Peace and Justice Post

Tomorrow blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy and Reem Maged will be interrogated by the military prosecution for criticising Egypt’s ruling military on air; protests are expected

Salma Shukrallah, Ahram Online,  May 30, 2011

 

Blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy in Reem Maged’s TV show

Blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy and television host Reem Maged were given a summons on Monday to appear before military prosecution after Maged screened on her show on Thursday Hamalawy criticising the role of military police, holding the head of the military police responsible for torturing activists.

The questioning will start tomorrow at 11am, and there has already been a call for demonstrations in front of the military prosecutor’s building.

Journalist Nabil Sharaf El-Din was also summoned on the same day after he criticised on OnTV Friday the way the military was handling the transition period.

Sharaf El-Din claims that the military’s approach makes many suspect that there is a transfer-of-power deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.

The same programme aired a very critical phone call with Mamdouh Shahin, member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), who attacked both OnTV and Sharaf El-Din.

The SCAF has criticised what it calls “irresponsible media,” arguing that it is creating a national split between the military and the people. The SCAF has decided to hold a forum 5 June to discuss the Egyptian media with the country’s various political forces.

By Joe Catron, The Palestine Chronicle, May 24, 2011

Barack Obama wants it both ways. Like every United States president since Bill Clinton, who partially brokered the now-defunct Oslo Accords in 1993, he aspires to act as a trusted intermediary in the 63-year old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, while simultaneously pandering to America’s massive pro-Israel lobby. These clashing goals have spurred him to propose an array of conflicting claims and positions that, aside from being fundamentally incompatible, are often simply painful to observe.

Over the course of four short days in mid-May, he managed, in three separate addresses – at the US State Department, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the White House briefing room, and at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful flagship of the Israel lobby – to offer blatant discrepancies, of policy or omission, on nearly every aspect of the conflict. This jarring discord did nothing to bolster Washington’s role in the situation and, to careful listeners, reinforced its ultimate irrelevance to any genuine resolution of it.

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Yahoo! News, May 28, 2011

SRINAGAR, India (AFP) – A human rights group in Indian Kashmir on Saturday said it had documented the cases of more than 1,400 people who were victims of “enforced disappearances” in the revolt-hit region.

The group said it had submitted the list of 1,417 names to Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah for an “independent and impartial” investigation.

“This is a preliminary list of cases of enforced disappearances documented by us,” the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons said in a statement.

The group says some 8,000 Kashmiri Muslims have disappeared since the insurgency against Indian rule erupted in 1989.

The list of missing was distributed at a protest at a park in Srinagar, summer capital of the Himalayan region.

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by Abdul Moeed Hashmi, Pajhwok Afghan News,  May 28,  2011

JALALABAD (PAN): As many as 112 people were killed in an airstrike by NATO-led troops in the remote eastern province of Nuristan, a senior official said on Saturday.

Twenty-two policemen, 20, civilians and 70 Taliban fighters were among the dead, Governor Jamaluddin Badr told Pajhwok Afghan News, quoting a probe into the incidents.

Foreign soldiers conducted the air raid on Thursday to drive insurgents from Doab district, he said, adding Afghan forces recaptured the town late on Thursday night.

Up to 40 people, including district’s administrative head and police chief, were wounded, Badr added. Both officials were discharged from hospital after receiving treatment.

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By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Palestine, MWC News, May 28, 2011

There is absolutely no doubt that a true, dignified peace with the Palestinians is nowhere on Benyamin Netanyahu’s agenda. The clear spirit of insolence characterizing his recent speech before Congress, often described as an Israeli-occupied territory, caricatures an extremist demagogue who understands peace to mean domination and enslavement by Zionist Jews of the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu doesn’t use terms such as “domination,” “enslavement” or even “subjugation. “However, the misleading  rationales, pretexts, and  red herrings he  keeps invoking  to justify Israeli recalcitrance and rejection of a just peace  illustrate a depraved mindset that covets more lebensraum or “breathing  space” at the Palestinians expense.

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Admitting failure in Iraq and Afghanistan is anathema to Official Washington, especially to the still-influential neocons whose status depends on maintaining the illusion of “victory” or at least limited success, even at the cost of more blood and treasure. But Daniel N. White says only a frank acknowledgement of failure can free America from even worse calamities ahead.

By Daniel N. White, Consortium News, May 28, 2011

There’s an important but little known story from World War II that comes to mind these days. It’s from the days before Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941.

It needs telling with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in their current state of failure – and with a war against Iran waiting in the wings.

The German Army, the Wehrmacht, was on a roll in late 1940. It had defeated and conquered Poland and France, and had thoroughly whipped the British Army in the process.

Adolf Hitler, a knowledgeable self-taught amateur historian and the most successful German politician ever in both domestic and foreign affairs, gave orders to the German General Staff to study and make plans for an invasion of Russia.

The staff officers, the bright young captains and majors, the older lieutenant colonels with gray hair and experience, went to work, and came up with plans for an invasion for the Wehrmacht General Staff to evaluate and present to Hitler.

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By Samer al-Atrush – CAIRO, Middle East Online, May 27, 2011

Partners in crime; now spilling the beans on each other

Egyptian ex-president Hosni Mubarak, charged with murder, “had complete knowledge of every bullet fired” at protesters, according to damning testimony by his former spy chief published in a state newspaper on Thursday.

The Al-Akhbar daily reported that prosecutors partly relied on testimony provided by Omar Suleiman, the former head of intelligence and briefly vice president, to charge Mubarak with premeditated murder.

“Mubarak had complete knowledge of every bullet fired at protesters, and the number of those killed or wounded,” Suleiman is reported to have told prosecutors.

Suleiman said he relayed to the president hourly updates on the police’s deadly response to the mass protests that began on January 25 to overthrow Mubarak, who ruled the country for three decades.

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The assassination of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden did more than knock off U.S. Public Enemy Number One. It formalized a new kind of warfare, where sovereignty is irrelevant, armies tangential, and decisions are secret. It is, in the words of counterinsurgency expert John Nagl, “an astounding change in the nature of warfare.”

This type of war requires a vast intelligence apparatus, which now constitutes almost a fourth arm of government that most Americans are almost completely unaware of.. According to The Washington Post, this murky world includes 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies in more than 10,000 locations across the country, with a budget last year of at least $80.1 billion.

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Rashid Khalidi explains how President Obama is reinforcing every roadblock to peace Israel has created

Reuters/Jim Young

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, May 20, 2011.

The old Arabic proverb has it that the dogs bark but the caravan goes on. President Obama’s comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speeches last week at the State Department and then at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) produced a great deal of sound and fury in Washington. However, the sense I had being in Beirut and the Gulf when they were delivered was that they meant much less to Arabs than they did in Washington or in Israel. There is little sense in the Arab world or among Palestinians that the United States has a constructive role to play in resolving this conflict. Indeed, if anything, it has only succeeded in making itself even more of a roadblock to progress than it was before.

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Though Iraq’s government had mostly managed to keep the protesters off the streets over the past several weeks, a massive rally organized by supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr took place in the capital city of Baghdad today. There, tens of thousands of Shi’ites marched to Sadr City, condemning the US and demanding that the American troops leave by December 31.

The march featured thousands of people wearing red white and black Iraqi flag uniforms, and included warnings that the mass of followers of Sadr could reform the Mahdi Army and resist the US occupation if the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) deadline is not honored.

US officials have repeatedly pressed Prime Minister Maliki to accept an open-ended US presence, and have argued that keeping US troops in Iraq would be a great way to spite neighboring Iran.

But they are extremely uncomfortable to hear how unpopular the occupation has become, with US commander Major General Jeffrey Buchanan slamming the protest march, saying it was “an affront to Iraq’s democracy.”