HUMANITARIAN AID AT THE POINT OF A GUN?

It is now almost three weeks since the disastrous passage of Cyclone Nargis across Burma on 2nd May and yet the military junta in power in that Asian country continues to deny free access to Western aid workers and aid flights.

As hundreds of thousands remain homeless and hungry, and millions teeter on the verge of disease and infection, there is now a growing call here in the West to intervene militarily in Burma, against the wishes of the ruling generals, and deliver aid parcels to the suffering Burmese at the point of a gun.

I have never been a fan of 'Humanitarian intervention', especially since it was used by dictators like Hitler to justify the conquest of the Sudetenland – and by our own Tony Blair to justify the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. I also find the idea of using military force – bombs, bullets, etc – to feed the victims of a natural disaster rather distasteful, not to mention counter-productive. Is being stuck in the middle of a shooting war between well-intentioned US marines and nationalistic Burmese soldiers really what the suffering victims of Nargis need right now?

It is of course the easy, popular and macho option to advocate military action in Burma, and it does makes it look like you ‘care’ – that’s why the foreign ministers of Britain and France have been at the forefront of such hawkish calls. I, however, was pleased to see the former poster-boy for ‘humanitarian interventionism’, David Rieff, cogently articulate the argument against such ill-thought-out aggression in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend:

“At first glance, the arguments…may seem like common-sense humanism. How could it be morally acceptable to subordinate the rights of people in need to the prerogatives of national sovereignty? In a globalized world in which people, goods and money all move increasingly freely, why should a national border -- that relic of the increasingly unimportant state system -- stand in the way of people dedicated to doing good for their fellow human beings? Why should the world stand by and allow an abusive government to continue to be derelict in its duties toward its own people?

“Surely, to oppose this sort of humanitarian entitlement is a failure of empathy and perhaps even an act of moral cowardice.

“This has been the master narrative of the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. It has dominated the speeches of officials and most of the media coverage, which has been imbued with an almost pornographic catastrophism in which aid agencies and journalists seem to be trying to outdo each other in the apocalyptic quality of their predictions. First, the U.S. charge d'affaires in Yangon, Myanmar's capital, without having left the city, told reporters that though only 22,000 people had been confirmed dead, she thought the toll could rise as high as 100,000. A few days later, Oxfam was out with its estimate of 1.5 million people being at risk from water-borne diseases -- without ever explaining how it arrived at such an extraordinarily alarming estimate.

“In reality, no one yet knows what the death toll from the cyclone is, let alone how resilient the survivors will be. One thing is known, however, and that is that in crisis after crisis, from the refugee emergency in eastern Zaire after the Rwandan genocide, through the Kosovo crisis, to the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the 2004 South Asian tsunami, many of the leading aid agencies, Oxfam prominent among them, have predicted far more casualties than there would later turn out to have been.

“In part, this is because relief work is, in a sense, a business, and humanitarian charities are competing with every other sort of philanthropic cause for the charitable dollar and euro, and thus have to exaggerate to be noticed. It is also because coping with disasters for a living simply makes the worst-case scenario always seem the most credible one, and, honorably enough, relief workers feel they must always be prepared for the worst.

“But whatever the motivations, it is really no longer possible to take the relief community's apocalyptic claims seriously. It has wrongly cried wolf too many times.

“We should be skeptical of the aid agencies' claims that, without their intervention, an earthquake or cyclone will be followed by an additional disaster of equal scope because of disease and hunger. The fact is that populations in disaster zones tend to be much more resilient than foreign aid groups often make them out to be. And though the claim that only they can prevent a second catastrophe is unprovable, it serves the agencies' institutional interests -- such interventions are, after all, the reason they exist in the first place.

“Unwelcome as the thought may be, reasonable-sounding suggestions made in the name of global solidarity and humanitarian compassion can sometimes be nothing of the sort. Aid is one thing. But aid at the point of a gun is taking the humanitarian enterprise to a place it should never go. And the fact that the calls for humanitarian war were ringing out within days of Cyclone Nargis is emblematic of how the interventionist impulse, no matter how well-intended, is extremely dangerous.

“The ease with which the rhetoric of rescue slips into the rhetoric of war is why invoking R2P should never be accepted simply as an effort to inject some humanity into an inhumane situation (the possibility of getting the facts wrong is another reason; that too has happened in the past). Yes, the impulse of the interveners may be entirely based on humanitarian and human rights concerns. But lest we forget, the motivations of 19th century European colonialism were also presented by supporters as being grounded in humanitarian concern. And this was not just hypocrisy. We must not be so politically correct as to deny the humanitarian dimension of imperialism. But we must also not be so historically deaf, dumb and blind as to convince ourselves that it was its principal dimension.

“Lastly, it is critically important to pay attention to just who is talking about military intervention on humanitarian grounds. Well, among others, it's the foreign ministers of the two great 19th century colonial empires. And where exactly do they want to intervene -- sorry, where do they want to live up to their responsibility to protect? Mostly in the very countries they used to rule.

“When a British or French minister proposes a U.N. resolution calling for a military intervention to make sure aid is properly delivered in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, then, and only then, can we be sure we have put the specter of imperialism dressed up as humanitarianism behind us. In the meantime, buyer beware.”

Rieff identifies the central flaw in the principle of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ – it only applies in a one-way direction, from North to South, from West to East. To have any real merit, the likes of France and Britain need to accept that India and China et al have a reciprocal right to intervene in our backyard, next time one of us faces a hurricane or similar natural disaster. (In fact, the United States rejected humanitarian aid from the likes of Cuba and Venezuala in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005). It’s not a step the governments of the West are likely to take any time soon.

THE MODERATION OF HAMAS

It has long been argued on the pro-Israeli, neoconservative right that liberal newspapers like the Guardian (in the UK) and the New York Times (in the USA) should not make space on their comment or op-ed pages for spokesmen from Hamas. Hamas, we are told again and again, is a terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of the state of Israel and staffed by Holocaust-denying Islamic extremists.

Of course, the whole reason that Israel’s apologists in the West so vociferously oppose giving a voice to members (or even supporters) of Hamas is to prevent the public in Britain, in America, across Europe, etc, from hearing the actual views of Hamas, rather than those caricatured (or falsely ascribed to them) in the right-wing press – as the actual views of Hamas suggest there is a great deal of room for compromise, dialogue and negotiation.

In fact, despite the opposition of Bush, Blair, Olmert et al, polls show a majority of the Israeli public support the idea of negotiating with Hamas. And Hamas too – contrary to popular opinion – has accepted the reality of the state of Israel (without formally ‘recognizing’ the Jewish state), is in favour of negotiating with the Israel government and has also thrown its weight behind a de facto ‘two-state’ solution based on a long-term truce between Israelis and the Palestinians. See here, here and here (if you don’t believe me).

And this week, Hamas – again, through the much-maligned op-ed pages of the Guardian – has taken its first public step to shake off its anti-Semitic image and its long history of association with Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists. Think I’m exaggerating? Well, how else can we respond to Monday’s Guardian article by Bassem Naeem, the minister of health and information in the Hamas-led Palestinian administration in Gaza, entitled ‘Hamas condemns the Holocaust’. Naeem takes on this traditionally taboo subject for Islamists head on:

“….it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

“…The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.”

This, for me, is a clear sign of Hamas moderating its image, its message, its approach. It is time for Israel and its Western sponsors (the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union) to respond in kind and to recognize that there can be no negotiated, peaceful, just settlement with the Palestinian people which excludes the political party which the Palestinians overwhelmingly elected to power in 2006 – Hamas.

PROPAGANDA FROM THE FRONT LINE….

"Girl of 8 used as 'suicide' bomber". That’s the headline which screamed out at me from the front page of London’s Metro freesheet on the Tube yesterday morning. I felt sick to my stomach, unable to digest this latest barbarity allegedly perpetrated by fellow members of my faith. Here is how the Metro reported the story in its first three paragraphs:

“Militants strapped explosives to a young girl and used her to blow up an army checkpoint in Iraq yesterday.

“They detonated the device by remote control as the child, thought to be as young as eight, walked towards a group of soldiers.

“The girl and an army captain were killed in the blast which also injured up to seven other soldiers."

Simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Five short paragraphs later, in the same article, a revelation:

“The Americans called it a 'suicide' attack and put the number of injured at seven. Later, they gave the age of the girl as between 16 and 18.”

So, let me get this straight. The Metro claims in its banner headline and at the start of its front-page lead story that a girl 8 has been used by those nasty evil terrorists in Iraq to kill and maim Iraqi soldiers. The article says she is ‘thought to be as young as eight’. Thought to? Thought to by whom? Because later in the same article, American officials give the age of the girl as being between 16 and 18. Can British journalism get any lazier, shoddier or more bizarre? I mean, if you’re going to lie about a ‘fact’ in your story (the age of a suicide bomber), it would probably be best not to reveal that your lying by undermining your own central ‘fact’ later in the same piece. Then agan, the article’s author was probably hoping that commuters making their way to work on a busy morning probably wouldn’t read beyond the headline and the opening paragraphs.

But it wasn’t just the Metro that went with the headline-grabbing claim of an ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’. So too did the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the rest. The Telegraph tried to have it both ways:

“It was reported that the girl was as young as eight. Neither the US or the Iraqi army could confirm this.”

If neither the US nor Iraqi troops could confirm an age of 8, then who “reported” that the “girl was as young as eight”. It’s a sly journalistic trick: confidently state something that you know to be potentially untrue, and then, in the very next breath, caveat it in order to cover your ass.

Of course, it’s not the first time, in the fog of Iraq’s bloody war, that false information has been peddled by journalists and/or occupying coalition forces. In its coverage of the alleged ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’, the Daily Mail reported this morning that,

“In February, Iraqi insurgents used two women with Downs Syndrome as human bombs in a blast that killed 99 people in Baghdad.”

Other reports made similar references to the infamous ‘Downs Syndrome bombers’, despite the fact that this story has been thoroughly debunked and disproved by, among others, the Independent’s award-winning Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

"More often, the lies have been small, designed to make a propaganda point for a day even if they are exposed as untrue a few weeks later. One example of this to shows in detail how propaganda distorts day-to-day reporting in Iraq, but, if the propagandist knows his job, is very difficult to disprove.

"On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.

"The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.

"The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.

"But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks."

Tragically, despite the Americans now admitting that there is no evidence that the bombers had Down’s syndrome, despite Iraqi officials acknowledging a link between Dr Aboub and Al Qaida to be improbable and unlikely, the doctor remains in prison, as do dozens of mentally disturbed beggars.

This is the power – and the disastrous and depressing consequences – of the propaganda that we are being fed by ‘reporters’ (stenographers?) from the front line of the conflict in Iraq. Next time I pick up the Metro and see a similar story to this morning’s rubbish, about ‘child suicide-bombers’ and ‘8-year-old killers’, I’ll remind myself that all it tells me is how screwed Iraq and its people are, how little progress is being made there and how little are media tells us. To quote, once more, the peerless Patrick Cockburn,

“…it is all too clear that al-Qa'ida is not running out of suicide bombers. But it is pieces of propaganda such as this small example, often swallowed hole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq.”

SHARIA LAW IN ISRAEL (!)

In the wake of the recent brouhaha over the Archbishop of Canterbury’s remarks about the compatibility of Islamic Sharia law with English civil law, politicians and pundits alike united to decry and condemn any such move towards allowing the spread of so-called ‘sharia courts’. This is what the Culture Secretary Andy Burnham MP had to say on the issue on BBC1’s Question Time:

“You cannot run two systems of law alongside each other. That would be a recipe for chaos."

Chaos? Really? I was reminded of his remarks when I came across this fascinating article in the Jewish Chronicle, which points out that Israel (Israel!) has managed to accommodate the sharia – especially in the form of Muslim family law – into its own legal code for the past six decades. The Chronicle notes,

“Not only is sharia law officially recognised by the justice system in Israel in everything regarding the personal status of Muslims, but the judges of the sharia courts are officially appointed by a joint ministerial-parliamentary committee and their salaries paid for by the state. Ironically, this arrangement originates from the days when Britain was the Mandate power in Palestine.

“Most matters of personal status, especially marriage and divorce, are ruled in Israel by religious courts. For three religious groups, Jews, Muslims and Druze, there are official, state-appointed courts, who rule on these matters. For Christians, there are private ecclesiastical courts whose rulings are recognised de facto by the civil authorities.

“The system began with an Act during the British Mandate, under which all recognised religious groups were allowed to deal with matters such as marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption in their own courts. After 1948, the system was continued but only in matters of personal status. By law, the sharia courts have exactly the same status as the rabbinical courts.”

I find it most amusing that the inclusion of state-sanctioned sharia courts for Muslim citizens of secular, democratic Israel – as with the application of Islamic 'personal law' for Muslim citizens in secular, democratic India – is a legacy of the great British Empire which had no qualms about “two systems of law” running “alongside each other” (to quote Andy Burnham). Yet, now, more than sixty years since the demise of that Empire, and in spite of an even larger concentration of Muslims living here in Britain, we are told that there is no space, no place, no possibility, of sharia law being incorporated, included or accommodated into our own ‘secular’ English legal system.

Islamophobia anybody?

FULL SPEED TO THE WHITE HOUSE? YEAH, RIGHT!

Will Hillary Clinton have (FINALLY! FINALLY!) dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination by the time I finish typing and publishing this blog? The signs look good, with Sky News currently reporting that the party’s former presidential nominee George McGovern has urged the former First Lady to pull out and the Clinton camp admitting that their candidate has had to lend herself (!) $6.4 million over the past month simply in order to stay in the race.

Let’s face the facts: she had to win Indiana by a big margin if she was to have any chance of convincing super-delegates that she is the more ‘electable’ candidate. She failed, and failed miserably. Obama cut her earlier twenty-point lead to just two percent, despite all his troubles over his controversial pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Meanwhile over in North Carolina, where Hillary had acknowledged she had to either win or narrow the gap, the junior senator from Illinois managed to give the junior senator from New York a massive 14 percentage point whipping – 56% to 42%.

Yet the Hillary-Bill campaining combo (Billary?) have so far refused to give up and seem to be campaigning in a self-deluded, heads-in-the-sand, parallel universe. Despite being behind in the delegate count, behind in the popular vote and behind in the number of states won, this is what Senator Clinton had to say at her ‘victory’ rally in the Indiana state capital, Indianapolis, last night:

"Well, tonight we've come from behind. We've broken the tie, and thanks to you, it's full speed on to the White House.”

Full speed? Yeah, right! Maybe if her definition of full speed is 5 miles an hour. She is down and out but she doesn’t want to admit it to herself – and nor do her equally delusional friends and family members. As pointed out by Guardian America’s Michael Tomasky yesterday morning:

“She - and Bill, and Chelsea, and most of the people around them - surely can't believe that she's about to lose the Democratic nomination. There was supposed to be no question about her winning it. There's reason to think they won't stop until the door is closed and triple-locked and boarded and sealed shut around the edges with rubber cement.”

Hillary’s supporters cling to the idea that she is the ‘electable’ candidate by repeatedly pointing out that their candidate wins more white, working-class votes than Obama does. They keep asking the question: ‘Why is it that Obama can’t win the white vote?’ Of course, the reality is that he has won plenty of white votes in plenty of white states (Iowa anybody?) and so I personally would turn the question on its head: ‘Why is it that Hillary can’t win the black vote?’ After all, come the general election in November, the Democrats won’t be expected to win the white, working-class vote (just ask John Kerry and Al Gore!) but, on the other hand, they simply can’t win – and never have won! – without the all-important black vote. But Hillary (with Bill’s help) has alienated black Democrats on a hitherto unprecedented level – and do I need to ask what the effect would be on black Democratic voters if a white candidate, behind in elected delegates and behind in the popular vote, effectively stole the nomination from a black front-runner by twisting the arms of unelected (and largely white) ‘super delegates’?

In fact, the party’s most senior black Congressman had this ominous warning for the Clintons, and the Democratic Party high command, only a week ago:

“We’ll be playing with fire if we interfere with the voters’ choice,” James Clyburn, the party’s chief whip in the House of Representatives, told The Sunday Times. “African-Americans will feel cheated.”

That’s the understatement of the century.

WAR WITH IRAN – BACK ON THE AGENDA?

So, is the United States planning military action against Iran before the current White House incumbent vacates the Oval Office in less than nine months time? I have long believed that President George W. Bush would not leave office without taking some form of military action against Iran – either directly or indirectly (via the Israelis). Yet, in recent months, I had convinced myself that war with Iran was now off the agenda, especially in the wake of the US intelligence community’s official assessment that Iran halted its alleged nuclear weapons programme five years ago.

Was I wrong to relax? Does the Bush administration really want to provoke a third world war in the Middle East? Check out what top officials were saying on Wednesday alone (!)

CIA

"It is my opinion, it is the policy of the Iranian government, approved to highest level of that government, to facilitate the killing of Americans in Iraq".

This was the bold claim of CIA Director Michael Haydon, speaking at Kansas University, in what AP’s John Milburn actually described as “the boldest pronouncement of Iranian involvement by a U.S. official to date”. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the Bush administration’s best prospects of engineering a war with Iran, and getting the US public on side, is to pretend that any military action against Tehran is in response to alleged Iranian ‘attacks’ on Coalition forces inside of Iraq. Once again, a la Iraq, we sadly see the top officials at the CIA willing to endorse such blatant propaganda.

PENTAGON

“There is indication that the Iranian support of the Taliban has continued. Again, we don't believe it to be at the same level of which they have provided fighters and weapons into Iraq. But there is some clear evidence that it has occurred."

This was the surprising claim of the chief of operations for senior U.S. military staff, Lieutenant General Carter Ham. Ham wants us to believe that not only are the perfidious Persians responsible for American deaths in Iraq but in Afghanistan too. Two for the price of one! Of course, the thought of Shia-fundamentalist Iran providing support for the Sunni-fundamentalist, Shia-hating, Iranian-diplomat-killing Taliban is so ridiculous and impossible that only a Pentagon official would dare express it, let alone think it in the first place.

STATE DEPARTMENT

“It will come as no surprise to hear that Iran remained the most significant state sponsor of terrorism.”

This was the not-so-surprising claim of Dell Dailey, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, speaking at the launch of the Bush administration’s annual report on terrorism trends. But what else would you expect him to say? Wouldn’t you expect him to focus on a fantastical Iranian terror ‘menace’ rather than allow journalists to focus on the State Department report acknowledgement that suicide bombings around the world are up 50%, casualties from terrorist attacks are up 9% and injuries are up 15%? So much for the much-lauded, so-called ‘War on Terror’….

Oh, and on a side note, while U.S. officials were talking up the Iranian ‘threat’, so too were the Israelis. And on Wednesday too! On a conveniently-timed visit to the United States, Israel’s Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz (a former defence minister and chief of the general staff) said Iran could possess nuclear bomb technology by the end of 2008, citing an updated Israeli intelligence assessment (and contradicting both U.S. intelligence and the International Atomic Energy Authority).

So Wednesday really was, for American and Israeli officials, ‘Get Iran Day’.

"WHAT A BLACK DAY, THEY KILLED MY FAMILY."

It never ceases to amaze (or disgust) me how Western journalists can continue to refer to a ‘peace process’ in the Middle East, while the Israelis simultaneously continue to butcher Palestinians in their hundreds. According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Palestinian death toll this year is worse, so far, than the previous three bloody years of the conflict. It said 312 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in 2008, including 197 unarmed civilians of whom 44 were children and another 14 were women.

Tragically, the latest killing includes both a woman and several children – shortly after 8am yesterday, a Palestinian mother and her four children were killed by an Israeli military attack as they sat around their breakfast table in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. Two other children and 10 others who were nearby were also injured.

Here is the peerless Donald Macintyre reporting on this brutal incident in the Independent:

“The Israeli military said it had been targeting nearby gunmen and suggested the deaths had been caused when explosives it said were being carried by two militants blew up. The children were about to eat breakfast when they were killed.

“The deaths of the children, and the wounding of two older siblings, overshadowed efforts by Egypt to broker a ceasefire between Israel and the armed factions in Gaza. At least one militant and another unidentified man were killed by Israeli forces during the incursion.

“Palestinian medics identified the dead children as sisters Rudina and Hana Abu Meatak, aged six and three; and their brothers, Saleh, four, and Mousad, 15 months. Their mother, Miyasar, who was in her late 30s, died later of wounds she sustained. Seven rockets were later fired into Israel, three claimed by Hamas in response to the deaths of the family.

“The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said that, according to its preliminary investigation, around 20 armoured vehicles moved over a kilometre into northern Gaza at around 6am, and that at around 8.15am Israeli aircraft had fired a missile at a group of militants. The missile landed 10 metres away from the Meatak home, seriously injuring a militant, it said.

“Less than a minute later, the PCHR said, two further missiles were launched at the same area, landing at the door of the same house and killing another militant. The centre said that shrapnel from the missiles destroyed the door and sprayed around the house, killing the children outright.

“…The children's father, Ahmad Abu Meatak, told Associated Press that he was on his way to a nearby market when his home was hit. "What a black day. They killed my family," he said, sobbing outside the local hospital where the bodies were taken.”

Donald Macintyre, incidentally, is a (British) Middle East correspondent who deserves praise and support for his rigorously honest and compassionate (not to mention brave and courageous) reporting from the Occupied Territories. In recent weeks, he has interviewed Israeli soldiers who have confessed to him the torture, beatings and abductions that they have inflicted on the residents of the occupied Palestinian town of Hebron in recent years (a story which remarkably appeared on the front page of the Independent, entitled 'Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army').

In fact, Macintyre – a former political commentator and domestic journalist who has transformed into an insightful Middle East reporter and foreign correspondent par excellence – has form in this area: it was nearly three years ago that he first reported on the former Israeli soldiers who have admitted to joining the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) simply out of a desire “to kill Arabs”. When I read such accounts, such confessions of brutality and abuse, my mind often harks back to a former (Jewish) colleague of mine who, despite being liberal and left-wing and ‘pro-peace’, used to be in continual denial about the IDF’s long history of killing, maiming and torturing Palestinian civilians. He once proclaimed to me: “I refuse to believe that a single Israeli soldier has ever deliberately killed or harmed a Palestinian civilian.” It’s both ironic and depressing that, thanks to the journalism of Donald Macintyre and others, we now know that Israeli soldiers themselves disagree with such a naïve and partisan statement.

By the way, on a related issue, the Guardian reports that warmonger-turned-peace-envoy Tony Blair yesterday presented to the Israeli government a list of checkpoints that he wanted lifted in the West Bank. There are currently 500 Israeli barriers in the West Bank, stifling trade, chocking the Palestinian economy, preventing mothers in labour from reaching hospital, blocking kids from getting to school, etc. Guess how many the Israelis decided to move after their meeting with the all-powerful Blair?

One.

US ELECTIONS UPDATE

I haven’t had a chance to blog this week. It’s time for the weekend now but let me cast a critical eye back over the previous four days of US presidential politics. As you’ll all have noticed by now, Senator Hillary Clinton remains in the Democratic race after winning the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday. She and her acolytes have been spinning her victory against Senator Barack Obama as ‘against all odds’ and as a victory for the ‘underdog’ and the mainstream media seems to be buying her crap. This blog, however, has no qualms about reminding the army of Beltway pundits and pontificators that opinion polls actually had Hillary in a 20-point lead over Obama only ten days before the primary – a lead she had built up since January. So it was Obama who was actually the underdog in this particular race and it was Obama who deserves credit, and plaudits, for halving Hillary’s initial lead on Tuesday to just 10 per cent (and that too after his rather unfortunate and offensive gaffe about "bitter" working-class people "clinging to guns or religion" in Pennsylvania.)

Now, as regular readers of this blog may have guessed by now, I am an Obama supporter. He is the best of a bad bunch. The other two remaining members of the ‘bad bunch’ – Senators McCain and Clinton – are pro-war hawks who say ludicrous things. Consider the evidence of this week alone:

Hillary Clinton

On ABC’s “Good Morning America” breakfast-news show, Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could "totally obliterate" Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran.

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Not only is this a nonsensical statement – does she really want to be known as the ‘Genocide Candidate’? – but it is also deeply hypocritical. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, has long been castigated and condemned for his alleged desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. Why should the US president now harbour an equally bizarre and immoral desire to wipe Iran off the map?

But, most troubling of all, is the fact that such a hawkish question was even asked in the first place. Can you imagine a politician in any other country in the world being asked such a question by a journalist on a breakfast show or answering in such a nakedly populist and hawkish manner? And on what grounds does a journalist even ask a presidential candidate about a hypothetical Iranian ‘nuclear’ threat to Israel when American’s own intelligence agencies have publicly and categorically confirmed that Iran has no nuclear weapons nor even a nuclear weapons programme (as I have blogged about here)? The mainstream media is pathetic, ignorant and biased – which is one of the many reasons behind me setting up this blog.

John McCain

On ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” on Sunday, April 20, McCain called one-time (and distant) Obama friend William Ayers “an unrepentant terrorist” (trying to smear Obama in a ‘guilt by association’ accusation). What was McCain’s evidence? McCain said that Ayers “was engaged in bombings which could have or did kill innocent people…” So McCain is saying that someone who engages in bombings which could have killed or did kill innocent people is a terrorist.

Now consider what McCain did. McCain flew a bomber, an A-4E Skyhawk, over North Vietnam. I don’t know whether he actually dropped his bombs before being shot down and taken prisoner by the Vietcong. But certainly he was engaged in actions that, if he had succeeded, could have killed innocent people – and was part of a war effort which did kill millions of innocent people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Which makes McCain, in his own words, a terrorist.

By the way, while the US press continues to devote acres of print to the presidential primaries, it ignores the rather shocking case of the FBI arresting retired US military engineer Ben-Ami Kadish on charges of spying for Israel (!) Imagine that! America’s best buddy in the world, it’s closest ally, the biggest recipient of US aid, continues to spy on it even now, more than twenty years on from the infamous Jonathan Pollard case. There’ll be more on the spying case here on the Radical Opinions blog next week. Stay tuned!

9-11, NETANYAHU AND AHMADINEJAD

With apologists for the United States having spent several years now accusing Muslims, Arabs, doves, liberals and lefties of either (a) having been indifferent to the suffering perpetrated by terrorists on September 11th 2001 or (b) cynically using it to advance their anti-war or anti-American political agendas, may I point readers of this blog in the direction of the pro-war, pro-American Israeli politician (and former prime minister) Benjamin Netanyahu's rather tactless yet revealing remarks at Bar Ilan University this week?

"We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq," Ma'ariv quoted the former prime minister as saying. He reportedly added that these events "swung American public opinion in our favor."

Israel is benefiting from 9-11? Imagine if you or I had said such a thing. There would be instant accusations of anti-Semitism. Imagine if another world leader had spoken about the ‘benefits’ of 9-11. There would be nothing but uproar in Washington DC and on Fox News and talk radio. But, as I have repeatedly pointed out in previous posts, there is one rule for the Israelis and one rule for everybody else.

Nevertheless, cynical and callous Benjamin’s remarks may have been, but the fact is that the chairman of the Likud party happens to be 100 per cent correct in his analysis: the 9-11 attacks – and the subsequent so-called ‘War on Terror’ – have indeed benefited Israel strategically and tactically, while strengthening pro-Israeli, anti-Arab sentiments amongst the American public at large.

However, on the other hand, the comments regarding 9-11 made this week by Netanyahu’s Persian bete noire, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, have been anything but accurate or correct.

Now, I have no time for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yes, alright, he was indeed mistranslated regarding his views on the existence and/or destruction of the State of Israel. But his views on the Holocaust are well-documented not to mention odious and ahistorical, and his decision to host a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran was both offensive and embarrassing. I consider him to be a bumbling ‘village idiot’, out of his depth, who has taken the art of ‘misspeaking’ to a new level. I mean, which sane and sensible leader stands in the front of the world’s media and denies there are homosexuals in their country, when images of the execution of homosexuals in that same country are publicly, widely and openly available? (I also can’t stand the fact that Mahmoud, like his self-centred and sanctimonious White House counterpart, wrongly and arrogantly assumes God is personally intervening to protect and guide him.)

Now, in his latest mis-pronouncement, the Iranian president has declared his support for the 'truthers' – the wide array of misguided, close-minded, obsessive 9-11 conspiracy theorists (who tragically tend to draw so much support and sympathy from the world’s conspiracy-obsessed Muslims). Speaking in the holy city of Qom, Ahmadinejad declared:

"Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names.

"Under this pretext, they [the U.S.] attacked Afghanistan and Iraq and since then, a million people have been killed only in Iraq."

Yes, the United States did use 9-11 as a ‘pretext’ to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. And, yes, as I have blogged here before, studies suggest up to a million people may indeed have been killed as a result of the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. But for Mahmoud to claim that a building (i.e. the World Trade Centre) simply ‘collapsed’ is an utterly false and misleading statement. The Twin Towers did not ‘collapse’, as a result of a natural disaster, or a bomb, or a controlled explosion or demolition. All of these ridiculous conspiracy theories have been repeatedly debunked and disproved by credible, independent experts from scientific and engineering backgrounds.

As for the names of the 9-11 victims not having been published, I am sorry to say that the Iranian prez is both a liar and a fool. A liar because here, here and here is the full list of all the dead and a fool because – a la his ‘homosexuals don’t exist in Iran’ comments – he must have known that his ludicrous claim could be instantly and demonstrably disproved as soon he made it. So why did he make it? I despair!

It is time, I believe, for supporters of Iran to disassociate from the 9-11 conspiracy theories promulgated by the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and it is time for supporters of Israel to disassociate themselves from the 9-11 cynicism and opportunism articulated by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s that simple.

THE ARROGANCE OF ISRAEL

So, let me get this right: the United States of America funds Israel to the tune of $7 million a day, or around $500 per Israeli per year. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War ll. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion. (See this Congressional report for all of the astonishing details of unparalleled US financial largesse towards the Jewish state.)

Yet, this week, when a former President of the United States – who happens to be the man who negotiated Israel’s peace deal with its largest Arab neighbour, and who also happens to be a Nobel Peace Laureate to boot – visits the State of Israel at the start of a Middle East tour, he is denied a meeting with the Israeli prime minister, as well as the country’s foreign and defence ministers, and the Israeli security services even have the temerity to decline the requests for help and assistance from the US Secret Service agents guarding him. (Has anyone actually reminded the Shin Bet that everything they possess – from their guns and grenades, to their suits and sunglasses – is paid for, in full, by the United States?)

Is this the height of arrogance?

Yes.

But why the snub? Why the rudeness and arrogance expressed towards a former occupant of the traditionally pro-Israeli Oval Office – behaviour described by one American source as ‘unprecedented’? Because this former president happens to be none other than Jimmy Carter, author of the 2006 best-selling book, ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’, in which he describes,

“…the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine's citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank. An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine, to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, this is more oppressive than what black people lived under in South Africa during apartheid.”

Judging by the official Israeli reaction to his visit now, two years on, I guess what they say is true. The truth hurts...

DO PALESTINIANS DESERVE LESS THAN TIBETANS?

Following on from yesterday, Haaretz also has a piece by its senior writer, and noted anti-occupation columnist, Gideon Levy, in which he makes a rather obvious yet under-reported point: why is it that the Tibetans are feted as freedom fighters by the West, lionised and eulogised, and China is condemned for its barbaric, repressive and colonial activities in Tibet, when the Palestinians are offered no such support or solidarity and Israel’s own China-like crimes of repression and occupation are ignored and overlooked?

The usual (depressing) two words: double standards.

From the Haaretz article:

“Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet….No small number of…good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy - who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.

“To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.

“These fights are just, and must be undertaken. But in Israel they are deluxe fights, which are unthinkable. When one comes to the fight with hands that are collectively, and sometimes individually, so unclean, it is impossible to protest a Chinese occupation.

“Citizens of a country that maintains a military subjugation in its backyard that is no less cruel than that of the Chinese, and by some parameters even more so, and against which there is practically no more protest here, have no justification in denouncing another occupation. Citizens of a country that is entirely tainted by the occupation - a national, ongoing project that involves all sectors of the population to some extent, directly or indirectly - cannot wash their hands and fight another occupation, when a half-hour from their homes, horrors no less terrible are taking place for which they have much greater responsibility.

“The world has fallen in love with Tibet. How easy it is to do so….

“The Palestinians are not as nice as the Tibetans in the eyes of the world. But the Palestinian people deserve exactly the same rights as the occupied Tibetan people, even if their leaders are less enchanting, they have no scarlet robes and their fight is more violent. There is absolutely no connection between rights and the means of protest, and from that perspective, there is no difference between a Tibetan and a Palestinian - they both deserve the exact same freedom."

Hear, hear!

USE A PALESTINIAN CAR MECHANIC, GO TO PRISON

As reported a few days ago by the liberal Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the Israeli Knesset has passed a law imposing a penalty of three years imprisonment on Israeli car-owners who take their vehicles to mechanics in the West Bank.

Does anyone detect the unmistakeable whiff of state-sponsored racism?

After all, the Israeli defence establishment – and its hardline apologists here in the West – justify each of the Jewish state’s ongoing crimes against freedom, democracy and the rule of law on the grounds of ‘national security’ – but what on earth is the security argument for banning the use of Palestinian mechanics by Israeli car-owners? Do Israeli cars have a track record of spontaneously combusting upon being touched by an Arab?

WHAT ON EARTH ARE BRITISH TROOPS ACTUALLY DOING IN IRAQ?

The headline in the Times this morning caught my attention: “Iraq snubs Britain and calls US into Basra battle.”

The article outlines how the Iraqi government of Nuri al Maliki, in its recent disastrous and bloody offensive against the Shia militias of Moqtada al Sadr, bypassed the British troops (still) stationed around the city of Basra and instead chose to rely for support on US military forces called in from Baghdad.

From the Times:

“About 550 US troops, including some from the 82nd Airborne Division, were sent from Baghdad to Basra to join up with 150 American soldiers already serving with Iraqi forces in the southern city.

“The Ministry of Defence made much of the fact that British troops, based at Basra airport outside the city, were not requested in the early stages of the operation. British officials claimed that the Basra offensive was proof that Iraqi troops could cope on their own.

“The Times has learnt, however, that when Britain’s most senior officer in Basra, Brigadier Julian Free, commander of 4 Mechanised Brigade, flew into the city to find out what was going on, Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, who was orchestrating the attacks on militia strongholds, declined to see him.”

So the question is, in the wake of such a humiliating gesture from our own puppet government in that occupied nation, why on earth are 5,000-plus British troops still in Iraq, cowering behind the walls of Basra airport and sitting on their backsides? Why have they not been withdrawn and brought home - as per the wishes of the majority of the British public? And do we need any further proof of the fact that British troops have been fighting and dying in vain in the south of Iraq, serving no particular strategic purpose other than to perpetuate the myth that the United States is part of a ‘Coalition’ that is occupying Iraq?

TOP US GENERAL IN IRAQ CONTRADICTS THE WAR HAWKS

This week, 'America's General' David H. Petraeus - he who ludicrously claimed, back in 2004 (!), that there were signs of "tangible progress" and "optimism" in Iraq – returned to Capitol Hill to once again brief Senators and Congressmen on the security situation in Iraq in the wake of the recent US military 'surge'.

Surprisingly, under pointed questioning from Senator Evan Bayh (Democrat, Indiana), General Petraeus painted a much more sombre and restrained picture of Iraq than many of his Republican cheerleaders:

"It's why I've repeatedly noted that we haven't turned any corners, we haven't seen any lights at the end of the tunnel. The champagne bottle has been pushed to the back of the refrigerator. And the progress, while real, is fragile and is reversible."

Contrast that with, say, the words of a certain senator from Arizona currently running for President, speaking on the same morning:

"But today it is possible to talk with real hope and optimism about the future of Iraq and the outcome of our efforts there. For while the job of bringing security to Iraq is not finished, as the recent fighting in Basra and elsewhere vividly demonstrated, we're no longer staring into the abyss of defeat and we can now look ahead to the genuine prospect of success."

Notice the difference?

IS ISRAEL THE WORLD’S MOST HYPOCRITICAL NATION? YOU DECIDE….

Which country is the most hypocritical on earth?

I am often torn when considering the answer to this question. Is it the United States, which blusters on and on about ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘liberty’ abroad while continuing to defend and even justify Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, rendition, the Patriot Act and warrantless phone tapping? Or which condemns elections in Palestine and Iran while simultaneously cosying up to dictators in Egypt and Saudi Arabia?

Or is it Saudi Arabia, which spends millions and millions of petro-dollars funding the spread of radical Islam across the world – building mosques and madressas and distributing books and pamphlets, from Bangladesh to Birmingham – yet forbids its residents from publicly practising any other religion apart from Islam and which remains the only country in the Arabian peninsula without a single church, synagogue or temple?

Is China the world’s most hypocritical country, with a totalitarian and dictatorial political system controlled by self-proclaimed communists on the one hand, but with those same communist rulers depending on a free-market, capitalist economic system to generate wealth and prosperity on the other?

Or it is my own home country, Britain, where the Archbishop of Canterbury was roundly condemned by all sections and segments of society, only a few weeks ago, for daring to even suggest that Britain’s Muslims be allowed to use religious courts to settle (some of) their legal disputes, despite the fact that Britain’s Jews have been allowed to do exactly the same for several decades now?

I happen to believe that the world’s most hypocritical nation is Israel. Why? Because for several years, the Israelis have been accusing Iran of being an ‘existential’ threat to the Jewish state, of developing a secret nuclear weapons programme and of disrupting the so-called ‘peace process’ by funding terrorist groups. The hawks in Tel Aviv have long harboured ambitions of launching a bombing campaign against Tehran and Israel’s neoconservative supporters in Washington D.C. are at the forefront of the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign inside the United States. Yet, only a week ago, the Swiss newspaper Sonntag revealed that Israel, supposedly observing a complete and utter boycott of all things Persian, has been buying Iranian oil for decades.

According to the Swiss report,

"Israel imports Iranian oil on a large scale even though contacts with Iran and purchasing of its products are officially boycotted by Israel. Israel gets around the boycott by having the oil delivered via Europe. A reliable Israeli energy newsletter, EnergiaNews…

"EnergiaNews got the information about the Iran trade from sources with ties to the management of Israeli Oil Refineries Ltd ... According to EnergiaNews the Iranian oil is liked in Israel because its quality is better than other crude oils.”

Can any country act any more hypocritically than this? You claim to hate a particular nation in your neighbourhood, you accuse it of being a state sponsor of terrorism and an existential threat to your own nation and people, you compare its president to Adolf Hitler and urge your allies in the West to sanction and even perhaps bomb it and – yet – all the while you continue to (secretly) buy oil from that country (!!) Is there any better definition of hypocrisy? I think not.

So, dear readers, that’s my view. What’s yours? Which do you think is the world’s most hypocritical nation, and why?

THIS BLOG IS BACK!

After another self-imposed and unavoidable blogging hiatus (apologies!!!), ‘Radical Opinions’ returns this week and it will be as explosive, controversial and contrary as ever. Rigorously radical yet rigorously factual.

I hope regular visitors to this blog will keep on coming and persuading their friends and colleagues to come here and post comments, start discussions and spread the word.

FIVE YEARS ON, ARE THINGS REALLY LOOKING UP FOR IRAQIS?

Five years on from an invasion which has perhaps caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, including over fifty people in a suicide bombing in Kerbala on Monday, it’s party time in Baghdad and Basra! At least, that’s what much of our mainstream media would have us believe throughout this week. Here’s a sample of headlines from across the West:

• 'Iraq's new optimism',
• 'Iraqis more upbeat',
• 'Iraqis regaining confidence'.

All of this joy and elation and seemingly heady ‘optimism’ is based on a poll of Iraqis carried out by the BBC, ABC and a variety of international broadcasters.

My biggest problem with such polls inside of Iraq is with the people they necessarily (and conveniently) have to exclude. For example, the Iraqi refugees – two million of whom have fled to neighbouring Syria, Jordan, Iran et al. They have tended to vote with their feet, as it were, by fleeing and refusing to return (despite all the triumphal rhetoric from American and Iraqi politicians, in the wake of the US military ‘surge’). They, not surprisingly, tend to be more pessimistic, more negative and more bitter about their lives, their futures, the future of Iraq, etc, than the Iraqis polled inside of Iraq. Yet they – the refugees – represent nearly ten per cent of that nation’s population.

Then there are the dead. Who speaks for them? It’s all very well sending pollsters into the streets of Baghdad, Mosul, Najaf, etc, to find out what Iraqis think of the security situation these days but what would the dead tell those pollsters if they had the chance? What would the million or so Iraqis who have been killed in the five years of sectarian violence and military occupation – according to a study by Opinion Business Research – have to say for themselves, were they given the chance? The silent and often forgotten dead of Iraq represent a mind-boggling and heart-breaking one in twenty-five of that country’s population.

Of course there are other problems with this BBC poll, that has unsurprisingly been trumpeted by the political and media classes alike. I find it’s always sensible in times like this to check the original, raw data of such heavily-spun, heavily-politicized opinion polls. Thankfully, the BBC has actually provided us with a detailed breakdown of the full questions and answers, by percentage, here.

The poll does indeed reveal that, for the first time, a majority of Iraqis do believe their lives are ‘very’ or ‘quite’ good. Yet does this actually translate into ‘optimism’ about the future? Here are some of the facts from the full data of the poll which the headline-writers and media pundits here in the West chose to ignore and overlook:

• A majority of Iraqis continue to believe that life will not improve at all in the coming year.
• A majority of Iraqis refuse to believe that their children’s lives will be better than their own.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that, for Iraq as a whole, things are either ‘quite’ or ‘very’ bad.
• A majority of Iraqis believe that life in Iraq, as a whole, will not have improved at all in a year’s time.
• Exactly half of all Iraqis believe the US-led invasion was ‘wrong’ and only a fifth support the war unconditionally, describing it as ‘absolutely right’.
• 70% of Iraqis describe the availability of jobs as ‘bad’ and a whopping 88% of them describe the supply of electricity as ‘bad’ too.
• Only a third of Iraqis believe the security situation in Iraq as a whole has improved over the past twelve months.

So, in conclusion, a much more depressing read than much of the mainstream media would have us believe. Life in Iraq is perhaps better in some, but not all, ways compared to a year ago. But, judging even by this poll, life in general there is still brutal, nasty, insecure and unstable.

GO HOME AND DIE, OR STAY AND STARVE

Go home and die, or stay here and starve: that’s essentially the message which the British government is now sending to Iraqi refugees.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

“More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi asylum seekers are to be told they must go home or face destitution in Britain as the government considers Iraq safe enough to return them, according to leaked Home Office correspondence seen by the Guardian.

“The Iraqis involved are to be told that unless they sign up for a voluntary return programme to Iraq within three weeks, they face being made homeless and losing state support. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraqi territory.”

The Guardian goes on to point out that this decision – from the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, via her callous and indifferent bureaucratic underlings at the new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) – comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across Iraq since last Sunday.

Iraq is not – I repeat, not! – a safe country in any shape or form. Violence continues to plague the north, south and centre of the nation. Over the past week, there have been shootings, car bombings and suicide bombings in all corners of that country – Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Hadita, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, Kirkuk. This blog has, on previous occasions, drawn attention to the 650,000-plus death toll there, as well as the recent post-surge spike in civilian deaths. And if, by now, you still don’t trust ‘Radical Opinions’ or ‘The Radical’ (i.e. me!), then simply turn your attention to the Foreign Office website, where Iraq is listed s one of the countries that the British government officially advises its citizens to avoid all travel to several parts of. Here is the stark statement from the FCO summary on travel to Iraq:

“The security situation in Iraq remains highly dangerous with a continuing high threat of terrorism throughout Iraq, violence and kidnapping…”

So we have an absurd and amoral situation in which the Home Office is forcing Iraqi asylum-seekers to go back to Iraq, which it claims is now safe, while the Foreign Office warns us that Iraq is unsafe and should be avoided. I am not sure what is worse: the mendacity of Home Office bureaucrats who choose to ignore the Foreign Office travel advice when it comes to making decisions on whether or not a country (in this case, Iraq) is safe, or a British government as a whole which seems to worry deeply about the lives of its own citizens while abroad, but chooses to forcibly send foreign refugees (Iraqis) back home to their own deaths. And, if you think I am exaggerating here, simply ask the family of Solyman Rashed. After spending fifteen months, penniless and impoverished in a UK detention centre, he agreed in 2006 to ‘voluntarily return’ to northern Iraq, which is supposedly ‘safer’ than the rest of Iraq.

He was killed just two weeks after he arrived back, in a car-bomb attack in the city of Kirkuk.

Is this what a Labour government was really elected to do?

(Incidentally, and on a side note, it would be worth tuning into Channel 4 this Sunday evening at 7pm, as the channel’s current-affairs strand, ‘Dispatches’, is devoted to 'Iraq's Lost Generation' and the plight of that country’s penniless, homeless and maimed refugees, who now number over 2 million).

THE COST OF ‘FREEDOM’

According to a recent report from a committee of MPs (the House of Commons Defence Select Committee, for those of you parliamentary anoraks who are interested!), the cost to the British taxpayer of our invasions, occupations and ongoing bombing-and-maiming operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has nearly doubled in the past year to more than 3 billion pounds.

On the other side of the pond, former World Bank chief economist and Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will continue to cost the United States approximately $12 billion a month – tripled the rate of their earliest years – in what he has termed (conservatively) in his new book as 'The Three Trillion Dollar War'.

Can you even begin to conceptualise three trillion US dollars? Can you picture in your mind how many suitcases would be required to carry 3 billion UK pounds? As one commentator in the New York Times recently noted, the human mind isn’t well equipped to make sense of a figure like a trillion (or even a billion):

“We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion – they all start to sound the same.”

So, let’s put it this way. What could the United States spend $3 trillion on, instead of the carnage and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, for a fraction of that amount, it could literally end global poverty, hunger and malnutrition. It could put a roof over the head of every homeless person on the face of the earth, and put food and water on the table of every starving human being in every corner of the globe. The World Bank estimates that the cost of meeting the UN’s Millennium Development Goals would be an additional annual $40-70 billion between now and 2015, i.e. $500 billion max! That would still leave $2.5 trillion in change (!) – i.e. not simply to build schools and hospitals in every town and village in America but in every town and village in the world. (I feel like Richard Pryor right now, in the classic ‘80s movie 'Brewster's Millions').

Even the UK’s own relatively paltry 3 billion pounds in war spending over the past twelve months could have been better spent halving child poverty across Britain – that’s how much it would cost to lift a million and a half children out of poverty in this country.

So you see: we could have spent our taxes on helping to feed and clothe poor kids here in Britain but instead we chose to spend it on killing kids thousands of miles away; the United States too could have spent its tax revenues on ending poverty, malnutrition and hunger across the globe but instead chose to bring greater poverty, malnutrition and hunger to the long-suffering people of Iraq.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE?

As the world's media convulses over the latest Arab-inflicted massacre against the poor, innocent people of Israel, spare a thought for poor Amira Abu Aser, buried in Gaza on Wednesday after being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house she and her family had been visiting. She spent only twenty days on this earth.


Was she firing rockets into Israel? Did she deserve to die? Is her death not an act of 'terrorism'?

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?

The bloodshed in the so-called 'Holy Land' continues, with the typical Middle East 'cycle of violence' spiralling further and further out of control. Earlier today, after hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the occupying Israeli machine, the predictable 'terrorist' response arrived - in Jerusalem, an Arab gunman infiltrated a Jewish seminary school in Jerusalem and shot dead eight people, wounding at least nine others.

The attack has dominated news headlines - of course, the deaths of Israeli civilians (like the deaths of American and British civilians) always trumps over the deaths of dark-skinned Arab Muslims. So, here is a small reminder of the suffering on the 'other', often ignored, side of the Mid East ledger of pain and suffering, from Monday's Guardian front page:

"First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12.

There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter.

Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

"She said she was in pain, that she couldn't breathe," he said. "A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound,
she couldn't breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating."

Read the full, heart-breaking piece from Rory McCarthy here.

And check out Donald Macintyre's excellent and deeply sensitive coverage in the Independent here.

And if your heart can bear the overwhelming sorrow and grief, read here about the latest report from Amnesty International on how the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has actually now reached its lowest point in forty years, i.e. since Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.

God save the Palestinians - after all, no one else will.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.

A WEEK OFF

Regular visitors to this blog (are there any?) may have noticed a slight lull in the number of postings here by me, the self-proclaimed 'Radical', in recent weeks. To be honest, February has been a bit of a mad month for me and I have slightly taken my eye off the (blogging) ball. In exactly seven days, I'll be back to blogging on an almost daily basis - exposing the myriad of lies and exaggerations and half-truths peddled by the Laptop Bombardiers and the Armchair Islamophobes.

As I said, the number of blogs that I have posted has slowed down but (thankfully! weirdly?) the hits continue to rise. Having started this blog in early December after a long period of personal and professional frustration with the right-wing, war-mongering, terrorism-fuelling, Muslim-demonizing trajectory of our political classes and the unthinking, uncritical, incurious and - frankly - xenophobic coverage of the world by our 'mainstream' media, I am pleased to see the hit counter (below, scroll down to the bottom) approaching a whopping two thousand.

So, thank you. And I will be back. Shortly. In a week. Watch this space.

(In the meantime, check out the excellent www.antiwar.com)

TIME FOR MUSLIMS TO SAY: 'NOT IN MY NAME'

Muslims often - rightly - accuse the media and the security services of Islamophobia, of hyping the terrorism threat, of distorting intelligence and fabricating evidence, of demonizing ordinary Muslims. In fact, this blog of mine has done so several times, based on solid facts, since its inception in December.

Yet we must remember that there are unquestionaly and undeniably several 'bad apples' (for want of a softer euphemism!) in the Muslim community - men (and women) who do actually (wrongly) believe Islam condones and even sanctifies violence and bloodshed; who do view jihad (mistakenly) as a primarily military, rather than a spiritual, struggle; who do in fact hate the West not simply for its foreign policy but because it is the West; it is non-Muslim, secular and liberal.

One such fanatical Muslim bigot is British-born, Birmingham-based Parviz Khan, who was sentenced to life in prison this week after pleading guilty to a plot to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier serving in the British army. The security services had bugged his home in Alum Rock and the transcripts of the surveillance intercepts make for a chilling and rather disturbing read:

"The MI5 bugging device at Parviz Khan's Birmingham home recorded attempts to indoctrinate Khan's five-year-old son in the ethos of al-Qaida inspired violence.

In one passage co-defendant Hamid Elasmar asks the boy: "How do you cut their neck?"
Khan then prompts the youngster, saying: "How do you cut them with a knife? Show me."
Then Khan is heard saying: "Like this. Good."

Khan was also recorded asking his son: "Who do you love?" "I love sheikh Osama Bin Laden," the child replies. Khan asks his son if he loves anyone else. The boy names extreme Muslim cleric Abu Hamza and Islamic militant sheikh Abdullah Rehman.

Then Khan asks the youngster: "Who do you kill?" The child replies: "America kill." Asked who else, the boy responds "Bush I kill" and "Blair kill." Prompted by his father, the five-year-old says he also wants to kill "kuffar" (a derogatory term for a non- Muslim), "Hindu," and "sharabi" (drunks).

Khan was also recorded discussing his desire that his three-year-old daughter should eventually marry a terrorist. "Inshallah [God willing], she'll marry into them and give birth to them," he told Zahoor Iqbal, a long-time friend. The trial jury was told that Khan then called his daughter towards him and asked her: "What will you cook for the men in the mountains?"

This is not 'jihad'. This is not even simply 'terrorism'. This is child abuse - plain and simple. How any self-proclaimed, so-called 'Muslim' can justify filling their innocent children's heads with such bile, hatred and violence, I simply do not know!

On February 14th 2003, I marched in London with millions of anti-war Muslims, protesting against the impending invasion of Iraq and carrying banners proclaiming 'Not In My Name'. At times like this, when I see the miserable, humourless, hate-filled mug shot of 'Muslims' like Parviz Khan staring out from the TV screen, I have to say to him and to his ilk: 'Not In My Name'. You do not represent my Islam, my Quran or my Prophet. You are a disgrace, a shame, an embarrassment and I disassociate myself and my beliefs from you and yours.

HAIL TO THE TORTURER-IN-CHIEF!

Outgoing US President George W. Bush gave a rare interview this week to a non-American, non-deferential, non-fawning interviewer, the BBC’s Matt Frei.

The main focus of the interview was (predictably, depressingly) the President’s preference for torturing his way to victory in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. These are some of the main (outrageous) points which the BBC interview highlighted:

• Bush believes that the London bombings – among other things – justifies the American use of torture (sorry, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’!)
  
  
• Bush believes America still supports human rights and occupies the international moral high ground (!!)
  
  
• Bush will veto any attempt by the Senate to ban waterboarding
  
  
• Bush does not consider waterboarding to be a form of torture
  

Yet, as the Guardian noted, on the very same day, one of the Bush administration’s very own Justice Department officials – Steven Bradbury, head of the Office of Legal Counsel – pointed out in congressional testimony,

“Let me be clear, though: There has been no determination by the justice department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law.”

Outside of the delusional corridors of the White House and the right-wing thinktanks of the neocrazy neocons, there are few sane souls who would dispute that waterboarding is indeed wholly, totally, undeniably, unquestionaly, indisputably and self-evidently an immoral, inhumane and brutal act of torture.

Former POW, Iraq war supporter and Republican Party presidential-candidate-to-be, Senator John McCain, is opposed to waterboarding, which he considers to be torture. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage – who happens to have been second-in-command at Bush’s State Department during the invasion of Iraq, and also happens to be a former US naval commando – also has a dim view of waterboarding:

“Of course water-boarding is torture. I can't believe we're even debating it. We shouldn't be doing that kind of stuff."

What precisely is “that kind of stuff”? Former US military psychologist Bruce Lefever, who underwent a diluted form of ‘waterboarding’ during his training, said it was “terrifying”, and that “you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic." It is not waterboarding – it is, put simply, water torture.

You can watch a mocked-up, diluted version of a waterboarding below, courtesy of MSNBC:


The reality is that waterboarding has long been a weapon not simply of Mr Bush’s heroic and hallowed counter-terrorism operatives, but of torturers and tyrants throughout history. Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge were amongst the 20th century’s most infamous practioners of waterboarding, as you can see below in a photo of one of the actual ‘waterboards’ used by the torturers of the Khymer Rouge.

And, most damning of all, the United States itself prosecuted Japanese officers in the wake of World War II, for waterboarding American prisoners of war – including an officer named Yukio Asano. As Senator Edward Kennedy has pointed out:

“Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II.”

How ironic! The US president declares in 2005, “We don’t do torture”, and then admits to, and defends, the use of waterboarding against terror suspects; while almost half a century earlier, the US government prosecuted Japanese officers for carrying out the very same practice against Americans. Hypocrisy? Double standards? Short-sightedness? All of the above. And all in the name of justifying, defending, and apologizing for torture, carried out by the supposed leader of the ‘free’ world, the United States of America. Waterboarding joins Abu Ghraib, Guatanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition in the long list of ignominious (and unAmerican!) legacies left to America, and to the world, by George Bush and his pathetic and immoral ‘War on Terror’.