Moviewatch and The Coming War On Iran

Israeli Options: possible strike routes to Iran by the Israeli Defence Force (graphic from Heartland Geopolitics)

The British Sunday Times today carried a low level report that in the recent Cabinet reshuffle, the Lib Dem Defence Minister, Nick Harvey, was dismissed to make it easier for his party leader, Nick "Cordite" Clegg, to give his blessing to an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear development facilities. Whatever the truth of Harvey's dismissal, the evidence is clear - the Israelis are continually heightening the chatter around their claims of having a right to attack Iran; only today, Israeli PM Netanyahu has stated that Iran is building a nuclear bomb and must be resisted, while President Obama has repeatedly indicated use of force to be an option. Meanwhile the American and British military are positioning themselves to counter any Iranian retaliation and in particular any use of the Iranian navy to blockade the narrow Straits of Homuz at the far end of the Persian Gulf, which would close off western access to key sources of Saudi and Kuwaiti oil. An attack is not far away.

In spite of Iran's repeated assurances that it is not developing nuclear weaponry (a claim largely supported by all the neutral assessments and evidence available), Israel is keen to strike - as are various Sunni dictatorships, such as Saudi and Bahrain, whose Governments (Wikileaks has shown us) have long petitioned for a western-backed assault on the Shia lands of Persian Iran. The period up to the US elections have long been seen as a prime time for an assault, with the narrative being that any US Presidential candidates, rather than opposing or criticising an attack, will instead vie with each other to show support for plucky little Tel Aviv. 

The current round of anti-western riots sweeping various Muslim countries  may well be used as a suspiciously useful pretext for the long-awaited attack. Unreported in the mainstream media is the growing view by many well-researched activists on the Net that the frankly bizarre video at the centre of the riots was not the production of the Egyptian-born con man, Nakoula Bassey, presented to the media. Rather it is the work of one Jimmy Israel, a film-maker  who goes under the pseudonym "Sam Bacile" and who originally cited Israeli backers as the funders of the film. And, in turn, the man who translated the film into Arabic, giving it the boost to reach a mainly Muslim audience, was Morris Sadek, who is closely aligned to the pro-Israeli neocons in the US Republican Party. Both Sadek has obvious interests in whipping up any situation that strengthens the hand of the pro-war argument on Iran; while Nakoula, nominally (and usefully) a Coptic Christian, is clearly motivated by money alone - as witness the previous work he has carried out for people with strong links to Islamic activists.

Predictably, the Western media dutifully parrots the line that Iran should not have nuclear weapons and that, because of President Ahmadinejad's reported hostility to Israel, any attack by the IDF's airplanes or missiles will be justified. If there was any truth to his alleged comments - that Ahmadinejad said, "Israel must be wiped off the map", it might be possible to have some sympathy for Israel; but the plain truth is that he has never uttered these words. What he did say was ”Imam ghoft een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.” This literally translates from Farsi to English as “The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” Neither the words "Israel", nor "map", nor "wiped from" feature - nor indeed was he making his own statement, but quoting from a much older speech by Ayatollah Khomeini. There is, consequently, a huge difference between opposing a specific regime, or government, and seeking to obliterate a country or race of people - and the comment in any case is specific to the illegal occupation of Jerusalem, not the existence of Israel or the Jewish people.

Yet while the Israeli Government and the western media repeatedly quote a quote that was never made, they completely ignore the pretty unambiguous statement by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2006 that: "We have no problem with the world. We are not a threat whatsoever to the world, and the world knows it. We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any state.”

In any case, even setting aside Iran's insistence that it is developing nuclear energy for the time when its oil reserves diminish, if like the USA and the UK, you claim nuclear deterrence works, why on Earth would Iran not develop nuclear weapons? It is, after all, surrounded by nuclear weapon states - Pakistan and India, as well as US forces in Afghanistan, to its east; Russia to the north; to the south, American forces ranged across the Gulf states in support of Saudi and its allies; and, to the west, Israel, its 200 warheads making it one of the biggest nuclear weapons states on the planet.

Iran is surrounded by hostile nuclear weapons' states or forces.

It seems it is ok for these states, all of whom have launched aggressor wars in recent decades, to have nuclear weapons. Iran, by contrast, in spite of not actually having developed a nuclear weapon yet and having not invaded another country since 1826, is fair game for an attack. Ironic beyond all measure, Israeli generals have even been contemplating exploding a high altitude nuclear pulse weapon above Iran to "blast it back to the Stone Age". All with at least the tacit approval of the USA and its British allies (the Israeli military is 20% funded by the US taxpayer) - and even the British Lib Dem leader, whose party once prided itself on its opposition to the Iraq war, appears to be clearing the way to at least not be too opposed to the latest military adventure.

How in any deluded scenario an assault on Iran is going to make the world more peaceful, or help to reconcile the Muslim and Western worlds, only the insane neurons in the helmet-heads of the Israeli and US military can possibly explain. These, of course, are the same men (and nearly all of them are men) who gave us the lie of the Weapons of Mass Destruction justification for invading Iraq. Given the monstrous dissimulation perpetrated to launch that war, who is to say they and their associates would not happily create a new crisis such as the one we are currently witnessing to pave the way for a "necessary" bomb-run or missile strike on Iran?

These men, we are told, are the guardians and saviours of our civilisation and way of life. And in hours, days or at most a few weeks, they will unleash the means of that salvation on the people of Iran.

Only we can stop them: protest now; contact your representatives and MPs, get active. Thousands of Israeli citizens are taking action by petitioning Israeli pilots to refuse to take part in bombing Iran. Please join them by signing the anti-war petition from the American Peace Movement here!

Just like Iraq and Libya, the threatened military adventure is about assaulting dissenting states - it is not about democracy or peace, as witnessed by America's continued support for vicious regimes in Saudi and Bahrain. The American neocons who did so much damage and took so many lives in Iraq are the real movers behind this latest aggression. Don't let them away with it again!

God of Love?

It was almost certainly a deliberate and very telling editorial decision, but one page of the print Guardian should have caught the attention of any reader today.

Emblazoned across the top of the page was the headline:

Pakistani girl accused of Qur'an burning could face death penalty

In an outskirt of Islamabad, an eleven year old Christian girl has been accused of blasphemy, a capital crime in Pakistan, for allegedly burning some pages of the Qu'ran - her family dispute this, claiming she was tricked by a Muslim neighbour into throwing ash into a pot with pages from the Muslim holy book already in it. Whatever happened, this child has now been arrested and nine hundred Christians expelled from the area.

Although he is a priest for a faith whose founder called on its followers to extend special protections to Christians and Jews as "Peoples of the Book", the local mullah is quoted as approving of the expulsions, not only because of the alleged book burning, but because of the infernal singing of hymns in the local churches (now closed).

"They have done this to provoke the Muslims, like they have with their noisy banging and singing from their churches," said a local mullah, who would not give his name. "We are not upset the Christians have left and we will be pleased if they don't come back."

On the same page, the next article similarly told the tragic tale of religious intolerance and the hypocritical taking of lives in the name of faiths that all outlaw killing.

Jewish settler attacks on Palestinians listed as 'terrorist incidents' by US

The US Government has finally declared as terroristic a longstanding pattern of hate crimes by Jewish settlers in Palestinian lands against Arabs - and even the Israeli Government has condemned in similar terms a series of attacks by settlers over the last few weeks which have included the random beating of a young Arab by a mob and the firebombing of a taxi carrying Arab children. The "Hilltop Youth", a group of Zionist extremists, has been linked to attacks that have killed three Palestinians and injured 183 over recent months. 10,000 olive trees, vital for Arab farmers' livelihoods, have been destroyed and in 90% of cases, the Israeli police have closed the case without charge.

During the same time, Palestinians have murdered a Jewish settler family in their home and bombed a bus terminal in Jerusalem, killing one and injuring fifty. Some may argue that the continuing and desperate siege of Gaza, where hundreds of thousands live in ghetto conditions surrounded by the Israeli army, somehow justifies such assaults, yet how can it? Such attacks are not war, but simple murders with civilians as their targets - as such, they detract from the real injustices and murder committed against Gazans by the Israeli state and invite the enemies of Palestine to create some moral equivalence between oppressor and oppressed.

And the three faiths involved - the Judaism of Israel and the Islam and minority Christianity of the Palestinians all talk of the sanctity of life. Yet here we see blood shed in the name of these same faiths.

The final article is less directly focussed on interfaith disputes, but shows how bigotry, in this case Christian-led against Muslims, can lead to laws with supposedly unintended consequences for all.

Pussy Riot protesters arrested in Marseille

Arrested because...?

Because in a fit of Islamophobia, France has banned the niqab, the face covering worn by some Muslim women as a mark of their faith. It is a policy advocated by many rightwingers in Europe - curiously adopting the same policy adopted by President Assad in Syria, who enacted a similar ban on such garments in universities, while until recently Turkey imposed a similar ban on Islamic dress in public buildings. Why so many are so obsessed with what others wear has always been a puzzle to me - it also ignores the possibility that, while some people may ban face-coverings now, this is setting a precedent for other people to ban other forms of dress they don't like. For example, what if the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths club together to ban women wearing trousers? Or to insist that men must stop shaving (a sinful activity in all three faiths writings)?

In France, the law has been used to arrest people who wore balaclavas over their faces to show solidarity with the similarly-clad Russian punks, Pussy Riot, three of whom were jailed for two years at the weekend. Supposedly, the French arrests prove that the niqab law is not about niqabs at all - but about face coverings and so not aimed in particular at Muslims. It seems an ingenuous argument and a patent lie - the law was inspired and argued for by pro-Christian rightists supposedly to defend alleged and undefined "French republican values". The last time I looked, the values of the Republic included liberte; but in modern France, it seems noticeable by its absence, especially for liberal protesters and for Muslim women of a certain outlook.

And the point behind all these sad stories of intolerance, violence and bigotry?

JUDAISM: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"      (Leviticus 19:18)

CHRISTIANITY: "Love your neighbor as yourself.'           (Matthew 22:36-40, NIV)

ISLAM: "Do good to parents, kinsfolk, orphans, the poor, the neighbour who is near of kin, the neighbour who is a stranger..."                                             (Qu'ran Ch4, v 36)

"We believe in God, and the revelation given to us, and to Abraham, Ishmai'l, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and that given to Moses and Jesus, and that given to (all) Prophets form their Lord: We make no difference between one and another of them: And we submit to God."  Qur'an (2:136)

Each faith stems from the same beginnings, shares a number of Prophets and holds, on paper at least, the many of the same or similar teachings, mostly based on respect and love. Yet, as we know, so often the reality is warped beyond recognition by the fundamentalists and bigots of each. It may be a trait within monotheism - if there is One God with One Way which has to be revealed to His followers, then the corollary is that those who don't agree with you must not only be wrong, but sinfully against God too. And so what is the duty of a believer? The majority of each faith see it as little more than proselytising, if even that - for the truth is that most people of faith live in at least passive tolerance of each other the overwhelming majority of the time; many learn to respect and share each other. 

But where belief morphs into blind faith with its attendant dogmatic superiority and is manipulated by those with a political agenda to boot - racial supremacy, land grabs or simply scapegoating for some sort of gain, then we see the headlines of today. A sad, bad and foreboding taste of how the 21st Century presents itself as far from the enlightened "modern" society it would like to think it is; but rather, the echoes of the Dark Ages and the dark hearts of the zealots of monotheism grow louder and louder with every day. It is a harbinger of a dystopian future of neo-Inquisitorial theocracy. Torquemada would approve.

We let the headlines pass at our own risk.

Jews, Christians and Muslims - one God, three faiths.

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.

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Nuclear Weapons That Can Hit London: from Israel

Who is the real threat?

ISRAEL:
- has invaded its neighbours countless times: Jordan (1951), Egypt (1956), Egypt, Syria and Jordan (1967), Lebanon (1978), Lebanon (1982- 1984), occupied Lebanon (1984-1990), Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2009).
- has repeatedly intervened in the Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, besieging their inhabitants, bulldozing thousands of houses and constructing huge barriers and walls to hem people into large concentration camps
- carried out airstrikes on Iraq's nuclear energy reactors in 1981
- sponsored terrorist organisations - supporting Hamas to undermine the PLO
- carried out terrorist attacks, car bombing four Iranian scientists in the last few years, as well as being involved in assassinations and abductions around the world, often in collusion with the US and "friendly" Arab dictatorships
- has attacked and seized aid ships in international waters, killing several unarmed occupants - even including attacking a US warship and killing 34 American sailors.
- has developed a large arsenal of nuclear weapons - well over 200, making it the fourth or fifth largest nuclear weapons state in the world. In this, it was helped by France and Britain in the 1960s. It has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, but their existence was revealed in the 1980s by the former nuclear technician, Mordechai Vannunu, who was jailed for his troubles. Israel is believed to have developed or be developing a longe range missile - the Jerhico 3 - that will have a reach of over 5,000km, making it feasible to target and hit London; maybe even within the fabled 45 minutes Tony Blair lyingly claimed for Saddam Hussein's non-exisent WMDs.
- has repeatedly refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and refuses all access by the International Atomic Energy Authority to its civilian and military sites
- receives over $8 millions every day from the US in military aid.

OR

IRAN:
- has not invaded a neighbouring state (or any other country) in nearly three centuries
- has no current links to any international terrorist organisations: it did sponsor Hizbollah in Lebanon for a time, but somewhat at arms-length and bearing in mind that Hizbollah (now a peaceful, mainstream political party with support across the faith divides) was formed in response to the Israeli invasions of the Lebanon. But there is only very patchy evidence linking Iran to any other violent acts in other countries - some Iranian elements may have been involved with some Shia groups in Iraq in the middle of the last decade, but this was after the US had invaded and largely destroyed the country on their doorstep. In fact, after 9/11, Iran arrested and handed over scores of al-Qaeda suspects to the USA.
- has no nuclear weapons
- has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and has allowed International Atomic Energy Authority officials to inspect its nuclear facilities
- receives no funding from the USA.

Any attack on Iran will be self-defeating, massively damaging in human costs, and will make a difficult situation far worse. President Obama originally promised to extend the hand of friendship to Iran, but quickly his outstretched palm clenched into a fist, his intransigence aiding rather than hindering the elements in Iran that do favour confrontation and understandably rallying Iranians to an anti-American position. Bear in mind many Iranians can still remember the toppling of Iran's first democratically elected government by the CIA and MI6 back in 1953 when it dared to nationalise the British and American owned oil industry. Premier Mossadeq was put under house arrest for life and the Shah was reinstated to become an absolute monarch employing brutal terror and repression against his people.

But above all, an attack on Iran for developing nuclear weapons it does not have by the only nuclear weapons state in the Middle East - Israel - will isolate tens of millions of Muslims and others there and around the world even further from a West that increasingly functions very openly on the basis of total self-interest and hypocrisy. The key issue here is simply wanting to ensure the continued compliance of governments across the Gulf Region with the national interests of the USA and its allies; so who is the real threat?

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.

Green Party Activists Arrested and Held By Israelis

Several Green Party activists from England and Wales have been arrested by the Israeli authorities for no apparent reason other than that they were en route to Bethlehem to take part in a peaceful human rights demonstration. They are being held in Givon prison. It is unclear what they are charged with, if anything.

Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, MP, has written to the European Court asking for action to help them.

More here

"People of the Book" - a review of Zachary Karabell's history of Islam and the West

It is always a treat to read something that is tightly written, fresh, and a bit different. This relatively short book (291 pages) is just that - American writer Zachary Karabell captures a broad sweep of history with an exciting gusto that brings periods and places normally obscure to western historians alive and with an immediacy that is explained by his central premise - that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have existed far more in mutual tolerance and respect, and sometimes even harmony, with each other than they have in conflict - whether the conflict of the Crusades or of the contemporary jihadists and neocons.

He takes us through the founding of Islam right up to the 1980s Middle east, yet somehow you do not get the sense of any period being overlooked or short-changed. Whether scholars, soldiers, merchants, priests or philosophers, he brings different ages to life by focusing on individuals of note at various points, though also slips down to take in anecdotes of every day life - how Moses Maimonides, a Jew, felt about working as a doctor at the court of Saladin, the Muslim prince, during the day to go home at night and work on his great treatise of rational Judaism; or how the Muslim caliph, Harun al-Rashid, turned Bagdhad into a centre of multi-faith discourse and learning, where his son held debates with Christian scholars; or how, more recently, men like Abduh argued for a new interpretation of Islam to mirror the Enlightenment process in Europe.

Yet there are dark tales here too - the slaughter of Muslims, Jews and heretic Christians by the Crusaders at the fall of Jerusalem in 1099. The suppression of much of the learning of Islamic centres such as Cordoba and Bagdhad by a more conservative strain of thinking around 700 years ago, one which has persisted in some respects and some societies ever since. And more recently the expulsion of the Palestinians and the creation of an essentially religious based state in Israel in 1948 and subsequently, flying full in the face of history while simultaneoulsy recasting history to justify the present.

Karabell's premise is that, as the third of the three faiths to emerge, Islam has always had to define itself in relation to Christians and Jews, acknowledging them all to have a shared history and a shared God, yet viewing both as incomplete. Mohammed invoked special protection over both Jews and Christians and this is central to the not always easy tolerance shown to both these faiths through history by often politically and militarily superior Muslims.

Contrary to the popular myths in the West of bloodthirsty Arabs forcing Islam on cowed conquered peoples, the book shows how in truth many eastern Christians welcomed the Muslims as they were far more tolerant of their beliefs than their previous rulers, the Orthodox Romans, had been. While in Europe, Jews and Christians who did not hold quite the right beliefs for the official church were persecuted and burned, for centuries, Muslims provided sanctuary to these people, demanding nothing in return other than a poll tax (which excused them from military service, not a bad deal at all). When the Jews were expelled from Christian Spain in the early 16th century, it was the Muslim Ottoman lands that sent ships to carry them to safety - and prosperity under the Sultan and Caliph.

By the same token, Karabell shows that the Crusader states, after their initial belligerence, settled down to a century of tolerance and even interfaith marriage and mixing which worked well for the people in the near east, but caught the inevitable displeasure of the Pope.

So where did this all go wrong?

In one sense of course, it didn't. There are still many societies where people of all three faiths live alongside each other, sometimes integrated, sometimes leading separate lives, in peace. In fact, most of the time, in most places, that is still precisely the case - whether in Egypt with its 10% Coptic Christian populace rearing pigs and drinking wine in a predominantly Muslim society; or in the Lebanon with its multi-religious coalitions, Christian President and Muslim Prime Minister; or in Dewsbury where I live, home to the London bombers but also to the country's first woman Muslim Cabinet Minister.

For most people, their religion is just one aspect of their lives to varying degrees of importance or unimportance. For example, Turkey is portrayed by some in Europe as a fundamentalist Muslim society ill-suited to joining the EU. Yet any visit to Istanbul would show you a city (outside the tourist area) indistinguishable from London, Berlin or Paris, and where a lower per centage of people attend Friday prayer at mosque than turn up at the near empty Churches of England on Sundays. Why then all this talk of a clash of civilisations? And why a desire to rediscover a false history of conflict and despair when in truth the times of togetherness have been far more of the story - and will need to be again for any hope of a future for us all?

There is no neat answer - except that perhaps where there has been conflict, it has been where religion is one of many elements, the central ones being, as ever, social justice and freedom, yet religion has been used sometimes by religious zealots, and often sometimes by populist (or just desperate) political leaders to justify the most dreadful deeds.

If Karabell shows anything, it is that each of these faiths can be and are interpreted in many many ways by their followers. And perhaps there is the one issue he does not tackle - Monotheistic faiths which each claim to be the revealed word and the sole, true, exclusive path to God and Truth, contain within them the seeds of conflict. However hard they may try, either scripturally or as individual believers, to respect, tolerate or even associate with those of other faiths, can faiths which proclaim one God and one way, ultimately live in real peace with each other?

The violence of Bin Laden's jihad and Bush's crusade may sit ill with faiths which proclaim love and peace, but as they each also proclaim themselves as the sole Truth, everything else by default stands ultimately as a lie. And woe unto those who worship a lie when a Believer of a certain ilk, fired up with the zeal of the One True God, steps forward to spread the Word.

Very much worth reading; this book has made and will keep making me think for a very long time.



"People of the Book" by Zachary Karabell is published in the UK by John Murray, isbn 978-0-7195-6755-1

"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...