Zaid Nabulsi – Zionism is an incurable disease of the mind

Posted: 01/22/2009 by editormary in Features, Newswire, Opinions and Letters, Palestine, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War, Zionism
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I lost my gloves one day in a coffee shop in Geneva, and I tell you, it’s difficult to ride without them when it’s really cold. So as I was paying for a new pair with a credit card, the salesman, whom I knew was from Israel, tried to start some small talk by asking me what my family name means. I told him that it relates to the city of Nablus where my family is originally from.

Suddenly, the most bewildered look was plastered on his face. “Where is Nablus?” he asked, “I’ve never heard of it.” Then, after realizing that I knew he was bullshitting me, he pretended to remember, “Ah, Shkheim you mean?”With my insistence not to learn these ugly names that the deranged Zionists have dug up from oblivion to erase our identity, that name certainly didn’t ring a bell. But now it was my turn. Although I knew where he was from, I asked “And you’re… from?” As he smiled while reminding me, I replicated the same look on his face moments ago. “Israel? Where is that?” Then after a brief pause, “Ah, the land of Canaan you mean. Palestine”.

You see if you want to get biblical on me, there is no such thing as Israel either, and I made that clear to this smartass. Here we were all of a sudden; my family descended from a place called Shkheim, and this guy a Palestinian. God does work in mysterious ways, but I still thanked Him for His small mercies that at least my name was not Zaid Shkheimy. “Have a nice day”, I told my Israeli friend. It was in fact a very cold, but still magnificently sunny day to hit the roads. The gloves warmed up my grip on the bike, but my heart was still frozen. I just cannot stand thieves who steal your gloves, or any other kind of thieves.

It was then that it finally occurred to me. Zionism is a sickness, for it takes much more than just a twisted ideology to make people think like that. It requires a profound leap of immorality of a higher order to instill this mentality in your followers. Zionism is not merely a political movement, but in its essence represents a deeply disturbed view of the world, which is a reflection of a terrible disease of the mind.

Indeed, to deny the existence of a vibrant community such as the Palestinian society in the early twentieth century and describe Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” is a disease of the mind.

To assert property claims over real estate after the lapse of more than 2000 years with the same certainty of title as if one resided there yesterday is a disease of the mind.

To describe the colonial immigration to Palestine of a European people with no proven historical link to the ancient Israelites – and whose great, great recorded ancestors have never set foot there – as some kind of a “return” to that land is indicative of a perverted misunderstanding and misapplication of the verb to “return” and can only be a result of a disease of the mind.

To blame the Palestinians for being unreasonable in rejecting a partition plan in 1947 which gave the Jews, who only owned 7 percent of the land, an astonishing half of Palestine, is a disease of the mind.

To demand of the Arabs at the time to peacefully succumb to such partition, where 86 percent of the land designated for the proposed Jewish state was Palestinian-inhabited and owned land, is a disease of the mind.

To eventually grab 78 percent of Palestine through war and to force the flight of the population through deliberate massacres and then call it a war of independence is a disease of the mind.

To deny the orchestrated massacres and eradications of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and then denounce the Israeli historians who later exposed this truth as self-hating Jews is a disease of the mind.

To claim that having escaped the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Dachau is a justification for the murder, expulsion, and occupation of another guiltless people is a disease of the mind.

To legislate that any resident of Poland, Hungary, New York, Brazil, Australia, Iceland, or even Planet Mars, who happens to be blessed with a Jewish mother (yet cannot point to Palestine on the map) has a superior right to “return” and settle in Palestine to someone who has been expelled from his very own land, confined to a squalid refugee camp, and still holds the keys to his house, is a disease of the mind.

To blame God for the theft and occupation of someone else’s land by claiming that it was He who had pledged this land exclusively to the Jews, and to seriously promote the myth of a land promised by the Almighty to His favorite children as an excuse for this crime, is a disease of the mind.

To milk the pockets of the world for the atrocities of the Nazis, while stubbornly refusing a simple admission of guilt, let alone compensation or repatriation, for the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people is a disease of the mind.

To keep reminding and blackmailing the world of the plight of the Jews under Hitler 70 years ago, while at the same time inflicting on the Palestinians today the same fate of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, is a disease of the mind.

To impose a collective guilt overshadowing Western civilization for the Holocaust and then to criminalize all legitimate historical debate of the nature and extent of that horrific event is a disease of the mind.

To virtually incarcerate the Palestinian people inside degrading cages, destroying their livelihoods, confiscating their lands, stealing their water and uprooting their trees, and then to condemn their legitimate resistance as terrorism is a disease of the mind.

To believe you have the right to chase the Palestinians into an Arab capital city in 1982 and to indiscriminately bombard its civilians for a relentless three months, murdering thousands of innocent people is a disease of the mind.

To encircle the civilian camps of Sabra and Chatila after evacuating the fighters and to unleash on them trained dogs (while providing them with night-illuminating flares for efficiency) and then deny culpability for the carnage is a disease of the mind.

To publicly declare a policy of breaking the bones of Palestinian stone-throwers to prevent them from lifting stones again and to enact this policy is a disease of the mind.

To have the sadistic streak of exacting vengeance on the innocent families of suicide bombers by punishing them with the dynamiting of their home is a disease of the mind.

To describe the offer of giving the Palestinians 80 percent of 22 percent of 100 percent of what is originally their own land as a “generous” offer is a disease of the mind.

To believe that you have the right to continue to humiliate the Palestinians at gun point by making them queue for hours to move between their villages, forcing mothers to give birth at check-points is a disease of the mind.

To flatten the camp of Jenin on its inhabitants and deny any wrongdoing is a delusional condition which is symptomatic of a serious disease of the mind.

To build a huge separation wall under the pretext of security, which disconnects farmers from their farms and children from their schools, while stealing even more territory as the wall freely zigzags and encroaches on Palestinian land is a disease of the mind.

To leave behind, in the last 10 days of a losing war in Lebanon, more than one million cluster bombs which have no purpose except to murder and maim unsuspecting civilians is a product of an evil disease of the mind.

To believe that the entire world is out to get you and to denounce any critic of the racist policies of the State of Israel as an anti-Semite, the latest victim being none other than peace-making Jimmy Carter, is an acute stage of mass paranoia, which is a disease of the mind.

To possess, in the midst of a non-nuclear Arab world, more than 200 nuclear warheads capable of incinerating the whole planet in addition to having the most advanced arsenal of weaponry in the world while continuing to play the role of a victim is a disease of the mind.

Yes, and for that salesman in peaceful Geneva to be so insecure as to refuse to acknowledge the name of the largest West Bank city under his country’s brutal military occupation is, sadly, nothing but an infectious disease of the mind.

That’s all what it is, ladies and gentlemen: Zionism is an incurable disease of the mind.

Take care, and if you ride, do it safely.

Zaid Nabulsi is a lawyer. He spent many years working for the United Nations in Geneva. He has a passion for (glorious) Harley Davidson bikes.

Gaza, Greece and the Meaning of Solidarity

Posted: 01/22/2009 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Grassroots Activism, Newswire, Palestine, Resistance, War, Zionism
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WRITTEN BY Noah Cohen

As news came out recently that the United States would be sending a new shipment of bombs to “Israel” from the Greek port of Astakos at some point between the middle and end of January, Palestinians sent out an urgent call to organizers in Greece to stop the shipment. Within a day, several organizations and individuals in Greece responded to the call. Perhaps most significant in the current context was that of the Greek Anti-authoritarian Movement, centrally involved in weeks of rebellion against the repressive forces of their own government:

“The Anti-authoritarian Movement calls for a Pan-hellenic gathering on Thursday, Jan. 15th at Astakos at 1:00 p.m. to block the departure of boats with American weapons which are destined for Israel.
DON’T LET THE CARGO OF AMERICAN WEAPONS LEAVE THE PORT
SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE
RESISTANCE TO GLOBALIZED STATE TERRORISM…”
As pressure began from below, even members of the parliamentary left began to raise questions. On January 12th, the “US” announced that it had canceled the shipment of arms through Astakos because of “concerns” expressed by the Greek government.

The prefect of Aitoloakarnania (where the port lies) announced that they would be sending instead a ship with material aid to Palestinians and expressed the sentiments of the local people:

“The people of Aitoloakarnania do not accept that Greek ports, and especially this port of Platygiali, constitute places for the transfer of weapons and ammunition which are used in belligerent circumstances and in the slaughter of the peoples of our region. … we are sending medicines and medical material to the beseiged people of Gaza instead of weapons [to Israel]…”

Resistance to Globalized State Terrorism

“Resistance to globalized state terrorism” is a call that relates the rebellion of youth and anti-authoritarians in Greece over the last several weeks to the slaughter of people in Gaza. Their opposition moves beyond the usual limits of “solidarity:” stopping a “US” arms shipment to “Israel” becomes a part of their own struggle.

State terrorism is globalized. The “US,” Greece and “Israel” collaborate not just against Palestinians, but against Greeks. It was the “US” that set up Greece’s repressive police structures: the MAT (Monades Apokatastasis Taxis)–“riot” police–are a special branch of political police that have their origins in “US” police training programs. Through the “Public Safety Program” in the 1960s and 1970s, the “US” supplied Greece with weapons and trained police in methods of repression–including torture–as part of the global “war against communism.” Just before Christmas, it was revealed that “Israel” was supplying Greece with a new harsher form of tear-gas to use against demonstrators. Protestors have described it as “asphyxiating.”

People in rebellion find their solidarity in a struggle against injustice which they know directly. It is solidarity in resistance. One can see this reading the statement of high-school students from the Coordinated Struggle of High-Schools in Athens, who chose to re-organize their national mobilization on education rights in Greece on January 9 into a mobilization for solidarity with Gaza:

“…Everyone must take a position:

–either with the victim or the executioner
–either with the Palestinians or with their murderers
–either with the peoples who fight or with the imperialists

…We are on the side of our student comrades in Palestine who have been murdered over these last days by Israeli fire.
Victory to the Palestinian people!”
Fighting zionism

The ties are concrete that link the police murder of Alexis Grigoropulos in Greece, the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, and the genocidal zionist assault on Gaza. The central role of the “US” and “Israel” in developing a global system of police repression has everything to do with their common history as colonial settler-states. As Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon and others have written, it’s in the colonies that the methods, apparatus, and ideology of fascism developed. Concentration camps, special laws that expropriate whole populations based on “race,” and the systematic annihilation of peoples: Europe did this to Africa, the Arab world, and the Americas before turning to the interior. It’s in the settler colonies that whole new classes emerge whose livelihood depends on repression: the various military and paramilitary formations of the settler garrison become the police, mercenaries and prison guards of the totalitarian state. Germany, Italy and Spain recruited their own repressive forces from the colonies. The Algerian settlers became the most fascistic bloc of political power within France and threatened to seize control of the country and impose a military dictatorship as France began to back away from its colony.

Wherever the “pioneering frontier” is most active so also is the development of genocidal repressive power. The “US” contracts zionist mercenaries and companies to develop its own domestic security state. Elbit Systems–the “Israeli” company that designed and built the wall that is intended to starve communities in Palestine–was contracted to develop the “US” border wall with Mexico and flight security systems in airlines. Instinctive Shooting International–now renamed Security Systems International–provided “Israeli” mercenaries for “security” in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, and now regularly organizes trainings in “Israel” for “US” police and Homeland Security. Repression is now “Israel’s” most important global industry–all it really has to export.

The failure to confront zionism as ideology and as material power is a failure to confront a bloc of repressive, white-supremacist power within our own society. This has been a major weak point of social justice, anti-racist and anti-war organizing. To take the most obvious example, the strength of zionism within labor unions has been a major force for turning them into pro-imperialist institutions.

Solidarity

The Greeks have understood that solidarity means recognizing the concrete points of intersection where the fight becomes serious.

The US is dead center of the system of genocide and global repression. The physical apparatus is here in every major city and across the country in small towns: munitions factories, military bases, recruiting centers. Virtually every major university has its research institutions to develop instruments of mass murder, and its theoretical institutes to develop strategies of repressive power.

But this extensiveness is also its weakness. The main strategy of security is depoliticization: there is simply no way to defend so many nodes of violence from a movement that is serious about intefering with them.

The Greeks have given a small example of what such a movement might look like. Let’s stop the flow of weapons at the source.

cartoon of the day

Posted: 01/22/2009 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, War
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Strategic Barbarity – Psy war and collateral damage

Posted: 01/22/2009 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Features, Hasbara Deconstruction Site, Newswire, Resistance, War
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WRITTEN BY FABIO MINI – By definition, collateral damages are those which happen to the civilian population’s detriment while military targets are being struck. They can be predicted or unexpected and they are caused by inaccuracy of weapons or mistakes. During the war in Kosovo, the NATO spokesman used the term in an extensive and absolutory way, even when the attack against civil structures was indeed intentional. Therefore, a fact liable to be a war crime was declassified and victims became responsible for their deaths, guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The case constituted the beginning of a new school of thought and today people have simply gotten used to the inevitability of civil victims in any kind of conflict, even the sort between cops and robbers. In a military respect, this is a signal of the regression of war into a conflict between asymmetrical sides: a regression both of humanity and of strategy. The regression of humanity becomes even more severe since it’s supported by military strategy and is then passed off as “evolution”. The fact is that, despite all the international laws, military codes and customs of war, it is civilian victims who have once again become the real targets in war. We have returned to “structural” destruction adopted during WWII through carpet bombings and during the Vietnam War through the use of napalm.

This kind of war seemed to come to its end when it was urged that a distinction be made between combatant and non-combatant forces, when ethics were brought to the fore to implement the rules about the protection of civilians and when even in the name of interest, it was suggested to limit damages since, in Liddell Hart’s words, “the enemy of to-day is the customer of the morrow and the ally of the future”. This kind of war seemed to be forever concluded when we turned from nuclear destruction to precision strikes, which represent the most important strategic and technological revolution of the second half of the last century. We have lost any track and memory of all this while pundits indulging in the military justification of collateral damages are the consequent ignorant persons. With all the advanced armies and weapons, collateral damages are supposed to be tending to zero and with the new enemies, archaic and desperate, there aren’t any military and productive structures that can to be destroyed in order to bend the will of their resistance. There are only houses, churches, mosques… and people, women and children. All easy targets, and therefore the real strategic challenge doesn’t lie in how to destroy – but in how to avoid striking – the innocent. In Chechnya, Afghanistan, Lebanon and, today, Gaza, the wanton strategy of striking civilians in order to make them turn against the insurgents, rebels or so-called terrorists is another regression. This should remind us of the way counterrevolutionary wars have been resolved, that indeed always had the victory of the rebels, as well as bring to mind the wicked deeds of colonial occupations. Even accounting for and disguising these regressions by propaganda means is a deja vù. The names and some means have changed, yet the outcomes are the same as always. The psychological war, trying to prove that civilians aren’t our targets but they are really victims of the enemy exploiting them as human shields hasn’t changed for a thousand years, and that’s why the enemy has to always be depicted as “wicked”. The same messages are used, even though leaflets, radio, television, ambassadors and political lobbies have been substituted for proclamations and infiltrates. Yesterday, the population lacking an alarm system used to become aware of the immanent attack from the bombers’ roar. A few minutes to seek shelter. Today, we phone the victims, but this, like in the past, can’t help those who are trapped in like a rat and have nowhere else to go. It just looks cynical.

The latest new aspect of psychological war is that it is no longer aimed at the enemy but at one’s own troops and, mainly, at the national and international public opinion. This arm of brainwashing the masses and destroying intellects is directed at one’s own forces and allies and every soldier knows that there is nothing more dangerous than starting to believe one’s own propaganda. The most powerful armies in the world can’t recognize and face the new forms of asymmetrical war. They can’t penetrate, make distinctions, sort out and operate in a surgical way. They can’t handle their own power excess and have lost awareness of the usefulness and lawlessness of provoking civilian destruction. They don’t realize that all this only helps barbarize war: a luxury the terrorists can afford. Not us.

Source: La Repubblica http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/01/20/la-barbarie-strategica.html

 

Translated from Italian by Diego Traversa and revised by Mary Rizzo, members of Tlaxcala www.tlaxcala.es

 

BAN Achinoam Nini (Noa) from participating at Gaza Charity Event!

Posted: 01/21/2009 by editormary in Mary\'s Choice, Music, Poetry, Events, Newswire, Palestine, Petitions, Resistance, War, Zionism
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UPDATE FROM JULIANO MER KHAMIS
Hi, we were informed by Achinoam’s Nini manager that she and Mira Awad won’t be performing tomorrow at the Solidarity event with the children of Gaza.
Call to Kill the Parents and Volunteer to Sing for the Children
We, the undersigned, demand that Achinoam Nini be barred from participating in the Gaza charity event scheduled for Friday, January 23, 2009  at “Levontin 7” in Tel Aviv

 

In an open letter to the Palestinian people, Israeli singer Ahinoam Nini wrote:
“I can only wish for you that Israel will do the job we all know needs to be done, and finally RID YOU of this cancer, this virus, this monster called fanaticism, today, called Hamas.”
 
Hebrew
 
English
 
Today, after her wish has been fulfilled, and the Israeli army “GOT RID” of over 1300 Palestinians, over 400 of them children, over 100 of them women, and injured more than 5000, Ahinoam Nini wants to share the stage at a charity performance for the sake of Gaza’s children?

 

There is no limit to your hypocrisy, Noa. You supported the war which orphaned these children, and now you want to play “Mama Theresa” and help them out? How cynical can you be? Thousands of children were crippled physically and emotionally for the rest of their lives in a war that not only did you not protest, you vocally justified. Maybe you can increase your popularity and try to wash your bloody hands by making headlines on the backs of these children, but you will not be able to clear your dirty conscience.

Not unless you recognize that an occupier has no moral right to tell an occupied people what to do, including what leadership it can or cannot democratically elect. Not before you recognize that the real “virus” or “cancer,” to use your ill-willed words, the “monster” is the ongoing occupation and the oppression that comes with it. anything it spawns, is its own doing. The real fanatics around here, Noa, are the people who think that they have the right to inflict so much harm and damage and pain to a besieged and beleaguered and disenfranchised people.

send adhesions to Juliano Mer Khamis children.gaza3@gmail.com

 

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