Peace and Justice Post

Israel’s military uses bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses, makes hundreds of arrests after murder of settlers.

Middle East Online, April 7, 2011

80 percent of the houses in the village had been raided NABLUS, West Bank – Israeli troops stormed Awarta village in the northern West Bank on Thursday, arresting more than 100 women as they hunted the killers of an Israeli family, officials said. The military also used bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses in a northern farming village east of Tubas, in an area under Israeli control, according to Palestinian security officials. In Awarta, hundreds of troops entered the village shortly after midnight and imposed a curfew after which they began rounding up the women, local council head Tayis Awwad said. Continues >>

by Joseph E. Stiglitz, CommonDreams.org, April 7, 2011

Source: Al Jazeera

The consequences of the Japanese earthquake – especially the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear power plant – resonate grimly for observers of the American financial crash that precipitated the Great Recession. Both events provide stark lessons about risks, and about how badly markets and societies can manage them.

Of course, in one sense, there is no comparison between the tragedy of the earthquake – which has left more than 25,000 people dead or missing – and the financial crisis, to which no such acute physical suffering can be attributed. But when it comes to the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, there is a common theme in the two events.

Experts in both the nuclear and finance industries assured us that new technology had all but eliminated the risk of catastrophe. Events proved them wrong: not only did the risks exist, but their consequences were so enormous that they easily erased all the supposed benefits of the systems that industry leaders promoted.

Continues >>

By Badri Raina

Since every scribe is telling it,

it is best that we tell the truth ourselves.

So here is how it is:

Saudi Arabia

You know that we know that you

bankroll terrorism, that fifteen of the nineteen

who knocked down our towers

were Saudis, all Sunnis to boot,

that you run torture chambers

to which our own Guantanamo

is no more than a wimp,

that your women exist only in name,

that nothing is further from your

political kitty than democracy,

that dissent in your country is a one-way

ticket to  disappearance and  mortality,

that you run Mecca in Spartan white

of simplicity and renunciation,

but serve in gold plates the least oblation—

all that and more we know,

but we also know that you have oil

more than any;

and that our need for guzzling the same

gives America its name.

Be thou secure then from  what rhetoric

we unleash about terrorism, democracy,

human rights upon imbecile nations

whose ripostes may be rational and  kosher

but, being non-oilsome, live out

of god’s  and Imperialisms’  favour.

Then it is no small thing that on your

sacred soil  you let our jackboots

perform their ordained toil.

Egypt

You stood by us, and kept both

Hamas and democracy at bay,

protecting the Zionists and the promised land,

but, having no oil, it was best

that we notched  a favour with

the millions who screamed ‘down

with dictatorship; give us democracy.’

Thus we prove that given the circumstance

we may have the cake and eat it too.

Bahrain

Is it a small matter that our fifth fleet

finds such welcome digs

in your waters and on your land?

Or that your Sunni despotism

keeps the Shia hordes of your populace

in their proper place?

That being the case, what is their revolt

for democracy and freedom

but sheer anarchism,

threatening to widen its insane dance

in an embrace with the Shia recalcitrant Iran?

Thus Hamas and Ahmedinijad

may be their people’s  choice,

but what is there to rejoice

in electoral mandates

if they do not favour the United States?

So, O the bulldozer of Bahrain,

bolstered by conscientious Saudi tanks,

you belong to our puissant ranks.

Yemen

Same goes for thee;

poor, mangled, and miserable

your people may be,

any despotism is better

than a people’s outcry if an Al Qaeda

is waiting by.

Syria

You may be secular to the bone,

O Baathist modernists,

your women may  breathe freedom,

you may have, like the old Saddam,

held your country together

against schism and sectarian mayhem,

we know how you remain suspicious

both of Israel and of us.

We know how you dare to keep alive

your links with Hezbollah and Iran.

We know how you aspire to take back

Your own lost Golan.

Such sentiments despoil your modernity,

and justify the unleashing of democracy

within your climes.

Thus for thee the bell chimes.

Iran

So what if you had no hand in 9/11?

So what if our own Saudis

spawned those men?

Your crimes are beyond the pale—

you are Shia, and you fear not

the Imperialist dragon’s  tail.

The Saudi’s may be the Wahabis

who feed a Pakistan, an Afghanistan,

who banish music, merriment, books,

who torch mosques, churches, temples,

schools, and relegate to the farthest nooks

laughter and women, who contravene

every article of faith on which

the Americas began,

they are not the fundamentalists whom

we fear; indeed, we hold them dear.

It is you, who may have a Persian history

replete with  poetry, philosophy, speculation,

and other gems of humanist  creation,

who are the fundamentalists of menace extreme,

because you have the cheek to pursue that dream

of independent existence and national culture,

who call the vulture what it is—vulture.

You we will pursue and hunt

till the Saudis are fully content

that Fukuyama will never knock at

their door; that history may end

elsewhere, but not where our own

Sheikhs and Mullahs contend.

Libya

Gaddafi, O Gadaffi, we know you

did many good things by your people;

we also know that for four long

years you stood by us, in nuclear

dismemberment and in oil,

but, alas, we had to do what we did

for two reasons: one, to take

the world’s mind away from Arab

troubles, and to win some battle

while Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan

we fail to settle, however we may

bomb and  blast, however our generals

yap yap and dress in fine fettle.

We knew that Idris, whom you dethroned

in 1969, had his loyal tribes in the east

of your realm; thus it was proper that

we sold tribal mayhem as call

for democracy, so that once dethroned,

the Russians and others no longer got to see

a drop of your oil which should all ours be.

Conclusion

Thus, O beloved Arabs, understand

once and for all:

dictatorship, monarchy, or democracy,

these are handmaidens that remain on call.

It all depends on how our cookie crumbles;

We do not give a shit

who speaks reason, or justice, rights

or reformations, who approves or grumbles.

We will decry fundamentalism when it

makes of us an enemy;

and we will call it democracy

if it says “let that be which suits

Wall Street, Pentagon, and the GOP.

by David Chibo,  Foreign Policy Journal, April 5, 2011

During WWI the Western Allies deliberately spread the soon-to-become-a-classic lie of German soldiers systematically impaling babies in Belgium and France on their bayonets and cutting the unborn children out of pregnant women. The lie helped persuade the Western public to support World (Imperial) War I, in which millions of soldiers and civilians would soon perish.

Modern marketing companies would label this story a “hook.” According to journalists, every big media event ideally needs a “hook,” which becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. An ideal “hook” may turn public opinion from being opposed to the war to being supportive of the war.

An example of a “hook” that soon generated momentum for the US involvement in the first Gulf War’s, “Operation Desert Storm” was a fraudulent report of the murder of Kuwaiti babies by Iraqi soldiers.

Continues >>

Marine life contamination well beyond Japan feared

By Kanako Takahara, Countercurrents.org,  April 5, 2011
Source: The Japan Times

Radioactive iodine-131 readings taken from seawater near the water intake of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant’s No. 2 reactor reached 7.5 million times the legal limit, Tokyo Electric Power Co. admitted Tuesday.

The sample that yielded the high reading was taken Saturday, before Tepco announced Monday it would start releasing radioactive water into the sea, and experts fear the contamination may spread well beyond Japan’s shores to affect seafood overseas.

The unstoppable radioactive discharge into the Pacific has prompted experts to sound the alarm, as cesium, which has a much longer half-life than iodine, is expected to concentrate in the upper food chain.

Continues >>

By Ray McGovern, Consortium News, April 6, 2011

The Obama administration’s decision to use a military tribunal rather than a federal criminal court to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others means the real motives behind the 9/11 attacks may remain obscure.

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The Likud Lobby and their allied U.S. legislators can chalk up a significant victory for substantially shrinking any opportunity for the accused planners of 9/11 to tell their side of the story.

What? I sense some bristling. “Their side of the story?” Indeed! We’ve been told there is no “their side of the story.”

For years, President George W. Bush got away with offering up the risible explanation that they “hate our freedoms.” The stenographers of the White House press corps may have had to suppress smiles but silently swallowed the “they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms” rationale.

The only journalist I can recall stepping up and asking, in effect, “Come on; now really; it’s important; why do the really hate us” was the indomitable Helen Thomas.

Continues >>

Amnesty International,  April 5,  2011

Recent Israeli government calls for the UN to retract the 2009 report of its Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict are a cynical attempt to avoid accountability for war crimes and deny both Palestinian and Israeli victims of the 2008-2009 conflict the justice and reparations they deserve, Amnesty International said today.

Statements by leading Israeli politicians that Israel’s conduct in the 22-day conflict in Gaza and southern Israel has been vindicated, following the publication of a Washington Post opinion piece by Justice Richard Goldstone on 1 April 2011, are based on a deliberate misinterpretation of Justice Goldstone’s comments. The international community must firmly reject these attempts to escape accountability and act decisively for international justice, as it has done on Libya, Sudan and other situations where war crimes and possible crimes against humanity have been committed.

Continues >>

AHRC, April 4, 2011

ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION – URGENT APPEALS PROGRAMME

Urgent Appeal update: AHRC-UAU-019-2011

——————————————————
MALAYSIA: Human rights lawyer sued for libel for blogging alleged violations of migrant workers rights

ISSUES: Human rights defenders; Migrant workers; Labour rights; Freedom of association; Freedom of assembly; Freedom of expression
——————————————————

Dear friends,

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) regrets to inform you that the Asahi Kosei (M) Sdn. Bhd. Company, a firm whom we earlier reported to have threatened to commence legal action against a human rights lawyer, Mr. Charles Hector Fernandez, for blogging about alleged violations of the migrant workers rights the company has committed, has proceeded in prosecuting him for libel.

UPDATED INFORMATION:

As mentioned in our previous appeal (AHRC-UAC-033-2011

), on February 14, 2011 the Asahi Kosei (M) Sdn. Bhd. Company, demanded from Mr. Fernandez the payment of RM 10,000,000.00 (USD 3,279,307), an apology and an immediate withdrawal of the posts in his blog that they claimed libelous to the Company. The company in Malaysia manufactures components for video equipment, hard disk drives and automotive parts.

However, even before Mr. Fernandez could respond to the Company’s demand, on February 21 he received an ex-parte injunction order and copies of court papers. The ex-parte order requires him to immediately remove all the posts he had in his blog about the case of the Burmese migrant workers and for him to stop any forms of communications by himself or his servants or agents about the issue.

The copies of court papers showed that the Asahi Kosei (M) Sdn. Bhd. Company had filed the legal action against Mr. Charles Hector Fernandez in court and applied for an ex-parte interlocutory injunction on 14 February 2011, the same day that Mr. Fernandez also received the copy of the Company’s demand letter dated February 11.

Continues >>

By Ilan Pappe, ZNet, April 5, 2011

“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document.” Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone’s much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: “If I had known then that the report would turn me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all.” And if that wasn’t the original sentence, it is certainly the subtext of Goldstone’s article.

This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC’s illegal dealings with the State of Israel.

Already In October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, “I’ve got a great love for Israel” and “I’ve worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so” (Video: “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” 4 October 2009).

Continues >>

By Kevin Zeese, Consortium News, April 5, 2011

Editor’s Note: Even while preaching the gospel of Internet freedom and democratic transparency to the rest of the world, the U.S. government continues an aggressive campaign to intimidate American anti-war whistleblowers and their supporters.

Perhaps most remarkable has been the harsh treatment of accused WikiLeaks leaker, Army Pvt. Bradley Manning, and the government’s paranoid reaction to people objecting to the maximum-security-style incarceration of this non-violent suspect, as activist Kevin Zeese describes in this first-person guest essay:

On March 20, Americans, in a vet-led assembly, gathered to support PFC Bradley Manning who is accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks and who has been held in solitary confinement at the Quantico Marine Base for seven months.

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We worked successfully with the Prince William County Police in Virginia for a safe and peaceful event, but one aspect of the event was in dispute – a veteran-led flower laying ceremony.

It seemed like something that should not have been controversial – a ceremony to remember the war dead at a replica of the Iwo Jima Monument. [The original monument is in Arlington, Virginia, across from Washington, D.C.]

The replica of the iconic monument of Marines raising the American flag at Iwo Jima is located at the entrance of the Quantico base and is open to the public every day of the year. But the Marines insisted on closing it to prevent a flower-laying ceremony by veterans on that Sunday.

Continues >>