Peace and Justice Post

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.

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From Israel to India, Taiwan and Chile … far-right groups are spreading

Jason Rodrigues, The Guardian/UK, August 2, 2010

A young Israeli neo-Nazi points at a religious Jewish man, as if to shoot him at a shopping mall. Israeli police later broke up a neo-Nazi group amd arrested members Photograph: Israeli police/EPA

Israel In 2008, four suspects were charged with neo-Nazi activities. They were members of a gang called Patrol 35 which targeted other minorities and desecrated synagogues. Some of the gang were Soviet immigrants who refused to accept their Jewish ancestry.

Chile Patria Nueva Sociedad (New Fatherland Society) is a well-organised neo-Nazi group in Chile. Its leaders claim to adhere to Nazi economic and labour principles but say the group is against xenophobia, racism and discrimination.

Russia Neo-Nazi gangs such as the White Wolves have resorted to lethal violence to get across their message of white supremacy. Gang members were jailed this year after several central Asian migrants were attacked and killed in Moscow’s back streets.

Taiwan In 2007 university students formed the National Socialism Association. The group claimed to have 800 members and a spokesperson said: “We want to study Hitler’s good points, not study his massacres.”

India A growing trend for Hitler memorabilia in India has caused shock. One publisher claims to have sold more than 100,000 copies of Mein Kampf (left) to Indians in the last 10 years. Some Indians have claimed to be inspired by Hitler’s “discipline and patriotism”.

Pakistan criticism has shifted focus away from deaths in Kashmir

Murtaza Shibli, The Guardian/UK, August 3, 2010

by Rick Rozoff
Global Research, August 4, 2010
Stop NATO – 2010-08-03

On September 17, 2009 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Barack Obama separately announced plans to shift the emphasis of the global American interceptor missile – so-called missile shield or anti-ballistic missile defense – project from the previous George W. Bush administration’s plans to a more mobile, flexible and geographically broader system. [1]

The proposed deployments of ten ground-based interceptor missiles in Poland and a forward-based X-band radar installation in the Czech Republic were abandoned in favor of what Obama deemed “stronger, smarter and swifter defenses of American forces and America’s allies.” Both Poland and the Czech Republic, however, remain part of Pentagon plans and will be incorporated into a broader grid with all 28 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization which in its final stage will cover all of Europe. Or at least the entire continent west of Russia and Belarus.

Plans for ground-based interceptors in Poland alarmed Russia, which necessarily saw them as aimed at itself, but would also have been housed in fixed silos that made them easy targets.

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by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, CommonDreams.org, August 4, 2010

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: War With Iran

We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war.

Israel’s leaders would calculate that once the battle is joined, it will be politically untenable for you to give anything less than unstinting support to Israel, no matter how the war started, and that U.S. troops and weaponry would flow freely. Wider war could eventually result in destruction of the state of Israel.

This can be stopped, but only if you move quickly to pre-empt an Israeli attack by publicly condemning such a move before it happens.

We believe that comments by senior American officials, you included, reflect misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu.

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Pro-independence leaders have appealed for calm as Indian forces killed more Kashmiris.

World Bulletin, Tuesday,  August 3, 2010

Pro-independence leaders have appealed for calm as Indian forces killed more Kashmiris.

Indian police killed at least four people on Tuesday in fresh clashes, raising the death toll of seven weeks of protests to 43.

At least 25 protesters have been killed in the last five days, civilians shot dead by police.

Police in Srinagar, the main town in the Muslim-majority territory, used loudspeakers mounted on vehicles to warn that “anyone seen violating curfew restrictions will be shot dead.”

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