• All Out To Defend Palestine
• Toward a Palestinian Popular Conference in the US
• Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference
• MIFTAH Calls for Universal Support of Palestinian Rights
• Palestinians Are Being Denied the Right of Non-Violent Resistance
• Ethnic Cleansing and Israel’s Racist Discourse
Unite in Defense of the Rights of All
• Condemn U.S. Genocide in Afghanistan
• Muslims and the Media
International Day of Action
December 2 will see actions around the world demanding an End to the Occupation in Palestine and that the rights of the Palestinian people be provided with a guarantee. Protesters are condemning the U.S.-Israeli crimes being committed, especially the ongoing massacres and efforts to eliminate the Palestinians as a people. Everywhere peoples are insisting that the Israeli occupation, funded, backed and protected by the U.S., be ended now. The peoples are determined to stop the repeated U.S. veto of United Nations Security Council Resolutions, which block implementation of the UN resolutions requiring an end to the occupation and right of return for Palestinian refugees. This drive of the people was further represented in UN General Assembly resolutions supporting Palestinian rights, passed overwhelmingly December 1. Actions in the U.S. are taking place in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and elsewhere. Actions worldwide include those in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and South Africa. Now is the time to step up the efforts to End the Occupation Now!
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Palestine Unites Us
Toward a Palestinian Popular Conference in the US
We, activists and organizers from the Palestinian community in the US holding diverse organizational affiliations, geographical and political backgrounds, met in Cleveland, Ohio, November 10-12, 2006 in follow up to the initial meeting held in Detroit on June 23, 2006.
We express grave concerns about a) the recent escalation of massacres and other war crimes committed in Beit Hannoun and other areas of occupied Palestine, b) the plight of Palestinian refugees in Iraq as well as the suffering of all people in Iraq under US/British occupation, c) the recent atrocities committed by Israel in Lebanon, and d) the US government veto of yet another UN Security Council that attempted to hold Israel accountable for persistent severe Human Rights violations, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
In these historic times, we reiterate our commitments to affirm our Palestinian narrative and assert our rights to: -- Self-determination and equality for all Palestinians -- Return of the Palestinian refugees to their original homes, lands, properties and villages (a natural right supported by international law and UN Resolution 194) -- End of Zionist occupation and colonization of Palestine, including Jerusalem.
After a weekend of intense deliberation, brainstorming, and strategizing we decided and committed to:
1) Convening and building a popular Palestinian national conference in Chicago in Summer 2008 in order to empower our community, unify our voice, and affirm the right of Palestinians in the Shatat (exile) to participate fully in shaping our joint destiny. We established various committees to carry on the functions needed for this.
2) Holding a larger preparatory meeting in 2007 that would further empower and build support among all our community members and organizations.
3) Continuing to exchange and expand projects, ideas, and campaigns done by the many local and national organizations and build upon them by providing fora for communication and positive collaboration.
We call on fellow Palestinians in the US to join us in empowering our community (individuals and organizations) and building for the Palestine National conference reflecting the will of ALL Palestinians in America. We believe strongly that our community can and must rise to the challenges facing us, as they do in Palestine.
Preparatory Committee
US Popular Palestinian National Conference, Cleveland, Ohio
For more information, please contact palestineconferenceusa@yahoo.com
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December 2 Event
Al-Awda West Coast Regional Conference
After almost 60 years, the Palestinian people’s struggle to regain their inalienable right to return and live on their lands and in their homes in Palestine has reached a new critical stage as evidenced by the escalation of the ongoing Israeli siege and aggression against the people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Since the Bush administration seems to be taking an even more active, direct and public role on the side of the Zionists, the struggle at home and in the US for the Palestinian Right to Return can come together in profound new ways which we must strategize and organize. We are working to implement the concrete directions of Al-Awda’s Fourth Annual International Convention which took place this past summer in San Francisco. We call on all activists for the return to come together to support and develop this important work.
As part of the activities set to coincide with the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, Al-Awda Riverside, Al-Awda San Diego and Al-Awda Los Angeles/Orange County will be hosting a one-day regional mini-conference for activists in the Right to Return Movement for Palestinian refugees.
The objectives of the upcoming conference are to develop:
1. A regional divestment for the return campaign
2. A regional refugee support campaign
3. Preparae for Al-Awda’s Fifth Annual International Convention
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MIFTAH Calls for Universal Support of Palestinian Rights
Wednesday, 29 November, 2006, marks the United Nations “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” which was initiated in 1977 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in observance of the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to independence and self-determination. The date also marks UNGA’s adoption of UN Resolution 181 in 1947, calling for the partition of British-mandate Palestine. [This year international actions in defense of Palestinian rights took place on December 2.]
The Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) reaffirms, on this occasion, the need for international recognition and active support of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, most notably their human rights, their right to independence, and their right to social and economic development, among other basic principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter (October 1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 1948).
Since the creation of the state of Israel in May 1948, 4.5 million Palestinians have been uprooted, displaced, and exiled, and 3.8 million others have languished under a brutal Israeli military occupation and a denial of their basic human rights in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The continued dual oppression of the Palestinian people, between exile and a systematic policy of Israeli strangulation inside the occupied Palestinian territories, calls for an immediate international effort to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the basis of existing legal foundations; namely UN Resolutions 242, 338, 194 and the land-for-peace equation initially adopted in the Madrid Peace Conference of October 1991.
In recent years, particularly since the outbreak of the Intifada in September 2000, Israel has subjected Palestinian civilians inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to a systematic policy of brutal military assaults, strangulation, deprivation of basic needs, and a continued campaign of suppression at the social, political, and economic levels.
Since 2000, Israeli military forces have killed approximately 4,570 Palestinians, including 943 children below the age of 18 and 281 women. 31,000 Palestinians have been injured as a result of Israeli military assaults, some with critical and irreversible disabilities.
MIFTAH urges the international community, at the Governmental and non-Governmental levels, to take a serious initiative aimed at ending the suffering of the Palestinian people, and pressure the Israeli Government to end its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories captured in the June 1967 war; to dismantle Jewish settlements and the Annexation Wall on Palestinian land, to withdraw to the 1967 boundaries, to recognize the Palestinian refugees right of return, and to abide by its legal and political obligations under international and humanitarian law.
For further information, please contact:
www.miftah.org
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Would Human Rights Watch Have Attacked Martin Luther King, Too?
Palestinians Are Being Denied the
Right of Non-Violent Resistance
If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent on the destruction of Israel.
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission: according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement,” the agonizing months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
Yet Western observers, and the organizations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch (HRW) published its latest statement on the conflict. It is a document that shames the organization, complacent Western societies and Fatma’s memory.
In its press release “Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks,” which was widely reported by the international media, HRW lambastes armed Palestinian groups for calling on civilians to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military.
Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to halt the Israeli attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.
On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring at least 10.
And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that their families’ homes were about to be bombed.
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the world’s leading organizations for the protection of human rights ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians’ right to security and a roof over their heads and argued instead: “There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack. Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.”
There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent means. On HRW’s interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.
HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press release.
It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack, labeling these civilians “human shields,” even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.
And HRW prefers to highlight a supposed violation of international law by the Palestinians -- their choice to act as “human shields” -- and to demand that the practice end immediately, while ignoring the very real and continuing violation of international law committed by Israel in undertaking punitive house demolitions against Palestinian families.
But let us ignore even these important issues and assume that HRW is technically correct that such Palestinian actions do violate international law. Nonetheless, HRW is still failing us and mocking its mandate, because it has lost sight of the three principles that must guide the vision of a human rights organization: a sense of priorities, proper context and common sense.
Priorities
Every day HRW has to choose which of the many abuses of international law taking place around the world it highlights. It manages to record only a tiny fraction of them. The assumption of many outsiders may be that it focuses on only the most egregious examples. That would be wrong.
The simple truth is that the worse a state’s track record on human rights, the easier ride it gets, relatively speaking, from human rights organizations. That is both because, if abuses are repeated often enough, they become so commonplace as to go unremarked, and because, if the abuses are wide-ranging and systematic, only a small number of the offences will be noted.
Israel, unlike the Palestinians, benefits in both these respects. After four decades of reporting on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, HRW has covered all of Israel’s many human rights-abusing practices at least once before. The result is that after a while most violations get ignored. Why issue another report on house demolitions or “targeted assassinations,” even though they are occurring all the time? And, how to record the individual violations of tens of thousands of Palestinians’ rights every day at checkpoints? One report on the checkpoints once every few years has to suffice instead.
In Israel’s case, there is an added reluctance on the part of organizations like HRW to tackle the extent and nature of Israel’s trampling of Palestinian rights. Constant press releases denouncing Israel would provoke accusations, as they do already, that Israel is being singled out -- and with it, the implication that anti-Semitism lies behind the special treatment.
So HRW chooses instead to equivocate. It ignores most Israeli violations and highlights every Palestinian infraction, however minor. This way it makes a pact with the devil: it achieves the balance that protects it from criticism but only by sacrificing the principles of equity and justice.
In its press release, for example, HRW treats the recent appeal to Palestinians to exercise their right to protect their neighbors, and to act in solidarity with non-violent resistance to occupation, as no different from the dozens of known violations committed by the Israeli army of abducting Palestinian civilians as human shields to protect its troops.
Women volunteering to surround a mosque become the equivalent of the notorious incident in January 2003 when 21-year-old Samer Sharif was handcuffed to the hood of an army Jeep and driven towards stone-throwing youngsters in Nablus as Israeli soldiers fired their guns from behind his head.
According to HRW’s approach to international law, the two incidents are comparable.
Context
The actions of Palestinians occur in a context in which all of their rights are already under the control of their occupier, Israel, and can be violated at its whim. This means that it is problematic, from a human rights perspective, to place the weight of culpability on the Palestinians without laying far greater weight at the same time on the situation to which the Palestinians are reacting.
Here is an example. HRW and other human rights organizations have taken the Palestinians to task for the extra-judicial killings of those suspected of collaborating with the Israeli security forces.
Although it is blindingly obvious that the lynching of an alleged collaborator is a violation of that person’s fundamental right to life, HRW’s position of simply blaming the Palestinians for this practice raises two critical problems.
First, it fudges the issue of accountability.
In the case of a “targeted assassination,” Israel’s version of extra-judicial killing, we have an address to hold accountable: the apparatus of a state in the forms of the Israeli army which carried out the murder and the Israeli politicians who approved it. (These officials are also responsible for the bystanders who are invariably killed along with the target.)
But unless it can be shown that the lynchings are planned and coordinated at a high level, a human rights organization cannot apply the same standards by which it judges a state to a crowd of Palestinians, people gripped by anger and the thirst for revenge. The two are not equivalent and cannot be held to account in the same way. Palestinians carrying out a lynching are committing a crime punishable under ordinary domestic law; while the Israeli army carrying out a “targeted assassination” is committing state terrorism, which must be tried in the court of world opinion.
Second, HRW’s position ignores the context in which the lynching takes place.
The Palestinian resistance to occupation has failed to realize its goals mainly because of Israel’s extensive network of collaborators, individuals who have usually been terrorized by threats to themselves or their family and/or by torture into “co-operating” with Israel’s occupation forces.
The great majority of planned attacks are foiled because one member of the team is collaborating with Israel. He or she not only sabotages the attack but often also gives Israel the information it needs to kill the leaders of the resistance (as well as bystanders). Collaborators, though common in the West Bank and Gaza, are much despised -- and for good reason. They make the goal of national liberation impossible.
Palestinians have been struggling to find ways to make collaboration less appealing. When the Israeli army is threatening to jail your son, or refusing a permit for your wife to receive the hospital treatment she needs, you may agree to do terrible things. Armed groups and many ordinary Palestinians countenance the lynchings because they are seen as a counterweight to Israel’s own powerful techniques of intimidation -- a deterrence, even if a largely unsuccessful one.
In issuing a report on the extra-judicial killing of Palestinian collaborators, therefore, groups like HRW have a duty to highlight first and with much greater emphasis the responsibility of Israel and its decades-long occupation for the lynchings, as the context in which Palestinians are forced to mimic the barbarity of those oppressing them to stand any chance of defeating them.
The press release denouncing the Palestinians for choosing collectively and peacefully to resist house demolitions, while not concentrating on violations committed by Israel in destroying the houses and using military forms of intimidation and punishment against civilians, is a travesty for this very same reason.
Common Sense
And finally human rights organizations must never abandon common sense, the connecting thread of our humanity, when making judgments about where their priorities lie.
In the past few months Gaza has sunk into a humanitarian disaster engineered by Israel and the international community. What has been HRW’s response? It is worth examining its most recent reports, those on the front page of the Mideast section of its website last week, when the latest press release was issued. Four stories relate to Israel and Palestine.
Three criticize Palestinian militants and the wider society in various ways: for encouraging the use of “human shields,” for firing home-made rockets into Israel, and for failing to protect women from domestic violence. One report mildly rebukes Israel, urging the government to ensure that the army properly investigates the reasons for the shelling that killed 19 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Hanoun.
This shameful imbalance, both in the number of reports being issued against each party and in terms of the failure to hold accountable the side committing the far greater abuses of human rights, has become the HRW’s standard procedure in Israel-Palestine.
But in its latest release on human shields, HRW plumbs new depths, stripping Palestinians of the right to organize non-violent forms of resistance and seek new ways of showing solidarity in the face of illegal occupation. In short, HRW treats the people of Gaza as mere rats in a laboratory -- the Israeli army’s view of them -- to be experimented on at will.
HRW’s priorities in Israel-Palestine prove it has lost its moral bearings.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net.
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Ethnic Cleansing and Israel’s Racist Discourse
“The term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with deportation and genocide.”
According to this definition, and others including those emerging in the 1990s, following the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, Palestinians have been and remain victims of a determined and unwavering ethnic cleansing policy that began in 1947-48 and continues until today.
However, it is important that when we examine the subject of ethnic cleansing in Palestine, we take into account its various dimensions, one of which is the accompanying racist discourse, which has become part and parcel of Israel’s ethnic cleansing
Any act of collective punishment -- whether ethnic cleansing or genocide or any other -- is often preceded and or adjoined by a racist discourse that dehumanizes the victim and justifies the crime on baseless grounds, a concoction of lies and fibs that may appeal to national or religious psyches, but fails the test of law, morality or basic human norms and expectations.
Without such discourse, which depicted the original inhabitants of Palestine as cancerous, subhuman and a nuisance in the face of civilization and progress -- as defined by the founders of the Zionist movement -- it would not have been possible to carry out a systematic campaign of murder and ethnic cleansing in 1947-48, which saw the killing of an estimated 13,000 Palestinians, the forcible eviction of 850,000 and the depopulation and subsequent destruction of nearly 500 villages and localities. Without such a racist discourse it would have been difficult, to say the least, to carry out scores of preempted massacres, including Deir Yassin, Tantoura, Abbasiyya, Beit Daras, Bir Al-Saba’, Haifa and so forth.
Were it not for a decided campaign of institutionalized racism that occurred on such a large scale and which is maintained until today, it would have been impossible and implausible to gun down scores of innocent people after lining them up against the crumbling wall of the old Tantura mosque in May of 1948, or to bulldoze the home of a crippled man in Jenin in April 2002 without giving his mother the chance to evacuate him. Or to describe as a “great success” the killing of 14 civilians, including children when a one-ton Israeli bomb slammed into their apartment building in the Zeitun neighborhood in Gaza in July 2002. Or the wanton murder of 19 people, most of them women and children of the same extended family in Beit Hanoun earlier this November. But according to Israeli officials, every other method has been tried, and failed. “With murderous, bloodthirsty terrorism that wants to wipe you off the map, you have to respond accordingly: Wipe it out,” as Ben Caspit commented following the brutal massacre of Beit Hanoun.
But if what purely motivates Israel is the fear of its own annihilation, then, how can the Zionist state’s morally flexible supporters explain Israel’s continuous colonization of the West Bank and Jerusalem? According to a 2004 Foundation for Middle East Peace report, the total settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has neared 420,000: 220,000 settlers in the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem. Expectedly, the number stands at a much higher figure.
New settlements are being erected while existing settlements are ever-expanding. According to a recent report drafted by the PLO’s Negotiations Affairs Department, Israel approved tenders for 690 new settlement units in two major east Jerusalem settlements: Ma’aleh Adumim and Beit Illit. The housing units could accommodate up to 2,800 new Jewish settlers.
If the idea was indeed to shield Israel from Palestinian attacks, then why is 80 percent of the wall being built on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land? Why encircle the Palestinian population of the West Bank from east and west, and those of Qalqilia from all directions? Why do thousands of Palestinian schools kids have to stand for hours in front of their gated villages to acquire permission from an Israeli soldier to allow them access to their schools and back?
Ethnic cleansing is indeed back on the Israeli political agenda, as Avigdor Lieberman, an Israeli politician who has for long advocated the ethnic cleansing of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, was recently appointed as Israel’s new deputy prime minister. One of his early ideas since the new post, aside from sending Palestinians packing, was the killing of the entire leadership of the elected Palestinian government. “They...have to disappear, to go to paradise, all of them, and there can’t be any compromise,” he told Israeli radio last week.
The unfortunate reality is that Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, though it might have changed tactics and pace throughout the years, has never stopped and is now more active than it has been for decades. It’s also clear that the adjacent racist discourse that made such a policy sustainable for six decades is also at work, making advocates of war crimes heroes in the eyes of most Israelis.
Moreover, amid unabashed American backing of such policies and almost total silence or helplessness of the international community, Israel knows that the success of its colonial project in the West Bank is dependent on the element of time.
What’s even more disheartening is the fact that Palestinian infighting is distracting and wasting energies that should be put to work to provoke and sustain an international campaign against Israeli atrocities. Infighting over governments that have no sovereignty, the lacking of any national cohesion or consensus or a clear political program that unifies Palestinians at home and in diaspora around one political and national agenda, will certainly ensure the success of the Israeli program and further contribute to the racist discourse that sees Palestinians as incapable of taking on the task of leadership and self-determination.
Ramzy Baroud’s latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press). Article based on a speech in London, “Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Methods and Consequences,” broadcast by Al-Jazeera.
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Condemn U.S. Genocide in Afghanistan
Voice of Revolution vehemently condemns the wanton slaughter of civilians by the U.S. and U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan. October 30, eighty-one young Muslim students, including many teenagers, and one teacher were assassinated in Bajaur, Pakistan by the U.S. and Pakistan armed forces. The school residence where they were sleeping early Monday morning was completely destroyed by missile strikes.
The cold-blooded slaughter of young Muslim males was hailed as a victory in the monopoly-controlled media. The U.S., British and Canadian governments and the mass media have reached the genocidal crossing of the Rubicon where mass imprisonment, torture and wanton killing of Muslims are deemed necessary in the endless “war on terror.”
When imprisonment, torture and slaughter of an identifiable group become acceptable and routine, is that not well down the bloody road of genocide? Such cruel and backward activity and behavior are well entrenched in European and U.S. state-organized practices and values. They form part of medieval politics and ideology that ooze forth when mass democratic opposition has been weakened or is not effective for whatever reason.
Monday night October 30, the U.S. NBC news with Brian Williams was triumphal in its report of the slaughter in Bajaur. NBC’s Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski gave a blow-by-blow rendition of the “deadliest-ever attack against suspected militants.” Miklaszewski said unnamed Pentagon officials told him the initial strike on the school came from a CIA predator drone firing hellfire missiles. About ten minutes later Pakistani helicopters arrived and fired as well. This time frame is corroborated by villagers who report hearing the initial large explosions and then some minutes later hearing the helicopters arrive. (See excerpts from Dawn below.)
The U.S. government later denied the direct involvement of a CIA drone firing missiles although it did admit to giving satellite, drone and other intelligence assistance.
Several articles in Asian newspapers have noted the premeditated nature of the Bajaur mass slaughter. The attack came just weeks before the U.S. elections, where the Bush Republicans trailed the Democrats. The other coldly devious aspect is that later in the day leaders of the people of the Bajaur region were scheduled to meet with representatives of the Pakistan central government to sign a peace deal similar to others signed earlier in nearby regions. The meeting has now been cancelled and the peace deal put in doubt.
History has shown clearly that medieval genocidal practices will not stop without a mass democratic movement that negates this backward trend in U.S.-Anglo-European imperialist culture and politics.
It is reported that following the slaughter, on October 31, an estimated 20,000 tribesmen “crowded into Khar, six miles from the school that was shredded in air strikes on Monday.” Cries of “Down with America” rang out. Speakers vowed, “to go to Afghanistan to oust American and British forces.”
Excerpts from Pakistani Newspaper Dawn, October 30
Eighty-two people were killed, 12 teenagers among them, in an air strike at a religious seminary in Damadola in the Bajaur tribal region on Monday morning. Local residents believe the air strike was carried out by fixed-wing U.S. drones that fired hellfire missiles at the compound, killing all those inside the seminary, including its administrator Maulvi Liaqat Ali. “Pakistani helicopters arrived 20 minutes later and fired rockets at the hillside,” one resident said.
Surprisingly, the strike on Damadola, the second since January, came the day the government was expected to sign a peace agreement with militants in Bajaur replicating the September 5 truce reached with militants in North Waziristan.
Locals in Chenagai, a small hamlet in Damadola, a village some 13km northeast of the regional headquarters, Khaar, said two loud explosions had woken them up at around 5am. One missile hit the compound while the other landed in a nearby stream, they said. The seminary was completely flattened. That was followed by a third strike from a second drone, they said. About 15 minutes later, three helicopter gunships of the Pakistan Army arrived and fired a few rockets that slammed into nearby hills. “Spy planes (drones) have been flying over the area for the last few days,” Akhunzada, a local resident said.
“There were two big explosions. They were so powerful that they shook the earth and rattled our doors and windows,” Sahibzada Haroon Rashid, the Jamaat-i-Islami member in the lower house of parliament, who lives barely a kilometer away from the bombed-out seminary, told Dawn on telephone from Khaar. He said the helicopters arrived at the scene a good 15 minutes later, firing a few rockets before flying back. “I have no doubt in my mind that it was done by the Americans and we are now making a futile attempt to cover it up,” he said. There was no “high-value target” or any foreign militant among those killed, local residents and government officials said.
Shops and markets were closed in the entire Bajaur region as news of the latest bombing spread. Thousands of angry Bajauris turned up at the first funeral for the victims.
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Muslims and the Media
October 26, Tony Seed, editor of Shunpiking Magazine interviewed Sandra L. Smith on the topic of Muslims and the Media. Sandra is the National Leader of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) and editor of the party’s daily newspaper TML Daily.
***
On the question of Muslims and the Media, I want to make several important points. I will stay away from the examples of media disinformation that are prevalent and well known to us all, especially to Muslims who are its victims. Instead, I want to highlight aspects of the modus operandi and underlying premise of this media disinformation.
According to the political theory that informs the European nation-state, many nations have existed since time immemorial but only those nation-states of a European style have history. This European nation-state was brought into being and established in the 19th century on the backs of the peoples of the colonized nations. It was then further imposed on various colonized peoples who were marching towards liberation and independence in the period immediately following the Second World War. The Eurocentric view that only those nations that accept the European nation-state have history was used to justify smashing the striving of the colonized peoples to determine their own way of life. In the 19th and 20th century this Eurocentrism played a dirty role to undermine the ability of the colonized peoples to base their nation-building projects on their own thought material and establish nation-states that served their own interests. Today at a time when European nation-building projects are in profound crisis, their imposition on the peoples fighting for liberation is causing disasters of unprecedented proportions.
History is Memory
Think about this for a moment. History is memory. Memory is intelligence. Thus, only those peoples who accept the European nation-state have intelligence and are worthy to join the international community of nations. Only they are worthy of respect.
If you have no history, you have no intelligence. You are therefore not human. Even though the cultures of the east — itself a Eurocentric geographical rendering — are millennia-old civilizations, unless they submit and form states acceptable to Anglo-American dictate and its ruling elite, and adhere to ways of life agreeable to it, then those states must be eradicated. This is what informs the Anglo-American “war on terror” and media disinformation.
Unless we understand this basic premise and are able to reject it by providing ourselves with a guide to action that favors the interests of the peoples, we remain vulnerable to the demand to prove that various countries are worthy members of what is called the international community of nations. Without such a guide to action, our conviction and beliefs, constantly bombarded with lies and attempts to sow doubt, will be undermined.
Revenge-Seeking Against those Who Will Not Renege on Their Conscience and Beliefs
We have to understand further that what we see today in the “war on terror” is a failure of the nation-building projects of the Anglo-American imperialists and their Zionist offensive to dictate the ways of life of others. Their perseveration in pursuing failed projects seriously hampers the ability of the U.S. imperialist-led forces to achieve world domination. Thus, what we see is their revenge. In desperation, their own morbid preoccupation with defeat makes them rabid and leads them to commit any crime to extinguish the human spirit that defies them. If they are going to come tumbling down, then they are determined to bring everyone else down with them.
There is nothing rational about their policies, behavior and responses. The “war on terror” is not an expression of war as politics through other means. It is revenge-seeking against those who will not renege on their conscience and beliefs. Revenge is the basest emotion and motive. It leads to outright wrecking of all norms of civilized conduct. The fact that revenge in the “war on terror” is backed up by the most powerful states and military machines humankind has ever seen makes it truly dangerous. But if we clearly understand how Anglo-American imperialist disinformation works, and oppose it with nation-building projects of our own, then the peoples can prevail.
A Government’s Duty Is to -Guarantee the Rights of the People and Look After Their Well-Being
We should take a close look at the modus operandi of the institutions of that moribund nation-state given rise to in the nineteenth century. It was meant to protect the way of life of the white men of property who took possession of the lands, resources and markets of others at that time. They imposed a theory of government according to which political parties are primary organizations whose role is to organize the people to vote for one of them. Then, through the election of Members of Parliament, the clear and coherent political will of the people is expressed in the form of party government. A party elected to rule receives a mandate to turn the political will into the legal will. Whether the system of representative democracy was parliamentary or presidential or a mixture of the two, the political theory informing the system is the same.
Political parties were and are to be the gatekeepers of the power of the property owners. The mission of parties was to keep the people themselves from coming to power while the property owners chose which party best represented their interests. The people were to have no role in making the actual decisions guiding the societies upon which they depend for their living and their well-being. Today these political parties have for the most part degenerated into cartels. The rank and file have been deprived of power by a mafia in control of the parties’ affairs. Similar to the polity as a whole, the rank and file have been reduced to a vote bank designed to provide the ruling mafia with a veneer of legitimacy.
The people’s conception of a political party and democracy that promotes a vision of society which favors the people is anathema to this system. The people’s vision of a ruler and government whose duty is to provide the rights of the people with a guarantee and look after their well-being is likewise abhorrent to such a system. When the people’s conception of democracy finds its expression in an election, the imperialists will not accept the verdict.
They spend oodles of money in what they call democracy-building to impose their own conception and bring to power in the oppressed nations, those who will build on the old colonial European model nation-state that submits to foreign interests. This explains why anyone who opposes foreign rule or truly stands for the well-being of the people is labeled a terrorist, why various countries are labeled “rogue states,” “axis of evil,” “dictatorships” and so on. It also explains why the imperialists and their media are so eager to promote sectarian violence between and within political parties or between communities, and why they have their secret services commit terrorist acts and blame the people for them. By imposing a state of civil war, all coherence is lost unless the people build a bulwark against it.
The promotion of sectarian fighting between one religious sect and another, between one nationality and another, between one community and another, between one political party and another is the act of a reactionary state, native or foreign or both. Self-serving explanations that blame the people for sectarian violence hide whose interests this violence serves, who is behind it and its aim.
People’s History, Memory and Vision
The peoples’ history reveals that different communities have come together since time immemorial. They formed nations and provided themselves with public institutions and formed states. They have every interest in doing so on a broader and broader basis in the future as well, until indeed it is possible to conceive that humanity itself will break down all borders and establish itself on an entirely new basis, determined by what is required to affirm human rights under those conditions.
For lack of a future on the old basis, societies die and dying societies degenerate into corruption, crime and violence. In contrast, societies striving to build a future for themselves give rise to those ways and means, forces, and thought material that provide the problems they face with solutions. It is to stop the people from finding solutions to the problems they face that the Anglo-American imperialists are imposing their outdated model of a European nation-state through violence. They, not the people, are behind the sectarian violence of all kinds. Disinformation, whether from the media or any agency of the state is precisely this — the work of secret agencies of the state to wreck the people’s coherence, whether in terms of their ability to think or their capacity to act in a manner that favors them. State terrorism uses its secret services to attack civil targets and then blame the people. Propaganda is spread to sow doubts about the motivation of certain personalities or the truth of events. These methods are used to smash people’s ability to find their bearings and to think rationally.
Thus, the only thing that stands between us and the wrecking taking place, the corruption, crime and violence which have replaced all norms of civilized human conduct, is our own ability to find our bearings by promoting what serves our interests and opposing those of our detractors. We must build our own unity on that basis. This is what we mean by having our own nation-building project. Only we can provide ourselves with a vision on which our societies can move forward.
Opposing Disinformation
The aim of disinformation is to dis the form — to destroy the social, political, cultural, religious and other forms people have established. Those forms include the organized societies and cultures they have given rise to, which permit them to flourish as a people. Those forms, in which our lives and cultures find expression, stand between the imperialists’ dreams of dominating the world and the actual realization of their dark dreams. The imperialists must target the forms and we must defend them. But far from hankering for the past and seeking to re-establish forms that the imperialists have smashed through state attacks, by defending our being we give rise to new forms, better forms. Only thus can we flourish.
Far from apologizing for the peoples’ historical forms and the thought material that lies behind them, we must defend them as the Muslim resistance is doing. And this is also the role of the media to in-form, to provide new content in a form that is coherent and helpful.
We must study and discuss the aim of both information and disinformation and their methods, not for purposes of complaining, as if the gods of plague have an interest in changing their ways, not for purposes of lamenting what has passed away, but to strengthen our own resistance to the wreaking, until we can turn things around and go on the offensive. Then, instead of having to daily establish what we are not, we will be able to proudly proclaim what we are.
Infidels Are Those with No Fidelity to Their Way of Life
Permit me to comment on one of the many lies used to disinform our resistance struggle. According to the imperialist media, Muslims consider all non-Muslims to be infidels and their enemy. In my opinion, this is an outright lie. It can be ascertained a lie because such an interpretation cannot be reconciled with the proud tradition of tolerance established by Islam through the centuries. Conquered peoples were not only permitted but also encouraged to continue their own religions and cultures. This remained the case until such a time when their nation-building projects lost their way for lack of renewed visions.
More important than historical truths however is to consider that this lie is designed to overwhelm the profound thought-material that gave rise to the Mohammedan nation-building project in the first place.
At that time, as tribal warfare was replaced with the need to engage in nation-building, the corruption of a few sought to undermine the coming together as one people. The times faced the call of history to build an authority commensurate with the conditions and the needs of the people under those prevailing conditions. A series of corrupt individuals blocked the call of history. They used their positions to impede the coming together of the people as one people. It was then that Islam defined infidels as people who had no fidelity to their own way of life, be it Islam or any other. Such people had no consciousness of their social responsibilities and thus no conscience or convictions. They were cowards, persons with no fidelity to principle of any kind.
Philosophy in those days served to explain the relations among people and the relations between people and nature. It should do so today as well. Such a philosophy was not one of marauders whereby the truth is what works and the ends justify the means.
The peoples from other cultures, political systems and religions who proudly adhere to their own beliefs and way of life and respect the right of others to do the same are not considered infidels. Today the imperialists are the marauding infidels. And always, once the real infidels fail to achieve their aims through one method, they adapt in order to survive. This is because for them, there is no principle, there is no culture, only their rabid self-serving belief that the end justifies the means.
Thus today, these infidels are adapting. They failed to rally people to their “war on terror” by demonizing those who refuse to submit to their dictate. So now they claim to respect all religions and cultures, while they denounce “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamo-fascism” and communism as hate ideologies and declare that all those who they say espouse these hate ideologies are to be outlawed. In this way, the imperialists are using their state power and institutions to criminalize conscience.
The mental constructs, which they call “Islamic fundamentalism” or “Islamo-fascism” are for purposes of establishing a precedent whereby they can outlaw all Muslim resistance to the Anglo-American imperialist attempt to take over the countries of Asia and Africa and suppress the resistance of all within the heartlands of imperialism as well. Today, any belief that hampers the imperialist cause is attacked under the guise that it is hate ideology. The Anglo-American imperialist agenda today is to criminalize all those who refuse to accept its values, way of life and dictate. They are called fundamentalists, extremists and terrorists.
Unite in Defense of the Rights of All
In my opinion, we are facing ever-greater challenges to speak out in the coming period. But this battle is one the imperialists cannot win. Survival is the activity of the animal kingdom, not of human beings whose ability to cognize, abstract absence, think and plan is not about survival through adaptation. It is about living, growing, flourishing. If someone wants to have fundamentalist beliefs, and another liberal beliefs, it is a matter of conscience. Politicizing belief and making it a matter upon which the state rules, is not acceptable. Only those matters that the public accepts to make public, deliberates on and develops conviction of what is good for the society as a whole, can be made matters of award and punishment. And it is we the people who are the public. It is our deliberation that matters. The media have an important role to inform, lead deliberation and the development of conviction. A starting point would be to accept the world as is, not as we would wish it to be. To accept the conditions as they are is for purposes of changing them. It does not mean we agree with those conditions but that we must base ourselves on what is. In this regard we cannot afford to become overwhelmed by an ideal of what we would like the world to be because we do not agree with how it is. We must pay attention to our direct experience, draw warranted conclusions and provide ourselves with guides to action that unite us in our common cause. We must unite by defending the rights of all.
These are some of the conclusions that I and the TML technical and editorial staff and the journalists who write for TML from the ranks of the fighting workers and people are drawing. We do whatever we can to seek truth from facts by paying utmost attention to the call of history. The imperialist line of end of history is intended to deny memory, which means to deny intelligence so that the peoples cannot unite on the basis of providing the real problems they face with viable solutions that serve humankind. We are determined to march on in the coming year so that together we take the necessary bold step in defense of the rights of all.
(from TML Daily, November 14, 2006, www.cpcml.ca; originally published in Shunpiking Magazine, -November 2006) ww.shunpiking.com.)
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