Suzanne Manneh
Guest Writer
San Francisco, CA

Tareq, a Syrian American graphic designer living in Silicon Valley, says his life has “completely changed 100 percent over the past year,” a change he credits to protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square exactly one year ago today. That date has since been enshrined as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the Arab Spring.

The toppling of Tunisia’s Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, followed by the fall of Libyan strongman Moammar Ghaddafi have defined what Tareq, who requested that his last name be withheld because of safety concerns for relatives in Syria, calls “the most important time of the region’s history.”

“[These events] have broken the barriers of fear for Arab Americans and Arabs abroad against oppression and reinforced pride in being Arab,” says Tareq, before striking a note of caution.

The road ahead, he says, is long and unpredictable. Events in his native Syria, where an ongoing struggle to oust President Bashar Al-Assad has claimed over 5,000 lives, checks his optimism.

Mohammed Bouazizi was not unlike many young Tunisians. A recent college graduate, he was reduced to selling fruit to support himself and his family. On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi immolated himself to protest policies blamed for rising unemployment and poverty.

That singular event launched a wave of protests, beginning in Tunisia and rapidly spreading across the region, culminating in an 18-day rally that drew on Egyptians of all stripes and from all corners who descended on Tahrir and eventually succeeded in ending Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Egyptians have since celebrated their gains, recently holding the country’s first, if controversial, democratic elections, with the moderate Egyptian Brotherhood sweeping into power ahead of secular and more religiously conservative rivals.
Tunisia also held elections in October 2011, with the moderate Islamist Ennahda Movement winning a majority of the vote.

But for others in the region — including Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria — the ripple effects of the Arab Spring continues to make waves.

“These uprisings toppled the whole idea of Arab equals terrorist, backwards, or illiterate,” said Momen El-Husseiny, an Egyptian and currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in Architecture and Global Metropolitan Studies. “All these notions that had been so potent were no longer so. We are now in communication with the entire world,” he said.

El-Husseiny, who spent the past year in Egypt and recently returned to Berkeley to complete his dissertation, said he immediately saw those changes within himself and in others.
Mokhtar Alkhanshali, of Yemeni descent, says the Arab Spring has altered the way Arabs are seen globally, dispelling widespread notions including that of Arab women being absent from the realm of civic engagement.

Nobel Peace Prize winner and head of the Yemeni organization Women Journalists Without Chains, Tawakkol Karaman, he noted, was “one of the first voices that came out in this movement in Yemen,” having “led the first protests in front of the University of Sanaa.”

Women also played an active and prominent role in Egypt’s Tahrir protests. Such actions, broadcast for a global audience thanks to the proliferation of mobile technology and social media, “changed the face of Arabs,” says Alkhanshali.

“For a Yemeni woman to be the first Arab woman and youngest person to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and play such a role…I feel very proud of that,” he added.
Alkhanshali shared another experience, one closer to home, that spoke to the new light under which Arabs are now being seen. It was last Halloween, he explained, when he encountered a stranger dressed in military fatigues and a Kiffyeh, a traditional unisex headscarf.

“He told me he was a Libyan revolutionary,” Alkhanshali recalled, saying it was then he realized that mainstream society was beginning to replace the image of Arabs as “riding camels and oppressing women” to “fighters for democracy.”

“I take my daughter to a (private) Arabic school,” says Hany Elhak, originally from Egypt and now living in San Jose. Recalling the events of the past year, he says that when the revolution first swept through Tunisia, students and parents with roots spanning the entire Arab world celebrated.

“People were bringing in food… We never felt that close,” he says, adding that a resurgent pride in Arab American identity and culture, long overshadowed by conflict in the region and fears of terrorism at home, were evident in recent protests in San Francisco.

“During demonstrations in support of the Syrian struggle, there have been Yemeni’s, Egyptians, everyone there in solidarity. There has definitely been a renewed sense of Pan Arabism, a sense of Arab pride,” noted Tareq.

And inspiration. For if nothing else, the Arab Spring helped precipitate what has become the largest protest movement to hit America since the Vietnam War.

At a recent Occupy Oakland rally, Tareq remembers hearing protestors chanting “The people want to topple Wall Street.” That chant, he says, found its precedent in Tahrir and Tunis, where protestors cried, Asha’ab ureed isqaat anizaam. “The people want to topple the regime.”

“Of course we can’t take the credit, but I do believe that if the Arab revolutions were not this powerful, the Occupy movement would not have been (as powerful) either,” he notes.
Arabs across San Francisco and the Bay Area are preparing to commemorate the anniversary of the Arab Spring with an event that organizers say will “bring the community together… to reflect on this last year of revolution in Egypt and honor all Arab struggles.”

Janaan Attia, a community organizer and one of the individuals responsible for putting on Wednesday’s event in the city’s Mission District, says it is “vital that Arabs gather and connect” with one another.

Discussions are sure to touch on issues of democracy and the continuing violence in countries like Syria, though many are hopeful and say they’d like to return when conditions improve.
Others are more cautious.

“I’m sure we will see democratic states,” said Tareq in reference to Syria, “but unfortunately (the violence) will continue. We won’t get democracy for free.”

By Philip Giraldi

Mark Twain is credited with saying that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Today’s United States is often compared to other historic nations, whether at their prime or about to decline and fall depending on one’s own political perspective. Neoconservatives frequently eulogize Washington as a new Rome, promising a worldwide empire without end carried on the back of a Pentagon bristling with advanced weaponry. Other observers also cite Rome but are rather more sanguine, recalling how in the 5th century the empire failed dramatically and fell to barbarian hordes. Still others note the fate of the British Empire, which came apart in the wake of the Second World War, or the Soviets, whose collapse was brought about by 50 years of unsustainable military spending.

But the historical analogy that appears to be most apposite for post-9/11 Washington is that of the Weimar Republic. To be sure, any suggestion that the United States might be following the same course as Germany in the years that led to Nazism must be pursued with caution because few Americans want to believe that the descent into such extremism is even possible in the world’s most venerable constitutional republic. But consider the following: both the United States and Weimar Germany had constitutions in which checks and balances were integrated to maintain a multi-party system, the rule of law, and individual liberties. Both countries were on the receiving end of acts of terrorism that produced a dramatic and violent reaction against the presumed perpetrators of the crimes, so both quickly adopted legislation that abridged many constitutional rights and empowered the head of state to react decisively to further threats. The media fell in line, concerned that criticism would be unpatriotic.

Both the U.S. and Germany possessed politically powerful military-industrial complexes that had a vested interest in encouraging a militarized response to the threats and highly polarized internal politics that enabled politicians to obtain advantage by exploiting national security concerns. Both countries experienced severe financial crises and printed fiat currency to pay the bills, and both had jurists and political supporters who argued that in time of crisis the head of state must be granted special executive authority that transcends the limits placed by the constitution.

The Weimar Republic, which replaced rule by the German emperor in the aftermath of World War I, was a liberal democracy in the 19th-century sense, which means it had a constitution that guaranteed individual and group rights, multi-party systems, and free elections at regular intervals. It took its name from the city of Weimar, where the constitution was drawn up in a national assembly convened in 1919. From the start, Weimar was plagued by a failure to create a sustainable political culture because of the high level of polarization and violence instigated by both the major and fringe parties, even though the relatively moderate Social Democrats were normally dominant.

Adolph Hitler became German chancellor in January 1933. The chancellor was the head of government, but the head of state was President and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was a hero of the First World War, and he despised the dangerous parvenu Hitler but foolishly thought he could control him. The National Socialist Party was, however, still a minority party in parliament with 33% of the popular vote when Hitler took charge, holding only three out of 11 cabinet positions. Strong socialist, Catholic, and communist parties actively contested the Nazis’ agenda. The media reflected the political divisions, with many papers opposing Hitler and his government.

Hitler benefited from the political paralysis of Weimar, which had forced his Reich chancellor predecessors to rule by presidential decree to bypass the logjam in parliament, but he could not actually legislate in that fashion and did not have a free ride. There was considerable resistance to his policies. All of that changed, however, when the seat of parliament in Berlin, the Reichstag, was burned down on Feb. 27, 1933. It was an act of terrorism that shocked the nation, and it was eventually attributed to an addled Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, though it was almost certainly carried out by the Nazis themselves. Hitler convinced President Hindenburg to sign a “Reichstag Fire Decree” on the following day, canceling the constitutional guarantees of habeas corpus and freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, and the privacy of communications. It authorized police search and seizure without any judicial warrant. It was no coincidence that the fire took place two weeks before parliamentary elections in which the Nazis, who beat and otherwise intimidated opponents and “monitored” the polling stations, won nearly 44% of the votes. The opposition, including the technically illegal communists, took 42% and Hitler was denied his majority, but he arrested socialist opponents, barred the communists, and was eventually able to form a government with his parliamentary allies.

Cajoling the Catholic parties to vote with him, Hitler subsequently passed the Enabling Act, which gave him the authority to ignore parliament and pass laws by decree. The full name of the Enabling Act was, in English, the “Act for the Removal of Distress from People and Reich.” Aided by leading jurists like Carl Schmitt, who argued that a powerful executive could ignore restraints imposed by bureaucrats and constitutions when required to cope with a “crisis,” and supported by conservatives and the army, Hitler quickly moved to consolidate power. The communist and socialist parties as well as any “new” parties were made illegal. In 1934, upon the death of Hindenburg, Hitler assumed the powers of the presidency, and the army began to swear allegiance to him rather than to the constitution. Germany became a dictatorship, and the rest is history. The March 1933 election was the last free election in Germany until the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949.

Fast forward 68 years. George W. Bush was president in 2001, a year after one of the most polarizing elections in U.S. history. There had been a gradual aggrandizement of the power of the U.S. presidency relative to the other branches of government since the Civil War, but most observers would have conceded that the constitutional separation of executive from legislative from judiciary remained largely intact. All of that was to change when the Twin Towers went down and the Pentagon was struck on 9/11. Though the Bush administration apparently had no hand in those events, the result was not too dissimilar to the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. A number of Bush Pentagon appointees, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, quickly mobilized to exploit the terror attack and pass legislation that would empower the White House and permit a massive military campaign directed against a number of countries that had been targeted for “regime change,” mostly in the Middle East. As a result, Iraq was eventually bombed and invaded even though it did not threaten the United States.

The first anti-terror legislation to pass was the USA PATRIOT Act, the full title of which is the “The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” a euphemism oddly reminiscent of Hitler’s Enabling Act. The PATRIOT Act became law six weeks after the fall of the Twin Towers and was followed by the PATRIOT Act II of 2006. Together, the two laws diminished constitutional rights to free speech, freedom of association, freedom from illegal search, habeas corpus, prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, and freedom from the illegal seizure of private property. The First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in the Bill of Rights were all discarded or abridged in the rush to make it easier to investigate, sometimes torture, and jail both foreigners and American citizens.

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA) followed, creating military tribunals for the trying of “unlawful enemy combatants,” including American citizens. Unlike in a civil or criminal court, the accused needs only a two-thirds vote by the commission members present to be convicted, resulting in a much higher conviction rate. The act suspends habeas corpus and Geneva Convention protections and permits the indefinite jailing of suspects in a military prison without charges or access to a lawyer. Hearsay or even information obtained overseas during torture can be used to obtain the conviction, while detainees do not have access to any classified information being used against them and cannot cross examine or even know the identity of witnesses.

Concurrent with the PATRIOT and Military Commission Acts, advocates of torture also emerged in Washington, not unlike the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s justification of the essentially lawless “Fuhrer State.” Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee declared torture legal because the president has the authority to do anything he deems necessary in time of crisis, the same argument that Hitler’s apologists made in discarding Weimar’s rule of law.

President Barack Obama has expanded the Bush portfolio, repeatedly citing state-secrets privileges to prevent any legal challenges while authorizing the assassination of U.S. citizens overseas based on suspicion, carrying out acts of war against countries with which Washington is not at war, and now, finally, signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which provides for indefinite military detention of anyone anywhere for any reason, including U.S. citizens in the United States, because the “whole world is the battlefield.” Did Hitler behave similarly in contravention of the Weimar constitution? He sure did. And if the expression “global war on terror” had been around in 1933, he likely would have used it auf Deutsch.

Sadly, on the verge of a new year, it is hard to argue that Washington in 2011 is much different from Weimar and Berlin in 1933. Last week, a man in Boston was convicted and sent to prison because he had traveled to Yemen and apparently wanted to join a terrorist group. He didn’t actually join the group; he just wanted to do it. So the age of the thought crime has arrived, something that even Hitler’s house jurist might have thought preposterous. Though we are not yet at the point where the president can declare opposition political parties illegal, Newt Gingrich might entertain the possibility if he were in charge. Pledges of personal loyalty to the leader, disenfranchisement of ethnic and religious minorities, and the burning of books by government fiat have not yet occurred either, but if one parses some of the rhetoric coming out of leading Republican presidential aspirants it is not inconceivable Muslim citizens will be subject to special security monitoring while a bonfire day featuring tracts on global warming and Darwinism might join Dixie Chicks CDs and french fries on the destroy-on-sight list.

While I jest to a certain extent, the power coupled with lack of accountability that has been assumed by the White House should be regarded as a deadly serious matter by every American citizen. If you think Weimar Republic Germany is a long time ago and far away so it can’t happen here, you are wrong. It can happen here, and unless something is done to stop it, it almost surely will happen here. It is happening already.

Article courtesy Philip Giraldi

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign in Iowa went into stealth mode in mid-December, temporarily closing its Des Moines office and removing all the campaign’s exterior signage.  Representatives of a coalition of peace and social justice organizations arrived at the campaign’s Des Moines headquarters on Saturday, December 17 to find the doors locked.  Though the office was scheduled to be open, the campaign’s Iowa staff  fled the site rather than talk with the activist peacemakers who have vowed to widen the public conversation about policies that matter to the American public.

“The elites have access to President Obama.  We came here to talk to the president’s people.  Since he’s locked us out of the process, we will say it outside, to the people here, in a press conference, to anyone willing to listen,” Des Moines Catholic Worker (DMCW) founder Frank Cordaro told a crowd of about 75, including members of the press and broadcast media.

“Our defense budget is approximately equal to that of the entire rest of the world. We could cut our defense budget in half, still have the highest spending in the world, and have more than $300 billion we could spend on the things we need here at home such as health care, education, roads and bridges – improvements to infrastructure,” said Elliott Adams, national president of Veterans For Peace (VFP), as he stood on the sidewalk outside Obama campaign headquarters at 621 E. 2nd Street.

“We have the power to create change.  The Occupy movement is wonderful!  It’s a new beginning, people taking charge of their future.  We need to use our power to create a world of justice, to create a world that is good for people,” Adams told The Independent Monitor.

Rev. Robert Cook of Des Moines spoke about the U.S. military’s impact in Central America.

“I’m out here because I am appalled for many reasons, not the least of which is that they’ve asked for a defense budget of $881 billion.  We have fought wars for decades and they just go on and on and on,” said Cook.

“The worst of it is the collateral damage, the civilians, the women, the children, and the unborn.  I went to El Salvador and saw the damage that was caused by the School of the Americas training in terror and torture.  There were more than 1,000 massacres and the worst was at El Mozote.  I visited El Mozote, where two little girls, 8 and 9 years old, grabbed me by the hand and took me to an excavation where they dug up and gave me this bone from an unborn baby,” said Cook, who produced a small box and displayed a tiny bone.

“So yes, I’m upset, by where our nation has been and where it is going,” said Cook.

“I was there during that war and after.  Our government was sending $1 million a day to fight that war.  The El Salvadorans would say to me, ‘We like you, we just don’t like what your government is doing,” Cook told The Independent Monitor.

Des Moines social worker Karla Hansen, producer of a documentary about Iran and the U.S. global war on terrorism titled Silent Screams, spoke to the crowd about the danger of an Israeli or U.S. attack on and war against Iran.

“Iran has not attacked another nation in over 250 years.  It is America that projects its interests beyond its own borders.  We are told that Iran can use its nuclear energy for peaceful means, but not for armaments.  Good!  This is exactly what we have been saying for a long time.  Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons.  We believe those who produce and stockpile nuclear weapons are politically backwards.  We believe that in this day and age, nuclear bombardment should have come to an end,” said Hansen, quoting from a letter by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Cordaro, a former priest, spoke about the assassination of Catholic Bishop Oscar Romero, who was killed while celebrating Mass in a hospital chapel in El Salvador on March 24, 1980.  Audio recordings of the event reveal that Romero was shot while elevating the chalice at the end of the Eucharistic rite. When he was shot, his blood spilled over the altar along with the contents of the chalice.

Cordaro produced a small swatch of cloth embedded in a medal.

“I have here a Franciscan coin, and on the back is a swatch of the blood-stained alter cloth.  The sisters who run the cancer hospital where the good bishop lived, celebrated mass, and was gunned down by U.S. weapons, U.S. ammunition, and U.S.-trained killers, cleaned up after the bishop’s body was taken away,” said Cordaro.

“Bishop Romero had the courage to tell President Carter, a Democrat, to stop sending military aid to El Salvador, because it only kills the people.  That kind of policy is the policy that this country has been running on since the 1950s.  Because he said that, within a week Bishop Romero was gunned down while celebrating the Eucharist, the Mass, for his people.  The bishop paid a high price for speaking out against the U.S. empire,” said Cordaro.

Rene Espeland, a DMCW peace and social justice activist, spoke about the plight of veterans.

“We’ve got all of these guys who made it back, but we’ve got more soldiers killing themselves than are killed in combat.  Something is really wrong.  Some VA health care is being privatized, and then it drops out,” said Espeland, referring to reports by government officials who say the number of suicides among veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the combat death toll because of inadequate mental health care.

United States Marine Corps veteran and VFP member Jeff Strottmann of Iowa City spoke to the crowd about Bradley Manning.  Manning, a US Army soldier, was arrested in May 2010 and has been incarcerated for allegedly leaking documents to Wikileaks, documents that exposed war crimes and embarrassed the U.S. government.

“Today is an international day of solidarity with Bradley Manning and the second day of his preliminary hearing for his court martial.  It’s also his 24th birthday.  The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has attempted several times to meet with him but has been refused access,” said Strottmann.

Manning was subjected by the U.S. government to conditions that clearly amount to torture while in custody in the Quantico brig, said Strottmann.

“He’s being held for doing not just what he had a right to do but what he had an obligation to do under international law and the Geneva Conventions.  He should be freed and he should be paid damages for his false arrest,” said Strottmann.

At that point, chants of “Free Bradley Manning” erupted spontaneously from the crowd.

Eric Hedberg of Des Moines spoke to the crowd about his early support for President Obama.

“Just a few years ago I read a some of Obama’s books, including one titled The Audacity of Hope, and I actually did have hope that things could change.  Over the last three years, I’ve seen things change in some ways for the worse.  Though they claim we are out of Iraq, they’ve escalated things in Afghanistan,” said Hedberg.

I’m troubled by the increased use of drones in Afghanistan under the Obama administration and what is called collateral damage, said Hedberg.

“That they would take the signs off the door and the windows and not be here to listen to what we have to say strikes me as ironic,” said Hedberg.

Following the press conference and rally, members of Occupy Des Moines erected tents on the sidewalk and lawn outside the Obama campaign headquarters and, with the help of VFP members, dropped a banner off the roof of the one-story building where the campaign headquarters is located.  Later in the day a group of about 45 Hispanic immigration rights activists joined the Occupy Des Moines action and spoke about the concerns of immigrant groups.

The Occupiers remained on the site until late Monday morning, December 19, when they decided to move their tents back to Stewart Square.

Unable to gain access to Obama campaign staffers, on December 19 about a dozen DMCW, Occupy Des Moines activists, and VFP members including Cordaro, Espeland, Megan Felt, Clarke Davidson, and Ed Bloomer occupied the offices of the Democratic Party of Iowa at 5661 Fleur Drive.

Seated in the office boardroom, Cordaro told reporters that, “We’ve already gotten more of a hearing here, from the state Democratic Party, than we did at the president’s office. We were able to read our message.”

“We’re being treated very nicely,” said Cordaro, adding that it seemed clear that party officials would not allow the occupation to continue.

Democratic Party of Iowa official Norm Sterzenbach called police to the scene and at the time of this report arrests were in progress.

Photo by Michael Gillespie

By Max Blumenthal

In October, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department turned parts of the campus of the University of California in Berkeley into an urban battlefield. The occasion was Urban Shield 2, an annual SWAT team exposition organized to promote “mutual response,” collaboration and competition between heavily militarized police strike forces representing law enforcement departments across the United States and foreign nations.

At the time, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department was preparing for an imminent confrontation with the nascent “Occupy” movement that had set up camp in downtown Oakland, and would demonstrate the brunt of its repressive capacity against the demonstrators a month later when it attacked the encampment with teargas and rubber bullet rounds, leaving an Iraq war veteran in critical condition and dozens injured. According to Police Magazine, a law enforcement trade publication, “Law enforcement agencies responding to…Occupy protesters in northern California credit Urban Shield for their effective teamwork.”

Training alongside the American police departments at Urban Shield was the Yamam, an Israeli Border Police unit that claims to specialize in “counter-terror” operations but is better known for its extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian militant leaders and long record of repression and abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Urban Shield also featured a unit from the military of Bahrain, which had just crushed a largely non-violent democratic uprising by opening fire on protest camps and arresting wounded demonstrators when they attempted to enter hospitals. While the involvement of Bahraini soldiers in the drills was a novel phenomenon, the presence of quasi-military Israeli police – whose participation in Urban Shield was not reported anywhere in US media – reflected a disturbing but all-too-common feature of the post-9/11 American security landscape.

The Israelification of America’s security apparatus, recently unleashed in full force against the Occupy Wall Street Movement, has taken place at every level of law enforcement, and in areas that have yet to be exposed. The phenomenon has been documented in bits and pieces, through occasional news reports that typically highlight Israel’s national security prowess without examining the problematic nature of working with a country accused of grave human rights abuses. But it has never been the subject of a national discussion. And collaboration between American and Israeli cops is just the tip of the iceberg.

Having been schooled in Israeli tactics perfected during a 63 year experience of controlling, dispossessing, and occupying an indigenous population, local police forces have adapted them to monitor Muslim and immigrant neighborhoods in US cities. Meanwhile, former Israeli military officers have been hired to spearhead security operations at American airports and suburban shopping malls, leading to a wave of disturbing incidents of racial profiling, intimidation, and FBI interrogations of innocent, unsuspecting people. The New York Police Department’s disclosure that it deployed “counter-terror” measures against Occupy protesters encamped in downtown Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park is just the latest example of the so-called War on Terror creeping into every day life. Revelations like these have raised serious questions about the extent to which Israeli-inspired tactics are being used to suppress the Occupy movement.

The process of Israelification began in the immediate wake of 9/11, when national panic led federal and municipal law enforcement officials to beseech Israeli security honchos for advice and training. America’s Israel lobby exploited the climate of hysteria, providing thousands of top cops with all-expenses paid trips to Israel and stateside training sessions with Israeli military and intelligence officials. By now, police chiefs of major American cities who have not been on junkets to Israel are the exception.

“Israel is the Harvard of antiterrorism,” said former US Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, who now serves as the US Senate Sergeant-at-Arms. Cathy Lanier, the Chief of the Washington DC Metropolitan Police, remarked, “No experience in my life has had more of an impact on doing my job than going to Israel.” “One would say it is the front line,” Barnett Jones, the police chief of Ann Arbor, Michigan, said of Israel. “We’re in a global war.”

Karen Greenberg the director of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security and a leading expert on terror and civil liberties, said the Israeli influence on American law enforcement is so extensive it has bled into street-level police conduct. “After 9/11 we reached out to the Israelis on many fronts and one of those fronts was torture,” Greenberg told me. “The training in Iraq and Afghanistan on torture was Israeli training. There’s been a huge downside to taking our cue from the Israelis and now we’re going to spread that into the fabric of everyday American life? It’s counter-terrorism creep. And it’s exactly what you could have predicted would have happened.”

Changing the way we do business

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is at the heart of American-Israeli law enforcement collaboration. JINSA is a Jerusalem and Washington DC-based think tank known for stridently neoconservative policy positions on Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians and its brinkmanship with Iran. The group’s board of directors boasts a Who’s Who of neocon ideologues. Two former JINSA advisers who have also consulted for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle, went on to serve in the Department of Defense under President George W. Bush, playing influential roles in the push to invade and occupy Iraq.

Through its Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), JINSA claims to have arranged Israeli-led training sessions for over 9000 American law enforcement officials at the federal, state and municipal level. “The Israelis changed the way we do business regarding homeland security in New Jersey,” Richard Fuentes, the NJ State Police Superintendent, said after attending a 2004 JINSA-sponsored Israel trip and a subsequent JINSA conference alongside 435 other law enforcement officers.

During a 2004 LEEP trip, JINSA brought 14 senior American law enforcement officials to Israel to receive instruction from their counterparts. The Americans were trained in “how to secure large venues, such as shopping malls, sporting events and concerts,” JINSA’s website reported. Escorted by Brigadier General Simon Perry, an Israeli police attaché and former Mossad official, the group toured the Israeli separation wall, now a mandatory stop for American cops on junkets to Israel. “American officials learned about the mindset of a suicide bomber and how to spot trouble signs,” according to JINSA. And they were schooled in Israeli killing methods. “Although the police are typically told to aim for the chest when shooting because it is the largest target, the Israelis are teaching [American] officers to aim for a suspect’s head so as not to detonate any explosives that might be strapped to his torso,” theNew York Times reported.

Cathy Lanier, now the Chief of Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was among the law enforcement officials junketed to Israel by JINSA. “I was with the bomb units and the SWAT team and all of those high profile specialized [Israeli] units and I learned a tremendous amount,” Lanier reflected. “I took 82 pages of notes while I was there which I later brought back and used to formulate a lot of what I later used to create and formulate the Homeland Security terrorism bureau in the DC Metropolitan Police department.”

Some of the police chiefs who have taken part in JINSA’s LEEP program have done so under the auspices of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), a private non-governmental group with close ties to the Department of Homeland Security. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of PERF, was so enthusiastic about the program that by 2005 he had begun organizing trips to Israel sponsored by PERF, bringing numerous high-level American police officials to receive instruction from their Israeli counterparts.

PERF gained notoriety when Wexler confirmed that his group coordinated police raids in 16 cities across America against “Occupy” protest encampments. As many as 40 cities have sought PERF advice on suppressing the “Occupy” movement and other mass protest activities. Wexler did not respond to my requests for an interview.

Lessons from Israel to Auschwitz

Besides JINSA, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has positioned itself as an important liaison between American police forces and the Israeli security-intelligence apparatus. Though the ADL promotes itself as a Jewish civil rights group, it has provoked controversy by publishing a blacklist of organizations supporting Palestinian rights, and for condemning a proposal to construct an Islamic community center in downtown New York, several blocks from Ground Zero, on the basis that some opponents of the project were entitled to “positions that others would characterize as irrational or bigoted.”

Through the ADL’s Advanced Training School course on Extremist and Terrorist Threats, over 700 law enforcement personnel from 220 federal and local agencies including the FBI and CIA have been trained by Israeli police and intelligence commanders. This year, the ADL brought 15 high-level American police officials to Israel for instruction from the country’s security apparatus. According to the ADL, over 115 federal, state and local law enforcement executives have undergone ADL-organized training sessions in Israel since the program began in 2003. “I can honestly say that the training offered by ADL is by far the most useful and current training course I have ever attended,” Deputy Commissioner Thomas Wright of the Philadelphia Police Department commented after completing an ADL program this year. The ADL’s relationship with the Washington DC Police Department is so cozy its members are invited to accompany DC cops on “ride along” patrols.

The ADL claims to have trained over 45,000 American law enforcement officials through its Law Enforcement and Society program which “draws on the history of the Holocaust to provide law enforcement professionals with an increased understanding of…their role as protectors of the Constitution,” the group’s website stated. All new FBI agents and intelligence analysts are required to attend the ADL program, which is incorporated into three FBI training programs. According to official FBI recruitment material, “all new special agents must visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to see firsthand what can happen when law enforcement fails to protect individuals.”

Fighting “crimiterror”

Among the most prominent Israeli government figure to have influenced the practices of American law enforcement officials is Avi Dichter, a former head of Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service and current member of Knesset who recently introduced legislation widely criticized as anti-democratic. During the Second Intifada, Dichter ordered several bombings on densely populated Palestinian civilian areas, including one on the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza that resulted in the death of 15 innocent people, including 8 children, and 150 injuries. “After each success, the only thought is, ‘Okay, who’s next?’” Dichter said of the “targeted” assassinations he has ordered.

Despite his dubious human rights record and apparently dim view of democratic values, or perhaps because of them, Dichter has been a key figure in fostering cooperation between Israeli security forces and American law enforcement. In 2006, while Dichter was serving at the time as Israel’s Minister of Public Security, he spoke in Boston, Massachusetts before the annual convention of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Seated beside FBI Director Robert Mueller and then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Dichter told the 10,000 police officers in the crowd that there was an “intimate connection between fighting criminals and fighting terrorists.” Dichter declared that American cops were actually “fighting crimiterrorists.” The Jerusalem Post reported that Dichter was “greeted by a hail of applause, as he was hugged by Mueller, who described Dichter as his mentor in anti-terror tactics.”

A year after Dichter’s speech, he and then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff signed a joint memorandum pledging security collaboration between America and Israel on issues ranging from airport security to emergency planning. In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano authorized a new joint memorandum with Israeli Transport and Road Safety Minister Israel Katz shoring up cooperation between the US Transportation Security Agency – the agency in charge of day-to-day airport security – and Israel’s Security Department. The recent joint memorandum also consolidated the presence of US Homeland Security law enforcement personnel on Israeli soil. “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” Napolitano remarked at a recent summit of AIPAC, the leading outfit of America’s Israel lobby, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The Demographic Unit

For the New York Police Department, collaboration with Israel’s security and intelligence apparatus became a top priority after 9/11. Just months after the attacks on New York City, the NYPD assigned a permanent, taxpayer-funded liaison officer to Tel Aviv. Under the leadership of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, ties between the NYPD and Israel have deepened by the day. Kelly embarked on his first trip to Israel in early 2009 to demonstrate his support for Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, a one-sided attack that left over 1400 Gaza residents dead in three weeks and led a United Nations fact-finding mission to conclude that Israeli military and government officials had committed war crimes.

Kelly returned to Israel the following year to speak at the Herziliya Conference, an annual gathering of neoconservative security and government officials who obsess over supposed “demographic threats.” After Kelly appeared on stage, the Herziliya crowd was addressed by the pro-Israel academic Martin Kramer, who claimed that Israel’s blockade of Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” Kramer added, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.”

Back in New York, the NYPD set up a secret “Demographics Unit” designed to spy on and monitor Muslim communities around the city. The unit was developed with input and intensive involvement by the CIA, which still refuses to name the former Middle East station chief it has posted in the senior ranks of the NYPD’s intelligence division. Since 2002, the NYPD has dispatched undercover agents known as “rakers” and “mosque crawlers” into Pakistani-American bookstores and restaurants to gauge community anger over US drone strikes inside Pakistan, and into Palestinian hookah bars and mosques to search out signs of terror recruitment and clandestine funding. “If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn,” the Associated Press reported. “The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny.”

The Israeli imprimatur on the NYPD’s Demographics Unit is unmistakable. As a former police official told the Associated Press, the Demographics Unit has attempted to “map the city’s human terrain” through a program “modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank.”

Shop ‘til you’re stopped

At Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, security personnel target non-Jewish and non-white passengers, especially Arabs, as a matter of policy. The most routinely harassed passengers are Palestinian citizens of Israel, who must brace themselves for five-hour interrogation sessions and strip searches before flying. Those singled out for extra screening by Shin Bet officers are sent to what many Palestinians from Israel call the “Arab room,” where they are subjected to humiliating questioning sessions (former White House Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala encountered such mistreatment during a visit to Israel last year). Some Palestinians are forbidden from speaking to anyone until takeoff, and may be menaced by Israeli flight attendants during the flight. In one documented case, a six-month-old was awoken for a strip search by Israeli Shin Bet personnel. Instances of discrimination against Arabs at Ben Gurion International are too numerous to detail – several incidents occur each day – but a few of the more egregious instances were outlined in a 2007 petition to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed with the country’s Supreme Court.

Though the Israeli system of airline security contains dubious benefits and clearly deleterious implications for civil liberties, it is quietly and rapidly migrating into major American airports. Security personnel at Boston’s Logan International Airport have undergone extensive training from Israeli intelligence personnel, learning to apply profiling and behavioral assessment techniques against American citizens that were initially tested on Palestinians. The new procedures began in August, when so-called Behavior Detection Officers were placed in security queues at Logan’s heavily trafficked Terminal A. Though the procedures have added to traveler stress while netting exactly zero terrorists, they are likely to spread to other cities. “I would like to see a lot more profiling” in American airports, said Yossi Sheffi, an Israeli-born risk analyst at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Israeli techniques now dictate security procedures at the Mall of America, a gargantuan shopping mall in Bloomington, Minnesota that has become a major tourist attraction. The new methods took hold in 2005 when the mall hired a former Israeli army sergeant named Mike Rozin to lead a special new security unit. Rozin, who once worked with a canine unit at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel, instructed his employees at the Mall of America to visually profile every shopper, examining their expressions for suspicious signs. His security team accosts and interrogates an average of 1200 shoppers a year, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

One of the thousands who fell into Rozin’s dragnet was Najam Qureshi, a Pakistani-American mall vendor whose father accidentally left his cell phone on a table in the mall food court. A day after the incident, FBI agents appeared at Qureshi’s doorstep to ask if he knew anyone seeking to harm the United States. An army veteran interrogated for two hours by Rozin’s men for taking video inside the mall sobbed openly about his experience to reporters. Meanwhile, another man, Emile Khalil, was visited by FBI agents after mall security stopped him for taking photographs of the dazzling consumer haven.

“I think that the threat of terrorism in the United States is going to become an unfortunate part of American life,” Rozin remarked to American Jewish World. And as long as the threat persists in the public’s mind, Israeli securitocrats like Rozin will never have to worry about the next paycheck.

“Occupy” meets the Occupation

When a riot squad from the New York Police Department destroyed and evicted the “Occupy Wall Street” protest encampment at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, department leadership drew on the anti-terror tactics they had refined since the 9/11 attacks. According to the New York Times, the NYPD deployed “counter-terrorism measures” to mobilize large numbers of cops for the lightning raid on Zuccotti. The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon.

Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists.”

“After 9/11 we had to react very quickly,” Greenberg remarked, “but now we’re in 2011 and we’re not talking about people who want to fly planes into buildings. We’re talking about young American citizens who feel that their birthright has been sold. If we’re using Israeli style tactics on them and this stuff bleeds into the way we do business at large, were in big trouble.”

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Occupy Des Moines protesters confronted anti-Muslim activist Tom Trento, founder of The United West, outside a Des Moines church on Friday, Nov. 19 as six Republican presidential candidates pandered to Christian fundamentalists gathered inside at a “Family Thanksgiving Forum” sponsored by the controversial conservative group, The Family Leader.

“It’s the type of bigoted group that some Republicans welcome,” said Des Moines Catholic Worker Frank Cordaro, referring to Trento’s organization, which claims to be “uniting western civilization to defeat Sharia Islam.”  The United West website declares that it one of its immediate goals is, “the mobilization of Americans and Europeans to stand firmly for the defense and protection of the State of Israel.”

“We just called him out for being a bigot,” said Cordaro, after Trento and his video camera crew sought to interview Occupy Des Moines activists.

Occupier Ross Grooters said Trento attempted to split Occupy activists off from the group and goad them to “spread a message of hate against Jewish and Islamic people, which is not what Occupy is about.”

“Trento was trying to get statements that he could use for his propaganda.  We surrounded him and told him that we don’t support bigotry.  We shouted him down and shamed him,” said Cordaro.

Some 2,000 conservative Christian evangelicals from across Iowa and beyond came to the event organized by Bob Vander Plaats, President of The Family Leader, to see Fox News pollster Frank Luntz moderate a discussion among Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum.  The candidates declared their views on religious issues including abortion and gay marriage while repeatedly attacking liberals and President Barack Obama in the sanctuary of the evangelical First Federated Church in Des Moines.

Gingrich told the crowd inside the church that his message to the Occupy movement is, “Go get a job right after you take a bath.”

“It’s pretty clear that we are having an effect.  When Newt Gingrich is speaking to his supporters about Occupy and the Occupy movement, that’s a win for us,” said Grooters.

Late in the day, Occupy Des Moines activists rallied again and marched from Nollen Plaza to the Hy-Vee Hall, site of one of the Iowa Democratic Party’s largest fundraisers of the year, the Jefferson Jackson dinner, to protest the appearance of keynote speaker Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

“Rahm Emanuel, in my mind, isn’t too much different from the GOP right now,” said Grooters.

“He is the definition of a corporatist Democrat.  He too takes money from big banks and big corporations, and he, too, is essentially bought,” said Grooters.

An Occupy Des Moines flyer handed out at the rally reminded readers that, “as an investment banker, Emanuel made ‘more than $18 million in just two and a half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions.’

“‘After Mr. Emanuel left banking to run for Congress, members of the securities and investment industry became his biggest backers, donating more than $1.5 million to his campaigns dating back to 2002.’”  The handout cited the New York Times, 12/3/08.

It also noted that as Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Emanuel consistently opposed effective health care reform and the single-payer option.

In 2006, as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, then-Rep. Emanuel worked to prevent the nomination and election of progressive Democratic candidates, effectively scuttling the progressive agenda.

Outside of Hy-Vee Hall a group of about 50 Occupiers chanted, “Banks got bailed out!  We got sold out!” and castigated Mayor Rahm Emanuel for having Occupy Chicago protesters jailed.  Several speakers demanded that Emanuel stand up for human rights and support First Amendment speech.

Bill Stansbery of Ames, a member of Veterans for Peace, was among a group of anti-war Occupiers protesting at Hy-Vee Hall.  Stansbery held up a placard bearing the message, “Slash Money for Military!”

“It’s obvious that we are spending too much money on the military and too much money on war.  We could use the money for other things here at home,” said Stansbery.

We need to get the big money, including the defense corporations, out of politics, said Stansbery.

Occupy Des Moines press committee spokesperson Stephen Toothman, wore a lapel tag with the message, “Ask An Occupier.”  Toothman said the group’s actions at the Republican Family Thanksgiving Forum and the Democratic Jefferson Jackson Dinner are part of its ongoing campaign of nonviolent educational protests and occupations in advance of the Iowa Caucuses.

Something tells us that Mohamed El-Erian is aware of the bulls’ last bastion of “growth” and “decoupling” – the dip in Initial Claims below 400K. Even so, his appearance on Bloomberg TV was full of sound and fury, and some quite memorable soundbites, starting with this one: “Let me tell ou what I find most terrifying: we’re having this discussion about a risk of recession at a time when unemployment is already too high, at a time when a quarter of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, at a time when the fiscal deficit is 9%, a time when interest rates are at zero. These are all conditions coming out of a recession, not going into a recession.” The Newport Beach dweller is spot on: the situation is getting worse by the day, and the only option left is to do more of what has already failed so many times, and which only makes non-dilutable transitory monetary equivalents that much more attractive (with the mandatory liquidation which may bring them to triple digits first of course).

Transcript from Bloomberg TV

On the U.S. going into a double-dip recession:

“I am worried. We’ve had two bits of unfavorable news in the last 24 hours. One you reported this morning, which is that we have less economic momentum than we thought we had – 2% growth as opposed to 2.5%.  The second is that yesterday we had no policy momentum. We’re worried about the concept of stall speed, that 2% growth may not be enough for an economy that still has to de-lever. We put the chance of a recession at one-third to one half, which is really high given initial conditions.”

On policy makers in Washington, D.C.:

“[Policy makers] are totally off the track. It’s not a failure to agree on medium-term fiscal reforms, it’s also a failure to give air cover for other things that need to be done — in housing, in the labor markets, in credit. We have no policy momentum. Let me tell you what I find most terrifying: we’re having this discussion about a risk of recession at a time when unemployment is already too high, at a time when a quarter of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, at a time when the fiscal deficit is 9%, a time when interest rates are at zero.”

On what factors could be driving a double-dip recession:

“This is a fragile economy. It doesn’t mean we don’t have strength, we certainly do – the corporate sectors are as strong as we have ever seen it in terms of balance sheets. We have incredible entrepreneurial spirit. But we’re facing all these structural headwinds, and the big concern is the possibility of us being tipped over by Europe. Things in Europe, as you mentioned a few minutes ago, are getting worse, not better.”

On solutions in the U.S.:

“Unlike Europe, the U.S. doesn’t face an engineering problem – it faces a political problem. The solution is not an engineering nightmare. You can actually put it on paper and get it done. But it’s been a political nightmare. What we’d like to see is the political class to come together and agree on the steps that need to be taken.”

“As you have heard us say over and over again, Bill Gross has been saying it, I’ve been saying it, other PIMCO colleagues have been saying it — it’s structural in nature. We need medium term structural reforms to increase the growth potential and job creation potential of this economy. We can do it. This is different from Europe. Europe has both a political problem and an engineering problem. Our problems are small relative to Europe, but if we wait they will become larger.”

On the S&P’s statement that US rating is unaffected by the supercommittee:

“That is what S&P is telling us. We have to remember that S&P still has us on negative outlook which means unless things improve over the next three years, there could well be another downgrade. The ratings agencies in general are in a very tough position. We talked about at PIMCO’s investment committee yesterday. They’ve been beaten up a lot, both for what they have done and for mistakes that disrupted the markets for a while. It is hard to be a ratings agency today. You have to read these comments in that context. They are under fire.”

On Joseph Stiglitz’s comments that austerity measures make the crisis worse:

“I think [Stiglitz] is right, in the sense that the muddled middle, where Europe has been, is no longer sustainable. The crisis that started in the outer periphery, Greece, not only has shifted to the inner periphery and the outer core, Spain and Italy, but it has also impacted France which is the inner core.”

“Europe needs to make a choice if it wants to save the euro, and it should save the euro. There’s only two choices: one is a full fiscal union, a political decision with a very large bill. The other [choice] is a smaller, less-than-perfect euro zone, which has political implications but has a smaller bill. That is a political decision that Germany must take. The quicker it takes it, the more likely it will be able to save the euro.”

On the options that could save Europe:

“There are no easy options. That’s why the process is paralyzed. Wherever the policy makers look, they see tremendous costs and tremendous disruptions. The tendency has been to do too little, too late. There is no costless way forward at this point, and that is a problem that all of us have to internalize and understand, that there are no easy solutions.”

On Europe being the single biggest threat to the U.S. economy:

“Left to our own, we would muddle along with the risk of stall speed, but one thing we cannot cope with is the major shock from one of the largest economic areas of the world, Europe. Already we’re seeing investors stepped back from markets because of the anxiety. The more that happens, the more dysfunctional these markets become.”

On whether the Fed should implement QE3:

“I smiled when one of your guests said earlier that the Fed has been the only adult in Washington. That is true. It has been the only institution willing to take steps. As you pointed out, because the Fed has taken these steps, it has taken pressure off of the rest of Washington to do its part…Other agencies haven’t stepped up to the plate. It is time for other agencies to step up. The effectiveness of the Fed is declining, unfortunately, day in and day out.”

On what the Fed should do:

“Chairman Bernanke has made it clear and he’s repeating it three times, saying that when they look at these unconventional policies, they recognize the benefits but there are costs and risks. What we call collateral damage, unintended consequences.”

“[Bernanke] recognizes that that equation, that balance, is shifting from potential benefits to costs and risks. Looking forward, if they were to do QE3, they may get some benefits, but I suspect there would also be quite a bit of collateral damage and distortions put into the system that would take us years to overcome.”

“[Collateral damage would be] pressure on the currency. What you will see is pressure on the functioning of markets, you will see people stepping back, because more and more non-commercial forces will be determining market outcomes. We will also see questions about the credibility of the Fed and the political autonomy of the Fed.”

Mohamed A. El-Erian re-joined PIMCO at the end of 2007 after serving for two years as president and CEO of Harvard Management Company, the entity that manages Harvard’s endowment and related accounts. El-Erian served as a member of the faculty of Harvard Business School. He is said to have left Harvard as a result of disagreements with Larry Summers regarding Harvard’s investment strategy under Summers’ leadership.

Courtesy Tyler Durden and zerohedge.com

By Juan Cole

From Tunis to Tel Aviv, Madrid to Oakland, a new generation of youth activists is challenging the neoliberal state that has dominated the world ever since the Cold War ended. The massive popular protests that shook the globe this year have much in common, though most of the reporting on them in the mainstream media has obscured the similarities.

Whether in Egypt or the United States, young rebels are reacting to a single stunning worldwide development: the extreme concentration of wealth in a few hands thanks to neoliberal policies of deregulation and union busting. They have taken to the streets, parks, plazas and squares to protest against the resulting corruption, the way politicians can be bought and sold, and the impunity of the white-collar criminals who have run riot in societies everywhere. They are objecting to high rates of unemployment, reduced social services, blighted futures and above all the substitution of the market for all other values as the matrix of human ethics and life.

Pasha the Tiger

In the “glorious thirty years” after World War II, North America and Western Europe achieved remarkable rates of economic growth and relatively low levels of inequality for capitalist societies, while instituting a broad range of benefits for workers, students and retirees. From roughly 1980 on, however, the neoliberal movement, rooted in the laissez-faire economic theories of Milton Friedman, launched what became a full-scale assault on workers’ power and an attempt, often remarkably successful, to eviscerate the social welfare state.

Neoliberals chanted the mantra that everyone would benefit if the public sector were privatised, businesses deregulated and market mechanisms allowed to distribute wealth. But as economist David Harvey argues, from the beginning it was a doctrine that primarily benefited the wealthy, its adoption allowing the top one per cent in any neoliberal society to capture a disproportionate share of whatever wealth was generated.

In the global South, countries that gained their independence from European colonialism after World War II tended to create large public sectors as part of the process of industrialisation. Often, living standards improved as a result, but by the 1970s, such developing economies were generally experiencing a levelling-off of growth. This happened just as neoliberalism became ascendant in Washington, Paris and London as well as in Bretton Woods institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This “Washington consensus” meant that the urge to impose privatisation on stagnating, nepotistic postcolonial states would become the order of the day.

Egypt and Tunisia, to take two countries in the spotlight for sparking the Arab Spring, were successfully pressured in the 1990s to privatise their relatively large public sectors. Moving public resources into the private sector created an almost endless range of

opportunities for staggering levels of corruption on the part of the ruling families of autocrats Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis and Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. International banks, central banks and emerging local private banks aided and abetted their agenda.

It was not surprising then that one of the first targets of Tunisian crowds in the course of the revolution they made last January was the Zitouna bank, a branch of which they torched. Its owner, Sakher El Materi, a son-in-law of President Ben Ali and the notorious owner of Pasha, the well-fed pet tiger that prowled the grounds of one of his sumptuous mansions. Not even the way his outfit sought legitimacy by practicing “Islamic banking” could forestall popular rage. A 2006 State Department cable released by WikiLeaks observed, “One local financial expert blames the [Ben Ali] Family for chronic banking sector woes due to the great percentage of non-performing loans issued through crony connections, and has essentially paralysed banking authorities from genuine recovery efforts.”  That is, the banks were used by the regime to give away money to his cronies, with no expectation of repayment.

Tunisian activists similarly directed their ire at foreign banks and lenders to which their country owes $14.4bn. Tunisians are still railing and rallying against the repayment of all that money, some of which they believe was borrowed profligately by the corrupt former regime and then squandered quite privately.

Tunisians had their own one per cent, a thin commercial elite, half of whom were related to or closely connected to President Ben Ali. As a group, they were accused by young activists of mafia-like, predatory practices, such as demanding pay-offs from legitimate businesses, and discouraging foreign investment by tying it to a stupendous system of bribes. The closed, top-heavy character of the Tunisian economic system was blamed for the bottom-heavy waves of suffering that followed: cost of living increases that hit people on fixed incomes or those like students and peddlers in the marginal economy especially hard.

It was no happenstance that the young man who immolated himself and so sparked the Tunisian rebellion was a hard-pressed vegetable peddler. It’s easy now to overlook what clearly ties the beginning of the Arab Spring to the European Summer and the present American Fall: the point of the Tunisian revolution was not just to gain political rights, but to sweep away that one per cent, popularly imagined as a sort of dam against economic opportunity.

Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, Rothschild Avenue

The success of the Tunisian revolution in removing the octopus-like Ben Ali plutocracy inspired the dramatic events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and even Israel that are redrawing the political map of the Middle East. But the 2011 youth protest movement was hardly contained in the Middle East. Estonian-Canadian activist Kalle Lasn and his anti-consumerist colleagues at the Vancouver-based Adbusters Media Foundation were inspired by the success of the revolutionaries in Tahrir Square in deposing dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Their organisation specialises in combatting advertising culture through spoofs and pranks. It was Adbusters magazine that sent out the call on Twitter in the summer of 2011 for a rally at Wall Street on September 17, with the now-famous hash tag #OccupyWallStreet. A thousand protesters gathered on the designated date, commemorating the 2008 economic meltdown that had thrown millions of Americans out of their jobs and their homes. Some camped out in nearby Zuccotti Park, another unexpected global spark for protest.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has now spread throughout the United States, sometimes in the face of serious acts of repression, as in Oakland, California. It has followed in the spirit of the Arab and European movements in demanding an end to special privileges for the richest one per cent, including their ability to more or less buy the US government for purposes of their choosing. What is often forgotten is that the Ben Alis, Mubaraks and Gaddafis were not simply authoritarian tyrants. They were the one per cent and the guardians of the one per cent, in their own societies – and loathed for exactly that.

Last April, around the time that Lasn began imagining Wall Street protests, progressive activists in Israel started planning their own movement. In July, sales clerk and aspiring filmmaker Daphne Leef found herself unable to cover a sudden rent increase on her Tel Aviv apartment. So she started a protest Facebook page similar to the ones that fuelled the Arab Spring and moved into a tent on the posh Rothschild Avenue where she was soon joined by hundreds of other protesting Israelis. Week by week, the demonstrations grew, spreading to cities throughout the country and culminating on September 3 in a massive rally, the largest in Israel’s history. Some 300,000 protesters came out in Tel Aviv, 50,000 in Jerusalem and 40,000 in Haifa. Their demands included not just lower housing costs, but a rollback of neoliberal policies, less regressive taxes and more progressive, direct taxation, a halt to the privatisation of the economy, and the funding of a system of inexpensive education and child care.

Many on the left in Israel are also deeply troubled by the political and economic power of right-wing settlers on the West Bank, but most decline to bring the Palestinian issue into the movement’s demands for fear of losing support among the middle class. For the same reason, the way the Israeli movement was inspired by Tahrir Square and the Egyptian revolution has been downplayed, although “Walk like an Egyptian” signs – a reference both to the Cairo demonstrations and the 1986 Bangles hit song – have been spotted on Rothschild Avenue.

Most of the Israeli activists in the coastal cities know that they are victims of the same neoliberal order that displaces the Palestinians, punishes them and keeps them stateless. Indeed, the Palestinians, altogether lacking a state but at the complete mercy of various forms of international capital controlled by elites elsewhere, are the ultimate victims of the neoliberal order. But in order to avoid a split in the Israeli protest movement, a quiet agreement was reached to focus on economic discontents and so avoid the divisive issue of the much-despised West Bank settlements.

There has been little reporting in the Western press about a key source of Israeli unease, which was palpable to me when I visited the country in May. Even then, before the local protests had fully hit their stride, Israelis I met were complaining about the rise to power of an Israeli one per cent. There are now 16 billionaires in the country, who control $45bn in assets, and the current crop of 10,153 millionaires is 20 per cent larger than it was in the previous fiscal year. In terms of its distribution of wealth, Israel is now among the most unequal of the countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Since the late 1980s, the average household income of families in the bottom fifth of the population has been declining at an annual rate of 1.1 per cent. Over the same period, the average household income of families among the richest 20 per cent went up at an annual rate of 2.4 per cent.

While neoliberalism has produced more unequal societies throughout the world, nowhere else has the income of the poor declined quite so strikingly. The concentration of wealth in a few hands profoundly contradicts the founding principles of Israel’s Labour Zionism, and results from decades of right-wing Likud policies punishing the poor and middle classes and shifting wealth to the top of society.

The indignant ones

European youth were also inspired by the Tunisians and Egyptians – and by a similar flight of wealth. I was in Barcelona on May 27, when the police attacked demonstrators camped out at the Placa de Catalunya, provoking widespread consternation. The government of the region is currently led by the centrist Convergence and Union Party, a moderate proponent of Catalan nationalism. It is relatively popular locally, and so Catalans had not expected such heavy-handed police action to be ordered. The crackdown, however, underlined the very point of the protesters, that the neoliberal state, whatever its political makeup, is protecting the same set of wealthy miscreants.

Spain’s “indignados” (indignant ones) got their start in mid-May with huge protests at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol Plaza against the country’s persistent 21 per cent unemployment rate (and double that among the young). Egyptian activists in Tahrir Square immediately sent a statement of warm support to those in the Spanish capital (as they would months later to New York’s demonstrators). Again following the same pattern, the Spanish movement does not restrict its objections to unemployment (and the lack of benefits attending the few new temporary or contract jobs that do arise). Its targets are the banks, bank bailouts, financial corruption and cuts in education and other services.

Youth activists I met in Toledo and Madrid this summer denounced both of the country’s major parties and, indeed, the very consumer society that emphasised wealth accumulation over community and material acquisition over personal enrichment. In the past two months Spain’s young protesters have concentrated on demonstrating against cuts to education, with crowds of 70,000 to 90,000 coming out more than once in Madrid and tens of thousands in other cities. For marches in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, hundreds of thousands reportedly took to the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, among other cities.

The global reach and connectedness of these movements has yet to be fully appreciated. The Madrid education protesters, for example, cited for inspiration Chilean students who, through persistent, innovative, and large-scale demonstrations this summer and fall, have forced that country’s neoliberal government, headed by the increasingly unpopular billionaire president Sebastian Pinera, to inject $1.6bn in new money into education. Neither the crowds of youth in Madrid nor those in Santiago are likely to be mollified, however, by new dorms and laboratories. Chilean students have already moved on from insisting on an end to an ever more expensive class-based education system to demands that the country’s lucrative copper mines be nationalised so as to generate revenues for investment in education. In every instance, the underlying goal of specific protests by the youthful reformists is the neoliberal order itself.

The word “union” was little uttered in American television news coverage of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, even though factory workers and sympathy strikes of all sorts played a key role in them. The right-wing press in the US actually went out of its way to contrast Egyptian demonstrations against Mubarak with the Wisconsin rallies of government workers against Governor Scott Walker’s measure to cripple the bargaining power of their unions.

The Egyptians, Commentary typically wrote, were risking their lives, while Wisconsin’s union activists were taking the day off from cushy jobs to parade around with placards, immune from being fired for joining the rallies. The implication: the Egyptian revolution was against tyranny, whereas already spoiled American workers were demanding further coddling.

The American right has never been interested in recognising this reality: that forbidding unions and strikes is a form of tyranny. In fact, it wasn’t just progressive bloggers who saw a connection between Tahrir Square and Madison. The head of the newly formed independent union federation in Egypt dispatched an explicit expression of solidarity to the Wisconsin workers, centering on worker’s rights.

At least, Commentary did us one favour: it clarified why the story has been told as it has in most of the American media. If the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya were merely about individualistic political rights – about the holding of elections and the guarantee of due process – then they could be depicted as largely irrelevant to politics in the US and Europe, where such norms already prevailed.

If, however, they centred on economic rights (as they certainly did), then clearly the discontents of North African youth when it came to plutocracy, corruption, the curbing of workers’ rights, and persistent unemployment deeply resembled those of their American counterparts.

The global protests of 2011 have been cast in the American media largely as an “Arab Spring” challenging local dictatorships – as though Spain, Chile and Israel do not exist. The constant speculation by pundits and television news anchors in the US about whether “Islam” would benefit from the Arab Spring functioned as an Orientalist way of marking events in North Africa as alien and vaguely menacing, but also as not germane to the day to day concerns of working Americans. The inhabitants of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan clearly feel differently.

Facebook flash mobs

If we focus on economic trends, then the neoliberal state looks eerily similar, whether it is a democracy or a dictatorship, whether the government is nominally right of centre or left of centre. As a package, deregulation, the privatisation of public resources and firms, corruption and forms of insider trading and interference in the ability of workers to organise or engage in collective bargaining have allowed the top one per cent in Israel, just as in Tunisia or the US, to capture the lion’s share of profits from the growth of the last decades.

Observers were puzzled by the huge crowds that turned out in both Tunis and Tel Aviv in 2011, especially given that economic growth in those countries had been running at a seemingly healthy five per cent per annum. “Growth”, defined generally and without regard to its distribution, is the answer to a neoliberal question. The question of the 99 per cent, however, is: Who is getting the increased wealth? In both of those countries, as in the US and other neoliberal lands, the answer is: disproportionately the one per cent.

If you were wondering why outraged young people around the globe are chanting such similar slogans and using such similar tactics (including Facebook “flash mobs”), it is because they have seen more clearly than their elders through the neoliberal shell game.

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History and the director of the Centre for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. His latest book, Engaging the Muslim World, is just out in a revised paperback edition from Palgrave Macmillan. He runs the Informed Comment website.

Article courtesy Al Jazeera English online

By Ann Wright

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates was right when he suggested that the WikiLeaks revelations were “embarrassing” and “awkward.” But his assessment — and that of so many other government officials — stems from the magnitude of what he left unsaid.

These revelations are not merely embarrassing. They also contain evidence of government actions and policies that are an abuse of power and that violate international human-rights standards to which we as Americans are committed.

For instance, through the information coming from WikiLeaks documents, the public is now aware of “FRAGO 242” — an official order not to report evidence of prisoner abuse by Iraqi security forces. This policy violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by Congress in 1994. The treaty explicitly requires allegations of cruel or inhuman treatment to be investigated and brought to a halt.
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In recent days, WikiLeaks has released cables that show government officials helped conceal the heinous execution of family members of suspected combatants in Iraq. The site of the murders, which included the execution-style slaying of two children and three infants, was obliterated by a subsequent coalition airstrike.

Taken as a whole, the material shows a pattern of concealing abuse by both U.S. and coalition forces. The information revealed by WikiLeaks is thus a critically important tool for those who seek to uphold basic human-rights standards and the professional conduct of U.S. military forces.

These revelations also bring our system of classification into question. Although Pfc. Bradley Manning has not yet been brought to trial, President Barack Obama has publicly declared that the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst “broke the law” by allegedly sending this restricted information to WikiLeaks.

Many civilians — and a surprising number of military personnel — are unaware that this system of classification is not grounded in any law passed by Congress. In fact, the entire edifice that allows the use of classification rests solely on the basis of executive orders that have been renewed and modified by various presidents. The ability to restrict information from the public is essentially an unchecked assertion of executive power.

However, according to Obama’s policy for classification of government documents (Executive Order 13526), there are several situations under which government information must never be classified. The government cannot use classification procedures “to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency … or prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.”

Administration officials have not provided any evidence that these WikiLeaks revelations have harmed our national security. They have, however, acknowledged that some of the material is personally, and professionally, embarrassing.

But they continue to act as if evidence of illegal or otherwise unethical behavior simply does not exist.

If online conversations attributed to Manning are accurate, it appears that his self-described “turning point” came when his own commanding officer refused to acknowledge clear evidence of an abuse of power. According to these conversations, Manning says he was told to investigate 15 Iraqi academics who had been brought in for questioning by Iraqi security forces, for the crime of supposedly printing “anti-Iraqi literature.”

After running the printed material through a translator, Manning realized that it was actually an article titled “Where Did the Money Go?” which sought to expose corruption within Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Cabinet. Manning’s commanding officer is said to have told Manning to “shut up” and find out how he could bring in more detainees. The message was clear: He could not rely on the chain of command to address evidence of wrongdoing.

This incident would be consistent with other revelations that have since emerged from the WikiLeaks embassy cables. Several diplomatic cables express concern about al-Maliki’s politicization of his security forces, using them to abuse political opponents.

In July, the Red Cross and a group of Iraqi parliamentarians asked for an investigation into an alleged torture facility being run by one of al-Maliki’s elite units in Baghdad’s Green Zone. That same month, the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction issued a report that noted more than $17 billion in funds that have gone missing.

The pattern of ignoring or otherwise concealing clear evidence of abuse has become so familiar that, to many, it now seems normal. But pretending that problems don’t exist won’t make them go away.

A recent report from the Council of Europe, which convenes the European Commission on Human Rights, stated that the current “deficit of transparency” among Western security and intelligence institutions leaves no choice but for the public to rely on whistle-blowers to hold governments accountable.

Instead of punishing and silencing alleged whistle-blowers like Manning for revealing uncomfortable truths, we should honor their courage to stand up for what’s right.

That’s all we should ask any American to do.

Ann Wright is a 29-year veteran who retired as a U.S. Army Reserve colonel and who later served as a U.S. diplomat in nine countries and deputy ambassador in four U.S. embassies. She is a member of the Advisory Board for the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Article courtesy Stars and Stripes

By Michael Gillespie, Contributing Editor

Veterans For Peace (VFP) national president Elliott Adams visited Des Moines on May 16 to present the state’s newest VFP chapter, Chapter 163, with its charter.

“I’m here in Des Moines today because we are proud that Iowa is now home to a new chapter of Veterans For Peace,” Adams told The Independent Monitor at a rally in front of the Federal Building.

“I’m out here on this street corner because there is a local effort to get Iowa’s Congressional representatives, Congressmen and Senators, to support moves to reduce the money spent on the war and bring our soldiers home. There is a time to recognize that a war has failed. The war in Afghanistan reminds me of the Vietnam War that I served in. The White House defended an un-winnable war when 20,000 of us were dead, and they kept talking about an exit strategy until 59,000 of us were dead. The people finally made the war stop,” said Adams.

“It’s time to bring ’em home,” said Adams.

Adams described VFP is a group of about 7,000 men and women across the United States who have served their country in uniform and who now recognize the necessity of a greater commitment to world peace. The group also accepts as associate members those who did not serve in uniform but support the organization’s efforts in behalf of peace.

Ed Flaherty of Iowa City, president of Eastern Iowa’s VFP Chapter 161, spoke about the points in the petition the veterans presented to representatives of Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA) and Tom Harkin (D-IA).

“Iraq, hey, we’re gonna be out of there by December 31, although some of the generals would like us to be there for longer. Let’s start bringing ’em home right now, 8,000 a month. That’s point number one. Point number two, President Obama said that on July 31 we’re gonna start withdrawing from Afghanistan. Well, fine. Some people would like to think a withdrawal is a couple of thousand troops – not true! Let’s bring at least 30,000 home in July and another 30,000 by the end of the year. Third point: Let’s freeze the Pentagon’s budget at 2008 levels. It’s a very modest request. It would still give ’em $480 billion for their base budget, which, you know, I could probably be prosecuted for suggesting that they be allowed that much. And the fourth thing is, let’s for the first time in history have an audit of the Department of Defense,” said Flaherty.

“That’s why we’re here. We want these two reasonable Senators, Grassley and Harkin, to go along with these very conservative first steps to peace,” said Flaherty.

Flaherty, along with Adams and Gil Landolt of Des Moines, president of VFP Chapter 163 in Central Iowa, noted the remarkable growth of VFP in Iowa.

“Chapter 161 in Eastern Iowa didn’t exist a year ago, and today here in Des Moines we are chartering Chapter 163 in Central Iowa,” said Flaherty.

Because the Iowa National Guard has contributed large numbers of troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, public awareness of and concern about the human costs of the wars is growing in Iowa. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) emerged years ago as the signature injuries of these wars. Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA) recently returned from a Congressional fact-finding trip to Afghanistan and introduced a bill that would require a more accurate accounting of the human and financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“These wars are incredibly personal for me and the people of my district. I’ve met with dozens of my constituents – young men and women and their families – who have sacrificed a great deal in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And when I meet injured soldiers and I see the hardships – physical and financial – that they and their families will endure for the rest of their lives it becomes crystal clear that the true cost of the war is not being accurately reported. With this bill, we can change that,” said Braley in a statement issued recently and available on his website.

Harkin and Grassley worked together to push the Joshua Omvig Suicide Prevention Act through the Senate in 2007. The law, named after a Grundy Center, IA soldier who committed suicide in 2005 while suffering from untreated PTSD after he returned from an 11-month deployment in Iraq, directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to offer mental health screening and referrals, at a veteran’s request, for counseling and treatment.

Some 3,500 Iowa Guard troops are currently stationed in Afghanistan.

James Marren, a veteran and a member of VFP Chapter 163, serves as treasurer of the Veterans National Recovery Center (VNRC), which hopes to turn the former Knoxville, IA Veterans Hospital into a national center for the treatment of veterans suffering from PTSD and TBI.

“We just had a hearing in Washington, DC. There were two other proposals, one from Chicago and one from a gentleman who used to be the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Knoxville. I think our proposal is really the best because it is the one that will provide the highest quality of service for our veterans,” said Marren.

Marren said he does not believe the other proposals are competitive and thinks VNRC has a very good chance of success.

Amy Beller from Harkin’s office and Bob Renaud from Grassley’s office met with the VFP delegation in front of the Federal building and accepted the petition from Adams, Flaherty, Landolt, and their fellow veterans.

“We’re pushing ’em!” Landolt told the crowd.

“I wish we didn’t have to do this. We all have other things that we’d rather be doing, but we need to end these wars and bring the troops home,” said Landolt.

Later, at the Vietnam War Memorial on the grounds of the Capitol, Adams presented Landolt with VFP Chapter 163’s official charter. Following the presentation ceremony, the group met for lunch at the Des Moines Catholic Worker hospitality house, Bishop Dingman House.

By Janet McMahon

One could be forgiven for thinking that the last three letters of AIPAC stand for “political action committee.” But since the American Israel Public Affairs Committee does not itself make campaign contributions to political candidates, technically it is not a PAC. Curiously, however, the 30-odd “unaffiliated” pro-Israel PACs, most with deceptively innocuous names, all seem to give to the same candidates—almost as if there were a guiding intelligence behind their contributions. In the eyes of the Federal Election Commission, AIPAC is a “membership organization” rather than a political committee. This means that, unlike actual PACs, AIPAC is not required to file public reports on its income and expenditures.

Not for nothing, however, did Fortune magazine once name it the second most powerful lobby in Washington. So it’s easy to understand why, like a night flower that blooms in the dark and dies with the light of day, this particular organization which advances the interests of a foreign government has fought long and hard to ensure that its funding sources and expenditures are not exposed to public scrutiny.

Despite its best efforts, however, unwanted light does occasionally shine on AIPAC’s activities. Most dramatically, perhaps, two of its top operatives, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted on espionage charges in 2005. Four years later federal prosecutors dropped the charges when it became clear that Judge T.S. Ellis’ numerous rulings in favor of the defendants would require the release of sensitive government documents. Rosen then sued his former employer for defamation, claiming that AIPAC routinely dealt in classified information and that he was in no way a rogue employee, as AIPAC had claimed.

A related case of unwanted publicity involved former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who was overheard on a 2006 NSA wiretap talking to someone described by CQ’s Jeff Stein as a “suspected Israeli agent”—thought to be Haim Saban, a major AIPAC contributor. “I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,” Saban described himself to The New York Times. During the course of their conversation Harman agreed to lobby the Justice Department to reduce the charges against Rosen and Weissman; in exchange, Saban would pressure then-House minority leader Nancy Pelosi to appoint Harman chair of the House Intelligence Committee following the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were expected to, and did, win. (Harman, who ultimately was not appointed chair, recently left Capitol Hill to head the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; a few blocks away, the Brookings Institution houses the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.)

Even though Pelosi resisted any pressure she may have received from Saban—reportedly because of personal animosity toward Harman as much as anything—she has demonstrated her sensitivity to AIPAC’s concerns. After Pelosi became speaker of the House following the Democrats’ 2006 victory, a provision was included in an Iraq war spending bill which would require the president to seek, with some exceptions, congressional approval before using military force against Iran. Since the Constitution grants the power to declare war to Congress, not to the president, this would appear to be uncontroversial. But AIPAC found it objectionable, and lobbied hard to have that provision struck from the bill. Speaking at AIPAC’s March 2007 annual meeting, Pelosi was booed when she described the Iraq war as being a failure on several counts. Shortly thereafter, the offending language was withdrawn from the pending legislation. After all, what’s an oath of office between friends?

Nor was that by any means the only legislation tailored to AIPAC’s wishes. Its tax-exempt fund-raising arm, the American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF), which AIPAC describes on its Web site as a “charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC,” spends the bulk of its $24 million budget paying for congressional trips to Israel. According to the Web site LegiStorm, “When Congress was working on strengthening the travel ban in 2006, reports indicated AIPAC lobbied for an exemption from the ban on lobbyist-sponsored travel. The organization did not receive a specific exemption, but the loophole on allowing non-profit travel allows the organization to continue to sponsor travel.” The non-profit AIEF simply certifies that it “does not retain or employ a registered federal lobbyist.”

That this was no accident was confirmed, perhaps inadvertently, by Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. In a 2009 C-SPAN interview, host Brian Lamb asked about the 2006 travel rules adopted as a result of the Jack Abramoff scandal whereby an “institution of higher learning” can sponsor trips. “Well,” Sloan blithely responded, “this was initially even called the AIPAC exception, there was this exception that 501(c)(3) organizations and universities could, in fact, still sponsor trips.” To Lamb’s characteristic “Why?” she replied vaguely, “That was the compromise that was reached in the House. They didn’t want to ban all private travel and they thought that these were the kind of trips that were more easily explained and didn’t have the same kind of appearance of corruption.”

More recent sightings of AIPAC’s “invisible hand” include a May 2009 letter to President Barack Obama ostensibly written by then-House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Republican Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia—among the top five House recipients of pro-Israel PAC contributions. As the Washington Post’s Al Kamen discovered, however, the e-mail attachment of the letter, which called on the president to act as a “trusted mediator and devoted friend of Israel,” revealed its true origin: it was titled “AIPAC Letter Hoyer-Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Do Americans want their laws and foreign policies drafted to serve the interests of a foreign government? At the very least, AIPAC’s funding sources and expenditures should be available for scrutiny by the citizens of its host country. In the meantime, the upcoming Move Over AIPAC conference, to be held in Washington, DC May 21-24—at the very time AIPAC will be hosting Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his congressional supplicants at its annual Washington policy conference—will shine a critical and much-needed light on the means and ends of the Israel Lobby’s flagship organization. There concerned Americans can discover, among other things, whether their elected representatives put the needs of their constituents ahead of Israel’s demands—and visit Capitol Hill to register their opinions.

For more information, visit www.moveoveraipac.org.

(Courtesy Janet McMahon and AlterNet.org)

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, wrmea.com, whose May/June 2011 issue includes totals for 2010 pro-Israel PAC contributions to all congressional candidates.