Peace and Justice Post

By Stephen Lendman, MWC News, Dec 6, 2011

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The Association for Civil Rights in Israel assesses Israel’s human and civil rights record annually. Its newly released 2011 report cites increasing crackdowns on basic freedoms.

Losing free expression and assembly rights threatens others. They’re basic ones Israel’s High Court affirmed.

It said the “true test of freedom of expression lies in allowing the airing of views that are extreme, controversial, or infuriating.” It’s the state’s obligation to protect them, including in public gatherings.

Israel ratified all core international human rights conventions relating to free association rights, including the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It requires signatories to respect the right to life, due process, judicial fairness, free and open elections, and freedoms of expression, assembly and religion.

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Mail Online, Dec 6, 2011

Former U.S. President George W. Bush has cancelled a visit to Switzerland over fears he could have been arrested on torture charges.

Mr Bush was due to be the keynote speaker at a Jewish charity gala in Geneva on February 12.

But pressure has been building on the Swiss government to arrest him and open a criminal investigation if he enters the country.

Criminal complaints against Mr Bush alleging torture have been lodged in Geneva, court officials said.

Human rights groups said they had intended to submit a 2,500-page case against him in the Swiss city tomorrow for alleged mistreatment of suspected militants at Guantanamo Bay.

Left-wing groups have also called for a protest on the day of his visit, leading organisers at Keren Hayesod’s annual dinner to cancel Mr Bush’s participation on security grounds.

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The nation’s economic news is grim indeed, and is the grimmest of all for black Americans. Recently released census data shows that while the median yearly income in this country is $50,000, it is only $32,000 for black people, the lowest of any other racial group in the country. Hispanics had a median income of $37,000, whites $49,000 and Asians $64,000.

Simply put, black Americans are at the absolute bottom of the economic heap in a county still teetering from the effects of a seemingly endless recession. The term recession is something of a misnomer because it does not adequately describe the worldwide crises endemic to capitalism. As western nations take their citizens on a dizzying race to the bottom with various austerity measures, the fate of people already on the bottom grows more precarious by the day.

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Terry Jones, The Guardian, Dec 6, 2011

Dwight D Eisenhower: in 1961 the retiring president warned fellow Americans of the danger in allowing too close a relationship between politicians and the defence industry. Photograph: W. Eugene Smith/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

In the 14th century there were two pandemics. One was the Black Death, the other was the commercialisation of warfare. Mercenaries had always existed, but under Edward III they became the mainstay of the English army for the first 20 years of what became the Hundred Years war. Then, when Edward signed the treaty of Brétigny in 1360 and told his soldiers to stop fighting and go home, many of them didn’t have any homes to go to. They were used to fighting, and that’s how they made their money. So they simply formed themselves into freelance armies, aptly called “free companies”, that proceeded around France pillaging, killing and raping.

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The U.S. has long had Iran virtually encircled as a result of the American occupation of Afghanistan on Iran’s Eastern border, its invasion of Iraq on its Western border, its NATO ally Turkey hovering on Iran’s Northwestern border, some degree of military relationship with Turkmenistan on Iran’s Northeastern border, and multiple U.S. client states sitting right across the Persian Gulf (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain, where the massive U.S. Fifth Fleet is stationed). Additionally, some combination of the U.S. and Israel has bombarded Iran with multiple acts of war over the last year, including explosions on Iranian soil, the murder of numerous Iranian nuclear scientists (in which even one of their wives was shot), and sophisticated cyberattacks. Meanwhile, top American political officials from both parties are actively demanding that an Iranian revolutionary cult be removed from the list of Terrorist organizations (just coincidentally, they’re all on the cult’s payroll). In the past decade, the U.S. and/or Israel have invaded, air attacked, and/or occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (to say nothing of the creation of a worldwide torture regime, a system of “black site” prisons around the world to which people were disappeared, and a due-process-free detention camp in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean where many people remain encaged for almost a full decade without charges). . .

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Columbia Professor Rashid Khalidi says nobody believes firing rockets is resistance that will liberate Palestine or that talking with the U.S. will deliver a just and lasting solution.

Chemi Shalev, Haaretz, Dec 5, 2011

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority should unite, unequivocally renounce violence and jettison the U.S.-led peace process which is “a corpse that has had formaldehyde pumped into its veins for over a decade” – this is the diagnosis and prescription of Professor Rashid Khalidi, one of the leading Palestinian intellectuals in the world.

“Nobody believes that firing rockets and getting 1,400 people killed in response is ‘resistance’ that is going to liberate Palestine, and nobody believes that talking with the U.S., with Dennis Ross putting his thumb on the scales in favor of Israel, which is already overwhelmingly superior, is going to produce an equitable and just and lasting solution of the Palestine question. If you still believe that – you have to have your head examined,” the U.S.-born Khalidi said.

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Socialist Worker, December 5, 2011

Protesters march in Pakistan against U.S. military attacks

GUNFIRE FROM NATO helicopters killed 24 Pakistani soldiers November 25 in Mohmand Province near the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in an attack on a military outpost that highlights the deep split between the Pakistani and U.S. governments over the war in Afghanistan.

NATO officials made contradictory claims about the attack–that it was a strategic error, but also that they had the go-ahead from the Pakistani leadership for the strike. Both of these claims were different from the original story–that NATO forces were fired on from across the Pakistani border. Accusations are also flying in Pakistan itself that there may have been communication between Pakistan and NATO forces approving the strike.

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William Blum, Information Clearing House, Dec 3, 2011

There’s no letup, is there? The preparation of the American mind, the world mind, for the next gala performance of D&D — Death and Destruction. The Bunker Buster bombs are now 30,000 pounds each one, six times as heavy as the previous delightful model.

But the Masters of War still want to be loved; they need for you to believe them when they say they have no choice, that Iran is the latest threat to life as we know it, no time to waste.

The preparation of minds was just as fervent before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. And when it turned out that Iraq did not have any kind of arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) … well, our power elite found other justifications for the invasion, and didn’t look back. Some berated Iraq: “Why didn’t they tell us that? Did they want us to bomb them?”

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By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Dec 3, 2011

Two significant events happened on Thursday: (1) the Democratic-led Senate rejuvenated and expanded the War on Terror by, among other things, passing a law authorizing military detention on U.S. soil and expanding the formal scope of the War; and (2) Obama lawyers, for the first time, publicly justified the President’s asserted (and seized) power to target U.S. citizens for assassination without any transparency or due process. I wrote extensively about the first episode on Thursday, and now have a question for those supporting the assassination theories just offered by the President’s lawyers.

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Israeli television released video footage of soldiers in the Israeli military torturing Palestinian prisoners.

In the report, aired by Channel 2, reporters explain that the abuse in the video is repeated daily, and that the soldiers are barely punished.

The footage, caught on tape by a cellphone camera, has been translated in the following video:

Despite Israel denying that it tortures or ill-treats prisoners, evidence suggests that abuse and torture are systematically integrated into Israel’s punishment of Palestinians.

In April this year, Channel 2 aired footage of a raid of prisoners’ cells and tents in Ktziot. Ktziot is a large Palestinian prison located near Israel’s Egyptian border. The violent and disturbing raid included guards shooting prisoners while in the cells; one man was killed and many others were injured. 

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