Category: politics

speak-out against government harassment of activists, rochester, ny, september 27, 2010 – photograph by al brundage.

I heard Aisha’s story from her a few weeks before the image of her face was displayed all over the world. She told me that her father-in-law caught up with her after she ran away, and took a knife to her on his own; village elders later approved, but the Taliban didn’t figure at all in this account. The Time story, however, attributes Aisha’s mutilation to a husband under orders of a Talib commander, thereby transforming a personal story, similar to those of countless women in Afghanistan today, into a portent of things to come for all women if the Taliban return to power. (Ann Jones – The Nation) Full article.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil’s growth rate, rivalling China’s, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy. Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday’s presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the “national security state”, an arrangement that conservative governments in the US and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favouring their rich friends. […] Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead – of more than 50 per cent compared with less than 30 per cent – over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the centre called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January. Full article.

for all my friends who have asked me about kashmir.

Maintaining bookmarks is a wonderful practice. But when one has to make a selection of 20 from hundreds of bookmarked items, not many of which you would remember anyway, it doesn’t seem to be a very wonderful task at hand. It is tedious. One has to go through every second item to remember what on earth it was about.

Of all the things that I do, I had been maintaining a bookmark folder dedicated to articles on Kashmir. I, initially, thought of compiling a list of 10 articles that all non-Kashmiris must read. But as I spent more time on it, I realised 10 would be too few — so 20 it is. Almost all have been written by Indians.

To me, the Internet is also about sharing. So here’s my Select 20 about Kashmir. Full article.

As part of a sting against anti-war activists suspected of connections to terrorism, on September 24 the FBI raided six homes in Minneapolis-St. Paul and elsewhere in the country. At the Hard Times Cafe in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, we interviewed peace activist Mick Kelly while the FBI searched his apartment above the cafe.

ann wright spoke about “afghanistan: the need to dissent” yesterday here in rochester. she started her lecture with the FBI raids on the homes of american peace activists (they were looking for links to foreign terrorist organizations) and aafia siddiqui’s 86 yr sentence. “these r dark times” she said.

disgusting, disgusting, disgusting. americans have totally lost the moral high ground, nay the mere ability, to talk about justice anywhere in the world!

Dr Aafia Siddiqui has been sentenced to 86 years of imprisonment by the federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, for allegedly firing at US troops in Afghanistan. A jury found Aafia Siddiqui guilty in February of trying to kill U.S. agents and military officers, after Afghan police detained her in 2008. During Siddiqui’s three-week trial, FBI agents and U.S. soldiers testified that when they went to interrogate Siddiqui, she snatched an unattended assault rifle. They claimed that the neuroscientist allegedly shot at them after abusing America. Full article.

Industrialized nations, the source of most pollutants now warming the earth, have a clear responsibility for the flooding, and thus have a powerful additional reason, beyond ordinary human compassion, to give assistance. These are connections that count, and they have nothing to do with terrorism or anyone’s image. Full article.

Google and Verizon want the FCC and Congress to allow media giants to transform wireless communications into a digital version of a bad cable TV package. Instead of a free and open Internet that will take Americans where they want to go—thanks to the longstanding neutrality principle, which guarantees equal access to all websites and applications—the Google-Verizon deal would permit Internet service providers to speed up access to some content while leaving the rest behind. Such “pay for priority” would allow big business to buy speed, quality and other advantages—which would not be merely commercial. Now that the Supreme Court has afforded corporations electioneering rights equal to those of citizens, decisions about how we communicate have a profound political component to them. Full article.

Early this morning (September 22, 2010) an Israeli security guard working for the Silwan settlers shot and killed a Palestinian resident of Silwan and wounded two others, one seriously. Riots broke out in Silwan following the shooting and continue as of this writing. Reportedly the Israeli police fired tear gas at Palestinians heading from the Haram al Sharif, where they had gathered following the shooting, to the Bab al-Rahma cemetery. There are Palestinian reports that settlers fired on the funeral procession and other reports of settlers attacking Palestinians. Israeli vehicles have reportedly been stoned and burned. In short, the situation on the ground is extremely volatile. Full article.

interview with omar barghouti – everything that u ever wanted to know about BDS.

Too frequently ignored or overlooked in the great ground zero mosque debate is the attribution of irrational violence to Islam, which effectively subdues acknowledgment of the profound violence perpetrated by the American state (military intervention, police brutality, labor exploitation, torture, legislative racism). The debate is fundamentally incomplete: it begins with the assumption that all Muslims are subsumed in a religious violence that is somehow nonexistent in Christian modernity. Muslim Americans are thus endowed a historical burden that no community could ever possibly overcome. Full article.

most interesting lecture by john mearsheimer.

What about the Palestinians? I believe that the two-state solution is the best outcome for them as well as the Israelis. However, the Palestinians have little say in whether there will be two states living side-by-side, because they are presently at the mercy of the Israelis, who are the lords of the land. This means that the Palestinians are going to end up living in Greater Israel, which will be an apartheid state. Again, one might even argue that they have already reached that point. Regardless, the Palestinians will obviously have a vested interest in moving away from apartheid and toward democracy as quickly and painlessly as possible. Of course, that will not be easy, but there are better and worse ways to achieve that end. Full article.

this is dr finkelstein’s answer to my email wherein i asked him to clarify his stance on BDS:

September 22, 2010

Thank you for requesting a clarification. IF the supporters of BDS stated clearly and unambiguously that their goal was to end the occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza, and a just resolution of the refugee question based on the right of return and compensation, I would support a comprehensive boycott and comprehensive sanctions. But the BDS movement does NOT clearly define its goals. For this reason, it is EASY to interpret its goal as the destruction/dismantling of Israel — a demand that has no support in international law and has no chance of success politically. So long as the goals of BDS are not clearly defined, I will only support a targeted BDS campaign of Israeli violations of international law, such as marketing products from the settlements, or arms transfers to Israel.