#BentBritain: #UK admits unlawfully monitoring legally privileged communications!

UK admits unlawfully monitoring legally privileged communications ~ Alan Travis and Owen Bowcott, The Guardian, Wednesday 18 February 2015.

Intelligence agencies have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for past five years, government admits

The admission comes ahead of a legal challenge brought on behalf of two Libyans, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, over allegations that security services unlawfully intercepted their communications with lawyers.  Photograph: PA & AFP

The regime under which UK intelligence agencies, including MI5 and MI6, have been monitoring conversations between lawyers and their clients for the past five years is unlawful, the British government has admitted.

The admission that the activities of the security services have failed to comply fully with human rights laws in a second major area – this time highly sensitive legally privileged communications – is a severe embarrassment for the government.

It follows hard on the heels of the British court ruling on 6 February declaring that the regime surrounding the sharing of mass personal intelligence data between America’s national security agency and Britain’s GCHQ was unlawful for seven years.

UK-US surveillance regime was unlawful ‘for seven years’

The admission that the regime surrounding state snooping on legally privileged communications has also failed to comply with the European convention on human rights comes in advance of a legal challenge, to be heard early next month, in which the security services are alleged to have unlawfully intercepted conversations between lawyers and their clients to provide the government with an advantage in court.

The case is due to be heard before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). It is being brought by lawyers on behalf of two Libyans, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, who, along with their families, were abducted in a joint MI6-CIA operation and sent back to Tripoli to be tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2004.

A government spokesman said: “The concession the government has made today relates to the agencies’ policies and procedures governing the handling of legally privileged communications and whether they are compatible with the European convention on human rights.

“In view of recent IPT judgments, we acknowledge that the policies adopted since [January] 2010 have not fully met the requirements of the ECHR, specifically article 8 (right to privacy). This includes a requirement that safeguards are made sufficiently public.

“It does not mean that there was any deliberate wrongdoing on their part of the security and intelligence agencies, which have always taken their obligations to protect legally privileged material extremely seriously. Nor does it mean that any of the agencies’ activities have prejudiced or in any way resulted in an abuse of process in any civil or criminal proceedings.”

He said that the intelligence agencies would now work with the interception of communications commissioner to ensure their policies satisfy all of the UK’s human rights obligations.

Cori Crider, a director at Reprieve and one of the Belhaj family’s lawyers said: “By allowing the intelligence agencies free reign to spy on communications between lawyers and their clients, the government has endangered the fundamental British right to a fair trial.

“Reprieve has been warning for months that the security services’ policies on lawyer-client snooping have been shot through with loopholes big enough to drive a bus through.

“For too long, the security services have been allowed to snoop on those bringing cases against them when they speak to their lawyers. In doing so, they have violated a right that is centuries old in British common law. Today they have finally admitted they have been acting unlawfully for years.

“Worryingly, it looks very much like they have collected the private lawyer-client communications of two victims of rendition and torture, and possibly misused them. While the government says there was no ‘deliberate’ collection of material, it’s abundantly clear that private material was collected and may well have been passed on to lawyers or ministers involved in the civil case brought by Abdel hakim Belhaj and Fatima Boudchar, who were ‘rendered’ to Libya in 2004 by British intelligence.

“Only time will tell how badly their case was tainted. But right now, the government needs urgently to investigate how things went wrong and come clean about what it is doing to repair the damage.”

Government sources, in line with all such cases, refuse to confirm or deny whether the two Libyans were the subject of an interception operation. They insist the concession does not concern the allegation that actual interception took place and say it will be for the investigatory powers tribunal hearing to determine the issue.

An updated draft interception code of practice spelling out the the rules for the first time was quietly published at the same time as the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruling against GCHQ earlier this month in the case brought by Privacy International and Liberty.

The government spokesman said the draft code set out enhanced safeguards and provided more detail than previously on the protections that had to be applied in the security agencies handling of legally privileged communications.

The draft code makes clear that warrants for snooping on legally privileged conversations, emails and other communications between suspects and their lawyers can be granted if there are exceptional and compelling circumstances. They have to however ensure that they are not available to lawyers or policy officials who are conducting legal cases against those suspects.

Exchanges between lawyers and their clients enjoy a special protected status under UK law. Following exposure of widespread monitoring by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, Belhaj’s lawyers feared that their exchanges with their clients could have been compromised by GCHQ’s interception of phone conversations and emails.

To demonstrate that its policies satisfy legal safeguards, MI6 were required in advance of Wednesday’s concession to disclose internal guidance on how intelligence staff should deal with material protected by legal professional privilege.

The MI6 papers noted: “Undertaking interception in such circumstances would be extremely rare and would require strong justification and robust safeguards. It is essential that such intercepted material is not acquired or used for the purpose of conferring an unfair or improper advantage on SIS or HMG [Her Majesty’s government] in any such litigation, legal proceedings or criminal investigation.”

The internal documents also refer to a visit by the interception commissioner, Sir Anthony May, last summer to examine interception warrants, where it was discovered that regulations were not being observed. “In relation to one of the warrants,” the document explained, “the commissioner identified a number of concerns with regard to the handling of [legal professional privilege] material”.

Amnesty UK’s legal programme director, Rachel Logan, said: “We are talking about nothing less than the violation of a fundamental principle of the rule of law – that communications between a lawyer and their client must be confidential.

“The government has been caught red-handed. The security agencies have been illegally intercepting privileged material and are continuing to do so – this could mean they’ve been spying on the very people challenging them in court.

“This is the second time in as many weeks that government spies have been rumbled breaking the law.”

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#Obama’s ‘Crusaders’ analogy veils the #West’s modern crimes!

Obama’s ‘Crusaders’ analogy veils the West’s modern crimes ~ Ben White, The Nation, February 14, 2015.

Like many children, 13-year-old Mohammed Tuaiman suffered from nightmares. In his dreams, he would see flying “death machines” that turned family and friends into burning charcoal. No one could stop them, and they struck any place, at any time.

Unlike most children, Mohammed’s nightmares killed him.

Three weeks ago, a CIA drone operating over Yemen fired a missile at a car carrying the teenager, and two others. They were all incinerated. Nor was Mohammed the first in his family to be targeted: drones had already killed his father and brother.

Since president Barack Obama took office in 2009, the US has killed at least 2,464 people through drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones. The figure is courtesy of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which says that at least 314 of the dead, one in seven, were civilians.

Recall that for Obama, as The New York Times reported in May 2012, “all military-age males in a strike zone” are counted “as combatants” – unless “there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent”.

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares.

The week after Mohammed’s death, on February 5, Mr Obama addressed the National Prayer Breakfast, and discussed the violence of ISIL.

“Lest we get on our high horses”, said the commander-in-chief, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”

These comments prompted a (brief) media storm, with Mr Obama accused of insulting Christians, pandering to the terrorist enemy, or just bad history.

In fact, the president was simply repeating a point often made by liberals since September 11, namely, that all religions have blots on their copy book through the deeds of their followers.

One of the consequences, however, of this invocation of the Crusades – unintended, and all the more significant for it – is to seal away the West’s “sins”, particularly vis-à-vis its relationship to the Middle East, in events that took place a thousand years ago.

The Crusades were, in one sense, a demonstration of raw military power, and a collective trauma for the peoples of the regions they marched through and invaded.

In the siege of Jerusalem in 1099, a witness described how the Europeans ordered “all the Saracen dead to be cast outside because of the great stench, since the whole city was filled with their corpses”.

He added: “No one ever saw or heard of such slaughter of pagan people, for funeral pyres were formed from them like pyramids.”

Or take the Third Crusade, when, on August 20, 1191, England’s King Richard I oversaw the beheading of 3,000 Muslim prisoners at Acre in full view of Saladin’s army.

Just “ancient history”? In 1920, when the French had besieged and captured Damascus, their commander Henri Gourard reportedly went to the grave of Saladin, kicked it, and uttered: “Awake Saladin, we have returned! My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.”

But the US president need not cite the Crusades or even the colonial rule of the early 20th century: more relevant reference points would be Bagram and Fallujah.

Bagram base in Afghanistan is where US soldiers tortured prisoners to death – like 22-year-old taxi driver and farmer Dilawar. Before he was killed in custody, Dilawar was beaten by soldiers just to make him scream “Allah!”

Five months after September 11, The Guardian reported that US missiles had killed anywhere between 1,300 and 8,000 in Afghanistan. Months later, the paper suggested that “as many as 20,000 Afghans may have lost their lives as an indirect consequence of the US intervention”.

When it was Iraq’s turn, the people of Fallujah discovered that US forces gave them funerals, not democracy. On April 28, 2003, US soldiers massacred civilian protesters, shooting to death 17 during a demonstration.

When that city revolted against the occupation, the residents paid a price. As Marines tried to quell resistance in the city, wrote The New York Times on April 14, 2004, they had “orders to shoot any male of military age on the streets after dark, armed or not”.Months later, as the Marines launched their November assault on the city, CNN reported that “the sky…seems to explode”.

In their bombardment and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and UK armed forces rained fiery death down on men, women and children. Prisoners were tortured and sexually abused. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. No one was held to account.

It is one thing to apologise for the brutality of western Crusaders a thousand years ago. It is quite another to look at the corpses of the victims of the imperialist present, or hear the screams of the bereaved.

In his excellent book The Muslims Are Coming, Arun Kundnani analysed the “politics of anti-extremism”, and describes the two approaches developed by policymakers and analysts during the “war on terror”.

The first approach, which he refers to as “culturalism”, emphasises “what adherents regard as inherent features of Islamic culture”. The second approach, “reformism”, is when “extremism is viewed as a perversion of Islam’s message”, rather than “a clash of civilisations between the West’s modern values and Islam’s fanaticism”.

Thus the American Right was angry with Mr Obama, because for them, it is about religion – or specifically, Islam. Liberals, meanwhile, want to locate the problem in terms of culture.

Both want to avoid a discussion about imperialism, massacres, coups, brutalities, disappearances, dictatorships – in other words, politics.

As Kundnani writes: when “the concept of ideology” is made central, whether understood as “Islam itself or as Islamist extremism”, then “the role of western states in co-producing the terror war is obscured”.

The problem with Mr Obama’s comments on the Crusades was not, as hysterical conservatives claimed, that he was making offensive and inaccurate analogies with ISIL; rather, that in the comfort of condemning the past, he could mask the violence of his own government in the present.

The echoes of collective trauma remain for a long time, and especially when new wounds are still being inflicted. Think it is farfetched that Muslims would still care about a 1,000-year-old European invasion? Then try asking them about Guantanamo and Camp Bucca instead.

Ben White is a journalist and author of Israeli Apartheid

Pep Montserrat for The National

#UN, post-colonial #colonialism + 9-11: Arundhati Roy on #Palestine!

Arundhati Roy on Palestine. ~ Palestine Diary.

Segment from the film “We..” where Arundhati Roy speaks about the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian struggle in the middle east. Historic references, who funds it, and more.

We is a fast-paced 64 minute documentary that covers the world politics of power, war, corporations, deception and exploitation.

It visualizes the words of Arundhati Roy, specifically her famous Come September speech, where she spoke on such things as the war on terror, corporate globalization, justice and the growing civil unrest.

It’s witty, moving, alarming and quite a lesson in modern history.

We is almost in the style of a continuous music video. The music used sets the pace and serves as wonderful background for the words of Ms. Roy and images of humanity in the world we live all in today.

We is a completely free documentary, created and released anonymously on the internet.

Links:
http://www.weroy.org/
http://www.weroy.org/arundhati.shtml

Full documentary on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63wPSS…

TRANSCRIPT

September 11 has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too.  On September 11, 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour declaration, which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of the city of Gaza.  The Balfour declaration promised European zionists a national home for Jewish people.  Two years after the declaration, Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary said: ‘In Palestine we do not propose to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.  Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import than the desires or prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land’.

How carelessly imperial power decreed whose needs were profound and whose were not.  How carelessly it vivisected ancient civilizations.  Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world.  Both are fault-lines in the raging international conflicts of today.

In 1937 Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians: ‘I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time.  I do not admit that right.  I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the red Indians of America or the black people of Australia.  I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place’.  That set the trend for the Israeli state’s attitude towards Palestinians.  In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said: ‘Palestinians do not exist’.  Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, said: ‘What are Palestinians?  When I came here [to Palestine] there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins.  It was desert, more than underdeveloped.  Nothing’.  Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians ‘two-legged beasts’.  Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them ‘grasshoppers’ who could be crushed.  This is the language of heads of state, not the words of ordinary people.

In 1947 the UN formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55% of Palestine’s land to the zionists.  Within a year they had captured 78%.  On May 14, 1948, the state of Israel was declared.  Minutes after the declaration, the US recognized Israel.  The West Bank was annexed by Jordan.  The Gaza strip came under Egyptian military control.  Formally, Palestine ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees.

In the summer of 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  Settlers were offered state subsidies and development aid to move into the occupied territories.  Almost every day more Palestinian families are forced off their lands and driven into refugee camps.  Palestinians who continue to live in Israel do not have the same rights as Israelis and live as second-class citizens in their former homeland.

Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas.  Tens of thousands have lost their lives.  Accords and treaties have been signed, ceasefires declared and violated.  But the bloodshed doesn’t end.  Palestine still remains illegally occupied.  Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalised on a daily basis.  They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine.  And when they will not.  They live with no semblance of dignity.  With not much hope in sight.  They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply.  So when accords are signed and words like ‘autonomy’ and even ‘statehood’ are bandied about, it’s always worth asking: What sort of autonomy?  What sort of state?  What sort of rights will its citizens have?  Young Palestinians who cannot contain their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel’s streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies’ suspicion and mutual hatred of each other.  Each bombing invites merciless reprisals and even more hardship on Palestinian people.  But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic.  Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli civilians, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government’s daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, 19th century colonialism, dressed up as a new-fashioned, 21st century ‘war’.

Israel’s staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the US government.  The US government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict.  It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought.  When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes.  And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the US.

What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict?  Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves — more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history — to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced?  Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty?  What hope does this leave the human race with?  What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory?  When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be?  What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag?  Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for, or the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion?

Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East.  But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly non-sectarian PLO, is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam.  To quote from their manifesto: ‘We will be its soldiers, and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the enemies’.

The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers.  But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they arrived at this destination?  September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002 — 80 years is a long long time to have been waging war.  Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine?  Some scrap of hope we can hold out?  Should they just settle for the crumbs that are thrown their way and behave like the grasshoppers or two-legged beasts they’ve been described as?  Should they just take Golda Meir’s suggestion and make a real effort to not exist?

In another part of the Middle East, September 11 strikes a more recent chord.  It was on September 11, 1990 that George W Bush Sr, then president of the US, made a speech to a joint session of Congress announcing his government’s decision to go to war against Iraq.

The US government says that Saddam Hussein is a war criminal, a cruel military despot who has committed genocide against his own people.  That’s a fairly accurate description of the man.  In 1988 he razed hundreds of villages in northern Iraq and used chemical weapons and machine-guns to kill thousands of Kurdish people.  Today we know that that same year the US government provided him with $500m in subsidies to buy American farm products.  The next year, after he had successfully completed his genocidal campaign, the US government doubled its subsidy to $1bn.  It also provided him with high quality germ seed for anthrax, as well as helicopters and dual-use material that could be used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.

So it turns out that while Saddam Hussein was carrying out his worst atrocities, the US and the UK governments were his close allies.  Even today, the government of Turkey which has one of the most appalling human rights records in the world is one of the US government’s closest allies.  The fact that the Turkish government has oppressed and murdered Kurdish people for years has not prevented the US government from plying Turkey with weapons and development aid.  Clearly it was not concern for the Kurdish people that provoked President Bush’s speech to Congress.

What changed?  In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.  His sin was not so much that he had committed an act of war, but that he acted independently, without orders from his masters.  This display of independence was enough to upset the power equation in the Gulf.  So it was decided that Saddam Hussein be exterminated, like a pet that has outlived its owner’s affection.

The first Allied attack on Iraq took place in January 1991.  The world watched the prime-time war as it was played out on TV. (In India those days, you had to go to a five- star hotel lobby to watch CNN.)  Tens of thousands of people were killed in a month of devastating bombing.  What many do not know is that the war did not end then.  The initial fury simmered down into the longest sustained air attack on a country since the Vietnam war.  Over the last decade American and British forces have fired thousands of missiles and bombs on Iraq.  Iraq’s fields and farmlands have been shelled with 300 tons of depleted uranium.  In countries like Britain and America depleted uranium shells are test-fired into specially constructed concrete tunnels.  The radioactive residue is washed off, sealed in cement and disposed off in the ocean (which is bad enough).  In Iraq it’s aimed — deliberately, with malicious intent — at people’s food and water supply.  In their bombing sorties, the Allies specifically targeted and destroyed water treatment plants, fully aware of the fact that they could not be repaired without foreign assistance.  In southern Iraq there has been a four-fold increase in cancer among children.  In the decade of economic sanctions that followed the war, Iraqi civilians have been denied food, medicine, hospital equipment, ambulances, clean water — the basic essentials.

About half a million Iraqi children have died as a result of the sanctions.  Of them, Madeleine Albright, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, famously said: ‘It’s a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.’ ‘Moral equivalence’ was the term that was used to denounce those who criticised the war on Afghanistan.  Madeleine Albright cannot be accused of moral equivalence.  What she said was just straightforward algebra.

A decade of bombing has not managed to dislodge Saddam Hussein, the ‘Beast of Baghdad’.  Now, almost 12 years on, President George Bush Jr has ratcheted up the rhetoric once again.  He’s proposing an all-out war whose goal is nothing short of a regime change.  The New York Times says that the Bush administration is ‘following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat of Saddam Hussein’.

Weapons inspectors have conflicting reports about the status of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and many have said clearly that its arsenal has been dismantled and that it does not have the capacity to build one.  However, there is no confusion over the extent and range of America’s arsenal of nuclear and chemical weapons.  Would the US government welcome weapons inspectors?  Would the UK?  Or Israel?

What if Iraq does have a nuclear weapon, does that justify a pre-emptive US strike?  The US has the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world.  It’s the only country in the world to have actually used them on civilian populations.  If the US is justified in launching a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, why, then any nuclear power is justified in carrying out a pre-emptive attack on any other.  India could attack Pakistan, or the other way around.  If the US government develops a distaste for the Indian Prime Minister, can it just ‘take him out’ with a pre-emptive strike?

Recently the US played an important part in forcing India and Pakistan back from the brink of war.  Is it so hard for it to take its own advice?  Who is guilty of feckless moralizing?  Of preaching peace while it wages war?  The US, which George Bush has called ‘the most peaceful nation on earth’, has been at war with one country or another every year for the last 50 years.

Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons.  They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business.  And then of course there’s the business of war.  Protecting its control of the world’s oil is fundamental to US foreign policy.  The US government’s recent military interventions in the Balkans and Central Asia have to do with oil.  Hamid Karzai, the puppet president of Afghanistan installed by the US, is said to be a former employee of Unocal, the American-based oil company.  The US government’s paranoid patrolling of the Middle East is because it has two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves.  Oil keeps America’s engines purring sweetly.  Oil keeps the free market rolling.  Whoever controls the world’s oil controls the world’s market.  And how do you control the oil?

Nobody puts it more elegantly than the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.  In an article called ‘Craziness Pays’ he says ‘the US has to make it clear to Iraq and US allies that…America will use force without negotiation, hesitation or UN approval’.  His advice was well taken.  In the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan as well as in the almost daily humiliation the US government heaps on the UN.  In his book on globalisation, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman says: ‘The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.  McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas….  And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps’.  Perhaps this was written in a moment of vulnerability, but it’s certainly the most succinct, accurate description of the project of corporate globalisation that I have read.

After September 11, 2001 and the War Against Terror, the hidden hand and fist have had their cover blown, and we have a clear view now of America’s other weapon — the free market — bearing down on the developing world, with a clenched unsmiling smile.  The task that never ends is America’s perfect war, the perfect vehicle for the endless expansion of American imperialism.  In Urdu, the word for profit is fayda.  Al-qaida means the word, the word of God, the law.  So, in India some of us call the War Against Terror, Al-qaida vs Al-fayda — the word vs the profit (no pun intended).

For the moment it looks as though Al-fayda will carry the day.  But then you never know…

In the last 10 years of unbridled corporate globalisation, the world’s total income has increased by an average of 2.5% a year.  And yet the numbers of the poor in the world has increased by 100 million.  Of the top hundred biggest economies, 51 are corporations, not countries.  The top 1% of the world has the same combined income as the bottom 57% and the disparity is growing.  Now, under the spreading canopy of the War Against Terror, this process is being hustled along.  The men in suits are in an unseemly hurry.  While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, while nuclear weapons are stockpiled to make the world a safer place, contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatised and democracies are being undermined.

In a country like India, the ‘structural adjustment’ end of the corporate globalisation project is ripping through people’s lives.  ‘Development’ projects, massive privatisation, and labour ‘reforms’ are pushing people off their lands and out of their jobs, resulting in a kind of barbaric dispossession that has few parallels in history.  Across the world as the ‘free market’ brazenly protects Western markets and forces developing countries to lift their trade barriers, the poor are getting poorer and the rich richer.  Civil unrest has begun to erupt in the global village.  In countries like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, India the resistance movements against corporate globalisation are growing.

To contain them, governments are tightening their control.  Protestors are being labelled ‘terrorists’ and then dealt with as such.  But civil unrest does not only mean marches and demonstrations and protests against globalisation.  Unfortunately, it also means a desperate downward spiral into crime and chaos and all kinds of despair and disillusionment which, as we know from history (and from what we see unspooling before our eyes), gradually becomes a fertile breeding ground for terrible things — cultural nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and of course, terrorism.

All these march arm-in-arm with corporate globalisation.

There is a notion gaining credence that the free market breaks down national barriers, and that corporate globalisation’s ultimate destination is a hippie paradise where the heart is the only passport and we all live together happily inside a John Lennon song (Imagine there’s no country…)  This is a canard.

What the free market undermines is not national sovereignty, but democracy.  As the disparity between the rich and poor grows, the hidden fist has its work cut out for it.  Multinational corporations on the prowl for ‘sweetheart deals’ that yield enormous profits cannot push through those deals and administer those projects in developing countries without the active connivance of state machinery — the police, the courts, sometimes even the army.  Today corporate globalisation needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, preferably authoritarian governments in poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies.  It needs a press that pretends to be free.  It needs courts that pretend to dispense justice.  It needs nuclear bombs, standing armies, sterner immigration laws, and watchful coastal patrols to make sure that it’s only money, goods, patents and services that are globalised — not the free movement of people, not a respect for human rights, not international treaties on racial discrimination or chemical and nuclear weapons, or greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, or God forbid, justice.  It’s as though even a gesture towards international accountability would wreck the whole enterprise.

Close to one year after the War Against Terror was officially flagged off in the ruins of Afghanistan, in country after country freedoms are being curtailed in the name of protecting freedom, civil liberties are being suspended in the name of protecting democracy.  All kinds of dissent is being defined as ‘terrorism’.  All kinds of laws are being passed to deal with it.  Osama Bin Laden seems to have vanished into thin air.  Mullah Omar is said to have made his escape on a motor-bike.  The Taliban may have disappeared but their spirit, and their system of summary justice is surfacing in the unlikeliest of places.  In India, in Pakistan, in Nigeria, in America, in all the Central Asian republics run by all manner of despots, and of course in Afghanistan under the US-backed Northern Alliance.

Meanwhile, down at the mall there’s a mid-season sale.  Everything’s discounted — oceans, rivers, oil, gene pools, fig wasps, flowers, childhoods, aluminum factories, phone companies, wisdom, wilderness, civil rights, ecosystems, air — all 4,600 million years of evolution.  It’s packed, sealed, tagged, valued and available off the rack.  (No returns).  As for justice — I’m told it’s on offer too.  You can get the best that money can buy.

Donald Rumsfeld said that his mission in the War against Terror was to persuade the world that Americans must be allowed to continue their way of life.  When the maddened king stamps his foot, slaves tremble in their quarters.  So, standing here today, it’s hard for me to say this, but the American way of life is simply not sustainable.  Because it doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

Fortunately power has a shelf life.  When the time comes, maybe this mighty empire will, like others before it, overreach itself and implode from within.  It looks as though structural cracks have already appeared.  As the War Against Terror casts its net wider and wider, America’s corporate heart is hemorrhaging.  For all the endless empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organisation, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the US.  Their decisions are made in secret.  The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors.  Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions.  Nobody elected them.  Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf.  A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs who nobody elected can’t possibly last.

Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil but because it was flawed.  It allowed too few people to usurp too much power.  Twenty-first century market-capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons.  Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.

The time has come, the walrus said.  Perhaps things will get worse and then better.  Perhaps there’s a small God up in heaven readying herself for us.  Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way.  Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.

 

| The Palestinian message to Israel: Deal with us justly. Or disappear!

The Palestinian message to Israel: Deal with us justly. Or disappear ~ Jeff Halper, Mondoweiss.

Until Operation Protective Edge, most of the “messaging” regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, certainly that which broke through the mainstream media, came from the Israeli side. Since Zionism’s official beginnings in Palestine some 110 years ago, the Jewish community, whether the pre-state Yishuv or constituted as the state of Israel, never took the Palestinians seriously. They were dark-skinned “natives” wrapped sinisterly in kafiyas, fedayeen or terrorists without names, history or humanity, an existential threat subsumed under the rubric “Arabs.” In 1967, when Israel finally came face to face with an organized, visible, politically aware Palestinian society, the idea of talking to them did not even occur to Israel’s leaders. They preferred to take what land and resources they wanted from the West Bank and “return” its Palestinian population to Jordan. (No one until this day in Israel has the faintest idea what to do with Gaza, except isolate it.) One Prime Minister, Golda Meir, even denied vociferously and derisively that a “Palestinian” people even existed. No Israeli government ever acknowledged the national rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination in their own country, even in a tiny, truncated state on parts of the Occupied Territory. In the brightest days of the Oslo “peace process,” all a Labor/Meretz government agreed to do was recognize the PLO as a negotiating partner. It never accepted the idea of a truly sovereign, viable Palestinian state, even if demilitarized and arising on but a fifth of historic Palestine.

To be sure, the Palestinian people resisted and, when possible, tried to negotiate. Their leadership was often weak, but we must remember that since 1948, when the nascent IDF went from village to village with ledgers containing the names of those who should be assassinated, until the attempted assassination of Muhammed Deif a few days ago, Israel has conducted a systematic campaign of eliminating by murder or imprisonment any Palestinian showing real or potential leadership. Fearful of giving any credit to Palestinian peace-making lest it undermine their own absolute claims by legitimizing a Palestinian “side,” Israelis forget and deride any Palestinian hand reaching out to them. Who remembers, for example, the moving words of Yasser Arafat at the (unsuccessful) conclusion of the Wye Plantation negotiations in 1998?  That’s when Netanyahu decided to stop agreed-upon Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank and his Foreign Minister Sharon publically called on the settlers to “grab every hilltop.” Nonetheless, in the concluding press conference, with nothing to gain and no prompting, Arafat said:

I am quite confident that I’m talking in the name of all Palestinians when I assure you that we are all committed to the security of every child, woman and man in Israel. I will do everything I can so that no Israeli mother will be worried if her son or daughter is late coming home, or any Israeli would be afraid when they heard an explosion.

The Palestinians’ messaging of peace, security and, yes, justice, was always buried under Israeli spin. At that very same Wye Plantation meeting, Sharon demonstrably refused to shake Arafat’s hand before the cameras. “Shake the hand of that dog?” he told reporters: “Never.” Mahmoud Abbas has gotten little better from Sharon or Netanyahu, despite repeated televised meetings with Israeli students, Knesset members or anyone else willing to listen to his pleas for peace, even at the price of giving up parts of East Jerusalem and some major settlement blocs. Abbas and his Palestinian Authority bear their share of the responsibility for this as well. For his own reasons Abbas has silenced his most articulate spokespeople, filled his Authority’s diplomatic posts for the most part with ineffective political hacks and makes it almost impossible for reporters to get information or responses – all in contrast to Israel’s vaunted hasbara and legions of professional spin-doctors. As a result, there has been little official Palestinian messaging at all. What has saved the day until now has been the efforts of civil society supporters of the Palestinian cause: the contributors to the Electronic Intifada, articulate Palestinian activists and academics on al Shabaka, events and actions initiated on campuses by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the myriad analysts, activists and organizations of the international civil society, including critical Israeli ones, not to forget the growing BDS movement.

That seemed to change suddenly when, on August 26th, Israel announced that it had accepted a permanent cease-fire with no pre-conditions, to be followed by a month of negotiations over issues of concern to Gazans – opening borders, reconstruction under international supervision, the rebuilding of the airport and seaport, ending restrictions on Palestinian fishing and on farming in the “buffer zone,” the reopening of the “safe passage” to the West Bank, release of prisoners and more. Hamas, who led the confrontation with Israel, was careful not to disconnect Gaza from the wider struggle for Palestinian national rights. It was Abbas who announced the cease-fire, not Khaled Mashal or Ismail Haniya, stressing that the struggle was a Palestinian one, not merely Gazan. In fact, although Netanyahu initiated Operation Protective Edge with an eye to destroying a Palestinian Unity Government of Fatah/Hamas, he ended up strengthening it. Hamas emerged the darling of the Palestinian people, as least as far as resistance goes. It was announced that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be joining the PLO. And, in order to allow a kind of civil relationship with Egypt, Hamas lowered its pan-Islam Muslim Brotherhood profile in favor of its Palestinian one.

Still, the messaging belonged to Hamas, the ones who not only confront the Israeli Occupation but who have seized the political initiative from it. In stark contrast to Abbas, who has declared security cooperation with Israel to be “sacred” and who passively allows Israel to take effective control of Area C, the 62% of the West Bank where the settlements, the massive matrix of Israeli highways and the Separation Barrier spell the end of the two-state solution, Hamas has sent a clear and forceful message to Israel: We won’t submit even if you kill us. Deal with us justly – or disappear.

Yes, even in its moment of triumph – an Israeli commentator wryly noted on TV this week that “a Six Day War this will not be,” and polls show that 59% of Israelis do not believe Israel won – Hamas has left the door open to a two-state solution. Their position, as I understand it and as set out in the Prisoners’ National Conciliation Document of 2006, is nuanced but principled and coherent. Hamas and Jihad reject utterly the legitimacy of Israel, viewing it as a settler colonial state, and thus reject any negotiations with it or any subsequent recognition. That said, if other Palestinian parties (i.e. Fatah) enter into negotiations with Israel and the outcome is a total withdrawal from the Occupied Territory based on conditions that would allow a truly sovereign and viable Palestinian state to arise, and if such a outcome would be approved by a referendum of all Palestinians around the world, Hamas and Jihad would respect that as the voice of the Palestinian people. Thus, while still rejecting the legitimacy of Israel in principle, Hamas has agreed to join a Unity Government that accepts the two-state solution – enough for the Netanyahu government to try and break it apart. Hence Hamas’s post-Operation Protective Edge message to Israel: deal with us justly – or disappear. This is your last chance. The alternative to the two-state solution, which few Palestinians believe is still possible, and rightly so, is a single state. That’s a democratic state in the eyes of the Palestinian left, an Algeria-like situation in which the colonialists leave in the eyes of Hamas and Jihad.

This should give Israel pause, although ironically it is Israel that has eliminated the two-state solution and has left a single state – an apartheid one in the eyes of all Israeli governments, including Labor – as the only other option. Indeed, just last month Netanyahu said publicly: “There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” For 110 years “practical Zionism” has believed it can beat the natives, that it can judaize Palestine and, with its metaphorical and physical Iron Walls, cause “the Arabs” to despair of the Land of Israel ever becoming Palestine.

Well, Israel has given it its best shot. After grabbing almost all the land, driving most of the Palestinians out, imprisoning and impoverishing them in tiny enclaves in both Israel and the Occupied Territory, after burying the Palestinian presence and patrimony under Israeli-only cities, towns, kibbutzim and national parks, after assassinating its leaders and leaving its youth with no hope of a future, it now brings the full force of one of the best-equipped militaries in the world against two million poor people living in an area the size of Mobile, Alabama. More than 2000 killed in Gaza, another 12,000 injured. Some 20,000 homes destroyed, 475,000 people displaced. Six billion dollars in damage to buildings and infrastructure. And for what? Israel may have finally discovered the limits of force and violence. After taking its best shots for more than a century – and, it is true, dealing the Palestinians devastating blows, as Netanyahu and the IDF proudly claim – Israel has gained one thing: an opportunity before it is too late to learn that the Palestinians cannot be beaten militarily, that Israel itself will never know security and normal life for all the “blows” it administers the Palestinians, as long as it maintains its Occupation. Indeed, for all its strength, it is liable to disappear if it doesn’t deal justly with the natives.

At least Abbas seems to have gotten the message. He now discards further pointless negotiations with Israel as brokered by the US, preferring to have the UN set a target date for Israeli withdrawal, and perhaps going to the International Criminal Court. Hamas is likely to prevent any backsliding on his part. Maybe Israel will never get the message, its hubris blinding it to tectonic shifts in the geopolitical landscape, especially among the people of the world. But the collapse is happening. Perhaps slower than in apartheid South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Shah’s Iran or Mubarak’s Egypt, but happening none the less. Having lost the power of deterrence, Israel will either have to deal justly with the Palestinians or, indeed, disappear.

 

 

| UN official busts David Gregory for using Israeli propaganda video: ‘That’s really unfair!’

UN official busts David Gregory for using Israeli propaganda video: ‘That’s really unfair’ ~ David Edwards, The Raw Story.

NBC host David Gregory was forced to issue a correction at the end of his weekly Meet the Pressprogram on Sunday after a United Nations official confronted him for using a unconfirmed Israeli video that allegedly showed Hamas shooting rockets from a UN school.

Following an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday, Gregory brought on UN Relief & Works Agency spokesperson Chris Gunness.

“The Israeli government has released videotape within the past hour, it was posted on YouTube, NBC News hasn’t independently verified,” Gregory explained to Gunness. “The Israelis say — and I realize that you cannot see this video, our audience can, and I’m going to describe it to you — that purports to show rockets being fired from a UN school.”

As the host spoke, NBC played fuzzy black and white video of rockets being fired from buildings at an unknown location.

“Is this accurate?” Gregory asked. “Could this be happening without the UN’s knowledge, that would only bolster the prime minister’s point that, in fact, Hamas is using civilians, using the United Nations even in a kind of propaganda war.”

Gunness found the notion that he was being made to respond to a unconfirmed video that he couldn’t even see so ridiculous that he could barely contain laughter.

“Look, to be fair to me, to bring me on a live program and expect me to comment live on air on pictures I haven’ actually seen, I think anyone looking at this program would agree that’s really unfair,” Gunness insisted. “I mean, if I can see it, I’ll happily comment on it.”

At the conclusion of the program, Gregory said that the United Nations had “confirmed that the video does not show rockets being fired from a UN-administrated school in Gaza.”

“So this is a back and forth that we are not able to settle at this point,” Gregory said.

Watch the video below from NBC’s Meet the Press, broadcast July 27, 2014.

(h/t: Egberto Willies)

David Edwards

David Edwards has served as an editor at Raw Story since 2006. His work can also be found at Crooks & Liars, and he’s also been published at The BRAD BLOG. He came to Raw Story after working as a network manager for the state of North Carolina and as as engineer developing enterprise resource planning software. Follow him on Twitter at @DavidEdwards.

 

| Let’s party says Middle East peace envoy Tony B’Liar as Israel carpet bombs Gaza!

Let’s party says Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair as Israel carpet bombs Gaza ~ Robin Beste, Stop the War Coalition.

Was it appropriate for the Middle East peace envoy to throw a lavish party for political cronies and minor celebrities as Israel slaughtered over 1000 Palestinian civilians?

 

WHERE was Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair last week as Israel invaded Gaza and committed horrific war crimes, killing over 1000 Palestinians, 80% of them civilians, 200 of them children?

Not at his official residence and office in the millionaires’ row of East Jerusalem, which costs £750,000 a year, and from where he directs his somewhat less than successful efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.

And what was Tony Blair doing, as Israel bombed hospitals, schools, centres for the disabled, and UN shelters to which 180,000 civilians fled — as at least 1000 homes were turned to rubble by random bombardment? What was he doing as the people in 46% of Gaza were warned by Israel to evacuate — without any indication of where they could go — or face being slaughtered by the world’s fifth most powerful military force?

What has been the Middle East’s Peace Envoy’s only visible contribution to finding a peaceful resolution to the carnage we have witnessed since 6 July, when Israel escalated its merciless attack on 1.8 million defenceless people, held captive by an inhumane siege, which for seven years  has left them starved of food, clean water and essential resources, including medical supplies?

The only sighting has been his appearances on television in which his one purpose seems to be to repeat endlessly that he supports “Israel’s right to defend itself”. By killing 200 childen? is never the repost by his interviewers, least of all on the BBC, which, like Tony Blair, is a fully signed up contributor to Israel’s propaganda campaign justifying crimes against humanity.

So has the peace envoy been active behind the scenes, working tirelessly to bring the carnage to an end?

As far as we know, his only behind the scenes activity has been to act as messenge-boy for the scam Egyptian “ceasefire proposal”, which was actually hatched in Washington, with the terms drafted by Israel. Tony Blair’s errand was to deliver the proposal to US-backed Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for him then to announce it as his initiative. The Middle East peace envoy, whose role is supposedly intended to mediate between warring parties in the region, didn’t consider showing the ceasefire proposal to Hamas, which only learnt of it from the media and understandably rejected it as a one-sided demand to surrender. As Israel based journalist Jonathan Cook wrote,

The corporate media swallowed the line of Israel accepting the “ceasefire proposal” and Hamas rejecting it. What Hamas did was reject a US-Israeli diktat to sign away the rights of the people of Gaza to end a siege that cuts them off from the rest of the world.

Tony Blair was the natural choice to be the US and Israeli emissary to the Egyptian dictator el-Sisi, who came to power in a military coup last year that toppled the democratically elected government of president Mohamed Morsi. The Sisi regime is estimated to have killed more than 2,500 protesters and jailed more than 20,000. But that didn’t stop Blair at the beginning of July agreeing to “advise” the Egyptian dictator in a deal which is said to promise huge “business opportunities”.

Not for the first time, Blair is blurring the lines between his public position as peace envoy and his private business dealings in the Middle East. Which is why a group of former British ambassadors and political figures joined a campaign to call for Blair to be sacked as Middle East envoy

So where was Tony Blair last week, as the world watched in horror as Israel invaded Gaza with complete disregard for international and humanitarian law?

He was in the United Kingdom.

And what was his prime activity last week? It was planning a surprise 60th birthday party for his wife Cherie. Why she needed one to coincide with the news that Israel’s mass murder in Gaza had passed 1000 is not clear, as her 60th birthday isn’t actually due till September.

But there was the Middle East peace envoy on Friday 25 July, partying at a cost of £50,000 in his £6 million mansion, with 150 political cronies, wealthy businessmen and minor celebrities.

The next day, over 60,000 protesters brought central London to a standstillcalling for the Gaza massacre to stop. Many thousands more demonstrated in towns and cities throughout the UK. And across the world, from San Francisco to Tel Aviv, on every continent, demonstrations called for an end to the killing, the siege to be lifted and Palestine to be free.

There is an ever-growing worldwide outrage that Israel is allowed with impunity to get away with such barbarity. As the Channel 4 News journalist Jon Snow put it: “Were any other country on Earth doing what is being done in Gaza, there would be worldwide uproar.”

And the response of Tony Blair, the Middle East peace envoy: “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Time to party.

| #BDS: Stop Arming Israel – TAKE ACTION NOW!

Stop Arming Israel ~ BDS Movement.

TAKE ACTION NOW – add your name to the call for a military embargo using the form on the right

Israel has once again unleashed the full force of its military against the captive Palestinian population, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, in an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression.

Israel’s ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems from the vast international military cooperation and arms trade that it maintains with complicit governments across the world.

Nobel laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Adolfo Peres Esquivel, Jody Williams, Mairead Maguire, Rigoberta Menchú and Betty Williams have published an open letter calling on the UN and governments around the world to impose a military embargo on Israel.

Other signatories include Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters from Pink Floyd, playwright Caryl Churchill, US rapper Boots Riley, João Antonio Felicio, the president of the International Trade Union Confederation, and Zwelinzima Vavi, the general secretary of the Confederation of South African Trade Unions.

By importing and exporting arms to Israel and facilitating the development of Israeli military technology, governments are effectively sending a clear message of approval for Israel’s military aggression, including its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

TAKE ACTION NOW – add your name to the call for a military embargo using the form on the right

The call will be presented to the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights when they take up their post in September 2014.
Read our fact sheet on the military embargo
#StopArmingIsrael

Photo: A child stands amid the rubble of the Al Dalu family home, Gaza City, December 3, 2012. Ten members of the Al Dalu family were killed, as well as two neighbors, by an air strike on their three-story home on November 18, 2012. Active Stills/Ryan Rodrick Beiler

DOWNLOADS, FACT SHEETS, NEWS

Fact sheet: The case for a military embargo on Israel ~ BDS Movement.

Fact sheet: The case for a military embargo on Israel

Israel’s illegal use of military violenc

– Israel uses military force to maintain an unlawful regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This system is put in place in order to control as much land with as few indigenous Palestinians on it as possible, and to prevent the Palestinian people from exercising its inalienable right to self-determination.

– Between 2000 and 2010 alone, Israeli armed forces injured tens of thousands and killed more than 7,000 Palestinians.

– Israel has a documented track record of breaching international humanitarian and human rights law during its armed conflicts. This includes during its military operations, invasions and occupations of Palestinian and other Arab territory. Israel’s wars are acts of aggression, rather than “self-defence”, and are therefore in violation of international law. Israel’s military forces have officially adopted a doctrine of disproportionate force, otherwise known as the “Dahiya Doctrine”, which calls for severely hurting civilians and civilian infrastructure as the most “effective” means of stopping or undermining irregular resistance forces. The UN and other bodies have repeatedly documented war crimes and crimes against humanity.

– Israel’s ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems from the vast international military cooperation and trade that it maintains with complicit governments across the world.

Military aid and exports to Israel

– Over the period 2009-2018, the US is set to provide military aid to Israel worth $30bn. In 2011, the average US taxpayer gave Israel $21 in military aid. This military aid is often used to purchase military equipment from US companies. Since 2000, the US has licensed the export of nearly 825 million weapons valued at nearly $10.5 billion.

– European Union countries also export huge volumes of weapons and military equipment to Israel. In the period 2005-09, EU countries granted arms exports licenses to Israel worth €7.47bn. Weapons exports from the EU to Israel during 2012 were worth €613 million, up 290% on the previous year.

– Governments that license arms sales to Israel are giving clear approval to its on-going aggression against the Palestinian people and other Arab peoples in the region, while the companies that manufacture and sell the arms are profiting from and encouraging Israel’s colonial violence and violations of international law.

Exporting ‘field tested technology’ 

– According to figures contained in US government research for the period 2008-11, 7.Israel is the 7th largest arms exporter in the world and the largest per capita exporter. In 2010, approximately 80% of Israel’s military production was exported, and exports by Israeli arms companies totalled $7.2bn.

– Revenue from exports of military equipment and technology provides a vital revenue source for the Israeli government and military. As the military industry becomes increasingly important to the Israeli economy, a powerful incentive for continued occupation, colonialism, warmongering and military aggression is being created.

– Israel’s persistent attacks on Palestinians provide an opportunity for Israeli military companies such as Elbit Systems and Israeli Aerospace Industries to showcase their new technology. Israeli military companies market their military exports as “field tested”, by which they mean that their technology has been tested during “live” assaults on Palestinian civilians.

– Following the 2008-09 assault on Gaza, in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, predominantly civilians, the Israeli army and military industry held a trade show in which they showed how their new technologies were used against Palestinians.

– Israel plays a leading role in exporting arms, equipment and technology to oppressive regimes. As well as exporting military and security technology and equipment itself, it is also exporting an ideology of securitisation, militarization of law enforcement as well as intense increasing oppression and domination.

Israel’s deadly drones

– Israel regularly uses armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, in its attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. According to the Al Mezan Center, more than 1000 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by armed drones in the period 2000-10.

– Israel is now reportedly the largest exporter of drones in the world. Military companies Israeli Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems export the technology that is tested on Palestinians in Gaza all across the world.

– Countries that have procured UAVs from Elbit include Australia, Canada, Croatia, France, Georgia, Mexico, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, Brazil and USA.

Joint Military Research: Direct complicity in Israel’s crimes

– As well as direct arms and military trade, Israel also engages in joint military and security research, training and development with countries across the world.

– Most notably, Israeli military companies are able to participate in EU research programs. In the period 2007-13, Israeli military companies took part in research projects to which the EU awarded €244m.

The Palestinian call for a military embargo

– In 2011, the Palestinian BDS National Committee issued a call for a comprehensive military embargo on Israel, which means an end to all forms of military trade and cooperation with Israel.

– A comprehensive military embargo is a crucial step towards ending Israel’s unlawful and criminal use of force against the Palestinian people and peoples of the region and a vital and effective, non-violent measure to pressure Israel to comply with its obligations under international law.

– A number of countries including Norway and Turkey have implemented forms of military embargo on Israel in the past. Germany recently decided not to go ahead with a military aid deal with Israel.

– More than a dozen European banks have divested from Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company, over its role in Israel’s military violence.

Taking effective action to #StopArmingIsrael 

Take action now to help Stop Arming Israel:

– Sign the call for a military embargo launched by Nobel Prize winners and artists. Add your name here.

–Share the links to the military embargo petition and to this fact sheet on social media.

–Take action online now to demand that the EU stops funding Israeli military companies.

– Write to your government to demand a military embargo on Israel and ask organisations that you are part of to put pressure on your government.

– Get in touch for help on starting a divestment campaign against companies and banks that are implicated in Israel’s military aggression and war crimes

DID YOU KNOW THIS ABOUT THE RACIST APARTHEID ‪#‎ZIONIST‬JEWISH STATE?
It’s bombing ‪#‎Gaza‬ to safeguard Jewish privilege in ‪#‎Palestine‬.

There are more than 50 Israeli laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life, including their rights to political participation, access to land, education, state budget resources, and criminal procedures. Some of the laws also violate the rights of Palestinians living in the 1967 OPT and Palestinian refugees.

 

| Armed robbery in Gaza – Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine’s stolen gas!

Armed robbery in Gaza – Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine’s stolen gas ~ Nafeez Ahmed, ECOLOGIST.

Israel desperately covets Gaza’s gas as a ‘cheap stop-gap’ yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The UK’s BG and the US’s Noble Energy are lined up to do the dirty work – but first Hamas must be ‘uprooted’ from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia’s Gazprom.

It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.

“Israel’s current offensive in the Gaza Strip is by no means an energy war”, writes Allison Good in The National Interestin a response to myEcologist / Guardianarticle exposing the role of natural gas in Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

This “has not stopped conspiracy theorists from alleging that the IDF’s Operation Protective Edge aims to assert control over Palestinians gas and avert an Israeli energy crisis.”

Describing me as a “self-proclaimed”international security journalist engaging in“shoddy logic, evidence and language”, Good – who works as a contractor for Noble Energy, the Texas-based oil major producing gas from Israel’s reserves in the Mediterranean Sea – claims that:

“Israel is nowhere close to experiencing an energy crisis and has no urgent or near-future need for the natural gas located offshore Gaza. While Israel gains nothing for its energy industry by hitting Gaza, it stands to lose significantly more.”

If you don’t like the evidence – ignore it

Yet Good’s missive is full of oversimplifications and distortions. She points out that Israel’s recently discovered Tamar and Leviathan fields together hold an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas – which, she claims “are expected to meet Israel’s domestic energy needs for at least the next twenty-five years” while simultaneously sustaining major exports.

“Israel is not using Operation Protective Edge to steal the Gaza Marine gas field from the Palestinians, and it is irresponsible to claim otherwise”, she asserts. Yet her blanket dismissal simply ignores the evidence.

In early 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed new negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Abu-Mazen over development of the Gaza Marine reservoir.

“The proposal was made in view of Israel’s natural gas shortage following the cessation of gas deliveries from Egypt”, reported the Israeli business daily Globes.

US-based Noble’s Gaza gas grab

But since 2012, Israel began unilaterally developing the Noa South gas reserve in the Mediterranean off the coast of Gaza, estimated to contain about 1.2 billion cubic metres.

According to Globes, Israel had previously “refrained from ordering development of the Noa field, fearing that this would lead to diplomatic problems vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority” as the field is “partly under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in the economic zone of the Gaza Strip.”

Allison Good’s employer, Noble Energy, “convinced” Israel’s Ministry of National Infrastructures that the company’s drilling would “not spill over into other parts of the reserve.”

“Israel wanted to cooperate with the Palestinian Authority to develop Israel’s Noa South reservoir, which spreads into Gaza’s maritime area”, reported Globes. “In the end, Israel decided to develop the Noa reservoir without any official agreement.”

Israel’s secret gas talks

Despite repeated breakdowns in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to exploit the Gaza Marine gas reserves, Israel’s interest only accelerated.

In May last year, Israeli officials were in “secret talks“ for months with the British Gas Group (BG Group), which owns the license over Gaza’s offshore resources, over development of the reserves.

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Gaza Marine holds about 1.6 trillion cubic feet in recoverable gas, and “offshore Gaza territory may hold additional energy resources.”

Determining the size of these additional resources requires further exploration which, however, is limited by “uncertainty around maritime delineation between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt.”

Senior Israeli sources said that the Gaza gas issue was expected to come up in US President Barack Obama’s talks with Israeli leaders during his visit to Israel at the time.

The Palestinians – who own the gas – were excluded

The talks also included Netanyahu’s personal envoy Yitzak Molcho and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his capacity as Quartet (US, UK, EU, Russia) special envoy to the Middle East.

Palestinian leaders, though, were excluded from these talks due to “political sensitivities and the complex relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.”

By October that year, the Financial Times reported that Netanyahu remained “very supportive” of the Gaza Marine gas project “which would see the fields exploited on behalf of the Palestinian Authority by investors led by BG Group.”

If all went ahead, the fields could be producing gas by 2017, generating “$6bn to $7bn of revenues a year.” An “energy industry source” cited by FT told the newspaper that:

“Israel may now see Gaza Marine as providing a useful alternative source of gas, especially at a time when its pipeline imports from Egypt have been disrupted due to unrest in the Sinai peninsula.

“Mr Netanyahu’s government faces criticism and a court challenge from opposition politicians over its plans to export up to 40 per cent of natural gas produced from its own, much larger Mediterranean gas reserves.

“Israel, the industry source said, may feel that gas from Gaza would allow it to reduce its reliance on the consortium led by Noble and Delek Energy now developing Israel’s Tamar and Leviathan offshore gasfields.”

Quashing the gas deal

But as Good herself noted in the same month in Dubai’s The National, there remained one problem:

“Hamas retains de facto jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip and, consequently, over Gaza Marine. The PA cannot negotiate on behalf of Hamas, and any agreement that Israel could make with Ramallah would certainly be declared null and void in Gaza. Israel also still refuses to negotiate with Hamas.”

And despite negotiations to exploit Gaza’s gas speeding ahead between Israeli government and BG Group officials, Netanyahu “quashed” a $4 billion economic stimulus initiative proposed by US Secretary of State John Kerry which “included a proposal for the exploitation of Gaza Marine.”

Why was Netanyahu simultaneously pushing forward negotiations over Gaza’s gas, while also blocking and excluding any deal that would grant any Palestinian entity inclusion in the deal?

Israel’s gas reserves inflated, consumption understated

As noted in my article, and ignored by Noble Energy contractor Allison Good, the drive to access Gaza’s gas was likely magnified in the context of a report by Israeli government chief scientists Sinai Netanyahu and Shlomo Wald of the Energy and Water Resources Ministry.

That report was submitted to the Tzemach committee tasked with drafting a national gas policy, but was covered up until Ha’aretz obtained a leaked copy.

The Tzemach committee recommended the government to export 53% of its gas – reduced to 40% this June – amidst widespread allegations of “improper conduct” anddeliberate inflation of reserve figures.

Indeed, according to the report of the Israeli chief scientists, the government’s gas policy is based on underestimating future Israeli demand and overestimating the country’s gas production potential.

In reality, the scientists said, Israel will need “50% more natural gas than has been forecast until now and its offshore reserves will be empty in less than 40 years.”

Israel’s looming gas crunch

The most optimistic estimate received by the Tzemach committee was that Israel would need 364 billion cubic meters of gas. In contrast, the chief scientists argued that by 2040, Israel would need 650 billion cubic meters, after which the country would consume 40 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

At this rate, “even if Israel chooses not to export any gas, it will entirely exhaust its offshore reserves” by 2055. This assessment, further, ignores that “not all the gas is likely to be commercially extractable.”

The upshot is that Israel cannot simultaneously export gas and retain sufficient quantities to meet its domestic needs.

And if Israel exhausts its gas resources “it will be forced to return to oil to meet its energy needs, even though global oil production is expected to start declining by 2035.” The scientists noted that “if oil output drops by even 15%, its price is likely to spike by 550%.”

These concerns are compounded by the consistent under-performance of several of Israel’s recent gas discoveries compared to the hype, such as in the Sara, Myra, Ishai, and Elijah-3 reserves.

As Israel faces a 2015 gas shortage, Gaza’s gas is a cheap stop-gap

Sohbet Karbuz, head of hydrocarbons at Observatoire Méditerranéen de l’Energie (OME) in Paris, points out that much of the gas was not in hindsight commercially recoverable. As he writes in the Journal of Energy Security,

“There is no certainty that it will be commercially possible to produce any percentage of contingent resources.”

Israel’s gas export policy, he thus remarks with reference to the much-vaunted Tamar and Leviathan fields, is based “partly on a mixture of hype and hope on the one hand, and reserves and prospective resources on the other.”

Drilling in Israel’s Leviathan reserves which was supposed to begin in December 2013 has been postponed to later this year due to high gas pressures at lower depths. In the meantime, reports Jewish Business News,

“Postponing Leviathan’s development could have major repercussions on Israel’s economy, which will face a natural gas shortage from 2015.”

Israel needs the Gaza Marine as a stop-gap, but wants it cheap, and is unwilling to exploit the reserves through any Palestinian entity.

UK Foreign Office – ‘Israel won’t pay the full whack’

Official British Foreign Office (FCO) documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Palestinian think-tank Al-Shabaka based in Washington DC shine new light on this.

According to email correspondence between the FCO’s Near East Group and the British Consulate General in Jerusalem in November 2009, Israel had refused to pay market price for Gaza’s gas. One Foreign Office official said:

“Israel won’t (i) pay the full whack [for the gas] (ii) guarantee to give a certain cut direct to the PA. So BG aren’t getting the gas out of the sea-bed. They are content to exploit other reserves and come back to this one when the price is right.”

Another email dated 29^th June 2010 noted that despite large reserves of gas discovered between Israel and Cyprus giving Israel the opportunity to become a net gas exporter, Israeli officials saw potential for the Gaza Marine to function as “a stop-gap measure before the new finds come fully on stream.”

On 8th February 2011, UK ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould wrote to the FCO explaining that Israel intended to therefore seek the development of Gaza’s gas reserves as this would

“enhance Palestinian opportunities; reduce Gaza’s dependence on Israel; and diversify Israel’s sources of gas. [redacted] added that this last point had been given added topicality by the attack this weekend on the gas pipeline from Egypt.”

British Gas and Israel collude to exclude Hamas

The biggest obstacle as far as Israel is concerned is Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the prospect of a strong independent Palestinian state.

An April 2014 policy paper for the European Parliament’s directorate-general of external policies points out that “distrust” between all these parties, particularly “political divisions on the Palestine side” have “hindered the negotiations.”

After Hamas was elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006, the group declared from the outset that Israel’s agreements with the PA were illegitimate, and that Hamas was the rightful owner of the Gaza Marine resources.

But BG Group and Israeli officials had come up with a strategy to bypass Hamas. A BG official told the Jerusalem Post in August 2007 that

“BG and Israel have arrived at an ‘understanding’ that will transfer funds intended for the PA’s Palestinian Investment Fund into an international bank account, where they will be held until the PA can retake control of the Gaza Strip.”

Under this plan, “Both Israel and BG intend that until the PA is able to remove Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, the money will be held in an international bank account. Neither side wants the money to go to fund terror-related activities.”

Hamas must be uprooted from Gaza

The plan was, according to an Infrastructures Ministry official cited by the Jerusalem Post, about “circumventing the possibility that Israeli money will end up in the wrong hands” by arranging “a payment plan” that would “completely exclude Hamas”.

In the same year, incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya’alon – then former IDF chief of staff – explicitly advocated that the only way in which Gaza’s gas could be developed was through an Israeli military incursion to eliminate Hamas.

Ya’alon’s concern was that “Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel”, a threat which “is not limited to Hamas” and includes the Fatah-run PA. As preventing gas proceeds from “reaching Palestinian terror groups” is “impossible”, Ya’alon concluded:

“It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.”

Ya’alon’s concerns voiced in 2007 – and the prospect of using military force to begin gas production in Gaza – remain relevant today. As the man in charge of Israel’s current war on Gaza, Ya’alon is now in a position to execute the vision he had outlined a year before Operation Cast Lead.

Extending Israeli sovereignty over Gaza

Thus, the exclusion of Palestinian representatives – whether Fatah or Hamas – from the latest negotiations between Israel and BG Gas is no accident.

While PA president Mahmoud Abbas was independently seeking to reach a deal with Russia’s Gazprom to develop the Gaza Marine, Netanyahu had already “made explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state” – which is why he deliberately torpedoed the peace process, according to US officials.

The other factor in this equation is the legal challenge to the Gaza gas proposals fromYam Thetis, a consortium of three Israeli firms and Samedan Oil.

Samedan is a subsidiary of the same US oil company, Noble Energy, that employs National Interest contributor Allison Good, and which has been operating in the Noa South field that overlaps Gaza.

Yam Thetis’ principal argument was that “BG had no right to drill in Palestinian waters as the Palestinian Authority is not a state and cannot grant such a right to drill in offshore Gaza.”

The upshot is that Noble Energy’s consortium should have the right to extend its drilling into the Gaza Marine on behalf of Israel – and at the expense of the Palestinians.

Removing the obstacles – Hamas and the PA

Since the Oslo Accords, although the PA’s maritime jurisdiction extends up to 20 nautical miles from the coast, Israel has incrementally reduced Gaza’s maritime jurisdiction by 85%from 20 to 3 nautical miles – effectively reversing Palestinian sovereignty over the Gaza Marine.

But with Israel’s determination to access Gaza’s gas accelerating in the context of the risk of a 2015 energy crunch, the fundamental obstacle to doing so remained not just the intransigent Hamas, but an insufficiently pliant PA seeking to engage the west’s arch-geopolitical rival, Russia.

Israel’s own commitment to blocking a two-state solution and bypassing Hamas meant that its only option to bring Gaza’s gas into production was to do so directly – with, it seems, the competing collusion of American and British energy companies.

The IDF’s Gaza operation, launched fraudulently in the name of self-defence, is certainly though not exclusively about permanently altering the facts on the ground in Gaza to head-off the PA’s ambitions for autonomously developing the Marine gas reserves, and to eliminate Hamas’ declared sovereignty over them.

 

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Also by Nafeez Ahmed: ‘Gaza: Israel’s $4 billion gas grab‘.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He has advised the British Foreign Office, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and US State Department, and his work was officially used by the 9/11 Commission. He writes for The Ecologist and The Guardian on the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises.

His latest nonfiction book is A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it(2010), and his forthcoming novel, Zero Point, is out this August.

| Israel Started This ‘War’ and Killed 1,000+ Based on A Very Big Lie!

Israel Started This War and Killed 1,000+ Based on A Very Big Lie ~ ICARUS VERUM, AddictingInfo.org

Over the past several weeks – Israel’s constant bombing of innocent civilians in Gaza, Palestine has become a front page story. And while many people cling to their own biases and personal beliefs relative to whether or not they view Israel’s actions justified … what is concerning is how so few people actually understand what led to Israel turning Gaza into a death zone. Well – the Israeli government lied to start a war.

In June of this year – three Israeli teens went missing. The Israeli government knew they were dead but put a gag order on Israeli news organizations so they were unable to report this. They flooded Palestinians towns with Israeli military(source), arrested hundreds of Palestinians including people let go in prior political agreements (source), and looted their homes of their valuables (source) all under the pretext of looking for the “missing teenagers”.  Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said there was “unequivocal proof” that Hamas was responsible for what he called “kidnappings” (source) and the US media reported it exactly as he said it.  If you were an American – you were told by the US media via the Israeli government that Hamas kidnapped three teenagers (source).  Netanyahu said he would show the evidence for the world to see (source) … days and weeks went by with no evidence but plenty of military actions against the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu incited violence against Palestinians and said that the Palestinian people will pay for these three kids getting kidnapped (source).  And that’s exactly what he got.  Over 10 Palestinians were killed by the IDF or by Israeli citizens in the coming days; one of them was burned alive by six Jews (source).  One Palestinian American teenager was filmed getting nearly beaten to death by the Israeli Defense Forces for simply not being Jewish (source).  There are to this day gangs of Jewish Israelis roaming the streets in Israel and Palestine looking to harm Palestinians just because of their ethnicity (source).  The message was – you hurt one of ours and we’re going make you pay the price.

For over a week – the Israeli government bombed Gaza unprovoked.  No missiles came from Gaza – the Israeli government said it was “retaliating” for the death of three Israeli teenagers who they said Hamas was responsible for killing.  Over a week of bombing Palestinian civilians in Gaza (source).  When asked for proof that Hamas was involved – this Israeli colonel said Israel didn’t need proof (source) they were simply going to bomb Palestine into the next century.  Operation “Protective Edge” began on July 7th (source) for what Israel called a response to rockets attacking Israel.  In reality – Hamas was really just retaliating against Israeli aggression that led to the murder of Palestinian civilians.

Well – as it turns out – Hamas wasn’t responsible for the kidnapping of those three Jewish kids despite all of the assurances by the Israeli government and parroting by the United States mainstream media.  It was all a lie.

As reported by Buzzfeed reporter Sheera Frenkel:

Hanan Ashrawi is a member of the PLO executive committee and she did an excellent job explaining why Israel is responsible for war crimes here:

“These are war crimes being committed before the world, before the eyes of the whole world and I just can’t understand how people sit back and say [it’s] self-defense. I just can’t take the language, I can’t take the propaganda, I can’t take the mantra that Israel has a right to defend itself. Against whom? Against innocent civilians? More than 80 children have been torn to bits. Is this self-defense?”

First – most people do not understand the big picture. So many think this is a religious war that’s gone on for 2,000 years. The person who thinks that is wholly misinformed. The Israeli government has been working for decades to steal as much land from the Palestinian people under the auspice of “security”. Even people who support a 2 state solution understand that geographically – Gaza is not linked to the West Bank which covers East Jerusalem, Ramallah, Hebron etc.

And with that lack of a contiguous border – Palestine has essentially been broken into two parts. Both parts have different leadership; Gaza is run by Hamas and the West Bank is run by Fatah or the Palestinian Authority. Both political groups have had their differences and infighting and this has made it very difficult for them to push for a bid at the United Nations to be a fully recognized country in the eyes of the world. And this bid to be a fully recognized country is what scares Israel the most; in fact – most Americans do not know that Israel to this day refuses to say what their borders actually are. For while the international community regards their borders to be set along the 1967 lines – the Israeli government will not accept this. In fact – even Hamas has called for the recognition of 1967 borders which is a de facto recognition of Israel as a state.

Bottom line – once Palestine is recognized as a country … their borders are recognized officially. And it is exactly this issue that has led Israel to start a war. In order for Israel to keep taking land from indigenous Palestinians in order to give it to Jews from Brooklyn and Russia – it needs there to be no borders. The only way to do that is to stop Palestine’s bid at the UN and the only way to do that is to break up the recent “unity government” between Hamas and Fatah where they have called for an technocratic government to run the show while they demonstrate solidarity.

And Netanyahu (source), his allies and American politicians dedicated to Israel and their wealthy pro-Israel donors have called for the breakup of the Palestinian unit government  (source) and (source).

And as Jewish News Service says HERE:

Some U.S. lawmakers are unconvinced. U.S. Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.  introduced a nonbinding resolution (H. Res. 622) on June 12, spelling out specific reasons to defund the unity government.

“All U.S. assistance to the Palestinian Authority should have been be suspended years ago, but openly joining a terrorist organization that kills women and children simply because they are Jewish should convince even the Obama administration to wake up and defund this madness,” said Franks. “With the formation by Fatah and Hamas of a unity government, it is all too clear why recent attempts at peace talks have failed. Peace talks will never be productive while only one party is seeking peace and another is openly courting terrorist allies.”

In the Senate, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), two prospective 2016 GOP presidential candidates, have both called for defunding the PA. Cruz is yet to introduce his bill, while Paul’s Stand with Israel Act of 2014 (S. 2265), introduced June 17, is not expected to pass.

Still, in an op-ed for National Review last week, Paul blasted the White House and State Department for what he views as an indecisive, morally equivocating U.S. attitude towards the murder of the Israeli teens.

Norman Finkelstein – the passionate and outspoken professor – said it best on Democracy Now HERE:

As to how we got to where we are, the general context is perfectly obvious for anyone who wants to see it. A unity government was formed between the PA and Hamas. Netanyahu was enraged at this unity government. It called on the U.S., it called on the EU, to break relations with the Palestinian Authority. Surprisingly, the United States said, “No, we’re going to give this unity government time. We’ll see whether it works or not.” Then the EU came in and said it will also give the unity government time. “Let’s see. Let’s see what happens.”

At this point, Netanyahu virtually went berserk, and he was determined to break up the unity government. When there was the abduction of the three Israeli teenagers, he found his pretext. There isn’t a scratch of evidence, not a jot of evidence, that Hamas had anything to do with the kidnappings and the killings. Nobody even knows what the motive was, to this point. Even if you look at the July 3rd report of Human Rights Watch, they said nobody knows who was behind the abductions. Even the U.S. State Department, on July 7th, there was a news conference, and the U.S. State Department said, “We don’t have hard evidence about who was responsible.” But that had nothing to do with it. It was just a pretext. The pretext was to go into the West Bank, attack Hamas, arrest 700 members of Hamas, blow up two homes, carry on these rampages, these ransackings, and to try to evoke a reaction from Hamas.

This is what Israel always does. Anybody who knows the history, it’s what the Israeli political scientist, the mainstream political scientist—name was Avner Yaniv—he said it’s these Palestinian “peace offensives.” Whenever the Palestinians seem like they are trying to reach a settlement of the conflict, which the unity government was, at that point Israel does everything it can to provoke a violent reaction—in this case, from Hamas—break up the unity government, and Israel has its pretext. “We can’t negotiate with the Palestinian Authority because they only represent some of the Palestinian people; they don’t represent all of the Palestinian people.” And so Netanyahu does what he always does—excuse me, what Israeli governments always do: You keep pounding the Palestinians, in this case pounding Hamas, pounding Hamas, trying to evoke a reaction, and when the reaction comes—well, when the reaction comes, he said, “We can’t deal with these people. They’re terrorists.”

Israel lied to the American media and the American media parroted their lies.  The Israeli war on Palestine is still ongoing with over 1,000 dead vs. 3 Israeli civilians, thousands more wounded and a completely demolished infrastructure.  The Israeli cabinet unanimously rejected the last peace deal that was purportedly proposed by Secretary of State Kerry (source).

For images of the effects of this war – you can see HERE, HERE, and HERE.

[Image courtesy of Mohammed Saber/EPA]

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| Forced Adoption in the UK: Child Protection or ‘Punishment Without a Crime’?

Forced Adoption in the UK: Child Protection or ‘Punishment Without a Crime’? ~ Lydia Smith, International Business Times.

When a couple brought their newborn son to a hospital with a fractured arm, Coventry social services were called in on suspicion that the child might have been injured by his parents.

The mother was arrested, handcuffed and detained for nine hours, fearing her child might be taken away. Although not charged with any offence, the couple remain on police bail, preventing them leaving the country.

The child was taken by his Irish grandmother to Ireland, where is he supported by a family. Social services are still attempting to get an order through the courts for the grandmother to return to England.

This is just one case study of “forced adoption” – a term used by critics of the practice of removing children permanently from their parents and their subsequent adoption.

Aside from Croatia, Britain is the only EU member state that practices forced adoption and for some, it is a secretive system that allows social workers to separate children from loving families without proper justification and with little concern for their interests.

But for others, adoption is only carried out when it is in the child’s best interests to do so – and criticism of the social care system is merely a consequence of the incomprehensibly difficult task of removing children from their parents.

There are 92,000 “looked after” children in the UK – meaning cared for by the state – according to NSPCC. More than half of these children in England and Wales became looked after because of abuse or neglect between 2012 and 2013 but critics say they have had their sons and daughters taken away for less.

Ian Josephs, who runs the Forced Adoption website, has helped hundreds of families in this situation.

Speaking to IBTimes UK, he explained lots of parents feel they are punished without having committed a crime.

“No baby or child should be removed from parents and put into care unless one of the parents has committed, or at least been charged with a crime against children,” he said.

But the argument for forcible adoptions is that if left too late, the child may be at risk or serious harm or even suffer death.

However, another problem lies in determining if and proving that, particularly in cases of emotional abuse, there is sufficient evidence to take the child away.

Critics state there are a number of procedural issues surrounding forced adoption. Some argue that due to increased funding for social services units – that effectively place a greater number of children with adopted families – there are financial incentives for local authorities to secure adoptions.

Moreover, some argue there is a demonisation of parent’s embroiled in care proceedings. More than 90% of families where children are forcibly adopted live below the poverty line – despite counterarguments that child abuse and neglect are not class issues.

Around 45% of the parents have mental health problems, which often go undiagnosed, unassessed or untreated, before proceedings take place.

Once a child is placed for adoption, neither the parents nor child have any recourse open to them to reverse the process – even when evidence comes to light that shows that the reasons for the adoption were flawed.

Currently, families subjected to forced adoption may also be prohibited by court order from publicly discussing their case and attempting to contact their children.

“Most parents who contact me say they have done nothing wrong and if they speak the truth, they shouldn’t be punished by the state by having their children confiscated – nor should they receive gagging orders to stop them complaining publicly and breaching their freedom of speech,” said Josephs.

Speaking at a conference for the charity Children Screaming to be Heard, Josephs stated that when children are taken into care, gagging orders isolate children from family and friends.

“Even if parents have done committed a crime, the children haven’t – we shouldn’t treat them like them have,” he added.

Introduced in April, the Children and Families Act 2014 seeks to reshape the adoption system – in particular, to get children placed with adoptive families more quickly.

But while adopting is necessary for children in danger, there are a number of solutions that don’t punish the families of children who are not.

Such solutions include pre-proceedings intensive support, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and specialist family support services.

Rather than bonuses for placing children in care, they could be used to support families remaining together.

Related

• Essex Forced Caesarean: Italian Mother’s Case ‘A Big Problem That’s Been Swept Under the Carpet’

Critics say forced adoption without criminal activity is “punishment without a crime” Getty