Peace and Justice Post

By M K Bhadrakumar | Asia times, May 21, 2008

“They [Arab leaders] have stopped taking their instructions from Islam, they have decided that peace with the Zionists is their strategic option, so damn their decision.” – Osama bin Laden, audio message, May 18

Last Tuesday, while United States President George W Bush was setting out from Washington on a five-day tour of the Middle East, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency quoted Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad as hinting that Tehran might consider a cut in oil exports. Of course, Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari quickly clarified that Tehran was only reviewing its exports
and here, too, a decision was to be taken on a possible increase or decrease.

Neither Ahmadinejad nor Nozari said anything like Iran was reviewing oil output as such (which exceeds 4.2 million barrels per day, the highest level since the 1979 Islamic revolution). But US oil prices went into a tizzy nonetheless and hit a record high of US$126 per barrel by the time Bush landed in the Persian Gulf region.

Bush was expected to press the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for an early meet to raise oil production. (OPEC is scheduled to next meet in September to decide on its oil output policy.) Stephen Hadley, the US national security advisor, was on record that Bush would tell Saudi King Abdullah that the oil-exporting countries should regard it to be in their self-interest to “take into account the economic health of their customers who pay these prices”. In the event, when they met on Friday, Bush found that the Saudi king was not to be persuaded.

Continued . . .

By Robert Parry | Consortium News, May 18, 2008

The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush’s own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis.

If Borah, an isolationist Republican from Idaho, sounded naïve saying “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided,” then what should be said about Bush’s grandfather and other members of his family providing banking and industrial assistance to the Nazis as they built their war machine in the 1930s?

The archival evidence is now clear that Prescott Bush, the president’s grandfather, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from and collaborated with key financial backers of Nazi Germany.

That business relationship continued after Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and even after Germany declared war on the United States following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941. It stopped only when the U.S. government seized assets of Bush-connected companies in late 1942 under the “Trading with the Enemy Act.”

So, perhaps instead of holding up Sen. Borah to ridicule, Bush might have acknowledged in his May 15 speech that his forebears also were blind to the dangers of Hitler.

Bush might have noted that his family’s wealth, which fueled his own political rise, was partly derived from Nazi collaboration and possibly from slave labor provided by Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

A more honest speech before the Knesset – on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding – might have contained an apology to the Jewish people from a leading son of the Bush family for letting its greed contribute to Nazi power and to the horrors of the Holocaust. Instead, there was just the jab at Sen. Borah, who died in 1940.

President Bush apparently saw no reason to remind the world of a dark chapter from the family history. After all, those ugly facts mostly disappeared from public consciousness soon after World War II.

Protected by layers of well-connected friends, Prescott Bush brushed aside the Nazi scandal and won a U.S. Senate seat from Connecticut, which enabled him to start laying the foundation for the family’s political dynasty.

In recent years, however, the archival records from the pre-war era have been assembled, drawing from the Harriman family papers at the Library of Congress, documents at the National Archives, and records from war-crimes trials after Germany’s surrender.

Continued . . .

Editorial

The New York Times, May 20, 2008

President Bush’s visit to the Middle East last week offered a graphic primer on his failed policies — and the many dangers his successor will face.

The Peace Process: In Israel, President Bush spoke again about his vision of a two-state solution with Palestinians and Israelis living side by side in peace. But after ignoring the conflict for seven years, the negotiations he opened in Annapolis last November have made little apparent progress. And Mr. Bush did not use the trip to press either side to make even minimum concessions.

The Israelis need to halt all settlement activity. The Palestinians need to do more to end attacks on Israel. The United States needs to be ready to press compromise proposals, something Mr. Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, show little interest in doing.

After a three-day stay in Jerusalem, Mr. Bush met the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in Egypt — not Ramallah — a fact that was duly and angrily noted by Palestinians. The next president will have to make a much stronger, and earlier, commitment to the peace process, appoint a more skilled and creative team of advisers and resolve to be a more sensitive and honest broker than Mr. Bush.

Saudi Arabia: Two months after Vice President Dick Cheney went to Saudi Arabia to plead for increased oil production, President Bush was there making the same pitch. The Saudis were only slightly more accommodating, agreeing to a modest increase that will do nothing to lower prices at American gas pumps or America’s dependence on imported oil. Such special pleading is unseemly. The next president is going to have to do a lot more to reduce America’s consumption of fossil fuels, and its dependence on the Saudis.

Lebanon: While Mr. Bush traveled the region, Lebanon’s pro-Western government was losing ever more ground to Hezbollah. Mr. Bush offered little help to the prime minister, Fouad Siniora — once a poster boy for Mr. Bush’s claimed rising tide of democracy — beyond promising to speed delivery of American military aid and urging Arab leaders to rally to Mr. Siniora’s side.

Mr. Bush is still stubbornly refusing to talk with either of Hezbollah’s backers — Iran and Syria — and accused all those who urge direct negotiations of appeasement, a barely veiled attack on Senator Barack Obama.

Mr. Bush has strengthened the region’s radicals with his failed Iraq war. And his refusal to talk has also made it easier for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions. The next president is going to need a better approach.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan: In Egypt, President Bush also met with leaders of the three countries that will present his successor with the greatest challenges: planning and executing an orderly withdrawal from Iraq, defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and helping nuclear-armed Pakistan defeat those same extremists while not unraveling. He made no progress on any of these dangerous fronts.

Americans need to hear from the presidential candidates — now — about how they plan to reverse this disastrous legacy.

The Huffington Post, May 15, 2008

By Larisa Alexandrovna
Dear Mr. Bush,

Your speech on the Knesset floor today was not only a disgrace; it was nothing short of treachery. Worse still, your exploitation of the Holocaust in a country carved out of the wounds of that very crime, in order to strike a low blow at American citizens whose politics differs from your own is unforgivable and unpardonable. Let me remind you, Mr. Bush, of your words today:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Bush said at Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration in Jerusalem.
“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said in remarks to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Well Mr. Bush, the only thing this comment lacked was a mirror and some historical facts. You want to discuss the crimes of Nazis against my family and millions of other families in Europe during World War II? Let me revive a favorite phrase of yours: Bring. It. On!

The All-American Nazi

Your family’s fortune is built on the bones of the very people butchered by the Nazis, my family and the families of those in the Knesset who applauded you today:

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, government documents show.Prescott Bush was one of seven directors of Union Banking Corp. (search), a New York investment bank owned by a bank controlled by the Thyssen family, according to recently declassified National Archives documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Fritz Thyssen was an early financial supporter of Hitler, whose Nazi party Thyssen believed was preferable to communism.

–snip–

Both Harrimans and Bush were partners in the New York investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Co., which handled the financial transactions of the bank as well as other financial dealings with several other companies linked to Bank voor Handel that were confiscated by the U.S. government during World War II.

Union Banking was seized by the government in October 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Oh, but there is much more too:

The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war, Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of “state sovereignty”.

I cannot think of one Democrat who can boast this kind of lineage. Can you? No, I don’t think so. But you can lie brazenly and attack a sitting US Senator on foreign soil by comparing him to Nazi sympathizers? Let us continue down memory lane to help those who applaud you understand just what it is they are celebrating.

Continued . . .

Balfour to Blair – VIDEO in two parts

Part 1:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19948.htm

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdEog7OXxYU

Egyptian foreign minister says US is fueling Middle East turmoil

The Raw Story | AP News, May 19, 2008 19:33 EST

Egypt’s foreign minister criticized President Bush’ Mideast policies Monday, a day after the American leader lectured Arab leaders on their approach to governing.

Bush took a strikingly tougher tone with Arab nations during his address to the World Economic Forum on the Middle East than he did with Israel in a speech last week.

Israel received praise from the president while Arab nations heard a litany of U.S. criticisms mixed with some compliments.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit responded Monday by saying U.S. support for Israel and its own actions in the Mideast helped fuel turmoil and a clash of civilizations between Muslims and the West.

“When we see … an Israeli tank in an Arab city, a Palestinian city or an American tank in an Arab city firing arms, that makes people angry,” said Aboul Gheit at a summit meeting linked to the economic forum being held in Sharm El-Sheik, a Red Sea resort town.

“The anger leads to lots of turmoil. Turmoil leads to instability,” said Aboul-Gheit.

Bush lectured Arab nations Sunday on suppressing political opposition and religious freedom in the region. He also said Iran must not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“Would you please tell me, did anyone raise the issue of the Israeli capability?” said Aboul Gheit on Monday to roaring applause. “Why are you hiding the Israeli nuclear capability?”

Experts have long maintained Israel has nuclear weapons, although the Jewish state refuses to confirm or deny it.

David Bromwich | The Huffington Post, May 18, 2008

We are slowly leaving the Bush presidency. Can we leave it fast enough for the safety of the world?

George W. Bush thought it would be a good idea to help Israel celebrate its 60th birthday. So he showed up to celebrate, in spite of the gross contradiction his presence there offered against an appearance of impartiality in the negotiations between Israel and Palestine — an accord whose success the president has said he intends to show as the diplomatic legacy of eight years in office.

In his speech to the Knesset, President Bush praised Israel in familiar and effusive terms. He also threatened Iran almost to the point of implying that Israel’s birthday present from America would be a war against Iran initiated by the U.S. Finally, and strangely, he went out of his way — in violation of a decorum observed by previous American presidents on foreign visits — to attack a political rival in the United States.

Senator Biden, Barack Obama, and others were quick to respond to the charge that talking (not giving things away) to a hostile country must constitute “appeasement”; but the coat-trailing use of the word, meanwhile, caught the attention of the press; and Chris Matthews, interviewing a talk radio shouter, was led to some characteristic rumblings:

“You think it was fair to go overseas and take a shot at a fellow American?… Why is Israel now the center of the Republican Campaign?… Why the focus on Israel?…. Why are we turning Israel into Hyde Park Corner?”

The questions are pertinent and not easy to answer. Why has Israel become the place to test an American politician for loyalty and strength? Loyalty to what and strength about what? Something about the American view of Israel, and his own exaggerated version of it, made George W. Bush believe he could get away with the provocative words he used and the graceless choice of an occasion.

In the American mind today, Israel stands for a policy of benign chauvinism, justified preemptive war, and provisional domination of the Middle East: the very policy the Bush administration has sought to graft onto the United States, while borrowing Israeli army rules of engagement for use in Iraq. Doubtless the unpopular president felt a certain exhilaration and nervous release in cutting down a member of his family (nationally speaking) in front of another family. But there was a personal as well as well as a generic reason for it. Probably Israel today seems to George Bush a friendlier place than most of America does. It is, to him, a sort of fifty-first state, a good deal like Texas but cleared of the protesters.

Continued . . .

Kavita Krishnam | Green Left, 17 May 2008

Karl Marx, born nearly two centuries ago, had in 1867 (in the first volume of Capital) laid bare the “intimate connection between the pangs of hunger of the most industrious layers of the working class, and the extravagant consumption, coarse or refined, of the rich, for which capitalist accumulation is the basis”.

In May 2008, nearly a century and a half later, as we hear Emperor George Bush hold forth on global hunger, we are reminded that capitalism and global wealth remains just as intimately wedded to hunger.

Bush, in the time-honoured traditions of the backyard bully, has long harboured the habit of dictating to nations who their friends and enemies should be. Now, he has taken to telling nations how much they should eat and of wagging a disapproving finger at poor nations whose middle class has made some improvements in its diet.

Greedy demands

Bush’s sentiments reek of callous contempt for the world’s poor. They lay bare the fact that the only perspective Bush and US imperialism is capable of is that of the US corporations. According to a May 3 India Times article, in Bush’s words, the growing purchasing power of the middle class in the developing world is “good” because “y’know, it’s hard to sell products into countries that aren’t prosperous”.

But, lamented Bush, “you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food”.

In other words, India’s growing appetite was pushing food prices up and causing the rest of the world to go hungry. Unfortunately, the world’s people haven’t mastered the art of being markets, not mouths — of tightening the belt over their bellies while loosening their purse strings.

Bush is the head of the nation whose successive governments used its military to ruthlessly batter a long list of Latin American and African countries into being pliant suppliers of cash crops for the US corporations — and devastating these nation’s food security in the process.

Continued . . .

The strategy for Hillary Clinton’s almost-defeated presidential campaign came from an out-of-date playbook.

The Socialist worker, May 20, 2008

ONE REASON why Sen. Hillary Clinton will more likely be found next year in Congress than the White House is that her presidential campaign was set to rerun the battles of the 1990s rather than to face today’s political reality.

Her initial pose as president-in-waiting seemed to assume that the Democratic electorate was simply interested in returning to a time before George W. Bush. Being a good sport, Clinton would play along in the primaries just long enough to eliminate other pretenders to the throne, before a grateful party would hand her the keys to the White House.

But Democratic voters had other ideas. And Clinton’s sinking ship is testament to her mistake. Perhaps her biggest miscalculation was Clinton’s idea that what worked to elect her husband in the 1990s would work today.

Clinton’s political approach–call it “Clintonism”–was forged in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of three straight landslide Democratic defeats in presidential elections at the hands of the Reagan-Bush Republicans.

Continued . . .

ZNet, May 19, 2008

By Margaret Kimberley

What does the word “Islamist” mean? The millions of people around the globe who practice Islam are called Muslims, but this new term has crept into the language without question or investigation. It seems to apply to Muslims who fight against the occupation of Iraq, or Somalians who don’t take kindly to the U.S.-backed Ethiopian government invading their country and killing their countrymen and women. In short, an Islamist seems to be any Muslim who has the nerve to act in opposition to the American government. Like anyone else deemed an enemy, a new word has to be invented in order to dehumanize. If Somalian resistance fighters were called just that, then Americans might question their government’s decision to keep killing them.

America‘s intervention gave Ethiopia license to invade Somalia and begin a horrific cycle of violence. According to Amnesty International, more than 600,000 Somalis have fled from their homes, at least 6,000 are dead and 90,000 children in refugee camps are in danger of death from starvation and lack of hygiene and medical care.

The so-called war on terror is in fact a war of terror practiced against millions of people all over the world. The Muslim religion is used as a convenient scapegoat to further the aims of that war and Somalia is just one of the victims. Somalia is now in the grip of one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and it is all happening under the direction of George W. Bush. In a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and all international human rights standards, a U.S. naval vessel sent cruise missiles into the city of Dusa Mareb to commit an extra judicial killing, an assassination, of Hashi Aden Ayro, the leader of al-Shabab. Al-Shabab is dedicated to fighting the American backed Ethiopian occupation and is therefore tagged as “Islamist,” “terrorist,” and “linked to al-Qaeda.”

Continued . . .