Vigil at Shiloh Christian Fellowship, Oakland, CA

By Charles E. Carlson
Charles Interviewed

Eleven stood with us, just the right team for the vigil at the inter-city Shiloh church on July 29, 2007. Contact was close and personal with the crowd in front of Shiloh’s doors. We were well prepared with literature and left about 400 pieces with the many hundreds who attended. God may have been there on the streets of Oakland; I don’t know about inside. Long time friend Jack Utz was there from far away, who also attended a Night to Honor Israel in South Carolina. He described the Vigil as “a church without walls,” exactly what we want each vigil to be.

Numerous church attendees stopped to discuss why we were there. One Sheila commented it was the first protest she had ever seen where there was dialogue. A couple from Rome, Italy, friends of one Vigiler from the neighborhood, stayed to watch and listen, the husband was translating for his wife, both hoping to understand Christian Zionism. They told us that pickets at the Vatican are common.

Every vigil is exciting, bringing butterflies and a a chill of anticipation. As my 17-year-old office assistant H.S. puts it after being a part of one, “it is like going into battle.”

The hint of fear everyone feels is like a battle…being on someone else’s turf, usually outnumbered by a big margin brings some tension, but there is more. How can anyone help but be nervous about confronting people knowing that logic and rational truth will fail with all but a few, and that the group is led on a course that brings needless death every day? We learned there are a hard line few inside every “Shiloh” whose minds are set; that makes us not only their enemy, but enemies of God in their eyes. We know some believe “the only good Arab is a dead Arab,” and will not stop thinking that way no matter what we do.

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Anthology of bigotry
The Israeli state is trying desperately to foreclose all exceptions to its unequivocally racist land laws

By Jonathan Cook

Israel’s parliament last week approved by an overwhelming majority the first reading of a bill to ensure that much of the country’s inhabited land remains accessible to Jewish citizens only — a move described by one leading local newspaper as turning Israel into a “racist Jewish state”.

The private member’s bill, called the Jewish National Fund Law, has received cross-party support. The first reading was approved by 64 legislators, with 16 — most of them Arab MKs — opposed. Supporters ranged from former premiere Binyamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party, to Ami Ayalon, a recent challenger to head the Labour Party.

The legislation is designed to nullify the threat posed by a Supreme Court judgment, reached in 2000, that potentially opens the door to thousands of Arab families leaving the tightly controlled areas assigned to them and choosing where they live. Currently Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the population, are barred from buying homes in most of the country.

The move is the latest in a series of battles since Israel’s establishment in 1948 to ensure exclusive Jewish control of land through an international Zionist organisation known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). By the time of Israel’s founding, the JNF had bought about six per cent of historic Palestine for Jewish settlement. Rather than demanding that these territories be handed over by the JNF, the new state authorities assigned the organisation a special, quasi- governmental status. The JNF was also given a significant share of the lands and property confiscated from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled during the 1948 War.

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Some Questions On the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

By Jeff Davis

A CNN article reports “In 2005, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Bridge Inventory database concluded the (I35 Minneapolis) bridge was ’structurally deficient.’ Minnesota Department of Transportation bridge engineer Dan Dorgan said the term ’structurally deficient’ is a Federal Highway Administration rating. Inspectors rate sections of the bridge on a 1 to 9 scale, with 9 being in excellent condition, he said. ‘A structurally deficient condition is a bridge that would have a rating of 4 either in the deck, the superstructure or the substructure,’ he said. ‘Any one of those in condition 4 or less is considered structurally deficient.’ ”

A recent report on the bridge noted that there were cracks in important main structural elements, which should have led to the bridge being shut down until they were repaired. The extreme temperature range in Minnesota and corrosive salts and anti-icing sprays tend to accelerate corrosion. The Minnesota Department of Transportation was repairing the road surface on the bridge, which was badly worn, but the support structure was in even worse shape. Repairing the road surface is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

This is the second spectacular failure of infra-structure under George W. Bush. Bush diverted money from levee construction around New Orleans for his Iraq War in the years before Katrina. Bush’s Kool Aid-drinking supporters all gave him a pass, repeating the mantra: “No one could have seen that hurricane coming.” Since when are we backward Third World tribesman who can’t plan ahead??? We design buildings to be safe from earthquakes; we can design levees to withstand hurricanes. There was a plan to reinforce and improve the levees. Some people did see a bigger hurricane coming, but Bush didn’t.

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