Naomi Klein on Disaster Capitalism

THE wrecking balls are swinging, demolishing public housing that had withstood the disaster. The authorities say those who used to live there have dispersed. Meanwhile thousands of people are homeless, sleeping under bridges

Commercial interests are being handed contracts for health provision and schools.
Some parts of the city are booming, as low-cost housing is replaced by expensive condoms. . But the local people are not benefiting. The largely Afro-American workforce has been replaced by migrant workers, who are cheaper and have no rights. If these workers from Mexico or further afield ask for more money or even wages they are owed the employer can threaten that the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) are on their way, and they can be deported.

Some of this sounds like what's happening elsewhere, but in New Orleans, as described by author Naomi Klein, it is happening big time. Klein says it was a mistake to accuse the US authorities of incompetence in the way they dealt with the disaster. On the contrary, they had proved highly competent in turning the disaster to advantage, for the interests they represent.

It was the same with natural disasters as with war. "Blackwaters (private security firm operating in Iraq) are there, Halliburtons(engineers involved in the oil industry and in building prison camps like Guantanamo) are there as well," Klein told a packed and attentive audience at London's Friends Meeting House on Monday.

In London to launch the paperback edition of her book "The Shock Doctrine", * the Canadian writer recalled that in the early period of settlement in north America the Puritans saw it as a gift from God that diseases like smallpox had ravaged the native American population. Now capitalism was using both natural and man made disasters. She talked about the huge rise in privatisation at home and abroad, with the number of private contractors working in Iraq growing until they now outnumbered the US soldiers.

In Burma, under 'crony capitalism' the military junta was busy privatising everything from rice mills to the national library, while making sure which generals got what. A week after the cyclone soldiers were mobilised not for disaster relief but to run polling stations for a referendum on the constitution. The fertile land of the Irawaddy delta was up for grabs, the floods having helped clear small peasant farmers.

In the United States itself something which had not been seen since olden times was back - private firefighters. Rich people who could pay extra premiums to the insurance companies were entitled to this service, so that while forest fires might destroy nearby homes,their homes they would be sprayed with fireproof liquid by fire engines bearing the company logo.

Private health companies were now profitably treating soldiers returning from the war, with both physical and mental problems. Homeland Security is another profitable industry, with private prisons and ID cards etc. and the 'war on terror' would really be against immigrants.

I just managed to get in to hear Naomi Klein speak having come from a meeting of trades unionists discussing problems not unrelated to the developments she was talking about.
I was the only one going on to her meeting and though the Friends Meeting House was packed for the occasion, the organised labour movement was not much in evidence.

Although Naomi Klein spoke about workers' struggles in the US and Iraq, and in support of the Iraqi oilworkers fighting privatisation and foreign oil companies, somehow, as I was discussing with friends afterwards, the working class as a force for change, the "gravedigger of capitalism", was absent from her conclusions. That said, we have to be impressed at the way a mass of mainly young people can fill a hall to hear about serious issues, and talk about what they can do. Many are taking part in lively campaigns and actions against the capitalists.

Rather than carp at what was not there, it is up to us socialists of the 'old school' in the movement to find ways of bringing the energy and ideas of the young and the older labour movement together.
.
* http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine

http://www.handsoffiraqioil.org/

Two good men gone

THE labour and socialist movement has just lost two characters who will be hard to replace.

Of Howard Andrews, who has died in Somerset after a short illness, aged 101, I've written before. Born in Kilburn, North West London, he heard the call for aid to Spain as a young man, and decided to go out there himself, delivering medical supplies and tending the wounded at the front, as Italian 'planes brought death overhead.

After military service in World War II, Howard returned to hospital work, and decided to move to the West Country. He helped his fellow-workers organise in the union, and then after retirement didn't pack it in, but broadened his activity. In recent years Howard, or 'Andy' as he was known to friends, and his buggy, were a familiar sight at peace demonstrations and picket lines. Even after celebrating his century with fellow-trades unionists and socialists (he'd turned down a telegram from the Queen saying he had never got on with that family) he made it to the left stage at Glastonbury, to address the young.

Cyril Smith grew up just up the road from Andy, but in a later generation. Though he attended Communist meetings as a student, he was one of the young socialists in the Labour Party who came into the Trotskyist movement in the 1950s. Opposed to Labour's imperialism and Cold War policies, but equally repelled by Stalinist brutality, many went with Tony Cliff's tendency at the time of the Korean war, becoming what we now know as the Socialist Workers Party.

Cyril was made of more rigorous stuff, in terms of Marxist theory and analysis. His youth branch in Wembley was one of those which launched the youth paper Keep Left, and he became a member of Gerry Healy's Socialist Labour League.

When I met Cyril in 1962 he was leading the SLL's Willesden branch, using his wit and humour to impart his Marxism to a bunch of young building and engineering workers at Sunday evening classes, and occasionally bringing some clever LSE graduate student along to be tested and give us a change.

Listening and discussing with Cyril was always a pleasure, even when I was the butt of his wit. He did not confine himself to theory, or stay aloof from everyday workers' life and struggles. It was during a strike of mainly immigrant workers at a firm called Marriotts in Wembley that Cyril met Sybil, a Jamaican woman shop steward who joined the SLL, and became his partner for many years. They moved to south London, and had two daughters I believe.

It was said that when Cyril had a job working for the National Coal Board their switchboard receptionist would sometimes put callers through to the SLL headquarters in Clapham where he was doing an article for the paper. He wrote on various subjects, both under his own name and as "John Crawford". It might be a coincidence though that the SLL Newsletter and our miner comrades were kept well-informed and up-to-date on the economics of the nationalised coal mining industry, where the money was going (such as to ex-owners), and the impact of mechanisation on health and safety.

A story I heard, possibly from when he was at LSE, was of the BBC interviewing people in the street on Budget day. The interviewer was approaching Cyril with a mike when another person came hurtling out saying "Not him! Not him!" It was Cyril's brother Tony who worked for the Beeb and resembled him in all but politics, being a Fabian. Whatever he feared brother Cyril might say in a brief soundbite, BBC viewers had to be saved from the menace of hearing a Marxist at teatime!

My own lingering memory though is of the evening in 1964 when some of us made a foray to the famous Ace Cafe on the North Circular Road to sell Keep Left and see if we could interest the young bikers and ton-up lads in joining the Young Socialists. Nowadays the clientele who throng the Ace forecourt on a Sunday morning look middle aged or older, and have probably swapped their business suits for weekend leathers, but then they were young guys with a wilder image, and we thought we had to look the part.

Who should join us, saying he had come straight from work, but Cyril, bespectacled and wearing a tie, and if I'm not mistaken carrying a briefcase. Incongruous, I thought, but next time I looked he was chatting away to a bunch of bike lads who were listening intently to his every word.

It was after 1985, when the Workers Revolutionary Party without the disgraced Gerry Healy and his acolytes attracted former members like me to give it another go, that I resumed my acquaintance with Cyril Smith. Together with Cliff Slaughter, Tom Kemp, Geoff Pilling and I think Frank Girling he was one of the "five professors" as they were dubbed by a hostile faction for whom it seemed, being able to read, never mind write a book was evidence of dubious, even dangerous, activity. Oddly enough, the person to whom this breakaway faction owed allegiance while baiting the intellectuals and the "middle class" was an American who took pride in his efforts to challenge Healy on dialectics, dismissed our concern over Healy's treatment of women as "non-political"(and of course "petty bourgeois") and today heads a highly successful international printing business.

But what struck many of us as bitterly ironic was that though the comrades being attacked were academics with books to their name, none were in fact Professors - they had been far too busy doing political work and contributing to the movement intellectually, to attain the kind of career status (and establishment acceptance) to which their abilities might otherwise entitle them.

There were confused and stormy times to come, as the WRP-Workers Press tried to re-examine its ideas, as Cyril insisted we must after our experience with Healy, and to break out of the isolation to which his sectarianism had led us, with regard to the workers movement and to the left internationally. Exasperated by what he began to see as opportunism and shallowness, Cyril clashed with the leadership - and with me, separately -and decided to concentrate on his theoretical work. When I became branch secretary in SW London, not only did he absent himself from meetings, ostensibly on health grounds, but some of the other comrades skipped the meetings because they were attending Marxism classes at Cyril's place. I could not ask what he had that I hadn't, so I made do with grumbling that Cyril (a mathematician by profession) was seeking a "pure" as opposed to applied Marxism.

Perhaps after experiencing the "Marxism" of the Healy party and its results that effort at purification should have been understandable.

The WRP-Workers Press is no more, and I am not sure what was achieved by our efforts. From Cyril's later period came a stream of books, reflecting his discussions in the WRP and more widely, and attracting wide interest. Communist Society and Marxist Theory (1988), Marx at the Millennium(1996), Karl Marx and the Future of the Human (2004), Marx Myth and Legends(2004). Having taken different paths, I haven't kept track of Cyril's development, though I know others swear by some of his books. But I still value the memory of the Cyril Smith who tried to educate me many years ago, and respect the integrity which led him to take the side he did in 1985, and to be an "awkward" voice subsequently. I'm also glad we parted on friendly terms, when we last met, at Peter Fryer's funeral.

On the surface, perhaps, Andy and Cyril were two quite different comrades. Certainly for much of their lives they would have been in different necks of the left-wing political woods. And while Andy was most keen to carry on his activism to the end, Cyril considered his chief duty to
be his theoretical work. Yet each of them entered the movement when young, and committed themselves, whatever the difficulties and disappointments they encountered; and each in their own way showed a stubborn determination to persevere with what they thought right to the end.


Some of Cyril Smith's writings:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith3. htm

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm

http://www.cix.co.uk/~cyrilsmith/book5.pdf

http://www.cix.co.uk/~cyrilsmith/


A review by Andy Blunden of Marx's Mathematical manuscrips, on which Cyril worked
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/mathematical-manuscripts/review.htm

Communist Society and Marxist Theory, available from Index Books:
http://www.indexbooks.co.uk/socialism.html

Cyril Smith's funeral will be on Thursday, May 22, 11 am at Lambeth Crematorium, Blackshaw Rd., London SW17.

=====================

from Somerset, Dave Chapple writes (extract)_
Andy's funeral, organised by the International Brigade Memorial Trust, will be held at 2.30pm next Thursday the 22nd May, at the Taunton Deane Crematorium in Wellington Rd. I have been asked to pay tribute at the service. He requested no flowers and any donations to the Morning Star/Peoples' Press Printing Society.
If friends would like to E-mail messages they can be read out or displayed at the reception.

Dave Chapple

davechapple@btinternet.com

Sweet Charity, Bitter Competition

HERE'S another example of the bitter competition between charities and voluntary organisations for resources and public business.

Regular readers of this blog will know about Southall Black Sisters' battle to save the grant from Ealing borough council which enables them to do vital advocacy and advice work, focussing on the particular problems of immigrant and ethnic minority women.

Southall Black Sisters have never turned away any woman who came to them for help. Though they originated mainly from the Asian community they are currently helping Somali women. But they point to their specialist knowledge of religious and cultural backgrounds, as well as language, and readiness to confront issues from arranged marriage and domestic violence to genital mutilation and 'honour killings '. The Tory council thinks a "general" service will do, though it has not come up with extra funds.

The Southall Black Sisters have gained wide respect for their work, well beyond their area and the field of social work, and it not surprising their campaign to continue has won wide support both locally and nationally.

Not from some people in the charity business it would seem. Here's a message recently posted to
supporters on the Save the Southall Black Sisters Facebook group.

Refuge We are extremely disturbed to note that the organisation Refuge has decided to make a bid for the recycled funds that should be awarded to SBS. Refuge is a national domestic violence charity that has considerable resources at its disposal. In 2006/7 for instance, its total annual income was £9.4 million. Refuge has made a bid for the £100,000 to provide a domestic violence service in Ealing. Needless to say, this move undermines our struggle for funding and for our autonomy. By way of a gesture of support, Refuge wrote to Ealing Council requesting it to make reserve funds available for SBS following the bidding process! It is a matter of great disappointment to SBS that a well known, well resourced national organisation like Refuge is colluding in the closure of a vital specialist organisation. Given its annual income, its bid for the £100,000 represents a ‘drop in the ocean’, but the same funds will make all the difference to our work with black and minority women. Its attitude displays a patronising, unprincipled and indifferent approach to our struggles as black and minority women.'

This case raises special issues, but it is also part of a wider pattern. Another contest I heard about the other day apparently involves Shelter and the St.Mungo's Trust, bidding for work concerning the prison service and ex-offenders.

The competition between charities for the public's money has already been highly profitable to the advertising and PR business. Smaller, community-based groups do not have the same resources, nor may they want to divert what funds they have from the purpose for which they were raised.

The competition to take on tasks for government may well make the business-like charity organisations cautious about saying or doing anything that those in power might not like. Southall Black Sisters have earned their reputation by standing up for their cllients against authority whenever it was necessary, whether that of a bullying husband, religious leaders, or the Home Office. Will those after their council money do the same?

Hamas minister condemns Holocaust and answers distortion

AFTER my remarks the other day on complaints about a "Hamas TV programme" distorting
the history of the Nazi Holocaust, it is good to see that an official Hamas spokesperson has clarified the issues. One, the Hamas-run Palestinian authority in Gaza is not responsible for the TV programme. Two, Hamas does not deny the facts of the Holocaust nor does it fail to condemn this massive crime.

This raises the issue of what, or who, was behind the raising of the complaints, which were made to the UN Secretary General no less, and whether the timing had anything to do with diverting attention from two other crimes - the Nakba, or catastrophe which befell the Palestinian people in 1948, and is being commemorated today; and the siege of Gaza, which is threatening another catastrophe, and which efforts are under way to end, and open peace talks. Reputable organisations need to be sure they are not being fed misinformation, or misused, if they want to stay reputable.

It also points to the new kind of denial, and historical revision, in which the Palestinians are blamed for their own misfortunes, the Zionists are exonerated of crimes like Deir Yassin, and the conflict in the Middle East is supposedly rooted in an age-old irrational hatred for Jews, endemic to Islam. Odd to think Jews fled the Inquisition to Muslim lands, unaware of this, or that the Holocaust happened in Europe, and refugees were kept out of the United States (which is also where mos Holocaust denial literature is printed). Perhaps further revision is on the way.

Anyway, here is what Palestinian Health and Information Minister Bassam Naeem has to say. It is taken from The Guardian May 12, 2008:

Hamas condemns the Holocaust

We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a political
struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression

Bassem Naeem

As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary of
the Nakba ("catastrophe") - the dispossession and expulsion of most of our
people from our land - those remaining in Palestine face escalating
aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and siege. But instead
of support and solidarity from the western media, we face frequent attempts
to defend the indefensible or turn fire on the Palestinians themselves.

One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to isolate
the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population
of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than a
hostility to Zionist occupation and domination of our land. A recent front
page article in the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did
an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV
channnel about the Nazi Holocaust.

In fact, the al-Aqsa Channel is an independent media institution that often
does not express the views of the Palestinian government headed by Ismail
Haniyeh or of the Hamas movement. The channel regularly gives Palestinians
of different convictions the chance to express views that are not shared by
the Palestinian government or the Hamas movement. In the case of the
opinion expressed on al-Aqsa TV by Amin Dabbur, it is his alone and he is
solely responsible for it.

It is rather surprising to us that so little attention, if any, is given by
the western media to what is regularly broadcast or written in the Israeli
media by politicians and writers demanding the total uprooting or
"transfer" of the Palestinian people from their land.

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that deny
or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including the Nakba of
1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun and LEHI
with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian
government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a
crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern
history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms
of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by
the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the
exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and
harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and
subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in
February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the
people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a
quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a
horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the
people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the
legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering.
Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have
lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular
maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the
Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies,
under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful
coexistence with all their neighbours. There are, today, more than six
million Palestinian refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been
detained at least once by the Israeli occupation authorities since 1967.
Hundreds of thousands have so far been killed or wounded. Little concern
seems to be caused by all of this or by the erection of an apartheid wall
that swallows more than 20% of the West Bank land or the heavily armed
colonies that devour Palestinian land in a blatant violation of
international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between
us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of
today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for
example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a
purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under
occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

Our right to resistance against occupation is recognised by all conventions
and religious traditions. The Jews are for us the people of a sacred book
who suffered persecution in European lands. Whenever they sought refuge,
Muslim and Arab lands provided them with safe havens. It was in our midst
that they enjoyed peace and prosperity; many of them held leading positions
in Muslim countries.

After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression, some
Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their oppressors are the
sons and daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves
punished for someone else's crime. But we are well aware and warmly welcome
the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish human
rights activists in Palestine and around the world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to adopt a more objective
approach when covering events in Palestine. The Palestinian people are
being killed by Israel's machine of destruction on a daily basis.
Nevertheless, we still see a clear bias in favour of Israel in the western
media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the
Palestinians today. Britain was the mandate authority that handed over
Palestine to Israeli occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous
crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to Palestine in
pursuit of safety. We, therefore, expect the Europeans to atone for their
historic crimes by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided
international response to the tragedy of our people.

Why Shelter faces storm

IT is over forty years since millions of people in Britain were shocked into awareness of social reality by a television drama about one woman and her children. It was called 'Cathy Come Home', and depicted the nightmare of poor people desperately trying to find and keep a roof over their heads, in one of the world's richest cities.

Cathy set new standards in TV drama realism and it gave a boost to the housing charity Shelter that was formed soon after, combining help with campaigning so that it did not give politicians an excuse to dodge responsibility, but tried to inform and set their agenda.
How well it succeeded, as authorities accepted the need for a safety net, but failed, as housing as a social need was forgotten in the Thatcherite rush to suck people into the property game, was discussed on the anniversary.
http://england.shelter.org.uk/home/home-7230.cfm

Nowadays the BBC is better-known for endless programmes about buying and selling property than hard-hitting social dramas. Of late if we have heard the words "working class" used on the box they have been prefixed by the words "white", at once patronising us and promoting a political agenda in which we fight each other for attention and scarce resources, rather than asking why there's a shortage or whether they are just over-priced. That might lead to us upsetting the property racket, and that would never do.

Shelter too, once the favourite good cause of the educated young as they moved from student revolt to respectability but retained a conscience, is losing or has already lost its halo. A few months ago Ken Loach, who took the camera out of the studio and the social issues into our homes, starting something when he directed 'Cathy', announced that he was boycotting Shelter. A lot of people, including unions, who have given their respect and support to the housing charity, may follow his lead. They fear Shelter is moving away from its social aims, and don't like the uncharitable way it is treating its staff.

The charity employs some 850 staff, about 60 per cent of whom are members of the TGWU Unite. In March they held their first ever strike, and they took further strike action the other day. Shelter workers are dedicated people, They don't expect the big salaries earned by some of their old college chums who went to work in business, the fat cat city bonuses awarded by firms that do well out of the housing market (or even to directors of banks that lost money speculating in ill-judged mortgages). But just because they chose to work for a charity doesn't mean they can afford to be one. Today's charities are big business, Shelter disposes of some £49 million a year, and the staff are not Victorian do-gooders from wealthy families, dabbling as a hobby with the poor, they are full-time professionals, and they too have families to keep, rents or mortgages to pay.

Shelter staff are not in dispute because they want big money or shorter hours. They are having to strike because they are battling to stay where they are. Under a plan introduced last year Shelter frontline staff have been downgraded, suffering pay cuts of around £3,000 a year.
The charity also wants to abolish its incremental pay scheme, so anyone who is on the lowest pay now can look forward to no improvement no matter how long they stay. No wonder the union says that the 30 to 40 staff who have already been downgraded would number more if it had not been that people have left the job. To add to this bleak picture, Shelter wants to increase working hours by what amounts to three weeks a year - with no increase in pay.

The way things are going some Shelter staff fear they could end up needing the kind of services they are supposed to provide. The Guardian instanced a worker who was given a choice - work the extra hours, which would mean having to spend more on childcare, or lose £2,000 a year. "One worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of dismissal, said: 'I'm the main breadwinner in my household and am living in a one-bedroom flat with two children. If I have to pay for more childcare, it's going to be very difficult to pay the mortgage and see my kids.'"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/24/socialexclusion.filmnews

Shelter bosses say the changes are necessary so Shelter can compete with such major private-sector companies as Capita - itself set up to take on work which the civil service has farmed out - in providing legal aid contracts. Chief executive Adam Sampson emailed all Shelter employees informing them: 'Those who decide that they are not prepared to work under the new arrangements will, with regret, be issued with notices of dismissal".

Sampson says the public give Shelter money to help the poor and homeless, not to pay Shelter staff. This is rich, coming from one of the charity's top tax bracket earners, who gets an estimated 25% more than the heads of other big homelessness charities. Shelter wants to make staff redundant, yet it has found the money to hire well-paid business consultants (not unlike our cash-strapped NHS) and spent £750,000 on refurbishing its head office. We won't know whether the generous public will approve such spending, since the charity does not give supporters any say in the way it is run.

Shelter's battle with its workforce is part of a wider picture, of charities becoming more like private businesses at the same time as competing with each other and with commercial companies to win contracts to do the government's work, by offering to do it on the cheap.
At the Greater London Association of Trades Union Councils AGM last weekend,while we were waiting for our guest speaker from the Shelter workers, a Barnet trade unionist updated us on the Fremantle care workers dispute. Fremantle is a 'charity' that took over residential care homes previously run by Barnet council, and last year terminated staff contracts, re-engaging them at up to a third less pay,

Besides reducing workers' pay and conditions, and making out that people ought to be prepared to put up with it for the sake of "charity", the handover to the 'voluntary sector' enables national and local government to evade questions of democracy and accountability. We might also guess that previously concerned and campaigning charities which could embarrass those in power may be less inclined to do so if they are intent in keeping in the government's good books. Especially when top executives become attached to bigger rewards and perks. Virtue may be its own reward "but you realise if we are to attract and keep senior executives of this calibre we must pay a competitive salary" - while competing to keep the lower-paid staff wages down.

Donations made payable to Shelter Strike Fund can be sent to Shelter Stewards, c/o 48, Swindon Close, Gorton, Manchester M18 8JQ. You can also invite a speaker.

Messages of support to shelterstewards@googlemail.com

Protests can be sent to adam_sampson@shelter.org.uk


Two Early Day Motions that you can ask MPs or MSPs to sign:
Westminster EDM - no.1016 Shelter and its staff.
Scottish EDM no.S3M01475 Solidarity with Shelter Workers

More than one kind of stench on the air

AS the Egyptian government tries to broker a cease fire that might end the siege of Gaza and open the door to new peace efforts, I am just digesting a message from a friend who wondered what to make of an approach to the United Nations by three Non-Governmental Organisations complaining about a Hamas 'educational' TV programme, entitled apparently "The murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot".

Their "urgent appeal" calls on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Human Rights commissioner Louise Arbour to condemn the programme, and reiterates "our disgust at the ongoing culture of hate toward Jews and Judaism that has culminated in an ultimate perversion, by the Gaza Hamas regime, of the Nazi genocide of six million Jews – and this just prior to the Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel and worldwide".

Knowing nothing about the organisations concerned, or their record on defending human rights in Gaza or anywhere else, I could not answer my friend's query about their credentials, or priorities. Being unable offhand to tell you what is on British TV right now, I am frequently impressed by the detailed knowledge which some Western-based organisations and politicians seem to command of what is in the Arabic-language media at any time.

Considering the terrible state of Gaza under siege in recent times, with the Israeli blockade creating shortages of food, medical supplies and electricity, and causing vital services to break down, I am also impressed that Hamas is apparently able to devote resources to TV programmes concerning the Nazi Holocaust, even from an unusual angle. Apparently the theme of this one is that the Zionists engineered the whole thing to remove unwanted sick and disabled Jews. Well, it makes a change from Ahmadinejad and guests questioning whether it even happened.

But what's it for?

To incite and sustain hatred of the Zionist state? The Israeli Defence Forces(IDF) are making a pretty good job of that on their own. If your family had been forced to flee Jaffa, or Majdal, in 1948, you grew up in a refugee camp, and you are reduced now to scavenging garbage for food for your kids, and stepping over untreated sewage in the street, you might feel sentiments other than brotherly love towards the neighbouring state you considered responsible. Even when its planes were not roaring overhead, terrorising your children with sonic booms if not killing them with rocket fire.

If you're anything like me, you'd feel hatred for Israel, and the powers that back it. You'd be unlikely to say "I can put up with the siege and all that, but did you see that TV programme last night when the electricity was on? That bit about what they did to their people in Poland and Hungary? That really got me".

So what's it all about? European and American racists and antisemites try to insult and belittle the Holocaust survivors, and deny what was done, in order to ease their own feelings of guilt and continue as before (just as some have given their support to Israel to cover what they really feel and turn their hatred on Arabs for now). But, as one of the hand-made posters on Saturday's Palestine demonstration in London said, "Arabs were not responsible for the Nazi Holocaust". Indeed not. In fact, the Palestinians were indirectly Hitler's last victims. What use can they, or their real supporters, have for Holocaust denial?

It can only further compound this tragedy if the Arab and Muslim world, which gave so much to human culture, should now be used as a dumping ground for Europe's old racist crap. The answer to Zionist misuse of history is not to deny it, or find excuses for the murderers, but to insist that its lessons be learned. 'Never again' must mean - never again to anyone.

All the same, I'd feel happier endorsing the condemnation of Hamas and what it was putting out on TV, assuming the reports are true, if I could feel sure that those petitioning the UN had been equally vociferous over the more obvious pollution that is going on as a result of Israeli action. I mentioned the stench in Gaza, because pumps and sewage works have been hit, or broken down for lack of power, and spare parts. Disease germs are no respecters of frontier posts. Maybe it would be poetic justice if some of what flows out to sea washed up on the beach at Tel Aviv. But we cannot wait for such consequences.

The columnist Johann Hari recently wrote on how he would like to celebrate the State of Israel's 60th anniversary, praising its cultural achievements and enlightened attitudes, but ...
'Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.
'Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.
'Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".
So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?'
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-israel-is-suppressing-a-secret-it-must-face-816661.html?r=RSS

This does not make pleasant reading. But it is not as unpleasant as what it describes. You can switch off a crap television programme, or watch it without having to believe what it says. It is not so easy to avoid the stench of raw sewage, or escape from disaster, or disease.

Having described one kind of outpouring of effluent, Hari was deluged by another, as pro-Zionist commentators variously denounced him as an "antisemite" (Melanie Philips), comparing what he wrote with medieval stories of well-poisoning (as though he was making it up rather than commenting on something that was happening), or called him a "fat faggot" (John D.Norman), who liked Arabs too much.
http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=1299

Hari wanted to show that what's happening with sewage was symptomatic of an attitude to the Palestinians, as well as being an evil in itself, and what the response to his article showed is that this racist attitude, with its own form of denial, is rampant here. If the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the other bodies protesting a Hamas TV programme are concerned about those creating a culture of hatred, there are a few characters here in London they should look at. Bravo, and koech to Johann Hari, for telling the truth, and shaming the devil, at the risk of provoking the response he did.

Ambassador of ill will in Canada

DIPLOMACY is supposed to mean using tact to ease tensions, gain understanding. and spread goodwill, even if cynics say a diplomat is someone prepared to lie for his country. Israel's ambassador in Canada is a man not only prepared to lie, but to stir ill-will, and try to interfere in the host country's affairs, in a way that only improves understanding in the sense that he reveals what his government's game is.

Here's the Toronto Globe and Mail May 8, 2008:
Israeli envoy fears policy shift
Ambassador says continuing influx of Muslims to Canada could erode support for Jewish state

Campbell Clark

Ottawa — Israel's ambassador says he is concerned that the growing number of Muslim Canadians might cause a shift in this country's Middle East policy.
Israel marks its 60th anniversary today and still feels isolated in the world. But it counts Canada as one of its few staunch allies on matters like UN votes, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will visit the country in June.
However, Alan Baker, Israel's ambassador in Ottawa, said Muslim communities have had an impact on the foreign policies of such countries as France, and he is concerned Canada might follow.
"The question is, how do you treat the results of this fact? Do you expect from these greater numbers that they will absorb themselves into Canadian society as Canadians or that they'll try to push Canadians to adopt their own values and principles? And this is the gist of the problem," Mr. Baker said in an interview.
He cited intensifying demonstrations when he or other Israeli dignitaries speak on Canadian university campuses that have led to speeches being cancelled. He also mentioned reports that some delegates to the 2006 Liberal leadership convention sought to use the Jewish religion of Bob Rae's wife against him.

"First of all, there's a Muslim member of Parliament, who's elected to one of the Toronto ridings ..., [Omar] Alghabra, who has been outspoken in his hostility toward Israel," Mr. Baker said.
"I've got nothing against the fact that Muslims are members of the Canadian Parliament. But it worries me that the type of political influence that we're seeing in Britain, in France, might ultimately reach the Canadian political system."
Mr. Alghabra, the Liberal MP for Mississauga-Erindale, said he is "at a loss" to understand why he would be called hostile to Israel, noting he supports a two-state solution for the Middle East.
(Mr. Baker said in a later telephone conversation that he should have instead characterized Mr. Alghabra's views as "less than friendly," but did not cite any specific comment.) Mr. Alghabra also said Mr. Baker's suggestion that immigrant communities might shift policy is overly simplistic.
"To assume that Canadian Jews or Canadian Muslims or any other community is monolithic and blindly following certain policies because of their ethnicity is, frankly, quite reductionist and unfair," he said.
http://ago.mobile.globeandmail.com/generated/archive/RTGAM/html/20080508/wisrael08.html

Quite right too.

In fact, ambassador Baker is a liar, on more than one count. As the Globe and Mail notes,
" Canada's foreign-policy stand has become more pro-Israel since 2004, when Paul Martin's Liberal government began shifting the country's voting pattern at the United Nations.
Mr. Harper's Conservatives moved further toward Israel, and Canada now votes consistently with a group of about a half-dozen countries, including the United States, Australia and Israel itself, that tend to buck the overwhelming majority".

As for Britain and France, we need only recall the way British airfields were used to shift cluster-bombs and other weapons to Israel during the Lebanon war, while Britain's UN delegate joined the US in opposing a cease fire. Or remind ourselves how Britain used its presidency of the European Union to suppress a report by British consular officials on how Israel was expanding and consolidating its grip on the occupied Palestinian West Bank.

On Israel-Palestine as on Iraq, the Blair government ignored the majority of the British public let alone the feelings of British Muslims.
Now Gordon Brown is a patron of both the Jewish National Fund and the Labour Friends of Israel. (see Brown speech to LFI meeting at last year's Party conference: http://www.lfi.org.uk/news///Speech_by_Gordon_Brown

The French government has moved if anything closer to a pro-Israel policy. The American neo-cons and Islamophobes may still not have forgiven France for not backing their war on Iraq, but this was no more due to France's Muslim population than to the imaginary French cowardice. French policy makers and the French public did not see why their boys should die to help US oil interests regain supremacy in the Middle East and give Washington or Wall Street greater power to dictate to the rest of the world, and specifically France and Europe.

In fact, Baker acknowledged that the Canadian government had become a stauncher backer of Israel. rather than trying to regain Arab trust or show independence of the United States so it might act as a peace broker.
"My aim is to ensure that any Canadian government will continue to maintain this position of realizing the true commonality of interests, and not going back to a non-committal attitude," he said.

So what is the Israeli ambassador really afraid of? The latest issue (no.55) of Jewish Socialist might give a clue. Under the heading "Canadian challenge", the magazine describes how more than a hundred Jews from 26 cities across Canada met at the end of March to discuss how they could challenge the uncritical support of Israeli policy coming from established Jewish organisations and the Harper government.

Author Naomi Klein said Israel was trying to normalise torture, collective punishment and permanent war in the name of "security". She urged progressive Jews to expose the ugly reality behind the slick Israeli tourism image, and oppose the Canadian government's endorsement of Israel's "security" policy.

Besides spokespersons for European Jews for Just Peace(EJJP) and the UK-based Independent Jewish Voices, there were representatives from two Canadian trade unions and the Canadian Arab Federation at this conference, which was called by the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians.

In other words, as Omar Alghabra says, it is wrong to assume that Jews or Muslims or any other community is monolithic or blindly prepared to follow any policy because of its ethnicity.

But Israeli ambassador Alan Baker wants to be able to assume that, and if he cannot rely on the blind loyalty of Canadian Jews to provide support and a cover for the Canadian government's pro-Israel, pro-war policy,, then he must try to play the anti-Muslim card, not only to sow fear and hostility between minorities, trying to restore a siege mentality, but to appeal to the prejudices of the majority. Why else does Israel's ambassador raise the question of too many Muslims entering Canada, blaming them for demonstrations over Palestine on campuses, and suggesting they might impose their supposedly alien values, assuring the interviewer he has "nothing against a Muslim sitting in the Canadian parliament, but..."

What the hell has it got to do with the Israeli ambassador which categories of people immigrate to Canada, or whether a Canadian of a particular background can be elected to his country's parliament? Whenever anyone engages in a Jew-count or suggests that Jews might have too much "influence" on policy they are rightly suspected if not roundly condemned as antisemitic. The idea that immigrants were part of some giant conspiracy to impose their ways was a classic of antisemitic and racialist propaganda. What else is the Israeli ambassador to Canada doing but trying to stir up racism?

This is not an isolated gaff. It goes with the way some Zionists in France and Italy have been prepared to support the fascists, and ignore their antisemitic past, for the sake of their anti-Arab and anti-Muslim campaigns. It also fits the way right-wing British newspaper columnist Melanie Philips, championing the Zionist state and the Washington neo-cons, has become the stalwart crusader against Islam in Britain, as well as recently declaring "Now is the time for war on Iran". The only debatable point is whether "Mad Mel"'s drift to the Right is explained by her support for Israel, as some erroneously accept, or if it is the other way round.

That the kind of right-wing attitudes which are expressed in anti-Muslim hysteria can easily slip over into attacks on Jews is known from experience, as well as simple psychology. That might not bother an Israeli Zionist, since they are inclined to see a bit of antisemitism as good for us, reinforcing a siege mentality, and even providing Israel with more immigrants. But when we see an ambassador for the Zionist State playing with fire, it is a good idea to be on the safe side and take their matches away.

Statement from conference of Concerned Jewish Canadians:
http://www.canpalnet-ottawa.org/ACJC_Statement.html

Outlook, a Canadian Jewish magazine from a left-wing tradition:
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/

Jewish Socialist
http://www.jewishsocialist.org.uk

Break the Silence!

THE Independent newspaper had a report last month from Donald Macintyre on how the Israeli army is maltreating civilians in the Hebron area.

How IDF behaves in Hebron
Saturday, Apr 19
Independent.co.uk
Our reign of terror, by the Israeli army

It quoted a young man who recently completed his military service, talking about incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man's decision to speak was "part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. ...Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there".

The young man was introduced by an older ex-soldier, Yehuda Shaul, who served in Hebron at the height of the Intifada, and is a founder of Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence, which has published the testimonies of 39 Israelis who served in the army in Hebron between 2005 and 2007. "They cover a range of experiences, from anger and powerlessness in the face of often violent abuse of Arabs by hardline Jewish settlers, through petty harassment by soldiers, to soldiers beating up Palestinian residents without provocation, looting homes and shops, and opening fire on unarmed demonstrators".

Then there was the treatment of a ten-year old boy to make him lead the way to a 15-year old stone thrower:
"The kid was really scared, realising we were on to him. We had a commander with us who was a bit of a fanatic. We gave the boy over to this commander, and he really beat the shit out of him ... He showed him all kinds of holes in the ground along the way, asking him: 'Is it here you want to die? Or here?' The kid goes, 'No, no!'

"Anyway, the kid was stood up, and couldn't stay standing on his own two feet. He was already crying ... And the commander continues, 'Don't pretend' and kicks him some more. And then [name withheld], who always had a hard time with such things, went in, caught the squad commander and said, 'Don't touch him any more, that's it.' The commander goes, 'You've become a leftie, what?' And he answers, 'No, I just don't want to see such things.'

"And the parents saw it. The commander ordered [the mother], 'Don't get any closer.' He cocked his weapon, already had a bullet inside. She was frightened. He put his weapon literally inside the kid's mouth. 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy.' So the father ... got hold of the mother and said, 'Calm down, let them be, so they'll leave him alone.'"
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/our-reign-of-terror-by-the-israeli-army-811769.html

Breaking the Silence is receiving support from Israelis concerned not only for the human rights of Palestinians but for the effect on their own society when young men return from military service protecting the right-wing settlers(who are armed themselves), having been taught that inhumanity and brutality against innocent civilians and children is "normal".

It is not just a problem in Hebron, occupied Palestine and Israel. When the Breaking the Silence veterans took their photographic exhibition and message to the United States there was an organised campaign to silence them, and Zionist groups mobilised other ex-soldiers to threaten legal action against them for supposedly slandering the Israeli military.

Response to the Independent report here was somewhat muted. More liberal apologists for Israeli policies will probably fall back on the last ditch that at least the existence of groups like Breaking the Silence shows how moral and democratic Israeli society is. But there is nothing liberal and democratic about the occupation, which has now lasted for two thirds of the Israeli state's existence. Nor are the right-wing settlers any respecters of fellow-Israelis' rights, let alone those of the Palestinians. Here is an item from the mainstream liberal daily Ha'aretz. Note the reference to the Breaking the Silence group as "Leftist", and police calling them "extreme left-wingers". These things are relative.

Leftist group: Police barring us from monitoring Hebron settlers
By Mijal Grinberg, Haaretz Correspondent
May 2, 2008

The group "Shovrim Shtika" (breaking the silence) said that the police have recently begun barring the organization from touring Hebron to monitor the actions of settlers. The main reason for this, according to the group, is the fact that the police has surrendered to the policies of the settlers in Hebron and Kiryat Arba.

The police, for their part, describe the "Shovrim Shtika" tours as a "platform for extreme left-wingers to enter the Jewish territory and create an imbalance in the area." The police maintain that they have not done anything that deviates from the law.

An altercation erupted Thursday between activists and settlers from Hebron and Kiryat Arba. Yehuda Shaul of "Shovrim Shtika", who has been organizing tours of Hebron for three years, said that he arrived in Kiryat Arba and turned with his group to show them an outpost outside the settlement and was then stopped at the entrance by a group of settlers who surrounded the vehicle he was in.

The right wing activists tell a different story: Noam Arnon said he and his friends were among the few people at the scene who did not surround the vehicle. He said that the car Shaul was in had driven backwards in efforts to run over another activist.

A police officer who arrived at the scene forbade the group from touring Hebron, even though the tour was already coordinated with the Israel Defense Forces and the police, and despite the fact that the settlers can travel freely anywhere in the area.

According to Shaul, this was the third such incident this week. He explained that this kind of restriction was a part of a growing trend. Attorney Michael Sfard said that the police behavior in these incidents has become "the executing arm of the Jewish settlement in Hebron, and if this behavior doesn't change, legal action will be taken."

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

* Palestinian ex-fighter and prisoner Bassam Aramin, whose daughter Abir was killed outside her school by Israeli Border Police, is due in Britain this week and will be joined by ex-Israeli helicopter pilot Yonatan Shapira. The two are co-founders of Combattants for Peace.

* Israel at 60 -What a State!, a show featuring Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel and Shazia Mirza, is on tomorrow evening, May 8, 8pm at old Hampstead Town Hall. It is organised by the Jewish Socialists' Group, proceeds will go to B'Tselem human rights group, Friends of Freedom and Justice in Bil'in, and the National Coalition of Anti-deportation Campaigns here in Britain. For more info. and to enquire if there are tickets left, see http://www.jewishsocialist.org.uk/

* There's a march in London on Saturday, May 10, against the Occupation, for Palestinian freedom, the right of return, and a just peace for both peoples. Called by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, assemble 1pm at the Temple on the Embankment, march to Trafalgar Square rally.