To have a goal is very important. It makes life a bit easier, because in a way, you know what you want and how to get it.
I have many goals, because my mind works very rapidly. I have what people may call "Backup Plans" just in case my first goal fails. I want to be a climatologist. This has to do with me studying the weather in different climates of the world. If this doesnt work out, I'd like to be a therapist. I am good at keeping things to myself, I love to help my friends and family whenever they need me, and I like to help people with problems that they are having about various situations. If plans A and B don't work, I think I may become a Motivational Speaker. I love to influence others with the knowledge that I have and further mine in the process. I have been told (Not that I like to toot my own horn) that I am a very influential person and that I inspire alot of people to not quit and become more than they are. If my A, B,and C plans fail, I'd Like to become a novelist. I love to read and I love to write, So that will work out well. It is important to have a goal and a few Backups incase it fails!

-M

The world has become a divided place. Whole countries have turned on each other, Ethnic people have traded on thier own kind, and the foundation of the human race has taken a drastic turn towards the worst. In an efficient way, We are all 1 people: -The Human Rcae-. So, why is it that we have to hurt each other to prive a point? Why is it that we have to rape our women, kill our children, and destroy our entire beings for nothing? Is it the need for power? Respect? Or, had the corruption of the world and -Human Race- become a noted past-time or a just a hooby that we've picked up? Most elders claim that our ("Our" being people of all races younger than 35-50 years of accumulated age and wisdom) current behavior is the reason for the corruption in today's world, But, I say to elders, Were YOU all so different? Most traits that the chldren of today's world possess come from thier line of family. If you and a friend entered a store, and you saw they were stealing, you question them. If they told you that everyone in thier family did it for as long as they could rememeber, what could you say??? Its a trait they were raised on. I say to you (Trusted readers of this posted entry of my blog)What do you believe is the true meaning of the world's corruption? Is it the actions of young adults, or the past actions of thier elders? Do they want power? Respect? What is the meaning of it all??

Depending on the circumstances, many people will tell you that they have a "Harsh Life". But what does this mean??? A "Harsh Life" can have many meanings. Someone could have just lost a job, a loved one, or their entire being because of the chaos they around. But, what is the true meaning of it? If you are robbed on the street, you would be considered to have a "Harsh Life" to some, But to others, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. On the other hand, Someone may have just lost a spouse, child, or very close friend. The would be considered to have a "Harsh Life" to some, But to others they may just be experiencing death and don't know how to grasp it. What Is YOUR Definition Of A"Harsh Life"???

The violence in Philadelphia is bad...very bad...people out of the blue getting hurt and kiling people for no reason. Sometimes there is a reason but there’s no reason for a person to kill another person.
Like my hood if you walk down the street and you don’t live down there u would get jumped are getting ran out the hood. The act of violence in Philadelphia is horrible, we need to be ashamed about how we acing because it’s unneeded.

I realize NYC is 6 times the size of Philadelphia but in 2005 NYC had 4 times as many violent crimes as Philly, but you never hear about NYC being an unsafe place to live. If NYC has 40,000 violent crimes per year and Philly’s has 10,000 violent crimes, in reality which place is more unsafe? I could show you a crime map of NYC, Chicago, DC, and La that would make you never want to step within 1000 miles of those cities.

Crime is everywhere in the cities. Certain sections are where 95% of the crimes take place. Is there spillover into what are seemingly safe neighborhoods? Yes but its exception not the norm. Just like Manhattan is going to be safer than parts of the Bronx/Queens, Center City is going to be safer than West/North Philly

Statistically you're more likely to die in a car crash driving around in suburbia than you are to die as an innocent victim of gun violence in the city.

(You're also much more likely to die on the drive to the airport than you are in the plane. People fear irrational phenomena because they don't feel in control of their lives, not because of actual risk analysis.)

As for Philly's housing values, it's not "worth it" to live anywhere but the exurban fringe of a Sunbelt city (say, Phoenix) if you're doing a strictly economic comparison of housing prices and incomes. But people value intangibles (culture, lifestyles, family). That's why people pay $2,000 a month for apartments the size of boxes in Manhattan. They're not crazy; they're just putting value in other things.

Philadelphia's housing has been historically undervalued when compared to its peers in the Northeast (NY, Boston, DC). Philly's basically playing catch-up now

There's a lot of volonce going on in Philly. In my opinion the most dangerous part of the city is 52nd and Market street It was not that long ago, that 52nd and Market were hailed as the "Main Street" of West Philly;seemingly it had so much to offer.

Thanks to tit being the state-of-the-art transportation hub, there is plenty of hustle and bustle as folks came from far and wide to take advantage of its unique shops, dynamite restaurants, and classy nightclubs.

But like so many other once-proud sections of the city, this area has suffered a devastating fall from grace.This formerly thriving thoroughfare is pockmarked with boarded-up storefronts, dive bars, careless drug dealers, and roaming bands of lost souls who lurk in the shadow of the Market-Frankford El.
living and growing up in the area and see it deteriorate is very painful i just wish that things can change for the better because is a thurving city of brotherly love where have all the love gone? i would hate to have my childern to grow up in this city because i'm so scraed that something jeapordize their future we need to clean up our acts and our cities

I would like to analize why teens are getting pregnant? There are too many fears that come to my mind when i think of young girls lacking direction. What can I do to stop teens from getting pregnant and focusing on finishing school? Should there be more programs out there, like going to different schools informing young girls to abstain from such activities?What role can a morther play in promoting responsible , and positve social behavior ?

Yesteday, a police officer got shot in his head in a donut shot on 66 and Broad street. I as a kid donot feel safe to walk down the street because i never know whats going to happen,if a police officer can get shot, how can young kids feel safe walking to school and coming back home from school? how can we stop this volince ?

This was my favorite picture from the community walk because I was glad to see that the community gave tribute to the Philadelphia Negro League because a lot of black people do not recieve a lot of credit and for them to have a whole memorial deicated to the Philadelphia Baseball Negro League its a step up from not reconizing black people at all.

9/11 did'nt really effect my life because I didnt lose any one in there, and plus it's president Bush's fault.

US Sponsored Bombing of Somalia: The Hidden War for Oil
Strategic interests behind US-Ethiopian alliance


by Carl Bloice

Global Research, May 14, 2007
Black Commentator


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Carl Bloice elucidates the failure or unwillingness of the Western media to accurately report the invasion and occupation of Somalia by a US backed Ethiopian government. He asserts that behind the US-Ethiopian political alliance lies a strategic move to secure positioning in this oil region.
The US bombing of Somalia took place while the World Social Forum was underway in Kenya, three days before a large anti-war action in Washington on 27 January 2007.

Nunu Kidane, network coordinator for Priority Africa Network (PAN), was present in Nairobi. After returning home, she asked: how 'to explain the silence of the US peace movement on Somalia?'

Writing in the San Francisco community newspaper Bay View, Kidane suggested one valid reason: 'Perhaps US-based organizations don't have the proper analytical framework to understand the significance of the Horn of Africa region. Perhaps it is because Somalia is largely seen as a country with no government and in perpetual chaos; with "fundamental Islamic" forces, not deserving of defense against the military attacks by US in search of "terrorists".'

To that it may be added the role of the major US media in the lead up to the invasion and the suffering now taking place in the Horn of Africa.

'The carnage and suffering in Somalia may be the worst in more than a decade - but you'd hardly know it from your nightly news', wrote Andrew Cawthorne for Reuters from Nairobi last week.

Amy Goodman's Democracy Now recently examined the coverage of ABC, NBC and CBS on Somalia in the evening newscasts since the invasion.

ABC and NBC had not mentioned the war at all. CBS mentioned the war once, dedicating three whole sentences to it. Despite the fact that there have been more casualties in this war than in the recent fighting in Lebanon.

While the major US print media have not completely ignored the conflict, their reporting is even more shallow than prior to the invasion of Iraq.

As recently as last week, Reuters was still maintaining that Ethiopian troops had invaded its neighbour with the 'tacit' support of the United States.

At least The New York Times has taken to describing it as 'covert American support'. Both characterisations obscure the truth.

The attack on Somalia was pre-planned. It would never have taken place without the approval of the White House.

We now know that the Bush administration gave the Ethiopian government the go ahead to ignore its own imposed ban on weapons purchases from North Korea, in order to gear up for the battle ahead. US military forces took part in the assault.

'The US political and military alliance with Ethiopia - which openly violated international law in its aggression towards Somalia, is destabilizing the Horn region and begins a new shift in the way the US plans to have permanent and active military presence in Africa', wrote Kadane.

Planning for the invasion actually began last summer when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the Somali government.

The US-Ethiopian version of shock and awe was to swiftly bring about the desired regime change, installing the Washington-favoured, government-in-exile of President Abdullahi Yusuf.

Only a few days after their troops entered the country, Ethiopian officials said their forces lacked the resources to stay in Somalia, and that they would be leaving soon.

At one point, the Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi declared - Bush-like - that the invaders' mission had been successfully accomplished and that two-thirds of his troops were returning home.

That turned out not to be true. Three months later, the Ethiopians are still in Somalia committing what numerous observers are calling horrendous war crimes.

'The obviously indiscriminate use of heavy artillery in the capital has killed and wounded hundreds of civilians, and forced over 200,000 more to flee for their lives', Walter Lindner, German ambassador to Somalia, wrote to the country's acting president last week.

Displaced persons are 'at great risk of being subjected to looting, extortion and rape - including by uniformed troops' at a various "checkpoints". Cholera - endemic to the region during the rainy season - is beginning to cut a swathe through the displaced', he continued. Adding that attempts by international groups to offer assistance to the victims are being obstructed by militias who are stealing supplies, demanding 'taxes', and threatening relief workers.

On 3 April, Associated Press reported that a senior European Union security official had sent an email to the head of the EU delegation for Somalia warning that:

'Ethiopian and Somali military forces there may have committed war crimes...donor countries could be considered complicit if they do nothing to stop them. I need to advise you that there are strong grounds to believe that the Ethiopian government and the transitional federal government of Somalia and the African Union (peacekeeping) Force Commander, possibly also including the African Union Head of Mission and other African Union officials have, through commission or omission, violated the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.'

In the meantime, the Bush administration has worked hard to raise troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Promises were made, but with one exception, remain unfulfilled.

In a telephone conversation with Bush, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni promised to provide between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia's transitional government and train its troops.

The Ugandans arrived. But they are said to have been largely confined to their quarters, refraining from taking part in the effort to crush the opposition.

Meanwhile, the 'transitional government' and Ethiopian forces have been reported shelling civilian areas in the capital from the government compound they are supposedly guarding.

None of the reporters on the scene appear to have explored the question of why the other African governments have failed to send troops. But I think the answer is obvious.

They would be called 'peacekeepers' but would be called upon to inject themselves into a civil conflict on the side of an unpopular puppet government, something they are loath to do.

Three months ago, I wrote:

'If the unfolding events in Iraq are any indication, what started out as a swift invasion and occupation could turn out to be a long and widening war.'

That was an understatement. At the time of writing, about 1,300 people are reported to have perished in the fighting. Over 4,300 wounded, and nearly 400,000 have fled their homes. Refugees trying to cross the Red Sea are reportedly drowning off the Somali coast.

'There is a massive tragedy unfolding in Mogadishu, but from the world's silence, you would think it's Christmas', the head of a Mogadishu political think-tank told Cawthorne. 'Somalis, caught up in Mogadishu's worst violence for 16 years, are painfully aware of their place on the global agenda.'

'Nobody cares about Somalia, even if we die in our millions', Cawthorne was told by Abdirahman Ali, a 29 year-old father-of-two, who works as a security guard in Mogadishu.

And, just as in Iraq, US supported forces - the small army of the enthroned and very unpopular government and the invaders - are caught up in a civil war, set in motion by invasion and occupation.

Additional to the forces loyal to the overthrown Islamist government, the regime in power is opposed by the Hawiye, one of the country's largest clans.

A spokesman for the clan recently called upon 'the Somali people, wherever it exists, to unity in the fight against the Ethiopians. The war is not between Ethiopia and our tribe, it is between Ethiopia and all Somali people', he said.

'For the major [world] leaders, there is a tremendous embarrassment over Somalia', Michael Weinstein, a US expert on Somalia at Purdue University told Reuters.

'They have committed themselves to supporting the interim government - a government that has no broad legitimacy, a failing government. This is the heart of the problem. But Western leaders can't back out now, so of course they have 100% no interest in bringing global attention to Somalia. There is no doubt that Somalia has been shoved aside by major media outlets and global leaders, and the Somali Diaspora is left crying in the wilderness.'

Last week, during what was described as a lull in the fighting, Ethiopian soldiers were moving from house to house in the capital Mogadishu, taking hundreds of men away by the truckload to an uncertain fate.

Meanwhile, the traumatised residents of the rubble strewn city were reported gathering up bodies, many of them rotting, for burial.

'Most of the displaced civilians are encamped on Mogadishu's outskirts, where the scenes are medieval', reported The Economist last week.

On 26 April, Martin Fletcher wrote in The (London) Times about five days he spent in Mogadishu, during which he canvassed many ordinary Somalis:

'People lack water, food and shelter. Cholera has broken out. The sick sometimes have to pay rent even to sit in the shade of trees. Things will get worse with the rains, which have started. Aid agencies say people will soon start dying in large numbers. Some reckon Somalia is facing its biggest humanitarian crisis, worse than in the early 1990s, when the state collapsed amid famine and slaughter. Overwhelmingly, they loathed a government they consider a puppet of the hated Ethiopians.'

Last week the Washington Post reported that interviews it conducted in Ethiopia and testimony given to diplomats and human rights groups 'paint a picture of a nation that jails its citizens without reason or trial, and tortures many of them - despite government claims to the contrary'.

The paper commented that such cases are especially troubling because the US government, a key Ethiopian ally, has acknowledged interrogating terrorism suspects in Ethiopian prisons, where some detainees were sent after being arrested in connection with Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia in December.

The following day the paper reported: 'More than 200 FBI and CIA agents have set up camp in the Sheraton Hotel here in Ethiopia's capital and have been interrogating dozens of detainees -- including a US citizen picked up in Somalia and held without charge and without attorneys in a secret prison somewhere in this city, according to Ethiopian and U.S. officials who say the interrogations are lawful.'

History will probably record the Ethiopian government's decision to team up with the US administration for regime change in Somalia as the height of folly. The country has enough problems at home, brought into sharp relief on 24 April, when forces of an ethnic-Somali separatist group, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, raided an oil exploration facility, killing 74 people, including nine employees of a Chinese oil company.

'As much as China's - and indeed America's - ally Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian prime minister, might like to be on top of security across the Horn, he is not always able to deliver. His army is the region's most powerful conventional force. But under his rule, Ethiopia is fraying again around the edges', said the Financial Times editorial on 26 April.

Armed separatist groups are now changing tactics. Unable to match the army on the battlefield, the Ogaden National Liberation Front has chosen the spectacular to draw attention to its cause.

Only recently, a separatist group in the north tried something similar, by kidnapping a group of British diplomats. Both horrific events can be attributed partly to fallout from Ethiopia's messy intervention in neighboring Somalia.

Initial battles last December were decisively in Ethiopia's favour. But like the Americans in Iraq, the Ethiopians in Somalia were ill prepared for the aftermath. A growing insurgency has delayed the withdrawal of their troops, exposing the government to attacks at home. It has also inflamed tension among ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia. And ironically, the Chinese workers killed near Ethiopia's border with Somalia may have been victims more of Washington's policy in the region than of Beijing's.

The US has actively backed Meles Zenawi's Somali adventure. In doing so it has undermined multilateral efforts to bring about peace. 'There are two main questions that Colonel Yusuf's and Ethiopia's Western backers should now ask themselves', said The (London) Guardian 26 April 26.

First, what was gained by encouraging the Ethiopian army to topple the Islamic Courts? The US allowed Ethiopia to arm itself with North Korean weapons and also participated in the turkey shoot by using gunships against suspected insurgents hiding in villages near the Kenyan border.

Second, Washington was convinced that the Islamic Courts were sheltering foreign terror suspects: 'But how many did they get and what price have Somalis paid?'

'America can be more heavily criticised for subordinating Somali interests to its own desire to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men who may (or may not)have been hiding in Mogadishu', said The Economist.

Chatham House, a British think tank of the independent Royal Institute of International Affairs, has concluded:

'None has been caught, many innocents have died in air strikes, and anti-American feeling has deepened. Western, especially European, diplomats watching Somalia from Nairobi, the capital of Kenya to the south, have sounded the alarm. Their governments have done little.

In an uncomfortably familiar pattern, genuine multilateral concern to support the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Somalia has been hijacked by unilateral actions of other international actors - especially Ethiopia and the United States following their own foreign policy agendas.'

Actually, there is no more reason to believe the Bush administration promoted this war, in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter, 'to catch a handful of al-Qaeda men', than that the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. What has unfolded over the past three months flows from much larger strategic calculations in Washington.

The invasion and occupation of Somalia coincided with the Pentagon's now operational plan to build a new 'Africa Command' to deal with what the Christian Science Monitor dubbed 'strife, oil, and Al Qaeda'.

When I first visited this subject shortly after the invasion, I quoted 10 per cent as the figure which is the proportion of our country's petroleum from Africa; and noted that some experts were saying the US would need to up that to 25 per cent by 2010. Wrong again.

Last week came the news that the US now imports more oil from Africa than from the Middle East; with Nigeria, Angola and Algeria providing nearly one-fifth of it - more than from Saudi Arabia.

The rulers in Addis Ababa claim the invasion was a pre-emptive attack on a threatening Somalia. The Bush administration says giving a wink and a nod to the attack was merely a chance to capture a few terrorist holed up in Somalia. But for most of the media and diplomatic observers outside the US, this was another strategic move to secure positioning in a region where there is a lot of oil.

On file are plans - put on hold amid continuing conflicts - for nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields to be allocated to the US oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips.

It was recently reported that the US-backed prime minister of Somalia has proposed enactment of a new oil law to encourage the return of foreign oil companies to the country.

Salim Lone, spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq in 2003, now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya, recently told Democracy Now:

'The prime minister's attempt to lure Western oil companies is on a par with his crying wolf about al-Qaeda at every turn. Every time you interview a Somalia official, the first thing you hear is al-Qaeda and terrorists. They're using that. No one believes it. No one believes it at all, because all independent reports say the contrary.'

I spoke with Kidane last week and she conceded that the situation in Somalia might seem complex to many in the peace and social justice movements.

However, she said, it is impossible to overlook the parallel with the situation in the Iraq: 'It's aggression, that is undeniable, and the same language is being used to justify it.'

Kidane is spot on to insist that the movements for peace and justice in the US - and elsewhere - must take up the issue. The unlawful US- Ethiopian invasion and occupation of that country and the accompanying human suffering and human rights abuses constitute a new - and still mostly hidden - war, which is in many ways is similar to that in Iraq. And, waged for the same reason.



Carl Bloice is a writer based in San Francisco. He is a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He is on the editorial board of Black Commentator where a version of this article was originally published on 2 May 2007.

BO$$UNIT is a group of young people who are trying to take control of there life with all thats going on. Bo$$unit basically takes advantage of how the world is so high tech nowadays and use technology to express whatever they want. Bo$$unit has realized with technology you can achieve many things, and they just want to show the world that in a way for young people and older people can understand. Bo$$unit produces many products with technology until they get enough money to build a studio that uses technology to do everything and have it open to the public to produce whatever they want to exspress to the world with a little help.

I think Invisible city class is about talking pictures about things people see every day but don’t pay any mind to and make a documentary about and describe it in your own words.

Well the pictures I took were about the natural environment and how everything in the park is different. I took pictures of different trees and leaves. I think the pictures I took match the class because we suppose to take picture that we are not used to taking.

The trip was fun because we took our class art stuff to this big conference and showed all of our work and we had a lot of people ask questions.

I actually like the trip we want on because it was different because it was better than being in school and sitting in the bored house all day chilling on Skype and MySpace.
This conference really help me out because in give me a little idea what I want to do in the future.

In my point of view our class ''Invisible City'' is about overlooking things that people pass by every day. I learned a lot from being in this class and it gave me a new lens to see things in different ways. I also liked this class because it also gives me a chance to show people how I see things with my photography.
Pictures I personally took were mostly landscape pictures, like pictures of my school and pictures of my community. The music we created was more up to date hip hop type instrumentals. The process of making the music was simple; we used this program called FL studio and put together sounds to make the music we produced.
We took all the projects our class made and we took it to Hershey, Pennsylvania to the PETE&C conference. There we displayed all the things we did in our class for people there to observe. I thought the conference was helpful because people there gave us feedback on what they thought about our work. I would be interested in going again, and if I could go again next year a project I would like to work on more of our music and maybe do some movies.

John Pilger addresses Columbia University in New York
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=267

On 14 April 2006, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University in New York brought together John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass for a discussion entitled 'Breaking the Silence: War, lies and empire'.

Tne following is a transcript of John Pilger's address - 'War by Media':

"During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How do you do it?”

What is the secret? It's a question now urgently asked of those whose job is to keep the record straight: who in this country have extraordinary constitutional freedom. I refer to journalists, of course, a small group who hold privileged sway over the way we think, even the way we use language.

I have been a journalist for more than 40 years. Although I am based in London, I have worked all over the world, including the United States, and I have reported America's wars. My experience is that what the Russian journalists were referring to is censorship by omission, the product of a parallel world of unspoken truth and public myths and lies: in other words, censorship by journalism, which today has become war by journalism.

For me, this is the most virulent and powerful form of censorship, fuelling an indoctrination that runs deep in western societies, deeper than many journalists themselves understand or will admit to. Its power is such that it can mean the difference between life and death for untold numbers of people in faraway countries, like Iraq.

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.” By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down. (Vandana Shiva has called this 'subjugated knowledge').

A venerable clichй is that truth is the first casualty in wartime. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. The first American war I reported was Vietnam. I went there from 1966 to the last day. When it was all over, the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, another correspondent who covered Vietnam. “For the first time in modern history,” he wrote, “the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen.” He was accusing journalists of losing the war by opposing it in their work.

Robert Elegant's view became the received wisdom in America and still is. This official truth has determined how every American war since Vietnam has been reported. In Iraq, the “embedded” reporter was invented because the generals believed the Robert Elegant thesis: that critical reporting had “lost” Vietnam. How wrong they are.

On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I called on the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed most of them had a gruesome photo gallery pinned on the wall -- pictures of the bodies of Vietnamese and American soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being tortured. Above the torturer's head was a stick-on comic strip balloon with the words: “That'll teach you to talk to the press.”

None of these pictures had ever been published, or even put on the wire.

I asked why. The response was that "New York" would reject them, because the readers would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would be to “sensationalise”; it would not be "objective" or "impartial". At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this: that atrocities surely were aberrations by definition. I, too, had grown up on John Wayne movies of the "good war" against Germany and Japan, an ethical bath that had left us westerners pure of soul and altruistic towards our fellow man and heroic. We did not torture. We did not kill women and children. We were the permanent good guys.

However, this did not explain the so-called “free fire zones” that turned entire provinces into places of slaughter: provinces like Quang Ngai, where the My Lai massacre was only one of a number of unreported massacres. It did not explain the helicopter “turkey shoots”. It did not explain people dragged along dirt roads, roped from neck to neck, by jeeps filled with doped and laughing GIs and why they kept human skulls enscribed with the words, “One down, one million to go.”

The atrocities were not aberrations. The war itself was an atrocity. That was the “big story” and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and effectiveness of the military were questioned by reporters, but the word "invasion" was almost never used. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was promoted by most journalists, incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers at home to tell the subversive truth -- those like Daniel Ellsberg, and mavericks like Seymour Hersh with his extraordinary scoop of the My Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam at the time of My Lai on March 16, 1968. Not one of them reported it.

The invasion of Vietnam was deliberate and calculated, as were policies and strategies that bordered on genocide and were designed to force millions of people to abandon their homes. Experimental weapons were used against civilians. Chemicals banned in the United States -- Agent Orange -- were used to change the genetic and environmental order in Vietnam. All of this was rarely news at the time. The unspoken task of the reporter in Vietnam, as it was in Korea, was, to normalise the unthinkable - to quote Edward Herman's memorable phrase. And that has not changed.

In 1975, when the Vietnam war just over, I witnessed the full panorama of what the American military machine had done, and I could barely believe my eyes. In the north, it seemed as if I had stumbled on some great, unrecorded natural disaster. On my office wall in London is a photograph I took of a town in Vinh province that was once home to 10,000 people. The photograph shows bomb craters and bomb craters, and bomb craters. Obliteration.

The Hollywood movies that followed the war were an extension of the journalism. The first was The Deerhunter, whose director Michael Cimino fabricated his own military service in Vietnam, and invented scenes of Vietnamese playing Russian roulette with American prisoners. The message was clear. America had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best. It was all the more pernicious because it was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it remains the only time I have shouted out in protest, in a packed cinema.

This was followed by Apocalyse Now, whose writer, John Millius, invented a sequence about the Vietcong cutting off the arms of children. More oriental barbarity, more American angst, more purgative for the audience. Then there was the Rambo series and the “missing in action” films that fed the lie of Americans still imprisoned in Vietnam. Even Oliver Stone's Platoon, which gave us glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, promoted the invader as victim.

Even the official truth, or the liberal version, that the “noble cause” had failed in Vietnam, was a myth. From Kennedy to Ford, the American war establishment had seen Vietnam as a threat, because it offered an alternative model of development. The weaker the country, the greater the threat of a good example to his region and beyond. By the time the last US Marine had left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, Vietnam was economically and environmentally crushed and the threat had been extinguished.

In the acclaimed movie The Killing Fields, the story of a New York Times reporter and his stringer in Cambodia, scenes that showed the Vietnamese as liberators of Cambodia in 1979 were filmed, but never shown.

These showed Vietnamese soldiers as the liberators they were, handing out food to the survivors of Pol Pot. To my knowledge, this censorship was never reported. The cut version of The Killing Fields complied with the official truth then dominant I the United States, especially in the liberal press, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books. This set out to justify the crime of the Vietnam war by dehumanising the Vietnamese communists and confusing them, in the public mind, with Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

In the post war period, the policy in Washington was revenge, a word that officials used in private, but never publicly. Famous insider journalists, like James Reston of the New York Times, embraced it and disguised it in anti-Vietnamese disinformation. An economic embargo was imposed on Vietnam and Cambodia. Supplies of milk were cut off to the children of Vietnam. This barbaric assault on the very fabric of life in two of the most stricken societies on earth was rarely reported in the United States.

During this time, I made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first, in 1979, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia described the American bombing that had provided a catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot and showed the human effects of the embargo. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries, but never in the United States. When I flew to Washington and offered Year Zero to the national public broadcaster, PBS. I received a curious reaction from PBS executives. They were shocked by the film, and they also spoke admiringly of it, even though but I could see them collectively shaking their heads. One of them finally said to me, “John, we are disturbed that your film says the United States played such a destructive role in Cambodia, and we may have an issue of objectivity. So we have decided to call in a Journalistic Adjudicator.”

“Journalistic Adjudicator” was straight out of Orwell. But it was real, and PBS appointed one Richard Dudman, a reporter on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Dudman was one of the few Westerners to have been invited by Pol Pot to visit Cambodia. His dispatches reflected none of the savagery then enveloping that country; he even praised his hosts. Not surprisingly, he turned his thumb down on my film and Americans never saw the film. Months later, one of the PBS executives, told me, “These are difficult days under Reagan. Your film would have given us problems. Sorry.”

The lack of truth about what had really happened in South East Asia - the media promoted myth of an honourable “blunder” into a “quagmire” and the cover-up of the true scale of the slaughter -- allowed Ronald Reagan to renew the same “noble cause” in Central America and rescue, as the Reaganites saw it, America's lost prestige in the world. The target, once again, was an impoverished nation without resources, whose threat, like Vietnam, was in trying to establish a model of development different from that of the corrupt, colonial dictatorships, backed by Washington. This was Nicaragua: population three million, one of the poorest nations on earth.

I reported the so-called Contra War from the Nicaraguan side; but it was not a war. Like all the attacks of the American superpower on small, defenceless countries, it was about murder, bribery and “perception management”. A CIA-armed and trained rabble known as the Contra would slip across the border from Honduras and cut the throats of midwives, or blow up schools and clinics. Reagan called them the equivalent of his nation's Founding Fathers. The Iran-Contra scandal that followed produced some excellent investigative reporting in he United States, yet when it was all over, the overall impression was of a mildly embarrassed administration in Washington, not the barbarity of its actions. Thanks to journalists, Reagan emerged smiling and waving, “the great communicator”. According to the American historian Greg Grandin (Empire's Workshop: Metropolitan Books), 300,000 people in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador had paid with their lives.

Is Iraq different? Yes, there are many differences, but for journalists there are haunting similarities of both Vietnam and Central America. The "noble cause" of “bringing democracy to the Middle East”, the promotion of a civil war and the killing of tens of thousands of invisible people. On August 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: “If we had known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them. The result is a human disaster of epic proportions, for which journalists in the so-called mainstream bear much of the responsibility; and that includes responsibility for the lives lost and destroyed.

This is true not only in America. In Britain, where I live, the BBC - which promotes itself as a nirvana of objectivity and impartiality and truth - has blood on its corporate hands. There are two interesting studies of the BBC's reporting. One of them, in the build-up to the invasion, shows that the BBC gave just two per cent of its coverage of Iraq to anti-war dissent. That was less than the anti-war coverage of all the American networks. A second study by the respected journalism school at University College in Cardiff shows that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them and that, by clear implication, Bush and Blair were right.

We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by MI6, the secret intelligence service. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI6 agents planted stories about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fakes. However, that is not the point. The point is that the dark arts of MI6 were quite unnecessary, because a systematic media self-censorship produced the same result.

Recently, the BBC's Director of News, Helen Boaden, was asked to explain how one of her “embedded” reporters in Iraq could possibly describe the aim of the Anglo-American invasion as “bring [ing] democracy and human rights” to Iraq. She replied with quotations from Tony Blair that this was indeed the truth, as if Blair and the truth were in any way related. This servility to state power is hotly denied, of course, but routine. It is even called “objectivity”. This is the BBC's correspondent in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the invasion of Iraq. “There is no doubt,” he reported, "that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East ... is now increasingly tied up with military power". Last year, he lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as "someone who believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." This is not unusual. On the third anniversary of the invasion, a BBC newsreader described the invasion as a "miscalculation". Not illegal. Not unprovoked. Not based on lies. Not a crime as defined by the judegment at Nuremberg. But a miscalculation. Thus, the unthinkable was normalised.

There is a new book out in Britain called “Guardians of Power”. The authors are David Edwards and David Cromwell, who edit a remarkable website called MediaLens. Their work is about the parallel worlds of unspoken truths and official lies. They have not bothered with soft targets, like the Murdoch press. They concentrate on the liberal media, which is proud of its objectivity and impartiality, its “balance” and “professionalism”. They studied the reporting of the invasions of Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and the current build-up to an invasion of Iran. What they reveal is a pattern. In the British media, as in the United States, as in Australia, rapacious western actions are reported as moral crusades, or humanitarian interventions. At the very least, they are represented as the management of an international crisis, rather than the cause of the crisis. This truthful, bracing book has not been reviewed in a single British newspaper, even though informed people have offered to write about it.

Now consider the treatment of Harold Pinter, Britain's greatest living dramatist. In accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature last December, Harold Pinter made an epic speech. He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought” in Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while American state crimes were merely “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged.” Across the world, he pointed out, the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power, “but you wouldn't know it”, he said. “it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.” For the BBC, Pinter's speech never happened. Not a word of it was broadcast. It never happened.

Pinter's threat is that he tells a subversive truth. He makes the connection between imperialism and fascism and he describes it as a battle for history. I would add that it is also a battle for journalism. Language has become a crucial battleground. Noble words, like “democracy”, "liberation", “freedom”, “reform” have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of these concepts. Their counterfeits dominate the news. "War on terror” is used incessantly, yet it is a false metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, American, British and Australian troops are fighting insurrections in countries where their invasions have caused mayhem and grief. And where are the pictures of “our” atrocities? How many Americans and Britons know that, in revenge for 3,000 innocent lives taken on September 11th, 2001, up to 20,000 innocent people have died in Afghanistan? How many know that the equivalent of the population of a middle-sized American city have been killed in Iraq, most of them by American firepower?

It is too easy to blame everything on Bush, and to plead, as liberal journalists do, that the “neo-cons” have hi-jacked America. Ask the Native Americans how benign the system used to be. Or listen to Richard Nixon on the Watergate tapes, talking about power and bombing. "You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians," Nixon said to Kissinger, "and I don't give a damn. I don't care .... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb ... I just want you to think big." In the nuclear age, from Harry Truman to George W Bush, there is no evidence that Nixon was unique.

The lies told about Iraq are no different from the lies that ignited the Spanish-American war, that allowed the Vietnam and Korean wars to happen and the Cold War to endure. They are no different from the myths of World War Two that justified the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities. It is as if we journalists are being constantly groomed to swallow the fables of empire. Richard Falk at Princeton has described the process. We are indocrinated to see foreign policy, he wrote, “through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence.”

In my career as a journalist, there has never been a war on terror but a war of terror. Not long ago I walked down a leafy street in Jakarta, Indonesia, where the former dictator General Suharto is living out his life in luxury, having stolen from his people an estimated $10 billion. A United Nations truth commission had just released a report, based on official files, that credits Suharto with the deaths of 180,000 people in East Timor. It says that the United States played a "primary role" in this terror. Britain and Australia are named as accessories to this vast suffering.

After I had filmed in East Timor in 1993, I interviewed Philip Liechty, a former CIA officer who, at his embassy desk in Jakarta, had seen the evidence of Suharto's horrors committed with American approval and American arms. He told me that, when he retired, he had tried to alert the media to East Timor. “But there was no interest,” he said, echoing Harold Pinter. And yet the deaths in East Timor are more than six times greater than all the deaths caused by terrorist incidents throughout the world over past 25 years, according to the State Department. The “mainstream” deals with this by reporting humanity in terms of its worthy victims and unworthy victims, its good tyrants and bad tyrants. The victims of September 11, 2001, are worthy. The victims of East Timor are unworthy. Israeli victims are worthy; Palestinians are unworthy. Saddam Hussein was once a good tyrant. Now he is a bad tyrant. Saddam must be envious of Suharto, who has always been a good tyrant, an acceptable mass murderer.

In the 1960s, the New York Times greeted Suharto's blood-soaked seizure of power in Indonesia as "a gleam of light in Asia". After Suharto had killed off 180,000 East Timorese, Bill Clinton called him “our kind of guy”. Margaret Thatcher offered similar unction, as did the Australian prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating on a regular basis. The media both led and echoed this chorus.

If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to “soften-up” the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us. We soften them up by de-humanising them, by writing about "regime change" in Iran as if that country is an abstraction, not a human society. Currently, journalists are softening up Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is likened to Hitler. That he has won nine democratic elections and referenda -- a world record -- is of no interest.

A few weeks ago, Channel 4 News in Britain - regarded as a liberal news service - carried a major item that might have been broadcast by the State Department. The reporter, Jonathan Rugman, the Washington correspondent, presented Chavez as a cartoon character, a sinister buffoon whose folksy Latin way camouflaged a man “in danger of joining a rogue gallery of dictators and despots - Washington's latest Latin nightmare.” In contrast, Condaleeza Rice was afforded gravitas and Rumsfeld was allowed to call Chavez Hitler, unchallenged.

Indeed, almost everything in this travesty of journalism was viewed from Washington, only fragments of it from the barrios of Venezuela, where President Chavez enjoys 80 per cent popularity. In crude Soviet-flick style, Chavez was shown with Saddam Hussein when this brief encounter only had to do with OPEC and oil. According to the reporter, Venezuela under Chavez was helping Iran develop nuclear weapons. No evidence was given for this absurdity.

The softening-up of Venezuela is well advanced in the United States.

Ninety-five per cent of 100 media commentaries surveyed by the media watch dog FAIR expressed hostility to Chavez. “Dictator”, “strongman”, “demagogue” were the familiar buzz words, so that people reading and watching had no idea that Venezuela was the only oil-producing country in the world to use its oil revenue for the benefit of poor people. They would have no idea of spectacular developments in health, education, literacy. They would have no idea that Venezuela has no political jails - unlike the United States.

So that if the Bush administration launches “Operation Balboa”, a mooted plan to overthrow the Chavez government, who will care, because who will know? For we shall only have the media version - another lousy demagogue got what was coming to him. The poor of Venezuela, like the poor of Nicaragua, like the poor of Vietnam and Cambodia, like the poor of Fallujah, whose dreams and lives are of no interest, will be invisible in their grief -- a triumph of censorship by journalism.

What should journalists do? I mean, journalists who give a damn? They need to act now. Governments fear good journalists. The reason the Pentagon spends millions of dollars on PR, or “perception management” companies that try to bend the news is because it fears truth tellers, just as Stalinist governments feared them. There is no difference. Look back at the great American journalists: Upton Sinclair, Edward R Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, I. F.Stone, Seymour Hersh. All were mavericks. None embraced the corporate world of journalism and its modern supplier: the media college.

It is said the internet is an alternative; and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of the great muckrakers: those like the Irish journalist Claud Cockburn, who said: "Never believe anything until it is officially denied." But the internet is still a kind of samidzat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on; just as most of humanity does not own a cell phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the "Bastille of words". That time is now."

Last update - 16:24 10/11/2006
Muslims in Auschwitz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=786453

By Gil Anidjar

As the end nears, it is said, the entire course of a life flashes before one's eyes. Is there time then to learn the lessons of history? Perhaps this is what Walter Benjamin was asking when, evoking the "tradition of the oppressed," he wrote of an image "flashing in a moment of danger." We reside in this moment, and the "image of our time," which Primo Levi placed before our eyes as recapitulating the course of our history, is that of Muslims in Auschwitz. The sound is that of one civilization clashing.

This is not an indictment of that civilization. It is an acknowledgment of its self-proclaimed achievements and of the name it has claimed for itself. The West is Christian, which is to say that it follows and replicates the map of Western Christendom, whether Roman Catholic, Lutheran and post-Lutheran, and ultimately "secular." All of which does indicate that significant changes have occurred within it, of course, yet throughout these changes, and throughout its expansion, the West understood itself as Christian (more recently, as "Judeo-Christian").

Mission and conquest (the Americas, India, the "scramble for Africa"), science (linguistics, biological racism and eugenics, nuclear weapons), politics (the modern state, direct or indirect rule), and economics (slavery, wage labor, the corporation, the financial market, famine) have all contributed to the unfinished project of devastation of entire regions of the globe, the extermination of countless communities and cultures. One could, I suppose, present the same course of events or developments and point to the advances otherwise made, but it is possible that, in a moment of danger, pride is not what is most urgently called for. But we hear the sound of one civilization clashing.

That there were Muslims in Auschwitz means that we have an image (one among many, but a striking one, and rarely considered) in which is contained the geographical, scientific, political and economical achievements of the Christian West. It means that the history of Orientalism (from the Crusades to the oilfields) is "the history of a strange, secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism," as Edward Said effectively put it. Why "secret"? Because the peculiar and millennial investment of the West in the joined figure of Jew and Arab (or, if you will, in the rule over Jerusalem, heavenly or earthly) is one of the crucial knots tying together geography, science, politics and economics.

It is not a matter of mere ideology therefore, but the cooperation in one theological-political figure an image that flashes in a moment of danger - of a series of pursuits undertaken in the name of Christ and Christendom, in the subsequent name of Christian civilization (and for a brief period under the "secular" marker of the "white race"), and finally, in that of "civilization" itself. Thus the sound of one civilization clashing.

The Christian West invented the "Semites." That is no secret. Less commented upon are the earlier gestures that, responding to oft-expressed anxieties, sought to prevent any alliance (real or imagined) between Jews and Muslims. The 19th-century equation of Jew and Arab did not manage to undo the older and weightier contention that Jews are not Muslims (read: they should not be allies of Muslims). Beyond the familiar phantasms of a fifth column, we witness the sedimentation of a rhetoric of "security" on the part of the paranoid powerful.

Having subjugated the world, the Christian West managed to invent a knowledge ("science") that construes the world as full of hatred and danger, full of animosity toward it. The Jews (and the witches) were perceived as an internal danger, the Muslims (and the "dark hordes") as an external one. What was needed was therefore walls, between and within, to protect "us" from "them," and most importantly, perhaps, to divide among "them" (indirect rule perfected the technique, with the results we know: sectarianism and civil war in Lebanon, communalism and partition in India, tribalism and apartheid in Africa; and there are more examples). Jews and Muslims, and more precisely, their fabricated, scientific image - "Semites" - constituted an early laboratory within which Western Christendom concocted the geographic, scientific, political and economic "object" to its soon-to-be-modern "subject."

Geography (globalization and the unequal division of passports), science (high bio-tech), politics (the UN Security Council) and economics (the World Bank, the IMF) why refer to these as "the Christian West"? Because the secret is out, it is international, and its name is vera religio. From under the bombs and behind the walls being built in Palestine, North Africa and Mexico, behind the countless virtual barriers that separate Western Christendom from its others, one can hear a familiar noise. It is the sound of one civilization clashing. And in this moment of danger, the image that flashes still is the image Primo Levi figured as the "image of our time." It is the name of our collective blindness enduring.

There were Muslims in Auschwitz.

Gil Anidjar is Associate Professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. His most recent book is The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford University Press, 2003).