Category: politics

YES! this on top of kate o’sullivan who on saturday september 4th attempted to make a citizen’s arrest on tony blair at a book signing in dublin. it really bugs me that it’s the people who stand up for justice and accountability (as they should – being free citizens of democracies) who r the ones to get brutalized by the police, whilst war criminals r protected. isn’t the system (including all these political bozos) supposed to work for us and not the other way around?

“Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.” (Tony Judt) Full article.

considered, informative discussion on the middle east peace process including some history and some thoughts on where we’re probably headed.

Even more stunning, perhaps, is the fact that Obama was willing to use this nation’s involvement in Iraq — which he had opposed so completely and whose extension in the form of the surge in 2007 he argued against flatly — as an example of what America can do when it puts its mind to it. “This milestone should serve as a reminder to all Americans that the future is ours to shape if we move forward with confidence and commitment,” he said. Full article.

Seventeen African nations gained their independence in 1960, but the dreams of the independence era were short-lived. Africa states of independence tells the story of some of those countries – stories of mass exploitation, of the ecstasy of independence and of how – with liberation – a new, covert scramble for resources was born.

“Europe was in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. The advent of the machine was transforming the cities there into the workshop of the world – a workshop in need of raw materials. It was the dawn of industrial-scale production, modern capitalist economies and mass international trade. And in this new industrial era the value of Africa rocketed – not only for its materials and as a strategic trade route, but also as a market for the goods Europe now produced in bulk.

But the scramble for Africa was not just about economics. Colonialism had become the fast-track to political supremacy in Europe. Rival European powers convened in the German capital and in February 1885 signed the Act of Berlin – an agreement to abolish slavery and allow free trade. The act also drew new borders on the map of Africa, awarding territory to each European power – thus legalising the scramble for Africa.

But with the Second World War – which saw the peak of Europe’s dependency on African troops – a powerful genie was released from a bottle – African nationalism. The tipping point came on February 3, 1960, when Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, gave his ‘wind of change’ speech. Within 10 months, Britain had surrendered two key African territories and France 14. The rate of decolonisation when it arrived was breathtaking.

Seventeen African nations gained their independence in 1960, but the dreams of the independence era were short-lived. Africa … states of independence tells the story of some of those countries – stories of mass exploitation, of the ecstasy of independence and of how – with liberation – a new, covert scramble for resources was born.” More here.

the taliban and al qaeda r brand names, omnipresent boogeymen who can be blamed for everything “evil” so that we can continue our “good” war.

The Japanese freelance journalist released Saturday after going missing in late March denied that his kidnappers were Taliban insurgents as claimed by Afghan security authorities. On his way back to Tokyo, where he says he was scheduled to arrive Monday night, Kosuke Tsuneoka, 41, said on his Twitter account his abductors were “a group of corrupt armed factions” in northeastern Afghanistan. Full article.

Nearly 600 Israelis have signed up for a campaign of civil disobedience, vowing to risk jail to smuggle Palestinian women and children into Israel for a brief taste of life outside the occupied West Bank. The Israelis say they have been inspired by the example of Ilana Hammerman, a writer who is threatened with prosecution after publishing an article in which she admitted breaking the law to bring three Palestinian teenagers into Israel for a day out. Ms Hammerman said she wanted to give the young women, who had never left the West Bank, “some fun” and a chance to see the Mediterranean for the first time. Her story has shocked many Israelis and led to a police investigation after right-wing groups called for her to be tried for security offences. It is illegal to transport Palestinians through checkpoints into Israel without a permit, which few can obtain. If tried and found guilty, Ms Hammerman could be fined and face up to two years in jail. Full article.

The talks are surely a farce, but this is an amazing moment that we must celebrate: independent Palestinian voices are at last being heard in major American newspapers as a counter to the endless pro-Israel arguments. And they are speaking plainly to Americans about an American idea: equal rights. The other day the New York Times ran Ali Abunimah on the centrality of Hamas to any discussion of the Palestinian future. Today the LATimes features an Op-Ed piece by Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, more prominently than Yossi Klein Halevi’s counterweight hasbara. And Tibi tells Americans of the right of return to stolen farms and houses. Full article.

I stand with the ACLU and people all across America in defense of religious liberty. I also affirm my support for leaders like Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City who boldly oppose religious discrimination rooted in cultural stereotyping and resist those who seek to trade away our most precious values for political advantage. Our laws protect the right to build a mosque, church, synagogue or any other house of worship. And preventing Muslims or any other group from practicing their faith is unconstitutional and un-American. Sign petition.

Beyond the arts world, an increasing number of trade unions, student unions and churches are signing up to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Even an Israel-based group, Boycott from Within, backs the campaign, stating that its government’s “political agenda will change only when the price of continuing the status quo becomes too high . . . because the current levels of apathy in our society render this move necessary”. Full article.

his does not make any sense!

The bomb appeared to target a rally being held for Al-Quds day, an international annual event held by the Shia community opposing Israel’s control of Jerusalem and showing solidarity with Palestinian Muslims. The death toll has now reached 43 while the number of people injured is over 100. Full article.

When will those brave critics of Islam decry this mob hate?
As anti-Muslim hysteria in the US reaches a peak, its intellectual accomplices should start to reconsider their actions

In the New York Times last week, writing about the eruption of hatred for Muslims in the US, Frank Rich asked what seems an increasingly pertinent question: “How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?” Americans who are shocked by what the columnist Maureen Dowd calls a “weird mass nervous breakdown” accuse the usual suspects – rightwingers whose “fear and disinformation” is “amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment”. But anti-Muslim toxins were injected into the mainstream well before August 2010, and not by rightwingers alone.

Bestselling authors like Ayaan Hirsi Ali may be the “new heroes”, as the writer Peter Beinart puts it, of the Republican party’s crusade against Muslims. But “professional” former Muslims have long provided respectable cover for the bigotry and, more often, plain ignorance of mainstream western commentators on Islam. This Monday Germany’s Hirsi Ali, the Turkish writer Necla Kelek, stood shoulder to shoulder with the German central banker and Social Democratic party (SPD) member Thilo Sarrazin as he asserted that Muslims are out-breeding white, presumably “Aryan”, Germans and that “all Jews share the same gene”.

Most of these ex-Muslim “dissidents” lucratively raging against Islam in the west wouldn’t be able to flourish without the imprimatur of influential institutions and individuals in the US and Europe. Hirsi Ali, who wishes to be the Voltaire of Islam, commands rapturous endorsements from not only rightwing crazies like Pamela Geller and Glenn Beck but also Tina Brown.

Certainly, the story of Hirsi Ali’s life attests powerfully to the degradations suffered by many women in patriarchal cultures. There is no question that she should feel free to say that Muslims are programmed to kill infidels and mutilate female bodies, however much these opinions may offend some people. There is little reason, however, for most of her opinions to claim serious intellectual attention.

Declaring that the civilised west has no choice but to stamp out barbaric Islam in the clash of civilisations, Hirsi Ali seems useful only to her bellicose neoconservative employers in the US and their ideological kin in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And her recent exhortations to Muslims to convert to Christianity make her sound more like Billy Graham than Voltaire.

Yet the mildest criticism of Hirsi Ali’s naivety triggers a tsunami of vitriol from her army of prominent supporters. In recent months Clive James as well as Melanie Phillips have rebuked Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for not joining the chorus of praise for Hirsi Ali, a defender of the western Enlightenment, and for being “soft” on apparently closeted jihadists like the Muslim academic Tariq Ramadan.

Those who tirelessly cheerlead Hirsi Ali’s war on totalitarian Islam today did not have much, if anything at all, to say about the original despoiling, by western-backed Muslim fanatics, of Pakistan and Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 80s. The long-gathering backlash that finally arrived in the west on 9/11 sent them scampering to bone up about “Islam” – about as gainful a mode of knowing your enemy as Afghans sitting down to read Kant’s essay What is Enlightenment? after a US drone has destroyed their village.

Many of these Islam watchers championed the misbegotten wars that have already killed hundreds of thousands of Muslims and ruined innumerable more lives. But they still present themselves as virtuous and lonely warriors, indefatigably rooting out the internal enemies of western civilisation, who tend to be either Muslims sinisterly reluctant to embrace the true American patriot’s worldview, or politically correct liberal-lefties too scared to hear, let alone speak, the real truth about Islam.

Thus the writer Paul Berman, a self-described “laptop general” who first stalked Ramadan and hounded Buruma and Garton Ash in the New Republic – once the principal periodical of liberal America – and then expanded his 28,000-word indictment into a much-reviewed book, could recently lament in the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch-owned US newspaper, that we are living in the “age of the zipped lip”.

Oddly, this persecution complex afflicts people with the easiest access to mass media and the greatest influence on public opinion. Defending Martin Amis, who had fantasised in the Times about subjecting Muslims to multiple humiliations, Ian McEwan protested that leftwingers were closing down “debate” on Islam.

As it turns out, millions of angry Americans have opened up an equally unedifying “debate” on Islam. “You look them [Muslims] in the eye and flex your muscles,” Hirsi Ali exhorted the west recently, “there comes a moment when you crush your enemy.” Well, that much-awaited moment is here. Populist sentiment, which Democrats as well as Republicans clamour to represent, fully endorses the scapegoating of a religious minority for America’s recent military and economic failures.

It remains to be seen how the previously besieged critics of Islam respond to the mob of Koran-immolators. Certainly their critiques of Islam, always redolent of tabloid wisdom, can no longer be passed off as acts of moral courage. And it may be too optimistic to expect them to go to Muslim countries, or befriend a few Muslims, and then discover, as EM Forster did, that: “Islam is more than a religion … it is an attitude towards life which has produced durable and exquisite civilisations.”

Even a conservative figure like Henry James, while recoiling from Jewish immigrants in Manhattan, manifested a curiosity about America’s new population that transcended the bigotries of his time. In comparison, the liberal assumptions of superiority today have seemed experience-proof. The mass anti-Muslim hysteria has now thrown them into crisis – finally, long after it has become clear that Hirsi Ali-style denunciations, vigorously amplified by mainstream intellectuals and politicians, have potentially terrible consequences for the millions of Muslims in the west.

Writing about another “foul, ignoble” episode in America’s recent history – Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunts against America’s internal enemies – James Baldwin marvelled at the “ignorance and arrogance” of intellectuals who went on discussing the threat to the “free” world while “every hour brought more distress and confusion – and dishonour – to the country they claimed to love”.

The stigmatisation of racial and religious bigotry counts as one of the very few instances of moral progress in the previous half-century. It’s not, alas, an irreversible advance, and the witch-hunters of today can still occasionally have a field day. But it is their intellectual accomplices who will invite the severest contempt of posterity.

The Guardian, September 1, 2010

[Obama] said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn’t know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country. He said we persevered because we share a vision with the Iraqi people. Most of the Iraqi people, their vision has been, for the last seven years, that the Americans would withdraw. Full article.