Archive for December 2016
Most Miserable Countries In The World?
Mind you this list is of 2014.
According to a analysis published by the Cato Institute, (an institute Not known for objectivity and its non-politicized articles) Venezuela holds the disreputable top spot as the most miserable nation in the world.
The 22 Most Miserable Countries In The World
The formula used to compile the list involves inflation, lending rates, and unemployment rates minus year-on-year per capita GDP growth. (And what about public services level and health care?)
Venezuela’s much higher misery score of 79.4 is much higher than every other country except Iran (61.6), and the top 22 countries are above 25 on the index.
Inflation is the major contributing factor plaguing three of the top four nations listed. The other countries are either hampered by high unemployment or interest rates. (All colonial nations politically enjoy low rates of borrowing. Is that taken into consideration?)
Here is the top 28 (and here’s the full study):
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/most-miserable-places-in-the-world-2014-4#ixzz312vSMk2Y
Top Ten Myths about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
by Jeremy R. Hammond | June 17, 2010
Myth #1 – Jews and Arabs have always been in conflict in the region.
Although Palestinians “Arabs” were the vast majority in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel, there had always been a minority Jewish population, as well. For the most part, Jewish Palestinians got along with their Palestinian Arabs (Moslem and Christians) neighbors.
This began to change with the onset of the Zionist movement, because the Zionists rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination and wanted Palestine for their own, to create a “Jewish State” in a region where Arabs were the majority and owned most of the land.
For instance, after a series of riots in Jaffa in 1921 resulting in the deaths of 47 Jews and 48 Arabs, the occupying British held a commission of inquiry, which reported their finding that “there is no inherent anti-Semitism in the country, racial or religious.” Rather, Arab attacks on Jewish communities were the result of Arab fears about the stated goal of the Zionists to take over the land. (But we are all Semite in this region according to western c=invented terms)
After major violence again erupted in 1929, the British Shaw Commission report noted that “In less than 10 years three serious attacks have been made by Arabs on Jews. For 80 years before the first of these attacks there is no recorded instance of any similar incidents.”
Representatives from all sides of the emerging conflict testified to the commission that prior to the First World War, “the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance, a quality which today is almost unknown in Palestine.”
The problem was that “The Arab people of Palestine are today united in their demand for representative government”, but were being denied that right by the Zionists and their British benefactors. (Britain refused to even hold municipal elections during its mandate on the ground that the Jews were minority)
The British Hope-Simpson report of 1930 similarly noted that Jewish residents of non-Zionist communities in Palestine enjoyed friendship with their Arab neighbors. “It is quite a common sight to see an Arab sitting in the verandah of a Jewish house”, the report noted. “The position is entirely different in the Zionist colonies.” (The problem was Zionism plans to take hold of Palestine through building colonies and settlements)
Myth #2 – The United Nations created Israel.
The U.N. became involved when the British sought to wash its hands of the volatile situation its policies had helped to create, and to extricate itself from Palestine. To that end, they requested that the U.N. take up the matter.
As a result, a U.N. Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created to examine the issue and offer its recommendation on how to resolve the conflict.
UNSCOP contained no representatives from any Arab country and in the end issued a report that explicitly rejected the right of the Palestinians to self-determination. Rejecting the democratic solution to the conflict, UNSCOP instead proposed that Palestine be partitioned into two states: one Arab and one Jewish.
The U.N. General Assembly endorsed UNSCOP’s in its Resolution 181. It is often claimed that this resolution “partitioned” Palestine, or that it provided Zionist leaders with a legal mandate for their subsequent declaration of the existence of the state of Israel, or some other similar variation on the theme. All such claims are absolutely false.
Resolution 181 merely endorsed UNSCOP’s report and conclusions as a recommendation.
Needless to say, for Palestine to have been officially partitioned, this recommendation would have had to have been accepted by both Jews and Arabs, which it was not.
Moreover, General Assembly resolutions are not considered legally binding (only Security Council resolutions are). And, furthermore, the U.N. would have had no authority to take land from one people and hand it over to another, and any such resolution seeking to so partition Palestine would have been null and void, anyway. (The recommended partition gave the Zionists 56% of the land while the jews represented 40% of the population)
Myth #3 – The Arabs missed an opportunity to have their own state in 1947.
The U.N. recommendation to partition Palestine was rejected by the Arabs. Many commentators today point to this rejection as constituting a missed “opportunity” for the Arabs to have had their own state. But characterizing this as an “opportunity” for the Arabs is patently ridiculous. The Partition plan was in no way, shape, or form an “opportunity” for the Arabs.
First of all, as already noted, Arabs were a large majority in Palestine at the time, with Jews making up about a third of the population by then, due to massive immigration of Jews from Europe (in 1922, by contrast, a British census showed that Jews represented only about 11 percent of the population).
Additionally, land ownership statistics from 1945 showed that Arabs owned more land than Jews in every single district of Palestine, including Jaffa, where Arabs owned 47 percent of the land while Jews owned 39 percent – and Jaffa boasted the highest percentage of Jewish-owned land of any district. In other districts, Arabs owned an even larger portion of the land.
At the extreme other end, for instance, in Ramallah, Arabs owned 99 percent of the land. In the whole of Palestine, Arabs owned 85 percent of the land, while Jews owned less than 7 percent, which remained the case up until the time of Israel’s creation.
Yet, despite these facts, the U.N. partition recommendation had called for more than half of the land of Palestine to be given to the Zionists for their “Jewish State”.
The truth is that no Arab could be reasonably expected to accept such an unjust proposal. For political commentators today to describe the Arabs’ refusal to accept a recommendation that their land be taken away from them, premised upon the explicit rejection of their right to self-determination, as a “missed opportunity” represents either an astounding ignorance of the roots of the conflict or an unwillingness to look honestly at its history.
It should also be noted that the partition plan was also rejected by many Zionist leaders.
Among those who supported the idea, which included David Ben-Gurion, their reasoning was that this would be a pragmatic step towards their goal of acquiring the whole of Palestine for a “Jewish State” – something which could be finally accomplished later through force of arms.
When the idea of partition was first raised years earlier, for instance, Ben-Gurion had written that “after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine”.
Partition should be accepted, he argued, “to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of Palestine”. The Jewish State would then “have to preserve order”, if the Arabs would not acquiesce, “by machine guns, if necessary.”
Myth #4 – Israel has a “right to exist”.
The fact that this term is used exclusively with regard to Israel is instructive as to its legitimacy, as is the fact that the demand is placed upon Palestinians to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”, while no similar demand is placed upon Israelis to recognize the “right to exist” of a Palestinian state.
Nations don’t have rights, people do. The proper framework for discussion is within that of the right of all peoples to self-determination.
Seen in this, the proper framework, it is an elementary observation that it is not the Arabs which have denied Jews that right, but the Jews which have denied that right to the Arabs. The terminology of Israel’s “right to exist” is constantly employed to obfuscate that fact.
As already noted, Israel was not created by the U.N., but came into being on May 14, 1948, when the Zionist leadership unilaterally, and with no legal authority, declared Israel’s existence, with no specification as to the extent of the new state’s borders.
In a moment, the Zionists had declared that Arabs no longer the owners of their land – it now belonged to the Jews. In an instant, the Zionists had declared that the majority Arabs of Palestine were now second-class citizens in the new “Jewish State”.
The Arabs, needless to say, did not passively accept this development, and neighboring Arab countries declared war on the Zionist regime in order to prevent such a grave injustice against the majority inhabitants of Palestine.
It must be emphasized that the Zionists had no right to most of the land they declared as part of Israel, while the Arabs did.
This war, therefore, was not, as is commonly asserted in mainstream commentary, an act of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. Rather, the Arabs were acting in defense of their rights, to prevent the Zionists from illegally and unjustly taking over Arab lands and otherwise disenfranchising the Arab population.
The act of aggression was the Zionist leadership’s unilateral declaration of the existence of Israel, and the Zionists’ use of violence to enforce their aims both prior to and subsequent to that declaration.
In the course of the war that ensued, Israel implemented a policy of ethnic cleansing. 700,000 Arab Palestinians were either forced from their homes or fled out of fear of further massacres, such as had occurred in the village of Deir Yassin shortly before the Zionist declaration.
These Palestinians have never been allowed to return to their homes and land, despite it being internationally recognized and encoded in international law that such refugees have an inherent “right of return”.
Palestinians will never agree to the demand made of them by Israel and its main benefactor, the U.S., to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. To do so is effectively to claim that Israel had a “right” to take Arab land, while Arabs had no right to their own land.
It is effectively to claim that Israel had a “right” to ethnically cleanse Palestine, while Arabs had no right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in their own homes, on their own land.
The constant use of the term “right to exist” in discourse today serves one specific purpose: It is designed to obfuscate the reality that it is the Jews that have denied the Arab right to self-determination, and not vice versa, and to otherwise attempt to legitimize Israeli crimes against the Palestinians, both historical and contemporary.
Myth #5 – The Arab nations threatened Israel with annihilation in 1967 and 1973
The fact of the matter is that it was Israel that fired the first shot of the “Six Day War”.
Early on the morning of June 5, Israel launched fighters in a surprise attack on Egypt (then the United Arab Republic), and successfully decimated the Egyptian air force while most of its planes were still on the ground.
It is virtually obligatory for this attack to be described by commentators today as “preemptive”. But to have been “preemptive”, by definition, there must have been an imminent threat of Egyptian aggression against Israel. Yet there was none.
It is commonly claimed that President Nasser’s bellicose rhetoric, blockade of the Straits of Tiran, movement of troops into the Sinai Peninsula, and expulsion of U.N. peacekeeping forces from its side of the border collectively constituted such an imminent threat.
Yet, both U.S. and Israeli intelligence assessed at the time that the likelihood Nasser would actually attack was low. The CIA assessed that Israel had overwhelming superiority in force of arms, and would, in the event of a war, defeat the Arab forces within two weeks; within a week if Israel attacked first, which is what actually occurred.
It must be kept in mind that Egypt had been the victim of aggression by the British, French, and Israelis in the 1956 “Suez Crisis”, following Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.
In that war, the three aggressor nations conspired to wage war upon Egypt, which resulted in an Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula. Under U.S. pressure, Israel withdrew from the Sinai in 1957, but Egypt had not forgotten the Israeli aggression.
Moreover, Egypt had formed a loose alliance with Syria and Jordan, with each pledging to come to the aid of the others in the event of a war with Israel. Jordan had criticized Nasser for not living up to that pledge after the Israeli attack on West Bank village of Samu the year before, and his rhetoric was a transparent attempt to regain face in the Arab world.
That Nasser’s positioning was defensive, rather than projecting an intention to wage an offensive against Israel, was well recognized among prominent Israelis. As Avraham Sela of the Shalem Center has observed, “The Egyptian buildup in Sinai lacked a clear offensive plan, and Nasser’s defensive instructions explicitly assumed an Israeli first strike.”
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin acknowledged that “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Yitzhak Rabin, who would also later become Prime Minister of Israel, admitted in 1968 that “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”
Israelis have also acknowledged that their own rhetoric at the time about the “threat” of “annihilation” from the Arab states was pure propaganda.
General Chaim Herzog, commanding general and first military governor of the occupied West Bank following the war, admitted that “There was no danger of annihilation. Israeli headquarters never believed in this danger.”
General Ezer Weizman similarly said, “There was never a danger of extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any serious meeting.”
Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev acknowledged, “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six-Day War, and we had never thought of such possibility.”
Israeli Minister of Housing Mordechai Bentov has also acknowledged that “The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”
In 1973, in what Israelis call the “Yom Kippur War”, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise offensive to retake the Sinai and the Golan Heights, respectively. This joint action is popularly described in contemporaneous accounts as an “invasion” of or act of “aggression” against Israel.
Yet, as already noted, following the June ’67 war, the U.N. Security Council passed resolution 242 calling upon Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. Israel, needless to say, refused to do so and has remained in perpetual violation of international law ever since.
During the 1973 war, Egypt and Syria thus “invaded” their own territory, then under illegal occupation by Israel.
The corollary of the description of this war as an act of Arab aggression implicitly assumes that the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, West Bank, and Gaza Strip were Israeli territory. This is, needless to say, a grossly false assumption that demonstrates the absolutely prejudicial and biased nature of mainstream commentary when it comes to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
This false narrative fits in with the larger overall narrative, equally fallacious, of Israeli as the “victim” of Arab intransigence and aggression. This narrative, largely unquestioned in the West, flips reality on its head.
Myth #6 – U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 called only for a partial Israeli withdrawal.
Resolution 242 was passed in the wake of the June ’67 war and called for the “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” While the above argument enjoys widespread popularity, it has no merit whatsoever.
The central thesis of this argument is that the absence of the word “the” before “occupied territories” in that clause means not “all of the occupied territories” were intended. Essentially, this argument rests upon the ridiculous logic that because the word “the” was omitted from the clause, we may therefore understand this to mean that “some of the occupied territories” was the intended meaning.
Grammatically, the absence of the word “the” has no effect on the meaning of this clause, which refers to “territories”, plural.
A simple litmus test question is: Is it territory that was occupied by Israel in the ’67 war? If yes, then, under international law and Resolution 242, Israel is required to withdraw from that territory. Such territories include the Syrian Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.
The French version of the resolution, equally authentic as the English, contains the definite article, and a majority of the members of the Security Council made clear during deliberations that their understanding of the resolution was that it would require Israel to fully withdraw from all occupied territories.
Additionally, it is impossible to reconcile with the principle of international law cited in the preamble to the resolution, of “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”. To say that the U.N. intended that Israel could retain some of the territory it occupied during the war would fly in the face of this cited principle.
One could go on to address various other logical fallacies associated with this frivolous argument, but as it is absurd on its face, it would be superfluous to do so.
Myth #7 – Israeli military action against its neighbors is only taken to defend itself against terrorism.
The facts tell another story. Take, for instance, the devastating 1982 Israeli war on Lebanon. As political analyst Noam Chomsky extensively documents in his epic analysis “The Fateful Triangle”, this military offensive was carried out with barely even the thinnest veil of a pretext.
While one may read contemporary accounts insisting this war was fought in response to a constant shelling of northern Israeli by the PLO, then based in Lebanon, the truth is that, despite continuous Israeli provocations, the PLO had with only a few exceptions abided by a cease-fire that had been in place. Moreover, in each of those instances, it was Israel that had first violated the cease-fire.
Among the Israeli provocations, throughout early 1982, it attacked and sank Lebanese fishing boats and otherwise committed hundreds of violations of Lebanese territorial waters. It committed thousands of violations of Lebanese airspace, yet never did manage to provoke the PLO response it sought to serve as the casus belli for the planned invasion of Lebanon.
On May 9, Israel bombed Lebanon, an act that was finally met with a PLO response when it launched rocket and artillery fire into Israel.
Then a terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal attempted to assassinate Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London. Although the PLO itself had been at war with Abu Nidal, who had been condemned to death by a Fatah military tribunal in 1973, and despite the fact that Abu Nidal was not based in Lebanon, Israel cited this event as a pretext to bomb the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, killing 200 Palestinians.
The PLO responded by shelling settlements in northern Israel. Yet Israel did not manage to provoke the kind of larger-scale response it was looking to use as a casus belli for its planned invasion.
As Israeli scholar Yehoshua Porath has suggested, Israel’s decision to invade Lebanon, far from being a response to PLO attacks, rather “flowed from the very fact that the cease-fire had been observed”.
Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Porath assessed that “The government’s hope is that the stricken PLO, lacking a logistic and territorial base, will return to its earlier terrorism…. In this way, the PLO will lose part of the political legitimacy that it has gained … undercutting the danger that elements will develop among the Palestinians that might become a legitimate negotiating partner for future political accommodations.”
As another example, take Israel’s Operation Cast Lead from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009.
Prior to Israel’s assault on the besieged and defenseless population of the Gaza Strip, Israel had entered into a cease-fire agreement with the governing authority there, Hamas. Contrary to popular myth, it was Israel, not Hamas, who ended the cease-fire.
The pretext for Operation Cast Lead is obligatorily described in Western media accounts as being the “thousands” of rockets that Hamas had been firing into Israel prior to the offensive, in violation of the cease-fire.
The truth is that from the start of the cease-fire in June until November 4, Hamas fired no rockets, despite numerous provocations from Israel, including stepped-up operations in the West Bank and Israeli soldiers taking pop-shots at Gazans across the border, resulting in several injuries and at least one death.
On November 4, it was again Israel who violated the cease-fire, with airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza that resulted in further deaths. Hamas finally responded with rocket fire, and from that point on the cease-fire was effectively over, with daily tit-for-tat attacks from both sides.
Despite Israel’s lack of good faith, Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire from the time it was set to officially expire in December. Israel rejected the offer, preferring instead to inflict violent collective punishment on the people of Gaza.
As the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center noted, the truce “brought relative quiet to the western Negev population”, with 329 rocket and mortar attacks, “most of them during the month and a half after November 4″, when Israel had violated and effectively ended the truce. This stands in remarkable contrast to the 2,278 rocket and mortar attacks in the six months prior to the truce. Until November 4, the center also observed, “Hamas was careful to maintain the ceasefire.”
If Israel had desired to continue to mitigate the threat of Palestinian militant rocket attacks, it would have simply not ended the cease-fire, which was very highly effective in reducing the number of such attacks, including eliminating all such attacks by Hamas. It would not have instead resorted to violence, predictably resulting in a greatly escalated threat of retaliatory rocket and mortar attacks from Palestinian militant groups.
Even if Israel could claim that peaceful means had been exhausted and that a resort military force to act in self-defense to defend its civilian population was necessary, that is demonstrably not what occurred. Instead, Israel deliberately targeted the civilian population of Gaza with systematic and deliberate disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks on residential areas, hospitals, schools, and other locations with protected civilian status under international law.
As the respected international jurist who headed up the United Nations investigation into the assault, Richard Goldstone, has observed, the means by which Israel carried out Operation Cast Lead were not consistent with its stated aims, but was rather more indicative of a deliberate act of collective punishment of the civilian population.
Myth #8 – God gave the land to the Jews, so the Arabs are the occupiers.
No amount of discussion of the facts on the ground will ever convince many Jews and Christians that Israel could ever do wrong, because they view its actions as having the hand of God behind it, and that its policies are in fact the will of God. They believe that God gave the land of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to the Jewish people, and therefore Israel has a “right” to take it by force from the Palestinians, who, in this view, are the wrongful occupiers of the land.
But one may simply turn to the pages of their own holy books to demonstrate the fallaciousness of this or similar beliefs. Christian Zionists are fond of quoting passages from the Bible such as the following to support their Zionist beliefs:
“And Yahweh said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him: ‘Lift your eyes now and look from the place where you are – northward, southward, eastward, and westward; for all the land which you see I give to you and your descendants forever. And I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth; so that if a man could number the dust of the earth, then your descendants could also be numbered. Arise, walk in the land through its length and its width, for I give it to you.” (Genesis 13:14-17)
“Then Yahweh appeared to him and said: ‘Do not go down to Egypt; live in the land of which I shall tell you. Dwell in the land, and I will be with you and bless you; for to you and your descendants I give all these lands, and I will perform the oath which I swore to Abraham your father.” (Genesis 26: 1-3)
“And behold, Yahweh stood above it and said: ‘I am Yahweh, God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.” (Genesis 28:13)
Yet Christian Zionists conveniently disregard other passages providing further context for understanding this covenant, such as the following:
“You shall therefore keep all My statutes and all My judgments, and perform them, that the land where I am bringing you to dwell may not vomit you out.” (Leviticus 20:22)
“But if you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments … but break My covenant … I will bring the land to desolation, and your enemies who dwell in it shall be astonished at it. I will scatter you among the nations and draw out a sword after you; your land shall be desolate and your cities waste … You shall perish among the nations, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up.” (Leviticus 26: 14, 15, 32-33, 28)
“Therefore Yahweh was very angry with Israel, and removed them from His sight; there was none left but the tribe of Judah alone…. So Israel was carried away from their own land to Assyria, as it is to this day.” (2 Kings 17:18, 23)
“And I said, after [Israel] had done all these things, ‘Return to Me.’ But she did not return. And her treacherous sister Judah saw it. Then I saw that for all the causes for which backsliding Israel had committed adultery, I had put her away and given her a certificate of divorce; yet her treacherous sister Judah did not fear, but went and played the harlot also.” (Jeremiah 3: 7-8)
Yes, in the Bible, Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, told the Hebrews that the land could be theirs – if they would obey his commandments. Yet, as the Bible tells the story, the Hebrews were rebellious against Yahweh in all their generations.
What Jewish and Christian Zionists omit from their Biblical arguments in favor of continued Israel occupation is that Yahweh also told the Hebrews, including the tribe of Judah (from whom the “Jews” are descended), that he would remove them from the land if they broke the covenant by rebelling against his commandments, which is precisely what occurs in the Bible.
Thus, the theological argument for Zionism is not only bunk from a secular point of view, but is also a wholesale fabrication from a scriptural perspective, representing a continued rebelliousness against Yahweh and his Torah, and the teachings of Yeshua the Messiah (Jesus the Christ) in the New Testament. (I refrained from any comment on this myth because religious verses are all crap and don’t deal with, except in historical context of religions)
Myth #9 – Palestinians reject the two-state solution because they want to destroy Israel.
In an enormous concession to Israel, Palestinians have long accepted the two-state solution.
The elected representatives of the Palestinian people in Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had since the 70s recognized the state of Israel and accepted the two-state solution to the conflict.
Despite this, Western media continued through the 90s to report that the PLO rejected this solution and instead wanted to wipe Israel off the map.
The pattern has been repeated since Hamas was voted into power in the 2006 Palestinian elections.
Although Hamas has for years accepted the reality of the state of Israel and demonstrated a willingness to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside Israel, it is virtually obligatory for Western mainstream media, even today, to report that Hamas rejects the two-state solution, that it instead seeks “to destroy Israel”.
In fact, in early 2004, shortly before he was assassinated by Israel, Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said that Hamas could accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Hamas has since repeatedly reiterated its willingness to accept a two-state solution. (Actually, evry Palestinian leader who recognized Israel was assassinated by Israel)
In early 2005, Hamas issued a document stating its goal of seeking a Palestinian state alongside Israel and recognizing the 1967 borders.
The exiled head of the political bureau of Hamas, Khalid Mish’al, wrote in the LondonGuardian in January 2006 that Hamas was “ready to make a just peace”. He wrote that “We shall never recognize the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights…. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms.”
During the campaigning for the 2006 elections, the top Hamas official in Gaza, Mahmoud al-Zahar said that Hamas was ready to “accept to establish our independent state on the area occupied [in] ’67″, a tacit recognition of the state of Israel.
The elected prime minister from Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, said in February 2006 that Hamas accepted “the establishment of a Palestinian state” within the “1967 borders”.
In April 2008, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter met with Hamas officials and afterward stated that Hamas “would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders” and would “accept the right of Israel to live as a neighbor next door in peace”. It was Hamas’ “ultimate goal to see Israel living in their allocated borders, the 1967 borders, and a contiguous, vital Palestinian state alongside.”
That same month Hamas leader Meshal said, “We have offered a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, a truce of 10 years as a proof of recognition.”
In 2009, Meshal said that Hamas “has accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders”.
Hamas’ shift in policy away from total rejection of the existence of the state of Israel towards acceptance of the international consensus on a two-state solution to the conflict is in no small part a reflection of the will of the Palestinian public.
A public opinion survey from April of last year, for instance, found that three out of four Palestinians were willing to accept a two-state solution.
Myth #10 – The U.S. is an honest broker and has sought to bring about peace in the Middle East.
Rhetoric aside, the U.S. supports Israel’s policies, including its illegal occupation and other violations of international humanitarian law. It supports Israel’s criminal policies financially, militarily, and diplomatically.
The Obama administration, for example, stated publically that it was opposed to Israel’s settlement policy and ostensibly “pressured” Israel to freeze colonization activities.
Yet very early on, the administration announced that it would not cut back financial or military aid to Israel, even if it defied international law and continued settlement construction. That message was perfectly well understood by the Netanyahu government in Israel, which continued its colonization policies.
To cite another straightforward example, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed resolutions openly declaring support for Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, despite a constant stream of reports evidencing Israeli war crimes.
On the day the U.S. Senate passed its resolution “reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas” (January 8, 2009), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a statement demanding that Israel allow it to assist victims of the conflict because the Israeli military had blocked access to wounded Palestinians – a war crime under international law.
That same day, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement condemning Israel for firing on a U.N. aid convoy delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza and for the killing of two U.N. staff members – both further war crimes.
On the day that the House passed its own version of the resolution, the U.N. announced that it had had to stop humanitarian work in Gaza because of numerous incidents in which its staff, convoys, and installations, including clinics and schools, had come under Israeli attack.
U.S. financial support for Israel surpasses $3 billion annually. When Israel waged a war to punish the defenseless civilian population of Gaza, its pilots flew U.S.-made F-16 fighter-bombers and Apache helicopter gunships, dropping U.S.-made bombs, including the use of white phosphorus munitions in violation of international law.
U.S. diplomatic support for Israeli crimes includes its use of the veto power in the U.N. Security Council. When Israel was waging a devastating war against the civilian population and infrastructure of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the U.S. vetoed a cease-fire resolution.
As Israel was waging Operation Cast Lead, the U.S. delayed the passage of a resolution calling for an end to the violence, and then abstained rather than criticize Israel once it finally allowed the resolution to be put to a vote.
When the U.N. Human Rights Council officially adopted the findings and recommendations of its investigation into war crimes during Operation Cast Lead, headed up by Richard Goldstone, the U.S. responded by announcing its intention to block any effort to have the Security Council similarly adopt its conclusions and recommendations. The U.S. Congress passed a resolution rejecting the Goldstone report because it found that Israel had committed war crimes.
Through its virtually unconditional support for Israel, the U.S. has effectively blocked any steps to implement the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The so-called “peace process” has for many decades consisted of U.S. and Israeli rejection Palestinian self-determination and blocking of any viable Palestinian state.
About the Author
Jeremy R. Hammond
Civil war as a game for children
Ghayas Hachem
Boréal
Montréal, 2014, 224 pages
Nous sommes à Beyrouth, dans les années 1980, en pleine guerre civile libanaise. Mais du côté des enfants. Du côté de l’imaginaire comme échappatoire, du jeu comme porte de sortie. Au début, du moins. Si la réalité finissait par prendre le dessus ?
Play Boys, premier roman du Montréalais Ghayas Hachem, fait se confronter constamment le ludisme et la réalité, tout autant que l’enfance et l’âge adulte. Mais plus on avance, plus les cloisons s’éventrent, les repères s’égarent.
Jouer à la guerre comme un enfant, ou entrer de plain-pied dans l’horreur, comme un homme ?
C’est le dilemme devant lequel l’auteur, lui-même né au Liban en 1973, place son personnage principal, un garçon de 12 ans.
Dilemme qui se pose sans se poser d’une certaine façon, puisque tout se produit comme par enchantement, tout naturellement, par glissements successifs.
Comment en vient-on à commettre l’irréparable, à sombrer dans la barbarie ? Est-ce que la guerre pardonne tout ?
Comment résister à l’appel du bourreau, de la vengeance ?
Qu’est-ce qu’un traître, pour qui ? Ce pourraient être les questions au centre de Play Boys.
Il y a aussi dans cette histoire à multiples tiroirs, qui n’est pas sans rappeler le percutant Parfum de poussière de Rawi Hage (Alto, 2007), une grande amitié entre deux jeunes garçons. Et la trahison qui entre en jeu.
Il y a la famille, sans tendresse aucune. Cette famille qui, à cause de la guerre, vit depuis près d’un an dans un appartement qui n’est pas le sien : il appartient à de jeunes mariés émigrés en Australie.
La quête du père
La mère est aigrie. Le frère aîné lui est soumis, lui obéit en tout.
Et le père ? Pas de père, justement. Il est absent, parti. Mystère.
Mystère du père absent, qui traverse le récit. On ne comprendra qu’à la fin, tout comme le jeune héros, ce qu’il en est vraiment.
Au début, il n’en est pas trop question, du père. Des bribes, ici et là.
La mère interdit de toute façon qu’on en parle à la maison. À peine si elle consent à laisser entendre vaguement qu’il est en voyage, parti à l’extérieur… peut-être même pris en otage, qui sait.
Pour le garçon de 12 ans, il est primordial de savoir à quoi s’en tenir. Ça deviendra une obsession.
C’est la trame la plus forte du roman, à vrai dire, cette recherche du père manquant, qui donne lieu à tous les égarements.
C’est la couche de fond qui ajoute un supplément d’âme à ce qui pourrait n’être qu’un autre roman sur la guerre mettant en scène des enfants. C’est ce qui touche le plus. Et puis le punch final concernant la disparition du père, liée de façon intrinsèque au conflit qui balaie le pays, nous rentre dedans.
Entre-temps, nous nous sommes peut-être un peu perdus en route, avec le héros pris en étau, entre deux feux.
Entre son cousin, jusque-là son meilleur ami, et son frère aîné grincheux. Ces deux-là jouent à la guerre en tentant d’imiter les grands, chacun de leur côté. Mais ils prennent la chose tellement au sérieux.
Tout ce que veut notre jeune héros, lui, en dehors de retrouver son père, c’est la paix, la justice sociale.
La fin de la guerre une fois pour toutes, il en rêve. Jusqu’à quand pourra-t-il préserver son innocence, cultiver sa naïveté ?
Si on peut voir dans ces jeux de guerre enfantins une métaphore de la vraie guerre et de ses débordements, de ses enflures, de ses « oeil pour oeil, dent pour dent », de sa soif toujours plus grande de pouvoir, cette partie-là du roman semble un peu trop appuyée. Elle donne lieu à tant de détails : elle s’éternise un peu. L’impatience risque de nous gagner. Surtout que les 70 premières pages coulaient de source.
La sexualité fantasmée
Dès le début, on est frappés par l’inventivité de l’auteur, par le côté cru de ses images, aussi. Il tourne en drôlerie la situation du héros de 12 ans, celui qui devient le narrateur de l’histoire, après coup.
Rien de comique, pourtant, quand se font entendre des crissements de pneus, des cortèges de martyrs, des bombardements dans l’autre Beyrouth, des sirènes proches…
Justement. C’est pour éviter d’entendre tout cela et d’y chercher un sens que le garçon s’évade dans l’imaginaire, dans le fantasme. Avec son cousin de 11 ans.
Il suffit d’imaginer les voisines dévêtues, d’inventer toutes sortes d’ébats sexuels avec elles, en faisant durer le plaisir. Ce que les garçons feront à répétition.
Ils en viendront à investir la chambre interdite de l’appartement squatté. Celle des jeunes mariés qui ont fui la guerre. Elle est tapissée de photos d’eux. Toutes les histoires sont possibles, derrière la porte close. On peut même substituer au corps de la mariée celui de filles nues sur papier glacé.
La sexualité, fantasmée, mais pas seulement, est omniprésente dans Play Boys. Comme exutoire. Comme récompense, aussi. Comme carburant.
La sexualité, face cachée de la guerre ? Ce pourrait être par cet aspect de son roman, par la façon frontale dont il l’aborde, que Ghayas Hachem se démarque le plus, finalement.
Famine hecatomb of Lebanon 1915-18. Causes and powerful deciders who contributed
Posted on: December 30, 2016
How many causes and powerful deciders contributed to the famine hecatomb of Lebanon 1915-18?
Trois manifestations au campus des sciences humaines de l’Université Saint-Joseph ont marqué le centenaire de la grande famine au Liban : l’exposition de photos inédites de la collection Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan sur la grande famine de 1915 au Liban ; la signature de l’ouvrage Le peuple libanais dans la tourmente de la grande guerre 1914-1918, par Christian Taoutel et Pierre Wittouck s. j. ; et la table ronde dirigée par Carla Eddé, regroupant l’historien et avocat à la cour Youssef Mouawad ainsi que Christian Taoutel, professeur d’histoire à l’USJ, et Émile Issa el-Khoury, président de Lebanus et petit-fils d’Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan.
1915-1918 : Jamal pacha, « le boucher », seul responsable de la grande famine au Liban ?
L’exposition, qui se déroulera jusqu’au 3 mai au campus des sciences humaines, révèle les scènes tragiques de la famine qui a sévi au Liban. Des flashs violents de mères squelettiques portant leur enfant mort ; des enfants décharnés au regard désemparé ou en sanglots devant l’agonie de leur mère, de leur père ou de leur fratrie ; des hommes affamés, désespérés, traînant les cadavres de leurs proches, ou encore un pendu à l’entrée de sa maison après avoir perdu sous ses yeux tous les membres de sa famille.
Avec un courage peu ordinaire, Kanaan a capté les souffrances indicibles. Ses clichés inédits sont le témoignage unique de la grande famine et d’une population morte de faim.
Né à Beyrouth, Ibrahim Naoum Kanaan (1887-1984) est originaire du village de Abey dans le caza de Aley.
En 1916, il occupait le poste de directeur principal des assistances gouvernementales au Mont-Liban. Émile Issa el-Khoury raconte qu’à la tombée de la nuit, son grand-père « Ibrahim s’emparait de sacs de farine qu’il portait lui-même sur le dos pour aller les distribuer clandestinement, mettant ainsi sa vie et sa fonction professionnelle en danger.
Animé par un idéal de liberté, il forma même avec un certain nombre de collègues un mouvement secret indépendantiste qui lutta pour la fin de l’occupation ottomane. Manipulant très tôt la caméra, il l’utilisa comme arme redoutable pour retransmettre à la postérité les atrocités vécues par son peuple et dont il fut le témoin oculaire ».
« Commémorer cette étape de l’histoire est un devoir moral et une cause humaine pour que les nouvelles générations soient mieux attentives à cet événement qui pèse encore sur notre mémoire collective et individuelle », a dit à cette occasion le père Salim Daccache, recteur de l’Université Saint-Joseph de Beyrouth. Il a tenu à souligner que « la répétition de cette grande famine se fait autour de nous, dans un pays proche, comme si les régimes politiques d’hier transmettent leur hargne contre les civils abandonnés à leur sort (…) ».
Profiteurs, accapareurs et usuriers…
Comment expliquer que le pays commémore la date du 6 mai, en souvenir des martyrs nationalistes exécutés, en 1916, par Jamal pacha et oublie ce pan de l’histoire ? s’est demandé pour sa part l’historien Youssef Mouawad.
Sans mâcher ses mots, il fait observer que la famine est perçue comme « une affaire chrétienne ». « Le souvenir des chrétiens et musulmans morts sur le gibet montre l’unité du Liban, alors que cette abominable catastrophe ne concernait qu’une composante sociale.
Elle était davantage une histoire sécessionniste puisque les régions les plus touchées, comme le Mont-Liban, étaient à 80 % chrétiennes, dit-il. Mais cela n’absout pas l’État libanais qui est dépositaire et garant de la mémoire nationale. »
Une étude récente publiée par la chercheuse allemande Linda Schilcher révèle que sur les 500, 000 morts de faim et de malnutrition en Syrie géographique, on décompte 200 000 victimes chrétiennes dans les régions septentrionales du Mont-Liban et 15 000 druzes.
« Un chiffre énorme pour une portion de territoire aussi réduite et dont la population était évaluée entre 414 000 et 496 000 habitants », souligne Youssef Mouawad, ajoutant que la population des villes a souffert de la faim mais « elle n’est pas morte de faim ».
Cette situation tragique a été provoquée par un nombre de facteurs :
- les réquisitions systématiques des récoltes et denrées alimentaires par les troupes ottomanes ;
- le blocus imposé par Jamal pacha à une région dont le relief montagneux ne pouvait assurer que quatre mois de subsistance par an ; le blocus maritime des flottes alliées en Méditerranée ;
- le ravage des sauterelles en 1915 ;
- la sécheresse en 1916 et le rôle de certains Libanais, « profiteurs, accapareurs et usuriers, qui n’ont pas hésité à tirer profit de la situation pour s’enrichir, contribuant ainsi à l’aggravation de la famine ».
- Sans oublier les épidémies comme le typhus, le choléra ou la typhoïde entre 1914 et 1916.
L’historien et avocat a, d’autre part, rejeté l’utilisation du terme « génocide » ainsi que la déclaration du ministre turc de la Guerre Enver pacha qui a dit en 1916 : « Le gouvernement ne pourra regagner sa liberté et son honneur que lorsque l’Empire ottoman aura été nettoyé des Arméniens et des Libanais. Nous avons détruit les premiers par le glaive, nous détruirons les seconds par la faim. »
« Pour moi, ce n’est pas le cas. Pour qu’il y ait un génocide, il faut une intention d’éradiquer une population. Or l’intention, dans ce cas précis, n’a pas pu être établie. Ces propos sont apocryphes. Les Ottomans étaient ravis que les chrétiens disparaissent, mais ils n’ont pas procédé à leur élimination de manière systématique », note-t-il.
Prenant à son tour la parole, Christian Taoutel a mis l’accent sur l’importance des archives des pères jésuites qui « dévoilent et brisent un douteux silence et étonnant oubli de cette période si dramatique de l’histoire du Liban ». Il livre quelques passages des fameux « diaires » (le journal) des pères jésuites.
En septembre 1916, de Ghazir, P. Angélil écrit : « Rien ne perce plus profondément le cœur d’un missionnaire impuissant à secourir la misère et condamné à voir tant de calamités. La mort lui est plus souhaitable. »
Dans son diaire du 28 juin 1915, le père Mattern consigne : « Dégâts immenses des sauterelles au Liban. Famine. Il n’y a plus de blé à Beyrouth. Taanaïl et Ksara, ravagés par les sauterelles… »
Dans une lettre de mai 1915, le P. Ronzevalle écrit que l’attitude de Jamal pacha (dit al-saffah) serait devenue tout à fait hostile aux chrétiens et aux francophiles. Il ajoute : « On ne peut plus y tenir, on y meurt littéralement de faim. À Achkout, en deux mois, on a vu mourir de faim 97 habitants sur 450 qu’ils sont. Beaucoup d’autres villages ont perdu le quart, le tiers et même la moitié de leurs habitants. »
Le 31 décembre 1916, sur la dernière page de son diaire, le P. Angélil souligne : « On veut nous faire périr doucement, sans bruit, ni sang. » Pour conclure, Christian Taoutel a rendu hommage au P. Alex Bassili et au P. Sélim Abou « sans lesquels ces archives seraient restées muettes ».
Christians in Iraq? Christians in Syria? Where to? Why this exodus?
ISIS and Al Nusra extremist wahhabit factions (the main fighting forces in Syria and Iraq) have been forcing Christians sects and other ethnic minority ethnic communities in Iraq and Syria to leave their houses and leave the country.
Christian sects in this region are the oldest Christians in the history of time.
In the first century they formed dozens of sects, which were later dubbed heretics by Byzantium Empire in the 4th century. Most of them had to flee to Persia, Egypt and inaccessible mountain regions to get away from persecutions.
These terrorist Wahhabi factions are displacing entire population and communities from locations they lived there for centuries.
This photo of an 8th Century BC Assyrian statue excavated from Tell Ajajah, near Hasakah on the Khabour River, was taken in May.
Isis has also bulldozed statues of lions along with Sufi and Shia shrines in the Raqqa province, the militant group’s headquarters.
.. تحية بحجم الكون لكل مظلوم عراقي وأخر المظلومين نكهة الشرق
وتراثه واحدى أجمل فسيفسائة المسيحيون العراقيون.
Adonis Diaries 