Peace and Justice Post

By Shamus Cooke, ZNet, September 19, 2010

With the November elections quickly approaching, the majority of Americans will be thinking one thing: “Who cares?” This apathy isn’t due to ignorance, as some accuse. Rather, working people’s disinterest in the two party system implies intelligence: millions of people understand that both the Democrats and Republicans will not represent their interests in Congress.

This begs the question: Whom does the two party system work for? The answer was recently given by the mainstream The New York Times, who gave the nation an insiders peek on how corporations “lobby” (buy) congressmen. The article explains how giant corporations — from Wall-mart to weapons manufacturers — are planning on shifting their hiring practices for lobbyists, from Democratic to Republican ex-congressmen in preparation for the Republicans gaining seats in the upcoming November elections:

“Lobbyists, political consultants and recruiters all say that the going rate for Republicans — particularly current and former House staff members — has risen significantly in just the last few weeks, with salaries beginning at $300,000 and going as high as $1million for private sector [corporate lobbyist] positions.” (September 9, 2010)

Congressmen who have recently retired make the perfect lobbyists: they still have good friends in Congress, with many of these friends owing them political favors; they have connections to foreign Presidents and Kings; and they also have celebrity status that gives good PR to the corporations.

Often, these congressmen have done favors for the corporation that is now hiring them, meaning, that the corporations are rewarding the congressmen for services rendered while in office, offering them million dollar lobbyist jobs (or seats on the corporate board of directors) that requires little to no work.

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Mideast talks fall apart, as Israel lets West Bank settlements begin anew. Peter Beinart on how American Jewish groups tie Obama’s hands—and work against peace.

Peter Beinart, CommonDreams.org, Sep 27, 2010

This just in, for anyone in the United States who still cares: Israel has not renewed the partial settlement freeze it imposed ten months ago. Which means that the direct talks with the Palestinians born this month may die in the crib. Which raises an interesting question: What would it take to make American Jewish groups admit that an Israeli prime minister is not serious about peace?

You could hardly find a better test case than Benjamin Netanyahu. Until last year, Netanyahu had not just spent his entire political career opposing a Palestinian state; he had repeatedly compared such a state to Nazi Germany. He opposed the Oslo peace talks at their inception, and as prime minister in the late 1990s so consistently reneged on commitments made by his predecessors that U.S. envoy Dennis Ross later noted that “neither President Clinton nor Secretary Albright believed that Bibi had any real interest in pursuing peace.” In 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, Netanyahu resigned from his cabinet in protest. Netanyahu was still on record as opposing a Palestinian state in 2009, when he again ran for prime minister. He hewed to this position when forming his coalition government, even though doing so helped keep Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party from joining his cabinet, thus preventing Netanyahu from assembling the national unity government he claimed to want in order to confront Iran. Through all of this, the major American Jewish groups still refused to publicly entertain the idea that Netanyahu was anything but a champion of peace.

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By the Rev. Howard Bess, Consortiumnews.com, September 27, 2010

Editor’s Note: Some Christians and Jews are seeking harsher policies against Muslims to counter Islam’s purported desire for dominance over other religions, ironically even as right-wing Christians and Jews themselves demand greater dominance over Muslims and others who practice different religions or none at all.

And, just as Muslims cite the Koran as a holy book that they feel must guide human behavior, many Christians and Jews trace their political agendas back to the Bible and the supposed “word of God.”

For instance, in defending the resumption of Jewish settlement expansion on the Palestinian West Bank, hard-line Israelis claim the Bible justifies the land grab.

Reflecting this fundamentalist and fundamentally racist view, Gershon Mesika, a settlement leader, lectured President Barack Obama on Sunday by saying: “I say to Hussein Obama: This Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. The Jewish people have the strongest title deed in the world, and that is the Bible.”

In the United States, Christian nationalists have taken up their own political-religious banner in demanding that the Christian Bible and the Ten Commandants become the basis for the American government, superseding even the U.S. Constitution.

In that context, retired Baptist minister Howard Bess examines this internal debate within Christianity (and Judaism) over where the Bible should stand as a factor in civil governance and whether one religion should dominate others:

One of the great sins of Christianity over the centuries is that it has sought dominance over believers in other religions as well as non-believers.

Somehow most Christian leaders have decided that their particular brand of religion should be dominant in the world and that the world would attain its greatest ideal if everyone were Christian.

Though there is material in the Bible to support this supremacist view, there is also a great body of Bible literature that looks at life from a very different perspective. According to this alternate point-of-view, the calling of the people of God is to be a servant people.

I have long maintained that the Bible should be read and studied with a recognition that both sides of the arguments are found in the same collection of writings, that the Bible is not monolithic on this and other key questions. The task of the Bible student is to join in the argument and to bring the argument to the most modern of settings.

The dominance side of the argument is rooted in the Bible story of King David, tracing his life from a humble shepherd boy to supposedly the most powerful king in the Near East. According to the story, he claimed power as a bloody, conquering tyrant and established a great capital city in Jerusalem as home to Jehovah God.

This story (which many historians consider largely mythical) has become the model and symbol of all Christian dominionists.

The servant side of the Bible tradition is rooted not in Jerusalem but in Babylon. Four hundred years after the establishment of Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and its God, Babylonia, a powerful neighbor to the east, conquered the last vestige of the Israelite nation, capturing Jerusalem and leveling the Holy Temple.

Some Israelites were carried off to the City of Babylon to be slave labor for the new dominant nation in the Near East. In that setting, the people of God pondered their role in the world. With dominance no longer a possibility, they concluded that their new calling from God was to serve the world rather than to dominate the world.

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Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 27 September 2010

Eyes in Gaza is a detailed and harrowing account by the Norwegian doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse of their experiences in al-Shifa Hospital during Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. For a time, they were not just the only western doctors in Gaza, but the only western witnesses to what they repeatedly call Israel’s “massacre” of some 1,400 Palestinian men, women and children. Hence the book’s title, bearing witness to their status as witnesses.

At noon on New Year’s Eve 2008, four days after the start of Israel’s onslaught, Gilbert and Fosse entered Gaza from Egypt. On the morning of 10 January 2010, with Israel’s campaign still having a week to run, they returned to Egypt and were replaced by another Norwegian medical team. During the intervening period they assisted their Palestinian colleagues — whose “historic heroism” (112) they praise unstintingly — in performing an average of twenty operations daily on the civilian victims of Israel’s orgy of shooting and bombing. In the absence of western media they also acted as reporters (“white voices” — 121-122), giving ten to fifteen interviews daily.

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By Gareth Porter, Truthout, | Report, Sep 27, 2010

Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was aboard the Mavi Marmara when he was killed by Israeli commandos. (Photo: freegazaorg; Edited: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style at point blank range by Israeli commandos.

The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.

The report says Dogan had apparently been “lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time” before being shot in his face.

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by Glenn Greenwald, CommonDreams.org, Sep 26, 2010

Prof. Angana Chatterji, Asian Human Rights commission, Sep 27, 2010

“Freedom” represents many things across rural and urban spaces in India-ruled Kashmir. These divergent meanings are steadfastly united in that freedom always signifies an end to India’s authoritarian governance.

In the administration of brutality, India, the post colony, has proven itself coequal to its former colonial masters. Kashmir is not about “Kashmir.” Governing Kashmir is about India’s coming of age as a power, its ability to disburse violence, to manipulate and dominate. Kashmir is about nostalgia, about resources, and buffer zones. The possession of Kashmir by India renders an imaginary past real, emblematic of India’s triumphant unification as a nation-state. Controlling Kashmir requires that Kashmiri demands for justice be depicted as threatening to India’s integrity. India’s contrived enemy in Kashmir is a plausible one – the Muslim “Other,” India’s historically manufactured nemesis.

What is at Stake?

Between June 11 and September 22 of 2010, Kashmir witnessed the execution of 109 youth, men, and women by India’s police, paramilitary, and military. Indian forces opened fire on crowds, tortured children, detained elders without explanation, and coerced false confessions. Since June 7, there have been 73 days of curfew and 75 days of strikes and agitation. On September 11, the day of Eid-ul-Fitr, the violence continued. The paramilitary and police verbally abused and physically attacked civil society dissenters. Summer 2010 was not unprecedented. Kashmir has been subjected to much, much worse.

The use of public and summary execution for civic torture has been held necessary to Kashmir’s subjugation by the Indian state. Militarisation has asserted vigilante jurisdiction over space and politics. The violence is staged, ritualistic, and performative, used to re-assert India’s power over Kashmir’s body. The fabrications of the military — fake encounters, escalating perceptions of cross-border threat — function as the truth-making apparatus of the nation. We are witness to the paradox of history, as calibrated punishment — the lynching of the Muslim body, the object of criminality — enforces submission of a stateless nation (Kashmir) to the once-subaltern postcolony (India).

Kashmir is about the spectacle. The Indian state’s violence functions as an intervention, to discipline and punish, to provoke and dominate. The summer of 2010 evidenced India’s manoeuvring against Kashmir’s determination to decide its future. The use of violence by the Indian forces was deliberate, their tactics cruel and precise, amidst the groundswell of public dissent. This was the third summer, since 2008, of indefatigable civil society uprisings for “Azaadi” (freedom).

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Associated Press in Cyprus, The Guardian, Sep 26, 2010

Imperialism, its character, means and ends has changed over time and place. Historically, western imperialism, has taken the form of tributary, mercantile, industrial, financial and in the contemporary period, a unique ‘militarist-barbaric’ form of empire building.

James Petras, James Petras Website, Sep 19, 2010

Within each ‘period’, elements of past and future forms of imperial domination and exploitation ‘co-exist’ with the dominant mode. For example, in the ancient Greek and Roman empires, commercial and trade privileges complemented the extraction of tributary payments. Mercantile imperialism, was preceded and accompanied initially by the plunder of wealth and the extraction of tribute, sometimes referred to as “primitive accumulation”, where political and military power decimated the local population and forcibly removed and transferred wealth to the imperial capitals.

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