Author and blogger As’ad AbuKhalil discusses the role of the US in supporting dictatorial regimes in the Middle East and North Africa both before and after the uprisings that swept the region in the spring of 2011. This presentation was part of the Building Solidarity with the Arab Spring Teach-In held on November 12, 2011 in Berkeley, CA.
Davutoglu said, “Syrian regime’s duty is not to accuse others but to listen and pay attention to its own people and meet its own responsibilities. The regime cannot survive by putting pressure on the people. Their not meeting the demands of the people increasingly shakes the confidence of the people. Syrian regime should understand that they cannot continue with status quo, the same system, one party regime, an order which pressurizes its own citizens.
Syrian regime should listen to its people instead of massacring them. As far as they do not stop massacring, they cannot get the support of the people by making epic speeches in every 3-4 months. They constantly make new promises and then postpone the reform dates they gave before.”
It is clear the Bush Administration was committed to bringing about regime change. Under President Barack Obama, it appears the US has not fully committed to the same of kind of destabilization efforts. The Obama Administration appears to have instead adopted a policy that is indicative of the sort of American exceptionalism rife within the Washington establishment.
Haneen Zoabi talks about the arrest, imprisonment, travel bans and the targeting of Palestinian parliamentarians, national political leaders and human rights defenders, the closing down of related organisations, and the current legislation being enacted to punish those who initiate or promote boycott measures for opposition to Israeli domination during the 3rd International Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town, November 2011.
Haneen Zoabi:
“I am supposed to be walking evidence of Israeli democracy … but we are the evidence that something is wrong with the Israeli system.”
“We are now described by Israel as a strategic threat. … In the Israeli official discourse from 2007, Yuval Diskin described us as a strategic threat.”
“What is the justification of Israel’s system of dominance? … it is the description of Israel as a Jewish state … the justification being that we, the Jews, deserve a Jewish state, even at the expense of Palestinian people. So this is what we should target, which stands behind Israeli apartheid discrimination, and we the citizens are a strategic threat because we reveal that, we reveal more than Palestinians in the Occupied Territories the contradiction behind the Jewish state and democracy.”
“At the same time as we are revealing the contradiction, Israel is asking all nations of the world to recognise it as a racist jewish state.”
“We need equality.”
Three crucial features distinguish South African and Israeli apartheid:
(1) “Israel has confiscated my land and has started to define me as the invader of the land. They call us in the Knesset, in the courts, in the media the invaders of the land … when they confiscate our land in the Galilee and the Negev, they said they are going to redeem the land, redeem, I don’t know this word, I ask about it – salvation from me, the indigenous people, there. It is not about stealing the land, it is about stealing my homeland, my relation with my homeland. They are trying to transmit, to rewrite history, they don’t like history, they don’t like to read history, what happened before 1948 and that means we were there, the Palestinian people … they like more to write history. And they say I am a risk, they must reserve the land. So the crime is not really just to steal my land, they are trying to redefine my relation with my homeland. It is not my homeland anymore. I cannot claim it. They rewrite history and I am the invader of the land.”
(2) Place names and street names are Judaeised – changing the landscape, “it is not stealing the land, but stealing the homeland… I am a non-jew living in a jewish state. So I have nothing to do, I have no integral rights. My citizenship is conditioned to my loyalty to zionism. You will not find this in Gaza and the West Bank.”
(3) Democracy to Israel is a strategic threat.
Around 43 laws, says Zoabi, legally discriminate against Palestinian Israelis, most of them are about citizenship, land and education.
“Through the goal of the education law, I cannot study my history.”
“The state acts not as a state, but as a political party… if I want to be accepted in the party, I must accept the ideology in order not to be persecuted.”
“There was no justification for the zionist project, there was no justification to have a jewish state in my homeland, but now there are Israeli generations who have not had any other homeland. We want to live with them, but not within a Jewish state, not within a racist state.”
Political zionism for its northern European progenitors was predicated on the antisemitic trope that Jews carried antisemitism with them and that a national project would address this. This form of zionism arose in the context of 19th century nationalism, antisemitism, social darwinism and german nationalism, based on similar Germanic mythologies of blut and boden and volkehood. Several sites were considered for the realisation of the zionist vision, Palestine had merit for past religious connections. The first WZO convention in 1897 affirmed one of the essential goals was ‘The promotion of the settlement of Jewish agriculturists, artisans, and tradesmen in Palestine.’ The treacherous Balfour declaration affirmed the formation of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Balfour exemplified imperial white supremacism in his statement:
‘And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, and future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. In my opinion that is right.’
As for the Nakba, which Israel now refuses to allow to be taught in schools so afraid are zionists of their own deeds and history, Walid Khalidi’s excellent work appends the content evidencing zionist malice aforethought – Plan Dalet and its precursor Plan Gimmel.
As Zoabi highlights above, Khalidi points to why zionists continually rewrite history:
‘The land that the zionists were looking for was one which they wanted to possess and unmistakably stamp with theirn own image. But what if this land was already possessed by others? The zionists had to face this dilemma from the very beginning. And we know that as early as Theodor Herzl they had decided that the answer was to be found in the theory of “the lesser evil”: in other words, that any hardship inficted on the indigenous population of the land chosen by them was outweighed by the solution that the zionist possession of the land offered to the jewish problem. The yardstick of the lesser evil (consciously or subconsciously applied) became the moral alibi of the zionist movement, dwarfing and finally submerging the anguish of its victims. ‘
Israeli forces detained nine Israeli activists blocking the path of bulldozers constructing Israel’s separation wall surrounding a Bethlehem village on Sunday.
The group sat infront of vehicles levelling ground to build the concrete wall that will entirely enclose the village of al-Walaja, popular committee member Shireen Al-Araj told Ma’an.
Aggression towards Iran has two purposes. First is Iran’s destruction. Iran carries out an independent foreign policy and has a functional welfare state. This is not to America’s liking. Second, the Iranian “threat” is a convenient bogeyman for the military-industrial complex, one reason that earnest efforts to counsel the White House to adopt a peaceful orientation to the IRI, as in the desperate realist push for reconciliation, won’t work under present circumstances: brinksmanship is too profitable for the arms firms, and they have a lot of money to make sure that brinksmanship is the preferred political tool for policymakers.
I caught up on a twitter fight that happened yesterday. Someone called out someone else for using ableist language. I follow both users and find that I generally agree with the politics of one and the work of the other. I thought we all were on the same page, but the Syrian revolution has exposed many arab leftists to be unable to criticise a regime that appears to be anti-israeli. I say appears because of course the Syrian regime has done nothing for its people in the occupied Golan heights. They’re happy to talk about and support resistance in other countries but not their own.
Now I’m not saying that the other account falls within that bracket, it’s just that their position is suspect. I don’t like accusing people of something without proof, and so far I only have circumstantial evidence. All I can say is that their criticism of the regime and support of the revolution has been conspicuously absent. But anyway, that’s not the point. The fight was about the use of ableist language. As that account used the term “lame” to refer to a stand up comedienne who they think has very suspect politics when it comes to Palestine. While I used to agree that she had problematic politics (that view has changed since I first published this post because I talked to her and she clarified her position. I was wrong and misinformed. She is a one state supporter and very vocal in her support for Palestine), the point was about the language used.
It’s very interesting to see that people are still very unaware of ableist privilege. The problem is that ableist language is so ubiquitous within our parlance. We don’t think twice about using certain terms that are derived from or mocking the physically and mentally disabled. To use the word “lame” to describe someone or someone’s comedy is very ableist. It is wrong to use it to describe someone who does not have a disability, but it’s even worse when you use it against someone with a disability. Even if you don’t mean to be ableist, using it is highly problematic. It perpetuates the idea that there is something wrong with certain forms of disability. It always comes from a place of privilege. Once that is pointed out one needs to realise and change their behaviour.
I must admit that I myself used, unthinkingly, a lot of ableist language. In fact, if you go back through my blog posts, you will probably come across a lot of ableist terms. I did not mean to use them to abuse or mock the disabled, but they still do. I have since realised that those terms are unacceptable and stopped using them. At the end of the day, all you can do is realise that you’ve done something wrong and try to fix it as best you can. No body is perfect, but it’s important to try not to hurt people because you unthinkingly use terms that abuse them and their being.
The problem is that people with disabilities suffer from real oppression, be it in accessibility or recognition, and that oppression is invisible. People without disability do not see the person with a disability but see the disability. When faced with someone in a wheelchair say, people don’t really see the person in the wheel chair but the wheelchair, they conflate the person with their disability. Moreover, the struggle of the disabled for recognition and accessibility is very often ignored by the media and its coverage is not as prominent as other forms of oppression.
We have been able to rid our language of much of the racist, sexist, classist, etc terms. However, ableist terms are still used wantonly without people realising. What happens when someone is challenged for using such language is that they become very defensive, and deny that they are doing anything wrong. Ideally, they would then think about it and realise that they were in fact in the wrong and stop using those terms. However, that doesn’t always happen, and cries of political correctness gone mad are uttered. The problem is that people aren’t always happy to acknowledge their privileged position.
All of us without disabilities are privileged, not in that we are better than people with disabilities, but we reap benefits within our society because of our lack of disability. It is imperative if we consider ourselves to be fighting for justice, that we take on the cause of the disabled as our own. We must recognise our privilege and work against it. This involves changing our language and not perpetuating the power relationship that they embody. Those terms normalise the idea that disabled people are not equal to people without disabilities. There is something absolutely wrong with that attitude and it must be fought with as much force as all other injustices.
The fight against oppression isn’t a simple one. We aren’t fighting against a group of people but against a system that created hegemonic power relations. Those power relations are actualised in real physical violence or lack of accessibility but are also mirrored in our language. If we want to fight oppression effectively we must dismantle all the forms of oppression including our use of terms that perpetuate and normalise that oppression. Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject. I’d like to hear what you have to say about it. It would be interesting to get your perspectives. Stay safe everyone. Live long and prosper.
A West Papuan activist in Australia claims his father and three other men have been illegally detained on trumped up charges in Papua New Guinea.
Ronny Kareni, who fled with his family from West Papua in 1984, says his father and the three men returned to the Indonesian territory to attend West Papuan independence celebrations in October.
Mr Kareni says they were initially detained by the Indonesian military before they fled back to PNG where they were targetted by corrupt police and customs officers.
In actions against TPN, 20,000 people in the Paniai area of West Papua have been left homeless after the army attacks.
They believe an Indonesian counter-terrorism unit Detachment 88 is involved in ongoing military operations in Paniai.
Quoting human rights defender Ferry Marisan, Media Alert says 30 people have died in the latest round of violence, including 17 this week.
”Only 10 of these victims were members of the TPN, according to Marisan.”
Children aged between two and four were among the dead.
The latest conflict area is in the area of the Derewo River Gold, a joint venture between an Indonesian company and Australian investors, Paniai Gold, a fully owned subsidiary of Melbourne based gold mining company West Wits Mining.
Indonesian security forces, including the U.S. and Australian supported Detachment 88, conducted “sweeping operations” in the Paniai area of West Papua that destroyed churches, homes and public buildings, and forced hundreds of civilians from their homes. The Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) urged the Police Commander to remove forces from the region, echoing civil society leaders in Paniai. Jakarta’s failure to provided basic health services to Papuans has led to a high rate of death among mothers at child birth according to a recent report. An unconfirmed report claims that President Yudhoyono has committed to withdraw non-organic troops from West Papua and to suspend the operations of a special unit proposed to address fundamental Jakarta-Papua problems. The cost in human life for Papuans of Jakarta’s decades of neglect of the Papuan population is well documented. Amnesty International met with a senior official in Jakarta to press for release of political prisoners, particularly in West Papua and Maluku. The three-month old strike by workers at the Freeport McMoRan mines appears to be headed toward resolution.
…
Inadequate Health Care Responsible for High Rate of Death of Mothers at Child Birth
The Jakarta Post reports that maternal deaths in West Papua remain high. Victor Nugraha, an official with the Papuan Health Agency, speaking to media in Manokwari, said that the rate of deaths in 2011 would be at least as high as in 2010. Real figures, he added, were difficult to ascertain because many cases of death during child birth are not recorded due to the shortage of medical personnel to maintain records.
According to the official the main causes of maternal death were hemorrhage, post-pregnancy infections, and hypertension. Anemia due to iron deficiency can lead to hemorrhaging. Beside low iron levels due to poor nutrition, anemia can also be caused by malaria, which is common in West Papua. The official also explained that late pregnancy checks and poor surgery facilities for caesarean sections in clinics also contribute to maternal deaths.
This report echoes a far more detailed study conducted in the Kebar Valley of West Papua in 2008 (see Health care in the Bird’s Head Peninsula. Its conclusions are stark:
Out of 708 pregnancies 4.7% led to miscarriage and 1.4% of the children were born dead.
Out of 665 child births, where the baby was born alive, 213 baby’s and children eventually died. This is an infant mortality rate of 32.0%. This means that almost 1 out of 3 children dies before its fifth birthday.
57.3% of the died children (213) were younger than 1 year old. 27.7% is between the age of 1 to 5 when it dies.
Most baby’s and toddlers (32.9%) died of fever or malaria. Fever in combination with coughing (probably pneumonia) causes a mortality rate of 13.9%.
Diarrhea, icterus, prematures and pulmonary affections like tuberculosis, pneumonia and bronchitis also occur, but in smaller numbers.
In 12.7% of the dead infants the cause of death was unknown, according to the mother.
94.4% of the pregnant women give birth at home, whether or not with the presence of a traditional midwife .
14 children were born twins; 3 are still alive.
Jazi Abu Kaf talks about the crime of persecution in regards to Israel’s actions towards the Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 3rd International Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town, November 2011.
