Peace and Justice Post

By Kate Randall, wsws.org, 8 October 2011

Anti-Wall Street protests continued to spread yesterday to cities across the US. According to the web site Occupy Together, as of Friday evening “Meetups” to plan protests had been established in more than 900 cities.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which began last month in New York, has expanded now to dozens of towns, including Tampa, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia; Washington, DC; Boston; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Chicago; St. Louis, Missouri; Minneapolis; Houston, San Antonio and Austin, Texas; Nashville; Portland, Oregon; Anchorage, Alaska; and a number of California cities.

The demonstrations—fueled by anger over social inequality, unemployment and a vast decline in living standards for the overwhelming majority—are also gaining international support. There are calls on Facebook for a global demonstration on October 15 in cities in more than 15 countries, from Dublin to Madrid, Buenos Aires to Hong Kong.

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CBS New York, Oct.8, 2011

A Wall Street protester wakes up at Zuccotti Park that she and hundreds of other activists are occupying on October 3, 2011 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — Saturday marks exactly three weeks since the Occupy Wall Street protest began at Zuccotti Park and with the numbers swelling by the day, the movement has outgrown the area.

As the protesters awakened to begin their day, a change of venue was on the agenda. The demonstrators feel it’s time to expand and will march to Washington Square Park Saturday afternoon.

“The size of the crowd has quadrupled since a week ago and there’s no more room for people who are trickling in from all over the country every day to join us, so we need elbow room,” said protestor Bill Steyert from Queens.

Showing no signs of diminishing, the Zuccotti Park campout has Mayor Michael Bloomberg also searching for solutions.

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by Stephen Lendman, uruknet.info, October 6, 2011

Israel treats Palestinian prisoners horrifically. In detention, interrogations include torture, intimidation and other abuses.

“Security prisoners” are punitively isolated for extended periods. Others for any reason or none at all face similar short or longer-term treatment.

Administrative detainees are held indefinitely without charges or trial. Children are treated like adults.

Horrific conditions include severe overcrowding; poor ventilation and sanitation; no change of clothes or adequate clothing; wooden planks with thin mattresses for beds; filthy blankets; inadequate food in terms of quality, quantity or conformance with dietary requirements; poor medical care; and hindered access to family members and counsel, among other abuses.

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The failure to uphold Britain’s obligations towards universal jurisdiction were demonstrated this week when Tzipi Livni met with Foreign Secretary William Hague in London and managed to avoid arrest for alleged war crimes. Livni’s previous, disrupted, visit to London in late 2009 was the catalyst for the British government’s move to change the law on universal jurisdiction. The then Labour government began to make changes to universal jurisdiction and these were put into effect by the Coalition with the recent Royal Assent for the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. The changes to the law mean that the Director of Public Prosecutions has to give consent to any application for an arrest warrant with prima facie evidence, whereby previously any citizen could apply to Westminster Magistrates Court for such a warrant.

Livni and other suspected war criminals have postponed visits to London for fear of arrest and, backed by the influential pro-Israel Lobby, had pushed the British government to effect changes to the law on universal jurisdiction. With both the Coalition Government and the Labour Party supporting these changes, ex-Foreign Minister Livni’s visit to London was inevitable. William Hague said that he was “delighted” to welcome Ms Livni to London at a critical moment for the Middle East. “It was an appalling situation when political abuse of our legal procedures prevented people like Mrs Livni from travelling legitimately to the UK,” he added. “We have dealt with this urgently as we promised to on coming to office.”

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To paraphrase one of Bob Dylan’s songs of youthful protest, “Something’s happening here, and you don’t know what it is, do you Ms. Bellafante?”

A New York Times writer, Ginia Bellafante, is but one of many establishment reporters and pundits who’ve been covering the fledgling “Occupy Wall Street” movement — but completely missing the story. Instead of really digging into what’s “happening here,” they’ve resorted to fuddy-duddy mockery of an important populist protest that has sprouted right in Wall Street’s own neighborhood.

In a September article, Bellafante dismissed the young people’s effort as “fractured and airy,” calling it a “carnival” in an “intellectual vacuum.” Their cause is so “diffuse and leaderless,” she wrote, that its purpose is “virtually impossible to decipher.” No wonder, she concluded, that participation in the movement is “dwindling.”

Whew — so snide! Yet, so wrong.

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• 
• • Michael Mansfield
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 7 October 2011 16.45 BST

Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who saw three of his children and a niece killed when Israeli shells smashed into his home in Gaza. Photograph: Khalil Hamra/Associated Press

Israel has violated innumerable UN resolutions and international laws over the past 50 years without any sanction being incurred – whether legal, economic, political or military. Most blatant is its disregard for the overwhelming opinion of the international court of justice in The Hague, which in 2004 declared the erection of a wall through the occupied territories to be unlawful. If you add the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, continued extension of illegal settlements, forced evictions and house demolitions, requisition of water resources, Gaza blockade and illicit use of cloned passports to facilitate an assassination outside Israel, anyone might be think that this is a state that regards itself as above the law.

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Pro-Israeli Hawk Urges U.S. to “Get Tough” With Sole Islamic Nuclear Power

by Maidhc Ó Cathail, Dissident Voice,  October 7th, 2011

While much attention has been paid to Admiral Mike Mullen’s allegations that Pakistan’s ISI was behind recent attacks on American targets in Afghanistan attributed to the Haqqani network, the subsequent call by an influential neoconservative pundit for the United States to “get tough with Pakistan” seems to have gone unnoticed.

Writing this week in two of the neoconservative flagship outlets, Commentary and The Weekly Standard, Max Boot argues for a more aggressive U.S. approach to Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. “I suggest we start treating Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency the way we treated Iran’s Quds Force in Iraq,” Boot opines in Commentary, an influential magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee, a key component of the pro-Israel lobby. “That is to say, apply the full range of our power–everything from diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, to kinetic military action–to curb the menace posed by this group.”

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Song Kang-ho, an activist opposing a naval base under construction, near the construction site, in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island, South Korea, August 2, 2011. (Photo: Jean Chung / The New York Times)

Jeju Island, 50 miles southeast of South Korea’s mainland, has been called the most idyllic place on the planet. The pristine, 706-square-mile volcanic island comprises three UNESCO World Natural Heritage sites.

Jeju’s history, however, is far from idyllic. In 1948, two years before the outbreak of the Korean War, the islanders staged an uprising to protest, among other issues, the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South. The mainland government, then under U.S. military occupation, cracked down on the Jeju insurgents.

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Freedom Plaza is an open block in the middle of D.C. in between the White House and the Capitol Building, and on Thursday it was packed with activists and concerned citizens protesting against the government’s wars and corporatism.

Freedom Plaza

Well over 500 people showed up to protest, which had initially been focused on the war in Afghanistan. The website, set up months prior in preparation, contained a pledge that many participants signed: “I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan…I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day or the days immediately following, for as long as I can, with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo…”

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After ten years of war, now is a perfect time to act to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Friends Committee on National Legislation has set up a toll-free number for us to call Congress: 1-877-429-0678. A Congressional “Supercommittee” is charged with coming up with $1.5 trillion in reduced debt over ten years, and the wars and the bloated Pentagon budget dangle before the Supercommittee like overripe fruit.

A recent CBS poll shows how far out of step with the 99% the Pentagon’s plans are. 62% want U.S. troops out within two years.

But the Pentagon wants to stay for at least thirteen more years.

So what else is new, you may say. The Pentagon wants to stay everywhere forever.

But here is a key political fact about the world in which we live: the Pentagon does not always get what it wants. The Pentagon did not want to eat a timetable for the withdrawal of all Pentagon forces from Iraq by December, but the Pentagon was forced to eat such a timetable anyway. Now, the Pentagon is trying to undo the timetable.

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