The Logic of Withdrawal: An Interview with Anthony Arnove

Jeff Severns Guntzel, Electronic Iraq, 3 July 2006

In Anthony Arnove's new book, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, he argues for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S.-led occupying forces from Iraq, a divisive issue even among those who were unified in their opposition to the invasion of Iraq. In an interview with eIraq, Arnove discusses his withdrawal scenario and the challenge of reversing U.S. policy in Iraq and the world.

Read an excerpt from the book here.

EI: Your book borrows its title from Howard Zinn's 1967 book "Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal." You also borrow that book's author, with Zinn providing a foreword and afterword.

AA: My book was inspired by Zinn's. I was struck by the parallels between the arguments that Zinn was making in 1967 and the arguments I felt needed to be made within the antiwar movement today. I was struck by the number of people I encountered who had opposed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but had come to feel that now that the United States had occupied the country it couldn't leave, that somehow an occupation that flowed directly from the invasion they had opposed could bring about a democratic future in Iraq--that it could lead to the rebuilding of that country or prevent a civil war from breaking out.

I went back and reread Howard's book and was really moved by the power of his argument: the only sensible solution to the unjust invasion in Vietnam was to call for immediate and unconditional withdrawal. He was countering arguments among liberals in the late 1960s that are similar to the ones we are hearing today. Many liberals felt "out now" wasn't a reasonable demand, that the antiwar movement had to be pushing for some different form of intervention or a phased withdrawal.

Why Did Israel Blow Up Gaza's Power Station?

Bad Faith and the Destruction of Palestine

By JONATHAN COOK

Nazareth.

A mistake too often made by those examining Israel's behaviour in the occupied territories -- or when analysing its treatment of Arabs in general, or interpreting its view of Iran -- is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap.

Such a reluctance to attribute bad faith was demonstrated this week by Israel's foremost human rights group, B'Tselem, when it published a report into the bombing by the Israeli air force of Gaza's power plant in late June. The horrifying consequences of this act of collective punishment -- a war crime, as B'Tselem rightly notes -- are clearly laid out in the report.

The group warns that electricity is available to most of Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants for a few hours a day, and running water for a similar period. The sewerage system has all but collapsed, with the resulting risk of the spread of dangerous infectious disease.

In their daily lives, Gazans can no longer rely on the basic features of modern existence. Their fridges are as good as useless, threatening outbreaks of food poisoning. The elderly and infirm living in apartments can no longer leave their homes because elevators don't work, or are unpredictable. Hospitals and doctors' clinics struggle to offer essential medical services. Small businesses, most of which rely on the power and water supplies, from food shops and laundry services to factories and workshops, are being forced to close.

Rapidly approaching, says B'Tselem, is the moment when Gaza's economy -- already under an internationally backed siege to penalise the Palestinians for democratically electing a Hamas government -- will simply expire under the strain.

Unfortunately, however, B'Tselem loses the plot when it comes to explaining why Israel would choose to inflict such terrible punishment on the people of Gaza. Apparently, it was out of a thirst for revenge: the group's report is even entitled "Act of Vengeance". Israel, it seems, wanted revenge for the capture a few days earlier of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, from a border tank position used to fire artillery into Gaza.

The problem with the "revenge" theory is that, however much a rebuke it is, it presupposes a degree of good faith on the part of the vengeance-seeker. You steal my toy in the playground, and I lash out and hit you. I have acted badly -- even disproportionately to use a vogue word B'Tselem also adopts -- but no one would deny that my emotions were honest. There was no subterfuge or deception in my anger. I incur blame only because I failed to control my impulses. There is even the implication that, though my action was unwarranted, my fury was justified.

But why should we think Israel is acting in good faith, even if in bad temper, in destroying Gaza's power station? Why should we assume it was a hot-headed over-reaction rather than a coldly calculated deed?

EARTH'S TEMPERATURE IS DANGEROUSLY HIGH, NASA SCIENTISTS WARN
Hilary Osborne

Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday September 26, 2006

Earth's temperature could be reaching its highest level in a million
years, American scientists said yesterday.

Researchers at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said a
further one degree celsius rise in the global temperature could be
critical to the planet, and there was already a threat of extreme
weather resulting from El Niño..

The scientists said that in the 30 years to the end of 2005,
temperatures increased at the rate of 0.2 degrees per decade, a rate
they described as "remarkably rapid".

Comparison of the current global temperature with estimates of
historical temperatures - based on a study of ocean sediment - showed
the current temperature was now within 1C of the maximum temperature
of the past million years.

Dr James Hansen, who led the study, said further global warming of
just 1C could lead to big changes to the planet.

"If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be
relatively manageable," he said.

A really nice text that actually engages with Said's legacy - rg

Published in New Left Review
TARIQ ALI -- REMEMBERING EDWARD SAID

1935–2003
Edward Said was a longstanding friend and comrade. We first met in 1972, at a seminar in New York. Even in those turbulent times, one of the features that distinguished him from the rest of us was his immaculate dress sense: everything was meticulously chosen, down to the socks. It is almost impossible to visualize him any other way. At a conference in his honour in Beirut in 1997, Edward insisted on accompanying Elias Khoury and myself for a swim. As he walked out in his swimming trunks, I asked why the towel did not match. ‘When in Rome’, he replied, airily; but that evening, as he read an extract from the Arabic manuscript of his memoir Out of Place, his attire was faultless. It remained so till the end, throughout his long battle with leukaemia.

Over the last eleven years one had become so used to his illness—the regular hospital stays, the willingness to undergo trials with the latest drugs, the refusal to accept defeat—that one began to think him indestructible. Last year, purely by chance, I met Said’s doctor in New York. In response to my questions, he replied that there was no medical explanation for Edward’s survival. It was his indomitable spirit as a fighter, his will to live, that had preserved him for so long. Said travelled everywhere. He spoke, as always, of Palestine, but also of the unifying capacities of the three cultures, which he would insist had a great deal in common. The monster was devouring his insides but those who came to hear him could not see the process, and we who knew preferred to forget. When the cursed cancer finally took him the shock was intense.

His quarrel with the political and cultural establishments of the West and the official Arab world is the most important feature of Said’s biography. It was the Six Day War of 1967 that changed his life—prior to that event, he had not been politically engaged. His father, a Palestinian Christian, had emigrated to the United States in 1911, at the age of sixteen, to avoid being drafted by the Ottomans to fight in Bulgaria. He became an American citizen and served, instead, with the us military in France during the First World War. Subsequently he returned to Jerusalem, where Edward was born in 1935. Said never pretended to be a poverty-stricken Palestinian refugee as some detractors later alleged. The family moved to Cairo, where Wadie Said set up a successful stationery business and Edward was sent to an elite English-language school. His teenage years were lonely, dominated by a Victorian father, in whose eyes the boy required permanent disciplining, and an after-school existence devoid of friends. Novels became a substitute—Defoe, Scott, Kipling, Dickens, Mann. He had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales but, despite his father’s monarchism, was despatched for his education not to Britain but to the United States, in 1951. Said would later write of hating his ‘puritanical and hypocritical’ New England boarding school: it was ‘shattering and disorienting’. Until then, he thought he knew exactly who he was, ‘moral and physical flaws’ and all. In the United States he had to remake himself ‘into something the system required’.

New Left Review 40, July-August 2006

How a militarized alliance of state-subsidized software firms, real-estate developers and captive Orthodox labour is forging the path of the Separation Wall in the Occupied Territories. Call for a cyber community boycott to support Palestinian farmers and Israeli oppositionists in their fight against it.

GADI ALGAZI

OFFSHORE ZIONISM

Faced with competition from low-paid computer programmers in India and elsewhere, many Western software companies have opted to ‘offshore’ their testing and development operations to the Subcontinent or East Asia. In Israel, however, the largest it company, Matrix, has come up with a novel solution: introducing, as the Matrix website describes it, ‘the first Zionist local offshore outsourcing’, using low-paid ultra-orthodox women workers in state-subsidized settlements in the Occupied Territories. Matrix has opened a new development centre, named Talpiot—after the idf’s elite combat unit—in the West Bank settlement of Modi‘in Illit. As Matrix ceo Mordechai Gutman explains, outsourcing to East Asia is not all perfect:

Long distances, cultural and language differences, different time zones, as well as rising wages and high turnaround rates, all combine to reduce the attractiveness of development in these countries. To tackle the problem, Matrix has set up a development centre in Israel, employing a highly qualified workforce at competitive rates . . . [At Talpiot], religious women gain employment in development centres close to their home, in a homogeneous environment that provides for their specific needs . . . Because the religious population competing for the jobs faces relatively low living costs, Matrix is able to provide its local offshore outsourcing services to customers at prices similar to those in Far East countries, but with the advantages of . . . geographic and cultural proximity. [1]

Glossed over in this ‘proximity’ is the fact that Matrix’s ‘offshore outsourcing’ operation in Modi‘in Illit takes place in the Occupied Territories, and that the ‘low cost of living’ is due to the substantial subsidies advanced by the state for the development of Israel’s colonial frontier.

Three miles east of the Green Line, Modi‘in Illit was founded in 1996. It is situated some 20 miles east of Tel Aviv and 8 miles west of Ramallah, on what were then the orchards, fields and pastures of five Palestinian villages: Ni‘lin, Kharbata, Saffa, Bil‘in and Dir Qadis. Modi‘in Illit is among the fastest-growing settlements in the West Bank today, soon to be granted the status of a city, and with a population of over 30,000; the Housing Ministry projects 150,000 residents by the year 2020. Along with the huge ring of Israeli-only housing around Greater Jerusalem, the eastward sprawling conurbation of Ma’ale Adumim, and other rapidly expanding settler towns such as Ariel, Karnei Shomron, Betar Illit and others in the cluster of settlements at Gush Etzion, it is part of a rash of new building that has transformed the West Bank landscape over the past ten years.

to continue reading with maps:

http://www.newleftreview.net/?page=article&view=2624

Autonomous Politics and its Problems
Thinking the Passage from Social to Political

by Ezequiel Adamovsky; May 09, 2006
Part One: Two Hypotheses on a
New Strategy for an Autonomous Politics

My aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in. Even if I will not have the space to analyze concrete cases, these reflections are not a purely "theoretical" endeavor, but spring from the observation of a series of movements I had the chance to be part of -the movement of neighbor's assemblies in Argentina, some processes of the World Social Forum, and other global networks- or that I followed closely in the past years -the piquetero (unemployed) movement also in Argentina, and the Zapatistas in Mexico.

From the viewpoint of strategy, the current emancipatory movements can be said to be in two opposite situations (somewhat schematically). The first one is that in which they manage to mobilize a great deal of social energy in favor of a political project, but they do that in a way that make them fall in the traps of "heteronomous politics". By "heteronomous" I refer to the political mechanisms by means of which all that social energy ends up being channeled in a way that benefits the interests of the ruling class or, at least, minimize the radical potential of that popular mobilization. This is, for example, the fate of Brazil's PT under Lula, and also of some social movements (for example certain sections of the feminist movement) that turned into single-issue lobby organizations with no connection to any broader radical movement.

The second situation is that of those movements and collectives that reject any contact with the state and with heteronomous politics in general (parties, lobbies, elections, etc.) only to find themselves reduced to small identity-groups with little chances to have a real impact in terms of radical change. This is the case, for example, of some of the unemployed movements in Argentina, but also of many anti-capitalist small collectives throughout the world. The cost of their political "purity" is the inability to connect with larger sections of society.

To be sure, this is just a schematic picture: there are many experiments here and there of new strategic paths that may escape those two dead-end situations (the most visible example being that of the Zapatistas and their "Sixth Declaration"). The reflections I present here are aimed at contributing to those explorations.

Hypothesis one: On the difficulty of the Left when it comes to thinking power (or, what truth can be discerned in people's support for the Right).

Let us face this awkward question: Why is it that, being the Left a better option for humankind, we almost never succeed in getting support of the people? Moreover, Why is it that people often vote for obviously pro-capitalist options --sometimes even very Right-wing candidates-- instead? Let us avoid simplistic and patronizing answers such as "the people don't understand…", "the pervasive power of the media…", and so on. These sort of explanations give us an implicit sense of superiority that we neither deserve, nor do they help us politically speaking. Of course, the system has a formidable power to control culture so to counter radical appeals. But we cannot look for an answer just there.

Leaving aside circumstantial factors, the perennial appeal of the Right lies in that it presents itself (and to some extent really is) a force of order. But why would order be so appealing for those who do not belong to the ruling class? We live in a type of society that rests upon (and strengthens) a constitutive, paradoxical tension. Each day we become more "de-collectivized", that is, more atomized, increasingly isolated individuals without strong bonds with each other. But, at the same time, never in the history of humankind was there such an inter-dependence when it comes to producing social life. Today, the division of labor is so deep, that each minute, even without realizing it, each of us is relying on the labor of millions of people from all over the world. In the capitalist system, paradoxically enough, the institutions that enable and organize such a high level of social co-operation are the very same that separate us from the other, and make us isolated individuals without responsibility with regards to other people. Yes, I am talking about the market and the (its) state. Buying and consuming products, and voting for candidates in an election, involves no answerability. These are actions performed by isolated individuals in solitude.

Such is our current inter-dependence, that (global) society requires, like never before, that each person does not behave as he or she is not supposed to behave. Yes, we have the freedom to dress like a clown if we want to, but we can't do anything that may affect the 'normal' course of society. Because today, a small group of people or even one person has bigger chances than ever to affect that normal course if they/he wants to. Like never before, a single person has the chance to affect the lives of millions and to cause chaos. Why is this the case today more than in the past? Let us consider an example: if a peasant in 17th century France decided not to farm his land, he would not be putting his neighbors' lives in jeopardy, but only his own. Imagine that he was angry or mad, and set out to impede his neighbors to harvest. In that case, the community would deal with him very soon; in the worst scenario, he might affect one or two of his neighbors. Fast forward to any country in the 21st century. If the three operators of the subway security system decide not to work (or to mess with the system just for fun), or if this important guy from the stock exchange lies about the prospects of AOL, they would be affecting the lives and labors of thousands of people, without those people even knowing the reason for the accident they had, or the loss of their jobs. The paradox is that the ever increasing individualism and lack of answerability before the other makes it more likely than ever before that, in fact, there will be people who will be ready to cause trouble or harm other people's lives and interests, even without good reasons. Ask the students of Columbine about that. Our mutual dependence in some respects paradoxically contrasts with our subjectivity of isolated, non-answerable individuals.

As people who live in this constitutive tension, we all feel to some extent the anxiety for the continuity of social order and of our own lives, in view of the vulnerability of both. We unconsciously know that we depend on other individuals doing the right thing; but we don't know who they are, or how to communicate with them. They are close but alien at the same time. This is the same anxiety that popular movies enact once and again in hundreds of films whose narrative structure and themes are almost the same. A person or a small group of people puts society or other people's lives in jeopardy -be it because of evilness, criminal orientation, madness, strange political reasons, you name it- until some powerful intervention restores order -a caring father, Superman, the police, the President, Charles Bronson, etc. As a movie-goer we come out with our anxiety sedated, but that comfort only lasts for some minutes…

Just like those films, the political appeal of Right-wing calls to order comes from society's anxiety for the ever-increasing possibility of catastrophic disorder. From the viewpoint of an isolated individual, it makes no difference if disorder is produced by another individual for random reasons, or by a progressive collective that does it as part of a political action. It does not matter if it is a criminal, a madman, a union striking, or an anti-capitalist group doing direct action: whenever there is fear of catastrophic disorder and of the dissolution of social bonds, Right-wing calls to order find a fertile soil.

There is no point in complaining about that situation: that fear is part of the society we live in. And it is not a matter of attitude: popular support for right-wing options is not due to 'lack of political education' -something that could be remedied by simply telling the people what to think in a more persuasive way. There is no "error" in popular support for the right: if there are reasons to believe that social life is in danger (and there usually are), the choice for more (right-wing) "order" is a perfectly rational option in the absence of other feasible and more desirable options.

What I am trying to argue is that there is a valuable truth to be learnt in the perennial appeal of the calls for more "order". It is time that we consider that, perhaps, what we (the radical Left) are offering is not perceived as a feasible or better option simply because, well, it isn't. The Left has indeed the best diagnosis of what's wrong with society. We now also have a fairly decent offer of visions of what a better society would look like. But what about the question of how to get there? When it comes to that, we either have the option of traditional Leninist parties taking power (sorry, neither desirable nor better for me), or vague and sometimes utterly non-realistic generalizations.

In any case, we invite people to destroy the current social order (which is obviously necessary) so that we can then build something better. Our political culture so far has been more about destroying, criticizing, attacking the present for the sake of the future, than about building and creating new and effective forms of co-operation and solidarity here and now. As we live in the future and despise the present, and as we do not bother to explain how we will protect people's lives from catastrophic social disorder while we try to build a new society, it is normal that the people perceive (rightly) that ours are nothing but vague, unreliable promises.

For reasons I will not have the space to explain here, the tradition of the Left has inherited serious impediments when it comes to thinking social order and, therefore, to relating to society as a whole. In general, the Left cannot think power as immanent with respect to social life. We tend to think of it as an external thing, a sort of parasite that colonizes society "from without". In turn, we tend to think of society as a co-operative whole that exists before and independently from that external entity. Hence the Marxist idea that the state, the laws, etc. are nothing but the "superstructure" of a society that is defined primarily in the economic realm. Hence also the attitude of some anarchists, who tend to consider all rules (with the exception of those freely and individually accepted) as something purely external and oppressive, while believing that the state could be simply destroyed with no cost for a society that -they think- is already "complete" and exists below the state's domination. Hence also the distinction that some autonomists propose between power as "power-over" (the capacity to command) and power as "power-to-do" (the capacity to do), as if it was a struggle between two independent and clearly distinguishable "sides" -one evil, the other good.

What matters for our purposes here is to understand that from all three cases mentioned above, it follows a strategic viewpoint (and also a certain "militant culture") that is based in an attitude of pure hostility and rejection of social order, the laws, and all institutions. While some Marxists reject that order for the sake of the new order to be created after the Revolution, some anarchists and autonomists do in the belief that society already possesses an "order" of its own ready to flourish as soon as we get rid of all the political-legal-institutional burden.

Maybe in the past it made sense to think of social change as, first and foremost, a work of destruction of the social order -I do not want to discuss this now. In any case, the situation today makes that strategic choice completely non-viable. Because nowadays there isn't any society "beneath" the state and the market. Of course, there are many social connections and forms of co-operation that happen beyond them. But the main social bonds that organize and produce social life are today structured by means of the market and the (its) state. The market-state have already transformed social life in such a way, that there is no "society" outside of them. What would be left if we could make the state and the marked cease to function right now by some magical twist? Certainly not a liberated humankind, but catastrophic chaos: more or less weak groupings of de-collectivized individuals here and there, and the end of social life.

From this follows that, if we adopt a political strategy for radical change that is completely "external" with regards to the market and the state, we would be choosing a strategy that is also, and by the same token, "external" with regards to society. In other words, any emancipatory politics that explicitly -in its program- or implicitly -in its "militant culture" or "attitude"- present itself as a purely destructive endeavor (or that only offers vague promises of reconstruction of social order after the destruction of the current one) will never manage to attract larger numbers of adherents. This is due to the fact that the others perceive (correctly) that that sort of politics puts the current social life in jeopardy, with little to offer instead. We are asking the people to trust us and jump into the abyss, but the people know (and they are right) that the complexity of our society is such that it cannot take that risk. In conclusion, the people do not trust in the Left, and they have very good reasons not to.

I would like to argue that we need to rethink strategy taking into account this fundamental truth: the rules and institutions that enable and organize oppression are, at the same time, the rules and institutions that enable and organize social life as such. They are immanent and constitutive of society. Of course we can have other non-oppressive rules and institutions. But for the time being, the market-state has become the spinal column of the one and only social life we have got. In view of this, we cannot continue to offer a political option aimed at simply destroying the current social order. On the contrary, we need to present a strategy (and a "militant culture" or "attitude" according to it) that makes explicit the path by which we plan to replace the market and the state with other forms of management of social life. While struggling against the current order, we need to create and develop, at the same time, institutions of a new type that are able to deal with the complexity of society's common tasks in the appropriate scale.

In conclusion, no emancipatory politics has chances to succeed if it has a strategy that, implicitly or explicitly, remains external to the issue of the alternative (but actual and concrete) management of social life. There is no autonomous politics or autonomy without taking responsibility for the overall management of the really existing society. In other words, there is no future for any strategy that refuses to think of the creation of alternative forms of management here and now, or that resolves that problem either by means of an authoritarian device (such as the traditional Leninist left) or by escapes to utopian day-dreaming and magical thinking (such as "primitivism", the reliance in angelic and altruistic "New Men" or in abstract schemes of direct democracy, and so forth). To avoid any misunderstanding: I am not suggesting that we anti-capitalists should find and get involved in a nicer way of managing capitalism (that would be the traditionally "reformist" or Social-democrat option). What I am trying to argue is that we need to create and develop our own political devices, able to manage the current society (thus avoiding the danger of catastrophic dissolution of all social order) while we walk towards a new world free of capitalism.

Hypothesis two: On the necessity of an "interface" that enables the passage from social to political.

I shall argue that if we are to present a new political strategy that is both destructive and creative at the same time, we need to collectively explore and design an autonomous "interface" that enables us to link our social movements to the political plane of the global management of society. I do not mean by this to endorse the traditional prejudice of the traditional Left, according to which social self-organizing is just fine, but the "real" politics starts only in the realm of party and state politics. When I refer to the "passage from social to political" I do not imply any higher value to the latter. On the contrary, I believe that autonomous politics needs to be firmly anchored in processes of social self-organization, but it also needs to expand so to "colonize" the political-institutional plane. Let me explain what would an "interface" be.

In capitalist society, power structures itself in two fundamental planes, the general social plane (bio-political), and the political plane properly speaking (the state). I call the social plane "bio-political" because, as Foucault has shown, power has penetrated there, in our own lives and daily relationships, so deeply, that is has transformed them according to its image and likeness. Market and class relations have shaped us in such a way, that we reproduce by ourselves the capitalist power relations. Each and every one of us is an agent who produces capitalism. In other words, power not only dominates us from without, but also from within social life. Yet, in capitalist society that bio-political plane of power is not enough to ensure the reproduction of the system. It also needs a plane that I call simply "political": the state, laws, institutions. That political plane makes sure that bio-political power relations continue to function properly: it corrects deviations, punish infractions, decides where to channel social co-operation, deals with larger scale tasks that the system needs, and monitors everything. In other words, the political plane deals with the global management of society; in a capitalist kind of society, it does so under the form of the state.

In current capitalist societies, the social (bio-political) plane an the state (political plane) are not disconnected. On the contrary, there is an "interface" that links them: the representative institutions, political parties, elections, etc. Through these mechanisms (usually called "democracy") the system gets a minimum of legitimacy so that the global management of society can take place. In other words, it is this "elective" interface that ensures that society as a whole accepts that a particular body of authorities makes all the important decisions that then everybody else must accept. Needless to say, this is an heteronomous interface, for it builds legitimacy not for the co-operative whole that we call society, but only for the benefit of the ruling class. The heteronomous interface channels the political energy of society in a way that it impedes society to make its own decisions and to be autonomous (that is, self-managed).

This article maybe a bit on the optimistic side, but there are some very important developments taking place to grapple with the Armenian Genocide in Turkey and one hopes that these historical questions are addressed with not only an outlook for historical clarity and justice, but also clarity and justice in addressing the Kurdish question at this present moment - rg

Turkey starts to admit it has an 'Armenian Question'
by Mavi Zambak

Despite resistance and opposition by nationalists, books, newspapers
and TV are starting to talk about the hitherto taboo issue. Judges
are helping the process by throwing out cases against writers accused
of insulting the nation and its institutions.

Istanbul (AsiaNews) - Section 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which
makes it an offence to insult Turkish identity, is outdated, a
leftover from a nationalist past that is still hanging, thanks in
part to groups like the Grey Wolves, who are linked to the Turkish
Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetci Hareket Partisi or MHP). It
was Grey Wolves' member Mehmet Ali Aðca who tried to kill Pope John
Paul II in 1981.

Last year famous Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk received death threats
after admitting to a German newspaper that a million Armenians had
been killed in Turkey. He was also charged under Section 301 with
denigrating "Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly
of Turkey, [. . .] the Government of the Republic of Turkey, the
judicial institutions of the State, the military or security
organizations". Only after several postponements and Europeans
grumbling about Turkey's commitment to freedom of expression was the
writer found not guilty on January 24 of this year.

Similarly, elements within the judiciary close to the MHP tried to
ban a conference entitled Ottoman Armenians During the Decline of the
Empire: Issues of Scientific Responsibility and Democracy at
Istanbul's Bilgi University on September 24-25 2005 after it was
blocked in the previous May because its scientific validity and the
qualifications of its participants were challenged. Also in this
case, protests in favour of academic freedom led Turkish Prime
Minister Erdogan to intervene and so it went ahead.

Elif Þafak, a young Turkish writer who lives in the United States,
went on trial yesterday for the same reason. Charges were brought
again by Kemal Kerincsiz, head of the Executive Board of the Lawyers'
Association, which pretends to defend the country against any writer,
editor, journalist or free thinker opposed its own narrow-minded
nationalism.

'NO USA': Korean Farmers Continue to Protest US Base Expansion
by Aaron Glantz
Dozens of South Koreans took to the streets of Washington, DC Thursday in support of small farmers forced to relocate to make way for a massive new U.S. military base in their country. President George W. Bush was meeting with his South Korean counterpart just steps away in the White House at the time.

On Tuesday, it took 10,000 South Korean police to dislodge the protesting farmers.

"They are elderly farmers," Kyo So of the group Korean Americans Against War and Neoliberalism pleaded from the protest outside the White House.

"They have been living there for many years. They turned the old wetlands into arable farmland. They raised their children there. They don't want to move."

The US military is increasingly unpopular in South Korea.

Outside the US base about 40 miles south of Seoul, protesters painted "NO USA" on buildings and stood on rooftops in a brief attempt to stop construction crews from tearing down about 90 homes.

Police had blockaded roads leading into the township, preventing more protesters from entering the area. Helicopters kept an eye on the protesters.

September 13, 2006

Police invade Daechuri and Doduri, demolish over 60 houses

22,000 riot police and 450 contracted construction workers and thugs invaded and occupied the villages of Daechuri and Doduri today at dawn. Police demolition equipment managed to wipe out 68 of the 90 houses that the Korean Ministry of Defense had threatened to destroy, but villagers successfully defended some houses.
The Ministry of Defense had promised to only destroy empty houses. But several squatted and renovated houses, as well as one long-term resident's house, were knocked down. A backhoe also destroyed a farming warehouse with expensive farming equipment inside, including a 100,000 USD tractor.
Children from Daechuri were unable to go to school today, because of the police lockdown of the the roads leading to town. In the village, police controls kept elderly residents from entering their homes and fields, and 10 residents received minor injuries at the hands of the police and their contractors. Some of the contractors also insulted (“bitch”, etc) elderly residents who were fighting to stop the demolitions or to reach their homes.

Many outside supporters were kept from entering the village by tight
police checkpoints over the past several days, and 21 were arrested this
morning trying to enter to defend the village. Yet despite their
overwhelming numerical disadvantage and several arrests in Daechuri,
villagers and supporters struggled all day to defend the village. The
police's first target in Daechuri was the Human Rights house. Several
human rights activists had tied themselves to the lookout tower built by
residents on the roof of the building, and residents barricaded the
building to keep the cops from coming up. But the police eventually
managed to enter, and dragged out and arrested the activists before
smashing up the house and all of the beautiful murals that it contained.
But around 40 other people who tied themselves onto the roofs of other
buildings kept the police from destroying 13 houses in Daechuri. At one
house right at the entrance to town, police stood off for hours with two
people sitting on the pointed top of the house's sloping roof. Elderly
villagers hurried to surround the house, and one villager climbed onto the
roof with the activists. After several failed attempts to force the two
activists down, police promised to let them go free (and then destroy the
house) if they came down on their own. But villagers had already learned
during previous attacks what a cop's promise is worth, so they stood their
ground and insisted that the police leave. Eventually the police were
forced to give up and leave the house standing and activists free.

Letter from Oaxaca: Performing in the Flames
By Guillermo Gomez-Peña

"Opening day arrived, and while we were setting up in
the Museum, 50,000 citizens had gathered outside to
support the teachers. The sound of their loudspeakers
intertwined with the sound of our rehearsal."

Dear friends:

On August 1st, my performance art troupe La Pocha
Nostra began our annual "summer school" in the Mexican
city of Oaxaca. Each summer we conduct two intensive
workshops, one for 'beginners" and another for
seasoned performance artists. The result is a public
performance at MACO (Museum of Contemporary Art,
Oaxaca). Artists come from as far away as Canada, the
US, the UK, Spain, Holland, Australia, and Peru to
collaborate with indigenous Oaxacans working in
experimental art forms.

The workshop is an amazing artistic and
anthropological experiment--how do artists from
different countries spanning three generations, from
every imaginable artistic background, begin to
negotiate a common ground? Performance art has
provided the answer, becoming the connective tissue
and lingua franca for our temporary community. But
this year the usual cross-cultural borders and
dilemmas we regularly face multiplied in all
directions. The gorgeous bohemian city had become
center stage for one of the most intense political
conflicts in contemporary Mexico, a nation on the
verge of total collapse.

I'll be more specific.

On May 22nd the Teacher's Union (section 22 of the
SNTE), who had been demanding a small raise in
teachers' salaries, began an indefinite occupation
(planton) of downtown Oaxaca. The government responded
with a violent police assault in which, on June 14th,
several teachers were wounded. The APPO (Asociación
Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca) immediately joined
the Teacher's Union and together they expanded the
planton and took over the Canal 9 TV station, two
radio stations, and several government buildings,
blocking the main avenues and freeways surrounding the
city. Los maestros were now demanding the destitution
of Governor Ulises Ruiz, a repressive politician from
the old PRI guard, as well as the release of all the
political prisoners the governor had jailed. Over the
month of July the movimiento magisterial grew to
encompass over 40 political, social and cultural
organizaciones and 50 ONGS (non-profits) from
throughout the state, including student associations,
universities, art collectives and indigenous
comunidades autónomas.

The tactics of the government shifted as well. By the
time my colleague Roberto Sifuentes and I arrived in
Oaxaca (July 29th), government hit men had carried out
38 political assassinations and several teachers had
been sequestered. The city felt like Belfast or San
Salvador in the late 80s. Thuggish paramilitaries and
porros (infiltrators posing as teachers) hired to
create mayhem were roaming around, every wall was
covered in graffiti and the government was cowardly
operating in absentia.

DEMOLITION OF HOUSES FOR U.S. MILITARY EXPANSION ? SOUTH KOREA
11 September 2006

SUMMARY
According to the local source, the South Korean government has officially announced the demolition of vacant houses in the villages of Daechuri and Doduri, Pyongtaek (100km southwest of Seoul, near west coast of Korean Peninsula) this week.  Local media reported that about 15,000 police and 500 hired thugs would be mobilized during the operation. 

Although no exact dates were given, local residents and activists expect the demolition to start in the morning of Tuesday, 12 September 2006.

The Pan-S Korea Commission against US base expansion in Pyongtaek (KCPT) has been holding candlelight vigil in front of the Ministry of National Defense at 5 pm every evening for more than 2 years.  Simultaneous candlelight vigils in Seoul, Pyongtaek, and other cities are also being planned, as well as a mass march in Seoul on 24 September 2006.

Over 20 supporters (peace keepers) from different parts of Korea have moved to the villages of Daechuri and Doduri since January 2005.  They have occupied houses that were abandoned by those residents who chose to leave.  Supporters hope this move will make it more difficult for the government to demolish those houses as a first step towards demolishing the entire village.  They are also hoping that more people in the international community will know about the imminent demolitions that make way for a military base, and express their concern and solidarity. 

To learn about the background of eviction in Daechuri village, Pyongtaek and the U.S. military expansion in Korea, please refer to Hotline Asia Urgent Appeal UA060327(3). 

"Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and
divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused
to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to
write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us
hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue." -Ilan
Pappe

Genocide in Gaza By Ilan Pappe

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three
citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This
is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An
average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip.
Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at loss of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has
vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the
West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side.
Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes
the parts it covets - half of the West Bank - and cleanses it of its native
population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for
a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it
won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an
arrangement cannot work in the Gaza enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan has
succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip
for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and
half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel - although geographically the
Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its
midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one
of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people
who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them
ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the
West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are
gone. Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the
outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the
Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed.
Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an
independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge.
The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most
dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or
another.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
UPDATE

Following a Visit to the Gaza Strip, PHR-Israel warns: Humanitarian Disaster in the Gaza Strip

For the first time in six years, members of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel were granted access to the Gaza Strip to witness up close the plight of the residents of the strip in the shadow of the unrestrained Israeli attacks.

Since September 2000, the per capita income has dropped by 50%- from a new report by the World Bank.

?There is no hope? in Gaza- Jan Egeland, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Last update - 09:38 03/09/2006
Gaza's darkness
By Gideon Levy
Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately. 
Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about 'the end of the occupation' and 'partitioning the land? now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied. 
In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity supply will be cut off for at least another year. There's hardly any water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority, no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta. 
More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. The Erez crossing is empty, the Karni crossing has been open only a few days over the last two months, and the same is true for the Rafah crossing. Some 15,000 people waited for two months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including many ailing and wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side to return to their homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the scenes at Rafah to understand how profound a human tragedy is taking place. A crossing that was not supposed to have an Israeli presence continues to be Israel?s means to pressure 1.5 million inhabitants. This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment. The U.S. and Europe, whose police are at the Rafah crossing, also bear responsibility for the situation. 

Their View of the World is Through a Bombsight

     American support for Israel's unwinnable aim of
     destroying Hizbullah only boosts its support in
     Lebanon and beyond

by Noam Chomsky

September 1, 2006

In Lebanon, a little-honored truce remains in effect -
yet another in a decades-long series of ceasefires
between Israel and its adversaries in a cycle that, as
if inevitably, returns to warfare, carnage and human
misery. Let's describe the current crisis for what it
is: a US-Israeli invasion of Lebanon, with only a
cynical pretense to legitimacy. Amid all the charges and
counter-charges, the most immediate factor behind the
assault is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This is hardly the first time that Israel has invaded
Lebanon to eliminate an alleged threat. The most
important of the US-backed Israeli invasions of Lebanon,
in 1982, was widely described in Israel as a war for the
West Bank. It was undertaken to end the Palestinian
Liberation Organisation's annoying calls for a
diplomatic settlement. Despite many different
circumstances, the July invasion falls into the same
pattern.

What would break the cycle? The basic outlines of a
solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict have been
supported by a broad international consensus for 30
years: a two-state settlement on the international
border, perhaps with minor and mutual adjustments.

The Arab states formally accepted this proposal in 2002,
as the Palestinians had long before. Hizbullah leader
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has made it clear that though
this solution is not Hizbullah's preference, they will
not disrupt it. Iran's "supreme leader" Ayatollah
Khamenei recently reaffirmed that Iran too supports this
settlement. Hamas has indicated clearly that it is
prepared to negotiate for a settlement in these terms as
well.