Angry White Kid

Tragedy in Lebanon

What a disgraceful situation in Lebanon.

The Lebanese Army shows that while it will have tea with Israeli invaders, it is more than happy to indiscriminately shell Palestinian refugees. (And of course the US is always willing to pitch in when it comes to killing Palestinians.)

The media tries to paint Palestinians as terrorists, though the members of Fatah al-Islam are nearly everything but Palestinian.

Instead of condemning the massacre of Palestinian civilians, the American Task Force on Palestine (which hangs out with the AIPAC-financed WINEP) and the American Task Force on Lebanon send out a press release expressing "support for Lebanon" and condemning the "assault on Lebanese sovereignty, stability and security."  They call for merely "minimiz[ing] civilian casualties." And to top it off, in the same press release they manage to do away with the right of return - asking instead for the refugee camps to be made into nicer places to live.

And the Palestinian refugees, expelled by Israel and already facing horrific conditions in Lebanon, are left to fend for themselves.

Here is info on the Nahr el Bared Relief Campaign.  Here is an insightful interview with As'ad Abukhalil.

Censoring Palestine on Daily Kos

As I couldn't care less about the Democrats, I don't read Daily Kos.  They like to call themselves the "left-wing of the Democratic Party", but on the political spectrum that's still a pretty right-wing place to be, and I'm not interested.

Given that 500,000 other people per day do appear to be interested, and given that anyone can post on the site, it is an important place to raise topical issues that most Democrats could use some educating about, such as Palestine.  Several pro-Palestine bloggers maintain diaries on the site in an effort to do just that.

But ironically enough, as the Palestinians marked the 59th anniversary of the Nakba - their forced expulsion from their homes and homeland - three pro-Palestine bloggers were expelled from Daily Kos. This occurred for no reason other than that the pro-Israel side complained consistently and loudly enough that some apparently weak-willed administrator gave in.

Sabbah, one of the recently-banned bloggers, provides some background on this development. Others on Daily Kos are trying to right the situation.  Unfortunately, I don't see the banned bloggers being reinstated. As the dKosopedia states, "If you are banned as a user for any reason, the only court of appeal is Markos himself."  And as Markos states, Daily Kos "is a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory."  As the Democrats' only concern about the Palestinians is making sure they remain as subjugated as possible, a blog dedicated to Democratic victory is likely not to look fondly on Palestinian rights or have any interest in the Palestinian narrative. 

In short, it's a shameful situation. The banned bloggers should be immediately reinstated and the censorship at Daily Kos - for which it is gaining a reputation - should end. But really, it's the Democrats, the other brand of American Fascism™, so I wouldn't expect much. My hat is off to those who tried, and keep trying, to make a difference.

UPDATE: curmudgiana at My Left Wing shares just how far off the deep end the Kos administrators have gone.  Truly, Daily Kos has now ideologically melded itself with Bush and the selective "war on terror." The purge and silencing of anything contradicting The Party line continues.

Doha Debate on the right of return

For those interested in Palestine and the right of return of Palestinians refugees, I highly recommend watching this debate and Q&A that aired this past weekend on BBC World.  It featured Bassem Eid and Yossi Beilin arguing against the right of return and Ali Abunimah and Ilan Pappe arguing for it. 

In my opinion, and in the opinion of the house, Abunimah and Pappe do a fantastic job while Eid  basically voices his surrender to the occupiers and Beilin can't fathom why Palestinians won't accept apartheid. An interesting post-debate exchange between Eid and Abunimah can be read here.

One of my favorite quotes:

Tim Sebastian, moderator:You don't think there should be compromise? 

Ali Abunimah: Of course there should be compromise.  The compromise is that I have no objection, in fact I'm very glad, that Yossi Beilin and his family and his ancestors live in the country. They're there.  The compromise is that they live there, with us, together in peace.  The thing I can't understand is why he finds it so horrifying that my mother should live in the country with him.

That illustrates an important point.  People are always saying that "both sides need to compromise" and "make difficult concessions for peace" and so on, but the failure of that line of thinking is that it ignores the concessions Palestinians have had forced upon them for the past sixty years.  78% of their country was stolen and they were expelled. The rest of it is slowly being colonized.  They've lived under military occupation for 40 years.  Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as third class citizens.  Basic human rights of every imaginable kind are consistently denied to them.  And the list goes on.

Removing settlements, taking down the wall, ceding control of East Jerusalem, implementing the right of return - these are not concessions for Israel to make and for Palestinians to counter with concessions of their own.  They are obligations under international and humanitarian law.  Just as ending apartheid in South Africa was not a concession but an obligation.  You don't get points for dismantling structures that you knew were illegitimate, contrary to international law, and shouldn't have been constructed in the first place.

Pro-Israel censors strike again

It's always struck me as odd how some of those who love to falsely proclaim Israel to be "the only democracy in the Middle East" also seem to be rabidly engaged in stifling free speech - ya know, one of those "tenets of democracy" things - in the U.S. when it comes to Palestine.  But they've done it again, this time in Miami, where:

My Name Is Rachel Corrie, the controversial play about a young American activist who died after she was run over by an Israeli-operated bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has been pulled from the lineup at Plantation's Mosaic Theatre after protests from some of the theater's subscribers and outside individuals.

Mosaic, a professional company that presents its shows in a black-box theater space at the private American Heritage School, had planned to offer the one-woman Rachel Corrie in repertory with Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, a solo show about Iraqi women.

But Mosaic's board of directors agreed to drop the play after phone calls, e-mails and comments on a special Rachel Corrie blog -- which has now been removed from the company's website -- made it clear that an impassioned, vocal minority strongly objected to the play.

Everywhere this play goes in the U.S. the pro-Israel crowd tries to shut it down. Even my cynical self still gets baffled at how threatened these people are of a dead 23 year old and her words. The irony of course is that those working to shut down these productions likely have never seen the play nor read Corrie's words.  They simply reactively clamor with sickening zeal to squash or discredit anyone who may claim that Palestinians are human beings and as such are deserving of, and indeed have, rights.

But as Robert Jamieson writes in the Seattle P-I, where the play has met with broad acclaim,

News flash: The best art, whether it deals with war or love in the time of AIDS or dark family secrets, touches political, social and moral nerves. If done well, a production can compel audiences to think.

That's lost on folks so blinded by their cause they would rather see the stage dark than a ray of light shine on one of the most contentious issues of the day.

PS - I'm leaving technology land for a few days, so any comments may not be published until Sunday.

Peace, Tania and Shimon

Tanya Reinhart (1944-2007) and Shimon Tzabar (1926-2007)

Intensive Care
by Shimon Tzabar

My heart beats too slow.
My heart beats too fast.
My heart doesn't beat middling -
middling as life,
middling as the blood streams,
middling as the joy that flows,
as oxygen that goes in and out.
Middling is what it ought to be
in order to survive in good company,
to raise children.
My heart doesn't want to beat middling.
My heart wants to fly to the end of the world
like a bird.
My heart wants to swim under water
like a fish.
My heart is crazy, crazy and mad.
My heart dreams adventure impossible to realize.
My heart has a screw loose in its head.

November 1998

The easiest targets

Take thirteen minutes to check out this very well-done video by If Americans Knew on Israel's tactic of strip-searching of women and children. The stories are appalling.

Bay Area talks on nonviolent resistance in Palestine

Apartheid Israel roundup

Last summer, I put up a couple posts on what I called "Jim Crow Israel."  But after reading more about apartheid, how it functions in Israel and the occupied territories, and about the experiences of those in the American south who labeled the situation there as apartheid, I've decided "Apartheid Israel" is a more fitting description for the events described below which provide a few examples (from just this week!) of the widespread and institutionalized racism that exists in that country.

First, a Palestinian-Israeli couple is filing suit after being denied residency in a predominantly Jewish town.  (Supposedly they failed a "suitability test.") 

An Israeli Arab [sic] couple petitioned the High Court of Justice this week, asking it to issue a temporary injunction that would allow them to live in the predominately Jewish town of Rakefet.

The couple, residents of Sakhnin, said they were denied residency in the town because they are Arab, but say that local authorities in Rakefet and officials at the Israel Lands Authority found an alternative way to keep them from moving into the town- by stating that according to a "suitability test," the couple are "not fit to live in the town."

On Tuesday, four Palestinian citizens of Israel were denied entry into a shopping mall because they were not Jewish.

Four law students at the Netanya College were refused entry at the city's Sharon Mall on Tuesday because the security guards identified them as being non-Jewish.

The students were asked to leave after one of them could not produce an identity card, even though his colleagues did present theirs. As they were ordered to leave, a guard sarcastically told them: "Now you have something to do your clerkship about."

Israeli airline El Al refused to fly the body of a Palestinian citizen of Israel back to Israel for burial.

Balad Chairman Azmi Bishara on Tuesday asked El AL General Manager Haim Romano to clarify why his company allegedly refused to fly the corpse of an Israeli Muslim woman on one of its flights.

The woman's family asked Bisahra to intervene after their request to transport her body from the U.S., where she died last weekend, was allegedly turned down by company representatives.

Adalah, a fantastic organization, filed a report with the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which will meet next week to review Israel's compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.  It's pretty damning, if you've got the time to read it.

Finally, for your viewing (dis)pleasure, some Jewish colonists in action in the West Bank. (Note: Both contain graphic language.)

This video was released by B'Tselem and shows colonist Yifat Alkoby "assaulting and swearing at women and girls from the Abu-'Ayesha family, in Tel Rumeida, Hebron."  Note the Israeli occupation soldier standing by and doing nothing.

This one was filmed by a British film crew, also in Tel Rumeida, Hebron.

And yet it is the Palestinians - facing a racist regime inside Israel and a racist military occupation in the territories - that the West is boycotting and making demands of?

Amazon.com bashing Jimmy

UPDATE: Seems the petition was somewhat successful.  Now, Amazon.com has posted an interview with Carter above the rest of the reviews.  Doesn't exactly meet the demands of the petition, but it is an improvement, however slight.

Haven't talked about Carter's book, but now seems like a good time.  Have you signed this petition?  14,000+ have so far. True, it is a seemingly minor issue for an imperfect, yet very significant book.  But with the pro-Israel side throwing everything and the kitchen sink at Carter (and in doing so proving Carter's point), this effort is one way to fight back.  Here's part of the press release on this effort:

Contact: Henry Norr
(510) 841-5035
henry@norr.com

Berkeley, CA – More than 10,000 customers of Amazon.com have signed an online petition threatening to close their accounts and take their business elsewhere if the Internet shopping site continues to present a new book by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter in an unusually negative light.

The petition, accuses Amazon of treating Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid unfairly by posting a lengthy and unabashedly hostile review on the page where it lists the book, in a section normally reserved for short, even-handed descriptions of the title in question.

In the book Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to bring about a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, points to Israel's 40-year-long occupation of the Palestinian territories as the key obstacle to peace in the region. He compares Israel's treatment of the Palestinian population to the brutal apartheid system that once kept South African blacks subjugated.

The review that provoked the petition, written by New Yorker staff writer and former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg, labels the book "cynical," disparages Carter's understanding of the conflict as "anti-historical," and accuses him of being "easy on Arab aggression and Palestinian terror." The review originally appeared in the Washington Post.

According to Henry Norr, a former journalist and initiator of the petition, its purpose is not to challenge Amazon's right to post a negative review, but to demand the same kind of nondiscriminatory treatment most books get on the site. The Goldberg review appears on the Amazon page under the heading "Editorial Reviews," a section that on most Amazon book pages contains only one- or two-paragraph synopses from book-listing services such as Publishers Weekly or the American Library Association's Booklist, or descriptions by the book's publisher or by Amazon itself.

Currently, the "Editorial Reviews" section on Amazon's U.S. site includes a one-paragraph, 198-word blurb from Publishers Weekly followed by the full, 20-paragraph, 1,636-word text of Goldberg's totally negative review.

The petition, which is addressed to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, suggests several possible remedies: removing the Goldberg review, moving it to a secondary page Amazon already uses for additional material on the book, or "restor[ing] a semblance of balance by giving comparable space and prominence to a more positive evaluation of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

If Bezos doesn't choose one of these options by January 22, petition signers pledge to stop shopping at Amazon, to completely close their accounts, and to urge friends, family, and associates to do likewise.

Other international Amazon sites also present the book even-handedly, according to reports by signers of the petition. So does the U.S. site of Amazon's chief competitor, barnesandnoble.com .

The petition also complains that Amazon does not include information customers need in order to evaluate Goldberg's attack on the book – such as the fact that he volunteered to serve in the Israeli military and served as a military policeman guarding Palestinian detainees in a prison camp notorious for its harsh conditions.

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

Other assessments of Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid:

Ali Abunimah, "A Palestinian view of Jimmy Carter's book," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 26, 2006

George Bisharat, "Truth at last, while breaking a U.S. taboo of criticizing Israel," Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan. 2, 2007

Chris Hedges, "Get Carter," The Nation, Jan. 8, 2007

Saree Makdisi, "Carter's apartheid charge rings true," San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 20, 2006

Israel wipes village off map

This morning in the Naqab (Negev) in southern Israel, the entire village of Tawil was bulldozed by the government.  The rationale given was that the village was "unrecognized" and therefore is not permitted to exist.  The real reason was that the village was comprised of Palestinian Arab Bedouin, and therefore Israel does not want it to exist.  The homes and livelihoods destroyed so simply and callously were certainly very real and recognized by their now homeless owners.

Israel claims to not "recognize" dozens of Bedouin villages in the Naqab and elsewhere (even though many existed before Israel itself), thereby absolving it of the responsibility to provide the villages with public services such as water, and permitting Israel to destroy said villages at its leisure.  Maan News reports plans to demolish 42,000 homes built in these "unrecognized" areas.

Such activity by Israel is reminiscent of the Nakba, when in 1947-1949, Zionist then Israeli forces systematically destroyed and/or depopulated more than 450 Palestinian villages, creating at least 750,000 refugees.

And like the Nakba, Israel has plans to "develop" the Naqab once it is cleansed of the Palestinians - a plan endorsed by George Bush in his 2004 letter to Ariel Sharon.  "Negev 2015" includes plans to build new housing communities and farms for Jews only, at a cost of $4 billion.  It goes without saying that there is nothing in these plans that will benefit the Bedouin inhabitants of the area, if there are any left.

For more info on "unrecognized" villages and plight of Palestinians in Israel, visit the Association of Forty and Adalah.