Category: politics

erik prince makes a killing out of killing.

the brilliant dahlia wasfi. this was in 2006. nothing much has changed since.

According to current statistics by Amnesty International, Israel takes 80% of the water in the Mountain aquifers in the north (one of many water sources available to Israel, including the state’s full access to the Jordan River, which runs inside the occupied West Bank); while Palestinians in the West Bank are left with just the remaining 20% of that one aquifer, and are prohibited from accessing water from the Jordan river altogether. However, in Gaza, 95% of the groundwater is extremely polluted and deemed unfit for human consumption, according to new reports from Israeli human rights organization B’tselem. The water crisis has entered into a troubling phase as Israel maintains its suffocating blockade against the 1.5 million Palestinians trapped inside the strip. This blockade, which has been in place as collective punishment following the Hamas party’s political takeover in 2007, prevents entry to hundreds of items – including essential industrial materials needed to repair the water infrastructure. Full article.

Over the past several years, entities closely linked to the private security firm Blackwater have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations, including Monsanto, Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and banking giants Deutsche Bank and Barclays, according to documents obtained by The Nation. […] One of the most incendiary details in the documents is that Blackwater, through Total Intelligence, sought to become the “intel arm” of Monsanto, offering to provide operatives to infiltrate activist groups organizing against the multinational biotech firm. Full article.

Seemingly genocides these days are only committed by Africans or Eastern Europeans, not those great bastions of democracy, U.S., U.K., and the “only democracy in the Middle East”, ally Israel. The Israeli Defence Force, trained U.S., troops for the two week November 2004, Fallujah pogrom. “If it moves, shoot it”, was the order of the day. “Their tactics basically involve massive fire power … bringing in tanks and helicopters to fire on targets … demolishing buildings, establishing snipers on roofs, smashing holes in walls (and) shooting anything that moved.” This in addition to: ” … aerial bombardment and shell fire from large field guns.” The plight of Fallujah “was not fully understood in the West, save by some of the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto … they were trapped (like) rabbits in a cornfield” being circled to be mown down and dismembered by combine harvesters. The photographs are testimony to the chilling description. The unsung heroes are those who determined to record them, so some time, some where, the crimes would be known and legal retribution sought. These terrible, pathetic images, are the silent testimony to the first known Western genocide of the 21st century. Sadly, it is a near certainty that Iraq and Afghanistan will, in time, produce proof of more. Full article.

Today Chile is critical to President Barack Obama’s rollback of the independent democracies in Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela. Piñera’s closest ally is Washington’s main man, Juan Manuel Santos, the new president of Colombia, home to seven US bases and an infamous human rights record familiar to Chileans who suffered under Pinochet’s terror. Post-Pinochet Chile has kept its own enduring abuses in shadow. The families still attempting to recover from the torture or disappearance of a loved one bear the prejudice of the state and employers. Full article.

Target: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Sponsored by: Human Rights Campaign

Recently Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi killed himself after his roommate secretly recorded him with another male student, then broadcast the video online.

In just the last few weeks since school started again, too many teenagers have taken their own lives following bullying and harassment because of their perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. How many more young lives will be lost before schools act?

Ask Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to include gender identity and sexual orientation in anti-bullying programs. Petition here.

What will be lost along with Kashmir [for Indians]? An unreal and bloated sense of self-importance. It has taken Great Britain 60 years to realise it is no longer the centre of an empire. Indian rulers have yet to realise they are no longer in charge of ‘the jewel in the crown.’ Indians are not the leaders of Asia — the Chinese are.

[…] Would not letting Kashmir go give the palm to Pakistan, India’s inveterate enemy? On the contrary, it might catastrophically weaken its real enemy, and the real enemy of the people of Pakistan, and dismantle its offensive structures. The Pakistani people have been held in thrall by a small corrupt military dictatorship, itself a captive of its mafia-style intelligence heads, who in turn are in cahoots with a medieval and benighted tribal terrorist force, which in turn is living on the bounty of drug dealers.

For the last 50 years or so America, for its own Byzantine reasons, has maintained this whole awful structure which oppresses the people of Pakistan and suppresses the development trends that are fast changing the face of Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Iran, and even Iraq till the Americans set the clock back a few decades. Will America discontinue support for this militaristic cabal now that they have experienced the result of their policies in 9/11?

Unlikely, for they are too Micawberish to change course. They will keep hoping that by supporting the Pakistan military, its ISI, and through it the Taliban, while at the same time giving alms to the unhappy Karzai, somehow something will turn up. They are dead wrong as they always have been. Nothing awaits them or India but sorrow.

The Pakistan military has propped up its power over people by rattling the bogey of Indian threat. If Indians end the Kashmir siege unilaterally, the Pakistani military will lose currency with their oppressed people.

Full article.

Every nation is subject to its own particular form of historical amnesia. Likewise, imperial powers have their own grandiose revisionist tendencies. Yet there is another form of historical denial particular to recently invented nations whose myth-making efforts are inextricably bound together with the process of the nation’s birth… Whereas older nations are, by and large, populated by people whose ancestral roots penetrated that land well before it took on the clear definition of a nation state, the majority of the people in an invented nation – such as the United States or Israel – have ancestry that inevitably leads elsewhere. This exposes the ephemeral link between the peoples’ history and the nation’s history. Add to that the fact that such nations came into being through grotesque acts of dispossession, and it is clear that a psychological drive to hold aloft an atemporal exceptionalism becomes an existential necessity. National security requires that the past be erased. Full article.

From Ron Johnson: “This op-ed is encouraging, especially for appearing in a journal of some circulation in the US. Iranian-US relations are a one-sided, continuing act of aggression including Kermit Roosevelt’s overthrow of a democratic Iranian government in order to put the Shah back on his throne (with a promise of nuclear power from Westinghouse Electric), abetting Saddam Hussein in his invasion and war against Iran, continuing sanctions for no apparent reason, except Iran’s refusal to knuckle down to Israel and US/British oil interests.” Full article.

Extreme Islamists have seldom done well in elections in Pakistan. Widespread popular support for the Afghan Taliban stems primarily from the conviction that they are essentially a Pashtun national liberation movement fighting a foreign occupation. The Pakistani Taliban was once said to be “60 miles from Islamabad”, but such scaremongering ignored the fact that there were three mountain ranges and one of the world’s most powerful armies in between the Taliban’s rag-tag fighters and the capital. The Pakistani state may not function very well but it is not failing, and – a pity – current crises may not even change it very much. Full article.