Peace and Justice Post

Khaleej Times, January 30, 2008

Karen Koning Abuzayd

Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and – some would say – encouragement of the international community. An international community that professes to uphold the inherent dignity of every human being must not allow this to happen.Across this tiny territory, 25 miles long and no more than six miles wide, a deep darkness descended at 8 pm on January 21, as the lights went out for each of its 1.5 million Palestinian residents. A new hallmark of Palestinian suffering had been reached.

There have been three turns of the screw on the people of Gaza, triggered in turn by the outcome of the elections in January 2006, the assumption by Hamas of de facto control last June, and the Israeli decision in September to declare Gaza a “hostile territory”. Each instance has prompted ever tighter restrictions on the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza. Each turn of the screw inflicts deeper indignity on ordinary Palestinians, breeding more resentment towards the outside world.

Gaza’s border closures are without precedent. Palestinians are effectively incarcerated. The overwhelming majority cannot leave or enter Gaza. Without fuel and spare parts, public health conditions are declining steeply as water and sanitation services struggle to function. The electricity supply is sporadic and has been reduced further along with fuel supply in these past days. Unicef reports that the partial functioning of Gaza City’s main pumping station is affecting the supply of safe water to some 600,000 Palestinians.

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03/02/08 “ICH” — — In Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Hillary Clinton lied again about Iraq.At the forum in Los Angeles, Hillary Clinton declared, “We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors.”

That statement was totally false. The bombing campaign had been planned for months and the inspectors were not thrown out. They were ordered out by President Bill Clinton in anticipation of the four-day U.S.-led bombing campaign.

The chronology, which is on the public record, is as follows:

In early 1998, the Clinton Administration began to raise concerns about Iraq’s refusal to allow inspectors of the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) to visit so-called “presidential sites,” a liberally-defined series of buildings and grounds across the country that Iraq claimed were used by government officials. Even though subsequent evidence has revealed that the Iraqis had nothing to hide, since all proscribed weapons and weapons material had long since been eliminated, Saddam Hussein held firm. Given that a number of prominent American political leaders from both parties had called openly for assassinating him, however, the Iraqi leader’s reluctance to allow Americans into presidential palaces may have been a result of concerns that such access would make him and other top officials personally vulnerable. Furthermore, the Iraqis had complained that, despite a stated policy of avoiding staffing UNSCOM with experts from “intelligence providing states,” there was a disproportionate number of Americans involved in the inspections, who would deliberately prolong the process and could potentially provide information to the U.S. military. The Iraqi dictator also reportedly had an obsessive compulsive disorder which led him to order that his palaces be kept meticulously clean and made him particularly reluctant to allow large groups of foreigners to move about his homes.

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Toward Unity and Independence Against the Empire

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, 2 / 3 February, 2008

By FIDEL CASTRO
Havana.

He spontaneously decided to visit Cuba for the second time since he became President of Brazil, even though the state of my health did not guarantee that he would be able to meet with me.

In the past, as he himself said, he visited the Island almost every year. I met him on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution at the home of Sergio Ramírez who at that time was the Vice President of that country. By the way, I would say that Ramírez fooled me, in some way. When I read his book, Divine Punishment ­an excellent narrative­ I came to believe that it was a real case that had happened in Nicaragua, with that legal nuisance so common in the former Spanish colonies; he himself told me one day that it was pure fiction.

There I also met with Frei Betto who today is a critic, but not an enemy, of Lula, as well as with Father Ernesto Cardenal, a militant leftist Sandinista and, today, an adversary of Daniel. The two writers were part of the Theology of Liberation, a progressive trend which we always saw as a great step towards unity between revolutionaries and the poor, beyond their philosophy and their beliefs, in accordance with the specific conditions of struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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uruknet.info, February 2, 2008

Saree Makdisi

Saree Makdisi shows how Israel, with the collusion of Egypt, is systematically grinding down and now actually starving the people of Gaza because it regards Gaza’s 1.5 million men, women and children as “a surplus population it would, quite simply, like to get rid of one way or the other”.

The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years – the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation – and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.

Gaza’s doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.

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A Colony By Any Other Name

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, Feb 2 / 3, 2008

By ROBERT FANTINA

A recent report in the New York Times outlines new U.S. demands being made on Iraq. The article states, in part, the following: “the Bush administration will insist that the government in Baghdad give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations and guarantee civilian contractors specific legal protections from Iraqi law.” So much for Mr. Bush’s vision of a democratic Iraq.

That one phrase contains two alarming concepts that should send up red flags in the halls of Congress, the United Nations and throughout the Arab world, although it is probably only the latter that will react. A look at each concept, and the expected reaction from those potentially impacted, is somewhat frightening.

The U.S., says Mr. Bush, must have ‘broad authority to conduct combat operations.’ In 2003 Mr. Bush sought that authority and, with the willing acquiescence of a Republican-controlled Congress, easily gained it. Since then, Republicans and Democrats alike have extended his ‘authority’ to ‘conduct combat operations’ at whatever level he chooses. It appears unlikely that he will be denied this ability anytime during the final year of his reign of terror.

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Rebel from a bygone era

Karma Nabulsi, The Electronic Intifada, 1 February 2008

“His very name scatters fire through ice,” wrote Byron of an 18th-century revolutionary leader, and so it has always been with the name of that extraordinary Palestinian George Habash. For those in anti-colonial movements across the world who learned and trained under him, his name embodies that inextinguishable human demand for justice and freedom. His exhilarating emancipatory model of resistance to injustice, his radical optimism and, above all, his tight political organization scorched the consciousness of young people across the Arab world, mobilized masses and inspired a huge wave of talented artists and intellectuals.

One doesn’t have to be a Marxist to appreciate the value of his extraordinary force. For 60 years Habash engaged in a non-stop struggle for Arab unity, human progress, women’s rights, liberation and equality. By founding the anti-colonial Arab Nationalist Movement, he lit a fuse throughout the region, from Yemen, where forces he trained and organized liberated the country from British rule, through the battle for Egyptian-Syrian unity, and Kuwait — which only has a parliament thanks to the movement’s impact — to the founding of trade unions across much of the Gulf.

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The Independent, February 3, 2008

When General Suharto came to power in 1965 he overthrew the grandfather of journalist Chris Kline, who explains here why he will not mourn the death of Indonesia’s dictator

Chris Kline as a child with his American father and Indonesian mother

When I was five or six, the Indonesian dictator Suharto, who died last week, came to Rome for a state visit. My Indonesian mother and I were summoned to the embassy to pay homage.

But when it came time for photographs, and Suharto picked me up, I shouted for him to put me down, and began punching him while he awkwardly kept smiling. I called out that he was a “uomo cattivo”, a bad man. Millions of Indonesians who thought the same would never have dared to say so aloud.

Why did Suharto permit this? Because I am the American grandson of the founder of modern Indonesia, Sukarno. General Suharto (both men, like many Indonesians, are known by only one name) overthrew him in a blood-soaked coup in 1965, covertly aided and enthusiastically abetted by the US, Britain and Australia.

I was just two when Suharto unleashed his “New Order”, living in Europe with my American father, Frank Latimore, and my Indonesian mother, Rukmini Sukarno. He was a Hollywood and Broadway actor, she was a European opera diva. We were far from Indonesia, home to a fifth of the world’s natural resources, which my grandfather led to independence after a long liberation struggle against colonial rule by the Netherlands. But we were not free from Suharto’s dictatorship.

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WSWS, February 2, 2008

By K. Ratnayake and Keith Jones

More than two hundred retired high-ranking Pakistani military officers have unanimously demanded that the country’s president, Pervez Musharraf, resign and hand over his powers to deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, so he can form a “neutral care-taker government” to supervise national elections.

Organized in the Pakistan Ex-Servicemen Association, the officers—who include army generals, admirals, air marshals, and at least one former head of Pakistan’s military—met in Islamabad, Thursday.

Former Air Force Chief Asghar Khan, who presided over the meeting, later told a press conference that Musharraf should “hand over powers to Justice Chaudhry who is still constitutional chief justice” so as “to save the country from worsening political turmoil.”

Chaudhry and some 60 other supreme and high court judges were arbitrarily purged by Musharraf when he imposed de facto martial law last November 3.

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The Daily Free Press, February 1, 2008

By Ben Kruger-Robbins

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Noam Chomsky denounced the Iraq War and “imperialistic” American foreign policy of the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations at Roxbury Community College last night.

Chomsky, a renowned linguist often noted as one of the nation’s leading leftist intellectuals, condemned Gens. David Petraeus and Ryan Crocker’s abusive actions against the Iraqi state to the crowd of more than 500.

“Lord Petraeus has initiated tyrannically destructive policies, including, but not limited to, the surge proposed on Sept. 11, 2007 in a despicably theatrical manner before Congress,” Chomsky said. “Great sectarian violence, particularly in the Anbar Province, has all but consumed a once prosperous nation.”

Chomsky drew comparisons between U.S. foreign diplomacy and the conduct of the Nazi Party within Germany, referencing the Nuremberg trials as a parallel to contradictions in U.S. political speech and government-sanctioned action.

“I think the ironies of United States deployed treacheries in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are self-evident,” he said.

Chomsky said “Ronald Reagan’s conservation coalition” caused the overthrow of the legally elected Sandinista-regime in Nicaragua in 1984.

“Reagan was a thug and a coward,” he said. “He managed to physically diminish a democratically-elected government and throw a nation into civil chaos for well over a decade . . . because the Sandinistas didn’t back U.S. trade policies.”

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By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers, January 31, 2008

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WASHINGTON — The U.S. death toll in Iraq increased in January, ending a four-month drop in casualties, and most of the deaths occurred outside Baghdad or the once-restive Anbar province, according to military statistics.

In all, 38 American service members had been reported killed in January by Thursday evening, compared with 23 in December. Of those, 33 died from hostile action, but only nine of them in Baghdad or Anbar.

A total of 3,942 American service members have been killed in Iraq as of Thursday, according to icasualties.org, an independent Web site that tracks the statistics.

U.S. officials in Iraq said the death toll had risen because the military was targeting armed groups that had been driven out of Baghdad and Anbar by the increase in American troops.

In January, the military launched a major offensive in northeastern Diyala province, where nine service members were killed. In addition, the U.S. moved troops to the northwestern Ninevah province, which has become an al Qaida in Iraq stronghold. Seven service members were killed there in January, compared with four in December.

The fact that more Americans have been killed in those provinces has some fretting that the U.S. is fighting another round of “whack-a-mole,” a term that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., once used to describe chasing insurgents and terrorists from one part of Iraq to another.

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