Peace and Justice Post

Amnesty International, 16 March 2011

Bahraini protesters today told Amnesty International of bloody scenes on the streets as government security forces stepped up their violent crackdown on demonstrations and blocked access to hospitals.

At least six people were reportedly killed in the capital Manama amid continuing protests as the army used tanks to flatten the peaceful protest camps set up in recent weeks to demand reform in the Gulf state.

Government forces also surrounded hospitals and attacked doctors trying to help the wounded.

“The distressing reports and images coming out of Bahrain today provide further evidence that the authorities are using lethal and other excessive force to crush protests, with reckless disregard for human life,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Director.

“Wounded protesters have also been prevented from accessing medical attention by government forces.. The Bahraini authorities must immediately put a stop to this bloodshed.”

Security forces attacked the mainly Shi’a protest camp at Manama’s Pearl Roundabout camp early on Wednesday.

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On March 11-13, a small conference of around 200 gathered on the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia with potential significance extending far beyond its modest attendance.  This was the national membership meeting of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a group founded in San Francisco in 1996 that, in the wake of the siege of Gaza in late 2008, has aggressively grown into a national organization with 27 local chapters and seven full time staff.

The meeting and its discussions were closed to the press (though this writer was in attendance), but this only highlights the newsworthiness of the meeting in itself.  Late last year, the Anti-Defamation League named JVP on a list it released of the “Top Ten Anti-Israel Groups in America,” and since then well-known members of the group have in some cases been met with violence or threats of violence, particularly on the west coast, and lesser forms of intimidation from various Jewish community leaders.

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By Richard Falk, Information Clearing House, March 16, 2011

After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki there was in the West, especially the United States, a short triumphal moment, crediting American science and military prowess with bringing victory over Japan and the avoidance of what was anticipated at the time to be a long and bloody conquest of the Japanese homeland. This official narrative of the devastating attacks on these Japanese cities has been contested by numerous reputable historians who argued that Japan had conveyed its readiness to surrender well before the bombs had been dropped, that the U.S. Government needed to launch the attacks to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that it had this super-weapon at its disposal, and that the attacks would help establish American supremacy in the Pacific without any need to share power with Moscow. But whatever historical interpretation is believed, the horror and indecency of the attacks is beyond controversy. This use of atomic bombs against defenseless densely populated cities remains the greatest single act of state terror in human history, and had it been committed by the losers in World War II surely the perpetrators would have been held criminally accountable and the weaponry forever prohibited. But history gives the winners in big wars considerable latitude to shape the future according to their own wishes, sometimes for the better, often for the worse.

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Michael Munger, Reason.com,  March 14, 2011

Watching recent events in Egypt I have had a sense of both surreal distance and of personal connection. Distance because it is hard to imagine that American “friend” Hosni Mubarak, recipient of more than $45 billion of U.S. military and economic aid, has finally been called out for his acts of brutal repression. Connection because one of the people Mubarak imprisoned was my brother-in-law.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim is an Egyptian academic sociologist and democracy activist. He is also married to my step-sister Barbara. In 2000 Saad was arrested by the national police, and charged by the Mubarak regime with embezzlement and defaming Egypt’s image.

What Saad had actually done was to obtain a large academic grant from the European Union and spend it on research. He also publicly asked when Egypt was going to have free and fair elections. In response, Saad was sentenced to seven years of hard labor. Given the state of Egyptian prisons, and Saad’s physical condition and age, it could have been a death sentence. He was finally released three years later.

I remember talking to Saad after he got out. His view of the American role was heartbreaking. Democracy activists in Egypt, and throughout the Middle East, had to distance themselves from America, he said. U.S. support for Mubarak was tarnishing America’s image, just as Mubarak himself was tarnishing Egypt’s image. How did we get to that point?

The answer is that American foreign policy seems to rest on a simple premise: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Except it’s not simple. It’s a blatant double standard. Our attitude seems to be, “Sure, that dictator is a murderous thug, but he’s our murderous thug”

Letting our enemies choose our friends is also dangerous. The U.S. supplied the rockets that the mujahedeen used to attack Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. Now we call the mujahedeen the Taliban, and they kill Americans. We also propped up Saddam Hussein and a host of other brutes who started out as docile U.S. puppets.

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“And if there is any conspiracy, it is one between Qaddafi and the West to slow down, even quash, the Arab revolt. To the extent that Qaddafi succeeds, he sends a message to all the other threatened despots of the region that harsh repression rather than concessions is the way to go.”

Immanuel Wallesrstein, Commentary No. 301, Mar. 15, 2011

There is so much hypocrisy and so much confused analysis about what is going on in Libya that one hardly knows where to begin. The most neglected aspect of the situation is the deep division in the world left. Several left Latin American states, and most notably Venezuela, are fulsome in their support of Colonel Qaddafi. But the spokespersons of the world left in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and indeed North America, decidedly don’t agree.

Hugo Chavez’s analysis seems to focus primarily, indeed exclusively, on the fact that the United States and western Europe have been issuing threats and condemnations of the Qaddafi regime. Qaddafi, Chavez, and some others insist that the western world wishes to invade Libya and “steal” Libya’s oil. The whole analysis misses entirely what has been happening, and reflects badly on Chavez’s judgment – and indeed on his reputation with the rest of the world left.

First of all, for the last decade and up to a few weeks ago, Qaddafi had nothing but good press in the western world. He was trying in every way to prove that he was in no way a supporter of “terrorism” and wished only to be fully integrated into the geopolitical and world-economic mainstream. Libya and the western world have been entering into one profitable arrangement after another. It is hard for me to see Qaddafi as a hero of the world anti-imperialist movement, at least in the last decade.

The second point missed by Hugo Chavez’s analysis is that there is not going to be any significant military involvement of the western world in Libya. The public statements are all huff and puff, designed to impress local opinion at home. There will be no Security Council resolution because Russia and China won’t go along. There will be no NATO resolution because Germany and some others won’t go along. Even Sarkozy’s militant anti-Qaddafi stance is meeting resistance within France.

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By Norman Solomon, ZNet,  March 15, 2011

Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.

Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us — people around the world — to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.

There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.

As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”

Nuclear power — from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years — is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.

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by David Krieger, CommonDreams.org, March 15, 2011

Our hearts go out to the people of Japan, who are suffering the horrendous effects of a massive earthquake and devastating tsunami.  Watching the news clips of the natural disasters in Japan makes us realize yet again the enormous power of nature and the limits of our capacities to control such power.  Large buildings, roadways and bridges buckled before the shockwaves of the earthquake.  Cars and trucks, even houses, seemed like small toys when they were swept away by the tsunami wave hitting the Japanese coastline.
“Nuclear power plant failures in Japan are a final wake-up call to replace nuclear power with safe, sustainable and renewable forms of energy”

In Japan, electric power has been knocked out for millions of people.  But the dangers are far greater than those associated with the temporary loss of power.  Some of Japan’s 55 nuclear reactors lost primary and backup power, which in turn led to core cooling problems, partial meltdowns and radiation releases within the reactor control rooms and into the atmosphere, with possibly far worse radiation releases still ahead.  Three of Japan’s 55 nuclear power reactors have reportedly experienced explosions.  Over 200,000 people have been evacuated from around the damaged nuclear power plants.

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by Paul Craig Roberts, Foreign Policy Journal, March 14, 2011

If we were to be blessed with a 21st century George Orwell, he would coin a new “speak” to apply to “support the troops.”  Would he call this “Deceptive Speak”?  Or would he be more clever?

The words certainly deserve an Orwellian name.  The catch-phrase was rolled out the minute the war started, which makes one wonder about its public relations origin.  Who can oppose supporting the troops, at least before we learned from WikiLeaks and Abu Ghraib of the intentional killing of civilians and torturing of whoever happened to be rounded up in the various sweeps? All for the fun and games of it.

“Support the troops” originated in the public relations department of the military/security complex. What “support the troops” really means is to support the profits of the armaments industry and the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony.

“Support the troops” is a clever PR slogan that causes Americans to turn a blind eye to the brutal exploitation of our soldiers and military families for profit and for an evil ideology.

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There are three reasons why monitoring AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) is a valuable use of time for anyone following events in the Middle East.

The first is that AIPAC faithfully reflects the positions of the Netanyahu government (actually it often telegraphs them before Netanyahu does).

The second is that AIPAC’s policies provide advance notice of the positions that will, not by coincidence, be taken by the United States Congress.

And third, AIPAC provides a reliable indicator of future policies of the Obama administration, which gets its “guidance” both from AIPAC itself and from Dennis Ross, former head of AIPAC’s think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and now the president’s top adviser on Middle East issues.

The next few months, as AIPAC prepares for its annual conference (May 22-24), will be especially fruitful for AIPAC watchers. The conference is a huge event, attended by most members of the House and Senate, the prime minister of Israel, and either by the president or vice president of the United States. It is also attended by thousands of delegates from around the country and by candidates for Congress who raise money for their campaigns at the event. This year, the leading Republican candidates for president will also be in attendance, all vying for support by promising undying loyalty to the AIPAC agenda.

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