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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Tue May 01, 2007 4:26 pm Post subject: John Pilger |
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The War on Democracy |
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faceless
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nekokate
Joined: 13 Dec 2006
Location: West Yorkshire, UK
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 12:25 am Post subject: |
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| Is it just me, or is Hugo Chavez a very handsome man?! |
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luke
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Jun 13, 2007 10:41 am Post subject: |
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The cry of the invisible
In Latin America, populist movements are rising up against western intervention. John Pilger explains why only the cinema was big enough to tell their story
June 13, 2007
johnpilger.com
In the 1960s, when I first went to Latin America, I travelled up the cone of the continent from Chile across the Altiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety buses and single-carriage trains. It was an experience my memory stored for life, especially the spectacle of the movement of people. They moved through the dust of a snow-capped wilderness, along roads that were ribbons of red mud, and they lived in shanties that defied gravity. "We are invisible," said one man; another used the term abandonados; an indigenous woman in Bolivia unforgettably described her poverty as a commodity for the rich.
When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of Latin America's working people, I recognised the people at the roadside, the gold miners and the coffee workers and the silhouettes framed in crosses in the cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cinema film began then, or when I reported Ronald Reagan's murderous assault on Central America; or when I first read the words of Victor Jara's ballads and heard Sam Cooke's anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.
The War On Democracy is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. It is this control, this organised forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged ... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".
This was true of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, when a popular revolution began to turn back poverty and bring literacy and hope to a country long dismissed as a banana republic. In the United States, the Sandinista government was successfully portrayed as communist and a threat, and crushed. After all, Richard Nixon had said of all of Latin America: "No one gives a shit about the place." The War On Democracy is meant as an antidote to this.
Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened in this country. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phoney "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.
The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. Granada's World in Action, where I began, was a prime example. It would report and film in ways that the BBC would not dare. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it.
The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.
Cinema and television production are closely related, of course, but the differences, I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows a panorama to unfold, giving a sense of place that only the big screen captures. In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.
Chris Martin and I (we made the film as a partnership) used two crews and two very different cinematographers, Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock, which then had to be converted to 35mm film - one of cinema's wonderful anachronisms.
The film was backed by the impresario Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-poverty projects all over the world, who had told producer Wayne Young that he wanted to put my TV work in the cinema. Granada provided additional support, and ITV will broadcast the film later in the year. The extra funding also allowed me to persuade the late Sam Cooke's New York agents to license A Change Is Gonna Come, one of the finest, most lyrical pieces of black music ever written and performed. I was in the southern United States when it was released. It was the time of the civil-rights movement, and Cooke's song spoke to and for all people struggling to be free. The same is true of the ballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whose songs celebrated the popular democracy of Salvador Allende before Pinochet and the CIA extinguished it.
We filmed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, where Jara was taken along with thousands of other political prisoners. By all accounts, he was a source of strength for his comrades, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. He wrote his last song there and it was smuggled out on scraps of paper. These are the words:
What horror the face of fascism
creates
They carry out their plans with
knife-like precision ...
For them, blood equals medals ...
How hard it is to sing
When I must sing of horror ...
In which silence and screams
Are the end of my song.
After two days of torture, they killed him. The War On Democracy is about such courage and a warning to us all that "for them" nothing has changed, that "blood equals medals". |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2007 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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free essays & book excerpts from pilger 
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Jul 06, 2007 12:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | These are Brown's bombs, too
By John Pilger
New Statesman
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair's bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government's lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown's bombs. Gordon Brown, Blair's successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide, according to the American scientist who led the 2006 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health survey of civilian dead in Iraq. While Tony Blair sought to discredit this study, British government scientists secretly praised it as "tried and tested" and an "underestimation of mortality". The "underestimation" was 655,000 men, women and children. That is now approaching a million. It is the crime of the century.
In his first day's address outside 10 Downing Street and subsequently to Parliament, Brown paid not even lip service to those who would be alive today had his government - and it was his government as much as Blair's - not joined Bush in a slaughter justified with demonstrable lies. He said nothing, not a word.
He said nothing about the added thousands of Iraqi children whose deaths from preventable disease have doubled since the invasion, caused by the willful destruction of sanitation and water purification plants. He said nothing about hospital patients who die every day for want of equipment as basic as a syringe. He said nothing about the greatest refugee flight since the Palestinians' Naqba. He said nothing about his government's defeat in Afghanistan, and how the British army and its Nato allies are killing civilians, including whole families. Typically, on 29 June, British forces called in air strikes on a village, reportedly bombing to death 45 innocent people - almost as many as the number bombed to death in London in July 2005. Compare the reaction, or rather the silence. They were only Muslims. And Muslims are the world's most numerous victims of a terrorism whose main sources are Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
And he said nothing about his government's role in Afghanistan's restoration as the world's biggest source of opium, a direct result of the invasion of 2001. Any dealer on the streets of Glasgow will have the stuff, straight from warlords paid off by the CIA and in whose name British soldiers are killing and dying pointlessly. He said nothing about stopping any of this. Not a word. Not a hint.
Do the dead laugh? In the new Prime Minister's little list of priorities was "extend[ing] the British way of life".
The paymaster of the greatest British foreign policy disaster of the modern era, Brown could not even speak its name, let alone meet the military families that waited to speak to him. Three British soldiers were killed on his first day.
Has there been anything like the tsunami of unction that has engulfed the departure of Blair and the elevation of Brown? Yes, there has. Think back a decade. Blair, wrote Hugo Young of the Guardian, "wants to create a world none of us has known, where the laws of political gravity are overturned", one where "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'". The new chancellor, effused the Observer, would "announce the most radical welfare Budget since the Second World war".
The "values" were fake and so was the new deal. One media-managed stunt followed another as Brown delighted the stock market and comforted the very rich and celebrated the empire, and ignored the longing of the British electorate for a restoration of public services so badly damaged by Margaret Thatcher. One of the first decisions by Harriet Harman, Blair's first social security secretary and a declared feminist, was to abolish the single parents' welfare premium and benefit, in spite of her pledge to the House of Commons that Labour opposed these impoverishing Tory-inspired cuts. Today, Harman is Brown's deputy party leader and, like all of the "new faces" around the cabinet table with "plans to heal old wounds" (the Guardian), she voted for an invasion that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of women.
Some feminism.
And when Blair finally left, those MPs who stood and gave him a standing ovation finally certified parliament as a place of minimal consequence to British democracy. The courtiers who reported this disgrace with Richard Dimbleby royal-occasion reverence are flecked with the blood spilled by the second-rate actor and first-rate criminal. They now scramble for the latest police press release. That the profane absurdity of the going of Blair and the silence and compliance of Brown - political twins regardless of their schoolboy spats - may well have provoked the attacks on London and Glasgow is of no interest. While the crime of the century endures, there almost certainly will be others.
Shame. |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Thu Aug 09, 2007 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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pilgers new film 'the war on democracy' is on itv 20th august 11pm good to see it on tv so quickly, shame its late on a monday though
| Quote: | Pilger: War On Democracy
Monday 20 August
11:00pm - 12:40am
ITV1 London
New film from BAFTA-award-winning documentary maker John Pilger, who claims that, far from bringing democracy to the world as it claims, the US is doing its best to stifle its progress. Talking exclusively to American government officials, including agents who reveal for the first time on film how the CIA ran its war in Latin America in the 80s, Pilger argues that true popular democracy is more likely to be found among the poorest in Latin America, whose movements are often ignored in the West. |
| Quote: | Good Ol' Bill, The Liberal Hero
By John Pilger
On 14 August, you are invited to "an audience" with Bill Clinton in London. You have a choice. You can attend the "breakfast and speech" or the "brunch buffet and speech". These will take place in the white elephantine Millennium Dome, where a place in the "Kings' Row" will cost you £799. Last year, Clinton made more than £5m granting "audiences". Not only the usual corporate types attend. A few years ago, I watched a conga line of writers, journalists, publishers and others of liberal reputation shuffling towards his grotesquely paid presence at the Guardian Hay Festival.
The Clinton scam is symptomatic of the death of liberalism - not its narcissistic, war-loving wing ("humanitarian intervention"), which is ascendant, but the liberalism that speaks against crimes committed in its name, while extending rungs of the economic ladder to those below. It was Clinton's promotion of the former and crushing of the latter that so inspired new Labour's "project". Clinton, not Bush, was Cool Britannia's true Mafia godfather. Keen observers of Tony Blair will recall that during one of his many farewell speeches, the sociopath did a weird impersonation of Clinton's head wiggle.
Clinton is able to make a shed load a money because he is contrasted with the despised Bush as the flawed good guy who did his best for the world and brought economic boom to the US - the fabled American dream no less. Both notions are finely spun lies. What Clinton and Blair have most in common is that they are the most violent leaders of their countries in the modern era; that includes Bush. Consider Clinton's true record:
In 1993, he pursued George H W Bush's invasion of Somalia. He invaded Haiti in 1994. He bombed Bosnia in 1995 and Serbia in 1999. In 1998, he bombed Afghanistan; and, at the height of his Monica Lewinsky troubles, he momentarily diverted the headline writers to a major "terrorist target" in Sudan that he ordered destroyed with an onslaught of missiles. It turned out to be sub-Saharan Africa's largest pharmaceutical plant, the only source of chloroquine, the treatment for malaria, and other drugs that were lifelines to hundreds of thousands. As a result, wrote Jonathan Belke, then of the Near East Foundation, "tens of thousands of people - many of them children - have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases".
Long before Shock and Awe, Clinton was destroying and killing in Iraq. Under the lawless pretence of a "no-fly zone", he oversaw the longest allied aerial bombardment since the Second World War. This was hardly reported. At the same time, he imposed and tightened a Washington-led economic siege estimated to have killed a million civilians. "We think the price is worth it," said his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, in an exquisite moment of honesty.
Clinton's economic "legacy" - like Blair's - is the most unequal society Americans have known. In his last presidential year, 1999, I walked along the ocean front at Santa Monica in California and was struck by the number of middle-class homeless, "bag gents" who had lost executive jobs and families thanks largely to Clinton's North American Free Trade treaty. As for working Americans, the boasted high employment figures concealed a reversion to real wage levels of the 1970s. It was Clinton, not Bush, who wiped out the last of Roosevelt's New Deal. Back in Santa Monica the other day, I noted the bag gents had multiplied.
These days, you see Good Ol' Bill, or the Comeback Kid, as he is variously known, wiggling his head on the TV news, campaigning for his wife, Hillary, among Americans who, terminally naive, still believe the Democratic Party is theirs and that "it's time to vote a woman into the White House". Together, the Clintons are known as "Billary" and rightly so. Like Good Ol' Bill, his wife has no plans to address the divisions of a society that allows 130,000 Americans to claim the wealth of millions of their fellow citizens. Like GOB, she wants to continue Iraq's torment for perhaps a decade. And she has "not ruled out" attacking Iran.
Those settling down in the Kings' Row at the Millennium Dome on 14 August for breakfast or brunch with GOB, having transferred another swag to the Clinton bank account, are unlikely to reflect on the blood spilt and the epic suffering caused, or on the moral corruption of the liberal ideology that courted and acclaimed Clinton, along with the criminal Blair.
But we should. |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Aug 17, 2007 6:51 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | The old Iran-Contra death squad gang is desperate to discredit Chavez
Democracy and hope in Latin America have been revived by Venezuela's leader. But the forces allied against him are formidable
John Pilger
I walked with Roberto Navarrete into the national stadium in Santiago, Chile. With the southern winter's wind skating down from the Andes, it was empty and ghostly. Little had changed, he said: the chicken wire, the broken seats, the tunnel to the changing rooms from which the screams echoed. We stopped at a large number 28. "This is where I was, facing the scoreboard. This is where I was called to be tortured."
Thousands of "the detained and the disappeared" were imprisoned in the stadium following the Washington-backed coup by General Pinochet against the democracy of Salvador Allende on September 11 1973. For the majority people of Latin America, the abandonados, the infamy and historical lesson of the first "9/11" have never been forgotten. "In the Allende years, we had a hope the human spirit would triumph," said Roberto. "But in Latin America those believing they are born to rule behave with such brutality to defend their rights, their property, their hold over society that they approach true fascism. People who are well-dressed, whose houses are full of food, bang pots in the streets in protest as though they don't have anything. This is what we had in Chile 36 years ago. This is what we see in Venezuela today. It is as if Chávez is Allende. It is so evocative for me."
In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent.
The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet's horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America's leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a "threat" to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government "absolutely endorsed" US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government - "remarkable by any standards" - in favour of the falsehood of "the threat of a communist takeover".
The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Chávez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a "middle class" in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La Línea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day's school. "I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers," she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time.
More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.
It is this new confidence of Venezuela's "invisible people" that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela's wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a "monkey". Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. "We had a deadly weapon, the media," said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.
Yet, as in Nicaragua, the "treatment" of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of Chávez, whom they smear as "power crazed" and a "tyrant". That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a "radical socialist", usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain's Labour party were once proud to wear.
In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges Chávez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela's oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as "the envy of the banking world" is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said "people don't give a shit". However much they play the man, Chávez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau's idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and "the hope of the human spirit", of which Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned.
· The War on Democracy, directed by Christopher Martin and John Pilger, will be shown on ITV on Monday at 11pm. |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:06 am Post subject: |
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you get it working alright nekokate?
| Quote: | 
The Swell of Boycott
John Pilger
August 23, 2007
From a limestone hill rising above Qalandia refugee camp you can see Jerusalem. I watched a lone figure standing there in the rain, his son holding the tail of his long tattered coat. He extended his hand and did not let go.
'I am Ahmed Hamzeh, street entertainer,’ he said in measured English.
Over there, I played many musical instruments. I sang in Arabic, English and Hebrew, and because I was rather poor, my very small son would chew gum while the monkey did its tricks. When we lost our country, we lost respect. One day a rich Kuwaiti stopped his car in front of us. He shouted at my son, 'Show me how a Palestinian picks up his food rations!’ So I made the monkey appear to scavenge on the ground, in the gutter. And my son scavenged with him. The Kuwaiti threw coins and my son crawled on his knees to pick them up. This was not right; I was an artist, not a beggar … I am not even a peasant now.
'How do you feel about all that?’ I asked him.
Do you expect me to feel hatred? What is that to a Palestinian? I never hated the Jews and their Israel … yes, I suppose I hate them now, or maybe I pity them for their stupidity. They can’t win. Because we Palestinians are the Jews now and, like the Jews, we will never allow them or the Arabs or you to forget. The youth will guarantee us that, and the youth after them.
That was 40 years ago. On my last trip back to the West Bank, I recognised little of Qalandia, now announced by a vast Israeli checkpoint, a zigzag of sandbags, oil drums and breeze blocks, with conga lines of people, waiting, swatting flies with precious papers. Inside the camp, the tents had been replaced by sturdy hovels, although the queues at single taps were as long, I was assured, and the dust still ran to caramel in the rain.
At the United Nations office I asked about Ahmed Hamzeh, the street entertainer. Records were consulted, heads shaken. Someone thought he had been 'taken away … very ill’. No one knew about his son, whose trachoma was surely blindness now. Outside, another generation kicked a punctured football in the dust.
And yet, what Nelson Mandela has called 'the greatest moral issue of the age’ refuses to be buried in the dust. For every BBC voice that strains to equate occupier with occupied; thief with victim, for every swarm of emails from the fanatics of Zion to those who invert the lies and describe the Israeli State’s commitment to the destruction of Palestine, the truth is more powerful now than ever. Documentation of the violent expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 is voluminous. Re-examination of the historical record has put paid to the fable of heroic David in the Six Day War, when Ahmed Hamzeh and his family were driven from their home. The alleged threat of Arab leaders to 'throw the Jews into the sea’, used to justify the 1967 Israeli onslaught and since repeated relentlessly, is highly questionable.
In 2005, the spectacle of wailing Old Testament zealots leaving Gaza was a fraud. The building of their 'settlements’ has accelerated on the West Bank, along with the illegal Berlin-style wall dividing farmers from their crops, children from their schools, families from each other. We now know that Israel’s destruction of much of Lebanon last year was pre-planned. As the former CIA analyst Kathleen Christison has written, the recent 'civil war’ in Gaza was actually a coup against the elected Hamas-led Government, engineered by Elliott Abrams, the Zionist who runs US policy on Israel and a convicted felon from the Iran-Contra era.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16 August, the Bush Administration announced an unprecedented $30 billion military 'aid package’ for Israel, the world’s fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness; not one of the world’s tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history.
But something is changing. Perhaps last summer’s panoramic horror beamed from Lebanon on to the world’s TV screens provided the catalyst. Or perhaps cynicism of Bush and Blair and the incessant use of the inanity, 'terror’, together with the day-by-day dissemination of a fabricated insecurity in all our lives, has finally brought the attention of the international community outside the rogue states, Britain and the US, back to one of its principal sources: Israel.
I got a sense of this recently in the United States. A full-page advertisement in the New York Times had the distinct odour of panic. There have been many 'friends of Israel’ advertisements in the Times, demanding the usual favours, rationalising the usual outrages. This one was different.
'Boycott a cure for cancer?’ was its main headline, followed by 'Stop drip irrigation in Africa? Prevent scientific co-operation between nations?’ Who would want to do such things? 'Some British academics want to boycott Israelis,’ was the self-serving answer. It referred to the University and College Union’s (UCU) inaugural conference motion in May, calling for discussion within its branches for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions.
As John Chalcraft of the London School of Economics pointed out, 'the Israeli academy has long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for an occupation in direct violation of international law [against which] no Israeli academic institution has ever taken a public stand’.
The swell of a boycott is growing inexorably, as if an important marker has been passed, reminiscent of the boycotts that led to sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Both Mandela and Desmond Tutu have drawn this parallel; so has South African cabinet minister Ronnie Kasrils and other illustrious Jewish members of the liberation struggle.
In Britain there is an (often Jewish-led) academic campaign against Israel’s 'methodical destruction of [the Palestinian] education system’ — which can be translated by those of us who have reported from the occupied territories as the arbitrary closure of Palestinian universities, the harassment and humiliation of students at checkpoints and the shooting and killing of Palestinian children on their way to school.
These initiatives have been backed by a British group, Independent Jewish Voices, whose 528 signatories include Stephen Fry, Harold Pinter, Mike Leigh and Eric Hobsbawm. The country’s biggest union, Unison, has called for an 'economic, cultural, academic and sporting boycott’ and the right of return for Palestinian families expelled in 1948. Remarkably, the House of Commons’ international development committee has made a similar stand. In April, the membership of the National Union of Journalists voted for a boycott only to see it hastily overturned by the national executive council.
In the Republic of Ireland, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called for divestment from Israeli companies: a campaign aimed at the European Union, which accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s exports under an EU-Israel Association Agreement. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, has said that human rights conditions in the agreement should be invoked and Israel’s trading preferences suspended.
This is unusual, for these were once distant voices. And that such grave discussion of a boycott has 'gone global’ was unforeseen in official Israel, long comforted by its seemingly untouchable myths and great-power sponsorship, and confident that the mere threat of 'anti-Semitism’ would ensure silence. When the British lecturers’ decision was announced, the US Congress passed an absurd resolution describing the UCU as 'anti-Semitic’. (Eighty congressmen have gone on junkets to Israel this summer.)
This intimidation has worked in the past. The smearing of American academics has denied them promotion, even tenure. The late Edward Said kept an emergency button in his New York apartment connected to the local police station; his offices at Columbia University were once burned down. Following my 2002 film, Palestine is Still the Issue, I received death threats and slanderous abuse, most of it coming from the US where the film was never shown.
When the BBC’s Independent Panel recently examined the corporation’s coverage of the Middle East, it was inundated with emails, 'many from abroad, mostly from North America’, said its report. Some individuals 'sent multiple missives, some were duplicates and there was clear evidence of pressure group mobilisation’. The panel’s conclusion was that BBC reporting of the Palestinian struggle was not 'full and fair’ and 'in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture’. This was neutralised in BBC press releases.
The courageous Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, believes a single democratic State, to which the Palestinian refugees are given the right of return, is the only feasible and just solution, and that a sanctions and boycott campaign is critical in achieving this.
Would the Israeli population be moved by a worldwide boycott? Although they would rarely admit it, South Africa’s Whites were moved enough to support an historic change. A boycott of Israeli institutions, goods and services, says Pappé, 'will not change the [Israeli] position in a day, but it will send a clear message that [the premises of Zionism] are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century … They would have to choose.’
And so would the rest of us. |
going on from this i was kinda shocked to hear today israel are playing england soon - english teams didn't play against apartheid south africa did they? |
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faceless
admin
Joined: 25 Apr 2006
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| Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:18 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | we Palestinians are the Jews now |
that rang bells for me like Quasimodo on speed. |
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mickyv
Joined: 12 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 10:21 pm Post subject: |
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| I’ve just got around to finally watching “The War on Democracy”, and as always expected & never let down by Pilger, it was inspiring & powerful stuff, as well as being a sad & grim reminder of the recent South American past. However one thing that struck me as it ended, was that there was no mention at all of Brazil, and it’s (Leftist reforming?) President Lula da Silva. I don’t think it was an omission because of time constraints, as a single sentence of a few second could have been made. Does anybody have any ideas or thoughts about this ? |
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2007 11:44 am Post subject: |
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About killing squads, this article is interesting since it highlighting links with the drug cartels.
Though when the cartels operate in a country with a fascist government, they are probably iin league together.
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major.tom
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler
Joined: 21 Jan 2007
Location: BC, Canada
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mickyv
Joined: 12 Dec 2006
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| Posted: Fri Aug 31, 2007 9:03 am Post subject: |
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| The protests happening now in Chile may or may not be inspired by what Hugo Chavez is doing in Venezuela, but undoubtedly it will be perceived as such who consider him a threat; perhaps dangerous times ahead for the great man. |
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