Peace and Justice Post

By Stephen Lendman, opednews.com, Oct. 3, 2011

Lawlessness, injustice, and contempt for democratic values define his administration. He delivered change all right – for the worst, and nothing ahead looks promising.

Obama-style “rules of engagement” include bullets, bombs, slit throats, knives in the back, or drone attacks justice.

Targeted victims are declared guilty by accusation. Due process and judicial fairness are discarded artifacts. US citizens are as vulnerable as global enemies.

No one is safe anywhere in a world ruled by rogue leaders, taking the law into their own hands with impunity.

As a result, freedom and security were jettisoned to memory hole oblivion. Let’s count the ways.

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Why I am an Atheist

By Bhagat Singh 1931, Marxists Internet Archive

Written: October 5–6, 1930
Source/Translated: Converted from the original Gurmukhi (Punjabi) to Urdu/Persian script by Maqsood Saqib;
translated from Urdu to English by Hasan for marxists.org, 2006;
HTML/Proofread: Andy Blunden and Mike Bessler;
CopyLeft: Creative Common (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2006.

Note: Bhagat Singh also called Bhagat Singh Shaheed (1907 – 1931) was an influential Indian revoutionary during the  Indian freedom movement against the  British colonial rule.

It is a matter of debate whether my lack of belief in the existence of an Omnipresent, Omniscient God is due to my arrogant pride and vanity. It never occurred to me that sometime in the future I would be involved in polemics of this kind. As a result of some discussions with my friends, (if my claim to friendship is not uncalled for) I have realised that after having known me for a little time only, some of them have reached a kind of hasty conclusion about me that my atheism is my foolishness and that it is the outcome of my vanity. Even then it is a serious problem. I do not boast of being above these human follies. I am, after all, a human being and nothing more. And no one can claim to be more than that. I have a weakness in my personality, for pride is one of the human traits that I do possess. I am known as a dictator among my friends. Sometimes I am called a boaster. Some have always been complaining that I am bossy and I force others to accept my opinion. Yes, it is true to some extent. I do not deny this charge. We can use the word ‘vainglory’ for it. As far as the contemptible, obsolete, rotten values of our society are concerned, I am an extreme sceptic. But this question does not concern my person alone. It is being proud of my ideas, my thoughts. It cannot be called empty pride. Pride, or you may use the word, vanity, both mean an exaggerated assessment of one’s personality. Is my atheism because of unnecessary pride, or have I ceased believing in God after thinking long and deep on the matter? I wish to put my ideas before you. First of all, let us differentiate between pride and vanity as these are two different things.

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Veterans and campaigners led a march and rally to the scene of the famous battle, fought by an alliance including the local Jewish community, Communist Party members and London workers against Oswald Mosley’s uniformed thugs.

They said the fight against Mosley’s modern-day equivalents would be equally tough.

Representatives from the local Jewish and Bengali communities were flanked by trade unionists from across the movement.

Cable Street veteran and former Communist councillor Max Levitas emphasised the need for the trade union movement today to fight “modern fascism.”

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by Edward S. Herman, Dissident Voice,  October 1st, 2011

Assassination is as American as apple pie. The record-breaking case of assassination targeting is Fidel Castro.  The 1976 Church Committee report on “Alleged Assassination Plots on Foreign Leaders” listed “at least” seven attempts to kill Castro, but the book by Fabian Escalante, the Cuban former official in charge of protecting Castro, claimed that the number of tries ran into the hundreds.  In 2006 Duncan Campbell pointed out that Luis Posada Carriles was still living in Florida after his failed effort to murder Castro (among his other terrorist actions), and Campbell noted sardonically that Florida is “a place where many of the unsuccessful would-be assassins have made their home.”¹ It would be a mistake, however, to think that Florida is the terror center of the world—that honor falls to Washington, D.C. and its environs; Florida is just one branch of the center, just as Guantanamo is just one branch of a D.C.-centered torture network.

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Imagine for a moment that on the day of the fancy speeches at the U.N. last Friday an Israeli father had been killed by a rocket out of Gaza. You know that the killing and the funeral would have been big news in the States. I bet we would have seen a photo of the grieving family and village on the front page of the Times– alongside of Abbas, asking the world for a Palestinian state. The nightly news would have had some footage.

Well last Friday morning — as Mahmoud Abbas later stated in his speech that day at the U.N.– Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian father  of 7 in the little village of Kusra in the northern West Bank. Issam Badran was 35.

A group of Israeli settlers came to tear down the village’s olive trees. They had set fire to its mosque earlier this month. And the village is resisting in its way. Three hundred people from the village went out to protect their lands last Friday.

Israeli soldiers came between the settlers and Palestinians. And who did they attack– the villagers! They shot Badran in the neck. Here is the best account I’ve seen: link to www.palestinemonitor.org

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• Staff and agencies
• guardian.co.uk, Saturday 1 October 2011

A group of Palestinians rally in New York while President Mahmoud Abbas calls for the UN to formally recognise the Palestinian state. Photograph: Gary Dwight Miller/ Zuma Press/Corbis

The Palestinian Authority has accused the US of “collective punishment”, after the US Congress blocked $200m (£128m) in aid in response to President Mahmoud Abbas’ bid for UN statehood.

The decision to freeze the payments was reportedly made by three congressional committees on 18 August, before Abbas’ planned bid for statehood recognition at the UN the following month.

The funds, intended for food aid, health care, and infrastructure projects, were supposed to have been transferred within the US financial year, which ends today. The Obama administration is reportedly negotiating with congressional leaders to unlock the aid.

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The UK has changed its laws to shield Israeli war crimes suspects from prosecution.

(Inbal Rose/MaanImages)

Legal mechanisms developed after the end of the Second World War to more easily prosecute war criminals are now being taken off the books to preserve Israeli impunity from accountability.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes an outraged international community demanded justice — a demand that resulted in the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the introduction of the new legal concept of universal jurisdiction. Justice, it seemed, would be impartial and hiding places for criminals scarce.

Universal jurisdiction is a simple concept. Deriving its authority from Common Article 1 of the Geneva Conventions, it places an obligation upon all states “to respect and ensure respect” for the laws of war, effectively requiring all states to prosecute suspected war criminals regardless of where the crimes were committed.

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By Paul Craig Roberts, lewrockwell.com, Sept. 30, 2011

In the past decade, Washington has killed, maimed, dislocated, and made widows and orphans millions of Muslims in six countries, all in the name of the “war on terror.” Washington’s attacks on the countries constitute naked aggression and impact primarily civilian populations and infrastructure and, thereby, constitute war crimes under law. Nazis were executed precisely for what Washington is doing today.

Moreover the wars and military attacks have cost American taxpayers in out-of-pocket and already-incurred future costs at least $4,000 billion dollars – one third of the accumulated public debt – resulting in a US deficit crisis that threatens the social safety net, the value of the US dollar and its reserve currency role, while enriching beyond all previous history the military/security complex and its apologists.

Perhaps the highest cost of Washington’s “war on terror” has been paid by the US Constitution and civil liberties. Any US citizen that Washington accuses is deprived of all legal and constitutional rights. The Bush-Cheney-Obama regimes have overturned humanity’s greatest achievement – the accountability of government to law.

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by Richard Falk,  Foreign Policy Journal, September 30, 2011

There is a natural disposition for supporters of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to suppose that the Palestinian statehood bid must be a positive initiative because it has generated such a frantic Israel effort to have it rejected. Despite the high costs to American diplomacy in the Middle East at this time of regional tumult and uncertainty, the United States has committed itself to exercise its veto on Israel’s behalf if that turns out to be necessary. To avoid the humiliation of disregarding the overwhelming majority opinion of most governments in the world, the United States has rallied the former European colonial powers to stand by its side, while leaning on Bosnia and Colombia to abstain, thereby hoping to deny Palestine the nine votes it needs for a Security Council decision without technically casting a veto. . .

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Hassan N. Gardezi, Viewpoint Online, Sept. 30, 2011

In the mid-1950s several Afro-Asian countries were asserting their independence from the hegemonic influence of Western powers, while Pakistan’s rulers were driving the country deeper into subservient cold war alliances with the United States, the super imperialist power in the making. A new leadership was emerging in Africa and Asia involved in movements of genuine national liberation.  Sukarno in Indonesia, Nkrumah in Ghana, Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka and Nasser in Egypt were trying to root out the remnants of imperialism from their countries, while Nehru of India along with Zhao Enlai of China were laying down the foundations of  Non-aligned Movement.

In 1956 Nasser of Egypt having overthrown the decadent monarchy of King Farouk nationalised the Suez Canal and its operations. Britain and France which claimed imperial title to the ownership of the Canal went to the United Nation’s Security Council to establish their title, only to be rebuffed by the Soviet Veto. Next they convened an international conference to drum up support for their claims. A resolution was moved in this conference calling for the surrender of the Suez Canal and its lucrative operations to the Anglo-French authority. Pakistan’s delegates to the conference, first Hamidul Haq Chowdhury and then Feroz Khan Noon, supported the resolution while Krishna Menon, the Indian delegate, firmly opposed it. Later when the resolution was about to be passed by the Western delegates and their Eastern allies, Krishna Menon walked out of the Conference along with the Soviet, Sri Lankan and Indonesian delegates, rendering the proceedings meaningless.

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