Bil'in: A victory for the anarchists

By Meron Rapoport

"I remember the moment I marched among a crowd of Palestinians," said one of the Israeli activists who participated in the ongoing demonstrations near the village of Bil'in, this week. Those demonstrations led to a High Court decision a few days ago ordering the rerouting of the separation fence near the village. "I served in the army, and my first instinct was to look for the signal operator and to check if we were marching properly spaced. The Palestinians shouted 'Allahu Akbar,' which is supposed to be the nightmare of every Israeli soldier, but I suddenly realized that I was with them, that they weren't my enemies."

One must understand. Anyone who went to demonstrate in Bil'in knew that he stood more than a small chance of getting hurt somehow by "his" army: by clubs, tear gas, rubber bullets. Undoubtedly, there were a few who sought out this violence, but it also befell those who did not seek it out. It was part of the deal. The violence that the soldiers and Border Police officers employed against the Israeli demonstrators on an average Friday in Bil'in surpassed that used against the settlers during the entire evacuation of Gush Katif. Nevertheless, a few hundred Israelis made this trip every Friday, without fail, for the last two and a half years. Not all of them at once. Sometimes five, sometimes 50, sometimes 100. But they came.

Most of these people were young, sometimes very young, and they gathered under the rubric of "Anarchists Against the Fence." The Zionist left had no presence there. Not Peace Now and not Meretz (some Meretz MKs sometimes assisted the arrestees, but no more than that) - and certainly not Labor. Older organizations from the non-Zionist left were supportive, and provided logistical assistance, but the initiative still came from the anarchists. They led the struggle.

Without question, it was a rather small group. Not everyone, even the most devout leftist and vigorous opponent of the occupation, is prepared to come and take a beating, to run up and down hills, to breathe tear gas, to be arrested. But it wasn't an insignificant number either, this group of people prepared to come to blows with the establishment. In Bil'in their goal was simple and tangible: to restore the lands to the Palestinians.

It will be interesting to see what their next goal is.

Haaretz

 

withstanding "the elephant of justified Christian homicidal violence and enmity"

"...The story of how a simple man, a "nobody" by the standards of the "somebodies" of this world, went from being a criminal who was executed by his government for declining to partake in a nation’s war, to being a person who was officially discussed at the Second Vatican Council, to being a figure known at every point of the compass, to being a person Beatified by the Catholic Church deserves the attention of everyone who struggles to understand how humanity can be extricated from this valley of tragedy and tears in which human life is ensnared. Franz Jägerstätter’s witness should be especially pondered by those who believe that fidelity to the Word (Logos) of God as revealed in Jesus is "not enough" to make an essential difference in the human situation, and by those who believe that Christianity must proclaim a "realistic gospel" of evil renamed, rationalized and accepted as good, if it is to be effective in this world. So, here on the threshold of Franz Jägerstätter’s Beatification, I hope to make visible the prophetic purpose and meaning of his life and death. I hope to illuminate the salvific communication from God for which he was the chosen instrument – the chosen instrument who nevertheless had to choose to see and to act..."

 

"...Franz Jägerstätter’s schooling ended when he was fourteen. He could not articulate a formal theology of Gospel nonviolence nor could he articulate a formal just war theology. How could he possibly be expected to, when even today most Christians are taught little or nothing – or outright falsehoods about both? Yet after two periods of military training, he permanently turned away from the only war and military operation he ever encountered; one which had the enthusiastic endorsement of his fellow Austrian and German Christians. He made this decision on the basis that participation would be a betrayal of his Lord and could seriously jeopardize his eternal destiny.

While prelates of distinction and theologians of renown were ceaselessly and publicly intoning, "Heil Hitler," Jägerstätter was literally saying, "Pfui Hitler." While self-designated Christian "realists" were expounding their theories on why it was necessary to cooperate with evil in order to save the Church and the world, Jägerstätter was observing:

Are we Christians today perhaps wiser than Christ Himself? Does anyone really think that this massive bloodletting can possibly save European Christianity from defeat – or bring it to a new flowering? Did our good Saviour, whom we should always try to imitate, go forth with His apostles against the heathens as German Christians are doing today?

While sophisticated religious propagandists for the government and military were telling people that St. Paul teaches in Romans 13, that Christians are "to obey authorities," Jägerstätter was responding "but only to the extent that they do not order anything evil, for we must obey God rather than men." In short almost alone among the Christians of Austria and Germany, he pointed out that there was an elephant in the Church!

The actual movements of mind and heart that empowered Franz Jägerstätter to see the obvious can never be known with certainty this side of eternity. As would be expected, his consciousness and conscience evolved as the crisis intensified and as the imperative to choose became more pressing. While there is hearsay and circumstantial evidence of various degrees of credibility concerning his internal religious development, as well as much sheer speculation, he in fact left only a few letters and reflections. However, from these we can garner glimpses of what was going on inside of him during his via dolorosa and of where he had arrived by its end. For example, in his prison statement, composed shortly before he was to be legally murdered, he wrote:

Just as those who believe in National Socialism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference: we need no rifles or pistols for our battle, but instead, spiritual weapons – and the foremost among these is prayer.

He concludes this prison statement with these most soul-revealing words:

Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.

All Austrians and Germans, of course, would have heard the same Gospel that Jägerstätter heard, but it seems from what his neighbors report that he read it and re-read it, pondered it and prayed over it as few of them did. Via this grace-saturated search for the truth of God and God’s Will through Jesus, culturally manufactured Gospel-blinders dropped from his eyes. The elephant of evil became so visible that he was compelled to speak the truth he saw and, if necessary, follow Jesus to a criminal’s death for acting on it. He simply could not continue to make-believe that he didn’t know what he did know.

Franz Jägerstätter, then, is not only a Christian martyr, he is also a chosen prophet of the The Holy One, Blessed be He. The Hebrew prophets are not fortune tellers nor are they persons who simply speak their own minds and conjectures. They explicitly speak the universally applicable Word (Logos) of God to concrete situations. By God’s grace they vividly see what others profess not to see, namely, rebellion against God in the here and now. The authentic prophet warns of the inevitable and disastrous outcome that will result, if present choice patterns remain unaltered. He puts on-notice those who have been given eyes to see and minds to understand, that it is now absolutely necessary to use those eyes and minds to see, name and turn from an evil, which is being marketed in pseudo-Divine packaging. In short, prophets in the Biblical sense are the ones sent by God to try to open the eyes of the minds and the hearts of a people who adamantly refuse to look and see that "There is an elephant in the room and it is ruining everything." ..."   Full article>>

Mirror: Fingerprint doubt over Kelly 'suicide'

Secret knife evidence points to murder, says MP

By Stewart Whittingham And Graham Brough 15/10/2007

Newly released evidence adds to the theory that MoD scientist Dr David Kelly was murdered and did not commit suicide, an MP has claimed.

Norman Baker revealed that the penknife Dr Kelly apparently used to slash his wrist did not carry his own fingerprints.

Lib Dem Mr Baker said: "The angle you pick up a knife to kill yourself means there would be fingerprints.

"Someone who wanted to kill themselves wouldn't go to the lengths of wiping the knife clean of fingerprints.

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"It is just very suspicious. It is one of the things that makes me think Dr Kelly was murdered. The case should be re-opened."

UN weapons inspector Dr Kelly, 59, was found dead near his Oxfordshire home in 2003, days after he was named as the source of a BBC story that claimed the Government had "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier said Saddam Hussein could launch conventional nuclear or biological weapons within 45 minutes.

Independent doctors have said neither the cut to Dr Kelly's wrist nor the drugs found in his body were enough to kill him.

And they claimed the official cause of death, a severed ulnar artery in the wrist, was extremely unlikely to be fatal.

Mr Baker, who is writing a book on Dr Kelly, used the Freedom of Information Act to discover from Thames Valley police that no fingerprints were on the penknife. The MoD germ warfare expert was not wearing gloves nor were any found at the scene.

An inquest ruled his death was suicide and the Hutton Inquiry exonerated then-PM Tony Blair.

Dr Kelly's former colleague, UN weapons expert Richard Spertzel, claimed the scientist was on Saddam's hitlist because his work in the 90s had forced Iraq to admit to a secret biological arsenal.

A Thames Valley police spokeswoman said: "There were no fingerprints on the knife.

"This, however, does not change the official explanation for his death."

Dr Kelly's wife Janice has said she is certain he committed suicide.

She refused to comment on Mr Baker's murder theory.

Link

 

dominionism and the despoiling of America

"...It happened quietly, with barely a mention in the media. Only the Washington Post dutifully reported it. And only Kevin Phillips saw its significance in his new book, American Dynasty. On December 24, 2001, Pat Robertson resigned his position as President of the Christian Coalition.

Behind the scenes religious conservatives were abuzz with excitement. They believed Robertson had stepped down to allow the ascendance of the President of the United States of America to take his rightful place as the head of the true American Holy Christian Church.

Robertson’s act was symbolic, but it carried a secret and solemn revelation to the faithful. It was the signal that the Bush administration was a government under God that was led by an anointed President who would be the first regent in a dynasty of regents awaiting the return of Jesus to earth. The President would now be the minister through whom God would execute His will in the nation. George W. Bush accepted his scepter and his sword with humility, grace and a sense of exultation.

As Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court explained a few months later, the Bible teaches and Christians believe “… that government …derives its moral authority from God. Government is the ‘minister of God’ with powers to ‘revenge,’ to ‘execute wrath,’ including even wrath by the sword…”  ..."   Full article >>

The Pentagon Plans for a New Hundred Years' War

"...In his tour de force book Planet of Slums, Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go… [T]hey now assert that the ‘feral, failed cities' of the Third World -- especially their slum outskirts -- will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor."

But the mostly male conference-goers planning for a multi-generational struggle against the global South's slums aren't a gang of urban warfare cowboys talking non-stop death and destruction; and they don't look particularly bellicose either, as they munch on chocolate-chip cookies during our afternoon snack breaks in a room where cold cuts and brochures for the Rapid Wall Breaching Kit -- which allows users to blast a man-sized hole in the side of any building -- are carefully laid out on the tables. Instead, these mild-mannered men speak about combat restraint, "less than lethal weaponry," precision targeting, and (harking back to the Vietnam War) "winning hearts and minds." ..."  Full article >>

Ward Churchill on genocide denial among N. American intelligentsia

An interview with Ward Churchill

"...He gained widespread notoriety in 2005, when the media seized on an essay he had written on September 11, 2001 entitled "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." In it, he suggested that American foreign policy was to blame for the attacks. He went on to say that some of those killed in the attacks were not "innocent" victims, but in fact the very people orchestrating and profiting from the imperialist system. He called them "little Eichmanns," a reference to the infamous Nazi bureaucrat..."

"...In a lively interview with Newsweek shortly after his dismissal, he refused to apologize for the "little Eichmanns" statement, in characteristically ardent terms:

"I never have any particular regrets about calling things by their right name. And it's about time we stop pretending that Americans are in a completely different analytical category from everyone else in the world, and are somehow exempt from the consequences of their actions."

Churchill is no stranger to unpopular ideas. Many of his writings have focused on the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US. Inspired in part by resistance to his own work, Churchill's current speaking tour focuses on what he calls "the denial of genocide in American academia."

"If you were making the exact same arguments and using same techniques to deny the holocaust in Germany, you would be guilty of a crime in Canada," he says.

Most deniers of the German holocaust are nuts, fringe types, he explains. "When you're talking about native people exactly the same thing is done, only it's the mainstream of academic discourse."

Churchill makes a convincing argument that the historic and systemic oppression of this continent's Indigenous populations does indeed fit within the official definition of genocide as found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which specifies "...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

"It's no more acceptable when something is done to victims of one genocide than when it's done to another set of victims," he says. "If the... Zundel types are repugnant--and they are--then the people who would deny the native genocide are just as repugnant."

One of the main differences in this context, he points out, is that European whites were largely successful in their conquest. And the victors, of course, write history.

"If you'd had a Nazi victory in Eastern Europe, the situation of any Jews who survived... would have been quite discernibly different."

At its best, academia can be a space for people of colour and Indigenous peoples to develop their own histories. Churchill presents a different analysis of history, and he doesn't much care if the mass media or his political opponents like it.

Overall, he says, Canadians have been more receptive than Americans to his message. He does as many talks in Canada as he does in the US, despite the much smaller population.

"One suspects it is in part because Canadians - and even progressive Canadians - tend to view their history as rather less genocidal than that of the United States," he muses.

"Canada didn't resort to the same direct killing techniques... but that's hardly an indication that the genocidal policy wasn't effective, just that the techniques employed were different."

He cites articles A and B of the genocide convention--imposing serious physical or mental harm, and inflicting destructive conditions of life.

"Surely in Canada it's clear that native peoples are subjected to various forms of psychological battering, and physical battering in the sense of endemic poverty," he says.

Falling back on the argument that Canada's treatment of the Indigenous population hasn't been as brutal as that of the US doesn't cut it either. "If you're talking about a worse genocide than another genocide, then you're arguing for a 'good' genocide..."  Full article >>

the origins of AIPAC

"...AIPAC's original internal codename in the American Zionist Committee was "the Kenen Committee." Its results have been unparalleled in the history of foreign lobbying. An AIPAC obituary declared that the State Department strenuously opposed Kenen's earliest lobbying efforts. The indefatigable Kenen worked members of Congress and obtained initial approval of $15 million in aid to Israel, despite robust State Department opposition. This early success set AIPAC's strategy of seeking aid to Israel not on the basis of merit, presidential administration prerogative as the maker of foreign policy, or broad State Department initiatives, but through fake grassroots efforts financed by foreign funds from Israel to "prime the American pump." The Israel lobbying campaign for favorable public relations and media coverage included strategically directed gifts and grants to U.S. colleges and universities for new Israel-centric "Middle East Studies" departments and unfettered lobbying with tax-exempt funds recycled from overseas into the U.S. political system. Activity reports from this intensive campaign are documented in the first chapter.

By 1973, Kenen was able to claim that he had boosted U.S. aid to Israel to $1 billion per year. When Kenen retired in 1974, he still retained his "editor emeritus" title at the Near East Report. The spirit of AIPAC's hardball and often illegal tactics would continue long after Kenen left the scene, and the results are staggering. At the time of Kenen's death in 1988, U.S. aid to Israel exceeded $3 billion a year, the highest amount of U.S. aid given to any country.[ix]

It is popularly believed that the immense power of the Israel lobby sprang from broad grassroots commitment by concerned individuals across America. However, evidence from internal American Zionist Council and AIPAC documents reveals a different history. Many groups, including Christian religious organizations now highly active in AIPAC-directed affairs, were initially indifferent to or even suspicious of Israeli initiatives. It took millions of dollars of Israeli government and overseas funds and decades of effort to create the public relations, lobbying, and political juggernaut that now dominates in America. However, not all Americans welcomed the formation of Israel's lobby.

Founder Si Kenen's startup activities proved to be so brazen that they were put under the microscope of a U.S. Senate committee investigating the activities of non-diplomatic foreign agents in the United States. The investigation was originally focused on Latin America, but was compelled to investigate the Israel lobby being assembled on U.S. soil. The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations dove headlong into questions about whether the American Zionist Council, AIPAC, the Jewish Agency and Si Kenen were avoiding Foreign Agents Registration Act declarations or filing false ones, acting as unlawful conduits to launder tax-exempt funds, and illegally disseminating Israeli government propaganda in the United States. This investigation, conducted by Senator James William Fulbright, provides the first outside glimpse into the American Zionist Committee, Si Kenen and AIPAC..."   Read on >>

beating the drums of Armageddon

America's Armageddonites

"...Utopian fantasies have long transfixed the human race. Yet today a much rarer fantasy has become popular in the United States. Millions of Americans, the richest people in history, have a death wish. They are the new "Armageddonites," fundamentalist evangelicals who have moved from forecasting Armageddon to actually trying to bring it about.

Most journalists find it difficult to take seriously that tens of millions of Americans, filled with fantasies of revenge and empowerment, long to leave a world they despise. These Armageddonites believe that they alone will get a quick, free pass when they are "raptured" to paradise, no good deeds necessary, not even a day of judgment. Ironically, they share this utopian fantasy with a group that they often castigate, namely fundamentalist Muslims who believe that dying in battle also means direct access to Heaven. For the Armageddonites, however, there are no waiting virgins, but they do agree with Muslims that there will be "no booze, no bars," in the words of a popular Gaither Singers song.

These end-timers have great influence over the U.S. government's foreign policy. They are thick with the Republican leadership. At a recent conference in Washington, congressional leader Roy Blunt, for example, has said that their work is "part of God's plan." At the same meeting, where speakers promoted attacking Iran, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay glorified "end times". Indeed the Bush administration often consults with them on Mideast policies. The organizer of the conference, Rev. John Hagee, is often welcomed at the White House, although his ratings are among the lowest on integrity and transparency by Ministry Watch, which rates religious broadcasters. He raises millions of dollars from his campaign supporting Israeli settlements on the West Bank, including much for himself. Erstwhile presidential candidate Gary Bauer is on his Board of Directors. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson also both expressed strong end-times beliefs.

American fundamentalists strongly supported the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. They consistently support Israel's hard-line policies. And they are beating the drums for war against Iran. Thanks to these end-timers, American foreign policy has turned much of the world against us, including most Muslims, nearly a quarter of the human race..."   Read on >>