Who is a "terrorist"?

Great article from NY Times.

In Cairo, Wafaa Younis was seated on a curb, selling bread and green onions and mint leaves, as goats ate trash strewn across the street. She was asked what advice she would give Mr. Obama as he tried to repair the Arab perception that Washington was the enemy.

“You have to understand everyone’s opinions and demands, and negotiate,” she said. “There will be no peace without this.”

Fleet Foxes

Mi hermanito favorito has the best taste in music. Here is Fleet Foxes:





My brother says this song- or at least the last minute and a half or so- reminds him of our childhood. Mostly he just loves the americana feel and, of course, the chords; they're beautiful.

Quote of the Day

On an Italian tourist to Baghdad, Renato Di Porcia, the deputy chief of mission at the Italian Embassy in Baghdad, had this to say:

"He is a little bit naïve."

Israel and Gaza, Extremism, Peace

Israel continues to disappoint me in its approach to Gazan aid distribution, denying even the paper to make anti-violence pamphlets:

Beyond the worsening shortage of food, mattresses, blankets and clothes for Gaza’s 1.4 million beleaguered residents, Israel’s continued closure of most access points is depriving the United Nations of paper to print out a human rights programme to teach children to eschew violence. “I’m being obstructed in printing out the human rights curriculum that we’re all so proud of having developed here and that is more important now than ever before to get on with the teaching of the responsibilities that go with human rights and to focus on making sure that these kids grow up with the right values,” the Director of Operations in Gaza for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), John Ging, said today.

I'm a firm believer in addresing the underlying attitudes in this conflict if peace is to be achieved, so this makes me really sad. I'm sure Israel has plenty of reasons they could give for why they aren't letting paper through, but frankly I'm sick of their reasons, especially ones I suspect are really just wrapping for political purposes.

“I don’t want to hear any more from people on the Israeli side the arguments about who might or might not benefit… The ordinary people on the ground are paying the price, not the politicians, and of course the inevitable consequences are entirely predictable: we’re going to have more desperation, more misery, more violence,” he said.
Mr. Ging, who has repeatedly warned that increasing misery in Gaza feeds extremism, cited UNRWA’s food distribution as a prime example of “how impossible it is being made for us.”

Of course, not only Israel is to blame. Shame on Hamas for stealing aid from UNWRA workers. Shame on anyone who is hindering UNRWA relief, especially those who purportedly speak for the people.

Mr. Ging also stressed that this week’s theft of UNRWA aid supplies at gunpoint by Hamas police was another challenge facing the Agency, adding that it was the first time the Islamist organisation had done so, and it must be the last. Hamas said it would give out the aid itself.
“I don’t know what they have done with it. I sincerely hope they have it intact because we want it back, that’s our message to them,” he stressed. “We won’t take seriously any commitments they give us vis-à-vis future action until they first and foremost return the aid that they stole and secondly make public their assurances that it won’t happen again, i.e. stop the nonsense that they’ve been coming out with trying to justify what they did and accept that it was an egregious error on their part.”
While the amount stolen was small, “it’s massive in its significance because they’ve crossed a red line,” he said.

I predicted, as did many others, that all this latest conflict would do is further flame extremism on both sides. And as usual, Gazans are being made to suffer. As Mr. Ging said:

...statements by Israeli opposition politician Binyamin Netanyahu, tipped by public opinion polls to win elections next week, that Israel has not yet finished the job in Gaza and Hamas must be toppled had caused heightened anxiety among a population that had already been at the receiving end of a massive military onslaught.

I don't know, maybe the extremism has been brewing regardless of the conflict, but I would certainly not say it has helped. And what if real efforts at peace had been made, instead of politicspoliticspolitics? But what we have now is definite growing extremism. Take the upcoming elections in Israel.

A THREE-HORSE race for much of the campaign, the Israeli election due on February 10th has a new hopeful. It is now a four-horse affair, with a long trail of also-rans. According to the polls, Yisrael Beitenu, previously a minor right-wing party led by Avigdor Lieberman, has been doing surprisingly well. ...
Mr Lieberman, the dark horse, is branded by the left as racist, even fascist. He wants Israeli Arabs, nearly 20% of the population, to pledge allegiance to the state and be required to do military or national service. “No loyalty—no citizenship” is one of Yisrael Beitenu’s election slogans, along with “Only Lieberman understands Arabic”. He also proposes a repartition of Palestine so that areas of Israel with large Arab populations can be transferred to the Palestinian Authority in return for areas of the West Bank settled by Jews. The Arab communities in question are unanimously and vehemently opposed to the plan.

And in Gaza:

...here in the ruins of El Atatra, perhaps the biggest damage has been to any memory of a shared past and any thought of a shared future.
“We used to tell fighters not to fire from here,” said Nabila Abu Halima, looking over a field through her open window. “Now I’ll invite them to do it from my house.”

To even talk about the conflict is drowned in conflict and polarization. I read a pretty interesting article about the difficulties on reporting about the war. Luckily, I am not a journalist so I am free from the burden of trying to carefully articulate things so as not to offend anyone. Not that I want to offend anyone! But I did notice that by posting a Facebook status tracking the many Palestinian deaths during the war, I was often deemed to somehow support Hamas. Well, no. I can sympathize with both sides, once I try to see what it is they are seeing. But it is quite disproportionately Palestinians who are dying and suffering, and, being an American, I am surrounded by friends and family who only know the Israeli position.

I just found this article today about what, normatively speaking, will be useful dialogue for achieving peace.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.
...
Many of the respondents insisted that the values involved were sacred to them. For example, nearly half the Israeli settlers we surveyed said they would not consider trading any land in the West Bank — territory they believe was granted them by God — in exchange for peace. More than half the Palestinians considered full sovereignty over Jerusalem in the same light, and more than four-fifths felt that the “right of return” was a sacred value, too.
As for sweetening the pot, in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to sell their children.
This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire.
…
Absolutists who violently rejected offers of money or peace for sacred land were considerably more inclined to accept deals that involved their enemies making symbolic but difficult gestures. For example, Palestinian hard-liners were more willing to consider recognizing the right of Israel to exist if the Israelis simply offered an official apology for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war. Similarly, Israeli respondents said they could live with a partition of Jerusalem and borders very close to those that existed before the 1967 war if Hamas and the other major Palestinian groups explicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist.[Politicians on bothsides mirroed these results] Making these sorts of wholly intangible “symbolic” concessions, like an apology or recognition of a right to exist, simply doesn’t compute on any utilitarian calculus. And yet the science says they may be the best way to start cutting the knot.

And another sad, beautiful example of why we should care:

Tears drop on her hands, hands that he had once kissed passionately, on her engagement ring, that ring he chose for her, on her cheeks that oust the redness of burning coals within her. The funeral is over now; his body is away, but the memory of him is as vivid as his own being yesterday. Dreams of a wedding, now written in the history of numerous deaths, is beyond of what reality can bring.

Her name is Hanaa, what means felicity. But, Hanaa shall know no felicity for many years now, overcoming the killing of her lost love, Mohammed, who was killed by IOF whilst at the Abu Middeen police station on December 27th, 2009. Red roses are thrown over Mohammed's tomb as he is carried through the streets of his neighborhood. Hanaa, her head bent towards the ground, stroking the ring on her right hand, nods her head accepting a reality imposed, one of which she had no choice in determining.

This is the case of many here in Gaza, where love has been targeted, where intimacy has been destroyed, where sentiments are victims of slaughtering and massacres. "We are just numbers in the media," says Hanan, a student at the Aqsa University in Gaza. "But, behind the numbers are stories, are loves lost, are childhoods devastated, choked."

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Surely an interesting and original feller.

Sri Lanka: UN official concerned over shelling of hospital, worsening civilian plight

I do not know nearly enough about the fighting in Sri Lanka or the civilian situation. What little I do know I have largely gleaned from MIA's music and interviews. But it has certainly been in the news lately. For all the complaining I sometimes do about media neglect, I have to admit that it is often the other way around.

Anyway, my thoughts are with the many suffering civilians in Sri Lanka.

Save Zimbabwe Now!

I guess we will see how this new power-sharing agreement in Zimbabwe works out.

In the meantime, sign this Save Zimbabwe Now! petition.

Shame on you, Thailand

Refugee Policy according to Thailand: just ship them out to sea. Who do they think they are, humans?

Ali from Gaza

Tonight I read a letter to President Obama from a seven-year old Gazan boy named Ali. It does not read like a seven-year old wrote it, but Ali has had to grow up a lot. The full text is here, but Ali is so thoughtful and and his words so heartbreaking that I want to share at least some parts here:

Thank you Mr. President, it was your speech that distracted me while I was collecting my sister’s fragments. I heard you saying: Israel has the right to defend itself… achieving peace in the middle east…. Hamas was sending rockets ….. democracy … and other words that I cannot remember. I am sorry again, I was striving to concentrate in your speech but the smell of my sister’s body and my fear that I may lose some of it didn’t help me to grasp what you were saying exactly. I just realised our neighbour’s anger when he turned the TV off murmuring that he wasted the battery for nothing. We had already pulled out the corps of my mother and half of the corps of my father; we couldn’t find the rest of his body. To be frank with you, I never thought of addressing any American president, I mean, it goes without saying that we are killed with American weapons and taxes. The doctors in the hospitals said that Americans were experimenting a new weapon called DIME in this war, I mean the war on Gaza. We don’t talk to the enemy.

But during the funeral I heard you...in an interview with an Arab TV channel saying that you want to deliver us a message that America is not our enemy. Oh, I felt responsibility, it seems Mr. President that someone is playing behind your back, it seems that you don’t know that we are killed with your weapons, it seems that those who use the veto to protect Israel and let it get away with its crimes against us in the security council are just doing this without even telling you, it seems that you don’t know that your country annually pumps a huge amount of money to Israel, well Mr. President, Israel is the enemy, and we didn’t choose it. We didn’t beg for check points, we didn’t beg for blockage, we didn’t beg for cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and this new bomb you are experimenting on us.

Besides, I heard you saying that you want to achieve peace in the Middle East; I know, I know, it is us, we are the Middle East. Why Mr. President? Why do you want to achieve more peace in us? We had enough peace; we had more than enough peace during the last war. Do you want to achieve more? The blond woman called Livni said that she wants peace that is why Israel waged this aggression on us. I lost my whole family in this peace process. And those who imposed the blockage on Gaza – during which one of my cousins died because of the shortage of medicine – always talk about peace: Abbas, Fayyad, Mubarak. They are men of peace, exactly like Livni. They did all what they can to achieve peace, I don’t think that you need more peace, do you?

I went to my cousin’s home, he also lost all his family, I am in his custody now. He is my all family and I am his only family. He is twenty one years old as I told you before, he was a student in the faculty of medicine, but he was not allowed to graduate, the blockage and the bad circumstances pushed him to leave the university and work, then he joined the resistance during this last war. He is a Hamas member now....

[Y]ou want to harm my cousin too because he is a terrorist. I wonder what is wrong with terrorists like my cousin. He is a very nice guy, you would like him if you met him. He prepares breakfast for me, he cooks very delicious smashed eggs, he takes me to school, he stays all night besides me because I have nightmares every night, and when I wake up startled with the frightening nightmare he puts his hand on my forehead and recites some verses from the Quran and sing me beautiful songs till I fall asleep again. After school he plays with me soccer in the street, he tells me very funny jokes and gorgeous fairy tales, he swings me along with his friends whom you call terrorists and I laugh to tears.

On my neighbour’s TV I watched you practicing some terrorism with your daughters; you were playing with them exactly like my cousin plays with me. Why don’t you want my cousin to be a good terrorist like you? Why do you want to make peace in my country while you all live in terrorism happily? Did we annoy you Mr. President? We don’t even know you, if someone in my district did anything wrong to you just tell me and I will oblige him to apologize for you.

As a general observation, we Americans do not know enough about what is going on in Gaza, and we certainly don’t understand the role our own government plays in it. We operate, if at all, under shallow mainstream media assessments driven by exclusively Western perspectives. Take Ali’s play with the words “peace” and “terrorist” as a particularly poignant example. I have spoken with some people, often Jewish and mostly on facebook, about our different views on the war. I can’t help but be frustrated by what I feel is often (but certainly not always) a parroting of one-lines with no genuine attempt to understand the conflict from a Gazan perspective. Justify, justify, platitude, justify. But if America is going to hold Israel’s hand while Israel does what it has done to Ali and so many others, we should know. We should not just know, but KNOW.

There are intelligent people who support Israel. But it’s not just about intelligence, it’s about marrying that intelligence with some measure of compassion and empathy. Not the false, superficial kind. Not the war-is-always -horrible,- but…-with-no-real-attempt-to-identify-and-assess-your-own-biases- kind. And there are compassionate people who support Israeli policies, too; I guess it’s just that, in my opinion, they are listening to the wrong version of the “truth”. I can’t ask anyone to believe or not believe certain sources of information. After all, I’m sure that people who support Israeli policies in Gaza are thinking the same thing about me. But I can ask people to at least really, truly think about it before they make up their minds. Peace is not going to be achieved unless people LISTEN. And besides, Ali and his family, and all others who have died in this conflict, deserve it.

Call for accountability for abuses of international law in Gaza and southern Israel
From the AI email I got:

Hours before Israel announced a ceasefire, an Amnesty International fact finding mission gained access to Gaza. Their initial reports are disturbing: the team found first hand evidence of war crimes, serious violations of international law and possible crimes against humanity by all parties to the conflict. ...
In the early afternoon of January 4th, three young paramedics walked through a field on a rescue mission to save a group of wounded men in a nearby orchard. A 12-year-old boy, standing by his house, assisted the operation by pointing to where the men could be found. An Israeli air strike on the area killed all four.

The bodies of the four victims could not be retrieved for two days. Ambulance crews who tried to approach the site came under fire from Israeli forces.

Our researchers later traveled to the scene of the strike with the two ambulance drivers who witnessed the attack. They met with the boy’s distraught mother and found the remains of the missile. The label of the missile read, “guided missile, surface attack” and cited the United States as the country of origin.

This is just one of many similar stories.

Under the Geneva Conventions, medical personnel searching, collecting, transporting or treating the wounded must be protected and respected in all circumstances. Clearly, this was not the case on Jan. 4th.

Obama on Israel-Palestine (Via the Traveller Within)