Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

After 28 days of fasting, anti-war hunger strikers received a breakthrough victory for their sacrifice: Leading members of the Iraqi Parliament invited fasters to join them to discuss their plans for peace in Iraq.

On Wednesday, August 2, hunger strikers will travel to Amman, Jordan to meet with these Iraqi MPs and break their fast. The delegation includes: Peace mom Cindy Sheehan, Retired Colonel Ann Wright, Iraq war veteran Geoffrey Millard, Politician/Writer Tom Hayden, and CODEPINK co-founders Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans, Gael Murphy and Diane Wilson. The invitation from the Iraqi MPs comes after fasters were rebuffed in numerous attempts to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during his visit to Washington last week, including setting up “Camp Al-Maliki” across from the Iraqi Embassy and publishing an open letter to him in one of the largest Iraqi newspapers. Faster and CODEPINK cofounder Medea Benjamin was arrested for disrupting al-Maliki’s address to Congress last Wednesday, saying loudly and repeatedly, “Iraqis want the troops to leave, bring them home now!”

The parliamentarians, who expressed concern for fasters’ health and dismay at the Prime Minister’s dismissal of their repeated requests for a meeting, will travel to meet with the US delegation in Jordan on August 3. The Iraqi elected officials will brief the Americans on the Reconciliation Plan they have been working on at the Reconciliation Conference held in Cairo last week. With the increased violence between Israel and Lebanon, a part of the U.S. delegation will go on to Syria and Lebanon to bear witness to the suffering of innocent victims of war in the region.

Non violent resistance has gained some results again.

Youtube.com, a website where anyone can upload videos has become one of the hottest websites on the internet. So when what looked like a homemade spoof of Al Gore; An Inconvenient Spoof, it seemed like just another amateur effort. But when the Wall Street Journal tried to find the guy who posted the film, they found that the film didn’t come from an amateur, but from a Republican public relations firm called DCI, which has oil giant Exxon as a client.

Diane Farsetta, with the Center for Media and Democracy commented that, “They want it to look like this came from someone who really believes this, who is really critical of Al Gore and global warming,”

Ana Marie Cox, the Washington editor of Time.com, said Americans have come to distrust the mainstream media.

“They’re more likely to believe something that comes straight from the horse’s mouth,” Cox said.

Public relations firms have long used computer technology to create bogus grassroots campaigns, which are called “Astroturf.”

Now these firms are being hired to push illusions on the Internet to create the false impression of real people blogging, e-mailing and making films.

Yet another twist in the battle for cyberspace visibility.

More than a third of the U.S. public suspects that federal officials either assisted in 9/11 or took no action to stop it so that the U.S. could go to war in the Middle East.

 Seventy-seven percent of the respondants in Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll said that their friends and acquantances have become angrier with the government recently and 54% say that they have become angrier; the highest the numbers have been since Scripps Howard began asking the question in 1995.

How this plays out in November is difficult to predict, but there is certainly fertile ground for new answers, new politicians, and new parties.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article documenting Israel’s “almost daily” military incursions into Lebanese territory.

In the process of its violations, Israel has terrorized the general population, destroyed private property, and killed numerous civilians. This past February, for instance, 15-year-old shepherd Yusuf Rahil was killed by unprovoked Israeli cross-border fire as he tended his flock in southern Lebanon. Israel has assassinated its enemies in the streets of Lebanese cities and continues to occupy Lebanon’s Shebaa Farms area, while refusing to hand over the maps of mine fields that continue to kill and cripple civilians in southern Lebanon more than six years after the war supposedly ended. What peace did Hizbullah shatter?

The Christian Science Monitor article represents a crack in the almost solid wall in the US media that refuses to discuss the true facts of the Middle East.  In the US, it is practically tabu to discuss anything other than the Israeli national mythology–poor little Isreal, surrounded by enemies (conveniently forgetting peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan) who started all the Middle East wars aainst Isreal.  This fiction isimpossible to justify in the case of the 1954 war where Britain, France and Isreal invaded Egypt to seize the Suez canal, but the true believers are never bothered by facts.

To Israel’s credit, it has been Israeli historians, such as Benny Morris, who have brought to light the true facts surrounding the ethnic clensing upon which Israel was founded, and the blatently aggressive and expanionist policies that Israel has followed since.

Ironicly, more Israeli Jews know the truth about their government, and are critical of it, than U.S. Jews.  Just as U.S. Irish Catholics supported the IRA for decades, US Jews continue to blindly support, an aggressive, racist government whose policies threaten the stability of the world.

It’s time for a fair debate in the US media about Israel.