David's blog

A Statement by the Solidarity Political Committee

On September 23, 2011 the Palestinian Authority and Palestine Liberation Organization intend to take an appeal for statehood recognition to the United Nations Security Council. When that is rejected – as it will be, since the Obama Administration has promised to veto it – the PA is expected to turn to the General Assembly, where there’s no great-power veto, for “non-member observer state” status which will give it access to UN institutions, including the ability to bring charges against Israeli occupation practices.

On one level, this may look like a purely symbolic gesture by the feeble PA/PLO leadership of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). No one believes it will change the situation on the ground – the blockade of Gaza, the cancer of Israeli colonial settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid-annexation Wall, the imprisonment of thousands of Palestinian activists and hundreds of children, and for that matter the police-state behavior of the PA’s own security forces.

IT SHOULD COME as no real surprise that president Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East said so little. Nor is it unexpected that the major media played it as if it were a major event. There are two sets of observations to be made on the president’s remarks, first on the Arab Uprising as a whole and second on the Israel-Palestine crisis.

Back in June 2009, president Obama’s address in Cairo to the Muslim world stimulated genuine public excitement from North Africa to South Asia. Two years later, there’s little indication that most ordinary Arabs or Muslims – aside from diplomatic, policy or business elites with a professional or direct economic interest – are paying very much attention.

People in Tunisia and Egypt know that their pro-American dictators enjoyed U.S. backing until days before popular uprisings forced the military to push them out. In Bahrain, Yemen and Syria, no one really expects the U.S. president’s proclamation that “(t)here must be no doubt that the United States welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity” will affect their lives or their struggles for democracy in any real way.

“OUTRAGED POLITICIANS ARE claiming that the release of government information is the criminal equivalent of terrorism and puts innocent people's lives at risk. Many of those same politicians authorized the modern equivalent of carpet bombing of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, the sacrifice of thousands of lives of soldiers and civilians and drone assaults on civilian areas in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Their anger at a document dump, no matter how extensive, is more than a little suspect.”

-- Bill Quigley, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights

Bill Quigley is right, of course. More than that, Wikileaks – and if he’s truly the “guilty” party, Private Bradley Manning – should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Among those “outraged politicians” is Peter King (R-NY), who emerged from his cave to demand that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton designate Wikileaks a “terrorist organization.” That would make it the first “terrorist” group in history to carefully consult with news organizations well in advance to make sure that no individuals were exposed to harm by its activities. The U.S. drone bomber jockeys, sitting safely at their computer terminals half a world away from the carnage they create, should be so responsible.

In fact, slapping the “terrorist organization” label on Wikileaks might actually happen, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that First Amendment protections may shield it from criminal prosecution in the United States.

by Kim Redigan

[Kim Redigan is a member of Michigan Peace Team and participated in MPT’s delegation on the Gaza Freedom March in December.

There’s a glimmer – a very faint glimmer – of hope arising from recent developments in Palestine.

It seems doubly ironic that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has given its 2009 award to Barack Obama -- just a few months after Arizona State University declined to award him the customary, symboli