Peace and Justice Post

Reflections of Fidel | Granma Internacional, Oct 27, 2008

IN Zulia, Chavez made reference to “comrade Sarkozy,” and did so with a certain irony but he meant no offense. On the contrary, he was rather recognizing the sincerity of the president when he spoke in Beijing in his capacity as chairman of the European Community.
Nobody was saying what every European leader knows but is not confessing: that the current financial system is no good and must be changed. The Venezuelan president candidly proclaimed:
“It is not possible to re-found the capitalist system; it would be like trying to re-float the Titanic when it’s lying on the ocean floor.”
According to press dispatches, at the meeting of the European and Asian Nations Association attended by 43 countries, Sarkozy made some remarkable confessions:
“Things are going badly for the world, which is facing an unprecedented financial crisis marked by its magnitude, swiftness and violence, a crisis whose consequences on the environment call into question the survival of humankind, as 900 million people lack the means to feed themselves.”
“The countries taking part in this meeting account for two thirds of the global population and half its wealth. The financial crisis started in the United States, but it is now a global crisis demanding a global response:
“An 11-year-old child’s place is not in a factory but in school.”
“No region in the world has any lesson to teach others.” This is a clear reference to the United States.
Finally, he recalled before the Asian nations the colonizing past of Europe on that continent.
If Granma had written those words, they would have been considered a cliché of the official communist press.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in Beijing that it was not possible “to foresee the magnitude and duration of the current international financial crisis. We are actually dealing with the creation of a new constituent Charter of finances.” That same day the news revealed the general uncertainty unleashed.
In the Beijing meeting, the 43 countries from Europe and Asia agreed that the IMF should play a major role in assisting the countries most seriously affected by the crisis. They also supported an interregional summit to promote stability in the long term and the development of the world economy.
The President of the Spanish government, Rodriguez Zapatero, stated that “there is a crisis of responsibility in which a few have grown richer but the majority is growing poorer.” He also said that “the markets have lost confidence in the market,” and urged countries to flee protectionism, as he is convinced that competition will make the financial markets to play their role. He has not been officially invited to the Washington summit since Bush resents his withdrawing the Spanish troops from Iraq.
The European Community president, José Manuel Durão Barroso, supported his warning on protectionism.
For his part, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon met with eminent economists to try and avert the developing countries becoming the principal victims of the crisis.
Miguel D’Escoto, former foreign minister of the Sandinista Revolution and current president of the UN General Assembly, demanded that the issue of the financial crisis should be discussed in the United Nations, not by the wealthiest nations and the group of emerging countries that make up the G-20.
There are disputes over the venue of the meeting at which a new financial system should be adopted on order to bring about an end to the chaos and the absolute lack of security for the peoples. There is a major fear that the wealthiest countries in the world, meeting with a small group of emerging nations hit by the financial crisis, might approve a new Bretton Woods, ignoring the rest of the world. President Bush said yesterday that the countries that will discuss the global crisis here next month should also renew their commitment to the basics of economic growth on a long-term basis: free markets, free enterprise and free trade.
The banks were lending tens of dollars for every dollar deposited by savers. They were multiplying money. They breathed and sweated through every pore… Any contraction would lead to ruin or to absorption by other banks. They had to be saved; always at the expense of the taxpayers. They were amassing great fortunes. Their privileged majority shareholders could afford to pay any money for anything.
Shi Jianxun, a professor at the Tongui University in Shanghai, stated in an article published in the foreign edition of The People’s Daily that “the crude reality has made people realize, amidst the panic, that the United States has utilized the hegemony of the dollar to plunder the riches of the world. He confirms the pressing need to change the international monetary system based on the dominant position of the dollar.”
With just a few words he explained the essential role of currencies in international economic relations. This was happening for centuries between Asia and Europe: it should be recalled that opium was imposed on China as a currency. I talked about that when I wrote The Chinese Victory.
The authorities of that country did not even wish to receive the metal silver initially paid by the Spaniards from their colony in the Filipinas for products acquired in China, because it was progressively devaluated due to its abundance in the so-called New World recently been conquered by Europe. Even today, European leaders feel ashamed at the things that they imposed on China for centuries.
According to the Chinese economist, current difficulties in the terms of trade between those two continents should be solved with euros, GB sterling, yens and yuans. Undoubtedly, reasonable regulation between those four currencies would aid the development of relations of fair trade between Europe, Britain, Japan and China.
Two countries that produce sophisticated equipment with state-of- the-art technology, both for production and services, such as Japan and Germany, would be included in that sphere, as well as China, the potentially largest locomotive of the world economy, with a population of close to 1.4 billion and over $1.5 trillion in its hard currency reserves, mostly in US dollars and Treasury bonds. Japan comes second with an almost identical total of hard currency reserves.
At the present juncture, as the Shanghai professor has rightly indicated and rejected, the value of the dollar is increasing due to this currency’s dominant position imposed on the world economy.
A large number of Third World countries, exporters of goods and raw materials with little added value, are importers of Chinese consumer goods which generally have reasonable prices, and technical products from Japan and Germany, which are constantly increasing in price. Even though China has tried to halt the overvaluation of the yuan, as the Yankees are constantly demanding in order to protect their industries from Chinese competition, the value of the yuan is increasing and the purchasing power of our exports is decreasing.
The price of nickel, our main export item, whose value recently reached $50,000-plus per ton, is currently barely fetching $8,500 per ton; that is, less than 20% of its maximum price attained. The price of copper has dropped at least 50%, and the same is happening with iron, aluminum, tin, zinc, and all the minerals indispensable for sustained development.  And defying any rational or human sense, the price of consumer goods like coffee, cocoa, sugar and others have barely grown over more than 40 years. That is why, not long ago, I also warned that as a result of the impending crisis, markets would be lost and the purchasing power of our products would be considerably reduced. In that circumstance, the developed capitalist nations are well aware that their factories and services will be paralyzed, and only the consumption capacity of a large part of humankind already living on the poverty line or below it, will keep them operating.
That is the great dilemma posed by the financial crisis and the danger that social and national self-interest will prevail over and above the desire of many politicians and statespersons agonizing over the phenomenon. They do not have the least confidence in the very same system from which they emerged as public figures.
When the peoples leave behind illiteracy, know how to read and write and possess the minimum knowledge indispensable for living and producing in an honorable way, they will still need to overcome the worst form of ignorance in our times: economic illiteracy. Only in that way can we understand what is occurring in the world.

Fidel Castro Ruz
October 26, 2008
5:15 p.m.

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GK NEWS NETWORK

Srinagar, Oct 27: Police on Monday arrested Nayeem Ahmad Khan, the provincial president of Hurriyat Conference (M) and chairman of National Front on Tangmarg-Varmul road. He was immediately taken to an unknown destination.
Khan was evading arrest since August this year when police cracked down heavily on Hurriyat leaders leading the fresh pro-freedom struggle triggered by Amarnath land row and economic blockade by extremists in Jammu.
Along with Shabir Ahmad Shah, Khan played a key role in bringing the two Hurriyats together. Shah has been sentenced to two years in prison for his role in the unification.
Nayeem Khan is one of the pioneers of the pro-freedom struggle in Kashmir. Born in 1965 in Pathanpora (Khas), of Pattan, Khan studied engineering in Srinagar. He formed Peoples League in 1979 as a student. In 1982 he was arrested while leading a students procession. He developed close links with Islamia Jamiat-u-Talba and Mahaz-i-Azadi.
In 1984 Khan was arrested when Maqbool Bhat was hanged in Tihar Jail and in 1986, along with Ishfaq Majeed Wani, Yaseen Malik and other pro-freedom leaders he formed a vibrant student organization, Islamic Students League (ISL). Nayeem Khan was elected its chairman and
Yasin Malik as general secretary.
The ISL gained popularity among students because of its socio-political agenda. In 1987 the ISL became a constituent of the Muslim United Front (MUF) which fought the massively rigged elections. In 1988 Nayeem Khan and his associates went underground, but he was arrested and booked under PSA. Though court quashed his detention and he was released, the police arrested him again and booked him under the same draconian law. He was shifted to sub-jail Reasi. He was released in August 1989.
On 17 October, 1989, Khan was arrested again along with Shabir Shah. Massive demos were held against their arrest. He was released from Madhya Pradesh jail.
In 1993 Khan was arrested for organizing huge processions and demonstrations against India and sent to infamous Kot Balwal Jail. After release, Nayeem played a pivotal role in the formation of APHC. He was arrested again in 2003 and released a year later.

Kashmir Watch

New Delhi, October 26:  It is innocents that had been victimized in all recent bombings said Ajit Sahi, Editor, Tehelka. He was delivering speech in Students Islamic Organisation of India conference held at Jamia Nagar, New Delhi  titled: ”Fascism, Extremism, State Terrorism: Students’ Resistance”.  All cases which have been charged till now in relation with recent bombings are based only on the basis of confessions which were acquired by brutal custodial torture. It is state terrorism which is the biggest menace of today. He reiterated that we as citizens must have minimum legal literacy as the law is being tampered by the authorities themselves. Living aside some exceptions, even the judiciary is acting on the basis of pre-conceived notions. He told that all religious groups must work united to uproot the menace of state terrorism.

SQR Ilyas, member, central advisory council, Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, said in his speech that the recent happenings in the country were unfortunate. Bombings in major cities of the country, victimization of innocent Muslim youths and media propaganda against Islam are all part of international conspiracy to defame Islam which is on run, in the name of ‘global war on terror’. The tendency of the authorities to charge sheet and hunt Muslim youths on the basis of pre-conceived notion when ever a bombing takes place has to be stopped. As all the fact finding teams had unanimously opined, the ‘encounter’ and the entire police verdict on the Batla House (New Delhi) incident was fake and fully fabricated. Though there are enough reasons to believe that the saffron brigade has involvement in the recent bombings, it is condemnable that no investigations are being done on this direction. We fear that the ongoing Govt. terrorism and protection to Hindutva chauvinist forces will indeed worsen the situation. If the motto of Govt. is really to accomplish peace and harmony in the country and not to play petty politics, it needs to do something creative.

Prof M.K Ramakrishnan of Jamia Millia said in his speech that the fight against fascist forces can only be strengthened if the concept of ‘secular India’ is regained.

SIO National President, Bashiruddin Sharqy, in his speech said that any move is impossible in our country by sidelining religions and religious communities. Religion is the manifestation of dialogue and communication. The art of coexistence must be regained and communicated with in different religions. Muslim society, together with engaging in political and religious activisms, must renew themselves as a proactive society. Instead of being a responsive or reactive society Muslims must go forward with their own well planned agendas.

SIO general secretary, Hashmatullah Khan delivered the Inaugural speech.

By Cromwell, David | Z Space, Oct 28, 2008

Since starting Media Lens in 2001, we have learned that corporate journalists are very often ill-equipped, or disinclined, to debate vital issues with members of the public.

In 2004, the esteemed Lancet medical journal published a study showing that 98,000 Iraqis had most likely died following the US-led invasion (http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf). John Rentoul, chief political correspondent of the Independent on Sunday, responded with sarcasm when we challenged him about his dismissal of the peer-reviewed science:

“Oh no. You have found me out. I am in fact a neocon agent in the pay of the third morpork of the teleogens of Tharg.” (Email, September 15, 2005)

In 2006, a follow-up Lancet study estimated that the death toll had risen to 655,000. Today, the probable death toll exceeds one million. (Just Foreign Policy, http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html; ‘Update on Iraqi casualty data’, Opinion Research Business, January 2008; http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88)

In 2003, Roger Alton, then editor of the Observer, also did not take kindly to a reader accusing him of peddling Downing Street propaganda on the eve of the invasion:

“What a lot of balls … do you read the paper old friend? … ‘Pre-digested pablum from Downing Street…’ my arse. Do you read the paper or are you just recycling garbage from Medialens?” (Email, February 14, 2003)

Last week, Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, was asked why he dismissed readers of Media Lens as a mere “lobby”, but not readers who post comments on his website. Seaton replied:

“because, unlike MediaLens readers, users of Comment is free are not given directives to spam journalists and others – and would not mindlessly follow such directives if they were” (Email, October 15, 2008)

The constant journalistic refrain is that the public is made up of ill-informed idiots, mindless “blog-o-bots” (Robert Fisk, interviewed by Justin Podur, ‘Fisk: War is the total failure of the human spirit’, December 5, 2005; www.rabble.ca), launching “an attack of the clones” (BBC journalist Adam Curtis, email to Media Lens, June 18, 2002). A moment’s thought would tell these journalists that the people responding to our alerts are interested in our efforts precisely to +expose+ methods of public deception, manipulation and control. The whole point of what we are doing is to challenge all forms of psychological goose-stepping.

Little of this professional contempt for public challenge ever makes it into the open. The media sections of the press, where journalism ought to be scrutinised, are reserved for professional navel-gazing, ego-burnishing and insider gossip. At best, media commentary is inoffensive, rarely straying from the anodyne; and even then, only to mock easy targets like the Sun or the Daily Mail. At its worst, corporate media ‘analysis’ props up a brutal propaganda system in which “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business”, as the US social philosopher John Dewey observed.

Swooning Over The British Press

Consider Stephen Glover, media commentator in the Independent, who earlier this month (October 2008) gloried at the supposedly vibrant state of the British press. Glover, one of the founders of the Independent in 1986, described his pleasure in “fingering the redesigned Daily Telegraph” which “looks quite handsome”. Glover also liked the “much-improved Times”, while the “revamped Independent” positively “crackles with energy.” (Stephen Glover, ‘It has its faults, but we should be proud of the British press’, the Independent, October 6, 2008) As though in the pay of “the teleogens of Tharg”, Glover asked innocently, “Am I starry-eyed?”

Undoubtedly. He was also suffering from blinkered, power-friendly vision. It is only two months since Glover belatedly, and superficially, pointed to the failings of the UK press in challenging government propaganda on Iraq:

“I am still awaiting an apology from those newspapers that assured their readers, before the invasion of Iraq, that there was absolutely no doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.” (Stephen Glover, ‘Press were wrong on Iraq’, August 11, 2008)

But media performance was far worse than Glover would have us believe, as we reminded him at the time (email to Stephen Glover, ‘No mea culpa from the British press’, August 19, 2008; http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=9849#9849).

The British media were willing accomplices in the perverse political portrayal of Iraq as a threat to the West. And, because the media simply buried the facts, not many people know that Iraq had already been devastated by thirteen years of brutal United Nations sanctions leading to the deaths of over a million people. Around half of them were children under five.

The two Westerners who knew Iraq best – Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, senior UN diplomats in Baghdad who resigned over the “genocidal” sanctions – were virtually shut out of British press and broadcasting. (For more on their expert and excluded analyses, see Hans C. Von Sponeck, ‘A Different Kind of War’, Berghahn Books, New York, 2006; and Denis Halliday, interviewed by David Edwards, Media Lens, May 2000; http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2001/iraqdh.htm)

The ideological role played by the corporate media, as faithful stenographers to power, continued up to and beyond the illegal 2003 invasion. This was a war of aggression, in contravention of the UN Charter, and recognised in law as the “supreme international crime”. If the British media had performed its fairy-tale role, and actually held power to account, perhaps there would have been no Iraq invasion, no cataclysm, no outpouring of grief and misery.

It is all too easy for media insiders to be seduced by the superficial glamour and “vibrancy” of newspapers, and to divert their eyes from the blood-soaked reality underneath.

At the Guardian’s website, an ostensibly rival media commentator, Roy Greenslade, noted that the Independent had ditched its media section. Greenslade, a Guardian veteran and now professor of journalism at City University in London, wrote:

“… ‘the media’ is a part of modern life that deserves to be monitored consistently. Its influence appears to grow rather than diminish. There needs to be public scrutiny of the people who own and control the various media platforms and of those who manage and operate it on behalf of those owners and controllers.” (Greenslade blog, Guardian website, October 6, 2008; http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2008/oct/06/theindependent)

As this paragraph suggests, Greenslade has mastered the art of saying very little. He could have observed that news operations, the BBC and Guardian very much included, operate as platforms for established interests in society: corporations, business investors and warmongering Western leaders. But such obvious, real-world facts are not allowed to intrude. He added:

“Despite its scant resources, The Independent has played, and is playing, a part in keeping the media honest.”

It is a bold judgement, one that can be made only by ignoring the actual content of the Independent’s media coverage. More crucially, it also overlooks what the paper reports, and does not report, in its news and business sections. In the age of the internet – when honest, non-corporate news sources are readily accessible – it is becoming ever harder to ignore the evidence before our own eyes.

Continued . .  .

by Jacob G. Hornberge, Oct 27, 2008

One of the popular post-9/11 sentiments has been the one that holds that Muslims are bent on conquering the world. The notion is that Muslims hate Christianity and Western freedom and values and that such hatred is rooted in the Koran and stretches back centuries. Thus, the United States has been drawn, reluctantly, into a war against Muslims. That’s why U.S. forces are in Iraq and Afghanistan, the argument goes — to defend our freedoms by killing Muslims over there before they get over here and kill us.

I sometimes wonder whether the people who have this mindset have reflected on the ramifications of their belief.

For example, if Muslims in general are at war with the United States, then why shouldn’t Americans be out killing Muslims here in the United States? After all, when a nation is at war, isn’t it permissible to kill the enemy? Isn’t that what war is all about?

The reason that proponents of this view don’t start killing Muslims here in the United States is very simple: Deep down, they know that the killers will be indicted by their very own government for murder. They will then be prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to serve time in a federal penitentiary for murder.

Let’s carry the ramifications overseas.

If the United States is at war against Muslims, then why not start with ousting the Muslim regime in Iraq and installing a Christian or Jewish regime in its place? Yes, I said Iraq. Believe it or not, the U.S. invasion of that country succeeded in installing an Islamic regime, a regime which, by the way, has closely aligned itself with the radical Islamic regime in Iran.

A second-choice candidate for invasion, occupation, and regime change would be Kuwait, another country run by an Islamic regime. Since Saddam Hussein’s forces were easily able to conquer the country, it should be a piece of cake for U.S. forces.

A problem arises however. Once the United States effects regime change in Iraq and Kuwait, installing Christian or Jewish regimes, what about the millions of Muslims in those two countries? Sure, their governments would no longer be Islamic but what about the millions of people living there? Wouldn’t they still be the enemy to Christians and the West? Wouldn’t they still be bent on world conquest? What should be done with them? Perpetual incarceration in concentration camps? Mass executions of all Muslims?

And what about Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and all the other countries in which people are predominantly Muslim. You know — the Islamic countries that are the recipients of billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid. Does the U.S. government invade those countries too, effect regime change, and incarcerate or execute the millions of Muslims living there?

During the Cold War, people used to say the same thing about the communists that we’re now hearing about the Muslims. The communists were coming to get us, and some Americans were even looking under their beds for communists. In fact, 58,000 American men were sacrificed in Southeast Asia because U.S. officials claimed that Vietnam was the central front in the war on communism. With a military loss in Vietnam, the dominoes would start falling, they told us, with the final domino being the United States.

Yet, the U.S. did lose in Vietnam, and yet the dominoes didn’t fall. It turned out that those 58,000 American men died for nothing. Today, U.S. officials even travel to Vietnam as tourists. Americans are freely trading with the people who were supposedly going to invade the United States and take over the IRS and the public schools.

Ironically, throughout the Cold War there was nary a mention of the Islamic threat to the West, even though proponents of that view today claim that the Muslim threat stretches back many centuries. In fact, the irony of ironies is that during the Cold War the U.S. government even entered into partnerships with Muslims, including Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and various Islamic regimes in the Middle East. No one accused U.S. officials of treason for entering into agreements with the enemy.

It’s true that Muslims have fundamental differences with Christians and the West, and vice versa. But those types of differences ordinarily do not cause people to kill people who have different values. Most Muslims are no different from Americans in the sense that they simply wish to live their lives in peace, practice their faith, raise their families, and be left alone. They don’t like it when some foreign government tries to interfere with their way of life, just as Americans don’t like it when some foreign government does that to them.

What all too many Americans, unfortunately, will not permit themselves to see is that that is precisely what the U.S. government did in the Middle East, especially when the Soviet communist bugaboo evaporated in 1989. As a result of U.S. interventionism in the Middle East, especially the interventionism that resulted in large number of deaths (e.g., the sanctions and the no-fly zones), what began as differences in values rose to the level of anger and rage that induced some people to seek vengeance through violence.

Thus, rather than ceasing its policy of interventionism after 9/11, which is what the U.S. government should have done even while pursuing the perpetrators through criminal-justice means, it did the very worst thing possible — it continued and even expanded its policy of interventionism in the hope of killing those whose differences with America’s values had risen to the level of rage as a result of U.S. interventionism. Not surprisingly, that only fueled more anger and rage.

So, what should the U.S. government do now? It should do what it should have done after 9/11: Exit Afghanistan and Iraq and the entire Middle East. Bring all the troops home.

Would this quell the anger and rage against the United States? Not all of it but certainly much of it. As I said above, most people simply want to live their lives in peace.

After all, look at Vietnam, where the U.S. government killed more than a million people. Once U.S. forces exited the country, the Vietnamese left the United States alone.

While there is the ever-present risk that there will still be some people who will still want vengeance, their numbers will be relatively small. While they will constitute an ever-present threat of terrorism, that’s the price that must be paid for past interventions. What’s important to note is that continued interventionism can never solve that problem — it can only make it worse.

When governments go awry, it is up to the citizenry to straighten out their course. The problem is not Muslims or Islam. The problem is the U.S. government and, specifically, its foreign policy of interventionism. Bringing an end to that policy will restore a sense of peace and harmony not only to the American people but also the people of the world.

The US is spending $300m to ‘engage and inspire’ Iraqis. That’s not the way to win hearts and minds