Israel’s Environmental Racism: Cancer-Causing Chemical Plants in Tulkarem

Posted on April 29, 2015

The ISM website has posted an article about a protest held today by locals in the West Bank city of Tulkarem. The protest was against the presence of 11 Israeli chemical plants that have been located there and that have been linked to spiking rates of cancer in the area.

Tulkarem, with a population of 62,000, is located in the northern part of the West Bank, lying west of the city of Nablus and east of the Israeli town of Netanya. The city makes up just five percent of the West Bank’s population, but accounts for 20 percent of all cancer cases, according to the report. And the article offers a glimpse into why this might be:

The protest against Israel’s chemical plants have been continuous since Gushiri Industries, a manufacturer of pesticides and fertilizers, first arrived in Tulkarem in the mid-1980s. The plant used to be located in the Israeli city of Netanya, only 12 kilometers away. However, a 1982 Israeli court order said the company was violating pollution regulations, making the company relocate to the West Bank’s Area C, which is under full Israeli control. The court order came after a complaint filed by Israeli citizens.

In other words, the Israeli citizens in Netanya sued to have the plant shut down so that it wouldn’t be operating near their homes and endangering their health or the health of their children. Finding that Gushiri was indeed violating pollution regulations, a judge ruled in their favor. The plant shut its doors and moved to Tulkarem. Were the courts and other Israeli officials satisfied with this resolution of the situation? Apparently so.

The following comes from Wikipedia’s article on Environmental Racism:

Environmental racism is placement of low-income or minority communities in proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments, such as toxic waste, pollution and urban decay. While there are competing views as to an exact definition, the interplay between environmental issues and social indicators are key to its understanding.

The primary contention issue in the definition is intent. Some definitions hold that only intentional discrimination against minorities in issues regarding the environment is what constitutes environmental racism, while others focus on the presence of unfavorable environmental conditions for minorities, intentional or not. A significant factor in creation of effective environmental segregation is the fact that low-income communities lack the organization and political power to resist introduction of dangerous technologies, as well as greater mobility of richer citizens away from areas falling into industrial and environmental decline.

If there’s any doubt in your mind as to whether the degradation of Tulkarem’s environment came about as a result of “intentional” pollution, perhaps the next paragraph from the ISM story might help clear that up:

Since the arrival of Gushiri Industries, ten other chemical plants have located nearby, the last one in 2007. The location of these plants have caused many local farmers to lose most of their land and contributed to unemployment and poverty in the area. Hence, many local Palestinians have been forced to work at these chemical plants, as the Israeli corporations are taking advantage of the low labor costs and the non-applicability of Israeli labor laws in Area C.

That’s a total of 11 toxic chemical plants, all Israeli-owned, all located in a Palestinian city with a population of just 62,000 people. I’m not a legal expert, but I’m guessing it probably would qualify as “intentional” environmental racism, at least by any reasonable standard of jurisprudence.

So what does all this mean in practice? What’s it like to be a local living in the city of Tulkarem? Here’s a bit more from the ISM story:

A representative from the Palestine Technical University (PTU), which neighbors the Gushiri chemical plant to the south and the Apartheid Wall to the west, said today that the smell is “unbearable” after 3 pm, which explains why most residents of Tulkarem always keep their windows shut. Residents living near the factories have also developed health issues including asthma, reduced lung capacity, skin ailments and eye infections. This is especially true for elementary students.

Additionally, it has been estimated that approximately 300 dunams, i.e. 300,000 square meters, of agricultural land is contaminated by emissions from the factories.

And finally, the article informs us of this:

The global civic organization Avaaz is currently running a campaign named “A child’s cry: Stop poisioning Palestine’s schools” to help stopping the chemical plants in Tulkarem. By signing a petition on their website, you can help putting pressure on the EU, their biggest market, to apply their strict(er) environmental regulations and impose an import ban on these factories.

This would, of course, be the same Avaaz which is campaigning for the imposition of a no-fly zone in Syria, similar, presumably, to the one set up in Libya in 2011–the sameorganization, by the way, whose founders have been described, by at least one critic, as “imperialist pimps of militarism.”

Why would a group campaigning for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria be launching an advocacy campaign for Palestinian children in Tulkarem? What purposes are served? Perhaps they feel it helps give their organization “legitimacy”–something which, of course, the country of Israel forfeited a long time ago.

The only thing that can be said with any certainty, is that the present government of Israel has no intentions of ending its occupation. There simply are too many profitable advantages from continuing it, having a convenient place to dump toxic waste being but one.

By the way, the protest today took place outside the Gishuri plant. And how do you think it turned out? Israeli soldiers fired tear gas canisters and shot one man in the abdomen with a rubber coated steel bullet. You can go here to read the full story.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Hypocrisy Run Amuck: PEN Writers Organization to Honor Charlie Hebdo

Posted on April 28, 2015

by Richard Edmondson

Perhaps PEN, the a writer’s advocacy group, should bestow a prestigious award on the gentleman interviewed in the above video. He is Arthur Topham, a Canadian writer who is battling a criminal charge of spreading “hate propaganda” for his criticisms of Israel.

Topham runs the website RadicalPress.com, and in 2012 he was arrested and charged with violating a Canadian law prohibiting the “willful promotion of hatred.” The charge stems from an article he published in 2011 entitled “Israel Must Perish.” The piece, which you can access here, is a satire. What Topham did was to parody a book published in 1941 by Jewish writer Theodore N. Kaufman entitled “Germany Must Perish”–an angry screed in which the author advocated the territorial dismemberment of Germany and the extermination, through forced sterilization, of the German people. Kaufman’s book wasnot a satire. Topham’s article was.

The Canadian blogger simply took the arguments advanced by Kaufman and changed the words around. Words like “Nazi” and “German” became “Jew” and “Zionist.” Topham was arrested by the RCMP on May 16, 2012. You can go here to read his own written account of his arrest that day, in which he describes how he tried to explain to arresting officers that the piece had been nothing more than a parody, and that he had not in reality been advocating a program of mass sterilization of all Zionists. It seems the police were not quite able to grasp the concept of the word “parody,” however. Topham was taken to jail.

That was nearly three years ago, and today Topham is still battling his case through the Canadian court system. You can go here to read a recently-posted article on his latest court appearance. (H/T Noor).

The PEN American Center in New York will be holding its annual “Literary Gala” on May 5, and recently it was announced that the organization will award its prestigious “Freedom of Expression Courage Award” to the rather odious French rag Charlie Hebdo. It seems to be a case of hypocrisy run amuck, and indeed the announcement has created a storm of controversy inside the organization, with at least six members having announced their withdrawal from the event.

Perhaps not surprisingly, PEN America is headed by a former Obama administration official.

---

Writers Withdraw from PEN Gala to Protest Award to Charlie Hebdo

By Glenn Greenwald

As I was close to finishing my own story, The New York Times published a long article last night about the rather intense and fascinating controversy that has erupted inside PEN America, the group long devoted to defending writers’ freedom of expression from attacks by governments. In essence, numerous prominent writers who were to serve as “table heads,” or who are longtime PEN members, have withdrawn from the group’s annual awards gala and otherwise expressed anger over PEN’s decision to bestow its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.

The Times story does a good job laying out the events and describing the general controversy, so in lieu of repeating that, I instead want to publish the key correspondence between the writer Deborah Eisenberg and PEN’s Executive Director, former Obama State Department official and Amnesty USA Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, which sparked the controversy; post the full comment given to The Intercept by the writer Teju Cole, who has withdrawn as a table head; and make a few observations of my own. The Intercept has also submitted several questions to Nossel, which I’m also posting, and will prominently post PEN’s responses as soon as they are received. All of those documents are here.

Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression. Indeed, some of the most repressive regimes on the planet sent officials to participate in the Paris “Free Speech” rally, and France itself began almost immediately arresting and prosecuting people for expressing unpopular, verboten political viewpoints and then undertaking a series of official censorship acts, including the blocking of websites disliked by its government. The French government perpetrated these acts of censorship, and continues to do so, with almost no objections from those who flamboyantly paraded around as free speech fanatics during Charlie Hebdo Week.

Under the guise of the “War on Terror,” there has indeed been a systematic assault on free speech: though it’s been one waged by Western governmentsprimarily against their Muslim citizens. For that reason, it has provoked almost no objections from those who dressed up as free speech crusaders that week. That’s because, as I wrote in the aftermath of that rally, the incident was used to manipulatively exploit, not celebrate and protect, free expression. Celebrating Charlie Hebdo was largely about glorifying anti-Muslim sentiment; free expression was the pretext.

This is all quite redolent of how the U.S. government and its acolytes quite adeptly exploit social issues to advance imperial aims. U.S. officials, for instance, gin up anger toward Putin or Iran by highlighting the maltreatment of those countries’ LGBT citizens — as though that’s why the U.S. government is hostile — while at the same time showering arms and money on allied regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt whose treatment of gays is at least as bad (while LGBT groups in the U.S. say nothing because those are Obama’s policies). Or American and British officials will denounce free press attacks by governments they want to demonize while cozying up to regimes that allow no press freedoms at all. It’s also similar to how neocons tried to persuade feminists to support the war in Afghanistan because the Taliban is heinous to women or justified the invasions of Iraq because Saddam violated human rights — at the very same time that the regimes neocons love the most are at least as bad if not worse on those issues (to say nothing of the human rights records of neocons themselves and the U.S. government).

This is now a common, and quite potent, tactic: inducing support for highly illiberal Western government policy by dressing it up as support for liberal principles. And it highlights the fraud of pretending that celebrations of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are independent of the fact that the particular group they most prominently mock are Muslims, a marginalized, targeted, and largely powerless group in France and the West generally.

As I wrote after the Paris rally, it is simply inconceivable that Charlie Hebdo would have been depicted as heroes had their primary targets been groups more favored and powerful in the West (indeed, a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist was fired by the magazine in 2009 for mocking Judaism: where were all the newfound free speech crusaders then?). As the objecting PEN writers note, one can regard the murders of the Charle Hebdo cartoonists as repugnant, vile and dangerous (as any decent person does) while simultaneously scorning the Muslim-bashing focus of their “satire.”

What, pray tell, is remotely admirable about sitting in the West — which has been invading,

bombing, and otherwise dominating Muslim countries around the world for decades, and has spent the last decade depicting Islam as the Gravest Threat — and echoing that prevailing sentiment by bashing Muslims? Nothing is easier than mocking and maligning the group in your society most marginalized and oppressed. People in the West have their careers destroyed when they’re accused of sympathizing with Islam, not for opposing it. Bashing Muslims and Islam is orthodoxy in the West, both on the level of official policy and political culture.

The controversy provoked by the PEN writers raises an ancillary though important issue: the role played by former Obama officials in human rights and other organizations designed to function as adversaries to the government. Human Rights Watch has come under fire because key officials served in the U.S. State Department and critics claim the group thus echoes the U.S. government line. NYU students are currently protesting the appointment to the faculty of former Yale Law School dean Harold Koh, who as a legal adviser in Obama’s State Department acted as an advocate of drone killings and Obama’s right to wage war in Libya in the face of a Congressional vote against that war. And now PEN is led by Nossel, a former Obama State Department official who faced serious criticisms after she left for using Amnesty USA’s credibility to advance Obama’s foreign policy.

Nobody suggests that working as an official of the U.S. government should be permanently disqualifying. But there have to be groups that act as genuine adversaries to the most powerful government on the planet — especially ones claiming to be human rights organizations or those who oppose state censorship — and when those groups are led by the very people who defended and implemented the policies of that government, those groups’ credibility to act in that capacity is seriously compromised. That’s how supposedly dissident groups become co-opted and converted into the opposite of what they claim. The writer Wallace Shawn, who is a member of PEN and protests the Charlie Hebdo award, told me:

The “boards” of every non-profit organization, university, theatre, etc., no matter what the organization’s original goals were, are made up of the same tiny group of people, and they choose the organization’s leaders, presidents, artistic directors on the basis that those individuals would be good at “fund-raising,” i.e. getting money out of a few more people from that same group……Then even the once serious people in the organization begin to internalize the in-born belief of the corporate-minded board members that the most important thing for the organization is to grow, raise more money, get more members………..the trend points in the same direction for every organization…….. (ellipses in original)

Whatever else is true, PEN America has always existed to defend unorthodox and marginalized views from attack, and there is absolutely nothing unorthodox or marginalized in the West about the views expressed by Charlie Hebdo cartoonists or in showering them with courage awards. As Eisenberg put it in her original letter, the Charlie Hebdo award appears to be “an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing anti-Islamic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world.”

The letters and other documents giving rise to this controversy, which I really encourage you to read, can be found here.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

When Royal Princes Become Cannibals

01-05-2015 | 16:06

Fatima Salami

Nothing worse could happen to the Yemeni people other than the disaster of shutting hospital doors in the face of their wounded and ill as thousands of Yemenis were life-threatened in the hours to come; that's the way Al Saud rulers wanted for the Yemeni children and elders - they relished scenes of blood and destruction.

The Al Saud royal family had been accustomed to cannibalism without remorse or sorrow as humanity was not expected of a monster!

They are the kings of shame; they worship money - overwhelmed by prestige and arrogance as the paranoia of greatness does not prevent them from committing sins even yielding to imaginary battles.

Deaf are the royalties of Al Saud; they cannot hear the screams and moans of bereaved orphans. They are mute and voiceless when it comes to telling the truth. They are blind and sightless when the remains of children and the wounded would stay out of hospitals by a brutal royal decree as confirmed to al-Ahed news website by Yemeni Ministry of Health spokesman Dr. Tamim al-Shami.

Closing hospital doors was threatening Yemen; "We are facing a real humanitarian disaster," said al-Shami. Electricity which is considered the basis for hospital operation is non-existent thus impairing the function of the latter.

In addition to that, the spokesman continued, "we are facing the risk of diesel shortage during the coming twenty-four hours which means that hospitals will stop working completely."

He confirmed the lack of alternatives to the existing reality, unless some traders worked internally to operate hospitals on a temporary basis, but "for the time being, there are no good news in this context, which will certainly lead the wounded to their inevitable death." 

However, Al-Shami was not embarrassed to plea to the international community for aid upon the emerging disaster. According to the spokesman "thousands of the wounded and sick are life-threatened."

Hence, faced with this tragic reality and in the light of the continued brutal Saudi aggression against Yemen "we cannot even treat the wounded, let alone patients who depend on oxygen tubes and others in intensive care units" added al-Shami.

He further revealed that "the Ministry of Health in Yemen has communicated with several international organizations, including the UNICEF which expressed its willingness to provide assistance, but Riyadh stands the impediment that prevents the arrival of any aid to the Yemeni people, just as what happened during the past two days, when Saudi Arabia interrupted the aid sent by Iran and bombed Sana'a runway."

Consequently, al-Shami expressed agony and heartburn towards the poor conditions of the Yemeni hospitals. The helplessness of children was what mostly touched him.

Nonetheless, he expresses grave disappointment towards the languid Arab politics which he described as Zionism. "Some rulers are seeking to control the states with their money that will go unheeded, God willing, and we are inevitably victorious" concluded al-Shami.

Source: al-Ahed News, Translated and edited by website team

Related Videos

مملكة آل سعود في مهب العاصفة | د وسيم بزي | الاتجاه

السعودية ،، ماذا بعد "عاصفة الفجر"

ما وراء الحدث | د فؤاد ابراهيم ~ محمد الوجيه | #العدوان_السعودي_على_اليمن | الساحات

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Foreign Policy Diary – ‘War on Terror’

SOUTH FRONT

شاهد| إحتراق طائرة وغارات بمطار صنعاء الدولي بفعل العدوان السعودي الأمريكي

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Burying The Greatest Victory in Spite

May 8: Day of celebration, day of warning

LD

April 29, 2015 (Ulson Gunnar - NEO) - In efforts to demonize Russia, the history of the Western World is being distastefully rewritten. The monumental sacrifices of the Russian people during World War II are not only being marginalized, but flipped upon their heads. Today, reading through the Western media, one will find a multitude of comparisons between Russia and Nazi Germany, with Russian President Vladimir Putin compared with Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. 

Beyond distasteful, this propaganda is dangerous to the point where it borders on exonerating the Nazis, even celebrating their acts of aggression and bolstering those monkeying their ideology today, particularly in Ukraine, Poland and other NATO-oriented Eastern European nations where fascism has been resurrected to once again battle the Russian people. 

The most recent example of this can be seen in an ABC News article "Polish Border Guards Refuse Entry for 10 Russian Bikers," where Russian bikers planned to trace the route of Russian soldiers as they pushed back the Nazi tide in World War 2. Their goal was to visit the grave sites of fallen Russian soldiers (which includes many Polish soldiers who fought alongside them) and honor the sacrifices of tens of millions who resisted and eventually ended fascism in Europe. 

Politically Motivated Exclusion: Western Free Speech?  

The ABC News article admits that Poland has been unable to explain precisely why the Russian bikers were barred from entering the country. No weapons were found and no danger was described. Instead, ABC claimed:

"This is not a normal bike club. They are tools in the hand of Vladimir Putin to make propaganda," said Tomasz Czuwara, spokesman for the Open Dialog Foundation, a Polish group that supports Ukraine. 

The German government has also expressed unease at the bikers and said they would not be welcome. 

German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer said that Germany had decided to revoke the Schengen visas of a small number of people after the government concluded that "there are some people we believe to be in the leadership of the Night Wolves who we do not believe are pursuing a legitimate aim with their actions in Germany."

Reminding the world of the dangers of fascism and extraterritorial military aggression is particularly inconvenient for the West, particularly NATO and especially the current political orders occupying power in Poland, Ukraine and even Germany. Reminding the world of the gradual encirclement and eventual invasion of Russia during World War 2 would make NATO's current encirclement and encroachment along Russia's borders look painfully familiar and could make NATO's already unpopular agenda even more untenable. 

Since the Russian bikers pose no real threat, it is clear that the decision to bar them from entering Poland, and possibly even barring them from entering Germany to honor fallen Russians in a war that Germany provoked and Polish collaborators helped facilitate, is purely politically motivated.

It is the West itself that often labels nations "dictatorships" and describes them as lacking "freedom" when activities are banned simply for political reasons, yet this is precisely what is being done now along the border of Poland. "Free speech," an alleged pillar of Western civilization ensures that even unpopular points of view and activism are protected. Honoring those who defeated the Nazis and fascism in Europe is hardly even "unpopular," though it appears there are concerted efforts to change that.  

What's even more ironic is the fact that the West currently claims Russia constitutes a grave danger to Western civilization and all of the rights and institutions within, yet it is the West itself dismantling these rights and institutions, brick-by-brick to maliciously array its people against Russia.

Russia's Thanks For Saving Europe 

Before launching the invasion of Russia, Nazi Germany was the uncontested master of Western Europe. It had swept away Polish, French and British forces in a lighting-fast war before consolidating everything under a singular fascist supranational state. The island nation of England was all that was left unconquered, and through a blockade and persistent air war, the Germans were confident they could break the British as well.

But in 1941, three massive German armies comprised of millions of soldiers moved east toward Russia. They aimed to seize Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, and the oil-rich southern regions in the Caucasus. The ensuing battle soaked Russia with the blood of its people. Over 20 million Russians, soldiers and civilians, would perish in a battle that first confounded, then exhausted the Nazi military machine, before eventually overrunning them and pushing them back to Berlin itself. 

It is commonly understood that if the millions of German soldiers committed to the failed conquest of Russia had been concentrated instead in the west, it is likely that Britain would have finally been conquered and the history of the Western World would have from then on been written by the Nazis.

But because of the monumental sacrifices of the Russian people, followed by sacrifices of Europeans and Americans, the Nazis were defeated. 

In the wake of a conflict described as the most expansive military theater of all time, one would expect this sacrifice to lead toward generations of enduring vigilance against fascism. What must those with relatives who perished in this great conflict, in Russia and in both America and Western Europe, think when they see a Ukrainian regime come to power backed by ultra-violent fascist militias wearing the insignia of Adolf Hitler's notorious Waffen SS divisions?  

Hypocrisy and the Shape-Shifting Notion of Freedom

In America, biker clubs too often ride to commemorate the sacrifices of fallen comrades. There have even been events held in Vietnam, a nation the US invaded from almost literally the opposite side of the planet. Yet the Vietnamese have allowed these events to move forward, a nation also described as "not free" by the West, yet apparently more willing to allow such events than the "free" West. 

It is clear that the increasing animosity toward, and attempts to defile the sacrifices of millions of fallen Russian soldiers during World War 2 represents not only a temporary political row between the West and Russia, but a dangerous overwriting of history that attempts to obscure the crimes, atrocities and acts of aggression that led up to and lasted throughout the war. Obscuring the warnings taught by history invites history's repeating itself.

It also represents an increasingly obvious hypocrisy pervading Western society, where the concept of "freedom" is used to label enemies as dictatorships, but is willfully trampled when politically convenient at home to an extent even "not free" nations refuse to entertain. 

Barring the Russian bikers is just one of many attempts to disrupt this year's Victory Day and reframe Russia as the very threat it helped defeat in World War 2. However, while Russian bikers seek to follow the trail of Russian soldiers as they pushed the Nazis back to Berlin, it is NATO that is following the ignoble steps of the Nazi army as it expanded eastward toward Russia. 

Ulson Gunnar, a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

Related Articles

• U.S. Media Outlet Mocks WWII Stalingrad Memorial as Victory Day Approaches
• Communist Party May Day Rallies Banned in Kiev and Kharkov
• Russian Economy Is in Better Shape Than You Might Think
• China, Russia to Hold First Joint Mediterranean Naval Drills

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!