Peace and Justice Post

Over a million children are taken out of school every year to pick cotton in dreadful – often fatal – conditions

The Independent, Jan 24, 2011

• Massive new leak lifts lid on negotiations
• PLO offered up key settlements in East Jerusalem
• Concessions made on refugees and Holy sites

• Israel spurned offer of ‘biggest Jerusalem in history’
• Palestinian leaders weak – and increasingly desperate
• The story behind the Palestine papers

• Seumas Milne and Ian Black, Middle East editor,
• The Guardian, Jan 23, 2011

The Palestine papers reveal the offer of concessions by Palestinian peace negotiators on areas such as the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem. Photograph: Awad Awad/AFP/Getty ImagesThe biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel‘s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.

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Svært mange har møtt Kopreitan med sin ombygde barnevogn på Karl Johan. Han hadde et brennende fredsengasjement, og solgte buttons og plakater med klare budskap. Ikke minst i kampen mot atomvåpen.

Kopreitan var en av de første som satte kampen mot apartheid på den politiske agendaen. I 1964 stormet han, sammen med 50 ungdommer, tennisbanen på Madserud for å stoppe tennislandskampen mellom Norge og Sør-Afrika. Han ble senere dømt for sivil ulydighet, men aksjonen skapte internasjonal oppmerksomhet. En demonstrasjon mot Vietnam-krigen på Eidsvoll på selveste 17. mai skapte også oppmerksomhet.

Politikk

På 60-tallet var han leder for Sosialistisk Ungdomsforbund (SUF), og senere ble han partisekretær for moderorganisasjonen Sosialistisk Folkeparti.

På slutten av 60-tallet oppsto det en splittelse der maoistene i ungdomspartiet sto mot moderpartiet. Kopreitan prøvde å lage et tredje alternativ, men trakk det korteste strået, og forsvant dermed ut av partipolitikken.

Etter bruddet med Sosialistisk Folkeparti ble han aktiv i Folkebevegelsen mot norsk medlemskap i Fellesmarkedet (EEC). Han fikk æren for å ha bygget opp organisasjonen til en omfattende folkebevegelse.

Nei til atomvåpen

Ole Kopreitan vil likevel først og fremst bli husket for sin innsats som leder for organisasjonen Nei til Atomvåpen. Han har vært aktiv i organisasjonen fra stiftelsen og fram til nå.

Han har vært organisasjonens ansikt utad og organisatorisk leder innad, og var sist på jobb i Nei til Atomvåpens lokaler torsdag. Kopreitan deltok også i internasjonale fora for atomnedrustning og var de frivillige organisasjonenes representant i FNs nedrustningsprogram.

I 2002 ble aktivisten tilkjent 60.000 kroner i erstatning og oppreisning fordi han var blitt utsatt for ulovlig overvåking. Innsynsutvalget konkluderte med at den ulovlige overvåkingen hadde funnet sted i 22 år.

Samme år fikk han Zola-prisen, utdelt av Foreningen til fremme av sivilt mot.

Ole Kopreitan ble født 19. september 1937 i Stavanger. Han vokste opp på Hitra og utdannet seg til lærer ved Sagene lærerskole, men praktiserte aldri som lærer.

Editorial,

Morning Star Online,   January 21, 2011

Email

Blair suggested to the Chilcot inquiry that he had disregarded attorney general Lord Goldsmith’s initial legal advice on the planned invasion of Iraq because it was “provisional.”

However, the then prime minister didn’t simply ignore the advice given. He stood it on its head.

Blair stood up in Parliament giving a position diametrically opposed to what Goldsmith had told him. He justifies that now by saying that he was convinced that the attorney general would come round to his view once he knew the full facts.

Both Blair and Goldsmith are at fault for their refusal to take international law seriously.

Blair was hell-bent on backing George W Bush’s invasion plan, irrespective of international law, while Goldsmith allowed himself to be browbeaten into changing his advice and is only now blowing the gaff on Blair’s criminal behaviour.

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Jesse Rosenfeld and Joseph Dana,The National, Jan 12, 2011

Never believe the Israeli army killed an unarmed civilian until it’s officially denied. This paraphrasing of Mark Twain’s “never believe anything until it has officially been denied,” should become a mantra for journalists operating in the Middle East.

It is a point reinforced recently by the death of a West Bank Palestinian resident, Jawaher abu Rahmah, who died from tear gas exposure during the recent demonstration against Israel’s separation wall and land annexation in the village of Bil’in.

It has become an almost predictable pattern: a Palestinian civilian is killed during a demonstration or Israeli military incursion and the evidence and witness testimony clearly demonstrates Israeli culpability. Then, military sources give farfetched and contradictory statements that become the central focus in Israeli and American media reports.

Jawaher, the 36-year-old sister of Bassem abu Rahmah – who was killed in 2009 from a high-velocity Israeli tear-gas canister fired directly at his chest – was seen by demonstrators, family members and the ambulance driver that took her to hospital, experiencing asphyxiation from a large amount of tear gas. Immediately following her death on January 1, quotes from unnamed Israeli military personnel began saturating the pro-Israel blogosphere. Statements ranging from claims that she was not at the protests and had cancer, to her being released from the hospital and later dying at home moved seamlessly from unvetted blogs to the headlines of Israeli dailies, and then into the main focus of news coverage in the American press.

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by Tom McTague, Daily Mirror, January 22, 2011

Blackwater founder sets up new force to tackle piracy

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles, The Independent, Jan 22, 2011

AFP/GettyBlackwater employee on patrol in Baghdad

Editorial Board,

wsws.org, 22 January 2011

The uprising in Tunisia represents a new stage in world political development. A new, international orientation for the working class in Tunisia and the Arab masses requires assimilating the most important political experiences of the 20th century, in particular the significance of the theory of permanent revolution. We are publishing here the Arabic translation of the WSWS editorial board statement, “The mass uprising in Tunisia and the perspective of permanent revolution” to encourage the broadest political debate on these issues. We encourage our readers and supporters to circulate this statement as widely as possible.

Click here for the pdf version of the statement in Arabic.

The potential lessons for good governance at home and for relations overseas are urgent

Editorial

The Guardian, January 21, 2011

History is written by the victors, and – victors or not – Tony Blair and George W Bush lost no time in picking up their pens. If not quite mission accomplished, the mantra of their memoirs is mission justified. The world dimly recalls that the facts were fixed, the intelligence spun and the law bent into line. But these sins dripped out so slowly that they lost all power to shock, political trust going the way of the frog who was slow-boiled by rising degrees. With regimes long since changed in both Washington and London, the second appearance of Mr Blair at the Chilcot inquiry could pass off with all the excitement of a historical debating society.

That would be a catastrophe. The potential lessons for good governance at home and – with a crisis over Iran in prospect – for relations overseas are urgent. Only this week we have learned that the attorney general was cut out of decision-making for several months, until the point where he came round to a more helpful understanding of the law. We learned, too, that Mr Blair sought to block his “personal dialogue” with the president being properly recorded. The assurances the prime minister gave to the president are “central” to the work of the inquiry. Sir John Chilcot himself argued as much while trying and failing to get the cabinet secretary to clear publication of those passages of the official record which provide “important, and often unique, insights into Mr Blair’s thinking and the commitments he made”.

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