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The arrest and trial of human rights activist Shiva Nazar-Ahari is part of an ongoing narrative.
Dorothy Parvaz, Al Jazeera, Last Modified: 07 Sep
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The rearrest and trial of Iranian human rights activist and journalist Shiva Nazar-Ahari adds another name and face to a long list of those targeted by the government there, charged with a list of extraordinary offences and subjected to an opaque justice system. Hers is not an exceptional case, as the government continues to expand its crackdowns beyond the leaders of the opposition and those who follow them in protest marches. Women’s rights activist are also targeted, and such is the situation for women’s rights advocate and attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh, whose home and office were raided a week ago. According to Gooyanews.com, security forces seized personal effects, computers and files. Sotoudeh was ordered to report to the public prosecutor’s office with her attorney, Nasim Ghanavi, who was told that she could not accompany her client during questioning. Charged with threatening national security and collusion, Sotoudeh was arrested on Sunday and taken to Evin prison. Like Alikarami, Sotoudeh worked with Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and has been harassed repeatedly by the government. In an interview with International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran prior to her arrest – Sotoudeh, who has been told to cease her activities, said that she had previously been called before the tax authorities. “I was referred to the taxation bureau and while there I noticed in addition to my name, they are conducting special investigations into 30 human rights lawyers,” she said, adding that the government is targeting human rights lawyers on tax charges because they take on pro-bono cases. “The only institution capable of defending lawyers is the Bar Association, but the authorities are putting it under tremendous pressure and attempting to incorporate it into the judiciary and take away its independence.” |
Archive for September, 2010
A mysterious judicial system in Iran
September 8, 2010
ElBaradei calls for Egypt election boycott
September 7, 2010Middle East Online, First Published 2010-09-07
‘The next few months will be decisive for reform’
Ex IAEA chief will press on with campaign to gather signatures ‘for change’ before organising ‘peaceful protests’ for reform.
CAIRO – Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief turned Egyptian reformer, has called for a boycott of a general election due later this year, an independent daily reported on Tuesday.
“We will boycott the upcoming election because anyone taking part will be acting against the will of the people,” ElBaradei said, according to the Shorouk newspaper.
Egypt is due to go to the polls for a parliamentary election in November ahead of a presidential election due next year.
ElBaradei, 68, has ruled out standing in next year’s vote unless the constitution, which places restrictions on independent candidates, is reformed.
Veteran President Hosni Mubarak, 82, has not yet said whether he will stand again, but is widely believed to be grooming his son Gamal for the succession.
Europe’s Alliance with Israel
September 7, 2010By David Cronin , ZNet, Sep 7, 2010
Change Text Size a- | A+ David Cronin’s ZSpace Page
Nine years after it was delivered, Tony Blair’s speech to the 2001 Labour Party conference remains a chilling piece of hubris and hypocrisy. Britain’s government, he claimed, was not only concerned with the well-being of its own people but with the entire planet. “The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountains of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.”
Blair’s protégé Catherine Ashton has evidently learned a few tricks from the war criminal who masquerades as a peace envoy. As the EU’s foreign policy chief (“high representative” in Brussels parlance), Ashton has been diligently spreading the myth that she and other senior European politicians are even-handed in dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
IDF document: “policy principle: separating Gaza from West Bank”
September 7, 2010
uruknet.info, Sept 6, 2010
Noam Sheizaf, Promised Land,
An IDF Powerpoint slideshow, presented before the Turkel committee for the investigation of the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, reveals the official goals of the Israeli policy regarding the Gaza strip.
The slideshow, prepared by The Administration for the Coordination of Government Policy in the Territories – the IDF body in charge of carrying out Israeli government policies regarding the civilian population in the West Bank and Gaza – deals with the humanitarian conditions in the strip; with food, water, fuel and electricity supply and with the condition of medical facilities in Gaza.
download the IDF slideshow [Hebrew] here
The first set of slides details the background for the current activities of The Administration for the Coordination of Government Policy in the Territories. Slide number 15 details the principles of Israeli policy:
– Responding to the humanitarian needs of the population.
– Upholding civilian and economic limitations on the [Gaza] strip.
– Separating [or differentiating, בידול] Judea and Samaria [i.e. West Bank] from Gaza – a security and diplomatic objective.
– Preserving the Quartet’s conditions on Hamas (Hamas as a terrorist entity).
Slide 20 deals with freedom of movement from and to the Gaza strip. Policy objectives are:
– Limiting people from entering or exiting the strip, in accordance with the government’s decision.
– Separating [differentiating] Judea and Samaria from Gaza.
– Dealing with humanitarian needs.
– Preserving the activity of humanitarian organizations in the strip.
– Keeping a coordinating mechanism with the Palestinian Authority.
Bacevich: America’s Empire and Endless Wars Are Destroying the World, and Ruining Our Great Country
September 7, 2010For more than 50 years, Washington has subscribed to the absurd notion that America can police the world with military action. All we’ve managed to do is bankrupt our country.
AlterNet, Sep 6, 2010
Andrew Bacevich speaks with a fairly unique mix of experience, authority, passion and wisdom in questioning our nation’s priorities: specifically our willingness to place so much of our national identity, wealth, attention, moral practice, and finally the life and blood of many thousands of our citizens and millions of those of other countries in the hands of our military. A professor of history and international relations at Boston University, Bacevich served twenty-three years in the U.S. Army, retiring with the rank of colonel. He lost his son in Iraq. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. He is the author of several books, including The New American Militarism; The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism; and his newest, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War.
McNally: Your book, Washington Rules, opens with a moment that you offer as a turning point: could you share that experience?
Blair Reveals Cheney’s War Agenda
September 7, 2010by Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com, September 8, 2010
Ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new memoir offers the expected rationalizations for his joining in an illegal, aggressive war against Iraq, even to the point of quibbling about the death toll. But Blair does reveal how much more war was favored by Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons.
In A Journey: My Political Life, Blair depicts Cheney as believing the United States was at war not only with Islamic terrorists but with “rogue states that supported them” and that “the only way of defeating [this threat] was head-on, with maximum American strength.”
Cheney wanted forcible “regime change” in all Middle Eastern countries that he considered hostile to U.S. interests, according to Blair.
“He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it – Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.,” Blair wrote. “In other words, he [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.”
Over the years, there have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America’s – and Israel’s – “enemies” starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public.
Usually, the scheme could be found only in obscure neocon policy papers or as part of Washington scuttlebutt. After the Iraq invasion, a favorite neocon joke was whether to next head west toward Damascus or east to Tehran with the punch line, “real men go to Tehran.”
Under this neocon plan, once “regime change” was achieved in Syria and Iran, then Israel’s front-line adversaries, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, would be left impoverished and isolated. Israel could dictate settlement terms to the Palestinians and incorporate the Jewish settlements on prime West Bank land into a Greater Israel.
Israel and Palestine: A true one-state solution
September 6, 2010by Paul Woodward, War in Context, on September 3, 2010
Israel should adapt to the 21st century. Is that really a utopian idea?
As Tony Judt succinctly distilled the issue a few years ago: “The very idea of a ‘Jewish state’ — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.”
President Obama’s “bold” departure from the position of his predecessor is that he has repeatedly asserted — as he did again on Wednesday — that “the status quo is unsustainable — for Israelis, for Palestinians, for the region and for the world.”
An occupation that has continued for 43 years has certainly proved very durable — sufficient reason for half a million Israelis to defy the claim that the status quo is unsustainable as they carry on living in the West Bank.
The focus of skepticism should in fact be focused less on the sustainability of the status quo than on the realistic prospects for a two-state solution. Such a resolution appears no more imminent now than it did when it was first proposed 73 years ago. In that period whole empires have risen and fallen and yet we’re still supposed to imagine that a Palestinian state is lurking just over the horizon?
As the Zionists have understood all along, it is the facts on the ground that shape the future and none of these facts point towards a partition of land upon which two people’s lives are now so deeply intertwined.
One state already exists. The challenge ahead is not how it can be divided, but how all those already living within its borders can enjoy the civil rights that belong to the citizens of all Western states — the part of the world to which Israel’s leaders so often profess their deepest affiliation.
India urged to free Kashmiri detainess ahead of Eid al-Fitr
September 6, 2010World Bulletin / News Desk, Sep 6, 2010
A Kashmiri leader called on India to release Kashmiri detainees who were arrested without charges ahead of Eid al-Fitr, a report said.
The Chairman of All Parties Hurriyet Conference, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in a statement issued in Srinagar urged India to release all the “illegally” detained Kashmiris before Eid al-Fitr.
Human rights workers have complained for years that innocent people have disappeared, been killed by government forces in staged gunbattles, and suspected fighters have been arrested and never heard from again.
Mirwaiz also appealed to the world human rights organisations to send their teams to Kashmir for cognisance of “the miserable plight” of the detainees at different jails in and outside the territory, Kashmiri Media Service said.
An other Kashmiri leader, Farooq Ahmed Dar, was quoted as saying: “India would not be able to suppress Kashmiris’ liberation struggle by resorting to brute force.”
Kashmiris see India as an “occupier” and accuse the ruling of systematic violations, killing dozens of civilians in Himalayan region.
Authorities deny any systematic violations and say all reports are investigated and the guilty punished.
Chris Floyd: Emissions of Evil From the Oval Office
September 6, 2010By Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque, Sep 1, 2010
On Tuesday night, Barack Obama gave a speech from the Oval Office on Iraq that was almost as full of hideous, murderous lies as the speech on Iraq his predecessor gave in the same location more than seven years ago.
After mendaciously declaring an “end to the combat mission in Iraq” — where almost 50,000 regular troops and a similar number of mercenaries still remain, carrying out the same missions they have been doing for years — Obama delivered what was perhaps the most egregious, bitterly painful lie of the night:
“Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility.”
“We have met our responsibility!” No, Mister President, we have not. Not until many Americans of high degree stand in the dock for war crimes. Not until the United States pays hundreds of billions of dollars in unrestricted reparations to the people of Iraq for the rape of their country and the mass murder of their people. Not until the United States opens its borders to accept all those who have been and will be driven from Iraq by the savage ruin we have inflicted upon them, or in flight from the vicious thugs and sectarians we have loosed — and empowered — in the land. Not until you, Mister President, go down on your knees, in sackcloth and ashes, and proclaim a National of Day of Shame to be marked each year by lamentations, reparations and confessions of blood guilt for our crime against humanity in Iraq.
Do Americans Know What Happened in Iraq?
September 6, 2010A Fox News poll released last week indicates the majority of Americans feel the Iraq war was a success. It also suggests they want to get past it and focus on other things. This is good and bad. It is good that average Americans can put our invasion of Iraq in 2003 out of their minds. It is bad because it indicates they don’t know what happened, or don’t care.
According to the Fox News article, 900 people were surveyed by telephone and asked questions such as “Do you think the war was a success?” “Do you think the Iraqi people are better off now than before the war?” However, the survey didn’t ask some very important questions. For example, it didn’t ask the respondents questions such as “Have you ever been to Iraq?” “Have you ever read a book about the Iraq War?” “Do you know the number of Iraqis who died in the war?” These would be very interesting questions to ask along with the others. They would gauge the level of knowledge and awareness of the respondents to judge the veracity of the answers they gave. According to the Fox News article:
“Despite its contentious history, most American voters appear to have made a positive judgment about the country’s efforts in Iraq. Almost six in 10 (58 percent) voters think, overall, the United States ‘did the right thing’ by going to war, according to the latest Fox News poll.
“A little over one-third of voters (35 percent) take the opposite view – that the U.S. “did the wrong thing” by becoming involved militarily in Iraq. From a partisan perspective, there is still division – as 54 percent of Democrats think the U.S. did the wrong thing in Iraq, while only 14 percent of Republicans feel the same way. A slim majority of independents (52 percent) think the U.S. did the right thing in Iraq.”
Peace and Justice Post 