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Falk on Gaza

Published
by
dvanhorn
on January 1, 2009
in Media, News and Palestine
. 0 Comments

Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, has issued a statement on the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Falk calls the strikes severe violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions.

Here is the full text of Falk’s December 27 official statement for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:

The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent s evere and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war. Those violations include:

Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza’s besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.

Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel’s escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.

The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel’s violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.

I remind all member states of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law – regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel’s serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.

Falk has been an outstanding analyst of US foreign policy, basing his critique on international law.  He’s written extensively on the illegality of the last fifty years of US policy, with an emphasis on the cases of Iraq and Israel/Palestine.  (See the i.c. review of this work: Friel and Falk: The Record of the Paper).  He was appointed to the UNHRC in March, 2008.  The diplomatic response at the time was largely predictable:

  • Israel: “The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories was hopelessly unbalanced. This mandate was redundant at best and malicious at worst. It was impossible to believe that out of a list of 184 potential candidates, the eminently wise members of the Consultative Group honestly had made the best possible choice for this post. [...] The Human Rights Council was rapidly moving away from its raison d’être.”
  • US: “expressed its concern on the mandate holder selected for the task of assessing the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This had long since been a particularly sensitive mandate and he hoped that it would not be conducted with bias and partiality. That being said, he wished the other new mandate holders the best of luck in their new appointments.”
  • Canada: “based on the writings of one of the candidates, the nominee for the mandate on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Canada expressed serious concern about whether the high standards established by the Council would be met by this individual. Therefore, Canada dissociated itself from any Council decision to approve the full slate.”
  • Palestine: “it was ironic that Israel which claimed to be representing Jews everywhere was campaigning against a Jewish professor who had been nominated for the post of Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The candidate was the author of 54 books on international law. Palestine doubted that those who had campaigned against him had read that many books. The candidate’s nomination was a victory for good sense and human rights, as he was a highly qualified rapporteur. If Israel was concerned about human rights it would have ended its prolonged occupation.”

But despite the fracas, Falk’s positions are representative of the larger consensus.  His assessment of Gaza was more or less affirmed by Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who called on Israel’s leaders to uphold international humanitarian law principles, especially those relating to proportionality in the use of military force and the prevention of collective punishment and the targeting of civilians.  The Palestinian human rights community said in a collective statement, “grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention amounting to war crimes, have been committed, including, wilful killing and the extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

Falk was recently deported from Israel after being detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours, denied entry because of what Israel called his “highly politicized views.”  He describes the experience in a December 29 editorial in the Houston Chronicle, in which he wrote:

Two weeks prior to this carnage, I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel in my capacity as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. I planned to visit Gaza, meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and tour the West Bank. Israeli officials had been given an advance itinerary for my trip.

I was, however, taken from the passport line by Israeli authorities. I was driven a mile from the airport, placed in a filthy detention facility, which smelled of urine, for 20 hours and deported.

Pillay called Israel’s treatment of the human rights reporter “unprecedented and deeply regrettable”.  In a December 17 Democracy Now! interview on the topic, Falk said:

Israel has been pursuing what I call a politics of opaqueness, trying to make the realities of the occupation as obscure as possible and as speculative as possible. They’ve kept those who are knowledgeable inside Gaza from leaving to attend international conferences—Raji Sourani, for instance, the head of the Human Rights Centre, who had previously been allowed to attend international conferences and is a distinguished recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Human Rights Award. So they’ve tried to keep people in who know something about the reality of the occupation and then try to keep people out, such as myself, who could report credibly on what is happening inside, and shifting that argument then to my qualifications.

The New York Times engaged in a shameful show of this in their December 15 report on the incident, U.N. Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel, whose fourth paragraph reads:

He has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that “only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.”

The Times, which had to issue an embarrassing editorial note afterward stating “Mr. Falk could not be reached before publication to defend himself”, is essentially plagiarizing the April 4 talking points of CAMERA, a Boston-based hard-line, pro-Israel propaganda group (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America). [In May, five Wikipedia editors involved in a secret CAMERA campaign to edit Wikipedia were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators.] CAMERA’s main case against Falk was a July 2007 article he wrote, which CAMERA characterizes by saying “Falk likened Israelis to Nazis”.

But if you actually read the article, instead you’ll find he evaluates the question: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?”  Falk then goes on to argue about the criminality of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.  The substance of the article has little to do with Nazis:

To ground these allegations, it is necessary to consider the background of the current situation. For over four decades, ever since 1967, Gaza has been occupied by Israel in a manner that turned this crowded area into a cauldron of pain and suffering for the entire population on a daily basis, with more than half of Gazans living in miserable refugees camps and even more dependent on humanitarian relief to satisfy basic human needs. With great fanfare, under Sharon’s leadership, Israel supposedly ended its military occupation and dismantled its settlements in 2005. The process was largely a sham as Israel maintained full control over borders, air space, offshore seas, as well as asserted its military control of Gaza, engaging in violent incursions, sending missiles to Gaza at will on assassination missions that themselves violate international humanitarian law, and managing to kill more than 300 Gazan civilians since its supposed physical departure.

As unacceptable as is this earlier part of the story, a dramatic turn for the worse occurred when Hamas prevailed in the January 2006 national legislative elections. It is a bitter irony that Hamas was encouraged, especially by Washington, to participate in the elections to show its commitment to a political process (as an alternative to violence) and then was badly punished for having the temerity to succeed. These elections were internationally monitored under the leadership of the former American president, Jimmy Carter, and pronounced as completely fair. Carter has recently termed this Israeli/American refusal to accept the outcome of such a democratic verdict as itself ‘criminal.’ It is also deeply discrediting of the campaign of the Bush presidency to promote democracy in the region, an effort already under a dark shadow in view of the policy failure in Iraq.

After winning the Palestinian elections, Hamas was castigated as a terrorist organization that had not renounced violence against Israel and had refused to recognize the Jewish state as a legitimate political entity. In fact, the behavior and outlook of Hamas is quite different. From the outset of its political Hamas was ready to work with other Palestinian groups, especially Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, to establish a ‘unity’ government. More than this, their leadership revealed a willingness to move toward an acceptance of Israel’s existence if Israel would in turn agree to move back to its 1967 borders, implementing finally unanimous Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Even more dramatically, Hamas proposed a ten-year truce with Israel, and went so far as to put in place a unilateral ceasefire that lasted for eighteen months, and was broken only to engage in rather pathetic strikes mainly taking place in response to Israeli violent provocations in Gaza. As Efraim Halevi, former head of Israel’s Mossad was reported to have said, ‘What Isreal needs from Hamas is an end to violence, not diplomatic recognition.’ And this is precisely what Hamas offered and what Israel rejected.

As he said in the DN! interview:

I merely tried to characterize the facts as I understood them to involve this kind of massive collective punishment of every man, woman and child, regardless of their activities, as being victimized by a set of policies summarized as a siege or blockade, where some of the effects are now very well established.

Falk writes in the Houston Chronicle editorial:

Israel’s treatment of Gaza is largely unseen by the outside world. I am not the only observer to be denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Numerous humanitarian aide workers, along with reporters and photographers, have been barred from Gaza to keep witnesses from reporting to the outside world on the tragic human cost of the siege.

Even before Israel’s strike, the statistics we did have from Gaza were deeply disturbing. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Malnutrition is extremely high and affects, in varying degrees, 75 percent of Gazans.

Gaza typically spends at least 12 hours a day without power. Basic drugs and medicine are no longer available. The generators for hospitals, vital to keep seriously ill patients alive, lack fuel and often do not function. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. Those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, often cannot leave Gaza for care. There were an estimated 230 Gazans believed to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care. Several of these patients spent their last hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel.

The magnitude of Palestinian suffering and the deliberate violations of international humanitarian law by Israel are indefensible. They should be addressed forcefully by the international community.

The Israeli authorities who carry out this draconian policy must be held accountable. We cannot build a world that respects human rights and the rule of law unless we judge everyone, including those who are our allies, by the same impartial standard.

Falk could not be more on point by drawing attention to the issues of legality surrounding the longest on-going military occupation—a subject that is simply unmentionable in US discourse—and I don’t think it can be overemphasized that US and Israeli policy toward Gaza has been one of collective punishment for Palestinians “voting the wrong way” in their free and open elections.  This is very much a war against democracy—one more in a long, continuous, and well-documented, but ultimately unspoken of, series of wars against democracy perpetrated by the US and its allies.

Secrets and Lies: The Persecution of Muhammad Salah

Published
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dvanhorn
on December 15, 2008
in Uncategorized
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The U.S. war on terror launched in the wake of the 11
September 2001 attacks cleared the way for the George W. Bush
administration’s pursuit of neo-conservative foreign and
domestic policy objectives already on the drawing board. The
tragedy also served to extend and deepen the U.S.-Israeli
partnership in the U.S. war on terror, both at home and
abroad. Within this context, the government’s prosecution of
Muhammad Salah—a test case meant to demonstrate how bedrock
constitutional principles governing the admissibility of
coerced confessions and secret evidence at trial, closed
courtrooms, and cross-examination rights could be stretched in
the post-9/11 era to make U.S. trials resemble Israeli
military tribunals in the occupied territories—is an
outstanding example of a U.S.-Israeli joint venture in the
legal realm.

Friel and Falk: The Record of the Paper

Published
by
dvanhorn
on December 28, 2007
in Books
. 3 Comments

Howard Friel and Richard Falk’s The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports Us Foreign Policy (Verso, 2004) is a blistering indictment of the New York Times coverage of foreign policy over the past fifty years, with particular emphasis on the years following September 11, 2001, the invasion and subsequent occupation and torture of Iraq, up until the manuscript’s deadline of June 2004. The book also examines the US backed coup attempt of Hugo Chavez, the World Court case of Nicaragua versus the US, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam war. It chronicles the paper’s record of ignoring international law (from September 11 2001 to March 21 2003, the editorial page never mentioned the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in the seventy editorials on Iraq), the consequences of it’s editorial policy of “non-crusading” journalism (as “former reporter and a former editor [John L. Hess and Aurthur Gelb, respectively] at the Time have pointed out, the Times applied its ‘non-crusading’ standard of editorial policy equally to housing corruption in New York City and to Hitler’s campaign in Europe”), and its legacy of “impartial” news coverage, which leaves the Times ideological on both sides of any given issue (see the chapter on Michael Ignatieff’s case for and against torture before and after Abu Graib for a devastating example of this).But more importantly, Friel and Falk highlight the relevant facts and considerations that necessarily become unspeakable by extension of the Times’ neglect of international law. For example, the following facts could not be uttered in regards to the US invasion of Iraq without appeal to international law, paraphrasing from the text:

  • The US and UK repeatedly threatened the use of force against a UN member state without Security Council authorization in violation of UN Charter Article 2(4), which stipulates, “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state […]”.
  • No Security Council resolution issued since 1991 has authorized the threat or use of force against Iraq.
  • Iraq has not attacked any state since 1990; it has never attacked or threatened to attack the US or UK.
  • Claims that Iraq intended to attack the US or any state indirectly by providing WMD to terrorist networks were speculative and self-serving and lacked credible evidence.
  • The “preventive” use of force, including an armed attack against Iraq, as a response to prospective terrorist threat from Iraq violated the UN Charter and fundamental principles of international law with respect to the prohibition of the use of force.
  • Failure to comply with disarmament obligations is insufficient as cause for threat or use of force according to UN Charter Article 51.
  • No Security Council resolution has stipulated failure to comply with disarmament obligations as being sufficient as cause for threat or use of force.
  • The resort to force in the absence of a resolution and any credible evidence of an imminent threat of armed attack violated not only the UN Charter; it also constituted a war of aggression and, thus, a crime against peace under the Nuremberg precedent.

All of these points, of course, are central to any evaluation of US policy towards Iraq, and even though the US “in large part established [the Nuremberg] precedent as an expression of global condemnation of Nazi aggression, the Bush administration not only violated Nuremberg-related law by invading Iraq, it do so without even a mention from the New York Times that such laws were violated or even existed.” Thus the Times is guilty of “not only a conspiracy but the commission of a war of aggression under international law.”

So, dual to their exposition on the Times is a full measure of US foreign policy against the rubric of international law. As they state in the Introduction:

It is our judgment, supported by a consensus of international law experts from around the world, that the United States government has repeatedly violated international law with respect to its war-making over the past half-century or so, resulting in unjustifiable death and destruction, as well as diminishing the quality of world order.

The exposition of a case against the last fifty years of US foreign policy according to international law makes the book worth reading in and of itself. The authors first citation is to a privately circulated memorandum by the international law expert, Howard N. Meyer, “On Not Taking International Law Seriously”. The essay lays out the book, more or less, in miniature, both in terms of the US violation of international law and the Times silence. I was able to find an expanded small collection of letters by Meyer, “No Regrets About Ignoring International Law”, which is available as a doc from the Project to Enforce the Geneva Conventions. I’ve made it available in pdf and html on ideological criminal. If you only have a minute, read the essay. If you have a couple hours (and you should), read the book, it’s good.

One can tell that the book was put together in a fairly hasty manner. It’s clear that the book is covering events up until the final moments of publishing. There are typographical problems. There are editing problems. The two authors never seem to find a common voice. There are very clearly two tones in the book, the predominant one of international legalese and another more impolitic one that shoots from the hip with awkward analogies (you decide which is which). There is a fair amount of copy & paste from previous critiques by the author with regards to US foreign policy and international law, but none if it is unwelcome or unnecessary. Friel and Falk have a companion volume, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, and I would expect a fair amount of redundancy (or perhaps it is more accurate to say “scaffolding”) in this volume. But so what? The books are interesting beyond any superficial flaws. Moreover, the framework of international law is essential to our understanding of current events yet completely absent from mainstream analysis. Friel and Falk are able to speak comprehensively about current events and their context in a timely way. They offer a view of what newspapers could look like if they upheld their mandate.

Friel and Falk conclude by suggesting an editorial policy to replace its current “non-crusading” one with one borrowing language from the federal judiciary, which applies “strict scrutiny” on issues of fundamental Constitutional rights, whereas a criteria of “rational basis” is applied for limiting non-fundamental rights for the sake of public health and safety. So for example,

[T]he Times applied, at best, only a ‘rational basis’ test to whether the United States should bomb North Vietnam in response to the reported attacks on US ships in the Tonkin Gulf, when a ’strict scrutiny’ test would have showed that bombing North Vietnam violated international law under these circumstances. Applying a strict scrutiny standard journalistically to the US involvement in Vietnam, beginning at least since 1954, might have prevented, or at least discouraged, the full-blown war in Vietnam that followed, because it might have made the government’s twenty-year record of violating international law and misrepresenting important facts with respect to Vietnam impossible to sustain, or even initiate.

In short, an editorial policy of “strict scrutiny” would apply the most rigorous standards of journalistic review to news events and conditions that implicate war and peace, human survival, human rights, the global environment, and fundamental principles of the UN Charter and US Constitution.

That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Hidden and Unfamiliar

Published
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dvanhorn
on November 18, 2007
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When I was in Frankfurt in late September, I went to the Museum für Moderne Kunst and happened to catch the opening of Taryn Simon’s An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar. I was blown away. Simon’s photography is both stunning in its asthetics and astounding in its subjects. Moreover, the irony of having to travel to Germany to get a glimpse of a young and powerful artist exposing the unseeable in American culture and society was not lost on me. I didn’t make the connection at the time, but I knew of Simon’s earlier work from a New Yorker article about her book The Innocents, whose subjects have been accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit, often photographing them at the site of the crime. Simon’s work is smart beyond her years; each piece carries with it its full semantics and rattling insight into the pathology of everyday American life, and yet the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The MMK was also exhibited photographs from Larry Clark’s haunting Tulsa, which documents methamphetamine use among Clark and his friends, including a photo of a young pregnant woman shooting up meth. Another connection I didn’t make at the time was that Clark is the director of the film Kids.

Scahill: Blackwater

Published
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dvanhorn
on November 16, 2007
in Books
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Jeremy Scahill won me over when we was reporting for Democracy Now! on the 2004 presidential election. Wesley Clark was in New Hampshire campaigning just days before the primary. The usual campaign coverage is a about as informative as a dog turd. Everyone is in softie mode– journalists, politicians, public citizens. And in the midst of it, a young reporter walks up to Clark who is making his way down the street kissing babies, etc. And Scahill opens: “In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium…”. (See the rest of the confrontation here).

So when his book Blackwater was announced, about the mercenary firm of the same name made famous by images of burnt remains of employees hanging over the Euphrates, I knew I had to read it. All in all, the book was great. It is clear and sober, yet a pleasure to read (Not nearly as academic–and therefore boring–as Peter W. Singer’s Corporate Warriors, although I recommend that book highly for a thorough and detailed portrait of how the system of mercenary armies arose and now operates, politically, financially, and historically). Scahill has a written voice that is far less confrontational than his spoken one, and yet the cutting analysis is still there. He is someone who thinks, and sadly we can’t say this about many of the journalists out there. Scahill represents hope for the future of investigative journalism. And unlike some of his colleagues, he checks his emotional baggage at the door, giving us a book far more substantial and potentially influential.

In fact, one of the few criticisms I have of the book are not about Scahill’s writing, but the publisher’s marketing. It’s published by Nation Books, and is blurbed by (among others) Joseph Wilson, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Arundhati Roy. In other words, the usual gang. None of them have much expertise in the field, and all convey a sense of “yeah, another howler from the Left.” Anyone who makes it past the cover is already a believer. But in between the covers, the book is far more accessible than to just Mother Jones readers. It should have been put out by a university press and blurbed by actual experts (like Peter W. Singer). It deserves to be taken seriously.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the book are the occasional sprinklings of observations from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has a way of calling a spade a shovel—with all the euphemisms and opaque language surrounding the thriving mercenary industry, Ratner has a way of getting the language right. In speaking of the unprecedented deployment of private mercenaries domestically immediately following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, Scahill quotes Ratner (page 332):

These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.

Yeah, what he said.

Human apparatchiks

Published
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dvanhorn
on November 16, 2007
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Below is a brutal and hilarious affront to the Brandeis administration, written as a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, The Hoot, in response to the recent actions taken against Donald Hindley, professor of Politics. The incident is recounted in Inside Higher Ed’s article Sending in the Class Monitor.

Letter to the editor: Response to human apparatchiks

Dear Editor,

I was distressed to read that the administration is assigning human apparatchiks to monitor Brandeis classrooms to assure linguistic conformity and political orthodoxy. Surely, the administration knows that the technology of authoritarian surveillance has advanced far beyond the primitive methods employed by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and Erich Honecker.

A laptop and a webcam can do the job far more cheaply and efficiently. Just position one unit per class in the back of the room, then patch the feed into a mainframe system located in Bernstein-Marcus. This simple expedient would not only provide an accurate audio-visual record of conversational malfeasance by faculty and students, but the real-time surveillance would allow the administration to dispatch agents immediately into the classroom to stop the utterance of verboten words or ideas.

-Prof. Thomas Doherty (AMST).

Habits of being

Published
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dvanhorn
on July 19, 2007
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Reading bell hooks today, I came across this:

In retrospect, I see that in the last twenty years I have encountered many folks who say they are committed to freedom and justice for all even though the way they live, the values and habits of being they institutionalize daily, in public and private rituals, help maintain the culture of domination, help create an unfree world. In the book Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community, Martin Luther King, Jr. told the citizens of this nation, with prophetic insight, that we would be unable to go forward if we did not experience a “true revolution of values.” He assured us that

the stability of the large world house which is ours will involve a revolution of values to accompany the scientific and freedom revolutions engulfing the earth. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing”-oriented society to a “person”-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.

Today, we live in the midst of that floundering. We live in chaos, uncertain about the possibility of building and sustaining community. The public figures who speak the most to us about a return to old-fashioned values embody the evils King describes. They are most committed to maintaining systems of domination—racism, sexism, class exploitation, and imperialism. They promote a perverse vision of freedom that makes it synonymous with materialism. They teach us to believe that domination is “natural,” that it is right for the strong to rule over the weak, the powerful over the powerless. What amazes me is that so many people claim not to embrace these values and yet our collective rejection of them cannot be complete since they prevail in our daily lives.

From Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

The Yes Men

Published
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dvanhorn
on June 20, 2007
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The Yes Men have struck again (photos, videos, and links):

Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in Calgary, Alberta, today [June 14, 2007].

The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the major highlight of this year’s conference, which had 20,000 attendees. In it, the “NPC rep” was expected to deliver the long-awaited conclusions of a study commissioned by US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. The NPC is headed by former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, who is also the chair of the study. (See link at end.)

In the actual speech, the “NPC rep” announced that current U.S. and Canadian energy policies (notably the massive, carbon-intensive exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands, and the development of liquid coal) are increasing the chances of huge global calamities. But he reassured the audience that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could “keep fuel flowing” by transforming the billions of people who die into oil.

As Jon puts it on the heads list:

The Yes men have consistently found some of the best ways to deal with hard hitting topics. Their use of humor to humiliate organizations is brilliant, and we should all be thankful to them. If only there was more of this going on. It seems that the use of truthful information and satire against blatantly assholic organizations really has potential (especially when it’s directed at a large group of their sheep).

Or, as Marissa succintly puts it:

These guys don’t fuck around, and they are smart and hilarious to boot.

I first came across the Yes Men at an art exhibit at MASS MoCA. They were running a video projector of The Yes Men documentary. In it, the Yes Men give a talk at a WTO “future of textiles” meeting in Finland. During the talk, Andy tears of his velcro-seemed business suit to reveal a golden body suit. A large golden phallus inflates from between his legs (at the exhibit, they had the suit fitted on a mannequin with phallus constantly inflating and deflating). The phallus sends signals to devices implanted in the textile workers anuses and gives immediate feedback to the boss donning the suit. It’s one of the funniest and smartest actions I’ve ever seen.

For a limited time, ballistichelmet is now hosting the movie for your viewing pleasure.

Jon also pointed out a recent documentary, Bringing Down A Dictator, he saw on the student movement Otpor (Serbian for “Resistance”) that helped bring down Milosevic in 2000 using humor and satire in a similar way to the Yes Men.

A few more links to Yes Men videos (thanks to Jon):

  • Democracy Now! video - The Yes Men have struck again. On Tuesday, a man claiming to be a representative of Halliburton gave a presentation at the “Catastrophic Loss” conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Amelia Island, Florida. Conference attendees include leaders from the insurance industry. We speak with the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum, who took part in the hoax. (transcript).
  • This is a little satire from the Yes Men fooling around and seeing if people will sign a petition in favour of preemptively annulling all gay marriages. very funny!
  • The Yes Men strike again. Impersonating a Dow Chemical spokesman on BBC, “Jude Finisterra” promises a huge compensation for the thousands of victims of the Bhopal disaster in which Dow Chemical’s subsidiary Union Carbide India was responsible for in 1984.
  • The Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum is interviewed after the media finds out about his Dow Chemical impersonation
  • The Yes men and their take on the oil industry.

Again I am reminded of the situationalist spirit and the book Lipstick Traces seems all the more relevant to the best of today’s activism.

Tanya Reinhart

Published
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dvanhorn
on March 19, 2007
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Tanya Reinhart has apparently died of a stroke in New York. Reinhart was one of the few critics of Israel that I felt could consistently be relied upon for sharp, correct, and just analysis of Israeli policy and advocacy for Palestinian rights. So many other intellectual big hitters have let me down, but not her. Her books, Israel/Palestine: How To End the War of 1948 and The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine Since 2003, have been listed on ideological criminal’s very short “Recommended Books” list since the beginning. Israel/Palestine in particular is perhaps the best account of the conflict and a must read for anyone interested in the context of the occupation and a way forward to a just peace. Concise, unflinching, demystifying and well-written, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Her voice will be missed. The world needs far more of her intellectual integrity and sense of justice.

Noam Chomsky, her PhD adviser, has written a eulogy which appeared on CounterPunch today, and Democracy Now! played excerpts from a 2004 interview and a February 2007 talk given as part of the Israel Apartheid Week.

Fishbone, The Struggle for Water

Published
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dvanhorn
on March 19, 2007
in Books
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My good friend Aaron Fishbone has just published a book, The Struggle for Water: Increasing Demands on a Vital Resource. The synopsis from Powell’s reads:

This title brings together a wide variety of materials on the issues and controversies surrounding the complex subject of water ownership and freshwater privatization. It presents a general overview of the state of the world’s fresh water and offers articles on both sides of the privatization controversy. Sections also deal with cooperation and conflict over water resources, international trade in water, and the growing struggle between farms and cities over this scarce resource. The anthology concludes with an appendix of primary source documents from a diversity of sources representing all major viewpoints on the issue. A general introduction and introductory essays to each chapter give the reader the necessary background to put the issue in perspective.