Peace and Justice Post

By  Ira Chernus,  The Huffington Post,  Oct 28, 2010

Israel can do whatever it damn pleases, and the Obama administration will never say no — or so the common wisdom goes. But it ain’t so. Obama has backed down far too often, but there’s also a long history of Israel giving in to U.S. pressure in the last 18 months. Here are just some of the highlights:

On June 4, 2009, Obama went to Cairo and called on the Israelis to agree to an independent Palestinian state. That same day Netanyahu met with his cabinet. “Ministers split over Obama’s Cairo speech,” one Israeli headline declared.

Just ten days later, Netanyahu spoke words that he’d never said publicly before: “Two states for two people.” Had Obama not made his own speech, it’s doubtful anyone would ever have heard those words from Netanyahu.

Later that summer, “a senior source in Jerusalem” told an Israeli reporter that American envoy George Mitchell had asked Netanyahu to promise a one-year freeze on settlement construction. “Netanyahu and Barak did not reject the request”; they merely “disagreed over some of the details.” The Israelis agreed to ten months, which “came about as a result of extensive bilateral discussions” between Israel and the U.S., according to the Washington Post.

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Syria spurns U.S. bid to mend ties

Haaretz, Oct 26, 2010

By The Associated Press

Syria’s president has accused the United States of sowing chaos overseas, snubbing Washington’s efforts to improve ties with Damascus.

	Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
	Photo by: AP

Bashar Assad told Al-Hayat newspaper in an interview published Tuesday that the U.S. created chaos in every place it entered.

“Is Afghanistan stable? Is Somalia stable? Did they bring stability to Lebanon in 1983?” Assad asked, referring to U.S. intervention in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war that ended in 1990.

In Washington, the State Department issued a strong rebuttal. Spokesman P.J. Crowley charged that Syria is destabilizing Lebanon by supplying arms to militants and issuing arrest warrants for Lebanese officials.

“These activities by Syria directly undermine Lebanon’s sovereignty and directly undermine Syria’s stated commitments to Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence,” Crowley said. We believe we’re playing a constructive role in the region, and we believe that Syria is not.

The tough retort appeared to run counter to U.S. efforts to improve ties with Syria.

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By Arundhati Roy, ZNet, Oct 28, 2010

Source: DN!

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to the award-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy, facing possible arrest in Indian on sedition charges after recent comments she made about Kashmir.

Earlier today, an Indian politician from the right-wing BJP party filed a written complaint against Roy after she publicly advocated for Kashmir independence and challenged India’s claim that Kashmir is a, quote, “integral part of India.” The area of Kashmir has been at the center of a decades-long dispute between India and Pakistan. Arundhati Roy made the comment at a conference organized to call on India to formally admit that Kashmir is an internationally recognized dispute. If charged and convicted of sedition, Arundhati Roy could face up to life in prison.

On Tuesday, she defended her statements made at the conference. She wrote, quote, “I said what millions of people here say every day…I spoke about justice for the people of Kashmir who live under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world.”

Roy went on to write, quote, “Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds. Pity the nation that needs to jail those who ask for justice, while communal killers, mass murderers, corporate scamsters, looters, rapists, and those who prey on the poorest of the poor, roam free.”

Well, last month, I had a chance to interview the author of The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, about Kashmir. We spoke in London. She began by describing how Kashmir is the unfinished business of the partition of India in 1947.

ARUNDHATI ROY: Since the 1990s, which is when—you know, at the same time that the war in Afghanistan, the American one, its jihad in Afghanistan, and India realigned itself and became, you know, what it is now, sort of completely aligned with the US. And, you know, the whole problem in Kashmir, the militant armed struggle for independence—I mean, there was always a struggle for independence. It’s not independence. It’s not ever been really a part of India, which is why it’s ridiculous for the Indian government to keep saying it’s an integral part of India. But that armed struggle claimed the lives of 68,000 people, because India today has 500,000 troops manning that little valley. It’s the highest, most militarized zone in the world.

India has done everything wrong there. Apart from a military occupation, it has completely rigged elections. It has changed that valley into a little sort of puddle, a little pool of spies and informers and intelligence networks and torture chambers. And today, you know, it’s come to a stage where people have just had enough. Now you don’t even know who the rulers are—I mean, who the leaders of the uprising are, because it’s just people who cannot take it anymore. But the government still is quite busy trying to manage the crisis. You know, there’s are all sorts of shady things going on. Cleaning mobs are setting business—buildings on fire, when it does look very much as though the intelligence agencies are doing that themselves in order to, you know, paint—once again paint this uprising in a different light.

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Ponderous But Vulnerable

I

There is that vignette in  Marquez’s  Autumn of the Patriarch where the protagonist looks idly out of the window at the bay below and seems to see an array of ships lined there, not all the same but their make and model spanning the centuries gone by.

“Magical Realism” everybody said.  Including the best and brightest of teachers in the universities of the world.  All except the author himself.

Same was the pedagogic fate that befell the opening fare of A Hundred Years of Solitude—two Latino rampagers visiting an Indian village  (Indian as in South America), and beguiling the natives with the mysteries of a magnet and a compass.  “Magical Realism” yet again.

Till Marquez in an elaborate interview confessed to doing or meaning nothing magical but being squarely within the realms of the mimetic/realist tradition of fiction-writing.  But just how?

On the first count, the composite image of ships spanning the centuries meant to suggest how in Latin American history, accreted layers of colonial oppression were ever embedded in the political semi-consciousness of the average perceiver as one historical whole—the gone-by never quite gone-by.

And on the second count, how the colonizing metropolitan West took hegemony to the hinterlands through technologies (magnet/compass) by claiming magical powers of redress for them, whereas at bottom meant to be deployed as mere instruments of domination.  Nostromo, Nostromo?

Most instructive both these contexts, methinks, for those of us who seek to unravel the qualities of change and the complex of perceptions accompanying them now here in India.

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By David Usborne in New York, The Independent, Oct 27, 2010

GETTY IMAGES

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has been described in the US media as a ‘threat to national security’

The White House and the Pentagon have failed to confront and contain the threat to national security posed by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange who should be arrested as an “enemy combatant”, voices on the US conservative right insisted yesterday.

Frustration with the failure of President Barack Obama to combat WikiLeaks has grown since the release of almost 400,000 secret documents that exposed the extent of abuse of prisoners in Iraq by US and Iraqi personnel.

One Fox commentator went so far as to call for the WikiLeaks figurehead to be treated as a prisoner of war. Christian Whiton,a former State Department official, demanded that America seize Mr Assange and deal with him and other WikiLeaks staff as “enemy combatants”. Calling for “non-judicial action” against them, he implied that they should be in Guantanamo Bay with Taliban inmates.

Nor was Whiton alone in his stance. “The government also should be waging war on the WikiLeaks web presence,” an editorial in the conservative Washington Times railed this week. Other infuriated conservative commentators made similar demands on websites of such august institutions as the neoconservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

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CommonDreams.org, Oct 27, 2010

Agence-France Presse

UNITED NATIONS — The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted Tuesday for a resolution calling on the United States to end its five-decade old embargo of Cuba.

The 19th straight annual condemnation of the embargo was supported by 187 countries, with only the United States and Israel against and three smaller US allies abstaining.

The 19th straight annual condemnation of the embargo was supported by 187 countries, with only the United States and Israel against and three smaller US allies abstaining.The embargo was first partially imposed in 1960, just after Fidel Castro staged his revolution, turned into law in 1962 and is now the biggest remaining hangover from the Cold War. The United States bans trade with and most travel to Cuba.

US President Barack Obama last year called for a “new beginning” with communist Cuba. But the island’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez told the UN assembly the blockade has been “tightened” this year and that the US government did not want to end the measures.

“There is not even a sign showing that its government is willing to dismantle the most irrational aspects of what is already the most comprehensive and long-lasting set of sanctions and coercive measures ever applied against any country,” he added.

“Its everyday impact continues to be visible in all aspects of Cuban life,” the minister said, listing medicines that Cuban children get no access to, which Havana claims is due to the sanctions.

Rodriguez estimated that the blockade had cost Cuba more than 750 billion dollars at current values. He called the blockade “an act of economic warfare and genocide.”

Washington wants “a pro-Yankee government but that is not going to happen.”

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Photo by GALLO/GETTY

Turkel Schmerkel.

For the past few days I’ve had the delightful task of hanging around the Yitzhak Rabin Guest House in West Jerusalem. I was covering the latest round of questioning by (Israeli) judges, appointed by the (Israeli) government to examine the legality of their deadly raid on the Gaza-bound aid ship last May. The inquiry is called the Turkel Commission, named after retired Justice Turkel – the big chief.

Now, I could tell you how, at various points, I saw every member of the panel fall asleep during the testimonies.

Or, I could describe the humiliating and condescending way in which the panelists spoke to the Arab-Israeli passengers who came to testify (compared to the respect they showed whilst interviewing Opposition leader Tzipi Livni and military chief Gabi Ashkenazi).

I could even explain how for 45 minutes I watched the panelists argue with the Arab passenger about how being that “he seemed like a reasonable man” he could breach Israeli law (as an Israeli citizen) and decide to get on a ship to Gaza. Indeed – a Palestinian going to a Palestinian territory seemed more absurd to these judges than the actual policy that stops him getting there (and by extension anyone getting out).

Every step of the way it was obvious that this commission, which was tasked with determining whether Israel is in breach of international law in blockading Gaza, had made up their minds long before they stepped into the Rabin Guest House.

But put all that aside, here are five simple reasons why this Commission is a sham.

1) The average age of the five original panelists is 84. They have all spent their careers defending the state of Israel and between them have very little expertise in international law…

2) …Except for one of the panelists – Proff Rosenne  – but sadly he died a few weeks ago. He was 93-years-old and he was not replaced, so the panel has now gone down to four.

3) The panelists were all hand picked by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and Ehud Barak, the defence minister. The two token international observers on the panel are also widely known as sympathetic to Israel.

4) The coverage of the Turkel Commission in the Israeli papers is virtually non existent. Apart from a local TV channel, Al Jazeera English was the only channel broadcasting from outside the proceedings the last two days.

5) Turkel said two weeks ago, during proceedings, that “the people of Gaza have brought this hardship on themselves”. Another panelist stated, despite the mass of data provided to the Commission by Israeli human rights groups on the situation in Gaza, “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.

Case closed.

The defence spending review represents a total victory for the military-industrial complex and its campaign of fear.

Raising the terror alert to “severe,” the “secret” briefings that air force cuts would leave the country totally vulnerable, the lobbying by the great and the good on why Britain needs a blue-water navy to maintain its status as a world power and finally the US demand that Britain continues to play its full role within Nato, have had the desired effect.

After all the leaks and speculation that the MoD faced meltdown from savage Treasury-led cuts, the outcome is a very modest 8 per cent reduction.

As a result, the overall investment of the armed forces will be smaller, there will be fewer surface vessels and fighter aircraft ordered and delays to some contracts – all quite traditional methods of dealing with a spending squeeze.

But the really significant outcome was the continuation of every major procurement programme, notably Trident, conventional nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.

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