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As capitalism descends deeper into crisis, the ruling class are getting more aggressive in their efforts to push the burdens of the slump onto workers’ backs. In these circumstances, the working class needs to be hard-headed about (a) just what they are fighting for, and (b) what grounds there are for confidence that their struggles will meet with success.
It would be comforting simply to hail the militancy of the striking construction workers, whose recent bold initiative in taking unofficial action over jobs has put the bosses and the government on the back foot, as winning a decisive victory for the British working class – comforting, but wrong.
It would be comforting to pretend that the battle lines coincided neatly with the struggle of labour against capital, and that the strikers and unions involved were free from the taint of “British jobs for British workers” chauvinism – comforting, but wrong.
It would be comforting to nod along with the New Communist Party’s line in the New Worker of 13th February 2009, under a headline blaring “Victory in Lindsey dispute”. How cosy it would be to nod sagely as Derek Simpson of Unite tells us that the Lindsey deal “establishes the principle of fair access for UK workers”, as the first stage in the battle against “employers who are excluding UK workers from even applying for work on construction projects”. How comforting it would be to pretend that the crucial issue confronting workers is not the failure of capitalism to guarantee employment to all workers but the failure of government to reserve a quota of the dwindling jobs pool for British workers.
In short, it would be far more comfortable all round to believe that workers really do now have the opportunity to unite behind the existing trade union leadership, guided by the political perspectives offered by the “left” of the Labour party and their sundry hangers-on, and that the only racist blot on the horizon is the fascist posturing of the British Nationalist Party (BNP) on the far fringes of “respectable” political life. Such illusions must indeed be comforting – but are completely false.
The BNP feeds off the racial prejudice sown amongst workers over a very long period by a labour aristocracy which has been specially groomed for this task by their imperialist masters. The natural habitat of this privileged layer of workers has throughout been the Labour party and the TUC which that party dominates. The emergence of “New” Labour has simply exposed the essentially bourgeois orientation of the party, now largely stripped of the protective colouration once provided by its proletarian membership.
The purpose of sowing racism amongst workers has been to divide and weaken organised labour. In the 19th century the scapegoat was the “Irish navvy”. In the 1930s it was primarily the “wandering Jew”, in the 1960s it was the West Indian and in the 1980s it was the “Paki”. Right now the scapegoats include migrant workers from Eastern Europe (their former socialist homelands now enduring capitalist meltdown), refugees from underdevelopment and war (both a consequence of imperialism), and just about anyone who is, or might conceivably be mistaken for, a Muslim.
This divide-and-rule use of racism is not just some random tactic happened upon by imperialism. By keeping the labour movement tied to the neo-colonial oppression meted out by the ruling class, the imperialist Labour party stands on guard on the exploiters’ behalf, ever ready to undermine the anti-capitalist efforts of the proletariat.
In the course of the latest “British Jobs for British Workers” furore, the bourgeois propaganda campaign has continued to play out through a very familiar division of labour. Whilst the angry victims of unemployment are persuaded to wrap themselves in the Union Jack and demand a “fair deal for Brits”, the “great and good” of the “left” Labour establishment present themselves as the guard dogs of “respectable” politics. On the one hand these gentry strive to pen the “wildcats” back within the legal pale, on the other they pretend to identify the BNP as the sole chauvinist threat.
By posturing as defenders of democracy against the BNP, apologists for the Labour party seek in practice to bind workers yet tighter to social democracy – the real pimp for fascism. Job done, these hypocrites can wash their own hands of any responsibility for the chauvinist panic they have helped to unleash, leaving it to the hysterical tabloids to cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s in this cautionary tale of “dirty foreigners stealing our jobs”.
Meanwhile, of course, the Labour party in government is free to go on building concentration camps for asylum seekers and their children, implementing racist immigration controls, criminalising trade union resistance and stacking ever higher the “anti-terror” legislation – purportedly against “Muslim terrorists”, but in reality a gun aimed at the working class if and when it decides to kick off. BNP, eat your heart out! With social democratic friends like this, who needs fascist enemies?
So what does “victory” look like in these times of crisis, and what does “defeat” look like? “Victory” may be claimed when a deal is cut with management whereby the workforce agrees to stomach a wage cut or short-time working in exchange for a promise of no more redundancies – yet. Or “victory” may be a deal cut with management to guarantee a quota of “British” jobs. However, jobs “defended” by such means can only demoralise the work force, pit one group of workers against another – and in any case pave the way for further retrenchment and defeats. To trumpet such deals as “victories” can bring only false comfort to workers in struggle, ill preparing them for yet tougher battles still to come.
The TUC and “left” Labour riposte runs as follows:
1. The recession is inevitable. If it’s anybody’s fault it’s the bankers, so we need a few heads to roll and a bit more regulation.
2. The best “we” can all do is sit it out and share the pain out a bit more “fairly”, helped along by a dose of Keynesian anaesthesia.
3. Anyway better times are round the corner, and it’s probably time we stopped “our” spendthrift ways and welcome a brave new world of virtuous austerity, ushering in a “greener” Britain.
By this logic, workers need to demand a “fair” distribution of wage cuts (you shave off a percentage of your fat cat bonus and we’ll swallow deteriorating pay and conditions) and a “fair” distribution of the rapidly diminishing jobs supply (with first place in the queue reserved for white British – otherwise the BNP will get in!).
The crisis is indeed inevitable – that much they have got right. But the scale of the crisis is at least on a par with the two great crises of the 20th century, each of which convulsed world society, spawning wars and revolutions. What workers need to be hearing is not soothing advice on how to collaborate with capitalism so that “we British” can weather the storm together. What workers need to hear is the truth: that their class interests are in open and direct contradiction with those of the exploiters; that organisation is the only weapon the proletariat possesses in its fight against capitalism; that everything which disunites workers also blunts that weapon of organisation; that complicity with oppression abroad and racism at home are the single most potent threat to the unity of the working class; and that the single most important task with which imperialism entrusts its social democratic gendarmes is to enforce that complicity upon the British working class.
So what does “victory” or “defeat” look like in these crisis days? To trample over the union-bashing laws, say “sod the ballot” and walk off the job – that is a most welcome proof of the continued fighting spirit of the working class. But to walk off the job and into the arms of the chauvinist TUC and Labour party – that is to court the most dangerous political setbacks for the whole class.
Victory must increasingly be measured in terms of the political gains workers win for themselves. Victory must be measured by how far workers can get out from under the disorganising influence of social democracy, how far workers can draw on their reserves of class militancy to challenge capitalism itself. Along this path, many tactics and many forms of organisation may present themselves. The workers in Waterford and elsewhere have refreshed memories on the potential of the occupation and work-in as tactics in the class war. Sooner than accept the capitalist’s plaint – “the order book is empty chaps, what can I do about it?” – the workers can demonstrate that it is the commodity market that is satiated, not the consumption needs of those who labour.
Attempts to rebuild militant organisation within the unions through initiatives like the National Shop Stewards Network – itself a logical development of the RMT’s own organisational break with Labour – will only thrive to the degree that they are able to cut loose from the false comfort offered by the “old hands” of “left” Labour and get serious about uniting the class to challenge the whole system of wage slavery.
As the working class learns to break the link with the Labour party, there are excellent reasons for anticipating a victorious outcome for its struggles. It is this message, not the false comfort offered by the “left” Labour swamp, which should command the attention of class-conscious workers.
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Via www.globalresearch.ca
Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghan history and the role played by the United States.
Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet “invasion” of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as “a good thing.” The actual story is not such a good thing.
Some Real History
Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators.
The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. “It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time.
The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.
The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes.
A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been “a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city’s university. Afghan women held government jobs—-in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women.”
The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world’s heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a “genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope.”
But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government’s dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children.
Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers.
A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military.
It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted–months before Soviet troops entered the country–that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas.
In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily.
Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style
The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts.
After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year.
Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as “a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.’”
Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA’s arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world.
Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah’s name against the purveyors of secular “corruption.”
In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban—heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan—fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes.
The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of “immorality” that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research.
The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed “immoral” were stoned to death or buried alive.
None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban’s oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women.
If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically.
The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water.
The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas
While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world.
US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific.
The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush’s war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL’s hopes for getting a major piece of the action.
Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a “rogue state” designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields.
In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention.
One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.
US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives.
The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world.
In the face of all this Obama’s call for “change” rings hollow.
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Via Pan African News blog.
An Open Letter To The People Of Zimbabwe: West Must Lift Sanctions Now!
Sign the letter (International Action Center)
First, let us begin by saying thank you. Thank you for demonstrating to and for African people and the world the courage and conviction that must be had to be self-determining in the face of insurmountable odds. Odds that would have crushed others with any less will to be free.
The road you chose for national liberation, which was carved through your first and second Chimurengas (armed liberation wars), cut an enduring path for us all to follow.
At this moment in time, when all the enemies of Africa have attempted to circle their wagons around you and crush your right to land and sovereignty, your leadership and the veterans of your struggle have rallied you to unite.
The words of one of Africa’s greatest patriots are so fitting to your struggle at this time:
“No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.”
–Patrice Lumumba’s last letter, December 1960
Lift the Sanctions Now!
As anti-war, community, political, youth, trade union activists and Pan Africanists along with other people of good conscience of all nationalities inside the U.S. and worldwide, we are declaring our full solidarity with the heroic struggle in Zimbabwe to defend the right to full independence and sovereignty. At the heart of this struggle is the ongoing fight for the control of African land, illegally and brutally stolen beginning in the late 19th century by racist British colonizers led by Cecil Rhodes.
The Lancaster House Agreement–signed by the representatives of the ZANU-ZAPU guerrilla movements and the British government in 1980–promised to legally transfer ownership of the millions of acres of arable land from a handful of very privileged white farmers back to the Zimbabwean people. The British government reneged on this promise while the people of Zimbabwe patiently waited for reparations in the form of land reform to happen. When their patience ran out after waiting 20 years for legal justice, the people had no other recourse but to expropriate the land themselves by any means necessary.
As a result of taking back what is rightfully their birthright: the land, the people of Zimbabwe have had to bear the full brunt of unmitigated ire and disdain on the part of the U.S. and British governments and more recently, the European Union governments. This disdain is reflected in the political demonizing of government leaders, notably President Robert Mugabe, who has defended the Zimbabwean people’s right to the land.
Defending the people’s right to the land, the fruits of their labor and the country’s resources means recognizing the right to self-determination and sovereignty without any imperialist interference. This is President Mugabe’s “crime” in the eyes of the imperialist governments and their media. Behind this demonizing of President Mugabe lies the real crime–the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., Britain and other Western countries that have resulted in the collective punishment of the Zimbabwean people.
These cruel sanctions for almost a decade have caused massive unemployment, malnourishment, hyperinflation, deeper poverty, lack of health care and fuel, the deterioration of the infrastructure and much more. A recent cholera epidemic that has claimed the lives of thousands could have been prevented if water purification chemicals had not been banned under the sanctions.
These genocidal attacks on the human rights of the people of Zimbabwe are very reminiscent of the sanctions imposed on the Palestinian population in Gaza by the U.S.-backed Zionist state of Israel. Let’s be clear–President Mugabe is not to blame for the economic crisis in Zimbabwe; it is the sanctions.
These economic sanctions along with other austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank are acts of aggression against the people of Zimbabwe with a goal of igniting political instability and regime change. We unequivocally denounce these sanctions as war crimes and the officials who initiated them as war criminals. Even as a national unity government has been implemented, the sanctions remain in place.
The people of Zimbabwe, like the people of Gaza, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere, are inspiring examples of resisting all forms of imperialist war and occupation. Millions of people around the world are facing an unprecedented economic crisis, including the U.S., where foreclosures, evictions, layoffs, utility shut-offs, lack of health care, tuition hikes and much more are skyrocketing at an alarming rate.
We face the same enemies at home as do the people of Zimbabwe–the worldwide clique of bankers and bosses who put their greed for profits before meeting people’s needs. Our solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe is not just moral in character but also material in character. Their victory is also our victory.
It is in this spirit of international solidarity that we will continue to work hand in hand with our sisters and brothers in Zimbabwe to demand from the U.S., British and other imperialist governments:
End the Economic Sanctions Now!
Full Land Reform for the Indigenous Zimbabweans!
Respect the Democratically Elected Leadership!
Stop the Demonizing!
Hands Off Zimbabwe!
Sign the Open Letter at http://www.iacenter.org/africa/zimbabweopenletter
Initial Signers:
Africans Helping Africans
December 12th Movement
Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST)
Friends of Zimbabwe
International Action Center (IAC)
Peoples Video Network
Dr. Molefi Asante, Pan-Africanist professor and author
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor, Pan-African News Wire
Amiri Baraka, playwright & poet
Sharon Black, All-Peoples Congress, Baltimore
Omowale Clay, December 12th Movement
Hillel Cohen, Doctor of Public Health, NY
Heather Cottin, Long Island Troops Out Now Coalition, NY
Chaka Cousins, All African People’s Revolutionary Party
Susan E. Davis, National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981*
Ellie Dorritie, ret., APWU*, WNY
Rachel Duell, prof., NJ
Andrea Egypt, organizer, Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice (MECAWI)*
Sharon Eolis, nurse-practitioner, ret., NY
Leslie Feinberg, Co-founder, Rainbow Flags for Mumia, NY
Sherry Finkelman, UFT L. 2*, NY
Sara Flounders, co-director, IAC
Julie Fry, V-P., Assn. of Legal Aid Attorneys*, NY
Michael Gimbel, del., NYC Central Labor Council*
Jerome D. Goldberg, attorney, Detroit, MI
Fred Goldstein, author, “Colossus Feet with Clay: Low Wage Capitalism”
Deirdre Griswold, editor, Workers World
Teresa Gutierrez, coordinator, May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights*, NYC
Dr. Sue Harris, co-director, Peoples Video Network
Imani Henry, Playwright/Performer
Larry Holmes, national organizer, Bail Out the People Movement*
Debbie Johnson, co-founder, Detroit Action Network For Reproductive Rights*
Prof. Dr. Leonard Jefferies, City College CUNY
Stevan Kirschbaum, chair, Grievance Comm., USW L. 8751*, MA
Michael Kramer, I.D.F. veteran, Veterans for Peace, Chap. 021*, NJ
Donna Lazarus, UFT*, NJ
Janet Mayes, Ph.D., NY
Dr. James McIntosh, Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People
Monica Moorehead, Millions For Mumia; editor, “Marxism, Reparations and the Black Freedom Struggle”
Milt Neidenberg, ret., Teamsters L. 840*, NJ
Frank Neisser, CWA L. 1701, ret.*, MA
John Parker, coordinator, IAC, Los Angeles
Viola Plummer, December 12th Movement
Susan Schnur, Transit Union L. 268*, OH
Atty. Malik Zulu Shabazz, New Black Panther Party
David Sole, Pres., UAW L. 2334*, MI
Paul Teitelbaum, IAC, AZ
Jill White, EdD, IL
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Appeal received from the Young Communist League of Yugoslavia (SKOJ).
Appeal to progressive forces worldwide: let’s stop the big capital puppet regime exterminate communism in Serbia!
With capitalism on the brink of global collapse and with people in Serbia rising their voice against the capitalist system, the Serbia’s puppet regime with its dirty campaign of lies and deceit is poised to seize the offices the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia (NKPJ) uses since 1991 and regularly pays for.
As the owner of the building in Nemanina 34 where on the third floor NKPJ has its offices, the bourgeois government, with the help of the media, such as the daily newspaper Press controled by the pro-imperialistic Democratic Party, wants the communists thrown out on the streets. They are not offering us any relocation to some new premisis.
The reason for removing the NKPJ out of the premises where they are legal residents for the last 18 years is the desire of the regime to destroy the leading factor of the national workers movement. The capitalists know very well that the NKPJ is integral part of the struggle against the pro-imperialistic and neo-globalistic policy.
Let it be known that the League of Yugoslavia Communist Youth (SKOJ) shall fight back! As on the October 5th 2000 counter-revolutionary coup, we shall be defending with our bare hands our rooms from all enemies, whatsoever!
SKOJ shall keep you informed about this new attack against our party.
We invite all progressive organizations and people in Serbia to support our struggle and help NKPJ !
Bourgeois hands off of the NKPJ!
Please send protest by email on predsednikvladesrbije@srbija.sr.gov.yu or fax 00381113617471
Secretariat of the SKOJ
Belgrade, December 30, 2008.
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Via the KOE.
Athens, 29 January 2009
An Appeal for Solidarity
Dear Friends and Comrades,
We urge you to read the following information and to express your solidarity:
Konstantina Kouneva, today 44 years old, is a Bulgarian immigrant living and working in Greece in order to support her family. She worked for many years as a janitor-employee of the private firm “OIKOMET”, which rents its employees in public sector’s enterprises. This firm is owned by Mr. Ikonomakis, old cadre of the social-democratic opposition party PASOK, and its legal councillor is Mr. Tzanis, former vice-minister of Interior Affairs (when PASOK was in power). The last years, Konstantina was cleaning the installations of the “Athens Piraeus Electric Railways (ISAP)”. The sector of janitors is one of the most exploited, as many employees are immigrants and subject of blackmailing by their bosses, while the state services and the trade-union bureaucrats do nothing in order to apply even the most basic and insufficient labour legislation.
Konstantina is an immigrant; a woman; a janitor. But she is much more than that: she is also a conscious unionized worker, and she became one of the most active leaders of the All-Attica Union of Janitors. This Union is one of the most combative, despite the fact that the trade-union bureaucrats (most of them belonging to PASOK and to the actual government right-wing party) do nothing to assist them in their hard struggle for the respect of the most elementary rights of their members and of the janitors as a whole. Konstantina soon became the soul of the Union: she was always in the first line of the struggle, unionizing her colleagues and demanding the respect of the labour legislation, despite the increasing threats and discrimination against her.
Konstantina is an example to us all. She is a model unionist, a personification of workers’ dignity and of belief in the rights of the working class. Konstantina is “stubborn”: she did not yield to the bosses’ threats. She was characterized as “the epitome of cheekiness” by her employee: “How can SHE, an IMMIGRANT single mother, a JANITOR, dare to challenge the system?” The initial blackmail and the transfer to night shift (so she could not take proper care of her child) did not intimidate her. She kept on fighting. So, anonymous death threats followed. She still did not yield. Until…
On midnight of 22 December 2008, while she returned from work to her home in a poor neighborhood of Athens, Konstantina Kouneva became the victim of murderous attempt. The goons of the bosses immobilized her and threw vitriol on her face. Then, they opened her mouth and threw the acid down her throat. Since that night, Konstantina fights for her life in the Intensive Care Unit in Athens. She has lost one eye and her face is burned; but the worst is that her digestive system does not exist anymore, burned by the acid. The doctors are struggling to save her life and her condition remains very critical. Her mother and her son Emmanuel (who suffers from cardiac decompensation) survive and take courage thanks to the active solidarity of hundreds of workers.
The “justice” and the police did nothing until today in order to find the perpetrators of this murderous attack against this valiant and genuine representative of the workers. The bourgeois Media did not find time and space to report her case. But her colleagues, all the honest workers, and the Radical Left organizations, did not let this crime to be covered by the guilty alliance of government, bosses, Media and “justice”. Today, despite the imposed silence of the mainstream Media, the whole Greece knows the case of Konstantina Kouneva. Many mobilizations of solidarity with Konstantina and with the militant trade-union movement took place since 22 December, including attacks against the ISAP installations and marches with the participation of thousands of people. The militant spirit of December’s Revolt gives life to this extraordinary flow of solidarity.
The Communist Organization of Greece is active part of this movement of solidarity, which moves under the slogan “Konstantina you are not alone”. We address an appeal to all the progressive forces to express their solidarity with Konstantina Kouneva, with the All-Attica Union of Janitors, with all those most exploited and “anonymous” militant workers who save the honor of the trade-union movement and continue its best militant traditions, bravely facing the attacks of the bosses and the hostility of the state and of the “official” trade-union leaderships.
The Union of the Working People, which is active in the movement of solidarity with Konstantina, would welcome your support and the support of trade-unions from your country. Please send solidarity messages to the Union of the Working People, which will transfer it to Konstantina and to her Union: enosiergazomenon@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (please send a copy to our email too). Also, consider the possibility to address the trade-unions and other workers’ organizations in your country and ask them to contribute financially in the fund-raising organized by the Union of the Working People for Konstantina. The details of the bank account opened by the Union of Working People for Konstantina are the following:
Bank Account Number (IBAN): GR3401106640000066474762649
Bank International Code – BIC: ETHNGRAA
Bank Branch: National Bank of Greece, Branch 664
Branch Address: Spyrou Patsi 2, GR-10441 Athens, Greece
Branch Phone Nr: +30-210-5224016
Account Holder: Papageorgiou Marriana (Union of the Working People representative)
In case you participate in the fund-raising, please inform the Union of the Working People and/or KOE.
We thank you in advance for any action you may undertake in order to express your solidarity and to condemn the murderous crime against the militant worker and unionist Konstantina Kouneva, who is always fighting for her life and for the rights of the most oppressed and exploited workers!
In solidarity,
Communist Organization of Greece (KOE), International Relations Department
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Via counterpunch.org
By Muhanmad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.
Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC’s coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. This partiality to truth, justice, freedom, compassion and tolerance it deems ‘within the consensus about basic moral values’. It is this consensus that the BBC spurned when it refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC)’s video appeal to help the people of Gaza.
The presumption that underlies the decision is that the BBC has always been impartial when it comes to Israel-Palestine. An exhaustive 2004 study by the Glasgow University Media Group – Bad News from Israel – shows that the BBC’s coverage is systematically biased in favour of Israel. It excludes context and history to focus on day-to-day events; it invariably inverts reality to frame these as Palestinian ‘provocation’ against Israeli ‘retaliation’. The context is always Israeli ‘security’, and in interviews the Israeli perspective predominates. There is also a marked difference in the language used to describe casualties on either side; and despite the far more numerous Palestinian victims, Israeli casualties receive more air time.
Many of these findings were subsequently confirmed in a 2006 independent review commissioned by the BBC’s board of governors which found its coverage of the conflict ‘incomplete’ and ‘misleading’. The review highlighted in particular the BBC’s selective use of the word ‘terrorism’ and its failure ‘to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation’.
These biases were once more evident in the corporation’s coverage of the recent assault on Gaza. A false sense of balance was sustained by erasing from the narrative the root cause of the conflict: instead of occupier and occupied, we had a ‘war’ or a ‘battle’ – as if between equals. In most stories the word occupation was not mentioned once. On the other hand the false Israeli claim that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005 was frequently repeated, even though access to the strip’s land, sea and airspace remain under Israeli control, and the United Nations still recognizes Israel as the occupying authority. In accepting the spurious claims of one side over the judgment of the world’s pre-eminent multilateral institution, the BBC has already forfeited its impartiality.
The BBC presented the assault as an Israeli war of self defence, a narrative that could only be sustained by effacing the 1,250 Palestinians (including 222 children) killed by the Israeli military between 2005 and 2008. It downplayed the siege which denies Gazans access to fuel, food, water, and medicine. It presented Hamas’s ineffectual rockets as the cause of the conflict when it was Israel’s breech of the six-month truce on November 4 which triggered hostilities. It described the massacre of refugees in an UNRWA compound in the context of Israel’s ‘objectives’ and ‘security’. The security needs of the Palestinians received scant attention. Selective indices were used to create an illusion of balance: instead of comparing Palestinian casualties to those suffered by Israel (more than 1300 to 13) the BBC chose to match them with the number of rockets fired by Hamas. No similar figures were produced for the tonnage of ordnance dropped on the Palestinians.
A parade of Israeli officials – uniformed and otherwise – were always at hand to explain away Israeli war-crimes. The only Palestinians quoted were from the Palestinian Authority – a faction even the BBC’s own Jeremy Paxman identified as collaborators – even though the assault was described invariably as an ‘Israel-Hamas’ conflict, much as the 2006 Israeli invasion was framed as an ‘Israel-Hizbullah’ war. This despite the fact that Israel made no attempts to discriminate between the groups it was claiming to target and the wider population. As one Israeli military official bragged, Israel was ‘trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel’. Indeed, given the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths, it would have been far more accurate to describe the assaults as ‘IDF-Lebanon’, and ‘IDF-Palestine’ conflicts.
To be sure, Palestinian civilian deaths were mentioned, but only in terms of their ‘cost’ to Israel’s image. Where Israeli crimes were particularly atrocious, the BBC retreated to condemning ‘both sides’. Israeli civilian deaths were elevated to headlines; Palestinians relegated to the bottom. The aforementioned massacre of Palestinian refugees received the same amount of coverage as the funeral of a single Israeli soldier. A hole in an Israeli roof from a Palestinian rocket often received the same attention as the destruction of a whole Gazan neighbourhood. There was also no investigation of Israel’s widely reported use of White Phosphorus, and of the equally illegal Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) munitions. The coverage of the unprecedented worldwide protests was also minimal. Critical voices were by and large excluded.
If there were no occupier and occupied in the conflict; no oppressor and oppressed, no state and stateless; then clearly assisting victims on one side would compromise ‘impartiality’. This view posits the Palestinian population as a whole as an adversary to the Israeli war machine. The BBC’s decision not to acknowledge the victims of the conflict is a function of its biased coverage. When it spent three weeks providing a completely distorted image of the slaughter carried out by one of the world’s mightiest militaries against a defenceless civilian population, it is unsurprising that it should fear viewers questioning how such a ‘balanced’ conflict could produce so many victims. And if the Israelis are able to look after their own, why should the Palestinians need British assistance?
When there is no mention of the violent dispossession of the Palestinians, or of the occupation; no mention of the crippling siege, or of the daily torments of the oppressed, viewers would naturally find it hard to comprehend the reality. For if these truths were to be revealed, the policy of the British government would appear even less reasonable. As a state chartered body, however, the BBC is no more likely to antagonize the government as a politician in the government is to antagonize the Israel lobby. Indeed, the BBC’s director general Mark Thompson can hardly be described as a disinterested party: in 2005 he made a trip to Jerusalem where he met with Ariel Sharon in what was seen in Israel as an attempt to ‘build bridges’ and ‘a “softening” to the corporation’s unofficial editorial line on the Middle East’. Thompson, ‘a deeply religious man’, is ‘a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors’ sources at the corporation told The Independent. Shortly afterwards Orla Guerin, an exceptionally courageous and honest journalist responsible for most of the corporation’s rare probing and hard hitting reports, was sacked as the BBC’s Middle East correspondent and transferred to Africa in response to complaints from the Israeli government.
But this decision to refuse a charity appeal has consequences that go far beyond any of the BBC’s earlier failings: as the respected British MP Tony Benn put it, ‘people will die because of the BBC decision’. It is so blatantly unjust that the only question the BBC management might want to mull over is just how irreparable the damage from this controversy might be to its reputation. The organization that only days earlier was reporting with glee a letter by Chinese intellectuals boycotting their state media is today itself the subject of boycotts across Britain, not just by intellectuals, but by artists, scholars, citizens and even the IAEA. Much like Pravda and Izvestia during the Cold War, today it is the BBC that has emerged as the most apposite metaphor for state propaganda.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch.org, and the co-editor of Pulsemedia.org. He can be reached at m.idrees@gmail.com
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Via The Guardian
Under the banner of the EU, and without parliament’s consent, the Home Office is taking data from children entering the UK.
Two months ago, the UK Borders Agency began fingerprinting foreign
children over six years old, from outside the European Economic Area and resident in Britain. At the time Jacqui Smith was congratulated for her tough line on issuing identity cards to foreign residents and no one, not even parliament, noticed that the biometric requirements applied to children of six. And parliament didn’t know because it was never asked to approve the policy.
Nowhere in the world are you more powerless than at a border. As a foreigner you also enjoy far fewer rights than locals. Do you think these children or their parents dare to speak up against the bureaucracy of the UK Borders Agency? In fact, no one has called the Borders Agency to account. Home Office officials I have talked to outside the agency were shocked that official government policy is now to fingerprint children.
When asked why (question 226407), the Home Office itself offers a much more solid defence: that the EU requires it. What it does not admit is that the British government is almost alone in pushing the EU to ensure that the age when fingerprinting can start is so low. Home Office officials pushed the EU to establish a standard age of six, despite opposition within other European governments. The next time you hear a government official support the EU, it is not just because it is a vehicle for “peace, prosperity and freedom”, but also because it is a vehicle to push through policies that the UK government would prefer not to pursue through the legislature at home.
The Bush administration rejected the contemplation of fingerprinting children, even within the controversial US-VISIT program that fingerprints visitors to the United States. The Department of Homeland Security is prohibited from fingerprinting children under 14, though it may well consider lowering it.
The Bush administration and the UK government have both pushed bad
policies through international bodies over the last eight years. The UN was compelled by the UK and the US to adopt shared standards to monitor foreigners and travellers around the world. In turn, when the government wanted to justify ID cards, it pointed to the international obligations to adopt biometric passports. When it collects information about British citizens’ travel habits, it will use “international standards” as a justification.
The bitter irony is that when the Bush administration tried to do exactly what these international standards propose – through collecting all travel information and other data about individuals to develop a risk score that they cannot correct – there was international condemnation. When the UK government wants to push exactly the same measures, and in fact collect even more data than the US, there is absolute silence because everyone in Britain thinks the UK government is just following international obligations.
Even if the Obama administration reverses course on treating entire populations as suspected criminals, the UK government will continue to hawk bad surveillance policy. Yet some of its most invasive practices and plans will never be reviewed by parliament. Just as Britons are powerless at the border of another country, they are also powerless within their own country.
Paradoxically, the European parliament pushed back against the European governments’ attempts to lower the fingerprinting age of citizens for their passports to six years old. Instead, the European parliament gained a “victory” recently by getting the standard raised to 12. So now the EU is requiring that teenagers across the EU be fingerprinted for their passports. Indeed, the UK government will now probably argue that it has to follow suit. The government has promised, however, that ID cards (which are based on passports, which are in turn based on EU “obligations”) would only be issued to people aged 16 or over. Will that pledge hold? Or will the fact that foreign residents in Britain have been forced to accept it and international standards, of course, be used as an excuse to issue children with compulsory ID?
•
Via The Guardian.
A group of 15 students are sitting at the back of the lecture theatre. Some are wearing scarves associated with the Palestinian movement, others hold the Palestinian flag. They are silent, apart from the few words one of them utters at the beginning of the lecture explaining why they are there: as part of a symbolic silent protest to show solidarity with the people of Gaza.
On the walls are photos of the conflict, showing men carrying blood-splattered children and posters calling for the massacre in Gaza to stop. In the corner of the room is a pile of sleeping bags and a table stacked with bottled water and cartons of fruit juice.
Over the last week, a storm of student protests has gathered over 16 universities across England, suggesting that students are awakening from the political apathy of which they are often accused. It’s enough to bring a tear to the eye of ageing sixties radicals.
Starting at the School of Oriental and African Studies, occupations in protest at events in Gaza spread to King’s College London and the London School of Economics (LSE), then out of the capital to Sussex, Warwick, Newcastle, Oxford, Essex, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Manchester Metropolitan, Bristol, Nottingham, Salford, and Kingston.
At Sussex, students have occupied the arts lecture theatre 24 hours a day sincea meeting with a controversial British Palestinian academic, Azzam Tamimi, on Tuesday night.
Simon Englert, 19, a second-year English literature and drama student from Belgium, is a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign on campus and one of the instigators of the 100-strong occupation. “It’s important for Universities to take a stand on this. We are told in history about the central role that students play in defending causes. So that is what we are doing today,” he says. “We invited LSE students along to our meeting and they helped to inspire this action.”
“The action has brought together socialists, Islamists and even students from the green movement who realise the detrimental effects of war on the environment,” says Gwen Wilkinson, a first-year psychology student from Newport.
A handful of Jewish students are involved in the protest, including Englert. “I don’t want to make a big thing about it,” he says, “but Israel doesn’t speak for the world’s Jewish community.”
The occupiers have issued the university with six demands including the issuing of a statement condemning the “atrocities perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip” and calling on it to disinvest from “companies complicit in human rights abuses”. At night they are using the internet facilities in the lecture hall to contact groups in the West Bank and are hoping to get through to Gaza.
Eleanor, 20, a first-year English and history student, has signed their petition. Although she says many students are attracted to Sussex by its radical history, she is reluctant to get involved in the occupation. “There are two sides to the story and Hamas were firing rockets into Israel,” she says.
And the occupation has passed some students by entirely. May Lam, a second-year media studies student rushing from the library, says: “I don’t even have time to do my own thing. It’s remote, in another country and there’s nothing I can do about it. There are so many problems here in the UK with a recession.”
At the LSE, veteran campaigner and politician Tony Benn told students: “I don’t believe in protesting, because that looks like you’ve lost the battle and don’t like it. I believe in making demands. This is more important than you realise at the moment, but when people get together and do something, that’s when history is changed.”
The numbers involved are a tiny proportion of the 2.5 million-strong UK student body, but they appear to speak for many more, and to have caught a wider mood. So far the protests have been peaceful and treated gently by the authorities, though some Jewish students have complained they feel threatened.
King’s students see the university occupations as a resurgence of the kind of action that took place during the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.
The zenith of British student political activism in the 1960s does not warrant a mention now, not even the protest by LSE students against Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), let alone those in 1968. Presumably for today’s students, many of whom were born in the early 1990s, the sixties are ancient history.
Unlike the anti-apartheid protesters, today’s students have the power of the internet at their disposal. They have put it to good use, publicising their campaigns through social-networking sites, making regular updates on blogs, and supporting one another through emailed messages of solidarity.
All the occupying students have issued similar demands: a statement from their vice-chancellor condemning the Israeli bombing of Gaza; severing university investment or links with companies supplying equipment used in the conflict; sending surplus computers and books to students in Gaza; scholarships for Gazan students – and no repercussions for their activism.
King’s students also want the university to remove the honorary degree it bestowed on Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, last November. In Oxford, students occupying the historic Clarendon building called on Balliol College to cancel a lecture series in Peres’s honour.
University officials have on the whole agreed to help students fundraise and send equipment to Gaza, but vice-chancellors have carefully sidestepped demands to issue political statements condemning Israel’s conduct.
So far, four of the occupying student groups have claimed victory: at the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Essex (after two days), and at Oxford (after just 10 hours), and the LSE. At the LSE, the student sit-in lasted a week but ended peacefully when the director, Sir Howard Davies, agreed to meet most of the students’ demands.
In a statement, he said he understood the students’ concerns and that the suffering of civilians in Gaza was “painful to observe”. But he refused to issue an official university condemnation of the conflict or to publish regular financial statements spelling out the university’s investment in companies involved in supplying arms to Palestine and Israel.
Michael Deas, a third-year environmental policy student involved in the LSE occupation, said students were “delighted” with the outcome. “It’s a real victory for student activism, particularly forcing the director into making a statement,” he said. Police evicted protesting students at the University of Birmingham after 12 hours.
In recent months, student activists have not limited themselves to sit-in protests over Gaza. They have boycotted careers fairs over university links with companies of which they disapprove – distributing badges, draping banners over displays and even dumping bags of coal to make their point.
The ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict has driven hundreds of students to act. But they still a tiny minority. Officials at Warwick – where students have demanded an end to links with BAE, GE Aviation, MBDA, Qinetiq and Rolls Royce – pointed out last week that more than 1,000 students had attended a careers fair where those companies were represented. Careerists, it seems, outnumber the idealists.
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Via the Telegraph.
One nine-year-old boy said his father had been shot dead in front of him despite surrendering to Israeli soldiers with his hands in the air.
Another youngster described witnessing the deaths of his mother, three brothers and uncle after the house they were in was shelled.
He said his mother and one of his siblings had been killed instantly, while the others bled to death over a period of days.
A psychiatrist treating children in the village of Zeitoun on the outskirts of Gaza City, where the alleged incidents took place, described the deaths as a “massacre”.
Rawya Borno, a Jordanian doctor, said civilians, including children, were rounded up and killed by Israeli troops.
Israel has denied the claims, dismissing them as Hamas propaganda, but said that an investigation is being conducted into soldiers’ conduct in the area.
In interviews with ITV News, Palestinians claimed that Israeli forces knowingly killed civilians in Zeitoun on the morning of Jan 14.
Abdullah Samouni, nine, described the moment his father was allegedly “executed” by Israeli soldiers.
Holding his arms in the air, he said: “He was surrendering like this. My father came out and they shot him right away.”
A boy named Ahmed said he was trapped for days in the wreckage of the shelled Samouni family’s house.
He said: “My mother was dead beside me, she was clutching my brother Nasser and they were dead. My brother Itzaq was bleeding for two days and then he died. My brother Izmael bled to death in one day. My uncle Talal was bleeding for two hours and he died. God bless them.”
Dr Borno said: “It’s a massacre. They collected them from their houses. They knew that they were civilians. They were children.”
When asked if Hamas had been in Zeitoun, Dr Borno replied: “Suppose that there is one of the fighters around, what is it to do with all these? Is the price to kill the family as a whole? Is this baby carrying a machine gun?”
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev suggested the claims could be Hamas propaganda and said an investigation was under way. However, he said that Israeli troops had reported that Zeitoun was “full of Hamas” militants and that soldiers encountered booby traps in “every house” in the village.
He said: “When people live in an authoritarian regime, when it’s clear there is an official message and the message is to give out atrocity propaganda, [then] at least I think we should ask questions.
“Hamas has an interest in sending out this sort of atrocity propaganda.
“What happened in that village is under investigation. I know from speaking to IDF officers that there was very serious combat in that village, that every house was booby-trapped, there were guns. Very difficult military operation.
“If there is any Israeli solder that has done something inappropriate of course that will be discovered and there will be law, but I am very concerned about a situation where children are manipulated, where everyone is on the same message.
“We know that village was full of Hamas fighters. It’s against the rules of engagement of the Israeli army to shoot innocent civilians.”
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Via KCNA
Pyongyang, January 21 (KCNA) — The DPRK extends full support and solidarity to the Palestinian people in their struggle to drive the Israeli aggressors out of their land and take back the legitimate rights including the right to self-determination.
A DPRK delegate said this in a speech made at a special meeting of the UN General Assembly held on Jan. 15 in connection with Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip of Palestine.
He bitterly dismissed the said aggression as a wanton violation of the UN Charter and international law and an undisguised provocation to the Mid-east peace process.
Referring to the fact that the Israeli army mercilessly killed innocent Palestinians and ruthlessly deprived them of the cradle of their life as evidenced by the destruction of dwelling houses, public establishments and schools, etc., he went on:
What should not be overlooked is that the Israeli army’s dreadful atrocities are being committed under the strong patronage of the U.S.
The reality proves once again that the U.S. is the harasser of world peace and the worst human rights abuser.
It is not only the legitimate rights but also the just cause for the Palestinians to struggle to retake the occupied territories and build a sovereign and independent state.
Israel should stop all military actions in the Gaza Strip and immediately withdraw its aggressor armed forces from there.
