Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in Jerusalem on private pilgrimage, meets Netanyahu
Cornelius Hamelberg
Cornelius Hamelberg
At this juncture Nigeria is in need of much prayer and maybe some fasting too. Let's pray and hope that the ceasefire between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Boko Haram Caliphate holds, since the kidnapped Chibok girls are supposed to be released on Monday or is it rescheduled for Wednesday?
Of course there are kinds of definitions of cease-fire, there's this one by Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to the UN which goes, “ We cease and they fire!”
I do fear that President Jonathan pilgrimage is going to make the Boko Haram people see red and may even further exacerbate their determination to do evil.
General Obasanjo has appealed to APC and PDP: Don’t field Muslim-Muslim, Christian-Christian ticket ; coupled with the appeal in Dr. Gumi's Letter to Buhari all that remains to really ignite the presidential election bonfire is for General Buhari to now set off on a pilgrimage or Umrah to Mecca and the pre-election polarisation between Christianity and Islam will then be revved up the nth degree in political Nigeria.
Hopefully, the religious leaders in Nigeria will start preaching peace and continue to appeal for quiet and may it be real quiet and not just the quiet before the storm.
That's what we need the world over, some peace and quiet
From my quiet Diaspora corner,
ZALANGA SAMUEL
Samuel
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 18:11:24 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in Jerusalem on private pilgrimage, meets Netanyahu
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Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Samuel,
Although there are those who are still looking upon the Nigerian presidential elections as a merely local matter, there's still the question of outside influence, of campaign fund contributions from abroad as there are vested interests in the outcome of this election.
Let us pray
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
The Israeli occupation's malignant policies exposed in a nutshell.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2014/10/24/robert-wade/organised-hypocrisy-on-a-monumental-scale
LRB Online · 24 October 2014
Organised Hypocrisy on a Monumental Scale
Robert Wade on the Economic Occupation of the West Bank
Late last year I made my first visit to the West Bank. I’d never before been anywhere in what was once known as the Levant, between Anatolia and Egypt, though I’ve travelled in other parts of the world, as a researcher into economic and political development. Mostly I look at institutions – of all kinds and sizes – and the ways they go about their business, whether it’s the management of common resources at village level, such as grazing and irrigation, or the state-level implementation of policies on industry and technology. I visited the West Bank at the invitation of the Kenyon Institute, which arranges visits and lectures by British-based academics. As well as lecturing, I interviewed civil servants and politicians, NGO officials and owners of small factories, and travelled across much of the territory. I was struck by the development impasse in the West Bank, and by the granular details of Palestinian life under the Israeli control system: I mean daily life, at the basic level, as distinct from the high-profile feuds and negotiations with which we’re all familiar.
First, some figures. In the combined territory of Israel plus Palestine, the population of Israeli Jews is just over six million, of whom about half a million live in East Jerusalem or settlements in the West Bank. The population of Palestinian Arabs is about six million, of whom some 2.7 million live in the West Bank, 1.7 million in Gaza and 1.7 million in Israel. So the ratio of Palestinian Arabs to Israeli Jews in the combined territory is 49.8:50.2. However, two qualifications have to be made. First, the population of Palestinian Arabs living as refugees is estimated at 6.8 million, bringing the number of Palestinian Arabs to nearly 13 million. Second, within the borders of Israel plus Palestine, the Arabs in the four territories where Arabs live (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel) have little exchange with one another; they are in no sense a unit.
The West Bank’s population of 2.7 million is around a third the size of Israel’s (including Arabs), but has a much higher birthrate (though the birthrate among Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is even higher).
The average income of Jewish Israelis (at market exchange rates) is around $40,000; that of Arab Israelis $13,000; that of West Bankers $3700, and less in Gaza.
At the end of the Second World War, Jews accounted for about 34 per cent of the population of historic or British Mandate Palestine, Arabs 66 per cent; the average income of the Jews was about twice that of Arabs. Today, the population ratio is almost 50:50; the average income of Jews is about 11 times that of West Bankers. Few places in the world have a long land border with such a large average income disparity between the two sides.
Before I arrived in the West Bank I had read about the Israeli system of control. ‘The miracle is based on denial,’ Ari Shavit writes in My Promised Land. ‘Bulldozers razed Palestinian villages, warrants confiscated Palestinian land, laws revoked Palestinians’ citizenship and annulled their homeland.’ But reading about it is one thing; encountering the system at first hand is quite another.
The souk in Hebron’s old city was eerily empty, with almost no people or goods to be seen. Walking through it I noticed netting strung over the street, and looking up towards the bright blue sky was puzzled to see rubbish strewn on the netting. My hosts explained that Israeli settlers had occupied the apartments of departed Palestinians above the souk, or built new apartments on top of the Palestinians’; and from this vantage point had taken to tossing their rubbish onto the heads of passing Palestinians below. Hence the netting. I was told that a minister in the Palestinian Authority recently had a chamber pot emptied on top of her.
The souk was like a ghost town, my hosts explained, because the Israeli government had closed off most access points to Palestinians, in order to ensure that the Israeli settlers could enter and leave the city by dedicated routes, avoiding all contact with Palestinians. The main way in to the souk had a revolving steel gate guarded by an Israeli soldier. As we passed through, two men on one side had a stack of cartons of canned goods on a trolley; they lifted the cartons one by one high up over the top of the barrier, into the hands of two men on the other side, who lowered them onto their trolley, ready to move elsewhere. Think of the transaction costs of shifting those canned goods a couple of metres through the checkpoint.
The next day, on a dusty dirt road outside Nablus, with the Israeli security fence on one side and an olive grove on the other, I met two brothers walking towards the town some three kilometres away, where they lived. They had been working on their (ancestral) land on the Israeli side of the fence. The Israelis manned a gate closer to the town, they said, but opened it for only one hour in the early morning, one hour at midday and one hour in the late afternoon. If they wanted to come or go at other times they walked, or sometimes drove a tractor, several kilometres to the next gate, which had more extended opening hours. They also each needed a permit to cross the fence. The permits didn’t last long. The period varied but was commonly about two months. When it expired the men had to apply for another permit, which could take weeks. Last year they applied for a permit to cover the period for harvesting their greenhouse tomatoes, their main source of income. But it took 40 days to arrive, by which time the crop had rotted. They had two more brothers who were not allowed to cross the fence under any circumstances, because years before they had been jailed for protesting against Israeli rule.
On to a nearby herder community, where fifty households tend several thousand head of sheep and goats on barren land. Electricity lines run overhead, water and sewage pipes run below, but the herders have no access to them. They buy water from an Israeli-owned water depot some distance away. They can pay for an Israeli-owned tanker to bring water to their cistern; but it was cheaper for them to tow their own water container to the depot behind a tractor, fill it, and pull it back home. In 2008 the Israeli authorities confiscated their water container, saying it did not meet standards. Now they pay the extra for the Israeli-owned tanker delivery.
The Palestinian Hydrology Group, an NGO, has been working for more than twenty years to improve water and sanitation facilities throughout the West Bank. The Nablus office has provided toilets to fifty poor communities, including this settlement of herders. In Israeli eyes the toilets are illegal, because built without a permit. The PHG knows from experience that the chances of getting a permit are practically zero. So, backed by Spanish aid, it built quickly collapsible toilet cabins. With just a few minutes’ notice the components can be spirited out of sight and reassembled when the soldiers are gone. In Area C of the West Bank (more than 60 per cent of the territory) it is illegal even to mend a failing water cistern without a permit – which is rarely given. Solar panels would require a permit, too.
The same restrictions mean that areas A and B of the West Bank (40 per cent of the territory), where Palestinians have greater scope for self-government, cannot be connected to scale-efficient infrastructure networks for electricity and water. The areas are fragmented (ghettoised) into small enclaves surrounded by area C land, where infrastructure projects require Israeli permits, which are rarely given. This greatly increases the cost of infrastructure services and restricts their supply to most of the West Bank population.
At the other end of the socio-economic ladder, I spoke to a senior Palestinian telecommunications executive. He told me that the Oslo Accords explicitly stated that the West Bank administration had the right to establish ‘separate and independent telecommunication networks’. But the fine print said that Israel would allocate frequencies for the Palestinians (or not). Unsurprisingly, given the enveloping structure of rule, the Israeli government has not allocated anything like enough frequencies to the Palestinians, with the result that the costs of building networks in Palestine are three times higher than they otherwise would be. Palestinians are unable to access the internet or email on their phones, because Israel has not allocated the frequencies needed for 3G (for ‘security reasons’). Israel has however allocated 3G frequencies to Israeli companies serving West Bank settlers and to provide seamless telecom access to Israeli citizens moving about the West Bank.
Telecom equipment can only be brought in through Israeli ports. Several years ago the Palestinian telecom agency ordered equipment from Ericsson, identical to Ericsson equipment imported at the same time by Israel. The Israeli equipment passed through customs in two weeks; the Palestinian equipment was held for two years for ‘security checks’, all the time incurring daily storage fees. Israel also insists on the same equipment standards for Palestine as for Israel, despite the income disparity.
Israel systematically blocks Palestinian external trade with other countries (70 per cent of the West Bank’s exports are sold in Israel). The only alternatives to Israel’s ports are two land bridges to Jordan. Israel often closes one of them, and the other is often choked by insufficient infrastructure. Israel levies murky forms of protection against Palestinian products, such as health and safety standards that Palestinian producers cannot comply with. Israeli law requires a wide range of products, including pharmaceuticals, to be certified before entering Israel; but Israeli security law also typically prohibits Israeli citizens from performing inspections in the Palestinian territories. Palestinian products subject to these rules therefore cannot be sold to the Israeli market, because they cannot be inspected by Israelis before entering Israel.
Israel has steadily blocked Palestine’s bids for membership of the World Trade Organisation, despite EU support and US non-objection, so Palestine cannot bring complaints against Israel’s restrictions on its exports to the WTO dispute settlement mechanism. At the same time as Israel is unconstrained by WTO rules in its dealings with Palestinian trade, the Palestinian economy bears the brunt of the free trade policies – unrestricted imports – instituted by the Palestinian Authority in compliance with the rules of the customs union with Israel and with the prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF.
No surprise, then, that the ratio of Palestine’s exports to GDP has steadily declined over the past two decades. One need not believe in free international trade as a magic bullet for development to see that Israel’s restrictions on Palestine’s international trade – even with Israel – are a major obstacle to Palestine’s economic development.
Around 70 per cent of the Palestinian Authority’s revenue comes from customs and other fees collected by the Israelis on the PA’s behalf. The Israelis take a sizeable collection fee and pass on the balance (or not). If some Palestinians behave badly in Israeli eyes – by striking back against the occupation or pressing for membership of international organisations – they may withhold the revenue, starving the PA of funds and making it difficult to provide even minimal public services.
Universities on the West Bank can usually employ visiting academics from outside Palestine for only one month before a permit is required; the permit may take years to arrive. It is widely said among the Palestinian elite that the quality of university education is deteriorating. To get a quality university education young people must leave, but few have the resources to do so.
Everywhere I went, I encountered despair about the Palestinian Authority and its effectiveness, even allowing for the tight Israeli constraints. Some 70 per cent of the PA’s revenues goes on salaries to public officials. Members of parliament, ministers and the president pay themselves extremely generously compared to average income: their average salary is about 24 times the Palestinian average, one of the highest ratios in the world (in Lebanon it’s 15:1, in Bolivia 10:1, Saudi Arabia 5:1, USA 5:1, Norway 2:1).
I visited a shoe factory in Hebron and a soap factory in Nablus. They are both supply rather than demand-constrained; they could sell more, mainly for export, if they produced more (though the shoe factory would then have to import more materials, with all the transaction costs that would incur). But the factories are a mess, in bad need of modernisation, not just of their equipment (which would have to be imported) but in terms of layout, storage, cleanliness and lighting.
The engineers of Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau, which I studied in the 1980s, were required to spend several days a month visiting factories, coaching owners and managers on improving production layout, investing in new equipment, exploring links with foreign-invested firms in Taiwan, investigating export markets.
I asked the shoe and soap factory owners if they had received any visits or support from officials of the Palestinian Authority. They said not. Later I asked a senior official whether the PA had any industrial development coaching or extension service. Yes, he said, we have PalTrade (a trade promotion agency). I said that what I had in mind was quite different from trade promotion. Well, he said, we have a Labour Ministry which looks after work conditions in factories.
His response illustrates what happens when a state is barely able to support itself, at the mercy of its neighbour’s (un)willingness to hand over its due revenue and to allow imports and exports. Under such conditions no state can sustain a development strategy, and it is no wonder that many PA officials are focused above all on survival: both their own survival in their well-paid positions, and the survival of the power structure they benefit from. Then the Washington-Brussels Consensus – that market liberalisation is the route to development – can be used to sprinkle justification on passivity. The fact that Chinese textile makers can profitably sell nylon keffiyehs in Palestine for only 10 shekel, undercutting Palestine-made cotton scarves at 25 shekel, can be interpreted as a simple gain for consumer welfare; with the hope, inspired by the theory of comparative advantage, that redundant textile workers will find employment in higher value-added activities elsewhere. But unemployment is high and rising, especially among the young.
The restrictions that the Israeli state imposes on Palestinians in the West Bank (to say nothing of Gaza, which I did not visit) are most visible in the Wall and security fence, which divides the whole length of the West Bank, including deep intrusions to annex additional land for Israel. But the restrictions also cover the movement of people, the import and export of goods and services, investments, and access to basic infrastructure (electricity, water, sanitation). They are so pervasive and systematic that it almost seems as if the Israeli state has mapped the entire Palestinian economy in terms of input-output relations, right down to the capillary level of the individual, the household, the small firm, the large firm, the school, the university, so as to find all possible choke points, which Israeli officials can tighten or loosen at will.
Under these circumstances – which I’m happy to say I have never encountered elsewhere – political and economic development is barely possible. In November 2013, the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said: ‘We can talk seriously about a political settlement with the Palestinians when their per capita GDP reaches $10,000 – not a day before that’ (because only then will Palestinians have enough at stake genuinely to want peace). This expresses organised hypocrisy on a monumental scale. Until Palestine has substantial sovereignty, including control over borders and natural resources, the conditions for a ‘political settlement’ will be postponed indefinitely, and the region will remain a generator of conflicts feeding larger regional conflicts – indefinitely.
Still, even within narrow constraints, the Palestinian Authority or its successor could do more than at present to foster economic development. For example, it could give higher priority to industry and agriculture, and less to ‘services’ (including the salaries of public officials). It could create a public-private-NGO agency to perform the same functions as Taiwan’s Industrial Development Bureau and its agricultural equivalent. The Occupied Territories now get more non-military aid per person than just about anywhere else in the world, through multilateral, US and European channels. Aid donors could do more to steer the allocations in more productive directions, and press the Palestinian Authority not to use aid money as an excuse for constructing a social compact with Palestinian citizens. They could press international organisations like the WTO and the International Olive Council to admit Palestine as a member. But in the end, firms, universities, pension funds and NGOs must mount sustained pressure on the US and Israeli governments to change their joint operating premise, ‘a sovereign Palestinian state eventually, but not now’.
Robert Wade is professor of political economy at the LSE, and winner of the 2008 Leontief Prize in Economics.
ZALANGA SAMUEL
You see, I grew up poor in Northern Nigeria with the “talakawas” in a rural community. I come from one of those that Mahmood Mamdani calls "subjects" and not citizens. I have made a commitment that I will always identify with those on the wrong side of history. Such people have been treated like sandals by the rich and powerful to use prophet Amos’ words. Such oppressed people need to have a voice. What amazes me in your analysis below is that it is history without any human, moral and ethical compass in the sense that JUSTICE did not figure very much as a central issue in the way you conceptualize the relationship between Israel and Palestinians. Zimbardo has a warning when he analyzes his prison experiment. And the warning is that often people focus on violent acts and ignore or fail to explain the process that led to the commitment of the violent act. I think in my view, you committed that error. I agree with you that the Palestinians engaged in violence, but that is not where our analysis should start. In effect you, you seem to just want them to embrace whatever “truth” Israel decides to propagate, but as I have clarified, there are Rabbis in Israel opposed to the way Israel treats the Palestinians. Check the documentary film “Israel vs. Israel.” Those Rabbis that care of the humanity of Palestinians have made Judaism more admirable and universal than those that blindly assume their God gave them land and He treats all people they are against as his enemies.
Boko Haram is on the surface a religious organization but for me, it is not a
religious organization. It is a product of mis-governance and injustice in the
way Nigeria, and in particular Northern Nigeria was governed. Indeed if you
grew up in the North, you would not be surprise why they target Western education.
The simple identifier of all the people that mess up their country or their
lives is Western education which enable people to get access to government
position and power, which is used for private enrichment to the detriment of
the masses. Seen from this perspective, there is nothing surprising about Boko
Haram targeting that. And access to good Western education is not open to all
in Nigeria.
Note that the northeast and especially Yobe and Borno area has one of the lowest human development indicators in the world. Statistically speaking, it is better to be a cow in Europe than to be a kind of human being there because the EU subsidizes each farmer's cow not less than $2:50 per day. In some parts of Europe it is more than that. Is that what God intended for this people to be their lives? No, No, and No. It is a humanly created condition. The European cow at least is relevant in the global economy because it produces some that is in demand and therefore useful: milk, beef, cheese, and skin. Many people in Yobe and Borno are not relevant even in Nigeria in such a way as the cow is in Europe, talk less of the global economy.
You
are interested in focusing on the violence of Boko Haram, ISIS or Palestinians,
suggesting as if as a specie of human beings, there is something wrong with
them inherently. You ignored the historical genealogy of the crisis, the events
that gave birth to such violence. If Boko Haram was just a question of Islam,
why is it that Sokoto State is very peaceful and that is the seat of the former
Sokoto Caliphate? Sokoto people are Muslims too. The difference between the way
you look at the situation and the way I do is that you see the violence of
these groups as the beginning of the analysis and for me, I see it as a
particular moment in a long trajectory of historical violence.
It is amazing that you relied on what the Prime Minister of Israel said
ignoring the fact that people like him want peace but on their own terms. For
people like him, contrary to what the Bible said, Palestinians are not created
in the image of God. Frankly, for people like him, the Palestinians need to go
and get their own God who will presumably love them and give them land. I
cannot belong to any religion that denies the humanity of another person. Palestinians
are not against peace, but even in struggling for peace, there has to be
justice. Will you be happy if your ancestors are killed or eliminated because
supposedly God who is all loving and created all equal decided that the land
your ancestor are living on has been given to others because they are chosen. Or would you be happy if the government of Sweden
forced you out of your house because historically the land was given to some
people by a God who does not care about your situation now but cares about His
people. This may sound simple, but this is exactly what is happening in the
Palestinian crisis. If we apply the logic of reasoning in Israel, how far back
in history do we want to go back to know the real people who are entitled to a
land. I am a Christian but I am not going to accept this kind of teaching.
Being a Christian does not mean I should not think -- in this case, I am so
much in agreement with Mark Knoll who wrote "The
Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," which is that the mind is not there.
People just accept what they are told because of the authority of the person
who said.
I am not sure that the world cares so much about democracy as such. True democracy
will turn things upside down for elites even in the United States. What the
masses may democratically want might go against what the elites want. So there
is a way in which people pay lip service to true democracy. Neoliberals are more concerned with governments
that create order and predictable conditions for market relations to thrive. There
is nothing that says capitalism can only flourish in a democracy. There are
many democracies that are dysfunctional for capitalism. That is why the Beijing Consensus is embraced and that
is why in spite of all that Kagame is, many in the West are happy with him,
because he produces results that are good for the market. Anyone that takes the
current form and substance of democracy in Nigeria seriously is not serious and
honest about the pain of the masses. We are not interested in virtual democracy
and elections that do not count much in terms of truly communicating the
yearnings of the "Wretched of the Earth" in Nigeria.
The closeness of Nigerian relations with Israel means nothing in terms of the
lives of ordinary Nigerians because what is key to Nigeria's future and
development is in the hands of Nigerians and not some people chosen by God in
another part of the world. No offense is intended. In any case, anyone who
studies human anthropology well knows that the God of Israel is not the only
type of God that has been conceptualized by human beings in history and even
the conception of God among the Israelites changed from the time of Abraham to
their enslavement in Egypt, conquest of the so-called promised land and their
captivity in Babylon. Indeed, if the book of Genesis was written during the
time of Abraham, it would have been different but it was written during the
captivity in Bablyon and the historical event and experience of the captivity
shaped the writing of the Torah.
And
there WILL never be an agreement on one single conception of God. As Hobbes
said in the Leviathan, human beings are never going to agree on the ultimate purpose
of life and even if they agree on that, they will never all agree on the means
to achieve or realize that. If there is one conception of God in a whole
society, check the history and you will see how some violence and hegemonic
strategies were used to enforce that. One ancient Greek philosopher said that
if cows had the ability to worship and imagine God, their conception of a God
will be one that is a cow or is cow form.
All the examples of violence you cited are creations of certain historical
processes. When the whole is not governed justly and fairly, the masses will
rise, and depending on their social contexts and resources at their disposal,
they will frame their struggle differently and use different strategies. I
regret the use of violence anywhere but we should also remember as Barrington
Moore, Jr. said, sometimes even when there is peace, there is violence on the
part of the elites against the masses to maintain the peace, but we ignore that.
If you compare the Zapatista rebellion and the workers uprising in Argentina,
you will see that they are all struggling for justice but because the contexts
differ, the strategies used are also different.
If
Boko Haram was not killing people, if they had framed their struggle around
JUSTICE for all, Jonathan's government or any government for that matter would
be history by now in Nigeria. Do you know how Nigerians feel the pain of the
current situation? I would argue the same thing applies to the Niger Delta
struggle in Nigeria, which should have been framed as a question of justice and
not simply one of small group rights. Many people identified with Martin Luther
King Jr. because there is a way he framed the civil rights struggle as justice
question for all humanity. The strategies he and his followers used used
compelled many outside the U.S. and even privileged people in the U.S. to
deeply reflect and concede that he had a point. In effect there was some kind
of universalism to his vision for humanity.
Christianity is used to condone injustice in the case of the Middle East
because often many care less about the historical forces that put the
Palestinians in their present situation. They are simply not CHOSEN by God. The
God of the Old Testament presumably created everyone but then He abandoned some
human beings and treated them like trash, because he favored His people. And
presumably we should not raise concern about that because He is Sovereign. Is
it not easy to screw up the lives of people and then hide behind your God to
say it is justified?
Interestingly,
historically, on many occasions when the Israelites were treated badly, they
fought and complained about it. They did not put down their arms against their
conquerors. They lamented their captivity in Babylon, as saw the event as
injustice. But presumably, the Palestinians should not feel bad, they should
just drop their arms, and Israeli elites and those powers that support them
should dictate the terms. What you ignored is the settlements that Netanyahu
order to be built ignoring the concerns of the Palestinians. The Peace that
Israel is looking for is not one of the full recognition of all human beings on
the same level. Beneath the surface is the belief in their entitlement.
By The Rivers of Babylon is a song of
great lamentation about how the people of Israeli appropriately felt the pain
of how they were treated as not ends in themselves or full human beings but as
means to someone's ends. They lamented the fact that their history had been
violently and callously stolen away from them. To take away people's agency to
shape their destiny is one of the worst types of human violence (see J.M.
Blaut's “THE COLONIZER's MODEL OF THE WORLD”).
The history of many of our people in Africa, and in my case in Nigeria, has been violently arrested by a morally and ethically bankrupt elite that lines its pocket but dresses in big “agbada” suit and necktie and pretends it is honest i.e. that they are men and women of God GENUINELY concerned about the struggles of the least amongst us. This is unacceptable. And my prayer is that a generation will rise up that will contest the hegemony of this arrogant elite whose courage is just to pursue what St. Augustine calls "libido dominandi" i.e., the lust to conquer. They lack humility and compassion. They are unable to see the humanity of the other. But they want us to respect them. Yet even in traditional African culture, you do not just demand respect, you have to behave as an elder in a manner that commands that respect. Being an elder or leader comes with responsibility.
Like the people of Israel “By the Rivers of
Babylon,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu7scpmY9iU
Palestinians and all oppressed people have the right to sing their song of
defiance and lamentation. Do not talk peace without talking about justice and
the historical conditions that created the injustice. Do not focus on violence
without looking at the conditions that created it. At least Frantz Fanon saw
how given the oppression of colonialism it necessitated violence on the part of
the colonized. Indeed, under some conditions he even saw violence as performing
a therapeutic function to the oppressed. It is unfortunate that we have elites
who think they are free but they are slaves because they can only be who they
think they are through the existence of the oppressed. Without the oppressed,
they feel they are nobody, indicating their self-identity is contingent on the
existence of the slave or the oppressed. In this case, they are not as
independent as they think.
One of the greatest challenges in the 21st century is to fight against how
religion is used in a sophisticated way to condone oppression. I have never
hidden my conviction about the misuse of religion, especially in Nigeria. There
is good evidence in sociology about how people’s beliefs and how religion can transform
society. But the transformation is not automatically good or bad, rather it
depends or it is contingent on many factors. Below is a piece I wrote that got
published in SUNDAY TRUST:
Samuel
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:52:40 -0700
From: cornelius...@gmail.com
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in Jerusalem on private pilgrimage, meets Netanyahu
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Samuel,
Sure, we know all about Fanon, Malcolm X, Dr. King, the ANC, Paulo Freire, Aminu Kano, etc. etc.
In explaining the causes of their distress, you come dangerously close to justifying Boko Haram's acts of savagery inflicted on their own people of Nigeria, in the name of Justice?!?
Let me assure you that I am fully acquainted with all the Palestinian positions, fully acquainted with the history of that part of the Middle East from Arab, Muslim and Palestinian sources and this includes the history of the Crusades. I have very good friends who are Palestinians who are very close to Hamas which was founded in 1987, who are close to Fatah, other friends who are close to Hezbollah, and that once upon a time I had excellent connections with Iran and some Iranian diplomats. In other words you are not about to brief me about background, but may do so about latest developments that ordinary folks like us are not privy to – and when I say ordinary folks like us, I include those who have PhDs in Middle East history and politics including people like Dennis Ross and Aaron David Miller , not to mention the late Arafat's rabbi and other like minded uncle tom rabbis like Rabbi Weiss & co of Neturei Karta – but not the Satmar Rebbe....
So, I take offence at your amazement and these words that you threw at me: “What amazes me in your analysis below is that it is history without any human, moral and ethical compass in the sense that JUSTICE did not figure very much as a central issue in the way you conceptualize the relationship between Israel and Palestinians.”
I don't know what analysis you are talking about nor am I aware that I made any analysis in this thread , since for me, the centre of gravity of this thread and indeed the subject matter of the original posting itself, is not the Arab-Israel conflict but the significance of President Goodluck Jonathan's latest pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I have no doubt that he is a holy man, a man of peace and very religious - but I still have some difficulty imagining President Barack Obama (another holy man and Nobel Peace Laureate) setting off on such frequent pilgrimages to Israel even though his Bible Belt constituency in America holds greater sway over US politics than Christianity holds sway in Nigerian politics. Particularly, considering that at least 60 % plus of the Nigerian electorate is Muslim.
I am very cautious about “God gave his land to His People” when addressing contemporary Palestinian suffering or Palestinian terrorism/ liberation struggle call it what you will, as an opening argument. And this is out of bitter experience, this is because the 11th January, 2014, the day that Ariel Sharon passed on to the Hereafter was a Sabbath and I did not know that he had passed away. The Sabbath was over, I was about to do the Havdala at about 16.20 when the front door bell rang – it was a young Swedish man who I had known since he was a baby – and his Palestinian wife from Ramallah where they had been living for some years – it was from her that I then learned that the bulldozer had gone to the Hereafter and at that point I was feeling very moved. I don't know how it started but suddenly we were knee deep in discussing the Israel versus Palestinians issue and I don't know exactly when I found myself saying - maybe shouting “The Almighty gave the land to His Chosen People isn't that what all the fighting is about? ” at which point my friend's wife burst into tears and with the tears still flowing they were reeling off their catalogue of daily humiliations at the checkpoints etc. and asking me whether all this was justified because God gave the land to His people Israel?
Relations were a little strained after that but all is now healed and they were at my Better half's birthday party this past Saturday....
It's good that you quote the Hebrew Prophet Amos, another champion of the oppressed.
The crux of the problem is the argument that runs through the Hamas Covenant/ Charter the centrepiece of which is to be found in their uncompromising Article 11 which is based on the idea of conquest all going back to Umarr Ibn al Khattab's conquest of 638 (of the common era)
Here's Confronting Violence in the Name of God a very recent lecture by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of the same spiritual ancestry as Amos and the other prophets of the Jewish Bible.
My blog update will be taking up the latest developments with the Swedish government which is currently suffering from illusions of grandeur...
The Swedish government wants to play “God”
Sincerely
Cornelius
...
ZALANGA SAMUEL
Samuel
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 14:54:41 -0700
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Samuel,
My hope and prayer is the same as yours - “that we will continue to all work together for the struggle for a more just society” for us all.
Your humility in the face of what I review as my arrogance, has put me to shame. Humility always wins in the end. Humility is a sign of greatness.
I say ”review” and unfortunately that was after I had pushed the send button – so the bird that flew out of my mouth cannot return except with my apologies. I apologise. I was feeling annoyed because I felt you were painting me (to the whole pan African serve list) as an unfeeling Zionist brute deriving joy from torturing poor, innocent Palestinians. So I had to restore at least some semblance of dignity. Well, whenever I would say “the poor Palestinians“, my best friend (born and bred in China of Jewish Lithuanian parents - now late moved to Israel in 1953 at the age of thirty five, after the communists took over in China ) - he would say to me, “You are an anti-Semite !”
(I went to collect him for the Purim festival some fifteen years ago - we were already late when the taxi arrived so I asked him to sit at the back of the taxi - being not the kind of man who's used to taking orders, at least not from me, he refused. Could you please fasten your seatbelt, I politely requested of him him and he told me to shut up. ( He loved Chopin, baked his own bread and was good on the Chinese piano) As we moved on I started chatting with the taxi driver who looked familiar and as we chatted on he causally told the front seat passenger that he was “ from Palestine” at which point my dear friend Mikhail frantically reached for his seat belt – as if otherwise a suicide bomb was going to to rip us and the taxi apart. The taxi (färdtjänst) was going to collect one more passenger, an old Polish lady so I went up to get her as we were in a hurry, as she got into the back seat with me she greeted the front seat passenger “Shalom Mikhail!” - ah – the cat was now out of the bag - and Dr. Tunkel fastened his seatbelt even more securely. We drove on in silence – not a word more was said until we arrived at our destination....
You say that “ If what happened against the Palestinians was committed by a Black African leader, he would have been characterized as committing crime against humanity.” Yes, I guess that if our dear President Goodluck Jonathan were to mete out the same response to Boko Haram's wanton acts of savagery the ISIS guys would be talking about crimes against humanity that the infidel president Goodluck Jonathan was committing.
Incidentally, Israel is now demanding that the UN declare Hamas a TERRORIST ORGANISATION
The Palestinians need someone like the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King - sit-ins not terror Molotov cocktails. Terrorism is not going to result in a Palestinian state, ever. At best it will only lead to more destruction of the kind you see going on everywhere where the terrorists are operating.
There's so much hypocrisy in the United States of America and very few of the pro Palestinians who are as sympathetic to the fate or the cause of the Indigenous American people many of whom are still living in culture reservations.
Indeed the struggle to establish the Kingdom of God on mother earth continues and in the words of the old Kabbalistic prayer, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven....le'olam va'ed"
Sincerely,
Cornelius