Peace and Justice Post

by Johan Galtung, Foreign Policy Journal, August 3, 2011

TRANSCEND Media Service — Anders Breivik was driven by a calling to save Christianity, catholic essentially, from a European civil war with Islam. The message said: Islam enters Europe on roads paved by multiculturalism, built by social democrats like the Workers’ Youth League at Utöya, the scene of killings. The calling goes on: dialogue with an implacable, fanatic enemy is impossible. Violence against government quarters, and massacre of young supporters, however regrettable, was necessary. Norway, Europe needed a wake-up call to return to their “origins.”

These crazy articles of faith found an evil terrorist carrier? The above words serve as a road sign: “No further thinking needed.” However, it is not the way to handle a catastrophe – only a lazy, easy, way out. We have to ask searching questions.

Is there something to it? What does this remind us of? How do we prevent a repeat?

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Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman condemned Breivik’s ideology, but he is still an enabler of Islamophobia.

Ali Abunimah, Al Jazeera, Aug. 2, 2011

In a Washington Post op-ed last week, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League, likened the hateful ideology that inspired Anders Behring Breivik to massacre 77 innocent people in Norway to the “deadly” anti-Semitism that infected Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This is a parallel that I, and many others who have been observing with alarm the rise of anti-Muslim incitement in the US and Europe, have made frequently.

Does this mean that Foxman – head of one of the most hardline and influential pro-Israel lobby groups – has found common ground with the Palestine solidarity movement?

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A small flotilla carrying human rights and peace activists to Israel-blockaded Gaza was itself blockaded in Greece after intense diplomatic pressure from Washington and Tel Aviv. But the Israeli news media continues to heap ridicule on the passengers. Two of them, retired U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright and Israeli-born Hagit Borer, respond.

By Ann Wright and Hagit Borer, Consortium News, August 1, 2011

Being, so to speak, of the “flotilla folk” ourselves, we read with some interest Roz Rothstein and Roberta Seid’s idle speculations in the Jerusalem Post on who our shipmates might have been, for idle speculations they certainly are, the writers having never contacted any of us.

In fact, at least when it comes to the American-flagged boat, The Audacity of Hope, we are not nearly as much of a mystery as one might imagine. Our biographies are all publicly posted at www.ustogaza.org,.

A perusal of our stories would reveal, among other things, that 58 percent of us are women and that our median age is 60.

Similar demographic patterns existed on other boats as well. Many are retired people; most with modest means. We are people willing to spend our savings to fly to Athens and stay there for weeks, doubled or tripled up in hotel rooms, waiting to sail to Gaza.

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by Dr. K R Bolton, Foreign Policy Journal, July 29, 2011

The news media has had a field day in headlining Anders Breivik’s actions as those of someone from the “far Right,” and as actions that are a consequence of Rightist ideology. Yet Breivik is an avid Zionist whose motives were predicated on Islamophobia. His ideological influences are libertarian and “neo-conservative.” He was playing his part, albeit as a loose cannon, in the “clash of civilizations.”

Although the news media has focused on his previous membership in the Progressive Party, his ideological commitment is to Zionism. Why then did not the news media headline Breivik’s atrocity as being that of a “Zionist,” and as a “stanch supporter of Israel”? As is often the case, the fictional “far Right” connection is a red herring. Headlines could have read “Zionist extremist on shooting spree,” “Israel supporter massacres youngsters at Labour camp in Norway,” and the like.

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By Amira Hass, ZNet, Aug. 2, 2011

“A financial crisis in the Palestinian Authority” – that is a convenient description of the situation where, on the eve of Ramadan, the Ramallah government is (again) unable to pay the full salaries of its 150,000 public sector employees. This is a short, but very inaccurate description, however. The crisis, says economist Raja Khalidi, is in the status quo that Israel has enjoyed since the Oslo Accords: Israel is in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – and Palestinian society and the donor countries finance the cost of this domination.

The low salaries in the Palestinian enclaves (on average, less than NIS 2,000 per month) and the PA’s large-scale withholding of wages is not some Icelandic story: These – just like the cost of housing in Israel, our tycoons and the state’s wealth vs. citizens’ miserable salaries – are all linked to the comprehensive economical regime that has been designed by Israeli governments between the river and the sea. It is further evidence of the Israeli crisis, even if for pragmatic reasons it is not talked about in the tent camps.

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Corruption

In a land of  religious eruption

How come we  have corruption?

Because, sonny boy,

The god-money alloy

Defeats  every  kosher  assumption.

Harijans

Yes, ‘Harijans’ are ‘Hindus’ when riots we  lead,

And  ‘Harijans’ are ‘Hindus’ when votes we need;

But when temple bells chime,

Or at food and drink time,

‘Harijans’ are  ‘Harijans’—a polluting breed.

BJP

The bjp is a party  brazen, proud, and strong,

It lies from the  right  all the way to the wrong;

Its  retailer street-smartness,

Cloaked in sanctimonious dress,

Befools, often enough,  the media and the throng.

                   by Badri Raina, August 2011

Allen L. Jasson, MWC News, August 1, 2011

It was mentioned in an MWC News item of July 27^th that “Breivik’s lawyer, Geir Lippestad, said that he was probably insane” and in another on the same day he was described as “a psychopathic fantasist”. Similar comments have been made by police and other commentators; most people probably agree – now. Before the attack, however he had never been under surveillance and had never been arrested and it’s interesting that people who knew or were acquainted with Breivik described him as “like anyone else”, “a modest person … well dressed… well educated”, someone who “did not attract attention” he had “attended a middle class high school” and was “a member of the Progress Party”. Of course, the stereotypic comment “a bit of a loner” creeps in as almost a mandatory label attached to anyone and everyone who does this sort of thing (without state sponsorship). But then, in a world that shops on-line, drives to work in an insulated, personal capsule, spends most of its leisure time in front of a television and resents friends dropping in unannounced, isn’t everyone?

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Nour Ali, The Guardian, August 1, 2011

Protesters in al-Assy Square in Hama on 22 July 2011, with a giant national flag. The army sent in tanks nine days later. Photograph: HO/AP

It’s early July in Hama. Among the rows of windswept trees and sandy housing, makeshift checkpoints of burned-out cars and dustbins protect its neighbourhoods. The atmosphere is tense as residents wonder what fate awaits the city at the heart of Syria‘s five-month-old standoff between protesters and the regime.

The answer came on Sunday. It is difficult to report from Syria as the government does not allow journalists to work freely in the country. But according to residents and activists, the regime decided it had had enough. Without provocation, tanks that had been stationed on the city’s outskirts for weeks previously approached Hama from four directions followed by infantry and security forces. . . .

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Akiva Eldar, The Daily Star, August 1, 2011

The creation of the Quartet by U.S. President George W. Bush was a unique and interesting attempt to develop an effective international mechanism that was not subject to the problematic rules of the game of the United Nations. The new forum was supposed to expand America’s wingspan without the burden of the Security Council and the nearly 200 members of the General Assembly.

The Quartet relegated the U.N. to one of four partners in formulating an international strategy for the Israel-Arab and particularly Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Quartet was intended to give U.S. policy with its known pro-Israel tilt a more balanced image, backed by international consensus. The initiative to give the Quartet its own policy instrument headed by a senior statesman like Tony Blair gave hope to the Middle East peace camp that the international community was really coming to the rescue of stalled final status negotiations.

There is no lack of hate speech in the media, in print and on the internet to empower Islamophobia. The mass murderer Breivik was heavily influenced, as his writings demonstrate, by the writings of a cottage industry of American and European Islamophobes. Many of these preachers of hate are interconnected, notes John L. Esposito.

 Middle East Online, August 1, 2011

The terrorist attacks and mass killings in Norway are a wakeup call for a world that has ignored xenophobic far right extremism in Europe and America and the exponential rise in prejudice, bigotry, and hatred.

Post 9/11, right wing preachers of hate (far right politicians, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political parties, hardline Christian Zionist ministers, and the media) have in the name of freedom of speech deliberately conflated the actions of a small but deadly minority of militants with the religion of Islam and the majority of Muslims. Political and religious extremism and Islamophobia have run rampant clothing themselves in the first amendment. As a result, a social cancer, which has threatened the democratic fabric of American and European societies, has metastasized, impacting not only the safety and security of Muslims but also, as the attacks in Norway demonstrate, all citizens. Like anti-Semites and racists, Islamophobes have long protested that their stereotyping, scapegoating and fear-mongering are not anti-Muslim prejudice.

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