Jerusalem families waiting for US action

by Marcey Gayer, The Electronic Intifada, 14 August 2009

In the early morning hours of Sunday, 2 August, a force of hundreds of police and border guards invaded the quiet East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and systematically evicted the sleeping Hanoun and Gawi families from their homes. The sun dawned upon a new reality: chaos in the streets, children crying and elders in anguish. The police blocked every entrance to the area, preventing friends from coming to the aid of the distressed families or even helping them to remove their belongings from their homes. Revealing prior coordination with the authorities, the homes were quickly occupied by ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers.

The Hanoun and Gawi families, consisting of 16 and 38 members, respectively, lived in their homes for 53 years. Built in 1956 by the UN and the Jordanian government (who had sovereignty over East Jerusalem at the time) as part of a temporary housing complex for refugees of the 1948 war, these were homes for those who already knew eviction and ethnic cleansing. However, this time the dispossession was accomplished "legally."

Since the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been building settlements along the eastern flank of Jerusalem to prevent expansion of its Arab neighborhoods. Moreover, within the past 20 years, the Israeli settlement project has begun encroaching upon the Arab neighborhoods themselves, installing nationalist Jewish families within their perimeters by force. Slowly but relentlessly, Israel is attempting to Judaize these neighborhoods in a manner designed not to attract international scrutiny and criticism.

Thus Maher Hanoun, the head of the Hanoun family, was ordered by Israeli courts to hand over the keys to his home to the Association of Sephardic Jewry on 19 July. Rather than comply with the court order, he held a press conference outside his house accompanied by several top officials, including Nils Eliasson of the Swedish Consulate representing the European Union, Robert Serry representing the UN, and Dr. Rafik Husseini of the Palestinian Authority. They all condemned the proposed eviction, calling it an affront to norms of international justice. In spite of US President Barack Obama's call to freeze Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, no representative from the US was present.

Hanoun, a 51-year-old salesman for the Nestle Corporation whose sales territory includes Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, and Tel Aviv, is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English. He is a man of culture and conscience, a believer in peaceful co-existence. He is soft-spoken, dignified and humorous, a devoted husband and the father of three wonderful children. He is the global everyman -- simple, honest, hard-working -- hardly deserving to be evicted from his home. But he and his family were evicted, simply because they are Palestinian.

Where does this all leave us? Maher Hanoun, his two brothers and their wives and children and the Gawis, 54 persons all together, are now sleeping under trees 50 feet from their former homes. Menacing armored vehicles are parked in front of each house and the neighborhood is overrun with police, border guards and stone-throwing settlers.

The dispossession of the Hanoun and Gawi families is a clear act of defiance directed at the Obama administration's call to freeze settlements. If it succeeds, this will be a green light for Israel to continue with its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Already five additional Sheikh Jarrah families have received court summonses and they are fated to join the Hanouns and the Gawis in the street if this supposedly "legal" land grab isn't stopped. If the new US president is to have any credibility on the international stage, he must keep faith with Maher Hanoun. Outside his home, Hanoun hung a big banner bearing President Obama's picture and the slogan "OBAMA,YES YOU CAN stop housing evictions in Sheikh Jarrah."

He and the world are still waiting.

Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv.

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Role of US Militarism in Ahmadinejad’s Rise

Many Americans have played important roles in Iran’s contemporary history, from Howard Baskerville (1885-1909), Iran’s "first American martyr" who, while helping the revolutionaries defend the city of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) against the forces of Iran’s dictator of the time, Mohammad Ali Shah, was killed in 1909 in Tabriz, to Joseph Cochran (1855-1905) who was the founding father of Iran’s first modern medical school, Samuel M. Jordan (1871-1952) who is sometimes referred to as the father of modern education in Iran and founded the American College of Tehran (later renamed the Alborz high school), and others.

The United States also played a crucial role in forcing the Soviet Union’s forces evacuate Iran in 1946, after World War II had ended. In the Tehran Conference of 1943, Joseph Stalin promised Harry Truman and Winston Churchill that his forces will leave Iran after WW II ends, but he did not deliver on his promise until he was pressured by the U.S. But, since then, the history of the U.S. intervention in Iran’s internal affairs has been depressing, resulting in tyranny, bloodshed, and revolution.

It all began with the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and started the era of the U.S. influence in Iran. In addition to its great political influence over the Shah of Iran, the U.S. helped establish and train the SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded security services. These events ultimately led to the 1979 Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed regime of the Shah. For decades the U.S. would not even admit its role in the 1953 coup. When Madeleine Albright did finally acknowledge it in 2000, she explained it based on the supposed Soviet military threat to Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic leftist students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 53 American diplomats and staff hostage. The event should be viewed in light of Iran’s bitter experience of the 1953 CIA coup. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981. Then, in 1983, against the Algiers Agreement of January 1981 that freed the hostages, President Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Iran, most of which have remained in effect. Ever since, the U.S. goal has always been to hamper Iran’s economic development and to contain it militarily, which in turn have helped the radicals and hardliners to prevent the Iranian people from advancing their country on a democratic path.

Iran’s reform movement was born in the early 1990s. But, at every stage of its development, instead of being helped by the U.S. and its allies, it has been hurt by them.

On May 23, 1997, the Iranian people elected Mohammad Khatami, a moderate and progressive cleric, as their next president by a landslide. But, instead of helping Khatami by lifting at least a part of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, the Clinton administration continued to pursue its dual-containment policy, whereby both Iran and Iraq were to be contained by the U.S. military and economic might.

Even when Khatami called for a dialogue among civilizations, the U.S. did not respond favorably. The hard-liners pointed to the U.S. non-responsiveness as yet another sign that it was only interested in hampering Iran’s developments, and rebuked Khatami and his supporters for wanting to resolved the differences between the two nations.

Only in April 2000, after the reformists had swept the elections for the Iranian parliament, did President Clinton make a minor gesture toward Iran by lifting sanctions on the imports of Iranian rugs, pistachios, and caviar. But, it was too little too late. The Clinton administration was on its way out.

Then, came the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. The Khatami administration provided crucial help to the U.S. in Afghanistan by opening Iran’s airspace to the U.S. aircrafts, and providing crucial intelligence on the Taliban. Iran’s Afghan ally, the Northern Alliance that it had supported and trained for years, was the first force that entered Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and overthrew the Taliban. Iran also played a crucial role in the formation of Afghanistan’s national unity government in December 2001.

But, the Bush administration rewarded the Khatami administration by making Iran a charter member of the "axis of evil" in February 2002, and began threatening it with military attacks. This further hurt the credibility of the Iranian reformists who were advocating a rapprochement with the U.S.

The U.S. then invaded and occupied Iraq in the spring of 2003. The Shiite groups that had spent their exile years in Iran, and had been supported, trained, and funded by it, were put in power in Iraq, and were considered allies of the U.S., but the George W. Bush administration accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, and continued to threaten it with military attacks. The threats helped Iran’s hardliners to further suppress dissent in Iran.

In late April 2003 the Khatami administration presented a comprehensive proposal to the U.S., whereby it agreed to recognize Israel, help transform the Lebanese Hezbollah to a purely political group, and limit its nuclear program. Not only was the proposal spurned by the U.S., but it also admonished the Swiss ambassador to Iran for delivering the proposal to it (Switzerland represents the U.S. interests in Iran). Instead, the U.S. continued to threaten Iran militarily. Once again, Iran’s reformists were sacrificed by the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran and the Middle East.

Almost at the same time, the confrontation between Washington and Tehran began over Iran’s nuclear program. Although every report by the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that, aside from some minor non-compliance cases, Iran had abided by its obligations towards Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and its Safeguards Agreement; the Bush administration threatened Iran with military attacks more strongly than ever.

The U.S. threats greatly helped Iran’s hardliners to crackdown on the reformists. First, the press that had enjoyed relative freedom during the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, was suppressed, partly because the hardliners accused it of being an agent of foreign powers. The reformists were then purged from the Iranian parliament during the 2004 elections. Then, on the eve of Iran’s 2005 presidential election, George W. Bush basically said that the Iranian people should not vote, which actually provoked the conservatives and even some nationalists to vote in large numbers and help elect Ahmadinejad.

Once Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, and began using harsh, but inconsequential, rhetoric against Israel, the U.S. ratcheted up its military threats against Iran. In a show of force, and in addition to surrounding Iran with the U.S. forces on three sides, the Bush administration dispatched two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf in May 2007, in order to frighten Iran. Dick Cheney used the deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis to threaten Iran, "We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats."

All such threats were used by Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters to further suppress dissent in Iran, shut down independent and reformist newspapers and other publications, and accuse the reformist and democratic groups of being agents of the U.S. and other foreign powers. The constant pressure on the reformists and their oppression by the hardliners prevented them from organizing and confronting Ahmadinejad and his supporters more effectively.

Even after the supposedly realist Obama administration took over in January just a few months before Iran’s presidential election, and the President began looking for Iran’s unclenched fist, the threats against Iran did not stop, nor did their nature change. Asked if the military option was still on the table with regard to Iran, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday January 28 that, "The President hasn’t changed his viewpoint that he should preserve all his options. We must use all elements of our national power to protect our interests as it relates to Iran."

Thus, decades of U.S. hostility toward Iran, and sanctions and military threats and attacks have had a net result: the efforts by the courageous people of Iran in establishing a democratic political system has been thwarted by undemocratic and even neo-fascist groups, who have used the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran as their excuse to suppress freedom.

Text taken from here.

Is justice right side up?

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones—the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes the five nations with veto power in the United Nations inviolable? Is it of a divine origin that veto power of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to guard the peace? Is it fair that world peace is in the hands of the very five nations who are also the world’s main producers of weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet another example of organized crime?

Those who clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding murderers yet say nothing about missile-wielding arch-murderers.

And one asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they try to aim their murderous proclivities at social injustice? Is it a just world when, every minute, three million dollars are wasted on the military while at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or curable disease? Against whom is the so-called international community armed to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?

text taken from here.