Peace and Justice Post

The abduction and murder of Italian Palestine solidarity activist Vittorio Arrigoni (pictured) in Gaza comes as a shock to the entire Palestine solidarity movement and its many supporters around the world. It will also come as a shock to the vast majority of Palestinians themselves, especially as the bonds of solidarity that have been forged between them and the countless thousands of volunteers, delegations and activists who’ve travelled to and struggled alongside them over many long years are strong and unbreakable.

At any given time hundreds of volunteers, solidarity activists, and aid workers from all over the world live and work in both the West Bank and Gaza alongside the Palestinian people and are regarded as brothers and sisters in struggle by the vast majority they come into contact with. From this country alone in recent years five aid convoys have been organised and travelled to Gaza under the auspices of the Viva Palestina pro-Palestinian charitable organisation. Each has successfully broken the siege and been met with open arms by the authorities and the people of Gaza alike. However, we should not kid ourselves. In the conditions of a six year long unremitting siege, which it is worth recalling is an act of collective punishment in violation of international law, of which there is still no end in sight, and with the international community still as yet refusing to intercede in any meaningful way to end the suffering of the 1.5 million men, women and children who are impacted daily, it is inevitable that extreme views and actions will result. Indeed, given the conditions described, it should come as a surprise that there have been remarkably few incidents of cruelty such as the one committed in the case of Vittorio Arrigoni.

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Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 303, April 15, 2011

For the last fifty years, United States policy in the Middle East has been built around its very close links with three countries: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. In 2011, it is at odds with all three, and in very fundamental ways. It is also in public discord with Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Brazil over its current policies in the region. It seems almost no one agrees with or follows the lead of the United States. One can hear the agonizing frustration of the president, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA, all of whom see a situation careening out of control.

Why the United States has created such an incredibly close alliance with Israel is a matter of much debate. But it is clear that for many years the relationship has been getting ever tighter, and more and more on Israeli terms. Israel has been able to count on financial and military aid and the never-failing veto of the United States in the U.N. Security Council.

What has happened now is that both Israeli politicians and its U.S. base of support have moved steadily rightwards. Israel is holding on tight to two things: eternal delays on serious negotiations with Palestine and the hope that someone will bomb the Iranians. Obama has been moving in the other direction, at least as much as U.S. internal politics will let him. The tensions are high and Netanyahu is praying, if he does pray, for a Republican presidential victory in 2012. The crisis point may however come before that when the U.N. General Assembly votes to recognize Palestine as a member state. The United States will find itself in the losing position of fighting against this.

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By Franklin Lamb, opednews.com, April 13, 2011

Whatever becomes of the truly pathetic “Pastor” Terry Jones and his plans to appear later this month at the largest Mosque in Michigan to condemn Islam and to generate some media attention while provoking all decent Americans and people of good will everywhere with his hate speech will not be of much lasting import to Muslim and American relations.

Even as Jones prepares to act as grand inquisitor and  plans to prosecute the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) for various imagined crimes, it reminds us that when it comes to intolerance, nothing in new under the sun in our land that beckons with its Statue of Liberty near Ellis Island in New York harbor:

“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse from your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless tempest-tossed to me/ I lift my lamp before the Golden Door.”

Muslims and Arabs who began arriving in America in the middle of the 19th century have in many ways embodied the intended fulfillment of the American dream promised in the above words of Emma Lazarus. The reasons that Muslims are often described as being “As American as apple pie” includes exactly their qualities that every Westerner observes and often comments on if they are fortunate enough to live among Muslims abroad or have Muslims as neighbors in their communities in the USA.

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Asian Human Rights Commission, April 14, 2011

 The UN panel commissioned to advise the UN Secretary General on several issues relating to the period covering the end of the war with the LTTE has now submitted its report. The content of the report has not yet been published. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on the UN Secretary General to publish the contents of this report.

The Sri Lankan government issued a statement in which it stated that it had received a copy of the panel’s report and that it rejected the content as being ‘flawed’ and ‘biased’. The Sri Lankan government did not mention the content of the report and on what specific issues it disagreed on.

This report was awaited globally since the appointment of the panel by the Secretary General. The appointment preceded several months of debate from all over the world on the responsibility of the UN relating to the event that occurred in Sri Lanka towards the end of the war with the LTTE. There were serious violations of human rights abuse which the government continuously denied.

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By Lionel M. Jensen, History News Network, April 11, 2011

Lionel M. Jensen is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and concurrently Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

It only took a little over four days after Ai Weiwei’s sudden apprehension by China’s Public Security Bureau at the Beijing Airport, for the government to initiate, as is its tireless and terrifying custom, the public process of building a “case” against the disappeared by alluding to the subject’s “crimes.”

Owing to comments made last Wednesday and Thursday in three of the Chinese Communist Party’s growing number of online and print “news” sources, China and the world now know that Ai’s actions were, according to Renmin ribao (“People’s Daily”) and the Global Times, legally “ambiguous” and too near “the red line of Chinese law.”  The Global Times also reported that the departure papers for his flight to Hong Kong were “incomplete,” thus he could not board the plane.

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Anna Hazare  lauds Modi

Anna, the Voice of the Upwardly Mobile:

A voice has been raised in India against the  venal misdeeds of politicians and, mutedly, of bureaucrats  (no mention of the corporates here).

Groups of  protestors led by a most unlikely mix of civil society leaderships, ranging from  those with staunch secular credentials and proven personal integrity (Prashant Bhushan, Arvind Kejrival, Kiran Bedi, Swami Agnivesh, Mallika Sarabai)  to those others  with known affiliation to right-wing Hindu organizations and dubious claims to probity (Baba Ramdev, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar), racuously foregrounded by corporate electronic channels with barely concealed antipathy to any  mass assertion from the Left, have been holding fort.

True to pattern and apprehension, the politics of a section of the protestors could not after all hold back mentioning chief ministers of two BJP- ruled and BJP-in-coalition- ruled states as exemplars of the India of their dreams.  Most significantly, that mention this time came from no less than Anna Hazare himself.

As per Anna speak,  Nitish  Kumar and  Narendra Modi  belong to a common category—chief ministers who  do good development work without being corrupt.  More of the corruption part hereunder. But,

what of Modi’s  fingers dipped  in  blood?  Response:  communalism is bad, but  “I  was speaking only of his development work.”

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The Israeli Regional Construction and Planning Committee approved a new settlement plan that aims at constructing 900 units for Jewish settlers in an area adjacent to Al Walaja Palestinian town in the Bethlehem District.

File – Israeli Settlement

The units will be built close to the Gilo illegal settlement that was built lands that were illegally annexed from the Palestinians. Israel does not regard Gilo as a settlement, but brands it’s as a “Jerusalem neighborhood”.

The new constructions will be built on 228 Dunams (56.34 Acres) that were illegally annexed from their Palestinian owners, and will include 4, 6 and 8-story apartment buildings, advanced roads and infrastructure.

The newly approved plan comes only one day after the so-called Regional Construction Committee approved the construction of 942 units for Jewish settlers south of Gilo settlement.

The two projects complement each other as they will ensure the expansion of Gilo settlement from the south with a total addition of more than 1800 units.

Israel’s policies of settlement construction and expansion were the main reason that pushed the Palestinians to withdraw from the American “supervised” peace talks with Israel.

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Pakistani Officials Slam Latest Attack Against South Waziristan

Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, April 13, 2011

Though Pakistani officials were quite clear on Monday in their demand that the US put its entire drone strike program “on hold” for the foreseeable future, drones were active again today in South Waziristan, attacking a village and killing at least six people.

The Zardari government had long been a tacit supporter of such strikes. The ugly number of recent incidents, as well as anger over the Raymond Davis affair and its subsequent revelation that a number of US spies were operating in Pakistan beyond the ones cooperating officially with the government, however, have sparked a backlash. Now it is not just cabinet ministers but Pakistan’s powerful military establishment making the demands that the strikes stop.

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Gareth Porter, Consortium News, April 14, 2011

Editor’s Note: The consequences of George W. Bush’s botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to reverberate across the region with the Obama administration now facing new resistance from Pakistan over CIA drone strikes and other special operations against alleged Taliban targets near the Afghan border.

With the Afghan conflict dragging on and political support in the United States waning, the Obama administration had stepped up those attacks in hopes of salvaging the increasingly fragile American position, as Gareth Porter reported for Inter Press Service:

The Pakistani military’s recent demands on the United States to curb drone strikes and reduce the number of U.S. spies operating in Pakistan, which have raised tensions between the two countries to a new high, were a response to U.S. military and intelligence programs that had gone well beyond what the Pakistanis had agreed to in past years.

The military leadership had reached private agreements in the past on both the drone strikes and on U.S. intelligence activities in Pakistan, but both had changed dramatically in ways that threatened the interests of Pakistan.

The Pakistani military, which holds real power over matters of national security in Pakistan, is now insisting for the first time that Washington must observe strict limits on both the use of drone strikes and on the number of U.S. military and intelligence personnel and contractors in the country.

And they have backed up that demand with a suspension of joint intelligence operations with the United States – a program that had been strongly sought after by the Barack Obama administration.

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by Jim Lobe, CommonDreams.org, April 14, 2011

WASHINGTON – If President Barack Obama wanted to place Washington “on the right side of history” during the ongoing “Arab Spring”, his reaction to recent events in Bahrain will likely make that far more difficult, according to a growing number of analysts and commentators here.

Funeral prayers are said over the coffin of Ali Isa Saqer, who died while in police custody. Photograph: Mazen Mahdi/EPA While his administration has become ever more outspoken against repression in Syria and Yemen – not to mention Libya, where Obama has called for regime change – it has remained remarkably restrained about the escalating crackdown by the Sunni monarchy against the majority Shia population and prominent pro-democracy figures.

The strongest criticism in weeks came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday night at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here when she appealed for a “political process that advances the rights and aspirations of all the citizens of Bahrain” and asserted that “security alone cannot resolve the challenges” facing the government.

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