I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
When the dark forces of Hindutva fascism in Kashmir and Zionist colonialism in Palestine are mercilessly oppressing and destroying the captive populations of the two countries, it seems the dreams of freedom and independence have also become victims of the long knives of the oppressors.
A famous Afro-American writer and poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) puts the trauma of the oppressed in the following poem.
Israel is the new Golden Calf of Western political establishments. It is eulogised, worshipped and commonly seen as sacrosanct. The 'Holocaust' industry is also its big stick with which Israel has subdued the West and many other world regions. No one who holds or aspires to hold any high political or official position in the West can dare to say a word about the way the Zionists have manipulated the event of the Holocaust to justify the colonisation of Palestine and silence any criticism of their brutal occupation, rampant killings and illegal expansion in the occupied territories.
Reprinted from Bracing Views with the author’s permission.
“Integrity First” is the fundamental core value of the U.S. Air
Force. Two other core values speak to “service before self” and
“excellence in all we do.” But integrity remains the wellspring, and
it’s the U.S. military’s stunning lack of integrity that has cost the
American people and indeed the world so dearly over the last
half-century.
Tonkin Gulf. My Lai. The Pentagon Papers. WMD in Iraq. Abu Ghraib.
The Afghan War Papers. So many instances of “official” lies and
distortions. So many lost wars where no senior officers were ever held
accountable. Put up, shut up, fuck up, cover up, move up, seems to be
the operating manual for success.
Last September, I wrote an article for TomDispatch:
“Something is rotten in the U.S. military.” I suggested that integrity
was now optional in that military, that lies and dishonor plagued
America’s war machine. Evidently, those lies, that dishonor, is working
just fine for the Pentagon as its budget continues to soar.
These thoughts occurred to me yet again as I read Seymour Hersh’s retrospective account
of Major General Antonio (Tony) Taguba’s withering investigation of
torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Taguba, a man of integrity,
conducted an official – and honest – investigation of torture and
mistreatment at Abu Ghraib; his reward for his honesty, his service, his
excellence was not a commendation and promotion but threats, ostracism,
and the death of his career as an Army officer.
Sy Hersh’s article captures the rot at the core of the Pentagon and the U.S. government. Here Hersh speaks recently to Taguba:
[Taguba] “I was not a whistleblower. I
knew I was in trouble when I was given the assignment [to investigate
abuse at Abu Ghraib], but when you see those photos what can you do? I
was a dead man walking.
“The kids were trained as traffic cops
and then were told to transport [Iraqi] detainees. That’s how they got
to Abu Ghraib. They weren’t trained for that but they had vehicles and
rifles, just undisciplined kids with incompetent leadership and they
were on the list to go home. They had all their equipment packed in
Kuwait and ready to be shipped. And then they were told to stay behind.”
I [Hersh] asked: Would he do it again?
“Sure,” Tony [Taguba] said, “I was hamstrung by the thirty days I had to
investigate. I do not think I fulfilled my mission. [Secretary of
Defense Donald] Rumsfeld was blaming the soldiers, but underneath they
had no operational plan” for dealing with the prisoners.
“In hindsight, there was nothing I did to compromise my integrity. But integrity in the military and elsewhere is a bumper sticker. There is no reward for telling the truth.” [Emphasis added]
“There is no reward for telling the truth” in the U.S. military. That
statement by retired General Taguba should move all Americans to take
action against a military that has so clearly and tragically lost its
way.
One suggestion: Cut the Pentagon budget in half
and insist that it must pass a financial audit else forfeit all
taxpayer funding. That might wake up a few generals and admirals.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He
taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools. He
writes at Bracing Views.
Open
letter calls on governments to urge India to end persecution and
targeting of Kashmiri human rights defenders, journalists, dissenters,
and political prisoners
Indian paramilitary troopers stand guard on eve of India's Independence Day in Srinagar, on 14 August 2023 (AFP)
Published date: 24 August 2023 21:13 BST
| Last update:1 day 12 hours ago
Amnesty
International and five other rights organisations signed an open letter
calling for an end to human rights violations in Kashmir and the release
of jailed human rights defenders and political prisoners ahead of the
G20 summit scheduled next month in New Delhi, India.
The letter, published
on 23 August and addressed to representatives of G20 member countries,
guest countries and invited international organisations, brought forth
concerns regarding human rights violations occurring in
Indian-administered Kashmir (IAK).
“As your leaders prepare to attend the G20 Summit in September 2023,
we urge your government to raise these issues directly and forthrightly
with the government of India in accordance with your obligations under
international law and call on India to adhere to its international legal
obligations,” the letter states.
The letter says that since 2019 - when India revoked Article 370A and
Article 35A, stripping Jammu and Kashmir's semi-autonomous status - the
government has “continued its repressive policies including restricting
freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association and failed to
investigate and prosecute alleged violations committed by its military,
paramilitary, police and other forces”.
Since 1947, both India and Pakistan have asserted their rights to the
contested territory, with each nation administering portions of it.
The letter was signed by Amnesty International; the Asian Federation
Against Involuntary Disappearances; the Asian Forum for Human Rights and
Development; CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation; Front
Line Defenders; and the Kashmir Law & Justice Project.
In November 2021, prominent human rights defender Khurram Parvez was
arbitrarily detained by India’s National Investigation Agency. Parvez,
the director of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS),
was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for "funding
terrorism under the garb of protection of human rights”.
In March 2023, the National Investigation Agency summoned noted
Kashmiri journalist Irfan Mehra, who had worked with JKCCS, and arrested
him for his association with the non-profit organisation.
“The Bharatiya Janata Party uses extreme law and policy to further
forms of coloniality in Kashmir to establish a Hindu nationalist state,”
Angana Chatterji, a scholar at the University of California, Berkeley,
told Middle East Eye.
“Impunity and authoritarian laws are used to repress civilians,
disallow bail, silence civil society dissent and social movements,
punish expressions of grief, rage and mourning, and harm human rights
work and media reportage,” Chatterji said.
UN rapporteur calls on India to end attacks on human rights activists in Kashmir
In their open letter, the organisations call on governments to urge
the Indian government to immediately and unconditionally release Parvez,
and Mehraj, as well as to drop all charges against them and end “the
ongoing persecution and targeting of Kashmiri human rights defenders,
journalists, dissenters, and political prisoners".
They also called on them to allow civil society to freely operate in
IAK and cease their “longstanding obstruction of international civil
society and inter-governmental organisations".
In March, Mary Lowler, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, lamented about
the shrinking landscape of civil society in the Kashmir valley and
called for the immediate release and the closing of the investigations
against Parvez and Mehraj in a statement.
“The arrest and detention of persons for exercising their human
rights are arbitrary. There must be accountability and remedy where such
abusive actions are taken.”
“Time and time again, the government has been called upon to address
the fundamental issues with the country's anti-terrorism framework and
its misuse to smear and silence human rights defenders,” Lawlor said.
Freedom
demands a price, and the INDIA conglomerate must be willing to pay it.
It’s time for them to recall the iconic slogan of the three musketeers:
“All for one, one for all.”
A
forked destiny broods over the republic, beckoning it this way or that.
No eight or so months in the history of post-Independence India may
ever have been as terminally fraught as those that confront “we the
people”.
Bolstered by its victories in Ayodhya (Ram Mandir) and Kashmir
(Article 370), a forthright right wing now makes bold to float the
agenda dearest to its ideological heart, namely, the rewriting of the
constitution of India – not just to erase from its Preamble the terms
secular’ and ‘socialist’ but to inscribe a new definition of the Indian
state as a Hindu Rashtra.
This is sought to be done in ways by now characteristic and familiar:
get religious pointmen to begin a grassroot propagation. Dhirendra
Shastri, for instance:
A third and perhaps the most infectious outreach is offered by
comprador corporate-electronic media channels where a host of young
anchors and reporters are now mentally primed to energetically project
the virtues of official thinking. Often, all day long.
The agenda is being couched in converging ways: first, that the
allegedly monochromatic cultural reality of this ancient land must find
place as the informing principle of the political state; and then, by
linking that in a most instructive marriage to the ‘giant strides’ being
made by the motherland in the universe of “development” – both ‘facts’
ostensibly requiring the drafting of a new constitution.
The second argument is mere chimeric fodder meant to entice the
gawking nationalist base, high on pride at India’s alleged global
leadership in order to obtain middle class assent on some spurious
economic ground to the transformation of the state into a strong,
sectarian entity. Never mind the pathetic indices on hunger and
malnutrition, record levels of unemployment, unconscionable inequalities
of income, rampant anaemia among lactating women, the embarrassing need
to feed free grains to some 80 crore Indians, a shameful per capita
purchasing power parity ratio next to the countries of the developed
world.
Bear in mind that the Indian constitution has already seen some 106
amendments in 70 years, while the world’s leading economy, the US, has
made no more than 27 since 1787; the Japanese none at all, while the
British do fine without a written constitution. In other words, the
least changes have taken place where development has been the highest.
So much, thus, for the specious propaganda that rapid economic
development requires a new constitution altogether. Not ‘development’
but a congenial religio-cultural architecture requires the scrapping of
the constitution as we now have it. And wouldn’t the corporate owners of
the state love a circumstance in which sundry contentions among an
unthinkingly consuming populace were put to final rest by a terminal
sleight-of-hand such as a rewritten constitution?
The plain and telling fact is that the coming general election of
2024 is likely to be India’s parallel to the German elections of 1933.
Golwalkar’s lauding of the Nazi regime (see We, Our Nationhood Defined, 1938) remains a lodestar to remember as we conceptualise the menacing froth now afloat.
The INDIA conglomerate
Clearly, while the coming together of 26 political parties into a
conglomerate instructively captioned INDIA, is reflective of their
understanding of the mortal nature of the prospect that now confronts
the democratic republic, that understanding must attain to a recognition
(an anagnorisis) that were they to fail for petty reasons, they may not
have a second chance for a long time to come.
If they sink, they will all sink, though some may fancy their clout
in their own strongholds. Let them not complacently believe that a third
mandate to the RSS-led right wing will not after all see any systemic
recasting of the state. That sort of delusion has been experienced
before in other parts of the world, to the catastrophic detriment of the
human race.
In our own case, were such a constitutional transformation to occur,
we may come to relive harrowingly enlarged scenarios of that which now
obtains in Manipur and Haryana. Let it never be forgotten that while
democracy is never the need of the expropriating classes, it is nothing
less than a lifeline for the masses. Freedom demands a price, and the
INDIA conglomerate must be willing to pay it. It’s time for them to
recall the iconic slogan of the three musketeers: “All for one, one for
all.”
Introductory remarks: Ted
Snider, a U.S. foreign policy columnist, discusses the horrors of this
war and the high numbers of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers, which
Washington and its Western allies rarely mention. The Zelensky regime
keeps a heavy lid of secrecy on the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers but
rather emphasizes the heavy losses the Ukrainian army is inflicting upon
the Russian fighters. The war is proving a great disaster for the
Ukrainians. The only sensible way is to let diplomacy work and the
two sides seek an end to the war by negotiations. However, Washington
had its objectives in mind, and it prevented Ukraine from entering into
any negotiations with Moscow or any compromises to that end.
-- Nasir Khan
-
by Ted Snider | The Libertarian Institute, Aug 21, 2023
Getting a count of Ukraine’s dead that isn’t the
output of someone’s propaganda machine is difficult to do. But the
number of dead is indisputably a horror. Measuring the maiming of
Ukraine solely in deaths, though, is an injustice to the depth of the
Ukrainian wound.
It is not just that using tens of thousands as the unit in
which to measure the dead may be an understatement meant to maintain
morale and keep Ukrainians fighting with the political West providing
support. Deaths may be the worst way to scar a nation, but they are not
the only way to scar a nation.
The promise that the sacrifice of soldiers in the
counteroffensive would be worth it has been deflated and hope has been
lost. The payment in lives it purchased is little, and a senior western
diplomat told
CNN that “for them to really make progress that would change the
balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely.”
The result is despair. An August 10 report from Kiev in The Washington Post
begins with the words, “This nation is worn out” and continues with the
hopeless observation that “Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are
simply not getting any.”
Reports of Ukrainians lining up to fight in the early days
of the war have been replaced by reports of Ukrainians doing everything
they can to elude the draft. On August 11, Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky dismissed
every director of a regional military recruitment center. Though
reports focused on the crackdown of corruption, the real news was what
the corruption was selling. Those who were willing to volunteer have
gone to the front and fallen; those who are left have seen the price and
no longer want to go. The heads of the recruitment centers were fired
for taking bribes to help them. They were fired for “exploiting their
positions to enrich themselves through draft evasion schemes.” Zelensky described
the “cynicism” and “treason” as the “illicit enrichment” and “unlawful
benefit” for the “illegal transfer of persons liable for military
service across the border.”
But death and despair are not the only costs. So too are loss of limb and loss of mental health. A Washington Postarticle
of August 15 describes “Bodies ripped to pieces. Arms and legs mangled
beyond recognition” from mines and “the mental anguish of amputating
limb after limb after limb.” The Wall Street Journal recently reported
that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians “have lost one or more limbs
since the start of the war” before saying that “the actual figure could
be higher.”
There are also unconfirmed reports of high numbers of suicides in the Ukrainian armed forces. A New York Times piece called “The Hidden Trauma of Ukraine’s Soldiers”
reports on the “crisis of wounded psyches, in addition to broken
bodies, among Ukrainian soldiers.” The report says that the need for
“treatment for psychological trauma…far outstrips Ukraine’s ability to
address it.”
There is no sign of an end to the horror. But what comes next for Ukraine may be worse.
Russia may not stay on the defensive forever. After a
counteroffensive comes the next offensive. Russia has been staying on
the defensive, allowing Ukraine to walk into their prepared positions
and be devoured. As the Ukrainian armed forces become frustrated and
reduced, Russia may be biding its time to turn the counteroffensive into
the next big Russian offensive.
There has apparently been unofficial chatter in Russia
about the inevitability of a future Russian offensive. Former general
Konstantin Pulikovsky is said to have commented that “there will
definitely be an offensive. But it usually begins when we feel that the
enemy is really exhausted.” On August 15, Russian defence minister
Sergei Shoigu told a security conference in Moscow that Russia says was attended by 26 defense ministers and 75 countries that “Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted.”
Writing in Asia Times, Stephen Bryen says
that “The Russians have been holding out instead of starting a big push
to finish the war, trying to wear down the Ukrainians…But war planners
in Moscow know how to count, and it could be they now see opportunities
for a big offensive.”
While emphasizing their defensive stance, Russia has
reportedly been quietly advancing in the north. Though Russia has not
called it an offensive, Ukrainian officials claim
Russia is “amassing vast numbers of troops and equipment along the
northern frontline in Ukraine,” as well as hundreds of tanks, artillery
systems, and rocket launchers.
Military analyst and ret. U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis has repeatedly pointed out that,
even if Ukraine were to launch and win a counteroffensive, the rate of
casualties and deaths would be so high, they would “have spent [their]
last remaining force with which to conduct offensives” or future
operations, leaving them vulnerable to a Russian offensive.
If the goal, as U.S. President Joe Biden always says,
is to put Ukraine in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in
the strongest possible position at the negotiating table,” then that
opportunity has twice passed. It passed in the days before the war when
Ukraine could have kept all its territory and avoided all of the deaths
in exchange for an American promise not to admit Ukraine into NATO when
Moscow presented its proposal on security guarantees. It passed again in
November 2022 when Ukraine recaptured massive amounts of territory, and
military analysts warned of an inflection point at which Ukraine could
likely not capture more territory but could lose more territory and more
lives.
The third opportunity is now. The counteroffensive is
failing and pushing it further may just be setting the battlefield for a
Russian offensive.
One day, Ukrainians, every one of whom will have known
someone who was killed or wounded in the war, may remember in despair
that Russia would likely have called off the war for a promise of
Ukraine’s neutrality, which is less than the U.S. demands of Cuba.
Zelensky was willing to make that promise in negotiations in the first
weeks of the war. Anatol Lieven, Director of the Eurasia Program at the
Quincy Institute, reports
that the large majority of Ukrainians opposed joining NATO in every
poll that asked the question before 2014. In 2008, when NATO opened the
door to Ukraine, 58% of Ukrainians opposed it. As late as May 2022,
three months into the war with Russia, still only 59% of Ukrainians said they would vote to join NATO.
They will also remember in despair that all of the
territories now annexed by Russia, excluding Crimea but including an
autonomous Donbas, could have remained part of Ukraine. Sociologist
Volodymyr Ishchenko, a leading scholar on radical movements in Ukraine,
says in a recent article
that “on the eve of the invasion, the largest opposition
party…advocated Ukrainian neutrality and the full implementation of the
Minsk Accords.” At the height of the political crisis over the
implementation of the Minsk Accords, Ishchenko reports that only 26% of
Ukrainians supported the “No” campaign.
Ukrainians may one day remember that, after they had
negotiated to their satisfaction in Belarus, again in negotiations with
then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and yet again in Istanbul,
they fought on in service of a wider American war that led to all their
deaths, broken bodies, and broken minds.
If the war goes on, all of this will likely only get
worse. If the goal is to negotiate before Ukraine is in an even more
vulnerable position and before it is even more wounded, then the time to
end the fighting and negotiate a diplomatic settlement is now.
To
stand up to Israel has a political cost few, including Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you do stand up, it singles you
out as someone who puts principles before expediency.
The long nightmare of oppression of Palestinians is not a tangential issue. It is a black and white issue of a settler-colonial state imposing a military occupation, horrific violence and apartheid, backed by billions of U.S. dollars, on the indigenous population of Palestine. It is the all powerful against the all powerless.
Israel
uses its modern weaponry against a captive population that has no army,
no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and
control and no heavy artillery, while pretending intermittent acts of
wholesale slaughter are wars.
The
crude rockets fired at Israel by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance
organizations — a war crime because they target civilians — are not
remotely comparable to the 2,000 pound “bunker-buster” Mark-84 bombs with a “kill radius” of over 32 yards and which
“create a supersonic wave of pressure when they explode” that have been
dropped by Israel on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, the thousands of Palestinian killed and wounded and the targeted destruction of basic infrastructure, including electrical grids and water purification plants.
Palestinians in Gaza live in an open air prison that is one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. They are denied passports and travel documents.
Malnutrition
is endemic in the Occupied Territories. “High proportions” of the
Palestinian population are “deficient in vitamins A, D, and E, which
play key roles in vision, bone health, and immune function,”according
to a 2022 World Bank report. The report also notes that over 50 percent
of those aged six to 23 in Gaza and over half of its pregnant women are
anemic and “more than a quarter of pregnant women and more than a
quarter of children aged 6–23 months [in the West Bank are] anemic.”
Eighty-eight percent of Gaza’s children suffer from depression, following 15 years of the Israeli blockade, according to a 2022 report from Save the Children and over
51 percent of children were diagnosed with PTSD following the third
major war on Gaza in 2014. Only 4.3 percent of the water in Gaza is considered fit for human consumption. Palestinians in Gaza are crammed into unsanitary and overcrowded hovels. They often lack basic medical care. Unemployment rates are among the highest in the world at 46.6 percent.
Zionism’s
goal, since before Israel’s inception, has been to displace
Palestinians from their land and reduce those who remain to a struggle
for basic subsistence, as Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappe, notes:
“10
March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together
with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for
the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders
were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic
expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The
orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to
forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and
bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes,
properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and,
finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled
inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of
villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan.
Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew)…
Once
the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission.
When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over
750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and
11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants.”
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, 1948. (UN Photo)
These
political and historical facts, which I reported on as an Arabic
speaker for seven years, four of them as The Middle East Bureau Chief
for The New York Times, are hard to ignore. Even from a distance.
I
watched Israeli soldiers taunt boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of
their armored jeep in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. The boys,
about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle. The
soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. In the Israeli
lexicon this becomes children caught in crossfire.
I
was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron
fragmentation bombs on densely packed neighborhoods. I saw the corpses
of the victims, including children, lined up in neat rows. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory.
I watched Israel demolish homes
and apartment blocks to create buffer zones between the Palestinians
and Israeli troops. I interviewed destitute families camped in the
rubble of their homes. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.
I
stood in the bombed remains of schools as well as medical clinics and
mosques. I heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from
the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked
spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites.
I,
along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have
never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”
Ironically, there is evidence of the Israeli military using Palestinians as human shields, which Israel’s High Court deemed illegal in 2005.
There is a perverted logic to Israel’s use of the Big Lie —Große Lüge. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.
There is a heavy political price to pay for defying Israel, whose overt interference
in the U.S. political process makes the most tepid protests about
Israeli policy a political death wish. The Palestinians are poor,
forgotten and alone. And this is why the defiance of Israel’s treatment
of the Palestinians is the central issue facing any politician who
claims to speak on behalf of the vulnerable and the marginalized.
To
stand up to Israel has a political cost few, including Robert F.
Kennedy Jr., are willing to pay. But if you do stand up, it singles you
out as someone who puts principles before expediency, who is willing to
fight for the wretched of the earth and, if necessary, sacrifice your
political future to retain your integrity. Kennedy fails this crucial
test of political and moral courage.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at an event in Phoenix in 2017. (Gage Skidmore, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Kennedy,
instead, regurgitates every lie, every racist trope, every distortion
of history and every demeaning comment about the backwardness of the
Palestinian people peddled by the most retrograde and far-right elements
of Israeli society. He peddles the myth of what Pappe calls
“Fantasy Israel.” This alone discredits him as a progressive candidate.
It calls into question his judgment and sincerity. It makes him another
Democratic Party hack who dances to the macabre tune the Israeli government plays.
Kennedy
has vowed to make “the moral case for Israel,” which is the equivalent
of making the moral case for apartheid South Africa. He repeats, almost
verbatim, talking points from the Israeli propaganda playbook put together
by the Republican pollster and political strategist, Frank Luntz. The
112-page study, marked “not for distribution or publication,” which was leaked to Newsweek,
was commissioned by The Israel Project. It was written in the aftermath
of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009 — when 1,387
Palestinians and nine Israelis were killed.
The
strategy document is the blueprint for how Israeli politicians and
lobbyists sell Israel. It exposes the wide gap between what Israeli
politicians say and what they know to be the truth. It is tailored to
tell the outside world, especially Americans, what they want to hear.
The report is required reading for anyone attempting to deal with the
Israeli propaganda machine.
The
document, for example, suggests telling the outside world that Israel
“has a right to defensible borders,” but advises Israelis to refuse to
define what the borders should be. It advises Israeli politicians to
justify the refusal by Israel to allow 750,000 Palestinians and their
descendants, who were expelled from their country during the 1948 war,
to return home, although the right of return is guaranteed under international law, by referring to this right as a “demand.”
Frank Luntz at an event in Des Moines, Iowa, November 2015. (Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
It
also recommends arguing that Palestinians are seeking mass migrations
to seize land inside Israel. It suggests mentioning the hundreds of
thousands of Jewish refugees from Iraq, Syria and Egypt, who fled
anti-Semitism and violence in the Arab world after the creation of the
Jewish state. The document recommends saying these refugees also “left
property behind,” in essence justifying the Israeli pogrom by the pogrom
Arab states carried out after 1948. It recommends blaming the poverty
among Palestinians on “Arab nations” that have not provided “a better
life for Palestinians.”
What
is most cynical about the report is the tactic of expressing a faux
sympathy for the Palestinians, who are blamed for their own oppression.
“Show
Empathy for BOTH sides!” the document reads. “The goal of pro-Israel
communications is not simply to make people who already love Israel feel
good about that decision. The goal is to win new hearts and minds for
Israel without losing the support Israel already has.” It says that this
tactic will “disarm” audiences.
I
doubt Kennedy has read or heard of Luntz’s report. But he has been
spoon-fed its talking points and naively spits them back. Israel only
wants peace. Israel does not engage in torture. Israel is not an
apartheid state. Israel gives Israeli Arabs political and civic rights
they do not have in other parts of the Middle East. Palestinians are not
deliberately targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Israel
respects civil liberties and gender and marriage rights. Israel has “the
best judiciary in the world.”
Kennedy
makes other claims, such as his bizarre statement that the Palestinian
Authority pays Palestinians to kill Jews anywhere in the world along
with falsifications of elemental Middle Eastern history, which are so
absurd I will ignore them. But I list below examples from the volumes of
evidence that implode the Luntz-inspired talking points Kennedy repeats
on behalf of the Israel lobby, not that any evidence can probably
puncture his self-serving attachment to “Fantasy Israel.”
Apartheid
A Palestinian boy and Israeli soldier in front of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, August 2004. (Justin McIntosh, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)
The 2017 U.N. report: “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid” concludes
that Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the
Palestinian people as a whole.” Since 1967, Palestinians as a people
have lived in what the report refers to as four “domains,” in which the
fragments of the Palestinian population are ostensibly treated
differently but share in common the racial oppression that results from
the apartheid regime.
Those domains are:
1. Civil law, with special restrictions, governing Palestinians who live as citizens of Israel;
2. Permanent residency law governing Palestinians living in the city of Jerusalem;
3.
Military law governing Palestinians, including those in refugee camps,
living since 1967 under conditions of belligerent occupation in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip;
4. Policy to preclude the return of Palestinians, whether refugees or exiles, living outside territory under Israel’s control.
On July 19, 2018, the Israeli Knesset voted “to approve the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law,
constitutionally enshrining Jewish supremacy and the identity of the
State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” the
Haifa-based civil liberties group Adalah explained. It is the supreme law in Israel “capable of overriding any ordinary legislation.”
In 2021 Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published its report “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”
The report reads:
“In
the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the
Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed
to cement the supremacy of one group — Jews — over another —
Palestinians. A key method in pursuing this goal is engineering space
differently for each group.
Jewish
citizens live as though the entire area were a single space (excluding
the Gaza Strip). The Green Line means next to nothing for them: whether
they live west of it, within Israel’s sovereign territory, or east of
it, in settlements not formally annexed to Israel, is irrelevant to
their rights or status.
Where
Palestinians live, on the other hand, is crucial. The Israeli regime
has divided the area into several units that it defines and governs
differently, according Palestinians different rights in each. This
division is relevant to Palestinians only…Israel accords Palestinians a
different package of rights in every one of these units — all of which
are inferior compared to the rights afforded to Jewish citizens. “
“Since
1948,” the reports continues, “Israel has taken over 90% of land within
its sovereign territory and built hundreds of Jewish communities, yet
not one for Palestinians (with the exception of several communities
built to concentrate the Bedouin population, after dispossessing them of most of their property rights),” the report reads.
Israeli military forces arriving to demolish the Palestinian community of Khirbet Ein Karzaliyah on Jan. 8, 2014. (B’Tselem, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
“Since 1967, Israel has also enacted this policy in the Occupied Territories, dispossessing Palestinians of more than 2,000 km2 on various pretexts. In violation of international law, it has built over 280 settlements in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) for more than 600,000 Jewish citizens. It has devised a separate planning system
for Palestinians, designated primarily to prevent construction and
development, and has not established a single new Palestinian
community.”
[“As
long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one
political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or
non-democratic. If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote,
that will be an apartheid state,” said ex-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2010.
Three
years earlier, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “If the
day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South
African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the
Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the
State of Israel is finished.”
A
former Israeli Ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel, put it even more
bluntly. “In the situation that exists today, until a Palestinian state
is created, we are actually one state. This joint state, in the hope
that the status quo is temporary, is an apartheid state.”]
Targeting Civilians
Tanzanians in Dar es Salaam protesting the 2008-2009 Gaza bombardment by Israel. (Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons, GFDL)
Contrary to Kennedy’s claims that “the policy of the Israeli military is to always only attack military targets,” the deliberatetargeting
of civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military, and
other branches of the Israeli security apparatus, has been extensively
documented by Israeli and international organizations.
The
2010 Goldstone report, which is over 500 pages, investigated Israel’s
22-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from Dec. 27,
2008, to Jan. 18, 2009. The United Nations Human Rights Council and the European Parliament endorsed the report.
The
Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according
to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than 6,000 homes were
destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in
one of the poorest areas on Earth. Three Israeli civilians were killed
by rockets fired into Israel during the assault.
“•
Numerous instances of Israeli lethal attacks on civilians and civilian
objects were intentional, including with the aim of spreading terror,
that Israeli forces used Palestinian civilians as human shields and that
such tactics had no justifiable military objective.
•
Israeli forces engaged in the deliberate killing, torture and other
inhuman treatment of civilians and deliberately caused extensive
destruction of property, outside any military necessity, carried out
wantonly and unlawfully.
•
Israel violated its duty to respect the right of Gaza’s population to
an adequate standard of living, including access to adequate food, water
and housing. “
On June 14 of this year, B’Tselem reported
that “Top Israeli officials” are “criminally liable for knowingly”
ordering airstrikes which were “expected to harm civilians, including
children, in the Gaza Strip.”
Contrary
to the myth propagated by Kennedy, reports and investigations, both by
the U.N. as well as by rights groups, domestic and international,
routinely cover suspected or known violations by Palestinian militants
when they investigate alleged war crimes. As B’Tselem noted in the same 2019 report, in total, four Israelis were killed and 123 wounded.
Last
month, the U.N.’s expert on the situation of human rights in the
Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Italian international
lawyer and academic Francesca Albanese, presented her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. It makes for very grim reading.
“Deprivation
of liberty has been a central element of Israel’s occupation since its
inception. Between 1967-2006 Israel has incarcerated over 800,000
Palestinians in the occupied territory. Although spiking during
Palestinian uprisings, incarceration has become a quotidian reality.
Over 100,000 Palestinians were detained during the First Intifada
(1987-1993), 70,000 during the Second Intifada (2000-2006), and over
6,000 during the ‘Unity Intifada’ (2021). Approximately 7,000
Palestinians, including 882 children, were arrested in 2022. Currently,
almost 5,000 Palestinians, including 155 children, are detained by
Israel, 1,014 of them without charge or trial.”
Torture
Around 1,200 complaints “alleging violence in Shin Bet [The Israeli Security Agency] interrogations” were filed between 2001 and 2019, according to the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel.
“Zero indictments have been brought,” the committee reports. “This is yet another illustration of the complete systemic impunity enjoyed by the Shin Bet’s interrogators.”
Coercive
methods include sexual harassment and humiliation, beatings, stress
positions imposed for hours and interrogations that lasted as long as 19
hours as well as threats of violence against family members.
“They
said they would kill my wife and children. They said they would cancel
my mother’s and sister’s permits for medical treatments,” one survivor said
in 2016. “I couldn’t sleep because even when I was in my cell, they
would wake me up every 15 minutes… I couldn’t tell the difference
between day and night… I still scream in my sleep,” another said in
2017.
Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer expressed
“his utmost concern” after a December 2017 ruling by Israel’s Supreme
Court exempting security agents from criminal investigation despite
their undisputed use of coercive “pressure techniques” against a
Palestinian detainee, Assad Abu Gosh. He called the ruling a “license to
torture.”
Abu
Gosh “was reportedly subjected to ill-treatment including beatings,
being slammed against walls, having his body and fingers bent and tied
into painful stress positions and sleep deprivation, as well as threats,
verbal abuse, and humiliation. Medical examinations confirm that Mr.
Abu Gosh suffers from various neurologic injuries resulting from the
torture he suffered.”
Civil Liberties
“Gas the Arabs!” graffiti in Hebron, 2008. (Magne Hagesæter, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)
In the November 2022 elections in Israel, a far-right theocratic, nationalist and openly racist coalition took power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, from the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit, “Jewish Power,” party, is the Minister of National Security. Otzma Yehudit is populated with former members of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Kach party, which was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for espousing
a “Nazi-like ideology” that included advocating the ethnic cleansing of
all Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as all Palestinians living
under Israeli military occupation.
His appointment, along with that of other far-right ideologues, including
Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, effectively jettisons the
old tropes liberal Zionists used to defend Israel — that it is the only
democracy in the Middle East, that it seeks a peaceful settlement with
the Palestinians in a two-state solution, that extremism and racism have
no place in Israeli society and that Israel must impose draconian forms
of control on the Palestinians to prevent terrorism.
The new coalition government is reportedly preparing
legislation that would be used to disqualify almost all
Palestinian/Arab Knesset members from serving in the Israeli parliament,
as well as ban their parties from standing in elections. The recent
judicial “reforms” gut the independence and oversight of the Israeli courts. The government has also proposed
shutting down Kan, the public broadcasting network, although that has
been amended to fixing its “flaws”. Smotrich, who opposes LGBTQ rights
and refers to himself as a “fascist homophobe,” said on Tuesday he wouldfreeze all funds to Israel’s Palestinian communities and East Jerusalem.
Israel has promulgated a series of laws to curtail
public freedoms, brand all forms of Palestinian resistance as
terrorism, and label supporters of Palestinian rights, even if they are
Jewish, as anti-Semites. The amendment of one of Israel’s principle
apartheid laws, the 2010 “Village Committees Law,”
grants neighborhoods with up to 700 households the right to reject
people from moving in to “preserve the fabric” of the community. Israel
has over 65 laws that are used to discriminatedirectly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the Occupied Territories.
Israel’s Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law prevents Palestinian citizens of Israel from marrying Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Interreligious marriage in Israel is also prohibited.
As explained by Jacob N. Simon, who served as the President of the Jewish Legal Society at the Michigan State University College of Law:
“The
combination of the blood line related requirements to be considered
Jewish by the Orthodox Rabbinical Court and the restriction of marriage
requiring religious ceremonies shows an intent to maintain race purity.
At its core, this is no different than the desire for pure blooded
Aryans in Nazi Germany or pure blooded whites in the Jim Crow Southern
United States.”
Those
who support these discriminatory laws and embrace Israeli apartheid are
blinded by willful ignorance, racism or cynicism. Their goal is to
dehumanize Palestinians, champion an intolerant Jewish chauvinism and
entice the naïve and the gullible into justifying the unjustifiable.
Kennedy, bereft of a moral compass and a belief system rooted in
verifiable fact, has not only failed the Palestinians, he has failed us.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
As Ukraine faces "staggering" losses and US public mood shifts, the Biden administration seeks billions more to prolong the war.
Aaron Mate, 14. aug. 2023
The Biden administration is asking Congress for an additional $24 billion for the Ukraine proxy war, more than half of it in military aid. The request comes one week after a CNN poll showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans oppose additional funding to Kiev.
For a White House committed to ensuring a Russian “quagmire”
in Ukraine, public opinion is of secondary importance. Two months into a
widely hyped yet now faltering Ukrainian counteroffensive, a fresh
influx of NATO weaponry appears necessary to prolong the war. In one of
several gloomy assessments to appear in US establishment media, a senior
western diplomat tells CNN
that the prospect that Ukrainian forces can “make progress that would
change the balance of this conflict” is “extremely, highly unlikely.”
Ukraine’s “primary challenge” is breaking through Russia’s heavily
fortified defensive lines, where “Ukrainian forces have incurred
staggering losses.” According to Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley, US
military assessments of the war are “sobering,” with Ukraine now facing
“the most difficult time of the war.”
This picture, CNN’s
Jim Sciutto observes, represents “a marked change from the optimism at
the start of the counteroffensive,” with Western officials now
acknowledging that “those expectations were ‘unrealistic.’” The
battlefield reality is so dire that it is even “now contributing to
pressure on Ukraine from some in the West to begin peace negotiations,
including considering the possibility of territorial concessions.”
But
as Biden’s new spending request suggests, there is no sign that the US
is among those Western states applying pressure for peace. After all,
the stated US aim, as top officials have made clear, is not to defend
Ukraine and its long-term future but to instead “weaken” Russia (Lloyd
Austin) and ensure “a strategic failure for Putin,” so that Russian can
“pay a longer-term price in terms of the elements of its national
power.” (Jake Sullivan)
Whereas CNN’s Western sources now
allow themselves to admit that their publicly voiced “optimism at the
start of the counteroffensive,” was “unrealistic”, it was in fact,
dishonest. As Pentagon leaks and subsequent disclosures
have confirmed, US officials were well aware that Ukraine was not
prepared to take on Russia’s heavily fortified defenses, but kept that
assessment under wraps. Accordingly, while Ukraine’s battlefield losses
are indeed “staggering”, what is perhaps most “sobering” is the fact
that the Biden administration both anticipated and encouraged them.
But
just like souring US public opinion, Ukrainian casualties are also a
secondary concern, as the Biden administration’s more candid
neoconservative proxy war partners continue to make clear.
To
push through the new spending package , the White House is “counting on
help from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority
leader,” the New York Times reports. At a public event, McConnell detailed his rationale:
The US, he explained, hasn’t “lost a single American in this war,” –
not accurate if one counts mercenaries and private citizens, but correct
in its implicit recognition that Ukraine has lost tens of thousands of
lives on its American sponsors’ behalf. According to McConnell, there
are additional benefits of the war that do not extend to ordinary
Ukrainians: “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is
actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So
it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for
what may lie ahead.”
Therefore, according to prevailing
Biden-McConnell policy, the US must continue to fund a war that will
sacrifice many more Ukrainian lives, all so that domestic war profiteers
can reap taxpayer largesse for “replenishing weapons”, and so that the
US – not having its soldiers die in Ukraine – can use the opportunity
for “improving our own military” for a war that it might actually fight.
Although US officials have reportedly “expressed frustration”
at Ukraine’s efforts to minimize military casualties, the Zelensky
government does appear to be a willing partner in McConnell’s sacrifice
ritual. Ukrainian defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov is said to have told
US officials that flooding Ukraine with weapons allows NATO allies to
“actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if
they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you
can’t invent a better testing ground.”
For the
benefit of weakening Russia, enriching US military contractors and
serving as a NATO “testing ground,” Ukrainian lives are not the only
staggering sacrifice. According to the Wall Street Journal,
“20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost one or more limbs since the
start of the war,” a scale unseen for a Western military since the
First World War, and a potential undercount “because it takes time to
register patients after they undergo” surgery.
According
to veteran State Department bureaucrat Aaron David Miller, the Biden
administration has no other choice but to continue sacrificing
Ukrainians. The US, he explained,
“is in an investment trap in Ukraine with no clear way out. Chances of a
military breakthrough or a diplomatic solution are slim to none; and
slim may have already left town. We're in deep and lack the ability to
do much more than react to events.” The key term here is “investment
trap”: having invested in a proxy war aimed at bleeding Russia, the US
is therefore obliged to continue it.
But if the US
were driven by other concerns – such as Ukrainian well-being – it could
consider supporting the diplomatic opportunities that it has blocked to
date. Prior to Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration encouraged
the Ukrainian government to crack down on political opponents; further
integrate its military into NATO; avoid implementing the Minsk accords
for ending its post-2014 civil war; and assault the Russian-allied
Donbas. When Russia submitted detailed proposals in December 2021 to
address its concerns, the White House effectively balked. And after
Russia’s invasion, the US blocked a tentative peace deal that would have
seen Russia withdrew to its pre-February 2022 lines. More recently, the
US has pushed Ukraine into a counteroffensive that it knew had no
chance, and rejected a Ukrainian NATO bid that it had long encouraged for the apparent purpose of baiting Moscow.
In
short, the Biden administration has provoked this war and is now
seeking a new influx of taxpayer money to prolong it. Even the latter
goal is now openly admitted. At last month’s NATO summit in Lithuania,
the New York Times reported,
“several American and European officials acknowledged” that their
“commitments” to Ukraine “make it all the more difficult to begin any
real cease-fire or armistice negotiations.” Additionally, US-led
“promises of Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO — after the war is
over —create a strong incentive for Moscow to hang onto any Ukrainian
territory it can and to keep the conflict alive.”
So long
as keeping the conflict alive comes predominantly at the cost of
Ukrainian lives, then Washington’s bipartisan proxy warriors clearly
have no qualms about forcing a war-weary public to foot the bill.
