Peace and Justice Post

Christian clergy will commemorate the birth in the Palestinian town of Bethlehem of their saviour as the son of God who had no place to lay his head and was, accordingly, born in a manger.

In Palestine today, lack of shelter remains a major problem for the people of Gaza, many of whom have been condemned to live in tents for the past two years.

Monday will mark the second anniversary of Israel’s unjustified military assault on the coastal enclave, when its armed forces wiped out over 1,400 Palestinians in just over three weeks.

The attack was designed to destroy social infrastructure to make people’s lives unbearable as a way of turning the Palestinian people against Hamas, which they had backed in free and democratic elections.

Israel has tightened the blockade against Gaza, despite international condemnation of this collective punishment of civilians, which is classified by the Geneva conventions as a war crime.

The occupying power, which presses ahead with its illegal colonisation of the West Bank, refuses to allow concrete or other building supplies into Gaza, preventing both the Palestinians themselves and the United Nations from beginning vital reconstruction.

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Information Clearing House, Dec  22, 2010

Video Documentary,

John Pilger says in the film: “We journalists… have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else’s country… In this age of endless imperial war, the lives of countless men, women and children depend on the truth or their blood is on us… Those whose job it is to keep the record straight ought to be the voice of people, not power.”

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by Gareth Porter, CommonDreams.org, Dec 23, 2010

WASHINGTON – This week’s leak to the New York Times of a proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids against Afghan insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against those sanctuaries.

Spc. Randy.J. Lockwood of Muskegon Michigan of 2nd Platoon Bravo Company 2-327 Infantry stand guard as Afghan men greet each other in Chowkay district near Pakistani border in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan, Wednesday, Dec 22, 2010.(AP / Rafiq Maqbool)

But the proposal for such cross-border raids also reflects a real demand from the U.S.-NATO command in Afghanistan to target insurgent leaders inside Pakistan if the Pakistani military does not respond to the threat, according to a U.S. source familiar with discussions at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul.

And the position of the Barack Obama administration on the necessity of attacking insurgent safe havens in Pakistan appears to be in line with the proposal for cross-border raids.

Carrying out such raids would probably provoke a new level of anti-U.S. sentiment in Pakistan, with dangerous political consequences in that country, according to experts on Pakistan, but the behaviour of the national security organs of the United States in the recent past suggests that such dangers are being rationalised.

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by Badri Raina

For India a year of  reckonings:

we  grew and we sank;

the poor lost their night-shelters,

the rich went laughing to the bank.

More women came  far afield,

the rapists had their fun;

the moralists shook their frozen heads,

saying what can be done

if women dare nature’s laws,

and covet spaces meant for men.

The cronies said why capitalism

if not for us and us;

watchdog media screamed for blood

but were cosy with the lobbyists.

The NGOs and idealists put

spanner in the wheel,

wrecking with  little love for the land

many a wholesome deal.

But Obama gave us certificate,

and  Israel many a gun;

so why speak of such familiar things

as crime and  corruption?

But when it came to the onion,

no middle class man could buy it;

the onion, it will bring you grief,

more than   pestilence or riot.

So minister spoke to minister

on Blackbury mobile phone;

how is it we roam the sea and sky,

but have no onion?

At which the wag had his say:

“such is the idea of India, dude,

fret not at onion-lack;

that idea is never for everyone,

some starve, some have it good.

Read any text of high religious worth,

and this is always understood.

Thus give your piece of beloved land

so those may fast forward go

who speak on your needless behalf,

and brand India into a show

that shames lesser peoples, lands,

eyeing the high high table;

pray for the  prestigious council seat,

and cut out your penurious babble.

take pride in being the fodder

that makes the canon go;

the India story is not so gory

as the whistleblowers show.”

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December, 23, 2010

Osamah Khalil, uruknet.info, Dec 22, 2010

This month marked a low point in the Obama administration’s attempts to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Following the administration’s announcement on 7 December that it was ending efforts to secure a 90-day extension of Israel’s limited moratorium on settlement building in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced “Plan B” for resolving the conflict three days later. Instead of emphasizing direct talks between the parties, Washington will now attempt to mediate between them to develop a framework agreement around the core issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem. Sound familiar? It should. The Obama administration is following the same failed path of its three predecessors to achieve peace. In other words, there is no Plan B. Continues >>

Karen Greenberg, The Guardian, Dec 22, 2010

Detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre. Photograph: Shane T McCoy/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer first reported, is about to issue an executive order that gives shape, contour and future life to indefinite detention for Guantánamo detainees. The order will provide for the continual detention of several dozen detainees – who will have access lawyers in order to periodically contest their detention.

On one level, we shouldn’t be surprised. In what has become a signature method of the Obama administration, the bad news was trotted out as an idea well ahead of time. In May of 2009, President Obama let it be known that indefinite detention was among the options that the administration would likely embrace in its efforts to close Guantánamo. Now, as their calculation may have predicted, what was once an unsavoury idea barely causes a ripple in the fabric of public opinion. Overshadowed by the continuing focus on the economy, and reflecting a growing callousness towards civil liberties issues in the “war on terror”, the public will likely greet the announcement with numbness.

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James Petras, Dec 3, 2010

The ‘fluidity’ of US power relations with Latin America is a product of the continuities and changes in Latin America. Past hegemony continues to weigh heavy, but the future augurs a continued decline. The current balance of power will however be determined by shifts in world markets, in which the US is destined to play a lesser role. Hence the greater probability of more divergences in policy, barring major breakdowns within Latin America.

Social Basis of Imperial Politics

Almost all theories of contemporary imperialism lack any but the crudest sociological analyses of the classes and political character of the governing groups which direct the imperial state and its polices. The same is true about the theorizing of the imperial state which is largely devoid of institutional analyses.

Most theorists resort to a form of economic reductionism in which ‘investments’, ‘trade’, ‘markets’ are presented as ahistorical disembodied entities comparable across space and time. The changing nature of the leading classes are accounted for by general categories such as “finance”, “manufacturing”, “banking”, “service” without any specific analysis of the variable nature and sources of financial wealth (illegal drug trade, money laundering, real estate speculation, etc.).

The shifts in the political and economic orientation of governing capitalist politicians, resulting in linkages with different capitalist/imperialist centers, which have major consequences in the configuration of world power, are glossed over in favor of abstract accounts of statistical shifts of economic indicators measuring capital flows.

Imperial theorizing totally ignores the role of non-economic socio-political power configurations in shaping imperial policy, over and against major economic institutions like MNC, up to and including major military commitments. The role of zionist power configurations and militarist ideologues in shaping US Middle East policy (2000-2010) is a crucial consideration in discussing contemporary imperialism in theory and practice.

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The permanent resistance

By Paul D’Amato, Socialist Worker, Dec 21, 2010

So long as society has been divided into classes and presided over by a ruling or exploiting class, there has been resistance from the exploited class.

The first recorded strike in history took place under Pharaoh Ramses III in 1158 B.C. The grievances of the strikers, who had fled work and found sanctuary in a local temple, were written down on a papyrus.

“It was because of hunger and thirst that we came here,” the scroll reads. “There is no clothing, no ointment, no fish, no vegetables. Send to Pharaoh, our good lord, about it, and send to the vizier, our superior, that sustenance may be made for us.” They had to occupy two other temples in the next few days until their demands for wages (paid in rations of food and drink) were met.

According to W.W. Tarn, strikes were an “an old Egyptian custom…not merely riots in which the manager got beaten, but regular withdrawals of labor.” According to Tarn, “The men had one weapon which officialdom feared; they could throw the machine of out of gear by leaving their ‘own place’ … and they usually took refuge in some temple with the right of asylum.”

In ancient Rome, the class struggle took a different form–various kinds of slave resistance, up to and including slave insurrections and wars. The landed aristocracy of the Roman empire depended for its wealth not on wage labor, but on plunder–which included not only stealing wealth, but seizing war captives and selling them into slavery. The Roman historian Tacitus attributed these fitting words to a British general fighting the Roman conquerors: “Robbery, butchery, rapine, with false names they call Empire; and they make a wilderness, and call it peace.”

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