Archive for June, 2009

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3.4 million displaced by Pakistan fighting

June 2, 2009
UPI.com, May 30, 2009
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, May 30 (UPI) — More than 3 million Pakistani civilians have been displaced by fighting between the government and Taliban militants, provincial officials say. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, information minister for Pakistan’s North West Frontier province, told reporters in Peshawar Friday the number of “internally displaced people,” or IDPs, stood at 3.4 million, with 2.8 million of them from the province’s Malakand division, Pakistan’s English-language newspaper Dawn reported.

Hussain asserted the provincial government was determined to provide food and shelter to all refugees, saying a “substantial” number of doctors had been dispatched to tend to them.

The official said government forces had succeeded in dismantling terror networks operating in Malakand, which includes the restive Swat Valley area, but added that fighting will continue until the militants have been defeated.

© 2009 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Is North Korea the real threat?

June 2, 2009

Alan Maass looks at the role of the U.S. government in setting the stage for escalating tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Alan Maass | Socialist Worker, May 29, 2009

Hillary Clinton (Marc Nozell)Hillary Clinton (Marc Nozell)

THE U.S. government has nuclear weapons pointed at North Korea, a fleet of Navy vessels permanently positioned off its coast, and close to 100,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea and Japan. Successive U.S. administrations have reneged on promises made over two decades to provide humanitarian aid to the North’s impoverished population.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the international response when the North Korean regime carried out a nuclear bomb test May 25.

Instead, U.S. and international political leaders, cheered on by the media, all heaped blame on North Korea alone for the escalating threat of war.

The nuclear test was North Korea’s second. This bomb, set off underground, was far more powerful, estimated at between 10 and 20 kilotons–approximately the same destructive power of each of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War.

The North Korean military announced the same day that it had test-fired three short-range missiles, and the government reportedly restarted a nuclear reactor it had promised to dismantle as part of an aid-for-disarmament agreement reached two years ago at so-called “six-party talks” involving China, Russia, Japan, the U.S. and the two Koreas.

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Hear Alan Maass at Socialism 2009 in Chicago, speaking on “Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists,” and in San Francisco on “Media as a Weapon: Speaking Truth to Power.” Check out the Socialism 2009 Web site for more details. See you at Socialism!

The U.S. and ally South Korea, in turn, put their military forces on a state of high alert–and American officials were pressing the United Nations Security Council for sanctions. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised North Korea would face “consequences” for what she called “provocative and belligerent actions.”

The idea that North Korea represents a military threat to the U.S. is absurd. The country is desperately poor, with a per capita income of less than $2 a day. Its military is years away from developing a long-range missile that could reliably reach the continental U.S., much less a nuclear device that could be carried on such a missile.

But on the Korean peninsula, the threat of horrific carnage is far more immediate. North Korea has an estimated 750 missiles and 13,000 artillery tubes pointed toward South Korea. Some 21 million people live in metropolitan Seoul, which is just 35 miles from the border with the North. And, of course, U.S. and South Korean forces have a far more destructive arsenal at their command. A war could leave 1 million civilians dead in a matter of days.

The North Korean regime’s militaristic rhetoric–and, even more so, its police-state methods for repressing dissent–makes it easy for the media to dismiss its leaders as crazed fanatics. But when North Korean officials say their attempts to develop nuclear weapons have been a deterrent against U.S. attack, they’re right.

When the Bush administration launched its “war on terror,” North Korea was included among the “axis of evil” list of possible targets after Afghanistan was conquered. But it never faced even preparations for a U.S. war. “The Iraqi war taught the lesson that…the security of the nation can be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force,” a North Korean official said a few weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

BEHIND THE conflict between the U.S. and North Korea lies more than a century of colonial occupation and imperialist domination.

Before the 20th century, rulers of China and Japan had fought over who would control the Korean peninsula. After defeating Russia in a 1905 war, Japan made Korea into its colony, which it ruthlessly exploited, with help from U.S. investors.

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, the U.S. and the former USSR–previously wartime allies–began their Cold War rivalry, with Korea serving as an early battleground. The peninsula was “temporarily” partitioned.

Communist forces in the North backed by the USSR launched an offensive with the aim of reuniting Korea in 1950. The U.S. responded with a wholesale slaughter. With the authority of the United Nations as a cover, the U.S. used napalm to firebomb every Northern city, reducing them to ruins.

Four years of war ended in a stalemate, at a cost of some 3 million dead; the previous partition line was reconfirmed in a 1953 armistice agreement.

Following the war, South Korea was run by its military, backed up by the U.S. Only after more than three decades of dictatorship did this regime finally crack, in the face of a mass democracy movement fueled by workers’ struggles.

North Korea adopted the repressive Stalinist system of its patrons in Russia and China. Though its leaders still claim to be presiding over “communism,” North Korea is the polar opposite of a socialist society of workers’ power and democracy. The state apparatus directs the economy and society with an iron hand, and the regime promotes a cult of personality, first around Kim Il-sung, and now his son Kim Jong-il.

But if North Korea has always been highly militarized, it has also faced half a century of military threats from the U.S. and its clients in the South. The U.S. introduced nuclear weapons to the peninsula in the late 1950s, in violation of the armistice that ended the war. It also maintains, to this day, a huge military force stationed in both South Korea and nearby Japan as a constant threat against the North.

North Korea was economically ahead of the South until the mid-1970s. But its increasing impoverishment intensified after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration stoked tensions by restarting war games on the peninsula and retargeting nuclear weapons once aimed at the USSR toward North Korea. According to a South Korean government official, the U.S. had drawn up plans for the overthrow of the North and its takeover by the South.

In 1994, the Clinton White House agreed to a deal in which the North Korean government promised to halt its nuclear weapons program, and the U.S. would lift its embargo on trade and credit, and also help with the building of a civilian nuclear power program, with shipments of fuel oil as a stopgap measure for producing electricity.

Clinton broke all these promises, except for the delivery of fuel oil and some food aid. The economic crisis grew worse. Severe flooding in the 1990s led to a famine that killed as many as one in 10 people in the country. In other words, in spite of the agreement, the Clinton administration was continuing to up the pressure on the regime, in the hopes that it would break.

When George W. Bush came to power, he made matters worse by rejecting further direct negotiations. The state of relations between the two countries was symbolized by Bush’s racist rants about Kim Jong-il being a “pygmy.”

Now the Obama administration is in charge, and its top foreign policy officials show no sign of wanting to pursue a different path. Thus, Obama’s UN Ambassador Susan Rice said she wanted to be sure North Korea would “pay a price” for its nuclear test.

No sane person wants to see the spread of nuclear weapons. But when it comes to the arms race and war threats in East Asia, the driving force is the U.S. government. Real disarmament would start with the American soldiers and weapons that have been pointed at North Korea for more than half a century.

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War Is Sin

June 2, 2009

by Chris Hedges | Truthdig.com, June 1, 2009

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

Those who return to speak this truth, such as members of Iraq Veterans Against the War, are our contemporary prophets. But like all prophets they are condemned and ignored for their courage. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. They know that what we are taught in school, in worship, by the press, through the entertainment industry and at home, that the melding of the state’s rhetoric with the rhetoric of religion, is empty and false.

The words these prophets speak are painful. We, as a nation, prefer to listen to those who speak from the patriotic script. We prefer to hear ourselves exalted. If veterans speak of terrible wounds visible and invisible, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax. Not our boys, we say, not them, bred in our homes, endowed with goodness and decency. For if it is easy for them to murder, what about us? And so it is simpler and more comfortable not to hear. We do not listen to the angry words that cascade forth from their lips, wishing only that they would calm down, be reasonable, get some help, and go away. We, the deformed, brand our prophets as madmen. We cast them into the desert. And this is why so many veterans are estranged and enraged. This is why so many succumb to suicide or addictions.

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just. It is waged to make the nation and the world a better place, to cleanse evil. War is touted as the ultimate test of manhood, where the young can find out what they are made of. War, from a distance, seems noble. It gives us comrades and power and a chance to play a small bit in the great drama of history. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded, all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, come unglued. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

The Rev. William P. Mahedy, who was a Catholic chaplain in Vietnam, tells of a soldier, a former altar boy, in his book “Out of the Night: The Spiritual Journey of Vietnam Vets,” who says to him: “Hey, Chaplain … how come it’s a sin to hop into bed with a mama-san but it’s okay to blow away gooks out in the bush?”

“Consider the question that he and I were forced to confront on that day in a jungle clearing,” Mahedy writes. “How is it that a Christian can, with a clear conscience, spend a year in a war zone killing people and yet place his soul in jeopardy by spending a few minutes with a prostitute? If the New Testament prohibitions of sexual misconduct are to be stringently interpreted, why, then, are Jesus’ injunctions against violence not binding in the same way? In other words, what does the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ really mean?”

Military chaplains, a majority of whom are evangelical Christians, defend the life of the unborn, tout America as a Christian nation and eagerly bless the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as holy crusades. The hollowness of their morality, the staggering disconnect between the values they claim to promote, is ripped open in war.

There is a difference between killing someone who is trying to kill you and taking the life of someone who does not have the power to harm you. The first is killing. The second is murder. But in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the enemy is elusive and rarely seen, murder occurs far more often than killing. Families are massacred in airstrikes. Children are gunned down in blistering suppressing fire laid down in neighborhoods after an improvised explosive device goes off near a convoy. Artillery shells obliterate homes. And no one stops to look. The dead and maimed are left behind.

The utter failure of nearly all our religious institutions-whose texts are unequivocal about murder-to address the essence of war has rendered them useless. These institutions have little or nothing to say in wartime because the god they worship is a false god, one that promises victory to those who obey the law and believe in the manifest destiny of the nation.

We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the awful knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor-thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death, and that few can resist the pull. At best, most of us become silent accomplices.

Wars may have to be fought to ensure survival, but they are always tragic. They always bring to the surface the worst elements of any society, those who have a penchant for violence and a lust for absolute power. They turn the moral order upside down. It was the criminal class that first organized the defense of Sarajevo. When these goons were not manning roadblocks to hold off the besieging Bosnian Serb army they were looting, raping and killing the Serb residents in the city. And those politicians who speak of war as an instrument of power, those who wage war but do not know its reality, those powerful statesmen-the Henry Kissingers, Robert McNamaras, Donald Rumsfelds, the Dick Cheneys-those who treat war as part of the great game of nations, are as amoral as the religious stooges who assist them. And when the wars are over what they have to say to us in their thick memoirs about war is also hollow, vacant and useless.

“In theological terms, war is sin,” writes Mahedy. “This has nothing to do with whether a particular war is justified or whether isolated incidents in a soldier’s war were right or wrong. The point is that war as a human enterprise is a matter of sin. It is a form of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. It produces alienation from others and nihilism, and it ultimately represents a turning away from God.”

The young soldiers and Marines do not plan or organize the war. They do not seek to justify it or explain its causes. They are taught to believe. The symbols of the nation and religion are interwoven. The will of God becomes the will of the nation. This trust is forever shattered for many in war. Soldiers in combat see the myth used to send them to war implode. They see that war is not clean or neat or noble, but venal and frightening. They see into war’s essence, which is death.

War is always about betrayal. It is about betrayal of the young by the old, of cynics by idealists, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians. Society’s institutions, including our religious institutions, which mold us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.

© 2009 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be out in July, but is available for pre-order.

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Fidel Castro: Torture can never be justified

June 1, 2009

Reflections of Fidel
(Taken from CubaDebate)

Granma.cu, May 29, 2009

ON Sunday, while putting the finishing touches to the Reflection on Haiti, I was listening to the television report on the ceremony commemorating the Battle of Pichincha that took place in Ecuador on May 24, 1822, 187 years ago. The background music was beautiful.

I stopped what I was doing to observe the bright, colorful uniforms of the era and other details of the commemoration event.

So many emotional recollections related to the heroic battle that was decisive for Ecuador’s independence! The ideals and dreams of the epoch were present at that event. Together with Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, were the guests of honor Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales – who are reliving today the yearning for independence and justice for which the Latin Americans patriots fought and died. Sucre was the main protagonist of that immortal deed, impelled by the dreams of Bolívar.

That struggle has not ended. It is arising once again under very different conditions; conditions that perhaps were not dreamed of at that time.

What came to mind was a speech by Dick Cheney that I read on Saturday; it was about national security and had been delivered at 11:20 on the previous Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute and was broadcast by CNN in Spanish and English. It was a response to the speech given by U.S. President Barack Obama on the same issue at 10:27 that same day, and to which he was adding an explanation on the closure of the Guantánamo prison. I had heard him when he spoke that day.

Mention of this piece of forcibly-occupied national territory struck me, in addition to my logical interest in the subject. I didn’t even know that Cheney would be speaking right after that. That is unusual.

Initially, I thought that it could be an open challenge to the new president, but when I read the official version I understood that the rapid response had been put together beforehand.

The former vice president had written his speech with great care, in a respectful and, at times, sugarcoated tone.

But what characterized Cheney’s speech was his defense of torture as a method of obtaining information under certain circumstances.

Our northern neighbor is a center of planetary power; it is the richest and most powerful nation, possessing a number of nuclear warheads that ranges from 5,000-10,000 that can be made to explode on any place in the planet with utmost accuracy. One would have to add the rest of its military equipment: chemical, biological and electromagnetic weapons as well as a huge arsenal of equipment for ground, naval and air combat. Those weapons are in the hands of those who claim they have the right to use torture.

Our country has sufficient political culture to analyze such arguments. Many people around the world likewise understand the meaning of Cheney’s words. I shall make a brief synthesis selecting his own paragraphs, accompanied by brief commentaries and opinions.

Continued >>


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Indian Freedom Fighter Bhagat Singh Bilga Dies at 102

June 1, 2009

New America Media

Ashfaque Swapan, Posted: Jun 01, 2009

Bhagat Singh Bilga, the last surviving member of the pre-Independence Gadar Party founded in San Francisco, died May 22 in Birmingham, England, at his son’s residence. He was 102.

The Hindustan Gadar Party was founded in 1913 by U.S.-based Indians to join in the struggle for India’s independence. The freedom fighters of the party published a weekly paper called “Gadar” to propagate the cause of Indian independence. In August 1914, when the party called on overseas Indians to return to India to fight for its freedom, most living in North America heeded the call and no fewer than 8,000 of them were said to have returned to India to take part in the revolution. Bilga signed up for the movement much later, in 1931. He was 24 then, and had just reached the Argentina in search of a job.

Till his death, he remained alert, informed and engaged in the issues of the day, people who had met him told India-West.

“Meeting Bhagat Singh Bilga at the age of 96 was like reliving the revolutionary history of the Gadar Movement,” recalled poet, folklorist and Gadar scholar Ved Prakash Vatuk.

“With his sharp memory and his deep conviction . . . his description of the events of twentieth century was like watching a real drama on the stage.

The Gadar revolutionaries are celebrated for their battle for India’s freedom, but they also had a passionately held and deeply non-sectarian, egalitarian agenda.

Bilga remained committed to the broad goals of the left in terms of economic emancipation of the downtrodden, but he kept away from the divisive ideological squabbles.

During the Khalistan agitation, he was one of very few Sikh leaders who was openly and unreservedly against what he considered a sectarian movement.

Sukirat Anand, who edits Bilga’s favorite Punjabi daily newspaper, the Jalandhar-based “Nawa Zamana” (New Age), had met Bilga many times. “The thing which struck me always about Bilga was … he always kept himself abreast of whatever was happening around him,” Anand recalled. “I think for the last 10 or even 15 years he knew about everything that was happening… he would be very coherent, he would never ramble.”

Vatuk recalled Bilga’s fearless stance for what he thought was right. “During the agitation for Khalistan, Bilga fearlessly went from village to village in Punjab where he could have been killed anytime,” he said.

In addition to his role in the Gadar Party, Bilga’s lasting legacy is the Desh Bhagat Yadgar Hall, the facility he built with public donations in Jalandhar.

Anand said Bilga was held in enormously high regard in Punjab across the political spectrum. Former Prime Minister I.K. Gujral called him “a legend.”

“Bilga was the oldest person left (from the Gadar Party), and he was also the president of the Desh Bhagat Yadgar Committee,” Anand said.

Bhagat Singh Bilga was born April 2, 1907, in the village Bilga in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. His father died when he was one. His maternal aunt took him to her village, but soon she died of plague. Her husband and Bilga’s grandmother raised him.

Bilga went to Kolkata in search of a job, and from there he went to Rangoon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Chile. In Argentina, he met Ajit Singh, the uncle of martyr Bhagat Singh, Ajit Singh. He joined the Gadar Party in 1930, eventually becoming the general secretary of the Argentina chapter.

The money he earned as a clerk in a railway store went to fund revolutionary outfits like Naujawan Bharat Sabha and Kirti Party. “Gaye the kamai karne ke liye, leke aye inqalab (We went to earn a living, and brought back revolution),” Bilga once said.

Bilga was sent to Moscow by the Gadar Party with 60 other Gadaris to learn politics, economics, military techniques and guerrilla warfare. In 1933, he received his orders to return to Punjab.

The Desh Bhagat Yadgar Memorial Hall, which he has helped establish, is a treasure trove for researchers, safekeeping over 17,000 books about India’s revolutionary history. There are handwritten statements of Gadaris, a British directory containing sketches and whereabouts of Gadaris, original copies of the movement’s handwritten newspaper, “Gadar” (in Punjabi and Urdu), which was published from San Francisco in 1913, and 2,000 rare pictures of revolutionaries.

“I have dedicated myself to this museum which has 35 other freedom fighters as its members,” Bilga once said. “It traces the life of each and every Gadari along with their photographs. We have collected them from their villages, relatives and friends, in India and abroad. And all this to tell the world that Englishmen didn’t leave India because a handful of Indians threw salt into their eyes. They left because we sent them packing.”

Every October, a five-day festival called Gadari Mela is hosted at the Yadgar Hall to celebrate the contributions of revolutionaries. It is attended mostly by families of martyrs of the Gadar Movement – 400 revolutionaries were hanged and 5,000 were sent to Kala Pani for life imprisonment; most of them never returned.

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Leading Rights Groups Call On Obama To Release Prisoner Abuse Photos

June 1, 2009

ACLU Calls On Court To Adhere To Mandate Requiring Release Of Abuse Photos

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

ACLU, June 1, 2009

NEW YORK – Several of the nation’s leading human rights and civil liberties organizations sent a letter to President Obama today urging him to release photos depicting the abuse of detainees by U.S. personnel overseas.

The letter, signed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and dozens of other groups, calls on the president to reconsider his decision to block the release of the photos. It states, “The hallmark of an open society is that we do not conceal information that reflects poorly on us – we expose it to the light of day, so that wrongdoers can be held accountable and future abuses prevented.”

“The disclosure of these photographs serves as a further reminder that abuse of prisoners in U.S.-administered detention centers was systemic,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “Some of the abuse occurred because senior civilian and military officials created a culture of impunity in which abuse was tolerated, and some of the abuse was expressly authorized. It’s imperative that senior officials who condoned or authorized abuse now be held accountable for their actions.”

Also today, the ACLU asked a federal appeals court to uphold its earlier ruling that the government must release the photos. On May 28, the government filed a motion asking the court to recall its mandate ordering their release, and today the ACLU filed its opposition to that motion.

“The public has an undeniable right to see these photos. As disturbing as they may be, it is critical that the American people know the full truth about the abuse that occurred in their name. The government’s decision to suppress the photos is fundamentally inconsistent with President Obama’s own promise of transparency and accountability,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “The government has failed to show any good cause for the court to recall its mandate that the photos be released, and we are confident the court will uphold its original order.”

In September 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ordered the government to turn over the photos in response to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit. The Obama administration originally indicated that it would not appeal that decision and would release the photos, but abruptly reversed its commitment to do so shortly before the agreed-upon deadline.

In addition to Jaffer and Singh, attorneys on the case are Judy Rabinovitz of the national ACLU; Arthur Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union; Lawrence S. Lustberg and Jenny Brooke Condon of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons P.C.; and Shayana Kadidal and Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

More information about the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit, including today’s filing, is online at: www.aclu.org/torturefoia

The full text of the letter to President Obama is below and available online at: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/39709res20090601.html

Continued >>

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Israel: Racists for Democracy

June 1, 2009

Uri Avnery | creative-i.info, June 1, 2009

HOW LUCKY we are to have the extreme Right standing guard over our democracy.

This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State.

The private member’s bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the “Jewish Home” party, which sailed through its preliminary hearing, promises one year in prison to anyone who publishes “a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State”, if the contents of the call might cause “actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts”.

One can foresee the next steps. A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders.

The consequences are inevitable. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted of this crime. There will be a need for concentration camps all over the country to house all the deniers of Israeli democracy.

The police will be unable to deal with so many criminals. It will be necessary to set up a new unit. This may be called “Special Security”, or, in short, SS.

Hopefully, these measures will suffice to preserve our democracy. If not, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting them from the country, together with the Jewish leftists and all the other enemies of the Jewish democracy.

After the preliminary reading of the bill, it now goes to the Legal Committee of the Knesset, which will prepare it for the first, and soon thereafter for the second and third readings. Within a few weeks or months, it will be the law of the land.

By the way, the bill does not single out Arabs explicitly – even if this is its clear intention, and all those who voted for it understood this. It also prohibits Jews from advocating a change in the state’s definition, or the creation of a bi-national state in all of historic Palestine or spreading any other such unconventional ideas. One can only imagine what would happen in the US if a senator proposed a law to imprison anyone who suggests an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America.

THE BILL does not stand out at all in our new political landscape.

This government has already adopted a bill to imprison for three years anyone who mourns the Palestinian Naqba – the 1948 uprooting of more than half the Palestinian people from their homes and lands.

The sponsors expect Arab citizens to be happy about that event. True, the Palestinians were caused a certain unpleasantness, but that was only a by-product of the foundation of our state. The Independence Day of the Jewish and Democratic State must fill us all with joy. Anyone who does not express this joy should be locked up, and three years may not be enough.

This bill has been confirmed by the Ministerial Commission for Legal Matters, prior to being submitted to the Knesset. Since the rightist government commands a majority in the Knesset, it will be adopted almost automatically. (In the meantime, a slight delay has been caused by one minister, who appealed the decision, so the Ministerial Commission will have to confirm it again.)

The sponsors of the law hope, perhaps, that on Naqba Day the Arabs will dance in the streets, plant Israeli flags on the ruins of some 600 Arab villages that were wiped off the map and offer up their thanks to Allah in the mosques for the miraculous good fortune that was bestowed on them.

THIS TAKES me back to the 60s, when the weekly magazine I edited, Haolam Hazeh, published an Arabic edition. One of its employees was a young man called Rashed Hussein from the village of Musmus. Already as a youth he was a gifted poet with a promising future.

He told me that some years earlier the military governor of his area had summoned him to his office. At the time, all the Arabs in Israel were subject to a military government which controlled their lives in all matters big and small. Without a permit, an Arab citizen could not leave his village or town even for a few hours, nor get a job as a teacher, nor acquire a tractor or dig a well.

The governor received Rashed cordially, offered him coffee and paid lavish compliments to his poetry. Then he came to the point: in a month’s time, Independence Day was due, and the governor was going to hold a big reception for the Arab “notables”; he asked Rashed to write a special poem for the occasion.

Rashed was a proud youngster, nationalist to the core, and not lacking in courage. He explained to the governor that Independence Day was no joyful day for him, since his relatives had been driven from their homes and most of the Musmus village’s land had also been expropriated.

When Rashed arrived back at his village some hours later, he could not help noticing that his neighbors were looking at him in a peculiar way. When he entered his home, he was shocked. All the members of his family were sitting on the floor, the women lamenting at the top of their voices, the children huddling fearfully in a corner. His first thought was that somebody had died.

“What have you done to us!” one of the women cried, “What did we do to you?”

“You have destroyed the family,” another shouted, “You have finished us!”

It appeared that the governor had called the family and told them that Rashed had refused to fulfill his duty to the state. The threat was clear: from now on, the extended family, one of the largest in the village, would be on the black list of the military government. The consequences were clear to everyone.

Rashed could not stand up against the lamentation of his family. He gave in and wrote the poem, as requested. But something inside him was broken. Some years later he emigrated to the US, got a job there at the PLO office and died tragically: he was burned alive in his bed after going to sleep, it appears, while smoking a cigarette.

THESE DAYS are gone forever. We took part in many stormy demonstrations against the military government until it was finally abolished in 1966. As a newly elected Member of Parliament, I had the privilege of voting for its abolition.

The fearful and subservient Arab minority, then amounting to some 200 thousand souls, has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, its downtrodden national pride has raised its head again, and today they are a large and self-confident community of 1.5 million. But the attitude of the Jewish Right has not changed for the better. On the contrary.

In the Knesset bakery (the Hebrew word for bakery is Mafia) some new pastries are being baked. One of them is a bill that stipulates that anyone applying for Israeli citizenship must declare their loyalty to “the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State”, and also undertake to serve in the army or its civilian alternative. Its sponsor is MK David Rotem of the “Israel is Our Home” party, who also happens to be the chairman of the Knesset Law Committee.

A declaration of loyalty to the state and its laws – a framework designed to safeguard the wellbeing and the rights of its citizens – is reasonable. But loyalty to the “Zionist” state? Zionism is an ideology, and in a democratic state the ideology can change from time to time. It would be like declaring loyalty to a “capitalist” USA, a “rightist Italy”, a “leftist” Spain, a “Catholic Poland” or a “nationalist” Russia.

This would not be a problem for the tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews in Israel who reject Zionism, since Jews will not be touched by this law. They obtain citizenship automatically the moment they arrive in Israel.

Another bill waiting for its turn before the Ministerial Committee proposes changing the declaration that every new Knesset Member has to make before assuming office. Instead of loyalty “to the State of Israel and its laws”, as now, he or she will be required to declare their loyalty “to the Jewish, Zionist and Democratic State of Israel, its symbols and its values”. That would exclude almost automatically all the elected Arabs, since declaring loyalty to the “Zionist” state would mean that no Arab would ever vote for them again.

It would also be a problem for the Orthodox members of the Knesset, who cannot declare loyalty to Zionism. According to Orthodox doctrine, the Zionists are depraved sinners and the Zionist flag is unclean. God exiled the Jews from this country because of their wickedness, and only God can permit them to return. Zionism, by preempting the job of the Messiah, has committed an unpardonable sin, and many Orthodox Rabbis chose to remain in Europe and be murdered by the Nazis rather than committing the Zionist sin of going to Palestine.

THE FACTORY of racist laws with a distinct fascist odor is now working at full steam. That is built into the new coalition.

At its center is the Likud party, a good part of which is pure racist (sorry for the oxymoron). To its right there is the ultra-racist Shas party, to the right of which is Lieberman’s ultra-ultra racist “Israel is our Home” party, the ultra-ultra-ultra racist “Jewish Home” party, and to its right the even more racist “National Union” party, which includes outright Kahanists and stands with one foot in the coalition and the other on the moon.

All these factions are trying to outdo each other. When one proposes a crazy bill, the next is compelled to propose an even crazier one, and so on.

All this is possible because Israel has no constitution. The ability of the Supreme Court to annul laws that contradict the “basic laws” is not anchored anywhere, and the Rightist parties are trying to abolish it. Not for nothing did Avigdor Lieberman demand – and get – the Justice and Police ministries.

Just now, when the governments of the US and Israel are clearly on a collision course over the settlements, this racist fever may infect all parts of the coalition.

If one goes to sleep with a dog, one should not be surprised to wake up with fleas (may the dogs among my readers pardon me). Those who elected such a government, and even more so those who joined it, should not be surprised by its laws, which ostensibly safeguard Jewish democracy.

The most appropriate name for these holy warriors would be “Racists for Democracy”.

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Sri Lanka Tamils ‘facing misery’

June 1, 2009

Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka, 23 May 2009

Huge numbers of civilians fled from the final battles

BBC News, June 1, 2009

A senior Sri Lankan Tamil political leader has urged the government to resettle civilians back to their homes as early as possible.

V Anandasangaree described conditions in camps for civilians displaced by the country’s war as “horrible”.

The head of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) said hundreds of thousands faced misery and hardship.

He said there were food, health and sanitation problems in camps set up for Tamil civilians in northern Sri Lanka.

Many people are having skin diseases as they didn’t get a chance to have a shower for days because of water shortage
V Anandasangaree
Tamil United Liberation Front

The United Nations says nearly 300,000 people have been displaced by recent fighting between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels.

The civilians have been housed in various camps, most of them in Menik Farm, near the northern town of Vavuniya.

The Menik Farm camp site, which is described by the UN as the world’s largest displacement camp, houses around 220,000 people displaced by the fighting.

Health fears

Mr V Anandasangaree, the TULF leader, is one of the few remaining long-serving moderate Tamil political leaders in Sri Lanka. He has strongly supported the government’s stance against the rebels.

“From the reports I get from the people [in the camps] they are good in some areas and horrible in many,” Mr Anandasangaree told the BBC.

V Anandasangaree

V Anandasangaree has been a critic of the Tamil Tigers

“Health, water and sanitation situation is horrible. Many people are having skin diseases as they didn’t get a chance to have a shower for days because of water shortage.

“Pregnant mothers and newborn babies go through a harrowing time in the camps due to scorching heat,” he said.

The Sri Lankan government accepts that conditions in some of the camps are not ideal but says facilities have been improved in many other camps. It says more land is also being allocated to build new camps to decongest those already full.

The United Nations and other aid agencies have also demanded better access to the camps to carry out humanitarian work.

Sri Lanka’s government is wary of aid agencies and has complained that the agencies had helped the Tigers in the past.

Sri Lanka says it plans to resettle most of the refugees within six months.

Mr Anandasangaree, a well-known critic of the Tamil Tiger rebels, the LTTE, also faulted the government for viewing every Tamil civilian in the camps as a possible Tamil Tiger suspect.

Sri Lanka has said it needs time to weed out potential Tamil Tiger infiltrators hiding in the camps.

“The civilians risked their lives while fleeing from the LTTE-held areas as the rebels were shooting at them. If the government suspects such people as Tamil Tigers, then the entire population of the two districts – Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu – should be the suspects,” he said.

“Then the government will never solve the problem.”

Sri Lankan officials say they have been overwhelmed by the sudden arrival tens of thousands of civilians from rebel-controlled areas since the start of the Sri Lankan military’s final battle against Tamil Tigers a few weeks ago.

The government says it also requires help from the international community for post-war resettlement and reconstruction.

The TULF leader also challenged the official view that de-mining needs to be carried out before the resettlement of civilians can begin in the north.

“The theory that the area is heavily landmined cannot be accepted because I am in touch with a number of people. So, when I ask them they tell me where the landmines are placed. They are local people. According to them, 75% per cent of the area is not at all landmined,” the Tamil leader said.

Mr Anandasangaree said Sri Lankan security forces were doing a commendable job in carrying out relief work for the displaced civilians, but said that was not enough.

“The government cannot address the problem fully on its own because of the size of the displaced population.”

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Obama Wants $736 Million Colonial Fortress in Pakistan

June 1, 2009

Critics say the White House wants to use the new “embassy” for “pushing the American agenda in Central Asia.”

By Jeremy Scahill | RebelReports, June 1, 2009

Ah, good thing the US quest for violent global domination was brought to a screeching halt with the November presidential election. Without Obama’s election, we’d still have an occupation of Iraq, mercenaries on the US payroll, torture of prisoners, an unending and worsening war that kills civilians in Afghanistan, regular airstrikes in Pakistan, killing civilians and an embassy the size of Vatican city in Baghdad, which was built in part on slave labor. Not to mention those crazy “Bush/Cheney” neocons running around trying to become the “CEOs” of foreign nations. Wow, glad that’s all over. Whew! And, it’s a really good thing Bush is no longer in power or else the US would come up with some crazy idea like building a colonial fortress in Pakistan to defend “US interests” in the region.

From McClatchy:

The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive — $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.

The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of $740 million.

[…]

Other major projects are planned for Kabul, Afghanistan; and for the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar. In Peshawar, the U.S. government is negotiating the purchase of a five-star hotel that would house a new U.S. consulate.

[…]

In Pakistan, however, large parts of the population are hostile to the U.S. presence in the region — despite receiving billions of dollars in aid from Washington since 2001 — and anti-American groups and politicians are likely to seize on the expanded diplomatic presence in Islamabad as evidence of American “imperial designs.”

“This is a replay of Baghdad,” said Khurshid Ahmad, a member of Pakistan’s upper house of parliament for Jamaat-e-Islami, one of the country’s two main religious political parties. “This (Islamabad embassy) is more (space) than they should need. It’s for the micro and macro management of Pakistan, and using Pakistan for pushing the American agenda in Central Asia.”

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Underlying the Economic Crisis is a Human Rights Time Bomb

June 1, 2009

The Economic crisis has only exacerbated human rights abuses

by Irene Khan |   The Independent/UK, May 29, 2009

Underlying the economic crisis is an explosive human rights crisis. The economic downturn has aggravated abuses, distracted attention from them and created new problems. In the name of security, human rights were trampled on. Now, in the name of economic recovery, they are being relegated to the back seat. The world needs a new global deal on human rights – not paper promises but commitment and concrete action from governments.

This crisis is about shortages of food, jobs, clean water, land and housing, and also about deprivation and discrimination, growing inequality, xenophobia and racism, violence and repression across the world. Billions of people are suffering from insecurity, injustice and indignity.

China and Russia are proof that open markets have not led to open societies. Human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, trade union representatives and other civil society leaders were harassed, attacked, or killed with impunity in every world region last year. From Gaza to Darfur and from eastern DRC to northern Sri Lanka, the human toll of conflict has been horrendous, and the lukewarm response of the international community shocking.

Huge resources are being dedicated to fight piracy off the coast of Somalia but not to stop the flow of arms that kill civilians in that country. Military action is being stepped up in Afghanistan and Pakistan but the human rights and humanitarian implications of the conflicts are being underplayed.

Ignoring one crisis to focus on another is a recipe for aggravating both. Economic recovery will be neither sustainable nor equitable if governments fail to tackle abuses that drive and deepen poverty, or armed conflicts that generate new violations.

Our first demand in our new campaign is to the USA and China. The US does not accept the notion of economic, cultural and social rights while China does not respect civil and political rights. Both governments must sign up to all human rights for all. Solutions to global problems must be underpinned by global values of human rights – and those at the top table of world leadership must begin by setting an example.

Taken from a foreword by Amnesty International’s secretary-general to its new report, ‘Underlying the Economic Crisis is a Human Rights Time Bomb’

© 2009 The Independent
Irene Khan is Secretary General for Amnesty International.

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