Category: politics

Breivik’s writings offer much more than a window into the motives that led him to commit terror. They can also be read as an embodiment of the mentality of a new and internationalized far-right movement that not only mobilizes hatred against Muslims, but is also able to produce figures who will kill innocent non-Muslims to save the Western way of life.
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Breivik and other members of Europe’s new extreme right are fixated on the fear of the “demographic Jihad,” or being out-populated by overly fertile Muslim immigrants. They see themselves as Crusader warriors fighting a racial/religious holy war to preserve Western Civilization. Thus they turn for inspiration to Israel, the only ethnocracy in the world, a country that substantially bases its policies towards the Palestinians on what its leaders call “demographic considerations.” This is why Israeli flags invariably fly above black-masked English Defense League mobs, and why Geert Wilders, the most prominent Islamophobic politician in the world, routinely travels to Israel to demand the forced transfer of Palestinians.

Judging from Breivik’s writings, his hysterical hatred of the Labor Party’s immigration policies and tolerance of Muslim immigrants likely led him target the government-operated summer camp at Utoya. For years, the far-right has singled Norway out as a special hotbed of pro-Islam, pro-Palestinian sentiment, thanks largely to its ruling Labor Party. In 2010, for instance, the English Defense League called Norway a future site of “Islamohell,” “where unadulterated political correctness has ruled the roost, with sharp talons, for decades.”
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Full article.

Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
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In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Angell deconstructs what she calls an apparent “raging epidemic of mental illness” among Americans. The use of psychoactive drugs—including both antidepressants and antipsychotics—has exploded, and if the new drugs are so effective, Angell points out, we should “expect the prevalence of mental illness to be declining, not rising.”
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What’s especially troubling about the over-prescription of the new antipsychotics is its prevalence among the very young and the very old – vulnerable groups who often do not make their own choices when it comes to what medications they take. Investigations into antipsychotic use suggests that their purpose, in these cases, may be to subdue and tranquilize rather than to treat any genuine psychosis.
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A remarkable series published in the Palm Beach Post in May true revealed that the state of Florida’s juvenile justice department has literally been pouring these drugs into juvenile facilities, “routinely” doling them out “for reasons that never were approved by federal regulators.” The numbers are staggering: “In 2007, for example, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen. Overall, in 24 months, the department bought 326,081 tablets of Seroquel, Abilify, Risperdal and other antipsychotic drugs for use in state-operated jails and homes for children…That’s enough to hand out 446 pills a day, seven days a week, for two years in a row, to kids in jails and programs that can hold no more than 2,300 boys and girls on a given day.” Further, the paper discovered that “One in three of the psychiatrists who have contracted with the state Department of Juvenile Justice in the past five years has taken speaker fees or gifts from companies that make antipsychotic medications.”
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Full article.

?”I analysed the rape figures for 2007 and I found that 90% of victims were Dalits and 85% of Dalit rape victims were underage girls.”
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Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state with 200 million people. It is also home to a staggering number of poor – official statistics show more than 60 million people here live on less than $1.25 (75p) a day .

Poverty also makes a community more vulnerable. Many victims were raped or assaulted when they went to the fields because, like millions of Indians, they have no access to toilets at home.

Uttar Pradesh has always had a high rate of crime, but it is the viciousness of the recent attacks that has stunned people most.

“These cases are so brutal that we wouldn’t have believed that they could happen – we thought such things could happen only in novels and films,” Mrs Verma says.
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Full article.

The attempt to seek an international arrest warrant for Rizzo is being led by the British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith of the campaign group Reprieve, and lawyers in Pakistan. The lawyers are also building cases against other individuals, including drone operators interviewed or photographed during organised press facilities.
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While killing civilians in military operations is not illegal under international law unless it is proved to be deliberate, disproportionate or reckless, Stafford Smith believes the nature of the US drone campaign puts it on a different legal footing.

“The US has to follow the laws of war,” he said. “The issue here is that this is not a war. There is zero chance, given the current political situation in Pakistan, that we will not get a warrant for Rizzo. The question is what happens next. We can try for extradition and the US will refuse.

“Interpol, I believe, will have to issue a warrant because there is no question that it is a legitimate complaint.”
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Full article.

talking of islamophobia as propaganda campaign, this is how it works. excellent investigative journalism. watch here.

From Kathy Kelly: Pls sign the petition to free Dr Rafil Dhafir, an MD from Syracuse NY who was sentenced to 22 yrs in prison after having delivered medicines and humanitarian aid to ordinary people in Iraq, in violation of US/UN economic sanctions. Dr Dhafir saw the need experienced by his own relatives and took steps to alleviate their suffering.

Islamophobia is a new ideological formation that has taken full expression since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Islamophobia does not originate in one particular administration, thinker, media outlet, special interest group or even economic sector or industry though indeed, these actors are collectively responsible for the virulent dissemination of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stereotypes and beliefs, circulated in order to naturalize and justify US global, economic and political hegemony.
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To streamline the massive, multifaceted ideological edifice of Islamophobia, two similar but competing paradigms of Islamophobia by Bernard Lewis and Fareed Zakaria will be mapped out. As bears repeating, these two are certainly not progenitors of the Islamophobic narratives deployed post 9/11, but arguably their work condenses Islamophobic narratives that have previously circulated and accumulated over the preceding decade. Lewis and Zakaria distilled many Islamophobic tenets into two separate but intersecting discourses that explicitly intend to legitimize the deployment of US political power in the Middle East and the control of its own domestic populations. The talking points within these two versions of Islamophobia are continually repeated throughout the mainstream media, in policy circles, and by native informants (persons of Muslim or Arab descent who are purportedly best placed to lay bare an inside view or critique of Arab/Islamic culture), but more importantly, echo in the speeches of Bush and Obama.
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Full article.

The City of Sydney council has voted to replace the words “European arrival” in the official record with “invasion”. The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word to describe how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British.
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In its landmark rejection of historical propaganda, Sydney recognises black Australia’s “cultural endurance” and, without saying so directly, a growing resistance to an outrage known as “the intervention”. In 2007, John Howard sent the army into Aboriginal Australia to “protect the children” who, said his minister, were being abused in “unthinkable numbers”. It is striking how Australia’s incestuous political and media elite so often rounds on the tiny black minority with all the fervour of the guilty, unaware perhaps that the national mythology remains culpably damaged while a nationhood, once stolen, is not returned to the original inhabitants.
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More here.

The drone war has developed its own slang. The scared humans on the ground running for cover are labelled ‘squirters.’ Successful attacks are called ‘bugsplats’. The likeness with extermination of insects is evidently not lost on the drone warriors: “It can get a little bloodthirsty. But it’s fucking cool.” More here.

this documentary is called “the naga story” i believe. it’s a great history lesson for those who don’t know that much about the naga people’s long and painful struggle for independence from india. check it out.

As indigenous and women of color feminists we sought to affirm our association with the growing international movement for a free Palestine. We wanted to see for ourselves the conditions under which Palestinian people live and struggle against what we can now confidently name as the Israeli project of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.
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Everyone we encountered—in Nablus, Awarta, Balata, Jerusalem, Hebron, Dheisheh, Bethlehem, Birzeit, Ramallah, Um el-Fahem, and Haifa—asked us to tell the truth about life under occupation and about their unwavering commitment to a free Palestine. We were deeply impressed by people’s insistence on the linkages between the movement for a free Palestine and struggles for justice throughout the world; as Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted throughout his life, “Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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We met with refugees across the country whose families had been evicted from their homes by Zionist forces, their land confiscated, their villages and olive groves razed. As a consequence of this ongoing displacement, Palestinians comprise the largest refugee population in the world (over five million), the majority living within 100 kilometers of their natal homes, villages, and farmlands. In defiance of United Nations Resolution 194, Israel has an active policy of opposing the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their ancestral homes and lands on the grounds that they are not entitled to exercise the Israeli Law of Return, which is reserved for Jews.
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We also came to understand how overt repression is buttressed by deceptive representations of the state of Israel as the most developed social democracy in the region. As feminists, we deplore the Israeli practice of “pink-washing,” the state’s use of ostensible support for gender and sexual equality to dress-up its occupation. In Palestine, we consistently found evidence and analyses of a more substantive approach to an indivisible justice.
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We were continually inspired by the deep and abiding spirit of resistance in the stories people told us, in the murals inside buildings such as Ibdaa Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, in slogans painted on the apartheid wall in Qalqiliya, Bethlehem, and Abu Dis, in the education of young children, and in the commitment to emancipatory knowledge production.
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Therefore, we unequivocally endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to pressure Israeli state-sponsored institutions to adhere to international law, basic human rights, and democratic principles as a condition for just and equitable social relations. We reject the argument that to criticize the State of Israel is anti-Semitic. We stand with Palestinians, an increasing number of Jews, and other human rights activists all over the world in condemning the flagrant injustices of the Israeli occupation.
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More here.

The 20-year sentence given to John Walker Lindh is a disgrace, but so too is the open-ended detention of the majority of the men in Guantánamo, who did nothing more than Lindh – the 58 Yemenis still held because of Congressional scaremongering and Obama’s cowardice, the 31 men held because they cannot return home safely, and because America is unwilling to provide them with a new home, and, I can say with confidence, the majority of the 46 other men that the President, disgracefully, wants to hold forever because he regards them as dangerous even though he has no evidence against them that would stand up in any court. More here.

a side of india u might not know from all the time magazine covers: A method of interrogation by which bodies of [Kashmiri] suspects were placed under heavy rollers caused at least 250 deaths through acute renal failure at one Srinagar hospital alone, according to Pankaj Mishra. Others died through application of electric shocks, and particularly through “immersing the prisoners’ heads in water during interrogation. More here.