Peace and Justice Post

Arab League Should Suspend Syria

(New York) – The systematic nature of abuses against civilians in Homs by Syrian government forces, including torture and unlawful killings, indicate that crimes against humanity have been committed, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Human Rights Watch urged the Arab League, meeting in Cairo on November 12, 2011, to suspend Syria’s membership in the League and to ask the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo and sanctions against individuals responsible for the violations, and refer Syria to the International Criminal Court.

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By Richard Falk,ZNet, November 12, 2011

 Source: Richardfalk.com

How many times have we heard in recent weeks either outright threats to attack Iran mainly emanating from Israel or the more muted posture adopted by the United States that leaves ‘all options’ on the table including ‘the military option’? What has Iran done to justify this frantic war-mongering in a strategic region that is sorting out the contradictory effects of the long Arab Spring and is the contested site of energy geopolitics that has replaced territory and minerals as the core issue of world politics? 

As a matter of historical context, it is worth observing that the Western military interventions of recent years, Iraq and Libya, were both in oil-producing countries, devastating the country to achieve regime change, which remains the central tenet of the neocon/Netanyahu vision for a reconfiguration of power in the Middle East. . .

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Veterans Today, November 13, 2011

The American ‘Foreign Policy’ Household Book

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad” Aldous Huxley

The Council for The National Interest

The Israel Lobby is one of the most powerful and pervasive special interest groups in the United States. It began its activities many decades ago and played a major role in the creation of Israel.

It consists of a multitude of institutions, many of them extremely well-funded, that work to influence Congress, the Presidency, academia, the media, religious institutions, and the American public on behalf of Israel. It also includes influential individuals.

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by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“The president is happiest when John Boehner and the Republicans come to the negotiating table but that is when the rest of us are most at risk.” In his quest for a Grand Bargain with the GOP, Obama has declared war against every progressive principle and betrayed every core constituency of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, “thanks to his success in marketing himself as an agent of change, and the complete capitulation of black voters and other progressives, Obama is free to do as he pleases in America and around the world.”

Freedom Rider: Obama Perfects Right Wing Policy

by BAR editor and senior columnist Margaret Kimberley

“Nothing sticks to him, no matter how awful his actions.”

Conservative pundit William Kristol had this to say about Barack Obama, a man he lauded as a “born again neo-con.” “What’s the joke – they told me if I voted for McCain, we’d be going to war in a third Muslim country? I voted for McCain and we’re doing it.”

It was said that Ronald Reagan had teflon, that is to say, nothing stuck to him. If Reagan had teflon, then Barack Obama has patented a brand new, space aged non-stick material, because nothing sticks to him, no matter how awful his actions. Thanks to his success in marketing himself as an agent of change, and the complete capitulation of black voters and other progressives, Obama is free to do as he pleases in America and around the world.

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by James Petras, Information Clearing House, November 9, 2011

After nearly 3 years in deep pursuit of the colonial wars initiated by ex-President Bush, the Obama regime has finally recognized the catastrophic domestic and foreign consequences. As a result the “reality principle” has taken hold; the maintenance of the US Empire requires modification of tactics and strategies, to cut political, military and diplomatic losses[1].

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators. This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity”) remains to be seen.

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“We will not build two (nuclear) bombs in the face of (America’s) 20,000,” said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week that accuses Iran of doing just that. He called Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, a US puppet, saying: “This person does not publish a report about America and its allies’ nuclear arsenals.”

Well, that’s true, actually. Amano will never publish a report about America’s nuclear weapons (only 5,133 of them now, actually). He hasn’t said anything about Israel’s, Britain’s and France’s weapons of mass destruction either. And his report is largely based on information fed to him by Western intelligence agencies.

But apart from that, Amano is as impartial and free from US influence as you would expect a career Japanese diplomat to be. Only cynical people will see any resemblance to Colin Powell’s performance at the United Nations in 2003, when the US defense secretary held up a test tube and assured us all that Iraq really was working on germ warfare.

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The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, in a move initiated by the Obama administration, has voted to waive Bush-era human rights restrictions on military aid to the Islam Karimov dictatorship in Uzbekistan, one of the most brutal and repressive regimes on the planet. The lifting of the restrictions, now part of the Foreign Operations bill, is before the full Senate and appears to have bipartisan support. The Obama administration has indicated that it intends to provide taxpayer-funded military assistance to Uzbekistan once the legislation passes both houses of Congress.

Torture is endemic in Karimov’s Uzbekistan, where his regime has banned all opposition political parties, severely restricted freedom of expression, forced international human rights and NGOs out of the country, suppressed religious freedom, and annually taken as many as two million children out of school to engage in forced labor for the cotton harvest.  Thousands of dissidents have been jailed and many hundreds have been killed, some of them literally boiled alive.

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Middle East Monitor, November 9, 2011

A media frenzy followed the publication of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s description of Benjamin Netanyahu as “a liar” during a private discussion with US President Barack Obama. The exchange took place shortly before a press conference with the two leaders on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

The French president’s comment revealed absolutely nothing new; there is something of a consensus, both inside and outside Israel, on Netanyahu’s expertise in the ways and means of deception. Palestinians who over the years have been burned by Netanyahu’s lies could provide a reference for his expertise.

What stands out is that Obama, who said nothing to dispel Sarkozy’s description of the Israeli Prime Minister, complained that he was forced to deal with this deceitful Israeli leader on a daily basis.

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Beginning with Occupy Wall Street in September 2011, a protest movement spread across the United States to 70 major cities and hundreds of other communities. Similar actions emerged in scores of other nations.

For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission. By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion. When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization.

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Palestine News Network, November 9, 2011

Fifteen of the activists from the Freedom Waves to Gaza flotilla came before an Israeli court on Tuesday, and were advised they could be held for up to 2 months without charges or a trial.

The coastline of the blockaded Gaza Strip, where the Canadian and Irish aid ships hope to reach on Friday (Lo Yuk Fai, PNN).