Josh’s blogg

 Letter from an American Teenager.

I wonder, what is the taste of true innocence upon the lips? Only a select and fortunate few would know. So I ask you, President Bush, Prime Minister Olmert- how do you think purity tastes once it has been stolen?
 
The United States, with its blindly pro-Israeli policy, has once again refused to condemn the state of Israel for its massacre of Palestinian civilians and for its violation of the honor of their country. As usual, the American administration has given a carte blanche to the Israeli government to kill as many Palestinian civilian men, women, and children as it deems useful.

The eyes of the world behold daily the savagery wrought by Israel against the innocents of Lebanon and Palestine. A line has been drawn, a boundary declared, as the Zionists forces have begun their assault on every man and women who won’t stay silent in the face of oppression and tyranny.

But why has our society chosen to support such an immoral policy, such an amoral nation?
As children, Americans are inundated with symbols of patriotism; they daily “pledge allegiance” to a country that has become a parody of the ideals upon which it was founded. As young adults many become ignorant of their own fortune and infatuated with an ideology of bellicose patriotism.

It is a shame that the very government that has enshrined in its constitution rights such as the right of free press and expression, the right to freedom from arbitrary search and seizure, the right to a speedy trial and to trial by jury, the right to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and a host of others has come to deny its own people the very constitutional liberties that many would die to defend.

I live in a country where if you are not “with” the government and its policies, you are “against” them.  If you refuse to assent to America’s myopic, opportunistic understanding of the Middle East, you are dismissed as a “terrorist apologist”, a supporter of the “Axis of Evil”. My own peers have seemingly been brain-washed into believing the government’s accolade of lies, and I feel I have become, in my own nation, an outsider looking in.
 
I go to a school where the teens bustling down the hallways are more interested in the latest fads than the politics of their own country. It’s not that young Americans can’t find out what’s going on in the world (in the internet age, information is ever-present), but that- by their own assertion- most simply don’t care. They don’t care because they trust their government to solve the world’s problems. Therein lies the dilemma; in the Middle East, American policy has exacerbated- and often been the cause of- the current violence.
 
The children and youths of Lebanon, Iraq, and Palestine do not have the luxury of such apathy; there, boys younger than I have been forced to pick up arms to protect their own lives and the land and honor of their people. The innocence stolen from these children by war is a matter which most Americans seem to care little of.
 
When my family in Lebanon was under the siege of the rampaging Israeli army, I came to school more passionate about politics than ever. But the 33 days of Israeli bombardment that so greatly affected me and my country passed unnoticed by most of my peers in highschool.
 
Young Americans, in failing to involve themselves in the political process of their nation which so greatly affects the lives of so many others, have committed in their ignorance and apathy a betrayal of their peers abroad. Our generation is known as “generation Y”. Ironically, the question “why” is one our generation seems unwilling to ask of its elders in power regarding the policies they have enacted, which have harmed so many innocents.

Why has a government that is supposed to be “for the people and by the people” hurt
so many? Why are other countries forced to suffer due to the whims of the rulers of the republic of America?

The silence of the world community regarding the crises in the Middle East has become deafening. It is time for the young people of America to wake from our apathy and challenge our governing bodies, to show the world that we do- indeed- believe in every individual’s right to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness.

Dare To Compare - Israel

I do not compare Israel with Nazi Germany. Israel is a Zionist settlers’ colony founded on land theft and terror against the Palestinian people; Nazi Germany was not.

Few days ago, I had a long e-mail message from someone with the “Jews for Peace” group. The message starts: “I am very annoyed by your comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany … There is no Auschwitz in Palestine, and the Palestinians have not experienced a holocaust. Palestinians are free to leave any time they wish.” I do not know anything about the group, but a response is in order:

Thank you for your e-mail. I take it you have never been in Occupied Palestine to see the facts on the ground. Or you are ignorant of Israel’s policies against innocent and virtually defenseless Palestinians with nowhere to go to.

I do not compare Israel with Nazi Germany. Israel is a Zionist settlers’ colony founded on land theft and terror against the Palestinian people; Nazi Germany was not. However, I do – like most people – compare Israeli policies in Palestine with those of the Nazis. If you deny what happened in Palestine in 1948 (Nakba) when thousands of Palestinians were murdered, and an estimated 800,000 Palestinians were terrorised and ethnically cleansed from their homeland in a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion by Jewish terrorist organisations, you deny “the holocaust” ever took place.

Honest Jews who experienced and survived the holocaust have often made the comparison between Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people and the Nazis’ brutal treatments of Jews and others. I am reminded of a letter to the Israeli Press twenty-five years ago in which Shlomo Shmelzman wrote: “In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald. I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear about ‘closed areas’ and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear ‘two-legged beasts’ and I remember ‘Untermenschen’ [subhumans]. I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission, and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder … Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood”. (Ha’aretz, August 11, 1982). Israel is consciously matching all of Hitler’s crimes, killing and depriving Palestinians of basic human rights. Only the methods are different.

Furthermore, various Israeli politicians today, including the hardcore Fascist Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who migrated from Moldova to Israel in 1978are advocating a harsher policy of ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Arabs in Palestine as a conclusion to Israel’s conquest of Palestine. In fact, a majority of Israeli Jews (64%) advocates this Fascist form of thinking. (Ha’aretz, 22 June 2004).

You write: “Gaza is free”. I am sure you learned this fraud from at least four sources of Zionist propaganda: the pro-Israel Jewish Lobby; the deranged ignoramus American Zionist, Alan Dershowitz; U.S. mainstream media; and the BBC. Gaza is not “free”. Gaza is a large fortified Concentration Camp. Since 2000, the entire population of Gaza (1.5 million) has been under total blockade with disastrous consequences. Anyone who tries to get out risks being murdered.

As a result of this premeditated collective punishment, Gaza has run out of food and medicine. Palestinians, children and infants in particular, are dying of starvation, malnutrition and preventable diseases. Without electricity, hospital and emergency centres operate infrequently, depriving the sick and injured of medical care. So, Gaza is a Camp not much different from the Nazi’s Camps. Indeed, Israelis have started to call Gaza the “Ghetto”.

The criminal blockade of Gaza was tightened after the democratic elections of January 2006. The Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS) won the elections in exactly the manner U.S. and the EU (the West) had called upon them to do – free and fair democratic voting. Unfortunately, “democracy” for the U.S. is only if the elected government serves U.S. interests. The criminal blockade is tightened on daily basis in violation of international law and civilised norms.

You are being naïve about the hyped evacuation of a few thousand illegal Jewish settlers from Gaza. I repeat: This was another Israeli fraud designed for mass propaganda aimed at diverting public attention away from Israel’s terror. As one Israeli Labor politician wrote recently: “The goal is to perpetuate Israeli control in most of the West Bank, and to repel any internal or external pressure for a different political solution. The Palestinians will be left with seven enclaves connected by special highways for their use.”

The building of illegal colonies (the so-called “settlements”) has accelerated dramatically, along with the illegal Apartheid Wall – described by some as ‘much worse’ than the Berlin Wall – confiscating Palestinian land and water resources and tearing Palestinian communities into small enclaves, dividing them from each other. With the completion of the Wall, some 1.6 million Palestinians will have access to no more than 12 per cent of historic Palestine which makes it impossible to establish a viable Palestinian state. In addition, the Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) is carrying out Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing, emptying Hebron of its original Arab inhabitants and Judaising the Jordan Valley, building illegal colonies, and making the so-called “Two-State” solution impossible. (See: Régis Debray, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2007).

Take a look at the new map of the Palestinian Occupied Territories produced by the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA). More than 45 per cent of the West Bank is now off limits to Palestinians. East Jerusalem has been systematically Judaised, its borders inflated, and the Arab Palestinians there have become prisoners in their homes. They are harassed on a daily basis by illegal armed extremist settlers and the IOF. According to IMEMC News, some 1,835 Palestinian families have been forced to move from their homes and at least 15, 000 Palestinians will be denied access to the City when the illegal Wall is completed. All over the Occupied Territories, ethnic cleansing of Palestinians “is in progress” and has been since 1948. (See: Victoria Buch, Occupation Magazine, September 2007).

The Occupied Territories of the West Bank, including major population centres such as Nablus and Jericho, are split into enclaves. Palestinians’ movement between them is restricted by more than 572 roadblocks, an increase of 52 per cent compared to 376 in August 2005. These include 96 manned Israeli checkpoints and 476 unmanned barriers (OCHA). At these roadblocks, increasing numbers of desperately ill Palestinians and newborn babies have died because Israeli soldiers and armed settlers prevent people from reaching hospitals. Israel has already formalised the de facto Ghettoisation of the West Bank through a network of Jews-only highways that bypass and isolate Palestinian towns and villages. Israel has created a system of control the Nazis could only dream of.

You allege that: “Israel offered the Palestinians ‘land for peace’ and a separate state, but the Palestinians refused the offer”. First, peace for Israel, writes Henry Siegman, is a “cover for [Israel’s] systematic confiscation of Palestinian land” and premeditated violence against defenceless Palestinians. Peace without justice is an empty rhetoric. That is why Israeli leaders love all these countless “peace” conferences. That was what the Oslo “Peace Process” was for. (Henry Siegman, LRB, 16 August 2007). That is why Israeli leaders love all these countless “peace” conferences.

Second, you are being very naïve to believe Israel’s manufactured propaganda. The “offer” was a scam. Israel offered the Palestinians nothing. In fact most of Israel’s criminal policies are designed to destroy any chance of a viable Palestinian state. The opportunity of a viable Palestinian state has passed and it is no longer a possibility unless Israel completely withdraws to pre-1967 boarders and implements all UN Security Council resolutions. (See: Hussein Agha & Robert Malley, NYR Books, 09 August 2001).

You also wrote: “Palestinians are free to leave any time they wish”. Where to? Israelis can go where they come from, and most Israelis are dual citizens, and have no problem returning to their homes in the U.S. and Europe. Palestinians have nowhere to go except to their homes in Palestine. Remember the common saying: ‘Jews have always demanded rights when they were in the minority, but they denied others the rights when they are in the majority and exercise power’. Palestinians have an inalienable right to return to their homeland.

Furthermore, you ignored the numerous diplomatic options offered by Arab nations and rebuffed by Israel. Indeed, all Muslim nations have offered Israel peace and recognition if Israel will renounce violence and accept a just peace. Instead, Israel has rejected every peace offer and continues to perpetuate violence, because violence is the foundation of the “State of Israel”.

According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, PCHR, Israeli Occupation Forces (the Israeli Army) crimes against the Palestinians during the period of 16 -22 August, 2007 were:

- 16 Palestinians, including 3 children, were murdered by IOF in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
- 10 of the victims were extra-judicially executed by IOF.
- 18 Palestinians were wounded by IOF gunfire in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
-· IOF conducted 30 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and two ones into the Gaza Strip.
- IOF arrested 44 Palestinian civilians, including a child, in the West Bank.
- IOF shelled fishing boats and arrested 8 Palestinian fishermen in Rafah.

Of course, Israel’s terror and war crimes continue uninterrupted. Innocent Palestinian civilians, including children, are murdered every day. Israel’s blockade of Gaza (as mentioned above) continues with an international flavour that is causing a humanitarian crisis. The Palestinians are defenceless and unable to effectively retaliate against illegal and brutal occupiers. It’s preposterous to compare Palestinian “violence” with Israeli violence. Israeli Gestapo-like death squads are murdering innocent Palestinian civilians and prominent politicians with ease and impunity.

Israeli war planes continue to fly ‘sonic boom’ raids, terrorising the civilian population and causing mental damage to children and infants, and premature birth and miscarriage among pregnant women. The deliberate murder of Palestinian children (with impunity) for sport, and the use of Palestinian children as human shields by the Israeli soldiers, is war crimes worse than the Nazis’ crimes.

As I write these words, Israeli soldiers killed five Palestinian boys and girls, aged between 10 and 12, in cold blood. The children had only been playing ‘tag’ in the backyard of their home. Two days earlier, Israeli soldiers killed three boys while they were collecting carob fruits. The Israeli alleged: “the children approached the security fence”, Israel’s routine pretext to justify murder. Then the Israeli Army admitted that the killing occurred “by mistake”. Do you remember; when was the last Israeli killed by Palestinians?

Furthermore, at least 11,000 Palestinians, including women and children, are imprisoned without charge or due process in notorious Israeli prisons. Palestinian prisoners are enduring torture and abuse – justified by the Israeli Supreme Court as a ‘necessity’ – not dissimilar from those practiced by the Nazis with complete disregard to human rights and human dignity.

Israel has used, and continues to use, all kinds of weapons to kill Palestinians, including cluster bombs, napalms, and a new “super-weapon” that uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide area by sucking the air out of people’s lungs and rupturing their internal organs. In addition, Israel’s uninterrupted house demolitions of Palestinian homes and destruction of agricultural land constitute war crimes.

It’s worth noting that Israel’s violence found unconditional military support within the U.S. and European power establishments. The recent $30 billion “aid package” to Israel – paid by U.S. taxpayers – is a case in point, although “Washington’s blind support for Israel exceeds by many times the amount of direct U.S. aid to Israel” (Shirl McArthur, WRMEA, July 2006). Israel’s usefulness is that it justifies U.S. violence and military presence in the region.

Let’s not forget that Israel is a rogue state in possession of the fourth largest military force in the world. Israel amasses an arsenal that includes biological and chemical weapons and more than 200 nuclear warheads. Israel is rightly considered by the overwhelming majority of people around the world as the biggest threat to world peace.

All the above mentioned Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people are so horrendous that they could be easily pass for Nazis’ war crimes against Jews. The whole idea of purely “Jewish State” in Palestine is based on the concept of the “Master Race” adopted in the Nazis’ ideology of Herrenvolk. Indeed, Jews consider non-Jews (Gentiles) as Untermenschen, or lesser humans. In Israel, the 20 per cent Palestinians are despised and denied equal rights in a deliberate discriminatory policy considered worse than South Africa’s Apartheid. Unlike South Africa’s Apartheid, Israel’s Apartheid is a real Apartheid. (See: Chris McGreal, Guardian, 16 February 2006). This racist policy led some Jews to stop associating themselves with Israel in order to deflect criticism away from Jews.

Despite the criminal nature of Israel’s policies, few people dare criticise Israel for fear of being labelled “anti-Semitists”. Israel uses the cliché of “anti-Semitism” and the holocaust to silence its critics. People who are falsely accused of “anti-Semitism” pay dearly, losing their jobs and livelihoods for daring to legitimately criticise Israel. Indeed, anyone who criticises Israel’s terror or rationally argues that the pro-Israel Jewish Lobby in the U.S. has a significant influence over U.S. policy is automatically labelled “anti-Semitic”. The holocaust has been turned from a human tragedy into a political tool and a multi-business industry. In addition, Zionist Jews have succeeded in making the holocaust unique and exclusive, belittling countless other genocide. Zionist Jews have mastered the art of ‘religion manipulation’ to justify violence and perpetuate a slow genocide in Palestine.

It should be acknowledged that there is a widespread anti-Semitism campaign directed not against Jews, but against Arabs and Muslims. Pro-Israel Christian Zionists, including the Christian Right and pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. and Europe, have declared war not only on the Palestinians and Arabs in the Middle East, but also on all Arabs and Muslims around the world. With the bulk of Western media inherently pro-Israel and anti-Muslim, Israel is portrayed as a “victim” defending itself from the Palestinians who are often depicted as “militants” and “terrorists”. In reality, the opposite is true.

In his last article in the Los Angeles Times (16 July 2007), the deputy of HAMAS political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzook, put the Movement’s view like this: “Why should anyone concede Israel’s ‘right’ to exist, when it has never even acknowledged the foundational crimes of murder and ethnic cleansing by means of which Israel to our towns and villages, our farms and orchards, and made us a nation of refugees? … I look forward to the day when Israel can say to me, and millions of other Palestinians: ‘Here, here is your family’s house by the sea, here are your lemon trees, the olive grove your father tended: Come home and be whole again’. Then we can speak of a future together.”

Finally, Israel’s existence as a “civilised” nation depends on Israel’s willingness to renounce violence, stop dispossessing and murdering Palestinians, and resume the path of a peaceful democratic coexistence.

I encourage you to carefully read the sources I refer to in this letter and reflect on the long history of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people before you blindly attack me again for daring to compare Israel’s policies in Palestine with those of the Nazis.

HARDLY a week goes by these days without a new book on Venezuela being published, it seems.

While this is a good thing - a couple of years ago most English-speaking progressives hadn’t even heard of President Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution - there is more danger of repetition.

Fortunately, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power is jam-packed with new and original information, much of which has only been available in Spanish until now. The title is a dig at the anarcho-marxist bible Change the World Without Taking Power by John Holloway, whose theories are severely challenged by even the existence of Venezuela’s Bolivarian government.

Greg Wilpert has been editing the independent solidarity-orientated news source VenezuelAnalysis.com since its launch over four years ago and is well used to communicating the reality of the revolution from the ground. Although he’s clearly sympathetic with the government’s aims, he presents all the different political positions fairly and with academic objectivity.

The bulk of the book looks at the Chavez government’s policies, specifically its economic, social, governance and foreign policies.

Wilpert explores the key aims and objectives, points out the pitfalls and examines in depth how successful the results have been.

Alongside this is an historical analysis which gives a fresh and sometimes personal perspective to the events inside parliament and on the streets. Venezuela is a country rich in both resources and contradictions, which is reflected by the government’s radicalisation in response to the ongoing counter-revolution.

Chavez’s base of support has shifted from the predominantly middle-class vote which elected him in 1998 to the largely working-class backing that he enjoys today. There are several reasons for this, from the relentless propaganda campaign against him and his supporters to the government’s initial urgent priority of raising living standards for people in absolute poverty by retaking control of the country’s oil and using the military to deliver social programmes.

The major message is that of empowering the population, whether through communal councils, co-operatives, comprehensive education or the new constitution.

The chapter on opportunities, obstacles and prospects summarises Venezuela’s journey on the road to “21st-century socialism” before carefully describing the current balance of forces. Wilpert warns that the Bolivarian movement’s internal and external obstacles may overwhelm the opportunities and he proposes a new agenda of attack against the bureaucratic and corrupt practices of the past.

Paradoxically, Chavez is both the movement’s greatest strength and weakness. Although he has united the left, his central role as maximum leader inhibits true bottom-up participatory power.

The epilogue bring everything up to date, with rare and valuable analysis of the major political developments since the December 2006 presidential election. These include constitutional reform, the new Unified Socialist Party of Venezuela and the replacement of coup-plotting television channel RCTV with experimental socialist station TVes.

Like his website, Wilpert’s book is a great place to get informed quickly and it should be required reading for anyone interested in either solidarity or socialism today.

Original source: Morning Star

From Caracas to Cape Town, Ches- terfield to Cowdenbeath, one man’s admittedly handsome face on a T shirt tells you more about its wearer than how well he or she fits it. Ernesto “Che” Guevara Lynch, who was murdered by United States agents under orders from Washington 40 years ago, is the face of global rebellion.

He inspires all the more intensely since he could have lived a prosperous bourgeois life as an Argentine dentist. Instead, and despite asthma, he chose a life of action, a motorcycle diarist, a comandante in a triumphant Cuban revolutionary army, a guerrilla leader in the Congo, a martyr in the mountain gulleys of Bolivia.

It’s true he had a spell as a bank manager – but it was the governorship of Cuba’s revolutionary state bank.

It was the 1950s motorcycle tour that did it. The immiserated wastelands of Latin American, where the poor starved, the latifundists larked and the US corporations sucked the blood of South America.

In 1954 he witnessed the overthrow of the reforming Guatemalan government at the behest of the United Fruit company, run by those scions of the US establishment, the Dulles family.

By the time Che Guevara met Fidel Castro a year later he was a rebel. After, he was a revolutionary. Guevara had absolutely no military background and signed on with Fidel as the rebel “army’s” doctor. In the mountains of eastern Cuba in the late 1950s he became a military leader and a strategist of revolutionary warfare of the first order. It was an old-fashioned ethos: lead your men (and women) from the front and don’t ask them to do anything you aren’t prepared to do with them.

It was in no small measure due to his military victories that the Cuban revolution triumphed – the rebels’ entry into Havana on New Years Day 1959 is memorably recreated in the Godfather II. The Mafiosi and the bordello owners headed for the airport with the barbaric dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Those who would traduce Che, Fidel and the Cuban revolutionaries must say what Cuba would be like now if that dictatorship had held on – Haiti, the most hellish place in the Western hemisphere is literally not far from Cuba, but metaphorically in a different universe.

By the standards of Cuba’s blood-drenched history the retribution visited on the dictator’s henchmen was light – even according to the US ambassador to Havana and the head of the CIA at the time, Alan Dulles.

Che, in particular, defies the right-wing stereotype of the ice-cold, cunning revolutionist. He said that ‘the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.’

Even as Cuba, in the grip of the US’s embargo, looked to the Soviet Union for support, Che was prepared to criticise the bureaucratism he saw in Moscow.

It’s a staple of liberal and conservative cynics that revolutionaries such as Che ineluctably end up mirror images of the monsters they set out to overthrow. No one shatters that lazy cliché more than Che.

Instead of settling down in Havana, he set out to spread revolution in Congo, where the great Patrice Lumumba had been murdered in a UN-supported coup. Nelson Mandela paid tribute to the Cuban role in Africa’s liberation struggle. On his release from prison he went to Cuba, rather than any other capital in the world, beneath an illumination of Che’s image, Mandela lifted his hands aloft and said: ‘See how far we slaves have come!’

‘There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death,’ Che told an international conference in 1965. ‘We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the world. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is our defeat.’

That internationalism, which has become a leitmotif of today’s movements, connected him with the masses on every continent.

Even the coldest of latter-day Cold Warriors must have been moved by the recent story that a Cuban medical team last year saved the sight of Mario Teran, the Bolivian sergeant who executed Che.

One of the greatest mistakes the US state ever made was to create those pictures of Che’s corpse. Its Christ-like poise in death ensured that his appeal would reach way beyond the turbulent university campus and into the hearts of the faithful, flocking to the worldly, fiery sermons of the liberation theologists.

Which leaves the liberals, who say that they too, as Che put it, ‘. . . tremble with indignation at every injustice,’ but who turn up their noses when the despairing mass of people resort to force against the daily violence of the elite.

They call to mind the admonition of the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass: ‘Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation… want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…. Power concedes nothing without a demand.’

Today, a new generation is struggling for progress – drawing strength from Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution, while many of us also remain mindful of the catastrophe that engulfed Allende and the Chilean movement when those who stood in its way were not defanged. To wish Venezuela’s social reforms without Che’s revolutionary steadfastness is to will the first 11 September atrocity – Santiago, Pinochet, 1973, gunfire drowning the song of a new Chile.

Che’s time is not past – it is coming. I was struck recently by the remarkable introduction by Lucia Alvarez de Toledo to a compilation of Che’s Bolivian diaries. She met the daughter of the telegaphist in the Bolivian village where Che was taken who had communicated the first written word of his murder.

Toldeo writes: “She said she had been there when Guevara had died. She said she was 19 at the time. Then she cast a look around her and said, ‘Look at us. Nothing has changed since then. El Commandante came too soon. We were ignorant and did not understand him… We abandoned him… and here we are just as we were before he came, or maybe even worse.’ “

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