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The Katie Couric interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a classic example of how he changes the subject away from his own controversial statements. I don't think Ahmadinejad is a particularly evil man, just a typically corrupt and cynical politician who cultivates domestic support by inflaming populist sentiments among the conservative and uninformed populace, while abusing the powers of his office to deny that same populace their rights so as to maintain his grip on power. Meanwhile, he plays a different card in the foreign arena, to allow his sponsors (like Russia) plausible deniability. This is why he was never going to explicitly deny the Holocaust in his interview with Couric, but instead used the opportunity to ask what sounds like a reasonable question about focus. From the interview, here's his reply:

Ahmadinejad: [In] World War II, 60 million people were killed. Why are we just focusing on this special group alone?

We're sorry for all the 60 million people that lost their lives, equally. All of them were human beings. And it doesn't matter whether they were Christians or Jews or Buddhists or Muslims. They were killed. So, we're sorry for everyone.

Hey that sounds pretty reasonable, right? 60 million died, why are we focusing so much on just one-tenth of that number? The implication he is making, which is pure gravy to his uneducated populist base, is that the Jews are whiners who demand special treatment and recognition. But there's something very special about that 6 million indeed which he (knowingly) omits - the manner and intent of those deaths.

I am not minimizing the scale of death in WWII - one life is one life. In the conflict, around 15 million Russian civilians died, and add another 15 million dead Chinese on top of that. Up to 3 million German civilians were killed as well. Both sides, Allies and Axis, aimed their military machines at civilian populations, and what the ruthless mechanical slaughter started, war crimes committed by soldiers on the ground finished. It was the sheer scale of death - a crime against humanity inflicted upon itself, and a stain that will always taint the valor and heroism of those who served as a whole - which directly led to the enactment of the Geneva Conventions and (more importantly) the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But all of this was war. That doesn't absolve it, but it does provide the causative context. In a real war, civilians die. What sets the Holocaust apart is that it wasn't war at all, but genocide. The 6 million Jews who died were not caught in the crossfire or bombed for strategic reasons. They weremarched into gas chanbers and executed like cattle, or roaches. In war, collateral damage deaths are counted with the full recognition by both soides, aggressor and victim alike, that the victims are human beings. It is that recognition of their humanity that lends them value as a target. There is, in the twisted logic of war, an honor being done to the victims of war. The Jews weren't afforded that honor, however - they were not killed in the context of war, but murdered.

6 million murders. All of one race, one group, one people. The intent was not strategic or tactical, but hatred. We have a word for this: evil. That's what sets the Holocaust apart from the rest.

As I've argued before, the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will entail only two of Democracy, Greater Israel, and Jewishness. In terms of the settlements policy, it seems that Israel has essentially picked the first two. President Obama's insistence that Israel freeze all settlements is in fact Israel's only chance to preserve its identity as a majority Jewish state. However, Prime Minister Netanyahu is still playing to his far-right base, vowing that the settlements will go on:

Israel's defense minister, Ehud Barak, authorized plans for 455 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the West Bank on Monday, in a move aimed at placating Israel's pro-settlement camp ahead of an expected construction freeze demanded by the Arab world and the United States.

(...) About 2,500 housing units are already under construction in the West Bank settlements. Israeli officials say they will be completed, regardless of any moratorium. They also say a moratorium will not apply to Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim the eastern part of the city as the capital of a future state.

It's clear that even a "freeze" will not be a true cessation of settlement buliding. The settlements are literally a colonial enterprise, with the aim of creating "facts on the ground" that compel the creation of Greater Israel. But the Palestinians will remain, and in the absence of a viable state of their own, are increasigly inclined to simply accept the reality of Greater Israel themselves:

After visiting the Middle East, [former US President] Carter said in an opinion article of The Washington Post newspaper the outcome was "more likely" than independent Israeli and Palestinian states being formed.

He said that one state was "obviously the goal of Israeli leaders who insist on colonising the West Bank and East Jerusalem".

However, he added: "A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

'Nonviolent struggle'

"By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbours and then demand equal rights within a democracy.

"In this nonviolent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Junior and Nelson Mandela."

Carter, who commented that a two-state solution was "clearly preferable", said that Palestinian leaders had also considered the current demographics of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

"Non-Jews are already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority," he said.

Greater Israel cannot be Jewish, unless it completely renounces Democracy as well. The two-state solution is the only way that Israel can survive as an avowedly Jewish nation, but the settlements are a cancer that paradoxically eat away at the dream of a Jewish homeland even as they grow the physica boundaries of the state.

One of the central rationalizations for the permissibility of "collateral damage" in warfare is that the enemy uses "human shields" - that militants are deliberately hiding among civilian populations so as to force the attacker to kill innocents if they decide to attack. I've argued for some time that collateral damage should be disavowed as a military doctrine, because the immorality of killing an innocent outweighs the morality of killing the guilty.

Still, despite this moral burden, there at least exists an ends-justifies-means argument for collateral damage. I personally reject such an argument, but it does exist and there will probably always be honest disagreement (much like the abortion issue) over it between people of genuine principle. There is no such debate about human shields, however - those who employ that tactic are utterly bereft of any claim to higher purpose. It is an unmitigated evil act.

For a state like Israel, which lays explicit claim to the Jewish heritage as part of its reason for existence, the standard policy of collateral damage is morally damaging enough. But what if the IDF itself actually used human shields?

A human rights group founded by Israeli veterans has collected what it says are damning testimonies from soldiers who took part in the offensive in January against Hamas fighters in Gaza. BBC correspondent Paul Wood looks at the anonymous claims presented by Breaking the Silence.

Standing by the ruins of his home in Gaza, Majdi Abed Rabbo explained how Israeli troops had used him as a human shield. "The Israeli soldiers handcuffed me and pointed the gun at my neck," he said. "They controlled every step." In this manner, Mr Abed Rabbo said, he was forced to go in ahead of Israeli soldiers as they cleared houses containing Palestinian gunmen. This same incident was described by one of the Israeli soldiers who spoke to Breaking the Silence.

"A Palestinian neighbour is brought in," he says. "It was procedure. The soldier places his gun barrel on the civilian's shoulder." If true, that was a clear breach of the international laws of war - which say soldiers have a duty of care to non-combatants - and of Israeli law. The Israeli Supreme Court outlawed the so-called "neighbour policy", of using Palestinians to shield advancing troops, in 2005. Until now, the Israeli army always had a ready answer to allegations that war crimes were committed during its offensive in Gaza. Such claims were, they said, Palestinian propaganda. Now, though, the accusations of abuse are being made by Israeli soldiers.

The common thread in the almost 30 testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence is that orders were given to prevent Israeli casualties, whatever the cost in Palestinian lives. Writing the report's introduction, the Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard says: "All the witnesses agreed that they received a particular order repeatedly, in a way that did not leave much room for doubt, to do everything, everything, so that they - the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers - would not be harmed. "The soldiers tell in their testimonies how this unwritten message, which came from brigade, battalion, and company commanders in morale-building conversations before entering Gaza, translated into zero patience for the life of enemy civilians."

Here are just a few quotes which give a flavour of the soldiers' testimony. The accumulation of detail is convincing and, in the eyes of Israel's critics, damning. "Things are happening in his battalion of which he (the commander) has no idea. There are people who deserve to go to jail... "When your company commander and battalion commander tell you, 'Go on, fire!' the soldiers will not hold back. They are waiting for this day, the fun of shooting and feeling all that power in your hands... "Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad. The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places. You see a house, a window, shoot at the window. You don't see a terrorist there? Fire at the window. In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents."

McClatchy has more details about other human shield techniques described in the soldiers' testimony:

Each Palestinian forced to work with the Israeli military was given the same nickname: Johnnie.

The story was confirmed by four other Israeli soldiers who seized control of the Gaza neighborhood, but declined to speak on the record, Shaul said.

The testimony matches with that of nine Palestinian men who told McClatchy last winter that Israeli soldiers forced them into battle zones during the offensive in their northern Gaza Strip neighborhood.

One Palestinian, Castro Abed Rabbo, said Israeli soldiers ordered him to enter buildings to search for militants and booby traps before they sent in a specially trained dog with high-tech detection gear.

Two other Palestinian men told McClatchy that Israeli soldiers used them as human shields by forcing them to kneel in a field during a firefight as they exchanged fire with Gaza fighters.

"I was down on my knees and they fanned out in a 'V' behind me," Sami Rashid Mohammed , a Fatah -leaning former Palestinian Authority police officer, said in an unpublished interview in February. "It wasn't more than 10 or 15 minutes of shooting, but it was so scary."

One of the Israeli soldiers interviewed described the offensive was necessary.

"We did what we had to do," he said. "The actual doing was a bit thoughtless. We were allowed to do anything we wanted. Who's to tell us not to?"
One Israeli reservist said a brigade commander gave them stark orders as they were preparing for combat.

"He said something along the line of 'Don't let morality become an issue; that will come later,'" the soldier said. "He had this strange language: 'Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later - now just shoot."

"You felt like a child playing around with a magnifying glass, burning up ants," another Israeli soldier said. "A 20-year-old kid should not be doing such things to people. . . . the guys were running a 'Wild West' scene: draw, cock, kill."

The Torah says, "a good deed performed with the help of an evil deed is also an evil deed." This is damaging enough of a critique by itself when applied to the IDF's collateral damage policy. But there's not even the fig leaf of a good deed to mask the ugliness of using human shields. In Gaza, it seems, Israel has truly shed its righteousness.

Related: Richard Silverstein is highlighting and offering commentary on a few of the soldiers' testimonies, including some of the video interviews. He also has made the actual Breaking the Silence report available for download (PDF). Finally, we have been covering Gaza-related news at Talk Islam in depth as well.

I just saw a re-tweet from Rebecca MacKinnon that Chinese blogger Peter Guo has been arrested by authorities in China. Amazingly, it seems he managed to twitter his arrest while in custody, by using his phone while the police were asleep (see screenshot at right).

There seems to be a crackdown on bloggers who wrote about a scandal involving gang rape at a police-sanctioned brothel. PC World has a story with more details already:

The detentions add to a long string of cases in which Chinese police have taken bloggers or other Internet users into custody for writing online about government corruption. The events also show how Chinese Internet users have sometimes used the Web to reveal and trumpet injustices, and how the government has worked to control online opinion when it turns critical of authority.

The five people have all been detained on defamation charges in the weeks since text and video accounts of the scandal spread on popular Chinese Web forums, lawyers for two of the detained people said Thursday.

A sixth person, writing on Twitter from a mobile phone early Thursday, claimed to have been taken away by police in the same municipal district of Fuzhou, Fujian province, where the other detentions occurred.

Articles posted online last month gave a mother's account of how a gang member called her 25-year-old daughter, Yan Xiaoling, and ordered her to come out to meet. The woman found her daughter dead in the hospital the next day and was told she had been raped by up to eight people before dying, according to the articles.

Police held a press conference the day after the articles appeared online and were widely re-posted. An official denied any violence or rape and said Yan had died of bleeding caused by a failed pregnancy, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

The official also denied any police ties to the gangster or to a prostitution-peddling karaoke joint owned by him, both allegations made in the online accounts.

But within days, police began detaining Internet users they seemed to suspect of writing the online accounts. Police have said that the defamation charges stem from the online materials, Liu Xiaoyuan, a lawyer for one of the detainees, said by phone.

MacKinnon also RTs that the reason for his arrest may have been a video he uploaded regarding the scandal, seemingly an interview with Yan's mother.

China has managed to render the old adage, "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" largely moot, due to filtering and collusion with the very corporations that run the net. But Twitter may be the true incarnation of Internet that will truly let light be shined where autocracies would prefer darkness.

Let's all say a quiet prayer for Peter and all the other bloggers held in custody. It's also worth remembering that Iranian blogfather Hossein "Hoder" Derakshan remains in custody in Iran, where bloggers are also routinely arrested, and have died in custody. Free speech is literally a matter of life and death.

The oppression of the Uyghur in China's Xinjiang province has been getting a surprising amount of media coverage. The first reaction most people have upon hearing about the Uyghur is to ask, "who?" so it's worth reviewing some basic information about who these people are and why their struggle is worth paying attention to.

In a nutshell, the Uyghur are an ethnic minority in China who practice Islam and speak the Turkic language. They are thus both an ethnic and a religious minority, unlike the Hui, who also practice Islam but who are culturally and physically identical to the Han majority. The Hui comprise the vast majority of Chinese muslims, so the Uyghur are a minority within a minority in that regard.

The Uyghur's ancient homeland in central Asia was previously known as East Turkestan, and has been variously ruled by khanates, dynasties, and warlords throughout history. The region was also named Xinjiang ("New Territory") during the Qing dynasty. The Uyghur did establish a short-lived East Turkestan Republic between 1944 and 1949, albeit with Soviet help. That ended when the People's Liberation Army took control and the area was renamed the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

The Uyghur are persecuted by Beijing in much the same way that the Native Americans were for almost two centuries by the United States, in that they face a relentless and systematic campaign to wipe away their cultural heritage and erase their religious identity. The primary vehicle for this is the immense immigrant influx by Han Chinese into Xinjiang, a deliberate resettlement by the Chinese government to change the demographics of Xinjiang. Over the past 50 years this immigration wave has changed Xinjiang from being 94% Uyghur in 1949 to 45% Uyghur now, with Han comprising 40%. The capital city of Xinjinag, Urumqi, is 75% Han and the Han dominate all levels of civic society and government in the province. It should be noted that Uyghurs, like all minority groups, are exempted from the one-child policy, but there are vastly more Han than Uyghur in China, so the balance in Xinjiang is unlikely to be countered by birthrate.

In addition to the deliberate dispossession of the Uyghur from their own land, the Chinese government engages in active religious persecution of the Uyghur, with believers forced to use state-approved versions of the Qur'an, a ban on beards and headscarves for any men and women who work in the state sector, and direct management of all mosques by the central authorities. Uyghur men are fined for performing prayers, muslim schools are closed down, and fasting by children or teachers is forbidden during Ramadan. In general, the state interferes in almost every aspect of Uyghur culture and religious observance that it can, in an attempt to make even simple observances and acts of piety too difficult to perform. The history and heritage of the Uyghurs are likewise under assault, with historic buildings and sites demolished and razed, and the Mandarin language is being imposed in rural schools to the exclusion of the Uyghurs' native tongue.

All of this is intended to eradicate the identity of the Uyghur, but at the same time the Uyghur are also the victims of discrimination and economic marginalization. Uyghurs are explicitly excluded from jobs, with signs stating bluntly that "no Uyghurs need apply". Massive investment by the central gvernment has led to the creation of huge farms and construction projects called bingtuan, at which an estimated 1 in 6 Han in Xinjiang is employed, but Uyghurs are rarely hired. In urban areas, increased development has led to rising rent, pricing Uyghurs right out of the market (as noted above, Urumqi is 75% Han). In almost every sphere, Uyghurs are second-class citizens with limited prospects and unable to take part in the modernization and development of Xinjiang.

This, then, is the context for the riots last week in Urumqi, which were actually triggered by a hate crime incident in eastern China. The resentment they feel is a serious threat to Beijing, which is why the response was so disporportionate and brutal. It is clear, however, that the heavy hand of Beijing is only making things worse.

Related reading: The Uyghur Human Rights Project website is an aggregator of news stories about the struggles and oppression of the Uyghur. The Council on Foreign Relations has a very detailed backgrounder on the Uyghurs and Xinjiang that should be essential reading. Razib had an extensive post last year about the Uyghur, noting that "the Han Chinese push into Xinjiang brings to mind a different dynamic, while the Hui are Jews among gentiles, the Uyghurs are like the Sioux being encircled by homesteaders." More recently, the New York Times had a nice history piece about Uyghur history and heritage, as well. Finally, a summary artricle in EurasiaNet discusses the tensions and grievances of the Uyghur in more detail.