Peace and Justice Post

Chris Floyd, uruknet.info, Dec 16, 2011

In March 2003, the United States of America launched an entirely unprovoked act of military aggression against a nation which had not attacked it and posed no threat to it. This act led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It drove millions more from their homes, and plunged the entire conquered nation into suffering, fear, hatred and deprivation. This is the reality of what actually happened in Iraq: aggression, slaughter, atrocity, ruin. It is the only reality; there is no other. And it was done deliberately, knowingly, willingly. Indeed, the bipartisan American power structure spent more than $1 trillion to make it happen. It is a record of unspeakable savagery, an abomination, an outpouring of the most profound and filthy moral evil. Continues >>

by Alex Callinicos, Socialist Worker, Dec 17, 2011

The news of the writer Christopher Hitchens’s death fills my mind with contradictory images and feelings.

I remember the young Christopher. He was a couple of years ahead of me at the same Oxford college in the late 1960s. He was then the best known activist of the International Socialists (IS, now the Socialist Workers Party) at Oxford.

Chain-smoking, elegant even in the donkey jacket that was standard issue on the revolutionary left, he was a brilliant orator. It was from him that I first learned, often with the force of revelation, many of the main ideas of the Marxist tradition.

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• Martin Chulov in Baghdad
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 December 2011 16.55 GMT

US soldiers hold the US and Iraqi flags during the symbolic flag-lowering ceremony marking the end of the US mission in Iraq. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images

There was no triumphalism and certainly no shock or awe. The end of the war in Iraq was subdued and simple: a small band playing as the US forces flag was furled with 200 troops watching on quietly.

In a makeshift parade ground in a corner of Baghdad airport, time was called on the war just after 1pm on Thursday, eight years, eight months and 26 days after its far more dramatic opening in March 2003. Nearby a plane was waiting to take home the US high command. And in southern Iraq, the 4,000 US troops who remain were steadily streaming towards Kuwait.

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By Sheldon Richman, MWC News, Dec 14, 2011

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Despite Barack Obama’s trumpeted force draw-down in Afghanistan, by the end of next summer more than twice as many U.S. troops will be fighting in that country’s civil war as there were when he became president in 2009. His soothing words notwithstanding, a force of about 70,000 will remain there at least until the end of 2014. We can be sure, however, that that won’t stop the president from campaigning for reelection on a peace platform. As Election Day 2012 approaches, we’ll be treated to lots of footage of withdrawing soldiers.

Yet Obama’s speech in June was mostly show, a spectacle to make the war- and deficit-weary public think he’s taking substantial steps toward disengagement. He did something similar in Iraq, though 50,000 troops remain and are still taking casualties.

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To mark Iran’s National Student Day on 7th December, a letter from imprisoned student Majid Dorri has been smuggled out of Behbehan Prison in southern Iran. In it, he says:

“16th of Azar [7 December] is a day when the university stood against oppression; it stood and gave martyrs; it stood and was dragged over the ground and through blood; but it did not leave, it stayed; it trembled but it did not surrender; it was weakened but did not bend.”

Student Day marks the killing of three students by police in 1953. On this day every year, Iranian students hold demonstrations and gatherings calling for reforms. They refuse to be silenced by the ever-mounting tide of repression.

 
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By Holly Rigby, Information Clearing House, Dec 14, 2011

This has been one of the darkest and most disturbing days I have ever had to experience. The funeral of Mustafa Tamimi, murdered by the IOF at a demonstration at Nabi Saleh on Friday, ended with the IOF shooting endless rounds of the teargas canisters that killed Mustafa at unarmed mourners, beating and arresting people with impunity as they walked across Nabi Saleh village after the funeral.

Nabi Saleh, a small village of only 550 people, has been organising non-violent protests against the theft of their land since 2009. The illegal Israeli settlement of Halamish has continued to grow and expand since 1976, and the tiny village has been holding the demonstration for two years protesting against the confiscation of the village’s main water supply, the Kaws Spring. Nabi Saleh has become infamous for its violence and arrests against Palestinians, but until yesterday nobody had been killed there by the IOF.

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Socialist Worker, December 14, 2011

Protests by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and other cities December 10 were by far the largest demonstrations in Russia since the collapse of the USSR two decades ago.

The focus of the mobilizations was massive fraud in the December 4 parliamentary elections. The ruling party, United Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, outraged millions with ballot-stuffing operations to try to achieve a parliamentary majority. These brazen attempts at vote-rigging were documented by both poll monitors and ordinary citizens using cell phone cameras.

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By John R. MacArthur, Harpers Magazine, Dec 14, 2011

As evidence of a failed Obama presidency accumulates, criticism of his administration is mounting from liberal Democrats who have too much moral authority to be ignored.

Most prominent among these critics is veteran journalist Bill Moyers, whose October address to a Public Citizen gathering puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” In his talk, Moyers quoted an authentic Kansas populist, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who in 1890 declared, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”

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 uruknet.info, Dec 14, 2011

Source: AFP

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Hundreds of Iraqis set alight US and Israeli flags on Wednesday as they celebrated the impending pullout of American forces from the country in the former insurgent bastion of Fallujah. Shouting slogans in support of the “resistance,” the demonstrators held up banners and placards inscribed with phrases like, “Now we are free” and “Fallujah is the flame of the resistance.” In the centre of the city surrounded by the Iraqi army, demonstrators carried posters bearing photos of apparent insurgents, faces covered and carrying weapons. Continues >>