Peace and Justice Post

U.S. academic Richard Falk spoke to UN Human Rights Council as it prepared resolution condemning settlement building in East Jerusalem and West Bank.

Haaretz, March 21, 2011

Source: Reuters

Israel’s expansion of settlements in East Jerusalem and eviction of Palestinians from their homes there is a form of ethnic cleansing, a United Nations investigator said on Monday.

United States academic Richard Falk was speaking to the UN Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass resolutions condemning settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The “continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation” in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan, he said.

This situation “can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing,” Falk declared.

Israel declines to deal with Falk or even allow him into the country, accusing him of being biased.

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With 42 killed in Sanaa, regimes show they will keep power at any cost

By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, March 20, 2011

afp/getty images 

More protests hit both Yemen (above) and Bahrain yesterday

Abrutal counter-revolution is sweeping through the Arabian Peninsula as Bahrain and Yemen both declare war on reform movements and ferociously try to suppress them with armed force.

In Yemen police and snipers on rooftops opened fire on Friday on a mass demonstration outside the main university, killing at least 42 people. The government has since declared martial law and set up checkpoints throughout the capital, Sanaa.

In Bahrain repression began a few days earlier, when King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa called for military support from other Gulf monarchs and 1,000 troops from Saudi Arabia crossed into the island kingdom. “This was the green light for our army to kill people,” says Ali Salman, the leader of al-Wefaq, the main opposition party.

As decisively as in Yemen the Bahraini al-Khalifa royal family has rejected reform and showed that it intends to hold power by armed force. Serried ranks of riot police advancing behind a cloud of tear gas and backed by armoured vehicles and helicopters cleared protesters from Pearl Square, which has been the gathering point for protesters. The 300ft-high monument commemorating the pearl fishers of the Gulf, a rallying point for protesters, has been torn down by the army. “It was a bad memory,” said the Bahraini Foreign Minister, Khalid bin Ahmed al-Khalifa.

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MQ-9 Reaper in flight. Staff Sgt. Brian Ferguson/US Air Force photo

No matter how much anyone talks about “surgical” strikes and precision bombing, air power and civilian deaths are inextricably bound together.

— By Tom Engelhardt, Mother Jones, March 17, 2011

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

When men first made war in the air, the imagery that accompanied them was of knights jousting in the sky. Just check out movies like Wings, which won the first Oscar for Best Picture in 1927 (or any Peanuts cartoon in which Snoopy takes on the Red Baron in a literal “dogfight”). As late as 1986, five years after two American F-14s shot down two Soviet jets flown by Libyan pilots over the Mediterranean’s Gulf of Sidra, it was still possible to make the movie Top Gun. In it, Tom Cruise played “Maverick,” a US Naval aviator triumphantly involved in a similar incident. (He shoots down three MiGs.)

Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the US had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that US patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.

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CommonDreams.org, March 19, 2011

Associated Press

More than 100 anti-war protesters, including the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, were arrested outside the White House on Saturday in demonstrations marking the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

A unidentified protester lifts his legs as he is arrested by U.S. Park Police near the White House while protesting against war on the 8th anniversary of the Iraq invasion in Washington, on Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo) The protesters, some shouting anti-war slogans and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” were arrested after ignoring orders to move away from the gates of the White House. The demonstrators cheered loudly as Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon’s secret history of the Vietnam War that was later published in major newspapers, was arrested and led away by police.

In New York City, about 80 protesters gathered near the U.S. military recruiting center in Times Square, chanting “No to war” and carrying banners that read, “I am not paying for war” and “Butter not guns.”

Similar protests marking the start of the Iraq war were also planned Saturday in Chicago, San Francisco and other cities.

The demonstration in Washington on Saturday merged varied causes, including protesters demanding a U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as well as those supporting Bradley Manning, the jailed Army private suspected of giving classified documents to the website WikiLeaks.

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By Mumia Abu Jamal, ZNet, Friday, March 18, 2011

As pro and anti-government forces battle for supremacy in the cities and deserts of Libya, in North Africa, the tenor and tone of U.S./Western reporting puts the lie to the often heard claim of journalistic objectivity.

The cheer-leading seems more apt for ESPN than on the nation’s leading newscasts, spurred on, of course, by U.S. enmity against Col. Moammar Khaddafy, who has long been a thorn in the side of U.S. Imperial designs on the region.

Let us not pretend that American efforts are caused by solicitude for the suffering Libyan people, for easily 10 (or perhaps, 30!) times that number suffered under Egypt’s President-for-life (and trusty U.S. ally), Husni Mubarak, and the U.S. turned a deaf ear for decades to their cries.

Only when the people rose up, and took the stage, did the U.S. start mumbling phrases about ‘human rights’, and concerns about ‘violence’.

This, from a government that secretly sent (and may still be sending) men to Egyptian hellholes to be tortured via rendition –and killed by the dreaded secret police.

Indeed, anyone with a smattering of American history cannot even hear the media and political charges of a government attacking or bombing ‘its own people’ without cringing. For U.S. National Guard fired semi-automatic weapons at unarmed students in Kent State University, Ohio, killing 4 kids who were protesting the Vietnam war.

Shortly thereafter, 2 Black kids were shot and killed by cops at Jackson State University, Mississippi, during a similar protest.

Philadelphia, PA was the site of a government bombing a home, killing men, women and babies. This was the MOVE Bombing of May 13, 1985, where 11 people were bombed to death, and a whole city block reduced to smoldering rubble.

Were any of these bombers ‘brought to justice?’

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By Danny Schechter, Consortium News, March 17, 2011

Ediitor’s Note: The U.S. political/media Establishment has long treated Al Jazeera as an American enemy in the global “information war.” During George W. Bush’s presidency, U.S. forces shot and jailed Al Jazeera correspondents as part of Bush’s brutal campaign to force “free-market democracy” on the Middle East.

But it appears Al Jazeera is emerging victorious from this conflict, with far greater credibility among well-informed people than U.S. propaganda outlets, including much of the timid U.S. news media. And, Al Jazeera is now on the front lines of spreading real democracy in the Middle East.

In this guest essay, Danny Schechter describes an Al Jazeera forum on these topics that he attended at the network’s base in Doha, Qatar:

When I arrived in the capital of Qatar, as one of the guest participants in the 6th annual Al Jazeera Forum focused on the Arab world in transition, it was clear the mood had changed.

In years past, the humiliation and oppression of the region was driving the discourse, but this year, events had taken a positive turn with popular youth revolutions catapulting the Al Jazeera TV networks into the global spotlight with governments falling and a new future emerging.

A revolt in Libya was topping the news, being described as civil war — whether it is or isn’t — with Western intervention in the form of a no-fly zone on the horizon to either protect that country’s people from a mad dictator, or in Col. Gaddafi’s view, use humanitarianism as a cover for an armed effort by foreign interests to seize the country’s oil wealth.

Just as the Forum began, we learned that an Al Jazeera Cameraman, Hassan Al Jaber, who I  met at an earlier Forum was killed in Libya, likely a targeted killing because the Al Jazeera people I met believe Gaddafi put money on their heads.

Soon, the story we came to discuss also lost its standing at the top of the media agenda. The disaster in the East had displaced the crisis in the Middle East.

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