The Largest Minority

January 14th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Our good friend Dennis Trainor (aka Davis Fleetwood) has a new job doing Op/Eds for The Uptake. Kudos to him for taking it to the next level.

January 10th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Thousands gathered at the Westwood Federal Building in Los Angeles today where they started their march against the US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. I was fortunate enough to be there.

Before the march even started, one man scaled a traffic light to hang a banner which read “We are all Gazan”, much to the cheer of the crowd below. After descending, he was arrested by police who were forced to retreat several yards behind a line of pigs on horseback from a fast advancing crowd chanting “let him go”. It is there where an intense stand-off between us and the police took place. Several protesters were pushed with batons and one man caught between the crowd and the cops even claimed to have been hit in the face by an officer without cause. He had the lump to prove it. Organizers of the event (the ANSWER Coalition) were able to convince the crowd to turn back from this distraction and join the march which had already gotten underway.

During the march there was a funeral procession with coffins draped with Palestinian flags, followed by individuals of all affiliations. After the march had concluded we were back in front of the federal building when a young man, perhaps inspired by the heroism he had seen earlier, climbed one of the many flag poles in front of the building to tie a Palestinian flag below the American flag already there. He too was arrested and an even larger stand-off with chants followed. I talked briefly with one man around my age who said it was his little cousin. Unfortunately, he didn’t know anymore than I did about the incident or where he had been taken.

I took plenty of video footage today. Unfortunately, my computer is dead (I’m borrowing one to type this) so it’ll be about a week or so before I get my new computer to edit the video. If you were at the event and would like to be informed via email of when I post this vid, please send me a message stating so at ManilaRyce@gmail.com

January 9th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

The lying silence of those who know.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist.” They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing.” Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, ‘Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy … who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war … we are appalled.”

Every subsequent “war” Israel has waged has had the same objective: the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first. Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Schlaim, Noam Chomsky, the late Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Yuri Avnery, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finklestein have dispatched this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism. “It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on 2 January, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology - in its most consensual and simplistic variety - has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”

In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines and treatment, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and the killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, meet the international standard of the Genocide Convention. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

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January 8th, 2009 by Sam

The rest below.

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January 8th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Thank you Dennis for being the lone voice of reason in the Congress. It’s a shame Democrats are just as greedy and murderous as Republicans or they would’ve made you their nominee instead of the elected puppet who remains silent about genocide.

“How can Israel claim self-defense when it bombs Gaza, which has no army, no air force, no navy, and has been under a constant blockade?”

The one point of contention I have with this courageous address is Dennis’ condemnation of Hamas. It’s time we stop prefacing our condemnation of Israel with condemnation of those fighting against their war machine. To paraphrase Chomsky, no person of understanding or humanity will too quickly condemn the violence that occurs when long-subdued masses rise up against their oppressors. Whether you agree with violence or not as a tactic, Hamas is completely justified in their resistance.

Hamas and Israel are not in equal violation of international or moral law, and using Hamas’ minor crimes to transition more smoothly into your main critique of Israel only lends credence to the American/Israeli characterization of Hamas as the aggressor and legitimizes the Israeli government’s influence over you through your willingness to self-censor.

January 6th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

Kudos to Rick Sanchez who does the research and finds that Israel violated the terms of the ceasefire first by killing 6 Gazans on November 4.

January 6th, 2009 by Manila Ryce

For anyone in LA, we’ll be protesting at the Israeli consulate at 4:30 pm. Come join us. Last time we had several thousand show up and the numbers keep growing.

Israel is believed to be using controversial white phosphorus shells to screen its assault on the heavily populated Gaza Strip yesterday. The weapon, used by British and US forces in Iraq, can cause horrific burns but is not illegal if used as a smokescreen.

As the Israeli army stormed to the edges of Gaza City and the Palestinian death toll topped 500, the tell-tale shells could be seen spreading tentacles of thick white smoke to cover the troops’ advance. “These explosions are fantastic looking, and produce a great deal of smoke that blinds the enemy so that our forces can move in,” said one Israeli security expert. Burning blobs of phosphorus would cause severe injuries to anyone caught beneath them and force would-be snipers or operators of remote-controlled booby traps to take cover. Israel admitted using white phosphorus during its 2006 war with Lebanon.

The use of the weapon in the Gaza Strip, one of the world’s mostly densely population areas, is likely to ignite yet more controversy over Israel’s offensive, in which more than 2,300 Palestinians have been wounded.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 stipulates that white phosphorus should not be used as a weapon of war in civilian areas, but there is no blanket ban under international law on its use as a smokescreen or for illumination. However, Charles Heyman, a military expert and former major in the British Army, said: “If white phosphorus was deliberately fired at a crowd of people someone would end up in The Hague. White phosphorus is also a terror weapon. The descending blobs of phosphorus will burn when in contact with skin.”

The Israeli military last night denied using phosphorus, but refused to say what had been deployed. “Israel uses munitions that are allowed for under international law,” said Captain Ishai David, spokesman for the Israel Defence Forces. “We are pressing ahead with the second stage of operations, entering troops in the Gaza Strip to seize areas from which rockets are being launched into Israel.”

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January 2nd, 2009 by Sam