Category: politics

Israel boat raid sparks condemnations, protests

ANKARA, Turkey – Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Israel and called for an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council as condemnations erupted across Europe and the Arab world Monday over Israel’s deadly commando raid on ships taking humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

Government after government demanded an explanation from Israel, which said its soldiers were trying to defend themselves against armed activists. The White House said it was trying to learn more about “this tragedy.” Full article.

Rights Groups Condemn Ruling on Bagram Detainees by William Fisher

Human rights advocates are expressing shock at a federal court ruling that detainees held by the United States in Afghanistan do not have the right to challenge their detention in a U.S. federal court – and dismay that their path to a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court may be blocked. A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, warned that if the precedent stood, U.S. President Barack Obama and future presidents would be able to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without ever having to prove their case in court. Full article.

Its Called War Porn

Whereas in wars past it remained the role of government ministries and media platforms, propaganda is now conveniently dispensed by those directly involved in the fight. War porn enables voyeurs to not only sense the gratification should they enlist to the cause, but enforces a hoped for success in a war against terror. War sells, war porn really sells, and peace is not good for the defence industry business. Full article.

Ahmadi Killings in Lahore

In view of two major attacks on Ahmadi mosques in Lahore on March 28, 2010, in which 90 people were killed and more than one hundred injured, a Pakistani American perspective…

In 2003 when Benazir Bhutto was invited to speak at St John Fisher’s College here in Rochester about racial, religious and ethnic tolerance, my husband made it a point to attend the event. He sat patiently through all her vapid rhetoric in order to ask her one single question. In 1974 her father Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, had bowed to political pressure and declared Ahmadis1 to be non-Muslims, triggering a wave of persecution and discrimination which is still alive and well today. Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and then again from 1993 to 1996. My husband’s question was simple: what had she or her administration done during those two shots at governing Pakistan to eliminate this religious intolerance? Bhutto fumbled for words and launched into a generic speech on the importance of co-existence but she had no answer. Her administration had done nothing to address this injustice.

In a country where the army has penetrated every facet of society to the detriment of civic institutions, where that same military has mounted devastating attacks on its own civilians creating millions of refugees, where the Police Act of 1861 which was drafted by the British to facilitate their rule over the Indian subcontinent still defines the relationship (with minor amendments) between the police and the citizenry, where a small group of venal elite continue to colonize 170 million people, most of whom can hardly scrape a living, what protection can we expect for religious minorities?

When I called an Ahmadi friend of mine to inquire about her family following the horrible attacks in Lahore, she was pragmatic about the state of affairs in Pakistan. “Don’t they kill Shias in mosques all the time?” she said. True. Such mass killings are not limited to religious minorities either – their motivation can be ethnic or political as well. But the fact is that when a religious minority is targeted, it exposes a disturbing truth about the level of intolerance in a society and its inability to use legal safeguards and adequate law enforcement to protect all its citizens.

In a country like Pakistan, which is already torn by sectarian strife, there is no room for blasphemy laws2 which are open to abuse or a constitutional clause that requires Pakistan’s head of state to be a Muslim. Such laws succeed only in exacerbating existing tensions and designating religious minorities as second-class citizens. Pakistan’s government needs to take a stand. Half-hearted condolences will not do, neither will hypocritical platitudes. The perpetrators of the violence must be brought to justice. Discriminatory laws must be repealed. The police force must be trained to protect Pakistani citizens irrespective of socio-economic status, ethnicity or religion. Religious freedom and tolerance must be treated as a national priority.

With Islamophobia being as rampant as it is in the Western world today, who could be in a better position than Muslims to understand the vulnerability of religious minorities? Let’s remember that human rights are universal and not the prerogative of any one select group. We can only be safe when all of us, each and everyone of us is safe.

[1] The Ahmadiyya movement was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889. His followers, the Ahmadis, believe him to be the promised messiah whose return is prophesized by all Abrahamic religions. Mainstream Muslims consider Muhammad to be the last prophet. This creates a divergence of views on the finality of prophethood, one of the central tenets of mainstream Islam. There are 3-4 million Ahmadis in Pakistan but their worldwide population might be as high as 200 million.

[2] Blasphemy laws were introduced by General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s. Under these laws, defaming the Prophet Muhammad or defiling a place of worship or a sacred object can be punished with a fine, imprisonment, even a death sentence.

CIA unit’s wacky idea: Depict Saddam as gay

calls into question all the “grainy” al-qaeda/bin laden videos, no?

During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people. One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project. The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said. Full article.

Étienne Balibar: Europe is a dead political project

We may well wonder, in these conditions, what is going to happen when the crisis enters its next phases? There will be protest movements, almost certainly, but they will find themselves isolated, and possibly they will become deviated towards violence, or recuperated by racism and xenophobia (which are already surging all around us). But the question also concerns intellectuals: what should and could be a democratically elaborated political action against the crisis at the European level? It is the task of progressive intellectuals, whether they see themselves as reformists or revolutionaries, to discuss this subject and take risks. If they fail to do it, they will have no excuse. Full article.

Chris Hedges: The Greeks Get It

We are facing the collapse of the world’s financial system. It is the end of globalization. And in these final moments the rich are trying to get all they can while there is still time. The fusion of corporatism, militarism and internal and external intelligence agencies—much of their work done by private contractors—has given these corporations terrifying mechanisms of control. Think of it, as the Greeks do, as a species of foreign occupation. Think of the Greek riots as a struggle for liberation. Full article.

House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo

House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo: How lawmakers have refused to give Obama $350 million (out of a $700 billion war budget) to buy a prison in Illinois and close Guantanamo – and why this should encourage the administration to think again about its flawed plan, to give up on indefinite detention, and to rediscover its lost principles. (Andy Worthington) Full article.

I Want to Live with my Family

Many Pakistanis, including some Pakistani military officials, feel astounded by the U.S. government suggestion that Pakistan should do more to dislodge militants from strongholds in FATA and in other parts of Pakistan. The Pakistani military says the casualty figures and troop levels speak for themselves. Pakistan has lost 2,421 soldiers fighting militants since 2004. In Afghanistan, 1,777 U.S.-led coalition troops have died since 2001, according to the website icasualties.org. Currently 147,400 Pakistani troops are stationed in the west and northwest along the Afghan border, fighting militants, while total U.S.-led coalition troops in Afghanistan will number about 140,000 when a U.S. troop surge is complete. Full article.

Drones and Democracy

The drone strike had killed three people. Their bodies, carbonized, were fully burned. They could only be identified by their legs and hands. One body was still on fire when he reached there. Then he learned that the charred and mutilated corpses were relatives of his who lived in his village, two men and a boy aged seven or eight. They couldn’t pick up the charred parts in one piece. Finding scraps of plastic they transported the body parts away from the site. Three to four others joined in to help cover the bodies in plastic and carry them to the morgue. But these volunteers and nearby onlookers were attacked by another drone strike, 15 minutes after the initial one. Six more people died. Full article.

Stephen Soldz: The “Black Jail”

For those who think that President Obama banned torture centers like this, think again. Obama’s Executive Order only banned CIA secret prisons. This administration thus apparently intended from the beginning to maintain its torture facility, only under a Defense Department rather than CIA label. Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic provides this description of the “black prison”: From what information I’ve been able to gather, the interrogation environment is much like a social science laboratory, with psychologists and experts in human behavior looking for clues to see who might know more than they do, alternating with interrogators trained to ferret out actionable intelligence information. Full article.