2008 State of the Universe Address

Swami Predicts Heart Times Ahead

Every year at this time, I am asked to make predictions, and each time I politely refuse because I don’t want to jeopardize my nonprophet status. But this year is different. With 2012 just one quantum leap year away, we humans might finally be ready for a quantum leap of our own. The message is coming in loud and clear. Time to shift or get off the pot.

In order to upshift our karma into surpassing gear, however, we must shift our awareness downward from the static of the head to the ecstatic of the heart. If we are to have an awakening instead of a wake, I predict heart times ahead.

Disheartenment in the Heartland

Heartenment, after all, is just the thing to counteract the disheartenment in the heartland. Take the economy — please! After years of untreated Deficit Inattention Disorder, the U.S. dollar is now worth less than a dollar of Monopoly money. As the most recent Greenspan report tells us, the average American family barely has enough green to span the average month. Meanwhile, trickle down economics has proved true to its name, leaving a growing class of pee-ons at the bottom.

Then there’s electile dysfunction. Instead of transparency around how votes are cast and counted, we have an apparent trance. The secret ballot has been taken to the next level, and now voting machines with secret software count the votes in secret. This is called “faith-based” vote counting. Hey, some of those new “smart” voting machines are so smart, that they don’t even need voters! This makes perfect sense because government of, by and for the people has now been efficiently transformed to government of, by and for the very, very few people. Talk about minority representation. We are now governed by a smaller minority than ever in our history!

Even when we do manage to get an election, the body politic still suffers from impotence. As we learned after the 2006 election, just because we vote for someone doesn’t mean they are going to vote for us. Instead of canceling the Iraqi Horror Picture Show, the Democratic misleadership has gone along with the same basic neocon con, only with a cosmetic makeover – sort of a wolfawitz in sheepawitz’s clothing.

Though the upwising continues, irony deficiency and truth decay still plague the body politic. Instead of forums that shine light on political issues, the media has encouraged againstums where incendiary phrases spark heated arguments. So, while red tribe Republicans and blue tribe Democrats argue whether it’s wronger to kill the born or the unborn, the born keep dying while the not-yet-born are stuck with the bill. No wonder our moral compass has gone south.

As if global warring isn’t enough to worry about, now there’s global warming. It would be sad indeed to have come this far, only to see the headline: “Human Race Ends In a Dead Heat.”

No wonder so many people are scared shiftless. The good news is, this is the State of the Universe Address and I am happy to report that the state of the Universe is copasetic – ever changing, same as always. This is particularly heartening when we realize that that universal state is also our own.

Universe Knows Best

When it comes to universal wisdom, you can’t beat the Universe. First of all, the Universe is everywhere all at once. Talk about being on top of things. Even as it keeps expanding, the Universe has it together — which means, as part of the universe, a part of us has it all together too. We are inextricably connected to the Universe. It is inescapable. Without the Universe, we’d be nowhere.

Here is more amazing news. We are all descended from the same Big Bang! When the Big Bang went boom, all of the Universe’s parts departed from one particle. And that includes us. So, we might as well proclaim it proudly. “The Big Bang is my pop. Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!”

The Big Bang is everybody’s pop, which means we are all related. If we are indeed a fractal chip off the old block, Universe-wise … then somewhere we must be as wise as the Universe. For millennia, spiritual teachers have told us to look inside for this universal wisdom. It turns out, they were right. The real spiritual pilgrimage is actually a journey of about twenty-four inches, roughly the distance from the head to the heart.

The Heart of the Matter is the Matter of the Heart

Yes, everyone is equipped to attune to universal wisdom because everyone has been given a heart. And yet, the heart seems to be the last gift we open. The most underdeveloped resource on the planet is the treasure inside our own treasured chest! Given all the craziness in the world, maybe if we invested in expanding our hearts, we’d have less need to shrink our heads.

And less of a need to be so all-consumed by consumerism. We have learned to spend so much energy pursuing happiness that we never stop to think what would happen if we actually caught it — or rather, if it caught us. With all this hot pursuit, we have left real happiness in the dust. It is sad indeed that we end up jealous that someone else’s happiness might be bigger than our own. Freud called this “happiness envy.”

As the saying goes, money can’t buy happiness, although it can buy anti-depressants. But if you are seeking more out of life than not being depressed, the key to happiness is to grow your own. Every one of us should be asking, “What good am I?” What good can I add to the greater goodness? Maybe if we had greater goodness, we’d need fewer goods. As human beings, our biggest asset is love, so now is the time to get up off our big fat assets, and practice supply-side spirituality. Because we aren’t here to earn God’s love, we are here to spend it. We are here to re-grow the Garden from the grassroots up, and have a heaven of a time doing it!

Heartland Security

Now while the solution is simple, no one said it was going to be easy. Just as the human potential movement has made great gains over the past 25 years, the inhuman potential movement has more than kept up. Everywhere I go, the little David’s I meet all ask the same question: How can we get Goliath to go lieth down? I have good news and I have other news, and they are both the same: It’s up to us. We must lead ourselves out of the bewilderness. Yes, we’ve been politically abused, so the first step is to disabuse ourselves. We must start overseeing instead of overlooking.

By overlooking what we should have been overseeing, we have become enablers for the lowest common dominator. Whether it’s called globalization or gobble-ization, it’s the same old mining operation — that’s mine, that’s mine, that’s mine. Because we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine that someday that “mine” will be ours, we have agreed to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with our government. We promise not to ask them what they are doing, and they promise not to tell us. That way, we can pretend to believe we are invading a country to keep the peace, when we are really there to keep the pieces.

Meanwhile, back at home, they’ve given last rites to the Bill of Rights, and newspeak has become the new spoken language of the mainstream media. Now before we just shrug and say, “Orwell, what can we do about it?” we need to see the only way to overgrow Big Brother is with bigger brotherhood — and even bigger sisterhood. Time to heal our spiritual dyslexia, and realize our natural state is sacred, not scared. The scared masculine and the scared feminine have given us the dysfunctional dance of abusers and enablers. Now we must empower the sacred masculine and sacred feminine to come together and conceive what has been inconceivable – the truly evolved human.

We need to amplify the love and light to counterbalance the darkness and fear, and that is why we need a nongovernmental Department of Heartland Security to secure the heartland and let the powers in power know in no uncertain terms, “Bigger brotherhood is watching you.”

To do that, we must migrate en masse –regardless of political or spiritual affiliation — to the land of the heart. Instead of squabbling over the differences that separate us, we must cohere around the heart-core values we share in common. That is the only way we can trade our insecurity for inner security. No matter where we stand on climate change, one thing is clear. Global heartwarming is bound to change the political climate for the better.

Whatever the problems, we have the wherewithal to address them. Now all we need is the aware-with-all. Whether you call yourself a creationist or an evolutionist, or take the simplest approach of all to the Great Unknown — not knowing — one thing is undeniable: We are all one with the same One. The story of separation, survival of the fittest, and lowest common dominator –that is the old story.

Only we have the power to close the book on the old story once and for all, by declaring: And they all lived happily ever after.

And happily ever after begins now.

© Copyright 2008 by Steve Bhaerman. All rights reserved. To find our Swami’s schedule and get a free catalogue, call toll free (800) SWAMI-BE or visit him online at www.wakeuplaughing.com.

Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.

Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.

Zaid Khan

What is to be done? Chances are that if you reading this, you already have a good grasp of what is happening. Also avail yourself to first hand accounts from residents in Gaza, such as Tabula Gaza, Raising Yousef–A Mother From Gaza and Dr Mona El Farra’s blog. Spread the word and discuss it with people who may not even know all this is happening or who may uncritically accept the Israeli neocon worldview propagated in some of the major media outlets. Israel is committing slow genocide and ethnic cleansing. A simple yet powerful letter like the one above can ricochet around the world.

Here are some other ways you can help:

Call for and participate in a boycott of Israel as many church and union groups have done. Talk to people you know about it and register it on the radar as an issue you care about with your local political representative. The smallest action can help in adding to diplomatic pressure and in raising awareness; make some noise in whatever media you can participate in: forums are often targeted by hasbara cyberhacks so weighing in and challenging their claims and the univocality of the Israeli narrative matters. Support Israeli-Palestinian peace groups such as Gush-Shalom and the Gaza Relief Convoy — put your money where your mouse is, with even just a few dollars. Display links from your blog. To paraphrase Ted Roosevelt, do whatever you can, with what you have, where you are. Everyone’s actions matter.

© 2008 - Ben Heine

If you’re in one of the many participating cities around the world and you’d like to take the opportunity to become involved in the January 26 Day of Action by the International Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, here are some details, with more available here:

LONDON
Demonstration and Candlelight Vigil: End the Siege on Gaza
Saturday, 26 January 2008, 16:00—18:00
Opposite 10 Downing Street, London (tube Westminster)

ROME AND OTHER MAJOR CITIES IN ITALY

CAPE TOWN
The Cape Town Anti-War Coalition will hold a protest at 10am in Adderley Street, Cape Town

USA - Anaheim, Washington DC, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle (Jan 25-29)

Gaza City, January 8, 2008. Empty coffins symbolize 62 patients who have died since June because Israel denied them access to medical treatment outside Gaza. Photo by Wissam Nassar

Yossi Wolfson, Economic Warfare in Gaza

NO MORE LIES or twisted tongues. Israel is saying at last what, in the past, it always refused to acknowledge: its war is against the Palestinian population.Until now, in discussions about the separation wall, closures, blockades, house demolition, and other sorts of collective punishment, the State Attorney’s Office lacked the gumption to admit in court that the aim of such measures is to harm civilians. It always came up with convoluted security claims in order to present some vital military necessity for the sake of the War against Terror. Harm to the population was described as a regrettable side effect.

But now a Rubicon has been crossed. This happened after ten human-rights organizations petitioned the High Court on October 28, 2007 against cuts in the supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza. The petitioners claimed that the cuts amount to collective punishment, which is forbidden under international law. The State might have answered that the cuts are a necessary military measure aimed at stopping the production of Qassam rockets. Or it might have tried some other tongue twister. But no. In their response to the petition, Dana Briskman and Gilad Shirman from the State Attorney’s Office announced openly, without blinking an eye, that the cuts’ main purpose is to exert pressure on the economy as a way of influencing Hamas.

Thus the State clamps the arteries of life for 1.5 million Gazans and describes its action as an economic war. Here it infringes a basic principle of the international laws concerning warfare, which distinguish between the civilian population and the armed forces. One main purpose of these laws is to shield civilians from the battlefield and mitigate the effects war can have on them. The lawyers for the State Attorney do not dispute this principle. Rather they would limit it to strictly military operations. Cutting the supply of electricity or gasoline is not a strictly military operation. In an economic war, they hold, the principle does not apply. Following this logic to its absurd conclusion, we find that it is forbidden to blow up a civilian installation, but it is permissible to disable it by cutting off raw materials. It is forbidden to blow up a power plant, but it’s OK to turn off the electricity.

This is not to imply that Israel abides by the law in its strictly military decisions. In summer of 2006, for example, it did blow up the Palestinian power plant in Gaza, raising the Strip’s dependence on itself for electricity—the same electricity that it today proposes to cut.

The state turns international law on its head. Various provisions regulate civilian supplies in wartime, with the aim of keeping the situation from reaching the threshold of a humanitarian crisis. Israel cites these provisions but interprets them as allowing it to harm civilians as long as it stops short of that threshold, defined by it.

What is the humanitarian threshold in Israel’s view? The blockade of Gaza has been going on at various levels for years. Since Hamas ousted Fatah there in the summer of 2007, the shipment of goods to the Strip has been restricted almost totally to basic foods, medicines, medical equipment, cooking gas, gasoline and electricity. Karni, the main checkpoint for transfer of goods, earlier functioned in a spotty manner, but today it is completely shut. The code for importing goods to Gaza has been deleted from the computers of Israel’s Customs Authority, which (according to the Paris Protocol) is supposed to collect the tariffs. The supply of fuel (except cooking gas) has been cut (without court interference). The electricity cut has not yet been implemented, but the shortage is already severe. Electricity and water are available only intermittently. Most of the industrial plants are closed for lack of raw materials and replacement parts. Hospitals, water and sewage services have been operating for the last year and a half (since Israel blew up the power plant) by means of emergency generators. Because replacement parts are lacking, the infrastructures are running down, and there is increasing danger of disaster. A harbinger was the bursting of the cesspool wall in Um al-Nassar last year, where five people drowned in a river of sewage.

According to statistics from the summer of 2007 (See the Gisha web site: “New Report: Commercial Closure“), before Israel hardened its measures, 87% of Gazans lived beneath the poverty line, which was reckoned at $2.40 per day. Already then there were perceived shortages in basic products, and food prices rose by tens of percentage points. According to figures of the World Food Program, 85% of Gazans depend on aid to purchase food.

In the view of Israel, however, the existing supply of goods is above what the law obligates it to allow, and the supplies of electricity and gasoline are even twice the minimum required. Below the humanitarian threshold as defined by it, Israel includes little more than hospitals run by generators, ambulances, supply trucks, and minimal public transport. On November 1, it repeated its assurances to the Court that its measures are carefully weighed and considered. It promised to watch the situation closely to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Yet the government had no up-to-date figures on the likely effects of an electricity cut. The Court asked for data, but the State did not provide them. Instead, it became clear that even the partial statistics cited earlier were misleading (See the Gisha web site: “Court criticizes State Attorneys…“).

Israel claims in court that it has the right to choose the countries it trades with, as if Gaza were just one independent state among the many. It views a cut in electricity to Gaza as not essentially different from, say, a cut in the sale of diamonds to Spain. This claim conceals the self-righteous notion that Israel, having disengaged, is no longer responsible for the Strip. But who presides over Gaza’s borders? Who rules its air space? Whose jets and attack helicopters are those up there? Who controls Gaza’s sea, preventing the erection of an independent harbor?

Gaza’s economic dependence on Israel is the fruit of a deliberate policy that has been in effect for decades. Here as well as in the West Bank, Israel stymied any fledgling industry that might compete with it. It developed Gaza’s dependence on it for electricity and gas. It turned the Gazans into a cheap labor force to serve Israeli industry—at first by having them commute into Israel and later by developing an industrial area at Checkpoint Erez. Israel also benefited from Gazan dependence on its products. When Karni was closed, among the loudest protestors were Israeli farmers. According to reports from the summer of 2007, about a fourth of the fruit grown in Israel was marketed in the Occupied Territories. The cut in gasoline shipments also made a dent in the income of Dor-Alon, the Israeli energy company supplying Gaza.

Yet Israel’s conceptual change about Gaza is not consistent. Disengaged or not, it can’t resist the temptation to exploit the Strip’s resources. Parallel to the discussion on cutting energy supplies, there is another petition before the High Court that also concerns energy—but here the supply would go from Gaza to Israel. In this petition, two corporate groups are battling for an Israeli license to pump natural gas from the reservoir off Gaza’s coast, a reservoir that—if Gaza belonged to a Palestinian state—would be in its territorial waters. The pumped gas is slated to become a major energy source in Israel’s economy. Did the Justices happen to recall another case they are hearing, in which the State says it no longer occupies Gaza? If so, they haven’t indicated this. Needless to say, no Justice cried in astonishment, “By what right do you intend to exploit the gas reserves of the Gaza Strip? This is against the provisions of international law, which forbid an occupying power from exploiting the natural resources of an occupied territory for its own use!”

Finally, we cannot ignore the similarities between Israel’s policies in Gaza and in Lebanon. In southern Lebanon too (if to a lesser degree), Israel for years used the population as a cheap commuting workforce and as consumers of its products, all in the framework of the so-called “Good Fence” policy. This ended, as in Gaza, in a unilateral withdrawal (May 2000). Israel’s interest in controlling the water that flows its way from southern Lebanon brings to mind its interest in Gaza’s gas reserves. Its attack on Lebanon in 2006 also has its Gazan parallels. In both places Israel learned that it has no military answer to the threat of rockets in the hands of militias. With Hezbollah as with Hamas, Israel refused to negotiate. In Lebanon too, it hesitated to open a broad ground war, and rightly so. It learned that it cannot rule a hostile area in the face of attrition from guerrillas. When it undertook military action in Lebanon, the weakness of its own armed forces became apparent. This weakness derives from the moral corruption of the military and political leadership. The war revealed an impossible combination: on the one hand, the leadership’s overall contempt for human life, and, on the other, Israeli society’s unwillingness to accept battle casualties.

In both cases, Gaza and Lebanon, Israel has made indiscriminate war from the air on civilians while hesitating to commit ground forces. In both it has sought to destroy the economic infrastructure and reduce the civilian population to primitive conditions. By harming them, it was thought, you could get them to pressure their leaders and thus make political gains. This notion proved false in Lebanon, as in Gaza. The Israeli attacks amount to an expression of weakness, but the price will not be paid by those who launch them, rather by civilians on both sides.

Let us recall that after maintaining a ceasefire or hudna for eighteen months, the democratically elected government of Hamas was subject to nothing but economic siege, divide and rule, sabotage and targeted killings. Let us also recall that Israel rejected the offer of a truce, instead continuing its collective punishment of a whole population already brutally repressed and assassinating leaders and civilians alike, including the son of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.

The criminal strangulation of a whole population of a million and a half people in one of the most densely populated places on the planet is being committed on the pretext of rocket attacks on Israel using primitive weapons like Qassams; with pretext being the operative word. As Uri Avnery recently observed in Help! A Ceasefire: “If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the cease-fire offer. But the leaders don’t really care … [it] has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army. The Israeli strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel.” Israel’s policy is to deliberately destroy Gaza.

The continued lobbing of these low-lethality weapons are in response to gross Israeli violations of airspace, terrifying sonic booms, the longest running illegal military occupation in modern history, Kafkaesque checkpoints which Israel closes with impunity, the indefinite holding of thousands of “administrative detainees” without charge or trial, and continued theft of Palestinian land. Add to that striking electricity generators and water treatment plants, and closing off Gaza crossings to aid and any free movement in or out, making life hell for ordinary people and truly spreading fear and terror.

As Yair Lapid, an Israeli journalist observes, while the outward objective of the IOF’s operation in Gaza is to prevent the Qassam fire, “[it is] the operation in Gaza [that] is causing Qassams to be fired. The Qassam fire will, in turn, bring about the next operation in Gaza, which will lead to the next round of Qassam fire.” Is this the way to end the cycle of violence? How would anyone feel if their home was bulldozed and their land stolen, with no hope of recourse in the courts? And so the cycle of violence continues, because Israel (thinks it) gains from it.

What can be done? Charley Reese expresses in plain and clear terms what is currently missing to achieve a genuine, just and lasting peace in the Holy Land: the US needs to be willing to constrain Israeli aggression, not give it a blank check. While this seems obvious, it bears reminding.

Respect for international law would also greatly accelerate a satisfactory resolution. Frankly, that’s not going to happen with this current President, Congress or the mainstream media in the US—sadly, the most likud-zionist-occupied territories yet—nevertheless, his recognition of the key to what would bring this conflict closer to a just resolution is to be commended. He writes:

To understand the failure of the president’s trip to the Middle East, which is foreordained and doesn’t have to be completed in order to fail, take note of two words that the president will not utter: “occupied territories.”

Let’s review the situation from the standpoint of international law. The West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and a smidgen of Lebanon the Israelis still occupy are officially designated as occupied territories. They were seized in war. Jerusalem is officially an international city, so designated by the United Nations partition resolution that created the state of Israel. The Israelis, of course, long ago declared the resolution null and void.

As occupied territories, they fall under the Geneva Conventions. An occupying power is not allowed to take land or to build settlements in occupied territory. It is not allowed to destroy homes, to uproot olive groves, to deport people, and to wall the area off – all of which the Israelis have done and are continuing to do.

This brings us to the question of negotiations. It is impossible for the Palestinians, whose land is occupied and whose lives are totally controlled by the most powerful military state in the Middle East, to make any concessions. To make a concession, you have to have something. They have nothing. They have no power. They don’t control their land, their borders, their access to the sea or the air, the water or even their movements within the territories. Thanks to the American vetoes, they don’t even have any recourse in the U.N.

The only party, then, that can make concessions is Israel, and Israel is not making any concessions, since it far prefers land to peace with an enemy that is virtually powerless.

Therefore, if the U.S. refuses to pressure Israel, there will be no peace. President Bush’s trip is nothing more than a public-relations ploy to simulate an interest in peace. Bush is, however, unwilling to say or do anything that might actually result in Israeli concessions and therefore in peace. In fact, the main purpose of Bush’s visit is to harangue the Arabs about the alleged dangers of Iran. He refuses to talk to the elected representatives of the Palestinians, who are Hamas members.

If Americans knew—incidentally an aptly named organization focused upon coming to a just settlement of this conflict, not at all irresolvable—the court of public opinion might also act as a greater brake on Israel’s bellicosity. As Paul Craig Roberts has recently written in a recommended piece, “The ignorance of Americans commits US foreign policy to the service of Israel.”

To support Gaza, please consider such actions as supporting Gush Shalom’s Gaza Relief Convoy campaign to get water filters into this beleaguered strip. You might also be interested in some of these current press picks:

• Is Hamas saving more Jewish lives than Olmert?
• Jenin, Jenin; Israeli air strike destroys Gaza ministry
• Gagged while Gaza is crushed
• Clueless in Gaza
• Economic Warfare in Gaza

Around the blogs:

• Attending the world: Arab Leaders: you’re Worthless!
• Sabbah: Does Bush KNOW Israel occupies Palestine?
• DesertPeace: Gaza: The Final Solution?
• The Fanonite: UK Israel Lobby in the Spotlight
• The Heathlander: Destroying Gaza

McCarthyism comes to Europe and the Levant: The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon’s Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi

by Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
– Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954

In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths.

In the human drama of Middle East theaters and in the wider context of the current Bush administration-spearheaded endless war, the New McCarthyism involves the mobilization of the global ‘war on terror’, in which we see once again the manipulation of fear and the corruption of public discourse in pursuit of narrowly partisan gain – chief among them, the Likudnik Israel-first hawks of the neoconservatives in the US and Israel.

The foot-soldiers of the Likud lobby around the world are applying pressure to stop people from attending academic and activist conferences. As with the McCarthyism of half a century ago, today’s Middle East Studies McCarthyism perpetrated by the Likud Lobby is also a threat to our liberty, to academic freedom, and to basic, fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities.

A network of right-wing Zionist activists has intensified its online campaign based on a melange of distorted or provably false charges against critics of Israel. Zionist media ‘megaphone’ the charges, stoking the furor. When mainstream media ultimately notices, it generally focuses its coverage only on the furor rather than investigating and reporting the truth about the false charges.

McCarthyism 2.0: The War On Terror

After the collapse of the USSR, there were expectations in many quarters that there would be a ‘peace dividend’. The military industrial complex had burgeoned during the Cold war, and vested interests therein were not going to give up their power, privilege and profit from war so readily, if at all.

Yet after the WTC attacks on Sept 11, 2001, a generalized ‘war on terror’ was sold to a stupefied electorate. Right out of the Red Scare playbook of the Cold War morphed the War on Terror playbook, with ‘terrorist’ substituted for communist as the new post cold war evil. With the scope widened, the demonization of the Arab/Muslim as the new monolithically conceptualized enemy commenced, and extended to the criminalizing of dissent and charity-giving: even social activists have been called terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.

Cynical campaigns to confound and confuse and whip up hysteria and ratchet up racism have abounded. Israeli-financed websites like Act of America spew obscene racist hatred against Americans and others of Arab or Muslim origin that would likely give even McCarthy pause.

During the current administration, Bush has amplified an explicitly anti-Muslim message by repeatedly using the term “Islamic fascism” to describe America’s purported enemies (including both the Hezbollah-led resistance in Lebanon and that of Hamas in Palestine).

The demonizing campaigns and venal ideological assaults of the Likudniks have involved bullying, intimidation and mistreatment of those who dare to contest the Israeli hawk worldview and version of the Middle East. In many cases they involve active government and lobby harassment to ensure a climate that is forcefully conducive to the Israeli version of events.

One method of silencing involves the all-purpose slander of the anti-Semitism accusation that has been elasticized to non-sensicality. A new ‘working definition’ promoted by some Israel lobbyists seeks to confuse anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, such that today it would also apply to Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, and Albert Einstein. According to Arthur Neslen in ‘When an anti-Semite is not an anti-Semite‘, the definition would even apply to Israel’s own PM:

What do Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Ehud Olmert and myself all have in common? We could each be censured for racism according to the European Union Monitoring Centre’s “working definition of anti-Semitism” which was recently adopted by the National Union of Students as official policy.

Only recently, a Spanish forum launched in July last year from the Madrid Social Forum has been subject to a hijacking of its agenda by underhanded means as a result of Zionist pressuring of the Spanish government. Initially, the Spanish Foreign Ministry pledged organizational and financial support for Forum for a Just Peace, which was to be held in Madrid from the 14-16th December, enabling the participation of Spanish, Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Israeli civil society representatives who had endorsed the conference.

A refusal by the International Committee to accept the Foreign Ministry stacking of the Conference with ideological zionists was met with the Spanish government response to shut down the conference venue and to send the police to evict the participants. This has effectively shut down the Forum for a Just Peace.

Challenging censorship of Middle East reality

Academia is an important and potentially powerful sphere within which to challenge power, and to posit alternatives. Successful, effective and popular academics are particularly targeted by the Israeli-hawk Likud Lobby in the USA and Europe because they succeed with bringing more people to ask why only one side of the Middle East conflict is being presented as the only side.

As Robert Fisk notes, the scare-mongering conveniently justifies occupation and feeds into war-mongering in service of resource theft and land expropriation in the Middle East:

Because it’s really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It’s to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country’s schools.

Campaigns against academics are often coordinated or facilitated through such groups as Campus Watch, FrontPage, CAMERA and various think tanks (tank-thinks) that validate the Likudnik-Zionist doctrinal framing of the Middle East. They have been mounted with mixed results against Professors Nadia Abu El-Haj (she was granted tenure at Barnard College this year), Joseph Massad, Debbie Almontaser, Tariq Ramadan, Juan Cole, Rashid Khalidi, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Hamid Dabashi, Sami al-Arian and Israeli academics Ilan Pappe and Tanya Reinhart, who both chose exile from Israel in protest to their former country’s policies.

“There certainly is a sense among faculty and grad students that they’re being watched, monitored,” says Zachary Lockman, president of the Middle East Studies Association. “People are always looking over their shoulder, feeling that whatever they say–in accurate or, more likely, distorted form–can end up on a website. It definitely has a chilling effect.”

Campaigns have typically involved intimidatory tactics and defamatory allegations, demonstrably proved baseless. The scurrilous attacks on Norman Finkelstein, for example, have laid bare the desperate lengths the Likud Lobby and such representatives as Alan Dershowitz are driven to smear and slander challengers. Finkelstein was ultimately denied tenure. Ultra-zionist Israel Lobby groups are attempting to intimidate publishers of Joel Kovel’s book Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine and to cripple its distribution. Tariq Ramadan, who Time magazine listed as one of the 100 most likely innovators of the 21st century, was repeatedly denied a visa for entry to teach in the US on spurious grounds.

Freedom of expression in media and even academe does not apparently include the freedom to duly and freely criticize Israeli policies. In the past year, lobby groups such as Campus Watch have been behind the so-called Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW) from October 22-26. Zionist hijacking of these spaces, like the McCarthy trials, has all too often been dishonest and abusive. Other campaigns have included vitriolic smear campaigns against the Khalil Gibran International Academy. The slander and intimation ultimately yielded a result: Debbie Almontaser resigned, all on the flimsy accusation of a t-shirt that had the Arabic word intifada on it—worn by someone else.

The Targeting of Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi

Recently zionists have been targeting Lebanon’s Ibrahim Mousawi, trying to prevent him from speaking or traveling to other countries.

Who is Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi? Born in Lebanon’s picturesque and fertile Bekaa Valley village of Nabysheet, Mousawi is a student of Politics, English Literature and Religion. A former school Headmaster, Ibrahim received his MA in English literature from The Lebanese University, his BA in Journalism from The Lebanese University, and earned his MA in Political Science from The American University of Beirut in 2003. He earned his PhD in Political Islam from Birmingham University-Britain 2007. The title of his dissertation was Compatibility between Islam and democracy; Shiism and democracy under Wilayat Al-Faqih, Iran as a case study.

During the July 2006 War with Israel, Mousawi held the position of editor in chief of Al-Intiqad (Criticism), a weekly Hezbollah newspaper, and was much sought after by international reporters for information and his insights. He appeared widely in the international media and was critical of the destruction of Lebanon and the Bush administration providing Israel with a green light to continue the slaughter while the international community was calling for a ceasefire.

Following the cessation of hostilities, the Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM) invited Mousawi to address peace activists in Belfast, Dublin and Galway about the summer conflict. This October he was invited back but was refused a visa without explanation.

When Irish Justice Minister Brian Lenihan denied Mousawi entry to Ireland, it followed Lenihan’s meeting with a delegation from Ireland’s zionist lobby. In addition, the Bush administration had pressured Ireland into rejecting his visa application, according to reports in the Irish media.

The IAWM issued a statement last month denouncing the decision as “an outrageous act of political censorship” and a “disgraceful attack on the anti-war movement” in Ireland. “The ban makes nonsense of the frequent claims by this [Irish] government that they favor dialogue and international diplomacy to resolve the problems of the Middle East,” Richard Boyd Barret, the head of the IAWM, said at the time.

“Anyone even remotely concerned with free speech and the right to engage in open political debate in this country should be very alarmed that the US government is now deciding what viewpoints can and cannot be heard in Ireland,” he added.

“I’m only involved in academia and media,” Mousawi avers, adding that the only “crime” he has ever committed is to openly express his political views, which he insists remain within the boundaries of legitimate intellectual discourse.

“We should allow for open debate,” Mousawi told the Daily Star. “After all, I come and I only say words. If my words are worth hearing, people should give me the opportunity to speak. If my words are rubbish, it’s worth the opportunity to refute what I say, and to undermine my logic if what I say is not logical. I’m a staunch defender of political freedoms and freedom of speech.”

In February 2005, just one week after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, he invited five Rabbis to a conference in Beirut and hosted them as guests on his political talk show. He also points out that Hezbollah was among the first to condemn the 9/11 attacks as ‘terrorism’ as well as to condemn the murder of Lebanon’s PM Rafik Hariri.

“I believe governments and politicians have failed to address the problems of the people,” he explains. “I believe there is another role that we have to play at the grassroots level, as NGOs and as members of civil society. There is a lot of diplomacy that could go on at this level. We don’t have to wait for officials to take the lead; we have seen what they have brought: nothing but disasters. So I want to highlight the need to interact at this level.”

Mousawi rejects the notion that there is a ‘clash of civilization’. “I believe that all over the world, people want the same things. We all want to be with our families; we all want to come back to our kids at the end of the day and bring bread to their tables and give them a good education, to live in harmony and peace.” Addressing the World Against War International Peace Conference in London last December, Mousawi told the 1200 delegates from 26 countries that he had a two month old son named Issa (Jesus), and one named Muhammad. “If I have another one I will name him Moses”, he added.

Mousawi occasionally writes for Beirut’s English language Daily Star and has been a commentator for CNN, ABC, and CBS. For many years, Mousawi has also worked extensively with Americans and Europeans arranging and interpreting interviews and is considered one of the best-informed people on political events in Lebanon and Palestine.

“I would say that we are in the midst of a war of terminology,” Dr. Mousawi asserts. “It is a war of definitions that we should pay attention to.”

Next Stop England

The Lobby next moved to bar Mousawi from England, with Henry Grunwald, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews as point man to lead the attack. Following the Zionist Lobby’s advisory to its affiliates, apparently without bothering with fact checking, Grunwald repeated the error that went out internationally to pro-Zionist media outlets that Mousawi is ‘Director of Al Manar, the Hezbollah News Service’, or as the Jerusalem Post claimed, “a senior official of the Al Manar Channel”. He in fact was never in that position and ceased working in the English language office nearly two years ago.

The Lobby also lined up Baroness Neville-Jones, the Shadow Security Minister and former Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Baroness, who has yet to criticize any of the atrocities committed by Israel in Palestine or Lebanon, apparently knows a threat to England when she is told by the Lobby about one–never mind the quality of her supplied facts.

After meeting with leaders of the British Chamber of Deputies, she felt “Mousawi’s presence is not conducive to the public good,” and that he might “preach hate” if he were allowed in. Yet the Baroness claimed not to know much about Mousawi except that he was (once again!) the fantasy non-Director of Al Manar Television—hardly a promising basis for an informed decision to bar someone from a country.

Unwilling to correct her misinformation, the Baroness’ press release cascaded into headlines for other Zionist outlets internationally who were quite prepared to repeat it. The Jerusalem Post ran a headline which blared ‘Hezbollah television station editor’s entry into Britain angers Jewish leaders’ and the Jewish Chronicle and Forward followed suit with the Jewish Chronicle of November 16 2007 headlining ‘Ban Hezbollah man from UK!’

The Baroness enlisted her fellow Zionist Conservative Party Chairman David Cameron, who was already under Zionist pressure, to ask England’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown to deny Mousawi entry to Britain, apparently because he did “not trust the ‘Arabists’ in the Home Office to do a proper job”.

“Are you aware that the Irish government recently refused entry to Ibrahim Mousawi, head of Hezbollah’s viciously anti-Semitic TV station, Al-Manar?”, Cameron tsk tsked to the British premier during Question Time in the House of Commons. “And just what approach will Her Majesty’s government take when Mr. Mousawi attempts to enter the UK to speak at a conference?” Cameron demanded. Brown demurred, apparently sensing that Cameron, not for the first time, had his facts wrong.

In 2002 AIPAC member and advisor Jeffrey Goldberg appeared in Beirut and interviewed Mousawi among others. Cloaking his extreme zionism, Goldberg posed as a journalist and wrote a substantially false article for the New Yorker issue of October 14, 2002, implying that Mousawi was anti-Semitic. Caught in his lies, the record was clarified and Mousawi vindicated but the New Yorker never did apologize nor retract Goldberg’s allegations.

Answering the Lobby charges of anti-Semitism, Mousawi categorically denies the accusation that he has even thought of promoting “anti-Semitic” views. “I would challenge anyone to provide evidence of any word that I have said that is hateful or anti-Semitic,” he says, adding that he himself has been a victim of discrimination and has therefore made a special effort to eschew any form of prejudice. “I have nothing against Jews. I have nothing against any human being, whether because of religion, gender or political affiliation,” he explains. “I’m a human being who believes in dignity, independence and freedom. I’m a bridge-builder and I’ve always been an advocate of dialogue and discussion.”

Mousawi’s Views

Mousawi affirms the view that in the Middle East the struggle is not with Judaism but with Zionism. Zionism is understood in much of the Middle East as an ideology that is the enemy of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and an ideology that informed the theft of Palestine from its rightful inhabitants who are overwhelmingly Christians and Muslims.

And what of the views Cameron and his Zionist marionettes so strongly felt would not be conducive to the public good?

Here’s Mousawi at the London Conference, as reported by the Daily Star:

Yes, we believe in religion, but this does not bring us to a place where we do not respect others or we do not recognize others If religion is not going to make me a better human being who cares for any human being, I don’t need it. … [Religion] is not to make me fanatic, irresponsible, or feel that I’m deemed to salvation while others are going to hell. No, this is not what we want. If you are really a true believer, you should care for any human being, whoever he is, wherever he lives.

During his speech, Mousawi also had a response for those who would question the idea of inviting a Hezbollah media man to an anti-war event.

Who can talk about [the need to] stop the wars and [achieve] peace more than those who are suffering from the occupation and the atrocities and the massacres and the aggressions? We want genuine peace. We don’t want compromises and we don’t want to go again and again to the same vicious cycle every 10 years or five years, where you make a temporary settlement and you end up with another war coming. The roots of the problem, the roots of the cause of the problem, should be addressed.

Affirming Hezbollah’s right to resist occupation and denying that the group engages in terrorism, Mousawi argues:

Hezbollah is a legitimate resistance group that is fighting to regain occupied land like the Shebaa Farms and to secure the return of prisoners held by Israel.

Many people try to demonize the resistance, but resistance is the right of people under occupation.

If there wasn’t an occupation, there wouldn’t be resistance. I would support any nation or people if they were occupied and exercising their right to resist an occupying force.

I don’t believe anyone wants to have wars. But in this part of the world, we have for decades been the victims of occupation and war.”

A durable peace, Mousawi argues, “cannot happen unless the core issues are addressed in a just way.” This is the same message Mousawi has presented to journalists and conferences all over the world.

More than a decade ago at an international conference in Stuttgart, Germany in 1997, Mousawi demonstrated a grasp of the essence of the major religions and drew applause from the international audience when he spoke about what being a Muslim meant to him:

When I say that I am a Muslim, I am saying that I am a Christian and I am saying that I am a Jew, for we all believe in the same God, we are all the sons and daughters of Abraham and we are all of the Book and revere the wisdom of all the Prophets.

Mousawi tells his audiences that war is the biggest terrorism and that the central teachings of the three Abrahamic religions admonish all to build bridges not walls. His ideas are in the tradition of a long line of Shia scholars and human rights advocates including the Shia clerics Mohammad Mahdi Shamseddine, Imam Musa Sadr, and Sayeed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah — all known for their life’s work for social welfare and their calls for dialogue and ecumenism work with Christians and all sects.

Overcoming Zionism

Challenging the bias (at best) and disinformation of the presented univocality of the Zionist narrative serves the cause of justice. In 1954 the tipping point came with Welch’s rebuke. In our own era, zionism is increasingly being criticized and spurned even by former adherents, with more Israelis questioning its ideological underpinnings. As has often been noted, debate is often freer in Israel than it is in the United States. Most notably, some of the children of the high-profile zionist founders of the state of Israel have turned their backs on this legacy, including the grandson of the right-wing PM Menachem Begin, 32 year-old Avinadav Begin, seen regularly protesting at the West Bank side of the Apartheid Wall over the past few years. In addition to Menachem Begin’s grandson, we also have no less than the Irgun-steeped Ehud Olmert’s daughter Dana attending a rally during the war on Lebanon.

Avrum Burg, a former Knesset speaker, Shimon Peres’ protégé, and Israel Agency director has also recently had his bombshell book released, Defeating Hitler, and left the country to take up French citizenship. Burg is in favor of abrogating the Law of Return, compares Israel to Germany and sees the end of the Zionist enterprise.

Many prominent international figures outside of Israel have been moved to speak up for Palestine and argue for sanctions. South Africans Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ronnie Kasrils and British doctor Colin Green, for example, cogently make the case for boycotting apartheid and supporting justice for all who live in the land of Canaan.

Yet this free debate among advocates of peace and justice in the Middle East such as Mousawi is being muzzled. While European law keep some Israeli generals and Ministers from visiting or grounded on runways lest they be arrested for war crimes upon alighting, visiting Lebanese, Palestinian and other scholars from the Arab and Muslim world are being denied entry, their voices stifled.

Howard Zinn has recently lent his support to set up The Committee for Open Discussion of Zionism http://www.codz.org/, formed in response to the active stifling and suppression of alternative views on Israel/Palestine and Zionism in the United States and beyond. CODZ sees the IFAW as:

… a well-organized campaign to silence dissent on campus and to get people to look at all Muslims as “Islamo-Fascists,” creating a dangerous atmosphere for Muslim students who have sustained so much hate and abuse since 9/11. IFAW seeks to solidify the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” call of the Bush administration, to equate any questioning of Zionism with support for terrorism, and to further beat the drums for war on Iran.

The zionist attack on Mousawi is part of the general Lobby campaign against Hezbollah and its supporters, institutions, staff, as well as anyone who seeks discussions with the movement. It is not only about Dr. Mousawi. Many scholars who work for Hezbollah affiliated institutions has been subjected to harassment and campaigns to deny them the right to speak at Conferences, to hold interviews, engage in dialogue and to travel to the US and sometimes England and parts of Europe.

In the pursuit of justice, the growing debate on Zionism, both in the Middle East and beyond, is a much needed, urgent and legitimate one.

All people of goodwill should support Dr. Mousawi’s right to free speech, not least so that, in the words of John Berger, “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com. Ann El Khoury is a researcher in Sydney, Australia. Her site is at www.peoplesgeography.com

Send.a.message–the website mentioned in the video–is HERE, check them out.
Related:

• ‘Art Attack’: meet the new creative dissenters
• Global messages cover Israeli-Palestinian wall

These two short video clips are around 2 and a half minutes each and are sourced from the BBC and Al Jazeera.

Painting peace on Israel’s concrete canvas - 18 Jan 07

Mystery Graffiti Artist *Banksy* Tags Birthplace Of Jesus

See also More guerilla graffiti in the Holy Land: Israel’s apartheid barrier as a canvas

Amid the illegal occupation and the murderous blockade of Gaza by the IOF, here’s some inspired dissent. Artist Peter Kennard meets members of a new generation of artistic dissenters in a movement spearheaded by artist Banksy, whose art has featured in Occupied Palestine as well as his native UK.

Art attack

by Peter Kennard | New Statesman | 17 January 2008

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It’s Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called “Santa’s Ghetto”. Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.

We are living through an exciting time for political art. I have been an artist for 40 years, and my work has always focused on political and social issues. In the 1970s, I started making photo montage work, drawing on imagery from the Vietnam War and the row over nuclear armaments (a retrospective opens at the Pump House Gallery this month). Since the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, I have been collaborating with a younger artist, Cat Picton Phillipps, developing new techniques and using digital technology to expose the lies that led to the invasion and the subsequent humanitarian disaster.

Over this period, our work has become linked to a group of young artists who work outside the official art world. Most of them started out painting graffiti on walls. The central figure in this group is Banksy, but although he attracts most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a growing band of talented, politically committed artists. Our associates come from Spain and Italy, the US, Britain and Palestine. Since the era of the Bush/Blair war in Iraq, this movement has become increasingly politicised, just as my generation was politicised by the war in Vietnam. These are artists who want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market, which has more of a stranglehold on art than ever. They combine creativity with protest, insisting that art should be more than the icing on the cake for the super-rich.

We arrived in Bethlehem with four fellow artists: Blu, an Italian who has painted on walls from Bologna to Buenos Aires; Sam3, from Spain; the long-standing Banksy collaborator Paul Insect, from Britain; and Gee Vaucher, another Brit and the only other artist of my generation. The rest are all in their thirties and come from street-art backgrounds. All of them are well informed about the Middle East and came to Bethlehem to show their solidarity with the Palestinians.

Banksy had been to the West Bank a number of times to paint on the Separation Wall. He knows and understands the situation and had a team of focused, sussed people working with him. They found a disused fast-food joint in Manger Square and managed to rent it. The idea was to show a combination of western and Palestinian artists. The art was available to buy on site only, so if you wanted to get hold of the latest Banksy or any of the other artworks, you would have to travel to Bethlehem to place a bid. This was important, because Bethlehem is being starved of its tourist trade as visitors are bussed in to see the Church of the Nativity and bussed out an hour later back to Israel. All proceeds from the sale, which exceeded $1m, went to local charities.

For our contribution, Cat and I decided to print a dollar bill across 18 sheets of the Jerusalem Post, ripped through to expose images of pre-Naqba Palestine. The pictures show the richness of Palestine’s history and the diversity of its culture - a sobering antidote to the stereotype of a violent, irrational people that we so often see on the news. We wanted to make the work in Bethlehem because taking finished pieces over would be difficult, given Israel’s heavy and ever-changing restrictions on what and who can travel in to the Palestinian territories.

We teamed up with a group of Palestinians, who helped to get hold of materials and sort out logistics. They also gave us all a window on life in the West Bank, with looming Israeli settlements and endless checkpoints. Every night we would pile into a kebab restaurant, where we would drink and dance, arguing over and discussing that day’s work. One night over dinner, the Palestinians recounted how they had been held and tortured by the Israeli authorities while they were still in their mid-teens. It was extraordinary how welcoming they were to this motley band of artists. All the privations and restrictions have only increased the Palestinians’ resilience and their desire to communicate with the outside world.

Through these friends we found a commercial printing house in Hebron, which got involved in sorting out our highly unconventional printing needs. This involved printing a giant dollar across many sheets of newspaper and also making a giant print to plaster on the Separation Wall. The printers immediately committed their time and energy to the project, and ended up printing for Banksy and the other artists.

Through this process of making, the people of Bethlehem became involved in what the work was saying. After we pasted our picture on the wall, we went for tea in the cafe opposite. The cafe owner, whose business has been destroyed by the wall, told us he appreciated the statement we had plastered on to the cement that he has to stare at every day of his life.

Sticking up a poster or painting the Separation Wall in the West Bank might sound inconsequential, but these are highly practical ways to help, in contrast to the intellectual interventions prevalent in much contemporary art. They contribute to a town and a people that are having their lifeblood strangled out of them.

In this context, it is important that the work communicates directly to the Palestinian people. While there has been a move to take on contemporary issues in a direct way in the theatre, in visual art the idea still holds that if you have something to say about the world, you have to hide it behind theory and obscurity. It sometimes seems that Britain’s art colleges turn out experts in camouflage, rather than fine art.

The pressure of world events is so great that it is increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of art for art’s sake. Radical art and politics converge in times of crisis, and that is happening now. I know, from my experience as a tutor at the Royal College of Art and at the University of the Arts in London, that the ironies of the Nineties YBA movement are now a thing of the past. Many art students and young artists are searching for ways to make a direct connection between their awareness of how things are in the world and their own art practice.

This involves thinking about not only the form of the art itself, but also the process of making. There are many collaborations taking place across media and disciplines, and artists are looking for new methods of distribution.

Unlike in my youth, there is no organised “left” into which artists can slot, but there is a concrete wall, 425 miles long, and we can turn it into an international canvas of dissent.

Four to watch

Blu burst on to the public-art scene after the success of his contributions to the “Urban Edge” show in Milan in 2005. His reputation is built on expansive, surreal, often aggressive wall and pavement murals. Though renowned for his playfulness, acclaimed pieces from 2007, such as Fantoche in Switzerland, Letter A in New York and Reclaim Your City in Berlin, have a more macabre tone.

Suleiman Mansour co-founded al-Wasiti Art Centre in east Jerusalem, which he now directs, and went on to lead the New Vision artists’ group, which proved influential during the first intifada. A pioneer of resistance art, Mansour makes work that revolves around the Palestinian struggle. He was head of the League of Palestinian Artists for four years, and won the Nile Award at the 1998 Cairo Biennale as well as the Palestine Prize for the Visual Arts the same year. He is famous for using locally sourced materials, such as mud and henna, in his pieces.

Sam3 (Samuel Marín) comes from Granada in southern Spain, where his ephemeral long, black silhouettes haunt the cityscape. Famous works include his 12 Shadows project for AlterArte and the iconic Erase Yourself, a silent protest against the civic legal authorities for removing graffiti in Barcelona.

Paul Insect is a London-based ex-designer whose pioneering of “steampunk”, a mixture of Gothic Victoriana and futuristic themes, has proved popular with the British arts intelligentsia. In July last year, Damien Hirst bought his entire “Bullion” show at the Lazarides Gallery in Soho. His painting Unicorn sold for an estimated £24,500 at Sotheby’s last month.

Ben du Preez

It is doubtful that it was a failed attempt to assassinate Ambassador Feltman. Had they targeted him it is likely the Ambassador would be dead.

… For many in Lebanon, the American Embassy under the Bush administration has become an Israel Embassy in the way that John Bolton became a second Israeli UN Ambassador. Once an Embassy joins one side in an internal conflict as it did in 1982 it loses its diplomatic status and under international law can be targeted as if a participant in hostilities against the Country.

What little credibility the Bush administration had was lost when it intensified the US record of facilitating Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, a string of five wars armed and funded, largely unknowingly, by American taxpayers and without their consent during 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. The Bush performance this week in occupied Palestine erases any doubt about its objectivity.

Few in Lebanon, Palestine, or the wider Middle East take Bush for anything more than a dangerous zealot in the service of Israel, not America. Bush’s midlife crisis exhibited by his dancing around with a sword in Saudi returns him full circle to his alcohol fuelled toga fraternity parties.

What might be a sensible prescription to remedy this mess? Read on for the article in full, and click on image thumbnails for the often unabashedly provocative full-size cartoons by Latuff et. al.

The Message to Bush: Remove Your Crusader Outpost!
The Bombing at Qarantina

By Franklin Lamb
Qarantina, Lebanon

That word again, Qarantina.

Qarantina was the site of yesterday’s message to the Bush administration where a 33 lb bomb killed three and wounded 21. The explosion destroyed the bomb resistant titanium reinforced US four wheel drive SUV which Embassy security agents liked to use to give their girlfriends rides and make fast food pickups for Embassy staff. This day it was being used for an Embassy errand, a drop off at Beirut’s airport. Qarantina, forever etched in the black annals of Palestinian history is the area of east Beirut near the Port where on April 13, 1976 Phalange forces killed 26 Palestinian bus riders*. A grisly crime, followed by another massacre of Palestinians months later in nearby Tal al-Zattar Refugee Camp which began on August 12, 1976 and according to scholar Helena Cobban killed 1,500 Palestinians in one day, and eventually as many as 3,000 according to other reports. Qarantina and Talal-Zattar. Some historians argue that these events ignited Lebanon’s 15 year and Civil War which killed and injured 152,000 and from which Lebanon has never recovered. [*correction: this occurred at Ain al-Rammaneh, though there was a Palestinian camp at Qarantina for a while].

Some Lebanese geographical place names, like Qarantina and Tel al-Zattar return to the world’s attention from time to time. Another is Qana, site of the April 18, 1993 Israeli massacre of more than 106 Lebanese and wounding of nearly 400, and Qana again, July 25, 2006 site of the massacre and maiming of dozens more.

Yet another is Khiam, the Israel created and closely monitored detention Center, near the blueline, and so often in the news due to its torture and murder chambers and infamous utility poles where prisoners were routinely handcuffed naked in freezing temperatures and left for days and mockingly given electric wire shocks to keep them, sometimes unsuccessfully, from freezing. During the July 2006 War, Israel carpet bombed Khiam, futilely trying, like the killer in Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart, to erase its two decade old crime scene, which following Israel’s May 24, 2000 expulsion from Lebanon was turned into a grim ‘museum’ by its liberators.

Ironically, for all the tons of US bombs Israel used against the former prison at Khiam, the metal torture box where a recalcitrant prisoner would be squeezed inside an oven or freezer, depending on the season, and a deranged sadist would then beat on the metal walls with a hammer inducing hearing loss and psychological disorientation and well as dislocated joints. Ironically, the Khiam torture box and the torture pole, no doubt both Israeli July 2006 bombing targets, remained undamaged during the intensive assault-erect today amidst the rubble, a monument and testament to Lebanese defiance and resistance.

Quaratina’s blast late yesterday afternoon was heard by this observer as he was weaving in and out of Beirut traffic on his motorcycle pleased that he had a good way to get home without sitting in traffic half the evening. These days in Lebanon when one hears of bomb blast the first word that comes to mind is who. Who was the target? Who were the perpetrators?

The organizers of the bombing of the Embassy car on its way back to the American Embassy at suburban Aukar, north of Beirut, are unlikely to be identified anytime soon, just as none of the past 21 bombings over the past 30 months in Beirut have been solved.

But this bombing seems different somehow.

It is doubtful that it was a failed attempt to assassinate Ambassador Feltman. Had they targeted him it is likely the Ambassador would be dead.

Murderous as it turned out to be for those killed and wounded, and while all terrorist acts are fundamentally designed as means of communication, the Qarantina blast, using 33 lbs. of high explosive is meant to tell the Bush administration something. Specifically that the Bush Administration is widely viewed in Lebanon and the Middle East, and increasingly in America itself, as a criminal and terrorist regime, and that it must depart Lebanon post haste.

The Qarantina blast is advising Bush and Rice to expedite US Ambassador Feltman’s long delayed and overdue departure and send a helicopter if necessary to get him to Cyprus for a plane back to Washington. Don’t even use Lebanon’s airport.

The message is also that if Bush and/or Israel act on their plans to attack Iran or Lebanon or Syria, the Embassy should be closed sooner rather than destroyed later. Few in Lebanon doubt that if Israel or the Bush administration bomb Iran that the American University of Beirut, bombed in 1991, and other US Rumsfeldian ‘legitimate targets of opportunity’ will be attacked.

Security guards at AUB’s four main entrances, Main Gate, Dorm Gate, Medical Gate and Sea Gate are on heightened alert this morning. List of targets found in suspected Salafist offices routinely list the Embassy, AUB and American businesses.

Despite Ms. Rice’s tough talk from a Saudi Palace that: “The United States will, of course, not be deterred in its efforts to help the Lebanese people, to help the democratic forces in Lebanon resist interference in their affairs,” the Embassy closure may be imminent with a possible reopening with the new US administration.

For many in Lebanon, the American Embassy under the Bush administration has become an Israel Embassy in the way that John Bolton became a second Israeli UN Ambassador. Once an Embassy joins one side in an internal conflict as it did in 1982 it loses its diplomatic status and under international law can be targeted as if a participant in hostilities against the Country.

What little credibility the Bush administration had was lost when it intensified the US record of facilitating Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, a string of five wars armed and funded, largely unknowingly, by American taxpayers and without their consent during 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. The Bush performance this week in occupied Palestine erases any doubt about its objectivity.

Few in Lebanon, Palestine, or the wider Middle East take Bush for anything more than a dangerous zealot in the service of Israel, not America. Bush’s midlife crisis exhibited by his dancing around with a sword in Saudia returns him full circle to his alcohol fuelled toga fraternity parties.

The Arabs, indeed the world, including the Zionist handlers realize that Bush and Rice are on a futile fantasy tour and will achieve nothing to resolve the question of Palestine, the central cause of the conflict in the Middle East. Which, of course, is the whole idea.

Any rationale that the American Embassy is dong legitimate work for American citizens here and should remain in Lebanon was severely weakened during the July 2006 war, when Embassy staff stiffed US citizens and left them stranded and in mortal danger in Tyre. This occurred when the Embassy cancelled a rescue ship because of Israeli attacks near the Port of Tyre, and ordered Embassy staff not to take the US citizen telephone calls because it might “tie up our lines.” “Just drive to Beirut for Christ’s sake,” ASC # 1 (American Service Center employee number one –”US Embassy consular staff can’t use real name anymore for their own security) advised some American citizens who did manage to get through by phone, apparently oblivious to the fact that Israel was bombing any vehicle that moved south of the Litani River with weapons paid for by the same frantic and desperate US citizens. Anger is still intense in Lebanon and the States over these callous breaches of diplomatic responsibility and national duty.

Added to this is the practice of Consular staff illegally confiscating and refusing to return passports of US citizens who have been critical of US Middle East policy. While the Embassy entreats US citizens to leave Lebanon these days it prevents some from doing so and places them in possible danger. A US Federal Court lawsuit is soon to be filed in Washington DC regarding one such case.

The Bush administration’s intense and continuing interference in Lebanon’s internal affairs rendered it guiltier of doing what it claims others are doing. Many of Lebanon’s political leaders have asked it to stop. It ignores these calls and sends instead a parade of Welch Club adherents on almost weekly visits with more orders, commands, and threats.

Bush would do well to close up shop here thereby protecting American interests and let the new administration offer an Ambassador to Lebanon. And next time hopefully based on the standards laid down at the 1815 Congress of Vienna when diplomatic immunity was offered for plenipotentiaries from nations who presented letters of credence and pledged to refrain from using their posts to undermine the sovereignty of the country which accredited and received them. This action would serve American citizens as well as the people of the Middle East.

The next administration can open a new phase of honest relations with Lebanon by a whole series of friendly and needed acts, including but not limited to these:

1.

Order the delivery to UNIFIL of the Israeli firing logs to limit the continuing loss of life from the US ordnance fired into Lebanon under penalty of freezing US aid;

2.

Permanently ban all shipments of cluster munitions to Israel;

3.

Make good on its pledge made at the United Nations conference in Geneva this week to create a rapid reaction force to defuse cluster bombs left over from conflicts and assign that force to Lebanon. Join the nearly 100 countries an the International Committee of the Red Cross, and support the “Oslo Process”, the initiative launched by the Norwegian government in 2007 which aims to produce a legally binding treaty banning cluster munitions by the end of 2008.

The current US position which supports the use of cluster bombs if used and defused properly, and that argues that efforts should focus on ensuring countries know how to use the weapons in a way that is in full accordance with international humanitarian law, is patent nonsense. The July 2006 war shows that the Israeli M-85 cluster bomb which it sells for $10 each because of its self-destruct feature does not work and this mechanism will not work because the cluster bombs are used in civilian areas and wide open spaces for which they are designed.

The only humanitarian solution is to ban the anti-personal cluster bomb completely. Israel has demonstrated in 30 years of its use against civilians in Lebanon that it is ineffective against military targets but is devastating against civilians, both during and after the conflict.

4.

Offer Lebanon a Marshall Plan for reconstruction projects necessitated by 30 years of Israeli bombardment with American weapons;

5.

Demand and enforce, if necessary, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanese territory including Shebaa Farms and the village of Ghajar.

6.

End American interference and support for certain factions and extend respect and dialogue with Lebanon’s opposition which in fact represents a significant majority of Lebanon’s citizens;

7.

Help more than 12% of Lebanon’s population, i.e. the Palestinian refugees, return to their land and homes in Palestine by forcing, if necessary, the full implementation of UNSC Resolution 242;

8.

Remove the Lebanese Resistance from the silly US ‘terrorism list” which makes a mockery of American ideals of the right to resist occupation and American commitments for respecting the choices of voters in elections from other countries as we ask them to respect ours.

These acts by the next US administration will go a long way in restoring the loss of respect our country has suffered from the current Cheney-Bush-Israel lobby cabal. And it may well prevent American expulsion from the region.

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com

Previous posts on Christmas and Bethlehem can be found here:

• Bush and Blair banned from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity
• Christmas in Bethlehem
• Occupation affecting Christians, too
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism
• Occupied Bethlehem: How children are faring behind the Wall
• Success! Bethlehem twins with local Sydney Council

Organisations

• Open Bethlehem
• The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
• Twinning with Palestine Network — International Page

Cartoon by Leunig

Caption: “Look at that! Brilliant! You kill the leader and you nip the whole movement in the bud.”

Bethlehem Today–State of Emergency (download powerpoint)

Rachel’s Tomb (download powerpoint)

The Open Bethlehem Campaign (download powerpoint)