Short video: Gaza forgotten
Produced by IF AMERICANS KNEW
Mission Statement of “If Americans Knew”
In a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for a nation’s actions rests with its citizens. The top rung of government – the entity with the ultimate power of governance – is the asserted will of the people. Therefore, in any democracy, it is essential that its citizens be fully and accurately informed.
In the United States, currently the most powerful nation on earth, it is even more essential that its citizens receive complete and undistorted information on topics of importance, so that they may wield their extraordinary power with wisdom and intelligence.
Unfortunately, such information is not always forthcoming.
The mission of If Americans Knew is to inform and educate the American public on issues of major significance that are unreported, underreported, or misreported in the American media.
It is our belief that when Americans know the facts on a subject, they will, in the final analysis, act in accordance with morality, justice, and the best interests of their nation, and of the world. With insufficient information, or distorted information, they may do the precise opposite.
It is the mission of If Americans Knew to ensure that this does not happen – that the information on which Americans base their actions is complete, accurate, and undistorted by conscious or unconscious bias, by lies of either commission or omission, or by pressures exerted by powerful special interest groups. It is our goal to supply the information essential to those responsible for the actions of the strongest nation on earth – the American people.
Action Focus #1
Israel is the largest recipient of US. aid in the entire world. It receives more aid than that given to all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, put together.
Israel receives over $10 million dollars per day from the United States, and there is evidence that the total figure is closer to $15 million a day. Yet this information is almost never printed in American newspapers. Coverage of the Middle East in general, and of Israel in particular, virtually never reports this enormous American connection with this region.
Empowered by American money, Israel is occupying land that does not belong to it, is breaking numerous international laws and conventions of which it is a signatory, and is promulgating policies of brutality that have been condemned by the United Nations, the European Union, the National Council of Churches, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and numerous other international bodies. This truth is also rarely reported.
Through the money and weaponry provided by the United States, Israel is imposing an ethnically discriminatory nation on land that was previously multicultural. There is ethnic and religious discrimination inherent in its national identity, and a doctrine of the supremacy of one group over all others permeates its political, financial, and military policies. This also is virtually never reported.
There are a variety of organizations and individuals in Israel who are protesting their government’s policies, and who are working strenuously and courageously on behalf of human rights and justice. It is their intent to create a just and fair nation with equal rights for all its citizens. They are refusing to serve in the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and are actively trying to prevent Palestinian homes from being bulldozed. These actions are also not covered in the American media.
American support of the Israeli government is against our national interest on every level: It places us at war with populations whose desperate plight we are helping to create, and who, quite correctly, place the responsibility for their sufferings on us. It makes us an accomplice to war crimes and an accessory to oppression. This also is not reported.
In analyzing the American media, we are increasingly discovering a cover-up of appalling proportions. Israel is being protected, the news about Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general is being distorted, and the American public is being manipulated.
We believe strongly that if Americans knew the truth about Israel and Palestine — about the massive amount of our tax money that is being given away to Israel, and about the human costs of Israel’s American-financed militarism — they would demand an immediate re-thinking of our policies in this region.
It is the goal of If Americans Knew to inform the American public accurately about this area. Most of all, it is to inform Americans about our enormous, and too often invisible, personal connection to it.
Americans, through our blank check to Israel, are empowering the worst elements of Israeli society, and undermining those working for a just, peaceful, and nondiscriminatory nation.
We are driving the violence in this region.
We can stop it.
Josiah:
I’m currently reading “The Question of Palestine” by Edward Said. Although I read and admired “Orientalism” and “Culture and Imperialism” years ago, this was the first time I had read Said on Palestine. The book is passionate (Said was himself a Palestinian who was exiled with his family from Jerusalem in 1948), but also surprisingly balanced in its appraisal of Zionism. Rather than emphasizing its exceptional aspects, he places Zionism (and its spokemen, like Herzl, Weizmann, Weitz and others) in the context of European culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in which ideas glorifying colonization and white (Jewish in this case) supremacy were voiced publicly, without shame. Zionism is only unique in that it established an apartheid state that survived the era of decolonization essentially intact in its ideas about and policies toward “natives.” Although Said’s book was published in 1979, the Israeli policies he describes in Israel and the (then-very-recently) Occupied Territories are remarkably similar
27 August 2006, 1:51 pmto those depicted in this video. I get a kind of historical reverse deja vu reading it, as Israeli policies exhibit such monotonous consistency, despite recurrent U.S. media talk of Israeli “moderation”.
With the failure of “Judaization” policy in the West Bank and Gaza (repeating what was done in former Palestine after 1948, with the “thickening” and subsequent contiguization of Zionist settlements), the long-term goal seems to be a negation of the possibility of statehood. Like the PLO, Hamas has been discredited in Western opinion by Israeli pressure. The weaker Palestinian civil society will be, the logic seems to go, the less likely they will be to achieve independence; and the militias that fill that vacuum will themselves be continuous IDF targets. But there can be no forced exodus of another 700,000 or so Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza, and the population will not simply starve or be bombed into smithereens. The current dynamic can only reproduce itself within certain limits, and Israel seems to be approaching them with increasing belligerence, like South Africa in the 1980s. (Pursuing that thread, compare IDF cross-border raids into Lebanon with SADF operations against refugee camps and infrastructure in Namibia, Angola and Mozambique. There’s even a superpower proxy war element with Iran instead of Cuba, etc.).
Yolanda Carrington:
Read this again:
“In the United States, currently the most powerful nation on earth, it is even more essential that its citizens receive complete and undistorted information on topics of importance, so that they may wield their extraordinary power with wisdom and intelligence.”
What extraordinary power? I could cut-and-paste the other absurd assumptions about American government from this statement, but my post would be a mile long if I did.
The government does not operate “by the asserted will of the people.” They didn’t fucking consult the people when they created this system.
What makes these folks think that they can overcome four centuries of genocide, white supremacy, privatized/patriarchal control of wealth and the means of production, bourgeois-patriarchal nationalism, imperialist ideology—and over one full century of the grossest corporate-capitalism ever seen in the short history of capitalism—to win the hearts and minds of the “American public?” And just who in the hell do they think the “American public” is?
Folks who can’t even see the humanity of the Africans, Asians, Arabs, Latin@s, and indigenous people in their fucking backyard are gonna suddenly care about colored people thousands of miles away in a nation that they’ve been brainwashed into believing is barbaric?
Stan, folks…I ain’t doomsaying here. But facts is facts, and the fact is that Americans (read: white folks—rich, poor, and in-between) do not see people of color as human beings, because Americans operate from the mindset, the standpoint, of white supremacy. This is why they will not lift a finger to stop US government support to Israel even “if they only knew.”
Let’s look at history. Genocidal Indian wars and slavery raged in white folks’ midst, and they didn’t do shit. Jim Crow came to power, thousands of African Americans were lynched, and they didn’t do shit. Over 100,000 Japanese Americans were sent to goddamn concentration camps during the Second World War, and they didn’t do shit. Between 1898 and 2003, the US government would attack the Philippines, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Nicaraugua, Panama, Iraq, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and a bunch of other places I can’t name now, and what did Americans (not fucking activists, but REAL beefeating Americans) do about it? Nothing. And for most of these crimes, Americans knew they were happening at the time they were happening.
I am angry at white people in the US for their racism. But am I angry at them for not acting to stop the US government’s crimes? No. Absolutely not. Because white folks in America do exactly what they know how to do, what they have been taught to do—which is to be racist and callous as hell toward people of color. I wouldn’t expect anything less. To be angry at people who perform exactly as they’ve been taught and who have no control over an oppressive ruling class (the true identity of “our government”) is to fall into liberalism. I ain’t a liberal. And I will not entertain liberal ideas that place responsibility for the crimes of the dominant class at the feet of the individual. That’s not justice.
And until we face the crimes against the First Nations and against the world squarely in the eye, nothing will ever be moral on this soil.
28 August 2006, 5:18 amStan:
Mostly I put this here for the video, not only because the video has powerful images on an important and under-reported topic, but to show — again — the potential of this medium.
The IAK “Mission Statement” is followed on their web site with an appeal for “tax deductable donations.” Ya know what that menas… 501(c)(3). If you get too radical sounding in a mission statement, you can “alienate” foundation funders…
As our mutual friend Ajamu has said more than once, ain’t gonna be no “non-profit socialism.”
28 August 2006, 7:57 amneilcaff:
In regards to the internet: I think the potential for the internet in political education terms is enormous. In organisational matters though I think political activists should be wary of being over reliant on the internet as a means of communication and organisation. Not to sound overly paranoid but governments and corporations, our class enemies, do have a lot more control over it than we realise.
29 August 2006, 5:54 amTo give an example. In a college the organisation I’m part of has a presence in our members were gearing up for a fight against proposed cuts in funds and job losses. Just as the campaign was getting off the ground the email addresses in the college of our members which included the student union president all went out of action for a week. Although we were able to get around this in a day or two we still lost crucial time because we were out of contact with other activists in the college. To be honest I don’t think there was any malign reason for what happened, technical difficulties do occur. It did underline the fact that there are weaknesses to the ‘net and the fact that a political organisation opposed to the status quo needs alternative tools of communication especially in times of heightened struggle this includes things like a newspaper but of course nothing replaces personal contact activists have with people in the broader movement and the community.
frank:
Ooooh- check out Rummy on this one: I think I can see smoke coming out of his ears.
29 August 2006, 6:06 pmhttp://www.sltrib.com/ci_4255447