Category: politics

there’s the war on terror and then there’s the war on drugs. “mexicans can’t take more of this fear. this country is overwhelmed by violence as never before.” 90,000 protest the militarization of the war on drugs, which has led to unimaginable bloodshed. organizers put the number of protestors at more than double that. more here.

It is telling that the U.S. chose Geronimo as Bin Laden’s moniker. At an unconscious level, perhaps U.S. officials realized that just like the famous Native American warrior, Bin Laden had a valid bone to pick with Western imperialism. More here.

one of the police commanders in saigon executing a vietcong guerrilla in 1968. this is not the kind of justice we want in (or outside) our country. name, ethnicity, skin color and type of crime believed to be committed r irrelevant. everyone gets a trial. everyone’s innocent until proven guilty. drone attacks and aerial bombardments which kill people w/o due process r extrajudicial killings and therefore no better than the “saigon execution” below. enough “cowboy justice” – which is no justice at all.

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

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?”It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them.”

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In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

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?”There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination.”

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?”Uncontroversially, [Bush’s] crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.”

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Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.” More here.

Brazil’s Supreme Court has voted overwhelmingly in favour of allowing same-sex couples the same legal rights as married heterosexuals. More here.

Hundreds upon hundreds of Tunisians have opened their homes to Libyan families since early April, when Colonel Qaddafi’s forces went on the attack.

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“Would you give your house to someone you didn’t know, from another country?” asked Maren Abouzakhar, 22, who fled the besieged Libyan city of Yafran early this month. She spoke in the airy drawing room of the house she and 10 relatives now shared with a local family; the owner had moved himself, his wife and their three children into the unfinished ground floor, leaving the comfortable, perfumed second story for their guests.

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Abdallah Awaye, 35, a thin, sun-darkened man and the owner of the house, described his gesture as a matter of obligation and pride. “This is how it is, these are our customs,” he said. “If there is something to eat, we will eat it together. If there is nothing to eat, we will have nothing together.” More here.

Islamophobia is solidly mainstream; there is no politically correct taboo against it, as there is with overt racism or other strains of xenophobia. In fact, some of Europe’s highest-profile Islamophobes justify their attacks on Islam and Europe’s Muslims in the name of women’s and gay rights. Conservative, liberal and even leftist parties tap into it.

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This mainstreaming of Islamophobia would have been inconceivable without the post-9/11 anti-Muslim discourse in European media; Islamophobic websites like Germany’s Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa and Politically Incorrect have tens of thousands of visitors a day. In large part the trail was blazed by intellectuals, a surprising number of whom had roots in progressive politics. Hugely influential was the late Italian writer Oriana Fallaci, whose bestselling books insisted that Islam is a thoroughly violent and totalitarian creed striving for world domination. The former antifascist partisan and left-wing journalist once likened the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Others include French writer and activist Bernard-Henri Levy (“the veil is an invitation to rape”), British novelist and former New Statesman editor Martin Amis, Dutch intellectual and Labor Party member Paul Scheffer, and in Germany such figures as Ralph Giordano, Necla Kelek, Alice Schwarzer and Henryk Broder, all leftists or former leftists of one stripe or another.

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In contrast to the conservative parties’ thinly veiled racism, the left’s anti-Muslim reaction is an anticlerical stance, a kind of dogmatic secularism that sees religion as nothing more than the opiate of the masses. Its inability to grasp that Islam is a source of identity for many European Muslims and, more important, to debunk racist Islamophobia plays straight into the hands of political foes. By branding Islam as something qualitatively different from and much more dangerous than other religions, the left helps to stigmatize it further — and lets other religions off the hook.

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Of all the specters haunting Europe, none are as potent– or potentially disruptive to democracy — as Islamophobia. Though the economic crisis and budget slashing across the continent have certainly fueled anti-Muslim discourse, they are not chiefly to blame for Islamophobia. The goals and jingoistic assumptions at the core of the right’s agenda are essentially unchanged from the 1980s. The difference is that the left and liberals have largely capitulated, unable to address the issue of Islam and the Muslims among us in a constructive way. More here.

Governments don’t just repress people with false interpretations of religion; sometimes they do it with false cant about national security. (Shirin Ebadi)

?”Our aim is to establish a free and completely sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, whose capital is Jerusalem, without any settlers and without giving up a single inch of land and without giving up on the right of return [of Palestinian refugees].” More here.

Bin Laden is dead. And bin-Ladenism, if you want to call it that, should die also.

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Every day, the U.S., directly with its own forces, or indirectly through its proxy forces, its clients, is killing, at a minimum, dozens of people. I mean, just since Obama came in, in the one limited area of drone strikes in Pakistan, something like 1,900 have been killed just under Obama. And that started decades before 9/11. We have to stop these people, these powerful people like Obama, like Bush, like those who run the Pentagon, and who think it’s OK to take civilian life. And it doesn’t seem that they can be stopped by normal, routine politics, because under the American system, as in most other systems, people don’t even know this is happening. People know the face of bin Laden. They know the evil deeds that he’s done. They see that he is dead, and they say, “Oh, great, we killed bin Laden.” But they don’t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be out in the street cheering about those deaths. More here.

i’m afraid osama’s death is going to justify another military adventure – this time in pakistan. the media r already talking the talk. the flags r out. just as the support for the wars was flagging, this latest success (w/o any evidence to prove it) has lifted the national mood. we can do anything.

Between Clinton’s address and worldwide security alerts of anticipated retaliation by Al-Qaeda, the discourse has been less about celebrating the end of an era, and more about fortifying the War on Terror, expanding its scope and reach, increasing and exacerbating racialized securitization.

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The victory, we are told, is in delivering justice. But what measure of justice, and for whom? The governments of this world – a global war-profiteering military-industrial complex spoken for by corporate media – have pulled the trigger on Osama Bin Laden in time to save Obama’s re-election campaign, and to mute the significance of May Day in a climate of increased precarity and dispossession. By funnelling the opium of patriotism (America’s exception to nationalism), Obama might well be preparing the American people for another decade of war, and is undoubtedly shooting the already paralyzed working and tax-paying American in the foot.

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In effect, this theatrical display does not pay tribute to the victims of 9/11 (may they rest in peace), nor does it give more meaning to the lives of dead soldiers or the victims of the American-led missions in the region. It is an ecstatic tribute to a death-machine in which the only winners have been a global capitalist elite: arms companies, security apparati, criminal (and in many cases, outgoing) authoritarian regimes, and the many corporations that thrive on disaster. Even more offensive in the Ground Zero party is the continued racialization of what constitutes a grievable human life, such that similar celebrations (by minorities) following 9/11 were seen as evidence of an innately violent culture of death, but popular celebrations of an empty assassination valorize a fictional “justice”.

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If these dancing Americans, however, were to transform their fear and fascination with violence into rage and courage to occupy the same streets in protest, against the ruling elite that has profited from the loss and grief of 9/11 and the wars that followed, and the undemocratic corporate interests running their lives, they might find the arms of other ordinary working people from around the world extended in solidarity. More here.

the brilliant david swanson: “Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death.”

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Nothing makes for peace like ceasing to wage war. Now would be an ideal time to give that a try. Our senseless wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Libya must be ended. Keeping bin Laden alive and threatening, assisted in keeping the war machine churning its bloody way through cities and flesh for years. No wonder President Bush was, as he said, not interested in tracking bin Laden down.

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But let’s return to the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being. A decade ago that would not have seemed as natural to a U.S. airline pilot. The automatic assumption would not have been that there could be no dissenters to that celebration. A decade ago torture was considered irredeemably evil. A decade ago we believed people should have fair trials before they are declared guilty or killed. A decade ago, if a president had announced his new power to assassinate Americans, at least a few people would have asked where in the world he got the power to assassinate non-Americans.

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Is it too late to go back 10 years in time in some particular ways? As we put bin Laden behind us, can we put the degredation of our civil liberties and our representative government, and our honesty, accountability, and the rule of law behind us too? Can we recover the basic moral deceny that we used to at the very least pretend and aspire to? More here.

The graffiti, which included comments like “Go Home” and Osama Today Islam tomorrow” was found hours after Pres. Obama anounced that U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden. More here.