Peace and Justice Post

by Stuart Littlewood, Dissident Voice, November 6th, 2010

In his recent pep-talk to the Anti-Defamation League, media magnate Rupert Murdoch complains about “an ongoing war against the Jews”.

He seems desperate to divert attention from the mounting resentment around the world towards Israel. But his threadbare argument collapses straightaway because no distinction is made between criminal Israelis and Jews generally. The one remains carefully hidden behind the other.

And the anti-Semitism label tends to get pinned on anyone and everyone in European society, “from its most élite politicians to its largely Muslim ghettoes”, who speaks against or as much as frowns at the racist regime.

The after-dinner audience he was addressing no doubt lapped it up, but unfortunately for Mr Murdoch people are better informed nowadays. I doubt if the wider audience buys it.

What they find unacceptable is Israel’s lawlessness and unrestrained killing. The much-hyped religious dimension is only relevant insofar as the perpetrators hide behind religion’s skirts and misinterpret religious texts to whitewash their crimes.

What also undermines Mr Murdoch’s case is the fact that not all Jews support the state of Israel or approve the dispossession and removal of its indigenous (Arab) population. An increasing number, to their credit, actively campaign against it.

And not all of Israel’s supporters are Jewish. They include battalions of Christian Zionists.

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by Khalid Amayreh, Intifada Palestine, Nov 3, 2010

“It is a slaughter house,” “even the Gestapo didn’t do this;” I spent many years in Israeli jails, and never experienced some thing like that.” These are some of the comments and observations made by people who have just been released from Palestinian Authority (PA) lockups and detention centers.

The PA said  it formally and completely stopped physical torture  in its numerous detention centers as of October 2000, especially following protests by the donor countries which complained that their tax-payers’ money was being used to torture suspected political  opponents in the West Bank.

However, recent reports and testimonies gathered by human rights organizations and journalists have shown that intensive, even life-threatening torture is still being widely practiced by PA security authorities with or without the knowledge of the political authorities.

In some instances, like at the Jericho prison, which has been described as most notorious in the application of torture, some prisoners and detainees are tortured 17 hours per day.

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Police tussles with demonstrators as they clear an area where anti-nuclear activists digged a hole beside the possible Castor transportation route in Splietau near Dannenberg November 6, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski

DANNENBERG, Germany (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of protesters took part in one of the largest anti-nuclear rallies in years Saturday as the first shipment of waste in two years was slowed by activists on its way from France back to Germany.

The transport has become a tense political issue this year due to anger over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to extend the lifespan of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants in the face of overwhelming public opposition.

The waste transported Saturday originated in Germany and was reprocessed at the French nuclear group Areva’s processing plant at La Hague for storage in a site in the northern German town of Gorleben.

Merkel urged those taking part in the rally to refrain from committing criminal acts while attempting to stop the convoy of 11 train cars carrying 154 metric tones of waste.

The train was held up for hours by an earlier demonstration near the German-French border when thousands of activists blocked the tracks. The waste shipment is expected to arrive in Gorleben, near the central city of Dannenberg, Sunday.

There were some isolated scuffles between demostrators and police. Also a group of about 150 protesters were trying to dig a tunnel under one road near Gorleben to make it impassable. They threw stones at police attempting to stop them. The police responded with clubs and pepper spray.

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By Bill Van Auken, uruknet.info, Nov 6, 2010

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of waterboarding.The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.” The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.” The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic interests. Continues >>

by Robert Fisk, CommonDreams.org, Nov 6, 2010

The speed with which the Baghdad church massacre by al-Qa’ida has frightened the peoples of the Middle East is a sign of just how fragile is the earth’s crust beneath their feet.

Unlike our Western television news, Al-Jazeera and Arabia show the full horror of such carnage. Arms, legs, beheaded torsos leave no doubt of what they mean. Every Christian in the region understood what this attack meant. Indeed, given the sectarian nature of the assaults on Shia Iraqis, I’m beginning to wonder whether al-Qa’ida itself – far from being the center/kernel/font of “world terror” as we imagine – might be one of the most sectarian organizations ever invented. Nor, I suspect, is there just one al-Qa’ida but several, feeding off the injustices of the region, a blood transfusion which the West (and I’m including the Israelis here) feeds into its body.

In fact, I’m wondering if our governments don’t need this terror – to make us frightened, very frightened, to make us obey, to bring more security to our little lives. And I’m wondering whether those same governments will ever wake up to the fact that our actions in the Middle East are what is endangering our security. Lord Blair of Isfahan always denied this – even when the 7/7 suicide bomber carefully explained in his posthumous video that Iraq was one of the reasons he committed the slaughter in London – and Bush always denied it, and Sarkozy will deny it if al-Qa’ida fulfils its latest threat to attack France.

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The blockade imposed on Gaza is a powerful psychological device aimed at wringing concessions from Gazans and Hamas.

Life in Gaza has been reduced to relying on human ingenuity and improvisation [Getty]

Gaza “the giant open prison” are not the words of Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. Nor were they scripted by Hamas’ Khaled Mishaal or Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas. They belong to David Cameron, the young and charismatic British prime minister.

Since the imposition of the Gaza blockade nearly four years ago, no single European leader has voiced moral outrage over the sanctions with such alacrity, simplicity and forcefulness. His words have reverberated widely in Gaza as well as elsewhere in the Arab world.

Like Cameron’s words, the untold misery shatters the international political society’s quasi silence and questions the immorality of indifference and inaction towards the blockade.

Gazans need to reclaim their state of dignity and humanity before reclaiming the seemingly illusionary hope of a Palestinian state. A peek inside the ‘big prison’ reveals the blockade to be multi-layered – affecting economy, polity, diplomacy and security.

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By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers,  Nov 4, 2010

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the influential Kashmiri separatist leader, discusses the situation in Srinagar, Inida. Geelani, is under house arrest. | Dion Nissenbaum / MCT

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SRINAGAR, India — Shortly before winning the presidency in 2008, Barack Obama said that as part of his drive to end the Afghanistan conflict, he’d take on one of South Asia’s most intractable issues — competing claims to Kashmir by nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India — even if it meant wading into a “tar pit” with little chance of quick resolution.

Two years later, although Kashmir is simmering after months of destabilizing violence, the conflict is all but off the agenda as Obama arrives this weekend for his first presidential trip to India.

A humbling Election Day for the president and his Democratic Party over domestic economic discontent leaves little room for him to embark on another risky foreign peace initiative. India’s rejection of outside mediation also makes it difficult for Obama to push the issue as he tries to woo leaders of the economic powerhouse.

But Kashmiri leaders are warning the president that it would be a strategic mistake to ignore the most dangerous spiral of violence to consume the picturesque valley in years.

“We are not asking the Americans to take a position against India or for Kashmir,” said Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, the spiritual leader who heads Kashmir’s umbrella group of secessionist politicians. “We are just saying that there is a general realization that India and Pakistan need to be pushed in terms of a dialogue.”

More than 700,000 Indian forces keep a tight grip on the predominantly Muslim population that launched a revolt in 1989 and rose up again this summer in a protracted series of stone-throwing protests that left more than 110 people dead. Though the worst of the violence has subsided, Indian forces regularly arrest protest leaders and impose curfews on activist strongholds in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital, and its surrounding villages.

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Norway’s government has promised to pursue reports of major US surveillance operations across the city of Oslo, with the Justice Ministry expected to take over the issue following Foreign Ministry attempts to get answers from the US embassy.

“We did not get comprehensive answers,” noted Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stone after the ministry met with US embassy officials. Justice Minister Knut Storberget insisted he had no prior knowledge of the US operation, which apparently used former police officers employed by the US embassy.

The story was broken by Norway’s TV2 channel, which found in an investigation that the US embassy was conducting “illegal systematic surveillance of Norwegian citizens.” The report said the former police officers were taking pictures and “registering” lists of Norwegian citizens who might be a threat to American interests.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley confirmed the spying operation, but insisted that Norway’s government had been informed of it. He added that a lot of American embassies conduct similar operations.

“The explicit and declared motive of the [Afghanistan] war was to compel the Taliban to turn over to the United States, the people who they accused of having been involved in World Trade Center and Pentagon terrorist acts. The Taliban…they requested evidence…and the Bush administration refused to provide any,” the 81-year-old senior academic made the remarks on Press TV’s program a Simple Question.

“We later discovered one of the reasons why they did not bring evidence: they did not have any.”

The political analyst also said that nonexistence of such evidence was confirmed by FBI eight months later.

“The head of FBI, after the most intense international investigation in history, informed the press that the FBI believed that the plot may have been hatched in Afghanistan, but was probably implemented in the United Arab Emirates and Germany.”

Chomsky added that three weeks into the war, “a British officer announced that the US and Britain would continue bombing, until the people of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban… That was later turned into the official justification for the war.”

“All of this was totally illegal. It was more, criminal,” Chomsky said.

The 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan was launched with the official objective of curbing militancy and bringing peace and stability to the country.

Nine years on, however, the American and Afghan officials admit that the country remains unstable and civilians continue to pay the heaviest price.

AHRC, Nov 4, 2010

The Asian Human Rights Commission has followed the case of Nyi Nyi Htun, the editor of a Karenni state-based news journal, who was charged for upsetting public tranquility by sending news reports outside Burma. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison on 13 October 2010 by the Seikkan Township court.

Police officers from the Yangon Division Police Chief Office arrested Nyi Nyi Htun in Thingangyun Township of Yangon Division upon suspicion of having connections with a series of bomb blasts in Yangon in October 2009. Nyi Nyi Htun was kept in police custody and tortured continuously for six days at the Yangon Divisional Police Headquarters. The police later confiscated a computer, a memory stick and other documents at his house.

The ALRC, the AHRC’s sister organization, has already submitted a statement to UN Human Rights Council regarding the brutal torture Nyi Nyi Htun has been exposed to. Kindly note ALRC-CWS-15-05-2010.

Nyi Nyi Htun was charged for being involved with an illegal organizations based at the Thai-Burma boarder under section 17(1) of the Unlawful Associations Act, section 13(1) of the Immigration Emergency Provisions Act, section 6(1) of the Wireless Act. Further he was charged with upsetting public tranquility under section 505(b) of the Penal Code.

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