Peace and Justice Post

By the  Rev. Howard Bess, Consortium News, Jan 14, 2011

Editor’s Note: The massacre in Tucson has prompted soul-searching among Americans, reflecting on the nation’s angry political rhetoric and the country’s easy recourse to violence.

However, that soul-searching should go even deeper, says the Rev. Howard Bess, back to the early distortion of Jesus’s teachings, messages of peace and justice that were twisted to justify wealthy churches embracing violence and power:

What happened in Tucson is not new to American life. It happens every day across the country. Indeed, murders using guns are so common that little note is taken until a high-profile person is the target or the numbers of dead are shockingly high.

Not only is violent behavior a generally accepted part of American life, but most Americans, including Christians, believe violence is an acceptable way to resolve disputes, an attitude that conforms with the Christian Faith as practiced for the last 1,900 years.

But that attitude was never part of Jesus’s message. Violence cannot be found anywhere in the recorded teachings from the life of Jesus.

When we read the gospels that carry the names of Matthew, Mark and Luke, we meet a very Jewish young man who was determined to understand and live out Torah, the will and law of God. He reduced the law of God to two specific commitments: We are to love God wholeheartedly and passionately. We are to love those around us as though they were a part of our own families.

In coming to that conclusion, Jesus drew heavily from a minority of Old Testament writers who had rejected violence in all its forms. His interest was in being the very best servant of God in the Jewish tradition. His best picture of the God he served was that of a loving father.

Peace and non-violence were always part of Jesus’s concerns. It is reported in the Luke gospel that Jesus looked out over the city of Jerusalem and wept, “If only you knew the ways of peace.”

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by: John Pilger, t r u t h o u t | Interview, January 14, 2011

Founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange. (Photo: Ben Bryant / Flickr)

The attacks on WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, are a response to an information revolution that threatens old power orders in politics and journalism. The incitement to murder trumpeted by public figures in the United States, together with attempts by the Obama administration to corrupt the law and send Assange to a hell-hole prison for the rest of his life, are the reactions of a rapacious system exposed as never before.

In recent weeks, the US Justice Department has established a secret grand jury just across the river from Washington in the eastern district of the state of Virginia. The object is to indict Assange under a discredited espionage act used to arrest peace activists during the First World War, or one of the “war on terror” conspiracy statutes that have degraded American justice. Judicial experts describe the jury as a “deliberate set up,” pointing out that this corner of Virginia is home to the employees and families of the Pentagon, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and other pillars of American power.

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by Prof Marc W. Herold
Global Research, January 14, 2011
– 2011-01-13
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The Obama administration’s effort to persist in carrying out a deadly war in Afghanistan outside the public’s eye has been succeeding. Three means are employed: tight control over news flowing out of Afghanistan; vastly greater reliance upon secretive night raids by U.S. Special Forces; and a stepped-up use of private contractors/mercenaries on the ground in Afghanistan. The latter effort is crucial in helping reduce reported U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan, the primary factor which affects domestic U.S. politics.

Every now and then, the mainstream media reports upon a particularly egregious incident which took place in Afghanistan. Nowhere can a reader get a sense of the overall level of pain inflicted upon average Afghan civilians by the actions of U.S. and NATO occupation forces. This brief essay paints a picture of ground reality in Afghanistan during the month of December 2010.  The United Nations’ UNAMA releases overall figures, but the data is simply presented in aggregate fashion and we are asked to believe. A skeptic cannot fact check the numbers. We are simply asked to believe these faith-based numbers. As I have noted many times, the UNAMA figures for civilians killed by U.S/NATO actions are at best around 70% of the actual numbers killed.  For example, for 2009, the UNAMA captured less than 60% of the civilians who perished.

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Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 297, Jan. 15, 2011

One of the guiding mantras of the twentieth century was the self-determination of peoples, of nations. It was a piety to which everyone assented in theory. But in practice, it was a very thorny, very murky subject. The key difficulty is how to determine which was the self, the people, the nation that would be entitled to determine its own destiny.

In every state, without exception, there are people in state power who argue what we have come to call a “Jacobin” position. They assert that all the citizens of that state constitute a nation, one that has already determined its destiny. We talk of nation-states as though the Jacobin principle were a reality rather than a political aspiration. Jacobins say that the state should be reinforced and strengthened by refusing to recognize the right, the legitimacy of any so-called intermediate group to stand between the state and the citizens. All rights to the individual; no rights to groups.

At the same time, in every state, again without exception, there are others – often called “minorities” – who contest this idea. They say that the Jacobin position hides the interest of some “dominant” group which maintains its privileges at the expense of all those who belong to groups other than the dominant group. The minorities (who often, but not always, comprise in fact the numerical majority of the population) argue that, unless the rights of groups are recognized, they are denied equal participation in the state.

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Bill Van Auken, wsws.org, Jan 12, 2011

Today marks the first anniversary of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that devastated the impoverished Caribbean nation of Haiti, leaving a quarter of a million of its people dead, more than 300,000 injured, and approximately a million and a half homeless.

One year after this natural disaster, the horrors facing Haiti’s population have only deepened, with a cholera epidemic claiming thousands of lives and a million left stranded in squalid tent camps.

This festering crisis underscores the social and political sources of the suffering inflicted upon Haiti’s working class and oppressed masses. That such conditions prevail virtually on the doorstep of the United States, which concentrates the greatest share of the world’s wealth, constitutes a crime of world historic proportions and an indictment of the profit system.

Those familiar with the conditions on the ground in Haiti provide an appalling account of the indifference and neglect of American and world imperialism toward the country’s people.

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The lawyer of Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblower website Wikileaks, has said that the journalist faces the threat of the death penalty or detention at Guantanamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault.

The Guardian quoted Assange’s legal team as saying in a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public prosecutions to extradite him, that there is a similar possibility that the US would eventually seek his extradition “and/or illegal rendition where there will be a real risk of him being detained at Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere”.

“Indeed, if Assange were rendered to the USA, without assurances that the death penalty would not be carried out, there is a real risk that he could be made subject to the death penalty. It is well known that prominent figures have implied, if not stated outright, that Assange should be executed,” they added.

The 35-page skeleton argument was released by Mark Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, following a brief review hearing at Belmarsh magistrate’s court on Tuesday, the paper said.

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By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi, The Independent, Jan 12, 2011

AP

The attack on the Samjhauta Express in 2007 may not have been the work of Muslim militants

By Ivan Eland, Consortium News, January 12, 2011

Editor’s Note: The Afghan War grinds on, now well into its tenth year, with no coherent U.S. plan for either success or withdrawal, only the prospect of more death and destruction and the further destabilization of nuclear-armed Pakistan.

With difficult choices ahead – and Washington still trapped in tough-guy rhetoric – the future prospects for U.S. policy in the region are only dimmer, prompting the Independent Institute’s Ivan Eland to suggest that the time has come for some unpleasant deal-making:

If actions speak louder than words, the U.S. military has seemed to confirm the pessimistic findings of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which the military had recently pooh-poohed.

The military assessment emphasized a rosy picture of gains in the Helmand and Kandahar provinces in Afghanistan, whereas the NIEs, a product of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, acknowledged some gains in those two provinces but focused on Pakistan’s unwillingness to shut down guerrilla sanctuaries across the border as a serious obstacle.

In December, the military commanders tried to discredit the NIE by saying it was an out-of-date effort by intelligence chair-borne divisions that had spent only limited, if any, time in Afghanistan.

The next week, however, senior American military commanders in Afghanistan — seemingly acknowledging the validity of the desk jockeys’ main point — were advocating a risky expansion of Special Operations ground raids across the Afghanistan/Pakistan border to attack those Taliban sanctuaries, also reflecting a growing frustration with Pakistan’s lack of effort there.

Furthermore, as the military emphasized gains in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, it downplayed the spread of the insurgency and instability into northern Afghanistan.

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