Fury as MPs compare Palestinians' treatment to Nazi ghettos
By Marie Woolf Chief Political Correspondent, The Independent
20 June 2003
Two MPS caused outrage yesterday by comparing the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to the Nazi segregation of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Oona King, Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, and Jenny Tonge, Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park, who visited Gaza last week with the charity Christian Aid, said the situation was getting worse as the area in which the Palestinians live gets smaller.

Ms King, whose mother is Jewish, said: "No government should be behaving like that - least of all a Jewish government. It's the same in nature but not extent. Palestinians are not being rounded up and put in gas chambers.

"What makes it similar is what happened to the Jewish people in that time, which was the seizing of land, being forced from property, torture and bureaucracy - control used in a demeaning way over the smallest task. On top of that, building a wall around them, and that is precisely what the Israeli government is doing."

Ms Tonge said: "You are almost getting a situation like the Warsaw ghetto - people can't get in or out. They can't work, they can't sell anything. There is this gradual squeeze."

But Lord Janner, the Labour peer and Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress, said it was wrong to draw comparisons with the Nazi era. "Comparisons with the Warsaw ghetto is horrendously inappropriate and shows a sad lack of historical perspective," he said.

Yuri Dromi, of the Israel Democracy Institute, said: "Comparing someone in Gaza to the ghetto is really appalling. I think it is outrageous. The Warsaw ghetto was created to suffocate the Jews and to execute them."

The MPs' comments came as Tony Blair held talks in London with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli finance minister, about the peace process and the state of Israel's economy.

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Steven E. Miller: 'The new right wing agenda'
Date: Saturday, June 14 @ 09:36:46 EDT

By Steven E. Miller, Common Dreams

What is going on in Washington? What is the larger agenda behind the amazingly aggressive right wing moves coming from the White House? According to the people I've been talking to and the articles I've been reading, the right wing agenda has three main points, each of which has precedents in earlier Republican and Democratic Administrations but which have been pushed to a qualitatively new level by the W clique:

1) Fundamentally change the role of government. In the Nation a couple weeks ago, this was described as going back to President McKinley. In other words, stripping government of all social welfare functions and all economic regulatory activity. Instead, government would revert to the sole role of protecting property and sovereignty through the use of its police/military power. This change will be accomplished in all three branches. The judiciary will be stacked, the legislature will pass the appropriate laws, and the executive will become more centralized and autocratic. The transformation of our budget surplus to endless deficits is part of this strategy - instead of having to argue against specific social programs the right-wingers can now simply say that they're being realistic and dealing honestly with the real lack of funds.



Pushing the fiscal crisis down to state and local levels (whose governments are often constitutionally prevented from running deficits) further spreads the transformation and diffuses opponents' ability to fight back. Those functions that simply cannot be eliminated will be privatized as much as possible. The end result is an authoritarian state whose main function is repression of all institutionalized (and individual) avenues of resistance, perhaps even of dissent, particularly the labor movement.

2) Fundamentally shifting the burden of taxation from capital (including profits and all forms of "unearned" income) to consumption. The eventual goal is to eliminate all capital gains, inheritance, and corporate taxes, as well as the entire income tax. Before that, it means finding ways to exempt as much as possible - starting with those aspects that primarily hit the "investing classes" (i.e. - the rich). Radical and repeated tax cuts help create deficits (re-enforcing the first strategic goal). They also make taxation increasingly regressive, putting ever-larger burdens on working families and the poor. Since this is happening at the same time that services provided by government to those groups are being reduced, it reinforces the traditional anti-tax feeling among the general population - making it easier to push for still more tax cuts and reinforcing the general anti-government feeling that has always been part of American culture.

3) Fundamentally change the nature of international relations from a "trilateral" world in which multinational elites collaborated on creating an investment-friendly world into a US-dominated "new world order" in which narrow nationalist goals are achieved through unilateral and pre-emptive use of the US's military power and everyone else is forced to accommodate Washington's ability to "create facts on the ground." This involves the radical transformation or withering away of many existing multinational organizations and arrangements and the permanent escalation of US military spending (which helps support the other two strategic goals). It plays to the US's currently dominating military strength while papering over our economic and other weaknesses. It also serves a domestic purpose of evoking knee-jerk nationalism and concern for the soldiers, which distracts attention other issues and makes it very hard to mount an oppositional movement. Acting like a bully also helps create the type of world that justifies the behavior. In the Middle East, Hamas and Sharon need each other to legitimize their own violence as the only viable response to the extremism of the other side. Similarly, by acting in ways that assume the world is full of terrorists, that allies are untrustworthy, that security comes from hitting everyone else before they can hit you, the new imperialists help create the very conditions they claim to be responding to, which then makes it necessary to act even more aggressively.

The most important implication of all this is that large segments of the domestic and world population are no longer seen as worth worrying about. On one level, this is just racism and classism. But there's more than that going on. In the past, capitalism was optimistic and assumed that it would keep expanding, which provided the basis for a "corporate liberalism" that saw everyone in the world as a potential consumer and/or laborer - and therefore having some potential worth. But the new reactionaries see the future as much more of a zero-sum game. Partly, this is an expression of their incredible greed and corruption - their incessant efforts to rip off wealth for themselves and their narrow sets of cronies. In any case, the result is that most of Africa, large swaths of Latin America and Asia, and significant parts of the domestic US population have been simply written off -individuals who may arise from the trodden mass are welcome as junior partners, but there is no concern at all for the general well being of these sectors beyond token PR and the limited need to keep local elites from causing too much anti-American trouble on the world stage.

The amazing thing is that the right wing fundamentalists have been able to seize power and win a large amount of support - or at least acquiescence -- among the US electorate. The people I talk with point to a number of contextual reasons. First, this country lacks any significant institutionalized alternative. The Democratic Party is both complicit and fratricidal. The labor movement is the only really powerful potential organized opposition, but they are ideologically scattered, organizationally weak, and under unremitting attack. In addition, the powerful role of money in shaping our electoral outcomes is another key ingredient in the right wings success, as well as in keeping liberal (much less radical) alternatives from gaining influence in the Democratic Party. The increasing dominance of US media by an incredibly small number of incredibly right wing corporations has a powerful impact. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the lack of any significant "third way," and the resulting feeling that there is "no viable alternative" has been a very important context for the right wings' ability to present themselves as inevitable and unstoppable. Finally, the current climate of insecurity, fear, and even paranoia - which the government and media are successfully doing their utmost to deepen and expand - plays an important role in making it hard to opposition to find political space.

Using all these institutional-cultural supports, the reactionary clique has built a broad and powerful coalition. They've become a "big tent" for anti-abortionists (pulling in the Catholic right wing), anti-feminists (attracting not only status-concerned men but women who feel threatened by the loss of the "security and respect" given to traditional female roles), homophobes, anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action groups (drawing on the racist undercurrents that always rise during periods of uncertainty, unrest, and change), gun advocates (pulling in huge numbers of rural and western voters), property-rights advocates (dipping into the traditional distrust of government bureaucracy), business advocates (offering a path forward to businesses increasingly pressed by foreign competition during an economic downturn), and more. And they've found ways to give everyone of these constituent groups immediate monetary, policy, and cultural-symbolic payoffs - further tightening their bonds to the government clique.

Most important, by wrapping themselves in the mantle of religion, the GOP leadership has made themselves a vehicle for the growing religious fundamentalist upsurge - parts of which can accurately be described as a fascist movement. Having god on your side means you are always right, no matter what other people may think or how events may fall out. You simply never have to say you are sorry, and all your failures are the result of evil forces beyond your control. Being on a Crusade, having an absolutist and deeply ideological sense of mission, also underpins the right wing's willingness to use all the power at their command - legal and extra-legal - to push for a maximal agenda. No matter how thin their electoral margin of victory, once in office, they act without hesitation or compromise. They understand that success creates its own legitimacy and its own tailwind, pulling others along with it.

The scariest part is that the right wing lunatics feel that they'll get away with it. Who remembers Afghanistan, or the absence of Iraqi's supposed weapons of mass destruction? Who seems to care that our economy is collapsing? In the short term, Bush and company win not because of smarter strategies or brilliant tactics, but because they have access to overwhelming resources and power and they can simply outlast everyone and everything else. In fact, they are so incompetent and so blind to the complexities of the real world that they will make huge mistakes. So it is possible (but not inevitable) that the world situation will spin out of control and the small clique now running the country will have to pass the baton to others in 2004 or 2008. But we should not underestimate their willingness to keep imposing their will through direct (or indirect) force -- the racism, lies, manipulation, and violence used to secure the 2000 election are likely to be repeated or exceeded in coming years.

In any case, while I believe that whoever replaces Bush - either in the next election or in the one afterwards, either Republican or Democrat - will moderate W's most extreme and obviously counterproductive actions, they are very unlikely to want or be able to reverse all the fundamental changes that he (as the culmination of a process that started with Ronald Reagan, or perhaps even earlier with Scoop Jackson) has so successfully pushed forward. Even if they wanted to go back to the pre-Bush status quo - which wasn't so wonderful anyway - in politics, as in life, you can never go back. They will have to make their way forward using the "new world order" as their starting point. Already, European leaders who opposed the US invasion of Iraq are making their peace with the reality that the US went ahead anyway and with the overall agenda of which it is merely one expression.

We're in for a long fight. We can't pretend that merely exposing the power elite's wrong doings or failures will cause their downfall. To survive, we need to find issues and movements that can provide some safe space, that uphold a different world view while not denying the new reality in which we live, that can win some concrete and meaningful small victories (which will require some new strategies) while projecting a vision of a more significant change. I think we'll be dealing with defensive steps for a while to come. But if we're lucky, we can keep a bit of the progressive spirit alive as kindling for the next wave of upsurge. And the bigger the oppositional movement we build the more likely we are to see significant changes. You never know...sometimes things change much quicker than we anticipate.

Steven E. Miller (miller48@attbi.com) was the former Board Chair of Grassroots International, a progressive international development and solidarity organization. He was also on the national board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). A former community organizer, teacher, and journalist, he currently leads a small non-profit that helps schools integrate technology into the curriculum.

(c) Copyrighted 1997-2003 Common Dreams

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Sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, have confirmed Israel has turned on President Bush and will do everything in her power to keep him out of the White House after completing his current term. Early removal is highly unlikely but not something to be ruled out.

Hints of Israeli lobbies in America not being fully supportive of Bush arose when an internal AIPAC memo was leaked, giving specific instructions to AIPAC personnel not to publicly support Bush or endorse his policies.

Rumors have surfaced of a deal that was made in which Israeli intelligence agents, who were operating in Iraq at the time, would assist the U.S. in locating Saddam's alleged WMD's and possibly plant them to bolster President Bush's presidency and justification for war. Backing out of their promise will prove destructive to Bush's chances for another term in the White House.

What drove the nail in the coffin for Bush was his support for the newest "road map" which seeks to establish a Palestinian state in 2005. In comments to Arab leaders, which he believed were not being recorded but were in fact caught on tape, he stated he would see to it that Israel followed through with their promises and did everything they could to dismantle settlements and calm IDF violence in the occupied territories.

The latest media assault on Bush is the culmination of frustration Israeli lobbies have had with the President, who may attempt to block some future plans the state may have in strengthening itself, against terrorism or for other reasons.

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Retired intelligence official says White House distorted evidence for war
Date: Saturday, June 07 @ 08:22:42 EDT

By John J. Lumpkin, Associated Press

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war.

'What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say,' said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. 'The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field.'

Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His office was privy to classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.

In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists.

Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said.



The administration's prewar portrayal of Iraq's weapons capabilities has not been validated despite weeks of searching by military experts. Alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have not turned up, nor has significant evidence of a nuclear weapons program or links to the al-Qaida network.

Bush has said administration assertions on Iraq will be verified in time. The CIA and other agencies have vigorously defended their prewar performances.

CIA Director George Tenet, responding to similar criticism last week, said in a statement: 'The integrity of our process was maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong.' On Friday, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency acknowledged he had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed Iraq had a program in place to produce them.

Also Friday, Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was not prepared to place blame for any intelligence shortcomings until all information is in.

'There are always times when a single sentence or a single report evokes a lot of concern and some doubt,' Warner told reporters after a closed hearing of his committee. 'But thus far, in my own personal assessment of this situation, the intelligence community has diligently and forthrightly and with integrity produced intelligence and submitted it to this administration and to the Congress of the United States.'

Thielmann suggested mistakes may have been made at points all along the chain from when intelligence is gathered, analyzed, presented to the president and then provided to the public.

The evidence of a renewed nuclear program in Iraq was far more limited than the administration contended, he said.

'When the administration did talk about specific evidence "

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More Than 13,000 May Face Deportation
By RACHEL L. SWARNS (NY Times)

WASHINGTON, June 6 — More than 13,000 of the Arab and Muslim men who came forward earlier this year to register with immigration authorities — roughly 16 percent of the total — may now face deportation, government officials say.

Only a handful have been linked to terrorism. But of the 82,000 men older than 16 who registered, more than 13,000 have been found to be living in this country illegally, officials say.

Many had hoped to win leniency by demonstrating their willingness to cooperate with the campaign against terror. The men were not promised special treatment, however, and officials believe that most will be expelled in what is likely to be the largest wave of deportations after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The government has initiated deportation proceedings, and in immigrant communities across the country, an exodus has already begun.

Quietly, the fabric of neighborhoods is thinning. Families are packing up; some are splitting up. Rather than come forward and risk deportation, an unknowable number of immigrants have burrowed deeper underground. Others have simply left — for Canada or for their homeland.

The deportations are a striking example of how the Bush administration increasingly uses the nation's immigration system as a weapon in the battle against terror.

For decades, illegal immigrants have often flourished because officials lacked the staff, resources and political will to deport them. But since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the government has been detaining and deporting illegal immigrants from countries considered breeding grounds for terrorists.

"There's been a major shift in our priorities," said Jim Chaparro, acting director for interior enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security, which has subsumed the old immigration service.

"We need to focus our enforcement efforts on the biggest threats," Mr. Chaparro added. "If a loophole can be exploited by an immigrant, it can also be exploited by a terrorist."

Advocates for immigrants warn that such a strategy — indeed, the administration's sweeping reorientation of law enforcement toward terrorism prevention — can be abused by government officials.

They note that, though it did not deal directly with the registration program, an internal Justice Department report was released this week that was deeply critical of the government's roundup of illegal immigrants after Sept. 11, 2001. Senior officials were found to have repeatedly ignored calls from immigration officials to quickly distinguish between the innocent and guilty. As a result, many people who had no ties to terrorism were jailed unnecessarily, the report said.

Advocates for immigrants have also accused officials of practicing selective enforcement by focusing on illegal immigrants from Arab and Muslim nations. Rather than disrupting communities, they say, the government should improve its intelligence and prosecution of terrorists.

"What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the immigrants' rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way."

Some of those facing deportation have waited months or years for officials to process applications to legalize their status. Immigration lawyers say they believe that a substantial number of these men avoid deportation. Their clients are only illegal, the lawyers say, because of the government's inefficiency.

Even before the registration program began early this year, the government had deported hundreds of illegal immigrants in its effort to prevent, and not simply respond to, terrorist attacks. But the scope of those deportations remains unclear.

Officials say more than 600 Arab and Muslim illegal immigrants were deported during the first wave of expulsions after Sept. 11. But the Justice Department stopped releasing figures after the number of arrested immigrants surged to 1,200, and officials have declined to give complete statistics for that period.

Another wave of deportations began last year after officials said they planned to find and arrest illegal immigrants who pose security threats and already have deportation orders. Of that group, more than 3,000 people have been arrested. Officials say they cannot say how many of those Arab and Muslim men have been deported.

But it is the special registration program — which required noncitizens from 25 Arab and Muslim countries to register from December through April — that seems likely to produce the largest number of expulsions. In the last two months, officials have released a succession of tallies of immigrants facing deportation; the 13,000 figure represents the most up-to-date estimate.

Officials acknowledged that most Arab and Muslim immigrants swept up in counterterrorism sweeps have no ties to terrorist groups. Of the 82,000 men who showed up at immigration offices, and tens of thousands more screened at airports and border crossings in the past six months, 11 have had links to terrorism.

Still, officials said, they can no longer ignore illegal immigrants from countries that pose a security risk. They noted that several Sept. 11 hijackers were in the country illegally at the time of the attacks.

In all, deportations of illegal immigrants from Asian and African countries have surged by nearly 27 percent in the last two years. The number of Pakistani, Jordanians, Lebanese and Moroccans deported during that time has doubled, the statistics show; the number of Egyptians deported has nearly tripled.

In the immigrant communities, the impact multiplies.

The Pakistani Embassy in Washington said that since Sept. 11, more than 15,000 Pakistanis in this country illegally are believed to have left for Canada, Europe and Pakistan.

Three weeks ago, in Stanton, Calif., Yasser Tair, a Syrian real estate agent, was deported to the country he left 14 years ago. Mr. Tair's wife, Zhour, and his two American-born children are also moving.

Their dining room table is already gone. So are the rugs, the children's beds, the computer. "I am selling everything," Zhour Tair said. "I cannot make it here anymore."

In Brooklyn, hundreds of illegal immigrants have sought help from the Arab-American Family Support Center. About 500 of the center's clients who registered are now fighting deportation in court.

Johanna Habib, the center's only staff lawyer, writes their names and court dates on an increasingly crowded wall calendar. Some of the men have American-born children or wives who are citizens or green-card holders. Many have applications to legalize their immigration status that have been pending for years.

"We have a handful that are going to be O.K." Ms. Habib said. "But it's a very small handful."

Abdel Hakim Benbader, a cabdriver from Algeria at the center, said he registered even though he was living here illegally, because he wanted to help. He said he thought his future was in the United States. His wife has a green card and his son is an American citizen.

"We were thinking of buying a house," said Mr. Benbader, who is fighting deportation. "We were thinking of having good jobs like everybody. If I'm leaving, it's going to be a big problem."

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"The story of Nazeeh"
Printed on Friday, May 30, 2003 @ 16:30:48 CDT ( )

By Oren Medicks
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (Israel)

(YellowTimes.org) -- Perhaps you need to be an Israeli in order to fully appreciate the improbability of the following situation: A group of Israelis, Palestinians and international peace activists living together in an olive grove deep inside Palestinian territory. Palestinians and Israelis search together for firewood at night, preparing information boards during the day, or washing dishes -- pouring a very careful trickle from a battered, old coke bottle because running water is unavailable. They sit quietly next to each other on the short guarding shifts -- fearing, not each other -- but a possible raid by the Israeli army.

Any Israeli who could imagine such a situation would shudder with a reflex vision of some murderous scenario. Being in the middle of "Intifadah-land" in the middle of the night? Surrounded by Palestinians with no soldier in sight to protect you? Even the most diligent researcher could not come up with a handful of Israelis who would be willing to put their lives in such jeopardy. Two months ago, even those who were on that hill could not fully believe they were actually there.

As often happens, the camp started as something quite different. Three months ago, Nazeeh, a farmer from the Palestinian village of Mas’ha, received a confiscation order issued by the Israeli authorities. According to the order, 95 percent of his land was to be confiscated in order to build the separation fence. The separation fence is marketed to the Israeli public as a reasonable security measure meant to separate Palestinians from Israelis; in reality, the only separation it offers is between Palestinians and their land.

As it is, Mas’ha, like all other Palestinian villages, is already separated from normal life by mounds of earth and rock that prevent any vehicle from entering or leaving the village. The ways in which Palestinians manage to survive under these inhuman conditions are worthy of many separate stories. A father of seven, Nazeeh realized immediately that losing his land will mean a death sentence for him and his family. With no land, no way to leave the village, or make a living in it, how could he feed his family?

As people who live in free states, living where we choose, moving freely from place to place, it is incredibly difficult to imagine the terrible feeling of impotence, frustration and loss, of being absolutely powerless in the face of a force who can play with your life at will, who actually wants you gone. With these heavy feelings and thoughts, Nazeeh looked at his poor options: The legal way was there, but he knew very well what little chance there was for a Palestinian appealing for Israeli justice. Besides, who could afford the attempt?

A demonstration? What’s the point? It would be scattered immediately by volleys of rubber bullets in the best case -- live ammunition in the worst -- and all those who participated would pay dearly. Appeal to media attention? No one is interested in the story of another miserable Palestinian. Nazeeh, a man who is used to working 16 hours a day, whose feet are as hard as wood from walking barefoot in his olive grove since the age of 5, could not contain his sorrow, frustration and anger.

He set out for his grove, to be with his olive trees for as long as he could. He told his wife: “Don’t wait for me. I have days, perhaps weeks, 'till the bulldozers erase my olive trees. I want to spend this time in the grove.” He took some water, a small bag of coffee and sugar, and two boxes of cheap, homemade cigarettes, and left for the grove.

Gradually, the story of Nazeeh started going around in the village, and then seeped out, through the roadblocks, to international peace activists in a nearby village -- and from there to Israeli peace activists.

Slowly at first, people started coming, at first just to visit, and then to stay. Within a few days, a little tent was erected in the grove. Very soon, the tent turned to a protest tent against the occupation. People created information boards with photos and maps. Media representatives started coming. Nazeeh’s tent became a story.

Until now, two months later, Nazeeh has not left the grove for more than a few hours. Some 500 Israelis and international peace activists have spent time there for a night or more -- nights that will no doubt change their views forever.

[Oren Medicks works with Gush Shalom, an organization part of the Israeli peace movement.]

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