Know Their Names

Right:The courtroom at the International Criminal Court.

Prosecuting war criminals is a frustrating affair. Appropriate laws are in place, but without mechanisms to enforce them they are meaningless. Domestic law is enforced by the state, but in questions of foreign policy states are driven by interests, not principles. They will assemble international tribunals, but only to judge weak and defeated enemies.

So, while the docks at the International Criminal Court are filled with petty African thugs, most war criminals are never held to account, in spite of a strong legal case. Taking that position to an extreme, the U.S has even pledged to intervene militarily to protect any American war criminal facing a prosecutor in the Hague. The value of these selective prosecutions to the human rights movement is minimal, but the fear they create among third world military leaders, who know political conditions and their aurora of immunity could easily change, is real.

That fear has been gnawing at the minds of many high officials, particularly after the London arrest of Gen. Augosto Pinochet, an American ally once considered untouchable

Even if the possibility of prosecution is remote the fear is real. Political realities will change, and with them so will legal ones, those who are untouchable today could end up on trial tomorrow. When justice cannot be implemented the fear of justice must fill the void.

Every arrest of a western war criminal in a western nation helps lift the veil of impunity. Every indictment is a victory, every arrest is a greater one. Western is an important qualification. Prosecutions of official enemies will produce more convictions, as well as an orgy of hypocritical self-congratulation, but they will be colored by their political context, doing nothing to advance human rights. Prosecutions of criminals from friendly nations will discourage future violations. A young officer in a combat zone will hesitate before ordering atrocities if he knows he will face the possibility of arrest for the rest of his life.

Towards this end western human rights activists need to begin compiling sealed lists of suspected criminals accompanies by legal evidence to support their prosecution. The travel of individuals on the list can then be monitored and information can be released as opportunities for arrest occur. This will do much to temper the actions of battlefield commanders. Those involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity will be troubled, uncertain if they are being targeted for future prosecution, they will face the choice of accepting a de facto travel ban, a small penalty in itself, or risk arrest and prosecution abroad.

PREMATURE ANTI-FASCIST?

Premature Anti-Fascist
A Lecture By
Bernard Knox

I first heard the remarkable phrase that serves as my title in 1946 when, fresh out of the US Army, I went up to New Haven, Connecticut for an interview with the chairman of the Yale Classics Department, to which, taking advantage of the generous provisions of what was popularly known as the GI Bill, I had applied for admission to the graduate program for the Ph.D. in Classics. I had submitted a copy of my certificate of the BA I had received from St. Johns College, Cambridge in 1936. I did not make any mention of the fact that I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better than Auden, who got a third, and Housman, who failed completely). To jazz my application up a bit, I had included my record in the US Army, private to captain 1942-45. The Professor, who had himself served in the US Army in 1917-18, was very interested, and remarked on the fact that, in addition to the usual battle-stars for service in the European Theatre, I had been awarded a Croix de Guerre a l'Ordre de l'Armée, the highest category for that decoration. Asked how I got it, I explained that, in July 1944, I had parachuted, in uniform, behind the Allied lines in Brittany to arm and organize French Resistance forces and hold them ready for action at the moment most useful for the Allied advance. "Why were you selected for that operation?" he asked, and I told him that I was one of the few people in the US Army who could speak fluent, idiomatic, and (if necessary) pungently coarse French. When he asked me where I had learned it, I told him that I had fought in 1936 on the northwest sector of the Madrid front in the French Battalion of the XIth International Brigade. "Oh," he said, "You were a premature anti-Fascist."

I was taken aback by the expression. How, I wondered, could anyone be a premature anti- Fascist? Could there be anything such as a premature antidote to a poison? A premature antiseptic? A premature antitoxin? A premature anti-racist? If you were not premature, what sort of anti-Fascist were you supposed to be? A punctual anti-Fascist? A timely one? In fact, in the '30s, as the European situation moved inexorably toward war, the British and French governments (the French often under pressure from the British) passed up one timely opportunity after another to become anti-Fascist. They did nothing when Adolf Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations and began a massive rearmament program (except that the British government negotiated an Anglo-German Naval Treaty that gave Hitler the right to build the U- boats that, in the early '40s, came close to starving Britain into surrender). No action was taken when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, demolishing the buffer against an invasion of France created by the Versailles Treaty. They allowed Hitler and Mussolini to supply Franco with planes, tanks, guns and troops, while enforcing a so-called Non-Intervention Agreement that cut off supplies to the Government. They remained silent while Mussolini conquered Abyssinia and Hitler annexed Austria. And in 1938, they sold down the river for a ludicrous illusion of Peace in Our Time the only strong, democratic state in Eastern Europe that might have been a deterrent to Hitler's plans for expansion, the Czechoslovak Republic. You couldn't call Chamberlain, Daladier and Laval 'timely anti-Fascists'. They declared war on Hitler in 1939 as he invaded Poland, a declaration that gave no help to the Poles, who were crushed between the armies of Hitler from one side and Stalin from the other. So what kind of anti-Fascists were they? My French maquisards had a phrase for the Frenchmen who, in 1944, as the Allied armies broke out of the Normandy pocket and raced across France in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht, finally tried to join the Resistance. Resistants de la dernière heure was their contemptuous name for them - 'last- minute anti-Fascists'. It is a perfect description of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax.

But in 1939, last-minute was too late. Too late to save the millions who died in the death camps; too late to save the soldiers and sailors who died in the campaigns in Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, at Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Okinawa and many other places Americans had never heard of; too late to save the civilians who, like the inhabitants of Guernica, died under the bombs in Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden and Hiroshima. It would have been better to be premature.

I did not, of course, say any of this to the professor. I kept quiet and was admitted, and resumed the study of those ancient authors whom I had left untouched for ten years, ever since, a few months after graduating from Cambridge in 1936, I left for Spain. What I did not realize (something the professor knew perfectly well) was that 'Premature Anti-Fascist' was an FBI code-word for 'Communist'. It was the label affixed to the dossiers of those Americans who had fought in the Brigades when, after Pearl Harbor (and some of them before) they enlisted in the US Army. It was the signal to assign them to non-combat units or inactive fronts and to deny them the promotion they deserved. Not only did they deserve it; the Army needed them in responsible positions, for they were the only soldiers in it who had any experience of modern war, who had been bombed and strafed by modern German and Italian aircraft, who had faced German and Italian tanks, who had come under the fire of modern artillery, especially the Luftwaffe's 88mm antiaircraft gun, which the German crews had found murderously effective against ground troops because of its high muzzle velocity. It was later the nightmare of the GIs in North Africa, Italy, and France.

What made me, and many others like me in England, France, Belgium, Holland, Canada and the United States, into premature anti-Fascists? I can speak only of my own case but it is, I think, typical of that of many of my contemporaries. I grew up, like most of my generation, haunted by the specter of what was known in England as the Great War, the war of 1914-18. My two earliest memories, in fact, are vivid pictures from that time. Some time in 1917, when I was barely three years old, I was carried, in the arms of a Canadian nurse who was boarding at our house in South London, across a street illuminated only by moonlight and the moving beams of the searchlights looking for German zeppelins overhead. Behind me came my mother, carrying my brother and sister, newly-born twins. We were hurrying to the bomb shelter, an underground taxi garage just across the street. My father was in the Army; he was engaged in the nightmare battle of Passchendaele in Flanders, a winter offensive in appalling weather conditions that won a few useless miles of muddy terrain at the cost of 300,000 casualties. The second picture is that of a Lee-Enfield rifle leaning against the wall of the sitting room of our house, and beside it a khaki kitbag with a helmet on top of it. It was my father's equipment; he was home on 24-hour leave before sailing for Italy, where his regiment was sent to stiffen the Italian army after its disastrous defeat at Caporetto.

My father, like many veterans of that war, would never talk about it. But like most of my generation, I read all the books about it I could get my hands on Robert Graves' classic Goodbye to All That, Henri Barbusse's unforgettable Le Feu, the unacknowledged model for Remarque's later All Quiet on the Western Front - and the poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg. All that we read induced in us a horror at what seemed a senseless waste of human lives and a fear that, in spite of the League of Nations, war might recur. The secondary school I went to in 1926, the year my father died, confirmed my fears. Like most such schools it had a Cadet Corps, a military training program designed to produce potential junior officers for the next war. Every Friday I went to school in uniform khaki puttees, breeches, a tunic with highly polished buttons, and a peaked cap; after morning lessons we went out onto the school playground and were put through the rigors of close-order drill, carrying rifles that dated back to the Boer War at the beginning of the century. But Friday afternoon was only the beginning. We also had firing practice at the HQ of the local Territorial Regiment with rifles and also the Lewis gun, the light machine gun of the British Army in the Great War, and every summer we went off to a camp on the Isle of Wight, where we lived through two weeks of military training under canvas, our lives regulated by bugle-calls and enlivened by simulated combat maneuvers against the cadet corps of other schools located in the vicinity.

When in the autumn of 1933 I went up to St. John's college in Cambridge, Hitler was already dictator of Germany and had begun his program of militarization of the country; the prospect of a renewed European war was now a grim reality. I soon joined something called the Anti-War Movement, which on November 11 organized a march to lay a wreath on the War Memorial. The inscription on the wreath read: 'To the victims of imperialist war from those who are determined to prevent another.' Naturally, we ran into opposition. November 11 in those days was not only a day of remembrance, it was also a sort of patriotic ceremony at which artificial poppies, reminiscent of those of Flanders, were sold by volunteers to raise money for wounded and hospitalized veterans. Our march through the central college area to the memorial was bitterly contested; not only were we pelted with fruit and eggs bought from nearby stores, we were also repeatedly charged by rugger toughs trying to break up our column. Though battered, we reached the memorial and deposited our wreath.

This demonstration, however, was only a symptom of a deeper malaise which affected us; we were worried not only about the possibility of war but also about the economic and political situation that produced it. And even if war was averted, we faced a bleak future. What would happen to us after three years of study and security at the university? England, like the rest of the world, was in the depths of the Great Depression, which seemed to have become a permanent condition. Even the professional optimists among the economic pundits could offer little hope of recovery. The Depression was a more dispiriting phenomenon in England than in the United States; the Roosevelt New Deal was no panacea but it was at least evidence of official concern, whereas the so-called National Government's policy of retrenchment was a defiant manifesto of indifference to widespread distress. In 1933 unemployment figures in the British Isles reached a record high of three million (23 percent of all insured workers); the unemployment benefits on which their families had to live were just enough to keep them from starvation on a diet of bread and margarine, potatoes and tea. Looking back at it in 1966, Harold Macmillan, who had been Prime Minister but was a junior conservative MP in the 1930s, remembered his conviction that "the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down... Perhaps it could not survive at all without radical change... Something like a revolutionary situation had developed."

But it was not only the working class that faced unemployment. University graduates, even the elite of Oxford and Cambridge, especially those whose studies were of the impractical type literature, philosophy and above (or perhaps I should say below) all the study of the Greek and Roman classics had only one road to go: teaching. And for someone like me, with a second-class degree, that meant teaching in some struggling boys' boarding school in cramped quarters and on unappetizing food for a miserable salary. There was an agency that found you such jobs; it went under the Dickensian name of Gabbitas and Thring (Auden parodied it in one of his poems as Rabbitsarse and String). It found a job for Evelyn Waugh when he left Oxford - a school that reduced him to such despair that he decided to commit suicide. He went down to the seashore and started to swim out to sea, determined to go on until his strength failed and he drowned. But he ran into a school of stinging jelly-fish and he turned back, to the delight of his later readers who were treated to hilarious visions of that school in his novels. Auden, also down from Oxford, ended up in a school in Scotland, where he had just as much difficulty understanding the Lallans dialect of his charges as they did understanding the bleat of his Oxford High-Church accent.

A 'revolutionary situation', MacMillan says. And he was right. And like many of my generation faced with what seemed to be the collapse of capitalism, I turned to the texts that seemed to offer an explanation of our dilemma - above all, that remarkable document The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. I was soon an active member of the Socialist Club; my investment of time in their activities and in Marxist studies are the reason why I ended up with a second-class degree. I was soon thinking of myself as a Communist. Not that the label meant very much in Cambridge, which was in those days still a purely university town; there were no factories, no unions, no working class except for the college porters, maids, and kitchen help. Our activity consisted mainly of Marxist study groups, with an occasional street demonstration. We also went to meetings of the British Union of Fascists to heckle and get thrown out by the Blackshirt thugs. There was, of course, as we were to discover much later, a serious side of Communism in Cambridge: Philby, Burgess, Maclean, and Blunt were all Cambridge men. But the first two had left Cambridge before my time and of the other two, the only one I ever saw, though I never talked to him, was Maclean. My sister still resists my requests for her to return a photograph I once lent her; it shows a demonstration in Cambridge with students carrying signs that say, 'Scholarships, Not Battleships'. By the side of the formation are two marshals shouting slogans for the marchers to repeat. One of them is Donald Maclean and the other me. On the back of the photograph, my sister has written: 'Bernard studying the Classics at Cambridge.'

Meanwhile, with money saved up from my scholarship funds, I had been spending all my vacations in Paris, living in cheap hotels on the Left Bank, deepening the knowledge of the French language I had acquired from a brilliant teacher at my London school, making friends among French students and even taking part in demonstrations against the government's policies. For in France, as in England, La Crise, as they called it, still crippled the economy and, as in England, a Fascist movement, Les Croix de Feu, the Fiery Crosses, had made its debut. One of its demonstrations provoked riots that resulted in 15 dead and over 1,000 injured. The threat of a Fascist coup united the French Communist and Socialist parties together with the liberals in a Front Populaire, which won an overwhelming victory in the elections of 1936. For the first time since the long-lasting Depression had begun, a government set out to redress some of the injustices of the system; long-overdue reforms were introduced: the forty-hour week, paid vacations. And Fascist organizations were banned. For the first time, a Western government had broken out of the pattern of retrenchment and repression.

It was a moment of jubilation and hope, but it did not last long. French capital reacted by pulling out of the country, and meanwhile, the newly-elected Spanish government of the Frente Popular was challenged by a military revolt. Popular demand in France huge demonstrations shouting 'Des canons pour l'Espagne', 'Des avions pour l'Espagne' and national interest both spoke strongly for the Spanish government's request to purchase arms, but the French premier, Léon Blum, under pressure from London, agreed to join the Non-Intervention Agreement, though Germany and Italy were openly supplying the rebels.

In September I received a letter from my friend John Cornford, the leader of the Communist movement in Cambridge, who had just returned from Spain, where he had fought for a few weeks on the Aragon front, in a column organized by the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the POUM, a party that was later to be suppressed as too revolutionary. He had returned to England to recruit a small British unit that would set an example of training and discipline (and shaving) to the anarchistic militias operating out of Barcelona. He asked me to join and I did so without a second thought.

I knew no more about Spanish politics and history than most of my fellow-countrymen, that is to say, not much. I had read (in translation) much (but not all) of Don Quixote, and seen reproductions of the great paintings of Velázquez and Goya. I knew that Philip II had married an English reigning Queen -- Mary -- and on her death claimed the throne of England, but had been defeated when in 1588 he sent the great Armada to invade England and enforce his claim. I knew that the Duke of Wellington had fought a long, hard campaign against Napoleonic armies in Portugal and Spain and that guerrilla (which was to become my military specialty in World War II) was a Spanish word. But I had no real understanding of the complicated situation that had produced the military revolt of July 1936. What I did know was that Franco had the full support of Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, that support had been decisive at the beginning of the war. The military coup had failed in Madrid and Barcelona, Spain's principal cities. Franco's best troops, the Foreign Legion and the Regulares, the Moorish mercenaries recruited to fight against their own people, were cooped up in Morocco, since the Spanish Navy had declared for the Republic. Planes and pilots from the Luftwaffe and the Italian Air Force, in the first military airlift in history, had flown some 8,000 troops across to Sevilla, Franco's base for the advance on Madrid.

And this was all I needed to make up my mind. I left a few days later for Paris, with a group of a dozen or so volunteers that John had assembled. There were three Cambridge graduates and one from Oxford (a statistic I have always been proud of), as well as one from London University. There was a German refugee artist who had been living in London, two veterans of the British Army and one of the Navy, an actor, a proletarian novelist and two unemployed workmen. Before we left, I had gone with John to visit his father in Cambridge; he was the distinguished Greek scholar Francis MacDonald Cornford, author of brilliant books on Attic comedy, Thucydides and Greek philosophy, and Plato. He had served as an officer in the Great War and still had the pistol he had had to buy when he equipped himself for France. He gave it to John, and I had to smuggle it through French Customs at Dieppe, for John's passport showed entry and exit stamps from Port-Bou and his bags were likely to be given a thorough going-over.

Once in Paris, we went to the Comité d'Entraide au Peuple Espagnol and that was where John's scheme for a small British unit on the Aragon front was abandoned. We were sent to a hotel in Belleville, a working-class section of Paris, where we found ourselves a tiny English drop in a sea of large national groups French, Polish, Belgian, German, Italian - all of them bound for Spain. We left next morning by train for Marseilles where, at night, we boarded a Spanish vessel that left at midnight and, once clear of the harbor, turned off all its lights there were reports of Italian submarines on the prowl. But we reached our destination, Alicante, safely and sailed into the port late one afternoon only to find it full of foreign naval vessels, all there, presumably, to enforce the Non- Intervention Agreement (which did not, however, apply to human imports). As we moved in, a British destroyer crossed our bows, its signal lamp flashing a message in Morse code. "They're telling us to show our colors," said one of our Navy men, and sure enough, a few minutes later, two members of the crew, black-bearded and wearing brightly-colored scarves, came on deck with a flag they proceeded to run up. It consisted of two triangles, one black, one red. The captain of the destroyer must have searched his flag book in vain; they were the colors of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica.

From Alicante we went by rail crowds at all the stations shaking clenched fists at us and shouting UHP to Albacete, where we were housed in what had been the barracks of the Guardia Civil. Our British section was assigned (mainly, I suppose, because I could serve as interpreter) to the French Battalion, where we ended up in the compagnie mitrailleuse, the machine-gun company. But for the rest of September and all through October we had no machine guns, not even rifles; the only weapon around was John's pistol, which he kept well under wraps. Since we couldn't train with weapons, our days were spent practicing close-order drill (French, English, or sometimes Spanish) and going on route marches along the dusty roads of the province of Murcia. No one knew when or where we would be sent to fight when (if ever) the weapons arrived, though the scuttlebutt rumors had us held in reserve for a flanking movement via Ciudad Real that would take Franco, now moving steadily toward Madrid, in the rear.

As the calendar moved through October and into November, events suddenly developed so fast that we could hardly grasp what was happening. One late evening, we were suddenly alerted and marched to the railroad yards, where huge wooden crates were being unloaded. We were given tools to open them up; our weapons had arrived at last.

There were stamps and bills of lading and brand marks on the cases that showed they had made the rounds of the international arms markets; some were in Arabic and one case was branded with the letters IRA. They contained rifles American '03 Springfields, the rifle carried by the Doughboys in the Great War and, at last, our machine guns. They were a sad disappointment antique models that sported a bicycle seat for the gunner high up in the air, real suicide traps; no one, not even the French, knew what they were (though the cases had French stamps on them) until our oldest French volunteer, a patriarch known as grand-père, identified them as St. Etiennes, a gun that was declared obsolete in the first weeks of the 1914 war. They must have been relics from the war of 1870.

But it was with these museum pieces that we set out in open trucks on the 6th of November, not for Ciudad Real, but for Madrid, where the war was about to be won or lost. Franco's troops had pushed through the Madrid defenses in the Western and Northwestern sectors; the government had left for Valencia and international opinion was unanimous that Madrid would fall. (One Paris newspaper actually published a fake picture of the Generalisimo riding on a horse down the Puerta del Sol.) The fall of Madrid would certainly be followed by British and, though reluctant, French recognition of Franco as the legitimate ruler of Spain.

We arrived on the eastern outskirts of Madrid on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The point was made in a speech by the Brigade's Political Commissar, Nicoletti, who urged us in Italian-accented French and with emphatic gestures to fight to the last man in the defense of Madrid and gave us the password for the night: "Madrid será la tumba del Fascismo." I was much struck by his gestures and especially his habit of sticking his chin far out when he made an especially defiant statement; in that pose, he bore a startling resemblance to Benito Mussolini. I learned later that Nicoletti (whose real name was DiVittorio) had been a close associate of Mussolini when they were both Socialists, before Italy entered the Great War. That night we were put on a train which went round Madrid to the Estación del Norte, and from there we set out, in the morning, on our famous march through Madrid to the front at Ciudad Universitaria, carrying our useless machine guns. We were three brigades -French, German, and Polish - that made up the first, which was officially denoted the XIth (International) Brigade. We arrived at a building called Filosofía y Letras where, while waiting for orders on the open ground, we had our baptism of fire - strafing by an Italian plane and artillery fire from German gunners - before moving into the building and taking up positions facing the enemy-held buildings, dominated by the Hospital Clinico on its hill, from which the Moorish snipers looked down our throats. It was there, as we frantically tried to get the hang of our antique guns (they seemed to work by an intricate mechanism of springs), that we were called to attention; a general had arrived. His name, he told us in English, which he spoke well with a transatlantic (perhaps Canadian) accent, was Kleber. His name was actually Stern and he was a Hungarian, but Kleber was an appropriate nom de guerre. Jean Baptiste Kleber was one of the French revolutionary generals who beat back the Austrian invasion of France in the 1790s. He asked us if we liked our guns and we told him in no uncertain terms what we thought of them. He asked if Lewis guns would serve our turn and two Lewis guns is what we got next day. They were guns we knew and we kept them firing during the next week or so as the Fascists made repeated attacks.

Early in those days, we had our first casualties. One gunteam was sent ahead to an advanced position but was overrun during the night by the Moorish troops, as we learned from the one man who returned. One of the dead was Maclaurin, a Cambridge man like John and myself. Meanwhile, life in Filosofía y Letras was no rest-cure. We had smashed the huge wide windows in the American-style building (flying glass can do just as much damage as the bullets or shell-fragments that produce it) and the Madrid winter cold (which came as a surprise to Northerners like us who had been fed on tourist propaganda about sunny Spain) seeped into our bodies no matter how many blankets we wrapped around our waists. The snipers, meanwhile, made us crawl along the floor when we had to move, until one night we built, on the wide window-sills, a barricade high enough to enable us to walk upright without giving them a target. The barricades were made of books from the building's library; we took the thickest and tallest books we could find - one of them, I remember, was an encyclopedia of Hindu mythology and religion. We later discovered, after hearing bullets smack into the books, that the average penetration was to about page 350; since that discovery I am inclined to believe, as I did not before, those stories of soldiers whose lives had been saved by a Bible carried in their left-hand jacket pocket.

We were later moved out of the building and marched by night to the vicinity of a village called Aravaca, where we caught our first glimpse of our battalion commander, Colonel Dumont, wearing a smart officer's uniform and a French kepi. (He was later to be shot by the Germans for his activity in the French resistance.) At Aravaca, we were in support of an attack by the Polish battalion; we sat in trenches under shell fire and helped the wounded survivors of the failed attack to the dressing station. Soon we were on the road back to University City, where some of the buildings, stormed during our absence, had to be recaptured. We later spent some time in the Casa de Campo, unable to sleep at night for fear of the Moorish patrols that moved swiftly and silently about their deadly work. And then back again to our old home, Filosofía y Letras, where John got a head wound from a shell that burst inside our room; for the next week or so, he wore a white bandage round the top of his head that made him look, from a distance, like a Moorish trooper.

At this point, some time in December (we had lost count of the days), we were given leave in Madrid. We sat in cafes and drank endless cafés con leche (food was scarce but coffee seemed to be plentiful) and went to the movies, where we saw a Russian film, Chapayev, in which Russian partisans in the Russian Civil War were armed with heavy machine guns. They were water-cooled Maxims, mounted on a heavy steel carriage, with a metal shield to cover the gunner. They were exactly the guns we were now using (we had exchanged our Lewis guns for them some time in November), but in the film the partisans had them pulled by teams of horses, while we had dragged them over the bumps and pits in the Casa de Campo and up and down the staircases of Filosofía y Letras with our bare and half-frozen hands.

Our leave ended suddenly with an alert; we were packed into the open Russian trucks again and driven round to the north-west of Madrid to a small village called Boadilla del Monte, where for the first time we met the English section, about the same size as ours, in The German Battalion of the XIIth brigade, which had arrived at Madrid a few days after us. But we had little time to celebrate. The enemy, stalemated in the western sector, had launched an offensive to outflank the Republican army, cut off the main road to the NW and perhaps attack the city from the North. We set up our two guns in front of the village and waited for daylight.

With it came the boom of artillery and the ripping sound of machine gunfire in the near distance and soon we saw the milicianos in front of us in full retreat; as they came towards Boadilla and the main road our orders were to cover their retreat and hold our position until further orders. The order to withdraw soon came; we did so by sections, one covering the other with fire as it came back. As our section was moving back, dragging the gun, I felt a shocking blow and a burning pain through my neck and right shoulder and fell to the ground on my back with blood spurting up like a fountain. John came back, with David, our Oxford man who had been a medical student. I heard him say; "I can't do anything about that" and John bent down and said, "God bless you, Bernard" and left. They had to go; they had to set up the gun and cover the withdrawal of our other crew. And they were sure that I was dying. So was I. As the blood continued to spout I could feel my consciousness slipping fast away.

I have since then read many accounts by people who, like me, were sure they were dying but survived. Many of them speak of a feeling of heavenly peace, others of visions of angels welcoming them to Heaven. I had no such feelings or visions; I was consumed with rage--furious, violent rage. Why me? I was just 21 and had barely begun living my life. Why should I have to die? It was unjust. And, as I felt my whole being sliding into nothingness, I cursed. I cursed God and the world and everyone in it as the darkness fell.

Many years later, when I returned to the study of the ancient classics, I found that my reaction was not abnormal. In Homer's Iliad, still the greatest of all war books, this is how young men die. Hector, for example, "went winging down to the House of Death/ wailing his fate, leaving his manhood far behind, his young and supple strength." And Virgil's Turnus goes the same road: vitaque cum gomitu fugit indignata sub umbras: 'his life with a groan fled angry to the shades below." "Indignata. Quia iuvenis erat," the great Virgilian commentator Servius explained. "Angry. Because he was young."

Some time later -I shall never know how long I came to. The blood was no longer spouting, just oozing. In a daze, I stood up and walked back through the abandoned houses of Boadilla del Monte out on to the road to Majadahonda, where I met my machine gun section in position at the edge of a small wood. My friends were astonished to see me but they could be of no help; there were no ambulances available and I had to walk the long miles to Las Rozas where there was a dressing station. (It was bombed, in spite of the Red Cross painted on the roof, by Italian planes shortly after I left it that evening.) I left it with three other walking wounded, in a car driven by a man who got lost time after time (he had never been to Madrid before); every time he slammed down on the brakes after making a wrong turn, every one of us screamed in agony. We finally arrived at the Brigade hospital. It was the majestic Hotel Palace, where I have stayed as a paying guest several times since then, always relishing the memory of what it looked like in those days -guns parked where people now leave their hats and coats and armed sentries at all the entrances (it housed the Russian military missions as well as the Brigade's wounded).

I was there for several weeks. The doctors were afraid that I would have a hemorrhage; in fact they were astonished that I had not had one on the long trek to Las Rozas. I was confined strictly to bed for the first two weeks. When the doctor came on his rounds, if he happened to have some student interns with him, he would point to the entry and exit wounds and say to them: "Tell me all the things the bullet missed that would have killed this man." There were apparently lots of them. I was later told by an English expert that the bullet must have been near the end of its trajectory and so took the path of least resistance. But he said: "You were lucky to have such good blood. Punctured carotid arteries don't usually heal up so fast and so well."

I had one professional nurse (they were rare, for nurses had usually been members of a religious order and they were mostly on the other side) but also a younger attendant who was clearly a novice, but was willing, unlike the nurse, who was frantically busy, to try to understand my fractured Spanish. After cleaning me up and passing the time of day with me she always took a long careful look at me, put her hand over my forehead and then went behind the bed where she made some notation, as I gathered because she came back with a pencil in her hand. I could not turn my neck round anything like far enough to see what she was up to -the wound was very painful if pressured - but finally I was able to do so, and saw, to my astonishment, a temperature chart. I had never seen one like it; it had the most amazing up and down zigzags, suggesting that the patient had died from hypothermia or boiling blood several times in the past few weeks. When she came again I asked her where she had trained as an enfermera. "I'm not an enfermera" she said proudly, "I'm a Voluntaria de la Libertad." I asked her where she had learned to take patients' temperatures and she replied, with a sweet smile "De las películas americanas" -from American films.

Early on in my stay in the hospital John came to see me. With what was left of our original group, he was on his way to Albacete to join the British Battalion that was now being organized. Our German refugee artist had also been badly wounded at Boadilla, a crippling wound high in the thigh, and John was killed a week or so later at Lopera in the South. Freddie Jones had been killed at Aravaca, and Paddy Burke, the actor, was killed a few weeks later.

Meanwhile, the doctors at the hospital told me that for treatment of the muscular or nerve injury that inhibited the full use of my right arm I would have to go elsewhere; in fact, they advised me to go home. And the news of John's death, which I received back at the base in Albacete, decided the issue for me. I returned to England, where I did in fact get expert treatment. But on the way from Madrid to Albacete I had seen an encouraging sight. We stopped at one point to let an oncoming train go by. As It rattled past, I saw men waving and giving us the salute with the clenched fist; evidently, these were reinforcements for Madrid. As the coach passed, I saw that it displayed a long white banner that read THE YANKS ARE COMING. It was a contingent of the Lincoln Brigade on its way to the front.

Back home, I watched in utter despondency as the British government persisted in its policy of appeasement and the prospect of victory in Spain receded fast as Hitler and Mussolini gave Franco a steadily increasing preponderance in weapons and troops. The sellout in Munich in 1938 plunged me into despair; it seemed to me that Chamberlain and his sinister Foreign Secretary Halifax were intent on making England a junior partner of Hitler's Drittes Reich. A meeting with a young American woman whom I had met at Cambridge some years before but with whom I now fell in love changed my life, not least because when after Munich she yielded to her parents' anxious insistence that she come home, she persuaded me to apply for an immigration visa, come to America and marry her. Which I did early in 1939.

In the interim I had ceased to think of myself as a Communist. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was understandable; the Western betrayal of Czechoslovakia was a clear signal to Stalin that if Hitler turned against Russia (as he repeatedly announced that he would in his book Mein Kampf), the West would not raise a finger to help. But the brutal annexation of the Baltic states and still more the aggressive war against Finland were harder to accept. I was appalled, too, by the show-trials of the Old Bolsheviks, Bukharin and the rest; I read the verbatim accounts of their so-called confessions, published by Moscow in English and available at left-wing bookshops in London. I was appalled. These tales of recruitment by the British Secret Service in the first days of the Revolution and a lifetime of espionage and sabotage were beyond belief; they could only be the product of fear and perhaps the experience of torture. And I was sickened too by reports, later confirmed, that our General Kleber, whose coolness under fire at University City had taught us all how to face danger, had been recalled to Russia and executed. Loyalty to the ideals for which my friends had died in Spain was undermined by the grim realities which I could no longer ignore. When I came to the United States I joined no party, and though remaining a resolute defender of the cause of freedom in Spain, refrained from political activity.

When the war finally broke out in 1939 it was aptly named the "phony war" -nothing happened in the West as Poland went under. When something did happen, and Hitler drove the British Army out of France, I was tempted to return but realized that I owed more to my wife, who had worked like a Trojan to get me admitted to the United States, than I did to the government which had made this defeat inevitable. I also had a feeling that America would sooner or later become involved and I would be able to fight in the uniform of the country that I was beginning to love.

When that I happened I somehow escaped the discrimination that hampered the military careers of so many of the American veterans of the Brigades. The only occasion on which the possibility emerged was one of the many medical examinations I went through as an enlisted man. The doctor noticed the scar on my throat. "It looks like a bullet wound," he said. I told him it was and he asked how I got it. "And don't tell me," he added, "that it was a hunting accident -or that you were cleaning the gun and it suddenly went off." So I told him I had fought in Spain. "What side were you on?" he asked, and I replied, indignantly, "The government side, of course. His face became a scowling mask. "You mean the Goddam Reds," he said. I made no reply, as he turned me round to find the exit scar. Then he said, "All right, go on to the next booth," and as I started he said, "They damn near got you, didn't they?" But I had no repercussions from this incident and was later selected for OCS and commissioned. And eventually I fought in Europe in a special force organized by the American OSS, the British SOE and the Free French to coordinate the action of the French Resistance forces with the advance of the Allied armies. It was the OSS too that later sent me to North Italy to work with large partisan formations that were operating on our side of the lines but in mountainous areas where heavy American equipment could not be used. The OSS also gave many Americans who had fought in the Brigades a chance to use their skills. General Donovan didn't care what your politics were or might have been as long as you were willing to fight, and there were many ex- Brigadiers who did dangerous and effective work between and behind the lines in Italy.

It was in Italy, too, that I had a sudden reminder of Spain. I was discussing operations with the staff of the Divisione Modena, a large partisan formation, and sometimes getting my newly acquired Italian mixed up with my half-forgotten Spanish, saying fuego instead of fuoco, for example, and frente instead of fronte. Suddenly, after another such fumble, the division commander stood up, smiling, walked over to me and patted me on the shoulder. "Spagna, no?" he said. He had been in the Battaglione Garibaldi that had fought next to us in the Casa del Campo. From that point on, relations with the partisans were no problem.

But of course I had never forgotten Spain. Not only, after the Second World War, did I often go back there (my American passport did not show, as my British one had, an exit from Spain in February 1937 and no entry). I went not only to see the Spain I had not been able to visit during the war -Seville, Granada, Burgos, Cordoba- but also to see again the places where I had fought. Boadilla looked just the same, but the Ciudad Universitaria had been rebuilt in a way that made it difficult for me to retrace my steps. On one occasion, when Franco was still in full control, I made myself rather too conspicuous in my search for the past. I was in the Museo del Ejército, a magnificent museum neglected by most tourists -it is their loss, for it contains many treasures, for example the silk tent used by Charles V when he was on campaign in Morocco and a coverage of the Spanish-American War that does not feature the Maine and Roosevelt's Rough Riders. It had at that time (I wonder if it is still there) a scale model of the Ciudad Universitaria as it looked in November, 1936. There was Filosofía y Letras, with the Hospital Clinico up on the hill, every detail exact. I spent so much time prowling around it that two of the guards came into the room and stared at me and I suddenly realized that I had been there for over an hour. I looked at my watch, muttered a greeting, and left in a hurry.

I also acquired and read what is now a rather large library about the war, including two books -La marcha sobre Madrid and La lucha en torno a Madrid by Colonel José Manuel Martinez Bande that with their photographs and maps explained to me, at last, where exactly I had been and what I was doing. Not that I really needed to be reminded. I am one of those who, in Herbert Matthew's phrase, "went to Spain and left their hearts there." And the poet of the Lincoln Brigade, Edwin Rolfe, spoke for all of us when he wrote, as he trained in Texas for the later war, his haunting poem, First Love:

I am eager to enter it, eager to end it.
But my heart is forever captive
of that other war
that taught me first the meaning
of peace and of comradeship.

And all of us have memories that can at times bring tears to the eyes in a rush of sadness and exaltation. Like Rolfe's-

and always I think of my friend who
amid the apparition of bombs
saw on the lyric lake
the single perfect swan.

MAREK EDELMAN'S LEGACY: ISRAEL'S MOST POPULAR ANTI-ZIONIST MILITANT

Marek Edelman is an odd choice of hero for any state. As an intelligent man with a drive to fight injustice he was in perennial conflict with powerful interests. He led the Jewish forces in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he was a leading voice of dissent against Poland's Communist government, and a fierce critic of Palestinian terrorism. He was also an avowed anti-Zionist, a socialist, and a supporter of the Palestinian resistance, which is why it is initially surprising to see Edelman's passing mourned by many of the same people whose work he devoted his life to resist, particularly high American and Israeli officials.

However, Dr. Edelman is more than the most popular anti-Zionist terrorist, err freedom fighter, in Israel, he is a symbol of tremendous moral authority, a symbol many would like to put to their own use. Many Zionists see their work as a continuation of resistance to NAZI atrocities, by praising him they associate themselves with that symbol.

Its not the first time repressive governments have tried to hijack the memory of his actions. The Polish government tried to get him to participate in festivities celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Uprising, he rebuffed them saying to do so “would be an act of cynicism and contempt” in a nation “where social life is dominated throughout by humiliation and coercion.” During the 2002 trial of Marwan Barghuti Edelman infuriated many in Israel with a letter addressed "To all the leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerrilla organizations. To all the soldiers of Palestinian militant groups," in which he condemned suicide bombings, but also affirmed his support for the Palestinian resistance, to whom he bequeathed both his moral authority and the legacy of his struggle, which in his view they were the heirs of. Israeli academic Israel Gutman typified the indignant reactions when he protested that "Edelman has been filled with hate for Israel for years," and "At the time, he claimed that Begin and Shamir has massacred Arabs."

But now Edelman is gone, he can no longer rebuff the attempts at hijacking the legacy of his actions to legitimize repression. Edelman is no hero to the Israeli government. He was a ruthlessly pragmatic opponent of oppression, irrespective of who was oppressed. While Edelman was comparing his struggle to that of the Palestinians Israeli generals where analyzing the Stroop Report, the findings of the NAZI general who repressed the revolt, for ideas of how to deal with the Intifada. When Benjamin Netanyahu eulogizes Edelman and the American embassy mourns his passing it is not because they admire him, Marek Edelman's spirit lives on in their worst enemies, but because he is finally no longer able to rebuke efforts at using his heroism as a basis to legitimize repressive governments. Marek Edelman is dead, but his spirit, embodied in his actions and words, is immortal, something no propagandist can suppress.

Marek Edelman's open letter on the occasion of the trial of Palestinian leader Marwan Barghuti:

To all the leaders of Palestinian military, paramilitary and guerilla
organizations
To all the soldiers of Palestinian militant groups:

My name is Marek Edelman, I am a former Deputy Commander of the Jewish Military organization in Poland, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Insurrection, In the memorable year of the insurrection - 1943 - we were fighting for the survival of the Jewish community in Warsaw. We were fighting for mere life, not for territory, nor for a national identity. We
were fighting with a hopeless determination, but our weapons were never directed against the defenseless civilian populations, we never killed women and children, In a world devoid of principles and values, despite a constant danger of death, we did remain faithful to these values and moral principles.

We were isolated in our fight, and yet the powerful opposing army was not able to destroy these barely armed boys and girls.

Our fight in Warsaw lasted several weeks, later we fought in the Underground and in the Warsaw insurrection of 1944.

Yet nowhere in the world can a guerilla force bring conclusive victory, nowhere can it be defeated by weapon-full armies, Neither can your war attain any resolution. Blood will be spilled in vain and lives will be lost on both sides.

We have never been careless with life. We have never sent our soldiers to certain death. Life is one for eternity. Nobody has the right to mindlessly take it away. It is high time for everybody to understand just that.

Just look around you, Look at Ireland. After 50 years of bloody war, peace has arrived. Formerly deadly enemies have set down at a common table. Look at Poland at Wales and Kuron, Without a shot being fired, the criminal communist system has been defeated. Both You and the State of Israel have to radically change your attitude. You have to want peace in order to save the lives of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people, and to create a better future for your loved ones, for your children. I know from my own experience that the current unfolding of events depends on you, the Military Leaders. The Influence of political and civilian actors is much smaller. Some of you studied at the university in my town- some of you know me. You are wise and intelligent enough to understand that without peace there is no future for Palestine, and that peace can be attained only at the cost of both sides agreeing to some concessions.
-Marek Edelman, Zurich, 10. August 2002

NOBEL COMMITTEE TO BARAK OBAMA: WAR IS PEACE

The last American President launched a war on the basis of anticipatory self-defense, and this morning the current American President received the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of anticipatory accomplishments. Prizes are not generally awarded in expectation of future actions for a good reason, Alfred Nobel's will established five prizes to be awarded "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Don't expect any scientific or literary prodigies to receive awards in view of what they could, potentially accomplish later in life.

What was most astonishing and disappointing in the award being given to U.S President Barak Obama, though, was the blatant departure from the provision of Nobel's will creating the Peace Prize for "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace." A Peace Prize for the man at the helm of the world's most militarized state? A peace prize for the man at the helm of two belligerent occupations? A peace prize for the man with the blood of innocent Gazans, and Pakistanis, and Afghans, and Iraqis, and others, killed either by his acquiescence or orders? Obama is a man of war and opportunism, he is not a man of peace.

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger received the prize, but it is no less inappropriate to hand the award to Obama. If the Nobel Committee could not find a suitable candidate they should have abstained from awarding it to preserve the integrity of the prize. However, there are thousands of worthy recipients. Most of them endure discomforts and risks to fight the abuses of the system Barak Obama presides over from Washington's comfortable and safe halls of power.

Anyone who participates in a system that so frequently and systematically damages the cause of peace and abuses human rights would be better served by an appearance in the docks at the Hague than one in Oslo.

ABU MAZEN

Does anyone have any information about the credibility of this story, first published by the small Palestinian news agency Shihab and reprinted in the Israeli tabloid Ma'ariv? Is it reliably sourced or is it just politically motivated tabloid junk?

Ma’ariv (p. 5) by Amit Cohen et al. — A Palestinian press agency claims that the surprising decision by Palestinian Authority officials to postpone the discussion of the Goldstone report in the UN Human Rights Council is the result of an Israeli threat. According to a report by Shihab, the Palestinian Authority refused Israel’s demand that it withdraw its support for the harsh report, which Israel considered one-sided. Following this, Israeli figures showed the PA a series of tapes in which Palestinian Authority officials could be heard urging Israel to continue the operation in Gaza. Israel threatened to reveal the material to media outlets as well as to the UN and this, in turn, resulted in the Palestinian retreat. It was further claimed that the Palestinians were shown footage showing a meeting between Abu Mazen, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and then foreign minister Tzippi Livni. In the course of the meeting, according to the report, Abu Mazen attempted to convince Barak to continue the operation. Barak appeared hesitant whereas Abu Mazen was enthusiastic. In addition, a telephone conversation recording between Abed Al-Rahim, secretary general of the Palestinian Authority and director of Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi’s bureau was presented. The Palestinian senior official can be heard saying that now is the time to bring ground forces into the Jabalya and Shati refugee camps. “The fall of these two camps will bring about the fall of the Hamas regime in Gaza, and will cause them to wave a white flag,” says Abed Al-Rahim. According to the report, Dov Weissglas told Abed Al-Rahim that such a move could result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. “They all voted for Hamas,” says Abed Al-Rahim, “they chose their fate, not us.” Following Hamas’s allegations against him, Abu Mazen ordered the establishment of an investigative committee to examine the cause for the postponement of the discussion of the Goldstone report, which sparked a furor and much criticism in the Palestinian street. Officially, Israel argues that Abu Mazen withdrew his request for the discussion as a result of Netanyahu making it clear that such a move would greatly harm the peace process. Moreover, Israel prefers to keep quiet since it has no desire to harm Abu Mazen any more than he has already been harmed and thus play into Hamas’s hands. “Abu Mazen did the correct thing on his part,” says a political source. “Had he insisted on pushing through the proposal, he would have badly harmed the peace process.” In addition, the Palestinian Authority has attempted over the last year to establish an additional cellular network in the West Bank—Wataniya, to be directed by Abu Mazen’s son. “The IDF had opposed the new cellular network, claiming that this would clash with its frequencies, and it was proposed to the Palestinians the minimum frequency allocation, which the Palestinians did not accept,” explained a senior security source. “It would be fairly correct to state that it was hinted to Palestinian senior officials that if they would withdraw their endorsement of the Goldstone report, they would get help in promoting their interests to form a second cellular network in the West Bank.”

R.I.P MAREK EDELMAN (1922-2009)

ISLAMIC EXTREMISM

While the existence of militant strands of Islam is not controversial the causes of this militancy is. The debate cleaves into two camps The first views Islamic extremism as it views all forms of religious extremism, entirely divorced from the hijacked tradition. The second school of thought takes the opposite view, conflating Islam and extremism. In this view, summarized by far right Dutch MP Geert Wilders, "there is no such thing as a moderate Islam," and the only recourse is for the west to "[b]an this wretched book [the Quran] like Mein Kampf is banned," and enact policies to make "no more Muslim immigrants allowed [and]. . .no more mosques,"

The ideology championed by Wilders and his far right cohorts is comforting for many, and perhaps that can explain its popularity. Eschewing nuanced understandings in favor of a dogmatic Us vs. Them approach, it shields westerners form introspection and appeals to powerful ethnocentric impulses. We are inherently good, so therefore, anyone with a conflict with us must be inherently evil, we can do no wrong and they can do right. It is easy to see how this belief fits within the context of a worldview where there are no distinctions between us and them, good and evil, where nothing distinguishes Barak Obama, Hugo Chavez, and Adolf Hitler from one another, and it is equally easy to see how detrimental this worldview is to attempts at fostering tolerance, interfaith dialog, and liberal Islam.

Islam is no more at fault for the conflict between East and West than Arab nationalism or Communism were a few decades ago, indeed Islam plays a similar role, as an ideology of resistance, though like then this is not widely understood. Western policy makers have again confused a historical movement, the backlash against colonialism and neo-imperialism, with the ideology encapsulating it. Like Communist and Arab nationalist movements within the Middle East during the 1970s and 1980s the popularity of militant Islam is rooted in societal factors only superficially related to the religion. Grievances are always expressed within an ideological framework, and so long as the grievances persist so will an ideology to encapsulate them.

When that ideology was Communism and nationalism western policy makers mistook these beliefs for the cause of anti-western sentiments and sought to replace them by encouraging a third ideology; militant Islam. The most violent fundamentalist movements within the Middle East, Hamas, the Taliban, Wahibism all enjoyed the backing of the West, which hoped Islam would pacify the Middle East by weakening the other two movements. It accomplished that much, it did weaken Communism and nationalism, but from a historical perspective it only replaced them, changing nothing.

Those who ascribe anti-western violence to Islam ignore history. Militant Islam is made potent by the same factors that gave rise to ideologically opposed, but equally violent movements. Displacement and occupation in Palestine led to the rise of Hamas, an organization generally cited as an example of the violence inherent in Islam. The most violent and rejectionist Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was born out of the same conditions as it Hamas, and it is much extremist than the Islamic Resistance, but it is not an Islamic organization. It embraces nationalism and Marxism, and though it is secular, it was founded and led by a Christian, Dr. George Habash, not a Muslim. Oppression, and not Islam, or Communism, or nationalism, is the root of the backlash against the West.

Sometimes it is articulated in Islamic rhetoric, elsewhere in terms of nationalism, paganism, Marxism, liberation theology, or hero worship, but no matter what ideology gives it voice there will be a backlash wherever people are subjugated. Oftentimes this backlash is so strong it transcends belief, in Latin American Osama bin Laden is a popular figure among Catholics with virulently anti-western views, and American atheists of the left are popular among many Muslims, not because of any ideological or religious qualification, but because of the perception of resistance.

In the case of Islam it is important to distinguish the religion from what is done in its name. It does not matter how popular extremism is Islam and its moderate followers are entitled to the respect due one of the world's great religions. Just as it would be unfair to condemn Christianity for the Inquisition and the Crusades or Judaism for the role of groups such as the JDL and Kach, condemnations of Islam on the basis of 9/11 or 7/7 is bigoted and intolerant.

Those who attempt to conflate Islam with its radical elements champion a transparently bigoted agenda that has done nothing but further alienate Muslims and worsen extremism. Al-Qadea is not the only organization to fantasize about a non-existent clash of civilizations. Western extremists often demand to see the evidence of Muslims protesting violence done in the name of Islam, though they don't hesitate demonize those in their own society making "not in my name" demonstrations against western atrocities. By asking where is the face of moderate Islam, but never seeking an answer they beg the question.

They always talk of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, though they appear to be unaware that the faculty of the oldest and most respected Islamic school, Al-Ajhar University in Cairo declared the ruling un-Islamic, or that the fatwa was condemned a month after being issued by 48 of the 49 member states of the Islamic Conference. They never tire of prattling on about how the Mumbai attacks demonstrate the barbaric nature of Islam, though they never mention the bodies of the ten attackers were refused an Islamic burial by officials at local Muslim cemeteries who were outraged at the attack.

Sadly, among the leaders of the anti-Islamic bigots, these omissions are not due to ignorance. An illustrious example is the reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The attacks were condemned by a flurry of fatwas representing almost the entire range of Islamic, even militant Islamic thought, they were condemned in spontaneous mass demonstrations across Iran and Pakistan, they were condemned by Muslims worldwide.

One such Muslim is Debbie Almontaser. Speaking of the attacks Almontaser commented “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims. … Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and have stolen my religion." Later when Almontaser became the founding principal of New York City's first Arabic-English public school, one of 67 such dual language schools, a xenophobic hate group calling itself "Stop the Madrassa" initiated a campaign against the school, attacking Almontaser personally. The group had trouble proving she was a "soft Jihadist", a radical, but law-abiding Muslim, seeking to establish a caliphate from within. But they had experienced help. At the helm of the effort was veteran racist activist Daniel Pipes.

Pipes took Almontaser's statement condemning 9/11, removed the last sentence so the quote read “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims," and branded her a "9/11 denier", a petty conspiracy theorist. The original quote did not conform to his ideological preconceptions so he distorted it to validate his bigotries.

The bigots are so caught up in their ethnocentric fantasies they are unable to appreciate elementary distinctions. One of the most popular scaremongering phrases among European Islamaphobes is Bat Ye'or's term Eurabia, in this simplistic worldview there is no difference between Muslim and Arab.

Sadly, this phenomenon is not confined to the traditional nativist xenophobes of the far right. Harvard law Professor Alan Dershowitz, O.J's leading defense attorney, is both an ardent Democrat and one of the most active anti-Islamic hate mongers in the U.S. For years he has championed a plainly bigoted agenda, his fanaticism is so overpowering not even basic facts stand in his way. Seeking expert commentary on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination by Christian Sirhan Sirhan a Boston Globe columnist consulted Derschowitz. "It [the assassination] was in some ways," Dershowitz informed him, "the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn't recognize it at the time."

R regardless of how bigots exploit the issue for their own purposes there are legitimate concerns about Islamic extremism. For leftists, many of them atheists and agnostics, any form of religious extremism is abhorrent. In the west they are often the only voice of protest against supporting repressive Islamic forces such as in Saudi Arabia, East Timor, and Bosnia. In the Middle East they are typically the greatest rival of Islamic extremists. Yet it is evident the sole issue for leftists is human rights, and so, even when they issue scathing denunciations of militant Islam, they are never condemned as anti-Muslim.

Still, they are the greatest challenge to Islamic extremism. Islamic extremism is dependent on the alienation of Muslims by bigots such as Pipes, Derschowitz, and Wilders and the oppression of Muslims in the third world. Leftists work to integrate Islam and Muslims, they oppose all forms of oppression, and they condemn violence irrespective of the ideology whose name it is perpetrated in. If they did not view these activities as such a threat, radical Islamists would have never felt compelled to kidnap British MP George Galloway, or engage in armed clashes with leftists in the Middle East. Leftists, who are castigated as radical appeasers of Islamofascism by those on the radical right, pose a genuine threat to militant Islam whereas the self-appointed guardians of the fatherland only encourage it.

COLLABORATORS

I have been very reluctant to comment on internal Palestinian politics, both because I am not Palestinian and because pro-Palestinian groups cannot afford to be fractured by internal disagreements, but the recent action of the PLO are so appalling they compel comment. The PLO's delegation to the U.N Human Rights Commission in Geneva, bowing to western, specifically American, pressure has withdrawn its support for the Goldstone Report accusing both Israel and the militant group Hamas of war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity during Israel's rampage in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. The report was flawed, but those flaws, which actually reflected a pro-Israel bias had nothing to do with the PLO's withdrawal, and the move would have been condemnable on pragmatic grounds even if they did.

Instead of pursuing justice for their citizens killed in large scale war crimes the PLO has pursued complacency. Can there be any doubt that the pretender President Mahmoud Abbas has no concern for his people, only for his own power. He has worked in tandem with the Israelis and Americans to subvert the results of democratic elections, he has undermined national unity, he has continued to occupy the Presidential compound after the expiration of his term in January, he has presided over increasing corruption and incompetence, he's even guarded by a Shin Bet security detail, and now he has acquiesced to the pressure of western nations and local businessmen and refused to demand accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out against the Palestinian people.

Abbas has shown himself to be just as much an enemy of the Palestinian people and just as destructive to Palestine's nascent democracy as his Israeli counterparts. Abu Mazen is nothing more than a petty, aspiring dictator and collaborator. And while those who support the Palestinian cause must maintain a unified front in spite of any political disagreements among them the ascendency of a collobarationist regime to power in Ramallah provides a discouraging indicator of what a liberated Palestine will look like.

FAIR AND BALANCED?

THE GOLAN HEIGHTS: WHAT ISRAEL WANTS

Most of the Golan Heights has been under Israeli control since the 1967 war. In many ways this scenic corner of southwestern Syria mirrors, in less extreme terms, the Nackba of 1948. After the takeover tens of thousands of Druze and Circassian residents became refugees in circumstances that remain controversial. Today Israel refuses to allow an estimated 100,000 Druze and Circassian displaced by the conflict to return home. Every week separated families meet with loudspeakers at the cease fire line, it is the only way they have been able to regularly see each other for the last forty years.

Israeli families who live on either side of the Israeli-Syrian border have no such problems. Almost immediately after taking control Israeli settlers, with the encouragement of their government, began colonizing the area. By the 1970's twelve Israeli settlements, illegal under international law which prohibits the transfer of a civilian population to occupied territory, had perched themselves among the hills of the Heights. In 1981 Israel effectively annexed the area with legislation transferring control of the Heights from military control to its Northern District, in a move condemned with only one negative vote by the U.N General Assembly. By 2004 nearly 20,000 Israeli settlers inhabited over thirty settlements, with plans for future migrants in the works.

On a human scale the story of the Golan Heights is similar to the story of the Nackba, but on a strategic level it is entirely different. The Golan was settled for a variety of reasons. Economic settlers pursued rich agricultural land, "[t]hey didn't even try to hide their greed for that land" reported former defense minister Moshe Dayan as he recounted the reasons and the methods for the seizure. The ultra-nationalist religious zealots will naturally support any expansionist policy, even, and especially, at the expense of security, and the Israeli government wants leverage over Syria.

It is true, the Likuid movement is adamant it will never withdraw from Golan, but this has more to do with domestic politicking then any serious commitment. Naturally Israel appreciates control of the water resources emanating from the Heights as well as their military value, but Golan is more valuable to Israeli policymakers as a bargaining chip, here the settlement project in the Golan Heights more closely resembles that in the Sinai than that in the West Bank.

The return of the Golan Heights to Syria will take place within the framework of a peace agreement between Israel and Syria, indeed it will be the basis of a peace agreement between Israel and Syria. By achieving a separate peace with Syria Israel will ply the Alawite-ruled republic from the Iranian orbit, weaken the Palestinian negotiation position, and likely gain concessions regarding Hezbollah, certainly at a minimum disrupt the Iranian supply links to the Lebanese group that serves as the main deterrent against both an attack on Iran and further military adventurism in Lebanon.

But undermining Hezbollah and Iran is a secondary, albeit important issue. Israel recognizes that the principal leverage the Palestinian bring to the negotiating table is the promise of normalizations of relation with surrounding Arab states and full integration into the region. The Palestinians have offered the Saudi Peace Initiative of 2002, endorsed by every Arab state (and almost every other state in the world), as the basis for negotiations. Under the plan Israel would be integrated into the region, the Arab-Israeli Conflict would officially end, and a Palestinian state would be created along the internationally recognized, pre-June 1967 borders.

Eventually Israel will be forced to reach some sort of settlement with its neighbors, but they want that settlement to include as much land as possible. By reaching a separate peace with the Syrians the Israelis will remove a significant regional power, much like they did by reaching a peace deal with Egypt, from the equation and substantially weaken the negotiating positions of the Palestinians. That is much more valuable to the Israelis than a small chunk of Syrian land, and for Syrian President Bashir al-Assad control of the Golan is much more valuable than some abstract devotion to the Palestinian cause.

LEBANON AND THE REFUGEE CRISIS

With dozens of parties, shifting alliances, a confessional based allocation of power, and frequent outbursts of violence there aren't many issues that unite all of Lebanon's political leaders. One of the few areas of agreement was touched on by President Michel Slei­man on Friday in his address before the 64th General Assembly of the United Nations: Lebanon will not allow the permanent resettlement of Palestinian refugees on its territory. The President framed the issue as Lebanese leaders usually do, "in defense of the refugees’ right of return.” However, the leaders of the Mediterranean country, which hosts twelve camps and over 400,000 refugees seem more concerned about maintaining the country's fragile confessional based political system than supporting Palestinian rights.

One only has to look to conditions in the overcrowded refugee ghettos Palestinians are confined to. Israel is not the only country that disregards Palestinian's human rights. In Lebanon even those who were born in the camps are in a state of legal limbo; they can't own property, travel abroad, or hold certain jobs. When fighting broke out between Lebanese troops and militant radicals at the Nahr al-Bared Camp two years ago human rights groups documented instances of arbitrary detention and torture by the military. Opposition to naturalization has nothing to do with support for Palestinians. If the Lebanese supported the Palestinians they would do something substantive to ease their pain. Perhaps citizenship is too sensitive an issue, but is the Lebanese state so insecure it would also be threatened by an end to legalized discrimination?

I oppose Zionism. It is a racist, colonial ideology. If it were my choice all refugees, both Jewish and Palestinian, would receive full reparations and the choice of repatriation in their country of origin or full assimilation in their country of residence. But I am not in charge and I am not naive. This will never happen. Those who support the Palestinians must take a pragmatic approach. While some have devoted themselves to Utopian ideals the Israelis have devoted themselves to the creation of facts on the ground. Facts which make such Utopian solution appear both out of touch and unworkable.

For those who view the Palestinians as nothing more than a political issue, a crowd pleaser, this present approach is the correct one, but for those who care for the fate of the Palestinians and whose primary objective is the reduction of their suffering it is absurd.

It is cruel to leave hundreds of thousands of refugees in a state of limbo, filled with dreams that will never be realized. Those who remain devoted to the cause of al-Awda, in spite of its obstacles, deserve respect, respect for their devotion and their position. No one has the right to take that struggle from them. However, those who reluctantly conclude they will never be allowed to return to their ancestral homeland cannot be held hostage to the political expediency of the rulers of their host countries. These are human beings, not pawns in an ideological battle. Those who support the Palestinian people must support them wherever they are oppressed against whoever oppresses them. The Arab states refusing to assimilate Palestinians, those who discriminate against them, and those who ascend to their suffering are no less culpable than the Israeli government.

This is not a capitulation to Zionism. This is a capitulation to reality. The struggle for the human rights of Palestinians must continue. The resistance must continue. But it must be founded in realism, it cannot have goals it does not have a way to achieve. Fantasies are a luxury the oppressed cannot afford, they are a luxury the allies of the oppressed cannot cling to.

A TRUISM OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

"There is permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state."

-French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner

YEMEN AIR STRIKE REQUIRES UN INVESTIGATION

The Yemeni government offered a familiar excuse and a familiar pledge concerning air strikes last week which hit a camp sheltering internally displaced persons, killing at least eighty-seven civilians. The Shia rebels active in the North of the country were to blame, the government said, for hiding in the camp, which officials denied existed. Still, the government said, it would investigate the incident.

That is not good enough. The air strike was a serious crime against humanity which undoubtedly involved the participation of senior officials. The government of Yemen is neither capable of launching a complete and transparent investigation or of taking any official action to address the situation beyond updating their spokesmens' talking points.

Governments guilty of crimes against humanity are rarely capable of anything more than a cover up. This attack requires the investigation of an impartial body capable of holding those guilty accountable, the U.N is the only such body. The U.N must act on the recommendation of its human rights commissioner and send an investigator to probe the air strike and, if appropriate, refer those guilty to the Security Council, which would be required to authorize indictments at the International Criminal Court since Yemen is not a signatory of the Rome Statue establishing the court.

THE WESTERN SAHARA

The story is familiar. Over a hundred thousand refugees languish in camps where many of them have lived for thirty years, others were born refugees, never knowing anything but the camps. The refugees fled the land their ancestors had lived on for nearly a thousand years following a foreign occupation, settlement, and annexation program, the country that displaced them refuses to enter meaningful negotiations and reneged on past agreements. A giant wall cuts off the refugees from 80% of their historic homeland, behind which the occupying power is attempting to establish facts on the ground, the basis for future negotiations, through a massive settlement program. Their political leadership is corrupt, dictatorial, and incompetent. Their international allies exploit their cause for their own political ends while doing little to address their situation.

The story is familiar, but the names are not. This is Africa's last colony, the Western Sahara. Since being claimed at the Berlin Conference, where Europe's colonial powers divided Africa among themselves, in 1884 the Western Sahara has been under foreign occupation, first by the Spanish, then briefly and partially by Mauritania, and now almost completely by the Moroccans.

In 1991 Morocco agreed to abide by international law and the ruling of the International Court of Justice in the Hague and allow the Sahrawis who inhabit the territory the African kingdom claims as its Southern Provinces to vote on independence. Since then Rabat has dragged its feat, sought to undermine the independence movement, and blocked the referendum, seeking to include hundreds of thousands of Moroccan settlers in the poll which it has refused to allow.

Morocco's defiance of international law and contempt for the wishes of the U.N Security Council have included mining the Sahara, the disappearing of hundreds, possibly thousands of civilians, arbitrary detention, politically motivated arrests, ethnic discrimination, torture, among other activities associated with its attempt to colonize the desert territory, have elicited little reaction from the international community which is reluctant to criticize a key regional ally.

A BREIF OVERVIEW OF THE INVASION OF IRAQ

It has been argued that because Iraq has already been invaded there is little reason for discussing the reasoning behind that invasion. This is a convenient position for many who supported the war, but it fails to understand that any discussion about the invasion of Iraq is only nominally a discussion about the invasion of Iraq. It is a trial of the mindset and ideology that led to the invasion. And as long as that mindset persists, as long as the risk of the disaster of Iraq being visited on another people exists, we can never move on.

The invasion of Iraq was undertaken because Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent danger to the U.S, ostensibly. When that rationale fell apart the motivations for the war switched to one of spreading democracy and promoting human rights. The efficiency of that switch was as effective and complete as the switch of official state enemies in the book 1984. The invasion of Iraq was about democracy, it had always been about democracy. In the few mentions of the archaic pretext made following the switch it was only to say the war was the result of a failure of intelligence, though the architects of it continued to suggest they made the right decision even in light of the revelation that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.

Every invasion and imperialist enterprise, with the possible exception of the Belgian looting of the Congo, has been accompanied by noble rhetoric. The typical practice of judging leaders by their actions while ignoring their rhetoric is often inverted when looking at one's own nation. However, rhetoric can never justify a war. Saddam Hussein had equally impressive rhetoric when he invaded Kuwait.

As for the stated motivations, easiest to dispel is the claim of WMD. After it was confirmed that no such weapons existed senior policy makers, including the President, answered in the affirmative when asked if they would have invaded in light of this knowledge. Ignoring the issues raised by the Downing Street Memo, this is an implicit admission that the primary case for war made to the public was not what motivated policy makers. The sheer number of pretexts, changed to meet political demands, is in itself enough to cast serious doubt on the official explanation.

Moving on to the next major claim, the claim of spreading democracy and human rights, of planting a democratic seed in the Middle East. This claim can be easily tested with a single question: are the words of the idealistic crusaders seeking a new future for the Middle East consistent with their actions. The answer is decidedly no.

The group of policy makers waging war on Iraq simultaneously maintained close relationships with equally repressive regimes that served their perceived interests, such as Saudi Arabia, and simultaneously undermined democracy in countries where it would harm their perceived interests, such as Haiti and Venezuela. The case of Iraq before the invasion is sufficient evidence to discard any pretense the neocons had for concerns about democracy and human rights.

This was the same group of people who armed Saddam and shielded him diplomatically during the Reagan administration when his worst atrocities were taking place. To a large extent the idealistic crusaders enabled many of the atrocities they were fond of rattling off against Saddam. The relationship between Saddam Hussein and the U.S goes back long before the neocons were in office, it began when he was a twenty-two year old CIA agent tasked with murdering Iraq's Prime Minister and continued until his first real crime, the invasion of Kuwait in violation of American wishes. But the relationship between the two was particularly strong during periods of neocon control.

As the idealistic crusaders celebrated justice in the death sentence handed down to Saddam after a show trial no one thought to suggest that American officials complicit in the same crimes should be similarly dealt with. Indeed, many of those issuing noble pronouncements about the need for those guilty of crimes against humanity to be brought to justice, such as Donald Rumsfeld to name just one prominent example, were complicit in Saddam's crimes against humanity. The American officials who sold Saddam weapons, the CIA officers who gave him lists of thousands of political enemies to be liquidated, the American General who authorized him to put down a Shiite uprising that likely would have ended his rule, the western businessmen who sold him the components he needed to jumpstart his chemical and biological weapons programs, the list goes on, but the principle is that, in international relations, only the defeated are ever guilty of crimes. The crime for which Saddam died was not killing Kurds, the American officials who orchestrated the invasion were guilty of that also, the crime for which he was sentenced, like Noriega before him, was turning on his American masters.

The last major pretext for the invasion was fighting terrorism. But the war was conducted with the prediction by western intelligence services, ultimately realized that invading Iraq would only increase the threat of terrorism. The morality of invading Iraq is not only dispelled by serious lapses in the official reasoning, it is dispelled by the results of the invasion, results that set back the official goals of spreading democracy, fighting terrorism, and promoting human rights.
Supporters of the war make frequent use of an ancient propaganda technique. They ask opponents of the war if the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. They seek to equate the acknowledgment of the cruelty of the enemy with a vindication of their cause. But that is not the question that must be answered. No one ever asks if the world would be better off without George W. Bush, nor does anyone propose the absurdity that an affirmative answer to that question would justify the invasion and destruction of the U.S. No, the question is not whether the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, it most certainly is, but rather whether the world is better off because of the invasion of Iraq.

Massive majorities of Iraqis believe the answer is no. And it is easy to see why. The war sent both the economy and the infrastructure back many years. It sent the educated elites and professional classes into exile, in all it created about five million refugees and internally displaced people, out of a population of just over thirty-million. Iraq Body Count has confirmed 100,000 deaths resulting to the invasion, though it suggests the actual toll is likely much higher. Compare that with seventy-seven politically motivated murders reported by Amnesty International in the last year of the Saddam dictatorship. Civilian casualties were never a concern for U.S general in Iraq, one of whom declared "we don't do body counts" when asked about the issue. Clearly, the invasion accelerated politically motivated deaths on a massive scale.

But even before the invasion, the largest source of deaths in Iraq was not the Saddam dictatorship, monstrous as it was, but the sanctions imposed on the county by the U.S, which starved half a million Iraqi children to death, according to the U.S. A figure Secretary of State Madeline Albright accepted and found to be "a very hard choice," but ultimately "worth it". If the Bush administration were serious about prosecuting criminals to safeguard human rights they did not need to go overseas to do it. Nor did they need to go to the trouble of starting a war. The President could have accomplished that quite easily, if that were his real goal in invading Iraq. But, it is perhaps insulting to take the neocons at their word and extend their logic to its natural conclusions, so I won't go on anymore about that point.

On WMD proliferation, the invasion was again harmful to its stated goals. The attack convinced many nations that the only way they could deter an invasion was by acquiring WMD. The invasion provided an incentive for the acceleration of WMD programs in the third world. Many planners from third world nations felt Iraq was invaded because it did not have WMD, wheras North Korea was safe because it did posses such deterrent. Such comments are not entirely true, North Korea did not have WMD at the time of the Iraq War, though it did have a conventional detterant in the form of artillery pointed at cities and American troops in the south of the penninsula. But what is important here is the perception, the perception that the only way a small, third world nation can detern an attack from the superpower that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined is to aquire WMD. By invading Iraq the Bush administration provided every weak, but rational despot ample motivation to initiate or accelerate WMD programs.

As for promoting democracy, it is obvious to any honest observer that Iraq is not a democracy. Even the American funded group Freedom House recognizes that Iraq is "not free", even the neocons implicitly acknowledge the point when they praise their favored regional client, Israel, as "the Middle East's only democracy". The invasion of Iraq was never about democracy, it never could have produced democracy. Every foreign policy expert, even the normally hawkish Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, foresaw that. Instead it set democracy back by providing dictators across the region an example of "what democracy would bring". The invasion of Iraq has been a disaster for the U.S, and more importantly for the people of Iraq. Sadly, the arrogant, reckless, and imperialistic mindset that made the invasion of Iraq possible still persists in American political culture. It was just recently that Congressman Dana Rohrabacher exclaimed to an Iraqi witness at a House hearing on the war his indignation that "I have never heard one word of gratitude from the Iraqi people about the 4,300 Americans who lost their lives," he continued "[w]e went to Iraq to try and free your people and now we're being blamed for sectarian violence," he said. "Don't blame us because that type of bloodlust exists in your society," before storming out of the room.

REALLY?

Attempting to rebut Cal Thomas would be redundant, but his thoughts, if they could be called that, are still important to understanding the right in America.

Invasion by Immigration

By Cal Thomas

Tribune Media Services

PORTSTEWART, NORTHERN IRELAND — The Daily Telegraph’s headline is meant to shock, or at least get the attention of Europeans apathetic about the threat they face: “A Fifth of European Union Will Be Muslim by 2050.”

In a related article “Muslim Europe: the Demographic Time Bomb Transforming Our Continent,” The Telegraph’s lead sentence summarizes the problem: “Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policymakers are talking about it.”

The late British parliamentarian Enoch Powell warned more than 40 years ago that Britain had to be mad to allow in 50,000 dependents of immigrants every year. Powell, who was denounced as a racist and a xenophobe by the intellectual elites, compared it to watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

In retrospect, Powell looks like a prophet. According to Oxford demographer David Coleman, Britain’s non-white population is on course “to grow from 9 percent at the last census in 2001 to 29 percent by the year 2051.” Coleman estimates that if Britain continues at its current level of immigration — 191,000 per year by 1999 reports — its population could increase by 15 million by 2050, which will bring change most Britons don’t believe in.

In his new book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West,” Financial Times and Weekly Standard columnist Christopher Caldwell lays out in undisputable terms and with irrefutable facts the threat faced by the West. He says it is worse than anything al-Qaida can deliver. Caldwell cites numerous reasons for the predicament faced by Europe (and the United States), including the idea of a European Union, which is quickly eliminating individual identity, culture and money (the one size fits all Euro). Without an identifiable culture, immigrants cannot be assimilated, even if they want to be, which in the case of radical Muslims, argues Caldwell, they don’t.

In addition to massive immigration, Caldwell says, the high birth rate among immigrants, coupled with the low birth rate among white Europeans (barely enough in some countries to replace those who are dying) means that soon 20 percent of Europe’s population would be Muslim.

The rapid population change, writes Caldwell, is startling when you consider that as recently as the mid-20th century there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe. At the turn of this century, there were between 15 million and 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain. What is the attraction of these countries, which to some Islamic minds are full of idolatry, hedonism and secularism? All one need do is listen to the radical sermons and the vitriolic statements of certain Islamic leaders and spokesmen and to the radical Islamic media. They say their goal is to subjugate Europe and America to their religion.

At a recent conference near Chicago called “The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam,” Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek responded to a question from the audience about whether the U.S. Constitution or Sharia law should rule the United States when Islam is in control. Razek said Sharia would rule and that the Constitution would have to go.

Caldwell writes that uncontrolled immigration without assimilation “exacts a steep price in freedom. The multiculturalism that has been Europe’s main way of managing mass immigration requires the sacrifice of liberties that natives once thought of as rights.”

Those who support immigration without assimilation claim the West needs more brainy people to run their computers and discover cures for diseases. Why can’t our school systems produce more intelligent people without having to import them? More than “brains” are coming to the West. Those with a radical theological and political agenda are infiltrating us more effectively than our enemies of the 20th century ever dreamed of doing.

Twice in the last century America has delivered Europe from homegrown evil. It won’t be able to do so again when that evil is imported and when America is dealing with immigration problems of its own.

WHAT A JOKE

From Ha'aretz:

The chairman of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission on Tuesday told the international community that a nuclear-free Middle East requires a change in regional attitude toward Israel.

In an address to the International Atomic Energy Association in Vienna, Shaul Chorev emphasized Israel's stance that it was prepared in principle to commit to a Middle East free of nuclear weapon.

Chorev also reiterated that Israel has repeatedly asserted it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region. It is our vision and policy to establish the Middle East as a mutually verifiable zone free if weapons of mass destruction and their delivery," Chorev told delegates. . .

VICTOR JARA'S LAST POEM

Written in a concentration camp, memorized, and smuggled out by other political prisoners by Chilean poet Victor Jara shortly before he was murdered on September 17, 1973.

We are five thousand
Confined in this little part of town
We are five thousand
How many of us are there throughout the country?

Such a large portion of humanity
With hunger, cold, horror and pain
Six among us have already been lost
And have joined the stars in the sky.

One killed, another beaten
As I never imagined a human being
could be beaten
The other four just wanted to put an end
To their fears

One by jumping down to his death
The other smashing his head against a wall
But all of them
Looking straight into the eyes of death.

We are ten thousand hands
That can no longer work
How many of us are there
Throughout the country?

The blood shed by our comrade President
Has more power than bombs and machine guns
With that same strength our collective fist
Will strike again some day.

Song, How imperfect you are!
When I most need to sing, I cannot
I cannot because I am still alive
I cannot because I am dying

It terrifies me to find myself
Lost in infinite moments
On which silence and shouts
Are the objectives of my song

What I now see, I have never seen
What I feel and what I have felt
Will make the moment spring again.

SALVADOR ALLENDE'S LAST SPEECH

As the military coup was in motion President Allende was offered safe passage out of the country in exchange for resigning and legitimizing the coup. Instead, he chose to die in the Presidential Palace. This is his last speech, delivered to his countrymen as the coup was in progress, hours before his death.

My friends,

Surely this will be the last opportunity for me to address you. The Air Force has bombed the antennas of Radio Magallanes.

My words do not have bitterness but disappointment. May they be a moral punishment for those who have betrayed their oath: soldiers of Chile, titular commanders in chief, Admiral Merino, who has designated himself Commander of the Navy, and Mr. Mendoza, the despicable general who only yesterday pledged his fidelity and loyalty to the Government, and who also has appointed himself Chief of the Carabineros [paramilitary police].

Given these facts, the only thing left for me is to say to workers: I am not going to resign! Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life. And I say to them that I am certain that the seeds which we have planted in the good conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever.

They have force and will be able to dominate us, but social processes can be arrested by neither crime nor force. History is ours, and people make history.

Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty that you always had, the confidence that you deposited in a man who was only an interpreter of great yearnings for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that. At this definitive moment, the last moment when I can address you, I wish you to take advantage of the lesson: foreign capital, imperialism, together with the reaction, created the climate in which the Armed Forces broke their tradition, the tradition taught by General Schneider and reaffirmed by Commander Araya, victims of the same social sector who today are hoping, with foreign assistance, to re-conquer the power to continue defending their profits and their privileges.

I address you, above all, the modest woman of our land, the campesina who believed in us, the mother who knew our concern for children. I address professionals of Chile, patriotic professionals who continued working against the sedition that was supported by professional associations, classist associations that also defended the advantages of capitalist society. I address the youth, those who sang and gave us their joy and their spirit of struggle. I address the man of Chile, the worker, the farmer, the intellectual, those who will be persecuted, because in our country fascism has been already present for many hours -- in terrorist attacks, blowing up the bridges, cutting the railroad tracks, destroying the oil and gas pipelines, in the face of the silence of those who had the obligation to act. They were committed. History will judge them.

Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country.

The people must defend themselves, but they must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!

These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason.

WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS

A defining principle of states is embodied in the anniversary of September 11, the principle of worthy and unworthy victims. On September 11, 2001 a terrorist attack killed thousands of innocent Americans. That last word, American, is critical. These were worthy victims. Today that attack will be mourned and marked. Flags will fly at half-mast, the names of the victims will be read out in public places, politicians and publications will offer somber, philosophical reflections on the need to safeguard against the evil man is capable of.

On September 11, 1973 another mass-atrocity unfolded. On September 11, 1973 Chile's democratically elected government was overthrown in a fascist coup by the military. As the body of President Salvador Allende was being carried from the flames of the Presidential Palace, as thousands of writers, labor organizers, social activists, and intellectuals were being rounded up, tortured and executed, as Chile began its long decent into fascism, government officials in the U.S were not publicly weeping for the dead, they were celebrating.

Chile's democracy would not be restored until 1990, not until after the economy was destroyed, at least 80,000 Chileans became prisoners of conscious, 30,000 were tortured, 200,000 were made refugees, over 3,200 were murdered by the government, and an international terrorist organization was initiated, that carried out attacks across Latin America and in the United States, that assisted in the attacks of violent, far-right European terrorist organizations, and whose members continue to live freely, even in the U.S, under the protection of the American government (see Michael Townley).

This was not an attack on Americans, it was an attack instigated by Americans, to protect American business interest. These are unworthy victims. They have been doubly killed their memory has been erased. It is not ideologically convenient, it can justify nothing, it has been forgotten, dropped in the memory hole. America is the victim of atrocities, it has always been the victim, it can play no other role than that of the victim. We can weep for vom Rath, whose death was indeed a tragic atrocity, but our victims are not worthy victims. When their fate is not being celebrated it is forgotten so that their story can repeat itself.

AMERICAN FASCISTS

I wonder what other acts of mass murder he thinks are just some "bullshit" concocted by "propaganda mills". The type of statements this man makes in this interview produced death sentences at Nuremberg.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE AFGHAN ELECTION

Originally written in April, but just as valid today.

Since being installed in the Presidential Palace by American soldiers shortly after the fall of the Taliban Karzai has been content following orders from Washington while siphoning off public funds for the construction of palaces and other trapping of power. He has even described himself as an American puppet. However, there appears to have been some falling out recently. In the last few months Karzai's stature as a courageous democratic visionary has diminished drastically.

Some of his less admirable characteristics were suddenly noticed in the West about the same time as the State Department's man in Afghanistan repeatedly broke with the official line to angrily denounce civilian casualties resulting from NATO military operation, his first real crime. With an election approaching it is likely the Americans will hand over the operations of the Afghan government to a more obedient crony, perhaps their former proconsul and U.N ambassador will, while retaining Karzai as a figurehead or even attempt to oust him all together in favor of a less free-minded visionary.

For seven years Karzai was adored for his courage and honesty while the tribal warlord and his cronies looted government coffers. Karzai would do well to remember the fate of other Washington allies who displayed an independent streak, the fate of Saddam Hussein and Manuel Noriega should be at the front of his mind. Perhaps the rift will be healed and Karzai's heroic stature will be renewed, if not it will be entertaining to watch the falling out, to watch the sudden concern of western officials for Karzai's corruption, dealmaking with warlords, anti-democratic tendencies, and connections to the drug trade. Certainly real issues, but ones of negligible importance when Karzai was following orders.

THE LATEST SHRIEKS FROM CAL THOMAS

Image: A Palestinian terrorist attempting to exterminate Jews from their historic homeland.

I am well accustomed to propaganda, I understand that accolades to power don't need to base their opinions on evidence or back up their views so long as they can shriek loud enough, I have known this for a long time, but the contemptibly of Cal Thomas's latest rant was still shocking.

Thomas begins by invoking the film Schindler's List which "never ceases to arouse [his] deepest emotions" and before ruminating on "[h]ow could people wantonly kill so many others as a matter of state policy?" That's a good question and one that Thomas, as an apologist for statist violence, is well equipped to explore. But Thomas does not answer it, at least not directly, anyone who reads his column on a regular basis, which in the past has called for the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank might have a few reflections.

Instead Thomas validates Godwin's law, declaring ominously that "[t]here are those who would gladly 'finish the job' the Nazis started," and that the Obama administration in pressuring the Israeli government to implement a plan that will give Israel's enemies the chance to carry out their genocidal ambitions. "Next time," he warns us "it is unlikely there will be an Oskar Schindler to save even a remnant."

The pressure that President Obama is applying towards Israel to freeze construction of illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Thomas informs us, is rooted in the same "blame it on the Jews. It's always their fault" attitude that causes people to blame the Jews for the Holocaust. Never mind that Obama still supports virtually every other violation of international law and humanitarian norms by Israel. Obama has failed to grasp that the Arab world will never come to terms with Israel. Like the NAZIS the Arab world is a bunch of lunatics who strive to murder Jews "simply for being Jewish." Failing to understand this, Thomas instructs us "has been the fundamental flaw in American foreign policy for decades."

Never mind that the Arab States have offered Israel full recognition on its internationally recognized borders, they are nothing more than a bunch of neo-NAZIS bent on destroying Jews wherever they are.

Israel has tried to negotiate. It "has given lots of quid, but has received little quo." Israel is a compassionate nation, but it is absurd to expect it "to stop building homes on its historic territory" without receiving anything in return. Perhaps here it is worth asking Mr. Thomas what do the Palestinian's have left to give in return? They have been ethnically cleansed from 78% of their historic homeland to make way for a state that officially discriminates against them, many cannot even visit the homes where they were born, the homes that they still hold deeds to, the homes that were appropriated by Israel to make way for ethnically pure families, they have been subjected to a forty-year hostile occupation in what remains of their shrinking homelands, they have been canonized, they have been made, in the words of former Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan "to live like dogs", and they have been driven to the point that even the current Israel defense minister Ehud Barak declares that if he were a Palestinian he would "have joined one of the terrorist organizations."

An indignant Thomas answers this question, bemoaning the racist double standards applied to the conflict Thomas declares his outrage that while demanding a freeze to illegal settlements the Obama administration said nothing when "a new Palestinian housing project has begun in Ramallah. . .[o]nly Israel is not allowed to determine where it's own people live."

The goal of this selective outrage, otherwise known as the application of international law, is clear. "It is to overwhelm the Jewish population and eventually eliminate all Jews from the land, not just land that is in dispute and which Israel holds onto because of its legitimate fear that Arab and Muslim nations, having started five wars, might go for number six if they believe they can win the next one. Only a fool would believe otherwise, given their repeatedly stated intentions and behavior." The Saudi Peace Initiative must be written in some code the rest of the world has obviously misinterpreted. Leave it to Cal Thomas to set the record straight.

SOME HONEST COMMENTS

. . .from an ardent Zionist

Israel's Jewish and Zionist character are inherently opposed to true, liberal Western-style democracy (original emphasis). Israel is, by definition, a Jewish state, which means that Jews must be the majority of the population. Israel's people, culture, religion, language, holidays and character are thoroughly Jewish. Even if an Arab has equality before the law and the right to vote, he is automatically culturally alienated from a state which belongs to another people.

. . .All lovers of Israel must realize that Israel, as long as it is a Jewish state, can never be a perfect democracy in the sense of Canada or the United States. This is not meant to criticize or deligitimize Israel- it is simply the stating of a fact.

Similarly, Israel can never have a complete separation of Synagogue and State, as is in the United States. Whatever role religion should play in the public sphere, most Israelis agree that it is important for Judaism to play a role in the Jewish State. For the concept of a Jewish state to have any significance, Israel must have some sort of Jewish character.

Here we see the fundamental flaws of liberal Israel advocacy. Israel will never be a perfect democracy, nor will it ever be thoroughly American or Western, if it is to be Jewish.

. . .Peace is an important goal for Israel, but it is not the most important goal. The quest for peace does not give Israel its right to exist, nor does its democratic government or Western leanings make it the morally superior party. After all, one could easily establish a democratic, Western regime on the stolen lands of another nation, as was the case in Canada, the United or India, for example. After appropriating native land, it is only natural for this country to seek peace with the conquered.

. . .To all those who charge Israel with the most vile of crimes, with "occupation, "ethnic cleansing", "theft of land", our answer most not be of saying that Israel wants peace, or that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle-East. The fact that Israel is the United State's greatest ally is irrelevant to this accusation. Our answer must be that of Simon the Maccabee, which he wrote to the Seleucid king Antiochus: "We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time had been unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity, we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers." There is no "Palestinian people", nor was there ever, nor will there ever be.

PARIS LIBERATED (WHITES ONLY)

Sixty five years ago today Paris was liberated from a racist supremacist regime. But something was missing in the column of Free French troops that marched triumphantly into the city, the black colonial troops who formed about 65% of the French army. As the allies pushed deeper into Nazi held territory French General Charles de Gaulle asked his British and American allies to allow French forces to lead the columns of allied troops entering the French capital. They agreed, but only if the black troops were removed from the French columns.

"It is more desirable," wrote General Eisenhower's Chief of Staff "that the division. . . consist of white personnel. " That view was seconded by British commanders. The sacrifice of black colonial troops deserves to be remembered, by the time Paris fell in 1940 over 17,000 of them had given their lives, but so to do this incident. Allied commandeers were willing to let black soldiers share in the death of war, but they refused to afford them a share of the credit in the victory over the racist ideology of a fascist dictator. The liberation of Paris serves as a reminder that having an evil enemy is not a mark of morality. States will cloak their actions in lofty rhetoric, even the Nazis did this, but ultimately their motivation is geopolitical, not humanitarian. The more people realize this the harder it will become for governments to abdicate their own responsibilities by focusing on the abuses of their foes.

AMNESTY, REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS DETAIL GOVERNMENT REPRESSION IN WAKE OF HONDURAS COUP

A new report by Amnesty International documents the extent of government repression in Honduras in the wake of a military backed coup that forced democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya sent into exile. An Amnesty team visited a police station in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa to record testimony from seventy-five Zelaya supporters who had been detained by military supported police at a peaceful July 30 rally. Most of the detainees had visible injuries, the aftermath of assaults by stone throwing, baton wielding police.

The protesters reported that they were attacked and beaten by police, backed by military units, while demonstrating for the return of Zelaya. Protesters saw their recording equipment confiscated by police as they were rounded up and brought to the police station. One demonstrator reported police telling him "[w]hether it’s by choice or by force, you have to be with this government” before beating and detaining him. One of ten students being held from the march recalled

The police were throwing stones, they rounded us up, they threw us face down on
the ground and they beat us – there are people with fractures, with head wounds,
they beat us on the buttocks.They stole our cameras, they beat us if we raised
our heads, they beat us when they were getting us into the police cars. They said
“Cry and we’ll stop”

Some of the police used to suppress demonstrations wore bandannas, while all lacked any visible identification and referred to each other using nicknames, making identification of involved individuals impossible.

The 19 page report reports that at least two protesters, nineteen year-old Isis Obed Murillodied and schoolteacher Roger Abraham Vallejohave, were killed by gunfire from police, female demonstrators have been sexually assaulted, while hundreds others have been beaten, arbitrarily detained, and held without charges as the de facto authorities have deployed soldiers and elite police units to suppress dissent, all in violation of international covenants to which Honduras is a party.

In addition to police unites the de facto government as deployed soldiers in the suppression of dissent. Soldiers backing police action against protesters were reported to have yelled incitements to police attacking protesters. Military roadblock have also been used to restrict freedom of movement outside of Tegucigalpa and frustrate the work of journalists and human rights workers.

A series of separate reports by the group Reporters Without Borders reports that journalists have been particularly targeted by the coup regime. “By suspending or shutting down the operations of certain local and international broadcast media, those who staged the coup have shown they clearly want to cover up what is going on. We urge all sides to respect press freedom,” commented the media rights group. The coup leaders blocked transmissions from certain radio and TV stations the day of the takeover and provided others with lists of foreign programs which they would not be allowed to air. Violence against journalists began hours after the coup when soldiers stormed the offices of Radio Progreso and halted the work of the staff. Violence and intimidation targeting the media has continued since then with numerous reporters, both from within and outside the country, being beaten, threatened, and having equipment confiscated.

The offices of Radio Globo were protected from a similar attack by over four-hundred opposition demonstrators after the station was tipped off about an impending raid by a pro-Zelaya plain-clothes police officer. Still, the de facto authorities have successfully shut down a number of stations seen as sympathetic to the ousted leader and intimidated individual journalists.

A number of journalists including Lidieth Diaz of Radio Globo, Gustavo Cardoza of the Jesuit run education station Radio Progreso, Julio Umaña of the daily Tiempo, Alfredo López of Radio Coco Dulce, and Venezaulan journalists Adriana Sivori, María José Díaz, Larri Sánchez, Eduardo Silvera, Pedro Quezada, Franklin Maldonado, Madelein García, Alexander Salazar, Hedor Lanten, Clayban Saint and Fredy Quintero, from Telesur and VTV have either been beaten, arrested, or seen equipment confiscated. In addition Allan Adális Martínez of Radio Alegre was fired after producing a report favorable to Zelaya and others such as Esdras Amado López of and Eduardo Maldonado have gone into hiding or requested political asylum.

Al-Shifa Bombing

In commemoration to all whose lives were lost as a result of the terrorist atrocity in Sudan eleven years ago today.

IF MARK REGEV HAD A SENSE OF HUMUR. . .

DEMOCRACY PROMOTION

That noble intent is a pretext, and not a preoccupation, of foreign policy makers is made so obvious by a voluminous historical record that it should be a self-evident truism not worth repeating. Recently declassified documents reveal President Nixon approached Brazil's military dictator in 1971 with promises of cash and other assistance in exchange for assistance in overthrowing Chile's democratic government and other leftist governments in the region, much as had occurred seven years prior in Brazil when a U.S backed coup ousted the democratic government and replaced with a neo-Nazi police state. Wednesday marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of the end of parliamentary democracy in Iran at the hands of a U.S/British coup that brought to power a ruthless tyrant who would rule for twenty-six years. Forty-four years ago today the first major ground battle of the Vietnam War involving American forces began, a war fought to foster democratic governance, a war that the U.S entered to prevent a democratic nationwide referendum and exited propping up a petty tyrant who idolized Hitler.

That disdain for democracy, when it produces governments hostile to perceived U.S interests, continues to the present. Over the weekend a senior official from Honduras's ousted government suggested U.S complicity in the June 28 coup that removed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya from office. At this point those claims are impossible to verify. It is entirely plausible that the U.S did authorize Zelaya's ouster and equally possible that it did not. What has, however, become increasingly evident since the coup is the U.S's tacit support for the coup government.

Although the coup was of concern when it happened the rhetorical response of the U.S government was appropriate. The military's actions were denounced, President Obama declared Zelaya's ouster a coup and demanded the restoration of democratic governance, the Pentagon halted joint exercises with the Honduran military, and the State Department suspended some aid. However, the U.S failed to follow up on this initial display with the use of its substantial leverage over Honduras, indeed President Obama suggested that advocates of such an approach were guilty of "hypocrisy".

The U.S accounts for 80% of all of Honduras's foreign trade, the imposition of sanctions, as mandated by U.S law against any nation where a military coup has occurred, would compel the Honduran elites supporting the coup to allow for the return of the Constitutional order. In addition the U.S retains close relations with the upper echelons of the Honduran military, trained at the infamous School of the Americas, the U.S even maintains a contingent of American soldiers . Due to the enormous U.S influence in the country the survival of the coup regime has been dependent on tacit U.S support. And the U.S has given that support. After the coup the Honduran business community enlisted the help of former White House Counsel Lanny Davis to lobby on their behalf. Although he appears not to know much about Honduras he has made known that his employers are satisfied with the American response to the coup.

That response has enabled the coup government to retain power, cracking down harshly on pro-Zelaya demonstrations, imposing curfews, detaining opposition lawmakers and other officials at military bases, dissapearing and assassinating opponents, shutting down media outlets, extra-judicial killings, the reconstitution of the Battalion 3-16 death squad, and other gross violations of human rights. The situation in Honduras recalls a dark era of U.S-Latin American relations marked by death squads, disappearances, and dictators.

ISRAELI PROPAGANDA MANUAL LEAKED

The tactics used by apologists for states guilty of obvious abuses of human rights are not difficult for an informed observer to discern. The more blatant the abuses the more obvious these tactics become, for the informed observer. In the case of Israel apologists for atrocities pander to racism towards Palestinians who they portray as irrational, anti-Semitic neo-Nazi fanatics, attacking critics, even Jewish critics, personally with allegations of Antisemitism, use loaded words like terrorist, fundamentalist, radical, violent, and rejectionist for Palestinian actions and counter-terrorist unit, targeted killing, security fence, and natural growth for Israeli ones. Even Israeli propaganda has a special word, hasbarah, explanation.

All of this is obvious to an informed observer, but that knowledge doesn't help mitigate the effect of these tactics. A recently prepared and leaked Israeli propaganda manual from the Israel Project might. Marked "Not for distribution or publication" the report, accessible here, by Frank Luntz on how best to influence "persaudables", replete with sample propaganda posters, quotes, and statistics to repeat, was recently leaked to Newsweek. For those not familiar with the situation or the debate surrounding Israel.

Reading and circulating this hasbarah manual will better equip those outside of the activist community to recognize and discount arguments relying on the hasbarah strategies it lays out.

Below is a sampling of the manual, the section instructing propagandists on the most effective words to use in their apologetics.
• “Accountability.” It is surprising that the value Americans want most in their own
government has not been used by Israeli spokespeople to describe what’s needed in the
current dialogue. Stop using “confidence-building measures” and start using
“accountability” to describe what’s needed most within the Palestinian government(s).
• “Building”: Never talk about “giving” the Palestinians something. It sounds too
paternalistic. Instead, talk about “building” because it suggests a step-by-step, layer-bylayer
improvement in conditions. Giving reminds people that you’re in the stronger
position and that creates more sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians.
• Children: As often as possible, make the stakes of achieving peace about providing a
future for both Palestinian and Israeli children in which they can live, learn, and grow up
without the constant fear of attack.
• “Come to Jerusalem to work for peace”: The visual symbolism isn’t lost on American
ears. It’s an active challenge to turn words into deeds.
• “Cooperation, collaboration, and compromise”: This is how Americans believe the
conflict must be solved. When you give a little, you get a lot.
• “Deliberately firing rockets into civilian communities”: Combine terrorist motive with
civilian visuals and you have the perfect illustration of what Israel faced in Gaza and
Lebanon. Especially with regard to rocket attacks but useful for any kind of terrorist
attack, deliberate is the right word to use to call out the intent behind the attacks. This is
far more powerful than describing the attacks as “random.”
• “Economic Diplomacy”: This is a much more embracing and popular term than the
current lexicon of “sanctions.” It has appeal across the political spectrum: the tough
economic approach appeals to Republicans, and the diplomacy component satisfies
Democrats.
• “Economic Prosperity”: Whenever Israel talks about the “economic prosperity” of the
Palestinians, it puts Israel in the most positive light possible. After all, who can disagree?
• Examples of Peace Efforts: Constantly cite Israel’s past efforts and sacrifices for peace
with moderate Arab leaders also willing to work for peace. But don’t dwell on the past.
Property of The Israel Project. Not for distribution or publication. 2009. 20
Simply present these past examples as the best reasons why Israel remains committed to
making peace in the future.
• “Equal rights”: Emphasize that Jewish Israelis and Arab Israelis enjoy equal rights and
equal protections under the law in Israel. But don’t stop there: “The tragedy is that
Palestinians have far less rights under their government than Israeli Arabs have under
ours.”
• Human to Human: Appealing directly to the Palestinian people on behalf of the Israeli
people takes the issue out of the political realm and humanizes it. “We know that the
average Palestinian and the average Israeli want to come together and make peace.
They want to live in peace. Israeli leaders have come together with Arab leaders to make
peace in the past. But how do you make peace with Hamas and Hezbollah?”
• Humanize Rockets: Paint a vivid picture of what life is like in Israeli communities that
are vulnerable to attack. Yes, cite the number of rocket attacks that have occurred. But
immediately follow that up with what it is like to make the nightly trek to the bomb
shelter.
• “If… If… If…Then.”: Put the burden on Hamas to make the first move for peace by
using If’s (and don’t forget to finish with a hard then to show Israel is a willing peace
partner). “If Hamas reforms… If Hamas recognize our right to exist… If Hamas
renounces terrorism… If Hamas supports international peace agreements… then we are
willing to make peace today.”
• “Living together, side by side. This is the best way to describe the ultimate vision of a
two-state solution without using the phrase.
• “Militant Islam”: This is the best term to describe the terrorist movement. Avoid Bushera
sounding terms like “Islamo-fascism.”
• “Mutual respect”: You want to put the conflict in perspective. “The best way, the only
way, to achieve lasting peace is to achieve mutual respect.” This relieves the pressure on
Israel and places it squarely on Hamas and Hezbollah. In fact, the fastest way to
demonstrate an open-minded approach and differentiate Israel’s aims from Hamas and,
frankly, Fatah, is to talk about your respect for the Palestinian people. “We do not have
the right to tell the Palestinians whom to elect to represent them. We hope they will
choose leaders that will listen and truly care about them. We respect their right to live in
peace and prosperity. All we ask is for them to respect the same for us.”
• “Nobody has to leave their homes”: This is the most winning phrase in the lexicon of
settlements. Use the principle of mutuality to explain that just as Arab Israelis are not
expected to move out of their homes in Israel, Jews in a new Palestinian state should be
allowed to stay in their homes, too.
• “One step at a time, one day at a time”: It is essential to lower expectations and reduce
the pressure on Israel to rush into an agreement that is either not in its interests or
jeopardizes its security. The “one step at a time” language will be accepted as a
common sense approach to the land-for-peace equation.
Property of The Israel Project. Not for distribution or publication. 2009. 21
• “Peace before political boundaries”: This is the best phrase for talking about why a
two-state solution isn’t realistic right now. First the rockets and the war need to stop.
Then both peoples can talk about political boundaries.
• “Persistence” and “perseverance” : It is not just the effort that matters. It’s the
intensity of that effort. The fact that against great odds and obvious provocations Israel
still seeks peace will be appreciated by all audiences.
• “Prevention”: With respect to Iran, this is your best word for the overall approach to
their quest for nuclear weapons. Not “preemption.”
• “The RIGHT to”: This is a stronger phrase than “deserves.” Use the phrase frequently,
including: the rights that both Israelis and Arabs enjoy in Israel, the right to peace that
Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to, and Israel’s right to defend its civilians against
rocket attacks.
• “Societal Progress”: This is a dangerous term unless used to address the aspirations of
the Palestinian people. First talk about how “the Palestinians have the right to the same
societal progress that is happening in Europe and Asia.” Then address the freedoms they
lack – and the freedoms they deserve. Americans and Europeans see “societal progress”
as a moral imperative and a fundamental necessity for eliminating the root causes of
terrorism.
• “Specific Plan of Action”: Even if the plan will take time, Americans want to know that
there is a specific plan of action to which both sides can and will be held accountable.
Whether you’re talking about the peace process with the Palestinians or the process of
preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, use this phrase to describe your
approach.
• “We have all made mistakes.” People do not expect Israel to be 100 percent successful
in all their efforts to stop terrorism. Admitting that Israel has and continues to make
mistakes does not undermine the overall justice of Israel’s goals: peace and security and a
better quality of life for everyone. It does gain you much needed credibility.
• “We’re all in this together.” One of the most powerful phrases of 2009 in America can
easily be adapted to the situation in the Middle East. Acknowledging a common
condition not only communicates a realistic approach from the Israeli perspective but also
builds a sense of empathy.
• “Working toward a solution”: Americans don’t expect the dispute between Israel and
the Arabs to end overnight, but they absolutely need to know that “Israel is working to
find a solution that is acceptable to everyone involved.” This suggests positive intent.
This suggests progress. This suggests hope. And all three are important components of a
successful communication effort.

AFGHAN MP MALALAI JOYA

REMEMBERING IS NOT ENOUGH

Iran Air Flight 655

The terrorist attacks of twenty-one years ago today probably won't be much recalled in the American press. The anniversaries of other large scale attacks are commemorated with somber front-page reflections on the savagery of the aggressors and the quest of the victims' families for justice. But the attack of twenty-one years ago, which left two hundred and ninety innocent civilians dead merits no such mention. The attack isn't worth recalling not because of its scale or significance, which is consistent with other major attacks, but because the victims and perpetrators are of the wrong nationality, the attack is inconsistent with the prevailing ideological framework. The personal tragedy of the victims deserves acknowledgment, so to does the reaction to it in the west and what this says about our political culture.

On June 3, 1988 Iran Air Flight 655 departed from Bandar Abbas, Iran for the 28 minute flight over the Straight of Hormuz to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates with 290 people from six nations including 66 children on board. As it took off Flight 655 approached an American missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, engaged, in Iranian waters, with several Iranian vessels. The American ship fired a heat seeking missile at the airliner, sending it crashing into the sea. For days afterward Iranian vessels pulled hundreds of corpses from the water. There were no survivors. Reacting to the crisis then U.S Vice President George Bush declared "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are." That has remained the consistent position of the American government which has refused to even accept responsibility, insisting that a financial settlement with Iran was merely the result of American benevolence. Indeed, when the ship returned to the U.S its Captain was awarded the Legion of Merit "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer" and its crew were also decorated for their heroism.

It does not take much imagination to see how different the reaction in the U.S would have been if the situation were reversed. If it was an Iranian warship in American waters that shot down an American civilian airliner, if the Iranian government refused to accept responsibility and saluted the courage of the commander of the vessel, if the Iranian Vice-President declared he
This elementary thought experiment underscore the hypocrisy of not only the American government, but also of the intellectual establishment, as they berate others for violent actions which disrupt their interests.

SAVING DARFUR OR SERVING HUMAN RIGHTS?

Save Darfur, sign the petition, spread the word about Tibet, help stop the LRA. The longer I have been active in the human rights movement, the more bothersome these calls have become. Every violation of human rights disgusts me. It has always provoked that response. When I was in Elementary school and first learned about human rights violations I was so repulsed I resolved to learn as much as I could about them so I could work against them. There are still many things I know little about, but I have come to a much better and perhaps also more cynical understanding of the world.

But these campaigns still bother me. Emotion and logic are the two factors driving every action. Emotion dictates ends, logic dictates means. Emotionally, nothing has changed, I remain dedicated to the same principles, but as I have grown intellectually, I have realized that the approaches I took to these issues and approaches many others who share my concern for human rights continue to take are harming the cause they are trying to serve. This problem is exemplifies by the movements I mentioned.

To be effective human rights activists must understand two issues: what processes enable abuses, and what actions will provide the greatest disruption to those processes? I am still learning how to answer those questions, but the more I reflect the more obvious a few basic points become. Nations are naturally inclined to dwell on the crimes of their strategic competitors while either ignoring, or draping in the rhetoric of noble intent their own crimes. Focusing on the crimes of competitors is convenient, it helps to delegitimize the opponent, it redirects attention, and it gives a moral pretense to strategic actions.

Take Sudan. The crimes of Sudan's government are serious and real, but in the eyes of the west Sudan's only real crime was to discover oil and sign a contract to sell that oil in perpetuity to China. That is Sudan's crime, Darfur has nothing to do with it, Darfur is a convenient propaganda weapon. When moral and strategic considerations converge the human rights movements is embraced. But if there is any doubt which consideration takes precedent it is helpful to look what course is taken when the two diverge. When the U.S's strategic interests are served by supporting abuses the rhetoric of human rights suddenly disappears. Solidarity activists are no longer moral leaders, but pesky, naïve fools. Saudi Arabia, Equatorial Guinea, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, and Algeria, to name a few, are all, like Sudan rich in oil and, like Sudan, ruled by repressive regimes. Unlike Sudan, however, they export to the west and are treated as trusted partners. There are thousands of examples to illustrate the point, but one exchange stands out as a particularly illuminating. In the 1990's an interviewer confronted then U.S Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, with the statistic that U.S imposed sanctions on Iraq had starved half a million children to death, she accepted the figure, but declared "the price is worth it". The scorn that comment would have elicited if it came from a Chinese or Sudanese official never came. That is the prevalent mindset.

That is where the human rights community is needed. That is where they can impact policy; with their own government. There are scant workable solutions to Chinese crimes, but there is a very obvious solution to the ones carried out with connivance of the American government, and those are more than enough to occupy the human rights community. Denouncing the crimes of official enemies is easy and rewarding, it will never change anything. Denouncing the crimes of friends and allies is not. It comes at a price, but opposing crimes against humanity was never about personal gain. Those who have embraced the rhetoric of human rights must now decide if they will also embrace the cause of human rights.

Americans must understand they cannot save the victims of their enemies, the only victims they can save are their own government's. They cannot save Darfur, they cannot save Tibet, they cannot save Burma, but they can save Palestine, they can save Iraq, they can save the hundreds of millions of people languishing under despots armed and supported by their government in their name with their taxes.

(selectively) REMEMBERING and FORGETTING

This editorial about China from Charles Hutzler, extolling the importance of remembering the Tienanmen Massacre against the efforts of the Chinese government to erase it from history, written for the AP, is an interesting reflection on western values and hypocrisy. What is particularly, and perversely, ironic about this article is that while the anniversary of the 1989 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators by an official enemy has received extensive media coverage, the comparable massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in South Korea with the support and approval of the U.S has been erased from western history in a manner even more encompassing than Chinese efforts to erase the Tienanmen Square Massacre. If only a few names and dates in this article were switched so that it was instead a commentary on the removal of the Gwangju Massacre from the historical record once could hardly doubt that it would elicit condemnation as fringe opinion not worthy of response, much less distribution by the AP.

BEIJING – As a young poet, Cui Weiping was not much interested in politics. But she says she could never shake the image of her husband returning home on a June night 20 years ago, his pants mottled with the blood of people shot by the Chinese army.

Now Cui is speaking out, trying to rescue the memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement and its violent end from a powerful government heavily invested in suppressing their very mention.

With the approach Thursday of the 20th anniversary of "six-four," Chinese shorthand for the June 4 crackdown date, this Beijing Film Academy professor feels a duty to remember.

"Opening fire was not our responsibility these 20 years. But not talking about six-four has been our responsibility these 20 years," said Cui, a slight, soft-spoken woman with a pixie-ish haircut.

In mid-May, 53-year-old Cui gave a speech on the duty to speak out to small gathering of like-minded liberals. She posted her comments — "Are we intending to continue this silence?" — on her blog. They were excised by censors from the Chinese site but then reposted by others and removed again repeatedly.

Two decades on, the events in the heart of the Chinese capital and elsewhere remain an essential issue for some Chinese even as the authoritarian government has largely succeeded in turning it into a non-issue for many, using stunning economic growth, sophisticated propaganda and repression to stifle public discussion.

The struggle matters because as China becomes economically and diplomatically stronger, its leaders and supporters point to their system as a model, an alternative to the capitalist, democratic West teetering in financial crisis. Gleaming rebuilt cities like Shanghai and the grand, flawless Beijing Olympics are what the Chinese leadership wants to be associated with, not the crackdown. Tiananmen Square has been remodeled too, with patches of grass to make it look less cold and forbidding.

The trouble is, the memories keep percolating. "Eighty-nine is like a dead rat in the Chinese political system. It's getting stinkier by the day," said Anne-Marie Brady, a Chinese politics expert at New Zealand's University of Canterbury. "It has to be dealt with at some point."

The Tiananmen movement rose from a ferment of reform bubbling through China and the Soviet Bloc. When a popular reformist leader died, students in Beijing marched to Tiananmen to demand change, later occupying the square for weeks and drawing in as many as a million people. People from other parts of China joined them, thronging around a makeshift statue of liberty. After hard-liners reasserted themselves, the military assault came, killing hundreds. In one iconic moment of resistance, a lone man holding shopping bags stood in front of a column of tanks.

Though they rarely talk about it, people in their 30s and older in Beijing and elsewhere remember the demonstrations and the months of martial law.

An advertisement circulated on the Internet in March for T-shirts marked with the dates of the crackdown in Roman numerals — VIIIIXVIIV for '89 6-4 — until being expunged. Last July, the plucky Beijing News tabloid ran two pages of photographs of China in the 1980s, one of them of a black-and-white Associated Press image titled "The Wounded" showing young men in bloodstained shirts on the back of a three-wheeled cart. No caption explained the context, but many knew the photo was from the crackdown. The government removed the spread from the Internet and ordered the paper recalled from newsstands.

Stunned by the protests and communism's collapse in Eastern Europe, Beijing opened a multi-front campaign to keep the Communist Party in power. Free market reforms were unleashed, raising living standards. The propaganda departments that supervise all media were reinvigorated. They adapted the flashy techniques of modern Western advertising and Hollywood entertainment and tamed the Internet. A new nationalistic message was peddled: that the party remained a bulwark against a hostile U.S. intent on thwarting China's rise to greatness.

Above all, the leadership set about reforming the party. Its elite think tanks studied the lessons of communism's fall elsewhere. The party opened its doors to entrepreneurs, thus co-opting a potential source of opposition. It restructured and retrained the bureaucracy to make government responsive to people's needs, if not open and democratic. Tax revenues swollen by the expanding economy provided means to buy off redundant factory workers and poor farmers left behind in the boom.

"Any ruling party, no matter how mighty its power, how senior its qualifications, how long its rein, if it's stuck in a rut, standing still and not making progress, conservative and rigid and not thinking about forging ahead, then its creativity will fail and its vital energy stop." Vice President Xi Jinping said reiterating this message to senior officials at the Central Party School last September.

Imposing a silence over Tiananmen and the arrest and harassment of political critics are blunter tools in this strategy. To Cui, the poet, the taboo is a humiliation the leadership uses to make people complicit in preserving the party's political monopoly.

"To allow such a hole to exist in our lives has made our ethics blurry and problematic," she said in addressing the May 10 gathering of academics and activists at a hotel function room in Beijing's Western Hills.

Cui was at home the night of the crackdown; her husband, like many in the city, had stayed on the streets. For years, Cui said, depression clouded her memories of the event. Translating into Chinese the book "Open Letters" by Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and post-communist president of Czechoslovakia, helped her recover her memories and voice. Her blog, hosted on China's biggest Internet portal, often features pointed social commentary. Government censorship is a frequent target.

Cui believes that the crackdown remains a sore point for many Chinese, including younger Chinese who are supposed to be apolitical. Friends pass around pirated DVDs of "The Gate of Heavenly Peace," a 1995 documentary about the Tiananmen movement. Some bulletin board sites host furtive discussions about what to wear to commemorate the anniversary. Some are suggesting white, the traditional color of mourning.

Online, however, Cui said a different idea has been voiced for what to wear this June 4. "Some say we ought to wear a white shirt and blue trousers just like tank man," Cui said.

KISSINGER'S CRIMES

At the end of every conflict the crimes of the defeated are prosecuted and the victors are absolved of their crimes. Those charged with prosecuting German and Japanese war criminals at the end of World War II sought to depart from that principle. What they got was a refined version of victor's justice, but while their fervent advocacy for a universal standard of justice never fully materialized, it did cause some notable embarrassments. There is no other way to describe the effect of the comments of American Gen. Telford Taylor, the U.S. chief of counsel at the Nuremberg Trials, to the American government. "To punish the foe — especially the vanquished foe — for conduct in which the enforcing nation has engaged," Gen. Taylor wrote in his 1971 book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy "would be so grossly inequitable as to discredit the laws," before noting that if the standards used at the Nuremberg and Manila trials were in operation there was a strong chance that many senior American officials would face execution.

Included in this group is perhaps the world's greatest living criminal, a man whose crimes dwarf the combined offenses of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, al-Quadea leader Osama bin Laden, and Congolese warlord Laruent Nkunda, a man who enjoys a comfortable life in the U.S as a respected elder statesmen; Henry Kissinger. It is likely that Kissinger will never face trial for his crimes, that unlike the NAZI war criminals who continue to be vigorously pursued, Kissinger will continue to enjoy the impunity of rank. But calling for his trial is still important, producing an indictment of the principles that drove Kissinger, and continue to drive U.S policy, is easier and ultimately more important than producing a legal indictment of the man who was instrument of those principles.

Kissinger is a follower of Realpolitik, the belief that a person, or nation, should advance their own influence without regard to the effects on others. When John Steinbeck created such a character in his novel East of Eden critics of literature complained she was too evil to be realistic, when Henry Kissinger came into office defenders of human rights mourned just how realistic she had become.

Actually, Kissinger's first major crime predates his coming to office, in many ways it created an office for him to come into. While still a professor in the 1960's Kissinger became an influential consultant to the government. U.S ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge invited brought Kissinger to the nation several times as an adviser, but Kissinger had greater ambitions than being a foreign policy consultant. During the election of 1968 he joined on the Nixon campaign while simultaneously participating in the Paris peace talks on which Vice President Hubert Humphrey built his Presidential campaign. Kissinger, who was poised to take a high powered job if Nixon won the election, instructed the generals who ran South-Vietnam they would receive a better deal if the Republicans won the election. As a result the peace initiative, which almost succeeded in ending the conflict, fell apart when the South-Vietnamese began a boycott of the talks on the eve of the election. Nixon became President, Kissinger became National Security Adviser, and millions of people in southeast Asia died as a result. Treason was Kissinger's first crime.

Once in office Kissinger escalated the destruction of southeast Asia that he had earlier helped to prolong. In 1969 Kissinger transmitted an order from President Nixon to bomb Cambodia. "It's an order," he instructed military assistant Andrew Haig, "it's to be done. Anything that flies on anything that moves." In the ensuing bombing campaign millions of Cambodian civilians were killed.

In 1971 West Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight, an extermination campaign in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) prompting Bangladesh to declare its independence with the assistance of India. In the war and accompanying genocide Kissinger and President Nixon provided Pakistan with political and diplomatic support. Kissinger recalled the senior American diplomat in Bangladesh, Consul General Archer Blood, after Blood accused Kissinger of supporting genocide and opposing democracy in a confidential State Department Telegram.

The same year that the Bangladesh Liberation War began Chile elected Salvador Allende to the Presidency. Kissinger had opposed the election of Allende, but when he failed in his attempts at subverting Chilean democracy he began plotting the overthrow of the new government. This began with the removal of senior Chilean military commanders who Kissinger believed would defend the elected government in the event of a coup. After two commanders of the armed forces had been removed, one by assassination, General Augusto Pinochet assumed the command of the military. On Sept. 11, 1973 he launched fascist coup in which Allende was killed. Pinochet reigned until 1990 with the staunch support of the U.S. His regime came to power because of Kissinger and it enjoyed the support of Kissinger in spite of its horrific human rights record. Almost all of Latin American was ruled at this time by right wing military dictatorships, and all of those regimes enjoyed the staunch and uncritical support of Kissinger, who offered military and political assistance to his Latin American proteges.

On December 7, 1979 another of Kissinger's proteges, Indonesian dictator Suharto, launched an invasion and genocide against former Portuguese colony East Timor. The invasion began hours after Kissinger and President Ford left Jakarta from a meeting with Suharto where they authorized him to attack East Timor. The CIA's ranking operation officer in Jakarta at the time, C Philip Liechty, reported:

"Suharto was given the green light by President Ford and Kissinger. There was discussion. . .about the problems that would be created for us if the public and Congress become aware of the level and type of military assistance. . .The decision was taken to get the stuff on the high seas before someone pulled the chain. Most of it went straight into East Timor and was used against non-combatants... 200,000 people died."

In Iraq Kissinger encouraged an uprising by the Kurds, sending them $16 million of military aid. Believing they finally had the support of the U.S in their quest for an independent state the Kurds revolted, but they were little more than a pawn in a U.S-Iranian move to improve relations with Iraq. When Kissinger's Iranian protege, the Shah, suggested that a Kurdish uprising would be a good negotiating chip with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Kissinger jumped at the opportunity. A later Congressional Inquiry into the affair, the Pike Report, found "that the US acted only as a guarantor that the insurgents would not be abandoned by the Shah," however Kissinger was as ready to betray the Kurds as the Shah was. On the same day the U.S, Iraq, and Iran concluded an arrangement ending disputes the U.S revoked its support for the Kurds, leaving them defenseless against attack by the Iraqi leader. The Kurdish leader pleader for Kissinger's assistance against the Iraqi operation, but Kissinger did not even respond because as the Pike Report state "[n]either the foreign head of state nor the president and Dr. Kissinger desired victory for our clients," the Kurds were nothing more than pawns to be tossed away when they were no longer of use. When hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees flednto Iran they receive no humanitarian aid, many were later expelled back into Iraq, and the U.S refused to admit even a single refugee. Kissinger defended the policy“[c]overt action,” he explained “should not be confused with missionary work.”

Kissinger's crimes extend far beyond this sampling, he is guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes that would earn him immediate condemnation as the latest incarnation of Hitler if they were carried out by an official enemy, but instead a former American official Kissinger enjoys the plush lifestyle of a revered eledr statesman collecting $30,000 a lecture and running a high powered consulting group. Human rights and justice are universal concepts, they cannot be applied to some people and not to other. The U.S needs a Nuremberg style tribunal against those who are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Palestina On My Mind

From Nin's blog.

Palestina On My Mind

I'm 28 years old.

And I cannot remember precisely, when I first heard the word "Palestine". Perhaps it was at my elementary school, because I read too much then. I raised some eyebrows with an article about the collapse of the USSR for the school magazine.

I was raised as a Muslim, in the world's biggest Muslim country. As I child I remember someone, perhaps a teacher, saying something about Jews and Christians. Yes, there was a lot of racism inside our community too. We're good. They're bad. And sometimes minorities didn't receive the respect they should have.

I am glad I decided not to believe those stereotypes, that I can teach my children to treat others as the way they want to be treated.

When Rachel Corrie was killed it changed my worldview. More than the way she died, I was shocked by the hate towards her and her family by Israeli's supporters. In Indonesia, Palestine was always connected to our Muslims identity. And for some Islamophobics and Zionists, Palestine was always connected to terrorism. And the stereotyping continued. Jews and Israelis and Zionists are all the same. Just like Muslims and Al Qaeda and Terrorists are all the same thing.

When I read about Rachel Corrie, I thought: "Hey, she's an American girl. And she's not a Muslim. Almost the same age as me. And she's dead defending my brothers and sisters in Palestine."

After that I began to learn Breaking the Silence from Daniel Bunuel "Don't tell my mom that I'm in The Holy Land" on National geographic channel, October 2008. And then Courage to refuse, ISM, Machsom Watch and Jews Against the Occupation are some of the best sources.

While blogging and reading, I found great thoughts from great people around the world, including Israel. Chet, Julia, Leila El Saba, and Young Activist in the US. Bob Birch and Antony Loewenstein in Australia. Yarra in Israel. And some amazing blogs, from Gaza with love, Oranges and Olives, Jerusalem Syndrom, Raising Yousuf and Noor, Munich and A little bit of everything, Tikun Olam, Mondoweiss and Jews san frontieres. I read "From Beirut to Jerusalem"'s dr. Ang Swee Chai and Palestinian walks's Raja Shehadeh.

Too many to mention.

But from them I knew one thing for sure. That Palestine (or Palestina in Indonesian) was never about religion. It was about humanity. It was about peace, justice and freedom. No matter what your religion is.

Lets face it. This is something that some people here in Indonesia need to learn more about.

I would finish with some words from Remi Kanazi.

I envision Palestine in my mind
With the “chosen” frozen in time
To realize their morality’s blind
To take back generations of crime
And put an end to Apartheid

How many kids sit and wish
They could be labeled other than a terrorist
To exist is to resist!
Reads the graffiti in their cities

Give them chalk instead of rocks
They’ll use the blackboards
If you let them go to school

Give them chalk instead of rocks
Instead you bulldoze the block
Destroy their homes
Palestine is what you call the “no building zone”

But you can’t bulldoze our minds
Every time we’ll rise through ashes
Like Cassius Clay
We’ll bob and weave for infinity
There is no divinity
In bombing our cities
Setting up committees to treat us differently
We’re from Falasteen
The land where dreams are made

So just remember one thing
One day the bells of freedom will ring
And you’ll see me smiling
Loving life in Palestine

This post dedicated for Blog About Palestine day 2009