Peace and Justice Post

EU, US Leaders Should Publicly Condemn Human Rights Violations

(Munich) – Saudi authorities have arrested over 160 peaceful dissidents in violation of international human rights law since February 2011, Human Rights Watch said today. Human Rights Watch urged the interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud, to order the immediate release of peaceful dissidents, including Nadhir al-Majid, a writer and teacher arrested on April 17.

Allies of Saudi Arabia have not publicly protested these serious and systematic violations. The European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said on April 18 that she had been “very pleased” with her two-day visit to Riyadh and made no public comments about the political prisoners. Neither Tom Donilon, the US national security adviser who visited Riyadh on April 13, nor Robert Gates, US defense secretary who visited on April 6, publicly commented on the kingdom’s human rights violations.

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brianjmatis/Flickr

Why a janitor ends up with a higher tax rate than a millionaire, and seven more charts that show how the richest Americans beat the IRS.

— By Dave Gilson, Plutocracy Now, April 18, 2011

“We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,” billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley famously (and allegedly) sniffed. She wasn’t entirely correct: The superrich do still pay taxes. The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers pay 32 percent of all income tax collected by the federal government.

But the superrich don’t pay as much as they used to—and thanks to a combination of tax cuts and preferential tax policies, their tax obligations can be less demanding than the so-called little people’s. In fact, the very wealthiest Americans’ tax burden has been steadily dropping for years, even as they’ve enjoyed astounding income growth not seen by the vast majority of Americans.

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By Steven Thomma, McClatchy Newspapers, April 18, 2011

WASHINGTON — He ran as the anti-Bush.

Silver-tongued, not tongue-tied. A team player on the world stage, not a lone cowboy. A man who’d put a stop to reckless Bush policies at home and abroad. In short, Barack Obama represented Change.

Well, that was then. Now, on one major policy after another, President Barack Obama seems to be morphing into George W. Bush.

On the nation’s finances, the man who once ripped Bush as a failed leader for seeking to raise the nation’s debt ceiling now wants to do it himself.

On terrorism, he criticized Bush for sending suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and denying them access to U.S. civilian courts. Now he says he’ll do the same.

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Khaleej Times, April 19, 2011

(AFP)

While there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel’s blockade means there is extensive poverty, endemic unemployment and that 80 percent of Gazans are dependent on aid handouts, said UNICEF spokeswoman Catherine Weibel.

Children under 18, around half the estimated 1.5 million population of the territory controlled by Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, are the most affected, the United Nations children’s agency spokeswoman told journalists.

While 90 percent of Gazan children are educated, largely thanks to UNICEF and UN Relief and Works Agency schools, poverty still obliges many to work.

They work often in “danger zones” such as smuggling tunnels running under the border from Egypt aimed at defying the Israeli blockade.

To keep working in the tunnels, which could collapse, be bombed or gassed, many youths take Tramadol painkillers, Weibel said.

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By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, 19 April 2011

A series of bombings have signaled the beginning of a spring offensive by the Afghan resistance forces, while inflicting the greatest single-day casualties on US-led occupation forces in nearly a year.

Two separate attacks last Saturday claimed the lives of eight NATO soldiers, the deadliest day for the occupation since June of last year.

The bloodiest attack was at a desert base near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. A man wearing the uniform of the Afghan army walked into a room where about 40 US and Afghan troops were meeting and detonated an explosive vest he was wearing. Five US soldiers were killed together with four Afghan troops and an interpreter. A number of others were wounded.

A spokesman for the Taliban said that the attacker was a soldier who had been in contact with the armed resistance for a “long time” and had been assigned to the base where the bombing took place about a month ago.

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CommonDreams.org, April 19, 2011

NEW YORK – The US worked behind the scenes to help Israel contain United Nations probes into possible war crimes committed during the 2008/’09 Gaza war, Foreign Policy reported today.

According to one cable, US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice (right) spoke with UN chief Ban Ki-moon three times on May 4, 2009 to urge him to remove recommendations for a wider investigation from a board of inquiry report into attacks on UN sites in Gaza. The online foreign affairs magazine cited exclusive WikiLeaks cables, detailing moves by Washington’s UN ambassador Susan Rice to prevent a more thorough UN investigation of alleged abuses in the conflict.

Some 1400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during the three-week Israeli offensive in December 2008 and January 2009, which was aimed at halting Palestinian rocket attacks.

According to one cable, Rice spoke with UN chief Ban Ki-moon three times on May 4, 2009 to urge him to remove recommendations for a wider investigation from a board of inquiry report into attacks on UN sites in Gaza.

Rice “underscored the importance of having a strong cover letter that made clear that no further action was needed and would close out this issue,” the US diplomatic cable said.

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Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian, April 18, 2011

Nobel peace prize laureate Shirin Ebadi wrote to the UN commissioner for human rights over the treatment of the Sunni minority in Iran. Photograph: Caren Firouz /Reuters

At least 12 people who are believed to belong to Iran‘s Sunni minority have been killed in clashes between security forces and anti-government protesters in the south-western city of Ahwaz since Friday.

On Monday, Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s Nobel peace prize laureate, wrote a letter to the UN high commissioner for human rights, in which she said “more than 12” Sunni protesters had been killed in Iran’s oil-rich province of Khuzestan, home to many Arabic-speaking Sunni Iranians.

According to Ebadi, hundreds of people in Ahwaz had gathered for a peaceful demonstration against the Islamic regime’s discrimination towards its Sunni minority.

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Leaked report talks of ‘credible allegations’ against troops

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent, The Independent, Apr 17, 2011

afp/getty imagesSri Lankan Tamils captured by government forces and held in a camp for displaced people in the northern district of Vavuniya in 2009. Some were not allowed home for a year

By Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News, April 17, 2011

Editor’s Note: Today’s neoconservative dominance of Official Washington has further pushed outside the realm of acceptable debate any evenhanded discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. There is deep-seated fear that criticism of Israel will bring accusations of anti-Semitism.

Even selective criticism of some Likud policies by J Street, a liberal Jewish organization, recently prompted retribution from Israel, a Knesset hearing decrying J Street as “anti-Israel.” It is in that context of intolerance that Lawrence Davidson assesses a congressional hearing:

Lobbification is a word I have just coined for the corruptive process that bends politicians to the will of special interests – that is to the will of lobbies.

The result of lobbification can be seen in the stilted and fawning behavior ofthe lobbified political brain. Politicians with lobbified brains become the obedient instruments of the lobbies which have captured their political souls. Below are a few examples of the results of lobbification.

The majority of the politicians who sit on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee are victims of lobbification. Among the major lobbies that have, over the decades, carried out this corrupting process are the Zionist organizations in their various Jewish and Christian manifestations.

In their present state, the lobbified minds of these committee members, so influential in the foreign policy formulation process of our country, are utterly incapable of questioning, much less defying, the hypnotic power of either American Zionists or the Israelis.

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