U.S. Admits Role in February Killing of Afghan Women

hard at work liberating the women of afghanistan: The Times of London reported Sunday night that Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.” Full article.

eboo patel talks about interfaith leadership in rochester – my take

dr eboo patel spoke at the 2010 interfaith conference here in rochester last evening. my husband and i had been invited to his talk followed by a private dessert reception in order to meet him one on one. dr patel is the founder and executive director of the interfaith youth core and is a member of president obama’s new faith advisory council. i already knew him from some of his writing. i was excited.

dr patel spoke about his passion, his belief in interfaith. he is especially dedicated to the idea of creating interfaith leaders – young people who will take us into a future of pluralism and mutual respect. he listed 4 global trends which make interfaith leadership a priority:

1) religious revival throughout the world

2) youth bulge: most of the world’s population consists of young people

3) media ubiquity because of which people who are vastly different are now being flung together

4) global socio-economic breakdown which is creating high levels of unemployment/underemployment and frustration

the bad news, he said, was that those who have been able to recognize and exploit the energies b/w these trends are extremists – large numbers of young people are being mobilized by strong extremist movements that are sweeping the world.

however, the good news is that these extremist movements can be deconstructed and replaced with pluralistic social models. this is where young interfaith leaders come into the picture. they can transform religious diversity to plurality, not conflict. they can make a positive engagement with difference possible. since leaders define reality, it’s important to get the vision right. young interfaith leaders can be trained to use their knowledge base and vision to offer the world another paradigm. interfaith projects would be a big part of this new world-view, this new engagement.

throughtout his speech dr patel invoked martin luther king jr. he sees him as the ultimate blueprint for interfaith leadership. MLK was obviously inspired by his christian faith but also by gandhi’s nonviolent resistance in india. dietrich bonhoeffer, the lutheran pastor who stood up to the nazis and was involved in an assassination attempt on hitler, is also one of patel’s interfaith heroes.

altho patel reveres these larger-than-life, courageous men (MLK, gandhi, bonhoeffer), he fails to understand that their work was strongly anchored in politics. they weren’t just talking about plurality, they were demanding it by asking for justice and equal rights for all and they were willing to risk their lives for such radical demands. if these are the men we must be inspired by and emulate then we must be brave enough to engage in politics and ask for equal human rights for all. u cannot separate MLK from the civil rights movement or gandhi from the quit india movement. if this is what we require from interfaith leaders then how can we not talk about american wars and occupations, about guantanamo, about extrajudicial killings courtesy of drones?

in his speech patel made the argument that all extremists (whatever their religious denomination) belong to the same religion – the religion of extremism. during Q&A a couple of students revisited that concept. one of them asked patel to elaborate on what he meant by that and also if it wouldn’t be more appropriate to view such extremists not as belonging to a separate cult but as being part of the human race, like the rest of us. patel’s answer was quite definitive. he said that some people are enemies of pluralism and they need to be put away. as an example he cited someone who would throw acid in a little girl’s face because she went to school. u can’t talk to such people. they need to be destroyed.

i found it interesting that this example, altho horrific and certainly heinous, fits the american govt’s narrative of brutality and barbarism originating mainly in the third world. there is no context of how the brutalization of a society as a whole can affect its internal structure, family dynamics, or gender issues. there is no mention of secular barbarism such as the use of white phosphorous and depleted uranium on civilian populations. i read an interesting article where the author argued that the use of depleted uranium is in fact slow genocide on account of how it curtails the growth of “unwanted” populations. i longed for more context, for more balance, for more honesty, for more reality.

to me the entire premise of global conflicts stemming from “religious revival” is problematic. one of the students in the audience said as much. he asked patel to comment on how even tho people might use religion as a rallying cry, their struggles are about other political or socio-economic issues. patel never addressed that question.

what really put me off tho was that towards the end of his speech, patel raised obama to the level of MLK and gandhi, presenting him as the new interfaith global leader of our time. what gall i thought, how misguided. but then patel went further – he mentioned clinton, he mentioned tony blair. that was it. i told my husband we should leave and forgo the private dessert invitation with patel.

no, i’m not rancorous. i don’t hate eboo patel. he is young (still in his 30s) with an already impressive bio. he is good looking, immensely articulate and speaks beautifully – with a voice and cadence that are nothing short of mesmerizing. it’s impossible not to acknowledge the man – his calm, his knowledge, his seeming truth. frankly, he’s a lot like his boss, like mr obama. and their tragedy is also the same: with all their gifts, they’re still very much part of the system. they ain’t no MLK.

apr 12, 2010
rochester, ny

Dr. King’s Economic Dream Deferred

This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about. Popular support for either party has struck bottom, as more and more agree that growing inequality is bad for the country, that corporations have too much power, that money in politics has corrupted our system, and that working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity – its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist. Full article.

Steve Meacham on Bill Moyers Journal

According to the non profit Americans for Financial Reform, Wall Street is paying itself $150 billion in compensation and bonuses -enough to solve the budget crises of every one of the 50 states, or prevent all foreclosures for four years, or create millions of jobs. So how about taking to heart the story of Steve Meacham and his merry band, City Life/Vida Urbana. In neighborhoods just south of Boston, City Life rallies people to fight foreclosures on their homes. Watch interview.

US Recants Claims on “High-Value” Detainee Abu Zubaydah

The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration had made about “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo prisoner who at one time was said to have planned the 9/11 attacks and was the No. 2 and 3 person in al-Qaeda. He was the first detainee captured after 9/11 who was subjected to nearly a dozen brutal torture techniques, which included waterboarding, and was the catalyst, the public has been told, behind the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has publicly admitted that personally approved of Zubaydah’s waterboarding. Full article.

A Bomber Jacket Doesn’t Cover the Blood by Norman Solomon

The man in the bomber jacket doesn’t press the buttons that fire the missiles and drop the warheads, but he gives the orders that make it all possible. One way or another, we’re used to seeing presidents display such tacit accoutrements of carnage. And the president’s words were also eerily familiar: with their cadence and confidence in the efficacy of mass violence, when provided by the Pentagon and meted out by a military so technologically supreme that dissociation can masquerade as ultimate erudition — so powerful and so sophisticated that orders stay light years away from human consequences. Full article.

Dan Ellsberg: “Our President Is Deceiving the American Public”

excellent interview with dan ellsberg about the staggering similarities b/w the wars in afghanistan and vietnam.

“What a counterinsurgency strategy ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.

I believe, by the way, that that applies to Iraq, as well, that I believe that our president is deceiving the American public—I don’t say that lightly—in the same way that all of his predecessors deceived us with respect to Vietnam, including the ones I served, which included Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Specifically, when he says in his State of the Union message that we will—he will get all troops, not just combat troops, but all troops, out of Iraq by the end of 2011, I believe that’s false and that he knows that’s false, and he has no real plan or intention of removing American bases manned by American military personnel, not just mercenaries, ever. By his second term or the second term of his successor, whoever that is, I think we have a future of 30,000 to 50,000 Americans in Iraq indefinitely. And I’m talking about the lives of our children, in terms of actual planning.”
Watch interview.

Pacified by Kathy Kelly

pls read this – as american citizens we don’t have a choice about whether we want to get involved with the war or not – we are already complicit.

“If the U.S. public looked long and hard into a mirror reflecting the civilian atrocities that have occurred in Afghanistan, over the past ten months, we would see ourselves as people who have collaborated with and paid for war crimes committed against innocent civilians who meant us no harm. Here is a short list of atrocities that have occurred in the months since General McChrystal assumed his post in Afghanistan.” Full article.

Aimé Césaire – Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

“Et surtout mon corps aussi bien que mon âme, gardez-vous de vous croiser les bras en l’attitude stérile du spectateur, car la vie n’est pas un spectacle, car une mer de douleurs n’est pas un proscenium, car un homme qui crie n’est pas un ours qui danse…”

And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear…
(Aimé Césaire, from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land)

The lingering of an absurd imperial reflex by Pankaj Mishra

Old reflexes, born of the victories of 1945 and 1989, linger among Britain and America’s political elites, which seem almost incapable of shaking off habits bred of the long Anglo-American imperium – what the American diplomat and writer George Kennan in his last years denounced as an “unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable” tendency “to see ourselves as the centre of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world”. In Afghanistan, the Anglo-American alliance hopes to bomb the Taliban to the negotiating table, baffling Afghans who, like most people, believe that the end of war – not more war – is a necessary prelude to dialogue. Culturally blind, tough-guy tactics also tend to be strategically dumb. Full article.

Arundhati Roy on Obama’s Wars, India, and Why Democracy is “The Biggest Scam in the World”

the astonishing arundhati roy:

The American government doesn’t understand what kind of ground they stand on. When you say things like “We have to wipe out the Taliban,” what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that America created. Iraq, the war is still going on. Afghanistan, obviously, is rising up in revolt. It’s spilled into Pakistan, and from Pakistan into Kashmir and into India. So we’re seeing this superpower caught in quicksand with a conceptual inability to understand what it’s doing, how to get out or how to stay in. It’s going to take this country down with it, for sure and it’s a real pity that, in a way, at least George Bush was so almost obscene in his stupidity about it, whereas here it’s smoke and mirrors, and people find it more difficult to decipher what’s going on. In fact, the war has expanded. Full interview.

Chris Hedges – The Health Care Hindenburg Has Landed

“Between 40 and 62 percent of the American people, including 80 percent of registered Democrats, want universal, single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans.” – this bill is NOT what we asked for. it’s a stunt.

“This bill is not about fiscal responsibility or the common good. The bill is about increasing corporate profit at taxpayer expense. It is the health care industry’s version of the Wall Street bailout. It lavishes hundreds of billions in government subsidies on insurance and drug companies. The some 3,000 health care lobbyists in Washington, whose dirty little hands are all over the bill, have once more betrayed the American people for money. The bill is another example of why change will never come from within the Democratic Party.” Full article.

Margaret Atwood talks to Bill Moyers

brilliant, brilliant interview – margaret atwood talks to bill moyers. the antinomian heresy: if u’re predestined to be the elect from birth, if u’re going to be saved no matter what, u can do the most atrocious things while still believing that u’re justified.

that kind of event (salem witch trials) replays itself in history when societies/cultures are under stress. people start looking around for human sacrifices. societies can give up their ideals, their freedoms, their values in almost frighteningly normal and rapid ways. fear sets in and people will trade their freedoms for someone who says: i’m a strong leader, i’ll take care of it – the trains will run on time. in order to preserve freedom, we have to demolish freedom. it’s amazing how quickly people rolled over for the patriot act.