Peace and Justice Post

(Hong Kong, August 10, 2011)

The Asian Human Rights Commission wishes to announce that a report on the situation of the human rights defenders of Balochistan has been uploaded on our website.

This report was compiled by Ms. Angelika Pathak, a London-based researcher who previously worked for Amnesty International as their Pakistan researcher. According to Ms. Pathak the report is divided in five parts:

– An introduction which explains the special protection under which human rights defenders were placed when in December 1998 the General Assembly (including Pakistan) adopted the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, the first UN instrument that explicitly recognizes the importance and legitimacy of the work of human rights defenders and lays down their right to effective protection; in Balochistan many political activists could be understood as in some sense defending the rights of the Baloch but in the narrower sense the term is applicable only to journalists, lawyers and human rights activist.

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MWC News, Aug. 6, 2011

To: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu
From: Lenni Brenner

Sir,
I applaud your offer to answer questions on any topic, from Arabs and others, worldwide. The old saying is correct: ‘Better jaw-jaw than war-war.’

As an 11 year old, I remember the creation of Israel in 1948 and the race between the USA and the USSR to recognize the new state. But, as I became a historian, I realized that the American public’s support for Israel was based on sympathy for the survivors of the holocaust, and the Biblical notion that God had given Israel to his chosen people. Few American Jews, fewer gentiles, had an in-depth knowledge of Zionism’s history. That remains true to this day.

You recently addressed America’s Congress. Many Americans support some of your positions. But few can outline your Likud Party’s politics beyond your speech, or know anything about its history. Revisionist Zionism is the dominant ideological movement in the party. Indeed your father was secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, Revisionism’s founder. But how many American politicians can define Revisionism? How many American Jews have read even one word by Jabotinsky?

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MWC News, March 15, 2011

Rassvyet, Berlin, November 4, 1923

Note: If you want to know what Benjamin Netanyahu really thinks about coexisting with Palestinians, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s 1923 article, The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), is a must read. Benzion Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister’s father, was Jabotinsky’s secretary.

When Britain declared Palestine to be the future Jewish national home, Palestine included today’s Jordan. But in 1921 London separated it from Palestine and gave it to the son of Britain’s puppet Sharif of Mecca. As no Jews lived there, the World Zionist Organization’s leaders accepted the loss. But Jabotinsky insisted that the WZO had to “revise” its policy. Britain giving part of Palestine to an Arab would inspire Palestinians to struggle on until they got it all back.

When Jabotinsky died in 1940, Revisionism was a minority within the Zionist camp. Few outside its ranks read The Iron Wall. But since 1977 Israel has had five Zionist-Revisionist Prime Ministers. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has declared the 12th of the Hebrew month of Tevet as “Jabotinsky Day,” when schools study his writings. Indeed his Iron Wall has become essential for anyone seeking basic understanding of Israel’s grim reality.

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By Stuart Littlewood, uruknet.info, Aug. 8, 2011

What a thought-provoking piece Prof Lawrence Davidson’s latest article is, whether you agree with every word or not.

Titled ‘The Palestinian Bid for UN Statehood Recognition’, it makes the point that the Palestinians’ move, which Tweedle-dum Obama and Tweedle-dee Netanyahu (they never contradict each other, you’ll remember) are desperate to discourage, merely replicates the process by which Israel itself gained recognition as a state. The world will recall that America recognized the Jews’ declaration of an Israeli state with almost indecent haste… like immediately.

The bid also echoes the UN’s original intention to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs. So there’s no attempt by the Palestinians to break new ground here. What they propose chimes nicely with what went before. How can there possibly be a valid objection? Recognition should be accorded Palestine just as easily as it was accorded Israel.

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The massacre of 77 people in Norway by a Muslim-hating extremist has prompted soul-searching among some Christians and Jews, but also has provoked rationalizations from some in Israel and elsewhere who view fear and loathing of Muslims as key to their political cause, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson, Consortium News,  Aug. 8, 2011

By now the world is aware that, despite the ardent wishful thinking of the Western media, the terrorism that struck Oslo on July 22 was not perpetrated by a Muslim individual or organization. It was done by a local Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik.

The object of his terror was the Norwegian government and its cultural and foreign policies. The government’s sins seem to have been being too much in favor of multiculturalism, too little opposed to Muslims, and not being an ally of Israel.

Breivik is at the violent end of a continuum of fear and loathing toward those who are culturally and/or religiously different. In this case, Muslim immigrants in Europe.

Like millions of others along this anti-Other continuum, he is angry that people different from himself are showing up in his neighborhood. It probably never occurred to him that given one or two generations most of these outsiders would be brought to share the culture and outlook of their adopted lands.

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On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced: “Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.  It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.”

When Truman lied to America that Hiroshima was a military base rather than a city full of civilians, people no doubt wanted to believe him. Who would want the shame of belonging to the nation that commits a whole new kind of atrocity? (Will naming lower Manhattan “ground zero” erase the guilt?)  And when we learned the truth, we wanted and still want desperately to believe that war is peace, that violence is salvation, that our government dropped nuclear bombs in order to save lives, or at least to save American lives.

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Five Years On, Government Unwilling to Prosecute Soldiers, Police

(New York) – The Sri Lankan government’s failure to bring to justice those responsible for the execution-style slaying of 17 aid workers five years ago highlights a broader lack of will to prosecute soldiers and police for rights abuses, Human Rights Watch said today. Despite strong evidence of involvement by the security forces in the killings, government inquiries have languished and no one has been arrested for the crime.

On August 4, 2006, gunmen murdered the 17 Sri Lankan aid workers – 16 ethnic Tamils and one Muslim – with the Paris-based international humanitarian agency Action Contre La Faim (Action Against Hunger, ACF) in their office compound in the town of Mutur, Trincomalee district. The killings followed a battle between Sri Lankan government forces and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for control of the town.

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Years have been wasted making concessions to their colonisers. Palestinians were right to call for a secular state at the outset

Sam Bahour, The Guardian, August 4, 2011

The Palestinian national liberation movement has reached its end. As the Palestinian leadership – if there is such a legitimate body today – prepares to bring the issue of statehood to the UN this September, the weeks and months ahead will witness the last desperate attempt to get the international community to assume their responsibilities and ensure that a Palestinian state becomes a reality in the occupied territories.

The reasons for the failure of the Palestinian national liberation movement are many. First and foremost, the shellshock that the creation of Israel caused among Palestinians in 1948 has never really gone away. Half of the Palestinian population at the time were displaced from their homes.

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By Agencies, MWC News, Aug. 6. 2011

Experts have questioned the Chinese government’s claim that recent attacks in the Xinjiang region were planned abroad by “Islamic extremists”.

Analysts and Xinjiang experts said on Friday there is no evidence that Chinese Muslim groups had been trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan to carry out the attacks.

Last weekend, ethnic Uighur assailants stormed a restaurant in the city of Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, killing the owner and a waiter, and then hacking four people to death on a nearby street.

According to state media, at least 14 people were killed and 42 injured in two separate incidents.

The attacks were the latest in several bursts of violence that have jolted Xinjiang – where many Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim Turkic-speaking people, resent the influx of Han Chinese.

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by James Petras, Dissident Voice,  August 8th, 2011

We live in a time of great destruction and grand economic opportunities and Latin America is no exception. In the global context, the US Empire is engaged in destructive wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Haiti). In contrast China, India, Brazil, Argentina and other “emerging economies” are expanding trade, investments and reducing poverty. The European Union (EU) and the United States (USA) are in deep economic crises. The EU “periphery” (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) are totally bankrupt. The US “dependencies” in North America (Mexico), Central America and the Caribbean are virtual narco-states plagued by mass poverty, astronomical crime rates and economic stagnation. The US dependencies are plundered by foreign multi-nationals, local oligarchs and corrupt politicians.

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