Peace and Justice Post

The Case of Aasia Bibi

By LIAQUAT ALI KHAN and JASMINE ABOU-KASSEM, Counterpunch, Dec 14, 2010

Aasia Bibi, a 45-year old Pakistani Christian woman, and mother of five, has been sentenced to death, under Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code, for allegedly “defiling” the Prophet Muhammad. Section 295 with various provisions is the blasphemy statute that enjoys popular support in Muslim Pakistan. Though Bibi is the first woman to be convicted for blasphemy, Christians, Hindus, and hundreds of Muslims have been charged under the statute. Section 295 is a convenient legal tool to settle petty personal scores, intimidate rival families, and practice ill-informed versions of Islam, particularly in small towns and villages, like the one where Bibi lived. Local judges come under pressure to convict persons charged under the statute with the strident approval of local elders. Over the years, attempts to repeal the statute have provoked stiff opposition from Muslim jurists and invited threats of violence from militant groups. Even Pervez Musharraf, a secular military dictator, could not, for fear of imminent and severe reprisals, repeal the statute. For the same reasons, major political parties are disinclined to correct the overbite of the blasphemy statute.

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Written by CP Editor, Caged Prisoners,  Sunday, 12 December 2010

When we arrived in Peshawar I was taken to a lavishly-fitted office. A Pakistani flag stood on the desk, and a picture of Mohammad Ali Jinnah hung at the back of the room. A Pashtun man was sitting behind the desk. He got up, introduced himself and welcomed me. His head was shaved—seemingly his only feature of note—and he was of an average size and weight. He walked over to me and said that he was the head of the bureau. I was in the devil’s workshop, the regional head office of the ISI.

By Badri Raina, Dec 13, 2010

Julian Assange, Aussie, we arraign you

for taking our First Amendment to heart:

“Congress shall make no law. . .abridging

the freedom of speech” we have writ;

but that was when we were the “land of the free

and the home of the brave.”

That starry-eyed time is long past;

since then, as befits an imperial power,

we set ourselves the goal to enslave

regions and regimes that would not

play the part that would befit

vassals to our military-christian destiny.

You thought that since we laud

your over-zealous counterparts

in a China or a Mynamar,

jailed by authoritarian juntas,

and facilitate for them the Nobel prize,

you could do the same in democratic disguise,

allowing no room for hypocrisy,

and, playing god,

use our hidden truths to tar

our resplendent  diplomacy.

More fool you; our posse

will pursue and hunt you down.

Hide where you will, you clown,

we will get you still.

Free is free till you play our tune;

step out of line, and you will soon

find we are the same

as those in Beijing or Rangoon.

And if the Russians want the Nobel

for you, as we did for the other two,

we will raise a merry hell

far more fatal

than anything they could do.

You mistake much when you think

that our Constitutional forefathers

would shamefacedly blink

at our procedures.

Look up the Philadelphia papers

and you will know that from the first

our professions were wisely studded with capers.

We allowed to ourselves as Protestant whites

privileges that puissant kites

alone have from Nature

over every  lesser, crawling creature.

Such is meant to be the presiding feature

of our place on the hill;

those that pull us down we kill.

Eric Margolis, Information Clearing House, Dec 13, 2010

In 1956, Britain, France and Israel colluded to invade Egypt to overthrow its hugely popular nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Israel provoked border clashes and quickly captured the Sinai Peninsula. The British and French landed at Suez.

US President Dwight Eisenhower deemed the tripartite Suez aggression immoral and damaging to American interests in the Muslim world.   “Ike” angrily ordered the British, French and Israelis to get out of Egypt at once – or else. They got out.

Fast forward to 2010. President Barack Obama has been demanding Israel stop building illegal Jewish settlements around Jerusalem and on the West Bank.

Obama rightly concluded the ongoing agony of Palestine has turned the Muslim world against the United States. It is also  the primary cause of what Washington calls “terrorism.” I write about this extensively in my latest book, “American Raj.”

After the Suez invasion, Israel’s American partisans set about building an influence network that would ensure no American president could ever force Israel to do anything against its will. Over the next half century, the Israel lobby became the most powerful and feared lobby in America, dominating both the US Congress and media.

The lobby’s brilliant success was again confirmed last week as Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of Israel’s rightist coalition, literally spit in Obama’s face, sneeringly rejecting the president’s pleas to create a viable Palestinian state. Vice President Joseph Biden was earlier humiliated on a trip to Israel to plead with Israel to stop building Jewish settlements.

The US Congress and rightwing media actually applauded the public humiliation of their president and vice president.

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No, not Labor. The British parliament is the one debating the treatment of underage Palestinian detainees by Israeli military tribunals.

Amira Haas, Haaretz, Dec 13, 2010

Labour Party representatives who had visited the Ofer military tribunal in the West Bank two weeks ago expressed shock over how the court conducts its hearings. In a parliamentary debate about detained Palestinian minors, they said that given a sample of 100 children, 69 said soldiers beat them and kicked them when they were being arrested. The children were better off pleading guilty regardless of whether they had done something, because if they were detained until the end of proceedings, this could be three times longer than their punishment, the parliamentarians said.

The Labour legislators cited data they had received from the Palestinian branch of Defense For Children International.

This is not the Israeli Labor Party. The visitors at Ofer were members of the British Labour Party. It was not Israel’s parliamentarians who spent an hour and a half debating a subject that shows the face of Israeli society, but rather their British counterparts.

In a debate December 7, Labour MP Sandra Osborne said that she and three of her colleagues had spent four days touring the West Bank under the auspices of the Council for Arab-British Understanding.

	A military Tribunal at the Camp Ofer prison near Ramallah.
	Photo by: Archive

“It was a visit to a military court … that shocked us to the core,” she said.

Another member of her faction, Richard Burden, added: “I thought that the area had lost its capacity to shock me.” But he realized he had made a mistake “when I saw the military court and what went on there.”

The visiting MPs were sitting in one of the caravans – the halls of the court – when they “heard a jangle of chains outside the door of the courtroom,” Osborne continued. “Army officers led child detainees into the military courtroom. The children’s legs were shackled, they were handcuffed and they were all kitted out in brown jumpsuits. One had to wonder if the soldiers felt threatened by 13- and 14-year-old boys.”

During the proceedings, she said, “The judge never once looked at the children or spoke to them.”

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The Independent, Dec 14, 2010

Reuters

Rabbi Michael Lerner

Editor, Tikkun Magazine

Huffington Post, December 12, 2010 10:43 PM

While making a deal to protect billionaires from $145 billion in taxes that they might otherwise have used to solve pressing domestic problems or to create over 3 million jobs at $30,000/yr., some Democrats and their advisors pointed out that the progressives who dissented from the deal Obama had worked out with the Republican leadership — and which, despite the non-binding vote in the Democratic caucus on Thursday to oppose the deal, is likely to retain most of its giveaways to the rich — had really no place to go in 2012 but to blindly support Obama, so why take seriously all their huffing and puffing about Obama’s list of betrayals?

Sure, they said, Obama had led peace and justice-oriented liberal and progressive movement people to believe he would end rather than escalate middle east wars, punish rather than ignore those who had lied us into the Iraq war and those who had ordered or carried out torture, end discrimination against gays in the military and elsewhere, secure rather than undermine domestic civil liberties and human rights, fight for rather than duck serious changes in immigration and in environmental protection, and insist on at least a public option in health care and lowered prices for pharmaceuticals. But, hey — those people who paid attention to these details were only a small minority, and they would rally around Obama no matter what, giving him no incentive to listen to them. After all, Obama was just being “realistic” about the limitations of his power.

I wondered why George Bush, who came into office without any electoral mandate, managed to fight for and demand his Right-wing program, while Obama seemed unable to even articulate a coherent worldview and kept falling back onto the formulations and assumptions of the Reagan/Bush years about the wisdom of the marketplace and the need to fight an endless war against terror. Spineless to his core, Obama seemed unable to fight for anything — his style was to concede before a battle, except if it was a battle to put down his own progressive and liberal base.

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by John Pilger, Dissident Voice,  December 11th, 2010

In the US Army manual on counterinsurgency, the American commander General David Petraeus describes Afghanistan as a “war of perception… conducted continuously using the news media”. What really matters is not so much the day-to-day battles against the Taliban as the way the adventure is sold in America where “the media directly influence the attitude of key audiences”. Reading this, I was reminded of the Venezuelan general who led a coup against the democratic government in 2002. “We had a secret weapon,” he boasted. “We had the media, especially TV. You got to have the media.”

Never has so much official energy been expended in ensuring journalists collude with the makers of rapacious wars which, say the media-friendly generals, are now “perpetual”. In echoing the west’s more verbose warlords, such as the waterboarding former US vice-president Dick Cheney, who predicated “50 years of war”, they plan a state of permanent conflict wholly dependent on keeping at bay an enemy whose name they dare not speak: the public.

At Chicksands in Bedfordshire, the Ministry of Defence’s psychological warfare (Psyops) establishment, media trainers devote themselves to the task, immersed in a jargon world of “information dominance”, “asymmetric threats” and “cyberthreats”. They share premises with those who teach the interrogation methods that have led to a public inquiry into British military torture in Iraq. Disinformation and the barbarity of colonial war have much in common.

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By Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News, December 11, 2010

Editor’s Note: In modern American politics, the Right and the neoconservatives have invested heavily in — and proven to be very adept at — shaping how large segments of the population understand reality, a concept sometimes called “perception management.”

This sophisticated propaganda now influences everything from why Americans distrust global-warming science to when they go to war, as professor Lawrence Davidson describes in this guest essay:

There is a postmodern position that states “reality is a social construct.” In other words, individuals and groups have their own realities and, according to the postmodernists, one reality is as true as another.

Certainly there is more than one way to interpret things. It is because individuals see the world differently and, at least in the American cultural milieu, have such trouble reconciling those views, that U.S. divorce rates run at about 50 percent.

Then there is the inescapable fact that nation states and rival ethnic communities periodically slaughter each other (and persistently try to repress one another) in an effort to disprove the postmodernist assertion that all realities are equal.

Thus we see the competition among groups to assert the reality of the powerful as triumphantly more real than the reality of all rivals.

It is hard to argue with the notion that there are many social, cultural and political “constructs,” each a product of its place and time. However, the notion that all realities are equal can quickly take us into a kind of theater of the absurd.

If you want to see what this looks like just take a close look at present-day American politics.

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