Peace and Justice Post

Speaking to reporters in Ramallah, Barghouthi proposed a set of initiatives to “surpass the intractable impasse in the so called peace process,” which he described as “meaningless and damaging” while Israeli settlement building continues.

The declaration calls on “all states, governments and international institutions recognize the Palestinian state and its borders immediately,” as well as lobbying the UN General Assembly to issue a recognition of the state on 4 June 1967 and “a demand that Israel end the occupation of its land, borders, airspace, and water resources, removing all illegal settlements from Palestinian territories.”

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People’s Daily Online, Oct 12, 2010

NATO helicopters violated Pakistan’s airspace Tuesday morning near Chaman border area in the southwest Balochistan province, local media reported citing official sources.

According to details, two NATO helicopters flew 200 meters inside Pakistani territory and returned after creating panic and fear among the border area residents, official sources added.

The NATO helicopters continued flights inside Pakistani territory for 20 minutes and had entered through “Bab-e-Dosti” or the Friendship Gate area on Pakistan-Afghanistan border, local media reported.

This is the second violation of Pakistani airspace by NATO gunship choppers within a week, official sources said.

Earlier on September 30, two NATO gunship fired rockets at paramilitary checkpoint in Kurram tribal area in the northwest border with Afghanistan, killing three troops and injuring an equal number.

Consequently, Pakistan blocked its Torkham border for NATO supplies for ten days. It was resumed on Sunday after a written apology by NATO to Pakistan government. The blockade strained bilateral relations between Pakistan and the United States, which is leading the war against terrorism in this region.

Moreover, the supply to NATO troops in Afghanistan was once again temporarily halted near Chaman border area Tuesday morning, as protestors blocked highway against sluggish road construction in southwest Balochistan province of Pakistan, local Urdu language media reported.

The Quetta-Chaman highway was broken at many places and is being under construction for many months. The slow pace of construction work is not only disrupting the traffic flow but convoys speed as well, local sources said, adding that the damaged road has also increased the frequency of wear and tear of tires and vehicles.

Over a thousand miles stretch from southern port city of Karachi to Torkham is backbone of vital supply to more than 140, 000 NATO troops fighting insurgency in Afghanistan since the ouster of Taliban government in 2001. Two border points at Chaman in Balochistan and Torkham in the troubled northwest Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province are used as entry points into Afghanistan.

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas stands by her controversial remarks on Israel that led to her retirement.

Associated Press, Oct 12, 2010

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas has acknowledged she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas has acknowledged she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement, but she says the comments were “exactly what I thought.”

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Eisenhower.

She has kept a low profile since then.

“(It was) very hard for the first two weeks. After that, I came out of my coma,” said Thomas, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon.

Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he’d been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied.

“Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not Germany, it’s not Poland,” she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, “They should go home.”

“Where’s home?” Nesenoff asked.

“Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else,” Thomas replied.

“I told him exactly what I thought,” she told Spears, who said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America. Thomas did not disagree.

“I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else,” she said.

“They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land,” said Thomas. There was no explanation of whom “they” referred to.

When she soon began getting calls about her remark, “I said this is the end of my job.”

She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. “At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel’s aggression and brutality,” Thomas said.

Asked whether she’s anti-Semitic, she responded “Baloney!” She said she wants to be remembered for “integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism” and would like to work again.

Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, some 70 kilometres north of Columbus, Ohio.

Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.

Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as “a hawk.” ”I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal,” Thomas said.

As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.

“That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy,” she said, describing Palin as “very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable.”

Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: “Frightening.”

by James Petras, Dissident Voice,  October 11th, 2010

The abortive military-police coup in Ecuador, which took place on September 30, has raised numerous questions about the role of the US and its allies among the traditional oligarchy and the leftist social movements, Indian organizations and their political parties.

While President Correa and all governments in Latin America, and significant sectors of the Ecuadorian public described the violent actions as a coup, the principle organ of Wall Street – the Wall Street Journal – described it as a “police protest”. Spoke persons for Goldman Sachs and the Council of Foreign Relations referred to the police and military power grab against the democratically elected government as a self-induced “political crises” of the President. While the coup was underway the “Indian” movement CONAIE, launched a manifesto condemning the government, while the “Indian” party Pachakutik supported the ouster of the President and backed the police coup as a “just act of public servants”.

In summary, the imperial backers of the coup, sectors of the Ecuadorian elite and Indian movement downplayed the violent police uprising as a coup in order to justify their support for it as just another “legitimate economic protest”. In other words, the victim of the elite coup was converted into the repressor of the peoples’ will. The factual question of whether their was a coup or not, is central to deciding whether the government was justified in repressing the police uprising and whether in fact the democratic system was endangered.

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By Dr. Elias Akleh, intifada-palestine.com, Oct 11, 2010

Palestinians had long lost confidence in their Palestinian Authority as their representative, who was supposed to defend their rights and work to achieve their statehood. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, was imposed on the Palestinians in the 2005 election when the Israeli forces had arrested and restricted the movements of other Palestinian candidates and his campaign was given 94% of TV coverage. Although his presidency had expired in January of 2009 he is still, illegally and unconstitutionally, occupying his position. Polls had shown that his popularity is very low.

Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and his government were also imposed on Palestinians when Abbas appointed him to the position after the democratically elected Hamas government foiled an American coup d’état that eventually caused a division between the Palestinians.

The Palestinians were deceived by the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They were misled that the Accords would be merely the first step in a plan that would eventually lead to Israeli withdrawal back to the 1967 Armistice Lines and to the establishment of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by 1995. Thus Yasser Arafat had dramatically altered the charter of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to reflect a new strategy of denouncing the legitimate armed resistance (labeled violence at the time), abandoning the liberation of all Palestine, accepting and recognizing the existence of the Israeli state on 78% of Palestine, and announcing peaceful negotiations as the only strategic choice for solving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

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Drone missile attacks near to Pakistan’s Afghan border have become an everyday occurrence since Obama took power

Declan Walsh in Islamabad, The Guardian, Oct 7, 2010

By Patrick Martin, wsws.org, 11 October 2010

In its main editorial Sunday, the New York Times, the major voice of what passes for liberalism in America, openly defends the right of the US government to assassinate anyone it pleases. The only restriction the Times suggests is that the president should be required to have his selection of murder victims rubber-stamped by a secret court like the one that now approves 99.99 percent of all electronic eavesdropping requests.

The apologia for killing begins with a blatant lie about the US assassination program using missiles fired from CIA-operated drone aircraft flying along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The Times claims, citing official US government sources: “The drone program has been effective, killing more than 400 Al Qaeda militants this year alone, according to American officials, but fewer than 10 noncombatants.”

Actually, Pakistani government officials estimated the number of civilians killed by drone attacks in 2009 alone at more than 700, with an even higher figure this year, as the Obama administration has rained missiles and bombs on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.(See “US drone missiles slaughtered 700 Pakistani civilians in 2009” .)

A report in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn concluded, “For each Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.”

The Times editors cannot be unaware of these well-established figures, since their own journalists have reported a civilian death toll from US missile strikes in Pakistan of some 500 by April 2009, and 100 to 500 more through April 2010. They lie shamelessly and deliberately in order to conceal the significance of their endorsement of such widespread killing.

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by: Bill Quigley, t r u t h o u t | Report, Oct 11, 2010

Haitians sit among the rubble in Port-au-Prince following an earthquake in January. (Photo: Zoriah)

“If it gets any worse,” said Wilda, a homeless Haitian mother, “we’re not going to survive.” Mothers and grandmothers surrounding her nodded solemnly.

We are in a broiling “tent” with a group of women trying to raise their families in a public park. Around the back of the Haitian National Palace, the park hosts a regal statute of Alexandre Petion in its middle. It is now home to 5,000 people displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.

Nine months after the quake, over a million people are still homeless in Haiti.

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