A Laboratory Called Palestine
I came across these three things in the last weekend that are worth looking at in light of the current tragedy unfolding on Gaza:
A — Robert Fisk asks “How do we deal with a coup d’état by an elected government?” Shows how Israel and the U.S. has sought to undermine the democratically elected government of the occupied territories after demanding that they hold elections. Reminds us that the U.S. has been continuing to try to treat the outgoing government as the victors. One can understand this confusion in the White House considering that the U.S. President himself didn’t need the majority of the vote to take charge. — Link
B — Laboratory rats: Palestinians of Gaza and our contemporary Josef Mengeles. Agustin Velloso echos an a cryptic analytical comparison made by Amira Hass a while ago…
The Palestinians have done more to advance psycho-biological science than all the rats of the world put together. A good million Palestinians know from experience that if you occupy them militarily, coop them up in 360 square kilometres, destroy and loot their houses, cut off electricity and drinking water, regularly bomb them, make them see they have no future and if finally you blockade their economy and arm the leaders, then the very least that will happen is that they set about shooting at one another.
— link
C — Outgoing United Nations Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto’s recently leaked 53-page End of Mission Report lays out that the United States is chiefly to blame for undermining the United Nations ability to act as an imparital agent in resolving the conflict. — Link
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Wp-o-matic is frustratingly in Beta, which means it’s yet another potentially cool tool out there on the web that’s still got lots of problems. I hope they get them sorted out as the potential for this thing is pretty amazing. However, as can be seen with the likes of Canvas, it could be yet another tool that the developers worked on until attention spans or careers got in the way.
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The soft launch
In spite of the content ported in below, this isn’t intended to be a one-issue blog. I ported it all over from my blogger blog so I’d have some content to format as I work on this site. The port went a little buggy. Three tries got all the lbog posts over and about half the comments, most of them hateful.
I’m actually going to be using this blog for a couple of things. One is to, of course blog like there’s no tomorrow. The other one is to send clients of my web design outfit, Movement Studio, here to get some WordPress experience if they don’t have it already, since it’s one of the open-source applications we work with quite regularly. Eventually, I’m hoping to see it morph into a sort of tech. blog from an activist vantage point, and group-edited. So stay tuned pussy cats. More coming at some point.
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And here it is
Interesting template. Kind of reminds me of those black & white generic food packages we’d see in the stores yars ago and in Repo Man. The new blogger tool is interesting, buggy, a little counter-intuitive in parts and not-quite-ready-for-prime-time, but I like the direction it’s going in. Now, I port to WordPress. See reasoning in post below.
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Porting to WordPress
How to explain it. As a website developer, I’ve always found it a little more than dubious that I actually don’t have a a proper website of my own and have instead been either squatting in point ‘n click Blogspots or Social Networky Myspace things. But as all mad scientists agree, the best subject for experimentation is yourself.
I’m building a site at a domain to be named later, to use the parlance of Baseball scouts, but messing around with what’s currently a bare-bones layout for one that’s already online over at WordPress.com, which offers a spiffy product for people who either just want a blog or actually want to use it as a base to build on. But I need some content over there to mess with and I urge, hey, I know where I’ve got a terabyte or two of that sitting around.
To port Blogger content over to WordPress it seems I’ve got to upgrade to the new, fancy 2.0, post-Google takeover Blogger. This is fine. I think it’s a spiffy keen tool and plan to keep TMICSIT around on Blogger for some time to come. But it does mean all the mods, custom template, various, java-enabled dancing logo-pollution, etc. will disappear and will be replaced with whatever off-the-shelf template that they have.
It’s no big. I threw this one together over the course of an afternoon at Caffe Vita in downtown Olympia back in 2005, a day before my plane left for Ben Gurion when I belatedly decided, hey a blog might be cool. And in fact it was. It was good to have something to write live on while living in Ramallah, and have something to basically store library of decent writing, video, strange happenings on the topic of the occupation since. But times they have a changed. I’ve gone from working out of Olympia’s WiFi coffee joints to working out of Morocco’s WiFi coffee joints, and in a week I head up to London to actually work out of a…. wait for it…. proper home office (weeee!). The WiFi may be cheaper by the cup that way, but I’ll have to make my own coffee.
Anyway, with all transitions comes the opportunity to try new things. I can’t say the Middle East won’t continue to take up a decent amount of real estate on this blog, but as work and times change so do interests so I think the next permutation of this blog will have other focuses as well, and possibly take on a group-edited role at some point in the burgeoning drew3000 InterWeb empire.
In the meantime hopefully the blog won’t go fallow too long.
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Sam Bahour has written a strong piece about the latest assasination in Ramallah in EI today. - link
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40 Years of Occupation: Tell Us Your Story
To mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, AAI is calling on members across the country to submit their stories about how the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation has affected their lives.
We will feature your stories, poems, artwork, and photographs of Palestine on a commemorative page on our website to be displayed during the week of the anniversary.
To submit your story, click here and tell us your story.
To submit poems and electronic images, please email them to aaimedia@aaiusa.org and include your name, phone number, title of the piece (if relevant), and information about when/where they were taken or created.
If you have print photographs, you can mail them in and we will scan and send back to you. Please mail them to the Arab American Institute (ATTN: Anniversary); 1600 K St. NW, Suite 601; Washington, DC 20006.
Note: AAI reserves the right to alter the wording of your entries (with the exception of poems) for grammatical accuracy and consistency with the rest of its website, but will not change the context of your entry.
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The best resignation letter
Dear Cindy Sheehan,
Thanks. And rest easy for a little while. You’re resigning from the right things. More people may also come to these conclusions as the Iraq war rages on through whatever Democratic presidency comes after Team Bush. Now the work starts.
Good Riddance Attention Whore
by Cindy Sheehan
I have endured a lot of smear and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.
I have come to some heartbreaking conclusions this Memorial Day Morning. These are not spur of the moment reflections, but things I have been meditating on for about a year now. The conclusions that I have slowly and very reluctantly come to are very heartbreaking to me.
The first conclusion is that I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican Party. Of course, I was slandered and libeled by the right as a “tool” of the Democratic Party. This label was to marginalize me and my message. How could a woman have an original thought, or be working outside of our “two-party” system?
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
I am deemed a radical because I believe that partisan politics should be left to the wayside when hundreds of thousands of people are dying for a war based on lies that is supported by Democrats and Republican alike. It amazes me that people who are sharp on the issues and can zero in like a laser beam on lies, misrepresentations, and political expediency when it comes to one party refuse to recognize it in their own party. Blind party loyalty is dangerous whatever side it occurs on. People of the world look on us Americans as jokes because we allow our political leaders so much murderous latitude and if we don’t find alternatives to this corrupt “two” party system our Representative Republic will die and be replaced with what we are rapidly descending into with nary a check or balance: a fascist corporate wasteland. I am demonized because I don’t see party affiliation or nationality when I look at a person, I see that person’s heart. If someone looks, dresses, acts, talks and votes like a Republican, then why do they deserve support just because he/she calls him/herself a Democrat?
I have also reached the conclusion that if I am doing what I am doing because I am an “attention whore” then I really need to be committed. I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. If an individual wants both, then normally he/she is not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others. I have spent every available cent I got from the money a “grateful” country gave me when they killed my son and every penny that I have received in speaking or book fees since then. I have sacrificed a 29 year marriage and have traveled for extended periods of time away from Casey’s brother and sisters and my health has suffered and my hospital bills from last summer (when I almost died) are in collection because I have used all my energy trying to stop this country from slaughtering innocent human beings. I have been called every despicable name that small minds can think of and have had my life threatened many times.
The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.
I have also tried to work within a peace movement that often puts personal egos above peace and human life. This group won’t work with that group; he won’t attend an event if she is going to be there; and why does Cindy Sheehan get all the attention anyway? It is hard to work for peace when the very movement that is named after it has so many divisions.
Our brave young men and women in Iraq have been abandoned there indefinitely by their cowardly leaders who move them around like pawns on a chessboard of destruction and the people of Iraq have been doomed to death and fates worse than death by people worried more about elections than people. However, in five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
I am going to take whatever I have left and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children and try to regain some of what I have lost. I will try to maintain and nurture some very positive relationships that I have found in the journey that I was forced into when Casey died and try to repair some of the ones that have fallen apart since I began this single-minded crusade to try and change a paradigm that is now, I am afraid, carved in immovable, unbendable and rigidly mendacious marble.
Camp Casey has served its purpose. It’s for sale. Anyone want to buy five beautiful acres in Crawford, Texas? I will consider any reasonable offer. I hear George Bush will be moving out soon, too…which makes the property even more valuable.
This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.
Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.
It’s up to you now.
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Lively, and educational. Get the skinny on who’s thinking what. — Link
John sends this:
They never are a debate,really, but Doha Debates is always worth it and the moderator puts pressure on one and all. And you can get look at AIPAC and its media lapdog in action.
Join Norman Finkelstein and Andrew Cockburn, brother to Alexander. Finkelstein is getting better at staying on message and used the time well. The Lobby wasn’t in Kansas anymore, and the Oxford students were not buying it - and the brit lapdog came off as a jerk.
See Debating AIPAC via google
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YouTube ban increases
Censorship creep grows. In my last week in Morocco I find that the government has suddenly decided to ban YouTube from computer screens. The Thai King, known for his kootie problem, has also banned YouTube from Thailand. — Link
So how am I able to sit here in Rabat and watch videos cats falling off of TVs, kids hurting themselves on homemade BMX bike ramps and show pro-Western Saraha independence propaganda to anyone around here who wants to see it? Well here’s a handy dandy guide to beating the bad guys: It’s BoingBoing’s Guide to Defeating Censoreware.
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