Peace and Justice Post

Middle East Online, Oct 14, 2010

The monorail will link Mecca with the holy sites

16 Chinese workers will be deported for protesting for higher wages, better working conditions.

RIYADH – Saudi authorities are deporting 16 Chinese workers on a light railway project in the Muslim holy city of Mecca after they led a protest for higher wages, Saudi media said on Thursday.

The 16 were arrested on Tuesday after a strike by Chinese workers over pay and conditions that saw several vehicles damaged, the Al-Watan newspaper reported citing a Mecca police spokesman.

Earlier reports said workers on the project were frustrated by low pay, non-payment of wages and the high temperatures they endure working in the desert kingdom.

Several hundred Chinese workers were brought in by a consortium led by China Railway Corp for the planned 1.8 billion dollar rapid transport system to serve pilgrims visiting the Muslim holy places.

The monorail will link Mecca with the holy sites of Mina, Arafat and Muzdalifah, which are visited by massive tides of pilgrims during the annual hajj.

Begun in early 2009, the project is scheduled to be partially in operation in time for this year’s hajj, which begins around November 14.

There has been criticism of the carriages the consortium intends to use on the monorail but Al-Watan reported that it had been rejected by the Chinese.

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says despite United Nations Human Rights Council findings that Israel clearly broke international law in its raid of the Gaza Strip Flotilla, the US has yet to condemn the action…

By Mahir Ali, ZNet, October 13, 2010

Mahir Ali’s ZSpace Page

That it appeared just as these relations were entering an increasingly fraught phase in the wake of Nato military incursions into Pakistani territory, the temporary closure of supply routes and the series of attacks on Nato tankers is merely a coincidence, albeit one that conforms to a long-standing pattern of mutual mistrust.

Although the Bush administration went out of its way to coddle Pervez Musharraf, plenty of Americans were consistently convinced that Pakistan was playing a double game of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The advent of the even more pliable Asif Zardari held out the promise of fewer problems on that score. Woodward quotes him as telling “CIA officials privately in late 2008 that any innocent deaths from the [drone] strikes were the cost of doing business against senior Al Qaeda leaders. ‘Kill the seniors,’ Zardari had said. ‘Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.’ “

The degree of moral abstemiousness inherent in that “What, me worry?” style of statement shouldn’t surprise anyone. More alarming is the apparent absence of any sense that the deaths of innocents serve as an invaluable recruitment tool for the Taliban.

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Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, Barghouthi proposed a set of initiatives to “surpass the intractable impasse in the so called peace process,” which he described as “meaningless and damaging” while Israeli settlement building continues.

The declaration calls on “all states, governments and international institutions recognize the Palestinian state and its borders immediately,” as well as lobbying the UN General Assembly to issue a recognition of the state on 4 June 1967 and “a demand that Israel end the occupation of its land, borders, airspace, and water resources, removing all illegal settlements from Palestinian territories.”

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People’s Daily Online, Oct 12, 2010

NATO helicopters violated Pakistan’s airspace Tuesday morning near Chaman border area in the southwest Balochistan province, local media reported citing official sources.

According to details, two NATO helicopters flew 200 meters inside Pakistani territory and returned after creating panic and fear among the border area residents, official sources added.

The NATO helicopters continued flights inside Pakistani territory for 20 minutes and had entered through “Bab-e-Dosti” or the Friendship Gate area on Pakistan-Afghanistan border, local media reported.

This is the second violation of Pakistani airspace by NATO gunship choppers within a week, official sources said.

Earlier on September 30, two NATO gunship fired rockets at paramilitary checkpoint in Kurram tribal area in the northwest border with Afghanistan, killing three troops and injuring an equal number.

Consequently, Pakistan blocked its Torkham border for NATO supplies for ten days. It was resumed on Sunday after a written apology by NATO to Pakistan government. The blockade strained bilateral relations between Pakistan and the United States, which is leading the war against terrorism in this region.

Moreover, the supply to NATO troops in Afghanistan was once again temporarily halted near Chaman border area Tuesday morning, as protestors blocked highway against sluggish road construction in southwest Balochistan province of Pakistan, local Urdu language media reported.

The Quetta-Chaman highway was broken at many places and is being under construction for many months. The slow pace of construction work is not only disrupting the traffic flow but convoys speed as well, local sources said, adding that the damaged road has also increased the frequency of wear and tear of tires and vehicles.

Over a thousand miles stretch from southern port city of Karachi to Torkham is backbone of vital supply to more than 140, 000 NATO troops fighting insurgency in Afghanistan since the ouster of Taliban government in 2001. Two border points at Chaman in Balochistan and Torkham in the troubled northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are used as entry points into Afghanistan.

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas stands by her controversial remarks on Israel that led to her retirement.

Associated Press, Oct 12, 2010

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas has acknowledged she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas has acknowledged she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement, but she says the comments were “exactly what I thought.”

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Eisenhower.

She has kept a low profile since then.

“(It was) very hard for the first two weeks. After that, I came out of my coma,” said Thomas, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon.

Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he’d been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied.

“Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland,” she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, “They should go home.”

“Where’s home?” Nesenoff asked.

“Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else,” Thomas replied.

“I told him exactly what I thought,” she told Spears, who said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America. Thomas did not disagree.

“I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else,” she said.

“They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land,” said Thomas. There was no explanation of whom “they” referred to.

When she soon began getting calls about her remark, “I said this is the end of my job.”

She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. “At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel’s aggression and brutality,” Thomas said.

Asked whether she’s anti-Semitic, she responded “Baloney!” She said she wants to be remembered for “integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism” and would like to work again.

Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, some 70 kilometres north of Columbus, Ohio.

Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.

Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “a hawk.” ”I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal,” Thomas said.

As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.

“That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy,” she said, describing Palin as “very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable.”

Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: “Frightening.”

by James Petras, Dissident Voice,  October 11th, 2010

The abortive military-police coup in Ecuador, which took place on September 30, has raised numerous questions about the role of the US and its allies among the traditional oligarchy and the leftist social movements, Indian organizations and their political parties.

While President Correa and all governments in Latin America, and significant sectors of the Ecuadorian public described the violent actions as a coup, the principle organ of Wall Street – the Wall Street Journal – described it as a “police protest”. Spoke persons for Goldman Sachs and the Council of Foreign Relations referred to the police and military power grab against the democratically elected government as a self-induced “political crises” of the President. While the coup was underway the “Indian” movement CONAIE, launched a manifesto condemning the government, while the “Indian” party Pachakutik supported the ouster of the President and backed the police coup as a “just act of public servants”.

In summary, the imperial backers of the coup, sectors of the Ecuadorian elite and Indian movement downplayed the violent police uprising as a coup in order to justify their support for it as just another “legitimate economic protest”. In other words, the victim of the elite coup was converted into the repressor of the peoples’ will. The factual question of whether their was a coup or not, is central to deciding whether the government was justified in repressing the police uprising and whether in fact the democratic system was endangered.

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By Dr. Elias Akleh, intifada-palestine.com, Oct 11, 2010

Palestinians had long lost confidence in their Palestinian Authority as their representative, who was supposed to defend their rights and work to achieve their statehood. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, was imposed on the Palestinians in the 2005 election when the Israeli forces had arrested and restricted the movements of other Palestinian candidates and his campaign was given 94% of TV coverage. Although his presidency had expired in January of 2009 he is still, illegally and unconstitutionally, occupying his position. Polls had shown that his popularity is very low.

Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and his government were also imposed on Palestinians when Abbas appointed him to the position after the democratically elected Hamas government foiled an American coup d’état that eventually caused a division between the Palestinians.

The Palestinians were deceived by the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They were misled that the Accords would be merely the first step in a plan that would eventually lead to Israeli withdrawal back to the 1967 Armistice Lines and to the establishment of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 1995. Thus Yasser Arafat had dramatically altered the charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to reflect a new strategy of denouncing the legitimate armed resistance (labeled violence at the time), abandoning the liberation of all Palestine, accepting and recognizing the existence of the Israeli state on 78% of Palestine, and announcing peaceful negotiations as the only strategic choice for solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

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