Category: politics

with all the “burka” talk in this article and the associated hysteria, what struck me most was this: Since donning the burka, the woman said she had been taunted by neighbours who called her a “smelly Arab” and that Israeli soldiers had asked to see her identification papers to prove she was not a Muslim. They backed down, she said, when she showed them that her children were clearly Jewish. Full article.

Using women in Afghanistan, or any other oppressed group, as a shield to continue wars is really an odious tactic. This war, the costliest in US history, should be justified on the basis of national security interests. Humanitarian reasons can justify peacekeeping missions, but if we stayed at war for 9 years based on what would happen if we left, we’d have garrisons actively fighting in over 100 countries and basically all of our citizens would be off at war. Surely this makes Bill Kristol go over the moon, but the rest of us should be worried. And, as Nick Kristof reports, the people we presume to “save” would rather be saved differently. Full article.

Not enough has been written about US civil rights attorney, Lynne Stewart, who was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison for illegally distributing press releases on behalf of her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman. The majority of mainstream output seems to have been generated by right-wing commentators highlighting the fact that the 70–year-old chemotherapy patient will likely die in a prison cell. Often referred to as a people’s lawyer,’ many believe Stewart’s harsh sentence has more to do with a McCarthyesque crackdown on lawyers who represent those targeted by America’s ongoing ‘war on terror’ than upholding the law. Full article.

We must remember that an attack on IHH is an attack on all humanitarian groups around the world. Given that IHH is among the most courageous humanitarian NGOs in the world — risking their lives to work in places like Somalia, cleaning up American messes in Iraq and Afghanistan — our politicians should perhaps be thanking them, rather than trying to tarnish their stellar reputation. Full article here.

For the cost of just 246 soldiers posted for one year, America could pay for a higher education plan for all Afghanistan. That would help build an Afghan economy, civil society and future — all for one-quarter of 1 percent of our military spending in Afghanistan this year. Full article here.

Furkan was killed on the top deck just above the bridge of the Mavi Marmara. He was using a video camera and was taking a video of the helicopters flying above the Mavi Marmara when he was shot from above in the foot and leg. His friend, who was standing next to Furkan when he was shot, helped him lay down and tried to help him. A very short time later two Israeli soldiers approached them and dragged Furkan away to the far corner of the deck above the bridge. This is where he was kicked, shot three more times and killed. Full article.

Caught off guard by the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington’s consensus policymakers drew no meaningful lessons from it. Quite the opposite, successive American administrations would blindly head down the very path that had led the Soviets to ruin. They would serially agree that, in a world without significant enemies, the key to U.S. global power still was the care and feeding of the American military and the military-industrial complex that went with it. As the years passed, that military would be sent ever more regularly into the far reaches of the planet to fight frontier wars, establish military bases, and finally impose a global Pax Americana on the planet. Full article.

Approximately 1,500 Israeli police came at 5:30 in the morning and evacuated everyone from their beds,” Ranaan said. “They brought tear gas and water cannons, but didn’t use them. There was a handful of Israeli peace activists who had come the night before to stay with the villagers, and the police beat them up and detained them. Once they evacuated everyone in the village, they started to demolish it. It took three hours to flatten the village. For the people of al-Araqib, it was a nightmare to see their village destroyed. Full article.

we support egypt’s oppressive regime to the tune of 2 billion dollars every year. how dare we talk about democracy and freedom.

just lovely.

The church, which was founded in 1986, has long been controversial in Gainesville. The Koran-burning protest is just the latest in a string of high-profile “protests on other issues, such as homosexuality, same-sex marriage, and abortion,” Religion News Service reports. But it seems clear that taking on Muslims is the one of the church’s central goals. The church’s leader, Dr Terry Jones – who before heading up the Dove World Outreach Center ran a sister church in Cologne, Germany – has published a book entitled “Islam is of the Devil” and posted a large sign outside his church that offers passing commuters the same message. Last year, members sent their kids to public schools wearing “Islam Is Of The Devil” t-shirts (the students were sent home, creating more headlines.) Full article.

Published in Guernica, July 2010 (thx Majid)

No one has described the victims’ experience more astutely or intransigently than Jean Améry—writer, résistant, Jew—who was captured by the Gestapo in 1943 and survived (or, as he insisted, did not really survive) Auschwitz and other camps. Améry’s relative anonymity is a shame, for he wrote some of the most original, incisive, and discomfiting essays on torture and genocide ever penned—essays that are, sad to say, still strikingly relevant, and that challenge current ideas about what reconstruction after genocide might look like. Despite the restrained irony of Améry’s voice, his writings accumulate into an accusatory howl.

As he hung from a hook in a Gestapo prison, Améry learned some quick lessons. “The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come,” he would later write. This helplessness is social more than physical, and bespeaks isolation and abandonment more than pain. The prisoner knows that the world has forsaken him—rescue, aid, solace are impossible—and that he is, therefore, no longer part of the world, even if he is not yet dead. Améry learned, too, that all those aspects of his character that he had considered central and unique would quickly vanish, leaving only one irrefutable reality: the body in pain. “The tortured person never ceases to be amazed that all those things one may… call his soul, or his mind, or his consciousness, or his identity, are destroyed when there is that cracking and splintering in the shoulder joints… Only through torture did he learn that a living person can be transformed so thoroughly into flesh.” The destruction of the autonomous self—a destruction that, if he survives, will continue to haunt the victim—makes torture “the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.”

The tortured person loses what Améry called “trust in the world”: a belief in the social contract, a belief that the boundaries of the body will be respected, a belief that the world wants to share itself with you. Trust in the world means that you, too, are entitled to a minimal safety and a minimal life: though the world might not shower you with happiness, it will at least defend your right to exist. The loss of that trust, Améry argued, is a kind of mutilation. That is why “whoever was tortured, stays tortured… It was over for a while. It still is not over. Twenty-two years later I am still dangling.”

In a startling piece called “Resentments,” written in the mid-1960s and addressed to a German audience, Améry wrote of the exultation he felt after the war, when the corroding loneliness of the torture-and-concentration-camp victim was eased. Améry was returned not only to life but to the family of man: he was in sync, intellectually and morally, with the world around him. This was, for him, “a totally unprecedented social and moral status, and it elated me,” he recalled. “There was mutual understanding between me and the rest of the world. Those who had tortured me and turned me into a bug… were themselves an abomination… Not only National Socialism, Germany was the object of a general feeling that before our eyes crystallized from hate into contempt.

Full article here.