On this 64th anniversary of the Nakba we mourn the ethnic cleansing that began in 1948 and that continues today with silent transfer, home demolitions, land confiscation and more.
But we also celebrate an amazing resilience and success of the Palestinian endogenous people against incredible odds:

-We just celebrated the success of a hunger strike by over 1600 political prisoners despite attempts to stifle the story in Zionist dominated Western media. They succeeded in achieving a part of their basic rights including receiving family visits and ending solitary confinement.

-We are 11.5 million people and while most of us are refugees and displaced people, we remain steadfast and hopeful and connected. Thanks to persistence and now the internet and modern communications, even the feeble attempts to isolate us from each other failed. Thousands of Palestinians still go to their main city of Jerusalem without Israeli permission. Thousands connect across the Green line to the areas occupied since 1948.

-We are still the most educated people in the Middle East with the highest per capita of postgraduates.

-We now have 12 universities inside the occupied Palestinan territories. On Saturday we held the second biomedical research symposium in Bethlehem showing scientific work rivaling that done in countries with a strong tradition of research. This is miraculous considering the conditions under occupation.

-We are still the people who helped develop the Arab world and even remind it of its unity and common destiny. But more than that, our resistance shielded fellow Arabs from the original plans of Zionists for an empire from the Nile to the Euphrates. We are still the main obstacle to the victory of the racist Zionist project.

-We have an amazing history of 130 years of struggle against the most well-financed, most-organized, most-supported (by Zionists and their Western backers) colonial project in human history.

- We have the fastest growing boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement in anti-colonial struggles. In less than 7 years we accomplished far more than what was accomplished with BDS in any other place (including in 25 years in South Africa).

-Palestine is still the place where people of different religions lived together in the same neighborhod unsegregated until European Zionists came and recreated ghettos for Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) and one large ghetto for Jews called Israel coexist in harmony. Church bells and the call of the Muezzin to prayer still penetrate deep in our souls despite all the Zionist attempts to silence them (e.g. the ethnic cleansing and destruction of 530 villages and towns).

- We educate our children that racism and notions of choseness are wrong and they grow to believe that we can still have the new Palestine that will be like our old Palestine: multiethnic, multireligious, multicultural and beautiful.

- Palestinians inspired activists around the world. Polls show great sympathy for our cause among average people. Palestine is now cause celebre among those struggling against oppression. Even Nelson Mandela said that South Africa will not be fully free until Palestine is free. According to polls, a majority in Western Europe correctly view Israel and the US as the two greatest threats to world peace. Thousands of internationals joined us in the struggle locally. Israel has become so paranoid about any solidarity visits and in the process exposed its apartheid racist nature.

We are grateful to be participants in shaping a better future for all. I am 100% sure that our Nakba will end, refugees will return, freedom and equality will happen, and Israelis will also be liberated from being oppressors and colonizers and become integrated into the fabric of the new and better Palestine. We can then become a “light unto the peoples.”

By:Mazin Qumsiyeh,Popular Resistance.

Israel turns 64 on May 14th. But it only seems to have made it to today thanks to unconditional life support from the US, UK, EU and powerful global Zionist lobbies.

­“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four…?” memorable words sung by Paul McCartney and John Lennon in the late sixties. If Israel’s founders had asked Western Powers that question back in 1948, the answer – then and now – would be a powerful and resounding “YES!”

In those days, Britain governed the Palestine Mandate and had become increasingly wary of Zionist extremism there. The terror bombing of the King David Hotel housing the British Military Government headquarters in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, which killed almost 100 people, may have been the straw that finally broke the British Camel’s back. It was carried out by the Zionist terror group “Irgun Zvai Leumi” under Menachem Begin, later to become one of Israel’s prime ministers and a Nobel “Peace” laureate.

So, as the end of Britain’s Mandate over Palestine set for May 1948 neared, London eagerly prepared to withdraw, and just one day before that – on May 14, 1948 – Zionist leaders unilaterally created the State of Israel.

War immediately broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Since then, four major wars and countless smaller ones have pitted Israel against various combinations of Arab states. But Israel survived.

Indeed, generously fed by the West, Israel always survives. Militarily, today Israel stands stronger than ever; and yet, it has grown weaker in global popular support, even amongst Jews.

Reminiscing on Israel’s creation, president Shimon Peres was quoted in The New York Times on April 25 as saying that in spite of many odds, “…we won anyway, thanks to hidden powers. Ever since, for all of my life, I have tried to understand those immeasurable powers.”

We can help President Peres “understand those immeasurable powers” by pointing to the “people hidden behind the curtain,” whom Benjamin Disraeli – Queen Victoria’s most famous prime minister – said really run things in this world.

They certainly seem to have systematically ensured Israel is ever-fed the fullest diplomatic cover, political support, unlimited financial and economic lifelines, and the fullest military backing by the West.

An example: today Israel is the only Middle Eastern nation with a powerful arsenal of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. It has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and yet this never makes the headlines in the Western press, which is far too busy whipping up fear and war-mongering against Iran, in order to justify Israel’s threatened unilateral attack, fully supported by the US, UK and Sarkozy France.

At 64, Israel clearly continues enjoying that lifeline from the West, especially the US. So much so that many wonder whether the US promotes its Middle East agenda through Israel, or if things are really exactly the other way around: that Israel controls US policy in the Middle East through powerful lobbies and gigantic global money power clout.

As academics Stephen Walt (Harvard University) and John Mearsheimer (Chicago University) point out in “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy,” “Israel is the largest annual recipient of (US) direct economic and military assistance since 1976… to the tune of well over $140 billion… [Washington] has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets… giving Israel access to intelligence it denies to its NATO allies, and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.”

In addition, “Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members… (and) blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda.”

In short, “The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace” even though “Israeli officials… ignore US requests and renege on promises… to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders.”

Actually, the plight of the Palestinians was well understood from the very beginning by Israeli leaders like David Ben-Gurion, who told Nahum Goldman, then-president of the World Jewish Congress: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

When she became prime minister, Golda Meir eloquently rounded off this view when she infamously remarked that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian.”

Ben-Gurion even acknowledged that early Zionists were hardly benevolent to the Palestinians, as the creation of Israel involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal.

But the Israel Lobby controlling US foreign policy towards Israel is not just about militant Jewish Zionists. It’s also about Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or Ralph Reed, and about politicians as Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, John Bolton, Joe Biden, John McKay and Joe Lieberman, some of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will.

Naturally no small nation in the world would ever be able to get away with all of this unless it did indeed have full support from – even control over – the United States of America, ensuring that it will be “needed and fed” until it’s sixty four and far beyond.
Can the Israel Lobby’s power be curtailed?

The answer lies with the American taxpayer and voter. They must open their eyes and realize how vilely they are being misused and abused.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can help promote this grand-awakening of American public opinion so the US stops being a powerful but intellectually-challenged proxy pawn to foreign interests that are contrary to US national interests.
Until then, Israel will continue to “get older and lose its hair,” whilst the US, UK and EU continue to “need them and feed them,” even at today’s ripe age of sixty-four…

By:Adrian Salbuchi,RT.

Bilal Diab’s health continues to deteriorate dramatically, according to Addameer lawyer Mona Neddaf, who visited him and two other long-term hunger strikers in Ramleh prison medical clinic today. Along with fellow administrative detainee Thaer Halahleh, Bilal Diab is on his 77th day of hunger strike today. Both Bilal and Thaer have yet to be hospitalized in a public hospital, despite being at immediate risk of death.
Bilal is currently experiencing frequent loss of consciousness and very low oxygen, hemoglobin and blood sugar levels. He is also suffering from hair loss, pain in his joints, and blood in his stool. After losing consciousness yesterday, Bilal was transferred to Assaf Harofeh hospital. However, during his transfer and while in the hospital, Bilal reported being shackled by all of his limbs and subjected to additional ill-treatment. He considered this a breach of medical ethics and therefore refused any treatment at the hospital. He requested to be transferred to a different hospital under humane conditions and was then sent back to Ramleh prison. A similar incident also occurred last Friday, 11 May, when he was transferred to Assaf Harofeh and refused to accept treatment there due to his mistrust in the doctors as a result of how he has been treated throughout his hunger strike.

In an attempt to further exert pressure upon Bilal, the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) yesterday used communication with his family as a bargaining chip to compel him to accept treatment. After agreeing to take glucose yesterday and today, in addition to one vitamin pill today, the IPS allowed him to make a phone call to his family last night, for seven minutes only. He has been denied all family visits up to this point in his hunger strike. Bilal further reported to Ms. Neddaf that he had refused to meet with the IPS medical ethics committee last week when they attempted to pressure him to take vitamins and other minerals.

Ms. Neddaf was also able to visit Hassan Safadi, currently on his 71st day of hunger strike, and Omar Abu Shalal, currently on his 69th day of hunger strike, in Ramleh prison today. According to Ms. Neddaf, both are in critical condition. Hassan has very low blood sugar and received medication today for infections in his body. He is also taking vitamins to support his heart muscle. Omar also agreed to start taking minerals and salt two days ago. Both of them continue to demand their immediate release from administrative detention.

Nine additional prisoners on hunger strike have also been newly transferred to Ramleh prison medical clinic. Today is the 28th day of Palestinian prisoners’ mass hunger strike.

Addameer renews its demand for the immediate transfer to independent hospitals for all hunger striking prisoners whose medical conditions are deteriorating. Addameer holds the Occupation responsible for the lives of all prisoners on hunger strike and urges the international community to continue exerting pressure on Israel in the strongest manner possible to save their lives.

 
By:Addameer.

Unless the spirit of the last year continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of.If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead — because victory won’t come quickly — it could prove a significant moment in American history.

The fact that the Occupy movement is unprecedented is quite appropriate. After all, it’s an unprecedented era and has been so since the 1970s, which marked a major turning point in American history. For centuries, since the country began, it had been a developing society, and not always in very pretty ways. That’s another story, but the general progress was toward wealth, industrialization, development, and hope. There was a pretty constant expectation that it was going to go on like this. That was true even in very dark times.

I’m just old enough to remember the Great Depression. After the first few years, by the mid-1930s — although the situation was objectively much harsher than it is today — nevertheless, the spirit was quite different. There was a sense that “we’re gonna get out of it,” even among unemployed people, including a lot of my relatives, a sense that “it will get better.”

There was militant labor union organizing going on, especially from the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations). It was getting to the point of sit-down strikes, which are frightening to the business world — you could see it in the business press at the time — because a sit-down strike is just a step before taking over the factory and running it yourself. The idea of worker takeovers is something which is, incidentally, very much on the agenda today, and we should keep it in mind. Also New Deal legislation was beginning to come in as a result of popular pressure. Despite the hard times, there was a sense that, somehow, “we’re gonna get out of it.”

It’s quite different now. For many people in the United States, there’s a pervasive sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair. I think it’s quite new in American history. And it has an objective basis.

On the Working Class

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back. If you’re a worker in manufacturing today — the current level of unemployment there is approximately like the Depression — and current tendencies persist, those jobs aren’t going to come back.

The change took place in the 1970s. There are a lot of reasons for it. One of the underlying factors, discussed mainly by economic historian Robert Brenner, was the falling rate of profit in manufacturing. There were other factors. It led to major changes in the economy — a reversal of several hundred years of progress towards industrialization and development that turned into a process of de-industrialization and de-development. Of course, manufacturing production continued overseas very profitably, but it’s no good for the work force.

Along with that came a significant shift of the economy from productive enterprise — producing things people need or could use — to financial manipulation. The financialization of the economy really took off at that time.

On Banks

Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college. That changed dramatically in the 1970s. Until then, there had been no financial crises since the Great Depression. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

And it was egalitarian.  The lowest quintile did about as well as the highest quintile. Lots of people moved into reasonable lifestyles — what’s called the “middle class” here, the “working class” in other countries — but it was real.  And the 1960s accelerated it. The activism of those years, after a pretty dismal decade, really civilized the country in lots of ways that are permanent.

When the 1970s came along, there were sudden and sharp changes: de-industrialization, the off-shoring of production, and the shift to financial institutions, which grew enormously. I should say that, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also the development of what several decades later became the high-tech economy: computers, the Internet, the IT Revolution developed substantially in the state sector.

The developments that took place during the 1970s set off a vicious cycle. It led to the concentration of wealth increasingly in the hands of the financial sector. This doesn’t benefit the economy — it probably harms it and society — but it did lead to a tremendous concentration of wealth.

On Politics and Money

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle. The legislation, essentially bipartisan, drives new fiscal policies and tax changes, as well as the rules of corporate governance and deregulation. Alongside this began a sharp rise in the costs of elections, which drove the political parties even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector.

The parties dissolved in many ways. It used to be that if a person in Congress hoped for a position such as a committee chair, he or she got it mainly through seniority and service. Within a couple of years, they started having to put money into the party coffers in order to get ahead, a topic studied mainly by Tom Ferguson. That just drove the whole system even deeper into the pockets of the corporate sector (increasingly the financial sector).

This cycle resulted in a tremendous concentration of wealth, mainly in the top tenth of one percent of the population. Meanwhile, it opened a period of stagnation or even decline for the majority of the population. People got by, but by artificial means such as longer working hours, high rates of borrowing and debt, and reliance on asset inflation like the recent housing bubble. Pretty soon those working hours were much higher in the United States than in other industrial countries like Japan and various places in Europe. So there was a period of stagnation and decline for the majority alongside a period of sharp concentration of wealth. The political system began to dissolve.

There has always been a gap between public policy and public will, but it just grew astronomically. You can see it right now, in fact.  Take a look at the big topic in Washington that everyone concentrates on: the deficit. For the public, correctly, the deficit is not regarded as much of an issue. And it isn’t really much of an issue. The issue is joblessness. There’s a deficit commission but no joblessness commission. As far as the deficit is concerned, the public has opinions. Take a look at the polls. The public overwhelmingly supports higher taxes on the wealthy, which have declined sharply in this period of stagnation and decline, and the preservation of limited social benefits.

The outcome of the deficit commission is probably going to be the opposite. The Occupy movements could provide a mass base for trying to avert what amounts to a dagger pointed at the heart of the country.

Plutonomy and the Precariat

For the general population, the 99% in the imagery of the Occupy movement, it’s been pretty harsh — and it could get worse. This could be a period of irreversible decline. For the 1% and even less — the .1% — it’s just fine. They are richer than ever, more powerful than ever, controlling the political system, disregarding the public. And if it can continue, as far as they’re concerned, sure, why not?

Take, for example, Citigroup. For decades, Citigroup has been one of the most corrupt of the major investment banking corporations, repeatedly bailed out by the taxpayer, starting in the early Reagan years and now once again. I won’t run through the corruption, but it’s pretty astonishing.

In 2005, Citigroup came out with a brochure for investors called “Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances.” It urged investors to put money into a “plutonomy index.” The brochure says, “The World is dividing into two blocs — the Plutonomy and the rest.”

Plutonomy refers to the rich, those who buy luxury goods and so on, and that’s where the action is. They claimed that their plutonomy index was way outperforming the stock market. As for the rest, we set them adrift. We don’t really care about them. We don’t really need them. They have to be around to provide a powerful state, which will protect us and bail us out when we get into trouble, but other than that they essentially have no function. These days they’re sometimes called the “precariat” — people who live a precarious existence at the periphery of society. Only it’s not the periphery anymore. It’s becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere. And this is considered a good thing.

So, for example, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, at the time when he was still “Saint Alan” — hailed by the economics profession as one of the greatest economists of all time (this was before the crash for which he was substantially responsible) — was testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, and he explained the wonders of the great economy that he was supervising. He said a lot of its success was based substantially on what he called “growing worker insecurity.” If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking. And he was highly praised for this, greatly admired.

So the world is now indeed splitting into a plutonomy and a precariat — in the imagery of the Occupy movement, the 1% and the 99%. Not literal numbers, but the right picture. Now, the plutonomy is where the action is and it could continue like this.

If it does, the historic reversal that began in the 1970s could become irreversible. That’s where we’re heading. And the Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.

Toward Worker Takeover

I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place.  In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place.

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public. And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce — which owned it anyway — turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.

We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.

Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons

I’ve kept to domestic issues, but there are two dangerous developments in the international arena, which are a kind of shadow that hangs over everything we’ve discussed. There are, for the first time in human history, real threats to the decent survival of the species.

One has been hanging around since 1945. It’s kind of a miracle that we’ve escaped it. That’s the threat of nuclear war and nuclear weapons. Though it isn’t being much discussed, that threat is, in fact, being escalated by the policies of this administration and its allies. And something has to be done about that or we’re in real trouble.

The other, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps towards trying to do something about it. The United States is also taking steps, mainly to accelerate the threat.  It is the only major country that is not only not doing something constructive to protect the environment, it’s not even climbing on the train. In some ways, it’s pulling it backwards.

And this is connected to a huge propaganda system, proudly and openly declared by the business world, to try to convince people that climate change is just a liberal hoax. “Why pay attention to these scientists?”

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke.  And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted — and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures.  It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

By: Noam Chomsky,Alternet.

The U.S. government has issued an arrest warrant for an American citizen who is seeking asylum in Sweden after he went public with allegations of illegal detention and torture while in the United Arab Emirates – which he believes was carried out at the behest of the FBI.

In newly filed documents, the U.S. government charges that Yonas Fikre, 33, an Ethiopia-born resident of Portland, Ore., was involved in money transfers set up to avoid U.S. reporting requirements. He is accused of conspiring with two other defendants — his brother Dawit Woldehawariat of San Diego and Abrehaile Haile of Seattle.

“Defendants Fikre and Woldehawariat wanted to conceal from the United States their connection to the money transfers” of about $75,000, the grand jury indictment states.

The accusation against the three is “structuring” — or using a series of bank transactions instead of conducting a larger transaction in an effort to avoid reporting the money movements to the federal government. Transactions over $10,000 require reporting.

After Fikre traveled to Sudan in 2009, and later to the UAE, he received money transfers that he says were for starting a trading business. The document alleges that a series of $7,000 money transfers from his brother, and handled by Abrehaile Haile — who operates Red Sea Inc., a money-transmitting business in Seattle — amounted to conspiracy to structure.

Fikre’s brother, a taxi driver, also was  charged with failing to file taxes for 2009 and 2010. He made about $26,000 in 2009 and $29,000 in 2010, the document states.

No terrorism charges are included in the documents.

“Frankly, I think its retaliation and retribution,” Fikre’s attorney, Thomas Nelson in Portland, said of the indictment.

Nelson said that FBI agents questioned Fikre when they met with him in Sudan in April 2010 shortly after the transfers.

The indictment  filed at the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of California were dated May 1.

Two weeks ago, Fikre went public with his story of alleged mistreatment by the FBI, and claims that he was detained and tortured in the UAE at the behest of the U.S. government.

The FBI will not comment on individual investigations, citing security and Privacy Act concerns, nor address the allegations that it orchestrated torture.

Fikre said that when he was detained in UAE, he was not accused of a crime. He was released without charge.

Related reports:

• American seeks political asylum in Sweden, alleging torture, FBI coercion.

Nelson said that the FBI agents used the accusation of “structuring” to pressure Fikre to become an informant in a case they were pursuing at a meeting with him in Khartoum in April 2010.

Fikre said the agents also suggested they could help him get off the U.S. “no-fly” list if he aided their investigation — a surprise, Fikre said, because it was the first he had learned that his name was on the list of “known and reasonably suspected terrorists.”

The no-fly list is maintained by the Terrorism Screening Center within the FBI. The center will neither confirm nor deny any individual is on the list. Typically, individuals do not discover they are on the list until they are refused boarding.

Fikre said he refused to become an FBI informant.

After the FBI encounter, Fikre moved his business to the United Arab Emirates where he was detained and, he says, tortured for 101 days. He said the questioning about his finances continued, along with questions about people, beliefs and finances of his mosque back in Portland. Fikre says he was blindfolded, so he could not see his interrogators, but the questions were so similar to those of the FBI months earlier that he believes the questioning, accompanied by sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, stress positions and beatings, was done on behalf of the FBI.

He is now in Stockholm where his appeal  for asylum is under review by the Swedish government.

Fikre, a naturalized American citizen, came to the United States as a refugee in 1991, after his family fled civil war in Ethiopia. Now that he is on the no-fly list, he is barred from boarding any flight that enters U.S. air space.

Nelson is concerned that the indictment might make his client essentially stateless.

“Yonas tried to come back to the United States and couldn’t get in, so he went to Sweden,” said Nelson. “The (Swedish) government might now claim he’s a fugitive and won’t let him in.”

Fikre’s immigration lawyer could not be immediately contacted for comment.

The prosecution argues that Fikre’s brother, Woldehawaria, 31, is a flight risk, so he is being held without bail.

Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney for the Council on American Islamic Relations, a nonprofit that represents Muslims in civil rights cases and advocates for American Muslim rights more broadly, said he thinks the indictment signals a warning to the population.

“It sends the message to the community and people on the no-fly list that there will be retaliation,” he said.

By:Kari Huus,U.S.News.

First-ever Capitol gathering marks determination to influence civil rights debate.

American Muslim activists were making the rounds at the State Capitol on Monday, May 7 as part of the first annual “Muslim Day at the Capitol,” with the goal of underscoring their influence as voters, and to discourage anti-Muslim rhetoric.

It’s a first for California, not just in an election year, but for any year.

The first annual “Muslim Day at the Capitol”, held Monday, looked on the surface like any other group’s lobbying day.

Briefings on issues, followed by meetings with lawmakers. But given post 9/11 politics, it’s much more.

CAIR-CA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations California chapter, organized Monday’s lobbying event to discuss issues like immigration and civil rights.

“It is important that members of our community engage with state lawmakers and fully participate in setting the course for a stronger California,” said CAIR-CA Board Chairman Masoud Nassimi in a statement.

The subtext is that California Muslims are trying to defuse anti-Muslim rhetoric and bias that has resulted at times in attacks and vandalism of mosques. In a presidential election year, Muslims have felt targeted by candidates who they say draw little distinction between them and radical Islamists in pandering to conservative voters.

They point to Newt Gingrich as a key example. In an effort to counter this, Muslim groups are suggesting that this could be a costly tactic in key battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida.

“These are the same states where minority groups, including American Muslims, are likely to play a key role,” said Santa Clara University assistant professor Farid Senzai in a recent New York Times op-ed.

Muslim voters remain a small part of the voting population. But they are much more aware now of the need to engage aggressively in political activism.

Monday’s lobby gathering in Sacramento isn’t tied to the national election. But it does reflect a realization that if you don’t speak out, you can get run over.

Kevin Riggs is an Emmy-award winning former TV reporter in Sacramento. He is currently Senior Vice President at Randle Communications.

Does anybody still believe in the Middle East Peace Process?

Nineteen years after Oslo and thirteen years after a final settlement was supposed to be reached, prospects for a two-state solution are as dim as ever. The international community mechanically goes through the motions, with as little energy as conviction. The parties most directly concerned, the Israeli and Palestinian people, appear long ago to have lost hope. Substantive gaps are wide, and it has become a challenge to get the sides in the same room. The bad news is the U.S. presidential campaign, Arab Spring, Israel’s focus on Iran and European financial woes portend a peacemaking hiatus. The good news is such a hiatus is badly needed. The expected diplomatic lull is a chance to reconsider basic pillars of the process – not to discard the two-state solution, for no other option can possibly attract mutual assent; nor to give up on negotiations, for no outcome will be imposed from outside. But to incorporate new issues and constituencies; rethink Palestinian strategy to alter the balance of power; and put in place a more effective international architecture.

For all the scepticism surrounding the ways of the past, breaking with them will not come easily. Few may still believe in the peace process, but many still see significant utility in it. Ongoing negotiations help Washington manage its relations with the Arab world and to compensate for close ties to Israel with ostensible efforts to meet Palestinian aspirations. Europeans have found a role, bankrolling the Palestinian Authority and, via the Quartet, earning a seat at one of the most prestigious diplomatic tables – a satisfaction they share with Russia and the UN Secretary-General. Peace talks are highly useful to Israel for deflecting international criticism and pressure.

Palestinians suffer most from the status quo, yet even they stand to lose if the comatose process finally were pronounced dead. The Palestinian Authority (PA) might collapse and with it the economic and political benefits it generates as well as the assistance it attracts. For the Palestinian elite, the peace process has meant relative comfort in the West Bank as well as constant, high-level diplomatic attention. Without negotiations, Fatah would lose much of what has come to be seen as its raison d’être and would be even more exposed to Hamas’s criticism.

But the reason most often cited for maintaining the existing peace process is the conviction that halting it risks creating a vacuum that would be filled with despair and chaos. The end result is that the peace process, for all its acknowledged shortcomings, over time has become a collective addiction that serves all manner of needs, reaching an agreement no longer being the main one. And so the illusion continues, for that largely is what it is.

More than any others, Palestinians have become aware of this trap, so have been the first to tinker with different approaches. But tinker is the appropriate term: their leadership, in its quest to reshuffle the deck, has flitted from one idea to another and pursued tracks simultaneously without fully thinking through the alternatives or committing to a single one. For a time, it seemed that President Mah­moud Abbas’s September 2011 speech at the UN General Assembly – resolute and assertive – might presage a momentous shift in strategy. But after the Security Council buried Palestine’s application for UN membership in committee, the logical follow-up – an effort to gain support for statehood at the General Assembly – was ignored. After admittance to one UN agency, the leadership froze further efforts. After refusing negotiations unless Israel froze settlements and without clear terms of reference, Abbas consented to talks. After threatening to dissolve the PA, central figures waved off the idea and declared the PA a strategic asset. After reaching a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, the two parties reverted to bickering.

One can fault the Palestinian leadership for lack of vision, yet there is good reason for its irresoluteness. Whatever it chooses to do would carry a potentially heavy price and at best uncertain gain. Negotiations are viewed by a majority of Palestinians as a fool’s errand, so a decision to resume without fulfilment of Abbas’s demands (settlement freeze and agreed terms of reference) could be costly for his movement’s future. His hesitation is all the stronger now that he has persuaded himself that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s positions are incompatible with a two-state solution. A decisive Palestinian move at the UN (whether at the General Assembly or in seeking agency membership) likely would prompt a cut-off in U.S. aid and suspension of tax clearance revenue transfers by Israel. A joint government with Hamas could trigger similar consequences without assurance that elections could be held or territorial unity between the West Bank and Gaza restored. Getting rid of the PA could backfire badly, leaving many public employees and their families penniless while also leading to painful Israeli counter-measures.

The trouble with all these domestic and international justifications for not rocking the boat is that they are less and less convincing and that perpetuating the status quo is not cost-free. A process that is turning in circles undermines the credibility of all its advocates. It cannot effectively shelter the U.S. from criticism or Israel from condemnation. Europe can fund a PA whose expiration date has passed only for so long. The Palestinian leadership is facing ever sharpening questioning of its approach. Most of all, the idea that to end the existing process would create a dangerous vacuum wildly exaggerates the process’s remaining credibility and thus assumes it still serves as a substitute for a vacuum – when in reality it widely is considered vacuous itself.

Finding an alternative approach is no mean feat. Contrary to what some say, or hope, it is not a one-state solution – which is championed, in very different versions, by elements of both the Israeli and Palestinian political spectrums. A one-state reality already is in place, but as a solution it almost certainly would face insurmountable challenges – beginning with the fact that it is fiercely opposed by a vast majority of Jewish Israelis, who view it as antithetical to their basic aspiration. By the same token, even though alternatives to the current process should be pursued, a solution ultimately will be found only through negotiations.

What should be explored is a novel approach to a negotiated two-state solution that seeks to heighten incentives for reaching a deal and disincentives for sticking with the status quo, while offering a different type of third-party mediation. In this spirit, four traditionally neglected areas ought to be addressed:

New issues. At the core of the Oslo process was the notion that a peace agreement would need to deal with issues emanating from the 1967 War – the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – as opposed to those that arose in 1948 from the establishment of Israel, the trauma of the accompanying war and the displacement of the vast majority of Palestinians. But if that logic was ever persuasive, it no longer is. On one side, the character of the State of Israel; recognition of Jewish history; regional security concerns extending beyond the Jordan River; and the connection with the entire Land of Israel have been pushed to the fore. On the other, the issue of the right of return and the Nakba (the “catastrophe” that befell Palestinians in 1948); the place of the Arab minority in Israel; and, more broadly, the Palestinian connection to Historic Palestine have become more prominent. Within Jewish and Muslim communities alike, religion has become more prevalent in political discussions, and its influence on peacemaking looms larger than before.

As difficult as it is to imagine a solution that addresses these issues, it is harder still to imagine one that does not. If the two sides are to be induced to reach agreement, such matters almost certainly need to be tackled. Israelis and Palestinians, rather than refusing to deal with the others’ core concerns, both might use them as a springboard to address their own.

New constituencies. The process for most of the past two decades has been led by a relatively narrow array of actors. But the interests of those who have been excluded resonate deeply with their respective mainstreams. In Israel, this includes the Right, both religious and national, as well as settlers. Among Palestinians, it includes Islamists, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the diaspora. That needs to be rectified. A proposed deal that is attractive to new constituencies would minimise opposition and could attract support from unexpected quarters.

New Palestinian strategy. The Palestinian leadership has tested various waters but is apprehensive about taking the plunge. That approach appears less sustainable by the day, eroding the leadership’s credibility and international patience. Rather than ad-hoc, shifting tactical moves, the entire Palestinian national movement needs to think seriously through its various options – including reconciliation, internationalisation, popular resistance and fate of the PA – and decide whether it is prepared to pay the costs for pursuing them fully. If the answer is “no”, then it would be better to stop the loose talk that has been surrounding them of late.

New international architecture. Palestinian recourse to the UN is a symptom, at base, of international failure to lead and provide effective mediation. The body responsible for doing so, the Quartet, has delivered precious little since its 2002 inception; by creating an international forum whose survival depends on perpetuation of the process and whose mode of operation entails silencing individual voices in favour of a mushy, lowest-common-denominator consensus, it arguably has done more harm than good. Whether the body should be entirely disbanded or restructured – and if so, how – is a question with which the international community needs to grapple. Whatever the form, it ought to address the profound changes taking place in the Middle East, the opportunities they present and the risks they pose.

The inescapable truth, almost two decades into the peace process, is that all actors are now engaged in a game of make-believe: that a resumption of talks in the current context can lead to success; that an agreement can be reached within a short timeframe; that the Quartet is an effective mediator; that the Palestinian leadership is serious about reconciliation, or the UN, or popular resistance, or disbanding the PA. This is not to say that the process itself has run its course. Continued meetings and even partial agreements – invariably welcomed as breakthroughs – are possible precisely because so many have an interest in its perpetuation. But it will not bring about a durable and lasting peace. The first step in breaking what has become an injurious addiction to a futile process is to recognise that it is so – to acknowledge, at long last, that the emperor has no clothes.

Israeli Court Rejects the Release of Hunger Strikers
By ISABEL KERSHNER
The New York Times
May 8, 2012
JERUSALEM — Israel’s Supreme Court on Monday rejected appeals for the release of two Palestinian prisoners who have been on a hunger strike for 69 days to protest their incarceration without formal charges, sharpening concern for their lives and raising the specter of widespread unrest in the event of a death.

Barring a last-minute deal, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, an advocacy group that has been monitoring the condition of the two men, said the court ruling was “the effective equivalent of handing down a death sentence.”

The judges said they had found no justification to intervene in the cases of Bilal Diab, 27, and Thaer Halahleh, 33, both residents of the West Bank accused of working with Islamic Jihad, an extremist organization. The court upheld the practice of imprisonment without charge — called administrative detention — if used sparingly. Yet the judges expressed unease over aspects of these particular cases and suggested that the authorities consider alternative approaches.

Citing classified evidence against Mr. Halahleh, the court said he had been engaged in transferring money for Islamic Jihad. But since Mr. Halahleh will have been in detention for almost two years when his current term ends in June, the court said, any further extension should be based on a more thorough investigation.

Mr. Diab, who previously spent years in prison on charges of military activity, according to court documents, was last detained in August 2011. Citing secret evidence that he played an organizational role in Islamic Jihad, also mainly related to money, the court suggested that the military authorities should consider administrative terms shorter than six months in Mr. Diab’s case, to allow for better judicial oversight.

In addition, one of the judges suggested that given the deteriorating health of the men, the authorities could consider the option of releasing them on parole.

Islamic Jihad is notorious for the suicide bombings it carried out last decade in Israeli cities, and more recently for firing rockets from Gaza into southern Israel. Spokesmen for the group have warned of dire consequences if a hunger striker dies.

Israel argues that administrative detention is necessary to ensure security. It currently holds more than 300 Palestinian administrative detainees, whose terms of up to six months can be renewed repeatedly.

Adding to the tensions, at least 1,500 convicted Palestinian security prisoners from various organizations have joined the hunger strike since mid-April, demanding better prison conditions.

The protest began with Khader Adnan, a detainee from Islamic Jihad who fasted for 66 days until he reached a deal in February for his release in April. Another detainee, Hana Shalabi, also believed to be a member of Islamic Jihad, fasted for more than 40 days before being sent into temporary exile in Gaza. Neither case caused any fundamental change in Israeli policy.

In a separate ruling Monday, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the state to reopen a highly contentious case involving five apartment buildings in Ulpana, a development linked to the Jewish settlement of Bet El in the West Bank.

The state had pledged to demolish the buildings, home to about 30 Israeli families, by May 1, in accordance with an earlier court ruling because they were built, albeit with government subsidies, on privately-owned Palestinian land. But the government, faced with a political challenge, recently asked the court to reconsider its ruling.

The judges said on Monday that the state had presented no legal precedent and no new facts to warrant such an extraordinary step. The court gave the state until July 1 to demolish the buildings.

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization representing the Palestinian landowners, welcomed the decision, saying it upheld the rule of law.
Leader of Israel Centrist Party Kadima Agrees to Join Netanyahu’s Coalition
By JODI RUGOREN
The New York Times
May 8, 2012
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the chairman of the opposition Kadima Party struck a deal early Tuesday morning to form a unity government, a surprise move that staves off early elections and creates a new coalition with a huge legislative majority.

According to the three-page agreement that Mr. Netanyahu and the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, signed after midnight, Mr. Mofaz will become a deputy prime minister, standing in for Mr. Netanyahu when he is abroad and joining all closed sessions of the cabinet.

A former defense minister and military chief who has been critical of the government’s aggressive focus on the Iranian nuclear threat, Mr. Mofaz will be “in charge of the process with the Palestinians,” according to a Kadima spokesman, Yuval Harel, who said that “part of the deal is to turn on the process.”

The unity agreement came hours after the Israeli Parliament took the first steps toward dissolving itself ahead of elections scheduled for Sept. 4 rather than at the end of the government’s term in October 2013. With his coalition divided over how to replace a law expiring Aug. 1 that exempted many ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service, Mr. Netanyahu had said in a speech to the convention of his right-leaning Likud Party on Sunday night that he wanted early elections to avoid the instability of a campaign atmosphere stretching over more than a year.

But even as the political establishment here was kicking into high gear in recent days, leaders of the Likud and Kadima parties had been in secret negotiations that culminated at midnight Tuesday at the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem, where he and Mr. Mofaz signed a contract, according to Mr. Harel. The two men then went to the Parliament building around 2:30 a.m., where they met with lawmakers from their parties, who voted to approve the deal, officials said. A news conference was scheduled for noon in Jerusalem.

“It was at the initiation of both sides,” Mr. Harel said in an overnight telephone interview. “This is the best way to get influence.”

In a brief statement issued Tuesday morning, Mr. Netanyahu, who moved closer to the center as a result of the accord, said: “A broad national unity government is good for the security, for the economy, for the people of Israel.”

Reaction from other political factions was swift and harsh. “This is a pact of cowards and the most contemptible and preposterous zigzag in Israel’s political history,” said Shelly Yacimovich, chairwoman of the Labor Party and suddenly the leader of the dwindling opposition. She vowed to “show the public that there is a political and ideological alternative,” and said the deal gave Labor “a golden opportunity to lead the people eventually, if not now then in 2013, onto a new path.”

Yair Lapid, a popular television commentator who recently formed a new centrist party, Yesh Atid, derided the agreement as a sign of “the old, detestable, ugly politics” and predicted that “this repulsive political alliance will bury all of its participants under it.”

But for Mr. Mofaz, who ousted Tzipi Livni as head of Kadima in a party primary last month, and Mr. Netanyahu, who polls predicted would sail to victory in early elections, the benefits were clear. Besides gaining a ministership, Mr. Mofaz buys himself time to build up public support for his platform, keeping his party’s 28 seats in Parliament rather than face elections in which polls show his faction would drop to 15 or fewer.

And Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition swelled from 66 to 94 of Parliament’s 120 members, while broadening its ideological base.

The 13-clause agreement promises that the new coalition will pass a new law by July ensuring equal national service for all Israeli citizens, including those religious Jews who had avoided the draft the study Torah. It also calls for an overhaul of the electoral process itself by year’s end. Kadima lawmakers would also head several key parliamentary committees, including foreign affairs and defense, and economics.

The Iranian-born Mr. Mofaz, 63, had originally said he would not join Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition. “I intend to replace Netanyahu,” he told The New York Times in an interview after his resounding victory over Ms. Livni. “I will not join his government.”

In the interview, Mr. Mofaz criticized the prime minister’s foreign policy focus, saying that a greater threat to Israel than Iran was the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. He said that he would start with an interim Palestinian state on 60 percent of the West Bank and negotiate the rest, keeping Israeli settlement blocs in place in exchange for land elsewhere. Borders and security could be negotiated in a year, he said, and thousands of settlers in far-flung locations would agree to move or be forced to.

Arik Bender, a writer for the daily newspaper Maariv, called the developments “Shaul Mofaz’s night,” writing in an analysis piece that he “saved the ship of Kadima from sinking at the very last moment, assured himself a prominent position in the government, and secured coalition favors for his party.” He said the deal dealt a “painful blow” to Ms. Yacimovich, and a “mortal” one to Mr. Lapid.

Yossi Verter, a senior analyst for the left-leaning daily newspaper Haaretz, called the deal “an atomic bomb,” and said it was struck out of Mr. Netanyahu’s “great power” and Mr. Mofaz’s “severe weakness.” “No party can topple him,” Mr. Verter wrote of the prime minister. “The new Netanyahu government is made of one hundred tons of solid concrete.”

David Horovitz, a veteran journalist who runs the new Web site The Times of Israel, described the new coalition as a “masterstroke” for Mr. Netanyahu. “The prime minister, with Kadima at his side, is also now potentially capable of taking a more centrist position on dealings with the Palestinians and over settlements,” Mr. Horovitz wrote in an analysis posted Tuesday morning. “It’s by no means clear that he wants to do so. But he has room for maneuver now if he wishes to use it. And the Americans and the rest of the international community will be well aware of the fact.”

Palestinian political prisoners illegally held in Israeli jails are on hunger strike and some are near death. The population of strikers includes 200 child prisoners, 27 Palestinian legislative council members, and 456 prisoners from Gaza who have not been allowed family visits since 2007 [1]. Meanwhile, colonization continued a relentless pace. Ramzy Baroud and Jeff Halper argue that Israel is “fixing” the outcome and is an “end-game” scenario to take over most of the West Bank and leave us in small cantons [2]. Yet, judging from my research into the carefully planned Zionist project, such plans are not end games but mileposts to give the Zionists time to consolidate gains in preparation for the next round of expansion in precisely the way Ben Gurion described it to his son in 1937. Ben Gurion explained lucidly how the new state of Israel when established on part of the coveted land would be a base of steady expansion and growth in the future with or without agreement from “Arabs” [3]. I pondered how little has changed in the intervening 75 years. Colonial Israel continues to push the envelope and expand with or without agreement from compliant “Arabs”. Compliant Arabs existed in 1937 (headed by Ragheb Al-Nashashibi) and existed in 1967 and in 2012. There also existed intellectual and honest Arabs throughout our history.
Zionist colonization is not driven by emotion or haphazard action. It is done as instructed by the founding father of Political Zionism Theodore Herzl in 1897: “we must investigate and take possession of the new Jewish country by means of every modern expedient.” Modern expedients advocated by Herzl include planned methodical structure to remove the native people (with or without agreement of some Arabs) and create a large Jewish state. Herzl was not specific on size of the “required estate” but Ben Gurion and people of his era thought it possible to go as far as between the Nile and the Euphrates.

The plans of colonizers are remarkably similar and known from the diaries of Herzl in 1897, from the letter from Ben Gurion to his son in 1937, the Allon plan of 1967, and from the Hebron accords of 1997. It is a plan of expansion without some Arabs consenting or occasionally with agreement from some Arabs. These agreements, like the treaties that some Native Americans signed with the government of the United States in its expansionary phase, were and are violated because they are merely consolidation tools [4]. I think like these Native American chiefs some Palestinians thought that they are doing the best they could under difficult circumstances. Most of the Native American “leaders” had no concept or understanding of the true nature of the notions and emotions driving the Westward expansion of the white colonialists in the USA. They did not delve deeply into notions of manifest destiny, choseness, and racism that characterize their oppressors. One could say the ideology of Native Americans exhibited the exact opposite of their colonizers and thus they presumed that whites are ultimately human and could be dealt with as equals.

Peace for natives is to get their freedom, to live in dignity, and most of all to get the boot of colonization off our necks. Peace for the colonizers is to have the victim stop wiggling under their boots. Towards this they devised ingenious plans including a Palestinian Preventive Security force. Any rational human being can see this dictation and imbalance of power in daily news. Thus the people are left out of decisions whether on “negotiations”, on “national reconciliation”, ongoing and not going to the UN, or on how they may eventually be liberated. Despairing and riding a ship without compass or rudder, the people grumble and boil underneath and later erupt in revolt.

Needs and desires of the colonizers and the colonized are not the same. Occupiers and colonizers want more opportunities to progress via consolidation and strengthening of the status quo and allowing them to expand further. We, the occupied and colonized people, want to halt and eventually reverse the process of injustice. Palestinians want to return to our homes and lands and live peacefully as we did for millennia. We insist on return and self-determination. We insist that the country must remain multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-cultural. This is not a border dispute nor is it a quibble over the Israeli illegal control of the religious sites. Like in the struggle in South Africa under apartheid, it is a struggle that pits two very different visions of the area: one of racism and apartheid and the other of justice and equality.

Sporadic acts of heroic popular resistance are not enough to reach peace with justice. Coordination and joint action must take place. What hinders it is a system developed by the occupiers and agreed to by some of the occupied people. Personal economic benefit maintains the status quo. What is done with support from a Palestinian authority is nothing short of making this occupation the most profitable in history (several billion dollars flow annually to Israeli coffers as a result of this occupation). Already Israeli and Palestinian business deals are being executed for example in area C. This is the “economic peace plan” of Netanyahu and others. Those who may think of disrupting the status quo are investigated and punished. Most Palestinians are excellent diagnosticians and have figured this out. But I think many have not started to articulate solutions or ideas to get out of this mud hole that the Oslo Process (actually started with the 10 point program in 1974) put us into. It is not going to be easy and it does require sacrifice. But those delusional individuals who think that they have a salary or a position and they do not want to risk rocking the boat should think again. They should think of how their children or grandchildren would live under a system of racism and oppression. This is as true of Israelis as it is true of Palestinians.

Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) give us hope. Shimon Peres, the architect of Israel’s arsenal of Weapons of Mass Destruction and a war criminal once explained: “In order to export you need good products, but you also need good relations….[If] Israel’s image gets worse, it will begin to suffer boycotts. There is already an artistic boycott against us and signs of an undeclared financial boycott are beginning to emerge.” International figures who worked against apartheid in South Africa argued convincingly of why this can help here in Apartheid Israel [5]. But BDS is only a tool and certainly not sufficient to effect the needed change. There has to be a structured program from the people which includes an articulation of a vision with concrete goals for the future. In my book “Sharing the Land of Canaan” in 2004 I argued for precisely such a program to move from apartheid to a state of all its citizens. These notions have gained widespread acceptance among intellectuals and activists of various religious and political backgrounds. To arrive to this vision, we need organization.

Organization requires visionary leadership arising organically from a maturing rising population. We should not be reluctant to push our existing leaders and if they are not willing to move then to create alternative leadership. ALL Factions have aging and non-innovative leadership and ALL factions have younger energetic and dedicated (but marginalized) individuals. Clearly the status quo is devastating for us and cannot last. We know from history that people will rise-up and DEMAND change.

Is it time for varied voices to coalesce into a thunderous uproar that cannot be ignored? May we organize meetings and discuss publicly the path forward? While many for example discussed the failure of the “two state solution” and some articulated future visions, we need more than that. Can we as a people in 1948 areas, in the WB and Gaza and in exile create mechanisms and structures that take us to where we decide to go? Can we convince the world and even Israelis that we are serious about working for a future of peace with justice and prosperity for everyone? Voices of negativism must not dominate this critical stage. This conversation must be open to people of goodwill from all factions and from independents. While it must start among Palestinians, we must later involve our trusted supporters from around the world. We do have the resources: financial, intellectual, emotional, and physical. Let those who have skills in organizing organize and those who have skills in media work do media work. Let those who have skills in social networking do that. Those who have skills in music write songs for the revolution. Imagine if we can get even 5% or even 1% of the Palestinians around the world as participants in an organized effort. The change that could happen can be monumental.

The world today only respects those who respect themselves and struggle for their own rights. We have nothing to be ashamed of as Palestinians even though 7 million of us are refugees or displaced people. We have a lot to be proud of from our history [6]. We cannot give up now that the crisis of Palestine weighed on the world conscience and when the Arab spring could change the whole geopolitical reality of the Middle East. Even if we fail at our goal this time, the positive spirit that results would enrich all our lives. It would unleash the creativity and the energy that we know is in us. Change can and must happen because it ours is an existential struggle for 11.5 million Palestinians in the world and for our children and grandchildren born and unborn. Each of us has a role to play and has skills and other resources to contribute. Even if we start slow and among a few individuals, it will grow because we have no other choice. Let us get on with it.

By:Mazin Qumsiyeh,popular-resistance.blogspot

Generals and secret police chiefs get together for an attack on the politicians.

In some countries, they arrest the president, occupy government offices and TV stations and annul the constitution. They then publish “Communiqué No. 1,” explaining the dire need to save the nation from perdition and promising democracy, elections etc.

In other countries, they do it more quietly. They just inform the elected leaders that, if they don’t desist from their disastrous policies, the officers will make their views public and precipitate their downfall.

Such officers are generally called a “junta,” the Spanish word for “committee” used by South American generals. Their method is usually called a “putsch,” a German-Swiss term for a sudden blow. (Yes, the Swiss actually had revolts some 170 years ago.)

What almost all such coups have in common is that their instigators thrive on the demagoguery of war. The politicians are invariably accused of cowardice in face of the enemy, failure to defend national honor, and such.

Not in Israel. In our country we are now seeing a kind of verbal uprising against the elected politicians by a group of current and former army generals, foreign intelligence and internal security chiefs. All of them condemn the government’s threat to start a war against Iran, and some of them condemn the government’s failure to negotiate with the Palestinians for peace.

Only in Israel.

It started with the most unlikely candidate to lead such a rebellion: The ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

For eight years, longer than most of his predecessors, Dagan led the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, comparable to the British MI6.  (“Mossad” means “institute.” The official name is “The Institute for intelligence and Special Operations”.)

Nobody ever accused Dagan of pacifism. During his term, the Mossad carried out many assassinations, several against Iranian scientists, as well as cyber attacks. A protégé of Ariel Sharon, he was considered a champion of the most aggressive policies.

And here, after leaving office, he speaks out in the harshest terms against the government’s plans for an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations. Not mincing words, he said: “This is the stupidest idea I have heard in my life.”

This week he was overshadowed by the recently relieved chief of the Shin Bet. (Shin Bet and Shabak are different ways of pronouncing the initials of the official Hebrew name “General Security Service.”) It is equivalent to the British MI5, but deals mostly with the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories.

For six years, Yuval Diskin was the silent chief of the silent service. His shaved head could be seen entering and leaving meetings of secret committees. He is considered the real father of “targeted eliminations,” and his service has been widely accused of extensive use of torture. Nobody ever accused him of being soft on Arabs.

And now he has spoken out. Choosing a most unusual venue — a get together of some two dozen pensioners in a smalltown cafe — he let fly.

According to Diskin — and who would know better? — Israel is now led by two incompetent politicians with messianic delusions and a poor grasp of reality. Their plan to attack Iran is leading to a worldwide catastrophe. Not only will it fail to prevent the production of an Iranian atom bomb, but, on the contrary, it will hasten this effort, this time with the support of the world community.

Going further than Dagan, he stated that the only factor preventing peace negotiations with the Palestinians is Netanyahu himself. Israel can make peace with Mahmoud Abbas at any time, and missing this historic opportunity will bring disaster upon Israel.

As chief of the Shin Bet, Diskin was the No. 1 official government expert on Palestinians. His agency receives and collates all the evidence, spy reports, interrogation results and information gathered from listening devices.

Leaving no room for doubt, Diskin said that he knew Netanyahu and Barak from close up, did not trust them and thought they were unfit to lead the nation in a crisis. He also said that they are deliberately deceiving the people. He did not omit to mention that they live in extreme luxury.

Anyone who thought that these accusers were lone voices, and that the whole choir of current and past security chiefs would rise and condemn them unanimously, was disappointed. One after another these experts were quoted by the media as agreeing with the two in substance, though not necessarily on their style. Not a single one questioned their assertions or denied what they said.

The current chief of staff and the Mossad and Shin Bet chiefs let it be known that they share the views of the two on Iran. Almost all their predecessors, including all the recent military chiefs of staff, told the media that they agree, too. Suddenly there was a united front of experienced security leaders against a war with Iran.

The counterattack was not late in coming. The entire battery of politicians and media hacks went into action.

They did what Israelis almost always do: When faced with serious problems or serious arguments, they don’t get to grips with the matter itself, but select some minor detail and belabor it endlessly.

Practically no one tried to disprove the assertions of the officers, neither concerning the proposed attack on Iran nor concerning the Palestinian issue. They focused on the speakers, not on what they said.

Both Dagan and Diskin, it was asserted, were embittered because their terms of office were not extended. They felt humiliated. They are venting their personal frustration. They are speaking out of sheer spite.

If they did not trust the prime minister, why did they not get up and resign while they were in office? Why didn’t they speak out before? If this was a matter of life and death, why did they wait?

Alternatively, why don’t they continue to shut up? Where is their sense of responsibility? Why do they help the enemy? Why don’t they speak only behind closed doors?

Diskin, it was added, has no idea about Iran. It was not in his area of responsibility at all. Dagan knew about Iran, but had a limited view. Only Netanyahu and Barak knew all the facts and the entire spectrum of opportunities and risks.

Sources “close to the prime minister’s office” also had another explanation: Dagan and Diskin, as well as their predecessors, were just stupid. Taken together with Dagan’s and Diskin’s assertion that Netanyahu and Barak are not rational (and perhaps not quite mentally balanced) this means that our national security depends entirely on a group of irrational and stupid leaders — and that this has been the case for years.

A frightening thought: What if everything they say about each other is true?

The man accused by his security advisers of messianic tendencies was exposed to personal scrutiny by another event this week.

His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, died at age 102, having remained of clear mind to the end. At the public funeral, he was eulogized by Benjamin. As could be expected, it was a kitschy speech. The son addressed his dead father in the second person — (“You taught me”…”You formed my character” etc) — a vulgar practice I find particularly distasteful. He also shed tears on camera.

There is no doubt that the father had a huge influence on his son. He was a professor of history, whose whole intellectual life was centered on one topic: The Spanish inquisition — a traumatic chapter in Jewish history comparable only to the Holocaust.

Ben-Zion Netanyahu was an extreme rightist, obsessed by the idea that Jews might be exterminated at any moment, and therefore cannot trust any goy. He held Menachem Begin in contempt, considering him a softy, and never joined his party. His intellectual attitude was reinforced by a personal trauma: His eldest son, Yoni, the commander of the spectacular Entebbe raid, was the only soldier killed in this operation.

It seems that he didn’t have such a high opinion of his second son. He once remarked publicly that Benjamin was unfit to be prime minister, but would make a good foreign minister — an uncannily accurate judgment, if one sees the job of the foreign minister as marketing.

The home in which “Bibi” grew up was not a very happy one. The father was a deeply embittered man. As a historian, he was never accepted by the academic world in Jerusalem, who disavowed his theories.

Not getting a professorship in Jerusalem, the father emigrated to the US, where Benjamin grew up. The father never forgave the Israeli establishment.

The myth of the great historian laboring at his titanic task was a daily reality at home, in America and, later, back in Jerusalem. The three sons had to walk on tiptoe, not being allowed to make any noise that could disturb the great man, nor to bring their friends home.

All this shaped the character and world view of “Bibi” — the specter of imminent national annihilation, the role model of the fiercely rightist father, the shadow of the older and much more admired brother. When Benjamin now speaks endlessly about the coming second Holocaust and his historical role in preventing it, this need not be just a ploy to divert attention from the Palestinian issue or to safeguard his political survival. He may — frightening thought! — actually believe it.

The picture that emerges is exactly that painted by Yuval Diskin: a Holocaust-obsessed fantasist, out of contact with reality, distrusting all Goyim, trying to follow in the footsteps of a rigid and extremist father — altogether a dangerous person to lead a nation in a real crisis.

Yet this is the man who, according to all opinion polls, is going to win the upcoming elections, just four months from now.

By:Uri Avnery,arabnews

I. The Status of the Corruption Cases Against the Mubarak Family and Some of Their Oligarchs

1. In reality, Egypt’s “Revolution” was a partial regime change. It brought down Hosni Mubarak’s presidency and the rule of his oligarchy, but it did not remove the military regime which has existed in Egypt since July 1952. The military regime consequently played an important role in the transformation of Egypt by making it possible for popular demand to remove Hosni Mubarak from the Presidency as well as his then-recently appointed Vice President, retired General Omar Suleiman, and the political caste that ran the country under Mubarak’s leadership.
2. The popular demand was also for the removal and accountability of the corrupt Mubarak oligarchy, which drained Egypt’s resources in a way that was unprecedented in the country’s history. During the Mubarak 30-year regime, his oligarchy managed to convert Egypt’s publicsector economy into private-sector wealth. They did so either by direct acquisition, by brokering the sale of government-owned industries and properties at nominal prices, and by acquiring substantial portions of Egypt’s prime land in the Sinai, along the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Coast, as well as prime agricultural land, all at practically no cost.

Thus public land was converted into private commercial and industrial projects. During this short period of  time Egypt’s national wealth was converted into private wealth, most of which is believed to then have been transferred abroad.
3. Under Mubarak, the government provided politically connected entrepreneurs with substantial concessions, such as land roads, electricity, water and sewage, for their private-sector projects.
This substantially increased the values of these projects. These entrepreneurs also received significant tax benefits and funding from banks. In essence the state financed the growth of the private sector through structural investments without receiving much in the way of taxes.
4. The ramifications of this wealth transfer have had broader effects on the Egyptian economy.
Bank funding of these projects was based on their total estimated values, including the value of the governmental benefits mentioned above.

In most cases, this doubled or more the value of  the original investment, thereby increasing the amount of the funding from the bank.

If the investment came under the guise that it was a foreign investment, (since the Foreign Investment Authority did not look into the capital source or ownership of the capital of foreign investments), the capital investment funds that operated in the country at least doubled in value as a result of government benefits.

Consequently, when these projects were funded by local banks (at levels up to fifty percent), the loans amply covered the original capital investment
which could then be transferred out of the country in what this writer previously referred to in both official reports to the government and in private reports as “U-turn” investment operations.

5. No one knows today how much of foreign investment projects, as well as domestic investment types owned by the oligarchy and its cronies, have been converted into a contingent domestic liability. In other words, if the original project was capitalized at a certain amount, the added free government benefits and concessions increased its value, and the bank loans allowed the investor to immediately recoup the original capital investment leaving the risk of loss to the local lending bank.
6. Because of the connivance of the Central Bank, private banks and Government ministries, no one knows even today the total value of these loans and the exposure of Egyptian banks. In addition, the Central Bank has guaranteed some of these bank loans as a way of covering up for these transactions and protecting the banks from too much risk exposure.
7. Consequently, Egypt’s private banks remain exposed to an unknown risk of loss if these projects fail. The Central Bank is also at risk with respect to guarantees it may have provided to some of these banks. The likelihood that a number of these projects would be unable to meet  their debt obligations puts additional economic and social pressures on the country’s economic viability and stability. More significant is the fact that in Egypt’s declining economy and depletion of foreign currency reserves, any actual losses arising out of the collapse of these investment projects would have serious repercussions on the economy, not to mention Egypt’s credit standing and borrowing capability.
8. One would have assumed that the governments appointed by the SCAF since March 2011 would have looked into the matter (particularly since this writer has raised the issue with the appropriate authorities both well before and after the fall of Mubarak). But it seems that no one in the SCAF or the government wants to face the unpleasant reality. Succeeding cabinets and ministers of finance have dealt with more immediate problems, probably with the hope that if their head is buried in the sand the danger cannot be seen and therefore does not exist.
9. The SCAF and succeeding governments wanted to get on with the problems of the day and set  as their primary goal public order and stability. They felt it best not to make the issue of corruption and its potential economic consequences a matter of public knowledge and debate.
Instead, a few persons were charged and made to face trial, despite a hasty investigation of their cases. In almost every case, these investigations addressed only a small portion of the facts the persons could have been charged with. These investigations also failed to look at the larger
aspects of institutionalized corruption and the large number of persons involved.
10. The possibility that the prosecutor general’s office could seize proceeds laundered abroad received significant publicity. These proceeds were estimated to be as high as $70 billion (though that estimate was made without any factual basis). For some time common people even
asked how much each person would get back, as if there was going to be a national refund program from the recovered foreign assets. But the prospects of that are dim due to the lack of expertise of Egyptian prosecutorial and banking authorities, and the complicated nature of foreign assets recovery for corruption and money laundering.

11. A large number of widely known oligarchs who have exploited the nation and its resources remain at large. Anyone in the streets of Cairo can name at least 10 or more persons who should have been investigated and prosecuted for the enormous wealth they have accumulated in a short period of time through their political influence with the Mubarak regime. The decision by the SCAF to bring only a few poorly investigated token cases to trial may have been a political choice, in part, to move the country from a state of revolution into a state of normalcy by preserving public order and maintaining stability. No one would disagree with the validity of that objective, but many reject the notion that the pursuit of this objective is incompatible with the accountability of those who have committed enormous crimes of corruption and abuse of power in the acquisition of private wealth to the detriment of the Country’s economy and the people of Egypt.
12. The economic and social difficulties that lay ahead should, if nothing else, justify the pursuit of accountability against those who have committed vast crimes of corruption and abuse of power. The consequences of these crimes will be long felt, and Egypt’s economy is not likely to rebound in a short period of time.
A. Summary of Cases

1. HOSNI, ALAA AND GAMAL MUBARAK AND HUSSEIN SALEM
1.1 Hosni Mubarak and his two sons

13. The Egyptian Public Prosecution charged former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak with three crimes. In addition to the accusation of premeditated murder against protesters during the uprising against his reign, Mubarak stands accused of two separate cases of financial corruption.

14. The first corruption charge concerns a 161,000-square-foot seaside mansion in the Sinai resort of Sharm al-Sheik which Mubarak obtained as a kickback from his friend, the businessman Hussein Salem. Mubarak obtained the mansion after he exploited his influence to facilitate Salem’s purchase of a large tract of prime land in the Sinai at a deeply discounted price, formally as part of a privatization deal.

Salem also provided the former president’s two sons with another four luxury villas worth EGP 14 million ($2.4 million). The two sons, Alaa and Gamal, are charged with profiteering by abusing their father’s power in receiving these four villas as part of the same kickback.

15. The second corruption charge concerns a separate deal for the sale of natural gas to Israel. This deal has been the subject of rumors and suspicions in Egypt for years and caused widespread anger among Egyptians because gas was exported to Israel at very low prices while Egypt suffered a natural gas shortage. In this count, prosecutors charged Mubarak with having sold national gas from the Egyptian government to the East Mediterranean Gas Company, in which Salem owned a large stake, at below market rates. The East Mediterranean Gas Company may have then resold the gas to Israel at a substantial mark-up, thus enriching Salem at the public’s expense, although the prosecutors’ statement is unclear on those details.

It is clear that Salem made huge profits out of the deal, which resulted in $714 million in lost revenue for Egypt. As more media attention was focused on the gas deal and Salem’s role, he sold his stake in the East Mediterranean Gas Company, thereby earning $2 billion in profit. The charges brought by prosecutors did not address the former president’s interest in the gas exportation deal, focusing instead on his role in helping enrich Salem through exercising his influence.
16. If found guilty, the former president could face sentences ranging from five years in prison to the death penalty.2 Alaa and Gamal Mubarak face sentences of 5 to 15 years in prison.
1.2 Hussein Salem

17. Hussein Salem is a notorious business magnate known for his close ties to Mubarak. He has been described in Egyptian mainstream media as “one of the most secretive businessmen in Egypt”. Salem fled Egypt with his son and daughter on February 3, 2011 at the height of the Egyptian revolution, a week before Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign. Salem was arrested in a wealthy Madrid suburb in June last year over charges of money laundering brought against him by Spanish authorities. Around $47 million of his possessions were frozen and houses worth $14 million were seized, including some in the jet-set resort of Marbella. The money is said to have been obtained in Egypt through illegal means and sent to Salem’s family accounts in Spain.

He was arrested after Interpol issued an international arrest warrant. He is wanted in Egypt and Spain for various charges of corruption and money laundering. His son and daughter, who were arrested in Spain last summer, are also accused of laundering some two billion Euros.

18. Salem faces charges in four different cases in Egypt. He is currently being tried in absentia in the same trial as Mubarak and his sons Alaa and Gamal in what is known as the “trial of the century”. The verdict will be delivered on June 2, 2012. Salem is also being prosecuted in absentia along with former Minister of Petroleum, Sameh Fahmy, for the above mentioned purchase of Egyptian natural gas at low prices, and sale to Israel at a substantive markup. Last October another Cairo criminal court sentenced Salem, his son and daughter in absentia to seven years in prison and a fine of $4 billion on charges of money laundering and profiteering. The court found Salem guilty of laundering more than $2 billion in the Egyptian-Israeli gas deal. In a fourth case, a Giza criminal court sentenced Salem to 15 years in prison for the illegal acquisition of public property—the nature reserve al-Bayadeyya in the Upper Egypt city of Luxor.4 Hussein Salem was the owner of the Crocodile Tourism Project Company which acquired the island. His son Khaled, who was the managing director of the company, received the same sentence.
19. Although Mr. Salem also holds Spanish citizenship, Spain recently informed the Egyptian ambassador in Madrid of a Spanish court’s decision to extradite Hussein Salem, his son Khaled and his daughter Magda to Egypt on the condition that they do not face the death penalty―a standard condition made by all EU countries in extradition decisions. Salem and his children have appealed the decision allowing their extradition, and a final decision is expected soon.
20. The charges do not involve Salem’s previous embezzlement in 1983 of U.S. aid funds for Egypt as described by this writer in an interview with Rania Badawy in Al-Masry Al-Youm on 19 Oct. 2011.6 In addition, the charges do not address the questionable concession that he obtained from Egypt to export Sinai Gas to Israel.
2. SAMEH FAHMY

21. A Cairo criminal court recently adjourned the trial of former Minister of Petroleum, Sameh Fahmy, and other officials for their role in exporting gas to Israel. In addition to the former minister, the indictment includes former Vice-President of the Egyptian General Authority for Petroleum
for the Processing and Manufacturing of Gas, Mahmoud Latif Mahmoud Amer; former Vice-President of the
Egyptian General Authority for Petroleum and Production, Hassan Mohammed Akl; former

Vice-President of the Egyptian General Authority for Petroleum and Planning, Ismail Hamid Ismail Karrara; former Chairman of the Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company, Mohammed Ibrahim Youssef Tawila; former Chairman of the Egyptian General Authority for Petroleum, Ibrahim Saleh Mahmoud; and, fugitive businessman Hussein Salem. Each of the defendants is accused of playing a role in squandering public money through allowing Hussein Salem to purchase Egyptian natural gas at below market prices, which he later sold to Israel at a substantial mark-up. Prosecutors accused the defendants of squandering public money, profiteering, damaging the country’s economic power and wasting natural resources.
22. The Public Prosecution stated that Fahmy, who was assigned by the government to negotiate with the Government of Israel over the gas exportation deal, deliberately conducted these negotiations against the interests of Egypt and signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Israeli government which paved the way for exporting gas to Israel for 15 years (with a renewal for a subsequent 5 years) at prices whose minimum limit did not exceed the cost of production and maximum limit was not commensurate with global prices. The Memorandum stipulated that prices were to be fixed during the long period of the agreement, and provided for a penalty clause for Egyptian alone to ensure its implementation of its obligations. Fahmy is also accused of selecting Salem’s East Mediterranean Gas Company to export gas to Israel without following the necessary procedures set forth in the procurements and bidding law.
23. Aside from Sameh Fahmy and Hussein Salem, the other defendants are top officials of the petroleum sector who are accused of setting the low gas prices and concluding the agreement which contained prejudicial terms to the interests of the Egyptian State, and which unlawfully enriched Salem with more than $2 billion. The gas price differential is estimated to have caused the Egyptian economy a loss of $715 million.
3. YASSIN MANSOUR

24. The Prosecutor-General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud referred businessmen Yassin Mansour, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the second-largest real estate company in Egypt, Palm Hills Developments (PHD), to criminal trial over charges of profiteering and unlawfully acquiring public property.

Former Housing Minister Ahmed al-Maghraby, who is Mansour’s cousin, was also referred to criminal trial in the same case, in addition to former Chairman of Akhbar Al Youm news corporation Mohamed Acahdi Fadli, and Emirati businessman and Chairman of Rakeen Egypt Company Waheed Metwally Atallah. Yassin Mansour was in the United Kingdom at the time of his referral to court.
25. The Public Prosecution alleges collusion between PHD, owned by Yassin Mansour and in which al-Maghraby is a shareholder, and the
UAE-based Rakeen Company in purchasing a 113-acre piece of land in the 6th of October City that was initially allocated to Akhbar Al Youm news corporation. The Prosecution accused al-Maghraby of unlawfully selling the land, which was owned by the State, to Akhbar Al Youm news corporation at prices below their true value. Akhbar Al Youm, in turn, allegedly sold the land to PHD through Rakeen Egypt, without fully paying its price to the State or implementing the project initially tied to the sale. Metwally allegedly used Rakeen Egypt as a ‘veil company’, purchasing the land with the intent of allowing Yassin Mansour to eventually acquire the company and the piece of land it purchased. According to the collusion of the defendants, al-Maghraby alone was able to illegally gain EGP 159 million.

26. On July 5, 2011, the court acquitted all defendants. Following their acquittal, the Prosecution lodged an appeal with the Court of Cassation, Egypt’s highest court, in order to quash the court’s decision and refer the defendants to another circuit for retrial.
4. MOHAMED MANSOUR

27. Mohamed Mansour comes from one of the most successful business families in Alexandria. The Mansour Group represents nine of the top Fortune 500 companies in Egypt and employs nearly 40,000 people. Born in 1948, Mansour received a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from North Carolina State University in 1968, and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Auburn University in 1971, where he taught until 1973.
28. Shortly after the revolution, several news reports emerged accusing Mansour, a businessman and guru of transport vehicles who headed the Ministry of Transportation from 2006 to 2009, of having engaged in corrupt practices during his tenure as Minister and in collaboration
with his cousin, Ahmed al-Maghraby, the former Minister of Housing. Mohamed Mansour is the elder brother of Yassin Mansour.
He was forced to step down as Minister of Transportation in October 2009 in the aftermath of a train crash which claimed the lives of 18 people and left 36 more injured. The accident triggered a barrage of criticism against his performance.
29. News reports accuse the former minister of doubling his fortune after assuming office by unlawfully gaining pieces of land owned by the State, and refusing to pay loans from Egyptian banks worth more than EGP 2 billion which he had obtained between 2006 and 2008.

30. Following the revolution, a group of workers at the Railways Authority lodged complaints with the Public Prosecution that Mansour and businessman Sherif al-Gabaly (brother of former Minister of Health Hatem al-Gabaly) had wasted more than EGP 4 billion of the Authority’s funds by failing to collect debts owed by several public and private entities to the Railway Authority.

Among these companies are Accor Hotels, which is owned by the minister’s cousin Ahmed al-Maghraby.
31. Mansour also established El Mansour and El Maghraby Investment and Development Company with his cousin Ahmed al-Maghraby. The company grew exponentially, triggering accusations of profiteering. The family partnership precipitated the indictment of Mansour for his involvement in some of the corrupt practices of which his cousin al-Maghraby was accused. Among these accusations is that al-Maghraby sold a 230-acre piece of land to the Mansour and Maghraby Group at a very low price.
32. Other accusations revolve around his role as Minister of Transportation. News reports accuse the former minister of wasting public funds as he spent an estimated EGP 100 billion during his tenure which failed to bring much improvement to the transportation sector. They also mention that Mansour allegedly conducted deals between the Ministry of Transportation and his General Motors company for the purchase of defect tractors worth EGP 2 billion.
33. However, the Public Prosecution has not pressed charges against Mansour over any of the aforesaid allegations. Now that a number of his family members, business associates and friends are behind bars, Mansour has retreated from public life, and faces an ambiguous future.

for more ……

The Supreme Court is asked to decide if government officials can be held accountable for torturing a US citizen

Two of the most under-discussed afflictions in American political life are inter-related: (1) the heinous, inhumane treatment of prisoners on American soil (often, though certainly not exclusively, Muslim political prisoners), and (2) the virtually complete abdication by subservient federal courts in the post-9/11 era of their duty to hold Executive Branch officials accountable for unconstitutional and otherwise illegal acts in the War on Terror context. Those two disgraceful American trends are vividly illustrated by juxtaposing two events, which I happened to be reminded of yesterday while looking for something else; first, from a January, 27, 2007, article in The Washington Post:

The prime minister of Canada apologized Friday to Maher Arar and agreed to give $9 million in compensation to the Canadian Arab, who was spirited by U.S. agents to Syria and tortured there after being falsely named as a terrorism suspect.

Arar, 36, a former computer engineer who was detained while changing planes at a New York airport in 2002 and imprisoned in a Syrian dungeon for 10 months, said after the announcement that he “feels proud as a Canadian”. . . .

“We cannot go back and fix the injustice that occurred to Mr. Arar,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in issuing the formal apology in Ottawa. “However, we can make changes to lessen the likelihood that something like this will ever happen again.” The head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police resigned over the affair, and the government has pledged to increase oversight of its intelligence agencies. . . .

The financial compensation settles a claim Arar made against the government for having provided exaggerated and false information to the United States that identified him as a terrorist suspect. Harper said the amount “is within this government’s realistic assessment of what Mr. Arar would have won in a lawsuit.” His attorneys also were awarded about $870,000 in legal fees.

“The evidence is clear that Mr. Arar has been treated unjustly. He should not be on a watch list,” Harper said.

And then this Christian Science Monitor article from June 14, 2010:

A Canadian citizen has lost his bid to hold US officials accountable for their decision to label him an Al Qaeda suspect and deport him to Syria where he was held without charge for a year and allegedly tortured during US-directed interrogations.

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up the case of Maher Arar, who was born in Syria but had lived in Canada since his teens. . . .

Arar filed a lawsuit in the US seeking to hold American officials accountable for their actions. . . . To date, the US government position on Arar has been to insist that Arar has no legal right to seek to hold American officials accountable for his ordeal.

In denying review of Arar’s case, the high court lets stand a 7 to 4 ruling by the full Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. That court found that because of “special factors” involving national security, Arar’s lawsuit should be dismissed.

The reason that’s so striking even several years later is it shows just how corruptly deferential American federal courts are to the Executive Branch when it comes to Muslims. One of the most amazing statistics of the last decade: not a single War on Terror victim — not one, whether foreign or American — has been permitted to proceed in an American court in an effort to obtain compensation for illegal treatment by the U.S. Government; instead, American courts have unanimously dismissed those cases at the outset, without reaching their substance. Even when everyone knows and admits that the U.S. Government abducted a totally innocent person and shipped him off to Syria to be tortured, as is true for Arar, American federal judges shut the courthouse door in his face, accepting the claims of the Bush and Obama DOJs that to allow the victim to obtain justice for what was done to him would be to risk the disclosure of vital “state secrets.” They accepted this Kafkaesque secrecy claim even after the Government of Canada published to the world a comprehensive report detailing what happened to Arar.

This was but one of the most extreme expressions of this post-9/11 trend of federal court abdication when it comes to Muslims. Time and again, federal judges have exhibited severe amounts of deference and bias when faced with Muslim defendants accused of some connection to Terrorism. For that reason, to be Muslim and accused of Terrorism-related crimes by the U.S. Government — no matter how tenuous the connection is, how dubious the allegations are, how devoid the charges are of any violent acts, how entrapped the defendant was by the FBI — has become a virtual guarantor of being convicted and sentenced to decades in prison: and not just any prison, but inhumane dungeons like the SuperMax at Florence, Colorado or the CMU unit at Terre Haute, Indiana (aka “GITMO North“): among the worst prison hell-holes ever designed.

Indeed, even Guantanamo military commissions — once scorned as due-process-free zones that would reflexively churn out convictions — have treated Muslim defendants accused of Terrorism links far better than U.S. federal courts have, as advocates of civilian trials, somewhat perversely, often point out. Just ponder that: if you’re a Muslim, even an American Muslim, accused of some serious crime relating to Terrorism, you’re more likely to receive a fair trial — a chance for acquittal on some charges — if you face a U.S. military tribunal than an American federal court. By stark contrast, look at what federal judges are willing to do when white non-Muslims face dubious, speech-based charges of Terrorism: the court will dismiss the entire indictment on the (correct) ground that the accused Terrorists have the First Amendment right even to advocate violence against the U.S. Government, an affirmation of core Constitutional principles which one almost never sees a federal judge brave enough to protect in the case of a Muslim facing similarly defective accusations.

Federal judges are given life tenure in large part to enable them to administer justice without regard to political considerations, but, with rare exception (ones promptly “fixed” on appeal), they have been driven by the same political anti-Muslim biases that have infected most other realms of American political life. Indeed, of all the American institutions that have shamefully contributed to the grotesque War on Terror excesses and the Islamaphobia which fuels them — the Congress, the Executive Branch, the American media, both political parties, the U.S. citizenry — none has been as obsequious or as craven as federal judges. Designed to be the Apolitical Check of Last Resort on executive overreach and vengeance-fueled lawlessness, they have instead become the eager engines of those syndromes.

In terms of gross travesties, it’s difficult to top the federal court treatment of Maher Arar. But the judicial treatment of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla comes close. Padilla was detained in 2002 and publicly accused by Attorney General John Ashcroft of being a “Dirty Bomber.” But rather than accuse him of any crimes in a court, the Bush administration declared him to be an “enemy combatant,” put him in a military brig in South Carolina for the next two-and-a-half years without charges, prevented him from any contact with the outside world (including even a lawyer), and subjected him to severe torture. When they finally indicted him almost three years later — only in order to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court from ruling on whether the President is permitted to imprison U.S. citizens on American soil without charges — they did not charge him with anything having to do with a “dirty bomb,” but instead filed glaringly trumped-up charges based almost entirely on a membership application he filled out to join Al Qaeda (he was not charged with any plots to engage in violence). He was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in prison on top of the 5 years he was already encaged, only to have the Obama DOJ successfully appeal and convince an appellate court that the sentence was too lenient.

For the last several years, Padilla, represented by the ACLU, has been attempting to hold accountable six Bush officials responsible for his torture by suing them for violations of his Constitutional rights. But, needless to say, the Obama DOJ — led by the President who, when he announced his candidacy, proclaimed that “the era of Scooter Libby justice will be over” — has insisted that, unless Congress explicitly decrees otherwise, these officials are immune from lawsuits even when they knowingly authorize the torture of an American citizen on U.S. soil. And federal courts — also needless to say — have thus far accepted that claim and barred Padilla from suing. Today, the ACLU filed a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review these dismissals, and it’s worth highlight a couple parts of that brief. Here, for instance, is the question which the ACLU is asking the Supreme Court to answer:

In what kind of country is that even a question? Even more so, in what kind of country do courts answer that question in the negative, as two separate American courts thus far have? As the ACLU explained, it is literally difficult to imagine a more extreme expression of full-scale immunity for government officials than shielding them even when they engage in conduct this patently illegal:

When it comes to shielding grave War on Terror crimes from all accountability, most critics have focused — rightfully so — on President Obama’s decree that even Bush-era torturers should not be subjected to criminal investigation. But that’s been only one of the many ways that the Obama administration has entrenched the consummately dangerous principle that even the most notorious crimes are beyond the reach of the law when committed by high-level government officials. But none of those ignominious efforts would succeed if the U.S. federal judiciary had even a fraction of the courage and integrity which the Founders envisioned life-tenured judges would exercise.

The central role played by federal judges in this full-on assault on legal equality and the Constitution when it comes to Muslim litigants and the War on Terror is often neglected. That’s because lawyers are in the best position to tell the story, but are often prevented — by their need to continue practicing before these judges and by formal disciplinary constraints – from publicizing the bad behavior of judges. Those factors, by design, operate to shield federal judges from scrutiny and critique. But no history of anti-Muslim hysteria, bigotry and legal oppression in the War on Terror will be complete without including the key enabling role they have played.

 

By:Glenn Greenwald,salon.

If you’re a serious revolutionary, then you are not looking for an autocratic revolution, but a popular one which will move towards freedom and democracy. That can take place only if a mass of the population are implementing it, carrying it out, and solving problems. They’re not going to undertake that commitment, understandably, unless they have discovered for themselves that there are limits to reform.

A sensible revolutionary will try to push reform to the limits, for two good reasons. First, because the reforms can be valuable in themselves. People should have an eight-hour day rather than a twelve-hour day. And in general, we should want to act in accord with decent ethical values.

Secondly, on strategic grounds, you have to show that here are limits to reform. Perhaps sometimes the system will accommodate to needed reforms. If so, well and good. But if it won’t, then new questions arise. Perhaps that is a moment when resistance is necessary, steps to overcome the barriers to justified changes. Perhaps the time has come to resort to coercive measures in defense of rights and justice, a form of self-defense. Unless the general population recognizes such measures to be a form of self-defense, they’re not going to take part in them, at least they shouldn’t.

If you get to a point where the existing institutions will not bend to the popular will, you have to eliminate the institutions. May Day started here, but then became an international day in support of American workers who were being subjected to brutal violence and judicial punishment. Today, the struggle continues to celebrate May Day not as a “law day” as defined by political leaders, but as a day whose meaning is decided by the people, a day rooted in organizing and working for a better future for the whole of society.

By:Noam Chomsky,commondreams

If Obama is the president of next to nothing on the domestic policy front, he has the powers previously associated with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad.He has few constraints (except those he’s internalized).  No one can stop him or countermand his orders.  He has a bevy of lawyers at his beck and call to explain the “legality” of his actions.  And if he cares to, he can send a robot assassin to kill you, whoever you are, no matter where you may be on planet Earth.

He sounds like a typical villain from a James Bond novel.  You know, the kind who captures Bond, tells him his fiendish plan for dominating the planet, ties him up for some no less fiendish torture, and then leaves him behind to gum up the works.

As it happens, though, he’s the president of the United State, a nice guy with a charismatic wife and two lovely kids.

How could this be?

Crash-and-Burn Dreams and One That Came to Be

Sometimes to understand where you are, you need to ransack the past.  In this case, to grasp just how this country’s first African-American-constitutional-law-professor-liberal Oval Office holder became the most imperial of all recent imperial presidents, it’s necessary to look back to the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency.  Who today even remembers that time, when it was common to speak of the U.S. as the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” the only “sheriff” on planet Earth, and the neocons were boasting of an empire-to-come greater than the British and Roman ones rolled together?

In those first high-flying years after 9/11, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their top officials held three dreams of power and dominance that they planned to make reality.  The first was to loose the U.S. military — a force they fervently believed capable of bringing anybody or any state to heel — on the Greater Middle East.  With it in the lead, they aimed to create a generations-long Pax Americana in the region.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was to be only the initial “cakewalk” in a series of a shock-and-awe operations in which Washington would unilaterally rearrange the oil heartlands of the planet, toppling or cowing hostile regimes like the Syrians and the Iranians.  (A neocon quip caught the spirit of that moment: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”)  This, in turn, would position the U.S. to control the planet in a historically unique way, and so prevent the rise of any other great power or bloc of nations resistant to American desires.

Their second dream, linked at the hip to the first, was to create a generations-long Pax Republicana here at home. (“Everyone wants to go to Kansas, but real men want to go to New York and LA.”)  In that dream, the Democratic Party, like the Iraqis or the Iranians, would be brought to heel, a new Republican majority funded by corporate America would rule the roost, and above it all would be perched a “unitary executive,” a president freed of domestic constraints and capable — by fiat, the signing statement, or simply expanded powers — of doing just about anything he wanted.

Though less than a decade has passed, both of those dreams already feel like ancient history.  Both crashed and burned, leaving behind a Democrat in the White House, an Iraq without an American military garrison, and a still-un-regime-changed Iran.  With the arrival on Bush’s watch of a global economic meltdown, those too-big-not-to-fail dreams were relabeled disasters, fed down the memory hole, and are today largely forgotten.

It’s easy, then, to forget that the Bush era wasn’t all crash-and-burn, that the third of their hubristic fantasies proved a remarkable, if barely noticed, success.  Because that success never fully registered amid successive disasters and defeats, it’s been difficult for Americans to grasp the “imperial” part of the Obama presidency.

Remember that Cheney and his cohorts took power in 2001 convinced that, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, American presidents had been placed in “chains.”  As soon as 9/11 hit, they began, as they put it, to “take the gloves off.”  Their deepest urge was to use “national security” to free George W. Bush and his Pax Americana successors of any constraints.

From this urge flowed the decision to launch a “Global War on Terror” — that is, a “wartime” with no possible end that would leave a commander-in-chief president in the White House till hell froze over.  The construction of Guantanamo and the creation of “black sites” from Poland to Thailand, the president’s own private offshore prison system, followed naturally, as did the creation of his own privately sanctioned form of (in)justice and punishment, a torture regime.

At the same time, they began expanding the realm of presidentially ordered “covert” military operations (most of which were, in the end, well publicized) — from drone wars to the deployment of special operations forces.  These were signposts indicating the power of an unchained president to act without constraint abroad.  Similarly, at home, the Bush administration began expanding what would once have been illegal surveillance of citizens and other forms of presidentially inspired overreach.  They began, in other words, treating the U.S. as if it were part of an alien planet, as if it were, in some sense, a foreign country and they the occupying power.

With a cowed Congress and a fearful, distracted populace, they undoubtedly were free to do far more.  There were few enough checks and balances left to constrain a war president and his top officials.  It turned out, in fact, that the only real checks and balances they felt were internalized ones, or ones that came from within the national security state itself, and yet those evidently did limit what they felt was possible.

The Obama Conundrum

This, then, was what Barack Obama inherited on entering the Oval Office: an expanding, but not yet fully expansive, commander-in-chief presidency, which, in retrospect, seemed to fit him like a… glove.  Of course, he also inherited the Bush administration’s domestic failures and those in the Greater Middle East, and they overshadowed what he’s done with that commander-in-chief presidency.

It’s true that, with President Truman’s decision to go to war in Korea in 1950, Congress’s constitutional right to declare war (rather than rubberstamp a presidential announcement of the same) went by the boards.  So there’s a distinct backstory to our present imperial presidency.  Still, in our era, presidential war-making has become something like a 24/7 activity.

Once upon a time, American presidents didn’t consider micro-managing a permanent war state as a central part of their job description, nor did they focus so unrelentingly on the U.S. military and the doings of the national security state. Today, the president’s word is death just about anywhere on the planet and he exercises that power with remarkable frequency.  He appears in front of “the troops” increasingly often and his wife has made their wellbeing part of her job description.  He has at his command expanded “covert” powers, including his own private armies: a more militarized CIA and growing hordes of special operations forces, 60,000 of them, who essentially make up a “covert” military inside the U.S. military.

In effect, he also has his own private intelligence outfits, including most recently a newly formed Defense Clandestine Service at the Pentagon focused on non-war zone intelligence operations (especially, so the reports go, against China and Iran).  Finally, he has what is essentially his own expanding private (robotic) air force: drones.

He can send his drone assassins and special ops troops just about anywhere to kill just about anyone he thinks should die, national sovereignty be damned.  He firmly established his “right” to do this by going after the worst of the worst, killing Osama bin Laden in Pakistan with special operations forces and an American citizen and jihadi, Anwar al-Awlaki, in Yemen with a drone.

At the moment, the president is in the process of widening his around-the-clock “covert” air campaigns.  Almost unnoted in the U.S., for instance, American drones recently carried out a strike in the Philippines killing 15 and the Air Force has since announced a plan to boost its drones there by 30%.  At the same time, in Yemen, as previously in the Pakistani borderlands, the president has just given the CIA and the U.S. Joint Operations Command the authority to launch drone strikes not just against identified “high-value” al-Qaeda “targets,” but against general “patterns of suspicious behavior.”  So expect an escalating drone war there not against known individuals, but against groups of suspected evildoers (and as in all such cases, innocent civilians as well).

This is another example of something that would be forbidden at home, but is now a tool of unchecked presidential power elsewhere in the world: profiling.

As with Bush junior, the only thing that constrains the president and his team, it seems, is some set of internalized checks and balances.  That’s undoubtedly why, before he ordered the successful drone assassination of Awlaki, lawyers from the Pentagon, State Department, National Security Council, intelligence agencies, and the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel held meetings to produce a 50-page memorandum providing a “legal” basis for the president to order the assassination of a U.S. citizen, a document, mind you, that will never be released to the public.

In truth, at this point the president could clearly have ordered those deaths without such a document.  Think of it as the presidential equivalent of a guilty conscience, but count on this: when those drones start taking out “behaviors” in Yemen and elsewhere, there will be no stream of 50-page memorandums generated to cover the decisions. That’s because as you proceed down such a path, as your acts become ever more the way of your world, your need to justify them (to yourself, if no one else) lessens.

That path, already widening into a road, may, someday, become the killing equivalent of an autobahn.  In that case, making such decisions will be ever easier for an imperial president as American society grows yet more detached from the wars fought and operations launched in its name.  In terms of the president’s power to kill by decree, whether Obama gets his second term or Mitt Romney steps into the Oval Office, the reach of the commander-in-chief presidency and the “covert” campaigns, so secret they can’t even be acknowledged in a court of law, so public they can be boasted about, will only increase.

This is a dangerous development, which leaves us in the grip — for now — of what might be called the Obama conundrum.  At home, on issues of domestic importance, Obama is a hamstrung, hogtied president, strikingly checked and balanced.  Since the passage of his embattled healthcare bill, he has, in a sense, been in chains, able to accomplish next to nothing of his domestic program.  Even when trying to exercise the unilateral powers that have increasingly been invested in presidents, what he can do on his own has proven exceedingly limited, a series of tiny gestures aimed at the largest of problems. And were Mitt Romney to be elected, given congressional realities, this would be unlikely to change in the next four years.

On the other hand, the power of the president as commander-in-chief has never been greater.  If Obama is the president of next to nothing on the domestic policy front (but fundraising for his second term), he has the powers previously associated with the gods when it comes to war-making abroad.  There, he is the purveyor of life and death.  At home, he is a hamstrung weakling, at war he is — to use a term that has largely disappeared since the 1970s — an imperial president.

Such contradictions call for resolution and that should worry us all.

By:Tom Engelhardt,alternet

You know the world is flat — and hot and crowded — but that’s just the tip of Friedman’s iceberg of hackery.

In conferring the honor of “Wanker of the Decade” on New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, blogger Duncan Black observed that “truly great wankers possess a kind of glib narcissism, the belief that everything is about them while simultaneously disavowing any responsibility for anything.” The sorry “state of the world is what it is,” Black continued, “in large part because people in positions of great power think this absurd buffoon of man is a Very Serious Person.”

Most readers are presumably familiar with the most prominent theories to have emerged from the brain of Thomas Friedman over the course of his career. To name a few here:

1. The world is flat.
2. Countries that have McDonald’s do not go to war with each other—except when they do, in which case it is preferable if the outcome of the conflict indicates that Serbs “wanted to stand in line for burgers, much more than they wanted to stand in line for Kosovo.”
3. By pure coincidence, the 2011 Arab uprisings were caused by some of Friedman’s own favorite topics: Barack Obama, Google Earth, Israel, the Beijing Olympics, and Salam Fayyad. (See blogger Sarah Carr’s response, in which she notes the additional revolutionary impetus provided by the 2008 Cheese-Rolling Competition near Gloucester, England.)

While conducting research for my book about Thomas Friedman, I had the pleasure of reading 17 years’ worth of biweekly dispatches from the three-time Pulitzer recipient. For the benefit of those who may lead more fulfilling lives, I’ve composed a brief list of lesser-known Friedmanian insights and policy prescriptions.

1. The Clinton administration should have dedicated itself to illegally manufacturing Iraqi currency.

In 1996 Friedman advised the following approach to Iraq: “Print dinars. The U.S. should flood Iraq with counterfeit Iraqi dinars. It would wreak havoc. Because the U.S. has blocked the sale of money-printing presses, ink and paper to Iraq, Washington can already print better Iraqi money than Baghdad can.”

Seven years later, the economic war plan was abandoned in favor of the more physical doctrine “Suck. On. This.”

2. The Cali cartel would have been a valuable partner in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

According to Friedman’s 2001 analysis, the merits of Colombian drug cartels included that “they understand that when we say we want someone ‘dead or alive’ we mean ‘dead or dead.’”

Geographical complications were resolved as follows: “The Cali cartel doesn’t operate in Afghanistan. But the Russian mafia sure does, as do various Afghan factions, drug rings and Pakistani secret agents.”

3.Thanks to NAFTA, Mexico has improved its selection of baby names.

During a 2010 visit to Mexico City, Friedman reported that, despite attempts by anti-NAFTA Mexicans to thwart progress by remaining poor, a promising trend had been detected by economist Luis de la Calle.

Without mentioning de la Calle’s former position as Trade and NAFTA Minister at Mexico’s embassy in D.C., Friedman cited the results of his study of the top 50 Mexican baby names of 2008: “The most popular for girls, he said, included ‘Elizabeth, Evelyn, Abigail, Karen, Marilyn and Jaqueline, and for boys Alexander, Jonathan, Kevin, Christian and Bryan.’” In case anyone had failed to grasp the magnitude of societal advancement, Friedman summarized: “Not only Juans.”

4. If the U.S. lowers its profile in the Arab world, the Arabs will realize that their children are being outperformed academically by the children of their maids.

In the midst of his Iraq war cheerleading campaign in 2004, it occurred to Friedman that “[t]he other way for us to promote reform is to get out of the way so people in the Middle East can see clearly that many of their maids’ children—from India, China, Sri Lanka and the Philippines—are excelling at math, science and engineering.”

As it turned out, the inverse relationship between a U.S. presence in the region and Arab admiration for the scholastic exploits of the offspring of their domestic servants found corroboration in Islam itself: “Only when the Arabs focus on how their maids’ children are doing in the world, not what the Americans are doing in their region, will they revisit one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet Muhammad: ‘Seek knowledge, even unto China. That is the duty for every Muslim.’”

5. Saudi Arabia suffers from an excess of democracy.

In the same 2003 column in which he confessed to having “a soft spot for the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah,” Friedman explained: “The problem with Saudi Arabia is not that it has too little democracy. It’s that it has too much.”

The homeland of 15 of the 9/11 hijackers received the additional benediction in 2007: “Of course, we must protect the Saudis.” This was approximately four years after the homeland of 0 of the 9/11 hijackers was told to suck on things.

6. Massacres of Muslims are a sign of freedom.

In his response to the 2002 government-incited slaughter of over 2,000 Muslims in the Indian state of Gujarat, Friedman determined that the fact that “[t]he rioting didn’t spread anywhere” indicated India was worthy of the subtitle “Where Freedom Reigns.” Continuing impunity for those behind the massacre suggests this may be the case.

As for Friedman’s deceivingly platitudinous postulate according to which Indian Muslims “are, on the whole, integrated into India’s democracy because it is a democracy,” the evidence he supplied—“There are no Indian Muslims in Guantánamo Bay”—raised the possible need for a reconsideration of the democratic credentials of places like Britain and the U.S.

7. The fall of the Soviet Union was propitious for Russian wardrobes.

In a 1995 column that began with a recounting of the story of how Russia’s salvation from communism had prompted the neighbor of a Moscow journalist to cease repetitive singing of Ace of Base songs while drunkenly beating his wife, Friedman noted additional perks to life in the transformed city: “New shops mushroom every day and people now dress in a rainbow of colors, instead of different shades of cement. I ate fajitas at a new chain of Moscow-Mex restaurants, where the menu said: ‘We worship our customers like the ancient Aztecs worshiped their gods.’ (Is that capitalism, or what?)”

8. Jeffrey Sachs is African.

Reporting from Accra in 2001, Friedman informed readers: “Africans themselves will tell you that their problem with globalization is not that they are getting too much of it, but too little.” Aside from the director of Ghana’s Institute for Economic Affairs, the Africans quoted in the column consisted of an Indian trade economist and Harvard’s resident neoliberal shock therapist.

No Africans were meanwhile quoted in Friedman’s 2009 memo datelined Chief’s Island, Botswana, in which he pondered the future of Africa while on safari. Charles Darwin and Dorothy of Kansas merited mentions, however, as did a leopard in a tree—the protagonist of a 121-word description of the demise of an antelope.

9. Karl Marx knew the world was flat.

10. In addition to being part of a neocon strategy and anti-liberal, the Iraq war was the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched. It had nothing, a little bit and everything to do with oil.

By : Belén Fernández, alternet.

Arab security sectors across the Middle East today appear to share a number of generally negative characteristics, including the use of coercion and of the military to control internal dissent,

the exclusion of particular ethnic or religious groups from the highest ranks of the security services, allegiance to the state as opposed to the citizen, and pervasive corruption in the judicial and policing systems. These common characteristics are frequently attributed to the role played by the colonial powers during their formation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter explores some of the strategies pursued by the British in four of its Arab territories: Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Oman and assesses their effects and long term influences.

How can Americans make major life decisions on the basis of faith that the world will end in the very near future?

In the summer of 2010, I saw him several times a week: a portly gentleman, leaning against a pillar in Penn Station and holding out two fistfuls of pamphlets to the disinterested commuters.

He wore glasses and earbuds connected to an MP3 player in his coat pocket, and always had a serene, almost bored expression that was in sharp contrast to the urgency of his message:

He was one of the devotees of Harold Camping, a formerly obscure Christian preacher who started making headlines in 2009, when he announced his discovery of a numerological code hidden in the Bible that foretold the exact date of the end of the world. As the appointed date grew nearer, Camping’s devotees became increasingly zealous in their race to get the message out. In addition to their leafletting volunteers, I saw billboards and subway ads. Their Web site had a form you could fill out to request free literature, bumperstickers and desk calendars for 2011 that ended the third week of May.

One day, I stopped for a brief chat with the fellow.

“May 2011,” I observed. “That’s soon.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, uncertain whether I was making fun of him.

“What happens on that day?” I asked.

“The universe will cease to exist,” he explained, as calm as if he were delivering a weather forecast. (I have to admit, I was hoping for something more dramatic: boiling oceans, rains of fire, rivers turned to blood, that sort of thing.)

“What happens if that date comes and you’re still here?” I persisted.

“I’ll be in big trouble,” he said calmly.

I wanted to correspond with him, but when I asked him for his e-mail address, he refused. “This is just the way I live now,” he said. I don’t know if that meant he had divested himself of worldly possessions like computers to prepare for the Rapture, or if his literature-distributing schedule was so hectic it left no time for e-mail.

Obviously, May 21, 2011 came and went without incident. Camping was at first unfazed, announcing that it was a “spiritual” judgment day, and that the real, visible apocalypse would actually happen on October 21. But when that date too passed with nothing out of the ordinary transpiring, a “flabbergasted” Camping was finally forced to confess that he had blundered. Soon afterward he retired from ministry, though he never offered to reimburse the volunteers who wasted their time and money spreading his phony predictions.

So ends the tale of Harold Camping. But he wasn’t just a lone kook crying in the wilderness. On the contrary, he was just one of the latest in a long line of Christian preachers who’ve made a profitable career out of erroneously predicting the end of the world. Some, like Camping, made one of the few fatal errors in religion: they tied their faith to a definitive test by predicting an exact date. Others, more cynical, are content to constantly hint that Armageddon is right around the corner, but without ever committing to a date.

As an example of the latter, the evangelical megachurch pastor David Jeremiah, in his book What In the World Is Going On? speaks of the imminent Armageddon as “a belief I have taught consistently for more than thirty years,” and doesn’t seem to find anything incongruous about this. The Christian author John Walvoord wrote apocalypse books throughout the 20th century, periodically reissuing them with updates as needed to accommodate current world events. Then there’s Hal Lindsay, who in the 1970s made a sensation with books like The Late Great Planet Earth and The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon (“The decade of the 1980s could very well be the last decade of history as we know it,” he announces).

Moving further back in time, another Christian sect that’s made a habit of erroneously predicting the end of the world is the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1920, J.F. Rutherford, the Watchtower Society’s second president and one of its founding members, published a book titled Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which forecast the arrival of God’s kingdom within a few years. In it, Rutherford prognosticated:

…since other Scriptures definitely fix the fact that there will be a resurrection of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and other faithful ones of old, and that these will have the first favor, we may expect 1925 to witness the return of these faithful men of Israel from the condition of death, being resurrected and fully restored to perfect humanity and made the visible, legal representatives of the new order of things on earth.

Ironically, the Jehovah’s Witnesses have their origins in yet another American sect that became famous for a failed apocalypse prediction: the Millerites, named after their founder William Miller.

Miller was born in 1782, served as an army captain in the War of 1812, and like Harold Camping 200 years later, came to believe the chronology of the end of the world could be pieced together by decoding hidden messages in verses scattered throughout the Bible. At its height, the Millerite cult had thousands of members nationwide. Miller and his followers triumphantly forecast October 22, 1844 as the date of the Second Coming, and when that date passed without incident, it became known as the “Great Disappointment.” Several disillusioned former Millerites went on to found splinter groups that still exist today, including the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-Day Adventists.

Just to show that apocalyptic expectation isn’t a modern phenomenon, here’s one more quote. This one is from the witch-hunting colonial preacher Cotton Mather, who wrote in 1692 to confidently predict the imminence of the “Millennium,” the 1,000-year era in which Jesus would physically reign over the Earth after triumphing in the Battle of Armageddon:

“If the Devil’s Time were above a thousand years ago, pronounced short, what may we suppose it now in our Time? Surely we are not a thousand years distant from those happy thousand years of rest and peace and (which is better) Holiness reserved for the People of God in the latter days; and if we are not a thousand years yet short of that Golden Age, there is cause to think, that we are not an hundred.”

If you’re getting the impression that Christians are more apt than members of other religions to see Armageddon just around the corner, you’re right. The perpetual apocalyptic expectation of Christianity has its roots in the New Testament, whose authors, like every subsequent generation of Christians, expected the end of the world to come within their own lifetimes.

For example, here’s St. Paul saying that his contemporaries who were married should abstain from sex from then on, so that they could be as pure as possible and ready to meet Jesus when he returned:

“What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they had none; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away.” –1 Corinthians 7:29-31 (NIV)

And in the epistle attributed to St. Peter:

“But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.” –1 Peter 4:7 (KJV)

And from one attributed to the apostle John:

“Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.” –1 John 2:18 (KJV)

Even Jesus gets in on the act, telling his contemporaries that he’ll return before they all die:

“And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power.” –Mark 9:1 (KJV)

In another verse, he seems to set the deadline even sooner by telling his disciples that he’ll return before they can even evangelize all the cities of Israel:

“When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another. I tell you the truth, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes.” –Matthew 10:23 (NIV)

These prophecies all failed, of course. Two thousand years later, life continues as it always has, and the authors of these fearful predictions have long since turned to dust. What’s remarkable is that, as each generation of Christians passes away, the apocalyptic torch is eagerly picked up by the next generation, which echoes their predecessors’ warnings without a trace of awareness that they’re recycling claims that have failed many times already.

Given their unbroken track record of failure, it’s easy to make fun of apocalypse believers, to mock them for being so gullible and foolish. But these ideas have very real human costs. Millennial fever often flourishes during times of great social upheaval and uncertainty, among people whose lives are so impoverished that they want to escape this world and live in a better one. And it inevitably happens that some of those people squander what little they do have in chasing this mirage.

After his deadline came and went, I never again saw the fellow I chatted with in Penn Station. But the rapture ads I saw on the NYC subway, I later learned, were funded by an elderly Camping follower whoemptied his retirement savings to pay for them. There were other stories about working people and parents who quit their jobs in the middle of an economic downturn to spend all their time spreading Camping’s message, families that were splintered by arguments over who was or wasn’t going to get into heaven when the trumpet blows. Other rapture-manias throughout history have drawn similar devotion, and when those prophecies inevitably fail, it’s the humiliated faithful who are left to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.

Beyond this harm, apocalypse belief instills in its devotees a constant state of subdued terror, encouraging them to fear that the world may end at any moment and that they won’t be numbered among the worthy when it does. Many accounts of believers and ex-believers testify to this nagging fear, describing how they repented and answered altar calls dozens of times, each time fearing that they may have had some secret sin that caused the last repentance not to take, and it’s best to do it again just in case. Others speak of how their religious belief made their lives empty and joyless, how they were so consumed with anticipation of God’s perfect kingdom arriving that reality seemed dull and lifeless by comparison.

But the worst consequence of apocalypse belief isn’t the waste, nor is it the fear. It’s the insidious attitude that since God is coming soon to destroy the world entirely, it doesn’t matter what we do to it in the meantime. It’s this belief that has so often made fundamentalists an obstacle to averting disastrous climate change, to preserving vanishing wilderness, or to making human civilization more sustainable. Not only do they not participate in these efforts, they actively oppose them, asserting that any political platform which starts from the premise that the Earth will be around for millions of years is a Satanic lie meant to keep us from heeding the warnings about God’s imminent destruction of the world.

For example, here’s Christian pastor John MacArthur:

“The environmental movement is consumed with trying to preserve the planet forever. But we know that isn’t in God’s plan. The earth we inhabit is not a permanent planet. It is, frankly, a disposable planet — it is going to have a very short life. It’s been around six thousand years or so — that’s all — and it may last a few thousand more. And then the Lord is going to destroy it.

I’ve told environmentalists that if they think humanity is wrecking the planet, wait until they see what Jesus does to it.

…This earth was never ever intended to be a permanent planet — it is not eternal. We do not have to worry about it being around tens of thousands, or millions, of years from now because God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth.”

It would be comforting to think that beliefs like this are only held by an insignificant minority of kooks, but that isn’t the case. As recently as 2007, a poll found that 25 percent of Americans subscribe to end-times beliefs: that’s one in four people who, presumably, make major life decisions and cast their votes on the basis of a faith that the world will end in the very near future.

There’s no easy solution to this problem. The apocalypse-sooners are motivated by a fervent faith which, by definition, is immune to contrary evidence. Their beliefs effectively pen them on both sides, seducing them with the promise of unimaginable reward if they stay faithful, herding them with the promise of unimaginable suffering if they fall into doubt.

But whether we can convince them or not, we can demonstrate that their beliefs are incredibly dangerous and destructive — to human lives, to well-being and to the world itself. Too many people are passive in the face of fundamentalism because they labor under the misconception that religious beliefs are benign at best, neutral at worst. A more engaged progressive opposition would go a long way toward limiting the influence of the righteous warriors who just can’t wait to see the planet destroyed.

By:Adam Lee,Alternet.

A private company doing the government’s work does not face the same privacy restrictions.

The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a reprehensible cyber-security bill that seeks to protect online companies—giant social media firms to data-sharing networks controlling utilities—from cyber attack. It is reprehensible because, as Democratic San Jose Rep. Zoe Lofgren said this week, it gives the federal government too much access to the private lives of every Internet user. Or as Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul also bluntly put it, it turns Facebook and Google into “government spies.”

But that’s not the biggest problem with the Congress’s urge to address a real problem—protecting the Internet from cyber attacks. While House passage launches a process that continues in the Senate, the bigger problem with the best known of the cyber bills before the House, CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, is not what is in it – which is troubling enough – but what is not on Congress’s desk: a comprehensive approach to stop basic constitutional rights from eroding in the Internet Age.

“I don’t think the current cyber-security debate is adequately protecting civil liberties,” said Anjali Dalal, a resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (and a blogger). “CISPA seems to place constitutionally suspect behavior outside of judicial review. The bill immunizes all participating entities ‘acting in good faith.’ So what happens when an ISP hands over mountains of data under the encouragement and appreciation of the federal government? We can’t sue the government, because they didn’t do anything. And we can’t sue the ISP because the bill forbids it.”

What happens is anybody’s guess. But what does not happen is clear. The government, as with the recently adopted National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, does not have to go through the courts when fighting state “enemies” on U.S. soil. Instead, CISPA, like NDAA, expands extra-judicial procedures as if America’s biggest threats must always be addressed on a kind of wartime footing. Constitutional protections, starting with privacy rights, are mostly an afterthought.

The CISPA bill takes an information-sharing approach to fight cyber attacks. Nobody has said there’s a problem with the government giving classified information to private firms to stop attacks. It is the opposite of that—Internet companies sharing information about users and their online activities—that raises civil liberties red flags. In general, the courts distinguish between public and private aspects of online activity, holding, for example, that e-mail addresses, subject lines and traffic patterns are like snail-mail addresses on the outside of a paper envelope—they are public. But just as a letter’s contents are private, courts have said that is true with online activity—although in a recent Supreme Court case involving wireless surveillance, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised the question of how much privacy people should expect in their online activities.

For now, however, the government generally needs a search warrant to look at the details of people’s online activities. That is because the Constitution protects civil liberties by restricting government intrusion into citizens’ lives. However, a private company doing the government’s work for it does not face the same restrictions.

CISPA’s fine print does an end run around the judicial hurdles. It essentially fights cyber threats by deputizing the tech sector to police the net and share everything— online activities, history, searches, transactions, mail—with various federal agencies, including possibly national security agencies. Internet firms would not be required to tell clients when their information was given to the government.

The latest Intelligence Committee amendments—which were submitted to the House Rules Committee on Wednesday morning (it decides what will be debated on the House floor on Thursday) — said the information given to the government would be used for “cybersecurity purposes,” or degrading, disrupting or destroying a network or system, as well as unauthorized taking of information. Cyber security purposes also is defined as protecting people from “danger of death or serious bodily harm,” which presumably means terrorism, and protecting minors from “child pornography,” “sexual exploitation” and “kidnapping.” This specificity was missing in earlier versions of the bill.

Critics in the civil liberties community have said CISPA’s wording is too vague, deputizes private actors, leaves no legal recourse, is open to mission creep and offers inadequate public protections, such as requiring ISPs to anonymize personal identifying information, or limiting the government’s use and retention of the data. Private firms cannot be expected to safeguard privacy, they said, especially after Congress has freed them from liability.

House Democrats have tried to amend the Intelligence Committee bill to clarify what is a cyber security threat, impose limits on the government’s use and retention of shared data, and to protect privacy by urging the encryption of records, and also saying that what is gathered cannot be used for other regulatory purposes. CISPA’s authors said they have addressed critics’ concerns, but late on Wednesday the White House, in its first comments on the bill, said it would veto it in its current form. Previously, the executive branch signaled that it preferred the approach in a Senate bill co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Connecticut, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, saying it offers more privacy assurances while protecting critical infrastructure and online platforms.

One of the biggest unknowns with government data mining—whether by federal agencies or contractors—is what will be done with all the information that is gathered. People may assume that more data means more confusion by analysts, but the opposite actually is true, according to experts such as Jeff Jonas, a senior scientist at IBM and a blogger. He says the public has little idea “what is computationally possible with Big Data,” which can predict—drawing on what is online—what someone is likely be doing at a certain time of day.

“Big Data is making it harder to have secrets,” Jonas wrote on his blog. He explains:

Unlike two decades ago, humans are now creating huge volumes of extraordinarily useful data as they self-annotate their relationships and yours, their photographs and yours, their thoughts and their thoughts about you… and more. With more data, come better understanding and prediction. The convergence of data might reveal your “discreet” rendezvous or the fact you are no longer on speaking terms with your best friend. No longer secret is your visit to the porn store and the subsequent change in your home’s late-night energy profile, another telling story about who you are… again out of the bag, and little you can do about it. Pity… you thought that all of this information was secret.

In the commercial world, consultants like Jonas tell clients that the best business practice is for companies to alert clients when third parties look at their data. But that courtesy, or legal requirement, is not part of the House’s CISPA bill. Indeed, as the San Jose Mercury News, the daily newspaper of Silicon Valley, noted in a Wednesday editorial urging the House to kill the bill, “personal privacy protection is all but nonexistent.”

But the biggest concern is not being touched at all: how to shore up constitutional rights, not chip away at them, when the Internet makes it harder for everyone to have secrets and the government deputizes the private sector to snoop for it without any judicial review.

“I think our First and Fourth Amendment rights aren’t being adequately considered,” said Yale Law School’s Dalal. “We have a right to be free from government intrusion into our private thoughts, actions and effects without a warrant. We also have a right to speak freely without government interference. Authorizing private surveillance of everything we do on the Internet with the understanding that government can be a recipient of that surveillance information threatens our right to speak freely, and to be free from unlawful search and seizure.”

It is almost certain that the GOP-controlled House will pass a version of CISPA on Friday. As was the case when the House passed legislation granting immunity to the telecom industry three years ago—for warrantless wiretapping of every American’s phone records to detect terrorist communications—the proponents will likely make many declarations about the price of freedom being vigilance. And its defenders will also declare that compromises were made to protect privacy rights.

However, every successive legislative “achievement” that gives government a deeper reach into people’s lives doesn’t just undermine specific civil liberties, it shrinks the Constitution. Indeed, it would be a rare day in Washington if Congress looked at constitutional protections first, not at the tail end, of every phase of the legislative process.

By:Steven Rosenfeld,Alternet.

Following last week’s eviction of the Palestinian Natcheh family from their Beit Hanina home, Israeli Knesset members Michael Ben-Ari and Aryeh Eldad visited the house now inhabited by some eight settlers. To mark the occasion they posted a picture of themselves lounging on the Natcheh’s sofa on Facebook.

“We are at the start of the establishment of a new Jewish neighborhood in the area, which will create a continuous sequence of Jewish neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem,” said Eldad to the settler online mouthpiece, Israel National News. “Only the stubbornness of the Jewish landowners and Aryeh King of the National Land Redemption Fund ultimately led to the achievement of the day and we are confident law enforcement agencies will be required from now on to remove Arab squatters from all the properties of the Jews in the area.” Ben-Ari and Eldad “affixed mezuzahs” inside of the house, rituatlistically marking the takeover.

The Knesset ministers hope to judaize Beit Hanina, though historically there have never been Jewish residents in this East Jerusalem neighborhood. On Facebook, Ben-Ari said the settlers will build 50 new housing units on the property.

Since 2004, settlers have tried to confiscate the Natcheh family’s property. Part of the land had belonged to the Hebrew University, and in 2004 their shares were sold to the Palestinian Authority, despite a steeper counter offer from King. Then about a year ago, King tracked down an alleged Jewish owner who he claimed purchased the land in 1974. King then presented documents to the Jerusalem municipality, though the Palestinian family said the papers were forged. Khaled Natcheh called the magistrate a “settlers’ court,” as reported by Haaretz’s Nir Hasson.

Yet the Natcheh family states they have owned the land since the 1930s, using it first as a cement factory, later building three homes during the 1980s, according to Michael Salisbury with the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions who has visited with the Natcheh family several times in the past few weeks.

Ben-Ari and Eldad are both members of the right-wing National Union party. Previously, Ben-Ari was a member of the now illegal Kach party.

By:Allison Deger,Mondoweiss. 

Al-Shabaka Policy Brief 

Overview

Thirteen years after the discovery of gas fields off the coast of Gaza, efforts to develop them remain deadlocked despite the international backing the project enjoys. Meanwhile the besieged Gaza Strip suffers prolonged power cuts and the Palestinian economy bears a huge financial cost – as do the Western taxpayers keeping it afloat. Al-Shabaka Program Director Victor Kattan discusses the actors and amounts involved as well as the reasons why the project has stalled and recommends some policy options to break the deadlock.

A Resource Out of Reach

The Palestine Electricity Company and the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation recently concluded an agreement to import Egyptian gas across the Rafah border. In time, this agreement could bring relief to the residents of the Gaza Strip who have been plagued by chronic fuel shortages with power outages of up to 18 hours a day. The gas could also benefit the Palestinians of the West Bank whose electricity is imported from Israel at high prices. But why does the Palestinian Authority even need to purchase and import gas from Israel and Egypt at considerable expense when two gas fields remain undeveloped off the Gaza coast?

The question is pertinent because there has been an agreement for 13 years between Consolidated Contractors Limited (CCC), the British Gas Group (BG Group) and the Palestine Investment Fund (PIF) to develop and commercialize the Gaza fields. In 2000 and 2002, the development studies undertaken by BG Group concluded that the fields were economically feasible. In other words, Gaza, rather than being one of the poorest places on earth, could be one of its richest, if only the development and commercialization of this precious natural resource off its own coast could be given the go-ahead.

Moreover, the gas would benefit the Palestinian people as a whole. For example, West Bank Palestinians could also utilize the gas from the Gaza gas fields to power electricity stations in the West Bank, and reach self-sufficiency in electricity generation that would achieve significant savings to the economy. Indeed, in 1999 the late Yasser Arafat famously hailed the discovery of the two gas fields as “a gift from God to our people”. But since their discovery 13 years ago, not a single cubic foot of gas has been extracted from the ocean floor. So why is the gas still in the ground? To answer this question, it is necessary to revisit the major actors involved in the agreement, as well as the agreement itself, before proposing some policy options on how to get the fields developed.

How Much Gas & Who Would Develop It

Within Gaza’s territorial waters, there are two main gas fields. Gaza Marine, the main field, is located 603 meters below sea level, 36 kilometers west of Gaza City. The second smaller field, the “Border Field” straddles the international boundary separating Gaza’s territorial waters from Israel’s territorial waters. According to the BG Group website, the reserves found in the two wells are estimated to be 1 trillion cubic feet (tcf). CCC believes that there are 1.4 tcf. To put this into perspective, Iran has 991.6 tcf of natural gas so this is not a massive quantity of gas, but it is still more than sufficient to meet Palestinian needs for the next 15 years, the time when it is estimated that the resource would be depleted at current Palestinian consumption levels in Gaza and the West Bank.

The interest in developing these gas fields began when CCC approached BG Group to buy Egyptian gas for the power plant it was building with Enron in Gaza in the mid 1990s. This is Gaza’s only power station where the gas under the recently concluded agreement with Egypt will be sent. BG Group told CCC that there was already gas off the waters in Gaza, which it knew from its operations in the Sinai. (BG Group’s largest presence in the Middle East is currently in Egypt where it operates the Rosetta and West Delta Deep Marine gas fields.)

The three partners that subsequently came together to develop the fields off Gaza is each a leader in its sphere. BG Group is one of the world’s major energy giants, based in England with operations in 25 countries across the globe and the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the United States. CCC, founded by three Palestinian businessmen in 1952, is the largest construction company in the Middle East and is now headquartered in Greece. In 1999, when the Gaza agreement was concluded, CCC had constructed all of BG Group’s facilities in Kazakhstan. As for the PIF, which was founded in 2003, it is a publicly owned company based in Ramallah and similar in structure to a sovereign wealth fund – although instead of investing surplus money in foreign markets, it reinvests this money in Palestinian resources.

In 1999, the Palestinian Authority (PA) granted an exploration license to BG Group and its partners covering the entire marine area offshore from Gaza. The 25-year agreement gives BG Group, the operator, the right to explore Gaza’s offshore marine area for gas fields, to develop those fields, and to build gas pipeline infrastructure. According to the limited information provided on the website of BG Group, it “holds 90 per cent of the equity in the license, which would be reduced to 60 per cent if the Consolidated Contractors Company [its current 10 per cent partner in the license] and the Palestine Investment Fund exercise their options at development sanction”. At development sanction, CCC chose to acquire an additional interest of up to 30 per cent in the project so that the proceeds from the sale of the gas would be divided between BG Group (60 per cent), CCC (30 per cent), and PIF (10 per cent).

It worth noting that this agreement only accounted for the proceeds that would be shared amongst the principal investors, because 50 per cent of the proceeds of the gas were to go to the PA in the form of royalties and taxes even though it had not invested a single penny in the project.[1] In addition to the direct revenue that the PA would generate from the commercialization of the gas fields, the Palestinian economy could make more than $8 billion of total savings in energy costs over the life of the project, if the gas were used for generating electricity in Gaza and in the West Bank. There would of course need to be accountability measures in place to ensure that the funds did indeed go to benefit the Palestinian people. It was understood that the proceeds would go to the Palestinian treasury which where import and export duties go, where Israel deposits the Palestinian taxes that it collects, and where European and United States aid money goes. Although the Palestinians have established safeguards against corruption to meet international standards, the Palestinian press and public would obviously have to remain vigilant.

In the first few years of the project when the wells were drilled the investors spent $100 million and development studies were undertaken by BG Group in 2000 and 2002. These studies concluded that the Gaza development would be “technically and economically feasible”. Indeed, CCC told me that the Gaza Marine project was “extremely feasible”.

Why the Project Has Stalled & the Cost to Palestinians

There is no dispute about sovereignty or who owns the gas. That it belongs to the Palestinian people is clear under international law. Even Israel does not dispute this. As Nabil Shaath, who was the PA’s Minister of Planning and International Cooperation in 1999 when the agreement with BG Group was concluded, told Palestinian radio: “Under the Gaza-Jericho agreement, the Israelis acknowledged our right to 20 miles (32km) into the sea as an economic sovereignty area, including its potential resources, such as oil and gas”. When the 1999 contract was concluded it was envisaged that one of the main buyers of Gaza’s gas would be Israel – in what was widely believed to be an Israeli precondition for allowing the development of the fields to go ahead – and “that gas from Gaza will soon be fuelling Israeli power stations as well as Palestinian industry”.[2]

According to the information provided to Al-Shabaka as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request from the Department for International Development (DfID): “BG Group drilled two wells in 2000 which proved the existence of a natural gas field. Since that time BG has investigated various options to commercialize this resource but without success. These have included sale of the gas to Israeli power generators, both state and privately owned and export of the gas to Egypt for onward export to world markets. In 2006, the Israeli government intervened via HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] to persuade BG to return to negotiations with Israel. BG withdrew from these negotiations in December 2007. Since that time no progress has been made on the development of Gaza Marine”.

What the information provided by DfID does not say is that the primary cause for the failure of the negotiations was due to the insistence of the Israelis to purchase the gas in Gaza at prices below market value. Israel wanted to negotiate a contract whereby it would only pay $2 per cubic foot rather than the market price of $5 to $7. As a source inside CCC told me: “The biggest resource in Palestine is being held up by the Israelis. If this is resolved it would reduce the subsidy the EU and US gives the PA”.

According to Dr. Muhammad Mustafa, chairman and CEO of the PIF, the cost of energy in the occupied Palestinian territories is huge. Petroleum and electricity costs are some of the biggest expenses the PA has because 98 per cent of the electricity in the West Bank comes from Israel. The situation was similar in Gaza before CCC built the power plant (it took over Enron’s 50 per cent share in the project when it went bust). As CCC reminded me, “before the power plant was built in 1999, 50 per cent of Gaza had no power at all”.

Dr. Mustafa explained that it would cost $800 million to develop Gaza Marine. No energy company is going to make such a financial commitment unless it can find a committed buyer who will agree to conclude a long-term contract where the price of the gas is set at a price representing market value. This is because as soon as the gas is developed it must be sold and transported to its final destination. The portion of the gas that is destined to the Palestinian market would be transported to the existing power station in the Gaza Strip and the planned station in the West Bank via pipelines. The surplus gas designated for export would be transported via a pipeline to a processing plant on-shore where it would be pressurized and super cooled so that it condenses into LNG. Once converted into LNG it would then be shipped on tankers to foreign markets. The investors would recoup the money they originally invested with a view to making a profit.

According to CCC the best plan would be to pipe the gas to El Arish in Egypt where there are already two LNG plants owned by BG Group and Agip (an Italian company) and Union Finosa (a Spanish company). The gas could then be super cooled into LNG and exported to Japan and Korea on long-term contracts. A source in CCC told me he expected such contract could fetch $13 per cubic foot, which is much more than what the Israelis or any European country would be willing to pay for it.

An additional benefit of piping the gas to El-Arish is that it would be very easy to take it from there via a short pipeline to Gaza and via the “Arab Pipeline” to the West Bank. The Arab Pipeline has already been constructed and it transports Egyptian gas to Jordan. This pipeline could be also used to transport the gas to the West Bank. From Jordan it would only be necessary to construct a short pipeline to get the gas to the West Bank.

However, even if a credit worthy buyer agrees to sign a contract, the developers would still need political and security clearance from Israel to export the gas. Successive Israeli governments since 2000 have refused to provide this. Thus, the developers are faced with an ultimatum amounting to blackmail: either agree to sell the gas to Israel at below market price or don’t sell it at all. As Nabil Shaath told Al Ayyam newspaper (June 7, 2000), “There is a desire on the part of Israel to confiscate our gas that lies in the Palestinian-controlled area, but we will confront such an attempt. We have legal evidence of our right and enjoy support from the British government, our partner in this gas project”. Despite this purported support, the project has remained stalled.

Up to 2009, Israel viewed gas the fields off Gaza as essential to its energy security even though it had discovered the Yam Tethys (Tethys Sea) gas fields around the same time as the fields off the Gaza coast were discovered, because the Yam Tethys fields were nearing depletion. Since 2009, Israel has made large discoveries of gas in the Tamar and Leviathan fields. Tamar, which holds about 9 TCF of gas, is currently under development and is expected to start generating gas by 2013. It will provide sufficient gas to meet Israel’s needs for the next 25 years. Leviathan holds larger gas quantities (~17 TCF), but is further from Israel’s coast, and much more expensive to develop. There is no clear development plan for Leviathan, but when development goes ahead, it would turn Israel into a net gas exporter. Thus, Israel has its own quantities of gas, and does not need to covet the fields off Gaza. One can only conclude that Israel continues to block the development of the gas fields as part of its blockade against the Gaza Strip.

Counter-Measures for the PLO/PA to Consider

According to senior PA officials, the PA has repeatedly asked former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the Special Representative of the Quartet, to get a commitment from Israel that would enable the consortium to develop the gas fields in Gaza.[3] In February, the Quartet proposed a series of measures to ease Israeli restrictions on the Palestinians in order to restart stalled peace talks. Apparently, this included giving the PA the go-ahead to develop the gas reserves (Ma’an News Agency Report, Feb. 3, 2012).

However, at the time of writing, peace talks remain stalled – as does the development of the gas reserves. Should Israel continue to frustrate the efforts to develop the Gaza gas fields, there are several options the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/PA may want to consider. It may want to raise Israel’s blockade of Gaza at the United Nations and the impact this blockade is having on its maritime waters as well as on the Palestinians in Gaza, if it returns to that forum as part of its strategy to become a member-state. This is because a fundamental aspect of statehood is the sovereignty every state is entitled to have over its territory and its maritime waters. Since the gas fields are within Palestine’s territorial waters, which Israel has never contested, the Palestinians are entitled to develop them and to benefit from their development and commercialization.

Under international law, every state with a coastline is entitled to an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending up to 200 nautical miles from the baseline, within which the coastal states enjoys extensive rights in relation to natural resources.[4] Thus, an effective action Palestine could take, apart from joining other international organizations like UNESCO, would be to accede to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

The PLO/PA may also want to bring the issue before the UN General Assembly in the form of a resolution calling on Israel to relinquish its control over the Palestinians’ territorial waters, and calling on third states not to assist Israel with developing its own gas fields until Israel has honored the agreements it concluded with the PA during the Oslo years and with the gas development consortium in 1999. This could create some of the international momentum necessary to bring pressure on Israel to stop blocking the development of the fields. The General Assembly may even want to recommend countermeasures should Israel decided to flout its resolution especially since natural gas is only a useful commodity if states are prepared to buy it. Pressure of this kind may be the best course of action to take against Israel as part of the quest for self-determination, freedom, justice, and equality, if the gas fields are to become a gift to the Palestinian people, rather than a curse.

[1] The agreement is consistent with agreements concluded between energy companies elsewhere in the world where the dividends from the exploitation of natural resources are usually split 50/50 with the host partner.

[2] A report published in The Times (“Arafat lights flame for BG gas find”, September 28, 2000, p. 32) said BG Group had concluded agreements with both Israel and the PA.

[3] The Office of the Quartet Representative is supposed to “build the institutions and economy for a future Palestinian state”, http://www.quartetrep.org/quartet/pages/about-oqr/. I made repeated requests to Tony Blair’s Office in London to inquire about these commitments but was told that Mr. Blair was too busy to respond to them.

[4] The International Court of Justice in the Libya/Malta Continental Shelf Case (1985) has confirmed that the EEZ has become part of customary international law. See R.R. Churchill and A.V. Lowe, The Law of the Sea (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 160-161.

By:Victor Kattan,Al-Shabaka, The Palestinian Policy Network.