Is the world failing Syrians?

The United Nations has warned that the humanitarian situation in Syria is deteriorating rapidly, and it estimates that more than nine million people - almost forty percent of the population - are now in need of help.

Delivery of aid has slowed and some reports suggest there has been little help for many people in need for almost a year.

The UN says the number of people displaced from their homes has risen to 6.5 million, and many are living without adequate food or access to electricity and medical supplies.

Officials of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent say their agency is able access most of the affected areas but the humanitarian aid has not been sufficient.

The figures are staggering, it’s catastrophic, the numbers continue to rise. Now when we have reached this very high figure, if we compare to the previous figures that went out in June when we were talking of about 4.2 million people displaced inside the country, it is not one event that has triggered this. It’s a continuation of conflict. It’s a continuation of the displacement that has now brought us to this horrific number. Jens Laerke, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

"It’s not difficult to get the aid in the country. The main challenge we are facing on the ground is the aid from outside, through our partners, is not enough for the need on the ground," Khaled Erksoussi, the head of operations for the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, told Al Jazeera.

"Now we are estimating the number is more than 6 million people internally displaced, yet we are still receiving aid only enough for 2.5 million people to be distributed each month."

Since the unrest began in March 2011, more than 100,000 people are estimated to have been killed. More than two million people have fled the country, seeking refuge in neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, as well as in Iraq and Egypt.

The 15-member UN Security Council approved a statement in October, calling for increased humanitarian assistance. But it was non-binding and, speaking in October, humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said it had had little impact on the ground.

"I expressed to the council my deep disappointment that the progress that we had hoped to see on the ground as a result of that statement has not happened, and as a result, what we are seeing is a deepening of the crisis, more and more people affected and, in particular, my worries [are] about the extremely brutal and violent nature of this conflict," she said.

Amos is calling on the Security Council to use its influence over those parties that can ensure the safe passage of medical personnel and supplies, the safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance, the protection of civilians, and those who can help expand critical, life-saving relief operations.

Bashar Jaafari, Syria's ambassador to the UN, said his country has done its part to help humanitarian aid workers on the ground - although he did admit that visas are limited, and not granted to all groups that request access.

"We are issuing too many visas to too many people. We are a sovereign nation like any other nation and we have our own reasons to deny visa to this individual or that individual. This is an integral part of our sovereignty - of any state in the United Nations," he said.

While all this was going on, the World Health Organization confirmed Syria's first outbreak of polio since 1999. At least 10 children have tested positive for polio in the eastern province of Deir az-Zor, with another 12 suffering from paralysis. More

 

The BBC's subjective view of Israel's occupation should concern us all

Just over a week ago, Israeli armed forces dragged a French diplomat out of an aid vehicle in the occupied West Bank. The international news agency Reuters released subsequent photographs of the woman, Marion Fesneau-Castaing, lying in the dust at the feet of Israeli soldiers, a gun pointed at her face. Fesneau-Castaing and others had been attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul, whose homes had been demolished by the Israeli army four days earlier, on 16 September.

Amena Saleem

The BBC responded with an online story headlined: "Diplomats protest over West Bank clash with Israel troops"

As is the norm with the BBC's coverage of Palestine and Israel, the story was written without context or background. Israel's presence in the West Bank, its military occupation, is illegal under international law. Its demolition of Palestinian houses and the displacement of their inhabitants are in violation of the Geneva Convention. In a feature on the demolition of Khirbet al-Makhul, the Independent quotes Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch as saying, "All the criteria appear to be met for this to be considered forcible transfer, which is a war crime."

None of this was reported by the BBC, whose headline reduced all of the above to "a clash with Israel troops". In the BBC's use of the word "clash" there is an implication that the diplomats were also at fault, that they waged some kind of battle against armed soldiers.

Khirbet al-Makhul is in the fertile Jordan Valley, a key area for Israeli settlement building. To obtain the necessary land for the illegal settlements, Palestinian villages have to be destroyed and the villagers moved on.

BBC Online's story chose to put the process this way: "The homes in Khirbet al-Makhul were knocked down on Monday after Israel's High Court ruled that they had been built without the correct permits."

The fault, then, seems to lie with the Palestinians who appear to be attempting to operate outside the planning system. A planning system, the average reader will assume, is fair, open and transparent, but nothing could be further from the truth. Under the practices of Israel's military occupation, it is a rarity for Palestinians to be granted a building permit, either to build new homes or extend existing ones.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reports that the Israeli military refuses to give building permits to Palestinians in 99 per cent of Area C, which is where the Jordan Valley, containing the village of Khirbet al-Makhul, lies.

Oxfam reports: "Israel's planning policy in Area C is used to maintain reserves of land for future development of Israeli settlements. Palestinians are often left with no choice other than to build without a permit, despite the ever present risk of demolition which threatens thousands of buildings and puts thousands of families at risk of forced displacement."

Who, reading the BBC's report, would know that? There was nothing in this report to provide a context for the events of a week of Palestinian house demolitions and the manhandling of European diplomats.

To add insult to injury, the Palestinians, who were presented as infringing Israel's honest planning laws, are then depicted as being too intransigent to comply with the consequences. The article continues: "... the Bedouin villagers of Khirbet al-Makhul have refused to leave the land where they say they have grazed sheep for generations."

The fact that the Palestinians have indeed been on this land for generations is furthermore presented as no more than a claim with the addition of two simple words: "they say". The Palestinians' existence on this land and their dispossession of it is not a fact for the BBC, it is merely a claim.

Why is the way the BBC presents Israel's occupation of Palestinian land an issue? After all, it is not as if much of the mainstream media does any better on the subject.

There are several key reasons. According to the BBC's own figures, BBC News reaches 81 per cent of the UK each week across all platforms (television, news, online). That's a quite staggering percentage of the population consuming the BBC's output, including what it has to say on Palestine and the occupation. No other news organisation can claim to be reaching and influencing the vast majority of the British population in this way.

Even more worrying, the BBC Media Centre reports that, "The BBC remains the news provider that the UK public trusts the most by far." It quotes an Ipsos Mori survey, conducted in February 2013, in which 58 per cent of respondents said that the BBC was the "one source they would most likely turn to for news they trust". This was significantly ahead of the nearest other provider, ITV, on 14 per cent.

So here we have a news organisation with a vast reach, commanding a high level of trust, publicly funded, which is failing to tell its audiences the ugly truth of Israel's occupation.

As demonstrated by the article on Marion Fesneau-Castaing and Khirbet al-Makhoul, the BBC will leave out the facts and the context which, if included, would show Israel to be the rogue state it is. And, wherever possible, it will present its audience with the official Israel line only; in this report, for example, that the Palestinians allegedly had no legal right to build where they did. The Palestinian perspective, indeed the fact that Israel almost never gives planning permission to Palestinians, forcing them to build "illegally" is omitted.

Four days after publishing this article, BBC Online ran another piece, headlined "Israel 'to act' over West Bank diplomats scuffle". This contained a video showing Fesneau-Castaing pushing an Israeli soldier in the face as she was lifted up from the ground and led away. The BBC reports that "...video emerged of her lashing out at an Israeli border policeman."

The video that BBC audiences will not see is that of Israeli forces destroying the tents in which the homeless Palestinian villagers were sheltering, while they were still inside. Once again, the true extent of Israel's aggression against the Palestinian people has been carefully hidden from those receiving their news via the BBC.

Through its massive omissions in reporting, the BBC is keeping its audience, 81 per cent of the British population, in the dark about the reality of Israel's occupation. Where are the BBC's reports on the arbitrary arrests and detention without trial of Palestinian civilians; the dragging of Palestinian children from their beds at night by Israeli soldiers to be thrown into jail; the destruction of Palestinian farmland and olive groves by armed Israeli settlers; the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem in ever-increasing numbers; and the impact of the apartheid wall and the checkpoints which contain Palestinian movement?

They are not there in the BBC's world; they are non-existent. Instead we have offerings from BBC Online such as, "West Bank: Why do some UK Jews settle in Israeli occupied land?"

The article begins: "Every year hundreds of British Jews make the life-changing decision to emigrate to Israel. A small number of these decide to join settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank." What follows is a 1,000 word paean to Israeli settlers. They are not an obstacle to peace, they tell BBC reporter, Samantha Dalton, they are in the West Bank to "contribute to civil society" and are simply misunderstood.

This cosy little article, given to us by a news organisation funded by our licence-fees, somehow seems oblivious to the fact that the settlers' very presence in the occupied West Bank contravenes international law. It is not bothered by the fact that UN Resolution 446 says settlements "constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East." From that point of view alone, this feature on the "life-changing" experiences of those who would be settlers is incredibly irresponsible.

And where is the Palestinian perspective? Again, as so often with the BBC, there is none. Not a single Palestinian is interviewed about the impact of settlers and settlements on Palestinians in the West Bank. There is nothing about the land theft necessary for the creation of settlements; nothing about the violent extremism of settlers in Hebron and elsewhere; and nothing about the allocation of 70 times more water to illegal Israeli settlers than to Palestinians.

For the BBC to include that kind of balanced information would be to inform its huge audience of the Palestinian experience of occupation and to expose too clearly the horrors of Israel's apartheid system. As we've seen, it's not the kind of information that the BBC is in the habit of giving out. That the BBC chooses to withhold important information which is vital for its audience to understand what is happening in Palestine and Israel is something that should concern us all. More

Amena Saleem is a journalist and activist, working closely with Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK. She has twice driven on convoys to Gaza with PSC. More information on PSC's solidarity work is available at www.palestinecampaign.org

 

Human Rights Watch urges Israel to stop displacing Bedouins

Human Rights Watch on Thursday urged Israel to stop trying to displace Bedouin families in the West Bank, where the army last week manhandled European diplomats on an aid mission.

“The Israeli military should end its unjustified attempts to forcibly remove a decades-old community,” the New York-based watchdog’s Middle East director Joe Stork said in a statement.

“Israeli forces didn’t just rough up diplomats, they demolished every single building in Makhul and ordered the residents to leave and never come back,” he said.

The army on September 16 demolished property built by the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley village after Israel’s Supreme Court ruled they had been erected without building permits and declared the area a “closed military zone”.

Mahul is in an area of the West Bank under full control of the army, which rarely issues building permits.

The move forced out 10 families, including 16 children, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.

Israeli troops on Friday then manhandled a group of European diplomats trying to deliver tents to residents of the demolished homes.

The troops forcefully dispersed the French, British, Irish, Spanish, Swedish and Greek diplomats who had accompanied aid workers to Makhul.

An Israeli court temporarily suspended any further demolitions on Tuesday following the incident, HRW said.

Major Guy Inbar, spokesman for the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), told AFP that Makhul demolition orders were first issued in 2009.

“In 2009 the civil adminstration issued demolition orders for this area and gave the population there an opportunity to come to the civil administration’s committees in order to prove that they are living on their land, to legalise the place,” he said.

“After not doing that for two or three years the civil administration issued again demolition orders and they appealed to the court,” Inbar said.

“The court heard both sides and decided that the orders were correct and that the population there lived in an illegal way… therefore the civil administration came and demolished the tents in that area.”

However, HRW said that under international humanitarian law, the forced transfer of civilians in an occupied territory is a “prosecutable war crime”.

Israel has destroyed more than 500 Palestinian-owned properties in the West Bank and mostly Arab east Jerusalem since the beginning of this year, displacing 862 people, according to OCHA. More

 

Hama Exodus of Helfaya People Across the Orontes River on May,10 2013 | SYRIA

After being subjected to shelling with canons and missiles by the regime's checkpoints and camps , the people of Helfaya were forced to leave their city and to flee across the Orontes River because of blocking the roads and entrances of the city with checkpoints.

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Warning: This video contains horrifying scenes and we don't recommend it for weak hearted people.This scene is just to document the crimes that are being committed by Bashar al-Assad and his regime. It is not to shock our viewers or to encourage violence; we just want to document what is happening in Syria.
محتوى الفيديو قاسي جداً و فيه مشاهد مؤلمة و لا ينصح لأصحاب القلوب الضعيفة بمشاهدته , هذا المقطع فقط لتوثيق الجرائم التي اقترفتها القوات الأسدية التابعة لنظام بشار الأسد , والمقطع ليس لصدم المشاهدين هذا المقطع هو مقطع لتوثيق الأحداث التي تحدث في سوريا , وليس للتشجيع على العنف.
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The Hijacking of Human Rights By Chris Hedges

April 08, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire.

Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.

Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”

There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.

Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.”

There are cases, and Bosnia in the 1990s was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the “humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human rights.

These “humanitarian interventionists” studiously ignore our own acts of genocide, first unleashed against Native Americans and then exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. They do not acknowledge, even in light of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our own capacity for evil. They do not discuss in their books and articles the genocides we backed in Guatemala and East Timor or the crime of pre-emptive war. They minimize the horror and suffering we have delivered to Iraqis and Afghans and exaggerate or fabricate the benefits. The long string of atrocities carried out in our name mocks the idea of the United States as a force for good with a right to impose its values on others. The ugly truth shatters their deification of U.S. power.

Nossel, in the contentious year she headed Amnesty International USA before leaving in January, oversaw a public campaign by the organization to support NATO’s war in Afghanistan. She was running Amnesty International USA when the organization posted billboards at bus stops that read, “Human Rights for Women and Girls in Afghanistan—NATO: Keep the Progress Going.” Madeleine Albright, along with senior State Department officials and politicians, were invited to speak at Amnesty International’s women’s forum during Nossel’s tenure. Nossel has urged Democrats to stay the course in Iraq, warning that a failure in Iraq could unleash “a kind of post-Vietnam, post-Mogadishu hangover” that would lamentably “herald an era of deep reservations among the U.S. public regarding the use of force.” She worked as a State Department official to discredit the Goldstone Report, which charged Israel with war crimes against the Palestinians. As a representative on the U.N. Human Rights Council she said that “the top of our list is our defense of Israel, and Israel’s right to fair treatment at the Human Rights Council.” Not a word about the Palestinians. She has advocated for expanded armed intervention in countries such as Syria and Libya. She has called for a military strike against Iran if it does not halt its nuclear enrichment program. In an article in The Washington Quarterly titled “Battle Hymn of the Democrats,” she wrote: “Democrats must be seen to be every bit as tough-minded as their opponents. Democratic reinvention as a ‘peace party’ is a political dead end.” “In a milieu of war or near-war, the public will look for leadership that is bold and strident—more forceful, resolute, and pugnacious than would otherwise be tolerated,” she went on. In a 2004 Foreign Affairs article, “Smart Power: Reclaiming Liberal Internationalism,” she wrote: “We need to deploy our power in ways that make us stronger, not weaker,” not a stunning thought but one that should be an anathema to human rights campaigners. She added, “U.S. interests are furthered by enlisting others on behalf of U.S. goals,” which, of course, is what she promptly did at Amnesty International. Her “smart power” theory calls on the U.S. to exert its will around the globe by employing a variety of means and tactics, using the United Nations and human rights groups, for example, to promote the nation’s agenda as well as the more naked and raw coercion of military force. This is not a new or original idea, but when held up to George W. Bush’s idiocy I guess it looked thoughtful. The plight of our own dissidents—including Bradley Manning—is of no concern to Nossel and apparently of no concern now to PEN.

Coleen Rowley and Ann Wright first brought Nossel’s past and hawkish ideology to light when she became the executive director of Amnesty International USA a year ago. Rowley and Wright have written correctly that “humanitarian interventionists,” in or out of government, see no distinction between human rights work and the furtherance of U.S. imperial power. Nossel, they noted, “sees no conflict between her current role and having been a member of the executive staff whilst her President and Secretary of State bosses were carrying out war crimes such as drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan and shielding torturers and their enablers in the Bush administration from prosecution.” (For more on this see Rowley’s article “Selling War as ‘Smart Power.’ ”) More