The U.S. State Department has announced it is sponsoring a “New Media Technology” delegation to Iraq to “explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.” Of all of the areas in Iraq in desperate need of attention, its “emerging new media industry” is not the one that pops to mind. Things like clean water, electricity, right of safe return for refugees and an end to the occupation seem more pressing than increasing Nouri al Maliki’s Twitter followers. But unfortunately, that’s how U.S. priorities in Iraq seem to work.
We must make space for all the genocides and all the traumas. The profound multi-generational fractures, the almost genetic fear of being hunted, the damage done to us individually and collectively, the resilience and desperate need to hold onto and cherish our cultures…these are just some of the things all of us who have experienced such mass violence have in common, whether Native American, African American, Jewish or Palestinian.
I refuse to enter peace and justice work leaving my own family’s unspeakable suffering at the door. It informs me daily. It’s inextricably connected to who I am and how I see the world. And so no one else should either.
The Holocaust simply has to stop being the only horror in the room, just as anti-semitism has to cease being the only discrimination that matters. Those of us in this movement need to reframe the space so we can all be present, and we can all learn from each other, and we can all lift each other up. That should be obvious.
Just 13% of CIA employees speak a foreign language nearly five years after the 9/11 Commission urged the agency to expand its ranks of bilingual operatives and analysts to help thwart future terrorist attacks, according to CIA data provided at USA TODAY’s request.
When the nearly 200 nations of the world get down to try to hammer out a common position on human rights, you can expect a fair amount of hypocrisy and blinkered vision to characterise the outcome. So it was with the United Nations Conference on Racism that took place in the South African city of Durban in 2001, and looks like happening with the review conference that opened in Geneva yesterday, with Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as star attendee.
The first conference, in the post-apartheid host country, was heavy on the wrongs and suffering inflicted on Africans through slavery and colonialism, and light on the wrongdoings of Africa’s contemporary leaders. The review conference, post-September 11, 2001, gives more attention to prejudice against Muslims and Islam, while keeping up the general anti-Western slant – as would be expected from a conference with countries like Libya and Cuba on the steering committee.
Yet the last-minute decision by the United States and Australia – following the Netherlands, Canada and Italy – not to attend the Geneva conference is a bit defeatist. A country that has just elected an African-American as its president and begun reaching out to Islamic countries could have held its head high in such a forum. Indeed until last week, the US State Department was claiming success in deleting many of the more egregious contents of the Geneva draft declaration that’s been kicking around the diplomatic circuit in recent months. Out has gone a demand for a new crime of “defamation of religion”, an insistence on slavery reparations, and specific condemnation of Israel as racist. British officials, who will still attend along with French counterparts, were quoted as saying the current draft text is acceptable if “adequate language” is included on the Holocaust and anti-semitism.
Far better for Western and Israeli diplomats to have gritted their teeth, argued against Mr Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying views if repeated, and lobbied for further changes in the draft. As indeed happened in Durban: despite poisonous anti-Israel diatribes on the conference floor (and even more in a simultaneous NGO forum), the final declaration said the Holocaust must never be forgotten, and while calling for a Palestinian state, also backed Israel’s right to security. Much of the campaign by Israel and Jewish diaspora groups against the Durban Review has been jumping at the shadows of what might happen. As is the reasoning of the Foreign Minister, Stephen Smith, for Australia’s pull-out. If his $35 million campaign to win a UN Security Council seat is to get anywhere, his diplomats will have to get on the floor and wrestle in talkfests like this.
This is curious. Israeli-made videos warning citizens not to evade military service, with India as a backdrop:
The Indian blogger comments:
The funny thing is that they’re worried about explaining themselves to Europeans while in India and leave Indians entirely out of the picture (literally, I think those are non-Indian actors playing the waiters).
The farce currently taking place in Geneva, known as Durban II, has already thrown up a veritable collection of freaks, distractions, nutty celebrities (what the hell is Angelina Jolie’s dad, Jon Voight, doing there?) and agendas. What follows is a small selection of the issues raised (and yet more evidence that the Western world, led by the US, Australia etc, continues to shield Israel from accepting responsibility for its horrific crimes against the Palestinians). Zionist activists were ready.
Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges wonders when the US will take seriously its shameful history:
Israel and the United States, which could be charged under international law with crimes against humanity for actions in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. Barack Obama may be president, but the United States has no intention of accepting responsibility or atoning for past crimes, including the use of torture, its illegal wars of aggression, slavery and the genocide on which the country was founded. We, like Israel, prefer to confuse lies we tell about ourselves with fact.
Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, challenges those who compare the Jewish Holocaust to the occupation of Palestinian land (as a response, I presume, to the charges at Durban II that the Jewish state is committing genocide against the Palestinians, as well as marking Holocaust Remembrance Day):
I have never called Israel Defense Forces soldiers Nazis and I never will. The Holocaust and the Nazis could not and should not be compared to any other inhumane behaviors.
In Europe, this designation is becoming more and more common. The IDF are Nazis and Israel is a Nazi, Jews afflicting unto others all that was done to them.
A large part of the world’s leftists – many of whom consider themselves to be friends of Israel, some of them even Jewish – see the Israeli occupation as a manifestation of renewed Nazism.
I reject that comparison with anger and contempt. It is incorrect, horrifically infuriating and harmful to the just Palestinian cause. The occupation is cruel enough, and while comparison to the Holocaust not only cheapens that historical memory, it also undervalues the crimes of the Israeli occupation.
Muzzlewatch has one of its key players in Geneva providing essential updates of proceedings, not least examining Zionist groups that preach human rights but in fact are designed to focus on abuses in every corner in the globel except Western nations or Palestine:
So hopefully by now, you’re getting the gist of the Israeli government’s campaign. They work closely with various NGOs that make up the pro-occupation/pro-Israel lobby. The Israel Project, for example, functions as a PR arm.
It is a very ridiculous and bitter thing that a president who in his own country witnesses a high number of human rights violations… where women are deprived of the most basic rights such as [choosing] their own clothes, and prisons are full of political and ideological prisoners… talks about racism and human rights violations of other UN countries.
One of these so-called human rights groups, UN Watch, surprised the Libyan chair by presenting a victim of the Muammar Qaddafi regime:
And the Jewish Telegraphic Agency produced this video about the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel gatherings in Geneva:
What does all this tell us about Durban II? A few things come to mind. Israeli policies are seemingly beyond debate. Crimes in Gaza and the West Bank are not really crimes at all because Iran also abuses citizens and therefore let’s focus on those. The Western states are fearful of allowing the world – and let’s face it, a great proportion of the globe are present in Geneva, aside from a handful of Western states – to talk about their crimes. Allied bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Biased.
The Australian Jewish community is overjoyed that Australia has withdrawn. Being potentially “marred with anti-Semitism” was seemingly a good enough reason to put out.
As a Jew who writes extensively about Israel/Palestine, I have no desire for Iran to speak for me on human rights (and my recent book, The Blogging Revolution, details the woeful record of the Islamic Republic.) But the fierce resistence to even examine the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and its well documented recent abuses in Gaza is shameful. These are not actions of a civilised nation. It is the behaviour that we would condemn if done by a relatively unknown Third World nation, but Israel is seemingly untouchable.
Well, it’s not anymore. Any number of activists, journalists, human rights workers and lawyers are increasingly speaking out about Palestine. Until the Western political and elite understand this, resistance will continue. Self-appointed Jewish leaders and their Western backers are trying to stop the inevitable; Israel is the new South Africa and will soon be viewed in exactly the same way that that apartheid regime was seen.
I don’t write this with glee but the madness of Durban II won’t change anything, other than convince a handful of smug Jews that the world hates Israel and Jews. A handful do, most do not.
Friends on the Earth Middle East release a statement today about an issue that receives far too little coverage in the media and on this site. Environmental concerns in the region and Israel’s withholding of essential services to Palestinians:
EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) calls on the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to replace the failed Joint Water Committee (JWC) with a new joint water management structure. FoEME calls on the Quartet led by the new Administration of US President Barak Obama to focus on the dire Palestinian water economy as a matter of urgency and help the parties replace the JWC with a new institution that empowers both sides as equal partners.
“It is time to replace the failed mechanism of the Joint Water Committee, established under Oslo, with an institution where Palestinians and Israelis are true partners in both water supply and management responsibilities,” said Nader Khateeb, Palestinian Director of Friends of the Earth Middle East.
As earlier reports of FoEME detailedand the latest World Bank report highlighted, the Joint Water Committee has failed the interests of both peoples, not providing the water quantities needed to Palestinians and not protecting shared Israeli/Palestinian water resources from large scale pollution.
“The irony is that due to the water crises, following 5 consecutive years of drought, pollution largely from Palestinian sources poses an ever increasing threat to the declining shared water reserves,” said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli Director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. “A key problem with the JWC is that it has disempowered the Palestinians from being able to take responsibility for water management. The Palestinians receive so little of the shared water, that Israelis must ask themselves, what incentive do Palestinians have to protect shared water from pollution?” he added.
In 2008, FoEME released a Model Water Agreement that called for the replacement of the Joint Water Committee with a new body where equivalent powers and responsibilities would lie with both sides covering all shared water resources.
As the World Bank report highlights the present structure of the JWC gives virtual veto power just to the Israeli side on all shared water issues.
“After 15 years of JWC failure, the results have proven to be catastrophic. It’s urgent to free the water sector and water needs of both peoples from the conflict”, continued Nader Khateeb, FoEME Palestinian Director.
EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East is a regional environmental organization where Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians are working together to promote sustainable development and sustainable peace.
Something is stirring at the New York Times. Columnist Roger Cohen has spent the last months writing piece after piece about Iran, Israeli extremism and war. Yesterday he was back with another round, titled, ‘Israel, Iran and Fear‘:
A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.
As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state …”
That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.
Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.
Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.
Cohen’s message is incredibly moderate. Where are the Jews standing up behind him to offer support?
Talking Points Memo has the skinny on a story that shows yet again that we know very little about the power of the Zionist lobby in the US:
This story is so radioactive it’s hard to know which of fifty different directions to go with it. In brief, Jeff Stein at CQ has a much, much more detailed account of that story, first reported in 2006, of Rep. Jane Harman getting caught on a wiretapped phone call allegedly discussing a quid pro quo with “a suspected Israeli.”
There are a lot of hairy details on this one. But the gist is that an NSA wiretap recorded Harman in a conversation with a “suspected Israeli agent” in which Harman allegedly agreed to use her influence with the DOJ to get them to drop the AIPAC spy case in exchange for help lobbying then-Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi to make Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee — a position she ended up not getting.
Jeff Halper in The Sydney Morning Herald (10/04) wrote, “Diaspora Jews need to revalidate Diaspora Jewish culture (that Zionism dismissed as superficial and ephemeral) and find genuine, compelling reasons why their children should remain Jewish.
Blindly supporting Israel’s extreme right-wing and militaristic policies is not the way to do that.
Such uncritical support contradicts the very liberal values that define Diaspora Jewry, driving away the younger generation of thinking Jews.”
Whatever one might think of his views about Israel, he is absolutely correct in his statement about Diaspora Jews in Australia.
I and others have raised this issue before and the Australian Jewish community leaders have imitated ostriches.
No-one has ever replied to any letter on the subject in The AJN, nor has there ever been a response at the plenum of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
The situation requires a response to show that the elected leaders of the community have the slightest concern for the 60 per cent who have not affiliated with the community and to show that they have some concern for the future of a community that is more than 200 years old.
Based on past performance, the so-called leaders will stay silent and hope that the problem will go away. It won’t. They will demonstrate by their inaction that they should not call themselves leaders of the whole community.
IAN BERSTEN
Roseville, NSW
MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Professor Jeff Halper just blew the opportunity of a lifetime (AJN 03/04).
Given a chance to have a letter published in this newspaper, he failed to explain to readers why he led boat trips in support of Hamas-controlled Gaza, even while rocket attacks against Israeli civilians continued why his visit was sponsored by an array of anti-Zionists who openly show sympathy for Hamas (which calls for genocide against Jews and opposes meaningful initiatives for peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians) and why he has publicly called for the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish State.
Many Australian Jews would have been interested to hear why this self-styled “peace activist” opposes the peaceful, two-state solution supported by the international community and instead favours the establishment of what would inevitably become the 23rd Arab state in the region (and that, only after a prolonged period of bloodshed).
Many of us were puzzled to know why Prof Halper feels Israel must not be defended at any price against an enemy that teaches children of kindergarten age on public television to kill Jews and, in so doing, to become martyrs for the cause.
But instead of enlightening us and giving readers a “critical presentation” of his views on such matters, Prof Halper treated us as idiots and wasted the space available to him by playing the victim and resorting the familiar complaint that the Jewish community didn’t show him respect when he was here and that it had muzzled his voice.
The facts are that Prof Halper’s tour received its fair share of publicity (much of it free) but in the end, he not only failed to make out his case or win any respect rather he showed himself to be a total hypocrite.
