Peace and Justice Post

(updated below)

The video of the CNN debate I did last night about WikiLeaks with former Bush Homeland Security Adviser (and CNN contributor) Fran Townsend and CNN anchor Jessica Yellin is posted below. The way it proceeded was quite instructive to me and I want to make four observations about the discussion:

(1) Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists. There’s just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they’ve ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, “Assange = Saddam” script.  So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a “high-tech Terrorist,”) that you’re viewed as being from another planet if you don’t spout it.  It’s the equivalent of questioning Saddam’s WMD stockpile in early 2003.

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By YVONNE RIDLEY, Counterpunch, Dec 29, 2010

I wonder if Hillary Clinton really believes in the pompous invective that sprays from her lips with the rapidity of machine gun fire.

We had a classic example of it just the other day when she let rip in her grating, robotic monotone over a Moscow court’s decision to jail an oil tycoon.

To be fair to Clinton, she was not alone. There was a whole gaggle of disapproving foreign ministers who poured forth their ridiculous brand of Western arrogance which has poisoned the international atmosphere for far too long.

The US Secretary of State said Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s conviction raised “serious questions about selective prosecution and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations”.

Although Khodorkovsky, 47, and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, 54, were found guilty of theft and money laundering by a Moscow court, critics like Clinton say the trial constitutes revenge for the tycoon’s questioning of a state monopoly on oil pipelines and propping up political parties that oppose the Kremlin.

Clinton’s censure was echoed by politicians in Britain and Germany, and Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, urged Moscow to “respect its international commitments in the field of human rights and the rule of law”.
Now while it may appear to be quite touching to see all these Western leaders express their outrage over a trial involving the one-time richest and most powerful man in Russia’s oil and gas industry, you have to ask where were these moral guardians when other unjust legal decisions were being made in US courts, for example?

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AMY GOODMAN: The renowned Indian physician and human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen has been sentenced to life in prison. On Friday, Dr. Sen and two others were convicted in court in India on charges of sedition and conspiracy.

Described as India’s most famous political prisoner, Dr. Sen is known as the “physician of the poor.” He spent many years working as a doctor in the rural-tribal areas of Chhattisgarh in central India and reported on unlawful killings of indigenous people by the police and private militias. The region is the site of intensifying conflict between India’s central government and the Maoist Naxalites.

In May of 2007, Dr. Sen was charged under the the draconian Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Act. The allegations against him ranged from helping the Maoist insurgency, being a member of a terrorist organization, to waging war against the Indian state.

In a statement released after his conviction, Amnesty International called Dr. Sen a “prisoner of conscience.” Asia-Pacific director Sam Zarifi said, quote, “This sentence will seriously intimidate other human rights defenders who would provide a peaceful outlet for the people’s grievances… Amnesty International believes that the charges against Dr. Sen are baseless and politically motivated,” the statement said.

Immediately after the sentencing Friday, Dr. Sen was taken back into custody. He had been free on bail since May of 2009. Earlier this year, Democracy Now!’s Anjali Kamat had a chance to speak with Dr. Sen by telephone while he was out on bail.

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The president’s backing of indiscriminate slaughter in Pakistan can only encourage new waves of militancy

Mehdi Hasan, The Guardian, Dec 28, 2010

Speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in May, Barack Obama spotted teen pop band the Jonas Brothers in the audience. “Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but, boys, don’t get any ideas,” deadpanned the president, referring to his daughters. “Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” The crowd laughed, Obama smiled, the dinner continued. Few questioned the wisdom of making such a tasteless joke; of the US commander-in-chief showing such casual disregard for the countless lives lost abroad through US drone attacks.

From the moment he stepped foot inside the White House, Obama set about expanding and escalating a covert CIA programme of “targeted killings” inside Pakistan, using Predator and Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles (who comes up with these names?) that had been started by the Bush administration in 2004. On 23 January 2009, just three days after being sworn in, Obama ordered his first set of air strikes inside Pakistan; one is said to have killed four Arab fighters linked to al-Qaida but the other hit the house of a pro-government tribal leader, killing him and four members of his family, including a five-year-old child. Obama’s own daughter, Sasha, was seven at the time.

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Ahmad Noorani, uruknet.info, Dec 28, 2010

ISLAMABAD: As another drone attack killed more than 20 people on North Waziristan on Monday, all leading political parties of the country unanimously declared that these attacks were tantamount to compromising the sovereignty of Pakistan and the government and the Pakistan Army should take immediate measures to stop them.

Leaders of these parties said the government and authorities should sort out the matter in accordance with parliament’s unanimous resolutions and take action against the extremists by itself wherever it is needed.

Senior leaders of these leading political forces say that compromising the sovereignty of the country would lead to making Pakistan a banana republic and foreign forces will keep on extending their targeted areas of attacks which consequently will damage the unity of the already troubled nation.

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By Joseph Kishore, wsws.org, 28 December 2010

As part of an escalating US campaign in Pakistan, missiles from suspected CIA drones killed up to 25 people on Monday.

The latest slaughter took place in the North Waziristan region, which borders Afghanistan and has been targeted by the majority of US missiles fired from unmanned aircraft over the past year. The region is said to be a stronghold of the so-called Haqqani network, which operates in Afghanistan and opposes the US occupation.

The Los Angeles Times, citing “Pakistani intelligence officials,” reported that 25 were killed after three trucks were incinerated in two separate attacks in Mir Ali, a city that lies close to the border with Afghanistan.

One of the attacks destroyed two trucks in the village of Sher Tala, while the other destroyed a truck traveling in the village of Machikhel.

As always, those killed were described by Pakistani officials and the US media as “suspected militants” or “terrorists,” even though no concrete information was provided about those killed. The US did not make any comment on the killings.

The attacks in North Waziristan followed by 10 days the killing of 54 in the Kyber tribal region, located further to the north along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. (See “US drones slaughter 54 in Pakistan”)

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The drums of war are heard again in Israel and they are sounded because once more Israel’s invincibility  is in question. Despite the triumphant rhetoric in the various media commemorative reports, two years after ‘Cast Lead’, the sense is that that campaign was as much of a failure as was the second Lebanon war of 2006. Unfortunately, leaders, generals and the public at large in the Jewish State know only one way of dealing with military debacles and fiascos. They can be redeemed only by another successful operation or war but one which has to be carried out with more force and be more ruthless than the previous one with the hope for better results in the next round.

Force and might, so explained leading commentators in the local media (parroting what they hear from the generals in the army), is needed in order to ‘deter’, to ‘teach a lesson’ and to ‘weaken’ the enemy. There is no new plan for Gaza – there is no real desire to occupy it and put in under direct Israeli rule. What is suggested is to pound the Strip and its people once more, but with more brutality and for a shorter time. One might ask, why would this bear different fruits than the ‘Cast Lead Operation’? But this is the wrong question. The right question is what else can the present political and military elite of Israel (which includes the government and the main opposition parties) do?

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In a country with countless ethnicities and religious minorities, the 1980s law against insulting Islam is used to settle scores, critics say. The case of a Christian woman sentenced to death has led to renewed calls for its repeal.

Daughters of Asia Bibi hold an image of their mother at their home in Sheikhupura, in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Human rights advocates have urged the president to pardon her and to repeal the blasphemy law under which she was convicted. (Adrees Latif, Reuters / December 27, 2010)

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2010

Reporting from Nankana Sahib, Pakistan —

Muslim cleric Muhammad Salim isn’t worried that a court or Pakistan’s president might spare a Christian woman from this village who has been sentenced to death on blasphemy charges.

After all, if Asia Bibi, a mother of two, escapes the hangman’s noose, he’s confident someone else will kill her.

“Any Muslim, if given the chance, would kill such a person,” Salim said calmly, seated cross-legged on a straw mat at a mosque here. “You would be rewarded in heaven for it.”

Salim isn’t the only one calling for vigilante justice. A cleric in Peshawar has offered 500,000 rupees, or $6,000, to anyone who kills Asia Bibi, if her execution doesn’t take place. Other hard-line clerics have warned they would mobilize nationwide protests against the government if President Asif Ali Zardari pardoned her.

Asia Bibi’s case has exposed deep rifts in Pakistan over the blasphemy law, seen by some as an appropriate measure to defend the tenets of Islam, but viewed by others as a dangerous tool easily abused in a society that is a volatile patchwork of ethnicities, religions and sects.

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According to the Obama administration, nothing can happen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan that doesn’t mean good news.

Apparently nothing can happen in the U.S. war in Afghanistan that doesn’t mean good news. If violence rises, it’s because “we’re taking the fight to the enemy.”  The Pentagon must be taking a lot of fighting to whoever they’re calling the enemy – this year alone the war has killed over 2500 Afghan civilians, and almost 500 U.S. troops and more than 200 other NATO forces have died too.  Of course in those isolated areas where violence may have dropped, it’s because “our strategy is winning.”

President Obama’s most recent Afghanistan review process resulted – surprise! – in the announcement that the U.S./NATO occupation will continue at least until 2014.  Another four years of war, death, and devastation for the people of Afghanistan, as well as for the young U.S. soldiers drafted by poverty and lack of opportunity and sent to kill and die there in escalating numbers.

That earlier promise of July 2011 as the pull-out date?  That one was always at least partially a sham – designed to pacify Obama’s powerfully anti-war base.  The language even when first announced was a carefully ambiguous version that sounded like “July 2011 will start a process to determine whether conditions might allow preparation for beginning consideration of when the partial transfer of some control to Afghan forces might allow for a partial withdrawal of a few U.S. troops…”

As is recognized by the 60% of people in the U.S. who understand that the war in Afghanistan is “not worth fighting,” this is a war we cannot win and cannot afford. There is no military solution – we’ve heard that for years now, from the very leaders orchestrating the war, in the Pentagon, in Congress, in the White House.  And yet, the military battle goes on, despite its inevitable failure.

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By the Rev. Howard Bess, Consortium News, December 24, 2010

(Originally published December 5, 2009)

Editor’s Note: In a modern era when ancient religious myths continue to set nations at war against one another at the cost of untold human suffering, it is no longer possible to look benignly even at some of the innocent myths like those that surround the birth of Jesus.

Anything that suggests the superiority of one religion over another carries with it the risk of justifying yet more killing. Indeed, one of the bitter ironies of this season’s joyful praise for the “prince of peace” is that his gentle teachings have been twisted into possibly the most violent and warlike religion in history.

If Christians don’t like to hear that – if they wish to think of, say, Islam as a particularly violent religion and Christianity as one of peace and human kindness – they should recall the endless bloodletting done in Jesus’s name, from the days since Christianity was adopted as Rome’s official religion through the Middle Ages to today.

For instance, think of:

–The “heretics” tortured and burned alive for transgressions such as disagreeing over interpretations of the transubstantiation of Christ in the communion or for deviating from Christian doctrine that clashed with scientific discoveries;

–The Crusaders who slaughtered the Muslim and Jewish populations of Jerusalem in 1099, hailed in Europe as a great victory;

–The interminable religious wars that ravaged Europe for centuries and the suffering that kings inflicted on their subjects after claiming a divine right under Christianity.

–The Christian-led genocides against and enslavements of indigenous “heathens” of the Western Hemisphere, Africa and Australia as well as brutal imperial incursions into Asia;

–The European pogroms against the Jews based on an anti-Semitism rationalized by labeling Jews collectively as “Christ killers,” laying the groundwork for the Nazi Holocaust as the Vatican and many Protestant religious leaders stood by silently.

–The religious justification for even more torture and butchery against “godless” leftists during the Cold War, again aided and abetted by the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians;

–Today’s “war on terror” or “clash of civilizations” directed against Muslims with the strong support of many deeply religious Christians (and Jews) who decry Islam as a violent religion bent on conquest.

So, given that grim history – and in the hope that Christians might pause in their celebrations to reflect on how far Christianity has strayed from the peaceful teachings of Jesus – we are republishing the Rev. Howard Bess’s article from 2009 about some of the cherished myths about Jesus’s birth:

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