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OLMERT AND THE JACKALS

August 12, 2010 – 10:46 am

On August 30, 2009 an indictment against former prime minister Ehud Olmert was served at the Jerusalem District Court, writes wikipedia. The indictment includes the following counts: obtaining by fraud under aggravating circumstances, fraud, breach of trust, falsifying corporate documents and tax evasion. The indictment refers to three out of the four corruption-related cases standing against him: ‘Rishontours’, ‘Talansky’ (also known as ‘money envelopes’ affair) and the ‘Investment Center’. This is the first indictment of someone who has ever held the office of Israeli Prime Minister. Peace activist Uri Avnery tracks the fall.

I cannot say that I ever liked Ehud Olmert. But now I almost feel sorry for him.

It is not pleasant to see how they pounce on him, like jackals and hyenas fighting over a carcass. And that also raises some questions.

Was Olmert the only fallible human being in this paradise? Not at all. The stories about the envelopes stuffed with cash, the cigars and the luxury suites in posh hotels fire the imagination, but the hedonism of Olmert is no different from that of Binjamin Netanyahu or Ehud Barak. When Barak accuses Olmert, it is like the kettle calling the pot black.

Netanyahu lived like a king in expensive hotels paid for by kind donors who, of course, ask for nothing in return, whose sole purpose in life is to allow him to revel in luxury. As for Barak - after decades of service as an army officer with a salary that did not reach the sky and some years as a cabinet minister with a similar income, he disappeared from public view for a short while and reappeared as a rich man. He bought a luxury apartment in one of the most expensive buildings in Tel Aviv, a structure that is a byword for ostentatious wealth. How does one get so rich in such a short time? Could it be by using connections acquired in the service of the state?

Olmert was a pioneer of this method. When still a very junior politician, just out of law school, he got rich through his connections with the heads of government departments which he made as a parliamentary aide.

The closer the connection between capital and power, and the more contact there is between local and foreign tycoons on the one hand and politicians and generals on the other, the more profusely corruption flowers. This is an almost automatic process.

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What does that say about our politicians? Simply: that none of them is a leader.

A real leader is not just a person with an aim. A leader is a person with one aim and one aim alone. In the best case, that is a positive aim, to which he devotes all his life. In the worst case it is power as such he craves. But in any case, a real leader is totally devoted to the aim he has adopted, and pursues no other - not money, not enjoyment, not a life of luxury.

Such a person was David Ben-Gurion, and such was Menachem Begin. They did not have to decide to live “modest lives” and dispense with luxury - they were just not interested in luxuries, money or the easy life. For them, these things were quite unimportant. From the moment they opened their eyes in the morning until they closed them again at night, nothing interested them but their aim. One can add Yitzhak Rabin to the list.

The priorities of a mere politician are quite different: he wants power in order to enjoy the amenities it brings with it. Power as a means. The amenities of power - money, luxuries, high-class restaurants, prestigious hotels - are the aim.

According to this definition, the entire recent and current crop of politicians - Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weitzman, Shimon Peres, the two Ehuds and Netanyahu - are all just ordinary politicians.

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With Olmert,  the problem is specially severe, because of his personal background.

People ask themselves: What did he need it for? Did he not foresee that in the end everything would become public, that his friends and admirers would abandon him? Was it worthwhile to risk his whole future for a vacation in Italy, expensive cigars, luxury suites in hotels and upgrading his flights?

The closer the connection between capital and power, and the more contact there is between local and foreign tycoons on the one hand and politicians and generals on the other, the more profusely corruption flowers. This is an almost automatic process.

The conditions in which he lived as a child probably had something to do with his behavior as an adult. He grew up in the ’50s in a neighborhood set up by the Herut party for ex-Irgun members in the village of Binyamina near Haifa. It was a poor neighborhood, and the children of the old-established village, which belonged to the political mainstream, looked down upon its inhabitants. Children can be cruel. In those days the Herut Party (today’s Likud) was far from power and the national consensus, their members were still considered “outsiders” who did not belong.

When a person with such a background ascends the political ladder, the possibilities that open up before him are liable to intoxicate him. A world of pampering and pandering is there for the taking. And when an American “exile Jew” - an utterly contemptuous term for Jews abroad - a professional schnorrer, who considers it a great honor to support him, comes and offers him all the goodies, the temptation is just too great.

There is a special angle to the Olmert story. Perhaps because of his childhood feeling of not belonging, he desperately craves Haverim. “Haver” is a typical Hebrew word denoting comrade, friend, pal, army buddy. (Bill Clinton famously ended his eulogy for Rabin with the Hebrew words “Shalom, Haver!”) Olmert needs many Haverim, Haverim all the time. Haverim who adore him, especially intellectuals and/or rich people, who admire and love him.

He loves to pamper his friends, to take them with him whenever he goes on journeys and vacations. He showers them with warmth and charm, slaps their shoulders, devotes time and attention to them. For him that was also of the attractions of power.

One of these friends, the lawyer Uri Messer, is mortified. Not because Messer broke the law. Not because he violated the norms of morality and democracy. But because Messer “ratted” on Olmert to the police. (Messer himself used the word “stinker”, the Israeli equivalent of informer.) Like a schoolboy: one does not squeal to the teacher. He tortures himself. As Messer himself says, he is not a “psycho” but a self-tortured man who betrayed a Haver.

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Another angle to the matter: the relationship between Olmert and Morris Talansky, who supplied him for years with the stuffed envelopes.

Talansky treated him as a slave treats his master. After some time, Olmert started to treat him as a servant. I almost said: as a colonial master treats an inferior native.

This is not unusual. Most Israelis treat the Jews of the Diaspora as if they were colonial subjects, who are obligated to serve and support the aristocrats of the “mother” country. Thinking and speaking about the American Jews, they inadvertently repeat anti-Semitic stereotypes. Talansky suits this stereotype perfectly. Olmert saw him like this, and that is how he saw himself. When Olmert came to America and honored him with his presence before his Jewish neighbors and acquaintances, it raised his status, and for this he was prepared to pay - and pay a lot.

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A question presents itself: Why do these fatal scandals always break when a leader takes a step towards peace, or at least pretends to take a step towards peace?

I do not believe that there is a conspiracy. In general I don’t tend to believe in conspiracies, though there are these, too.

A real leader is totally devoted to the aim he has adopted, and pursues no other - not money, not enjoyment, not a life of luxury.

But we have here, I believe, a more profound phenomenon. The main thrust of the current establishment is towards occupation, expansion and war. Therefore, when a corruption scandal concerns a leader moving in that direction, the scandal is smothered in its infancy. But when the scandal involves a leader who is making gestures in the direction of peace, the scandal reaches huge proportions.

That happened to Sharon on the eve of the dismantling of the Gaza Strip settlements. It is happening now to Olmert when he dares to speak about peace with Syria and the evacuation of the Golan settlements.

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Lord Acton is famous for his dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In the same vein, we say that occupation corrupts, and total occupation corrupts totally.

Ehud Olmert is the typical product of the cynicism and lawlessness that have infected this country in the 41 years of occupation.

That does not mean that there was no corruption before. There certainly was. In my view, the corruption was born together with the state, and not by accident. A lot has been said about the Naqba on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary. But one phenomenon that accompanied the Naqba is consistently ignored: the massive theft of abandoned Arab property.

In the course of the 1948 flight and expulsion, some 100,000 to 150,000 Arab families abandoned their homes. Most of them lived in simple dwellings, but not a few were living in elegant houses in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Haifa. What happened to the interior of these homes? To the tens of thousands of expensive carpets, fauteuils, refrigerators, wardrobes, pianos? Where did the inventories of shops and stores go?

They disappeared.

Some of them did reach government storerooms and were distributed to new immigrants. I have never seen a report on this. The huge majority were just stolen.

Generally, not by the combat soldiers who captured these places. They fought and moved on. But after them came the rear echelon, the transport and quartermaster troops, the cronies of people in power, who came with lorries and trucks and loaded up everything they came across.

That was no secret. We knew and talked about this at the time. For years one could see the sofas and armchairs covered with velvet draping in private living rooms and offices. But the phenomenon was never investigated and, later on, was smothered and suppressed.

I have spoken about this several times in the Knesset. I mentioned the Biblical story of Achan, the son of Carmi, who during the conquest of Jericho violated God’s command not to plunder. As punishment, the Israelites were routed at the next battle. “Israel has sinned, and they have also transgressed my covenant which I commanded them: for they have even taken of the accursed thing, and have also stolen, and dissembled also, and they have put it even among their own stuff.” (Joshua 7:11) Joshua executed Achan and his whole family by stoning. He was for genocide of the Canaanites but against plundering.

The theft in broad daylight of the property abandoned by individuals already violated the ethos that was accepted before the foundation of the state. The denial and suppression made it worse. But the large-scale corruption, whose bitter fruit we see now in all its ugliness, started indeed with the occupation in 1967.

The occupation is corrupt, and it corrupts by its very nature. It denies all human rights, including the right to property. It fills the occupied territories with an atmosphere of general lawlessness. It enriches the occupier and everybody connected with him. It creates a climate of wanton cynicism, an environment of “anything goes”. Such an atmosphere does not stop at the Green Line. It permeates the state of the conqueror.

That’s where the rot set in.

Note: Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch’s book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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ASSAULT AND BATTERY

August 10, 2010 – 4:09 am

Philip Noyce’s Salt is ridiculous, it’s reactionary, it’s over-the-top and, as Critic After Dark Noel Vera says, whaddaya know, it’s a lot of fun.

Philip Noyce’s Salt has many of the virtues something like Christopher Nolan’s Inception lacks - it’s cleanly made; it doesn’t ask to be taken as anything other than what it is, a meat-and-potatoes action flick; it’s amped up not a little by the butt-kicking presence of huge-eyed, prehensile-lipped Angelina Jolie (who I will take over Leonardo DiCaprio in a heartbeat, anytime, anywhere).

Jolie plays Salt, as in Evelyn (not, alas, the Roald Dahl version). She apparently was captured and tortured by the North Koreans (”Give her the spicy kimchi”), eventually traded for one of their own spies (probably boxoffice gold that the United States and Russia just recently made a similar exchange, and with a beautiful spy to boot), suspected of being a Russian double agent, and again trapped, presumably to be interrogated again.

I wouldn’t know what American intelligence agencies use nowadays to persuade their prisoners to talk - Hannah Montana reruns, I suppose, played in an endless loop. The prospect might make one demand a return to the relatively more humane practice of waterboarding or, in Evelyn’s case, drive her to break out of her cell, shoot her way out the building, create radical new traffic patterns in the surrounding roadways, perhaps kill the president of Russia along the way (a top agent assassinating her own president? Only in Russia!).

The whole thing is ludicrous enough to be funny, and I’m not sure the effect was entirely unintended. It’s also hugely reactionary - the Koreans torture Evelyn half-naked (this is actually more disturbing than I suspect it’s meant to be); they are obviously seen as brutal sadists (Not rapists? The film is firmly silent on the matter).

The Russians are worse - paranoid war-mongers who do little else but cultivate deep-cover superspies and plot to provoke the Muslim world into attacking the United States. A key plot point is revealed by (ta-dah!) Fox News, and we’re supposed to take this as gospel truth (it’s the only stretch of logic I have difficulty believing).

But this is Philip Noyce we’re talking about, the director of, among other things, Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and a recent adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (same year); based on all that he’s not one to swallow conservative American political doctrine wholesale (he even injected a subversive undertone into the flag-waving Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994)). Noyce has got to be kidding. Right? Right?

Whatever. The movie’s so cartoonish, the proceedings so lacking in pretension and flag-waving bombast that it’s difficult to take offense; it’s almost like protesting that Road Runner cartoons are too violent (they are, but you have to be nuts to think kids (of the right age, anyway) are in danger of taking them literally). For all we know Salt IS meant to stand for the Road Runner, a near-invulnerable character with no inner psychology (other than what fleeting glimpses we see in giant closeup of Jolie’s gorgeous face) and no intention of being more than an instrument of motion - of violence dealt out with verve and inventiveness.

That said, it’s refreshing - no, more than that, it’s downright invigorating - to see a filmmaker do solid, old-fashioned action filmmaking. Noyce is a veteran, and a fan of clear action sequences with minimum use of the shaky-cam (when he does use it, it’s for brief emphasis, as just one in a wide variety of tools). He doesn’t cut the image to the point of incoherence and when he can, he uses on-camera effects (sure there’s some digital work, but it’s kept in one corner under a strict leash, and not allowed to dominate the proceedings).

Some of his best effects are the simplest, though - a breathless interval when Salt hangs outside a window ledge; or when she’s crouching behind a car, surrounded by hundreds of cops and with nowhere to go; or when a crucial pair of handcuffs is unlocked (or better yet used, with startling effectiveness). Sometimes it’s the still moments and not the violent ones that have your pulse racing the fastest.

Funny but it took five years and two Batman movies for Nolan to learn to slow the action down, to use editing precisely and not incomprehensibly, to refrain from shaking the camera like a baby rattle, in the mistaken assumption that the audience would find the gesture more exciting. Noyce has been directing movies since Nolan was in grade school, and you can see his long experience in the way he shapes and stages his action - no fuss, not a lot of lingering (just the occasional slow motion to allow you to follow what’s happening), and enough real-time thrills to fill half a dozen lesser action flicks.

Noyce doesn’t need multiple dream levels or teams of specialists or elaborate metaphysical conundrums to make his film interesting (even the plot, twisty as it is, reveals itself to have an elegant simplicity when it’s fully unfolded). He serves the action straight, no ice, no chaser; you can feel it burning as it goes down the throat.

Note: First published in Businessworld, July 29, 2010. You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@hotmail.com.

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BUFFETT, GATES, ROCKEFELLER AND THE CONSCIENCE OF THE VERY, VERY RICH

August 7, 2010 – 4:03 am

So Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and the “Great Givers” club are giving handouts to… well, details are sketchy says New York journalist Carl Ginsburg. What is not sketchy is the wealth of detail on how these “Great Givers” earned their wealth. Let’s just say, it ain’t fair.

Of all the farcical notions put forth during this time of high farce, casting America as “broke” places way up there on the list, as trillions of dollars are being stockpiled in the face of a national downsizing and its attendant growth in misery. Here we sit, a captive national audience to the president’s seemingly daily farce, “We are all in this together”.

Instances of hoarding in U.S. history are many, but the current example stands out for its enduring quality, as Congress reaches deep into corporate pockets, with occasional forays into legislation of the extreme incremental variety. Profits are up 41 per cent since Obama’s election; yet half of American workers have suffered a job loss or a cut in hours or wages over the past 30 months - hardly the recipe for togetherness.

More farce: that irresponsibility is the root of poverty, a stalwart theme in American political theater, with the latest reminder from Treasury Secretary Geithner in a New York Times op-ed this month, saluting Americans for “saving more” and “borrowing more responsibly”. These instructions from the government’s top economic point man were imparted in the face of continued wage stagnation, high foreclosure rates and new forms of financial foolery.

Now enter stage left: the “Great Givers”, they come in the form of American billionaires proposing to give away half their wealth. Beware strangers bearing gifts.

The billionaire pledge - a broadside of noblesse oblige - was formulated by none other than two of the planet’s leading mega-billionaires, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. These two American moneybags are imploring fellow prophets of profit to address global suffering by earmarking not less than 50 per cent of personal wealth for charity. First discussed at a dinner in May 2009, the specifics are just now surfacing thanks to Carol J. Loomis in the June 16 issue of Fortune.

According to Loomis, Buffett and Gates, who share a commitment to charity and to the Democratic Party, summoned a group of billionaires to dinner in New York City. David Rockefeller - whose granddad cornered the market in kerosene, then gasoline - played host and invited this billionaire boys club to share their calling. Two subsequent dinners were held, expanding the group invited to take the plunge to about thirty. Areas of charitable concern shared by America’s very richest, Loomis says, include “education, culture, hospitals and health, the environment, public policy, the poor generally.” Generally.

Details are scarce because participating billionaires were promised privacy - privacy being a constitutional commitment to enormous wealth. One detail that did get out was the name Buffett assigned his file on this new initiative: “Great Givers”.

It would appear that the ability to give greatly stops at the factory door. Buffett’s billions, for example, include holdings in Wal-Mart, a company fresh from victory in Chicago where, after years of resistance by community forces, construction of its first mega-store was just given a green light. Times as they are, with “jobless recovery” taken to new heights and millions looking for work, Wal-Mart offered a wage of US$8.75 per hour to seal the deal. The amount Wal-Mart agreed to pony up is 50 cents over the Illinois minimum; still, at under $20,000 per year gross, no one would argue that it constitutes a living wage. Such are the elements of Great Giving.

Buffett’s profits are not tied exclusively to low wages stateside; his Wal-Mart earnings are a result of paying the lowest garment wages in the world, according to labor rights advocates. Wal-Mart has started moving some of its garment factories out of China, where garment workers have been making the princely sum of $147 per month, to Bangladesh, where monthly earnings total $64, the lowest wage of its kind. In this world of farce these wages are linked to Bangladesh’s low literacy rate - 55 per cent. Had workers only acquired educations, the master thespians of farce would say, wages would be higher.

Areas of charitable concern shared by America’s very richest, Fortune’s Carol J. Loomis says, include “education, culture, hospitals and health, the environment, public policy, the poor generally.” Generally.

It’s not fair, however, to solely tie Buffett’s billions to uneducated Bangladeshis.

This Great Giver also bought a stake in Goldman Sachs and its Ivy-educated money managers, doing his part to rescue the financial system by transferring $5 billion to America’s gilded investment bank (in exchange for a 10 per cent per annum return). Yes, this is the same Goldman that last month admitted “a mistake” in selling subprime mortgage bonds destined to collapse; the same Goldman that set aside $9.3 billion the first half of this year for salary and bonuses; and, yes, the same Goldman that orchestrated speculation in the world wheat crop with disastrous results, according to Frederick Kaufman’s cover story in the July issue of Harper’s, “The Food Bubble.”

Undoubtedly, Buffett’s due diligence uncovered the following when sizing up the Goldman investment:

“The history of food took an ominous turn in 1991, at a time when no one was paying much attention. That was the year Goldman Sachs decided our daily bread might make an excellent investment… [W]ith accustomed care and precision, Goldman’s analysts went about transforming food into a concept. They selected eighteen commodifiable ingredients and contrived a financial elixir that included cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs, and a variety or two of wheat… They weighted the investment value of each element… that could be expressed as single manifestation, to be known thenceforward as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index…

“Since Goldman’s innovation, hundreds of billions of new dollars had overwhelmed the actual supply of and actual demand for wheat…

“In 2008, for the first time since such statistics have been kept, the proportion of the world’s population without enough to eat ratcheted upward. The ranks of the hungry had increased in a single year, the most abysmal increase in all of human history.”
(pp. 27-28)

Clarifying what the Great Giver Buffett means by the poor generally.

Buffett’s Goldman investment remains solid, as the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) fined Goldman for its “mistake” what amounted to little more than petty cash - $550 million. It was, according to finance professor Charles Geisst, “like passing around the church collection plate and collecting a few extra bucks for sins.” Geisst summed it up this way: “This is unlikely to change much at all. I think it will be business as usual right away.” More money for Buffett to give greatly.

Warren Buffett’s fellow Giver of Great Gifts, Bill Gates, has diversified his holdings as well. But his tens of billions result chiefly from the company he co-founded and led for decades, Microsoft, where profits remain very strong. “Microsoft Still Earnings Powerhouse,” barked the headline in USA Today, July 23, 2010. In its fledgling years, profits on Gates’ software were reportedly 70 per cent annually. Otherwise, after all, you don’t make upwards of $50 billion charging cost plus 5 per cent.

Current returns for this scion of the responsible class were reported at 48 per cent, as Windows 7, the latest software batch out of Microsoft, led the company’s product pack. “It certainly shows that Office and Windows franchises are as strong as ever and delivering huge revenue,” analyst Brendan Barnicle told the Wall Street Journal recently. Indeed, annual sales have hit new records year after year, tripling to $62.5 billion in fiscal 2010. Net income for Gates’ Microsoft grew from $9.4 billion per year a decade ago to $24.1 billion this year.

Another way to gauge Gates’s billions is by catching a glimpse of the multitudes of students priced out of the computer market - thanks in part to that Great Giver’s expensive software - lined up daily at community college libraries for some free access to computers, each machine an expression of Gates’ creative commitment to profit in the +40 per cent range - a gift Gates gave himself that keeps on giving. As Gates told Fortune: “The diversity of American giving is part of its beauty.”

Note: Carl Ginsburg is a journalist in New York City. He can be reached at carlginsburg@gmail.com. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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THE PRICE OF BEING WORLD CLASS

August 5, 2010 – 10:27 am

The Commonwealth Games in October has Delhi going through massive construction and beautification. The aim may be “the best Games village in the world” but as Assistant Professor Mitu Sengupta points out, amidst questions of child labor violations, the renovations may turn out to be a giant subsidy to tourists and the rich at the expense of the poor.

Delhi is an anxious city this monsoon season, struggling to meet an onerous deadline. Preparations are on at a feverish pace for the 19th Commonwealth Games, which will bear down upon town in about two months (October 3-14), along with tens of thousands of tourists, television cameras and some 8,500 athletes from the 71 states and territories that were once parts of the British Empire.

Around-the-clock construction amid spells of heavy rain has turned Delhi into a swirl of mud and scaffolding. But the city’s frustrated residents expect that their upturned streets and impassable traffic jams will soon give way to something spectacular. On the horizon, or so they’ve been told hundreds of times, is the transformation of India’s congested national capital into a ‘world class city,’ worthy not only of hosting this high-prestige sporting event, but of India’s growing reputation as a major global power.

This hubris-laden dream is a familiar one. There is a tradition of using ‘urban spectacles’ such as the Olympics and World’s Fairs to enhance a city’s global recognition, image and status, and to push through controversial policy reforms that might otherwise linger in the pending file for years (it is easier to undercut local opposition under the pressure of a fixed deadline and the international spotlight).

All too often, however, the reforms involved center on a privatization of public assets, and are the invention of an affluent, globally connected minority that is relatively detached from local conditions and the local population. The 2010 Commonwealth Games (CWG) in Delhi, a case in point, are being employed to invigorate an elite-driven program of major urban change.

Among the changes specific to the CWG is an extravagant renovation of existing sports venues - Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, overhauled by a German engineering firm, now resembles a mammoth spacecraft - and the construction of a ‘Games Village’ along the river Yamuna, which the President of the Indian Olympic Association assures will be “the best Games village in the world, perhaps better than the Olympic village at Beijing.”

The 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi are being employed to invigorate an elite-driven program of major urban change.

Other ‘world class’ items to be paraded at the event include new arenas for tennis, wrestling and ‘big bore’ shooting. As pointed out in a recent Times of India editorial, these high-end facilities are products of Western or Dubai-based conglomerates from “conception to realization.” Following the event, many shall be turned into profit-making ventures to be managed by private companies, and apartments at the Games Village will be sold to private buyers, a decision that provoked considerable public outrage when MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly) associated with the Delhi State government demanded them at discounted rates.

Though hard to believe at present, given Delhi’s rubble-strewn streets and debris-clogged drainpipes, a much grander program of ‘urban regeneration’ is in the works. The city is slated for a magnificent makeover; one that will transform it into a “classy metropolis.” Delhi will get wider roads, higher bridges, clover-leaf flyovers, bus corridors, and an expanded subway network. A flashy new airport terminal, cited as the eighth largest in the world, is among the few projects actually completed.

With the population of the city expected to swell to 23 million by 2021, such projects may seem reasonable, especially if all the money goes where it should. But even if corruption were (miraculously) not a factor, the renovations underway may turn out to be a giant subsidy to tourists and the rich at the expense of local collective consumption by the poor.

Delhi Metro stands criticized for catering to the middle classes rather than the masses, and the new, brilliantly-lit Terminal 3 at Indira Gandhi International Airport looms over a dusty, slum-peppered landscape like a quintessential ‘monument to vanity.’ The Games Village - a dense cluster of high rise buildings - was protested on the grounds that the allocated land is ecologically fragile and that construction would lead to the eviction of hundreds of vulnerable families (the Supreme Court duly overruled such objections).

Indeed, Delhi’s priorities are more plainly laid bare by other aspects of ‘beautification,’ such as bamboo screens to hide slums, and landscaping projects for the prosperous, leafy residential colonies that surround the main sites of the Games.

The Home Ministry, Ministry of Sports and Delhi Police have also developed a security agenda that will leave a lasting imprint on the city. The ‘basics’ include a 14-foot fence around the main stadium, along with food tasters, helicopter surveillance, armed guards and snipers to protect athletes and their families (Scotland Yard is reportedly working with Delhi Police to protect British athletes).

Following the event, many shall be turned into profit-making ventures to be managed by private companies, and apartments at the Games Village will be sold to private buyers, a decision that provoked considerable public outrage when MLAs (Members of the Legislative Assembly) associated with the Delhi State government demanded them at discounted rates.

Before the Games, 58 important markets and 27 border checkpoints across Delhi will be secured with CCTV cameras; an automated fingerprint and palm identification system, the first for the country, will be installed at 135 police stations, and a high-tech ‘intelligent traffic management system,’ equipped with radars, will be installed in core areas of the city. Behavioral changes are also expected. The Indian Home Minister has instructed Delhiites to adopt manners that befit residents of “an international city.” Their gratitude will no doubt be demanded as they are scanned, probed and frisked.

The cost of this massive transformation is staggering. The budget for the CWG has ballooned from an initial outlay of INR 1,899 crore (US$440 million) in 2003 to an official figure of INR 11,000 crore (US$2.5 billion), an estimate that excludes the price of non-sports-related infrastructure development (such as the extension of Delhi Metro), which will be borne by the Delhi Government. Unofficial estimates are much higher.

According to a report by the Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) - an arm of the global movement, Habitat International Coalition - the total expenditure on infrastructure, beautification projects and security is unknown, but is likely to be in the “hundreds of crores.” It suggests that the CWG is “likely to create a negative financial legacy for the nation, the effects of which are already visible in the form of higher cost of living and taxes for Delhi residents,” and argues that such outrageous spending for a 12-day event is “hard to justify in a country that has glaringly high levels of poverty, hunger, inequality, homelessness and malnutrition.”

The report concludes that “from the time of the bid to the continuous colossal escalation in the total budget [the CWG] has been characterized by a lack of public participation, transparency and government accountability.”

The HRLN has also brought to light some of the worrying social and environmental consequences of the event. A Right to Information (RTI) application filed specifically for the HLRN study has uncovered a torrent of disturbing information. Delhi has announced “no tolerance zones” for ‘beggars’ and is arbitrarily detaining homeless citizens under the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act 1959, an archaic law that was imported to Delhi in 1960.

Funds reserved for helping marginalized communities (under the Scheduled Caste Sub Plan) are reportedly being diverted to cover expenses related to the CWG. Over 100,000 families have already been evicted in order to make space for CWG-related projects, and a further 30,000 to 40,000 are on the cusp of ‘relocation,’ a euphemism for shunting the poor to the remote peripheries of the city, where they face grueling commutes to work and disrupted schooling for their children.

The cost of this massive transformation is staggering. The budget for the Commonwealth Games has ballooned from an initial outlay of INR 1,899 crore (US$440 million) in 2003 to an official figure of INR 11,000 crore (US$2.5 billion). Unofficial estimates are much higher.

Groups such as the Peoples’ Union for Democratic Rights and the Commonwealth Games Citizens for Workers, Women and Children have also drawn attention to the use of child labor at CWG construction sites, and a whole array of barefaced labor violations.

As a consequence of the construction boom sparked by the CWG, some one million migrant workers have poured into Delhi from neighboring areas in Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, which are among the poorest in the country, if not the world. Most work without proper documentation for labor contractors for less than Delhi’s minimum wage of INR 152 (USD 3) per eight hours work, and live in squalid, makeshift roadside camps that lack even the most basic amenities. Eighteen on-site injuries and 42 deaths have been officially reported.

The arrogant misallocation of resources, labor violations and privatization and securitization of public space associated with the CWG are by no means unique moments in Delhi’s recent history. Since the early 1990s, when India embarked on a program of radical economic liberalization, middle class ‘citizens groups,’ drawn mainly from India’s new managerial and technocratic classes, have launched aggressive campaigns to ‘cleanse’ cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata of ‘encroachers’ and ‘polluters.’ Slumdwellers, street vendors and rickshaw pullers have been consistently targeted, along with the destitute and homeless.

The demand for a safe and pristine bourgeois utopia - often framed in the language of a ‘public need’ for sanitation, security and environmental protection - has found mounting support among city officials and the judiciary. The ‘beautification’ of freshly ‘cleaned-up’ promenades, parks, beaches and waterfronts has been undertaken with financial support from the corporate sector, with private security firms awarded contracts for the surveillance of freshly ‘cleaned up’ public spaces. The city, as Christiane Brosius suggests in a perceptive book on India’s ‘new middle class,’ is increasingly “following the patterns of a multinational corporation.”

The CWG will thus strengthen a model of inequitable urban change that is well underway in Delhi and other Indian cities; a program driven by the rather fascistic vision of an affluent minority who would rather not be reminded that 77 per cent of the India’s population live on less than INR 20 (US 50 cents) a day, and that more than half the country is engulfed by deadly insurgency. The lure of national prestige, an immovable deadline and, as of late, the urgency of avoiding national embarrassment, have proved good means to undermine the many independent activists and urban social movements that routinely resist this agenda.

Note: Mitu Sengupta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. She may be reached at: mitu.sengupta@gmail.com. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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BLOOD BATH

August 3, 2010 – 4:07 am

In Koji Kawano’s The Girls Rebel Force Of Competitive Swimmers (2007), a virus ravages a school and it’s only the school pool that will prevent everyone from turning into flesh-eating zombies. Stephen Tan reviews.

It’s the first day of school for just-transferred Aki and the school is down with a strong case of viral infection. A team of medical staff is injecting the staff and students with an anti-viral drug but Aki and her newfound friend, Sayaka, decide to give the jabs a miss.

Masterminded by a mad doctor, the injections turn the students and teachers into flesh-eating zombies. A maths teacher goes berserk in the classroom and chops off the heads and limbs of his students. Another teacher, who seems to have developed a taste for human brains and entrails, uses her womanly charms to lure the school principal. Meanwhile, the zombie students are tearing each other apart.

However, Sayaka and members of her swimming team do not seem affected by the virus. When a team member, who was down with flu and hasn’t gone into the pool, turns into a zombie, Aki reasons that the school’s swimming pool holds a key to the mystery. After killing off some zombie students, Aki and the team make for the pool but are confronted by the maths teacher.

Aki holds off the maths teacher while the others get away. She is injured before despatching off the maths teacher and Sayaka stays behind to care for her. Alone together, Aki tells Sayaka that she was an orphan who was adopted by the mad doctor who turned her into a fighting machine for the highest bidder. Fed up with what she has become, Aki decided to escape, hopefully, to a better life.

Sayaka then tells Aki that she has a sister who was separated when young and thinks Aki is her long lost sister because they have similar moles on their bodies. But the idea that they could be sisters did not stop them from having sex. Well, at least it did not stop Sayaka from fondling and fingering Aki and the two ended up kissing each other.

Refreshed from their rest, they meet the other team members at the pool only to find another zombie there. Using a pail of pool water, they drench the girl which, Aki theorises, kills off the virus. Just as the girl regains her sanity, she is cut down by a zombie-teacher with a chainsaw. The pool water doesn’t work on the teacher (as she has received a much stronger dose of injection) but the girls manage to subdue and chain her up.

However, someone cuts her loose and she easily kills off the members of swimming team (excepting Sayaka) before Aki drives a knife into the zombie’s head. Aki then heads off to look for the mad doctor who she thinks is behind the infestation.

Koji Kawano’s The Girls Rebel Force Of Competitive Swimmers (2007) is sure a mouthful for a title though the film has also been known as Attack Girls Swim Team vs the Unliving Dead; Attack Girls’ Swim Team Versus the Undead; Inglorious Zombie Hunters and Undead Pool. But let’s not kid ourselves. This is not a movie like the new BBC reimagining of Sherlock Holmes where you tick off - a) Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street; b) has a landlady called Mrs Hudson; c) a clever brother, Mycroft, who works for the government; d) a policeman called Lestrade and e) Moriarty, the archenemy.

The Girls Rebel Force Of Competitive Swimmers or Girls Rebel Force (in short) has Sasa Handa who has an attractive pair of breasts and it’s the job of the film to show her off in as many topless scenes as possible. So we have Aki taking a shower; Aki being fondled by Sayaka; Aki being imprisoned and having sex with the mad doctor and, the money shot in the film, a nude Aki in the finale firing off a laser shot at the mad doctor from her vagina. And, as an afterthought, there is a blood-drenched Aki in the pool.

To director Kawano and screenwriter Satoshi Owada’s credit, there is an attempt to present a semblance of a story but it’s just an excuse to hang everything loosely together. A virus breaks out in a school and there is no talk of containment; students are still preparing for a swimming competition (like SARS never happened); and as a Japanese Nikita, Aki isn’t very deadly nor strong nor smart. On the other hand, setting Sayaka up as a “spy” is a nice touch and giving the mad doctor an equally mad twin brother is quite novel by which time it’s the end of the reel and there’s no one there to run with that subplot.

Still, that leaves quite a good bit of bloodletting that will not disappoint gore fans. There is that English-speaking zombie teacher who is quite handy with the chainsaw and would rather drape human entrails round her neck. And those who cringe at the toe-cutting scene in The Final (2010) will probably barf at the sound of the teacher sniping off the school principal’s toes. Then there is the maths teacher who turns his iron rulers into twin blades of doom. This is comical, strictly Evil Dead territory and it works.

But then, the mantra behind the film is probaby the same for films of similar ilk: if you show it, they will come. And no one here is talking of any fields of dreams.

Note: The Girls Rebel Force Of Competitive Swimmers DVD (CN Entertainment) is banned in $ingapore.

Click here for more reviews.

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DO DISCLOSURES OF ATROCITIES CHANGE ANYTHING?

July 31, 2010 – 5:31 pm

The aim of the Wikileaks may be to end the war in Afghanistan but as history shows, such disclosures might not be as effective as one thinks. But more than that, as CounterPunch editor Alexander Cockburn points out, the importance lies in getting the facts and information out in the open and consigning them at once to the judgment of the world.

The hope of the brave soldier who sent 92,000 secret US documents to Wikileaks was that their disclosure would prompt public revulsion and increasing political pressure on Obama to seek with all speed a diplomatic conclusion to this war. The documents he sent Wikileaks included overwhelming documentary evidence - accepted by all as genuine, of:

- the methodical use of a death squad made up of US Special Forces, known as Task Force 373,
- willful, casual  slaughter of civilians by Coalition personnel, with ensuing cover-ups,
- the utter failure of “counter-insurgency” and “nation building”,
- the venality and corruption of the Coalition’s Afghan allies,
- the complicity of Pakistan’s Intelligence Services with the Taliban.

Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, skillfully arranged simultaneous publication of the secret material in the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel.

The story broke on the eve of a war-funding vote in the US Congress. Thirty-six hours after the stories hit the news stands, the US House of Representatives last Tuesday evening voted Aye to a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a US$33-billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114. To be sure, more US Reps voted against escalation than a year ago when the Noes totted up to only 35. That’s a crumb of comfort, but the cruel truth is that in 24 hours the White House, Pentagon, with the help of  licensed members of the Commentariat and influential papers like the Washington Post, had finessed the salvoes from Wikileaks.

“WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war” was the Washington Post’s Tuesday morning headline. Beneath this headline the news story said the leaks had been discussed for only 90 seconds at a meeting of senior commanders in the Pentagon.

The story cited “senior officials” in the White House even brazenly claiming that that it was precisely his reading of these same raw secret intelligence reports a year ago that prompted Obama “to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.” (As in: “Get that death squad operating more efficiently” - an order enacted  by Obama’s appointment of General McChrystal as his Afghan commander, elevated from his previous job as top US Death Squad general in charge of the Pentagon’s world-wide operations in this area.)

DEFINE TERRORIST?
There are logs showing that Task Force 373 simply killed their targets without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

There’s some truth in the claim that long before Wikileaks released the 92,000 files the overall rottenness and futility of the Afghan war had been graphically reported in the press. Earlier this year, for example, reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London blew apart the US military’s cover-up story after Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February 2010 raid, in which two Afghan government officials were also killed.

It’s oversell to describe the Wikileaks package as a latterday Pentagon Papers. But it’s undersell to dismiss them as “old stories” as disingenuous detractors have been doing. The Wikileaks files are a damning series of snapshots of a disastrous and criminal enterprise.

In the Wikileaks files there is a compelling series of secret documents about the death squad operated by the US military known as Task Force 373, an undisclosed “black” unit of special forces, which has been hunting down targets for death or detention without trial. From Wikileaks for the first time we learn that more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a “kill or capture” list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritized effects list.

There are logs showing that Task Force 373 simply killed their targets without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

One could watch Assange being interviewed on US news programs where he would raise the fact that the US military has been - is still - running a death squad along the model of the Phoenix Program, his  interviewers simply changed the subject. Liberal gate-keepers complained that the Wikileaks documents were raw files, unmediated by responsible imperial journalists such as themselves. This echoed the usual ritual whines from the Pentagon about the untimely disclosures of “sources and methods”.

The bitter truth is that wars are not often ended by disclosures of their horrors and futility in the press, with consequent public uproar.

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the U.S. war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met.

Disclosures from the mid-1950s that the French were torturing Algerians amid the war of independence were numerous. Henri Alleg’s famous 1958 account of his torture, La Question, sold 60,000 copies in a single day. Torture duly became more pervasive, and the war more savage, under the supervision of a nominally Socialist French government.

After Ron Ridenhour and then Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre in 1968 in Vietnam with over 500 men, women and babies methodically, beaten, sexually abused, tortured and then murdered by American GIs - a tactless disclosure of “methods” - there was public revulsion, then an escalation in slaughter. The war ran for another seven years.

It is true, as Noam Chomsky pointed out to me last week, when I asked him for positive examples, that popular protest in the wake of press disclosures “impelled Congress to call off the direct US role in the grotesque bombing of rural Cambodia. Similarly in the late ’70s, under popular pressure Congress barred Carter, later Reagan, from direct participation in virtual genocide in the Guatemalan highlands, so the Pentagon had to evade legislation in devious ways and Reagan had to call in terrorist states, primarily Israel, to carry out the massacres.”

Even though New York Times editors edited out the word “indiscriminate” from Thomas Friedman’s news report of Israel’s bombing of Beirut in 1982, TV news footage from Lebanon prompted President Reagan to order Israeli prime minister Begin to stop, and he did. (On one account, which I tend to believe,  the late Michael Deaver, was watching live footage of the bombing in his White House office and went to Reagan, saying “This is disgusting and you should stop it.”)

This happened again when Peres’s forces bombed the UN compound in Qana in 2006, causing much international outrage, and Clinton ordered it ended. There was a repeat once more in 2006, with another bombing of Qana that aroused a lot of international protest. But as Chomsky concludes in his note to me, “I think one will find very few such examples, and almost none in the case of really major war crimes.”

So one can conclude pessimistically that exposure of war crimes, torture and so forth, often leads to  intensification of the atrocities, with government and influential newspapers and commentators  supervising a kind of hardening process. “Yes, this - murder, torture, wholesale slaughter of civilians - is indeed what it takes.” Even though this pattern is long-standing, it often comes as a great surprise. A friend of mine was at a dinner with the CBS news producers, shortly before they broke the Abu Ghraib tortures. Almost everyone at the table thought that Bush might well be impeached.

“The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation… The Press lives by disclosures… For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences - to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”
- Robert Lowe, 1851

The important constituency here is liberals, who duly rise to the challenge of unpleasant disclosures of imperial crimes. In the wake of scandals such as those revealed at Abu Ghraib, or in the Wikileaks files, they are particularly eager to proclaim that they “can take it” - i.e., endure convincing accounts of monstrous tortures, targeted assassinations by US forces, obliteration of wedding parties or entire villages, and emerge with ringing affirmations of the fundamental overall morality of the imperial enterprise.

This was very common in the Vietnam war and repeated in subsequent imperial ventures such as the sanctions and ensuing attack on Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. Of course in the case of Israel it’s an entire way of life for a handsome slice of America’s liberals.

What does end wars? One side is annihilated, the money runs out, the troops mutiny, the government falls, or fears it will. With the US war in Afghanistan none of these conditions has yet been met. The US began the destruction of Afghanistan in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinksi started financing the mullahs and warlords in the largest and most expensive operation in the CIA’s history until that time.

Here we are, more than three decades later, half buried under a mountain of horrifying news stories about a destroyed land of desolate savagery and what did one hear on many news commentaries earlier this week? Indignant bleats often by liberals, about Wikileaks’ “irresponsibility” in releasing the documents; twitchy questions such as that asked by The Nation’s Chris Hayes on the Rachel Maddow Show: “I wonder ultimately to whom WikiLeaks ends up being accountable.”

The answer to that last question was given definitively in 1851 by Robert Lowe, editorial writer for the London Times. He had been instructed by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.”

“The first duty of the press,” Lowe wrote, “is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation… The Press lives by disclosures… For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences - to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.”

Note: Alexander Cockburn (together with Jeffrey St Clair) edits CounterPunch. The veteran political journalist also writes the “Beat the Devil” column for The Nation and a weekly syndicated column for the Los Angeles Times as well as for The First Post, which is syndicated by Creators Syndicate. He can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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U.S. TREASURY IS RUNNING ON FUMES

July 31, 2010 – 4:09 am

The Obama regime has made war the business of America but as Paul Craig Roberts points out, it is these wars that are bankrupting America. The US economy and the well-being of Americans are being sacrificed to the regime’s wars.

The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”

What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.

Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.

And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.

If Obama cared about the lives of our soldiers, he would not have sent them to a war, the purpose of which he cannot identify. Earlier in his regime, Obama admitted that he did not know what the mission was in Afghanistan. He vowed to find out what the mission was and to tell us, but he never did. After being read the riot act by the military/security complex, which recycles war profits into political campaign contributions, Obama simply declared the war to be “necessary.” No one has ever explained why the war is necessary.

If Obama cared about the lives of our soldiers, he would not have sent them to a war [in Afghanistan], the purpose of which he cannot identify.

The government cannot explain why the war is necessary, because it is not necessary to the American people. Any necessary reason for the war has to do with the enrichment of narrow private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were declared and the private interests being served identified, even the American sheeple might revolt.

The Obama regime has made war the business of America. Escalation in Afghanistan has gone hand in hand with drone attacks on Pakistan and the use of proxy forces to conduct wars in Pakistan and North Africa. Currently, the US is conducting provocative naval exercises off the coasts of China and North Korea and instigating war between Columbia and Venezuela in South America. Former CIA director Michael Hayden declared on July 25 that an attack on Iran seems unavoidable.

With the print and TV media captive, why doesn’t Washington simply tell us that the country is at war without going to the trouble of war? That way the munitions industry can lay off its workers and put the military appropriations directly into profits. We could avoid the war crimes and wasted lives of our soldiers.

The US economy and the well-being of Americans are being sacrificed to the regime’s wars. The states are broke and laying off teachers. Even “rich” California, formerly touted as “the seventh largest economy in the world,” is reduced to issuing script and cutting its state workers’ pay to the minimum wage.

Supplemental war appropriations have become routine affairs, but the budget deficit is invoked to block any aid to Americans - but not to Israel. On July 25 the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported that the US and Israel had signed a multi-billion dollar deal for Boeing to provide Israel with a missile system.

Any necessary reason for the war [in Afghanistan] has to do with the enrichment of narrow private interests and with undeclared agendas. If the agendas were declared and the private interests being served identified, even the American sheeple might revolt.

Americans can get no help out of Washington, but the US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, declared that Washington’s commitment to Israel’s security is “not negotiable.” Washington’s commitment to California and to the security of the rest of us is negotiable. War spending has run up the budget deficit, and the deficit precludes any help for Americans.

With the US bankrupting itself in wars, America’s largest creditor, China, has taken issue with America’s credit rating. The head of China’s largest credit rating agency declared: “The US is insolvent and faces bankruptcy as a pure debtor nation.”

On July 12, Niall Ferguson, an historian of empire, warned that the American empire could collapse suddenly from weakness brought on by its massive debts and that such a collapse could be closer than we think.

Deaf, dumb, and blind, Washington policymakers prattle on about “thirty more years of war.”

Note: Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, How The Economy Was Lost, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com. The above article was posted at CounterPunch.

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SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY

July 29, 2010 – 10:43 am

Jewish racism knows no boundaries. Though many people of many ethnic origins live between the river and the sea, the Jewish State is not exactly a multi- cultural society. The Israeli legal system is racist to the bone; it is a true mirror of Jewish supremacy and Talmudic tribalism. In the article below, The Guardian continues to follow the astonishing story of Saber Kushour, a young Palestinian man who was convicted of rape after having consensual sex with a Jewish Israeli woman who had believed him to be a fellow Jew. Introduction by jazz musician and writer Gilad Atzmon.

Saber Kushour apologises as he asks his guests to move the plastic chairs on his breeze-block balcony a little closer to the door to his house. If he were to sit where they are now, he explains, the electronic tag attached to his ankle would set off an alarm.

Kushour’s edginess is understandable - he is recalling a 15-minute encounter almost two years ago which he says “has destroyed my life”.

Last week the married father of two from east Jerusalem was sentenced to 18 months in jail for the “rape by deception” of a Jewish woman who claimed she would not have had sex with him had she known he was an Arab. What might have been a tawdry episode - casting neither Kushour nor the woman in a favourable light - exploded into a debate in Israel about racism, sexual mores and justice.

“I am paying the price for a mistake that she made,” Kushour, 30, told the Observer. “I was shocked at the sentence - it shows a very vivid and clear racism.” The message from the judge, he says, was that “because you are an Arab and you didn’t make that clear, we are going to punish you”.

In his verdict, Judge Zvi Segal conceded that it was not “a classical rape by force”. He added: “If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated. The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls.”

At his home in Sharafat, where he is confined while awaiting an appeal, Kushour tells a different story. The woman has not been identified and has not gone public with her account.

Kushour was buying cigarettes in September 2008 when an unexpected opportunity presented itself for a casual sexual encounter. “Any person in my shoes would have done the same thing,” he says.

A woman in her 20s struck up a conversation as he left the shop to return to his job delivering legal papers around Jerusalem by scooter. “She said ‘you have a nice bike’ and other things which I don’t remember.” Within minutes, he says, he realised that her interest was not confined to small talk.

Kushour speaks fluent, unaccented Hebrew, as do many Palestinians living and working in Jerusalem. The woman asked his name and Kushour replied “Dudu” - a common Israeli name. “Since I was a kid everyone calls me Dudu - even my wife calls me Dudu. It’s a nickname.” At no point, he says, did the woman - who gave her name as Maya - ask if he was Jewish, although he has acknowledged that he said he was single.

The pair went to a small roof area in a nearby office block. “When we were having sex, she was worried that someone would see us, but she never told me to stop. She was more than willing - she initiated it.”

It has been suggested that Kushour presented himself as a bachelor interested in a long-term relationship. If that had been Maya’s concern, Kushour points out, she might have asked him more about his background. After the brief encounter, Kushour tapped Maya’s mobile number into his phone and left. “I didn’t treat her like garbage - this is what she wanted.”

‘My conviction for “rape by deception” has ruined my life’, says Saber Kushour.

Unknown to him, Maya contacted the police after the encounter to lodge a complaint. Kushour says he doesn’t know how or when she realised he was not Jewish. The woman was given a medical examination, presented in court, which showed, according to Kushour, no signs of force or injury.

Six weeks later Kushour was idly flicking through numbers in his mobile’s address book. “I saw ‘Maya’ and I thought ‘who is Maya?’ I had already forgotten about her. I rang the number to see who it was, and then I realised it was the girl. I said ‘Can I see you?’ and we arranged to meet.”

Maya didn’t show up and didn’t respond to Kushour’s calls and texts. But, crucially, she now had a vital piece of information for the pursuit of her complaint - his contact details.

Three days later Kushour received a phone call from the police. “They told me I had a problem and to come to the police station.” He was interrogated for five to six hours, without a lawyer. In the final hour of questioning, the police began to mention a rape claim. Eventually Kushour was handcuffed and taken to a cell.

Over three days the questioning continued. “This was the hardest moment of my entire life,” says Kushour. “I didn’t have a clue what they were going to do.” On the third day, Kushour was taken to court - by this time represented by a lawyer found by his brother - and charged with rape.

He spent the next two months in prison and since then has been electronically tagged and confined to his home. The case came to court last week. His lawyer has told him that, because of the publicity surrounding the case, the appeal may be expedited. In the meantime, says Kushour, “I can’t leave the house, I can’t work, I can’t feed my children.”

Kushour’s conviction has transfixed Israel. Some see echoes of a primeval - and racist - instinct to protect “our” women against outside marauders. Others are outraged at what they see as a blatant injustice, pointing to a backdrop of widespread, systematic and - some say - growing discrimination against Arabs who make up 20 per cent of Israel’s population.

“This is a most amazing decision by the court,” says Tamar Hermann of the Israel Democracy Institute. “Deception is one thing - but to be convicted of rape?” It has, she says, “struck a sensitive chord in the Israeli mainstream of Arabs pretending to be Jews.”

The issue of identity is paramount in a land where both communities regard each other with suspicion and hostility.

Yuval Yonay, a sociology professor at Haifa University, in one of Israel’s few mixed cities, says Kushour’s behaviour “might be improper but it is not rape”. He says that in 16 years of teaching at a university where 20-25 per cent of the student population is Arab, he has “never even heard of a mixed relationship”. Discrimination against Arabs is, he says, evident at all levels.

Some have defended the verdict. “We all have different characteristics, and it is a person’s right to have sexual relations with a person knowing the facts about those characteristics,” Dana Pugach of the Noga Centre for Victims of Crime told the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Kushour says he has had a lot of support over the past week from Israeli Jews. “The problem is not with the people themselves, but those in power,” he says. “I just want justice.”

Whatever the outcome of his appeal, his brief encounter with Maya has turned his life upside down. His relationship with his wife has been severely tested. “I asked her last night to forgive me. She said yes, but I can see the pain and hurt in her eyes.”

Note: Gilad Atzmon was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military. He lives in London, and is the author of two novels: A Guide to the Perplexed and the recently released My One and Only Love. Atzmon is also one of the most accomplished jazz saxophonists in Europe. His latest CD is In Loving Memory of America. Visit Gilad Atzmon at http://www.gilad.co.uk/.

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THE SLEEP OF REASON

July 27, 2010 – 4:15 am

Christopher Nolan’s Inception may be his best film to date but as Critic After Dark Noel Vera says, it’s still a 150-minute house of cards built on the premise of dreaming with little in the picture that has the authentic feel and solidity of real dreams.

It’s okay. Easily the best movie of the summer, though from what I’ve seen so far that’s not saying much. Easily the best thing Nolan’s ever did to date, though from what I’ve seen of his Batman movies, that’s not saying much either.

Plotline bears remarkable similarity to Scorsese’s Shutter Island. Both are overwrought, both strain mightily, both hinge upon Leonardo DiCaprio piercing the elaborate veil of illusion and coming to terms with his private family tragedy.

Plotline also borrows heavily (very heavily) from Philip K. Dick’s remarkable Ubik - down to an elaborate case of industrial espionage involving telepaths and anti-telepaths (Nolan calls them ‘extractors’), and of unsettling, even menacing shifts in reality. Nolan borrows the device of using a commonplace object - in Ubik a coin, in Nolan’s movie a spinning top - to suggest a meta-twist on top of all the other twists.

Nolan’s reached a personal best here. Unlike in the Batman movies, his action sequences here are actually coherent - or at least semi-coherent (he still has trouble with car chases); perhaps the best bit involves Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing both Spiderman and Neo on the walls and ceilings of a hotel hallway - that showed some demented wit. I actually prefer this over The Matrix - the latter was almost all clunky CGI effects, while Nolan’s puzzle-box picture features clean slow-motion footage and on-camera stunts that actually look dangerous.

That’s about as far as this goes: it looks dangerous. Nolan’s constructed a 150-minute house of cards built entirely on the premise of dreaming; for all that, there’s little in the picture that has the authentic feel and, well, solidity of real dreams. Vans may skitter off bridges and elevators drop down shafts and snowbound strongholds go up in flames, but one’s sense of reality is never really threatened, not the way Dick constantly threatens to pull the rug out from under you.

In Ubik, a gritty reality is convincingly presented, a fast-moving plot introduced to capture your attention and whip things along. Unsettling little details show up - milk spoils quickly, technological devices regress to their equivalent in 1939 (a process of devolution, you might say), and the face of one of their associates suddenly starts appearing on coins and on television. It’s a nightmare situation, and the ultimate explanation provided at the end of the book offers little comfort - if anything, only adds to the general sense of paranoia and despair.

Paradoxically, one needs utter realism to sell the fantastic, and Nolan betrays his hand early when he folds an entire city like a taco, then has the veteran extractor (DiCaprio) explain how things work to a neophyte dream architect (a slight and pretty Ellen Page). Dick doesn’t work like that; he throws you into the situation, to sink or swim as best you can.

The movie might have sold its ungainly package if it had style - but that’s Scorsese territory. Nolan manages a handful of striking moments (DiCaprio and Page stepping on and walking up a wall a la Fred Astaire in Royal Wedding; DiCaprio recovering his luggage from the airport carrel, looking around, and realizing that every other face is familiar) but compared to Scorsese he’s strictly a rookie at dream imagery (DiCaprio hugging his wife, who turns into a pillar of crumbling hot coals; a woman mental patient caught pantomiming the drinking of a glass of water; a man carrying children to a lakeside, the man moving backwards, the footage projected forwards), not to mention establishing a sense of menace (DiCaprio’s portentous arrival at the island dock).

All that said, even Scorsese’s intriguingly overdone little thriller pales in comparison to a true Dickian film, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Think Ubik crossed with Behind the Green Door - not easy to find examples of science-fiction pornography. Cronenberg’s masterpiece is one transgressive dream image after another (a man kisses a pair of lips on a TV set, his face sinking into the screen; a vagina-like opening appears in the same man’s abdomen, into which he inserts a videocassette - funny how, of the two primal subconscious drives (violence, sex), Nolan’s dream images contain so much of one, so very little of the other). Compared to Scorsese, Cronenberg and Dick, Nolan’s picture - which heavyweight film critic Roger Ebert calls “wholly original, cut from whole cloth” - starts to look rather threadbare, not to mention secondhand.

There’s been criticism of the criticism that the film’s too linear, too literal and bound by logic. “Of course, it’s literal, it’s meant to be. Those are constructed worlds with rules to them that the heroes are meant to circumvent. Thrillers in general are films where the hero bends or breaks the rule at his peril - that’s the very source of the thrill.”

Good point, though I’d point to films like Michel Gondry and Charles Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the kind of perfeclty valid thriller that doesn’t rely on linear logic, and that Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. - easily one of the greatest and most beautiful films ever made - is not only a first-rate thriller that doesn’t need much linear logic but is wonderfully funny to boot.

Dodo Dayao of Piling Piling Pelikula labels Nolan’s latest a heist film, and I think he does a better job of calling it better than most critics have done so far. I’d consider it an excellent heist film, then, that attempts an extra twist. Problem with Nolan I suppose is that he doesn’t do twists very well - his mind’s too linear (even his breakthrough hit Memento goes backwards in a more or less straightforward fashion). At most, Inception manages a half-twist that lifts it above, say, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean movies.

And even redefining the picture as a heist movie… Jules Dassin’s too great an artist, in my opinion, to just do straight genre. His Rififi is the defining heist film, with the actual crime committed in real time, using almost no dialogue. I submit that when things start to go wrong in the story - when destiny (for which the crew’s intricate plan makes few provisions) start to unravel the crew members’ respective lives, Dassin for no apparent reason (a reaction, maybe, to all the grim realism that came before?) throws in a final drive from the countryside back to Paris that feels very much like a dream, more nightmarish (yet free-floating) than anything in Nolan’s movie.

Even Dassin’s most offhand efforts, it must be said, seem superior to Nolan’s big-budget strainings.

Note: You can also email Noel Vera at noelbotevera@hotmail.com.

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ANOTHER PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM $HEEP CITY

July 22, 2010 – 10:56 am

Click on the graphic to watch the video.

This video, A Girl’s Hope, was made by Think Family, a part of the $ingapore government’s National Family Council. It has been seen on television and cable TV since the middle of July. The reference to YOG, Youth Olympic Games, near the end refers to $ingapore hosting the games from August 14 to 26, 2010. The National Family Council and YOG are under the Ministry for Community Development, Youth and Sports.

We invite readers to give their opinion on what message the video delivers. Click on the graphic above to watch the video. All comments will receive a free pass to unofficial live music.

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