Peace and Justice Post

By Rob Kall, opednews.com, October 5, 2011

The banksters on Wall Street, The Heads of Lehman Brothers, BofA, Morgan Stanley, etc.,– they’re all just single heads of the hydra that is multinational globalization.

This protest pinpoints how dysfunctional our economic system is: we must refashion it for human needs, not corporate aims

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• Richard Wolff,  guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 October 2011

A man holds up an anti-Wall Street placard on the march to NYPD headquarters. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, “Wow!” And now, ever more people are organising local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.

Let me urge the occupiers to ignore the usual carping that besets powerful social movements in their earliest phases. Yes, you could be better organised, your demands more focused, your priorities clearer. All true, but in this moment, mostly irrelevant. Here is the key: if we want a mass and deep-rooted social movement of the left to re-emerge and transform the United States, we must welcome the many different streams, needs, desires, goals, energies and enthusiasms that inspire and sustain social movements. Now is the time to invite, welcome and gather them, in all their profusion and confusion.

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Exclusive: Israeli leaders continue to pound the drum about taking out Iran’s nuclear program – and some hardliners may want to strike soon, fearing the window of opportunity will close if President Barack Obama wins reelection and is less susceptible to political pressures, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern observes.

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, Oct. 3, 2011

There are mounting signs that the right-wing Israeli government may think the timing is right for an attack on Iran, with growing alarms inside Israel about alleged Iranian progress on building a nuclear bomb – and with President Barack Obama fearing loss of key Jewish political support in 2012 if he doesn’t go along.

On Sept. 26, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated Iran’s alleged progress, telling interviewer Charlie Rose that “time is short” before Iran obtains nuclear weapons and poses a direct threat to Israel and the rest of the world.

Yet, the key factor in any Israeli decision to send its aircraft and missiles to Iran is the degree to which Netanyahu and other hard-line Likud leaders believe that President Obama is locked into giving blanket support to Israel — particularly as Election 2012 draws near.

The Israelis might well conclude that the formidable effectiveness of the Likud Lobby and kneejerk support of the U.S. Congress as well as still powerful neoconservatives in the Executive Branch (and on the opinion pages of major American newspapers) amount to solid assurance of automatic support for pretty much anything Israel decides to do.

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The US drone that assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen was launched from one of the Obama administration’s newly constructed bases on the Arabian Peninsula.

It was only a few weeks ago that reports were first released about the Obama administration’s new construction of “a constellation of secret drone bases,” as they were described by the Washington Post, installed with the specific intention to broaden the drone war in the Arabian Peninsula and northeast Africa, especially in Yemen and Somalia.

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AHRC, Oct. 4, 2011

Ms. Srini Wasana Amaratunga

Urgent Appeal Case : On 25 September body of Ms. Srini Wasana Amaratunga was found at the Elakanda, Wattala in the Gampaha District. Srini had been missing since the morning of the 24th and her relatives made a complaint to the Negombo police. As is customary, the police took no action until her body was found a police team on patrol attached to the Wattala Police Station. This is a one of a series of cases which have occurred in the last several months where women have been abducted and robbed for their jewellery and money. The Asian Human Rights Commission has observed an increased in the daily occurrence of crimes in every part of the country and the law enforcement agencies are doing nothing to carry out their statutory duties. The lethargic approach of these officers and the undue delays in the judiciary have exasperated the situation to the point where the general public live in constant fear. This case is yet another illustration of the exceptional collapse of the rule of law in the country.

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By Ismail Salami, vetetarnstoday.com, Sept. 29, 2011

In a primitive society where women find themselves in such a farcical situation where they are not even allowed to drive, a simple word like ‘driving’ which is per se devoid of any archetypal undertones has come to carry a meaning far beyond ordinary.

Saudi Arabia has treated women as second-class citizens for decades, denying them many rights including the right to drive. However, the act of driving recently gained symbolic significance when a group of Saudi activists launched an online campaign in June and urged women to start driving on Saudi Arabian roads. Known as the “Women2Drive” campaign, they used Facebook and Twitter to engage in driving as part of their protest against women discrimination in the country.

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• Ben Quinn,   The Guardian,  October 4,  2011

Tzipi Livni, now opposition leader in Israel, will meet foreign secretary William Hague in Britain. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images

“The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power”

Julius Caesar

There comes a time in Macbeth’s  bloody-minded totalitarianism when, wishing to control every little mite of time, space, and freedom of action, he realizes that in so doing he has in fact come to lose all control over everything.

Indeed, the one profound and profoundly enacted truth of Macbeth’s career is to communicate the fearful irony at the heart of all  absolutist ambition, namely, that far from achieving any omnipotent security of selfhood or regime, every successive crime calculated to nail opposition leaves a residue which in course metamorphoses into an uncontrollable  destiny. All moral compass lost, a madly irrational anarchy overtakes the tyrant, until  his only pathetic rationale for going forward or turning back comes to be  which end is physically closer and more accessible: “I am in blood/Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more/Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (Macbeth, Cambridge, ed. John Dover Wilson.)

This seems to be the point at which politics in Gujarat may now have arrived.

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The conflict between the U.S. and Pakistan continues to evolve. Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar has provided a tough and undiplomatic answer to the senior US authorities, including her American counterpart, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accused Islamabad of “pandering to terrorists” from the “Taliban.” The head of Pakistan’s foreign ministry, in fact, accused the U.S. intelligence agencies of committing a series of terrorist attacks against U.S. facilities in Afghanistan to write it off to Pakistan.

Earlier, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, at a hearing in the Senate criticized Islamabad, accusing it of supporting Pakistan’s “Haqqani” (ISI) that allegedly could have ordered the militants to attack the U.S. embassy in Kabul on September 13.

According to the senior military officer, “Haqqani” is “a direct continuation of the ISI.” In addition, Washington virtually accused Islamabad of committing other attacks as well. Among them is a recent attack on a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan where 77 soldiers were injured.

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