Wild Turkey: Syria’s Blindside

Wild Turkey: Syria’s Blindside
Jim Kavanagh

The sudden jihadi offensive in Syria is a disaster. It is, first of all, a disaster for the Syrian people. It's also a disaster for the Palestinian people, Hezbollah, Iran, and the entire axis of anti-Zionist resistance. And it's a disaster for Russia (and China) and the project of replacing unipolar American hegemony with multipolarity based on a new BRICS-based global political economy.

It's a disaster that challenges all the parties involved to recognize that what they might have more comfortably treated as parallel but separate conflicts are elements of one big, unavoidable war that is going to require new strategies from each and from all of them together—strategies that reconcile the interests of each with the interests of all. If that is possible.

It does no good to downplay the disaster-in-progress in Syria. In short order—what can aptly be called a blitzkrieg—jihadi forces have taken control of Aleppo, a city of over 2 million people and one of the oldest continuously habited cities in the world, and Hama, a city of a million people, with—and this is the crucial point—no significant resistance from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

We can comfort ourselves by saying it’s a tactical retreat and the Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi PMU cavalries are on the way. These are potentially formidable forces, and we all saw how Russia and Hezbollah helped the SAA defeat what seemed an unstoppable jihadi offensive from 2011 to 2019.

But, a) “Helped” is the operative word.  The SAA fought like hell during that time, resisting every assault from a panoply of forces supported by the U.S., Israel, NATO, and Gulf monarchies, until Russia and Hezbollah came in and turned the tide. This time, the SAA melted away from two major Syrian cities in a week, despite knowing that the Idlib jihadis were arming up for an offensive. As I write, the jihadis are threatening Homs and have the momentum. There may not be enough time for Russian, and/or Iranian, and/or Iraqi forces to assemble and organize an effective defense, let alone counteroffensive, before Damascus is breached. Something has gone seriously wrong with the SAA, whether complacence, incompetence, and/or corruption (per Alexander Mercouris, who reports that the SAA Aleppo contingent simply defected), and foreign forces cannot replace what was a disciplined, dedicated SAA. If Assad needs an extended commitment of masses of foreign troops (which Russia never supplied) to stop the jihadis, Assad is toast. Russia and Iran can help Syria; turning it into a protectorate of Russia or Iran is another thing entirely.

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

The Question is Called: Waiting for Iran to Answer

Jim Kavanagh

So, it looks like we’re heading into a major war. With its assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief “ceasefire/hostage release” negotiator, topping off its incessant, deliberate slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza and its accelerated evictions and home demolitions in the West Bank, Israel has erased any scintilla of pretense that it is doing anything else but trying to “finish ’48”—-achieve the total ethnic cleansing of Palestine via extermination and expulsion.

Israel has crossed all and everybody’s red lines. Israel is telling the world it will kill anyone and any number of people, anywhere, at anytime of its choosing, and it does not give a damn about what anyone in the world thinks of it. It is acting with complete, insouciant, contemptuous disregard of international law, conventions, and common morality, certainly of the people and nations it considers its adversaries and of the countries on whose support it depends.

No Respect: Bernie, Gaza, and Liberal Zionism

No Respect: Bernie, Gaza, and Liberal Zionism

Jim Kavanagh

After Israeli strikes on houses in Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, November 1, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Al-Masri/File photo 

With a New York Times op-ed on November 22^nd, Bernie Sanders chimed in with his take on what’s happening in Gaza right now, and what must be done to “balance our desire to stop the fighting with the need to address the roots of the conflict.” It’s worth examining his piece as an example of the liberal-Zionist framework of thought, which begins with the assumption that Zionism is a necessary and virtuous project that "we" must support and that takes priority over everything else in the context, including the lives of Palestinians, and ends—after conjuring a happily-ever-after version of Zionism that pleases the minds and consciences of Western liberals like himself—right where it started.

Bernie begins by insisting that “we must first be cleareyed about facts” and immediately recounts the facts he finds relevant thusly:

On Oct. 7, Hamas, a terrorist organization, unleashed a barbaric attack against Israel, killing about 1,200 innocent men, women and children and taking more than 200 hostage.

Unfortunately, Bernie’s account of root facts is tendentious and factually incorrect. It does not “address” but obscures “the roots of the conflict,” by starting “On Oct. 7.” It is not clear-eyed but tendentious in trying to pass off as fact the characterization of Hamas as “a terrorist organization.”

Bernie’s use of “terrorist” here echoes the hypocrisy of all Western mainstream politicians and media, and it’s worth delving into.

Reign of “Terror”

Of course, “terrorist” is a terrible word, almost always used dishonestly—and Bernie knows it.  Even Ronald Reagan knew that “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” Insofar as it can be used factually, the word “terrorism” denotes a tactic used sporadically by virtually every state army and armed resistance group in history.

Those who support a group’s objective never dismissively use “terrorism” to describe its actions, let alone to condemn the group. They accept such tactics as unfortunate and morally problematic, but non-dispositive, elements of a legitimate struggle. On the other hand, when a group whose objective they oppose uses the same tactics, they insist that group must be condemned and eliminated. It’s never the tactic, always the objective, that’s the deal-breaker, the thing that determines when and how “terrorism” will be used.

Nobody had more contempt for this hypocrisy than the proudly self-identified “terrorists” who were the vanguard fighting founders and, latterly, Prime Ministers, of the Zionist state—like Menachem Begin, who embraced the title of ”Father of terrorism in all the world,” and Yitzhak Shamir, who wrote an article forthrightly entitled “Terror,” saying:

Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war…We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle….First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier.

Israel’s Solution to Gaza: War on Iran

 Israel’s Solution to Gaza: War on Iran

Jim Kavanagh

Youssef Massoud |AFP via Getty Images

A US-Israeli war on Iran is very likely very soon. Here are four reasons why I say that:

1. A military attack on Iran has been an Israeli demand for at least fifteen years, in active preparation by the U.S. and Israel for at least six years, and was already ordered by the president.

Per the long 2019 New York Times article, The Secret History of the Push to Strike Iran, “Hawks in Israel and America have spent more than a decade agitating for” war on Iran. In 2008, Israeli politicians Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, and Ehud Barak began to pressure U.S. President George W. Bush to join an attack on Iran, but he was “unequivocally against” it.

They ran into resistance again with the Obama administration, whose message, according to State Department official Wendy Sherman, was: “Please don’t go off on a hair trigger and start a war, because you’re going to want us to come in behind you,” Netanyahu thus saw Obama as “part of the problem, not the solution”—although maybe not then Vice President, “I am a Zionist” Joe Biden, who, in one meeting, “threw his arm around [Uzi] Arad [one of his former top advisers] and said with a smile, ‘Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.’”

Israel had better luck with the Trump administration, especially after the ascension of Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who were themselves hot for attacking Iran. in June 2017, CIA Director Pompeo up a stand-alone Iran Mission Center, replacing previous Iran specialists with “a much more focused and belligerent group.” Its purpose—as of any Mission Center—was to “elevate” the country as a target. It was headed by Michael D’Andrea, a convert to Islam known as “the undertaker” and "Ayatollah Mike, who was  notorious for his “central role in the agency's torture and targeted killing programs,” and for having an “aggressive stance toward Iran.”

This was followed in December 2017, by the signing, in a “secret” meeting at the White House, of a pact with Israel “to take on Iran.” This This was a pact to coordinate “steps on the ground” against “Tehran and its proxies.” The Israelis considered these secret “dramatic understandings” to be of “far greater impact” on Israel than Trump’s more public recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

First and Foremost, Colonialism Must End

 First and Foremost, Colonialism Must End

Jim Kavanagh

It Is What It Is

It’s necessary to start with this, because it’s the core of the problem and must be put first and foremost: The horrific events over the last week in Gaza and Israel demonstrate at least one thing irrefutably: Zionism is colonialism. Israel is a colonial-settler, apartheid state that, as such, must exterminate, expel, or subjugate Palestinian Arabs.

You may think it’s colonialism that’s justified for some reason, but it’s still colonialism. If you want to support it, you have to make the argument that it’s an acceptable exception to the now-universal prohibition of colonialism and apartheid under jus cogens—the preemptory, compelling norms of international law “from which no derogation is ever permitted.” And you will be making an argument for colonialism.

You may think—as secular Western liberals are wont to do—that this exceptional colonialism is justified by the Holocaust, which you take as proof that Jews are the ur-victims of the planet and therefore are entitled to take and keep a global safe room for themselves, even if it means exterminating, expelling, and subjugating the people who have been living in that room for centuries. That’s an argument that the Palestinians (who had nothing to do with the European Holocaust) are just less important people, whose historical obligation is to get out of the way of the Jews (who, whether victims of the Holocaust or not, are always-already victims). It’s an argument for colonialism.

Leaving out, as much as they can, the part about the Palestinians, this is the argument secular Western liberals make to themselves for Zionism as righteous compensatory colonialism.

Please note that it is not the argument on which the original Zionist thinkers, their political progeny who rule Israel, or the religious-Zionist settlers who are Zionism’s shock troops base their colonial project. For them, the Holocaust is not the reason for the Zionist colonial project, though it does provide an excuse to Western liberals for supporting colonialism while convincing themselves they’re doing something else.

Those to whom you cannot make that argument with a straight face are the Palestinian people. They know, and will not let you ignore, disguise, or forget that that it’s colonialism, and they are the colonized. They have not and—what is finally so clear and so upsetting to self-deluded Western liberals who actually thought they could persuade everyone of Zionism’s righteousness—will never submit to being the colonized, to living, because they are not Jewish, as secondary “human animals” in ”a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”  

The people of Gaza will never submissively accept their forced displacement and imprisonment in what Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling called “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.” The people of Palestine will never allow Jewish-supremacist settler colonist­s to live in the complacent comfort of the mastery to which they think they have the right—the comfort they need to complete the Zionist project. The Palestinians will never generously and passively accept Zionism’s right to take their homes, lives, and dignity, even if that makes the West feel better about its history with the Jews.

They will resist colonial domination and, as is their right, fight for liberation from colonial domination “by all available means, including armed struggle.” “No justice, no peace” isn’t a political slogan; it’s political science.

Critical Hour Discussion of Ben & Jerry's Leaving Occupied Territories (7/29/2021)

China Names Diplomatic Veteran Qin Gang as New Ambassador; US Steps Up Airstrikes on Afghanistan 

My segment starts at ~1:03:30

Listen to "China Names Diplomatic Veteran Qin Gang as New Ambassador; US Steps Up Airstrikes on Afghanistan" on Spreaker.

The Critical Hour is a daily 60 minute hard hitting news analysis and talk radio program hosted by Dr. Wilmer Leon and Garland Nixon. The mainstream news outlets play it safe by parroting the perspectives of their corporate benefactors. The Critical Hour uses clear, cutting edge insight and analysis to examine national and international issues impacting the global village in which we live. Those who are truly interested in understanding what is going on in the world, why and especially who is behind it turn to The Critical Hour for rhetoric free analysis and commentary.

Press TV Discussion of Israeli Home Demolitions & Ethnic Cleansing (7/11/2021)

UN: 421 Palestinian homes demolished in 2021 

http://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/82510

Press TV Discussion of Prospects for New Israeli Government (5/31/2021)

 Hamas: New Israeli PM will not change Hamas stance

Apartheid Does Not Have the Right To Defend Itself, Or To Exist

 Apartheid Does Not Have the Right To Defend Itself, Or To Exist

Jim Kavanagh

Twitter/IsraelArabic

With its latest attack on Gaza—on the families it drove from their homes in what is now Israeli territory—Israel is surpassing itself in viciousness. As of today, Israel has killed 212 Gazans, including at least 61 children and 36 women. It is “obliterate[ing] multiple generations of families” in the middle of the night—at least 21 members of the al-Qawlaq family, from 6 months to 90 years old. It is pulverizing residential towers and media offices, and bombing “civic infrastructure, businesses and the main roads leading to the city’s al-Shifa hospital.” Destroying the roads is an instructive example of Israel’s gratuitous, and clever, cruelty: It of course prevents ambulances and medics from moving where they’re needed; it also blocks the families who are fleeing to the hospitals for safety from the sudden explosion of their homes. But, We didn’t bomb the hospital!

Given all of Israel’s precision weapons and careful advance planning, this is not an accident, nor was the killing of at least two key senior medical staff in one night—reminiscent of the one day, during the Great March of Return protest in 2018, when Israeli snipers, who claimed to “know where every bullet landed,” just happened to wound and kill 18 paramedics. It’s a plan to increase the suffering and chaos.

A powerful state only does these things to people it despises and fears.

Press TV Discussion of Israeli Attack on Gaza and Ongoing Colonial Violence (5/14/2021)

 Israel launches numerous deadly strikes on besieged Gaza Strip

Related articles: Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy, Gaza Calling: It’s the Colonialism, Stupid!, Zionism In The Light of Jerusalem

Statement to Al Mayadeen (Lebanese TV) About Israeli Attack on Gaza (5/12/2021)

 “Zionist Narrative is losing Its Legitimacy”

Jim Kavanagh, Editor of The Polemicist, says that we are witnessing new outrageous crimes by the Israeli government on the behalf of the Zionist settler-colonial project it represents.

Related articles: Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy, Gaza Calling: It’s the Colonialism, Stupid!, Zionism In The Light of Jerusalem

Interview with Kate Frey of We Are Many, They Are Few (2/19/2020)

We Are Many, They Are Few

A wide-ranging interview with Jim Kavanagh

My interview with political commentator and editor of the Polemicist, Jim Kavanagh. We discuss US imperialism in the Middle East, Israel, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic primaries, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Critical Hour Discussion of Bernie, Palestine, Ukraine (1/31/2020)

Friday Is Brexit Day, but Now the Work Really Begins

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

There’s been a lot of hype around Friday for Brexit, the same way we all waited with bated breath for the clock to strike 12 on January 1, 2000, for Y2K, when all the computers were supposed to crash, and nothing happened. How’s this playing out in London?

According to Friday remarks from French President Emmanuel Macron, Brexit is a "historic warning sign" for the European Union, adding that it meant "we need more Europe." He continued, "This departure is a shock. It's a historic warning sign which must ... be heard by all of Europe and make us reflect.” How is this playing out there? Macron, who was elected on a promise to transform the EU, also argued that Britain's decision to leave was enabled by the fact that "we did not change Europe enough".

"US President Donald Trump unveiled his much-awaited peace plan on Tuesday at the White House. Alongside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said his plan is 'a win-win' for both Israel and the Palestinians," Haaretz reported Tuesday. But the plan demands Palestinians to "dismiss all pending actions" before the International Criminal Court. So what do we make of this?

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (11/22/2019)

As Dems' Impeachment Marathon Wraps Up, the Counterattack Begins

On Thursday, House Democrats concluded their 72-hour impeachathon with testimony from two witnesses: Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council adviser on Russia, and David Holmes, a counselor in the US Embassy in Ukraine, who backed up the allegations that US President Donald Trump conditioned military aid and a White House meeting for Ukraine on Kiev opening an investigation into former US Vice President Joe Biden, who may face Trump in the 2020 US presidential election, and his son Hunter. Have the Democrats been able to present a case to the American people that will impact how they vote in 2020? Has the needle been moved, or without a conviction in the Senate, will they have shot themselves in the foot? Does Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani need to look both ways twice before crossing the street so he can avoid being hit by the bus they are trying to throw him under? Is it possible that when this gets to the Senate that former National Security Adviser John Bolton will flip on the president and spill the beans?
[Related articles: The Empire Steps Back: Trump Withdraws From Syria – Impeachment Now Possible; Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit]

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (11/15/2019)

Another Of Trump's Men Falls: Roger Stone Found Guilty, but Based on What?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and associate of US President Donald Trump, was found guilty of federal charges on Friday. "The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for less than two days before finding Stone, 67, guilty on all seven counts," the Washington Post reported. "A judge set Stone’s sentencing for Feb. 6 and allowed him to remain free until then. Stone faces a legal maximum penalty of 50 years in prison — 20 years for the witness tampering charge and five years for each of the other counts, although a first offender would face far less time under federal sentencing guidelines."

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (8/16/19)

Global Unrest: Hong Kong Protests, Chinese Tariffs, US Near Recession and More!

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time. 

Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways has been caught up in the fallout of ongoing pro-democracy protests in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Hundreds of flights were canceled this week because of protests at Hong Kong International Airport, and the airline has threatened to fire employees who take part in the demonstrations. It was announced Friday that the company's CEO Rupert Hogg and Chief Commercial Officer Paul Loo are resigning. The airline's stock has fallen almost 24% since April. What’s going on in Hong Kong and why?

Fighting Fake Stories: The New Yorker Serves Up A Doozie

State Department

On July 8^th, The New Yorker published a short piece by Adam Entous, under the graphic above, titled “The Maps of Israeli Settlements That Shocked Barack Obama.” In the article, Entous purports to tell us the heretofore unknown inside story of how the Obama administration came to the surprising realization that Israeli settlements were taking over the West Bank. In the kind of irony The New Yorker might best appreciate, the magazine’s latest promotional tag line is: “Fighting Fake Stories With Real Ones,” and this Adam Entous article is the epitome of fake.

As Entous narrates it, in 2015, the third year of Obama’s second term, as his “Presidency was winding down,” a gentleman called Frank Lowenstein—who was, and still is, the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations and Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State—stumbled upon a map of West Bank settlements “that he had never seen before.” Though Lowenstein—as, you know, Special Envoy for Palestinian Negotiations and all—had seen “hundreds of maps of the West Bank” and had one “adorning” his office, this “new map in the briefing book” was a revelation to him. It showed clearly that “not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained.”

Shocked, shocked, Lowenstein scurried off to show the map to Secretary of State John Kerry, telling him: “Look what’s really going on here.” After studiously having the map’s information “verified by U.S. intelligence agencies,” Kerry then unfurled the map on a coffee table in the White House for President Obama to see. As Ben Rhodes, “one of Obama’s longest-serving advisers,” recounted, Obama, too, was “shocked” at Israel’s “systematic” use of settlements to “cut off Palestinian population centers from one another.”

Sacrificing Gaza: The Great March of Zionist Hypocrisy

The Great March of Return is a startling, powerful expression of Palestinian identity and resistance. Thousands of Palestinians have come out, bravely and unapologetically, to say: “We refuse to remain invisible. We reject any attempt to assign us to the discard pile of history. We will exercise our fundamental right to go home.” They have done this unarmed, in the face of Israel’s use of deadly armed force against targets (children, press, medics) deliberately chosen to demonstrate the Jewish state’s unapologetic determination to force them back into submissive exile by any means necessary. By doing this repeatedly over the last few weeks, these incredibly brave men, women, and children have done more than decades of essays and books to strip the aura of virtue from Zionism that's befogged Western liberals' eyes for 70 years.

What the Israelis have done over the past few weeks—killing at least 112 and wounding over 13,000 people (332 with life-threatening injuries and 27 requiring amputation)—is a historical crime that stands alongside the Sharpeville Massacre (69 killed), Bloody Sunday (14 killed), and the Birmingham Fire Hoses and Police Dog Repression as a defining moment in an ongoing struggle for justice and freedom. Like those events, this month’s slaughter may become a turning point for what John Pilger correctly calls “the longest occupation and resistance in modern times”—the continuing, unfinished subjugation of the Palestinian people, which, like apartheid and Jim Crow, requires constant armed repression and at least occasional episodes of extermination.

The American government, political parties, and media, which support and make possible this crime are disgraceful, criminal accomplices. American politicians, media, and people, who feel all aglow about professing their back-in-the-day support (actual, for some; retrospectively-imagined, for most) of the Civil-Rights movement in the American South and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa but continue to ignore the Palestinian struggle for justice against Zionism, because saying peep one about it might cost them some discomfort, are disgraceful, cowardly hypocrites.

You know, the millions of ant-racist #Resistors who are waiting for a quorum of Natalie Portmans and cool elite, preferably Jewish, personalities to make criticism of Israel acceptable before finding the courage to express the solidarity with the Palestinian people they've always had in their hearts. Back in the day, they’d be waiting for Elvis to denounce Jim Crow before deciding that it’s the right time to side with MLK, Malcolm, and Fred Hampton against Bull Connor, George Wallace, and William F. Buckley.

Zionism In The Light of Jerusalem

f

Wissam Nassar | DPA

Donald Trump's official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is an embarrassment. A salutary embarrassment.

It’s a clumsy, all-too-obvious unmasking of decades of bipartisan U.S. policy whose contempt for Palestinians has been cloaked with a smile and a handshake.

As such, it's an embarrassment for the Zionist political and media elite that prefers to operate behind smiles and handshakes, and not flaunt their power.

It's an embarrassment to liberal Zionists and “peace process” promoters everywhere—in the American political parties and media, in European conservative and social democrat governments, and in Jewish Zionist organizations. For fifty years, they have laser-focused attention on the post-’67 “occupation,” and done all that they can [nothing concrete], in solidarity with the Israeli Jewish peace movement [dwindling to insignificance in an increasingly fascistic political culture], to end the occupation [minimize its cost to the Jewish state, ‘cause “no concessions, no withdrawals, no Palestinian state” is already proclaimed Israeli policy].

It's an embarrassment to the Arab monarchs and the Palestinian Authority functionaries, who for decades have collaborated in the task of subduing Palestinian rage as Israel went about its colonizing project, holding out the promise that the good American Daddy and his kinder, gentler Israeli Jewish progeny would one day reward the Palestinians for their good behavior.

It’s an embarrassment to those liberals who want to portray Donald Trump as a uniquely evil interloper imposed on American politics by a foreign power, rather than understand him as the product of an American political culture that they helped to create while obtusely refusing to recognize what they were doing.

The only parties who are not embarrassed are the “hard”—that is, intellectually honest and consistent—Zionists in Israel and the United States (many liberal Democrats included) and Donald Trump himself, who is immune to embarrassment.

Mad Cow Disease Blights Human Rights Festival

Je Suis Elsie Goldie

The Wanted 18 is a funny and serious documentary by Canadian filmmaker Paul Cowan and Palestinian multimedia artist Amer Shomali. It’s showing today at the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York.

The film is about an episode of creative, constructive, and non-violent resistance in Beit Sahour, a Christian town near Bethlehem during the First Intifada.¹ In 1988, activists in the occupied town wanted to boycott Israeli milk, and instead produce it on their own. They went to a “peacenik farmer” on a nearby kibbutz, and bought 18 cows, one of which was named Goldie. Then they sent a local student to the United States to learn the arcane techniques of dairy farming, and began to produce their own milk.

Which caused the Israeli occupation authorities to, yes, Have a cow.

Why? Because, for Israel, it is anathema for Palestinians to create any –  even the most elementary – institutions that would support their self-sufficiency and independence, and undermine their subjugation to Israeli authority. Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s what the Israeli military governor said:

We had a strict directive on dealing with those who formed the neighborhood committees with all the necessary force, and all legal means at our disposal in order to control them so as to prevent the possibility of their setting up an administrative apparatus which was ultimately designed to replace our own.

And the cow project had indeed created a sense of accomplishment and energized the Beit Sahour community.  As Jalal Qumsieh, who bought the cows, said: “The moment I saw the cows at the farm, I felt as if we had started to realize our dream of freedom and independence.” The colonial authorities can’t have that. Qumsieh recalls, “word-for-word,” the Israeli military response: “These cows are dangerous for the security of the State of Israel.” 

Cut to today, where the Palestinian filmmaker, Amer Shomali, who had been to many festivals throughout the world, is prevented by Israel from getting a visa to attend the premiere of his film, because he, like the cows, is a “national security threat.”²  Gotta keep him penned in.

There are just so many security threats that must be denied to Palestinians, like 4G phone service and digging a well:

And it’s crazy, but 'til today, all of those insane things happening in Palestine under the label of security, security threat—for example, …we’re not allowed to have 3G network on our mobiles. The Israelis have 4G; we are not allowed to have 3G. … because they said having frequency for the Palestinians is security threat. So everything can be a security threat, like digging a well to water natural reserve in the Palestinian cities is security threat. Everything can be labeled as a security threat...

So Amer took a more circuitous route, going to Amman to get a visa from the American Embassy there. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get one there, either, because their “visa machine was broken” or something. Though Amer suspects “there’s a kind of coordination” between Israeli military and American diplomatic authorities regarding visas, he believes the Americans have the best intentions, and will give him a visa in time to get to Los Angeles for the next screening on June 19^th. When asked what the “technical difficulties” in the Amman embassy were, he said: “I have no idea. Something with the system, system collapse. I don’t know. I have no idea. But they were smiling when they said that, so I have—I believe they have good intention.”

Amer does not think this “system collapse” is a cowardly and despicable ruse by the Americans to hide their connivance with Israel in preventing a real Palestinian from accompanying and amplifying the real story of creative resistance his film tells to American audiences.

Amer is a more trusting soul than I. We’ll see.

La Vache Qui Fait Rire

As Julia Bacha, Brazilian filmmaker and impact producer of The Wanted 18, says:

We really want communities, particularly here in the United States, to start thinking about what are the stories that we are hearing from the region and what are the stories about resistance that arrive to us. I think historically we have been told that Palestinians only used violence to achieve their aims, when in fact there’s a very long history of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance, which this film is one example of. And for Amer to be able to tell this story with some humor, we hope we’ll be able to attract more people to join.

That, the Israeli authorities and their American accomplices know, is a real threat to their ongoing enterprise of milking sympathy for Israel by demonizing and erasing Palestinians.

Did I mention it’s the Human Rights Watch Film Festival he was prevented from attending?

Cowabunga.

________________

Sources and Notes

The Wanted 18: Israel Blocks Palestinian Filmmaker from Making NYC Film Premiere About Intifada Cows | Democracy Now!

The 18 Palestinian Cows That Threatened Israel’s Security | The Nation

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¹ I hate to emphasize that word, but I think it’s unfortunately the case that many Americans need to be reminded that all Palestinians are not Muslims, and Muslims are not the only victims of, and fighters against, Israeli colonialsm.

² He was actually refused permission to travel from Ramallah to Jerusalem, where he would get a visa from the American Consulate. Travelling from the West Bank is very complicated, and very strictly controlled by Israel.

Here's how Amer tells it: 

Basically, I applied for an American visa at the American Consulate in Jerusalem. And in order to get to Jerusalem, you need to cross a main checkpoint blocking the road between Ramallah, where I live, and Jerusalem, where the American Consulate is. And to get that permit, you need to apply for the Israeli army. And my permit was rejected for security reasons. And it’s not a special case, like there’s tens of thousands of Palestinians, young Palestinians, who are labeled as a security threat to the state of Israel. And it’s quite frustrating. Jerusalem is just 25 minutes away from here. From this studio, it’s like 10 minutes. But you still can’t reach there. The American Embassy in Jerusalem does not offer any facilities for Palestinians who can’t get there. And they even ask you, even if you thought of sneaking to Jerusalem illegally, without a permit, to attend your interview, they will ask you, "Where is the Israeli permit?" as if there’s a kind of coordination. Anyway, I missed my appointment—