Aung San Suu Kyi, Omar Khadar, And Barack Obama: A Dreadful Tale Of What America Has Become

By John Chuckman

16 November, 2009
Countercurrents.org

During his trip to Asia, President Obama called for the government of Burma to release Aung San Suu Kyi, a noted dissident who has spent years under house arrest.

It made headlines, a fact which tells us more about the role of media as an outlet for government press releases than in communicating genuine news.

Obama’s was hardly a brave or innovative act when you consider that it is a universally-condemned military junta keeping Aung San Suu Kyi penned up.

But when you appreciate the full context of Obama’s call, you may agree with me that it was more a cowardly act than anything else.

A year ago, after eight years of mind-numbing stupidity, countless public lies and bloody war crimes, Obama’s arrival on the American political scene thrilled the world. His intelligence, his grace, and his sense of decency were striking. His like as an American politician, quite apart from his race, had not been seen in the lifetime of many.

But the hopes raised by Obama, like so many flickering little candles in a fierce wind, already are largely extinguished. This polished, educated, liberal-minded and decent man, after only one year in office, has been overwhelmed by America’s military-industrial complex, a terrible machine which grinds on night and day, chewing people in its gears, no matter who is elected ostensibly to be in charge of it.

Much as I resent Burma’s treatment of Aung San Suu Kyi, it shines as genuinely humane compared to America’s treatment of Omar Khadr.

The key facts in the case of this young man, a prisoner at Guantanamo, are easily told.

Omar Khadr was born to a fundamentalist Muslim, highly political family whose father knew and died fighting for Osama bin Laden. In an era whose ruling myths are a clash of civilizations and a war on terror, Omar would seem to have been doomed from birth.

Under intense pressure from his family, fifteen-year old Omar went to fight in Afghanistan when America invaded it. In doing that, he was doing nothing that tens of thousands of Americans hadn’t done, both as idealists for causes and as soldiers of fortune in countless wars from the Spanish Civil War to the Cuban Revolution or the turmoil of the Congo.

Omar’s experience reminded me a little of American Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July, a story where the need for maternal approval helped drive his destructive participation in America’s Vietnam holocaust (three million Vietnamese slaughtered, many hideously with napalm, and the legacy of soil saturated with Agent Orange and littered with millions of landmines more than justifies that term).

The American claim against Omar is that he shot an American soldier, a medic no less, a fact seemingly almost designed to increase his infamy.

The story, as I heard it in an interview a few years ago with an American soldier, a friend of the dead medic’s, was that after a small firefight, Omar hid himself, then leapt up, heartlessly killing the medic whose only interest was the wounded. Omar was then captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo.

Even were that story true, and it is not, there would still be no excuse for sending a fifteen-year old child to Guantanamo. That act violated all international conventions on the treatment of child soldiers, but then almost everything America has done over the last eight years has violated international conventions, international laws, common decency, and the spirit of its own Bill of Rights.

For years, Omar, like hundreds of inmates at Guantanamo, was held incommunicado: he was allowed no contact with his family, he was allowed no visits from the International Red Cross (again in contravention to international conventions) and he was allowed no legal counsel. Omar was allowed no rights of any kind: being kept shackled in a secret prison ninety miles offshore was considered adequate to efface the entire spirit and meaning of America’s own rights and laws.

We now know that the soldiers who captured Omar, in fact, shot him twice in the back as the frightened boy tried to run. Despite life-threatening wounds and his young age, Omar was consigned to years of imprisonment and torture at Guantanamo. Indeed, his worst torturer, a soldier with a reputation at Guantanamo as perhaps its most vicious interrogator, deliberately contrived his sessions with Omar so that the boy had to sit in a position which pulled at his slowly-healing and painful wounds.

We also know now, evidence having just been published in Canadian newspapers, that Omar could not possibly have killed the medic: Omar was photographed hiding under a pile of rubble as the soldiers passed.

So who killed the medic? One perhaps should recall the case of Pat Tillman, an American football player killed by his own forces in Afghanistan, a case at first covered up the military, but even now full of unanswered questions.

And why did the Americans shoot Omar, twice, in the back? One simply cannot avoid the suggestion that the American soldiers involved acted with cowardice and savagery.

Some readers may object that American soldiers are incapable of such behaviour, but let’s go back to that time in Afghanistan, reviewing some things we now know as facts, and think about what they suggest about the ethos prevailing there when a fifteen-year old was shot in the back and sent to be tortured.

America’s carpet bombing in Afghanistan was destructive beyond anything Americans have ever been told. Just as was the case in the First Gulf War when uncounted tens of thousands of poor Iraqi recruits were bulldozed into the desert after having been literally pulped into tailing ponds of human bits and fluids by B-52s, the true horror of what massive bombing did in Afghanistan was understandably not well advertised..

The public has been led to believe that, compared to the horrors inflicted upon Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan was almost bloodless. But I learned recently from an expert journalist – an American no less - with many years of experience in that country that a great deal of blood was shed. In Kabul alone, fifty to sixty thousand Afghans died in America’s brutal bombing and artillery cover for its Northern Alliance proxy army, itself a gang of thugs many of whom are not one wit more ethical or civilized than the Taleban.

We knew too, those who cared to search, of the brutal tactics of American special forces in the mountains after the initial “victory”: tales of heavily-armed goons marching into remote towns, throwing stun grenades, breaking down the doors of homes, holding women and children at gunpoint while their male family members were marched away with no explanation. The men were often kept for considerable periods to be “questioned.”

At the least suspicion, air strikes were called in, and in dozens and dozens of cases, those air strikes wiped out whole families or groups of villagers who had done nothing to oppose Americans. They were the victims, thousands of them, of young Americans filled with irrational resentments over 9/11, anxious to prove how good they were with their high-tech killing machines, and let loose on someone else’s country.

And we knew, at least again those who cared to search, the story of America’s hideous treatment of Taleban prisoners in the early days of occupation, of Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld’s Nazi-like public demand that all prisoners should be killed or walled away forever. One of America’s ghastly allies of the Northern Alliance, General Dostum, took Rumsfeld in deadly earnest: he had his men round up three thousand prisoners, seal them in vans and drive them out onto the desert to suffocate in the heat. The bodies were then buried in shallow mass graves. All this was watched by American soldiers who somehow failed to act the way Jimmy Stewart did in war movies. Instead they picked their noses or smoked cigarettes as they gawked.

We also knew of the terrible tales of boys being raped while American troops never lifted a finger to help them. In a strict fundamentalist country like Afghanistan, where young women are kept guarded and almost hidden, the sexual behaviour of men often takes on the character of that common in prisons everywhere: that is, young and vulnerable men are brutally raped and often treated as “bitches” by older, tougher prisoners.

Only recently, I heard the horrible stories of a Canadian soldier with post traumatic stress who told of seeing a boy with blood running down his legs as two Afghan allies raped him. The soldier could do nothing and was told later only to buck it up. He told too of a translator, a hired Afghan, gleefully relating to him about the way he liked to use a knife on boys he raped.

We all saw the ghastly pictures from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Only now we know far uglier pictures and recordings have been suppressed, images and sounds of young Iraqis being raped and sodomized by American soldiers at the prison.

Those facts give us some realistic sense of the atmosphere in Afghanistan when American soldiers shot Omar in the back, falsely accused him of killing a medic, and sent a fifteen-year old boy off to years of torture.

Omar remains a prisoner in Guantanamo, although the torture mercifully has stopped, but it was announced only a couple of days ago that he would be among those who would stand trial in New York.

Trial for what? For trumped-up charges of murder? Trial for acts in war? Trial for being an abused child soldier? Trial under American laws which never applied to Afghanistan? A trial where every scrap of government evidence is tainted with years of torture and human-rights abuse? Where the government doing the trying itself has acted against countless laws and treaties in invading and occupying two countries?

If there were one breath of decency left in America’s establishment, Omar and the other abused prisoners would all be released and allowed to live the rest of their lives in peace. They are no threat to anyone, most did nothing deserving imprisonment, and those who may have committed something we would regard as a crime have been viciously punished already.

Only days ago, Obama’s White House Counsel Greg Craig was let go. Craig, an old friend of the President’s, had promised to make his administration the most transparent in history. Craig was the main force behind the Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo in one year.

Well, there is no sign Guantanamo is to be closed any time soon, and the policy’s chief advocate is gone. But more importantly, when we speak of American torture chambers, it is easy to forget that Guantanamo is only the most publicized of many. What horrors go on at places like America’s secret base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, or in a number of other locations, all part of the CIA’s vast international torture gulag, is anybody’s guess.

Obama has not uttered a whimper about the CIA’s euphemistically-named extreme rendition, a practice whereby thousands of people have been kidnapped off streets and sent bound to some of the world’s hell-holes for months of torture. Afterwards, having been discovered innocent of anything, they find themselves dumped in some obscure place like Bosnia without so much as an apology for their treatment.

Obama told people repeatedly during his campaign that American forces in Iraq would be withdrawn promptly, saying “you can bank on it,” and people believed him because Obama did not vote in the Senate for that illegal war, but most of America’s soldiers remain there still.

Obama appointed a commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has a background swirling with suggestions of black operations and dirty business, and now that ghastly man has said he needs forty-thousand more troops.

American Predator drones, guided by buzz-cut, faceless men with computer screens in locked rooms in America, now frequently invade Pakistan’s airspace. One can just imagine them hooting and pumping their arms like young men playing a computer game when one of their terrible Hellfire missiles strikes its target, the home of someone not legally charged with anything, killing everyone who happens to be nearby.

No, I only wish the ugly stain on America’s flag was keeping a dissident under house arrest.

Che Guevara: Until victory always! by Fidel Castro

On 18 October 1967, 10 days after Che Guevara’s death, the details of the revolutionary hero’s last moments finally emerged. Before a nation in mourning, Fidel Castro gave this speech. In this emotive text brought to you by Pambazuka News, ‘El Lider Máximo’ revisits the journey of his comrade-in-arms, revealing Che’s human side, his military prowess, his philosophy and his great revolutionary pedigree.


It was a day in July or August of 1955 when we first met El Che. On that night, as he himself recounts, he became part of the future Granma expedition. Although up to this point, the expedition had neither ships, weapons, nor troops. This is how El Che, together with Raul, became one of the first two names on the Granma list.

Twelve years have since gone by: Twelve years full of war and history, during which the cruel hand of death has taken many valuable and irreplaceable lives. But during this time, we have also seen the rise of extraordinary people in this our revolution. During this period, we have seen bonds of affection and friendship form between these men of the revolution and the ordinary people that defy description.

So tonight we come together, you and I, to attempt to put into words the feelings we hold towards this man, one of the best known, most loved and admired, and undoubtedly the most extraordinary of revolutionary comrades. To convey to him and to those who fought and fell beside him, and wrote and glorious and indelible page in the annals of history.

Che was the kind of man who drew the affection of others, by virtue of his simplicity, his character, his nature, his personality and authenticity, not to mention his other extraordinary qualities.

At the offset, he was just our troop doctor. However, little by little, bonds and shared feelings began to develop. He appeared to us to be consumed by a burning hatred for imperialism. Not only had his political consciousness grown significantly at this point, but he had also witnessed first-hand the case of Guatemala, where foreign imperialist mercenaries had destroyed the revolution. For him there was no need for convoluted arguments. He knew that Cuba was in the exact same situation. He knew that there were men willing to fight this situation, that these men were inspired by patriotism and a fierce revolutionary spirit. This was enough for him.

Thus, he embarked with us on the journey to Cuba towards the end of November 1956. I recall that the journey was particularly arduous for him; the circumstances of our departure had not allowed him to take along the medications he depended on. He endured the voyage in the grip of a terrible attack of asthma, with neither respite nor a word of complaint.

We landed and began our first advance on foot. We suffered our first defeat and retreat, only to regroup – as you are well aware – as the small remaining band of the Granma expedition. El Che was our doctor.

Then came our first victory, and El Che became a soldier, all the while continuing in his role as troop doctor. By our second victory, Che was not just a soldier, but also one of the most courageous, displaying for the first time the remarkable individual prowess that would henceforth define him.

Our force continued to grow and soon we were faced with a decisive and crucial battle in our campaign. It was a difficult one. We had unreliable intelligence, and had to attack a well-defended position on the coast, in broad daylight, with our rearguard under constant attack. At this tenuous point, a Herculean effort was required: Comrade Juan Almeida in the fore was faced with an impossible task. One of our flanks was completely exposed and neutralised and risked compromising the entire operation. Suddenly, there was El Che, still just a doctor, assembling three or four men, only one of whom was armed with a carbine, and launching a support attack from that flank.

On that occasion, he both fought and treated the injured with equal valour. He attended to wounded comrades, as well as to the enemy combatants, where necessary. And when we were forced to retreat, leaving behind all our arms, we embarked on a long march, harassed by different enemy forces. At this point we had to leave someone behind to care for the injured. Che stayed behind, with a small group of soldiers, treated the injured and saved their lives before they all later rejoined the column.

Next came the battle of Uverro, which was much the same. There was another occasion, also in the earlier days, that has never been discussed. Our little troop was betrayed and came under heavy aerial attack. We were retreating from the bombs, when I remembered that some weapons had remained in the hands of a few peasant fighters who had earlier fought alongside us and subsequently asked to rejoin their families. There wasn’t, at that point, sufficient discipline within our ranks. And in that moment I believed that those weapons were gone for good. I had hardly verbalised the dilemma when Che offered to go and recover the weapons. While bombs rained down on us, Che sped off on his mission.

This was one of Che’s enduring qualities; an immediate willingness to undertake the most dangerous of missions. This no doubt gained him admiration, and in double measure, since he was a man who fought alongside us and yet he was a foreigner. He was a profound man, whose spirit overflowed with dreams of battles all over the continent. He was a man who consistently showed a spirit of altruism and abandon: Always ready to take on the most difficult task and risk his life.

He earned the rank of commander and leader of the second column that was based in Sierra Maestra. Here he grew in stature and earned a reputation as a brilliant soldier in a war that would take him to even greater heights.

Che was a peerless soldier and peerless leader. From a military point of view, he was extraordinarily capable, courageous, and aggressive. His only weakness as a soldier was his excessive taste for attack and obliviousness to danger.

Our enemies can draw whatever conclusions regarding his demise, but Che was a lord of war! A master guerrilla! And he had limitless faith. He showed this on two specific occasions: The first was when he traversed an entire island at the head of his column, not knowing where he was going and achieving, Like Camilo Cienfuegos, a remarkable military feat. Again during the incredible campaign in the province of Las Villas, he mounted an audacious attack, and infiltrated a town defended by heavy artillery, tanks and several thousand infantry… with barely three hundred men. These two campaigns cemented his status as a unique leader, an exponent of revolutionary war craft.

There are those who, in his heroic and glorious death, try to debunk the truth and validity of his ideas on guerrilla warfare. A true exponent can die in his craft, especially one as dangerous as revolutionary war. But what will never die is the craft to which he dedicated his life and mind. What is so strange about an artist dying in his work? To tell the truth, it is surprising that he did not die earlier, on the numerous occasions when he risked his life for our revolution. And how many times did we prevent him from risking his life on minor skirmishes?

And so it happens, that in one of the many battles he waged, he lost his life. We do not know enough to understand the circumstances of this last battle, to judge whether he acted with excessive courage. But yes, we reassert that as a guerrilla, his Achilles heel was precisely his excessive audacity and disregard for danger. It is on this score that I differed with him, because for me, his life, his experience, his leadership qualities, his prestige, and all that he embodied alive, were worth much more than he considered himself.

What shaped his character most profoundly however, was the idea that men possess a value that is relative to history, the idea that causes are not defeated when those who champion them fall, that the inexorable march of victory continues, and will not stop because the leaders die. This is a fact: Who can dispute it? This is evidenced by his faith in people, in ideas, in leading by example. More so, as I said a few days ago, how we wish it was him who was victorious, to see him lead the victorious march, under his command. There are too few men with his experience, his vision and unique capabilities. All the same, we know how to appreciate his example and we cherish absolute conviction that his example will be followed and will inspire similar men to lead the people.

It is not easy to find as many qualities in one person as Che possessed. It is not easy for one to develop into a man such as him. I must say he was a difficult man to measure up to, and impossible to surpass. But I will say that men like him have an ability to inspire similar qualities in others.

In Che we admire not only the accomplished fighter. We admire the fact that he was able to, with just a handful of men, fight against an entire oligarchic army under the control of Yankee imperialism and supported by neighbouring oligarchies.

Searching the pages of history, one would probably not encounter another example of one who stood with so few against such mighty forces. This demonstrates Che’s self-belief, belief in others and their ability to fight for what’s right. Our enemies believe they debunked his general concept of the guerrilla, by having defeated his ideas on revolutionary armed struggle. All they succeeded in doing, with a stroke of luck, was to end his life. We do not know to what extent even this stroke of luck was aided by Che’s excessive enthusiasm that I have spoken of, and was evident even during our own liberation struggle!

In the battle of Dos Rios, the apostle of our liberation Jose Marti was killed. In the battle of Punta Brava, Antonio Macco, veteran of a hundred battles, was felled. In this nature of struggle, many patriots die, but this has never signalled an end to the Cuban cause. The death of Che, as I have said, is a hard blow, a terrible blow for the revolutionary movement. Through his death we have lost our most experienced and capable leader. But those who believe that we have lost his tactical genius, his ideas on guerrilla warfare, are wrong. The fallen mortal, who was always at the mercy of bullets, was a soldier, a leader a thousand times more capable and worthy than those who, by a stroke of luck, killed him.

How then shall the revolutionaries face this blow? How do they face this loss? What would Che say if he could speak about this loss? Speaking at the Latino-American Solidarity conference, he said, ‘If somewhere in the world death comes unexpectedly upon me, I shall welcome her, as long as my war cry is heard by another ear, and another hand takes up a weapon.’ The war cry will not be heard by one ear, but by a million willing ones. And it is not one, but a million hands inspired by his example that will reach out and take up arms! New leaders will emerge. Eager men with attentive ears and ready hands will need leaders. Those leaders will emerge from among the people like they have done in all revolutions. Admittedly, they will never see as gifted and experienced a leader as Che. Nonetheless, these new leaders will be formed and hardened in battle and emerged from amongst the millions of keen ears and willing hands that will reach out to take up arms.

We do not seek to imply that Che’s death will have an immediate effect on the revolutionary struggle. Not even Che envisioned an immediate victory from his battles against oligarchies and imperialism. His revolutionary spirit was prepared for a long struggle – five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, if necessary. It is within this perspective that we must understand the invincible force of his legacy.

Those who rejoice in Che’s death seek in vain to deny his successes and leadership qualities. Che was an extraordinary military leader. But as we remember Che, when I think of Che, it is not essentially of his military qualities. No. War is a means and not an end. War is an instrument in the hands of the revolutionary. Revolution is the goal. It is in the realm of ideas, feelings and virtues, and acute vision that the loss of Che hits us hardest.

Che embodied a rare range of virtues within him. He was a man of absolute integrity, of unfailing loyalty, of total sincerity, a stoic and Spartan man, a man of blameless conduct. When a man dies, there is a tendency to give speeches extolling his qualities. Rarely, however, can we extol them as truthfully as we do here with Che. He was a true example of revolutionary virtue. But he had another quality, besides his intelligence, willingness, experience – his heart. He was extraordinarily human and sensitive. For this reason, I reflect on his life and conclude that Che was indeed a rare man. He brought together the revolutionary virtues, sensitivity, and iron character, a will of steel and incredible tenacity.

To future generations he bequeaths a heritage of experience both on the battlefield and in the intellectual domain. He wrote with classic virtuosity, and his accounts of battle know no equal. His intellectual depth was impressive. He wrote with gravitas, and I have no doubt that some of his writings will live on as classics in revolutionary thought. His vigorous mind leaves us with a multitude of mementos, accounts of events that would otherwise have been forgotten.

As a tireless worker for the fatherland, he never took a day off. He took on numerous responsibilities: Head of the central bank, head of the planning commission, minister for industry, head of the military divisions, leader of political, economic and social delegations. His versatile mind allowed him to tackle any task. He ably represented the country at numerous international conferences, in the same evocative way he spoke to his troops under enemy fire. It was with the same assiduous approach that he served as a model worker at the head of every organisation where he was deployed. For him, there were no days off, no moments of respite: Passing by his office, I would see lights burning late into the night. He was always working or studying, or both. He was a tireless reader of everything.

His thirst for learning about the human condition was insatiable. He sacrificed sleep to study, and on statutory holidays he threw himself into voluntary work. He was the inspiration for, and the leading example of volunteerism, which is today shared by thousands across the country and continues to grow.

As a true revolutionary communist, he had an infinite faith in moral values and conscience. For sure, he believed that moral resources are the leaven of communism in human society.

He thought, debated and wrote prodigiously. On a day such as this we must acknowledge one fact: The writings of Che will have a perpetual place in the history of the Cuban revolution and of Latin American. The value of his ideals as a man of action, as a thinker, as a moral beacon, as a man of spotless moral virtue and conduct has universal value.

The imperialists sing songs of triumph over the death of Che the guerrilla; the imperialists celebrate the stroke of luck that handed them this redoubtable soldier. Perhaps they forget – or pretend to forget – that the soldier was only one facet of this great man. And when we speak of the pain of loss, this pain is for the loss of not only a soldier but a man of virtue and exquisite humanity. Our pain is of a lost intellect, and this is our greatest loss. It hurts us that he was only 39 when he died, and yet there was so much more that we would have reaped from him.

I know well the extent of the loss to the revolution, but this is also the weakness of the imperialist enemy; they believe that by eliminating the man they have also killed his ideas, virtues and his example. And they believe it so firmly that they shout it out loud, as if it was the most natural thing to kill him after wounding him in battle. They see nothing repugnant in their actions and admit it openly. As if it was their right as oligarchs and mercenaries to kill a captured enemy combatant. Worse yet, they explain why they did it – that bringing Che to trial would have caused undue attention, and that it would have been impossible the contain the presence of such a revolutionary in court. And worst of all, they hid his remains.

Whether or not it is true, they announced the incineration of his remains, showing their fear, their lack of conviction that by killing the man they killed his ideas as well.

Che perished championing the cause of the oppressed and exploited of the continent: Che died for the humble of the earth. The commitment with which he waged this battle is beyond the question, even for the most callous of his enemies.

Those who follow and live by his example, and fight for the downtrodden arise each day among the people. The enemy has realised this: It will not be long before they realise that Che’s death was a seed from which many of his kind shall sprout. I am convinced that the revolutionary cause on the continent will sprout from his death: That the revolutionary cause in Latin America will survive this blow.

From a revolutionary perspective, from our perspective, how can we learn from Che’s example? Maybe we believe we have lost him? It is true that we shall no more read new fruits of his pen, neither shall we hear his voice. But Che left the world a heritage, a rich heritage, and as the children of this country, we are the most privileged heirs. He left us his revolutionary ideals, his character, his will, his tenacity and his love of work. In one word, he left us his example. Che’s example must serve as an ideal for our people!

What should our revolutionary soldiers, our men conform to? No question, they should be like Che! What should the men of our future generations conform to? Like Che! How should our sons be educated? They must be educated in the spirit of Che! If we seek the model of the future man in every sense, this model must be Che! And with all our revolutionary vigour we wish that our children become like Che!

Che has become the ideal man, not just for our people but also for the whole of Latin America. Che exemplified revolutionary stoicism, sacrifice, tenacity and work ethic in the purest form. He practised Marxist-Leninism in its freshest, purest and most revolutionary form. Nobody has, to this point championed the internationalist cause of the proletariat better. This, above all else, is the example of Che!

In his heart and mind, Che had no veils, no prejudices no egotism or chauvinism: He was ready to shed blood for all peoples. He shed blood on Cuban soil when he was wounded in combat, fighting for the freedom of the exploited and oppressed. He shed blood in Bolivia for the downtrodden. He shed blood for all the people of America. He shed blood in solidarity with the Vietnamese by combating the oligarchies of Bolivia. It is for this reason, Comrades, that we must look to the future with resolve, decisiveness and optimism. We will always look to Che’s example for inspiration in battle, in tenacity and resolve in the face of the enemy, and inspiration in the spirit of internationalism.

Tonight, through this massive display of recognition, incredible in size, in discipline, and in devotion, we show our people’s ability to honour our fallen comrades, we honour those who have served us, we show our solidarity with the revolutionary struggle. We show that we will forever hold aloft the banner and the principles of the revolution. Today, in this memorable moment, we lift our spirits to Che with absolute optimism in the definitive victory of the people. We say to him and all those who have fallen by his side, ‘Until victory, always!’

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Fidel Castro Ruiz was the leader of the Cuban Revolution. This speech was his first official homage to Che Guevara, at the official announcement of his death. This text is an extract from ‘Eulogy for Che Guevara by Fidel Castro’ (Eric Losfeld, 1968).
* Translated from French by Josh Ogada.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

M Shahid Alam - How Eurocentric is your Day?

At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy.
This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?
The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.
Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.
Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.
I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.
How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.
Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start.
In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.
 Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.
When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.
Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.
If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’
When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.
At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, the scientific method, and secularism – hallmarks of modernity – are entirely of Western origin.  Are they?
During the eighteenth century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.
Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.
When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.
On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’
M. Shahid Alam is Professor of Economics, Northeastern University, Boston. He is the author of Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009). You may contact him at alqalam02760@yahoo.com .
http://us.macmillan.com/israeliexceptionalism (check out this book!)

Cartoon of the Day - Israeli Wall vs The Berlin Wall

Breaking The Australian Silence by John Pilger

07 November, 2009
Countercurrents.org

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war -- against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” -- a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother’s eight siblings used the word “stock” a great deal. You either came from “good stock” or “bad stock”. It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock – that we had what was called “the stain”.

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. “Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!” she said. And we did – until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our “bad stock”. There was outrage. “Your son,” my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, “is no better than a damn communist”. She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: “We are civilized today and they are not.” “They”, of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.
The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war – against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else’s country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: “It’s important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause.”

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard’s lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That’s the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn’t give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: “Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It’s a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name.” That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and they can’t know.”

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- “public relations”, or PR. “What matters,” he said, “is the illusion.” Like Kevin Rudd’s stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier’s family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia’s highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia’s military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the “army’s dirty work” in “urban combat zones”. What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

“I confess,” wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, “that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.” We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed – that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one??

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a ‘training team’, requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: “Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government.”

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about “the downward thrust of Chinese communism”. What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America’s objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. “We have to inform the British to keep them on side,” he said. “You are with us, come what may.”

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

“It’s time we sang from the world’s rooftops,” said Kevin Rudd in opposition, “[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom …”.

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: “Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if “we” do it. Terror is not terror if “we” do it. A crime is not a crime if “we” commit it. It didn’t happen. Even while it was happening it didn’t happen. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They’re in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an “arc of instability” that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this “full spectrum dominance”. More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion – that’s enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.
According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter who is president – George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush’s wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to “annihilate”. Iran’s crime is its independence. Having thrown out America’s favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn’t occupy anyone else’s land and hasn’t attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America’s behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It’s taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism – the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama’s case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: “The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst …. We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum.”

Compare that with Rudd’s words the other day. “I make absolutely no apology whatsoever,” he said, “for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia … a tough line on asylum seekers.”

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term “illegal immigrants” is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear – they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that’s not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, “turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe”. .

Why isn’t this spelt out? Why have weasel words like “border protection” become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There’s a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase “Palestinian land” to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as “the subject of negotiation”. That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as “the subject of negotiation”.

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family -- babies, grannies – are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a “right to exist” in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, “There’s going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now.”

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion -- “an episode”, according to one study, “more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”. In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. “Building democracy”, said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It’s set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canapés. They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.
There’s a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable “looking from the side”.

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it’s tricky, isn’t it? -- because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence – to no longer “look from the side” in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister’s wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don’t like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by “a person or persons unknown”. That’s how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie’s parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I’ve known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He’s in his sixties. He’s a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this -- as they do to black Australians, almost every day – Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, “doesn’t have a clear idea of what’s happening on the ground” in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international “shame list” for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That’s it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called “intervention”, which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in “unthinkable numbers”, according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the “unthinkable numbers”. Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been “quarantined”. What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk -- from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world’s richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent – not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.
I said, “You’re exhausted.”

He replied, “Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I’m just tired to death, mate.” He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as “a piece of political wreckage” that “the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away … in a way that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs”.

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don’t hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don’t look from the side – those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia’s historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew.
Which in sleep has fallen on you.
Ye are many – they are few.

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies -- socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor -- and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clichés that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people’s Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It’s true some people don’t give a damn – but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged – a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

“The struggle of people against power, “wrote Milan Kundera, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

In Australia, we have much to be proud of – if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we’ve progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world’s first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement – until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.
I believe the key to our self respect -- and our legacy to the next generation -- is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

Nahida Izzat: Equal Rights for serial killers and their Victims???

Can anyone see some ethical flaws with that?
I have no authority to talk in the name of all Palestinians, but I have previously stated that I DO NOT wish the zionist murderers, those of whom were directly or indirectly involved in massacres, theft of land, subjugation and oppression, to remain in Palestine after its liberation from the occupier, except of course for the very few good people amongst them – as no soul should carry the liability of another.
I reiterate, I do not wish the invader, occupier and criminal racists to stay in Palestine, the land that they have incessantly raped, destroyed and disfigured, nor do I desire them to be my neighbours.
They have shown no respect, no appreciation, and no love to this land or to her people.
They do not deserve to live there.
Many of our supporters freak out upon hearing this declaration of mine, they think that I am becoming an uncaring person, or turning into a radical hardliner; and some curiously and attentively listen, then, timidly and modestly, try to understand.
I will try here to elucidate by asking some simple questions, as to why I think it is unreasonable to make the premises of a JUST SOLUTION dependent upon our acceptance –as Palestinians, of giving the right of permanent residency and equal rights of citizenship to all zionist Jewish occupiers in our stolen land of Palestine.
Here are my questions:

•  Why do our supporters, progressives who advocate a one state solution, keep asking us – Palestinians – to share our land with those who acquired it by theft, military force and murder?
•  Would you share your home with the armed robber who came to steal from you?
• Should a thief get to enjoy the same rights of ownership to materials and assets that he acquired by armed robbery, as the person who was robbed?
• Should a colonialist imperialist occupier regime, who keeps hold of countries by terrorizing the indigenous population and perpetrating endless scores of bloodshed, not be severely sanctioned as legislated wisely by International Law ?
• Should the USA decide to move a few tens of millions of its citizens to Iraq or Afghanistan, confiscate Iraqi lands, give it to those colonizers, then demands that those citizens have equal rights with Iraqis or Afghanis; should we support the equal rights of those colonizers?
•  Should the Algerians have waited for the French occupiers to be magnanimous enough to give them "equal rights”?
•  Would Algeria be to the Algerians today, had they not fought for the liberation of their country against colonial France?
• Under International Law; is an occupying entity entitled to ANY rights whatsoever?
•  Why defend the “right” of the barbaric occupier – who has been engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide for over six decades, to stay in Palestine after its liberation, and this while keeping land and houses, villages, archaeological treasures, churches and mosques, libraries, they’ve forcibly stolen at gun point?
•  Why imagine that it is unrealistic to return the stolen land and property to its legitimate owners while ignoring its mode of acquisition by zionists?
•  Why instead of defending the right Palestinians to get ALL their country back; including: homes, orchards and land, supporters ask the victims to keep on giving, by the supposition that returning back stolen property creates "another injustice" to the OCCUPIER?
•  Why are we – Palestinians – continuously pressed to accept this scurrilous logic, by our supporters?
•  Are people so naïve that they don't realize that doing so, invariably corresponds in fact to… a full support – quasi unconditional, of the zionist thieves and their ideological core which deems colonising Palestine as a “Divine and historical right” for the Jewish people ?
•  What does the notion of Justice, social responsibility, fair dealing mean if we are to equate criminals with victims in terms of rights to ownership of stolen property?

My logic is simple:
Supporting "equal rights" in which the occupier gets the privilege of staying in the land they’ve looted and destroyed, while keeping hold of the estate of absentees, would mean a grave violation of the fundamentals of ethical foundations of human social interaction.
The message it gives: bullies, criminals, thieves are allowed to get away with MURDER. literally!
It is a carte blanche for bullies to do what they like, steal, kill, colonize, rape, oppress, torture…
Advocating "equal rights" between the criminal and victim, in which the criminal escapes punishment for his crimes, gets to keep stolen lands, while being rewarded by enjoying the fruits of his aggression in terms of total participation in decision and law making in the land he abused, is an assassination of the concept of justice, on which peaceful Civilization is built and needs to prosper.
Furthermore, I reiterate; any future decision on the status of ILLEGAL COLONIZERS in Palestine should be a PALESTINIAN DECISION; they, and ONLY they, can choose whether to allow their tormentors to stay or not.
فليتكَ تحلو والحياةُ مريرة
وليتكَ ترضى والأنامُ غضابُ
ألا ليتَ الذي بيني وبينكَ عامرٌ
وبيني وبينَ العالمينَ خرابُ
إذا صحَّ منكَ الودُ فالكلُ هينٌ
وكلُ الذي فوقَ  الترابِ ترابُ
يارب علمني ان احب الناس كما احب نفسي
وعلمني ان احاسب نفسي كما احاسب الناس
وعلمني ان التسامح هو اكبرمراتب القوة وان
حب الانتقام هو اول مظاهر الضعف
يارب اذا أسأت الى الناس فأعطني شجاعة الإعتذار
وإذا أساء لي الناس فأعطني شجاعة العفو
http://poetryforpalestine.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!92AA638F9B6EA940!5195.entry