Peace and Justice Post

Mr Netanyahu said his government was working with the US to make sure that the push for a two-state peace settlement is rejected by the UN security council.

He was responding to a speech delivered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Saturday in which he said he would hand the request for full status to UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon on Friday.

Mr Abbas said “extensive and sincere” Palestinian peace efforts had been scuppered by “Israeli intransigence.”

“We seek to gain membership in the UN on the basis of the 1967 borders so that we could afterwards return to the negotiations on a clear and internationally recognised reference.”

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For andre år på rad rammes Pakistan av en voldsom flom. Ifølge pakistanske myndigheter er syv millioner mennesker rammet, 342 er bekreftet omkommet, skriver NTB.

Mange mennesker mister alt de eier for andre gang på et år. Andre rammede er fra områder som normalt ikke er utsatt for flom.

De helsemessige utfordringene i området er svært store.

– Verre

Pakistans Røde Halvmåne, med 70.000 ansatte, driver et omfattende arbeid i flomområdene. De får støtte fra Røde Kors nasjonalforeninger fra andre land.

Norges Røde Kors Olaf Røsset er i Pakistan nå.

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“Now we can see [success in Vietnam] clearly, like the light at the end of a tunnel”

–Gen. Henri Navarre, commander French forces in Vietnam, May 20, 1953

“A new phase is starting…we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view…there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

–Gen. William Westmoreland, commander U.S. forces in Vietnam, November 1967

“Yesterday’s attack [in Kabul] was a fleeting event; it came and it went. The insurgents are on the defensive.” The performance of Afghan security forces should tell Afghans “they can sleep well at night.”

–Gen. John Allen, North Atlantic Treaty Commander in Afghanistan, Sept. 14, 2011

Dear Lord, what is about generals that seem to make them so particularly immune to history’s lessons?

Gen. Navarre had a sure-fire plan to draw the Vietnamese insurgents into a great battle that would end the war. Worked like a charm. On May 7, 1954 the French army surrendered at Dien Bien Phu.

In November 1967, Gen. Westmoreland was making the rounds in Washington, talking up “body counts” and “pacification,” and how the U.S would have this little matter in Vietnam wrapped up pretty quickly. Ten weeks later, on Jan.31, 1968, the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive that put the U.S. Embassy in Saigon under siege, seized the city of Hue, and shattered the myth that the U.S. was winning the war in Vietnam.

And now Gen. Allen says the attack on Kabul indicates the Taliban are on their last legs.

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Not quite.  The Palestinian Authority (PA) says it will ask the United Nations General Assembly to upgrade from being a non-voting “observer entity” to an “observer state.”   This bureaucratic-sounding change hardly seems earthshaking.  The Vatican is an “observer state.”

But the earth is shaking.  A majority of the world’s nations are fed up by the endless suffering of the stateless Palestinians and support creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.

Turkey’s increasingly influential premier, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, went to Cairo last week and spoke for the world: “Let’s raise the Palestinian flag and let that flag be the symbol of peace and justice in the Middle East.”

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Six More Activists Arrested under Abusive Anti-Terrorism Law

(London) – The Ethiopian government should end its widening crackdown against opposition politicians and dissidents, Human Rights Watch said today. In the past week, three well-known critics of the government – actor Debebe Eshetu, journalist Eskinder Nega, and opposition party leader Andualem Aragie – were arrested in Addis Ababa. Three other opposition party members were also detained.

Security forces arrested Eskinder, who is well-known in Ethiopia for his critical commentary, on the afternoon of September 14, while picking up his child from school. Andualem, vice chairman of the opposition party Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) and executive committee member of Medrek, the largest opposition coalition, was arrested around the same time on his way to the UDJ offices. On September 8, the government also arrested the popular actor Eshetu for his alleged involvement in Ginbot 7, a banned opposition group.

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The countdown to September 23 has begun. On that day, if he does not renege on his September 16 speech, Mahmoud ‘Abbas will present a formal request for full UN membership for a state of Palestine. The UN Security Council, which must approve such requests, will not do so, because the United States will act upon its repeated vows to exercise its veto. And then?

The world, by all indications, will denounce the Obama administration for rank hypocrisy. How can President Barack Obama deliver speech after speech endorsing Palestinian statehood in principle and then block it in practice? Several advisers to ‘Abbas, the nominal president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), think the embarrassment to the White House will be enough to make the point. Others want him to rub Obama’s nose in it, taking a request for upgraded non-member observer status to the General Assembly. When that proposal passes overwhelmingly, they insist, the PA will have declared its independence of the United States, specifically the US monopoly on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” The Palestinians, meanwhile, might be one big step closer to full voting UN membership, since no polity seeking statehood would have achieved this status before. And they might win access to UN bodies like the International Criminal Court, where Palestinian claims against Israel could then be pursued directly. It would be, as these advisers like to say, istihqaq Aylul, loosely translated, “the September claim of our just due.” And then?

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By Medea Benjamin, opednews.com,  Sept. 16, 2011

This article co-written by Allison McCracken, the DC Coordinator of CODEPINK.

During August recess this year, 81 members of Congress went on a junket to Israel funded by the Israel lobby group AIPAC (well, funded by the American Israel Education Fund, but they are really one and the same ) to “learn first-hand about one of our closest friends and allies.” While the representatives insist they got a balanced view, their itinerary belies that claim: 95% of their time was spent hearing the Israeli government point of view, with only one token meeting with Palestinian reps.

CODEPINK has filed a complaint with the Congressional Ethics Committee stating that these trips — and the upcoming ones scheduled for December — violate the Congressional prohibition on traveling with a lobby group. We feel these Potemkin voyages are part of AIPAC’s grand plan to control and monopolize Congress, which is not just unethical, but dangerous. Their bias reinforces a disastrous U.S. policy of unconditional support for Israel that obstructs peace and runs counter to our national interests.

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By Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, September 16, 2011

With their surprise visit to Tripoli Thursday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron signaled that the scramble by the major powers for control of Libya’s oil wealth is in full swing.

The visit was unannounced and conducted under a massive security blanket. It included a brief visit to a Tripoli hospital and a joint press conference with Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the former Gaddafi justice minister who heads up the NATO-backed National Transitional Council, and Mahmoud Jibril, the US-trained economist and former Gaddafi official designated as the NTC’s “prime minister”.

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On Wednesday, a coalition of Israeli peace organizations published a list of 50 reasons for Israel to support a Palestinian state. Assuming that you only accept five of them, isn’t that enough? What exactly is the alternative, now that the heavens are closing in around us?

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, Sept. 15, 2011

What will we tell the world next week, at the UN? What could we say? Whether in the General Assembly or the Security Council, we will be exposed in all our nakedness: Israel does not want a Palestinian state. Period. And it doesn’t have a single persuasive argument against the establishment and the international recognition of such a state.

So what will we say, that we’re opposed? Four prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu among them, have said that they’re in favor, that it must be accomplished through negotiations, so why haven’t we done it yet? Is our argument that we object to it’s being a unilateral measure? What’s more unilateral than the settlements that we insist on continuing to build? Or perhaps we will say that the route to a Palestinian state runs through Ramallah and Jerusalem, not New York, a la the U.S. secretary of state. The State of Israel itself was created, in part, in the United Nations.

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LONDON (Reuters) — A British law limiting citizens’ rights to seek the arrest of foreign politicians for alleged war crimes took effect on Thursday, removing a thorn in British-Israeli relations.

The law amends legislation which Israel had protested about, saying it exposed its high-profile officials to the threat of arrest for alleged offenses if they visited Britain.

Under the old law, private individuals could start criminal prosecutions, including for international war crimes, by applying to a magistrate for an arrest warrant.

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