Iran: prepared for the worst
By Omid Memarian
Created 2007-10-30 18:37
The resignation of Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's national-security council and top nuclear negotiator, on 20 October [1] has provoked been much discussion about what it might reveal of Tehran's complex intra-regime politics. What has been less remarked is that this was the second key personnel change among Iran's governing elite in the past two months. This sequence of events, reflecting the key arguments [2] and calculations of Iran's top leaders, signifies the emergence of a revised political strategy designed to cope with with the heightened threat of United States military action.
The moderate conservative Larijani [3]was replaced by deputy foreign minister for European and American affairs Saeed Jalili [4](who may have a lower profile in the west than Larijani, but has the advantage of being a close advisor of both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei's closest advisors). The move was a surprise - it took place only days before the meeting between Iranian and international representatives over Iran's nuclear programme on 23 October [5] in Rome (which Larijani still attended in his national-security council capacity). What gives it added significance is that it follows the replacement with effect from 1 September of General Rahim Safavi [6] as commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards by General Mohammad Ali Jafari, [7] who has a poor reputation among Iranian civil-society activists for his role in suppressing social movements in the late 1990s.
This reshuffle at the top involves more than "routine" political rivalries [8]: it signifies the Islamic Republic's preparation for the worst-case scenario of a US military strike. The calculation is that the appointment of obedient middle-level officials such as Jalili and Jafari is likely to solidify the collective leadership Iran needs during a tense period where the possibility of armed escalation is very real.

Mercenaries and the new configuration of world violence
By Mariano Aguirre
Created 2007-10-16 17:30

A series of incidents involving employees of private companies
operating as security guards have resulted in the deaths of around
twenty Iraqis in recent months. The bloodiest of these was on 16
September 2007, when guards working for the United States company
Blackwater - which is subcontracted by the Pentagon - shot and killed
[1] as many as seventeen civilians at a Baghdad intersection.

The Iraqi government would like to call a halt to the activities of
Blackwater,, and begin legal proceedings against it. The human-rights
minister Wijdan Mikha'il Salim said on 15 October [2] that an inquiry
would publish its results by the end of the month, but that the
government had already decided to bring the private companies under
Iraqi jurisdiction.

The United States administration takes a very different view: it wants
Blackwater and other security companies which operate in Iraq [3] (and
which sources variously estimate as numbering 50,000-100,000
employees) to carry on with their activities unencumbered by any legal
restrictions. This is even more the case now, when there is pressure
both by the Democrats and the US electoral timetable to decrease US
troop numbers in Iraq.

Mariano Aguirre is a journalist and writer on international relations.
He co-ordinates peace, security and human-rights matters at the
Fundacion para las Relaciones Internacionales y el Dialogo Exterior
(Fride [4]), in Madrid. He is a fellow of the Transnational Institute,
Amsterdam; the former director of the Peace Research Center (CIP),
Madrid; and a former programme officer at the Ford Foundation in New York.

The Iraqi human-rights minister's [5] declaration notwithstanding,
there is little chance of the weak Iraqi government being able to make
legal headway against Blackwater [6]. In 2004, Paul Bremer, as head of
the post-occupation Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq,
signed Order 17 granting legal immunity to private-security firms
which worked for Washington; Iraqi law confirmed this unusual measure.
The legal expert Joana Abrisketa [7] of the University of Deusto
points out that this immunity makes the security firms triply
unaccountable: to military or civil American law, or under the terms
of international law (see "Blackwater, mercenaries and the rule of law
[8]", Fride, 27 September 2007).

from:
http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2007/10/05/florian-opitz-facing-14-
years-of-prison-in-nigeria

Florian Opitz facing 14 years of prison in Nigeria

Florian Opitz was arrested in Nigeria by the Nigerian State Security
Service (SSS) and has to appear in court today. He is accused of
'endangering national security' and faces up to 14 years in prison.

Florian Opitz is a freelance documentary filmmaker, author and
journalist. His last very successful documentary "The Big Sell-Out"
http://www.thebigsellout.org

"is a political film. In various episodes the abstract phenomenon of
privatisation is depicted in stories about very concrete human destinies
around the globe. The documentary tells tragic, tragicomic but also
encouraging stories of the everyday life of people, who day by day have
to deal with the effects of privatisation politics, dictated by
anonymous international financial institutions in Washington D.C. and
Geneva, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank
and the World Trade Organisation (WTO)."

Arrested with him were filmmaker Andy Lehmann (Berlin), Danjuma Saidu
(Nigeria) and Judith Asuni (US/Nigeria), doing research in the Niger
delta for their next film. They were alledgedly taking pictures of oil
refineries, pipelines and ships. The Niger Delta has seen many bloody
conflicts about resources, oil revenue and distribution of wealth, often
depicted as 'ethnic conflicts' by neighbouring tribes. Judith Asuni has
lived in the region for 36 years and works with the peace work NGO
Academic Associates/PeaceWorks.
http://www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org/en/node/18

October 11, 2007

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACTS:
Email: media@caedefensefund.org
Claire Pentecost: 773-383-9771
Gregory Sholette: 212-865-3076
Edmund Cardoni: 716-854-1694
Igor Vamos: 917-209-3282
Lucia Sommer: 716-359-3061
Dianne Raeke Ferrell: 412-352-2704

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE PERSECUTION & ILLNESS FORCE SCIENTIST TO PLEAD IN PRECEDENT-SETTING CASE
Scientist’s Wife and Daughter Comment on Case

Buffalo, NY – Today in Federal District Court, Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, under tremendous pressure, pled guilty to lesser charges rather than facing a prolonged trial for federal charges of “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” in a surreal post-PATRIOT Act legal case that has attracted worldwide attention.

“From the beginning, this has been a persecution, not a prosecution. Although I have not seen the final agreement, the initial versions contained incorrect and irrelevant information,” said Dr. Dianne Raeke Ferrell, Dr. Ferrell’s wife and an Associate Professor of Special Education and Clinical Services at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “Bob is a 27 year survivor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma which has reoccurred numerous times. He has also had malignant melanoma. Since this whole nightmare began, Bob has had two minor strokes and a major stroke which required months of rehabilitation.”

Dr. Ferrell added that her husband was indicted just as he was preparing to undergo a painful and dangerous autologous stem cell transplant, the second in 7 years.

The Ferrell’s daughter, Gentry Chandler Ferrell, added: “Our family has struggled with an intense uncertainty about physical, emotional and financial health for a long time. Agreeing to a plea deal is a small way for dad to try to eliminate one of those uncertainties and hold on a little longer to the career he worked so hard to develop... Sadly, while institutions merely are tarnished from needless litigation, individuals are torn apart. I remain unable to wrap my mind around the absurdity of the government's pursuit of this case and I am saddened that it has been dragged out to the point where my dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion.” (To read Gentry Ferrell’s full statement, please visit:http://caedefensefund.org/press/ferrellplea.html)

Dr. Ferrell’s colleague Dr. Steven Kurtz, founder of the internationally acclaimed art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, was illegally detained and accused of “bioterrorism” by the U.S. government in 2004 stemming from his acquisition from Dr. Ferrell of harmless bacteria used in several of Critical Art Ensemble’s educational art projects. After a costly investigation lasting several months and failing to provide any evidence of “bioterrorism,” the Department of Justice instead brought charges of “mail fraud” and “wire fraud” against Kurtz and Ferrell. Under the USA PATRIOT Act, the maximum penalty for these charges has increased from 5 years to 20. (For more information about the case, please see “Background to the Case” below or http://caedefensefund.org)

Was looking for a specific text and somehow stumbled upon this collection of short sentences on the future (collected by Olbrist)

... As Yona Friedman once told me: “The only real thing is the here and now. The future is an intellectual construction.”

I recently asked artists and architects for their definition of the future. The incomplete list follows here:

the future will be chrome
Rirkrit Tiravanija

the future will be curved
Olafur Eliasson

the future will be "in the name of the future"
Anri Sala

the future will be so subjective
Tino Sehgal

the future will be bouclette
Douglas Gordon

the future will be curious
Nico Dockx

the future will be obsolete
Tacita Dean

the future will be asymmetric
Pedro Reyes

the future will be a slap in the face.
Cao Fei

the future will be delayed
Loris Greaud

the future does not exist but in snapshots
Philippe Parreno

the future will be tropical
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

future? ...you must be mistaken
Trisha Donnelly

the future will be overgrown and decayed
Simryn Gill

the future will be tense
John Baldessari

Zukunft ist lecker
Hans-Peter Feldmann

Zukunft ist wichtiger als Freizeit
Helmut Kohl (proposed by Carsten Höller)

a future fuelled by human waste
Matthew Barney

the future is going nowhere without us
Paul Chan

list continues below ...

Some friends in Chicago put this together about their activities in the last
years. Thought it would be useful. It documents Autonomous Cultural
Practices in Chicago From 2000-2005.

http://www.learningsite.info/NeoTrashing.pdf

As the territorial boundaries of the international ‘own- ership society’
expand, we witness our last public square being wired for surveillance and
renamed af- ter a corporation. With this sweeping expansion, we (the
editors) feel an urgent need to reclaim, rebuild, and redefine public space
as not only an essential component of democratic participation, but also as
an open field for play, hope, and critical reinvention. Towards the ends of
that reinvention, this publication will take a look at a unique period of
cul- tural activism that took place in Chicago from 2000 to 2005. At that
time a wide range of activists, artists and hybrid coalitions responded to
the spatial shifts in power created by neoliberal economic restructur- ing.
Using a diverse range of methodologies, as you will see, these groups and
projects address some of the most fundemental and urgent challenges of
contemporary urban life. The term ‘neoliberalism’ refers to the histori- cal
transformation and recent extension of capitalist market domination into
every corner of the globe and into every moment of our waking lives. Its
dominating logic of free-market fundamentalism corrodes social solidarity as
it rejects social justice in favor of indi- vidual ‘freedom’ to compete and
consume. Neoliberal policies of corporate governmen- tality, structural
adjustment, privatization, financial- ization, and deregulation of labor and
markets have amounted to a complete dismantling of the Keynes- ian welfare
state (public spending to stimulate the economy) as well as an erosion of
the democratic protections and political gains fought for by hundreds of
years of peoples’ struggle. The practical effects of this global policy of
accumulation through disposses- sion have been the rapid, and geographically
uneven distribution of poverty and structural inequality. In the US, the
dissolution of most aspects of the social state (such as public education
and public housing) are concomitant with the development of a massive market
for, and public financing of, the prison and military. In Chicago this has
meant the imposition of new surveillance and policing infrastruc- tures in
increasingly disenfranchised and abandoned low-income neighborhoods at the
edges of the city, while the majority of transportation renovations, new libraries, parks and capital investments have been centralized in the ever-expanding core of downtown gentrification.

While the increasingly speculative nature of real
estate has made the pattern of gentrification a dominant one in every city,
Chicago has experienced particularly violent waves of residential
regeneration. Public spaces and social institutions for the provision of
common needs such as food, shelter, and educa- tion have been thrown into
the private market, forcing Chicago’s residents to become
citizen-entrepreneurs; competing with each other for extremely scarce em-
ployment opportunities and public resources. The projects in this
publication raise funda- mental questions about our right to the city and
the possible uses of culture in the struggle for community
self-determination: How should we interact with our neighbors? What kinds
of reforms do we want from the state and what kinds of collective
infrastructures should we be building ourselves instead? What kinds of
spaces encourage resistance, free move- ment, and the well being of the
whole population? What would it take to denormalize capitalism in the
‘global’ city of Chicago? Much of the work presented here reflects temporary
organizations and events. In cases where it was possible, the projects and
groups are described by their participants or initiators and are accompain-
ied by press releases and promotional ephemera that were used at the time of
the project’s initiation. The first section of this publication, “Right to
the City”, looks at contestations of the planning of housing and land use in
the city. Projects that respond to the gentrification of various
neighborhoods will be shared alongside campaigns that critique
tourist-centric economic development plans, and the corresponding
privatization of public housing and public space. In the other sections
“Protest Experiments” and “Social Reorganization” we will look at self-orga-
nized attempts to create alternative public spheres through the reinvention
of protest and the creation of other spaces for democratic convergence. The
pre- sentation of independent media projects alongside space reclamations
and interventions offer examples of exciting ways of democratically sharing
ideas and writing alternative histories while resisting the consol- idation
of media, communication, and social life under the control of fewer and
fewer corporations. These alternative models of resource sharing and
coopera- tion counter the hyperindividualism and competition that has taken
hold of our minds, and instead build coalitions and creative communities of
resistance that are building the capacity for a radical and imaginative new
course.

Big Banks Are Selling Us Out on Climate Change
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet
Posted on October 6, 2007, Printed on October 8, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64470/

We're nearing the end of the window of opportunity we have to avert the catastrophic effects predicted from the earth's changing climate. We're either going to sink or swim. Our best hope at this time is to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, like carbon dioxide.

Global leaders are putting their heads together to come up with solutions. Across the world, countries and municipalities are passing legislation to limit GHG emissions; people are cutting consumption; new technologies are being developed to further alternative energy sources. And yet, in the United States, the coal industry has us poised to move in the absolute wrong direction. Right now, there are about 150 new coal-fired power plants on the drawing board. The amount of polluting emissions they will release is staggering -- between 600 million and 1.1 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year, for the next 50 years. And this, according to Rainforest Action Network (RAN), will basically negate every other effort currently being considered to fight climate change.

Over the last 20 years since Bill McKibben wrote the first global warming book for a general audience, only a few things have changed: Scientists have realized the problem is worse than they thought, and the crisis is coming on faster than predicted.

"The final question as to whether we can address it in serious fashion is whether the coal that is in the ground stays in the ground," said McKibben. "We already know that we are going to burn all the oil we can get our hands on because we have gotten our hands on most of it and it is intensely valuable. Coal, on the other hand, is the question. If the 150 power plants get built, there is no use talking about compact fluorescent light bulbs or mass transit or any of those other things ... we'll have no hope of averting climate change short of catastrophic proportions."

As many of you know Congress is set to vote on a resolution which would recognize the Armenian Genocide. The following text was just emailed through the Variant mailing list and thought that some folks may be interested to read:

http://www.variant.randomstate.org//pdfs/issue30/AHDenial30.pdf

-rg

Trying to find news on the mass murders of monks that we know are taking
place - but nothing .... i found 4 articles on BURMA ... read on ..
INDEPENDENT TODAY

Monks vanish as Burmese troops step up presence

By Rosalind Russell in Rangoon

Published: 02 October 2007

The gates were open at Rangoon's glittering Shwedagon temple yesterday but
soldiers, not monks, wandered its marble-floored shrines and pavilions. Five
days after Burma's military leaders began a crackdown on protesting monks
and their civilian supporters, the red-robed Buddhist clergy, normally seen
in their thousands around the city, have vanished. And the UN's special
envoy sent to confront the military junta was stalled for yet another day.
"The monks are gone. We are worried about them. We don't know where they
are," said a young guide at the temple. Usually hundreds of monks would be
milling around the golden, bell-shaped, stupa – praying, chatting quietly in
groups or explaining the significance of gem-encrusted statues or shrines to
visitors. Soldiers with rifles have taken their place, their bare feet the
only mark of respect to Burma's most sacred Buddhist site. There are few
visitors, and stall-holders selling paper flowers and incense sticks for
offerings have little trade. "It is strange now," said the guide, out of the
earshot of soldiers. "We don't think the army should be at the temple. We
think the monks have been taken away. We think they are in jail." A senior
monk told The Independent at the weekend he believed 3,000 monks had been
detained by Burmese security forces, and were being held in police and
military camps. Burma's Buddhist clergy spearheaded 10 days of street
demonstrations against the country's military rulers, until the army cleared
the streets with tear gas, baton charges and gunfire, killing at least nine
people. By night, under cover of a curfew, soldiers have raided monasteries,
intimidating, beating and arresting monks. Rangoon residents say civilian
vigilante groups, armed only with rocks and sticks, have tried to protect
the revered clergy by blocking the gates of monasteries and confronting
troops. Collecting alms, mostly gifts of food, each day from devotees,
Burma's monkhood is privy to the population's increasing economic hardship.
Corrupt generals have ruined a country rich in natural resources and many
families survive on one meal a day. Meanwhile, the UN announced last night
that its envoy to Burma, Ibrabim Gambari, has now been told he can meet
Myanmar's senior general today, as he tries to persuade the junta to end the
vicious crackdown. Gambari flew to Myanmar's new jungle capital on Monday,
waiting to convey international concern to the junta leader Than Shwe.
Gambari has been informed "he will be able to meet the senior general, Than
Shwe, on Tuesday," the U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said in New
York.Previously, it appeared the meeting would not take place as junta
leaders ignored Mr Gambari's approaches. Military authorities have continued
to block internet and mobile phone texts, the channels which demonstrators
had used to organise themselves and to send images of last week's violent
crackdown around the world. Up to a dozen independent newspapers are
reported to have stopped publishing. Talks, no progress in Burma

*Eyal Weizman interviewed by Konstantin Kastrissianakis (on his new
book, Hollow Land)*

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=194

** *Konstantin Kastrissianakis: *In your recently published
book, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation
d.shtml>you provide a multilayered understanding of what the spatial
dimensions of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are. Architecture and
planning are revealed as strategic tools in the conflict, could you
elaborate as to how this is so?

*Eyal Weizman:* The book is looking at the various means of spatial
dispossession and control that Israel has built in the West Bank and
Gaza. It attempts to read them not only as an index of government
top-down planning, but, instead, to see the ways in which they are
reflecting conflicts and contradictions and how they mirror the play
of various independent or semi independent organizations, whose
actions are 'architectural' in as much as they have solidified into
form. What this book tries to go against, in a historiographic manner,
is the idea that there is a one to one relationship between state
ideology and facts on the ground. Until now, most of the research
on Israel-Palestine has looked at built realities as the output of
the intentions of a chief political or military designer. That the
relation of space and power is that organized centralised power
determines spatial organization. In fact, the relation between space
and politics is never like that; it is in fact responding to many and
diffused forces and influence, space is the product of conflicting
interests. Even if we are speaking from within the hegemonic Israeli
discourse, it has many fissures within it. Even the practices of
the Israeli occupation of Palestine embody more contradictions than
coherence. This is of course no excuse to the brutal occupation and
the ongoing violation of Palestinian legal rights, but I think hat if
we are more nuanced in understanding politics we could as well find
better ways to manage and deal with conflicts.

The consequence of all this ˆ and this is outlined very clearly in the
book ˆ is the existence of systems of dispossession, and violations
of human rights and international law. The idea behind the book is to
ask how do you take a built reality, like a settlement, a checkpoint,
a road, the wall, and treat those not as embodiments of state ideology
but as diagrams of the very complex political force fields around
them. Built forms are a result of the mediation among the interests
and demands of humanitarians, the intentions of the Israeli military
ˆand the books makes distinctions between various sectors within the
military itself, the influence of international organisations, the
various wills of Palestinian organizations themselves ˆand their
internal conflicts play as well a major role in shaping space. This
approach is based on a more ecological understanding of the spaces of
conflict. In an ecology of conflict state-bound and non-state bound
actors are operating in a condition of relationality and feedback.
In fact, the West Bank is this kind of laboratory, where all these
actors are linked in a relation of conflict/cooperation and through
various other forms of association in a very intense and accelerated
manner. You need to see the realities of the occupation in the West
Bank as a field of forces which is extremely diffused, operating
through the transformation of the built environment. This will allow
you to see the Wall for example not only as the obvious material
manifestation of state ideology but as a diagram of all forces that
act and change its path as it is built. In many cases Palestinian and
Israeli organizations were successful in changing the path of the
wall. ˆ moving it closer to the international border. The problem,
however, always was that by interfering in the design of the wall they
pretty much accepted it as a fact. There is always a paradox of lesser
evil involved in decisions to act.

Interview with Norman Klein on the New Canon
by Jelle Bouwhuis

Exactly a decade ago, around the time that the Guggenheim Bilbao
opened its doors (October 1997), the phrase 'Disneyfication' was
not only used for society in general, as it was introduced by Jean
Baudrillard in the 80s, but became also a fashionable denominator to
characterize the latest trend in museum policy - usually negatively.
However, the process which we casually call Disneyfication, also in
the field of the arts, is inevitable, says Norman Klein. Klein is
a Los Angeles based cultural critic and author of 'The History of
Forgetting - Los Angeles and the erasure of memory' (1997) and 'The
Vatican to Vegas - A History of Special Effects (2004), among others.
The first is centered on the devastation of the quarter Bunker Hill in
LA from the 60s until the 80s. Through evocative sources such as film
history, novels and 'docufables' Klein describes how this once lively
neighborhood with 250.000 inhabitants erased from memory. In the
second he describes how special effects and 'scripted spaces', spaces
that put the spectator in the center to please, amuse and direct him,
became a substitute for feudalist power relations since the Baroque
and continue to do so up and to the current Bush administration in the
United States. Especially since the 50s the art world sees itself more
and more confronted with what Klein calls the New Canon:

I am convinced that the art historical models we set up during the 1920's,
let us say, or even the 1950's - both following a kind of Enlightenment
sense of evolutionary culture - have worn out. In brief, there seems to be
no way to go from the Enlightenment to Disneyland in 1955, much less toward
this illusionist culture that is so essential in 2007.
There are various strategies for taking us to 2007 more easily. For example,
I write about the seventeenth century as an instructive parallel, to help
explain the eras in the arts since Pop, or the mid-fifties. Other models
simply begin with Pop itself, much the way that art historians used to begin
the modern with Manet, or David.

A flock of new shows on LA Pop (Centre Pompidou, 2006 - JB), on LA
Cool (presumably 80s/90s artists such as Mike Kelley, Christopher
Williams and Stephen Prina - JB) suggest the same response, to locate
a new point of origin, to reinvent the American place in the post
1955 art history. Among museums, curatorial buying over the past
thirty years has brought Conceptual Art forward to the cutting edge of
blue-chip indicators - in art pricing, and even art nostalgia.

So what meaning can we build out of this trend? I'll try as follows:
In effect, the history of the last fifty years is increasingly
about the crisis in representing space, from conceptual space to
virtual space to cyberspace to cinematic space to public space to
intimate space/identity. And the era when these Scripted Spaces,
these narratized, themed illusions began to take over begins around
1955. And not only in the fine arts, of course, also in architecture,
in urban planning, in themed environments. And finally, in media
environments - directly into the internet, games, media art. At last,
we begin to see the new canon emerging, for as surely as the stock
market opens every Monday, a canon must emerge in the art world.
Even if it is an anti-canon. But is it an anti-canon really? Instead
of abstraction, we have the ironic staging of space. Instead of
Enlightenment traditions of ontological real, we have Artifice, the
art of the handmade illusionistic space.

And even museums are being redesigned, reinvented as cultural tourism.
Space is problematical, an allegory for global madness, a soothing
journey into a sublime nowhere, a re-enactment of the invasion of the
self by entertainment, which stands in for global economic authority.
The canon then will be more architectonic, more about themed illusion,
trace the end of irony, let us say, from Pop into hyperbolic home
entertainment. Both Pop and Minimalism are potential points of origin,
not the post-modern moment, but rather a post-war paradigm as starting
point. Pop is the figurative scripted space. Minimalism in the victory
of entertainment/design.

It is only a matter of time before this emerging canon - and canons
are always problematical, and anti-canonical - becomes a standard
place to start a conference. We may think this is an evasion, but
isn't canon always something of an evasion? It is a discourse, not
an answer. This new canon, post 1955, will only be valuable if it
generates its own problems effectively. After all, modernism and
postmodernism may be over, but dialectical logic is still the best way
to keep art history alive.

This is an interesting article in relation to the anti-war effort. --rg

KATHLEEN CHRISTISON: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PALESTINE?
By Kathleen Christison

PalestineChronicle.com
Saturday September 22, 2007

Has the anti-war movement abandoned Palestine and the Palestinian
people to the Israeli-U.S. pro-war machine?

A group of anti-war leaders held a conference call at the end of
August under the sponsorship of Michael Lerner's Network of Spiritual
Progressives to do some long-term strategic planning for the anti-war
movement. The discussants included leaders of the country's best known
peace groups -- United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, Pax Christi,
the Department of Peace, and others -- as well as Lerner himself and
Democratic Congressmen Lynn Woolsey and Jim Moran. They talked about
Iraq, of course, but of virtually nothing else. There was a bit about
"peace and justice" in general, one passing mention of trying to stop
an attack on Iran, and a whole lot of talk about avoiding action
on all issues, including even Iraq, until Woolsey and a couple of
progressive colleagues try their hands at manipulating weak-kneed
congressional Democrats into "showing some backbone" on a withdrawal
from Iraq. This must be a new concept in opposing war: do nothing.

You would think there was nothing else wrong in the world. There was
no talk of the U.S. aggression in Afghanistan (which is assumed even
by the anti-war movement to be a "good" war, despite the excessive
number of innocent civilians -- never remembered -- who have been
killed there). There was nothing about safeguarding Lebanon from
frequent Israeli attack and nothing, of course, about supporting
Palestinian human and national rights or opposing Israel's gross
violation of these rights. There was nothing, in short, about any
of the massive injustices perpetrated around the world by the United
States, primarily as part of the so-called war on terror, and ignored
by the anti-war/peace movement. This is a peace movement but apparently
not a justice movement.

Interestingly, two of the discussants, Lerner and Rick Ufford-Chase, a
representative of the Presbyterian Church (USA), now lead organizations
formed after earlier efforts to address the Palestinian-Israeli issue
failed in the face of strong opposition from Israeli supporters. Lerner
formed the Network of Spiritual Progressives after his Tikkun
Communities faced too much opposition from the Jewish community
over the Tikkun effort to tread a middle path between Israel and the
Palestinians. Ufford-Chase was the principal Presbyterian spokesman
when the church launched a campaign in 2004 to divest from companies
supporting Israel's occupation, but after the church backed away from
that position in 2006 under heavy attack from Israeli supporters,
the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, headed by Ufford-Chase, formed a
new organization focused specifically on Iraq, called Christian Peace
Witness for Iraq.

Thus has the anti-war movement abandoned Palestine and the Palestinians
to the Israeli-U.S. pro-war machine. This abandonment is not new by
any means; it just gets more and more unjust with time. United for
Peace and Justice has always been chary of speaking out on behalf of
the Palestinians. It organized a demonstration in June opposing the
Israeli occupation timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the
occupation, but this was such a pro forma event that the section of
UFPJ's website dealing with its "Palestine/Israel Just Peace Campaign"
has not been updated since mid-2004. Pax Christi regularly tackles
nuclear disarmament, the School of the Americas, Iraq, immigration,
Haiti -- as, of course, it should -- but Palestine? Rarely if ever. And
so on, with a few notable exceptions, through the catalogue of peace
movements.

Scott Ritter's latest book on strategizing for the anti-war movement,
Waging Peace, makes no mention of the very unpeaceful situation in
Palestine-Israel.

MoveOn.org and other political organizations give little indication
that they have ever even heard of Palestine. The same for liberal
talk radio hosts on Air America, particularly Thom Hartmann and Randi
Rhodes. Grassroots initiatives such as the Declaration of Peace make
no mention of Palestine and the very preventable tragedy evolving
there. None of the excellent films about the Bush administration's
aggression around the world -- neither Fahrenheit 9/11, nor Uncovered,
nor Hijacking Catastrophe, nor No End in Sight, nor any of the others
that have come out in the last several years -- contains a word
about the very large part Israel plays in the U.S. imperial machine
or about the carte blanche that U.S. war-mongering has given Israel
to step up its oppression of the Palestinians and its murder of the
Palestinian nation.

And this is the key point: Israel's war machine is essentially a part
of the U.S. war machine, Israel's assault on Palestinians is part
of the U.S. "war on terror," the U.S. and Israel do not go to war
anywhere in the region without close coordination and cooperation. The
U.S. enables Israel's occupation and oppression of Palestinians;
Israel facilitates and pushes U.S. war policy.

One does not act without the other, and the Palestinian plight cannot
therefore be separated from whatever other atrocities this war machine
perpetrates elsewhere in the Middle East, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Lebanon, or Iran.

Although Israeli supporters roundly condemn any attempt to link
Israel to planning for the war in Iraq, they never hesitate to link
the Palestinians to the "terrorists" against whom the Iraq war and the
"war on terror" are supposedly being fought.