Peace and Justice Post

The Israeli navy has boarded the two Gaza-bound aid ships carrying activists and humanitarian supplies, foiling the latest attempt to bring much needed assistance to the people of Gaza.

The aid ships ignored demands by Israel to reroute away from Gaza to an Israeli port and when the vessels were between 40 and 60 miles off the coast, they were intercepted by Israeli war ships. No one was hurt in the Israeli operation to capture and reroute the aid ships.

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AHRC, November 4, 2011

Urgent Appeal Case : The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has been alerted to the case of a man who has been held in prison in Burma for over 22 years for a crime that he did not commit. Than Zaw was arrested with a number of other men and accused of a bombing in 1989. He was sentenced to death by a military tribunal in which he had no rights to represent himself, but later the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. Even though the authorities subsequently captured the person alleged to be the real bomber, and he was also imprisoned, neither Than Zaw nor the other accused were released. In October, the other remaining accused behind bars was finally let out of jail; however, inexplicably Than Zaw was not also freed.

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By Liaquat Ali Khan, Information Clearing House, November 03, 2011

President Obama has openly deployed murder as an instrument of foreign policy. Soon after assuming office, Obama authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to plan and execute the murder of terrorists and other enemies, regardless of whether they are U.S. citizens. Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Muammar Gaddafi are the prominent murder victims while numerous others in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, and Pakistan have been purposely targeted and killed.

The legitimization of extra-judicial killing is a disturbing development in international law as other nations are certain to follow suit. In pursuit of pre-meditated murders, the collateral damage (the killing of the obviously innocent) has been extensive. The claim that such murders can be executed with electronic precision, though false, serves as an incentive for other nations to develop drones to perpetrate their own surgical assassinations. For now, however, the CIA enjoys the monopoly over drone kills.

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An American Predator assassination drone (file photo)

At least 127 people have been killed in separate US assassination drone strikes in Somalia and Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan over the past two days.

On Thursday, 41 people were killed and 33 others were injured when the US military launched a assassination drone attack on the outskirts of Hoomboy town, which is situated in Somalia’s southern region of the Middle Juba.

The aerial attack followed a US assassination strike against Jamame town in Somalia’s southern Jubbada Hoose region. At least 28 people were killed and dozens more were wounded.

Meanwhile, at least three people were killed in a non-UN-sanctioned US assassination drone attack on Pakistan’s northwestern region of North Waziristan on Thursday.

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by Richard Falk, Foreign Policy Journal, November 4, 2011

It may not ease the daily pain of occupation and blockade, or the endless anguish of refugee status and exile, or the continual humiliations of discrimination and second class citizenship, but the admission of Palestine to membership in UNESCO is for so many reasons a step forward in the long march of the Palestinian people toward the dignity of sunlight! This notable event in Paris illuminates the path that leads to self-determination, but also brings into the open some of the most formidable obstacles that must be cleared if further progress is to be made.

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Diplomatic moves in the United Nations, no matter how refreshingly daring, are not enough.

Amira Hass, Haaretz, November 2, 2011

Now that Palestine has been recognized by the United Nations’ cultural organization, UNESCO, it will be no more of a non-state and no less occupied than it was before. Its citizens will be no less unfree than they are today, no less under the yoke of Israeli foreign rule. But their civil disobedience versus Israel, the United States and the Quartet raises the hope that the Palestinians will not return to the negotiating table – because negotiations have become an obstacle to the decolonization process, the essential condition for peace.

The Palestinians’ application for membership in the United Nations was welcomed, even by critics of the Palestinian Authority, because it was understood as the close, albeit belated, of an overly long chapter. This was the chapter in which the Palestinian leadership, in exchange for dubious guarantees and slivers of privilege for a small group, took part in a charade of negotiations, while in reality, the area intended for the realization of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination kept being reduced and fragmented. This chapter exposed the fact that the parties in Israel’s various coalition governments disagree on only one thing: the number and size of the Palestinian Bantustans in Israel’s master plan.

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By Jerry White, wsws.org,  3 November 2011

March arriving at Port of Oakland, stretches far into distance

Thousands of protesters participated in a day of marches and demonstrations in Oakland, California Wednesday. The actions were held eight days after a violent attack by police on the Occupy Oakland movement resulted in more than 100 arrests and the near-fatal wounding of a young Iraq War veteran, Scott Olsen.

Olsen, 24, suffered a skull fracture when police fired a “non-lethal projectile” directly at his head during peaceful protests on October 25. He remains hospitalized in fair condition, according to friends.

Those participating in the protests Wednesday expressed deep outrage over the attack on freedom of speech and other democratic rights, as well as the enormous inequality that has animated the Occupy movement as a whole.

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Special Ops in Obama-time

 (Credit: AP)

The principal reason so little attention is paid to the constant victims of American violence in the Muslim world is because the U.S. Government refuses to disclose anything about these attacks and media outlets virtually never report on those victims (MSNBC demoted and then fired its then-rising-star Ashleigh Banfield when she returned from Iraq and pointed out that fact in an April, 2003 speech denouncing the “one-sided” coverage of American wars: meaning, the invisibility in U.S. media of America’s civilian victims). It’s easy to cheer for a leader who regularly extinguishes the lives of innocent men, women, teeangers and young children when you can remain blissfully free of hearing about the victims. It’s even easier when the victims all have Muslim-ish names and live in the parts of the Muslim world we’ve been taught to view as a cauldron of sub-human demons. That’s why it’s periodically worth highlighting the actual impact of those drones and the actual people they kill, as the BBC did today:

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