Peace and Justice Post

Middle East Online, Aug 8, 2010

Emotional case

Tehran tells UN panel that stoning case is undecided, but Sakineh could still face capital punishment.

GENEVA – Iran told a UN rights body on Thursday that a final decision has yet to be taken in the case of a woman sentenced to death by stoning, which has sparked an international outcry.

However, Mossadegh Kahnemoui, a senior Iranian judicial official, insisted that the woman, Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, had been found guilty of adultery and conspiracy to murder her husband.

“Her case is still being processed and nothing is yet decided,” he told the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, after committee members raised questions about her fate.

“This case is still pending a final decision,” added Mossadegh, a member of Iran’s delegation at a regular review of the Islamic state’s application of an international treaty on racial and ethnic discrimination.

Continues >>

by Muriel Mirak-Weissbach Global Research, July 31, 2010

Israel’s attack on a humanitarian aid ship headed for Gaza may prove to be the greatest strategic error the government has ever made. Like the Soweto riots in South Africa in 1976, or Bloody Sunday – the American civil rights march on March 7, 1965, in Selma, Alabama, where police opened fire and killed civilians – the Mavi Marmora affair crossed a red line. It has triggered an international wave of condemnation, expressing a shift in attitude toward Israel. The hope is that this international outrage, flanked by growing anti-government dissent inside the country, will provoke an identity crisis among the elite and people of Israel, shake up the political kaleidoscope and allow for a viable pro-peace force to emerge. Unless this occurs, new Israeli aggression, including against Iran, will remain high on their immediate agenda.

The details of the May 31 events are well known, documented by passengers on the Mavi Marmora headed for Gaza. Among the most dramatic was the eye-witness account of Ken O’Keefe on BBC’s Hard Talk show, who effectively dismantled attempts by his interviewer to legitimize the Israeli position (that the passengers were armed terrorists etc.), and established that the Israeli military opened fire immediately after boarding the ship, killing 9 in cold blood.(1) German doctor Matthias Jochheim, a member of the IPPNW on board, has delivered his own low-key, sober version, confirming the same facts.(2)

Israel’s violent action was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back; even the wobbly-kneed German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle had to denounce it and lend his voice to an international chorus demanding that the illegal three-year Gaza blockade be lifted. Those actions which did follow, like Egypt’s reopening the Rafah border crossing and Israel’s cosmetic redefinition of what could or could not enter Gaza, led to at least a formal, partial relaxation of the blockade, albeit at the cost of nine innocent lives.

Continues >>

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com, August 5, 2010

Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week.  He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. “Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”

Now, if you were the proverbial fair-minded visitor from Mars (who in school civics texts of my childhood always seemed to land on Main Street, U.S.A., to survey the wonders of our American system), you might be a bit taken aback by Mullen’s statement.  After all, one of the revelations in the trove of leaked documents Assange put online had to do with how much blood from innocent Afghan civilians was already on American hands.

The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes…”  Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA paramilitaries’ role in civilian deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.”  Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. special operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

Continues >>

John Pilger, New Statesman, August 4, 2010

Having helped destroy other nations far away, our former prime minister — “peace envoy” to the Middle East — is now free to profit from the useful contacts he made while working as a “servant of the people”.

Obama says withdrawal is on schedule, but renaming or outsourcing combat troops won’t give Iraqis back their country

Seumas Milne, The Guardian/UK, August 5, 2010

by Waseem Shehzad, Media Monitors Network, August  4, 2010

“Since 2002, India has purchased $5 billion worth of Israeli weapons. On the flip side of the coin, the Kashmiris have adopted the Palestinian youth’s tactics of confronting the heavily armed Indian troops with stones. Resistance tactics recognize no borders.”

Protests and the now-routine killing of Kashmiris by Indian occupation forces have resumed in Srinagar and other parts of the violence-plagued state of Kashmir. The latest round of protests erupted after the June 11 killing by Indian police of a 17-year-old youth, Tufail Ahmed Mattoo, who was hit by a tear gas shell on his head blowing his brains out. People were so enraged by this horrible act that they immediately held a protest rally. Other deaths followed. Since then, the cycle of violence has escalated. The June 11 rally was organized to protest the cold-blooded murder of three Kashmiri youth — Mohammed Shafi, Shahzad Ahmad Khan and Riyaz Ahmad — kidnapped by the India army in April. The gruesome murders were carried out on the direct orders of an Indian army colonel; a major was also involved.

Each killing brings out more protesters onto the streets. The situation has now deteriorated to the point where the Indian army has been called out to enforce curfew that the people appear determined to defy.

Continues >>