MDA and the Red Crystal

For 57 years, Israel’s Magen David Adom (MDA) was not a member of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Due to explicit non-recognition by the international community, the lone national aid society with a Jewish symbol faced a thorough rejection of its red Star of David as a valid international first aid emblem.

Since 1930, the Magen David Adom has provided domestic emergency medical assistance, mobile intensive care units, disaster relief, and blood bank service. Yet, the MDA was not recognized under the Geneva Conventions until June 22, 2006. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) was admitted on the same day.

MDA and Jews worldwide rejoiced when the Red Crystal was formally sanctioned as the third emblem on January 14, 2007, ensuring MDA’s international integration.

Officially, concerns about symbol proliferation had been predominant amongst many member relief societies, as there was originally supposed to be only one symbol for the entire movement.

Many Arab and Muslim IFRC members had also objected to MDA's admission due to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and due to the fact that the PRCS had also not yet been admitted to the IFRC.

According to the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), the three official emblems function as "symbols of assistance for the victims of armed conflicts and natural disasters." Thus, any of the three can be used as a protective symbol in conflict zones or as an identifying medical assistance marker.

According to ICRC’s Jerusalem spokesperson Bernard Barrett, “International humanitarian law specifies the use, size, purpose and placing of the emblems, what respect for the emblems entails, and the penalties for misuse."

The Red Cross symbol was created in 1863 as the reverse of the Swiss flag and was not intended to bear religious significance for the relief society during neutral, humanitarian missions. The symbol's recognizability from afar was crucial so that persons, vehicles, or buildings bearing the symbol would not be targeted during wartime.

The Ottomans were the first to employ the Red Crescent, which was officially adopted in 1929, after Muslim nations refused to use a cross emblem that evoked negative memories of the Crusaders.

Red Crystal’s Saving Grace

The formal addition of the Red Crystal to the Geneva Convention mandates that all countries recognize it as equivalent to the other two official emblems. Israel and Eritrea were the first nations to declare their intention to employ the emblem on aid missions.

While Israel made the decision in order to overcome objections to the red Star of David, Eritrea intended to brandish the new neutral icon because of its mixed population of Christians and Muslims.

Israeli international aid missions are slated to use the new logo as early as this summer, according to David Abadi, MDA's international coordinator. Joint training missions with the Sri Lankan and Georgian Red Cross Societies will be the first opportunity for use of the Red Crystal - with the red Star of David inside.

"We've created a way to solve some of the problems we've had in the past,” said Tore Svenning, the Cyprus-based IFRC representative in Israel. “In the future, if similar cases appear, we will have a tool to deal with them."

In large part due to a prolonged campaign by the United States to promote the inclusion of MDA in the movement, the MDA is poised to enter a new era. Having overcome its pariah status, the MDA hope to advertise “the opportunity to use the Crystal along with any other logo inside," according to Abadi.
"One of the greatest accomplishments of the original Red Cross was creating one symbol. However, this broke down," said Abadi.

MDA supporters had long alleged that the exclusion of MDA was evidence of an anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist campaign.

"Adoption of a new sign comes with the correction of a deep injustice," said Olivier Durr, Geneva-based head of the Unit for ICRC Policy.

“This new symbol is the most realistic way for MDA to become a member of the IFRC, but merely to use a symbol is not enough,” countered Nouris al-Khatib, President of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. “MDA must abide by all of the other conventions, with respect to the occupied territories and to the geographic dominion of the PRCS.”

Al-Khatib stated, “Yet, our membership in the IFRC is a symbol of nationhood - just as Israel’s membership is.”

Practical and Symbolic Use

“The adoption of the Red Crystal reaffirms the determination of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to consolidate its universality and thereby to enhance its strength and credibility," according to a January 2007 joint statement by the ICRC and IFRC. The Movement is composed of the ICRC, IFRC, and all of the national aid societies.

The MDA has been expanding ties to the ICRC in recent years, according to Bruce Biber, head of the Division for Cooperation and Coordination within the Movement. "But now, the MDA is at the same level of recognition and is officially one of us."
Biber added, "We welcome and encourage MDA to develop and encourage ties with other national societies. With one of the best emergency response capabilities, MDA has a lot to share. This is a historic chance." Biber hopes that as MDA becomes more active internationally, the Red Crystal will become “more widely known and appreciated."

So far, eighty countries have signed and fourteen have ratified the updated Geneva Convention protocols. While none of the signatories thus far are Arab nations, Biber hopes that “as more countries sign, there will be more of a push for Arab countries to ratify.”

Long-term Changes

"The Red Crystal increases the number of options we have. We could use this emblem in any context where the cross or crescent would be problematic," said Durr, who mentioned the possibility of using the Crystal during Muslim-Christian sectarian violence in African nations.

Biber said, "Israel is the first to adopt the Crystal, and we hope it won't be the last. We consider Israel as a test case for the very long term."

PRCS President al-Khatib agreed: “This is my favorite solution. We are all better off with just one emblem. Yet, it’s not easy to implement. This is not likely to have a serious impact for at least fifty years.”

“We are planning a mega-campaign to popularize this symbol and to afford it the same international status as the Cross and the Crescent,” said Jean-Christophe Sandoz, field coordinator for the ICRC in Jerusalem.

Victory for MDA

This "third protocol emblem" of the ICRC is hailed as a truly universal emblem - free of ethnic, religious, or political connotation. On abroad missions, the MDA can use the red square frame tilted at a 45 degree angle alone or can incorporate it with the red Star of David, depending on the situation in the host country.

MDA is still permitted to use the red Star as its sole emblem for indicative purposes within Israel. However, MDA plans to place the crystal alongside the Jewish star on ambulances as early as 2008, according to David Abadi, MDA's international coordinator.

Abadi’s office has already obtained flags, workshirts, and vests with the new combination emblem - but is still waiting on patches and other necessary supplies.

“However, according to international humanitarian law, countries still must give their consent in order for a national society to provide aid,” reiterated Erab al-Fuqaha, spokesperson for the PRCS.

Therefore, countries may still reject MDA’s disaster relief teams.

"Regardless, this is a compromise idea that's good for everybody, and no one is fighting it," Abadi said. "At the field level, it takes time to be recognized. For this symbol to be seen as the equal of the others, it could take 5, 10, 20 years. We've got patience."

“Yet, personally, I wish that this could be the sole emblem for all first aid societies," Abadi added.

"We hope that the other societies within the Movement will become full partners with MDA, opening doors for all," said Barrett, the ICRC spokesperson. He added, "Everyone was happy to bring in MDA and the PCRS at the same time."

PRCS President al-Khatib concluded, “In general, people must cooperate to save life. Yet, at the end of the day, it’s in the hands of politicians to ensure adhesion to humanitarian doctrines.”

The War on Carbon

Either you're with us or you're against us. This is a battle to the death between good and evil. The simple binarisms carry over beautifully into this campaign. This is another war on a noun, but it is brought to you by rather different folks who inculcated you in the other wars on nouns. This war hath no clear beginning nor end. That is, unless the first act of war was the commencement of the Industrial Revolution...and then the endgame would be the day when the earth turns into an overheated hellhouse where we all burn up and die. The War on Carbon is upon us. Aiding or abetting in the conspiracy to commit acts of Carbonism are punishable by death. Carbonism is a crime tantamount to treason.

A Convenient Truth: Carbonism is akin to Communism


Essentially, committing Carbonism entails the decision to perfidiously turn against one's country. All Carbonist offenses are deemed sinful, unAmerican, and thoroughly unpatriotic. Such disregard for the national wellbeing will not be tolerated in a society where full-blooded patriots and God-fearing folk must swear allegiance to the anti-Carbonist crusade and root out any Carbonist who hides among us. In fact, your neighbor might be harboring Carbonists. Your next door neighbor might be the most unrepentant Carbonist ever to step foot on American soil. If you see something, say something! You shall report your neighbor to the Department of Homeland Security to ensure that this traitor is doomed to a life of misery for Carbonist crimes against the environment and thus against humanity. Failure to abide by Western civilization's environmental creed is something only illegal aliens or lesser races would consider. Carbonists have pledged their loyalties to the God of pollution, waste, and profligacy. Even some holy roller figures have recently been implicated in Carbonist scandals that involved homosexual prostitution, crank, and illicit conspiracy to destroy the moral fabric of the nation.

The Axis of Carbon

Carbonism in all its forms has been decreed to violate the principles behind our Constitution. Carbonism that relates to either power plants, motor vehicles, or domiciles can never be differentiated. Carbonist-related activity, especially if it initiated in a state-sponsored Carbonist network, must be rooted out once and for all. Once a Carbonist, always a Carbonist. Carbonism is beyond unconstitutional. It's subhuman, for God's sake! Never again will we tolerate such levels of Carbon in our stratosphere! The time has come for us to realize that the current clash of civilizations between Carbonists and true Westerners must be won before it is lost! Carbonist agitation has reached dangerously high levels. Although all of us once consented to the funding of Carbonist infrastructures in a number of societies, we've reached a national consensus that this support for fundamentalist Carbonism was a mistake. We allied with the Carbonists back then merely to ensure victory over the last noun that we summarily defeated.
Carbonism Threatens Your Children!

Carbonists deserve to be stripped of their citizenship, civil liberties, and financial assets. In the event that any vacancies arise at Guantanamo Bay, Carbonists ought to serve out their life sentences amongst the most vile convicts of other wars on nouns. Carbonists are the worst type of enemy combatant. They deserve no legal representation and certainly no right to habeas corpus. Carbonists and all Carbonist sympathizers deserve to be stripped fully of their dignity, for they have attempted to ensure that the Axis of Carbon will triumph over freedom and democracy.

Carbo-Fascism is Primitive and non-Western

All fundamentalist Carbonists attempt to overthrow the Western belief in the rule of law. They actually value death more than life. Indeed, they believe that engaging in lifelong pursuit of maximum carbon emission will result in one's ascendance to heaven, where there will be hordes of virgins waiting to please even the most extremist Carbonist. Carbo-Fascism is the work of the heathen who has forsaken the tenets of Western ideology in favor of a fundamentalist crusade to overheat this earth, in effect turning our planet into a greenhouse.

Greenism is the Antidote to Carbonism

Greenists will soon defeat all Carbonist insurgents and their allies. Carbonists have been reported to threaten a number of capitals in certain regions of the world. However, the true will of the people shall prevail. The Western way of life will triumph over this demonstrable evil. Carbonist regimes will be punished to the fullest, and unrepentant Carbonists will pay the price for their willful destruction of our habitats and our sanity. This earth cannot bear the brunt of Carbonist bombings and brutality. Carbonist supporters claim to follow an elite of freedom fighters. However, no rational human being actually wants to live in a society run by Carbonist crusaders, but the debased Carbo-Fascists continue to swindle ordinary people into supporting their evil deeds. End the reign of Carbon before it's too late! Behold, the doctrine of Carbonism is the most dire threat this civilization has ever faced. The Carbon menace is upon us, and the time is now to take up arms against anyone suspected of being involved in Carbonist-related behavior. Anti-Carbonists of the world, unite! The Carbonists shall not be allowed to take from us our freedom and our way of life. We will win the War on Carbon no matter the cost. Set their Carbonist smokestacks ablaze, and usurp their Carbonist fuels. Carbonism has been on the rise for far too long. We must reverse the tide of Carbonist expansion to ensure that our children enjoy freedom from Carbonist oppression. The War on Carbon must be fought on all fronts. The Carbonist hates you because he knows he's up against truth and morality. Fear not, we will not cease the War on Carbon until each and every last Carbonist is brought to justice.

United Nations = Global Government

For better or for ill, the United Nations forms the basis of what has become the global tier of government in the modern age. Although the levels are government in this supposedly globalized society are usually said to be local, state, and federal, there is no reason why we ought to stop at the federal level when we conceive of what political layers of hierarchy are ruling over our lives. While the global level of government is not nearly as powerful as it will be some time down the road, it surely took centuries before the nation-state system became the dominant organizational form of political relations between people. But, at this juncture in political evolution, it seems clear that nation-states have indeed ceded power to a superior level of governmental might.

This becomes undeniably true upon comprehension of a foundational infrastructure that takes root on another plane. Introducing the world government, which, having been dominated by the Western neocolonial interests since its inception, is augmented semiotically by the merger-cum-emergence of two disparate loci of power that inhere seminally beyond the pale. Planar ascendance becomes the overarching focus of political discourse, as the anachronistic planar arrangements are cast out for a new round of infectiously legitimate but nihilistically ontological precepts...Without forecasting the complete submersion of inferior levels of government under the global mantra, it does seem however necessary to explain the extent of globally active governing bodies.

The IMF, World Bank, and WTO are some of the more invidious world bodies that exert a tremendous amount of control over the monetary, economic, and financial systems that regulate the flow of goods and currency throughout the world. In the financial realm, though these bodies control and govern in unprecedented ways, multinational corporations have proven that, in the financial sphere, the world government is still relatively weak - especially when compared with the powers of the multinationals, as well as central/national banks.

In terms of military prowess, the global government is decidedly even weaker than on the economic front. Though the UN Security Council is endowed with certain rights under international law that supposedly leave the bottom line military issues to be resolved by this body, most nations ultimately will act unilaterally if they so deem necessary. I believe, like one notorious Sam has suggested, that the optimal UN fighting force should be composed of professional soldiers who are paid by the global body politic and are not explicitly or publicly tied to any nation-state. While they would not be considered mercs, they run the risk of being treated as such. In order to combat this tendency, it seems that UN member countries should donate a number of soldiers to this international force that is proportional to their national populations. The force would be 6 million strong if countries contributed a mere .1% of their populations to this force. The soldiers would not serve as representatives of their nations; they would honor the sovereignty of the UN command structure.

In the human rights and ecological discourses, which are dominated largely by non-governmental organizations, the world government is rather strong. Its capacity to impose quasi-Western standards upon the rest of the world is even resisted by nations that do not yet pass muster in the house of the world government. Next, I see that in the social and cultural spheres, localized production will reign supreme, and peoples that do not wield the most economic or military advantage will nonetheless often incur tremendous cultural dominion over their spheres of influence. Cultural memes are often spreading like wildfire across the globe and creating empires of which treasury ministries, military chiefs, and parochial diplomats are unaware. There are innumerable ways of measuring progress, of redefining progress, and of re-evaluating what preference orders filter into the list of global governmental priorities. Social, ecological, and cultural goods will be incorporated into the Pax Suprema that replaces imperialist and coloniast discourses, even if these former discourses pretend already to represent peace and freedom in the current era.

Yet, critical geopolitics demands that we explain how this normative plan becomes a reality. Is the above prescription a recipe for disaster in that it does not account for basic human nature and the Prisoner's Dilemma? Will nations and other units that currently control resources at different levels not be willing to forsake these powers in order to fulfill some universalist directive? Does this cosmopolitan, globalizing plan smack of conspiratorial schemes to foment a so-called new world order? Do these goals appear to entertain fraudulently revolutionary or phony messianic views of how the future will be capable of resolving the current material problems facing our world? Perhaps there are fundamental rules of the geopolitical universe that I have ignored in this outline. If so, then now is the time to develop pragmatic solutions to the material dilemmas that plague our planet. It is also necessary to break the stranglehold that ideology has achieved over our linguistic discourses. Maybe this plan for united world government will be fruitless if it too falls for the same ideological traps that befall my ideological opponents. I have tried not to rely on idealized assumptions about resource accumulation or the entrenched domination of capital in how we measure our lives.

So, all this definitely does not mean that I am in favor of the neoliberal turn, which has been one of the most dominant forces in the establishment of global authority over human life. I seek progressive government that allows for a high degree of regional and local autonomy in the decision-making proces. I support open, democratic governance where it is possible to attain such a level of understanding between governors and governed. However, I am not quixotically supportive of efforts to spread the gospel of democratic peace to the vast majority of the world that is so-called underdeveloped. I find that the buzzwords of freedom and democracy are generally pseudonyms for economic prosperity and/or cultural-racial superiority. Spreading American-style democracy and thus achieving American-ushered neoconservative global domination & neoliberal economic control is disingenuous and ill-advised. While Western geopolitical might has indeed reached critical mass in attaining dominion over much of the earth, and while most socioeconomic systems inherently seek merely to reproduce themselves, I find that it is best to limit the strength of any of the various imperial traditions that attempt to secure control over the global government. Perhaps this is naive to think that we could simply throw out the old assumptions about the Old World of foreign policy realism and the bottom line of hard power.

It is indeed idealistic to seek the creation of a new, progressive bottom line that emphasizes peace, justice, and tolerance. Yet, we must be ambitious about what objectives we strive to fulfill. The domination of the world is currently accomplished by globalizing influences that tend to monopolize access to credit, exert military force in unjust ways, and leave world bodies (corporations, NGO's, and the UN Security Council!) unaccountable to the people over which they rule. Perhaps my yearnings are horrifically populist or naively simplistic, in hoping that the masses might somehow be able to attain a greater degree of sovereignty over the decisions that regulate how they are fed, where they work, and who their leviathan is. Or, conversely, libertarians might scream that they desire not to have any sort of global tier of government which would supersede even the American federal government in its capacity to regulate, tax, and control. I too am skeptical about unifying this world under a massive bureaucracy that would control so many details of our lives. I harbor doubts about this global government's ability to promote the sort of governance that I imagine is possible. If I can't even get a federal government in this country of which I approve, why do I expect that I would appreciate the decisions made by my global regime du jour? Because I consider myself an alter-mondialist. We ought to aim for a constantly evolving system of alter-globalization. Un otro mundo es possible.

The answers are so complex that I will leave discussion of most of these topics to another time. However, i do know that uniting the consciences of the world under the umbrella of world government is perhaps a visible and realizable goal for the body we now know as the United Nations. This organ is poised to project itself boldly into primacy in terms of its role in the formation of a globally governing regime. This regime, we shall say, is beyond the 2006 conception of regime. A new sort of hegemonic force will be unsheathed as the World Government supersedes the Federal government, La Republique, and the Crown. At the moment when Emperors and Dukes, Amazonian Chiefs and Chechen Lords, all bow down to the same sovereign, so to speak, of the world government food chain, the world will have evolved beyond the myopic competition of empires and the clash of civilizations. This supernational approaches high quality of control over the mass of population groups in the process of accumulating a sufficient quantity of capital that is requisite for this level of political transfer between the aggressively uppity national governments and the World Government. Fear not the Talibanisation of federal structures, both within the traditionally-defined Islamic world and without. The subaltern governments would indeed experience gross fragmentation under the strain of a more sturdy planar People’s Palace from the top. At the supreme level of world government, this project of post-immodernity brings together a planar and hierarchical structure that results in the extension of layers of control exercised by the internationalist refusenik compadres over sinister nationalist apparachiks.

The System & The Condition of Post-Modernity

One well-known critic by the name of Mike Lwin had this to say about my recent blog post on God & BIBLE:

"I don't think God arose in human consciousness because people started to understand morality as a guiding force--rather, I believe that the concept of God was created as a coping mechanism for humans to deal with two things: One, to explain things in a prescience world they could not understand, and two, easing the finality of death with a promise of an afterlife. Morality wasn't taken into account until much later is "God"'s development, in my view. Additionally, how is the outcast so successful? What are you doing that is so much better than the system at hand? Furthermore, and this is what so many outcast-outsider-wanderers don't take into account--let's say you DO cause a revolution and overthrow the current system. What system do you implement, and how is this system going to be significantly better? The problem with any outsider discourse is that, while being intelligent and independent, its actual implementation may not exactly produce a better society (by all accounts, such "enlightened" outsider attempts have resulted in *poorer* ones), and in the end what you may visualize as implementing never gets implemented in actuality the way you imagined it. In other words, it's easy to talk about bringing down the system. It's another thing to actually do it, and it's a WHOLE other animal to actually make a better system. Whenever you deal with large masses of people, compromise is involved, which destroys the fundamental credo of the outsider philosophy. What is good for one is pretty much never good for all."

Well, I don't have many answers to the questions above, but I will start to address them herein. In this so-called post-modern civilization, we have many times attempted to overthrow the "system" that regulates our biological, social, and economic existence. Individuals and groups frequently become obsessed with the notion that they have the inertial capacity to combat the entirety of this all-encompassing system. Shall we view such audacity and hubris from a cynical perspective, believing that individuals cannot effect social change, or shall we embrace the optimistic and humanistic ideal of individual empowerment in the face of nearly omnipotent societal forces?"

Does the easy answer lie in submitting to the sacrosanct powers that govern our human universe? The combined might of god, government, and social convention (which establish hierarchical authority structures in order to control human behavior and regulate the ebb and flow of human irrationality) is indeed awesome. To go along with subjugation and allow ourselves to be controlled by the herd is certainly the path of least resistance. To exist as mediocre, average, and common is to place oneself no greater or no lesser than fellow human beings. Is this desirable?