EDITOR: The Silent war
While in Israel and the US the war drums are sounding, the EU and the rest of the west seem blind or disinterested – the coming war seems to be invisible in these countries. It is of course this very attitude of denial which enables the Israeli aggression and makes it more likely. By treating this as an ‘Israeli’ business, Europe aids and abets the atrocities to come. The Iranian attempts to drum up support in the non-aligned nations will of course never stop the planned Israeli strike!
Iran calls upon non-aligned nations to support its nuclear program: Haaretz
At Tehran conference, official says Syria expresses supports for Iranian-brokered peace plan.
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Members of the Non-Aligned Movement states continue to support Iran in its attempt to develop a nuclear program and stand behind Iran in ongoing negotiations with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Iranian government said Monday.
“The support of NAM members (for) Iran’s peaceful nuclear program could be a springboard for reflecting and supporting the Iranian standpoints at the IAEA,” Iranian Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said, in comments reported by the Fars news agency.
He said NAM members at the IAEA had in 2003 opposed the forwarding of the Iranian nuclear dossier to the United Nations Security Council.
Despite those objections, the UN Security Council has, in the meantime, issued five resolutions against the Islamic state over its uncompromising stance in the nuclear dispute, including financial sanctions.
Salehi on Sunday called on summit attendees to reject the international sanctions and confront the Security Council for imposing them. Security Council members insist the sanctions are necessary, out of fears that Iran is attempting to build a nuclear weapon.
Also on Monday, an Iranian lawmaker was quoted as saying that Syrian President Bashar Assad has given his support to Iran’s effort on to come up with a new peace plan for Syria, an Iranian lawmaker was quoted as saying Monday.
“We have consulted with the Syrian president how Iran’s efforts could be realized at the NAM summit,” Alaeddin Boroujerdi was quoted by the ISNA news agency.
EDITOR: Israeli lies fail to persuade anyone
Rachel Corrie death: struggle for justice culminates in Israeli court: Guardian
Nine years after she was killed protesting in the Gaza Strip, the verdict in a lawsuit brought by her family is about to be heard
Her blonde hair, megaphone and orange fluorescent jacket with reflective stripes made 23-year-old Rachel Corrie easily identifiable as an international activist on the overcast spring afternoon in 2003 when she tried to stop an advancing Israeli military bulldozer.
The young American’s intention was to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah refugee camp, close to the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Scores of homes had already been crushed; Corrie was one of eight American and British volunteers acting as human shields for local families.
“She was standing on top of a pile of earth,” said fellow activist and eyewitness Richard Purssell, from Brighton, at the time. “The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn’t slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again.”
The question of whether the driver of the Caterpillar D9R bulldozer saw the young woman in the orange jacket, and drove deliberately at and over her, has been at the centre of the Corrie family’s decade-long battle for accountability and justice.
On Tuesday that struggle is set to culminate when an Israeli court gives its verdict in a civil lawsuit that the family have brought against the state of Israel.
An Israeli Defence Forces investigation has already found that its forces were not to blame and that the bulldozer driver had not seen the activist. No charges were brought and the case was closed. The IDF report concluded: “Rachel Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle but rather was struck by a hard object, most probably a slab of concrete which was moved or slid down while the mound of earth which she was standing behind was moved.” Corrie and other International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activists were accused by the investigators of “illegal, irresponsible and dangerous” behaviour.
But witness accounts gathered in Rafah in the aftermath of Corrie’s death on 16 March 2003 suggest little doubt as to what happened. According to Tom Dale, from Lichfield in Staffordshire: “the bulldozer went towards her very slowly, she was fully in clear view, straight in front of them”.
Corrie tried to scramble on top of the earth being pushed into a mound by the bulldozer blades. “Unfortunately she couldn’t keep her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see she was in serious trouble, there was panic in her face as she was turning around. All the activists there were screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to stop. But they just kept on going,” Dale said. The incident lasted around six or seven seconds.
Corrie was taken by a Red Crescent ambulance to the Najar hospital, arriving at the emergency room at 5.05pm. She was still alive – just. At 5.20pm she was declared dead. It was, the Israeli military said later that day, a “very regrettable accident”.
Rachel Corrie had arrived in the Holy Land on January 22, a young woman brimming with idealism, anger at injustice, and a determination to make a difference, however small.
She had volunteered for the ISM, an organisation of pro-Palestinian activists who engage in direct action against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
After two days of training workshops, Corrie headed for Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. In early 2003, Israeli troops, tanks and armoured vehicles were a daily presence in Rafah and other cities. Snipers were stationed in watchtowers; helicopters and military planes buzzed in the skies.
The second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, had begun more than two years before, and suicide bombers were being regularly despatched from Gaza and the West Bank to cause death and destruction in Israel.
Death and destruction was also a feature of life in Gaza. Corrie was shocked by what she saw. “No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just cannot imagine it unless you see it,” she wrote in one of her many emails to family and friends at home in Olympia, Washington state, on 7 February.
Three weeks later, she told her mother, Cindy, in an email: “I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it’s a good idea for all of us to drop everything and devote our lives to making it stop… Disbelief and horror is what I feel.”
Corrie and other ISM activists in Rafah were mainly engaged in trying to obstruct house demolitions being carried out by the IDF, which said the targeted homes were suspected of sheltering militants or concealing the entrances to tunnels dug under the border with Egypt to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and explosives. The activists said the demolitions were collective punishment for the actions of a minority of militants.
The presence of international activists was a nuisance for the IDF, but the military was not to be deterred. “During war there are no civilians,” an IDF training officer later told Haifa district court during a hearing into the Corrie family’s civil lawsuit, implying that militants, Palestinian civilians and international activists were all legitimate targets.
A Israeli military spokesman described ISM activists as “a group of protesters who were acting very irresponsibly, putting everyone in danger — the Palestinians, themselves and our forces — by intentionally placing themselves in a combat zone.”
But Corrie’s death caused an outcry far greater than that of any Palestinian. According to the Observer, nine Palestinians, including a girl, 4, and 90-year-old man, were killed on the same day. But inevitably the death of young American woman made headlines around the world and caused serious diplomatic reverberations.
The next day, Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, promised US president George W Bush that Israel would conduct a “thorough, credible and transparent” investigation into the incident.
Corrie’s body was taken by the Israeli authorities to the National Centre of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, where an autopsy was conducted. No report was published but, according to Human Rights Watch, the conclusion was that death was caused by “pressure on the chest … with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae … and tear wounds in the right lung with haemorrhaging of the pleural cavities”.
The Corrie family was not satisfied with the IDF report. Seven years after their daughter’s death, in March 2010, they launched a civil case against the state of Israel, accusing its military of either unlawfully or intentionally killing Corrie or of gross negligence. It was, said the family, “absolutely our last resort”.
Sporadic hearings dragged on for 18 months. The court heard testimony from four ISM activists who witnessed the incident, but a Gaza doctor who examined Corrie’s wounds was refused an entry permit to Israel to give evidence.
The driver of the bulldozer, whose identity has not been made public, testified from behind a screen for “security reasons”. He repeatedly insisted that the first time he saw the activist was when she was already dying: “I didn’t see her before the incident. I saw people pulling the body out from under the earth.”
When the hearings ended in July last year, Corrie’s mother Cindy said the family was “at this moment in much the same place as we were when they began – up against a wall of Israeli officials determined to protect the state at all costs, including at the expense of truth.”
Last week, back in Israel for the verdict in the civil lawsuit, Cindy told the Guardian the ruling would be “a milestone” in the family’s long battle for justice and accountability. “The lawsuit is only one part of what we’ve done. There has still been no ‘thorough, credible and transparent’ investigation into Rachel’s death. Whatever happens, this is not the end.”
EDITOR: The Guardian veering right in an attempt to garner US readership comes unstuck…
The saga surrounding Joshua Treviño is an incredible object lesson to the opportunists at the Guardian, who are trying to build up US readership by employing right wing hacks of the worst kind. This specific attempt has gone haywire, as it also seems that the Guardian did not do a proper check on its new acquisition… as a result, they had to climb down in an unedifying fashion, abandoning their newly-discovered talent… it won’t stop them from trying again, though. Their chosen voice of freedom in the US was not just an ardent Zionist, supporting the murdering of people on the Flotilla in 2010, but an aggressive right-winger all round, not the typical candidate for a Guardian contract? But there again, the Guardian is changing, looking for new and exciting voices. Rush Limbaugh, maybe?
The readers’ editor on… the bruising fallout from a writer’s offensive tweet: Guardian
The Guardian has received almost 200 complaints regarding Joshua Treviño, whose freelance contract has now been ended by mutual agreement
Joshua Treviño is an unashamed American rightwing and Republican polemicist whose role as a commentator for the Guardian US websitewas announced on 15 August 2012. Nine days later, in a joint statement by Treviño and the Guardian, it was announced that his freelance contract had been ended by mutual agreement.
Between those two dates there was an extremely powerful campaign on the web attacking his role, which, as a former speech writer for the George W Bush administration, was envisaged by the Guardian as someone who would give insight into the Republican campaign.
The attacks were led chiefly by the Electronic Intifada website and heavily supported by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign and its members. The Guardian readers’ editor’s office had received almost 200 complaints by the end of last week. In the first 24 hours the complaints turned on a tweet posted by Treviño on 25 June 2011: “Dear IDF: If you end up shooting any Americans on the new Gaza flotilla – well, most Americans are cool with that. Including me.” This was seen by the complainants as an incitement to shoot Americans taking part in a flotilla of boats that planned to break the blockade of Gaza in 2011. An attempt in 2010 to break the blockade ended with the interception of the boats by the Israelis and the deaths of nine protesters.
While the remit of the Guardian’s readers’ editor is wide ranging, I did not feel that a tweet from a private account before he was contracted to the Guardian fell within it.
However, as a result of the first flush of complaints, Treviño wrote a blogpost for the Guardian’s US site on 16 August, which he described as a clarification. In it he recognised that this particular tweet might lead people to believe he was inciting the IDF to shoot Americans but he strongly denied this – three times – in the article. He wrote: “I urged no such thing. I intended no such thing. But sufficient numbers believe I did, and in cases of widespread misapprehension of meaning, the fault always lies with the writer.” He also apologised for giving “the impression that I welcome killing”.
This triggered a further complaint from Ali Abunimah, co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, that this latest Treviño article was inaccurate because there was ample evidence from other tweets to show that Treviño did mean to encourage the shooting of Americans in that flotilla. As this complaint relates to a current piece of journalism on the Guardian website, this falls within the readers’ editor’s remit.
I have reviewed Abunimah’s complaint. While I think it likely that a reasonable person might well believe this was the intent of the tweet, I don’t think it is possible to make an objective finding of inaccuracy about his denial. The tweet states clearly that he would be “cool” ie relaxed about them being shot. In the article he denies absolutely that he meant this to be taken as an encouragement to the IDF to kill Americans. I believe the complaint would require a judgment on Treviño’s sincerity: a matter of opinion, not a decision based on factual accuracy.
There was a second complaint on Thursday 23 August received by senior editorial staff in the US and referred to the readers’ editor. This concerns another blogpost Treviño had written as a contributor to the Guardian’s US site – before he was on contract – on 28 February 2011 about a Republican congressman’s inquiry into Islamic radicalisation, which quoted the Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak.
Until shortly before this blogpost, the author had been a consultant for an agency retained by Malaysian business interests and ran a website called Malaysia Matters, which should have led to a footnote disclosing the relationship. Failure to declare a potential conflict of interest is a breach of the Guardian’s editorial code. This relationship will now be footnoted on the blogpost and, as the article was not in print, a correction included in the Guardian’s online corrections and clarifications. A Guardian spokesperson said that following this disclosure, both Treviño and the Guardian agreed to end the contract.
This has been a bruising 10 days for the Guardian that could have been handled better. Some of the issues were already in the public domain and could have been addressed earlier.
Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of Guardian US, said: “We didn’t know about the tweet. Trevino has a combative and prolific Twitter presence – there are something like 81,000 tweets. When it was drawn to our attention, we too were horrified and asked for an explanation. He assured us that it was a casual and horrendous use of language on social media.
“Sharing that explanation with our readers, while never going to change anyone’s mind, was the most open way, we felt, of acknowledging what was a reprehensible tweet and allowing us to focus on what we had engaged him to do, which was, on the eve of the Republican convention and in the middle of an already vicious and highly partisan election campaign, explain and analyse the politics of the US Republican party.
“This has been an eye-opening week. We knew that there are dangers inherent in attempting to be fair minded and allow our opponents as well as our friends a voice and we have learned several lessons. But I hope we will continue to try and find ways to engage with honestly held philosophies and opinions.”
“Phantom Control”: Israel’s Secret Service and the Occupation: RealNewsNewtwork
Yael Berda’s new book The Bureaucracy of Occupation sheds light on Israel’s more invisible control over the Palestinians
Precis
In recent years Israel’s control over the Palestinian people in the occupied territories has changed. While the presence of the Israeli army has been greatly reduced, the occupation has taken a more invisible form. In her new book The Bureaucracy of Occupation, attorney Yael Berda sheds light on how the Israeli secret service (the Shabak) exploits every point of contact with Palestinians, especially the imposed permit system, to recruit informants to further its control over the population. Activist Anan Quzmar of Birzeit University’s Rights to Education campaign tells The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky how this form of “phantom control” makes political involvement and activism nearly impossible.
EDITOR: From the Horse’s Mouth…
Every now and then, one of the people involves in the criminal occupation and its iniquities discovers his humanity and speaks up, revealing what Israel is trying so hard to cover up.
Former Israeli soldiers disclose routine mistreatment of Palestinian children: Guardian
Booklet of testimonies of former Israeli soldiers describes beatings, intimidation and humiliation of children
Live URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/aug/25/breaking-silence-israeli-abuse-palestinians-video
More than 30 former Israeli soldiers have disclosed their experiences of the treatment of Palestinian children during military operations and arrests, pointing to a pattern of abuse.
A booklet of testimonies, published by Breaking the Silence, an organisation of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to publicising the day-to-day actions of the army in the occupied territories, contains descriptions of beatings, intimidation, humiliation, verbal abuse, night-time arrests and injury. Most of the children had been suspected of stone-throwing.
The witness statements were gathered to show the “common reality” of acts of violence by soldiers towards Palestinians, including children, in the West Bank, said Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence. “Sadly enough this is the moral consequence of prolonged occupation of the Palestinian people,” he said.
One former soldier describes serving in Hebron in 2010: “You never know their names, you never talk with them, they always cry, shit in their pants … There are those annoying moments when you’re on an arrest mission, and there’s no room in the police station, so you just take the kid back with you, blindfold him, put him in a room and wait for the police to come and pick him up in the morning. He sits there like a dog …”
Children frequently soiled themselves, according to the testimonies. “I remember hearing him shitting his pants … I also remember some other time when someone pissed in his pants. I just became so indifferent to it, I couldn’t care less. I heard him do it, I witnessed his embarrassment. I also smelled it. But I didn’t care,” said another.
Another soldier describes an incident in Qalqiliya in 2007 in which a boy was arrested for throwing stones. “At the end of the day, something has to make these kids stop throwing stones on the road because they can kill,” he said.
“That specific kid who actually lay there on the ground, begging for his life, was actually nine years oldI mean, a kid has to beg for his life? A loaded gun is pointed at him and he has to plead for mercy? This is something that scars him for life. But I think if we hadn’t entered the village at that point, then stones would be thrown the next day and perhaps the next time someone would be wounded or killed as a result.”
Some of the statements illustrate the disjunction between the Israeli military and Palestinians. One soldier said: “You put up a checkpoint out of boredom, sit there for a few hours and then continue on. Once I saw kids passing, and one of the guys, a reservist who spoke Arabic, wanted to ask them what they study. He didn’t mean it in any bad way. Then I saw how the kid nearly peed his pants as the guy tried to kid with him, how the two worlds are simply disconnected. The guy was kidding and the kid was scared to death.”
Most of the soldiers have given testimonies anonymously. One, who spoke to the Guardian, said he had been given no guidance during his training for military service on how to deal with minors. He said children were sometimes arrested and interrogated, not because they were suspected of an offence, but to try to elicit information about older family members or neighbours.
He had given a witness statement to Breaking the Silence because “I thought that people who don’t see this on an everyday basis should know what’s going on.” He said many Israelis were unwilling to acknowledge the reality of the military occupation in the West Bank. “It’s very easy [for the Israeli public] to be completely detached. It’s a hard thing to handle – stuff like that being done in your name.”
According to Gerard Horton of Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCI) the testimonies confirm a pattern of behaviour uncovered by his organisation’s research into the treatment of Palestinian children by the Israeli security forces.
DCI and other human rights organisations say Palestinian children are routinely arrested at night, handcuffed, blindfolded, mistreated and denied access to their parents or a lawyer.
“For years credible reports of human rights abuses against children living under Israeli military occupation have emerged,” he said. “These latest testimonies from young soldiers given the task of enforcing the occupation provide further evidence of its deeply corrosive effects on all. The testimonies lay bare the day-to-day reality of the occupation. These are not isolated incidents or a question of ‘a few bad apples’. This is the natural and foreseeable consequence of government policy.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Defence Forces said that Breaking the Silence had declined to provide the IDF with testimonies ahead of publication so they could be verified and investigated.
He said its true intention was “to generate negative publicity regarding the IDF and its soldiers. The IDF has in the past, and continues to, call upon the organisation to immediately convey complaints or suspicions of improper conduct to the relevant authorities. In line with the IDF’s ethical commitments, any such incidents will be thoroughly investigated.”
Pro-Palestinians prepare new mission for Palestinian children: PressTV
Mon Aug 20, 2012
Over 100 Pro-Palestinians in Europe and North America are organizing a fresh trip to Palestine in order to deliver stationery to the children of Palestine. This time, their mission is based on an official invitation from the Palestine Authority.
These pro-Palestinian French are ready to return to meet Palestinians on their soil.
This time, it is upon the official invitation of the Palestinian Authority who has requested safe passage to the French Foreign Minister for the French visitors.
In the past, Western visitors to Palestine were refused entry. Their names were blacklisted and they were not allowed boarding by airlines. Israeli authorities stated they were hooligans. But the organizers say they think otherwise.
This time the organizers say that beyond their right to visit their Palestinian friends, they are also accomplishing a second goal, which is, the right of Palestinian children to education.
Books, pencils, notebooks and other stationary are being collected. Palestinian children have suffered a severe shortage of essential items due to the long running Israeli blockade.
Organizers say, despite the odds, they are determined to reach Palestine.
MONDAY 27 AUGUST 2012
The sermon by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef added to a flurry of recent rhetoric from Israeli officials that has raised international concern that Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East’s only atomic power, might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. “[When] we ask God to ‘bring an end to our enemies’, we should be thinking about Iran, those evil ones who threaten Israel. May the Lord destroy them,” Yosef was quoted as saying by Israeli media yesterday.
Last week, Mr Netanyahu sent his national security adviser to brief the 91-year-old Rabbi on Iran’s nuclear activities in what was widely seen as an effort to win his backing for any future military strike, possibly before the US presidential vote in November.
The Rabbi is the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, a key member of Mr Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Mr Netanyahu is frustrated that Western diplomacy to try to force Iran to rein in its programme has been fruitless. He said that Iran, whose leaders have threatened Israel’s destruction, had made “accelerated progress towards achieving nuclear weapons”.
Rabbi Yosef issued his call in a sermon on Saturday in which he said Iran should be included in a traditional Jewish New Year blessing next month in which God is asked to strike down Israel’s enemies.