In a historic trial Former Guatemalan Dictator Rios Mont convicted of genocide...then he's not

During the Reagan-BushI years of proxy wars against revolutions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, General Rios Mont was a star player for the USAs counter-revolutionary team. As dictator of Guatemala he waged an open war of extermination against indigenous Indian communities whom he distrusted as being sympathetic to revolutionary groups. This has been well documented and it has been a scandal for decades that Rios Mont and his henchmen got away with mass murder.

Recently, he was finally brought to book. His conviction was a vindication of the rights of the Guatemalan people and a victory for human rights workers. Until he was unconvicted. A Guatemalan court ruled the conviction invalid.

Why? The ruling business elite of Guatemala thought indicting and convicting Rios Mont was a bad precedent. Committing genocide against the people, especially the Mayan speaking Indios, who are at the bottom of the social pecking order, is a time-honored tradition of Guatemala's ruling elite. If Rios Mont is guilty of genocide and punished for it, why stop with just him? A lot of rich and connected people are also complicit.

Of course, the US government backed up Rios Mont's tantrum of mass killing as part of saving the free world from godless communism (it was the 1980s, terrorism hadn't moved up to the top of the list yet). Another significant player in the massacres was the Israeli army. They trained the Guatemalan military's death squads and gave them inspiration. This is also well documented, if any one cares to look it up (don't ask Abe Foxman).

Rise Up or Die

Chris Hedges' Columns(from Truthdig)

Posted on May 19, 2013

By Chris Hedges

Joe Sacco and I spent two years reporting from the poorest pockets of the United States for our book “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.” We went into our nation’s impoverished “sacrifice zones”—the first areas forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace—to show what happens when unfettered corporate capitalism and ceaseless economic expansion no longer have external impediments. We wanted to illustrate what unrestrained corporate exploitation does to families, communities and the natural world. We wanted to challenge the reigning ideology of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism to illustrate what life becomes when human beings and the ecosystem are ruthlessly turned into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. And we wanted to expose as impotent the formal liberal and governmental institutions that once made reform possible, institutions no longer equipped with enough authority to check the assault of corporate power.

What has taken place in these sacrifice zones—in postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., and Detroit, in coalfields of southern West Virginia where mining companies blast off mountaintops, in Indian reservations where the demented project of limitless economic expansion and exploitation worked some of its earliest evil, and in produce fields where laborers often endure conditions that replicate slavery—is now happening to much of the rest of the country. These sacrifice zones succumbed first. You and I are next.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

The Department of Justice seizure of two months of records of phone calls to and from editors and reporters at The Associated Press is the latest in a series of dramatic assaults against our civil liberties. The DOJ move is part of an effort to hunt down the government official or officials who leaked information to the AP about the foiling of a plot to blow up a passenger jet. Information concerning phones of Associated Press bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hartford, Conn., as well as the home and mobile phones of editors and reporters, was secretly confiscated. This, along with measures such as the use of the Espionage Act against whistle-blowers, will put a deep freeze on all independent investigations into abuses of government and corporate power.

Seizing the AP phone logs is part of the corporate state’s broader efforts to silence all voices that defy the official narrative, the state’s Newspeak, and hide from public view the inner workings, lies and crimes of empire. The person or persons who provided the classified information to the AP will, if arrested, mostly likely be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. That law was never intended when it was instituted in 1917 to silence whistle-blowers. And from 1917 until Barack Obama took office in 2009 it was employed against whistle-blowers only three times, the first time against Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Espionage Act has been used six times by the Obama administration against government whistle-blowers, including Thomas Drake.

The government’s fierce persecution of the press—an attack pressed by many of the governmental agencies that are arrayed against WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and activists such as Jeremy Hammond—dovetails with the government’s use of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force to carry out the assassination of U.S. citizens; of the FISA Amendments Act, which retroactively makes legal what under our Constitution was once illegal—the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of tens of millions of U.S. citizens; and of Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, which permits the government to have the military seize U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them in indefinite detention. These measures, taken together, mean there are almost no civil liberties left.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet. The same corporate forces that give us endless soap operas that pass for news, from the latest court proceedings surrounding O.J. Simpson to the tawdry details of the Jodi Arias murder trial, also give us atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that surpass 400 parts per million. They entrance us with their electronic hallucinations as we waiver, as paralyzed with fear as Odysseus’ sailors, between Scylla and Charybdis.

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible.

In the Lakota Indian reservation at Pine Ridge, S.D., in the United States’ second poorest county, the average life expectancy for a male is 48. This is the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti. About 60 percent of the Pine Ridge dwellings, many of which are sod huts, lack electricity, running water, adequate insulation or sewage systems. In the old coal camps of southern West Virginia, amid poisoned air, soil and water, cancer is an epidemic. There are few jobs. And the Appalachian Mountains, which provide the headwaters for much of the Eastern Seaboard, are dotted with enormous impoundment ponds filled with heavy metals and toxic sludge. In order to breathe, children go to school in southern West Virginia clutching inhalers. Residents trapped in the internal colonies of our blighted cities endure levels of poverty and violence, as well as mass incarceration, that leave them psychologically and emotionally shattered. And the nation’s agricultural workers, denied legal protection, are often forced to labor in conditions of unpaid bondage. This is the terrible algebra of corporate domination. This is where we are all headed. And in this accelerated race to the bottom we will end up as serfs or slaves.

Rebel. Even if you fail, even if we all fail, we will have asserted against the corporate forces of exploitation and death our ultimate dignity as human beings. We will have defended what is sacred. Rebellion means steadfast defiance. It means resisting just as have Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, just as has Mumia Abu-Jamal, the radical journalist whom Cornel West, James Cone and I visited in prison last week in Frackville, Pa. It means refusing to succumb to fear. It means refusing to surrender, even if you find yourself, like Manning and Abu-Jamal, caged like an animal. It means saying no. To remain safe, to remain “innocent” in the eyes of the law in this moment in history is to be complicit in a monstrous evil. In his poem of resistance, “If We Must Die,” Claude McKay knew that the odds were stacked against African-Americans who resisted white supremacy. But he also knew that resistance to tyranny saves our souls. McKay wrote:


If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!


It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”

Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” grasps the dark soul of global capitalism. We are all aboard the doomed ship Pequod, a name connected to an Indian tribe eradicated by genocide, and Ahab is in charge. “All my means are sane,” Ahab says, “my motive and my object mad.” We are sailing on a maniacal voyage of self-destruction, and no one in a position of authority, even if he or she sees what lies ahead, is willing or able to stop it. Those on the Pequod who had a conscience, including Starbuck, did not have the courage to defy Ahab. The ship and its crew were doomed by habit, cowardice and hubris. Melville’s warning must become ours. Rise up or die

When ‘J’ means ‘Jewish’ not ‘Justice’

from mondoweiss


May 16, 2013 01:00 pm | Heike Schotten

This is a companion article to Sandra Tamari's piece, "The meaning of solidarity in the Palestine movement." These pieces are part of an ongoing conversation in activist spaces about “Jews identifying as Jews”. We published Elisha Baskin and Donna Nevel on this issue recently. --Ed.

When “J” means “Jewish” Rather than “Justice”: On Zionism, Jewish Exceptionalism, and Jewish Supremacy in U.S. Palestine Solidarity Organizing

Zionism contends that Jewish people have a special connection to the Zionist colonization of Palestine (i.e., Israel). Unfortunately, this “special connection” is often reproduced in certain Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work in the U.S. This happens when the focus of movement work is directed toward the needs, motives, beliefs, or histories of Jewish people, rather than the needs and situation of Palestinians. In these cases, I shall argue, movement work exchanges its focus on justice for a focus on Judaism, shortchanging Palestinians—and genuine solidarity with them—in the process.

Undoubtedly, Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity activism does important work to undermine this “special connection.” Groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), American Jews for a Just Peace (AJJP), and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) drive a wedge between Zionism and Judaism, demonstrating by their very existence that not all Jews are Zionists (nor are all Zionists Jews). This is of enormous strategic value, particularly in the U.S. context, wherein the presumption that Zionism and Judaism are co-extensive has a stranglehold on politics and public discourse. The importance of this work has been affirmed, for example, by the Boycott National Committee in Palestine, which has endorsed the JVP-initiated campaign demanding that TIAA-CREF divest from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation. Omar Barghouti has named JVP “an important ally in the U.S.” that consistently resists “Jewish privilege.”

However, in the course of my time working in the Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. (since 2006), I have seen Jewish-identified Palestine solidarity work often reproduce the notion that Jewish people have a “special connection” with the Zionist colonization of Palestine, thereby sidelining the needs and situation of Palestinians in order to focus on Jewish people, identity, or history. This happens, in my experience, in three prominent ways:

(1) Jewish Values

All too often, in venues too numerous to mention, I have heard Jewish people cite the distinctiveness or importance of Jewish Values as their reasons for being involved in Palestine solidarity work. Jewish Values refers to any number of things: sometimes it references a specific Jewish ethical tradition or set of teachings, derived perhaps from Biblical or Talmudic sources. Sometimes it is based on a more culturalist assertion about specifically Jewish commitments to social justice (e.g., tikkun olam). And sometimes it is based on historical claims about the consistency or disproportionate participation of Jewish people in social justice movements generally (e.g., Civil Rights, labor, feminism, gay liberation, etc.). Regardless of its content, however, it is all-too-common to hear Jewish-identified people lay claim to Jewish Values as the reason, motive, or purpose for their participation in Palestine solidarity work.

In my view, this position mistakes personal reasons for joining this movement for the work of the movement itself, exchanging a focus on justice for a focus on Judaism. Distracted by individual motives or personal beliefs, this activism becomes oriented toward the maintenance or upholding of Jewish Values rather than responding to the situation and needs of Palestinians (as evidenced by the enormous amount of work being done internally within Jewish communities – more on this in the final section). Worse, Palestinian self-determination is championed because doing so exemplifies or otherwise fulfills Jewish Values. In other words, being in solidarity with Palestine becomes the new meaning or content of Jewish Values. This unwittingly instrumentalizes Palestinians or the Palestinian cause as important insofar as they can help to realize (or “heal”) Jewish Values (from Zionism).

It also suggests that liberation or self-determination are uniquely or distinctly Jewish Values, which of course they are not. Such advocacy engages in Jewish exceptionalism, reinforcing the idea that Jewish people – because of certain “values” – are exceptional, both in the sense that Jews are exceptions to the rule and exceptional, or a cut above the rest. However, not only are Jewish Values neither synonymous with liberation nor uniquely related to liberation, but they are certainly unnecessary to claim as the basis for one’s Palestine solidarity work, especially when doing so re-iterates Jewish exceptionalism.

Moreover, by insisting on Jewish Values as the reason for their solidarity with Palestinians, Jewish people actually re-inscribe Jews as central to this region and the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom when in fact they are not central to it – or, at least, no more or less central to it than any other non-Palestinian people. (Remember, it is Zionism that requires an essential connection between Israel and Jewish people.) When Jewish people assert specifically Jewish Values as the basis for their Palestine solidarity work, they re-instate the connection between Jewish people and Israel – even if this time in the form of a critique – that centers Jewish people and Jewish Values as the main pivot of a relationship of resistance to Israel and the Zionist project.

I fully accept that many people are committed to the liberation of Palestine because of a personal commitment to Jewish Values. But being critical of Israel and in solidarity with the liberation of Palestine are not distinctly Jewish values, nor should they be if this movement is to be truly liberatory.

When Jewish people mistake their individual connections to Jewishness or Jewish Values for politically principled social justice work, they distract from the situation of Palestinians and re-instate Jewish people’s “special connection” to Israel/Palestine, short-circuiting solidarity and fortifying Zionism in the process.

(2) Jewish Oppression

Paralleling the Jewish Values line is the Jewish Oppression line. In this case, Jewish people invoke their historical experience of oppression as the reason for their intimate connection to Palestine solidarity work. Occasionally, this historical experience of oppression takes the form of a broader narrative about Jewish people having been exiled and oppressed throughout their existence, despised and dislocated from everywhere they have lived. Much more commonly, this argument relies on the Holocaust as the premier example of unthinkable oppression. Regardless, the claim I most often hear made is that, because of Jewish people’s excruciating experience of oppression during the Holocaust, they are uniquely situated or obligated, as Jews, to undertake Palestine solidarity work. This is because, for example, they are obliged to universalism by the uniquely post-Holocaust injunction, “Never Again.” Or simply because their distinct experience of oppression obliges them to say no to Israel’s crimes.

Connecting solidarity work to the Holocaust in this way unwittingly suggests that it is Jewish people’s unique relationship with exceptional oppression that especially situates them to work on Palestinian liberation. Again, this mistakes personal connections and motivations for justifications of political principle, shifting the focus from justice to Judaism once again. It also somehow manages to suggest that addressing the situation of Palestinians is important insofar as it addresses or speaks to Jewish Oppression. This again re-centers Jewish people in a movement for Palestinian liberation, albeit this time through the lens of Jewish Oppression rather than Jewish Values. Finally, it borders on a kind of Holocaust exceptionalism, whereby the oppression of the Jews is either exceptionally horrible or else more specifically and uniquely horrible than anything other people(s) have undergone throughout history, since it is precisely on this unique or distinctive horribleness that the claim to the special obligation to Palestine solidarity turns.

I fully accept that many people are committed to the liberation of Palestine because of familial or historical connections with the Holocaust. I would again insist, however, that this connection remains a personal connection rather than an assertion of political principle. Many people have many familial and historical connections with many oppressions that may (or may not) bring them to Palestine solidarity work. From the perspective of the work, however, such connections are interesting but inessential. Why, after all, is a connection with any oppression necessary to commit one to the liberation of Palestine? More importantly, asserting specifically Jewish people’s connection to the Holocaust as the basis for Palestine solidarity work re-iterates the Zionist insistence on the essential relationships among the Holocaust, Israel, and Jewish people. These connections should be disregarded in Palestine solidarity work, for certainly outrage at the Holocaust – much less the injustices of the Israeli state – do not and should not require a particular kinship or historical linkage with either. Suggesting otherwise sidelines Palestinians once again, undermining solidarity and fortifying Zionism.

(3) Jewish Credibility

Finally, it is all too often the case that Jewish people – sometimes unwittingly and with good intentions, sometimes not – position themselves in the United States as uniquely credible reporters about the situation on the ground in Palestine. This is due to a number of factors, I’m sure, not least of which is the proliferation of opportunities for (sufficiently moneyed) Americans to travel to Palestine on delegations or solidarity tours. (This phenomenon is so common it is now a research area for academics.) Upon return to the U.S., participants often wish to convey what they have seen and learned while they were in Palestine.

The politics of solidarity tours is complex, to be sure. I make no pretense of judging if they are “good” or “bad,” and could not do so without risking hypocrisy given my own participation in both a Birthright Israel program (in 2000) and a Birthright Unplugged program (in 2006), much less my current position as Outreach and Communications Director for Birthright Unplugged, wherein I have facilitated numerous delegations to Palestine.

However, it is often the case that delegates’ well-meaning and heartfelt attempts to communicate what they saw in Palestine—especially when those delegates are Jewish—can unwittingly position both American and Jewish people as uniquely credible reporters about Palestine. To be clear, this is often far from anyone’s intentions. Nevertheless, in the U.S. context of vitriolic, racialized Islamophobia –itself exacerbated by the imperial frame within which all news about the “Middle East” unfolds and all popular culture takes its cues – some voices are inevitably deemed more “objective” than others. And as we well know, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims (and all those taken to be such) are always already de-legitimized in U.S. public discourse. Biased, irrational, violent, terroristic – even after decades of work on this issue, the possibility of a credible, mainstream Arab or Muslim or Palestinian voice gaining any traction as a public authority on Palestine remains remote. Moreover, we are all-too-familiar with the insistence that, anytime a Palestinian or Arab or Muslim does speak publicly, and especially about Palestine, it is necessary to wheel in a Jewish and/or Israeli counterpart in order to “balance” the conversation.

While it is crucial that people speak out about the truth of Israel’s illegal military occupation, indigenous dispossession, apartheid policies, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, nevertheless if it is only or primarily Jewish people reporting such facts, Jewish people are re-centered as the authorities on Palestine. This marginalizes Palestinian voices and leadership and reproduces the Jewish supremacy latent in U.S. public discourse that holds that only Jewish people can be objective, credible reporters about Israel/Palestine.

Aside from distinguishing Judaism from Zionism, the other primary justification I hear of both Jewish-identified solidarity work and the three positionings identified above is the importance of moving the U.S. Jewish community and/or the mainstream Jewish establishment’s hard-line position on Israel. Undoubtedly, fighting AIPAC and the Zionist lobby is important work. However, in my experience, this is typically not the “Jewish establishment” people mean when they make this claim, but rather groups like Hillel or their own congregations and temple Boards. This narrower target makes sense, given that the Zionist lobby consists not simply of Zionist Jewish organizations, but also Zionist Christian Evangelical organizations and Zionist neocons. Indeed, we would do well to remember that the Zionist lobby may not best be characterized as definitively Jewish. Its more defining characteristic may rather be neo-imperialism, a quality that Zionist Jews share with non-Jewish Zionists.

For my own part, I’m skeptical that U.S. Jewish opinion has much sway over the machinations of the Zionist lobby. Their opinions may matter more to the so-called “Jewish establishment,” but even presuming a major shift on Israel on their part leaves me unconvinced that this would significantly affect either the Zionist lobby or U.S. policy on Israel. After all, neither actually cares about Jewish people, their welfare, or what they really think—this is far from their raison d’être. To presume otherwise is again to presume that Zionism has something to do with Judaism or Jewish people, when in fact Judaism and Jewish people are instead used as ideological leverage to advance the Zionist lobby’s colonial and imperial policies.

At its best, Jewish people’s addressing the U.S. Jewish community’s position on Israel is a form of unlearning racism, a way in which Jewish people educate other Jewish people about Israel’s status as a settler colonial state rather than an emancipatory polity for Jewish people.

However, this kind of work is also about personal commitments which, like Jewish Values or Jewish Oppression, may be important to individuals but are not productive bases or justifications for solidarity work. Some people wish to make synagogues more welcoming spaces for dissenting views on Israel. Young folks want to alert their elders that their generation is not committed to Zionism, even as they embrace Judaism (this is one animus behind the JVP project Young, Jewish, and Proud). Others are interested in building new religious institutions and practices of worship that are spiritually meaningful but no longer complicit with Zionism.

All of these are admirable goals. But they are not solidarity work. Making internal change within the U.S. Jewish community may make U.S. Jews less racist, synagogues more open, families more communicative, and religious institutions and practices less Zionist. But in order for solidarity work to be solidarity work, it must be responsive and accountable to the demands and situation of the oppressed. And it really must be said that Jews are not oppressed in the U.S. (much less anywhere else). They are certainly not the oppressed in this movement. The oppressed here are the Palestinians, and our work for Palestinian liberation must be accountable to the demands and situation of Palestinians – in Palestine and throughout the world. Working to change families, synagogues, and Jewish communities may make more room for individual Jewish people to live, work, worship, and play. But changing the Jewish community is work that is addressed to Jewish people, by Jewish people, for Jewish people. It should not be confused with work that aims at the liberation of Palestine.

I, too, came to this work with the belief that, as someone raised Jewish in a staunchly Zionist home, I had a “special connection” to the Zionist colonization of Palestine. In particular, I felt I had an obligation to do Palestine solidarity work because everything Israel did was undertaken and justified “in my name.” However, as I have spent more time in this movement and also begun to learn from the work of other activists, particularly those in the prison abolition and immigrants’ rights movements as well as participants in indigenous struggles for self-determination in the Americas and beyond, I have begun to understand the ways in which my belief in my “special connection” to Palestine is self-serving and itself a by-product of Zionist propaganda. It is in the interest of Zionism that Jews everywhere understand themselves to be uniquely or distinctly connected to Israel – even if that connection is a critical one.

While it is necessary and important to distinguish Zionism and Judaism, the role of Jewish people in Palestine solidarity work (if indeed any such “role” actually exists) is to confirm that Palestinian liberation is not a Jewish issue. Jewish people must recognize that commitment to justice turns not on an exceptionalist Jewish connection to this region, country, or colonial project, but rather on the principled belief in the freedom, equality, and self-determination of all people(s). Indeed, such commitment may help us to remember that we ourselves are settlers in North America, complicit with the colonization of indigenous peoples here, residing upon stolen land from which we launch our otherwise heroic critiques of Israel.

The fight for Palestinian liberation is anti-racist work and a form of anti-colonialism. It is part of an indigenous people’s struggle. To suggest that Jewish people have a special connection to Israel/Palestine is to re-iterate a central Zionist contention that the settler colonization of Palestine is by, for, or about Jewish people. Insofar as it is Zionism which we are fighting, we surely do not want to agree to that.

The War on Terrorism Industry: Expanding the Brand -- the FBI puts Assada Shakur on wanted terrorist list

A former insider explains how Human Rights Watch panders to the Israel lobby

from Electric Intifada
Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Fri, 05/03/2013 - 18:57

Scott Long has written an excellent exposé of the scurrilous smear campaign against Egyptian human rights defender Mona Seif by the Zionist organization UN Watch and its director Hillel Neuer, “a former corporate lawyer and lobbyist for Israel” (I wrote about the UN Watch smear campaign against Seif here yesterday).

While the whole post is well worth reading, Long includes a fascinating passage on how Human Rights Watch (HRW), where he was director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program until 2010, panders to the Israel lobby which attacks it constantly.

Those of us who observe HRW’s work have long known that it deals with Israel by a different, much softer standard than it applies to any other country.

Long’s account indicates that HRW observes a sort of fake balance in which it must artificially generate criticism of Palestinians just in order to offset criticism of Israel’s much greater and more frequent human rights abuses and crimes:

Human Rights Watch, where I worked for many years, strains all its muscles to be completely objective on Israel/Palestine — an effort that has never gotten it a scintilla of credit from the militant pro-Israel side. Its releases on Israel and Palestine are the only ones in the entire organization that are routinely edited by the executive director himself. An informal arithmetic dictates that every presser or report criticizing Israel has to be accompanied by another criticizing the Palestine Authority or Hamas — or, if that isn’t possible (the PA barely retains enough authority to violate anybody’s rights) at least one of the surrounding Arab states. A mathematical approach to objectivity may help accountants detect embezzlement or captains keep ships afloat, but that kind of balance looks ridiculous in the political world, where the incessant fluidity of action disrupts the illusions of double-entry bookkeeping. (The call for an “embargo on arms” to “all sides” is an excellent example of “objectivity” that benefits one side much more than the other. As often noted during the Yugoslav civil war — when extremely well-meaning people urged that unarmed Bosnians and the Serbian army both go cold turkey on acquiring arms — a cutoff will matter much more to those who have only scant resources than to those flush with weaponry. If you want to stop that kind of fighting, an embargo alone won’t do it. It’s like the majestic equality of the law as Anatole France described it, forbidding both rich and poor to sleep under bridges.)

Whatever you think of the neighboring conflict, Egyptian activists are undoubtedly reasonable when they ask what a similar “objectivity” would have looked like in their 20-year struggle with Mubarak. Should each documented act of torture by State Security have been followed by a search for some malfeasance by human rights organizations? Do the immense power of a state and the vulnerability of a people’s movement carry the same responsibilities? At what point do you acknowledge (as Human Rights Watch did in Egypt) that, though both sides may do wrong, one side’s demand is right and the other’s is wrong?

An excellent question indeed.

More thoughts on US foreign policy, Israel, the Israel Lobby, Saudi Oil, China and Jonathan Pollard

Sometimes, something inspires me to get a deep thought, well, it can seem like it at that moment. But occasionally that idea develops staying power and explains something about the real world.

In the introduction to Rashid Khalidi's new book "Brokers of Deceit," about the USA's dishonest role in the Palestine/Israel negotiations, Khalidi points out that the USA's alliance with Saudi Arabia is the key strategic one in the Mideast (and maybe in the world) because of oil. The alliance with Israel has benefited the US, as a proxy military arm and testing ground for new technology in controlling, maiming and killing people. But If the two allies of the US in the region clash too much, the US would slap Israel down (as it did over selling US weapons to the Saudis). Luckily for Israel's Zionist rulers, the Saudis really don't care about what they do to the Palestinians, neither does the US government, and besides, the Israel lobby has a lot of clout in domestic politics. So, there's no incentive to reign Israel in.

Taking this line of thought further, China really needs oil and is going to increasingly encroach on US turf in the Mideast and central Asia. How far can the US trust Israel in this coming clash? Israel has a history of playing its own games outside of US control. US intelligence agencies have had their suspicions about how Israel has used US intelligence and US technology behind Washington's back, especially in terms of secretly selling information to China. Which brings up the question of why has the US--which endorses in advance everything Israel does and says--been so hard and unforgiving of Israel's jailed-for-life spy, Jonathan Pollard?

The Israeli government, AIPAC & the whole lobby, senators and representatives, all have appealed for a presidential pardon, but no dice. Perhaps this is a warning to Israel to not screw around with US military and technological assets that could endanger its position of dominance over Mideast oil. If the Israelis becomes a serious hinderance to the US in its coming clashes with China over who has hegemony over energy supplies and who has the military edge, the US won't hesitate to throw them overboard. Even Alan Dershowitz won't be able to save them.

Rashid Khalidi's new book BROKERS OF DECEIT: short, power-packed and insightful

Weighing in at 167 pages, including the index, War and Peace it is not. But Khalidi's just released book packs a punch that is both edifying and bracing, and besides covering the announced topic of the book very well; Khalidi, virtually as an aside, delivers a shattering blow to the argument that through lobbies like AIPAC, JDL, etc. Israel has hijacked US foreign policy in the Mideast and is in the drivers seat. I'll get to that part later.
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The sub-title of the book is: "how the US has undermined peace in the middle east," and its narrow focus makes it all the more penetrating. In the introduction Khalidi states his purpose, "This book is concerned, primarily, however not with the misuse of language, important though that is, but with an American-brokered political process that for more than thirty-five years has reinforced the subjugation of the Palestinian people, provided Israel and the United States with a variety of advantages, and made considerably more unlikely the the prospects of a just and lasting settlement of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs."

Khalidi illustrates his argument with chapters on three key events: chapter 1 is "The First Moment: Begin and Palestinian Autonomy in 1982; chapter 2, "The Second Moment: The Madrid-Washington Negotiations, 1991-3" and chapter 3 the Third Moment "Barak Obama and Palestine, 2009-12."

Needless to say (for those with some familiarity with these events)everything involves Israeli demands, Palestinian objections and US support for any and every Israeli position, followed by Palestinian defeat. Kalidi's narrative of how this was done and the gross use of Orwellian "new speak" by the US and Israel is fascinating and often illuminating in unexpected ways. For example, when Begin spoke of Palestinians being allowed to have "autonomy" he also excluded them from having any territory of their own. What was trumpeted publicly as a great concession was in fact double-talk and meaningless; from the start Israel never intended for there to be a Palestinian state, ever.

Adding to his insights, Khalidi himself was a participant in some of these events as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid conference. This is an important book that has the potential to reach a lot of people. It is a work of scholarship, but very readable and never dry.

Now to the part about what is the US fundamental interest in the Mideast and what role the Israel lobby plays. In the introduction Khalidi states what he thinks should have been seen as obvious (it escaped my notice, I have to admit). The key strategic relationship the US has in the Middle east is not Israel, it is Saudi Arabia. Having access and control of Saudi oil (and that of the surrounding Gulf Kingdoms of Dubai, Kuwait et al)is vital for the US and its world position. It is a relationship that began in 1933 and it is a relationship that is deep (read House of Saud, House of Bush, for instance). Fortunately for the Zionist rulers of Israel, the Saudis don't care about the Palestinians enough to threaten to rupture or modify their political and economic relations with the US. When US-Saudi interests conflicted with what Israel wanted, Israel lost. Try though they did, the Israelis didn't stop sales of US f-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia during the Carter years and they didn't stop Regan's sales of AWACS system aircraft to the Saudis. When both of these sales came before Congress it was the petrochemical lobby that beat the Israel lobby.

Other instances of the US slapping down Israel when if felt its most vial interests were at stake are the Israeli military's withdrawal from Sinai in 1975 and the later signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, which the US had to shove down Israel's throat. The treaty, a victory of the US over the Soviets, making Egypt a client state of the US, was too important to allow the Israelis to scuttle it.

Since there is no pressure from the oil producing states on the US over Palestine and there is no domestic counter to AIPAC & co. letting Israel do what it does has not had any dire consequences for any US administration. To go against the Israel lobby can be costly election time, and no Democrat or Republican cares about the Palestinians to push the issue.

So Saudi oil is the bedrock of US policy. Insofar as it doesn't conflict with the Saudi-US relationship, any US administration isn't going to antagonize Israel's domestic partisans and lap dogs.




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