Peace and Justice Post

Liu Xiaobo was jailed in 2009, while his wife Liu Xia has been under illegal house arrest© Private

“Chinese citizens are living in a straitjacket as the authorities imprison and ‘forcibly disappear’ those who speak out for political reform”

—Catherine Baber, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Deputy Director, Dec 9, 2011

China must release jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo along with others imprisoned for dissent, Amnesty International said today – one year after the Chinese activist won the award.

Liu Xiaobo has remained in prison since he was awarded the prize in absentia on 10 December 2010, while his wife Liu Xia has been under illegal house arrest.

Meanwhile, other government critics, such as veteran democracy activist Liu Xianbin, have also received long jail terms for speaking out on the same spurious charge of “inciting subversion of state power”.

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Tahrir Square, epicenter of the earthquake that ousted Egypt’s western-backed dictator, Husni Mubarak, is quiet – for the moment.

There are banner-wavers, speakers, and youngsters milling about. But the by now world-famous square has a forlorn, leftover look, with more street people than revolutionaries. Violence crackles like static electricity.

Heavily armed riot and security police and their armored vehicles are massed nearby. In the ancient Khan al-Khalili Bazaar, I saw vanloads of government thugs waiting to attack demonstrators. I was almost arrested when I started taking photos.

Demonstrators at Tahrir showed me cans of expended tear gas that caused some deaths and many casualties. Whether they were the usual anti-riot CS gas, or the six times stronger, carcinogenic CR that can kill or blind, I could not tell. But the canisters were marked, “Made in the USA” and everyone knew it.

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Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other “story” – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.

But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard “experts” who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.

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AHRC, Dec 9, 2011

Statement : The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) today published its 25-page report containing its analyses on what it has observed as the irreparable ‘social and systemic impact’ of the ongoing violations of human rights in the country. The government remains incapable of providing the most rudimentary forms of protection to its people despite the growing intolerance of the public towards human rights violations. On the other hand the improvements in the legal framework to protect rights, has created the situation where despite the laws being in place to protect the citizens they resort to an emerging ‘parallel system’ from which they now seek remedies and redress.

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by Sami Jamil Jadallah, Veterans Today, Dec. 10, 2011

We all know who “invented” the Palestinians, what we do not know is who “invented” Newt Gingrich?

This is typical political season, where presidential candidates out bid each other and will do every thing they are capable of doing, and since they have no moral or ethical scruples, they stoop so low they become indistinguishable from crawling worms, and are ready to sell their mothers, their country for a ‘fist full of dollars”.

And there is no better place full of dollars than the American Jewish community with its vast financial resources and its well-known financial contributions for political candidates on both sides of the isles and its one issue, Israel.

Outbidding all of his rivals on the Republican side, Newt Gingrich came out making this discovery:  “ I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and who were historically part of the Arab community and who had a chance to go many places”.

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  Seumas Milne,guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 December 2011

Iranians carry honorary coffins and pictures of a Revolutionary Guards commander killed in an explosion at the Alghadir missile base. Photograph: Reuters

They don’t give up. After a decade of blood-drenched failure in Afghanistan and Iraq, violent destabilisation of Pakistan and Yemen, the devastation of Lebanon and slaughter in Libya, you might hope the US and its friends had had their fill of invasion and intervention in the Muslim world.

It seems not. For months the evidence has been growing that a US-Israeli stealth war against Iran has already begun, backed by Britain and France. Covert support for armed opposition groups has spread into a campaign of assassinations of Iranian scientists, cyber warfare, attacks on military and missile installations, and the killing of an Iranian general, among others.

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By Paul J. Balles, Arab News, Dec 9, 2011

PATRIOTISM consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong,” said James Bryce, a British academic, jurist, historian and liberal politician.

Americans won’t like this. Practically everyone else will: Americans simply can never admit they were wrong.

Ill-begotten wars – from Vietnam to Afghanistan – have accomplished nothing but increasing enemies toward American arrogance. Nothing could have been more misguided than the Iraq war, based on a mythical collection of weapons of mass destruction. The lie, the war and the occupation cost the lives of 4,801 Americans plus 179 UK lives and the death of 1,455,590 Iraqis. The WMDs never existed.

Instead of an admission that the Iraq debacle was wrong, the fraudsters made lame excuses in attempts to exonerate themselves. “There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ‘Americanize’ him,” wrote American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley.

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AHRC, Dec 9, 2011

Asia

Statement : On the occasion of the annual International Human Rights Day, held on December 10, 2011, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is releasing reports on the human rights situations in ten Asian countries: Bangladesh, Burma, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Sri Lanka. In 2011, the AHRC has witnessed the continuing widespread use of torture, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings by state agents, serious clampdowns on the freedom of expression, and attacks on human rights defenders. Furthermore, in some of the countries listed above, religious intolerance has led to suppression of religious freedoms and violence against religious minorities.

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Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.

Israeli Government ministers reacted to Clinton’s criticism of democracy Israeli style on Sunday at a weekly cabinet meeting.

In 2006, Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu explained why “Israel is only a democracy if you are a Jew.”

Both Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have now gone public with concerns over Israel’s growing isolation in the Middle East and are urging that regime to take diplomatic steps to address the issue.

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Jerry White, wsws.org, 8 December 2011

In what was billed by the White House as a major speech on the economy, President Barack Obama on Tuesday combined a potted review of American history with half-truths and lies in an attempt to present himself as a fighter for social equality and critic of Wall Street.

Obama, who has spent nearly three years in the White House single-mindedly defending the interests of the financial elite, has in recent weeks adopted this populist persona with the aim of derailing the emergence of social protest, in the form of the Occupy Wall Street protests, and seeking to channel it behind his reelection campaign.

Typical of such carefully staged events, the site of Obama’s remarks—Osawatomie, Kansas, where Theodore Roosevelt gave his 1910 “New Nationalism” speech—was chosen for its symbolism. By wrapping himself in the mantle of Roosevelt’s Progressive Era reform agenda, Obama hoped to lend credibility to his improbable pose as a man of the people and opponent of the moneyed interests.

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