Peace and Justice Post

AlterNet

By Jim Hightower, Hightower Lowdown. Posted November 17, 2007.

Bush & Buckshot are riding their little stick horses, demonizing another Muslim nation — and the Dems are supporting it. We’ve got to shut them down.

Look out — here they come again! Bush & Buckshot are riding their little stick horses, waving the bloody flag of 9/11, demonizing another Muslim nation, shouting warnings about weapons of mass destruction, bellowing for regime change, and generally trying to whoop up a new war. Having done so well in Iraq, George W and Cheney are pushing feverishly to hype up a national-security threat and commit our nation, our bedraggled military, our depleted treasury, and our country’s already-tarnished name to another of their fantasyland, neocon, preemptive invasions of a sovereign people who are doing no harm to us. Their target this time: Iran.You might be thinking, oh, come on, Hightower, surely not. You’re paranoid — even the Bushites aren’t that crazy. I wish.

The drums of war

For such leading neocon zealots as Norman Podhoretz, bombing and even invading Iran are about protecting “our” Mideastern oil, strengthening Israel’s regional power, and continuing Western control of the restive Muslim majority in the Middle East. Podhoretz and other true believers assert that there’s an urgent need for Israel and the West to crush Iran’s Muslim government now, frantically wailing that it intends to destroy America and control the world. Even though Iran has made no threats to the U.S., the neocons see regime change there as the key to winning “World War IV” (they insist that the Cold War was World War III) against what they have dubbed “Islamofacism.”

Keep reading . . .

The Independent, UK.

By Robert Fisk | Published: 16 June 2007

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party – Hamas – and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today “Palestine” – and let’s keep those quotation marks in place – has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn’t like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked – on our side – which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds – and goes on building – vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” still left to negotiate over ?

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IPS News

By Aaron Glantz

SAN FRANCISCO, California, Nov 16 (IPS) – Two U.S. Army deserters who fled to Canada and sought refugee status on grounds of their opposition to the war in Iraq have lost their bids to have the Supreme Court of Canada hear their cases.

The court refused to hear the appeals of Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey Thursday, who were rejected two years ago by Canada’s immigration authorities.

The board ruled they would not be at risk of their lives if they returned to the United States, nor were they at risk of “cruel and unusual treatment or punishment”.

Hinzman and Hughey deserted the U.S. Army in 2004 after learning their units were being deployed to Iraq to fight in a war they have called immoral and illegal. The men argue that serving in Iraq would force them to commit crimes against civilians, and that they would be persecuted if forced to return to the United States.

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The Nation, November 17, 2007

The American-sponsored Middle East peace conference (or meeting or get-together) expected to be held in Annapolis , Maryland later this month has more to do with providing Secretary of State Condoleezza a much-needed photo op to repair her tarnished legacy than creating the groundwork for a just and comprehensive settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. Besides the need to repair her legacy, Rice urgently needs to buy Arab support for the Administration’s war in Iraq and its escalating threats against Iran. As a result, after years of scorning Arab-Israeli diplomacy, Rice has become such a freqent visitor to the region that she given birth to a new verb in Israeli government circles: ‘lecondel.” According to the New York Times, the verb –based on Ms. Rice’s first name– means ” to come and go for meetings that produce few results.”

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US envoy urges Pakistan’s president to lift state of emergency as thousands more are detained

Peter Beaumont in Islamabad
Sunday November 18, 2007
The Observer

The bruises suffered by Hassan Tariq, a senior barrister in Sindh province, extend in large purple patches from his hip to his rib cage. According to his own account, he was beaten with ‘a hard object’ and kicked and punched by officers for refusing to chant slogans in favour of Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf.

He was seized on 8 November, but it was five days later when police brought him to the hospital in Nawabshah where doctors found that he had fractured ribs and internal bleeding to his lungs. After the operation to clear his lungs, he discovered the police who had been stationed outside his door had fled, leaving him a free man.

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The Times, November 17, 2007

By Philip Webster

Tony Blair has admitted for the first time that he ignored the pleas of his aides and ministers to deter President Bush from waging war on Iraq because he believed that America was doing the right thing. And he has acknowledged that he turned down a last-ditch offer from Mr Bush to pull Britain out of the conflict.

He has also revealed that he wishes he had published the full reports from the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) instead of the infamous September dossier about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction that so damaged him, and was almost certainly one of the factors that contributed to him leaving office sooner than he wanted.

In frank remarks in a BBC documentary, Mr Blair confirmed openly the belief of many of his closest supporters that he never used his position as America’s strongest ally to try to force Mr Bush down the diplomatic rather than the military route.

It was never a “bargaining chip” for him and he was never looking for a way out, he told David Aaronovitch, of The Times, in interviews for The Blair Years. “It was what I believed in, and I still do believe it,” he said.

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Information Clearing House

By Paul Craig Roberts

11/14/07 “ICH” — — Experts in the West and ordinary people in Arab lands have understood for many years that the United States does not have an independent policy toward the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter, a man of good will, tried to use American influence to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the source of dangerous instability in the Middle East. However, Israel was able to block Carter’s attempt, while blaming Yasser Arafat. Carter’s plan would have given rise to a Palestinian state. Israel did not want any such state, because obvious military aggression is necessary in order to steal the territory of an official state with defined borders. It is much easier to steal land from a non-state.

By preventing the rise of a Palestinian state, Israel has been able to continue with its theft of the West Bank. Palestinians who have not been driven out have been forced into ghettos, cut off from schools, hospitals, water, and their olive groves and farmlands. In a recent book, President Carter called the existing situation “apartheid.” Carter was demonized by the Israel Lobby for his use of this word, but some experts consider Carter’s choice of words to be an euphemism for the continuation of what I. Pappe and N. G. Finkelstein call “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

That the vast majority of Americans know nothing of this is testimony to the power of the Israel Lobby.

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AFP – Saturday, November 17

CARACAS (AFP) – – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded Friday that Spain’s King Juan Carlos apologize for telling him to “shut up” during a summit in Chile last week.

Chavez said Juan Carlos should “offer some type of apology.”

A diplomatic row erupted at the Ibero-American Summit last Saturday when the king told Chavez to “shut up” when the leftist Venezuelan leader called former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar a “fascist.”

“The least I’m entitled to as head of state is that the King of Spain — who is not the king of Latin America — offer some type of apology for attacking me,” Chavez told state-run television VTV.

Chavez claims he neither saw nor heard the king, as he (Chavez) was addressing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero at the Ibero-American summit.

“If I had heard him … I would have stared him down like an Indian, because I am an Indian and a little bit black and white,” he said.

Zapatero on Thursday said the king was merely defending him when he intervened at the summit — Chavez interrupted Zapatero’s speech several times before the king told him “why don’t you just shut up.”

The Spanish prime minister said the incident “took on great significance” because television cameras picked it up.

The populist and virulently anti-American Chavez made his comments during the television interview on the eve of a foreign visit that begins on Saturday with the OPEC summit in Riyadh, followed by a trip to Tehran and a visit to Paris for his first meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

albawaba.com, November 14, 2007

Head of Assembly of Experts, Chairman of the Expediency Council and former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Wednesday that a “hellish power” in the region is determined to loot Iran’s rich natural resources by weakening the Islamic Republic of Iran.

According to Irna, Rafsanjani made the remarks in a meeting with a group of people from provincial cities of Saveh and Zarandieh in Markazi province.

“Those who created and brought up terrorist groups to confront the Islamic Revolution, rushed to suppress their own puppets and now they admit that terrorism have engulfed the entire region,” he was quoted as saying.

Given the goals behind the US masterminded greater Middle East plan, he said the plot was to bolster Israel and weaken Iran but this was to no avail, Rafsanjani said. “Devoted Iranian people are the bastion in the campaign against enemies and it is the duty of the officials to be at their services by all means,” Rafsanjani stated.

© 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)