“They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.”

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"Reverberations as Door Slams on Hope of Change

Amir Hesami/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran flashed victory signs on Saturday in Qum, south of Tehran

Multimedia

Slide Show

Iranian Protesters Fill Streets After Election Result

Memo From Tehran

Reverberations as Door Slams on Hope of Change

By BILL KELLER

TEHRAN — It is impossible to know for sure how much the ostensible re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad represents the preference of an essentially conservative Iranian public and how much, as opposition voters passionately believe, it is the imposed verdict of a fundamentally authoritarian regime.

But for those who dreamed of a gentler Iran, Saturday was a day of smoldering anger, crushed hopes and punctured illusions, from the streets of Tehran to the policy centers of Western capitals.

Iranians who hoped for a bit more freedom, a better managed economy and a less reviled image in the world wavered between protest and despair on Saturday.

On the streets around Fatemi Square, near the headquarters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, riot police officers dressed in RoboCop gear roared down the sidewalks on motorcycles to disperse and intimidate the clots of pedestrians who had gathered to share rumors and dismay.

“Another four years of dictatorship,” a voter muttered. “This is a coup d’état,” several others agreed. Some women wept openly. Some talked of “mutiny.” Others were more cynical.

“It was just a movie,” said Hussein Gharibi, a 54-year-old juice vendor, scoffing at those who had gotten their hopes up. “They were all just players in a movie.”

Far off, President Obama and other Western leaders who had seen a better relationship with Iran as potentially helpful in resolving the problems of Afghanistan, Iraq and nuclear proliferation faced the prospect of doing business with a man who, in addition to being a Holocaust-denying hard-liner, now stands suspected in a sham election.

There were some important constituencies that took satisfaction from the outcome.

Domestically, Mr. Ahmadinejad appealed to the fears of the more pious and poor who had found change unsettling. This included those alarmed by the days of political street carnival preceding the election and those (not just men) put off by Mr. Moussavi’s attention to the traditional, second-class role of women in this paternalistic quasi-theocracy.

They were joined by the civil servants, police officers and pensioners who all enjoyed the incumbent’s oil-financed generosity to his base, by those who relished his name-naming attack on corruption and by those who took pride in his defiance of the West.

Outside Iran, the result was comforting to hawks in Israel and some Western capitals who had feared that a more congenial Iranian president would cause the world to let down its guard against a country galloping toward nuclear weapons capability. (Mr. Moussavi, while promising a more conciliatory foreign policy, did not disavow the country’s nuclear-processing project, which Iran insists is for civilian ends alone.)

“In fact, Moussavi will be more difficult to deal with, because he will be nicer,” one skeptical Western diplomat said on the eve of the vote.

Among downcast Iranian journalists and academics, the chatter focused on why the interlocking leadership of clerics, military officers and politicians, without whose acquiescence little of importance happens, decided to stick with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Did they panic at the unexpected passion for change that arose in the closing weeks of the Moussavi campaign? Did Mr. Moussavi go too far in his promises of women’s rights, civil freedom and a more conciliatory approach to the West? Or was the surge an illusion after all, the product of wishful thinking?

The optimists in Iran and abroad have to ask themselves whether the joyful ruckus that filled the streets represented a new popular force or just an opportunity to let off steam. While Iran is not quite the closed society many imagine — it is a nation of text messagers and Facebook users, with access to Persian-language BBC broadcasts and other independent voices — it is still a controlled society.

On the street, the speculation focused more on how the election was manipulated, as many voters insisted it must have been for Mr. Ahmadinejad to score such a preposterous margin of victory.

One version (from somebody’s brother who supposedly knew someone inside) had it that vote counters simply were ordered to doctor the numbers: “Make that 1,000 for Ahmadinejad a 3,000.”

Others pointed out that the ballots seemed designed to lead opposition voters astray. Voters were obliged to choose a candidate and fill in a code. Though Mr. Moussavi was candidate No. 4, the code No. 44 signified Mr. Ahmadinejad.

One employee of the Interior Ministry, which carried out the vote count, said the government had been preparing its fraud for weeks, purging anyone of doubtful loyalty and importing pliable staff members from around the country.

“They didn’t rig the vote,” claimed the man, who showed his ministry identification card but pleaded not to be named. “They didn’t even look at the vote. They just wrote the name and put the number in front of it.”

The government on Saturday insisted that the election was aboveboard and made it ominously clear that it would have little patience with anyone who questioned the purity of Iranian democracy.

It was far from clear what recourse the opposition had left.

Mr. Moussavi, who disappeared amid rumors that he was under house arrest or worse, sent word that there would be no turning back, but he did not say how he or his followers should challenge the outcome.

The text messaging that is the nervous system of the opposition was shut down, along with universities, Web sites and newspapers the government regarded as hostile. Mr. Moussavi was not allowed a platform on Saturday and barely managed to get out a communiqué calling the election “a magic show.”

Although there were bursts of defiance that were forcibly subdued, there was also a palpable fear; on Saturday, unlike on Friday, few opposition voters would let their names be used.

“By the evening, people will pour into the streets,” predicted one young woman, from inside the hood of her black chador. “But Ahmadinejad will become president by force.”

American officials and outside analysts believe Ms. Saberi’s arrest was politically motivated

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"In Turnabout, Iran Releases U.S. Journalist

By NAZILA FATHI and MARK LANDLER

TEHRAN — An Iranian-American journalist sentenced to eight years in prison on charges of spying for the United States was released Monday, a legal turnabout that removes an obstacle to President Obama’s opening to Iran but illustrates the volatility of the Iranian government.

The journalist, Roxana Saberi, had been in jail since January, yet an appeals court rejected the sentence, a month after Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter urging the court to be fair in its review.

American officials said Iran’s handling of the Saberi case underlined a deepening divide within its leadership about how to respond to President Obama’s recent overtures. It also reflects domestic politics a month before Mr. Ahmadinejad faces a critical election, according to analysts.

“Those who are trying to engage the U.S. won out,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. “There wasn’t going to be any major new administration initiative toward Iran without this case resolved.”

Ms. Saberi, 32, who has lived in Iran since 2003 and worked as a freelance reporter for National Public Radio and the BBC, was reunited with her parents and will return to the United States in the coming days, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Washington. She had originally been arrested for buying a bottle of wine, which is illegal in Iran. The charges were later elevated to working without a press credential and espionage.

“We continue to take issue with the charges against her and the verdicts rendered, but we are very heartened that she has been released,” said Mrs. Clinton, who had called for the release.

Ms. Saberi’s father, Reza Saberi, who lives in Fargo, N.D., but was born in Iran, told reporters outside his family home here that his daughter was “exhausted but in good condition.” Ms. Saberi did not talk to reporters after leaving Evin prison, which is known for housing political prisoners. She had gone on a hunger strike while in jail, but ended it after two weeks because of health problems.

American officials and outside analysts believe Ms. Saberi’s arrest was politically motivated, at a time when the Obama administration is reaching out to Iran after nearly three decades of hostility. The Iranian government, some analysts said, sought to use the arrest of a journalist to gain leverage in talks with the United States over its nuclear program and other matters.

But with Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton both taking up Ms. Saberi’s cause, analysts said, the political cost of keeping her in prison may have come to seem too high. The fact that the severity of the charges against her was changed, officials said, illustrated the internal tug-of-war over the case.

“They understood that this wouldn’t help them,” said Thomas R. Pickering, a former undersecretary of state who has conducted informal talks with Iranians. “They were asking the U.S. to put words into action, and at the same time, they were going in the opposite direction.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad is seeking re-election on June 12. The letter he sent to the court was the first time he had intervened in a judicial case in his four years in office. Analysts said it would help his prospects if he could advance negotiations with the United States before the election.

“Mr. Ahmadinejad wants to take serious steps towards improving ties with the United States before the elections,” said Ibrahim Yazdi, a political analyst in Tehran. “If he succeeds, it would be to his interest.”

If the United States were to establish an interest section in Tehran, for example, that would allow Iranians to obtain visas to the United States, without traveling to a third country, as they have to do now.

The United States has made several gestures to Iran. Mr. Obama taped a greeting for the Iranian people on the Persian New Year and the administration announced that it would take part, along with other major powers, in face-to-face negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

The threat of a Taliban insurgency in Pakistan may create an opportunity for Tehran and Washington to find common cause, analysts said. Iran views Taliban militants on its eastern borders as a major threat and cooperated with the United States in operations in Afghanistan in 2001.

Last month, when Mrs. Clinton was at a conference on Afghanistan in The Hague, the United States handed Iranian diplomats a letter calling for the release of Ms. Saberi, along with two other Americans who are missing or detained in Iran, Robert Levinson and Esha Momeni.

The United States views the release of Ms. Saberi as a “partial response” to that letter, said a senior State Department official. But it should not be viewed as a “grand gesture of détente,” he added.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing internal deliberations, said the United States did not offer Iran any quid-pro-quo for the release of Ms. Saberi.

Her parents traveled to Tehran several weeks ago to lobby for her freedom. “Her release was a big surprise,” an emotional Mr. Saberi told reporters.

She was found guilty in April in a trial her father said lasted less than an hour. A lawyer for Ms. Saberi said the appeals court rejected the original jail term and handed down a two-year suspended sentence in its place. That means that she can leave Iran immediately, he said.

In their appeal, her lawyers argued that the espionage charge should be lifted because the Foreign Ministry and court had previously said that there was “no hostility between Iran and the United States.”

Some analysts warned the United States against drawing too much comfort from Iran’s decision.

“They pushed her to the verge of a nervous breakdown for a transient political purpose,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “It shows the difficulty the Obama administration will have in negotiating with a regime that has so little value for the lives of its citizens.”

Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran, and Mark Landler from Washington."

if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"Israel, Iran and Fear

By ROGER COHEN

NEW YORK — When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, the return of the capital from Bonn to the scene of the crime, Berlin, prompted agonizing over how to memorialize the Holocaust. Germans thirsted for a “Schlussstrich” — closure with Hitler — even as they acknowledged its impossibility.

A large Holocaust memorial was built in Berlin, but not before a leading writer, Martin Walser, had prompted outrage by railing against “the permanent presentation of our shame” and use of Auschwitz as “a moral stick.”

Closure on the Nazi mass murder is of course impossible. There is no such thing as inherited guilt, but inherited responsibility endures. Germans, through responsibility, have built one of the world’s most successful democracies, a wonder from the ashes.

In the German mirror stands Israel, another vibrant democracy birthed from the crime, albeit one, unlike Germany, that has not found peaceful coexistence. Israel, too, craves closure on a past that holds the insistent specter of annihilation.

As Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, has written, Israel was supposed not only to take the Jewish people out of exile but ensure that exile was “taken out of the Jewish people.” In this, 61 years after its creation, Israel has fallen short.

Uncertainty does not so much hang over the country as inhabit its very fiber. Existential threats — from Iran, from Hamas and Hezbollah, from demography — are forever invoked. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses — for now — to support even the notion of Palestinian statehood.

I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program.

Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.”

But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?

Yes, Israel is small — all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea is scarcely bigger than Maryland — and its environment hostile. This, as former President Jimmy Carter notes in a fine new book, makes it vulnerable. But as Carter also writes in “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land,” Israel has a “military force that is modern, highly trained and superior to the combined forces of all its potential adversaries.”

Not only that, Israel has a formidable nuclear arsenal; it has made peace with Egypt and Jordan; it has a cast-iron security guarantee from the United States; it has walled, fenced, blockaded and road-blocked the roughly 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into a pitiful archipelago of helplessness; its enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, only declared victory in recent wars by preventing their own destruction.

Israel has the most dynamic and creative society in the region, one that does not convict American journalists in shameful secret trials, as Iran has just done with Roxana Saberi; it has never fought a war with Iran; and it knows — despite all the noise — that Persia, at more than 3,000 years and counting, is not in the business of hastening its own suicide through militarist folly.

Some of this, no doubt, Lerman has told his daughter. It should reassure her. Fear is the worst of foundations.

Far from Iran, and the tired Nazi analogies misleadingly attached to it, there is another threat. As Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East scholar and author, suggested to me recently: “The biggest risk to Israel is Israel.”

A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.

As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”

That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.

Netanyahu now wants Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, who have recognized Israel, to go further and recognize it as a Jewish state, even before he accepts a hypothetical Palestinian state. That’s a sign of the Israeli angst occupation has institutionalized.

Closure is the overcoming of horror. It is the achievement of normality through responsibility. It cannot be attained through the inflation of threats, the perpetuation of fears, or retreat into the victimhood that sees every act, however violent, as defensive.

Readers are invited to comment on global.nytimes.com/opinion"

The sentence was likely to be commuted or reduced in a higher court, said the analyst, who declined to be named.

TO BE NOTED: From Reuters:

1 of 2Full Size

Related News

Clinton says will press Iran on journalist's case

12:59pm EDT

Obama "disappointed" by Iran's sentencing of journalist

3:13pm EDT

By Parisa Hafezi and Fredrik Dahl

TEHRAN (Reuters) - An Iranian-American journalist accused in Iran of spying for the United States has been jailed for eight years, her lawyer said on Saturday, five days after she was put on trial.

An Iranian judiciary official, quoted by the ISNA news agency, confirmed the sentencing of Roxana Saberi, a U.S.-born freelance reporter who has worked for the BBC and National Public Radio (NPR).

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was very disappointed by the sentencing and would raise the case with Tehran.

Saberi's jailing could become a source of U.S.-Iranian tension at a time when Washington is trying to reach out to the Islamic Republic following three decades of mutual mistrust.

The judiciary earlier this week said Saberi went on trial on Monday at a Revolutionary Court, which handles security cases.

"She has been sentenced to eight years ... I will appeal," lawyer Abdolsamad Khorramshahi told Reuters.

ISNA quoted the unnamed judiciary official as saying: "Branch 28 of the Revolutionary Court sentenced Roxana Saberi to eight years for espionage. She can appeal the sentence."

Her father, Reza Saberi, told the NPR that his daughter had been coerced into statements that she later retracted.

"She was deceived," he said. "She is quite depressed about this matter and she wants to go on a hunger strike. And if she does, she is so frail it can be very dangerous to her health."

The United States has called the charges against Saberi "baseless" and demanded her immediate release.

"I am deeply disappointed by the reported sentencing of Roxana Saberi by the Iranian judiciary," said Clinton in a statement released by the State Department in Washington.

"We will continue to vigorously raise our concerns to the Iranian government," added Clinton. She said she was working closely with Swiss interlocutors who handle U.S. interests in Iran to get details about Saberi's court decision and to ensure her "well being".

NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller said in a statement: "We are deeply distressed by this harsh and unwarranted sentence."

Saberi, 31, who is a citizen of both the United States and Iran, was arrested in January for working in Iran after her press credentials had expired.

MISS NORTH DAKOTA

Her parents visited her in Tehran's Evin jail on April 6, after arriving from the United States. Evin is a jail where rights groups say political prisoners are usually taken.

According to a website set up to campaign for her release, freeroxana.net, Saberi moved to Iran six years ago.

She grew up in Fargo, North Dakota, and holds Masters Degrees in Journalism and International Relations. She was chosen Miss North Dakota in 1997, the website says.

Washington cut ties with Iran shortly after the Islamic revolution in 1979 but U.S. President Barack Obama has offered a new beginning of diplomatic engagement on a range of issues if Tehran "unclenches its fist."

Iran says it wants to see a real switch in Washington's policies away from those of former President George W. Bush, who led a drive to isolate the country because of nuclear work the West suspects has military aims, a charge Iran denies.

One Iranian analyst said Saberi's sentencing should not be seen as a sign of Iran rebuffing Washington's overture, but that she had been in the "wrong place at the wrong time."

The sentence was likely to be commuted or reduced in a higher court, said the analyst, who declined to be named.

Paris-based media rights group Reporters Without Borders this week said Iran used the espionage charge to "arrest journalists and tighten the muzzle on free expression."

Iran denies such accusations and says it respects freedom of speech based on Islamic rules.

(Additional reporting by Washington bureau; editing by Richard Balmforth and Mohammad Zargham)"

It has even been forced to buy wheat from the US for the first time in 26 years.

TO BE NOTED: From the FT:

"Iran becomes biggest wheat importer

By Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran and Javier Blas in London

Published: April 16 2009 19:07 | Last updated: April 16 2009 19:07

Iran has become the world’s largest importer of wheat, the country’s staple, in a blow to Tehran’s goal of achieving self-sufficiency in the crops it considers key to food security.

Iran has in months catapulted from being a minor player in the cereals market to the top buyer. It has even been forced to buy wheat from the US for the first time in 26 years.

The surge in cereal imports – due largely to drought – comes amid rising concern about food security among Middle East and North African countries that has led Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states to seek farmland overseas to grow crops.

The US department of agriculture forecasts Iran will buy 8.5m tonnes of wheat in the 2008-09 crop year, which ends in June, taking it ahead of Egypt as the world’s top importer.

Iran would then account for about 6.5 per cent of the global trade of the grain. Cereals traders confirm the forecast – the benchmark for agricultural markets – pointing to strong buying by Tehran. The total cost of the imports is estimated at between $2bn and $2.5bn (€1.5-€1.9bn, £1.3bn–£1.7bn), with the 1m tonnes bought from the US since last July worth $356m.

“With production in 2008 reduced by drought, Iran has set aside its goal of wheat self-sufficiency and emerged as the world’s largest wheat importer, after importing only 0.2m tonnes in 2007-8,” the USDA said in a recent market report.

Iran sees wheat as a strategic commodity for its 70m population, for whom bread and rice are the main food sources. The country claimed it had achieved self-sufficiency in grain in 2004, but recent bad crops have forced it to enter the international market.

Mohammad-Reza Eskan­d­ari, minister of agriculture, has vowed to regain wheat self-sufficiency by producing 15m tons this season. But traders remain sceptical, pointing out that Tehran continues to buy large amounts in the international market for delivery later this year, suggesting another bad crop.

Issa Kalantari, head of the country’s national farmers’ union and a former agriculture minister, has cast doubt on Iran’s ability to maintain wheat self-sufficiency.

“Since there is a severe shortage of investment in the agricultural sector the question of self-sufficiency is meaningless,” said Mr Kalantari.

The government of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, president, argues that drought is the only reason for importing grain. But his critics say record imports of agricultural products, worth about $12bn, is due to mismanagement and drought.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009"

Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.

TO BE NOTED: From the NY Times:

"Israel Cries Wolf

By ROGER COHEN

ISTANBUL — “Iran is the center of terrorism, fundamentalism and subversion and is in my view more dangerous than Nazism, because Hitler did not possess a nuclear bomb, whereas the Iranians are trying to perfect a nuclear option.”

Benjamin Netanyahu 2009? Try again. These words were in fact uttered by another Israeli prime minister (and now Israeli president), Shimon Peres, in 1996. Four years earlier, in 1992, he’d predicted that Iran would have a nuclear bomb by 1999.

You can’t accuse the Israelis of not crying wolf. Ehud Barak, now defense minister, said in 1996 that Iran would be producing nuclear weapons by 2004.

Now here comes Netanyahu, in an interview with his faithful stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, spinning the latest iteration of Israel’s attempt to frame Iran as some Nazi-like incarnation of evil:

“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs. When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the entire world should start worrying, and that is what is happening in Iran.”

I must say when I read those words about “the wide-eyed believer” my mind wandered to a recently departed “decider.” But I’m not going there.

The issue today is Iran and, more precisely, what President Barack Obama will make of Netanyahu’s prescription that, the economy aside, Obama’s great mission is “preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons” — an eventuality newly inscribed on Israeli calendars as “months” away.

I’ll return to the ever shifting nuclear doomsday in a moment, but first that Netanyahu interview.

This “messianic apocalyptic cult” in Tehran is, of course, the very same one with which Israel did business during the 1980’s, when its interest was in weakening Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. That business — including sales of weapons and technology — was an extension of Israeli policy toward Iran under the shah.

It’s also the same “messianic apocalyptic cult” that has survived 30 years, ushered the country from the penury of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, shrewdly extended its power and influence, cooperated with America on Afghanistan before being consigned to “the axis of evil,” and kept its country at peace in the 21st century while bloody mayhem engulfed neighbors to east and west and Israel fought two wars.

I don’t buy the view that, as Netanyahu told Goldberg, Iran is “a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest.” Every scrap of evidence suggests that, on the contrary, self-interest and survival drive the mullahs.

Yet Netanyahu insists (too much) that Iran is “a country that glorifies blood and death, including its own self-immolation.” Huh?

On that ocular theme again, Netanyahu says Iran’s “composite leadership” has “elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist in any other would-be nuclear power in the world.” No, they exist in an actual nuclear power, Pakistan.

Israel’s nuclear warheads, whose function is presumably deterrence of precisely powers like Iran, go unmentioned, of course.

Netanyahu also makes the grotesque claim that the terrible loss of life in the Iran-Iraq war (started by Iraq) “didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness.” It did just that, which is why Iran’s younger generation seeks reform but not upheaval; and why the country as a whole prizes stability over military adventure.

Arab states, Netanyahu suggests, “fervently hope” that America will, if necessary, use “military power” to stop Iran going nuclear. My recent conversations, including with senior Saudi officials, suggest that’s wrong and the longstanding Israeli attempt to convince Arab states that Iran, not Israel, is their true enemy will fail again.

What’s going on here? Israel, as it has for nearly two decades, is trying to lock in American support and avoid any disadvantageous change in the Middle Eastern balance of power, now overwhelmingly tilted in Jerusalem’s favor, by portraying Iran as a monstrous pariah state bent on imminent nuclear war.

A semblance of power balance is often the precondition for peace. Iran was left out of the Madrid and Oslo processes, with disastrous results. But that’s a discussion for another day.

What’s critical right now is that Obama view Netanyahu’s fear-mongering with an appropriate skepticism, rein him in, and pursue his regime-recognizing opening toward Tehran, as he did Wednesday by saying America would join nuclear talks for the first time. The president should read Trita Parsi’s excellent “Treacherous Alliance” as preparation.

The core strategic shift of Obama’s presidency has been away from the with-us-or-against-us rhetoric of the war on terror toward a rapprochement with the Muslim world as the basis for isolating terrorists.

That’s unsustainable if America or Israel find themselves at war with Muslim Persians as well as Muslim Arabs, and if Netanyahu’s intense-eyed attempt to suck America into a perpetuation of war-on-terror thinking prevails.

The only way to stop Iran going nuclear, and encourage reform of a repressive regime, is to get to the negotiating table. There’s time. Those “months” are still a couple of years. What Iran has accumulated is low-enriched uranium. You need highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. That’s a leap.

Israeli hegemony is proving a kind of slavery. Passage to the Promised Land involves rethinking the Middle East, starting in Iran."

prisoners in the country are being denied medical treatment, possibly as an extra punishment

TO BE NOTED: From AI:

"Deaths in custody in Iran highlight prison authorities' disregard for life

20 March 2009

The death in custody of an internet blogger in Iran on Wednesday raised renewed fears that prisoners in the country are being denied medical treatment, possibly as an extra punishment.

Omid Reza Mirsayafi's death follows that of another political prisoner, Amir Hossein Heshmat Saran, who died in suspicious circumstances on 6 March after five years in prison.

"The full circumstances of both prisoners' deaths have yet to become clear, but it appears that both may have resulted from a failure or refusal on the part of the prison authorities to allow them urgently needed medical treatment," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme.

"The Iranian authorities have an obligation to ensure that both deaths are urgently and impartially investigated, and to ensure that any officials responsible for denying or withholding medical treatment or for contributing to these prisoners' deaths in other ways are brought to justice."

Omid Reza Mirsayafi died at Tehran's Evin Prison less than six weeks after starting a 30-month sentence. He was convicted of "insulting the Supreme Leader" and "propaganda against the system" in relation to articles he had written on his blog. He denied the charges.

He is reported to have been suffering from depression, for which he received some medication from the prison clinic and to have become seriously ill after taking an overdose.

Another prisoner, who is a medical doctor, Dr Hesam Firouzi, provided immediate assistance and recommended his hospitalization. Despite this prison staff were reported to have failed to recognize the seriousness of his condition and did not transfer him to hospital.

Two weeks earlier, Amir Hossein Heshmat Saran died at a hospital in Karaj shortly after he was taken there from Raja’i Shahr (or Gohardasht) Prison. He was serving an eight-year sentence imposed in 2004 for establishing the United National Front political party.

He died after he was reported to have become seriously ill on 4 March. His wife has said that, when she visited him in hospital on 5 March, he appeared to be in a coma and that he was shackled to the hospital bed. After his death, a hospital doctor told her that he had suffered a brain haemorrhage and a lung infection and that he should have been hospitalized sooner.

Other political prisoners have died in custody in suspicious circumstances in recent years. Abdolreza Rajabi, a member of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), died unexpectedly in Reja'i Shahr Prison on 30 October 2008.

In 2006, Akbar Mohammadi, a student, died in Evin Prison, and Valiollah Feyz Mahdavi, a PMOI member under sentence of death, died in Reja’i Shahr Prison after hunger strikes in which they were apparently denied adequate medical attention.

"These latest deaths underline the urgent need for the Iranian authorities to improve prison conditions and to take immediate measures to ensure that all prisoners in their custody are treated humanely," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.

"It is shameful that the health of prisoners is disregarded to such an extent that they are denied potentially life-saving treatment and allowed to die while in the care of the state. We fear that refusal of timely medical care is being used as another tactic in the arsenal of repression of dissent in Iran."

Parents need to be with their children, not separated from them on the basis of prejudice and hatred.

From the Guardian:

• Comment is free Seven friends face revolutionary court

Baha'is' rights have often been violated in Iran; now, as pressure mounts on the government, activists' lives are being threatened

Comments (29)

• 
• • Nazila Ghanea
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 16 February 2009 18.00 GMT
  • Article history

Fariba is a 46-year-old psychologist and a mother of three. She graduated from high school with honours but was barred from attending university because of her religious beliefs. Her youngest daughter is 14. I know her through her son, who studied for postgraduate qualification in the UK. Mahvash, 55, was a school principal before she was dismissed from public education. Vahid, 37, is an optician. He has a nine-year-old son. I am a parent too. Parents need to be with their children, not separated from them on the basis of prejudice and hatred.

Fariba, Mahvash and Vahid, in the face of tremendous challenges, have devoted their lives to serving the people of their country. Along with four other ordinary, decent citizens of Iran, they made up the membership of an informal committee attending to the needs of the 300,000-strong Baha'i community, the country's largest non-Muslim religious minority, after its formal administrative institutions were disbanded in 1983. The authorities were fully aware of their activities and had informal dealings with them. One could even say that their demands on the community necessitated the existence of this informal Baha'i representation.

The "seven friends in Iran", as they were known, were arrested in dawn raids last spring. Since that time, they have been detained without charge in Tehran's notorious Evin prison. No evidence against them has been brought to light, and they have been denied access to their legal counsel, the Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, who has been threatened, intimidated, and vilified in the news media since taking on their case.

Along with four of their colleagues, their lives may now be in danger. This week, it has been reported, will see a case against them sent to the revolutionary court in Tehran. They are accused of "espionage for Israel, insulting religious sanctities and propaganda against the Islamic Republic".

Such spurious allegations against the Baha'is are not new – but they are extremely serious. Even during the years prior to 1979 under the Shah, history has sadly shown that when Iran feels threatened, it inflames deep-rooted prejudice against Baha'is and other religious minorities to mobilise mass support. The Iranian government is well aware that, as articles of faith, Baha'is honour Islam as a divine religion, are obedient to the laws of the land and do not engage in political activity. The presence of their world headquarters in modern-day Israel is an historical consequence of the Persian and Ottoman authorities themselves banishing the faith's founder to the penal colony of Acre, 80 years before the state of Israel was formed.

Sixty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this case alone belies a contemptuous, continuing abuse by a sovereign government against one of its minorities. While such targeted violations are taking place within the context of pressures over all civil society organisations in Iran – including students, journalists, women's rights activists, lawyers groups, health practitioners, trade unions, and even the British Council last week – those against the Baha'is give rise to particular concern because of the systematic pattern of violations that are so regularly been resuscitated against them.

Non-discrimination on the basis of religion is fundamental to human rights. Freedom of religion or belief was recognised in international law long before the declaration, in 1948. It was subsequently captured in article 18 of that document, and expounded in article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the Islamic Republic of Iran has ratified. Non-discrimination is also upheld in tens of other international and regional standards, and indeed in Islamic law and custom as well. Freedom of religion or belief upholds the right of all, including the Baha'is in Iran, to have and to manifest the religion of their choice in worship, observance, practice and teaching. According to the 1981 UN declaration on the elimination of all forms of intolerance and discrimination based on religion or belief, this implies the possibility of observing Baha'i holy days, the full operation of community life, teaching and education of the Baha'i faith in Iran and the free choice of all to join or leave its membership, the communication of Baha'is with their co-religionists inside and outside Iran and their establishment of community and charitable institutions. More pertinent to this present case, the freedom to train, appoint, elect or designate leaders is recognised, with the objective of facilitating for religious groups the conduct of their affairs. Yet further rights accrue due to the fact that Baha'is constitute a minority community, and in order to facilitate their continuity, development and full participation in society.

All of this could, sadly, not be more distant from the daily reality of the lives of Iranian Baha'is. As a UN expert committee once noted, even the dead in Iran cannot rest in peace. Baha'i cemetery desecrations don't just go unheeded, they take place under government supervision. Over 200 articles in the Kayhan over the past two years have attacked every aspect of the faith's history, personalities, beliefs and community life. Such messages are reinforced on television, in mass marches and in Friday sermons. Under government tutelage, the media serves to endanger their already highly curtailed existence.

The Baha'is have found a degree of solace and relief from the growing number of expressions of solidarity they receive from Iranians in the diaspora and even within Iran, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. Recently, a group of Iranian intellectuals, promoters of justice and champions of freedom, published an open letter (pdf) in which they stated that, as Iranians, they were ashamed of the oppression perpetrated against Baha'is in their homeland.

Within Iran itself, where defiance of the ideology of the government risks dire consequences, there are increasing incidents of Iranian Muslims challenging the mistreatment of their Baha'i compatriots. Students and schoolchildren have protested at the expulsion of Baha'is from several educational institutions, part of a government-sanctioned policy to deny Baha'is access to education purely on grounds of their beliefs. Even senior figures in the Shia religious establishment, notably Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, have stated publicly that Baha'is should have the rights of citizens and to live in Iran.

Meanwhile, seven innocent people are among the many awaiting judgment in Iran on their fate. Far from being a threat to state security, the Baha'is of Iran are deeply committed to the peaceful and prosperous development of their country. The facts demonstrate that they are persecuted purely for their religious beliefs. Time and again, they have been offered their freedom – and in some cases, their lives – if they recant their faith and convert to Islam. For more than a century, Baha'is have preferred to face the most extreme punishment rather than deny the very principles that guide their lives. They should not, however, be required to make that choice."

Me:

DonthelibertDem

16 Feb 09, 10:32pm (1 minute ago)

You know it's a strange world when, in a section entitled "Comment Is Free", people seem to be defending persecution as against freedom of belief.

The other thread is Jew Hatred. What does Israel have to do with problems in Iran? Why not quote Nigeria, Sudan, Rwanda, the Congo, Sri Lanka, Colombia,Pakistan, India, Turkey, etc. There should be one standard of human rights and war crimes, and each country or ethnic group or whatever should be compared against that. Period. Leave the other countries for another discussion. The question before us is the mistreatment of the Bahai in Iran, which is a clear violation of human rights. To argue otherwise is a logical fallacy called Poisoning The Well.

“How many words do you think you write per unit of electricity?” she asked.

From TimesOnLine:

"Money is dead - long live barter

With cash ever harder to come by, will the council let us settle tax bills in cake?

John-Paul Flintoff

Inspired by global economic developments, I’ve been thinking recently about doing without money. Not in a bad way. Oh no: I’m planning to do very well indeed without money – perhaps turn myself into Mr Big. And the method I intend to use, now that money has dried up everywhere, is . . . barter.

I realise it will not be easy. When I started doing this, I phoned the council to ask about settling my tax bill by barter, and an official said: “We allow direct debit, cash, cheque, credit card. But barter? It’s unheard of, sir.”

My accountant had warned me about this: only inheritance tax, he said, could be settled with goods, such as an oil painting. But I persisted, telling the man from the council that if I failed to pay my bill the council would send bailiffs to confiscate goods to the same value – a kind of forced barter after the fact.

What could I offer? A vast sackful of apples and other produce from my allotment, a selection of silk ties (rarely used), large piles of novels (good condition) and some amazing home-baked cakes.

He was unmoved. Perhaps I could work for the council instead – sweep the streets; paint a portrait of the mayor? “It’s a very ingenious proposal,” the official said, “but I don’t want to waste your time.”

I know what you’re thinking: barter is useless. But you may be mistaken. Because an astonishingly large proportion of the global trade in goods and services is barter-based, to protect traders against alarming currency fluctuations.

In one of the most famous examples, Pepsi took profits from Soviet Russia in the form of vodka. The largest barter of all time took place last year: China agreed to build massive infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo in exchange for copper and cobalt supplies worth an estimated £6 billion. About the same time, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed with Pakistan and Thailand, respectively, to swap oil for food.( TRUE. I POSTED ON THIS. )

Not for nothing has The Wall Street Journal described barter as a “powerful cash-saving tool”. The journal of the “reciprocal trade industry”, Barter News, goes further: “We’re moving into the golden age of barter,” it reported recently, adding that 600,000 companies in the US alone actively traded both locally and across borders.

In the UK, a village pub, the Pigs, at Edgefield, in Norfolk, offered pints in exchange for locally sourced food to be cooked in its kitchens. Thousands of others trade more formally through exchanges such as Bartercard: last year the Fashion TV network used Bartercard to save £110,000 in cash on alcohol and other goods for its launch party – which FTV is repaying by providing advertising.

Happily, barter works for individuals too. A Canadian, Kyle MacDon-ald, made headlines by bartering, via trade after trade on the internet, a paper clip for a house. Only slightly less impressive, my friend the photographer Guy Hills persuaded every tailor in Savile Row to make him an outfit in return for photographing them at work. A couple named Dan and Gemma Scott cut £9,000 from the cost of their wedding by bartering for the church, the reception, the cars and the photos. To do this, they worked as housekeeper and labourer, dug ditches, delivered leaflets and repaired cars. “When Gemma started planning the wedding,” Dan said, “I knew we didn’t have the money for it. We ended up with a £12,000 wedding for just £3,000.”

It wasn’t the Scotts alone who benefited: the people for whom they carried out those services probably wouldn’t have hired them, in the present economic turmoil, if they’d asked for cash. The wedding might not have happened, and a whole lot of economic activity would never have taken place if the Scotts hadn’t thought of using barter.

Despite these examples, it would be misleading to suggest that barter always takes place between two parties who each have something the other wants. Indeed, straight swaps of that kind are rare, because they’re flawed: if you want one of my cakes and can’t offer anything I need, the barter is over before it starts.

To get around this, barter is these days increasingly transacted through a group exchange: you pay me a credit for my delicious cake, and I spend that credit on another member of the exchange – getting my loo unblocked, or having a foot massage. In effect, the credits are a form of money issued and guaranteed by the group.

The challenge lies in finding the right exchange network. ReadIt SwapIt.co.uk has had a huge increase in book swaps (there are currently 221,000 books available). WhatsMineIsYours.com facilitates clothing and accessory exchange. SeedyPeople.co.uk lets gardeners and allotmenteers exchange seeds. UKhomeswap.co.uk has thousands of users who pay a monthly fee in the hope of swapping council properties, while Hamptons International has a similar scheme for landlords.

Alas, satisfaction is not guaranteed. On ReadItSwapIt, for instance, many members have done many swaps – one in Scotland claims to have done 900 – but for me it would be cheaper and more convenient, now that my local post office has closed, to get new books from the library (which hasn’t, yet) and give away anything I don’t need to charity shops.

On swapz.co.uk and swapcycle.co.uk, the variety of offers is stunning. They give evidence that many transactions are taking place that wouldn’t have done if people depended entirely on money. Typical of this is the woman offering to do housework in exchange for somebody fitting tiles in her kitchen, through one of many local exchange trading systems, or Lets, up and running across the country. As many as 40,000 people belong to Lets, and more are joining all the time.

Slightly different are the 250 or so “time banks” across the country, in which everybody’s time has the same value. In effect, this brings members’ income down (or up) to the national average. The revolutionary implication is that if people want to stop being poor and oppressed they could save themselves the trouble of protest marches by setting up a time bank and dropping out of the mainstream economy altogether.

At least, that’s the theory. Practice is trickier. Molly Scott Cato of Cardiff School of Management, the author of Green Economics, a delightful new book examining such things, concedes that time banks can improve quality of life in communities. “But for most members this is peripheral to their main livelihood,” she says.

All the same, I do find all this barter activity rather inspiring. I may not have persuaded the council, yet, but the company that sells me electricity proved willing to consider barter. A woman handling the marketing seemed to think I could help to write some publicity material. Something, however, needed to be resolved first: “How many words do you think you write per unit of electricity?” she asked."

I'm giving the thought of barter serious consideration.

"If so, that’s an outcome that could have been achieved without the killing of close to 400 people"

Rootless Cosmopolitan with a good post:

"Understanding Gaza

It’s fear of another Holocaust that has driven Israel to bomb the crap out of the Palestinians in Gaza — at least, that’s if you believe what you read on the New York Times op ed page. (Never a good idea, of course, because as I’ve previously noted, when it comes to Israel and related fear-mongering, there simply is no hysteria deemed unworthy of the Times op ed page.)

Morris, a manic fellow at the best of times prone to intellectual mood swings — having laid bare the ethnic cleansing that created modern Israel, Morris then didn’t as much recant as complain that the problem was that Ben Gurion hadn’t finished the job. And since the 2000 debacle at Camp David, of course, he’s been a de facto editorial writer for Ehud Barak, the failed former Prime Minister nicknamed “Mr. Zig-Zag” while in office because of his inconsistency — and who, of course, is the author of the current operation in Gaza.

Barak, never shy about spewing utter rubbish when his audience is American and prone to be taken in by demagoguery, last weekend offered the priceless suggestion to Fox News that “expecting Israel to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda.” Presumably it would not occur to Fox’s anchors to ask why, then, had Barak maintained just such a cease-fire for the past six months? And why had he been seeking its renewal?( VERY GOOD POINT )

But when it comes to demagoguery, this crowd knows no shame. Here is Morris explaining what he wants us to believe is the current Israeli mindset:

“Many Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War … the Egyptians had driven a United Nations peacekeeping force from the Sinai-Israel border, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and air traffic and had deployed the equivalent of seven armored and infantry divisions on Israel’s doorstep… Arab radio stations blared messages about the coming destruction of Israel.

“Israelis, or rather, Israeli Jews, are beginning to feel much the way their parents did in those apocalyptic days. Israel is a much more powerful and prosperous state today. In 1967 there were only some 2 million Jews in the country — today there are about 5.5 million — and the military did not have nuclear weapons. But the bulk of the population looks to the future with deep foreboding.”

This “foreboding” says Morris is based on the fact that the Arab world has never truly accepted the legitimacy of Israel’s creation (well, duh! Israel’s creation for Arabs is inextricably linked to the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees from its territory; a process well documented by Morris himself) and continue to oppose its existence. (The fact that the Arab world has offered a comprehensive recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for it retreating to its 1967 borders seems to have passed the historian Morris by.)( GOOD POINT )

Then, he says , there’s the fact that “public opinion in the West (and in democracies, governments can’t be far behind) is gradually reducing its support for Israel as the West looks askance at the Jewish state’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors and wards. The Holocaust is increasingly becoming a faint and ineffectual memory and the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.”

Well, actually, as Avrum Burg has said so eloquently in his new book The Holocaust is Over, We Must Rise from its Ashes, it is precisely because of the Holocaust experience and the universal message of “Never Again” that the West today is engaged with human rights abuses everywhere, no matter who the victim and perpetrator( TRUE. WE DON'T DO VERY GOOD JOB THOUGH. ) — even when the perpetrators are Jewish. Again, though, the idea that Israel is being isolated in the West would seem preposterous to any objective observer; and the idea that the Holocaust is being forgotten even more so(I DON'T ). (Clearly, historian Morris pays no attention to the Academy Awards.) This sort of silliness makes you onder if anyone actually edits the NYT’s op ed page. How can any editor even vaguely grounded in reality allow a sentence to pass that says “the Arab states are increasingly powerful and assertive.” Any examples you can provide to back this outlandish claim, Benny? Would the op ed page editors even think to ask? Benny Morris may be like your hysterical uncle making up his own facts to support unsustainable arguments, but he’s hardly the first to have done so on the NYT op ed page in the past year alone.

A little reality isn’t going to slow down Morris’ train of hysteria — Iran’s nuclear program and Ahmadinejad’s bluster about Israel disappearing “has Israel’s political and military leaders on tenterhooks,” he proclaims. Oh yeah? How come whenever they’re behind closed doors and not talking to gullible Americans, they let on that they know that even a nuclear-armed Iran represents no “existential threat” to Israel? If Israelis are on tenterhooks, it’s no the political and military leadership who understand the realities; it’s the public that has listened to its political leaders spin up an endless torrent of baseless hysteria about Iran under the absurd rubric of “1938 all over again”.

Morris’s menaces extend to Hizballah in the north with its rockets — which only seem to be fired on Israel when Lebanon is under attack by the Israelis — and then there is Hamas, armed to the teeth with rockets and ready to fight until every inch of Palestine “is under Islamic rule and law.” (Actually, Hamas has not even imposed Shariah law in that tiny patch of Palestine — Gaza — that it currently controls, so it seems to be making a poor start.)

You’d think that the 100-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties of the first four days of the Gaza offensive would give the lie to the idea that Israel is threatened with annihilation by Hamas and its rockets.

And then there’s the “internal” menace, Israel’s Arab population, which identifies more with the Palestinians, which they essentially are, than with the Jewish population of a state that offers them a second-class citizenship. (Go figure, eh?) Morris concludes by warning that Israel is feeling closed in by these intolerable menaces, and that the Gaza bloodbath won’t be the last time it lashes out. Sounds ominously like a threat of new ethnic cleansing, actually. (Actually, the “internal” menace that Morris doesn’t mention is the fact that growing numbers of young Israelis don’t live in Morris’s echo chamber of existential threats everywhere they look; they’re evading military service in record numbers and are, increasingly, moving abroad, having seen through the fiction that the whole world is a cesspool of virulenet antisemitism( I DO BELIEVE THAT JEW HATRED IS ON THE RISE. ).)

Essentially, Morris would have us excuse the bloodbath in Gaza in light of the specter of a new Holocaust. That’s a little deranged, actually. Cynically wielding the Holocaust as a cudgel to intimidate critics into silence, as Burg points out in his book, is a well established trope of Israeli p.r. But when a vast military machine is being unleashed on a captive population under siege, whose most militant members are lightly armed and try to make up in suicidal courage for what they lack in materiel, the image most likely to spring to mind is that of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Robert Fisk, in his own analysis, does something rarely found in the columns of U.S. news outlets: He reminds us who the Gazans are:

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.

But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics( WHICH HAMAS IS ) suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

Now, when it comes to understanding and responding to the crisis, we have the comments made by President-elect Barack Obama last July in Sderot, which were widely quote in response to teh weekend’s strikes:
“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

I suppose the question I’d like to ask Obama, in the very Jewish tradition of asking how I would experience that which I was about to do to another, is what he would do if someone had moved his grandparents out of their home and forced them into a refugee camp, where he and his daughters lived, caged in, and were now being slowly choked of any meaningful livelihood, denied access to medicines, elecricity, even basic foodstuffs sometimes. What, I wonder would he do then? (He needs to have a meaningful answer to that question if he’s to be anything other than an obstacle to progress in the Middle East, like Bush has been. He may want to take a lesson from “Mr. Zig-Zag” here: On the election campaign trail in 1999, Ehud Barak was asked what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian, and answered without hesitation, “Joined a fighting organization.”( I KNEW AN MAN WHO FLED ACRE. HE WAS ONE OF THE MOST PEACEFUL AND DECENT MEN I EVER KNEW. HE WAS MY ARABIC TEACHER. ). A moment of rare honesty, that.)

It will be up to Obama, more than any other world leader, to change the morbid dynamic between Israel and the Palestinians — because it is a U.S.-authored conceptual approach( DEAD END ) that undergirds the current travesty in Gaza. I wrote in the National last weekend, Israel’s attack on Gaza was closely paralleled with the murder in Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold:

It’s not that Israel wanted to attack Gaza; it would have us believe it had no choice.

Like the Vicario brothers in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterful novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold – who believed they were honour-bound to kill Santiago Nasar for sleeping with their sister, and told anyone who would listen of their intention in the unspoken hope that someone would stop them – Israel, too, had been yelling from the rooftops its intention to strike Gaza.

…Just as in the Marquez novel, what propelled the Gaza tragedy forward to its bloody conclusion was that neither the Israelis nor anyone they told of their plan were willing to confront the absurdity of the ‘rules’ that made them believe they were obliged to spill blood. Israel claimed that it had no choice but to launch a military campaign that has begun with air strikes but will probably escalate to some form of ground invasion.

The context of the renewed rocket launching, of course, was the breakdown of the ceasefire brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas in June, which expired last week. Israel set off the latest upsurge in rocket attacks by launching raids on Nov 5 which it said were necessary to stop Palestinians tunnelling under the boundary fence. But the ceasefire has not really worked for Hamas, because it had expected that in exchange for holding its fire, not only would Israel reciprocate but it would also begin to ease the crippling economic siege, the objective of which was the overthrow of the Hamas government. Israel insists that wasn’t what it agreed, saying it had offered only “calm for calm” – and that the same offer was still on the table.

But why would Hamas settle for a cease-fire that removed the threat of Israeli bombs, but did nothing to relax Israel’s chokehold on its economy?

…Israel has painted itself into a strategic corner – with the enthusiastic support of the Bush administration – by continuing its quest to reverse the choice of the Palestinian electorate in 2006. Even some in the Israeli security establishment recognise that the fundamental flaw in Israel’s policy over Gaza is its refusal to recognise political reality. “The state of Israel must understand that Hamas rule in Gaza is a fact, and it is with that government that we must reach a situation of calm,” Shmuel Zakai, former chief of the Israeli military’s Gaza division, told Israel Army Radio last week. Israel’s error, he said, was in failing to improve the economic situation in Gaza once the truce took hold, and instead maintaining a chokehold that worsened the situation.

…The US-Israeli strategy on Hamas in Gaza has been a spectacular failure because it is fatally flawed (by its inability to relinquish the goal of reversing the results of the 2006 Palestinian election by anti-democratic means). So when, in the coming days, you hear Israeli leaders claiming they “had no choice” but to go to war in Gaza, remember the Vicario brothers of Gabriel Garcia’s novel, who also believed they had no choice. And also remember that Marquez, in his book, blamed the whole town and its anachronistic codes for failing to stop a tragedy that unfolded in slow motion and in plain sight.

Many Israelis are questioning the old fictions about military action being able to solve Israel’s problems. The ever-excellent Tom Segev offers the following:

Israel is striking at the Palestinians to “teach them a lesson.” That is a basic assumption that has accompanied the Zionist enterprise since its inception: We are the representatives of progress and enlightenment, sophisticated rationality and morality, while the Arabs are a primitive, violent rabble, ignorant children who must be educated and taught wisdom - via, of course, the carrot-and-stick method, just as the drover does with his donkey.

The bombing of Gaza is also supposed to “liquidate the Hamas regime,” in line with another assumption that has accompanied the Zionist movement since its inception: that it is possible to impose a “moderate” leadership on the Palestinians, one that will abandon their national aspirations.

As a corollary, Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over.

All of Israel’s wars have been based on yet another assumption that has been with us from the start: that we are only defending ourselves. “Half a million Israelis are under fire,” screamed the banner headline of Sunday’s Yedioth Ahronoth - just as if the Gaza Strip had not been subjected to a lengthy siege that destroyed an entire generation’s chances of living lives worth living.

It is admittedly impossible to live with daily missile fire, even if virtually no place in the world today enjoys a situation of zero terror. But Hamas is not a terrorist organization holding Gaza residents hostage: It is a religious nationalist movement, and a majority of Gaza residents believe in its path. One can certainly attack it, and with Knesset elections in the offing, this attack might even produce some kind of cease-fire. But there is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.

Indeed, soon enough, this bloody mess will end in another cease-fire, having hardly changed the political equation in Gaza at all ( I AGREE )— much to the chagrin of the Bush Administration, the Israeli government and the regimes in Cairo and Ramallah who are quietly cheering Israel’s assault in the hope that it fatally weakens Hamas. That cease-fire will end rocket fire on Israel, but will also likely require the opening of the border crossings into Gaza. If so, that’s an outcome that could have been achieved without the killing of close to 400 people( I AGREE ). And my money says that this cynical show of force by Barak and Tzipi Livni won’t even stop Bibi Netanyahu from winning Israel’s February election. The killing in Gaza, in other words, even by the most cynical measure, has been utterly senseless( I AGREE )."

"However, the UN said that they expect agricultural goods barter to become more common. "

Via Yves Smith on Naked Capitalism:

"From the Financial Times:
Thailand on Monday said it planned to barter rice for oil with Iran in the clearest example to date of how the triple financial, fuel and food crisis is reshaping global trade as countries struggle with high commodity prices and a lack of credit.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation said such government-to-government bartering – a system of trade not used for decades – was likely to become more common as the private sector was finding it hard to access credit for food imports.

“Government-to-government deals will increase in number,” said Concepción Calpe, a senior economist at the FAO in Rome. “The lack of credit for trade could lead also to a resurgence of barter deals between countries,” she added."

What do we call this economy? The nation barter economy? Can it work with anything but one good for another good? How do you price it?