Bloody Brothers

The last few weeks has seen a seemingly exponential upsurge in violence not only across the Middle East but also in Ukraine and west Africa. Most have been going on outside the gaze of western media for some time and a wide range of very different interests and outlooks are involved - from the "Caliphate" of ISIS in the north of the Fertile Crescent, through the Syrian and Ukrainian civil wars to the pummelling of Gaza by far superior Israeli forces and the kidnapping of girls and others by Islamists in Nigeria as part of a wider cross-border conflict.

But one thing unites those taking part, whether the neo-fascists aligned to Kiev, or the religious fundamentalists of Boko Haram - a belief that spilling the blood of others is a legitimate way to impose their version of the world on others. It is an outlook that cuts across the religions involved - the extremist Jews who this week have called for the mothers of dead Palestinians to be killed as well and their houses destroyed; or the Koran testing of terrified Nigerian villagers by insurgents who separated those they deemed to be unbelievers before shooting them; or the "White Christians" supposedly championing European civilisation against Russian "Asiatics" as they ethnically cleanse eastern Ukraine.

Whether religion drives this behaviour or is incorporated to sanction it, isn't the issue. What is, is the willingness to deny the humanity of opponents - the Israeli Prime Minister breathtakingly complained about "telegenically dead" Palestinian corpses, while Boko Haram decreed the girls they seized from a school to be the "property" of their male captors.

This first video powerfully evokes the fundamental problem that drives the conflict - the belief in divine sanction being on your side consequently sanctions just about any form of behaviour, no matter how inhumane or extreme. I might disagree towards the end about the apparent equivalency portrayed between Israel and Gaza (Hamas do not have missiles like that, although they may well wish they did), but the video is about motive as much as method.

The second video isn't a cartoon. From Syria, it is real life for millions of people, including huge numbers of children - over half of Gazans are under 25- right now. It isn't as graphic as some of the recent footage from Gaza, but it is deeply upsetting and perhaps more powerfully than some of the more explicit images we have seen, it sums up the truly ceaseless tension and terror and the inhumane, dreadful and totally unjustifiable cost exacted on the innocent by the bloody brothers who would make this world their own.

Little Children, Big Guns and Dark Hearts

Miriam Monstango, 8 years old - her face a little apprehensive but full of life as she looks to the camera. How apprehensive it must have looked on Monday morning as she ran for the safety of her schoolroom at a Jewish school in Toulouse in France, only to have her hair caught by the gunman who was firing at her classmates. When he tried to shoot Miriam, his gun jammed. But he gripped onto her while he switched to another weapon and shot her in the head. On the same day, he killed a rabbi and his two little children - the youngest just three years old.

This was apparently done, in the gunman's mind, in revenge for the hundreds of Palestinian children killed by the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza and the West Bank. As blogged before here, the IDF routinely blames Hamas and others for the so-called "collateral damage" that occurs when Israeli jets strafe Gaza indiscriminately, or when IDF tanks fire illegal white phosphorus shells into Palestinian hospitals, allegedly having "no choice" because of the presence of enemy fighters in the vicinity. For collateral damage, of course, the decoded words should be civilians and children - especially the more than 1,400 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military during the last decade, most of them when they were committing such dreadful acts as playing football, going to school or even shopping. No more excusably, though perhaps demonstrating the massive imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during the same period, 125 Israeli children were killed in Palestinian attacks. (The western media tends to ignore this fact, just as, while it has already designated the Toulouse gunman, Mohammed Merah, as a Muslim extremist, it is hard at work mitigating the murderous rampage by US soldier Robert Bales, who killed at least two babies in his slaughter of 17 Afghan civilians last week, as the product of prolonged stress.)

We will never know for certain Merah's state of mind or motives now that the French police have shot him dead. But his apparent claims of revenge and self-justification of his terrible deeds echo the words of all too many political leaders who seek to sanctify their worldview with religious beliefs that place the fate of individuals, no matter how innocent, below the proclaimed, divinely-ordained interests of the respective Faith community.

Yet what minds think like this, on either or all sides? Under what religious law, what political ideology or vaguely humane rationale do children become collateral damage? By what mindset does it become acceptable to kill a child - any child, anyone's child - because of the loss, however appallingly, of a child of your own, or your faith community?

A Gazan childhood: The final, terrifying moments of the life of
Mohammed al Doura, a 12 year old Palestinian boy killed in 2000.
More here.

Well, there is a mindset which contradictorily both condemns such a viewpoint and validates it. It is a mindset found within the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Between them, these three faiths are followed, at least notionally, by the majority of the people on this planet. They are linked inextricably, although many of their followers vehemently deny this fact, or are unaware perhaps - but their God/Allah is the same Divinity, their prophets - Abraham/Ibrahim, Moses/Musa, Jesus/Isa are often the same people; and the Muslims' final prophet, Muhammed, enjoined his followers to give special protection and respect to Christians and Jews as fellow "People of the Book".

Each faith universally decries killing of humans and prescribes forgiveness and love of neighbours and all humanity. But some followers of each of them doggedly hold to the concept of "reciprocal justice" or like for like punishment - an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament set out their bloody tariff of vengeance. In Islam, although the Koran mentions rather than promulgates the principle, the other holy writings, the hadith (laws developed over centuries by Islamic scholars) sanction revenge and some versions of sharia law interpret and implement the rule literally. In all these faiths, although all their prophets advocated generosity of spirit and forgiveness, the concept continues to be held by many believers to be both just and holy.

And so we end up with the dreadful, twisted self-justification for shooting up a school playground in France or shelling schoolrooms in Gaza; or the rarely mentioned rape camps of Bosnia set up by Serb Christians with their avowed aim to breed Muslims out of existence - many of the Bosniac Muslim victims were children, some as young as 12.

In the old days of polytheism, by default, pagans held that there are many ways to the same Truth, while philosophers such as Aristotle identified good and evil acts as the deliberate choices of humans, not the mystical interventions or injunctions of God or Satan. But the potential logic of revealed monotheist faith and its potentially exclusive nature means that a gospel of love can be twisted into one of hatred by those so-minded to do so. This is all the more likely if The Word divides the world so sharply into good and evil, into fellow-believers and the unfaithful or Fallen.

Mahatma Gandhi lamented that  - "An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind." Those who seek revenge are blind people - blind to the hypocrisy of revenge; blind to the destruction of the justice they seek by acts of injustice; blind to the beauty of the Creation they claim to be the gift of their God.

An eye for an eye - it is not a holy concept at all; it is simply the red mist of the psychopath's pathetic self-regard. Those of any faith or nationality who adopt its tenets do so at the cost of extinguishing the very humanity they claim perversely to supremely epitomise, and almost certainly betray the intent of the founders of their faith and the beliefs of most of their co-religionists. Whether Anders Breivik, or Ariel Sharon or Mohammed Merah, their empty souls are the antithesis of the lives they sacrifice for their own vanity - the lives of the children of Gaza and Toulouse, or the youths on Utoya; lives now gone, but remembered and valued far beyond the banal egos of the small men with big guns and dark hearts.

In the Name of God: since 2000, 125 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinian attacks; in the same period, the Israeli armed services have killed 1,471 Palestinian children.

REMEMBER THESE CHILDREN WEBSITE: CLICK HERE

Newt Gingrich and The Invention of America

Nothing invented - the real tears of a real Palestinian, under  Israeli fire.

The appalling Newt Gingrich, a hopeful for the Republican nomination for US President in next year's election, has described the Palestinians as an "invented" people with no right to a state of their own. Like many a US politician before him, Gingrich is parroting a line used frequently by Zionists to excuse the dreadful treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli state.

Gingrich tries to redesignate the millions of people in Gaza and West Bank with the generic term Arab. This would be a bit like saying there is no such thing as English people or Greek people - but rather deciding they are all Europeans! To Gingrich's ignorantly blinkered eyes of course, Arabs are all just a homogenous bunch of bearded brown guys who spend their days chomping spicy food, shouting Allah-u-akbar, and plotting against America. In truth, Arabs are tens of millions of people across the Middle east. living in diverse countries with diverse cultures and diverse religions (there are millions of Christian Arabs, as well as other faiths like the Druze). The Palestinians are as distinctive as Jordanians are from Algerians, or Libyans from Iraqis.

Palestine itself is no more or less invented than any other state - all states are on some level invented when they are created: the creation of Britain was a union, to some degree forced, between at least four distinctive ethnic groups. Germany was forged by Prussian conquest of a myriad of German city states back in 1871, while a little later Garibaldi and Vittorio Emmanuel united the state of Italy from a number of different elements. Some states are ethnically based, others emerge as an amalgam - as Britain did.

By far the most invented nationality of all, complete with the most artificially created state of all, is of course the American identity claimed by the United States. Newt did not reflect on this before his bigoted tirade - but America was created through a combination of colonisation, bribery and bloody conquest in terms of its territories and though the gradual and far from easy or completed amalgamation of scores of different ethnicities, destroying the cultural distinctiveness of its component parts far more completely than any other empire in history. And all in the last two and a bit centuries - the Palestinians, by contrast, can better that history by over a thousand years.

So, if Palestine has no right to exist, why does America have any right to exist either?

The people who calls themselves Palestinians are the same people who have lived in the area of Palestine for over fourteen centuries. For much of that time, they did not have their own state because they were part of larger empires, latterly the Ottoman Turkish Empire which collapsed at the end of the First World War. Palestine was then transferred to be a mandate of the British Empire and it was at this stage that the Balfour Declaration decided that Palestine could provide a homeland for Jewish people from other parts of the world. Many Jews had of course lived in the area for centuries alongside their Muslim and Christian neighbours, mostly in peace. But driven by the dreadful victimisation of the Nazi Holocaust, anti-semitism among Europeans, and in many cases their own religious fervour, since 1945, millions of other Jews from elsewhere in the world have emigrated to Israel, driving out Palestinian people who had lived there for centuries. And this was done on the spurious basis that their Jewish ancestors had lived there even earlier.

Quite aside from the debate about how far back in history you can go to raise grievances, there is of course a lie peddled by the West, that the blood thirsty Muslim Arabs seized Israel and drove out the Jews and that the Christian Crusaders then made common cause with the Jews to retake the Holy Lands - and that their failure to do so was only put right by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Many American evangelicals even send donations to Israel today in this belief.

But the truth could not be further away - the Jewish disapora from the Roman province of Palestina began in the second century, driven by both the persecution and the opportunities provided by the then pagan Roman Empire. When the Muslim Arabs arrived in the area five centuries later, they were welcomed by Jews and dissident Christians as liberators from the increasingly monotheistic totalitarianism of the Christian Byzantine Empire. A whole five hundred years later, when the Crusaders turned up and briefly captured Jerusalem, the Warriors of the Cross of Jesus indiscriminately slaughtered the Jews, "heretic" Christians and Muslims who had jointly defended the city. It was one of the greatest massacres in recorded history. (Notably, when the Muslims retook the city a century later, exiled Jews flocked back to live there in peace and prosperity.)

Understanding history is vital to understand why we are where we are, but it is today that matters. The bottom line is that millions live in the huge refugee camps that are the totality of Palestinian territory. They live in some of the most difficult conditions in the world - confined in small areas; shelled and bombed by a superior Israeli army and air force; deprived of many goods; deprived of life chances; and with the highest rate of depressive illness measured anywhere in the world. These people are not invented. They are not made up or artificial. They are real, flesh and blood, like you and me. And they are where they are because they lived in Palestine and the Israeli state pushed them out forcibly; and unlike Gingrich's weasel words, they had and have nowhere to go.

The problem is real and the solution has to be found - a real one, not the dangerous fantasy with which Newt Gingrich, in his bizarre little brain, seeks to dismiss the existence of millions and so excuse the violence and degradation to which they are constantly subjected. If Americans vote for this man, with his very much invented artificial reality, they will do so at great peril to themselves and to the peace of the world.

The area of the current USA in 1830 - only the red part was American then; the rest was invented later.

Palestine Elections: Voting the Right Way for Europe

British Foreign Secretary William Hague, fresh from his confused Libyan spy adventure, demonstrated his ignorance of another Middle Eastern issue yesterday. After Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, one of two claimants to be President of the Palestinian National Authority, called for immediate elections to the National Council, his party's main rivals, Hamas, denounced the idea, saying there had to be a reconciliation process before any elections are held.

Hague was quick to denounce Hamas' opposition to voting:
‘Hamas should not be allowed to “stifle the democratic expression of Palestinians”, he thundered, or more likley croaked after his troubles of the last few days.

On the face of it, who but rabid anti-democrats would oppose elections? In liberal democratic terms, is anything more important than getting to a ballot box?

Yet what Mr Hague did not acknowledge, either from ignorance or deviousness, was that Palestinians have gone to the polls before, voted and elected Hamas as their government. Here are the results of the Palestinian General election of 2006:

• Hamas          - 440,409 votes;  74 seats
• Fatah/PLO   - 410,554 votes;  45 seats
• Others          -   97,815 votes;  11 seats

At the same time, in a direct election, Fatah's Abbas was elected as President and both he and the National Council were to have a five year term with elections due again in January this year.

Yet, inspite of this, with the then Conservative Opposition's full support, the British Government and its American and European counterparts refused to acknowledge Hamas' election, repeatedly rebuffing their attempts to enter the international stage and conniving with Israel in its dreadful blockade of Gaza which continues even today. Because, just as we have seen in Egypt recently, for all the West's claims to want to export the Holy Grail of electoral democracy to the world, it turns out that elections are quite disposable if the results turn out to be wrong. For democracy to work, it seems, people have to vote the right way.

Deep in brutalised Gaza, Palestinians worry endlessly about voting reform

.

And so, isolated and ignored in spite of their vital importance to any peace process, Hamas currently control the Palestinian territory in the Gaza strip after a break between them and Fatah, who control the myriad of PNA statelets scattered around the Israeli controlled West Bank. After the violence and the disputed arrangments in the territories since, a reconciliation process is absolutely vital.

Abbas is effectively grandstanding for the benefit of his Washington sponsors in calling for elections - no outcome would provide a satisfactory or peaceful settlement if it was not preceded by talks and agreement. That agreement, of course, needs first and foremost to be between Palestinians, but also vital is agreement from America and Europe - including Mr Hague (assuming he remains Foreign Secretary in spite of everything) - that they will respect the outcome of any elections as the genuine wishes of the Palestinians and undertake to engage with whoever wins.

After all, surely the sole purpose of Western foreign policy is to promote democracy around the world? That's what Iraq was about, wasn't it? And why all these people have to die in Afghanistan? And why we sold all these weapons to nice Mr Mubarak? Isn't it?

"If You Don't Have Tears In Your Eyes, You Will Cry In Your Heart."

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 00:11

These poignant words will stay with me until the day I die, not least because the girl who spoke them is just ten years old - a Palestinian in Gaza interviewed on tonight's "Panorama" programme on BBC1. She had just shown a picture - a drawing in typical child's form, stick figures drawn with crayons - "This is my Mum when the missile cut her in half." "This is my brother holding his baby son...his brains were dripping out." She said she still hoped to have a life, or at least half a life, but she was finding it hard to believe both her parents were dead.

This appeared to be a belated attempt by the BBC to right their bias in their reporting of the war against Gaza, as well as their bizarre refusal to broadcast a humanitarian appeal a couple of weeks ago in case they were seen to be anti-Israeli. Here, their reporter, Jeremy Bowen, did go out of his way to show that many many homes of Palestinians had been bombed and even susbequently flattened by Israeli bulldozers with the dead unburied still inside, entombed in their homes. And he did point out as he stood among the rubble that each pile represented someone's home or business and was unlikely to do anything but increase hatred and antagonism towards Israel.

He interviewed International Red Cross representatives who said that, in contravention of international law, Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers had denied them access to the injured for 2 days and there was no evidence that they had treated anyone themsleves as they are expected to do. One boy of 15 was interviewed, his eyes bleak with despair, as he explained how he had sat with the corpse of his mother, his own legs shattered and unable to walk, while his brother slowly bled to death a few feet away.

This, we were then told by the Israeli Government spokesman, was done to stop terrorism and if people suffered it was the fault of Hamas, not the IDF weapons that rained down on Gaza. They had warned civilians to get out of areas due to be attacked he insisted - and of course claimed they only attacked buldings where Hamas fighters or weapons were.

But Gaza is a tiny, cramped place - 1.6 million people in an area smaller than the Isle of Wight - so where were these people supposed to flee to? With both Israel and Egypt keeping the tiny territory sealed, anyone inside was effectively trapped and at the mercy of what was clearly pretty indiscriminate firing by the IDF.

Bowen did not point this out, however. Just as he also failed to point out that Hamas fighters inevitably were in the streets of Gaza - because where else could they be? No modern war is fought on some neat, open battlefield like Waterloo or El Alamein. Gaza was more like Stalingrad - so if we eulogise, rightly, the Soviets who defended the ruins of that city house by house, why was it so wrong or surprising that Hamas fighters, the only army that the Gazans have, defended their city when it was attacked by fighting in that city?

Film was shown of white phosphoros shells falling on Al-Quds hospital, again in contravention of international law - by which hospitals are never to be attacked. Bowen did mention that the use of white phosphoros is illegal "in some circumstances" - he did not specify that its use in civilian areas (like hospitals) is one such; nor, more importantly, that when the first reports of its use emerged during the attack, Israel flatly denied it.

The BBC remains guilty alongside much of the rest of the international media of grossly misreporting this war. It continued even tonight to equate the puny attacks of the Hamas rockets which killed 4 Israelis to the assault of the IDF which killed 1400 Palestinians. They left unchallenged the Israeli claim that nearly all the 1400 were "Hamas terrorists", when at least 600 were children and many more were women and male civilians.

Israel will tomorrow almost certainly elect its most extreme rightwing Government in history. In pole position is likely to be a party committed to expelling the remaining Israeli Arab citizens, completing the ethnic cleansing which began in 1948, when hundreds of thousands were driven out of Israel into Gaza, which now exists as a huge, permanent refugee camp.

President Obama has early on indicated that he believes Israel has a right to expand its borders - as indeed Israel's constitution allows for, a unique position in world constitutions - and has ruled out talking to Hamas. Like the BBC, he seems to ignore the unassailable fact that Hamas is the democratically elected Palestinian government which came to power in multi-party elections - instead, like Bush before him, he is already signalling he will deal instead with the electorally defeated and discredited PLO-Fatah.

How would it be if the world had ignored Obama's election and was treating John McCain as the real President of the USA? How does he expect Hamas to respond? And how does he, and Israel, expect the people of Gaza to respond? Looking into the empty, grief-struck eyes of the traumatised children of Gaza, have they not simply created a new generation of grievance, a next generation of suicide bombers and budding rocketeers?

It is common in the West to see Israel as "like us" and the Arabs as "the Other". Yet the Palestinians we saw tonight were striking in that their world, their lives and homes, their aspirations were so like ours - the doctor who mourned his four teenage daughters, one of whom had hoped to follow him as a doctor and another studying to be a journalist; on the wall of their destroyed bedroom, next to the splattered brains of another dead daughter, a "Barbie" sticker incongruously decorated the shattered plaster. A legitimate target, the IDF spokesman said, because Hamas may have been nearby.

History is written by the victors and, in spite of a half-hearted effort, Bowen and the BBC comprehensively failed tonight to explore the truth - that this war, like the war in Lebanon in 2007, was a war embarked on by an Israeli Government with poor poll ratings and by a country terrified of any of its neighbours being successful - because if they are, they may cease to be "the Other".

Just as Lebanon has an albeit fragile unity across three or more distinct faith groups, the Palestinians contain a significant Christian minority (the so-called "Living Stones") which enjoys greater protection among its Muslim compatriots than the few Christians inside Israel have in an increasingly monolithic society. These facts are never explored, never revealed - why, for example, was Yasser Arafat trying to reach Bethlehem for the last Christmas of his life, when the IDF decided to besiege him in Gaza for the final terrible, tragic weeks of his time on earth? Because, although a Muslim himself, he was trying to join with his Christian compatriots in their religious celebrations.

The Middle East is a complex, mulitfaceted range of different societies, faiths and politics. It is this that makes it both far more tolerant than people in the West realise and which frustrates hope while simultaneously offering it - Jew, Christian and Muslim have lived longer in peace there than they have in war; it is not impossible they may do so again. But first we have to step back from the simplistic politics of confrontation where manipulative politicians deliberately drive polarisation to the extremes.

This will not suit the western media as it does not sit with a western culture which demands instant, easy explanations with things neatly fitting into boxes and defintions. But it will be the only way to find a solution, the only way to reach any ultimate truth.

And as a start, President Obama and the European Governments which between them wield so much influence over Israel need to recognise that, however unpalatable it may be, Hamas is part of that solution.

Maybe he's been watching too much of the BBC.

In war, truth is the first casualty. Aeschylus Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC - 456 BC)

And the children are the second, followed by the future...