You can't make this shit up.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, of course, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his activism against apartheid.
From CBS affiliate WCCO in Minneapolis:
Oct 4, 2007 11:26 am US/Central
Desmond Tutu Not Invited To St. Thomas
St. Paul (AP) ¯ Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu won't be speaking at the University of St. Thomas in April because school officials are worried his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would offend the Jewish community, a school official said.
And an associate professor who pushed for Tutu's visit has been removed as director the university's justice and peace studies program.
The Rev. Dennis Dease, St. Thomas' president, decided not to invite Tutu after talking with his staff, said Doug Hennes, vice president for university and government relations.
"He (Tutu) has been critical of Israel and Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians, so we talked with people in the Jewish community and they said they believed it would be hurtful to the Jewish community, because of things he's said," Hennes said.
Hennes said the university does not believe Tutu is anti-Semitic. But Hennes cited a 2002 speech in which he said Tutu criticized "the Jewish lobby." Hennes also said Jewish groups feel Tutu has compared the Israeli policy toward Palestinians to how Adolf Hitler treated Jews.
Julie Swiler, public affairs director for the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said she told St. Thomas officials that Tutu's remarks were hurtful to Jews. In addition to comparing Jews to Hitler, the speech "questions Jewish faithfulness to God," she said.
In his speech, Tutu said he supported the existence of the state of Israel, but compared the treatment of Palestinians to that of blacks under South African apartheid. He also criticized demolition of Palestinian homes if Israeli authorities suspected a family member was a terrorist.
Tutu said he wasn't criticizing Jewish people, but the Israeli government.
"The apartheid government was very powerful, but we said to them, 'Watch it,"' he said in the speech in Boston. "If you flout laws of this universe, you're going to bite the dust. Hitler was powerful. (Josef) Stalin was powerful. Idi Amin was powerful."
A lie, injustice, oppression, those will never prevail in this world of God," he said.
Marv Davidov, a peace activist and teacher at St. Thomas, was dismayed with the university's decision.
"I am Jewish, and stifling debate and dissent (and) criticism of Israel is a disservice to all Jews, the state of Israel and the American people," he said.
A leader of the international group that was to sponsor the visit also disagreed with the decision.
"This is a tragedy for the entire community of Minneapolis-St. Paul and indeed for the entire state of Minnesota," said Ivan Suvanjieff, president and co-founder of Colorado-based PeaceJam. "Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a towering moral arbiter of our day. He has worked tirelessly on a global basis in the name of human rights and all that is decent."
Mike Klein, who taught at St. Thomas and is a board member of Youththrive, PeaceJam's Upper Midwest affiliate, said the group learned the 75-year-old Tutu was available in April.
"I was quite excited about it, and passed on that news, expecting the same excitement back from the administration," Klein said. "Instead, the response I got was, 'We will have to pass."'
Meanwhile, Cris Toffolo, an associate professor and former director of the university's justice and peace studies program, wrote two memos urging university officials to reconsider their position. She said asked whether the university reached its conclusions based on a Web site that she said misquoted Tutu as linking Israel to Hitler.
Toffolo said she received a letter in August removing her as director of the peace studies program for two reasons: She had kept pressing to invite Tutu, and she should not have sent Tutu a letter using her director's title to tell him what happened.
Hennes confirmed Toffolo had been relieved of the position, but could not disclose the reasons. He said she is still a tenured faculty member.
http://wcco.com/local/desmond.tutu.jewish.2.370693.html
[Scroll to bottom of page for article.]
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
A Racist War
Let's face it, the invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq boils down to one question: "Why are we in Iraq?"
Leaving aside the fact that the U.S. government's answer to this simple question has changed, almost on a monthly basis, let us deal with their current answer to this question: "To help the Eye-rackis. To bring them democracy and to help them build a stable nation."
This same answer is echoed by Fox News and by everyday God-fearing, right-wing people all over the U.S., people who would kindly invite you into their homes for a piece of pie or help you when your car is stranded on the highway.
If that answer is true, however, then the two questions must be asked, "Why do these same God-fearing right-wing people hate Iraqis? Why, if they believe in Christian charity, are there no Christian charities that raise funds to help the millions of injured Iraqis or the millions more whose families are bereft of their chief breadwinner?"
Keep in mind that these aren't simply randomly injured or murdered people, these are people killed by the hand of our own American boys, good Christian boys who defend our country's honour and are willing to die for freedom.
It's dishonest - not just disingenuous; we've long since moved past that stage - to say that American troops' wilful murder, torture, and mutiliation of innocent Iraqi civilians is isolated or the work of "a few bad apples". No, this is systematic, planned, encouraged, and, worst of all, gleeful. Our boys in Eye-rack are glad to rape 14-year-old Iraqi girls, then set them on fire, then murder their parents. It makes them happy. And our good, God-fearing Christian nation does nothing to stop it.
An article in the East Bay Express excerpted in Ted Rall's 9 Oct 2007 column, provides loads of supporting evidence in some gruesome detail.
Here's the link to the full article, and the relevant part excerpted below:
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/
But it isn't just Blackwater. Official U.S. soldiers are no less stupid or vicious or trigger-happy than their private counterparts.
In 2003 U.S. troops manning a checkpoint in Karbala repeatedly fired a 25-millimeter cannon at a Toyota containing 13 people trying to flee the fighting. At least seven people, including five children age five or under, were killed. "You just f---ing killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough," a captain radioed to his platoon leader moments later. Checkpoint shootings of innocent civilians became a daily occurrence, due to rules of engagement that placed more value upon the lives of American troops than those of the Iraqis they were supposedly there to liberate.
Often the "checkpoints" were invisible to Iraqi motorists. American soldiers would hide in buildings near an intersection and fire "warning shots" at the engine blocks of approaching vehicles. Assuming that they were being ambushed by bandits, Iraqi drivers would floor the accelerator. Soldiers then treated them as potential suicide bombers, turning them into Swiss cheese. "Many U.S. officials describe...the military's standard practice of firing at onrushing cars from their checkpoints in Iraq," reports The Washington Post.
"We fired warning shots at everyone," said one soldier. "They would speed up to come at us, and we would shoot them. You couldn't tell who was in the car from where we were. We found that out later. We would just look in and see they were dead and could see there were women inside."
That's what happened to Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari. After obtaining the release of a journalist from insurgents who had held her hostage for one month, Calipari accompanied her to a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. U.S. soldiers opened fire. The warning shot missed the engine block. Calipari died; the reporter was wounded. Though their Iraqi driver insists that he was driving their Toyota Corolla (memo to travelers to Iraq: consider a Honda) under 25 miles per hour, the Pentagon said he was "speeding."
A lot of professional U.S. soldiers have screamed their contempt for Iraqis since the beginning of the war. "For almost a year," reported the East Bay Express in 2005, "American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to [a pornographic website]. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography."
If you've just eaten, stop reading now.
The Express describes the photos: "A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as U.S. Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet."
There's more.
"[A] person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, 'What every Iraqi should look like.' One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection 'DIE HAJI [a racist slur for Iraqis used by U.S. soldiers] DIE.'"
Google the Express story. It gets even uglier.
Blackwater's hired goons are exempt from prosecution. So, apparently, are real soldiers. Atrocity after atrocity goes unpunished or rewarded with a slap on the wrist.
Specialist Jorge Sandoval, 22, was acquitted of murdering two Iraqis, one on April 27, the other on May 11 near Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad. However, a military court-martial found him guilty of planting detonation wire on the first victim to make him look like an insurgent. If he was innocent, why did he try to cover up the shooting?
Specialist James Barker, 23, of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, admitted that he held down a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in 2005 while another soldier raped her, then shot her several times in her Mahmudiya home. He dowsed her with kerosene and set her on fire. According to CNN, "he was not sure if he penetrated the girl, because he was having trouble getting an erection." He and five fellow soldiers also murdered her parents and her 7-year-old sister. Thanks to a plea bargain, said The New York Times, "he could be released on parole in 20 years."
The same crime committed in the U.S. would earn life in prison, or the death penalty.
A Marine Staff Sergeant charged in the massacre of 24 people in Haditha, The New York Times reports, will not face murder charges because investigating civilian deaths isn't a military priority. "Prosecuting the Haditha case has posed special challenges because the killings were not comprehensively investigated when they first occurred," says the Times. "Months later, when details came to light, there were no bodies to examine and no Iraqi witnesses to test."
The 2005 Express piece contains this tragicomic gem: "[Disrespect for Iraqi deaths] could become an international public-relations catastrophe." Internationally, the "war porn" scandal was merely one of a string of stories that confirmed our reputation as brutal neocolonialists. Here in the United States, however, "supporting the troops" means turning a blind eye to their actions--or blaming them on private contractors.
(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)
Leaving aside the fact that the U.S. government's answer to this simple question has changed, almost on a monthly basis, let us deal with their current answer to this question: "To help the Eye-rackis. To bring them democracy and to help them build a stable nation."
This same answer is echoed by Fox News and by everyday God-fearing, right-wing people all over the U.S., people who would kindly invite you into their homes for a piece of pie or help you when your car is stranded on the highway.
If that answer is true, however, then the two questions must be asked, "Why do these same God-fearing right-wing people hate Iraqis? Why, if they believe in Christian charity, are there no Christian charities that raise funds to help the millions of injured Iraqis or the millions more whose families are bereft of their chief breadwinner?"
Keep in mind that these aren't simply randomly injured or murdered people, these are people killed by the hand of our own American boys, good Christian boys who defend our country's honour and are willing to die for freedom.
It's dishonest - not just disingenuous; we've long since moved past that stage - to say that American troops' wilful murder, torture, and mutiliation of innocent Iraqi civilians is isolated or the work of "a few bad apples". No, this is systematic, planned, encouraged, and, worst of all, gleeful. Our boys in Eye-rack are glad to rape 14-year-old Iraqi girls, then set them on fire, then murder their parents. It makes them happy. And our good, God-fearing Christian nation does nothing to stop it.
An article in the East Bay Express excerpted in Ted Rall's 9 Oct 2007 column, provides loads of supporting evidence in some gruesome detail.
Here's the link to the full article, and the relevant part excerpted below:
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/
But it isn't just Blackwater. Official U.S. soldiers are no less stupid or vicious or trigger-happy than their private counterparts.
In 2003 U.S. troops manning a checkpoint in Karbala repeatedly fired a 25-millimeter cannon at a Toyota containing 13 people trying to flee the fighting. At least seven people, including five children age five or under, were killed. "You just f---ing killed a family because you didn't fire a warning shot soon enough," a captain radioed to his platoon leader moments later. Checkpoint shootings of innocent civilians became a daily occurrence, due to rules of engagement that placed more value upon the lives of American troops than those of the Iraqis they were supposedly there to liberate.
Often the "checkpoints" were invisible to Iraqi motorists. American soldiers would hide in buildings near an intersection and fire "warning shots" at the engine blocks of approaching vehicles. Assuming that they were being ambushed by bandits, Iraqi drivers would floor the accelerator. Soldiers then treated them as potential suicide bombers, turning them into Swiss cheese. "Many U.S. officials describe...the military's standard practice of firing at onrushing cars from their checkpoints in Iraq," reports The Washington Post.
"We fired warning shots at everyone," said one soldier. "They would speed up to come at us, and we would shoot them. You couldn't tell who was in the car from where we were. We found that out later. We would just look in and see they were dead and could see there were women inside."
That's what happened to Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari. After obtaining the release of a journalist from insurgents who had held her hostage for one month, Calipari accompanied her to a checkpoint near the Baghdad airport. U.S. soldiers opened fire. The warning shot missed the engine block. Calipari died; the reporter was wounded. Though their Iraqi driver insists that he was driving their Toyota Corolla (memo to travelers to Iraq: consider a Honda) under 25 miles per hour, the Pentagon said he was "speeding."
A lot of professional U.S. soldiers have screamed their contempt for Iraqis since the beginning of the war. "For almost a year," reported the East Bay Express in 2005, "American soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan have been taking photographs of dead bodies, many of them horribly mutilated or blown to pieces, and sending them to [a pornographic website]. American soldiers have been using the pictures of disfigured Iraqi corpses as currency to buy pornography."
If you've just eaten, stop reading now.
The Express describes the photos: "A man in a leather coat who apparently tried to run a military checkpoint lies slumped in the driver's seat of a car, his head obliterated by gunfire, the flaps of skin from his neck blooming open like rose petals. Six men in beige fatigues, identified as U.S. Marines, laugh and smile for the camera while pointing at a burned, charcoal-black corpse lying at their feet."
There's more.
"[A] person who posted a picture of a corpse lying in a pool of his own brains and entrails wrote, 'What every Iraqi should look like.' One person posted three photographs of corpses lying in the street and titled his collection 'DIE HAJI [a racist slur for Iraqis used by U.S. soldiers] DIE.'"
Google the Express story. It gets even uglier.
Blackwater's hired goons are exempt from prosecution. So, apparently, are real soldiers. Atrocity after atrocity goes unpunished or rewarded with a slap on the wrist.
Specialist Jorge Sandoval, 22, was acquitted of murdering two Iraqis, one on April 27, the other on May 11 near Iskandariyah, south of Baghdad. However, a military court-martial found him guilty of planting detonation wire on the first victim to make him look like an insurgent. If he was innocent, why did he try to cover up the shooting?
Specialist James Barker, 23, of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, admitted that he held down a 14-year-old Iraqi girl in 2005 while another soldier raped her, then shot her several times in her Mahmudiya home. He dowsed her with kerosene and set her on fire. According to CNN, "he was not sure if he penetrated the girl, because he was having trouble getting an erection." He and five fellow soldiers also murdered her parents and her 7-year-old sister. Thanks to a plea bargain, said The New York Times, "he could be released on parole in 20 years."
The same crime committed in the U.S. would earn life in prison, or the death penalty.
A Marine Staff Sergeant charged in the massacre of 24 people in Haditha, The New York Times reports, will not face murder charges because investigating civilian deaths isn't a military priority. "Prosecuting the Haditha case has posed special challenges because the killings were not comprehensively investigated when they first occurred," says the Times. "Months later, when details came to light, there were no bodies to examine and no Iraqi witnesses to test."
The 2005 Express piece contains this tragicomic gem: "[Disrespect for Iraqi deaths] could become an international public-relations catastrophe." Internationally, the "war porn" scandal was merely one of a string of stories that confirmed our reputation as brutal neocolonialists. Here in the United States, however, "supporting the troops" means turning a blind eye to their actions--or blaming them on private contractors.
(Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.)
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Seinfeld in the Arab World
Last week I visited Dubai for a few days - and I confess, it was a relief to be out of Africa and to have running water - and literally the first thing I saw when I switched on the television was (drumroll, please)... Seinfeld!
Yup, contrary to the assertions made on Bill Maher's show [see my blog post dated 10 July 2007], Seinfeld is popular in the Arab world. Speaking to a few Arabs from countries other than the UAE reveals that Seinfeld is popular in syndication in Egypt, Lebanon, and even terrorist-0riented Syria.
So it seems, Bill, that even evildoers who obsess over obliterating Israel are fond of following the exploits of "a few neurotic New York Jews", (the words of Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza on the show).
Yup, contrary to the assertions made on Bill Maher's show [see my blog post dated 10 July 2007], Seinfeld is popular in the Arab world. Speaking to a few Arabs from countries other than the UAE reveals that Seinfeld is popular in syndication in Egypt, Lebanon, and even terrorist-0riented Syria.
So it seems, Bill, that even evildoers who obsess over obliterating Israel are fond of following the exploits of "a few neurotic New York Jews", (the words of Jason Alexander, who played George Costanza on the show).
Starvation in Palestine
If you had any doubts as to the deliberate aim and effects of the Israeli occupation, look no further than this article from the LA Times [see below].
The Israelis have imposed a "carefully managed" starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza, in the words of the UN.
The Israeli government, for its part, laughs at its starvation policy as a case of "put[ting] the Palestinians on a diet."
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi22sep22,0,2737657.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
Full text below. Saree Makdisi is a UCLA professor and nephew of the late Edward Said.
=====BEGIN ARTICLE====
The war on Gaza's children
Israel's sanctions are leaving a generation of Palestinian children poorly educated and hungry.
By Saree Makdisi September 22, 2007
An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they cannot concentrate -- or, even if they can, because they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.
Even before Israel this week declared Gaza "hostile territory" -- apparently in preparation for cutting off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity to 1.5 million men, women and children -- the situation was dire.
As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it, "they are liable to starve."
An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza's fishermen.
Los Angeles parents who have spent the last few weeks running from one back-to-school sale to another could do worse than to spare a few minutes to think about their counterparts in the Gaza Strip. As a result of the siege, Gaza is not only short of raw textiles and other key goods but also paper, ink and vital school supplies. One-third of Gaza's children started the school year missing necessary textbooks. John Ging, the Gaza director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, whose schools take care of 200,000 children in Gaza, has warned that children come to school "hungry and unable to concentrate."
Israel says that its policies in Gaza are designed to put pressure on the Palestinian population to in turn put pressure on those who fire crude home-made rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot. Those rocket attacks are wrong. But it is also wrong to punish an entire population for the actions of a few -- actions that the schoolchildren of Gaza and their beleagueredparents are in any case powerless to stop.
It is a violation of international law to collectively punish more than a million people for something they did not do. According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.
Instead, it has shrugged off the law. It has ignored the repeated demands of the U.N. Security Council. It has dismissed the International Court of Justice in the Hague. What John Dugard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, refers to as the "carefully managed" strangulation of Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly part of its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger."
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA and the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," forthcoming from Norton.
The Israelis have imposed a "carefully managed" starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza, in the words of the UN.
The Israeli government, for its part, laughs at its starvation policy as a case of "put[ting] the Palestinians on a diet."
Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-makdisi22sep22,0,2737657.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail
Full text below. Saree Makdisi is a UCLA professor and nephew of the late Edward Said.
=====BEGIN ARTICLE====
The war on Gaza's children
Israel's sanctions are leaving a generation of Palestinian children poorly educated and hungry.
By Saree Makdisi September 22, 2007
An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they cannot concentrate -- or, even if they can, because they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.
Even before Israel this week declared Gaza "hostile territory" -- apparently in preparation for cutting off the last remaining supplies of fuel and electricity to 1.5 million men, women and children -- the situation was dire.
As a result of Israel's blockade on most imports and exports and other policies designed to punish the populace, about 70% of Gaza's workforce is now unemployed or without pay, according to the United Nations, and about 80% of its residents live in grinding poverty. About 1.2 million of them are now dependent for their day-to-day survival on food handouts from U.N. or international agencies, without which, as the World Food Program's Kirstie Campbell put it, "they are liable to starve."
An increasing number of Palestinian families in Gaza are unable to offer their children more than one meager meal a day, often little more than rice and boiled lentils. Fresh fruit and vegetables are beyond the reach of many families. Meat and chicken are impossibly expensive. Gaza faces the rich waters of the Mediterranean, but fish is unavailable in its markets because the Israeli navy has curtailed the movements of Gaza's fishermen.
Los Angeles parents who have spent the last few weeks running from one back-to-school sale to another could do worse than to spare a few minutes to think about their counterparts in the Gaza Strip. As a result of the siege, Gaza is not only short of raw textiles and other key goods but also paper, ink and vital school supplies. One-third of Gaza's children started the school year missing necessary textbooks. John Ging, the Gaza director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, whose schools take care of 200,000 children in Gaza, has warned that children come to school "hungry and unable to concentrate."
Israel says that its policies in Gaza are designed to put pressure on the Palestinian population to in turn put pressure on those who fire crude home-made rockets from Gaza into the Israeli town of Sderot. Those rocket attacks are wrong. But it is also wrong to punish an entire population for the actions of a few -- actions that the schoolchildren of Gaza and their beleagueredparents are in any case powerless to stop.
It is a violation of international law to collectively punish more than a million people for something they did not do. According to the Geneva Convention, to which it is a signatory, Israel actually has the obligation to ensure the well-being of the people on whom it has chosen to impose a military occupation for more than four decades.
Instead, it has shrugged off the law. It has ignored the repeated demands of the U.N. Security Council. It has dismissed the International Court of Justice in the Hague. What John Dugard, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, refers to as the "carefully managed" strangulation of Gaza -- in full view of an uncaring world -- is explicitly part of its strategy. "The idea," said Dov Weisglass, an Israeli government advisor, "is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger."
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English literature at UCLA and the author of "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation," forthcoming from Norton.
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