Direct-to-Consumer DNA Testing and the Myth of Personalized Medicine: Spit Kits, SNP Chips and Human Genomics

http://www.etcgroup.org/

Special Report on Human Genomics, Part I

Direct-to-Consumer DNA Testing and the Myth of Personalized Medicine:Spit Kits, SNP Chips and Human GenomicsIn the coming months, ETC Group will publish a series of reports on the impact and implications of human genomics. The topic of the first report in the series is the burgeoning Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing industry, which is promising consumers a guidebook for maintaining health as well as a gene-based horoscope predicting future illness. The second report will examine large-scale human genomics projects and their relation to biopiracy. A third report will examine the corporate context – the industry players vying to control and profit from the genomics revolution. Issue & Impact: “Personalized medicine” is based on the belief that we can – or, one day soon will be able to – detect, prevent and treat disease according to an individual’s genetic profile. “Gene-informed,”[1] individualized medicine is being touted as a boon to health and longevity around the world, though its efficacy and usefulness have yet to be demonstrated. Nevertheless, the DNA testing field is advancing rapidly. The global market for personal gene testing is estimated at $730 million and growing 20% every year, according to market research analysts.[2] An explosion of unregulated direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing is feeding that growth. Today there are more than one thousand different genetic tests available. Marketers of personal gene testing want us to believe that our genes define us and hold the key to our health and wellbeing. In fact, the information gleaned from most genetic tests has very limited use for patients, but it is extremely valuable to companies and researchers trying to establish links between medical conditions and genetic variations, enabling – they hope – the eventual development of drugs targeted to people with specific genetic profiles. In the shorter term, drugs that have been taken off the market due to unexpected adverse reactions in a small percentage of the population could be re-marketed as personalized drugs, intended only for those with the appropriate genetic profile. Through clever (and often misleading) marketing, some companies are persuading consumers to pay for storage of genetic data and health information, which the companies intend to use (e.g., sell) for research and drug development. While DNA testing is currently expensive, risky (e.g., it can result in privacy violations and discrimination) and provides information with extremely limited usefulness, it is being marketed as the next cutting-edge, must-have accessory – the iPod of the medical world.[1] The phrase is used by Dr. Russ Altman, Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, in a Google TechTalk entitled “Opportunities for Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine,” 22 February 2006, on the Internet: http://thepersonalgenome.com/2006/02/russ_altman_tal/[2] Estimate comes from Piper Jaffray & Co., cited in Matthew Herper and Robert Langreth, “Will You Get Cancer?” Forbes.com, 18 June 2007, on the Internet: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0618/052_2.html

The veracity of Indian democracy

From Gujarat to Nandigram
Sushmita
If you disagree with the state, you will be killed. If you are not a Hindu you will be killed. You are a human being and think like one. This can provide enough reasons for killing you. Didn’t you hear this during the honorable tour of Indian democracy? Our right to live will be decided by the thermometer of majority of the parliamentary politics of India. The honorable journey in the service of finance capital is moving ahead crushing the oppressed masses. Chief Minister of a state challenges all those who oppose the mass killings by saying that he is elected by the majority. Not only this he even challenged his opponents to contest the elections to find it (let elections decide whether he is right or wrong). If we follow Narendra Modi or other monks of Indian democracy, we get to the conclusion that the people of Gujarat have not only welcomed the killings organized by Narendra Modi but also provided him a license to continue.
Crisis of Indian Democracy and Fascism.
Discussions are hot on the reelection of Narendra Modi. At many places caste equations and equations of congress and BJP are being discussed. But there are much important questions which are left out.i.e. Is Modi the first person to be elected after organizing mass killings? Indira Gandhi was responsible for enforcing an emergency. Repression reached to heights, people got killed but she got re elected with majority in just three years time. The facts lay strong emphasis on the questions that are being raised on democracy in India. This democracy based on semi feudal and semi colonial relations becomes more regressive with the deepening of economic crisis. If we talk about the present structure of parliament we find that power has been centralized to the cabinet and more so in the pre determined standing committees which are found to be serving the finance capital. Even the roles of ministers are decided by this finance capital. More importantly fascism has been borne out of the Indian parliament itself. The decision to put an emergency can be undemocratic but in no way unlawful in the parliamentary framework. If in majority the government has a right to reject crores of masses on the basis of decision taken by the cabinet as the whip of cabinet is a compulsion to all members of the parliament. Today the Indian parliament is undergoing severe crisis despite using caste, religion and other regressive measures. There is a contradiction between democracy and feudalism. The growth of democracy means decline in role of feudal institutions (such as caste, creed, religion etc) in our social political life. But what we find here is that these institutions have made a strong hold. Indian parliamentary politics has made all these feudal relations more strong. Apart from this we can get a glimpse of the increasing crisis in the present structure of governance where there is multi party position and multiparty opposition. Still it is hard to complete five years tenure. And now they are talking of revising the constitution. It is harsh reality that the parliament can do nothing more than have a mock debate on economic and external affairs. Now ordinance have taken the place of bills in parliament. Emergency powers are becoming the common tools of governance. In this way Indian democracy is becoming more and more another weapon to repress the masses. Political crisis is increasing in the country. If we read the indicators in the country we find that the whole of ruling class is busy serving finance capital. The rights and struggles of working classes are being curbed. The judiciary is all set to follow the directions provided by finance capital. These indications are found in many anti-struggles and anti strike decisions given by the court. Arundhati Roy was punished for standing by the people who are displaced in the Narmada project. Whereas, Narendra Modi was spared, when he announced that, “enemies of humanity will be killed as Sohrabuddin”. May be this is not contempt of court. The rulers use a section of people to built private gangs to crush any mass struggle by the masses. In Gujarat we saw that Narendra Modi mobilized all the classes against the Muslims. Even the dalits and tribes were mobilized for the genocide. We can also see the glimpse of these regressive measures taken by that state in organizing anti struggle gangs amongst the people against struggling masses of Orissa and Nandigram. After 1990’s there has been increase in private gangs backed by the state in areas of nationalities and naxal struggle. State consciously creates an environment of terror to garner the support of masses for its repressive measures. Time and again the masses are being told that they are in constant danger. They are sitting on a heap of gunpowder which can be ignited from anywhere in Pakistan or Bangladesh. This terror is being used by the government to justify its huge expenditure on intelligence and army (legal as well as illegal) such as Salwa Judum in Chhattisgarh, grey hounds and cobra in Andhra Pradesh, NASUS in Jharkhand, SULFA in Assam, etc and black laws. In such a way it creates have inner contradictions amongst the masses.
The signs of fascism are quite clear. One thing the ruling classes have in common that they have all been using and organizing masses into reactionary forces. Fascism is deep rooted into the economic and political system. We also find that riots take place at those places were indigenous and handicraft industry have a strong hold. Such as Bhagalpur (silk mills), Aligarh (lock industry), Gujarat where there are a large number of small industries. Imperialism conflicts with indigenous techniques. It uses riots as means to destroy indigenous techniques. We find that not a single industrial organization protested when large numbers of small scale industries were destroyed during the riots.
Fascism in the country could be traced back to 1970s when the signs of world wide depression could be seen. Imperialism again plunged to a long term crisis from the 70s. This is the time when India faced the consequences of emergency. Indira Gandhi in her later years used Hindu chauvinism. The anti people decisions introduced fascism to the people of India in the times of growing economic and political crisis. By giving loans IMF started its structural adjustment programs in 1980s. Rajiv Gandhi’s reign saw many such anti people policies as well as concept of a strong Hindu nationalism.
The rise of Hindu fascist forces into a political force
The Hindu fascist ideology has been in existence for as long as seven and a half decades with the inauguration of the RSS in 1925 at Nagpur. But it did not play any significant role in state power. It has risen to power in the last 25 years and since then has become a strong political force. Initially its bases were upper caste people and Hindu merchant communities. In 1980s ruling classes decided to develop this fascist ideology. It has increased day by day and has made a place even amongst the dalits and backward castes. All the ruling classes have played a significant role in developing aiding and abetting the growth of fascist forces. The different fronts made with an intention of parliamentary alliances have legalized Hindu fascism. It has maintained a mask by making alliances with regional parties. BJP in its tenure associated with big commercial households and together with its organizations-CII, FICCI, and ASOCHEM-formed various committees with different ministries. It went so far as to make acquaintances with the PM office. We see that Hindu fascism is basically a result of a course of political events, which has been brought by the ruling class, which centers on imperialism and increasing political and economic crisis of national and foreign capitalists and ruling classes.
Does fascism have any definition?
According to the 13th meet of Communist International, “comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”.(1) Dimitrov warns also of development of fascist ideology by the rulers if there is economic and political crisis .i.e. the main question is of economic and political crisis and class character. A special character of fascism is that, it is supported by regressive forces and it uses these forces to legalize its works. The regressive mass movement aroused by fascism is used by the rulers to terrorize and repress the people’s struggles. According to Togliyati,
“Fascism should be used only when the attack start on working class & it is being carried out on depending any mass base as petty bourgeoisie. We get this specificity in Germany, Italy, France, England, & all those other places where fascism is in existence.”2 ( translation ours)
If we read the signs coming from different parts of the country, it becomes clear that state is becoming fascist. Its roots are well dug into the crisis of imperialism which is leading to rise in dangerous political crisis.
Dying Imperialism And Growing Fascism
Fascism is directly related to finance capital. This relation can be understood by reviewing the past. After 1930’s, imperialism again went into deep and long term crisis in 1970’s. Before this period, surplus capital searched ways to grow. IMF, IBRD and globalization brought a solution for this. In 1980 inoperative capital found a way in giving loans to the third world. After 1990 .i.e. with the introduction of globalization, the surplus capital tried to make a place in the world market and come out of the depression. This technique helped a little but the crisis had come to say. After the dot.com bubble brusted in 2002, the situation became worse. The American economy started shrinking. Then came the housing bubble started by the Federal Reserve (central bank of America). It also gave fruits for some time but on august 16, 2007, the tree collapsed, which was called sub-prime crisis. This crisis had far reaching effects. According to Rodigo Rato, “US will bear the burnt of the economic consequences of the crisis, with the bulk of the impact not being felt until next year… The potential consequences of the episode should not be underestimated and the adjustment process is likely to be protected. Credit condition may not normalize soon, developed in the structure … it has an real effect on the real economy which will be felt more in 2008, with greater intensity in US, less in other areas.”(3)
The impact of the crisis of the American economy on the world economy is evident. Signs of depression cannot be ignored as it would increase the economic crisis globally.
The crisis in American sub prime market, lead to instability in all the share markets of the world. The results were so drastic that many of the leading banks of the world were endangered. So to save them, the central banks had to pour in a lot of wealth. The European Central Bank invested $130 billion, Japanese Bank invested $1 trillion and American Federal Bank invested $43 billion. As imperialism has already used all techniques, it has no other alternative left than to loot the already poor countries. This it would attain through the medium of globalization. “ To give some idea of the importance of profits from investments abroad in the total US economy, these represented about 6% of the total business profits in 1960s, 11% in 1970s, 15-16% in the 1980s &, 1990s, & have averaged 18% for the five years period 2000-2004.(4)
There has also been an increase in purchase and sale of stocks. “If we see trend of last 30 years in 1975, 19 millions stock shares traded daily on the New York stock exchange, by 1985.the volume had reached 109 million & by 2000, 1,600 million shares with a value of over $ 60 billion. Even larger is the daily trading on the world currency markets, which has gone from $ 80 billion a day in 1977, to the current average of $ 1.8 trillion a day. That means that every 24 days the dollar volume of currency trading equals the entire worlds annual GDP. (5) we can easily draw conclusions that the finance capital will search more and more avenues for profits and economic instability would increase.
Apart from this concentration has grown many folds. According to a study published in 2005 we find that the top 10 companies controls almost 59% market share of the world’s leading 98 drug firms. The top 10 companies control almost half of the $29,566 million global pesticide market. Analysts predict that only three major companies will survive in the conventional pesticide business by 2015. In 2004, the 10 global food retailers accounted for combined sales of $ 84,000 million – 24% of the estimated $ 3.5 trillion global market. We can asses from these oligarchies how trance national companies are controlling & shaping our social-economical-political life. At the beginning of this decade it was predicted by many analyst that the period of corporate mergers as seen in 1990s was over but in 2004, the global value of corporate mergers & acquisitions climbed to $ 1.95 trillion- a 40% jump over the $ 1.38 trillion in 2003. Combined sales of world’s largest 200 largest corporations account for 29% of world’s economic activity in 2004. It was about $ 11,442,253 million. We can asses the concentration of wealth from this fact that the total wealth of 946 world’s billionaires grew 35% year to year while income levels for the lower 55% of the world’s population declined or stagnate.
According to James Petras, “Given the enormous class and income disparities in Russia, Latin America and China (20 Chinese billionaires have a net worth of 29.4 billion USD in less than ten years), it is more accurate to describe these countries as ‘surging billionaires’ rather than ‘emerging markets’. In backward countries globalization was produced as the solution of all their problems. Mainstream economists preach us that capital always seeks the highest returns & typically flows from rich countries to poor ones- but The Economist notes that emerging economies sent about $350 billion to rich countries in 2004.(6) These all facts of concentration show that the crisis in imperialism is deepening. We know that the fundamental reason of the crisis of the imperialism is the contradiction between social form of production & private form of ownership. These all process would intense the contradictions of imperialism to a large extent. We can say that if imperialism in the period of com. Lenin was moribund & parasite then it is thousand times more moribund & more parasite. To come out from this crisis imperialism would take more reactionary measures. As result the plunder of oppressed nation would rise at huge level. The expenditure on imperialist war would increase. The market of weapon would be promoted. In all countries racial & religious sentiments would be ignited. To keep the level of profit high many genocide & mass killings would be organized. It is the last tool in hands of imperialism.
The leaders of the Indian economy are showing the economy to be full proof, but they themselves are not sure about it. The sales of shares, by the FIIs were the largest in August after the sub prime crisis. The monthly sales reached to a record figure since they were allowed participation in the Indian markets in the early 1990s. This means that a single crisis in American market has the potentiality to shake the whole market. Big comprador houses of India are bound as never before to the imperialists. Most of the private banks in India have become more foreign than Indian. The reasons for the flow of funds by the FIIs are the serious sub-prime crisis and low interests rates rather than the strong position of Indian economy. The foreign control on Indian economy has reached to dangerous limits. The foreign investment in telecom sector is about 74%. The real estate boom in India is going the U.S way. The crisis in Indian agriculture is known to all. In the past 30 years there is a record decline in food grain production. India’s foreign debt has grown by massive 23% during 2006-07 and stood at $165 billion. It constitutes 16.4% of the GDP. From May 2007 onwards there are signs of slowdown in the economy. With such high level of dependence on foreign capital, it is inevitable that even small shocks in the international economy will badly impact India. Apart from this concentration has increased during the period of globalization. According to James Petras, in India which has the highest number of billionaires (36) in Asia with total wealth of $191 billion, Prime Minister Singh declared that the greatest single threat to India’s security are the Maoist led guerrilla and mass movements in the poorest parts of the country. In China, with 20 billionaires with $29.4 billion net worth, the new rulers, confronting nearly a hundred thousand reported riots and protests, have increased the number of armed special anti-riot militia a hundred fold. (7)
Social democrats and fascism
Social democracy in India which has changed to social fascism has also contributed to the growth of fascism. It has consciously ignored the class character and relation with finance capital. This is because It belongs to the same class of rulers in places where it has been for along time and its hunger for finance capital is well known.
In neck deep parliamentarianism, these fake Marxists consciously engage the struggle against fascism in equation of parliamentarianism. It even left behind the rulling class parties in becoming an agent of finance capital. Not only it mobilized the masses in interest of finance capital but it also used them against the struggling masses who fought against finance capital. It propagated largely about land reforms, but the fact is that distribution of a large part of acquired land is still pending in the court. The social democrats were not so serious to take the land from land lords and distribute amongst the landless than to snatch it from the farmers and give to the imperialists. Coming of fascism into power and role of social democrats in it is very rightly explained by Dimitrov, “Comrades, fascism also attained power for the reason that the proletariat found itself isolated from its natural allies. Fascism attained power because it was able to win over large masses of the peasantry, owing to the fact that the Social-Democrats in the name of the working class pursued what was in fact an anti-peasant policy. The peasant saw in power a number of Social-Democratic governments, which in his eyes were an embodiment of the power of the working class; but not one of them put an end to peasant want; none of them gave land to the peasantry. In Germany, the Social-Democrats did not touch the landlords; they combated the strikes of the farm laborers, with the result that long before Hitler came to power the farm laborers of Germany were deserting the reformist trade unions and in the majority of cases were going over to the Stahlhelm and to the National Socialists”.(8) is not the statement very apt for the social democrats in India? They in india advised the working class not to strike in interest of development. They told that it is time for class collaboration and not class struggle.
The social democrats frequently form alliances with other sections of compradors bourgeoisie and feudal rulling classes who have ample reasons to grow as fascist forces. On this Dimitrov writes “Was not the German Social-Democratic Party in a coalition government? It was. Was not the Austrian Social-Democratic Party in office? Were not the Spanish Socialists in the same government as the bourgeoisie? They were. Did the participation of the Social-Democratic Parties in the bourgeois coalition governments in these countries prevent fascism from attacking the proletariat? It did not. Consequently it is as clear as daylight that participation of Social-Democratic ministers in bourgeois governments is not a barrier to fascism”. (9). Dimitrov’s words expose these social democrats.
From 2002 Buddhdev Bhattacharya started to speak against madarasas & in favour to implement a draconian law like POTA in West Bengal.
These signals unveil the character of the social democrats. A chief minister orders to kill the masses in interest of foreign capital and reacts by saying that they have been paid back in the same coin. The same CM apologises for the attack on fascists In case of attack in Tapan Sikdar case. Does it not clear things? These social democrats declared that the largest threat were the struggling forces in the rural areas. They advised the ruling classes to understand the threat of Maoists in Nandigram. In Dimitrov’s words “Only such monstrous philistines, such lackeys of the bourgeoisie, as the superannuated theoretician of the Second International, Karl Kautsky, are capable of casting reproaches at the workers, to the effect that they should not have taken up arms in Austria and Spain. What would the working class movement in Austria and Spain look like today if the working class of these countries were guided by the treacherous counsels of the Kautskys? The working class would be experiencing profound demoralization in its ranks”. (10)
Social democrats today tell us to forget the dream of socialism. We should forget that barbarous states have plunged the world into ocean of blood just to make profits. We should forget that our friends have up rooted czar and chiang kai seik and gave there lives to create a new social system. We are being told that the martyrdom of crores of daughters and sons of the working class went in vain and socialism was there mental mayhem. We should forget that Hiroshima and Nagasaki was destroyed for profits. We should forget that the hands of these profiteers are dripping with the blood of our sisters and brothers in Vietnam and Chillie and other countries. But they should know that masses can never forget the dream of socialism. Kautsky’s legacy is not peoples’ legacy. Peoples’ legacy is with the legacy of writers such as the great Christopher Coldwell, Lorca, ken saro viva and philosophers and those great soviet daughters and sons , who under the leadership of Stalin, cut the claws of Hitler who dreamt of changing the world map.
The facts reveal that the crisis of imperialism and entrance of foreign capital and the rise of hindutva as a fascist force occurred in the same period. As the rate of foreign capital increased in the economy, more and more riots and hatred and hatred and anti people tools came into play. The road show of Indian democracy from Gujarat to Nandigram is also related to this foreign capital. The ruling classes have no other alternative than fascism to come out of this political crisis. By exaggerating the force of fascism, the social democrats and other liberal forces ultimately fulfill the interest of fascism. It ignores the fact that to crush the mass struggles it takes the path of fascism. To be in power it uses all reactionary means and create contradictions among masses. But mass uprisings take place from within these.\ and organize itself for bigger struggles. Struggle is the prime aspect here. About this Lenin says “ The school of civil war --- does not leave the people unaffected. It is a harsh school, and its complete curriculum inevitably includes the victories of the counterrevolution, the debaucheries of enraged reactionaries, savage punishments meted out by the old governments to the rebels, etc. But only downright pedants and mentally decrepit mummies can grieve over the fact that nations are entering this painful school; this school teaches the oppressed classes how to conduct civil war; it teaches how to bring about a victorious revolution; it concentrates in the masses of present day slaves that hatred which is always harboured by the downtrodden, dull, ignorant slaves, and which leads those slaves who have become conscious of the shame of their slavery to the greatest historic exploits”.(11)
The ruling classes are again becoming fascists. Fascism is not invincible. It would lead the ruling class to downfall. On the other side the struggles of masses have also increased. To crush this the ruling class is becoming more and more fascist. Today again imperialism is suffering from crisis and depression. It is becoming more and more reactionary. But on the other hand in latin America and Asia more and more masses are joining hands in struggle. Today the responsibility to smash fascism falls on the hands of inharitors of warriors & daughters and sons of soviet who sacrificed their lives in fight against profiteers powers. Victory of the working class is in inevitable because only & only masses are creators of history. State only and only represses.

1. United front against fascism – Dimitrov
2. Palmiro Togliatti on Fascism
3. The Independent, 25 September 2007.
4. Monthly Review, December 2006
5. Ibid
6. The Economist, 24 September 2004
7. Global ruling class, James Petras
8. United front against fascism – Dimitrov
9. Ibid
10. Ibid
11. [V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 15:183]
Sushmita is a researcher .

Translated from Hindi by Lalima.

BMW axes 8,100 jobs to increase profits

By Dietmar Henning

On February 27, German auto manufacturer BMW confirmed its plans to shed 8,100 jobs. Shortly before Christmas, the company had announced the cutting of several thousand jobs but had not given any concrete figures. In December of last year, Der Spiegel magazine raised the figure of 8,000 jobs in danger, but BMW refused to comment further.
Now, BMW personnel executive committee member Ernst Baumann announced that most of the 8,100 redundancies are to take place in Germany in the form of unemployment for 5,000 agency workers and 2,500 members of the permanent staff. An additional 600 employees will lose their jobs at the company’s international locations.
BMW currently employs a total of 108,000 workers, including around 80,000 in Germany. In addition, the company employs 8,000 agency or temporary workers in Germany. According to personnel chief Baumann, 2,500 of these workers have not had their contracts renewed. The remaining 2,500 jobs are to be shed in the course of the year.
The elimination of jobs amongst full-time staff is due to take place through the implementation of part-time work for older workers and redundancy payments. Although BMW is prepared to pay out millions to this end, Baumann assured shareholders that the “synergy effect” would result in a reduction in personnel expenditure amounting to €500 million per year starting from 2009.
The job cuts are part of an extensive savings program aimed at increasing the company’s profits and rewarding shareholders. “We are working to improve our profits in order to achieve the required premiums” was the reason given by Baumann for the job cuts. The current rate of profits—5 percent—is to be increased to between 8 and 10 percent by 2012, while the net yield on assigned capital is to be increased to more than 26 percent.
At present, BMW profit levels are less than its main competitors. Therefore, the company plans to save a total of €6 billion in material and personnel costs by 2012 and increase annual productivity rates by 5 to 10 percent. “This is simply laid down by the competition,” Baumann insisted.
In order to double profits, it is unlikely that the present measures will suffice, and it is likely that the current round of job cuts is just the start.
Record profits
On Wednesday, Baumann announced plans by BMW for further cutbacks in other areas alongside the cuts in personnel expenditure. The company has been affected by the high costs of raw materials and development, and, in order to minimise costs, BMW is increasing its pressure on suppliers. At the start of this year, Herbert Diess, on behalf of the BMW executive, demanded that a number of suppliers agree to a discount of between 15 to 20 percent. In addition, Diess cut payments usually made by the company to suppliers to help with the costs of raw materials.
Baumann also claimed that BMW was forced to save because of the weak dollar. While BMW still produces a majority of its vehicles for domestic consumption, its most important sales market is now the US. A euro worth US$1.50 for any lengthy period of time would constitute a “critical” level for BMW. “Then we need to take further measures with regard to personnel,” Baumann threatened.
Despite increases in the prices of raw material and development costs, as well as the weak dollar, both 2006 and 2007 were record years for BMW, with the company selling more cars than ever before. All three of its brands—BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce—announced record turnover at the start of the year, and overall turnover increased by 14 percent to €56 billion. In January, chief executive Norbert Reithofer also announced that current profit levels would exceed those of last year (€3.75 billion). The exact profit level for 2007 is still to be given.
In total, BMW delivered 1.5 million vehicles worldwide, 9.2 percent more than the previous year. The biggest single market for BMW was the US, with 336,000 units sold—an increase of 7.1 percent. This was the company’s best result ever in the US, making BMW the most successful European brand on the US market.
German sales of 284,000 new vehicles were somewhat less than previous year (296,000), but BMW still fared better than the general trend—with sales dropping by 4.2 percent compared to an overall new vehicle sales decrease of 9.2 percent.
BMW assumes that increases in the rate of value-added tax were behind this decrease on the German market. The super-rich, however, remain unconcerned about such changes in commodity taxes, and luxury brand Rolls-Royce was able to sell 1,010 vehicles in 2007—increasing sales by 25.5 percent.
The role of the trade unions and factory council
The main auto trade union, IG Metall, and the BMW factory council have supported all of the job-cutting measures implemented by BMW since the 1990s, while at the same time the central works council only recently agreed on new worsened conditions with management for those employees retaining their jobs.
The factory council gave its stamp of approval to shorter breaks and the abolition of premiums and shift payments for the 80,000 workforce in Germany. The remaining workers would also have to make “a contribution,” Baumann declared approvingly. And although profits are continuously increasing, the company profit-sharing scheme would not yield any increase for its employees this year.
It is now clear that the current range of job cuts was a done deal, worked out some time ago between the union, BMW management and the factory council.
When Der Spiegel reported on the planned job cuts three days before Christmas, IG Metall and the BMW factory council barely reacted. Both bodies avoided any criticism and expressly lined up behind BMW board chairman Norbert Reithofer.
“We are not at all concerned” was the comment of Matthias Jena, speaker for IG Metall in Bavaria, just after the Christmas break. The plans for changes in production—particularly in the 7 series—have been known since May 2007. “If production is reorganised, then fewer people are needed. That is completely normal,” Jena said.
The head of the Bavarian IG Metall, Werner Neugebauer, who sits on the supervisory board of BMW, had already been informed by the executive in May 2007 on plans for dismissals. When Der Spiegel printed its report in December, Neugebauer saw no need to interrupt his Christmas holiday or make a statement. After all, the dismissals were a component of the strategy paper the company had submitted in September. This strategy paper had received the unconditional support of IG Metall and the factory council.
By refusing to lift a finger to oppose the dismantling of the jobs of agency workers, the union and factory council are driving a wedge between the company’s 80,000 full-time staff and its 8,000 temporary workers. The cynical message to the full-time staff is clear: “Keep calm, those hardest hit are the temporary workers, and we will do what we can for those permanent staff who lose their jobs.”

Economist estimates cost of Iraq war to exceed $3 trillion

By Naomi Spencer
As the five-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq approaches, a leading economist is estimating that the overall cost of the war will be between $3 trillion and $5 trillion. This figure does not take into account the enormous devastation that the US military has wrought upon the population and social infrastructure of Iraq.
On Thursday, Joseph Stiglitz told the congressional Joint Economic Committee that $3 trillion was at the low end of estimated war costs. After factoring in the cost of weapons and operations, future health-care costs for veterans, interest on foreign loans used to fund the war, and future borrowing, Stiglitz said the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be somewhere between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for the US alone. Another estimated $6 trillion will be borne by other countries, he said.
Stiglitz, former chief economist for the World Bank and a Nobel laureate, is co-author with Harvard economics professor Linda Bilmes of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, a book released Friday. The book builds on 2006 research that estimated the cost of the so-called war on terror in excess of $1 trillion.
Officially, the US spends $16 billion every month to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, but this figure includes only direct expenses.
These enormous sums are being expended to carry out a crime of immeasurable proportions. More than a million civilians have been killed in Iraq alone. Some 4.5 million more have been displaced by the violence, with thousands of refugees fleeing the country into Syria, Jordan and elsewhere every day. With $3-5 trillion, the US government has destroyed an entire society.
Those charged with carrying out the conquest have also been sacrificed. Over 5,000 military personnel—the vast majority US troops—have died in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. A substantial portion of the estimated costs will go to pay for health care for the tens of thousands of wounded soldiers.
The American ruling class has initiated a policy of unending war as it cuts jobs and social programs in the United States. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, $1 trillion could pay for 8 million housing units, university scholarships for 43 million students, health care for 530 million children, or the salaries of 15 million public school teachers in the US.
In an interview published Thursday in the British newspaper, the Guardian, Stiglitz noted that the US spends $5 billion a year in aid to Africa. “Five billion is roughly 10 days’ fighting, so you get a new metric of thinking about everything,” he said.
The United Nations estimates that $195 billion would end world hunger and most of the devastating diseases afflicting the world’s poor. AIDS, measles, tuberculosis, malaria and other water-borne illnesses could all be brought into manageable numbers or wholly eradicated within a short time for less than the cost of one year of waging war in Iraq. Instead, the US occupation of Iraq has reintroduced diseases such as cholera into Iraqi society.
For years, the US political establishment has carried out attacks on social programs and the jobs of American workers. Workers are now told that there is no money for decent wages and benefits, while billions are spent on military wars of aggression.
One consequence of the chaos wrought in the Middle East, Stiglitz asserts, has been the enormous rise in the price of oil. For industrialized countries, the increase in the cost of oil attributable to the war is around $1.1 trillion. For developing countries, the effect has been much more extreme. According to Stigltiz’s and Bilmes’ book, the increase in the cost of oil more than offsets the increase in foreign aid to countries in Africa.
The White House, which refused to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on the cost of the war, reacted to Stiglitz’s remarks with undisguised hostility and derision. “People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure,” White House spokesperson Tony Fratto told the press. “One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11.”
The Iraq war, Fratto said, “is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. Three trillion dollars? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?”
Stiglitz told Democracy Now! radio on Friday that the most significant budgetary cost of the war is the care of disabled veterans, which he said “will total hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decades.” The war has inflicted a huge number of injuries. He said that an estimated 39 percent of soldiers would have some form of disability after completing their rotations.
Bilmes, who also appeared on the Democracy Now! program, explained that while in previous wars the ratio of wounded to dead was two-to-one or three-to-one, new medical technologies have allowed many who might otherwise have died to survive extremely serious injuries. The wounded to fatality rate for the Iraq war is approximately 15-to-1. “What it means is that the United States has a long-term cost of taking care of many, many thousands of disabled veterans for the rest of their lives,” she said.
“Then you go beyond that budgetary cost to the cost of the economy,” Stiglitz added. “When somebody gets disabled, the disability pay is just a fraction of the loss to their family, to the income that they could have otherwise earned.”
“There are a whole set of macroeconomic costs, which have depressed the economy,” including the price of oil, Stiglitz said. “What’s happened is, to offset those costs, the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with liquidity.... We were living off of borrowed money. The war was totally financed by deficits. And eventually, a day of reckoning had to come, and now it’s come.”
While the vast majority of the US and world population wants an end to the occupation in Iraq, no section of the political establishment represents this opposition.
An article in the Wall Street Journal on Friday noted that the Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, employ careful rhetoric on the issue of withdrawal from Iraq. “Both candidates draw a distinction between ‘combat’ troops, whom they want to withdraw, and ‘noncombat’ troops, who will stay to battle terrorists, protect the US civilian presence and possibly train and mentor Iraqi security forces,” the newspaper noted.
This distinction allows the candidates to posture as opponents of the war while maintaining their commitment to an indefinite occupation.
“No one is talking about getting to zero,” a foreign policy advisor for Obama told the Journal. An unnamed Obama campaign “senior advisor” said the senator was “comfortable with a long-term US troop presence of around five brigades,” according to the paper.

The World According to Washington

By Noam Chomsky

On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. "The world is a better place without this man in it," US State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said. "One way or the other he was brought to justice." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh had been "responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden". Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as "one of the US and Israel's most wanted men" was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, "A militant wanted the world over", an accompanying story reported that he was "superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden" after September 11, 2001, and so ranked second among "the most wanted militants in the world".

The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines "the world" as the political class in Washington and London (and whoever happens to agree with them on specific matters). It is common, for example, to read that "the world" fully supported President George W Bush when he ordered the bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. That may be true of "the world", but hardly of the world, as revealed in an international Gallup Poll after the bombing was announced. Global support was slight.

In Latin America, which has some experience with US behavior, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama, and that support was conditional on the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported), and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic / judicial measures, rejected out of hand by "the world".

Following the terror trail

In the present case, if "the world" were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.

The Financial Times reports that most of the charges against Moughniyeh are unsubstantiated, but "one of the very few times when his involvement can be ascertained with certainty [is in] the hijacking of a TWA plane in 1985 in which a US Navy diver was killed". This was one of two terrorist atrocities that led a poll of newspaper editors to select terrorism in the Middle East as the top story of 1985; the other was the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro, in which a crippled American, Leon Klinghoffer, was brutally murdered. That reflects the judgment of "the world". It may be that the world saw matters somewhat differently.

The Achille Lauro hijacking was a retaliation for the bombing of Tunis ordered a week earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His air force killed 75 Tunisians and Palestinians with smart bombs that tore them to shreds, among other atrocities, as vividly reported from the scene by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way, though the Sixth Fleet and US intelligence could not have been unaware of the impending attack. Secretary of State George Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action", which he termed "a legitimate response" to "terrorist attacks", to general approbation. A few days later, the UN Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (with the US abstaining). "Aggression" is, of course, a far more serious crime than international terrorism. But giving the United States and Israel the benefit of the doubt, let us keep to the lesser charge against their leadership.

A few days after, Peres went to Washington to consult with the leading international terrorist of the day, Ronald Reagan, who denounced "the evil scourge of terrorism", again with general acclaim by "the world".

The "terrorist attacks" that Shultz and Peres offered as the pretext for the bombing of Tunis were the killings of three Israelis in Larnaca, Cyprus. The killers, as Israel conceded, had nothing to do with Tunis, though they might have had Syrian connections. Tunis was a preferable target, however. It was defenseless, unlike Damascus. And there was an extra pleasure: more exiled Palestinians could be killed there.

The Larnaca killings, in turn, were regarded as retaliation by the perpetrators: They were a response to regular Israeli hijackings in international waters in which many victims were killed - and many more kidnapped and sent to prisons in Israel, commonly to be held without charge for long periods. The most notorious of these has been the secret prison/torture chamber Facility 1391. A good deal can be learned about it from the Israeli and foreign press. Such regular Israeli crimes are, of course, known to editors of the national press in the US and occasionally receive some casual mention.

Klinghoffer's murder was properly viewed with horror and is very famous. It was the topic of an acclaimed opera and a made-for-TV movie, as well as much shocked commentary deploring the savagery of Palestinians - "two-headed beasts" (Prime Minister Menachem Begin), "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" (Chief of Staff Raful Eitan), "like grasshoppers compared to us," whose heads should be "smashed against the boulders and walls" (Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir). Or more commonly just "Araboushim," the slang counterpart of "kike" or "nigger".

Thus, after a particularly depraved display of settler-military terror and purposeful humiliation in the West Bank town of Halhul in December 1982, which disgusted even Israeli hawks, the well-known military/political analyst Yoram Peri wrote in dismay that one "task of the army today [is] to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim living in territories that God promised to us", a task that became far more urgent, and was carried out with far more brutality, when the Araboushim began to "raise their heads" a few years later.

We can easily assess the sincerity of the sentiments expressed about the Klinghoffer murder. It is only necessary to investigate the reaction to comparable US-backed Israeli crimes. Take, for example, the murder in April 2002 of two crippled Palestinians, Kemal Zughayer and Jamal Rashid, by Israeli forces rampaging through the refugee camp of Jenin in the West Bank. Zughayer's crushed body and the remains of his wheelchair were found by British reporters, along with the remains of the white flag he was holding when he was shot dead while seeking to flee the Israeli tanks which then drove over him, ripping his face in two and severing his arms and legs.

Jamal Rashid was crushed in his wheelchair when one of Israel's huge US-supplied Caterpillar bulldozers demolished his home in Jenin with his family inside. The differential reaction, or rather non-reaction, has become so routine and so easy to explain that no further commentary is necessary.

Car bomb

Plainly, the 1985 Tunis bombing was a vastly more severe terrorist crime than the Achille Lauro hijacking, or the crime for which Moughniyeh's "involvement can be ascertained with certainty" in the same year. But even the Tunis bombing had competitors for the prize for worst terrorist atrocity in the Mideast in the peak year of 1985.

One challenger was a car-bombing in Beirut right outside a mosque, timed to go off as worshippers were leaving Friday prayers. It killed 80 people and wounded 256. Most of the dead were girls and women, who had been leaving the mosque, though the ferocity of the blast "burned babies in their beds", "killed a bride buying her trousseau", and "blew away three children as they walked home from the mosque". It also "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb, reported Nora Boustany three years later in the Washington Post.

The intended target had been the Shi'ite cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, who escaped. The bombing was carried out by Reagan's CIA and his Saudi allies, with Britain's help, and was specifically authorized by CIA director William Casey, according to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's account in his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987. Little is known beyond the bare facts, thanks to rigorous adherence to the doctrine that we do not investigate our own crimes (unless they become too prominent to suppress, and the inquiry can be limited to some low-level "bad apples" who were naturally "out of control").

'Terrorist villagers'

A third competitor for the 1985 Mideast terrorism prize was Prime Minister Peres' "Iron Fist" operations in southern Lebanese territories then occupied by Israel in violation of Security Council orders. The targets were what the Israeli high command called "terrorist villagers". Peres's crimes in this case sank to new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder" in the words of a Western diplomat familiar with the area, an assessment amply supported by direct coverage. They are, however, of no interest to "the world" and therefore remain uninvestigated, in accordance with the usual conventions.

We might well ask whether these crimes fall under international terrorism or the far more severe crime of aggression, but let us again give the benefit of the doubt to Israel and its backers in Washington and keep to the lesser charge.

These are a few of the thoughts that might cross the minds of people elsewhere in the world, even if not those of "the world", when considering "one of the very few times" Imad Moughniyeh was clearly implicated in a terrorist crime.

The US also accuses him of responsibility for devastating double suicide truck-bomb attacks on US Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Lebanon in 1983, killing 241 Marines and 58 paratroopers, as well as a prior attack on the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63, a particularly serious blow because of a meeting there of CIA officials at the time.

The Financial Times has, however, attributed the attack on the Marine barracks to Islamic Jihad, not Hezbollah. Fawaz Gerges, one of the leading scholars on the jihadi movements and on Lebanon, has written that responsibility was taken by an "unknown group called Islamic Jihad". A voice speaking in classical Arabic called for all Americans to leave Lebanon or face death. It has been claimed that Moughniyeh was the head of Islamic Jihad at the time, but to my knowledge, evidence is sparse.

The opinion of the world has not been sampled on the subject, but it is possible that there might be some hesitancy about calling an attack on a military base in a foreign country a "terrorist attack", particularly when US and French forces were carrying out heavy naval bombardments and air strikes in Lebanon, and shortly after the US provided decisive support for the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed some 20,000 people and devastated the south, while leaving much of Beirut in ruins. It was finally called off by President Reagan when international protest became too intense to ignore after the Sabra-Shatila massacres.

In the United States, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is regularly described as a reaction to Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist attacks on northern Israel from their Lebanese bases, making our crucial contribution to these major war crimes understandable.

In the real world, the Lebanese border area had been quiet for a year, apart from repeated Israeli attacks, many of them murderous, in an effort to elicit some PLO response that could be used as a pretext for the already planned invasion. Its actual purpose was not concealed at the time by Israeli commentators and leaders: to safeguard the Israeli takeover of the occupied West Bank.

It is of some interest that the sole serious error in Jimmy Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid is the repetition of this propaganda concoction about PLO attacks from Lebanon being the motive for the Israeli invasion. The book was bitterly attacked, and desperate efforts were made to find some phrase that could be misinterpreted, but this glaring error - the only one - was ignored. Reasonably, since it satisfies the criterion of adhering to useful doctrinal fabrications.

Killing without Intent

Another allegation is that Moughniyeh "masterminded" the bombing of Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires on March 17, 1992, killing 29 people, in response, as the Financial Times put it, to Israel's "assassination of former Hezbollah leader Abbas Al-Mussawi in an air attack in southern Lebanon". About the assassination, there is no need for evidence: Israel proudly took credit for it. The world might have some interest in the rest of the story.

Al-Mussawi was murdered with a US-supplied helicopter, well north of Israel's illegal "security zone" in southern Lebanon. He was on his way to Sidon from the village of Jibshit, where he had spoken at the memorial for another Imam murdered by Israeli forces. The helicopter attack also killed his wife and five-year-old child. Israel then employed US-supplied helicopters to attack a car bringing survivors of the first attack to a hospital.

After the murder of the family, Hezbollah "changed the rules of the game", Prime Minister Rabin informed the Israeli Knesset. Previously, no rockets had been launched at Israel. Until then, the rules of the game had been that Israel could launch murderous attacks anywhere in Lebanon at will, and Hezbollah would respond only within Israeli-occupied Lebanese territory.

After the murder of its leader (and his family), Hezbollah began to respond to Israeli crimes in Lebanon by rocketing northern Israel. The latter is, of course, intolerable terror, so Rabin launched an invasion that drove some 500,000 people out of their homes and killed well over 100. The merciless Israeli attacks reached as far as northern Lebanon.

In the south, 80% of the city of Tyre fled and Nabatiye was left a "ghost town", Jibshit was about 70% destroyed according to an Israeli army spokesperson, who explained that the intent was "to destroy the village completely because of its importance to the Shi'ite population of southern Lebanon". The goal was "to wipe the villages from the face of the earth and sow destruction around them", as a senior officer of the Israeli northern command described the operation.

Jibshit may have been a particular target because it was the home of Sheikh Abdul Karim Obeid, kidnapped and brought to Israel several years earlier. Obeid's home "received a direct hit from a missile", British journalist Robert Fisk reported, "although the Israelis were presumably gunning for his wife and three children". Those who had not escaped hid in terror, wrote Mark Nicholson in the Financial Times, "because any visible movement inside or outside their houses is likely to attract the attention of Israeli artillery spotters, who … were pounding their shells repeatedly and devastatingly into selected targets". Artillery shells were hitting some villages at a rate of more than 10 rounds a minute at times.

All of this received the firm support of President Bill Clinton, who understood the need to instruct the Araboushim sternly on the "rules of the game". And Rabin emerged as another grand hero and man of peace, so different from the two-legged beasts, grasshoppers and drugged roaches.

This is only a small sample of facts that the world might find of interest in connection with the alleged responsibility of Moughniyeh for the retaliatory terrorist act in Buenos Aires.

Other charges are that Moughniyeh helped prepare Hezbollah defenses against the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, evidently an intolerable terrorist crime by the standards of "the world", which understands that the US and its clients must face no impediments in their just terror and aggression.

The more vulgar apologists for US and Israeli crimes solemnly explain that, while Arabs purposely kill people, the US and Israel, being democratic societies, do not intend to do so. Their killings are just accidental ones, hence not at the level of moral depravity of their adversaries. That was, for example, the stand of Israel's High Court when it recently authorized severe collective punishment of the people of Gaza by depriving them of electricity (hence water, sewage disposal and other such basics of civilized life).

The same line of defense is common with regard to some of Washington's past peccadilloes, like the destruction in 1998 of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. The attack apparently led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but without intent to kill them, hence not a crime on the order of intentional killing - so we are instructed by moralists who consistently suppress the response that had already been given to these vulgar efforts at self-justification.

To repeat once again, we can distinguish three categories of crimes: murder with intent, accidental killing, and murder with foreknowledge but without specific intent. Israeli and U.S. atrocities typically fall into the third category.

Thus, when Israel destroys Gaza's power supply or sets up barriers to travel in the West Bank, it does not specifically intend to murder the particular people who will die from polluted water or in ambulances that cannot reach hospitals. And when Bill Clinton ordered the bombing of the al-Shifa plant, it was obvious that it would lead to a humanitarian catastrophe. Human Rights Watch immediately informed him of this, providing details; nevertheless, he and his advisers did not intend to kill specific people among those who would inevitably die when half the pharmaceutical supplies were destroyed in a poor African country that could not replenish them.

Rather, they and their apologists regarded Africans much as we do the ants we crush while walking down a street. We are aware that it is likely to happen (if we bother to think about it), but we do not intend to kill them because they are not worthy of such consideration. Needless to say, comparable attacks by Araboushim in areas inhabited by human beings would be regarded rather differently.

If, for a moment, we can adopt the perspective of the world, we might ask which criminals are "wanted the world over".


Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and What We Say Goes, a conversation book with David Barsamian, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. The Essential Chomsky (edited by Anthony Arnove), a collection of his writings on politics and on language from the 1950s to the present, has just been published by the New Press.

Diary

By Yonatan Mendel

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma'ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn't get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel's most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla's Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: 'Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.'

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn't do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert's shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon's mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu's secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin's secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to 'security' there is no such freedom. It's 'us' and 'them', the IDF and the 'enemy'; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It's not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they'd rather think well of their security forces.

In most of the articles on the conflict two sides battle it out: the Israel Defence Forces, on the one hand, and the Palestinians, on the other. When a violent incident is reported, the IDF confirms or the army says but the Palestinians claim: 'The Palestinians claimed that a baby was severely injured in IDF shootings.' Is this a fib? 'The Palestinians claim that Israeli settlers threatened them': but who are the Palestinians? Did the entire Palestinian people, citizens of Israel, inhabitants of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, people living in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states and those living in the diaspora make the claim? Why is it that a serious article is reporting a claim made by the Palestinians? Why is there so rarely a name, a desk, an organisation or a source of this information? Could it be because that would make it seem more reliable?

When the Palestinians aren't making claims, their viewpoint is simply not heard. Keshev, the Centre for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, studied the way Israel's leading television channels and newspapers covered Palestinian casualties in a given month -- December 2005. They found 48 items covering the deaths of 22 Palestinians. However, in only eight of those accounts was the IDF version followed by a Palestinian reaction; in the other 40 instances the event was reported only from the point of view of the Israeli military.

Another example: in June 2006, four days after the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was kidnapped from the Israeli side of the Gazan security fence, Israel, according to the Israeli media, arrested some sixty members of Hamas, of whom 30 were elected members of parliament and eight ministers in the Palestinian government. In a well-planned operation Israel captured and jailed the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, the ministers of finance, education, religious affairs, strategic affairs, domestic affairs, housing and prisons, as well as the mayors of Bethlehem, Jenin and Qalqilya, the head of the Palestinian parliament and one quarter of its members. That these officials were taken from their beds late at night and transferred to Israeli territory probably to serve (like Gilad Shalit) as future bargaining-chips did not make this operation a kidnapping. Israel never kidnaps: it arrests.

The Israeli army never intentionally kills anyone, let alone murders them -- a state of affairs any other armed organisation would be envious of. Even when a one-ton bomb is dropped onto a dense residential area in Gaza, killing one gunman and 14 innocent civilians, including nine children, it's still not an intentional killing or murder: it is a targeted assassination. An Israeli journalist can say that IDF soldiers hit Palestinians, or killed them, or killed them by mistake, and that Palestinians were hit, or were killed or even found their death (as if they were looking for it), but murder is out of the question. The consequence, whatever words are used, has been the death at the hands of the Israeli security forces since the outbreak of the second intifada of 2087 Palestinians who had nothing to do with armed struggle.

The IDF, as depicted by the Israeli media, has another strange ability: it never initiates, decides to attack or launches an operation. The IDF simply responds. It responds to the Qassam rockets, responds to terror attacks, responds to Palestinian violence. This makes everything so much more sensible and civilised: the IDF is forced to fight, to destroy houses, to shoot Palestinians and to kill 4485 of them in seven years, but none of these events is the responsibility of the soldiers. They are facing a nasty enemy, and they respond dutifully. The fact that their actions -- curfews, arrests, naval sieges, shootings and killings -- are the main cause of the Palestinian reaction does not seem to interest the media. Because Palestinians cannot respond, Israeli journalists choose another verb from the lexicon that includes revenge, provoke, attack, incite, throw stones or fire Qassams.

Interviewing Abu-Qusay, the spokesman of Al-Aqsa Brigades in Gaza, in June 2007, I asked him about the rationale for firing Qassam missiles at the Israeli town of Sderot. 'The army might respond,' I said, not realising that I was already biased. 'But we are responding here,' Abu-Qusay said. 'We are not terrorists, we do not want to kill . . . we are resisting Israel's continual incursions into the West Bank, its attacks, its siege on our waters and its closure on our lands.' Abu-Qusay's words were translated into Hebrew, but Israel continued to enter the West Bank every night and Israelis did not find any harm in it. After all it was only a response.

At a time when there were many Israeli raids on Gaza I asked my colleagues the following question: 'If an armed Palestinian crosses the border, enters Israel, drives to Tel Aviv and shoots people in the streets, he will be the terrorist and we will be the victims, right? However, if the IDF crosses the border, drives miles into Gaza, and starts shooting their gunmen, who is the terrorist and who is the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?' My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: 'If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make Israel safer. It's the implementation of a government decision!'

Another interesting distinction between us and them came up when Hamas demanded the release of 450 of its prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit. Israel announced that it would release prisoners but not those with blood on their hands. It is always the Palestinians -- never the Israelis -- who have blood on their hands. This is not to say that Jews cannot kill Arabs but they will not have blood on their hands, and if they are arrested they will be released after a few years, not to mention those with blood on their hands who've gone on to become prime minister. And we are not only more innocent when we kill but also more susceptible when we are hurt. A regular description of a Qassam missile that hits Sderot will generally look like this: 'A Qassam fell next to a residential house, three Israelis had slight injuries, and ten others suffered from shock.' One should not make light of these injuries: a missile hitting a house in the middle of the night could indeed cause great shock. However, one should also remember that shock is for Jews only. Palestinians are apparently a very tough people.

The IDF, again the envy of all other armies, kills only the most important people. 'A high-ranking member of Hamas was killed' is almost a chorus in the Israel media. Low-ranking members of Hamas have either never been found or never been killed. Shlomi Eldar, a TV correspondent in the Gaza Strip, bravely wrote about this phenomenon in his book Eyeless in Gaza (2005). When Riyad Abu Zaid was assassinated in 2003, the Israeli press echoed the IDF announcement that the man was the head of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza. Eldar, one of Israel's few investigative journalists, discovered that the man was merely a secretary in the movement's prisoner club. 'It was one of many occasions in which Israel "upgraded" a Palestinian activist,' Eldar wrote. 'After every assassination any minor activist is "promoted" to a major one.'

This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into media reports -- there are no checkpoints between the army and the media -- is the result both of a lack of access to information and of the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray soldiers as criminals. 'The IDF is acting in Gaza' (or in Jenin, or in Tulkarm, or in Hebron) is the expression given out by the army and embraced by the media. Why make the listeners' lives harder? Why tell them what the soldiers do, describing the fear they create, the fact that they come with heavy vehicles and weapons and crush a city's life, creating a greater hatred, sorrow and a desire for revenge?

Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to stop Gaza's electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that 'the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.' Another thing the soldiers do is clearing -- khisuf. In regular Hebrew, khisuf means to expose something that is hidden, but as used by the IDF it means to clear an area of potential hiding places for Palestinian gunmen. During the last intifada, Israeli D9 bulldozers destroyed thousands of Palestinian houses, uprooted thousands of trees and left behind thousands of smashed greenhouses. It is better to know that the army cleared the place than to face the reality that the army destroys Palestinians' possessions, pride and hope.

Another useful word is crowning (keter), a euphemism for a siege in which anyone who leaves his house risks being shot at. War zones are places where Palestinians can be killed even if they are children who don't know they've entered a war zone. Palestinian children, by the way, tend to be upgraded to Palestinian teenagers, especially when they are accidentally killed. More examples: isolated Israeli outposts in the West Bank are called illegal outposts, perhaps in contrast to Israeli settlements that are apparently legal. Administrative detention means jailing people who haven't been put on trial or even formally charged (in April 2003 there were 1119 Palestinians in this situation). The PLO (Ashaf) is always referred to by its acronym and never by its full name: Palestine is a word that is almost never used -- there is a Palestinian president but no president of Palestine.

'A society in crisis forges a new vocabulary for itself,' David Grossman wrote in The Yellow Wind, 'and gradually, a new language emerges whose words . . . no longer describe reality, but attempt, instead, to conceal it.' This 'new language' was adopted voluntarily by the media, but if one needs an official set of guidelines it can be found in the Nakdi Report, a paper drafted by the Israeli Broadcasting Authority. First set down in 1972 and since updated three times, the report aimed to 'clarify some of the professional rules that govern the work of a newsperson'. The prohibition of the term East Jerusalem was one of them.

The restrictions aren't confined to geography. On 20 May 2006, Israel's most popular television channel, Channel 2, reported 'another targeted assassination in Gaza, an assassination that might ease the firing of Qassams' (up to 376 people have died in targeted assassinations, 150 of them civilians who were not the target of assassinations). Ehud Ya'ari, a well-known Israeli correspondent on Arab affairs, sat in the studio and said: 'The man who was killed is Muhammad Dahdouh, from Islamic Jihad . . . this is part of the other war, a war to shrink the volume of Qassam activists.' Neither Ya'ari nor the IDF spokesman bothered to report that four innocent Palestinian civilians were also killed in the operation, and three more severely injured, one a five-year-old girl called Maria, who will remain paralysed from the neck down. This 'oversight', revealed by the Israeli journalist Orly Vilnai, only exposed how much we do not know about what we think we know.

Interestingly, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip one of the new 'boo' words in the Israeli media is Hamastan, a word that appears in the 'hard' news section, the allegedly sacred part of newspapers that is supposed to give the facts, free from editorialising. The same applies to movements such as Hamas or Hizbullah, which are described in Hebrew as organisations and not as political movements or parties. Intifada is never given its Arabic meaning of 'revolt'; and Al-Quds, which when used by Palestinian politicians refers only to 'the holy places in East Jerusalem' or 'East Jerusalem', is always taken by Israeli correspondents to mean Jerusalem, which is effectively to imply a Palestinian determination to take over the entire capital city.

It was curious to watch the newspapers' responses to the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh in Syria two weeks ago. Everyone tried to outdo everyone else over what to call him: arch-terrorist, master terrorist or the greatest terrorist on earth. It took the Israeli press a few days to stop celebrating Moughniyeh's assassins and start doing what it should have done in the first place: ask questions about the consequences of the killing. The journalist Gideon Levy thinks it is an Israeli trend: 'The chain of "terrorist chieftains" liquidated by Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Musawi and Yihyeh Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi (all "operations" that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and intoxicating moment), have thus far brought only harsh and painful revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world.'

Israeli correspondents on Arab affairs must of course speak Arabic -- many of them indeed studied it in the security establishment's schools -- and they need to know the history and politics of the Middle East. And they have to be Jews. Strikingly, the Israeli-Jewish media prefer to hire journalists with average Arabic rather than native speakers, since they would be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Apparently, Jewish journalists are better equipped than Arab Israelis to explain 'what Arabs think', 'Arab aims' or 'what Arabs say'. Maybe this is because the editors know what their audience wants to hear. Or, even more important, what the Israeli audience would rather not hear.

If the words occupation, apartheid and racism (not to mention Palestinian citizens of Israel, bantustans, ethnic cleansing and Nakba) are absent from Israeli discourse, Israeli citizens can spend their whole lives without knowing what they have been living with. Take racism (Giz'anut in Hebrew). If the Israeli parliament legislates that 13 per cent of the country's lands can be sold only to Jews, then it is a racist parliament. If in 60 years the country has had only one Arab minister, then Israel has had racist governments. If in 60 years of demonstrations rubber bullets and live ammunition have been used only on Arab demonstrators, then Israel has a racist police. If 75 per cent of Israelis admit that they would refuse to have an Arab neighbour, then it is a racist society. By not acknowledging that Israel is a place where racism shapes relations between Jews and Arabs, Israeli Jews render themselves unable to deal with the problem or even with the reality of their own lives.

The same denial of reality is reflected in the avoidance of the term apartheid. Because of its association with white South Africa, Israelis find it very hard to use the word. This is not to say that the exact same kind of regime prevails in the Occupied Territories today, but a country needn't have benches 'for whites only' in order to be an apartheid state. Apartheid, after all, means 'separation', and if in the Occupied Territories the settlers have one road and Palestinians need to use alternative roads or tunnels, then it is an apartheid road system. If the separation wall built on thousands of dunams of confiscated West Bank land separates people (including Palestinians on opposite sides of the wall), then it is an apartheid wall. If in the Occupied Territories there are two judicial systems, one for Jewish settlers and the other for Palestinians, then it is an apartheid justice.

And then there are the Occupied Territories themselves. Remarkably, there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news section it doesn't exist. In the past they were called the Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel's mass media today they're called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim). The term helps preserve the notion that the Jews are the victims, the people who act only in self-defence, the moral half of the equation, and the Palestinians are the attackers, the bad guys, the people who fight for no reason. The simplest example explains it: 'a citizen of the Territories was caught smuggling illegal weapons.' It might make sense for citizens of an occupied territory to try to resist the occupier, but it doesn't make sense if they are just from the Territories.

Israeli journalists are not embedded with the security establishment; and they haven't been asked to make their audience feel good about Israel's military policy. The restrictions they observe are observed voluntarily, almost unconsciously -- which makes their practice all the more dangerous. Yet a majority of Israelis feel that their media are too left-wing, insufficiently patriotric, not on Israel's side. And the foreign media are worse. During the last intifada, Avraham Hirschson, then the minister of finance, demanded that CNN's broadcasts from Israel be closed down on the grounds of 'biased broadcasting and tendentious programmes that are nothing but a campaign of incitement against Israel'. Israeli demonstrators called for an end to 'CNN's unreliable and terror-provoking coverage' in favour of Fox News. Israeli men up to the age of 50 are obliged to do one month's reserve service every year. 'The civilian,' Yigael Yadin, an early Israeli chief of staff, said, 'is a soldier on 11 months' annual leave.' For the Israeli media there is no leave.


Yonatan Mendel was a correspondent for the Israeli news agency Walla. He is currently at Queens' College, Cambridge working on a PhD that studies the connection between the Arabic language and security in Israel.