Peace and Justice Post

The blockade imposed on Gaza is a powerful psychological device aimed at wringing concessions from Gazans and Hamas.

Life in Gaza has been reduced to relying on human ingenuity and improvisation [Getty]

Gaza “the giant open prison” are not the words of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Nor were they scripted by Hamas’ Khaled Mishaal or Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas. They belong to David Cameron, the young and charismatic British prime minister.

Since the imposition of the Gaza blockade nearly four years ago, no single European leader has voiced moral outrage over the sanctions with such alacrity, simplicity and forcefulness. His words have reverberated widely in Gaza as well as elsewhere in the Arab world.

Like Cameron’s words, the untold misery shatters the international political society’s quasi silence and questions the immorality of indifference and inaction towards the blockade.

Gazans need to reclaim their state of dignity and humanity before reclaiming the seemingly illusionary hope of a Palestinian state. A peek inside the ‘big prison’ reveals the blockade to be multi-layered – affecting economy, polity, diplomacy and security.

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By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers,  Nov 4, 2010

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the influential Kashmiri separatist leader, discusses the situation in Srinagar, Inida. Geelani, is under house arrest. | Dion Nissenbaum / MCT

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SRINAGAR, India — Shortly before winning the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama said that as part of his drive to end the Afghanistan conflict, he’d take on one of South Asia’s most intractable issues — competing claims to Kashmir by nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India — even if it meant wading into a “tar pit” with little chance of quick resolution.

Two years later, although Kashmir is simmering after months of destabilizing violence, the conflict is all but off the agenda as Obama arrives this weekend for his first presidential trip to India.

A humbling Election Day for the president and his Democratic Party over domestic economic discontent leaves little room for him to embark on another risky foreign peace initiative. India’s rejection of outside mediation also makes it difficult for Obama to push the issue as he tries to woo leaders of the economic powerhouse.

But Kashmiri leaders are warning the president that it would be a strategic mistake to ignore the most dangerous spiral of violence to consume the picturesque valley in years.

“We are not asking the Americans to take a position against India or for Kashmir,” said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader who heads Kashmir’s umbrella group of secessionist politicians. “We are just saying that there is a general realization that India and Pakistan need to be pushed in terms of a dialogue.”

More than 700,000 Indian forces keep a tight grip on the predominantly Muslim population that launched a revolt in 1989 and rose up again this summer in a protracted series of stone-throwing protests that left more than 110 people dead. Though the worst of the violence has subsided, Indian forces regularly arrest protest leaders and impose curfews on activist strongholds in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, and its surrounding villages.

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Norway’s government has promised to pursue reports of major US surveillance operations across the city of Oslo, with the Justice Ministry expected to take over the issue following Foreign Ministry attempts to get answers from the US embassy.

“We did not get comprehensive answers,” noted Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stone after the ministry met with US embassy officials. Justice Minister Knut Storberget insisted he had no prior knowledge of the US operation, which apparently used former police officers employed by the US embassy.

The story was broken by Norway’s TV2 channel, which found in an investigation that the US embassy was conducting “illegal systematic surveillance of Norwegian citizens.” The report said the former police officers were taking pictures and “registering” lists of Norwegian citizens who might be a threat to American interests.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed the spying operation, but insisted that Norway’s government had been informed of it. He added that a lot of American embassies conduct similar operations.

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.

“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”

The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.

“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”

Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, “a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban… That was later turned into the official justification for the war.”

“All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal,” Chomsky said.

The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country.

Nine years on, however, the American and Afghan officials admit that the country remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the heaviest price.

AHRC, Nov 4, 2010

The Asian Human Rights Commission has followed the case of Nyi Nyi Htun, the editor of a Karenni state-based news journal, who was charged for upsetting public tranquility by sending news reports outside Burma. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison on 13 October 2010 by the Seikkan Township court.

Police officers from the Yangon Division Police Chief Office arrested Nyi Nyi Htun in Thingangyun Township of Yangon Division upon suspicion of having connections with a series of bomb blasts in Yangon in October 2009. Nyi Nyi Htun was kept in police custody and tortured continuously for six days at the Yangon Divisional Police Headquarters. The police later confiscated a computer, a memory stick and other documents at his house.

The ALRC, the AHRC’s sister organization, has already submitted a statement to UN Human Rights Council regarding the brutal torture Nyi Nyi Htun has been exposed to. Kindly note ALRC-CWS-15-05-2010.

Nyi Nyi Htun was charged for being involved with an illegal organizations based at the Thai-Burma boarder under section 17(1) of the Unlawful Associations Act, section 13(1) of the Immigration Emergency Provisions Act, section 6(1) of the Wireless Act. Further he was charged with upsetting public tranquility under section 505(b) of the Penal Code.

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By Bill Blum, ZNet, Nov 3, 2010

Bill Blum’s ZSpace Page

Jon Stewart and the left

The left in America is desperate; desperate for someone who can inspire them, if not lead them to a better world; or at least make them laugh. TV star Jon Stewart is sometimes funny, especially when he doesn’t try too hard to be funny, which is not often enough. But as a political leader, or simply political educator for the left, forget it. He’s not even what I would call a genuine, committed leftist. What does he have to teach the left? He himself would certainly not want you to entertain the thought that Jon Stewart is in any way a man of the left.

He billed his October 30 rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC, as the Million Moderate March. Would a person with a real desire for important progressive social and political change, i.e, a “leftist”, so ostentatiously brand himself a “moderate”? Even if by “moderate” he refers mainly to tone of voice or choice of words why is that so important? If a politician strongly supports things which you are passionate about, why should it bother you if the politician is vehement in his arguments, even angry? And if the politician is strongly against what you’re passionate about does it make you feel any better about the guy if he never raises his voice or sharply criticizes those on the other side? What kind of cause is that to commit yourself to?

Stewart in fact appears to dislike the left, perhaps strongly. In the leadup to the rally he criticized the left for various things, including calling George W. Bush a “war criminal”. Wow! How immoderate of us. Do I have to list here the 500 war crimes committed by George W. Bush? If I did so, would that make me one of what Stewart calls the “crazies”? In his talk at the rally, Stewart spoke of our “real fears” — “of terrorists, racists, Stalinists, and theocrats”. Stalinists? Where did that come from, Glenn Beck? What decade is Stewart living in. What about capitalists or the corporations? Is there no reason to fear them? Is it Stalinists who are responsible for the collapse of our jobs and homes, our economy? Writer Chris Hedges asks: “Being nice and moderate will not help. These are corporate forces that are intent on reconfiguring the United States into a system of neofeudalism. These corporate forces will not be halted by funny signs, comics dressed up like Captain America or nice words.”

Stewart also grouped together “Marxists actively subverting our constitution, racists and homophobes”. Welcome to the Jon Stewart Tea Party. In his long interview last week of President Obama on his TV show, Stewart did not mention any of America’s wars. That would have been impolite and divisive; maybe even not nice.

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By HIROAKI SATO, The Japan Times,Oct 31, 2010

NEW YORK — One aspect of the modern sense of war, be it delusional, duplicitous or both, was palpable in two articles paired at the top of the front page of The New York Times toward the end of September. The headline of one said “Drug Use Cited In Killings of 3 Civilians”; the headline of the other, “CIA INTENSIFIES DRONE CAMPAIGN WITHIN PAKISTAN.”

One had to do with old-fashioned murder by infantrymen on the ground, the other with ultramodern murder by electronically operated vehicles in the sky. Those involved in the former sometimes face charges of war crime. Those involved in the latter face no such bother — though they may be at times “criticized” for their incompetence.

The main points of the first story are these: Five soldiers in a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan are investigated by a military court in Washington State for killing three unarmed Afghan civilians on three separate occasions earlier this year, for “no apparent reason.” They are provided with defense lawyers to raise some fuss.

“The soldiers are accused of possessing dismembered body parts, including fingers and a skull.” Some were photographed with the heads of dead Afghans.

One of them may or may not have been under medication for battlefield trauma. In any case, the use of “illegal drugs” was rampant among the soldiers of the unit — on “bad days, stressful days, days that we just needed to escape,” as one of them said.

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By Michael Parenti, Countercurrents, 23 September , 2010

When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States an empire. It was widely believed that U.S. rulers did not pursue empire; they intervened abroad only out of self-defense or for humanitarian rescue operations or to restore order in a troubled region or overthrow tyranny, fight terrorism, and propagate democracy.

But by the year 2000, everyone started talking about the United States as an empire and writing books with titles like Sorrows of Empire, Follies of Empire, Twilight of Empire, or Empire of Illusions— all referring to the United States when they spoke of empire.

Even conservatives started using the word. Amazing. One could hear right-wing pundits announcing on U.S. television, “We’re an empire, with all the responsibilities and opportunities of empire and we better get used to it”; and “We are the strongest nation in the world and have every right to act as such”—as if having the power gives U.S. leaders an inherent entitlement to exercise it upon others as they might wish.

“What is going on here?” I asked myself at the time. How is it that so many people feel free to talk about empire when they mean a United States empire? The ideological orthodoxy had always been that, unlike other countries, the USA did not indulge in colonization and conquest.

The answer, I realized, is that the word has been divested of its full meaning. “Empire” seems nowadays to mean simply dominion and control. Empire—for most of these late-coming critics— is concerned almost exclusively with power and prestige. What is usually missing from the public discourse is the process of empire and its politico-economic content. In other words, while we hear a lot about empire, we hear very little about imperialism.

Now that is strange, for imperialism is what empires are all about. Imperialism is what empires do. And by imperialism I do not mean the process of extending power and dominion without regard to material and financial interests. Indeed “imperialism” has been used by some authors in the same empty way that they use the word “empire,” to simply denote dominion and control with little attention given to political economic realities.

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Stephen Zunes, The Huffington Post, Nov 4, 2010

The Pentagon has announced a $60 billion arms package to the repressive family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, the largest arms sale of its kind in history. Rejecting the broad consensus of arms control advocates that the Middle East is too militarized already and that the Saudis already possess military capabilities well in excess of their legitimate security needs, the Obama administration is effectively insisting that this volatile region does not yet have enough armaments and that the United States must send even more.

According to reports, Washington is planning to sell 84 new F-15 fighters and three types of helicopters: 72 Black Hawks, 70 Apaches and 36 Little Birds. There are also reports of naval missile-defense upgrades in the works.

Though supporters of such arms sales argue that if the United States did not sell weapons to the oil-rich kingdom, someone else would, neither the Obama administration nor its predecessors have ever expressed interest in pursuing any kind of arms control agreement with other arms-exporting countries. A number of other arms exporters, such as Germany, are now expressing their opposition to further arms transfers to the region due to the risks of exacerbating tensions and promoting a regional arms race.

The United States is by far the largest arms exporter in the world, surpassing Russia — the second-largest arms exporter — by nearly two to one.

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