Christopher Alessi: Resentment Seethes in Gaza

Christopher Alessi: Resentment Seethes in Gaza

Since the militant Palestinian group Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel has imposed a crippling economic blockade, sealing its border with the Occupied Territory and limiting the movement of most goods and people across it.

But the blockade policy, particularly following Israel's war with Gaza early last year, has had the opposite effect of what its leaders intended. Desperate and disenfranchised, even more civilians in Gaza have turned to Hamas, either for work or social services. As a result, the militant movement is at its strongest - and, perhaps, angriest - since assuming control over the Strip.

"The blockade is a recipe for continued radicalization in Gaza," said Ammar Hijazi of the Palestine Mission to the United Nations. Hijazi explained that 80 percent of the 1.5 million people living in Gaza are under the age of 30. "The young generation that wants to work will make desperate choices," he said, like joining a militant group such as Hamas, or even more extremist organizations.

The death and destruction caused by the war, coupled with the rigid restrictions on Palestinian movement outside the territory, have fueled unprecedented resentment towards Israel. "It doesn't take much to have a suicide bomber," Hijazi said. "You can see how much radicalization will happen because of the humiliation of occupation and controlled checkpoints."

Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, argued that extremism is inevitable when a population is "systematically impoverished through the deliberate policy of a government [Israel] along with the active participation of the international community."

"Especially young kids are driven to these extremist groups," Roy said. "They have been traumatized by war and the siege and know nothing but violence." ...

World's Opinion Of U.S. Has 'Improved Sharply' Under Obama, Says BBC Poll

World's Opinion Of U.S. Has 'Improved Sharply' Under Obama, Says BBC Poll

Since Barack Obama entered office, the world's view of the United States has 'improved sharply,' according to a poll carried out by the BBC World Service.

Nearly 30,000 people in 28 countries were asked to rate countries on their positive impact upon the world. This year 46% of the respondents rated the US's influence as positive - the first time since 2005 that the survey returned more positive votes than negative for America.

"After a year, it appears the 'Obama effect' is real" said Steven Kull director Program on International Policy Attitudes (Pipa) at the University of Maryland, who helped conduct the poll.

"Its influence on people's views worldwide, though, is to soften the negative aspects of the United States' image, while positive aspects are not yet coming into strong focus."

In Germany, positive ratings for the United States jumped from 18% in 2009 to 39% this year. Jumps like this and others helped the US overtake China in the rankings, where positive ratings dropped to 41%

The only two countries to have seen a drop in positive views of the US are Turkey and India.

Despite this, the US still trails behind other countries with higher ratings. Germany is the most favorably viewed nation (an average of 59% positive), followed by Japan (53%), the United Kingdom (52%), Canada (51%), and France (49%). ...

The Real Insult To Muslims - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

The Real Insult To Muslims - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

23 Apr 2010 05:09 pm

Aunt B. nails Viacom:

[T]his large media conglomerate is regularly and repeatedly signalling that, even if they’re willing to stand up to angry Baptists or Jews with hurt feelings, pissed off Muslims are so scary and weird and “other” that they have to be handled with kid gloves. I know plenty of fucked-up Christians who I’m sure have sent angry letters and phone calls to Comedy Central about South Park. So, what Comedy Central is saying is that some death-threaty, angry, fundamentalist kill-joys, if they’re Christian, obviously don’t reflect the opinions of all Christians or warrant changing programming to accommodate. But some death-threaty, angry, fundamentalist kill-joys, if they’re Muslim, will be treated as if they are the legitimate authority on their religion and Comedy Central will respond in fear to them. And fear is just the submissive expression of hostility. ...

�Iraq Slaughter Not An Aberration : Information Clearing House -� ICH

�Iraq Slaughter Not An Aberration : Information Clearing House -� ICH
By Glenn Greenwald

April 06, 2010 "Salon" -- I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.

But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.

A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior. ...

�The United States takes the matter of three-headed babies very seriously. : Information Clearing House -� ICH

�The United States takes the matter of three-headed babies very seriously. : Information Clearing House -� ICH |

By William Blum | April 06, 2010

...

The BBC reported last month that doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the United States during its fierce onslaughts of 2004 and subsequently, which left much of the city in ruins. "It was like an earthquake," a local engineer who was running for a national assembly seat told the Washington Post in 2005. "After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was Fallujah." Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.

The BBC correspondent also saw children in the city who were suffering from paralysis or brain damage, and a photograph of one baby who was born with three heads. He added that he heard many times that officials in Fallujah had warned women that they should not have children. One doctor in the city had compared data about birth defects from before 2003 — when she saw about one case every two months — with the situation now, when she saw cases every day. "I've seen footage of babies born with an eye in the middle of the forehead, the nose on the forehead," she said.

A spokesman for the US military, Michael Kilpatrick, said it always took public health concerns "very seriously", but that "No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues." ¹

One could fill many large volumes with the details of the environmental and human horrors the United States has brought to Fallujah and other parts of Iraq during seven years of using white phosphorous shells, depleted uranium, napalm, cluster bombs, neutron bombs, laser weapons, weapons using directed energy, weapons using high-powered microwave technology, and other marvelous inventions in the Pentagon's science-fiction arsenal ... the list of abominations and grotesque ways of dying is long, the wanton cruelty of American policy shocking. In November 2004, the US military targeted a Fallujah hospital "because the American military believed that it was the source of rumors about heavy casualties." ² That's on a par with the classic line from the equally glorious American war in Vietnam: "We had to destroy the city to save it."

How can the world deal with such inhumane behavior? (And the above of course scarcely scratches the surface of the US international record.) For this the International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded in Rome in 1998 (entering into force July 1, 2002) under the aegis of the United Nations. The Court was established in The Hague, Netherlands to investigate and indict individuals, not states, for "The crime of genocide; Crimes against humanity; War crimes; or The crime of aggression." (Article 5 of the Rome Statute) From the very beginning, the United States was opposed to joining the ICC, and has never ratified it, because of the alleged danger of the Court using its powers to "frivolously" indict Americans.

So concerned about indictments were the American powers-that-be that the US went around the world using threats and bribes against countries to induce them to sign agreements pledging not to transfer to the Court US nationals accused of committing war crimes abroad. Just over 100 governments so far have succumbed to the pressure and signed an agreement. In 2002, Congress, under the Bush administration, passed the "American Service Members Protection Act", which called for "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by ... the International Criminal Court." In the Netherlands it's widely and derisively known as the "Invasion of The Hague Act". ³ The law is still on the books.

Though American officials have often spoken of "frivolous" indictments — politically motivated prosecutions against US soldiers, civilian military contractors, and former officials — it's safe to say that what really worries them are "serious" indictments based on actual events. But they needn't worry. The mystique of "America the Virtuous" is apparently alive and well at the International Criminal Court, ...

�Former IAEA chief: Iraq war killed “a million innocent civilians”�� : Information Clearing House -� ICH

�Former IAEA chief: Iraq war killed “a million innocent civilians”�� : Information Clearing House -� ICH | By Patrick Martin

April 03, 2010 "WSWS" -- The former head of the UN’s chief nuclear agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, said in an interview with the British newspaper Guardian Wednesday that those who launched the war in Iraq were responsible for killing a million innocent people and could be held accountable under international law. He was clearly referring to US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and their top military and security aides.

It was his first interview with an international publication since ElBaradei returned to his native Egypt, after a decade heading the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in large measure because of his opposition to the efforts by the Bush administration to use concocted charges about “weapons of mass destruction” as an all-purpose pretext for military intervention throughout the Middle East.

“I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US have started to sink in,” he told the Guardian. “Sure, there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians? All the indications coming out of [the Chilcot inquiry in Britain] are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question―where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?”

This suggestion that Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes, coming from a high-ranking former UN official, would ordinarily be considered major news. The Guardian interview was reported by the main British and French news agencies, Reuters and AFP, but the entire American corporate media gave it zero coverage. Not a single major American newspaper or television network mentioned it.

The discussion of the violation of international law in launching the Iraq war came in the course of a longer discussion of the bankruptcy of US-British foreign policy in the Muslim world. ElBaradei criticized the longstanding support of Washington for dictators like Mubarak. “The idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is Bin Laden and Co. is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true.”

He warned of “increasing radicalization” in the Arab world: “People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see―they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.”

“Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view,” he said. “It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it’s been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.” ...

McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number' Of Innocent Afghans

McChrystal: We've Shot 'An Amazing Number' Of Innocent Afghans

As reported in the New York Times last week, a significant number of innocent Afghans continue to be killed by US and NATO forces despite new rules issued by Gen. Stanley McChrystal meant to help reduce civilian casualties. Indeed, the number of Afghans who have been killed or hurt by troop shootings at convoys and military checkpoints has basically remained the same since McChrystal announced his directives.

"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," said McChrystal during a recent video-conference with troops, the Times reported.

Talking Points Memo has obtained a longer transcript of McChrystal's statements, which you can read in full here. ...