Backlash against immigrant workers in the UK

London Independent:  "Tensions over immigration are bound to increase during the recession. They go beyond jobs: research for the Government has found that white working class people believe immigrants get unfair (preferential) treatment on housing and benefits."

Andrew Grice: The soundbite that haunts the PM

I don't think he meant it literally. But he was trying to send a signal.

Saturday, 31 January 2009

London Independent

...It was too late. Mr Brown's original, stark message had stuck. If it was meant as a dog whistle, it failed – everyone heard it. Yesterday, it was certainly in the minds of the workers who staged wildcat strikes about construction jobs going to Italian and Polish workers. Their placards included: "In the wise words of Gordon Brown 'UK jobs for British workers'."

Tim Finch, head of migration, equalities and citizenship at the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank, said: "'British jobs for British workers' was a careless slogan that is coming back to haunt the Prime Minister." Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister, warned: "Nationalist-protectionist rhetoric always does lasting economic and social damage."

The line from Downing Street is that Mr Brown does not regret his language. He doesn't do regrets – or sorry. However, ministers were sufficiently worried by the refinery protests to call urgent talks to try to ensure a level playing field for British workers in the recession.

If Mr Cameron had announced a policy of "British jobs for British workers", Labour MPs would have queued up to accuse him of racism. No one is suggesting Mr Brown has a racist bone in his body. But he was playing with fire and has been burnt.

Mr Cameron chooses his words on immigration carefully. The Tories' previous hardline rhetoric delighted traditional supporters but alienated others, contributing to their "nasty party" image. In fact, Mr Cameron hasn't changed his party's policies much. It is still committed to a cap (as yet undefined) on the number of immigrants coming to Britain from outside the EU. To try to reassure voters, Labour hints its "points system" for skilled workers amounts to the same thing, but does not support a cap.

Tensions over immigration are bound to increase during the recession. They go beyond jobs: research for the Government has found that white working class people believe immigrants get unfair (preferential) treatment on housing and benefits. Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, warns that such fears, however unfounded, should not be branded "racist", since that alienates people even more. The fears could hurt Labour at the general election.

Recently, Mr Brown has cooled on his "Britishness" agenda as he puts his energies into limiting the downturn. Unfortunately for him, the damage had already been done...more

London Guardian: Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets

Strikes across the UK, riots across Europe:

"Mediators called in as wildcat strikes spread across UK"    London Guardian, January 31, 2009

London Guardian:  Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets

* Ian Traynor, Europe editor
* The Guardian, Saturday 31 January 2009

France's trade-unions call on workers to strike all over the country

France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.

It's a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver.

Exactly 20 years ago, in serial revolutionary rejoicing, they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power.

Europe's time of troubles is gathering depth and scale. Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.

Athens

Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a 15-year-old middle-class boy going to a party in a rough neighbourhood on a December Saturday, was the first fatality of Europe's season of strife. Shot dead by a policeman, the boy's killing lit a bonfire of unrest in the city unmatched since the 1970s.

There are many wellsprings of the serial protests rolling across Europe. In Athens, it was students and young people who suddenly mobilised to turn parts of the city into no-go areas. They were sick of the lack of jobs and prospects, the failings of the education system and seized with pessimism over their future.

This week it was the farmers' turn, rolling their tractors out to block the motorways, main road and border crossings across the Balkans to try to obtain better procurement prices for their produce.

Riga

The old Baltic trading city had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.

After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.

The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections. It added that the economy of Estonia would shrink by 7% and of Lithuania by 4.5%.

The Latvian central bank's governor went on national television this week to pronounce the economy "clinically dead. We have only three or four minutes to resuscitate it".

Paris

Burned-out cars, masked youths, smashed shop windows, and more than a million striking workers. The scenes from France are familiar, but not so familiar to President Nicolas Sarkozy, confronting the first big wave of industrial unrest of his time in the Elysée Palace.

Sarkozy has spent most of his time in office trying to fix the world's problems, with less attention devoted to the home front. From Gaza to Georgia, Russia to Washington, Sarkozy has been a man in a hurry to mediate in trouble spots and grab the credit for peacemaking.

France, meanwhile, is moving into recession and unemployment is going up. The latest jobless figures were to have been released yesterday, but were held back, apparently for fear of inflaming the protests.

Budapest

A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency - the forint - sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.

So far the streets have been relatively quiet. The Hungarian misery highlights a key difference between eastern and western Europe. While the UK, Germany, France and others plough hundreds of billions into public spending, tax cuts, bank bailouts and guarantees to industry, the east Europeans (plus Iceland and Ireland) are broke, ordering budget cuts, tax rises, and pleading for international help to shore up their economies.

The austerity and the soaring costs of repaying bank loans and mortgages taken out in hard foreign currencies (euro, yen and dollar) are fuelling the misery.

Kiev

The east European upheavals of 1989 hit Ukraine late, maturing into the Orange Revolution on the streets of Kiev only five years ago. The fresh start promised by President Viktor Yushchenko has, though, dissolved into messy, corrupt, and brutal political infighting, with the economy, growing strongly a few years ago, going into freefall.

Three weeks of gas wars with Russia this month ended in defeat and will cost Ukraine dearly. The national currency, at less than half the value of six months ago, is akin to the fate of Iceland's wrecked krona. Ukrainians have been buying dollars by the billion. In November the IMF waded in with the first payments in a $16bn rescue package.

The vicious power struggles between Yushchenko and the prime minister, Yuliya Tymoshenko, are consuming the ruling elite's energy, paralysing government and leaving the economy dysfunctional. Russia is doing its best to keep things that way.

Reykjavik

Proud of its status as one of the world's most developed, most productive and most equal societies, Iceland is in the throes of what is, by its staid standards, a revolution.

Riot police in Reykjavik, the coolest of capitals. Building bonfires in front of the world's oldest parliament. The yoghurt flying at the free market men who have run the country for decades and brought it to its knees.

An openly gay prime minister takes over today as head of a caretaker government. The neocon right has been ditched. The hard left Greens are, at least for the moment, the most popular party in the small Arctic state with a population the size of Bradford.

The IMF's bailout teams have moved in with $11bn. The national currency, the krona, appears to be finished. Iceland is a test case of how one of the most successful societies on the globe suddenly failed.

link to article

My terror as a human shield: The story of Majdi Abed Rabbo

As battle raged in Gaza, Israeli soldiers forced Majdi Abed Rabbo to risk his life as a go-between in the hunt for three Hamas fighters. This is his story...

By Donald Macintyre in Jabalya, Gaza
Friday, 30 January 2009
London Independent


After yet another fierce, 45-minute gun battle, Majdi Abed Rabbo was ordered once again to negotiate his perilous way across the already badly-damaged roof of his house, through the jagged gap in the wall and slowly down the stairs towards the first-floor apartment in the rubble-strewn house next door. Not knowing if the men were dead or alive, he shouted for the second time that day: "I'm Majdi. Don't be afraid."

All three men – with Kalashnikov AK-47 rifles, wearing camouflage and headbands bearing the insignia of the Izzedine el Qassam brigades – were still alive, though one was badly injured and persuaded Mr Abed Rabbo to tighten the improvised bandage round his right arm. The youngest – perhaps 21 – was taking cover behind fallen masonry from where he could see the Israeli troops who had sent the visitor. Nervously, Mr Abed Rabbo told them: "They sent me back so I can take your weapons. They told me you are dead." It was the youngest who replied defiantly: "Tell the officer, 'If you're a man come up here'."...more

What is DHS defining as "criminal?"

Newspapers are reporting today that new DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano wants "alien criminals" out of the U.S.

"Homeland secretary wants criminal aliens out of US" (Washington Post/AP, January 29, 2009)  is stating:

"About 113,000 criminals who were in the U.S. illegally were deported last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. The agency estimates there are now as many as 450,000 criminals in federal, state and local detention centers who are in the country illegally."

Are they considered criminals for having been in the U.S. without a visa?  Or not reporting for an ICE summons, or for murdering people?   Considering that so many studies of immigrant populations have found that the actual criminal rate among immigrants is extremely low, I am wondering what the criteria is for the latest need to eject people.

Military Suicides are Epidemic during Iraq War

click here for link to mp3 of report on PBS McNeil Lehrer

click here for link to video

McNeil Lehrer, January 29, 2009
Report
Army Reports Record Number of Suicides Among Troops
Soldier; file photoArmy officials said Thursday that suicides among troops are at their highest level in decades. In 2008, the army suicide rate surpassed the civilian rate for the first time since the Vietnam War. Health correspondent Betty Ann Bowser examined the problem last November.

Thank you Lou Dobbs

Hate spreads from television to real life

"Teenagers Charged with More Attacks on Latinos," New York Times, January 29, 2009

Immigration and how Latinos Vote

ElectionPollingRecap1-28-09

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Recently named NY Senator "Borderline Xenophobic"

Gillibrand’s Immigration Views Draw Fire
New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: January 27, 2009

...Ms. Gillibrand, a Democrat, opposed any sort of amnesty for illegal immigrants, supported deputizing local law enforcement officers to enforce federal immigration laws, spoke out against Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s proposal to allow illegal immigrants to have driver’s licenses and sought to make English the official language of the United States...

...A group of Hispanic state lawmakers have threatened to support a primary challenger to Ms. Gillibrand, who must stand for election next year. And El Diario La Prensa, the Spanish-language daily, described her as “a disappointing choice.”

“If Gov. David Paterson wanted to deliver a slap to immigrant New Yorkers, he effectively did so with his appointment yesterday of Representative Kirsten Gillibrand,” El Diario said in an editorial on Saturday.

The flap over Ms. Gillibrand’s immigration record underscores the political challenges she faces as she broadens her political constituency from an overwhelmingly white district along New York’s eastern fringe to the entire state. Census data show that about 21 percent of the state’s population and 36 percent of New York City’s residents were born overseas, said Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College...more

More Violence in Gaza - Wednesday morning

Last update - 07:35 28/01/2009
IAF strikes Hamas tunnels in response to Gaza border blast
By Amos Harel, Anshel Pfeffer and News Agencies
Haaretz - Israel


Israel Air Force aircraft struck before dawn Wednesday tunnels used for smuggling goods and weapons on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

Rafah residents began to flee their homes in panic as the Israeli aircraft struck three times, Hamas officials said. There was no initial word of any casualties.

The Israel Defense Forces spokesman said the attack came in response to a remote-control bomb attack at the Gaza Strip security fence Tuesday, which killed an Israel Defense Forces tracker and wounded three other soldiers, one seriously...more

One more Detention Death

Another Detention Death and Mounting Questions

by Nina Bernstein

New York Times
January 27, 2009

He lived 42 of his 48 years in the United States, and had the words “Raised American” tattooed on his shoulder. But Guido R. Newbrough was born German, and he died in November as an immigration detainee of a Virginia jail, his heart devastated by an overwhelming bacterial infection.

His family and fellow detainees say the infection went untreated, despite his mounting pleas for medical care in the 10 days before his death. Instead, after his calls for help grew insistent, detainees said, guards at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va., threw him to the floor, dragged him away as he cried out in pain, and locked him in an isolation cell...

Accounts of Mr. Newbrough’s last days echo other cases of deaths in immigration custody, including one at the same jail in December 2006, which prompted a review by immigration officials that found the medical unit so lacking that they concluded, “Detainee health care is in jeopardy.”

But Immigration and Customs Enforcement never released those findings, even when asked about allegations of neglect in that death, of Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born mechanic with no criminal record whose kidneys failed over several weeks. Instead, officials defended care in that case and other deaths as Congress and the news media questioned medical practices in the patchwork of county jails, private prisons and federal detention centers under contract to hold noncitizens while the government tries to deport them... more

Report of Abdoulai Sall's death recently obtained by the ACLU posted in the New York Times:

20090128 Detain Report 

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Obama's Interview with Al-Arabyia -

Part I



Part II

High Fructose Corn Syrup REALLY is Poison

Many of the store-bought foods we eat and drink contain High-Fructose Corn Syrup.  These include:

Soft Drinks (Coke, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Pepsi)

Cookies - (Oreos, Chocolate Chip, etc.)

Catsup

Fruit Juices 

Ice Cream

Breakfast Cereals (Corn Flakes etc)

see dreamacttexas post:  "Poison - High Fructose Corn Syrup," October 30, 2008

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury

Monday, January 26, 2009; 12:00 AM

Washington Post

MONDAY, Jan. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies...more

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link to image

see report from Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy below:
421_2_105026

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DREAM Act Summit, Dallas, January 31

www.universityleadership.org

Dare to Realize the DREAM!
Texas DREAM Action Summit 2009

Dear DREAM Act Advocate,

On behalf of the New American PAC and University Leadership Initiative (ULI), we invite you to the 2nd Texas DREAM Action Summit this Saturday, January 31st in Dallas, TX.

With your assistance, we hope to plan coordinated and continuous campaigns throughout the year of (1) letter writing and call-ins (2) congressional district visits, (3) blogging, and most important (4) DC congressional visits; as well as other strategies brought to the table. As advocates we will strategize in accordance with the new president and cabinet, taking into account any up-dates (1) congressional targets, (2) talking points, and (3) messaging.

To ensure that the coordinated campaigns are effective, we will divide the state in regions; therefore, your participation is essential. We must ensure that our current Congressional co-sponsors sign the DREAM Act once its introduced and that we get other members of Congress to become co-sponsors; something we hope you will assist us with.
It is NOT too late to register. Please email the information requested below, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, to ourdream2005@gmail.com.

University Leadership Initiative
New American PAC

www.universityleadership.org

Gaza, Empathy, and the Holocaust

In the previous post I mention Robert Fisk's article about the mail he receives regarding Gaza. I focus on a letter from a professor who believes the Gaza war was about oil.

Yet Fisk mentions a number of other issues in the article. He reports about the email going around with photos of the WWII Holocaust as compared to Gaza. I received one of these emails too.

Fisk says that there is no way the two can be compared. I agree. Millions and millions compared to 1500+ is a big difference. But what we have to remember is that for the families and supports of the 1500+ it feels like a holocaust.

This does not mean I am against Israel. I am saying that there needs to be empathy for what people are feeling, even if what they say is not totally accurate. The Israeli's still feel the WWII Holocaust. Each Hamas rocket that lands on Israeli land is a prickly reminder of the past.

What we need to say and repeat over and over again, is that the sadness and despair created by these events does not warrant more violence. Israel and Hamas have to find a better way.

link to Fisk article

Oil and Gaza: surprise?

Robert Fisk writes an interesting article in the London Independent, where he speaks of some of the letters he has received about Gaza.  He tells of a professor in Canada who believes the Gaza War was about oil. 

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Robert Fisk: Plots, sense and nonsense: the view from the post bag

Saturday, 24 January 2009
London Independent

Mail that you don't see in the Letters to the Editor column. First, here's reader Jack Hyde tipping me off about a possible (real) reason behind Israel's bloodletting in Gaza. He encloses a paper by University of Ottawa economist Michel Chossudovsky who says that "the military intervention of the Gaza Strip by Israeli Forces bears a direct relation to the control and ownership of strategic offshore gas reserves". It's not exactly The Plot. But it's something that Obama and his lads and lasses may need to study in the next few days.

For according to Chossudovsky, British Gas and its partner, the Athens-based Consolidated Contractors International Company – owned, apparently, by two Lebanese families – were granted 25-year oil and exploration rights off the Gaza coast by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority in 1999. About 60 per cent of reserves along the Gaza-Israel coastline belong to "Palestine" (wherever that is these days).

But since the Hamas election victory in 2006 and its coup in Gaza in 2007, the Hamas government has been by-passed, even though poor old "President" Mahmoud Abbas, marooned in the West Bank, can only glimpse the Mediterranean from a hill near Jenin. Many negotiations later – and after Israeli "defence" officials claimed that the Palestinians could be paid only in goods and chattels for their gas rather than cash which might go to the dreaded Hamas – there was a proposed agreement under which Palestinian gas from Gaza wells would be channelled via undersea pipelines to the Israeli port of Ashkelon, thus transferring the control of gas sales to Israel. British Gas withdrew from these talks in December 2007.

But in June of 2008 – when, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz, Israel began its invasion plans for Gaza – Israel suddenly asked British Gas to resume talks. And, so says Chossudovsky, negotiations began again for the purchase of natural gas from the Gaza offshore fields. Israeli tanks have now driven out of the Gaza Strip, but Israeli naval vessels still control the coast and there's an obvious question: if the Israelis can continue to violate international law by seizing Palestinian land in the West Bank, why cannot they seize the sovereignty of Palestinian gas fields off Gaza? If Israel can annex Jerusalem, why not annex Gaza's maritime areas?...more

link to image

What was Pope Benedict Thinking?

Perhaps the Pope also thinks the Holocaust didn't happen, since he UN-excomunicated Richard Williamson - a priest who "believes there were no gas chambers" -- I find that odd (both what the Pope did and what Williamson believes), since there is tangible, concrete information readily available proving Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen really happened. Where has this guy Williamson been hiding? And why does the Pope think Williamson is ok? Is it because the Pope was a member of the "Hitler Youth?"  Is he trying to punish the Israelis for the Gaza bombardment?

Whatever the reason.  It seems like either Benedict has lost his reason; or he has a touch of evil in him.

link to photo

Pope stirs up Jewish fury over bishop

The Vatican is reinstating a British priest who denies millions died at the hands of the Nazis

* Tom Kington in Rome and Jamie Doward
* The Observer, Sunday 25 January 2009

Tension between the Vatican and Jewish groups looked set to explode yesterday after Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated a British bishop who has claimed no Jews died in gas chambers during the second world war.

Benedict yesterday welcomed back into the Roman Catholic Church Richard Williamson and three other men who were excommunicated in 1988 after being ordained without Vatican permission. The three had been appointed by breakaway French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The Vatican decree issued yesterday spoke of overcoming the "scandal of divisiveness" and seeking reconciliation with Lefebvre's conservative order, the Society of Saint Pius X, which opposes the modernisation of Catholic doctrine.

But Jewish groups have warned the Pope that the decision could damage Catholic-Jewish relations after Williamson claimed in an interview, broadcast last week, that historical evidence "is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... I believe there were no gas chambers".

Shimon Samuels, of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Paris, said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson, whose return to the church will "cost" the Vatican politically...more

2000 immigrants in detention center meant for 800

Migrants break out of overcrowded Italian facility

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO
The Associated Press/Washington Post
Saturday, January 24, 2009; 11:24 AM

ROME -- Hundreds of migrants and refugees broke out of an overcrowded immigration facility on a Sicilian island Saturday to protest their treatment, authorities said.

About 600 people forced open the gates at the facility and marched toward the center of the island of Lampedusa before making their way back, according officials at the facility and news reports...more

What the BBC refuses to air

This is the GAZA Charity appeal by the UK DEC that the BBC and Sky refuse to air:

BBC crisis over refusal to broadcast Gaza appeal

• Archbishop in attack on aid decision
• Isolated Thompson urged to rethink

* Caroline Davies, Vanessa Thorpe and Gaby Hinsliff
* guardian.co.uk, Saturday 24 January 2009 19.55 GMT

The BBC was in crisis last night as politicians including government ministers, religious leaders and senior members of its own staff condemned the decision not to broadcast a charity appeal to help the stricken people of Gaza rebuild their homes.

The corporation's director general, Mark Thompson, was left isolated as rival broadcasters ITV and Channel 4 agreed to put out the plea for aid made jointly by 13 British charities. The BBC has decided the broadcast of the appeal might be seen as evidence of bias on a highly sensitive political issue.

The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, has accused the broadcaster of "taking sides". He said yesterday: "This is not a row about impartiality but rather about humanity.

"This situation is akin to that of British military hospitals who treat prisoners of war as a result of their duty under the Geneva convention. They do so because they identify need rather than cause. This is not an appeal by Hamas asking for arms but by the Disasters Emergency Committee asking for relief. By declining their request, the BBC has already taken sides and forsaken impartiality," the archbishop added.

Communities secretary Hazel Blears said: "The BBC's decision should not discourage the public from donating to this important appeal. I sincerely hope the BBC will urgently review its decision."

The BBC's unrepentant stance has stirred up rebellion in the ranks of it own reporters and editors. One senior BBC news presenter told the Observer: "I've been talking to colleagues and everyone here is absolutely seething about this. The notion that the decision to ban the appeal will seem impartial to the public at large is quite absurd...more

ITV and Channel 4 to air Gaza appeal as pressure mounts on BBC

by Nicholas Watt

London Guardian

January 24, 2009

Agreement reached between majority of commercial networks to show appeal as protesters picket BBC


ITV and Channel 4 today announced they would screen an appeal to raise emergency funds for Gaza, as the BBC came under intense pressure from the government to reverse its decision not to transmit the appeal by the Disasters Emergency Committee...more

BBC faces protest for blocking Gaza appeal

By Nicky Shaw
Saturday, 24 January 2009



Hundreds of protesters are expected to gather outside Broadcasting House in London today after the BBC defended its decision not to broadcast a public appeal to raise funds for Gaza.

The corporation said the decision was taken with other broadcasters not to show the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) crisis appeal because of impartiality concerns. There were also doubts about the delivery of aid in such a volatile situation, the BBC said... more

Phosphorus in Gaza

from Los Alamos National Laboratory:

"Phosphorus is very poisonous, 50 mg constituting an approximate fatal dose. Exposure to white phosphorus should not exceed 0.1 mg/m3 (8-hour time-weighted average per 40-hour work week). White phosphorus should be kept under water (as it is dangerously reactive in air) and should be handled with forceps, as contact with the skin may cause severe burns."

Growing concern over Israel's weapons use

By Donald Macintyre in Atatra, northern Gaza Strip
Friday, 23 January 2009
London Independent

...If the investigation which the Israeli military announced this week into the use of white phosphorous is serious, it will have to examine the events at the Abu Kalima house here in this semi-rural suburb of of Beit Lahiya, among many other locations. It's unlikely to dwell for long on the fact that the war saw the first use of artillery in Gaza since late 2006.

The military ended it after 18 members of one family were killed by shelling on a civilian house in Beit Hanoun in November 2006.

But it will have to take into account that the Amnesty International have no doubt that the shells which killed the Abu Kalima family contained phosphorus. Nafez al Shaban, the Glasgow and US trained head of Shifa Hospital’s Burns Unit is certain that the bone-deep tissue destruction sustained by Mrs Kalima, her critically injured daughter in law and grandaughter, were caused by it. And finally fragments of the brown spongy substance, with its unpleasantly pungent smell, are still lying in the debris outside the Abu Kalima house...more

link to article in London Telegraph "Gaza's phosphorus casualties relive 3 week Israeli war"January 23, 2009

Open Letter to Obama RE: Immigration Policy

From Democracy in Action

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

http://www.nnirr.org/

Take Action to Ensure the Human Rights, Safety and Well-Being of Immigrant Communities!

DEADLINE TODAY: Friday, January 23rd (Friday). Sign now!

CLICK HERE: 

http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5702/t/4329/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=201

We believe we have an opportunity -- indeed a mandate -- to demand no less than an end to the cycle of punishment and abuse against immigrant communities: stopping raids and suspending detentions and deportations is not only a part of our agenda for immigration reform, it is a pre-requisite for a genuine, rights-based immigration policy. Join our “Open Letter” to President Barack Obama, to be released on January 27th.

link to image

Failing English Only: Nashville Does The Right Thing

JANUARY 23, 2009 2:58AM
Salon.com
by Thomas Horton

I am very proud to say that today, "New Nashville" struck a blow for what is decent and right, and defeated Crafton's "English Only" bill. A very organized movement got out the "no" vote, and Nashville thankfully did not become the largest city in the country to vote in such a law, sparing itself the embarrassment of being a national laughingstock, and whipping boy for late-night TV hosts...more

E-Verify Attached to Stimulus Bill - High % of errors plague the system

The newspapers are not saying anything about it. Yet, the old anti-immigration song it at it again. FAIR, the anti-immigration group has a campaign going, asking supporters to call Congressmen demanding E-verify stick with the stimulus package. No word from Obama.

Remember that E-Verify is a program that matches social security numbers within the system. The system has not been worked out well and this could mean that because of errors, many workers could lose their jobs. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is fighting it.

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from National Immigration Law Center

The House Appropriations Committee made a serious mistake when it approved an amendment to the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) that would require all businesses and other public or private "entities" that contract to receive money from the stimulus package to use the flawed federal Basic Pilot/E-Verify program. This will not only delay use of stimulus funds, but will hurt millions of workers. It should be stripped from the bill.

The amendment represents a massive expansion of the E-Verify program. As has been well documented, the E-Verify program is deeply flawed, inaccurate, and subject to substantial employer abuse. Bottom line - it is not ready for a massive expansion and definitely not in times of economic crisis.

The E-Verify provision in the stimulus will:
• Harm workers who are either falsely denied work or are targeted by employers abusing the E-verify program;
• Create substantial new burdens for businesses, especially small businesses, at precisely the wrong time;
• Send the wrong signal to new voters that the Congress prefers to play politics by enacting symbolic and ineffective immigration "enforcement" measures over serious and effective economic stimulus or serious immigration reform.

Stimulus E-Verify TPs - Final

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December 23, 2008
U.S. Chamber: E-Verify Expansion Is Illegal
@ 3:39 pm by Walter Alarkon

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing the federal government to stop its expansion of a program that seeks to verify whether employees are legally allowed to work in the country.

The Chamber, a business-friendly group that has opposed measures expelling illegal immigrant workers, said that the Bush administration has unlawfully used an executive order to require federal contractors and sub-contractors to use the Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify program. The Chamber group said that the executive order discards federal immigration and procurement laws.

"This massive expansion of E-Verify is not only bad policy, it’s unlawful," said Robin Conrad, executive vice president for the Chamber's public policy law firm.

The executive order would make the E-Verify program mandatory for federal contractors with projects that cost more than $100,000 and for sub-contractors with projects that cost more than $3,000

http://briefingroom.thehill.com/2008/12/23/us-chamber-e-verify-expansion-is-illegal/

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Children of Gaza: stories of those who died and the trauma for those who survived
Rory McCarthy reports from Gaza City on the individual stories of some victims and the physical and psychological toll on an estimated 350,000 youngsters

* guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009 17.34 GMT


Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.

In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.

Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.

Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land...more

The Slave Builders of the White House

White House and Supreme Court Building were built by slaves.

Jesse Holland on How Slaves Built the White House and the US Capitol

From Holland Book

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excerpt from Democracy Now
January 21, 2009

link to video and audio

Associated Press reporter Jesse Holland. He is author of Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C.

JESSE HOLLAND: Standing out there in front of the US Capitol will be Barack Obama, who will become the most powerful man in the United States, an African American president. But he is going to be standing in front of a building that was created and built by some of the least powerful people in the United States: African American slaves.

Through research, we’ve been able to determine that just about 400 of the more than 600 people who worked on the construction of the Capitol were African American slaves. Maybe another fifty or so were African American freedmen. These are people who had their papers to signify that they were free. So the entire building, the center of democracy in the United States, was created by African American slaves.

AMY GOODMAN: And the documents that prove this?

JESSE HOLLAND: The reason why we know this for a fact is because the federal government rented slaves from plantations in Virginia, Maryland and in the District of Columbia. The government had to write receipts for the use of these slaves, and those receipts still exist at the National Archives in the Library of Congress. Through meticulous searching through those archives, we’ve been able to determine, almost precisely, that just about 400 of the workers who created the US Capitol were slaves.

AMY GOODMAN: The year?

JESSE HOLLAND: This was in the—the construction of the Capitol began in the early 1700s, and it finished directly before the Civil War. Actually, one of the better stories comes at that time directly before the Civil War. To complete the Capitol, they wanted to put a statue on top of the Capitol Dome, and an American art student in Paris wins the competition and creates the Statue of Freedom, a statue that today sits on top of the Dome. He takes a picture of the statue, and he sends it back to the United States, and it wins the competition.

But the person in charge of the construction of the Capitol at that time was the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, who would go on to be the president of the Confederacy. Well, when Jefferson Davis saw the picture of the Statue of Freedom, he threatened to cancel the entire project. The reason why is because Thomas Crawford, the art student who created the Statue of Freedom, had placed on top of the Statue of Freedom what was called a liberty cap. Well, Jefferson Davis was a student of Roman history, and he knew what a liberty cap signified. What a liberty cap tells the world is that that person wearing the liberty cap is a freed slave. So what Thomas Crawford wanted to put on top of the Capitol was a statue of a freed slave. But when Jefferson Davis sees this, he goes ballistic. He says he is not going to put a picture—a statue of a freed slave on top of the US Capitol. And he tells Thomas Crawford that “you either change the statue, or we’re going to cancel the entire project.”

Well, Crawford is an art student, and he needed the commission money. But the only thing he did was he took off the liberty cap and put on an American eagle helmet. So when most people look at that Statue of Freedom, when they see the Statue of Freedom behind Barack Obama on Inauguration Day, most people are going to think that that’s a statue of a Native American. No, it’s actually a statue of a freed slave with an American eagle helmet on top...more

Gaza & the Bush Admin. denial of Geneva Convention Rules could have encouraged Israel

If the U.S. is supporting Israel financially - and politically (just about everyone in Congress voted to support the Gaza invasion) - then it makes sense that Israel could have been copying our stance regarding the Geneva Convention.  If we tortured, why wouldn't they.

It will be interesting to see if Israel takes a different turn now that Obama is in office and has brought the Geneva Convention Rules back to light. Considering how most Israeli's feel about Arabs; how well will they negotiate with a peacemaker (George Mitchell) who is half Lebanese?  

Last update - 11:44 23/01/2009
UN human rights official: Gaza evokes memories of Warsaw Ghetto
By Haaretz Service and Reuters


There is evidence that Israel committed war crimes during its 22-day campaign in the Gaza Strip and there should be an independent inquiry, UN investigator Richard Falk said Thursday.

...Falk, speaking by phone from his home in California, said compelling evidence that Israel's actions in Gaza violated international humanitarian law required an independent investigation into whether they amounted to war crimes.

"I believe that there is the prima facie case for reaching that conclusion," he told a Geneva news conference...."To lock people into a war zone is something that evokes the worst kind of international memories of the Warsaw Ghetto, and sieges that occur unintentionally during a period of wartime," Falk, who is Jewish, said, referring to the starvation and murder of Warsaw's Jews by Nazi Germany in World War Two...more

The Gift of McCain's Loss

McCain's lost bid for the presidency may be a gift for DREAMers.  He's back to his maverick ways.  He has little to lose these days and will surely be a backer of the DREAM Act.  Immigration is back on his agenda
 

Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick
He Chides Republicans Who Hindered Clinton

By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 23, 2009; Page A01

McCain's ...agenda in the Senate: immigration reform; overhauling energy and environmental policies; budget restraint; improving Social Security...more

BBC denies help to Gaza Charity

Broadcasters refuse to air Gaza charity appeal

BBC declines to show DEC appeal under agreement dating back to 1963, leading to other outlets following suit

* Jenny Percival
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 January 2009 19.27 GMT

The BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its appealtoday saying the devastation in Gaza was "so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act".

...The corporation said it had been concerned about the difficulties of getting aid through to victims in a volatile situation. The BBC, which has faced criticism in the past over alleged bias in its coverage of the Middle East, said it did not want to risk public confidence in its impartiality.

The DEC's chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said the decision could have a big impact on its appeal. "We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won't have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station."

DEC appeals have recently raised £10m for the Congo and £18m for Burma.

Gormley rejected the BBC's claim that it was difficult for aid to reach those in need, saying 100 lorries a day were entering Gaza. He challenged the corporation's concerns about impartiality. "We are totally apolitical and are driven by the principles of the Geneva conventions in terms of impartiality and neutrality. This appeal is a response to those humanitarian principles. The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime."

A BBC spokesperson said: "Along with other broadcasters, the BBC has decided not to broadcast the DEC's public appeal to raise funds for Gaza. The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC's impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story. However, the BBC will of course continue to report the humanitarian story in Gaza."...more

Continued Problems at Detention Centers

Report Faults Treatment of Women Held at Immigration Centers
New York Times

By DAN FROSCH
Published: January 20, 2009
Some 300 women held at immigration detention centers in Arizona face dangerous delays in health care and widespread mistreatment, according to a new study by the University of Arizona, the latest report to criticize conditions at such centers throughout the United States.

The study, which federal immigration officials criticized as narrow and unsubstantiated, was conducted from August 2007 to August 2008 by the Southwest Institute of Research on Women and the James E. Rogers College of Law, both at the University of Arizona. It was released Jan. 13...more

link to summary of reportReport on Women in Detention

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Help for Veterans

Halting recruiting for one day isn't going to help much with the pressure on Army recruiters. Four in Houston have committed suicide in 3 years. Suicides in general, of Iraq veterans, are so high it would make you shiver.

see story on the Houston recruiting problem:


Army to Stop Recruiting for 1 Day after Houston Suicides, Houston Chronicle, January 22, 2009

• Veterans experiencing emotional and suicidal crisis, as well as their concerned family members or friends, have immediate access to emergency counseling services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 800-273-TALK (8255).
• For information on suicide warning signs visit www.behavioralhealth.army.mil.
• The Army's Battlemind Training System is a mental health awareness and education program that helps prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of war and assists with the detection of possible mental health issues before and after deployment. Visit www.battlemind.org .
• Soldiers in crisis should talk to their chaplain, chain of command or a fellow soldier immediately. They may also call Military OneSource at 800-342-9647 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-SUICIDE.
• Call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at 800-984-8523 or e-mail wsfsupport@conus.army.mil

Close your eyes and pretend you can't see death

At 1 a.m. I was woken up by sirens. Small red lights in my room started blinking. I called the front desk and was told that nothing was going on. Two days later, as a friend and I were getting into a taxi to go to a museum, the siren goes off again. We are just leaving the campus of Hebrew University. We ask about the siren. We are told that it is just a "test."

This was my experience in Israel. Where Isreali colleagues constantly told me it would be safe, that the rockets from Gaza justified retaliation. Some people were hateful. Others mournful.

The denial screamed in my ears. I woke up the last night from bad dream, so anxious I had to call home to Houston. The next morning it was all calmness. I went to the airport and without incident checked in my luggage and got my boarding pass.

The fact that the Israeli security person asked me where my grandparents were from did not rile me. I knew it was the worst form of ethnic profiling, but then, the country is afraid.

When there is death all around, some people think its better to keep your eyes closed, and only open them to see the enemy somewhere else.

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In Israel, detachment from reality is now the norm

All these years on from Sabra and Chatila, has anything changed?
by Patrick Cockburn

London Independent

Thursday, 22 January 2009

..Israeli society was always introverted but these days it reminds me more than ever of the Unionists in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s or the Lebanese Christians in the 1970s. Like Israel, both were communities with a highly developed siege mentality which led them always to see themselves as victims even when they were killing other people. There were no regrets or even knowledge of what they inflicted on others and therefore any retaliation by the other side appeared as unprovoked aggression inspired by unreasoning hate...more

Obama's Silence on Gaza

The inauguration speech was great. It made me feel like this country could actually become what Jefferson said it would be....  All people would have an equal chance.

Then I began to think about what wasn't said... No talk of Gaza --- at the same time more bodies are being discovered. No talk of the DREAM Act and immigration. Let's hope the silence has to do with strategy- -

Obama is a wise man. Maybe he is thinking of a solution, and believes that it should be done quietly.


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So far, Obama's missed the point on Gaza...
by Robert Fisk
London Independent
Thursday, 22 January 2009

...for the people of the Middle East, the absence of the word "Gaza" – indeed, the word "Israel" as well – was the dark shadow over Obama's inaugural address. Didn't he care? Was he frightened? Did Obama's young speech-writer not realise that talking about black rights – why a black man's father might not have been served in a restaurant 60 years ago – would concentrate Arab minds on the fate of a people who gained the vote only three years ago but were then punished because they voted for the wrong people? It wasn't a question of the elephant in the china shop. It was the sheer amount of corpses heaped up on the floor of the china shop...more

Obama Inaugural Speech

Part I



Part II

Dubya's Legacy: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza

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from the London Independent, January 17, 2009

Keep your hungry, Keep your Poor.

A short on another DREAMer. More updates to come on this film as we find out.

Stories from Gaza

link to audio from Gaza - Rory McCarthy reporting for the London Guardian, January 19, 2009.  What would Martin Luther King say to this?

The Anti-War Speech of Martin Luther King

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On the day honoring Martin Luther King - Democracy Now has a program that focuses on Dr. King and plays his anti-Vietnam war speech that was condemned by our revered TIME Magazine and the Washington Post.

click here for link to program on Dr. King.  Think Iraq and Gaza as you hear his speech

P.S. What would Dr. King think about the DREAM Act?

A section of  King's speech on April 4, 1967:

 REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote: "Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.?

We continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play.

The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war. I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one, end all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two, declare a unilateral ceasefire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three, take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four, realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and in any future Vietnam government.

Five, set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

Part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under the new regime, which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary.

Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task, while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.

These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now, there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression, which has now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago, he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” We in the West must support these revolutions.

Racism Over? I don't think so

Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln

The hundreds of thousands that are filling up the mall in D.C. for the inauguration are not an indication of racism gone away, or diminished. It is still there. Its in the song the RNC made of Obama. That is big stuff, not a local level issue. Obama is there for many reasons. One of course, the guy is incredibly intelligent, articulate, wise and many other things. Plus he was pushed along by us having a president that was totally the opposite. But then, does that mean we are less racist?


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Far Fewer Consider Racism Big Problem
Little Change, However, at Local Level


By Michael A. Fletcher and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 19, 2009; Page A06

As President-elect Barack Obama prepares to take office, far fewer black and white Americans say they view racism as "a big problem" in American society than said so in mid-1996, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

With the nation poised to inaugurate its first African American president, the survey found that just over a quarter of all Americans said they see racism as a large societal problem, less than half of the 54 percent who said so about a dozen years ago. Americans also have high hopes that Obama -- who is of mixed-race parentage but refers to himself as African American -- will inspire an improvement in race relations.

But even as declining numbers of Americans see racism as a big problem for the country, there has been little change in the amount of racism people perceive in their local communities. The survey also found that there has been little change over the past six years in the proportion of African Americans who said they have experienced racial bias in housing, employment and other areas... more

Who is responsible for the proxy war?

As Robert Fisk is wondering if there should be a War Crimes Tribunal, I'm thinking about who should be tried. Yes, of course, everyone is angry at Israel. They were the ones that bombed the houses; that used the phosphorus; that stopped the aide from coming in.

Yet, maybe we need to look at the bigger picture. I believe that Israel was used by the E.U. and the U.S. Killing the Gazans was a proxy for getting at Iran. Sure, the Israelis took it as their own. There is plenty of anger about the rockets hitting Israeli cities for months on end. But then, what about the embargo?

It's like a cat and mouse game that is no game. Its about death and destruction. And the U.S., in it's timely manner, just before Obama takes office, pushes Israel into becoming the aggressor (again).

As strong as Israel is said it be. I believe it is fragile. The Holocaust has colored their responses. There is no doubt the Holocaust was one of the most horrible thing that has happened in the history of mankind (along with the Middle Passage, the genocide of the Native Americans and other catastrophys that I can't remember at this moment). I applaud the Israelis for making sure we don't forget it. The thousands of photographs I saw last week at the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem are like ghosts that follow me everywhere I go. I see faces in my mind and can't imagine the horror.

The people are dead but the injuries live on, in the living and their descendants. The U.S. knows this and only has to push a little bit to get them going. Remember what happened at the U.N. - Condi Rice was about to go against U.S. policy in endorsing a cease fire and her boss called her up and told her to stop. Why is that? Why would anyone want to let a murderous rampage continue?

Israel is strategically placed in the Middle East. Is it the most secure outpost for the U.S. against it's imagined war with Muslim extremists who have become terrorists (not all Muslim extremists are terrorists, we have to keep reminding ourselves of that). More Jews live in New York than in all of Israel. So Bloomberg thinks its a good thing to take the trip to Israel and show his constituency that he cares. We have so many connections.

What is very important to remember at this point is that the Israelis are not the only culprits. They have acted out for the U.S. and the E.U. - just think.... Sarkozy makes life miserable for Arabs (and their descendants) in France, he desperately tried to broker a ceasefire. Why would he care? Actually he doesn't care. It's a political move, and the Israelis are doing it for all of us.

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So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn't it time for a war crimes tribunal?

London Independent

By Robert Fisk

Mr Ban said it would not be up to him to launch a war crimes tribunal. It was pathetic

Monday, 19 January 2009

It's a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli ceasefire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza. Condi and Ms Livni thought their new arms-monitoring agreement – reached without a single Arab being involved – would work. Ban Ki-moon welcomed the unilateral truce. The great and the good gathered for a Sharm el-Sheikh summit. Only Hamas itself was not consulted. Which led, of course, to a few wrinkles in the plan. First, before declaring its own ceasefire, Hamas fired off more rockets at Israel, proving that Israel's primary war aim – to stop the missiles – had failed. Then Cairo shrugged off the deal because no one was going to set up electronic surveillance equipment on Egyptian soil. And not one European leader travelling to the region suggested the survivors might be helped if Israel, the EU and the US ended the food and fuel siege of Gaza...more

Be Careful Where you Read your news

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A UK insurance company says that bicycle riders are having lots more accidents these days.  Cycling Weekly says the information is wrong.

Why would the insurance company provide the wrong information. Because the more bike riders around, the less people use their cars -  and fewer people need auto insurance.

The data from the insurance company was posted on a major UK newspaper website.  No one questioned the accuracy of the statistics, until a reader demanded the article be removed.

This brings me to another issue, about milk - yes, the kind you drink- unrelated in a sense, but totally connected if you think about truth in advertising.

Did you know that there are studies indicating that children you drink cows milk in infancy have a significantly higher risk for TYPE 1 Diabetes?  Did you know that milk causes all sorts of other problems in people, including hay fever, digestive problems, headaches?  Just think about it a minute.  Why isn't this information out in the open?  

Instead we see these commercials with famous movie stars wearing a white ring around their mouths.  Especially for those skinny females, do you think they drink milk?  I bet not, they probably think it is too fattening...

CTC SLAMS CAR INSURANCE COMPANY
Home » CW News » CTC SLAMS CAR INSURANCE COMPANY
Thursday 15th January 2009 - Cycling Weekly

CTC – the UK's national cyclists' organisation has completely refuted claims by car insurance company LV= (Liverpool Victoria) that “inexperienced cyclists taking to the roads in the last six months have resulted in a 29% increase in road accidents involving cyclists”.

The figure appears to be no more than the difference in casualty numbers for cyclists between summer and winter. LV='s estimate of the number of collisions involving cyclists is over nine times higher than official figures and is based on a serious miscalculation of the number of cyclists in Britain. CTC has dismissed the figure as nothing more than a scaremongering publicity stunt.

Roger Geffen, CTC's Campaigns and Policy Manager, said: “This is Mickey Mouse research and flies in the face all official published statistics on cycling. There is plenty of evidence showing that cycling gets safer the more cyclists there are. In London there has been a 91% increase in cycle use on the capital's main roads since 2000, and a 33% reduction in cycle casualties in roughly the same period”.

He added: “CTC has been researching cycle safety for over a century. Manipulating statistics for a PR stunt wastes the time of the people who took part in the survey. By demonising cyclists and scaring people into staying in their cars, it also undermines the efforts of charities like CTC to encourage more cycling and improve road safety for all”.

Singling out cyclists as a law-breaking group is discriminatory and serves only to create aggression and conflict between road users. This is highly irresponsible behaviour for an insurance company professing to care about road safety.

CTC has contacted LV= to set out our reasons why we think their figures are incorrect and have requested that they either revise them or withdraw their press release titled “Road users warned over inexperienced cyclists” dated January 16, 2009.

from Cycling Weekly

A few words from Bill Moyers

To tell you the truth, Southern Baptists from Texas used to scare me. Having grown up in a Jim Crow town, the more southern a person was, the more I wanted to avoid them. But then here we have Bill Moyers, who I must say is one of the most reasonable Southern Baptist Ministers I have ever encountered.

He is being blasted for criticizing the invasion of Gaza. I won't say much more, just read the post by Foxman and Moyers and make your own decision

Exchange Between Bill Moyers and Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League

Following Bill Moyers' reflections on the events in Gaza on the JOURNAL last week, Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman sent him this letter:

Mr. Moyers,

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary: (1) moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world; (2) historical revisionism, asserting that Canaanites were Arabs; (3) anti-Semitism, declaring that Jews are “genetically coded” for violence; (4) ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of humiliation rather than counter-terrorism; and (5) promotion of an individual, the Norwegian doctor in Gaza, who has publicly expressed support for the September 11 attacks.

I have seen and read serious critiques of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and I have disagreed with many of them. Your commentary, however, is different, consisting mostly of intellectually and morally faulty claims that do a great disservice to the PBS audience. It invites not disagreement, but rebuke.

On one point you are correct – “America has officially chosen sides.” And rightly so. Fortunately for our nation, very few of our citizens engage in the same moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism as you. If the reverse held, it would not be a country that any decent person would want to live in.

Sincerely,

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League

In response, Bill Moyers sent Mr. Foxman the following message:

Dear Mr. Foxman:

You made several errors in your letter to me of January 13 and I am writing to correct them.

First, to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

When American troops committed a similar atrocity in Vietnam, it was called My Lai and Lt. Calley went to prison for it. As the publisher of a large newspaper at the time, I instructed our editorial staff to cover the atrocity fully because Americans should know what our military was doing in our name and with our funding. To say “my country right or wrong” is like saying “my mother drunk or sober.” Patriots owe their country more than that, whether their government and their taxes are supporting atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, or, in this case, Gaza.

Contrary to your claim, I made no reference whatsoever to “moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel. That is an old canard often resorted to by propagandists trying to divert attention from facts on the ground, and, it, too, is unworthy of the slaughter in Gaza. Contrary to imputing “moral equivalency” between Hamas and Israel, I said that “Hamas would like to see every Jew in Israel dead.” I said that “a radical stream of Islam now seeks to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth.” And I described the new spate of anti-Semitism across the continent of Europe. I am curious as to why you ignored remarks which clearly counter the notion of “moral equivalency.”

And although I specifically referred to “the rockets from Hamas” falling on Israel and said that “every nation has the right to defend itself, and Israel is no exception,” you nonetheless accuse me of “ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel.” Once again, you are quite selective in your reading of my essay.

Your claim that “the checkpoints, the security fence and the Gaza operation” [I used the more accurate “onslaught”] are not humiliating of the Palestinians is lamentable. I did not claim that these were, as you write, “tactics of humiliation rather [emphasis mine] than counter-terrorism,” but perhaps it is overly simplistic to think they are one and not the other, when they are both. Also lamentable is your description of my “promotion” of the Norwegian doctor in Gaza when in fact I was simply quoting what he told CBS News: “It’s like Dante’s Inferno. They are bombing one and a half million people in a cage.” The whole world has been able to see for itself what he was talking about, and as one major news organization after another has been reporting, is reeling from the sight.

And, to your claim that I was “declaring Jews are ‘genetically coded’ for violence,” you are mistaken. My comment – obviously not sufficiently precise – was not directed at a specific people but to the fact that the human race has violence in its DNA, as the biblical stories so strongly affirm. I also had in mind the relationship between all the descendents of Abraham who love the same biblical land and come to such grief over it.

From my days in President Johnson’s White House forward, I have defended Israel’s right to defend itself, and still do. But sometimes an honest critic is a government’s best friend, and I am appalled by Israel’s devastation of innocent civilians in this battle, all the more so because, as I said in my column, it is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen. To be so indifferent to that suffering is, sadly, to be as blind in Gaza as Samson.

Sincerely,

Bill Moyers

from Bill Moyers Journal

DREAM Act and Change.org

The Case Foundation and Change.org organized a special pre-Inauguration event at the National Press Club on Friday, January 16  the winners of the the Ideas for Change in America competition were announced.  This was followed by a panel of leading thinkers that discussed how the Obama administration and grassroots advocacy groups can use new online tools to deepen civic participation in America.

The panel included Chris Hughes, director of My.BarackObama.com and co-founder of Facebook, and Jose Antonio Vargas, political reporter for the Washington Post.

From DREAM Activist

Change.org - We did it!

Author: admin
16JAN

We have officially gained the status of “Top 10 Ideas for Change” in America from Change.org

CONGRATULATIONS and a big THANK YOU to everyone who voted, everyone who lent their support and endorsements and propelled this idea to the top. Major props go to Dave Bennion from Change.org, Kyle from Citizen Orange, Kety Esquivel from NCLR for being on the ball, Katherine Harris from Immigration Forum for pushing through the NAM article, Anthony Alvarez from Chronicles of a Nomad Immigrant, Porter Corn from Mexico Trucker, Margarita Reyes and Andrea Ortega for lending An Unfinished DREAM video to the movement, the DREAM Act Portal, Liz Mateo from Dreams to be Heard, Greissa from Texas, Jon Pincus for his support and strategy-sharing tips, Nilav Bhadra and the students pushing this on Myspace and their own social networks, and of course the famed Underground Undergrads without whom this would not have been possible.

In the next few days, what students and supporters can do is:

1. No pressure - Vote for the DREAM Act on Change.gov

2. Join the DreamActivist mailing list and add us as a friend on other social networking sites –>>> mo@dreamactivist.org

3. Contact us if you want to get directly involved in the movement, join the United We DREAM coalition, lend resources, and be in the loop on the ground if you are a student group —>> admin@dreamactivist.org

4. Submit suggestions on what Change.org can do to advance the DREAM Act here

MEDIA : To reach the administrators at DreamActivist for media-related inquiries, call 1-800-594-7498 or email media@dreamactivist.org
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Napolitano and the DREAM Act

The WaPo's coverage of  Napolitano's confirmation hearing doesn't mention the DREAM Act.  I haven't seen the complete video, maybe it was mentioned somewhere...  

What she did stress was how employers would be the new target of DHS.  Well, at least the workers will be (sort of) off the hook.  But as many of us know, that is not the answer.  If employers hire the workers its not just to pay lower wages.  Its such a complicated situation...

Now that unemployment is high, it will be a good time to see if all those people without jobs will want to take the jobs left by immigrants who have been deported.  How many of you would want to wash dishes at restaurant?  How many of you want to be roofers?  How many would want to change the really dirty sheets in a hotel room? 

Back to Napolitano - 

 

Maybe Napolitano is keeping the DREAM Act under her belt, waiting for the moment to move forward.

The silence is interesting.

Looking in the Lexis-Nexis Database, the only mention of the DREAM Act in recent weeks was about five days ago in the LA Times, when Hector Tobar mentioned that Hilda Solis was a strong supporter of the DREAM Act.  


I am hoping that the DREAM Act's low profile is a good sign. It may be a strategic move to keep guys like Krikorian off-track.

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Napolitano Pledges Shift In Immigration Focus


By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 16, 2009; Page A08

Janet Napolitano, President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, vowed yesterday at her Senate confirmation hearing to shift the focus of U.S. immigration enforcement from illegal workers to the prosecution of employers who hire those workers, signaling a clear break with the outgoing Bush administration... more

Winning but Losing: Israel's New Legacy

the timing of all of this is so interesting.  Why stop two days before the inauguration?

see dreamacttexas post "I went to Israel" - January 17, 2009

from the London Guardian, January 18, 2009:

"While the Obama inauguration is probably not the only factor that determined the timing of this ceasefire, it is hard not to see a connection with Israel almost certainly not wanting an ongoing Gaza crisis to rain on Tuesday's parade and to force their conflict with the Palestinians any higher up the new administration's agenda than it already is. Nevertheless, solidifying the ceasefire and the aftermath of this conflict will exercise the Obama team from day one in office, forcing them to make early choices in how they will approach the Israel/Palestine issue. The Obama administration will likely have to ensure the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, follow-up on US support for weapons smuggling efforts, while simultaneously taking a position on Gaza reconstruction efforts."

NY Times Opinionator Blog:  The Battle Over the Battle in Gaza: January 18, 2009

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Victorious, but vilified: Israel has 'destroyed its image and its soul'

By Kim Sengupta in Jerusalem and Donald Macintyre on the Gaza-Egypt border
Sunday, 18 January 2009
London Independent

After three weeks of carnage in Gaza, there were tentative signs of a ceasefire last night. But the bitter legacy of the past 22 days for Israel is that, while it declares victory on the battlefield, the country's reputation has rarely sunk so low.

Yesterday the United Nations called for a war crimes investigation after two children, aged five and seven, were killed when, it claimed, an Israeli tank shell hit a school sheltering some of the more than 40,000 internally displaced refugees.

"These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead," said John Ging, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza. In Jerusalem, Chris Gunness, the organisation's spokesman, added: "There has to be an investigation to determine whether a war crime has been committed."

Mr Gunness used unusually strong language. But the call came at the culmination not only of a rising civilian death toll but also a series of attacks on UN installations and, in some cases, the people who were under the UN's care at the time. The most lethal of these was an earlier shelling in which 43 internally displaced Gazans, sheltering in the Fakhura UNRWA school in Jabalya, were killed on 6 January.

Yet last week, an attack was launched that was – or should have been – as diplomatically embarrassing. For while the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was in the region for talks with Israeli ministers, an attack was launched on the main UNRWA compound, injuring three, setting fire to fuel and food in the depot with what Mr Ging said was white phosphorus, and sending up a dense plume of black smoke which became the defining image of the day's television coverage.

While Mr Ban said that the defence minister, Ehud Barak, had apologised for a "grave error", government spokesmen immediately suggested – just as they had initially in the Jabalya case, although UNRWA officials say this was later retracted in private conversations – that there had been firing by militants from in or around the UN compound. Mr Ging described the claim as "nonsense", adding that the UN had warned the Israelis that the compound was in danger from shelling, and had provided them with GPS co-ordinates to prevent an attack.

It began to seem like a pattern: after each episode of "collateral damage", international organisations would accuse the Israeli military of targeting buildings and civilian areas; then the Israelis would respond that they had simply returned fire after Hamas fighters had used these places to launch attacks. There was no discussion of whether the Israeli military's use of force was proportionate or not.

But while international concern grew over the rising daily toll of deaths in Gaza, the Israeli government continued to receive consistent majority support domestically. A common view expressed by many Israelis was that Hamas had brought it all upon itself by continuing to fire rockets into southern Israel for the past eight years.

By last night, it was beginning to look as if the Israeli mood was changing. With an election looming and, even more decisively perhaps, a new US president ready to take office on Tuesday, foreign minister Tzipi Livni and Mr Barak were both – however belatedly – ready to call a halt at the beginning of last week. Only the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, apparently eager to exorcise the failures of Lebanon in 2006, appeared to be pursuing the war with enthusiasm. Few Israelis have yet publicly recalled the prescient remark of one of the fathers of modern Zionism, Chaim Weizmann: "The world will judge the Jewish state by the way it will treat the Arabs."

For many Israelis the cost of the war became clear when a Hebrew-speaking physician, Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who had been frequently interviewed on prime-time TV by a top reporter, Shlomi Eldar, phoned the journalist live on air to announce that his three daughters had been killed. "My God, my girls, Shlomi," viewers heard him say. "Can't anybody get to us, please?" As Mr Eldar got the authorities to allow rescue services to the stricken family, it was not lost on commentators that the same disaster was striking hundreds of other families without direct access to Israeli TV.

Ari Shavit, a leading columnist on the newspaper, 'Haaretz', was a fervent proponent of the "just war" at the outset. By Friday, he was writing: "Shelling a United Nations facility is something not to be done at any time, but doing it on the day when the UN Secretary-General is visiting Jerusalem is beyond lunacy. The level of pressure the Israel Defence Forces have been exerting on Gaza may be squeezing Hamas, but it is destroying Israel. Destroying its soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, destroying it in the living rooms of the international community... "

Hundreds of African Migrants drown off Yemen Coast

Hundreds of African Migrants Feared Drowned
London Independent
January 18, 2009

By Sadie Gray

Hundreds of African migrants are feared drowned after their boats capsized in the Red Sea as they tried to reach Yemen.

Some 300 people were believed to be aboard two ships making the perilous crossing from the Horn of Africa, but only 30 had been rescued and a dozen bodies had washed up on the Yemeni coast. Of the 120 migrants on another ship which capsized in the Arabian Sea, only 80 made it to shore...more

Thai Navy abandons migrants

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Hundreds may have perished in Andaman Sea

By MICHAEL CASEY

Washington Post
The Associated Press
Saturday, January 17, 2009; 4:13 AM

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Thailand will investigate reports that the Thai navy abandoned migrants on a barge in the ocean where hundreds of them may have drowned, the government said Saturday.

The Thai Foreign Ministry also said it will reassess the overall situation of illegal immigration in light of the incident and would attempt to work with neighboring countries to better address the problem.

"Thai officials are currently investigating and verifying all the facts and surrounding circumstances," the ministry said in a statement, referring to the late December incident where more than 100 Myanmarese and Bangladeshi workers were rescued by Indian authorities from a barge adrift near the Andaman Islands.  more

I went to Israel

Jerusalem, at the Wailing Wall, January 16, 2009, by M.T. Hernandez

Amidst my parents, colleagues, and friends telling me it was too dangerous, I went to Israel on January 9th.  I gave a talk at a conference at Hebrew University.  The topic -  the Jewish influence on the Catholic Church in New Spain.  It was one of those situations that I just couldn't stay home... no matter what the risk management office of my university told me.

Well, I have gone and come back.  I am still alive; I was not near any terrorist bombings, and I had no trouble getting out of the country after a week.  Life in Israel goes on, even if 1000+ people are dying a few miles away.  

I saw lots of soldiers, and lots and lots of rifles.  The university felt like a bunker.  Our passports were checked every time we went on campus.  There were over two hundred soldiers at the Wailing Wall. I couldn't tell if you were guarding the place or they were their because of order to leave for Gaza.  We were checked for weapons as we entered a small cafe a block from campus.  I'm told that is normal.

The strangest thing (for me) was the television access in my hotel room.  I stayed at the faculty club on campus.  The TV stations listed CNN, but when I turned on the the TV, there was just a fuzzy screen.  I guess we weren't supposed to see what was going on in Gaza.  We weren't kept from the internet however - so I kept up with the news on-line.

The place is beautiful.  But at least on the Jewish side of town, there is a quiet sadness everywhere.  I walked to the Arab section of Old Jerusalem with a friend - that scene was different.  There was more movement, more talking, and actually more life.

My Jewish colleagues at the conference were fantastic hosts.  A few spoke to me about the Gaza conflict.  I kept hearing that the rockets from Gaza had been going on for a long time and the U.S. and other nations had not responded in support of Israel on this.  There is a sense of being locked in - that there was no option but to blow the Gazans away.

Everybody is locked in actually.  The Gaza population is trapped, but so are the Jews.  While the Gaza people are dying now, the is also a sense that the Jews could be blown away at any time.

---

 

Gaza op may be squeezing Hamas, but it's destroying Israel's soul
By Ari Shavit, Haaretz Correspondent

January 16, 2009

On Thursday it happened, conclusively - Operation Cast Lead turned insane. Attacking any densely populated city is a serious act at any time, but when Israel's international legitimacy is being ground to dust, such an attack is nothing but madness.


Shelling a United Nations facility is something not to be done at any time, but doing it on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem is beyond lunacy. The level of pressure the Israel Defense Forces has been exerting on Gaza may be squeezing Hamas, but it is destroying Israel. Destroying its soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America.

Israel is not Russia and Gaza is not Chechnya. Israel cannot deal with its enemies the way belligerent superpowers deal with theirs. Wars must be just and proportional.

Without being just, Israel cannot triumph on the battlefield. Without a sound moral foundation any Israeli victory is Pyrrhic.

Twenty-one days ago the campaign against Hamas was balanced and right. About a week ago it started slipping and in the last few days it has crossed every line. True, Hamas is in distress, its leaders are being killed, its prestige is dwindling. But this cannot change the fact that what began as a vital, calculated military operation has become a riotous rampage in a populated area. At any given moment the rampage could end in disaster.

The prime minister has apparently decided to act like some kind of Putin. If he ended his first war with no clear conclusion, he will end his second one with a scorched earth. But one should also ask, where is Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who is supposed to "look the truth in the eye" in his election campaign? And where is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who claims to have the courage to change things?

After two weeks of serving their state, they are now in cahoots with licentious military moves.

In a few days the fire will cease and the fog will disperse, revealing the horror. Hamas will be crushed, but pictures of outrageous destruction and killing will flood the world. Beirut's "Waltz with Bashir" will pale by comparison to Gaza's waltz with Olmert.

Then we'll discover that we will not be paying the price of the past week's belligerent escapade only in Obama's America. We will be paying it with the damaged souls of our sons and daughters.

At a gate to the Old City in Jerusalem. A group of students with their body guard. January 16, 2009. Photo by M.T. Hernandez

A short history of war and exaggeration - the Middle East

speaking of genocide, proportionate response, and the Nazis.

link to Democacy Now program on Gaza, January 17, 2009, Bloody Israeli Assault on Gaza Enters Fourth Week, Palestinian Death Toll Tops 1,100

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Robert Fisk’s World: When it comes to Gaza, leave the Second World War out of it

How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis?
London Independent
Saturday, 17 January 2009

Exaggeration always gets my goat. I started to hate it back in the 1970s when the Provisional IRA claimed that Long Kesh internment camp was "worse than Belsen". It wasn't as if there was anything nice about Long Kesh – or the Maze prison as it was later politely dubbed – but it simply wasn't as bad as Belsen. And now we're off again. Passing through Paris this week, I found pro-Palestinian demonstrators carrying signs which read "Gaza, it's Guernica" and "Gaza-sur-Glane".

Guernica, as we all know, was the Basque city razed by the Luftwaffe in 1937 and Oradour-sur-Glane the French village whose occupants were murdered by the SS in 1944. Israel's savagery in Gaza has also been compared to a "genocide" and – of course – a "holocaust". The French Union of Islamic Organisations called it "a genocide without precedent" – which does take the biscuit when even the Pope's "minister for peace and justice" has compared Gaza to "a big concentration camp".

Before I state the obvious, I only wish the French Union of Islamic Organisations would call the Armenian genocide a genocide – it doesn't have the courage to do so, does it, because that would be offensive to the Turks and, well, the million and a half Armenians massacred in 1915 happened to be, er, Christians.

Mind you, that didn't stop George Bush from dropping the word from his vocabulary lest he, too, should offend the Turkish generals whose airbases America needs for its continuing campaign in Iraq. And even Israel doesn't use the word "genocide" about the Armenians lest it loses its only Muslim ally in the Middle East. Strange, isn't it? When there's a real genocide – of Armenians – we don't like to use the word. But when there is no genocide, everyone wants to get in on the act.

Yes, I know what all these people are trying to do: make a direct connection between Israel and Hitler's Germany. And in several radio interviews this past week, I've heard a good deal of condemnation about such comparisons. How do Holocaust survivors in Israel feel about being called Nazis? How can anyone compare the Israeli army to the Wehrmacht? Merely to make such a parallel is an act of anti-Semitism.

Having come under fire from the Israeli army on many occasions, I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I've never understood why strafing the roads of northern France in 1940 was a war crime while strafing the roads of southern Lebanon is not a war crime. The massacre of up to 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps – perpetrated by Israel's Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli soldiers watched and did nothing – falls pretty much into the Second World War bracket. Israel's own estimate of the dead – a paltry 460 – was only nine fewer than the Nazi massacre at the Czech village of Lidice in 1942 when almost 300 women and children were also sent to Ravensbrück (a real concentration camp). Lidice was destroyed in revenge for the murder by Allied agents of Reinhard Heydrich. The Palestinians were slaughtered after Ariel Sharon told the world – untruthfully – that a Palestinian had murdered the Lebanese Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel.

Indeed, it was the courageous Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz of the Hebrew University (and editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica) who wrote that the Sabra and Chatila massacre "was done by us. The Phalangists are our mercenaries, exactly as the Ukrainians and the Croatians and the Slovakians were the mercenaries of Hitler, who organised them as soldiers to do the work for him. Even so have we organised the assassins of Lebanon in order to murder the Palestinians". Remarks like these were greeted by Israel's then minister of interior and religious affairs, Yosef Burg, with the imperishable words: "Christians killed Muslims – how are the Jews guilty?" - more

How may Minute Men work for the Dept. of Homeland Security?

Far Right Wing "British National Party" advocates sending everybody away. They are not allowed to work for the UK's immigration system. What a novel idea! Can you imagine if DHS couldn't hire Minutemen or people who belong to Krikorian's group?

BNP links to immigration service staff

After nearly 300 allegations of brutality and racist abuse, official inquiry is launched

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor
Wednesday, 14 January 2009

An official investigation has been launched after two immigration service staff working with asylum-seekers were found to have links to the British National Party, The Independent has learnt.

One guard employed to look after asylum-seekers at a detention centre has been forced to resign after his name was found on a membership list of the BNP. Another man has been suspended while his employer investigates alleged links to the same far-right organisation.

Both cases raise serious concerns about racism within the immigration system, where membership of extreme political groups has long been suspected. Over the past two years The Independent has helped reveal nearly 300 allegations of brutality, including 38 claims of racism, made by asylum-seekers about private security and immigration staff. Some of the allegations included abusive and racist language, in which refugees fleeing persecution were referred to as "monkeys" or told to "go back to their own countries".  more

NO Cell phones while driving, PLEASE

link to image

A Problem of the Brain, Not the Hands: Group Urges Phone Ban for Drivers


By TARA PARKER-POPE

New York Times
Published: January 12, 2009

In half a dozen states and many cities and counties, it is illegal to use a hand-held cellphone while driving — but perfectly all right to talk on a hands-free device.

The theory is that it’s distracting to hold a phone and drive with just one hand. But a large body of research now shows that a hands-free phone poses no less danger than a hand-held one — that the problem is not your hands but your brain.

“It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel,” said David Strayer, director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah and a leading researcher on cellphone safety. “It’s that your mind is not on the road.”

Now Dr. Strayer’s research has gained a potent ally. On Monday, the National Safety Council, the nonprofit advocacy group that has pushed for seat belt laws and drunken driving awareness, called for an all-out ban on using cellphones while driving...more

A last kick in the face by Bush - Immigration

Today's NY Times tells us about the latest moments of the Bush administration and how it wants to leave its mark among immigrants:

New York Times:  "And last week, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, in an appalling last-minute ruling, declared that immigrants do not have the constitutional right to a lawyer in a deportation hearing and thus have no right to appeal on the grounds of bad legal representation. Mr. Mukasey overturned a decades-old practice designed to ensure robust constitutional protection for immigrants — one needed now more than ever in the days of the Bush administration’s assembly-line prosecutions."

Is this something that Obama will be able to rescind once he is in office?

---

Editorial
New York Times
January 13, 2009

Immigration

A scene from the last days of the Bush administration: On a snowy afternoon last weekend, a church in New York City is filled to bursting with more than 1,000 people. Parents holding babies, teenagers, old men and women with heavy coats and canes. They murmur and shout in prayer, a keyboard and guitar carrying their voices to the height of the vaulted ceiling.

The music has a deafening buoyancy, but as congregants step forward to speak, their testimony is heavy with foreboding and sorrow. They tell of families terrorized and split apart.

A young woman from Pakistan describes humiliating conditions at a detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., where she was sent with her mother and ailing father. A mother tells of her son, an Army sergeant and citizen, losing his wife to deportation. A Mexican man, with theatrical defiance, waves a shoe at the unnamed forces that have thwarted his desire to legalize.

It is hard to appear sinister in a church, and the congregation at Iglesia La Sinagoga, a center of Pentecostalism on 125th Street in East Harlem, seemed utterly ordinary. But as undocumented immigrants and their loved ones, they are the main targets of the Bush administration’s immigration war.

Families like theirs have endured a relentless campaign of intimidation and expulsion, organized at the top levels of the federal government and haphazardly delegated to state and local governments.

The campaign has been disproportionate and cruel. The evidence is everywhere...more

Did Detroit Save the Plans from the Electric Car It Threw Away?

see clip to film:  who killed the electric car?

Detroit Goes for Electric Cars, But will Drivers?
New York Times

January 11, 2009

DEARBORN, Mich. — Inside the Ford Motor Company, it was called Project M — to build a prototype of a totally electric, battery-powered car in just six months.

When it was started last summer, the effort was considered a tall order by the small team of executives and engineers assigned to it. After all, the auto industry can take years to develop vehicles.

But Ford was feeling pressure from competitors, and decided it could not afford to fall behind in the rapidly expanding race to put electric cars in dealer showrooms.

“Frankly, I think it’s a gamble not to do it,” William C. Ford Jr., the company’s executive chairman, said in an interview. “It’s clear that society is headed down this road.”

Certainly, Ford and other carmakers are betting billions of dollars on this new direction, at a time when they can ill afford it and when Detroit is facing government scrutiny after the $17.4 billion bailout of G.M. and Chrysler.

Throughout the cavernous Detroit auto show hall, typically the high temple of brute horsepower, auto companies will be competing this week to establish their green and electric credentials. On Sunday, when the show opens, Ford will announce plans for its electric vehicle, including a goal to start selling them by 2011. more

link to image

Postville in the UK

It doesn't just happen in the U.S. --

Primark in storm over conditions at UK supplier
Fashion giant acts after investigation

* Dan McDougall
* The Observer, Sunday 11 January 2009
* Article history

Britain's high street fashion giant Primark was at the centre of a storm last night over allegations that illegal immigrants paid just over half the minimum wage had been employed to make fashionable knitwear for one of the firm's bestselling ranges.

Primark announced yesterday that it had launched an inquiry after an investigation by the Observer and the BBC revealed that Manchester-based garment firm TNS Knitwear may have breached key employment and immigration laws. Breaches of the legislation could lead to fines of up to £10,000 for each illegal worker and potential prosecution for tax evasion and employment law abuses.

Primark also said it had handed material uncovered by the investigation to the UK Border Agency.

The workers, caught by an undercover journalist on a hidden camera, were allegedly being paid £3 an hour - just over half the minimum wage of £5.73 - for 12-hour days, seven days a week. Many of the garments made by the Pakistanis, Afghans and Indians over the past five months had ended up two miles away in one of the retail giant's largest and most profitable stores in Manchester's bustling Market Street...more

see blog post from ethicalandgreen.com  "Primark - Unethical Fashion"

image

Legal Resident - but no license?

Legal immigrants battle red tape
Renewing a driver's license can involve clearing lots of hurdles
By SUSAN CARROLL
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
Jan. 9, 2009, 10:38PM


Pakistan native Adeel Mehmood started building a life in Houston after the U.S. government granted him asylum more than two years ago.

He graduated from the University of Houston, settled into a home in Garden Oaks and saved money from his restaurant job to buy his dream car: a new Toyota Camry.

The 25-year-old still faithfully makes payments on the Camry — and on his insurance — even though the state of Texas in December denied his application to renew his driver's license, citing a new policy that took effect Oct. 1 requiring specific documentation to prove an applicant's legal immigration status.

Three months after the policy took effect, critics are pointing to a growing list of cases involving legal immigrants who have been significantly delayed or outright rejected in their efforts to get or renew licenses, despite being authorized to live and work legally in the U.S.

"I have always maintained my legal status," Mehmood said. "It's not fair to people who want to live here and follow the law."

Under the policy change, only applicants who have documents showing they have permission to stay in the U.S. for at least six months are eligible for Texas driver's licenses.

But immigration attorneys are reporting that people who meet that criterion — but are unable to produce documents required by the DPS to prove their legal status — are still being turned away.

For example, Mehmood said he was rejected by the DPS after being told his letter from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services granting him asylum wasn't specifically listed on DPS's list of acceptable forms.

The Texas chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association is pushing for revisions to the policy, adopted by the Texas Public Safety Commission in August, saying the list of acceptable DPS documents needs to be expanded to include several forms of legal status that allow for a six-month stay or longer in the U.S. They also are pushing the state to make allowances for delays in processing times sometimes caused by USCIS.

"This is going to end up impacting lots and lots of people," said John Nechman, a Houston immigration attorney. "Every day there seems to be another example." more

Gaza and how we kill people so easily

Bill Moyers presented a though provoking segment on his show last night.  Worth watching:

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Saturday Jan. 10, 2009 06:44 EST
Bill Moyers on Israel/Gaza
by Glenn Greenwald

(updated below - Update II)

On his PBS Journal Show last night, Bill Moyers delivered a poignant essay on Israel/Gaza (video below). The whole segment is worth watching -- it begins with coverage of a mostly ignored anti-war march this week in Washington (while media hordes, down the street, fixated on the Roland Burris circus) -- but Moyers' essay begins at roughly the 2:20 mark.

The most striking aspect is that sober, fact-based, even-handed commentary like this about Israel automatically subjects one to widespread, profoundly ugly accusations of being "anti-Israel" and even "anti-Semitic," to the point where not a single U.S. Senator and no House member other than a handful dare utter anything other than unquestioning support for Israeli actions, such that most members of the U.S. Congress are, literally, far more willing to question and oppose American military actions than Israel's military actions (the establishment discussion rules are virtually identical to those that prevailed in the pre-Iraq-war days, though even more rigidly enforced: one can question the efficacy of the Israeli attack from the perspective of Israeli interests, but may not question its morality, legality or justifiability)

Time to VOTE for the DREAM Act on change.org

For the DREAM Act to be presented as the 10 changes recommended to the new administration, it needs to move up two notches in the voting being held by change.org.  PLEASE vote NOW.

If you don't know about the DREAM Act, it is a bill that allows undocumented college students to regularize their immigration status.  These are productive, bright students who will help pull the U.S. into a productive future.  They are hardworking and dedicated.  Having taught a number the past few years, I can say they are most often much more motivated and serious about their education than their U.S. born counterparts.

PLEASE VOTE NOW

Houston - Talk on Immigration - Camayd Freixas - Thursday January 8

Dr. Camayd-Freixas is professor of Latin American Literature at Florida International University. St. Thomas U. should apologize for listing him as only a "federal court interpreter" in its announcement.

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Thursday January 8, 7 p.m. - Rothko Chapel, University of St. Thomas, Houston
FREE Lecture
Postville: Immigrant Abuse beyond America’s Back Roads
Stephen Bloom, Professor of Journalism
Erik Camayd-Freixas, Professor of Latin American Literature


The Rothko Chapel brings the public discussion of human rights abuses at the hands of both a meat packing plant and federal immigration officials in Postville, Iowa earlier this year to the forefront by presenting together, for the first time, the two experts on this subject. Stephen Bloom, professor of journalism at the University of Iowa and author of Postville: A Clash of Cultures in the Heartland, and Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, associate professor of Latin American Literature at Florida International University and a first-hand witness to the legal proceedings in his role as certified interpreter for the United States courts, will discuss the human rights violations that occurred and the implications with regards to ethics, justice, and democracy. The public is invited to meet the speakers at a reception immediately following the program.

Life and Ethics are more important than allegiance

Click here for link to Democracy Now program on latest news from Gaza

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Gaza is living hell these days.  I can't sleep at night thinking of how people are running from place to place looking for safety.  I read the papers constantly.  Israeli officials told people to leave their houses.  People left and went to the schools.  There were 600 huddled in the U.N. school that was bombed yesterday.

I am not taking sides in this.  I am concerned about people being trapped in a small strip of land and not being able to get out.  As Americans we are no less guilty, think of the million plus Iraqi civilians that have died since we bulldozed our way into Baghdad.  

Perhaps it is good we are seeing pictures of the carnage in Gaza...  we are feeling it.  The horror in Iraq has been so removed... we are not aware of the hundreds of thousands of maimed bodies that we have left behind.  All we have are our traumatized soldiers, who have now been told that PTSD does not warrant a Purple Heart.  Yet, these soldiers return with the ghosts in their heads.  I work at a university and there is usually at least one in every class.  The soldiers bring the ghosts to us even if they don't say a word.

Who knows if Israel has a good reason to bomb the life out of Gaza.  It should be a good enough reason to find a solid diplomatic solution.  War these days only brings more terrorism.  All Israel is doing is recruiting more suicide bombers for the other side.  Many people say that Israel has to fight back...  especially thinking of the Holocaust where no one fought back or supported the Jews.  But resistance does not always mean violence.  There has to be a better way.

Word from Gaza

The London Independent has Fares Akram, a reporter in Gaza sending in daily information:

This past Saturday the Akram's father was killed at their farm in northern Gaza, when the house was bombed. His father actually belonged to the Palestinian Authority, and was not a member of Hamas.

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I heard the news... it's time to evacuate my pregnant wife

Posted by Fares Akram

London Independent

* Wednesday, 7 January 2009 at 02:49 pm

Things are getting worse by the day. The streets here in Gaza City have been empty. It's dangerous to go on the balcony but if you risk looking out you can see columns of black smoke rising from the north. The sound of automatic machine gun fire from the Apache helicopters I find most terrifying.

Overnight, it seems the Israeli tanks progressed further into Gaza, and now we've heard about the tank shelling at a UN school in Jabalya camp killing more than 30 people. I found out about that when the electricity resumed for a short time in the evening and I was able to get online. I'm appalled but not surprised: if you have tanks on high ground to the east of Jabalya firing down on such a densely populated area, this kind of bloodshed can be expected.


Personally I've had a big decision to make. I've had to evacuate Alaa from our family home. It's just too risky for a woman who is due to give birth shortly, to stay here in our apartment which is quite a distance from the nearest hospital. I managed to find a taxi driver willing to make the journey, and moved her to stay at her parents' house in Al Masser near the Beach refugee camp which at least is closer to a small clinic. Alaa packed up all the things for the baby – the first aid kit, some diapers, her own clothes. She didn't want to go.

I can't describe how sad it is to be apart from your wife in these circumstances. I want to be with her, but I also have the responsibility of my younger brothers, my sisters and their kids and my mother, especially after what happened to our father, who was killed by an Israeli air strike on our farm in northern Gaza on Saturday. Emotionally my mother has been very strong. But I saw tears in her eyes when Alaa was leaving. Don't worry, I told Alaa, I'll be with you soon. Now I'm very much afraid I won't be able to meet my promise. Even phone contact isn't assured. The Palestinian telecoms company say all our networks will be down soon if Israel doesn't allow fuel into Gaza within 48 hours.

Meanwhile we have no water, not even cold water. There isn't a drop in the taps.

My sister's children and our young cousins have been clustering around a very old kerosene stove we decided to try to use after the cooking gas ran out. We rush to do some cooking in the night if electricity suddenly comes on. We got power back last night for half an hour and made a loaf of bread.

There are seven children under the age of 10 here and they're all pretty scared. They don't stop asking what's going on. Will the Jews come to our house, they ask.

Today I've eaten nothing but dates and some of the bottled water we had brought in before this began. There's no chance of a shower, or getting any sleep. And the nights are so long after dark when you can't read or go online. At least when the electricity is on you feel slightly reassured and relaxed. The dark contributes to your feeling of being completely isolated and afraid.

American Identity

Great great grandchildren of Sally Hemings  

link to photo

As we are about to inaugurate our next president I am wondering if we have finally accepted that the real definition of American is not someone like Thomas Jefferson or Dolly Madison.

Our new president has African ancestry, as well as European. He was raised by a white family who were not wealthy, but sent him to the best schools. He married an African American woman who is the descendent of slaves.

How would he describe himself? Of course, he has to say he is American first. But then what does he say? He is from Chicago? He is originally from Hawaii? He is a father? He has roots in Africa?

No, racism is not gone. It is REALLY alive and well. But, America has changed. Our ideal image is not Jefferson. Maybe it is the children of Sally Hemings.

By the way, speaking of American identity... it is worth checking out Annette Gordon Reed's book on Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson -- Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy

Be careful what you say if you are wearing a scarf

It is unfortunate that American paranoia has come to this point. I recall reading a year or so ago that someone was wearing a t-shirt with Arab letters, and was told to change shirts if he wanted to get on a plane. You can't even wear a t-shirt that has Arab letters saying "I love my Mom" --- TSA will get you.

I don't say this because I am for any particular group, not even my own (American, female, Latina, mother, wife, Texan, academic?). It's that I think that all people should be treated fairly and we should always examine our reactions of fear, particular among policing institutions (like TSA).

Thanks Air Tran for apologizing to the family. PLEASE don't do this again. Same goes for the other airlines.

Airline Apologizes For Booting 9 Muslims
Group Plans Discrimination Complaint

Kashif Irfan with his sons Luqman, 4, Sinan, 2, and Murad, 7. Irfan and other family members are attending a religious retreat in Orlando, but were delayed on the way when AirTran kicked them off a flight from Washington.

By Amy Gardner and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 3, 2009; Page A01

A U.S. airline apologized yesterday to nine Muslim American passengers from the Washington area who were removed from a flight out of Reagan National Airport, but a Muslim civil rights group said it intends to press a discrimination complaint against the airline for its treatment of the passengers.

"It is incumbent on any airline to ensure that members of the traveling public are not singled out or mistreated based on their perceived race, religion or national origin. We believe this disturbing incident would never have occurred had the Muslim passengers removed from the plane not been perceived by other travelers and airline personnel as members of the Islamic faith," said the complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Transportation by the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an advocacy group...more

Immigration and the Working Class Non-Immigrant

Affluent people generally say things about immigration that show they don't know much about the situation (I keep getting told by very educated types that undocumented immigrants don't pay taxes). But working class people (non-immigrants) and lower middle class people are usually the most angry.

Since I work on this blog, and am writing a book on DREAMers, I often talk to colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and students about immigration. Those adults who did not attend college seem to be the most angry. I hear stories about how people who just got here cheat on welfare, use up all our resources and generally make life miserable for everyone else.

When I first started having conversations with my father about immigration, he said that current immigrants didn't have have to work as hard as he did to make it (he immigrated with his parents when he was six months old). As time went on and we talked more and more, he began to understand the plight of the DREAMers. But his initial idea was the immigrants took advantage. It seems that he was thinking of a close friend of my mother that came a couple of decades ago was able to work enough quarters to get social security now that she is over 65, has Medicaid, lives in subsidized housing and has a caretaker (paid for by the government). She still hasn't learned English well. But then, you have to know the whole story. Her daughter and grandchildren are American citizens. Her son-in-law is extremely successful (a South American immigrant) and they pay enough taxes for many many people who just got here.

Why are people so angry? Because they think they are being shafted. They think something they deserve is going to someone less American - One of my friends who is most angry was a single Mom for years, really struggled but raised her daughter well and has worked for the same company for over 20 years. She is respected at her job and has made a good life for herself (she is second generation Texan). But those years that she was on her own make it hard for her to have sympathy for someone else.

A student of mine told me once that my success was due to my father's success. He had a good business and had clout in our community. The student said this gave me a big head start - making it easier to go to college, get a PhD, become a college professor, write books and have a successful blog. I can't say that life was that easy. I was a single Mom too, for eighteen years. I started my graduate program as a single Mom, with a kid in high school and a kid in college. But then, I had my parents who backed me up when they could...  Maybe there is no way I can truly empathize with my friend. Her parent's couldn't help her. Her father was a custodian, and her mother was a homemaker.

It is worth the time and trouble to find out why people are so angry at things.
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White working class feels ignored over immigration, says Hazel Blears
Communities secretary says politicians need to reconnect with this group, as study shows resentment over impact of migration

* Deborah Summers, politics editor
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 January 2009 13.42 GMT


Many white working-class people across the country feel their concerns about the impact of immigration are being ignored, according to the communities and local government secretary, Hazel Blears.

Politicians need to start reconnecting with this group of people, Blears said today, as a study of attitudes to immigration was published finding a widespread sense of resentment, unfairness and disempowerment among white working-class communities in England.

"White working-class people living on estates sometimes just don't feel anyone is listening or speaking up for them," Blears said.

"Whilst they might not be experiencing the direct impact of migration, their fear of it is acute." It was the responsibility of politicians to challenge the myths about immigration spread by the far right, she said.

A report for the Department for Communities and Local Government based on interviews with people living on estates in Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Thetford, Runcorn and Widnes, found that some people believed that the same rules were not applied to everyone equally...more

Flying While Muslim

Doesn't matter that the passengers were exonerated.  What an embarrassing incident for them to be taken off of a plane.  Even though an Anglo (white) guy in LA killed all his relatives on Christmas Eve, most mass murderers are NOT people of color.... (people of color can be Black, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Asian, South Asian etc) ---  being Muslim is enough to make people paranoid.

Very very  few Muslims subscribe to terrorism.  Many Americans subscribe to violence.  What does that tell you?

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9 Muslim passengers kicked off flight after remark
Associated Press/LA Times
7:48 AM PST, January 2, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Nine Muslim passengers were kicked off a flight from Washington, D.C., to Florida after other passengers reported hearing a suspicious remark about airplane security.

AirTran Airways spokesman Tad Hutcheson called the incident on the New Year's Day flight from Reagan National Airport to Orlando, Fla., a misunderstanding, but defended the company's response. He said the airline followed federal rules and did nothing wrong.

One of the Muslim passengers, Kashif Irfan, told The Washington Post the confusion began when his brother was talking about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window."'

Irfan told the newspaper he thought he and the others were profiled because of their appearance. The men had beards and the women wore headscarves, traditional Muslim attire.

Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist and his brother is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria, Va., with their families, and were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Irfan's sister-in-law and Irfan's three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2. A family friend also was traveling with the group to a religious retreat in Florida.

Federal officials ordered the rest of the passengers from the plane and re-screened them before allowing the flight to depart.

The family was upset that AirTran didn't allow the Muslim passengers to book another flight. They eventually made it to their destination on a US Airways flight.

"The FBI agents actually cleared our names," Inayet Sahin, one of the family members kicked off the flight, told CNN. "They went on our behalf and spoke to the airlines and said, 'There is no suspicious activity here. They are clear. Please let them get on a flight so they can go on their vacation,' and they still refused..."more

Two Tours and You Could be in Trouble

Repeated tours in the Middle East are dangerous.  Most of us already know that, but the military hasn't cared.  Lets hope that Obama changes a few things.

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A Focus on Violence by Returning G.I.’s


By LIZETTE ALVAREZ and DAN FROSCH
Published: January 1, 2009
New York Times

FORT CARSON, Colo. — For the past several years, as this Army installation in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains became a busy way station for soldiers cycling in and out of Iraq, the number of servicemen implicated in violent crimes has raised alarm.

Nine current or former members of Fort Carson’s Fourth Brigade Combat Team have killed someone or were charged with killings in the last three years after returning from Iraq. Five of the slayings took place last year alone. In addition, charges of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault have risen sharply.

Prodded by Senator Ken Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, the base commander began an investigation of the soldiers accused of homicide. An Army task force is reviewing their recruitment, medical and service records, as well as their personal histories, to determine if the military could have done something to prevent the violence. The inquiry was recently expanded to include other serious violent crimes.

Now the secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, says he is considering conducting an Army-wide review of all soldiers “involved in violent crimes since returning” from Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a letter sent to Mr. Salazar in December. Mr. Geren wrote that the Fort Carson task force had yet to find a specific factor underlying the killings, but that the inquiry was continuing.

Focusing attention on soldiers charged with killings is a shift for the military, which since the start of the war in Iraq has largely deflected any suggestion that combat could be a factor in violent behavior among some returning service members...more