Peace and Justice Post

Behold, a voice from out of the wilderness

And lo, but he was tanned. Tony Blair came before us yesterday not as a former Prime Minister but as a man of religion. The Vicar of St Albion is breaking free of his parish chains. He wants God to stop being so parochial. Tony Blair has decided that it’s time that God went global and he’s the man to do it.

He stood, light shining down on his golden face, in Westminster Cathedral almost directly beneath a huge red and gold encrusted cross hanging from the soaring ceiling. He spoke from a wooden pulpit before a congregation (sorry, audience) of hundreds. In the real pulpit, to the side, two TV crews were filming him. Outside, the Blair nonbelievers chanted and whistled. As I walked in a woman screamed like a banshee: “Arrest Tony Blair! This is the House of Satan!” Inside, powerful organ chords drowned out the noise of the nonbelievers. The audience was dotted with turbans, yamakas and robes.

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International Herald Tribune, March 3, 2008

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON: Members of the U.S.Congress have as much as $196 million (126.2 million) collectively invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the start of the Iraq war, according to a new study by a nonpartisan research group.

The review of lawmakers’ 2006 financial disclosure statements, by the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, suggests that members’ holdings could pose a conflict of interest as they decide the fate of Iraq war spending. Several members who earned the most from defense contractors have plum committee or leadership assignments, including Democratic Sen. John Kerry, independent Sen. Joseph Lieberman and House Republican Whip Roy Blunt.

The study found that more Republicans than Democrats hold stock in defense companies, but that the Democrats who are invested had significantly more money at stake. In 2006, for example, Democrats held at least $3.7 million (€2.3 million) in military-related investments, compared to Republican investments of $577,500 (€372,000).

Overall, 151 members hold investments worth $78.7 million (€50.6 million) to $195.5 million (€125.9 million) in companies that receive defense contracts that are worth at least $5 million (€3.2 million). These investments earned them anywhere between $15.8 million (€10.1 million) and $62 million (€39.9 million) between 2004 and 2006, the center concludes.

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Intimidation and Violence in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq

By RANNIE AMIRI | CounterPunch, April 3, 2008

Seasoned Middle East observers have long been familiar with the contempt the United States holds for genuine democracy in the region, despite the equally familiar rhetoric and platitudes to the contrary. One only needs to count the litany of Arab countries considered American allies to appreciate this; all are nations ruled by a collection of monarchs and dictators who have never stood for a legitimate election in their lives.

In 1953, a precedent was set: anyone who dared challenge Western interests or dictates would be unceremoniously deposed. Such was the case when the popular and democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, was overthrown in the CIA-orchestrated coup dubbed Operation Ajax after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The toppling of Mossadegh’s government (engineered by President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit Roosevelt Jr.) allowed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to become absolute monarch of Iran. Shortly thereafter, the nation’s oil reserves were opened up to a consortium of American and European companies.

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Ilan Pappe

Uruknet, April 1, 2008

Dr. Ilan Pappe, whose parents fled Nazi Germany, received his doctorate at Oxford University and was Senior Lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University in Israel, Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva, and Chair of the Emil Tourma Institute.

He is currently Chair of the Department of History at the University of Exeter and Co-Director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies. Pappe has just completed a cross-Canada tour on the topic of his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Am Johal interviewed him in Vancouver for rabble.ca.

Am Johal: Why did you decide to leave Israel?

Ilan Pappe: The main reason was an inability to function as an academic which is what I was within the Israeli academic community.

I could not manage a proper dialogue with my professional group or with the public at large. There was a feeling of being irrelevant to the debate. Israel was becoming a closed society.

My family wasn’t safe because of threats. That alone wouldn’t have pushed me out, but was a factor.

Thirdly, I thought the focus of the struggle over the public discourse is much more outside of Israel to change public opinion to a different reality.

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Forty years after King’s last stand

The Socialist Worker, April 4, 2008

MARTIN LUTHER King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis 40 years ago in the midst of a struggle that he saw as part of the next stage for the civil rights movement–supporting a strike of African American sanitation workers. Here, BRIAN JONES reviews an excellent new book, Michael Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road, which tells the story of that struggle.

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WHEN MARTIN Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, he was in Memphis supporting 1,300 striking sanitation workers. This particular fact is sometimes mentioned in civil rights histories; when it is, the significance of that strike–for King, and for the strikers–is little understood. Likewise, the role of Black workers generally in the fight for racial and economic equality is not nearly as well studied.

In Going Down Jericho Road, historian Michael Honey brings to life the story of the Memphis sanitation strike, illuminating it not only with an organizer’s sensitivity to the dynamics of the movement (Honey is a civil rights veteran himself), but with the voices of Black sanitation workers, union activists and Black radical youth.

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What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the American Empire

Howard Zinn | ZNet, April 3, 2008

With an occupying army waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with military bases and corporate bullying in every part of the world, there is hardly a question any more of the existence of an American Empire. Indeed, the once fervent denials have turned into a boastful, unashamed embrace of the idea.

However the very idea that the United States was an empire did not occur to me until after I finished my work as a bombardier with the Eighth Air Force in the Second World War, and came home. Even as I began to have second thoughts about the purity of the “Good War,” even after being horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even after rethinking my own bombing of towns in Europe, I still did not put all that together in the context of an American “Empire.”

I was conscious, like everyone, of the British Empire and the other imperial powers of Europe, but the United States was not seen in the same way. When, after the war, I went to college under the G.I. Bill of Rights and took courses in U.S. history, I usually found a chapter in the history texts called “The Age of Imperialism.” It invariably referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the conquest of the Philippines that followed. It seemed that American imperialism lasted only a relatively few years. There was no overarching view of U.S. expansion that might lead to the idea of a more far-ranging empire — or period — of “imperialism.”

I recall the classroom map (labeled “Western Expansion”) which presented the march across the continent as a natural, almost biological phenomenon. That huge acquisition of land called “The Louisiana Purchase” hinted at nothing but vacant land acquired. There was no sense that this territory had been occupied by hundreds of Indian tribes which would have to be annihilated or forced from their homes — what we now call “ethnic cleansing” — so that whites could settle the land, and later railroads could crisscross it, presaging “civilization” and its brutal discontents.

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As the Damascus Arab League Summit has illustrated, the principle of Arab unity has rarely been as fragile. For the people of this region, this is a tragedy. The more Arabs are divided on crucial issues affecting their lives, the more unprotected and powerless ordinary people feel. For in the world of geopolitics small is definitely not beautiful.

Every crack that forms within the Arab nation represents another vulnerability that offers its enemies a quicker route to fulfilling their own goals. For instance, on Sunday, an Arab League statement warned Israel that the league’s continued support for the 2002 Saudi “Arab Peace Initiative” was contingent upon Israel’s actions. The Israeli papers have reacted by suggesting the offer isn’t workable anyway because it relies on the agreement of all 22 Arab League member countries, many of which are currently at odds with one another.

Such divisions have given the Israelis an excuse to pour public scorn on the Arab Peace Initiative, which they never intended to take seriously anyway, since they have little intention of pulling back behind pre-1967 borders or handing over East Jerusalem to become the capital of a new Palestinian state.

Put simply, the more Arabs can’t get along, the more Israel is strengthened. The current animosities between Lebanese are music to the Israeli government’s ears because a strong, unified and economically viable Lebanon might emerge as a potential threat on its borders.

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The Jerusalem Post, April 3, 2008

By JPOST.COM STAFF

Hamas agrees to a Palestinian state established along the 1967 borders, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal says.

Mashaal: We accept state on ’67 borders

In an interview published Wednesday in Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayam, Mashaal referred to the 2006 prisoners’ document as proof of this, saying “There is a Palestinian document and in it all organizations say they agree to a state in the 1967 borders.”

The prisoners’ document, also known as the National Reconciliation Document, was drafted by members of different Palestinian factions including Fatah and Hamas, held in an Israeli prison. It calls for the “establishment of an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on all the territories occupied in 1967,” but does not explicitly recognize Israel’s right to exist within its pre-1967 borders.

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By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers, April 1, 2008

Amir Haider Hoti, the new chief minister of the North West Fronteir Province of Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The new top official in Pakistan’s terrorism-racked northwest frontier has demanded that the United States end missile strikes in the country and called for negotiations with militants — an approach that would dramatically alter the American-inspired war on terror there.

Amir Haider Hoti, who took the oath of office Tuesday as chief minister of the North West Frontier Province, said in an interview with McClatchy that military action should now be used only as a “last resort.”

“To some extent, the interests of Pakistan have been sacrificed to the war on terror. We’ve suffered a lot,” Hoti said. The United States “should let us handle it, let Pakistan handle it.”

Hoti’s demands, if he carries them out, could severely undercut U.S. strategy in Pakistan. President Bush has relied on an alliance with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to attack Islamic militants in the tribal areas.

But Musharraf’s party was drubbed in Pakistan’s February parliamentary elections, and there are growing concerns in Washington that the country’s newly elected leaders will reverse the military-dominated strategy, which has caused an angry public backlash in Pakistan.

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The Times, April 3, 2008, April 3, 2008