Jødisk parlamentsmedlem sammenligner Israel med Nazityskland: “They are not simply war criminals, they are fools”

Sir Gerald Kaufman er medlem af det britiske parlament. Han er også ortodoks jøde og zionist, og dertil ikke den mindste smule tilfreds med Israels fremfærd i de besatte områder. Man svigter de idealer, staten blev grundlagt på, mener han:

“My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.”

He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants “was the reply of the Nazi” and added: “I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.”

He accused the Israeli government of seeking “conquest” and added: ”

They are not simply war criminals, they are fools.”

Via Khobbeizeh.

Forstå situationen i Gaza – en amerikansk analogi

Professor og aktivist Randall Kuhn tager sig tid til at forklare, hvad Israels besættelse og invasion af Gaza egentlig betyder, sådan oversat til amerikansk. Om man efter endt læsning vil forsvare den heroiske israelske indsats med de resulterende drab af mere end 1000 mænd, kvinder og børn, må enhver jo selv dømme.
Fra Washington Times:

In the wake of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak made this analogy: “Think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico.”

[…]

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Native American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana? Not just immigrants, but even those who have lived in this country for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers, even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their homes in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy? Sounds pretty awful, huh? I may be called anti-Semitic for speaking this truth. Well, I’m Jewish and the scenario above is what many prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

What if the United Nations kept San Diego’s discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied Tijuana and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana where only whites could live.

And what if the United States built a network of highways connecting American citizens of Tijuana to the United States? And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States but also around every neighborhood of Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the U.S. military on demand? What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this occupation? Would you be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful? Okay, now for the unbelievable part.

Think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers? Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana? Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well. What if we set up 50-foot high watchtowers with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight? And four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to arrive. And we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn’t allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn’t even allow them to fish.

Would you be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been “freed” from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not. But you may be surprised to learn that the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket, or a gun, or a weapon of any kind.

Via Akram’s Razor.

“Kan du fatte det, perker!”

Hvordan er det at være ung dansker af anden etnisk baggrund og gøre brug af sin grundlovssikrede ret til at demonstrere, f.eks. mod Israels krig i Gaza? Her et et bud:

Via Modkraft, der også nævner et andet eksempel politiets provokerende, truende og formentlig dybt ulovlige adfærd:

Den anden episode drejer sig om 17-årige Camilla Christiansen fra København, der efter at være blevet anholdt oplevede at blive kaldt »landsforræder« af en betjent. Udtalelsen falder, da hun forklarer betjenten, at hendes koran-halssmykke skyldes interesse for islam, en religion den unge pige overvejer at konvertere til.

Den 17-årige pige deltager den 10. januar i en moddemonstration på Rådhuspladsen i København vendt mod en pro-israelsk demonstration. Hun anholdes senere samme dag, da nogle betjente mener at kunne genkende hende fra en episode tidligere på dagen, hvor det kom til noget skubberi mellem unge dansk-palæstinensiske demonstranter og politi.

Da betjentene har anholdt hende, placerer de hende på gulvet mellem sæderne i mandskabsvognen. Siddende her med hænderne bundet med strips på ryggen, spørger en af betjentene hende, hvor hendes mor og far er.

– Min mor er derhjemme, min far kender jeg ikke, svarer hun, hvorefter politimanden siger:

– Det er derfor, din mor ikke kan opdrage dig ordentligt. Er du dansker?

følge Camilla Christiansen spørger politimanden formentlig til hendes etniske oprindelse, fordi hun har mørkt hår og går i følgeskab med to dansk-palæstinensiske piger, der begge bærer muslimsk hovedtørklæde.

Hun svarer »ja« til spørgsmålet, hvilket får politimanden til at spørge til den kæde, hun bærer om halsen:

– Hvis du er dansker, hvorfor har du så Koranen hængende om halsen?

– Fordi jeg interesserer mig for islam, svarer Camilla Christiansen, der aldrig tidligere har været anholdt.
Svaret får betjenten til at kalde hende for »landsforræder«, en bemærkning som ifølge Camilla Christiansen får de øvrige politifolk til at grine.

Fascister i det danske politi? Quelle surprise. Jeg siger velbekomme.

Link: Betjent: »Sæt dig ned perker!

Med venlig hilsen fra den israelske hær

En 19-årig studerende på al-Azhar-universitetet i Gaza fortæller, at han og hans familie blev bedt om at forlade deres hus, da  en gruppe israelske soldater skulle bruge det.

Da de vendte tilbage, fandt de ikke huset i helt samme stand:

He returned yesterday to find the houses ransacked and scarcely habitable, with furnishing and electrical appliances tossed out of the window, gaping holes in the wall made for firing positions, furniture smashed, clothes piled on the floor, pages of family Korans torn out and remains of soldiers’ rations littered in many rooms.

Stars of David and graffiti in Hebrew and English proclaiming “Arabs need 2 die”, “no Arabs in the State of Israel” and “One down and 999,999 to go” had been scrawled on walls. A drawing of a gravestone bore the inscription “Arabs 1948 to 2009”.

Men huset står der da i det mindste endnu, hvilket er mere end man kan sige om mange andre huse taget i besiddelse af den israelske hær under den seneste konflikt.

Så hvis du gerne vil vide, hvad formålet med den seneste invasion i Gaza var, så bare spørg soldaterne. De ved besked.

Link: Gazans return to mourn their dead and salvage their lives

Så slem var Bush – masser af cirkus, men ingen brød

Patrick Farley opsummerer:

Trying to explain what was wrong with the Bush Era feels like trying to vomit up a cannonball. I don’t think my jaw can stretch that wide.

Seriously, where does one even begin? Abu Ghraib? Ahmed Chalabi? Mission Accomplished? The “Battle of Iraq?” Valerie Plame? No-bid contracts? The billions of dollars the Pentagon can’t account for, and apparently never will? The Department of Justice firings? The blue Iraqi flag? The staged press conference? The fake Thanksgiving turkey? Terry Schiavo? Freedom Fries?

I can at least say this for Bush: he *didn’t* plant any WMDs in Iraq.

But really, Bush himself wasn’t the problem. Bush was a cipher, the perfect vacuum at the center of a perfect storm — an ideological superstorm which rotated, like some slow, sick, wobbling hurricane of raw sewage over America for 8 years, like some brown, shitty version of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. This Neo-Conservative Superstorm, as I’ll call it, had three major sources of energy feeding it:

a) a panicked population in need of a Protective Patriarch,

b) a Republican party crowded with brazen and reckless ideologues,

and most significantly:

c) A network of Conservative Think Tanks with deep pockets and a fearsomely coordinated army of media pundits.

Og så videre, og så videre, og så videre. Det mest afslørende øjeblik af dem alle var måske Katrina: Landet er ved at miste en storby, og hvad gør præsidenten? Ingenting – laller rundt, fortsætter sin ferie og er tydeligvis fuldstændig ligeglad. Da nødhjælpen slår totalt fejl og den øverste chef for landets katastrofeberedskab bliver klædt af for åben skærm (journalisten vidste simpelt hen meget mere om situationen end den øverste chef for hele baduljen), lader Bush sig flyve ind til et rent photo op og roser nødhjælpschefen for at have gjort “one hell of a job”.

Hvis præsidenten simpelt hen er ligeglad, når en hel storby er ved at gå under, hvad er al snakken om terror og sikkerhed så værd?

Da orkanen Betsy hærgede New Orleans i 1965, tog præsident Lyndon B. Johnson straks derned og tog, med Spike Lees ord, direkte ind, hvor det gik allerhårdest til:

Johnson flew to New Orleans, and went to the Lower Ninth Ward. He shined a flashlight in his face in the dark and said, I’m Lyndon B. Johnson, I’m the President of the United States and we care about you.

George W. Bush gjorde ikke en skid, og det i en endnu værre situation. Det er svært at sige noget værre om en præsident end, at han simpelt hen vil blæse på de folk, han har ansvaret for at beskytte.

Det er ikke til at vide, hvad Obama vil bringe og gøre, og jeg har allerede kørt kanonerne i stilling til at kritisere ham sønder og sammen, hvi det skulle gå hen og blive nødvendigt.

Men i det mindste er der ingen, der mistænker ham for andet end at være engageret og intelligent. Efter Bush kan det kun blive et fremskridt.

Via Boing Boing.

Løsning på krisen: Lad folk trykke deres egne penge

Skribenten og miljøaktivisten George Monbiot opfordrer i dagens Guardian til, at man i stedet for de mange kæmpechecks til industrien og finanslivet lader lokalområder løfte sig selv ud af krisen ved at trykke deres egne penge:

In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out – as the government did yesterday – that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of “an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange”. The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.

But the projects that have proved most effective were those inspired by the German economist Silvio Gessell, who became finance minister in Gustav Landauer’s doomed Bavarian republic. He proposed that communities seeking to rescue themselves from economic collapse should issue their own currency. To discourage people from hoarding it, they should impose a fee (called demurrage), which has the same effect as negative interest. The back of each banknote would contain 12 boxes. For the note to remain valid, the owner had to buy a stamp every month and stick it in one of the boxes. It would be withdrawn from circulation after a year. Money of this kind is called stamp scrip: a privately issued currency that becomes less valuable the longer you hold on to it.

One of the first places to experiment with this scheme was the small German town of Schwanenkirchen. In 1923, hyperinflation had caused a credit crunch of a different kind. A Dr Hebecker, owner of a coalmine in Schwanenkirchen, told his workers that if they wouldn’t accept the coal-backed stamp scrip he had invented – the Wara – he would have to close the mine. He promised to exchange it, in the first instance, for food. The scheme immediately took off. It saved both the mine and the town. It was soon adopted by 2,000 corporations across Germany.

Og penge er ultimativt blot et udtryk for de handlendes tillid til udstederen. Hvorfor holde fast i, at det skal være et statsmonopol? Det forekommer ikke logisk. Jeg er ikke økonom, men tanken om en økonomi suppleret med penge med begrænset levetid, som folk, organisationer og lokalområder virker som den rigtige måde at lade de ramte selv redde sig ud af finanskrisen – nedefra og op, ved selvforvaltning.

Link: If the state can’t save us, we need a licence to print our own money

Politivold: Peberspray mod pressefotograf

Kamal Qureshi er rystet over politiets optræden i forbindelse med en brutal anholdelse, hvor en af betjentene brugte sin peberspray ikke mod den, der skulle anholdes, men mod en fotograf, der forsøgte at dokumentere anholdelsen.

Til Modkraft.dk beskriver Qureshi episoden sådan her:

Kamal Qureshi var [13. januar] på vej til en middag på Christiansborg, da han pludselig får øje på nogle betjente i færd med at anholde en dansk-palæstinensisk mand, der havde deltaget i en netop afsluttet demonstration til fordel for den krigsramte befolkning i Gaza.

Begivenhederne får nogle pressefolk, bl.a. en kameramand fra mediebureauet Local Eyes, til at løbe til stedet for at filme anholdelsen.

– Den pågældende pressefotograf samt nogle andre fotografer kommer løbende hen til det sted, hvor politiet er i færd med at foretage anholdelsen. Da pressefotografen begynder at filme optrinnet, sprayer en betjent ham direkte i øjnene med peberspray, fortæller Kamal Qureshi, der er overbevist om, at politifolkene godt var klar over, at de brugte peberspray mod pressefolk på arbejde.

– Kameramanden bar et synligt pressekort og var udstyret med et stort, professionelt kamera. Politiet kunne ikke være i tvivl om, at der var tale om presse.

Anvendelse af peberspray er fuldt så meget vold som en knippel lige i synet. Er det virkelig i orden, at politiet bruger vold for at lukke munden på pressen? Men så ikke-i-orden det end er, er det ikke noget nyt.

Qureshi er rystet, men vi er mange, der kan fortælle , at der desværre ikke er meget nyt under solen: Den er helt gal med i hvert fald visse sektorer af politiet, og det har den været i årevis. Og det er heller ikke kun et spørgsmål om “brodne kar” – problemet er snarere systemisk.

Men nu har Kamal Qureshi altså også opdaget det. Det kan der måske komme noget godt ud af.

Link: Voldsom episode har rystet MF’ers tillid til politiet

Lynkursus i økonomiske teorier

Socialisme
Du har to køer. Du giver den ene til din nabo.

Kommunisme
Du har to køer. Staten tager dem begge og giver dig lidt mælk.

Fascisme
Du har to køer. Staten tager dem begge og sælger dig lidt mælk.

Nazisme
Du har to køer. Staten tager dem begge og skyder dig.

Surrealisme
Du har to giraffer. Staten opfordrer dig derfor til at lære at spille mundharpe.

Bureaukrati
Du har to køer. Staten tager dem begge, skyder en, malker den anden…og smider mælken ud.

Traditionel kapitalisme
Du har to køer. Du sælger den ene og køber en tyr. Din flok udvides og din økonomi vokser. Du sælger kvæget og lever resten af dine dage af overskuddet.

Moderne kapitalisme

Du har to køer. Du sælger den ene og presser den anden til at producere ligeså meget mælk som 4 køer. Senere hyrer du en dyr konsulent til at analysere, hvorfor koen faldt død om.

IT-Factory-kapitalisme
Du har to køer. Du sælger tre af dem til dit børsnoterede selskab, fordi en bankgaranti overbeviser investorer om, at du i virkeligheden har fire køer. Derfor trækker du fodret til fem køer fra i skat. Retten til at malke seks køer overføres via en bank i Polynesien, ejet af et skuffe selskab, som tilbage sælger retten til at malke syv køer til dit oprindelige selskab. Det revisorgodkendte årsregnskab fastslår, at virksomheden ejer otte køer med option på en mere. Du hævder, at du har en tyr, der får førstepræmie ved dyrskuet, hvorefter du sælger tyren og forsvinder.

En fransk virksomhed
Du har to køer. Du går i strejke og blokerer vejene, fordi du vil have tre køer.

En italiensk virksomhed
Du har to køer, men ved ikke hvor de er. Du beslutter dig for at holde frokost.

En russisk virksomhed
Du har to køer. Du tæller dem og når frem til, at du har fem køer. Du tæller dem igen og når frem til, at du har 42 køer. Du tæller dem igen og når frem til, at du har to køer. Du åbner en flaske vodka.

En kinesisk virksomhed
Du har to køer. Du har 300 ansatte til at malke dem. Du hævder at du har fuld beskæftigelse og høj produktivitet. Du lukker den avis der skriver det modsatte.

En australsk virksomhed
Du har to køer. Forretningen ser ud til at gå fint. Du lukker kontoret og fejrer det med et par fadbamser.

En japansk virksomhed
Du har to køer. Du redesigner dem, så de kun er en tiendedel størelse og producerer tyve gange så meget mælk. Du skaber derefter en mangafigur og forøger din indkomst ved at lancere den som børnelegetøj over hele verden under navnet Kokimon.

En irakisk virksomhed
Alle tror du har masser af køer. Du fortæller dem, at du ikke har nogen. Ingen tror dig, så de bomber dig sønder og sammen og invaderer dit land. Du har stadig ingen køer, men i det mindste bor du nu i et demokrati.

(Den her har jeg altså ikke selv skrevet, jeg fik den i en email).

Gaza: Hvem har ansvaret?

Et gennemgående argument fra folk, der forsvarer Israels ret til at invadere Gaza og gøre stort set bare, hvad der passer dem i den forbindelse (og med 1200 døde, heraf mere end 400 børn, har de ikke lagt mange bånd på sig selv), er, at det er nødvendigt for at knuse Hamas og i øvrigt er det Hamas, der har tvunget dem til at agere på den måde ved deres raketangreb, som kun viser, at Israel lige så godt kunne have ladet være med at ophæve besættelsen af Gaza for et par år siden.

Alle disse argumenter er falske – besættelsen af Gaza er aldrig ophørt, og de seneste ugers omfattende invasion har tydeligvis ikke været i stand til at standse hverken det ene eller det andet raketangreb. Få siger det bedre end den israelske journalist og kommentator Gideon Levy, her i et svar til forfatteren A. B. Yehoshua:

It is as if the mighty, including you, have succumbed to a great and terrible conflagration that has consumed any remnant of a moral backbone.

You, too, esteemed author, have fallen prey to the wretched wave that has inundated, stupefied, blinded and brainwashed us. You’re actually justifying the most brutal war Israel has ever fought and in so doing are complacent in the fraud that the “occupation of Gaza is over” and justifying mass killings by evoking the alibi that Hamas “deliberately mingles between its fighters and the civilian population.” You are judging a helpless people denied a government and army – which includes a fundamentalist movement using improper means to fight for a just cause, namely the end of the occupation – in the same way you judge a regional power, which considers itself humanitarian and democratic but which has shown itself to be a brutal and cruel conqueror. As an Israeli, I cannot admonish their leaders while our hands are covered in blood, nor do I want to judge Israel and the Palestinians the same way you have.

The residents of Gaza have never had ownership of “their own piece of land,” as you have claimed. We left Gaza because of our own interests and needs, and then we imprisoned them. We cut the territory off from the rest of the world and the occupied West Bank, and did not permit them to construct an air or sea port. We control their population registrar and their currency – and having their own military is out of the question – and then you argue that the occupation is over? We have crushed their livelihood, besieged them for two years, and you claim they “have expelled the Israeli occupation”? The occupation of Gaza has simply taken on a new form: a fence instead of settlements. The jailers stand guard on the outside instead of the inside.

And no, I do not know “very well,” as you wrote, that we don’t mean to kill children. When one employs tanks, artillery and planes in such a densely populated place one cannot avoid killing children. I understand that Israeli propaganda has cleared your conscience, but it has not cleared mine or that of most of the world. Outcomes, not intentions, are what count – and those have been horrendous.

Gideon Levy er en af de meget få israelske kommentatorer, der tør gå mod strømmen og vise sit eget lands politik frem for, hvad den er – et nådesløst, langsomt og brutalt folkemord.  Måske klarsynet skyldes, at han som journalist ligesom kollegaen Amira Hass netop har specialiseret sig i forholdene i de besatte områder. I hvert fald er han altid et oplysende bekendtskab – således også her.