Monday, March 12, 2018
Saudi Prince Visits UK as Britain Boosts Murderous Arms Sales
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=JkZ39mgAAwU
Senators Called on to End US Role in 'Worst Humanitarian Crisis on the Planet'
With call-in action and
letters, groups ramp up pressure on lawmakers to back Sanders-led resolution
The Sanders-led resolution, introduced at
the end of last month, calls for "the removal of United States Armed
Forces from hostilities in the Republic of Yemen that have not been authorized
by Congress."
The United States has been
fueling the conflict for years by aiding Saudi Arabia's bombing campaign with
weaponry and military intelligence, leading to accusations by rights groups and
some lawmakers that the U.S. is complicit in fueling what the United Nations
describes as "the world’s largest humanitarian crisis."
There is urgency for
constituents to make the calls, the groups warn, as a vote could come as soon
as Monday.
In a further push to make the
resolution successful, Win Without War led a group of over 50
organizationse—including CODEPINK, Democracy for America, Our Revolution, and
War Resisters League—in sending a
letter Thursday to senators calling on them to back the resolution.
Their letter says that
"U.S. weapons sold to Saudi Arabia have been misused repeatedly in
airstrikes on civilians and civilian objects, which are the leading cause of
civilian casualties in the conflict and have destroyed Yemen's vital
infrastructure. This destruction of infrastructure has exacerbated the world's
largest hunger crisis in which 8.4 million civilians are on the brink of
starvation and created the conditions necessary for the largest cholera
outbreak ever documented in modern history," they state.
"Congress has a
constitutional and ethical duty to ensure any and all U.S. military operations
comply with domestic and international law, and U.S. participation in the civil
war in Yemen raises numerous legal and moral questions that must be resolved by
Congress," the letter continues.
"With S.J.Res. 54, the
Senate must send a clear signal that without congressional authorization, U.S.
military involvement in Yemen’s civil war violates the Constitution and the War
Powers Resolution of 1973," it adds.
It wasn't the only letter
senators received Thursday calling on them to support the resolution.
A group of nearly three dozen
experts—including former U.S. ambassador to Yemen Stephen Seche and Nobel peace
laureate Jody Williams—also delivered a
similar missive to lawmakers.
In their
letter, the group of experts referenced an assessment by Reps. Ro
Khanna (D-Calif.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and Walter Jones (R-N.C.), which said,
in part:
Nowhere else on earth today is
there a catastrophe that is so profound and affects so many lives, yet could be
so easy to resolve: halt the bombing, end the blockade, and let food and
medicine into Yemen so that millions may live. We believe that the American
people, if presented with the facts of this conflict, will oppose the use of
their tax dollars to bomb and starve civilians.
The resolution currently has 8
co-sponsors, including one Republican, Mike Lee of Utah. The Democratic
senators co-sponsoring the resolution are Chris Murphy of Connecticut, Cory
Booker of New Jersey, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Dianne
Feinstein of California.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Slavoj Žižek: "Why do people find Jordan Peterson so convincing?"
The wide popularity of Jordan
Peterson, a once-obscure
Canadian clinical psychologist and university professor who has become
beloved of the alt-right, is a proof that the liberal-conservative “silent
majority” finally found its voice. Peterson, who has said that the idea of
white privilege is a "Marxist lie" and theorised that
"radical feminists" don't speak out about human rights abuses in
Saudi Arabia because of "their unconscious wish for brutal male
domination", is fast becoming a mainstream commentator.
His advantages over the
previous anti-LGBT+ star Milo Yiannopoulos are obvious. Yiannopoulos was witty,
fast-talking, full of jokes and sarcasms, and openly gay – he resembled, in
many features, the culture he was attacking. Peterson is his opposite: he
combines a “common sense” approach and (the appearance of) cold scientific
argumentation with a bitter rage at a threat to the liberal basics of our
societies – his stance is: “Enough is enough! I cannot stand it anymore!”
It is easy to discern the
cracks in his advocacy of cold facts against “political correctness”: not only
is he often relying on unverified theories, but the big problem is the
paranoiac construct which he uses to interpret what he sees as facts.
"Facts are facts," he likes to say, before going on to say that
"the idea that women were oppressed throughout history is an appalling
theory" and that to conceive of gender as a social construct is "as
bad as claiming the world is flat".
Jacques Lacan wrote that, even
if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with
other men) is all true, his jealousy is still pathological: the pathological
element is the husband's need for jealousy as the only way to retain his
dignity, identity even. Along the same lines, one could say that, even if most
of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they seduce
German girls, and so on) – which they are not, of course – their anti-Semitism
would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the
true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their
ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society is an organic whole of
harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder is needed to account for divisions
and antagonisms.
The same holds for how, today,
the anti-immigrant populists deal with the “problem” of the refugees: they
approach it in the atmosphere of fear, of the incoming struggle against the
“Islamification” of Europe, and they get caught in a series of obvious
absurdities. For them, refugees who flee terror are equalised with the
terrorists they are escaping from, oblivious to the obvious fact that, while
there are probably among the refugees also terrorists, rapists, criminals and
so on, the large majority are desperate people looking for a better life.
In other words, the cause of
problems which are immanent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an
external intruder. Anti-immigrant racism and sexism is not dangerous because it
lies; it is at its most dangerous when its lie is presented in the form of a
(partial) factual truth.
Unfortunately, the liberal,
left-wing reaction to anti-immigrant populism is no better. Populism and leftie
“political correctness” practice the two complementary forms of lying which
follow the classic distinction between hysteria and obsessional neurosis: a
hysteric tells the truth in the guise of a lie (what it says is literally not
true, but the lie expresses in a false form an authentic complaint), while what
an obsessional neurotic claims is literally true, but it is a truth which
serves a lie.
Populists and PC liberals
resort to both strategies. First, they both resort to factual lies when they
serve what populists perceive as the higher truth of their cause. Religious
fundamentalists advocate “lying for Jesus” – say, in order to prevent the
“horrible crime of abortion”, one is allowed to propagate false scientific
“truths” about the lives of foetuses and the medical dangers of abortion; in
order to support breast-feeding, one is allowed to present as a scientific fact
that abstention from breast-feeding causes breast cancer, and so on.
Common anti-immigrant
populists shamelessly circulate non-verified stories about rapes and other
crimes of the refugees in order to give credibility to their “insight” that
refugees pose a threat to our way of life. All too often, PC liberals proceed
in a similar way: they pass in silence over actual differences in the “ways of
life” between refugees and Europeans since mentioning them may be seen to
promote Eurocentrism. Recall the Rotherham sex abuse scandal, where the race of
the perpetrators was downplayed in case anything in the case could be
interpreted as racist.
The opposite strategy – that
of lying in the guise of truth – is also widely practiced on both poles. If
anti-immigrant populists not only propagate factual lies but also cunningly use
bits of factual truth with the aura of veracity to their racist lie, PC
partisans also practice this “lying with truth”: in its fight against racism
and sexism, it mostly quotes crucial facts, but it often gives them a wrong
twist. The populist protest displaces onto the external enemy the authentic
frustration and sense of loss, while the PC left uses its true points
(detecting sexism and racism in language and so on) to reassert its moral
superiority and thus prevent true social change.
And this is why Peterson’s
outbursts have such an effect. His crazy conspiracy theory about LGBT+ rights
and #MeToo as the final offshoots of the Marxist project to destroy the West
is, of course, ridiculous. It is totally blind for the inner antagonisms and
inconsistencies of the liberal project itself: the tension between liberals who
are ready to condone racist and sexist jokes on account of the freedom of
speech and the PC regulators who want to censor them as an obstacle to the
freedom and dignity of the victims of such jokes has nothing to do with the
authentic left.
Peterson addresses what many
of us feel goes wrong in the PC universe of obsessive regulation – the problem
with him does not reside in his theories but in the partial truths that
sustain them. If the left is not able to address these limitations of its own
project, it is fighting a lost battle.
Israeli Army’s Lies Can No Longer Salvage Its Image
It is has been a very bad week
for those claiming Israel has the most moral army in the world. Here’s a small
sample of abuses of Palestinians in recent days in which the Israeli army was
caught lying.
A child horrifically injured
by soldiers was arrested and terrified into signing a false confession that he
was hurt in a bicycle accident. A man who, it was claimed, had died of tear-gas
inhalation was actually shot at point-blank range, then savagely beaten by a
mob of soldiers and left to die. And soldiers threw a tear gas canister at a
Palestinian couple, baby in arms, as they fled for safety during a military
invasion of their village.
In the early 2000s, at the
dawn of the social media revolution, Israelis used to dismiss filmed evidence
of brutality by their soldiers as fakery. It was what they called “Pallywood” –
a conflation of Palestinian and Hollywood.
In truth, however, it was the
Israeli military, not the Palestinians, that needed to manufacture a more
convenient version of reality.
Last week, it emerged, Israeli
officials had conceded to a military court that the army had beaten and locked
up a group of Palestinian reporters as part of an explicit policy of stopping
journalists from covering abuses by its soldiers.
Israel’s deceptions have a
long history. Back in the 1970s, a young Juliano Meir-Khamis, later to become
one of Israel’s most celebrated actors, was assigned the job of carrying a
weapons bag on operations in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. When
Palestinian women or children were killed, he placed a weapon next to the body.
In one incident, when soldiers
playing around with a shoulder-launcher fired a missile at a donkey, and the
12-year-old girl riding it, Meir-Khamis was ordered to put explosives on their
remains.
That occurred before the
Palestinians’ first mass uprising against the occupation erupted in the late
1980s. Then, the defence minister Yitzhak Rabin – later given a Hollywood-style
makeover himself as a peacemaker – urged troops to “break the bones” of
Palestinians to stop their liberation struggle.
The desperate, and sometimes
self-sabotaging, lengths Israel takes to try to salvage its image were
underscored last week when 15-year-old Mohammed Tamimi was grabbed from his bed
in a night raid.
Back in December he was shot
in the face by soldiers during an invasion of his village of Nabi Saleh.
Doctors saved his life, but he was left with a misshapen head and a section of
skull missing.
Mohammed’s suffering made
headlines because he was a bit-player in a larger drama. Shortly after he was
shot, a video recorded his cousin, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi, slapping a soldier
nearby after he entered her home.
Ahed, who is in jail awaiting
trial, was already a Palestinian resistance icon. Now she has become a symbol
too of Israel’s victimisation of children.
So, Israel began work on
recrafting the narrative: of Ahed as a terrorist and provocateur.
It emerged that a government
minister, Michael Oren, had even set up a secret committee to try to prove that
Ahed and her family were really paid actors, not Palestinians, there to “make
Israel look bad”. The Pallywood delusion had gone into overdrive.
Last week events took a new
turn as Mohammed and other relatives were seized, even though he is still
gravely ill. Dragged off to an interrogation cell, he was denied access to a
lawyer or parent.
Shortly afterwards, Israel
produced a signed confession stating that Mohammed’s horrific injuries were not
Israel’s responsibility but wounds inflicted in a bicycle crash.
Yoav Mordechai, the
occupation’s top official, trumpeted proof of a Palestinian “culture of lies
and incitement”. Mohammed’s injuries were “fake news”, the Israeli media
dutifully reported.
Deprived of a justification
for slapping an occupation soldier, Ahed can now be locked away by military
judges. Except that witnesses, phone records and hospital documentation,
including brain scans, all prove that Mohammed was shot.
This was simply another of
Israellywood’s endless productions to automatically confer guilt on
Palestinians. The hundreds of children on Israel’s incarceration production
line each year have to sign confessions – or plea bargains – to win
jail-sentence reductions from courts with near-100% conviction rates.
It is more Franz Kafka than
Hollywood.
A second army narrative
unravelled last week. CCTV showed Yasin Saradih, 35, being shot at point-blank
range during an invasion of Jericho, then savagely beaten by soldiers as he lay
wounded, and left to bleed to death.
It was an unexceptional
incident. A report by Amnesty International last month noted that many of the
dozens of Palestinians killed in 2017 appeared to be victims of extra-judicial
executions.
Before footage of Saradih’s killing
surfaced, the army issued a series of false statements, including that he died
from tear-gas inhalation, received first-aid treatment and was armed with a
knife. The video disproves all of that.
Over the past two years,
dozens of Palestinians, including women and children, have been shot in
similarly suspicious circumstances. Invariably the army concludes that they
were killed while attacking soldiers with a knife – Israel even named this
period of unrest a “knife intifada”.
Are soldiers today carrying a
“knife bag”, just as Meir-Khamis once carried a weapons bag?
A half-century of occupation
has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been
allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also needed an industry of lies
and self-deceptions to make sure the consciences of Israelis are never clouded
by a moment of doubt – that maybe their army is not so moral after all.
A version of this article
first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
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