Tab dump 21-04-09

Excellent article in NY Times where a Times reporter and photographer wound up in the middle of a pitched infantry battle after an ambush near a riverbed in Afghanistan, in which the troop miraculously lost only one of the men. The story makes you feel really sorry for the soldiers, but is, obviously, completely one-sided. The journalists were completely embedded. Dramatic and engaging, the article gives a good description of combat on a strategic level that newspapers hardly ever cover anymore. And more to the point: probably shouldn't cover anymore. It ends up being a riveting story (with unbelievable multimedia: recordings of interviews and the sound of the actual combat, slideshow of incredible photos, etc.) from a more or less bygone age of media.

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Jokes from the cultural revolution.

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"Culture and Barbarism: Metaphysics in a Time of Terrorism" by Terry Eagleton:

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God? Who would have expected theology to rear its head once more in the technocratic twenty-first century, almost as surprisingly as some mass revival of Zoroastrianism? Why is it that my local bookshop has suddenly sprouted a section labeled “Atheism,” hosting anti-God manifestos by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others, and might even now be contemplating another marked “Congenital Skeptic with Mild Baptist Leanings”? Why, just as we were confidently moving into a posttheological, postmetaphysical, even posthistorical era, has the God question broken out anew?

Unlucky strike

This little t-shirt motif (go to the Flickr link for a larger size) comes to us courtesy of the Lacktr Prpgnda Community.

Number crunching

According to the Al-Jazeera Gaza Twitterbot, Hamas is reporting that 48 of its fighters were killed in the Gaza bombings and the subsequent invasion. 

According to Gaza Body Count, 1203 dead have been confirmed so far. Those 1203 are 98,93 % of the casualties, with the remaining 1.07 % - 13 dead - on the Israeli side. 

If that's true, then 3.99 %, almost 4 % of those killed on the Palestinian side were legitimate targets. The remaining 96 % were innocent bystanders. 

Or, well, "bystanders" is maybe the wrong word, seeing as how they were locked inside a territory they couldn't escape from. Maybe "terror victims" or "murder victims" are a better phrase.

Whatever we call them, I believe that percentage is far higher than most wars in the 20th century. I have top people getting the numbers now. In the meantime, let's suffice to say that there is no way that this can be adequately described as a war on Hamas aggression. Reading purely from the numbers, this was a war on Palestinian civilians which happened to hit some Hamas fighters. I'm sure you could pretty much carpet bomb Gaza and get the same percentage. I wonder if they were even aiming. 

Update: My top people. Well... Mikkel, actually, has gotten hold of the numbers. They're in comments.

Ting Finn Jarle Sæle ikke vet

Og forresten drar Finn Jarle Sæle noen tall ut av fullstendig løse luften uten kildehenvisning her:

Vår presse later som om det ikke er slik. De to legene Mads Gilbert og Erik Fosse, som har gjort en innsats for lidende mennesker – har ikke informert om dette. Deres legetjeneste var faglig arbeid. Deres journalistikk brøt med alle presseetiske regler. De snakket om myrderier, om blodbad – som forutsetter at Israel aktivt har gått løs på sivile. Men tallene taler for seg. I et folketett område, er de sivile tapene de minste i krig til nå. Og prosenten sivile som ble drepet den første uken, var 25 prosent av antall drepte. Det er noe av det laveste som har vært i noen krig.

Sæle, tre ting:

For det første så tror jeg ikke på det tallet ditt på 25 %. Det kan simpelthen ikke stemme.

For det annet så er 25 % på ingen måte de laveste tapstallene blant sivile i krig til nå i det hele tatt, se kommentarer på posten over.

For det tredje så er ikke Gilbert og Fosse journalister, og har aldri hevdet å være det. De er øyenvitner, altså kilder. De skriver ikke sakene selv. Øyenvitner er, som du kanskje vet, siden du er redaktør for en norsk avis, noe man faktisk er pålagt å bruke som journalist når man ikke selv har sett noe.

Og vet du hvorfor journalistene ikke har sett noe og derfor må bruke øyenvitneskildringer? Fordi Israel ikke slapp inn journalister. Det opplever jeg som litt problematisk - gjør ikke du?

Hjemme fra demoen

Jeg vet ikke om jeg skal le eller gråte: Alle nyhetene nå handler om gatekamper i Oslo. Dagbladet, VG og NRK. Vi hadde den største anti-krigsdemonstrasjonen i Oslo siden markeringen mot krigen i Irak, 15. februar: 40.000 mennesker gikk fredelig i gatene. Etterpå lagde en liten gruppe på etter mitt anslag 100-200 kvalm rundt de amerikanske og israelske ambassadene. Det ØDELEGGER fullstendig budskapet til demoen og fjerner effekten fra media. Vi skal ikke gi dem anledningen til å dekke noe dramatisk og sexy som gatekamper. Gi dem heller anledning til å dekke de 40.000 menneskene. På grunn av gatekampene dekker de nå også pro-krig, pro-massemord-markeringen i mye mye større grad enn fakkeltoget. Det er en total visuell-retorisk seier til Israel-bevegelsen.

Samtidig så er det dumt å tenke at det er gatekampene som dekkes først og fremst av media. Det synes jeg er en konsekvent feilprioritering som gir feil inntrykk av det som skjedde. Volden trumfer freden selv i media. Hvorfor er vi alltid så flinke til å dekke volden, og ikke dens årsaker?

Highly civilised people

Every morning's newsletter from the New York Times contains a note at the bottom about events that took place on this day in history. On December 29th, the third day of the Gaza bombing campaign, it read "On Dec. 29, 1940, during World War II, Germany began dropping incendiary bombs on London." For the people of London, if they had time to reflect on the irony, this must have seemed like the perversion of New Years Eve. Fireworks raining down in destruction, rather than celebration. "As I write", wrote George Orwell in an article published two months after the firebombing started, "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."



As of yesterday, at least 437 people have died in Gaza and 2,250 have been injured by highly civilised human beings since Israel's bombing campaign began. Many of them were civilians. Women. Children. 1.5 million people live on the Gaza strip, and half of them are under 14. It is the most densely populated area in the world, and all the doors are locked. How do you think the people there are feeling?



Let's not use names that do not fit the reality of events. The bombing of Gaza is a crime against humanity and a mass murder of civilians. There is nothing proportional or proper about this. There is nothing here that conforms to the laws of war. The people who ordered it are war criminals who should be tried in the International Criminal Court and spend the rest of their natural lives in jail.

On December 29th, I participated in a protest that drew several hundred people out against the bombings. We started at Parliament and then moved up the hill to the area outside the Israeli embassy. The mood was aggressive and unpleasant, dominated by Palestinian and other Arab teenagers and young men. Several people, mainly male refugees in their 40s, as far as I could tell, were waving signs saying "[Star of David] = [Swastika]". As we ascended the hill next to the royal palace, I saw young men running off into flowerbeds to pick up rocks. As we neared the embassy, I had already realised that things were going to go wrong, and I decided to make myself scarce. I detached myself from the protest, cut through the park, came out 50 meters in front of the column of people and passed just in front of the police barricade before making my way out of the protester's paths.

As the protesters reached the barricades, I saw rocks flying and fireworks arcing out and exploding under the streetlamps. I watched the protest for a little while, until I got too cold, and then skulked off home. On the evening news, I saw that the conflict had escalated and the police had used tear gas, and we saw kids in Palestinian headscarves lighting things on fire and overturning barricades and being driven away by police.

And so, another chance of creating the image of a respectable peace movement was wasted. In the minds of television viewers across the country, supporting the cause of solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people is something that angry kids with masks across their face and rocks in their hands do.

Am I angry with the kids who threw rocks? Of course I am. What they did was wrong and counterproductive. Do I understand why they feel the way they feel? Of course I do. I feel much the same way. But I'm using that feeling differently.

Protests, though not neccessarily the most effective form of political action, are acts of political speech. They are meant to cause action to be taken. They are meant to change minds, to articulate grievances and differences, to show disgust and to be humane in the face of barbarism. They are rhetorical acts. Rhetoric is language which is instrumental: it is measured by how much it gets things done.

Throwing rocks accomplishes nothing. It creates a quick fix of gratification, an outlet for rage. Then the tear gas clears and nothing has changed. We aren't in this for our own gratification. We are in this to create political solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza. We want to end the violence and the oppression. More violence does not help. We are trying to build and articulate political consensus that will force the Israeli to end the violence in Gaza, and the unlawful occupation and oppression of the Palestine people.



Said more generally, though, I think that the actions of the protesters are going against the grain of what the peace movement has to be. It has to do with how I see what we're up against. Consider for a moment what the term "crimes against humanity" mean. According to the Rome Charter, it means:

[P]articularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority. However, murder, extermination, torture, rape, political, racial, or religious persecution and other inhumane acts reach the threshold of crimes against humanity only if they are part of a widespread or systematic practice. Isolated inhumane acts of this nature may constitute grave infringements of human rights, or depending on the circumstances, war crimes, but may fall short of falling into the category of crimes under discussion [emphasis mine]

That the bombing campaign on Gaza is a war crime is so obvious one must be criminally negligent to think otherwise. That it also constitutes a crime against humanity is now something that we, as activists, must keep in constant focus. The people directing this atrocity should never set foot outside of Israel again unless it is to see the inside of the International Criminal Court.

When I began this post with the note on the incendiary bombing of London, I was drawing an obvious paralell. But the paralell does not appear to be as obvious to everyone as it should be (think, for instance, of the banners I saw in the protest. The idea that this has anything to do with Jewishness is stupid and must be beaten back at all costs. Norwegians can think, for instance, of Trond Andresen's unbelievably stupid article in this Saturday's Klassekampen). So to clarify: my point is that the Israeli government and military are, like the highly civilisaed beings of Orwell's time, comitting crimes against humanity from the air. Raining fire and brimstone on the innocent and the guilty alike. Burning children alive. Killing pregnant women. Killing people who had nothing to do with anything; who were just living their lives. Highly civilised people.

Consider again what crimes against humanity means. It isn't just blowing children up and saying that there is no crisis here. It is doing so as part of a systematic policy of atrocity. The children die because there is a plan in which their lives are not valued. A crime against humanity is using the power of the human intellect and rationality to destroy the civilisation which raised it. It is a crime which destroys our very humanity by using our humanity against ourselves. It is the perversion of thought.

The bombings are a nightmare, but it a nightmare of human invention - a crime against humanity. Crimes have perpetrators. Perpetrators can be tried and they can be punished. Don't throw rocks. All rocks that we throw hit ourselves. We will get through this by being calm but full of rage. Keep the rage alive and use it productively.

The opposite of a crime against humanity is civilisation. It is to use the same highly civilised gifts and powers and institutions that the crimes against humanity pervert in order to create peace, security and freedom.

I want people to talk about what is happening. Write about it, protest about it, demand action from your government, not just words. Demans Security Council intervention. Demand a peacekeeping force. Demans a boycott (if you think that will help - I'm unconvinced). But: Spread the information around. Sooner or later, something has to give. But for that to happen the peace movement has to be serious, it has to be massive, it has to be across the entire cross-section of humanity and most of all, it has got to be peaceful. We have to channel our rage through civilisation, not out of it, or towards it. We have to be even more highly civilised than our barbaric adversaries.

It sticks with me that the kids at the protest were throwing fireworks. I think this had to with available weapons at the time (later, they supposedly tried siphoning gas from nearby cars). Their rage was greater than the weapons available, but even with better weapons, they couldn't have won the war. It struck me, then, that this is a metaphor for what I am trying to argue here. We win when we stop trying to do the same as our opponents with weaker weapons. That's what being civilised is all about. Fireworks should be the highly civilised opposite of a barbarically civilised aerial bombardment, not an impotent attempt to replicate that bombardment on the ground. So save the fireworks people, please. We'll have plenty of use for them when we win.

SMS from Gaza

Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor and solidarity worker who is one of very few foreigners providing eyewitness accounts to Norwegian media from inside the Gaza strip, where he is volunteering at a hospital.

This one was verified to me earlier today by people in the aid community in touch with Mads Gilbert as being geniune. I've snipped the translation from Shädy Äcres:

"Thanks for your support.. They bombed the central vegetable market in Gaza city two hours ago. 80 injured, 20 killed. All came here to Shifa. Hades! We wade in death. Blood and amputees. Many children. Pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything this terrible. Now hearing tanks. Tell it, pass it on, shout it. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We're living in the history books now, all of us! Mads G, 3.1.09 13:50, Gaza, Palestine.

How dare they say there is not a humanitarian disaster happening? This is a crime against humanity. The leaders of this atrocity should be tried and convicted and thrown in jail for the rest of their lives.

Livni lyger

Klassekampen har et veldig bra intervju i sin lørdagsutgave med Mads Gilbert, en norsk lege og Palestina-aktivist som driver med nødhjelp i Gaza. Det er verdt å lese, om ikke annet så for å bryte med de barbariske uttalelsene til Tzipi Livni til Haaretz:

Livni said "there is no humanitarian crisis in the Strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce."

In her remarks to reporters, Livni said Israel had been careful to protect the civilian population and had kept the humanitarian situation in Gaza "completely as it should be".

Kontraster denne åpenbare løgnen med Gilberts situasjonsbeskrivelse:

Gilbert er sjokkert over uttalelser fra Israels utenriksminister Tzipi Livni om at det ikke er noen humanitær krise i Gaza.

- Det er tydelig at Livni ikke har sett de som vi ser. Det som foregår i Gaza, er en menneskeskapt humanitær katastrofe. Halvannen million mennesker er sperret inne på et lite område, uten fluktmuligheter. De er nesten uten inntekter, strøm, mat og medisiner, og har ingen beskyttelse. For første gang på våre reiser i området, har Erik og jeg sett folk i matkøer. Dette er det nærmeste vi kommer Warszawa-gettoen. Når Israels regjering sier at dette ikke er en humanitær krise, er deres historiske hukommelse særdeles kort.

- Israel hevder at Hamas hindrer distribusjon av humanitære hjelpesendinger?

- Dette stemmer etter det vi får vite overhodet ikke. Israel sprer nå så mange løgner om konflikten og forholdene i Gaza at det nesten ikke er til å tro. Problemet her er ikke Hamas, men den israelske okkupasjonen og en lammende blokade, som blant annet har tvunget helsevesenet i kne også før de siste, dramatiske krigshandlingene. Blant de mindre synlige konsekvensene er at behandlingstilbudet for vanlige sykdommer og skader i en utsatt befolkning på halvannen million, praktisk talt er lik null.

100 mot en

- Jens Stoltenberg gikk i sin nyttårstale langt i å sidestille Hamas’ raketter og Israels flyangrep, og dette preger mange vestlige reaksjoner. Hvordan oppfattes dette i Gaza?

- Det er fullstendig absurd å framstille dette som en symmetrisk konflikt med delt ansvar. Det er en vanlig oppfatning blant lokalpolitikere og andre i Gaza om at disse nålestikkangrepene mot Israel bør innstilles, men det er ute av alle proporsjoner å sammenlikne dette med Israels militæraksjon. Til nå er tre israelere drept, og mer enn 400 palestinere. Det går altså mer enn 100 palestinske liv på ett israelsk. Vi vet av rik erfaring at alle palestinske ledere blir behandlet som terrorister av israelerne. Dette skjedde også da tusenvis av sivile ble drept i Israels kamp mot PLO og Yassir Arafat på åttitallet.

Congo links

The war in the Congo, if counted as an ongoing war since 1998, is so far the most destructive war since WWII. To my unending embarassment I completely failed to notice it until at the end of the US elections. The number of dead in the current flare-up is uncertain, but probably very high. At least 2 million people have been internally displaced. It seems to be about resources, not the reported tribal problems, if I'm reading Johann Hari (via Audun Lysbakken) and some reports I heard on the BBC right. Congo is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, which is why things keep destabilising there. The 17.000 UN troops in the region - the biggest UN peacekeeping force in the world - can't do anything about what is happening, apparently because they are scattered and cut off.

Why the war in the Congo is not a huge thing in the news is beyond me. It has a small, but thorough Wikipedia page under the name of "Nord-Kivu fighting" or "Battle of Goma" (much smaller than the South-Ossetia/Georgia/Russia War had just two days into it). Still catching up with this one. 

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Elsewhere, George Soros on the financial crisis.

Dreaming about Africa

So last night, having slept like the dead for 45 minutes, I found myself suddenly awake, sitting up on the sofa, exclaiming "CONGO! CONGO!"

I haven't, to my knowledge, done something like that in years.

This morning, the front page of the paper reads

DANGER OF MAJOR WAR
The conflict in Eastern Congo could spread to the entire region and trigger a major African war, fears the head of the UN. Yesterday, Congolese soldiers drew closer and closer to the rebel army. Over 250.000 people have been sent running in the last few days.

And then I learn that basically Congo has been tearing itself to pieces for a while now. My all-Obama-all-the-time filter probably kept that news out of my consciousness until it surfaced in this strange way.

I'm going to Africa in 10 days, but fortunately not near Congo. I'll be in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa.

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Speaking of Africa, if you ever get the chance to see Amadou & Mariam live (as I did last night), RUN, don't walk. They're this incredibly sweet blind African couple who play incredibly groovy African blues music:

On. My. Mind.

Obviously, I'm intensely concerned about the fighting in Georgia. It's war and I categorically don't like it, but it's my next-door-neighbour involved in major combat operations that have obvious imperial motives. That's uncomfortable. An op-ed piece in today's Aftenposten (a Norwegian paper) talked about how we can better understand now the rush the Baltic states had in entering the EU and NATO. If there is one thing this war is making clear, it is that Russia is a country that is not to be trusted as an international player. If we were paying attention in Chechnya, we already knew that, but this war if anything makes it clearer.

I haven't really been paying attention to Easter Europe/Western Asia for a good long while, so I have to admit this caught me unaware. Fortunately I happened to wind up at a dinner day before yesterday where one of the guests had just stepped off the plane from Tbilisi and the other had recently travelled in Abkhazia recently. Now I'm in the process of reading up on what's happening, and here are some of the things I'm reading:

Wikipedia already has a thorough article on what they are calling the 2008 South Ossetia War. Press "refresh" frequently. Depressing aside: Wikipedia has an icon specifically for articles on ongoing warfare.

A Fistful of Euros has some really interesting coverage, with one of their contributors actually in Tbilisi. The comments on their posts seem to be drawing a lot of really unpleasant English-speaking Russian nationalists, but the debates are still good.

This post in particular cleared up the tactical situation a lot:

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital) and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

And this one is very unpleasant:

Russia has no reason to do that unless it’s gunning for regime change. Attacking Gori is right at the bleeding edge of plausible self-defense; Gori is near the border, and has been the forward base for Georgian operations in South Ossetia. But going beyond Gori, landing forces on the Georgian coast, or attacking in force out of Abkhazia, would be something else again.

There are undoubtedly plenty of people in Moscow who’d like to try. Russia’s leaders view Saakashvili as obnoxious and dangerous: for American readers, it’s sort of like how conservative Republicans feel about Fidel Castro. You know how, for fifty years now, a certain minority of Americans have entertained fantasies about landing in Havana and slamming that sonofabitch up against the wall? Like that. Except the Russians have the power to actually do it.

And here's another piece in The Guardian called "The War that Russia Wants".

In recent years, the Kremlin had escalated its interference in Georgia's territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia - bombing Georgian territory twice last year, illegally extending Russian citizenship to residents there, and appointing Russian security officers to their self-declared governments. South Ossetia's government in particular is practically under Moscow's direct control, with little if any ability to act independently.

But this flare-up is a direct consequence of Russia's deliberate and recent efforts to engage its small neighbor in military conflict. In April, Russia's President Vladimir Putin signed a decree effectively beginning to treat Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of the Russian Federation. This land grab was a particularly galling move because Russia is in charge of both the peacekeeping operations in the conflict zones, and the negotiations over their political resolution. The mediator had now clearly become a direct party to the conflict.

Also see this Fistful of Euros piece on the "retro" feel of the war. I understand what they mean. This war feels more understandable than most wars these days, in some sense.

Meanwhile, in the forgotten countries

My friend Ingeborg, a very talented reporter and photographer, is visiting Hebron and the West Bank these days. She writes stories to Norwegian newspapers, but she also blogs about it in English and Norwegian at Den dejlige tid.

photo: Ingeborg Refsnes

While the meeting in Annapolis was happening, there was street fighting and clashes in Hebron, leaving at least 24 people injured. On the same day, Israeli fighter jets killed two Hamas members and injured 10 people.

Oddly moving fact: there are only 5 surviving veterans of WWI left in Britain. They're all older than 106. Strange how that historical catastrophe keeps afflicting the present, while the actual participants are going extinct.

and now, vice president Cheney on why the invasion of Iraq was a mistake

Oh, that was in 1994? I'm sorry. My bad.