Outsourcing Torture – Chris Hedges

The Bush administration has called for the respect of human rights in Burma, a pretty safe piece of posturing, but it remains silent as Egypt’s dictator, Gen. Hosni Mubarak , unleashes the largest crackdown on public opposition in over a decade. Our moral indignation over the shooting of monks masks the incestuous and growing alliance we have built in the so-called war on terror with some of the world’s most venal dictatorships.

False Prophets: Christians United For Israel

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10052007/profile.html

Shin Bet and the Israeli Academy: Partners in Human Rights Abuses

By JONATHAN COOK

There were some remarkable admissions
in a piece by the distinguished Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling
in the immediate wake of the British teaching union NATFHE’s
vote yesterday to offer members moral backing if they boycott
Israeli universities. British academics opposed to Israeli colleagues’
complicity in the lengthy and continuing occupation of the Palestinians
are now advised to boycott them and their institutions.

Today, and quite incidentally,
Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper of a
decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem,
to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of
the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used
its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the
occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades.

The Shin Bet is possibly best
known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions
from detainees. Although torture was banned by the country’s
Supreme Court in 1999, the Shin Bet has continued with its notorious
practices during the second intifada, according to the Israeli
human rights group the Public Committee against Torture.

According to Kimmerling, Shin
Bet staff will not only be encouraged to further their education
with government grants (maybe no bad thing), but the Shin Bet
itself will be able to devise the study course. As Kimmerling
notes, the most likely result will be a “professional studies”
programme relating to the Shin Bet’s work.

Kimmerling rightly observes
that such a programme clashes with the very values of free speech
and free thought supposedly embodied by his university: “Although
both institutions [the Shin Bet and Hebrew University] conduct
‘research’, the objects of the research and the methodologies
are day and night.”

Such arrangements are nothing
new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong
ties between the universities and the defence industry because
“some university staff join academia after [military] service
and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them
manage to ‘go civilian’.”

In fact, Kimmerling understates
the problem. Anyone who has spent time in an Israeli university
will know that its academic staff and the country’s huge defence
industry are intimately entwined. The geography department of
Haifa University, for example, was until very recently headed
by Prof Arnon Sofer, who is best known in Israel for advocating
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, both occupied Palestinian non-citizens
from the West Bank and the minority of Palestinian citizens from
Israel.

Sofer, who has also taught
at the National Defence College and the Police Training College
for many decades, once boasted to me that he had imparted his
values to almost every senior security official in Israel. Stickers
on the doors of nearly every lecturer in his department declare
membership of the National Security Studies Center, Sofer’s own
government-funded “research” body that disseminates
his obscene ideas.

Kimmerling offers his own high-profile
example of this “partnership”. Menachem Milson, the
dean of the humanities faculty at Hebrew University, was in the
1970s and 1980s head of the military government — misleadingly
known as the civil adminstration — in the West Bank. In that
post he developed the notorious “Village Leagues”,
local Palestinian militias financed by Israel whose role was
to weaken Palestinian support for Fatah and thus prolong the
occupation while Israel concentrated on its illegal colonisation
of the territory.

Kimmerling himself has written
at length about the terrible nature of Israel’s occupation: that
it has been designed to destroy any hope of Palestinian sovereignty
even in the small ghettoes left to the Palestinians of their
original homeland by extending Jewish domination. He even coined
a term for this slow and relentless erosion of the Palestinian
people’s rights: politicide.

So, given his own evidence,
what are Kimmerling’s conclusions about the legitimacy of the
British union’s boycott? That it is, he warns, “no small
hypocrisy”. This judgment echoes his denunciation last year
of the short-lived decision by another British union, the Association
of University Teachers (AUT), to recommend a boycott of several
Israeli universities. After vigorous campaigning by pro-Israel
supporters, the vote was rapidly overturned.

What are Kimmerling’s reasons
for objecting to such boycotts? Because “no one dared propose
a boycott of American or British academic institutions after
the invasion of Iraq, or Chinese academe for human rights violations.”

Are these comparisons, dutifully
trotted out by apologists for Israeli occupation of much less
intellectual stature than Kimmerling, reasonable? Let’s examine
them.

The Chinese abuse of its own
population’s rights and the violation of the Tibetan people’s
rights through its lengthy occupation of their homeland deserve
continuous and vocal denunciation. But does it follow that a
boycott of Chinese universities would have the same meaning and
effectiveness as one of Israeli universities?

China has long been treated
by the West as a pariah nation, even if it often covertly trades
with Western governments. No one in the West describes China
as a democracy or believes that the Chinese authorities have
allowed any room for civil society to emerge. In fact, we know
that Chinese dissidents, including academics, have received terrible
punishments, such as being imprisoned, tortured and killed.

So how exactly does Kimmerling
imagine that a boycott of Chinese universities will encourage
dissident views, and how will this help progressive politics
in the country? If the Chinese government offers no space for
critical voices, how can actions by British academics make a
difference?

What is needed in the case
of China is concerted sanctions by Western governments against
the Chinese authorities. The fact that this has not been forthcoming
is not the responsbility of European or American academia.

Also, unlike China, the tiny
country of Israel receives huge sums of aid from the United States
— this week it was announced that the House of Representatives
has approved $2.5 billion for next year — and special trading
status with the European Union that greatly benefits the Israeli
economy. Most of the US money does not have to be accounted for,
thereby subsidising the occupation industry of which the universities
are a part and the harmful government-sponsored initiatives of
professors such as Arnon Sofer.

So while on the one hand China
is officially condemned as an authoritarian and anti-democratic
state for its abuse of human rights, Israel is showered with
financial rewards for its occupation. It therefore falls on British
and American academics to distance themselves from their government’s
support for Israel through the limited means available to them.

What about American and British
universities? Following NATFHE’s logic, should British academics
be boycotted for the invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Ignoring the obvious point
that British academics are hardly in a position to boycott themselves,
let’s examine Kimmerling’s argument. He is suggesting that there
is a double standard at work: British academics are seeking to
punish Israeli academics for the occupation while no one is punishing
British academics over the occupation of Iraq. But this analogy
is patently false.

First, the reason the British
union wants Israeli academics punished is for their collective
silence and collaboration with the occupation. One of Israel’s
main universities, Bar Ilan, has a campus in the West Bank settlement
of Ariel, which the government intends to annex behind the wall
it is building. As Ariel is about 14km from the Green Line, the
pre-1967 border, such a move will end any hope of a viable Palestinian
state.

With a few honorable exceptions
— Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart and Kimmerling himself — almost
no one in Israeli academia is speaking out against the occupation
or about their own universities’ implicit or overt support of
it. Kimmerling’s article about the Shin Bet studies programme
is a very rare example of such public dissent.

That is hardly true in Britain,
where academics have been at the forefront of the huge opposition
in the UK to the invasion of Iraq and to the country’s subsequent
occupation. Campuses are alive with protest and debate about
the legitimacy of Britain’s role in Iraq. The fact that it is
not represented in the British media is a failure by the country’s
media, not the academics.

The same is most definitely
not true in Israeli universities, where protests by Jewish staff
and students all but never occur. Arab students who have tried
to protest against the occupation of the Palestinian territories
at Haifa University, where most of them are based, must seek
a permit from the university authorities which they are almost
always denied. Demonstrations are usually filmed by university
officials. Students are then arrested later by the police, and
others punished by university special disciplinary committees.
Arab students facing these sanctions have rarely received any
support from Jewish students or academics.

(It should also be noted that
Palestinians are denied all acess to Israeli universities to
study, while their own educational opportunities are severely
damaged by the checkpoints, curfews and invasions associated
with the occupation. Arab students belong to the country’s minority
of Palestinian citizens, one in five of the population, who are
grossly under-represented on campuses and systematically stripped
of their voice. Arab lecturers account for less than 1 per cent
of academic staff.)

The second point is that whereas
the American and British occupation of Iraq is in its infancy,
the Israeli one is reaching what should be its mid-life crisis.
At what point does inaction, turning a blind eye, become culpable?
Surely four decades of ignoring the Israeli occupation stretches
our denials of moral responsibility beyond credibility.

Were the occupation of Iraq
still to be in its stride by the year 2040, and British universities
keeping quiet, I would very much hope academics around the world
would be taking action against their British and American colleagues
too.

Which leads us to the third
difference. Whereas the success or failure of American goals
in Iraq is still open to question, Israel’s plans to steal Palestinian
land have been consistently successful and are only gathering
pace. In fact, as British union delegates appear to understand,
hopes of salvaging any viable state for the Palestinians have
almost run out of steam. The Israeli government is now planning
the final stages of its annexation of Palestinian land — misleadingly
called “convergence” — and with it the destruction
of any chances of meaningful Palestinian statehood.

Kimmerling, however, does have
one valid point. In truth, it will be hard to boycott American
academics and universities even if they prove themselves in the
long run to be as spineless as Israeli ones. This is because
the Western academic system is sustained by American academia;
without it, the system would probably collapse.

The fact that it will be difficult
to penalise American academics may be unfair, but it is hardly
justifiable grounds for British academics to shun their moral
responsibilities to bring whatever pressure they can to bear
on Israel to end its gratuitious occupation. Such boycott campaigns
can be effective — as should be obvious from the high-level
efforts made by the Israeli government last year to help overturn
the boycott vote by the AUT.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming “Blood
and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State“
published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States
from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

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Most of the war crimes were Israel’s

A year after the Second Lebanon War

Most of the war crimes were Israel’s

By Jonathan Cook

08/16/07 “ICH” – This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon war by Israelis. A month of fighting — mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizbullah on northern Israel in response — ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizbullah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians.

When Israel and the United States realised that Hizbullah could not be bombed into submission, they pushed a resolution, 1701, through the United Nations. It placed an expanded international peacekeeping force, UNIFIL, in south Lebanon to keep Hizbullah in check and try to disarm its few thousand fighters.

But many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put in question Israel’s account of what happened last summer. This is old ground worth revisiting for that reason alone.

The war began on 12 July, when Israel launched waves of air strikes on Lebanon after Hizbullah killed three soldiers and captured two more on the northern border. (A further five troops were killed by a land mine when their tank crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit.) Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese prisoners since it withdrew from its two-decade occupation of south Lebanon in 2000.

The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been widely blamed for the army’s failure to subdue Hizbullah, appointed the Winograd Committee to investigate what went wrong. So far Winograd has been long on pointing out the country’s military and political failures and short on explaining how the mistakes were made or who made them. Olmert is still in power, even if hugely unpopular.

In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has “learnt the lessons” from the last war. The new defence minister, Ehud Barak, who was responsible for the 2000 withdrawal, has made it a priority to develop anti-missile systems such as “Iron Dome” to neutralise the rocket threat from Hizbullah, using some of the recently announced $30 billion of American military aid.

It has been left to the Israeli media to begin rewriting the history of last summer. Last weekend, an editorial in the liberal Haaretz newspaper went so far as to admit that this was “a war initiated by Israel against a relatively small guerrilla group”. Israel’s supporters, including high-profile defenders like Alan Dershowitz in the US who claimed that Israel had no choice but to bomb Lebanon, must have been squirming in their seats.

There are several reasons why Ha’aretz may have reached this new assessment.

I, (FASCIST) ROBOT – THE BBC’S GAVIN ESLER LETS RIP

In response to our September 18 alert, ‘The
Media Ignore Credible Poll Revealing 1.2 Million Violent Deaths In
Iraq,’ BBC Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler sent one Media Lens reader
the following response:

“Sorry but this medialens inspired stuff is very sophomoric. The
last time I remember a robotic response from people like this was
watching film of the nuremberg rallies. I always wondered why people
marched to another’s beat without any obvious thought from themselves.
Perhaps you know the answer, or perhaps you merely intend to keep
marching.

“Please don’t write to me again in someone else’s words. It is so embarrasing for you. Please learn to think for yourself.

Gavin”

The polite and thoughtful email that elicited this response was
sent by James, a masters student at Durham University. You can read it
here: http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2611

The email contains several points that we did not even make in our media alert.

The irony of Esler’s focus on our alleged fascistic tendencies is that
it has become very much the reflexive response of irate journalists
over the last six years. In his enthusiasm for the war that has since
demolished Iraq, the Observer’s Nick Cohen wrote to us on March 15,
2002:

“Dear Serviles

I would have more respect for you if you showed the smallest
awareness that a tyrant bore some responsibility for tyranny. I
appreciate this is difficult for you, it involves coming to terms with
complexity and horribly Eurocentric principles such as justice and
universality, and truly I share your pain. But your for [sic] sake far
more than mine, I’d like to know roughly how many deaths in Iraq are
down to Saddam. If you admit that we’re in double figures, or more,
what should be done about it?

Viva Joe Stalin”

The Independent on Sunday’s deputy editor Michael Williams
described Media Lens emailers – who were challenging the paper’s
hypocrisy in ’saving the planet’ while banking the loot from fossil
fuel adverts – as “a curmudgeonly lot of puritans, miseries, killjoys,
Stalinists and glooms”. (Williams, ‘A bottle of bubbly for the best way
to fly,’ Independent on Sunday, January 22, 2006)

Peter Beaumont of the Observer cringed with disgust as he told
readers how Media Lens was “a closed and distorting little world”, part
of “a curious willy-waving exercise… Think a train spotters’ club run
by Uncle Joe Stalin.” (Beaumont, ‘Microscope on Medialens,’ The
Observer, June 18, 2006; http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1800328,00.html)

The Stalinist zombies were also very much on the march in the mind of
BBC producer Adam Curtis, who interpreted our analysis of his series
The Century Of The Self as us “stamping [our] little feet” and “trying
to whip up an attack of the clones”. (Email to Editors, June 18, 2002)