[fse-esf] [Fwd: [JPLO-OLPJ] EF: PETITION TO SUSPEND THE EU-ISRAEL
TRADE AGREEMENT!
CETIM
cetim at bluewin.ch
Mon May 26 09:16:53 CEST 2008
Forwarded by the JPLO List
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**_PLEASE SIGN THE PEACE CYCLE PETITION TO SUSPEND THE EU-ISRAEL TRADE
AGREEMENT!_***_
_*
The Peace Cycle petition to put pressure on the European Parliament to
suspend trade with Israel is now online and awaiting your signature at
the following address:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Suspend-EU-Israel-Trade-Agreement
There are hundreds of petitions around at the moment, but _this petition
is unique_ because the Peace Cycle will personally deliver it to Members
of the European Parliament at a specially arranged campaign event in
Brussels on Tuesday 9th September 2008. It is therefore essential that
you sign, and get others to sign, so that when we present it to MEPs
they //have// to take notice.
The EU-Israel Association Agreement forms the basis on which Israel and
EU countries trade with each other.
The Agreement gives Israel preferential trading terms, and its stated
objective is "to gradually integrate Israel into European policies and
programmes". There is also a financial assistance element which makes
Israel eligible for €14 million in European Community financial
cooperation over the next seven years.
In view of Israel's appalling human rights record towards the
Palestinian people and it's own Arab citizens, and it's continuous
breach of International Law and UN Resulotions, it is an outrage that
the European Union should allow this Agreement to continue. The
Agreement itself states that it must be "**based on respect for human
rights and democratic principles which guides internal and international
policy".***
*
Israel is clearly in breach of these terms.
We therefore believe the Agreement must be suspended until Israel
respects human rights and international law.
Everyone is welcome to join the Peace Cycle in Palestine this August,
and in Brussels this September - see our website for further details on
how you can support this campaign: www.thepeacecycle.com
<http://www.thepeacecycle.com/>
But whether you decide to join us or not, **PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION NOW!***
*
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/Suspend-EU-Israel-Trade-Agreement
**_Thank you for your support, now please forward this to all your
contacts and ask them to forward it to theirs - let's get this petition
noticed by the EU!_**
The Peace Cycle
www.thepeacecycle.com <http://www.thepeacecycle.com/>
*Rashid Khalidi: Liberation Deferred *
*22/05/2008*
By Rashid Khalidi*
The Nation
http://www.thenation.com/
MAY 21, 2008
The "Palestine Question" has been with us for sixty years. During this
time it has become a running sore, its solution appearing ever more
distant. Whether the events sixty years ago that created this question
solved the previously perennial "Jewish Question" is once again open to
debate. This is the case after many years when the apparent triumph of
Zionism stilled doubts and drowned out the protests of those who argued
that what purported to be the solution to one problem had created an
entirely different one.
It is considered by some to be a slur on Israel and Zionism, and indeed
even tantamount to anti-Semitism, to suggest that these events sixty
years ago should be the subject of anything but unmitigated joy.
Commemoration, or even analysis, of what Palestinians call their
national catastrophe, al-Nakba -- the expulsion, flight and loss of
their homes by a majority of their people sixty years ago -- is thus
considered not in terms of this seminal event's meaning to at least 8
million Palestinians today (some estimates are over 10 million) but only
because it is directly related to the founding of Israel. Palestinians
presumably do not have the right to recall, much less mourn, their
national disaster if this would rain on the parade of celebrating
Zionists everywhere. The fact that the 1948 war that created Israel also
created the largest refugee problem in the Middle East (until the US
occupation of Iraq turned 4 million people into refugees) must therefore
be swept under the rug. Also disregarded is the obvious fact that it
would have been impossible to create a Jewish state in a land nearly
two-thirds of whose population was Arab without some form of ethnic
cleansing.
It is ironic and tragic that the resolution, if indeed it was a
resolution, of a Jewish question should have created a Palestine
question. It is even more ironic that the former should have been
resolved not where it arose in its most acute form, in the West, or at
the West's expense, but rather in Palestine, and to the detriment of
Palestine's people. This was in large part the result of the efforts of
a West stricken by a (fully justified) sense of guilt for centuries of
suffering inflicted on European Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, a
West that compounded its sins by helping to inflict further suffering,
this time on Palestinians. It is also tragic that beyond the harm that
was done to the Palestinians by the growth of Zionism and the
establishment of Israel, these same developments should have led to the
uprooting of the world's oldest and most secure Jewish communities,
which had found in the Arab lands a tolerance that, albeit imperfect,
was nonexistent in the often genocidal, Jew-hating Christian West.
A few things seem clear sixty years after 1948. One is that if the
Jewish question has lost its saliency, perhaps more as a consequence of
the enormity of the atrocities of the Nazis than for any other reason,
the creation of Israel has raised different questions and problems for
its supporters and others. To the extent that Zionism has succeeded in
winning acceptance of its assertion that all Jews are part of a national
body whose nation-state is Israel, it has linked the status and
circumstances of Jews everywhere not only to the fate of that state but
to every facet of that state's policies and actions. Insofar as some of
those policies and actions may be unacceptable, their very existence
must be denied or elided, and reality bent to suit the tender
sensibilities of supporters of Israel: for example, the rank
discrimination against the 1.4 million Arab citizens of Israel who are
not part of the Jewish ethnicity in whose name and for whose interests
the state was created and exists; or the collective punishment inflicted
on the 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip imprisoned for months on
end; or the systematic torture and humiliation inflicted on the hundreds
of thousands of Palestinians who have passed through the Israeli prison
system. We see the results of this bending of reality in the travesty
that passes for news coverage of Israel and Palestine in the American media.
Where reality cannot be bent and such violations of basic human rights
and dignity cannot be denied or elided, they are justified as necessary
for the "security" of the Jewish state. This argument carries weight
after centuries of profound Jewish insecurities, but it masks the fact
that these oppressive and unjust policies and actions sow resentment
that guarantees Israel's eternal insecurity. Even worse, some of
Israel's supporters in the United States and elsewhere apparently feel
obliged to become general partisans of discrimination and racial
profiling, or collective punishment, or torture, or imprisonment without
due process, or all of the above. Thus, if the Jewish question is
resolved through the establishment by force of a Jewish state in what
was an Arab land, then the maintenance of this state in the face of the
natural, understandable resentment of those harmed in the process
involves its supporters not only in justifying the unjustifiable in
Israel and Palestine but by logical extension also in justifying it in
the United States, in Guant?namo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a
sad result not only for those who have sought a remedy for an age-old
problem but also for those dismayed at the new problems this solution
has created and the ripple effect of this solution far from Israel or
Palestine.
Another thing has become clearer and clearer over these sixty years: a
just resolution of the Palestine question will be far from simple, if it
is indeed possible at all; and if it is ever to be resolved, this will
depend in large measure on the Palestinians themselves, whose current
status is perhaps as desperate as it has been since 1948. Such a
resolution will not be simple, because the now universally applauded
two-state solution faces the juggernaut of Israel's actions in the
occupied territories over more than forty years, actions that have been
expressly designed to make its realization in any meaningful form
impossible. This is true whether those actions involve the unending
process of the meticulously planned and state-supported colonization and
effective annexation of slice after slice of the West Bank, the
isolation of Arab East Jerusalem from its hinterland in the West Bank,
the systematic confinement of more than 2 million Palestinians living
there in smaller and smaller and ever more hermetically sealed cantons,
or the cancerous growth of what might be called an Israeli
prison-industrial complex. This military, security, state and private
apparatus controls most of the important decisions in the lives of the
nearly 4 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who are
about to enter their forty-second year of military occupation, and it
has harbored a Palestinian prison population of about 10,000 since 2000.
In principle this juggernaut is, of course, not unstoppable. There is,
however, no sign that its momentum has slowed in the past seventeen
years (since the Madrid conference) of the cruelly misnamed "peace
process," let alone recognition of its vast power, or a willingness to
confront and reverse it, on the part of most Israeli, American or other
decision-makers. The deceitful, feeble silence of US policy under three
administrations about this juggernaut, and the mass media's attitude
that the emperor's clothes look just splendid, would be nauseating if
one was not already accustomed to this sort of feckless, insouciant
irresponsibility on the part of Washington, and of the American media's
complicity with it.
While the two-state solution is thus deeply flawed -- if it has not
become unrealizable -- there are also flaws in the alternatives, grouped
under the rubric of the one-state solution. How can most Israelis and
Palestinians be persuaded to forgo their aspirations for a state of
their own, and to overcome their dislike of each other such that they
can contemplate living together in one state, whether binational,
federal, cantonal or unitary? How would it be possible to reverse the
ideological triumph of Zionism, which convinced Israelis and others that
the main lesson of the Holocaust is that there must be a Jewish state
(while in the same breath they are told that this state will have to
fight for its existence against an environment rendered permanently
hostile by the conditions of its establishment and maintenance)? How
would it be possible to reverse the process whereby all Palestinian
political formations of any consequence have gradually become wedded to
the idea that the establishment of a Palestinian state in 22 percent of
historic Palestine -- via the reversal of forty-one years of Israeli
occupation practices carried out with the acquiescence of the United
States and that render the creation of such a state virtually impossible
-- would be an acceptable solution to the question of Palestine? This
was true first of Fatah, and then of more radical Palestinian groups
like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and is now true
even of Hamas.
Moving toward a two-state, or a one-state, solution or toward any other
resolution of the Palestine question -- that is, getting the
Palestinians out of the parlous state they are currently in -- is
dependent on a reversal in the dynamic of the Palestinian polity. For
several years, this has been spiraling downward, and it now seems to be
nearly in free-fall. Only when the Palestinians were united, when they
had some sense of what their national strategy was, and when they chose
tactics appropriate to that strategy, did they have any success at all,
minimal though it has been, over the past forty-one years, the past
sixty years -- indeed, over the past ninety years. The Palestinians were
most emphatically not united around a clear strategy and appropriate
tactics during the British Mandate until 1948 or during the two decades
afterward, nor have they been for the past decade or so, both periods
that have been disastrous for them. Even during the era from the heyday
of the PLO in the late 1960s through the first intifada of 1987-91, when
the Palestinians gained broad international legitimacy and sympathy, and
grudging recognition from Israel, this unity and strategic clarity were
flawed in many ways.
In particular, Palestinians lacked clarity about the moral, legal and
political disadvantages in the use of violence against an Israeli polity
able to mobilize in defense of its actions, however unspeakable, the
most powerful tropes of victimhood in modern Western culture. This
confusion among some Palestinians exists although farsighted thinkers
like Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmad understood decades ago that nonviolent
resistance was integral to Palestinian success; although the greatest
successes of the Palestinians were won by the unarmed popular protests
of the first intifada; and despite widespread (but underreported)
peaceful joint Palestinian-Israeli protest movements against Israel's
illegal wall inside the West Bank. Many Palestinians understandably
cling to the legitimate right of any people under occupation to resist
their oppressors. They see only the extensive, continuous violence
directed by Israel against the Palestinians, much of it structural and
integral to the maintenance of the occupation. They cannot understand
that because of Israel's cloak of permanent victimhood, its massive
violence remains either invisible or justified in the West, while every
Israeli casualty seems to be mourned there with infinite sadness and is
taken as another sign of the inherent barbarity of the Palestinians.
Today we are witness to the spectacle of two feeble and clueless
Palestinian political movements, both lacking strategic vision and
bereft of the selfless patriotism that would lead them to bury their
petty differences, fighting like two cocks on a garbage heap, as the
Arabic expression has it. They do so although overwhelming majorities of
Palestinians have consistently demanded that they compromise with each
other in the interest of national unity. The Fatah-dominated Palestinian
Authority has abandoned any idea of popular mobilization, any last shred
of an ethos of service to the people, any sense of the vital importance
of national unity if even minimal Palestinian objectives are to be
achieved, any respect for the democratic process that brought its rivals
in Hamas into power in January 2006, and any sense of the danger of
hitching the Palestinians to the bankrupt policies of a lame-duck
American President who heads the most pro-Israeli Administration in US
history.
The blindness of Hamas is as bad: neither able to fight nor to negotiate
effectively, neither able to compromise with Fatah nor to govern on its
own, and no more able to break free of the clutches of its external
backers than is Fatah vis-à-vis its own foreign backers, Hamas has
lurched from disaster to disaster since its unexpected victory in the
2006 elections. Undermined by the refusal of the United States and
Israel even to attempt to negotiate with a Hamas-dominated government,
last summer it made the fatal mistake of taking over the Gaza Strip in
response to preparations for a US-supported coup by Fatah strongman
Muhammad Dahlan. Hamas reached a low point in April, when a poll showed
that it enjoyed the support of less than 18 percent of Palestinians
(versus 32 percent for Fatah, whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, however, is
even more unpopular than Ismail Haniya of Hamas: 11.7 percent to 13.3
percent). The ideological bankruptcy and the degree of popular rejection
of both of the formations that dominate Palestinian politics are
illustrated by the fact that together they enjoy the support of barely
50 percent of Palestinians.
If there is to be a resolution of the Palestine problem, it depends on
the Palestinians' understanding the massive disadvantages they labor
under in fighting a struggle for liberation against the heirs of the
victims of the Holocaust, in the growing shadow of worldwide
Islamophobia. It depends on their unity and on their adopting the
appropriate strategy and tactics for this difficult task, in mobilizing
the powerful moral force of their cause and the remarkable strengths of
Palestinians under occupation and in the diaspora who have withstood
extreme pressures but have neither submitted nor despaired. These
strengths must be deployed not just for a defensive steadfastness but
for a positive goal of liberation, peace and justice, one that can
change the terms of the conflict and the way it is understood, and win
over enough of their opponents and enough of the outside world to change
the unfavorable balance of forces that today keeps them scattered,
dispersed, confined and imprisoned sixty years after the destruction of
Arab Palestine.
* Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia
University, is the author, most recently, of "The Iron Cage: The Story
of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood."
Hebrew original: http://wwwynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3544547,00.html
<http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3544547,00.html>
*FM Livni, the Nakba is not going to disappear!*
* **The only way to dissipate the power and the pivotal role of the
Nakba in Palestinian discourse is to actually recognise it. The Nakba's
role in the creation of the Palestinian national identity is evocative
of the role given by the Israeli political establishment to the Holocaust.*
* **Dror Etkes*
* *The events marking the state's 60th anniversary celebrations, of
which the President's Conference was meant to be one of the high spots,
served to focus attention on a crucial contradiction. On one hand we
have the democratic ethos and the pretension to be "a light unto the
nations". On the other hand we have the gloomy political reality. And
the gap between the two is increasing.
The clearest expression of this gap can be seen in the inability of the
Israeli political establishment to accept even a modicum of
responsibility for choices made and actions taken by the state, both
past and present. A good example of this attitude was unintentionally*
*provided by one of the conference's invitees, Foreign Minister Tzipi
Livni. During the concluding session, the one devoted to "a vision of
Israel's future", she said that "the Palestinians will be able to
celebrate their independence day on the same day that the word Nakba
[catastrophe] is erased from their lexicon".
One must hope that millions of Palestinians scattered around the world
have been reading their newspapers in recent days. After all, it is not
every day that a senior Israeli political personality lays down the line
on what is required from the Palestinians in order to obtain their
yearned-for independence. Livni's comments lead one to conclude that, as
always with Israeli politicians, everything is predicated on the
Palestinians' behaviour. And if they finally update their lexicon of
national values, and perhaps also start teaching bible and civic studies
according to the Israeli curriculum, all the problems will be solved.
The vision of the two-state solution, with Israel generously evacuating
a couple of settlements, will come to fruition.
The boastful and illusory attempts by Israeli politicians to mould the
Palestinian historical narrative though the erasure of those chapters
that fashion the creation of their nation recall an earlier episode. We
have here a tragi-pathetic rehashing of the previous Israeli canon, one
that was holding sway until a decade and a half ago. That was the notion
there does not exist, and has never been, such a thing as the
Palestinian people. According to this version of history, upon which
people of Livni's generation were raised, there was an amorphous
collection of people, the majority of whom were Bedouin, who arrived in
the 19th century and who went under the collective name of "Arabs" --
and that's all. Those particular Arabs are supposed to feel a deep sense
of gratitude to the Zionist enterprise that has drained the coastal
swamps, built by-pass roads and provided places of employment for them.
There is continuing denial [in Israel] of the Palestinian Arabs' Nakba
and a demand that they obliterate it and give up any affinity to all the
parts of the land which they call Palestine. This is the same land that
the Jewish community here call the Land Of Israel, But the Nakba denial
and the foregoing demand provide the ultimate proof of the moral
immaturity of Israeli society on its 60th birthday. This is an
expression of the State of Israel's obstinate refusal to recognise the
complex circumstances of its own formation. It is an ongoing denial of
the fundamental historical fact that there is more to the history of
this land than one continuous line from God's promise to Abraham and the
formation of the state of Israel. Those intermediate "trivial" chapters
have left their mark upon both the landscape and culture of this land.
This stubborn insistence is an expression of a steadfast determination
to hang on to our victim status. This in turn allows us Israelis to
observe the world from a standpoint of a subject who has no control over
his/her destiny and who therefore is unaccountable for his/her actions.
The denial of the right of the Palestinians to remember and grieve for
their disaster in turn strengthens the dominant destructive forces among
them. They too cling to their status as an offended victim, and refuse
to accept any responsibility for their actions and choices in recent
decades. But beyond that, the continuing denial of the Nakba by Israel
prevents the absolutely necessary dialogue about the way in which one
day it may be possible to deal with the questions that have been hanging
around for 60 years between Arabs and Jews about the connection and
ownership of this land.
The Nakba's role in the creation of the Palestinian national identity
is evocative of the role given by the Israeli political establishment to
the Holocaust in the creation of Israeli identity and consciousness. The
only way to dissipate the power and pivotal role of the Nakba is
actually to recognise it. What is certain is that hobnobbing with
billionaires, celebrities and fashionable philosophers who remind us of
our status as long-suffering but cute, is not going to advance this aim
even slightly.
*[Translated by Sol Salbe from /Ynet/.] *
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/22/israelandthepalestinians
*The Palestine literature festival was an enlightening experience -
but not always for the right reasons*
**Ahdaf Soueif**
* The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>,
* Thursday May 22 2008
By Lion's Gate I sat down and surveyed the Valley of Jehosophat. Well,
actually, we Arabs call it Nutmeg Valley after the trees that used to
grow here in abundance. Opposite me, across the valley, is the Mount of
Olives where the pine trees favoured by Israelis to give a European look
to the landscape are overtaking the indigenous olive. At the top of the
hill to my right the UN has placed its offices - unwisely perhaps, for
to the Biblically minded this is the Hill of Evil Counsel where Jesus'
arrest was planned in the house of Caiaphas. Behind me are the walls of
al-Haram al-Sharif, the great enclosure housing the al-Aqsa mosque and
the Dome of the Rock.
I have just walked away from the gate to the Haram because the Israeli
soldiers would not allow my non-Muslim friends to go in with me.
Signalling to me from behind the soldiers, the Palestinian caretaker
apologised and said he would have welcomed us all in but these were
"their" regulations.
We were in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem for the Palestine festival
of literature which I, Brigid Keenan, Eleanor O'Keeffe, Victoria
Brittain and other friends had put together. It ran from May 7 to 11 and
in every city our venues were filled to the rafters and our authors rode
high on the enthusiasm of the audience. Roddy Doyle in Bethlehem got
thunderous laughter and applause when he said he would be seeking
reparations from the residents for the slaps he had received at his
Irish school for saying baby Jesus was born in Nazareth. His books sold
out in three days. A young man at Birzeit University was overwhelmed to
meet Ian Jack; he had kept up his subscription to Granta since moving
back from the US nine years ago. Schoolkids cried with joy when they met
Khaled Abdalla; they had just seen The Kite Runner.
Every night we bedded down in a different hotel, and every morning we
packed up and got on the bus and off at a checkpoint. At Qalandiya, we
left our heavy luggage on the bus and learned to squeeze through the
metal cages of the turnstiles without leaving a gap; the cages rotate a
given number of times then stop. Once through, we were told we had to
turn round and go through again - carrying our luggage. We saw a weeping
woman, cradling her baby and propping up her husband, who was so ill he
had tubes coming out of him and looked like her grandfather. The
soldiers had turned them back. We could do nothing for her. At Bethlehem
University the students were so taken by Jamal Mahjoub they asked for
his novels to be put on the syllabus. The young women on Andy O'Hagan's
and Pankaj Mishra's workshops asked if we couldn't run longer courses.
Now I'm standing in the Muslim cemetery and below me Christian and
Jewish graves, too, cover large tracts of ground. Everyone wants to be
buried here, in Nutmeg Valley, for it is here that the trumpet shall
sound and the dead shall rise. Silwan, the Palestinian village nestled
in the corner to the right, has for centuries found employment tending
the graves. We walk round the mellow walls of the Old City till we are
overlooking the village. An Israeli friend (call her "B") is showing us
the excavations that burrow through the ground towards al-Aqsa. They are
undertaken, she says, in an "ideological spirit". A guard at al-Aqsa
once showed me the great well that used to store oil for the lamps:
"This is where they plan to come in," he said. B tells us that 60% of
Silwan has been taken over by settlers and the remaining villagers are
fighting to stay on their land. She teaches us to read the landscape, to
see the three small, fiercely antennaed hilltop settlements placed to
cut off the main approaches to East Jerusalem, to trace the giant tunnel
linking the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus to the (illegal)
settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. We cluster around her maps and diagrams.
Our group is dwarfed by tourists getting off giant coaches marked
"Jewish National Fund".
Esther Freud and Hanan al-Shaykh decide to walk to the hotel. They take
a short cut across some waste ground behind the building and are
surrounded by a pack of growling dogs. Israeli soldiers appear and
question the two writers. The soldiers tell them they're in a military
zone and they'd been watching them and could have shot them. By the
entrance to Western Wall Plaza, a massive billboard from the Israeli
ministry of tourism proclaims that Jews pray there to express their
"faith in the rebuilding of the Temple", and in a slick shop nearby they
sell drawings of the Haram cleansed of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of
the Rock. They show plans and raise funds for the Third Temple rising in
their place.
In al-Khalil/Hebron, we walked through the emptied streets of the old
town past the shuttered shops of what had been the beating commercial
heart of Palestine. Groups of robust American settlers jogged by us in
shorts with machine guns. We saw the houses where Palestinian families
who refused to leave were not allowed to use their front doors but had
to climb into their homes through the back windows. And the houses where
they were forbidden to lock their doors because the Israeli soldiers
came in to check on them every night between midnight and 3am.
We were very silent when we left. But in Bethlehem that night the
al-Funoun Troupe danced and flew across the stage in their brilliant
costumes, and the audience stomped and yelled and whistled and, next
morning, the students jostled and laughed and argued. We're here, the
Palestinians were saying, we read and question and blog and shop and
play and dance. We live.
**· **This week Ahdaf read **The Last Life **by Claire Messud: "Wise,
touching and fully imagined." She also read **Temptations of the West
**by Pankaj Mishra: "It deals coolly with very hot topical issues."
* WAR PROFITS*
*By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org*
**[New York, May 22, 2008.]**
I can't make this up:
In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world's top oil
companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line
around Iraq and signed their names to it.
The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It
explains this week's rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel.
It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now.
*Barack Obama knows this. *Or, just as important, those crafting his
policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton's team. There could
be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic
candidacies. And you won't learn a thing about it on the news from the
Fox-holes.
Let me explain.
In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British
Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental
counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising
supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by their successors during the
Clinton years, when oil traded at $22 a barrel.
The solution then, as now: stop the flow of oil, squeeze the market,
raise the price. The method: put a red line around Iraq and declare that
virtually all the oil under its sands would remain there, untapped.
Their plan: choke supply, raise prices rise, boost profits. That was the
program for 1928. For 2003. For 2008.
Again and again, year after year, the world price of oil has been
boosted artificially by keeping a tight limit on Iraq's oil output.
Methods varied. The 1928 "Redline" agreement held, in various forms, for
over three decades. It was replaced in 1959 by quotas imposed by
President Eisenhower. Then Saudi Arabia and OPEC kept Iraq, capable of
producing over 6 million barrels a day, capped at half that, given an
export quota equal to Iran's lower output.
In 1991, output was again limited, this time by a new red line: B-52
bombings by Bush Senior's air force. Then came the Oil Embargo followed
by the "Food for Oil" program. Not much food for them, not much oil for us.
In 2002, after Bush Junior took power, the top ten oil companies took in
a nice $31 billion in profits. But then, a miracle fell from the sky.
Or, more precisely, the 101st Airborne landed. Bush declared, "Bring'm
on!" and, as the dogs of war chewed up the world's second largest source
of oil, crude doubled in two years to an astonishing $40 a barrel and
those same oil companies saw their profits triple to $87 billion.
In response, Senators Obama and Clinton propose something wrongly called
a "windfall" profits tax on oil. But oil industry profits didn't blow in
on a breeze. It is war, not wind, that fills their coffers. The beastly
leap in prices is nothing but war profiteering, hiking prices to take
cruel advantage of oil fields shut by bullets and blood.
*I wish to hell the Democrats would call their plan what it is: A war
profiteering tax.* War is profitable business – if you're an oil man.
But somehow, the public pays the price, at the pump and at the funerals,
and the oil companies reap the benefits.
Indeed, the recent engorgement in oil prices and profits goes right back
to Bush-McCain "surge." The Iraq government attack on a Basra militia
was really nothing more than Baghdad's leaping into a gang war over
control of Iraq's Southern oil fields and oil-loading docks. Moqtada
al-Sadr's gangsters and the government-sponsored greedsters of SCIRI
(the Supreme Council For Islamic Revolution In Iraq) are battling over
an estimated $5// billion// a year in oil shipment kickbacks, theft and
protection fees.
The //Wall Street Journal// reported that the surge-backed civil warring
has cut Iraq's exports by up to a million barrels a day. And that
translates to slashing OPEC excess crude capacity by nearly half.
Result: ka-BOOM in oil prices and ka-ZOOM in oil profits. For 2007,
Exxon recorded the highest annual profit, $40.6 //billion//, of any
enterprise since the building of the pyramids. And that was BEFORE the
war surge and price surge to over $100 a barrel.
It's been a good war for Exxon and friends. Since George Bush began to
beat the war-drum for an invasion of Iraq, the value of Exxon's reserves
has risen – are you ready for this? – by $2 //trillion//.
Obama's war profiteering tax, or "oil windfall profits" tax, would equal
just 20% of the industry's charges in excess of $80 a barrel. It's
embarrassingly small actually, smaller than every windfall tax charged
by every other nation. (Ecuador, for example, captures up to 99% of the
higher earnings).
Nevertheless, oilman George W. Bush opposes it as does Bush's man
McCain. Senator McCain admonishes us that the po' widdle oil companies
need more than 80% of their windfall so they can explore for more oil.
When pigs fly, Senator. Last year, Exxon spent $36 billion of its $40
billion income on dividends and special payouts to stockholders in
tax-free buy-backs. Even the Journal called Exxon's capital investment
spending "stingy."
At today's prices Obama's windfall tax, teeny as it is, would bring in
nearly a billion dollars a day for the US Treasury. Clinton's plan is
similar. Yet the press' entire discussion of gas prices is shifted to
whether the government should knock some sales tax pennies off the oil
companies' pillaging at the pump.
More important than even the Democrats' declaring that oil company
profits are undeserved, is their implicit understanding that the profits
are the spoils of war.
And that's another reason to tax the oil industry's ill-gotten gain.
Vietnam showed us that foreign wars don't end when the invader can no
longer fight, but when the invasion is no longer profitable.
*****************
Greg Palast is the author of, "Trillion Dollar Babies," on Iraq and oil,
published in his New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse.
Palast is currently working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on investigation
the latest attacks on the right to vote in America. Support this effort
and receive a signed copy of Armed Madhouse from the author at Palast
Investigative Fund.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
**Oakland activist keeps spirit of revolution strong**
**By Momo Chang, Correspondent**
InsideBayArea.com -- May 19, 2008 01:51:31 PM PDT
http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtribune/ci_9312282
OAKLAND - Yuri Kochiyama embodies the spirit of
activism that one might find in an ebullient college
student, but this long-time activist for social justice
turns 87 today.
Kochiyama is most well known as the woman who cradled
Malcolm X in her lap after he was shot Feb. 21, 1965,
during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York
City.
"I wanted to get up to where Malcolm was," explained
Kochiyama, who was in the audience that day. "I sort of
put his head in my lap, praying and hoping that he was
still alive."
That moment of Kochiyama cradling the revolutionary
leader was captured in a Life magazine photo.
Kochiyama, who shares the same birthday as Malcolm X
and another revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, is still an
activist today.
The walls of her studio apartment in a senior housing
complex near downtown Oakland are covered with
political posters and signs that say "Free Mumia,"
"Free Palestine," and "Impeach Bush" alongside family
photos, many showing interracial relationships.
Her desk and bed are covered with folders and leaflets
and letters - lots of letters. She corresponds with
more than 200 political prisoners in the United States,
many black activists. "I can never catch up," she says.
But she was not always this radical.
Kochiyama grew up in a solidly middle class Japanese
American family in San Pedro, according to Diane
Fujino, associate professor of Asian American studies
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who
wrote
Kochiyama's 2005 biography.
During World War II, Kochiyama's family was forced to
move to an internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas, but not
before her father, who had just undergone surgery, was
imprisoned and tortured. He died soon after.
Kochiyama moved to Harlem - where she lived for about
40 years - after the war to live with her now-deceased
husband, Bill. They, along with their six children,
lived in a housing project.
She became involved in local civil rights
organizations, such as a Harlem parents' group, and
rallied for better schools, safer streets and union
jobs for people of color.
It wasn't until she met Malcolm X, though, that her
ideology became more radical, one of self-determination
for African Americans and all people.
"He was so dynamic, and of course, his message so
powerful," Kochiyama said, describing Malcolm X as her
biggest political influence.
The petite Asian American woman first met Malcolm X at
a courthouse in 1963, when she went up to him to shake
his hand. She was in her 40s at the time.
Kochiyama, then known as Mary, was new to the Civil
Rights Movement. She did end up shaking Malcolm X's
hand and questioned his views on integration. Malcolm X
invited her to his office for more discussion. Though
she never went, she wrote many letters to him.
Kochiyama later invited Malcolm X to her apartment,
which was dubbed "Grand Central Station," because of
the many community members they housed.
Daughter Audee Kochiyama-Holman, 58, said that growing
up, there was always someone living in their home
besides their family, and that her mother would take
the kids to demonstrations.
"For us kids, it was a very different kind of
upbringing," she said. "It felt like 24/7 it was an
activist home."
On June 6, 1964, the Kochiyama family hosted some
hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. The person they wanted to meet most was
Malcolm X.
As their apartment filled with guests, they anxiously
awaited, wondering if he would show. He did.
Malcolm X also wrote the Kochiyamas many postcards - 11
from nine countries, to be exact. Kochiyama also became
a member of his organization, the Organization of Afro-
American Unity, and became Muslim for several years.
Poet and activist Amiri Baraka remembers first hearing
about Yuri.
"There was a lot of discussion about her, because of
the photo of her," said Baraka, of Newark, New Jersey.
He said it was unusual at the time to find an Asian
American involved in black liberation struggles, but
that he viewed it positively. The two met in 1965 and
still keep in touch. Kochiyama recently attended
Baraka's jazz opera, The Sisyphus Syndrome, in Oakland.
Richard Aoki, a field marshal of the Black Panther
Party, said that he and Kochiyama were two of a handful
of Asian Americans active in African American struggles
prior to the Asian American movement in the late '60s.
"When the Asian American struggle burst loose, we found
ourselves sort of in the forefront because of our
exposure and experience in the African American
struggle," Aoki said. "It was refreshing to find
someone that would agree politically," he added.
Though Kochiyama largely aligned herself with the black
liberation movement, she also had a third world
outlook, Aoki said. She was one of the people arrested
after taking over the Statue of Liberty with Puerto
Rico independence activists in 1977, for example.
She moved to Oakland in 1999 to be closer to family
after suffering a stroke.
In recent years, she's continued to support various
political causes, participating in anti-war
demonstrations, immigrant rights' rallies and numerous
community events. And she continues to write to
political prisoners, many of whom she's known for
decades.
She uses a walker to get around, and occasionally a
wheelchair, but that doesn't stop her. She's got scores
of cross-generational friends to shuttle her around.
"She's been in it for the long haul, since the '60s,"
said Mary Uyematsu Kao, a friend of the family. "She's
represented Asian Americans in a lot of social justice
and freedom struggles."
Kochiyama recently started a grassroots group, Asian
Americans for the San Francisco Eight. The "SF8" case
includes former Black Panthers and affiliates facing
trial for the 1971 shooting death of a San Francisco
police officer. Kochiyama has known some of them for
decades, visiting them in prison when she lived in
Harlem.
About half the jury in cases tried in San Francisco is
Asian American, but Asian Americans know very little
about the case, according to the group.
Sophy Wong, 32, first met the elder Kochiyama when Wong
was a college student. Today, they work together side-
by-side in the political group, though Yuri is her
grandmother's age.
"You realize she's the most humble person, and gives
huge props to everyone else but herself," said Wong, an
HIV doctor in San Francisco. "At the same time, when
injustice happens in the world, she's there and speaks
out about it."
Kochiyama will be honored later this month by a local
youth group, Asian Pacific Islander Youth Promoting
Advocacy and Leadership, for their 10-year anniversary
event.
Wong, who says Yuri Kochiyama is a role model for the
younger generations, added that in progressive and
liberal circles, people are often angry, loud, and not-
so-humble - a contrast to the way Kochiyama operates.
"Yuri represents to me the ability to be humble, yet
fierce, at the same time," Wong said.
[Inside Bay Area is the interactive publication of The
Oakland Tribune.]
_____________________________________________
Colombia's bloody glove
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/colombias-bloody-glove/>
*Dialing for dollars in Cuba*
*May 20, 2008 · No Comments
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/dialing-for-dollars-in-cuba/#comments>*
<http://machetera.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/parm.jpg>
**U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, Michael Parmly, impersonates a Cuban "Lady in
White" impersonating an Argentine "Mother of the Plaza de Mayo"**
By: Machetera
There are so many things wrong with this story that it would be hard to
know where to begin, so let's start with Tuesday's headline
<http://www.elnuevoherald.com/167/story/211150.html> in //El Nuevo
Herald//, the Spanish language fiefdom of the //Miami Herald//, which
says "Dissident Cuban Woman Says Government Hounds but Doesn't Allow a
Defense."
Now, aside from the striking fact that the Cuban woman in question,
Martha Beatriz Roque, is given a free platform by a major U.S. daily
from which to defend herself (and doesn't) - something which is never
offered those hounded by the United States government, Machetera's going
to take a wild guess here and say that if the Cuban government didn't
also invite her to appear on the Cuban political television
program, //Mesa Redonda (Round Table)// where her grasping emails
<http://www.freethefive.org/usTerrorism/USTerrCubaProves051908.htm> were
unveiled, demanding payment for services rendered, it would have been to
save her from being killed by the audience. Because Martha doesn't just
take money from anybody. She takes it from the ugliest people - Santiago
Alvarez, the benefactor of Luis Posada Carriles, who blew up a Cuban
passenger plane in 1976, killing all 73 people on board.
Alvarez, you'll recall, spirited the aging terrorist Posada Carriles
from Mexico to safe haven in the United States, aboard his vessel, the
Santrina - a felony, incidentally, but one that has so far not been
prosecuted since the government has been otherwise occupied slapping him
on the wrist for his unusual weapons collection
<http://www.freethefive.org/usTerrorism/USTerrAlvarez11907.htm>:
"machine guns, rifles, C-4 explosive, dynamite, detonators, a grenade
launcher and ammunition," according to the //Miami Herald//.
Fidel Castro was the first person to point out that Posada Carriles had
arrived on the Santrina, not as Posada Carriles claimed, on a bus
crossing the Mexico/Texas border, but the U.S. press ran with the bus
story for a very long time anyway. It worked out well in the end, as the
lie about the bus trip was what the government finally used to charge
and minimally sentence Posada Carriles instead of complying with
international law and turning him over for extradition to Venezuela to
be prosecuted in the 1976 plane bombing.
When not dialing for dollars (or specifically, euros) for herself and
others, Martha apparently busied herself writing to the judge overseeing
Alvarez's prosecution, which might have paid off, had the letter not
been lost at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. Martha understood the
consequences and wrote to her Miami confidante and intermediary for the
terrorists, Carmen Machado,
/"It's a serious problem, since [Cuban] Security will surely bring
out the original letter on //Mesa Redonda//, or in a book, or maybe
they'll bring me back to trial for it, since they've never had any
proof against me despite all the years I've lived. I wanted you to
know and for you to tell my friend, of whom I'm also very proud."/
Martha's not the only one taking money from such despicable people. The
U.S. government p.r. creation, the "Ladies in White," (Damas de Blanco)
takes terrorist money too. The "Ladies in White" are the Cuban wives of
other so-called dissidents who don white clothing and head-scarves in
the most cynical appropriation of the memory of the Argentine Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo who marched to demand the return of their children,
abducted in the U.S. supported military dictatorship there.
The p.r. geniuses who thought up the "Ladies in White" have counted on a
short public attention span and a compliant press, but Hebe de Bonafini,
a real mother from Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was perfectly blunt
about the insult in aninterview
<http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=17055> with Salim Lamrani in 2005:
**/Lamrani: The Cuban authorities arrested and harshly sentenced
various people to prison terms, which the international press calls
"dissidents," for having collaborated with the economic sanctions
against Cuba and for receiving subsidies from the United States. The
French press has often alluded to the "Ladies in White," the family
of these "dissidents," who march in Havana to ask for the liberation
of their family members. Several media have referred to these people
as the "Cuban Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo." What does Hebe de
Bonafini, President of the Association of the Mothers of the Plaza
de Mayo think? /**
/De Bonafini: First, let me say that the Plaza de Mayo is in
Argentina and nowhere else. Our white headscarf symbolizes life,
while the women you speak about to me represent death. This is the
most important and most substantial difference that should be noted
by these journalists. We are not going to accept their being
compared to us, or that our symbols be used to trample upon us. We
are in complete disagreement with them./
**/However, they are demanding the release of their family members.
Doesn't that seem legitimate?/**
/These women defend United States terrorism. They defend the world's
foremost terrorist country, that with the most blood on its hands,
that which launches the most bombs, that invades the most countries,
that imposes the strongest economic sanctions against others. We are
talking about a country that is responsible for the crimes of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki./
/These women don't realize that the struggle of the Mothers of the
Plaza de Mayo symbolizes love for our abducted children, killed by
tyrants imposed by the United States. Our battle represents the
Revolution, the one that our sons and daughters wanted to make.
Their struggle is different, since they defend the subversive
policies of the United States that only contain oppression,
repression and death./
**/What, according to you, are the interests being defended by the
"Cuban dissidents?"/**
/The interests of the United States, of course. You'd have to be
blind or dishonest not to see it. You only have to read the reports
published by the U.S. State Department, in which it is said that a
$50 million budget is earmarked for the fabrication of an opposition
in Cuba. The information is public, and it's available. The
dissidents themselves, as they are called, meet with Mr. James Cason
[the U.S. representative preceding Michael Parmly in Havana] and are
under his command. These dissidents have openly supported the
maintenance of economic sanctions that so harm the Cuban people.
Who, besides the United States, supports those economic sanctions?
Tell me! /
Now, to some of the sordid details about the current transactions.
Machetera won't bother to translate all the emails from Martha
(Martuchita) to her pals in Miami, but she will make a couple of
observations.
In his Monday press conference on the affair, State Department spokesman
Sean McCormack played stupid.
<http://machetera.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/mccorm.jpg>
He claimed repeatedly not to understand the "mechanics" of how the
terrorists' money got to Cuba (inside the pocket of the number one U.S.
diplomat, Michael Parmly) and insisted that international law was not
violated. Perhaps not, but U.S. law was, even if McCormack refused to
admit it. It's a law with which sadly, Machetera has a personal
acquaintance, and it has to do with George W. Bush's brilliant
humanitarian edict that no more than $300 per quarter can be sent to a
Cuban citizen, and only by a family member in the United States. When
you go to Western Union, you fill out an affidavit that is filed with
the Office of Foreign Assets Control, swearing you haven't sent more
than the maximum permitted, every single time. But that's just for the
common folk. Martuchita's uncommon, and so are her friends.
Carmen Machado, or alternately Carmenchu or Carmita, Alvarez's
message-girl who was in frequent contact with Martha was both arrogant
enough and evidently stupid enough to use her work
email,Carmen.Machado at HCAhealthcare.com for the correspondence. Machado
is (appropriately enough) a Financial Coordinator at Aventura Hospital
<http://miamihealthinternational.com/CustomPage.asp?guidCustomContentID=E2628C51-BC98-4F8A-91FD-D3A627414A1B> between
Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
<http://machetera.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/mach.jpg>
Aventura, as Machado's email address suggests, is owned by Hospital
Corporation of America
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospital_Corporation_of_America>, "the
largest private operator of health care facilities in the world," where
Senator Bill Frist made his fortune. Frist dumped his shares in a very
timely manner, just prior to the release of "disappointing earnings"
figures, claiming that because he was running for president, he wanted
to avoid any conflict of interest. He was joined in this clairvoyance by
numerous executives, who unfortunately, were not in the presidential
race. Shareholders sued the company and in August 2007, the lawsuit was
settled, with HCA paying $20 million to shareholders.
No virus found in this incoming message.
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2008-05-22 07:06
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