PALESTINE
Unless you’ve been to Palestine and seen firsthand what Palestinians are forced to endure by the Israeli military apparatus occupying an ever greater proportion of their land, it’s hard to understand the extraordinary oppression, humiliation and harassment occurring daily. Here’s a view from on the ground by an Australian human rights observer (my own account is here).
From Gaza, the story of Hamza’s death. What Labor’s shift on Palestine means. How extremism and Israel’s relentless settlement-building destroyed any chance of a “two-state solution”. And a “one-state solution” is the equivalent of apartheid, as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak argues.
THE DYSTOPIA AT THE FRONT DOOR
Like a lame version of Minority Report, US police are now predictively policing black Americans for violent crimes — leading, inevitably, to violent crimes against black Americans. A new book explores the rise of mass shootings as an American phenomenon. The routine nature of mass shootings in the US. Artificial intelligence can now write its own disinformation without human help (why anyone thought writing an algorithm for that was a good idea is beyond me).
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Just because the EU parliament voted the deal down doesn’t mean China accepts that its investment deal with the EU is dead (well why would they, given they don’t believe in nonsense like parliaments). China’s campaign of forced reproductive control in Xinjiang (seriously, why the hell are we contemplating sending anyone to the genocide Olympics next year?). Elsewhere, China also has a huge infrastructure debt problem. Europe should resist the example of the US and Australia and send diplomats to the Indo-Pacific, not people in uniform.
INDUSTRY POLICY
Unhappy with the Suez Canal, Japanese shippers are looking for other ways to ship to European markets. The collapse of Kashmir’s legendary carpet industry. Scott Morrison and Angus Taylor might be desperate to support fossil fuels but Australians are embracing rooftop solar at record levels, and European companies are abandoning natural gas at a rate of knots.
UNLIMITED FISCAL OPPORTUNITY
It’s been enjoyable to watch in recent days the rest of the media catch up with Side View’s long-running interest in UFOs. In case readers have ever wondered quite why Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP’s the new, more legit acronym, like how sci-fi fans liked to refer to “speculative fiction”) is of such interest to a publication ostensibly interested in public affairs, here’s why.
That UFOs might, by some quirk of the laws of physics, be piloted by little green women from Proxima Centauri/Uranus/the fifth dimension is possibly the least interesting aspect of them (my view — they’re glitches in the simulation within which we reside, but that’s another story). But UFOs are endlessly fascinating for what humans project onto them, how they have morphed over the decades to reflect societal fears (the Cold War and communism, higher sources of non-capitalist wisdom, bodily and sexual violation) and the remarkable array of conspiracy theories they generate.
There is in fact a straight connection between the stories of alien abduction of the 1980s and ’90s (complete with anal probes) and cattle mutilations, and the profound hostility to the US government exhibited by large swathes of the population, based on the conviction it is engaged in some kind of conspiracy against citizens — often with straight tropes from right-wing mythmaking like world governments thrown in.
It’s also now clear that UFOs represent a magnificent new opportunity — especially in the conspiracy-genic state of US politics — for the channelling of more funds to defence contractors to “investigate” the phenomena and develop new technology. The New Republic explains.
MISCELLANEOUS
The cover-up continues in a decades-old British murder linked to systematic policy and media corruption (no prizes for guessing the media company concerned). Ex-Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger deplores wokeness (apparently it all went wrong after he stopped editing the official journal of record of political correctness…).
And finally, no, Americans are not returning their pandemic pets in large numbers. Because — why would you?
And the fact is that Hamas was spawned by Israel.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel ‘aided Hamas directly – the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),’ said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies. Israel’s support for Hamas ‘was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,’ said a former senior CIA official.”
“In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel’s control over the occupied territories.”
In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a “humanitarian” organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas – but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support.
Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel – and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin’s group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.
Ami Isseroff, writing on MideastWeb, shows how the Israelis deliberately promoted the Islamists of the future Hamas by helping them turn the Islamic University of Gaza into a base from which the group recruited activists – and the suicide bombers of tomorrow. As the only higher-education facility in the Gaza strip, and the only such institution open to Palestinians since Anwar Sadat closed Egyptian colleges to them, IUG contained within its grounds the seeds of the future Palestinian state. When a conflict arose over religious issues, however, the Israeli authorities sided with the Islamists against the secularists of the Fatah-PLO mainstream. As Isseroff relates, the Islamists
“Encouraged Israeli authorities to dismiss their opponents in the committee in February of 1981, resulting in subsequent Islamisation of IUG policy and staff (including the obligation on women to wear the hijab and thobe and separate entrances for men and women), and enforced by violence and ostracization of dissenters. Tacit complicity from both university and Israeli authorities allowed Mujama to keep a weapons cache to use against secularists. By the mid 1980s, it was the largest university in occupied territories with 4,500 students, and student elections were won handily by Mujama.”
Again, the motive was to offset Arafat’s influence and divide the Palestinians. In the short term, this may have worked to some extent; in the longer term, however, it backfired badly – as demonstrated by the results of the recent Palestinian election.
The Hamas infrastructure of mosques, clinics, kindergartens, and other educational institutions flourished not only because they were lavishly funded, but also due to being efficiently run. Sheik Yassin and the future leaders of Hamas acquired a reputation for “clean” governance and good administrative practices, which would greatly aid them – especially in comparison to the PLO, which was widely perceived as corrupt. Indeed, “clean government” – and not the necessity of armed struggle – was the main theme of their successful election campaign.
Read the rest @ Hamas, Son of Israel – Antiwar.com Original
Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/