Peace and Justice Post

• 
• • Michael Mansfield
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 October 2011 16.45 BST

Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who saw three of his children and a niece killed when Israeli shells smashed into his home in Gaza. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

Israel has violated innumerable UN resolutions and international laws over the past 50 years without any sanction being incurred – whether legal, economic, political or military. Most blatant is its disregard for the overwhelming opinion of the international court of justice in The Hague, which in 2004 declared the erection of a wall through the occupied territories to be unlawful. If you add the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, continued extension of illegal settlements, forced evictions and house demolitions, requisition of water resources, Gaza blockade and illicit use of cloned passports to facilitate an assassination outside Israel, anyone might be think that this is a state that regards itself as above the law.

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Pro-Israeli Hawk Urges U.S. to “Get Tough” With Sole Islamic Nuclear Power

by Maidhc Ó Cathail, Dissident Voice,  October 7th, 2011

While much attention has been paid to Admiral Mike Mullen’s allegations that Pakistan’s ISI was behind recent attacks on American targets in Afghanistan attributed to the Haqqani network, the subsequent call by an influential neoconservative pundit for the United States to “get tough with Pakistan” seems to have gone unnoticed.

Writing this week in two of the neoconservative flagship outlets, Commentary and The Weekly Standard, Max Boot argues for a more aggressive U.S. approach to Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. “I suggest we start treating Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency the way we treated Iran’s Quds Force in Iraq,” Boot opines in Commentary, an influential magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee, a key component of the pro-Israel lobby. “That is to say, apply the full range of our power–everything from diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, to kinetic military action–to curb the menace posed by this group.”

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Song Kang-ho, an activist opposing a naval base under construction, near the construction site, in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island, South Korea, August 2, 2011. (Photo: Jean Chung / The New York Times)

Jeju Island, 50 miles southeast of South Korea’s mainland, has been called the most idyllic place on the planet. The pristine, 706-square-mile volcanic island comprises three UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites.

Jeju’s history, however, is far from idyllic. In 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, the islanders staged an uprising to protest, among other issues, the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South. The mainland government, then under U.S. military occupation, cracked down on the Jeju insurgents.

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Freedom Plaza is an open block in the middle of D.C. in between the White House and the Capitol Building, and on Thursday it was packed with activists and concerned citizens protesting against the government’s wars and corporatism.

Freedom Plaza

Well over 500 people showed up to protest, which had initially been focused on the war in Afghanistan. The website, set up months prior in preparation, contained a pledge that many participants signed: “I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan…I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day or the days immediately following, for as long as I can, with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo…”

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After ten years of war, now is a perfect time to act to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Friends Committee on National Legislation has set up a toll-free number for us to call Congress: 1-877-429-0678. A Congressional “Supercommittee” is charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion in reduced debt over ten years, and the wars and the bloated Pentagon budget dangle before the Supercommittee like overripe fruit.

A recent CBS poll shows how far out of step with the 99% the Pentagon’s plans are. 62% want U.S. troops out within two years.

But the Pentagon wants to stay for at least thirteen more years.

So what else is new, you may say. The Pentagon wants to stay everywhere forever.

But here is a key political fact about the world in which we live: the Pentagon does not always get what it wants. The Pentagon did not want to eat a timetable for the withdrawal of all Pentagon forces from Iraq by December, but the Pentagon was forced to eat such a timetable anyway. Now, the Pentagon is trying to undo the timetable.

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Rashid Khalidi, Information Clearing House, Oct. 6, 2011

As the dust settles after last week’s “showdown” at the United Nations over the Palestinian application for membership, several initial conclusions can be drawn.

First, the United States now is thoroughly out of touch with most of the international community when it comes to Palestine and Israel. It has positioned itself to the right of the most right-wing, pro-settler government in Israeli history. This was reflected in the joyful reception of President Obama’s speech by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and his right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, as well as in the Israel lobby’s satisfied response to Obama’s caving in to Israeli demands all along the line.

In an almost surreal display of pandering, Republican presidential candidates—notably Texas governor Rick Perry—disparaged the president for “appeasing” the Palestinians and thereby betraying Israel. This rhetoric came despite the fact that Obama single-handedly sabotaged the Palestinians’ UN bid while publicly lecturing them and the entire General Assembly on the suffering of Israelis without so much as a word acknowledging Israeli occupation, violence and settlements—not to mention the Palestinian suffering caused by these American-supported policies. Obama’s domestic electioneering in the face of a historic demand by the long-suffering Palestinians was not lost on the world. Taken in the context of the Arab Spring and its wave of popular demands for human and political rights, it means that the United States has lost all credibility as an honest broker in this conflict.

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 By John Pilger, ZSpace, Oct. 7, 2011

The High Court in London will soon decide whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct. At the appeal hearing in July, Ben Emmerson QC, counsel for the defence, described the whole saga as “crazy”. Sweden’s chief prosecutor had dismissed the original arrest warrant, saying there was no case for Assange to answer. Both the women involved said they had consented to have sex. On the facts alleged, no crime would have been committed in Britain.

 However, it is not the Swedish judicial system that presents a “grave danger” to Assange, say his lawyers, but a legal device known as a Temporary Surrender, under which he can be sent on from Sweden to the United States secretly and quickly. The founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who published the greatest leak of official documents in history, providing a unique insight into rapacious wars and the lies told by governments, is likely to find himself in a hell hole not dissimilar to the “torturous” dungeon that held Private Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower. Manning has not been tried, let alone convicted, yet on 21 April, President Barack Obama declared him guilty with a dismissive “He broke the law”.

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Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, Oct. 7, 2011

The first remembrance field dedicated solely to British military personnel who have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, in Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Ten years of western occupation of Afghanistan led the UN this week to plead that half the country’s drought-ridden provinces face winter starvation. The World Food Programme calls for £92m to be urgently dispatched. This is incredible. Afghanistan is the world’s greatest recipient of aid, some $20bn in the past decade, plus a hundred times more in military spending. So much cash pours through its doors that $3m a day is said to leave Kabul airport corruptly to buy property in Dubai.

Everything about Afghanistan beggars belief. This week its leader, Hamid Karzai, brazenly signed a military agreement with India, knowing it would enrage his neighbour, Pakistan, and knowing it would increase the assault on his capital by the Haqqani network, reported clients of Islamabad’s ISI intelligence agency. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Pentagon is exulting over its new strategy of drone killing, claiming this aerial “counter-terrorism” can replace the “hearts and minds” counter-insurgency. Down in Helmand, visiting British journalists gather to recite the defence ministry’s tired catechism: “We are making real progress on the ground.”

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MWC News, Wednesday, 05 October 2011

By Richard Falk

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The exciting presence of protestors on Wall Street (and the spread of the Occupy Wall Street protest across the country) is a welcome respite from years of passivity in America, not only in relation to the scandalous legal and illegal abuses of comprador capitalists, but also to the prolongations of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rising Islamophobic tide at home, and a presidency that seems less willing to confront hedge fund managers than jobless masses. But will this encouraging presence be sustained in a manner that brings some hope of restored democracy and social wellbeing at home and responsible law-oriented leadership abroad?

There is little doubt that this move to the streets expresses a deep disillusionment with ordinary politics based on elections and governing institutions. Obama’s electoral victory in 2008 was the last hope of the young in America who poured unprecedented enthusiasm into his campaign that promised so much and delivered so little. Perhaps worse than Obama’s failure to deliver, was his refusal to fight, or even to bring into his entourage of advisors some voices of empathy and mildly progressive outlook. . .

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By a reporting team,

wsws.org,  6 October 2011

The World Socialist Web Site spoke to many of those who joined Wednesday’s mass demonstration against Wall Street.

Sean Charls, age 24, a bank employee, joined the demonstration after leaving work in lower Manhattan.

“It’s about time, America is long overdue for a revolution,” he said. “Historically since the American Revolution, there hasn’t been a movement that everyone has been so passionate about. A lot of people are really hurting right now, and nothing is being done about it. Instead they are being stabbed in the back by the people who are in charge. Isn’t democracy supposed to be “government by the people, for the people’?

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