months ago, in another
publicity blitz, she was photographed clasping the hands of orphans in the
Congo.

Crisis: Mia Farrow talks about having to quit her hunger strike over her
doctor's fears that she would die

On a fundraising trip for the United Nations' charity Unicef the elfin-faced
star placed one boy on her knee and cuddled another. The haunting pictures
subsequently appeared in glossy magazines all over the globe.

Farrow's high-profile protests for African children pluck at the heart strings.
Her doctor, who has now told her to abandon her latest stunt (she was,
apparently, in danger of having a life-threatening seizure) begged her never to
start it, although she managed to put 9lb on to her tiny frame in preparation.

Her friends tried to convince the 64-year-old that if they could find another
celebrity to take her place, she could withdraw from the protest gracefully.

Unsurprisingly, none of the Hollywood glitterati stepped forward to pick up the
baton, although at what now appears to be the 11th hour, the tycoon Sir Richard
Branson - who also enjoys the glare of publicity - has agreed to do so.

Many of Farrow's friends must have wondered why the actress - about to be
embroiled in a New York courtroom row which promises to revive salacious details
of her family life with former lover Woody Allen, and also recovering from the
death of her own troubled daughter - does not devote more of her time to her own
children and grandchildren.

It was while Mia Farrow was thousands of miles away in the Congo in December
that her eldest daughter, Lark, became desperately ill. She was living in a
shabby apartment in the New York suburb, the Bronx.


The actress in 1998 with her adopted daughter Lark, who contracted Aids in her
20s

Only 35, Lark died in hospital on Christmas Day of pneumonia, leaving Mia's
granddaughters, aged 12 and 13, without a mother and only a wayward father they
hardly see.

It was the final chapter of Lark's fractured existence. Adopted by Mia in the
early Seventies from a Saigon orphanage - again amid worldwide publicity - she
was three months old and had been abandoned by her birth mother at the height of
the Vietnam War.
Farrow's move was praised as an act of genuine philanthropy at a time when
adoptions of poor foreign children by celebrities - now accepted as all rather
familiar thanks to Madonna and Angelina Jolie - were practically unheard of.

The bewildered dark-eyed girl was brought from Vietnam to Britain, where the
actress then lived in a mansion near Dorking, Surrey, with her second husband,
the conductor Andre Previn. Greeted by the couple at the airport, the youngster
was dressed in a check-romper suit - her only outfit - with a parcel, containing
a tin teaspoon, tied to her wrist.

By all accounts she had a happy early childhood with her stepsister Daisy, whom
Farrow adopted a year later in 1974. It was only afterwards, when the actress
returned to America, that Lark (who was so named because it had 'just the right
Eastern ring about it,' according to Mia) began to spiral out of control.

As a teenager, she was convicted of shoplifting hundreds of dollars worth of
lingerie from a shopping mall with Daisy and later struggled to rid herself of a
drug habit.

Then, in her 20s, she mysteriously contracted HIV/Aids, which she - and her then
husband, an unemployed builder named Chris McKinzie - always claimed was caught
from a dirty needle at a tattoo parlour.

As a result, the couple's two children - Sara and Christine - were born with the
virus, much to Farrow's horror. Despite Mia's success and wealth, they have
grown up in near poverty.
When Lark died, the stairway to her grim apartment had paint peeling off the
walls and there was the cloying odour of cooking. The only cheering note was a
plastic Father Christmas pinned to the front door by the girls.

Lark struggled to pay the fees for her daughters' private church school, and her
illness meant that, although she drove her daughters there, she was often too
unwell to leave the car and walk them along the short path to class.

Mia cradles a baby Lark, soon after adoption. She's with her then husband Andre
Previn in 1973 at Heathrow Airport

Father Timothy Tighe, the priest who presided over her funeral service, recalls:
'Lark had very little money, but she really tried to do a good job in bringing
the girls up. Her ex-husband, Chris McKinzie, is disliked by everyone in the
family.

'When he arrived at the funeral he was asked to go. The family hates him because
they blame him for the downfall of Lark. It was a blessing that he did as he was
told and went away after paying his respects.'

Sitting beside their sobbing grandmother at the service in New York, the
bereaved girls listened as the priest paid a tribute to Lark. He said: 'She had
dark moments, but she put one foot in front of the other and kept going for her
own daughters.'

They were kind words. Yet the truth is that Lark's death is the latest in a long
line of misfortunes to befall Mia Farrow and her increasingly dysfunctional
family.

While the actress has successfully campaigned for the world's destitute and
dispossessed, at her own hearthside a series of disasters have unfolded.

The actress (veteran of more than 50 films, including The Great Gatsby with
Robert Redford, the Agatha Christie thriller Death On The Nile, and several hits
directed by her notoriously neurotic ex, Woody Allen) has been married twice.

She eloped at 19 with the already ageing Hollywood icon Frank Sinatra, and then
wed the musician Andre Previn (now 79 and a stooping, frail figure who attended
Lark's funeral service as her adoptive father). Both marriages ended in divorce.

Farrow has also been mother to an incredible 15 children - 11 adopted and four
of her own. Two are now dead (another adopted daughter, Tam, died of heart
disease in 2000 at the age of just 19.)

But of all the tumultuous events in her life, it is the climax of her unorthodox
relationship with Woody Allen for which she is renowned.

Their 12-year liaison ended hideously - and very publicly - when he started an
affair with Lark's sister, Soon-Yi, who was 35 years his junior and who was
adopted from South Korea as a child by Farrow and Andre Previn.

Mia's ex Woody Allen started a scandalous affair with her adopted daughter
Soon-Yi (right), 35 years his junior

Farrow, who had been Allen's partner and cinematic muse for more than a decade,
was angered and dismayed to discover, in 1992, that he had been conducting a
sexual relationship with her daughter.

The custody battle that followed had a huge impact on the Farrow family. As a
friend commented this week: 'Many of Mia's children never recovered from the
shame of what happened. Lark, who was then in her late teens, was distraught and
many who knew the family felt that this turned her towards drugs.'

Indeed, in an unguarded moment, Lark confided to a New York newspaper that
Soon-Yi was immature, had never had a boyfriend and that Woody Allen was to
blame for her plight.

The relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi was said to have turned Lark towards
drugs Farrow's biological son by Allen, Satchel, changed his christian name to
Ronan to escape the links with his father. A child prodigy, he was accepted into
law school at Yale University at 16, but has since deferred his admission to
work for Unicef, alongside his mother.

A still loyal Frank Sinatra threatened to send in his associates from the Mafia
to break Allen's legs, but this plan was put on hold after Mia begged her
ex-husband not to do such a thing. But the uproar over the split with Allen left
Mia's image as a near-perfect Earth mother and saviour to a brood of adopted
children tarnished irretrievably.

And the controversy never seems to go away. Even this weekend - as Mia ended her
hunger strike saying she felt 'awful' with an aching body - new stories were
breaking in New York which threaten to re-open the debate about her unorthodox
relationship with the maverick film director.

Lawyers for the clothing chain American Apparel have threatened to summon Mia
and Soon-Yi to give evidence in a lawsuit brought by the movie director against
the company. He is suing American Apparel for $10 million after they used his
image in an advertising campaign, which involved him being pictured as a spoof
rabbi.

The firm's lawyers are fighting dirty, saying that 'after the various sex
scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America's desire
to have him endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.'

To prove their point they want to air details of his past life.

Soon-Yi, who has since had two daughters with Allen (and has not spoken to her
adopted mother since the affair was discovered) may be asked to repeat what she
said in court papers at the time of the disgrace.

She claimed that many of her brothers and sisters had fallen into 'theft and
alcohol abuse and truancy'. Farrow herself, she added, was 'no Mother Teresa'.

The allegations didn't end there. In a tape handed to lawyers, seven-year-old
Dylan (who Mia adopted while with Allen) was allegedly shown shaking and crying
as she claimed that he had abused her.

This particularly poisonous allegation, always denied strenuously by Allen,
finally shattered all illusions about the happy menagerie of the Farrow
household.

During the custody fight that followed, a movie producer friend of Allen, Jane
Reed Martin, testified that Farrow showed favouritism towards her own four
biological children and treated the adopted ones like second-class citizens.

Indeed, she claimed that Lark was used by her mother as little more than 'a
scullery maid'.

As for Farrow's attitude to Soon-Yi, she was quoted as saying: 'I have tried to
speak to her and asked her to come home. She has not responded, so I've given
up. I no longer count her as family.'

Yet as the Farrow clan gathered at Lark's funeral, it was clear that at least
some of her children are still close to their mother.

In attendance were Allen's estranged son Ronan, Mia's three sons with Previn (a
lawyer, accountant and architect) as well as Lark's last boyfriend, Robert
Garcia, who helped care for her as she was dying.

Mia Farrow, starring alongside Jack Black in comedy film Be Kind Rewind, her
latest work

Mia is also busy with movie work, last year starring in the comedy film, Be Kind
Rewind, and is still bringing up her 17-year-old son Isaiah (one of six children
she has adopted as a single mother since splitting with Woody Allen).

After the service, Farrow swept Sara and Christine into her car and back to her
large farmhouse, with white picket fence, two hours away from New York in the
countryside of Connecticut.

Lark was buried a mile from St Saviour Church, Brooklyn, New York, later in the
day, with no family members present.

Soon afterwards, Mia said she was worried about the frail health of her two
granddaughters, and will play a big part in bringing them up.

Perhaps this explains why she was at pains to point out during her 'fly on the
wall' hunger strike: 'I am still a parent. I don't want to die.'

It was enough to bring tears to the eyes, but now she has got her wish -
although the children of Darfur are still suffering.

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Nooses in Iraq
http://www.thedish.org/TheDISHv10no42.htm#phantom


The Jena 6 outrage, which has Mychal Bell back in jail and five other black boys
awaiting trial, has peeled away the thin veneer of a color blind society and
revealed a festering cancer of racism, oozing with repressed hatred in the
United States. Galvanizing the black community, black leaders of all stripes are
calling for a blackout day boycott, a march on Washington DC and congressional
actions to label such acts as hanging nooses hate crimes. Missing in action and
feared dead since his last posting, deep-cover operative Peep City Barnabus is
back in Iraq. The DISH received a dispatch in which the super sleuth tells a
chilling and tragic story that confirms racism is expressed as openly in the
military as it is on US streets.

According to Peep City, black soldiers are finding nooses in bed rolls, duffel
bags and other personal belongings. Complaints to their superiors are dismissed
as overly sensitive of pranks, even though a black driver found a noose hanging
in his tank. Complaining soldiers that try to talk to the media are threatened
with court-martial. One soldier who had been placed under military detention
told Barnabus, a black soldier that was in the cell next to him had been sucked
up by "rendition" because he tried to contact his congressman about nooses and
racism in his unit. "The brother disappeared into a black hole during the night
and no one has seen him since."

Peep City would not provide any names for fear of retaliation. He said, "It is
too easy for a black soldier to come up missing or dead." Barnabus warned
further, "The rednecks are in charge, so black soldiers have to go along to get
along. Black soldiers' only hope of making it out of Iraq alive is to keep their
heads down." The current increase in non-combat deaths adds weight to Peep
City's report.

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"Hang 'em high" state approves innocence commission
May 15, 2009
http://blogs.chron.com/texaspolitics/archives/2009/05/post_58.html


Texas' unenviable record of convicting too many innocent people
helped the Texas House pass legislation Friday creating an innocence
commission that would investigate how innocent people ended up in
prison.


State photo Rep. Ruth McClendon, D-San Antonio


"What we're trying to do is to make sure that we never, never ever convict a
person wrongly again," says. Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon, D-San Antonio, author of
HB 498.

The bill still needs Senate approval before he heads to Gov. Rick Perry.

At least 38 Texans have been exonerated after wrongful convictions,
according to The Innocence Project. Many of these inmates served
decades in prison before being exonerated through DNA evidence.

An innocence commission would investigate cases to determine what
went wrong resulting in convictions of innocent people to help reduce
the future chances of an innocent person ending up in prison.

But even with Texas' pitiful record of convicting innocent people,
passage of the bill was not a slam-dunk. The final vote: 87 for and 51
against. Only Republicans opposed the measure.

"Texas is a 'hang 'em high' state," McClendon noted, explaining opposition to
her bill.

If the bill becomes law, HB 498 would formally be known as the Timothy Cole
Innocence Commission. ===

===

Innocence Blog
Texas Compensation Bill Heads to Governor's Desk
May 14, 2009


The Texas House passed an amended bill today to improve the state law
compensating the wrongfully convicted after their release. The new
bill, which would become law with a signature from Gov. Rick Perry,
pays exonerees $80,000 per year they spent in prison for crimes they
didn't commit and includes credit for tuition at state colleges and
universities. The bill would also pay $25,000 per year an exoneree
spent outside of prison on parole for a crime they didn't commit - a
first in the nation. An earlier version of the bill also included
health care, but that was removed in a Senate amendment.

The bill would represent a significant increase in compensation paid to the
exonerated, from the current law, which provides $50,000 per year. Texas is one
of 27 states with exoneree compensation laws, is yours one?

The legislation is named for Timothy Cole, who was posthumously exonerated this
year after DNA proved that he had been wrongfully convicted in 1986. He died of
a heart attack in prison in 1999 and DNA testing finally proved his innocence in
2008. "It is a landmark bill," (Innocence Project Co-Director Barry) Scheck
said. "For
a fixed damage award, it's the highest in the country."Read more about today's
developments. (Associated Press 5/14/09) CBS Evening News reported on Cole's
case and the Timothy Cole Compensation Act on Saturday: In 1985, a serial rapist
attacked five women near Texas Tech University. Among his victims was then
20-year old sophomore Michelle Mallin.

"It's constantly in my mind all the time," Mallin said recently.

Cole, a 25-year-old college student was convicted, largely because Mallin
identified his picture in a photo lineup.

"I honestly thought it looked like him," she said.

===

Read the text of bill:

http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/tlodocs/81R/billtext/html/HB00498H.htm

===

For more info see:
http://www.hro.house.state.tx.us/pdf/ba81r/hb0498.pdf#navpanes=0

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Dollar stops being Russia's basic reserve currency
19.05.2009
http://english.pravda.ru/business/finance/19-05-2009/107581-dollar_russia-0


The US dollar is not Russia's basic reserve currency anymore. The euro-based
share of reserve assets of Russia's Central Bank increased to the level of 47.5
percent as of January 1, 2009 and exceeded the investments in dollar assets,
which made up 41.5 percent, The Vedomosti newspaper wrote.

  The dollar has thus lost the status of the basic reserve currency for the
Russian Central Bank, the annual report, which the bank provided to the State
Duma, said.

In accordance with the report, about 47.5 percent of the currency assets of the
Russian Central Bank were based on the euro, whereas the dollar-based assets
made up 41.5 percent as of the beginning of the current year. The situation was
totally different at the beginning of the previous year: 47 percent of
investments were made
in US dollars, while the euro investments were evaluated at 42 percent.

The dollar share had increased to 49 percent and remained so as of October 1.
The euro share made up 40 percent. The rest of investments were based on the
British pound, the Japanese yen and the Swiss frank.

The report also said that the reserve currency assets of the Russian Central
Bank were cut by $56.6 billion. The losses mostly occurred at the end of the
year, when the Central Bank was forced to conduct massive interventions to curb
the run of traders who rushed to buy up foreign currencies. The currency assets
of the Central Bank had grown to $537.6 billion by October 2008. Therefore, the
index dropped by almost $133 billion within the recent three months.

The majority of Russian companies, banks and most of the Russian population
started to purchase enormous amounts of foreign
currencies at the end of 2008. The dollar gained 16 percent and the
euro 13.5 percent over the fourth quarter. The demand on the US dollar
was extremely high, and the Central Bank was forced to spend a big part of its
dollar assets, experts say.

The change of the structure of the currency portfolio of the Bank of Russia has
not affected the official peg of the dual currency basket, which includes $0.55
and 0.45 EUR.

The investments of the Bank of Russia in state securities of foreign issuers
have been considerably increased, the report said. About a third of Russia's
international reserves are based on US Treasury bonds.

Russia became one of the largest creditors of the US administration last year,
the US Department of the Treasury said.

Russia increased its investments in the debt securities of the US
Treasury from $32.7 billion as of December 2007 to $116.4 billion as of December
2008.

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Why Hamas is not the issue


Gaza: History Matters
By ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN
http://www.counterpunch.org/hagopian01092009.html


     Mohammed, age six, marched with determination to his bedroom, put on a
record of the Fatah marching song, picked up a wooden toy rifle and marched out
to the balcony.  He pointed the rifle to the sky where minutes ago, Israeli
planes flew over dropping bombs on Palestinian refugee sites.    Mohammed told
me he wanted to be a pilot so he could fight Israeli warplanes.  "But Mohammed,
the Palestinians do not have planes."   "I don't care, I will fight them
whatever way I can."  Was a resistance fighter born this minute or was he a
"future terrorist"?  (Beirut 1973)

How does one explain the horrific fate that has befallen caged Gaza – a land
saturated with rubble and body parts – carpet-bombed by air, invaded by ground,
attacked by sea? Put to the test of history, Israeli "explanations" fail the
credibility test.

History matters.  Israel conquered and occupied Gaza (along with the West Bank
and East Jerusalem) in 1967. Hamas was an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim
Brothers.  In Gaza, it provided a network of social welfare institutions
supporting the poor.  During the first Palestinian Intifada (literally "shaking
off" the occupation), a Hamas resistance military wing was formed.  Israel and
the US favored and met with Islamic Hamas leadership as a counterforce to the
secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Fatah faction then dominant in
the Intifada. As Hamas later strengthened, Israel reversed the process.

History matters.  Palestinians have consistently resisted Israeli dominance over
their lives.  Gazan resistance has been especially problematic for Israel.   In
the 1970s, before Hamas, Ariel Sharon was charged with "pacifying" Gaza.  Sharon
imposed a brutal policy of repression, blowing up houses, bulldozing large
tracts of refugee camps, imposing severe collective punishment and imprisoning
hundreds of young Palestinians.

Domination and colonialism are contrary to the United Nations Charter.  The
legitimacy of struggle for self-determination by peoples under colonial and
foreign domination was reaffirmed in U.N. General Assembly resolution 2787
(December 6, 1971).  As others before them, Palestinians have and do exercise
the legal and moral right to resist.

History matters.  In 2005, Israel withdrew its illegal colonial settlers from
Gaza.  Israeli scholars Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron noted in a
Counterpunch article at the time that the primary motive of the evacuation of
the settlers was to remove them from harm's way in anticipation of an
intensified future mass attack on Gaza.

History matters.  After Hamas won elections in 2006, its leadership accepted a
two-state solution based on the pre-war June 4, 1967 borders, but this was
unacceptable to Israel.  Earlier, Israel destroyed secular Fatah leader and
Palestinian Authority President Arafat for failing at Camp David in July 2000 to
comply with its demands to accept permanent Israeli control over Palestinian
life and land confined in enclaves. Hamas became the new challenge to Israel's
vision.

The facts of history affirm that Israel will not accept a sovereign Palestinian
state on any part of historic Palestine.   Hamas is not the issue.  All
Palestinian leaders sooner or later, secular or Islamic, are declared
unacceptable partners for peace no matter how much they concede to Israel.  That
Israel hides behind the "Hamas Islamic threat" today to destroy it as a
potential partner is becoming transparent.

Today, Palestinian Authority President Abbas's Fatah "security force" is used
against Hamas supporters on the pretense that Abbas could be accepted by Israel
as a satisfactory "partner" but for Hamas.  Both before and after Hamas won the
2006 elections, Abbas fared no better than Arafat though he conceded more.  In
fact Jonathan Cook's new book, Disappearing Palestine," describes the persistent
Israeli strategy to achieve the diminution of Palestine.   Nonetheless Abbas
continues to comply with Israeli/US demands, faulted by his people and
humiliated by his keepers.

The picture changes when history matters.   Treating Israeli war crimes as
historically detached events, unrelated to its Zionist ideology and militaristic
strategy to control all of Palestine, becomes more transparent each day.

Israel has a choice:  by accepting Palestinian rights under international law
now and jettisoning its exclusivist ideology and militarism, Israel secures the
future of its people in a shared Israel/Palestine; or by continuing its present
policy of ruthless repression of indigenous Palestinians and denying them self
determination, it cultivates an intensified and unyielding native resistance. 
Israel has always chosen the latter.  Will President-Elect Obama have the
courage to help Israel embrace the first?


Elaine C. Hagopian is Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston

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TIME TO BREAK THE AXIS OF SLEAZE
ERIC S. MARGOLIS
http://www.ericmargolis.com/political_commentaries/time-to-break-the-axis-of-sle\
aze.aspx


The global financial crisis that began on Wall Street has put the world in a
surly, frightened mood. At least 25 million peoples have been thrown out of work
by the made-in-USA crisis.

People around the globe are angrily blaming the international crisis on the
United States and on their own leaders.  Politicians everywhere are in a panic
as public unrest grows.

Last week, leaders of the world's leading industrial nations sought safety in
numbers at the G20 summit in London to demonstrate they are taking positive
action against the worst economic crisis since the 1930's.

Interestingly, at the same time, Adm. Dennis Blair, the US intelligence chief,
warned the global financial crisis, not al-Qaida,  Taliban or assorted Muslim
miscreants, pose the greatest threat to US national security.

As with many summits, the London G20 jamboree produced mixed results.

President Barack Obama and wife Michelle were a huge hit.  Obama came as a
zephyr of spring after the winter of George Bush, who was probably the most
hated man on earth since World War II.

Obama urged Europe and Asia to join the US in spending more billions to
stimulate their battered economies.  He even allowed that the US bore some of
the responsibility for the current economic mess.  But Europe looked askance at
Obama's spending plans to date, and with good reason.

The US government and Federal Reserve have already spent, guaranteed, or lent  a
staggering  $12.8 trillion to jumpstart the US economy, an amount equal to 90%
of total US economic output in 2008.

To aid the financial industry, the Fed slashed interest rates to nothing,
punishing middle class savers and retirees. Unable to further lower rates,  the
US government is flooding the economy with billions of dollars created from thin
air that will inevitably generate future asset bubbles, stoke inflation, and
eventually drive down the US dollar.

By contrast, Europe, Russia and Japan resisted more stimulus deficit spending,
rightly fearing inflation.  They have declining populations and cannot, like the
US, saddle the next generation with monster deficits as the Obama team plans to
do.

Come to think of it, were not most of the people now running Obama's financial
`rescue' the very same people who presided over Wall Street's meltdown?  Like
the wonderful Claude Raines in `Casablanca,' they are now `shocked, shocked'
that such chicanery went on in Wall Street under their noses.

France's President Nicholas Sarkozy and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel
demanded more regulation of the international financial industry.  Europe and
Asia blame America's and Britain's financial gamblers and fraudsters for the
Panic of 08. Reckless borrowing caused this world crisis;  more massive debt
hardly seems the correct  remedy.

However, the G20 summit finally compromised on a $ 1 trillion more spending for
the International Monetary Fund  and some more vague regulation.

Particularly interesting were comments by Britain's PM Gordon Brown that a new
world economic order is emerging from the London summit.  Meaning: the days of
total US economic hegemony are ending and a multi-lateral world economic order
will replace it.   Given that Britain is a virtual US protectorate, Brown's
words were startling.  China also lost no time in rubbing salt into America's
bleeding financial wounds.

But this financial crisis won't be resolve until the rotten US financial sector
is restored to health, transparency, and integrity.  Many major US financial
institutions are insolvent: their liabilities exceed assets.  Neither the
bankers nor the Obama administration will admit it, or take necessary action.

That's because the US financial industry has grown far too powerful.  Today,
finance is America's leading industry at about 24% of GDP.  Manufacturing has
shrunken to 12%.  Wall Street's `Masters of the Universe' grew so rich they were
able to buy or manipulate most politicians and government regulators.

Investment banks like Bear Sterns, Lehman, and Goldman Sachs routinely borrowed
$20-30 billion daily, and  lent out US $35-50 per dollar of assets they owned
(commercial banks generally were restricted to a 10:1 ratio). In what became
known as the `carry trade,' banks borrowed money at 1% and invested in billions
worth of fraudulent subprime mortgages at 4%, netting 3%.

Money was made from money, not productivity.   Hedge fund managers paid only 15%
income tax while ordinary workers paid full taxes.  Investment became run amok
gambling, as Wall Street used other people's money to take death-defying risks
and rake in billions.

When this house of cards finally collapsed, the money men   used their clout to
get both the Bush and Obama administrations to bail them out.  At the heart of
the financial web dominating  America is the bank, Goldman Sachs.  Ironically,
many of its alumni have been managing Bush and Obama's  `rescue plan.'

In the outrageous, obscene AIG bailout, Goldman alone got US $12.9 billion from
Washington, no-strings attached.  Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and
everyone important in Congress received embarrassingly large cash contributions
from Wall Street. Now, the money lenders are  trying to block meaningful
financial reforms.

If US banks don't admit their true losses, and if the White House keeps propping
them up, they will become like Japan's bankrupt `zombi' banks in the 1990's:
dead men walking.

The right answer is make financial institutions come clean and fire the
fraudsters who ran them into the ground.  Then temporarily nationalize these
banks and insurers and break them up into smaller firms that are not too big to
fail.   The bankers, brokers, traders and credit rating agencies responsible for
the greatest fraud in US history, the subprime and Alt-A mortgage scams,  should
join crook Bernie Madoff behind bars.

The panic of 08 laid bare just how much Wall Street controlled and manipulated
the US government. The axis of sleaze between Wall Street and Washington's
politicians has to be broken.   But, so far, this is not happening.

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TRUST AS A GUIDING FORCE

Dr. E.A. Richarda, P.E.
http://my.execpc.com/~drer/ear1.htm


Many sections of the economy are in dire straits, other parts are simply riding
out the recession as best they can, holding fast until sanity returns to the
nation.  But, what actually caused the recession?  Some experts say it was the
greed of the financial institutions, others place the blame on the actions of
certain politicians, likewise greedy.

The decline of the housing market, generally speaking, was the waning of an 
adequate income required to continue regular payments on  mortgages, by families
so close to a financial precipice that even a slight  trembling in the economy
caused a fatal imbalance.

Yet, the pre-collapse economic structure of the time would have survived had
there not been manipulations by a clique that engendered a continually mounting
loss of Trust.

Trust!?

Yes, Trust is the critical word in describing the present dismal circumstances!

Why?

Because Trust, in its various forms, is the cornerstone of a successful society,
and must be maintained in all phases of life if confidence and consistency are
to govern at all levels.

Some basic examples of extended societal Trust:

The child Trusts his parents to watch over and guide him as he grows into
adulthood.

The family Trusts the father to work, get paid, and provide a reasonable
standard of living,

The landlord, or the lender, Trusts that tenants will pay the rent, and that
mortgagees will pay on their house loans.

The employer Trusts his workers arrive on time and expend their best efforts to
produce products of the required salable quality.

The consumers that purchase services or manufacturer's products Trust  that the
service or product will be of acceptable quality and be satisfactory for the
ends sought.

Citizens will go to the polls and Trust that the election process will be
carried out in a fair and honest manner.

People Trust that civil servants, police, firemen, and the military will perform
their protective duties as required.

And there must be a Trust that local, state, and federal politicians will serve
honorably the best interests of the people they represent, regardless of party
affiliation.

Finally, it is imperative that a president have the Trust of the people, and
serves with honor, the foreign and domestic needs of the nation to the best of
his ability.

Thus it is clear that in any robust economy, there must exist  a long chain of
Trust, from the family, to the small business, to the workers, to the civil and
military services, to the corporations, to the financial institutions, to the
Congress, and ultimately to the president.

And it is also painfully obvious that any crucial break in that chain of Trust
leads to a disaster that will affect the entire economic chain itself.

This is what has occurred, brought about by those greedy individuals whose avid
quest for gain and power fractured in a number of places that chain of Trust.

I do not name them; they are known.

They will be held liable!


Email Dr. E.A. Richards - ea.richards@...

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Why I Live in the Middle of the Desert?
A Victim Of US Butchery Appeals
Mohammed Daud Miraki, PhD
www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com


"It was the middle of the night this past winter when the door of my house
exploded out of its foundation. My family and I were awakened by the sheer noise
of the explosion. My pregnant wife, my two daughters, my son and I stepped out
of the house into our yard. As we approached the destroyed door of our yard, the
intruding US soldiers had already entered the compound and they started firing
at us. The bullets hit everyone in my family including my wife and our unborn
child, two daughters, my son and I; everyone was killed except one of my
daughters and I. After the shooting, the US forces ordered vicious attack dogs
to drag the bodies of my family members out of the yard into the ally outside. I
was also bitten by the dogs after I shielded my surviving daughter, who was also
badly injured by an incoming US round. So, when I covered my daughter with my
body from the attacks of these vicious dogs, the US troops ordered these vicious
beasts to attack me as well.

While my daughter and I were in great deal of pain from the injuries, the bodies
of my pregnant wife, my daughter and my son were disfigured by the attack dogs
of the US forces. The terror exercised by the US forces had created such a
disastrous situation that my daughter and I were not in a state of consciousness
and could not fully comprehend until the US troops left our village and our
neighbors came to get us medical care.

The painful molestation and disfigurement of the members of my family by the
attack dogs and their bullet ridden bodies will always haunt me and my surviving
daughter until the day we die.

After my daughter and I recovered from our wounds, we took some of our
belongings and a tent and moved to the middle of the desert in Laghmen Province
since I could not live in the same house whose yard is stained with the blood of
my wife and children." (My Interview with the Victims in Laghman Province, 2009)


Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to appeal on behalf of this father and daughter and
raise money to build them a modest house away from where he used to live since
his painful memories could not allow him to even visit his own village. I know
those kind people who have always showed concerns for the victims in Afghanistan
would be able to extend a helping hand to these victims. Kindly donate at
www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com or contact me via email at
mdmiraki@...

Sincerely,

Mohammed Daud Miraki, PhD
5347 North Ravenswood Avenue
Chicago , IL 60640
www.afghanistanafterdemocracy.com
mdmiraki@...

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An egregious Zionist assault on "Academic Freedom" at UCSB
by Hector Carreon
La Voz de Aztlan
Wed, 27 May 2009
http://www.aztlan.net/zionist_assault_on_academic_freedom.htm


[IMAGE] Los Angeles, Alta Califronia - May 27, 2009 - (ACN) The ADL of B'nai
B'rith, an arm of the Israeli Mossad in the USA, is again attempting to silence
respected scholars at American universities who dare to criticize Israel's
genocidal policies against the Palestinian people.

The ADL is today targeting Professor William I. Robinson of the University of
California at Santa Barbara because he was teaching his students a lesson by
making comparisons between the Nazis' treatment of Jews and the Zionists'
treatment of Palestinians.

The ADL and other powerful Zionist organizations have now brought formal charges
against the professor utilizing the old canard of "antisemitism" and are
demanding that the UC Chancellor and the UCSB Academic Senate punish him.
Professor Robinson teaches Global and International Studies as well as Latin
American and Iberian Studies at the university.

The assault on Professor Robinson is almost identical to the one against
Professor Tony Martin of Wellesley College in 1993. Professor Martin, now
retired, taught Arican Studies and was a recognized scholar in Black History.
Professor Martin also had to face formal charges after three Jewish student
members of Hillel of B'nai B'rith and the ADL accused him of "antisemitism"
because he lectured on the well established history of Jewish involvement in the
African slave trade.

The attack on Professor Martin also involves a conspiracy between the ADL,
Hillel, certain Jewish academicians and outside international Zionist
organizations. The student organization Hillel function as "watchdogs" and
"spies" on campuses throughout the USA for the International Zionist Movement of
B'nai B'rith. The official motto of Hillel is, "Maximizing the Number of Jews
Doing Jewish With Other Jews."

Professor William I. Robinson needs the support of all freedom loving people.
The principal of "Academic Freedom" is essential in the universal struggle for
human justice. In its absence, genocidal regimes will continue perpetrating
their war crimes. Professor William I. Robinson eloquently presented the
egregious Zionist assault on "Academic Freedom" in a speech at a recent
conference in Garden Grove, California. The following three part video documents
his speech at the 7th Annual International Al-Awda Convention:

Part 1
[VIDEO]

Part 2
[VIDEO]

Part 3
[VIDEO]

http://www.aztlan.net/zionist_assault_on_academic_freedom.htm

===

Prof. Robinson Delivers Speech Addressing His Case
GARDEN GROVE, CALIFORNIA
23 MAY 2009
http://sb4af.wordpress.com/



THESE ARE THE REMARKS GIVEN BY PROF. WILLIAM I. ROBINSON FOR THE SEVENTH ANNUAL
INTERNATIONAL AL-AWDA CONVENTION, THE PALESTINE RIGHT TO RETURN COALITION.  IN
HIS SPEECH HE ADDRESSES THE CURRENT CASE AGAINST HIM AT UCSB.  YOU CAN WATCH
VIDEO EXCERPTS OF THE SPEECH  POSTED AT THE ABOVE WEBSITE.

***

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS UNDER ATTACK AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.  I AM UNDER
INVESTIGATION BY THE UNIVERSITY – AND I FACE POSSIBILE SANCTIONS – BECAUSE OF MY
VOCAL CONDEMNATION OF THE NEARLY ONE-MONTH LONG ISREALI INVASION OF GAZA THAT
BEGAN LAST DECEMBER.

THIS CAMPAIGN AGAINST ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS NOT JUST AN ATTEMPT TO PUNISH ME. 
MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY, IT AIMS TO CREATE AN ENVIRONMENT OF FEAR AND INTIMIDATION
IN WHICH ANY CRITICISM ON ISREALI POLICY IS SUBJECT TO SANCTIONS AND CENSORSHIP.

BUT SILENCE IN THE FACE OF SOCIAL INJUSTICE IS COMPLICITY IN THAT INJUSTICE.

LAST JANUARY 19 WAS THE BIRTHDATE OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.  WE HAD ALREADY
BEEN FOLLOWING, WITH GROWING HORROR, THE ONE MONTH SIEGE OF GAZA — THE
DESTRUCTION OF MOSQUES, SCHOOLS, HOSPITALS, UNITED NATIONS SUPPLY CENTERS, FOOD
WAREHOUSES, THE DOMOLITION OF CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE, THE BLATANT TARGETING OF
CIVILIANS, INCLUDING THE USE OF WHITE PHOSPHOROUS AGAINST THEM.

THAT MORNING I LISTED TO SOME OF THE SPEECHES DELIVERED BY KING SHORTLY BEFORE
HIS DEATH.  THESE INCLUDED HIS FAMOUS CONDEMNATION OF THE U.S. WAR AGAINST
VIETNAM.  IN THAT SPEECH HE EXPLAINED THAT SOME PEOPLE HAD WARNED HIM, IF HE
SPOKE OUT AGAINST THE WAR, HE WOULD RISK LOSING THE SUPPORT OF SOME SECTORS OF
THE CIVIL RIGHTS COALITION.

HIS ANSWER WAS UNEQUIVOCAL: YOU CANNOT SPEAK OUT AGAINST ONE INJUSTICE AND NOT
AGAINST ANOTHER, HE SAID.  YOU CANNOT COMPROMISE WITH FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES,
SUCH AS JUSTICE, TRUTH, AND SOLIDARITY WITH ALL OPPRESSED AND ABUSED PEOPLES.

THAT AFTERNOON AS I PREPARED TO GIVE MY EVENING COURSE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA AT SANTA BARBARA, MY COURSE ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF GLOBALIZATION, I PUT
TOGETHER TWO NEWS ITEMS FROM THE ON-LINE WORLD PRESS FOR CLASSROOM DISCUSSION
ALONG WITH A COMMENTARY BY ME.

I DO THIS EVERY WEEK IN MY CLASS.  EACH WEEK I SELECT SEVERAL NEWS ITEMS FROM
THE WORLD PRESS AND DISTRIBUTE THEM TO MY STUDENTS, SOMETIMES WITH MY OWN
COMMENTARY, AS A WAY OF INITIATING CLASSROOM DEBATE ON CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL
EVENTS AND CONTROVERSIES.

ONE OF THE ITEMS WAS AN ARTICLE WRITTEN BY A JEWISH AMERICAN JOURNALIST, JUDITH
STONE, WHO HAD RECENTLY RETURNED FROM THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES.  HER ARTICLE WAS
CRITICAL OF THE OCCUPATION.  IT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE KANSAS CITY JEWISH
CRONICLE.  THE DAY AFTER IT WAS PUBLISHED, THE EDITOR OF THE NEWSPAPER, ANOTHER
JEWISH AMERICAN, DEBBIE DUCRO, WAS PROMPTLY FIRED BY THE MAGAZINE'S PUBLISHERS
FOR HAVING PRINTED THE ARTICLE.

THE SECOND ITEM I INCLUDED IN THE MATERIAL FOR CLASSROOM DISCUSSION WAS A PHOTO
ESSAY THAT HAD BEEN CIRCULATING IN THE PUBLIC REALM FOR WEEKS.  IT JUXTAPOSED
NAZI ATROCITIES AGAINST JEWS IN WWII AND ISRAELI ATROCITIES AGAINST
PALENSTINIANS IN GAZA.

I INTRODUCED THESE ITEMS WITH A COMMENTARY OF MY OWN THAT I WANT TO READ TO YOU
NOW WITH JUST AS MUCH PASSION AND CONVICTION AS WHEN I WROTE IT:

IF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. WERE ALIVE ON THIS DAY OF JANUARY 19, 2009, THERE IS
NO DOUBT THAT HE WOULD BE CONDEMNING THE ISRAELI AGGRESSION AGAINST GAZA ALONG
WITH U.S. MILITARY AND POLITICAL SUPPORT FOR ISRAELI WAR CRIMES, OR THAT HE
WOULD BE STANDING SHOULDER TO SHOULDER WITH THE PALESTINIANS.  I AM FORWARDING
SOME HORRIFIC, PARALLEL IMAGES OF NAZI ATROCITIES AGAINST THE JEWS AND ISRAELI
ATROCITIES AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS.  PERHAPS THE MOST FRIGHTENING ARE NOT THOSE
PROVIDING A GRAPHIC DEPICTION OF THE CARNAGE BUT THAT WHICH SHOWS ISRAELI
CHILDREN WRITING "WITH LOVE" ON A BOMB THAT WILL TEAR APART PALESTINIAN
CHILDREN.

GAZA IS ISRAEL'S WARSAW – A VAST CONCENTRATION CAMP THAT CONFINED AND BLOCKADED
PALESTINIANS, SUBJECTING THEM TO THE SLOW DEATH OF MALNUTRITION, DISEASE AND
DESPAIR, NEARLY TWO YEARS BEFORE THEIR SUBJECTION TO THE QUICK DEATH OF ISRAELI
BOMBS.  WE ARE WITNESS TO A SLOW-MOTION PROCESS OF GENOCIDE – DEFINDED BY
WEBSTERS DICTIONARY AS "THE SYSTEMATIC KILLING OF, OR A PROGRAM OF ACTION
INTENDED TO DESTROY, A WHOLE NATIONAL OR ETHNIC GROUP" – A PROCESS WHOSE
OBJECTIVE IS NOT SO MUCH TO PHYSICALLY ELIMINATE EACH AND EVERY PALESTINIAN THAN
TO ELIMINATE THE PALESTINIANS AS A PEOPLE IN ANY MEANINGFUL SENSE OF THE NOTION
OF PEOPLE-HOOD.

THE ISRAELI ARMY IS THE FIFTH MOST POTENT MILITARY MACHINE IN THE WORLD AND ONE
THAT IS BACKED BY A PROPAGANDA MACHINE THAT RIVALS AND MAY WELL SURPASS THAT OF
THE U.S., A MACHINE THAT DARES TO MAKE THE LUDICROUS AND OBNOXIOUS CLAIM THAT
OPPOSITION TO THE POLICIES AND PRACTICES OF THE ISRAELI STATE IS ANTI-SEMITISM. 
IT SHOULD BE NO SURPRISE THAT A STATE FOUNDED ON THE NEGATION OF A PEOPLE WAS
ONE OF THE PRINCIPAL BACKERS OF THE APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICAN STATE NOT TO MENTION
OF THE LATIN AMERICAN MILITARY DICTATORSHIPS UNTIL THOSE REGIMES COLLAPSED UNDER
MASS PROTEST, AND TODAY ARMS, TRAINS, AND ADVISES MILITARY AND PARAMILITARY
FORCES IN COLOMBIA, ONE OF THE WORLD'S WORST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATORS.

WELL, WHAT HAPPENED AFTER I DISTRIBUTED THIS COURSE MATERIAL?

TWO STUDENTS OUT OF 80 ENROLLED IN THE COURSE, AND WHOM I DO NOT KNOW
PERSONALLY, TOOK OFFENSE AT THE PHOTO IMAGES AND WITHDREW FROM THE CLASS.

THAT WAS JANUARY 19.  ON FEBRUARY 9, THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE, OR ADL, SENT A
LETTER OF PROTEST TO ME WITH C.C.'S TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, TO THE CHANCELLOR OF THE SANTA BARBARA CAMPUS AND TO OTHER
UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS.

TEN DAYS LATER, ON FEBRUARY 19, THE TWO STUDENTS SUBMITTED A GRIEVANCE AGAINST
ME WITH THE UNIVERSITY.  THEIR LETTERS WERE CLEARLY MODELED AFTER THE ADL
LETTER, AND HAVE BEEN POSTED AT THE BLOG WWW.SB4AF.WORDPRESS.COM.

IT WAS SUBSEQUENTLY REVEALED THAT FROM THE START, THE TWO STUDENTS HAD BEEN
ADVISED BY THE ADL, HILLEL, STAND WITH US, THE SIMON WEISENTHAL CENTER, AND
OTHER GROUPS FROM THE ISRAEL LOBBY.

THEN ON MARCH 9, THE DIRECTOR OF THE ADL, ABRAHAM FOXMAN, FLEW INTO SANTA
BARBARA FROM WASHINGTON AND MET WITH 9-10 MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY AND WITH TWO
DEANS.  SOME OF THOSE PRESENT WERE LED TO BELIEVE THAT THE MEETING WAS TO BE
ABOUT THE JEWIST STUDIES PROGRAM ON CAMPUS.  BUT FOXMAN OPENED UP THE MEETING
WITH ONE SINGLE AGENDA ITEM – PROSECUTING ME – AN AGENDA ITEM THAT WAS THEN
DISCUSSED FOR ONE HOUR.

THIS WAS ON MARCH 9.  TWO WEEKS LATER, ON MARCH 25, THE UNIVERSITY DECIDED TO
INVESTIGATE ME FOR POSSIBLE VIOLATIONS OF THE FACULTY CODE OF CONDUCT.

AS YOU CAN SEE FROM THE DATES IN THIS SEQUENCE, FROM THE START, OUTSIDE GROUPS
FROM THE ISREAL LOBBY FIRST BROUGH PRESSURE TO BEAR ON THE UNIVERSITY, AND THEN
THE UNIVERSITY DECIDED TO TAKE MEASURES AGAINST ME.

IN THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS NEW DETAILS OF THIS POLITICAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST ME BY
THESE IDEOLOGICALLY EXTREMIST GROUPS WITH A POLITICAL AGENDA HAVE BEEN BROUGHT
TO LIGHT.

FOR INSTANCE, ONE OF THE BOARD MEMBERS OF THE GROUP "STAND WITH US," APPARENTLY
MET WITH THE CHANCELLOR IN MID MARCH – BEFORE I WAS BROUGHT UP ON CHARGES. 
ACCORDING TO THE "STAND WITH US" WEBSITE, HE WARNED THE CHANCELLOR THAT FUNDERS
MAY WITHDRAW THEIR SUPPORT FOR THE UNIVERSITY AND HE CALLED ON THE CHANCELLOR TO
INVESTIGATE ME.

MOREOVER, IT HAS NOW BEEN REPORTED THAT THE DIFFERENT PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY GROUPS
MET WITH OTHER UNIVERSITY OFFICIALS BEFORE THE DECISION WAS MADE TO BRING ME UP
ON CHARGES.

YOU WILL FIND ALL OF THIS INFORMATION AND ALL THE ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS IN MY CASE,
POSTED ON THE BLOG I MENTIONED.

AND WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE CHARGES AGAINST ME?  THERE ARE TWO:


THE FIRST CHARGE IS THAT I AM ANTI-SEMITIC.  THE CLAIM THAT CONDEMNATION OF
ISRAELI STATE POLICIES AND PRACTICES IS EQUIVALENT TO ANTI-SEMITISM IS AN
OBNOXIOUS ATTEMPT TO STIFLE ANY CRITICISM OF ISRAEL.   IT HAS NO MORE MERIT THAN
TO CLAIM THAT CRITICISM OF THE IRANIAN GOVT. IS ANTI-MUSLIM, OR CRITICISM OF THE
ZIMBABWE GOVERNMENT IS ANTI-BLACK RACISM, AND SO FORTH.

IT IS A VICIOUS POLITICAL PLOY, INTENDED TO DEFLECT CRITISM OF ISRAELI STATE
POLICIES AND PRACTICES, AND SHOULD BE EXPOSED AND DENOUNCED AS SUCH.

THE SECOND CHARGE AGAINST ME IS THAT I INTRODUCED INTO MY COURSE MATERIAL THAT
WAS "SUBSTANTIALLY UNRELATED" TO THE COURSE.  HOW THE ISRAELI INVASION OF GAZA
IS UNRELATED TO A COURSE ON CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL AFFAIRS IS BEYOND MY
COMPREHENSION.

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE IS VERY CLEAR: I AM SIMPLY THE LATEST VICTIM IN THE
CAMPAIGN BY THE ISRAEL LOBBY AND ITS BACKERS TO HARRASS AND ATTACK AND SILENCE
CRITICS OF ISREALI STATE CONDUCT, INCLUDING ISRAEL'S BLATANT DISREGARD FOR
INTERNATIONAL LAW, ITS ILLEGAL OCCUPATION, ITS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS, ITS WAR
CRIMES, ITS ETHNIC CLEANSING, AND ITS APARTHEID SYSTEM.

ISREAL MAY BE WINNING THE MILITARY BATTLES – GIVEN THAT IT IS THE 5TH MOST
POWERFUL MILITARY MACHINE IN THE WORLD, AND THE RECIPIENT OF $3-4 BILLION IN
U.S. MILITARY AID EVERY YEAR.  BUT IN THE WAKE OF THE INVASION OF LEBANON
FOLLOWED BY THE BRUTAL INVASION OF GAZA IT HAS BEEN LOSING THE BATTLE OF
LEGITIMACY.

THE DIRECTOR OF THE AMERICAN-ISRAELI PUBLIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE (AIPAC), HOWARD
KOHR, ACKNOWLEDGED THIS EROSION OF LEGITIMACY, WHEN HE OPENED THE AIPAC ANNUAL
CONVENTION EARLIER THIS MONTH.  HE SAID, THERE IS A HUGE AND GROWING
INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE POLICIES OF ISRAEL.

"NO LONGER IS THIS CAMPAIGN CONFINED TO THE RAVINGS OF THE POLITICAL FAR LEFT OR
FAR RIGHT," HE SAID, "BUT INCREASINGLY IT IS ENTERING THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM."

IT IS IN THIS CONTEXT THAT THE ISRAEL LOBBY IS STEPPING UP ITS VICIOUS ATTACKS
ON ANYONE WHO WOULD SPEAK OUT AGAINST ISRAELI POLICIES.  LAST YEAR, THE ADL
ANNOUNCED THAT IT WOULD START TO TARGET THE BIG STATE UNIVERSITIES, BEGINNING
WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

THIS IS THE CONTEXT IN WHICH THIS POLITICAL APPARATUS HAS TARGETTED ME.  THE
PERSECUTION I AM EXPERIENCING IS PART OF A LARGER – AND WELL DOCUMENTED –
PATTERN THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA OF MACARTHYIST REPRESSION
UNLEASHED ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES AGAINST FACULTY WHO DARE BRING UP FOR DEBATE
ISRAELI POLICIES, MUCH LESS THOSE WHO WOULD COME OUT IN SUPPORT OF PALESTINIAN
RIGHTS.

THESE CAMPAIGNS TO SILENCE DEBATE CONSTITUTE A GRAVE ATTACK ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM,
ON FREE SPEECH, AND ON DEMOCRACY ITSELF.

WHY IS ACADEMIC FREEDOM SO IMPORTANT?


ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS THE LIFE BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSITY.  ANY ATTACK ON SUCH
FREEDOM EXERCISES A POTENTIALLY CHILLING EFFECT ON THE ABILITY OF THE UNIVERSITY
COMMUNITY TO ENGAGE IN OPEN DEBATE AND EXCHANGE OF IDEAS OF CONTEMPORARY
MATTERS, FREE FROM INTIMIDATION AND THE THREAT OF SANCTIONS.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS THEREFORE NOT NEGOTIABLE.  IT ENCOMPASSES, IN ACCORDANCE
WITH THE DEFINITION SET FORTH BY THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY
PROFESSORS, AMONG OTHERS, THE RIGHT OF FACULTY TO FULL FREEDOM IN RESEARCH AND
IN THE PUBLICATION OF RESULTS, FREEDOM IN THE CLASSROOM IN DISCUSSING THEIR
SUBJECT, AND THE RIGHT OF FACULTY TO BE FREE FROM INSTITUTIONAL CENSORSHIP,
DISCIPLINE OR OTHER FORMS OF RESTRICTIVE INTERFERENCE IN TEACHING, RESEARCH,
SPEAKING AND PUBLISHING, WHEREVER THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND UNDERSTANDING MAY
LEAD.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS SUCH A THREAT TO THE ISRAEL LOBBY – &, INDEED, TO ANY
ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, AUTHORITARIAN, OR TOTALITARIAN PROJECT – PRECISELY BECAUSE IT
PROSCRIBES CENSORSHIP AND PROHIBITS ANY ATTEMPT TO LIMIT WHAT IS AND IS NOT
ACCEPTABLE TO RESEARCH, TO TEACH, TO QUESTION & TO DEBATE, & PRECISELY BECAUSE
ACADEMIC FREEDOM THRIVES ON CONTROVERSY AND CRITICAL THINKING.

IT IS NO WONDER THAT ACADEMIC FREEDOM WAS SUPRESSED IN NAZI GERMANY, IN
APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, IN THE MILITARY DICATORSHIPS OF LATIN AMERICA, IN THE
FORMER SOVIET UNION, AND IN THE UNITED STATES UNDER MCCARTHYISM AND AT OTHER
TIMES IN US HISTORY.  AND IT IS CERTAINLY NO WONDER WHY ACADEMIC FREEDOM IS SEEN
AS SUCH A THREAT BY THE ISREAL LOBBY AND ITS SPONSORS.

OUR MISSION AS EDUCATORS IS TO HELP DEVELOP CITIZENS WHO CAN THINK CRITICALLY
AND INDEPENDENTLY ON THE BURNING ISSUES OF OUR DAY, AND WHO CAN PARTICIPATE IN A
MEANINGFUL AND CONSTRUCTIVE WAY IN SOCIETY.

LET ME READ TO YOU ONE PASSAGE FROM THE STATEMENT ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM BY THE
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS:

IT IS A MISTAKE "TO ASSUME THAT STUDENTS HAVE A RIGHT NOT TO HAVE THEIR MOST
CHERISHED BELIEFS CHALLENGED.  THIS ASSSUMPTION CONTRADICTS THE CENTRAL PURPOSE
OF HIGHER EDUCATION, WHICH IS TO CHALLENGE STUDENTS TO THINK HARD ABOUT THEIR
OWN PERSPECTIVE, WHATEVER THOSE MIGHT BE.  IT IS NEITHER HARRASSMENT NOR
DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF A STUDENT TO HOLD UP TO CLOSE CRITICISM AN IDEA OR
VIEWPOINT THE STUDENT HAS POSITED OR ADVANCED.

IDEAS THAT ARE GERMANE TO A SUBJECT UNDER DISCUSSION IN A CLASSROOM CANNOT BE
CENSORED BECAUSE A STUDENT WITH PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL BELIEFS MIGHT
BE OFFENDED.  INSTRUCTION CANNOT PROCEED IN THE ATMOSPHERE OF FEAR THAT WOULD BE
PRODUCED WERE A TEACHER TO BECOME SUBJECT TO ADMINISTRATIVE SANCTION BASED UPON
THE IDIOSYNCRATIC REACTION OF ONE OR MORE STUDENTS….CONTROVERSY IS AT THE VERY
HEART OF FREE ACADEMIC INQUIRY…"

FROM BEGINNING TO END, THIS ATTACK ON ME CONSTITUTES A PATENT, OMINOUS, AND
POLITICIZED VIOLATION OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM.

VERY SIMPLY, TWO STUDENTS SUBMITTED A GRIEVANCE WITH THE UNIVERSITY
ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE THEY HAD A DIFFERENT POLITICAL POSITION THAN MINE AND
BECAUSE MY COURSE MATERIAL DISAGREED WITH THEIR OWN POLITICAL POSITION.  AND IT
HAS NOW BECOME CLEAR THAT THESE TWO COMPLAINANTS WERE PART OF THE ISRAEL LOBBY. 
THEY WENT DIRECTLY TO THE ISRAEL LOBBY, AND THEN THE MASSIVE MACHINERY OF THE
ISRAEL LOBBY'S REPRESSION CAME DOWN ON ME.

DOES ANYONE REALLY THINK THAT I WOULD BE FACING CHARGES RIGHT NOW IF I HAD
INTRODUCED INTO MY COURSE READING MATERIAL THAT WAS PRO-ISRAELI AND TWO
PALESTINIAN STUDENTS IN MY COURSE SUBMITTED A GRIEVANCE?

WHAT IS EVEN WORST THAN THE POLITICIZED NATURE OF THESE GRIEVANCES THEMSELVES,
AND THE BLATANT INTERFERENCE IN THE UNIVERSITY'S AFFAIRS BY EXTREMIST OUTSIDE
GROUPS WITH A POLITICAL AGENDA, IS THAT THE UNIVERSITY HAS BEEN COMPLICIT IN ALL
THIS.  THE UNIVERSITY'S PROCESS AGAINST ME HAS BEEN CONDUCTED BY SYSTEMATICALLY
VIOLATING UNIVERSITY PROCEDURES AND DENYING MEDUE PROCESS, AS IS DOCUMENTED ON
THE BLOG, WWW.SB4AF.WORDPRESS.

LET US BE CLEAR THAT WHEN WE SUPRESS ACADEMIC FREEDOM THE UNIVERSITY BECOMES AN
INDOCTRINATION CAMP WHERE TRUTH IS SUBORDINATED TO IDEOLOGY AND POWER.  THAT IS
THE THREAT WE NOW FACE.

NOW, IF THE UNIVERSITY ADMINSTRATION HAS ACTED IN SUCH A REPREHENSIBLE MANNER,
HAS BROUGHT SUCH SHAME TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, HOW HAVE THE STUDENT
BODY AND THE FACULTY REACTED?


WELL, WHEN THEY LEARNED OF THE CHARGES AGAINST ME, GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE
STUDENTS ON MY CAMPUS, ESTABLISHED A "COMMITTEE TO DEFEND ACADEMIC FREEDOM" AND
SET UP THE BLOG THAT I MENTIONED AND WHICH INCLUDES A PETITION.

FOR THEIR PART, MANY FACULTY MEMBERS ACROSS CAMPUS ARE ALSO OUTRAGED BY THIS
ATTACK ON OUR ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND ARE MOBILIZING IN A NUMBER OF WAYS TO DEFEND
IT.

THE COMMITTEE TO DEFEND ACADEMIC FREEDOM HAS RECEIVED HUNDREDS OF LETTERS FROM
FACULTY, FROM ACADEMIC ASSOCIATIONS, AND FROM MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC AROUND THE
WORLD, DEMANDING THAT THE CHARGES AGAINST ME BE DROPPED.

MEMBERS OF THE FACULTY ON MY CAMPUS ARE AT THIS TIME CIRCULATING A PETITION
WHICH STATES, IN PART:

SINCE FEBRUARY 25, OUR COLLEAGUE WILLIAM I. ROBINSON, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY,
HAS BEEN THE SUBJECT OF A SERIES OF ATTACKS FROM TWO STUDENTS AND A NUMBER OF
OFF-CAMPUS INDIVIDUALS THAT REPRESENTS A SERIOUS BREACH OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM AND
A THREAT TO THE AUTONOMY OF THE UNIVERSITY.

DISPLEASED BY THE CONTENTS OF AN EMAIL AND TWO ARTICLES FORWARDED BY PROF.
ROBINSON ON JANUARY 19 TO HIS CLASS OPPOSING THE RECENT ISRAELI CAMPAIGN IN
GAZA, TWO STUDENTS FILED A COMPLAINT WITH THE SENATE ALLEGING "ACADEMIC
MISCONDUCT" AND "ANTI-SEMITISM."

ON FEBRUARY 25, THE UCSB ACADEMIC SENATE OPENED AN OFFICIAL INQUIRY INTO THESE
ALLEGATIONS. THIS INQUIRY IS ONGOING AND HAS BECOME NATIONALLY AND
INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN. QUITE ASIDE FROM THE MERITS OF THE STUDENTS' COMPLAINTS,
OVER THE PAST FEW WEEKS THE PUBLIC EXPOSURE OF THIS CASE HAS BROUGHT TO LIGHT
APPARENT VIOLATIONS OF PROF.

ROBINSON'S RIGHTS TO DUE PROCESS BY THE SENATE AND ITS COMMITTEES, ALONG WITH
WORRISOME NEWS OF PRESSURES RECEIVED BY THE ADMINISTRATION FROM ORGANIZATIONS
SUCH AS THE ANTI DEFAMATION LEAGUE TO ADMINISTER AN EXEMPLARY PUNISHMENT TO
PROF. ROBINSON.

WE HAVE LEARNED THAT ORGANIZATIONS SUCH AS THE ADL HAVE ORGANIZED A CAMPAIGN
DIRECTED AT PRESSURING THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE ACADEMIC SENATE TO MAKE THIS
CASE AN EXAMPLE TO PREVENT VOCAL OPPOSITION TO THE STATE OF ISRAEL AND ITS
POLICIES.

THE SITUATION DEMANDS DECISIVE, PUBLIC AND SWIFT RESPONSE BY THE UCSB FACULTY IN
DEFENSE OF DUE PROCESS AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM ON BOTH PROCEDURAL AND SUBSTANTIVE
GROUNDS.

MEANWHILE, I HAVE RECEIVED SEVERAL THOUSAND EMAILS AND LETTERS FROM ALL AROUND
THE WORLD.  MUCH OF THIS CORRESPONDENCE HAS BEEN SUPPORTIVE BUT THERE HAS ALSO
BEEN A LOT OF HATE MAIL, SOME OF IT VIOLENT AND VULGAR.

CLEARLY, DRAWING HISTORICAL COMPARISONS BETWEEN ISRAELI STATE BEHAVIOR & NAZI
BEHAVIOR IS A VERY DIFFICULT THING FOR DEFENDERS OF ISRAEL TO SWALLOW.   IT
TOUCHES A RAW NERVE, WHICH INDEED IT SHOULD.

ON THE ONE HAND, AS ONE READER OF A LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW WITH ME PUT IT
IN A LETTER HE SENT TO THE EDITORS AND TO ME:  "IF YOU DO NOT LIKE NAZI
COMPARISONS THEN URGE ISRAEL NOT TO COMMIT NAZI-LIKE ATROCITIES RATHER THAN
CONDEMN AND OSTRACIZE THOSE WHO MAKE THE COMPARISON."  THAT IS, ONE EVOKDES
NAZIS TO POINT TO NAZI-LIKE BEHAVIOUR.

THIS MUCH SHOULD BE EVIDENT.  IN THIS REGARD, THERE IS A DEFINITE PARALLEL
BETWEEN THE WARSAW GHETTO AND GAZA.  THE NAZIS UNDERTOOK FORCED POPULATION
TRANSFER AND THEN SEALED OFF THE GHETTO, LOCKING THEIR VICTIMS IN, CONTROLLING
ALL MOVEMENT, CONTROLLING WHAT FOOD, MEDICAL SUPPLIES OR ANYTHNG ELSE COULD GO
IN OR OUT, GENERATING IN THIS WAY A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS, DISEASE, AND
STARVATION, AND RESPONDING WITH DISPROPORTIONATE FORCE AGAINST THE SLIGHTEST
SIGN OF RESISTANCE FROM THE GHETTO.

AS A RESULT OF THE ISRAELI BLOCKADE OF GAZA AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ITS FOOD
SUPPLY SYSTEM, ACCORDING TO THE UNITED NATIONS, ACUTE MALNUTRITION IN GAZA IS ON
THE SAME SCALE AS THE POOREST NATIONS IN SOUTHERN SAHARA, WITH MORE THAN HALF OF
ALL PALESTINIAN FAMILIES EATING ONLY ONE MEAL A DAY.

ON THE OTHER HAND, QUITE EVIDENTLY, THE COMPARISON BETWEEN NAZI ATROCITIES
AGAINST JEWS IN WWII AND ISRAELI ATROCITIES AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN THE PRESENT
IS NOT INTENDED TO SUGGEST THAT THE LATTER REPLICATES THE FORMER.  THE
DIFFERENCES ARE NUMEROUS.  NO TWO HISTORIC EVENTS OR PROCESSES ARE EVER
IDENTICAL.

DRAWING ANALOGIES OR COMPARISONS BETWEEN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY EVENTS OR
PROCESSES IS NOT INTENDED TO SUGGEST THEY ARE IDENTICAL.

RATHER, SUCH COMPARISONS ARE A PEDOGOGICAL TOOL MEANT TO UNCOVER PATTERNS OF
HUMAN CONDUCT – OR BETTER PUT, HUMAN MISCONDUCT – THAT MAY MANIFEST THEMSELVES
IN A VARIETY OF HISTORICAL CIRCUMSTANCES; TO IDENTIFY WHAT STRUCTURAL CONDITIONS
MAY GIVE RISE TO THESE FORMS OF CONDUCT; AND TO REFLECT ON THE PAST, SO THAT
COLLECTIVE AGENTS IN THE PRESENT MAY GAIN A GREATER UNDERSTANDING OF THE
SIGNIFICANCE OR MEANING OF SUCH CONTEMPORARY EVENTS THAT SHARE SIMILAR
CHARACTERISTICS WITH THOSE OF THE PAST; AND THEN, HOPEFULLY, TO ACT UPON THAT
UNDERSTANDING.

ZIONISTS AND DEFENDERS OF THE ISRAELI STATE TAKE GREAT OFFENSE AT ANY ANALOGY
BETWEEN THE NAZIS AND ISRAELI STATE ACTIONS, IN PART, BECAUSE THE JEWISH
HOLOCAUST IS USED BY THE ISRAELI STATE AND THE ZIONIST POLITICAL PROJECT AS A
MECHANISM OF LEGITIMATION, SO THAT TO DRAW SUCH ANALOGIES IS TO UNDERMINE
ISRAEL'S LEGITIMATING DISCOURSE.

IT IS CRUCIAL TO POINT THIS OUT, BECAUSE THAT DISCOURSE HAS GRADUALLY COME TO
LEGITIMATE CURRENT OR PROPOSED ISRAELI POLICIES THAT DEMONSTRATE AN EVER MORE
FRIGHTENING SIMILARITY WITH OTHER HISTORICAL INSTANCES OF GENOCIDE.  IN FACT,
WHAT WE ARE SEEING AT THIS TIME IS PRE-GENOCIDAL ACTIVITIES.

THE POLITICAL PARTY OF ISRAEL'S FOREIGN MINISTER, AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN RECENTLY
PROPOSED A LAW TO IMPRISON FOR THREE YEARS ANYONE WHO COMMEMORATES THE NAKBA
(WWW.HAARETZ.COM/HASEN/SPAGES/108588.HTML).

THIS PROPOSAL COMING FROM A PARTY IN ISRAEL'S GOVERNING COALITION SHOULD SET OFF
ALARM BELLS THAT FASCISM IS EMERGING.  THE PROPOSED LAW AMOUNTS TO CRIMINALIZING
ACTS OF MEMORY, OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY, OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL EXPRESSSION.

IMAGINE CRIMINALIZING BLACK COMMEMORATION OF SLAVERY, OR INDIAN COMMEMORATION OF
GENOCIDE IN THE AMERICAS?  OR JEWISH COMMEMORATION OF THE HOLOCAUST?

LIEBERMAN HAS DESCRIBED ISRAELI ARABS AS A "DANGEROUS FIFTH COLUMN" AND HAS
PROPOSED THEY BE REMOVED.  SUCH A RACIST PROJECT OF POPULATION TRANSFER IS ALL
TOO SIMILAR TO OTHER HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY INSTANCES OF ETHNIC CLEANSING
AND GENOCIDE, INCLUDING THE NAZI EXPERIENCE.  YET POLLS SHOW THAT A SOLID
MAJORITY OF ISRAELIS – 60 PERCENT – NOW FAVOR SUCH FORCED RELOCATION.  THIS IS
BUT ONE MORE WARNING BELL THAT A POPULATION WHO SUFFERED THE NIGHTMARE OF NAZI
EXTERMINATION IS NOW ITSELF EMBRACING FASCIST PROPOSALS.

AND SO WE SEE IN THESE DEVELOPMENTS THE PEDAGOGICAL VALUE OF DRAWING ANALOGIES
BETWEEN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SITUATIONS, AS WELL AS THE ETHICAL
IMPERATIVE THAT IS REVEALED THROUGH THE COMPARISON.

THE CAPACITY TO COMMIT THE ATROCITIES ASSOCIATED WITH THE NAZI HOLOCAUST IS
WITHIN US ALL.

THEREFORE, CONDEMNATION OF OPPRESSION AND DOMINATION CANNOT BE SELECTIVE. 
EITHER WE CONDEMN IT IN EVERY INSTANCE OR WE LOSE THE MORAL AUTHORITY TO CONDEMN
IT IN ANY INSTANCE.  IF WE CONDEMN THE NAZI HOLOCAUST WE MUST ALSO CONDEMN WHAT
I HAVE DESCRIBED AS SLOW-MOTIOIN ISRAELI GENOCIDE AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS. 
THAT THESE TWO EVENTS ARE NOT IDENTITICAL IS IRRELEVANT TO THE PEDAGOGICAL
PURPOSE OF THE ANALOGY OR TO THE MORAL IMPERATIVE THAT ADHERES TO THE
COMPARISON.

THE NOTED JEWISH HISTORIAN BENNY MORRIS, WHO IS A PROFESSOR AT BEN GURION
UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV, AND WHO CLOSELY IDENTIFIES WITH ISRAEL, GAVE A LENGTHY
INTERVIEW TO THE ISRAELI NEWSPAPER HA'ARTEZ, AND PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 9, 2004.

IN THAT INTERVIEW, HE REFERRED TO THE GENOCIDE OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN WHAT IS
TODAY THE UNITED STATES IN ORDER TO SUGGEST THAT GENOCIDE MAY BE ACCEPTABLE.  HE
SAID:

"EVEN THE GREAT AMERICAN DEMOCRACY COULD NOT HAVE BEEN CREATED WITHOUT THE
ANNIHILIATION OF THE INDIANS.  THERE ARE CASES IN WHICH THE OVERALL, FINAL GOOD
JUSTIFIES HARSH AND CRUEL ACTS THAT ARE COMMITTEED IN THE COURSE OF HISTORY."

THEN HE WENT ON TO CALL FOR ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE PALESTINIANS, SAYING:
"SOMETHING LIKE A CAGE HAS TO BE BUILT FOR THEM.  I KNOW THAT SOUNDS TERRIBLE. 
IT IS REALLY CRUEL.  BUT THERE IS NO CHOICE.  THERE IS A WILD ANIMAL THERE THAT
HAS TO BE LOCKED UP IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER."

SUCH A STATEMENT SHOULD CAUSE US TO PAUSE.  WE MUST CONSIDER VERY CAREFULLY WHAT
MORRIS IS PROPOSING, AND THE HISTORICAL PROJECT IN WHOSE NAME HE MAKES SUCH A
PROPOSAL.

THIS LEADS ME TO CONCLUDE WITH AN URGENT WARNING.

BEYOND PALESTINE AND ISRAEL, BEYOND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, WE ARE IN THE
MIDST OF A GLOBAL CRISIS, THE WORST CRISIS IN DECADES.

AS THIS CRISIS UNFOLDS, THE MEANS OF VIOLENCE ARE MORE LARGE-SCALE AND MORE
DESTRUCTIVE THAN HUMANITY HAS EVER KNOWN, AND WE FACE AN ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
THAT THREATENS LIFE ITSELF ON THE PLANET.

IT IS AT TIMES OF CRISIS SUCH AS THIS THAT SOCIAL AND POLITICAL TENSIONS RISE
AND THAT FASCIST AND TOTALITARIAN PROJECTS REAR THEIR UGLY HEADS.

THERE IS ONLY ONE WAY TO PREVENT SUCH PROJECTS, AND THAT IS THROUGH SOCIAL
JUSTICE.  AND SOCIAL JUSTICE REQUIRES SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER.

IT IS TIME TO DRAW THE LINE.  WORLD WAR II BEGAN WHEN DEMOCRACY WAS OVERTHROWN
IN SPAIN AND FRANCO CAME TO POWER.  THAT WAR LED US TO THE HOLOCAUST, AND AS
WELL, OPENED UP SPACE FOR THE ZIONIST PROJECT TO EXERCISE ITS HEGEMONY OVER THE
JEWISH COMMUNITY WORLDWIDE, IN ALIGNMENT WITH THE VICTORIOUS IMPERIALIST POWERS
IN THAT WAR.  THAT IN TURN BROUGHT US THE TRAGEDY OF THE NAKBA, OF GAZA, OF THE
OCCUPATION, AND NOW THE THREAT OF GENOCIDE AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS.

BY STANDING UP FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE IN PALESTINE, BY DEFENDING DEMOCRACY AND
ACADEMIC FREEDOM ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES IN THE UNITED STATES, WE DO MUCH MORE
THAN ACT ON PRINCIPLE, ON ETHNICAL GROUNDS, AS MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. REMINDED
US.

BY STANDING UP FOR WHAT IS RIGHT, AND DECENT, AND HUMAN, WITHOUT FEAR OF THE
SANCTIONS WE MAY FACE FOR DOING SO, WE ALSO CLOSE THE DOOR ON A POSSIBLE FUTURE
THAT IN THE 21ST CENTURY CAN ONLY BE MANY TIMES MORE TRAGIC THAN A TRAGIC PAST.

THANK YOU

*********************************************************************

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