US scholars endorse academic boycott of Israel

By Rachel Zoll and Karin Laub, AP, Dec 16, 2013

NEW YORK (AP)—The American Studies Association on Monday endorsed a boycott of Israeli universities, the largest group of U.S. scholars to do so.

About one-third of the group’s more than 3,800 members voted, approving the boycott by 66 percent. Last April, the smaller Association for Asian American Studies, which has about 800 members, became the first scholarly group in the U.S. to support an academic boycott of Israel.

"The ASA condemns the United States’ significant role in aiding and abetting Israel’s violations of human rights against Palestinians and its occupation of Palestinian lands through its use of the veto in the UN Security Council," the American Studies Association said in a statement explaining the endorsement.

The vote, which is largely symbolic, is nonetheless a sign of the increasing momentum of the international boycott movement against Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians. While the movement—which presses for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel—has scored some successes in Europe and elsewhere, it has had far less influence in the United States, Israel’s closest and most important ally.

Kenneth Stern of the New York-based American Jewish Committee called the American Studies Association decision “abhorrent.” Stern said he was particularly disturbed by language in the group’s statement accompanying the resolution, comparing Israeli policies to apartheid and referring to the “Zionist settler-colonial project.”

In the Palestinian territories, civil society groups launched a boycott-divertment-sanctions campaign against Israel in 2005 and have created a far-flung network of activists, including in Europe and the United States. The impact on Israel’s robust economy has remained largely negligible.

Still, activists say they have changed the tone of the debate.

"It is not anymore a taboo, like it was before," to call for a boycott, said Luisa Morgantini of Italy, a former vice president of the European Parliament and pro-Palestinian activist. "More and more people are aware of the violation of human rights, and also of the colonization that the Israelis are doing in the land of Palestine."

While some activists call for a boycott of Israeli companies and institutions, others attempt to target Israel’s settlement enterprise. Close to 600,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. Last week, the Dutch water company Vitens, the largest supplier of drinking water in the Netherlands, decided to cut ties with Israel’s national water carrier over its operations in West Bank settlements.

At the same time, Britain’s overseas trade body issued a warning to firms investing in Israeli settlements, saying ties to the Israeli communities established in the West Bank could be bad for business. Last month, Israel acceded to a European funding ban on projects in the occupied territories by assuring the EU it would not spend money received under a technology-sharing pact in the West Bank or east Jerusalem.

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Stand to Reason- What is Faith?

by Greg Koukl

Faith & Wishing

I don’t like the word “faith.”

It’s not that faith isn’t valuable. True biblical faith is essential for salvation. But faith is often deeply misunderstood in a way that hurts Christianity and harms Christians.

Some think that having a level of certainty about the truth of Christianity makes “belief” unnecessary or irrelevant. That kind of knowledge undermines genuine faith and offends God.

The reasoning goes something like this. We all know God wants us to have faith. In fact, without faith, it’s impossible to please Him (Hebrews 11:6). However, gathering evidence for God and Christianity leaves little room for faith. After all, how can one have faith in something he knows is true? Faith, then, is opposed to knowledge. Therefore, apologetics undermines the faith project and thus displeases the Lord.

On this view, faith is believing the unbelievable, clinging to your convictions when all the evidence is against you. Faith is a “leap,” a blind, desperate lunge in the darkness. When doubts or troubles beset us we’re told to “just have faith,” as if we could squeeze out spiritual hope by intense acts of sheer will.

This view of faith reduces Christian conviction to religious wishful thinking. We can hope, but we can never know.

But this will never work. Someone once said, “The heart cannot believe that which the mind rejects.” If you are not confident the message of Scripture is actually true, you can’t believe it even if you tried.

The “I just take Christianity on faith” attitude can’t be the right approach. It leaves the Bible without defense, yet Peter directs us to make a defense for the hope that is in us. (1 Peter 3:15)

Also, the biblical word for faith, pistis, doesn’t mean wishing. It means active trust. And trust cannot be conjured up or manufactured. It must be earned. You can’t exercise the kind of faith the Bible has in mind unless you’re reasonably sure that some particular things are true.

In fact, I suggest you completely ban the phrase “leap of faith” from your vocabulary. Biblical faith is based on knowledge, not wishing or blind leaps. Knowledge builds confidence and confidence leads to trust. The kind of faith God is interested in is not wishing. It’s trust based on knowing, a sure confidence grounded in evidence.

The following biblical examples suffice to make my point.

Blood, Boils, Frogs, and Flies

Israel’s exodus from Egypt was depicted in a clever animated film called “The Prince of Egypt.” After seeing the movie, my wife and I spent time reading the original account in the Hebrew Scriptures.

Though I’d read this passage a number of times, something jumped out at me I hadn’t seen before, a phrase God kept repeating over and over.

Reading the encounter with God at the burning bush, we sense Moses’ reluctance to be God’s deliverer. And it’s understandable. Why would Pharaoh, the most powerful leader in the world, submit to a renegade? Why would two million Hebrew slaves follow a murderer and a defector?

“What if they won’t believe me, or listen to me?” Moses demurred. “What if they say, ‘The Lord hasn’t appeared to you’?”

What God didn’t say in response is as important as what He did say. He didn’t say, “Tell Pharaoh he’s just going to have to trust you on this one. Tell the Hebrews they’ve got to have faith.”

Instead God asked, “What’s that in your hand?”

“A staff,” Moses answered.

“Throw it on the ground.”

So he threw it down, and it became a serpent.

“Stretch out your hand,” the Lord said. “Grab it by the tail.”

Reluctantly, Moses did as he was told. When he grabbed the snake, it became a staff again.

“Do this,” God said, “and then they’ll believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers, has appeared to you.”

More signs followed that got the people’s attention: the river of blood and frogs covering the land; the gnats, flies, and locusts; the boils and the pestilence; the hail, the darkness, and finally the angel of death. All for one purpose: “That they might know there is a God in Israel.” This phrase is repeated no less than ten times throughout the account. (Cf., Exodus 6:7, 7:5, 7:17, 8:10, 8:22, 9:14, 9:29, 10:2, 14:4, and 14:18)

What was the result? “And when Israel saw the great power which the Lord had used against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord, and they believed in the Lord and in His servant Moses” (Exodus 14:31).

Note the pattern: a powerful evidence (miracles, in this case), giving the people knowledge of God, in Whom they then placed their faith. Knowledge –some level of certainty—went before belief in each of these cases.

God didn’t ask Pharaoh, the Hebrews, or even Moses for mindless faith, blind leaps, or wishful thinking. He demonstrated His power, giving them good reason to believe, resulting in obedience. First, Pharaoh and the Hebrews were given good reason to know. This then grounded their investment of faith (active trust) in God. (Of course, Pharaoh’s “faith” was not expressed in humble surrender leading to salvation, but in obedience under compulsion. The point is, he was compelled to act based on the unmistakable evidence of God’s power.)

In the animated feature, Miriam sings a song of deliverance which includes the refrain, “There can be miracles when you believe.” But the reality was just the opposite. Miracles didn’t follow belief; they preceded it. Acts of power led to knowledge, which then allowed faith to flourish.

Taking the Easy Way Out?

Fast forward to the New Testament and you’ll find the same pattern in the life of Christ.

In Mark 2, we encounter Jesus speaking to a group gathered in a home in Capernaum. A crowd blocks the front door, keeping a paralytic—being carried by his four friends—from gaining an audience with the Healer. The only way in is from above, so they dig through the earthen roof and lower the deformed man down on a pallet.

Jesus is impressed. Seeing their faith He says to the paralytic, “My son, your sins are forgiven.”

His words offend the scribes, though, who grumble among themselves at such an audacious claim. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” they whisper.

Jesus, aware of their complaint, puts a question to them. “Which is easier to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven’ or ‘Arise, take up your pallet and walk’?”

How would you respond? If you were in Jesus’ position, would it be easier for you to claim to forgive sins or claim to heal paralysis? The correct answer is it’s always easier to boast about something no one can check up on than to claim to have supernatural powers and be put to the test.

Jesus knew it looked like He was taking the easy way out, until His next remark: “But in order that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—He then turned to the paralytic—”I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.” Then, in the sight of everyone, the paralytic got up and got out.

Jesus gives us the same lesson we find in Exodus. He proves something that can’t be seen—the forgiveness of sins—with evidence that can be seen—a dramatic healing. Jesus heals “in order that you may know.” Once again, the concrete evidence allows the doubters to know the truth so they can then trust in the forgiveness Christ could give.

The Apostle Peter

On to the book of Acts and Peter’s dramatic sermon on Pentecost. The crowd is both amazed and bewildered at the manifestations of the Spirit they see with their own eyes.

Peter takes his stand before the throng. It isn’t intoxication they witness , he tells them, but inspiration, prophecy being fulfilled in their midst by the hand of God. He recounts that Jesus—even though attested to by miracles, signs, and wonders—had been murdered at the hands of godless men. Death couldn’t hold Him in the grave, though. He has risen. Not only did King David himself foretell such a thing; Peter and the rest of the disciples had witnessed the risen Christ themselves. The promise of the Father, the Holy Spirit, was now being poured out in a way that Peter’s entire audience could see and hear.

He closes with a statement tailor-made for all those who think that certainty somehow diminishes genuine faith: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” (Acts 2:36)

When the crowd hears the evidence—the miracles, the fulfilled prophecy, the witnesses of the resurrection, the powerful manifestations of the Spirit in their midst—the people are pierced to the heart. They are convinced of their error, they know the truth, and thousands believe, putting their trust in the Savior.

Hear, See, Handle, Believe

The Beloved Disciple brings it all together for us in 1 John. He opens his letter with the evidence of his own eyewitness encounter with Christ. Notice how many senses he appeals to:

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled concerning the Word of Life—and the life was manifested, and we have seen and bear witness and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us—what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also….

Then he closes his letter like this:
by Greg KouklAnd the witness is this, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has the life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have the life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, in order that you may know that you have eternal life. (1 John 5:11-13)

To John, faith wasn’t a blind leap. It wasn’t wishing on a star. It was grounded in evidence that led to knowledge. It was certain.

The record is clear from the Old Testament, to the Gospels, from the very beginnings of the early church, to the epistles of the apostles: Biblical faith isn’t wishing, it’s confidence. It’s not denying reality, but discovering reality. It’s a sense of certainty grounded in evidence that Christianity is true—not just “true for me,” but actually, fully, and completely true.

Spiritual growth involves increasing our knowledge and our certainty of God. So there are two things here: first knowledge, and second confidence in what we know.

How do we increase confidence? Wish harder? Hope against hope? Stop our ears to the sounds of the critics without, and ignore the doubts of the agnostic within? This will never work, because confidence cannot be fabricated. It must be earned. As you gather substantiating evidence, your confidence grows automatically and your faith is deepened.

Faith is not about wishing, but about confidence, and the facts make the difference. You get a hold of the facts, you study, you learn—even a little—and you’ll realize you’re not just wishing on a star about eternal things. You’ll realize Christianity is really true.

And that changes everything.

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Peter O'Toole: 'No one can take Jesus away from me.'

Laura Turner, Religion News Service, Dec 15, 2013

Peter O’Toole, one of the last century’s greatest actors whose roles in films such as “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Lion in Winter” earned him eight Oscar nominations but no wins (a record), died Saturday (Dec. 14) at the age of 81.

O’Toole grew up in Leeds, England, the son of an English nurse and an Irish bookie. He was evacuated from Leeds during World War II and sent off to Catholic school, where the nuns forced him to become right-handed.

O’Toole recalled one time in his childhood when his father, Patrick, “stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: ‘Jump, boy. I’ll catch you. Trust me.’” O’Toole jumped and fell onto the floor with a thud. “The lesson, said his father, was ‘never trust any bastard.’” It’s hard to imagine that lesson not bearing itself out in O’Toole’s worldview.

In a 2007 interview with The New York Times, O’Toole described himself as a “retired Christian.” He played, among others, the pope (twice–onstage early in his career and in “The Tudors”), a Catholic priest (“Fore Greater Glory”), and a British lord who thought he was Jesus (“The Ruling Class”).

O’Toole left his Catholic faith behind in his childhood, but often had high praise for the figure behind Christianity. Speaking of his admiration of the Sermon on the Mount, O’Toole said, “No one can take Jesus away from me…there’s no doubt there was a historical figure of tremendous importance, with enormous notions. Such as peace.” He didn’t have much use for the institution of the Catholic church, but he held Jesus in reverence.

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Silent Night, Holy Night!

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louvar-nos-periodos-dificeis

Louvar nos períodios difíceis! from Dennis Molinski

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Goliath: The Book That May Delegitimize Israel’s Apartheid State

By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, December 12, 2013

Thanks to the Israel lobby’s slander campaign against Max Blumenthal and his new book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, I not only learned things about the Jewish state that I never knew, I also made a wonderful discovery—but more about that later. I confess I probably wouldn’t have read Goliath if not for the controversy it has generated: those squeals of pain coming from Israel’s apologists had to mean something, I figured. Either the book was egregiously unfair to the Jewish state or else a brilliant chronicle of its depredations against ordinary human decency. I had to read it in order to find out.

Goliath is an easy read on a subject that makes many very uneasy: although it’s fairly long, it consists of many short vignettes told in the first person, chronicling Blumenthal’s travels across the length and breadth of the Holy Land—and the story it tells is alarming, especially for those who count themselves among Israel’s friends.

For years, the Israeli body politic has been moving rightward—i.e. toward militarism, ultra-nationalism, and religious fundamentalism—to such a degree that it seems unrecognizable to those of us who belong to the older generation. We remember—or think we remember—the Israel of Exodus, the brave little upstart that defied the odds and, surrounded by enemies on every side, made the desert bloom with the verdant fields of a liberal democracy.

Goliath proves that liberal democracy is now, for all intents and purpose, defunct: indeed, it may have never existed in the first place. The book demonstrates this on every page with brutal real-life firsthand reporting. Starting off slowly, Blumenthal paints a portrait of a society living in a bubble, with the Israeli Ashkenazi aristocracy on top, the Mizrahi drone-workers charged with police work and other non-elite tasks near the bottom, and the Palestinian helots on the lowest rung, eking out a problematic existence with all the legal and economic factors pointing to their eventual expulsion from Israeli society. As the rightist wave engulfs what had been the dream of socialist Zionists to build an egalitarian society, and turns it into a bastion of religious nationalism and outright racism, Blumenthal moves through this society-in-transition with the unforgiving eye of a born documentarian, mercilessly exposing the hypocrisy, mendacity, and criminality of a country that is coming unhinged.

How else are we to explain the fact that, during the attack on Gaza, IDF soldiers killed an eight-year-old child, one Ibrahim Awajah, and used his corpse for target practice? This was no isolated incident: one by one we read the stories of disgusting atrocities carried out by the IDF—how they lobbed a shell into the living room of Izeldeen Abuelaish, a Harvard-trained fertility doctor and medical researcher who had helped many Israelis have children. The shell decapitated two of his daughters and “shredded” his other children “to pieces.” As this was going on, Israelis sat on Parash Hill, near Sderot, which offers a clear view of the Gaza Strip, watching the slaughter and cheering as if it were the latest hit movie—spectators to their own moral degeneration.

As if they were quite well aware of what they were becoming—indeed, had become—ordinary Israelis reacted with hatred against anyone in their midst who held up an unflattering mirror to their war hysteria. Right-wing demagogues like Avigdor Lieberman, now Foreign Minister, demanded that antiwar protesters be jailed. At Tel Aviv University, the youth organizer of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu said antiwar protesters should be deprived of their citizenship, to raucous cheers: the university’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism to the contrary notwithstanding.

As Operation Cast Lead came to a horrific and bloody close, a poll taken by Daniel Bar-Tal, an eminent political psychologist, found that more than half of Israelis wouldn’t allow an Arab into their homes. A full 68 percent wouldn’t live in the same building as an Arab, while 63 percent said Arabs represented a dire security threat to the state of Israel. Forty percent said the government should deport them all or “encourage” them to leave. The backdrop to this was a rising tide within the political and clerical class of brazen racism. Israel’s Chief Rabbi, Ovadiah Yosef, screeched “It is forbidden to be merciful to the Arabs. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable!”

Blumenthal’s portrait of Avigdor Lieberman is something the scandal-plagued right-wing demagogue and former bouncer may never recover from: while Lieberman has earned the contempt of the liberal Ashkenazi “coastal elite,” as Blumenthal dubs them, in America he is less well-known. Blumenthal’s account of how this “hulking bear-like man” hunted down a twelve-year-old Arab boy and beat him up for punching his son—slamming him into a wall and “leaving him with a painful head wound”—captures the essence of a born bully. A legal “fixer” allowed the thuggish politician to get off with just a fine.

An immigrant from Russia, where he was a nobody, Lieberman came to Israel and founded a party, Yisrael Beiteinu, that is the most successful fascist political formation in the world: the party advocates a truculent mix of domestic authoritarianism and territorial expansionism, the expulsion of all Arabs and the forced “Judaization” of the West Bank. His nationalism, however, is entirely secular: he and his followers have no interest in the Torah, or the 3,000 year tradition of Jewish moral and political law. As Blumenthal puts it, “He was content to allow the army to define who was a Jew.” His “politics melded authoritarian populism with a distinctly anti-clerical strain, appealing to anyone who loathed the presence of Muslims, radical leftists, and the ultra-Orthodox.”

Unfortunately, as Blumenthal writes, “there was no shortage of citizens in Israel who held this sentiment.”

Lieberman’s crudeness is well-known to observers of Israeli politics, but in the US his ties to Mafia figures may be less widely understood: Michael Cherney, a Russian Jewish oligarch, paid Lieberman half a million through a Cypriot shell firm, and is known to have ties to criminal gangs in the former Soviet Union. The two, says Cherney, were in daily communication. Another supporter of dubious moral character: Martin Schlaff, whose connections to the East German Stasi made him a rich man. Evidence of Schlaff’s $3.5 million payoff to Ariel Sharon in exchange for permission to build a casino in Israel was rendered moot when Sharon fell into a coma from which he has yet to emerge. Schlaff then became a major backer of Yisrael Beiteinu, as Lieberman took in millions in mysterious payments through a company run by his daughter. After gaining 11 Knesset seats, Lieberman was named Minister of “Strategic Threats” (Warmongering) in Ehud Olmert’s rather shaky government. Today he is Foreign Minister, after being temporarily kicked out of the government while being investigated for fraud, the David Duke of Israel to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s George Wallace.

What is particularly shocking in Blumenthal’s book is its exposure of the explicit racism that has become commonplace in Israeli society. When Anastasia Michaeli, a Yisrael Beitenu MK, served on a panel charged with choosing someone to represent Israel in the Eurovision song contest, she objected to one contestant because he “looks Arab.” In her defense, she stated: “I am looking at this competition from a Zionist point of view.”

If so, it isn’t any sort of Zionism the older Ashkenazi elite would recognize. But that’s the point: the “new” Zionism is something else altogether.

The theme of this book is encapsulated in its portrayal of one of my heroes—or, I should say, my newest hero, since I had no knowledge of him before reading Blumenthal’s work: his name is Yeshayahu Leibowitz. The Israeli polymath, who fled Germany in 1933 and emigrated to Palestine where he taught brain physiology at Tel Aviv University, starting teaching philosophy at the age of 72 (!), was an Orthodox Jewish scholar who edited the Encyclopedia Hebraica. As the Independent describes him,

“On the one hand he was a libertarian, an extreme form of classical liberalism, and believed that human beings should be free to determine their way of life without any state interference. On the other hand, he was an ultra-Orthodox Jew who insisted that the state and religion must be separated completely to avoid corrupting each other.

“Leibowitz argued vehemently for two positions: that holding any state as a value in itself was inherently fascist and that sanctifying any piece of land, including Israel, was a form of idolatry. Very soon after the Six-Day War, Leibowitz predicted that if Israel didn’t withdraw immediately from the occupied territories, all of the state’s energy would be tied up in ruling another people against its will.”

While he was indeed a Zionist, who believed—as I do—that Jews living in Palestine have the right to national self-determination, it was Leibowitz’s critique of the particular circumstances of Israel’s nation-building project that allowed him to see the society he was living in in realistic terms. In a prescient essay published on the eve of Israel’s great victory in the 1967 war—when the rest of Israeli society was celebrating and the Likud party was getting its start as the “Movement for a Greater Israel”—the man Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel” foretold the fate of the Jewish state if it absorbed its new conquests into the realm:

“The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress the Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”

And so it came to pass.

Israel, “unpartitioned Eretz Israel,” would become like the apartheid state of South Africa, Leibowitz warned: racism would overwhelm the culture. Instead of filling the concrete needs of its citizens, the Jewish state, Leibowitz said, would devote itself to “the specific tasks of government and administration of this strange system of political domination.”

When it was revealed that an Arab woman who had been arrested for belonging to the Palestine Liberation Organization was handcuffed while she gave birth to her child, Leibowitz took to calling the perpetrators—the government—”Judeo-Nazis.” As the IDF overran the Occupied Territories, he wrote that the final phases of Israel’s moral and political degeneration would see the appearance of “concentration camps”—at which point “Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”

The vast system of prisons and “administrative detention” camps set up by the Israelis to detain thousands of Palestinians held without charge—as well as the giant concentration camp being constructed to intern African refugees who have turned up seeking asylum—is well documented in Goliath. Indeed, we follow Blumenthal as he takes us into the heart of this monster, and he tells the story of resisters and just plain ordinary people caught up in the maleficent wheels of an oppressive system. As both Palestinians and Israelis-with-a-conscience are arrested arbitrarily, held without charges, and abused, we hear their cries for help.

What kind of a “liberal democracy” segregates its citizens according to their ethnic affiliation, with entire Palestinian towns—whose inhabitants are indeed citizens of Israel—walled off from “Israel proper” and forced into destitution and ruin by petty regulations forbidding commerce and building renovation? What kind of “democracy” has a police state apparatus fully mobilized to detect and crush even the slightest form of nonviolent dissent, responding to peaceful demonstrations with bullets and brutal repression? The knock on the door in the night—a feature of Nazi Germany, or any totalitarian system—is a regular occurrence in Goliath: activists, both Palestinian and Israeli, who are organizing for peaceful change are harassed, arrested, beaten, and attacked. The chilling conformity of Israeli society, where “patriotism” and militarism are the norm, is depicted here in disturbing detail.

Particularly shocking is the degree to which segregationist policies, going far beyond those of the old American South, are openly and even enthusiastically advocated even by the ostensibly “liberal” Ashkenazis. The stretching of the law to allow for “Jews only” housing, roads, and entire towns is dramatized over and again by the stories of people whose fate is a plaything in the hands of a police state: one couple must give up their sun-filled home in a good area for life in a dark slum because one doesn’t have the right papers and will be deported if they move. Villages where people have lived since the time of Christ are demolished, the inhabitants driven out and “Jewish only” communities arise out of the ruins—all paid for and justified by the Israeli government, which is being funded to the tune of $3.5 billion per year by you and I.

Yes. Israel still has a relatively free press, but military censorship is a reality: yes, they have elections, but the electorate is poisoned by a crazed nationalism and a racist streak that resembles the Ku Klux Klan at its height: formally, Israel is still a “democracy,” but Leibowitz was right when he declared that “Israel is the only dictatorship that exists today in the enlightened world.” It is a “democratic” despotism based on blood, soil, and conquest, and it is fast losing even its formal democratic character: e.g., when the Supreme Court makes decisions the government disagrees with, such as the right of Palestinians who are Israeli citizens to organize protests, the court is ignored. And nothing is said. Increasingly there are attempts by the far right to make it impossible for open dissent to assert itself: laws demanding a “loyalty oath” of all citizens, and blatant attempts to stifle speech are increasingly in the air. The desire for an “Israeli Putin,” a strong leader who will dispense with the “democratic” niceties, transfer the Arabs out, and unite the nation around the vision of a Greater Israel, is palpable. This is the vision of Lieberman and his fellow rightists, many of whom emigrated from Russia in the 1980s, and it is increasingly the Israeli reality.

Of particular concern to the Israelis and their Western amen corner is the movement for nonviolent resistance to the apartheid state, which is being taken up by both Palestinians and Israeli leftists, including the BDS campaign to boycott Israeli goods: this movement has been ruthlessly crushed wherever it has arisen, but it just keeps bouncing back—much to the consternation of the publicity-conscious regime, which is horrified by the prospect of the whole world watching as nonviolent Palestinians and their Israeli comrades are brutalized by their thugs. The Israelis are truly the Bull Connors of the new millennium.

It is now illegal to advocate boycotting Israeli goods inside Israel, or to memorialize “the Nakba”—the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians from their historic homeland. Mob attacks on Palestinians right in the center of Jerusalem are commonplace, along with vicious attacks—including the arson of an orphanage—on African refugees. This coarsening—brutalization, really—of Israeli society is something one imagines Leibowitz would have despised had he lived to see it. The mere fact that the Israelis routinely arrest and torture Palestinian children as young as eight should be enough to delegitimize the “Jewish state” in the eyes of the world—that is, if enough eyes see it.

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"180" Movie

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"O Holy Night" By David Phelps

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Libya militia says oil terminals to remain closed

By Esam Mohamed, Associated Press, Dec. 15, 2013

TRIPOLI, Libya (AP)—The head of a Libyan militia that has shut down most of the country’s oil terminals for months said Sunday they will remain closed because the government has failed to meet his group’s demands—mainly a share of revenues for their eastern region.

Ibrahim Jedran, leader of the militia in eastern Libya, had promised to reopen the oil terminals Sunday following mediation from influential tribal leaders. Jedran accused the government of corruption and of “watering down” his group’s demands.

Jedran, head of the so-called Political Bureau of Barqa, is a leading advocate of a federal state in which each region has some autonomy as was the case from 1951 until 1963 under King Idris when Libya was divided into three regions: Cyrenaica, or Barqa, Tripolitania and Fezzan. Like other Libyan regions, easterners have long complained of discrimination by the central government in Tripoli.

He had declared the formation of an autonomous regional government and the formation of a regional company to handle sales of oil in the last two months, increasing the challenge to a central government already weakened by the proliferation of militias. The central government rejected the declarations but has not moved against the militia that shut the terminals since last summer.

"The closure of the oil terminals in eastern Libya will continue. Work will not resume there because of the failure to reach an agreement with the interim government to implement the conditions of the region," he said in the eastern town of Ajdabiya, 480 miles (800 kilometers) southeast of Tripoli. "We will not reopen the terminals because of the corruption of the interim government which doesn’t care about the real demands of Libyans."

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Ali Zidan said that the government is spending billions of dollars of its foreign reserves to compensate the losses of oil revenues. Libya has been losing millions of dollars every day after production dropped from 1.4 billion barrels a day to a few thousand since the closure.

On Friday, Zidan said the government can force open the terminals but would rather avoid the bloodshed.

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If a Drone Strike Hit an American Wedding, We would Ground Our Fleet?

By Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, Dec. 16, 2013

On my wedding day, my wife and I hired a couple of shuttle vans to ferry guests between a San Clemente hotel and the nearby site where we held our ceremony and reception. I thought of our friends and family members packed into those vehicles when I read about the latest nightmarish consequence of America’s drone war: “A U.S. drone mistakenly targeted a wedding convoy in Yemen’s al-Baitha province after intelligence reports identified the vehicles as carrying al Qaeda militants,” CNN reported, citing government sources in Yemen. “The officials said that 14 people were killed and 22 others injured, nine in critical condition. The vehicles were traveling near the town of Radda when they were attacked.”

Can you imagine the wall-to-wall press coverage, the outrage, and the empathy for the victims that would follow if an American wedding were attacked in this fashion? Or how you’d feel about a foreign power that attacked your wedding in this fashion?

The L.A. Times followed up on the story and found slightly different casualty figures: “The death toll reached 17 overnight, hospital officials in central Bayda province said Friday. Five of those killed were suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda, but the remainder were unconnected with the militancy, Yemeni security officials said.”

More than a dozen dead, many more injured, and an unknown number of survivors whose lives have suddenly taken a nightmarish turn the likes of which we cannot imagine, and all for the sake of five people suspected of ties to al-Qaeda. How many actual al-Qaeda terrorists would we have to kill with drones in Yemen to make the benefits of our drone war there outweigh the costs of this single catastrophic strike? If U.S. drone strikes put American wedding parties similarly at risk would we tolerate our targeted-killing program for a single day more? Our policy persists because we put little value on the lives of foreign innocents. Even putting them through the most horrific scene imaginable on their wedding day is but a blip on our media radar, easily eclipsed by a new Beyonce album.

The Obama Administration dishonestly talks of “surgical” drone strikes, as if surgeries ever result in double digit casualties. “Before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured—the highest standard we can set,” President Obama promised back in May. The CNN story about this latest strike says, “The convoy consisted of 11 vehicles, and the officials said that four of the vehicles were targeted in the strikes.” Is attempting to pick off alleged militants while in a wedding convoy with innocents the highest standard we can set to avoid civilian deaths? If so, the results speak for themselves.

In that same May speech, Obama said:

Remember that the terrorists we are after target civilians, and the death toll from their acts of terrorism against Muslims dwarfs any estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes. So doing nothing is not an option. Where foreign governments cannot or will not effectively stop terrorism in their territory, the primary alternative to targeted lethal action would be the use of conventional military options. As I’ve already said, even small special operations carry enormous risks. Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage.

And invasions of these territories lead us to be viewed as occupying armies, unleash a torrent of unintended consequences, are difficult to contain, result in large numbers of civilian casualties and ultimately empower those who thrive on violent conflict.

Does anyone believe that, if not for our lethal drone program, the United States would’ve sent the Air Force or ground troops to fire on this wedding party? The thousands of drone strikes we’ve carried out in recent years suggest that drones decrease the cost of lethal action so much that the U.S. takes it more often now than we would if we didn’t have a drone fleet at the ready—and not, as their defenders sometimes argue, that drones are saving us from air strikes and ground invasions.

Finally, Obama says that drone strikes are ordered only against targets who pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans.” Is anyone else skeptical that the targets in this wedding convoy would be imminently attacking us right now if not for those Hellfire missiles?

Even if you disagree with the growing global opposition to America’s targeted-killing program, and believe that the frequent use of lethal drone strikes is necessary, reflect on the U.S. reaction to killing more than a dozen people in this wedding convoy, including many innocents. The moral course, if we must have a drone program that puts civilians at risk, would be to apologize for any terrible mistakes that we make, pay reparations to the wronged survivors, and explain what steps will be taken to insure nothing like this will ever happen again. Instead, according to CNN, “U.S. officials declined to comment on the report.”

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