Peace and Justice Post

As he turns 93, Nelson Mandela can look back on an extraordinary life of accomplishment, as the world’s iconic leader on behalf of racial justice and individual liberty. A new book of quotations compiles some of what he has learned and what he has taught, Danny Schechter reports from Johannesburg, South Africa.

By Danny Schechter, Consortium News, July 1, 2011

Nelson Mandela, icon-hero of the world, turns 93 on July 18. He survives in the face of family tragedies, such as one in June that claimed a great-grandchild who was born premature and died after just four days,

The man, known by his clan name Madiba, still evokes wonder and admiration and almost god-like reverence, with airport stores selling “We Love Mandela” posters and T-shirts. He is the one South African that most of South Africans take pride in, including the older generation that first knew him as an apartheid-government-designated terrorist.

So feared was he that his picture could not be shown in the media and his words could not be quoted for 27 years.

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Maher al-Assad attends the funeral of late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad in Damascus on June 13, 2000. Maher is now leading his elite military units around the country to violently quell protests. (Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Described as the country’s “thug-in-chief,” Maher al-Assad has become the de facto power in Syria, leading his elite troops around the country to kill protesters threatening his family’s 41-year-old dictatorship even as his elder brother, the president, continues to pledge reforms.

“He’s the one doing the regime’s dirty work. He plays the Rifaat role from the 1980s: the nasty guy of the regime,” said Radwan Ziadeh, director of the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.

In 1982, Rifaat al-Assad, former President Hafez al-Assad’s younger brother, led a military assault on Hama to crush an uprising by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, killing between 20,000 and 30,000 people, one of the worst atrocities committed by an Arab regime against its own people.

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Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 308, July 1, 2011

Ollanta Humala was elected President of Peru on June 5, 2011. The one sure loser in this election was the United States, whose ambassador, Rose Likins, scarcely hid her open campaigning for Humala’s opponent in the second round, Keiko Fujimori. What was at stake in this crucial election in Latin America?

Peru is a key country in the geopolitics of South America for a number of reasons: its size, its heritage as the locus of the Inca empire, its locus as a fount of the Amazonia River, its ports on the Pacific, and its recent history as the site of a major struggle between nationalist forces and pro-American elites.

In 1924, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian intellectual and Marxist – a quite unorthodox Marxist – founded the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), which was intended to be a pan-American anti-imperialist organization. APRA flourished in Peru, although it was severely repressed. What was original about APRA, unlike most left movements in the Americas, was its understanding that the majority of Peru’s peasantry were indigenous Quechua-speaking peoples who had been systematically excluded from political participation and cultural rights. After 1945, APRA began to lose some of its radical edge but still had a strong popular base. Only the death of Haya de la Torre prevented his election as President in 1980.

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  To be or Not To Be American

William A. Cooke, MWC News, June 30, 2011

This week the United States Senate unanimously adopted a resolution drafted by its masters, the State of Israel and AIPAC, to prevent the United Nations, of which the United States is a member, from exercising its constitutional rights to free speech to deliberate on the recognition of a Palestinian State. The resolution is an exercise in coercion since its intent is to withhold funding from the Palestinian Authority should the UN deliberate on such a resolution of recognition, making the UN responsible for depriving the Palestinian people of America’s support.

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There are many parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan. The recent American mayors’ resolution to “bring our war $$ home” and Obama’s announcement that troops are now being withdrawn are fresh reminders, but the story they tell is grim, writes Eric Walberg.

Middle East Online, July 2, 2011

In Baltimore, the nation’s mayors debated and passed a War Dollars Home Resolution at their annual meeting, the first time they have taken a stand on war since they passed a similar resolution in 1971, during the Vietnam war. The anti-war resolution even made the TV news, which has downplayed the fact that the majority of Americans have wanted an end to their illegal wars for years.

It is a moment flooded with nostalgia for those who cut their political teeth 40 years ago during the Vietnam war, though it is hard to even recognise the State of the Union 40 years on. The “War on Poverty” of LBJ has been replaced by a “war on terror”. Today’s America has a black president, yet is mired in recession, and promises only falling living standards, collapsing infrastructure, and more and more violations of civil rights.

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by Eric Margolis, LewRockwell.com, July 2, 2011

In his majestic poem “Recessional,” Rudyard Kipling was writing of the fading British Empire, but his words are as vivid and pertinent today as a century ago:

Far-called our navies melt away –
On dune and headland sinks the fire –
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

The objective of war is to achieve political objectives, not to kill enemies.

Politically, the US has achieved nothing in Afghanistan after ten years of desultory, destruction, and titanic expenditure.

So in this sense, the United States has already lost the Afghan conflict, its longest war. Militarily its forces have been stalemated, meaning that it has lost the all-important military initiative and is now on the strategic defensive. We have seen this before – in Vietnam.

Once more, Afghanistan fulfills its grim title as “graveyard of empires.”

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In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution:  (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who legally approved it (Yoo, Bybee, Levin), and (3) those in the CIA and the military who tortured within the confines of the permission slips they were given by those officials and lawyers (i.e., “good-faith” torturers).  The one exception to this sweeping immunity was that low-level CIA agents and servicemembers who went so far beyond the torture permission slips as to basically commit brutal, unauthorized murder would be subject to a “preliminary review” to determine if a full investigation was warranted — in other words, the Abu Ghraib model of justice was being applied, where only low-ranking scapegoats would be subject to possible punishment while high-level officials would be protected.

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Irish activists accuse Israel of ‘act of international terrorism’ that ‘could have caused death and injury’.

Middle East Online, June 30, 2011

‘The boat would have sunk’ DUBLIN – Irish activists on Thursday accused Israel of sabotaging a ship that had been due to join a flotilla to challenge an Israeli blockade of Gaza, forcing the vessel’s withdrawal. The Irish Ship to Gaza (ISG) campaign said it “believes that Israel has questions to answer and must be viewed as the chief suspect in this professional and very calculating act of sabotage”. ISG said the propeller of the ship, the Saoirse, had been “sabotaged in a dangerous manner in the Turkish coastal town of Gocek, where it had been at berth for the past few weeks”. It said repairing the damage would take some time and therefore the Saoirse “cannot participate in Freedom Flotilla 2”. Fintan Lane, ISG national coordinator, claimed it was a “reckless action” and an “act of international terrorism”.  Continues >>

The Financial Times quoted Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar as saying that Pakistan has already stopped US drone flights from the Shamsi air base.—Reuters photo

WASHINGTON / ISLAMABAD: The US is rejecting demands from Pakistan that American personnel abandon a military base used by the CIA to stage drone strikes against militants, US officials told Reuters.

US personnel have not left the Shamsi air base and there is no plan for them to do so, said a US official familiar with the matter. “That base is neither vacated nor being vacated,” the official said. The information was confirmed by a second US official.

On Wednesday, federal Minister for Defence Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar said that US had been asked to stop using the base for drone strikes and vacate it.

Relations between the two uneasy allies deteriorated after the May 2 raid by US SEALs in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden.  Wednesday’s statement by Mr Mukhtar was the latest salvo.

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THE MARK: Since the second intifada, fewer Israeli citizens have had the opportunity to interact with Palestinians living in the occupied territories, and to witness first hand how they live, as you do. How can the Israeli public come to understand the realities of Palestinian life under Israeli rule?

AMIRA HASS: It is not so rare for Israelis to see how impossible it is to live under foreign rule, and a ruthless rule. There are many Israelis, in fact, who do see: activists for Checkpoint Watch and Breaking the Silence, women activists who monitor the military courts, and the people who go every week to demonstrate against the occupation vis-à-vis the army at the security wall in several villages in the West Bank. There are many other people who can understand, as well – those who have never been in Gaza to see the reality directly, but who have imagined how impossible it is to live under this blockade.

Sure, this group is a minority, made up only of hundreds – or maybe some thousands – of Israelis, but I’m not [alone]; there are many who witness and oppose.

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