Month: March 2013

News broke this week that Israeli bus company Afikim began running “Palestinian-only” buses to transport West Bank Palestinian workers into Israel, reportedly because Israeli settlers complained about having to ride the bus with Arabs.

See Mondoweiss for details on how this system of segregated public transportation is hardly new. But things seem to be escalating since the news broke: just hours after the “Palestinian-only” buses started operating, two of them were set on fire by “unknown assailants.”

At The Daily Beast‘s Open Zion blog, Anna Lekas Miller says this is just one small detail in the broader Israeli-apartheid system:

Though many are outraged over the Jim Crow-like segregation, this is only the tip of an apartheid iceberg in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. To begin with, the Palestinians who are being asked to take the segregated buses are the privileged few with permits to work in the state of Israel. Most Palestinians living in the West Bank are not even able to travel to Israel on a segregated bus; their only options are to find work in the West Bank, which can be very difficult, or to sneak in and illegally work in Israel, which is low-paying and can result in arrest and imprisonment if they are caught.

And of course, even that doesn’t cover it. No discussion of Israeli apartheid can be complete without delving into the complex system of checkpoints which riddle what remains of Palestinian territory. As Noam Chomsky wrote in 2009:

The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, nor does the wall, and if intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled definitively. In reality, their major goal is to harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the “matrix of control,” designed to make life unbearable for the “drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle” who seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are “like grasshoppers compared to us” so that their heads can be “smashed against the boulders and walls.” The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered “princes.” And similar attitudes, even if more discretely expressed, shape policies.

That analysis, along with the racist quotations from Israeli officials, rings accurate when one watches this short clip from the 2003 documentary Checkpoint:

I’m reminded as well of the shocking recent survey conducted by the Israeli data firm Dialog, which found that most Israeli Jews would support an explicitly apartheid system if Israel annexes the West Bank.

Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they want preferences for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries. Almost half, 49 percent, want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones; 42 percent don’t want to live in the same building with Arabs and 42 percent don’t want their children in the same classes with Arab children.

About a third of the Jewish public wants a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset 69 percent objects to giving Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

“A sweeping 74 percent majority is in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank,” Haaretz reported. “Almost half – 47 percent – want part of Israel’s Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority and 36 percent support transferring some of the Arab towns from Israel to the PA, in exchange for keeping some of the West Bank settlements.”

Underlying all of this are the ideas articulately expressed by the Israeli settler in this video (click the “cc” button to turn on closed captions):

This system of segregation, oppression, and dispossession of Palestinians is allowed to continue solely because of unconditional US support for it. Period.

US political leaders and media pundits trumpet North Korea’s recent testing of missiles and nuclear weapons as a great threat. But the US mass media do not tell the whole story. Without the context of history and current events, the actions of North Korea look insane, but when put in context we find that the United States is pushing North Korea on this path. North Korea is really not a significant threat compared to what the United States is doing with nuclear weapons, the Asia Pivot and war games off the Korean coast. In this article, we seek greater understanding by putting ourselves in the place of North Korea.

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Historical Context: Korea, a Pawn for Big Power, Brutalized by the United States

The history between Korea and the United States goes back to the late 1800s when the US had completed its manifest destiny across North America and was beginning to build a global empire.  In 1871, more than 700 US marines and sailors landed on Kanghwa beach in west Korea, seeking to begin US colonization (a smaller US invasion occurred in 1866).  They destroyed five forts, inflicting as many as 650 Korean casualties. The US withdrew, realizing it would need a much larger force to succeed, but this was the largest military force to land outside the Americas until the 1898 war in the Philippines. S. Brian Willson reports that this invasion is still discussed in North Korea, but it has been erased from the history in South Korea as well as in the United States.

Korea succumbed to Japanese rule beginning in 1905, often serving as a pawn between Japanese conflicts with China and Russia. This was a brutal occupation. A major revolt for Korean democracy occurred on March 1, 1919, when a declaration of independence was read in Seoul. Two million Koreans participated in 1,500 protests. The Koreans also appealed to major powers meeting in Versailles after World War I, but were ignored as Japan was given control over the East. The Japanese viciously put down the democracy movement. Iggy Kim, in Green Left, reports they “beheaded children, crucified Christians and carried out scores of other atrocities. More than 7,500 people were killed and 16,000 were injured.”

Near the end of World War II, as Japan was weakened, Korean “People’s Committees” formed all over the country and Korean exiles returned from China, the US and Russia to prepare for independence and democratic rule. On September 6, 1945, these disparate forces and representatives of the people’s committees proclaimed a Korean People’s Republic (the KPR) with a progressive agenda of land reform, rent control, an eight-hour work day and minimum wage among its 27-point program.

Continue reading “North Korea and the United States: Will the Real Aggressor Please Stand Down?”

See here for the background of the UK investigations of “terrifying acts of brutality” by British troops in Iraq. We all know the stories from Abu Ghraib. And see here and here for some of the details about US-sanctioned torture that the WikiLeaks cables revealed.

White House Denounces Dennis Rodman

No, seriously, they did. The White House issued a whole statement condemning the Dennis Rodman visit to North Korea, and North Korea for allowing him to visit, insisting “celebrity sporting events” of this kind are unacceptable.

The administration’s position reflects the always sympathetic media’s own stance on Rodman’s visit, putting it somewhere between an outrage and a joke. Only ABC’s George Stephanopoulos even gave the basketball star anything resembling a fair hearing on his visit, and he faced a flurry of criticism for doing so.

Whether they’re more officially outraged at Rodman “propping up” North Korea (as though he was actually capable of doing so) or North Korea for propping up Rodman isn’t even clear, and the reality is that the reaction more reflects on North Korea’s status as faceless “bad guy state” and the discomfort of having anything happen there that isn’t a de facto outrage.

Official condemnation seems little more than a cursory nod at this point, as so eager is the administration to discredit Rodman’s visit, or pretend it never happened that they declined publicly to even debrief him on the matter, unheard of for a rare visit to North Korea

Sports have long played a special role in opening up nations, and if there’s one thing the Obama Administration seems determined to avoid it is an “opening up” of North Korea. How else can one explain that the US reacted with condemnation when North Korea offered to sign a peace deal officially ending the Korean War. It’s been 60 years since the war was really being fought, but US administrations seem more comfortable with keeping the war officially on, seeing a state of peace as an unacceptable “compromise.”

Having Dennis Rodman feted by North Korea’s leader, and worse yet, having him come back speaking of him as a friend undermines the official position of North Korea as a carefully sealed black box from which only vaguely-defined cartoonish bad guys can emerge.

After 60 years one would think the US would at least be resigned to North Korea’s existence, but officials seem stubbornly comfortable in the status quo. Even in 1995, when Japan sought to play a little “sports diplomacy” with North Korea, sending legendary pro wrestlers Antonio Inoki and America’s own “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, the US played no role. Nearly 20 years on, the US government still seems uncomfortable with the prospect of a thaw, and it is only a single basketball player with an unconventional reputation that manages to find time to visit. And he gets denounced for it.

Secretary of State John Kerry stopped off in Saudi Arabia on Monday to stand united in the name of democracy in Syria. The Associated Press called it “a united front,” reporting that Kerry and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal “warned Syrian President Bashar Assad that they will boost support to rebels fighting to oust him unless he steps down.”

You really have to swim through a lot of cognitive dissonance to understand how the secretary of state of the world’s only empire and the foreign minister of the Middle East’s worst dictatorship can stand united on bringing democracy to Syria.

Kerry said he and the Saudi FM “discussed the urgent need to bring an end to the bloody civil war in Syria and to promote peaceful, inclusive transition, and provide the Syrian people with the safety, security, justice, and freedom that they deserve.” He said he wanted to “make clear today that the United States will continue to work with our friends as we did in Rome to empower the Syrian opposition to be able to hopefully bring about a peaceful resolution, but if not, to continue to put pressure on Bashar Assad,” because he has “lost his legitimacy.”

Prince Saud said, “Morally, we have a duty to protect [the Syrian people],” claiming Assad is “diabolical” and “has lost all authority in that country.” He apparently forgot to mention how it is that the Saudi monarch has any legitimate authority in his own country.

The irony of all this was pointed out boldly by renowned Middle East journalist Robert Fisk not long ago. The Obama administration “say they want a democracy in Syria,” Fisk wrote. “But Qatar is an autocracy and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world.”

“Rulers of both states inherit power from their families – just as Bashar has done – and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages,” he added.

So Kerry and Saud are playing chicken with Assad: ‘Step down from power or we’ll increase lethal support to the rebels.’ Put differently, the policy of the United States is to say, unless Assad initiates a “peaceful, inclusive transition” to democracy, we’ll boost support for armed militias of Islamic extremists, none of whom have any legitimacy with the Syrian people or any intention of setting up an inclusive democracy post-Assad.

Also consider the geo-politics of Kerry’s visit to the authoritarian regime in Saudi Arabia. There were two main issues brought up in the press conference: (1) regime change in Syria, and (2) threatening Iran by warning that “time is running out” for a political settlement on their civilian nuclear program.

Kerry’s visit was a perfect example of how the United States lays prostrate at the foot of the Saudi Kingdom. The two issues discussed are really designed to signal to the Saudis that the US will subordinate itself to their interests, which are to undermine the two main Shiite powerhouses in the region, Syria and Iran, for the sake of Sunni-Saudi regional hegemony.

Syria expert Joshua Landis said it quite well in a recent talk: “We defeated Hitler because we denied him oil. And I think that lesson really sunk in in the security establishment. Planning for a third world war after the Second World War was always about denying oil. And that’s why the Persian Gulf is so important. If China were to go on the war path, or anybody else, we could turn it off. So it’s not only [about] guaranteeing the free flow of oil to our friends, but guaranteeing that we have our hand on the spigot, so we can turn it off to our enemies. [That’s] what is driving national interests.”

In anticipation for his book release next month, Vali Nasr is publishing harsh critiques of the Obama administration’s foreign policy (see earlier ones here and here). Nasr was at the State Department in Obama’s first term working on Afghanistan and Pakistan under Richard Holbrooke. His lengthy piece in Foreign Policy is excerpted from his forthcoming book and it confirms what many have speculated about Obama: shallow politics matter most.

The United States failed in Afghanistan, Nasr writes, because Obama made decisions for the sake of partisan politics rather than doing what was right or practical and in America’s interests.

Nasr writes that, “the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans.”

Nasr reveals that “The Taliban were ready for talks as early as April 2009,” but the US military, along with the President’s political hacks, insisted on a troop surge instead of negotiations. “Obama was too skittish to try [negotiating with the Taliban],”  and he “seemed to sense that no one would fault him for taking a tough-guy approach to Pakistan.”

The Taliban had certain demands going into negotiations, Nasr writes, but Washington could have used their willingness to talk to procure a pledge from the Taliban to cut ties with al-Qaeda and deny them operational sanctuary in Afghanistan. This scenario, mind you, would have made the troop surge – and all of the death and suffering that eventually did come of it – utterly moot. But Obama turned down the opportunity, opting instead for a war strategy all of the experts told him would fail.

This narrative is not new. David Rothkopf at Foreign Policy said as much last year, even going so far as to claim Obama himself opposed his own troop surge and didn’t believe in its efficacy. “So why did he do it?” Rothkopf asks. “The answer is that that Obama was leaving Iraq and could not afford to look weak in Afghanistan at the same time or he would come under political attack from the right.”

It’s truly the ultimate mark of the Hope & Change President to impose a war of choice on America and Afghanistan for the sake of his political reputation.

“It was to court public opinion that Obama first embraced the war in Afghanistan,” Nasr writes. “And when public opinion changed, he was quick to declare victory and call the troops back home. His actions from start to finish were guided by politics, and they played well at home.”