Peace and Justice Post

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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Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu (L) is understood to be calling for military action against Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to rally support in his cabinet for an attack on Iran, according to government sources.

The country’s defence minister Ehud Barak and the foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are said to be among those backing a pre-emptive strike to neutralise Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But a narrow majority of ministers currently oppose the move, which could trigger a wave of regional retaliation.

The debate over possible Israeli military action has reached fever pitch in recent days with newspaper leader columns discussing the benefits and dangers of hitting Iran.

Mr Lieberman responded to the reports of a push to gain cabinet approval by saying that “Iran poses the most dangerous threat to world order.”

But he said Israel’s military options should not be a matter for public discussion.

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• Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 November 2011

Israeli doctors are ignoring the complaints of Palestinian patients who claim they have been mistreated, according to the report. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Medical professionals in Israel are being accused of failing to document and report injuries caused by the ill-treatment and torture of detainees by security personnel in violation of their ethical code.

A report by two Israeli human rights organisations, the Public Committee Against Torture (PCAT) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), claims that medical staff are also failing to report suspicion of torture and ill-treatment, returning detainees to their interrogators and passing medical information to interrogators.

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By Stephen Lendman

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Promising change after eight Bush/Republican years, Obama delivered betrayal.

With congressional Democrats, he exceeded Bush’s harshness, lawlessness, belligerency, and public trust betrayal.

He violating every major domestic and foreign issue promise made. As a result, he’s been complicit in:

• looting the nation’s wealth, wrecking the economy, and consigning growing millions to impoverishment without jobs, homes, savings, social services, or futures;
• giving Wall Street crooks greater money power, disguised as financial reform;
• waging multiple imperial wars and occupations, spending more on militarism than the rest of the world combined at a time America has no enemies;
• belligerently ousting Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and Libya’s Gaddafi;
• promoting regime change in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and elsewhere against independent leaders, while continuing support for the world’s most ruthless, corrupt tyrants;
• presiding over a bogus democracy under a homeland police state apparatus;
• continuing Bush’s worst lawless policies; adding more of his own, including indefinite detentions without charge, and deploying Special Forces death squads in over 120 countries to kill targeted suspects, including Americans;
• targeting whistleblowers, dissenters, Muslims, Latino immigrants, and environmental and animal rights activists called terrorists;
• illegally spying on Americans more aggressively than Bush; …

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