Peace and Justice Post

Al Jazeera, Aug 14, 2010

At least 20 million people have now been affected by heavy flooding across Pakistan, the country’s prime minister has announced, calling the disaster the nation’s “worst-ever calamity”.

Yousuf Raza Gilani urged Pakistanis on Saturday to “join hands” to help deal with the crisis, which has left more than 1,600 people dead across the country.

“This natural disaster has brought a huge devastation and approximately 20 million people have been affected by it,” he said in a sombre address marking Pakistan’s independence from British colonial rule 63 years ago.

“[It] destroyed standing crops and food storages worth billions of dollars, causing colossal loss to the national economy.

“Therefore, despite all out efforts by the government, all available aid seems to be inadequate. I would appeal to the world community to extend a helping hand to fight this calamity.”

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The New York Times

Aabid Nabi, right, sat next to his brother Fida Nabi, who was shot in the head during a protest, in a hospital in Srinagar. Mr. Nabi later died from his injury. More Photos »

By LYDIA POLGREEN, New York Times, Aug 12, 2010

The New York Times

Mr. Nabi was the 50th person to die in Kashmir’s bloody summer of rage. He had been shot in the head, his family and witnesses said, during a protest against India’s military presence in this disputed province.

For decades, India maintained hundreds of thousands of security forces in Kashmir to fight an insurgency sponsored by Pakistan, which claims this border region, too. The insurgency has been largely vanquished. But those Indian forces are still here, and today they face a threat potentially more dangerous to the world’s largest democracy: an intifada-like popular revolt against the Indian military presence that includes not just stone-throwing young men but their sisters, mothers, uncles and grandparents.

The protests, which have erupted for a third straight summer, have led India to one of its most serious internal crises in recent memory. Not just because of their ferocity and persistence, but because they signal the failure of decades of efforts to win the assent of Kashmiris using just about any tool available: money, elections and overwhelming force.

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Middle East Online, Aug 13, 2010

Prominent experts: the official cause of death was ‘extremely unlikely’

Calls for inquest into death of UK weapons inspector who exposed ‘sexed up’ Iraq dossier.

LONDON – A group of prominent experts on Friday called for a full inquest into the death of British government weapons inspector David Kelly, whose apparent suicide in July 2003 plunged then prime minister Tony Blair into crisis.

The eight senior figures said in a letter to The Times newspaper that the official cause of death in the Kelly case, haemorrhage, was “extremely unlikely” in the light of evidence since made public.

The signatories included a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.

Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in Oxfordshire, southern England, in 2003 after he was exposed as the source for a BBC story that alleged that Blair’s government had “sexed up” intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

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by Matthew Rothschild, The progressive, Aug 13, 2010

by Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, Aug 13, 2010

Four months before WikiLeaks rocketed to international notoriety, the Robin Hoods of the Internet quietly published a confidential CIA document labeled “NOFORN” (for “no foreign nationals”)-meaning that it should not be shared even with US allies. That’s because the March “Red Cell Special Memorandum” was a call to arms for a propaganda war to influence public opinion in allied nations. The CIA report describes a crisis in European support for the Afghanistan war, noting that 80 percent of German and French citizens are against increasing their countries’ military involvement. The report suggests that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the [International Security Assistance Force] role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory.”

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Dr. Lawrence Davidson, Intifada Palestine, Aug 8, 2010

Netanyahu compared Hamas to the Nazis and the firing of Qassam rockets with the London Blitz during World War II

“Unfortunately, even if you believe that Israel is a necessary retreat for threatened Jewry, the use of the Holocaust as a justification for Israel and its policies is a grave strategic mistake. For by underpinning its continued existence on preventing a second Holocaust, the defenders of Israel invite some of their adversaries to call into doubt the first Holocaust”

On August 5, 2010 Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, citing a Fars (Iran) news service story, reported that a non-governmental organization in Iran had “launched a Website with cartoons on the Holocaust aimed at undermining the historic dimensions of the mass murder of Jews.” Israelis and Zionists reacted angrily to this announcement. Spokesmen at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum stated that the website was “yet the latest salvo emanating from Iran that denies the facts of the Holocaust and attempts to influence those who are ignorant of history.” The Haaretz report also noted, somewhat resentfully, that “since the 1979 Islamic revolution , Iran has not acknowledged Israel as a sovereign state and even refrained from using the name Israel, instead referring to the Jewish state as the Zionist regime.”

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I can barely believe the words I am writing are not a nightmare from which I will soon wake up.

A third of Pakistan is now under water, and fresh rainfall threatens two more waves of flooding in the southern Sindh province.

Courtesy BBC

The submerged area of the country is as big as the United Kingdom!

14 million Pakistans have been affected.

2 million have been made altogether homeless.

6 million people are in need of immediate help.

The United Nations is now calling for nearly half a billion dollars in international aid for Pakistan, in the face of a weird resistance on the part of the world community to step up and help. When Pakistan faced a relatively minor security threat from a small guerrilla movement of Pakistani Taliban in the northwest, the world community ponied up billions in aid. This much more devastating flood is not generating the same enthusiasm for helping the country.

Oxfam America is taking donations for the Pakistan relief effort.

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By Ray McGovern, Consortiumnews.com, August 12, 2010

I guess I was naïve in thinking that The Atlantic and its American-Israeli writer Jeffrey Goldberg might shy away from arguing for yet another war — this one with Iran — while the cauldrons are still boiling in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s worth remembering how Goldberg helped to make the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. For instance, on Oct. 3, 2002, as America’s war fever was building, Goldberg wrote in Slate, the online magazine:

“The [Bush] administration is planning … to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.”

Looking back on Goldberg’s commentaries at the time, it’s also a reminder of how many U.S. publications that are considered centrist or even liberal were bending over backward to get in line with that coming invasion.

Even earlier, on March 25, 2002, Goldberg filled the pages of The New Yorker with a mammoth 17,000-word story hyping Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s ties to terrorism and glossing over the ambiguities regarding the gassing of civilians in the Kurdish city of Halabja during the Iran-Iraq war.

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Since 1967, Israel has prevented the growth of Palestinian communities in the Jordan Valley by cutting off their water supply or declaring large areas as live fire zones.

Amira Haas, Haaretz/Israel, July 17, 2010

The IDF’s Civil Administration destroyed a Palestinian village Monday morning that had earlier been cleared out when its water supply was cut off.

The IDF demolished about 55 structures in the West Bank village of Farasiya, including tents, tin shacks, plastic and straw huts, clay ovens, sheep pens and bathrooms. These structures served the 120 farmers, hired workers and their families who lived in the Jordan Valley village.

The Civil Administration said they had declared the area a live fire zone and posted eviction orders for 10 families in tents on June 27.

“Since no appeal was filed in the following three weeks, and given the danger posed by the location of the tents, they were removed,” they said in response.

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