Peace and Justice Post

Nour Ali, The Guardian, August 1, 2011

Protesters in al-Assy Square in Hama on 22 July 2011, with a giant national flag. The army sent in tanks nine days later. Photograph: HO/AP

It’s early July in Hama. Among the rows of windswept trees and sandy housing, makeshift checkpoints of burned-out cars and dustbins protect its neighbourhoods. The atmosphere is tense as residents wonder what fate awaits the city at the heart of Syria‘s five-month-old standoff between protesters and the regime.

The answer came on Sunday. It is difficult to report from Syria as the government does not allow journalists to work freely in the country. But according to residents and activists, the regime decided it had had enough. Without provocation, tanks that had been stationed on the city’s outskirts for weeks previously approached Hama from four directions followed by infantry and security forces. . . .

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Akiva Eldar, The Daily Star, August 1, 2011

The creation of the Quartet by U.S. President George W. Bush was a unique and interesting attempt to develop an effective international mechanism that was not subject to the problematic rules of the game of the United Nations. The new forum was supposed to expand America’s wingspan without the burden of the Security Council and the nearly 200 members of the General Assembly.

The Quartet relegated the U.N. to one of four partners in formulating an international strategy for the Israel-Arab and particularly Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The Quartet was intended to give U.S. policy with its known pro-Israel tilt a more balanced image, backed by international consensus. The initiative to give the Quartet its own policy instrument headed by a senior statesman like Tony Blair gave hope to the Middle East peace camp that the international community was really coming to the rescue of stalled final status negotiations.

There is no lack of hate speech in the media, in print and on the internet to empower Islamophobia. The mass murderer Breivik was heavily influenced, as his writings demonstrate, by the writings of a cottage industry of American and European Islamophobes. Many of these preachers of hate are interconnected, notes John L. Esposito.

 Middle East Online, August 1, 2011

The terrorist attacks and mass killings in Norway are a wakeup call for a world that has ignored xenophobic far right extremism in Europe and America and the exponential rise in prejudice, bigotry, and hatred.

Post 9/11, right wing preachers of hate (far right politicians, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political parties, hardline Christian Zionist ministers, and the media) have in the name of freedom of speech deliberately conflated the actions of a small but deadly minority of militants with the religion of Islam and the majority of Muslims. Political and religious extremism and Islamophobia have run rampant clothing themselves in the first amendment. As a result, a social cancer, which has threatened the democratic fabric of American and European societies, has metastasized, impacting not only the safety and security of Muslims but also, as the attacks in Norway demonstrate, all citizens. Like anti-Semites and racists, Islamophobes have long protested that their stereotyping, scapegoating and fear-mongering are not anti-Muslim prejudice.

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Lawrence Davidson, MWC News, July 29, 2011
 Part I

The 27 July 2011 New York Times had a front page article about the upcoming September 13 special election for New York City’s Ninth Congressional District seat. The article opens a window on the political use of Israel as a campaign touchstone. The Ninth District, the most heavily Jewish District in the nation, is the one recently vacated by Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner who was, of course, a loyal supporter of Israel. Alas, he was also a man with a strong libido and no discretion. He was forced to step down after electronically sharing obscene pictures of himself with at least six women. The Democratic and Republican candidates who seek to fill this seat are not known for gross indiscretion in their private lives (though who knows what skeletons lurk in which closets), yet in their public pursuit of this Congressional seat they seem to be drawn, as by an irresistible political force, to follow Weiner’s lead and do obeisance at the alter of Zionism. Is this yet another form of folly?

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Christian nationalists, like confessed Norway mass-murderer Anders Breivik, insist that a violent defense of Christendom is needed to shield Western Christianity and its culture from encroachments by Muslims. But Gary G. Kohls writes that such ugly intolerance is an affront to Jesus’s teachings of peace and forgiveness.

By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News, August 1, 2011

Newspaper reports have provided intensive coverage of the horrific details of the mass murderer in Norway, with pictures and multiple interviews of the survivors and witnesses of the massacre of 80 or more defenseless adolescents at a summer camp for left-wing Labor Party youth.

The reports indicated that scores of young people had been methodically stalked and shot to death by a 32-year old (politically and theologically) professed Conservative Christian named Anders Breivik – a nationalist, a racist and a pro-violence xenophobe.

Breivik was a loner whose diplomat father divorced his mother when he was an infant and had very little to do with him after that. Breivik became a baptized Christian when he was 15, completed his compulsory military service (where he learned to handle firearms), went to college, joined a gun club, obsessively played first-person shooter videogames such as World of Warcraft, became a Mason and then, up until the shootings, lived with his mother in a wealthy suburb of Oslo.

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Police scramble to track extreme-right after Norway attacks as EU seeks to widen terror surveillance to include right-wing extremism.

Middle East Online, July 31,  2011

‘We have sent the signal that it’s okay to spread hatred against Muslims’

THE HAGUE – Anders Behring Breivik may have acted alone on his killing spree in Norway but European police forces are preparing to keep close watch on other potentially dangerous right-wing extremists.

Fearful of a rise in extremism, the European law enforcement agency Europol has been scrambling to update its database of hard right-wing activities on the continent and individual governments have voiced their concerns.

However some commentators say that the onus should not just fall on the security services but also on politicians and the media, some of whom stand accused of stirring up right-wing sentiment.

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By: Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Information Clearing House, July 31, 2011

The Nation

They call it “bug splat”, the splotch of blood, bones, and viscera that marks the site of a successful drone strike. To those manning the consoles in Nevada, it signifies “suspected militants” who have just been “neutralised”; to those on the ground, in most cases, it represents a family that has been shattered, a home destroyed.

Since June 18, 2004, when the CIA began its policy of extra-judicial killings in Pakistan, it has left nearly 250 such stains on Pakistani soil, daubed with the remains of more than 2,500 individuals, mostly civilians. More recently, it has taken to decorating other parts of the world.

Since the Pakistani government and its shadowy intelligence agencies have been complicit in the killings, the CIA has been able to do all this with complete impunity. Major human rights organisations in thrall to the Obama Administration have given it a pass. So have the media, who uncritically accept officials’ claims about the accuracy of their lethal toys. Two recent developments might change all this.

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By Reza Varjavand, opednews.com, July 30, 2011

Recent public opinion polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans still believe in God and a universal spirit, almost nine out of ten people according to the latest Gallop poll published in 2011. The same polls show that a great percentage of people surveyed also believed in miracles, heaven, afterlife, hell, and the devil. Although these percentages have diminished since 1994, the numbers are perplexing in the wake of modern scientific discoveries.

Human beings have always believed in supernatural things, even those that may defy conventional wisdom or are considered scientifically refutable. Scientists and theologians have offered different answers to the question of why people believe in general, especially why they believe in strange things. In his newly published book The Believing Brain, author Dr. Michael Shermer, who is the founder of the Skeptic Society, tries to provide answers to this and similar questions by relying on scientific analyses.

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carlimsakoo

James Petras,  July 30, 2011

“So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionist,s against all cultural Marxists/Multiculturalists”.
Anders Behring Breivik’s Manifesto

“. . . two more cells exist in my organization”. . .
Ander Behring Breivik in police custody (Reuters 7/25/11)

Introduction:

The July 22, 2011, bombing of the office of the Norwegian Prime Minister, Labor Party Jen Stoltenberg, which killed 8 civilians, and the subsequent political assassination of 68 unarmed activists of the Labor Party Youth on Utoeya Island, just 20 minutes from Oslo, by militant neo-fascist Christian-Zionists, raises fundamental questions about the growing links between the legal Far-Right, the ‘mainstream media’, the Norwegian police, Israel and rightwing terrorism.

The Mass Media and the Rise of Rightwing Terrorism:

The leading English language newspapers, The New York Times (NYT), the Washington Post (WP), the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and the Financial Times (FT), as well as President Obama, blamed “Islamic extremists”, upon the first police reports of the killings, publishing a series of incendiary (and false) headlines and reports, labeling the event as ‘Norway’s 9-11’,in terms, which echoed the ideological motivation and justifications cited by the Norwegian Christian-Zionist political assassin, Anders Behring Breivik himself. The July 23/24 front page of the Financial Times (of London), read “Islamist extremism fears: Worst Europe strike since 2005”. Obama immediately cited the terrorist attack in Norway to further justify his overseas wars against Muslim countries. The FT, NYT, WP and WSJ trotted out their self-styled “experts” who debated over which Arab/Islamic leaders or movements were responsible – despite Norwegian press reports of ‘the arrest of a Nordic man in police uniform’.

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