Peace and Justice Post

Outrage among Egypt victims’ families as witnesses say ousted dictator did not give shooting orders.

‘This is a joke’

Former president Hosni Mubarak’s trial resumed Monday with none of the witnesses implicating him for hundreds of deaths during Egypt’s revolution, sparking outrage among victims’ families.

The case against the ousted dictator and six of his security chiefs suffered another blow when it emerged that the prosecution’s main witness had been convicted of destroying a recording of police telephone conversations.

And two other police officers summoned to back the case that Mubarak and six security commanders ordered the shootings of anti-regime protesters during a revolt testified they had in fact been ordered to exercise “restraint”.

Continues >>

by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies, Sep. 5, 2011

A group of extremist Israeli settlers broke, on Monday at dawn, into a mosque in Qasra village, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, and torched it after destroying its property and writing anti-Arab slogans on its walls.

File – Mosque Burnt By Settlers Near Ramallah

The Maan News Agency reported that the settler broke into Al Nourein mosque after breaking it windows, and burnt tires inside the mosque. The fire spread in the mosque consuming most of its property.

Ghassan Douglas, in charge of the settlements file at the Palestinian Authority in the northern part of the West Bank, stated that this is not the first attack against mosques in the West Bank, and called on the Quartet Committee (The United States, The European Union, the United Nations and Russia) to intervene and stop the escalating attacks.

In related news, dozens of settlers hurled stones at Palestinian vehicles driving near the Yitzhar settlement, on the Nablus- Huwwara road; damage to several vehicles and a local bus was reported.

Continues >>

By Eric margolis, Information Clearing House, Sep. 5, 2011

The state human rights commission of the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir reported its investigators had found 2,156 bodies buried in unmarked graves in 38 locations. Most were young men. Many bore bullets wounds.

Grisly and horrifying as this discovery was, there was hardly a peep from India’s allies, notably the United States and Britain, who have raised such a hue and cry over civilian deaths in Libya, Iran and Syria. India shrugged off the report.

There may be many more bodies to be found. Most, or all, were the product of the decades-old uprising by Kashmir’s Muslim majority against often brutal Indian rule that the outside world has largely ignored.

The fabled state of Kashmir lies in majestic isolation amid the towering mountain ranges separating the plains of India from the steppes and deserts of Central Asia. Nineteenth Century geopoliticians called Kashmir one of the world’s primary strategic pivots.

Historic Kashmir, with its distinctive Indo-European and Tibetan-Mongol peoples, has ended up divided between three nations: India, Pakistan, and China.

Some nine million Kashmiris live in the Indian-ruled two thirds of Kashmir; over three million in the Pakistani portion, known as “Azad Kashmir,” or in Pakistan proper, and small numbers in the frigid Aksai Chin plateau at over 5,000 meters altitude.

Continues >>

Just because U.S. soldiers aren’t dying in Iraq doesn’t mean all is well there.

The New York Times had as a recent headline “Iraq War Marks First Month With No U.S. Military Deaths,” with a certain Colonel Douglas Crissman saying, “If you had thought about a month without a death back during the surge in 2007, it would have been pretty hard to imagine…” The paper does report that this “has occurred amid a frightening campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations from Sunni insurgents that killed hundreds of Iraqis, resurrecting the specter of the worst days of sectarian fighting.”

The American media in general has been content to ignore Iraq once U.S. casualties leveled off. The Iraq War received just 1 percent of national coverage in 2010, according to the Pew Research Center.

But Iraq is still suffering eight years after an illegal invasion, and nothing will change this reality. Do try telling Dick Cheney that, though.

Continues >>

Another Ahmadi killed in hate crime against religious minorities

The religious minority group of Ahmadis is under constant threat of religious hate crimes and no serious efforts have been initiated by the government to provide protection the community.

In the latest incident a member of the Ahmadiyya community was murdered after receiving death threats from an extremist group who is allegedly patronized by the Punjab provincial government. Mr. Naseem Ahmad Butt, 55, was shot dead by four men as he lay sleeping inside his house in Muzaffar Colony, Faisalabad, Punjab province. According to his brother Khalid Pervez Butt, at about 1am, the attackers entered by climbing over the walls. “The boys were between 20 and 25 years old. Three of them kept a watch on the door as one kicked my brother. When he was awake, the killer said “You are Ahmadi and liable to be killed”, Khalid told daily The Express Tribune.

Continues >>

By Dan Brook, opednews.com, Sep. 4, 2011

Modern revolution has broken out again. There is a tidal wave of democracy — a political tsunami — rushing through the Arab world “to the shores of Tripoli”. History never actually repeats itself, of course, though it does occasionally seem strikingly familiar. There are only a handful of times in history when rising tides of democracy have simultaneously washed over multiple countries: 1848, 1968, 1989, and 2011. We are reminded, yet again, that what seems impossible — even unthinkable — can quickly become inevitable.

Continues >>

By Khalid Amayryeh, MWC News, Sept. 4, 2011

On Friday, 2 September, a pro-Israeli body at the United Nations released a brazenly unbalanced report concluding that Israel’s four-year blockade of some 1.7 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip was “legal” and “within the barometers of international law.”

The scandalous report, dubbed as the Palmer report, also concluded that the manifestly criminal Israeli assault on a Turkish ship carrying solidarity activists and humanitarian materials  to besieged Gazans, which occurred 18 months ago and killed at least nine Turkish citizens and injured many others, was also legal.

Continues >>

By Bhanwar Meghwanshi, Countercurrents.org, Sep. 5, 2011

It has now been confirmed that the Anna Hazare-led so-called ‘second freedom struggle’—as some sections of the media have mistakenly chosen to call it—has close links with the RSS. From conceptualizing this media-propelled movement to successfully organizing it, the RSS, it appears, played a key role in it. This being the case, it is imperative to analyse the specific communal character of this self-styled Gandhian movement against corruption.

No movement can be properly understood without taking into account the forces behind it and their underlying objectives. Anna Hazare’s movement has been analysed from several perspectives by both its critics as well as supporters. Thus, it has been asked if the movement was truly a Gandhian one. Was it really politically impartial? Was it democratic? Was it orchestrated by the media? Was it funded by the corporate world? Was it an NGO stunt? Was it all-India in its scope? On all these points there has been heated debate. Yet, lamentably little has been said about whether or not this movement was truly based on the Constitutional principle of secularism and what, in particular, its position has been on the issue of Hindutva.

Continues >>

The real issue is whether the history of Palestine and Israel will be shaped by law and the determination of the global community of nations to treat both sides equally, or by the muscle of a robust Zionism and its American diplomatic partner, notes Rami G. Khouri.

Middle East Online, Sep.5, 2011

BEIRUT — Two major Middle East-related events will take place this month with their epicenter in New York City: the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States, and the expected Palestinian bid for the United Nations General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state in the lands that Israel occupied in 1967. These events will generate intense debate and high emotions — most of which will be highly exaggerated. I will comment on the 9/11 commemorations in my column from the United States next week, and here will discuss the Palestinian bid for UN recognition of statehood — or rather, the hysterical American and Israeli reactions to the bid.

Continues >>

CommonDreams.org, Sep. 3, 2011

Source: Reuters,

WASHINGTON – Documents found in Tripoli detail close ties between the CIA and Libya’s intelligence service and suggest the United States sent terrorism suspects for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan Foreign Minister. Koussa defected from now-fugitive leader Muammar Gaddafi’s government and flew to Britain on March 30 amid this year’s rebel uprising.(EPA) The Times reported that the files cover the time from 2002 to 2007, when Moussa Koussa headed Libya’s External Security Organization. Koussa most recently had been Libya’s foreign minister but defected from now-fugitive leader Muammar Gaddafi’s government and flew to Britain on March 30 amid this year’s rebel uprising.

The newspaper reported that the documents — including some English-language files concerning the CIA and Britain’s MI-6 intelligence agency — were found on Friday at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spy chief by journalists and the group Human Rights Watch.

Continues >>