Month: October 2009

By Linda Heard

Now even the United Nations Human Rights Council is “anti-Semitic.” Well, that’s the view of Israel’s Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, who is outraged that the body rubber-stamped the Goldstone Report on war crimes committed in Gaza. Some years ago, that accusation would have had enormous shock-value, whereas, nowadays, the label has been so propagandized the only thing it elicits is a yawn.

Anti-Semitism is a genuine scourge on humankind in the same that racism and bigotry are and should be eradicated, but Israel is in danger of devaluing the term by attaching it to anyone who doesn’t agree with its policies. Moreover, when used loosely as an insult, it doesn’t help Israel’s cause or standing in the world.

On the contrary, terming “anti-Semitic” the 25 member states that voted to back the report’s recommendations, last Friday, will make them even more determined to see Israel before the International Criminal Court. And it is worth remembering that two, Russia and China, hold veto-power in the UN Security Council.

When Israeli officials have to resort to name-calling and evocation of the Holocaust as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently did during an address to the UN General Assembly, it signifies that they are losing the argument.

It seems that Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy is of like mind. Netanyahu “cheapened the memory of the Holocaust in his speech to the UN General Assembly…” he wrote. “He did so twice. Once, when he brandished proof of the very existence of the Holocaust, as if it needed any, and again when he compared Hamas to the Nazis.”
According to the Israelis, anti-Semites are lurking everywhere. In 2002, Netanyahu — then Israel’s foreign minister — accused Belgium of “anti-Semitism” and “blood-libel” when the Belgian Supreme Court ruled that members of Israel’s military were open to prosecution for the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres.

Netanyahu called this “an outrageous decision” that “reminds us of ‘Old Europe’ and all its sicknesses,” even though an Israeli commission found then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon indirectly responsible.
In 2004, the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin of “anti-Semitism” and “total identification with the goals and methods of Palestinian terror groups” following a boycott of the BBC for broadcasting a documentary on Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. That same year, Israel handed British news outlets dossiers it had compiled on the anti-Semitic leanings of various reporters.

More recently, Sweden was accused of “blood-libel” for refusing to condemn a newspaper story concerning the theft of Palestinian organs by Israeli soldiers. Up popped Yuval Steinitz again to announce that “the Swedish government cannot keep silent any longer. In the Middle Ages, slander was spread accusing Jews of preparing Passover matza (unleavened loaves) with the blood of Christian children.”

Last September, Israel’s ambassador to Spain Raphael Schutz urged the Spanish government to control “anti-Semitic attacks” from Spanish leftists and intellectuals. Anti-Semitism in Spain has reached intolerable levels and was “rampant” among the general public, he said, but was ‘kind’ enough to add ‘the Spanish government is not always anti-Semitic.”

Even US presidents haven’t escaped Israel’s regular “anti-Semitic” lashings. In June this year, head of Israel’s National Union Party Yaakov Katz blasted “the Obama-Clinton ‘no natural growth policy’ for 650,000 Jews in Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem,” as “nothing less than anti-Semitism.”

Israel’s Science and Technology Minister Daniel Herschkowitz also rejects President Obama’s settlement freeze, and characterizes his decision to grant the Presidential Medal of Freedom to former UN Rights Commissioner and President of Ireland Mary Robinson as “borderline anti-Semitic”; a ridiculous view that was heartily echoed by AIPAC.

Earlier, former US President Jimmy Carter was branded with the “anti-Semitic” slur for his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” Ironic, when, arguably he did more than any US leader to broker regional peace.

It’s time that the international community got together to tell Israel to quit such undeserved attacks on its leaders and institutions. The Israeli government and press need to be told “that dog will no longer hunt.”

If Israel wants its arguments to be heard it needs to make them without such knee-jerk abuse, based on the long-time illusion of Israel’s victim status. The fact is that Israel is far from being a victim today.

Unconditionally protected by the superpower, it is the only state on earth that is allowed to get away with a policy of so-called nuclear ambiguity and given a free pass to snub international court rulings, UN Security Council resolutions, international law and the Geneva Conventions without fear of repercussions.

Poor little Israel surrounded by hostile Arab nations that do not want peace no longer exists. Every Arab country — along with all-important Palestinian factions — is more than ready to take a place at the negotiating table. It is Israel that is reluctant to trade land for peace and normalization of relations with its neighbors, and now threatens the Palestinian National Authority with an end to the peace process due to its support of the Goldstone Report and UNHRC vote. What peace process? Exactly!

Instead of flaying around with accusations, insults and threats, Israel would be far better served answering the report’s allegations. Did its military use Palestinian civilians as human shields? Were Palestinian infrastructure, factories and homes wantonly destroyed? Were weapons such as white phosphorous or DIME bombs used illegally in heavily populated areas? Were UN facilities and ambulances wrongly targeted under the pretext they harbored militants?

AN

(Submitted by Dirk Chardet)

by Dan Pearson and Kathy Kelly

Five months ago, shortly after the Pakistani government had begun a military offensive against suspected Taliban fighters in the northernmost area of the country, we arrived in Islamabad, the capital, as part of a small delegation organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). Our initial travel plans had focused on learning more about civilian suffering caused by U.S. drone attacks. But, over the course of our three-week visit, close to 3 million people had become uprooted by violence in the Swat Valley and neighboring districts. Visiting tent encampments and abandoned buildings to which people had fled, we spoke with people who identified themselves as poor people, with meager resources, who were anxious to return to their homes as soon as possible. They were also alarmed because they feared that their crops, animals, shops and stores were already destroyed.

Now that the military offensive in Swat has wound down, Pakistan’s government officials have labeled the operation a success. They claim to have cleared the area of Taliban fighters and have commenced a new military offensive in South Waziristan.

A closer look reveals a very different story.

Many families from Swat and surrounding districts returned to find that their homes, crops and other means of survival have been damaged or destroyed. Such circumstances force many to rely heavily on food aid. According to Amjad Jamal, a spokesperson for the World Food Program (WFP), “around 2.4 million displaced people received aid from the WFP food hubs last month.”

The WFP announced today that they are temporarily closing 20 food hubs in the North West Frontier Province citing concerns of worsening security.

Reporting from a Pakistani field hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the BBC met with scores of victims wounded by land mine explosions. The father of a 14 year old boy whose hands were blown off while he was playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance expressed anger over the government’s failure to remove the land mines before telling people it was safe to return. The father worked as a jeweler before the military offensive began, but after he and his family fled the fighting, his shop was looted; now he has no income, and his home was damaged in the shelling.

The BBC also reported that more than 200 corpses, believed to be bodies of suspected Taliban, have been found across the valley in recent weeks. Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission has called for an investigation into reports of numerous extra-judicial killings and reprisals carried out by security forces.

CD

By VIJAY PRASHAD

Climate change, financial turbulence and Iran – nothing was left off the table in what was a blistering September for Barack Obama.

GERALD HERBERT/AP

President Barack Obama, followed by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, arrives to make a statement on Iran’s nuclear facility, on September 25 at the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh.

IN September, the world’s crises came together on American shores. Climate change, financial turbulence and Iran – nothing was left off the table. Then, to top it off, in early October, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize for Peace. It has been a blistering, bewildering month. The prize came the day after the eighth anniversary of the United States’ war in Afghanistan, whose future was being debated in the White House. It is unlikely that the President will reduce troop levels or find a way to end this conflict.

The United Nations General Assembly gathered at its magisterial home, where the issue of climate change made its way to the centre of things. All this was preparation for the U.N. Climate Change Conference to be held in Copenhagen in December. The G-8 countries wanted to put down a marker, demanding that India, China and Brazil make significant concessions as a prelude to what will be the 15th U.N. “Conference of the Parties” on climate change (the first was in Berlin in 1995).

Fander Falconi, Ecuador’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, put the case of the developing nations quite plainly: the “rich nations and over-consuming elite” have done the most to destroy the climate, “for that reason they must assume the costs of carbon emission reduction”. He went further, into territory that neither India nor China nor Brazil ventured, that the G-8 should pay “reparations that recognise the ecological debt, the historic responsibility for excess of emissions during several decades even when the warming effect was already detected”.

India’s External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, was more measured at a round table discussion, but he too pointed out: “We cannot get away from the fundamental fact that unsustainable lifestyles and patterns of production and consumption in the developed world have caused climate change. This cannot continue.” He did not use the term reparations, which is a red flag. But he did point out that “developing countries must be supported financially, technologically, and with capacity-building resources so that they can cope with the immense challenges of adaption”.

In the back rooms of the U.N. and in the salons of New York, the “locomotives of the South” (India, China, Brazil, South Africa) acknowledged that they would have to make some concessions or else the U.S. Senate would simply refuse to go along with whatever comes out of Copenhagen. Already the Indian government has agreed to quantify its efforts to mitigate climate change, a position that it was not willing to take as recently as June 2009.

FL

Please contribute $1 to support Dooda (NO) Desert Rock
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:04:10 -0600

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Please send your $1 to Elouise Brown, Dooda (NO) Desert Rock Organization, PO Box 7838, NewComb, NM 87455 or you can donate on Facebook also. Thank you in advance for your contribution. Elouise Brown  thebrownmachine@hotmail.com 505-947-6159

Elouise Brown

President, Dooda Desert Rock

PO Box 7838

NewComb, New Mexico 87455
505-947-6159

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The findings highlight the necessity of early intervention such as Head Start, researchers say.

By Carla Rivera

Poor immigrant Latinas have healthy babies, but by age 2 or 3, their toddlers begin to lag behind white middle-class children in vocabulary, listening and problem-solving skills, according to two studies released Tuesday.

Researchers call it the “immigrant paradox”: Pregnant Latino women smoke and drink less than pregnant white and African American women, Latino newborns have lower infant mortality rates, and the cognitive skill of infants 9 to 15 months are about equal for white and Latino children.

But by the time they are toddlers, Latino children trail their white counterparts by up to six months in understanding words, speaking in more complex sentences and performing such simple tasks as assembling puzzles.

The findings from researchers at UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh are based on a nationwide tracking study of more than 8,000 children born in 2001 and are being published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal and the medical journal Pediatrics.

Past studies have documented disparities between Latino children and their white peers in kindergarten and persistent achievement gaps in later grades. The new findings pinpoint the beginnings of those gaps at an earlier age than previously thought. They also highlight the urgency of early intervention — children in preschool programs such as Head Start may already be at a disadvantage, researchers said.

“Cognitive skills and language during toddler years are a strong predictor of who will do well in kindergarten and early elementary grades,” said study co-author Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley. “These early lags in learning need to be addressed in a sensitive and respectful fashion, but they need to be addressed early on.”

LAT

(Submitted by reader)

ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires

AP photo

The state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, or TRT, has removed scenes of Israeli violence against Palestinians from the TV series “Ayr?l?k,” which caused a diplomatic row with Israel, the producer was quoted as saying Thursday, reported Agence France-Presse.

A scene showing Israeli soldiers shooting a row of blindfolded Palestinians was cut from the second episode, broadcast on Tuesday, Selçuk Çobano?lu told Milliyet daily. “Each broadcaster has its own regulations of supervision. … We don’t have objections to this situation,” he said.

Çobano?lu rejected accusations that the series incited hatred against Israel, insisting that the main theme was about love, which “will become more obvious in the upcoming episodes,” he said.

Meanwhile, Hürriyet daily reported on Thursday that “Ayr?l?k” also caused tension to rise between Turkey and Iran.

TRT failed to pay the balance due for the hotel bill in Tabriz, Iran, where some of the scenes were shot. The Iranian foreign ministry stepped in and gave Turkey a diplomatic note.

Nam?k Güler Erpul, deputy general director of the Foreign Ministry’s bilateral cultural relations department, sent an official letter to TRT on May 8 asking for the sum to be paid for Turkey’s dignity. The amount was paid on May 11.

HDN

Documents reveal Italian dictator got start in politics in 1917 with help of £100 weekly wage from MI5

Tom Kington in Rome

Benito Mussolini was paid £100 a week by MI5 to keep Italy in the first world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his brief career as a British agent.

Archived documents have revealed that Mussolini got his start in politics in 1917 with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5.

For the British intelligence agency, it must have seemed like a good investment. Mussolini, then a 34-year-old journalist, was not just willing to ensure Italy continued to fight alongside the allies in the first world war by publishing propaganda in his paper. He was also willing to send in the boys to “persuade” peace protesters to stay at home.

Mussolini’s payments were authorised by Sir Samuel Hoare, an MP and MI5’s man in Rome, who ran a staff of 100 British intelligence officers in Italy at the time.

Cambridge historian Peter Martland, who discovered details of the deal struck with the future dictator, said: “Britain’s least reliable ally in the war at the time was Italy after revolutionary Russia’s pullout from the conflict. Mussolini was paid £100 a week from the autumn of 1917 for at least a year to keep up the pro-war campaigning – equivalent to about £6,000 a week today.”

Hoare, later to become Lord Templewood, mentioned the recruitment in memoirs in 1954, but Martland stumbled on details of the payments for the first time while scouring Hoare’s papers.

As well as keeping the presses rolling at Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper he edited, Mussolini also told Hoare he would send Italian army veterans to beat up peace protesters in Milan, a dry run for his fascist blackshirt units.

“The last thing Britain wanted were pro-peace strikes bringing the factories in Milan to a halt. It was a lot of money to pay a man who was a journalist at the time, but compared to the £4m Britain was spending on the war every day, it was petty cash,” said Martland.

“I have no evidence to prove it, but I suspect that Mussolini, who was a noted womaniser, also spent a good deal of the money on his mistresses.”

After the armistice, Mussolini began his rise to power, assisted by electoral fraud and blackshirt violence, establishing a fascist dictorship by the mid-1920s.

His colonial ambitions in Africa brought him into contact with his old paymaster again in 1935. Now the British foreign secretary, Hoare signed the Hoare-Laval pact, which gave Italy control over Abyssinia.

“There is no reason to believe the two men were friends, although Hoare did have an enduring love affair with Italy,” said Martland, whose research is included in Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, which was published last week.

GOU

(Submitted by Dirk Chardet)

SMALL MINDS Using genetic manipulation and light beams scientists created a memory in a fly’s brain that made a tennis shoe smell something to avoid.

By NICHOLAS WADE

As part of a project to understand how the brain learns, biologists have written memories into the cells of a fruitfly’s brain, making it think it had a terrible experience.

The memory trace was written by shining light into the fly’s brain and activating a special class of cells involved in learning how to avoid an electric shock.

The goal of the research is not to give flies nightmares but rather to understand how learning in general works, from flies to people. “In the case of the fly, where we have a numerically rather simple nervous system that does something rather complex, I think we have a chance to break open the black box and understand it,” said Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford, leader of the team that has developed the new technique.

Psychologists study learning by running rats through mazes, but biologists want to learn the actual mechanics of how a memory trace is laid down in a nerve cell or neuron. So they need an organism whose genes can be easily manipulated.

In the early days of molecular biology, when others were working on DNA, the biologist Seymour Benzer decided to dissect behavior by studying the fruitfly. His student Chip Quinn discovered in the early 1970s that fruitflies, surprisingly, could learn. If exposed to a chemical odor and at the same time given an electric jolt big enough to kill a person, the fruitflies associated the two and would in the future avoid the odor.

Of the two chemicals that Mr. Quinn picked, one smelled like licorice and the other “a lot like tennis shoes in July,” according to Jonathan Weiner, author of “Time, Love, Memory,” an entrancing history of Benzer’s work. Biologists ever since have used the same system to train fruitflies. With the aid of the licorice and tennis shoe odors, Dr. Miesenböck’s team has now managed to peer deep inside the black box of the fly’s learning system.

NYTS

By B. R. Gowani

10% is the official unemployment rate
Nor is the unofficial rate too great:
The Economy is on a downward slide
And by now, people’s hopes have died

So all of the employed make a plan
To join the jobless; to form a clan
They declare a total general strike
To break the rulers’ disparity-dyke

Most dependent is the capitalist class
That forms a part of the exploiting brass
To maintain the greatest democracy façade
They appealed calmly while hiding the rod

Patriotism, nationalism, enemy, and flag
The usual bull shit were used to gag
But the people have really united this time
And are in no mood to join the elite’s chime

Technical support in foreign countries can
Guide; but to collect garbage you need Tom or Anne
Every general, CEO, and politician are in a rage
And feel like malnourished animals in a cage

The US ruling class is now extremely mad,
Consider Martial Law as an option, it had,
For the president it is an easy task,
Cause commander-in-chiefs don’t have to ask

Martial Law is justified by the regime
The media drowns people’s collective scream
The so called “choice” the people supposedly had
Vanished in the air like Osama bin Laden bad

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com