Uploads from AnomalousNYC, tagged gaza, with geodata

Tamer Nafar

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:13:46 -0800

Tamer Nafar of the Palestinian hiphop trio DAM, performing in the Lower East Side, New York City, November 2005.

You can buy their latest album on itunes, or you can hear them here:
Who's a Terrorist? (video)
Born Here (video)

Old trailer for Slingshot Hiphop

Wanna know more?
Slingshot Hiphop

"We saw that we don't rule our own destiny
So we tried to grasp it in our hands and it died
All we asked for was a breath
And what did we sacrifice for it?
Also a breath..."

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:38:52 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Palestinian children in the Occupied West Bank town of Al-Khalil protest the Israeli closure of dozens of West Bank food charities.

Four years ago, before the Israelis completely cut off most food aid, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right To Food Jean Ziegler reported that Palestinians were suffering from hunger at levels comparable to the worst famine zones of sub-Saharan Africa. He described the imposition of famine as a "Weapon of Mass Destruction", and pointed out that Palestinian famine and poverty is an intended result of Israeli policies. Ziegler reported that one in ten Palestinain children would suffer some degree of permanent physical and mental retardation as a result of the prolonged malnourishment. He noted that when there is more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet, "a child that dies from famine is murder."

As these children protested, many children were being murdered in Gaza, but not by famine. Four children from the Dardouna family were killed while playing soccer when Israel bombed an adjacent mosque in Jebaliya. A 13 month old girl was killed by Israeli terror-bombing in Beit Hanoun on friday. On saturday alone, 52 Palestinains were killed, and by the time you read this, many more will be dead. The latest irruption of Israel's collective murder campaign in Gaza began on wednesday with a massive barrage of missiles which have continued nonstop now for four days.

The vast majority of Israel's victims, as always, are civilians and children. The large number of children being killed is to some extent predictable, given Israel's indiscriminate bombing of densely populated cities and the fact that more than half of the 1.5 million people imprisoned in the Gaza Strip are under the age of 15.

As the Palestinian death toll approaches 70, here's how the racist scumbags at the Jerusalem Post summarized the ongoing mass slaughter: "Two IDF soldiers were killed and five others wounded during a military operation meant to combat the ongoing Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli cities in the western Negev.”

....

A partial list of the dead of the last few days - this doesnt include today's killathon:

. 1. Zaki Abu Zeid, 20, killed on 2/27 in Al Boreij refugee camp.

2. 2. Omar Atiyya, 26, killed on 2/27 in Khan Younis.

3. 3. Aziz Masoud, 21, killed on 2/27 in Khan Younis.

4. 4. Ahmad Al Mtawwaq, 19, killed on 2/27 in Khan Younis.

5. 5. Abdullah Adwan, 22, killed on 2/27 in Khan Younis.

6. 6. Mohammad Abu A Haseen, 22, killed on 2/27 in Khan Younis.

7. 7. Ibarhim Zaki Maseemy, 20, killed on 2/27 in the West Bank.

8. 8. Hammad Mirshid Masalha, 60, killed on 2/27 in Jabal Al Rayyis.

9. 9. Minwir Mohammad Abu Mandeel, 34, killed on 2/27 in Jabal Al
Rayyis.

10. 10. Bilal Kamal Hijazi, 13, killed on 2/27 in Jabalia.

11. 11. Suleiman Khalil Hamada, 12, killed on 2/27 in Jabalia.

12. 12. Anas Al Mana'ma, 10, killed on 2/27 in Jabalia.

13. 13. Mohamamd Al Bora'ey, 5 months, killed on 2/27 in Gaza.

14. 14. Luay Qneita, 19, killed on 2/27 in Al Shujaeyya.

15. 15. Ahmad Al Samry, 23, killed on 2/28 in Al Shujaeyya.

16. 16. Amjad Al Amraty, 24, killed on 2/28 in Al Shujaeyya.

17. 17. Maher Abu Al Reesh, killed on 2/28 in the West Bank.

18. 18. Ahmad Al nadi, killed on 2/28 in Gaza city.

19. 19. Jawad Tafish, killed on 2/28 in Gaza city.

20. 20. Hamza Al Hayya, killed on 2/28 in Gaza city.

21. 21. Abdullah Al Zweydi, 23, killed on 2/28 in Beit Hanoun.

22. 22. Awad Al Banna, 27, killed on 2/28 in Beit Hanoun.

23. 23. Deeb Dardouna, 11, killed on 2/28 in Jabalia.

24. 24. Omar Dardouna, 14, killed on 2/28 in Jabalia.

25. 25. Ali Dardouna, 8, killed on 2/28 in Jabalia.

26. 26. Mohammad Hammouda, killed on 2/28 in Jabalia.

27. 27. Rami Khalifa, 27, killed on 2/28 in Gaza.

28. 28. Mohammad Al Hilu, 24, killed on 2/28 in Al Shaty' refugee
camp.

29. 29. Ramiz Nasser, 27, killed on 2/28 in Beit Hanoun.

30. 30. Tal'at Salaah Rmeilat, killed on 2/28 in Al Sudaniyya.

31. 31. Amjad Al Sakani, 12, killed on 2/28 in Gaza

32. 32. Khalil Ahil, killed on 2/28 in Gaza.

33. 33. Mohammad Masoud Al Hilu, killed on 2/28 in Gaza.

----------------------

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Nayef Haslamoun, Al-Khalilo/Hebron, Occupeid West Bank, February 28, 2008
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

The Experiment

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:13:45 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

"Hermetically under siege, after decades of occupation and years of Intifada in which Israel destroyed the little infrastructure that the Strip ever had, following many months of total embargo on everything except basic food products, which brought the economy to a halt, with daily invasions of Israeli tanks and extra-judicial killings by Israeli airplanes, and now with gasoline supplies cut and electricity supply to be reduced soon, the Gaza Strip (1.5 million people, 80 percent refugees) is no longer the world's biggest open-air prison. It's a huge laboratory for human experimentation, run by the Israeli army."
--Ran HaCohen, Beware of Barak, Dec. 27, 2007

Welcome to Planet Gaza
September 21, 2007
By Pepe Escobar

It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded "international community"? It's the standard "three monkeys" - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.

This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet's decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a "hostile territory" has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun "gradually" to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.

Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza's hospitals will not be affected.

There's more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha'aretz so nicely put it, this is just a "plan to limit services to civilians".

Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.

This comes on top of other "restrictions" already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be "fundamental humanitarian needs".

It was up to AMIN (Arabic Media Internet Network), Ramallah's information site, to put things in perspective. Ramallah is in the West Bank. The West Bank is "friendly". Gaza is "hostile". So West Bank residents can now "thank God for having escaped this collective punishment" - even though they still have to contend with walls, curfews, military incursions, arbitrary arrests and a thousand checkpoints.

Residents of the "hostile entity", according to AMIN, will closely follow the example of the "friendly entity", where walls and blast walls still bloom. The (good) point is to have been classified as "friendly"; "It's better being half 'enemy' than being it full-time, it's more comfortable being half deprived of electricity and fuel, it's better being half exposed to air raids, it's more benign to be half destructed than totally."

AMIN also points out that Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah government in the West Bank can always blame Hamas' government in Gaza for this sorry outcome. Then the "secular" will win over the "Islamists". But there's still a choice to be made. Gaza, full of shame for being branded an "enemy", may succumb to Israel's dictates. Or the West Bank, full of shame for being branded "friendly", may fight Israel's dictates. Conclusion: "What's worse under occupation, to be an 'enemy' or to be a 'friend'?"

And now for the monkeys
While this was being announced, US President George W Bush's Sunni Arab allies in the "axis of fear" - from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Jordan, Kuwait and the Persian Gulf petromonarchies - had better fish to fry, from taking over almost half of the London Stock Exchange (Dubai, Qatar) to turning the screws on internal repression and fanning the specter of "the Persians". "Classic" al-Qaeda (not the diet Iraqi brand), through resident oracle Ayman al-Zawahiri in person and Osama bin Laden's voice, was more interested on its new video-op calling for a jihad against "infidel" Bush ally President General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.

It was up to a lone, meek United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to urge Israel to "reconsider" its decision - which once more is "contrary to Israel's obligations towards the civilian population under international humanitarian and human rights law" (as if that other occupying power, the US in Iraq, was giving a damn to the suffering of the Iraqi civilian population). Ban should have also explained what "hostile entity" means in international law: nothing.

Israeli strategy is to bring down the "quality" - non-quality, rather - of life in Gaza to unbearable levels, thus sabotaging any attempt by Hamas to govern the Strip properly. The crude Qassam rockets fired over Israel - the apparent reason for the blockade - are not even fired by Hamas, but by al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, for instance, connected to Islamic Jihad. The actual blockade anyway comes on top of any further military incursions, soon to be decided by Israel, according to the Israeli press.

The US subscribes to everything. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - who is right in the middle of intense lobbying for a US-sponsored, and already discredited, November peace conference - incredibly said that Hamas "is indeed a hostile entity. It is a hostile entity to the US as well." Nobody asked Rice what kind of "peace" she is exactly lobbying for.

Rice added that the US "will make every effort to deal with their [Palestinian] humanitarian needs". How? By bombing Gaza with cornflakes? "Hostile" Hamas called the plan "a declaration of war". "Friendly" Palestinian Authority chairman Abbas - who meets his friend Bush next week in New York - only called it "oppressive". It was up to one of his ministers, Ashraf Ajami, to dare to use the crystal-clear words "collective punishment".

Voices of reason in Israel, such as Meretz (leftist political party) chairman Yossi Beilin, at least had the courage to denounce the plan as "foolish as well as dangerous".

University of Michigan professor and Informed Comment blogger Juan Cole has defined Gaza as "the worst outcome of Western colonialism anywhere in the world outside the Belgian Congo". And just like contemporary Belgium in relation to the Congo, Israel will never admit to what it has inflicted on Palestine.

No wonder Likud superstar Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu loves these Likudnik-style methods. It proves how the majority of Israel's political elite is still wallowing in the mire of Zeev Jabotinsky, a Zionist in love with fascism in 1930s Europe. This treatment of Palestinians bears all the elements of fascism: radical (Israeli) nationalism; racism (the demonization of Palestinians as a sub-race); colonialism; expansionism (the goal of Israel); a penchant for a military dictatorship (the preferred method for ruling Palestinians); and absolute indifference to the point of despising the (Arab) poor.

As much as peace and security for Israel are more than a just cause, the colonization and hardcore repression of the "friendly" West Bank and "hostile" Gaza are nothing but fascism. Professor Toni Negri, author of Empire and Multitudes, is one among throngs of top public intellectuals appalled that among so much cosmopolitanism at a global level, many Jews are simply not part of it, and are still attracted by "archaic and barbarian" ideologies such as Zionism.

Get me to my gulag on time
Planet Gaza may be our contemporary Congo - the heart of darkness, especially when taken in conjunction with that other heart of darkness, Iraq. There's nothing about a "Korea model" in Iraq - as much as Washington will try to keep an array of permanent military bases in Mesopotamia.

The logic of the US in Iraq is pure Planet Gaza. French geopolitical master Alain Joxe, in his book L'Empire du chaos, has been one of the few who have identified Palestine as the ultimate live textbook on urban repression - a "technical experiment" in the ultimate red zone carefully studied by the Pentagon, with all its known attributes (blast walls, checkpoints, pinpoint military incursions and "acquisition of targets", collective punishment, etc).

The Israeli wall penetrating the "friendly" West Bank like a dagger has been replicated by mini-walls in Baghdad. As much as Israeli armed settler/missionaries do their ethnic cleansing in slow motion in Palestine, mercenary Blackwater and their ilk do the dirty work in Iraq. "Friendly" West Bank Fatah and "hostile" Gaza Hamas are mirrored in Iraq by the "good" (Sunni tribes, collaborator Shi'ite parties Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, Da'wa, the Kurds) and the "bad" (Sunni guerrillas, al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, the Shi'ite Mahdi Army).

Iraq is actually Planet Gaza redux. According to British polling organization ORB, no fewer than 1.2 million Iraqis may have died violent deaths, most of them caused directly or indirectly by the occupation, since 2003. That's close to the entire population of Gaza.

Invisibility is also part of the logic of Planet Gaza. Invisibility at least for US and Israeli exceptionalism - as both could not possibly assimilate the hard truth pointing to US and Israeli administrations killing loads of innocent Arab civilians. The "international community" - an antiseptic construct that basically means the US and western Europe - may not see it; autocratic, incompetent, corrupt Arab leaders may not see it; but the real world - public opinion in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Asia, Russia - sees Planet Gaza for what it is. It's not about "al-Qaeda". It's not about "Islamo-fascist terrorists". It's about fighting neocolonialism. It's about national liberation. And - barring any possibility of dialogue - it's about perennial blowback.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Eyad Albaba, Sept. 20, 2007, Bureij Refugee Camp, Gaza; mother of Mahmoud Kassassi wails at her son's death. Mahmoud, 17, was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in his home in the Bureij Refugee Camp.
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

The Pantry of the Future-Devourers

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 11:04:16 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

As Palestinians mark the dismal 40th Anniversay of the Israeli Occupation, Israel rains bombs on the crowded cities and refugees camps of Gaza, among the most densely populated pieces of land in the world.

Behind all the bluster, it is seldom mentioned that nearly half of the population of the Gaza Strip are under the age of 14, and that the majority of all victims of Israel's daily attacks are children and other civilians.

Virtually all of these children have either personally witnessed people murdered by israelis, or lost one or more family members or relatives to Israeli attacks. Virtually all of them, unsurprisingly, exhibit symptoms of acute forms of psychological trauma.

Virtually none of these children have ever been permitted outside the walls which enclose Gaza. Until recently, most of them had never even seen the ocean, even though the Strip is only two miles wide, because of Israeli movement restrictions and the Jewish-only beachfront settlements which took up one-third of the land of Gaza.

Of the 1,500,000 people crammed into the Gaza prrison - most of them refugees from Israeli ethnic cleansing - fully 1,100,000 of them are entirely dependent on ouside food aid to survive.

Perversely, Israel routinely blocks and restricts the delivery of food and water to gazans, and constantly lobbies other states to do the same. As a consequence, according to the UN, Gazans are suffering from malnutrition at levels comparable to the worst famine zones of sub-saharan Africa, and one in ten of these children will suffer some degree of phsyical and mental retardation.

This week, former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliayhu declared that every one of these children is a legitimate target for Israeli attack. He proposed that the launching of rockets from Gaza against the city of Sderot, which recently killed two Jews, permits Jews to indiscriminately kill "even a million" Palestinians.

The Jerusalem Post notes that his religious ruling will be distributed to every synagogue in Israel.

....

Eliyahu advocates carpet bombing Gaza
by Matthew Wagner
Jerusalem Post, May. 30, 2007

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides' commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu's son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

"If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand," said Shmuel Eliyahu. "And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop."

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. "I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them."

source

....

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Ibrahim Abu Mustafa, May 28, 2007, Gaza.
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

The Victim Must Be Silenced

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Wed, 30 May 2007 10:44:43 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Jewish residents of the southern Israeli town of Sderot light fires in the streets to protest what they see as an insufficiently lethal response by the Israeli government to the problem of Palestinian bottle rockets being lobbed over the Gaza wall towards their city.

Ironically, the people that Sderot residents are so eager to see killed are precisely the people who used to live in Sderot.

Sderot was formerly the Palestinian village of Najd, a small Palestinian city present at least since the 1500s. Najd was completely ethnically cleansed by Jews in a single day on May 13, 1948, two days before the declaration of the state of Israel and before the outbreak of the 1948 "War." After being looted by Jews, Najd's 82 buildings were bulldozed and dynamited and its surviving population forcibly relocated 14 kilometers west into the tiny, 2-mile-wide racial prison camp called the Gaza Strip. Zionist colonists, who had been living peacefully alonside the Palestinian residents of Najd and had previously bought 500 dunums of land in the city, helped themselves to the remaining 13,000 dunums from their former neighbors. This stolen and ethnically cleansed land sits underneath Sderot, founded in 1951, and the Or ha-Ner Kibbutz, established in 1958.

Sderot is 8 miles away from the massive prison wall that has imprisoned Gaza's 1.5 million residents since the early 1990s. As such it is the closest thing to a target for homemade Palestinian "rockets" - improvised bottle rockets with no guidance systems and very little destructive capacity which are launched blindly over the wall. The vast majority of them land in the desert and of the handful that actually strike anything, only a very few have caused casualties or serious property damage.

Israel, on the other hand, has been bombing Gaza from the air on a more-or-less continuous basis since the removal of 8,000 illegal settlers in the summer of 2005. Thousands have been killed by the Israeli bombings – the vast majority of them civilians, including huge numbers of children. 50 Gazans have been killed in the last two weeks alone, and hundreds - mostly civilians - have been hospitalized. On the Israeli side, two Israelis have been killed by Palestinian “rocket fire” in the last six months. Even though Israelis stand a greater chance of drowning in the bathtub than dieing from a Palestinian rocket attack, an immense national hysteria has been created about those brown people behind the wall. For most Israelis, this racial anxiety justifies the murder of thousands more civilians in Gaza and the ongoing Israeli campaign to further starve Gaza’s 1.5 million imprisoned inmates of food, water, electricity, medicine and any kind of government or economy. Thanks to Israel's systematic campaign to de-develop Palestine and eradicate its civil infrastructure, more than 80% of Gazan families now live in a state of extreme poverty and eat only one meal a day. In Gaza, this represents an increase of family poverty of more than 25% in the last year alone.

Western headlines wheeze endlessly about Palestinian “rocket attacks”, declaring on a daily basis that Israel needs to use yet more and more indiscriminate military force against the Gazan population. These same headlines never seem to mention that half of the Gazan population are children under the age of 14, or that 20% of those children already suffer some degree of permanent physical and mental retardation because of Israel's satanic strategy of imposing famine.

Despite the patent criminality of Israel's conduct, Israel is permitted in the media to present itself as guided by a boundless humanitarian compassion and restraint, as if its campaign of mass destruction were really targeting “militants” rather than 1.5 million of the poorest, most defenseless people on earth. As Israeli assassins roam the Occupied territories, freely abducting and murdering government officials and leaders of the military resistance, the headlines of the day speak for themselves:

Israel vows to keep hitting militants
Israel keeps up pressure
Do what it takes to halt rocket fire, orders Olmert
Israel may escalate as rockets fall
Israel Faces Dilemma On Hamas Rockets
Israel grants army approval to widen ground operations
Israel sees no quick fix to Hamas rockets
Olmert promises 'no limit' in fighting militants
Israel vows to widen fight against militants
Israeli PM Olmert announces new attack on Hamas
Israel continues crackdown

“Hamas rockets fall as Israel considers escalation,” blathers Reuters, conveniently failing to note that Israeli rockets are also “falling," with astronomically more lethal effect.

Hamas repeated today its offer of a full truce, reiterating that it will stop lobbing rockets over the prison wall into the desert if Israel stops bombing crowded Gazan cities.

Israel's response was typical of all past Israeli responses to peace overtures: “I have no intention of making any agreement” with the democratically elected government of Palestine, Israel’s Prime Minster announced. “We will strike them and continue to strike them… I have no intention of stopping.” He explained that Israeli attacks - bombings, home destructions, abductions and death squad operations - would continue “without a time-table”, and “for the long-term."

ORIGINAL PHOTO: David Furst, May 29, 2007, Sderot, Israel
TEXT AND IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

LINK OF THE DAY: The 8 Stages of Genocide

the whites of their eyes 2

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:14:14 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Taken by a friend of mine outside Ansar Prison, Israel, in September 2004, at a protest by the group Ta'ayush against Israel's "administrative detention" policy for non-jews. The practice of administrative detenion means that - in the name of security - any non-Jew may be arrested without charges or evidence, and imprisoned without legal recourse or trial. These terms of detenion last six months and at their expiration may be renewed repeatedly.

Protestors in Israel are routinely filmed, and these police videos are routinely used in court as 'evidence" against activists.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Regev N.
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Cronulla Beach 1

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 10:19:13 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Scenes from the anti-arab race riots in Australia's Cronulla Beach, December 2005.

Thousands of racists in Sydney went on a rioting spree, breaking into homes in a Lebanese neighborhood and beating people, and attacking in the street anyone they thought might be of Arab descent.

A member of a local group called The Patriotic Youth League explained to Sydney Herald reporters: "We're just young blokes standing up for our own sort. That may not be politically correct, but we don't go beating people up for the hell of it."

What you are seeing is the predictable and desired result of use of the product known as "The War on Terror."

States which have purchased this product - incuding Australia, Great Britain and the United States - are engaged in the mobilzation of domestic racism against Islam, Muslims and Arabs. Like all products, the War on Terror has its designers, its marketers, its ad agencies and architects. It has a history which can be traced back to and through the Netanyahu administration in Israel, which - in conjunction with American Likudniks, neo-cons, and other ultra-right and formerly anti-communist groups - first fully marketed the product in the late 1990s.

The War On Terror is a product which conceives of israel quite precisely as israel has always concieved of itself: as the racial front line of Western civilization and security - a bulwark against barbarism. The War On Terror requires of its adherants an ideological identification with Israel, and a deliberate blurring of distinctions between properly national interests and Israeli interests. As such, Israel's problems (endless occupations, permanent insecurity, volatile and perpetually-tweaked racism, hysteria about immigration and demographics, green lines & border anxieties, suicide bombers, etc) become our problems, and Israel's desires become our needs. The war on Terror thus requires the subjugation or destruction of Israel's neighbors in the Middle East, and the violent demonization of all opposition to Zionism. This is a product which sits comfortably alongside other products - creating huge profits for corporations in the oil, military tech, and penal sectors, and misery for human being everywhere.

It is an expensive product. For Americans alone, it has cost more than $500 billion US Dollars so far in Iraq, and billions more in Afghanistan. It has cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of lives of those on the recieving end in the Middle East. Its real costs are far more serious: the unprecedented proliferation of terrorism worldwide (up 800% since the occupation of Iraq); loss of any kind of sense of hope, safety and security; a new global race to nuclear armament; evasion of truly pressing global issues such as rapidly growing poverty for most of the world's population, famine and epidemic disease, environmental degradation and global warming; the complete evaporation of funding for social programs from health care to education to housing and transportation and everything else, the militarization of civil society, the promotion of a state of constant racial anxiety, the loss of basic freedoms - freedom to protest, freedom to travel, freedom to speak, freedom to access news and information, freedom from government intrusion into our private lives, freedom to know basic facts about what our own government is doing. These are all part of the cost of The War on terror. It is similarly costly for Australians, for the British, and for Israelis as well, who have watched their social services disappear and their entire society transformed with particular brutality into a neo-liberal military fiefdom engaged in perpetual war.

The War on Terror is a product designed and tested by Israel for its principal imperial patron - the US. It envisions a global empire, a world subjugated under American military, cultural, political, economic hegemony, and permanent, global war. It is a war which benefits only the elites of each state, and the transnational elites which use states as their actors while occupying none. It is a war against the ideals of human rights, international law, and national sovereignty. Some describe it as a new stage of capitalism. As such it is also a war on humanism.

But this product has a human face as well. You can see it in the photo above. The War on terror is a war on you.

Who do you want to be? What kind of world do you want to live in?

Dump the product.

....

"Humanism is the only, and I would go so far as saying, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history."
--Edward Said

.....

TEXT: /anomalous
ORIGINAL PHOTO: Craig Greenhill (previously inaccurately attributed to Andrew Meares), Cronulla Beach, December 11, 2005
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Dafna, Yassir & Dafna

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:22:53 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

A visiting Israeli photographer back in September 2004 - seems to be theme of the week.

A Gaslight Unto the Nations

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 10:18:40 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Pro-genocide graffiti left overnight by Jewish settlers on the door to the Abu Heikel home in Hebron. (It's in English because huge numbers of the settlers are from the US).

The initials JDL stand for the Jewish Defense League, a Brooklyn-based terrorist group responsible for dozens of bombings and innumerable racial attacks in the United States. In the mid-1980s the FBI described the JDL as "the second most active terrorist group in the United States," saying that it was involved in 37 domestic terrorist attacks carried out from 1977 to 1984. (Orange County Register, Nov. 19, 1985). The JDL was founded by Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane, who additionally formed the terrorist groups Kach and Kahane Chai. These groups - which are all formally characterized as terrorist organizations by the US State Department, the Israeli Government, and the European Union - are very active throughout the West Bank, which has been controlled for the last 40 years, Iraq-style, by Israel's army. They are associated with a number of local splinter terrorist organizations, such as the "Committee for Road Safety", a racist hit-and-run club which has been murdering Palestinian pedestrians in the region for decades. In Occupied Palestine, members of these organizations were responsible for the 1994 Hebron Massacre , attempts to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and a 2002 attempt to blow up a Palestinian elementary school full of girls in East Jerusalem.

Didn't know about that? Ask yourself why.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: CPT-Hebron, Tel Rumedia, July 2006. source
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

....

Tel Rumeida is a small Palestinian neighborhood in the West Bank city of Hebron widely-acknowledged as housing the most violent and extremist faction of the Israeli settler movement. Palestinian families who live directly next to these settlers are often virtual prisoners in their homes, subject to the settlers’ violent attacks and destruction of property.

Please visit The Tel Rumeida Project

Saif

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 11:24:10 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Saif, on his way to the "Salute to Israel Parade", May 2004

The prison built, the key thrown in the sea

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 19:15:21 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

The procession needs a witness. Please help tell this story, or at least help me tell this story.

And yes, that is really a street full of blood.
...

"Innocent Palestinian people are being treated like animals, with the presumption that they are guilty of some crime. ... The additional restraints imposed on the new government are a planned and deliberate catastrophe for the citizens of the occupied territories, in hopes that Hamas will yield to the economic pressure." --former US President Jimmy Carter, May 2006

There is still no other way of stopping Israel than besides boycott, divestment and sanctions. We should all support it clearly, openly, unconditionally, regardless of what the gurus of our world tell us about the efficiency or raison d'etre of such actions. The UN would not intervene in Gaza as it does in Africa; the Nobel peace laureates would not enlist to its defense as they do for causes in Southeast Asia. The numbers of people killed there are not staggering as far as other calamities are concerned, and it is not a new story -- it is dangerously old and troubling. The only soft point of this killing machine is its oxygen lines to 'western' civilization and public opinion. It is still possible to puncture them and make it at least more difficult for the Israelis to implement their future strategy of eliminating the Palestinian people either by cleansing them in the West Bank or genociding them in the Gaza Strip. --Ilan Pappe, "Palestine 2007: Genocide in Gaza, Ethnic Cleansing in the West Bank", University of Haifa, January 11, 2007

The last hope of halting Israel’s steady ghettoization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and calculated destruction of the Palestinian economy is the imposition of sanctions against Israel, especially the revoking of the $9 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. If we allow Israel to complete its massive $2-billion project to ring Palestinians in militarized, pod-like encampments in Gaza and the West Bank with security barriers, walls and electric fences, we will condemn Israel and the Palestinians to endless cycles of violence that could ultimately, given the mounting rage and despair that grip the Middle East, doom the Jewish state.
--Chris Hedges, former bureau chief of the New York Times, November 20, 2006

'The procession needs a witness' On Black

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Wesam Saleh, Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip, November 8, 2006
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

At his master's gate

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 14:38:57 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

"A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state."
--William Blake

Unchain your dog
Hunger in Palestine
UN Relief and Works Agency
Palestine Red Crescent Society
Weekly Report of Israeli Human Rights Violations, December 28, 2006

...

Dr. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, in Bethlehem, December 2006:

"Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences, Your Graces:

We are overwhelmed by the welcome we have received and although we are used - we who have been visitors before - to being welcomed with generosity, today has been exceptional.

We are indeed here to say to the people of Bethlehem that they are not forgotten.

We are here to say: what affects you affects us. We are here to say, your suffering is our suffering too, in prayers and in thought and in hope.

We are here to say, in this so troubled and complex land, that justice and security are never something which one person claims and the expense of another, or which one community claims at the expense of another. We are here to say that security for one is security for all. And for one to live under the threat of occupation or of terror is a problem for all.

The wall, which we walked through a little while ago, is a sign not simply of the passing problem in the politics of one region; it is a sign of the things which are deeply wrong in the human heart itself. That terrible fear of the other, of the stranger, which keeps us all in one kind or another of prison. In one of the hymns we sing in English during the Advent season, we sing about Jesus Christ, the one who comes the prison bars to break. And it's our prayer and our hope for all of you that the prison of poverty and disadvantage, the prison of fear and anxiety, will alike be broken.

We are here on pilgrimage because we trust that 2,000 years ago an event took place here which assures us that these prisons could be broken, broken by the act of God in whose sight all are equally precious - Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. And for whom all lives are so equally precious that the death of one is affront to all. That is why we are here. We are here not to visit an ancient and interesting site; we are not here to visit a theme park. We are here to visit a place and a people which speak of the freedom of God to set human beings free. That is the truth which remains the same day after day, year after day, and millennium after millennium. It is that Good News which has driven us here. It is that Good News which teaches us the response to despair, and the response to the terrible conditions in which so many of you now live. Thank you, once again, for what you have done to make us feel at home here, we who are now fellow citizens with you here in this place.

Pray for us in the western world, for us in England, that our faith may be strengthened by yours. Because you are a gift for us. Unlike the wise men who came from the east 2,000 years ago, we, the not very wise men from the west, have not come to pour out our gifts; we have come to receive the witness of your faith, your endurance and your hope; to receive the gifts of God. So pray for us, pray that we may be strong, and loyal friends to you, and to all the peoples of this land. And we shall pray for you also.

Flag of Gaza

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 08:32:17 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

The Mega Prison of Palestine
March 07, 2008
By Ilan Pappe

In several articles published by The Electronic Intifada, I claimed that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while continuing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. I asserted that the genocidal policies are a result of a lack of strategy. The argument was that since the Israeli political and military elites do not know how to deal with the Gaza Strip, they opted for a knee-jerk reaction in the form of massive killing of citizens whenever the Palestinians in the Strip dared to protest by force their strangulation and imprisonment. The end result so far is the escalation of the indiscriminate k! illing of Palestinians -- more than one hundred in the first days of March 2008, unfortunately validating the adjective "genocidal" I and others attached to these policies. But it was not yet a strategy.

However, in recent weeks a clearer Israeli strategy towards the Gaza Strip's future has emerged and it is part of the overall new thinking about the fate of the occupied territories in general. It is in essence, a refinement of the unilateralism adopted by Israel ever since the collapse of the Camp David "peace talks" in the summer of 2000. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his party Kadima, and his successor Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, delineated very clearly what unilateralism entailed: Israel would annex about 50 percent of the West Bank, not as a homogeneous chunk of it, but as the total space of the settlement blocs, the apartheid roads, the military bases and the "national park reserves" (which are no-go areas for Palestinians). This was more or less implemented in the last eight years. These purely Jewish entities cut the West Bank into 11 small cantons and sub-cantons. They are all! separated from each other by this complex colonial Jewish presence. The most important part of this encroachment is the greater Jerusalem wedge that divides the West Bank into two discrete regions with no land connection for the Palestinians.

The wall thus is stretched and reincarnated in various forms all over the West Bank, encircling at times individual villages, neighborhoods or towns. The cartographic picture of this new edifice gives a clue to the new strategy both towards the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The 21st century Jewish state is about to complete the construction of two mega prisons, the largest of their kind in human history.

They are different in shape: the West Bank is made of small ghettos and the one in Gaza is a huge mega ghetto of its own. There is another difference: the Gaza Strip is now, in the twisted perception of the Israelis, the ward where the "most dangerous inmates" are kept. The West Bank, on the other hand, is still run as a huge complex of open air prisons in the form of normal human habitations such as a village or a town interconnected and supervised by a prison authority of immense military and violent power.

As far as the Israelis are concerned, the mega prison of the West Bank can be called a state. Advisor to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, in the last days of February 2008, threatened the Israelis with a unilateral declaration of independence, inspired by recent events in Kosovo. However, it seemed that nobody on the Israeli side objected to the idea very much. This is more or less the message a bewildered Ahmed Qurei, the Abbas-appointed Palestinian negotiator, received from Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, when he phoned to assure her that Abed Rabbo was not speaking in the name of the PA. He got the impression that her main worry was is in fact quite the opposite: that the PA would not agree to call the mega prisons a state in the near future.

This unwillingness, together with Hamas' insistence of resisting the mega prison system by a war of liberation, forced the Israelis to rethink their strategy towards the Gaza Strip. It transpires that not even the most cooperative members of the PA are willing to accept the mega prison reality as "peace" or even as a "two state settlement." And Hamas and Islamic Jihad even translate this unwillingness into Qassam attacks on Israel. So the model of the most dangerous ward developed: the leading strategists in the army and the government embrace themselves for a very long-term "management" of the system they have built, while pledging commitment to a vacuous "peace process," with very little global interest in it, and a continued struggle from within, against it.

The Gaza Strip is now seen as the most dangerous ward in this complex and thus the one against which the most brutal punitive means have to be employed. Killing the "inmates" by aerial or artillery bombing, or by economic strangulation, are not just inevitable results of the punitive action chosen, but also desirable ones. The bombing of Sderot is also the inevitable and in a way desirable consequence of this strategy. Inevitable, as the punitive action cannot destroy the resistance and quite often generates a retaliation. The retaliation in its turn provides the logic and basis for the next punitive action, should someone in domestic public opinion doubt the wisdom of the new strategy.

In the near future, any similar resistance from parts of the West Bank mega prison would be dealt with in a similar way. And these actions are very likely to take place in the very near future. Indeed, the third intifada is on its way and the Israeli response would be a further elaboration of the mega prison system. Downsizing the number of "inmates" in both mega prisons would be still a very high priority in this strategy by means of ethnic cleansing, systematic killings and economic strangulation.

But there are wedges that prevent the destructive machine from rolling. It seems that a growing number of Jews in Israel (a majority according to a recent CNN poll) wish their government to begin negotiations with Hamas. A mega prison is fine, but if the wardens' residential areas are likely to come under fire in the future then the system fails. Alas, I doubt whether the CNN poll represents accurately the present Israeli mood; but it does indicate a hopeful trend that vindicates the Hamas insistence that Israel only understands the language of force. But it may not be enough and the perfection of the mega prison system in the meantime continues unabated and the punitive measures of its authority are claiming the lives of many more children, women and men in the Gaza Strip.

As always it is important to be reminded that the west can put an end to this unprecedented inhumanity and criminality, tomorrow. But so far this is not happening. Although the efforts to make Israel a pariah state continue with full force, they are still limited to civil society. Hopefully, this energy will one day be translated into governmental policies on the ground. We can only pray it will not be too late for the victims of this horrific Zionist invention: the mega prison of Palestine.

A Light Unto The Kindergarteners

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 12:13:46 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Israeli soldiers bravely confront a rioting mob of heavily armed dangerous arab radicals who are attempting to escape their barbed-wire cages and assemble at their diabolical terror lair - the preschool across the street.

For millions of Palestinians, this week marks the 40th year of life in an ethnic prison, where their every move is subject to the often-lethal whims of Jews with machine guns. The last 2,000 days have seen 31 Palestinian stillbirths at checkpoints after pregnant women were prevented from passing and forced to give birth in the dirt. 117 other critically ill Palestinians died as a result of Israeli delay and obstruction of emergency medical passage at checkpoints. Hundreds of more were simply killed by Israelis at checkpoints.

Ironically, the vast majority of checkpoints are not on the border between Israel and the Occupied territories, but deep within Palestinian territories, where they act principally to prevent palestinians from moving around within their own villages and towns - from passing between villages and from getting to their jobs, schools, hospitals, or anywhere at all. The ultimate goal of these completely arbitrary and changing obstructions has nothing to do with security. The checkpoints exist for one reason: they are a form of collective punishment designed to make life miserable, untenable, and impossible for Palestinians, in the hope that they will understand they have no future on the land that Jews intend to steal from them.

ORIGINAL IMAGE: Mahfouz Abu Turk, Abu Dis, May 24 2007
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Liberty

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 10:09:05 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

June 9 / 10, 2007

Forty Years Later: Searching for the Truth About the USS Liberty
By WARD BOSTON

Forty years ago this week, I was asked to investigate the heaviest attack on an American ship since World War II. As senior legal counsel to the Navy Court of Inquiry it was my job to help uncover the truth regarding Israel's June 8th 1967 bombing of the USS Liberty.

On that sunny, clear day 40 years ago, Israel's combined air and naval forces attacked our American intelligence-gathering ship for two hours, inflicting 70 percent casualties. Thirty four American sailors died and 172 were injured. The USS Liberty remained afloat only by the crew's heroic efforts.

Israel claimed it was an accident. Yet I know from personal conversations with the late Admiral Isaac C. Kidd -- president of the Court of Inquiry -- that President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered him to conclude that the attack was a case of "mistaken identity".

The ensuing cover-up has haunted us for forty years. What does it imply for our national security, not to mention our ability to honestly broker peace in the Middle East, when we cannot question Israel's actions even when they kill Americans?

On June 8th, survivors of Israel's cruel attack will gather in Washington, DC to honor their dead shipmates as well as the mothers, sisters, widows and children they left behind. They will continue to ask for a fair and impartial congressional inquiry that, for the first time, would allow the survivors themselves to testify publicly.

For decades, I have remained silent. I am a military man and when orders come in from the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States, I follow them. However, attempts to rewrite history and concern for my country compel me to share the truth.

Admiral Kidd and I were given only one week to gather evidence for the Navy's official investigation, though we both estimated that a proper Court of Inquiry would take at least six months.

We boarded the crippled ship at sea and interviewed survivors. The evidence was clear. We both believed with certainty that this attack was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew.

I am certain the Israeli pilots and commanders who had ordered the attack knew the ship was American. I saw the bullet-riddled American flag that had been raised by the crew after their first flag had been shot down completely. I heard testimony that made it clear the Israelis intended there be no survivors. Not only did they attack with napalm, gunfire, and missiles, Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned at close range three life rafts that had been launched in an attempt to save the most seriously wounded.

I am outraged at the efforts of Israel's apologists to claim this attack was a case of "mistaken identity."

Admiral Kidd told me that after receiving the President's cover-up orders, he was instructed to sit down with two civilians from either the White House or the Defense Department, and rewrite portions of the Court's findings. He said, "Ward, they're not interested in the facts. It's a political matter and we cannot talk about it." We were to "put a lid on it" and caution everyone involved never to speak of it again.

I know that the Court of Inquiry transcript that has been released to the public is not the same one that I certified and sent to Washington. I know this because it was necessary, due to the exigencies of time, to hand correct and initial a substantial number of pages. I have examined the released version of the transcript and did not see any pages that bore my hand corrections and initials. Also, the original did not have any deliberately blank pages, as the released version does. In addition, the testimony of Lt. Lloyd Painter concerning the deliberate machine-gunning of the life rafts by the Israeli torpedo boat crews, which I distinctly recall being given at the Court of Inquiry and including in the original transcript, is now missing.

I join the survivors in their call for an honest inquiry. Why is there no room to question Israel even when they kill Americans -- in the halls of Congress?

Let the survivors testify. Let me testify. Let former intelligence officers testify that they received real-time Hebrew translations of Israeli commanders instructing their pilots to sink "the American ship".

Surely uncovering the truth about what happened to American servicemen in a bloody attack is more important than protecting Israel. And surely forty years is long enough to wait.

Ward Boston served as chief counsel to the Navy's Court of Inquiry into the attack on USS Liberty and as a naval aviator in World War II on the carrier Yorktown, and as an FBI agent prior to his assignment to the Navy's Judge Advocates General Corps. He is a graduate of the Law School of the College of William and Mary, and a resident of Coronado, California.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Memorial website maintained by survivors of Israel's attack on the Liberty
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

40 Years

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:07:11 -0700

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

On the occasion of the 40 year anniversary of the Israeli Occupation, a peaceful protester holds aloft a Palestinian flag while being attacked by Israeli water-cannons containing an unknown caustic chemical dye.

On June 5, 1967 – forty years ago today – just after 7 am, Israeli fighter jets launched a devastating, Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack on Egyptian military bases. Within hours, and before any effective response could be organized, Israel had similarly destroyed military bases in Jordan and Syria. This Israel blitzkrieg was the beginning of what became known as the “Six Day War.”

Contrary to popular Zionist-drafted mythology, Israel was not attacked first nor was it faced with serious threat of attack. Two days earlier, the New York Times had written that “Cairo does not want war and it is certainly not ready for war.” All of Israel’s senior statesmen said as much. Abba Eban, writing in his diaries, noted that “Nasser did not want war,” and even Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech several years later, said “We must be honest with ourselves: we decided to attack him.”

Israel’s omni-directional war-mongering in 1967 was motivated by the same goals as its war-mongering today: territorial expansion and regional domination. By the end of the Six Day War, Israel had more than doubled in size by seizing territories held by Egypt, Syria and Jordan; namely the Sinai, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which it promptly annexed. Only the Sinai, after being completely ethnically cleansed and settled by Jews, was eventually abandoned. All the remaining territories, including the millions of non-Jews living in them, remain under Israeli military control.

In the Occupied Syrian Territory known as the Golan Heights, Israeli bulldozers completely leveled roughly 250 villages. Their former residents, now refugees in IDP camps in Syria, now number over half a million. Only 5 Golani villages were permitted to remain. Roughly 45 Jewish settlements have been established in the Golan Heights, and the entire territory has subsequently been annexed to Israel, despite the continuing refusal of EVERY country on earth, including the US, to recognize Israeli jurisdiction. On December 19, 1981, the UN Security Council unanimously rejected Israel’s annexation of the UN, and despite Israel’s total indifference to international law, the UN has reiterated its position annually.

In the Occupied Gaza Strip, a million and a half Palestinians – half of them under the age of 14 – are incarcerated inside what is routinely described as a walled outdoor prison compound. The Gaza Strip, 25 miles long and 2 miles wide, remains one of the most densely populated regions on earth, and 1.1 million of its 1.5 residents are totally dependent on the provision of outside food aid to survive. Horrifically, Israel routinely obstructs food, water, fuel, electricity, and medical supplies to the starving residents of Gaza, who live in conditions comparable to the worst famine zones of sub-Saharan Africa. Because Israel has consistently worked to destroy any civil infrastructure in Gaza - bombing police stations, banks, prisons, schools, sewage treatment plants, airports, sports stadiums, seaports, roads, ambulances, bridges, farms, electricity stations, greenhouses, telephone infrastructure, mosques, shopping centers, local clinics, industrial plants, TV and radio stations, and above all, the homes of Gazans – the inmates of this vast racial prison are suffering from a systematic and planned breakdown of anything resembling law and order. This Israel-constructed chaos is, as intended, gradually giving rise to every imaginable form of militancy, which Israel presumably will use as an excuse to further intensify its Naziesque punishment of Palestinians everywhere.

While Israel transforms Gaza into an ever more nightmarish concentration camp, it raises its vast, 30-foot-high racial walls throughout the West Bank at a feverish pace. This wall, fraudulently marketed to its American financiers as an “anti-terror device”, is in fact a vast ethnic cleansing machine, destroying Palestinian land and lives, confiscating non-Jewish properties, and providing endlessly expanding zones available for Jewish settlement. More importantly, the Wall is carefully constructed to confiscate all of the West Bank’s most fertile farmland and water-producing areas, leaving the Palestinians in densely packed and disconnected walled Bantustans with no access to the fundamental resources required to support their own population. By Israeli law, Palestinians are not permitted to drill wells, and 85% of all water “extracted” from the Palestinian territories is dedicated exclusively to use by “the jewish people.” Palestinians may use only 15% of their own water, which is of course generously SOLD to them by Jewish companies. Over the course of the last 40 years, Israel’s official policies of “Judaisation” have resulted in the complete ethnic cleansing of nearly half of the West Bank. This relentless ethnic cleansing drive is accelerated by a vast network of Jewish-only roads, which cover fully 17% of the West Bank, granting swift movement to the 450,000 settlers living illegally in the West Bank. Simultaneously, these roads impede virtually all movement for non-Jews, for whom a trip of only a mile or two can involve detours of several hours and long delays at the innumerable racial checkpoints.

…

The original version of the photo above is taken at a demonstration against the Wall which is confiscating land around the West Bank village of Bil’in. In this shot, Israeli occupation soldiers are using massive water cannons to spray an unknown chemical substance on demonstrators. The fluid contains a bright blue dye – the color of the Israeli flag – which discolors skin, hair and clothing for several days and causes prolonged burning and skin irritation. Demonstrations at Bilin have been taking place weekly for two years. Although they are very strictly non-violent, Israelis have used incredible violence to shut them down. Hundreds have been arrested, gassed, and shot, including just a few weeks ago Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan. To find out more about the Palestinian Non-Violent Resistance Movement, simply type “bilin demonstrations” in Google for tens of thousands of articles – virtually none of them from the US press.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Nasser Shiyoukhi, Bil’in (Occupied West Bank) June 2, 2007
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Cronulla Beach 4

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 14:46:06 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Welcome to The War On Terror: Loathe Thy Neighbor

Two policemen desperately trying to protect a Lebanese-Australian man from thousands of anti-arab rioters in Australia's Cronulla Beach, December 2005.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: unknown, internet, possibly from Sydney morning Herald
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Cronulla Beach 3

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:06:04 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Welcome to BushWorld: Loathe Thy Neighbor

Scenes from the anti-arab race riots in Australia's Cronulla Beach, December 2005.

ORIGINAL PHOTO: Andrew Meares(?), Cronulla Beach, December 11, 2005
IMAGE ALTERATION: /anomalous

Cronulla Beach 2

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:48:50 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

Juliano Mer Khamis

nobody@flickr.com (AnomalousNYC) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 17:00:55 -0800

AnomalousNYC posted a photo:

I had the honor of meeting Israeli actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis at a screening of his film "Arna's Children" in New York City, May 2004. A great artist and a true hero of the struggle for justice in the Middle East. Juliano was murdered in April 2010 outside his Freedom Theatre in Jenin.

The Freedom Theatre, Jenin

ARNA'S CHILDREN CAN BE WATCHED HERE:
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9004838847737803917#