Peace and Justice Post

Bahraini medical personnel protesting in Manama.

The United States continues to ignore the thwarted Arab Spring in Bahrain. Recently, a quasi-military court in the small Gulf state sentenced 20 doctors and nurses to up to 15 years in jail. The charge against them? Treating injured demonstrators opposing the regime.

Doctors and nurses in the Middle East have a long and proud tradition of treating the ill, regardless of the situation. In ninth-century Baghdad, for example, Hunayn ibn Ishaq was the Caliph’s physician. The Caliph asked this physician to prepare a poison to kill his enemies. The physician refused, risking his life, and was eventually jailed for one year. After serving his sentence, the Caliph inquired as to why he refused. The physician replied, “My profession is instituted for the benefit of humanity and limited to their relief and cure.”

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by Jim Fetzer, Leuren Moret, and Christopher Busby, Vetrans Today, November 3, 2011

 U.S. Marines fire Nov. 11, 2004, on Fallujah with a 155 mm Howitzer. One of the weapons originally designed for this artillery piece was a tactical nuclear weapon (that could include a neutron warhead) designed by Samuel Cohen, to be fired in eastern Europe on Soviet troops during President Ronald Reagan’s term in office. [Photo: Lance Cpl. Samantha L. Jones]

On Friday, 28 October 2011, it was my honor to host Leuren Moret and Christopher Busby as my guests on “The Real Deal”, an internet radio program broadcast on M/W/F from 5-7 PM/CT over revereradio.net. Leuren Moret is an independent geoscientist who has done expert studies on the Fukushima disaster, radiation problems around the world including depleted uranium. Dr. Christopher Busby is a visiting biomedical studies professor at the University of Ulster and is the co-author of reports about the effects of depleteed uranium in Iraq especially in relation to Fallujah. What Busby found much to his surprise was not DU but enriched uranium instead.

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by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, November 5, 2011

Surely, the New York Times would not dare turn down a piece from the new Richard Goldstone, who had already recast himself as the self-appointed guardian of Israel’s world reputation even as he had earlier been anointed as the distinguished jurist who admirably put aside his ethnic identity and personal affiliations when it came to carrying out his professional work as a specialist in international criminal law, or in carrying out high profile investigative and fact-finding missions in the international arena. Goldstone was even seemingly willing to confront the Zionist furies of Israel when criticized by one of their own adherents in chairing the UN panel appointed to consider allegations of Israeli war crimes during the Gaza War of 2008-09.

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Faced with a round of threats and speculations of an impending war so shrill that it has sent oil prices soaring, Russia and China were quick today to caution the United States against launching an attack on Iran.

Attacking Iran would be a “very serious mistake fraught with unpredictable consequences,” warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, while China expressed concern that the threats were harming the prospects of diplomacy.

They are just the latest in a growing chorus of nations to express concerns about starting another major war. Germany has also said they oppose such a move.

A growing number of US officials past and present have expressed a preference for launching a military attack on Iran soon, with an IAEA report alleging some vague allegations about computer simulations serving as the latest pretext.

Israeli officials have also been hyping the prospect of launching an attack on Iran themselves, with President Shimon Peres insisted the war was “more likely” than any sort of diplomatic solution. Israeli military officials are said to prefer an attack before winter.

Last week Israel successfully test-fired a new long-range ballistic missile, capable of striking military targets deep inside Iran.

In remarks to Israel’s Knesset, Prime Minister Netanyahu said, “A nuclear Iran will pose a serious threat to the Middle East and the entire world, and it of course poses a direct and heavy threat to us.”

On September 3^rd, Gen. Hasan Firouzabadi, supreme commander of Iran’s military and Revolutionary Guards armed forces, said, “Iran hopes there won’t be a need to target the nuclear facility of the Zionist regime, but if there is, Israel would receive dreadful retribution. Our developed weapons can hit any part of the Zionist regime.” [1]

Israeli ambassador in Washington Michael Oren, claims Hezbollah in South Lebanon has 16,000 rockets ranged to cover every part of Israel with enhanced precision and that includes the Dimona WMD facility- which has never allowed International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors into.

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By Richard Falk, MWC News,November 7, 2011

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As someone who has witnessed the humiliations daily endured by Palestinians living decade after decade under ‘occupation’ the word occupation was for me an inalterably dirty word. I associated the practice of occupation, especially prolonged occupation of the sort that Israel has imposed on Palestine as synonymous with ‘abuse’ and ‘oppression.’ Having just completed two days of intense discussions between leading Israeli and Palestinian voices for peace at an LSE workshop presided over by Mary Kaldor and Lakhdar Brahimi reached a single Archimedean point of consensus: ‘End the Occupation.’ Personally, I was not so content with this outcome as it tended to narrow the Palestinian agenda to a kind of ‘land for peace’ formula, neglecting the plight, the rights, and the prospects of five million or so territorially dispossessed Palestinians living as refugees or exile, often enduring intolerable situations of vulnerability and deprivation that has continued for generations,  whose persistence is incompatible with a sustainable peace or a tolerable future.

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By Frances Fox Piven,  Countercurrents.org, November 7, 2011

Source: TomDispatch.com

Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality

We’ve been at war for decades now — not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed — until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

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Much of the international support that Israel receives is based on several lies it tells and re-tells as “facts”.

By Joseph Massad, Information Clearing House, November 7, 2011

In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 24 years.

Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years.

This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, however, is far more insidious.

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If there is a fixed human nature, then why have human societies differed so radically?

Paul D’Amato,   Socialist Worker, November 4, 2011

WHY DO people behave the way they do? One common answer to this question is that behavior is determined by something in our “human nature.” So greed, selfishness, violence and war are all blamed on something innate to all of us.

Of course, for every manifestation of greed, selfishness and violence, there are at least as may examples of compassion and sharing.

But leaving that aside for a moment, the problem with the commonly held view of human nature is this: If there is a fixed human nature, then how can it be that human societies have differed so much between different regions and historical times?

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