Saturday 8 January 2011

Who would speak up against "Israeli and Jewish Exceptionalism"?‏


Israeli Exceptionalism

Alam: Zionism: Two Deficits

M. Shahid Alam shares with us an excerpt from his recent book, Israeli Exceptionalism
excerpted from the author’s Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave, 2009)

We do not fit the general pattern of humanity…”
David Ben-Gurion
“…only God could have created a people so special as the Jewish people.”
Gideon Levy

The fecundity of the Zionist project in producing claims of exceptionalism is not in doubt. Anyone who scans the voluminous Zionist literature will be suitably impressed by its repeated resort to claims of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism. There is scarcely any aspect of Israeli or Jewish history that has not been embellished with some claim to uniqueness.

Israeli exceptionalism has many uses. It defends, obscures, explains away the ‘abnormal’ character of the Zionist nationalist project. When the Irish sought national liberation, their goal was straightforward. They wanted to regain national control over their lives and their country from a foreign power. No one had to convince the Irish that they are descended from the gods; that they possessed a unique essence which set them apart from all other peoples; or that their history, religion, race, language, morality or culture set them above their colonial masters. Occasionally, driven by exuberance or hubris, nationalists have advanced exceptionalist claims, but the success of their movement has not depended on their acceptance. The Irish claimed sovereignty because they knew that they are a nation with their own territory. In order to create their own state, they did not have to establish that they are exceptional.

The Zionists confronted two handicaps that Irish nationalists did not face. The diverse and scattered Jewish communities of Europe – and even more so, the world – did not constitute a single people. Instead, the Jews of the world were loosely united by their religious heritage, but they shared their languages, cultures and genes with their neighboring communities. Moreover, no Jewish community had its own country, a substantial and contiguous territory where it formed a majority of the population. Despite these twin Jewish deficits – the absence of a nation and a national territory – the Zionists were determined to ‘liberate’ the Jews of Europe and endow them with their own state.

The Zionists would remedy the first deficit by denying its existence. They knew that the Jews were not a nation, but it would be unwise to begin their ‘nationalist’ movement with the admission that a Jewish nation did not yet exist. They also did not think that this deficit was a serious hindrance to their movement. With help from anti-Semites, whose attacks had been growing in recent decades, the Zionists were convinced that they could quickly convince enough frightened Jews that they are a nation. Instead of constructing a nationalism based on a common religion, however, the Zionists chose to cultivate a racial basis for Jewish nationalism. They embraced the anti-Semitic accusation that Jews of Europe are an alien race, not Germans or Russians, descended from the ancient Hebrews.

A racial identity offered the best hope of inculcating nationalism in culturally diverse Jewish communities. Only an identity, based on the myth of a common descent, could unite peoples who were as different ethnically and culturally as the Jews of Portugal, Britain, Germany, Greece and Russia. Only the myth of racial unity, only the conviction that they are a single family, descended from Abraham and Jacob, could unite orthodox, conservative and reform Jews into a nation. Once the Jews were convinced of their racial identity, preserved over hundreds of generations in exile, this would also endow them with pride in their ancient pedigree and their unique ability to survive and preserve their racial purity through difficult conditions. This was sure to engender a strong sense of their distinctiveness, superiority and destiny, rooted in Jewish traditions and the Jewish Bible. With confidence, the Jews could see themselves as a unique nation, both ancient and divinely blessed.

The Zionists were more candid about their ‘land deficit;’ this was not something they could fudge. Indeed, their land deficit defined the ‘abnormal’ condition of Jews; they were an abnormal people because they did not have a country they could call their own. Conceptually, the land deficit was easier to fix. The Jews only had to stake a claim to Palestine as their country: there were two ways of doing this. Jews of secular persuasion could claim that they had a historical right to Palestine, since they were descended from the ancient Israelites. In addition, it would be easy to reclaim this land because – according to early Zionist rhetoric – ‘this was a land without a people.’ No one had claimed Palestine during their absence. The religious Jews had a simpler and – for them – more irrefutable claim. Their God had promised the land to their ancestors for keeps. All they had to do was invoke their divine right to this Promised Land.

It turns out, after all, that the Jews are a people with their own land. Once the Zionists had made their case, there would be nothing abnormal about their national project. This was the official rhetoric of the Zionist project of national liberation for the Jewish people. On the back of this rhetoric, the Zionists would succeed in convincing the Western world to support their exclusionary colonial project in the Middle East.

M. Shahid Alam is a professor of economics at Northeastern University. Israeli Exceptionalism can be ordered from Amazon.com
====

Jewish Superiority



The "DNA of the Chosen People"


John Entine - Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People




Abraham's children

Meanwhile, sowing hate through their "unique" and "exceptional" humour continues:

"The Muslim War Council"



"The Three Terrors"



"Kenneth O'Keefe from the flotilla on The Tribal Update"



"The Iranian bomb"



--

We Con The World

We Con the World


The origin of Eastern European Jews

Zoossmann-Diskin Biology Direct 2010, 5:57

The origin of Eastern European Jews revealed by autosomal, sex chromosomal and mtDNA polymorphisms


nahida
zionists get the hell out of Palestine’
~ Helen Thomas

To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war.
 ~ Ludwig von Mises

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says . . .  I'll try again tomorrow.      
 ~ Anne Henninghake

Gazans mark Israel attack on UN school

Fri Jan 7, 2011 5:43AM


"Ashraf Shannon, Press TV, Gaza

Gazans marked the second anniversary of an Israeli attack on a UN-run school during the 22-day war .

In the attack forty two people, many of them children and women who had taken shelter in the school lost their lives.

Schoolchildren reenacted the Israeli air and ground strike on the UN school, which took place on the 11th day of the Israeli war on the strip.

Hundreds of people including those injured in the attack and relatives of the victims took part in the ceremony
Also in attendance were some senior Hamas officials.

During the attack on the school, 500 had crammed into the classrooms in the hope that the place clearly marked by UN flag would be immune from Israeli strikes.

An elderly woman recalls the time when she found her grandson lying dead in a pool of blood following the attack.

During the war on Gaza more than 1400 people including hundreds of children and women were killed while thousands were injure, some with permanent disabilities.

On the second anniversary of the Israeli attack on the Fakhoura school, many are still traumatized, but hopeful that life may return to normal despite the international conspiracy of silence.



- Sent using Google Toolbar"
River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Factions slam PA, Israel for killing of civilian, detention of hunger strikers

[ 08/01/2011 - 10:19 AM ]

RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- Several Palestinian resistance factions denounced the Israeli killing of an elderly man in Al-Khalil city on Friday and the kidnapping of five hunger strikers, saying these crimes are direct results of the Palestinian Authority's security cooperation with Israel.

Islamic Jihad said that the PA's security collaboration with Israel reached a very serious level which entails a decisive national position against it.

It added that these crimes unveiled once again how fragile the security situation is in the West Bank which resulted from the Fatah-controlled PA's security commitments towards the Israeli occupation.

The Movement stressed that such crimes also proved further that the legitimate weapon in occupied Palestine is the one able to defend the Palestinian people and protect them against the Zionist threats and dangers.

For its part, the popular resistance movement stated that the Israeli detention of the five hunger strikers after their release from PA jails confirmed the PA's involvement in this crime.

The popular resistance stressed that the PA's persistence in cooperating with the Israeli occupation against its people is a national crime and a departure from the Palestinian norms and values.

Hizbuttahrir, for its part, said that the shameful positions demonstrated by the PA and Arab leaders towards Israel's barbarism encourage it to persist in its violations against the Palestinian people.

The democratic front for the liberation of Palestine also condemned the killing of an aged man and the kidnapping of political hunger strikers immediately after their release from PA jails.

It emphasized that such crimes would never break the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and the will of their resistance.

Hamas holds PA-Israel responsible for killing old man, detaining hunger strikers

[ 08/01/2011 - 08:51 AM ]

DAMASCUS, (PIC)-- The Hamas Movement held the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel fully responsible for killing at dawn Friday an elderly man in Al-Khalil city and kidnapping five hunger strikers immediately after their release from PA jails.

The Israeli occupation forces (IOF) seeking to assassinate a resistance fighter from Hamas Movement in Al-Khalil city early Friday mistakenly shot dead a 65-year-old Palestinian man called Omar Al-Qawasmi.

They also kidnapped in full coordination with the PA intelligence apparatus five hunger strikers after they were released from West Bank jails.

Hamas in a press release on Friday said the assassination of this elderly man and the kidnapping of five hunger strikers took place in the context of the security cooperation and the exchange of roles and information between the PA security militias and the IOF commandership.

Hamas called on all Palestinians to go on marches in protest at these crimes and the PA security collaboration with the Israeli occupation, stressing that this cooperation only serves Israel's settlement and Judiazation activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.

For his part, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told a news conference on Friday that the PA militias helped the IOF to kill an elderly man during a raid on his apartment and kidnap five hunger strikers after their release from their jails in the West Bank.

Spokesman Abu Zuhri added that the raiding Israeli troops wanted to kill Hamas leader Wael Al-Bitar during a raid on an apartment building, but they confused his home with another one and killed an old man as he was sleeping in bed thinking he was Bitar.

The spokesman emphasized that the persistence of both the PA and the IOF in kidnapping and killing Hamas cadres and supporters in the West Bank would never succeed in undermining the strength and steadfastness of the Movement.

In a related incident, the Palestinian refugees in Yarmouk camp in Damascus organized a sit-in on Friday afternoon to condemn the killing of Qawasmi and the PA's collaboration with the Israeli occupation.

In his speech during the event, Dr. Nawaf Attakruri, a member of the association of Palestinian scholars, urged the Palestinian people in the West Bank to revolt against the PA and the Israeli occupation as one enemy.

"You started the intifada (uprising) in 1987 with stones and knives and now you should revolt with what is available in your hand even if the enemy and its collaborators banned the means of resistance because the death of dignity is more desirable than the death of humiliation," Dr. Attakruri underscored.

He stressed that it is not appropriate to call what the PA is doing in the West Bank security coordination, but it should be called treason and betrayal.

In this regard, thousands of Palestinian citizens in Gaza city and Rafah area participated in massive marches called for by Hamas to express their anger at the PA's security collaboration with the Israeli occupation that led to the killing of the aged man and the kidnapping of five hunger strikers.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

On the verge of Cast Lead II, a look back

Ken O'Keefe

 Today our team in Gaza met the Awaja family from Thabat.  There were nine members of this family, seven children aged 1 to 12 years old, but one son was murdered during Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), so seven children is now six.  Today we visited a few days in the life of this family, courtesy of a magnificent Palestinian mother named Wafaa.

Before Cast Lead Thabat was known as Beit Lahia. Thabat means perseverance, determination, steadfastness, resolution, in a nut-shell, never give up.  When you hear this family’s story, which in terms of heartbreak is not so uncommon, you will understand why this area was renamed.

As a reminder, during Cast Lead Israel killed over 1400 people who were imprisoned in a medieval siege.  Hundreds of children were murdered; nine-year-old Ibrahim is just one; one child within one family, a statistic for most, and a shattered family for some.

During Cast Lead the Israeli Army invaded Thabat and the Awaja family, like just about every family, took shelter in their home.  Let us not forget however there were no options, there was nowhere to run; Gaza prison was and remains sealed off by both Israel and its collaborator, the Egyptian government.  Anyway, as the family hid and prayed, with no warning whatsoever, the family home caved in around all nine members of the family, courtesy of an Israeli bulldozer.  Their home became a demolition site, but the family remained there, trapped and terrified for one horrible day and night.  A cold, dark, terrifying January night, waiting and hoping for some form of rescue.  It never came.

The next day Ibrahim (9 years old) and his father, Kamal, poked their heads out of the pile of rubble that was their home to see if escape was possible.  This is where the nightmare became a living hell.  Israeli soldiers shot Kamal in the chest from about a 100-metre distance; then they shot 9 year-old Ibrahim in the stomach.  In a panic, with Ibrahim bleeding badly, Kamal picked up his son and the entire family fled their former home into the street.  I asked this question twice, to be very clear, “was there any fighting going on around you, is there any chance at all that the Israeli’s fired at your family by mistake.”  The answer came with a wry, tortured smile, “No, one million percent no.”  After hearing what happened next you will know why.

With the entire family now exposed in the street, while Kamal carried his now limp son, he was shot twice more in the chest; he and Ibrahim fell to the ground, lifeless. Six children and their mum remained, and then mum was shot, twice, once in each leg.  The family is now exposed in the street, father and son thought to be dead, mum now unable to walk and bleeding dangerously.

If you have a child, think of your child in this circumstance.  Now think of seven of them in this circumstance.  I want every parent to imagine this, think what you would feel in this scenario.
Bleeding and unable to walk, crawling with her 1 year-old baby, Wafaa and six of the children managed to reach the side of the road and find some cover behind a abandoned fridge.  Ibrahim and his father remain lifeless, although shot three times father Kamal is alive, but playing dead.  20 metres away, the rest of the family hid on the side of the road.  What happened next would torture anyone but a demon.
Israeli soldiers then came to “within seven metres” of Kamal and his son, Kamal shot three times in the chest, Ibrahim lifeless but possibly still alive, a gunshot to his stomach.   Unimaginably, while his mother watched just 20 metres away, the soldier shot Ibrahim in the eye and his brains and head exploded.  A son was lost, while a mother watched.  Wafaa told me the soldiers ate Strawberry’s shortly after executing her son.


Martyred; Ibrahim (9 years-old)

That same soldier then began to unload “100, 150 bullets” into Ibrahim’s lifeless body.  When the eldest son, Subhi (13 years-old), looked to see what was happening, he was shot in the head.
Perhaps the only luck on this day was that his headshot was not fatal.


Subhi (now 15 years-old)

And so it was, in this particular instance one killed and three seriously injured.  Add them to the statistics of Operation Cast Lead; numbers.

Wafaa told me more about how she knew “one million percent” that her sons killing was no accident.  Because they remained on the side of the street with no medical care for three more days, the Israeli’s walking by regularly over that time, making a point to laugh when they passed Ibrahim’s bullet ridden body.

With Ibrahim martyred and no home to live in, and no building materials to rebuild, the now 8 member Awaja family was forced to live in a tent, and they have done so for the last two years.  Only this week had they managed to get a flat to live in, paid for by a charity.


As you might imagine the whole family is just a little bit traumatized.  All of the children are experiencing post traumatic stress disorder.  The eldest daughter, Omsiat (14 years-old) thinks of Ibrahim everyday, and she misses him the most when she is walking to school, as they used to walk this journey together every school day.

Another daughter, Hala (11 years-old), is obsessed and fearful of death.  Most heartbreaking of all is little Diaa (5 years-old), he was your normal 3 year-old when all this happened.  He has not spoken since and nearly the whole time we were there Diaa was sitting up on the window ledge, gazing.  He did this in a way man of 50 might do it, with deep, troubled contemplation.  This was not a little boy anymore, his childhood over at the age of 3.


Diaa

I asked Wafaa if she could say anything to her son’s killer, or the killer’s mother, what would she say?  She simply said she hoped that he would feel the pain of losing a child someday.  I think if you were there you would have taken this as I did, this was not about vengeance, I think it was simply the best she imagined justice could be.

Since I arrived in Gaza in late November 2010, nearly 30 Palestinians have been shot in the “buffer zone” near the border.  These people, many children, were not involved in any threatening activity; they were collecting rocks in order to eek out a living.  They were shot in a way that makes one thing clear, shooting Palestinians is nothing more than a game for many Israeli soldiers.

During Operation Cast Lead top commanders approved white phosphorus for use in densely populated civilian areas, so shooting a boy in the head from seven metres away and riddling his dead body with bullets is par for the course really.

Is Israel synonymous with Judaism?  This is a serious and relevant question with serious repercussions.   Do Israeli’s/Jews consider Palestinian life is equal to Israeli/Jewish life?  In all honesty, those who live in Palestine know the answer, and it is an emphatic no.  And so the following is a legitimate question as well, what percentage of Israeli’s even consider Palestinians to be human beings?

Based on what I have read and witnessed, on the Mavi Marmara and otherwise, what has been shared with me from first hand accounts, I believe that significant numbers of Israeli’s consider Palestinians to be sub-human.

I think it is time to compare the “decent Germans” of Hitler’s Germany to the silent Jewish and American people of today.  As we sit on the verge of Cast Lead II, being Jewish and American carries a burden of massive proportions.

No sane society would argue that ignorance is a defence.  It may be forgiven, if the injured party is so inclined, but it is not a defence.  Americans are guilty, and if Israel is synonymous with Judaism, then the Jewish people are guilty as well.  I honestly hope that more and more Americans and Jewish people speak out, indeed they have a unique ability and responsibility if you ask me.

Silence at this stage, is indeed complicity.

Regardless of all the darkness and complicity I remain of the absolute belief that we, people of conscience, can “be the change we wish to see in the world” and ultimately effect a better world.  Never mind what anybody else is doing, if we get it together we will transform insanity onto justice and dare I say it, peace will break out.  Even if it does not, I cannot imagine anything better to fight for, if not for ourselves, for our children, everyone’s children.  TJP

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian


Sectarianism and its Discontents

American and Papal pretensions to be defenders of local religious minorities
have contributed more to the situation of sectarianism, rather than to the “safeguard” of the Christian community

Joseph Massad , Friday 7 Jan 2011

The horrifying scene of carnage in a Christian church in Alexandria, which ended not only the passing year but also the lives of innocent people, was not just shocking to everyone in Egypt and the region, but also terrifying to some who began to postulate that this might very well usher in the end of the presence of Christians in the country, if not in the Arab world at large.

The panic and dismay visited on most people have understandably led some to rush to offer dramatic scenarios for the immediate future.

It strikes me as more opportune, however, especially in these times, to offer an analysis of what is unfolding that is informed not only by the past and current situation in Egypt, but also by the regional context in which this violent act was committed. Fanning the flames of panic and sectarianism will only lead to more such violence without improving security or bringing about sought after civic peace.

I should start perhaps historically, with the advent of the modern age, which brought about European intervention in the Ottoman Empire, often under the guise of protecting the non-Muslim communities, which acted as a precursor to the later and full-scale European colonisation of the Ottoman Arab provinces.

As is well known, this intervention has augured badly for the Christian communities, many of whom ended up displaced from the very capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, while many others in the Syrian and Iraqi provinces immigrated to the Americas by the end of the nineteenth century and through the present.

This and subsequent colonial manipulation of sectarian identities by British and French colonialism brought about a number of episodes of communal violence against Arab Christians (and aided by later Zionist intervention, against Arab Jews) virtually unknown in scale and nature prior to the arrival of the European “protectors,” whether the French in Damascus (in 1840 with the French-instigated blood libel against Syrian Jews, and in 1860 with the massacre of Syrian Christians), or the British in Baghdad (in 1933 with the massacre of Iraqi Assyrians, and in 1941 the massacre of Iraqi Jews).

The sectarian nightmare that Lebanon has constituted since the mid-nineteenth century, and the role of the French and the Vatican in it, is in a class of its own. Egyptian Christians have been spared such massacres in the modern period, though not the effects of French (beginning with Napoleon) and later British manipulation of existing sectarianism in the country.

Surely, the extant of institutional discrimination against Egyptian Christians by the different organs of the state cannot be laid fully at the doorstep of colonialism, but Sadat’s regime’s intensification of sectarian hatred and his opportunistic manipulation of Islam in the service of imperial policies, along with his support of some Islamist groups against the threat of Soviet and other varieties of communism and Arab nationalism, facilitated the attacks on Egyptian Christians in the 1970s.

Sadat’s policies institutionalised a new trend in Egyptian popular culture that continues today to dominate many corners of civil society, among Christians and Muslims alike.

While sectarianism predates Sadat’s rule, his anti-Arab attitudes and his campaign to de-Arabise Egypt by removing it from the Arab fold in the late 1970s and beyond contributed to this new sectarian trend. As most Egyptians saw their identity as grounded in the region, when Sadat insisted on de-Arabising them while allying himself with Israel and the United States, the majority of Muslim Egyptians opted for Islam as the new extra-Egyptian framework for their identity.

This spurred many Christian Egyptians to revert to a more parochial and local identity of ‘Copticness,’ rooted exclusively within Egypt. Arabness, as a non-racial non-essentialist identity, which defines Arabs as those whose native language is Arabic, included and welcomed Egyptian Christians under its banner, even though it was not always the major political current among most Egyptian Christian intellectuals.

However, the Sadat-generated momentum of de-Arabisation and the rise of Islamism, augmented in the early 1980s by the US (and Saudi) sponsorship of pan-Islamic efforts to fight its war in Afghanistan (in which many Islamist Egyptians volunteered to participate), led to the strengthening of sectarian Christian and Muslim identities that relegated Egyptian Christians to an unfortunate localism that removed them from any regional identity project.  

This has intensified the sense of isolation felt by many Egyptian Christians, especially in light of the sectarian anti-Christian societal discourse regnant in the post-Sadat era across the country, including but not limited to educational institutions, ranging from primary schools all the way to universities, in curricula, and among teachers and students alike.

We must note though that anti-Christian institutionalised discrimination is often exaggerated by expatriate and some US-based chauvinist fanatics as “oppression,” while played down by the state and its operatives as “non-existent.”

Assisted by actual incidents of communal violence, especially in the south of the country, the hyperbole on both sides is hardly mitigated. Yet, American and Papal pretensions to be defenders of local religious minorities, aided in the last three decades by an army of US-funded NGOs, have contributed more to this situation of sectarianism rather than “safeguarded” Christian Egyptians.

This Egyptian situation exists today in the context of horrifying sectarian violence made possible by the American invasion and occupation of Iraq which brought in its wake Al-Qaeda to the country (it does seem ironic that where the Americans go in the Arab world and outside it, they bring al-Qaeda along with them, not least in Yemen where their ongoing intervention has created a civil war in the country).
While most of those killed in the American-instigated sectarian violence in Iraq have been Shiite and Sunni Muslims (notwithstanding the attacks on the tiny Palestinian community of Baghdad), Europe and America’s media characteristically feature with much fanfare the equally horrifying violence against Iraqi Christians, as if the latter are somehow specifically and solely targeted among Iraq’s sects and ethnic groups for such violence.

Nonetheless, it is important to assert that it was the arrival of the Americans in Iraq that has pretty much reduced the size of Iraq’s Christians to infinitesimal levels.

How is one to read the carnage of Alexandria in this context and what would be needed to contain its effects?

Those few who believe that foreign intervention in Egypt might protect the Copts are wittingly, or unwittingly, using the incident to bring about a wider role for US imperialism in the country – as if what the US has brought about in Egypt in the last three decades (massive strengthening of the rich and impoverishment of the poor, de-education, destruction of Egyptian agriculture, gargantuan corruption and theft of public funds, economic dependence, and diminishment of Egypt’s regional political and military role, not to mention the US hand in the ongoing sectarianism) has not been sufficient, and as if the Americans have ever intervened anywhere in the world to help the oppressed or the discriminated against, unless one considers dethroned dictators or a business class, whose powers to pillage were curtailed by a nationalist government, “oppressed groups.”

Had the US been a protector, those in our part of the world who are oppressed (and this includes millions of people of all shades and colors) would not only have been saved by US intervention, but their very suffering would not continue to be underwritten by US policies, as is most often the case. So much then for the US as a protector of the lives of Arab, including Egyptian, Christians.

It strikes me that calls for state reform and putting an end to discriminatory policies are essential, but so are calls for reform in the religious institutions that claim to speak for Muslim and Christian Egyptians, and for the kind of sectarian discourse they churn out.

This is not to suggest that the demographic differences between a majority of Muslim Egyptians and a minority of Christian Egyptians should be elided nor that the state’s identifying “its” religion as the same as that of the majority of its population is irrelevant (something Sadat, under American aegis, did much to institutionalise and consecrate) when analysing the power of these religious institutions, but rather that at the level of sectarian discourse they can often be seen as mirroring one another.

To say that the Egyptian state has had a hand in sectarian manipulation is to state the obvious, but this discourse now has an independent momentum and will have to be deconstructed by the anti-sectarian civil society forces in the country, not only in the political sphere, but also and especially in the cultural and social spheres (it is rather unsurprising that the sphere of wealth is the only sphere where no discrimination against rich Christian Egyptians can be said to exist).

And this should be done not by strategies of manifesting a special “admiration” for the Christians as a separate sect (as a secular Marxist Palestinian intellectual of Muslim background recently averred to me at a private gathering) and exaggerating the sectarian identity of “their” contribution to Egyptian and Arab history (a cause dear to Arab neoliberals and their Western sponsors).

Rather, we must understand how Europe and the United States, in claiming to “sponsor” and “protect” the local Christian communities and make it de rigueur to “admire” them and identify “their” contributions to the modern Arab world in sectarian terms, will bring about the very same exclusion of these communities in the countries where they live and belong as those hateful fanatics, who target them and who claim them to be foreign to the body politic, want to do.

Zionism sought to create an exclusive Jewish state and empty the world of Jews who would all flock to the Jewish colonial settlement to live in a racist intolerant state.

Similarly, these international forces are intent on transforming Arab and Muslim countries into Israeli-style exclusive enclaves of “intolerant” Muslims whom the (“Judeo-Christian”) world must not tolerate on account of their own alleged intolerance.

In this vein, I should mention that one week before the terrorist attack in Alexandria, the Egyptian authorities uncovered a major Israeli spy ring in the country.

Given the history of Mossad bombings of Egyptian post offices, cinemas, cultural centers, and train stations in the 1950s, and Mossad bombing operations across the Arab world that have never ceased to the present (the Mossad has always had a flair for car bombings), it would be important to investigate possible or even potential links between the Mossad operatives and the church bombers. ( More here)

The irony remains, however, that it is the intolerant Americans, Europeans, and the Israelis and their extremist intolerant, though at times unwitting, local allies, namely the violent minority of sectarians among Islamists, who stand to benefit most from the Alexandria tragedy.

Unless intellectuals in Egypt and the Arab world, Muslim and Christian, religious and secular, resist joining this international alliance of the intolerant, they may very well help them achieve their goals.

 The writer is Associate Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

2011: The year Lebanon Allows Palestinians Some Elementary Civil Rights?


First published in Al Manar English Edition

FRANKLIN LAMB

Shatila Camp, Beirut

Maybe it was the really loud celebratory Ak-47 Kalashnikov and small arms gunfire and fireworks in my South Beirut neighborhood that triggered the intense New Years Eve nightmare. Or I guess it could have been the seemingly, just below my bedroom window, launched RPG-7’s which followed minutes past midnight on January 1, 2011.

Anyhow, in my News Years dream, I was back in my childhood home, Milwaukie, Oregon, nearly half a century ago. Our farming and lumber town on the Willamette River had a population of around 2000 in those much simpler and less crowded days. I dreamt it was Saturday afternoon and as we always did during our middle school years, my best friend and Lake Road neighbor, David Inabnit and I went to our town’s decaying WW II era movie theatre called the “Victory”, at exactly 1 p.m.

We stood in line to watch the Saturday Matinee, paid the 20 cents for admission, used the dime his sainted mother Martha always gave us for spending money and bought either Milk Duds or Good ‘n Plenty candies and settled into the comfortable over stuffed seats.

We always enjoyed the afternoon complete with Realtone News, a bunch of cartoons, the latest episode of an action serial like Dick Tracy, Hopalong Cassidy or the Cisco Kid, and usually a Cowboys and Indians movie. Or sometimes, my favorite childhood action hero, “Tarzan, King of the Jungle.” Tarzan’s very pleasant friend Jane, who always seemed to twist her angle and had to be carried by Tarzan, swinging on vines through the treetops (Jane reminded me of Miss Whitehead, our Milwaukie Grammar School 4th Grade teacher) was quite pretty.

But the jungle duo’s screeching and too hyper chimpanzee ‘Cheetah’ regularly got on my nerves. It was not until two decades later that I learned to my horror that the film producers sometimes would beat, drug and apply electricity to our presumed distant cousin to get the dramatic shots they wanted. These revelations shattered my idolatry towards “Tarzan, the Ape man” because I figured he knew about and should have prevented the animal abuse that his partner ‘Cheetah’ suffered.

My New Year’s nightmare was centered on one of those terrifying scenes (besides a giant boa constrictor slithering down a tree or dropping from vines overhead and wrapping around and crushing someone-or a zillion silvery flesh eating piranhas splashing in a bloody feeding frenzy and quickly stripping their victims skeleton right there on the huge screen in front of us) that still upsets me a lot. It was a quicksand pit scene where the victims would sink out of sight and disappear forever while flailing their arms and screaming--swallowed up by the shifting and sinking sand despite all their intense struggling to save themselves.




In my nightmare this vast quicksand pit kept getting wider and broader. David and I were high up in the treetops watching the swirling deathtrap cork-screwing downward as it expanded. To our horror, futilely struggling to extricate and save themselves were thousands of soon to be suffocated Palestinian refugees, some of whom I recognized from today’s refugee camps in Lebanon.

David and I could see in the distance people huddled in groups and watching. They appeared to be discussing whether they should try to rescue the condemned. But they all just stood there. Some shedding crocodile tears as they gawked—but no one made a move to save the perishing wretches.

Tarzan was nowhere to be seen and we kept looking for him to swing down from the overhead vines.

He never came.

This observer admits to possessing a fragile and perhaps nightmare susceptible psych these days, after long observing the lives of friends in Palestinian camps in Lebanon. But it is one thing to study the statistics, read well meaning NGO studies, and attend three dozen or so Palestinian Rights ‘Workshops/Conferences of one kind or another over the past few years. It’s quite another to share greatly valued personal relationships with some of those whose life experiences provide the sociological data.

NEW YEAR’S 2011 STATISTICAL UPDATE: LEBANON ‘LOWEST OF THE LOWS’

In Lebanon this past summer, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), conducted a socio-economic survey of 2,600 Palestinian refugee households.

The depressing survey results are not encouraging. As bad, if not worse than in Gaza, the data reveals a ticking social, moral, political and perhaps literal time bomb.

The data graphically illustrate the urgent need for immediate Lebanese and global governmental and civil society support, advocacy, and political pressure to encourage Lebanon’s parliament to enact internationally mandated elementary human rights for Palestinian refugees.

Both the international community and Lebanon have created and perpetuated the quicksand death pit tragedy unfolding in Lebanon’s camps. The good news is that either can fairly quickly end the nightmare if they can be motivated to develop the political will.

DEMOGRAPHICS: SWELLING

Half of the population is under 25 years old. Two-thirds of the Palestinians live shoe horned inside camps the square footage of which has not appreciably increased over the past six decades but whose population has more than quadrupled.

One-third live in gatherings mainly near one of the 12 camps’ vicinity. Nearly 7 % are extremely poor, meaning they cannot meet their essential daily food needs, five times the percentage for the poorest Lebanese.

Nearly 67 per cent of Palestine's refugees in Lebanon are poor and cannot meet their basic food and non-food needs. This is double the number for the Lebanese poor and one of the highest in the World.

UNEMPLOYMENT: RISING

Nearly 56 per cent of Palestinians are jobless. Two-thirds of Palestinians employed in elementary occupations (i.e. street vendors, construction or agriculture workers) are poor.

A major part of Palestinians refugee problems in Lebanon are caused by the fact that Lebanon’s government refuses to grant them the internationally mandated rights required and enjoyed by all the world’s refugees. These include the right to work and to own a home, the two deprivations, among those most severely impacting Palestinians in Lebanon.

EDUCATION: SHRINKING
Less than half of young people of secondary school age (16-18 years old) are even enrolled in schools or vocational training centers. Eight per cent of the Palestine refugee population of school age (7-15 years old) are not enrolled in any school as 2011 begins. Only 6 per cent of Palestinians refugees in Lebanon are university degree holders whereas in the Diaspora the figure is often in the 80-90 percentile for Palestinians.

Formerly one of the Palestinian refugees’ characteristics was a strong educational background. This proud attribute has now vanished in Lebanon’s camps. High dropout rates and insufficient skills combined with multi-barriers established by the Lebanese government severely limit the refugees’ ability to find even menial ‘informal economy’ or ‘black market’ jobs.


FOOD INSECURITY: INCREASING

Sixty three per cent of Lebanon’s Palestinians experience food insecurity, and 15 per cent of Palestinians are severely food insecure and are in acute need of food assistance.

Approximately 25% of refugee households consume inadequate amounts of fruit, vegetables, dairy and meat, and one-third of the population is not meeting their micronutrient requirements.

According to the authors of the UNWRA survey, micronutrient deficiencies cause stunting, poor cognitive and psychomotor development of children

Unhealthy dietary habits are common among Lebanon’s refugees.
Fifty-seven per cent have unhealthy dietary habits including the excessive consumption of sweets.
Sixty-eight per cent consume sweetened drinks which directly increases the burden of chronic diseases.


HEALTH: DETERIORATING

Chronic illnesses affects close to a third of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees.
All Palestinian households with a disabled head of household live in extreme poverty. Twenty one per cent of Lebanon’s Palestinian refugees attest to experiencing depression, anxiety, or distress. Ninety five per cent of the population is without medical insurance but UNRWA, which is again being targeted for dissolution by the US Congressional Israeli lobby, does its best to provide primary and secondary health care.
100 percent of the camps and gatherings potable water is polluted.

HOUSING CONDITIONS: SQUALID

Sixty-six per cent of the houses suffer from dampness and leakage which often results in psychological and chronic illnesses.

Eight per cent of households live in shelters where the roof and/or walls are made of corrugated iron, wood or asbestos. Eight per cent live in overcrowded conditions (more than three people in one room) while as many as seven to a room is not uncommon.

Every group and political party in Lebanon has failed the Palestinian refugees-including their leadership. The best of the Palestinians are those struggling to survive in the Camps and it is their young people who will likely take the Palestinian struggle to survive and to return to Palestine to the next level if necessary.

A 2011 SOLUTION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY?

It would take Lebanon’s Parliament just two hours to fix half of the problem and to abolish the racist 2001 law that forbids Palestinians from owning a home. Unfortunately its author, who is currently Minister of Labor, has not altered his mindset a decade later.

Indeed, he has just submitted to Parliament a draft law that would outlaw Christians selling any property at all in Lebanon to Muslims (read: Hezbollah supporting Shia) for the next 15 years under penalty of ten years in jail and a fine double the sale price. He has declared that such a law is “necessary in order to advance sectarian harmony” while denying that he favors building medieval walls around the 18 sects land holdings.

It would take roughly the same amount of time for Parliament to declare that Palestinians shall be allowed the full right to work. Not the mockery of the August 17, 2010 public relations feel good “cancellation of the work permit fee” gesture that likely has not and will not help one refugees secure a job, the same right that all other foreigners have.

By way of contrast to Lebanon inaction, the Palestinian’s arch enemy Israel, as if to taunt Lebanon, announced this week that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has instructed Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer to increase the number of Palestinians from the West Bank allowed to work in Israel. Ben-Eliezer is to allocate 5,000 more work permits for Palestinians from the West Bank.

So at the beginning of 2011 the score might be said to be: 5000 Israeli work permits for Palestinians. Zero from Lebanon.

Increasingly, political analysts are concluding that Lebanon’s politicians are simply not capable, given this country’s virulent sectarianism and civil war memories, and despite occasional sweet words about the 1949 Universal Declaration of the Human Rights being partly authored by a Lebanese gentleman, of granting internationally mandated elementary civil rights to Palestinians.

This despite the fact that those who came to Lebanon 63 years ago were forced here by Zionist ethnic cleansing.


IT’S THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY’S OBLIGATION ALSO, STUPID!

On the other hand, it would require of President Obama, President Ahmadinejad, the European Union or any one of a number of other heads of major powers only the time required to send the right communication to Lebanon’s three key politicians to correct this now 63 year long injustice.

The UN and the international community must politely demand that Lebanon end this unacceptable discrimination against their sisters and brothers because it is no longer internationally tolerable.

They must make clear that all foreign aid to Lebanon will be suspended until Parliament meets its internationally mandated humanitarian obligations toward Palestinian refugees.

The current Christian, Sunni and Shia back scratching Parliamentary leadership trio would likely stumble over each other, scrambling to comply with the remarkable, long overdue international involvement.

Were the international community to cease averting its eyes and actually give some meaning to the more than 100 UN Resolutions on Palestine and the more than 500 conference declarations over the past half century dealing with Palestinian refugees, Lebanon’s six decades of shame would be lifted.

More importantly, the implementation of the Right of Return to Palestine, and the refugees’ departure from Lebanon would be advanced as the warehoused refugees gain some economic strength to pursue their inalienable right and responsibility to regain Palestine.

A win-win formula for Lebanon and humanity if ever there was one.

Hopefully, all of Lebanon’s politicians and parties, along with the international community, will assure that 2011, is not just the year of the Rabbit, but the year that Palestinian refugees in Lebanon secured the internationally mandated elementary rights to work and to own a home.


Dr. Franklin Lamb is Director of the Sabra Shatila Foundation.


Beirut Mobile: +961-70-497-804
Office: +961-01-352-127
He is working with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign in Lebanon on drafting legislation which, after 62 years, would, if adopted by Lebanon’s Cabinet and Parliament grant the right to work and to own a home to Lebanon’s Palestinian Refugees. One part of the PCRC legislative project is its online Petition which can be viewed and signed at:
 
petitiononline.com/ssfpcrc/petition.html.
fplamb@palestinecivilrightscampaign.org.

Franklin Lamb’s book on the Sabra-Shatila Massacre, International Legal Responsibility for the Sabra-Shatila Massacre, now out of print, was published in 1983, following Janet’s death and was dedicated to Janet Lee Stevens. He was a witness before the Israeli Kahan Commission Inquiry, held at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in January 1983.

Please check our website for UPDATES:

http://www.palestinecivilrightscampaign.org/

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Contact him at: fplamb@sabrashatila.org.

Sheikh Qassem: Ball in Hariri’s Court, He Knows What to Do - Clinton Tells Hariri US Supports Lebanon's Independence


08/01/2011 Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem stressed on Saturday that the Resistance party has fully played its role, emphasizing that the responsibility now lies on the other party to guarantee the success of Saudi and Syrian mediation to solve the Lebanese crisis.

Speaking to Lebanese daily As-Safir, Sheikh Qassem said that Prime Minister Saad Hariri knows what to do, stressing that the ball was in his court.

"We are pushing towards this solution because it’s the best for everyone, but in agreements there isn't anything called an 80 percent or 90 percent success. They would either be implemented or not, meaning it’s either white or black," Sheikh Qassem said.

"We are now waiting for the official Syrian and Saudi announcement that the settlement succeeded," Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General said. "Nobody can set a specific timing for such announcement because there are some details which depend on the mediators’ follow up," his eminence added.

Sheikh Qassem said that the final settlement should be announced soon, adding that there was a conflict between announcing the settlement and releasing the indictment in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, given that its release would change everything since what precedes the indictment is not the same as what follows it. That’s why accelerating the solution is in everybody’s interest."

Clinton Tells Hariri US Supports Lebanon's Independence

08/01/2011 A few hours after ending his private vacation and returning to the Lebanese capital, and a few hours after announcing that the Saudi-Syrian agreement was done a long time ago and throwing the responsibility on others, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri flew to New York where he met with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and is expected to meet later on Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz for the second time in less than ten days.

According to press reports, Clinton has discussed growing tensions in Lebanon with the country's Prime Minister and Saudi King Abdullah at separate meetings in New York.

A source who attended the Clinton-Hariri meeting said that the US Secretary of State reaffirmed strong US support for Lebanon's independence and for the work of the UN-backed tribunal that is investigating the 2005 assassination of Hariri's father, former PM Rafiq Hariri.

"Secretary Clinton expressed her strong support for the independence and sovereignty of Lebanon," the source told AFP. Clinton also "expressed very clearly her support for the Hariri tribunal," the source added.

The secretary of state left the hotel saying her talks had been "excellent" but no other official details were given.

Just after she left, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel Al-Jubeir, was seen going to the Hariri suite.

In a related development, the US State Department said the first US ambassador to be posted in Damascus since 2005 was expected to arrive in the country by the end of the month.

Clinton swore in Robert Ford on Friday, and her spokesman Philip Crowley said the new ambassador would be in Damascus "before the end of January."

The United States withdrew its ambassador after the 2005 assassination of Hariri.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

Egypt’s Muslims attend Coptic Christmas mass, serving as “human shields”

Posted: January 8, 2011 by crescentandcross


Muslims turned up in droves for the Coptic Christmas mass Thursday night, offering their bodies, and lives, as “shields” to Egypt’s threatened Christian community
Yasmine El-Rashidi , http://english.ahram.org
Egypt’s majority Muslim population stuck to its word Thursday night. What had been a promise of solidarity to the weary Coptic community, was honoured, when thousands of Muslims showed up at Coptic Christmas eve mass services in churches around the country and at candle light vigils held outside.
From the well-known to the unknown, Muslims had offered their bodies as “human shields” for last night’s mass, making a pledge to collectively fight the threat of Islamic militants and towards an Egypt free from sectarian strife.

“We either live together, or we die together,” was the sloganeering genius of Mohamed El-Sawy, a Muslim arts tycoon whose cultural centre distributed flyers at churches in Cairo Thursday night, and who has been credited with first floating the “human shield” idea.
Among those shields were movie stars Adel Imam and Yousra, popular preacher Amr Khaled, the two sons of President Hosni Mubarak, and thousands of citizens who have said they consider the attack one on Egypt as a whole.

“This is not about us and them,” said Dalia Mustafa, a student who attended mass at Virgin Mary Church on Maraashly. “We are one. This was an attack on Egypt as a whole, and I am standing with the Copts because the only way things will change in this country is if we come together.”
In the days following the brutal attack on Saints Church in Alexandria, which left 21 dead on New Year’ eve, solidarity between Muslims and Copts has seen an unprecedented peak. Millions of Egyptians changed their Facebook profile pictures to the image of a cross within a crescent – the symbol of an “Egypt for All”. Around the city, banners went up calling for unity, and depicting mosques and churches, crosses and crescents, together as one.

The attack has rocked a nation that is no stranger to acts of terror, against all of Muslims, Jews and Copts. In January of last year, on the eve of Coptic Christmas, a drive-by shooting in the southern town of Nag Hammadi killed eight Copts as they were leaving Church following mass. In 2004 and 2005, bombings in the Red Sea resorts of Taba and Sharm El-Sheikh claimed over 100 lives, and in the late 90’s, Islamic militants executed a series of bombings and massacres that left dozens dead.

This attack though comes after a series of more recent incidents that have left Egyptians feeling left out in the cold by a government meant to protect them.

Last summer, 28-year-old businessman Khaled Said was beaten to death by police, also in Alexandria, causing a local and international uproar. Around his death, there have been numerous other reports of police brutality, random arrests and torture.

Last year was also witness to a brutal parliamentary election process in which the government’s security apparatus and thugs seemed to spiral out of control. The result, aside from injuries and deaths, was a sweeping win by the ruling party thanks to its own carefully-orchestrated campaign that included vote-rigging, corruption and rife brutality. The opposition was essentially annihilated. And just days before the elections, Copts – who make up 10 percent of the population – were once again the subject of persecution, when a government moratorium on construction of a Christian community centre resulted in clashes between police and protestors. Two people were left dead and over 100 were detained, facing sentences of up to life in jail.

The economic woes of a country that favours the rich have only exacerbated the frustration of a population of 80 million whose majority struggle each day to survive. Accounts of thefts, drugs, and violence have surged in recent years, and the chorus of voices of discontent has continued to grow.

The terror attack that struck the country on New Year’s eve is in many ways a final straw – a breaking point, not just for the Coptic community, but for Muslims as well, who too feel marginalized, persecuted, and overlooked, by a government that fails to address their needs. On this Coptic Christmas eve, the solidarity was not just one of religion, but of a desperate and collective plea for a better life and a government with accountability. 
Egypt’s Muslims support Coptic Christians on religious holiday
By the CNN Wire Staff
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Faith overcomes fear in Egypt

(CNN) — Egyptian Muslims attended Christmas services Friday in a show of solidarity with Coptic Christians days after a bombing killed 23 congregants in the country’s north.
Coptic Christians celebrate Christmas Day according to the Julian calendar, and observed it on Friday this year.

Security was tight around churches after the blast on New Year’s Day outside the Church of the Two Saints in Alexandria.

Congregants were forced to empty their pockets before the start of the service as part of security measures set up after the bombing.



“Police plan a large-scale security operation for tonight to protect Egypt’s Coptic Christians and their churches.” Col. Alla Mahmoud of the interior ministry said Thursday.

Protests have broken out in Christian areas of Egypt every night since the car bombing outside the Church of the Two Saints in Alexandria.

Hundreds of officers — outfitted in helmets with visors, body armor and carrying shields and night sticks — lined the streets, leaving a path for demonstrators to pass.

Egyptian authorities have released a sketch of a man they think is responsible for the attack.
“The man in the picture is unknown and authorities are trying to confirm his identity,” Mahmoud said.

The interior ministry used forensic technology to recreate the face of the suspected suicide bomber.

About 9 percent of Egypt’s 80 million residents are Coptic Christians.

Coptic Christians base their theology on the teachings of the Apostle Mark, who introduced Christianity to Egypt, according to St. Takla Church in Alexandria, the capital of Coptic Christianity.

The religion is known for its rift with other Christians in the fifth century over the definition of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
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