Repentance now

[Political Waves]

We seem to have ... to use a few country'ism's ... lost our rabbit-assed mind, dumb as a box of rocks. We're defending Israel and blaming Obama and his Liberal minions for the oil spill.

According to The Crazy (tm) ... as Josh Marshall calls the radical Right ... the 19-year-old American citizen that was killed in the raid on the Mavi Marmara wasn't a 'real' American. Moved to Turkey when he was 2, American-born Furkan Dogan was shot five times, four to the head by Israeli commandos. If you listen to FOX News, he was a terrorist in the company of al-Qaeda operatives. If you listen to the Neocons, he was just an 'anchor baby' and therefore irrevocably tainted, shouldn't be entitled to rights of citizenship anyway. If you listen to Israel, he was a criminal engaged in warring against their absolute authority. If you ask the Palestinian's, he was a martyr on their behalf. I wonder what his mother might say, if asked?

FOUR shots into the head seems a bit of overkill, eh? In the footage being show on FOX [and many OTHER places ... thank you, Jon Stewart,] seized by Israel from Turkish journo's on the Marmara, we witness the audacity of people trying to defend themselves from ... I dunno ... SHOTS TO THE HEAD, perhaps? 
 

Before we make up our minds, though, perhaps we should listen to the accounts of international reporters, here:

Flotilla Eyewitness: ‘I Think They Went Out to Murder’

Joshua Holland, AlterNet

6/4/10

 

During the 3 days Israel held most of those detained in the attack on the Freedom Flotilla — including 60 journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders –Israel shaped the narrative of what occurred 70 miles off the coast of Gaza in the predawn hours of May 30.

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/06/04/flotilla-eyewitness-i-think-they-went-out-to-murder/

And even as Gingrich and other Talking Heads from the Righty persuasion parrot the "Palestinians aren't suffering" meme, the amount of walking (and carried) wounded taking advantage of Egypt's open border tells quite a different story -- be sure to read it, below. How can we defend Israel when they've been holding up critical medical supplies and equipment for years? When they've carefully examined how many calories it takes to sustain life without thriving, making sure Palestinians don't get any more than that -- or any nutmeg, for chrissakes! When they hold up cement for necessary building after their bombs tore hell out of Gaza because Hamas would use it all for bunkers! Get a GRIP, Israel!

That's it -- no more for me. I don't want to hear one more nihilistic, self-centered quip or argument. Either the hate-mongers come down on the side of love and compassion -- get over the self-centered "victimization tapes" that define both Israel and the rabid Right in this country -- or prepare for a defeat like they've never ever imagined.

Living in a dream world of imagined self-righteousness simply isn't enough to sustain life anymore. They need to wise up and come to the table for some sort of actual dialogue or expect to be treated like the whiny little bitches they are. Back in the day when the Right was fomenting a previous extremist version of xenophobic radicalism, intellectual powerhouse Bill Buckley stepped in and directed them to shut their yaps lest they tarnish the Republican brand as a wingnut movement. There was an adult in the room to silence the noisy children. Bill's gone now, and so is respect for intellect -- now the Right takes pride in its ignorance and comfort in its narrow-minded world vision. They swoon at the babble of Palin and Beck as if listening to true wisdom, able to discern only the echoes of self-pity and tribal-superiority from their twisted, poisonous logic. To the world, these two are clowns -- to the Righty's, they're 'average folks' speaking patriotism in the alternative Universe they prefer to reality.

I can't be the ONLY person who is watching them paint themselves into a corner of oblivion. They got nothin'. They offer the future only more of what's diminshed its bright hope. They've denied appointments [well over 100 are still outstanding in Obama's administration,] assistance for the unemployed and poor, and have obstructed all attempts to change the status quo -- they've only come to the defense of health insurers, lobbyists, bankers and oil companies in the last 18 months. Take warning, Israel -- if the Republican Right and the Fundamentalists are the ones defending you now, you're on the loosing side of history.

A few excellent weekend reads on both the Gulf and Israel, including a link to my weekly, which might explain a bit of my passion, today -- and a bonus read on ... well ... consciousness. Of course, from my perspective, that's all we EVER talk about here.

Back in those days I wrote about this week, Martin Luther King said of us, and to us:

 

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the vitriolic words or violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.

Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and actions of the children of darkness, but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.

 

Times up. Repentance ... followed by redemption and restoration ... can be the ONLY thing we're about  -- and the time is now.

Make Love, Not War on life.

Jude



Behold our dark, magnificent horror
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Friday, June 4, 2010
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/04/notes060410.DTL

There is, you have to admit, a sort of savage grace, a tragic and terrible beauty, to the BP oil spill.

Like any good apocalyptic vision of self-wrought hell, the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history has its inherent poetry. You see that creeping ooze of black, that ungodly wall of unstoppable darkness as it slowly, inexorably invades the relatively healthy, pristine waters adjacent, and you can't help but appreciate the brutal majesty, the fantastic, reeking horror of this new manifestation of black death we have brought upon ourselves, as it spreads like a fast cancer into the liquid womb of Mother Nature herself.

Really, it's not just the incredible photographs of the spill that are, in turns, heartbreaking, stunning, otherworldly and downright Satanic in their abject revulsion. It's not just the statistics that tell us how many millions of gallons might ultimately be spilled, or the stunned scientists who can only hypothesize how this unprecedented catastrophe might affect the fragile food chain and distress the ocean's ecosystems at the very root level.

It's not even the endless, heartrending tales of livelihoods lost, industries destroyed, coastlines ravaged or wildlife killed. The fact is, any one of these aspects alone is enough to poison your soul for as long as you wish to wallow in that murky state of fatalism and doom. It is nothing but bleak.

I think the most disturbingly satisfying thrill of this entire event -- and it is, in a way, a perverse thrill -- comes from understanding, at a very core level, our shared responsibility, our co-creation of the foul demon currently unleashed.

What a thing we have created. What an extraordinary horror our rapacious need for cheap, endless energy hath unleashed; it's a monster of a scale and proportion we can barely even fathom. Because if you're honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.

Do you wish to try and deflect it? Lay responsibility elsewhere? Really? We can't quite blame an "act of God," as we would for some sort of hurricane or tsunami inflicted upon meager humankind by an angry deity, punishing us all for being too war-like, violent or perhaps naïve enough to want to enjoy the sunshine for five goddamn minutes before He decided He'd better kill some people lest we forget who's in charge.

We cannot blame evil terrorists, some cluster of swarthy foreigners who hate our shopping malls and secretly envy our Porsche Cayenne's. Nor can we blame the spill on some sort of nefarious conspiracy, a secret act wrought by devious agents in black helicopters designed to destabilize the U.N. and induce universal mind control -- unless, of course, you're getting a little desperate and don't get outside much, in which case, you absolutely can.

Finally (and a bit shockingly), I'm not hearing Pat Robertson or any of his cretinous cult of apocalypticans blame the gays, or voodoo, or anal sex, or reality TV for what's happening in the Gulf. Oil is, after all, completely non-denominational. It mocks all religions equally -- except, of course, the only one that really matters: capitalism.

This is how you know this is one of the more universally damning disasters of our time: No one really seems to know how to process it, much less react. The GOP is backtracking like terrified hyenas from Sarah "Queen of Duh" Palin's "drill baby, drill" mantra/ass tattoo, as suddenly the incessant Republican wail for more oil exploration, more drilling, more tax cuts for oil conglomerates don't just reek of the usual inbred cronyism; they reek of death and destruction the likes of which the country has never seen.

On the other hand, hardcore lefties are going mad with desire that the disaster will lead to the immediate imprisonment of every BP employee worldwide, as if BP is somehow any different than any other oil titan raping the planet right now (hi, Alberta's oilsands). Hardcore lefties would also appreciate it if Obama would use the disaster as a surefire excuse to instantly change the entire course of energy history by immediately shutting down all 48,000 oil wells in the Gulf and hand every American a bicycle and a solar panel. See? All better.

Sure. As if oil wasn't woven like oxygen into every single aspect of American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel didn't come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells wouldn't re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren't powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.

Truly, BP is behaving no better or worse than any other corporate spawn of Satan would in a similar situation. What's more, if you don't think every oil company on earth is right now kneeling before Beelzebub in gratitude that it wasn't one of their own wells that exploded, you haven't been paying attention.

That said, after all is said and done, it's gloomily nice to think our darkest disaster in a generation could somehow ultimately improve our attitudes, change our behavior, lighten our violent treatment of the planet. As someone recently noted, the BP spill isn't Obama's Katrina, it's actually Big Oil's Chernobyl. Meaning: a disaster so appalling and devastating it might very well alter the industry and change the course of our energy policy forever.

Is it possible? Or, more accurately, are we even capable of such a shift? Is there any silver lining to be found in that black and greasy gloom? This is, perhaps, the most imperative question of all: If we can produce a demon of such extraordinary scale and devastation, can we not also somehow create its exact opposite? Let us pray. ++


Down to Raisins
William Rivers Pitt, t r u t h o u t
Thursday 03 June 2010
http://www.truthout.org/down-raisins60099

There is an old story about Abraham Lincoln spending vast amounts of time in the telegraph room of the War Department waiting for dispatches from his commanders in the field. One day, according to Lincoln biographer John C. Waugh, after a particularly long night, the president turned to the telegraph operators and said, "Well, boys, I am down to raisins."

When asked to explain the phrase, Lincoln told the story of the little girl who celebrated her birthday by feasting on sweets, followed by raisins for dessert. Soon, she became violently sick and started throwing up everything she had eaten. Her concerned parents summoned a doctor, who upon investigating her issue, told the parents the danger was past and that she was "down to raisins."

That's us; that's you and me, and certainly that's the people in the Gulf region. We have all become so sickened by the events surrounding the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon and the broad-spectrum, oil-soaked destruction, which has not even begun to sink its teeth in, that we are all down to raisins.

The dome failed when it filled with bubbles. "Top kill" failed because, well, they were trying to stuff mud into an oil-spewing hole 5,000 feet below the surface of the sea. The diamond saw meant to slice the pipe and make room for a cap got caught in the apparatus down there. They were able to salvage the thing, but if they screw this maneuver up as badly as they've screwed up everything else so far, the amount of crude dumping into the sea could increase by as much as 20 percent ... which in BP-ese could mean 30 percent, 40 percent or even 200 percent.

Oil has been ravaging the Louisiana coastline for days now. The Coast Guard has said that, of the 126 miles of coastline that has been affected, 25 of those miles can be restored to its previous condition. That same dreary percentage will certainly apply to the rest of the Gulf, which has also begun to feel the effects of this calamity. Oil has arrived on Dauphin Island, Alabama. Oil has reached the Mississippi coast. Oil is expected to reach Florida by the end of the week. Oil is expected to annihilate reefs, kill fisheries, destroy tourism, slaughter wildlife and create staggering dead zones that will affect everything from whales to tuna to birds to plankton, which pretty much amounts to the entire food chain. Whatever survives the oil faces an equally toxic death from the dispersants being used to contain the oil.

BP, for its part, has made some moves of its own. One of their spokespersons got up on his hind legs and declared, with bare face hanging out, that reports of massive oil plumes lurking for miles under the surface of the sea do not, in fact, exist, despite reports from a series of experts that the things are down there, just waiting to strike. BP has hired former Cheney spokesperson Anne Womack-Colton to be the company's face for the disaster. They have decided not to add a second blowout preventer to the wrecked gear at the center of the crisis, and after attempting to do this cut-and-cap move, will concentrate only on drilling relief wells. The best-case scenario, they say, has the well being fully shut down by late August, maybe, if we're lucky.

We haven't been lucky yet, and according to experts, we have no reason to think our luck will turn:

BP Plc's failure since April to plug a Gulf of Mexico oil leak have prompted forecasts the crude may continue gushing into December in what President Barack Obama has called the greatest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

BP's attempts so far to cap the well and plug the leak on the seabed a mile below the surface haven't worked, while the start of the Atlantic hurricane season this week indicates storms in the Gulf may disrupt other efforts.

"The worst-case scenario is Christmas time," Dan Pickering, the head of research at energy investor Tudor Pickering Holt & Co. in Houston, said. "This process is teaching us to be skeptical of deadlines."

As for the Feds, it seems the memo regarding how unutterably important this situation is has, at long last, penetrated the farthest reaches of government. President Obama has been speaking about it on a daily basis, and his administration has announced the launching of a criminal probe into BP's actions before and after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

That's great, for what it's worth, which isn't much at all if you're a fish, bird, whale or Gulf Coast human whose livelihood is drowning in crude. It's all just words. As for actions? Well, never fear, because the Feds have met with "Titanic" and "Avatar" director James Cameron to brainstorm on how to stop the leak.

No, really. James Cameron, underwater filming expert, has been cut into the loop. One could take this as an indication of the all-hands-on-deck attitude being taken in order to end this crisis, but I hear this and just want to put my head in the oven. Mud to fill the hole, and now movie directors to save the day. You really can't make this stuff up.

Hurricane season began on Tuesday, the saw got stuck, and the end of August is more than 70 days away. Christmas is too massive to contemplate, but contemplate it we must, because we are down to raisins with this thing. ++


Egypt opens Gaza border — for those already cleared
Miret El Naggar, McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/03/95313/amid-gaza-health-crisis-patients.html

RAFAH, Egypt — They arrived at the border by the busload: amputees and people with other disabilities by the dozens, in wheelchairs pushed by family members or friends. Others approached on crutches and canes, and many had patches over their eyes or head bandages and had to be guided by relatives.

They were Palestinians from Gaza, taking advantage of Egypt's decision to lift the blockade that it maintains jointly with Israel. They had come to Egypt for medical care, fleeing what U.N. officials call a public health shambles in Gaza.

At a busy checkpoint arrival hall Mohamed Hamdy sat in a wheelchair, waiting to cross the border and be taken to Cairo's Palestine Hospital for medical treatment.

Hamdy, 37, painted a bleak picture of the state of health care in Gaza. "A sick person going to a hospital in Gaza winds up dead," he said.

Hamdy's right leg was amputated, his left leg suffers from nerve atrophy and he has four pieces of shrapnel in his abdomen, injuries sustained during last year's Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israeli soldiers.

A member of the Gazan military police, he said he was one of only two men in his 120-member unit to survive a strike by an Israeli F-16 jet fighter.

Hamdy could be considered lucky, however, since the Hamas government, which seized control of the coastal strip in 2007, had issued the necessary form referring him to an Egyptian hospital, where he said he'd had 38 surgeries so far.

On Thursday, 577 Palestinians crossed into Egypt, while 153 were sent home because they didn't have the official papers, Egyptian border officials told McClatchy.

"It's only fair to say there is a public health care crisis in Gaza," Chris Dennis, a spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, told McClatchy. He said that the main hospital in Gaza — where 80 percent of the population lives on aid — was running one elevator, had limited fresh water supply and was battling with frequent power cuts.

Thousands of Palestinians lined up at the border after Egypt announced this week that it's opening its borders after a deadly Israeli raid on a flotilla that was carrying aid to the besieged territory, where an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians live in grim conditions.

Though pharmaceuticals are stockpiled in Gaza's drugstores, many people at the border complained that they'd been misdiagnosed or had been given medication to ease pain instead of curing their ailments. All of those McClatchy interviewed said they were coming to Egypt looking for better health care.

"I have a lump at the back of my head, and I don't know what it is," said Zeinab Selim, 57, who sobbed as she clutched her medical reports. She and her husband had been coming every day to the border since it opened Tuesday hoping to enter Egypt for medical care. Selim said her husband suffered from a fracture in his left thigh and soreness in his back.

"We benefit nothing from visiting the doctors in Gaza. And the pain never goes away," Selim said. They were both sent home again Thursday because they didn't have the necessary permits.

Another woman, Islah Eissa, 40, said she'd spent five years going to doctors in Gaza to no avail. Finally she was authorized to go to Egypt, where doctors determined that she had rheumatoid arthritis, which had severely worsened after years of neglect.

Mahmoud Fayed, an orthopedist at an government hospital in Egypt, Nasser Institute, where many Palestinians are referred, confirmed that he'd treated several cases in which misdiagnosis or neglect was apparent.

The World Health Organization said this week that medical equipment urgently needed in Gaza had been piling up for a year waiting for clearance from Israel. These include CT scanners, X-ray machines, fluoroscopes, infusion pumps, medical sterilization gases, laboratory equipment, UPS (uninterrupted power supply) batteries and spare parts for support systems such as elevators.

One U.N. official put the value of the equipment at $20 million.

"It is impossible to maintain a safe and effective health care system under the conditions of siege that have been in place now since June 2007," Tony Laurance, the head of the WHO's office for Gaza and the West Bank, said in the statement. "It is not enough to simply ensure supplies like drugs and consumables. Medical equipment and spare parts must be available and be properly maintained."

Hossam Abu Safiyah, a Palestinian pediatrician in Gaza, confirmed that the hospitals were suffering not only from a lack of supplies but also from a lack of training.

"A surgeon, for instance, needs to attend conferences, do workshops and work with his hands. It is not enough to read on the Internet," Abu Safiyah said. He added that before the siege doctors frequently attended medical conferences in Egypt and abroad. "All that ended after the borders were sealed."

Israel has come under strong international criticism for insisting on the blockade, while Egypt is being pressured by its neighbors and population to open its borders with the Gaza Strip.

Since the border opened, there's been a steady flow of humanitarian aid across the border into Gaza. The latest Thursday were 28 electric generators and 250 tents, donated by the Egyptian Red Crescent. ++


Through the Looking Glass: The Myth of Israeli Exceptionalism
Michael Gould-Wartofsky, HuffPo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-gouldwartofsky/through-the-looking-glass_b_596704.html

Share Comments 149 In the bloody wake of the Mavi Marmara, with its righteous torrent of international outrage, and in view of a new confrontation impending at sea, a point of vital importance has gone missing. It is one that many Jews and many Gentiles grasp, but do not name.

It is the myth of Israeli exceptionalism, and its contradictions go to the heart of the radical disconnect between world opinion - including growing swathes of Jewish and Israeli opinion - and the actions of the war party in Israel and in the United States. Yet most of us still see the conflict through the lens of some exceptionalism, as if through Alice's looking glass.

Exceptionalism is the ideology that holds that one's country is above and beyond any other in the world, more righteous, more holy, and others less so. The late, great, Jewish American historian Howard Zinn wrote an essay in 2005 on "The Myths of American Exceptionalism":

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history. This was often accompanied from early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the idea that [our] expansion is divinely ordained.

Exceptionalism is an ideology propagated by the power elites of two nations of vastly different proportions and histories - Israel and the U.S. - but each declaring a divinely manifest destiny, each justifying a permanent state of exception, each engaging in extrajudicial assassinations and occupations, each with its second-class humanities and "internal enemies."

It is ideas like exceptionalism - and the grim realities of the state of exception - that enable nation-states to defend policies of expansionism, violations of international law, the dispatching of international activists. All the more so for young states with centuries of colonialism etched into the land and consciousness.

Through the looking glass, even for those who still have eyes to see (and who haven't, say, had eyes shot out of their sockets, as did Jewish American art student Emily Henochowicz at a West Bank protest this week), it can be hard to tell myth from fact, ideology from history.

The looking glass of exceptionalism comes in lenses of many colors, many brands:

* For the Israeli apparatchik: The State of Israel, as protector of the Jews and "the only democracy in the Middle East," has an inalienable right to use overwhelming, disproportionate force against its foes. All Jews must stand with it at all times under all circumstances. The genuine rights of the Jews, as a historically oppressed people, become the state's right to [fill in the blank].

* For the anti-Zionist activist: Israel is an exceptionally evil, exceptionally powerful entity, a "barbaric" nation among supposedly "civilized nations." And "Israel," by which many activists equate the people and the state, is facing exceptional payback. Their actions now run the gamut from boycotts to firebombs, which tactics can also fan the flames of anti-Semitism.

* For the anti-Semitic opportunist: The real problem is the "Jewish problem." This exceptionally problematic people must either be liquidated or, as Ann Coulter put it, "perfected." Zionism is a codeword for Judaism, "the Zionists" for "the Jews," much as "the Reds" used to be. Anti-Semitic crimes worldwide have surged since the invasion of Gaza. And what now, with Stars of David burning in the streets?

* For the American pundit-politician: Through the looking glass of American exceptionalism and paternalism, the conflict provides a civilizational rallying point and a spectacle to sell to the public. "America and her ally, Israel, are waiting for your response," writes Sarah Palin in a Facebook note to President Obama, while VP Biden, on Charlie Rose, just wants to know, "So what's the big deal?"

(Witness the conflict's nature as spectacle, as blood and circuses for the masses, in the immediate evaporation of Middle East coverage amid news of Al and Tipper's divorce.)

For the Jewish peacenik, on the other hand, the State of Israel is inherently neither more righteous nor less righteous than other nation-state with a history of colonialism and partition, war and occupation. Yet the weight of Jewish history confers a special responsibility on the Jew, who, of all people, ought to know how uncivilized even the most "civilized" nations can become.

James Baldwin penned the following provocative lines in 1967: "The Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man - for having become, in effect, a Christian...He is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't."

A new generation of Jews, as hawk-turned-dove Peter Beinart has observed, is refusing to accept this moral assimilation, for which ideologies of exceptionalism are but a mask. Many of them joined demonstrations this week in New York and Tel-Aviv. More and more refuse to see the conflict through the looking glasses of exceptionalism, through the blinders of extreme nationalism and tribalism.

Our generation and others must now chart a course towards the only safe harbor there is: An end to the blockade. An end to all forms of terror. A port of peace and freedom. A beginning. ++


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The Movement to Smother Solidarity -- From Israel to Ethiopia to Honduras
Johann Hari, London Independent via HuffPo
June 4, 2010
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-movement-to-smother-s_b_600489.html

Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or color or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterized at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful."

You can criticize Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists -- and they are trying to give it the force of law.

Let's look at how this is being imposed in three parts of the world I have reported from: Israel/Palestine, Ethiopia, and Central America. Everyone now knows the Israeli navy committed a machine-gun massacre on a ship in international waters that was carrying humanitarian aid for the blockaded people of Gaza, who Israeli officials joke they have "put on a diet". The boat was armed with Holocaust survivors, Nobel Peace Laureates, food, medicine, cement to rebuild bombed-out homes, and a couple of metal bars that were grabbed at when armed gunmen illegally boarded the boat. Several of the photos released by the IDF "proving" there were other weapons there have already been exposed as old images that have been on the web for years. Some even still had tags on them identifying them as having been taken in 2003.

But how many people know that the Israeli government is slowly obstructing and silencing the organizations within Israel that are trying to get the country on to a saner and safer path? Israel has some of the most admirable peace campaigners in the world -- people who remember the lessons of Jewish history and so document every abuse against human rights their government commits. But they are now facing -- as Daniel Sokatch, the director of the pro-peace New Israel Fund, puts it -- "a coordinated effort to stifle dissent and shut down the human rights community in Israel".

It began a year ago. The Israeli government and military refused to co-operate with the UN's investigation into the war on Gaza, but the Israeli human rights groups did. When it was published, authored by a Jewish judge, it proved to be a meticulous and accurate documentation of what happened: it rightly also condemned Hamas's war crime of indiscriminately firing rockets at Israeli civilians. But rather than face up to what their leaders had done, many Israelis decided to attack the messenger by declaring the report's criticisms were down to the "fifth columnists" who had "collaborated" with the UN.

The feverish protests -- depicting the human rights groups' leaders as horned demons or Hamas flunkies -- focused on one fact: they receive some of their funding from European governments. The Israeli government announced this was an "unacceptable infringement" on "Israel's autonomy." At a Knesset hearing, one of the human rights groups' foremost critics demanded to know: "What right do they have to criticize the Israeli government?"

A new law is being passed that would strip any group receiving a shekel from other governments of their tax-exempt status, and require them by law to describe themselves as paid agents of a foreign government every time they made a public statement. Their leaders have been arrested and detained on several occasions. Some Israeli politicians are calling for further restrictions still. There is, of course, a comical double standard here: the Israeli settler-right is drenched in money from the US, but there is no suggestion of restricting them.

But this argument -- why should outsiders be allowed to criticize us? -- is being used more and more as a reason for governments and groups to thwart human rights campaigns. In Ethiopia, the government of Meles Zenawi passed a law last year requiring all human rights groups to receive 90 per cent of their funding from within the country itself. It's cleverer than a ban - it sounds less authoritarian - but it has the same effect. As I saw earlier this year, the organizations that were rescuing little girls from having their vaginas hacked out, or being kidnapped and forced into life-long servitude to a "husband" they didn't want, have had to lay off almost all their staff. And there was nobody left to monitor Meles' claim to have won 99.6 per cent of the vote in the presidential election last week.

Half a world away, in Honduras, the same arguments are appearing, with the same motives. A year ago, President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and forced out of the country by a far-right military clique after making the mistake of mildly redistributing the elite's wealth to the poor. Fake elections were then held, boycotted by more than half of the population. Now the members of the peaceful National Front of Popular Resistance are being mysteriously murdered across the country, along with the journalists who try to document these crimes.

They are people like Claudia Brizuela, a left-wing talk show host, who was shot in the face in front of her two kids, aged two and eight. A Honduran government spokesman laughed when asked about this and suggested the Resistance are killing their own members "to cause trouble." The critics of these new death squads are being described as "agents" of Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales, foreign governments with "no right" to talk about Honduras.

These arguments crop up in more unexpected places. Whenever I write articles supporting the rights of Muslim women or African gays or Iranian trade unionists, I get a pepper-spray of critics claiming I am being "imperialist". It's not "your culture". You're not Muslim, or African or Iranian. Stick to your own kind. These arguments usually come from people who consider themselves to be liberal, and would be astonished to discover they are using the same arguments as the Israeli right and the Honduran junta.

But this view exaggerates cultural differences. When delegates from all over the world came together in the wake of the Holocaust to write the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they thought there would be a massive and irreconcilable row about how to define them. It didn't happen. People everywhere, it turned out, want the same basic rights -- and in every culture, there remain thugs who will try to take those rights away.

The differences between cultures are less significant than what we share. No human being wants to be tortured. No human being wants to be starved. No human being wants to be imprisoned without trial or reason. Even in cultures where these acts are normalized by some, the victims still scream and beg for it to stop. In the moment the torture begins, or the cell door slams shut, the cultural difference disappears, and the basic human desire for dignity and safety is all that remains. It is universal. It is never the "culture" of a torture victim to want the torture to continue.

So who are we to talk about Israel or Ethiopia or Honduras? We are humans, like them. Just as people there can -- and should -- oppose our Government's crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should oppose their governments' crimes against innocent people. It's called solidarity. It's one of the few things that can help the people of Gaza, or the women of Ethiopia, or the dissidents of Honduras now. Instead of sealing ourselves away behind cultural borders, we need more ships carrying hope to suffering strangers. ++

 

 

"I'm asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington ... I'm asking you to believe in yours."
~ Barack Obama

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