Category: politics

on justice and human nature.

It’s not enough to see it as a ping-pong: Hamas attacked this, and Israel retaliated. Israel is never retaliating, because it’s the occupying power, and occupation, by definition, is aggression and violence. More here.

sacré bleu, the islamization of (poor) secular france…

Burqa in Paris from redragprod on Vimeo.

The European Union is seeking to utilise the humanitarian cover of the fate of the besieged city of Misrata to send ground troops to Libya under its command. The operation could be mounted within a matter of days. In a reversal of previous policy, the German government of Angela Merkel has offered to play the leading military role. More here.

France’s five-million-strong Muslim minority is Western Europe’s largest, but fewer than 2,000 women are believed to wear a full face veil. Rights groups have accused the government of Nicolas Sarkozy of attempting to stir up racial tensions and of targeting one of France’s most vulnerable minorities. More here.

“People forcing women to wear the veil face a much larger fine and a prison sentence of up to two years.” – this makes as much sense as blasphemy laws. More here.

Karam, 13, was first arrested on Sept 20th, right in front of his school in the old city in southern Hebron, dragged away from his friends and classmates and savagely beaten by Israeli forces before being thrown into the back of their military jeep and driven away – the charge was lopping stones at (illegal) Israeli settlers. More here.

The densely populated Gaza enclave is once again under Israeli aerial attack. Five people have been killed and over 30 injured already. Max Blumenthal calls the assault ‘Operation Goldstone,’ since Israel seems to be taking encouragement from the Judge’s partial retraction of his earlier report. More here.

The youths of Afghanistan who were witnessing the demonstration condemn and denounce the lies of the mass media about the reason of protests in several cities of Afghanistan. The main reason of the peaceful protest was demand for the immediate withdrawal of US & NATO troops from Afghanistan. Violence was the result of self-defense as the guard first opened fire on protesters. More here.

the kalma chowk flyover project is going to affect my parents who live close-by. good to know lahore’s environmentalists r fighting it out in court to make sure all the diff sides of the issue r heard – what could be more democratic than that? again, this is another side of pakistan people might not expect. check it out. in english.

watch interview with environmental lawyer rafay alam here.

from ann wright: the u.s. embassy in iraq will have a staff of 16,000 by next year, plus a security component of 5,000. The u.s. occupation of iraq continues.

and this happens on a daily basis in afghanistan.

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Residents of a district in central Kabul province on Monday accused foreign troops of killing a shopkeeper and taking away his son during an overnight raid.

The incident happened Sunday night in Chaar Asyab district of Kabul when NATO-led troops attacked the house of Yasin, a relative, Ghulam Rassoul, said.He said his uncle, Yasin, 50, and his son, Khairullah, 30, had no links to any militant group.

Yasin had a shop of car spare parts in the district bazaar, Rassoul said.”My uncle was innocent. We can not forgive his killing. The murderers should be tried at court,” he said, adding there was no presence of militants in the area.

More here.

That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the “evidence” brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. One did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. Reports from Breaking the Silence and UN reps on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report.

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Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by “mistake.” So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing only on one of dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article.

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We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be re-admitted to the tribe. He went very far with his mea culpa and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist: suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.

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More here.

Juliano Mer Khamis was killed by gunmen in Jenin today. His death is a tremendous loss for Palestine, the arts and people concerned with social justice everywhere. RIP. Here is the first part of his film “Arna’s Children”. The entire film can be watched on YouTube.

Noam Chomsky: American Foreign Policy
Harvard University, March 19, 1985

This is a fascinating lecture. It was delivered in 1985 and focuses on South America and Vietnam, yet its resonance for current American foreign policy is astonishing. For those who might think it’s too radical or too paranoid, I say: the proof of the pudding is in the eating – think Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, etc. I am copying/pasting some excerpts from Chomsky’s lecture but there is a link to the entire text at the end of this note.

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Substantial similarities in American military interventions (looking at South America and Vietnam):

(1) United States intervention was significant and decisive.
(2) The effects of intervention were horrifying.
(3) The roots of this intervention lie in a fixed geopolitical conception that has remained invariant over a long period and that is deeply rooted in U.S. institutions.

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The Grand Area was a region that was to be subordinated to the needs of the American economy. As one planner put it, it was to be the region that is “strategically necessary for world control.” The geopolitical analysis held that the Grand Area had to include at least the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, and the former British Empire, which we were then in the process of dismantling and taking over ourselves.

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George Kennan was one of the most thoughtful, humane, and liberal of the planners, and in fact was eliminated from the State Depatment largely for that reason. Kennan was the head of the State Department policy planning staff in the late 1940s. In the following document, PPS23, February 1948, he outlined the basic thinking:

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity…. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction…. We should cease to talk about vague and…, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

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They concluded accurately that the primary threat of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers “in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West.” [Could Islamic countries pose a similar threat of not complementing Western economies?]

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If a government is so evil or unwise as to undertake a course of action of this sort [democratization, internal economic development, etc], it immediately becomes an enemy. It becomes a part of the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” to take over the world, as John F. Kennedy put it.

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One thing you’ll notice, if you look over the years, is that the United States quite consistently tries to create enemies (I’m not being sarcastic) if a country does escape from its grip. What we want to do is drive the country into being a base for the Russians because that justifies us in carrying out the violent attacks which we must carry out, given the geopolitical conception under which we organize and control much of the world. So that’s what we do, and then we “defend” ourselves. We engage in self-defense against the Great Satan or the Evil Empire or the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy.” [Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, etc]

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We follow a policy of what some conservative business circles outside the United States (for example, the Far Eastern Economic Review) call “bleeding Vietnam.” That is, a policy of imposing maximum suffering and harshness in Vietnam in the hope of perpetuating the suffering, but also insuring that only the most harsh and brutal elements will survive. Then you can use their brutality as a justification for having carried out the initial attack. This is done constantly and quite magnificently in our ideological system.

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A twenty-year war of terrorism was waged against Cuba. Cuba has probably been the target of more international terrorism than the rest of the world combined and, therefore, in the American ideological system it is regarded as the source of international terrorism, exactly as Orwell would have predicted.

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Virtually everything that is now happening has happened before, in corresponding or very similar forms. Our historical amnesia prevents us from seeing that. Everything looks new and therefore we don’t understand it. It must just be a stupid error.

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Let’s go back a little further, because self-defense is deeply rooted in American history. In the nineteenth century, when we were wiping out the Native American population, we were defending ourselves against savage attacks from British and Spanish sanctuaries in Canada and Florida and therefore we had to take over Florida, and we had to take the West to defend ourselves from these attacks. In 1846 we were compelled to defend ourselves against Mexico. That aggression began deep inside Mexican territory, but again, it was self-defense against Mexican aggression. We had to take about a third of Mexico in the process, including California, where the explanation was that it was a preemptive strike. The British were about to take it over, and, in self-defense, we had to beat them to it. And so it goes, all the way back. The Evil Empire changes, but the truth of the matter remains about the same. And if American history were actually taught, people would know these things. This is the core of American history.

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Lars Schoultz found that there is a relationship between human rights and American foreign policy: namely, the more the human rights climate deteriorates, the more American aid increases. The correlation was strong. There was no correlation between American aid and need.

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The popular organizations were destroyed; therefore we can now permit democratic elections — now that there is no concern anymore that they might mean something. These elections are carried out in “an atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumor and grisly reality.” That was the assessment by the head of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group, Lord Chitnis, with regard to the 1984 elections in El Salvador — rather different from the media coverage here, as you may recall. The point is that once the basis for democracy has been destroyed, once state terrorism has been firmly established, then elections are entirely permissible, even worthwhile, for the sake of American public opinion. The failure was that people began to join the guerrillas. There were only a few hundred guerrillas when all of this began. They grew to many thousands during this period.

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Whether this opposition, which is quite real, can become sufficiently organized and effective to block further escalation — I don’t know. It could be that the current level of attack on the population of Central America will suffice to achieve the major American military ends. What is clear, however, is that we’re living through another chapter in a sordid and shameful history of violence and terror and oppression.

Unless we can muster the moral courage and the honesty to understand all of this, and to act to change it, as we indeed can, then it’s going to continue and there will be many millions of additional victims who will face starvation and torture, or outright massacre, in what we will call “a crusade for freedom.”

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Complete lecture here.