[Peace-discuss] Fw: Informed Comment - Hopeful news

[Jenifer Cartwright]

Fyi...

--- On Thu, 11/29/12, Informed Comment <jricole at gmail.com> wrote:




 
Informed Comment




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Informed Comment














In Rebuke to Obama, Netanyahu– Much of Western Europe to Support Palestine as UN Observer State


AP Punked on Iran by Junk Science Graph (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)


Machowski:  We’re already at War with Iran, though Ayatollahs have not decided to Weaponize Nukes (Video)


Obama’s Lawless Drones have caused Yemen al-Qaeda to Triple (Young Turks)






In Rebuke to Obama, Netanyahu– Much of Western Europe to Support Palestine as UN Observer State


Posted: 29 Nov 2012 01:04 AM PST
The confidence scam that Israel and the United States have been running on the Palestinians, of a “peace process,” is finally about to meet a well-deserved demise.  There are now  over 600,000 Israeli settlers on the Occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank (including the areas unilaterally annexed by Israel to its ‘district of Jerusalem’).
It now seems all but certain that the United Nations General Assembly  will vote on Friday to grant the Palestine Authority “observer state” status at the United Nations, the same position enjoyed by the Vatican.  It is an upgrade from “entity” recognized as “permanent observer.”  Its primary significance is that as an observer, Palestine will have some of the same prerogatives of members within the UN legal structure.  In particular, it will be in a much strengthened position to launch protests against the war crimes and crimes against humanity practiced by Israel against the Palestinians.
 Euronews has a report:
 
Aside from the new legal status of Palestine that will result, this event signals a sea change in the relationship of Europe to Palestine and Israel.  For decades, Europeans felt guilt about the Holocaust, or saw the Israelis as underdogs, or viewed them as fellow Europeans facing barbarian hordes, and so consistently supported Israel against the Palestinians.  That would still be the case if the Likud Party had not foolishly destroyed the Oslo Peace process and if Israeli governments had not implemented an illegal blockade on Gaza and pursued large-scale population transfer of Israelis into the Occupied West Bank, which is illegal under the 1949 Geneva Conventions.  The Lebanon and Gaza Wars, and the Israeli attack on the peaceful aide ship from Turkey, the Mavi Marmara, all drastically undermined Israel’s standing in the eyes of Europeans.
 Reuters reported  that “As of Wednesday afternoon Austria, Denmark, Norway, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland had all pledged to support the Palestinian resolution.”  Other observers  suggested that the same 11 that voted in 2011 for Palestinian membership in UNESCO were likely to repeat that vote this year, with the possible exception of Cyprus:  Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovenia and Spain.  In addition, it was originally thought that the Netherlands might well vote for Palestine this time, since there has been a change of government there (they’ve now said now), and Portugal and Switzerland have already joined this group.
Here is a notional map of how the European voting might go (not just EU but the continent):

Once the Palestinians have gained a friend with the stature of France, in many ways the Israeli attempt to keep them in a box has already failed.  Flanked by Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and Switzerland, the pro-Palestinian bloc encompasses much of what was traditionally thought of as Western Europe.  And Greece, after all, was the cradle of Europe.  
Lots of reasons might be given for their willingness to give Palestinians their due.  There is resentment of Anglo-American hegemony.  These countries were all strong-armed by the Obama administration to deep-six the Palestinians, and they are refusing.  The Irish now see Israel as doing to the Palestinians what the British used to do to them.  Spain and France also have foreign policy aspirations in the Arab world.  France has a significant Muslim voting bloc, which largely goes for the now-ruling Socialists.  
But ultimately the real reason is that the high officials in Europe find the far right wing Israeli government and its Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians increasingly distasteful.  The scales have just fallen from their eyes.
In the law, “standing” is a crucial concept.  Standing dictates who has a right to bring a law suit.  You can’t proceed with a civil action unless the judge agrees that you have standing.  Typically, you couldn’t sue on behalf of your cousin if you weren’t affected by the alleged tort.  Up until now, the “entity” of the Palestine Authority did not have the standing to bring complaints against Israel to the UN.  But Palestine as a UN observer will have such standing, and it could be significant.
Since almost no one else in the US will do so, let me direct readers to  the Palestinians’ own position paper on the step. (One of the consistent features of colonialism and Orientalism is that the oppressed are deprived of a voice first of all by being made invisible in mass media and only ever represented by their enemies and detractors.  It is very rare that we see an actual Palestinian with good English interviewed about Palestine on American television evening magazine shows.)
As an “observer state,” Palestine can join UN bodies and can sign treaties.  One it might like to sign is the Rome Statutes that created the International Criminal Court, a body that the United States and Israel, as hegemons, hate the way the devil hates holy water.  Being a hegemon means never having to be tried for your war crimes (most of the government leaders prosecuted by the ICC so far have been from weak, despised African dictatorships).  
As a member of the ICC, Palestine could then bring complaints against Israel for its annexation of Palestinian land and practice of Apartheid (which is recognized in the Rome Statutes as a war crime).  
Whereas the US consistently vetoes all condemnations of Israel by the four other UN Security Council members, making sure that the Palestinians are always screwed over, it has no ability to stop the UN committees of the General Assembly, the UNGA itself, or the ICC from criticizing or sanctioning Israel.  The US and Israeli tactic has been to prevent any official world body from ever producing a text condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, lest a body of international law grow up that would stand in the way of further Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, or of its creepy and illegal blockade of the civilians of the Gaza Strip.  That tactic is about to be defeated.


H/t  this site
The some 11 million Palestinians, promised a state (no, not Jordan) by the League of Nations and by the British mandatory powers, were largely uprooted and rendered stateless by a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing by Jewish settlers in Palestine in 1947-48, who had been planted there by a combination of British imperial interests and the rise in Europe of a terrifying and vicious fascist racism in the 1930s. 
The helpless, stateless Palestinians, many still living in refugee camps, were successfully slandered by Israel’s fanatic supporters as mindlessly violent oppressors of the Jews.  When the West remembered National Socialism vividly, the Palestinians were depicted in Zionist propaganda as Nazis.  At the height of the Cold War, the burghers, retailers and engineers among the Palestinians were painted as dangerous Communists.  After 9/11, the Palestinians (among the more secular groups in the Middle East) were reconfigured as al-Qaeda.  While some Palestinians (amazingly few) did mobilize some 20 years after the disaster of their expulsion from their homeland to resist further Israeli expansionism in the region, with the taking of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967, and Israel has at times been embattled (so that you could understand fear of or anger toward its enemies) it was never acceptable to smear and marginalize an entire people.
Meanwhile, in the decade after the Oslo Peace Accords were signed in the early 1990s, the Israelis doubled the number of settlers on Palestinian land, land from which the Israelis had dishonestly pledged to withdraw by 1998 (they still haven’t withdrawn).






AP Punked on Iran by Junk Science Graph (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)


Posted: 28 Nov 2012 10:08 PM PST
Yousaf Butt and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress write at  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
 This week the Associated Press reported that unnamed officials “from a country critical of Iran’s nuclear program” leaked an illustration to demonstrate that “Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” The article stated that these officials provided the undated diagram “to bolster their arguments that Iran’s nuclear program must be halted.”
The graphic has not yet been authenticated; however, even if authentic, it would not qualify as proof of a nuclear weapons program. Besides the issue of authenticity, the diagram features quite a massive error, which is unlikely to have been made by research scientists working at a national level.
The image released to the Associated Press shows two curves: one that plots the energy versus time, and another that plots the power output versus time, presumably from a fission device. But these two curves do not correspond: If the energy curve is correct, then the peak power should be much lower — around 300 million ( 3×108) kt per second, instead of the currently stated 17 trillion (1.7 x1013) kt per second. As is, the diagram features a nearly million-fold error.
This diagram does nothing more than indicate either slipshod analysis or an amateurish hoax.

Read   the whole thing






Machowski:  We’re already at War with Iran, though Ayatollahs have not decided to Weaponize Nukes (Video)


Posted: 28 Nov 2012 10:00 PM PST
 Matthew Machowski, current Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary, University of London  and an experienced Middle East analyst gives the best talk on Iran’s nuclear enrichment program that I’ve yet heard.  
 
His conclusion:  There is no good evidence that Iran has a “structured” nuclear weapons program as opposed to a civilian nuclear enrichment program;  the regime has not made a decision to build a nuclear warhead;  and it may have decided (not clear) that it wants ‘nuclear latency’ or the ability quickly to weaponize if it feels threatened.
Machowski urges us to view the conflict with Iran as already a war in progress.






Obama’s Lawless Drones have caused Yemen al-Qaeda to Triple (Young Turks)


Posted: 28 Nov 2012 09:00 PM PST
 Cenk Uygur on the scandal of the Obama administration’s admission that it had no clear criteria for drone strikes.  According to the NYT, the Obama team scrambled to come up with formal procedures lest they bequeath an out-of-control program to the Republicans if Romney were to win.
 
What I don’t understand is why the Obama administration thought that Romney could not just issue new guidelines and ignore their new rules.  If it is just a matter of administrative precedent, that can easily be overruled.
The US government should not be permitted to exercise violence abroad without a declaration of war and congressional approval and oversight.  If it has to happen, it should be done by the Department of Defense, not the CIA or sub-contractors to the CIA, a civilian agency.  
Cenk points out that ‘signature strikes,’ where the victims are unknown and the drone operators are just going by weapons going off, should be forbidden.  (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc. are places where celebratory fire is common).
 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that US media consistently underestimate the number of non-combatant deaths that occur as a result of drone strikes.
With his usual erudition, Cenk cites the work of  Gregory D. Johnsen on Yemen, who argues that al-Qaeda has tripled in size in the past few years there, in some large part because of US drone strikes.






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