woensdag 23 december 2020
dinsdag 15 december 2020
John Pilger: Het dodelijkste virus is niet Covid. Het heet Oorlog.
The Most Lethal Virus Is Not Covid. It Is War
By John Pilger
December 15, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - Britain’s Armed Services Memorial is a silent, haunting place. Set in the rural beauty of Staffordshire, in an arboretum of some 30,000 trees and sweeping lawns, its Homeric figures celebrate determination and sacrifice.
The names of more than 16,000 British servicemen and women are listed. The literature says they “died in operational theatre or were targeted by terrorists”.
On the day I was there, a stonemason was adding new names to those who have died in some 50 operations across the world during what is known as “peacetime”. Malaya, Ireland, Kenya, Hong Kong, Libya, Iraq, Palestine and many more, including secret operations, such as Indochina.
Not a year has passed since peace was declared in 1945 that Britain has not sent military forces to fight the wars of empire.
Not a year has passed when countries, mostly poor and riven by conflict, have not bought or have been “soft loaned” British arms to further the wars, or “interests”, of empire.
Empire? What empire? The investigative journalist Phil Miller recently revealed in Declassified that Boris Johnson’s Britain maintained 145 military sites – call them bases — in 42 countries. Johnson has boasted that Britain is to be “the foremost naval power in Europe”.
In the midst of the greatest health emergency in modern times, with more than 4 million surgical procedures delayed by the National Health Service, Johnson has announced a record increase of £16.5 billion in so-called defence spending – a figure that would restore the under-resourced NHS many times over.
But these billions are not for defence. Britain has no enemies other than those within who betray the trust of its ordinary people, its nurses and doctors, its carers, elderly, homeless and youth, as successive neo-liberal governments have done, Conservative and Labour.
Exploring the serenity of the National War Memorial, I soon realised there was not a single monument, or plinth, or plaque, or rosebush honouring the memory of Britain’s victims — the civilians in the “peacetime” operations commemorated here.
There is no remembrance of the Libyans killed when their country was wilfully destroyed by Prime Minister David Cameron and his collaborators in Paris and Washington.
There is no word of regret for the Serbian women and children killed by British bombs, dropped from a safe height on schools, factories, bridges, towns, on the orders of Tony Blair; or for the impoverished Yemeni children extinguished by Saudi pilots with their logistics and targets supplied by Britons in the air-conditioned safety of Riyadh; or for the Syrians starved by “sanctions”.
There is no monument to the Palestinian children murdered with the British elite’s enduring connivance, such as the recent campaign that destroyed a modest reform movement within the Labour Party with specious accusations of anti-Semitism.
Two weeks ago, Israel’s military chief of staff and Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff signed an agreement to “formalise and enhance” military co-operation. This was not news. More British arms and logistical support will now flow to the lawless regime in Tel Aviv, whose snipers target children and psychopaths interrogate children in extreme isolation. (See the recent shocking report by Defense for Children, Isolated and Alone).
Perhaps the most striking omission at the Staffordshire war memorial is an acknowledgement of the million Iraqis whose lives and country were destroyed by the illegal invasion of Blair and Bush in 2003.
ORB, a member of the British Polling Council, put the figure at 1.2 million. In 2013, the ComRes organisation asked a cross-section of the British public how many Iraqis had died in the invasion. A majority said fewer than 10,000.
How is such a lethal silence sustained in a sophisticated society? My answer is that propaganda is far more effective in societies that regard themselves as free than in dictatorships and autocracies. I include censorship by omission.
Our propaganda industries – both political and cultural, including most of the media – are the most powerful, ubiquitous and refined on earth. Big lies can be repeated incessantly in comforting, credible BBC voices. Omissions are no problem.
A similar question relates to nuclear war, whose threat is “of no interest”, to quote Harold Pinter. Russia, a nuclear power, is encircled by the war-making group known as Nato, with British troops regularly “maneuvering” right up to the border where Hitler invaded.
The defamation of all things Russian, not least the historical truth that the Red Army largely won the Second World War, is percolated into public consciousness. The Russians are of “no interest”, except as demons.
China, also a nuclear power, is the brunt of unrelenting provocation, with American strategic bombers and drones constantly probing its territorial space and – hooray – HMS Queen Elizabeth, Britain’s £3billion aircraft carrier, soon to sail 6,500 miles to enforce “freedom of navigation” within sight of the Chinese mainland.
Some 400 American bases encircle China, “rather like a noose”, a former Pentagon planner said to me. They extend all the way from Australia, though the Pacific to southern and northern Asia and across Eurasia.
In South Korea, a missile system known as Terminal High Altitude Air Defense, or THAAD, is aimed point-blank at China across the narrow East China Sea. Imagine Chinese missiles in Mexico or Canada or off the coast of California.
A few years after the invasion of Iraq, I made a film called The War You Don’t See, in which I asked leading American and British journalists as well as TV news executives – people I knew as colleagues — why and how Bush and Blair were allowed to get away with the great crime in Iraq, considering that the lies were not very clever.
Their response surprised me. Had “we”, they said – that is journalists and broadcasters, especially in the US — challenged the claims of the White House and Downing Street, investigated and exposed the lies, instead of amplifying and echoing them, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 probably would not have happened. Countless people would be alive today. Four million refugees would not have fled. The grisly ISIS, a product of the Blair/Bush invasion, might not have been conceived.
David Rose, then with the London Observer, which supported the invasion, described “the pack of lies fed to me by a fairly sophisticated disinformation campaign”. Rageh Omah, then the BBC’s man in Iraq, told me, “We failed to press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough”. Dan Rather, the CBS anchorman, agreed, as did many others.
I admired these journalists who broke the silence. But they are honourable exceptions. Today, the war drums have new and highly enthusiastic beaters in Britain, America and the “West”.
Take your pick among the legion of Russia and China bashers and promoters of fiction such as Russiagate. My personal Oscar goes to Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, whose unrelenting rousing drivel about the “existential threat” (of China/Russia, mostly China) was illustrated by a smiling Scott Morrison, the PR man who is Australia’s prime minister, dressed like Churchill, V for Victory sign and all. “Not since the 1930s ….” the pair of them intoned. Ad nauseum.
Covid has provided cover for this pandemic of propaganda. In July, Morrison took his cue from Trump and announced that Australia, which has no enemies, would spend A$270 billion on provoking one, including missiles that could reach China.
That China’s purchase of Australia’s minerals and agriculture effectively underwrote the Australian economy was “of no interest” to the government in Canberra.
The Australian media cheered almost as one, delivering a shower of abuse at China. Thousands of Chinese students, who had guaranteed the gross salaries of Australian vice-chancellors, were advised by their government to go elsewhere. Chinese-Australians were bad-mouthed and deliverymen were assaulted. Colonial racism is never hard to revive.
Some years ago, I interviewed the former head of the CIA in Latin America, Duane Claridge. In a few refreshingly honest words, he summed up “Western” foreign policy as it is ordained and directed by Washington.
The super-power, he said, could do what it wanted where it wanted whenever its “strategic interests” dictated. His words were: “Get used to it, world.”
I have reported a number of wars. I have seen the remains of children and women and the elderly bombed and burned to death: their villages laid to waste, their petrified trees festooned with human parts. And much else.
Perhaps that is why I reserve a specific contempt for those who promote the crime of rapacious war, who beckon it with bad faith and profanities, having never experienced it themselves. Their monopoly must be broken.
This is a version of an address John Pilger gave to a Stop the War fund-raiser, Artists Speak Out, in London. http://johnpilger.com/
dinsdag 1 december 2020
De ITUC/IVV: Erkenning en verantwoordingsplicht van bedrijven zijn de sleutel tot de rechten van Palestijnse arbeiders
ITUC: Recognition and corporate accountability key to Palestinian workers’ rights
Recognition of the state of Palestine and corporate accountability under international law are key to Palestinian workers’ rights
The 29 November is the international day of solidarity with Palestinian people and the ITUC calls on the international community to redouble efforts to achieve a two state solution, based on United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the pre-1967 borders – with East Jerusalem as capital of a Palestinian state.
28 November 2020, International Trade Union Confederation
“The illegal settlements and their infrastructure comprise over 60% of the occupied West Bank and take resources that should benefit the people who are under occupation, who are entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law,” said Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary.
“The ITUC calls on companies and investors to end their complicity in, and with, the illegal settlements.”
Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary
“In line with international law and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the ITUC calls on companies and investors to end their complicity in, and with, the illegal settlements.
“The extraction of profits by Israeli and multinational corporations is reliant upon impeding Palestinian economic development, annexation of land and the plunder of Palestinian natural resources. For this we call on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to continue to ensure that the UN database of companies and businesses operating in the illegal settlements is updated and that it has a guarantee of adequate resources to ensure its sustainability,” concluded Sharan Burrow.
The ITUC welcomes the recently announced measures by the Israeli government that will significantly improve the current exploitative permit system for Palestinians seeking work in Israel. The new measures are aimed at overcoming the quota system and establishing direct employment relations between workers and employers, fighting the illicit and lucrative web of labour brokers.
Until now, Palestinians who seek a decent living by working in Israel are discriminated against and face an oppressive permit system that ties them to a particular Israeli employer, in conditions of severe exploitation.
“These reforms are a step forward. It is unacceptable that around 45% of Palestinians working in Israel have had to buy a permit from a broker and lose around 14% of their wages in illegal recruitment fees. These fraudulent brokers make up to US$256 per permit. In total that’s US$119m in illegal profits for labour brokers in 2018 alone. If the new reforms are going to work enforcement will be key,” commented Sharan Burrow.
The ITUC welcomes the reforms as a step towards implementing the International Labour Organization (ILO) general principles and operational guidelines for fair recruitment.
“Millions of dollars are accumulated by the state through deductions from Palestinian wage earners in Israel. It is unacceptable that Israel refrains from transferring these funds as a punitive measure against the Palestinian Authority. In addition, the convoluted application process further prohibits workers from accessing their social benefits,” said Sharan Burrow.
The recognition of the state Palestine and corporate accountability under international law would put an end to these abusive practices and exploitation. The international community has the responsibility to urge governments and companies to respect international law.
~~~~
The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) represents
200 million members of 332 affiliates in 163 countries and territories.
For more information, please contact the ITUC Press Department on +32 2 224 02 53 or by e-mail: press@ituc-csi.org
Palestijnse arbeiders: gevangen tussen militaire bezetting en werkloosheid
Palestinian workers: Caught between military occupation and unemployment
Caught between military occupation and unemployment, Palestinians continue to work in the Israeli economy without full labour rights
27 November 2020, by Qassam Muaddi, Equal Times
It is four in the morning and heavy rain washes the deserted alleys of the village of Al Midiah, west of Ramallah. A white minibus makes its way through in the darkness between the stone houses, towards the olive groves, at the western end of the village. The vehicle stops with a sudden jerk of the brake and 10 young people get out. They rush over the wet ground of a dirt road, between the prickly pears. The oldest, Mohammad, is 33 years old, with a backpack, a hood over his head, and a packet of tobacco in his hand. These young Palestinians will attempt to cross the Green Line, separating the occupied West Bank and Israel, illegally. Israel’s concrete separation wall comes to an end before Al Midiah. Here, the Green Line is marked by barbed wire that crosses the valley and in which workers regularly make holes to cross – at the risk of finding the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) patrolling the other side.
Zie verder ausPalestine
En van de ITUC/IVV Equaltimes
De TUC is solidair met de Palestijnen, 29 november 2020
The TUC stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people
Supporting Palestinian rights is a priority for the TUC.
Author
Published date
29 Nov 2020
The ITUC rates Palestine as one of the worst countries in the world for workers, with no guarantee of rights due to a breakdown in the rule of law.
Our work and policies in support of Palestinian rights and decent work are set out in an evidence-based report, ‘Justice for Palestine’ published today.
The TUC calls on the UK government to:
- publicly support ending the illegal military occupation of Palestine;
- take firm action to ensure annexation does not go ahead;
- speak out in support of protecting all Palestinian human rights, including the right to collective self-determination and the right of refugees to return;
- recognise the State of Palestine and support genuine efforts towards a comprehensive, just and lasting peace based on a two-state solution, with Palestinians and Israelis participating as equals in talks.
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land has lasted for over 50 years, in violation of international law.
The human rights situation “deteriorates day-by-day”, according to the UN’s Special Rapporteur. Human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) include labour exploitation, home demolitions, forcible population transfer, excessive use of force and torture, and restrictions on freedom of movement.
In the first six months of 2020, 21 Palestinians were killed by Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) with at least half being shot.
The nation-state law, passed by Israel’s Knesset in 2018 enshrines discrimination, and the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has called on Israel to repeal the law or bring it into line with the relevant Covenant.
Israel has been allowed to act with impunity for decades, and it now threatening to annex more Palestinian land.
Despite claims by outgoing President Trump and others that annexation is off the table as part of Israel’s agreement with the United Arab Emirates, Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated that “There is no change in my plan to apply sovereignty, our sovereignty, in Judea and Samaria, in full coordination with the US. I’m committed to it, this hasn’t changed… This issue remains on the table”.
But arguably, annexation is happening on the ground anyway with, for example, Israel’s construction of the 700km-plus wall mainly built on Palestinian land.
We’ve written to the UK government stating our concerns about the annexation threat and called on it to publicly state that annexation would be met with serious consequences.
The occupation has suffocated the Palestinian economy.
According to the ILO, the occupation, settlements and restrictions such as checkpoints, roadblocks, the wall, metal gates, being unable to access natural resources and infrastructure “severely affect Palestinians’… right to non-discrimination, with regard to pursuing an adequate standard of living and decent work”.
The economy in Gaza, blockaded by air, sea and land for over a decade is near collapse. Poverty rates in Gaza are over 50 per cent.
Young Palestinian women face particularly bleak employment prospects, with 66 per cent out of the labour force in quarter two (April-June) of 2020.
Despite business having an obligation to respect human rights under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, many are complicit and profit from the occupation and violations of Palestinian human rights – with some of these listed in the UN’s database.
This complicity must end.
Faced with little alternative, around 130,000 Palestinians work in the illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, and in Israel, in exploitative conditions characterised by discrimination, low pay, insecurity, poor health and safety and few rights at work (see report for more details).
It’s good to hear that the Israeli government will finally make improvements to the exploitative permit system for construction workers in Israel, so that they will receive permits directly, rather than through their employer.
This looks like a step forward and should establish a direct relationship between workers and employers, rather than via profiteering labour brokers - but enforcement will be vital.
We're still waiting for more information about this policy change, but we'd want to see all workers treated fairly and have their rights respected.
The Covid-19 pandemic has added further hardship and uncertainty for Palestinian workers and their families.
Despite a tripartite agreement being signed with the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), 52 per cent of workers did not receive their salary/wages during the lockdown period. The PGFTU has been supporting incomes and providing food aid.
Meanwhile, the illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian territory continue to expand – a move recently jointly condemned by the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain as being in violation of international law and imperilling the viability of a two-state solution. Around 600,000 Israeli settlers now live in the occupied West Bank, with about one-third in East Jerusalem, in approximately 250 settlements.
The extensive appropriation of land and the appropriation and destruction of property required to build and expand settlements breaches international humanitarian law.
This injustice cannot continue.
In solidarity with Palestinian people, the TUC supports a ban on trade with the illegal settlements, an end to arms trading with Israel, and suspension of the UK-Israel Trade and Partnership Agreement until Palestinian rights are respected.
We encourage affiliates, employers and pension funds to disinvest from, and boycott the goods of, companies who profit from illegal settlements, the occupation and the construction of the wall.
We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
For more information about the TUC’s policies and work on Palestine see:
Our report
--2020 ITUC Global Rights Index / MENA, speciaal 'Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Libya'
Citaat uit het voorwoord, pagina 4
.... The Middle East and North Africa is the worst region in the world for working people for seven years running with the ongoing insecurity and conflict in Palestine, Syria, Yemen and Libya, coupled with the most regressive region for workers’ representation and union rights. ....
Zie het rapport op ITUC
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