Peace and Justice Post

Settlers Step up “Price-tag” Policy

by Jonathan Cook, Dissident Voice,  August 2nd, 2010

A rabbi from one of the most violent settlements in the West Bank was questioned on suspicion of incitement last week as Israeli police stepped up their investigation into a book in which he sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including children and babies.

Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira is one of the leading ideologues of the extreme wing of the religious settler movement. He is known to be a champion of the “price-tag” policy of reprisal attacks on Palestinians, including punishing them for attempts by officials to enforce Israeli law against the settlements.

So far the policy has chiefly involved violent harassment of Palestinians, with settlers inflicting beatings, attacking homes, throwing stones, burning fields, killing livestock and poisoning wells.

It is feared, however, that Shapira’s book The King’s Torah, published last year, is intended to offer ideological justifications for widening the scope of such attacks to include killing Palestinians, even children.

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Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency, or ISI as it is popularly known, is seen as their nemesis by those who have tried to undermine the security interests of the country one way or the other. It is no wonder then that in past few years the Americans unleashed a strong ISI-bashing campaign, with India following suit.

The Americans made no bones about their dislike for this agency, blaming it for working against their interests in Afghanistan. The Indians also see an ISI agent behind every rock in Kashmir and in Afghanistan where they are trying to dig their heels. They do not hesitate to pin on ISI the blame for the freedom struggle in Kashmir or for acts of terrorism by Indian extremists. Until recently the Karzai government dominated by the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance also remained hostile to ISI.

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Pat Buchanan, Yahoo! News, August 3, 2010

High among the blunders of history was the “blank cheque” Kaiser Wilhelm gave Vienna, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to deal with the Serbs as they saw fit.

Five weeks later, Vienna cashed the check and declared war, after Belgrade refused to submit to all 10 demands of an ultimatum. Russia mobilized; Germany and France followed. And war came, the bloodiest in all of European history with 9 million soldiers in their graves.

Since June 1914, a “blank check” given by one nation to another for war has been regarded as strategic folly.

Thus it is startling to learn 47 House Republicans just signed on to H.R. 1553 declaring unequivocal “support for Israel’s right to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by Iran … including the use of military force.”

These Republicans have just given Tel Aviv a blank check for a pre-emptive war that Israel, unless it uses its nuclear weapons, can start but not finish. Fighting and finishing that war would fall to the armed forces of the United States.

Who do these Republicans represent?

The Pentagon has made clear that with two wars of nearly a decade’s duration bleeding us, we do not want a third war with Iran. For while easy to predict how such a war begins, with air and missile strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, no one can know how it ends.

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Lurching Toward War?

By Anthony DiMaggio, Counterpunch,  August 1, 2010

The European Union is imposing more severe sanctions on Iran, while U.S. leaders debate whether they should officially support an Israeli military attack.  The cavalier nature of “debates” concerning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons development assume that it is the right of the U.S. and its allies to do whatever they want to Iran, whenever they want, however they want.  This is a recipe not only for criminal aggression, but devastation and imperial terror on a massive scale.

European sanctions against Iran seek to target the country’s energy, trade, and banking industries by blocking dozens of individuals and companies from doing any business with the country.  The sanctions are described by the BBC as some of “the most far reaching sanctions adopted by the EU against any country.”  The export of equipment and technology needed for refining and producing natural gas are prohibited, while money transfers from European countries to Iran (of more than 10,000 Euros) will be subject to the approval of national officials.

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Is anyone talking about people ?

MPRESSIONS BY UDAY SHANKER,

Greater Kashmir, August 3, 2010

Every one in New Delhi seems to be taking stock of Kashmir situation. Every one seems to be  concerned over the deteriorating situation in Kashmir. Every one is mourning the mounting loss of human lives. Every one  is  giving his own solution to the problem. But no one is talking about the people.
Why? One may ask.  There is an undying habit of looking at the situation from incident to incident basis, from one enclave to another basis, from individual to individual basis, as if people have already been rendered irrelevant. Experimenting is the art that Delhi has perfected so far, despite the fact that all  these hit and trial methods have not   shown any way forward  so far. It’s latest experiment  of trying a young man has failed, given the situation that has surfaced in the Valley.

Delhi doesn’t seemed to have learnt any lessons. It is still focused on  peripheral   issues, with an unshaken focus on fire fighting measures.  The tragedy is that if Delhi is  not getting a sense as  what to do in  this situation, much of the fault lies with the leadership of Kashmir, if at all it deserves to be called a leadership. The new  generation leader Omar Abdullah for months kept on  harping  that there was no  problem. He was asking where is the problem? He did not see any problem until the youth started dying on the streets of Kashmir, until the people  were out on streets in thousands, until the whole Valley seemed to be in flames.

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By Stephen Lendman, uruknet.info, August 1, 2010

On July 6, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI) and Adalah: The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel released a report titled, “Exposed: The Treatment of Palestinian Detainees During Operation Cast Lead,” detailing their horrific treatment.Transferred to Israel for interrogation, detainees related grim details of their ordeal – grave human rights violations, showing Israel’s “contempt for the rule of law.” Their “fundamental due process rights were trampled on and the rule of law brutally disregarded during and after the fighting,” providing compelling evidence of collective punishment since Israel’s 2005 “disengagement,” followed by an embargo, a medieval siege, regular incursions, Cast Lead, and continued oppression of 1.5 million people – isolated, surrounded, attacked, brutalized, and slowly suffocated into submission, what hasn’t happened and won’t, but it doesn’t deter Israel from trying, or America from providing weapons and funding its lawlessness. Continues >>

By Arun Kumar, wsws.org, August 2, 2010

According to a new Oxford University study, 55 percent of India’s population of 1.1 billion, or 645 million people, are living in poverty. Using a newly-developed index, the study found that about one-third of the world’s poor live in India.

The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) has been developed by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as a more precise and comprehensive means of estimating poverty levels. It will replace the Human Poverty Index that has been used in the UNDP’s annual Human Development Report since 1997.

The MPI assesses a range of factors or “deprivations” at the household level as well as income and assets. These include: child mortality, nutrition, access to clean drinking water, sanitation, cooking fuel, electricity, and years of schooling and child enrolment. “A person is considered poor if they are deprived in at least 30 percent of the weighted indicators,” the study states.

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