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<PRE>THE HOFFMAN WIRE
Dedicated to Freedom of the Press, Investigative Reporting and Revisionist History
Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor
<A HREF=" http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html
">http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html</A>
*******************************************</PRE>
Jan. 29, 2002
CONTENTS:
1. The Proposed Ban on Germany's Rightist Party, the NDP
2. The Daily Life of Palestinian Women Under Israeli Occupation
3. The Pearl Kidnapping and the Policy Change for the Guantánamo Bay
Concentration Camp
4. Model Letter to the Editor
5. Hoffman's Current Writing and Research Schedule
===========================
Government Agents and the Proposed Ban on Germany's Rightist Party, the
NDP
Germany's center-left coalition, headed by Gerhard Schröder, decided
last year that it wanted the most high profile of the militiant right
wing political parties, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD),
made illegal. Some say that the NPD's ideology can be fairly described
as a precursor to neo-Nazism.
However, as with almost all neo-Nazi movements in the West, at least two
leading NPD officials, whose excesses have been cited as grounds for a
ban, have been exposed as agents of the secret police--in this case the
Bundesverfassungsschutz (BVD), Germany's domestic secret police agency.
The German government is thus seeking to destroy a party for actions
which, in some cases, had been said or done by its own agents.
It is not just Schröder's Social Democrats or their allies in the Green
party who are backing a ban on the NPD, but also the Christian and Free
Democrats who make up the center-right opposition.
The German constitutional court has postponed a hearing, scheduled for
February 5. Proceeding with a ban risks adding substance to the right's
claim that parliamentary democracy in Germany is an elaborate and
hypocritical sham.
Prudent activists need to be cautious when cooperating with or endorsing
parties such as the NPD. The British Secret Police helped establish the
neo-Nazi Combat 18 group in Britain. Aryan Nations in Idaho was riddled
with police agents in leadership and policy-making positions; and agents
of the government sting operation known as the Oklahoma City Bombing
continue to hold leadership positions within the neo-Nazi movement in
the U.S. and to enjoy travel privileges into Germany at a time when
revisionists and other sincere opponents of the Zionist Occupation
Government in Berlin are subject to immediate arrest upon entry.
Until authentic counter-intelligence plays some active and meaningful
role in our ranks, it is wise to limit contact with such groups.
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EDITOR's NOTE: There has been a failure to put a human face on
Palestinian suffering. Most protests in print of conditions imposed by
the Israelis amount to dull ideological hectoring by partisans preaching
to the choir. What follows is a human interest story which offers
genuine insight into both the conditions which produce suicide bombers
and the unspeakable daily life of the average Palestinian. Needless to
say, this article was not published in the tightly censored mainstream
American media, but rather in England's Manchester "Guardian" newspaper.
"We Just Want to Live Normally": The Daily Life of Palestinian Women
Under Israeli Occupation
The Guardian, January 29, 2002
On a clear morning last autumn, in a village in Arab east Jerusalem, a
woman was screaming. It was a high, desperate note and it jangled
through the stiff air that had yet to be warmed by the bustle of the
day. She was begging for her home, hopelessly.
We watched as the clumsy yellow Caterpillar drilled straight through the
wall of her trim two-storey house. It splintered like a cracker, to the
inexorable crunch of bulldozer tread on rubble. The demolition - one of
an estimated 8,000 across the occupied territories since 1967, which
have left some 40,000 Palestinians homeless - was a desperate affair. A
crowd of Palestinians had gathered on a nearby rooftop to witness the
inevitable, as another home fell to the complex system of zoning,
permits and demolitions, by which Israel maintains its artificial
domination over the city of Jerusalem and beyond. Mainly women, they
paced, wept, cursed, turned to one another, turned away. Here was a
domestic tragedy.
The woman's father raved at anyone who would listen. He had sunk his
savings into his daughter's house. It was built on his land,
expropriated by the Israelis. He had no money left, and no patience. He
would martyr himself, he threatened wildly, strap a bomb around his
waist and blow up the lot of them. The women listened kindly. It was a
father's threat to make - a man's threat.
The news that the 20-year-old Palestinian who detonated a suicide bomb
in Jerusalem on Sunday was a woman - the first woman to carry out such
an attack in Israel - has been greeted with incredulity. Extreme acts of
violence have not generally been part of the lexicon of Palestinian
women's struggle. There have been exceptions, notably Leila Khaled, an
international hijacker for the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine in the 70s and now an outspoken politician...
But in the villages, and around the checkpoints, the story has been one
of endurance, not extremity. Women have reached a stage where they
simply want to feel safe, says Marina Barham, who lives in the West Bank
village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, and runs a local theatre company.
"They want their children and their husband to be safe, in their home,
in the street, at their place of work. They want to live normally, not
to be under stress all the time worrying whether their family will come
home safely."
Hope comes down to a street empty of tanks and food on the table. As
Israeli incursions continue into the West Bank and Gaza, and the
Palestians' sphere of movement becomes increasingly limited, the fabric
of civil society is unravelling. Half the Palestinians are now living
below the poverty line. With many men out of work, the responsibility
for feeding the family is increasingly falling to women. The majority of
those killed or injured since the second intifada began in September
2000 are men - and again women are left to care for the disabled. Widows
and those whose husbands are in prison, become the breadwinners.
The checkpoint regulations out of Bethlehem have changed again, Barham
tells me, and there is even further to walk. Last November I watched
women trudge past the lines of cars at the checkpoint into Ramallah, mud
caking their smart work shoes, or sticking to their heavy shopping bags.
And last year, seven women gave birth at checkpoints, unable to reach
the hospital in time...
Professor Jeff Halper, coordinator of the Israeli committee against
house demolitions...has studied the effects of demolition on
families...The violation and ensuing trauma of losing one's home is akin
to that of rape for many women, he says. "For most Palestinian women,
the house is their entire world. Unless they are educated and go out to
work, that's the woman's domain. After the demolition, she will usually
have to live with her husband's family. She has lost her world in a
physical sense, and in a social sense, too, because she is no longer in
charge but living in someone else's house, and has to take on the
subordinate status of a daughter to her mother-in-law."
Shadia el Sarag tells me that after the bombing on Sunday, the Israeli
military flew so low over Gaza City that the windows in her office
smashed. El Sarag runs a women's empowerment initiative, as part of the
Gaza community mental health programme. The Gaza strip is a miserable
place, saturated with fear and poverty. Refugees bed down in the
streets, El Sarag says, because they are afraid that Israeli tanks will
come in the night to destroy their shacks while they sleep...
In the south of Gaza, the situation has become particularly desperate.
Women are divorced in absentia by husbands who cannot afford to support
them. Sent back to live with her parents, the woman often finds that her
children are not welcome there. Prostitution is a final desperate
solution - should her relatives find out, she will be killed to preserve
the honour of the family name.
If women are becoming more radical, argues Fikr Shaltoot, the
coordinator of a medical charity in Gaza, it is because of the brutal
Israeli action against the Palestinians. "It is because of what we see
day and night: the destruction of homes, the closures, people killed
while they are sleeping, people dying because the checkpoint won't let
an ambulance past to get to the hospital.
"Many women are depressed and suicidal. If there is a chance for
Palestinian women to martyr themselves, then they will. Everyone is very
surprised that the Jerusalem bomber was a woman, and perhaps she will be
honoured more because of that. But in Palestine there are already many
heroines - if a woman has a son handicapped by a shell, if she is
widowed, if her husband is imprisoned and she continues to support the
family, then she is a heroine for me."
<end quote>
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3. The Pearl Kidnapping and the Policy Change for the Guantánamo Bay
Concentration Camp
by Michael A. Hoffman II
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is allegedly being held by
militants in Pakistan. Pearl's employer is one of the most bloodthirsty
advocates of war-Zionism and Talmudic racism in mainstream American
publishing. The Pakistani charge that Pearl is a CIA asset may also have
validity. Pearl's alleged kidnappers are reported to have said that he
is being held in "inhuman conditions like the Muslims at Guantánamo" and
that this abuse of Pearl would continue until conditions for Muslim
POWs held in Cuba improved.
Lo and behold, George Bush said yesterday that he is "reconsidering the
question of whether detainees held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be
protected under the Geneva Convention." It seems that Pearl is an
important enough figure to cause a high-level change in America's rather
stupid military prisoner policy, which was bound to have precisely the
repercussions on Americans captured by foreign forces that we observe in
the case of Pearl.
Lest we forget, Bush's foreign policy is deliberately calculated to
foment more terror attacks on America and on Americans at home and
abroad. American foreign policy under Bush is virtually 100% vintage
Likud policy brewed in Jerusalem, with all of the lumbering, Neanderthal
war-without-end implications. War, terror, and cycles of reprisal and
counter-terror are the fuel that feeds the Leviathan state, whether in
the Socialist Israeli entity, or in the post-Constitutional American
empire in which we witness the emergence of a hybrid, Stalinist-Monopoly
Capitalism system of governance.
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4. Model Letter to the Editor
Here is a sophisticated letter-to-the-editor on the subject of the
Middle East. It ought to slip past most Pharisee filters at local
newspapers. I suggest that it serve as a model for your own epistles.
Letter to the Editor
Ariel Sharon has no desire to seek peace with the Palestinians nor to
advance a just and viable solution to the conflict. While I abhor the
deaths and injuries caused to innocent Israelis by the suicide bombers,
Sharon's every move guarantees that the violence and suffering on both
sides will escalate. Palestinian children continue to be detained in
Israeli prisons without trial; innocent civilians are shot and bombed.
Many Palestinians are denied freedom of movement; homes are demolished
in the dead of night; the settlements in the occupied territories
flourish; orchards are razed to the ground, depriving the Palestinians
of their livelihood; water supplies are scarce and unemployment and
poverty soar.
It is because of these appalling conditions that an international
movement is emerging to speak out on behalf of the Palestinians and to
campaign for and with them. To label this as anti-semitic misses the
point. The diminishing of any racial or religious group, the removal of
their human and civil rights, is morally unacceptable and dehumanizes us
all.
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5. Hoffman's Current Writing and Research Schedule
Your editor is at present involved in paperwork and office-cleaning
chores attendant on his return from Europe. When this tedium is
concluded in the next few days, I will take up production of issue no.
22 of "Revisionist History" newsletter, a hard copy publication not to
be confused with the e-mail HOFFMAN WIRE dispatch. "Revisionist History"
issue 22 will contain a report on my fact-finding tour overseas as well
as in-depth analyses of the current American crisis, and should be in
the mail to subscribers by mid-February, if not sooner.
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Today's Hoffman Wire is posted online at:
http://www.hoffman-info.com/wire2.html
Tell a friend!
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<PRE>Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press
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