Well-Made World #14

US

• No Empires still hates Lee Bollinger. He was terrible as our university president, and only gets worse when it comes to placating the ADL and friends.
• NE could not pass this one up. Turns out that, since 1994, the US military has been researching the use of, shall we say, "unconventional," non-lethal weaponry. The highlight of this article is the revelation of one US hope to develop a bomb that would cause uncontrollable sexual urges among (male) enemy forces. "Let's watch these men fuck, and then kill them!"--is this how it would have gone? For more on enduring racist assumptions about Arab sexuality, from Andre Gide to Abu Ghraib, as well as an eloquent work of intellectual history, see Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs, Chicago, 2007.
• Manhattan judge Charles S. Haight Jr. reverses his recent rebuke of NYPD surveillance tactics, dealing a blow to organized dissent in the city No Empires calls home.

Middle East

• Huge developments in Israel/Palestine over the last twenty-four hours. The Western "strategy" of isolating a democratically-elected government is playing out to devastating effect in the Gaza Strip, amid recent intense factional fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Abu Mazen has, unsurprisingly, dissolved the fragile unity government in Palestine and declared a state of emergency; what is surprising, however, is that Fatah appears to have been so thoroughly routed, given its links to Muhammad Dahlan and his millions in arms, courtesy of Washington. No Empires is prone to believe Hamas spokesmen who say that they were pressed to ensure that Dahlan's thugs (the National Security Forces) did not act as a supra-governmental force--though this, of course, does not mean we condone the violence, which of course plays right into Washington's and Jerusalem's hands.
• The Palestine Center for Human Rights documents, and condemns, the recent violence in the Occupied Territories, going so far as to apologize for their staff's inability to fully cover events as they unfold, given the starkly dangerous atmosphere in which they are working.
• Alvaro de Soto, former UN coordinator for the Middle East (as of yesterday) discusses Palestine/Israel in his End of Mission Report, claiming that the one-state solution is gaining ground, and also that Western refusals to deal with democratically-elected Hamas officials may lead to a weakening of democratic impluses amongst Palestinians. Full text of his speech can be found here.
• Not long after Desmond Tutu compares the situation in Palestine to South African apartheid, Israel walks all over him once again. Despite Tutu's efforts to investigate the carnage wreaked at Beit Hanoun last year, Itzhak Levanon shrugs it off, playing the part of the broken record. As usual, he cites "imbalanced and one-sided resolutions" in the UN council, "which utterly ignores the fact that we live with terrorism every day and that more than 3,000 Qassam rockets have been launched into Israel since we withdrew from Gaza," adding that "a large part of these missiles have been launched precisely from towns such as Beit Hanoun." Towns such as Beit Hanoun, No Empires asks? Cheap rhetorical devices abound.
  
• As you may well know, No Empires loves Ilan Pappe. Thank you JL.
• And finally, Amira Hass on the current situation in Gaza.

Europe

• Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, responds in full to the exiting Prime Minister's repudiation of his paper, wondering if Blair would have gone so far if the Independent hadn't been so scathingly critical of Blair and Bush's march toward Baghdad.
  

Well-Made World 13

EUROPE

• No Empires to Albania: Uh, what the fuck?
• Tony Blair, apparently thirsting for (positive) relevance, has lashed out against political reporting in the British media--and by the Independent in particular--for undermining Britons' confidence in their country and their government. Simon Kelner, editor of the Independent, responds, feeling honored at his paper's having been singled out, and even sees Blair's attack as confirming the veracity of the Independent's anti-Iraq war stance.

NEAR EAST

• Flailing around for bedfellows among an Iraqi population it has done everything under the sun to fragment and destroy, the US is giving arms support to Sunni groups for the purpose of fighting their former Shiite allies, who are now accused of representing Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
• Kevin Zeese picks up where Dennis Kucinich left off on the floor of Congress a week or so back, and updates us on the state of the Iraqi "hydrocarbon law," a privitization law that the United States is desperately clinging to as the "benchmark" by which the puppet government must prove itself. Iraqi oil laborers are on strike and are under constant threat from the Iraqi Army and the Maliki government for "sabotaging the [Iraqi] economy."
• Meanwhile, the Iraqi Parliament has recently passed a resolution calling for an end to the American occupation. Today's New York Times, furthermore reports a closed-door meeting between William Fallon, head of CENTCOM, and Nuri al-Maliki, during which Fallon stresses the need for "public progress" on security in Iraq, and where does the pressure start? With the oil distribution law.
• Loose sends us this piece by Patrick Seale, which reminds us that, in recent weeks, George Bush and Robert Gates have stated that the US aim is an "enduring presence" in Iraq--they cite the post-WWII South Korean and Japanese models, though we all know Bush has never read anything resembling a history book in his life--and also that, of the 110 bases built by the US following the invasion, 14 of these are slated to become permanent bases (including the 100-acre compound on the banks of the Tigris--see Well-Made World 6).
  
  LATIN AMERICA

• Richard Gott, the preeminent journalist of Latin America, writes on Hugo Chavez's recent refusal to renew the charter of RCTV, producers of "colonial" television and proponents of the short-lived, CIA-backed coup against Chavez in 2002. See The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, dir. Kim Bartley & Donnacha O'Briain.

U.S.

• In yet more distressing news for academic freedom in America, Norman Finkelstein has been denied tenure in the political science department at DePaul university in Chicago, even after his departmental colleagues voted 9-3 in favor of tenure. This would usually be the place for some No Empires-style vitriol directed against Alan Fucking Dershowitz, who wielded massive outside pressure against Finkelstein, but we're too disgusted to continue.