Peace and Justice Post

Testimony from a soldier in the reserves sent to disperse a demonstration in the West Bank before it even started.

By Amira Hass, Haaretz, Sept. 21, 2011

Like every Friday in the past 20 months, this week too there will be a demonstration in the village of Nabi Saleh against the takeover of the spring of the neighboring villages by settlers and the Civil Administration’s archaeology department.

“A large part of our training for the reserve duty was devoted to these demonstrations and the need to repress them,” says R., a soldier who served in the area over the summer in a reserve unit of the Alexandroni Brigade. “We were led to understand that the aim was to stop the popular uprising so that it would not become something big and problematic. The commanders spoke a lot about the fact that this was a new wave of demonstrations, a new type, and that we were now learning how to deal with them, what to do.”

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• The Pakistani cricketing legend and politician talks about his country’s damaging relationship with the US, how aid and corruption are further ruining it – and how he is sure he will be its next president

  • Stuart Jeffries,  guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 September 2011

Imran Khan. Photograph: David Levene

When Barack Obama announced in May that American commandos had killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Imran Khan was furious. “The whole of Pakistan felt this way. Wherever I went I felt this humiliation and anger in people. It was humiliating because an American president announces it, not our president. And because it was the American military, not our military, which this country has given great sacrifices to nurture, that killed him.”

Khan stirs his cappuccino angrily. “Most humiliating of all was that the CIA chief Panetta says that the Pakistan government was either incompetent or complicit. Complicit!” But surely Leon Panetta had a point, didn’t he? The world’s most wanted man was living a mile from Pakistan’s military academy, not in some obscure cave. “They’re talking about a country in which 35,000 people have died during a war that had nothing to do with us. Ours is perhaps the only country in history that keeps getting bombed, through drone attacks, by our ally.”

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By Stephen Lendman

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“(T)he (UN) General Assembly shall meet every year in regular session commencing on the Tuesday of the third week in September, counting from the first week that contains at least one working day.”

The 66th session began Tuesday, September 13.

On Friday, September 23, Abbas and Netanyahu will address the body. Obama plans to do it Wednesday, September 21.

According to Middle East expert Jon Alterman:

“The president’s actions have gotten him anger on all sides, and accolades on none,” with good reason. “I don’t know an easy way to get out of this problem.”

Put another way: He made his bed. Now he has to sleep in it!

So does The New York Times. Its longstanding editorial policy notoriously turns a blind eye to the most egregious injustices – notably on Israeli/Palestinian issues.

As a result, it virulently opposes Palestinian statehood and full UN membership, no matter how just, right and timely.

Supporting the right thing, in fact, was never The Times long suit.

It’s September 11 editorial is one of many examples. Headlined, “Palestinian Statehood,” it calls a UN vote for it “ruinous,” adding:

“If a UN vote takes place, Washington and its partners will have to limit the damage….”

On September 18, Times writer Neil MacFarquhar headlined, “Palestinians Turn to UN, Where Partition Began,” referring to the 1947 partition plan. More on it below.

According to America’s UN ambassador Susan Rice:

“There is no magic wand. There is no magic piece of paper here or anywhere else. In order to achieve the creation of a Palestinian state with clear boundaries, with sovereignty, with the ability to secure itself and provide for its people, there has to be a negotiated settlement.”

According to MacFarquhar:

“The United States and Israel accuse the Palestinians of turning to the United Nations in a futile attempt to short-circuit the direct negotiations.”

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By Rand Clifford, Countercurrents.org, Sept. 21, 2011

An innocent bystander exposed to mainstream corporate media (CorpoMedia) during the lead-up to 9/11/11 would likely conclude that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe that nineteen Arab boys armed with box cutters achieved the horrendous destruction of 9/11/01 despite the best efforts of the entire American security apparatus.

Innocent faith in the dignity of American leadership might shield the bystander from knowing that, despite successful suicide missions, many of those Arab boys are alive and well. (1) Faith strong enough could also shield them from knowing that a scientific opinion poll taken in October of 2006 by the New York Times/CBS News (2) revealed that 84% of American do not believe the official government explanation of the September 11, 2001 “terror attacks” (apparently, They soon put a damper on any more independent polls).

Blind faith might render the bystander clueless about the whole diabolical nightmare that set in motion “the long war” being greed trickling down from the pinnacles of “humanity” rather than hatred bubbling up from below.

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U.S. Representative Joe Walsh (R-IL), introduced on Monday a resolution (with 30 co-sponsors) to support Israel’s right to annex the West Bank in the event that the Palestinian Authority continues to push for vote at the United Nations.

“We’ve got what I consider to be a potential slap in the face coming up with the vote in the UN, which is absolutely outrageous,” Walsh told Politico website last July.

	The U.S. House of Representatives, September 14, 2011
	Photo by: AFP

He was quoted as saying that “it’s clear that the United States needs to make a very strong statement. I would argue that the president should make this statement, but he’s not capable of making it. So, the House needs to make this statement, if the [Palestinian Authority] continues down this road of trying to get recognition of statehood, the U.S. will not stand for it. And we will respect Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria.”

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Social-democracy had its apogee in the period 1945 to the late 1960s. At that time, it represented an ideology and a movement that stood for the use of state resources to ensure some redistribution to the majority of the population in various concrete ways: expansion of educational and health facilities; guarantees of lifelong income levels by programs to support the needs of the non-“wage-employed” groups, particularly children and seniors; and programs to minimize unemployment. Social-democracy promised an ever-better future for future generations, a sort of permanent rising level of national and family incomes. This was called the welfare state. It was an ideology that reflected the view that capitalism could be “reformed” and acquire a more human face.

The Social-Democrats were most powerful in western Europe, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, and the United States (where they were called New Deal Democrats) – in short, in the wealthy countries of the world-system, those that constituted what might be called the pan-European world. They were so successful that their right-of-center opponents also endorsed the concept of the welfare state, trying merely to reduce its costs and extent. In the rest of the world, the states tried to jump onto this bandwagon by projects of national “development.”

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Members of one of the largest sects of Islam, the Shiaite community, came under attack from militant Islamic organizations which, in the past had the patronage of Pakistan army and its intelligence agencies who offered sophisticated terrorist training including the handling of rocket launchers. The Balochistan province and Kurram agency of northern area, well known as a Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) has become a killing ground for the Shia sect that consist of 24 percent of the Muslim population in Pakistan. These are the places where the contingents of the Pakistan army and its Para-Military force, the Frontier Corps (FC) are stationed and controlling all the roads, besides having check posts all around the major cities. There is also a huge presence of spies from the infamous intelligence agency, the ISI. As a result banned Islamic militant organizations feel at liberty to operate freely under the patronage of the law enforcement agencies.

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The Palestinians won’t get a state this week. But they will prove – if they get enough votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power – that they are worthy of statehood. And they will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to call – when it is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – “facts on the ground”: never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers and expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase on the Middle East. It’s over: the “peace process”, the “road map”, the “Oslo agreement”; the whole fandango is history.

Personally, I think “Palestine” is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs’ land for their colonial projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don’t believe me. Israel’s massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as punishment, the “cordons sanitaires” beside the Jordanian frontier, the Israeli-only settlers’ roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing that prevents the existence of “Greater Israel” is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.

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Like George W. Bush before him, Barack Obama evidently looks out on the “unlit world” and sees a source of global volatility and danger for the United States. His answer has been to deploy US military might to blunt instability, shore up allies, and protect American lives, notes Nick Turse.

Middle East Online, Sept. 20, 2011

Destabilizing the World One Region at a Time

It’s a story that should take your breath away: the destabilization of what, in the Bush years, used to be called “the arc of instability.” It involves at least 97 countries, across the bulk of the global south, much of it coinciding with the oil heartlands of the planet. A startling number of these nations are now in turmoil, and in every single one of them — from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zambia — Washington is militarily involved, overtly or covertly, in outright war or what passes for peace.

Garrisoning the planet is just part of it. The Pentagon and US intelligence services are also running covert special forces and spy operations, launching drone attacks, building bases and secret prisons, training, arming, and funding local security forces, and engaging in a host of other militarized activities right up to full-scale war. But while you consider this, keep one fact in mind: the odds are that there is no longer a single nation in the arc of instability in which the United States is in no way militarily involved.

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The Asian Human Rights Commission urges the world community and the international donors to help the more than eight million flood affected people from Sindh province who are under severe threat from widespread disease. The flooding has affected 22 out of the 23 districts in Sindh. The affected people need life-saving help. The flood waters have not yet started to recede and people are continuously migrating from one place to another place looking for a dry place to settle. The main roads, which above the flood levels are filled with men, women and animals but that will only continue until the waters have reached that level.

The affected people are totally deprived of potable drinking water and depend on the flood water which is the main cause of gastroenteritis and if allowed to run unabated will lead to the deaths of many people. The children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable, especially in their weakened condition due to malnutrition. There are hospitals in the rural areas but they are also affected by the flooding and little if any facilities are available. The chance of outbreaks of malaria and dengue is very high as no sufficient measures have yet been taken by the government.

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