Category: politics

This short film allows women in Afghanistan to give voice to their reasons for opposing an ongoing occupation, and it features an interview with renowned Afghan feminist Malalai Joya. Watch video here.

While shock and disgust has been expressed, internationally, at these allegations and photos – one thing is striking: the continued use of terminology, such as ‘rogue’, to abnormalize these actions.

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While their behaviour certainly isn’t the overwhelming norm, it is not completely outside of being a re-occurrance we have repeatedly witnessed, particularly since the invasion of Afghanistan: from the many massacres in Iraq and Afghanistan to the stories and photos from Abu Ghraib; the torture and unjust detention at Guantanamo; collateral murder and to the documents of the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan papers, still being sifted through, highlighting various American atrocities and disregard for proper process, international law and self-professed liberal axioms. And certainly such a maschismo disregard, disrespect for and trivialization of human life has not been limited to those who have been put into the by-default dehumanized category of the “other” and the “enemy” but also to fellow soldiers, particularly women who have been victims of “rampant rape” within the military institution.

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A discourse has already, and very easily, rendered an entire group sub-human and disposable without consequence. This isn’t a phenomena exclusive to the United States and its own military. We find such instances through militaries across the world, from Israel to India. Rather it is something deeply entrenched in the character of modern warfare and the modern institution of the military, particularly following WWII which saw the overnight evolution of military conflict which made indiscriminate violence from a state institution legitimate, making use of weaponry made to match. More here.

it’s mind-boggling that people don’t make a connection between the devastation of a country by 30 yrs of imperial wars plus a decade-long psychopathic military occupation and out of control, murderous mob behavior. get real.

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Friday’s demonstrations in Afghanistan also came against the backdrop of growing anti-American sentiment, aggravated by the war-crimes case against five U.S. soldiers, members of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma.

The self-styled “kill team” is accused of killing at least three Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province last year.

On Thursday, as gruesome photos of the American soldiers posing with the corpses of victims began circulating in Afghanistan after being published in Rolling Stone magazine, Karzai denounced the killings and the photos and demanded those responsible be punished. More here.

Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth, Balochistan is desperately poor – barely 25% of the population is literate (the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7% have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of Pakistan’s natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the supply grid. More here.

was shocked to read “Straight man’s burden: The American roots of Uganda’s anti-gay persecutions” in harper’s magazine – we don’t just interfere militarily in third world countries, we also export some of our most fundamentalist social “values”.

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An anti-gay bill that calls for the death penalty or life imprisonment for some homosexual acts was introduced in Uganda’s Parliament about a year ago. The proposed legislation was stalled after an international outcry, including from President Obama, who called the bill “odious.”

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Less talked about are the ties between the anti-gay measure and the far-right evangelical movement here in the United States. The author of the bill is David Bahati, a Ugandan lawmaker who has close ties to US organized evangelical groups that operate across several African countries. The groups are members of parliamentary prayer fellowships organized by the Family, one of the most powerful Christian conservative groups in Washington, DC.

The Family, also known as the Fellowship, is so highly secretive it didn’t even admit it existed until last year, when three political sex scandals, those of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, Nevada Senator John Ensign, and former Mississippi Congress member Chip Pickering, forced it into the open. All three men lived at one time in the Family’s clubhouse on Capitol Hill, known as the “C Street House.”

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?…so, OK, this is what’s going on in Uganda, this is sort of the nightmare scenario—I followed it back to the United States and in the US armed forces, where groups linked to the Family—not the same as the Family—but that’s where you see the real flowering of a kind of a militarized, politicized fundamentalism, that leads you into situations where you have something like the 15,000-strong Officers’ Christian Fellowship. This is not fringe.

These are officers defining their mission as reclaiming territory for Christ in the military, not allowing the opposition—this is how they put it—not allowing the opposition, all of which is spearheaded by Satan, to stand in their way. They describe military personnel who don’t share their religious beliefs as “spiritual terrorists.” They describe the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as a “spiritual war of the greatest magnitude.” And you even have situations where you have senior officers—I spoke to one three-star general, who used language to describe the situation we can’t even—you know, we can’t say on TV, said this is an “F-ing clown show,” where you have senior officers promoted on the basis of religion, not merit. You have strategy, you have military decisions being based on the Book of Revelation, in some cases. You have troops who are being forced to pray, to traditions not their own. And you have the military, in every way, sort of fulfilling, you know, the kind of al-Qaeda charge against the United States. There’s folks in the military—the vast majority of military personnel are honorable folks, but there’s a very strong core within it that sees their mission not as defending democracy, but as expanding Christ’s kingdom. (JEFF SHARLET)

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More here.

no one’s taking on yemen’s president ali abdullah saleh (hey, he’s our friend) even after he had snipers shoot protestors in the head. i guess we’re too busy promoting democracy in libya. more here.

The Arab Jew’s narrative holds creative ways to handle the problems which the national idea brought upon each other in the Middle-East. It is sharing knowledge of the Arabic language, culture and diverse viewpoints. But it is also a shared struggle for social justice and a re-construction of the region with its original inhabitants. And yes by moving on this scale of possibilities we can contribute to de-colonize Israel.

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Nowadays, the cultures of the lands of Islam, the Middle East, and the Arab world, are all still part of our identity; a part which we cannot, and do not wish to repress nor uproot.

Surely, the Jews living in Muslim countries endured some difficult times. Nevertheless, those painful moments should not conceal nor erase the well known and documented history of shared life. Muslim rule over the Jews was much more tolerant and lenient compared with non-Muslim countries. The fate of Jews in Muslim regions cannot be compared with the tragic fate of Jews in other regions, Europe in particular.

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Judaism and Islam are not far apart from religious, spiritual, historical and cultural point of views. The alliance between these two religions dates back many generations. Yet the memory of this partnership and the unique history of Jews originated from the Muslim and Arab world (which today constitutes 50% of the Jewish population in Israel!) has unfortunately faded, both in Israel as well as in the majority of the Muslim world. In the necessary reconciliation process between West and East, oriental Jews can and should embody a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.

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More here.

the NYT rewrites the story of an 11 year old victim of a horrid gang rape in texas – this time less focus on how the 11 year old dressed and how much make-up she wore.

full article here.

The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one dictator in particular and by so doing to bring the Arab rebellions to an end by asserting western control, confiscating their impetus and spontaneity and trying to restore the status quo ante.

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The Saudis entered Bahrain where the population is being tyrannised and large-scale arrests are taking place. Not much of this is being reported on al-Jazeera. I wonder why? The station seems to have been curbed somewhat and brought into line with the politics of its funders.

All this with active US support. The despot in Yemen, loathed by a majority of his people continues to kill them every day. Not even an arms embargo, let alone a “no-fly zone” has been imposed on him. Libya is yet another case of selective vigilantism by the US and its attack dogs in the west.

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The divisions on this entire operation within the American politico-military elite have meant there is no clear goal. Obama and his European satraps talk of regime change. The generals resist and say that isn’t part of their picture. The US state department is busy preparing a new government composed of English-speaking Libyan collaborators. We will now never know how long Gaddafi’s crumbling and weakened army would have held together in the face of strong opposition. The reason he lost support within his armed forces was precisely because he ordered them to shoot their own people. Now he speaks of imperialism’s desire to topple him and take the oil and even many who despise him can see that it’s true. A new Karzai is on the way.

The frontiers of the squalid protectorate that the west is going to create are being decided in Washington. Even those Libyans who, out of desperation, are backing Nato’s bomber jets, might – like their Iraqi equivalents – regret their choice.

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More here.

or more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives. The United Nations has estimated that more than 500,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions, and that 5,000 Iraqi children continue to die every month for this reason. More here.

interesting that there is no mention of hindu extremism or hindu misogyny, just the clash between old and new — that results in indiscriminate rape (???)

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The rate of reported rape [in Delhi] is nearly triple that of Mumbai, and 10 times as high as Kolkata, formerly Calcutta, according to government records. A survey completed last year by the government and several women’s rights groups found that 80 percent of women had faced verbal harassment in Delhi and that almost a third had been physically harassed by men.

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In each case there has been an explosive clash between the rapidly modernizing city and the embattled, conservative village culture upon which the capital increasingly encroaches. The victims are almost invariably young, educated working women who are enjoying freedom unknown even a decade ago. The accused are almost always young high school dropouts from surrounding villages, where women who work outside the home are often seen as lacking in virtue and therefore deserving of harassment and even rape.

“If these girls roam around openly like this, then the boys will make mistakes,” the mother of two of those accused in the rape said in an interview, refusing to give her name.

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Full article.