Month: November 2012

Israel has again attacked Gaza. In its aerial and ground assault that began on Saturday, November 10th, at least 7 Palestinians have been killed, 5 of them civilians, 3 of whom were children. Up to 52 others, including 6 women and 12 children, have been wounded.

As in every vicious military offensive Israel carries out in Gaza, the dominant narrative is that it is a response to rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. This is how it’s being reported in the US, and this is how virtually every American understands it.

And it’s a lie.

It’s true that on Saturday, prior to the expanded Israeli bombardment, the military wing of the Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine shot an anti-tank missile at an Israeli Defense Forces vehicle near the Gaza border, wounding four Israeli soldiers. But what prompted the firing of the anti-tank missile?

First, on Monday, November 5th, Israeli forces shot and killed 23 year old Ahmad Nabhani when he “approached the border fence with Israel.” According to at least one account, Nabhani was mentally challenged.

Then, on Thursday, November 8th, the Israeli Occupation Forces – eight tanks and four bulldozers, to be exact – invaded southern Gaza, shooting and killing a 13-year old boy. Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (via):

According to investigations conducted by PCHR, at approximately 16:30 on Thursday, as a result of the indiscriminate shooting by IOF military vehicles that had moved into the ‘Abassan village, 13-year-old Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa was seriously wounded by a bullet to the abdomen. At the time he was shot, Ahmed had been playing football with his friends in front of his family’s house, located nearly 1,200 meters away from the area where the IOF were present.

So, even if honest observers brush to the side the cruel and inhumane Israeli blockade on Gaza and refuse to let it influence the equation of exactly which side started this flare up of violence, it is clear Israel started this latest clash. And in response to the response, Israel has waged a harsh, disproportionate military assault.

This would be a simple thing to understand if, for example, Western media bothered to ask the other side what happened. Palestinian news media immediately reported that the anti-tank missile Israel was supposedly responding to was admitted to by the Popular Resistance Committees, who described it as “revenge” for preceding Israeli violence on Gaza. But that basic task of honest journalism is apparently out of the question.

Every single Israeli incursion or attack on Gaza is accompanied by the same narrative: Israel fairly responded to unprovoked Palestinian rocket fire. The last major war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead in December ’08-January ’09, also carried this narrative. Israel committed war crimes in that one-sided conflict, targeting and killing hundreds of civilians, using indiscriminate weapons, and intentionally destroying civilian infrastructure. It has become an accepted fact – even among critics of Israel – that the offensive was a response to Hamas rocket fire. The rocket fire did indeed occur immediately before the assault, but it was in response to Israel’s breaking of the six-month cease-fire, which even Israeli officials in WikiLeaks cables admitted Hamas had kept to.

“Two weeks after American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone in Yemen his sixteen year old son Abdulrahman was also killed, according to Obama adviser Robert Gibbs, because “he should have a far more responsible father.”   –Kill Lists Will Continue by Philip Giraldi — Antiwar.com

The US already spends more on its “intelligence budget” than almost any nation spends on their entire military. Umpteen spy agencies track terrorists, dissidents, money launderers, and spy on virtually every nation on the planet. What was originally a pretty limited mission of counter-espionage has spread into a terrifying leviathan. Like a large-tusked elephant or a giant rhino with a big horn.

It makes some sort of sick sense then, at least to somebody, that the US intelligence community is now throwing entire teams at “wildlife poaching” in third world countries, terming the dealers in ivory and rhino horns an honest to god threat to national security, on extremely shaky grounds.

Poachers have weapons that could theoretically be dangerous to people, but it was ever thus, and poachers motivated by the profit on the illegal ivory trade probably picked that over straight-forward burglary in the first place because the locals don’t have much to take. The poor are easy targets, to be sure, but in nations where they are at subsistence levels, burgling the rhino is probably the more economical choice.

Beyond that, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argues that the places poachers sell banned goods could also be used to sell banned drugs. Of course the exact opposite case could be made as well, and if the myriad US chemical prohibitions hadn’t created massive black markets for a zillion plants and pills there wouldn’t be ready-made conduits for poachers to use.

It seems extremely disingenuous to point the finger at the wildlife poaching and its sale on the black market, estimated at a few hundred million dollars a year, as the prime motivator for those markets, when the Afghan opium trade reaches into the billions of dollars annually and the Mexican smuggling operations are estimated at $35-$45 billion a year.

The failed drug war and the juicy profits it created are why there’s an enormous global black market thriving, and no matter how irked governments are by a black market, throwing what will undoubtedly be many millions of dollars at tracking poachers is obviously not going to have any measurable effect.

JEREMY SCAHILL: …you were one of only half-a-dozen members of Congress — not a single senator — to simply state on the record that American citizens have the right not to be assassinated by their own government without due process.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: …it’s amazing that we’re in an America where we have to defend the rights of Americans to be free from assassination by their own country… How long is it before some local police department uses a drone to intercept and kill a suspect, and when that becomes commonplace? –Jeremy Scahill and Dennis Kucinich: In Obama’s 2nd Term, Will Dems Challenge U.S. Drones, Killings?

Mr. Kucinich submitted a bill to Congress guaranteeing Americans couldn’t be assassinated by Uncle Sam without due process a year before the drone assassination of American imam Anwar al-Awlaki — and 2 weeks later, his 16 yr-old American son because, as Obama front-man Robert Gibbs put it, “he should have a far more responsible father.”  Only six of “our” 535 public servants in Congress would support it.  529 of them apparently thought that assassinating the folks they are supposed to protect and serve — and who elect and pay them — is just fine.

So one of the things that can happen here is your assassination by Uncle Sam — and coming soon perhaps, by your local cop-shop.

Via Electronic Intifada:

This is an area of intense Israeli settlement activity, where some villages, such as Susya, have been ordered totally destroyed by the occupation forces.

Video shot by Operation Dove (website) shows bulldozers, accompanied by Israeli occupation forces, carrying out demolitions of a two storey home belonging to Mohammad Musa Mohammad Abu Aram, and a rainwater cistern belonging to Mahmud Ahmed Nasser Nawaja, as distraught villagers watched.

…Israel had demolished 476 Palestinian owned structures in the occupied West Bank in 2012, as of September’s monthly report from UN OCHA.

In 2011, according to the UN, over 1,100 Palestinians, half of them children, were displaced by Israeli demolitions, an increase of 80 percent on the previous year.

In so-called “Area C,” 60 percent of the West Bank under full Israeli rule with no role for the Palestinian Authority, there were some 3,000 outstanding demolition orders, 18 targeting schools, as of July 2011.