Peace and Justice Post

Peace broker, bank adviser and lecturer, now Blair plans to teach religion at Yale

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Patrick Wintour , Guardian, via Palestinian Pundit

March 8, 2008 Not content with trying to bring peace to the Middle East – as well as advising an insurance company on the risks of climate change, a bank on crisis management and Rwanda on good governance – Tony Blair is to add another job to his portfolio: teaching God and politics at one of America’s most prestigious universities. Yale, the Ivy League alma mater of his good friend George Bush, confirmed yesterday that the former prime minister is to join the schools of management and divinity at the campus in New Haven, Connecticut, in the autumn. He will teach a course on faith and globalisation, looking at religion in the modern world. This will also be the theme of his Faith Foundation, which he is to launch in London before his Yale commitment starts. It is intended to promote understanding between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The deans of Yale’s management and divinity schools are discussing with Blair how much time he will spend on campus. A spokesman for Blair insisted yesterday that his position would not require him to spend extended periods in Connecticut. But even before yesterday’s announcement, his aides were expressing concern about his workload next year. Continued . . .

By RALPH NADER | Counterpunch, March 8 – 9, 2008

The world’s largest prison—Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of  them starving, sick and penniless—is receiving more sympathy and protest  by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported  in the U.S. press.

In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government  blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel and other necessities from  coming into this tiny enclave through international relief organizations  is received with predictable silence or callousness by members of  Congress, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The contrast invites more public attention and discussion.

Israel has militarily occupied Gaza for forty years. It pulled out its  colonials in 2005 but maintained an iron grip on the area  controlling  all access, including its airspace and territorial waters. Its F-16s and  helicopter gunships regularly shred more and more of the areas—public  works, its neighborhoods and inflict collective punishment on civilians  in violation of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the International Red Cross declares, citing treaties establishing  international humanitarian law, “Neither the civilian population as a  whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”

Continued . . .

Telegraph, UK, March 8, 2008

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Hillary Clinton had no direct role in bringing peace to Northern Ireland and is a “wee bit silly” for exaggerating the part she played, according to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province.

Full coverage of the US Elections 2008 David Trimble: Hillary Clinton mere “cheerleader” in Ireland   Hillary Clinton with the Rev Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness after their meeting in Washington last year                         “I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.” Mrs Clinton has made Northern Ireland key to her claims of having extensive foreign policy experience, which helped her defeat Barack Obama in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday after she presented herself as being ready to tackle foreign policy crises at 3am. Continued . . .

The Independent, UK, March 8, 2008

Fifty years after historic march, protest camp at atomic weapons base is outlawed in a new blow to civil liberties

ABBIE TRAYLER-SMITH

Kate Hudson, the chairman of CND, with its vice-president, Walter Wolfgang, outside the nuclear base at Aldermaston

By Kim Sengupta

It survived six Tory governments, the end of the Cold War and the rise and fall of mass marches against the British nuclear deterrent. But after 50 years in which the tradition of peaceful demonstration has been maintained outside the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, the New Labour era has finally done for one of the most famous symbols of protest in British political history.

Today would have seen the latest gathering of the band of women who have assembled on the second Saturday of each month since the 1980s to object to the continuing development of the United Kingdom’s nuclear deterrent. Instead, following a High Court ruling this week, the protest tents are being removed, demonstrators are being threatened with arrest and “no camping” signs are being erected.

From being a symbol of the right to protest, Aldermaston has become the latest testament to the desire of successive New Labour governments to curtail the right to assemble, demonstrate and object to government policy.

Continued . . .

Reuters, March 7, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush will veto legislation on Saturday banning U.S. intelligence agents from using waterboarding and other controversial interrogation methods, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said on Friday.

Last month, Congress sent Bush a broad intelligence authorization bill that contained new limits on CIA interrogation techniques, despite Bush administration warnings that such a measure would be rejected.

“The president will veto the intelligence authorization bill tomorrow,” Fratto told reporters.

The legislation was approved by the Senate and House of Representatives on partisan votes that did not indicate there was enough support in Congress to overturn Bush’s veto.

Waterboarding, in which suspects are subjected to simulated drowning, has been widely criticized by many members of Congress, human rights organizations and other countries.

Continued . . .

Egypt is building a 10-foot-high concrete wall along its border with Gaza to prevent any new breaches after Palestinian militants blasted through the barrier in January to escape a blockade of their territory, an official said.

The new wall replaces a mixed barbed-wire, iron and concrete barrier which was breached in several places when militants blew it open with explosives, added the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to talk to the media.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians flooded across the open border unchecked for 12 days before Egypt managed to reseal it. They snapped up food, fuel and other goods made scarce in Gaza by an Israeli closure, imposed after Hamas violently seized control of the strip in June.

London Review of Books, March 6, 2008

Yonathan Mendel

A year ago I applied for the job of Occupied Territories correspondent at Ma’ariv, an Israeli newspaper. I speak Arabic and have taught in Palestinian schools and taken part in many joint Jewish-Palestinian projects. At my interview the boss asked how I could possibly be objective. I had spent too much time with Palestinians; I was bound to be biased in their favour. I didn’t get the job. My next interview was with Walla, Israel’s most popular website. This time I did get the job and I became Walla’s Middle East correspondent. I soon understood what Tamar Liebes, the director of the Smart Institute of Communication at the Hebrew University, meant when she said: ‘Journalists and publishers see themselves as actors within the Zionist movement, not as critical outsiders.’

This is not to say that Israeli journalism is not professional. Corruption, social decay and dishonesty are pursued with commendable determination by newspapers, TV and radio. That Israelis heard exactly what former President Katsav did or didn’t do with his secretaries proves that the media are performing their watchdog role, even at the risk of causing national and international embarrassment. Ehud Olmert’s shady apartment deal, the business of Ariel Sharon’s mysterious Greek island, Binyamin Netanyahu’s secret love affair, Yitzhak Rabin’s secret American bank account: all of these are freely discussed by the Israeli media.

When it comes to ‘security’ there is no such freedom. It’s ‘us’ and ‘them’, the IDF and the ‘enemy’; military discourse, which is the only discourse allowed, trumps any other possible narrative. It’s not that Israeli journalists are following orders, or a written code: just that they’d rather think well of their security forces.

Continued . . .

Editor & Publisher, March 07, 2008 7:40 AM ET

Associated Press

NEW YORK The number of wounded soldiers has become a hallmark of the nearly 5-year-old Iraq war, pointing to both the use of roadside bombs as the extremists’ weapon of choice and advances in battlefield medicine to save lives.

About 15 soldiers are wounded for every fatality, compared with 2.6 per death in Vietnam and 2.8 in Korea.

But with those saved soldiers comes a financial price — one veterans groups and others claim the government is unwilling to pay.

Those critics also say that the tens of thousands of soldiers wounded in Iraq are part of a political numbers game, one they say undermines the system meant to care for them.

The most frequently cited figure is the 29,320 soldiers wounded in action in Iraq as of Thursday. But there have been 31,325 others treated for non-combat injuries and illness as of March 1.

“The Pentagon keeps two sets of books,” said Linda Bilmes, a professor at Harvard and an expert on budgeting and public finance whose newly published book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, was co-authored with Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

“It is important to understand the full number of casualties because the U.S. government is responsible for paying disability compensation and medical care for all our troops, regardless of how they were injured,” Bilmes said.

Continued . . .

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 7 March 2008

Young relatives of newborn baby Amira Abu ‘Aser mourn during her funeral in Gaza City, 5 March 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel’s recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift.

“I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of Israel,” US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his “condemnation” and “condolences,” as did EU High Representative Javier Solana.

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu ‘Aser was buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house’s inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces.

But confirming their status in the eyes of the “international community” as less than complete human beings, neither Amira’s killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences.

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are “terrorism,” while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against “terrorism.” But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades.

Continued . . .