Author: mara.ahmed

Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. And having a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel (just watch Blitzer in this 5-minute clip if you have doubts about that) is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.” Full article.

Secondary only to ending the siege of Gaza and achieving Statehood, the enactment of the basic civil right to work and to own a home for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Refugees living in squalor in Lebanon is perhaps the most critical and immediately achievable goal of the Palestinian resistance and the ideals enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Friends of Palestine and supporters of basic civil rights, wherever they live, can help this happen without violence or martyrs by signing and distributing the Online Petition and by twinning with a Palestinian Refugee in Lebanon. Sign here.

most excellent, altho a bit hypocritical considering the brutal military occupation of kashmir by the indian army.

Dockworkers at the major Indian port of Cochin are refusing to unload Israeli cargo in protest of Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip.
According to the Indian communist publication People’s Democracy, “The boycott began on June 17 on receipt of information that cargo unloaded at Colombo Port [Sri Lanka] from Israeli ship m/v Zim Livorno 16 was bound to arrive at Cochin Port in a feeder vessel.”

“On June 23, trade unions held a joint protest rally in Cochin Port near the office of Zim Integrated Shipping Services (India) Pvt Ltd – the Israeli shipping line,” the report added. At the demonstration, labor leaders denounced Israel’s attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla in May which left nine people dead. Representatives of several trade unions—including those aligned with both left and right wing parties— joined the demonstration. The port of Cochin, in the state of Kerala, is one of the biggest ports in India. The Chochin dockworkers join workers at ports in Sweden, South Africa, and other countries who have refused to unload Israeli cargo. Calls for boycotts against Israel intensified in the wake of the flotilla raid. Full article.

A 43-year-old Iranian woman will not be stoned to death after an international campaign launched by her children. It is unclear whether the authorities have lifted the death sentence for alleged adultery against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani or if she faces execution by another means. More here.

The occupation of the Palestinian territories defines Israel’s economy in a large way. About two-thirds of Israel’s history, it has been occupying power, controlling Palestinian territories. But even before that occupation, Israel has created a very particular system of economic control, which is designed to promote the idea of a Jewish state. The Jewish state is not merely a cultural idea; it’s not merely a symbolic idea; it’s a material reality which is designed to redistribute wealth in order to draw as many Jews as possible to this area and to maintain a sustainable control of the Jewish population over a piece of land which is by nature binational.

…until the year 2000, Israel was about the tenth biggest arms exporter in the world, but the fourth biggest arms exporter to the developing world, because Israel was willing to sell weapons to clients, to customers which other countries were reluctant to sell to, such as South Africa during the apartheid and so on. But after September 11, after the attacks, there was a famous quote by Benjamin Netanyahu, who is currently Israel’s prime minister. He said these attacks are good for Israel; they show the world that Israel fighting terrorism—or fighting Islam, basically—is a good thing. (Shir Hever) – Watch interview here.

this has nothing to do with islam. it’s a barbaric pre-islamic custom that needs to stop. pls sign this petition.

WARSCHAWSKI: [Since 9/11] the discourse of clash of civilizations has become deeply internalized in Israeli discourse and by the Israeli public – that we Israel are the front line defending not only ourselves but so-called Judeo-Christian civilization against not just the Palestinians – they are only the front line of a much bigger threat, which is Islam, Islamic fundamentalism. In fact, there was a shift in the discourse, starting with fighting terrorism (this was the main discourse at the end of the ’80s) then to Islamic terrorism, and then to Islam as such – a civilizational threat.

JAY: And it goes to the very core of the conception of the Israeli – of a Jewish state, because if there wasn’t some kind of clash of civilizations, you wouldn’t need a Jewish state.

WARSCHAWSKI: Yes, but the Jewish state was a answer not to Islam but to European anti-Semitism.

JAY: That gets transferred.

Watch interview here.

Most recently, this duplicitous landscape of war-on-terror “success” has been illuminated yet again by the case of four alleged Newburgh, New York, conspirators — the Newburgh Four — and in the botched arrest and fatal shooting (a first for federal authorities) of an African American imam in Detroit, leader of the so-called Ummah Conspiracy. As the details have slowly emerged, these two cases offer vivid examples of how government-scripted many of the terror plots “uncovered” in the U.S. in recent years have turned out to be. Each case, in fact, offers a window onto a stark world in which nothing is what it seems to be. Full article.

So between Afghanistan and Paksitan combined, there are a few hundred Al Qeada members total. All of this ongoing war and those hundreds of billions of dollars spent and those deaths and the decade of occupation, and those bombings and shootings and drone attacks and lawless prisons and habeas-stripping court precedents: it’s all (ostensibly) for a few hundred extremists total hiding in remote tribal areas. A few hundred. Full article.

An Indian MP’s call for the children of a recently-contacted Andaman Island tribe to be removed from their parents and sent to residential schools has sparked worldwide outrage. Full article.

First published: Thursday, July 1, 2010

On 9/11, a small group of terrorists attacked the United States. In response, our government has spent the past nine years waging a “war on terror.”

It exploited those attacks as an excuse to start wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using fear of Muslims as the justification. A preemptive war against Iraq was begun under false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraqi government would share these with terrorists, particularly al-Qaida. Thousands of Muslims were rounded up in the Middle East as possible terrorists and tortured. The “worst of the worst” were sent to Guantanamo to be held and tortured indefinitely. But the U.S. knew all along that many of these prisoners were innocent, misrepresenting them as terrorists in order to generate fear that would induce Americans to permit restriction of their civil liberties and allow their tax dollars to be spent supporting these wars.

Our government needed to find terrorists living among us as a further way to manipulate our fear of Islam and thus fight its “war on terror” at home. Taking inspiration from former Vice President Dick Cheney’s 1 percent doctrine (if there is a 1 percent chance someone might be a terrorist, the government must act as if it is a certainty), the government launched a program of preemptive prosecution against Muslims to entrap and convict them of contrived crimes in order to preempt them from possibly supporting terrorism in the future.

Hundreds of Muslims are serving long prison sentences in America for crimes they did not commit. The purpose of these prosecutions is to increase our fear of Muslims and to convince the public that repressing both the Constitution and civil liberties is the way to prevail over terrorism.

We know the consequences of this injustice firsthand. We were involved in cases of Muslims who were targeted and entrapped in the Albany area, such as Yassin Aref, Mohammed Hossain, Ansar Mahmood, Dr. Rafil Dhafir and Imam Warith Deen Umar. We know that these individuals were not involved in terrorism, and our government now acknowledges as much. When innocent people are entrapped and framed based essentially on their religion, we cannot turn our heads and pretend that we do not see injustice. We cannot remain silent while these Muslims and their families, our friends and neighbors, have been wronged.

On April 5, the Albany Common Council became the first city in the United States to pass a resolution calling on the U.S. government to appoint a special prosecutor to re-examine the cases of Muslims who were preemptively prosecuted. The inspector general of the Justice Department has recommended this, but the department itself has taken no action.

Without Muslims falsely convicted of terrorism, how would our government justify its repression of civil liberties, its wars abroad and the “war on terror” itself?

On July 23–25, Albany will host the United National Peace Conference, bringing together all the national peace organizations to discuss strategies for implementing peace in the U.S. and the world. Speakers will include Noam Chomsky, Kathy Kelly and Cindy Sheehan.

One of the issues the conference will consider is how Muslims here and abroad are mistreated based on fear of Islam, and how to break this exploitation of fear cycle. You will hear many stories from both Muslims and non-Muslims like us, who have been personally touched by experiences of injustice and are determined to speak out about it.

Even if you cannot attend the conference, you can still help promote peace. Learn to see your local Muslim community as your American neighbors who are striving, like you, to build this country, and as people from whom you have nothing to fear. We came to know Albany’s Muslim community from different perspectives. Each of us has learned from them that despite media hype, Islam is a peaceful religion that recoils from extremists or terrorism. Unfortunately, we have also learned how maligned and fearful Muslims are throughout America.

It is time to stop the wars, persecution and injustice that flow from fear. It is time to start a healing that only peace can bring.

Stephen Downs is an attorney in Selkirk and founder of Project SALAM (Support And Legal Advocacy for Muslims). Joe Lombardo is a Delmar-based organizer of the United National Peace Conference. Register for the conference here.

excuse me while i puke:

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is to receive a prestigious US medal and $100,000 (£67,000) prize for his work in conflict resolution. The National Constitution Centre is awarding him its Liberty Medal for “steadfast” efforts to broker peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. Previous winners include Nelson Mandela and former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior. Mr Blair said he was driven by values of “freedom, liberty and justice”. More here.

Naomi Klein: One of the most important messages that we really need to learn in this moment is if we are going to oppose the strategy that these G20 leaders have just put on the table for how to deal with the budget crisis that they created, if we’re going to say, “We don’t want to get stuck with the bill for your crisis,” then we have to put other revenue sources on the table, and that means cutting military and police spending, like the outrageous police spending we just saw in Toronto, but much larger than that, the losing wars that we’re fighting—that’s a great cost saver—and also taxing the banks, financial transaction taxes, but also going after the fossil fuel companies, because the message that we need to learn from the BP disaster is just the incredible costs imposed on societies by this industry. It is not just BP. Watch here.