Author: mara.ahmed

Challenging Toronto’s corporate security walls

walls r definitely in.

In Toronto this week, contract workers are putting final touches on the three-metre high and six-kilometre long $5.5 million dollar concrete and metal security fence encompassing the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. Total security bill for the G20 in Toronto and G8 in Huntsville is expected to reach over $1 billion, the most expensive in history. Within and around this armed camp are 20,000 law enforcement officials, 1,000 private security guards, closed circuit TV cameras, military-style checkpoints along with sound and water cannons.Behind these steel cages is a corporate-driven narrative of profiteering. An open conspiracy that fuses Canadian state security agencies and one of Canada’s key multinational corporations, directing millions in public funds towards private accounts. Full article.

An Improvisation for Angular Momentum by A.R. Ammons

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical!

Perhaps the death mother like the birth mother
does not desert us but comes to tend
and produce us, to make room for us
and bear us tenderly, considerately,
through the gates, to see us through,
to ease our pains, quell our cries,
to hover over and nestle us, to deliver
us into the greatest, most enduring
peace, all the way past the bother of
recollection,
beyond the finework of frailty,
the mishmash house of the coming & going,
creation’s fringes,
the eddies and curlicues

Where Thoreau Lived, Crusade Over Bottles

let’s join mrs hill!

Mrs. Hill’s crusade began a few years ago when her grandson, then 10, told her about the so-called Pacific garbage patch, a vortex of plastic and other debris floating between California and Hawaii, thought to be twice the size of Texas. She researched and homed in on bottled water, finding that millions of plastic bottles were disposed of daily and that most were not recycled. While most opponents of bottled water have sought piecemeal change, like getting government agencies to stop buying it, Mrs. Hill wanted her affluent, erudite town to take a bolder step. “The bottled water companies are draining our aquifers and selling it back to us,” she said, repeating her pitch from the town meeting in April. “We’re trashing our planet, all because of greed.” Full article.

General Discharge by Robert Scheer

After the brilliant Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings, President Barack Obama has no valid option other than to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Not because of the dozen outrageous anti-administration verbal gaffes which have been reported, but rather because this definitive piece on the “Runaway General” establishes the man in charge of the Afghanistan misadventure as an egotistical flake whose half-baked Afghan war-fighting strategy should never have been endorsed in the first place. It is McChrystal’s policy of counterinsurgency (COIN) that must be fired more than the man who exemplifies its irrationality. Full article.

Judge lifts offshore drilling ban

A federal judge struck down the Obama administration’s six-month ban on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as rash and heavy-handed, saying the government simply assumed that because one rig exploded, the others pose an imminent danger, too. US District Judge Martin Feldman, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and has owned stock in a number of petroleum-related companies, sided with the plaintiffs. Full article.

1700% Project: Mistaken for Muslim

PLS WATCH THIS: THE POWER OF ART TO RESIST VIOLENCE AND RACISM.

In this video, narratives collide with music, poetry and politics to create a complex and layered experience. A poet, dancer, angel, prisoner converge with community to speak, deflect, and intervene against racial profiling and hate crimes. This convergence exemplifies a spirit of defiance and resistance from communities of people who refuse to end in violence. This spoken word video is a collaboration between artist Anida Yoeu Ali and filmmaker Masahiro Sugano with over 100 diverse volunteers, participants and community members in the Chicagoland area. It is part of an ongoing project that engages art as a form of intervention against the racial profiling of Muslims in a post 9/11 era.

Oliver Stone Tackles Latin America’s Political Upheaval in “South of the Border”

ok, this interview with oliver stone and tariq ali about what’s going on in south america totally rocks! THIS gives me hope for the world. time to work together – not just south america as a unified continent, but all “third world”, “developing” countries that have been ruthlessly colonized, post colonized, and messed with forever. enough.

watch interview here.

johan galtung interview on DN! – my take

“I Love the US Republic, and I Hate the US Empire”: Johan Galtung on the War in Afghanistan and How to Get Out – second part of Amy Goodman’s interview with Johan Galtung. Known as a founder of the field of peace and conflict studies, he’s spent the past half-century pursuing nonviolent conflict resolution in international relations. His latest book is The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What?: Successors, Regionalization or Globalization? US Fascism or US Blossoming?

watch interview here.

my comments:

i found the galtung interview interesting but i had major problems with how he started off.

the occupation of afghanistan cannot last because colonization has never lasted anywhere. of course afghanistan is even harder to occupy than most countries on account of how afghan society has always been loosely structured, with no strong central govt. we find the same social set up in pakistan’s northern regions and that’s why the pakistani govt had never interfered in their business – they had always been quite autonomous – before and after british colonial rule, pre and post partition. but galtung chooses to focus on islam as the reason why afghanistan cannot be colonized. he talks about muslims all over the world fighting for afghan independence, falling in the common trap of treating islam as a monolith and buying into the class of civilizations. he goes further and uses islamic theology to back up his claims – the followers of “allah” will never capitulate to “infidels”. that is so franklin graham! first of all, christians and jews r not infidels but people of the book in islam. secondly, since when have the followers of jesus or moses liked to capitulate to muslim infidels? the simple fact is that no one likes to have their country occupied. period.

i agree with him on 9/11. i don’t think that al qaeda had much to do with it. in fact, they issued a statement right after 9/11 saying as much (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/inv.binladen.denial/). most people don’t remember that. 9/11 was probably carried out by a small group of disaffected, mostly saudi men. again, i don’t think it was just about an oil treaty or about what the prophet said when he expired. i think the presence of american troops on saudi soil is a huge problem as is american foreign policy.

it’s true that conflict resolution is outside the purview of u.s. foreign policy, that the u.s. might become increasingly irrelevant and that turkey could become an imp world player. i have always talked about the need for more cooperation b/w the islamic world and latin america because they have v similar colonial histories and r still the victims of nefarious post colonial interference. the rapprochement between turkey, iran and brazil seems to be in line with that idea. i also agree with what he says about india – their alacrity to align themselves with america and israel and with the lethal combination of the “war on terror” doctrine mixed together with aggressive capitalism does not bode well. they will end up on the wrong side of the split between the present world order and its eventual replacement.

afghanistan will certainly be another vietnam – it’s self evident. people talk about differences but in fact the similarities r quite stunning. the result will be the same – as soon as we leave the country, the puppet govt we have propped up will collapse and the taliban will take over – they already control most of the country anyway.

also, totally agree about al jazeera being multi-angle. it’s real journalism vs what we have – corporate media where news looks like an advertisement stuck in an endless loop.

galtung is absolutely right that the word terrorism, as applied to national resistance movements, is preposterous.

but then sure enough he returns to his comfort zone of infidels and ummahs. i’m glad he mentions some concrete issues tho. when the west became insistent on crediting al qaeda for 9/11, bin laden did use that opportunity to become a spokesperson for the monolithic islam conjured up by the west. he came out with a statement of issues the muslim world had with the u.s. including palestine, somalia, chechnya, kashmir, lebanon, the devastating sanctions on iraq, jerusalem as the capital of israel, the theft and exploitation of resources found in muslim countries, etc. galtung is right that no effort was ever made to talk about any of these concerns.

his recommendations which include trading for equal economic benefit, pulling out of military bases, creating a dept of peace, putting an end to political arm twisting,
and forgetting about a separate mandate from god in favor of dialogue r all spot on.

Huge outpouring of Oakland picketers stop unloading of Israeli ship

Somewhere between 700 and 1,000 demonstrators from all over the San Francisco Bay Area made their way at 5:30 on a Sunday morning deep into the Port of Oakland to stage a spirited community-labor picket line in front of a berth where an Israeli freighter, the Zim Shenzhen, was due to dock. Waving Palestinian and Turkish flags and chanting “Free, free Palestine – don’t cross the picket line” and “An injury to one is an injury to all – the Israeli apartheid wall will fall,” the demonstrators blocked three gates to the berth for more than four hours. The turnout was all the more impressive because the BART, the Bay Area subway system, doesn’t even start running until around 8 a.m. on Sunday, and even after people got to the assembly point in West Oakland, we had to walk more than a mile to get to the berth. Full article and video.

Report from the Middle East: Michel Warschawski on growing up in Jerusalem

i chanced upon this interview on the real news. it’s an 8-part discussion with peace activist michel warschawski. i found it enlightening. not only are warschawski’s own biography and work extremely compelling, but over the course of this in-depth interview, he makes certain connections which i found brilliant. i will post some of it, if not most of the interview here. this is the first part in which warschawski talks about his own journey. i was particularly moved by the story of how he became a political activist – he remembers vividly the exact moment that it happened.