Saturday, June 07, 2008
Interview with Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky
On the Future of Israel and Palestine
Counterpunch
Barat: Thanks for accepting this interview. Firstly I would like to ask if you are working on something at the moment that you would like to let us know about?
Ilan Pappé: I am completing several books. The first is a concise history of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the other is on the Palestinian minority in Israel and one on the Arab Jews. I am completing an edited volume comparing the South Africa situation to that of Palestine
Noam Chomsky: The usual range of articles, talks, etc. No time for major projects right now.
Barat: A British M.P recently said that he had felt a change in the last 5 years regarding Israel. British M.Ps nowadays sign E.D.M (Early Day Motions) condemning Israel in bigger number than ever before and he told us that it was now easier to express criticism towards Israel even when talking on U.S campuses.
Also, in the last few weeks, John Dugard, independent investigator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the U.N Human Right Council said that "Palestinian terror 'inevitable' result of occupation", the European parliament adopted a resolution saying that "policy of isolation of the Gaza strip has failed at both the political and humanitarian level" and the U.N and the E.U have condemned Israel use of excessive and disproportionate force in the Gaza strip.
Could we interpret that as a general shift in attitude towards Israel?
Ilan Pappé: The two examples indicate a significant shift in public opinion and in the civil society. However, the problem remained what it had been in the last sixty years: these impulses and energies are not translated, and are not likely to be translated in the near future, into actual policies on the ground. And thus the only way of enhancing this transition from support from below to actual policies is by developing the idea of sanctions and boycott. This can give a clear orientation and direction to the many individuals and ngos that have shown for years solidarity with the Palestine cause.
Noam Chomsky: There has been a very clear shift in recent years. On US campuses and with general audiences as well. It was not long ago that police protection was a standard feature of talks at all critical of Israeli policies, meetings were broken up, audiences very hostile and abusive. By now it is sharply different, with scattered exceptions. Apologists for Israeli violence now tend often to be defensive and desperate, rather than arrogant and overbearing. But the critique of Israeli actions is thin, because the basic facts are systematically suppressed. That is particularly true of the decisive US role in barring diplomatic options, undermining democracy, and supporting Israel's systematic program of undermining the possibility for an eventual political settlement. But portrayal of the US as an "honest broker," somehow unable to pursue its benign objectives, is characteristic, not only in this domain.
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Gabriel Mathew Schivone
Monthly Review
May 2008
Gabriel Matthew Schivone: In a recent interview, Abdel Bari Atwan, author and editor of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Quds Al Arabi, said that President Bush is not ending terrorism nor is he weakening it, as he claims in one of his strongest assertions with regard to his so-called “War on Terror.” Rather al-Qaeda now has powerfully developed into more of an ideology than an organization. As Atwan describes it, al-Qaeda is expanding like Kentucky Fried Chicken, opening franchises all over the world. “That’s the problem,” he says. “The Americans are no safer. Their country is a fortress now, the United States of Security.” Is this accurate?
Noam Chomsky: Except for the last sentence, it’s accurate. There’s good reason to think that the United States is very vulnerable to terrorist attacks. That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of U.S. intelligence, of specialists of nuclear terror like Harvard professor Graham Allison, and former defense secretary Robert McNamara and others, who have warned that the probability of even a nuclear attack in the United States is not trivial. So, it’s not a fortress.
One of the things that Bush hasn’t been doing is improving security. So, for example, if you look at the government commission after 9/11, one of its recommendations—which is a natural one—is to improve security of the U.S.–Canadian border. I mean, if you look at that border, it’s very porous. You or I could walk across it somewhere with a suitcase holding components of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration did not follow that recommendation. What it did instead was fortify the Mexican border, which was not regarded as a serious source of potential terrorism. They in fact slowed the rate of growth of border guards on the Canadian border.
But quite apart from that, the major part of Atwan’s comment is quite correct. Bush administration programs have not been designed to reduce terror. In fact, they’ve been designed in a way—as was anticipated by intelligence analysts and others—to increase terror.
The World Food Crisis Sources and Solutions
Monthly Review
May 2008
An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.
'Routine' Hunger before the Current Crisis
Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition (Associated Press, February 18, 2007).
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Review: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Of all the illegal and dishonest misadventures that the Bush administration got away with, the least criticized of all might be the 2004 overthrow of Haiti's democratically- elected government.
Peter Hallward's new book is a welcome corrective to the false impressions and historical amnesia about Haiti afflicting most of the English-speaking world. Jonathan Kozol called it, "A brilliant politically sophisticated and morally infuriating work on a shameful piece of very recent history that the U.S. press has either distorted or ignored. The most important and devastating book I've read on American betrayal of democracy in one of the most tormented nations in the world."
Hallward, a UK-based philosophy professor, was teaching a course in 2003, which involved daily reading of Le Monde and other newspapers when he noted a systematic demon-ization of President Aristide and his Lavalas movement. He subsequently wrote one of the best articles about the 2004 coup ("Option Zero in Haiti," New Left Review 27, May-June 2004) shortly after it happened. Ever since, he seems to have been collecting information for a bill of indictment against the U.S., France, and Canada, the coup's principle backers. In the process he has also put together a damning critique of liberals and self-described radicals who either through intellectual laziness or lack of cross-class solidarity accepted Bush-approved PR on Haiti.
In his research, Hallward used mostly public sources. He appears to have read everything written about Haiti in the past ten years, as well as much earlier work. Interviews with principles—ranging from Aristide to several key coup players, and both pro- and anti-Aristide figures—buttress his scholarship. Hallward puts the country's recent violence in the context of 200 years of "great power" hostility toward Haitian sovereignty, beginning with the 1804 revolution, the only successful slave revolt in world history.
Hallward excels at showing the means by which Haiti's ultra-rich minority worked hand in glove with right-wingers in Washington and Paris to create a case for "regime change." After the first U.S.-backed coup against Aristide in 1991, when public opinion in the U.S. was still largely sympathetic to Lavalas, Hallward notes, "Jesse Helms spoke for much of the US political establishment when on 20 October 1993 he denounced Aristide as a ‘psychopath and grave human rights abuser.'" But "neither Helms nor anyone else could pin a single political killing on the 1991 [Aristide] administration. In the run up to the second coup, incomparably more insistent versions of the same charge would resurface at every turn."
Monday, June 02, 2008
Biofuel Land Demand Puts Peasants at Risk: Report
ROME - The rise of biofuels is not only adding to the global food price crisis but also poses a risk for peasants, pushed off their land to make way for energy crops, a report prepared for this week’s food summit said.
The use of food such as maize, palm oil and sugar to produce fuel has been blamed in part for record high commodity prices which are driving millions of people into hunger, and will be a key issue discussed by world leaders at the Rome summit.
Condemned as a “crime against humanity” last year by the then U.N. food rapporteur, Jean Ziegler, critics of biofuels say they divert nutrition away from mouths and into fuel tanks and compete for land that should be used to grow food.
Both the United States and the European Union have policies promoting the use of biofuels as alternatives as a way to reduce reliance on crude oil.
The report, published on Monday by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that hosts the three-day summit from Tuesday, flagged up several social and environmental risks of biofuels, but said they were not the main cause of the food crisis.
“Recent hikes in world food prices have not been caused primarily by biofuels,” it said, listing the main reasons for the price hikes as poor harvests, low stocks and rising demand in Asia for food and fodder.
Co-written by the FAO and the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development and (IIED), the report, “Fuelling exclusion? The biofuels boom and poor people’s access to land”, said the biofuels boom was a major threat to millions of peasants.
Mentioned Report
High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy
Iraq Death Toll ‘Above Highest Estimates’
by Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail
BAQUBA - The real number of the dead is far higher than even the highest declared in death tolls, many Iraqis say.
A study by doctors from the Johns Hopkins School of Health in conjunction with Iraqi doctors from al-Mustanceriya University in Baghdad, published in the British medical journal The Lancet in October 2006, estimated the number of excess deaths as a result of the occupation at above 655,000.
Just Foreign Policy, an independent organisation “dedicated to reforming U.S. foreign policy” offered an updated total of 1,213,716 at the time of this writing.
On Sep. 14, 2007, Opinion Research Business (ORB), an independent polling agency located in London, produced a figure of 1,220,580 deaths as a result of the invasion.
These estimates are above any official figures from Iraq, but they do consider the reported official figures.
Iraqis believe that the authorities are hiding these figures. “The U.S. military benefits from hiding the real totals,” said a political analyst who declined to give his name because of the atmosphere of fear within Iraq. “And the Iraqi government is a puppet of the Americans, so their figures are ridiculously low as well.”
Sunday, June 01, 2008
The New Smear Against Chávez
Source: Socialist Worker
WASHINGTON AND its faithful lackeys in the media have launched a new offensive against Hugo Chávez and the government of Venezuela. The recent "discovery" of a laptop computer that allegedly belonged to the FARC guerrilla group has ignited another media-generated scandal, creating a whole new round of accusations against the Chávez government, but without any evidence to support them.
Those who have followed events in Venezuela in recent years shouldn't be surprised by this. Every few months, a new controversy is ignited by the media regarding Venezuela's socialist president, Hugo Chávez; each time with plenty of distortions, baseless accusations and outright falsehoods.
Late last year, the media "show" centered on a proposed reform to the Venezuelan constitution. The mainstream media repeated endlessly that the constitutional reform would make Chávez "president for life" and would "turn Venezuela into a dictatorship."
In reality, the reform simply proposed the removal of presidential term limits--something that has also been in the works in neighboring Colombia, where it has gotten absolutely zero criticism from the mainstream media. The reason? Colombian President Alvaro Uribe is Washington's closest ally in the region.
Additional Links
Colombia: More Doubts on Interpol’s Laptop Findings
The War Machine: Or How to Manipulate Reality
Interol's Forensic Report on FARC Computers and Hardware Seized by Columbia
