As Prepared for Delivery –

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

Last month, I went to Andrews Air Force Base and welcomed home some of our last troops to serve in Iraq. Together, we offered a final, proud salute to the colors under which more than a million of our fellow citizens fought — and several thousand gave their lives.

We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected around the world. For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country. Most of al Qaeda’s top lieutenants have been defeated. The Taliban’s momentum has been broken, and some troops in Afghanistan have begun to come home.

These achievements are a testament to the courage, selflessness, and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.

Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.

The two of them shared the optimism of a Nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share — the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement.

The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules. What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values. We have to reclaim them.

Let’s remember how we got here. Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Technology made businesses more efficient, but also made some jobs obsolete. Folks at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but most hardworking Americans struggled with costs that were growing, paychecks that weren’t, and personal debt that kept piling up.

In 2008, the house of cards collapsed. We learned that mortgages had been sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them. Banks had made huge bets and bonuses with other people’s money. Regulators had looked the other way, or didn’t have the authority to stop the bad behavior.

It was wrong. It was irresponsible. And it plunged our economy into a crisis that put millions out of work, saddled us with more debt, and left innocent, hard-working Americans holding the bag. In the six months before I took office, we lost nearly four million jobs. And we lost another four million before our policies were in full effect.

Those are the facts. But so are these. In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005. American manufacturers are hiring again, creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s. Together, we’ve agreed to cut the deficit by more than $2 trillion. And we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like that never happens again.

The state of our Union is getting stronger. And we’ve come too far to turn back now. As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum. But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.

No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

This blueprint begins with American manufacturing.

On the day I took office, our auto industry was on the verge of collapse. Some even said we should let it die. With a million jobs at stake, I refused to let that happen. In exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got workers and automakers to settle their differences. We got the industry to retool and restructure. Today, General Motors is back on top as the world’s number one automaker. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and factories. And together, the entire industry added nearly 160,000 jobs.

We bet on American workers. We bet on American ingenuity. And tonight, the American auto industry is back.

What’s happening in Detroit can happen in other industries. It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh. We can’t bring back every job that’s left our shores. But right now, it’s getting more expensive to do business in places like China. Meanwhile, America is more productive. A few weeks ago, the CEO of Master Lock told me that it now makes business sense for him to bring jobs back home. Today, for the first time in fifteen years, Master Lock’s unionized plant in Milwaukee is running at full capacity.

So we have a huge opportunity, at this moment, to bring manufacturing back. But we have to seize it. Tonight, my message to business leaders is simple: Ask yourselves what you can do to bring jobs back to your country, and your country will do everything we can to help you succeed.

We should start with our tax code. Right now, companies get tax breaks for moving jobs and profits overseas. Meanwhile, companies that choose to stay in America get hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. It makes no sense, and everyone knows it.

So let’s change it. First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it. That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home.

Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas. From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax. And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

Third, if you’re an American manufacturer, you should get a bigger tax cut. If you’re a high-tech manufacturer, we should double the tax deduction you get for making products here. And if you want to relocate in a community that was hit hard when a factory left town, you should get help financing a new plant, equipment, or training for new workers.

My message is simple. It’s time to stop rewarding businesses that ship jobs overseas, and start rewarding companies that create jobs right here in America. Send me these tax reforms, and I’ll sign them right away.

We’re also making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world. Two years ago, I set a goal of doubling U.S. exports over five years. With the bipartisan trade agreements I signed into law, we are on track to meet that goal — ahead of schedule. Soon, there will be millions of new customers for American goods in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. Soon, there will be new cars on the streets of Seoul imported from Detroit, and Toledo, and Chicago.

I will go anywhere in the world to open new markets for American products. And I will not stand by when our competitors don’t play by the rules. We’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration — and it’s made a difference. Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.

Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China. There will be more inspections to prevent counterfeit or unsafe goods from crossing our borders. And this Congress should make sure that no foreign company has an advantage over American manufacturing when it comes to accessing finance or new markets like Russia. Our workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is level, I promise you — America will always win.

I also hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the United States but can’t find workers with the right skills. Growing industries in science and technology have twice as many openings as we have workers who can do the job. Think about that — openings at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.

That’s inexcusable. And we know how to fix it.

Jackie Bray is a single mom from North Carolina who was laid off from her job as a mechanic. Then Siemens opened a gas turbine factory in Charlotte, and formed a partnership with Central Piedmont Community College. The company helped the college design courses in laser and robotics training. It paid Jackie’s tuition, then hired her to help operate their plant.

I want every American looking for work to have the same opportunity as Jackie did. Join me in a national commitment to train two million Americans with skills that will lead directly to a job. My Administration has already lined up more companies that want to help. Model partnerships between businesses like Siemens and community colleges in places like Charlotte, Orlando, and Louisville are up and running. Now you need to give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers — places that teach people skills that local businesses are looking for right now, from data management to high-tech manufacturing.

And I want to cut through the maze of confusing training programs, so that from now on, people like Jackie have one program, one website, and one place to go for all the information and help they need. It’s time to turn our unemployment system into a reemployment system that puts people to work.

These reforms will help people get jobs that are open today. But to prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier.

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning — the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies — just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

We also know that when students aren’t allowed to walk away from their education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight, I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.

When kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.

Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid. We can’t just keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we’ll run out of money. States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college presidents who’ve done just that. Some schools re-design courses to help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury — it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge: The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens. Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.

I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration. That’s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office.

The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.

You see, an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country. That means women should earn equal pay for equal work. It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.

After all, innovation is what America has always been about. Most new jobs are created in start-ups and small businesses. So let’s pass an agenda that helps them succeed. Tear down regulations that prevent aspiring entrepreneurs from getting the financing to grow. Expand tax relief to small businesses that are raising wages and creating good jobs. Both parties agree on these ideas. So put them in a bill, and get it on my desk this year.

Innovation also demands basic research. Today, the discoveries taking place in our federally-financed labs and universities could lead to new treatments that kill cancer cells but leave healthy ones untouched. New lightweight vests for cops and soldiers that can stop any bullet. Don’t gut these investments in our budget. Don’t let other countries win the race for the future. Support the same kind of research and innovation that led to the computer chip and the Internet; to new American jobs and new American industries.

Nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my Administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now, American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right — eight years. Not only that — last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years.

But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly one hundred years, and my Administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy. Experts believe this will support more than 600,000 jobs by the end of the decade. And I’m requiring all companies that drill for gas on public lands to disclose the chemicals they use. America will develop this resource without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk.

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock — reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

What’s true for natural gas is true for clean energy. In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries. Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

When Bryan Ritterby was laid off from his job making furniture, he said he worried that at 55, no one would give him a second chance. But he found work at Energetx, a wind turbine manufacturer in Michigan. Before the recession, the factory only made luxury yachts. Today, it’s hiring workers like Bryan, who said, “I’m proud to be working in the industry of the future.”

Our experience with shale gas shows us that the payoffs on these public investments don’t always come right away. Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. But I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy. I will not walk away from workers like Bryan. I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here. We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

We can also spur energy innovation with new incentives. The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there’s no reason why Congress shouldn’t at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation. So far, you haven’t acted. Well tonight, I will. I’m directing my Administration to allow the development of clean energy on enough public land to power three million homes. And I’m proud to announce that the Department of Defense, the world’s largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history — with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year.

Of course, the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy. So here’s another proposal: Help manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings. Their energy bills will be $100 billion lower over the next decade, and America will have less pollution, more manufacturing, and more jobs for construction workers who need them. Send me a bill that creates these jobs.

Building this new energy future should be just one part of a broader agenda to repair America’s infrastructure. So much of America needs to be rebuilt. We’ve got crumbling roads and bridges. A power grid that wastes too much energy. An incomplete high-speed broadband network that prevents a small business owner in rural America from selling her products all over the world.

During the Great Depression, America built the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. After World War II, we connected our States with a system of highways. Democratic and Republican administrations invested in great projects that benefited everybody, from the workers who built them to the businesses that still use them today.

In the next few weeks, I will sign an Executive Order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

There’s never been a better time to build, especially since the construction industry was one of the hardest-hit when the housing bubble burst. Of course, construction workers weren’t the only ones hurt. So were millions of innocent Americans who’ve seen their home values decline. And while Government can’t fix the problem on its own, responsible homeowners shouldn’t have to sit and wait for the housing market to hit bottom to get some relief.

That’s why I’m sending this Congress a plan that gives every responsible homeowner the chance to save about $3,000 a year on their mortgage, by refinancing at historically low interest rates. No more red tape. No more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest financial institutions will ensure that it won’t add to the deficit, and will give banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.

Let’s never forget: Millions of Americans who work hard and play by the rules every day deserve a Government and a financial system that do the same. It’s time to apply the same rules from top to bottom: No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.

We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them. That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior. Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market. They make the free market work better.

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly. In fact, I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his. I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense. We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill — because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I’m confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder. But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago. I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean. I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules. The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose: Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

So if you’re a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits. You’re required to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail — because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again. And if you’re a mortgage lender or a payday lender or a credit card company, the days of signing people up for products they can’t afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over. Today, American consumers finally have a watchdog in Richard Cordray with one job: To look out for them.

We will also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments. Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender. That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing. So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.
A return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help us protect our people and our economy. But it should also guide us as we look to pay down our debt and invest in our future.

Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let’s agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay.

When it comes to the deficit, we’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more, and that means making choices. Right now, we’re poised to spend nearly $1 trillion more on what was supposed to be a temporary tax break for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Right now, because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.

Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else – like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans? Because if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t do both.

The American people know what the right choice is. So do I. As I told the Speaker this summer, I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.

But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes. And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right: Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires. In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions. On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up. You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages. You’re the ones who need relief.

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference — like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right. Americans know it’s not right. They know that this generation’s success is only possible because past generations felt a responsibility to each other, and to their country’s future, and they know our way of life will only endure if we feel that same sense of shared responsibility. That’s how we’ll reduce our deficit. That’s an America built to last.

I recognize that people watching tonight have differing views about taxes and debt; energy and health care. But no matter what party they belong to, I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now: Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.

Can you blame them for feeling a little cynical?

The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco?

I’ve talked tonight about the deficit of trust between Main Street and Wall Street. But the divide between this city and the rest of the country is at least as bad — and it seems to get worse every year.

Some of this has to do with the corrosive influence of money in politics. So together, let’s take some steps to fix that. Send me a bill that bans insider trading by Members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow. Let’s limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries they impact. Let’s make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa — an idea that has bipartisan support, at least outside of Washington.

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything — even routine business — passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

The executive branch also needs to change. Too often, it’s inefficient, outdated and remote. That’s why I’ve asked this Congress to grant me the authority to consolidate the federal bureaucracy so that our Government is leaner, quicker, and more responsive to the needs of the American people.

Finally, none of these reforms can happen unless we also lower the temperature in this town. We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a Government program.

On the other hand, even my Republican friends who complain the most about Government spending have supported federally-financed roads, and clean energy projects, and federal offices for the folks back home.

The point is, we should all want a smarter, more effective Government. And while we may not be able to bridge our biggest philosophical differences this year, we can make real progress. With or without this Congress, I will keep taking actions that help the economy grow. But I can do a whole lot more with your help. Because when we act together, there is nothing the United States of America can’t achieve.

That is the lesson we’ve learned from our actions abroad over the last few years.

Ending the Iraq war has allowed us to strike decisive blows against our enemies. From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United States of America.

From this position of strength, we’ve begun to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Ten thousand of our troops have come home. Twenty-three thousand more will leave by the end of this summer. This transition to Afghan lead will continue, and we will build an enduring partnership with Afghanistan, so that it is never again a source of attacks against America.

As the tide of war recedes, a wave of change has washed across the Middle East and North Africa, from Tunis to Cairo; from Sana’a to Tripoli. A year ago, Qadhafi was one of the world’s longest-serving dictators — a murderer with American blood on his hands. Today, he is gone. And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change can’t be reversed, and that human dignity can’t be denied.

How this incredible transformation will end remains uncertain. But we have a huge stake in the outcome. And while it is ultimately up to the people of the region to decide their fate, we will advocate for those values that have served our own country so well. We will stand against violence and intimidation. We will stand for the rights and dignity of all human beings – men and women; Christians, Muslims, and Jews. We will support policies that lead to strong and stable democracies and open markets, because tyranny is no match for liberty.

And we will safeguard America’s own security against those who threaten our citizens, our friends, and our interests. Look at Iran. Through the power of our diplomacy, a world that was once divided about how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program now stands as one. The regime is more isolated than ever before; its leaders are faced with crippling sanctions, and as long as they shirk their responsibilities, this pressure will not relent. Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is still possible, and far better, and if Iran changes course and meets its obligations, it can rejoin the community of nations.

The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe. Our oldest alliances in Europe and Asia are stronger than ever. Our ties to the Americas are deeper. Our iron-clad commitment to Israel’s security has meant the closest military cooperation between our two countries in history. We’ve made it clear that America is a Pacific power, and a new beginning in Burma has lit a new hope. From the coalitions we’ve built to secure nuclear materials, to the missions we’ve led against hunger and disease; from the blows we’ve dealt to our enemies; to the enduring power of our moral example, America is back.

Anyone who tells you otherwise, anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about. That’s not the message we get from leaders around the world, all of whom are eager to work with us. That’s not how people feel from Tokyo to Berlin; from Cape Town to Rio; where opinions of America are higher than they’ve been in years. Yes, the world is changing; no, we can’t control every event. But America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs — and as long as I’m President, I intend to keep it that way.

That’s why, working with our military leaders, I have proposed a new defense strategy that ensures we maintain the finest military in the world, while saving nearly half a trillion dollars in our budget. To stay one step ahead of our adversaries, I have already sent this Congress legislation that will secure our country from the growing danger of cyber-threats.

Above all, our freedom endures because of the men and women in uniform who defend it. As they come home, we must serve them as well as they served us. That includes giving them the care and benefits they have earned — which is why we’ve increased annual VA spending every year I’ve been President. And it means enlisting our veterans in the work of rebuilding our Nation.

With the bipartisan support of this Congress, we are providing new tax credits to companies that hire vets. Michelle and Jill Biden have worked with American businesses to secure a pledge of 135,000 jobs for veterans and their families. And tonight, I’m proposing a Veterans Job Corps that will help our communities hire veterans as cops and firefighters, so that America is as strong as those who defend her.

Which brings me back to where I began. Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.

One of my proudest possessions is the flag that the SEAL Team took with them on the mission to get bin Laden. On it are each of their names. Some may be Democrats. Some may be Republicans. But that doesn’t matter. Just like it didn’t matter that day in the Situation Room, when I sat next to Bob Gates – a man who was George Bush’s defense secretary; and Hillary Clinton, a woman who ran against me for president.

All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves. One of the young men involved in the raid later told me that he didn’t deserve credit for the mission. It only succeeded, he said, because every single member of that unit did their job — the pilot who landed the helicopter that spun out of control; the translator who kept others from entering the compound; the troops who separated the women and children from the fight; the SEALs who charged up the stairs. More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other – because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.

So it is with America. Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes. No one built this country on their own. This Nation is great because we built it together. This Nation is great because we worked as a team. This Nation is great because we get each other’s backs. And if we hold fast to that truth, in this moment of trial, there is no challenge too great; no mission too hard. As long as we’re joined in common purpose, as long as we maintain our common resolve, our journey moves forward, our future is hopeful, and the state of our Union will always be strong.

Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.

This was his acceptance speech at the nominating convention:

Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson Accepting Justice Party Nomination for Candidacy for President of the United States (website)

I am proud to accept the nomination of the Justice Party to run as its candidate for President of the United States.

This is not my campaign.  This is a campaign of, for, and by the people.  We join together in this endeavor for the sake of justice – social justice, environmental justice, and economic justice.   We pledge to organize and act, tenaciously and over the long haul, for the sake of the public interest, to enhance and protect freedom for all, and to vindicate the sacred promise of justice for all.

Those who understand that our great nation and its people have been harmed severely, and are at tremendous risk for even greater damage in the future, can be powerful agents of positive change.  We need not settle for governance by the Republican and Democratic parties, which thrive on the corrupt money machine, nor do we have to confine ourselves to voting for the lesser of two evils, if indeed there is a lesser evil among the common choices.

If we have the vision, the courage, and the will, we can, together, forge a very different way – a way that will lead to a future of fiscal responsibility and respectful regard for the economic burdens we leave for later generations; secure jobs and fair compensation; decency and rationality in our cruel, self-destructive criminal justice system that is largely based on an irrational rage to punish; an investment in our nation’s infrastructure, education, and innovation that is as substantial as our need to re-gain our global competitive edge; compassionate and rational immigration reform; respect for fundamental human and civil rights; victory over the stranglehold of the military-industrial-congressional complex; protection of our air, water, and wild lands; essential health care for all, as in every other nation in the industrialized world; protection against and condemnation of illegal wars of aggression, pursuant to the United Nations Charter and the Kellogg-Briand Pact; international leadership on the urgent challenge of climate change; and restoration of the rule of law, including full accountability for crimes, regardless of the wealth or status of the perpetrators.

Men, women, and children across the United States, and throughout the world, are suffering horrendously because of the corruption of our government, the timidity of much of the public, and criminality that is rewarded rather than rectified.  Lives have been taken, lifetime injuries inflicted, life savings decimated, essential health care rendered more elusive for millions of people, jobs lost, and the damage inflicted by our nation’s debt increased exponentially — all because of crimes committed with impunity, public policy guided by bribery, and a crooked two-tiered economic and justice system that rewards a narrow class of rich and powerful people while devastating the rest.

The root of this disaster is systemic corruption fed by money from the few who have benefited.  The public’s interest in catching up with the rest of the industrialized world and providing essential health care to every man, woman, and child has been undermined by the corrupting influence of money flowing from the medical and insurance industries.

The public’s interest in reducing the outrageous cost of prescription drugs has been frustrated by the corrupting influence of money flowing from the pharmaceutical industry.

The public’s interest in reducing our deficits and the crushing burden of our accumulated debt, as well as reprioritizing the ways in which our government spends our money, has been frustrated by the corrupting influence of money flowing from military contractors, the beneficiaries of the military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned our nation in his last presidential address.

Perhaps most outrageous and tragic over the long-term, the public’s interest in energy independence and the avoidance of the most catastrophic impacts of climate disruption has been frustrated by the corrupting influence of money flowing from the fossil fuel industry – the coal, oil, and gas companies.

Whether these calamities continue is our choice. Bringing integrity and competence to our government is within our power. That’s why people across the nation are supporting our campaign, which limits contributions to $100 per person and engages in grassroots strategies rather than billion dollar television campaigns financed by the wealthy.

The American people can ensure that the public interest, not simply the interests of politicians and campaign contributors, is protected. We the people are powerful enough to end the perverse government-to-the-highest-bidder system sustaining, and sustained by, the two dominant parties.

With the complicity of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the Bush administration marched our nation off a cliff — morally, legally, and economically — by perpetrating a disastrous war of aggression against Iraq.  President Obama, for his political advantage, simply shrugged off war crimes committed in conjunction with that war, with the excuse that we “need to look forward not backward.”  It is a trademark reminder — in the spirit of President Ford’s ignominious pardon of Richard M. Nixon — that, in our two-tiered system of injustice, the rich and powerful are above the law, which is applied, often with a crushing vengeance, against the rest of us.

Wall Street criminals have raked in billions of dollars while eviscerating the U.S economy through their fraudulent schemes.  Goldman Sachs sold clients on perverse investments while secretly betting billions of dollars against them.  Several Wall Street firms bundled toxic mortgages and fraudulently sold them as top-rated investments, ultimately devastating the U.S. economy, including the housing market and the retirement plans of millions of men and women throughout the U.S. This was all aided and abetted by occupants of the White House and by a de-regulating Congress that have acted as if they are on retainer by Wall Street banks. Just recently, President Obama appointed a new Chief of Staff who was COO at CitiGroup and who oversaw investments in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market collapse.  We need a president who will surround himself not by the Goldman Sachs crowd, but by those who have a record of caring about, and acting to protect, the public interest.

Remarkably, some pundits are still puzzled about what the nation’s Occupiers – and now the international Occupiers – are angry about. The appropriate inquiry is “Why have we put up with this for so long?”

Most Americans are far less financially secure – some are wiped out and many have lost their homes – because of these crimes.  The plutocracy is now fully exposed.  While drug offenders are being incarcerated for decades under contemptible minimum-mandatory sentences, not one day has been served in prison by the perpetrators, who, along with their Wall Street colleagues, gave unprecedented contributions to President Obama’s last campaign. Goldman Sachs’s political action committee and individual contributors employed by Goldman Sachs donated over $1 million to Obama’s last election. They’ve enjoyed an enormous return on their investment, to the enormous detriment of the rest of us.

Please thoughtfully consider this fact, then be appropriately outraged:  22% of children are now living in poverty in the United States. The skids toward the economic disaster, including the resulting loss of jobs and skyrocketing poverty, were greased by the unconscionable deregulation of the financial industry, made possible through the collusion of Republicans and Democrats.  Again, that deregulation came about not because of the promotion of the public interest, but because of the corrupting influence of multi-national corporations that took us to the cleaners, then received bail-outs because they were considered by our economic policy-makers – themselves part of the corrupt financial class – as “too big to fail.”  The Republican Party pursues deregulation as a priority in its increasingly bizarre ideology, even when it puts most Americans at tremendous risk, while President Obama and most of Congress gorge themselves at the trough of special interest money, then act accordingly.

We will fight to make certain that, in the future, no banks will be “too large to fail” and that the only thing we will consider to be “too large to fail” is the interests of the American people.

We must set aside our fear-based notion that a candidate other than a Republican or Democrat can be a “spoiler” for the lesser of two evils and, instead, help make real change happen, for our good, for the good of our country, and for the good of our children and later generations.  We can be responsible, ethical stewards for the future by drawing the line now and committing to “no more” of what the two dominant parties have done to our nation.

Win or lose, we can, through this campaign, make a tremendous positive difference in our nation and our world.

Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, in their remarkable book That Used to Be Us, make the argument about the vast difference a third party or independent candidacy can make for our nation.  Here is what they say:

Now [the Democrats] have become the most conservative force in American politics. . . .Now the [Republicans] are the party of fiscal radicalism and recklessness, cutting taxes without reducing spending and thereby pushing the United States ever deeper into debt.  The two parties are, however, united on two things – unfortunately.  Neither has the courage to take the necessary serious steps to address the dangerously high budget deficit . . . : And neither has the courage to reduce America’s, and therefore the world’s, ruinous dependence on oil by raising the price of gasoline. . . .

Business as usual in American politics is a recipe for national decline. . .

The American political system does not need blowing up, but it does need shaking up. . . . It needs political shock therapy. . . .

We hope that [such a shock] will come from within – from a combination of grassroots and high politics.  We mean by this a serious independent presidential candidate. . . .

The only way around all these ideological and structural obstacles is a third-party or independent candidate, who can not only articulate a hybrid politics that addresses our major challenges and restores our formula for success but . . . does this in a way that enough Americans find so compelling that they are willing to leave their respective Democratic and Republican camps . . . Only that could change a political system that rewards our politicians for postponing hard decisions and blaming the other party rather than making those decisions.

Because third parties do not win elections, voters expect them not to win and thus do not vote for them so as not to waste their votes.  This calculation, a major reason for the weakness of third parties (and thus the strength of the Republicans and Democrats), can, however, be seriously mistaken.  A vote for a third-party presidential candidate can be an effective way to change the direction of American national policy – and that is the strategy we are advocating.[1]

Friedman and Mandelbaum then describe recent polls, reflecting that people in the United States will support a third-party candidate:  A Pew poll finding that more voters identify themselves as independents than as Democrats or Republicans; another Pew survey finding that 72 percent of respondents are dissatisfied with the condition of our country; a Washington Post-ABC News poll reporting in 2010 that only 34 percent of the respondents believed that Democratic candidates deserved reelection, and only 31 percent believed that Republicans deserved reelection; and an Ipsos Public Affairs 2010 poll in which 71 percent of respondents said they would like to see more than just the Democratic and Republican Parties on the presidential ballot.[2]

Friedman and Mandelbaum continue as follows:

An independent presidential candidate who did all these things – describing, more vividly and accurately than the two major parties have yet done, the world in which its citizens are living and are destined to live in this century; prescribing the policies that will make it possible for Americans to thrive in that world and for America to exercise global influence in this century, as they did in the last one; and galvanizing the country to adopt these policies – could provide the shock therapy we need.

[I]t’s the best shot we have.  Sticking with the status quo, by contrast, is a sure thing – a sure pathway to decline.[3]

As Friedman and Mandelbaum conclude, win or lose, “an independent presidential candidacy can change America – and therefore the world – for the better. . . [O]ver the long term it would probably have a greater impact on the course of American history than the person who [won the election].”[4]

Let us embrace this historic opportunity.  For an end to the corruption and impunity for the privileged elite, and a fair shake for all Americans, we can reject the Republican/Democratic duopoly that has brought our nation to its current sad state.  We now have the choice to support a party and a candidate offering genuine hope for a safer, healthier, more just world.

[1] Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us, pp. 329, 330, 331, 334, 335.

[2] Id. at 340.

[3] Id. at 346.

[4] Id. at 347.

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The Obama administration appears to have given a green light to an Israeli attack on an unarmed flotilla carrying peace and human rights activists — including a vessel with 50 Americans on board — bound for the besieged Gaza Strip. At a press conference on June 24, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized the flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Campaign by saying it would “provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.”

Clinton did not explain why a country had “the right to defend themselves” against ships which are clearly no threat. Not only have organizers of the flotilla gone to great steps to ensure are there no weapons on board, the only cargo bound for Gaza on the U.S. ship are letters of solidarity to the Palestinians in that besieged enclave who have suffered under devastating Israeli bombardments, a crippling blockade, and a right-wing Islamist government. Nor did Clinton explain why the State Department suddenly considers the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the port of Gaza to be “Israeli waters,” when the entire international community recognizes Israeli territorial waters as being well to the northeast of the ships’ intended route.

The risk of an Israeli attack on the flotilla is real. Israeli commandoes illegally assaulted a similar flotilla in international waters on May 31 of last year, killing nine people on board one of the vessels, including Furkan Dogan, a 19-year old U.S. citizen. Scores of others, including a number of Americans, were brutally beaten and more than a dozen others were shot but survived their wounds. According to a UN investigation, based on eyewitness testimony and analysis by a forensic pathologist and ballistic expert, Dogan was initially shot while filming the assault and then murdered while lying face down with a bullet shot at close range in the back of the head. The United States was the only one of the 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council to vote against the adoption of the report. The Obama administration never filed a complaint with the Israeli government, demonstrating its willingness to allow the armed forces of U.S. allies to murder U.S. citizens on the high seas.

As indicated by Clinton’s statement of last week, the administration appears to be willing to let it happen again.

Congressional Response

Last year, 329 out of 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a letter that referred to Israel’s attack that killed Dogan and the others as an act of “self-defense” which they “strongly support.” A Senate letter — signed by 87 out of 100 senators — went on record “fully” supporting what it called “Israel’s right to self-defense,” claiming that the effort to relieve critical shortages of food and medicine in the besieged Gaza Strip was simply part of a “clever tactical and diplomatic ploy” by “Israel’s opponents” to “challenge its international standing.”

But not everyone in Congress believes the assaulting and killing human rights activists on the high seas is legitimate. Last week, on June 24, six members of Congress signed a letter to Secretary Clinton requesting that she “do everything in her power to work with the Israeli government to ensure the safety of the U.S. citizens on board.” As of this writing, they have not received a response.

Earlier in the week, the State Department issued a public statement to discourage Americans from taking part in the second Gaza flotilla because they might be attacked by Israeli forces. Yet thus far neither the State Department nor the White House has issued a public statement demanding that Israel not attack Americans legally traveling in international waters. Indeed, on Friday, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland implied that the United States would blame those taking part in the flotilla rather than the rightist Israeli government should anything happen to them. Like those in the early 1960s who claimed civil rights protesters were responsible for the attacks by white racist mobs because they had “provoked them,” Nuland stated, “Groups that seek to break Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza are taking irresponsible and provocative actions that risk the safety of their passengers.” Again, The Obama administration didn’t offer even one word encouraging caution or restraint by the Israeli government, nor did it mention that the International Red Cross and other advocates of international humanitarian law recognize that the Israeli blockade is illegal.

Who’s On Board

Passengers of the U.S. boat, christened The Audacity of Hope, include celebrated novelist Alice Walker, holocaust survivor Hedy Epstein, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, veteran foreign service officer and retired lieutenant colonel Ann Wright, Israeli-American linguistics professor Hagit Borer, and prominent peace and human rights activists like Medea Benjamin, Robert Naiman, Steve Fake, and Kathy Kelly. Ten other boats are carrying hundreds of other civilians from dozens of other countries, along with nearly three thousand tons of aid. Those on board include members of national parliaments and other prominent political figures, writers, artists, clergy from various faith traditions, journalists, and athletes.

Fifteen ships have previously sailed or attempted to sail to Gaza as part of the Free Gaza Campaign. None was found to contain any weapons or materials that could be used for military purposes. The current flotilla organizers have stated that their cargoes are “open to international inspection.” Despite this, however, the Obama State Department insists that the Israelis have the right to intercept the ships due to the “vital importance to Israel’s security of ensuring that all cargo bound for Gaza is appropriately screened for illegal arms and dual-use materials.”

Though the flotilla organizers have made clear that the U.S. boat is only carrying letters of support for the people of Gaza, the State Department has also threatened participants with “fines and incarceration” if they attempt to provide “material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas.”

As with many actions supporting Palestinian rights, the coalition of groups endorsing the flotilla includes  pro-Palestinian groups as well as peace, human rights, religious, pacifist and liberal organizations, including Progressive Democrats of America, Pax Christi, Peace Action, Nonviolence International, Jewish Voice for Peace, War Resisters League, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Despite this, Brad Sherman (D-CA), ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Relations Committee’s subcommittee on terrorism, nonproliferation and trade, has claimed that organizers of the flotilla have “clear terrorist ties” and has called upon U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to prosecute U.S. citizens involved with the flotilla and ban foreign participants from ever entering the United States.

Israel‘s Position

Largely as a result of last year’s flotilla, Israel has somewhat relaxed its draconian siege on the territory, which had resulted in a major public health crisis. The State Department has gone to some lengths to praise Israel for allowing some construction material into the Gaza Strip to make possible the rebuilding of some of the thousands of homes, businesses and public facilities destroyed in Israel’s devastating U.S.-backed 2008-2009 military offensive, which resulted in the deaths of over 800 civilians. At no point, however, has the Obama administration ever criticized Israel for destroying those civilian structures in the first place.

As with many potentially confrontational nonviolent direct actions, there are genuine differences within the peace and human rights community regarding the timing, the nature, and other aspects of the forthcoming flotilla. However, the response to the Obama administration’s position on the flotilla has been overwhelmingly negative. Many among his progressive base, already disappointed at his failure to take a tougher line against the rightist Israeli government as well as his reluctance to embrace human rights and international law as a basis for Israeli-Palestinian peace, feel increasingly alienated from the president.

More significantly, the Obama administration’s response may signal a return to the Reagan administration’s policies of defending the killing of U.S. human rights workers in order to discourage grassroots acts of international solidarity, as when Reagan officials sought to blame the victims and exonerate the perpetrators for the murder of four American churchwomen by the El Salvadoran junta and the murder of American engineer Ben Linder by the Nicaraguan Contras. Perhaps the Obama administration hopes that giving a green light to an Israeli attack on the U.S. ship and other vessels in the flotilla will serve as a warning. Perhaps they hope that Americans volunteering for groups like Peace Brigades International, Witness for Peace, Nonviolent Peaceforce, Christian Peacemaker Teams, International Solidarity Movement, and other groups operating in conflict zones like Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Nepal, Indonesia and elsewhere will think twice, knowing that the U.S. government will not live up to its obligations to try to protect nonviolent U.S. activists from violence perpetrated by allied governments.

Indeed, nothing frightens a militaristic state more than the power of nonviolent action.

www.stephenzunes.org

I was reminded of a spring day in Atlanta almost five years earlier when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strutted onto a similar stage to loud acclaim from another enraptured audience.

Introducing Rumsfeld on May 4, 2006, the president of the Southern Center for International Policy in Atlanta highlighted his “honesty.” I had just reviewed my notes for an address I was scheduled to give that evening in Atlanta and, alas, the notes demonstrated his dishonesty.

I thought to myself, if there’s an opportunity for Q & A after his speech I might try to stand and ask a question, which is what happened. I engaged in a four-minute impromptu debate with Rumsfeld on Iraq War lies, an exchange that was carried on live TV.

That experience leaped to mind on Feb. 15, as Secretary Clinton strode onstage amid similar adulation.

The fulsome praise for Clinton from GWU’s president and the loud, sustained applause also brought to mind a phrase that – as a former Soviet analyst at CIA – I often read in Pravda. When reprinting the text of speeches by high Soviet officials, the Communist Party newspaper would regularly insert, in italicized parentheses:  “Burniye applaudismenti; vce stoyat” —  Stormy applause; all rise.

With the others at Clinton’s talk, I stood. I even clapped politely. But as the applause dragged on, I began to feel like a real phony. So, when the others finally sat down, I remained standing silently, motionless, with my eyes fixed narrowly on the rear of the auditorium and my back to the Secretary.

I did not expect what followed: a violent assault in full view of Secretary Clinton by what in Soviet parlance were called the “organs of state security.”  The rest is history, as they say.  A short account of the incident can be found here.

Callous Aplomb

As the video of the event shows, Secretary Clinton did not miss a beat in her speech as she called for authoritarian governments to show respect for dissent and to refrain from violence. She spoke with what seemed to be an especially chilly sang froid, as she ignored my silent witness and the violent assault that took place right in front of her.

The experience gave me personal confirmation of the impression that I had reluctantly drawn from watching her behavior and its consequences over the past decade. The incident was a kind of metaphor of the much worse violence that Secretary Clinton has coolly countenanced against others.

Again and again, Hillary Clinton – both as a U.S. senator and as Secretary of State – has demonstrated a nonchalant readiness to unleash the vast destructiveness of American military power. The charitable explanation, I suppose, is that she knows nothing of war from direct personal experience.

And that is also true of her husband, her colleague Robert Gates at the Defense Department, President Barack Obama, and most of the White House functionaries blithely making decisions to squander the lives and limbs of young soldiers in foreign adventures — conflicts that even the top brass admit cannot be won with weapons.

The analogy to Vietnam is inescapable. As White House tapes from the 1960s show, President Lyndon Johnson knew that the Vietnam War could not be “won” in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, he kept throwing hundreds of thousands into the battle lest someone accuse him of being soft on communism.

I had an inside seat watching Johnson do that. And I did nothing.

Now, with an even more jittery president, a hawkish Secretary of State, General David they-injure-their-own-children-to-make-us-look-bad Petraeus, and various Republican presidential hopefuls – all jockeying for political position as the 2012 election draws near – the country is in even deeper trouble today.

No one on this political merry-go-round can afford to appear weak on terrorism. So, they all have covered their bets. And we all know who pays the price for these political calculations.

This time, I would NOT do nothing.

My colleagues in Veterans for Peace and I have known far too many comrades-in-arms and families whose lives have been shattered or ended as a result of such crass political maneuvering. Many of us know far more than we wish to know about war and killing. But — try as we may with letters and other appeals — we cannot get through to President Obama. And Secretary Clinton turns her own deaf ear to our entreaties and those of others who oppose unnecessary warfare. It is a pattern that she also followed in her days as a U.S. senator from New York.

See No Evil

In the summer of 2002, as the Senate was preparing to conduct hearings about alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and the possibility of war, former Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq and U.S. Marine Major, Scott Ritter, came down to Washington from his home in upstate New York to share his first-hand knowledge with as many senators as possible.

To those that let him in the door, he showed that the “intelligence” adduced to support U.S. claims that Iraq still had WMD was fatally flawed. This was the same “intelligence” that Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller later branded “unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent.”

Sen. Hillary Clinton would not let Ritter in her door. Despite his unique insights as a U.N. inspector and his status as a constituent, Sen. Clinton gave him the royal run-around. Her message was clear: “Don’t bother me with the facts.” She had already made up her mind. I had a direct line into her inner circle at the time, and was assured that several of my op-eds and other commentaries skeptical of George W. Bush’s planned invasion were given personally to Clinton, but no matter.

Sen. Clinton reportedly was not among the handful of legislators who took the trouble to read the National Intelligence Estimate on WMD in Iraq that was issued on Oct. 1, 2002, just ten days before the she voted to authorize war.

In short, she chose not to perform the due diligence required prior to making a decision having life-or-death consequences for thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. She knew whom she needed to cater to, and what she felt she had to do.

But, bright as she is, Hillary Clinton is prone to willful mistakes — political, as well as strategic. In dissing those of us who were trying to warn her that an attack on Iraq would have catastrophic consequences, she simply willed us to be wrong. Clearly, her calculation was that she had to appear super-strong on defense in order to win the Democratic nomination and then the presidency in 2008.

Just as clearly, courting Israel and the Likud Lobby was also important to her political ambitions.

Tony Blair Admits Israeli Role

Any lingering doubt that Israel played a major role in the U.S.- U.K. decision to attack Iraq was dispelled a year ago when former Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke publicly about the Israeli input into the all-important Bush-Blair deliberations on Iraq in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002.

Inexplicably, Blair forgot his usual discretion when it comes to disclosing important facts to the public and blurted out some truth at the Chilcot hearings in London regarding the origins of the Iraq War:

“As I recall that [April 2002] discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us [Bush and Blair], whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.”

According to Philip Zelikow – a former member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and later counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – the “real threat” from Iraq was not to the United States.

Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002, the “unstated threat” from Iraq was the “threat against Israel.” He added, “The American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”

But it wasn’t as though leading Israelis were disguising their hopes or an attack on Iraq. The current Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu published a pre-invasion piece titled “The case for Toppling Saddam” in the Wall Street Journal, in which he wrote:

“Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do … I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.”

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, “the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.” And, as a retired Israeli general later put it, “Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional [WMD] capabilities.” In the United States, neoconservatives also pushed for war thinking that taking out Saddam Hussein would make Israel more secure.

Those Israeli leaders and their neocon allies got their wish on March 19, 2003, with the U.S.-U.K. invasion.

Of course, pressure from Israel and its Lobby was not the only factor behind the invasion of Iraq — think also oil, military bases, various political ambitions, revenge, etc. — but the Israeli factor was a central one.

A Calculating Senator

I’m afraid, though, that these calculations aimed at enhancing Israeli security may ultimately have the opposite effect. The Iraq War and the anti-Americanism that it has engendered across the Middle East seem sure to make Israel’s position in the region even more precarious.

If the Iraq War does end up making the region more dangerous for Israel, the fault will lie primarily with Israel’s hard-line leaders, as well as with those American officials (and media pundits) who so eagerly clambered onboard for the attack on Iraq.

One of those U.S. officials was the calculating senator from New York.

In a kind of poetic justice, Clinton’s politically motivated warmongering became a key factor in her losing the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, who as a young state senator in Illinois spoke out against the war.

Although she bet wrong in 2002-03, Clinton keeps doubling down in her apparent belief that her greater political vulnerability comes from being perceived as “weak” against U.S. adversaries. So, she’s emerged as one of the Obama administration’s leading hawks on Afghanistan and Iran.

I suspect she still has her eye on what she considers the crucial centers of financial, media and other power that could support a possible future run for president, whether in 2012 if the Obama administration unravels or in 2016.

Another explanation, I suppose, could be that the Secretary of State genuinely believes that the United States should fight wars favored by right-wing Israelis and their influential supporters in the U.S.

Whichever interpretation you prefer, there’s no doubt that she has put herself in the forefront of American leaders threatening Iran over its alleged “nuclear weapons” program, a “weapons” program that Iran denies exists and for which the U.S. intelligence community has found little or no evidence.

Bête Noire Iran

As a former CIA analyst myself, it strikes me as odd that Clinton’s speeches never reflect the consistent, unanimous judgment of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, issued formally (and with “high confidence”) in November 2007 that Iran stopped working on a nuclear weapon in the fall of 2003 and had not yet decided whether to resume that work.

Less than two weeks ago (on Feb. 10), in a formal appearance before the House Intelligence Committee, National Intelligence Director James Clapper testified:

“We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons….

“We continue to judge Iran’s nuclear decisionmaking is guided by a cost-benefit approach, which offers the international community opportunities to influence Tehran.”

Who’s in Charge Here?

Yet, in her determination to come across as hard-line, Clinton has undercut promising initiatives that might have constrained Iran from having enough low-enriched uranium to be even tempted to build a nuclear arsenal.

Last year, when – at the urging of President Obama – the leaders of Turkey and Brazil worked out an agreement with Iran, under which Iran agreed to ship about half of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) out of country, Clinton immediately rejected it in favor of more severe economic sanctions.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva were left wondering who exactly was in charge in Washington — Hillary Clinton and her pro-Israel friends, or Obama.

Brazil released a three-page letter that Obama had sent to Lula da Silva a month earlier in which Obama said the proposed uranium transfer “would build confidence and reduce regional tensions by substantially reducing Iran’s” stockpile of low-enriched uranium.

The contrast between Obama’s support for the initiative and the opposition from various hardliners (including Clinton) caused “some puzzlement,” one senior Brazilian official told the New York Times. After all, this official said, the supportive “letter came from the highest authority and was very clear.”

It was a particularly telling episode. Clinton basked in the applause of Israeli leaders and neocon pundits for blocking the uranium transfer and securing more restrictive UN sanctions on Iran – and since then Iran appears to have dug in its heals on additional negotiations over its nuclear program.

Secretary Clinton is almost as assiduous as Netanyahu in never missing a chance to paint the Iranians in the darkest colors – even if that ends up painting the entire region into a more dangerous corner.

More Hypocrisy

On Feb. 15, Clinton continued giving hypocrisy a bad name, with her GWU speech regarding the importance of governments respecting peaceful dissent.

Five short paragraphs after she watched me snatched out of the audience Blackwater-style, she said, “Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.” It was like something straight out of Franz Kafka.

Today, given the growing instability in the Middle East – and Netanyahu’s strident talk about Iran’s dangerous influence – it may take yet another Herculean effort by Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen to disabuse Netanyahu of the notion that Israel can somehow provoke the kind of confrontation with Iran that would automatically suck the U.S. into the conflict on Israel’s side.

At each such turning point, Secretary Clinton predictably sides with the hard-line Israeli position and shows remarkably little sympathy for the Palestinians or any other group that finds itself in Israel’s way.

It is now clear, not only from the WikiLeaks documents, but even more so from the “Palestine Papers” disclosed by Al Jazeera, that Washington has long been playing a thoroughly dishonest “honest-broker” role between Israel and the Palestinians.

But those documents don’t stand alone. Clinton also rejected the Goldstone Report’s criticism of Israel’s bloody attack on Gaza in 2008-09; she waffled on Israel’s fatal commando raid on a Turkish relief flotilla on its way to Gaza in 2010; and she rallied to the defense of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak this month when Israeli leaders raised alarms about what kind of regime might follow him.

Just last week, Clinton oversaw the casting of the U.S. veto to kill a U.N. Security Council resolution calling on Israel to stop colonizing territories it occupied in 1967. That vote was 14 to 1, marking the first such veto by the Obama administration. Netanyahu was quick to state that he “deeply appreciated” the U.S. stance.

Silent Witness

In the face of such callous disregard for what the Founders called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” words failed me — literally — on Feb. 15.

The op-eds, the speeches, and the interviews that others and I have done about needless war and feckless politicians may have done some good but, surely, they have not done enough. And America’s Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) is the embodiment of a Fourth Estate that is dead in the water.

I counted about 20 TV cameras at the Clinton speech and reporters galore. Not one thought to come outside to watch what was happening to me, and zero reporting on the incident has found its way into the FCM, save a couple of brief and misleading accounts.

A Fox News story claimed that “a heckler interrupted” Clinton’s speech and then “was escorted from the room.” Fox News added that I “was, perhaps, trying to hold up a sign.” CNN posted a brief clip with a similar insistence that I had “interrupted” Clinton’s speech, though the video shows me saying nothing until after I’m dragged away (or “escorted”) when I say, “So this is America.” There also was no sign.

Disappointing, but not surprising. But I guess I really do believe that the good is worth doing because it is good. It shouldn’t matter that there is little or no guarantee of success — or even of a truthful recounting of what happened.

Jail

One of my friends, in a good-natured attempt to make light of my arrest and brief imprisonment, commented that I must be used to it by now.

I thought of how anti-war activist Dan Berrigan responded to that kind of observation in his testimony at the Plowshares Eight trial 31 years ago. I feel blessed by his witness and fully identify with what he said about “the push of conscience”:

“With every cowardly bone in my body, I wished I hadn’t had to do it. That has been true every time I have been arrested. My stomach turns over. I feel sick. I feel afraid. I hate jail. I don’t do well there physically.

“But I have read that we must not kill. I have read that children, above all, are threatened by this. I have read that Christ our Lord underwent death rather than inflict it. And I’m supposed to be a disciple.

“The push of conscience is a terrible thing.”

As Fr. Berrigan clearly understood, the suffering of the victims of war is so much worse than the shock and discomfort of arrest.

For her part, Sen. and/or Secretary Clinton seems never to have encountered a war that she didn’t immediately embrace on behalf of some geopolitical justification, apparently following Henry Kissinger’s dictum that soldiers are “just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.”

For us Veterans for Peace, we’ve been there, done that. And so, enough already!

Moreover, beyond the human suffering of those caught up in war, there’s what’s in store for the rest of us. As recent rhetoric and disclosures of leaked documents have made clear, what lies ahead is a permanent warfare state, including occupation of foreign lands and new military bases around the globe — unless we have the courage to stand up this time.

Already well under way is creeping curtailment of our rights at home. “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — one who knew.

I think we need to bear in mind that we are part of a long line of those who have taken a stand on these issues. As for those of us who have served abroad to safeguard the rights of U.S. citizens — well, maybe we have a particular mandate now to keep doing what we can to keep protecting them.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his career as a CIA analyst, he prepared and briefed the President’s Daily Brief and chaired National Intelligence Estimates. He is a member of the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

——————————————————————————–

As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt.

Blind-sided by security officers who pounced upon him, Mr. McGovern remarked, as he was hauled out the door, “So this is America?” Mr. McGovern is covered with bruises, lacerations and contusions inflicted in the assault.

Mr. McGovern is being represented by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF). “It is the ultimate definition of lip service that Secretary of State Clinton would be trumpeting the U.S. government’s supposed concerns for free speech rights and this man would be simultaneously brutalized and arrested for engaging in a peaceful act of dissent at her speech,” stated attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the PCJF.

Mr. McGovern now works for Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

by The Independent/UK

These Are Secular Popular Revolts – Yet Everyone is Blaming Religion
(Our writer, who was in Cairo as the revolution took hold in Egypt, reports from Bahrain on why Islam has little to do with what is going on.)
by Robert Fisk
Mubarak claimed that Islamists were behind the Egyptian revolution. Ben Ali said the same in Tunisia. King Abdullah of Jordan sees a dark and sinister hand – al-Qa’ida’s hand, the Muslim Brotherhood’s hand, an Islamist hand – behind the civil insurrection across the Arab world. Yesterday the Bahraini authorities discovered Hizbollah’s bloody hand behind the Shia uprising there. For Hizbollah, read Iran. How on earth do well-educated if singularly undemocratic men get this thing so wrong? Confronted by a series of secular explosions – Bahrain does not quite fit into this bracket – they blame radical Islam. The Shah made an identical mistake in reverse. Confronted by an obviously Islamic uprising, he blamed it on Communists.

Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the “stable” dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West’s hypocrisy that they didn’t want America on their side. “The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers,” an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. “Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side.” At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. “We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,” a medical orderly told me on Friday. “And now Obama wants to be on our side?”

The events of the past two months and the spirit of anti-regime Arab insurrection – for dignity and justice, rather than any Islamic emirate – will remain in our history books for hundreds of years. And the failure of Islam’s strictest adherents will be discussed for decades. There was a special piquancy to the latest footage from al-Qa’ida yesterday, recorded before the overthrow of Mubarak, that emphasised the need for Islam to triumph in Egypt; yet a week earlier the forces of secular, nationalist, honourable Egypt, Muslim and Christian men and women, had got rid of the old man without any help from Bin Laden Inc. Even weirder was the reaction from Iran, whose supreme leader convinced himself that the Egyptian people’s success was a victory for Islam. It’s a sobering thought that only al-Qa’ida and Iran and their most loathed enemies, the anti-Islamist Arab dictators, believed that religion lay behind the mass rebellion of pro-democracy protesters.

The bloodiest irony of all – which dawned rather slowly on Obama – was that the Islamic Republic of Iran was praising the democrats of Egypt while threatening to execute its own democratic opposition leaders.

Not, then, a great week for “Islamicism”. There’s a catch, of course. Almost all the millions of Arab demonstrators who wish to shrug off the cloak of autocracy which – with our Western help – has smothered their lives in humiliation and fear are indeed Muslims. And Muslims – unlike the “Christian” West – have not lost their faith. Under the stones and coshes of Mubarak’s police killers, they counter-attacked, shouting “Allah akbar” for this was indeed for them a “jihad” – not a religious war but a struggle for justice. “God is Great” and a demand for justice are entirely consistent. For the struggle against injustice is the very spirit of the Koran.

In Bahrain we have a special case. Here a Shia majority is ruled by a minority of pro-monarchy Sunni Muslims. Syria, by the way, may suffer from “Bahrainitis” for the same reason: a Sunni majority ruled by an Alawite (Shia) minority. Well, at least the West – in its sagging support for King Hamad of Bahrain – can point to the fact that Bahrain, like Kuwait, has a parliament. It’s a sad old beast, existing from 1973 to 1975 when it was dissolved unconstitutionally, and then reinvented in 2001 as part of a package of “reforms”. But the new parliament turned out to be even more unrepresentative than the first. Opposition politicians were harassed by state security, and parliamentary boundaries were gerrymandered, Ulster-style, to make sure that the minority Sunnis controlled it. In 2006 and 2010, for example, the main Shia party in Bahrain gained only 18 out of 40 seats. Indeed, there is a distinctly Northern Ireland feel to Sunni perspectives in Bahrain. Many have told me that they fear for their lives, that Shia mobs will burn their homes and kill them.

All this is set to change. Control of state power has to be legitimised to be effective, and the use of live fire to overwhelm peaceful protest was bound to end in Bahrain in a series of little Bloody Sundays. Once Arabs learnt to lose their fear, they could claim the civil rights that Catholics in Northern Ireland once demanded in the face of RUC brutality. In the end, the British had to destroy Unionist rule and bring the IRA into joint power with Protestants. The parallels are not exact and the Shias do not (yet) have a militia, although the Bahraini government has produced photographs of pistols and swords – hardly a major weapon of the IRA – to support their contention that its opponents include “terrorists”.

In Bahrain there is, needless to say, a sectarian as much as a secular battle, something that the Crown Prince unwittingly acknowledged when he originally said that the security forces had to suppress protests to prevent sectarian violence. It’s a view held all too savagely by Saudi Arabia, which has a strong interest in the suppression of dissent in Bahrain. The Shias of Saudi Arabia might get uppity if their co-religionists in Bahrain overwhelm the state. Then we’ll really hear the leaders of the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran crowing.

But these interconnected insurrections should not be seen in a simple ferment-in-the-Middle-East framework. The Yemeni uprising against President Saleh (32 years in power) is democratic but also tribal, and it won’t be long before the opposition uses guns. Yemen is a heavily armed society, tribes with flags, nationalist-rampant. And then there is Libya.

Gaddafi is so odd, his Green Book theories – dispatched by Benghazi demonstrators last week when they pulled down a concrete version of this particular volume – so preposterous, his rule so cruel (and he’s been running the place for 42 years) that he is an Ozymandias waiting to fall. His flirtation with Berlusconi – worse still, his cloying love affair with Tony Blair whose foreign secretary, Jack Straw, praised the Libyan lunatic’s “statesmanship” – was never going to save him. Bedecked with more medals than General Eisenhower, desperate for a doctor to face-lift his sagging jowls, this wretched man is threatening “terrible” punishment against his own people for challenging his rule. Two things to remember about Libya: like Yemen, it’s a tribal land; and when it turned against its Italian fascist overlords, it began a savage war of liberation whose brave leaders faced the hangman’s noose with unbelievable courage. Just because Gaddafi is a nutter does not mean his people are fools.

So it’s a sea-change in the Middle East’s political, social, cultural world. It will create many tragedies, raise many hopes and shed far too much blood. Better perhaps to ignore all the analysts and the “think tanks” whose silly “experts” dominate the satellite channels. If Czechs could have their freedom, why not the Egyptians? If dictators can be overthrown in Europe – first the fascists, then the Communists – why not in the great Arab Muslim world? And – just for a moment – keep religion out of this.

© 2011 The Independent
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.  He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

by The Guardian/UK

Palestinians Plan ‘Day of Rage’ after US Vetoes Resolution on Israeli Settlements

US decision to use UN security council veto sparks furious reaction in West Bank and Gaza

by Harriet Sherwood

Palestinians are planning a “day of rage” on Friday in response to the US wielding its veto against a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements.

Palestinians are planning a “day of rage” on Friday in response to the US wielding its veto against a UN security council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. The US decision to use its veto has sparked a furious reaction in the West Bank and Gaza.

Anti-US rallies took place in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem, Tulkarem and Jenin this weekend after the 14-1 vote on the resolution, in which the US stood alone against the rest of the security council, including Britain, Germany and France. It voted in contradiction of its own policy.

This is not a good time for the United States to be antagonizing the Arab world—which is certainly what Obama’s veto did. Obama’s veto is a public embarrassment, a clear cut exposure of our hypocrisy in dealing with Israel.

We vetoed a policy that we have publicly been supportive of, and we stand absolutely alone in the entire world. The vote was 14-1. There is no credit in being number one in this instance.

The biggest mistake of the past century was the establishment of the State of Israel. There has not been a day of peace since that decision. Israel has proven to be the most intransigent partner anyone could possibly have.

In Gaza, Hamas described the US position as outrageous and said Washington was “completely biased” towards Israel.

Ibrahim Sarsour, an Israeli-Arab member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, said it was time to tell the US president, Barack Obama, to “go to hell”.

“Obama cannot be trusted,” he wrote in an open letter to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. “We knew his promises were lies. The time has come to spit in the face of the Americans.”

The Egyptian foreign ministry said the US veto would “lead to more damage of the United States’ credibility on the Arab side as a mediator in peace efforts”.

The use of the veto for the first time under Obama will strengthen perceptions in the Arab world that for the US, protection of its ally Israel overrides its desire for a just outcome for Palestinians in the decades-old conflict.

The move is likely to impede US efforts to persuade the parties to return to peace negotiations, which stalled in September over the issue of settlement expansion.

With protests raging across the Middle East against repression, corruption, food prices and dismal economic prospects, Washington is acutely aware that distrust of the US is widespread in the region.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyhu, said his country “deeply appreciated” the US use of its veto.

However, some Israeli commentators warned that the vote served to reinforce Israel’s international isolation and said Washington would expect a payback from its ally. They suggested the US would be unwilling to use its veto in similar circumstances again.

The opposition leader, Tzipi Livni, said Israel was “now in political collapse”.

“We now find that Germany, Britain and France – all friends of Israel who want to help it defend itself – voted against the positions of Israel, and the US is being pushed into a corner and finds itself with Israel against the world,” she said.

The vote, on Friday night, followed frantic diplomatic efforts to prevent the tabling of the resolution, which was carefully worded to reflect official US policy on settlements.

Obama spoke to Abbas on the phone for 50 minutes on Thursday, offering a package of inducements, including public statements, to withdraw the resolution.

According to the Palestinian press, Obama also suggested US aid to the Palestinian Authority could be halted if the resolution went ahead.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made a further telephone call to Abbas on Friday to put pressure on him to abandon the resolution.

However, the Palestinian president – aware of the volatile mood in the region and the backlash he would face if he acceded to Obama’s demands – refused to withdraw. One Palestinian official told Reuters that “people would take to the streets and topple the president” if he backed down.

After the vote, the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, told the security council that Washington agreed with “our fellow council members, and indeed with the wider world, about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israel settlement activity”.

But she added: “We think it unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians.”

Underlying the growing gap between the US and Europe on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying settlement construction was against international law.

The veto served to unite the political rivals Hamas and Fatah in condemnation. Palestinian leaders are considering whether to take a resolution on Israel’s settlement policies to the UN general assembly.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/23/middle-east-peace-process-over-palestinians?CMP=twt_gu

By Karma Nabulsi

The Guardian, Great Britain

It’s over. Given the shocking nature, extent and detail of these
ghastly revelations from behind the closed doors of the Middle East
peace process, the seemingly endless and ugly game is now, finally,
over. Not one of the villains on the Palestinian side can survive it.
With any luck the sheer horror of this account of how the US and
Britain covertly facilitated and even implemented Israeli military
expansion – while creating an oligarchy to manage it – might overcome
the entrenched interests and venality that have kept the peace process
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-peace-talks
going. A small group of men who have polluted the Palestinian
public sphere with their private activities are now exposed.

For us Palestinians, these detailed accounts of the secretly
negotiated surrender of every one of our core rights under
international law (of return for millions of Palestinian refugees,
on annexing Arab Jerusalem, on settlements) are not a surprise. It
is something that we all knew – in spite of official protests to
the contrary – because we feel their destructive effects every
day. The same is true of the outrageous role of the US and Britain
in creating a security bantustan, and the ruin of our civic and
political space. We already knew, because we feel its fatal effects.

For the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, official
Palestinian policy over these past decades has been the
antithesis of a legitimate, or representative, or even
coherent strategy to obtain our long-denied freedom.
But this sober appreciation of our current state of
affairs, accompanied by the mass protests and civil
society campaigns by Palestinian citizens, has
been insufficient, until now, to rid us of it.

The release into the public domain of these documents is such a
landmark because it destroys the final traces of credibility of the
peace process. Everything to do with it relied upon a single axiom:
that each new initiative or set of negotiations with the Israelis,
every policy or programme (even the creation of undemocratic institu-
tions under military occupation), could be presented as carried out
in good faith under harsh conditions: necessary for peace, and in the
service of our national cause. Officials from all sides played a double
game vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It is now on record that they have
betrayed, lied and cheated us of basic rights, while simultaneously
claiming they deserved the trust of the Palestinian people.

This claim of representative capacity – and worse, the assertion they
were representing the interests of Palestinians in their struggle for
freedom – had become increasingly thin over the last decade and a
half. The claim they were acting in good faith is absolutely shattered
by the publication of these documents today, and the information to
be revealed over this coming week. Whatever one’s political leanings,
no one, not the Americans, the British, the UN, and especially not
these Palestinian officials, can claim that the whole racket is
anything other than a brutal process of subjugating an entire people.

Why has this gone on for so long and at such high cost? And why
haven’t the Palestinians been able to create the democratic
representation so urgently needed to advance their cause? Israel,
along with those who share its worldview, would assert that the
problem lies with the Palestinians themselves, being part of an Arab
political culture that can only breed either authoritarian governments
or terrorists. Yet what these documents reveal is the extent of
undemocratic, authoritarian, colonial and, frankly, terrifying
coercion the US, Britain and other western governments have been
imposing upon Palestinians through this unaccountable leadership.

The unconstrained power of America, the global superpower that has
(now on record and in sickening detail) taken one party’s side in
this conflict, can be seen on every page. Everyone is implicated, from
the president to the secretary of state, from the military generals
who have created the security forces to implement these policies to
the embassy staff involved in the daily execution of them. It also
shows this policy is an absolute failure, bringing ruination upon
the Palestinians and increasing belligerency from the completely
unfettered, aggressive and erratic Israel, currently practising a
form of apartheid towards the Palestinians it rules through force.

This uneven balance of power can only be
successfully addressed in the same way every national
liberation movement has addressed it in the past:
Through the unassailable strength of a popular mandate.
Ho Chi Minh sitting down with the French, or Nelson Mandela
negotiating with the apartheid regime embodied this popular
legitimacy, and indeed drew their principles and negotiating
positions from it. The Palestinian leadership’s weak and
incompetent posturing is the opposite of dignified and
honourable national representation, and proves useless to boot.

On the positive side, had such deals eventually come to light,
Palestinians would have rejected them comprehensively. But the
worst betrayal has been what this hypocrisy has bequeathed to
the young generation of Palestinians. These officials have led a
new generation to believe that participating in public governance
is base and self-seeking, that joining any political party is
the least useful method to advance principals and create change.

Through their harmful example, they have alienated young Palestinians
from their own history of resistance to colonial and military rule, so
they now believe that tens of thousands of brilliant, imaginative and
extraordinarily brave Palestinians never existed or, worse, fought and
died for nothing. It cuts them off from any useful mobilising methods
and techniques that they might draw upon today – the democratic and
collective mechanisms that are needed more than ever. They have given
young people the idea that there is no virtue in collective organisation,
the mechanism by which popular democratic change is made and preserved.

The increasingly popular view that the Palestinian revolution was
a failure from its inception, always corrupt, driven from above and
never from below, is false – but it has gained credibility through
the actions of the current regime. Its behaviour has nearly erased
the record of the contribution made by tens of thousands of ordinary
Palestinian citizens who, through the sheer force of their devotion
to public life, fought for principles and created real and democratic
self-representation under the worst of conditions. It is our most
valuable freedom, and one well worth fighting for: the release of
these devastating documents paves the way for its restoration.

How 1,600 confidential Palestinian records of negotiations with Israel from 1999 to 2010 came to be leaked to al-Jazeera

Seumas Milne and Ian Black The Guardian, Monday 24 January 2011

The revelations from the heart of the Israel-Palestine peace process are the product of the biggest documentary leak in the history of the Middle East conflict, and the most comprehensive exposure of the inside story of a decade of failed negotiations.

The 1,600 confidential records of hundreds of meetings between Palestinian, Israeli and US leaders, as well as emails and secret proposals, were leaked to the Qatar-based satellite TV channel al-Jazeera and shared exclusively with the Guardian. They cover the period from the runup to the ill-fated Camp David negotiations under US president Bill Clinton in 2000, to private discussions last year involving senior officials and politicians in the Obama administration.

The earliest document in the cache is a memo from September 1999 about Palestinian negotiating strategy. It suggests heeding the advice of the Rolling Stones: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you can get what you need.” The final one, from last September, is a Palestinian Authority (PA) message to the Egyptian government about access to the Gaza Strip.

The Palestine papers have emerged at a time when a whole era of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, starting with the Madrid conference in 1991, appear to have run into the sand, opening up the prospect of a new phase of the conflict and potentially another war.

In particular, they cover the most recent negotiations, before and after George Bush’s Annapolis conference in late 2007 – when substantive offers were made by both sides until the process broke down over Israel’s refusal to freeze West Bank settlement activity.

The bulk of the documents are records, contemporaneous notes and sections of verbatim transcripts of meetings drawn up by officials of the Palestinian negotiation support unit (NSU), which has been the main technical and legal backup for the Palestinian side in the negotiations.

The unit has been heavily funded by the British government. Other documents originate from inside the PA’s extensive US- and British-sponsored security apparatus.

The Israelis, Americans and others kept their own records, which may differ in their accounts of the same meetings. But the Palestinian documents were made and held confidentially, rather than for overt or public use, and significantly reveal large gaps between the private and stated positions of Palestinian and, in fewer cases, Israeli leaders.

The documents – almost all of which are in English, which was the language used by both sides in negotiations – were leaked over a period of months from several sources to al-Jazeera. The bulk of them have been independently authenticated for the Guardian by former participants in the talks and by diplomatic and intelligence sources.

The NSU – formally part of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – is based in the West Bank town of Ramallah under the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat. It has drawn heavily on the expertise of Palestinian-American and other western-trained diaspora Palestinian lawyers for technical support in negotiations.

In the case of one-to-one talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders – especially between Mahmoud Abbas and the then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert – NSU officials were not present, but reports on the outcome of the encounters were often given later to the unit and records made.

After the breakdown of the Camp David talks, which Clinton and Israeli leaders blamed on Yasser Arafat and a lack of technical Palestinian preparation, Palestinian leaders went to great lengths to ensure that the fullest records and supporting documents were drawn up for later talks. Among NSU staff, the Arab-American lawyer Zeinah Salahi drew up many of the meeting records, while others were made by the French-Palestinian lawyer Ziyad Clot, author of a book about the negotiations, Il n’y aura pas d’Etat Palestinien (There will be no Palestinian state).

The role of the NSU in the negotiations has caused tensions among West Bank-based Palestinian leaders and officials, and widespread resentment about the salaries paid to its most senior managers, notably Adam Smith International’s Andrew Kuhn, who stepped down from running the unit last year.

But as the negotiations have increasingly been seen to have failed, and the Ramallah-based PA leadership has come to be regarded by many Palestinians as illegitimate or unrepresentative, discontent among NSU staff has grown and significant numbers have left. There has also been widespread discontent in the organisation at the scale and nature of concessions made in the talks.

Among NSU staff cited in the documents, Salahi now works for the US embassy in Cairo, Clot has returned to France and Rami Dajani works for Tony Blair in his role as the Middle East quartet’s envoy. Kuhn is working elsewhere for Adam Smith International, including on projects in Afghanistan.

In response to the leaks, PA and PLO leaders such as Saeb Erekat can be expected to point out that one of the core principles of the negotiations is that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. As such they are not necessarily committed to provisional positions that in the event failed to secure a settlement – though Erekat made clear to US officials in January 2010 that the same offers remained on the table.

Critics are likely to argue that concessions – such as accepting the annexation of Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem – are simply pocketed by the Israeli side, and risk being treated as a starting point in any future talks.

Some Fatah leaders are likely to accuse al-Jazeera of having an anti-PA agenda by publishing the leaked documents, which they believe will benefit their Hamas rivals, backed by Iran — as shown in critical comments about the TV station in the documents themselves.

Relations between al-Jazeera, the most widely watched TV channel in the Middle East, and the PA leadership have often been strained after it has run reports regarded by the administration as hostile – as is the case with regimes throughout the region.

The documents have been redacted to remove details such as email addresses, phone numbers or other information that could identify those who leaked them.
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Al-Jazeera is a vital source in the Middle East
24 Jan 2011
Palestine papers reveal risks for peace

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The U.S. veto in the United Nations Security Council on February 18 of a draft resolution demanding that “Israel cease all settlement activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” and reaffirming that settlements are “illegal,”  undermines American interests in the Middle East and prospects for a two-state peace.

We heartily agree with Philip Wilcox. Publicly we have condemned Israeli settlements as an impediment to peace, but at the United Nations we veto the very goal we supposedly are trying to achieve.

What it amounts to is that the United States has been playing games with peace for years with no intention of peace (except during the Carter years). We have been deceptive with the Palestinians. We have been pulling off a major ruse in falsely pretending to be ‘fair brokers.’

The Obama Administration, along with Hilary Clinton, are big disappointments. Our blind allegiance to Israel has caused enormous problems throughout the Middle East.

The United States of America has been a disaster for the people of the Middle East. We have propped up dictators for our own selfish purposes while they abused their people with our concurrence.

The Obama Administration has continued this tragedy and it is starting to backfire and we are going to reap what we’ve sowed.

The Obama administration has worked strenuously but unsuccessfully over eighteen months to persuade Israel to freeze settlement building which it regularly described as “illegitimate.” Yet Israel has accelerated settlement in defiance of American wishes.

In casting the U.S. veto of the resolution, the US representative explained that only direct negotiations will bring peace and that the resolution would have risked “hardening attitudes” and further resort to the UN.  This is not persuasive. The text of the resolution called on the parties “to continue with …their negotiations,” and was entirely consistent with this goal, and otherwise reflected U.S. policy.

In any case, negotiations over the past seventeen years have utterly failed to break the impasse over Israel’s occupation and settlement policies, at least in part, because of Israel’s insistence in expanding settlements unilaterally in territory that is the subject of negotiations.  The settler population has expanded from 281,000 in 1993 to 557,800 in 2010.  Notwithstanding a temporary, partial freeze, the settler populace in the West Bank alone grew by 15,000 in 2010.  While passage of a resolution condemning Israeli policy might further harden Israeli views toward compliance with international law and opinion in the short run, it would signal that Israel cannot continue to expand settlements with the impunity it has enjoyed in the past.

Other U.S. officials have said the UN should stay out of Israeli-Palestinian peace-keeping. Yet the UN has been deeply involved in this conflict from the very beginning. It recognized Israel in 1948 and passed other landmark resolutions, like 242.  In 2003, the U.S. supported the Security Council’s endorsement of the Quartet’s roadmap, which calls for a settlement freeze.

Anticipated domestic criticism appears to be the real reason for the U.S. veto.  But foreign policy leadership requires courage and strategic vision.  The U.S. veto will likely accelerate the decline of U.S influence in the Middle East, undermine the credibility of its own policy on settlements, and further erode our reputation as an impartial mediator. All this makes the prospect of progress toward a two-state peace even more distant.

At a time when U.S. efforts to make peace between Israel and Palestine have ground to a halt, the U.S. needs a new policy.  Growing protest in the Middle East over oppression and denial of freedom and human rights makes this all the more urgent.

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: February 12, 2011 09:15AM

Two federal agencies have slapped Zions Bank with multimillion-dollar civil penalties for failing to monitor suspicious wire transfers of billions of dollars related to transactions that may have involved drug trafficking and other crimes.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on Friday said it imposed an $8 million penalty against Zions for shortcomings in its anti-money laundering controls — violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA Patriot Act.

Oh these damnable regulations! They are such a nuisance. How can we hide money laundering if we have to be regulated? Well, maybe the regulators will be asleep at the switch. Maybe the regulators will be understaffed and not get around to us. Maybe our political contributions will keep us out of jail! Maybe our white shirts and ties and memberships in all the right clubs and churches will throw them off the track! This is our business and it is none of their business. Why do we have to put up with these intrusions of government? Don’t they know our God is Laissez Faire and we don’t want anyone messin’ around with our religion.

We’ve got to get rid of Obama! This wouldn’t have happened under Bush. We could have whitewashed it easy with a call to Hatch. Hell, even Matheson has no influence with Obama. Here in Utah we are defenseless because we’ve put all our eggs in the Republican basket. That money we gave to them has gone right down a rat hole.

Oh well, we will just have to increase our fees and bounce more checks that will cause other checks to bounce and we can bounce that merry-go round back to profitability. We can recover this in a matter of weeks, but damn, we’re going to have to be careful not to bounce the wrong checks. We wouldn’t want to bounce our next TARP check.

It’s too damn bad we’ve got the Tribune in town or we could cover this up in a minute. We thought we had that covered when we arranged for Singleton to buy the Trib, but damn, he couldn’t control his staff. This free press stuff is sure a nuisance. We need to do something about that, but this internet stuff is getting pretty scary. Look what it did in Egypt. We don’t have a chance. Perhaps the jig is up!

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — a Treasury Department agency involved in fighting money laundering — also fined Salt Lake City-based Zions $8 million but said the government would be satisfied by a single payment of $8 million.

“The bank is supposed to file suspicious activity reports if they find suspicious activity, and the bank failed to file those on a timely basis,” OCC spokesman Dick DeBuck said.

“The regulations also require the bank to monitor this wire activity, and the bank did not do that, either.”

Zions did not admit or deny the allegations spelled out in separate documents issued by the OCC and the Financial Crimes Network.

In a statement, CEO Scott Anderson said the bank takes “very seriously our obligations to comply with federal laws and regulations, including the Bank Secrecy Act.”

Anderson said Zions has closed down the business unit handling the money transfers and has been cooperating fully with regulators.

“Over the past three years, we have employed considerable resources bankwide to significantly enhance our systems designed to detect and report potentially suspicious activities,” Anderson said in the statement.

The OCC said Zions had developed a “remote deposit capture product” that allowed customers to deposit imaged financial documents such as checks into accounts in Mexico and other countries from “remote” locations, ostensibly in the United States.

The product was marketed to “high-risk customers” in 2006 and 2007 “without sufficient regard to (Bank Secrecy and Patriot Act) compliance implications,” the OCC said.

The Financial Crimes Network said Zions failed to report 132 cases of suspicious activity that represented more than $12.3 billion.

“These suspicious activities involved, among other things, sequentially numbered travelers checks, possible black market peso exchange, transactions involving entities and accounts alleged to have been involved in drug trafficking activities and unusual wire transfers,” the Financial Crimes Network said in a document released Thursday.

The agency said Zions processed money transfers that indicated patterns commonly associated with money-laundering, such as the nature of the business, originators and beneficiaries in “high-risk” locations and lacked any apparent business or legal purpose.

This article that you are reading now appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune on February 12th. The Deseret News did not report on the violations although the two government agencies made a public announcement of the fines.

Now, two days later, the Deseret News published the following report which is astonishing in its downplay of the violations and fines. There is no detail offered, and infers that Zions Bank didn’t agree with the fines. It was as if Zions made a clerical error and it has been corrected. It was a bizarre take on the situation.

DeBuck said the OCC discovered the violations during examinations of the bank. But an OCC statement said the bank later conducted a voluntary assessment of its “foreign correspondent business” after shutting down the unit. Zions then reported suspicious activity to the agency.

According to the Financial Crimes Network, Zions filed 20 reports of suspicious activity after the review. The transactions involved in the activity totaled $11.5 billion, according to the network.

“With these actions, we are sending another strong message that banks need to be vigilant and ensure that they have effective anti-money laundering programs in place,” John Walsh, the OCC’s acting director, said.

pbeebe@sltrib.com

© 2011 The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: February 3, 2011 01:01AM

San Diego • Many Americans are keeping a watchful eye on the developments halfway around the world in Egypt. However, they must not forget the crisis next door in Mexico.

The situation in the Middle East commands attention because one spark could ignite the whole region. But Mexico is way beyond sparks. It is on fire. We worry about Egypt because it is too important — strategically, diplomatically — to be consumed by chaos. Yet what about the chaos on our back porch?

That is the question being asked by the family and friends of Nancy Shuman Davis, a 59-year-old American missionary who — along with her husband, a fellow missionary — lived and traveled in Mexico for more than 30 years. Recently, the couple was driving along a Mexican highway in a region fought over by rival gangs that move drugs into Texas. They encountered gunmen who fired into their vehicle, striking Nancy in the head. Her husband sped across the border to a hospital in McAllen, Texas, where she died.

Tragedies like this should be enough to focus the minds of Americans on what is happening south of the border.

At this point, that’s probably the one thing that Mexican President Felipe Calderon wants most from his neighbors: focus. Calderon still needs the aid promised by the United States under the Merida Initiative. And he still needs a full partner, not a silent one. But none of this can happen until Americans learn to focus on Mexico.

Focus seems to be lacking in the Obama administration. The only person in this shop who seems to have a clue what the stakes are in all this is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She was right a few months ago when, during a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, she compared recent events in Mexico to what happened in Colombia 20 years ago “where the narco-traffickers controlled certain parts of the country.” Mexican officials complained about the reference to Colombia, but that’s only because the analogy fit so well.

And Clinton was right again when, during her latest trip to Mexico to meet with Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa in the city of Guanajuato, she described Calderon’s battle against the cartels as “absolutely necessary” and insisted that “there is no alternative” given the need to preserve order and stability.

Nor can the American people seem to focus on Mexico, even though their fingerprints are all over the drug war. We consume the narcotics that keep the cartels flush with cash, and we supply the guns and bullets that drive up the body count.

This is serious business. The drug war has claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Mexicans — five times as much as the U.S. military death rate for Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The war threatens Mexico’s fragile democracy, and it seems to be fueling the improbable resurrection of the corrupt and discredited Institutional Revolutionary Party. And now it is poised to destroy the country’s most treasured institution: the Mexican family. Since the cartels are having trouble moving their product north to eager buyers in the United States, they’ve had to sell it domestically and begin to create something Mexico has never seen: a lost generation of drug addicts.

Yet none of this matters to most Americans, who still approach the subject of Mexico’s drug war with a severe case of attention deficit disorder.

We always focus on the wrong thing. When Calderon points out that there wouldn’t a Mexican drug industry without U.S. consumption of illegal drugs, Americans decide they want to argue over whether it’s time to legalize drugs in the United States. When Calderon reveals that most of the guns confiscated from drug traffickers by Mexican authorities are entering Mexico from the United States, Americans get the urge to debate gun control. And while Mexico spirals out of control in a way that threatens U.S. interests in the region, all that most Americans seem to care about is whether the beaches on the Mexican Riviera will be safe for spring break.

Americans are incapable of having a serious conversation about this crisis. And so it is no wonder that we can’t muster a serious commitment to helping Mexico put out the fire, which all but ensures that the flames will spread.

The New York Times

Published: February 3, 2011 01:01AM

Ramallah, West Bank • I’m meeting a retired Israeli general at a Tel Aviv hotel. He begins the conversation with: “Well, everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.”

That pretty much sums up the disorienting sense of shock and awe that the popular uprising in Egypt has inflicted on the psyche of Israel’s establishment. The peace treaty with a stable Egypt was the unspoken foundation for every geopolitical and economic policy in Israel for the last 35 years, and now it’s gone. It’s as if Americans suddenly woke up and found both Mexico and Canada plunged into turmoil on the same day.

This is a perilous time for Israel, and its anxiety is understandable. But I fear Israel could make its situation even more perilous if it succumbs to the argument one hears from a number of senior Israeli officials today that the events in Egypt prove that Israel can’t make a lasting peace with the Palestinians. It’s wrong and dangerous.

To be sure, Hosni Mubarak, Israel’s longtime ally, deserves all the wrath being directed at him. The best time to make any big, hard decision is when you are at your maximum strength. You’ll always think and act more clearly. For the last 20 years, Mubarak has had all the leverage he could ever want to truly reform Egypt’s economy and build a moderate, legitimate political center to fill the void between his authoritarian state and the Muslim Brotherhood. But Mubarak deliberately maintained the political vacuum between himself and the Islamists so that he could always tell the world, “It’s either me or them.” Now he is trying to reform in a panic with no leverage. Too late.

But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is in danger of becoming the Mubarak of the peace process. Israel has never had more leverage vis-a-vis the Palestinians and never had more responsible Palestinian partners. But Netanyahu has found every excuse for not putting a peace plan on the table. The Americans know it.

No, I do not know if this Palestinian leadership has the fortitude to close a deal. But I do know this: Israel has an overwhelming interest in going the extra mile to test them.

With the leaders of both Egypt and Jordan scrambling to shuffle their governments in an effort to stay ahead of the street, two things can be said for sure: Whatever happens in the only two Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, the moderate secularists who had a monopoly of power will be weaker and the previously confined Muslim Brotherhood will be stronger. How much remains to be seen.

It is virtually certain that the next Egyptian government will not have the patience or room that Mubarak did to maneuver with Israel. Same with the new Jordanian cabinet. Make no mistake, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has nothing to do with sparking the demonstrations in Egypt and Jordan, but Israeli-Palestinian relations will be impacted by the events in both countries.

To put it bluntly, if Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state, talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority.

What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But that’s over.

I had given up on Netanyahu’s cabinet and urged the U.S. to walk away. But today, I believe President Barack Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions, and demand that the two sides negotiate on it without any preconditions. It is vital for Israel’s future that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible. There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way.

by Julio Godoy

Published on CommonDreams.org

BERLIN – European non-governmental organisations combating neo-liberal globalisation find their position vindicated by the ongoing socio-economic and environmental crisis upsetting the world.

The legitimacy of the demands of the European members of the World Social Forum (WSF) is not only founded in the massive support they enjoy from workers and peasants groups across the globe. Now, it enjoys the endorsement of governments which not long ago were supporters of neo- liberal globalisation. [1]

“The endorsement by European governments of our basic demands, such as the transaction tax, constitutes a great satisfaction,” Hugo Braun, of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), told IPS.

The financial crisis that has devastated the world has awakened the masses to the failure of capitalism and alternative forms of commerce or at least significant modifications are destined to take seed.

What has happened in Tunisia and Egypt is only the beginning. It will not stop there, and it will spread beyond the Arab world and into Europe, and America will not escape untouched.

The problems in Egypt are not so different than the problems everywhere. The unequal distribution of enormous wealth at the top of the food chain while the masses remain in poverty. The pr0phets of capitalism have always preached that wealth trickles down, but they have proven to be false prophets. The opposite has happened. The fruits of labor have trickled up. Labor has not received its just due and as is clearly apparent by the unfair accumulation of wealth in the hands of capital and the meager scraps left for the laborers. Labor is worthy of its hire, but modern day capitalists have paid themselves billions while cheating labor of its fair share of the production.

It must change. Capitalism can only defend itself by correcting the wealth distribution problem. If that doesn’t happen there will be continual protests and riots and continual instability.

Capitalists in America are already hiding from the masses in secure compounds all around the country. Their wealth is ostentatious and they live with poverty all around them, and most of them haven’t done an honest day’s work their entire lives. The rich in America aren’t so different than the rich in Egypt. In fact, the disparity is actually more stark.

As Abraham Lincoln said in one of his State of the Union speeches, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ”

That dignified ideal has never been achieved under our current form of capitalism.  As it is Capital has become King and Labor is a mere pawn.

“But European governments must still realise that the global crisis cannot be solved with simply declarations of intentions. The system cannot be repaired, the system must be replaced by another one,” Braun said. “We need a strict control of financial markets, a democratisation of the economy, a transfer of wealth from the top of society to the lower classes, on a global basis.”

Braun, who is taking part in the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, said that the main subject of the gathering should be “the search for the features of a post capitalistic society. Profit driven capitalism cannot solve the crisis, it is rather the cause of it.”

The financial transaction tax is one of the most emblematic demands of European NGOs opposed to neo-liberalism. The idea – which calls for the exaction of a small fee on all speculative financial transactions to pay for development projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America – is based on the proposal of late Nobel Prize winner in economics James Tobin. In 1997 the tax was the founding pillar of the ATTAC group in France.

ATTAC is a founding member of the European Social Forum (ESF) and of the WSF.

The call for a financial transaction tax has recently been endorsed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who promised to put it on the agenda of the Group of 8 and the Group of 20 debates. During 2011, France will be coordinating both groups.

The German government publicly stated its support for Sarkozy’s plan to put the financial transaction tax high on the G-8 and G-20 agendas this year. Sarkozy also announced that his government would propose control instruments against speculation in foodstuff markets to stop rising prices and guarantee food supply.

With general awareness of the global economic and environmental crisis, several themes that have defined the WSF for the last 10 years have become standard parts of a critique of neo-liberalism – from rejection of free trade to denouncing intensive agriculture and the privatisation of public services.

“The alter globalisation movement represented by the World Social Forum has renewed contemporary politics,” says French journalist Laurent Joffrin, director of the daily newspaper Liberation.

Joffrin points out that the international political agenda is now dominated by numerous themes the WSF and its member organisations rescued from indifference – such as the plight of landless workers in developing countries, the rejection of intensive agriculture and industrial production of food, and the constraints imposed by the global environmental crisis.

“The WSF… forces the traditional Left to revise its own positions on all these subjects, including international trade, tax justice, financial globalisation, and climate change refugees,” Joffrin said.

While during the first half of the past decade, governments of the industrialised countries of the world followed the old maxim of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that there was “no alternative” to neo-liberal globalisation, the WSF has insisted since its beginnings that “Another World is Possible.”

The global financial crisis – provoked by neo-liberal deregulation, and its spill over into the entire economy – has proven that the Thatcherite position was self-destructive, and that alternatives on how governments can cope with financial markets and in general economic globalisation are not only possible but more importantly, indispensable.

Braun pointed to the growing emissions of greenhouse gases – despite the global awareness that reducing these emissions is central to stopping and reverting climate change. “Instead of reducing emissions, profit driven capitalism continues to heat the Earth,” he explained.

Braun also referred to the socio-economic consequences of climate change, and the urgent need to establish global climate justice, in favour of developing countries and of future generations.

Confronted with the criticism that the WSF is just another NGO fair, without real impact in global politics, Braun said that indeed “the WSF needs to mobilise people, make people realise that only organised popular political pressure can make governments and corporations change their behaviour.”

Braun pointed out that ATTAC and other NGOs are organising a “global action day” in favour of the financial transaction tax. “On Feb. 17, we will carry out demonstrations across European capitals to support the transaction tax, at least at the European level,” he said.

Published: February 3, 2011 04:51PM

Rome • A U.N. agency reported Thursday that world food prices have reached a historic peak, but good harvests are — for now — forestalling the kind of food emergency felt in many places in 2008.

Rising food prices have been among the triggers for protests in Egypt, Algeria and elsewhere.

“What is happening in northern Africa seems to be more political in nature,” said U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) economist and grain expert Abdolreza Abbassian. “Of course, we cannot ignore the food inflation as one of the elements of discontent.”

FAO said its food price index was up 3.4 percent in December from a month earlier — the seventh straight month of world food price increases.

“What will probably be identified as a major difference is the duration of the rise. It has been a long one, accompanied by strong volatility,” Abbassian said.

But he said the situation is “moderately more comfortable” than the crisis of 2008 because of strong harvests, which potentially “can help countries carry on until, hopefully, world markets settle down to normal levels.”

These escalating food prices could have been one of the catalysts that triggered the protests in Tunisia and Egypt. When the price of food is beyond the reach of the poor it is certainly going to cause dissatisfaction.

Still, Oxfam International, a confederation of organizations working to find solutions to poverty and injustice around the globe, said the FAO index “should ring alarm bells in capitals around the world.”

“Good harvests are offsetting the worst for many, but if prices remain high, it will be just a matter of months before the world’s poor are hit by another major food price crisis,” said Chris Leather, a policy adviser for Oxfam, in a statement. “Governments need to act now and act together to stop the rot.”

He called on Group of 20 finance ministers meeting later this month in Paris to ensure commodity prices are more transparent and urged governments to avoid the mistakes of 2008, when spiraling prices led to export bans and hoarding.

During the 2008 crisis, the world’s biggest rice producers, Thailand, Vietnam and India, curbed rice exports to protect domestic supplies, leading to record high prices. The number of hungry then reached 1 billion.

This time around, rice, one of the world’s most important staples, is priced 50 percent below 2007 levels and also below those of last year.

FAO said the food price index in January reached 231 points, the highest level registered since 1990, when the agency started monitoring prices. The index regularly checks monthly changes in global food prices, looking at cereals, fats, dairy, sugar and meat prices. Only meat prices remained stable.

Among the factors driving up prices were a weak U.S. dollar, which boosted commodity prices across the board, and a strike in Argentina that has blocked exports of both corn and soybeans. Another issue is uncertainty about winter harvests in the Northern Hemisphere, in particular the United States, a large swathe of which has been hard hit by winter storms.

By HAMZA HENDAWI

and MAGGIE MICHAEL

The Associated Press

Published: January 30, 2011 05:49PM

Cairo • Egypt’s most prominent democracy advocate took up a bullhorn Sunday and called for President Hosni Mubarak to resign, speaking to thousands of protesters who defied a curfew for a third night. Fighter jets streaked low overhead and police returned to the capital’s streets — high-profile displays of authority over a situation spiraling out of control.

Watts Cookin’ will not follow the day-to-day developments in Egypt as events are moving much to quickly for us to track. We will, however, post significant developments as the long term narrative develops.

Right now the protesters are in charge, but they seem to be leaderless. ElBaradei is asserting himself toward that position, but Mubarak’s reign isn’t over yet. He may well save himself by declaring that he will lead the country to democracy in an orderly manner that will satisfy the people. We shall see.

In the meantime, U.S. policy is critical for the future. Obama seems to be taking the prudent ‘wait and see’ approach, positioning the U.S. for support of a democractic movement.

Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei’s appearance in Tahrir, or Liberation, Square underscored the jockeying for leadership of the mass protest movement that erupted seemingly out of nowhere in the past week to shake the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Now in their sixth day, the protests have come to be centered in the square, where demonstrators have camped since Friday. Up to 10,000 protesters gathered there Sunday, and even after the 4 p.m. curfew, they numbered in the thousands, including families with young children, addressing Mubarak with their chants of “Leave, leave, leave.”

“You are the owners of this revolution. You are the future,” ElBaradei told the crowd after nightfall. “Our essential demand is the departure of the regime and the beginning of a new Egypt in which every Egyptian lives in virtue, freedom and dignity.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Cabinet that he was “anxiously following” the crisis, saying Israel’s three-decade-old peace agreement with Egypt must be preserved.

Protesters have shrugged off Mubarak’s gestures of reform, including the sacking of his Cabinet and the appointment of a vice president and a new prime minister — both seen as figures from the heart of his regime.

ElBaradei, the former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, has gained a following among young secular democracy activists with his grassroots organizing. But some demonstrators dismiss him as an expatriate long removed from Egypt’s problems.

“Many people feel he loves prizes and traveling abroad,” said Muhammad Munir, 27. “He’s not really one of the people.”

The outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to establish an Islamist state in Egypt, has made some statements that it was willing to let ElBaradei act as point man for the movement. But it also appeared to be moving for a more prominent role after lying low when the protests first erupted.

On Sunday evening, the presence of overtly pious Muslims in the square was conspicuous, suggesting a significant Brotherhood representation. Hundreds performed the sunset prayers. Veiled women prayed separately.

A senior Brotherhood leader, Essam el-Erian, told The Associated Press he was heading to Tahrir Square to meet with other opposition leaders. El-Erian told an Egyptian TV station that the Brotherhood is ready to contact the army for a dialogue, calling the military “the protector of the nation.”

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More on Egypt upheaval

U.S. wants orderly transition • The U.S. appealed Sunday for an orderly transition to lasting democracy in Egypt even as escalating violence in the American ally threatened Mideast stability and confronted President Barack Obama with his most critical foreign policy challenge to date.

U.S. wants citizens out •The State Department is prepared to evacuate thousands of U.S. citizens from Egypt on chartered planes, but is relying largely on friends and families in the U.S. to relay that information to stranded Americans. Assistant Secretary of State Janice Jacobs told reporters Sunday that she expects it will take several flights over the coming days to handle the number of 52,000 Americans who want to leave Egypt

Al-Jazeera cut off • The pan-Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera said that Egyptian authorities ordered the closure of its Cairo news hub overseeing coverage of the country’s massive street protests. The station denounced the move as an attempt to “stifle and repress” open reporting.

Fighting off looters • Civilians armed with knives, axes, and makeshift spears watched over neighborhoods in the sprawling capital, defending their families and property from looters after police largely abandoned the streets.

Travel warnings • Foreign governments stepped up their warnings about travel to Egypt, with several urging their nationals to evacuate as soon as possible, further fueling uncertainty over where the Arab nation is headed after the mass protests.

Mideast stocks down sharply • Investors nervous about instability gripping Egypt drove Middle Eastern stocks down sharply as markets reopened following the weekend of violent protests.

Gaza looks for relief • Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers expect any new Egyptian government to ease the punishing border blockade that Hosni Mubarak’s regime helped enforce against its people for years.

The Salt Lake Tribune

First published Jan 30 2011 04:23PM

A Canadian judge is now considering a landmark challenge to his country’s ban on polygamy as unconstitutional — a case being closely watched in Utah.

First, welcome to the Tribune Lindsay Whitehurst. This is the first story we’ve posted with her byline, and it is a big story. We will be following with keen interest.

Polygamy has been a legal question that has bothered Mormons since before statehood. For several generations many Mormons have been dismayed that they were forced to abandon polygamy by the government. To them, it was clearly an infringement of religious freedom and the argument isn’t without merit.

Testimony ended last week in the proceeding, sparked by the Canadian branch of a polygamous sect based in Utah. Since late November, British Columbia Chief Justice Robert Bauman has heard from nearly 20 witnesses — some of them Utahns — and taken many more affidavits and video testimonies about plural marriage.

The justice is expected to issue a ruling later this year on whether an anti-polygamy law dating to 1892 violates Canada’s guarantee of freedom of religion. The Utah Attorney General’s Office will be watching that ruling, said spokesman Paul Murphy.

“I think it will inform us,” he said. “Canada is tackling the same issues we have, in that we have this law but for the most part it hasn’t been enforced by any law enforcement agency.”

Utah’s bigamy law makes it a felony to marry or co-habitate with more than one husband or wife, though Attorney General Mark Shurtleff has focused on investigating crimes within polygamous groups rather than the practice itself.

Polygamists have also been observing the “historic” proceedings, said Marlyne Hammon, a member of the action committee for the polygamous community of Centennial Park, located just south of the Utah state line in Arizona.

“If Canada were to drop that law, it would send quite an important message out to the world,” she said. “They can see [polygamy] is not what everyone says. It’s about people.”

The case began in 2009 when the attorney general of British Columbia filed charges against James Oler and Winston Blackmore, two leaders of separate factions in a Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints settlement known as Bountiful. Authorities had been investigating polygamy at Bountiful since at least 1990, but had feared running afoul of the country’s religious freedom laws. Fundamentalist Mormons believe in polygamy as a religious principle.

In 2007, then-Attorney General Wally Oppal appointed the first of three different special prosecutors to review the case; two years later, charges were filed. When a court threw them out on religious freedom grounds, the new attorney general asked the Supreme Court to investigate whether the polygamy law is constitutional.

On Nov. 22, the chief justice started a proceeding called a constitutional reference question. The first part of the inquiry focused primarily on expert testimony.

One professor said that plural marriage violates international human rights laws and another linked it to increases in social ills, such as crime and discrimination against women, according to the Globe and Mail of Toronto and The Province of Vancouver. But lawyers arguing against the law pointed to a Cornell legal study concluding that, even though polygamy laws are seldom enforced, they keep people in those communities from reporting abuse to authorities, the Vancouver Sun reported.

One of Utah’s most high-profile former polygamists espoused a similar point of view. Carolyn Jessop wrote a best-selling book chronicling the intimidation and abuse she and her children suffered in the FLDS culture, but nevertheless testified in Canada that polygamy should be decriminalized.

“What’s happening is children are being born into this, but we don’t have the same rights, we don’t have any protections,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation quoted Jessop as saying. “It’s not being prosecuted, but it’s not being regulated, either. My theory is decriminalizing the crime would be giving people some rights, so we have claim to property, we have claim to help.”

Other Utah voices included Mary Batchelor, of the pro-polygamy advocacy group Principal Voices, and her co-founder Anne Wilde, whose podcast was played during the proceedings.

Several women from the FLDS and other polygamous groups have testified, many anonymously, to their personal experiences. While one told stories of loving her large, close plural family, another reported feeling isolated and helpless, Canadian newspapers reported.

After testimony ends, lawyers on both sides will prepare their closing arguments, which will begin in late March. Though Bauman’s eventual ruling will likely be appealed, the outcome is poised to influence decisions about whether to prosecute polygamists in both British Columbia and the rest of the country, a law officer with the British Columbia Supreme Court said.

Even if the law is struck down, Hammon said she doesn’t foresee a rush of plural families from the U.S. moving to Canada. A total of about 38,000 polygamists live in Utah, many as part of about four major groups.

“The people here in this state, we’ve established ourselves in our homes,” Hammon said. “We want to continue on fighting for our civil rights.”

The decision will not likely have much direct effect on U.S. policy toward plural marriage, said University of Utah law professor Wayne McCormack.

“The U.S. has its own particular history with polygamy,” he said.

A pair of Supreme Court rulings that found religious freedom does not empower breaking the law have cooled interest in the polygamy question going before the justices, he said. Unless, that is, the Supreme Court takes up the issue of same-sex marriage.

“That would resuscitate the interest in polygamy,” McCormack said. “The U.S. courts are not going to be interested in polygamy until they have first dealt with same-sex marriage.”

lwhitehurst@sltrib.com

By Philip C. Wilcox, Jr. | President, Foundation for Middle East Peace

Today, few disagree that without massive withdrawals from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where over 500,000 settlers now live, there is no hope for a two-state peace. A majority of Israelis also agree that an end to the conflict, preservation of a democratic, Jewish Israel, and freedom and statehood for Palestinians, are impossible without a radical reversal of Israel’s misbegotten settlement adventure.

Philip Wilcox is one of the most respected Middle East experts and his suggestions and observations are always sought after by both sides of the question. Whenever you see his name you will know that there is serious constructive conversation taking place. So read on….

Most governments today believe that international law, including UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and the Fourth Geneva Convention outlawing settlements, should inform an agreement on a two-state border. The roadmap, which was endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 1515, Quartet positions, and statements by the Obama administration concur that the starting point for creating a two-state peace should focus on the 1967 border.

Israel’s 43-year national project of settling the territory occupied in 1967 was designed to create “facts on the ground” that would maintain Israeli control and thwart Palestinian self-determination. Today, even Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says he accepts the need for a two-state peace. But continuing aggressive settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in defiance of the United States and the international community, are clear evidence that Netanyahu and his government oppose a genuine two-state agreement, and still adamantly reject a shared Jerusalem.

In the end, the Israeli and Palestinian people themselves must accept a border that addresses their basic needs. For Palestinians, this means freedom, sovereignty, and security in a viable, contiguous state, the end of settlements, and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. For Israel, it means peace within “secure and recognized borders”, as set forth in Resolution 242, reconciliation with the Arab states and an increasingly estranged international community, and, for most Israelis, preserving a Jewish, democratic state.

Fortunately, it is not necessary to invent a solution, given the exhaustive work by Israeli and Palestinian experts on the elements of a comprehensive peace and a territorial solution. The first effort to address the contradiction between the 1967 borders and settlements came late in the Oslo talks when negotiators began discussing a compromise between total withdrawal to the 1967 border and a redefined border through land swaps.

The swap concept was also adopted in the late 2000 “Clinton parameters” and the Geneva accord of 2003. The latter was drafted by leading Israeli and Palestinian experts, and elaborated in 2009. It proposes Israeli annexation of two percent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem adjacent to the 1967 line containing about 350,000 setters in big bloc settlements. In return, Israel would evacuate about 150,000 other settlers and transfer to Palestine two percent of its land, of equal quality, next to the southern West Bank and Gaza. (The latter would especially appeal to land-starved Gazans, and could support reconciliation between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, essential to an ultimate peace agreement.) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has endorsed land swaps on a 1:1 basis, and the Obama administration has concurred, in general.

Israeli withdrawal of many settlements near the 1967 line and dozens of others deeper in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, and annexations limited to large, dense settlements, such as Modiin Illit adjacent to central Israel, and in East Jerusalem, would restore a more contiguous and economically viable border interrupted only with a few enclaves attached to Israel with access roads. It would also allow a contiguous Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem that is a bottom line requirement. Another benefit would be restoration of critical farmland and water resources now controlled by settlements.

But even such a compromise, following the Geneva accord or some other plan, would demand a radical transformation of the status quo. Israeli and Palestinian leaders have long since proved that they cannot negotiate such a deal by themselves, given their crippling internal ideological and religious divisions and the unequal balance of power. Just as leadership by the US and the international community was necessary to create and sustain the new state of Israel in 1948, similar intervention and a US-led peace plan will be necessary to create a viable Palestinian state and rescue Israel from its self-destructive policies.

Israel’s current leadership (which is dominated by the settler, religious and ideological right) as well as extreme Hamas elements would fiercely resist this, and detailed negotiations would still be necessary. But there is a chance that, with broad international, including Arab and UN support, and tough, determined, but empathetic US diplomacy, such a transformative US plan could galvanize majorities in Israel and Palestine to agree and oblige their leaders to make peace. This would require an unprecedented and politically-challenging change in US policy, restoring balance to the current lopsided American-Israeli alliance. But the alternative is tragic defeat for the national hopes of both Israelis and Palestinians, more instability in the region, and continued erosion of US national security.

Lower the Deficit! End $3B in Aid to Israel

The next federal government budget is scheduled to include a record-breaking appropriation of $3.075 billion in military aid to Israel, part of a ten-year agreement to provide $30 billion of weapons to Israel.

From moral, financial, and legal perspectives, the United States cannot afford to continue providing military aid to Israel to commit human rights abuses against and oppress Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and to deny them their rights to freedom and self-determination.

I strongly urge you to end military aid to Israel as a sanction for its obstinate refusal to abide by UN resolutions, human rights standards, and international law in its apartheid policies toward the Palestinian people.

We cannot afford to be complicit any longer in providing Israel high-velocity tear gas canisters to injure and kill Palestinians civilians nonviolently protesting the theft of their land. We cannot afford to be complicit any longer in providing Israel armored bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes and raze Palestinian agriculture to clear land for illegal Israeli settlements.  We cannot afford to be complicit any longer in providing Israel the guns, ammunition, tanks, missiles, naval vessels, helicopters, and fighter jets used to impose an inhumane and illegal blockade on the 1.5 million Palestinian civilians of the Gaza Strip.

We cannot afford to be so munificent in providing Israel with the weapons of war it needs to destroy Palestinian infrastructure, especially while our schools, roads, and other basic infrastructure are crumbling. We cannot afford to pay for Israel to make Palestinians homeless especially while millions of our own citizens lack access to affordable housing. We cannot afford to provide Israel with the weapons of war it needs to injure and kill so many innocent Palestinian civilians especially while millions of our own citizens still lack access to quality health care.  We cannot afford to employ Israeli soldiers to impose apartheid on Palestinians especially while millions of our own citizens cannot find a job.

Instead of providing Israel with $3.075 billion in military aid in FY2012, we could much more wisely spend this money to provide 373,376 low-income families with affordable housing vouchers; or retrain 495,640 unemployed workers for green jobs; or educate 909,204 at-risk youth through early reading programs; or supply basic health care services to 24,902,818 people lacking insurance. [1]

We cannot afford to continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s blatant violations of U.S. laws that are supposed to prevent U.S. military aid from being used to commit human rights abuses.  The Arms Export Control Act limits the use of U.S. weapons to “internal security” or “legitimate self-defense.”  Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid policies toward Palestinians are neither.  The Foreign Assistance Act states that no U.S. aid may be provided to any country “which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”  During the past ten years, the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem has documented Israel’s killing of more than 3,000 Palestinians civilians.  Is this not enough evidence to enforce the law?

During last December’s Human Rights Day, the State Department affirmed that “there is a single universal standard [of human rights] that applies to every country, including our own. We apply it to the Israelis, and we also view…Palestinians as being human beings under the Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] and entitled to those rights.”

It is long past due for the United States to make good on its words.  It can and must do so by ending military aid to Israel.

Israeli Consul General Jacob Dayan stepped up to the podium at Utah Valley University to applause and stepped down to chants of protest on Friday.

Dayan addressed the need for the United States to stay strong and to continue its relationship with Israel as global changes occur.

“The U.S. needs to continue to be a leader. It is important for Israel to have a strong U.S. because we share U.S. values,” he said. “A perception of a weak U.S. hurts Israel. It is vital to see leadership in the U.S.”

In the audience there was a negative undercurrent as he talked of Israel being the only democracy in the region where there are equal rights and freedom of speech and where women are treated as equals.

Colleges and universities are becoming the bulwark of freedom in our country. It is where truth is forced into the open and authorities face true public scrutiny.

Congratulations to The Daily Herald for being at the speech and giving a full report, including those who would not let the propaganda stand unchallenged.

“Everyone at the end of the day wants freedom of speech,” he said. “I believe the revolution in the Arab world will come from the women.” He emphasized the difference between democratic Israel and the rest of nations in the region regarding the treatment of women.

Prior, during and after the talk, pamphlets, maps and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were passed to the audience declaring Israel an Apartheid state in references to its practices in the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza.

A handful of people in the audience of about 100 raised questions about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. He was asked if Palestinians in these areas have rights to own homes, move freely and to rebuild.

Reports from international sources accuse the Israeli government of sending Palestinians from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers and that laws are in place that won’t allow for Palestinian homes to be upgraded, making them eventually fall into ill repair so the government tears them down.

Kathy French teaches Behavior Science and Peace and Justice studies at UVU. “They are demolishing Christian/Palestinian homes and going into occupied territories of occupied Jerusalem,” French said. “Many people in other countries say Israel is not a democracy.”

While Dayan spoke of the numbers of Palestinian children used as suicide bombers, French and Frances H. ReMillard with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions-USA shared statistics of the number of Palestinian children killed by Israelis.

“His whole talk was based on building fear,” ReMillard said. “We give more money to them, and political power, and I am concerned about the use of our tax dollars for this.”

Other hecklers chanted “shame on Israel,” as Dayan left the lecture. He added he was happy there was a Human Rights organization to criticize its own country. “It shows we are a democracy,” he said. “The Palestinians are entitled to have their own state.”

A statement by the university following Dayan’s speech said, “UVU was pleased to accommodate the request of Israeli Consul General Jacob Dayan to visit campus during his visit to Utah. The consul general asked to speak to [the] campus and meet with President Matthew Holland to discuss the possibility of creating partnerships between UVU and Israeli institutions of higher learning, although nothing concrete is agreed upon at this point. The consul general was not paid by UVU for this visit.”

The statement goes on to say, with regard to any discussion, presentation or debate that occurs on campus, UVU adheres to a philosophy of facilitating open dialogue.