Washington Dispatch: Televangelist Rod Parsley, a key McCain ally in Ohio, has called for eradicating the “false religion.” Will the GOP presidential candidate renounce him?

By David Corn | Mother Jones, March 12, 2008

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a “war” against the “false religion” of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

On February 26, McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, a supersize Pentecostal institution that features a 5,200-seat sanctuary, a television studio (where Parsley tapes a weekly show), and a 122,000-square-foot Ministry Activity Center. That day, a week before the Ohio primary, Parsley praised the Republican presidential front-runner as a “strong, true, consistent conservative.” The endorsement was important for McCain, who at the time was trying to put an end to the lingering challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a favorite among Christian evangelicals. A politically influential figure in Ohio, Parsley could also play a key role in McCain’s effort to win this bellwether state in the general election. McCain, with Parsley by his side at the Cincinnati rally, called the evangelical minister a “spiritual guide.”

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In Torture We Trust

By ROBERT FANTINA | Counterpunch, March 14, 2008

The U.S. Congress sent President Bush a bill that would have banned the CIA from using ‘harsh interrogation methods,’ which most of the world sees as torture and which even the military is forbidden to use. Said Mr. Bush: “The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror.”

It is not surprising that the irony of that statement is lost on Mr. Bush. Terrorist tools that he allows the Central Intelligence Agency to use are a ‘valuable tool’ in the war against terror.

The spineless Democratic Congressional leadership duly weighed in with meaningless rhetoric, proving once again that talk is cheap, and it can’t get much cheaper than the pronouncements of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In vowing to override the presidential veto, a near impossibility considering the numbers and therefore an easy target for taking the moral high ground, Ms. Pelosi said: “In the final analysis, our ability to lead the world will depend not only on our military might, but on our moral authority.”

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Source: Gush Shalom – Israeli Peace Bloc,
Press release, March 13, 2008

The government does not want a ceasefire, but a new flareup. Those who sent the assassins to carry out “liquidations” today, in Tulkarm and Bethlehem, knew what they were doing – a grave act of provocation which might blow up the serious chance which had opened up, to reach ceasefire and calm. This is a wanton, completely irresponsible act, which might return the inhabitants of Sderot, Ashkelon and Gaza back into the hell from which they momentarily escaped.

The lethal propaganda perpetrated today is the latest in a whole week of provocations:

• the Prime Minister approving settlement construction, spitting in the face of the entire world;
• the incitement in the Knesset, even by the Speaker, to the vengeful destruction of a family house for a crime of which none of the people living there is guilty;
• the rabbis who openly and insolently encourage their disciples to commit indiscriminate killings;
• and also the small-minded boycott declared against the Al-Jazeera TV, whose only sin was to expose to the world’s gaze horrors which the Government of Israel wanted to hide.

Contact: Adam Keller, adam@gush-shalom.org

Chanting “war criminal,” anti-war protesters waved blood-colored hands at U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, but police held them back as she left a Capitol Hill hearing room.

Earlier, Republicans had complained about the distraction from the group as they held up signs saying “Condi Kills Kids” during the hearing on the State Department budget.

But the chairman of the House of Representatives committee, a New York Democrat, declined to eject the protesters.

“We’re here in the United States of America. And as long as they don’t disrupt this proceeding and as long as they’re silent, they will be welcome,” said Rep. Nita Lowey, who runs the subcommittee overseeing State Department appropriations.

“But they may not stand and they may not disrupt the proceedings.”

The demonstrators, between 15 and 20 members of the Code Pink organization often seen at congressional hearings on Iraq, included one woman who was arrested last autumn for waving blood-colored hands in Rice’s face.

The protesters wore pink T-shirts splattered with red, as well as pink scarves and pink artificial flowers braided into their hair. There were occasional outbursts from the group.

“Thank God,” one protester said when Rice, an architect of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, said it was her last appearance to testify on the budget.

Rice ignored the protesters. Several plainclothes police officers and uniformed Capitol Hill police watched them warily.

“I am embarrassed for the entire committee,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis, a California Republican.

“I hope we never do this to the likes of you again,” he told Rice.

Political Affairs Magazine, March 6, 2007

Norman Markowitz

A recent article by Thomas Riggins dealt cogently and insightfully with the recent controversy over an anti-Muslim book, While Europe Slept, which received a finalist nomination for a National Book award. Riggins presented an accurate distinction between “radical Islam” and Islam as a religion, and highlighted the open racist politics of group which have campaigned on chauvinist political platforms (“Keep Sweden Swedish”) while claiming to defend the civil rights and liberties of women, other religious groups, and minorities threatened both by Muslim “terrorists” and by Muslim populations hostile to these values.

As the non-Marxist philosopher-athelete, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, said, “this is dejavu all over again.” Although the global political situation may be different, present-day anti-Muslim racism (broadly defined) not only bears a good deal of resemblance to the anti-Jewish racism or anti-Semitism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but some of the social economic factors are similar, as are the political forces exploiting and developing this racism.

In this essay, I will not dwell on the Marxist concept of religion as a manifestation of idealist philosophy, and its social role, which Tom dealt intelligently with. Rather I will look at how the relationship of longstanding hostilities rooted in religion to modern racist mass politics has functioned.

In that regard the comparison of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, Great Britain and the U.S. a century ago can I think is fruitfully compared to the present-day immigration of Muslims, mostly from non European countries, to West Europe, Great Britain, and the United States.

East European Jewish immigrants were a visible part of a huge migration of Eastern and Southern European populations to the U.S. Britain, and other advanced capitalist countries, a migration created by the economic and political fallout from the rise of industrial capitalism and the huge inequalities which developed from its subjugation of non-industrial regions.

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Islamic Jihad leader Mohammad Shahada killed

Ma’an News, March 12, 2008

Muhammad Shahada, who was killedbby Israeli special forces on Wednesday [Ma’anImages] Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli special forces gunned down four Palestinians in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Wednesday evening, including a leader in Islamic Jihad, witnesses said. Islamic Jihad leader Mohammad Shahada, Issa Marzouq, Imad Al-Kamal, and Ahmad Bilboul were killed in the attack. Marzouq and Al-Kamal were also an Islamic Jihad activists. Bilboul was an activist with the armed wing of Fatah, the Al-Aqsa Brigades. The Israeli forces entered the area between the Cinema neighborhood and Duheisha refugee camp and opened fire on car from another civilian car. Passersby pulled the bodies of the four men from the small red car, which had been parked in front of a bakery when the Israelis opened fire. According to one witnesses, the car appeared to have been “showered with bullets.” The Palestinian security services said that they transferred the four dead bodies to Al-Hussein hospital in neighboring Beit Jala. Hundreds of Palestinians congregated at the hospital, expressing their deep anger A life of resistance Veteran activists in the armed Palestinian resistance movement, Shahada and his comrades had evaded the forces of the Israeli occupation for years. On Wednesday the four activists were in Bethlehem meeting with other Fatah activists in preparation for Fatah’s sixth movement conference. The activists visited the offices of Ma’an News Agency earlier on Wednesday, saying: “The Israeli occupation doesn’t want to arrest us. Really, they want to assassinate us.” As if foreseeing his own death, Shahada repeated this sentence to Ma’an’s chief editor, Nasser Lahham. Israeli bulldozers destroyed Shahada’s house last Thursday night, immediately following the deadly shooting attack at Jewish religious school in Jerusalem. Ma’an’s chief editor, Nasser Lahham, spoke with Shahada at Bethlehem’s Christmas Eve celebrations on Manger Square last December. Shahada was smiling on Christmas Eve, radiating confidence: “The Palestinian people are capable of raising the flag of liberty and completing their mission. Israel has to realize that military occupation of Palestine does not solve its problems, either now or in the future.” Asked about the US-backed peace initiative, Shahada said, “The Annapolis conference did not reach a brave level of addressing the Palestinian rights. It instead took us back to the Road Map plan trying to vision that the Palestinian problem was only one of security chaos, which every body knows is incorrect.” Finally, asked why he rejected amnesty in favor of continuing with armed struggle, he said “it is the revolutionaries who have the right to give amnesty to the occupation, and not the opposite.”

news-journalonline, March 11, 2008

By PIERRE TRISTAM
ESSAYS

Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida’s bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah’s raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The Hamas ambush last week of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing one Israeli soldier; d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq, which have killed about 3,500 soldiers (not including some 800 nonhostile deaths); e) None of the above.

The answer is (e) — none of the above. It may be impossible to agree on a single definition of terrorism. It’s easier to agree on what terrorism isn’t. Attacking military personnel or military installations isn’t terrorism. It’s an act of war. This definition would hold even according to the U.S. Code, which states: “The term ‘terrorism’ means an activity that involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.”

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International Herald Tribune, March 13, 2008

The Associated Press

BAGHDAD: Three American soldiers were killed in a rocket attack in southern Iraq on Wednesday, bringing to 12 the number of soldiers who have been killed in Iraq over the past three days.

Lieutenant Patrick Evans of the U.S. Navy, a military spokesman, said the three soldiers were killed in an attack on Combat Outpost Adder near Nasiriya, about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, southeast of Baghdad. Two other soldiers were wounded.

The attack came a day after an American soldier died when a roadside bomb hit his patrol near Diwaniya, 130 kilometers south of Baghdad.

Eight soldiers were also killed in a pair of bomb attacks on Monday, the heaviest single day of U.S. casualties since September.

Three of those soldiers died in a roadside bombing in Diyala, a violent province where Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia – the Sunni insurgent group that U.S. intelligence says is primarily made up of Iraqis but is foreign-led – has been active.

The five others were killed while on foot patrol in central Baghdad. A suicide bomber approached them and detonated his explosives vest. Three Americans and an Iraqi interpreter were wounded.

The latest killings mark a significant rise in deadly attacks against Americans; the overall U.S. military death toll in Iraq is nearing 4,000, according to an Associated Press count.

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The Guardian, March 13, 2008

Elna Schor in Washington

A US military study officially acknowledged for the first time yesterday that Saddam Hussein had no direct ties to al-Qaida, undercutting the Bush administration’s central case for war with Iraq.The study, based on more than 600,000 documents recovered after US and UK troops toppled Saddam in 2003, concluded there was “no ‘smoking gun’ [direct connection] between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaida”.

George Bush and his senior aides have made numerous attempts to link Saddam and al-Qaida in their justification for waging war against Iraq. The US defence department attempted to bury the release of the report yesterday.

The Pentagon cancelled a briefing on the study and scrapped plans to post its findings on the internet, ABC news reported. Unclassified copies of the study would be sent to interested individuals in the mail, military officials told the network.

Another Pentagon official told ABC that initial press reports on the study made it “too politically sensitive”.

As early as 2002, military intelligence analysts discounted the administration’s claim that the Iraqi government had trained al-Qaida members to employ chemical weapons. But Bush aides continued asserting that the intelligence they received showed a link.

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John W. Whitehead | The Huffington Post, March 11, 2008

“The very rich,” observed F. Scott Fitzgerald, “are different from you and me.” And nowhere is this so-called difference more apparent than in the growing divide between poor and working class Americans and the rich who rule over us.

While working class Americans are getting poorer (there are five million more poor people today than in 2005), studies show that the rich are indeed getting richer. According to the Center for American Progress, 37 million Americans, a size roughly equivalent to the population of California, live below the official poverty line. Thus, in a nation of almost 297 million people, 12.6 percent are poor (for instance, a family of four that makes less than $19,971 is considered poor). And one out of every three Americans is considered low-income.

At the other end of the spectrum, 19 percent of the nation’s income is held by the richest one percent of Americans who, according to former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston, have gotten richer as a result of taxes, subsidies and regulatory policies that “take from the many to give to the already superrich.”

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