Category: politics

Funny man Bill Maher, on his show Real Time with Bill Maher, said he’s scared of a hot new trend in Britain: naming babies Mohammed. That’s the most popular name for a baby boy there now, and Maher is “alarmed.”
“Am I a racist to feel alarmed by that?” Maher asks his guests. “Because I am. And it’s not because of the race, it’s because of the religion. I don’t have to apologize, do I, for not wanting the Western world to be taken over by Islam in 300 years?” Full article.

my friend osie’s comment:

Anyhow, why would he care about what happens in 300 years (an outcome he can predict based on the number of children named for a prophet). Who knows if there will be people on earth OR a western world in 300 years? And he won’t be there…

Seriously, he has nothing more pressing to fret about?

I was kinda freaked out by the number of Ashleys born and named in the 80s, but I didn’t lose sleep over it.

Many boys named Jesus in the Latino community, does that worry Bill? I met an African American kid named Messiah once, too (sounded really funny as his mom was yelling at him in playground). Come to think of it, the proliferation of Bills might be worth some worry time. Clinton, Gates, Prince William, Bill Bryce even.

Does ge realize what a jackass this comment turns him into? Oy vey Bill, ur name may stay popular but you are so 5 minutes ago!

The essence of our case was that the accumulated pattern of harm, stretching over 19 years, revealed a clear and specific “intent to destroy”, in whole or in part, the state and nation of Iraq. We catalogued the purposive dismantling of the Iraqi state and the imposition, incitement and engineering of sectarian conflict. We also described the systematic destruction of Iraq’s civil infrastructure, added to the massive use of depleted uranium, which from 1990 onwards led to millions of excess deaths. We outlined the use of disproportionate and indiscriminate force, the use of internationally prohibited weapons such as white phosphorus, and the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare. And we identified the use of death squads and armed militias associated with political forces promoted by and protected by Washington, the terror that led to the forced mass displacement of five million Iraqis, and the institutionalised regime of mass and arbitrary detention and torture, along with blackmail, kidnapping, rape and unfair trials, that characterised Iraq under US occupation. Full article.

?”That is not to excuse Aziz on the grounds that he was only following orders (which hasn’t been a defence since the Nuremberg trials in the 1940s)” — LOL. can we imagine how many western officials, both civilian and military, should be sentenced to death on similar grounds? if we look at numbers, saddam hussein and tariq aziz’s crimes against humanity were rather tame. Full article.

Leaders among Palestinian citizens in Israel said the clash had been triggered by undercover police who began throwing stones from among the demonstrators — a tactic that the unit has been caught on film using at protests in the West Bank. Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who comprise a fifth of the total population, condemned the police actions. “Racism is no longer found only in documents or on the margins, like with Marzel, but has become a phenomenon among decision-makers and carried out on the ground. What happened today in Umm al-Fahm is a menacing escalation.” Full article.

When a corporation like McDonald’s intimidates its employees into voting a specific way, it violates both state and federal election law. It’s no surprise to anyone that Ohio is a battleground state in this election, and for a multinational corporation like McDonald’s to threaten employees like this is morally and legally wrong. This despicable corporate conduct is the logical extension of the Citizens United decision, which has unleashed corporate arrogance and abuse. Full article.

All she has done is bravely use her position to draw attention to the unjustifiable repression of unrest in the Kashmir valley that has been taking place over the past few months. Rather than chase after a novelist for speaking at a seminar, the Delhi government would be better off investigating the 100-plus people who are believed to have died in violence in Kashmir since June. Full article.

Amnesty International Tuesday called on Pakistan’s government to investigate the reported torture and killings of more than 40 Balochistan political activists. The human rights organization said activists, politicians and student leaders were among people targeted in “enforced disappearances,” abductions, arrests and cases of torture and other ill-treatment in the restive Balochistan province. More here.

In April of 2004, Pantano and his platoon stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Fallujah. While the majority of his platoon was away, he and two others ordered the detained Iraqis to search their own car for weapons and then allegedly unloaded two full magazines of his M16A4 rifle into them. Sergeant Daniel Coburn, who was 27 at the time and one of the three soldiers at the incident, recalled wondering “when the lieutenant was going to stop, because it was obvious that they were dead.” “I believed that by firing the number of rounds that I did, I was sending a message,” Pantano told the New York magazine. Full article.

In the papers some have accused me of giving ‘hate-speeches’, of wanting India to break up. On the contrary, what I say comes from love and pride. It comes from not wanting people to be killed, raped, imprisoned or have their finger-nails pulled out in order to force them to say they are Indians. It comes from wanting to live in a society that is striving to be a just one. Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free. (Arundhati Roy) Full article.

n 2003, after the fall of the capital Baghdad following the US-led invasion, Fallujah remained calm and, contrary to what happened elsewhere, there was no looting. But the policy pursued by the US and UK of indiscriminate killing of civilians and of collective punishment generated resistance in the whole area. In order to eradicate the resistance in and around Fallujah, the invading forces attacked the city and the crimes committed in the course of these attacks are the subject of a new report by MHRI called “Testimonies of Crimes Against Humanity in Fallujah, Towards a Fair International Criminal Trial, ” presented at the15th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council. This report gives a grim view of a policy of collective punishment, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the US forces between 2003 and 2010. Full article.

“War destroys people,” Khamad Jan concluded, after giving us a tour of the developing potato crisp production factory. Again, he stared at the ground as he thought about what he would say. “It destroys our livelihood. It damages our minds.”

“All the players in this war have their own purposes for being here,” he added, after a long pause. “There is absolutely no benefit to the people here from the wars that are being fought.” Full article.

The principal reason the Williams firing resonated so much and provoked so much fury is that it threatens the preservation of one of the most important American mythologies: that Muslims are a Serious Threat to America and Americans. Above all else, this fear-generating “nexus” is what must be protected at all costs. And it is this fear-sustaining, anti-Muslim slander that NPR’s firing of Williams threatened to delegitimize. That is why NPR’s firing of Williams must be attacked with such force: because it is an important step toward stigmatizing anti-Muslim animus in the same way that other forms of bigotry are now off-limits, and that is what cannot happen, because anti-Muslim animus is too important to too many factions to allow it to be delegitimized. Full article.

Comment from Jack Bradigan Spula:

I think Williams has made a lucrative career by playing various sides against each other – and quite deftly till now. He got in trouble last year with comments he made on Fox (in response to Bill O’Reilly, at al.) about Michelle Obama’s supposedly projecting a “Stokely-Carmichael-in-a-designer-dress thing” (we can only wish!). Most of his observations are boring rather than offensive. My impression, which gelled during his 2001 Rochester appearance, is that he’s a narcissistic blabberer, only slightly less hard to stomach than O’Reilly and company. I’m glad he’s now off NPR… But that doesn’t mean I think NPR (or public broadcasting overall) is worth a rat’s ass, either. The NewsHour, The Nightly Business Report, the 1370 Connection, practically anything other than This American Life (which mostly hews to soft topics but occasionally presents some really good stuff): all this “public programming,” which really is the product of private corporate interests above all, is boring, lifeless, supportive of the status quo and noticeably elementary in content. I’m sticking with Pacifica, Amy Goodman, et al., from whom you can depend on real journalism, and with whom you’ll never have to endure the foolishness of a Juan Williams.

Juan, you probably remember in 1986 when the Washington Post Magazine ran a Richard Cohen column defending jewelry store owners who wouldn’t buzz in young black men. It caused such a big controversy that the New Republic ran a bunch of responses to it, including one by you. You might find it interesting to go back and read what you wrote then — for instance, “Racism is a lazy man’s substitute for using good judgment … Common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me.” (Michael Moore) Full article.

It is the biggest leak of military secrets in history. Al Jazeera has details of nearly 400,000 classified US documents. They are the secret Iraq files, leaked to whistleblower website WikiLeaks. For the past ten weeks Al Jazeera has had complete access to those files. As part of our forthcoming coverage, we reveal how the US military gave a secret order not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities discovered by American troops. Full report.