Successful revolutions are the everlasting bane of the colonizer. Control the narrative and image becomes reality. This kind of reality: Freedom is Slavery.
Did you know that Colonialism ethnically cleansed the First Peoples of Cuba? Land was found sticking up from the sea circa 1492. Did the Spanish make plans for a thanksgiving dinner or did they brutally subjugate and enslave the locals? Empires prefer the latter. They may miss pockets of resistance during clean up operations but it’s not from want of trying. Native Peoples either become victims of genocide or they are gathered and placed in camps like Gaza, more geographically appropriate: Guantanamo.
Caption for the cartoon and the bulleted text below are at Boundless.com:
The end of the 1800s was known as the ‘Age of Imperialism,’ a time when the United States and other major world powers rapidly expanded their territorial possessions.
American Imperialism is partly based on American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is different from other countries because of its specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy.
One of the most notable instances of American Imperialism was the Annexation of Hawaii in 1898, in which the United States gained the control and possession of all ports, buildings, harbors, military equipment, and public property that had belonged to the Government of the Hawaiian Islands.
1959: heads rolled at “Concerned Citizens for Answering the Question Who Lost Cuba” when Fidel and Che pushed back against occupation. Empires do not like being embarrassed by nightmarish headlines: “Inhabitants of a 1,000 mile-long island expel American Empire.”
A large faction in the British Mandate for Palestine expelled 700,000 Palestinians in 1948, all but pockets of resistance remained. Possession is 9 points of the law, so the remaining Palestinians obtained citizenship by default. But of those 3/4 of a million refugees? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has a reply: they retain the right to return. Syrian refugees retain that right.
When the British Empire imploded, their imperial “Mandate for Palestine” disappeared.
Dr. Laurence G. Wolf, no small voice for humanity, was my mentor from 1965 to 1969 at the University of Cincinnati: formative years. I last talked to him in a service of two local Unitarian churches a summer or two ago. Wolf introduced me to the geography of the Middle East.
Lisa Chieco brought up Thailand the other day. It’s the only South-East Asian country not colonized by the British or the French. The British left their tongue in India. Indian literature suffers profoundly from imposition of English over many generations.
Foreign policy wisdom does not spring from imperial ambition. Lisa and I were among many of you who may have read this far. We earned a collective memory of the day before the disaster of 2003. A catastrophe (Nakba) for Iraq.
The four divided sectors of Kurdistan are occupied by four authorities. The Kurds’ ancient home is inhabited by Kurds.
Saddam did not gas his own people, he gassed the Kurds. Lines were not drawn in the sand, they were drawn with a straight-edge, but not at random. They used the strategy divide and conquer, i.e. let the Sunnis and Shias fight each other and we save bullets and we save time. Kurdistan is already inhabited by the Kurds but modern-day boundaries place them among foreign peoples in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
Sounding out for solid solidarity in Cincinnati for Palestine. I have included a new category on billziegler1947: cincy4palestine. You can reference existing content on Palestinian independence and human rights by clicking it. CPSC recognizes the need to act locally as we join in solidarity with a purpose.
CPSC is obtaining visibility in greater Cincinnati and the greater world. It began last year with a teach in at the Cincinnati and Hamilton County Public Library, a second at the University of Cincinnati, a third at the Clifton Mosque, a fourth at Mt. Auburn Presbyterian Church and we are working on a fifth teach-in.
We are raising our visibility and are joining other like-minded souls in supporting BDS.
At the same time we have sponsored film screenings at several locations to shine truth on a deferred dream and a half century of occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, funded by the monetary and military power of the United States.
We believe that many small voices speaking truth will bring down the Apartheid Wall and end the occupation.
The Oslo Accords of 1993 are dead. 500,000 stakes were driven through its heart by a half-million settlers. These settlers, many of them truculent and militant, live in modern super gateway communities subsidized by the United States. It’s a divide and conquer strategy.
The United States government transfers $10,000,000 per day to Israel ($0 per day for Palestine) as well as the highest tech military support systems. These preserve a lucrative status quo for Israel and for those corporations making a killing from it.
Meanwhile Palestinians’ birthright is reported throughout US media as “stones, knives and poorly guided mortar fire.” Informed readers have to go offshore for the headlines that are ignored in our corporate or corporate-sponsored media.
The Apartheid Wall looms above a complex of modern fenced highways leading to each former Palestinian village and renamed in Hebrew from the original Arabic. Fences and security stations are everywhere. The reason: humiliation and eventual ethnic cleansing for a “greater” Israel.
Download the App buycott on your iPhone or on whatever app supports it to scan bar codes while shopping
BDS Movement Full List: here is an up-to-date and handy reference to the players: who they are, where they are and why they matter. Their game is gaining your participation through witting or unwitting complicity.
BDS Marin: here is one of the many local groups thinking global. The list above does not include Nestle among boycotted products but this Marin County movement does include them. So it’s good to cross compare.
BDS Movement on Twitter: here is another social media avenue for learning, teaching or contributing. I’ve just received an article that delves into the HP security matrix. Life is an ongoing dystopia for Palestinians. HP has really earned it’s place on the BDS list. I’m looking into their other products but do not want to make it overly complex, or less focussed, at this moment.
Please feel free to contact me (ziegler.bill@gmail.com) or leave a comment on this post. Truth and accuracy are important, let me know if something isn’t correct. Participation is vital.
Yesterday I attended a screening of Ghost Town – The Story of Hebron. A well attended event successfully delivered by the Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition. A fellow supporter of the Palestinian cause noted that I had a bottle of Tradewinds Tea in front of me. Nestle, a Swiss company of notable size, owns Tradewinds: they have plants in the West Bank.
We are presently working on a locally based BDS Movement for the Cincinnati area. Look for us at local businesses that unknowingly contribute to the massive human rights violations in territories occupied by Israel since 1967: the Naksa.
I was a sophomore at the University of Cincinnati at the time of the Six Day War, working on my B.A. in Geography: it was a subject topic in Human Geography that became the stuff of current events in the classroom. In 1971 I completed my M.A. in the same field at Kansas State University. I was born 8 months before the Nakba, so my personal hallmarks coincide in memory with the hallmarks of Palestine these 68 years now. A difference: I have never been a refugee but 6 million Palestinians from Palestine still are. BDS helps everyone.
No time is a good time to support an Apartheid state. I am personally complicit in supporting Apartheid by continuing my American citizenship. Rather than renouncing my home land I am at this moment exercising First Amendment rights, rights that are not available in the State of Israel. Lucas Koerner learned firsthand what may occur if you stand on a public square in Jerusalem. No one should feel discomfort at taking a stand, whether by #StandWithIsrael or #StandWithPalestine.
The First Amendment is one resilient set of words. I like its resonance. It’s available to the most marginalized people. Majority rule makes the world safe for the already comfortable. The Tyranny of the majority (dated 23 February) seeks to restrict basic human rights that already belong to the marginalized, on those less powerful. Just keep repeating this lie: “Majority Rules” from the playground to adulthood and you’ll think it’s truth.
Meanwhile, in this age of one dollar one vote you can still use the dollars at your discretion to cast a BDS vote.See you in the marketplace.
Our fellow Americans and Earth citizens could benefit from historical perspective. The mantle of American Exceptionalism, a garb that resembles an emperor’s new clothes, becomes more transparent with each passing year.
Americans carry a lot of shame for things we’ve done to this planet that no other government in the world can match, such as the atomic bomb and agent orange (all of this inflicted on civilian populations, explaining it as “collateral damage”).
Another 9/11, this time 1973, the assignation of duly elected president of Chile. Here a boy carries on a tradition that unites the people of Chile who were another victim: wearing Allende glasses
We have murdered peoples, starved them and spread deadly smallpox virus via “gift blankets”, a virus previously unknown in the Americas. These gift blankets exposed native populations to a disease that spread like wildfire. Did you learn this in history class?
From trains passing westward millions of bison were murdered. Stacked, the bison heads rested thousands high with a deliberate goal: starve the natives and their nations. Our collective memory ascribes the slaughter to sportsmen shooting from the comfort and safety of train cars. There is a little more to that story. Those “sportsmen” disembarked from the locomotives to murder as many bison as humanly possible and thereby remove the buffalo as sustenance to Native America. We learn soundbites. “The Indians used every single part of each buffalo.”
From Smithsonian.org. This is not photo-shopped. Would that it were.
But connecting the dots leading to genocide is never taught. George Washington as a youth chopped down a cherry tree and owned up to it. Andrew Jackson is the president we have on the twenty-dollar bill. His nickname was “Stonewall.” We store soundbites in our memory and we pass them down to our grandchildren. No mail delivery on Presidents Day, banks close but schools are in session and there are sales at Target. Congress passed a law making Presidents Day a Monday holiday…
We murdered millions of First People to get what we wanted, promises broken as greed expanded.
We witness the same dynamic in the Israel/Palestine Conflict. The misinformed think in black and white terms: Philistina does not exist. I use the name Philistine because that is what they call themselves. Bill speaks to the distinction between Philistine and Palestine here.
It looks like a series of squiggly lines but evokes a familiar biblical tribe: the Philistines.
British and the United States bound by “a special relationship” snap the Israel into existence in 1948, a catastrophe for the people already living there. The world was still reeling over the disclosure of concentration camps built by a country with a genocidal dream: Third Reich Germany. We forced villagers living near the camps to march through and to bury the dead found in those camps. Israelis and Americans know little or less about the daily human rights abuses in Israel and the occupied territories. It doesn’t help that the New York Times is corporate and NPR is sponsored by corporations. An independent press is our lifeblood.
There is an American camp established to house “enemies of the state” without legal recourse, or representation: Guantanamo, an American naval base from the days when Cuba was ours to manipulate.
The locus of two eras of imperial ambition on the island of Cuba
We invaded, without provocation, the independent country of Iraq in 2003. My husband and I participated in one of many rallies in the days preceding that war, also a catastrophe. We were already in Afghanistan under the guise of chasing the terrorist responsible for the horror of 9/11 in New York City. We lost 3000 that day: it was genuine horror. We responded by murdering innocent civilian “collaterals.” Those fighting back are fighting for their autonomy and the right to own their nation without the foreign interests who run their government. The British set borders in their Middle Eastern colonies to contain rival religious sects that could fight one another and leave the governance to the halls of empire. Divide and conquer.
And we are that remaining world power that installed the puppet Saddam Hussein! But perhaps just say “mistakes were made,” accidents happen. But to the victors go the spoils.
So our uninitiated young people and our more simple and hardline conservatives, tricked and lied to with a propaganda team that manipulates a language of fear alloyed with ignorance, have been at this war for 16 years! In keeping with this embarrassing situation – we also are a, so far, sole superpower gone wild in Israel. We want to make up for what started as humiliation and provocation by the Third Reich and murder of millions of Jews in Europe.
And now the shoe is on the other foot. Out of a vindictiveness, and resources available to the Earth’s fourth largest military, centuries old olive groves are bulldozed to break the spirit and humanity of the Palestinian people. Using humiliation as a daily means of control, cornering them in the same kind of ghetto that the Jews endured in Poland. Install a man with the skills of Joseph Goebbels to orchestrate. Without a military and with weapons on a par with those of the former Ottoman Empire, they revolted using these meager “weapons” and couldn’t gain their freedom.
With fell precision, Israel used a false-flag campaign to tell all Arabs living in ancestral homes that an attack by other Arab nations was imminent and they would be better off leaving their homes until the danger was over. 1948: 700,000 Palestinians lived out a modern incarnation of the “Trail of Tears.” So, building upon a lie Israel moved in and took this land from people who were sharing THEIR land with the new state of Israel. In a word, the Palestinians (Philistines) had their land stolen, with catastrophic (Nakba) results. Israel has a 10 per cent population of Palestinians who did not leave in 1948. Their access to the polls limited similar to Jim Crow. On the very day of his reelection Netanyahu famously warned of those “swarming” voters. It’s as repulsive as our Jim Crow laws in the South. Peaceful demonstrations were the beginning in our nation – because the removal of legal slave ownership should have made black people safe and equal – but let’s not be foolish – it did no such thing until black people got sick and tired of it and revolted – and I would do the same.
There are no shortage of parallels between oppression of blacks in the Jim Crow South and Israel’s present-day oppression of Palestinians. Issam Rimawi APA images
The Black Panthers were born into a dream denied, to paraphrase Langston Hughes. They demanded equality and freedom, and were also murdered, but the message made it to the fore and legal recourse resulted in affirmative action and enforcement of the 14th Amendment. Now, we have nazi storm troopers of a police armed with military gifted them by the Defense Department who just shoot black people like they’re in target practice! I’m sickened and ashamed – and we are the nation supporting the same shameful behavior of the current governmental leaders in Israel.
I lean on God, knowing in my heart it is the Enemy we need to fight: the evil that flourishes on greed and hate.
billziegler1947 