Category: politics

Jones was working for an Iraq war contractor when she was drugged and then brutally gang-raped. When she reported the attack to her employer she was locked in a shipping container and denied food and water for at least 24 hrs. The main attacker named in the complaint said the sex he had with Jones, while she was unconscious, was consensual. And it was enough for a Houston jury to believe. More here.

i’ve posted before on caste in the indian subcontinent but do we ever think of caste in america? in her book “the new jim crow” the brilliant michelle alexander explains at length the racial caste system that exists here at home. this is so imp (and so eye-opening) – pls watch.

Anybody who believes the platitude that the people want peace, it’s just the leaders who want war, should have been at Ben-Gurion Airport today. It’s a good thing those Free Palestine activists got arrested; otherwise, the little mob that formed spontaneously would have punched them up pretty good.
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Only minutes after I got to the Arrivals hall, a few activists stood in front of the phalanx of reporters and cameramen, help up their little signs and started chanting “Israel Apartheid” and ”Free Palestine!” The cops tore the signs from their hands and started pushing them toward the exit. After the first couple of minutes of watching in shocked silence, people in the terminal started to boo. Men were cursing loudly – “sons of bitches,” “garbage,” and things in Arabic I didn’t understand.

A couple of dozen people, mainly men but also a few women, followed very close behind the tightly-bunched demonstrators, cops and reporters to the police van. “Throw them in the garbage,” shouted one woman. An old man tried to get at one of the activists, but the police stopped him.

I was there ostensibly as a journalist, and I was scribbling notes, but I felt cowardly not saying anything to these nationalist hooligans, so I started telling them in Hebrew, “What are these people doing?” The woman who wanted them thrown in the garbage said, “They’re hurting us!” I said, “They’re talking,” and the little mob turned on me, a couple of the men raised their fists. The woman told me, “Go back home, get out of here,” I said, “I live here.” The cops mistook me for a demonstrator, put me in the police van, but when I showed them my press card, they let me go.

Let me repeat – the police started off arresting the demonstrators, but very shortly their main task was to keep them from being assaulted. They had to hold back the herd – and that’s what these people were, a herd incited by the idea that these protesters, non-violent protesters trying to get to the West Bank, were a menace, an immediate threat to their security.

And I do not buy the idea that these people are helpless pawns being manipulated by the government, the media, the right-wing politicians. Most Israelis, even if they wouldn’t join a mob like the one at the airport, want to hear the belligerent rhetoric the opinion-makers are feeding them. They hate anybody who says anything bad about Israel, and take their words automatically as “blood libels.” The opinion-makers know this, and the ones who are popular and want to stay that way tell the people what they want to hear.

Who’s manipulating whom is a chicken-and-egg question.

Watching my enraged countrymen at Ben-Gurion, I imagined the daily headlines having been distilled into a kind of political methadrine and mainlined into their veins. Few Israelis would join them in physically going after people chanting slogans. But in their insistence that protesters like these be silenced because their words are acts of violence, acts of war, of terrorism, they represent the majority. They are an authentic expression of the national will. Theirs is the loudest voice in the land, it’s joined by the voice of Netanyahu, the government, the settlers and most of the media. All competing voices are drowned out.

Which is why these foreign activists on these flotillas, whatever I or anybody else thinks of the totality of their politics, are absolutely vital not only to the Palestinians, but to Israel. They’re bringing oxygen to a suffocating nation.
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More here.

In order to decolonize, Canadians and Americans have to re-imagine themselves, not as citizens with the privileges conferred by being descendants of colonizers or newcomers from other parts of the world benefitting from white imperialism, but as human beings in equal and respectful relation to other human beings and the natural environment. This is what radical imagination could look like. More here.

If the US believes in the rule of law, it should not be hindering my advocacy of claims against the CIA for wrongful death and injury. (Human rights lawyer Mirza Shahzad Akbar)
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This month, the US state department prevented me from travelling to the United States to participate in a conference hosted by the human rights programme at Columbia University law school in New York City. I have been granted US visas before and no reason was given by the state department for refusal on this occasion: despite repeated enquiries, we were merely told there was a “problem” with my application.
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Why would the US government want to prevent me from discussing these cases at Columbia law school? Perhaps, it is because our legal challenge disrupts the narrative of “precision strikes” against “high-value targets” as an unqualified success against terrorism, at minimal cost to civilian life.

As a lawyer in Pakistan, my experiences tell a different story. A 17-year-old boy named Sadaullah – another victim of the drone attacks – sought my help shortly after we filed Karim Khan’s case. In September 2009, when he was 15 years old, Sadaullah was serving food at a family iftar, the traditional breaking of the daily fast during the holy month of Ramadan, when missiles from a drone struck his grandfather’s home and killed four of his relatives. Falling debris knocked Sadaullah out, but he survived. When he awoke in a Peshawar hospital, he found that both his legs had been amputated and shrapnel had penetrated his eye, rendering it useless. Pakistani media reported that the strike had killed Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant leader. But months later, Ilyas Kahsmiri was seen alive in Afghanistan. It was only a few weeks ago that the militant was reportedly killed in yet another drone strike.
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More here.

One night, more than two years after he disappeared, Mu’min’s father showed up. He was wearing his prison clothes. His hair had turned gray. He had trouble walking. He was thin; his skin was yellow and his lips were blue. In prison he had been in solitary confinement and was tortured with sleep deprivation, dogs, beatings. His ankle had been broken. His arms had been tied above his head, injuring his shoulders. His personality had changed. He would wake up at night screaming. The next year Mu’min, too, was imprisoned, after he took his father’s gun and chased after some men who were stealing his car. An American patrol arrested him and accused him of being a terrorist. They put him in prison, beat him, and, three months later, released him. More here.

baghdad was a beautiful city with modern infrastructure, busy thoroughfares and leafy suburbs. “there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people” and destroying an entire country for oil. one million murdered, 5 million dispossessed. this is what we’ve done…
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“For 12-year-old Abbas Mohammed and his family, it is used plastic bottles and empty aluminum cans that keep them alive. Mohammed spends his school summer holidays picking through a Baghdad garbage dump so he can sell the discarded items and help support his family.

As Iraq battles to emerge from the ruins of war, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF estimates nearly a quarter of Iraq’s children — over three million youngsters, the most vulnerable group in society — scrape by on an income of less than $2.20 a day. One child in nine is working.

A recent International Labor Organization report listing dangerous jobs in which children are engaged across the world mentioned collecting garbage as one of the activities in which minors risked suffering violence and injury.

Mohammed wears a glove over his left hand to protect himself from sharp objects in the dump and his mother says she fears he could catch a disease. But she says she needs him to work.” More here.

Pakistan is host to the largest refugee population of 1.9 million, Iran is host to 1.1 million and Syria to one million. Afghans make up the largest number of refugees at 3 million, followed by Iraqis (1.6 million), Somalis (770,200), along with people from the Democratic Republic of Congo (476,000) and Myanmar (415,700).
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“Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industralised countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile it is poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden.”
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More here.

?”We’re there because our country is committing infanticide, genocide, the looting of nations. I’m determined to be there until they kill me. How much longer will that be?”
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Mr Haw was born in 1949, initially living in Barking, Essex. He was a member of the merchant navy, ran a removals business and worked as a carpenter.

An evangelical Christian, his faith saw him visit Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the killing fields of Cambodia.

He also worked with troubled youngsters in Redditch, Worcestershire, where he lived with his wife Kay and his seven children before starting his Parliament Square protest.

He said the children of Iraq and other countries were “every bit as valuable and worthy of love as my precious wife and children”.

“I want to go back to my own kids and look them in the face again, knowing that I’ve done all I can to try and save the children of Iraq and other countries who are dying because of my government’s unjust, amoral, fear – and money-driven policies,” he said.

More here.

this is one of a kind article. it talks about what it’s like to live under the constant threat, the constant robotic buzz of drones. it’s heart-breaking. pls read.
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Buzzing robots sail through the sky, and nobody sleeps. Poor villagers spend their meagre savings on pills; at night they swallow sedatives and in the morning they take anti-depressants. They sweep their rooms and courtyards every couple of hours, trying to purge their homes of microchips. Nobody has seen the tiny chips – some say they’re invisible to the naked eye, others say the electric filaments are fine enough to be woven into cloth. Every garment is suspect, every speck of dust.
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A financially weakened United States, chastened by its military misadventures, will likely increase its reliance on unmanned aircraft.

If drones are the future, Pakistan’s tribal areas offer a look ahead at the dystopia that emerges when mechanical hunters drift overhead.

It’s a dark and confusing picture, making it hard to say whether the missile strikes reduce, or increase, the number of terrorists.
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Villagers whisper about the drone strikes leaving behind poisonous dust that causes a variety of ailments, from diarrhea to skin disease.

People who sleep under the buzzing of the drones say it’s hard to settle down for the night, listening to the sound of armed machines nearby.

Muhammad Amad, executive director of Idea, an aid group that works in the tribal areas, was telling a visitor that the drones are counterproductive because they stir up local anger, when he was interrupted by one of his local staffers from Waziristan, interjecting in broken English: “Mental torture,” said the bearded man, with sun-weathered skin. He repeated himself, struggling to enunciate: “Mental torture.”
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?”They come here with headaches, insomnia, anxiety,” Dr. Shafique said. “They lie down at night and they don’t know if they will get up again. Especially at night, they are seized with anxiety.”

The doctor paused as a Pakistani fighter jet thundered past, so loud that it set off car alarms in the street. Drones are not the only thing that can kill you in the tribal areas, but Dr. Shafique said their omnipresence gets under your skin.
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?”I grabbed my Kalashnikov, because I thought somebody fired a rocket at my house,” Mr. Dawar said. The second explosion opened cracks in his ceiling, and the blasts kept coming – seven in total, destroying his neighbour’s house. He went to investigate the smouldering ruins, drawn by the sounds of a child weeping.

“There was nothing left but body parts, and a kid lying under some bricks,” he said.
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More here.

an excellent analysis of the illegality, immorality, ineffectiveness and secrecy surrounding the drone program. a must read for all well-meaning pakistanis who think that the war on terror is *their* war.
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Even as Obama has abandoned some of the language of the War on Terror, he has refused to dispense with its core legal foundation (what Alston refers to as the ’law of 9/11’). The US continues to assert a right to self-defense based on the wholly spurious justifications made famous under Bush: that the war is borderless, and that the groups with whom the USA is in armed conflict are ’undefined and open-ended’. As Alston rightly notes, “this interpretation of the right to self-defense is so malleable and expansive that it threatens to destroy the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the United Nations Charter.”
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Farhat Taj and her yammering allies share none of these legal or ethical qualms. Taj’s defense of the program, in fact, unabashedly reverses elementary legal principles: absent “verifiable evidence of civilian ’casualties’,” she has argued, drone victims can be declared terrorists. [4] Given that she means this to be the serious, reasoned argument of a ‘civilized’ public intellectual, the barbarity of the logic merits explication: the outrageous supposition, here, is that the program’s victims are militants (guilty) until proven civilian (innocent)! Taj is content, moreover, to root this argument in her faith in the CIA. Given that this is the intelligence wing of a State apparatus that is dripping in the blood of civilians, past and present, I hope I can be forgiven for suggesting that the Pakistani Left knows better.
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Farhat Taj is fond of noting that there is, today, a happy coincidence between her goals and the goals of the American Empire. The criminal naievete and willful neglect of history that this argument exemplifies reminds me of the fate of the Iraqi ex-leftist, Kanan Makiya. Makiya, too, hoped to ride American bombs into an Iraq free of tyranny and oppression; before long, of course, he woke to find his country irreparably ravaged by the subsequent imperial onslaught.
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More here.

there should be a similar movement resisting the war on terror, putting stats together and collecting testimony. the scale of the criminality is astounding. the war on drugs is tied in with multiple agendas – suppression of dissent (even tho we fight for democracy), austerity policies (and other forms of financial rape), maintaining stability (or puppet regimes), controlling immigration (while at the same time dispossessing small farmers), and of course making lots of money thru laundering or weapons manufacturing or mercenary corporations. sick.
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There was about an average of 2,000 drug war-related homicides in the years before President Calderón launched this drug war, which is a model of the military confronting cartels in the streets. And since then, last year, for example, we had 15,000 drug-related homicides. So the correlation is obvious. More here.

and here comes the muslim loyalty oath! hey, what’s next? heil obama?!

more here.

a terrific history lesson on palestine/israel. edward said is one of the commentators. worth watching.

Britain’s ramblers are to march through central London to reclaim the word ‘walk’ from Slutwalk feminists amidst fears the campaign’s abuse of the word could lead to the sexualisation of the innocent pastime.

Rambler group, Prolaps, say they will take immediate action to prevent the word from being permanently associated with the behaviour of semi-naked women clearly not prepared for a proper ‘walk’. “I get that they’re trying to reclaim the word ‘slut’ – and good on them for that – but why did they have to drag the word ‘walk’ down with them?” – LOL!!!

More here.