Jenka's journal

in portland, oregon -- immigration raids, equality and humanity

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 07:41:09 GMT

it is at times like these when i just feel so angry.....
seething seems like the right word for how i feel.

when immigrations officials in all their white trucks can just sweep into town and sweep up......

sweep up families, mothers and fathers and sons, breaking them apart again, turning their lives upside down...

and for what?

so that bush can say he's being 'tough on illegal immigrants', by putting them in prison and deporting them back to what used to be home.....

but what used to be home is now subdivided and sold, and the land they once farmed is now turned into factories, or owned by the ones that own everything now, and put fences up to keep out the people who lived there before.

and in risking everything by crossing that deadly border, in order to send money back home, they have risked this possibility too......

that immigrations and customs enforcement would carry out the largest raid in recent oregon history, as they did today, and pull people out of their place of employment, in this case the del monte fruit company, pack them into buses and send them back down south.......

and the white people sit back and say, yes, well, but they _are_ undocumented, after all......

and that smugness is what makes me so angry -- how dare they sit back in their privilege and judge these southern brothers and sisters? how dare they? i seethe in my anger -- these european-americans whose grandparents or great grandparents arrived in this country just as 'undocumented' as these mexicans, salvadoreans and guatemalans of today. yet they would deign to judge their brethren, consider them 'illegal' just for being here -- how dare they?

what gives anyone the right to think that they are better than anyone else, for any reason, at any time? it's so wrong! yet, this is what makes this country tick -- this smug privilege, where people who were born into privilege refuse to see it as anything but an invisible birthright that just somehow 'is', and then judge the desperate actions of those who weren't born into such lucky circumstances. argh! I could just burst with this seething ...... seeing bush or anyone of his cadre just makes me boil -- that overprivileged caste from which they all come, blinding them to the reality of the millions -nay, billions - that they are stepping on to keep that privilege afloat.

i picture an image from the film qoyanisqaatsi, in which a group of copper miners in south america are carrying bag after bag of muddy, dripping copper up single-file muddy paths from the mines, carrying the bags on their heads, sweat mixing with mud and rain and copper until it is just a wash of brown.... and in the midst of it -- if you aren't watching closely, it is easy to miss, because the workers don't miss a beat -- there is a human body being carried up, above the heads of two workers, looking almost like just another bag of copper...a fellow worker, no doubt, who died or collapsed in the mines.....

how dare we give so little value to that man's life, or to the lives of any of those hardworking men, carrying loads like that day after day for years, so that we can have our copper faucets, copper pipes, copper pennies -- and that's just one tiny component of all the raw materials that make up this industrial society......

i know, if you read my journal, you've heard this before, but unless this society can realize the full connection to the sources of all of the things that we use in our lives, we are bound to be engaging in exploitation -- from the mining of the raw materials, to the manufacturing of the goods, to the shipping, buying, selling -- there is exploitation at every step of the process.

and all of those people being stepped on at every stage, they are all people, who deserve the same rights as every single one of us.

and it's not just the 200 women and men that got yanked out of portland, in front of all our eyes, on this day.......
the kids are still being killed there in palestine.....in iraq....afghanistan, in the congo, in sierra leone, in kashmir.....
and those kids are every one of them just as adorable and deserving of life as my own two sweet nieces.....
so how can so many americans just look down and see them as different and somehow less equal

it makes me so mad.

and then, when i called the reporter from the local newspaper who, just a few weeks ago, did an expose of this delmonte plant that was raided today .... this reporter who applied for a job there and worked side by side with these workers (not telling the bosses, of course, that she was a reporter)......who wrote up her scathing indictment of the factory's conditions along with stories of the people who worked there next to her but were afraid to speak out because they were without work documents.....

well, despite her bleary ramblings about her 'fellow workers' in the article she wrote, seemed entirely unconcerned when i reached her at her high-and-mighty reporter's desk after the raid. defensive and curt, there was no emotional connection to the workers she had written so highly about....no worry in her voice about how dear maria's five kids would be able to cope without their mom tonight, and every single night to come, or how jose's sick brother-in-law would pay his bills now that poor jose had been scooped up into immigration jail.....
no, this reporter who wrote with such feeling three weeks ago was now off on another tip, obviously considering herself and her work much more important than those workers she so gladly exploited for a scoop just a few weeks ago.

....and people wonder why i can't stand the corporate media.....

that kind of arrogant blundering -- without even an awareness or the tiniest bit of concern that the people she had worked next to were now shivering in cold concrete cells with no hope to be reunited with their families ever again in their lifetimes....

that's what really, really makes me seethe
at times like these.

bloodbath in gaza

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 16:19:54 GMT

6 june 2006
palestine

the scenes we are watching on palestine tv right now are horrific......a pile of bodies on the sandy beach in gaza, emergency crews stumbling, tripping over the sand, running out of stretchers, running toward ambulances holding the bodies of children, a small girl screaming "daddy, daddy daddy" and falling over the body of her dead father, weeping uncontrollably as the palestinian emergency crews rush past her to bring the injured to the hospital.

it is as horrific as any palestinian suicide bomb in israel -- 11 killed, 40 injured -- babies missing limbs, body parts falling off of stretchers....but will this bombing, a missile shot from an israeli naval vessel at a crowded beach full of vacationing palestinians, be put on the front page of the washington post? or reported on CNN? will this child who lost her father be interviewed by sympathetic news teams who will broadcast her story to the world? or will this broadcast on palestine tv be the only news coverage that this event will get?

today's attack reminds me of a similar one in 2002 - when a crowded apartment building in gaza was hit by an israeli missile, and two dozen family members, asleep in their beds, were blown to pieces....and is it a strange coincidence that the most brutal attacks happen just when delicate coalitions and agreements for peaceful solutions are being made? in the 2002 attack, the missile strike came just hours after all the palestinian factions had made an agreement (after months of fragile talks) to stop suicide attacks against israel. the israeli attack later that night, followed the next morning by an announcement from the US that they were increasing aid money to israel, so infuriated the palestinian factions that they called off the agreement.

and now, this blatant massacre of civilians in gaza - coming just as palestinians were on the brink of a major breakthrough regarding a document of national unity that would implicitly recognize israel -- now that chance has been shot down again by israeli violence. hamas had been going the diplomatic route, adhering since last february to a ceasefire (despite the israeli side violating the ceasefire hundreds of times since the agreement), engaging in democratic elections and peaceful methods of diplomacy. but now, faced with just the latest in a series of atrocities, the armed wing of hamas says they will no longer adhere to the cease-fire, and will resume attacks against israel.

americans are not getting the real picture of what is happening here. in the US, this conflict is portrayed as an embattled jewish nation, traumatized by the holocaust and struggling to survive, up against a sea of arabs who hate them only because they are jewish, and irrational attackers who blow themselves up in the name of allah.

but what do americans know of the palestinian people? do they know how the palestinians were pushed from their homes in 1948 to become landless refugees in crowded camps and in diaspora around the world, just so the state of israel could be created on their land? do they know that jewish refugees and survivors of the holocaust were turned away from the US and britain after world war II, because of anti-semitism in those states, and many ended up coming to the new 'jewish state' unwillingly, or unwittingly, lured by promises from leaders in the political movement known as zionism? or how the palestinians were massacred, their land stolen, their homes taken over by zionists? do americans know the history of the state of israel, pre-emptively attacking its neighbors time and again, and pushing the palestinians into smaller and smaller areas of land -- much like the 'reservation' system created for native americans in the USA? how the israeli government developed a nuclear program in secret, exposed only by the actions of one brave israeli scientist (mordechai vanunu) in the name of peace -- who was subsequently imprisoned for 27 years and still remains under house arrest - israel now has over 30 nuclear weapons, and no one in the international community has said a word. what about how the israeli military has occupied the palestinian people's land, all of it, for the last 40 years, dividing the people into checkpoint-divided enclaves, shooting at children and dropping missiles into crowded neighborhoods on a daily basis, all the while seizing more and more land for their state?

and today....a child has lost her entire family. in a single moment, her whole life has been turned into a nightmare. others have lost children, brothers, wives, mothers....throughout palestine, people are watching and crying. three days mourning has been declared throughout palestine, including a general strike. while the world's media may be trying to stoke fires of division among these beleagured people, i wish you could see the steadfastness of shop-owners, schools and businesses that will remain closed for three days - not because someone is forcing them not to open, but in mourning for the palestinians who were just killed.

and meanwhile, the israeli military trivializes the attack -- likening it to a 'work accident' and downplaying the credibility of witness accounts. these soldiers who shot the missile will never face justice. israeli soldiers never do. they can kill at will. even when the families of those killed go to great expense to bring the case to trial, in a justice system where they are 'non-persons', there is never any justice served. even in the most publicized case - the case of iman al-hams, a 13-year old girl shot down in cold blood in gaza last year, with transcripts of the sniper who killed her and the sergeant saying 'it's a small girl...shoot her....anything that moves in this area, even if its a three year old, should be shot' - even in that case, where the evidence was overwhelming that a child was being shot in cold blood, the sergeant was promoted, not punished. when israelis build settlements on palestinian land, believe me the palestinians who live there try every means to stop them -- they take it to court...but no palestinian challenge to an israeli settlement has ever won in the israeli high court....or they hold protests, marching and holding signs and banners, which the people in bil'in village and other villages have done every week for the last 16 months, despite being attacked at every protest by israeli soldiers who are brutal in putting down the peaceful demonstrations.

most palestinians are incredibly patient. as my pal seth porcello, a canadian volunteering here in palestine, wrote last week:
"According to many of the people I have talked to here, Bil'in has
become a kind of symbol for non-violent resistance in Palestine.
Their persistence and endurance in continually confronting the wall
that separates them from their land remains unshaken even while under
the most intense repression. However, while Bil'in remains a symbol
of the non-violent resistance in Palestine, it is continually in
danger of becoming a symbol for something else: the failure and
hopelessness of non-violent resistance under the longest and possibly
most brutal occupation in the world. Wagi (wa-gee), a longtime
Bil'in resident who I met at the Outpost spoke to me about this
problem. Wagi has a disabled son, who was shot with a "dum dum" bullet
by an Israeli soldier while at a protest against the wall. The
bullet shattered his spine. Another of his sons was shot in the
shoulder while sitting down during a raid of Wagi's house, and a
third is in prison for three months after attending a non-violent
protest against the wall in Bil'in. While he continues to be
committed to non-violent resistance, he spoke to me about his worry
that the youth, including his sons, would abandon non-violent
resistance as the consequences are often just as dire as those of
picking up a gun. This seems to also be true for internationals,
considering last weeks demonstration nearly claimed the life of Phil
Reese from Australia. As Wagi put it - if people are not allowed to
demonstrate peacefully, then what other option do they have but to
become violent (paraphrasing)? It is a difficult question to answer,
and one that remains a matter of personal choice two generations, and
two intifadas, into this occupation. Wagi was arrested one week
after our conversation at the friday demonstration against the wall
and is now in prison. The shelter we took at the outpost to have our
conversation is now burned to the ground. And the next demonstration
is on friday. For more information on the history of the Outpost,
you can find an audio report here:
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/9843.php"

when palestinians know that no one is hearing their mourning cries, no one is feeling their pain, no one is standing up to the power of israel to kill them at will and take their land piece by piece and imprison them into ghettoes -- how can anyone wonder why some young person would get desperate and go try to kill some israelis? of course it's not justified, there is never a justification for killing civilians, but, living without hope, occupied for generations, your children, brothers, sisters killed without any recourse, without any justice, with only silence from the world at large -- can't you understand why someone would?

and the israelis know it, too -- that's why they often arrest the family members of those who are shot in cold blood by their army, or at the very least put them on 'security lists'. my fiance saed, shot during a peaceful demonstration in 1991 and paralyzed, is one such example -- his family has been penalized for his having been shot by the israeli army. what have they done wrong? absolutely nothing. but israeli authorities feel that those whose family members were shot in cold blood may be likely to commit 'thought crimes' against the israeli government - thinking bad thoughts about the israeli soldiers that shot their loved one, for instance. and these 'thought crimes' (see george orwell's book _1984_) would be a threat to the israeli goal of complete control and submission of the palestinian population. saed's mother, a devout christian, for instance, was denied permission to go to jerusalem to pray in the church of the holy sepulchre during christmas and easter (an age old tradition among palestinian christians, dating back to the first days after christ's death) -- why? 'security reasons'. no other explanation, no way to know. but it probably has to do with the fact that her son was shot, in cold blood, and paralyzed, 15 years ago, by their soldiers -- they worry that she might take revenge. this sweet old lady, who would never harm a fly, let alone another human being, is being penalized because her son was a victim of the israeli occupation!!! isn't there something wrong with this equation?

the booming blast of artillery shells every 15 seconds, relentless, non-stop shelling for months would drive most normal people insane. imagine - no place to escape the loud booms - any one of them could hit your home, kill your family, at any moment. palestinians live in constant terror. as former US attorney-general ramsey clark said, "the palestinian people are, along with the iraqi people, the most terrorized people on earth". and when they fight back against the occupying power -- a legitimate right under international conventions -- THEY are called the terrorists.

what is a terrorist anyway? it used to be that anyone who targeted civilian populations was a terrorist. but it seems that someone who targets palestinian civilians (ie. the israeli military) is not ..... someone who targets iraqi civilians (the us and british occupying armies) are not (and if you doubt that they are targeting civilians, check this british piece about a massacre carried out in cold blood by US marines -- for which the marines have been let off, with the US government saying they did nothing wrong:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1784705,00.html ).
or how about afghani civilians? do those who kill afghanis (the US military) count as terrorists? no, it seems the definition of terrorism has changed. it is only those who kill OUR civilians, who threaten OUR 'strategic national interest' (ie. our hold on natural resources that may be in someone else's country, but are needed for americans to maintain the 'american way of life') who are 'terrorists' in the US government's view.

take for example the trans-caucasus oil pipeline - just finished -- to get oil from azerbaijan out through turkey and onward to the USA (much safer - in the US government's eyes - than the original plan, which was to route this oil out through afghanistan). this article expains how the US-trained special forces protecting this pipeline as it runs through former-soviet georgia are most concerned about 'terrorism' -- by which they do NOT mean attacks on civilians. by 'terrorism', they are specifically referring to any attempt to destroy or hinder the constant flow of oil through this pipeline into americans' gas tanks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/story/0,,1784834,00.html

oh, while i'm on the topic of afghanistan, i just wanted to point out that the war in afghanistan is far from over. death tolls are as high as they've ever been, US and british troops are perceived not as liberators but as occupiers, who have been there for nearly five years -- resentment of the foreign occupation is high, and reached a breaking point a week ago when riots broke out in kabul after a US military vehicle did a hit-and-run on a civilian in the city:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,,1785599,00.html
and kabul is supposed to be the 'green zone'! the only place in afghanistan where US and british troops have any semblance of control - the rest of afghanistan has returned to the local mafias and the taliban has steadily come back to power in most areas.

and if you have any doubt that the reason for attacking afghanistan was oil, check out this statement from US representative ron paul from texas in 2002:
"The real reason for our presence in the Persian Gulf, as well as our eagerness to assist in building a new Afghan government under U.N. authority, should be apparent to us all. Stuart Eizenstat, Under Secretary of Economics, Business and Agricultural Affairs for the previous administration, succinctly stated U.S. policy for Afghanistan testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Trade Committee October 13, 1997. He said, 'One of five main foreign policy interests in the Caspian region is to continue support for U.S. companies and the least progress has been made in Afghanistan , where gas and oil pipeline proposals designed to carry Central Asian energy to world markets have been delayed indefinitely pending establishment of a broad-based, multiethnic government.' This was a rather blunt acknowledgment of our intentions. It is apparent that our policy has not changed with this administration. Our new Special Envoy to Afghanistan , Zalmay Khalilzad, was at one time a lobbyist for the Taliban and worked for Unocal , the American oil company seeking rights to build oil and gas pipelines through northern Afghanistan . During his stint as a lobbyist, he urged approval of the Taliban and defended them in the U.S. press. He now, of course, sings a different tune with respect to the Taliban, but I am sure his views on the pipeline by U.S. companies has not changed."
(source: congressional record 2002 - http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r107:2:./temp/~r107Zo8Kbi:e7034:)

and of course there is the well-known statement from Unocal oil company before congress in 1998:
"From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company." - Mr. John J. Maresca, vice-president of international relations, Unocal Corporation Feb 12, 1998
full statement here: http://www.progressiveaustin.org/afoilpip.htm (also available in the 1998 congressional record, print version only)

sigh.....

do americans think that afghani mothers suffer less than they do when they lose their sons or daughters? or iraqi mothers? or palestinian mothers? all people suffer, all people feel the loss of a loved one with pain, anger, sorrow and rage -- this is universal.

so why be surprised that after the daily indignities, the imprisonment, the constant shelling, the taking over of their land and the killing of their children with no justice in sight, that some palestinians resort to desperate acts of violence? but to classify the israel-palestinea tit-for-tat kind of conflict (ie. you kill my children, so i'll kill yours), although that element does exist. this conflict is the strategic, planned takeover of one people's land by another people using violence, occupation, imprisonment and constant humiliation as tools -- tools used by the israeli authorities, military and civilians to completely disenfranchise the palestinians of their land.

if israel is truly a 'democracy', as they claim, then why not take down the wall, give palestinians citizenship in a state (israeli OR palestinian), and let them have the equal rights that all people are entitled to under international conventions???

but that will never happen. because by giving palestinians equal rights, by defining the borders of their nation, by removing their military from the palestinian areas, they will not be able to fulfill their stated objective (stated clearly by israeli prime minister ehud olmert in his address to the US congress several weeks ago, to thunderous applause from the american legislators) to TAKE OVER ALL of this land.

oh and btw - the gutless corporate lackeys in the us house of representatives succumbed to corporate pressure and overwhelmingly passed a bill yesterday to essentially sell off the internet to the highest bidder (321 for, 101 against), as well as wrecking public access tv. take a moment to save the internet by letting your senator know to vote against it (H.R. 5252 - the COPE Act):
http://savetheinternet.com

the internet is still a new technology - it has allowed more media democracy than television and radio put together.....just think, you wouldn't even be able to get these updates from palestine, if it weren't for the internet! let's not let them take this away, as was done with radio and television (both of which were quite democratic at their start, but were allowed to become controlled by commercial, corporate interests with the help of the US government).

and here's an op-ed my fiance saed wrote about the Israeli attack on the Gaza beach, called "The Gaza sea cries pure and dear blood":
http://www.imemc.org/content/view/19247/1/

rest in peace tom fox

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 03:16:54 GMT

i had been writing a long piece about the israeli occupation in palestine, but then i got the news that my friend, associate and fellow justice-seeker tom fox had been killed in iraq. i will send the other piece when i finish it....but i wanted to send this out now. in memory of tom:

well, many of you probably know me. but maybe you never got the chance to know tom fox. i just learned of his death -- an announcement i have been dreading, but almost expecting, since the video released last week of the christian peacemaker hostages in iraq did not include him.

they say his body had signs of torture.....that he was shot in the head and chest.....the kidnappers, some ignorant group of iraqi hotheads that knew nothing about these men, but knew only that they had captured some westerners, held them since november 25th......they released a video in late january showing the four men scared and thin in a dark room.....then another video last week showing three of the four men, but not tom.

what would tom say?
he would blame the US occupation, he would blame the US government hotheads who have created a regime exactly mimicking the regime of saddam hussein that they claim to have hated so much.

a regime in which there is utter lawlessness, and fundamentalism is on the rise, where any westerner is seen as a target because so many innocent iraqis have been killed ....his kidnappers, tom would say, were blinded by the hate brought on by the US occupation of their land. they couldn't see clearly through this hate, and they kidnapped and killed someone who could have helped them.

this is what happens, tom would tell us, when people do what they hate.

"Do not do what you hate.
Do not do what you hate.
Do not do what you hate."

Tom said this at the end of his first journal entry from Iraq.

I can imagine, as he was tortured and killed, that Tom was praying for his kidnappers, praying that they would come to an end of their hate.

He said it himself, in his journal, when he said, "Here in Iraq I struggle with that second form of aggression ... how do you stand firm against a car-bomber or a kidnapper?

"It seems easier somehow to confront anger within my heart than it is to confront fear. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right then I am not to give in to either. I am to stand firm against the kidnapper as I am to stand firm against the soldier. Does that mean I walk into a raging battle to confront the soldiers? Does that mean I walk the streets of Baghdad with a sign saying 'American for the Taking' No to both counts. But if Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life and, if I lose it, to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan. I struggle to stand firm but I'm willing to keep working at it."

I am not a Christian. But to me, Tom Fox epitomizes all that is good about christians -- if jesus were alive today, i think he would be in iraq with tom fox. standing up to the forces of hate, the cycle of hate, standing with the power of non-violence and love, loving your enemy. that's what jesus said and did, right? he never hated those who hated and tormented him, even as they killed him. he loved them and forgave them. 'love your enemy' -- that's what jesus said and did.

and that is what tom fox did.

when i met tom last year, we were both in palestine. two dc-area residents meeting for the first time across the world, in a war zone. i was covering a protest in a village called jayyous, where the israeli annexation wall has separated farmers from their olive and orange groves, vegetable fields and greenhouses. we met up with a group of several hundred israelis, who themselves were risking arrest for even entering a palestinian area. for the apartheid of the state of israel is so complete that not only can palestinians not leave their prisons of the west bank and the gaza strip, but israelis cannot enter the palestinian areas either.

i remember when the tension was high, when an israeli soldier pushed tom back so he almost fell over a stone wall, and i grabbed him by the arm before he fell.....tom didn't back away from the soldiers with their machine guns pointed at him and the rest of the protesters, an unarmed group of people who were speaking out for justice in the face of extreme injustice. there, under the olive trees, next to the electrified fences of separation, fear and hatred, i saw tom fox start praying for the soldiers. his eyes were as full of love as theirs were full of fear and hate.

....it's always hard to lose a friend.....you feel anger, frustration, pain, and you want to lash out at those who did this. but i know tom would ask us all to please PLEASE love our enemy. and do not do what we hate.

he would ask us to learn from his example, to follow his lead in loving and forgiving his enemies. and he would ask us to try our best, in every way we can (non-violently and with love, he would add), to get our government to leave iraq and all the other countries we are occupying militarily.

he would ask us to free ourselves of hate.

do we have the courage to do that?
do you have the courage?

read more about tom:
http://electroniciraq.net/news/2299.shtml

thoughts on the election of hamas

Thu, 09 Feb 2006 16:21:38 GMT

9 feb 2006
beit sahour
palestine

surprise surprise........the militant hamas party won a majority in the palestinian legislative elections two weeks ago wednesday, and everyone except the palestinians themselves are surprised about it. well, my question for israel and the US is: what did you expect? The Palestinians basically put themselves on the sacrificial altar last year, electing the man that the US and Israel wanted, in a desperate attempt to end the 5-year ongoing open conflict and bring peace. And what did Israel do? Continued the occupation, expanded construction of the apartheid Wall that literally divides the Palestinian areas into separated islands under complete Israeli control. Missile strikes by Israeli forces continued killing civilians throughout the year, and the so-called 'disengagement' from the Gaza Strip was a laughable performance in which settlers engaged in illegal settlements were rewarded monetarily, and the Gaza Strip was turned into literally the largest open-air prison on earth. Settlements in the West Bank, meanwhile, continued to expand – the overall population of settlers increased by 12,000 last year, making a grand total of 250,000 settlers in the West Bank (as opposed to the 9,000 who were 'disengaged' from the Gaza Strip).

Over the last two weeks since Hamas' electoral victory in Palestinian legislative elections, American pundits have taken the opportunity to blast the Palestinian people's choice, without attempting to understand the real reasons behind that choice. Some right-wing writers have gone so far as to say that the election of Hamas reveals the Palestinian people's true nature as genocidal, anti-Jewish fanatics -- a sentiment that is not based in any type of reality.

They are the words of someone who has obviously never set foot in the Palestinian occupied territories, nor seen the conditions in which the Palestinians are living. Having been disenfranchised from their land in what is now Israel in 1947, with ongoing disenfranchisement due to Israeli settlement and expansion, the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees now constitute the largest refugee population on earth, according to United Nations figures.

Charles Krauthammer, an editorialist with the Washington Post newspaper, said in a Feb. 3rd article that the truth in this situation is that, "After 60 years, the Palestinian people continue to reject the right of a Jewish state to exist side by side with them". But this assertion is entirely untrue. In fact, every poll of the Palestinian populace, by Israeli, Palestinian and international pollsters, shows that the vast majority would accept the 1967 borders - the so-called "Green Line", 23% of their original land, as an acceptable border with Israel. But since that border was established in 1967, 400,000 Israelis have been transferred across that border into illegal settlements on Palestinian land. Most of this expansion took place in the years between 1993 and 2000, when a 'peace agreement' was supposedly in place. Now Israel is constructing a massive wall, bigger even than the Berlin Wall -- supposedly for security, but in fact to secure a de facto border that encompasses more than half of what's left of the Palestinian territory - leaving Palestinians with only 13% of their original land, divided into islands with borders completely controlled by Israel. What people on earth would not be upset about being dispossessed of so much of their land?

Krauthammer attributes the source of the conflict to the Palestinians "choice" of "rejectionism". In fact, the Palestinians have had no choice whatsoever in this conflict. Palestinians did not choose to be dispossessed of their land in 1948, did not choose to be occupied militarily, did not choose to live in what has literally become the world's largest prison, criscrossed with checkpoints, unable to travel from town to town, and forbidden to leave.

Some of the American pundits have gone so far as to compare Hamas with the Nazis, a comparison that enflames emotions, but is entirely inaccurate. A more realistic comparison would be with the Irish Republican Army in the early 1990s, who were rightly called 'terrorists' at the time for their tactic of targeting British civilians, but who, through negotiations during the 90s, were able to eventually form part of a coalition government beginning in 2000 in Northern Ireland.

If there is to be peace in the Middle East, there needs to be recognition by both sides of the other's wrongs. Articles like Krauthammer's serve only to enrage both sides of the conflict. His article, like many op-eds in the U.S. over the past week have failed to mention that since a 'truce' was made between Hamas and Israel last February, Hamas has killed one Israeli (according to the Israeli government's own numbers), while the Israeli military has killed 180 Palestinians, two-thirds of them civilians (according to an Israeli human rights group's estimate -- the Israeli government does not keep count of Palestinian deaths under occupation). Not recognizing the role of Israel in the conflict is to leave out the most important component of an explanations as to _why_ Palestinians may have voted for Hamas.

For it is not, as the U.S. editorialists suggest, because Palestinians are some kind of Jew-hating Nazi-like monsters. It is more likely because they are living under the world's longest and most brutal military occupation. Why is it that American commentators are less compromising than even the Israelis themselves? Israelis generally recognize the Hamas victory as a response to corruption and compromise by the party previously in power. Hopefully negotiations for peace in the Middle East will involve some of the more level-headed Israelis themselves, instead of hot-headed hate-mongers like Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe commentator who called Hamas 'Jew-hating Nazis'. Peace _is_ possible in the Middle East, despite what these pundits may think. I mean, if the Brits can recognize Martin McGuinness, the 'bomb-throwing' former head of the armed division of the Irish Republican Army, as education secretary in a joint Northern Irish government....anything in the world is possible.

on the building up and tearing down of walls...

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 07:50:09 GMT

jan. 7 2005
washington dc

it's hard coming back to 'the other world' from new orleans. i'm continually amazed at the level of ignorance so many people -- even progressive, thoughtful people -- have about the situation in new orleans. how many levees broke, the fact that there is a BARGE sitting on top of a neighborhood in the lower ninth ward, the fact that people's homes in one area (the poor area) are being bulldozed, while in another area (the rich area that was flooded), the homes destroyed are being rebuilt with huge insurance payments received by the owners....

and i find myself having to answer the question, "SHOULD new orleans be rebuilt? is it worth it?" -- a question that wasn't even a question down in new orleans. there, it is simply a matter of how.....how much money, how much time, how much effort will it take to rebuild.......whereas here, in washington and elsewhere, the question, months later, is still IF new orleans is worth rebuilding. my dad gave me a book, called "why new orleans matters", which is the answer of one new orleanian to that question (his answer, by the way, is an emphatic YES, new orleans should be rebuilt). i find it incredibly insulting that the displaced new orleanians who find themselves in temporary housing situations around the country after being abandoned and left for dead by their local, state and federal government, are having to answer for that very government's neglect. to me, the very question itself points to a 'blame the victim' mentality that is all too prevalent in our society today. here is a city of people, mainly african-american, who have always been ignored (at best) and brutalized (at worst) by a government that has made it very clear for the last century and a half that it DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THEM. so now, to add insult to injury, they are being confronted with the question, "Why should we rebuild YOUR town?"

in new orleans, that is not even a question. instead, volunteering there is a frenzy of activity -- cleaning, gutting houses, churches, community centers, defending the poor from eviction and the uninsured from property seizure....building up a community base by providing the necessities and the tools needed to piece back together fragments of shattered lives and homes..... the question seems almost irrelevant (and certainly irreverant)....and reverberates with a patronizing tone that insults the very people i have been working with hand in hand every day for the past several months.

what we do need to do, however, is to demand that the levees be rebuilt stronger and the wetlands be restored so that the city can continue to survive.
(see this speech by the dutch ambassador when he visited new orleans several weeks ago, on how and why new orleans can rebuild:
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?disc=231355;article=1189;title=REBUILDING%20LOUISIANA%20COALITION%20Discussion%20ListSERVE )

the last journal i sent out was quite a while ago. a lot has happened since then -- it's been a very difficult time. first, we lost the battle to stop the evictions at louisburg square apartments, a case which was a showcase of blatant corruption, dirty dealings and unabashed greed on the part of the landlord.....the landlord a realty company owned by leonard samia of boston, a man well known to tenant-rights advocates there, a man voted 'slumlord of the year' by the angry tenants association in boston just last year. despite all our best efforts inside and outside the courts, the old boys network of jefferson parish sheriffs, judges, landlords and contractors managed to push the tenants out. well......hopefully we can win in a lawsuit against the landlord and the sheriff's department in which we expose their dirty dealings in a federal court, but still.....it is very disheartening to lose in court after we fought so hard to help these tenants keep their (undamaged) homes.

things were looking up in the ninth ward, where we started a media center and a radio station (we are broadcasting on the internet now, since the local FCC decided they didn't like the fact that we were broadcasting emergency and relief information on the FM band without a license -- even though in a time of crisis, unlicensed broadcasting for communication and relief purposes IS allowed). we also have a distribution center, mobile clinics, a community center, a gardening/bioremediation project and a fledgling childcare cooperative starting. a number of other projects are getting started in other areas of the city - st. bernard's parish, where a rainbow family kitchen has been feeding people with hot meals and a new distribution and relief center has started, in plaquemines parish and houma, where relief centers are beginning and thriving.....it was almost feeling hopeful in the midst of the mud-stained wrecked and damaged neighborhoods......

but all of our efforts will be in vain if the levees are not rebuilt, and rebuilt properly, with the (freely offered) oversight of skilled dutch engineers (the dutch, by the way, have been at the business of dyke-building and flood control since 1300, so they have a little bit of experience). so when senator stevens deliberately sabotaged the passage of the levee-rebuilding act in congress by adding on a last-minute pork-barrel amendment -- the controversial drilling for oil in the arctic national wildlife refuge -- saying cynically, "new orleans can get their money to rebuild the levees when we can drill in the arctic refuge".......it just makes all of our efforts seem so fruitless and wholly inadequate to stand up to the vast, corrupt and greedy power-empire made up of people bent on filling their pockets by any means that they can.

and on december 10th, one of our volunteers, meg perry, died in a bus accident -- a beautiful, caring, brilliant, courageous volunteer and activist that devoted herself to this relief effort with her whole heart. i hope that anyone reading this, whether you knew meg or not, will look at this memorial page:
http://www.peoplesfreespace.org/hurricanerelief/?p=24
to get to know her a little better, and to realize what a devastating loss her death is to the relief effort, to our community, to her home community in portland maine, and to the planet that she worked so hard, in so many ways, to save. she devoted herself to alternative energy, and drove a group of volunteers down from maine in a vegetable oil powered school bus.....she was working in new orleans on the bioremediation project, to bring compost, organic compounds and necessary minerals back into the soil of new orleans to help it grow again. her energy and sense of hope was inspirational to everyone who knew her, and even though i only got to know her for a short few months, she was an inspiration to me too, and gave me a burst of energy to continue this work each time i got to talk with her. death comes so unexpectedly sometimes.....it's just hard to lose a jewel like meg when she is so young, only 25. it hurts to see someone so magic and inspiring slip away like that...

....for some reason i keep thinking of rachel corrie, who died in palestine in 2002 standing in front of a doctor's home to protect it from the israeli bulldozer that ran over her and killed her. i know the circumstances are very different -- rachel was engaged in civil disobedience, while meg was involved in relief work (albeit on her way to a protest to demand the right of return and justice for new orleanians when she was killed) -- rachel's death was much more controversial, the derogatory accusations and insults toward rachel came from all over (even the left) when she was killed; whereas the media haven't been disrespecting meg in that way -- except for fox news, which called her a 'drifter' in their coverage, without even finding out who she was or what work she was doing (we're demanding a retraction from fox for that insulting drivel they dare to call 'news'). but in so many ways, these two young women who were killed 'in the line of duty' so to speak -- serving the least well off of society -- remind me of each other. there is a video of rachel when she was in the fifth grade, speaking in front of her school about the problem of world hunger and saying "40,000 children a day die of hunger -- we can change this. those children in those other countries, they are just like us....they ARE us." and in a way she proved this when she went to palestine and stood with the palestinian people in the civil and non-violent struggle for freedom from brutal occupation and the seizure of their land. she became one of 'the others' in the eyes of the american media, who either ignored or insulted her in death. but in rachel's eyes i saw, as i saw in the eyes of meg perry in the few chances i had to look into them , that there are no 'others', we are all one human family, and we better find a way to work this out. all these struggles, all this injustice, all this fear people have of each other......we need to overcome this ongoing system of fear that is dividing us and destroying us.....we need to realize that we are all in this thing together. we need to see each other, especially 'the other', as human. what makes tom hurndall (a young british volunteer who was killed in palestine walking children to school in 2002) more important than the children whose lives he was protecting? why does the death of rachel corrie create so much more media than the death of little chukri dawoud (a ten year old boy killed on his front steps in palestine around the time rachel was killed)? what makes any of us more important than anyone else?? i'm tired of all the division and destruction....

why ask dividing questions like 'is new orleans worth it?'? the entire country of the netherlands is built on a flood plain, most of it below sea level, but no one is questioning the fact that the netherlands exists! it has been devastated several times by massive storms that broke its levees, but the people rebuilt, and rebuilt stronger, safer and better. obviously the engineering and technology are available to rebuild new orleans...besides the fact that it is home to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them black, most of whom have never lived anywhere else -- it is these people's home. and slowly but surely, they are coming back home. even the massive destruction caused by the levee breaks and subsequent flooding of the city can't keep these resilient new orleanians away. but the local police, the federal government and the insurance companies are doing their best to keep the poor people from feeling welcome when they come back home. with police brutality and harassment, evictions and denials of aid money from insurance companies and FEMA for many poor people in new orleans, coming home to a destroyed home and attempting to rebuild is an impossible dream for many of the poorest new orleanians. hopefully, with some of our work, we are helping a little to make that impossible dream possible.

working in the poorest areas of new orleans, we are also subject to some of that police harassment. so many of our volunteers have been stopped, questioned, frisked, insulted, detained, handcuffed and arrested, for no other reason than for being in the poor neighborhood, or for observing police behavior as they harass someone else. just the day after meg died, we were having a memorial service in the community garden where she had been implementing the bioremediation project in the flooded seventh ward of new orleans. the memorial service was pretty much over, a few people were still there, sharing songs and stories and getting ready to leave....it was about 6:00 in the evening. suddenly a police car rolled up and a very aggressive police officer ran up to one of the mourners, who was talking on his phone near the street, grabbed him and threw him down on the hood of the car and handcuffed him. when two of us very somberly approached and asked why our friend was being detained, we were forced to put our hands on the hood and be patted down by this officer, who then shoved and kicked my friend (who happened to have been in the accident with meg the day before and had a head injury with 13 staples from the accident). the rest of the people remaining at the memorial service were then brought over and patted down with their hands on the car, and three other cars with 7 more officers arrived, with their guns drawn and laser sights pointed at people's heads (including one pointed at the head of a thirteen year old kid)....eventually we were all released with no apology, and the only explanation given for grabbing my friend originally was that he was 'walking around in an unlit area' -- a charge that is totally ridiculous because, one, the area was lit, and two, there was no curfew in effect at all.....why did they grab him? why did they detain the rest of us? there was no crime committed, nor even any semblance of an attempt on the part of the police to say that there was a crime committed. the only reason he, and the rest of us, were detained was because the police felt like detaining us. it came as a harsh reminder that, even in our time of loss, we would not be left in peace by the new orleans police. and i wonder just how many people face this situation -- discovering the bodies of loved ones in the wreckage of their homes, only to then be harassed by police for being in that area of the city. it seems that every person who has come back to the city has had at least one interaction with the police -- none of them positive. just last week the police shot a mentally ill man in broad daylight and killed him. the police tried to say that the man had a weapon and was threatening them.....but a videotape of the incident shows that the man's 'weapon' was a tiny 3 inch pocketknife, and he was 15 feet from the nearest officer, and backing away, when he was shot.

do we not have the capacity as a human community to come up with some way to assist a mentally ill individual who may be acting irrationally? is our only solution to shoot them? to kill them? oh my family, my people.....
we can do better than this.

so now i go to palestine, to work to bring down the literal and figurative walls that are growing with each day higher and higher in that place. and i hope when i return to new orleans, the walls to stop the water from invading the city will be built up strong enough to protect it through a thousand more hurricane seasons. tearing down walls in one place.....building them up in another......i just hope it is enough -- of course it is not enough, i am just one person, but my latest hero, the martyr meg perry, said in september before she came down to new orleans, "get enough people together and you can move mountains". well, come on people.....we got some mountains to move.

the informal sector, the rhizome and relief

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 07:06:23 GMT

i left new orleans for a couple of days, to speak at the conference of the International Association of Women in Radio and Television about indymedia, new technology and journalism in a disaster area.....

as the plane lifted off, i looked down at new orleans....the flooded area so clearly distinct from the non-flood area: the browned branches of trees, the mud-caked walls of houses........lake ponchartrain, much bigger than the city itself, with one small line - the causeway -- crossing the lake.....and the thought of trying to escape a crowded city on that little line with 100+ mph winds whipping around became a very frightening prospect indeed.

but my thoughts soon drifted as the plane flew higher, and i began to think in more general terms about the bigger picture of what is happening down in new orleans and the gulf coast. as i watched the patchwork of farmland and city streets, it appeared that the gridwork was pushing up against the more organic forms of trees, snaking rivers and mountains......in some instances, it seemed that the vein-like spread of forests and swamps was pushing back against the grid.....and i thought about the image that some in the activist community have chosen to represent 'the movement' of people working for social justice: the rhizome.

the rhizome is a natural organism that spreads, root-like, underground -- it is self-replicating, and decentralized in its growth. tentacle-like fingers reach out from one organism to the next, reaching, curving, touching, a web-like network crossing the landscape.

watching the vein/root-like spread of nature battling the grid structure of the cities, i started to think of our way of organizing relief aid -- the rhizome-like, organic, flexible, spontaneous spread of the common ground model of relief coming head-to-head with the rigid, structured, top-down and immobile model offered by FEMA and the government. their model, based on a comamand-control structure, stood by while hundreds of people drowned in their homes after the post-katrina flood in new orleans. their model did not allow for the flexibility and creativity necessary to save the people, to evacuate and to bring them to dry ground. in fact, their structure and focus became an obstacle to helping the people in their time of desperate need. police in gretna, just across the river from new orleans, prevented new orleans residents from crossing the bridge into gretna -- the soaked, weary residents waded onto the bridge from the toxic flood water below to try to cross into gretna (where evacuation buses were lined up and waiting at the mall parking lot), but were shot at by gretna police firing live ammunition over their heads, and forced to turn back into the flood water.

why is the story being told and repeated throughout the country about the new orleans flood still the story of looting and shooting? haven't you learned by now that this story was a red herring? A media smokescreen? a story by which the news media diverted attention away from the desperate cries for help from the thousands of people abandoned in the flooded city toward a false image of a black criminal class that was to blame for all the problems? i can't believe that even now, two months later, people are still asking me about the looting -- hasn't the truth about that been exposed by now??

but then, i remember how the top-down structure of government-led relief, in combination with a state-run corporate media, shaped the picture of post-katrina new orleans, and i realize it is no wonder that people are still so misled in the news they receive about new orleans and the gulf coast.

so let me tell you a story - a story which is one small part of the emerging story of post-hurricane new orleans. this is a story i have pieced together out of dozens of personal interviews....a story verified by hundreds of independent accounts compiled by human rights watch and other groups working in the area. but it is a story that, despite all evidence to the contrary, continues to be denied by the authorities. it is the story of the prisoners in old parish prison, who were, by all accounts, left behind on the day after the hurricane hit and the flooding began.

the day before the hurricane, many of the prisoners who were on the first floor were moved up to the second floor before the guards evacuated, but no other measure was taken by the guards to ensure the survival of the prisoners. there were prisoners left on the first floor who died in their cells. no one knows how many -- the prisoners don't know, they were stuck in their own cells and couldn't tell how many were stuck below, and the authorities aren't talking - they deny that anyone died at all.

when the guards evacuated, they left some food for the prisoners, but not much. then the water started pouring in. the first floor filled with water, and the prisoners on the second floor, as they heard the drowning cries of those below, began to panic. the water was rising, dirty, oily, smelling of sewage and toxins -- they took whatever they could find and tried to bash through the windows. the water rose to chest level and stopped rising.....the men (there were women prisoners, as well, but they were not on the second floor) reached for anything they could find to hit the windows....some men, who had been put in the gymnasium by guards, managed to use a basketball hoop. others, locked in a large cell, used a door fastener they had managed to break loose......it took many hours, but at last, some of the prisoners managed to break through the windows and escape into the flooded hallways. they joined together and tried to get out of the building......bodies floated by, both inside and outside the building. and at last, a day later, a boat arrived with a couple of guards who had the decency (well, as an afterthought, anyway) to come back for the prisoners.

the men and women were brought by boat to a highway overpass (an island in the flooded city), where they were made to wait in their sewage-soaked clothing with no food and water for another full day, until they were taken off by bus to various federal facilities. with their records lost, and no one paying any attention to who was who - who was in prison for a felony, and who was just there on an overnight charge for trespassing or drunkenness - it has taken two months, and only just now are these prisoners beginning to be released.

listen to the first-hand account of stanley, a 65 year old man who was arrested the day before the hurricane on a bogus trespassing charge, and ended up almost dying, and remaining in prison for weeks:
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2005/10/7230.php

first-hand account of dale:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/10/6048.php

now let me tell you another story. it is the story of charlestine jones, a mother of two daughters currently being evicted from her home with nowhere to go. it is the same story of bertha dugas, and of sonia khan, a guatemalan grandmother with her whole family of eleven crowded into her one-bedroom apartment (because her daughter's home was damaged).....also being evicted with no place to go. it is a story of blatant corruption, of greedy landlords and real estate agents trying to make money off their insurance claims by claiming hurricane damage when in fact there was none..............this is a story of intrigue and secret deals, of re-development schemes and crooked politicians....and the story goes to the mayor's office, the governor's office, the federal government......it is the story of a system corrupted from the bottom to the top.

when i first wrote to you all about new orleans, i sent along a letter that i had written to my congressman about the failure of the government to respond to the crisis, in which i advocated that control of the local situation be placed into the hands of new orleans mayor ray nagin. i still think that is the case -- that in the emergency crisis, local control needed to be given in order to safely and quickly evacuate the population. and i think that ray nagin has enough knowledge of local geography and resources that he would have been more than able to oversee the evacuation, had he been given the authority to do so.

but after the initial crisis has passed, and it is time to start the cleanup and rebuilding process, ray nagin has shown himself to be the stooge he was (s)elected to be. not long after the hurricane, he made the statement that the rebuilding of new orleans should be modelled on the way the st. thomas housing projects (in new orleans) were redeveloped several years ago. this is a sick and twisted statement - considering the way the st. thomas housing projects were redeveloped at the absolute expense of the poor folks who lived there.....the people were lied to at every stage of the process: first, they were promised that the redevelopment would be wholly to their benefit.....the first row of homes were then torn down and condos built in their place......although the people of st. thomas housing projects did not see any benefit from that (those whose homes were torn down were displaced, and high-paying tenants put into the new condos), they were told that the next row of condos would be for them. then, the next row, then the next. but at every stage of the 'redevelopment', citizens from st. thomas were displaced and replaced by high-paying renters, until, after a two-year process, the low-income tenants had ALL been replaced, the housing project had become high-priced condos and a walmart, and pres kasnakoff the developer had fattened his pocket with quite a hefty profit.

now pres kasnakoff and his pals are part of mayor nagin's "rebuilding new orleans" redevelopment commission, and are looking to make some hefty profits from this latest venture as well. it doesn't seem to matter to these greed-driven developers that many of those displaced from the st. thomas housing projects ended up in sub-standard housing in the lower ninth ward, the area that took on the most water during the flood -- who knows how many elderly, sick and handicapped people drowned because they couldn't escape from the lower 9th ward.......it doesn't seem to bother pres kasnakoff and his real estate buddies that they are displacing the poorest of the poor, who have suffered more than any humans should ever have to suffer in their lives........it doesn't seem to affect the consciences of these businessmen at all that their 'redevelopment plan' means the literal throwing-out of thousands of these poorest people with no place to go and no resources, rendering them invisible so that the richest few can build casinos and money-making tourist traps on top of what used to be their homes. you may think i am being over-dramatic here -- i wish that i were being over-dramatic.....but after looking into the eyes of the folks who are being thrown out onto the street with no place to go, and having inside peeks at the twisted dealings of the old-boy network of developers, businessmen and politicians, i am afraid that this is in no way an over-dramaticization of these very real, and extremely disturbing, events.

i know this journal is getting long.....i am always way too long-winded....but there is something else that i feel i really need to share.....i mentioned earlier about the rhizome structure, and how much more effective it is than the hierarchy in getting things done......and i just feel i need to illustrate this by pointing out that, despite the fact that both FEMA and the red cross have tens of billions of dollars in aid money to spend, they have gotten very little real help to people in need. in new orleans, for example, there is NO FEMA relief center open to the public on the east side of the mississippi (where the vast majority of new orleans' citizens live). the only FEMA center open to the public is at Landry High School in Algiers. the place is staffed by FEMA workers and blackwater security forces - the blackwater soldiers outnumber the FEMA workers about 5 to 1. (Blackwater Security, you may remember, gained infamy early in the war against Iraq when its members were implicated in torture in Abu-Ghraib and other prisons........the mercenary soldiers grew to be so hated by the Iraqi people that four of them were killed by mobs and their bodies dragged through the streets of Fallujah -- an event which led to the US invasion/decimation of the city of Fallujah in revenge)

so anyway, Landry high school is crawling with mercenary soldiers, and people going there seeking aid are routinely turned away. if you are lucky enough to be able to convince the guard at the front that you are indeed worthy of receiving aid, you are ushered into the gymnasium where some tables are set up, and, after a considerable wait, you are brought to a FEMA worker who connects to the internet and tries to go through the FEMA application process on the FEMA website. now, if any of you have tried going through the FEMA application process on their website, you know that it crashes 3-4 times during each attempted application, and you have to start the whole application over again. so, after several hours of frustration, if you are able to finish the application process without the whole system crashing, at the end of the process you are issued a FEMA id number. having this number means that, at the end of two weeks, you may or may not be issued an emergency check for $2,000 for hurricane-related expenses. this may sound like a pretty good deal, but for those who have lost everything, it is just a tiny dent in the expenses they have incurred.

so that is what FEMA can give you. as for someone who is walking into the FEMA center with nothing, nowhere to go, home destroyed, family missing.......sorry, but you are out of luck. FEMA can issue you an ID number, but as far as emergency shelter and supplies, they do not provide anything.......well, ok, they have one flier on their flier table that says: EMERGENCY SHELTER, with a phone number. if you phone that number, you will find a church in baton rouge, two hours drive away, that is full. the red cross center is the same way......they do have a few box lunches and some bottled water you can get there, but have said that the only aid they can give people is an application for cash assistance (which may or may not be approved). they are routinely turning people away, sending them to our tiny organization, common ground, for help. let me repeat this, because i just find it so astounding: FEMA AND THE RED CROSS ARE SENDING PEOPLE TO _US_ (common ground) FOR HELP. these organizations, with their tens of billions of dollars of funding, can't seem to get it together enough to open even ONE emergency shelter in new orleans. or to provide food, or transportation, or cleaning supplies, or even phone calls, for the people who have suffered so much.

we had a call the other day from the main red cross center in new orleans, saying there were two guys there who had no place to go, but that they could not help them there at the red cross.....they sent them to common ground, where we gave them some warm tea and a place to sit down and relax a bit, and heard their story -- they were workers, one from houston and one from atlanta, who had been hired by contractors to come work in new orleans.....but when they arrived, they found the conditions horrendous: tiny shared tents on a naval base which they were not allowed to leave, cold showers and filthy port-a-johns, 12-hour days 7 days a week for low wages.....they felt they had to leave, but had no way to get back home. we ended up taking them in and sharon, one of the people who started common ground, ended up giving them money out of her own pocket to help them get home. the day after, we ended up putting up a young man who the red cross sent to us as well -- a resident of the ninth ward who survived five days on his roof with no food or water, ended up in florida, and then evacuated from there during hurricane wilma......he came to common ground and slept with the other volunteers on the floor of an old firehouse, and now has joined our relief effort to clean up and bring back the ninth ward.

there are so many aspects to this story - so many facets of human suffering -- so many poor folks ignored and terrorized by the authorities (the military every day points guns in the faces of anyone remaining in the city - relief workers and citizenry alike), abandoned and betrayed by the official relief agencies, lied to and kicked out by the landlords and developers -- how much more can any person sit back and take??

but not everyone is taking it lying down -- that's what makes me hopeful, and grateful, and glad to be doing this work -- last week charlestine jones led a campaign to pressure the landlord in her public-funded housing complex to stop the forced eviction of herself and other residents, and with the help of local supporters and a national campaign, was able to get the owner to negotiate, and agree to the tenants' demands. this is what gives me hope ....and now other tenants are coming forward, starting to fight back against these illegal and unjust evictions. and it gives me strength, to know that with the power of people working together, we can get this entrenched power structure and old-boys network to budge. now, we just need to push more. and harder. and from every possible angle. and eventually, we, who work for justice and truth, and not for money and personal interest, will win in this struggle. we must. it's not just new orleans. the earth itself is depending on us for this fight.

and if all this reading isn't enough for you, here are two good articles written by friends of mine:

"Why are they making new orleans a ghost town?" by bill quigley (a local human rights lawyer who has been giving volunteer legal aid):
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/10/6157.php

"Katrina: Direct Action vs. Government Guns" by scott weinstein (a nurse at the common ground clinic):
http://www.commongroundrelief.org/2005/10/katrina_direct_action_vs_gover.html

are new orleanians the new palestinians?

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 11:54:12 GMT

10/22/2005
new orleans, louisiana

here in the dim light of the garage we've turned into a makeshift studio and computer lab, i sit trying to collect my thoughts to launch a campaign to challenge the behavior of the new orleans police department.......but my thoughts and plans keep getting invaded by images -- images of the dried-out brown flood areas i've been driving through to bring food and water to some holdouts in east new orleans.....the brown, dried grass and mud mile after mile - abandoned homes with water lines 8 feet high, the toys-r-us with the sign broken off, the car dealerships with row after row of cars brown from floodwater......and the images of the people i've been talking to -- the old man who was arrested for trespassing just before the storm, and then found himself, along with hundreds of other prisoners, abandoned in old parish prison as the floodwaters rose around them, and those on the first floor died in their cells......he cried as he told me his story, his tears have struck me, as so many others, deep in my heart.

and the courage of charlestine jones, who came to us last week seeking our help to fight her landlord, who was illegally evicting her....and we helped her........we got together and planned and organized, we met the challenge and got together rallies and petitions, press conferences and faxes to the management -- activists in boston brought the tenants' demands to the office there, and in dc the same....in new orleans the manager had the list of demands delivered to his house.....and we won......today the owner agreed to four of the five demands, and the tenants are satisfied with that.....

but the struggle is just beginning.....

i had hoped to be in palestine by now.......but instead i am here in new orleans....i have no benefactors, no paycheck from FEMA or the government, but i am working, along with so many others in this project, out of my love for this city and her people....and for all people........i am working probably harder than i have worked in my life -- manual labor, mental labor, emotional labor....this is tiring work.....and i keep wondering, "where are all the volunteers?" we need so many more than we have.......we need the residents of this city to return and start working in the jobs that are being snatched up by outside contractors......we need people who can take care of their own needs and roll up their sleeves and work on cleanup....we need organizers and lawyers, environmentalists and engineers ..........

and the more i think about the need, and how vast it is, i find myself thinking about the residents of new orleans -- scattered and broken, in shelters and apartments across the country....and how many talented, skilled people have been pushed into diaspora, with no hope of returning. their jobs are being sold off to the lowest bidder, and the culture of new orleans has been split into ten thousand pieces in ten thousand shelters -- how will we piece this puzzle back together to bring new orleans back?? in a way, this is an american version of al-naqba (the catastrophe), that 1948 event when the state of israel was created and the palestinians were pushed out of their homes and scattered to the wind.

so, in a way i am already in palestine -- the 'occupied west bank', the white settlements on what used to be brown peoples' lands, the corporate looters coming in to get rich off the disaster while the indigenous new orleanians are thrown to the wind to make their own ways in new lands.

are new orleanians going to be the new palestinians? refugees in their own country, forced out of their destroyed and battered homes to make way for the developers and their plans and money-making schemes? or will we fight back.....and remake new orleans in the image of a sustainable economy and community....with public control of resources and a safe, sustainable environmental cleanup and rebuilding of the levies?

the plot thickens....stay tuned to this series for the next climax in this movie.....(or come down here yourself and help us clean this place up! -- see http://www.commongroundrelief.org for more info)

starhawk has written a good piece about the situation right now in new orleans, and the common ground collective that i am working with:
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/NewOrleans_update1.html

and another one entitled, "Who will take out the garbage?"
http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/NewOrleans_update2.html

here is the weblog of a guy who is volunteering here (check the entry 'hostile takeover'):
http://www.bringdownbush.org/blog/

check the audio interviews and reports i have made at:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/

and if you have time today (october 22nd - day of action against police brutality), consider sending an email or making a call to challenge police brutality and prison conditions in new orleans:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/10/6058.php

report from new orleans

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 06:46:19 GMT

7 october 2005
new orleans, louisiana

people keep asking me when i will be sending an update, when i will write my next journal.....i can't promise to write too much right now, but i want to at least ease everyone's fears a bit and share some info.

well.....in all the different projects and places i have worked, i don't think i have ever slept so little or worked so hard for so many hours each day. it is constant -- since the moment i got here -- just this gaping hole of need that we are all scrambling, just scrambling to fill. the emotional intensity of this disaster, combined with the gross neglect of the government, have combined themselves into a twisted look of blank anxious fear, shock and weary resignation -- this is the look shared by those who have lost everything in the storm, those who lost a child or a home or a friend.....and perhaps it is this look that weighs the experience more than any amount of heavy lifting or climbing or driving or organizing that i do each day. it is this look, the hurricane katrina look, that pierces me a dozen or more times each day as i work side by side with those who have lost everything in the storm to help rebuild their lives and the lives of their friends and neighbors.....

people who come down here to volunteer seem to sink into this 'black hole' once they arrive here -- calls are rare and the phone lines are difficult; updates sporadic and disjointed......those who are outside of this 'black hole' find themselves trying to sort through bits and pieces of informtion to get a full picture of what is going on......the mainstream media seems to have moved on to the next 'big story', and declared the disaster over.

meanwhile, the folks who evacuated and were shipped off all over the country are starting to trickle back to new orleans, seeing their homes (or what's left of them) for the first time.....showing up at our center with 'the look' on their face......and we load them up with supplies, talk and listen and give them some time to process......but the need is so great, it always feels like what we are doing is so small, so so small.....

what this whole thing has made more and more clear to me is the absolute inability of centralized authority structures to respond to crisis, and the absolute ability of humans to reach each other with compassion and solidarity, DESPITE the obstacles put in place by bureaucratic structures and organizations purporting to help. there have been some incredible coalitions -- surprising mutinies.....we've had national guard soldiers sneak supplies out of their warehouses so we could distribute them directly to people, we've had amtrak police sneak ice for our clinic from their stash, red cross volunteers who defected and joined our ranks.....so many many examples of people trying to get supplies to the people who need them -- even if they have to defy orders from above in order to do it. why do the organizations that are set up to distribute aid to people make it so difficult for the people to get it?? could it be a problem with the style of organization itself?

one of the people who founded the common ground clinic, who is also a good friend of mine, has said that she founded the clinic under the premise that the way we, as a movement, have been able to organize medical care during large convergences and protests could be applied to this emergency situation. the main focus of this style of organizing is that it is consensus-based, non-hierarchical, and that it places the patient in the position of being an empowered individual (even a hero of sorts, in this type of situation), and not a powerless victim to be tended to by an 'expert' doctor. this way of organizing the clinic has been wildly successful -- the common ground clinic has served hundreds of people a day for the last six weeks, while FEMA and red cross have just barely, over the last two weeks, begun to even offer anything in this area, let alone come close to serving the number of people, with the quality of care, as common ground clinic.

well, i suppose i will have more time to theorize about the efficacy of anarchist/decentralized models of organization during a time of crisis when and if i actually step back from this whole thing and examine it that way. as for now, i am simply doing it, living these decentralized, non-hierarchical ways of organizing relief in a crisis situation.

here's an article on what i did last night:
http://dc.indymedia.org/newswire/display/130638/index.php

and today i talked to three different people who had lost their mothers -- one man's mother was buried under the rubble of their home, and he has been living down the street under a tarp, wearing the same clothes since the hurricane.....he started to cry when he started talking about his mother buried under the mud.....
the audio is at http://neworleans.indymedia.org

then i went to the FEMA base camp for the city of new orleans......it made me feel sick to my stomach....we drove in the main entrance, telling the military guards that we were looking for a FEMA representative (we were, and still are, trying to get them to bring some port-a-johns near the 'welcome home' kitchen in washington square park). we got some vague directions from the soldiers and were waved inside to park. we then walked around this absolutely surreal scene of hundreds of enormous air-conditioned tents, each one with the potential of housing 250 people -- whole city blocks of trailers with hot showers......huge banks of laundry machines, portajohns lined up 50 at a time....a big recreation tent, air-conditioned, with a big-screen tv.....all of it for contractors and FEMA workers, NONE of it for the people of new orleans.

we never did manage to find an actual FEMA representative to ask our question to, but we did talk to a couple guys who were staying there, who told us that the tents were pretty empty, not many people staying there.....and that "we don't combine with the evacuees -- we have our camp here, as workers, and they have their camps".....and when i tried to explain my experience with people who had lost their homes -- how we had to literally drive two sisters to LAKE CHARLES three hours away, because there were no shelters any closer, everything was either shut down or full. they could house thousands of people there at this FEMA base camp, thousands of new orleans citizens could live there while they rebuilt and cleaned their homes in the city. but instead, due to the arrogance of a government bureaucracy that insists they are separate from the 'evacuees', and cannot possibly see themselves mixing with them and working side by side on the cleanup, these people are left homeless.......like the poor man i talked to earlier in the day, living under a tarp with his mother buried under the mud of their house......why can't he live in their tents???? oh it makes me so sad and mad to see so much desperate need, and then just blocks away to see this huge abundance of resources not being used.

I have seen no FEMA center that is actually providing any aid for people -- I have been to this main FEMA base camp and three others in new orleans, and each of them have signs saying "No public services available at this site/Authorized personnel only".

it's so different from how we are working at the common ground collective, or at Mama Dee's in the city, or the other community places that people are starting up -- where neighbors are helping neighbors, people just helping each other.......if an elder needs their roof tarped, or a tree removed from their house, we send a team over to work on it -- but then maybe that elder helps us out, by driving one of our volunteers somewhere in their vehicle or picking up supplies for us. we help each other -- it's so different when we are all human together, instead of a militarized, razor-wired, fenced-in compound like the FEMA camp that keeps out the people in need and keeps the contractors and workers inside.

the communities we are helping do still need many things -- including volunteers for the cleanup effort, clearing out black mold and debris from flooded areas (some of which has been left untouched for the last six weeks. check http://www.commongroundrelief.org for a list of needs. we also need volunteers to help us with legal research -- if you are interested in donating a hew hours of internet time, send me an email. One other thing people can do from afar is to go to http://www.extendthedeadline.org and sending a message to FEMA to extend their deadline for hurricane survivors to apply for emergency aid (it has been near impossible for people to get through on the one phone line FEMA provided to apply for the aid, and FEMA has cut off the deadline to apply).

report from the occupied west bank of new orleans

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 19:54:36 GMT

18 sept 2005
algiers
occupied west bank
louisiana
usa

my friends, i am writing to you under military curfew, with helicopters flying overhead and armed personnel carriers patrolling the streets, from the occupied west bank. but this time it is not the occupied west bank of palestine that i write from, but the west bank of the mississippi river. a few hours ago, i watched about 30 helicopters take off from an aircraft carrier in the middle of the oil-slicked mississippi and roar through the sky low overhead. soon after, i was stopped by police who were sternly enforcing a curfew that hadn't even officially begun for the night. the police and military tear through the streets all night, taking shots at any dark-colored figure who they see out on the street.

i have only been here since yesterday, but already i have heard story after heartbreaking story of the incompetence and negligence of the US government at the local, state and federal level in response to this crisis. from the man who had to rush out of a relief center where volunteers were using the internet to help him locate his family because it was 7:30, and he had to rush across town to his half-ruined home before eight, or he would be shot for breaking curfew, to the family whose landlord took their last $400 rent money for this month even though their home had been completely destroyed, to the many stories of people wading through neck-deep water, floating their grandmothers in refrigerators to try to escape the flooded-out city of new orleans, only to be turned back at the bridge by police with shotguns.....the stories are horrendous, sad and infuriating, especially infuriating - because this disaster was preventable.

even now, a full 3 weeks after the hurricane hit, the red cross has yet to arrive in this and many other neighborhoods around new orleans. many suspect that the red cross will never arrive here with medicine and supplies, because they hope to force people to leave this area. it is absolutely unconscionable, and a violation of every human rights treaty to which the US is a signatory, for the government to use food and medicine as a weapon to try to force people out of their homes. yet that is exactly what they are doing.

everyone is aware that the water is completely contaminated, and many streets are covered in contaminated mud. but no government agency has provided drinking water -- it is as if these people are expected to simply lay down and die. but now, thanks to the efforts of many independent volunteers who came here despite the government's warnings and naysaying, many lives have been saved that would otherwise have been lost. many more lives are precariously close to being lost, but new volunteers, water, supplies and medicine keep arriving every day, staving off death another day for those folks the government 'left behind'.

contrary to the popular image promoted by the media, those who were 'left behind', unable to evacuate before the hurricane, were not looters, thugs and criminals. they are, for the most part, the elderly -- the most vulnerable members of our society, and poor families with young children who could not afford to evacuate. after being ignored by the government for the first few days of the disaster (a period in which they thought surely they were being left to die in the muck and mud), they were subjected to a massive military occupation, an operation described by the brigadier-general in charge as "turning this place into a 'little somalia'". those who didn't die in their attics waiting for help to arrive have been tormented by a massive military presence that, for the most part, would rather shoot than help them. sure, there are some notable exceptions -- national guard units who have distributed food and water on their own - but these are rogue units, not following the 'shoot-to-kill' orders from their superiors.

perhaps i sound a little bitter...... but arriving here, meeting all these elderly, sick and poor people who all tell me the same story, and realizing that story is completely different from the one being shown on television and in the news around the country -- it makes a person feel sick, literally sick, and disgusted at the lies that are being spread to try to justify the shameful inaction of the government in this crisis.

there are so many people and places that have been left out of all the news reports, left out of the red cross relief efforts......i have just seen video from the coast of Bay St. Charles, Mississippi, a town that was completely wiped out - of those who stayed in their homes, there are no survivors. The Houma Nation of Indians on the Louisiana coast has also had most of its members' homes completely destroyed. These are pictures taken just a few days ago -- the whole place is still underwater:
http://www.unitedhoumanation.org/KatrinaAerial.htm

the official death count is unbelievably low - but most bodies have not even been recovered yet. it may take a long time before we figure out the real numbers of how many people have died in this disaster. and very little is being revealed about all the contaminants that are in the water, including massive oil spills that have been estimated to total half the size of the infamous Exxon-Valdez oil spill:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katrina/story/0,16441,1566152,00.html#article_continue

I have just watched camera footage a friend just took a few days ago of a medical research plant in mississippi that was under 30 feet of floodwater. with no testing of the level of contamination, mexican immigrant workers were cleaning the place, wearing no protective gear at all.

so when news came through this area that bush has suspended the minimum wage, it was just another blow for the weary, tired and (many now) homeless residents who have come to expect government neglect and animosity as common practice -- so none were surprised at this move, which would benefit (as usual) the most wealthy, while further impoverishing these, the most impoverished citizens of the united states.

i have been busy since i got here, using my tech skills to help with internet connectivity, phone (over internet) and other communication. any volunteers (especially doctors, nurses and trained medics) who are willing to work hard and spend more than just a few days here would be able to help a good deal in this relief effort. in fact, a number of people who originally volunteered with the red cross and have become frustrated with the inaction of that organization have been contacting the grassroots clinics and organizations that are actually feeding and providing medicine to the thousands of people 'left behind' by the disaster.

there is also an effort to rescue abandoned pets underway:
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/5435.php

i am currently working with the common ground collective:
http://www.commongroundrelief.org

if you can listen to audio, here is an interview i did in algiers with a doctor in the free clinic
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/5437.php

love!
jenka

ps - here is part of a message from my friend ryan about why NOT to donate to the red cross:
I urge you to NOT send any money to the red cross, and instead to consider sending it to other groups. The Red Cross has a history of mis-using funds and not helping to people who need it most. There has been so much racism going on in New Orleans right now and the Red Cross is fitting right in with it.

There is a terrific list of local, people of color, low-income, and
grassroots groups the are doing direct relief effort, no strings attached.
Please consider them and see this list:
http://katrina.mayfirst.org

The Red Cross has been trying to evict groups like Vets for Peace from
feeding groups of evacuees in Covington, LA. They also have been known for keeping most donations they get for themselves and paying their CEOs
6-digit salary. For more info and resources, please see:

RED CROSS 9/11 SCANDAL (CNN):
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/11/06/rec.charity.hearing/?related

RED CROSS CEO's NEARLY 700,000 A YEAR SALARY (FORBES)
http://www.forbes.com/finance/lists/14/2004/LIR.jhtml?passListId=14&passYear=2004&passListType=Misc&datatype=Misc&uniqueId=CH0013

ANOTHER ARTICLE
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2005/09/05/red_cross_ceo_pulled_down_651957_salary_bush_strafes_new_orleans.htm

Thoughts on the Hurricane

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 09:22:59 GMT

When I used to live in New Orleans (1999), there were always rumors that when 'the big one' hit, New Orleans would be underwater, and many would die as a result. In 2001, this was confirmed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which rated a hurricane in New Orleans to be one of the three most likely, most catastrophic disasters in this country. There was plenty of warning that this was coming....like this article from the Houston Chronicle from 2001, which says, in part:
" In the face of an approaching [Category 3 or above hurricane] storm, scientists say, the city's less-than-adequate evacuation routes would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under 20 feet of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston. Economically, the toll would be shattering."

The warnings were there, the scenario was drawn out time and time again. But where was the money? The Bush administration had cut $20-$40 million needed to strengthen levees -- a 2004 project that was 80% complete. Al Naomi, the head of the Louisiana Army Corps of Engineers, said in early 2004, "The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink," he said. "I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest." He estimated it would take $20 million to complete the levee restoration, which he requested from the Federal Government, but the $20 million was denied, and the 2005 Bush Administration budget appropriated only $3.9 million to the project.

Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, said on June 8, 2004, "It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."
(see this article for more detail: http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002331.html )

Meanwhile, FEMA also suffered from cutbacks under the Bush administration, a push to privatize the agency, and an absorption into the all-encompassing "Department of Homeland Security". The restructuring of the agency into a competitive structure based on the private, corporate model, resulted in poorer areas, like Louisiana, being left out of flood-control grant money altogether!
"In a sense, Louisiana is the floodplain of the nation," noted a 2002 FEMA report. As a result, flooding is a constant threat, and the state has an estimated 18,000 buildings that have been repeatedly been damaged by flood waters -- the highest number of any state. And yet, in summer 2004 FEMA denied Louisiana communities' pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. In Jefferson Parish, part of the New Orleans metropolitan area, flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue was baffled by the development. 'You would think we would get maximum consideration' for the funds, he says. 'This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.'"
(see this article for more detail: http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2004-09-28/cover_story.html )

I'm not pointing these things out to place blame, but to try to explain why the flooding happened, and why the emergency response by the government has been so inadequate and inept. The levees broke because federal money was withheld that was to be used for necessary upkeep. FEMA has shown itself incapable of a thorough or speedy evacuation. Residents had to escape the city on their own, or not at all. Left behind: the sickest, oldest, poorest, youngest. Thousands are believed to have drowned, some trapped in attics as flood waters rose for 2 days.

What really hurts are the cries for help -- the chanting outside New Orleans' Superdome: "Help! Help! Please help us!", the mayor, angry and frustrated at the failure of federal support, saying that his own efforts to save his city are being held up by bureaucratic holdups at the federal level.
(listen to this segment from an emotional interview with the New Orleans Mayor on Thursday, Sep. 1: http://houston.indymedia.org/news/2005/09/42795.php )

My friend Jordan writes:
"In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge."

I read the accounts of the squalor of the refugee camps, the people who haven't had water for days, and I feel sick, and angry that this all could have been avoided. I think of the New Orleans I know and love - a city bursting with energy, with flowers and moss hanging from ancient trees along brick and cobblestone streets with antique streetcars rumbling along. I was last there this past March, and the magic of the city struck me as it often had before -- I found myself stopping to talk to artists on the street, with cars covered in beads and trinkets, watching fairy-winged angels float by on their bicycles -- the city of New Orleans is mesmerizing with its beauty and culture. Is that all gone for good? Perhaps.

In March, during my visit to New Orleans, I had dinner with Debbie and Bill Quigley, a nurse and law professor, respectively, who live in the Garden District near Tulane University in New Orleans. The dinner discussion inevitably moved toward the topic of hurricanes in New Orleans, and what would happen when "The Big One" hit. Debbie recounted stories of past hurricanes, where the nurses, doctors and their families had to 'move in' to the hospitals while the water rushed by outside. So I wasn't completely surprised when I heard Bill Quigley's voice on the radio yesterday (Thurs. Sep. 1), reporting the conditions at Memorial Hospital, where he and Debbie had not only 'moved in', but were quite literally trapped inside the hospital with no water and no electricity, and 1200 patients in need of urgent care. I haven't heard word of them since, and the hospital switchboard has no info on them.....I just hope they are able to get out, but knowing them, they will probably make sure every single patient is safe before they even attempt to remove themselves.

I think of the out-of-the-way coffeeshops where brilliant musicians would try out their voices and rhythm for the first time in front of a crowd, the street dancing and second-line jazz parades every Sunday afternoon......the New Orleans I knew........and the sweltering heat.......the heat where thirsty thousands are now marching to a very different beat. The beat of a military deployment that has been sent in to New Orleans by Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco with orders to "shoot to kill". Orders reiterated by a well-rested, long-vacationing George W. Bush.

I'll admit I've never been a fan of George W. Bush, but his actions this week in response to this catastrophe have been absolutely appalling. Where was he on Sunday, when the hurricane was clearly becoming "The Big One" that would hit New Orleans? At his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on vacation (ignoring, as he has for months, the peace delegation of mothers whose children were killed in the Iraq war, camped outside his doorstep). Where was he on Monday, when the hurricane hit, the levees broke and the city faced exactly the 'doomsday scenario' that had been predicted time and time again? Travelling to California and Arizona, acting as a salesman for the pharmaceutical companies, advocating new, high-priced drugs for Medicare recipients. What about Tuesday, as the waters rose and the city drowned? Still no word from Mr. Bush, who was busy playing guitar for a photo-op in San Diego and then rushing back to continue his vacation in Crawford. Only Wednesday, after flying over the region in his private jet and landing in Washington, did he make a statement at all, a statement described in a New York Times editorial as his "worst speech ever", in which he called on his dad to lead the relief effort. What kind of a 'leader' gets on television THREE DAYS AFTER the event and says he is depending on his father and former President Clinton to head up relief efforts??

Where is the LEADER who will say, "I WILL NOT REST until I know that every survivor of the hurricane is safe"? Where is a leader who will immediately admit the mistake of not giving the requested funds to levee restoration, and devote the needed federal money to rescue the survivors and mop up the mistake? That leader is simply not there. Instead, we have George W. Bush, who gave an interview to ABC on Thursday saying "no one expected the levees to be breached", when in fact such a scenario was listed by FEMA as one of the three most likely disasters in the US (as I mentioned earlier). Everyone expected the levees would be breached when a hurricane of this magnitude hit New Orleans: the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (authorized by Congress in 1996 after floods killed six, but cut almost completely in 2003 by Bush administration budget cuts) -- everyone predicted this scenario, expected it -- especially after the budget cuts of 2005, and the UNPRECEDENTED budget cuts for FY2006. Everyone, it seems, except George W. Bush.

And even now, although he's finally deigned to make a visit to some affected areas (but not the hardest hit spot - New Orleans itself), Bush has made no statement committing the federal government to a significant or sustained effort to aid the areas that have been devastated by the hurricane.

I am angry, yes. But the feeling is superceded by another, an overwhelming feeling of compassion for the survivors, and a desire to do whatever I can to help them live and survive this thing. The humanitarian aid organization I work with, Pastors for Peace, is organizing an ad-hoc humanitarian aid caravan to Louisiana and Mississippi, picking up aid in different spots around the country and bringing it south to the survivors. I will be helping with this effort as much as I can before I go to Palestine.

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philadelphia and west virginia

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:34:15 GMT

I arrived in Philly a few days before the 'Biodemocracy' protest against the
Biotech Industry's annual convention, got to attend much of the 'Biodemocracy'
teach-in ( http://www.biodev.org/ )and work on puppets and signs for the big
event......well unfortunately the 'big event' wasn't quite as big as i'd
hoped...only a few hundred folks gathered for the first event of a series of
protests: breakfast in front of Glaxo-Smith-Klein Pharmaceutical
Corporation...joined by a few dozen bicycle cops, plainclothes cops, and
suspicious-looking camera holders with super telephoto lenses. but,
surprisingly enough for philly cops, they didn't harass us too
badly.......maybe they've cooled off since chief timoney left for miami (and
note how they started treating protests in miami since he got there -- re. FTAA
nov. 2003)......or maybe they were just busy gathing intel for homeland
security....

anyway the teach-in was great. well, actually it was really disturbing to hear
about the extent to which the biotech industry has managed to gain control of
the resources that we eat and drink and use for medicine....but great that
people were coming out to stand up to the biotech industry and say no -
farmers, elderly people, medicaid recipients, professors, scientists......not
enough, not enough to stop them....but a start.

i was inspired by percy schmeiser, a farmer from saskatchewan who stood up to
monsanto corporation when they sued him for 'patent infringement' when pollen
from their patented seed drifted through the wind onto his crop of canola and
infected it. he's been through 4 lawsuits, which have cost him nearly
$500,000, and lost......he's still fighting, though. he told horror stories of
the company hiring private detectives to trespass on his farmland and gather his
crops, to spray his crops with their patented herbicide to see if the crops
would die -- if they didn't die, that meant they were infected with their
patented 'roundup ready' seed that would resist their patented 'roundup'
herbicide (kind of like the old test in the 'salem witch trials' to see if a
woman was a witch - throw her in the water, if she didn't drown, she was a
witch, and if she did drown....well, she wasn't a witch, but was dead anyway).

the monsanto police would sit with their tinted-window Sport Utility Vehicle
just outside Percy's driveway for days on end, following him when he left his
home, following his wife, even his grand-daughter on her way to school. It was
pure intimidation -- wouldn't be surprising if we were talking about the Mafia,
but this is a multinational corporation. Well, I guess the two are not really
so different, in the end. Monsanto is the company, remember, that produced
'Agent Orange' that destroyed so much of Vietnam during the Vietnam War and
left so many veterans terminally ill. And Percy's not the only farmer they've
sued. They've taken more than 60 farmers to court in the US, and another 40 in
Canada, and hundreds more lawsuits are pending. The company sends 'extortion
letters' to farmers claiming that the farmer is using Monsanto's patented seed,
and that they will sue the farmer unless the farmer pays the corporation a
certain amount (usually in the hundreds of thousands of dollars) within a
couple of weeks to 'settle out of court'. Many of these farmers end up losing
their farms in the lawsuits -- it's really out of control. The court system is
set up to protect the corporations, and now that corporations are in the
business of patenting life forms -- well, it's not just farmers, but ALL of us,
that are in trouble because of this.

Companies like Monsanto are genetically modifying seeds, and those genetically
modified seeds infect other seeds -- the few studies that have been done have
shown that 37 of the 38 strains of canola seed in the country has been infected
with genetically-modified strains, 80% of the corn and close to 90% of the
cotton in the country has been infected. The companies claim that the genetic
modification is safe -- their proof? "You're already eating it!" Well, I, for
one, don't want to be a guinea pig for their genetic testing, especially when
the long-term effects are not known. And when these genetically-modified
strains get into the food system, as they have in North America, THERE IS NO
TURNING BACK! If they prove to be harmful, there is no way we can retract them
from the food supply and go back to the non-genetically-modified strains. This
is really frightening stuff!! And yet, many people in this country, many smart
and thoughtful people, are believing the companies' propaganda that they are
doing this to 'combat hunger'. In fact, genetic modification does the exact
opposite. It was promised to increase yields - it does not. It was promised
to decrease the use of pesticides - it does not. It was promised to cost less
- it does not. And the crops have lower nutritional value than their
non-genetically-modified counterparts. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO CONTROLLED
SCIENTIFIC STUDY?? I'm sorry to shout, but I'm angry about this!! This is the
future of our food supply, and these companies are mutating it on a national and
international scale!! They are lying to the public, and we are accepting it at
face value. WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!

Well, our protest in Philadelphia did very little to actually stop the Biotech
Industry from meeting -- it was a fairly small, but beautifully creative
protest. As I have noticed at every protest I attend, what is most impressive
is not necessarily the 'protestation', but the creation of a joyous and
beautiful counter-culture that demonstrates an alternative to the profit-driven
world of fast-dealing that goes on inside the Biotech conference. In our
temporary autonomous zone, puppets personifying the demons of biotech were met
by a beautiful puppet of sunlight and freedom, and dozens of painted images of
organic vegetables, rising up in joyful defiance to their monstrous, tortured
vision of a world of high-priced drugs, genetically-modified crops and
bio-weaponry. There were people of all ages, from infants to retirees, singing
and chanting and dancing in the hot sunlight.....and there were medics supplying
water, organic food free for all provided by the volunteer cooks of 'food not
bombs', even a temporary clinic set up in the basement of a church. THIS is
why i go to protests, not so much to vent my anger but to be part of this
vision for another possible way to organize our society.....through voluntary
mutual aid.

a society of abundance -- fresh, organic produce to eat, free healthcare for
everyone whenever they need it (preventative measures as well).....such a thing
IS possible. but as long as we are confined by a profit-driven business model,
it's hard to see clearly that there's any alternative to that model.

----------

i got another chance to see this 'alternative model' in action when i went to
the rainbow gathering ( http://www.welcomehome.org )in west virginia. it's a
gathering of nomadic folks from all over, and back-to-the-land hippies from the
sixties who have kept this annual gathering happening for over thirty
years.....ten thousand or more gather each year on the fourth of july weekend
and live in the woods for a week, camping and sharing music and stories,
drumming and ending the whole thing with a sun ceremony on the fourth of july.
here's an article about it:
http://wildflowerstew.org/52916.html

many on the right and left alike look down on this gathering as 'too much
fluff', but i found it to be full of hard workers who laid miles of plastic
pipe from a well to 20 main kitchens over a five mile stretch of land....the
kitchens provided free food, and there were dozens of smaller kitchens as
well....toilets were dug (three feet deep at a minimum - covered over when they
reached two feet), paths established, stages built for performances......the
woods were transformed into a magical fairyland of music, drumming, dancing and
sharing for those few days.....i found it to be a refreshing breath of nice
energy....all around me were people who were smiling and practically glowing
with life...lots of children and families.....and lots of GREAT food. no
rulers, no leaders, no governing authority. each kitchen organized on their
own, each person brought their own talent or skill to the community - be it
teaching yoga classes, cooking delicious tofu, laying water pipes, playing
banjo or digging toilets, everyone had something to contribute. and no one had
to make rules or assign schedules to make people work. they worked because they
wanted to help. and guess what?? _everything_ _got_ _done_!

on the last day of the rainbow gathering, there was a sun ceremony to celebrate
the community and life on earth.....at dawn the drumming, which had been going
for 24 hours, stopped abruptly, and i became acutely aware of the birds singing
and crickets chirping.....the silence spread throughout the camp, and people
maintained silence as they awoke and prepared a morning meal. everyone joined
a silent walk through all the woodland paths to the main meadow, where a circle
was formed with everyone joining hands......the circle kept growing wider and
wider, until it touched the very edges of the field - 10,000 people holding
hands. and then the children's parade came up the hill, with beautiful
costumes and rainbow colored banners, and they came into the middle of the
circle.....the people began to 'ohm', quietly, then more loudly, until a
crescendo was reached, and cheering and shouting ensued. the drums picked up
in the middle of the field where the children were gathered, and everyone
rushed forward in noise and dancing to celebrate.

now, i'm not saying the gathering is perfect -- i definitely have my critique
(white cultural privilege, disconnection to local struggles and direct action,
for example)....but i found it to be a beautiful breath of fresh air that
demonstrates how people CAN live together without money, governments or laws.

houston, texas

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 17:08:38 GMT

7 april 2005
houston, texas

i got an email after my last journal entry asking me why i am so negative about everything -- accusing me of 'looking at the world through blood-covered glasses'.... well, i wanted to respond a bit, first of all by saying that yes, when you have seen the blood, touched it, smelled it, and know that your government, and, in extension, YOU, as a citizen, are responsible....well, it is hard to walk away from that. and in fact i would consider it a crime to walk away from it. so i spread the word about these atrocities committed in our name BECAUSE i think we have the power to change it. and not only the power, but the responsibility to change it.

that said, i need to point out that there is so much hope and beauty and creativity surrounding me, as i have been travelling around and meeting all of the most sincere and incredible people who are fighting against this monstrosity of violence and war. in new orleans, we met charlie reith, who is a teacher and a founder of a permaculture center at tulane university in new orleans. permaculture is a farming method that is completely organic, using no pesticides or chemicals, but that is based on studying nature's cycles and ecosystems, and re-creating them in a concentrated form on the farm. so the farm becomes a complete ecosystem in itself -- a diversity of crops are grown together, and the waste material is put back into the cycle of production. the institute for social ecology in vermont has done a lot of studying of this method ( http://www.social-ecology.org ), and come up with pretty amazing ways to de-pollute a toxic place using natural methods. and charlie has a small business, selling organic potting soil and natural (garlic and lemon based) insect repellent for gardens....it's called laughing crow....http://www.grow-with-the-crow.com

from new orleans, we went to lafitte, louisiana, where we met an incredible group of actors who are living and performing on a boat. they built the boat themselves, a replica of an historical tall-ship, and they travel and perform their theatrical production on the boat itself. the audience sits on the shore, and the actors, acrobats and singers use their tremendous talents to bring a message -- in this case, the story of a group of refugees rounded up as 'terrorists' by a mega-corporation contracted by the government to 'get rid of the problem'. the theatre troupe tries to make the stories of the various refugees really come alive for the audience, to be able to connect and relate to the various characters (each from a different place in the world)......the story is a parable, but also a warning, because in fact the US government IS rounding up refugees.......in louisiana alone there are thousands in prison, not knowing their status, or whether they will be sent to be tortured or killed in their country of origin.

and now we are here in houston, where we were able to visit a wonderful community center called MECA, in the hispanic community......the folks there are absolutely wonderful, filling the children's lives with music lessons, tutoring, after-school classes and programs, and counseling. they are hoping to put in a legal clinic for immigrants, and possibly even a free medical clinic as well. the center has a beautiful community garden, where kids from schools in the area come after school to learn about the growing process and plant fresh vegetables. there is a student prison art project, where teachers work with kids age 12 - 16 who have been told that they are incorrigible, and there is no place for them but prison. a lot of times the only thing they did wrong was get in a fight with another kid, and sometimes not even that, but they are put in locked prisons just like adult prisons......anyway, these local artists are volunteering to come in and work with the kids to make murals......they are absolutely stunning, and show so much of the pain and fear the kids have to deal with growing up in poverty.

the problem is the system of capitalism that uses lies, threats and violence to maintain a situation where a very few have power and wealth, while everyone else works to increase the wealth of those few. but there IS a solution - many solutions, in fact, and THAT is what gives me hope. everywhere i go i meet people who know that this hierarchical system of oppression is not the only way to do things -- everywhere i go i meet people who are struggling to bring beauty and hope, fresh food and inspiration for a better world back into the dismal monoculture that has stultified our senses and made us forget how to feel.

travelling around to colleges with this 'wheels of justice' tour, i find myself getting into discussions with students and others who are talking completely from their heads, with rhetoric and arguments and numbers........until before they know it they are making absurd arguments like saying that killing 500,000 children is ok if it serves our nation's strategic objective. well i'm sorry, but there is NEVER a justification for killing a child. ONE child -- let alone 500,000, like the 500,000 that died in iraq under sanctions between 1991 and 2002. and i find it really disturbing that people in this country are telling the iraqi people that WE know what's best for them, when americans know nothing about iraq. in every classroom we've been in with this tour, when we ask the students to name an iraqi other than saddam hussein, they fail to name anyone. every once in a while, someone will mention ahmed chalabi, the petty criminal wanted for bank fraud that became the US government's pet. but as far as the history and culture of iraq, historical figures, writers, artists -- americans know NOTHING about this country. and yet we have the arrogance to think we can go in there and tell them how to live. as far as i'm concerned, THAT type of attitude, justifying endless war, is looking at the world through blood-covered glasses. the problem is not seeing the blood. because it is there. when i look at the houston skyline, and see Halliburton corporate headquarters -- one of the main profiteers off this war, when I see Bechtel -- a company that has been trying to force the poor people in bolivia to pay for their right to drink water, when i see citibank and exxon-mobil and boeing and lockheed martin -- companies that profit handsomely off every war -- yes, i begin to see those mirrored skyscrapers with their multi-million dollar offices for what they are -- i see them dripping with blood. but i would rather be able to SEE that, and point it out for others to see, than to blind myself and think that everything is ok when it's not.

and there are people trying to change things, trying to make a difference, to commit their lives to LIFE instead of death......everywhere i go i meet such people. and i'm grateful. and i know that in this fight for the human rights of ALL people, we will win in the end, because we must. there is no other choice. if we don't commit ourselves to life, human rights and the environment, we are doomed to go down in a ball of flames. and i sure don't want to see this planet destroyed in that way. so i'll keep fighting -- for ALL of us, for those who are living in the misery of the effects of war and occupation, and yes, for those who are still living in denial, and refuse to see the blood.

so my time on the wheels of justice tour is over. but the bus rolls on......you can keep following the journey at http://www.justicewheels.org

washington dc.......SUCKS!

Tue, 08 Mar 2005 17:20:07 GMT

March 8, 2005
Washington DC

Wow.......it sure is depressing to come back to the U.S. at a time like this -- left and right, friends are discouraged, struggling.........

the last of the old-growth forests are being cut down in oregon....
see http://o2collective.org/archives/000030.html to help

the Bush administration is celebrating international women's day by urging the United Nations to roll back women's right to choose...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5137612-103681,00.html

instead of living up to its obligations under the Nuclear non-proliferation Treaty, the U.S. government is building MORE nuclear weapons (as if the world needs more weapons)...
http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/insecurity/contents.asp

and even talking about using nuclear weapons in Iraq (!)...
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020315-nuke08.htm

and planning to dump the country's spent nuclear fuel rods on native american land....
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2005/Mar-05-Sat-2005/news/25999957.html
http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/02sum/burial1.asp

and opening more native american sacred sites to gold mining...
http://www.wsdp.org/press.htm#113004

not to mention the massive cuts in education, health care, job training, worker safety, environment, veteran's benefits in the proposed FY2006 budget...
http://www.afscme.org/action/fy2006.htm

without the support in place for young people coming out of poverty, many will have no other choice but to join the military -- this is what is known as the 'economic draft', or the 'backdoor draft'......
http://www.nodraftnoway.org/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=1091130514&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&

meanwhile the de facto world government of the World Trade Organization and 'Free Trade' agreements plows ahead, despite the massive resistance of poor and indigenous people worldwide...
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/wto/

corporations are getting patents on seeds, and even on diseases themselves, preventing native communities from growing their traditional food supplies and preventing researchers from finding out ways to prevent disease without paying them money....
http://savewildrice.com/

things are getting bad......just look at the headlines on
http://www.resist.ca
http://www.theheadlines.org
http://www.commondreams.org
and see if you can avoid feeling depressed...

everywhere i turn the news is discouraging -- friends losing jobs and homes, academics like Ward Churchill coming under attack for their views (see http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7210 )......

the arrogance of those in the bush administration is absolutely astounding.....he surrounds himself with people who have been condemned worldwide for their _very_ well-documented roles in criminal acts, including making John Negroponte -- the butcher of Honduras -- the chief of a new, controversial 'Intelligence Czar' post. Americans may not know who Negroponte is, but believe me, the people of Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, who suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths in massacres that Negroponte supported and covered up while he was U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the eighties -- _those_ people know who he is. He was chastised during the Iran-Contra scandal (as were many who are now serving in the Bush administration) for engaging in illegal activities in the Nicaragua war. As someone who has _been_ to Nicaragua, and _seen_ the effects of that horrible war, I simply cannot believe that the men responsible are still roaming the streets free, let alone serving high posts in the presidential administration. Is it too much to ask that the American people at least _remember_ the Iran-Contra scandal?? I would argue that most people in the U.S. probably don't even remember what the scandal was about. So these men can continue pursuing the same type of policy -- if they were hundred of thousands of _U.S._ deaths, instead of Central Americans, would we remember it then??? Well, considering how well we remember and commemorate the 3,000 deaths of September 2001, I would guess that if U.S. citizens were the _victims_ and not the _perpetrators_ of these hundreds of thousands of deaths, we would be remembering them very well indeed.

I mean....it would be one thing if these people were begging forgiveness for their roles in the massacres, and changing their ways....but instead, people like Negroponte, as ambassador to Iraq over the last year, proposed the "Salvador option" in Iraq: targeting civilian populations to scare them into ceasing their support for the popular resistance (see http://nuclearfree.lynx.co.nz/salvador.htm ). He was condemned for it before, even by his own government, but continues to press for the same type of criminal policy of killing children. As Professor Ward Churchill said in the controversial talk for which he is still being put under fire (see above link): "Americans, you will not be safe until you stop killing other people's children. It's as simple as that."

sigh............
it's a depressing time to be in this country.

Anyway, I wanted to share an editorial I wrote after an Italian journalist was shot at yesterday by US forces in Iraq....

Targeting of journalists?
March 7, 2005

After Monday’s shooting incident in Iraq, in which U.S. soldiers in Iraq shot at the car of Italian journalist - Giuliana Sgrena - killing the Italian intelligence agent who had helped free her from captivity, and wounding three others, questions have been raised by Italian officials and others as to whether the U.S. military engages in a policy of directly targeting members of the media. Although it is unclear whether Monday’s incident was a deliberate attack (due to conflicting accounts from eyewitness reports and the official U.S. military statement), there has been mounting evidence that the U.S. military has engaged in a policy of deliberate targeting of journalists.

In December, a Lebanese television station was listed by the U.S. State Department. With the U.S. administration throwing around the word 'terrorist' so loosely, using it to refer to virtually anyone who disagrees with their line, it is not surprising that the term was used recently to refer to a media organization as 'terrorist media' (al-Manar television in Lebanon). But what is surprising, and in many ways, more disturbing, is the way most of the media outlets have simply let this precedent-setting accusation go unnoticed, sliding it under the proverbial carpet without a thought as to the implication.

The targeting of media outlets which present a dissenting voice to the 'Washington Consensus' is not a new thing. During the conflict in Kosovo in 1993, US forces targeted Serb television, because it was seen as an agent for the opposing side. And in November 2001, BBC World Service correspondent William Reeve was injured in Kabul, Afghanistan, by an American missile that had scored a 'direct hit' on the Al-Jazeera network's office next door. Nik Gowing, a colleague of Reeves, stated at the time that "Journalists now appear to be legitimate targets. It seems to me that a very clear message needs to go out that this must not be allowed to continue", adding that al-Jazeera's only 'crime' was presenting news that Western audiences found uncomfortable.

The targeting of journalists became even more apparent when the US army invaded Iraq in 2003, in a conflict that continues until today. During this conflict, US officials have urged journalists to 'embed' themselves with military battalions -- a position that would previously have seemed absurd to any journalist concerned with the task of presenting a fair and accurate picture of what was going on (the historical job description of a journalist). In this case, however, the proposition was accepted at face value and with little outcry from most of the US media conglomerates.

International journalists were far less willing to allow their journalistic integrity to be compromised by agreeing to this obscenely partisan proposal, and were warned by the U.S. administration that they would be 'fair game' if they did not accept it. Sure enough, on April 8, 2003, the U.S. army bombed the offices of two television networks and the hotel where most international journalists were staying in Baghdad -- three separate attacks on journalists in the same day, which the U.S. administration even now insists were 'accidental' and 'unrelated'. Three journalists were killed in the attacks: a Ukrainian cameraman for Reuters, a Spanish cameraman and a reporter from Qatar. It is 'un-embedded' journalists who appear to have been targeted by U.S. military attacks.

The U.S. has the most powerful military in the world, but the U.S. is also a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, Article 79 which states that: “Journalists engaged in dangerous professional missions in areas of armed conflict shall be considered as civilians within the meaning of Article 50, Paragraph 1. They shall be protected as such under the conventions of this Protocol, provided that they take no action adversely affecting their status as civilians. It seems from the reading of this Article, that the only journalists who appear to have taken actions that would 'affect their status as civilians' are those who have 'embedded' themselves within the military of one side of a conflict.

Surely, if a free and democratic media is to exist in this world, and to proliferate, a multiplicity of viewpoints should be encouraged, not discouraged, and most certainly, should not be blown into oblivion with high-tech modern smart bombs.

back in dc

Sat, 26 Feb 2005 09:01:58 GMT

25 february 2005
washington dc

yep....here i am, back in the belly of the beast. watching the television here and reading the newspapers, i am finding out that all this time, while i was seeing palestinian friends brutalized, wounded and killed by the reckless and random shooting and shelling of the israeli army, all this time palestine was in a period of 'relative calm'! what a surprise! if only i had known it while i was there, so i could have told 25 year old Niveen Akram Kahleel as she was forced to give birth at a checkpoint last week because israeli soldiers wouldn't let her through, or 15 year old Hani Khaleel Mohammad, before he was shot in the head two weeks ago.....if i had told them of the 'relative calm' being reported by the american media all this time, of the glorious headlines praising israel's release of a few hundred prisoners, would that have changed the fact that Hani is dead?? Along with seven others, since this 'peace summit' took place on feb. 8th....

and now, tonight, a palestinian bomber took his own life and the lives of three others in tel aviv. none of the palestinian resistance groups are claiming responsibility......lately, they've been laying down their arms. i haven't heard yet who the bomber is, but i can guess that he was young ......probably lost a few friends to israeli army violence -- hey, maybe he knew Maher Abu Sneina, whose family i visited a month ago in Qalqilia after he was killed with over thirty bullets emptied into his 20-year old body.....well, i did hear that the bomber came from the nearby town of Tulkarem......so who knows, maybe he did know Maher. maybe they were friends, went to school together, played together, grew together......maybe he had seen his best friend shot dead, or three of his best friends, as was the case with sadiq abdul rahim, the 17 year old suicide bomber who, after all three of his best friends were killed, walked to a nearby settlement and blew himself up, killing 3 israelis, two years ago...

the cycle of violence perpetuates itself.......we all know that violence begets violence, especially when one is young and prone to act irrationally out of fear and anger.

there is no excuse for killing civilians.

but there is also no excuse for the whitewashing the american media has done of the ongoing killing of palestinian civilians by israeli soldiers. we deserve to know the facts about what is happening there. if three dead israeli civilians warrant a front-page headline on the new york times, then what about the six dead palestinian civilians killed in cold blood since this supposed 'cease-fire' began? don't their lives warrant front-page headlines as well?

apparently not......for they get barely a mention in the american press.

the american media should be held criminally responsible for their absolute failure to live up to their mandate as the conscience of the nation. when reporters are embedded with the military, and retired generals are the main 'analysts' given air-time on the evening news, when the nightly headlines read word-for-word like the Pentagon's daily press release, well, the line between a military propaganda wing of the government and a free, independent media becomes extremely blurred indeed.

i arrived back into the states and stepped right into the middle of an independent media conference -- the air was full of excitement, but one felt the tension as well........people sounded weary, this fight has gone on so long and the major media outlets continue to be consolidated into fewer and fewer massive corporations. cbs is owned by westinghouse, nbc by general electric -- both of them major weapons manufacturers...and then people wonder why the news media is pounding the drums for more war? they have a vested interest! sigh........i'm beginning to remember how cynical one can get living in this country.

...and how afraid!! this is another thing the media has become quite adept at doing -- making people in this country feel that they are threatened, and need to be very afraid.....i was listening to c-span, and i heard an 'expert' talking about how interpol -- that's the international intelligence agency -- had said that there's a threat of chemical weapons being used against us!! and we're not ready for an attack like that!! as he continued speaking in a heightened alert voice, i found my imagination starting to follow him -- what if we WERE attacked by chemical weapons? i'm in washington dc now!! who knows what disease might start plaguing the city -- would my family make it out alive? would we die torturous deaths like being burned alive by napalm?? i became......very.....afraid.....

then i turned off the radio and realized that was the point! that the broadcast was TRYING to make me afraid...and the only chemical weapons i would experience would be the cs-gas and tear gas fired at us at incredibly high doses during our street protests against their closed, armored, fortified meetings on 'free' trade.

we have to get to the root of the problem. otherwise we are dealing only with the symptoms, and the symptoms will keep recurring, until and unless we can get at the cause. and the causes are many -- greed, power, fear of losing power......

i've gotten so many wonderful responses to my journals from palestine....one woman donated on my website the price of a ticket to the play 'the diary of anne frank', for, as she put it, "all the little anne franks hiding now in palestine". and one response was from jack herbert out in oregon, who says, in connection with the 'root of the problem':
"the separation between rich and poor is itself violence. It doesn't just lead to violence in reaction to it. It is the initial violence, and its enforcement is escalating violence. The violence in reaction is reaction to the initial and escalating violence of the rich. The separation is enforced; enforcement is violence -- whether laws, economic and business systems, attacks and intimidations of those who dare to speak against their poverty, police, guards, firings, harassments and rapes, malnutrition and starvation, disease and lack of medical care and promotion of health, wearing down of spirit,... Poverty kills. Look at death rates of any age group for different classes, different groups of people. Look at the suffering. Poverty is violence. It's not the poor who initiate violence in reaction to their enforced poverty; their poverty is the violence of the rich against them; their violence is their struggle against the violence against them, usually when nonviolence has failed. 'Just trying to earn a living for my family', never minding the consequences to others of how we do it, is violence. It kills. It creates and maintains endless misery and hopelessness until death comes."

Funny, my late friend Father McSorley came up with the same conclusion in his book _peace_eyes_, that i was reading at the beginning of my journey, way back in november in hamburg germany.

Jack works with a group that is an inspiring answer to the question, "but what can we DO about it?" he says:
"The Metropolitan Alliance for the Common Good in Portland, Oregon, a coalition of over 30 churches and some labor and community organizations, learned methods of Saul Alinski, the organizer who built union strength in Chicago, from the Industrial Areas Foundation. When we want to learn about a subject area and develop motivation and plans, we break into pairs or very small groups and tell each other our own histories in the subject area. We discover a lot of similar experiences and also surprises about how larger forces in society affect us. Then we regather into our larger meeting and develop what we will do. The community we discover and create becomes an active force in our local community and could join similar groups elsewhere for change outside our locality. A lot of the force behind local problems comes from national and international forces, so we will need to look farther. Many people become empowered as never before to look dysfunction in the face and work effectively to change it, instead of going along with it, as our society teaches."

So I'll leave you with that thought....
I'm sure that you'll be hearing from me again soon, on my next adventure...
until then, check my website http://www.jenkasjourneys.org

I'm attaching an editorial piece I wrote tonight after the bombing in Tel Aviv...

love to all,
jenka

---------------------------------
Who really 'shattered' this truce?
February 25, 2005

After Friday's attack in Tel Aviv which killed 3 and injured 38 Israelis (according to Israeli police), the American media has been quick to repeat the Israeli claim that Palestinians have 'shattered the truce' established February 8 when Palestinian and Israeli leaders met in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt. But from February 8th until February 25th, when the Tel Aviv attack took place, 8 Palestinian civilians (5 adults and 3 children) have been killed and 36 injured (according to the Red Crescent Medical Society - RCS). Just to point out the obvious, this is higher than the number of Israelis killed on Friday -- but where was the media when the Palestinians were killed? Why is it suddenly a 'shattering of the truce' when a bomb explodes in Tel Aviv, but the deaths and injuries of these Palestinians don't count at all in the question of how, and by whom, the truce was really broken?

The daily atrocities against the Palestinian people didn't cease or desist on February 8th -- the very next morning, February 9th, saw a large-scale military invasion of the West Bank city of Nablus. There was no 'relative calm' for the people of Rafah refugee camp as they faced the almost daily demolition of homes and the shooting of high-velocity bullets and tank shells at their homes and neighborhoods. The Israeli military constructed additional checkpoints and brought in more troops during the 'cease-fire' period, without dismantling any of the over 400 checkpoints already in place. And just try talking about the Israeli 'cease-fire' to the family of Hani Khaleel Mohammad, 15, who was shot in the head and killed on February 15th, or that of Sabri Fayez Al-Rajoub, 16, killed while walking to a mosque the day before.

On Friday, the day the bombing took place, Mazin Ahmad Bin Hasan, 16, was killed in Rafah, and two other teens were injured. Also on Friday, Kerin Kayemit, the Permanent Israeli Fund, announced that they will be constructing tens of thousands of new homes this year in settlements built on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Maali Adumim settlement east of Jerusalem will erect 21,000 new units, and over 5600 units will be constructed in ten other West Bank settlements, in a plan reportedly approved by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. The settlement expansion, as well as the construction of the Israeli annexation wall have continued throughout this supposed 'cease-fire', even despite an additional ruling against the wall this week at the International Court of Justice in the Hague. In fact, on February 8th, the day the 'cease-fire' was being negotiated in Egypt, the Israeli High Court issued a ruling allowing for the construction of the wall around Ariel settlement, 16 miles into the West Bank.

Nearly all Palestinians agree in the counter-productiveness of suicide bombings, which target mainly civilians, and most Israelis oppose the targeting of civilian populations in the Palestinian occupied territories. Yet the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian land and the sporadic suicide bombings against Israelis both end up killing civilians. Since the beginning of the current open conflict in September 2000, 3,587 Palestinians (RCS figures) and 1,042 Israelis (Israeli military figures) have been killed. It is estimated that 2/3 of the casualties on both sides are civilians.

While the American public, until Friday's attack, has been reading rose-colored headlines about 'prisoner releases' (in a month when more Palestinians were arrested than released) and 'cease fires' in Israel and Palestine, the Palestinian civilian population was living a very different reality -- a reality in which, from February 8th until today, the Israeli army has not _for_one_minute_ ceased its fire against them.

palestine: checkpoints

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 15:42:03 GMT

2 feb 2005
beit sahour, palestine

there's so much going on right now it's hard to pick what to talk about...peace
talks scheduled for next week....the ongoing violence of gaza....

i had a hard day, coming from a little farming village where i was visiting
friends in the northern west bank to bethlehem (in the south). i started on
the main road from tulkarem to ramallah (two major palestinian cities), but
there was almost no traffic passing (no taxis, buses...nothing..). a number of
cars and buses passed, but they were vehicles of israeli settlers, and they sped
past me and my palestinian friend at the speed of fear (yeah, pretty darn
fast)....leading my friend to surmise that perhaps a surprise checkpoint had
been set up further north, and the palestinian cars were all stopped there. a
likely scenario, as surprise checkpoints are something that happen every day in
palestine. after an hour of watching israeli vehicles pass us by, a van pulled
up that was just going to the next village, but had two guys in it who were
trying to go to hebron (south of bethlehem)....so, i gained some travelling
partners in the quest for a ride to bethlehem. we got out at the next village
and waited at an intersection with a few other guys who were headed south.

the weather had gotten surprisingly cold for this climate, and my jacket
suddenly didn't seem as warm as it used to be....anyway, we managed to flag
down a minibus that agreed to take us south to the next main checkpoint. the
road where we were waiting was the main road headed to Ariel, the biggest
Israeli settlement in the west bank.....a sign at the intersection says "Ariel"
with an arrow in one direction, and "Tel Aviv" with an arrow in the other
direction....I found the sign quite ironic and strange, given the dozens of
Palestinian towns and villages that are left off the sign. Also, it feels
really insulting to see a sign in a Palestinian area pointing out two major
places that Palestinians cannot go. I wonder how it must feel to see that sign
every day, in hebrew and english (not arabic), and to know that you will never
be allowed to go in either direction -- to tel aviv OR to ariel.

we got out at the checkpoint about 10 miles down the road, and walked across --
all the palestinians had to have their IDs and permission checked -- as an
american, i was allowed right through. this is the same checkpoint (zater),
where a month ago i watched a bus full of about 50 people stopped for hours as
the soldiers checked every person, held them there and questioned them, over
and over again, making them wait outside, in the rain. this type of thing is
also an every day occurrence for palestinians, something that would try
anyone's patience (especially if it happens to you every single day).

at the checkpoint, there were a number of young israeli settlers waiting for a
bus from the ariel settlement. walking past them, i could feel their hostility
-- i felt like asking them how it felt to be living on stolen land.....but i
don't even know if any of them spoke english.....and they probably have a ready
answer, anyway. many settler youth consider themselves to be the front lines in
the struggle for 'eretz israel' (greater israel), and are indoctrinated in a
deep and complex ideology in which israel is always the victim, no matter how
aggressive the action they are taking.

in the area around ariel, settlement expansion is a visible reality -- settler
outposts, made up of 6 - 8 mobile home trailers, a sniper tower, and usually
some military post nearby, are a common sight on the hilltops around ariel.
the mobile homes are soon followed by infrastructure (water pipes and
electricity lines), then construction of permanent buildings and houses. this
all happens quite quickly -- usually within a matter of months, and then the
israeli government can claim that the 'demographic reality on the ground' is
that there are israelis living in that area, and it needs to be included in the
state of israel. it is BLATANT LAND CONFISCATION! And it is possible only
through the extreme imbalance of military power -- Israel can take the land,
destroy whatever homes, farms and olive trees might be there already, and claim
the land for israel ONLY because Israel has the military power to kill anyone
who stands in their way.

am i pro-palestinian? someone wrote to tell me that after my last journal. of
course. anyone who can come here and see the reality of what is happening in
the west bank and gaza strip, and what happened 50 years ago in what is now
Israel, will realize that this is exactly the kind of disenfranchisement that
happened to the native americans in the USA, and justice DEMANDS that we stand
on the side of the oppressed. some, like the christian peacemaker art gish, in
the book i just finished called 'hebron journal', would argue that christianity
demands the same thing. not being a christian, i can't really advocate with
any real authority on that point, but having read the gospels, it certainly
seems like what jesus would do -- he always stood on the side of the oppressed.

anyway, back to zater checkpoint. when we walked passed those settler youth, i
could only imagine what the palestinians around me must have been thinking and
feeling. getting stared down with hostile glances by those who have blatantly
taken your land through force. some of the settlers carried guns. ALL of the
soldiers carried guns. none of the palestinians, obviously, had any guns or
weapons of any kind. the group of us got into a collective taxi that was
waiting just past the settler youth....a shepherd was herding his flock of
sheep past the taxi as we got in....i saw a lot of little lambs chasing their
mamas across the road....the embodiment of peace and tranquillity -- a strange
contrast to the hostility and unspoken threat of violence we felt just a few
yards back.

i had a good discussion in the taxi, broken arabic and english, discussing
whether abu mazen, the new palestinian president, will bring peace. the main
consensus in the taxi (not necessarily representative of anything) was a
resounding no -- he would end the intifada, yes, but the israeli expansion
would continue.....and thus, so would the resistance to the occupation. but
the palestinians have no power in the situation -- one of the guys said that if
marwan barghouti (the jailed fatah leader, currently in prison) had stayed in
the presidential race instead of dropping out, he would have won (he was the
favorite).....but israel and the US would not have accepted the result, and
would have appointed abu mazen anyway. so the palestinians voted for abu mazen
to appease israeland the US -- like a kid in the schoolyard giving the bully his
lunch money so the bully won't hit him again. appeasement......

we made it to the qalandia checkpoint 15 miles away within an hour, and were met
by a crazy scene -- hundreds of people waiting in the 'wind tunnel' created by
israel when they dug through the middle of a hill to build the checkpoint --
strong, chilly wind, people huddled together, standing behind vans and taxis to
somewhat block the wind......we heard that abu dis checkpoint (the next one
before bethlehem) was closed -- rumors of a bomb threat -- the israeli army
spreads these rumors a lot (they are usually not true), to justify the
continual closing of checkpoints, the random closures that make any kind of
schedule or plan absolutely impossible. so there was a crowd of at least 50
people who were trying to get to bethlehem and hebron, pushing into one van
that had decided to take the chance and make the run, despite the rumor that
the checkpoint on the way would be closed.

meanwhile, qalandia itself was extremely crowded, things were moving achingly
slow, cars were lined up for at least a mile and were honking like crazy.
night was falling fast, and the worried looks on faces of people trying to get
home safe before dark became a quiet desperation...the culture of infinite
patience began to wear thin as people pushed their way in to the last available
seats on the taxis that were leaving. the guys who i had joined in the van at
the beginning of my journey were thinking about staying with friends in
ramallah instead of risking being stuck at a closed checkpoint after dark. i
thought about my friend who told me about sleeping overnight at a checkpoint in
gaza last week because he couldn't get through, and my jacket suddenly seemed
even thinner than before...

i decided to go through jerusalem....something the vast majority of palestinians
canot do. only those who have permission from israel can enter the city of
jerusalem, despite the fact that the city is almost half palestinian. the
permits are extremely difficult to obtain. but i can enter and exit fairly
easily as an american.....I felt horrible leaving the two brothers who were
headed to Hebron.....we had had such a good discussion in the car, they were
good guys.....and I felt like I was abandoning them in the cold because I
happened to have the privilege of an american passport.

I got in the bus to jerusalem. after battling the traffic jam for half an hour
we made it to the next checkpoint, where everyone's IDs and permissions,
including my own, were thoroughly examined by the soldiers in charge.
sufficiently convinced of the legality of all of our existences, we were
allowed to pass, and enter the holy city of jerusalem (al-quds, for the arabic
speakers). I got to the bus station, and walked a few blocks to where i could
get a collective taxi to the place near bethlehem where palestinians go across
--legally or illegally, they climb over a hill, and taxis wait on both
sides....an israeli military tower sits on a hilltop nearby, but doesn't often
disrupt the crossing -- except for the occasional raid. this is one of the
reasons why all the checkpoints are so ridiculous -- people always find a way
to get where they are going. even the construction of the illegal annexation
wall will not prevent palestinians from entering israel or vice versa. but
that's not really the point of the wall.....the point is to enclose more of the
west bank into israel....and in that, at least, the wall is succeeding.

one more collective taxi, then a short taxi ride and a half-hour walk and I made
it back to bethlehem. five hours after I began my journey, an odyssey of epic
proportions -- all of this, to go a measly 30 miles. this is a typical trip
for a palestinian to take -- even if you own your own car, you still have to go
through the checkpoints, and that can sometimes even take longer than crossing
by foot. in some checkpoints, like huwwara checkpoint near nablus, it's not
even possible to cross the checkpoint by car.

the family i stay with recently went to an engagement party for their niece in
nablus,and had to go through huwwara checkpoint. salibeh is 60 years old and
recently had a heart attack. he rarely even leaves the home....his wife is
extremely sensitive to cold -- she doesn't go out if it's less than 40 degrees.
and their son is retarded -- but the soldiers don't care about any of this.
they all had to walk through the cold dusty wind for almost a mile to cross the
checkpoint, with dust and sand blowing into their faces, ruining their dress
clothes, and challenging salibeh's fragile health condition. a british friend
told me about meeting an eighty-year old woman crying at a checkpoint a couple
weeks ago who the soldiers wouldn't let through. turns out the woman had just
had surgery!! eighty years old!! and was standing in the cold at a
checkpoint, just two days after her gallbladder was removed. I'd be crying
too! I mean, being forced to _walk_ two days after surgery is bad enough, but
being held at a checkpoint for hours? like i said, these are conditions that
would try anyone's patience.

this is the daily life of palestinian people. and the checkpoints are just one
aspect of the occupation. 400 of them, all over the west bank and gaza. and
now the israeli government wants the US to give hundreds of millions more
dollars (we already give six BILLION dollars a year in aid and loans to israel)
to build high-tech crossing terminals inthe illegal israeli annexation wall.
how about tearing down the wall instead, as was ruled by the International
Court of Justice in the Hague? too bad the court has no enforcement power, and
Israel has the backing of the most powerful country in the world, the US. with
a friend like that, I guess it's possible to step on whoever you want -- no
matter what the international court of justice may say, or rule....might makes
right, after all.

new years resolution: free palestine?

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 15:05:25 GMT

1/1/2004
beit sahour
palestine

my latest audio reports:
weekly report 12/24-31:
http://www.imemc.org/audio/2004/december/week5-summary.htm

special report on election campaign:
http://www.imemc.org/audio/2004/december/sp-election.htm

pictures of palestinian family life:
http://www.jenkasjourneys.org/pal_pics.html

I'm living with a family here in the Bethlehem area, and I want to describe them a bit so you know a little about a typical Palestinian family. They have four children -- three are grown, and the youngest is a teenager living with them in the house. The teenager, Ghassan, is retarded, and is included in every part of the family life -- he even helps in the woodshop, which is the family business. Being Christians, they go to church on Sundays, and in their family woodshop, produce hand-carved Christian icons to sell to tourists. Unfortunately, due to the onset of the current intifada over the last four years, there have been very few tourists, and the business is not doing very well at all. The family's home is built, like most of the homes here, with cement and cinder blocks -- local materials, strong and lasting. None of the homes here are built with wood -- it's too impractical in this climate. Their living room is wide and spacious, shared with the dining room. Most Palestinian homes I have been in share this feature -- even the most modest homes crowd in lots of luxurious sofas, cushions, long curtains on the walls, and high ceilings. I think the saying 'My home is my castle' is appropriate for Palestine, because even the smallest home, while appearing plain from the outside, is a virtual palace in its living areas. All the homes I've been in have lots of sofas -- always ready for visitors, and long nights of visiting with neighbors and friends. And friends often come over, sharing tea and coffee and talking in loud, raucous tones about the issues of the day. They watch tv shows that come in from Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia....soap operas, comedies and news shows -- there's even a news show from Jordan in english that the family likes to watch to brush up on their english skills...

The family I stay with take care of their grandson in the mornings -- their daughter goes to work early, and drops off her 3 year old at 5:30 am. He's a very active kid (most 3 year olds are), and loves exploring and getting into things. In the early pre-dawn hours, I often awaken to the sound of "Simon! Put that down!"....but a delightful child nonetheless.....we share bread with olive oil and thyme for our breakfast. After breakfast, I go next door to my co-worker's home, the nephew of the family I stay with (many families live this way, with extended families often taking up whole neighborhoods of a town, with everyone knowing which family lives where). We try to start up his jalopy, often having to recruit another family member or two to help push -- a routine that reminds me of my days in high school, driving my dad's 1973 dodge dart.

The homes around here all have vegetable gardens -- people grow what they can in the arid climate -- spinach, greens, cabbage, potatoes and okra are common. and many families also have olive trees -- not like in the countryside, where families build their whole livelihood on growing olives, but a few, for the family to have fresh olives through the year.

water conservation is a part of life -- people don't use more than is necessary for washing up... the toilet handles have two flush handles, which give less or more water as needed, so you don't have to use five gallons every time you flush. rainwater collection barrels are common in the villages, and virtually every home is built with a solar hot-water system on the roof -- water runs through pipes under glass casing to heat up, then is piped into the house. they generally only use the electric hot water heaters in the winter, when the solar heating system doesn't provide enough hot water. (the average palestinian uses ten times less water than the average israeli -- since israel was formed, the sea of galilee has gone down five feet! -- water is a political issue here, and control of the water sources and wells is something the israeli government is scrambling to do by building the annexation wall in the west bank in such a way that it annexes those resources for israel)

the local internet provider is a resident who bought a high-speed line from israel, then attached it to a wireless transmitter on his roof. the neighborhoods can receive it at one house in their neighborhood (preferably high on a hill), then connect the other homes around them with cables. as I mentioned, families tend to cluster together in neighborhoods, and so the families can organize together their internet plan, and how to pay for it. hundreds of people can get high-speed internet, for very little money, in this way. very different from the monopolized huge corporations that are trying to control internet access in the US.

I've described the town as it is without Israeli military incursions. unlike other towns in the west bank and gaza, bethlehem isn't undergoing daily invasions and week-long curfews right now -- but the occupation is still very visible in a number of ways.

first, through the total lack of tourists -- there were some here for christmas, but other than that they are few and far between. the streets are eerily empty, in a town that was described as 'bustling with activity, of both tourists and pilgrims' in a tour book from the year 2000, just before the current intifada began.

second, and connected, are the checkpoints guarding every entrance to the town -- menacing and foreboding, they intimidate tourists from entering and forbid palestinians of this area from going out (even to another part of the palestinian land, let alone into israel). very few palestinians are able to get permission to enter jerusalem, and if you are denied permission once (the Israeli authorities never tell you why, just 'security reasons'), you will never get permission again. Whole families are denied, simply by their last name -- and if you know anything about how Palestinian families work (ie. there are _large_ groups of hundreds of people with the same last name), you realize very quickly this is another form of collective punishment for the Palestinian people.

third, the military invasions that do occur -- several times since I've been here -- usually to make an arrest. the usual method of making an arrest is to invade the town with 30 or more vehicles, surround the home of the person who is 'wanted' (no warrant necessary, suspicion is more than enough -- and administrative detention without charge or trial is given out in six-month stints). if the person doesn't come out, loudspeakers blast noise and commands at the home and soldiers fire at the building until the 'wanted' man (very few women are pursued in this way by the army) surrenders. Last week in Nablus, soldiers shot up a building with a 'wanted' man inside until the building collapsed, crushing the man underneath. now, just because someone's name is on a wanted list does not mean they are guilty of anything at all -- it's quite easy to get one's name on a wanted list.....sometimes palestinians who are tortured in israeli prisons will just start saying names to make the torture stop -- maybe people they have a family feud with, maybe associates or someone they don't like -- people will say anything under torture (unfortunately for those running guantanamo bay detention camp, torture is not a reliable way of extracting information). but israel has some kind of immunity to rules that other nations are supposed to uphold, so they use methods of torture and interrogation in their prisons for which other nations would be condemned for even _thinking_ about trying. so, someone gets their name on a wanted list, and the army comes after them in a full-scale invasion. the town turns into a war-zone.....teenage boys come out and, in their bravado, think they are somehow a match for the tanks and the armored hummers -- they throw stones and shout "get out!" at the israeli soldiers, who respond with gunfire. i saw a young guy get shot in the leg in this way the last time the army was in town.

the fourth way the occupation is visible in the life of palestinians in bethlehem is through the encroaching israeli settlement activity -- most notably on the mountain known as abu ghneim. i sent a link with pictures in my last journal entry -- it shows the mountain going from a wooded park to a fortress -- all of the trees are gone, and the mountaintop itself has been chopped off, there are huge gashes around the sides of the mountain to make room for the highway and the wall that annexes this land as part of Israel, and keeps the Palestinians out. and the top of the mountain is covered in buildings -- all built exactly the same, filled with new Israeli settlers. the mountain can be seen from virtually anywhere in bethlehem (itself located high on a hill), reminding the palestinians that live there that they cannot escape this creeping presence of Israel, that is growing slowly (and not so slowly) outward, taking more and more Palestinian land. why? because they _can_......Israel has the sixth largest army in the world, while the palestinians have only stones (true, there are a few guns and even mortars in southern gaza, but still they are no match for the military power of israel, which has chemical, biological and nuclear weapons at its disposal). israel has the might (and the money, and a powerful propaganda machine), and so .... it seems that might makes right in this place.

if only somebody out there would care enough to challenge this idea. then _maybe_ there would be some hope for the palestinian people. christians? muslims? buddhists? caring individuals? who? will stand up against this injustice? I _know_ that these religions all teach love, and not hate, in their texts. i know, in my heart, that 'might makes right' is a philosophy that kills. so why do people still not take action??? how can we let an injustice like this continue unabated??? will we keep wringing our hands and putting it off til tomorrow -- until the time comes when it's too late?

palestine #2: thoughts on occupation

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 07:50:13 GMT

22 dec 2004

sitting here in palestine, I find myself thinking about privilege. the privilege of americans to be able to ignore what's happening here -- because, unlike the palestinians, _we_ have a choice. like last night, when I heard the army trucks rolling through town at 4 am....i was tired, i had just gone to bed a couple hours before.....i didn't want to get up.........but if the tank rolls into your house, as has happened to so many Palestinians, you really can't go back to bed. if the armored bulldozers turn your home into rubble, you really can't just change the channel to find something funny on the tv instead of this depressing violence. because it is a reality. if this was our reality in the US, if it was OUR country under occupation by an invading force, and we found ourselves completely dominated by a powerful military force that shoots children at will, massacres whole villages and demolishes homes to make way for their colonial expansion -- well, i dare say we would see a whole lot more suicide bombings than there are here -- if it was _americans_ under occupation? there would be a suicide bombing every hour!

people in the US always ask me: "what about the suicide bombings? why do they blow themselves up?"..........as if that is the whole of the conflict over here.....ignoring the fact that the first suicide bombing was in 1991, after 40 years of violent occupation....

here's part of a piece I wrote after the sniper attacks in dc entitled "Now we know how Israel feels"
http://www.jenkasjourneys.org/writing/sniper.html

In order to experience the reality of the daily life of Palestinians, the following scenario would have to occur: the DC area would have to be invaded by an army, the fourth-largest army in the world, and militarily occupied. Checkpoints would be set up throughout the DC, Maryland and Virginia area, and all movement between cities and towns would cease. Anyone who is employed would be unable to work, and would be prevented even from going outside of their home for fear of being shot by one of the tanks, armed personnel carriers, or humvees that now line the streets. All legal rights would be nullified, and passage from one town to another would be at the whim of the soldiers manning the local checkpoint -- even if there were an emergency, if someone is hurt, shot, and bleeding and needs to get to the hospital in the next town, the passage of the ambulance through the checkpoint would be at the complete discretion of the soldiers there. Most of these soldiers would not speak our language, and would bark orders in a foreign tongue that we would be compelled to obey (or be shot). Soon, water and food would become scarce, with the soldiers often shooting directly at water towers and watching the water pour out of the gunshot holes onto the ground while people who depend on this water to drink watch helplessly.

The government of the occupying country would pass discriminatory laws against us, allowing THEIR citizens to dig water wells 70 meters deeper than our people, requiring a complex set of permits to build (or re-build) our homes on our own land -- and then, when we try to go through the permit process, denying 100% of the applications. The occupying country would use its superior military might to take over much of our land, then would build housing developments (settlements) on this newly-acquired territory and encourage its own citizens, through housing subsidies and mortgage benefits, to move into these housing developments. One million of their citizens would eventually move into these housing developments, which usually occupy the hilltops, the prime real estate of our land. There would be walled-in highways going from the occupying country's land to these housing developments, and only the occupying country's citizens would be allowed to use these roads. Our people would be forced into smaller and smaller areas, our houses torn down before our eyes as the occupier expands their "security zone" further and further into our land. Our main economy, which in this case would be the production of olive oil from olive trees, would be completely decimated as the occupying army chops down grove after grove after grove of ancient olive trees and then sells the wood as firewood to their citizens living in the illegal housing developments on our land.

Our people would undergo daily humiliation at the hands of the occupying army. Many would be brutally beaten and jailed --sometimes for years-- without charge. Periodically all of the men in a town would be rounded up and forced to stand in the playground of a local school -- sometimes for up to 24 hours at a time -- and be interrogated, humiliated and laughed at by the occupying soldiers. The men would be so humiliated there would often be tears in their eyes as they stood there being shouted at by these foreign soldiers. The soldiers would sometimes break the mens' arms or beat them on the head, while all the others watch (including children who peek fearfully around corners at the sight of their fathers' humiliation). Children are also beaten and imprisoned, hundreds of them, often for the "crime" of throwing stones at the tanks they see invading their neighborhoods. Some are kept in jail with adults for years, with no trial and no legal recourse. For, being an occupied territory, we would be a people without rights.

All of this is illegal, of course, under the Geneva Convention and the Declaration of Human Rights -- an occupier is expressly forbidden from maintaining a military occupation for any length of time (in this case, over fifty years). And the occupier is also expressly forbidden to take land from the occupied people. But that is exactly what is happening in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where over three million Palestinians live (if you can call it living) in absolute daily terror of the Israeli army that is occupying their land.

-------------------------------------------

I have been doing a lot of interviews, and making audio reports about the daily violence here....if you have a minute, check the website:
http://www.imemc.org -- I have been editing newsbriefs and making the audio reports.

Two days ago I interviewed an American woman who is in jail, waiting to be deported after participating in a protest against the Israeli Wall currently being built on Palestinian land. She was arrested when she questioned soldiers who were severely beating a child in the head and back. This woman said during the interview, "Americans are completely complicit in this -- it is American taxpayer money that is funding this wall, and the weapons which are killing children, and most Americans -- they know, but they don't seem to care."
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/3124.php

And yesterday, I interviewed a young woman whose story, I think, exemplifies the conflict.....Her father-in-law, whose family is from Bethlehem, lost a leg to an Israeli mine when he was just eighteen. He was angry, of course, but decided to keep to the way of peace, and became a doctor. One day, he and the entire medical staff at his hospital were arrested with no explanation and deported to Lebanon. He was angry once again, but remained peaceful, and raised a family of four boys and a daughter in a tent in the desert. Eventually they returned to his childhood home in Bethlehem, and tried to make a life there in the refugee camp of Deheishe. The boys didn't participate when others went out to throw stones -- they just wanted to maintain peace. But then, in 2000, the youngest son, Mahmoud, a teenager, was coming home from school and saw a ten year old child get shot in front of his eyes. He picked up the child and started running for the hospital. But the child was shot in the head, and never made it to the hospital. The child died there in his arms. For days Mahmoud couldn't eat or sleep, and two months later, he was out with the other boys throwing stones at the tanks. He was shot by Israeli soldiers -- first in the leg, then, when the soldiers saw him lying helpless on the ground, he was shot in the head. With their youngest brother dead, the other brothers could not be convinced by their father to remain peaceful any longer. They, too, began to pick up stones, and a couple of them picked up guns. They were all arrested by Israel, and are currently in jail for being part of the resistance. And the young woman, whose husband is the oldest of these brothers, has a two-year old child who has never seen his father. The father, her husband, is accused by Israel of directing a suicide bombing that killed 14 Israelis. So she lives with her parents-in-law, in a stable. For they have had their family home destroyed by the army three times -- collective punishment for having family members in jail. The last time was just two months ago, and they are afraid to rebuild the home because they are sure that the Israeli army will just destroy it again. So they live in a manger in Bethlehem, cast out from every place they tried to seek refuge from this storm. (sound familiar?)

Eventually the Israelis and Palestinians are going to have to live together -- whether in one state or two states, or whatever the arrangement might be. The cycle has to stop -- the killing of children in revenge for the killing of children has to come to an end somewhere. And we, in the United States, have an _obligation_ to stop funding the occupation, to stand up to this blatant injustice. For it is with the violence of the occupation that the cycle begins, and ends.

beit sahour, palestine

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 17:18:59 GMT

10 dec 2004
beit sahour
palestine

wow......coming into this country is such a mind trip. Entering ben gurion airport in tel aviv, I am taken aside and questioned: why do I have a stamp from Morocco in my passport? What is my purpose in coming to Israel? Where will I be travelling in Israel? How long will I be staying? Where will I be staying? Who will I meeting? ....and on and on......

and I know I cannot tell them I will be visiting Palestine -- even though it is my right to do so! Because, if I tell them this, I will not be allowed to enter Israel. oh, i could try....tell them I have a right to visit palestine, make a big scene......but, judging from the experience of those who have done so, I would be turned away or worse, deported. simply for mentioning the word palestine, I could be put on the next plane home.
their questioning continued....what about my morocco stamp? when did I visit morocco? for how long? for what reason??
hey...wait a second....is it illegal to visit morocco? well, according to israel, anyone who has ever visited an arab country is ineligible to enter israel. this practice by israel is completely illegal by international law, but they get away with it by saying it is not official policy -- it is simply a de facto practice that almost all the people who have a stamp from an arab country, any arab country, in their passport are unable to visit Israel. Luckily Morocco and the other north African countries are not considered Arab enough to really be a threat to Israel, so I was allowed to enter (albeit not without a thorough questioning to ensure that I would not be entering the Palestinian areas).

so i left the airport on a minibus taxi filled with Hasidic jewish people, and watched the sun rising over hillsides filled with the foundations of destroyed palestinian villages. i wondered to myself how people living in israel could manage to blind themselves to the very stark and blatant fact that they were living on stolen land. the foundations and ruins that i saw along the road to jerusalem were not ancient artifacts. they were homes that had been destroyed only 50 years ago. how could people live with themselves knowing that their homes, farms and communes were built at the expense and disenfranchisement of the hundreds of thousands of palestinians who were kicked off this land so the Jewish state could be built on this land?

i know we can't go back in time, but i do wish we humans would learn from our mistakes and not repeat them........sometimes I wonder if alice walker's character in _temple of my familiar_ was correct to assert that when children grow up they repeat the horrors of their own childhoods by inflicting that fear and pain on others......like an abused child growing up to abuse their own children. and some certainly do break the cycle (with a lot of work and support), but others lash out in such fury that the cycle of violence grows deeper, and expands with a momentum all its own. now, here in the holy land, the children of the children of the holocaust are imposing collective punishment on an entire population of people -- degrading, humiliating, and often wounding or killing them -- taking their land and livelihood, and creating an intolerable situation for an entire generation of children....

it's one theory, anyway.

personally, i am most angered by the US role in this region's conflict. our history is a shameful one, for although the US and Britain did free the victims of the holocaust, they would not accept the refugees that resulted from the liberation. The US and Britain were in the most advantageous position both economically and socially after World War II (compared with the devastated countries of Europe and the rest of the world), and could have absorbed the refugees from the concentration camps. Instead, they both turned away boatload after boatload, leaving these 'liberated' people with no place to go to escape their persecutors. Even England could argue economic impoverishment in the aftermath of the war, but the US could make no such claim, as it emerged a major superpower who could certainly have taken in these refugees. But no, they agreed instead to shove them off onto the land of the Palestinian people, and hope that the Palestinians would not have the strength to resist the theft of half their land.

i know, my tone must sound bitter......I am angry because this type of theft continues, and yet there are still those who argue that this is acceptable behavior. I'm sorry, but I just cannot accept that forcing people off the land where they have lived for a thousand years is ever justified, no matter what the circumstances. I can understand the plight of the Jewish people in the late 1940s, and I don't blame them for wanting a homeland after 3000 years of diaspora, but I _do_ _not_ _agree_ that their 'safe haven' could be built by displacing the Palestinian residents of the land.

as i sat in the minibus from the airport, i watched a hasidic couple and their baby as they were dropped off at their home. next door, a palestinian worker was loading equipment onto a pickup truck.....the hasidic man had to make two trips with his luggage, and as he left the suitcases on the sidewalk while he brought the first load into his house, he must have looked over his shoulder at that palestinian man at least 8 times! such suspicion....such mistrust......FEAR, really....

I visited a community center in West Jerusalem (West Jerusalem is generally considered to be the Israeli part of the city, whereas East Jerusalem is the Palestinian part) that is one of a very few joint Israeli-Palestinian projects. But the Palestinians involved are mainly those who live in Israel (there are 1.2 million Palestinians still living within the borders of Israel proper), because those who live in the West Bank and Gaza (the 'occupied territories' -- what Palestinians still refer to as 'Palestine') find it next to impossible to enter Israel. So part of the project of the community center is to educate Israelis on the reality of the occupation, and to provide a space to talk about these issues.

Now, I am working as a journalist, to help get the word out about the daily incidents of violence against the Palestinians.....as 'John', an international volunteer in the West Bank, rightly asks: "_Where_ are the foreign journalists??", a question he attempts to answer in this article:
http://www.palsolidarity.org/DesktopModules/Articles/ArticlesView.aspx?tabID=0&alias=Rainbow&lang=en-US&ItemID=652&mid=10618

I am working with a fairly new organization called the International Middle East Media Center ( http://www.imemc.org ), and you can check that website for the daily updates and weekly audio reports that I'm helping with. To me, this is important work.....there is a virtual media blackout on news from within the West Bank and Gaza......as you will see if you visit the website, we have documented incident after incident after incident of _daily_ military incursions, shootings, closures, home demolitions and non-violent demonstrations in the occupied territories......These are things that are not reported elsewhere! The daily killings of Palestinians are not considered news by the major networks. How sad that these people's lives are not considered worthy of coverage, although 3,465 have died in the last four years. And that does not include the 27,000 injured, or the 112,000 in prison (numbers from the Red Crescent Medical Society -- http://www.palestinercs.org/crisistables/table_of_figures.htm and the Palestinian Prisoners Society http://www.ppsmo.org/e-website/ )

I'm not saying that the Israelis haven't suffered also .... of course, they have. But the daily life of Israelis and that of Palestinians in the occupied territories is simply incomparable. I wrote an article somewhat addressing this when there were snipers menacing my town of DC, and the claim was made by some editorial writers that, "Now we know how Israel feels".
http://www.jenkasjourneys.org/writing/sniper.html

Being in Bethlehem, I am learning a good deal about the history of non-violent resistance here (I guess being the birthplace of Jesus has had some kind of effect, as this area is at the heart of the non-violent movement against Israeli occupation) From tax strikes to sit-ins, marches and non-violent civil disobedience, the people of this area have a long history of standing up to the occupation non-violently. Unfortunately for them, their non-violent movement just hasn't been deemed newsworthy, and without the media present, their efforts are fruitless, and often met with violent repercussions.

Here is the birthplace of the International Solidarity Movement, which I volunteered with the last time I was in Palestine, standing with Palestinians in non-violent witness and resistance to the violent occupation of their land. It started when a group of Israeli activists approached the Rapprochement Center, a dialogue group between Palestinians and Israelis that had been meeting here in the Bethlehem area for years, with the idea of using their privilege as Israelis to stand up to the illegal actions of the Israeli army. The Israeli activists had already been doing this -- standing up to bulldozers that were destroying Palestinian olive groves, waving their Israeli identity cards in front of soldiers who were trying to shoot at Palestinians (an Israeli soldier wouldn't shoot an Israeli citizen with impunity, as they could a Palestinian). So the Israelis got support from the Rapprochement dialogue group, and began recruiting international activists to join them....local Palestinians took the initiative to organize non-violent demonstrations -- with Israelis and internationals present Palestinians are less fearful of being shot. The movement's premise, that internationals and Israelis were immune to the violence of the soldiers, suffered a setback when two internationals, Tom Hurndall and Rachel Corrie, were killed in quick succession in 2003, and another, Brian Avery, was seriously wounded. These deaths did make a ripple in the international media -- unfortunately, the bias of the US media portrayed the young peace activists as 'naive and stupid' at best, and 'protectors of terrorists' at worst -- a very dismissive response to a non-violent movement built on 40 years of experience. But the movement kept going, albeit changing tactics somewhat with the realization that internationals were _not_, in fact, immune, and have organized campaigns to help Palestinians during the olive harvest, and, now, to ensure election fairness. With the international coverage (albeit somewhat negative), the movement has sparked a lot of interest, and has actually grown considerably since the deaths.

On Tuesday (dec. 7), I tried to cover one of these non-violent demonstrations -- I had heard that a number of Israelis planned to get arrested in an act of civil disobedience opposing the construction of the wall. so i went to cover the event.....it was in a town about 30 miles away, also in the west bank......but because of all the israeli checkpoints (there are hundreds, in every part of the palestinian areas), it took me four hours to even get near the town. by the time i reached the last checkpoint, outside the town of Naileen, the demonstration had already started in the town, and the soldiers wouldn't let me through -- they had declared it a 'closed military zone', and no internationals or israelis could enter.....ironically enough, that was one of the things the israelis were protesting against (ie. every time they try to come to a demo in a palestinian area, the army declares it a 'closed military zone', thus inhibiting their right to protest). so the soldiers made me get off the minibus and I was stuck there, in the middle of nowhere, without a ride. I tried walking down the road to find a minibus that could take me back to ramallah, and found that I was on a settlement road.....barbed wire fences on both sides, a wide road with SUVs speeding past, and _completely_ _empty_ of palestinians.....it felt so strange.......a few steps down this road, and I had entered another country.....a country where there WHERE NO palestinians.......in the distance was a shopping mall......it had the feel of an american suburb (albeit a heavily militarized suburb) -- a place where people drove places rather than walked, with cookie-cutter houses on the hill, and all the modern conveniences nearby. I was picked up by a settler woman who asked where I was going...when I replied 'naileen', she said 'Nili?' --which is the name of a settlement! That's right, Israelis have constructed a settlement right next to the Palestinian town of Naileen, and had adopted a hebrew-ized version of the name for their settlement.

As I continued down the empty road, I thought about a scene in the movie, "The People and the Land", in which the interviewer is talking to a family of settlers, and the woman said "We aren't taking the Arabs' land....when we look out our window, we don't see any Arabs, all we see is hills".......Doesn't she realize that the Israeli army has conveniently REMOVED the arabs from the area, so that SHE can live there?? As I looked up and down the new settler road, I wondered if the people who moved here thought the same way as the woman in that film. It's easy to feel there are no Arabs here -- even though they ARE there, just over the hill, around the bend......there are heavy military barriers to make sure they are not seen or heard by the settlers.
(see my pictures...http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/news/2004/12/148824.php)

An eerie feeling, to be sure......the worst of it was when I actually _did_ see a Palestinian -- driving a truck to do construction on the settlements. It really hurt to see that -- here is a man selling out his own people, contributing to their disenfranchisement, so that he can get a buck. I have talked to Palestinians about this -- how twisted and ironic it is that Palestinian workers agree to construct Israeli settlements, even to build the Wall around themselves....all the Palestinians I talked to agree that Palestinians shouldn't be doing it, but that they are doing it for survival (ie. it is the only alternative to starving to death)......the historical process of disenfranchisement and colonialism continues here, today.

I found myself wondering if perhaps there wasn't a psychological element to it as well -- that, as he approached the checkpoints, this Palestinian wouldn't have to duck his head and feel humiliated and think, "I hope they let me through this time".....no, _this_ Palestinian, working to build the settlement, could proudly display his permit to the soldiers and pass through easily, as the other Palestinians waited there, humiliated, for hours at the checkpoint.... _this_ Palestinian could tell the soldiers "_I_ have a right to be here" (underlying meaning: "_I_ have a right to exist....see? I'm working for _you_!") It's a strange psychology, I know, but ......I can't help but wonder.......

The home where I am staying is just down the street from the spot where the shepherds are supposed to have seen the vision of the angel telling them jesus would be born in bethlehem.....there is a greek orthodox chapel there, although apparently there is some debate between the greek orthodox church, the catholics and the lutherans as to the exact spot where this actually occurred, so they each have a chapel in the place where they claim it took place.

I have a view of this mountain:
http://www.arij.org/Abu%20Ghniem%20(January%201997-May%202004).jpg
or....what's left of it.

People in the town here are quite bitter about it -- when I ask them what happened there, they tell me it was the only green space in the area, the only forest where they could hike and take their kids....and now, the mountaintop has been chopped off and an Israeli settlement put in its place.
Here, you can see the progression of destruction, from 1997 until now:
http://www.arij.org/paleye/abughnam/pictures.htm

Below the mountain, where the wide road is visible in the most recent photo, is where the wall is being constructed (there is currently an electrified chain-link barbed-wire fence).

It's so hard to think about the amount of destruction of Palestinian lands, how that destruction is continuing and continuing, with no end in sight. Now, the Israelis are building this wall, which twists and snakes through Palestinian land, in an attempt to seize more territory for Israel -- the building of the wall, the building of settlements, the military occupation of Palestinian land are all completely illegal by internationally agreed upon conventions, and are harshly condemned year after year by the United Nations. But every year, the United States vetoes the condemnation of the world, and gives Israel eight billion dollars a year to continue their illegal occupation of Palestine.
here's a map of the wall that has been constructed so far:
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/maps/wall_phase_1_2.htm
You can see how the planned route of the wall will seize up to 40% of the Palestinian West Bank and make it Israeli land. It will divide the West Bank into 3 major 'islands', whose borders will be completely controlled by Israel. THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN! UNLESS WE STOP IT! This is the work of the modern-day abolitionist.

Words cannot really describe the impact this wall has....but this factsheet gives more than enough info to convince anyone that the wall is really making things worse for everyone:
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/new_web/factsheet_wall.htm

Well, if I haven't depressed you enough yet.....
here's the first weekly audio report I produced for the IMEMC:
http://www.imemc.org/audio/2004/december/week2-summary.htm

I will be producing 5-10 minute audio reports every Friday (available at 9 AM EST), if you know anyone who would like to broadcast them on the radio.

I know that there can be some way out of this mess......it is hopeful to see Israelis getting arrested in civil disobedience against the wall:
http://www.imemc.org/headlines/2004/December/week1/120704/budrus.htm
but still, even this is not a new thing. Israelis and Palestinians have worked together in the past......but as long as this occupation continues......I think things will only get worse.

Hamburg, Germany and Amsterdam, Netherlands

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 08:57:30 GMT

30 november 2004
london, england

Hamburg, Germany and Amsterdam (Nov. 15 - 20)

I went to visit Neuengamme, the concentration camp near Hamburg. Taking the bus
out through the countryside to Neuengamme, I wondered which of the trees,
streams, fields would have been there fifty years ago.....what did the
prisoners see as they were shipped to this place of starvation and
death......did they think they would come out of it alive? And as I passed the
quiet country towns I remembered something my German friend in Hamburg had told
me -- that during WWII, many small farmers received several workers (slaves)
from the concentration camps.....all over the countryside, this happened, so
for them to argue afterwards that they 'didn't know' what was going on is
absurd. They knew, they must have known -- maybe they didn't realize the
_extent_ of the holocaust, but they had to know that something horrible was
happening in that prisoner camp over the hill, with its tall smokestacks and
its grey factories and buildings, and its razorwire fence. it's so peaceful in
the area around there -- so quiet....I wondered to myself, is this what it was
like back then? A quiet countryside where people simply _didn't_ _talk_ about
certain subjects. The Neuengamme camp, among other things, was one of the
taboo topics.

I got off the bus at Neuengamme alone, and began walking toward what looked like
the most likely building to be memorializing the concentration camp ....
surrounded by razor wire, tall walls, and concrete, it looked so menacing --
like an actual prison........as I got closer, I realized.....it WAS an actual
prison. I saw a prisoner being released from the huge metal gate that slid
open mechanically just a crack to let the man out with his clear plastic bag
full of his belongings and his bus fare....he squinted into the sunlight,
glanced my way briefly, and walked off toward the bus stop. I must have looked
astonished, to see an actual prison on the site of a former concentration camp,
because when I asked some men digging a ditch nearby about it, they laughed and
said yes, it's a prison.....to get to the museum I would have to go back out to
the road, turn left, and then go _upstairs_ .... one of the ditch-diggers was
very insistent, as he pointed off to the left, across a field of gravel and
several one-story buildings, that I would have to go 'upstairs' to find the
museum and memorial. I mean, obviously it was the translation (none of them
spoke english well), but still, I felt myself being brought further and further
into an ionesco-like absurdity, with no one else sharing my feeling that
something was terribly, terribly wrong.

I finally found the and the memorial to the victims of Neuengamme (no stairs
involved whatsoever).....I asked at the desk about the prison, and they said
that, yes, it was rather strange that there was a prison there, and the mayor
of Hamburg in the 1990s had made a statement about how insulting it was to the
victims of Neuengamme, and how he would have the prison moved to another
location....but he never did.

In the museum, I found myself drawn to the photographs of both the victims and
the guards -- staring deep into their eyes, trying to understand what they were
thinking at the time. in the early photos (1937-8) the victims were hopeful, some were even smiling....conditions were overcrowded, dirty, but they still thought they were going to get out of there alive. but after 1942, there was this hopeless, vacant stare in so many of their eyes -- as if they had completely given up hope. one of the people who shared anne frank's family's hiding place ended up at this camp, i found out when i later went to amsterdam. it was a work camp, with a factory on site (the Walther-Werke weapons factory), and hundreds of off-site 'satellite camps' where prisoners would be sent to work. 40,000 of the 100,000 prisoners held at neuengamme worked at one of these work camps, which included the factory run by Schindler (featured in the movie 'Schindler's List'). Schindler managed to save several hundred people's lives by pretending he was a Nazi, joining the Nazi party, and then bringing jews to work for him so they wouldn't be killed in the extermination camps (the most famous of which were Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen). But most of the 'satellite camps' of Neuengamme were not like Schindler's. The one in which Anne Frank's family friend died was known as the 'Elbo Brigade', which was a satellite work camp ostensibly set up to _move_ the Elbo river (ie. dig a new path for a branch of the river that had been deemed to be in the way of progress). The Elbo Brigade was infamous among prisoners for its work conditions, and prisoners on this brigade occupied the lowest rung of the prison hierarchy (jews, russians, ukrainians and poles) -- they were usually worked to death.

the nazis had everything very well-organized. they kept records of
every prisoner, every death (although the cause of death they listed was often rather suspect -- ie. heart aneurisms in 20-year olds etc.)
Neuengamme started out holding mainly political prisoners who were part of the resistance in Hamburg and elsewhere. Many soviet prisoners arrived in 1941, as well as french and polish political prisoners. it was only after 1942 that the waves of victims of directly racial and ethnic persecution began to flow into the camp. by the end (1945), there were 13,000 jews held in neuengamme, 28,000 soviet prisoners, 17,000 polish, 11,000 french, 500 roma gypsies, and varying numbers of homosexuals, jehovah's witnesses, "anti-social elements" and resistance fighters from all over europe, all labelled with patches in the shape of an inverted triangle (or a six-pointed star for jews) in different colors to indicate one's category in the hierarchy. the first victims of en-masse death by zyklon-b gas in this particular camp were about 500 soviet prisoners gassed in the hallway of the barracks in late 1942. and that same year, over 1000 prisoners died from a typhus outbreak. after 1942, things just got worse and worse.....the cycle spiralled downward......prisoners and guards alike beginning to consider these miserable conditions to be simply 'the status quo', and as such, allowing things to deteriorate until the end finally came in 1945.

but just before liberation, the nazis evacuated the camp, marching the exhausted and starving prisoners to Sandbostel, where they were
abandoned without food or water, fighting each other over every crumb
they could find. this is the condition in which they were found by the British and US troops who eventually arrived to rescue those who
remained alive.

7000 prisoners from Neuengamme died on board three ships that the nazis had crammed them onto during the evacuation of the camp in 1945 -- the british mistook these prison ships for german army transport ships, and bombed them from airplanes.

it's all so hard to take in......the way that war brings out the very
worst, and also the very best in people....
when i visited amsterdam, and went through the house where anne frank
and her family hid for three years from the nazis (before being discovered and shipped to concentration camps), i could see the best in people -- the courage of the people who hid the frank family, at great risk to themselves.....the patience and caution of these exuberant teenage sisters, who held in their tantrums and cut short their songs so they could survive through this time....and the story told by anne's childhood friend, who encountered anne in 1945 in the auschwitz camp and managed to give her some food and clothes when anne had lost everything and everyone who was dear to her in the world (anne died soon after, just a month before the liberation of auschwitz, without knowing that her father was still alive).

and the worst of people....
the way the nazi regime was able to commit the most heinous atrocities thanks to the complacency, apathy and complicity of the german population.....some resisted, but most were taken in by hitler's appeal to the 'common german', who felt oppressed and victimized by the unfair conditions imposed by the treaty of versailles after the first world war. in many ways, the two wars are
really one war....the rise of fascism directly following the effects of world war one....

but i still couldn't really understand, no matter how deeply i looked
into their photos, just _what_ was in the minds of those nazi soldiers that guarded the camp. there was definitely fear, fear of being pointed out and picked upon and called out as 'the other', and being on the other side of the fence. there was this definite feeling in their eyes that they _had_ to do this, or be kiled themselves. but again, it's so hard to decipher....when a man becomes a soldier, he stops thinking. the military is organized as a hierarchy, so the soldiers at the bottom _depend_ on the integrity of the rule at the top. they put their whole faith in their leaders, because if they began to question authority, the whole structure would break down. and this is true of any military .....I just read _the red badge of courage_ about a soldier in the US civil war, who joins up with idealism and courage, and soon finds out he is part of a unit that is expected to _die_ -- to charge into impossible odds, and to die, with courage and selflessness, because it will serve
the larger strategy of the battle. to do this they must believe with
all their hearts that their leaders know best, or they would all
certainly run away. and that struggle is the real battle of war, the
battle to keep the footsoldiers from running away. for they act as a
group, and once some start running, there becomes a mob, for those who remain know that the odds of their winning the battle, small enough to begin with, grow smaller with each soldier that runs away.

the problem is not just that there is a horrible leader. the problem is the 'groupthink' that makes mass numbers of people follow this leader because they are afraid. the problem is the structure that _requires_ complete faith in leadership. if people started taking responsibility for their own actions -- every one of their actions, instead of appealling to a chain-of-command to claim responsibility for them, then maybe things like this wouldn't happen. to
me that is the most important thing to come out of the horror of the
holocaust -- the nuremberg judgment which ruled that soldiers have a
right and a _duty_ to disobey orders which are morally repugnant.
so why do we still have abuses like those at abu-ghraib prison in
iraq?? the nagging question persists at the back of my head -- and the answer, that the real problem is the _structure_ _itself_, keeps poking into my subconscious thought......perhaps it is this hierarchy that is the problem.

at the end of his book _peace_eyes_, my late mentor father mcsorley had visited five continents, and hundreds of activists and groups working for peace, and he had questioned all of them on the causes of war and how it could be prevented. his encounters and experiences brought him to the realities of injustice, the growing gap between the rich and poor, the division of people into 'highers' and 'lowers' that created the resentments that would lead people to war. and the continual theft of resources by the rich -- the violence of colonialism -- has led to a modern world that cannot seem to reconcile itself to this reality ....
the rich remain fiercely oblivious to the theft of land and resources, the killing and the pillaging being done in their name, while the poor remain powerless and resentful. this combination can only lead to violence -- and it is only by recognizing and changing their lifestyle that the rich can really hope to curb the attacks against them that will invariably result from this structure.

well....I haven't even talked about England....but I'll be back there in January, maybe I can sum it up then....
For now, I am off to the turbulent Holy Land.

love
jenka

hamburg, germany..on the road again......in europe this time

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 21:22:38 GMT

13 nov 2004
hamburg, germany

on the road again......in europe this time
just spent a few days with david rovics the avant folk musician (http://www.davidrovics.com ) in denmark, as he toured around singing in squats, cafes and communist clubs....
....I'm reading a book called _Peace_Eyes_, by my friend and mentor Father McSorley, who died a couple of years ago at age 89....In the book, he describes his journey through Europe in 1969 meeting with different peace groups, individuals and clergymen interested in peace. One of the observations he makes as he travels is that, , "people of all ages say freely, 'I'm a communist.' They are not considered untouchable because of that. I think this is a much healthier viewpoint...I think it is healthy to give the communists a chance to talk and to let them see they do not have much of a following. This is much better than the exaggerated fear which we use to suppress discussion. Is the U.S. afraid communists might win if they were allowed to speak?" (p. 17, _Peace Eyes_)

These are thoughts and questions I share as I wander along some of the same paths 35 years later -- and strangely enough, many of the issues remain the same. In 1969, when McSorley set out to see the world with 'peace eyes', the US army was entrenched in a quagmire of a war on the other side of the earth, with U.S. soldiers fighting to dominate and control a land that was not, and had never ever been, American soil. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, the goal was occupation and pacification of the population, and the population was extremely hard to pacify. The longer the US troops remained in Vietnam, the more the resistance against them grew. The US populace had just elected a right wing zealot who promised a reign of 'honesty, integrity and real american values', who ended up getting impeached in one of the biggest presidential scandals in U.S. history (you guessed it, Mr. Richard 'I am not a crook' Nixon). And now we find ourselves in a similar position -- although the internal dissent in the US has not reached anywhere near the levels of 1969's street riots and bomb-throwing, the international situation has many parallels, with the US military over-stretched beyond its capacity, and a right wing leader promising 'honest values', while in practice engaging in some of the most corrupt back-room political dealings in history.

Looking at the economic situation, I think one has to go even further back -- to the massive inflation of the late 1920s, and the bursting of that economic bubble in 1929. The dollar is rapidly losing value in the international market, while the Euro steadily rises. The federal government is engaging in massive deficit spending, largely to support the industry of death -- the guns, bombs, missiles and bombs that kill people in war. And the American people are becoming severely indebted themselves -- personal debt is at an all-time high. The question is not whether the crisis will come, but when.
(here is a fairly good analysis of this economic reality: http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/update.htm )
Also, the well-known (except in the U.S.) fact that Iraq had started using the Euro as its standard currency in oil exports prior to the war, with the possibility that the OPEC nations would start using the Euro instead of the dollar as well frightened those in power in Washington, and has been offered by some theorists as the 'real reason' for the war in Iraq.
( Report by Canadian Institute for Strategic Studies: ' On Guns and Butter: An Alternative Perspective on the Reasons for Invading Iraq' -- http://www.ciss.ca/Comment_GunsButter.htm )

So far, though, US companies have been unable to eke any profit out of Iraqi oil (what with pipelines getting blown up and sabotaged all over the country). And oil consumption by Americans just keeps growing. On Friday, the Interior Department gave the approval for ConocoPhillips and partner Anadarko Petroleum Corp. to drill for oil in the Alaskan wildlife refuge (source: Reuters newswire Nov. 12, 2004), one of the last wild places left in our country -- a desperate move, considering the massive opposition since the beginning of Bush's first term to this potentially devastating oil drilling operation in this extremely delicate ecosystem.

But back to this trip through Europe, and the parallels to my friend's journey in 1969, I have to say this: that in Father McSorley's writing he is clearly focused on the fact that nuclear weapons exist, and that this fact makes conventional war obsolete. He was from a generation that _remembered_ the atomic bomb -- he was a prisoner of war in the Philippines when the bombs exploded in Japan -- and due to that horrific memory, he worked his entire life to convince people of the futility of war in the face of such destructive power. Now, in the present time, as the memory of that horror fades into elderly people's stories, young people often don't see the relevance of being involved in the anti-nuclear struggle. After all, we humans haven't used the atom bomb since then -- what makes anyone think that we'll ever use the bomb again? Well, my answer to anyone who doubts that humans (specifically, those humans in the US) are capable of using nuclear weapons ever again comes in the form of three words:
george. walker. bush.
The man, with the help of his advisors, decided during his first term to expand and re-vamp the US nuclear arsenal, which ALREADY has 6,000 nuclear weapons, 2,000 of which are forward-deployed, ready for use at the push of a button. Thanks to the mandate he received a couple weeks ago from the US people, he will no doubt continue on this dangerous path.
(a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists about the Bush administration's nuclear policy: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/nuclear_weapons/page.cfm?pageID=1520 )

The nuclear threat is a real one, and one which is really underestimated, in my view -- instead of using non-existent nukes as an excuse to go to war with Iraq, we should be focusing on disarming the nukes that do exist. But since most Americans have only had three years for the realization to sink in that, yes, there are people in the world who hate and want to hurt us (or at least our financial and military institutions), I think it will take a few more years for the majority of Americans to really wake up and figure out _why_ there are people who hate us (yes, believe it or not, there _are_ reasons, they don't 'hate our freedom' as george bush so stupidly surmised), and start to figure out that it is OUR 6,000 nukes which are the threat to world peace (not Saddam's 0). And by the time people start to really realize the extent of US military involvement worldwide since World War II, and why people around the world are so fed up with the US killing their people, overthrowing their democratically-elected leaders, and installing military dictatorships in their countries, well, by that time it may be too late.
(US military involvement worldwide? what? well, here's a list, to start: http://free.freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/books/KillingHope.html )

Anyway, I am here in Hamburg, and I am extremely impressed with how few cars there are on the roads. People really use the trains and buses, and there are a lot of bikers. Even in this cold weather (34 degrees today), there are still hundreds of people biking -- not just for recreation, but to get from place to place. Most people have racks on their bikes, and carry boxes or shopping bags or kids very easily (they have ingenious child-seats here). Part of the sidewalk is designated as a bike lane, and pedestrians are very respectful of that -- there is a bike _culture_ here, unlike in US cities, where pedestrians and cars alike are very un-used to sharing the road with bikes. In the US, in the few cities I've experienced that actually _have_ bike lanes, the lanes are invariably in between parked cars and the traffic lane, leaving bikers vulnerable to doors opening, cars double parked in the bike lane, and cars using the bike lane as a turning or passing lane --- all of which can prove extremely dangerous or even fatal to a biker. Here there is no such fear, as the bike lanes are part of the sidewalk, and one only has to dodge the occasional pedestrian, rather than having to dodge between cars. I have even found that I am lax about wearing a helmet here (I am an extremely strict helmet wearer in the states, being that a helmet saved my life last year) -- because being on the sidewalk is so much safer than being on the street! I just wish that these types of bike lanes could be implemented in US cities -- right now it is not feasible to ride a bike on a US city sidewalk because you have to go really slow to dodge pedestrians who are not used to having to watch for bikes. In Copenhagen there is even a separate sidewalk for the bike lane, with its own lower curb, between the street and the pedestrian sidewalk. It just makes so much more sense!!

It is also strange to see NO SUVs on the road -- people don't even know what an SUV is! There are much smaller, more fuel efficient cars -- I've seen a number of electric vehicles that look like a cross between a golf cart and a car -- tiny, often just big enough for one person, but perfectly efficient. Such a vehicle would be unsafe to drive in the US! Because the vehicle is low, surrounded by trucks and SUVs you would be invisible (not to mention choking on their fumes). I don't know what it is that makes the people over here so much more conservative with their energy usage, but it sure is refreshing (coming from the culture of over-consumption we have in the US). It might have to do with the five-dollar a gallon gas price.....(European governments add heavy taxes on gas in order to discourage overconsumption of this finite resource). But it goes beyond just gas....the lights in the houses are often set on timers, so that if you go through a hall and turn the light on, it will automatically go off after a few minutes.....the bulbs on lights are mostly energy-saving halogen bulbs.....Recycling is the norm, rather than the exception -- and people actually DO it (unlike in the US, where the most progressive districts find it hard to get even 29% of the population to separate their garbage).

I also want to comment briefly on fascism/anti-fascism.....I went to a commemoration the other night of 'Kristallnacht' (the night of broken glass), the night of Nov. 9, 1938 when Joseph Goebbels announced a governement sanctioned reprisal against the Jews -- Synagogues were ravaged and burned, Jewish shop windows were broken, Jews were beaten, raped, arrested, and murdered. 91 were murdered and 30,000 arrested and sent to camps -- it was the beginning of what was to become the German holocaust against the Jews. This is an event that many Germans remember with open-eyed fury, and reverent, tearful reflection. Among the young, middle-aged and elders, there are many who stand up to remember this night and make sure it doesn't happen again.

but I wonder sometimes if there isn't some truth to the claim made by one of Alice Walker's characters in her book _The Temple of My Familiar_ that the horrors of one's childhood are re-enacted in one's actions as an adult. When I see the children of the children of the Holocaust building walls around towns of Palestinian refugees, arresting and shooting at children and establishing checkpoints throughout a territory they have militarily occupied, I wonder what is going through their minds.....are they even conscious of the parallels? I wonder...

In Germany, however, the struggle is a different one. There are Nazi groups that are beginning to gain support in the last few years -- still, very marginal and small, but they do exist. We also have groups like this in the US, white supremacist hate groups, and they sometimes have marches and rallies. Last year, I went to a counter-demonstration to oppose the white supremacist rally that was held on the lawn of the US capitol. There were only a couple hundred white supremacists, and we who opposed them were much more numerous. But there was extremely vigorous anger among the anti-white supremacists (the group I was with). It was very heated, to say the least. I began to wonder if the source of the rage was some kind of deep-seated resentment against the white supremacists for being _too_ much _like_us_ -- that we need to separate ourselves, both internally and externally, from the white culture that encourages and maintains that type of ignorance.

I also want to note that in Germany, the anti-fascist movement is huge and diverse -- whereas in the US it was mainly young people at the anti-white supremacist demo, here there would be thousands of people of all ages. Another difference in the anti-fascist movements of the US and Germany is this: when I went to the demonstration in Washington DC last year opposing the white supremacist group, I had friends and family who told me that I should just ignore these white supremacists, that going to oppose them gives them too much visibility. This argument is just not used in Germany -- people know all too well the effect of ignoring a hate group's influence until it grows so large as to take power and implement its policies of ethnic cleansing on the population. So the opposition to nazi groups is large and vocal, and diverse.

I heard the story of one demo held here in Hamburg this past January, where the police protected the several hundred pro-Nazi marchers while attacking the thousands of anti-fascists who had come out to oppose them. A woman named Esther Bejerano, who is a survivor of Auschwitz, was speaking on a stage to the rally of the anti-fascists when the police came in with a water cannon, spraying all the anti-fascists who were gathered there. Remember, this was JANUARY, in Hamburg, 20 degrees -- below freezing -- basically, the police were giving these people hypothermia by soaking them with water in that kind of weather. Esther Bejerano went to one of the police who were spraying the cannon, and asked, 'Who is responsible for this? We are having a peaceful protest and you are giving people hypothermia!', to which the police officer replied, 'I don't know, I'm just following orders.' This did not please Esther in the least, who said to the officer and to the crowd, 'Just following orders? I've heard that line before -- fifty years ago in Auschwitz!' I have heard that the police are often violent to the anti-fascists, while giving tacit and sometimes outright approval to the Nazi groups. This is a dangerous trend, and one which is occurring in the US as well. When the police and government give tacit and active support to hate groups, those groups are given the legitimacy they need to expand their base of support.

We cannot just ignore groups or people whose ideas we disagree with. It's important to keep up the dialogue, so that ideas can be challenged, experiences can be shared, and a better understanding of the world can emerge. In this way, as Father McSorley suggested in regard to communists, fear of a philosophy one does not understand (like communism) does not rule the policies of a government and the culture of its people. Instead, we try to listen and understand the other's ideas, and challenge them with our own. This can only be done through peaceful dialogue, but people _attempt_ to change other people's ideas through war. In his book _Peace_Eyes_, Father McSorley summarized the idea of a man named Steven King-Hall, a commander in the British Navy, who believed that the existence of weapons of mass destruction had made war obsolete, and that the military should be used for something besides war and the preparation for war. King-Hall asks the rhetorical question, "How can the Navy be useful today?", and answers that "education is the key to the military's future. No one wins a war that they do not believe in. If there is no common set of values there is no chance of winning. You cannot say you have victory by killing people; you must try to convert them to your values, make them believe you have a better set of values to give. War is essentially a conflict of ideas. But the way to change ideas is not through hatred or killing." (p. 15, _Peace_Eyes_)

To me, this is essentially the problem with the Bush administration's war -- what began, supposedly, as retribution for the 3,000 people killed in 2001 has taken on the rhetoric of a battle of values -- Christian vs. Muslim values in this case, without much attempt to understand or reflect on the commonalities and differences of those values. The US army is in Iraq challenging the value system of the people there, telling them that the US has a better value system and they should adopt it, while all the while dropping bombs and killing innocents. Even if a value system _does_ have merit, using violence to convince people to adopt it immediately delegitimizes any merit it may have had. Instead of de-humanizing the 'enemy', we need to try to understand their culture, experience and values. I mean, here is the US, a 200 year old nation, attacking a society that is at least 5,000 years old, and having the audacity to tell them that our values are superior and they should adopt them. The ignorance and arrogance of my fellow americans continues to astound me.

Abe Osheroff, a 90-year old anti-fascist from the US who fought against Franco in Spain in the 1930s as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the US (a volunteer brigade that received no support from the US government, by the way, for the US was supplying Franco with arms at the time), gave a talk in Austin, TX in December, 2001. I went to hear him speak and I recall one of his thoughts at the time, which was that the recent attack on the US would result in stereotyping of Muslim people, and that the best thing people in Austin could do would be to organize an International Conference on Islam, inviting scholars from around the world and people from all over Texas, to discuss and try to gain a better understanding of Islam. To me, that's what is needed right now. That, among other things....