Consider The Ravens

Rachel Corrie

2010-09-28T06:17:00.002+07:00

"Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" -John 15:13 the Bible

ROOT

2010-09-28T04:54:00.001+07:00

The Story of Art In The Age ROOT from Art In The Age on Vimeo.

2010-09-28T04:28:00.004+07:00

Adolph Murie was one of the first scientist to study wolves in their natural habitat.

A Hell Disaster-The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

2009-11-21T00:33:00.007+07:00

Winston Churchill once summarized his views on Palestine succinctly: "a hell-disaster", and of course, his words are echoed by Robert Fisk, who has covered the Middle East for over thrity years, has said the same of the conflict and that is likely what you would call Palestine too: a living hell. Many people argue Israel has the right to defend itself, which is true; however, they defend themselves while oppressing the Palestinains. This is against the law. The Palestinains have no rights of land, their houses are demolished by Israel, and hemmed in by the wall built around the West Bank. Israel has bombed schools and UN refugee camps all in the name of "war on terrorism". Those who feel the brut force of this humanitarian conflict most sorely are civilians, women, and children who are trapped in the middle of one of the longest conflicts of our time. [1]

This humanitarian conflict began in Genesis. God made a covenant with Abraham saying, “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates” which makes up the promised land. This, therefore, to the Jews is their rightful God given land. After this, there was a scattering of many Jews into Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, followed by the terror of World War II, and the unbelievable atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust. Finally, came a new nation: Israel.[2] A new land was given to the survivors that had been in Diaspora for years under the brutal reign of Hitler. But out of one Diaspora came another; and in effect, Israel’s nationhood in 1948, made for a situation in which the Jewish people immigrated to their new land making the Palastinians have to move out. More than 750,000 Palestinian people were displaced. This number was enlarged by the effects of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which means today there are 4.6 million Palestine refugees. According to United Nations, the Palestinian refugee population is the oldest in the world.[3]

This refugee problem is addressed in the book, The Question of Palestine, by Edward W. Said. He presents an argument for the right of Palestinians to their own homeland. Said writes in his book that 7th Century Palestine was predominantly Arab. He also explains that in a 1922 census it showed that 78% of the population was Arab. With this in mind, the creation of Israel in 1948 by the UN created a significant geopolitical problem as these Arabs who were dispersed by pressure and force. Ironically, in 1948, the very same year that these international machinations created the state of Israel, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared everyone has the right to return to his own country, thus giving the Jewish people the right to a home and land, while totally overlooking the Palestinans.The rights of the Palestinians was at that time and until today ignored and denied. [4]

Frustrated by their rights being completely ignored, Hamas leader, Ahmed Abu Halabeya, told a media conference Monday, October 26th 2009, that Palestinian militants are urged 'to carry out holy attacks'. This kind of grassroots response is a norm for groups like Hamas, as they struggle against the national repressive policies of Israel. In exasperation, as is the response of many politically oppressed peoples, the Palestinians launch mortars and sent suicide bombers into downtown Jerusalem. Because of Palestinian attacks, Israel built the wall around the West Bank. Some organizations, such as Christians United for Israel, have said that the wall reduced the number of Palestinian infiltrations and suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians in Israel and in Israeli settlements. Yet the effectiveness and need of the wall meets with mixed reviews. According to Haaretz , an Israeli newspaper, "The security fence is no longer mentioned as the major factor in preventing suicide bombings, mainly because the terrorists have found ways to bypass it."[7] Why have there been less attacks? Perhaps attacks have eased as Hamas has changed its focus towards the politcal arena. Instead of attacking Israel militarily, it has started to make serious steps politcally as its preparations for the Palestinian parliamentary elections have largely replaced its active involvement in terror.

The wall has not only caused a physical separation, but a humanitarian one as well. The U.N Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has clearly stated there is acute malnutrition in Gaza, and it is seen on the same level as some of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa with more than half the families living on less then a meal a day. It has been projected that the poverty rate in Gaza has reached 80% according to the CIA World Fact Book.[8] In the view of the International Court of Justice on this issue, the construction of the wall breaches Israels obligation under the the applicable international humanitarian law and human rights instruments. Israel is told that it needs to repect the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Furthermore, it must ensure freedom of access to the Holy Places that came under its control following the 1967 War. Further, Israel is under an obligation to cease the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem.[13]

The wall has caused the humanitarian crisis to grow; however, another pressing issue is how the people in Gaza are very welcoming to groups like Hamas. Not only are they militant organizations, but they are also the only ones in society meeting pressing social needs. Israel is strategically cutting off critical resources coming in and out of Gaza. The populace is forced well below the poverty level, with people even lacking adequate food to eat, making for a chronic state of hopelessness. This kind of situation creates a fertile breeding place for radical groups to easily recruit and operate in the area. Paul Collier, in The Bottom Billion states, “Young men, who are the recruits for rebel armies, come pretty cheap in an environment of hopeless poverty. Joining a rebel movement gives these young men a small chance of riches."[9]

Again, the combination of care and social services received from political and para-military organizations serves to confuse the humanitarian issues of who is really right or wrong. “When the border is closed, thousands of Palestinians are cut off from paychecks, and the economy reverts to barter, credit and welfare. Much of the latter comes from groups like Hamas, which is widely viewed in the West as a terrorist organization but is seen by Palestinians primarily as a provider of education and health care and the guarantor of a social safety net that includes financial assistance during lean times” (Time: The Middle East: The History, the Conflict, the Culture, the Faiths page 42)[10]

I strongly believe Israel should meet the critical social needs of the people in Gaza, instead of making life unbearable. Then Hamas will not be needed as a organization, neither to attack Israel or to keep food on the tables of Gaza.

The social needs are many, but another issue unresolved is the number of Israelis who have been killed in dozens of suicide bombings carried out by Hamas, especially since the start of the Palestinian uprising against Tel Aviv in September 2000. This is nothing compared to the destruction that took place in "Operation Cast Lead” which was an offensive by the Israeli army in December, 2008 for twenty-two days. According to a report by Amnesty International called “22 Days of Death and Destruction” that shed light on the injustice that went on during that single twenty-two day attack. They gave a modist overall figure of some 1,400 fatalities, in addition to some 300 children, 115 women, and 85 men aged over 50.[11]An anonymous soldier talks about his days in the Gaza Strip during "Operation Cast Lead", “We didn’t see a single house that was not hit. The entire infrastructure, tracks, fields, roads — was in total ruin,”[12]

Another questionable human rights issue is regarding the settlements Israel builds. They are built on high hilly areas of the West Bank where agriculture is very good. Therefore, when an Israeli settlement is built, the Palestinian community are moved down into the more harsh areas of the West Bank where there is little running water or electricity. The inhabitants of settlements are generally ultra-orthodox Jews who think more needs to be done to take back the Holy Land. Theses settlers are extremist Israelis, carrying guns and driving around in armored cars, essentially like a small army. According to the Fourth Geneva Convention Article 49 'an occupier may not forcibly deport protected persons, or deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into occupied territory'[14] This speaks strongly to how wrong it is for Israel to build settlements inside Palestinian lands.

American media has distorted not only our understanding of the reasons for the settlements, but also strongly influence our views on aspects of the Middle East via the way they spin the issues. Changing words can make situations seem less than reality. A wall is a fence, or a barrier. A colony, becomes a “settlement”, becomes a “neighborhood.” Robert Fisk has said the changing of linguisitics does not really matter, but the fact that it so often “All matched up with “terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist,[to describe Arabs and Muslims].”

Next in regards to aid money: the costs to American taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is around three trillion dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America's entire foreign aid budget. Over the last 20 years, the U.S. has been slowly phasing out economic aid to Israel and gradually replacing it with increased military aid, says Thomas R. Stauffer, Ph.D. in a Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003. Yet, Christian United for Israel magazine led by Pastor John Hagee, says in the April, 2009 edition, “While American families are suffering from an economic contraction, Secretary Clinton announced that President Obama intends to send nearly $ 1 billion of our tax money into Gaza which is under the firm control of the terrorist thugs of Hamas”

Perhaps the saddest of all the humanitarian abuse of rights is that Palestinians, unfortunately, have little to no freedom of choice in any matter. The freedom to choose expands life and makes one human. Amartya Sen in Development As Freedom. posits, “I regard the extension of the range of choice, that is, an increase in the range of effective alternatives open to the people, as the principal objective and criterion of economic development; and judge a measure principally by its probable effects on the range of alternatives open to individuals.”

This clearly applies to the Palestinian people's present plight. They neither have freedom, range of choice, or really any viable alternatives open to them. They do not have the freedom to choose if they want to travel between the West Bank and Gaza. The ,right to land is another unavailable choice. Do I want water now or later? How much water? Can I move out of this conflict zone, or can I travel by this road? If one has freedom of choice, then society flourishes economically, politcally, and in terms of security as well. All Palestinians currently live in a hell disaster under Israeli occupation and separation. There is unresolved frustration and angst that has destroyed a society, and continues bringing it into further cyclical conflict.

Research page

[1] Frisk, Robert. (2005, October 29). Government for and by the dead. Independant, Retrieved from http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10807.htm

[2] Editors of Tme Magazine, . (2006). Time: the middle east: the history, the conflict, the culture, the faiths . New York: Time.
[3] UNRWA, Initials. (n.d.). Un refugees. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/unrwa/refugees/whois.html
[4] Said, Edward. (1979). The Question of palestine. New York: Vintage Books.
[5] Macintyre, Donald. (2009, October 29). Israel accused of denying palestinians access to water.. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-a
[6] Tribe, Initials. (2007, December 01). End of apartheid across all palestine. Retrieved from http://tribes.tribe.net/propalestine
[7] Amos, Harold. (2006, January 02). Shin bet: palestinian truce main cause for reduced terror. Retrieved from http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?i
[8] CIA Fact Book, Initials. (2009, October 29). Middle east, gaza strip. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ge
[9] Stewart, Heather. (2007, June 10). Action will speak louder than words. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jun/10/politics
[10] Editors of Tme Magazine, . (2006). Time: the middle east: the history, the conflict, the culture, the faiths . New York: Time.
[11] Amnesty, Initials. (2009, July 02). Israel/gaza: operation "cast lead": 22 days of death and destruction. Retrieved from http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/MDE15/015/2009/en
[12] Gorenberg, Gershom. (2009, July 17). Breaking the silence. Retrieved from tp://www.shovrimshtika.org/oferet/news_item_e.asp?id=1
[13] International Court of Justice, Initials. (2004). Legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied palestinian territory. Retrieved from http://www.sloopdemuur.nl/pdf/1677.pdf%20Summary%20Int.%20Court%20of%20Justice.pdf
[14] ICRC, Initials. (1949, August 12). Convention (iv) relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war. . Retrieved from http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/385ec082b509e76c41256739003e636d/6756482d86146898c125641e004aa3c5
HAZOU, Christopher. (2009, February 25). No conspriacy behind bad reporting just lousy writing. Retrieved from http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/021909/news2.html

Sen, Amartya. (2000). Development as freedom. New York: Anchor.

Stauffer, Thomas. " The Costs to American Taxpayers of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: $3 Trillion." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (2003): n. pag. Web. 26 Oct 2009. .

Hagee, John. Christians United for Israel. April 2009. CUFI, Web. 30 Oct 2009. .

Bibliography:

Mark Twain. Innocents Abroad. Signet Classics (February 1, 1966).

Tom Segev and, Haim Watzman. Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel. NY: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt; First US edition. (April 23, 2002)

Jimmy Carter. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Simon & Schuster; 1 edition (November 14, 2006)

Robert Fisk. The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East. Knopf; 1st American edition (November 8, 2005)

Robert Fisk. The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays. Nation Books (July 28, 2008)

Paul Collier. Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places. Harper; 1 edition (February 3, 2009)

Noam Chomsky. Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (American Empire Project). Holt Paperbacks (August 12, 2004)

City of blinding lights

2009-11-12T07:49:00.006+07:00

The sun begins to rise as a saffron robed Buddhist monk peacefully walks the streets of Bangkok hoping for alms. The monk passes a small stall selling red-hot chilies, lemon grass, and tamarind seeds: the sweet, sour and spicy ingredients of tom yam soup. This reminds him of his city: colorful Bangkok, full of paradoxes. The sweet, sour and spicy all mixed up together. He continues walking as the darkness fades, and the heat of the sun begins its scorching task. He glances up at the interweaving highways criss-crossing each other with golden pagodas and temples intertwined. He smiles gently pleased that millions come to pray and offer gifts, hoping for merit each day, which will help them reach nirvana. He returns to his temple through a wall of smoke rising from the burning incense placed just right at the spirit house. His eyes burn and tear up. His mind a bit foggy, he thinks to himself, is there more to life than this?

Just down the road from the temple, a man in an Armani suit drives up in his Mercedes. He carefully drives into his parking space located right below a flashy billboard beckoning him to buy just one more thing, which will make his life full and complete. He has escaped bad karma, he thinks to himself as he watches an emaciated figure, full of white leprous sores, crawling, begging, and hoping for a handout. His city is complicated. Industrialism flourishes, right next to poverty. The posh live next door to the poor. There is no cast system in Buddhism but karma says to the slum dwellers, you are paying for you’re past life’s evil deeds, you wicked man, and there is nothing civil about you. His pride of knowing he has good karma momentarily ceases. Money can’t buy peace. He is hollow inside. Is his pain deeper than the leper begging?

The rich young ruler gets out of his car and fulfills his morning ritual of buying ancient Thai coffee smothered in sweetened condensed milk on the side of the road from his favorite street vender. She smiles graciously as he leaves a five baht tip. She places it in a jar thinking of her children back home in the province living with her parents. This single mom has left them and the serenity of the countryside of rice planting and farming for the hope of a better future for her children. She sells to the millions who work in the high-rise office buildings. She greets her friend, a taxi driver, who has also left the provinces. Like the geese migrating every six months, thousands of rice farmers turned taxi drivers hold on to the promise of prosperity, only to discover pain and disappointment in the city of contradictions.

Photos by my good friend Stephen Ostrowski's

The taxi driver slowly weaves through the crowded streets and congested traffic around Bangkok all day. It is late and he is tired, but maybe he can get lucky and pick up one last customer before calling it a day. He slows down and picks up a foreigner dressed in a casual polo shirt and kaki pants. “You want sexy girl?” He is hoping for an extra tip by offering to take him to one of the many brothels catering to tourists. The foreigner smiles and off they go. At night, under the red neon lights a girl waits hoping for a customer. She needs to meet her quota, or be fined. Wearing skin tight black jeans, high heals, see through lacy top, thick black eyeliner, and never ending lipstick, she prances clutching her pack of Marlboro cigarettes like a baby girl holding tight to her stuffed doll. She finds safety in the kick of tobacco. She has heard that sixty percent of tourists come to Bangkok for the sex industry, and she believes it as the thousands walk her street each night drooling after her body. She hopes by sacrificing herself to provide for her daughter back home living with grandma, she will get good karma. She puffs her cigarette, and takes a sip of whisky from her plastic cup, sitting on the sidewalk, to ease the pain of missing her daughter.

As the night grows darker, the monk sleeps on his hard mat on the floor, the rich man stumbles home after a night on the town, the coffee seller sleeps in a makeshift cardboard box dreaming of another life, the taxi driver returns to where thousands live on top of each other crowded in a rat, cockroach infested slum and the tourist takes the pretty girl home to his four star hotel for the night just as the sun is rising to begin a new day.

Remembering the Wave

2007-11-23T04:26:00.000+07:00

Two days after the Asian Tsunami hit the south of Thailand I found myself in a hospital. I hate hospitals. I have spent more time than I would like to think about in hospitals because of a chronic liver disease. But this was different. I wasn’t the patient. I was a volunteer. And this didn’t seem like a hospital, it seemed more like a war zone. A chaotic mess. The kind of thing you see in movies. People frantically running in and out of rooms. Blood painted the dirty, white, tile floor where the dying and injured could barely find enough space to lie. Painful screams and quiet crying could penetrate even the hardest man’s heart. Trucks drove up dumping more bodies. Surreal. Two bodies wheeled passed me… one in a black bag and the other pale as a ghost. Dead people. My heart sank and my stomach felt sick like I wanted to vomit up my insides. I quickly took a few deep breaths and pulled myself together. There was work to be done.

I wore a badge that read, “translator.” I was the guy who helped patients understand in English what was getting ready to happen to them. Telling a total stranger that their leg was going to be amputated, is not something teen-age boys are equipped for. Understanding medical procedures and surgeries are hard enough in my own native language, but I needed to translate for Thai doctors and nurses so that foreign tourists who spoke English as a second or third language could understand. My memory is beginning to fade, because three years is a long time, but one face still haunts me. She must have been about my age with reddish, blonde hair and freckles. Yellow and purple bruises covered her body. Her eyes spoke of fear, loss and worry. I went up to her bed to talk or possibly pray for her. I mean, what can one do in a situation like this? I asked her name, which I have long forgotten. I remember only faces now. She cried as she told me her story. She was in her hotel room when a wall of water came crashing in tossing her back and forth as if she was in a washing machine. She hit her head. She had no feeling in her legs. She didn’t know where her family was. Were they dead or alive? I had been told she was paralyzed, but I didn’t dare talk about that. I visited with her several times over that week. We talked about movies, school, and normal teenage stuff. I held her hand and cried when she cried, laughed when she laughed, and held on to the hope that she would find her family.

I still hate hospitals. I would have rather volunteered in a fishing village, but instead I found that grace and strength flow in like a flood in times of crisis. I was surprised. I found it flowed through me.