By
Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed
Inter Press Service
2-25-6
BAGHDAD (IPS) - Widespread sectarian violence generated by the recent bombing of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra has also brought widespread demonstrations of solidarity between Sunnis and Shias across Iraq.
The revered Al-Askariyya Mosque in Samarra, 135 km northwest of Baghdad, is one of four sacred places for Shias in Iraq.
The mosque was bombed at 6:55am Feb. 22 by men who tied up the guards and planted the explosives. This being the third attack on the Shias in as many days, outrage was immediate, violent and widespread.
Bloody retaliatory attacks took the lives of three Sunni Imams and scores of civilians, while over 50 Sunni mosques were attacked.
Yet the violence led also to demonstrations of solidarity after Shia and Sunni leaders called for calm and restraint.
Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani called for "easing things down and not attacking any Sunni mosques and shrines."
Sistani's office was quick to issue a statement: "We call upon believers to express their protest...through peaceful means. The extent of their sorrow and shock should not drag them into taking actions that serve the enemies who have been working to lead Iraq into sectarian strife."
Muqtada Al-Sadr, arguably the second most influential Shia cleric in Iraq told reporters: "It was not the Sunnis who attacked the shrine of Imam Al-Hadi, God's peace be upon him, but rather the occupation (forces) and Ba'athists...God damn them. We should not attack Sunni mosques. I have ordered the Al-Mahdi Army to protect both Shia and Sunni shrines."
Sadr returned promptly from Lebanon and called on the Iraqi parliament to vote the departure of occupation forces from Iraq.
Sunni religious authorities called for peace and asked people to confront those trying to generate a sectarian war.
Many Arab media outlets blamed the floundering Iraqi government for failing to provide the security needed to prevent the attacks. But thousands of people who joined demonstrations blamed American troops for failing to protect the Iraqi people.
Sunnis were quick to demonstrate solidarity with the Shias in Samarra and to condemn the mosque bombings. Demonstrations of solidarity between Sunnis and Shias followed all over Iraq. Some of the bigger demonstrations were held in Basra, Diwaniyah, Nasiriyah, Kut, and Salah Al-Din.
Much of the Shia anger was directed at U.S. forces. In the primarily Shia city of Kut south of Baghdad, thousands marched through the streets burning U.S. and Israeli flags.
Thousands of Shias marched through Sadr City, the huge Shia slum area of Baghdad, shouting anti-American slogans. Sadr City has almost half the population of Baghdad.
Many large demonstrations were held in Baghdad outside Sadr City.
"Those shrines are very important to all Muslims, not only in Iraq but all over the Islamic world," 40 year-old merchant Ahmed Hassan told IPS at a demonstration in Khadamiyah area of Baghdad Feb. 23. "Every Muslim in Iraq not only criticised and condemned this action, but everyone is against it."
Thousands of Sunnis joined Shia demonstrations in Baghdad despite moves by the Iraqi security forces to seal off Sunni areas.
"This is no more than an Israeli kind of act done by the American troops using some men who were paid," a 54 year-old Shia man told IPS. "It is not the Sunnis who are responsible, because we know the Americans and Israelis want to divide us. The Sunnis would never bomb a Muslim mosque."
A 25-year-old woman among the demonstrators was telling everyone she could that the attack had nothing to do with the Sunni people of Samarra.
"My husband is a Sunni from Samarra who goes to that shrine," said Hashmia Atimim. "Of course we know it was a foreigner who did this horrible act."
Some of the sentiments at the demonstrations found unexpected if partial echoes. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement that those who attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra "have only one motive: to create a violent sedition between the Sunnis and the Shiites in order to derail the Iraqi rising democracy from its path."
(c)2004, 2005 Dahr Jamail.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Deliberate Acts
Agreed analogies only go so far.
Calling a person or a group of people "the devil" does make it sound, as if I believed, there are people with no hope of redemption, no way out of damnation.
I believe as long as a person is alive, he or she has a choice.
This is, what with very few exceptions every religion on earth preaches: There is a choice. There is no predestination.
I do not believe that human beings are determined by their biology in their thoughts and in their acts.
Nor do I believe that they are determined by their living conditions, their upbringing or their membership in a class or a group.
Humanity is a very unic species on earth. We are not determined by our instincts or by environmental factors.
While those factors can surely have influence on us and our acts, we have a "manual override" other species don´t.
Our intelligence is this override. It can bring us to acts of "evil" bringing destruction on fellow members of the species or other living beings, no member of any other species ever could, or to acts of "good" sacrificing for the wellbeing of others even until total self-sacrifice.
Our intelligence makes us capable of choice and capable of change.
Everyone has a chance to turn around, change his thinking and his acts, regret, repent, make reparations as far as possible and find redemption.
Reparations in the case of instigating wars based on lies, is of course, first and foremost telling the truth. The dead can´t be brought back to life and and the maimed won´t get back their limbs, but truth can bring back peace.
When I talk about a "human devil", I mean the believe I have come to, that it is not a faceless system, some automatacy, which is responsible for exploitation, oppression, mass-murder and war.
It is people, human beings, who deliberately plan for these results of their politics.
Marxists believe that those results are inevitable results of capitalism and that to overcome those terrible conditions for humanity a Marxist led revolution is necessary.
I see in Marxism a lot of evidence of being a rather intolerant "religious faith". Marxism's "God" of "Dialectic Materialism" does not allow for any alternatives. It is a very jealous and absolutistic "God".
I very much agree with the issues of social injustice, imperialism and permanent war for the enrichment of the few, which are raised by Marxists, but I also believe that the solutions to those problems must be found within the people and culture of single countries and cannot be imposed on all the world by a western ideology. And since humanity contains so many diverse cultures the solution to social problems will be diverse. This in my opinion might actually enrich the human condition.
And while it might make the cooperation between countries a bit more complicated than a one-world system, it could in the long run actually help humanity to overcome the scourges of ethnocentrism and racism. For learning to communicate to other cultures on a equal basis will do this for you in the long run.
Even within the European framework Marxist revolutions could not deliver on the promises of Marxism inspite of the high cost in human lives.
If the people of Eastern Europe had felt some kind of confidence in the justice of their socialist system, they would have defended it against the onslaught of western capitalism. Sure many people in Eastern Europe believe now in hindsight, that what they had then was better than what they have now, but still just as the lesser of two evils.Marxist materialism could not fulfill the human desire for true justice, which is also a spiritual value.
(The only place were socialism actually has worked enough for the people to want to defend it, is Cuba. But if you look closely,even there the system is not doctrinaire Marxist but a mixture respecting cultural values of the Cuban people. And when Castro shook hands with the Pope, the Cuban revolution made peace with the Church.)
But when saying, that the originator of human misery is not an an anonymous "system", but actual people, who use this system and would use any other system as well to serve their advantages and further the goals of their philosophies, then we need to try to identify those people.
I do not think, that they are just one ethnic group, like Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jews or Chinese, although some probably have these ethnic backgrounds.
Nor do I think that their background is from one single religion.
Nor do I think that they are true believing Free Masons or even ritual Satanists, although I did use the "devil" analogy.
These people believe themselves to be ultra-rationalists, so praying to any God, or to the "Architect of the Universe" or even to Lucifer, makes very little sense, except for some kind of perverted fun.
Those strange religion-like groups might be used to trap some politicians with embarrasing photographs, or they might be used for some strange form of male-bonding.
But I´m rather convinced that the actual believe system of the ruling elite is atheist, materialist, nihilist and social-darwinist.
Those are the defining characters of their worldview. This is what drives their political actions.
Kurt Nimmo on his site "Another Day in the Empire" quotes Shadia Drury in the worldview of the Straussian Neocons, who are now the spearhead of the global elite:
Then he quotes Michael Doliner:
Calling a person or a group of people "the devil" does make it sound, as if I believed, there are people with no hope of redemption, no way out of damnation.
I believe as long as a person is alive, he or she has a choice.
This is, what with very few exceptions every religion on earth preaches: There is a choice. There is no predestination.
I do not believe that human beings are determined by their biology in their thoughts and in their acts.
Nor do I believe that they are determined by their living conditions, their upbringing or their membership in a class or a group.
Humanity is a very unic species on earth. We are not determined by our instincts or by environmental factors.
While those factors can surely have influence on us and our acts, we have a "manual override" other species don´t.
Our intelligence is this override. It can bring us to acts of "evil" bringing destruction on fellow members of the species or other living beings, no member of any other species ever could, or to acts of "good" sacrificing for the wellbeing of others even until total self-sacrifice.
Our intelligence makes us capable of choice and capable of change.
Everyone has a chance to turn around, change his thinking and his acts, regret, repent, make reparations as far as possible and find redemption.
Reparations in the case of instigating wars based on lies, is of course, first and foremost telling the truth. The dead can´t be brought back to life and and the maimed won´t get back their limbs, but truth can bring back peace.
When I talk about a "human devil", I mean the believe I have come to, that it is not a faceless system, some automatacy, which is responsible for exploitation, oppression, mass-murder and war.
It is people, human beings, who deliberately plan for these results of their politics.
Marxists believe that those results are inevitable results of capitalism and that to overcome those terrible conditions for humanity a Marxist led revolution is necessary.
I see in Marxism a lot of evidence of being a rather intolerant "religious faith". Marxism's "God" of "Dialectic Materialism" does not allow for any alternatives. It is a very jealous and absolutistic "God".
I very much agree with the issues of social injustice, imperialism and permanent war for the enrichment of the few, which are raised by Marxists, but I also believe that the solutions to those problems must be found within the people and culture of single countries and cannot be imposed on all the world by a western ideology. And since humanity contains so many diverse cultures the solution to social problems will be diverse. This in my opinion might actually enrich the human condition.
And while it might make the cooperation between countries a bit more complicated than a one-world system, it could in the long run actually help humanity to overcome the scourges of ethnocentrism and racism. For learning to communicate to other cultures on a equal basis will do this for you in the long run.
Even within the European framework Marxist revolutions could not deliver on the promises of Marxism inspite of the high cost in human lives.
If the people of Eastern Europe had felt some kind of confidence in the justice of their socialist system, they would have defended it against the onslaught of western capitalism. Sure many people in Eastern Europe believe now in hindsight, that what they had then was better than what they have now, but still just as the lesser of two evils.Marxist materialism could not fulfill the human desire for true justice, which is also a spiritual value.
(The only place were socialism actually has worked enough for the people to want to defend it, is Cuba. But if you look closely,even there the system is not doctrinaire Marxist but a mixture respecting cultural values of the Cuban people. And when Castro shook hands with the Pope, the Cuban revolution made peace with the Church.)
But when saying, that the originator of human misery is not an an anonymous "system", but actual people, who use this system and would use any other system as well to serve their advantages and further the goals of their philosophies, then we need to try to identify those people.
I do not think, that they are just one ethnic group, like Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Jews or Chinese, although some probably have these ethnic backgrounds.
Nor do I think that their background is from one single religion.
Nor do I think that they are true believing Free Masons or even ritual Satanists, although I did use the "devil" analogy.
These people believe themselves to be ultra-rationalists, so praying to any God, or to the "Architect of the Universe" or even to Lucifer, makes very little sense, except for some kind of perverted fun.
Those strange religion-like groups might be used to trap some politicians with embarrasing photographs, or they might be used for some strange form of male-bonding.
But I´m rather convinced that the actual believe system of the ruling elite is atheist, materialist, nihilist and social-darwinist.
Those are the defining characters of their worldview. This is what drives their political actions.
Kurt Nimmo on his site "Another Day in the Empire" quotes Shadia Drury in the worldview of the Straussian Neocons, who are now the spearhead of the global elite:
"Strauss thinks that a political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat, and following Machiavelli, he maintains that if no external threat exists, then one has to be manufactured. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united—and they can only be united against other people.” Strauss’ established governance, according to Drury, is made possible through “aggressive, belligerent foreign policy,” and “[p]erpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in.” According to Jim Lobe, “Strauss’ neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a ‘national destiny’—as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983—that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a ‘myopic national security.’”
Then he quotes Michael Doliner:
The Straussians “are not, as some think, merely agents of Israel,”
Nor was the war fought merely for oil. They did not ally themselves with the religious right merely for expedience. They do not seek primarily to further the fortunes of Halliburton and Bechtel. All these are real motives, but they are peripheral motives. Their goal is to turn America into the Straussian State and rule it perpetually. Consequently, the debacle in Iraq [or the coming debacle in Iran] does not seriously affect their plans. Even the Katrina aftermath might not shake them. A Straussian society needs an endless war to supply a “them” against which “we” will do endless battle. The endless war, such a horrible prospect for the rest of us, provided the political glue to transform the United States of American from a liberal democracy to a Straussian totalitarian state.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Deliberate Provocation
Did they see it then, some 67 years ago in Europe, even earlier in Asia, did they see the train engine coming at them, running over everything on their way, already Tschekeslovakia was run over, then Polland and then...?
Did they see that the whole world was strapped to the tracks, and the engine was running unstoppable, madmen at the wheels and nobody to pull the emergency brakes?
Some people did see it. Their words are recorded. We still can read them.
But could they ever imagine that after the engine had run against the wall, 50 million dead bodies would be strawn around its tracks?
Who could have imagined this?
Did they see before hand the weapons that would be used, incinerating whole cities, burning land and harvests to the ground, leaving nothing but ruins and blackened earth?
Did they see the firestorms raging, the fires which couldn't be extinguished when they hit the skin, fires that would burn you alive in unimaginable pain?
Did they see the weapons which would exterminate cities in an instant and still would keep on killing twenty, fifty years after they were used?
They did not know about these kind of weapons then, the last time the engine ran over the whole world.
But we know now.
And most look away, too frightening is the view, too eery the sound. Afghanisthan has been run over already, Iraq a hundred thousand dead bodies already by last spring and nobody has been counting any more since then.
And the engine is running, running towards us, Iran will be next or Syria. A military option is proposed, a nuclear one is not excluded.
Madmen at the wheel and nobody to pull the emergency brake and Europe close at the side of the Americans, no longer wavering, but there in the engine.
How many bodies will it be this time, 50 million or 500 million or more?
It is planned to be a generational war, 30 years or so.
The last time a 30 year war was fought in Europe, half of the population was dead afterwards.
It won´t hit Europe this time? Really?
The whole world is strapped on the tracks. When the engine is not stopped it will run over us and it will run over you.
But the engine needs fuel to run. It's fuel is hatred. It´s an artificial fuel, not natural.
When the Danish paper printed those Muhammed cartoons. They were only done by Muslim hating cartoonist, printed by an Muslim hating editor in a paper owned by Muslim haters for the consumption of local Muslim haters. And there are so many of them now in Europe.
But when those cartoons reached the Middle East, half a year later, the anger there was real. But the activists threatening foreigners, first of all in Palestine, trying to empty the land of foreign witnesses to upcoming crimes, those agents were not real, they were mercenaries.
It happened right after a Hamas victory, but those violent agents weren´t Hamas. They were from some obscure Fatah group, Fatah who had sunk in their own corruption, undermind by Israel and probably riddled with collaborators.
But the anger has spread and the frustration and maybe the hatred has become real or maybe there are other paid agents to spread it.
And we are on a threshold of a Clash of Civillisations or maybe we already stepped over it.
And I hear the arrogance and ignorance in the talking heads on TV and read it in the papers, blowing the smoke of a "free society", a "information society", when their "information" is nothing but pure viciousness, deliberate instigation to hatred and war.
And the engine is running.
And the arrogant western atheist viciousness is telling us: what´s wrong with a little bit of fun, a little bit of fun on those retards who believe in something else than pure science, those religious idiots.
We Christians should not have taken it laying down, when those atheist fanatics were smearing crosses with urine and feces and called it art.
Because it gave them a precedent: Smearing what for many people is holy, is just fun or art or a matter of free speech.
I don´t believe in violence, but I believe in screaming. We should have screamed louder. Let them call us retards, so what?
At least we are not hate-mongering mass-murdering madmen.
For atheists not much is holy. But in their "free speech" defense they are just holier than thou.
However historically, they have a very bad memory.
Have you ever seen those cartoons, that were printed in the "Stürmer", the leading Nazi hate paper? Maybe you have seen it in history class and if not, maybe you can look it up.
Those cartoons will look eerily familiar now. They were used to defame an ethnic and religious minority, to bring the majority in the country up against them, put the majority into the right mood, the right mood for expulsion, deportation, incarcaration, slave labour oppression, abuse and murder.
It was not a matter of "free speech" then, it was a matter of hate and everybody knew it. But now we have gotten used ot our smoke screens. We need them to not feel guilty.
But when the engine comes running over us, the smoke screens won´t protect us, because they are just that - empty smoke.
The engine is fueled by hatred. And we provide it. It´s not their hatred, it´s ours, the western, enlightened, secular and so very rational hatred towards the "others" who do not want to be like us.
And the engine is running full speed at us, and I hear the rumbling.
And feel the vibration of forboding desaster.
And I can´t turn my eyes away.
And I only can imagine what lies ahead.
But then, those people 67 years ago, who felt like I feel now, nothing in their imagination could prepare them for the reality that finally hit them and hit also the others who didn´t want to look.
Nothing.
Did they see that the whole world was strapped to the tracks, and the engine was running unstoppable, madmen at the wheels and nobody to pull the emergency brakes?
Some people did see it. Their words are recorded. We still can read them.
But could they ever imagine that after the engine had run against the wall, 50 million dead bodies would be strawn around its tracks?
Who could have imagined this?
Did they see before hand the weapons that would be used, incinerating whole cities, burning land and harvests to the ground, leaving nothing but ruins and blackened earth?
Did they see the firestorms raging, the fires which couldn't be extinguished when they hit the skin, fires that would burn you alive in unimaginable pain?
Did they see the weapons which would exterminate cities in an instant and still would keep on killing twenty, fifty years after they were used?
They did not know about these kind of weapons then, the last time the engine ran over the whole world.
But we know now.
And most look away, too frightening is the view, too eery the sound. Afghanisthan has been run over already, Iraq a hundred thousand dead bodies already by last spring and nobody has been counting any more since then.
And the engine is running, running towards us, Iran will be next or Syria. A military option is proposed, a nuclear one is not excluded.
Madmen at the wheel and nobody to pull the emergency brake and Europe close at the side of the Americans, no longer wavering, but there in the engine.
How many bodies will it be this time, 50 million or 500 million or more?
It is planned to be a generational war, 30 years or so.
The last time a 30 year war was fought in Europe, half of the population was dead afterwards.
It won´t hit Europe this time? Really?
The whole world is strapped on the tracks. When the engine is not stopped it will run over us and it will run over you.
But the engine needs fuel to run. It's fuel is hatred. It´s an artificial fuel, not natural.
When the Danish paper printed those Muhammed cartoons. They were only done by Muslim hating cartoonist, printed by an Muslim hating editor in a paper owned by Muslim haters for the consumption of local Muslim haters. And there are so many of them now in Europe.
But when those cartoons reached the Middle East, half a year later, the anger there was real. But the activists threatening foreigners, first of all in Palestine, trying to empty the land of foreign witnesses to upcoming crimes, those agents were not real, they were mercenaries.
It happened right after a Hamas victory, but those violent agents weren´t Hamas. They were from some obscure Fatah group, Fatah who had sunk in their own corruption, undermind by Israel and probably riddled with collaborators.
But the anger has spread and the frustration and maybe the hatred has become real or maybe there are other paid agents to spread it.
And we are on a threshold of a Clash of Civillisations or maybe we already stepped over it.
And I hear the arrogance and ignorance in the talking heads on TV and read it in the papers, blowing the smoke of a "free society", a "information society", when their "information" is nothing but pure viciousness, deliberate instigation to hatred and war.
And the engine is running.
And the arrogant western atheist viciousness is telling us: what´s wrong with a little bit of fun, a little bit of fun on those retards who believe in something else than pure science, those religious idiots.
We Christians should not have taken it laying down, when those atheist fanatics were smearing crosses with urine and feces and called it art.
Because it gave them a precedent: Smearing what for many people is holy, is just fun or art or a matter of free speech.
I don´t believe in violence, but I believe in screaming. We should have screamed louder. Let them call us retards, so what?
At least we are not hate-mongering mass-murdering madmen.
For atheists not much is holy. But in their "free speech" defense they are just holier than thou.
However historically, they have a very bad memory.
Have you ever seen those cartoons, that were printed in the "Stürmer", the leading Nazi hate paper? Maybe you have seen it in history class and if not, maybe you can look it up.
Those cartoons will look eerily familiar now. They were used to defame an ethnic and religious minority, to bring the majority in the country up against them, put the majority into the right mood, the right mood for expulsion, deportation, incarcaration, slave labour oppression, abuse and murder.
It was not a matter of "free speech" then, it was a matter of hate and everybody knew it. But now we have gotten used ot our smoke screens. We need them to not feel guilty.
But when the engine comes running over us, the smoke screens won´t protect us, because they are just that - empty smoke.
The engine is fueled by hatred. And we provide it. It´s not their hatred, it´s ours, the western, enlightened, secular and so very rational hatred towards the "others" who do not want to be like us.
And the engine is running full speed at us, and I hear the rumbling.
And feel the vibration of forboding desaster.
And I can´t turn my eyes away.
And I only can imagine what lies ahead.
But then, those people 67 years ago, who felt like I feel now, nothing in their imagination could prepare them for the reality that finally hit them and hit also the others who didn´t want to look.
Nothing.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Culture and Philosophy
Why waste time on talking about movies, TV-shows, books or some philosophical theory, when in the real world real wars are killing and maiming people, destroying their homes and lands?
Should it not be enough to just document the suffering and the crimes to get the peoples of the world to oppose them and stop them?
Obviously not.
Wars, massacres, oppression, torture and other atrocities are justified or downplayed.
We never see the world plain and obectively. We allways see it coloured through the glasses of our own worldview. While my individual worldview might differ from the views of my immidiate neighbours, it still is influenced by the collective worldview of my country and the culture I live in.
A worldview is created by culture and mirrored in it and it bases on a collective philosophy wich changes through the years.
Our western culture has become more cynical and less humanist in the last twenty years and has still not overcome racism. Instead, racism has changed its focus from skin-colour to culture.
Of course in our western self-righeousness we declare that this is not real racism, since, while people cannot change the colour of their skin, they could change their culture and religion or at least the attitude towards religion easily and become like us, the prototypes of the wonderful modern man, the over-humans instead of the barbarians they are now. And if those barbarians do not want to become like us, those barbarians just get what´s coming to them.
When westerners accuse Muslim societies of oppressing women and the Muslims accuse western societies of abusing women´s sexuality for profit, then most westerners wouldn´t even consider of looking at the accusations. They would not even consider, that the suffering caused by turning sexuality into a merchandize to be sold, bought and used for the advertisment of other products together with the economic devastation of neo-liberal politcs, might cause as widespread physical and psychological suffering among women as the legal discrimination of women in Muslim societies.
All this western self-righteousness is based on modern western philosophies, which define freedom in a whole different way than non-western people do or we ouselve have defined some twenty years ago.
We need to realize that our own culture is far from perfect or even on the way to perfection, it is not even a whole lot better than the cultures we critizice.
And I believe that we need to question our collective worldview including all the assumption we perceive as undeniable truths, which in reality are just theories.
Those theories stand in comptition to a other contrdicting theories which have just as much sceintific evidence behind them as the ones generally accepted by most of us.
When we analyze our culture mirrored in movies, music, tv-shows and books, we can recognize what the philosphies and assumed "truths" our culture is built on, and what philosophies are propagated by the powerful in order to move our culture into their direction.
Should it not be enough to just document the suffering and the crimes to get the peoples of the world to oppose them and stop them?
Obviously not.
Wars, massacres, oppression, torture and other atrocities are justified or downplayed.
We never see the world plain and obectively. We allways see it coloured through the glasses of our own worldview. While my individual worldview might differ from the views of my immidiate neighbours, it still is influenced by the collective worldview of my country and the culture I live in.
A worldview is created by culture and mirrored in it and it bases on a collective philosophy wich changes through the years.
Our western culture has become more cynical and less humanist in the last twenty years and has still not overcome racism. Instead, racism has changed its focus from skin-colour to culture.
Of course in our western self-righeousness we declare that this is not real racism, since, while people cannot change the colour of their skin, they could change their culture and religion or at least the attitude towards religion easily and become like us, the prototypes of the wonderful modern man, the over-humans instead of the barbarians they are now. And if those barbarians do not want to become like us, those barbarians just get what´s coming to them.
When westerners accuse Muslim societies of oppressing women and the Muslims accuse western societies of abusing women´s sexuality for profit, then most westerners wouldn´t even consider of looking at the accusations. They would not even consider, that the suffering caused by turning sexuality into a merchandize to be sold, bought and used for the advertisment of other products together with the economic devastation of neo-liberal politcs, might cause as widespread physical and psychological suffering among women as the legal discrimination of women in Muslim societies.
All this western self-righteousness is based on modern western philosophies, which define freedom in a whole different way than non-western people do or we ouselve have defined some twenty years ago.
We need to realize that our own culture is far from perfect or even on the way to perfection, it is not even a whole lot better than the cultures we critizice.
And I believe that we need to question our collective worldview including all the assumption we perceive as undeniable truths, which in reality are just theories.
Those theories stand in comptition to a other contrdicting theories which have just as much sceintific evidence behind them as the ones generally accepted by most of us.
When we analyze our culture mirrored in movies, music, tv-shows and books, we can recognize what the philosphies and assumed "truths" our culture is built on, and what philosophies are propagated by the powerful in order to move our culture into their direction.
"Munich": Responses
"Der Spiegel" uses Spielberg´s movie as title to last week´s print magazine with the headline: May Democracies kill Terrorists - The Ethics of Revenge.
No matter to what conclusions the fanatic pro-Israel Spiegel comes, the headlines in themselves imply the first untruths.
Can there ever be an ethic in revenge?
Even the old Vikings with their very low threshold in refraining from killing came to conclusion that in the long run the circle of revenge and counter-revenge must be broken or it would destroy both parties and they invented a compensation system and a neutral court, which actually was the primare function of "Althingi" the parliament.
Mahatma Ghandi thought, that with the rule of an eye for an eye, everybody would go blind in the end. Revenge imprisons people in a vicious circle with no way out of violence and bloodshed, no hope for peace. How can anybody presume this was ethical.
And who has the ethics on his side. The Israeli death-squad revenging the kidnappings and killings of those Israeli athletes or the kidnappers revenging the far higher death-toll of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the eviction of the Palestinians from their land with the help of rape, murder and massacres?
Then the assumptions of the first question: Who actually are the terrorists. Are agents acting for a state less terrorists than other agents acting for a national liberation movement? Both are killing for their political goals.
And then, what actually is a democracy?
Is it a country where people can go to elections and make a cross behind some name or the name of a party?
Well, then just about every country in the world has some kind of elections and should be called a democracy.
Isn't the minimum requirement for a country to be called a democracy that is has equal legal rights for all its citizens and protects those rights. And Israel even fails in this minimum, by discriminating with written laws against it´s non-Jewish citizens.
But then words like democracy, freedom and justice have turned into Orwellian phrases with no meaning at all, phrases just to be used to justify the powers of the powerful.
Here are other responses to "Munich".
For instance a review by Lydia Howell, a Minneapolis-based journalist and host of KFAI radio's "Catalyst: Politics & Culture."
A response from a Socialist Site by David Walsh
And a response by Steven Spielberg himself in which he ends all speculation of the movie being pro-Palestinian or at least somehow neutral to both sides:
No matter to what conclusions the fanatic pro-Israel Spiegel comes, the headlines in themselves imply the first untruths.
Can there ever be an ethic in revenge?
Even the old Vikings with their very low threshold in refraining from killing came to conclusion that in the long run the circle of revenge and counter-revenge must be broken or it would destroy both parties and they invented a compensation system and a neutral court, which actually was the primare function of "Althingi" the parliament.
Mahatma Ghandi thought, that with the rule of an eye for an eye, everybody would go blind in the end. Revenge imprisons people in a vicious circle with no way out of violence and bloodshed, no hope for peace. How can anybody presume this was ethical.
And who has the ethics on his side. The Israeli death-squad revenging the kidnappings and killings of those Israeli athletes or the kidnappers revenging the far higher death-toll of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the eviction of the Palestinians from their land with the help of rape, murder and massacres?
Then the assumptions of the first question: Who actually are the terrorists. Are agents acting for a state less terrorists than other agents acting for a national liberation movement? Both are killing for their political goals.
And then, what actually is a democracy?
Is it a country where people can go to elections and make a cross behind some name or the name of a party?
Well, then just about every country in the world has some kind of elections and should be called a democracy.
Isn't the minimum requirement for a country to be called a democracy that is has equal legal rights for all its citizens and protects those rights. And Israel even fails in this minimum, by discriminating with written laws against it´s non-Jewish citizens.
But then words like democracy, freedom and justice have turned into Orwellian phrases with no meaning at all, phrases just to be used to justify the powers of the powerful.
Here are other responses to "Munich".
For instance a review by Lydia Howell, a Minneapolis-based journalist and host of KFAI radio's "Catalyst: Politics & Culture."
Israeli hardliners have little to fear from Spielberg's excursion into the political thriller genre, a bloody philosophy lesson from which only the most dedicated and sophisticated viewers will be able to discern any worthwhile, deeper meaning...........
Some Israelis (such as Ehud Danoch, the Israeli Consul-General in Los Angeles) have slammed Spielberg for making Israeli and Palestinian violence seem "equivalent" -- a totally absurd claim to anyone who's actually seen the film. In fact, Munich virtually omits "the Palestinian side" of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. There's just one brief exchange, between the film's lead Israeli agent and a Palestinian, where the Palestinian expresses longing for a "homeland" and makes a fierce declaration that "Israel will eventually lose to the Palestinians, even if it takes a 100 years." It's a startling moment, because it's the only time a Palestinian speaks. Otherwise, Palestinians are portrayed in the usual way: nameless thugs "speaking gibberish" (untranslated Arabic) who commit "senseless" acts of brutality against Jews........
Avner (Eric Bana), the lead agent who serves as our primary lens, ultimately takes his wife and child out of Israel and moves them to Brooklyn. He must visit them in secret, and none of them seem "at home" away from Israel. There is the looming irony that perhaps in attempting to avenge his homeland, it is lost to him forever. But most disturbing to this viewer is that, in the film's final scene, it's still not his own violent acts that apparently haunt Avner, only the Palestinians' slaughter of the Israeli Olympic team. This should mollify Spielberg's pro-Israel critics. In a clumsy, ham-fisted display of propaganda, he saves the bloodiest flashback of all for last, with Avner "remembering" Munich, while having sex with his wife in Brooklyn. It would have made more sense, psychologically, dramatically, and morally, if he had been reminded instead of the blood-spattered, bullet-ridden female assassin they deliberately left naked, or the Palestinian couple they shot dead in bed.
In short, Munich is neither the equal of Schindler's List nor Saving Private Ryan, both of which showed more courage and complexity, with memorable characters entangled in moral ambivalence. It is more interesting than most action movies and is still worth seeing, but Munich doesn't do justice to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. That's too bad, because Steven Spielberg might be the only American filmmaker able to get both the cash and the audience to put a new perspective before the American people.
A response from a Socialist Site by David Walsh
.......One can find fault with Spielberg and principal screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America) on a number of grounds. Although there are references to the origins of the state of Israel, the film tends to suggest that the history of violence in the region began in Munich in 1972. In fact, the establishment of the Zionist state meant the expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians. In 1946, Jews owned less than 12 percent of the land in the area that became Israeli territory; that figure rose to 77 percent after the 1948-49 war.
Palestinians fled their land in large measure out of fear of Zionist violence. In the notorious massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948, Menachem Begin’s Irgun group massacred 250 men, women and children. This widely publicized event was part of a deliberate effort to terrorize the Arabs and empty Palestine of its population. Over a two-year period from 1947 to 1949, the Zionists destroyed and depopulated more than 400 Arab villages, systematically replacing them with Jewish communities. By 1972, then, masses of Palestinians had been living miserably in refugee camps distributed throughout the region for more than two decades. They had only recently taken up arms against their condition.
The killing of the Israeli athletes was an atrocity (how many were killed by Palestinians and how many by German police snipers remains unknown), but the ultimate responsibility for the violence lies with the Zionist authorities and their backers in Washington and elsewhere.
Moreover, it is reasonable to assume, and research apparently backs this up, that the decision taken by Meir was only in part a specific response to the Munich events. These rather provided the moral and political pretext for the Israelis to eliminate a portion of the Palestinian leadership, many of whom had nothing whatsoever to do with the Olympic hostage-taking. Avner raises this issue in the film, but, again, the reference is only a fleeting one........
And a response by Steven Spielberg himself in which he ends all speculation of the movie being pro-Palestinian or at least somehow neutral to both sides:
"I am as truly pro-Israeli as you can possibly imagine ... But there is a constituency that nothing you can say or do will ever satisfy." Spielberg himself admits that the silliest aspect of this whole buzz ball is that one faction is accusing him of "moral equivalency" - in other words, of making like Switzerland and refusing to pick a side. "Frankly," he tells Ebert, "I think that's a stupid charge." The film is meant to be critical of Israel, he says – but in the nicest, gentlest, most puppy-dogs-and-ice-cream, appropriate for a 10 year old's birthday party way possible.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
"Munich": Spielberg's lies and cover-ups
The Humanization of Israeli killers, and the Dehumanization of Palestinian civilians
Who is retaliating against whom in the Arab-Israeli conflict? That is the question
by As'ad AbuKhalil
(As'ad AbuKhalil, a native of Lebanon, is a leading expert on the Middle East. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He teaches at California State University at Stanislaus and at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC/Berkeley. He is the author of "Bin Laden, Islam & America's New War on Terrorism." His latest book is "The Battle for Saudi Arabia.")
This film reminds me of a line that comedian George Carlin used in his comedy routine that went roughly like this: "Why do we call Israeli terrorists 'commandos,' and Palestinian commandos 'terrorists?" His question never got a laugh the two times I saw him use it with a live audience.
The thrust of the Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare notwithstanding: Israeli killers are conscientious and humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter what--vicious killers.
Did you notice how one lone critical opinion of the movie by one Israeli diplomat (Ehud Danoch, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles), which mildly criticized the movie, got so much press in the US?It helped to promote the movie and to give the illusion of a "balanced" cast to the narrative, that it does not deserve. This supposed critical opinion reminded me of O'Reilly; how he always seems to find one e-mail from somebody in Montana who tells him that he is too liberal. He needs that to maintain an image that does not exist, just as Spielberg needs to maintain an image that he does not deserve.
This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. It is a celebration of Israeli murder of Palestinians. When Israelis kill, it is always moral, and always careful, and always on target. On Dec. 26, yet another New York Times neo-con reviewer thinks that Spielberg was not sympathetic enough to the Israeli killers.
I was angry watching it; and I grew more angry as I observed the liberal Berkeley audience with whom I watched it react sympathetically to the movie, rooting for the Israeli head assassin, as he went about his "civilized" killing. I watched a humane Berkeley audience root for an Israeli killing team,in a story with Palestinian victims who were real people, with real blood.
An emotional moment for Spielberg, and presumably for American audiences was when the chief Israeli assassin talked with his young daughter in New York, stating that he missed her very much. Oh, yeah. That was the point at which you were expected to shed a tear or two; the music grew particularly sentimental at that point.
Spielberg's movie is based on a "non-fiction" book by journalist George Jonas, Vengeance, which took the Israeli account at face value. But in the book the Israeli killers did not express regret or second-thoughts of any kind. None! In the book -- but not in the movie-- the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." Hmmm...How could Spielberg have missed that?
I can connect to the story, in its details and personalities. The first victim of the movie was Wa'il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah's son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that none of the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich.
But why should this movie, a Spielberg movie, bother with facts, especially if they get in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative? This movie is intended for mass audiences who know nothing about the facts of the conflict. That is exactly why it will work, and why it will deliver the propaganda goods.
Munich was not as planned an operation as has often been maintained. This was not planned months in advance, as Abu Iyad maintained in his account written with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land. Abu Iyad for years exaggerated the claims about the "carefully planned" Munich operation, and PLO media at the time lied about PLO gunmen throwing grenades into the helicopters, so as to make the last shootout more of a fight that it actually was.
Massacred Palestinians who were being bombed by Israeli fighter jets in their refugee camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO had to give them some, even if they were not legitimate heroes. The German police at the time were going to take the PLO out, no matter what, and no matter how much the Germans endangered the lives of the hostages, and they presumably had Israeli consent. An Arab League diplomat revealed this recently when he broke his silence in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the negotiator with the Palestinian guerillas in Munich.
It can be argued that the Palestinians risked the lives of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is similar to the moral perils entailed by hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. Quite true.
But it is also true that the "State of Israel" has taken a nation hostage, and has been endangering the lives of millions of Palestinians since the inception of the Israeli state. It is a question of who is retaliating against whom. One of the many false premises of the Spielberg movie is that Israel only went on a killing rampage-and only against Palestinian "killers"--after Munich; that Munich was some kind of watershed.
Watershed it was not, except in Israeli propaganda brochures. Israel has been perpetrating killing rampages against Palestinians, mostly civilians, since before the creation of the state of Israel. And how could Spielberg lionize Golda Meir and forget to mention her most memorable quote: that "there is no such thing as the Palestinian people"?
Spielberg must have missed that too,as he portrayed her as Grandma goodness who was pushed into vengeance by Palestinian monsters. More humanization of Israel and dehumanization of Palestine. That is why the movie showed the director of the Israeli assassination machine with his child: the audience must see him as a caring human being.
Not a single Palestinian in the movie appeared unarmed. They all were terrorists, and their murder had to be justified, and Spielberg did a great service for the state of Israel in that regard. They should name some stolen Palestinian property in his honor.
What were the Israelis doing before Munich? Before Munich -- not after-Israelis placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his 14-year-old niece. The teenage girl was not plotting the Munich attack when she was murdered by the Israelis; nor was her uncle. Kanafani wrote for Al-Hurriyyah magazine.
Israel, also before Munich, sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif, a writer and journalist, and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any group. But Sayigh was a really diligent researcher, and Israel did not appreciate it.
Abu Sharif never had a military role. He was an innocent victim of Israeli killing. He nevr held a gun. I see him as a human being, and not as the armed and vengeful character that appears in Spielberg's movie; typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when they speak Arabic never need subtitles. We get them them when people speak in French and German, but Arabic is not important. It is not important to know what cheap natives say; we only need to know what expensive people say: Europeans and Israelis.
Do you notice that Hollywood still portrays Israelis as Europeans: they still don't want to accept that some half of all Israelis come from Asian and African countries. This makes it easier for the White Man to identify with them. And there is this element that is never mentioned about Palestinian attacks: and this is true of the present and of the past. It is not that some Palestinian leaders recruit or compel Palestinians to attack Israelis. It is the other way round. Palestinians, regular rank-and-file pressure Palestinian leaders and commanders to send them on military or suicidal missions against Israeli targets. Munich occurred exactly like that. Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon, those who were trained by Fatah and by other groups, were lobbying for "action." Why? In February of the same year prior to Munich, Israeli jets bombed Palestinian refugee camps, and killed innocent people. This is what is missing in the movie. Most Palestinians who are killed by Israelis are unarmed and are killed not by conscientious and sensitive Israeli assassins-as they are outrageously portrayed in this movie-but by Israeli pilots who bomb refugee camps filled with unarmed civilians. Palestinians who are bombed from the air, long before Munich, are elderly and women and children in their beds. These are the victims that you will never see in a Spielberg movie.
Israel was killing Palestinians, and this was the context of pre-Munich. A small Palestinian group chose to seek venegeance--retaliation-- but they were not sure of their target, and this was only three months before Munich. One of the handful of people who knew about this was Abu Mazen, the Abu Mazen who today is the head of the puppet Palestinian Authority. But do you notice that US/Israel always forgive the past of those who submit to Israeli dictates? Look at how US and Israel forgave Anwar Sadat for his Nazi past. Abu Mazen was the money guy, and he dispersed the funds for Abu Dawud, who engineered the operation.
The American public and US media and popular culture are so enamored with the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, but the image of the Mossad does not match its actual reality. The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession with Abu Hasan Salamah as the "mastermind" of Munich when he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Munich. To be sure, Abu Hasan was a braggart, and had a big mouth, and would take credit for things he did not do, and would distance himself from failed "operations" that he planned, like the Sabena hijacking in 1972.
That was Abu Hasan: he lived the life of a playboy, and enjoyed a unique indulgent pampering from Abu Ammar who treated him like a son. Abu Ammar would never say no to Abu Hasan, on anything. But Abu Hasan had nothing to do with Munich, and this ostensibly all-knowing Mossad, did not know it. Former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, once said that the Mossad is a mediocre organization, but that it does outstanding PR. Former CIA man in Beirut Robert Baer said this about the Mossad--in an interview he gave to Al-Jazeera: "Let me tell you something, what people most err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that [i.e. Norway]. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge of those countries."
But this can never be maintained in a country that wants to exaggerate the prowess and knowledge of an intelligence agency not only to help feed the Israeli propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public for more ruthless times and ways. So a very small number of people knew about it, and of course Abu Iyad was one of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on the list, and yet his name was not on the list, just to show you about how much--or how little-- Israel knew. Abu Iyad spoke more than he needed not only because he wanted to send a message to the enemy, but also because the wars of factions and "Abus" within the PLO necessitated a game of one-up-manship, and of wild exaggeration at times.
And while Black September was a paper name, and did not have a separate organizational existence or structure, several factions used the name for their own ends. Nobody consulted with Abu Iyad about Abu Hasan's use of the name for the failed Sabena hijacking. Abu Dawud is a key person here. And while his name was mentioned in passing, it was added after the fact in Israeli propaganda accounts. Abu Dawud was arrested in France for another reason in 1977, and he was released because there were no German or Israeli warrants for his involvement in Munich. That shows you.
Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of Munich. But I personally believe the account of Abu Dawud more than I believe Spielberg, i.e. Israeli propaganda claims, or even German police. (Abu Dawud's account is found in Abu Dawud, Filastin: Mina-l-Quds Ila-Muikh (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1999). German police lied quite a bit about the case; they leaked to the press fanciful accounts of Palestinian infiltration of the workforce at the Olympic city, when none of that actually took place. They were too embarrassed to tell the truth. Similarly, the Israelis wanted to back the German account, especially as the violence at Munich was a propaganda bonanza for the Israelis in the West, just as Munich-this is not known in the West-was a propaganda bonanza for Fatah in the Middle East, as horrrific as the outcome was for all. And in that sense, the Germans, the Israelis, and Abu Iyad (and certainly Abu Hasan) lied about Munich, but not Abu Dawud, in my opinion. Abu Dawud is one of those 2nd tier PLO leaders who did not get corrupted in the messy Lebanese scene, and who did now allow the Gulf money that corrupted many PLO leaders to affect him.
Dawud was a man who was in charge of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and yet his name does not appear in any chronicle of the war because he was too low key, and because he never bragged. (he never talked even when the brutal Mukhabarat secret police in Jordan dangled him by his feet for days, while torturing him). People who saw him in jail at the time did not recognize him. But know this: your reliable "moderate" US allies in Jordan are quite proficient at torture. They are probably the best; they are helping the US in that regard as we speak. Most Lebanese did not even know Dawud's name. But this also explains why he survived, unlike say Abu Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois society. He could not get enough of that life. He developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment on Madame Curie Street in Beirut, and the routine he developed (going to the gym at the same time every day), made him an easy target for Israeli assassins.
Abu Hasan could get all the money he wanted for his own group from Yasser Arafat, and was doing a good job of maintaining not only good relations with the CIA but also with Lebanese right-wing groups. He became good friends with some right-wing militia leaders. Read the novel by Navid Ignatius, Agents of Innocence: it is based on Abu Hasan, although the author does not admit it.
It is interesting that in the Spielberg movie, the Israeli head killer (who was in the movie named "Troy"), was cast to be most appealing to the audience: a good looking and charismatic figure. But say what you want about Abu Hasan (and many people in Palestinian struggle, like Abu Dawud, did not like him) but he was a good looking and charismatic figure in real life. But in the movie the actor who played him in Spielberg's movie is not at all attractive.
Spielberg does not want the viewer to identify with any Palestinian in the movie. He just wanted to identify with the expensive human beings: the Israelis. The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir's painting, the Mosque,where they are an unidentifiable blob. For Spielberg they were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed to evoke emotions, and you were not supposed to see them bleed, and if you did, you had to cheer for their killers.
The only ones that you had to feel sorry for were the Israelis who get killed, including the killers when they kill. The sentimental music that plays when Israelis die, differs from the music that plays when Palestinians die n "Munich." And no speaking roles for Palestinians were necessary. Why bother? Give one a line, and you have done your "objective" duty.
The list of prisoners that Palestinian guerillas submitted to German authorities for release, did not have just "200 Arab prisoners" on it, as the movie clams. It had the names of some 234 Arab and non-Arab prisoners, including Japanese and Germans, but that was not in the movie.
The statement that was issued by the guerillas gave a name to the Munich "operation": "Bir`im and Ikrit," the names of two (predominantly Christian) villages in northern Palestine, the people of which were expelled by Israeli occupation forces in 1948 for "security reasons." In 1972, the people of those villages petitioned the Israeli courts to return to their native villages, and the Israeli courts turned them down.
But if Spielberg were to use the actual name of the Palestinian commando "operation" in Munich ("Bir`im and Ikrit") he would have to relate to his audience those burdensome details and it would have detracted from his celebration of the Israeli killing machine.
But this begs the question: why is the Munich massacre more infamous than the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps in February, prior to Munich? And why do the letter bombs to three Palestinian writers not get world attention? Why did American liberals not notice? Can you imagine what would happen if a Palestinian threw even a rose at an Israeli writer? Can you imagine the outcry among American leftists if a Palestinian were to say even a bad word to Amos Oz for example? That was the stature of writer Ghassan Kanafani among Palestinians.
I will not get into the military/intelligence background of the Israeli hostages as Abu Dawud does in his memoirs because the attackers did not know that information prior to the "operation." Abu Dawud gives many details about the military backgrounds of some of the Olympic hostages, but I do not think that this is appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that information before hand. I will not get into what actually happened at the site at the airport when the hostages were being transferred by their captors not only because the captors were responsible by virtue of the hostage "operation", but one can raise questions regarding the actual responsibility for the killing of the hostages. Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the 1990s in which writers raised questions about German police responsibility, and on how the German government never published autopsy reports of the hostages. The Israeli government also did not want to examine the bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would have settled the question, of course.
Dawud stressed that the attackers were under strict instructions to not shoot at the hostages, and you notice in the scene in the movie, that when they were storming the compound, they clearly struggled with the door and avoided shooting, when shooting could have shortened their entry time. Dawud claims that they were under strict orders to avoid using the grenades. He raises the possibility that the helicopter may have exploded from a bullet that hit its gas tank, but I don't know, and I have never relied on Spielberg, or on the book on which he based his account, for historical accuracy.
In retaliation for Israeli atrocities, Palestinians also have managed to assassinate Israeli military and intelligence leaders but those operations do not get Hollywood attention because the trend in US media and popular culture is that you should only show Palestinians when you can claim they are wantonly killing civilians, not when they are retaliating against Israeli military personnel.
It is not true that the Israeli response was confined to the assassination of the 11 Palestinians as was shown in the movie: Israel was also killing other Palestinians. Israeli "response" or initiative we should call it, was more massive and brutal that the operation of the secret team.
Three days after Munich, Israel ordered a bombing which required the use of some 75 Israeli aircraft (the largest attack since 1967). Their bombings of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon resulted in the killing of more than 200 civilians. And this is not because the Israelis were after a camp north of Sidon that was used for training the Munich attackers. That camp was not even hit (another sign that Israelis had no information about the real culprits of Munich) while other camps with civilians in them were bombed. While the "retaliatory" killings were being perpetrated by Spielberg's soulful assassins, Israeli bombing of Palestinian refugee camps continued uninterrupted.
The most glaring omission in the film, which shows you that the Israeli team was not only savage but also ignorant of their targets, was what transpired on July 21, 1973, when Ali Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter relaxing with his pregnant wife at a swimming pool in Norway, was murdered by Spielberg's beloved assassination team merely because Ali resembled what the hit team thought Abu Hasan Salamah looked like. The Norwegian police tracked and arrested the Israeli killers, but they were all released in a secret deal with the Israeli governement.
These inconvenient and uncomfortable facts about the Israeli killing team were omitted by Spielberg. Even Wa'il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in Rome who knew nothing about Munich, and was an academic with close ties to Leftist circles in Italy, was shot 14 times. He almost certainly never held a gun in his life. Zu`ytir was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on which he knew nothing. The PLO representative in France, Mahmud Hamshari also had nothing to do with Munich; he too was "liquidated."
The movie, it seems, relished detailing the 1973 Israeli revenge in Beirut. Spielberg really enjoyed depicting that act by Israeli hit squads. But who were the three PLO personalities killed in that so noble endeavor? And who cares about the details? Kamal Udwan was the Fatah/PLO leader responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. He not only had no responsibilities in Europe, but he opposed "operations" in Europe, and even those by Black September. More than that, Udwan was one of the most moderate PLO leaders, having accepted the two-state solution back in 1970, before any of his colleques in Fatah. Another victim, Abu Yusuf An-Najjar, was in charge of intelligence in Lebanon-Lebanon, not Europe. While Udwan had no knowledge of Munich, Abu Yusuf may have heard about it but had no role whatever in it. The third victim was another Palestinian writer: and Israelis have no qualms about the murder of Palestinian poets, artists, and writers: Kamal Nasir was a poet, who was killed in his bed. The movie did not tell you that by the time the Israeli terrorists finished with their retaliation "mission," some 100 Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered on that day in April 1973.
The PLO representative in Cyprus also had nothing to do with Munich; he was the intelligence envoy of Abu Yusuf An-Najjar. And some people targeted on the list of the Israeli murder team were not only not involved with Black September, but some were not even members of the Fatah organization. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a Palestinian scholar who had just completed his PhD in political science; I recently had dinner with Basil's best friend in college in Candada. Kubaysi was in the PFLP and not in Fatah. The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black September.
But we can rest assured the film is accurate: Spielberg offered the script to Dennis Ross and his former boss Bill Clinton to verify the "accuracy" of the film's Middle East political and historical references.
Spielberg portrayed the neighborhood where the PLO leaders and others were killed with all the features of the Orientalist imagination. The houses were old style with arches, and the place was protected like a military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived in a civilian residential building in the most modern and upper class neighborhood of Verdun in Beirut. But why bother with that fact?
The Munich movie does not tell you that on September 16, and 17, Israel launched an invasion of south Lebanon, razing the refugee camp of Nabatiyyah. The Lebanese newspapers at the time had on the first page a picture of a smashed civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians crushed inside after an Israeli tank ran over their car near Jwayya in south Lebanon. That must have been too messy for Spielberg to cover. The car had stopped at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance to the village. Were those civilians in the car also involved in Munich?
As Spielberg's movie ends,we see written on the screen the statement that Abu Hasan Salamah was later "assassinated." Spielberg forgot to add that he was "assassinated" by a massive car bomb in a crowded street in Beirut, which killed and injured scores of civilians--but hey--they were only Arabs and their blood is too cheap to mention.
Who is retaliating against whom in the Arab-Israeli conflict? That is the question
by As'ad AbuKhalil
(As'ad AbuKhalil, a native of Lebanon, is a leading expert on the Middle East. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the American University of Beirut, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University. He teaches at California State University at Stanislaus and at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC/Berkeley. He is the author of "Bin Laden, Islam & America's New War on Terrorism." His latest book is "The Battle for Saudi Arabia.")
This film reminds me of a line that comedian George Carlin used in his comedy routine that went roughly like this: "Why do we call Israeli terrorists 'commandos,' and Palestinian commandos 'terrorists?" His question never got a laugh the two times I saw him use it with a live audience.
The thrust of the Spielberg movie is simple, fanfare notwithstanding: Israeli killers are conscientious and humane people, while Palestinians are always--no matter what--vicious killers.
Did you notice how one lone critical opinion of the movie by one Israeli diplomat (Ehud Danoch, Israel's consul general in Los Angeles), which mildly criticized the movie, got so much press in the US?It helped to promote the movie and to give the illusion of a "balanced" cast to the narrative, that it does not deserve. This supposed critical opinion reminded me of O'Reilly; how he always seems to find one e-mail from somebody in Montana who tells him that he is too liberal. He needs that to maintain an image that does not exist, just as Spielberg needs to maintain an image that he does not deserve.
This movie could easily have been a paid Israeli advertisement for its killing machine. In fact, it could be a recruitment movie for Israeli killing squads. It is a celebration of Israeli murder of Palestinians. When Israelis kill, it is always moral, and always careful, and always on target. On Dec. 26, yet another New York Times neo-con reviewer thinks that Spielberg was not sympathetic enough to the Israeli killers.
I was angry watching it; and I grew more angry as I observed the liberal Berkeley audience with whom I watched it react sympathetically to the movie, rooting for the Israeli head assassin, as he went about his "civilized" killing. I watched a humane Berkeley audience root for an Israeli killing team,in a story with Palestinian victims who were real people, with real blood.
An emotional moment for Spielberg, and presumably for American audiences was when the chief Israeli assassin talked with his young daughter in New York, stating that he missed her very much. Oh, yeah. That was the point at which you were expected to shed a tear or two; the music grew particularly sentimental at that point.
Spielberg's movie is based on a "non-fiction" book by journalist George Jonas, Vengeance, which took the Israeli account at face value. But in the book the Israeli killers did not express regret or second-thoughts of any kind. None! In the book -- but not in the movie-- the killers, according to Jonas, had "absolutely no qualms about anything they did." Hmmm...How could Spielberg have missed that?
I can connect to the story, in its details and personalities. The first victim of the movie was Wa'il Zu`aytir, and I knew his niece; I went to school with Abu Hasan Salamah's son--he was younger; and I knew the street and building where the three PLO leaders were massacred in Beirut. And let me tell you that none of the five people mentioned here had anything to do with Munich.
But why should this movie, a Spielberg movie, bother with facts, especially if they get in the way of a smooth pro-Israeli narrative? This movie is intended for mass audiences who know nothing about the facts of the conflict. That is exactly why it will work, and why it will deliver the propaganda goods.
Munich was not as planned an operation as has often been maintained. This was not planned months in advance, as Abu Iyad maintained in his account written with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land. Abu Iyad for years exaggerated the claims about the "carefully planned" Munich operation, and PLO media at the time lied about PLO gunmen throwing grenades into the helicopters, so as to make the last shootout more of a fight that it actually was.
Massacred Palestinians who were being bombed by Israeli fighter jets in their refugee camps demanded heroes and heroism, and the PLO had to give them some, even if they were not legitimate heroes. The German police at the time were going to take the PLO out, no matter what, and no matter how much the Germans endangered the lives of the hostages, and they presumably had Israeli consent. An Arab League diplomat revealed this recently when he broke his silence in an interview on Ziyarah Khassah on Al-Jazeera. He should know: he was the negotiator with the Palestinian guerillas in Munich.
It can be argued that the Palestinians risked the lives of the hostages by taking them hostages, even if they did not intend to kill them. That is true. This is similar to the moral perils entailed by hijacking: the hijackers, any hijackers, are responsible, and should be held responsible for whatever endangerment to the lives and health of victims. Quite true.
But it is also true that the "State of Israel" has taken a nation hostage, and has been endangering the lives of millions of Palestinians since the inception of the Israeli state. It is a question of who is retaliating against whom. One of the many false premises of the Spielberg movie is that Israel only went on a killing rampage-and only against Palestinian "killers"--after Munich; that Munich was some kind of watershed.
Watershed it was not, except in Israeli propaganda brochures. Israel has been perpetrating killing rampages against Palestinians, mostly civilians, since before the creation of the state of Israel. And how could Spielberg lionize Golda Meir and forget to mention her most memorable quote: that "there is no such thing as the Palestinian people"?
Spielberg must have missed that too,as he portrayed her as Grandma goodness who was pushed into vengeance by Palestinian monsters. More humanization of Israel and dehumanization of Palestine. That is why the movie showed the director of the Israeli assassination machine with his child: the audience must see him as a caring human being.
Not a single Palestinian in the movie appeared unarmed. They all were terrorists, and their murder had to be justified, and Spielberg did a great service for the state of Israel in that regard. They should name some stolen Palestinian property in his honor.
What were the Israelis doing before Munich? Before Munich -- not after-Israelis placed a bomb under the car seat of Palestinian writer/artist, Ghassan Kanafani and killed him and killed his 14-year-old niece. The teenage girl was not plotting the Munich attack when she was murdered by the Israelis; nor was her uncle. Kanafani wrote for Al-Hurriyyah magazine.
Israel, also before Munich, sent a letter bomb to Bassam Abu Sharif, a writer and journalist, and left him with life-long scars and bodily damage, and they also sent a letter bomb to Anis Sayigh, a scholar and researcher, who was not a member of any group. But Sayigh was a really diligent researcher, and Israel did not appreciate it.
Abu Sharif never had a military role. He was an innocent victim of Israeli killing. He nevr held a gun. I see him as a human being, and not as the armed and vengeful character that appears in Spielberg's movie; typical of US movies where Arabs appear, Arabs when they speak Arabic never need subtitles. We get them them when people speak in French and German, but Arabic is not important. It is not important to know what cheap natives say; we only need to know what expensive people say: Europeans and Israelis.
Do you notice that Hollywood still portrays Israelis as Europeans: they still don't want to accept that some half of all Israelis come from Asian and African countries. This makes it easier for the White Man to identify with them. And there is this element that is never mentioned about Palestinian attacks: and this is true of the present and of the past. It is not that some Palestinian leaders recruit or compel Palestinians to attack Israelis. It is the other way round. Palestinians, regular rank-and-file pressure Palestinian leaders and commanders to send them on military or suicidal missions against Israeli targets. Munich occurred exactly like that. Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon, those who were trained by Fatah and by other groups, were lobbying for "action." Why? In February of the same year prior to Munich, Israeli jets bombed Palestinian refugee camps, and killed innocent people. This is what is missing in the movie. Most Palestinians who are killed by Israelis are unarmed and are killed not by conscientious and sensitive Israeli assassins-as they are outrageously portrayed in this movie-but by Israeli pilots who bomb refugee camps filled with unarmed civilians. Palestinians who are bombed from the air, long before Munich, are elderly and women and children in their beds. These are the victims that you will never see in a Spielberg movie.
Israel was killing Palestinians, and this was the context of pre-Munich. A small Palestinian group chose to seek venegeance--retaliation-- but they were not sure of their target, and this was only three months before Munich. One of the handful of people who knew about this was Abu Mazen, the Abu Mazen who today is the head of the puppet Palestinian Authority. But do you notice that US/Israel always forgive the past of those who submit to Israeli dictates? Look at how US and Israel forgave Anwar Sadat for his Nazi past. Abu Mazen was the money guy, and he dispersed the funds for Abu Dawud, who engineered the operation.
The American public and US media and popular culture are so enamored with the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, but the image of the Mossad does not match its actual reality. The best evidence is this movie: look at this obsession with Abu Hasan Salamah as the "mastermind" of Munich when he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Munich. To be sure, Abu Hasan was a braggart, and had a big mouth, and would take credit for things he did not do, and would distance himself from failed "operations" that he planned, like the Sabena hijacking in 1972.
That was Abu Hasan: he lived the life of a playboy, and enjoyed a unique indulgent pampering from Abu Ammar who treated him like a son. Abu Ammar would never say no to Abu Hasan, on anything. But Abu Hasan had nothing to do with Munich, and this ostensibly all-knowing Mossad, did not know it. Former CIA director, Stansfield Turner, once said that the Mossad is a mediocre organization, but that it does outstanding PR. Former CIA man in Beirut Robert Baer said this about the Mossad--in an interview he gave to Al-Jazeera: "Let me tell you something, what people most err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that [i.e. Norway]. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge of those countries."
But this can never be maintained in a country that wants to exaggerate the prowess and knowledge of an intelligence agency not only to help feed the Israeli propaganda myth, but to also prepare the American public for more ruthless times and ways. So a very small number of people knew about it, and of course Abu Iyad was one of them. And Abu Iyad is the most important person on the list, and yet his name was not on the list, just to show you about how much--or how little-- Israel knew. Abu Iyad spoke more than he needed not only because he wanted to send a message to the enemy, but also because the wars of factions and "Abus" within the PLO necessitated a game of one-up-manship, and of wild exaggeration at times.
And while Black September was a paper name, and did not have a separate organizational existence or structure, several factions used the name for their own ends. Nobody consulted with Abu Iyad about Abu Hasan's use of the name for the failed Sabena hijacking. Abu Dawud is a key person here. And while his name was mentioned in passing, it was added after the fact in Israeli propaganda accounts. Abu Dawud was arrested in France for another reason in 1977, and he was released because there were no German or Israeli warrants for his involvement in Munich. That shows you.
Now, I will not give a blow-by-blow account of Munich. But I personally believe the account of Abu Dawud more than I believe Spielberg, i.e. Israeli propaganda claims, or even German police. (Abu Dawud's account is found in Abu Dawud, Filastin: Mina-l-Quds Ila-Muikh (Beirut: Dar An-Nahar, 1999). German police lied quite a bit about the case; they leaked to the press fanciful accounts of Palestinian infiltration of the workforce at the Olympic city, when none of that actually took place. They were too embarrassed to tell the truth. Similarly, the Israelis wanted to back the German account, especially as the violence at Munich was a propaganda bonanza for the Israelis in the West, just as Munich-this is not known in the West-was a propaganda bonanza for Fatah in the Middle East, as horrrific as the outcome was for all. And in that sense, the Germans, the Israelis, and Abu Iyad (and certainly Abu Hasan) lied about Munich, but not Abu Dawud, in my opinion. Abu Dawud is one of those 2nd tier PLO leaders who did not get corrupted in the messy Lebanese scene, and who did now allow the Gulf money that corrupted many PLO leaders to affect him.
Dawud was a man who was in charge of Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, and yet his name does not appear in any chronicle of the war because he was too low key, and because he never bragged. (he never talked even when the brutal Mukhabarat secret police in Jordan dangled him by his feet for days, while torturing him). People who saw him in jail at the time did not recognize him. But know this: your reliable "moderate" US allies in Jordan are quite proficient at torture. They are probably the best; they are helping the US in that regard as we speak. Most Lebanese did not even know Dawud's name. But this also explains why he survived, unlike say Abu Hasan Salamah, who married a Lebanese former Miss Universe, who introduced him to Lebanese bourgeois society. He could not get enough of that life. He developed a routine, and lived in a fancy apartment on Madame Curie Street in Beirut, and the routine he developed (going to the gym at the same time every day), made him an easy target for Israeli assassins.
Abu Hasan could get all the money he wanted for his own group from Yasser Arafat, and was doing a good job of maintaining not only good relations with the CIA but also with Lebanese right-wing groups. He became good friends with some right-wing militia leaders. Read the novel by Navid Ignatius, Agents of Innocence: it is based on Abu Hasan, although the author does not admit it.
It is interesting that in the Spielberg movie, the Israeli head killer (who was in the movie named "Troy"), was cast to be most appealing to the audience: a good looking and charismatic figure. But say what you want about Abu Hasan (and many people in Palestinian struggle, like Abu Dawud, did not like him) but he was a good looking and charismatic figure in real life. But in the movie the actor who played him in Spielberg's movie is not at all attractive.
Spielberg does not want the viewer to identify with any Palestinian in the movie. He just wanted to identify with the expensive human beings: the Israelis. The Arabs are worse than they were in Renoir's painting, the Mosque,where they are an unidentifiable blob. For Spielberg they were just armed, with no humanity. They were not supposed to evoke emotions, and you were not supposed to see them bleed, and if you did, you had to cheer for their killers.
The only ones that you had to feel sorry for were the Israelis who get killed, including the killers when they kill. The sentimental music that plays when Israelis die, differs from the music that plays when Palestinians die n "Munich." And no speaking roles for Palestinians were necessary. Why bother? Give one a line, and you have done your "objective" duty.
The list of prisoners that Palestinian guerillas submitted to German authorities for release, did not have just "200 Arab prisoners" on it, as the movie clams. It had the names of some 234 Arab and non-Arab prisoners, including Japanese and Germans, but that was not in the movie.
The statement that was issued by the guerillas gave a name to the Munich "operation": "Bir`im and Ikrit," the names of two (predominantly Christian) villages in northern Palestine, the people of which were expelled by Israeli occupation forces in 1948 for "security reasons." In 1972, the people of those villages petitioned the Israeli courts to return to their native villages, and the Israeli courts turned them down.
But if Spielberg were to use the actual name of the Palestinian commando "operation" in Munich ("Bir`im and Ikrit") he would have to relate to his audience those burdensome details and it would have detracted from his celebration of the Israeli killing machine.
But this begs the question: why is the Munich massacre more infamous than the genocidal Israeli bombardment of Palestinian refugee camps in February, prior to Munich? And why do the letter bombs to three Palestinian writers not get world attention? Why did American liberals not notice? Can you imagine what would happen if a Palestinian threw even a rose at an Israeli writer? Can you imagine the outcry among American leftists if a Palestinian were to say even a bad word to Amos Oz for example? That was the stature of writer Ghassan Kanafani among Palestinians.
I will not get into the military/intelligence background of the Israeli hostages as Abu Dawud does in his memoirs because the attackers did not know that information prior to the "operation." Abu Dawud gives many details about the military backgrounds of some of the Olympic hostages, but I do not think that this is appropriate because even Abu Dawud did not know that information before hand. I will not get into what actually happened at the site at the airport when the hostages were being transferred by their captors not only because the captors were responsible by virtue of the hostage "operation", but one can raise questions regarding the actual responsibility for the killing of the hostages. Abu Dawud cites Israeli newspapers from the 1990s in which writers raised questions about German police responsibility, and on how the German government never published autopsy reports of the hostages. The Israeli government also did not want to examine the bullets that killed the Israeli hostages. That would have settled the question, of course.
Dawud stressed that the attackers were under strict instructions to not shoot at the hostages, and you notice in the scene in the movie, that when they were storming the compound, they clearly struggled with the door and avoided shooting, when shooting could have shortened their entry time. Dawud claims that they were under strict orders to avoid using the grenades. He raises the possibility that the helicopter may have exploded from a bullet that hit its gas tank, but I don't know, and I have never relied on Spielberg, or on the book on which he based his account, for historical accuracy.
In retaliation for Israeli atrocities, Palestinians also have managed to assassinate Israeli military and intelligence leaders but those operations do not get Hollywood attention because the trend in US media and popular culture is that you should only show Palestinians when you can claim they are wantonly killing civilians, not when they are retaliating against Israeli military personnel.
It is not true that the Israeli response was confined to the assassination of the 11 Palestinians as was shown in the movie: Israel was also killing other Palestinians. Israeli "response" or initiative we should call it, was more massive and brutal that the operation of the secret team.
Three days after Munich, Israel ordered a bombing which required the use of some 75 Israeli aircraft (the largest attack since 1967). Their bombings of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon resulted in the killing of more than 200 civilians. And this is not because the Israelis were after a camp north of Sidon that was used for training the Munich attackers. That camp was not even hit (another sign that Israelis had no information about the real culprits of Munich) while other camps with civilians in them were bombed. While the "retaliatory" killings were being perpetrated by Spielberg's soulful assassins, Israeli bombing of Palestinian refugee camps continued uninterrupted.
The most glaring omission in the film, which shows you that the Israeli team was not only savage but also ignorant of their targets, was what transpired on July 21, 1973, when Ali Bushiki, a Moroccan waiter relaxing with his pregnant wife at a swimming pool in Norway, was murdered by Spielberg's beloved assassination team merely because Ali resembled what the hit team thought Abu Hasan Salamah looked like. The Norwegian police tracked and arrested the Israeli killers, but they were all released in a secret deal with the Israeli governement.
These inconvenient and uncomfortable facts about the Israeli killing team were omitted by Spielberg. Even Wa'il Zu`yatir, the PLO representative in Rome who knew nothing about Munich, and was an academic with close ties to Leftist circles in Italy, was shot 14 times. He almost certainly never held a gun in his life. Zu`ytir was more interested in literature than he was in military affairs, on which he knew nothing. The PLO representative in France, Mahmud Hamshari also had nothing to do with Munich; he too was "liquidated."
The movie, it seems, relished detailing the 1973 Israeli revenge in Beirut. Spielberg really enjoyed depicting that act by Israeli hit squads. But who were the three PLO personalities killed in that so noble endeavor? And who cares about the details? Kamal Udwan was the Fatah/PLO leader responsible for the West Bank and Gaza. He not only had no responsibilities in Europe, but he opposed "operations" in Europe, and even those by Black September. More than that, Udwan was one of the most moderate PLO leaders, having accepted the two-state solution back in 1970, before any of his colleques in Fatah. Another victim, Abu Yusuf An-Najjar, was in charge of intelligence in Lebanon-Lebanon, not Europe. While Udwan had no knowledge of Munich, Abu Yusuf may have heard about it but had no role whatever in it. The third victim was another Palestinian writer: and Israelis have no qualms about the murder of Palestinian poets, artists, and writers: Kamal Nasir was a poet, who was killed in his bed. The movie did not tell you that by the time the Israeli terrorists finished with their retaliation "mission," some 100 Palestinians and Lebanese were murdered on that day in April 1973.
The PLO representative in Cyprus also had nothing to do with Munich; he was the intelligence envoy of Abu Yusuf An-Najjar. And some people targeted on the list of the Israeli murder team were not only not involved with Black September, but some were not even members of the Fatah organization. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a Palestinian scholar who had just completed his PhD in political science; I recently had dinner with Basil's best friend in college in Candada. Kubaysi was in the PFLP and not in Fatah. The same for Muhammad Budia: he was with Wadi` Haddad, and not with Black September.
But we can rest assured the film is accurate: Spielberg offered the script to Dennis Ross and his former boss Bill Clinton to verify the "accuracy" of the film's Middle East political and historical references.
Spielberg portrayed the neighborhood where the PLO leaders and others were killed with all the features of the Orientalist imagination. The houses were old style with arches, and the place was protected like a military base. In reality, the PLO leaders lived in a civilian residential building in the most modern and upper class neighborhood of Verdun in Beirut. But why bother with that fact?
The Munich movie does not tell you that on September 16, and 17, Israel launched an invasion of south Lebanon, razing the refugee camp of Nabatiyyah. The Lebanese newspapers at the time had on the first page a picture of a smashed civilian car with seven Lebanese civilians crushed inside after an Israeli tank ran over their car near Jwayya in south Lebanon. That must have been too messy for Spielberg to cover. The car had stopped at the Israeli checkpoint that was set up at the entrance to the village. Were those civilians in the car also involved in Munich?
As Spielberg's movie ends,we see written on the screen the statement that Abu Hasan Salamah was later "assassinated." Spielberg forgot to add that he was "assassinated" by a massive car bomb in a crowded street in Beirut, which killed and injured scores of civilians--but hey--they were only Arabs and their blood is too cheap to mention.
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
NOT IN MY NAME
President Chirac of France has indicated that the so-called "Nuclear Option" is thinkable against so-called "terrorist states".
The Chancellor of Germany, my home country, Angela Merkel has defended Mr Chirac´s remarks from critics within the German opposition parties.
Those government leaders of the biggest European countries have practically given the American and Israeli war-machine a green light for nuking Iran.
The war-crimes committed in the war against the Iraqi people were not committed in our, the German and the French name, the even worse crimes against the Iranian people will be.
I´m angry. I´m sad. I´m scared.
I knew that Ms Merkel as German Chancellor was not a good sign.
When Chancellor Schröder refused to rubber stamp the war against Iraq, I was so proud of him. I was so happy to be German, when I heard his speech in the Bundestag, when he said that the "power of the law" should rule and not the "law of power".
At that moment I was confident that we Germans had learned from history.
Cynics say, that the reason for Germany and France in not joining in with the Americans, was that those countries had opposing business interests in Iraq to the Americans.
But this at least was not the reason for Mr Schröder´s decision. I remember the media blast against him by all the pro-business media and generally by most all of the German media, even part of the publicly owned media.
I refuse to become a cynic dividing the whole world purely in business interests.
I refuse to believe in that dark and negative image of the human kind, which does not allow for ethical values.
I believe that in each one of us, is this ability for compassion and pure goodness, even politicians, even in capitalists.
Mr Schröder was the most business chancellor, the SPD, the German Social-Democrats ever had. In his office he was a German Tony Blair.
But he did not act like Tony Blair. In this short time span he became a compassionate and ethical human being, a person he used to be when he started to go into politics.
He possebly got the French President Chirac into the boat by pointing out French business interests going sour with an Iraq war. He might have gotten Russian President Putin in by pointing out that power would even shift more into the direction of the US when they would take over the whole Middle East, which in the long run would be dangerous to Russian sovereignity and interests. But Schröder was against the war for his love of ethics, ethics he might have compromised many times in his political career, but not this time, this one single time.
Ms Merkel is different. She has sold out all faith in human ethics a long time ago. And most Germans can feel it. Her party the "Christian Democrats", who actually have left pretense of the highest Christian value, the love of neighbour, quite a long time ago, had before the elections quite a bit of lead on Schröder´s SPD.
There had been quite a propaganda campaign against the SPD, by down-talking the German economy, which at the same time in reality had become the world-champion in export, far above the USA, still above Japan and even above the cheap wage, sweat-shop billion people country China. So while the high unemployment (high profit corporation were cutting down on personell, while also cutting down on paying taxes. Lacking those tax-revenues cities and towns were scrimping on public employment and work projects for small companies) and the so-called "economic problems" were causing the SPD government millions of votes, Ms Merkel was causing her own party to loose most of those votes again, just by being the parties front-runner, a person without charisma, unconvincing in her arguments and incapable of one single honest smile, that would reach her eyes.
As a conspiracy theorist I ask myself who, what economic big forces, pressed Ms Merkel, the vote-looser, on the CDU.
As a woman however I feel frustrated by her, the first female German Chancellor, one of very few female heads of government in the world. She sure makes us women look bad. She stands in a line with the British Margaret Thatcher and the American Condoleeza Rice, a woman without compassion or ethics, acting as if a woman in order to get respected in politics, must even act more cruel than a man.
And it makes me sad and angry. And it scares me.
But as a German and a woman I refuse to identify with Ms Merkel:
NOT IN MY NAME do I want the women and men of Iran being nuked, there homes, land and culture turned into radio-active rubble, their children being ripped to pieces, their future children condemned to life-long suffering of the consequences of radiation.
Who are the "terrorist states"?
Who terrorizes whom, threatening with the worst terrible destruction imaginable?
When Chancellor Schröder held his speech in the Bundestag, he knew, that chances were slim to stop the American war-machine, but he still refused to take part.
He thought, not in my name, the German name.
Now Schröder is no longer in power, now we Germans have to say it on our own:
NOT IN OUR NAME
so have the French, so have the other Europeans and so all the Americans of good will
NOT IN MY NAME - NOT IN OUR NAME
If enough people say it, over and over again, the mothers to their sons, the sisters to their brothers, the children to their fathers, they will stop the war-machine, because they will stop the soldiers.
It still goes: "Imagine it is war, and nobody goes there!"
The Chancellor of Germany, my home country, Angela Merkel has defended Mr Chirac´s remarks from critics within the German opposition parties.
Those government leaders of the biggest European countries have practically given the American and Israeli war-machine a green light for nuking Iran.
The war-crimes committed in the war against the Iraqi people were not committed in our, the German and the French name, the even worse crimes against the Iranian people will be.
I´m angry. I´m sad. I´m scared.
I knew that Ms Merkel as German Chancellor was not a good sign.
When Chancellor Schröder refused to rubber stamp the war against Iraq, I was so proud of him. I was so happy to be German, when I heard his speech in the Bundestag, when he said that the "power of the law" should rule and not the "law of power".
At that moment I was confident that we Germans had learned from history.
Cynics say, that the reason for Germany and France in not joining in with the Americans, was that those countries had opposing business interests in Iraq to the Americans.
But this at least was not the reason for Mr Schröder´s decision. I remember the media blast against him by all the pro-business media and generally by most all of the German media, even part of the publicly owned media.
I refuse to become a cynic dividing the whole world purely in business interests.
I refuse to believe in that dark and negative image of the human kind, which does not allow for ethical values.
I believe that in each one of us, is this ability for compassion and pure goodness, even politicians, even in capitalists.
Mr Schröder was the most business chancellor, the SPD, the German Social-Democrats ever had. In his office he was a German Tony Blair.
But he did not act like Tony Blair. In this short time span he became a compassionate and ethical human being, a person he used to be when he started to go into politics.
He possebly got the French President Chirac into the boat by pointing out French business interests going sour with an Iraq war. He might have gotten Russian President Putin in by pointing out that power would even shift more into the direction of the US when they would take over the whole Middle East, which in the long run would be dangerous to Russian sovereignity and interests. But Schröder was against the war for his love of ethics, ethics he might have compromised many times in his political career, but not this time, this one single time.
Ms Merkel is different. She has sold out all faith in human ethics a long time ago. And most Germans can feel it. Her party the "Christian Democrats", who actually have left pretense of the highest Christian value, the love of neighbour, quite a long time ago, had before the elections quite a bit of lead on Schröder´s SPD.
There had been quite a propaganda campaign against the SPD, by down-talking the German economy, which at the same time in reality had become the world-champion in export, far above the USA, still above Japan and even above the cheap wage, sweat-shop billion people country China. So while the high unemployment (high profit corporation were cutting down on personell, while also cutting down on paying taxes. Lacking those tax-revenues cities and towns were scrimping on public employment and work projects for small companies) and the so-called "economic problems" were causing the SPD government millions of votes, Ms Merkel was causing her own party to loose most of those votes again, just by being the parties front-runner, a person without charisma, unconvincing in her arguments and incapable of one single honest smile, that would reach her eyes.
As a conspiracy theorist I ask myself who, what economic big forces, pressed Ms Merkel, the vote-looser, on the CDU.
As a woman however I feel frustrated by her, the first female German Chancellor, one of very few female heads of government in the world. She sure makes us women look bad. She stands in a line with the British Margaret Thatcher and the American Condoleeza Rice, a woman without compassion or ethics, acting as if a woman in order to get respected in politics, must even act more cruel than a man.
And it makes me sad and angry. And it scares me.
But as a German and a woman I refuse to identify with Ms Merkel:
NOT IN MY NAME do I want the women and men of Iran being nuked, there homes, land and culture turned into radio-active rubble, their children being ripped to pieces, their future children condemned to life-long suffering of the consequences of radiation.
Who are the "terrorist states"?
Who terrorizes whom, threatening with the worst terrible destruction imaginable?
When Chancellor Schröder held his speech in the Bundestag, he knew, that chances were slim to stop the American war-machine, but he still refused to take part.
He thought, not in my name, the German name.
Now Schröder is no longer in power, now we Germans have to say it on our own:
NOT IN OUR NAME
so have the French, so have the other Europeans and so all the Americans of good will
NOT IN MY NAME - NOT IN OUR NAME
If enough people say it, over and over again, the mothers to their sons, the sisters to their brothers, the children to their fathers, they will stop the war-machine, because they will stop the soldiers.
It still goes: "Imagine it is war, and nobody goes there!"
Thursday, January 19, 2006
"Munich" and Abu Nidal
OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME
There was a time when I thought that Palestinian was a synonym for terrorist - literally.
I remember exactly when I got impression. It was in August 1972 during the Olympic Games of Munich.
I was still a child then, I knew nothing about politics, very little about history and had not yet developed any interest in watching the news or reading a newspaper.
But from the few times I did pay attention to the news I knew that those Olympic Games were special for Germany.
Everybody was talking about it them, a long time before hand. Everybody was looking forward to them. And even people who normally weren't interested in sports or just interested in soccer were now watching the events on TV.
The openenings of the Games were so impressive, all those many athlets from just about every country of the world had come to Germany, the flags, the music, the cheering, the excited talks. It seemed like my whole country was so very, very happy.
And then all of a sudden everything changed. People were killed as hostages taken and afterwards those hostages were killed as well.
Everybody was in shock and all the happiness was gone. The Games went on, but there was no excitement any more. The reporters only made sad commentaries. And for the closing ceremonies there was no music, no dancing, no performances and no cheering.
I remember a group of children about my age, the commentator told the TV audience that they had practiced for many month to perform dances for these ceremomies, but because of the events, they would now only walk through the stadium.
I remember how sad those children looked and I remember that I hated the "Palestinians" for destroying all the happiness.
It was not until years later that I found out, that "Palestinians" didn´t just mean terrorists, that it was the name of a people.
By then I had seen the movie Exodus, which gave the impression, that Palestinians (or Arabs as they are called in the movie) are people who (most of them at least) did not want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbours, who had just come to the land after having fled terrible persecution in Europe.
Years later I watched the TV movie "Sword of Gideon" about the retaliation of Mossad against the people who were supposedly responsible for the death of the Israeli athlets in Munich. While I did not like the thought of assassinations I still did sympathize with those Mossad characters.
The events of Munich had poisened my mind for a long time against the Plaestinians. And it took many years and good antidote of historic information for me to realize exactly who is the oppressor and who is the victim in Palestine.
Now Stephen Spielberg has made a remake of the "Sword of Gideon" and from what I have read this movie seems to be not quite as pro-Israeli as the older movie.
At least the main-character shows in the end doubts about his murderous mission, doubts about its ethics, doubts about its goals and even doubts about the question, if the people killed are really guilty of any crime.However this movie is, according to reviewers, still blatantly from an Israeli point of view.
Looking back on the events of Munich I can see that I was not the only one who was influenced by them to become a staunch supporter of Israel at least for quite a while. The murder of those Israeli athletes was one of the best propaganda points for the Israely side ever.
Which leads me to the question what stupid idiot was responsible for this point.
He was called Abu Nidal. And he and his organisation "Black September" have scored many more points for the Israeli side.
I found some interesting information and credible speculations on Abu Nidal and his supposedly pro-Palestinian actions:
Another interesting speculation on Abu Nidal is here. If you follow the link, you will see, that this was posted by Gordon Thomas in September 2001, probably before 9/11 since it was not mentioned:
Now Gordon Thomas, the author, has written a book about the Mossad and is said to have excellent connections into the Mossad and into British intelligence.
So Mr Thomas´sources have told him that Abu Nidal was in Baghdad with Saddam ready to use his organisation for major terrorist attacks.
And after 9/11 most neocons wanted to attack Iraq right away, but were stopped by others to go after Afghanistan first.
Could it be that Abu Nidal, with him the Palestinians together with Saddam were supposed to be framed for 9/11 first? But then they were forced by the oil-interest backers into a change of plan and frame Osama to get into Afghanisthan?
Remember the cheering Israelis who gave each other high fives will filming the collaps of the WTC buildings. When they were arrested they told the police "we are Israelis, we are not your problems, the Palestinians are."
The question of course is, why did they not use the Abu Nidal story to frame Saddam? Why did they have to cook up some story of an Iraqi agent meeting Mohammed Attah in Prague?
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME
There was a time when I thought that Palestinian was a synonym for terrorist - literally.
I remember exactly when I got impression. It was in August 1972 during the Olympic Games of Munich.
I was still a child then, I knew nothing about politics, very little about history and had not yet developed any interest in watching the news or reading a newspaper.
But from the few times I did pay attention to the news I knew that those Olympic Games were special for Germany.
Everybody was talking about it them, a long time before hand. Everybody was looking forward to them. And even people who normally weren't interested in sports or just interested in soccer were now watching the events on TV.
The openenings of the Games were so impressive, all those many athlets from just about every country of the world had come to Germany, the flags, the music, the cheering, the excited talks. It seemed like my whole country was so very, very happy.
And then all of a sudden everything changed. People were killed as hostages taken and afterwards those hostages were killed as well.
Everybody was in shock and all the happiness was gone. The Games went on, but there was no excitement any more. The reporters only made sad commentaries. And for the closing ceremonies there was no music, no dancing, no performances and no cheering.
I remember a group of children about my age, the commentator told the TV audience that they had practiced for many month to perform dances for these ceremomies, but because of the events, they would now only walk through the stadium.
I remember how sad those children looked and I remember that I hated the "Palestinians" for destroying all the happiness.
It was not until years later that I found out, that "Palestinians" didn´t just mean terrorists, that it was the name of a people.
By then I had seen the movie Exodus, which gave the impression, that Palestinians (or Arabs as they are called in the movie) are people who (most of them at least) did not want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbours, who had just come to the land after having fled terrible persecution in Europe.
Years later I watched the TV movie "Sword of Gideon" about the retaliation of Mossad against the people who were supposedly responsible for the death of the Israeli athlets in Munich. While I did not like the thought of assassinations I still did sympathize with those Mossad characters.
The events of Munich had poisened my mind for a long time against the Plaestinians. And it took many years and good antidote of historic information for me to realize exactly who is the oppressor and who is the victim in Palestine.
Now Stephen Spielberg has made a remake of the "Sword of Gideon" and from what I have read this movie seems to be not quite as pro-Israeli as the older movie.
At least the main-character shows in the end doubts about his murderous mission, doubts about its ethics, doubts about its goals and even doubts about the question, if the people killed are really guilty of any crime.However this movie is, according to reviewers, still blatantly from an Israeli point of view.
Looking back on the events of Munich I can see that I was not the only one who was influenced by them to become a staunch supporter of Israel at least for quite a while. The murder of those Israeli athletes was one of the best propaganda points for the Israely side ever.
Which leads me to the question what stupid idiot was responsible for this point.
He was called Abu Nidal. And he and his organisation "Black September" have scored many more points for the Israeli side.
I found some interesting information and credible speculations on Abu Nidal and his supposedly pro-Palestinian actions:
Abu Nidal began his long and bloody career in the PLO, only to become a bitter rival of Yasser Arafat. It was a situation that the Israeli Mossad, in a manner similar to their CIA cousins, would seek to exploit.
As Middle East expert Patrick Seale writes:
Israeli penetration of Palestinian organizations was common, but it was clearly not the whole story. Most intelligence sources I consulted agreed that it was standard practice to use penetration agents not simply to neutralize or destroy the enemy but to try to manipulate him so that he did one's bidding without always being aware of doing
Whatever jobs [Abu Nidal] might have done for Arab sponsors, and they had been numerous and nasty, he had done many other jobs from which Israel alone appeared to benefit."(1312)
Confirming Seale's theory are top Middle East terrorism experts, including intelligence officers in Arab countries, and even within Abu Nidal's own organization.
One French terrorism expert stated: "If Abu Nidal himself is not an Israeli agent, then two or three of his senior people most certainly are. Nothing else can explain some of his operations."
A former senior Jordanian intelligence officer said: "Scratch around inside Abu
Nidal's organization and you will find Mossad."
Backing up these reports was a former member of Abu Nidal's own Justice Committee, who told Seale that Mossad agents captured by Abu Nidal were usually killed very quickly to prevent them from confessing their true motives. Abu Iyad, former chief of PLO Intelligence, added,
"Every Palestinian who works in intelligence is convinced that Israel has a big hand in Abu Nidal's affairs."(1313)
Nidal's organization has been responsible for some of the most brutal acts of terrorism in the world. According to the State Department, Abu Nidal has carried out more than 100 acts or terrorism that have resulted in the deaths of over 280 people. Some of these attacks include the 1986 grenade and machine-gun assaults on El Al counters at the Rome and Vienna airports, attacks on synagogues, and assassinations of Palestinian moderates.
...........
What is curious is that Israel has never punished Abu Nidal's organization.Israel has a long-standing policy of launching immediate and massive retaliation against any terrorist attack. While Israeli forces have bombed, shelled and raided Palestinian and Shi'ite positions in Lebanon, and have sent hit teams to kill Palestinian guerrilla leaders in other countries, they have never attacked
Abu Nidal. Given Israel's harsh and unrelenting policy of retribution against terrorist attacks, this seems more than a bit bizarre. As Seale concludes: Abu Nidal is a professional killer who has sold his deadly services certainly to the Arabs and perhaps to the Israelis as well. His genius has been to understand that states will commit any crime in the name of national interest. A criminal
like Abu Nidal can flourish doing their dirty work.(1315) Former DEA agent
A curious feature of Abu Nidal's terrorism is that more than 50 percent of it has been directed against Arab and Palestinian rivals. The ANO's vicious war against the PLO has led to Arab claims that it was secretly manipulated by Israel's Mossad secret service. According to this seemingly far-fetched hypothesis, the Mossad penetrated Abu Nidal's organization and has manipulated Abu Nidal to carry out atrocities that would discredit the Palestinian cause.
The hypothesis is based on four main points:
1. Abu Nidal killings have damaged the Palestinian cause to Israel's advantage
2. the suspicious behavior of some of Abu Nidal's officials
3. the lack of attacks on Israel and lack of involvement in the Intifada,
4. and Israel's failure to retaliate against Abu Nidal's groups.
Another distinctive feature of Abu Nidal's terrorism is that the ANO has generally not concerned itself with captured ANO members, preferring to abandon them to their fate rather than to attempt to bargain for their release. These traits would seem to suggest that the ANO has been more a product of its leader's paranoid psychopathology than his ideology
Another interesting speculation on Abu Nidal is here. If you follow the link, you will see, that this was posted by Gordon Thomas in September 2001, probably before 9/11 since it was not mentioned:
Abu Nidal is back
Branded by Western intelligence services as the “grandmaster of terrorism”, who vanished from their tracking computer screens a year ago, has surfaced - and sent a surge of fear around the world.
Abu Nidal is alive and well in one of Saddam Hussein’s magnificent villas on the outskirts of Baghdad - according to intelligence reports received this week by the CIA, Mossad and French intelligence.
All three services conclude that this most feared of terrorists who has remained out of sight for a year - and has not attacked a Western target for ten years - is planning some new outrage for his new host paymaster: Saddam Hussein............
Now his confirmed presence in Baghdad has sent a collective shiver through Western capitals.
Recent killings - including the murder of an Egyptian cleric in Yemen last month - bear the hallmark of Abu Nidal. Counter-terrorism experts say their ground intelligence suggests that Nidal has solved a problem for Saddam: giving him what he lacks - a ready-made terrorist organisation able to operate world-wide.
Nidal’s ANO is believed to now number no more than 200 followers. Mossad believe that over the past few months they have slipped into Iraq via Jordan.
Many of them are veterans of terrorist attacks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former senior adviser to the Israeli government on counter-terrorism, told me: “Nidal and Saddam have a tortured history and their relationship is hardly based on mutual trust. Saddam financed Nidal’s early activities - only to discover that Nidal was also working with Syria - to Iraq’s disadvantage. Nidal left Baghdad in a hurry.”
But now he is back. And, for the moment at least, Nidal’s well-known history of conducting terrorist acts on behalf of his host, almost certainly has led Saddam to welcome him.
Now Gordon Thomas, the author, has written a book about the Mossad and is said to have excellent connections into the Mossad and into British intelligence.
So Mr Thomas´sources have told him that Abu Nidal was in Baghdad with Saddam ready to use his organisation for major terrorist attacks.
And after 9/11 most neocons wanted to attack Iraq right away, but were stopped by others to go after Afghanistan first.
Could it be that Abu Nidal, with him the Palestinians together with Saddam were supposed to be framed for 9/11 first? But then they were forced by the oil-interest backers into a change of plan and frame Osama to get into Afghanisthan?
Remember the cheering Israelis who gave each other high fives will filming the collaps of the WTC buildings. When they were arrested they told the police "we are Israelis, we are not your problems, the Palestinians are."
The question of course is, why did they not use the Abu Nidal story to frame Saddam? Why did they have to cook up some story of an Iraqi agent meeting Mohammed Attah in Prague?
Sunday, January 08, 2006
Thoughts about Ariel Sharon
OPEN YOUR EYES AND SEE
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME
When I heard that Ariel Sharon had had a stroke, my first thoughts were, to be quite honest, God let him go to hell now.
For Palestinians Sharon is the posterman for oppression and mass-killings of their people. He was
Read comments on Umkhalil´s blog.
Read there also an article by Karma Nabulsi first published in the British paper the Guardian.
Nabulsi writes:
For Egyptians Sharon, who was head of the 9th brigade of the Israeli army in the 1967 war, was responsible for the murder of hundred´s of POW and civil workers in the Sinai.
For me Sharon is the proto-type of a man without a conscience and the most prominent representative of not only Nihilist theory but practice.
Power for himself and power for Israel are the only aims of his politics. And for this he walks over thousands of dead bodies.
For me Sharon is a character straigt out of Orwell' 1984. He says peace when he means war. His lies flood the main-line media and have taken in all mainline politicians in America and in Europe.
Just yesterday the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, said: "Even in difficult times, we stand steadfastly on the side of Israel".
He is the man who has so much influence within the American government, that he can walk into the Pentagon without restrictions making demands of any kind.
He is most likely one of those pressuring America into the Iraq war.
And still, while I cannot fault anybody who has suffered under Sharon, or see his family and friends suffer under him to hate him, it will not do for me.
For I know this hatred would spread in my mind.
Sharon´s attitude and politics are not unique in Israel. And although most Israelis know about his crimes against humanity, far too many see him as a hero.
If I hate Sharon, I will start to hate others as well.
But I know deep in my heart, that hatred even of the most guilty is counterproductive in a quest for peace.
Hatred will cause fear in those who are hated, not insight in what they have done to deserve this hatred.
Hatred and fear are the greatest obstacles in coming to a mutual agreement of living together, for a beginning of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Hatred asks for aggressive revenge and fear for protection through violent aggression.
The circle of violence will never end in a framework of hatred and fear.
So all I can do is repeating the prayer, Jesus said on the cross: "Father forgive him, for he knew not what he did." For his mind was clouded, by lies told to him, and lies he told to himself, clouded by an ideology, which makes murderes out of men.
And Father forgive those, who have followed his command, his orders and his lead, for they knew not what they did. For their minds were clouded by fear and hatred towards those they feared and still in reality were never a danger to them.
And Father forgive us, the rest of the world, for standing by and doing nothing to prevent the murders and the terrible sufferings, for we knew not what we did. For our minds were clouded by ignorance and cowardice.
AND THEN
SCREAM WITH ME
When I heard that Ariel Sharon had had a stroke, my first thoughts were, to be quite honest, God let him go to hell now.
For Palestinians Sharon is the posterman for oppression and mass-killings of their people. He was
"the mass murderer who led the assault on the West Bank village of Qibya, on October 14, 1953, in which his troops blew up 45 houses and killed 69 Palestinian civilians -- about half of them women and children, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Beirut, Tal Alzaatar,Ain Alroumanah, Jenin"
Read comments on Umkhalil´s blog.
Read there also an article by Karma Nabulsi first published in the British paper the Guardian.
Nabulsi writes:
Sharon has shaped everything for us: young, or old, in exile, or at
home in an Israeli prison under occupation. He is emblematic of our
condition; worse than emblematic, it is his very fist we feel. To this
day I have not been able to watch him on television, but must avert my
eyes at the immense presence of this avatar - there is no one else who
evokes this terrible reaction.
I know this is shared by Palestinians everywhere, especially the
survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which, let us not
forget, he was culpable, according even to an Israeli tribunal, the
Kahane Commission. They recommended that he never be allowed to return
to public office....
To us, to me, his mission had always been thus: to kill our
resistance, our organisations, our solidarity, our institutions, and
above all our national liberation movement....
This he did through the iron tools of military rule: assassination,
imprisonment, violent military invasion...
His great skill was breaking ceasefires whenever he felt cornered to
make a political concession towards peace, he sought to provoke an
inevitable response, which could then be used to advance his military
aims, and free his hands to expand settlements, expropriate land in
Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank. He never cared for Gaza, it was
a military asset. Indeed he won internationally uncontested control of
the West Bank (which was always his goal), by returning it. An empty
gesture anyway: in practice it is still owned and run by Israel...
Two summers ago, I went back to Shatila Camp where I had lived and
worked for so many years, the first time since 1982, and I have
returned many times in the past two-and-a-half years. Twenty-three
years ago we had been evacuated from the city, with the rest of the
PLO, at the end of the siege of Beirut, and only two weeks before the
massacres. But we only agreed to leave with international guarantees
that the civilian refugee camps would be protected from the fascist
Lebanese militias. Instead Sharon invaded Beirut (that he could not
take while we were there), surrounded the refugee camps, and had his
forces light up the night sky with flares, while the Lebanese militia
did their work with knives and axes and guns, day after day. He let
busloads of them in, no Palestinians allowed out.......
For Egyptians Sharon, who was head of the 9th brigade of the Israeli army in the 1967 war, was responsible for the murder of hundred´s of POW and civil workers in the Sinai.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv published accounts given by two Israeli officers, Arye Biro and Mordechai Brown. They confessed, giving facts and figures, that they and other officers had carried out collective massacres of Egyptian POWs during both wars. Biro and his unit killed 49 unarmed POWs in Sinai during the 1956 war, and Brown, commander of battalion 890, was responsible for the deaths of more than 500 POWs, including civil workers, during the 1967 war.
The pair also revealed that the murdered POWs were forced to dig their own graves using only their hands. They were then shot in the back.
For me Sharon is the proto-type of a man without a conscience and the most prominent representative of not only Nihilist theory but practice.
Power for himself and power for Israel are the only aims of his politics. And for this he walks over thousands of dead bodies.
For me Sharon is a character straigt out of Orwell' 1984. He says peace when he means war. His lies flood the main-line media and have taken in all mainline politicians in America and in Europe.
Just yesterday the German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, said: "Even in difficult times, we stand steadfastly on the side of Israel".
He is the man who has so much influence within the American government, that he can walk into the Pentagon without restrictions making demands of any kind.
He is most likely one of those pressuring America into the Iraq war.
And still, while I cannot fault anybody who has suffered under Sharon, or see his family and friends suffer under him to hate him, it will not do for me.
For I know this hatred would spread in my mind.
Sharon´s attitude and politics are not unique in Israel. And although most Israelis know about his crimes against humanity, far too many see him as a hero.
If I hate Sharon, I will start to hate others as well.
But I know deep in my heart, that hatred even of the most guilty is counterproductive in a quest for peace.
Hatred will cause fear in those who are hated, not insight in what they have done to deserve this hatred.
Hatred and fear are the greatest obstacles in coming to a mutual agreement of living together, for a beginning of reconciliation and forgiveness.
Hatred asks for aggressive revenge and fear for protection through violent aggression.
The circle of violence will never end in a framework of hatred and fear.
So all I can do is repeating the prayer, Jesus said on the cross: "Father forgive him, for he knew not what he did." For his mind was clouded, by lies told to him, and lies he told to himself, clouded by an ideology, which makes murderes out of men.
And Father forgive those, who have followed his command, his orders and his lead, for they knew not what they did. For their minds were clouded by fear and hatred towards those they feared and still in reality were never a danger to them.
And Father forgive us, the rest of the world, for standing by and doing nothing to prevent the murders and the terrible sufferings, for we knew not what we did. For our minds were clouded by ignorance and cowardice.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Why is it so hard to accept evidence
The evidence that the attacks of 9/11 could not have succeeded without US-government involvement is practically overwhelming, if you are objective.
Three highrise buildings have crashed into their own foundation on the same day. The cause of those crashes is supposedly fire. That steel-framed buildings have totally crashed without the help of explosives has never happened before 9/11 2001 and never happened afterwards. The crashes only took seconds, barely more than a free fall. If you watch those crashes you can see that they look exactly like controlled demolishions carried out by expert-firms, something you might have seen in documentarys on this matter.
It is said, that the air-plane crash had weakened the buildings´structures. But the third building was not hit by an airplane. And the WTC-towers were especially built to withstand a hit by an airplane of similar size as those on 9/11.
It is said, that a fire fueled by airplane kerosene is hot enough to weaken steel.
And again, the fire in the third building was not fueled by airplane kerosene.And in one of the twin-towers most of the kerosene burned out at the impact of the crashing plane outside the building.and the fire-fighters in the towers could get all the way up to crash-sight without feeling an extraordinary high heat. In fact, they were convinced to be able to extinguish the fire in a short time. Photographs of the towers before the crash show victims who still were alive at the time directly at the impact area. No extraordinay heat had killed them yet.
After the crash of the WTC-buildings no experts, according to Fire Engineering Magazine, were allowed to examine the remains of the buildings to find out what caused their structural failure.
These facts are indefutable. They comprise undeniable evidence that the key-points of the official 9/11 story are lies.
There different opinions on how the American government was involved in the planning or in the attacks themselves. But the physical facts point to the use of explosives in bringing the buildings down. And the fact that the US-Government did not allow examination of the remains, provide strong evidence, that it were not Muslim extremists who had gained access to those buildings to plant the explosives in the strategically right positions, but people who worked in collusion with powerful members of this very government.
There are thousands of other facts digged up by the 9/11 truth-movement that point in the direction of government involvement, but of course there is also disinformation floating around. While the disinformers try to discredit the facts, they cannot make them disappear.
Those undefutable facts are convincing enough to allow yourself to be convinced.
However for most people, especially on the Left, evidence be damned, they just cannot allow themselves to fundamentally doubt the official story.
It does not fit into their concept: "Islamistic terrorism is a blowback for American imperialism in the Muslimic world."
And of course many people in those Muslimic countries resent the American foreign politic. But the motive alone does not make a suspect into the murderer, he also needs an opportunity. There are others who have a motive as well: the members of the PNAC think-tank, who most of them are sitting now in the US-goverment or work as cheerleaders for war in the US-media. The government members have access to the buildings and the means, financially and the personal (special intelligence units probably), to do the job and cover their tracks. They might have used Islamist patsies, by having their organisations infiltrated and so manipulate their actions. But those patsies could never have succeeded on their own.
Chances are that the role of those patsies was rather minor.
Logic tells me that the man pretending to be Attah in Florida, could not have been a fundamentalistic Muslim. Being a fundamentalist means you strongly believe in your religion and accept all its rules. You want those rules to be a basis of behavior for everyone else. A man who is so convinced of his faith, that he is ready to martyr himself for it, would never ever break all those rules just before his supposed martydom. A fundamental Muslim would never drink alcohol, use cocain, live with a non-Muslim girlfriend, wear forbidden jwellery, go to a strip-bar and put money in the strip-dancers´ underwear. This all defies logic.
The arguments used by those who cannot accept a government involvement are, that it could not have been a government conspiracy are something like:" Thousands of people would have been involved and they could not have been kept quiet for so long."
In reality it depends on the method used for those attacks how many people needed to have been involved. And American intelligence agancies have a budget of 30 billions a year, drug revenues not counted, and nobody knows how many staff they employ. Special units are trained rigidly to follow commands without asking questions, they allways work on a need to know basis, never being allowed to see the full picture. And of course the organizers would have their own interest at stake, either financially or ideologically.
To salvage their belief in a international Islamist terror-network in the face of mounting evidence, that many of those blamed for terror-attacks are not acting like fundamentalists at all in their private life, some lefties have now started to see Islamism as a ploy used by political dissidents from Muslim countries to get the population on their side.
They just cannot come to grips with the notion, that AlQaeda is of course a political organisation, but it´s not fighting American and Israeli imperialism but supporting it by providing the propaganda tools to justify American military interventions, a planned generational war, a "clash of civilisations" and an exponential growth of military expenditure to enrich the main-shareholders of the military-industrial complex.
There have been precedents of lies to justify wars, precedents of false-flag operations by intelligence organisations.
In Italy it has been proven by a court of law that right-wing organisations had committed brutal terrorists acts blaming the radical left.
"Operation Gladio" it was called.
There is documentary proof of personal connections between those Italian right-wingers and the CIA.
One of those connections is Michael Ledeen, who once again is a high offical in the Pentagon.
The Left, the secular and the religious humanists and everybody else who believes in democratic values will never be able to overcome the war-profeteers and stop war and oppression unless they will accept the fact, that those fascists lie, cheat, manipulate the media and even mass-murder innocents in their own country to be able to profit from further mass-murder in other countries.
There has been a "Reichstags-fire" and a "Sender Gleiwitz incidence",a "Gulf of Tonkin" and an "Operation Phoenix" before. There has been a "Lavon affair" and the "Pseudo Mau Mau".
Through Phoenix over 40000 people were murdered in cold blood by US-employed CIA snipers, some of the victims were American military personell seen as security risk. British employed Pseudo Mau Mau murdered black Kenyans and white missionaries alike. In the Lavon affair Israel murdered British and American civillians, citizens of those 2 countries which had made the Jewish State possible, just a few years before.
Now there is al-Zarqawi a Palestinian from Jordan committing atrocities against civilians, fellow Muslims, totally counterproductive, if he wants the support of the Iraqi population.
If you do not recognize the enemy´s tactics, how can you beat him?
One of the tactics, of course, is to call conspiracy-theorists insane.
Why for God's or Marx's sake is the Left so totally incapable to accept that there are people within the upper echelon of the capitalist system who walk over dead bodies, thousands if necessary, for their political,ideological and financial gain?
They have done it before.
Three highrise buildings have crashed into their own foundation on the same day. The cause of those crashes is supposedly fire. That steel-framed buildings have totally crashed without the help of explosives has never happened before 9/11 2001 and never happened afterwards. The crashes only took seconds, barely more than a free fall. If you watch those crashes you can see that they look exactly like controlled demolishions carried out by expert-firms, something you might have seen in documentarys on this matter.
It is said, that the air-plane crash had weakened the buildings´structures. But the third building was not hit by an airplane. And the WTC-towers were especially built to withstand a hit by an airplane of similar size as those on 9/11.
It is said, that a fire fueled by airplane kerosene is hot enough to weaken steel.
And again, the fire in the third building was not fueled by airplane kerosene.And in one of the twin-towers most of the kerosene burned out at the impact of the crashing plane outside the building.and the fire-fighters in the towers could get all the way up to crash-sight without feeling an extraordinary high heat. In fact, they were convinced to be able to extinguish the fire in a short time. Photographs of the towers before the crash show victims who still were alive at the time directly at the impact area. No extraordinay heat had killed them yet.
After the crash of the WTC-buildings no experts, according to Fire Engineering Magazine, were allowed to examine the remains of the buildings to find out what caused their structural failure.
"For more than three months, structural steel from the World Trade Center has been and continues to be cut up and sold for scrap. Crucial evidence that could answer many questions about high-rise building design practices and performance under fire conditions is on the slow boat to China, perhaps never to be seen again in America until you buy your next car... Fire Engineering has good reason to believe that the "official investigation" blessed by FEMA and run by the American Society of Civil Engineers is a half-baked farce that may already have been commandeered by political forces whose primary interests, to put it mildly, lie far afield of full disclosure. Except for the marginal benefit obtained from a three-day, visual walk-through of evidence sites conducted by ASCE investigation committee members - described by one close source as a "tourist trip"- no one's checking the evidence for anything."(Fire Engineering Magazine, January 2002)
These facts are indefutable. They comprise undeniable evidence that the key-points of the official 9/11 story are lies.
There different opinions on how the American government was involved in the planning or in the attacks themselves. But the physical facts point to the use of explosives in bringing the buildings down. And the fact that the US-Government did not allow examination of the remains, provide strong evidence, that it were not Muslim extremists who had gained access to those buildings to plant the explosives in the strategically right positions, but people who worked in collusion with powerful members of this very government.
There are thousands of other facts digged up by the 9/11 truth-movement that point in the direction of government involvement, but of course there is also disinformation floating around. While the disinformers try to discredit the facts, they cannot make them disappear.
Those undefutable facts are convincing enough to allow yourself to be convinced.
However for most people, especially on the Left, evidence be damned, they just cannot allow themselves to fundamentally doubt the official story.
It does not fit into their concept: "Islamistic terrorism is a blowback for American imperialism in the Muslimic world."
And of course many people in those Muslimic countries resent the American foreign politic. But the motive alone does not make a suspect into the murderer, he also needs an opportunity. There are others who have a motive as well: the members of the PNAC think-tank, who most of them are sitting now in the US-goverment or work as cheerleaders for war in the US-media. The government members have access to the buildings and the means, financially and the personal (special intelligence units probably), to do the job and cover their tracks. They might have used Islamist patsies, by having their organisations infiltrated and so manipulate their actions. But those patsies could never have succeeded on their own.
Chances are that the role of those patsies was rather minor.
Logic tells me that the man pretending to be Attah in Florida, could not have been a fundamentalistic Muslim. Being a fundamentalist means you strongly believe in your religion and accept all its rules. You want those rules to be a basis of behavior for everyone else. A man who is so convinced of his faith, that he is ready to martyr himself for it, would never ever break all those rules just before his supposed martydom. A fundamental Muslim would never drink alcohol, use cocain, live with a non-Muslim girlfriend, wear forbidden jwellery, go to a strip-bar and put money in the strip-dancers´ underwear. This all defies logic.
The arguments used by those who cannot accept a government involvement are, that it could not have been a government conspiracy are something like:" Thousands of people would have been involved and they could not have been kept quiet for so long."
In reality it depends on the method used for those attacks how many people needed to have been involved. And American intelligence agancies have a budget of 30 billions a year, drug revenues not counted, and nobody knows how many staff they employ. Special units are trained rigidly to follow commands without asking questions, they allways work on a need to know basis, never being allowed to see the full picture. And of course the organizers would have their own interest at stake, either financially or ideologically.
To salvage their belief in a international Islamist terror-network in the face of mounting evidence, that many of those blamed for terror-attacks are not acting like fundamentalists at all in their private life, some lefties have now started to see Islamism as a ploy used by political dissidents from Muslim countries to get the population on their side.
They just cannot come to grips with the notion, that AlQaeda is of course a political organisation, but it´s not fighting American and Israeli imperialism but supporting it by providing the propaganda tools to justify American military interventions, a planned generational war, a "clash of civilisations" and an exponential growth of military expenditure to enrich the main-shareholders of the military-industrial complex.
There have been precedents of lies to justify wars, precedents of false-flag operations by intelligence organisations.
In Italy it has been proven by a court of law that right-wing organisations had committed brutal terrorists acts blaming the radical left.
"Operation Gladio" it was called.
Among the "smoking guns" unearthed by Ganser is a Pentagon document, Field Manual FM 30-31B, which details the methodology for launching terrorist attacks in nations that "do not react with sufficient effectiveness" against "communist subversion." Ironically, the manual states that the most dangerous moment comes when leftist groups "renounce the use of force" and embrace the democratic process. It is then that "U.S. army intelligence must have the means of launching special operations which will convince Host Country Governments and public opinion of the reality of the insurgent danger." Naturally, these peace-throttling "special operations must remain strictly secret," the document warns.
Indeed, it would not do for the families of the 85 people ripped apart by the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station to know that their loved ones had been murdered by "men inside Italian state institutions and ... men linked to the structures of United States intelligence," as the Italian Senate concluded after its investigation in 2000.
The Bologna atrocity is an example of what Gladio's masters called "the strategy of tension" -- fomenting fear to keep populations in thrall to "strong leaders" who will protect the nation from the ever-present terrorist threat. And as Rajiva notes, this strategy wasn't limited to Western Europe. It was applied, with gruesome effectiveness, in Central America by the Reagan and Bush administrations. During the 1980s, right-wing death squads, guerrilla armies and state security forces -- armed, trained and supplied by the United States -- murdered tens of thousands of people throughout the region, often acting with particular savagery at those times when peaceful solutions to the conflicts seemed about to take hold.
There is documentary proof of personal connections between those Italian right-wingers and the CIA.
One of those connections is Michael Ledeen, who once again is a high offical in the Pentagon.
."Ledeen was allegedly tied to the Italian P2 Masonic Lodge, a violent right wing group that was involved in a number of terrorists attacks in Italy in the 1970s.In the late 1970s, while P2 was doing its dirty work, Ledeen was working as a consultant to Italian intelligence on terrorism issues. More recently, Ledeen worked with Pentagon staffers to redevelop the channel to arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar (the medium between Oliver North and Iran in the Iran-Contra affair) in support of resistance efforts in Iran. In addition to his work with the American Enterprise Institute, Ledeen has supported or co-founded a number of advocacy groups pushing for a radical transformation of the Middle East, including the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, JINSA, and of course, Ziad Abdelnour’s U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon.
The Left, the secular and the religious humanists and everybody else who believes in democratic values will never be able to overcome the war-profeteers and stop war and oppression unless they will accept the fact, that those fascists lie, cheat, manipulate the media and even mass-murder innocents in their own country to be able to profit from further mass-murder in other countries.
There has been a "Reichstags-fire" and a "Sender Gleiwitz incidence",a "Gulf of Tonkin" and an "Operation Phoenix" before. There has been a "Lavon affair" and the "Pseudo Mau Mau".
Through Phoenix over 40000 people were murdered in cold blood by US-employed CIA snipers, some of the victims were American military personell seen as security risk. British employed Pseudo Mau Mau murdered black Kenyans and white missionaries alike. In the Lavon affair Israel murdered British and American civillians, citizens of those 2 countries which had made the Jewish State possible, just a few years before.
Now there is al-Zarqawi a Palestinian from Jordan committing atrocities against civilians, fellow Muslims, totally counterproductive, if he wants the support of the Iraqi population.
If you do not recognize the enemy´s tactics, how can you beat him?
One of the tactics, of course, is to call conspiracy-theorists insane.
Why for God's or Marx's sake is the Left so totally incapable to accept that there are people within the upper echelon of the capitalist system who walk over dead bodies, thousands if necessary, for their political,ideological and financial gain?
They have done it before.
Friday, August 12, 2005
Talk to the Christians
On Wednesday, August 10, 2005 my friend Umkhalil wrote on her blog
"An Apology From a US Christian to Palestinians"
There she distances herself from the attitude of the Christian Zionists, represented by Jerry Falwell, who boasts: "The Bible Belt is Israel's safety net in the US"
and Ed McAteer, who promotes ethnically cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.
She writes:
Here is the answer I wrote to her:
This was a very good post and I agree with you fully in your assessment of those socalled Christian leaders.
And as Christians we should distance ourselves from those leaders and even apologize for the crimes other Christians justify or even commit in the name of our religion.
However, I do not believe that McAteer actually represents any kind of "moral majority". His views are unethical and immoral. And I am convinced that the majority of Christians, even US Christians do believe in high ethical values. The trouble is that many Christians are totally misinformed.
There are being informed by mass-media which either bend the truth about Palestinians and other Arab people by emphasising on so-called terrorist attacks neglecting to mention Israeli state-terrorism or American military terrorism against the people of Iraq or those media outlets just blatently lie. And Fallwell and McAteer can use those lies for their hate-mongering politics.
I´ve met conservative American Christians who have changed their pro-Israel attitude when they had received more truthful information about the situation in Palestine.
There are religion-haters on the Left who say it is useless to talk to conservative Christians,for they all are nothing but fanatical haters.
This is not true.
It might take a while for the shocking truth to sink in, but in the long run more and more Christians are realizing that they have been misled, that some self-appointed leaders are false prophets and that in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we should not support the oppressors, but the oppressed in Palestine and in Iraq. For Jesus himself has during his life on earth been the spokesmen for the poor and the humiliated, and He himself has been tortured. Jesus has told us to see Him in those who suffer.
So while we probably cannot reach those immoral leaders, it is in my opinion paramount to not give up on their duped followers.
We as Christians ourselves need to find ways to get the truth out to those other Christians. We need to figure out how to do it best and most effectively.
And then miracles can happen. Like a tidal wave the truth will wash away all the lies, and true justice can finally have a fertile ground to grow in Palestine and in other places.
"An Apology From a US Christian to Palestinians"
There she distances herself from the attitude of the Christian Zionists, represented by Jerry Falwell, who boasts: "The Bible Belt is Israel's safety net in the US"
and Ed McAteer, who promotes ethnically cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine.
She writes:
"For their malice, for their perversion of Christianity, for their promulgation of lies regarding the Palestinian people and their history in Palestine, for their demonisation of the Palestinians, for their lack of regard for the dwindling numbers of their co-religionists in Palestine, for the lies that their leaders spew about God; i.e., "Those who promote a Palestinian state have placed themselves in alliance against God," for their incitement to hatred, for their advocating ethnic cleansing, for their role in promoting Israel's repressive measures in the occupied territories, for those who believe as does Gary Bauer, co-founder of Stand For Israel, that it is an "obscenity" to give up land for peace, and for their complete and total abdication of the Golden Rule, I apologize to the Palestinians on behalf of US Christians."
Here is the answer I wrote to her:
This was a very good post and I agree with you fully in your assessment of those socalled Christian leaders.
And as Christians we should distance ourselves from those leaders and even apologize for the crimes other Christians justify or even commit in the name of our religion.
However, I do not believe that McAteer actually represents any kind of "moral majority". His views are unethical and immoral. And I am convinced that the majority of Christians, even US Christians do believe in high ethical values. The trouble is that many Christians are totally misinformed.
There are being informed by mass-media which either bend the truth about Palestinians and other Arab people by emphasising on so-called terrorist attacks neglecting to mention Israeli state-terrorism or American military terrorism against the people of Iraq or those media outlets just blatently lie. And Fallwell and McAteer can use those lies for their hate-mongering politics.
I´ve met conservative American Christians who have changed their pro-Israel attitude when they had received more truthful information about the situation in Palestine.
There are religion-haters on the Left who say it is useless to talk to conservative Christians,for they all are nothing but fanatical haters.
This is not true.
It might take a while for the shocking truth to sink in, but in the long run more and more Christians are realizing that they have been misled, that some self-appointed leaders are false prophets and that in the spirit of Jesus Christ, we should not support the oppressors, but the oppressed in Palestine and in Iraq. For Jesus himself has during his life on earth been the spokesmen for the poor and the humiliated, and He himself has been tortured. Jesus has told us to see Him in those who suffer.
So while we probably cannot reach those immoral leaders, it is in my opinion paramount to not give up on their duped followers.
We as Christians ourselves need to find ways to get the truth out to those other Christians. We need to figure out how to do it best and most effectively.
And then miracles can happen. Like a tidal wave the truth will wash away all the lies, and true justice can finally have a fertile ground to grow in Palestine and in other places.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Prejudices and the "Undermind"
"Wenn einer eine Reise tut, dann kann er was erzählen". (A German proverb: "When someone travels, he has a lot to tell about afterwards")
The last few weeks I have been traveling through altogether 9 European countries. Maybe you remember the American movie:"It´s Tuesday this must be Belgium."
This is about the way we traveled on this trip.
I haven’t done a lot of traveling the tourist way so far, have most often just been visiting close relatives when I was away from home. So this time I thought, I’ll use the chance to see as many places in Europe as possible. Who knows when I ever get another chance.
One other positive aspect for me was, that when I ride as passenger in a car or a bus or a train and see the landscape move by in front of my eyes, my thoughts also start moving.
(By the way, the other best place for me to think is the bathtub at home, where nothing at all is moving. Maybe its the Icelandic hot water, it’s full of sulphur and actually very good for your skin. Maybe it’s also good for the brain cells, mine at least.)
What I noticed most during my trip, when I was talking to the people I met, was that just about everybody from every nation or ethnic group seems to have some prejudices against people from other nations or ethnic minorities.
Many Germans are prejudiced against the Tschek and the Polish, many Tschek are prejudiced against the Polish and the Gypsies, most everybody else in Europe seems to fear the Germans are still Nazis in their hearts. And while many Icelanders are prejudiced against Asian immigrants into Iceland, most other Western-Europeans are now severly prejudiced against their Muslim immigrants.
And actually if I’m really honest, I have to include myself in this litany. How often don’t I just generalize "the Americans", when I talk about the horror and disgust I feel for the crimes of war and oppression organized by the American government and acted out by American military and intelligence agencies.
My friend Umkhalil thinks, that the major reason for all these prejudices people have against "the others" might be the superior complex nearly everybody has sometimes. And she is probably right in this.
Everybody has some doubts about him- or herself, feels slightly incompetent in some situations, and this makes him or her feel bad. But when we can compare ourselves favorable to somebody else our self-doubts get smaller and we feel better.
It’s the situation Jesus describes in the story about the Pharisee standing in the front row of the synagogue praising and thanking God for being so much better morally than the sinner back there in the last row. And Jesus said that the sinner in the last row who accepts that he has done wrong and asks sincerely for divine forgiveness will find far more favor in the eyes of God.
But alas, it seems to be human nature to think far more often like the Pharisee than the repentant sinner.
But we do not only compare ourselves individually with others, since we are social beings, nearly all of us identify with some social groups, very often a national or ethnic groups. And there we also try to make ourselves feel better by thinking that our group of people is morally, intellectually, economically or in some other way better than some other group.
Since this prejudiced thinking is so very common, it most often isn’t really dangerous to the people who are objects of our prejudices.
Take for instance an elderly German aunt of my husband’s (He is half German, half Icelandic and we were also visiting his German relatives on this trip). As a child she lived in Poland as a member of a German minority. Together with her mother and sister she was driven out of Poland during after WWII. She never grew out of the prejudices against the Polish people taught to her by her parents and neighbors so very long ago.
She actually told me that nearly all Polish are lazy workers and steal.
I just gaped at her. How can anybody nowadays believe a thing like this?
And this aunt is not a general right-winger hating all foreigners. She has quite a good relationship to the foreigners living on her block.
I told her, that I knew many Polish people from my parish. All of them are very diligent workers and would never think about stealing anything, ever.
"And besides, think about the German farmers who are sometimes interviewed on TV, when it is talked about forcing unemployed Germans into work as seasonal harvest helpers on farms. Those farmers are actually horrified by the thought of having to employ only Germans instead of the Polish who come year after year as guest workers for the harvesting season. The farmers say, that the Polish workers are by far more diligent and skilled in this hard work than any unemployed German they have sometimes tried to employ." "These are the special Polish" the aunt thinks, "They are exceptions."
So if this aunt would ever have to deal regularly with some Polish people, she would probably meet them at first with quite a bit of distrust. But after a while she would probably decide, that these Polish neighbors probably belong to the small group of the "special Polish". I don’t think that there would be too much harm done.
It only starts to become dangerous, when some powerful politicians are using those prejudices for their own selfish reason, most often for war-mongering in the pursuit of more power and more land ore other economic advantages.
But for this purpose to play upon our inner superiority complex is not enough. The war-mongerers have to play on something else as well: our hidden fears.
And these fears have something to do with the way our brain works.
In the book "Hare brain and Tortoise mind", by Guy Claxton, the author explains, that we all are thinking on different levels of consciousness. And on all levels the mind tries to figure out patterns so we can function as good as possible in a complicated world.
Our conscious logical mind, which is related to our speech centrum tries to figure out the most obvious patterns.
But like with the learning of physical skills, the patterns involved in social situations are often far too complicated for our rational mind to cope with the entire subtle tale telling signs and recognize the underlying patterns.
This is when our "undermined" gets in. Our "undermind" has a mote of thinking, which can deal with far more information than our rational mind and see the underlying patterns.
And from the time we are very small children we start watching the people in our environment, watching their facial expressions and body language. And from the experiences we get through this, our "undermind" tries to figure out patterns in behavior, feelings and thoughts. And most of us are getting rather good in reading other people especially their opinions and feelings about ourselves. And from this our "undermind" tries to figure out, if we can trust these other people or not.
So far explains Claxton in his book.
My guesses in this are, that the trouble with this pattern seeking of our “undermind” is, that it bases its judgment on signs which are not universal. Some signs like smiles or a threatening aggressive posture are probably more or less the same throughout the human race, but the more subtle signs of our body language are probably depending on the culture we come from. And when we meet people from an unfamiliar culture our "undermind"has not enough information to base its judgment on. We are no longer able to "read" the other’s mind in the same way as we would in a familiar social setting. This makes us insecure and slightly fearful. And this is also the moment, when we are most vulnerable for the self-serving propagandists and the fear-mongerers.
Hitler and the other Nazi propagandists used these vulnerabilities, the old prejudices and the subconscious insecurities Germans felt when dealing with Eastern Europeans both Jews and Slavic people. The Nazis used them when proclaiming to the Germans that those "others" are dangerous to the Germanic race, that those strangers are planning to overwhelm or even eliminate the "superior Germanic race", out of envy of course.
Some people might conclude from this, that it is always dangerous when people of different cultures live together in the same country, the same town or the same neighborhood, for the differences and insecurities between the cultures can be exploited by the powerful and ruthless for instigating violence between those different cultural groups, even instigating a civil war or a war between nations.
This surely could happen. And therefore you might conclude to either ban any kind of immigration of people from other cultures or demand absolute assimilation. This is what most German politicians are demanding of the Muslim community in Germany right now. They see a multi-cultural society as dangerous.
And I think they are wrong.
Even while part of the mechanism, which could lead to violence between different cultural groups is subconscious, we, each and every one of us also has a conscious, rational mind. And this mind has, given enough time to think, always an override over our "undermind".
I actually see a big chance in a multicultural, multiethnic society, a chance we can use to promote a permanent peaceful world with just a bit of deliberate positive effort.
By having people of different cultures living just next door or across the street, if we reach out to them, we have the chance to overcome our conscious prejudices and our subconscious insecurities and fears, so they can no longer be abused by self-serving manipulators.
As human beings our ability to learn stays with us for all our lives or at least until we get Alzheimer. Just like our conscious mind can learn a new language, our "undermind" can learn in on a new culture. It however does take a slight bit of effort or even courage to stand the insecurity we will feel in the beginning of this new social experience and not just run away.
In my opinion the reaching out to other cultures should not only be done on an individual bases, but it would be more effective on a collective bases.
And since the modern self-serving propagandists are trying to use the differences between the so-called Judeo-Christian culture and the Muslim culture for their newest project in war-mongering, I see a big obligation of especially the Church to counter their unscrupulous efforts.
The last few weeks I have been traveling through altogether 9 European countries. Maybe you remember the American movie:"It´s Tuesday this must be Belgium."
This is about the way we traveled on this trip.
I haven’t done a lot of traveling the tourist way so far, have most often just been visiting close relatives when I was away from home. So this time I thought, I’ll use the chance to see as many places in Europe as possible. Who knows when I ever get another chance.
One other positive aspect for me was, that when I ride as passenger in a car or a bus or a train and see the landscape move by in front of my eyes, my thoughts also start moving.
(By the way, the other best place for me to think is the bathtub at home, where nothing at all is moving. Maybe its the Icelandic hot water, it’s full of sulphur and actually very good for your skin. Maybe it’s also good for the brain cells, mine at least.)
What I noticed most during my trip, when I was talking to the people I met, was that just about everybody from every nation or ethnic group seems to have some prejudices against people from other nations or ethnic minorities.
Many Germans are prejudiced against the Tschek and the Polish, many Tschek are prejudiced against the Polish and the Gypsies, most everybody else in Europe seems to fear the Germans are still Nazis in their hearts. And while many Icelanders are prejudiced against Asian immigrants into Iceland, most other Western-Europeans are now severly prejudiced against their Muslim immigrants.
And actually if I’m really honest, I have to include myself in this litany. How often don’t I just generalize "the Americans", when I talk about the horror and disgust I feel for the crimes of war and oppression organized by the American government and acted out by American military and intelligence agencies.
My friend Umkhalil thinks, that the major reason for all these prejudices people have against "the others" might be the superior complex nearly everybody has sometimes. And she is probably right in this.
Everybody has some doubts about him- or herself, feels slightly incompetent in some situations, and this makes him or her feel bad. But when we can compare ourselves favorable to somebody else our self-doubts get smaller and we feel better.
It’s the situation Jesus describes in the story about the Pharisee standing in the front row of the synagogue praising and thanking God for being so much better morally than the sinner back there in the last row. And Jesus said that the sinner in the last row who accepts that he has done wrong and asks sincerely for divine forgiveness will find far more favor in the eyes of God.
But alas, it seems to be human nature to think far more often like the Pharisee than the repentant sinner.
But we do not only compare ourselves individually with others, since we are social beings, nearly all of us identify with some social groups, very often a national or ethnic groups. And there we also try to make ourselves feel better by thinking that our group of people is morally, intellectually, economically or in some other way better than some other group.
Since this prejudiced thinking is so very common, it most often isn’t really dangerous to the people who are objects of our prejudices.
Take for instance an elderly German aunt of my husband’s (He is half German, half Icelandic and we were also visiting his German relatives on this trip). As a child she lived in Poland as a member of a German minority. Together with her mother and sister she was driven out of Poland during after WWII. She never grew out of the prejudices against the Polish people taught to her by her parents and neighbors so very long ago.
She actually told me that nearly all Polish are lazy workers and steal.
I just gaped at her. How can anybody nowadays believe a thing like this?
And this aunt is not a general right-winger hating all foreigners. She has quite a good relationship to the foreigners living on her block.
I told her, that I knew many Polish people from my parish. All of them are very diligent workers and would never think about stealing anything, ever.
"And besides, think about the German farmers who are sometimes interviewed on TV, when it is talked about forcing unemployed Germans into work as seasonal harvest helpers on farms. Those farmers are actually horrified by the thought of having to employ only Germans instead of the Polish who come year after year as guest workers for the harvesting season. The farmers say, that the Polish workers are by far more diligent and skilled in this hard work than any unemployed German they have sometimes tried to employ." "These are the special Polish" the aunt thinks, "They are exceptions."
So if this aunt would ever have to deal regularly with some Polish people, she would probably meet them at first with quite a bit of distrust. But after a while she would probably decide, that these Polish neighbors probably belong to the small group of the "special Polish". I don’t think that there would be too much harm done.
It only starts to become dangerous, when some powerful politicians are using those prejudices for their own selfish reason, most often for war-mongering in the pursuit of more power and more land ore other economic advantages.
But for this purpose to play upon our inner superiority complex is not enough. The war-mongerers have to play on something else as well: our hidden fears.
And these fears have something to do with the way our brain works.
In the book "Hare brain and Tortoise mind", by Guy Claxton, the author explains, that we all are thinking on different levels of consciousness. And on all levels the mind tries to figure out patterns so we can function as good as possible in a complicated world.
Our conscious logical mind, which is related to our speech centrum tries to figure out the most obvious patterns.
But like with the learning of physical skills, the patterns involved in social situations are often far too complicated for our rational mind to cope with the entire subtle tale telling signs and recognize the underlying patterns.
This is when our "undermined" gets in. Our "undermind" has a mote of thinking, which can deal with far more information than our rational mind and see the underlying patterns.
And from the time we are very small children we start watching the people in our environment, watching their facial expressions and body language. And from the experiences we get through this, our "undermind" tries to figure out patterns in behavior, feelings and thoughts. And most of us are getting rather good in reading other people especially their opinions and feelings about ourselves. And from this our "undermind" tries to figure out, if we can trust these other people or not.
So far explains Claxton in his book.
My guesses in this are, that the trouble with this pattern seeking of our “undermind” is, that it bases its judgment on signs which are not universal. Some signs like smiles or a threatening aggressive posture are probably more or less the same throughout the human race, but the more subtle signs of our body language are probably depending on the culture we come from. And when we meet people from an unfamiliar culture our "undermind"has not enough information to base its judgment on. We are no longer able to "read" the other’s mind in the same way as we would in a familiar social setting. This makes us insecure and slightly fearful. And this is also the moment, when we are most vulnerable for the self-serving propagandists and the fear-mongerers.
Hitler and the other Nazi propagandists used these vulnerabilities, the old prejudices and the subconscious insecurities Germans felt when dealing with Eastern Europeans both Jews and Slavic people. The Nazis used them when proclaiming to the Germans that those "others" are dangerous to the Germanic race, that those strangers are planning to overwhelm or even eliminate the "superior Germanic race", out of envy of course.
Some people might conclude from this, that it is always dangerous when people of different cultures live together in the same country, the same town or the same neighborhood, for the differences and insecurities between the cultures can be exploited by the powerful and ruthless for instigating violence between those different cultural groups, even instigating a civil war or a war between nations.
This surely could happen. And therefore you might conclude to either ban any kind of immigration of people from other cultures or demand absolute assimilation. This is what most German politicians are demanding of the Muslim community in Germany right now. They see a multi-cultural society as dangerous.
And I think they are wrong.
Even while part of the mechanism, which could lead to violence between different cultural groups is subconscious, we, each and every one of us also has a conscious, rational mind. And this mind has, given enough time to think, always an override over our "undermind".
I actually see a big chance in a multicultural, multiethnic society, a chance we can use to promote a permanent peaceful world with just a bit of deliberate positive effort.
By having people of different cultures living just next door or across the street, if we reach out to them, we have the chance to overcome our conscious prejudices and our subconscious insecurities and fears, so they can no longer be abused by self-serving manipulators.
As human beings our ability to learn stays with us for all our lives or at least until we get Alzheimer. Just like our conscious mind can learn a new language, our "undermind" can learn in on a new culture. It however does take a slight bit of effort or even courage to stand the insecurity we will feel in the beginning of this new social experience and not just run away.
In my opinion the reaching out to other cultures should not only be done on an individual bases, but it would be more effective on a collective bases.
And since the modern self-serving propagandists are trying to use the differences between the so-called Judeo-Christian culture and the Muslim culture for their newest project in war-mongering, I see a big obligation of especially the Church to counter their unscrupulous efforts.
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