Peace and Justice Post

The release of large amounts of classified documents has shown how eager the administration is to tell the American public the exact opposite of what they are telling one another. It seems that the classification system isn’t even necessary for this, however, as Vice President Biden, fresh off of pledging to the American people that the US would be totally out of Afghanistan “come hell or high water, by 2014” has now told a completely different story to Afghan officials.

“We are not leaving in 2014,” Biden assured President Hamid Karzai during a news conference in Kabul, insisting that the US was prepared to continue with its military occupation “well beyond 2014.”

Biden, who had previously chastised Karzai for his corruption, praised him today for his “leadership” through nearly a decade of failed NATO military adventures. Karzai, who has recently been condemning the US for killing large numbers of civilians, spent his time praising the US for its “contributions.”

Currently there are some 150,000 NATO troops, predominantly from the United States, and NATO estimates that there are 25,000 Taliban forces in the country, which is the exact same estimate they made a year ago. Despite claims of “progress” in the war, violence is still on the rise across the nation.

by Albert Einstein, Global Research, Jan 10, 2011

This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949).

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has—as is well known—been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

Continues >>

Chris Hedges,  trutdig.com,  Jan 10, 2011

AP / Petros Giannakouris

A young protester with a painted face demonstrates in central Athens during an anti-war rally back in 2007.

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. It is not represented by the press. It is not arbitrated by a judiciary that protects us from predators. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. All polite appeals to the formal systems of power will not end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must physically obstruct the war machine or accept a role as its accomplice.

The moratorium on anti-war protests in 2004 was designed to help elect the Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry. It was a foolish and humiliating concession. Kerry snapped to salute like a windup doll when he was nominated. He talked endlessly about victory in Iraq. He assured the country that he would not have withdrawn from Fallujah. And by the time George W. Bush was elected for another term the anti-war movement had lost its momentum. The effort to return Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war in Iraq became another sad lesson in incredulity. The Democratic Party, once in the majority, funded and expanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Barack Obama in 2008 proved to be yet another advertising gimmick for the corporate and military elite. All our efforts to work within the political process to stop these wars have been abject and miserable failures. And while we wasted our time, tens of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani civilians, as well as U.S. soldiers and Marines, were traumatized, maimed and killed.

Continues >>

By Ilan Pappe, ZNet, January 11, 2011

I begin by thanking all the organizers; I know it took quite a lot of efforts to bring us all together. It is a great achievement, and as Mazin Qumsiyeh and Haidar Eid, mentioned, and Lubna Masarwa, yesterday, you also provided a great opportunity for us to meet and we are very grateful to you for this opportunity to meet you and to meet each other. It is easier because of the Israeli oppression to meet here than to meet in Palestine where we should meet and hopefully one day we will all be there without the need to go to the frozen hills of Stuttgart to create a joint life!

And I think that’s the gist of the Zionist story that it does not allow people to meet normal life and to be normal friends that they need to go through all that hardship in order to fulfill a very elementary human impulse to live together.

We live in very bizarre times. On the one hand, we could not have wished as activists for a better Israeli government. I think that this particular government makes any sophisticated analysis about what Zionism in Israel is all about quite redundant. It is very easy to expose not only the Israeli policies, but also the racist ideology behind them. On the other hand, Israel is the most successful economy in the West in the last three years; it has done much better than the Germany, much better than most of the economic powers of the West; its banking system is very stable, its currency is one of the strongest in the world and it doesn’t suffer at all from all the hardships that had affected the Western capitalist economies in the last three years.

The result is a very bewildering gap between what average and decent people in the West think about Israel and the way the Israelis, specially the Israeli Jews, think about themselves. They think that they live in a very successful society, they believe that the Arab-Israeli conflict is over, that the Palestinian question has ended, yes, you have a problem in Gaza, yes you have a problem with Hezbollah in Lebanon, but this is a global problem, this is not a particular Israeli problem; this is part of the so-called war against terror.

Continues >>

Morning Star Online, January 10, 2011

Email

Chile joins other South American nations to recognize Palestine as a “full, free and sovereign” state.

CommonDreams.org, Jan 8, 2011

Chile has become the latest South American country to officially recognise Palestine as an independent state.

Palestinian authorities have travelled extensively to convince nations to recognise it as a state (EPA)

“The government of Chile has adopted the resolution today recognising the existence of the state of Palestine as a free, independent and sovereign state,” Alfredo Moreno, the foreign minister, said on Friday.

“Chile has permanently and consistently supported the right of the Palestinian people to constitute themselves as an independent state, in peaceful coexistence with the state of Israel,” Moreno said.

Chile’s decision follows a meeting in Brazil between Chilean President Sebastian Pinera and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador last month recognised Palestine within its borders prior to 1967, and Uruguay and Paraguay are expected to join them in the coming weeks.

Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Costa Rica also recognise the Palestinian state.

Continues >>

One of the flashpoints in Occupied Palestine in recent years has involved peaceful weekly protests against continued Israeli construction of a separation wall extending throughout the whole of the West Bank. A particularly active site for these protests has been the village of Bil’in near the city of Ramallah, and it is here where the Israeli penchant to use deadly force to disrupt nonviolent demonstrations raises deep legal and moral concerns. These concerns are accentuated when it is realized that way back in 2004 the International Court of Justice (the highest judicial body in the UN System) in a rare near unanimous ruling declared the construction of the wall on occupied Palestinian territory to be unlawful, and reached findings ordering Israel to dismantle the wall and compensate Palestinians for the harm done. Israel has defied this ruling, and so the wall remains, and work continues on segments yet to be completed.

It is against this background that the world should take note of the shocking death of Jawaher Abu Rahma on the first day of 2011 as a result of suffocation resulting from tear gas inhalation while not even being part of the Bil’in demonstration. Witnesses confirm that she was standing above the actual demonstration as an interested spectator. It was a large year end demonstration that included the participation of 350 Israeli and international activists. There was no excuse for the use of such a harsh method of disrupting a protest against a feature of the occupation that had been pronounced to be unlawful by an authoritative international body. As it happens the brother of Ms. Rahman had been killed a few months earlier by a tear gas canister fired with a high velocity from a close range. And there are many other reports of casualties caused by Israel’s extreme methods of crowd control. International activists have also been injured and harshly detained in the past, including the Irish Nobel Peace Laureate, Mairead Maguire. Together these deaths exhibit a general unacceptable Israeli disposition to use excessive force against Palestinians living under occupation. Just a day later an unarmed young Palestinian, Ahmed Maslamany, peacefully on his way to work was shot to death at a West Bank checkpoint because he failed to follow an instruction given in Hebrew, a language he did not understand.

Continues >>

by Tom Mellen, Morning Star Online, Jan 7, 2011

A local Pakistani spook said: “US drones fired four missiles, targeting a vehicle and a house.

“So far five bodies have been recovered – Taliban have surrounded the area and there are fears the final toll may go up.”

According to conservative estimates, the US assassination campaign has killed at least 2,100 people since the Bush administration started it in 2004.

Last year the US launched over 120 drone strikes in north-western Pakistan, killing at least 995 people, compared to 53 attacks in 2009 which killed around 500 people.

These figures are almost certainly far too low as they are based on the claims of intelligence officials and are impossible to independently confirm.

Political opposition to the undeclared US war on the country’s tribal areas has risen along with the mounting human cost.

Continues >>

Blasphemy is not a protector of religious freedom, as the UN maintains, but its mortal enemy

Nick Cohen, The Observer,  Jan 9, 2011

If the circumstances were not so hideous, the successful attempt by Pakistan to persuade the UN Human Rights Council to condemn blasphemers who defame religion would have been a black comedy. Every word its diplomats used in 2009 to protest against Islamophobia turned out to be a precise description of the prejudices the Pakistani state was appeasing at home.

They told the UN it must approve a universal blasphemy law to protect religious minorities from “intolerance, discrimination and acts of violence”. If they were not the hypocrites they appeared, but honourable men, who wanted to help all minorities and not only Muslims, they must now accept that Salmaan Taseer was butchered for protecting Pakistan’s religious minorities from its own blasphemy law.

Taseer did not go so far as to assert that the Qur’an, like the Talmud and the Bible, was the work of men, not God, or criticise the teachings of Muhammad. His crime was to stand up against the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, a subject that the media of the supposedly warmongering, culturally imperialist “crusaders” of the west barely mention for fear of causing “offence”. He denounced the treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five. She had argued with Muslim women who refused to drink water she had carried because she was impure and therefore the drink she carried was contaminated. They told the local cleric she had taken Muhammad’s name in vain.

That was enough for the judge to order that she be hanged by the neck until she was dead. Not much respect shown for her minority rights, then. Nor for the rights of Salmaan Taseer, whose last sight on earth was of Constable Mumtaz Qadri firing 26 bullets into his body, while other members of his bodyguard stood by and let him do it.

Continues >>