Category: activism

as obama talks about daal and keema and the pleasures of urdu poetry, the murder of pakistani civilians continues.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) — US missile strikes killed dozens of people in a Pakistani tribal area controlled by Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, where the army is preparing an assault, officials said Wednesday. Full article.

excellent analysis by tariq ali (as usual). he explains how dangerous present american foreign policy is in that part of the world. a coup within the pakistan army – that seems to be what we’re asking for.

what war does to those who are lucky enough to survive.

Refugee crisis in Iraq: 1-1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan (increasing its modest population of 5.5 million by 14%); at least another 150,000 have made it to Lebanon; over 150,000 have emigrated to Egypt; and over 1.9 million are now estimated to have been internally displaced.

THE IRAQI REFUGEE CRISIS

The crisis began with the displacement of one million Iraqis fleeing war-related violence in the first three years following the 2003 invasion and escalated dramatically after the bombing of a mosque in Samarra in February 2006. Subsequent sectarian killings, facilitated by the collapse of governing and civil structures, led to a mass exodus from the country. Many of the refugees were at one time middle-class professionals: doctors, engineers, teachers, artists, filmmakers, administrators.

Jordan hosts between 500,000 and 750,000 Iraqis; Syria between 1.5 and 2 million. Several hundred thousand have made their way to Egypt, the Gulf States, Iran, Turkey, and Yemen. By the summer of 2007, some 60,000 Iraqis were fleeing Iraq each month, mainly to Syria—the last open border.

In October 2007, when Syria closed the last legal exit from the country, the flood of refugees subsided temporarily only to increase again in early 2008. Despite the perception, that fall, that Iraqis were choosing to return home, the Iraqi Red Crescent reported that less than 50,000 actually returned to Iraq from Syria in the last three months of 2007, when the Iraqi government began offering free bus transit and a payment of $800 to each returning family.

The vast majority of Iraqis who returned did so because their residency permits had expired or because they had run out of money to sustain their lives in exile. Many found their homes had been destroyed or occupied by other families in their absence.

The majority of refugees do not believe they can return to Iraq. Yet few nations have been willing to accept them. Many are now seeking any route of escape, no matter the cost and risk, often through human smuggling networks.

Since the most vulnerable refugees reside in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, we have decided to focus on those countries, as well as on Internally Displaced People (IDPs) inside Iraq, who have become refugees in their own country.

listen to interviews with iraqi refugees.

to those who say that the pakistani public is largely supportive of a war against the taliban – here is a protest in faisalabad. the large banner reads: “stop the mass murder of the pashtun people, stop this american war!”

It is clear—and has been for a long time— that the Obama administration is radically expanding the US war in Afghanistan deeply into Pakistan. Whether it is through US military trainers (that’s what they were called in Vietnam too), drone attacks or commando raids inside the country, the US is militarily entrenched in Pakistan. It makes Obama’s comment that “[W]e have no intention of sending US troops into Pakistan” simply unbelievable. Full article.

At age 23, John Lewis, chairman of SNCC, was a veteran of many civil rights battles. On August 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, he gave one of the major speeches.

Though not as well known as Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, delivered the same day, Lewis’ fiery words cut deep, accusing the federal government of conspiring to ignore inequality. The text of Lewis’ speech was itself a battleground; some of the most controversial words and phrases were removed, and the ending was reworked, at the insistence of other march leaders. The text here is the version Lewis delivered.

SPEECH:

We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages, or no wages at all. In good conscience, we cannot support wholeheartedly the administration’s civil rights bill. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.

This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations: This bill will not protect the citizens in Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges. What about the three young men in Americus, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest? The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama and Georgia, who are qualified to vote but lack a sixth-grade education. “ONE MAN, ONE VOTE” is the African cry. It is ours, too. It must be ours.

People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to register to vote. What is there in this bill to ensure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?

For the first time in one hundred years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action. We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say, “My party is the party of principles?” The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party?

In some parts of the South we work in the fields from sunup to sundown for $12 a week. In Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by Dixiecrats but by the federal government for peaceful protest. But what did the federal government do when Albany’s deputy sheriff beat attorney C. B. King and left him half dead? What did the federal government do when local police officials kicked and assaulted the pregnant wife of Slater King, and she lost her baby?

It seems to me that the Albany indictment is part of a conspiracy on the part of the federal government and local politicians in the interest of expediency.

The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, “We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.”

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.

We all recognize the fact that if any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about. In the struggle, we must seek more than civil rights; we must work for the community of love, peace and true brotherhood. Our minds, souls and hearts cannot rest until freedom and justice exist for all people.

The revolution is a serious one. Mr. Kennedy is trying to take the revolution out of the streets and put it into the courts. Listen, Mr. Kennedy. Listen, Mr. Congressman. Listen, fellow citizens. The black masses are on the march for jobs and freedom, and we must say to the politicians that there won’t be a “cooling-off” period.

We will not stop. If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the South, through the streets of Jackson, through the streets of Danville, through the streets of Cambridge, through the streets of Birmingham. But we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the desegregated South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy.

We must say, “Wake up, America. Wake up! For we cannot stop, and we will not be patient.”

Source: Lewis, John, with Michael D’Orso. Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

brilliant, brilliant interview with howard zinn!

we won’t disillusion young people by bringing down conventional american heroes (like columbus and theodore roosevelt). we can introduce them to the real heroes of our history by bringing them out of obscurity – people who resisted and brought about change.

watch interview on democracy now!

The Fort Laramie Treaty once guaranteed the Sioux Nation the right to a large area of their original land, which spanned several states and included their sacred Black Hills, where they were to have “the absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the land.

However, when gold was discovered in the Black Hills, President Ulysses S. Grant told the army to look the other way in order to allow gold miners to enter the territory. After repeated violations of the exclusive rights to the land by gold prospectors and by migrant workers crossing the reservation borders, the US government seized the Black Hills land in 1877. Full article.

The regime has arrested Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, daughter of the former president, who spoke at a pro-Mousavi rally, along with 4 other members of that family. This step is typical of an old Iranian ruling technique, of keeping provincial tribal chieftains in check by keeping some of their children hostage at the royal court. It is widely suspected that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a multi-billionaire who is well connected politically, is funding and aiding the reform movement’s protests. Full article.

very moving…

“What I think the policies of the Obama administration over the past five months show is that we need independent political movements in this country that cannot and will not allow themselves to be co-opted by the Democratic Party–that don’t function as partisan movements for the promotion of one of the two corporate parties, but rather keep as their primary focus ending U.S. wars of aggression around the world, fighting for single-payer health care and fighting for the rights of working-class people and the poor in this nation.” Full article.