From The Independent:

More than half of Afghanistan is back under Taliban control and the Nato force in the country needs to be doubled in size to cope with the resurgent group, a report by the Senlis Council think-tank says. A study by the group found that the Taliban, enriched by illicit profits from the country’s record poppy harvest, had formed de-facto governments in swathes of the southern Pashtun belt. […]

Yesterday’s Senlis dossier coincided with an Oxfam report saying that Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian crisis in which millions face “severe hardship comparable with sub-Saharan Africa”. It highlights the fact that US spending on aid in the country, $4.4bn since 2002, was only a fraction of its military expenditure of $35bn in 2007 alone.

“As in Iraq, too much aid is absorbed by profits of companies and subcontractors, on non-Afghan resources and on high expatriate salaries and living costs,” said the report. “Each full-time expatriate consultant costs up to half a million dollars a year.”

Meanwhile, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said civilian casualties caused by military action has reached “alarming levels” this year. “These not only breach international law but are eroding support among the Afghan community for the government and international military presence, as well as public support in contributing states for continued engagement in Afghanistan,” she said.

The over 50% figure put forward by this think tank is subject to dispute; the fact that the Taliban is controlling much of Afghanistan cannot, alas, reasonably be disputed at this point.

From an campus newspaper account of a recent Ward Churchill speech:

Markevich responded by asking Churchill to clarify his Sept. 11 remarks.

“Three young high school students were traveling on a plane to an award ceremony. Of course, they never made it,” Markevich said. “They were murdered.”

“By Bush and Cheney,” someone shouted, to wild applause by some of the audience. Churchill smiled and shrugged, but did not comment.

“My question is, were those three students part of a cog in a capitalist machine and were they also ‘little Eichmanns’ who deserved to die as you claimed?” Markevich said.

“That was an amazingly stupid question,” Churchill said. “If you have a reading comprehension above the eighth grade, which you should have, since you appear to be impersonating a student up there, then you’d understand that those three … could not be construed as the technocratic core of the empire, and that’s who I described as little Eichmanns. That’s disingenuous bullshit you just spit out.”

1) What sort of idiot audience applauds “by Bush and Cheney” in this context? This sort of knee-jerk Bush-hating is just stupid. Let’s hate them for real things.

2) Churchill, whose firing I supported, is right to call this specific question misaimed; in his infamous essay, Churchill called the folks killed while working in the WTC “little Eichmanns,” not the people on the planes. That doesn’t mean Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” statement was less than repulsive.

3) In his speech, Churchill recycles for the billionth time the “Israel/Nazi” comparison, which I think is brainless, useless, antisemitic (what makes the “Israel is the new Nazis!” rhetoric attractive to folks like Churchill, I suspect, is not that the Nazi comparison adds any analytic power to our understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but that the comparison is an especially hurtful thing to say to Jews). But the comparison of Israel and American “manifest destiny,” also made by Churchill, is more interesting to me, and I’d be interested in seeing the comparison developed by someone who — unlike Churchill — isn’t completely without class and credibility.

From Oxfam:

Humanitarian agency Oxfam International today said there is an increasing risk to public health in Gaza as water and sanitation services begin to buckle under the strain of Israel’s restrictions on fuel, vital maintenance goods and spare parts into Gaza.

According to Oxfam International’s partner the Coastal Municipalities Water Utilities (CMWU) 15% of Gaza’s population – 225,000 people – is not receiving an adequate amount of drinking water due to the lack of diesel.

Oxfam is also worried at the latest reports of Israel’s Attorney General’s Office giving approval to its new Defense Ministry’s plan to reduce the quantity of electricity delivered to the Gaza Strip. This decision comes on top of Israel’s fuel reductions since 28 October 2007, which are having an immediate impact on the water and wastewater systems in the Gaza Strip.

According to Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs:

“There has to be an immediate resumption of fuel supplies to Gaza if we are to avoid a public health crisis. Access to clean water is a fundamental human right and must not be used as a tool to collectively punish the population of Gaza. As international efforts increase to breathe new life into progress towards peace, the international community is ignoring Gaza’s plight, allowing it to slip further into a crisis. Ordinary civilians in Gaza are being punished for crimes they have not committed, in clear violation of international humanitarian law. This illegal policy of collective punishment must stop at once.”

Israel’s Supreme Court recently placed a temporary injunction against Israel cutting back Gaza’s electricity supply, which is good. But the disaster caused by lack of fuel and other supplies continues unabated.

The Independent today has an article with more information about this case, including the woman’s own description of her experiences from an interview she gave to Human Rights Watch. (May be triggering.)

Some parts of her story will sound familiar no matter where in the world you live.

She said: “They [the judges] said to me, ‘What kind of relationship did you have with this individual? Why did you leave the house? Do you know these men?’ They used to yell at me. They were insulting. The judge refused to allow my husband in the room with me. One judge told me I was a liar because I didn’t remember the dates well. They kept saying, ‘Why did you leave the house? Why didn’t you tell your husband?’ […]

The ordeal is still not over. The Qatif girl and her husband face an intensely uncertain future. She has been attacked by her brother, who reportedly tried to kill her. Her lawyer, Al-Lahem, believes she may now be pursued by Sunni extremists through the sharia courts.

Her appalling treatment was summed up in one exchange between her husband and the judges at the first sentencing. “It was like she was the criminal,” he remembered.

I don’t imagine most readers of Alas follow Australian politics particularly closely - neither do I. The main political issues I’ve followed have been union issues, racism against immigrants and indigenous issues, particularly the invasion of the Northern Territories. The common theme in all this is that Australian Prime Minister is an evil racist troglodyte.¹

Australia had elections yesterday and after eleven years in power the Howard government was finally defeated. I’m not really celebrating that - not being a huge fan of the Australian Labour party. But I do take some small joy, because it looks like John Howard lost his seat, and won’t even get back into parliament. Assholes losing their jobs is the highlight of any election.

1. The other theme is that the opposition Labour party also sucks beyond the telling of it (back)

Trying to destroy a people’s food source to drive them away is not a minor matter or a prank; it’s a disgusting, hideous crime, and if it happened to Americans or Israelis it would be labeled terrorism. I hope folks will read Avishai Margalit’s review of Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine by David Shulman. From Shulman’s book:

It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with… deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family…. The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers’ subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.

Schulman travelled to Twaneh and verified that the poisoned barley was there. Margalit provides more background:

In the southern West Bank, Assaf tells us, southeast of Yata, the main township in the area, more than a thousand Palestinians dwell in caves, in an area of some 7,500 acres. Some of the cave dwellers live in this area only during the seasons for planting and harvesting; some live there throughout the year. Water is scarce and the cave dwellers are dependent to a large degree on local cisterns.

In the 1970s, Israel declared part of the Yata region a “closed military area.” In 1980, next to the closed area, Israel established four settlements, which now have about two thousand settlers. Between 1996 and 2001, these settlers erected four additional outposts—small, armed encampments, said to be needed to protect the larger settlements. A fifth outpost, Maon Farm, was set up inside the area that the occupation forces had said was closed to settlement, and the settlers at Maon Farm were evacuated by the army for a few months; but they soon returned. Before they did so, the army had already expelled the Palestinian cave dwellers by force from the closed area, destroying their wells, blocking their caves, and confiscating their meager property of blankets and food. The army justified the expulsion on grounds of “a necessary military need,” specifically, its need for a training ground that would use live ammunition, endangering anyone who lived there. But the settlers of Maon Farm returned to the closed area unopposed by the Israeli authorities, and there was no mention of live ammunition endangering them. […]

There seems no chance that these young people will understand what Shulman is trying to do. On a cold, wet, and muddy January day, Shulman and his friends are on their way to bring blankets to the cave people. The settlers try to stop them. “One of the men shouts that we are on the side of Bin Laden…. They are determined to keep the blankets away from the cave dwellers.”

The review (and the book it’s reviewing) covers a lot more ground than just the poisoning; I encourage folks to click over and read the whole thing.

On October 15 the police raided over 60 houses throughout New Zealand. They arrested 16 people on jointly possessing a number of firearms, and one person on drugs charges. From the very first day the police were talking about charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act.

The raids were brutal, a 12 year old girl had a gun pointed at her head, and when her grandmother tried to comfort her the police yelled at the grandmother to shut up and moved closer to both of them (you can view the 12 year old’s comments here). In Ruatoki, a they put a roadblock on the line where the land had been confiscated so many years ago, and anyone who went in and out had to have their photo taken by their car. When one house was raided, the children were locked in a shed for hours by the police while the search was being carried.

Four people were arrested in Wellington; three of those were friends of mine - people I loved. They didn’t get bail; they went into the prison industrial complex.¹ Suddenly prisons stopped being an abstract concept to me, and became a reality that I attempted to navigate while trying to visit the prisoners and get them books and money.

But we didn’t, couldn’t, just do prisoner support, we also needed to stand in solidarity of people who had been attacked, particularly Tūhoe, the iwi ² that had been targeted in these raids. The four weeks that followed was prisons and driving and meetings and court and protests and meetings and supporting each other and meetings and prisons and court and driving and hugs and tears and and anger and love.

At 4pm, Thursday 8 November almost four weeks after people had been arrested, the Solicitor General announced that no-one would be charged under the terrorism suppression act (these were the first charges ever attempted by the police under the Terrorism Suppression Act). The following day all my friends got bail, and all 16 defendents are now free

I don’t think I could describe the sustained joy that started at 4.01 and continued for a week. They were released eleven days ago and I’m smiling right now, because they’re out and I can see them whenever I want.

It’s joy and a respite, but we’ve got so much work to do. All 16 are still facing charges under the Arms Act. The Terrorism Suppression Act - which allowed extensive bugging, has just been strengthened. While our friends are out of prisons, those vile instituations still stand, with far too many trapped inside. ³ I still live in a colonised country, where demands for Tino Rangatiratanga and Mana Motuhake⁴ are ignored.

I couldn’t write much. I was in too much of a whirlwind to know what to say. I’m looking forward to writing more regularly, but what’s happened over the last 6 weeks has affected me, and will affect what I write.

I’ve been promising to write more about feminism in prisons for a while now. While my analysis hasn’t changed much, your understanding changes as issues stop being abstract and distanced and become part of your reality, and the reality of those you love. So I imagine those posts will take a slightly different form than they might have two months ago, but will probably be stronger because of it. Most importantly, in the next few days (or weeks) I hope to write an introductory post that’ll cover some of the very basic history of colonialism in NZ, and Maori resistance, that I can use a reference point if I want to write more on Alas. I’ve generally avoided cross-posting what little I do write on Alas, but I think writing about colonialism where I live has resonances beyond, so that I should do the background work to make what I write intelligible.

I can answer questions if people have any, it can be hard to write about what’s going on here for another audience, but I think it’s worth doing.

Updated I realised I didn’t do any sort of explanation of the charges under the Arms Act. 16 of those arrested were charged under the Arms Act. These charges related to events that the police claim happened in the Urewera Mountains. Almost all the charges are joint charges - so 16 people are charged with co-possessing a rifle, or whatever.⁵ Most defendents are facing several charges under the arms act - the weapons they were alleged to possess were not found on their property during the raids. Just two people have additional charges - in relation to four guns the police claim to have found during the raids.

1. Being remanded in custody is much rarer NZ than America, and there is no such thing as money bail, so you never have to put up a bond (back)
2. tribe (back)
3. Please hold the inevitable ‘what about the rapists and murderers’ comments until I write a proper post about this and have time to reply (back)
4. I’m not going to try and translate - but I think land and freedom best conveys the meaning (back)
5. I’m the worst person in the world to try and explain this, because my knowledge of guns is so supremely limited that (back)

From the BBC:

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in Qatif in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

Seven men were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years. […]

The rape victim was punished for violating Saudi Arabia’s laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence. […]

The rapists’ sentences were also doubled by the court. Correspondents say the sentences were still low considering the rapists could have faced the death penalty. […]

The Arab News quoted an official as saying the judges had decided to punish the girl for trying to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.

Mr Lahem [the victim’s lawyer] said that the judges’ decision to confiscate his licence to work and stop him from representing his client is illegal.

Curtsy: Thene

Click on the cartoon to see a larger version…

I really don’t like the way the art came out in this one; the figures look stiff and overworked. Oh, well; the next one will be better. (I hope.)

I first heard about this case when I was listening to BBC radio on Tuesday. I tuned in during the middle of of this story, and it seemed so bizarre that I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Well, now I got the chance to hear the whole story. It turns out that some foreign aid groups tried to take a group of 103 children out of the country. The aid workers are now accused of child trafficking and violating international laws.

Some members of the NGO Children Rescue/Arche de Zoe have been arrested for attempting to take the 21 girls and 82 boys - the youngest being about a year old and the oldest about 10 - out of Chad. The agency workers were French. Three journalists who were travelling with the volunteer workers and the Spanish crew who were to fly them back to France are also being held. In Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, a prosecutor on Wednesday also charged Jacques Wilmart, a Belgian pilot involved in the affair, with “complicity in abduction”, before sending him to jail.

Zoe’s Ark says it wanted to rescue children from Darfur, but French officials and UN aid workers say they believe many were from Chad and were not orphans.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) called the attempt to separate the more than 100 young Chadian children from their parents and then take them to France for adoption an “illegal and totally irresponsible move.” The UN said the children had family in the country.

“They are not orphans and they were not sitting alone in the desert in Chad, they were living with their families in communities,” Annette Rehrl of U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters in Abeche.

UNICEF spokesperson Veronique Taveau told journalists in Geneva that what happened had violated international rules, such as The Hague Convention on international adoption and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Taveau said the case was not an isolated incident but one that was highly visible because of the size of the group of children.

L’Express reports the Europeans offered sweets and biscuits to encourage the children to leave their homes.

“My parents had gone to work in the fields. As we were playing some Chadians came and said here are some sweets, why don’t you follow us to Adre and then we’ll take you home. We were taken to the hospital in Adre,” said a young boy who gave his name as Osman. Adre is a town on the Chad-Sudan border.

“We spent seven days in Adre and I’ve been here in Abeche for more than one month. We were well fed by the whites, there was always food. I would like to go back to find my parents,” he told reporters at the Abeche orphanage where the children are being cared for by local and international aid workers.

Many European media outlets were putting a slightly more favorable spin on this, but as more information comes out, these so called aid groups are not looking good at all. The UN has said that most of these children were not orphans, which they found out from interviewing the older children. Now many of the children are separated from their families, and there are concerns that the youngest children may not be reunited because they are too young to talk. Needless to say this is not going over well with people all over Africa. As the International Herald Tribune article cited in this paragraph notes:

The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad.

The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur.

This history is one reason why adoptions by Westerners are not common in African countries. Incidents like this contribute to the destruction black families, and I suspect these aid workers felt no need to respect the rights of poor black African families.¹

1. Why oh why am I having flashbacks to this old Rachel’s Tavern post/comment? I was so angry at that woman. I could barely contain myself. (back)

From The Observer:

In the words of one soldier: ‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts.’

Another explained: ‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you. You feel that you are the law. You are the law. You are the one who decides… As though from the moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God.’

The soldiers described dozens of incidents of extreme violence. One recalled an incident when a Palestinian was shot for no reason and left on the street. ‘We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, he shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look,’ he said.

The soldiers developed a mentality in which they would use physical violence to deter Palestinians from abusing them. One described beating women. ‘With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with any more.’

Yishai-Karin found that the soldiers were exposed to violence against Palestinians from as early as their first weeks of basic training. On one occasion, the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men were made to sit on the floor of the bus. They had been taken from their beds and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then proceeded to beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men.

Curtsy: Informed Consent.

From Para Justicia y Libertad!:

Congratulations to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner who has become the first woman to be elected president in Argentina’s history. Kirchner, 54, is the wife of current President of Argentina, Néstor Kirchner and a former senator for Buenos Aires Province. In the Oct, 2007 general election, Mrs. Kirchner, she ran for president of Argentina, representing the ruling Front for Victory party, a center-left Peronist party.

Fernández is the second woman to be elected leader of a South American nation in two years, after Michelle Bachelet, who became Chile’s president last year. […]

Her election extends the trend of left-leaning elected governments in Latin America, although she is more moderate than the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. Mrs Kirchner is expected to maintain her husband’s friendly relations with Chavez.

Fernández has vowed to continue the work of her husband after winning a presidential election widely seen as a referendum on his economic policies. She has fiercely rejected the pro-market policies of the 1990s, which she blames for the 2001 crisis.

From Brad Plumer:

For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers–who often can’t afford it on their own–on the grounds that the subsidies would make it impossible for a “solid agricultural market to develop.”

Well, it’s hard to flout the donors, and Malawi did as told. What happened next? Some 1,500 Malawians starved to death in 2002, and five million more needed emergency rations in 2005. So, last year, the government finally told its “advisors” to shove off and put the subsidies back in place. Two years of record surpluses followed, and Malawi is now shipping excess maize to Zimbabwe. As Toronto’s Globe and Mail tells it, the subsidies have worked wonders; they’re far cheaper than importing food aid; and even the EU has reversed its stance and pledge to underwrite the fertilizer coupons.

And from The New York Times:

Bank policies in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed African governments to cut or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, decontrol prices and privatize may have improved fiscal discipline but did not accomplish much for food production, the evaluation said.

It had been expected that higher prices for crops would give farmers an incentive to grow more, while competition among private traders reduced the costs of seeds and fertilizer. But those market forces often failed to work as hoped.

“The whole thing was based on the idea that if you take away the government for the poorest of the poor that somehow these markets will solve the problems,” Professor Sachs said. “But markets can’t step in and won’t step in when people have nothing. And if you take away help, you leave them to die.”

Professor Easterly said the bank’s managers had made elementary mistakes. “It was a simplistic, Economics 101 lesson, that if you raise prices, farmers produce more, which makes sense if farmers have roads, access to credit, good access to fertilizer markets,” he said. “But most of the time, farmers were lacking those.”

From a post on Oy Bay (curtsy to Muzzlewatch) entitled “San Francisco Art Gallery Censors Writing and Art Work as Too Zionist”:

Himmelberger Gallery, a well-known art gallery located in San Francisco’s tony Union Square, has decided to cancel plans to publish an art catalogue of one of its represented artists, noted author Alan Kaufman […] The gallery objects to the expressly Zionist focus of several essay contributions to the catalogue by well-known authors and journalists[…]

The catalogue was to present 15 of Kaufman’s paintings which are under contract to the gallery and whose subjects range from the Holocaust to Israel to the New Antisemitism. The gallery’s prices for the works in question have been cited at between $3,275 and $36,000. The works have hung in the gallery and a cross-section of them also appeared on the gallery website.

At a meeting between gallery head David Himmelberger and Kaufman, Himmelberger surprised the artist and author with an eleventh hour decision not to proceed with the catalogue due to the Zionist “agenda” of the essays as well as some of the paintings. Himmelberger said that such a presentation was antithetical to the aims of the gallery, which promotes “international understanding” and forswears all forms of nationalism and religion. But the authors see this as a transparent example of the way in which the word Zionism has been exiled from civil discourse and has been turned by the cultural establishment into a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, and a euphemism for Antisemitism.

Oy Bay also quotes a statement released by the “Zionist Five,” who are the five authors who were to be published in the catalogue. From reading the statement, my guess is that it’s not the word “Zionism” that scared the publisher away, so much as the extremism of the views presented. For example:

Let us, then, be perfectly frank about one thing. To vilify, marginalize, suppress or outlaw Zionism politically, socially or culturally, for any reason whatever, is to wish no less then murderous extinction upon every Jewish man, woman and child in the world today.

Note the “for any reason whatsoever.” Next time I hear someone deny that Zionists mix up criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism, I hope I remember that quote; according to these folks, criticizing Zionism for any reason at all isn’t just anti-Semitic, it’s wishing Genocide upon the Jews.

Some thoughts:

1) It’s not censorship for a private publisher to decide not to publish a book. Kaufman’s belief that he’s been “censored for expression of a Zionist perspective” is over the top.

2) When I first read this story, I thought perhaps Kaufman was suffering from another form of censorship: When a publisher owns the rights to publish a work but refuses to publish it. I think that is censorship, but it doesn’t seem to be the case here; the gallery’s lawyer has said that Kaufman is free to publish the catalogue elsewhere.

3) There’s another form of de facto censorship, which is when objections to a point of view are so overwhelming that that point of view becomes impossible to publish, or is in some other significant way cut out of “the marketplace of ideas.” It’s implausible that’s the situation here, though; one gallery owner declined to print one catalogue, but most of the authors in the catalogue are published elsewhere.

Kaufman might argue that San Francisco’s “marketplace of ideas” effectively disallows pro-Zionist discussion. If that’s true, then that’s a reasonable complaint on his part. On the other hand, the fact that his paintings were displayed in a major San Francisco gallery, apparently without being protested, suggests that the San Francisco experience may not be as bleak as all that.

4) Kaufman sees an equivalence between his situation and that of Black men (what about Black women?) in “the old South”:

“My standing up and declaring Zionist art in San Francisco is really like a black man standing up in the old South and declaring himself a free man.”

The comparison trivializes slavery and Jim Crow, in much the same way that stupid concentration camp comparisons trivialize the Holocaust. (I do think that comparisons can be worthwhile when they’re intelligently made, as The Sideshow argues.)

A week ago today the New Zealand police invaded homes all over the country. They arrested 17 (or 18) people with breaches of the Firearms Act. But the search warrants were issued under the Terrorism Suppression Act. Those arrested were called terrorists.

The police invaded Ruatoki, a Tuhoe community. They set up a checkpoint along the confiscation line. Those who wanted to go in or out of this community had to stand by their cars and have their picture taken. Armed police officers boarded the bus that takes kids to Kohanga Reo.

That paragraph may not make much sense to non-NZers. Maori are the tangata whenua, or indigenous people of New Zealand. Kohanga Reo is immersion kindergarten. Tuhoe are an iwi, or tribe, from the North Island of New Zealand. This is an attack on the indigenous people of New Zealand. On the indigenous people who are fighting colonisation. This has dominated the news in New Zealand for a week. It is the first time the Terrorism Suppression Act (the New Zealand version of the Patriot Act) has been used and it is being used against indigenous people who have been terrorised by the New Zealand state.

If that was all that had happened I would have written sooner. But the police also invaded a house I’ve spent many, many hours in. They took three of my friends.

There is an element of ridicule to all this. The police took a backpack that people had taken to the farmers market - with avocados and potatoes, later they brought it back because they decided it didn’t contain any evidence of terrorism. The paper claimed that groups from all over the country working on many different issues were going to launch co-ordinated attacks. They clearly don’t know us very well (anyone who has ever worked on the left will understand why).

But when I laugh it is only to relieve the stress, because my friends still aren’t free. In New Zealand almost everyone gets bail. The day that our friends were arrested the other news included a man who had serially raped prostitutes who was out on bail. That they are still there, that we are still going out to the prison everyday, would have seemed unreal a week ago.

I have closed this post to comments. I’m sorry, but I cannot handle abstract discussion about people I love, when I don’t know when we’ll get them back. I will be writing more about this, I will be writing about some of the issues involved. Right now I just wanted to let people know why I hadn’t been posting, and explain some of the background for when I have the energy to write about what is involved.

* There is no situation, no matter how serious and stressful, for which I don’t have the perfect Buffy quote.

Thomas, a 7 year old child I look after, is holding my inflatable globe. “I’m going to find England, where J K Rowling lives.”

A few minutes later he’s back, he can’t find England. “There it is,” I point to the pink splodge and get back to getting afternoon tea together.

“But it doesn’t say England.” The inflatable globe isn’t proving as distracting as I’d like.

“They’ve called it the UK, rather than England.”

“Why?”

“The UK is made up of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales”

“Why?”

“Well - ” I put afternoon tea on the table. “A long time ago England and Wales had a war and England beat Wales. Then England and Scotland had a war and England beat Scotland. Then England and Ireland had a war and England beat Ireland. Ireland fought back, so part of Ireland got to be free from England, but not all of it.” I have relatives who would not appreciate the implication that Wales didn’t fight back - but I don’t want to complicate things.

“England also beat Samoa” Where did he learn that from?

“Yes England beat Samoa, but that wasn’t till much later. Before England could go around beating countries on the other side of the world, it had to take over the countries closer to home.” It’s never to young to start on some basic education about colonialism. “England beat lots of places and took their land, like New Zealand, Australia and Zimbabwe.”

“South Africa beat England.” Oh.

“Yes, South Africa did beat England in the Rugby World Cup.¹ We use lots of the same words to describe war as we do to describe sport.” Not quite where I expected to end up, but I guess it’s a start.

1. Readers may come from countries where rugby is less important than war, and so will not understand how easy it is for a NZ 7 year old to make this mistake. When NZ got knocked out of the Rugby World Cup in the quarter finals there were serious discussions about what impact this would have on next years election. There are people here who don’t quite understand that when two teams play sport one team loses and the other wins. (back)

Very few issues fill me with despair like thinking about Israel and Palestine.

I don’t understand why, when American Jews lean left, virtually all the major lobbies and organizations representing American Jews are on the far right. (Groups like AIPAC are strongly in favor of the Iraq invasion and have loyally supported Bush’s policies). Why, oh why, can’t we have a representative Jewish lobby?

(Speaking of which, see Glenn Greenwald’s recent posts on the ADL’s extreme reluctance to call out major right-wing figures for casually slinging around trivializing Nazi and Holocaust comparisons — 1 2 3 4 — even though they jump to criticize such important left-wing figures as an anonymous poster on Moveon.Org’s message board. Again, why do we American Jews — most of whom are liberal democrats — accept right-wing partisan hacks representing us in Washington?)

(But Glenn, you’ve missed a major example — the way that the ADL has never found time to criticize the word “Feminazi,” coined by Rush L., which Rush and other major right-wingers have been using nonstop for almost 20 years).

I’ve given up on any possibility of an honest debate or engagement with 99% of Israel’s supporters. I get it: Anyone who criticizes Israel, ever, in anything but the mildest of terms, is an anti-semite. (Edited to add the following sentence:) Meanwhile, far too many of Israel’s defenders are far too quick to dismiss any but the mildest criticism of Israel as anti-semitic. Rootless Cosmopolitan reports that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has now been branded an anti-semite, and St. Thomas University has accordingly cancelled a scheduled speech by Tutu:

Having asked sane and rational people to believe that Jimmy Carter is a Holocaust denier¹ simply for pointing out the obvious about the apartheid regime Israel maintains in the occupied territories, the same crew now want us to believe that Archbishop Desmond Tutu is an anti-Semite. No jokes! That was the reason cited for Tutu being banned from speaking at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis. “We had heard some things he said that some people judged to be anti-Semitic and against Israeli policy,” explained university official Doug Hennes.

Since the above quote includes the word “apartheid,” which people are bound to object to, I’ll point out this post by Tony Karon defending his (and Jimmy Carter’s) use of the term. (Karon, who is Jewish, is branded “self-hating” rather than anti-Semitic.)

Also branded anti-Semites: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, Harvard and Columbia University of Chicago professors, authors of the current best-seller The Israel Lobby. Neither of them has a single documented instance of anti-Semitism, but they’ve published a scholarly book criticizing Israel, so they’re anti-Semites. Daniel Levy’s review of the book in Haaretz is critical and balanced, the most reasonable commentary on the book I’ve read so far.

UPDATE: Here’s the fourth post from Glenn Greenwald on the ADL’s apparent bias.

1. Tony is exaggerating here; Carter was called all sorts of foul things by Israel’s partisans, but they stopped short — just barely short — of calling him a Holocaust denier. (back)

Today, hundreds — thousands? — of bloggers are posting the above link, in one way or another, to drive traffic to free-burma.org. Please follow the link for more information.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that George Bush can’t open his mouth without saying something stupid:

This has received attention from “Bush is stupid” commenters around the world. But in commenting on George Bush’s inability to communicate even the most basic of concepts - they missed the fallacy in what Bush was trying to say.

Whatever Nelson Mandela has become, the ANC, and larger black resistance against apartheid, was not the movement that Bush wants to persuade us it was. Mandela was arrested as a terrorist. The ANC was not non-violent; they blew stuff up and killed people.

You can say the ANC should have stuck to non-violent resistance (although I think to do so from the comfort of your own home would make you look like a right dick), but to imply that the ANC was non-violent (even if no-one understands what you’re trying to do) is just lying.

Here’s a nifty stencil. While I might take issue with the limited image it paints of the resistance - but I understand the advantages of a simple image.

The condemnation of SLORC is coming from all sides, including Bush and New Labour in the UK (with Helen Clark bleating on behind). These are government’s that don’t exactly have a history of supporting democracy and democratic movements, unless there’s a buck or two to be made. Australia and NZ eventually supported East Timorese independence from Indonesia, but only because they got some natural resources out of it. We cannot see Western governments as the great white horses that will protect people who are being oppressed by their own government.

I recommend Lenin’s Tomb:

There has been a popular movement against the ruling State Law and Order Council for years, obviously, and this is part of a real revolt. The monks are an important and esteemed segment of society because they provide education and social services, whereas the dictatorship simply exploits people. So why should it be that the United States government has, for the last few years, been applying sanctions to Burma along with its allies? Why is it championing the main democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi? Only an ostrich would imagine it has anything to do with democracy. Well, it’s the same as East Timor in many ways. The West, after having backed a genocidal regime for years, has terrorised the opposition into accepting a neoliberal programme. Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy has promised that, upon taking power, it will implement structural adjustments opening up huge parts of the economy to international investors. There is more than a parallel there: Suharto was one of the Burmese junta’s closest allies before an uprising threw him off, and a polyarchical neoliberal regime in both states will restore the symmetry to some extent. So, it’s another phase in the transition from anti-socialist dictatorships used by Washington to slightly less coercive regimes in which the opposition has basically been neutered. The experiment launched in Chile in 1973 was really that successful. Britain, which has been doing fine out of the old regime, now hopes to do even better out of the new one. And at the same time, it has a chance of re-moralizing its disgraced foreign policy. New opportunities for intensified capital accumulation will open up, and in all probability the health and nutrition indices - already so miserably poor that they contribute to genocidal levels of death in some segments of the population - will get worse. Of course, while the NLD are the natural beneficiaries of any successful rebellion, there is no guarantee that people will simply accept the neoliberal programme. It depends how much the overthrow of the SLORC is a result of mass mobilisation, and how much of it comes about as a result of the elite compromise and handovers that were prevalent in Eastern Europe after 1989, and in recent colour-coded revolutions. A recently victorious rebellious mass can be surprisingly disobedient.

I don’t think this analysis should change our support for resistance in Myanmar. But I do think it’s important that we challenge the idea that Western government’s could plan a benign, or even a positive role in Myanmar. It’s up to the people of Myanmar to decide how to fight against their government; it’s up to the rest of us to fight our governments to keep their greedy hands off Myanmar.