At the end of April, another Michael, Michael Jackson’s personal assistant, called me and asked me to come the next day at 10 a.m. and asked me the make and model of my car. I drove to the Holmby Hills home. I drove up to the front door, and was met by an assistant who told me to go inside. I was met there by a woman dressed like a housekeeper, but with a white turban on her head. She said, ‘Michael Jackson will be with you shortly.’ About two minutes later, he came down the stairs.

I was reluctant to shake his hand because I had heard that he was concerned about germs, but he immediately stuck his hand out and gave me a very firm handshake. He was very skinny, but not the least bit frail. He was wearing a suit and a hat. He was going to rehearsal later for the tour. He said, ‘You look familiar.’ I told him a long time ago I worked on a TV tribute to Sammy Davis, Jr. at Shrine Auditorium [that he had participated in]. I told him I had met him briefly there.’ He said, ‘I never forget a face.’

He told me, ‘I have three projects going on simultaneously.’ One was the tour that the whole world knew about. The other two I believe no one knew about. One was to be an album of pop songs. Then he said, ‘The other one is that I want to record an album of classical music’ — what he called classical music.

He said he listened to classical music all the time; it was his absolute favorite. I was impressed with the pieces he mentioned: Aaron Copland’s Rodeo, Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait; Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. I mentioned Bernstein's On the Waterfront. Then Michael mentioned that he loved Elmer Bernstein's film music, too, and he specifically mentioned To Kill a Mockingbird.

I realized that almost all the classical pieces he mentioned are childlike, very simple and pretty, like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. He also mentioned Debussy several times, specifically Arabesque [No. 1] and Clair de lune. He was very soft-spoken when were talking about music, but when he got animated about something, he was very changed. When he mentioned how he loved Elmer Bernstein, and I said I liked the Magnificent Seven score, Michael started singing the theme very loudly, almost screaming it.

He said, ‘I’m making a CD.’ Then his son, Prince Michael, came in, and Michael asked him to find a CD player. Paris found one and brought it in with Prince. Michael played the CD. It was very pretty music. He said, ‘But a section is missing.’ He played a second piece. And he said, ‘But a section is missing, too. But I can hum it to you.’ I asked if there was a piano in the house, and he said there was one in the pool house. We headed out there, but Michael stopped when he saw the dog was outside, soaking wet from being in the pool. He didn't want us to get splattered. It was kind of funny. Michael got another assistant to hold the dog while we went to his pool house.

I sat at the piano and Michael hummed the missing part of one of the pieces. I had taken a little digital recorder with me and asked if I could record him. He was in perfect pitch. I tried to figure out chords to go with it as he hummed. He said, ‘Your instincts are totally right about the chords.’

We talked about classical music some more. I played some Debussy pieces. Michael seemed very happy and I think he felt very comfortable with me. He mentioned Leonard Bernstein again, and I played some of West Side Story. He told me he had met Bernstein once and that Bernstein had said he was a big fan of Michael’s.

Back in the house, whenever he’d go from room to room, you’d hear, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ ‘I love you, Paris.’ They all seemed pretty normal and happy.

Michael was very anxious to get the pieces orchestrated and record the music with a big orchestra. I suggested we record it at the Fox, Sony or Warner Brothers lot. I asked if he could have someone call me to discuss the budget and he said he would take care of it. When I left there were several fans outside the gate.

[Later] I talked to Michael on the phone. He asked me how the project was going and I said I was waiting to hear from someone so we could set the deal. I suggested we could record the music in London while he was doing the show there. He liked the idea. He again brought up Arabesque.

I laid the music all out on my computer and started on the orchestrations. Finally, a week before Michael died, his manager, Frank Dileo, called and asked me for an email with the budget and an electronic mock-up of the music, the costs of orchestration.

Now I have no idea what’s going to happen with this. I’m hoping the family will do something to get this done. I will not bring it up [with them] until after what I think is an appropriate time.

My guess is that each piece would be seven to ten minutes long. [Each one] is more substantial than a song. It’s very pretty music. One piece had an Irish quality about it. I suggested that we could use a Celtic harp. The pieces sound like pretty film score music, with very traditional harmony, and definitely very strong melodies. One of them was a little John Barry-ish, like in Out of Africa -- that kind of John Barry score. I could hear [in my head] sweeping strings and French horns in unison.

I told Michael I was going to use one of Leonard Bernstein’s batons I had bought at auction when we did the recording. I knew he would have gotten a big kick out of that. I guess I still will use that baton if I ever get to conduct the music.

From weblogs.baltimoresun.com

05/07/2009 - 10:45 PM

From Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

On 11 June, members of the Palestinian security agencies detained Haitham Amr, a resident of the small village of Beit al-Rush, 25 kilometers south west of Hebron .

Two days later, Amr, 32 and father of three small children, was found dead in his cell at the Mukhabarat (General Intelligence) headquarters in downtown Hebron .

Amr apparently died after he was subjected to an unusually harsh session of torture resulting in a massive internal bleeding.

At first, PA security officials claimed that Amr had jumped from the second floor of the building in an attempt to escape. However, the claim seemed to have been totally concocted and contained no iota of truth.

The PA did carry out an autopsy on Amr’s body at al-Quds University Medical College immediately after his death. However, the forensic report has not been made public, despite the passage of nearly one month after the incident.

Amr is not an isolated case. Since the establishment of the American-backed regime in Ramallah, under the supervision of the American security commissioner, Gen. Keith Dayton, as many as eight Palestinians were either unlawfully killed or tortured to death at the hands of PA security personnel.

Today, hundreds of mostly political activists are languishing in PA detention centers, the majority of whom without charge or trial. And when trials do take place, they are usually conducted in clear violation of internationally accepted procedure.

The PA routinely claims it doesn’t hold “political prisoners” in its jails and detention centers. However, it is amply clear that this claim is false.

This writer has spoken with dozens of released detainees who testified that they were harshly tortured.

In addition, the former prisoners, many of whom have been re-arrested either by Israel or the PA for no legitimate reasons, said they were asked which political party they had voted for in the 2006 elections, what their political preferences were, and what they thought of Hamas.

It is widely believed that as many as 4000 political activists have been arrested ever since the ousting by Hamas of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007. Now, there are as many as 750 political detainees in PA custody. Some observers have called the wanton campaign against the Islamic opposition a real inquisition.

In addition to arresting and torturing people suspected of sympathizing with Hamas, the PA security agencies have seized hundreds of educational, health, sport, and charitable institutions previously run by Islamic organizations.

Moreover, hundreds of civil servants, including teachers, have been unceremoniously fired from their jobs. Others, who have not been fired, have been receiving only partial salaries as a reprisal for their alleged sympathy with Hamas. In many cases, the charges are based on secret reports filed by local informers.

Human rights activists have pointed out that many of these informers often abuse their “function” by filing false charges against a given civil servant for reasons having to do with personal vendetta or clan feuds.

In the meantime, the Palestinian Justice system has been more or less in a state of paralysis thanks to the hegemony of the security agencies which often warn judges and lawyers against interfering in “security matters.”

Furthermore, freedom of speech, including press freedom, has also been suffering immensely as a result of heavy and occasionally draconian interference by the security agencies. Journalists have been arrested, tortured and humiliated for reporting news and views the PA wants to remain hidden from the eyes of the public.

Some of the incarcerated journalists and writers still languishing in PA jails include Mustafa Sabri, Fareed Hamad, Qays Abu Samra and Serri Sammour. The latter was arrested from his home after publishing an internet article on Fatah.

A few months ago, this writer was detained in a slimy cell in Hebron for 60 hours for saying during a TV interview that the PA was subservient to Israel .

The PA, an artificial entity without any semblance of sovereignty, is nearly totally dependent on politically-motivated foreign aid for its very survival.

The western rationale for keeping the PA afloat, at least financially, is ostensibly to prepare for the creation of a Palestinian state.

However, it is obvious that the West is actually helping create a police state, and in the Palestinian case, a police state without a state, an entity that very much looks like a graveyard for human rights, civil liberties and simple human decency.

Last month, President Obama vowed in his speech in Cairo to open a new chapter in U.S. relations with Muslims around the world, based on mutual respect.

However, one month later, Muslims all over the world are still watching U.S. continuing to help local dictatorships savage their masses by denying them basic freedoms and human rights. This is happening in occupied Palestine as well as many other parts of the Middle East.

Needless to say, a healthy relationship between Muslims and the West ought to be based on honesty, not on hypocrisy and moral duplicity.

This week, European states decided to summon their ambassadors from Tehran to protest the Iranian authorities’ crackdown on western-backed protesters.

Western powers, which have supported and embraced every dictator and tyrant in the Muslim world, from the Shah of Iran to Suharto of Indonesia, are suddenly invoking the mantra of civil liberties and human rights to justify their hostile posture against Iran, a country that is seemingly determined to be free and independent from western and Zionist subservience.

However, when it comes to Israeli crimes in Gaza, or the systematic persecution and savaging of non-conformist Palestinian activists, we see that the West is not only silent, but is actively standing on the side of tyrannical Arab governments and the Nazi-like Israeli occupiers.

Needless to say, the persistence of the erstwhile American policy of backing dictators and embracing the colonialist Israeli occupation will only vindicate the views of many Muslims and non-Muslims alike who argue that the US is not really sincere about having a dignified rapprochement with the Muslims world.

In the final analysis, people in this part of the world want to see real actions not just hear eloquent words lacking in substance.

As a Palestinian, I would like to see the Obama administration (and also the EU states) tie their financing of the PA to the latter’s respect for human rights and civil liberties.

Will the Obama administration and EU have the moral integrity to behave this way? (end)

© PalestineFreeVoice Copyright reserved 2003 - 2011

A political-economic oligarchy has taken over the United States of America. This oligarchy has institutionalized a body of law that protects businesses at the expense of not only the common people but the nation itself.

CNN interviewed a person recently who was seriously burned when his vehicle burst into flames because a plastic brake-fluid reservoir ruptured. Having sued Chrysler, he was now concerned that its bankruptcy filing would enable Chrysler to avoid paying any damages. A CNN legal expert called this highly likely, since the main goal of reorganization in bankruptcy is preserving the company’s viability and that those creditors who could contribute most to attaining that goal would be compensated first while those involved in civil suits against the company would be placed lowest on the creditor list since compensating them would lessen the chances of the company’s surviving. This rational clearly implies that the preservation of companies is more important than the preservation of people. Of course, similar cases have been reported before. The claims of workers for unpaid wages have often been dismissed as have their contracts for benefits.

But there is an essential difference between a business that lends money or delivers products or services to another company and the employees who work for it. Business is an activity that supposedly involves risk. Employment is not. Neither is unknowingly buying a defective product. Workers and consumers do not extend credit to the companies they work for or buy products from. They are not in any normal sense of the word “creditors.” Yet that distinction is erased in bankruptcy proceedings which preserve companies at the public’s expense.

Of course, bankruptcy is not the only American practice that makes use of this principle. The current bailout policies of both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury make use of it. Again companies are being saved at the expense of the American people. America’s civil courts are notorious for favoring corporate defendants when sued by injured plaintiffs. Corporate profiteering is not only tolerated, it is often encouraged. The sordid records of both Halliburton and KBR are proof enough. Neither has suffered any serious consequences for their abysmal activities in Iraq while supplying services to the troops deployed there. Even worse, these companies continue to get additional contracts from the Department of State. “A former Army chaplain who later worked for Halliburton's KBR unit . . . told Congress . . . ‘KBR came first, the soldiers came second.’" [http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/deyoung.html] Again, it’s companies first, people last. But Major General Smedley Butler made this point in 1935. [See http://www.scuttlebuttsmallchow.com/racket.html] And everyone is familiar with the influence corporate America has over the Congress through campaign contributions and lobbying. For instance, “the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has earmarked $20 million over two years to kill [cardcheck].”[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-nacard-check4-2009jun04,0 7195326.story?track=rss] Companies expect returns on their money, and preventing workers from unionizing offers huge returns. And on Thursday June 4, 2009 USA Today reported that, “Republicans strongly oppose a government run [healthcare] plan saying it would put private companies insuring millions of Americans out of business. ‘A government run plan would set artificially low prices that private insurers would have no way of competing with,’ Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, said . . . .” (Kentucky ranks fifth highest in the number of people with incomes below poverty. Why is he worried about the survival of insurers?)

The profound question is how can any of it be justified?

President Calvin Coolidge did say that the business of America is business and the American political class seems to have adopted this view, but the Constitution cannot be used to justify it. The word “business” in the sense of “commercial firm” occurs nowhere in it. Nowhere does the Constitution direct the government to even promote commerce or even defend private property. The Constitution is clear. It was established to promote just six goals: (1) form a more perfect union, (2) establish justice, (3) insure domestic tranquility, (4) provide for the common defense, (5) promote the general welfare, and (6) secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Of course, the Constitution does not prohibit the government from promoting commerce or defending private property, but what happens when doing so conflicts with one or more of its six purposes? Shouldn’t any law that does that be unconstitutional? For instance, wouldn’t it be difficult the claim that a bankruptcy procedure that protects business and subordinates or dismisses the claims of workers and injured plaintiffs establishes justice? How can spending trillions of dollars to save financial institutions and other businesses whose very own actions brought down the global economy be construed as establishing justice or even promoting the general welfare when people are losing their incomes, their pensions, their health care, and even their homes? These actions clearly conflict with the Constitution’s stated goals. Shouldn’t they have been declared unconstitutional? Although the Constitution does provide people with the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, it does not clearly provide that right to organizations or corporations and it certainly does not provide to anyone the right to petition the government for special advantages. Yet that is what the Congress, even after its members swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, allows special interest groups to do. Where in the Constitution is there a justification for putting the people last?

How this situation could have arisen is a puzzle? Haven’t our elected officials, our justices, our legal scholars, our professors of Constitutional Law, or even our political scientists read the Constitution? Have they merely misunderstood it? Or have they simply chosen to disregard the preamble as though it had no bearing on its subsequent articles? Why have no astute lawyers brought actions on behalf of the people? Why indeed?

The answer is that a political-economic oligarchy has taken over the nation. This oligarchy has institutionalized a body of law that protects businesses at the expense of not only the common people but the nation itself. Businessmen have no loyalties. The Bank of International Settlements insures it, since it is not accountable to any national government. (See my piece, A Banker’ Economy, http://www.jkozy.com/A_Bankers__Economy.htm.) Thomas Jefferson knew it when he wrote, “Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gain.” Mayer Amschel Rothschild knew it when he said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws." William Henry Vanderbilt knew it when he said, “The public be damned.” Businesses know it when they use every possible ruse to avoid paying taxes, they know it when they offshore jobs and production, they know it when the engage in war profiteering, and they know it when they take no sides in wars, caring not an iota who emerges victorious. IBM, GM, Ford, Alcoa, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Chase Bank, J.P. Morgan, National City Bank, Guaranty, Bankers Trust, and American Express all knew it when they did business as usual with Germany during World War II. Prescott Bush knew it when he aided and abetted the financial backers of Adolf Hitler.

Yet somehow or other the people in our government, including the judiciary, do not seem to know it, and they have allowed and even abetted businesses that have no allegiance to any country to subvert the Constitution. Unfortunately, the Constitution does not define such action as treason.

America’s youthful students are regularly taught Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and are familiar with its peroration, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” If that nation ever existed, it no longer does. And when Benjamin Franklin was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?” he answered, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” We haven’t. What we have ended up with is merely an Unpublic, an economic oligarchy that cares naught for either the nation or the public.

To argue that the United States of America is a failed state is not difficult. A nation that has the highest documented prison population in the world can hardly be described as domestically tranquil. A nation whose top one percent of the people have 46 percent of the wealth cannot by any stretch of the imagination be said to be enjoying general welfare (“generally true” means true for the most part with a few exceptions). A nation that spends as much on defense as the rest of the world combined and cannot control its borders, could not avert the attack on the World Trade Center, and can not win its recent major wars can not be described as providing for its common defense. How perfect the union is or whether justice usually prevails are matters of debate, and what blessings of liberty Americans enjoy that peoples in other advanced countries are denied is never stated. A nation that cannot fulfill its Constitution’s stated goals surely is a failed one. How else could failure be defined? By allowing people with no fastidious loyalty to the nation or its people to control it, by allowing them to disregard entirely the Constitution’s preamble, the nation could not avoid this failure. The prevailing economic system requires it.

Woody Guthrie sang, “This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land,” but it isn’t. It was stolen a long time ago. Although it may have been “made for you and me,” people with absolutely no loyalty to this land now own it. It needs to be taken, not bought, back! America needs a new birth of freedom, it needs a government for the people, it needs a government that puts people first, but it won’t get one unless Americans come to realize just how immoral and vicious our economic system is.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who blogs on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site's homepage.

"Rafah, Gaza

A mass rally took place on June 18, 2009 in Rafah Governorate, in solidarity with Ahmad Sa'adat.

The participants carried Palestinian flags and posters of Sa'adat, and chanted for the lives of Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners in the Zionist jails.

Iyad Awadallah of the PFLP spoke at the rally. He praised the strength of the prisoners and their example of national unity, calling for national unity to confront the occupier and struggle for the rights of the Palestinian people. He closed by paying tribute to Sa'adat and all prisoners."

________

We are asking for your endorsement and that of your organization to the below letter, inspired by the hunger strike of imprisoned Palestinian national leader Ahmad Sa'adat, calling upon United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to uphold his responsibilities and take action to protect the rights, health and lives of Palestinian prisoners and demand the freedom of all 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners.

We welcome endorsements from all organizations, individuals, coalitions and institutions in support of the goals of this letter and the rights and freedom of Palestinian prisoners.

Dear Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-Moon;

We, the undersigned organizations and individuals, call upon you to immediately take action in defense of the lives, health and rights of the over 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners held inside Israeli occupation jails. This number includes numerous elected members of Palestinian Legislative Council, among them Ahmad Sa'adat, General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; Marwan al-Barghouthi, Fateh leader; Abdel-Aziz Dweik, Hamas leader and President of the Council, just freed after three years in prison, and dozens of other elected political leaders, in addition to thousands of other Palestinian activists, union members, community organizers, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters.

Palestinian prisoners suffer in conditions that violate international standards and norms, and are imprisoned because they refuse to accept a brutal occupation of their land and their people. Ahmad Sa'adat recently waged a nine-day hunger strike in protest of the policy of isolation and solitary confinement that has recently been escalated against Palestinian prisoners. Palestinian prisoners have been denied family visits, at times for years, denied access to all books and magazines, and denied even communication with their fellow prisoners in the isolation units. Palestinian prisoners, including Sa'adat, are currently denied necessary health care and medical treatment.

Palestinian prisoners are placed into isolation because they are national leaders and because the Palestinian prisoner movement has been an inspiration to all Palestinians and all who struggle for freedom. Ahmad Sa'adat's hunger strike has sparked thousands of people around the world to appeal for his release, as a living example who symbolizes the steadfastness and strength of the Palestinian prisoners amid isolation and dire conditions, and it must compel all of those outside the prisons to act. Many Palestinian and international human rights and social justice organizations have called for the release of Sa'adat and to ensure the safety of his life and health, as well as for freedom and protection for all Palestinian prisoners.

The fate of these 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners is a fundamental issue of justice. Palestinians, in Palestine and in exile, are denied their rights - to return home,to self-determination, and to freedom, and those who seek to secure those rights are subject to imprisonment, whether within the open-air prisons of Gaza under siege or the walled-in West Bank, or the jails of the occupation. The silent, and at times, active, complicity of international agencies, particularly the United Nations, in the denial of Palestinian rights must not continue.

We call upon you to uphold your responsibilities and exert all pressure to end torture, cruel and inhuman treatment of Palestinian prisoners, and to free every Palestinian political prisoner from Israel's occupation jails.

Sincerely,

June 18: Ahmad Sa'adat's isolation extended in retaliation for his defense of prisoners' rights..

23 Jun 2009 12:32 PM PDT

In my last post, I looked at the failures of newspapers who are trying to do the right thing (incorporate high-quality local bloggers) but failing because they are either opening the doors to everyone (it’s fun but mostly nonsense), they are putting the bloggers in a blogger “ghetto” all by themselves (as if readers were interested in reading any blog), or they are turning their blogger aggregation operations over to an outside company — for example, in the case of the Des Moines paper, to Pluck (note: Chris Snider pointed out in his comments that the Register is doing good work elsewhere on their site; more on that soon).

It’s not like there aren’t great examples of successful blog aggregation staring newspapers right in the face.

The Huffington Post came into Chicago and stole great local bloggers who otherwise might have appeared in the Tribune and driven traffic to the paper's website instead of the interloping HuffPo.

By embarrassingly stark contrast to clueless newspapers, the Huffington Post came into Chicago and stole the very best local bloggers from under the Chicago Tribune’s nose. HuffPo gave those bloggers an enviably simple and attractive HuffPo URL on one of the most popular sites in the world (e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack).

The Huffington Post/Chicago is loaded with top-notch local names (like Mr. Cusack’s) and dozens of less famous but equally high-quality bloggers. The Chicago Tribune has none (they did, however, finally launch their answer to HuffPo/Chicago: A completely separate site called ChicagoNow that proudly boasts all of 50 bloggers from the entire Chicago metro area; it’s colorful and fun, but still a blogger ghetto and mentioned on chicagotribune.com only in teeny weeny type at the very bottom of the page. Way to be proud, guys!).

The Chicago Tribune's answer to the Huffington Post's Chicago site. ChicagoNow offers a collection of what they consider the best blogs in the city, but it's still a blogger ghetto (albeit a nice one) where blogs are kept separate from the main Tribune website.

(Full disclosure: When Huffington announced her Chicago plans months before her launch, I had written to the Tribune suggesting they beat her to the punch and grab all the best bloggers in the city. They never replied.)

The Huffington Post has been selling advertising on its blogger pages for months. The Tribune, obviously, only just started. Aggregation and multiple-author blogs like the Huffington Post are making money by attracting millions of unique visitors to the best content in the verticals of the user’s choice (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, YouTube, etc.) Those sites don’t (yet) have the local newspaper’s brand recognition or respect. The newspaper still is the best local information source in its market (for now).

Le Monde incorporates high-quality bloggers on their website in the appropriate section right next to staff content, but clearly labeled as a blog. No blogger ghetto

But newspapers must start doing the hard work of finding, vetting, and incorporating the hundreds of high-quality local text and video bloggers in their markets (e.g., 3,000 videos about Washington, D.C. were posted in one month alone on YouTube). If newspapers did that, they would have a wealth of new content that currently is going begging for a home, an audience, and advertising inventory. Newspapers would quickly increase their depth, reach, relevance, and revenue by weaving those high-quality local blogs throughout their websites and by publishing excerpts in the category appropriate pages of the newspaper.

Every imaginable topic is addressed by bloggers, and thus every newspaper could address every reader’s needs simply by aggregating and organizing that content. If, however, newspapers don’t do that, their competitors like the Huffington Post are very happy to step into the void to run the blogs and sell the ads.

Only a handful of newspapers “get it.” Le Monde, based in Paris, leads the field, publishing select, high-quality non-staff blogs throughout the newspaper’s website. Expert technology bloggers appear in Le Monde’s technology section. Top-quality arts bloggers appear in the arts section. Sports bloggers in sports. And so on.

BostonNOW incorporated high-quality local bloggers much like Le Monde, with nearly 4,000 local bloggers signing up to be hosted on BostonNow.com. The bloggers were highlighted on the home page and in the theme-appropriate sections of the website and the print product. The results were stunning. In less than a year, BostonNOW had at least twice as many monthly unique visitors as similar U.S. free dailies that had been publishing for 1-7 years.

BostonNOW was also selling interactive campaigns to clients who were creating their own blog presence on the site. For example, a local bank paid $90,000 to build its blog on BostonNOW to appeal to recent college grads looking for financial advice. Two condominium developers paid $10,000 each for their own blog sites. (BostonNOW was closed in 2008 when its Icelandic investors pulled the plug as a result of their country’s economic collapse.)

When I spoke at an international conference of journalists and bloggers in NYC, a renowned video blogger said, “Before John Wilpers and BostonNOW came to town, we thought of newspapers as THEIR newspapers; now we think of BostonNOW as OUR newspaper.” Web-centric bloggers who’d posted on BostonNOW and had excerpts of their posts appear in the paper began calling for tearsheets! These were young adults who had not previously picked up a paper!

Another example: BostonNOW published an excerpt from a top Boston-area blog without permission (an accident). The site editor was upset, but the blogger was conflicted. “My phone was ringing off the hook with friends telling me it was great that my blog was in the paper,” she said later. “I knew I should be angry, but I was so excited! I couldn’t wait to see the paper.” That blogger became a regular BostonNOW blogger and a motivated advocate of the paper promoting us and our website to her tech-savvy, print-averse friends some of whom became BostonNOW bloggers and passionate grassroots marketers for the paper.

If newspapers fail to embrace these new content creators, their future is threatened: “They (newspapers) are going to see the relentless emergence of new forms of media that might not even be built or positioned as competition, but which have the potential to siphon off their audience,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of media think tank iFOCOS, in a Knowledge@Wharton article. The message is clear: Learn to evolve or join the Dodo bird. Partner with bloggers and other emerging new media, or put another nail in the coffin of a once-thriving industry

.

REUTERS/Suhaib Salem (GAZA POLITICS)

By Hiyam Noir

GAZA - During a press conference in Gaza City on Tuesday, the Palestinian PM, Ismail Haniyeh said that Hamas will support any relevant proposal to establish an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.

The municipally East Jerusalem, illegally annexed by the Israelis 1980, is administered by the Israeli military.Hamas which following the Palestinian legislative elections,in control of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Prime Minister ship, formally refused to see the Green Line corresponding to a prospective border between Israel and a future Palestinian statehood. Smaller political parties such as the PFLP (General Command) the PRC and Islamic Jihad have supported Hamas position.

"During the Israeli massacres, Gilaad Sword operation with onset in June 25 2006, 350 Palestinian were killed and many were wounded. And in November the same year,the international community be witnessed a deliberate genocide when the Israelis bombed the town of Beit Hanoun, 63 Palestinians were killed and many were wounded.The attack occurred the day after the Israelis withdrawal following the Operation Autumn Cloud - operation in the northern Gaza Strip.

The UN Security Council motioned to condemn the Israelis for shelling a housing complex in which civilians, including new born babies died. The Palestinian prime minister,Ismail Haniye denounced the Israeli attack as an "awful massacre" and said, that the talks on forming a more moderate Palestinian unity government would now, after these massacres be suspended.

Hamas' political bureau issued statements which claimed that suicidal bombing attacks inside Israel were consistent to a temporary phase of the struggle. Not expected to subsequently take place ad infinitum (or until the destruction of Israel, following its official platform).However the statement was inconsistent with Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, and promptly rejected.

Ismail Haniyeh’s statement on Tuesday, came during a joint press conference in Gaza City with former US president Jimmy Carter, whom arrived in the early morning to Gaza. Haniyeh said that:“I will exert pressures towards realizing this dream,” and added that the Gaza government in close association with other Palestinian political parties are maintaining ceasefire, yet the border crossings should be opened to guarantee a continuation of this ceasefire.

Jimmy Carter who was met by a delegation of Hamas leaders, said that also the issue of a prisoner swap deal was discussed. Ismail Hanieyh asserted that his government intended to support the goal to an earnest attempt to achieve success in releasing all political prisoners.

On his current visit in the Middle East Carter met last week with Hamas top leader Khalid Mash’al in Damascus, Carter said that – “Hamas must be involved if there will ever be a lasting peace in the region”."I don't believe there is any possibility to have peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis unless Hamas is involved directly,Carter said after the meeting in Damascus with the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

On Tuesday in Gaza, Carter said he had long wished for a Palestinian reconciliation. And he asserted that he will report and testify to the US president Barack Obama,the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,and George Mitchell the Middle East envoy about his first hands account in Gaza.

Jimmy Carter said during his tour in areas most devastated in Gaza municipally that -“ When I see the destruction perpetrated against innocent people, my immediate feeling is one of grief and despair and an element of strong anger!

“Never before in history has a large community like this community of 1.5 million human beings, been starved of their basic needs after being savaged by bombs and missiles,then denied the means to recover," – Jimmy Carter said during a graduation ceremony in a UN school in Gaza City.

This abuse must cease,the separation walls must be brought down, and the basic right of justice and freedom must be manifested. When I see the deliberate destruction that has been wracked against your people I have to hold back my tears”. Carter said standing by the ruins of the American International School in Beit Lahia, - “the school was deliberately destroyed in the bombard meant by F16 warplanes, made in my country".

"Regarding the blockade of Gaza, Carter said that "The responsibility for this terrible human right crime, lies in Jerusalem, in Cairo, in Washington, and throughout the international community".

The Israelis genocidal war over Gaza with the onset in late December ending tree weeks later, killed more than 1.450 people and wounding over 5.000. The bombardment left large swaths of land in ruins on Gaza Strip and between Egypt and Israel.

"As I my self feel partially responsible for this crime, as must all Americans and the Israelis," Carter said.

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By Khalid Amayreh

Journalist — Occupied Palestine

By Federico Fuentes.

Green Left Weekly

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Addressing the 400-strong May 21 workshop with workers from the industrial heartland of Guayana, dedicated to the “socialist transformation of basic industry”,Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez noted with satisfaction the outcomes of discussions: “I can see, sense and feel the roar of the working class.”

“When the working class roars, the capitalists tremble”, he said.

Chavez announced plans to implement a series of radical measures,largely drawn from proposals coming from the workers’ discussion that day.

The workers greeted each of Chavez’s announcements with roars of approval, chanting “This is how you govern!”

Chavez said: “The proposals made have emerged from the depths of the working class. I did not come here to tell you what to do! It is you who are proposing this.”

Nationalisation and workers’ control

To the cheers of the workers, Chavez announced the nationalisation of six iron briquette, ceramics and steel companies, one after the other.

He said this started “a process of nationalisations” aimed at creating an integrated basic industry complex as part of building socialism.

Chavez also said it was necessary for there to be workers’ control along “the entire productive chain”. Plans for the industrial complex had to be “nourished with the ideas of the working class”.

Throughout the day, workers from local steel, aluminum and iron companies raised demands for greater worker participation in managing production, more nationalisations,and the need to sack corrupt and counterrevolutionary managers.

The workers were affiliated to the Socialist Workers’ Force (FST),which organises unionists in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela(PSUV),the mass revolutionary party led by Chavez).

Saying this new phase would have to be “assumed with responsibility”,Chavez called on the workers to wage an all-out struggle against the “mafias” rife in the management of state companies.

Chavez said he would approve a new law to allow workers to elect state company managers.

“Every factory should be a school, in order, as Che said, to create not only briquettes and sheets and steel and aluminium, but also,above all, new men and women, a new society, a socialist society”, he said.

Chavez also called for workers to organise an armed militia. Worker battalions in each factory should be equipped with weapons.in case anyone makes the mistake of messing with us”.

Post-referendum offensive

These moves are part of a push to deepen the Venezuelan revolution after the February 15 referendum that voted to remove restrictions on the number of terms public officials could stand for election.

At stake was the future of the revolution. Its central leader, Chavez, was unable to stand for re-election in 2012 under pre-existing regulation limiting a president to two terms.

The referendum initiative followed the November regional elections, in which the PSUV won a majority of governorships and mayoralties, yet lost some key states to the right-wing opposition.

The opposition used newly won offices to launch an assault on grassroots organisations and the government’s pro-poor social programs.

The referendum was part of a counter-offensive to strengthen the organisation of the revolutionary forces and win another mandate for the revolution’s radical program.

As part of the campaign, around 100,000 “Yes committees” were organised in factories and communities across the country. The “Yes” campaign, which won nearly 55% or 6.3 million votes,was a decisive mandate to deepen the revolution.

The campaign raised the level of organisation among the revolution’s baseworkers students, peasants, the urban poor and other sectors.

After the referendum, Chavez called for the restructuring of the PSUV. The Yes committees were to be converted into “socialist committees” as grassroots units of the party.Special emphasis was put on strengthening the social fronts.

In early May, Chavez reshuffled the PSUV regional vice-presidents, appointing those seen as his closest collaborators.

Attacks on capital

With this momentum, the government gave clear signals of how it intended to fight the global economic crisis and falling oil prices.

Rather than a pact with the capitalist class, as some within the revolutionary movement had called for, Chavez launched an offensive —with state intervention into, and in some cases expropriation of, capitalist firms.

This followed previous nationalisations in oil,steel,telecommunications, electricity,and other industries. This is part of ensuring state ownership over strategic sectors of the economy, to direct such sectors towards social needs.

Rice-producing factories owned by Polar, Venezuela’s largest company, were temporarily taken over by the military in February after it was found the company was deliberately evading government-imposed pricecontrols.

Under Venezuelan law, food companies are obliged to direct 70% of production towards selected products at a set price. This is to ensure enough affordable food is available to the poor.

Venezuelanalysis.com said on March 11: “During a recent surge in land reform measures, Venezuela’s National Institute of Lands (INTI) [took] public ownership of more than 5000 hectares of land claimed by wealthy families and multi-national corporations.”

INTI said it would review tens of thousands more hectares as part of its drive to ensure fertile land is directed towards food production for social needs, rather than corporate profits.

On May 7, the National Assembly passed a law ensuring state control over a range of activities connected to the oil industry, previously run by multinationals.

The next day, “the government expropriated 300 boats, 30 barges, 39 terminals and docks, 5 dams and 13 workshops on Lake Maracaibo, where there are large crude oil reserves”, a May 9 Venezuelanalysis.com article said.

On May 20, it nationalised a gas compression plant in the eastern state of Monagas under the same law.

Five days before, the government took over a pasta processing plant owned by US multinational Cargill after government inspectors found it was not producing price-regulated pasta as required.

Food vice minister Rafael Coronado said that after the 90-day intervention period, inspectors “together with the workers, the communal councils” would decide what to do with the company.

Revitalised working class

On April 30, announcing plans to expropriate the La Gaviota sardine processing plant, Chavez told a gathering of workers that “wherever you see a private company, a capitalist company that is exploiting the workers and is not complying with the laws, that is hoarding, denounce it, because the government is willing to intervene”.

La Gaviota had been shut for two and a half months by workers’ protests demanding the boss comply with the collective contract.

The same day, the government and workers took over the Cariaco sugar processing plant, the scene of similar protests.Some of the companies Chavez said would be nationalised on May 21 have also faced industrial disputes.

Chavez had previously threatened to nationalise Ceramicas Carabobo if the bosses refused to come to an agreement with the workforce. Workers at Matesi had called for the company be nationalised due to the unwillingness of management to sign a fair collective contract.

Matesi and Tavsa were part of the previously state-owned steel production complex, Sidor, before being sold off separately in the 1990s to Techint, an Argentine company.

After a 15-month dispute over the signing of a collective contract,the government nationalised Sidor, which was majority owned by Techint, decrying the “colonialist mentality” of the bosses overseeing super-exploitative conditions.

However, in Matesi and Tavsa, negotiations over collective contracts continued. Inspired by the Sidor example, where a collective contract was signed after nationalisation, Matesi workers demanded their factory also be nationalised.

This increase in industrial militancy has resulted in a number of factory occupationsThis includes the Tachira-based coffee processing plant Cafea, which was closed by its bosses.

Its workforce, together with unions and the local community, have occupied the plant and are demanding it be nationalised.

Green Left Weekly

Karl Schembri

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Ramattan) – You don’t need to have atrocious parking skills to appreciate the luxury of a car that finds its own parking space and parks itself. For Mohammed Abu Hamda, the luxury is to be able to get his invention out of the occupied territories.

The 23-year-old inventor has just finished his self-parking vehicle prototype – an engineering gem through which a model car armed with intricate sensors and a mini computer finds its way through cars, kerbs and people to park itself all on its own, at the push of a button.

The invention has earned him the highest marks in his final year at the Birzeit University computer engineering department after it was duly tested by his supervisors.

“You can just get out of the car and let it find a parking slot as you get on with your errands or go watch a film,” the proud inventor says as students gather around his prototype exhibited among the final year engineering projects on campus. “Parking is a problem and this is a solution.”

A network of sensors takes in all the environmental data around it – walls, cars, pedestrians and available parking spaces – and a controller processes all that information instructing it to drive around until it finds the best slot.

“All scenarios have been tested and covered in the data testing,” Abu Hamda says about his invention which he financed totally out of his own pocket, with the help of his parents who are both IT engineers. “It has 100 percent accuracy.”

A video shows his model car navigating around boxes, stopping wherever there is a potential parking space and calculating if it fits in within seconds.

“If it doesn’t find a parking space within the desired area, it will inform you through an alarm system,” he adds.

With some adjustments, he says the technology can be applied to any vehicle, but with all the restrictions Palestinians face, he is finding it extremely hard to get the already beleaguered motor industry to look at the occupied territories.

“Getting components shipped from the US was a headache, but getting the prototype out is even harder,” he says. “I’m sending emails and trying to make contact with car manufacturers, but you know we have huge limitations.”

In his speech in Cairo last Thursday, US President Barack Obama spoke of the “daily humiliations – large and small – that come with the occupation” of Palestinians.

“Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society,” he said. “And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank.”

More than 600 checkpoints cripple the Palestinian economy with grossly distorting trading conditions. Official statistics show that the economy shrunk from a GDP of $4.511 billion in 1999 to $4.133 billion in 2007, and Palestinians’ unemployment ran around 27 percent last year.

A labyrinthine bureaucracy imposed by Israel in the name of security makes business and entrepreneurship a logistical nightmare. There is no functioning airport in the West Bank and Gaza, and the coastal strip’s sea port is sealed off by the occupying forces.

The West Bank is also fragmented by a bizarre patchwork of land classified as Areas A, B and C under the 1993 Oslo accords. Area C is under full Israeli security and civil control, while Area A denotes Palestinian self-rule, and in so-called Area B Israel controls security while Palestinians have civil control. Yet there is little territorial continuity between A and B.

Professor Adnan Yahya, Birzeit’s Dean of the Faculty of IT says it is hard to get noticed under the current conditions, although local companies that have started outsourcing services seem to be promising.

“We’re targeting industry across the whole spectrum through the development of hardware, software and prototypes, but it’s not as easy as elsewhere,” he says.

Mariam Taha, another engineering student, hopes Palestinian stores will be using her innovative system through which supermarket customers would be able to scan barcodes on their mobile cameras and pay for their items through an instant mobile phone transaction.

“This system eliminates queues at stores and you don’t have to worry about cash,” she says.

For Abu Hamda, the next step for his invention is to make a car drive all by itself. The question is: will it stop at checkpoints? Abu Hamda laughs, but keen to become famous as an engineer rather than a terrorist, he knows that would have to be the first priority for his future supercar.

Agence Global

By Nadia Hijab

In the days since Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last week there has been a desperate search for substance in between the lines of a great performance. Where are the policies that can change the lives of people in the Middle East hit by the wars and occupations initiated or supported by the United States?

Many have read much into Obama's speech - that was part of its genius - but it contained no policy announcements. That does not mean there are no policies. The Obama administration works differently from its predecessors in at least three ways.

First, it doesn't do business on the basis of public pronouncements. There will, for example, be no reprise of Bush senior's public appeal to the American people that he was "one little lonely guy" facing up to a thousand lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

At that time, the Bush administration wanted Israel to attend the Madrid peace conference in the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf war. The White House also announced its intention to tie loan guarantees to Israel to ending settlement activity. In contrast, the Obama administration looks unlikely to make any public threats.

Second, the Obama administration speaks with one voice. The same tough line - settlements must stop, peace must start - is delivered by Mr. Obama; Vice President Joe Biden, who used to call himself a Zionist; Hillary Clinton, the former stridently pro-Israel junior senator from New York; Rahm Emanuel, who twice volunteered for the Israeli Army; the national security adviser, General James Jones; and the special envoy, George Mitchell.

This seamless act makes it hard for right-wing pro-Israel forces to drive in a policy wedge. This is a far cry from Bush junior's administration, when Vice President Dick Cheney and the deputy national security advisor Elliot Abrams actively undermined Condoleezza Rice's efforts.

Third, this is an administration that does its homework. It has studied the rise and fall of previous peace efforts, including Bill Clinton's hasty and ill-prepared convening of the Camp David summit in 2000. By contrast, weeks before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Washington in May, the Obama team reportedly briefed key Democrats in Congress about possible disagreements with Israel.

When Mr. Netanyahu visited Capitol Hill, expecting to be shielded from the administration, Haaretz reported that he was "stunned" by a coordinated attack against his stand on settlements. Several leading lawmakers, including Jewish ones, said they thought Mr. Netanyahu should be "very, very aware of the concerns of the administration and Congress."

True, Aipac secured 329 Congressional signatures on a letter urging Mr. Obama to pursue peace as "a devoted friend to Israel." But the warnings of senior lawmakers still carry weight.

Meanwhile, it is worth noting some of the policy shifts, however small. For instance, Israelis maintain that they had an understanding with the Bush administration supporting "natural growth" in the settlements. Hillary Clinton shot this down in no uncertain terms. The Obama administration, she pointed out, had been given the official records by the outgoing Bush administration, and there "is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements. If they did occur, which, of course, people say they did, they did not become part of the official position of the United States Government."

As for the 2004 Bush exchange of letters with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that promised Israel it could have the major settlement blocs plus Jerusalem and minus the Palestinian refugees, the State Department spokesman steadfastly side-stepped a journalist's questions as to whether or not the letters were binding.

So, yes, nothing has changed on the ground yet. But because of the way it works, the Obama administration has a much better chance of bringing peace to the Middle East than its predecessors. Still, before breaking out the champagne, remember that Mr. Obama works within the boundaries of the American establishment.

Within those narrow confines and given the present Israeli-Palestinian power imbalance, the Palestinians are likely to secure a bare minimum of rights while Israel walks off with the rest. Unless, that is, the Palestinians can rapidly tilt the balance in their favor - or unless Israel's intransigence does it for them.

_________________________________________________________________

Published by Agence Global and distributed by the Institute for Palestine StudiesThe Institute has produced authoritative studies on Palestinian affairs and the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1963. Its flagship Journal of Palestine Studies is published by the University of California Press.

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The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) aims to raise public awareness about the occupation of Palestine and the struggle of the Palestinian people. PSC seek to bring pressure on both the British and Israeli government to bring their policies in line with international law. PSC is an independent, non-governmental and non-party political organisation with members from communities across the UK.

[ 07/06/2009 - 01:54 AM ]

By Khalid Amayreh

In June 1967, when Israel launched the 6-day-war on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Khalid Amayreh was 10 years’ old. In the following two-part article, he recollects the war, whose outcome and ramifications continue to trouble Palestine, the Middle East and the rest of the world:

Read Part 1

I personally witnessed numerous demolitions when I was eleven years old. The demolition, or blowing-up operation, would begin with declaring the village where the doomed house was located a closed military zone. The declaration would be made via loud speakers located atop military jeeps.

In the process, all males betweens the ages of 13 and 70 would be ordered to gather at the playground of the local school, where they were forced to stand with their heads bowed down. Very often, the soldiers would shoot over the heads of people with the purpose of terrorizing them. And anybody daring to raise his head would be kicked in the back by heavily armed soldiers. Civility and simple human decency were always absent, as is the case in these days, and there was no al-Jazeera or CNN to report on Israel’s shameful acts, so the Zio-Nazis always felt at liberty doing to us as they saw fit.

Then, the commanding officer in charge of the operation would give the doomed family ten minutes to salvage whatever meagre belongings they could. (These days they demolish our homes immediately without giving a grace period to get our belongings out).

The scene of young children comforting younger children is devastating. The distraught housewives would struggle to get their utensils and whatever mattresses and foodstuff out, lest they be crushed and irretrievable. A small child would rush to get his favourite toy or an enlarged picture of his late grandfather, before it was too late. Then the commanding officer would give the go-ahead signal and the house would become rubble in a few seconds.

Afterwards, the Red Cross would bring a tent, as a temporary shelter for the victims, otherwise the tormented family would simply make an enclosure and sleep under the trees, or, if the weather was cold, find a cave to live in until a permanent solution could be found. These were indelible images of misery I won’t ever forget, an ugly testimony to Israel's Nazi-like savagery.

Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, observed that the Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls “the Message to the Palestinians.”

The Message, Halper says, is “Submit, only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent.”

The implication and deeper meaning of the message is very clear. It is the “you (Palestinians) do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel.”

Halper reminds us that Zionism has been from the very inception a “process of displacement” and house demolitions have been “at the centre of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians” since 1948.

Halper elucidates the policy of house demolitions. In 1948, he says, Israel systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85% of the villages existing before 1948. And since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 21,000 Palestinian homes. More homes, he adds, are being demolished in the path of Israel’s Separation Wall, with the number of homes demolished estimated at 40,000 in the past four years.

And contrary to Israeli propaganda that Arab houses are destroyed for security reasons, Halper points out that the 95% of these demolished homes have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews to ensure the advance of Zionism.

In addition to the manifestly barbaric practice of home demolitions, the Israelis really ‘excelled’ in the widespread practice of physical and psychological torture, especially in the first few years of the Occupation. In fact, a villager by the name of Salim Mahmoud Safi from Khorsa, my village, was tortured to death in 1970.

And Israel often imprisons the bodies of Palestinians killed or tortured to death for years in order to further torment and inflict pain upon their families. This is a well-known fact here.

Born into a very poor family, I started working in Beer Sheva when I was thirteen as a construction worker and then as an assistant plasterer (Maggish in Hebrew). I did this usually during the summer break and occasionally on Fridays. However, I was always careful not to allow my ‘job’ to seriously undermine my school learning.

In Beer Sheva, or Bir al Sab’a as the city is known in Arabic, I was able to learn Hebrew as well as the Moroccan dialect spoken by many Jews who had immigrated from North Africa. Like Palestinians, most Moroccan Jews worked in the construction sector and doing other menial jobs. Some were street sweepers as well, and almost all of the beggars in the streets were Jews originating from North Africa.

I was able to tour the city, which in the 1980s and 1990s received tens of thousands of immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

In the Old Town, I saw the old Palestinian homes, which the Jews seized after expelling their original occupants and proprietors at gunpoint. I also saw the town’s mosque, which dates back to around 1911, when Palestine was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Israel converted the mosque into a ‘museum’ and later into a ‘House for the Artists.’ And when some local Israeli Muslim leaders petitioned the Israeli government to rehabilitate the holy place and allow the town’s Muslim community to pray there, the Israeli authorities said an emphatic “NO.” This is how the ‘only true democracy in the Middle East’ behaves toward its own non-Jewish citizens.

On some occasions, the people for whom I worked would not give me my wages. I worked with such famous construction firms as Rusco, Solel Bonei, Hevrat Ovdeim. I still retain my old Israeli work card.As Palestinian labourers, we were continually humiliated at Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks at the A’rad Intersection on the way to Beer Sheva. I remember a Jewish police officer who spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent beating one of my relatives savagely without a convincing reason.

I made many Jewish friends then, but the psychological barrier remained largely intact. I did intermix with some Tunisian and Moroccan Jews in A’rad, Beer Sheva and Dimona. However, their sense of superiority (and victory) over us always impeded the evolution of normal human relations between them and myself. They viewed us then, as they do now, as the Biblical equivalents of wood hewers and water carriers. We were only good for making coffee and doing the hard, menial works for the superior race, the chosen people. “Muhammed Ta’asi coffee” (“Muhammed! Prepare the coffee for the Jews”) they would scream scornfully at us in a condescending tone.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel as ‘day- labourers’, mostly in the construction and agricultural fields. They would wake up one or two hours before dawn in order to be able to reach the worksite before eight o’clock.

Work in Israel lured most able-bodied Palestinians who abandoned agriculture, which was not financially very rewarding. Indeed, at one point, a day-labourer became economically better-off than erstwhile middle-class professionals such as teachers, clerks and other civil servants.

The Israelis knew what they were doing. By the mid 1980s, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became the second biggest market for Israeli products after Europe. So, it was really a kind of indirect slavery. We worked in Israel, building multi-story buildings for would-be immigrants, and then we spent the wages we earned buying Israeli products, even Israeli produce, as Palestinian agriculture fell into neglect as greater numbers of Palestinians preferred to earn more money working in Israel than working their land which comparatively yielded little money.

I said it was a kind of indirect slavery because Palestinian workers in Israel, whose number in the mid-1980s reached more than 130,000, were deprived of social benefits and health insurance, and they had no political rights whatsoever. (end)

Even before 1967, the Israeli army had been carrying out routine incursions into the West Bank, destroying poor people’s homes and killing innocent civilians, very much like what Israel has been doing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon recently. I still vividly remember how the Israeli army, including tanks and warplanes, attacked the small nearby town of Sammou’, 25 kilometres south-west of Dura, in November 1966, destroying the town, virtually completely, and killing many civilians. You see the condescending Zionist mentality. They are never interested in genuine peace and coexistence with the peoples of the Middle East, but are only intent on subjugating and tormenting people with brute force. This was as much the case 40 or even 60 years ago as it obviously is now.

“The acceptance of partition (by Israel) doesn’t commit us to renounce Transjordan; one doesn’t demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”⁷

Gigantic defeat

The historical defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 (historical because Israel occupied the rest of Palestine, including al-Masjidul Aqsa, one of Islam’s holiest places) didn’t necessarily reflect any inherent Arab inferiority vis-à-vis Israel; it rather reflected the bankruptcy of the regimes.

In 1973, during the October or Ramadan war, the Egyptian and Syrian armies could have scored a decisive victory over Israel had it not been for the massive intervention of Israel’s guardian-ally, the United States. It is likely that the Arab armies could, under favourable circumstances, defeat the Israeli army, as demonstrated by Hezbollah in its war with Israel in the summer of 2006.

At the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, the Israelis launched what one may call a PR campaign, employing Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants from the Arab world and Druze officers. Some naïve people in our community, who had been disenchanted with the heavy-handedness of the Jordanian regime, prematurely began making positive remarks about the new occupiers. The reason for that is the often-made assumption that people tend to initially make positive statements about any conqueror.

Such people would speak auspiciously and optimistically about the fledgling Israeli era. They would make casual remarks like this: “Oh, they are better than the Jordanians, they are civilized and educated!” and “the Jews are educated people, they treat people with dignity and respect” and “under Israel’s rule, everybody is equal.” These people simply didn’t know what they were talking about.

But such feelings, which were not widespread among the people, didn’t last long, as the occupation army began revealing its ugly face by adopting stringent measures against us. Well, occupation and decency seemed then, as they do now, an eternal oxymoron. There is no such a thing as a civilized or enlightened or benevolent occupation. A foreign occupation is an act of rape, it is by nature a criminal and evil act, otherwise it would be something else.

Actually, the Israeli occupation is probably the worst occupation ever in the history of mankind, not only for its brutality, but for its durability as well.

Indeed, I would argue that, in many aspects, the Israeli occupation is probably worse than the Nazi occupation of Europe. The Nazis wanted to conquer, pacify and stabilize rather than ethnically cleanse and uproot non-German Europeans as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians.

Soon enough, the Israelis began confiscating the land and building settlements, employing all kinds of dirty tactics, including bribery, shadowy deals, deception, tricks, falsification of documents and outright coercion. They also resorted to the harsh policy of collective punishment such as demolishing homes as a reprisal for guerrilla attacks or membership in the PLO, especially in the Fatah organization, founded and headed by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In our Palestinian culture, if you want to express extreme ill will towards somebody, you say “Yikhrib Beitak” – may your home be destroyed.

The Israelis sought to take full advantage of this weak spot in our social psychology. Thus, they demolished thousands upon thousands of houses. The demolitions, a clear-cut war crime under international law, have never ceased. Today, they do it mostly by bulldozers and by pinpoint bombing from the air. (See the chapter “Telephone Terror” I don’t know for sure the number of Palestinian homes Israel has destroyed since 1967. However, I can safely claim that they exceed the 15,000 figure.

In fact, the wanton demolitions of Palestinian homes and villages started immediately after the war. Indeed, immediately after hostilities were over, the Israeli army utterly destroyed more than 170 homes in the Maghariba and al-Sharaf neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

In the third and fourth weeks of 1967, Israeli army bulldozers wiped out the Palestinian villages of Beit Nuba, `Imwas (Emmaus), and Yalu, all on the orders of Yitzhak Rabin.

Approximately twelve thousand people were driven away from their homes, many of them trucked to the River Jordan, others were sent wandering in the desert without food or water.

Eventually, the Israeli government, thanks to a generous gift of Canadian tax-payers’ money, built an infamy on the ruins of ‘Imwas. They called it Canada Park. This is Canada, which claims to be a guardian of human rights and the rule of international law!!!

Actually, Israel continues to behave in such a manner. As I write these words, the Jewish state is unearthing and destroying the ancient Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem, the Mamanullah (or Mamillah) graveyard, in order to build the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ there!! Yes, Canada Park and Museum of Tolerance!! You see the depravity and brutal ugliness of these criminals? On July 26, 2007, European rabbis held a protest and prayer vigil in Brussels over a 600-year-old cemetery in Vilnius, Lithuania that they said was being used for construction. (See “Rabbis protest construction of Jewish cemetery”: www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa). Of course it is wrong to desecrate cemeteries, Jewish or non-Jewish. However, it is a sign of ultimate hypocrisy to unearth and smash the bones of dead Muslims in Jerusalem in order to build a Museum of Tolerance on the site of the former Muslim graveyard while Jewish leaders would rave and rant and protest when a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe is desecrated by authorities there.

Home demolitions would leave deep psychological scars in people’s memories. Children would return from school only to see their homes being destroyed by bulldozers driven by soldiers wearing helmets with the Star of David engraved on them. That Star of David, which we are told is originally a religious symbol, symbolized hate and evil and cruelty. Even today, I couldn't imagine a more hateful and evil symbol. It is very much comparable to the way Holocaust survivors view the Nazi Swastika.

Phobias, deep stress, neurosis and depression are among the disorders children of demolished homes would suffer as post-traumatic effects.

I personally witnessed numerous demolitions when I was eleven years old. The demolition, or blowing-up operation, would begin with declaring the village where the doomed house was located a closed military zone. The declaration would be made via loudspeakers located atop military jeeps.

In the process, all males betweens the ages of 13 and 70 would be ordered to gather at the playground of the local school, where they were forced to stand with their heads bowed down. Very often, the soldiers would shoot over the heads of people with the purpose of terrorizing them. And anybody daring to raise his head would be kicked in the back by heavily armed soldiers. Civility and simple human decency were always absent, as is the case in these days, and there was no al-Jazeera or CNN to report on Israel’s shameful acts, so the Zio-Nazis always felt at liberty doing to us as they saw fit.

Then, the commanding officer in charge of the operation would give the doomed family ten minutes to salvage whatever meagre belongings they could. (These days they demolish our homes immediately without giving a grace period to get our belongings out).

The scene of young children comforting younger children is devastating. The distraught housewives would struggle to get their utensils and whatever mattresses and foodstuff out, lest they be crushed and irretrievable. A small child would rush to get his favourite toy or an enlarged picture of his late grandfather, before it was too late. Then the commanding officer would give the go-ahead signal and the house would become rubble in a few seconds.

Afterwards, the Red Cross would bring a tent, as a temporary shelter for the victims, otherwise the tormented family would simply make an enclosure and sleep under the trees, or, if the weather was cold, find a cave to live in until a permanent solution could be found. These were indelible images of misery I won’t ever forget, an ugly testimony to Israel's Nazi-like savagery.

Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, observed that the Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls “the Message to the Palestinians.”

The Message, Halper says, is “Submit, only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent.” 8

The implication and deeper meaning of the message is very clear. It is the “you (Palestinians) do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel.” 9

Halper reminds us that Zionism has been from the very inception a “process of displacement” and house demolitions have been “at the centre of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians” since 1948. 10

Halper elucidates the policy of house demolitions. In 1948, he says, Israel systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85% of the villages existing before 1948. And since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 21,000 Palestinian homes. More homes, he adds, are being demolished in the path of Israel’s Separation Wall, with the number of homes demolished estimated at 40,000 in the past four years. 11

And contrary to Israeli propaganda that Arab houses are destroyed for security reasons, Halper points out that the 95% of these demolished homes have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews to ensure the advance of Zionism. 12

In addition to the manifestly barbaric practice of home demolitions, the Israelis really ‘excelled’ in the widespread practice of physical and psychological torture, especially in the first few years of the Occupation. In fact, a villager by the name of Salim Mahmoud Safi from Khorsa, my village, was tortured to death in 1970.

And Israel often imprisons the bodies of Palestinians killed or tortured to death for years in order to further torment and inflict pain upon their families. This is a well-known fact here.

Born into a very poor family, I started working in Beer Sheva when I was thirteen as a construction worker and then as an assistant plasterer (Maggish in Hebrew). I did this usually during the summer break and occasionally on Fridays. However, I was always careful not to allow my ‘job’ to seriously undermine my school learning.

In Beer Sheva, or Bir al Sab’a as the city is known in Arabic, I was able to learn Hebrew as well as the Moroccan dialect spoken by many Jews who had immigrated from North Africa. Like Palestinians, most Moroccan Jews worked in the construction sector and doing other menial jobs. Some were street sweepers as well, and almost all of the beggars in the streets were Jews originating from North Africa.

I was able to tour the city, which in the 1980s and 1990s received tens of thousands of immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

In the Old Town, I saw the old Palestinian homes, which the Jews seized after expelling their original occupants and proprietors at gunpoint. I also saw the town’s mosque, which dates back to around 1911, when Palestine was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Israel converted the mosque into a ‘museum’ and later into a ‘House for the Artists.’ And when some local Israeli Muslim leaders petitioned the Israeli government to rehabilitate the holy place and allow the town’s Muslim community to pray there, the Israeli authorities said an emphatic “NO.” This is how the ‘only true democracy in the Middle East’ behaves toward its own non-Jewish citizens.

On some occasions, the people for whom I worked would not give me my wages. I worked with such famous construction firms as Rusco, Solel Bonei, Hevrat Ovdeim. I still retain my old Israeli work card.

As Palestinian labourers, we were continually humiliated at Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks at the A’rad Intersection on the way to Beer Sheva. I remember a Jewish police officer who spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent beating one of my relatives savagely without a convincing reason. I made many Jewish friends then, but the psychological barrier remained largely intact. I did intermix with some Tunisian and Moroccan Jews in A’rad, Beer Sheva and Dimona. However, their sense of superiority (and victory) over us always impeded the evolution of normal human relations between them and myself. They viewed us then, as they do now, as the Biblical equivalents of wood hewers and water carriers. We were only good for making coffee and doing the hard, menial works for the superior race, the chosen people. “Muhammed Ta’asi coffee” (“Muhammed! Prepare the coffee for the Jews”) they would scream scornfully at us in a condescending tone.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel as ‘day-labourers’, mostly in the construction and agricultural fields. They would wake up one or two hours before dawn in order to be able to reach the worksite before eight o’clock.

Work in Israel lured most able-bodied Palestinians who abandoned agriculture, which was not financially very rewarding. Indeed, at one point, a day-labourer became economically better-off than erstwhile middle-class professionals such as teachers, clerks and other civil servants.

The Israelis knew what they were doing. By the mid 1980s, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became the second biggest market for Israeli products after Europe. So, it was really a kind of indirect slavery. We worked in Israel, building multi-story buildings for would-be immigrants, and then we spent the wages we earned buying Israeli products, even Israeli produce, as Palestinian agriculture fell into neglect as greater numbers of Palestinians preferred to earn more money working in Israel than working their land which comparatively yielded little money.

I said it was a kind of indirect slavery because Palestinian workers in Israel, whose number in the mid-1980s reached more than 130,000, were deprived of social benefits and health insurance, and they had no political rights whatsoever.

Before I leave this subject, I would like to say a few words about a specific phenomenon I frequently observed during my stint as a construction worker in Israel.

I remember that some Israeli construction companies would often dispatch a lesser number of buses to take Palestinian labourers, including myself, back home at the end of the workday. For example, two buses would be sent to take 250 workers, when the normal capacity of a single bus didn’t exceed 50-60 passengers.

This meant that many of the exhausted workers would be left standing in the corridor of the bus during the 2-hour trip back home in the West Bank. Eventually, the mostly uneducated labourers would begin thronging at the bus’s front door in order to get to an empty seat to spare themselves the bane of having to remain standing all the way from Bir al Sab’a to Dura.

I believe the Israelis did that deliberately at least on some occasions. Indeed, whenever there were scenes of labourers struggling and pushing to get on board the bus first, Israeli and Western photographers would suddenly appear from out of nowhere to catch the chaotic scenes for posterity.

Then, the disgraceful pictures would find their way to the front pages of American and European magazines and newspapers, further enforcing the already negative stereotypes maintained about the Arabs. This is the same criminal Israeli mentality that continues to vilify and demonize Palestinians these days by fabricating fake shows of young Palestinian boys fitted with explosive belts, provided by the Shin Bet, who are then made to appear before TV cameras at a certain junction in the West Bank to say that they were going to carry out suicide bombings because they hated Jews so much and wanted to have sex with 72 virgins in paradise!! And then an Israeli spokesman would appear on a Western TV channel rather confidently, saying that “There can be no peace with the Arabs until they love their children more than they hate Jews.”

In 1974, then an eleventh grader, I remember I took part in an anti-occupation demonstration in Dura. The occupation soldiers cornered me in one of the narrow streets of the small town, beating me savagely on the head using the butts of their rifles. They nearly killed me. I hated them, as I never posed a threat to their lives. They displayed no humanity or mercy and I was only shouting “Falastin Hurra” “Free Palestine.”

With my head bleeding heavily, I went to the local UNRWA clinic where I got my wounds stitched up. Upon returning home, far from receiving a prodigal son’s reception, my late father (May God have mercy on his soul) roughed me up further for interfering with the occupation army. He would rebuke me saying, “You think you will beat Israel when 22 Arab states couldn’t do it!!” Well, in a certain sense, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He was a man who saw his three brothers killed before his very eyes and he apparently didn’t want to see his son get killed at the hands of his brothers’ killers. “My son, we had already paid our dues,” he would say, in a half-choked voice. (end)

Endnotes

1 Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Oxford University Press, 2006.
2 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, p. 225. Penguin Books, 2000.

3 ibid

4. Haaretz Newspaper, 1972
5 Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, South End Press, USA, 1983.
6Ibid.
7Ibid.

8. Zionism as a Racist Ideology: Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide, Kathleen and Bill Christison, 8/9 November, 2003, http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-christison201103.htm.

9. ibid

10. ibid

11. Ibid

12. ibid
13Shulamit Aloni, We have Become a Barbarian People, Yediot Ahronot, 1 January, 2003.

14. ibid

15. ibid
16Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? Dodd, Mead, 1978.
17Paul Findley, They Dare To Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989.
18Professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy a Working Paper. http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011
19 Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Simon & Schuster, 2006.
20 Interview with Former President Jimmy Carter, The Forward, 15 Nov. 2006.
21 Ibid.

22 ibid
23 LA Times, 12/05/2000.

24 DePaul University Finkelstein quits, Jerusalem Post, 7 September, 2007
25Haaretz, 4 March, 2007.
26 Ibid.

27ibid.

Press-conference Ezzedine Al- Qassam Brigades Gaza June 4 2009
Propa/PalestineFreeVoice Image

"The hijacked unconstitutional Fatah - ruled PA is today supplied with loads of modern weaponry, and trained by USA to kill it's own people...what dark secrets are rabidly rooted in the minds of PA.. are they concocting a new coup d'état ?"

Hiyam Noir, GAZA - Abu Ubayda, spokesperson of Hamas armed wing, Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigades, affirmed on Wednesday that any attempt by the Palestinian Authority (PA) Fatah security forces in the West Bank to arrest so called “wanted activists” would be met with retaliations.Ezzedine Al-Qassam released a statement warning the PA against attempts to harm Ezzedine Al-Qassam fighters, the statement said that –“what happened in Qalqiliya on Sunday would be retaliated in any place..”

Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas movements spokesperson said in a press conference on Wednesday that - “After Fatah attacks in Qaliqilya, on Hamas affiliated members,we [Hamas], will probably suspend the dialogue with Fatah. It has became more and more difficult to go back to a dialogue, in particular because of Fatah’s aggression towards Hamas. At present there is nothing new and positive in our dialogue sessions, and the important issue that is, the release of political prisoners, has not yet been dealt with,"[ Several hundred Hamas affiliated members, whom has committed no crimes are still being confined in filthy dungeons,held and tortured by PA-Fatah in the West Bank.]

On Sunday, six Palestinians died when a gang of PA - Fatah affiliated so-called "security forces" attempted to abduct Hamas residents, in the town of Qalqiliya. The armed battle that erupted between the two political groups Hamas and Fatah in the West Bank, is seen by many Palestinians as the most violent in the West Bank since June 2007. This is when Hamas movement took full control of the coastal Palestinian enclave, intercepting the chaos that had erupted following the Hamas intelligence revelation of Fatah coup planes.

Having no problem to be recognized by the Palestinian voters,as being reliable and for fighting the Fatah corruption and decadence.Hamas wielded it's authority to rule in Gaza, they installed law and order - and democracy on the ground and in official institutions, the violence was quelled and the cleaning of the unruly,disorderly and chaotic past would be dealt with.

The armed attacks on Hamas affiliated in the West Bank continued on Thursday, when gangs of tugs from the Palestinian Authority " security' killed two people. Fawzi Barhoum repeated his statement from Wednesday,during a press briefing, he said that Hamas is likely to pull out of upcoming talks with Fatah, it has became difficult to go back to the dialogue, because of the killings and abductions of Hamas members in Qalqiliya. - The Cairo dialogue has not become the success we worked for so hard".

Next negotiation meetings between Palestinian political factions are scheduled to begin in Cairo,during the first week of July.Now the Cairo-meetings are in shambles – one must ask, who is to take blame for the failure? This question might be answered, if one take the time to meticulously study the history of the past..

Did the old strongmen of Fatah, it's collaborators and henchmen, ever had an honest desire to achieve Palestinian unity,democratic order and peace, what is on the minds of PA today, two years after that the Gaza plot was revealed by Hamas, what is their agenda for Palestinian future.The hijacked unconstitutional Fatah - ruled PA is today supplied with loads of modern weaponry, and trained by USA to kill it's own people...what dark secrets are rabidly rooted in the minds of PA.. are they concocting a new coup d'état ? End