Did you get a frantic letter from Senator John Kerry, on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee? The usual plea for ever more money comes with a separate sheet warning that: “Republicans will do anything to see president Obama fail, and america will pay the price. The headline on the reverse quotes Rush Limbaugh saying: “We need to wipe them out!” Following are quotes from Tea Party darling Rand Paul, and other Republicans Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt and Linda McMahon.

Coincidentally, a former NAACP employee who years ago sent a white farmer to a white lawyer, so he could be “helped by one of his kind” lost her department of agriculture job for doing so after mentioning the incident in a speech. The TV, as CNN says, is ‘all over the story’, and the Tea Party is feeling vindi-cated after the blooper by popular radio host Mark Williams.

Both incidents bring to my mind the Russian Revolution.

“Whhaat?” you’ll say. Not Hitler? “I thought the danger we’re in with the Tea Party and the local militias is fascism!”

True, but I’m referring to how various unde-sirable events, however different they may be, come about. In the early 20th century there was a Russian Social Democratic Party whose majority was referred to as the Bolsheviks (for big) while the minority were called the Men-sheviks, for small, or minority. The latter were more inclined to cooperate with the Liberals at a time when most Russian activists broadly agreed on the need for reform.

BThe Bolsheviks staged a successful revolu-tion in Russia because the Mensheviks failed to stand up to the Liberals.

I’m drawing this picture with a broad stroke, because what’s important here is not the detail – about which some readers will inevitably nitpick – but the gist.

Not so long ago entire populations were cowed by the warning: ‘The Russians are coming!’ Now we’re told: “The terrorists are coming!”

But the Democratic Party’s frantic appeals for help are like closing the barn door after the horse got away: It’s not more money they need, it’s the courage to form a Social Democratic Party that will stand up to the Republicans and deal with terrorism with a cool head.

Before the Tea Party takes over.

Israel’s mounting paranoia offers an excellent opportunity to analyze how news is slanted, by whom, and to whom.

A friend in Europe emails me news from various sources, and recently I received a story whose original source was the Near East News Agency (NENA), a collaborative of journalists working in the Near East that publishes in Italian and English. The story was about Israel’s efforts to prevent its neighbor Jordan from building an independent nuclear energy capability.

Israel is one of four countries with known nuclear capabilities not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the others being India, Pakistan and North Korea. Not- withstanding its own rogue position, Israel has been waging a relentless campaign to persuade the world that Iran is a mortal threat, not only to Israel, but to everyone else.

Now, just in case its campaign against the relatively distant threat should ultimately be unsuccessful, Israel now asserts that an equal threat lies next door, in Jordan, a tiny Muslim country which has been its steadfast ally.

The NENA article emphasized that Israel, with the backing of the U.S., is withholding “acceptance” of its neighbor’s plans to build two nuclear fuel plants, until Jordan promises that it will send its nuclear fuel abroad for reprocessing. (The NENA article also revealed that Jordan possesses 3% of known uranium deposits.)

Curious to know more about this story, I went to the New York Times. A May 2 Times article placed the Israel/Jordan controversy within the larger scope of U.S. efforts to strengthen the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty during a month-long international conference. It pointed out that diplomats were negotiating agreements for overseas reprocessing with Jordan and Bahrain, and indicated there might also be a deal with Saudi Arabia.

The Times article quoted a participating diplomat saying that these endeavors were part of an attempt to isolate the Iranians, but that Iran and others at the United Nations non-Proliferation Conference, including Egypt, were more interested in forcing the region’s one nuclear-weapons state, Israel, to acknowledge its atomic arsenal and sign on to the nonproliferation treaty.

Egypt, in particular, wants the Middle East to be nuclear arms free, but the Obama administration only supports this idea within the context of a broad regional peace.
In other words, for Washington, a nuclear-free Middle East is contingent on resolving the situation with Iran, rather than the situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

This is worrisome because Egypt, while lobbying for a conference next year on its proposal for a nuclear-free zone, also plans to build several nuclear reactors. According to The Times, Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak has hinted that if there is no agreement, his country might feel that needs to develop nuclear weapons, too.

Although the Times article has broader thrust, it manages to obscure the fact that the Obama administration accumulates blunders in the most volatile part of the world. Unlike the admittedly partisan NENA story, it fails to mention fthat Washington is threatening Jordan with a loss of 600 million a year in financial support if it goes ahead with a project that makes Israel nervous. Nor does it mention that our close allies, France and South Korea, are planning to help this tiny, resource poor county ensure its future energy needs.

Without several sources for world news, American voters are blindsided, taken totally unawares by major events. Nuclear non-pro-liferation is a major policy goal of President Obama. But alternate news sources reveal not only that in this, as in so many other laudable goals, his policies are counter-productive; they document the fact that a multi-faceted world can pursue laudable goals without us.

But they’re no longer about Cleopatras nose.

If we look at the world from a distance, instead of a series of highly differentiated conflicts, we see one big conflict that pits haves against have-nots, and simultaneously, license against sexual repression.

The buzz today is all about maybe talking to the Taliban. But we do not see the Taliban to, say, the way we saw the Germans during the second world war: essentially people of the same culture who had fallen prey to a national delusion of grandeur. We know the world the Taliban are defending tooth and nail is different in fundamental ways from ours, so how can we talk about leaving the Afghan people to their mercy?

I should say “the Afghan women”. For this is a war about license versus sexual repression. In the West, which is organized for the unlimited growth of capital, everything is a means to that end, and sexuality is tailored accordingly: men and women must constantly be concerned with looking young and if possible beautiful in order to attract a succession of mates. To that end, they purchase beauty products ever improved upon and clothing that will be out of fashion next year. And when women – and men – serve advertising to earn a paycheck, they become full-time sex symbols. The feminists denounced this long ago, but they got nowhere with this aspect of women’s lib because they didn’t realize that we live in a culture whose ultimate purpose is to increase returns on capital. Anything that achieves this is impervious to reform.

This is the nexus between the revolt of the have-nots (the Shiites), against ‘the West’, and the fierce determination of the repressive Sunni Wahabbi, represented by the Taliban, to preserve the sexual slavery of women. The differences between these two groups have us in a state of utter confusion: the greater conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia – which has recently spread to the Horn of Africa – is about the unequal distribution of wealth. In those areas where fundamentalist Sunni Islam holds sway, it is also about maintaining the subjection of women, considered as possessions.

Given that the Taliban fall into this latter category, we could possibly persuade them to abandon the wealth provided by poppies for that which could be extracted from high priced minerals – apparently ’discovered’ in the nick of time, but perhaps in fact the heretofore unavowed reason for the eight-year Afghan war. In that case, the liberation of Afghanistan’s women would have to wait until the influx of wealth from that economic bonanza overwhelms tradition, as is beginning to happen in other Muslim countries.

The fight for equity that is foremost in the Shia dominated areas, (Iran, and recently Iraq, where the long suffering Shia majority are now in power), is not that of equity in the traditional Marxist sense, but as Hezbollah’s leader Nasrallah makes clear, in the sense of the Radical Enlightenment about which Princeton’s Jonathan Israel writes.

And so, in reality, our foreign wars mirror our domestic situation: the United States is increasingly polarized between a growing minority of Christian fundamentalists, whose women are expected to remain in the home, often schooling their children to shield them from the secular education system, while workers, blacks, Latinos, single mothers, and those with special needs begin at last to organize events such as the Second US Social Forum recently held in Detroit, where residents are inventing new forms of urban self-sufficiency instead of waiting for government to solve society’s problems. At the very same time, however, Tea Partyers are pushing back against these initiatives, also in the name of not waiting for government to do so.
Monday night Larry King rebroadcast his recent interview with Bill Maher, who in a rare moment of passion, said what American progressives are thinking on this Independence Day: “There is no Tea Party equivalent for us. We have two parties, but only one politics, and while the Tea Party is pushing the Republicans to the far right, no one is pushing the Democrats to the left.”

While Christian fundamentalist women do not cover their heads, they are expected to remain in the home – and to vote for a politics of inequality based on a consumerism that relies heavily on fashion models and wrestling match sex queens.

Talking to the Taliban and Hezbollah, is only likely to be productive if and when “the West” drops the capital W that implies superiority and accepts the inanity of chasing after oil and gas in order to continue a way of life that besides demeaning one of life’s great pleasures, will render the planet inhospitable to humans.

It took the admission by BP that it may ultimately not be able to plug the leak in the Gulf for President Obama to commit major funding for solar power. Energy Secretary Chu fears that we might be reaching a tipping point on climate change, yet he suggested we could save a lot by adopting tougher energy standards for new buildings, implying that the consumer society these represent could continue in the face of a point of no return for the planet.

Replace Allah and Jehovah with nature and it’s clear that our conflict with Islam is importantly about how we live our individual lives. Before we can hope to see them move toward more personal freedom, we have to reconsider what we do with our own.

The expression first became a rallying cry during the First World War, with the slogan “Never Again.”  Then there came Buchenwald, and it was “never again” all over again.

Katrina was a natural disaster piled on top of Army Corps indifference, which was never to be allowed to happen again.

The more recent worldwide financial debacle really concentrated minds worldwide, so that, two years later, heads of finance from the countries that make things happen (even things that are never supposed to happen again) gathered in Toronto to make sure that this particular event should never happen again. The President returned home with an assignment from the countries that America used to tell what do do, which was to kick domestic opposition into line to create a Consumer Protection Agency (or whatever it’s called, don’t hold me to names) so that at least if this does happen again, it won’t be our fault.

The President was unwise to hold that it would never happen again.  But hardly less wise than BP that has been assuring us that thanks to its good faith and its technical know-how what we could all a “magnitude ten” oil spill would never happen again.

Never?  With more than 3000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, not to mention those we haven’t been told about in other oceans and on other lands.

Or, less spectacularly, the gas rigs whose numbers remain secret, on lands that used to be picture postcard perfect, throughout the country, fracking, or fracturing the soil hundreds of yards down, pumping scarce water laden with chemicals into once fertile land, sending fumes into the water pipes of nearby kitchens, causing them to burn in contact with a match.  At this point, the question becomes: “Never what?”

Never more jobs lost, never more private prisons built, never more men in search of work arrested, never more soldiers turned into invalids – never more what?

I don’t know if it was due to his famous poem “The Raven” that the early nineteenth century writer Edgar Allan Poe is seen as a forerunner  of science fiction, but surely our powerless lives today, would have been considered science-fiction in his time.

The hero of Poe’s poem hallucinates a black raven sitting unruffled over his bedroom door, repeating only one word: ‘Nevermore”.  He mourns the loss of his love Lenore, and asks the raven if there is “balm in Gilead”, to which the answer is also “Nevermore”.
Still not getting it, the poet implores:
‘Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore     But: “Quoth the raven,`Nevermore.’”

Now, with a dramatic gesture the poet orders the beast to:

“Get back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“Take thy form from off my door!…. and leave no black plume as    a token of that lie…!”
Alas:
“The raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming

Unable to accept the finality of death, Poe wanted desperately to bring back the past.  We, very differently, imagine that we can prevent its repetition.   But like Poe’s demon, we are dreaming.

During the Vietnam war, American draft resisters found refuge in Canada. Those days are long gone. I’m not con-vinced that it’s just be-cause Canada has a Conservative Prime Minister that the country has emulated so much of our Homeland Security provisions, extending them to cover domestic dissent.

Whatever the reason, this much is certain: Canada is now more than ever an extension of the United States, and while it is probable that the North American Free Trade Agreement has something to do with it, the more deeper reasons are more worrisome. Sooner or later, the conflictive situation with Mexico will make it part of a North American Colossus – a desperate but probably futile effort to meet the challenges of China, India and Brazil.

What should make us take notice is that this is part of a larger conflictive situation: the grass roots of the world (no longer the workers or proletarians of the world), are finally getting it together. As it reports on efforts of the G8 and the G20 in Toronto to save the world economic system, the American media ignores the fact that 15,000 people are camping in tents in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, a predominantly black city that is finding new ways to live with the newly liberated land. Much less are Americans aware of similar experiments going on across their country – and nost others.

Today, in the tight credit market, CNN revealed to its viewers the existence of micro-finance, a concept for which a Bangladeshi, Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank that makes loans to peasants, mainly women, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Only ten years behind, CNN! Bravo! A few weeks ago your founder, Ted Turner, long ago ousted, was given a tour of the Atlanta headquarters after a remake, and when he was asked by your friendliest anchor, Fredricka Whitfield, whether he had any unfulfilled wishes, he said he had always wished that CNN would cover more foreign news. Alas!

The fact that political junkies can turn to the internet hardly makes up for the failure of the Mainstream Media (or MSM as it is known), to bridge the oceans that have for two hundred years complacently separated Americans from the rest of the messy world. Why? Because even the most highly regarded on-line resources such as Huffington Post, Truth-Digg, Common Dreams, to name but a few, are mainly concerned with who said what to whom on the domestic front.

I’m lucky to receive internet newsletters and blogs in other lan-guages that I read, and although many of these, like their American counterparts, are mainly concerned with national issues, there are a growing number of on-line news publications that have an international focus, and some of them make the effort to publish in several languages.

This is not where I meant to go with this blog, so the names of these multi-lingual newsletters will have to wait for my next blog. I want to get back to the idea of a North American colossus, in which Mexican manpower plays a similar role to that of China’s rural population.

The two sides in the immigration debate are irreconcilable as things now stand: But one could imagine the creation of a political entity similar to the European Union, that would link the U.S. with Canada and Mexico in such a way as to get around that problem and create a more competitive economy. One would have to hope that such an entity would not more closely resemble the authoritarian Chinese regime than the European.

My head is spinning. The amount of evidence pointing to the com-plete discombobulation of the world that one receives from just an hour of TV is overwhelming.

Today, I was fresh from the viewing, last night, of the new documentary Gasland, by Josh Fox, whose family is offered $100,000 for the gas rights under their Pennsylvania portion of the Marsellus Shale. This is a must-see film that reveals a continent-wide landscape studded by hydraulic fracturing towers for the extraction of liquid gas, a sight which is disturbingly similar to the thousands of drilling rigs studding the Gulf of Mexico.

Realizing how much is being put over on us, on land and on sea, I turn on CNN to learn that the day’s subject of burning (sic) concern is the first anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson. The networks continue to ignore the 15,000 people gathered since yesterday for the second US Social Forum in Detroit, emblem of industrial decline and the citizen-propelled sustainable renewal who are trying to show that “Another World is Possible, Another US is Necessary”.

At noon, tuning in to Democracy Now on the Drexel University channel (which has recently taken to loping off not the last five minutes, but the last ten or twelve minutes of the hour-long show), I’m just in time to hear Amy Goodman describe the unprecedented security walls erected in Toronto for the meetings of the G8 and the G20. Last night the BBC gave only a passing mention to the automobile stuffed to the gills with arms and gasoline that was stopped, quoting the police that there was no evidence that this vehicle, whose closed roof rack was also stuffed with arms, had any link to terrorism.

Today on the Toronto river bank, a police vehicle drew up as a Montreal-based political activist was telling Amy Goodman that the police sought information about him even from artist friends, and just as I was picturing in my mind’s eye a medieval walled castle, the young man said: “We’re living in a world of walls, the Berlin Wall, the Mexican border wall, the Israeli wall, etc.” And I thought: ‘We haven’t made much progress since the Middle Ages.’

In those days walls were to keep out rudimentarily-armed soldiers, while today walls are to keep in – or out – unarmed civilians. And our media walls are keeping other, unarmed civilians from knowing about the concrete and barbed wire walls governments increasingly use to keep us in line.

As our corporate leaders mindlessly scrounge for the last vestiges of fuel for economies devoted to the consumption of largely unneces-sary products, imperiling water supplies and arable land, people across the globe are banding together (as in primitive times?), determined to wrest control of their lives from the techno-monster, that rules us, creating community vegetable gardens on Detroit’s abandoned lots, housing communities in its abandoned factories, meaningful lives for the handicapped, and a host of other bottom-up initiatives that the G8 and the G20 try to pretend are irrelevant.

To remain sane, the rest of us have to tell ourselves that thanks to our combined efforts, like the kings and counts of yore, our robber barons will some day become irrelevant.


Today Otherjones is publishing a text by Professor Curtis Doebbler, professor of law at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine, representative of Nord Sud XXI to the United Nations in New York and Geneva, and a member of the Brussells Tribunal Advisory Committee. The link is www.brussellstribunal.org/Newsletters/Newsletter5EN.htm

“The starting point for any consideration of international law in relation to “the question of Palestine” — as the UN neutrally refers to it — is the right to self-determination. No right has been more important to so many peoples and states in the international community. Although we have a tendency to devote more attention to the international law of self-determination as it developed since the creation of the United Nations, the right to self-determination in the form that it is more relevant to “the question of Palestine” existed much earlier. In fact, this right can be traced back to the very existence of the nation-state, when it was decided that people living together in a particular territory have the right to form themselves into a sovereign state.

In other words, when there is no existing state, the right of self-determination gives the people concerned the right to form their own state. Applied to Palestine this means that after World War I when the Ottoman Empire was forced to relinquish sovereign over Palestine and when the British conquerors expressly denounced any interest in ruling Palestine, since that time the people living in Palestine have had the right to decide their own future.

As we know, this right was never recognised. Instead, first Britain and the international community acting through the United Nations denied the Palestinian people this right. This violated international law, as there is nothing in the UN Charter that allows the organisation the right to violate the right to self-determination. In fact, Article 1 of the UN Charter makes the right to self-determination one of the purposes for which the United Nations exists.

According to international law existing at the time, the creation of the State of Israel was illegal. Moreover, we know that once an illegal act has been committed by states, the consequences of that act remain illegal and may not be recognised as legal by other states. Thus even today it is correct to say that Israel is an illegal state and has been since its creation, no matter what its de facto position might be.

Even if one were to acknowledge the creation of Israel by the UN General Assembly’s adoption of resolution 181 on 29 November 1947, that resolution itself states, in Part 1, Subsection A, Paragraph 3, that “independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem … shall come into existence in Palestine.” In other words, in the very same paragraph as the State of Israel is created, so is the state of Palestine and the “international” city of Jerusalem.

Neither Israel nor the international community have respected the terms of this resolution. Instead, not only has Palestine been denied statehood, but also Palestinians are being offered about 3.5 per cent of the territory to which they had — and have — a right under the “roadmap” that the Quartet stresses as the basis for negotiations. Instead of a solution, this looks more like the theft of the right of self-determination from the Palestinian people.

Moreover, Israel has continued from 1947 to date to violate UN resolutions with impunity.

The occupation and international law

Just a day before the UN actually created the State of Israel, Israel proclaimed its own independence. Again this was done in violation of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and in violation of the League of Nations Mandate to the British, which was still in effect.

When the Arab states took up arms to defend the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, Western states — as they had done regularly for centuries — supported the colonisation of Palestine by Zionists claiming to have a right to create the State of Israel. Whatever religious, historical or political basis the Zionists had, they did not have any grounds under international law and in fact violated this law.

Rather than reacting to a violation of international law, the international community allowed Israel to act unlawfully and even ratified the de facto outcome of the occupation of Palestine. Even territories that the international community agreed did not come under any Israeli claim were allowed to be annexed. The process of annexation continues to this day.

According to the United Nations, parts of the territory over which the Palestinians were denied their right to self-determination became Israel. About 45 per cent of the original mandate territory was considered by the UN as occupied.

Putting aside disagreement about Israel’s illegitimacy, according to Article 47 of the Hague Regulations annexed to the Fourth Hague Convention from 1907, an act of occupation become de jure when the occupying power de facto exercises jurisdiction over a territory. By the 1970s, Israel had de facto jurisdiction over all of the mandate territory, including the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and parts of Southern Lebanon. As such Israel became an occupying power over these territories and people within in them.

Somewhat like a mandate holder under the League of Nations system, Israel was therefore required by the rules of international humanitarian law to provide for the occupied population under its control. This means ensuring proper administration, judicial facilities, educational facilities, and healthcare facilities. Instead, Israel has increasing denied Palestinians these services. This has been most notably the case in Gaza.

While claiming to be acting in the name of national security, Israeli soldiers have shot and killed infants, children, women and men. Israel has repeatedly denied Palestinians the right to reach school and hospitals. And Israel regularly imposes it own administrative system of checkpoints and other forms of harassment, including its own courts, on Palestinians. All of these actions violate the international legal duties of an occupying power.

Israel’s actions denying the people of Gaza the basic necessities of life are a particularly onerous form of oppression that violates norms of international humanitarian law including the prohibition against collective punishment that is found in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The right of self-defence

Israel has repeatedly invoked its right of self-defence to fight back against the Palestinians. While it is true that Israel may have a right to use force to protect itself from attack, it cannot justify the use of force to perpetuate an illegal situation. Thus, if one views the creation of Israel to be illegal, then so is any force used to maintain this illegal situation.

Even states entitled to use force in self-defence must satisfy several criteria. There must first be an armed attack against the state by another state, and any force used must be proportionate and necessary to achieve a lawful objective.

As indicated above, even if Israel had been entitled to use force against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla — which it was argued it was not — it would have only been able to use proportionate and necessary force.

A more interesting question is what type of force might be used against Israel, as it is the entity that has and continues to violate international law.

First, the UN Security Council could authorise the use of force against Israel, but this is a political decision that Israeli friends with veto power on the Security Council are likely to prevent.

Second, the UN General Assembly could authorise the use of force against Israel. This could be done by a simple majority of the assembly with no state having veto power. The action of the General Assembly is limited while the Security Council is seized of a matter, and arguably, acting on it, but it is the General Assembly that has the power to decide this question.

Third, Palestinians have a legitimate right of self-determination that entitles them to use force against Israel. Such use of force, although prima facie legal under international law, must conform to the rules of international humanitarian law. These rules include prohibition of attacks against civilians, either by design or because they are indiscriminate.

And fourth, every state in the international community has the right to assist the Palestinians in their struggle, including their armed struggle, to achieve their right to self-determination. Again, of course, such assistance must conform to the rules of international humanitarian law.

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla is an example of such assistance. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla is a general phrase that can be used to describe the boats attempting to bring humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza. Even the Israelis do not deny that the boats are bringing humanitarian assistance. Nevertheless, Israel sees itself as entitled to stop the boats based on its suspicion that they will assist the self-determination struggle of the Gaza people, particularly their use of force against Israel.

The problematic nature of this argument is readily apparent. How can a state that is violating international law by subjecting an occupied people to inhuman and collective punishment justify actions to maintain its illegal ways? The simple answer is that it cannot. It is violating international law merely by maintaining an illegal regime, and just about everything it does that serves that end is illegal. This was the case with South Africa as it struggled to maintain its illegal apartheid regime. It increasingly exercised police powers to maintain its illegal hold over black South Africans. Sometimes the police acted less forcefully, and sometimes, black South Africans were subjected to court proceedings, but irrespective of the standards of these “concessions”, the South African government was acting illegally. Two UN Special Rapporteurs on human rights in Palestine — one a South African anti-apartheid campaigner and one a Jewish American professor — have criticised Israel for its illegal actions that they refer to as similar to, or worse than, the South African apartheid government’s actions.

The Israel argument is sometimes expressed in a more nuanced form concerning its embargo on Gaza. It claims that it no longer occupies Gaza and is therefore entitled to act against it in self-defence, through an embargo and the interdiction of ships bringing humanitarian assistance. The legal errors in this argument are many.

First, Israel interdicted the Gaza ships on the high seas. No state is allowed to stop and board ships on the high seas without the permission of the ship, unless the ships have been involved in international piracy. In fact, to act in violation of this fundamental rule of international law is itself piracy. Moreover, the crew of a ship under attack by pirates or unauthorised persons attempting to enter their ship by force are entitled to use necessary and proportionate force to repel the illegal invaders. In this case, this would mean that the ships crew would be entitled to use force that is equivalent to that of as highly qualified and heavily armed invader as the Israeli military.

Second, according to Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Court of Justice in the Nicaragua Case, the provision of humanitarian assistance to people in need, especially under occupation, is always allowed and never an unfriendly act.

Third, the preventing of humanitarian assistance to a people in need is itself an illegal act.

Despite the importance of international law, this law is impotent unless it is applied, and Israel and its allies have proven themselves to be quite intransigent in their failure to respect international law. The law, nevertheless, is a powerful tool in the hands of those who seek to promote the rule of law.

Thus even if states like Israel do not respect the law, the law continues to exist as a minimum common denominator that has been agreed upon by states in the international community. It continues to serve as the best chance we have to live together, not even as friends, but merely without annihilating each other.

What wackiness to wake up to on a Sunday morning! On CNN’s State of the Union, Joe Lieberman tells Candy Crowley that the government should police the internet – taking China as an example!

A stunning example of the fact that, as I have written elsewhere, however different their regimes, and notwithstanding their external antagonisms, political leaders share a common attitude vis a vis their subjects.

But would internet security suddenly have become a burning issue had the cooperatively-run internet site Wikileaks – which, coincidentally, Wikipedia says was founded by Chinese dissidents some years ago – not recently show an American helicopter gunship deliberately targeting and killing a dozen civilians and wounding two children in Afghanistan? The footage, complete with the two-way ground-to-air conversation was leaked by an American soldier, who has been arrested, and a hunt is on for Julian Assange, the Australian who is the public face of Wikileaks, now and not for the first time, in hiding.

But let’s not lose the thread here: Senator Lieberman is proposing legislation that would authorize the White House to prevent use of the internet that could threaten our national security – as does China, a country which is officially Communist, and in any case recognized as an authoritarian regime. Yet Senator Lieberman, like most of his colleagues in the Congress, would not be caught dead recommending that the United States emulate in any way, shape or form, the social-democratic countries of Europe, which, as the world stands today, are widely considered to be the best that humans have achieved so far in terms of governance.

As for where the world stands today, an Arizona lawmaker proposes that birth certificates be denied children of illegal immigrants, never mind that according to the Constitution, any person born on U.S. soil is an American citizen; and Israelis of European origin demonstrate against having their children schooled together with those of Sephardic, usually North-African, origin.

More encouragingly, civilians around the world are increasingly adopting similar attitudes toward those that govern them, whether it be Americans on the Gulf Coast tired of waiting for government and BP to clean up the oil mess, college students voting to divest from companies doing business with Israel, West bank Palestinians boycotting settler products, South American Indians or Africans of the Niger Delta suing big oil for polluting their lands.

Americans are amazing: we have the best president since Franklin Roosevelt, and yet, even the so-called liberal media can’t stop finding fault. This is proof, if ever it was needed, that tv anchors are paid to provide suspense, not information. They speculate endlessly on what negative effect this or that policy decision, speech, or encounter will have on the 2012 election.

Their endless harping on President Obama’s “performance” feeds negative poll results. It’s no surprise that 52% of voters are dissatisfied with the President’s handling of the Gulf oil spill, when they hear nothing but criticism on TV! Questions to actors in the BP disaster have only one purpose: to elicit negative appraisals of the administration’s behavior.

President Bush failed by every criteria when Katrina struck, yet this was a natural disaster that had been waiting to happen (with insufficient protection for New Orleans); policemen shot people hovering under a bridge, the thousands that took refuge in a sports complex had no water for days, yet the only thing on the minds of officials was the possibility of looting. People clung to anything that floated til they were (sometimes) rescued. And “Brownie” was praised.

I think Americans have forgotten just how incompetent the Bush administration was. And ironically, because it was so incompe-tent, they expect nothing less than miracles from his successor. As the President would say, “Let’s be clear”: No human being has ever been responsible for the number of catastrophes and blunders this president inherited. The greatest economic debacle since 1929 began before he entered the Oval Office and is not over. He inherited two and a half wars in Southwest Asia – with two more looming in the Horn of Africa; is expected to finally end Israel’s war with the Palestinians, of which we are a part. Meanwhile, at home he’s facing a border/drug/arms crisis with Mexico, largely because the previous admi-nistration did not implement immigration reform.

And he should have made sure the rot in the Office of Minerals Management was dug out so that the greatest ecological disaster the country has ever known would not strike a still recovering Gulf Coast?! Even as other industrial disasters occur almost daily, and while the coal industry continues mountain-top mining of the most polluting substance?

Americans cursed and wrung their hands for eight years over the most inept AND crooked president the country has ever had (not to mention a Darth Vader vice-president), then, having managed to beat the skeptics and the racists and elect a man who is his exact opposite, who could produce the kind of outcomes most of us are desperate for, we feel betrayed because he doesn’t have a magic wand.

We fault him for bowing to the generals’ demand for a surge in Afghanistan after eight years of wasted efforts to turn a tribal country into a liberal democracy (which suddenly, turns out to have untapped precious minerals galore). The same explanation prevails for Obama’s failure to endorse calls in Copenhagen for serious action on climate change: one of his hands is tied by the military complex, the other by the industrial complex, and alas, he’s not Houdini.

The larger picture is this: pre-Reconstruc-tion Americans are determined to make America’s first black president pick up the tab for the disasters created by his pre-decessors, not only to ensure he cannot be reelected, but also to preclude another such crazy idea from entering the heads of voters – who might dare to back an Asian or Hispanic for president next time.

Friday, June 4th:I know that ore than half of the volunteers in the flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza were Turks, but does that statistic explain why all of this killed were Turks? (One held an American passport but was of Turkish origin.) Would Turks stand out among fair-skinned Americans, British, French, etc. individuals on board the Turkish ship that was boarded in a pre-dawn raid last Monday?

One of the early Israeli reports said that its soldiers were surprised to hear ‘Arabic’ (more likely Turkish) being spoken on the ship. I have not heard anyone raise this issue. Why? Racial profiling isn’t an American monopoly.

Saturday: On today’s news, someone was suggesting that the Israeli attackers had a hit list. Maybe they didn’t have a list, but the idea would certainly suggest that they were instructed to use racial profiling.

After seeing the recent film “Inglorious Basterds” by Quentin Tarantino it occured to me that the Israelis are on a master race kick. In the film, a group of Jewish Americans inflict a series of vicious punishments on Third Reich combatants, ending with the assassination of Hitler and his entire general staff! Tarantino fans like the fact that the film is horrendously violent. As a film lover, I do not recommend it. Aside from that, I believe that it unapologetically represents a communal Israeli dream of being able to overcome even the most powerful enemies.

Israel’s handling of relief efforts for the people of Gaza would seem to confirm that the country is under a sort of superman spell. How long before it wakes up?

Although the American Heritage Dictionary refers to ‘entering’ or going aboard a vehicle or ship, the Israeli army’s reference to its troops ‘going aboard’ the Turkish ship carrying relief supplies does not evoke men rappelling down from a helicopter in full riot gear in the middle of the night.

How to be surprised that they were greeted with clubs and knives?

A ‘boarding party’ comes alongside a ship on another ship, and requests permission to come aboard. Usually in broad daylight.

Israel could have done this, in order to inspect the cargoes being carried, which could then have been ‘safely’ delivered to Gaza.