Fatima and Ahmed's Son

Somebody Else’s Money

2012-01-28T19:10:00.001+02:00

Dissident Voice
Herbert Dyer, Jr.
January 27, 2012.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
— (Susan Sontag) Partisan Review, 1967.

After coming under heavy criticism for this statement, Sontag eagerly recanted and revised it, saying that “it slandered cancer patients.”

As representatives and protectors of America’s white supremacist ethos, the current roster of Republican Party presidential office seekers demonstrates daily its steadfast determination to keep Black people at the absolute bottom of this republic’s racial, political, economic and social hierarchies. Rick Santorum’s declaration and warning against giving “somebody else’s money” to Black people sums up the entire Republican Party’s “platform.” He echoes Newt Gingrich, who has described the First Black President as “the food stamps president” and whose solution to Black youth joblessness is to turn them into janitors in their own deteriorating public schools. Notice that he does not suggest putting Black students to work as student-clerks, teachers’ or principals’ aides, library attendants, shop or home economics helpers, or even hall monitors, but as menial laborers. His default position for all problems black is a return to a kind of forced labor, a neo-slavery. Willard (“Mitt”) Romney consistently decries “entitlements” for everybody except his fellow fat cats and their transnational companies while Ron Paul’s white supremacist past is rapidly catching up with him via his opposition to long settled civil rights legislation and blatantly racist tracts, pamphlets and newsletters.

But Santorum’s admonition is the clearest and most direct statement of just exactly where so-called “conservative” whites stand:   Who are the “somebody else’s” in his nostrum? They are readily identified as the consistent opponents of all policies or programs which might even remotely help Black people, including Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, educational grants and loans, jobs and job training, housing assistance, and, God forbid, welfare. (In the recent past – post-World War II – Santorum’s predecessor-“somebody else’s” even opposed giving Black military veterans benefits offered in the G.I. Bill of Rights). In short, Santorum’s “somebody else’s” view all of these as “stealth” forms of “reparations” to Blacks for centuries of slavery and subsequent racial segregation and discrimination. This the “somebody else’s” cannot – and will not — abide.

Why can’t Santorum’s“somebody else’s” and most so-called “conservative” (and many not so conservative) white folks come to grips with the fact that they owe Black people? Here’s a short list of the most common arguments against reparations:

1) Nobody in my family ever owned slaves; the corollary to this is that no Black person living today was ever a slave;
2) My European ancestors didn’t even get to America until long after slavery ended;
3) Reparations have already been paid in the form of welfare, Supreme Court decisions, Presidential Executive Orders, civil rights laws, affirmative action policies and programs, etc.;
4) Any white debt owed to Blacks was paid in blood by the 600,000 white men who died on both sides during the Civil War;
5) There is no consensus – even among Blacks – as to how reparations would be paid and to whom;
6) It was the Africans themselves who eagerly participated in, if not actually originated, the Atlantic Slave Trade. The corollary to this is that there were actually many Black slaveholders – not to mention a significant number of Native Americans who likewise held Black slaves; and,
7) Finally….a completely new “rationale” against reparations has surfaced: the election of America’s First Black President “proves” that “white racism” is over and done with. President Obama’s election canceled any debt owed by whites to Blacks, and thus obviated the need to pay Black people anything at all.
On the surface, these arguments appear reasonable, even compelling. But as we dig just beneath the surface, each one of them fails both the “reasonable” and “compelling” tests.

“Nobody in my family owned slaves…..” This argument renders slavery and the ongoing horrendous treatment of Blacks as a matter of individual acts and choices by long dead misguided white ancestors (and a rapidly diminishing number of live throwbacks to a bygone era). It ignores the supportive and enabling role that kings, princes, elected and appointed legislatures, courts, and executives played in institutionalizing and maintaining a brutal slavocracy which benefitted all whites whether they did or did not own Black slaves.

This and the ”no living black people were slaves”, and the post-slavery European immigration arguments center around a general conservative and white America political myth that this nation-state was organized by, and comprised of, only “rugged individuals” who united for their own personal and “private” self-interest. America, they argue, is not, never has been, and never will be a “society” composed of disparate peoples who came together as a result of a “social contract”, a la’ John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689) or Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contract Social (1762).

The late arrival of European immigrants.   The late comedian Richard Prior and author Toni Morrison point out that a European immigrant’s entrance into American whiteness was expedited, facilitated, and gauged by just how quickly and thoroughly he or she could learn, embrace, and express the most important word in the American socio-political lexicon: “Nigger.”

This was only the first step in embracing an American ethic and ethos of whiteness. One’s Irish-ness, Italian-ness, German-ness, French-ness, Hungarian-ness, or…..were not shed completely, but firmly relegated into and served as a backdrop for a brand spanking new identity – American.

Next came the actual acceptance and use of one’s whiteness as not just a matter of privilege, but of right — a God-given, if not Constitutional right.

Reparations have already been paid. It was not until half way through the Civil War, when it looked as though the south might actually win, that Lincoln and the north decided that this really might be a war to end slavery rather than simply to “save the union.” Yes, 600,000 white men died in that orgy of blood and bluster. But the number of direct Black casualties has never been calculated, and is probably impossible to know. How many of the almost 200,000 Black men who fought for the north were killed outright rather than taken as prisoners of war? It is known that thousands of Black people (civilians and soldiers) died at the hands of civilian whites who objected to being drafted into the war and took their frustrations out on basically defenseless Blacks especially in the so-called more enlightened north.

General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Order No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865, granted 40 acres and a mule to those slaves who had been freed as the north neared its ever increasingly assured victory.   More than 10,000 people settled on 400,000 acres of their former slave owners’ lands as a result of this order.   After Lincoln’s assassination in April, however, the new president, Andrew Johnson, immediately rescinded Sherman’s order, expelled the new “freedmen”, and returned the land back to the self same former slave owners.

The “reparations have already been paid” argument also ignores the fact that immediately following the Civil War Blacks brought constant, numerous, well-argued claims to the courts and state legislatures, through the national congress, against the federal government, the states individually, corporations, and specific former slaveholders for payment of “services” rendered. All such entreaties were denied.

Likewise, all efforts to compensate Blacks in the decades and now centuries following the war were also turned back. Black people were specifically excluded from most provisions of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948 (desegregation of the military) was the first such effort by any president since Lincoln to directly address the plight of Black people. The landmark legislation of the 1960’s (the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968) came into being not because of a change of heart on the part of Santorum’s “other people.” Rather, it was the Civil Rights Movement beginning in the 1940’s and 50’s, the raised fist of the Black Power Movement of the late ‘60s and the concurrent “Long Hot Summers” of revolution and riots in the major (and not so major) cities — all forced President Johnson’s hand to sign those bills into law.   So let’s be clear: Each and every proposed bill, law, program, policy, ordinance, suggestion that Black people might need even a little extra help in order to “even the playing field” has been met with not just denial but scorn, ridicule, feigned disbelief, and, in many cases, violence.

The “some Black people owned slaves” argument. Yes, a significant number of free Black people and Native Americans owned slaves. In the case of free Blacks, it was more often than not a former slave husband who after years of moonlighting bought his still enslaved wife and children. Yet, as with any other group, there were those who today would be described as “race traitors.” These people were generally of “mixed” lineage and identified more with the white “majority” than with the enslaved Black laboring class/caste.

Africans enslaved Africans. Slavery has existed in all societies in one form or another throughout recorded history – Africa included. Whether in Africa, Europe, the Americas or Asia, capture as a prisoner of war usually led to enslavement by the victors. Nell Irvin Painter’s 2010 book, The History of White People, is a fascinating and detailed look at the history of “white slavery”, beginning with the ancient Greeks. African kings and merchants participated in that slavery from the beginning; but at no point, in her chronicle does the scope, brutality and sheer evil manifested during the Atlantic Slave Trade come through. For the most part, in Africa slaves were viewed as extended, if subservient, members of the slave owner’s family. They were never considered as commodities or chattel in the European sense of those words. They could marry, own property, and some even rose to positions of power as slaves within the system. Thus, most African sellers of Africans thought that they were selling their war captives to be used in the African sense of term.   This is an essential difference and distinction.

As for Indians, by 1860 the Cherokees held 4,600 Black slaves; the Choctaws, 2,344, the Creeks, 1,532; the Chickasaws, 975; and the Seminoles, 500. Some Indian slave owners were just as harsh and cruel as any white slave master and were often hired to catch runaway slaves. Indeed, slave-catching was a lucrative business for some Indians, especially the Chickasaws. Interestingly, the very last Confederate General to surrender at the end of the Civil War was Brigadier General Stand Watie, a Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Now, Santorum’s “other people” will take this fact and determine that if they must pay Blacks for slavery, why also should Indians not be required to do so? The answer, of course, is that compared to the not quite 4 million Black people held in bondage by white people, the less than 10,000 owned by Indians is but a drop in the proverbial bucket; and that, for the most part, slavery as practiced by Indians was never as institutionalized, wide-spread and deeply engrained into the Indian psyche as it was among whites in both the North and South.

The First Black President.   The majority of white folks in this country did not vote for Barack Obama. And that has always been the problem. Despite the John Browns, the Henry Lloyd Garrisons, the Quakers, the Viola Liozzos, there has never been a majority of white Americans who supported anything “black.”   Yet, Obama represents a chance, perhaps a last chance, for many white folks to reclaim their humanity; to join the human race. At once, his presence has allowed them to face and yet hide their sordid race history. They know they are guilty.   Obama has allowed them to assuage some of that guilt. He has allowed them to deflect some of that guilt onto his own persona. The fact of his own “whiteness” has helped them immensely. It is unlikely that he would have been elected had he not had a white parent. So for him, and him alone, the “one-drop rule” has been suspended.

But this does not mean that white supremacy has ended, or even been suspended. This First Black President’s policies and practices are virtually identical to every other “white” president who has preceded him save LBJ, FDR, and Lincoln. That is, he not only supports white supremacy but has deepened and enhanced it to the point that Black people today are in a worse socio-economic position than at any time since the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Finally, there is really only one argument necessary to refute those who oppose reparations for Black people: White people today still benefit from slavery while Black people still suffer from its devastating, lingering, ongoing, effects.

Herbert Dyer Jr. is an African American writer in Chicago with a masters degree from Governors State University in Political & Justice Studies. He can be reached at: accra0306@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Herb.

Comment: Brilliant analysis that tackles a very complex set of arguments and counter-arguments.

Why is it so hard for most white people to see racism as a structure and not merely a prejudicial attitude?

That aside, the strength of Dyer's article is summed up by his reference to Obama's whiteness. It is an important point that can be reduced to Tom's biracial background but there is much more.

The agents of whiteness are white people in the main; that is a given. But people of color like Obama are complicit in advancing the interests of whiteness.

Whiteness is dependent on those people of color who will do its bidding. And, as whiteness evolves it is becoming clearer that it does not even need white overseers to secure its bidding.

Most black/brown leaders on the African continent, particularly the pot-bellied ANC in South Africa, are complicit agents of whiteness.

If you want to know just how deep that complicity runs just poll white South Africans and ask them to name the leader they admire the most.

Nelson Mandela is a saint among the vast majority of white people not because he showed them the error of their ways. On the contrary, he and his movement allowed them to escape the consequences of their actions; Mandela affirmed whiteness.

But there is even more to consider. Particularly for those who are engaged in radical struggle at whatever level.

When does black/brown radical politics become untangled from its engagement/confrontation with whiteness?

Are we doomed to see the struggle toward freedom as one that pushes white people to 'own' their brutal histories? Are we free when whites change their ways or is it a pipe dream that sets us up for failure?

Is the call for slavery reparations (including affirmative action) then not mostly about asking whites to affirm blacks? How is this a radical re-ordering?

I like what Biko offered on these questions. He argued that racism is a white problem and white people should deal with its fallout.

For Biko the real revolution lies in overcoming the confines of racialized struggle. Seeking white affirmation for black suffering was, therefore, a futile strategy.

But there must be more.   And if he lived longer he would have offered more.

I think that white people should work to disentangle whiteness from their consciousness by becoming race traitors. That is, turning their backs on the privilege of being white and its relationship to power.

To do so whites will need a radical program toward reorienting their humanity. Such a reorientation needs the kind of awareness that recognizes how being white is a historical position balanced on racism.

So, you can't be a non-racist or non-racial white person. Affirming a white identity is a racist act.

Being black is not similarly described but it nonetheless requires a radical move, as described by Biko, beyond the racial confines of the identity.

There is no organic blackness and black struggle does not improve the condition of black folk unless it seeks to disinherit its racialization (the construction of being made to be black).

Biko understood this course of struggle and even commented that when black folks struggled toward regaining their identities it would simultaneously free whites; an unintended outcome nonetheless.

His argument assumed that blackness could not survive black struggle. In other words, black struggle is about becoming human and not about becoming free blacks.

A world where free blacks and whites motion toward freedom is a world of false consciousness.

The ANC of Mandela has missed this all important point. Inside of their contrived freedom the identity of being a free black is assumed to be characterized by white markers.

In other words, blacks are free when they become like whites. Freedom in this context is about affirming whiteness and its superiority. In this racial revision, affirmed blacks and affirmed whites are 'natural' allies.

In a very distinct sense, Mandela and Obama are the outcomes of this racial revision - a revised oppression at most.

But it is a delusional compact because it asks blacks to become even more committed to servicing the interests of white privilege and power. And for this reason, racism is ever present. Its structure persists even where it is not named.

There cannot be an end to racism unless their is an end to the constructed world that assumes being human is a racial reality.

The real struggle toward freedom must seek to subvert and destroy race.

So if any of my students from Black Studies are still reading here, I think my answer to how we end racism is still the same.

We end racism by making whiteness irrelevant. When whiteness is irrelevant white people in effect do not exist and they are therefore forced to re-invent their humanity.

Onward!

Marine Gets Three Months in Jail for Massacring Two Dozen Civilians

2012-01-28T17:57:00.000+02:00

Russia Today (RT)
January 24, 2012.

United States Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich arrives for his

arraignment at Camp Pendleton, California,

January 9, 2008 (Reuters / Mike Blake)

More than six years after Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich led a squad of Marines into two Haditha, Iraq homes and massacred two dozen civilians, the American serviceman in charge has reached a plea deal.

For nine counts of manslaughter, Wuterich will get three months of confinement.

Wuterich is the last of eight men tied to the November 2005 killing that left 24 Iraqis dead, including women, children and the elderly. It was announced on Monday this week that he had reached a plea with prosecutors during his military tribunal and is now expected to be sentenced as early as Tuesday. According to the Associated Press, Wuterich will face a maximum of three months of confinement, the forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay and a rank demotion.

Of the other seven Marines charged with the now-notorious massacre, one was acquitted and six had their charges dismissed. Wuterich’s attorneys have been confident throughout the ordeal that he would see a similar outcome. “He’s going to be glad to have it over because he knows that he’ll be exonerated,” lawyer Neal Puckett told National Public Radio earlier this month.

On November 19, 2005, Wuterich led a squad of men into two separate homes in the town of Haditha and opened fire on everyone in sight. Prosecutors say that a roadside bomb exploded moments before the Marines stormed the home, and were brought into hysterics by seeing a fellow soldier die in the attack. In response, they went on a rampage and for 45 minutes raided the two homes and were never faced with gunfire. Wuterich later said he instructed his team to “shoot first and ask questions later.”

“My Marines responded to the threats they faced in the manner that we all had been trained,” he explained to CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2007. After the roadside bomb was detonated, Wuterich said that, “My responsibility as a squad leader is to make sure that none of the rest of my guys died. And at that point, we were still on the assault.”

Lt. Col. Joseph Kloppel, spokesman of the Camp Pendleton marine Corps base near San Diego, California, told the media on Monday that “By pleading guilty to this charge, Staff Sergeant Wuterich has accepted responsibility for his actions.”

Comment: There are no adequate words to express my deep disgust with the outcome of this case.

May the murdered victims rest in peace until that final balance.

Onward!

Protest and Rally Saturday 28 January 2pm-4pm US Embassy Grosvenor Square London W1 Hands Off Iran and Syria: No Western Intervention

2012-01-27T17:10:00.011+02:00

Stop the War on Iran before it starts

Called by Stop the War Coalition, supported by Unite union, War on Want, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Campaign against Sanctions and Military Intervention on Iran (CASMII), Friends of Al-Aqsa, Goldsmiths Student Union and SOAS Student Union.

Speakers include: Tony Benn, Salma Yaqoob, Roger Lloyd Pack, Jeremy Corbyn MP, John McDonnell MP, Abbas Edalat, Lindsey German, Sabah Jawad, Andrew Murray

The growing threats against Iran in recent weeks have been backed up with increased sanctions. As we know from Iraq, these are a prelude to war, not an alternative to it. There are signs of covert intervention already in Iran, as there are in Syria. Stop the War opposes all military intervention from the west in the region, for which there is absolutely no justification.

We will be gathering outside the US embassy, Grosvenor Square, London W1 on Saturday 28 January from 2-4pm. Please support the protest and rally if you can.

10 reasons why YOU should be there...

Sign up for the Facebook event...

More reasons to be there:
• John Rees: Attack on Iran will drag Russia and China into war...
• Tariq Ali: Western intervention in Syria would be a disaster...
• Simon Jenkins: Why is Britain picking a fight with Iran?...

Contact Stop the War
Address: 231 Vauxhall Bridge Road London SW1V 1EH United Kingdom
E-Mail: office@stopwar.org.uk

Telephone: 020 7801 2768

More Information: Stop the War Coalition

Onward!

Credit

Brutally Elegant

2012-01-26T15:58:00.000+02:00

Nadal beat Federer 6-7, 6-2, 7-6, 6-4 to reach the Australian Open Final today

It was a brilliant match by one of sport's greatest rivalries. I played hooky from work commitments and watched from the edge of my seat.

I felt a little sorry for Federer. He played amazing tennis but the street fighter of old had his number today.

I can still remember being pissed at Federer for crying and stealing Nadal's moment of championship glory at the Australian Open Final of 2009.

Nadal had just demolished Federer but instead of being annoyed he offered consolation and praise to the defending champion.

In today's encounter, a semi-final, Federer made no fuss after losing and walked off court but without signing any autographs. The man is mostly a classy champion and undoubtedly the greatest tennis player of all time.

If he had won I would not have been too sad since I think his game is better suited to beating Djokovic.

I can't wait till Sunday for the final where I fully expect Djokovic to be present barring a huge upset in his semi-final match with Murray. My opinion is that Murray does not have the what it takes to beat Djokovic.

But does Nadal have what it takes to beat the seemingly unbeatable Djokovic?

I think he does even though he lost 6 straight matches to Djokovic in 2011. Nadal seems hungry again and that brawler look is back on his grill and in his demeanor.

In fact, if the Nadal that just beat Federer was a motorcycle he would be a lime green Triumph Speed Triple, a street fighter unlike any other.

2007 Triumph Speed Triple

Brutally elegant indeed!

Nadal Picture Credit

Triumph Picture Credit

"These Days I Live the Way I Wanna"

2012-01-25T22:27:00.003+02:00

"Every now and then I must confess
I'm not quite up to all this happiness
Sometimes I wonder if the place I'm at is where I do belong
But don't get me wrong

I'm livin' it up
Havin myself a time
Livin' it up"

Al Jazeera Uses a Former CIA Station Chief to tell us About Muslim life in the US

2012-01-25T10:59:00.005+02:00

I have just about given up reading Al Jazeera for my daily dose of news and analysis.

In recent months Al Jazeera has moved to consolidate its place alongside the corporate news agencies.

That feel of a counter source for news is about gone. Al Jazeera is now mainstream enough not to offend American sensibilities of the ruling kind.

And I guess it was inevitable. The Emir who funds Al Jazeera is hardly a radical lover of truth. See his position on Bahrain and of course, Libya, and it is hardly surprising that Al Jazeera is contaminated by politicized interests.

Being bought and paid for is a problem in all walks of life. I cannot pretend that I will call every spade a spade even here on the blog.

But I am not pretending to be a reliable news source that is critical of mainstream media for essentially stereotyping and ignoring so called 'middle east' issues.

That is what Al Jazeera aimed at when it started.

It was the Arab Spring that raised Al Jazeera's credibility among the American and British rulers and eased their way into being another CNN or BBC.

Obama made a comment that he was watching Al Jazeera to keep informed on the protests in Tunisia and then Egypt's Tahir Square.

Mainstream American media, like their ruling class, was mostly caught sleeping while Al Jazeera was reporting live.

The endorsement from Tom boosted the appeal of Al Jazeera but it hardly moved any cable carriers to stream the channel into American households; there are few US cities, about two or three at most, where Al Jazeera is carried by cable operators.

This did not stop the drift to blatant ass-kissing. Al Jazeera began cozying up to the empire and the drift is hardly hidden.

Take for example having one Robert Grenier, a former CIA Station Chief, writing an opinion column entitled "The Two Faces of Muslim Life in the US".

A header description of the column reads:

"While assimilation of Muslim communities in US society is laudable, a creeping Islamophobia is undermining it."

Really?

And so we need a former CIA operative to confirm that it is "laudable" to seek assimilation into America (like Al Jazeera) but those pesky and unnamed Islamophobes are making the going rough.

What utter nonsense. This is pandering journalism. The kind that postures, sycophantically even, to get inside the establishment.

This kind of news analysis sits well with what CNN or the New York Times would serve up for its middle or the middle readers.

The entire piece is based on the assumption that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims out there - the good ones are trying real hard to get ahead in the supposed venerable meritocracy but some not so nice scaremongers are not playing along.

What crap!

This thinking is at odds with opinion polls that find Islamophobic sentiments well seated throughout the American nation and its leadership.

Islamophobia and the more accurate racist hatred of anything that looks Islamic/Muslim is hardly an accident caused by scaremongers/Islamophobes (read right-wingers).

And even if it was (which it is definitely not) who the hell needs a former CIA operative who worked in various guises over 27 years (including being the director of a CIA counter terrorism center) to lay it on thick for us. Is this man a reliable source?

This sh*t is more than irresponsible it is downright patronizing.

The only thing worthwhile about the opinion piece were some of the comments. A couple even lightly questioned the credibility of the author.

But one in particular was in response to the usual American drivel about the US's greatness and the hard work ethic to advance. The response by Ari Lee called the greatness into question by telling of the loneliness of American life and its emptiness:

"I am an immigrant and after spending my 20+ years in US I have to state that what you are saying is a common delusion of a well to do American. Most people who work hard get just enough to survive till next payday. Most of them rent or live in dilapidated trailers all their life, because they simply can’t afford to buy a house. Many of them don’t have any medical coverage and can’t afford to go to see a doctor or a dentist. Practically all of them die alone, abandoned by their relatives and their grown up children. Of 5 countries where I have lived America is the loneliest place. The real drama here is not the discrimination against your religion (in fact Americans are remarkably tolerant this way) or some obvious threats to your life but the fact that this lonely, self-centered, heart-deprived life is not worth living. Muslims who contemplate coming to this country should not fear being beaten or killed – America is generally safe place – but they should fear for passions of their heart, for flame of their spirit for bonds and unity between their people, their children, their wives and brothers, for the music of the Sky and Earth. Because in this regard America is Death itself."

Having lived in the US for three decades myself this comment struck a chord for me. I used to wonder about all that fun that is portrayed on television and in movies and the friendships and associations that tell of an informed people engaged and living life to the fullest.

Truth is it is a fabricated myth - a downright lie.

The US is a lonely place made up of individuals at odds with their humanity. I am not saying that there are not good people there who will stand up for what is right.

I am saying that the aura of a people who have better and more engaged lives than the rest of us elsewhere is a purposeful fabrication meant to obscure the meaninglessness of existing inside a vacuous capitalized life.

It is hardly surprising then that a former CIA operative would skirt the larger disease to point at mere symptoms while still applauding the supposed meritocratic character of American life and its contrived democracy.

For him it would be unthinkable to trace the genocide of Indians and the holocaust of slavery to explain the system of racism that values everything in American life. He would not be thinking that his white ass cannot see why Muslims are primarily the victims of racism.

Muslims do not belong in the US not because of Islamophobia but because of racism. Islamophobia is an unwieldy term that soon runs out of usefulness when we try to explain why brown/black skin people who are not Muslims are targeted nonetheless.

Does anyone really think that those Marines pissed on dead Afghan bodies because they were Muslim?

The average American knows nothing about Muslims or Islam. Their reaction to a Muslim threat is merely a refashioning of the same kind of racist impulse that led to the near-extermination of Indians and centuries of slavery and Jim Crow.

How many schools in Arizona do you think teach Islamic Studies to the general population? If there was such a thing the legislators would extend the ban on Chicano/Mexican American Studies to incorporate a banning of the Qur'an in public schools too.

The US is a racist state and its problems are about racism - the rest is just symptomatic.

If Al Jazeera is even serious about offering an alternative to the corporatized news system it would not posture the pandering drivel of Robert Grenier as news analysis?

I am, however, afraid that Al Jazeera could care less as it machines itself into a greater media foothold in the US.

Onward!

The Palestinian Children – Alone and Bewildered – in Israel's Al Jalame Jail

2012-01-23T14:40:00.000+02:00

The Guardian (UK)
Harriet Sherwood
January 22, 2012

Between 500 and 700 Palestinian children are arrested by Israeli soldiers each year, mostly accused of throwing stones. Since 2008, Defence for Children International (DCI) has collected sworn testimonies from 426 minors detained in Israel's military justice system.

Their statements show a pattern of night-time arrests, hands bound with plastic ties, blindfolding, physical and verbal abuse, and threats. About 9% of all those giving affidavits say they were kept in solitary confinement, although there has been a marked increase to 22% in the past six months.

Few parents are told where their children have been taken. Minors are rarely questioned in the presence of a parent, and rarely see a lawyer before or during initial interrogation. Most are detained inside Israel, making family visits very difficult.

Human rights organisations say these patterns of treatment – which are corroborated by a separate study, No Minor Matter, conducted by an Israeli group, B'Tselem – violate the international convention on the rights of the child, which Israel has ratified, and the fourth Geneva convention.

Most children maintain they are innocent of the crimes of which they are accused, despite confessions and guilty pleas, said Gerard Horton of DCI. But, he added, guilt or innocence was not an issue with regard to their treatment.

"We're not saying offences aren't committed – we're saying children have legal rights. Regardless of what they're accused of, they should not be arrested in the middle of the night in terrifying raids, they should not be painfully tied up and blindfolded sometimes for hours on end, they should be informed of the right to silence and they should be entitled to have a parent present during questioning."

Read the rest of the article here.

Comment: The Deputy Prime Minister of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, and four others have just been charged by the ICC for crimes against humanity.

Is it just me or do others wonder why Israel escapes the same kind of international scrutiny?

Of course I know that Israel and its partner in human rights crimes, the US, have not signed the Rome Statute that would give the ICC jurisdiction over its inhumane treatment of Palestinians.

Still, it just seems so whack that most of what the ICC does is focused on African states - kinda like crimes against humanity are a black thing when the US and Israel are worse by any measure.

And, I am not even making a judgment about the culpability of Kenyatta and his cronies during the civil war that left 1200 Kenyans dead in 2007.

I guess in Orwellian terms some are more equal, or rather capable/culpable of human rights violations, than others.

Onward!

John Pilger: The World War on Democracy

2012-01-20T10:50:00.005+02:00

JohnPilger.com
January 19, 2012.

Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise. My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia. “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lizette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there. Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit. The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette’s youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime -- in exchange for a $14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine -- was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic façade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening”. Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the US has:

*Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.
*Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.
*Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
*Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
*Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism -- but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries”, wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things ...
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust …

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: the Guardian. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed ...” The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia. Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States. There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities”. In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill. At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London. “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” said Lisette. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

*****

Comment: John Pilger keeps it real once again; simply a brilliant sweeping analysis that is detailed and nuanced. There should be more Pilgers everywhere contesting the disease of empire and its attachments.

The irony of Obama was that he was feted and elected because his supporters believed he would defend democracy from the threat of neo-cons only to beat them at their own disastrous game.

The problem is Obama and the elite establishment that owns him (even created him). But the bigger problem is the inability of liberalism to envision a world beyond its dysfunctional marriage to undemocratic capitalism.

Obama is merely a symptom of a larger disease and it matters little that he is black or white, liberal or conservative - the rot lies inside the idea of elite managerial liberalism and its inherent contradictions (greed to be exact).

Pilger's article fills in the details of the brutality of liberal machining; it's selective emphasis on freedom and liberty on the one hand and the genocidal erasure of a people like the Chagos islanders, among others, on the other hand.

It is a story as old as European colonialism itself, if not older. While elite Europeans struggled to make sense of man's nature and the problems associated with free will and justice they had millions of black and brown bodies shackled to the business of developing capitalism.

How many million African slaves died in the processes of developing the ideas of western liberty and freedom? UNESCO puts the number of enslaved Africans into the Americas at 12 million?

It is not even clear whether that number accounts for the millions who died in the 'middle passage'.

How many indigenous peoples were slaughtered to make way for the blatant thievery of liberal capitalism?

It is mind-boggling to think that so many many millions of people died to construct this world system that has 'refined' itself to kill even more black and brown bodies as it works out its ideological kinks.

And at its ideological base, the impetus and momentum is still about greed and made worse by the inability to envision a balanced world.

How much different is the world we live in now from the times when millions of slaves and indigenous peoples were being massacred by developers? Is the wars in the so called 'middle east' and now east Africa (again) not about the same pathological need to mine for development?

Does anyone really believe that Gadaffi was murdered to free impoverished Libyans? Or that the looming war with Iran is about liberty and freedom?

Here in rainbow delusion the potbellied ruling class are paying close attention, and in keeping with their comprador politics they are working hard to emulate their liberal masters.

And we are not free.

Onward!

Welcome to the World’s First Bunker State: Room for Jews only in Israel’s "villa in the jungle"

2012-01-19T15:20:00.001+02:00

Dissident Voice
Jonathan Cook
January 18, 2012.

The wheel is turning full circle. Last week the Israeli parliament updated a 59-year-old law originally intended to prevent hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees from returning to the homes and lands from which they had been expelled as Israel was established.

The purpose of the draconian 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law was to lock up any Palestinian who managed to slip past the snipers guarding the new state’s borders. Israel believed only savage punishment and deterrence could ensure it maintained the overwhelming Jewish majority it had recently created through a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Fast-forward six decades and Israel is relying on the infiltration law again, this time to prevent a supposedly new threat to its existence: the arrival each year of several thousand desperate African asylum seekers.

As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalised these new refugees — in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.

Israel’s intention is apparently to put as many of these refugees behind bars as possible, and dissuade others from following in their footsteps.

To cope, officials have approved the building of an enormous detention camp, operated by Israel’s prison service, to contain 10,000 of these unwelcome arrivals. That will make it the largest holding facility of its kind in the world — according to Amnesty International, it will be three times bigger than the next largest, in the much more populous, and divine retribution-loving, US state of Texas.

Israeli critics of the law fear their country is failing in its moral duty to help those fleeing persecution, thereby betraying the Jewish people’s own experiences of suffering and oppression. But the Israeli government and the large majority of legislators who backed the law — like their predecessors in the 1950s — have drawn a very different conclusion from history.

The new infiltration law is the latest in a set of policies fortifying Israel’s status as the world’s first “bunker state” — and one designed to be as ethnically pure as possible. The concept was expressed most famously by an earlier prime minister, Ehud Barak, now the defence minister, who called Israel “a villa in the jungle”, relegating the country’s neighbours to the status of wild animals.

Barak and his successors have been turning this metaphor into a physical reality, slowly sealing off their state from the rest of the region at astronomical cost, much of it subsidised by US taxpayers. Their ultimate goal is to make Israel so impervious to outside influence that no concessions for peace, such as agreeing to a Palestinian state, need ever be made with the “beasts” around them.

The most tangible expression of this mentality has been a frenzy of wall-building. The best-known are those erected around the Palestinian territories: first Gaza, then the areas of the West Bank Israel is not intending to annex – or, at least, not yet.

The northern border is already one of the most heavily militarised in the world — as Lebanese and Syrian protesters found to great cost last summer when dozens were shot dead and wounded as they approached or stormed the fences there. And Israel has a proposal in the drawer for another wall along the border with Jordan, much of which is already mined.

The only remaining border, the 260km one with Egypt, is currently being closed with another gargantuan wall. The plans were agreed before last year’s Arab revolutions but have gained fresh impetus with the overthrow of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Israel is not only well advanced on the walls of the bunker; it is also working round the clock on the roof. It has three missile-defence systems in various stages of development, including the revealingly named “Iron Dome”, as well as US Patriot batteries stationed on its soil. The interception systems are supposed to neutralise any combination of short and long-range missile attacks Israel’s neighbours might launch.

But there is a flaw in the design of this shelter, one that is apparent even to its architects. Israel is sealing itself in with some of the very “animals” the villa is supposed to exclude: not only the African refugees, but also 1.5 million “Israeli Arabs”, descendants of the small number of Palestinians who avoided expulsion in 1948.

This has been the chief motive for the steady stream of anti-democratic measures by the government and parliament that is rapidly turning into a torrent. It is also the reason for the Israeli leadership’s new-found demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel’s Jewishness; its obsessions with loyalty; and the growing appeal of population exchange schemes.

In the face of the legislative assault, Israel’s Supreme Court has grown ever more complicit. Last week, it sullied its reputation by upholding a law that tears apart families by denying tens of thousands of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship the right to live with their Palestinian spouse in Israel — “ethnic cleansing” by other means, as leading Israeli commentator Gideon Levy noted.

Back in the early 1950s, the Israeli army shot dead thousands of unarmed Palestinians as they tried to reclaim property that had been stolen from them. These many years later, Israel appears no less determined to keep non-Jews out of its precious villa.

The bunker state is almost finished, and with it the dream of Israel’s founders is about to be realised.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

*****

Comment: The imagery of a bunker in this article reminds me of the 'circling of the wagons' by Boer insurgents in the era before apartheid.

The circle was at first a defense strategy. It worked to some extent but the extension of the wagon circle as political metaphor into the ideology and practice of apartheid was fatally flawed.

The lesson that Israel will learn over time is that a bunker just like a circle of wagons cannot forever preserve illegitimate regimes.

To re-imagine Israel there will need to be radical leadership that will dismantle its preoccupation with surviving at all costs. To do this the ideology of Zionism must be abandoned. There cannot be peace in Israel until all its peoples, Jews and Palestinians alike, are accorded equal legitimacy to co-exist peacefully.

That progressive vision is, however, severely lacking. In the last couple of days Israeli forces have again struck out at Gaza killing more innocent civilians.

No bunker and no ideology can save Israel from the inevitable crumbling that comes with this kind of fascist abuse. Zionism, as distinct from Judaism, is akin to fascism in much the same way that apartheid was.

In the end, the white regime had no-where to run. Apartheid could have been so much less if in the 1950s the ideology of apartheid was just abandoned in favor of democratic inequality.

It took decades more to force the apartheid regime to its senses. The same is unfolding in Israel.

What strikes me is that Israel today feels/looks a lot like South Africa in the declining years of white supremacy. By the mid-1980s the writing was on the wall, so to speak, even though the apartheid regime was still a fierce military force in the region.

But military force cannot withstand the onslaught of the struggle toward freedom; Israel should be paying close attention to the manner that apartheid unraveled in South Africa.

No bunker can save Israel from the inevitable. Freedom for Palestinians is inevitable. Israel must embrace this inevitability for its own sake.

Onward!

Johan Kotzé not a monster - Tutu

2012-01-18T17:23:00.000+02:00

News24
January 18, 2012.

Cape Town - Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has called on the media and public to stop calling Limpopo rape and murder accused Johan Kotzé the "Modimolle monster", saying that despite his alleged crimes, he is still a child of God.

Kotzé is accused of hiring three men to gang-rape and mutilate his estranged wife, and of killing her 19-year-old son.

Tutu wrote a letter to The Star, in which he condemned what had happened, but also expressed his concern that the widespread outrage over Kotzé's alleged actions had led to him being dubbed a monster.

'Capacity to become a saint'

"He may indeed be guilty of inhuman, ghastly and monstrous deeds, but he is not a monster. We are actually letting him off lightly by calling him a monster because monsters have no moral sense of right and wrong - and therefore cannot be held morally culpable, cannot be regarded as morally blameworthy," Tutu wrote.

He added that Kotzé "remains a child of God with the capacity to become a saint. This may shock some of us".

"We should condemn ghastly acts of awful cruelty but we must, as they say, hate the sin and love the sinner, or hope that he may change for the better."

He said this was in many ways the basis of the Truth and Reconciliation process.

"We heard bloodcurdling stories of how people had been murdered brutally and yet we saw some extraordinary scenes of magnanimity when perpetrator and victim or relative of victim embraced publicly.

"If it were true that once a murderer always a murderer, then we should have had to shut up shop straightaway. But we believed then, and I hope we still do, that it was possible for people to change for the better, that the worst criminal could become a good and virtuous person."

Appalled

Tutu was not defending Kotzé's alleged acts, saying decent people are rightly appalled at what had happened, and that it was quite right to condemn the "dastardly, barbaric and monstrous" deeds.

He expressed his deep sympathy and condolences to Kotzé's estranged wife and pleaded that people stop calling him a monster.

However, The Star quoted criminologist Dr Jackie de Wet, from the University of Fort Hare, as saying that the chances of someone like Kotzé being rehabilitated and becoming a good and virtuous person - if he did indeed commit the crimes he is charged with - are "very, very slim, almost minuscule".

ANC Women's League protesters outside the Modimolle Magistrate's Court during his appearance last Friday dubbed him a monster. "No human being can do such a thing," said ANCWL Waterberg treasurer Joy Matshoge.

*****

Comment: On the right side of your screen I have a quote by Tutu that says "we live in a moral universe". I must admit that over the years that the quote has appeared here I have come to appreciate some what the Arch intends but not nearly enough.

I think to understand the point of view that Tutu is developing in his letter about Johan Kotzé one must understand the notion of forgiveness through testimony as found in Christian theology.

To a large extent this notion of forgiveness is somewhat re-fashioned in Islam with a sterner view of how forgiveness is approached. The Qur'an says "God is most gracious and most merciful" indicating repeatedly that the final judgment of forgiveness is the sole province of God. But Muslims are also commanded to forgive if someone sincerely apologizes and does so in keeping with Qur'anic injunctions.

Despite the approach, the notion of forgiveness is consistent in the three Abrahamic faiths; God judges and forgiveness is dependent on repentance.

This injunction in my thinking is not about morals because God is above morality. What then is the substance of morality? How do we become moral? And, what are moral acts as opposed to immoral acts where sin is expressly not mentioned or motioned.

In the latter question I wonder mostly if someone who thinks that Johan Kotzé should be hung for his alleged crimes would be expressly immoral. Or, if someone is just indifferent about the human condition does it make that person amoral?

What would Tutu's moral universe mean for people outside of the Abrahamic faiths? Are Buddhists and Taoists similarly concerned with living in accordance to morals?

I ask these questions even as I begin fashioning an argument for a chapter I am working on that in part focuses on the notion of the nation as a moral community.

I have glossed over the logical sequences of how we arrive at a nation and what it means to be a moral nation but my point is about imbuing the nation with a moral character.

Some might argue Machiavelli would be laughing his ass off at me for even thinking that politics can be fashioned to be anything but raw interests and more so, interest that coalesce around power.

But such a reading is a thin understanding of Machiavelli and it probably owes its distortion to latter day realists who want to use his thinking to remove ideals and ethics from political interests.

My reading of Machiavelli is that he privileged the notion of interests where it could be determined as positive - in other words the Prince is supposed to secure known interests that are good/beneficial.

So, what if morality and ethics and forgiveness are indeed known/good interests that secure the power of the state? Would it then not be logical for the Prince to guard and expand these interests?

If the state is fashioned to be a moral arbiter then the interest of the Prince would be concerned with morals, no?

Still, the question of what is meant by moral versus immoral remains a matter of speculation unless you enter into the framed thinking of Tutu. It is clear to see what he means by morals in the case of Johan Kotzé.

It is not for the press and the many many folks who sit around to judge this man as a "monster" devoid of good and the ability to repent because Tutu's moral universe is defined by the morality of redemption.

Step outside of that construct and the issue of morality becomes unclear again. How would Zoroastrianism - another monotheistic religion - view the dastardly acts of Johan Kotzé, for example?

As I read Tutu's letter it dawned on me that he has made a classical mistake in reasoning. It is impossible to know whether a "monster" is moral or amoral since there is no such thing as a "monster".

We cannot just assume, as I expect most do, that animals are closest to what we mean when we point to a monster.

Are we sure that animals do not have a sense of morality or at the very least they act in terms of what Machiavelli would consider right action?

I have never come across a dog or cat, for example, that gets up in the morning with the express intention of just f*cking up other dogs and cats for no other reason other than being an immoral bad ass or "monster".

Even animals reason beyond such stupidity it would seem. So why would they even need to be moral or immoral?

My point is that the issue of morality is a construction that must be interpreted and contextualized by interests.

If you remove the relationship to God or organized religion at the very least then the dog/cat who just goes about its business may in fact be described as moral. What about the female dog who will allow other puppies from another female to suckle? Is that a moral act?

But even where morals are connected to God or organized religion the judgment of what is moral or immoral is hardly a given.

Very few Americans will call Geroge W. Bush and Barack Obama murderous immoral monsters and they are responsible for the death of many many more people than Johan Kotzé will ever be able to kill with his bare hands.

Yet some of the very same people who extol the virtues of forgiveness and redemption in religion see the wars "over there" as moral crusades. In fact this coming election in the US will be dramatized by those who think Jesus has endowed them with the right to make this judgment.

Are these people monsters or moral Christians or amoral animals?

It depends on where you are standing I suppose - I know the relativist position is usually a cop-out but what else is there when you make a detached judgment on morality.

For me, morals are constructions and they must be understood within the context they are framed. Tutu is moralizing from the point of view of a Christian and his reasoning is relative to that.

In the end the courts may declare a mistrial in this case because Johan Kotzé is found to be legally insane and incapable of knowing what he was doing and its consequences.

The issue of his morality won't fade away even if this is the case. But we should not confuse its persistence with the insistence that morality in any framed context tells us what is universally right and what is wrong.

It really depends on where you stand - and how you frame the notion of morals and morality.

Onward!

The Next Inquisition: Surprise, Fear and Fanaticism in Tucson's Ethnic Studies War

2012-01-17T19:22:00.001+02:00

CommonDreams.org
Re-posted from WordStrike
January 17, 2012.

One of the little pleasures I have in life is waiting for the Saturday mail to bring The New Yorker to my door. Reading the magazine gives me a couple hours of escape; it is well-written and I can never predict the direction its conversations will take.

For instance, this week (Jan 16, 2012) the Inquiring Minds section reviews “The Spanish Inquisition.” The article is introduced by a Monty Python sketch where one of the members of the group, Michael Palin, announces “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

The author Adam Gopnik explores the history of the institution, relating the lessons to today; taking it from “Torquemada[i] to Dick Cheney, and from Guantánamo to Rome,” asking where were the others “when Giordano Bruno is burned to death…”[ii]

The theme of the Gopnik piece is that society always looks to the past for symbols of cruelty which inevitably are based on “surprise, fear…and fanatical devotion.” The gestapo, the K.G.B., the Stasi share similar profiles. Gopnik includes Guantánamo and the “more than twelve hundred government organizations [in the U.S. that] focus on national-security concerns…they have a forebear in Torquemada and the men in the red hats.” Like in the past, today’s torturers always act with surprise, fear and fanaticism, covering their actions with excuses of regret and necessity.

Gopnik is not an apologist for the Inquisition, commenting on the work of a revisionist historian, he writes, “his mordant point is not so much that the Inquisition doesn’t deserve its reputation for cruelty as that its victims don’t deserve theirs for moral courage.” There is always complicity with cruelty in the name orthodoxy such as in the case of Arizona.

Anti-Semitism, racism, and fanatical nationalism are imbedded in the oppressors’ culture. “The Spanish Inquisition didn’t have any real interest in saving the Jews’ soul; they just wanted their houses and their money.” Thus, the purpose of the Inquisition was not to erase Jewish identity (or that of the Moslems) but to remove them as competitors.

This treachery can be compared to the abolishment of the Mexican Studies program in Tucson – civic leaders really don’t care if Mexicans go to school, just as long as they keep on making money off them and they learn what they want them to learn. Anti-Mexican feelings, racism and fanatical nationalism are imbedded in Tucson’s Torquemada culture. The truth be told, Latino identity a barrier to the inquisitors ends.

Acts of surprise, fear and fanaticism are hidden under the cover of regret and necessity. “The point of an inquisition is to reduce its victims to abstractions, and abandoning the effort to call their pain back to particular life…” Bruno’s sin was that he included a plurality of worlds with equal weight.

Even to this day the Pope says he is sorry that the Inquisition occurred. That is not acceptable to critics who want the Pope to say he is ashamed. Likewise it is not enough for society to say that it is sorry for slavery, and the lynching of blacks, browns and Asians. It is not enough to be sorry for keeping blacks and browns uneducated, society should be ashamed of it, just the same as Americans should be ashamed of Abu Ghraib, the pissing on the bodies of dead soldiers, the abolishment of the Tucson Mexican American Studies program, and the censorship of books.

In typical Torquemada fashion Tucson Unified School District inquisitors, Mark Stegeman, Michael Hicks, Miguel Cuevas and Alexandre Borges Sugiyama abolished the district’s highly successful Mexican American Studies program at the direction of the lord inquisitors in Phoenix. Now they are banning books.

Among the censored books are Leslie Marmon Silko, Rethinking Columbus, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Rodolfo Acuña's Occupied America, Arturo Rosales' Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's, Critical Race Theory, in addition to a dozen other books.

Thus far, there has been no comment from the American Civil Liberties Union or progressives in the United States. Apparently they do not see the parallel in what is happening in Tucson, and what happened in South Africa under apartheid, the burning of the books by the Spaniards in Middle America, or, for that matter, Germany in the1920s and 30s.

Censorship is criminal. We live in a world of knowledge; books and education give us access to that knowledge; if we are deprived of it, the inquisitors deny us the right to make rational choices.

Arizona schools have abandoned its mission to educate students; they have intentionally denied Mexican American students access to knowledge. Consequently the Arizona bureaucracy has deliberately kept them in the fields, the mines and the prisons, hoping to deny them alternatives.

The purpose of critical thinking is to give students alternatives and to dispel myths and repel blind allegiance to those who deny them alternatives.

According to the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “Censorship reflects society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

The motivation of the TUSD Trustees cannot be explained in terms of greed alone. It cannot be rationalized by culture alone. Money and personal gain play a role. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but it’s there.

Of the Tucson gaggle the only honest one is Hicks, who is openly a racist and limited intelligence. The failed scholar Stegeman is stuck on the promotion ladder. He’ll never make it to full professor without support of politicos. Sugiyama is a bad scholar and a worse teacher; his only chance for a full time position is to sell his posterior. The pitiful Cuevas just wants acceptance from rich white people in the city.

Monty Python and others can laugh at the fanaticism of the past; however, it is hard to laugh at today’s inquisitors. It is easier to turn the other way, La zorra nunca se ve la cola (The Skunk Doesn’t See Its Tail).

So, what can we do? We have no choice but to “Fight Back!”

[i] Tomás de Torquemada was the first Grand Inquisitor of Spain, appointed by the pope in 1483.
[ii] Giordano Bruno was an Italian 16th century Dominican friar who the Roman Inquisition found guilty of heresy for writing that the sun was not only the center of the universe but a star in a universe of other inhabited planets. Bruno was burnt at the stake.

Rodolfo Acuña is one of the pioneers of the ethnic studies movement and the author of Occupied America: A History of Chicanos.

*****

Comment: Ouch that was one hard kick Acuña just attached to the complicit ass of the Tucson Unified School District.

It is terrible that a School District and state can effectively conspire to erase a people and its history. How is banning books even constitutional in the US with its touted first amendment protection of the right to free speech?

Are books not considered free speech where such books do not incite hate or instigate/promote violence?

At the very least there should be respect for putting ideas on the table, no? I mean the very idea of an education is to provide access to a range of ideas and open up avenues for students to ask questions as they learn and add to our knowledge base.

How does banning books in a democracy meet the needs of students? Who in a democracy benefits from banning or hiding information?

In South Africa we don't ban books or anything anymore. We just make access to critical thinking and material close to impossible.

Even Aunt Jemima (Oprah) commented this week that education standards in South Africa are too low.

Do you know that a South African student can go through an entire undergraduate degree and not even study one course on South African history and politics?

You should also know that it is entirely possible to get a degree in political science and barely study African political thought too.

We are a scarily stupid nation even without banning books. This week our potbellied leaders advised our high school graduates to become entrepreneurs because there are no jobs for them in South Africa - true story.

The dumbing down of South Africa is in full swing and it is absolutely telling if you pay attention to what is postured as intellectual debates here.

Too many folks confuse consumer thoughts about markets and capitalization with intellectual ideas. In effect South Africa is producing capitalist clones/drones who know a lot about name-brands and close to nothing else.

The inspirational dictum by René Descartes that holds "I think therefore I am" has been replaced by the more apt and downright depressing descriptor, I consume therefore I exist.

At the very least in Arizona and across the US there are committed thinkers ready to do battle with those who seek to erase diversity and difference.

Here our supposed thinkers are bought and paid for - most of them anyway.

When a society or nation gives up on pursuing ideas it needs not fear death because it is dead already.

Onward!

For Too Many African-Americans, Prison is a Legacy Passed from Father to Son

2012-01-16T18:50:00.000+02:00

The Guardian (UK)
Gary Younge
January 16, 2012.

Today is Martin Luther King Day. But with more African-American men facing jail than were enslaved in 1850, there is little to celebrate

According to Jeffrey Gamble, the luckiest day of his life was when his car hit the kerb at the corner of Jefferson and National in Los Angeles while he was drunk-driving. It flew over a fence, falling 80ft into a creek below, leaving him with a broken neck and paralysed. "If I hadn't had that accident, I would be dead – or in jail for the rest of my life, just like my brothers," says Gamble, 47. Prison, for the Gambles, is as common a destination as university might be for a middle-class family. His two brothers are both in jail. Ricky, who was convicted for burglary and assault with a firearm under the three strikes law, is in for 110 years to life. Mike got life without parole for the murder of a local councillor. His father was in jail for a series of alcohol-related offences. His son, Khalif, has also been in jail for dealing drugs and possession.

"It's not just that we didn't fear jail," says Jeffrey, who now uses his experience to warn youngsters away from gangs and prison. "It was like a rite of passage. You needed to go to jail so you could have that badge of honour." Three generations of African-American men enmeshed in the criminal justice system. A legacy of incarceration passed from father to son. A cycle that just won't break.

When Martin Luther King, whose birthday is marked across the United States on Monday with a national holiday, adopted Mahatma Gandhi's call to "fill the jails" 50 years ago, he didn't mean this. Back then, the aim was to delegitimise the prevailing power structure by removing the stigma from protesting against unjust laws. Today, imprisonment is not an act of resistance but a fact of life. It is both the product and cause of social collapse in many black communities, where full jails do not challenge racial inequalities but sustain them.

For decades the issue never entered mainstream debate unless an increasingly desperate right wing decided to ramp up its race-baiting rhetoric. (The man who delivered the racist Willie Horton ad for George Bush Snr's campaign in 1988 now works for Team Romney). On a local level it is back on the agenda because the states simply cannot afford it: California spends $47,102 per inmate per year. It is a national disgrace. The mass incarceration of African-Americans is the civil rights issue of the day. The statistics are horrific.

One in three African-American boys born in 2001 stands a lifetime risk of going to jail, according to the American Leadership Forum. In 2007, one in every 15 black children had a parent in prison. According to Ohio State University law professor and author Michelle Alexander, there are more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole in the US now than there were enslaved in 1850. Alexander also calculates that because felons lose the right to vote, more African-American men were disenfranchised in 2004 than in 1870, the year male franchise was secured. There are now roughly the same number of black men in American prisons as the populations of Glasgow and Derby combined. Black women are seven times more likely than white women to be in prison. Almost one in 10 young black men are behind bars.

Exclusion does not end with prison but begins there. In many states, felons lose the right to vote and sit on juries for ever. Sometimes conviction isn't even necessary, arrest is enough. Whether you are eventually found guilty or not, the fact you have been arrested can be enough to thwart your chance of getting a job or housing.

Broadly speaking, there are two opinions about how so many African-Americans could have ended up in this situation. The first is that black people are genetically pathological; the second is that societal factors are at play. For those who believe the former, turn the page. There are other papers for you and other days. The very fact that King's birthday is commemorated indicates that such bigotry is no longer officially accepted.

Like many Conservatives, Mike Reynolds, who launched California's three strikes initiative after his daughter was murdered by convicted felons, believes the key societal factor is an over-generous welfare system that encourages black women to have children and black men to abscond. In the case of the Gambles, nothing could be further from the truth. Jeffrey's mother says she had no idea he was involved in crime from the age of eight because she was holding down two jobs.

Indeed, the extent to which the problem is economic means that for most of those who end up in jail it's not too much welfare, but too few jobs. Black unemployment currently stands at almost 16%. For young black men between the ages of 16 and 19 (those at risk of entering the criminal justice system) it is almost 50%. "In the past in the civil rights movement, we have been dealing with segregation and all of its humiliation; we've been dealing with the political problem of the denial of the right to vote," King said, just 10 days before his death. "I think it is absolutely necessary now to deal massively and militantly with the economic problem." But that shift in emphasis from race to class demanded allies who were too few, and too weak.

As Jeffrey saw it when he was growing up, he had two choices: a long life scraping by on the minimum wage, if he was lucky, or a shorter one on the streets that promised fast money and either death or prison. He grew up in the shadow of the university of southern California, but it might as well have been a foreign country: "The only thing we went to USC for was to break into their cars when there was a game on, and sell weed," says Jeffrey.Khalif's choices are not much different. He wants to be a truck driver. But with a criminal record, work is as hard to come by as the $500 he needs to enrol in a driving course. To escape the lure of crime, he moved 70 miles away to Lancaster, where he stands on the street for five hours a day earning the minimum wage for holding up a sign directing hopeful house buyers. "It's a struggle," he says. "But it's better to go that way than the wrong way."

Each of the Gambles must, and does, take personal responsibility for the decisions they make; but society must answer for the options that were available to them and others. As King wrote in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people."

*****

Comment: Excellent article. Troubling statistics.

One statistic that is not mentioned is that there are more black men in the prison system, including those awaiting trial, than there are black men in colleges and universities across the US.

The racial character of the prison system in the US is unmistakable even though many folks wrongly assume that those who are in prison are there because they commit crimes. It is more complex than that. The racialization of crime is unmistakable. Blacks are more likely to be policed and they are more likely to be incarcerated with longer prison sentences than whites.

In effect, the racialization of crime in the US feeds the prison-industrial complex. States are paid federal dollars for the number of prisoners they have. Prisons create jobs and prisoners are the currency.

There should be little irony in the realization that the prison system trades on the skins of black and brown folks - in a manner reminiscent of the institution of slavery.

I found this statistical graph interesting:

Linn Washington Jr used this graph to explain that "America incarcerates vastly more blacks, and Latinos, than whites, and the Drug 'War' is the prime reason."

Add to that racialized sentencing discrepancies and you can account for why so many black men serve longer periods in prison than white men, particularly middle class white men.

There are, for example, harsher penalties for being caught in possession of crack cocaine and its derivatives than powdered cocaine. The former is more likely to be in the possession of poor black/brown men and women. The latter is more likely to be in the possession of wealthier whites.

The prison-industrial complex is fast becoming one of the most profitable enterprises in the US. So profitable that it is being privatized at an alarming rate in the US and other white settler states like Australia.

This means that the need to keep prisons full of black and brown and poor folks will never just fade away.

In the process of locking up large proportions of black, brown, and poor, the US secures the privileges of whiteness - particularly rich white elites who profit off racialised oppression much like their ancestors did during slavery and Jim Crow.

And in the end, being imprisoned means these folks loose their right to vote and are systematically disenfranchised and made non-existent inside the politics of whiteness.

How far has the US really advanced the cause of universal freedom, liberty, and equality for all?

Onward!

C'mon Rafa!

2012-01-16T13:53:00.000+02:00

GAME ON: Rafael Nadal of Spain prepares to serve in the late afternoon

light during his first round match against Alex Kuznetsov of the US at the

Australian Open tennis championship in Melbourne. (Rick Rycroft, AP)

Picture Credit

La Vida Loca y Motocicletas

2012-01-15T17:45:00.006+02:00

I got to ride a bike exactly like this one today and it was one helluva experience that still has parts of my soul buzzing with excitement levels I can't quite fully explain.

For the uninitiated or mostly uninterested, this is a 2008 Honda CBR1000rr. It is a race replica and the flagship of Honda sportbikes.

If you know anything about this model then you will know that Honda changed the bike dramatically in the visual and power departments after 2007.

In 2007 the exhaust pipes were under the seat and from 2008 onward they back where they belong on the right side of the bike.

It is rumored that the 2012 model, the first drastic change in specs since 2008, has more horsepower for those who need to see a little more past 300 kph, or 186 mph for you non metric types.

That is plenty fast dawg! Just ask Tony over there in Melbourne where tomorrow the Australian Open (or should I say Novak Djokovic show?) will start.

What the hell happened to Rafa Nadal? Ummm, OK I'm known to 'drift when I drive'.

My bikes over the years have all been standard old skool bonnies. But after today that may be over.

I hope when tomorrow morning comes around I will stop worrying about staying alive in this muy loco country and allow myself to dream past 300 kph again.

And if I can find the reason to believe that a Honda race replica in Kimberley may be freeing then it would have to be a brand new Repsol edition like this one.

Ai esto es exactamente lo que necesito realmente libre!

¡Adelante!

Picture Credit

Who’s afraid of “The Tempest”?

2012-01-14T11:41:00.002+02:00

Salon
Jeff Biggers
January 14, 2012.

Arizona's ban on ethnic studies proscribes Mexican-American history, local authors, even Shakespeare

As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”

Facing a multimillion-dollar penalty in state funds, the governing board of Tucson’s largest school district officially ended the 13-year-old program on Tuesday in an attempt to come into compliance with the controversial state ban on the teaching of ethnic studies.

The list of removed books includes the 20-year-old textbook “Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years,” which features an essay by Tucson author Leslie Silko. Recipient of a Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, Silko has been an outspoken supporter of the ethnic studies program.

“By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students,” said the book’s editor Bill Bigelow. “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”

Another notable text removed from Tucson’s classrooms is Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” In a meeting this week, administrators informed Mexican-American studies teachers to stay away from any units where “race, ethnicity and oppression are central themes,” including the teaching of Shakespeare’s classic in Mexican-American literature courses.

Other banned books include “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by famed Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos” by Rodolfo Acuña, two books often singled out by Arizona state superintendent of public instruction John Huppenthal, who campaigned in 2010 on the promise to “stop la raza.” Huppenthal, who once lectured state educators that he based his own school principles for children on corporate management schemes of the Fortune 500, compared Mexican-American studies to Hitler Jugend indoctrination last fall.

An independent audit of Tucson’s ethnic studies program commissioned by Huppenthal last summer actually praised “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos,” a 40-year-old textbook now in its seventh edition. According to the audit: “Occupied America: A History of Chicanos is an unbiased, factual textbook designed to accommodate the growing number of Mexican-American or Chicano History Courses. The auditing team refuted a number of allegations about the book, saying, ‘quotes have been taken out of context.’”

Freire’s work on pedagogy has been translated into numerous languages, and is taught at universities around the United States.

In a school district founded by a Mexican-American in which more than 60 percent of the students come from Mexican-American backgrounds, the administration also removed every textbook dealing with Mexican-American history, including “Chicano!: The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement” by Arturo Rosales, which features a biography of longtime Tucson educator Salomon Baldenegro. Other books removed from the school include “500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures,” by Elizabeth Martinez and the textbook “Critical Race Theory” by scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

“The only other time a book of mine was banned was in 1986, when the apartheid government in South Africa banned ‘Strangers in Their Own Country,’ a curriculum I’d written that included a speech by then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela,” said Bigelow, who serves as curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine, and co-directs the online Zinn Education Project. ”We know what the South African regime was afraid of. What is the Tucson school district afraid of?”

Jeff Biggers, the author most recently of "Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland," is currently at work on a new book on Arizona politics and history. More Jeff Biggers

*****

Comment: There is not enough aspirin in the whole state of Arizona to make my head feel better.

How is it possible to ban educational programs and books politically deemed to be unfriendly to white settlers by white settlers? This is dangerous territory.

What is next? Ban ethnic studies programs at universities ... oh yeah that is happening already.

A few years ago I was offered a position at a university in Arizona to teach Black/African Studies. I decided against it because I was looking for a more vibrant intellectual community.

Ummmm so I decided to accept a position at a so called university in Mafikeng, South Africa. Yeah I know I am a dumb ass but hey I would be unemployed now in Phoenix or close to it, no?

And if you even thinking I am ostensibly unemployed anyway in the rainbow delusion where 'intellectual' is not even a word then - ummmm, I am not feeling you.

I should give Bill Bigelow a call in Portland and update him on how books are 'banned' in the post-apartheid state. (See Bill Bigelow's post: "Rethinking Columbus Banned in Tucson")

In South Africa we do not have to literally ban books or intellectual ideas. No-one reads in South Africa. And when they do read it is not books.

It is estimated that less than one percent of South Africans buy books (and whites make up the largest proportion of those who buy books)! The rest of us are too busy being free to care about the substance of freedom.

Our president boasts a primary/grade school education and if you have ever watched him struggle to read a prepared speech you will know it shows.

Thankfully, literacy is not a requirement to be a politician in the post era. And you can be a professor in the employ of the government without being able to write a coherent paragraph in any language.

Inside such a system the government does not have to worry about the power of critical ideas. The only ideas that are floating through the halls of this government are the ones given to them by the apartheid regime and white liberals.

So no need to ban books and critical ideas here in the rainbow delusion ... illiteracy is freedom! Viva illiteracy. Viva Malema.

Oh yeah, if you have not read Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" - what you waiting for? ;0)

Onward! to more illiterate insanity.

Americans can Choose Between Being American Or Human but Not Both Presently

2012-01-14T09:57:00.003+02:00

Countercurrents.org
Jay Janson
January 13, 2012.

Many parents who wouldn't think of letting their children see the ... (marines urinating on dead Afghans) wouldn't think twice if their children joined the Marines.

Oh, but this is just a few bad apples in the military [as Sec. of State Hillary Clinton said]. This has been said so often and for so long that it's getting to the point where so many apples are bad it is hard to find a good one. You know, the good ones who just kill for the US government without killing civilians for sport, bombing wedding parties, carrying out battlefield executions, killing hundreds with cluster bombs, covering up botched raids, posing for pictures with their victims, murdering civilians, and keeping body parts of their victims.

Some day in the perhaps not so distant future, after Americans are humiliated by the defeat of their government's attempt to control and exploit every bit of the planet and its inhabitants, they will be finally free to rehabilitate themselves as the Germans did after suffering through their Nazi era.

US military history includes invading, occupying and usually bombing and often torturing (in chronological order), the nations of Native Americans, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Samoa, Japan (Commodore Perry) China, Nicaragua, China, Fiji, Uruguay, China, Panama, China, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Turkey, Paraguay, Angola, Columbia, Japan, Panama, Mexico, China, Colombia, Hawaiian Islands, Nicaragua, Formosa, Chile, Hawaii, Brazil, Nicaragua, China, Korea, Colombia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Nicaragua, Samoa, Philippines, China, Panama, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Honduras, Nicaragua, Honduras, China, Honduras, Nicaragua, China, Mexico, Haiti (for 19 years), China, Dominican Republic (for 8 years), Cuba (for 3 years), Mexico, Panama, Soviet Union (for 2 years), Panama, Nicaragua, China, Korea (3 years in the north 60 years troops garrisoned in the South), Thailand, Laos (23 years), Congo, Vietnam (30 years), Dominican Republic, Congo, Cambodia (5 years), Cambodia, Lebanon, Iran (8 year collaboration with Iraq invasion), Zaire, Iran, El Salvador, Libya, Lebanon, Honduras, Chad, Grenada, Libya, Bolivia, Libya, Panama, Colombia, Philippines, Panama, Iraq, Zaire, Kuwait, Iraq, Somalia, Iraq, Macedonia (all listed DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY -- NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND) and going on from 1993, Serbia, Kosovo, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya. [This list does not include a number twice as great of US military incursions solely to protect Americans and their property, nor laudable protective occupations of nations threatened with Nazi invasion.]

But, more importantly, sadly and unfortunately for a clear picture of a consistently inhumane US foreign policy, this official list does not include CIA sponsored violence fomenting the overthrow of governments all around the world unfavorable to unjust and manipulative private US investments, and nefarious activity within almost every single nation on earth arranging the marginalization of uncooperative patriot leaders.

With the now overwhelming control of news and information right down into primary schools by a Western, largely white, consensus of investors, even when horrific facts of US crimes against humanity come to light, such desperately needed info is media managed into insignificance for a psyop bombarded TV watching America public as well as for the great population watching via satellite transmission in all industrialized commercialized and materialist programed societies abroad.

Deeply buried in the tangle of distracting spectacular entertainment is the fact that most of America's wealthy families backed, invested in and collaborated with Adolph Hitler, almost every major corporation functioning right up to, and some even during, the German war in Europe; that during the US participation in WW II, a million German and Japanese homes were targeted with fire-bombs, atom bombs dropped on women and children, and since the war threats to nuclear bomb again elsewhere made on fourteen occasions. Rationalized or just shrugged off are its genocidal slave trade and slavery, its Wounded Knee, No Gun Ri, Sinchon, My Lai, Fallujah style masscres over America's two-hundred and twelve years short history; its Guantanamo, its Abu Ghraib, its frantic terrorism by its military and now unmanned drones in the poor former colonial world, its super in size, unequaled in history, investment in production and distribution of weapons of mass distruction; its placement of US military bases to cover the globe into protect those, what Martin Luther King Jr. called, "unjust predatory investments" creating and sustaining wars for their maintenance; its preparations for a world war of incrementally greater profits than the previous ones; its threat through further 'development' and mindless material progress to the very physical survival of the planet and its species.

The advice of the flower children of the 60s, to "just drop out" of US imperialism, was similar to that of Jack Keroac of the Dharma bums of the earlier 'Beat Generation', so influenced by black jazz musician greats, seemed to echo Jack London and Walt Whitman's call to an reappreciation of nature and humanity 'on the road' in true individual freedom to avoid spiritual death in stifling conformity to an inculcated ideal of desperate greed.

Of course a similar case can me made for citizens of European empires having to choose to be on the side of humanity or on the side of an empire persecuting humanity for plunder, such as, especially, the British and French so recently challenged witnessing their empires bomb wealthy Libya into submission to their proxy armed insurgents, who were also those of the US, the EU and the international community of nations, (read international community of predatory investors), currently focused on destroying the intolerable independence of Syria.

Americans like Tom Pain, Eugene Debs, W.E.B. Debois, Helen Keller, Paul Robeson, and to a great extent Thomas Jefferson refused to choose and sought to fight with an intense aim to change their US into something more intelligent, more sane, more moral and acceptable. They fought surrounding corruption, amorality and misanthropic materialism in the tradition of the anarchist heroes of Europe: Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, E. F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich in the Americas, just as those rebels of the ancient world, Zeno, Lao Tzu, Mo Ti, Sidhartha Gautama (Buddha), and Jesus fought against stultifying and imprisoning imperial dictatorships of body and mind.

Shall Americans choose between sanity or empire, or choose not to choose but to change America?

Or remain bent out of shape, their backs twisted.

Jay Janson, 80, is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer.

*****

Comment: What's left to say?

Nonetheless, I don't expect too many Americans are even listening.

Onward!

US Marines Accused of War Crimes

2012-01-12T10:52:00.013+02:00

The Guardian (UK)
Chris McGreal
January 12, 2012.

Video posted anonymously on YouTube claims to show American troops in Afghanistan urinating on dead bodies

US forces in Afghanistan are facing fresh accusations of war crimes after film emerged of American marines urinating on dead bodies and laughing.

The US military command in Kabul, which was severely embarrassed last year by revelations that Americans soldiers were running a "kill squad" murdering Afghan civilians, said it would investigate the undated video, and that if it proved to be authentic, desecration of corpses would be regarded as a serious crime. Despoiling of the dead is illegal under the Geneva conventions as well as under US military law.

In the graphic short video, four soldiers in combat gear and carrying weapons are seen acting in unison as they urinate on three bloodied corpses. One of the soldiers sighs with relief, another says "yeah" and a third laughs. One remarks: "Have a great day, buddy". Another says: "Golden, like a shower".

A fifth soldier films the incident.

The video was posted anonymously on Wednesday along with a caption that said: "scout sniper team 4 with 3rd battalion 2nd marines out of camp lejeune peeing on dead talibans".

Military officials confirmed that the soldiers appear to be carrying rifles of a kind issued to sniper teams in Afghanistan.

A US department of defence spokesman, Captain John Kirby, told CNN: "Regardless of the circumstances or who is in the video, this is egregious, disgusting behaviour. It's hideous. It turned my stomach."

The marine corps said in a statement: "While we have not yet verified the origin or authenticity of this video, the actions portrayed are not consistent with our core values and are not indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps. This matter will be fully investigated."

The promise of an investigation is unlikely to quiet concern at yet another revelation of abuses by American forces. Last year, 11 soldiers were convicted over the murders of three Afghan civilians by a "kill squad" and the subsequent cover up. It was revealed that some of them collected body parts, including fingers and skull parts, as trophies, and posed for photographs over the corpses of their victims.

The US military has also yet to live down the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and the use of waterboarding and other torture of alleged terrorists held at Guantánamo.

The US marines corps is also under scrutiny after the trial began this week of one of its soldiers, Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, charged with the deaths of 24 Iraqis during an attack in 2005.

Wuterich was commanding a group of soldiers who burst into the victims' homes in Haditha and shot women, children and men in their nightclothes. He is accused of manslaughter. Seven other soldiers also charged were either acquitted or had the case against them dropped.

A US congressman compared the killings in Haditha to the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

The Haditha killings contributed to the Iraqi government's refusal to agree to immunity for US troops after the formal withdrawal of American forces at the end of last year.

*****

Comment: The anonymous video that was posted in the article has been removed from YouTube.

Surprised?

But here it is preserved by the The Guardian:

Are these fools part of the "heroes" Obomber was referring to when he waxed on about the sacrifices made by US soldiers in Iraq?

And please save me the nonsense about the need to verify the video. The mere fact that the original 39 second video is now removed from YouTube tells you that some folks in Washington are embarrassed.

Yesterday was a good day for those who are already at war with Iran; fighting the good fight by assassinating academics in the field of nuclear science.

Today not so good, again. Now the minutes can't tick fast enough past another small revelation of how dirty and unjust US soldiers can be when they making 'sacrifices over there'.

Late last night I happened on the start of a movie called The Dry Land. I read the introductory caption to see how a movie about a returning war veteran would be sold to non-American audiences.

It read: "A U.S. soldier returning home from war struggles to reconcile his experiences abroad with the life and family he left in Texas".

I forced myself to sit through most of the movie and it was true to form; the Vietnam vet syndrome of a returned military man who can't quite put pieces together. The pained stares into nowhere and flashbacks that the loved ones can't understand. The looking up of war buddies and the sharing of memories.

In this version the white boy is fighting memory loss - 'cause that happens when you shoot and kill people and then conveniently forget that you were a voluntary part of a killing machine 'over there'.

The scene at Walter Reed Army Hospital was about enough to make me want to hurl. Somewhere in-between a few guitar verses of Bob Marley's Redemption Song (go figure hey??) the other white boy in the hospital bed starts bleeding profusely and then is stabilized fast enough to tell the guitar-playing main actor about his heroic deed that led to the incident that in turn led to the bomb that blew of the legs of the guy telling the story.

Seems the do-gooders were just trying to help a wounded woman and her child and it was a booby-trap ... but wait, the woman was purposely shot by "hajees" to draw the goodwill intention of the soldier boys!

See! So they were doing what god endows Americans to do especially when the savages sacrifice a defenseless woman with child (how biblical and patriarchal and racist and patronizing) only to get bombed for their innate humanity and kindness.

What f*cking bullsh*t?

The US is an immoral warmongering state that kills innocent children on the daily. Not a f*cking day goes by when innocents are not massacred so that they can hold onto their empire delusions.

By the time white soldier boy returns from the hospital his dog is happy to see him but his mama is gravely ill and I was choking for air so I turned off the idiot box.

Hollywood has already started to revise history to fit the delusions of most Americans (a dominant theme of American life is the 'heroic victim'). Soon we will have a Chuck Norris looking for missing in action f*cks who are presumed to be held by 'hajee savages somewhere over there'.

And huge chunks of the population will be immersed in post-war trauma irrespective of whether they actually fought anywhere else other than their local pub.

Nascar and Harley Davidson will hold memorial events to highlight the plight of the 'brave souls' who carried America through heroic battles killing children, raping women inside and outside military camps, and pissing on living and dead hajees.

F*ck these contrived 'heroes'. They do not deserve anything but contempt. The US war machine and its attachments represent nothing less than inhumane barbarity.

We should resist being pulled into the sentimentalized version of the US soldier as hero. Moral, ethical, and thinking people do not join dirty wars no matter what.

And heroes don't kill for killing sake like the celebrated sniper, Chris Kyle, who has written a book about assassinating more than 160 hajees!

This man is no hero. He is a murdering drone. Nothing more.

He deserves our contempt no matter where you live or how close or remote your life is to the killing fields 'over there'.

Don't celebrate, venerate, or feel sorry for the American soldier. Karma is a b*tch and the wheels of justice may turn slowly but turn they most certainly do.

An American poet, Gary Coseri, put the hero syndrome into context with the following poem:

Do not call them “heroes”
if they have done your killing for you.
Say that they have done your bidding;
say they were your “soldiers.”

Say that you have trained them well:
They are the oiled machinations of war,
performing as expected.

Refrain from saying “professionals,”
and the usual nonsense about “surgical strikes.”
They were never doctors and nurses
in starched, white linens.

The best heroes are dead ones—
mortified and mortared.
They neither complain nor contradict.
They don’t re-live “friendly fire” incidents,
the sonofabitch sargeant-sadist,
nor the rapist in their midst.

They don’t see again
the faces of traumatized children.
Their bones stretch to attention under the sod.

The man and woman who will kill and injure
because some fool tells them to
are just little spin-off fools.
No act born of ignorance is heroic.
Heroes are sensible, not imbeciles.
Heroes dispel myths; they neither create
nor perpetuate them.

The fully manifested hero,
aware of his power and dignity,
is more than human, is humane.

Heroes don’t talk about heroes.
They need no confetti showered in their faces.
They question; they learn; they challenge; they act
according to their own honed principles:
What is truth? for example;
what is honor?

Onward!

South Korean Protesters Care for 'Comfort Woman' Statue

2012-01-11T15:48:00.000+02:00

Los Angeles Times
World Now
Jung-yoon Choi
January 11, 2012.

Photo: The statue in Seoul that commemorates Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Army during World War II is dressed in a woolen cap, scarf and mittens, with a blanket wrapped around her lap. (Credit: Matt Douma)

SEOUL -- She sits there alone, day and night, no matter what the weather. Her gaze is fixed at the building just across the street –- the Japanese Embassy.

She’s a bronze statue in the shape of a young girl, placed here last month as a reminder of the 200,000 Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II.

The life-size statue was placed in downtown Seoul to mark the 1,000th weekly protest that a handful of surviving former sex slaves, known here as “comfort women,” had waged at the embassy. Commissioned to a husband-and-wife sculptor team and placed by a nongovernmental organization in Seoul, the statue has prompted the Japanese government to call for its removal.

For activists, the statue is more than a symbol. It is a cause to be kept alive. In the frigid days of winter, they have assembled each week to dress the statue as they would a child sentry.

The statue is dressed in a woolen cap, scarf and mittens, with a blanket wrapped around her lap.

“People have said that the girl looked so cold, so the day after the 1,000th protest I went to put on a hat or a scarf on the statue,” said a blogger who goes by the name of Mongu. “Then I saw a scarf, wrapped around the girl’s bare feet. I was very touched by that, and decided to carry on with ... the outfit.”

Now, every week, new clothes adorn the statue. Some passersby even leave pocket money by the figure.

Mongu said it’s important to show South Korean support for the former comfort women.

“From the Japanese Embassy’s point of view, they can see that Koreans are not neglecting the statue but tending to it with care, treating her like a family.”

The sculptor said he is satisfied with the buzz his creation has made. “I’ve gotten comments from people that they are moved to tears when they see the dressed girl,” Kim Wun-sung said.

But the statue has also been a backdrop for violence. This week, a man who said his grandmother had been a comfort woman stood near the statue as he lobbed several incendiary devices at the Japanese Embassy.

None exploded. The man faces criminal charges.

RELATED
South Korea presses Japan at U.N. over 'comfort women'
In South Korea, a landmark sex-slave rally at Japan Embassy
Japan apologizes to South Korea for decades of colonial rule

*****

Comment: The term "comfort women" is an unfortunate and grossly inaccurate description of the sexual slavery that was forced onto as many as 400 000 women from China, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam, by Japan during World War II.

Women in Japan were also used as prostitutes during the war but "comfort women" from the countries above were enslaved and shipped to "comfort stations" where they were used to 'service' military personnel.

There are personnel narratives that describe the conditions in "comfort stations" as nothing short of inhumane. Women were routinely brutalized by beatings, rape, and many ended up the further victim of sexually transmitted diseases.

It is a horrific story made worse by Japan's revisionist political view that has sought to obscure the inhumanity of its actions.

Japan has claimed that the Korean "comfort women" issue was settled in 1965 when it paid $300 million to South Korea.

Surviving Korean "comfort women" reject this claim and have staged more than 1000 protests outside the Japanese embassy in Seoul calling for a formal apology and meaningful reparations.

It is estimated that three-quarters of all "comfort women" died as a result of their sexual enslavement.

The past cannot just be made to disappear. It will remain an open wound until it is confronted and a measure of resolution is found.

In the case of Korean "comfort women" the Japanese government should commit to an engagement meant to reach back and to restore a sense of justice for the thousands who have been so severely wounded.

Onward!

Constitutional Law 101: Federal Court Rules That Discrimination Against Muslims Violates the First Amendment

2012-01-11T10:31:00.000+02:00

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
Blog of Rights
Heather L. Weaver
Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief
January 10, 2012.

Condemning an entire faith and singling out its followers for disfavored and unequal treatment by the government violates the Constitution, it turns out. That principle might seem obvious to anyone who has read the Constitution, but the State of Oklahoma and its voters did not get the message, prompting a federal appeals court today to affirm a decision blocking the implementation of an anti-Islam constitutional amendment.

The Constitution’s promise of religious liberty extends to followers of all faiths, including Muslims. Thus, a federal appeals court ruled today that an Oklahoma law that discriminates against Muslims appearing before state courts likely violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court upheld a district court ruling preventing the amendment from taking effect. The ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (“CAIR”) represent the plaintiff in the case, Muneer Awad (pictured), the executive director of CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter.

Oklahoma’s proposed “Save Our State Amendment” would have changed the state constitution to bar state courts from considering so-called “Sharia Law” in making decisions. The amendment defined “Sharia Law” broadly as Islamic law based on the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed. If implemented, the amendment would have rendered Oklahoma’s Muslims second-class citizens before the state courts. For example, it could have prevented courts from probating a will that incorporated or even mentioned the religious beliefs of the deceased. It also could have inhibited Muslims from forming enforceable contracts in accordance with their religious beliefs, even while those of other faiths could. And it would have effectively denied Muslims the ability to bring suit in state court to remedy violations of their religious freedom rights.

In its ruling, the appeals court flatly rejected the State’s claim that the law was necessary to protect against the courts’ improper application of Sharia law. The court affirmed that the so-called “Sharia threat” identified by the State is a myth. The court wrote: "Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve. Indeed, they admitted...that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma."

In addition to blatantly discriminating against Muslims, the amendment also would have banned state courts from applying or considering “international law.” Not only would this have violated the Constitution, but it also would have undermined courts’ abilities to interpret laws and treaties relating global business issues and international human rights. And it could have blocked state courts from recognizing or ruling on issues relating to international marriages and adoptions.

The Oklahoma law was an early entrant in the race by a number of state officials to ban Sharia law and international law in response to a loathsome wave of anti-Muslim sentiment that has swept the country in the last few years, including myriad attacks on Muslim houses of worship, discrimination against Muslim women, and the improper targeting of Muslims in the national security context. The ACLU continues to work tirelessly to protect the rights of Muslims in all of these areas.

The court’s decision today represents a significant victory against anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry and sends the message that the religious liberty of Muslims, like Americans of all faiths, may not be put up for a vote.

*****

See also Los Angeles Times article: "Appeals Court Affirms Order Blocking Oklahoma Sharia Law Ban" (January 12, 2012.)

Court Upholds Ruling Blocking Oklahoma Sharia and International Law Ban

2012-01-11T10:09:00.000+02:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

DENVER, CO – A federal appeals court today unanimously upheld a ruling that blocked implementation of a discriminatory and unnecessary Oklahoma state constitutional amendment that would have prohibited state courts from considering what is broadly described as Islamic “Sharia law” and “international law.”

The court concluded that by singling out Islam for unfavorable treatment in state courts, the law likely violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court rejected the state’s argument that the constitutional amendment was necessary to protect against improper application of Sharia law, explaining:

“Appellants do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve. Indeed, they admitted . . . that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law or used the legal precepts of other nations or cultures, let alone that such applications or uses had resulted in concrete problems in Oklahoma.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) challenged the amendment on behalf of Muneer Awad, executive director of CAIR’s Oklahoma chapter.

“As the court recognized, this amendment did nothing more than target one faith for official condemnation,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Even the state admits that there has never been any problem with Oklahoma courts wrongly applying religious law. The so-called ‘Save Our State Amendment’ was a solution in search of a problem, and a blatantly discriminatory solution at that.”

“No one in Oklahoma deserves to be treated like a second-class citizen,” said Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the ACLU of Oklahoma. “This proposed amendment was an affront to the Constitution and everything it stands for.”

The proposed constitutional amendment also would have barred state courts from applying or considering “international law.”

“Attempts to paint international law as irrelevant to the American legal system are wrong-headed and dangerous,” said Chandra Bhatnagar, senior attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. “Preventing courts from considering international or foreign law violates our Constitution and undermines the ability of courts to interpret laws and treaties regarding global business, international human rights and even family law issues including international marriage and adoption. For U.S. global leadership to be taken seriously, courts must be able to honor international commitments consistent with our constitutional values.”

More information on this case can be found here: www.aclu.org/religion-belief/muneer-awad-v-paul-ziriax-oklahoma-state-board-elections-et-al

More information on bans on Sharia and international law can be found here: www.aclu.org/religion-belief/bans-sharia-and-international-law

*****

Comment: Strike one against the racist Islamophobic dumb asses in Oklahoma and elsewhere in the US.

Now watch the right-wing backlash and attacks on Muslims, mosques, and anyone who looks like a "terrorist" ...

Onward!

Forced Sterilization Worth $50,000, North Carolina Panel Says

2012-01-11T09:43:00.001+02:00

Los Angeles Times
Nation Now
January 10, 2012.

In the first instance of a state moving to compensate victims of forced sterilization, a gubernatorial panel in North Carolina voted Tuesday to pay victims of a state eugenics program that forcibly sterilized more than 7,500 people.

The Governor's Eugenics Compensation Task Force, established by Gov. Beverly Perdue in March, voted to pay verified victims $50,000. The payments must still be approved by the Legislature.

At least seven of 33 states that carried out eugenics programs have acknowledged or apologized for the policies, but North Carolina is the first to propose paying compensation. The state's forced-sterilization program, designed to weed out the mentally disabled, criminals and other "undesirables," was in effect from 1929 to 1974. North Carolina formally shut down its discredited Eugenics Board in 1977.

The rate of sterilizations in North Carolina picked up after World War II despite unfavorable comparisons to Nazi eugenics, and peaked in the 1950s. The task force has estimated that between 1,500 and 2,000 sterilization victims are still alive. The state has verified 72 victims.

Impoverished or uneducated African Americans were victimized by many eugenics programs, especially in the South. But the task force found that, although many victims of the North Carolina program were African Americans, the number of Caucasians who were sterilized was even higher.

If the payments are approved, victims would have three years to apply for compensation.

The sterilizations were supervised by a state Eugenics Board that included the chief medical officers of the state hospital and the Institution for the Feeble-Minded, the state attorney general and the secretary of the state board of health. Of the 7,528 documented cases of forced sterilization, nearly 3,000 were carried out in the 1950s and more than 1,600 between 1960 and 1968.

Involuntary-sterilization laws remained on the books in North Carolina until 2003, the task force reported.

The five-member task force is made up of a former judge and journalist, a historian, a physician and a lawyer.

Task force Chairwoman Laura Gerald told the Associated Press that the panel has sought to strike a balance between victims’ rights and political realities.

"Compensation has been on the table now for nearly 10 years, but the state has lacked the political will to do anything other than offer an apology," Gerald said.

*****

Comment: This decision, if sanctioned by the legislature, is an important step toward reaching back and bringing a measure of restorative justice.

The eugenics movement in the US was racist and classist to the core. And, this movement is where the pressure to legalize abortion started - the original impulse, in part, was to remove certain kinds of genetics from the population. (See Margaret Sanger the founder of Planned Parenthood)

That aside, the position taken by the North Carolina panel illustrates that the past is never just in the past and that confrontation is important if we are to make sense of what happened.

The fact that the panel is suggesting a monetary reparation is also significant even if the amount of money may seem paltry.

A mere apology is not enough, reparation is important to show goodwill.

It will be interesting to see where this decision goes. The political will is there, for now, and that is very important to move beyond the impasse.

At the very least, forced sterilizations is being talked about and confronted.

Here in South Africa there were forced sterilizations under apartheid. I have also written here of government officials who would administer birth control injections to young girls on the streets of black townships.

We have not even conceptualized a confrontation with that ugly past. In large part due to ignorance but also because the political will is seriously lacking.

I am reminded that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did not even look into sexual assault as a political crime. Apartheid abuses against women were not even discussed.

Makes me wonder if there are even human rights organizations in South Africa who are pursuing reparations against the state for institutionalized rape and sexual abuse.

It seems reasonable to me that such lawsuits and political actions be directed at the present government since South Africa does not represent an abrogation of the past - South Africa merely transitioned from apartheid and the state now is representative of succession.

In this context, the state now is responsible for what happened in the past and that includes reparations for human rights abuses under apartheid.

Onward!

Millions Killed in America's Wars. Who cares? Certainly not Americans

2012-01-10T18:46:00.000+02:00

Washington Post
John Tirman
January 6, 2012.

As the United States officially ended the war in Iraq last month, President Obama spoke eloquently at Fort Bragg, N.C., lauding troops for "your patriotism, your commitment to fulfill your mission, your abiding commitment to one another," and offering words of grief for the nearly 4,500 members of the U.S. armed forces who died in Iraq.

He did not, however, mention the sacrifices of the Iraqi people.

This inattention to civilian deaths in America's wars isn't unique to Iraq. There's little evidence that the American public gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where our military interventions take place. Think about the memorials on the Mall honoring American sacrifices in Korea and Vietnam.

These are powerful, sacred spots, but neither mentions the people of those countries who perished in the conflicts.

The major wars the United States has fought since the surrender of Japan in 1945 — in Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan — have produced colossal carnage. For most of them, we do not have an accurate sense of how many people died, but a conservative estimate is at least 6 million civilians and soldiers.

Our lack of acknowledgment is less oversight than habit, a self-reflective reaction to the horrors of war and an American tradition that goes back decades. We consider ourselves a generous and compassionate nation, and often we are. From the Asian tsunami in 2004 toHurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Haiti earthquake in 2010, Americans have been quick to open their pocketbooks and their hearts.

However, when it comes to our wars overseas, concern for the victims is limited to U.S. troops. When concern for the native populations is expressed, it tends to be more strategic than empathetic, as with Gen. David H. Petraeus's acknowledgment in late 2006 that harsh U.S. tactics were alienating Iraqi civilians and undermining Operation Iraqi Freedom. The switch to counterinsurgency, which involves more restraint by the military, was billed as a change that would save the U.S. mission, not primarily as a strategy to reduce civilian deaths.

The wars in Korea and Indochina were extremely deadly. While estimates of Korean War deaths are mainly guesswork, the three-year conflict is widely believed to have taken 3 million lives, about half of them civilians. The sizable civilian toll was partly due to the fact that the country's population is among the world's densest and the war's front lines were often moving.

Even more lethal

The war in Vietnam and the spillover conflicts in Laos and Cambodia were even more lethal. These numbers are also hard to pin down, although by several scholarly estimates, Vietnamese military and civilian deaths ranged from 1.5 million to 3.8 million, with the U.S.-led campaign in Cambodia resulting in 600,000 to 800,000 deaths, and Laotian war mortality estimated at about 1 million.

Despite the fact that contemporary weapons are vastly more precise, Iraq war casualties, which are also hard to quantify, have reached several hundred thousand. In mid-2006, two household surveys — the most scientific means of calculating — found 400,000 to 650,000 deaths, and there has been a lot of killing since then. (The oft-cited Iraq Body Count Web site mainly uses news accounts, which miss much of the violence.)

The war in Afghanistan has been far less violent than the others, with civilian and military deaths estimated at about 100,000.

The numbers can be confusing because some estimates include only those people killed by direct violence; others include deaths from "structural" violence — such as those resulting from a destroyed health-care system. That we do not have an official way of accounting for the dead is one sign of the uncaring attitudes that have accompanied our wars.

It is difficult to obtain accurate mortality figures during wartime, but the best way might be to commission a consortium of public health schools — the most qualified institutions that study violence — to conduct household surveys every year.

The lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is also shown by these civilians' absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries. The entertainment industry portrays these wars rarely and almost always with a focus on Americans.

A few nonprofit organizations have sprung up to deal with the wars' victims — notably the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, a Washington-based group founded by Marla Ruzicka, an aid worker who was killed in Iraq in 2005. Such efforts rarely register with the American public, however.

Pollsters, meanwhile, have asked virtually no questions of the public about foreign casualties. But on the rare occasions when they do, the results have been striking. A 1968 Harris poll found 4 percent favored an end to the Vietnam war because of harm to civilians. A University of Michigan pollster concluded: "More and more Americans now think our intervention was a military mistake, and want to forget the whole thing."

On Iraq, when an Associated Press survey asked Americans in early 2007 how many Iraqis had died in the war, the average of all answers was 9,890, when the actual number was probably well into the hundreds of thousands. In several polls in 2007 and 2008, Americans were asked whether we should withdraw troops even if it put Iraqis at risk of more civil unrest; a clear majority said yes.

Today there is virtually no support for helping rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan — no campaigns by large charities, no open doors for Iraqi refugees. Even Iraqis who worked with the American military are having trouble getting political asylum in the United States and face a risk of retribution at home. The U.S. response to so many dead, 5 million displaced and a devastated country is woefully dismissive.

Even civilian atrocities tend to fade quickly from view, or else become rallying points for the accused troops. My Lai, where about 400 Vietnamese were murdered by a U.S. Army unit in 1968, at first shocked the nation, but Americans quickly came to support Lt. William L. Calley Jr. — who was later found guilty of killing 22 villagers — and the others involved.

Indifference

More recently, eight Marines were charged in the 2005 Haditha massacre in Iraq, and none has been convicted. (The last defendant's trial started this past week.) Indeed, each atrocity that fails to alter public opinion piles on to further prove American indifference.

Why the American silence on our wars' main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls "the frontier myth" — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we're trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America's sturdiest national narratives.

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages.

By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as the Indians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplan wrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, "The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century."

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military's code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound? It was Geronimo.

The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture's derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put these foreigners at risk of violence. President George W. Bush, to his credit, disavowed these wars as being against Islam, as has President Obama.

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the "just world" theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that "just world" is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

These attitudes have consequences. Perhaps the most important one — apart from the tensions created with the host governments, which have been quite vocal in protesting civilian casualties — is that indifference provides permission to our military and political leaders to pursue more interventions.

There are costs to our global reputation as well: The United States, which should be regarded as a principal advocate of human rights, undermines its credibility when it is so dismissive of civilian casualties in its wars.

Appealing for international action on Sudan, Syria and other countries may sound hypocritical when our own attitudes about civilians are so cold. Korean War historian Bruce Cumings calls this neglect the "hegemony of forgetting, in which almost everything to do with the war is buried history."

Will we ever stop burying memories of war's destruction? More attention to the human costs may jolt the American public into a more compassionate understanding. When we build the memorial for Operation Iraqi Freedom, let's mention that Iraqi civilians were part of the carnage. Count them, and maybe we can start to recognize and remember the larger tolls of the wars we wage.

*****

Comment: I have wondered over the years what accounts for the disconnection and alienation that characterizes so much of American life.

I think to a large extent the emphasis on the individual and the immediate circle accounts for some of this.

It is a selfish problem no doubt ant it also may explain why Americans are so uninformed in general. If it does not speak to that immediate circle (inclusive of reductionist national myths) then it matters very little to most.

What emerges is a disfigured world view in which the average American sees and feels no connection to whatever is going on 'over there' even if it is being done in their name.

That said, I am also sticking with my often stated critique: Knowing the facts and details is un-American.

Most Americans do not know where Iraq is on a map, why then should their president even mention the millions of Iraqis who died in the 'war over there'? It is of very little interest to their immediate circle - that circle of one.

Onward!

Why the NDAA Now?

2012-01-10T15:08:00.000+02:00

Dissident Voice
Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken
January 7, 2012.

Barack Obama just signed into law one of the most repressive and right-wing pieces of legislation ever passed in the history of the country: the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It allows the military, a.k.a. the Pentagon, to determine who is a “terrorist” and to detain that person in prison, indefinitely, without trial, under its jurisdiction. It makes no difference whether the person is a U.S. citizen or a foreign “enemy combatant.”

The NDAA takes the civilian judicial system out of the equation regarding who is a “combatant” or “terrorist” and substitutes military command over every person inside or outside of the United States. By defining the entire U.S. as a battlefield, all the Pentagon needs to do, in order to exercise this power, is get the approval of the sitting president.

Historically in the U.S., questions of criminality were determined by civilian tribunals. The country has now yielded the principle of arrest, detainment, punishment, and imprisonment to executive privilege. This catapults American jurisprudence back into the reign of George the Third.

Although many progressive figures have stated that this is a “major step toward a police-state, but we are not there yet,” the reality is that this act is nothing short of a military coup, and one that transforms the authority of the president into the sort of military dictatorship that Augusto Pinochet, Kim Jung Il, and Bashar al-Assad would be proud [All these men are dictators, but it should be noted that the Pinochet dictatorship was brought about and supported by the US -- Ed]. While it is not surprising that a weak-kneed coward like Obama would acquiesce to the demands of the military, one must wonder why the Pentagon, at this time, would insist upon the authority to undermine the U.S. Constitution and establish a military/police state.

After all, there is no threat from within to our peace and security. There is no nation on earth that could even fantasize about waging war with our bellicose government. Why did not the Pentagon wait until there was a real, or meaningful threat to the U.S. before doing away with practically 300 years of American jurisprudence? The answer is clear: with the passage and signing of this bill, there has been a military coup that has taken place, and the identity of the individual in the White House and the bought-off congressional representatives no longer have anything to do with who is making the decisions in this country, either internationally or domestically.

It is obvious that the corporations that benefit from drones and endless assaults on the world’s people would insist upon unregulated, unlimited power, but what is astonishing is that the American people would allow this coup to take place without so much as an objection. We have become so intimidated, uneducated, and propagandized as a nation that we permit Police, the Pentagon and “Private Contractors” to govern our lives.

What are the implications of the Pentagon and its corporate allies deciding to dismember the Constitution at this time:

1)  They are saying that the military/corporate complex is in charge, and electoral politics mean nothing;
2)  They are warning those who would criticize our foreign or domestic policies that the consequences of excessive criticism could land you in jail for the rest of your life, or that it could be fatal;
3)  They are saying that our civilian judicial system is now subordinate to military control and domination;
4)  They are telling the American people that dissent is dangerous, and outside the law;
5)  They are informing the world that the true masters have stepped forward from the shadows to demonstrate that Americans are no more in control of their own government than the citizens of any fascist regime in the world;
6)  They are reinforcing the concept that we are in a perpetual state of war, and that there will never again be periods of peace; and,
7)  They are saying that obedience, and not democracy, is the order of the day.

In sum, the passage of this legislation is nothing short of a consolidation of state power into the hands of the military and its corporate allies. By passing these laws during the presidency of a self-identified Democrat, the Pentagon can claim widespread national support for their theft of the American economy and its transformation into an imperial empire. In order to continue spending 50-75% of the American budget on wars of aggression and the ongoing development of weapons and machinery of destruction, the Pentagon has to be certain that it can control a potentially rebellious populace.

Knowing what an opportunistic sham Obama is, and recognizing that his only goal is to remain in office, the Pentagon can continue to define our foreign policy as one of permanent war, and reap the financial advantages that flow from having a Republican Congress, and an unprincipled president in the White House.

*****

Comment: So much for the liberal democrat who would serve the people and protect individual liberties enshrined in the constitution.

Obama has consolidated the US into a war mongering police state.

Onward!

Plymouth (UK) Considers Curbs on Foreign Students in City Centre Shops

2012-01-09T23:29:00.001+02:00

The Guardian
Steven Morris
January 9, 2012.

Proposal would limit number of students allowed in a shop at one time to tackle rise in shoplifting and antisocial behaviour

Plymouth city centre is proposing to limit the number of foreign students who can enter shops at one time because of a rise in shoplifting and antisocial behaviour.

Teenagers who are visiting the city to study English could find their movements restricted by the Operation Drake project.

Shops would display stickers stipulating that only a certain number of students could be inside at a time. Posters would also be sent to language schools explaining the scheme.

Operation Drake is being discussed by city councillors on Monday but the project has already attracted criticism from some local people who believe it could be seen as racist.

The proposals are set out in a report to the council's growth and prosperity overview and scrutiny panel (pdf).

It says Operation Drake has been worked on by Plymouth Against Retail Crime and a police community support officer.

The report says: "Over the past five years we have seen in Plymouth, especially the city centre area, a large influx of foreign students. Feedback received from retailers has been that they have experienced an increase in shoplifting and antisocial behaviour from foreign students, incurring large financial losses."

It adds that the action plan includes:

• Special cards for foreign students to carry with them at all times with useful contact numbers.
• Stickers to be displayed in retail premises bearing Operation Drake logo limiting the number of students allowed in at any one time.
• Posters displayed in all language schools explaining Operation Drake.

The plan was greeted with concern on the Plymouth Herald website. "Shocked at how racist this report is. What sort of city are we living in?" said one commentator. "And will we be sewing some symbol on to their clothes just so we know who the 'different' people are?" asked another.

*****

Comment: So we can safely assume that a large proportion of these foreign students are not considered white hence the fingering for theft and social dysfunction.

And the gist of the proposal is to thin the herd and subject foreign students to apartheid style pass books!

Why not just get them to wear a sign or symbol on their sleeves like the Nazis did to Jews? Would make it easier to spot the degenerates and it would learn them their place among the superior race, no?

This proposal is unbelievable. Do these students not contribute to the economy of Plymouth? Is their presence not tied to local jobs?

The proposal seems almost to suggest that these misfits from another country should be happy to be learning English in Plymouth.

How dumb are these folks?

Onward!

Paush Purnima in India

2012-01-09T12:10:00.000+02:00

FAITH: A Hindu woman smokes marijuana at the confluence of the rivers Ganges,

Yamuna and mythical Saraswati, on "Paush Purnima", the first day of

the holy dip during Magh Mela at Sangam in Allahabad,

India. (Rajesh Kumar Singh, AP)

Credit

Race in Britain 2012: Has Life Changed for Ethnic Minorities?

2012-01-08T18:48:00.005+02:00

The Independent
Jane Merrick, Brian Brady, Kate Youde
December 8, 2012.

Last week, as Gary Dobson and David Norris's 19-year escape from justice finally came to an end, the distraught parents of another young ethnic minority man visited the scene of their son's death.

Anuj Bidve, a 23-year-old Lancaster University student who was shot dead on Boxing Day, was killed for the apparent crime of not being white.

Nearly two decades after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, has anything changed? And what is life really like for young black and ethnic minority people in Britain today?

In the high-visibility worlds of the establishment, entertainment and sport, there are signs of progress: there are more than four times as many black and ethnic minority MPs in Parliament as there were in 1993. A Muslim woman takes her seat at the cabinet table every Tuesday. An African-born man is in charge of a FTSE 100 company. Black and Asian actors regularly take leading roles in prime-time TV series.

The population has changed since 1993: then ethnic minorities accounted for 5.1 per cent in England and Wales; the latest figure is 8.7 per cent.

Some would argue that the major dividing line in Britain today is not race but class, and that Stephen's killing captured the nation's interest only because he was from a "nice" middle-class family and had aspirations to be an architect.

But the statistics for ethnic minorities are bleak: black men are 26 times more likely than their white counterparts to be stopped and searched by police, while black men and women in their early twenties are twice as likely to be not in employment, education or training as white people. And black and Asian defendants are still more likely to go to jail than their white counterparts when convicted of similar crimes – and they serve longer sentences. A Ministry of Justice (MoJ) analysis of tens of thousands of cases found that in 2010, 23 per cent of white defendants were sent to prison for indictable offences, compared with 27 per cent of black counterparts and 29 per cent of Asian defendants.

The report, Statistics on Race and the Criminal Justice System, also found that ethnic minority defendants received longer sentences in almost every offence group. For sexual offences, white defendants received an average of just over four years in jail, but black defendants were sent down for more than five years. For violence against the person, the average breakdown was 16.8 months for whites, 20 months for blacks and almost two years for Asian defendants. The MoJ insisted that "the identification of differences should not be equated with discrimination", claiming that the disparities between ethnic groups could be explained by the seriousness of the offences, the presence of mitigating or aggravating factors and whether or not a defendant pleaded guilty.

Yet Lee Jasper, chairman of the London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium, said: "Nothing can so starkly illustrate the industrial scale of racism in the judicial process than these figures."

Last summer's riots paradoxically suggested something in society has changed for the better. The ingredients for widespread inter-racial violence were there, but it never materialised. However, Gurbux Singh, who was chair of the Commission for Racial Equality when Oldham and Bradford were torn by race riots in 2001, warned yesterday: "With the recession taking hold, when you have disaffected young people who feel they are right at the bottom competing with another community, I am fearful that the tensions can easily arise again."

In March 1993, a month before Stephen's murder, Stoke City player Mark Stein was called a "short, ugly, black, bean-headed twat" by an opponent on the football pitch. On Friday, Tom Adeyemi, the 20-year-old Oldham defender, was left in tears after alleged racist abuse was hurled at him from Liverpool's Kop. A 20 year-old man from Aintree was arrested last night in relation to the incident.

Last Tuesday, despite a plea from Stephen's mother Doreen not to rejoice, there appeared to be collective back-patting when Norris and Dobson were found guilty, as if the verdicts had cleansed Britain of racism.

Yet reminders of racial hatred were never far away. Yesterday, Subhash and Yogini Bidve, having flown to Salford to visit the scene of his kiling, were back in Pune for his cremation. Mourners watched a flower-filled open coffin carried through the streets.

There is nothing that can comfort them in their loss. But perhaps the prominent coverage of Anuj's death, and the impact the Lawrence trial has had, show that one thing has changed for the better since 1993, and that is ultimately because of one young man from Eltham: our public horror at racism has increased.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: The headline above got me to thinking about how race is not understood even where well meaning articles like this one tackle the subject.

Race and ethnicity are not the same thing. They are often collapsed into meaning the same thing but to really deconstruct race you have to understand how race is racialised by power.

Or in more exact words, how race is formed through socio-political and historical processes; and how race identities are made to fit a racialized power hierarchy.

Race may be made to cross over ethnicity but it does not explain ethnic difference(s), or racial power.

In South Africa, for example, both Afrikaners and English are collapsed into the white race. But are they not separate ethnicities where language, culture, history, origin, point to an ethnic difference in formation? What then is the purpose of merging both into whiteness?

Ethnicity is not race but the focus on ethnicity in race-based states is meant to obfuscate the power imbalance and historical brutality of race and racism (discrimination based on race).

So who are the ethnic races in Britain, if we assume there is such a thing? And when do these races separate or return to ethnicities? And for what reason(s)?

Are white people in Britain an ethnicity? Are Scots, English, and the Welsh an ethnic majority when a one needs to be constructed for racial dominance (or alternatively racial normalcy)?

And, who are the ethnic minorities in Britain? Do these minorities see themselves as a race or an ethnicity (or both)? Or is the associated gaze a function of whiteness?

The point here is an area much discussed in postcolonialism theory. Whiteness is constructed (since race is not real) in reference to power and its structural expression(s).

The racial Other is constructed and deconstructed in reference to whiteness in keeping with the interests of power.

Inside of power then, the racial Other can be the ethnic Other while whiteness is assumed to be, on the face of power, a oneness (a default normality even).

But it is not. It is all very misleading if the radical purpose is to deconstruct race.

Is Asian a race, or an ethnicity? If it is the latter then how are Pakistanis and Thais a singular ethnicity? And when do both become a racialized ethnicity and for what reason(s)?

Of course it is important not to assume that national categories like Pakistani and Thai are singular identities that seamlessly relate to ethnicity or race for that matter - and, I am not even layering the further 'jeopardies' of gender and class.

I am arguing for conceptual complexity here because to deconstruct the relevance of race we must confront the idea of race.

If we accept that ethnicities can be reduced to races then we can also assume that culture and language and heritage can be pinned to a racial essence and, of course, a racialized power hierarchy.

Such an assumption glosses over how the power of whiteness divides the world/reality into convenient descriptors that speak mostly to its interests and not the interests of those who are put into racialised identity cages.

In effect, such an assumption is premised on identity erasure and that is a violent function of racism.

Onward!

Georgia State Rep: ‘I’m Afraid’ Of Romney’s Mormon Faith, But ‘It’s Better Than A Muslim’

2012-01-07T11:42:00.001+02:00

Islamophobia Today
Zaid Jilani
January 6, 2012.

One obstacle that Mitt Romney may face as he asks for the support of Republican primary voters is bigotry against the Mormon faith.

A Marietta Daily Journal story published yesterday demonstrates the bigotry that Romney may have to overcome.

The Journal quotes Republican state Rep. Judy Manning saying that she’s scared of Romney’s Mormon faith. But at least he’s “better than a Muslim”:

“I think Mitt Romney is a nice man, but I’m afraid of his Mormon faith,” Manning said. “It’s better than a Muslim. Of course, every time you look at the TV these days you find an ad on there telling us how normal they are. So why do they have to put ads on the TV just to convince us that they’re normal if they are normal? … If the Mormon faith adhered to a past philosophy of pluralism, multi-wives, that doesn’t follow the Christian faith of one man and one woman, and that concerns me.”

Manning’s criticism of Romney’s faith and her attack on Islam as an even more inferior religion — in addition to other comments she has made against LGBT rights — demonstrates an important point. Progressives and others who oppose bigotry and preach tolerance must denounce discrimination of every kind, not just because all discrimination is wrong, but because validating discrimination against one group can lead to increased discrimination against other groups in the future.

*****

Comment: It is usual to read stories like this from the ailing empire, and everywhere else really. Last week a Muslim woman was "shocked by a stun gun" in a Florida Walmart. The woman was wearing traditional clothes from Pakistan which, of course, makes her a terrorist.

Then there are the constant attacks on masjids all across the western world and especially in white settler states where some Caucasians want to keep the land their ancestors stole through rape, pillaging, and genocide, free of Muslims.

The first thought that entered my head when I looked at this Republican heffa in the story above was, who elected this woman? What kind of bigoted mindset elects such a person to political office?

A lot is made of how this kind of racism is just a circus show and, to an extent, I can see why for very different reasons than the usual apologists might offer.

Barack Obama is a black man and he would never be so stupid to utter such racist and bigoted comments. But Obama is a mass murderer and a liberal who inherited Bush's legacy only to advance its conservative mania.

Inside of the liberal establishment -wherever and whatever they are now- there are more heinous individuals than this stupid and racist heffa.

It reminds me of a little wisdom passed down in the decades of surviving whiteness in South Africa. That wisdom advised folks of color to just laugh off the open racist positions that some Afrikaners exhibited in their interactions on the daily.

"You know an Afrikaner is racist because they don't hide it. You need to be worried about English speaking liberals. They hide their racism behind fancy talk and then stab you in the back."

There is no science behind this kind of wisdom but it holds more than a grain of truth. No-one is saying just look the other way when stupid asses like this heffa mouth racist crap.

That is not my point - I am not minimizing her crudeness against Mormons or Muslims.

But more than just me will be saying don't lose sight of racist murderers who come clothed in ideological pretensions, and/or skin pretensions like Obama, and do much worse.

Even the Ku Klux Klan can't claim to have killed many scores of brown and black children all across the world -in the interest of whiteness- while their own kids slept soundly in a big White House.

Onward!

Record Speaks for Itself: How Obama Brought 'Hope' and 'Change' to the American People

2012-01-06T16:06:00.000+02:00

Stopwar.org.uk
Extracted from Glenn Greenwald
Salon
January 2, 2011.

Barack Obama's record over the past three years speaks for itself when deciding whether he deserves a second term as president.

He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack.
He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs.
He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield.
He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers.
He has enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it.
His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act when compliance became inconvenient.
He has entrenched for a generation the Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law.
He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability.
He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason.
He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists.
He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities.
He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government.
His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.
He has made America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war more robust than ever before.
He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed“a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight.
His “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

Ross Caputi: "I am Sorry for the Role I played in Fallujah"

2012-01-06T11:22:00.002+02:00

Guardian UK
Re-posted from stopwar.org.uk
Ross Caputi
December 22, 2011.

"As a US marine who lost close friends in the siege of Fallujah in Iraq seven years ago, I understand that we were the aggressors ...

What we did to Fallujah cannot be undone, and I see no point in attacking the people in my former unit. What I want to attack are the lies and false beliefs. I want to destroy the prejudices that prevented us from putting ourselves in the other's shoes and asking ourselves what we would have done if a foreign army invaded our country and laid siege to our city.

I understand the psychology that causes the aggressors to blame their victims. I understand the justifications and defence mechanisms. I understand the emotional urge to want to hate the people who killed someone dear to you. But to describe the psychology that preserves such false beliefs is not to ignore the objective moral truth that no attacker can ever justly blame their victims for defending themselves.

The same distorted morality has been used to justify attacks against the native Americans, the Vietnamese, El Salvadorans, and the Afghans. It is the same story over and over again. These people have been dehumanised, their God-given right to self-defence has been delegitimised, their resistance has been reframed as terrorism, and US soldiers have been sent to kill them.

History has preserved these lies, normalised them, and socialised them into our culture: so much so that legitimate resistance against US aggression is incomprehensible to most, and to even raise this question is seen as un-American.

History has defined the US veteran as a hero, and in doing so it has automatically defined anyone who fights against him as the bad guy. It has reversed the roles of aggressor and defender, moralised the immoral, and shaped our societies' present understanding of war.

I cannot imagine a more necessary step towards justice than to put an end to these lies, and achieve some moral clarity on this issue. I see no issue more important than to clearly understand the difference between aggression and self-defence, and to support legitimate struggles. I cannot hate, blame, begrudge, or resent Fallujans for fighting back against us. I am sincerely sorry for the role I played in the second siege of Fallujah, and I hope that some day not just Fallujans but all Iraqis will win their struggle."

Read the rest of this thought provoking article here.

*****

Comment: This article was not re-published in any mainstream newspaper in the US. Surprised?

It is fitting to remember that approximately 6000 Iraqi civilians died in the occupation of Fallujah.

Obomber, the Nobel Peace Laureate, summed up the US war on Iraq on December 14 with these glorification remarks:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. … Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. … So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. … You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

What utter rubbish! The US murdered innocents in a war of lies, greed and aggression. What about the millions killed in the cumulative devastation? Is that the faceless sacrifice Obomber is referring to?

Oh and they fought this murderous war and killed innocents in Iraq so American children can be free!

Huh?

What f*cking kind of twisted logic is that? Free from what? A moral conscience?

And, what kind of god will be smiling down on Tom and the US for massacring innocents? Not a just God that is for sure.

So much for the first black president of the US. This is "the change you can believe in" - but first you must go mad to make it easier to rationalize.

Onward!

"I Am a Terrorist: Memories of the War"

2012-01-05T22:45:00.000+02:00

"I am living in a world whose concepts are no longer clear to me. A world where the criminal walks free and the victim is called a terrorist. A world where killing a five-year-old kid is permissible. A world that has left me baffled about what is right and what is wrong. I have always thought that we could figure out who the terrorist was simply by looking at who died on whose side. I was wrong. Israel has the ability to kill Palestinians at night and call them terrorists the next morning."

Read the rest of this very powerful testament from Gaza blogger, Sarah Ali, at her blog: Here We Are

Onward!

Gordon Hirabayashi Dies at 93; Opposed Internment of Japanese Americans

2012-01-05T15:55:00.003+02:00

Los Angeles Times
Elaine Woo

January 5, 2012.

Gordon Hirabayashi, who was convicted for defying the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II and, four decades later, not only cleared his name but helped prove that the government had falsified the reasons for the mass incarceration, has died. He was 93.

Hirabayashi, who had Alzheimer's disease and other ailments, died Monday in Edmonton, Alberta, where he had lived for many years, said his son, Jay.

The elder Hirabayashi was one of only three Japanese Americans who refused to comply with Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942. The order gave military authorities the power to restrict the freedom of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier.

Opposing his family's wishes and incurring criticism from other Japanese Americans for "rocking the boat," Hirabayashi resisted the order and was arrested and convicted in 1942 for violating a curfew and refusing to enter a relocation camp. He spent more than two years in several prisons and took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1943 ruled against him and upheld the government's argument that the restrictions were a military necessity.

He never portrayed himself as a hero, his son said. Nor did he view himself as a radical. "I was not one of those angry young rebels, looking for a cause. I was one of those trying to make some sense of this, trying to come up with an explanation," he told the Associated Press in 2000.

It took more than 40 years to reopen his case, but Hirabayashi eventually savored victory.

"What Gordon should be most remembered for is taking a stand on a matter of principle at a time when hardly anyone — not only within the Japanese American community but the nation at large — sided with him or sympathized with him," said Peter H. Irons, a retired UC San Diego political scientist whose research in the 1980s helped lay the legal foundation for the overturning of the convictions. "It wasn't at all like the civil rights movement where thousands of people engaged in demonstrations and civil disobedience. It was a very lonely stand."

Hirabayashi was the last surviving member of the trio of men who were convicted of violating the federal order. The other two were Minoru Yasui, who died in 1986, and Fred Korematsu, who died in 2005. Hirabayashi was also the only one of the three to receive a full trial when the cases were reopened in the 1980s.

Born in Seattle on April 23, 1918, Hirabayashi was the son of an immigrant truck farmer who arrived from Japan in 1907. His father, a pacifist who converted to Christianity in Japan in a sect influenced by the Quakers, instilled in him the importance of standing up for his beliefs.

He was a senior at the University of Washington in 1942 when the curfew and evacuation orders were imposed. At first he obeyed the 8 p.m. curfew. But one night, as he left his Caucasian classmates at the library to hurry back to his dorm, the injustice of the restrictions suddenly hit him. That realization deepened when the evacuation was announced. He opposed it on the grounds that it violated the 5th Amendment, which prohibits the seizure of property and rights without due process of law.

After his conviction, he hitchhiked to one of the prisons, in Arizona, when the government said it could not afford to transport him there, his son said. In 1999, the area once occupied by the prison in Arizona's Catalina Mountains was named the Gordon Hirabayashi Recreation Site.

After the war, Hirabayashi returned to the University of Washington, where he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in sociology. He taught at American University in Cairo for a few years before moving to Canada in 1960 to join the University of Alberta faculty. He chaired its sociology department for seven years and retired in 1983.

By then Irons, who was a lawyer as well as a professor, had launched a campaign to press for rehearings of the cases against Hirabayashi, Korematsu and Yasui. The latter two men were cleared in separate court actions in 1983 and 1984.

In 1986 Judge Donald G. Voorhees of the U.S. district court in Seattle ruled that the government had withheld from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 critical information that might have led the high court to strike down the legal foundations of the internment. Specifically, he found that the government suppressed a report by Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, who was in charge of the internment, stating that racial reasons made it impossible for military authorities to determine who was loyal and disloyal. In finding federal misconduct, Voorhees invalidated Hirabayashi's 1942 conviction.

In the wake of Voorhees' ruling, Congress approved legislation providing $1.2 billion in reparations to Japanese American internees.

"As fine a document as the Constitution is," Hirabayashi told The Times on the eve of his legal victory, "it is nothing but a scrap of paper if citizens are not willing to defend it."

In addition to his son, Jay, he is survived by his wife, Susan Carnahan; two daughters, Marion Oldenburg and Sharon Yuen; a sister, Esther Furugori; a brother, James; nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. He was divorced from his first wife, Esther, who died several hours after Hirabayashi's death.

*****

Comment: May Mr. Hirabayashi rest in peace. I am saddened by his departure from this earthly round but his memory of resistance will live forever.

His life was no doubt more complex than just his stand against the racism that led to thousands of Japanese-Americans being put into what amounted to no more than concentration camps.

But what an example; wish I could have interviewed him when I co-wrote my 2006 article entitled "The Internment of Japanese Americans in World War II: A Case Study of National Trauma and Institutional Violence".

I have been thinking about some of what we wrote in that article. The link between memory and trauma, for example. How are traumatic memories transmitted over more than just one generation, even 12 generations as in the case of slavery?

These thoughts came to mind in the last couple of weeks as I worked through an article (just submitted for academic review yesterday) entitled: "A Meditation on Confronting the Legacy of African Slavery in the US".

How do we remember trauma when we did not experience it first hand? And what are the politics implied inside the contours of the "imagined" nation?

The next couple of decades will be spent just trying to conjure some formative thoughts.

Onward!

“America 's Chickens Are Coming Home To Roost”

2012-01-04T22:23:00.001+02:00

Countercurrents.org
William Cook
January 4, 2012

(An end of the year lament)

"Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y'all, not a black militant (Ambassador to Iraq , Edward Peck). Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised...” (Jeremiah Wright, September 16, 2001 )

Prophets fare poorly in their own country, yet countries would do well to hearken to their prophets. Scorn, ridicule, and innuendo attend their pronouncements as the righteous defend their actions as logical, existential and necessary. Jeremiah Wright suffered such scorn and mockery because he understood the consequences of revenge on the innocent and the defenceless, justified by whatever inane discourse. Wright spoke truth to power that Sunday after 9/11 and the righteous cried to heaven condemning him to perdition for defaming America, for even suggesting that revenge for the sake of revenge is the motivation of the arch fiend against the Almighty, the foulest, most ignorant, most amoral rational for action.

Prophets anticipate truth; they review a nation's past history and can predict its future. Witness America 's past as the Reverend Wright did that Sunday morning, and what America is doing now repeats its ugliness. Wright said this about America 's past:

He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, he pointed out that what Malcolm X said when he was silenced by Elijah Mohammad was in fact true, he said Americas chickens, are coming home to roost.”

"We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

"We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

"We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

"We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

"We bombed Qaddafi's home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children's head against the rock. (See Psalm 137 to understand how the righteous take revenge against the innocent and defenceless.)

"We bombed Iraq . We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they'd never get back home

"We bombed Hiroshima . We bombed Nagasaki , and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

"Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America 's chickens are coming home to roost.

That was the Sunday after 9/11, 2001 when Wright quoted Ambassador Peck. But even that list of America's atrocities is not complete as Mark Twain would attest in his recounting of the massacre of the Moro's at the turn of the last century 1900 and our disastrous foray into Vietnam when we lost 58,000 American soldiers and killed millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians.

This is the America that exists now: we preach righteousness, but lie with impunity; declare God's mission to bring freedom to the mid-east, then decimate the women and children, the old and infirm as necessary collateral damage; proclaim the existence of Weapons of Mass destruction, then massively destroy a nation's infrastructure, steal its natural resources, take control of its government replacing it with a favoured puppet; and then write the history to extol our righteousness while defaming the defenceless people decimated. Wright knew.

Read the rest here.

[William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com]

*****

Comment: This article is so good I highly recommend you read it all: brutal in its deconstruction and downright honest in capturing the deceit of what the US represents.

I have wondered about Pastor Wright in the long and dirty aftermath of Obama's deception. Wright called it right.

Sh*t needs to said and thank God there are people like Pastor Wright who will stand up and say it no matter what.

Onward!

Election 2012: Season of the Fascist: Witnessing the Ron Paul Campaign Humanise the Face of White Supremacist Politics

2012-01-04T11:15:00.007+02:00

Indigenist Opinion
The Angryindian

January 2, 2012.

'White domination is so complete that even American Indian children want to be cowboys. It's as if Jewish children wanted to play Nazis.’ -- Ward Churchill --

I’ll be brutally honest with you dear reader, I was totally prepared to sit quietly on the sidelines sipping lukewarm, milk-infused Assam calmly watching the mainstream press play moralistic footy with the Ron Paul Newsletter scandal without saying a word. Really, I was. Regular readers are aware that I just finished an in-depth editorial on the rapid rise of the far-right which became an eBook, ‘Of Caucasians, Christians and Desperate White Men: Why Conservative Racialists in the US, UK and Israel Are Ultimately Responsible for the Tragedy in Norway’ (available as a free download from Aboriginal Press Books) and frankly, I had grown tiresome with the entire subject. Believe me when I say that it takes a strong stomach to sit and objectively review neo-Nazi and other assorted right-wing literature and I decided that I had read enough insanely hateful bile to swear me away from the subject until long after the passage of the new year.

That was until I found out that someone I truly respect, veteran journalist Robert Scheer, editor-in-chief of Truthdig.com, decided to appeal to the struggling 99% with an editorial that effectively and authoritatively whittles down the subject of Mr. Paul’s observable neo-Nazi connections to a petty matter that ‘is certainly worthy of criticism’ but not nearly as important as his anti-corruption, isolationist, anti-war political platform. In other words, it is entirely o.k. for a 21st century American presidential candidate to harbour neo-Nazi sentiments and cognizant connections to fascism so long as he, or she, is verbally committed to doing away with war, economic decay and governmental over-reach.

I have a serious, serious problem with this. And so should you. Especially if you consider yourself to be a rational, fellow-traveller of the progressive ‘Left’.

Read the rest of the Angryindian's analysis here.

*****

Comment: I remain in awe of Angry's ability to deconstruct political pretensions in the empire. And I am not just saying that because the brother is my comrade in struggle (and I don't mean in a vacuous ANC sense) and good friend.

Just yesterday I was reading a re-posted article from Loonwatch.com entitled "Why Islamophobes Hate Ron Paul" and thinking through why the 'left' - what's left of them - would even be attracted to this man.

It is the same kind of desperation that made many left of left folks vote for Tom is my thinking. The left got caught napping. They been asleep for awhile now and those burned by Obomber are not sure what is left anymore.

These same folks set aside Tom's veracious ass kissing in the hope that his contested political blackness would be more than just a skin color handed down to him by slave-era legislation.

Inside this frame it is not a stretch to dismiss Ron Paul's racist diatribes from the past. They got nothing, nada, and niks left.

In South Africa the leftie brigade joined the Toms in the ANC and much the same drift is apparent.

In Bloemfontein in just days they will celebrate a movement that is hardly coherent and definitely not left in the radical sense. Its politics is the politics of the moment.

Whatever sells.

Since our contrived liberation the left movement of the ANC has been led by a menagerie of political drift from Mandela's appeasement politics to Mbeki's Shakespearean inspired neo-liberalism to one and a half presidents of the whatever is on the table mindset of Zuma who declared war alongside the West on an African country and then said he did not know that bombing meant really bombing.

These fools of the supposed left can be bought by whatever.

Sobukwe and Biko used to warn radicals to be weary of the contrived politics of lefties of the liberal kind.

I think on the Ron Paul buy-in by Truthdig.com they would be saying - 'I told you so'.

My brother Angry, I guess the question is "what's left anymore"? :0)

Onward!

Only Saudi Women May Sell Lingerie

2012-01-02T23:28:00.001+02:00

News24.
January 2, 2012.

Riyadh - Saudi Arabia says starting on Thursday, only females can work in women's lingerie stores.

The 2006 law banning men from working in female apparel and cosmetic stores has never been put into effect, partly due to hard-liners in the religious establishment who oppose the whole idea of women working where men and women congregate together, like malls.

The Labour Ministry says that over 28 000 women have already applied for the sales jobs.

Saudi's Arabia's most senior cleric, Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, spoke out against the decision in a recent sermon, saying it contradicts Islamic law.

He argued that wrongdoing may occur when a woman stands face to face with a man and sells without embarrassment.

The country follows an ultraconservative interpretation of Islam called Wahhabism. (SAPA)

*****

Comment: Oh the embarrassment of losing your job as a lingerie sales~~person/man~~ to a woman. Must be so emasculating, no?

I would be crushed. For real. I mean you establish a clientele base, not that you can tell one female customer from another mind you, but nonetheless you have a reputation of selling naked niceties to oppressed women so they can be 'free' - it is a revolutionary job.

It is all so confusing.

What exactly does the Qur'an say about women buying lingerie from women at their local mall? Or women selling without embarrassment? What is that anyway?

Just trying to figure out how all this is against Islamic law

And what exactly goes for lingerie in the kingdumb? Fingerless gloves? :0)

I'm gonna need a lotta aspirin wrapping my head around the f*cked up gender politics that Saudis sell as Islamic. Again.

Onward!

Ps. Don't stories like this give Islamophobes a big hard-on, or at least a small pitched tent if you know what I mean? ;0)

Boat Capsizes in Kenya (Lamu), at Least 7 Dead

2012-01-02T09:58:00.000+02:00

News24
January 2, 2012

Nairobi - At least seven people died and many more were feared missing after a boat carrying dozens of passengers hit another vessel and capsized off the Kenyan island of Lamu on Sunday evening, the Kenya Red Cross said.

Nelly Muluka-Oluoch, a Kenya Red Cross spokesperson said 20 survivors had been found so far and the boat may have been carrying up to 80 passengers. She said rescue teams were searching for more survivors into the night.

The boat was taking people from Lamu Island to the nearby mainland when it hit the other vessel.

A Lamu resident at the hospital on Lamu Island said 13 passengers, including five children, had been admitted for treatment after being pulled from the water.

He said the small ferries typically take up to about 50 passengers from the island to the mainland, but survivors said the boat was overloaded with people and baggage.

Officials in Lamu said they were still trying to determine the exact number of passengers and how many people had managed to make it to shore but did not yet have precise figures.

Kenyans flock to the Indian Ocean coast over Christmas and New Year for holidays and Lamu is a popular tourist destination.

Muluka-Oluoch said Red Cross teams in Lamu also said the small ferry was overloaded.

"The boat was carrying 80 people. So far seven bodies have been taken to the mortuary and there are 20 survivors so far," she said.

Overloading was blamed for another ferry disaster off the Indian an coast in neighbouring Tanzania in September. More than 200 people died when the MV Spice Islander sank as it sailed from Zanzibar to Pemba island.

*****

Comment: This is sad news. I used the ferries described in the article between the mainland and Lamu Island - everybody does.

The vast majority are old and dilapidated.

This news story made me remember my small misadventure on a small boat in Lamu with Korir and a few other colleagues.

We were lucky to escape unscathed - just drenched and late for a scheduled town hall meeting.

I miss Lamu and my heart goes out to the victims of the boat accident. They really need to clamp down on the boat operators and make travel between the Islands much safer.

**An aside: today marks exactly a year since I posted the Lamu boat misadventure - must mean something, no?

Oh, and I wonder what Aasia's 2012 resolutions look like ;0)

Onward!

‘Repeat After Me: The United States Is Not an Imperialist Country—Oh, and Don’t Get Emotional About War’

2011-12-30T15:42:00.002+02:00

Bill Bigelow
Rethinking Schools Blog
Reposted in Commondreams.org
December 29, 2011

You may have seen that an administrative law judge in Arizona, Lewis Kowal, just upheld the decree by the State Superintendent of Public Instruction that Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program violates state law. Judge Kowal found that the Tucson program was teaching Latino history and culture “in a biased, political, and emotionally charged manner.” According to CNN, one lesson that the judge objected to taught that the historic treatment of Mexican Americans was “marked by the use of force, fraud and exploitation.”

Try this “history detective” experiment. Ask the next person you encounter to tell you what they know about the U.S. war with Mexico. More than likely, this will be a short conversation, because that war (1846-48) merits barely a footnote in U.S. history textbooks. The most recent textbook I was assigned when I taught high school history in Portland, Ore. was American Odyssey. In 250 pages devoted to pre-20^th century U.S. history, the book includes exactly two paragraphs on this war. (The district’s new adoption, History Alive! Pursuing American Ideals, doubles the coverage to a whopping four paragraphs.)

And yet this is the war that “gave”—in the words of American Odyssey—California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and part of Colorado to the United States of America. And the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, formally ending the war, ratified the annexation of Texas, which had broken away from Mexico largely because of Mexico’s policies against slavery.

Most Mexicans know that the war against Mexico was another chapter in U.S. imperialism—a “North American invasion,” as it’s commemorated in a huge memorial in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. But don’t take Mexicans’ word for it. Here’s what Col. Ethan Allan Hitchcock, aide to the commander of U.S. forces Gen. Zachary Taylor, wrote at the time in his journal about the war’s origins: “I have said from the first that the United States are the aggressors. … We have not one particle of right to be here … It looks as if the government sent a small force on purpose to bring on a war, so as to have a pretext for taking California and as much of this country as it chooses.”

Exactly. President James K. Polk, himself a slaveowner, had ordered U.S. troops into an area claimed by Mexico and inhabited by Mexicans and waited for them to be attacked. And when they were, Polk claimed aggression and the U.S. had its war. The invading U.S. Army actually called itself the Army of Occupation.

The abolition movement regarded the war as a land grab to expand slavery. The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass denounced the Mexican invasion as “a murderous war—as a war against the free states—as a war against freedom, against the Negro, and against the interests of workingmen of this country—and as a means of extending that great evil and damning curse, negro slavery.” Henry David Thoreau coined the term “civil disobedience” in defense of his position that people should not pay taxes to support the war against Mexico. Thoreau argued that a minority can act against an unjust system only when it “clogs by its whole weight.”

Students enrolled in Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program would likely have known this history, because, after all, this is the story of how people living in Tucson no longer live in Mexico. But according to Judge Kowal, the program violates state law. That law bans curriculum that might “promote resentment toward a race or class of people.” And, as mentioned, Kowal complained that the material in Mexican American Studies was presented in “an emotionally charged manner…”

I have not seen the full Mexican American Studies curriculum, although I know it includes important texts like Rudolfo Acuña’s classic Occupied America and Paulo Freire’s A Pedagogy of the Oppressed—a book studied in every teacher education program worthy of the name. But I’m wondering how one can teach about the history of the U.S. relationship with Mexico in a manner that is not “emotionally charged.” You want to talk about “bias”? What about the bias of a textbook that can “cover” a war like that waged against Mexico in two paragraphs, or four paragraphs, and fail to so much as quote a Mexican, an abolitionist, a soldier, a woman, an African American, or a Native American—or fail to describe the death or injury of a single human being? What about the bias of a textbook or an entire curriculum that can discuss invasion and war in a manner that is not “emotionally charged”?

Here’s a U.S. infantry lieutenant who wrote his parents after a U.S. officer named Walker was killed in battle, quoted in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: “Gen. Lane … told us to ‘avenge the death of the gallant Walker’ … Grog shops were broken open first and then, maddened with liquor, every species of outrage was committed. Old women and girls were stripped of their clothing—many suffered still greater outrages. Men were shot by dozens … their property, churches, stores, and dwelling houses ransacked … It made me for the first time ashamed of my country.” In his memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant wrote that this was “one of the most unjust [wars] ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation …”

The problem with the school curriculum in this country is that it is not emotionally charged enough. Poverty rates are skyrocketing—especially for children of color. People are losing their homes because of the criminal behavior of huge financial institutions—and race has a lot to do with who profits and who suffers. This country’s military is still being sent to invade and occupy—and murder people with silent, invisible drones. The rich and powerful poison our atmosphere, our water, our food, and our children. So, yes, let’s have a curriculum that gets emotional—and that tells a fuller truth than is offered in our textbooks. And let’s stand in solidarity with the teachers and students in Tucson who are demanding to teach and learn about things that matter. © 2011 Rethinking Schools

Bill Bigelow is curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and author or co-editor of several Rethinking Schools books: A People's History for the Classroom, The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, Rethinking Columbus, Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World, and Rethinking Our Classrooms--Volumes 1 and 2. Bigelow lives in Portland, Oregon, and has taught high school social studies since 1978.

*****

Comment: I have always maintained that knowing the details is un-American but I say this out of a sense of sadness not gloat. Disease travels as you know.

Bill Bigelow is one of those rare educators who pushes the boundaries of what is considered to be knowledge. So many folks, more than just Americans, are happy to float along unconcerned with the state of the world or the real value what is sold to them as important.

Where is there time to contest reality and knowledge production when news-entertainment keeps us posted on the really important stuff: the Kardashians, Kendra, Jerseylicious, Lady Gaga and Charlie Sheen?

How are we expected to know that the US invaded Mexico before the end of slavery and stole their land?

It was not on the E! channel was it?

And Darwin thought that we would advance because we getting smarter.

He was wrong, advancement for the elite few is about making more people just dumber than sh*t. If we were all equally smart do you think most of us would care who was f*cking Kim Kardashian?

I heard she is back with her old boyfriend now that the sham marriage is out of the way, no? ;0)

Onward!

Zapiro on Zuma and Free Speech

2011-12-27T10:08:00.000+02:00

Credit

"This Christmas" and Sunday Soul

2011-12-25T16:32:00.001+02:00

Last night I searched high and low for soulful Christmas music on TV, including satellite radio channels, but came away somewhat dismayed.

No Temptations. No Sarah Vaughn. Not even Mariah. And certainly no old footage of Redd Foxx doing "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" ... you gotta love that gravelly voice and Fred Sandford stance :0)

What stuck in my head though was a scene from a movie I happened on earlier in the day where Chris Brown is doing a rendition of the Donny Hathaway classic, "This Christmas".

Can't get the tune out of my head, even as I should be writing elsewhere and not here.

I like Hathaway's more up-tempo version. It is the standard. But I also like the version by The Whispers. Perhaps more because it is a little more soulful, at least to me it is.

Oh did I tell you that it is so hot in Kimberley that I wish it would snow.

Come to think of it, the last white Christmas we had here in South Africa was right before Mandela became president - so that would make it December 25, 1993 :0)

Onward!

Too Good Not to Post: Now That's The Xmas Spirit

2011-12-24T09:09:00.001+02:00

CLEAR MESSAGE: A young Palestinian protester dressed as

Santa flashes the victory sign as he stands opposite an

Israeli soldier during a rally in Maasarah,

near Bethlehem. (Musa al Shaer, AFP)

Onward!

Picture Credit

One Last Funky Friday for 2011

2011-12-23T20:20:00.000+02:00

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

AND MERRY CHRISTMAS

TO MY CHRISTIAN SISTERS AND BROTHERS

Onward!

Ps. I am taking a break here because I have to. And Santa Claus better stay the hell away from my momma. For real.

Peace. :0)

Fearless Women of Egypt

2011-12-21T10:22:00.000+02:00

Onward!

Credit

Women No More Under Egypt's Military Boot

2011-12-19T12:48:00.003+02:00

Onward! to real liberation and freedom my brave sistas ...

Picture Credit

*****

Update: See "Image of Unknown Woman Beaten by Egypt's Military Echoes Around World" by Ahdaf Soueif.

Also, "Deadly Cairo Clashes Stretch into Fourth Day" by Selim Saheb Ettab.

A protester in Cairo today (December 19) carries a picture

of the woman who was beaten by military police

last week. (AFP, Mohammed Abed)

Kenya's Criminal Assault on Famine-Stricken Somalia

2011-12-19T09:59:00.000+02:00

Truthout
Stephen Roblin
December 18, 2011.

On October 15, Kenya's top security chiefs declared war on Al Shabaab, the loose coalition of Islamist militias that controls southern Somalia. The next day, hundreds of Kenyan soldiers in armored trucks and tanks reportedly "stormed" across Kenya's northern border and into the region with the goal of decimating an Islamist coalition that was originally catapulted to dominance in 2007 consequent to a US-backed Ethiopian intervention.

Since then, Kenyan airstrikes have been clearing the way for Kenyan soldiers and their Somali proxy forces as they move deeper into southern Somalia, a region from which Al Shabaab has waged a bitter war against Somalia's Mogadishu-based Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and the African Union (AU) "peacekeeping" mission (AMISOM) that has prevented its collapse. Ethiopian troops have reportedly joined the invasion where they are primarily targeting Al Shabaab strongholds in central Somalia.

Southern Somalia is currently the "epicenter" of a famine that the UN believes could claim up to 250,000 lives in coming months. Famine relief efforts have been crippled by three major factors: Al Shabaab's partial ban on aid agencies, the large-scale theft of food aid by TFG-affiliated militias, and US aid restrictions - the last of which have effectively criminalized humanitarian assistance in southern Somalia since 2008.

The Kenyan intervention now joins the factors cited above as a primary obstacle to overcoming "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today." In fact, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has already found that intervention is limiting humanitarian access and has stated unequivocally that "[t]he hostilities threaten the lives of those in crisis and the ongoing humanitarian efforts to assist them."[1]

Pushing hundreds of thousands of Somalis closer to the brink of starvation, however, has done nothing to deter Kenya, nor its backers, from pursuing what is clearly an illegal intervention.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: It is somewhat delusional to think that Kenya's war on Somalia is about isolated attacks by Al Shabaab.

It is even more delusional to expect that Kenya would prioritize the suffering of starving Somalis in Somalia?

Al Shabaab is not even a coherent militia. And, there are hundreds of thousands of starving Somali refugees inside of Kenya.

The US is the agitator behind this attack on Somalia. It has sold dreams and promises to the Kenyans and the Ethiopians (who have joined in).

The strategy is aimed at 'securing' the region which sits adjacent to the theater of middle east interests, and of course, Israel.

Why you think Israel has been 'asked' to help Kenyans fight those crazy Muslims in Somalia?

Nothing new here. This is old cold war tactics which seek to close failed states and replace them with US-friendly client states.

And by the looks of it, Kenya and Ethiopia are buying the same sh*t.

Inside of this historical imbalance, the humanitarian principle which would have Africans caring about other Africans is set aside for stuff and other promises of more stuff.

And the stuff is not about development mind you. It is about propping up client states with friendly Toms who care little about democracy, international law, or the fragility of their compromise.

For now, a promise is as good as gold. It is the politics of imaginary colonial trinkets. Still.

Onward!

Back on Script in Egypt

2011-12-17T09:46:00.000+02:00

No mercy: Egyptian army soldiers arrest a woman protester wearing
the Niqab during clashes near Cairo's downtown Tahrir Square,
Egypt. Activists say the clashes began after soldiers severely
beat a young man who was part of a sit-in outside the
Cabinet building. (AP) Read more

Credit

Do Books "Prime People for Terrorism"?

2011-12-16T11:07:00.007+02:00

New Statesman rolling blog
Fahad Ansari (guest post)
December 15, 2011.

This week's terrorism conviction has serious implications for freedoms of speech and thought in modern Britain.

In August 1966, Egyptian Islamist thinker and writer Sayyid Qutb was convicted in Cairo of conspiring against the state. The evidence used to incriminate him consisted primarily of extracts from his book Milestones, a treatise on Islamic governance written by Qutb during a previous stint in prison. For Egyptian President Nasser, the ideas contained in Milestones were as threatening to his position as the birth of Moses was to the Pharaoh thousands of years earlier. Nasser 's solution to his dilemma was little different from that of the Pharaoh. Kill the ideological revolution in its infancy. Qutb was executed in prison on 29 August 1966. All known copies of the book were confiscated and burned by military order, and anyone found in possession of it was prosecuted for treason.

Almost half a century later, on Tuesday 13 December 2011, British Muslim Ahmed Faraz was sentenced to three years in prison in London after being convicted of disseminating a number of books which were deemed to be terrorist publications and thereby "glorifying" and "priming people" for terrorism (despite, as the judge conceded, having had no role in any specific terror plots). One of those books is Qutb's Milestones - which is considered by some to be one of the core texts of the modern Islamist movement and the ideological inspiration for Al Qaeda. In a trial which lasted over two months, jurors had the entirety of Qutb's thoughts and ideas, as expressed in his book, read out to them to decide whether or not such ideas are permissible in 21st century Britain. They concluded that they were not and Milestones has now been deemed a "terrorist publication" and effectively banned in Britain.

Milestones is also published by Penguin Books, who previously found themselves in the dock in 1960 (around the same time that Qutb was writing Milestones) after publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover, the last case of its kind until now. However, the CPS case was that the Milestones special edition published and sold by Faraz contained a number of appendices intended specifically to promote extremist ideology. Yet these appendices consisted of a series of articles about Qutb by contemporary thinkers and writers and a syllabus of three books taught by Hassan al-Banna, the founding ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is on the verge of being democratically-elected in post-Mubarak Egypt.

Other books Faraz was selling which are now also effectively banned include those of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian scholar who became one of the leaders of the jihad in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation, as well as a teacher and mentor to Osama Bin Laden. Ironically, Azzam's Defence of Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan were ideological and theological texts that were heavily promoted in the Western and Muslim worlds to encourage young Muslims to join the Western-backed jihad against the Soviet Union . Until very recently, both books were readily available to purchase from mainstream booksellers, Amazon and Waterstones, yet neither company seems to have been threatened with prosecution.

Whatever your view of Qutb or Azzam's works, the Faraz case has extremely serious implications for freedoms of speech and thought in modern Britain . In the land of Shakespeare and Wordsworth where more books are published every year than in any other country in the world, books could now be banned and ideas prohibited. Yet a core free speech principle is that the best way to defeat ideas is to debate and discuss them, not prohibit or criminalise them. Perhaps it is for this reason that Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf - the ideological inspiration for the most violent political movement of the 20th century - remains available in bookstores and libraries today. It is probably the same reason that the prosecution's expert witness, US-based terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman, admitted under cross-examination that none of the books would have been banned in the United States under the first amendment of its constitution.

Many will argue that since Faraz was also convicted of possessing information likely to be of use to a person committing or preparing for an act of terrorism (including military training videos and bomb-making instructions), the books ought to be viewed through this prism. The reality is that over the course of three years, the police seized and examined 19 computers, 25 hard drives, 15,000 books, over 9,000 DVDs and videos and millions of documents, all of which belonged to a busy bookstore. Out of these, they could only find four documents which the jury concluded fell afoul of this specific law and which it could not even be proven had ever been read by Faraz.

The case also has wider implications for political debate inside the British Muslim community. To believe or to even discuss an Islamic mode of governance, the political union of Muslim countries in a caliphate and issues related to military jihad and foreign conflicts seem to have become synonymous with "glorifying" terrorism. Now that the dissemination of books which promote and advocate such ideas is being criminalised, the logical next step may be to try and ban the ultimate source of all Islamic political thought - the Qur'an itself - as Dutch politician Geert Wilders once proposed. (For those who may accuse this writer of scaremongering, journalist Yvonne Ridley was met with the same incredulity five years ago when she announced to thousands of Muslims that the government would try and ban Milestones.)

In Nasser's Egypt , thousands of copies of Milestones were destroyed and burned by the state. In 21st-century Britain , will all of us who possess copies of it now have to burn them ourselves or risk being arrested and prosecuted for possessing "un-British" books and glorifying terrorism?

Comment: What kind of judicial system inside of a democracy can find plausible reason to ban books or ideas contained in books?

This from a country who would have taken to the battlefield to protect Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in 1988.

There is no place for censorship in a democracy. In 1988 I was among a small group of Muslims who did not support the banning Rushdie's warmed over nonsense in South Africa or anywhere else.

My argument then was similar to when Zapiro was condemned in 2010 for defaming the Prophet; produce counter narratives, engage ideas and deconstruct that which offends you but don't stick your head in the sand.

In the US the warmongers who are supposedly the gatekeepers of democracy are now waging a war on civil liberties.

The framers of the US constitution must be spinning in their graves like a rotisserie chicken.

The right to a fair trail is soon to be a thing of the past. Tom has declared war without even involving the congress and it won't end in the near future.

What is it about this time that makes the US and Britain so eager to violate civil liberties? Who wants to live in a country where material is everywhere and critical ideas are hard to find even banned?

Reminds me of a time when I started looking through a bookstore in Singapore. What the hell do people read here was my thinking.

Nothing that was even remotely critical of anything was on the shelves. Singapore bans anything even remotely critical of its authoritarian capitalism.

In Thailand you can go to jail for long periods if you 'insult' the king, even in a book published outside the kingdom!

Now in Britain you have to worry about which books are on your shelves just in case the freedom police show up looking to trump up charges and declare you a terrorist.

In the mid 80s I smuggled a copy of The Communist Manifesto into South Africa. I tore off the covers and put it in a jacket that had a hidden compartment.

I thought it an important act for freedom and my politics. If I was caught it may have led to a lengthy prison term under the Suppression of Communism Act.

I would have been a "terrorist" under apartheid and I would be a terrorist sympathizer now in Britain because of the copy of Milestones on my bookshelf here in the dustbin by the hole.

The strange thing about my 'daring' is that I never read the copy I smuggled. I never distributed it to anyone and have no idea what ever happened to it.

For me the act of acting against banning ideas was more important at the time. So important that I did not take the next important step and read it very carefully (I had just read selectively before that) until I started taking classes in the US on political theory a year or more later.

It seems very odd to me that Britain would not see the intellectual value of countering ideas with other ideas: a kind of dialectical thinking that the west is always selling as reason.

And even while these books are banned you can read Mein Kampf on any crappy rainy day (almost year round that is) in Britain.

Huh?

So much for their so called "matured democracy".

Onward!

Kenya's Samburu People 'Violently Evicted' after US Charities Buy Land

2011-12-15T23:15:00.001+02:00

The Guardian (UK)
Clar Nichonghaile and David Smith
December 14, 2011.

Around 2,000 Samburu families have stayed squatting on edge of disputed territory, says NGO Survival International

The pastoralist Samburu have reported constant harassment

frompolice with women allegedly raped and animals

seized. Photograph: Zhao Yingquan/Xinhua

Members of the Samburu people in Kenya have been abused, beaten and raped by police after the land they lived on for two decades was sold to two US-based wildlife charities, a rights group and community leader have alleged.

The dispute centres on Eland Downs in Laikipia, a lush area near Mount Kenya. At least three people are said to have died during the row, including a child who was eaten by a lion after the Samburu were violently evicted in November last year.

The London-based NGO Survival International said the Samburu were evicted following the purchase of the land by two American-based charities, the Nature Conservancy and the African Wildlife Foundation.

The groups subsequently gifted the land to Kenya for a national park, to be called Laikipia National Park.

Survival International said the land was officially owned by former president Daniel arap Moi, although AWF simply said it bought it from a private landowner.

With nowhere to go, around 2,000 Samburu families stayed on the edge of the disputed territory, living in makeshift squats, while 1,000 others were forced to relocate, Survival said.

Jo Woodman, a campaigner for Survival, said the pastoralist Samburu had reported constant harassment from police with women allegedly raped, animals seized and an elder shot as recently as last month.

"There has been an ongoing, constant level of fear, intimidation and violence towards the community, which has been devastating," Woodman said.

A community leader, who did not wish to be named, described police harassment as enormous. He said police beat people, burned manyattas or traditional homesteads and carried out arbitrary arrests during the period leading up to and including the eviction last year. He said they also confiscated many animals and the intimidation has continued.

"The situation has been really bad for a long time," he said. "[The Samburu] have nothing. Things like bedding and utensils were burned."

Kenyan police were not available on Wednesday to comment on the allegations.

Survival has written to the UN appealing for urgent action to put an end to the violence and provide assistance to the Samburu, who have gone to court to establish their right to the land.

"In one incident, a Samburu elder was shot dead by paramilitaries," the group said in its letter to the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination, dated 7 December.

"The displaced community has nothing but their livestock, thousands of which were impounded – with no reason given – on 25 November 2011. This is an urgent and serious violation of the rights of this community, which has been left squatting beside its land with no amenities," Survival's letter said.

The two conservation groups gifted the 17,100 acres to Kenya's government in November to create a national park to be run by the Kenya Wildlife Service.

However, since then a court has banned the KWS from proceeding with the conservation project until a ruling on the Samburus' legal case.

Both US-based charities indicated they were watching the situation with concern but were unable to comment for legal reasons.

John Butler, director of marketing for the AWF, said: "The African Wildlife Foundation does not condone violence. AWF has a longstanding history of working closely with local communities to ensure that conservation solutions benefit both people and wildlife. Unfortunately, we cannot comment at length on this issue due to a pending court case in Kenya."

Blythe Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Nature Conservancy, said: "The conflict over natural resources across Africa is a serious issue. Everywhere we work in Africa, we're working with local communities to address natural resource issues. We're closely monitoring this situation; unfortunately we can't comment at length due to a pending court case in Kenya."

Kenya has a history of land-grabbing by senior government officials, particularly during Daniel arap Moi's time in power. Land disputes are common as legal documents of ownership are often missing or have been forged.

A request for comment from Kenya's Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife went unanswered. However the minister, Dr Noah Wekesa, was quoted as telling parliament last month that KWS had ceased all activity on the land, which would not be gazetted as a national park until the other legal case was resolved.

The Samburu's legal case was heard in the town of Nyeri on Wednesday and lawyer Korir Sing'Oei said the court confirmed that the KWS had secured registration of the land.

"The court has turned a blind eye to the pleas of the Samburu community and allowed these illegalities to subsist," he said. "The transfer [of the land to the KWS] is totally unlawful and it's in flagrant violation of the interests of the Samburu community."

The court had agreed to give further direction on the matter in January.

Korir Sing'Oei said he intended to address the violations of rights in a separate case.

"Last year, when the community was forcefully evicted from the land ... their homes were burnt down and livestock confiscated in their hundreds and lots of their women were violated," he said.

"Given the powerful actors who have vested interests in the land, this issue has been really hushed up in the local media," he added.

The lawyer said the evicted Samburu had no intention of leaving Laikipia, a popular destination for wildlife-loving tourists and the area where Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton in a rustic lodge.

"Where would they go to? They have absolutely nowhere else to go," he said.

The community elder said running away was not an option.

"That's the place you call your home ... it's where you were brought up and where your children call home. It's an ancestral land."

*****

Comment: Some regulars here might recall that the lawyer in this case, Korir Sing'Oei, and I are working on a book on indigenous rights in Africa.

Korir was part of the legal team who won the 2010 Endorois decision at the AU court of human rights in Banjul.

It was a landmark decision for indigenous rights in Africa.

Korir is also one of the folks who worked on the sections of the new Kenyan constitution that pertains to indigenous rights.

I am happy to see him defending the rights of the Samburu in this case.

It saddens me to see the Kenyan government backtrack on its constitutional duty to protect the rights of indigenous peoples and support their development.

The Endorois decision forces all African states who are members of the AU to respect the sovereignty of indigenous peoples.

The Kenyan government was ordered by the judgment to rehabilitate the Endorois for their losses and suffering.

They have not done so and now are in default of the court's decision.

But hardly anyone will notice. The Samburu eviction from their own land is just another example of the low priority given to indigenous people in Kenya.

And it is no better elsewhere in Africa.

Onward!

Obama Administration Backs Bill Authorizing Indefinite Military Detention Of US Citizens

2011-12-15T22:43:00.000+02:00

WSWS.org
Joseph Kishore
December 15, 2011.

The Obama administration declared Wednesday afternoon that it was abandoning its nominal threat to veto a military authorization bill that explicitly authorizes the indefinite military detention of anyone the federal government declares to be a terrorist or supporter, including US citizens.

The final passage of the bill is now virtually assured by the end of the week. It marks a new stage in the collapse of the most basic democratic rights in the United States and the erection of the framework of a military-police state.

From the beginning, the administration has supported all fundamental components of the bill, while criticizing it largely from the standpoint of defending executive power. In a statement, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that a few cosmetic changes this week ensured that it “does not challenge the president’s ability to collect intelligence, incapacitate terrorists and protect the American people.”

A few hours later, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of the legislation, 286-136, with support from both big business parties. Democrats split 93-93 on the bill, while Republicans voted for it by a margin of 193-43.

The Senate is expected to vote on it Thursday, before it arrives at the president’s desk. Both houses of Congress had already passed earlier versions of the same legislation, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

The bill would allow for the open-ended detention of anyone caught up in the “war on terror,” without trial or charges, including US citizens. This is the first explicit legislation to effectively abolish habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful detentions) and the constitutional rights to a fair trial (the Sixth Amendment) and due process (the Fifth Amendment).

Another provision requires that such individuals be taken into military custody, with an exception for US citizens. The military seizure of US citizens is left to the discretion of the executive branch. This means the effective abolition of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has restricted use of the military for domestic policing for more than a century.

The main concern of the administration was that the requirement for military custody could hamper actions of other agencies engaged in counterterrorism operations, such as the FBI and CIA. An earlier policy statement from last month outlined the White House position that the requirement on military detention was an “unnecessary, untested, and legally controversial restriction of the President’s authority to defend the Nation from terrorist threats that would tie the hands of our intelligence and law enforcement professionals.”

The White House has cited the extra-judicial assassination of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki (a US citizen) as evidence that there should be no restraints on the form through which executive power is exercised.

In response to White House pressure, House and Senate negotiators on Monday agreed to compromise language that states that nothing in the bill will affect “existing criminal enforcement and national security authorities of the FBI or any other domestic law enforcement agency…regardless of whether such… person is held in military custody.”

Another measure would allow the president to waive requirements on the grounds of “national security.”

The administration also expressed the concern that the explicit authorization of indefinite detention was not necessary, as the White House claims that this power is already incorporated in the Authorization to Use Military Force, passed in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks. Its inclusion in the bill could prompt judicial review. Carney’s statement declared, “Though this provision remains unnecessary, the changes ensure that we are merely restating our existing legal authorities and minimize the risk of unnecessary and distracting litigation.”

Commenting on the amended version, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement earlier this week: “The sponsors of the bill monkeyed around with a few minor details, but all of the core dangers remain—the bill authorizes the president to order the military to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others found far from any battlefield, even in the United States itself.”

This assault on fundamental democratic rights has been packaged into a $662 billion military spending bill, including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill also includes new sanctions against Iran and the renewal of the AUMF, which was passed after the September 11 attacks and used to justify everything from aggressive war to domestic spying.

It incorporates a sweeping definition of those who are subject to the law, including anyone who “substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces” and “any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities.” This language can be stretched to include virtually anyone, including political opponents of US wars justified on the pretext of the “war on terror.”

The battlefield is defined in the legislation to encompass the entire world, including the “homeland”—that is, the United States. A person can be detained “under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities”—that is, forever.

The White House was particularly concerned to ensure that the legislation not restrict the ability of the executive to detain US citizens indefinitely. During the early drafting procedure, it requested that Congress strip out language that would have excluded citizens from the indefinite detention clause.

The entire “debate” within the political establishment over the NDAA testifies to the collapse of any commitment to democratic rights within the American ruling class.

*****

Comment: The US is starting to feel a lot like apartheid South Africa.

Detention without trial was standard operating procedure for the apartheid security police.

The military was used to police the citizenry. And, they locked up political prisoners indefinitely on an island too.

Where are my 'liberal' friends now?

Are they watching their 'change we can believe in' president whittle away the very constitution they thought he would protect?

I guess most of them conveniently looked the other way when he voted for the Patriot Act.

Now where they gonna look?

Tom has just joined the crazies and declared war on some of the most important constitutional rights granted to citizens.

The right to be charged. The right to a speedy and fair trail. These are part of the foundation of American democracy.

It is more than a slippery slope hey. They need more than a limp '"Occupation" that's for sure.

And now the ugly truth is known; Obama is no better than Bush, in fact, he is worse.

Onward!

That Time of Selling Again

2011-12-15T13:55:00.001+02:00

I like Christmas. Well, I like it where it snows and there is Egg Nog and some semblance of a festive mood beyond the incessant capitalization (just about hard to miss anywhere these days though).

I grew up appreciating Christmas and respecting what it means to Christians cause my grandma taught me so.

Just a few hours ago I was in a store and they were piping in Christmas tunes amidst the hurry of folks who seem to be on a holiday treadmill.

It is all familiar. The hurry. The rush.

And then the let down. It is inevitable. You do know that this time of the year more people commit suicide than any other time of the year?

Oh yeah, did I tell you that more people kill themselves here in the Northern Cape than in any other province in South Africa? And they do so all year round too!

OK, so my rant is really about how capitalists shape Christmas (other holidays too). It is a holiday so commercialized now that it has lost any spiritual meaning (mostly).

They selling us stuff. All of us. And they selling prejudices too wrapped up in feel good crap.

Thought you may like this blast from the not so distant past:

Does it not just suck? Bet the other box is a blender!

So Guru, if you planning on buying that make-belief significant other a gift this Christmas, make it a real gift.

Try a microwave for Chinese leftovers. Or a popcorn maker for game days.

I'm getting my make-belief girlfriend lingerie. Again.

Onward!

Ps. I wonder if she would rather have a Kawasaki?

Image Credit (Dunno)

Israeli Settlers Attack Mosque in al-Quds

2011-12-14T11:10:00.000+02:00

PressTv
December 14, 2011.

Israeli settlers have once against attacked a mosque in the western part of al-Quds (Jerusalem) to terrorize the Palestinian community, residents say.

The settlers moved to set the mosque ablaze on Wednesday and scrawled anti-Arab graffiti on the walls of the building, AFP reported.

The attackers also set fire to a building nearby, the report said.

"A good Arab is a dead Arab" and "price tag" were spray-painted by the settlers on the exterior walls of the mosque.

Israeli settlers are the main suspects behind "price tag" operations on mosques in the Palestinian territories.

Under the so-called "price tag" policy, Israeli settlers regularly engage in attacks against Palestinians and their properties, in supposed reaction to Tel Aviv's operations against illegal settlements.

Muslim nations have frequently blamed such acts on the Israeli regime, calling them a sacrilege of Islamic sanctities. The Israeli settlers have been heavily armed by Tel Aviv, and enjoy near immunity.

Violence by extremist settlers against the native Palestinian population is routine.

*****

Comment: And the UN will be doing what exactly to protect Palestinians from these Israeli thugs.

Can we expect Nato to launch an aerial bombardment of Israeli and its settlements until they respect the human rights of Palestinians?

Or, are Palestinians just less than human?

What a sham! The west kills Gaddafi but it sat on its hands as Israel bombed Gaza to pieces. Where was the concern for the innocent victims of Israel's inhumane actions (which have never seized).

Bet you hear not a peep out of Tom or Killary on this round of action by Israeli terrorists.

Onward!

Iran rejects US Calls for Return of Spy Drone

2011-12-14T10:53:00.003+02:00

Guardian (UK)
December 13, 2011.

Defence minister demands apology from Washington for invading Iranian airspace and says plane is now its property

Iran has rejected US calls for the return of a spy drone captured by its military and instead demanded an apology from Washington.

Tehran last week identified the drone as an RQ-170 Sentinel and said it was captured over the east of the country. The almost-intact aircraft was displayed on state TV and heralded as a victory for Iran in its protracted intelligence and technological battle with the US.

Iran's defence minister, Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, said: "Their plane invaded Iran and Iranian forces reacted powerfully. Now, instead of offering an apology to the Iranian nation, they impudently ask for the return of the plane."

US officials say the unmanned aircraft malfunctioned and was not brought down by Iran.

President Barack Obama said on Monday the US wanted the surveillance aircraft back and has delivered a formal request for its return, though Iran is not expected to comply.

But Vahidi said the US should instead apologise for invading Iranian airspace. "Iran will defend its stance and interests strongly," he added in remarks carried by the semi-official Mehr news agency.

Hours after Obama's request, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reiterated his minister's comments. "The Americans have perhaps decided to give us this spy plane," he said in an interview broadcast live on Monday night on Venezuelan state television. "We now have control of this plane."

On Tuesday the Iranian legislator Hamid Rasaei told an open session of parliament the drone would remain in Iran, describing it as "war booty". Later, 186 legislators in the 290-seat assembly issued a statement condemning the "invasion" and urging the international community to take a tough stance over the "dangerous act".

Meanwhile, Iranian media said Obama's plea for the drone's return put the US in the role of a "beggar".

There are concerns in Washington that the Iranians may attempt to reverse-engineer the chemical composition of the drone's radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft's sophisticated optics technology that allows operators to identify suspected terrorists from tens of thousands of feet in the air.

There are also fears that the drone's database could be hacked, although it is not clear whether any data could be retrieved – some surveillance technologies allow video to stream through to operators on the ground but do not store much collected data, but if they do, it is encrypted.

Another legislator, Parviz Sorouri, claimed on Monday that Iranian experts were in the final stages of recovering data from the captured drone.

*****

Comment: Should Iran ask the US to return its frozen assets in the US?

The more I think about this it seems plausible that the US may have 'sacrificed' the drone so as to escalate the manufactured crisis with Iran.

Of course, my assumption credits the US with thinking ahead.

Dunno.

Onward!

Imperialism through the Looking Glass

2011-12-13T13:36:00.000+02:00

Dissident Voice
Kim Petersen
December 12, 2011.

Imperialism is Antithetical to the Sovereign Equality of States

How are Westerners to make sense of human precepts that espouse the goodness of sharing with those less fortunate while western corporations plunder the wealth from the land of those in dire need? How is it that Westerners can make sense of the professed desire for peace and love for fellow humans when western militaries wreak violence on smaller nations and blithely explain away civilian deaths as “collateral damage”?

It makes one wonder: on which side of the looking glass are we?

If one wandered to the other side of the looking glass — where up is down and down is up, where left is right and right is left, where good is bad and bad is good — what would one find? How does imperialism look like on the other side of the mirror?

Just imagine what would have been the reaction of the United States if Iran was running a covert spy operation against it and refused to discuss the matter?1

What would have been the reaction if an Iranian drone had been brought down/crashed in the continental United States? One can easily imagine the outcry and indignation. It would certainly be described as a clear-cut casus belli. What if the Iranian reaction to its “lost” drone were merely to deny the authenticity of the drone?2 Or what if it the reaction were to deny its drone had been brought down by the US?3 ,4

What if the reaction were merely to downplay US acquisition of Iranian technology?3 What if the Iranian reaction to the loss of its surveillance craft5 were unapologetic, as if spying on a sovereign nation was its right?6

What if this were one of many preceding drone tresspasses?7

What would the reaction be if Iran built a case against the US based on dollops of disinformation, manipulating international personnel charged with nonproliferation responsibility, and targeted the US economy by pressing for worldwide sanctions8 for failing to live up to many clauses in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty including the preamble which states,

Desiring to further the easing of international tension and the strengthening of trust between States in order to facilitate the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons, the liquidation of all their existing stockpiles, and the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery pursuant to a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control…9

In the “real world,” the US has continued to maintain and update its nuclear stockpile in clear contravention of the NPT.10

What if the Iranian president and foreign minister all declared that “no options were off the table” in how to deal with the nuclear threat posed by the United States?11

Imagine if Iran had attempted to shut down nuclear facilities in the US and Israel with a computer virus?12 How would the US and Israel have responded?

Imagine if Iranian black operatives were assassinating nuclear scientists in Israel while denying it all back home “with a smile.”13 Imagine if explosions mysteriously erupted from Dimona?14 What would be the reaction in Israel – especially if a former Iranian head of state security hinted his state was behind it all acting as “the hand of Allah”?15

What if part of the justification for destruction of Israeli nuclear facilities was that Israeli-made drones were used by Iran’s nemesis, the US, to overfly its neighbour state, Iraq?16 ,17

If, as a part of modern historical record, Iran had plotted and helped bring about the overthrow of an elected US government and then replaced it with an authoritarian monarch kept in place with a draconian state security, how would Americans view the Iranian state?18

If everything detailed here has happened mirror opposite against Iran, how then is it that a serial aggressor state like the US19 has any moral clout to denounce Iran? How is that Israel, a serial violator of international law, has any moral standing to pronounce on Iran?

Is the United Nations not based on the “sovereign equality of all its Members” as stated in the UN Charter?20 Why then should the reaction among UN members differ in response to similar provocations?

How does one state justify its possession of weapons of mass destruction while denying other states the same right of possession? What happened to Iraq and Libya when they gave up possessing WMD?

What has happened to North Korea which gained possession of nuclear bombs? What conclusions should the Iranian state reach from all of this?

Does each state not have the inalienable right to self-defense equal to that of other states?21

*****

Comment: If you spend enough time around Americans you will soon realize that most of their identity and world view is based on a violent white exceptionalism.

This is true for most Americans across the racial divides. White exceptionalism is an imperial mindset and not a skin color.

An example, last night I found myself watching a program about American truck drivers plying their trade in India (somewhere in the Himalayas).

Ummm don't ask why.

It did not take too long for the usual American arrogance that pronounces 'reality' at every second to appear.

One trucker in particular, a good ol' boy from Alabama, took exception to the manner that Indians appear on the streets of their own country.

"These people have no commonsense. Why do they stand around in thousands on street corners as if they have nothing to do," he said as he tried to negotiate Indian traffic patterns.

"Why don't they go home and watch cable TV or play Playstation or something," he blurted out rudely over incessant comments about "these people" this or "these people" that.

Somewhere toward the end of the program the fat ass stood around sanctimoniously delivering an assessment of his sanity versus the insanity of Indians.

'I have been to every state in the US (note the world is the US). All the major roads and the secondary roads too," he pressed with incredulous eyes which offered a western rational gaze for those who need to confirm that whiteness (particularly its American version) can insert its authority at any point in the constructed continuum of the Other.

Alabama red dismissed India. Its people. Its layered history. And he did so based on his experience driving a Tata truck (for a few hours) in Delhi!

The authority of the western white gaze is the critical definition of imperial American exceptionalism.

It is practiced and consumed by those who depend on whiteness to define a reality.

"These people" are a category or consciousness that allows a white fat fool who drives a truck for a living to be a 'rational' signifier of value anywhere in the world.

It is a historical disfigurement and it is violent (always).

Iran, for example, must be bombed to save Iranians from their inherent irrationality and destructiveness. (Think of how Columbus discovered America when there were folks there already - or how Hegel's rationalism is not drawn from other non-western thinkers because they did not understand rationalism until he explained their theory to them)

This (un)thinking is founded on the exceptionalism that whiteness is the superior (even only) rationalism that stretches across time - even before the garden of Eden (god/Jesus is reason therefore god/Jesus must be white).

Any other rationalism is mere mimicry. Whiteness is godly and ordained to prescribe value (if Jesus was brown it is the business of whiteness to make him white since he should have known better).

This is true even where whiteness absorbs eastern values and then reorders its value (think of Yoga and its disassociated practice inside of whiteness - yoga as exercise only).

So Iran must be bombed to death in order to save the west from the destruction they signify - with or without nuclear weapons.

The Iranian mind (the racialized Other) is criminally destructive. Any weapon is nuclear whether it exists or not. (Kill em before they grow)

Liberal pundits in the west will absolve the excesses of whiteness as mistakes but punish severely any such semblance in the Oriental sphere.

Simply put, whiteness is the imperialism that constructs all western 'reality'. And whiteness is not a skin color. It is a disfigured world view backed up by the violent ability to pronounce rationality over all things.

This power to interpret. Is why the west sees its exceptionalism as 'reasonable and real'.

Iran will be dangerous until it is destroyed. Like Libya. Like Vietnam. Like Somalia.

In its place the imagined Iran will be imposed to signify the 'reason' of whiteness and its imperialism.

This to the white American mind is not injustice or unreasonable.

It is 'reality' and it comes with a side of fries and a Big Gulp Coke.

And we are not free.

Onward!

Civilian Killings Created Insurmountable Hurdle to Extended U.S. Troop Presence in Iraq

2011-12-11T18:28:00.000+02:00

Washington Post
Liz Sly
December 11, 2011.

HADITHA, IRAQ — In the accounting of what was won and lost in America’s Iraq war, this sleepy farming town deep in the western desert will rank as a place where almost everything was lost.

It was here, on Nov. 19, 2005, that a group of Marines went on a shooting spree in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed. Their patrol had been hit by a roadside bomb and one of their comrades was dead. They ordered five men out of a taxi and gunned them down. Then they went into three nearby homes and shot 19 people, including 11 women and children.

On those facts, U.S. and Iraqi accounts agree. On just about everything else — why it happened, whether it was justified and how it was resolved — they do not.

And in those dueling perceptions, over the killings in Haditha and others nationwide, lay the undoing of the U.S. military’s hopes of maintaining a long-term presence here. When it came to deciding the future of American troops in Iraq, the irreconcilable difference that stood in the way of an agreement was a demand by Iraqi politicians for an end to the grant of immunity that has protected on-duty U.S. soldiers from Iraqi courts.

“The image of the American soldier is as a killer, not a defender. And how can you give a killer immunity?” said Sami al-Askari, a lawmaker who is also a close aide to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

So the troops are going home this month, leaving a question mark over what had been one of the chief goals of the war — to nurture a strategic ally in the heart of the Middle East.

They leave behind a legacy that will forever be tainted in the minds of many Iraqis by the casualties inflicted by the American military on civilians. It’s the raw nerve that jangles, a sensitivity that grates on both sides even as the troops stream out of the country.

The Iraqi government’s decision “has saved the lives of many Iraqis,” said Yusuf al-Anizi, 38, the embittered brother of one of the Haditha victims. “Otherwise, we would have more tragedies to pile on the many tragedies we have seen.”

Exactly how many Iraqis were killed by Americans may never be known. An analysis last year by King’s College London of 92,614 civilian deaths reported from 2003 through March 2008 by Iraq Body Count — a Web site that monitors civilian casualties — found that 12 percent were caused by coalition forces. Though there is no reliable figure for total civilian casualties throughout the nearly nine-year-long war, most estimates put the overall number of deaths at more than 100,000. According to the Defense Department, 4,474 American service members have died, 3,518 of whom were killed in action.

The vast majority of civilian deaths were the result of Iraqis killing Iraqis, whether in bombings or the sectarian bloodletting that engulfed the country in 2005-07, said U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan.

In most of the incidents of acknowledged violations, such as the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, servicemen and women have been brought to trial, and many are serving prison sentences, Buchanan said.

And in the case of Haditha, there was a thorough investigation, he pointed out. Charges were brought against seven Marines, though they were dropped against six of them and the seventh was acquitted. An eighth Marine will stand trial in January.

“We take all of these things seriously,” Buchanan said. “We do in fact hold trials, and we treat them in accordance with the law. And if they are not found guilty, we’re not going to put people in prison.”

In explaining the breakdown in talks over the immunity issue, the U.S. military blames above all the behavior of private contractors. Buchanan singled out the Nissoor Square incident in 2007, in which Blackwater security guards killed 17 civilians at a busy traffic circle in Baghdad.

‘It’s in the air’

While Haditha and Nissoor Square became potent symbols for many Iraqis, just as vexing were the smaller, often untold incidents of civilians shot dead at checkpoints or near convoys by nervous soldiers fearful that they were about to be attacked, said Peter Van Buren, a State Department official who worked with Baghdad’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2009-10. When he arrived, he said, he was struck by the disconnect between Iraqi and U.S. perceptions of the war.

“We tried to convince them we were the good guys and that we’d got rid of Saddam, but given all the killings that had happened, that never hung together,” he said, recalling an occasion when he distributed fruit trees to farmers in a rural area. One refused to accept the seedling and spat on the ground. His son had been killed accidentally by U.S. forces, the farmer said, “and you’re giving me a fruit tree?”

“It’s in the air, it’s in the water, it’s the background music to what we do,” Van Buren said. “The Iraqis remember it even if we don’t. It will be a very dark legacy, and it’s one that will follow us around the Middle East.”

Officers who served acknowledge that such killings soured relations but say there’s little that can be done to avoid civilian casualties in urban warfare. In instances such as the Haditha killings, Iraqis “have every right to be bitter,” said retired Col. Peter Mansoor, who commanded a combat brigade in Baghdad in 2003-04 and then returned as executive officer to the top U.S. commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, during the surge of U.S. troops in 2007-08.

“In most cases, the circumstances are a lot cloudier,” he said. “The enemy does not wear uniforms. U.S. forces are taking fire, and they hit civilians. It’s harder to assign blame.”

On two occasions in 2003, soldiers under his command killed civilians by mistake — once when a family of six drove unwittingly into the middle of a firefight with insurgents, and later at a checkpoint when a family rushing a child to the hospital failed to stop.

Troops learned lessons as the war went on, he said. They learned to construct checkpoints in ways that made boundaries clearer. After the surge, when soldiers went to live in Iraqi neighborhoods, they learned to better distinguish friend from foe.

“I’m sure those families will never forgive the killings,” he said of the six civilians shot dead by his soldiers. “But when you look at it from the soldiers’ point of view, it was justified. It’s very hard, and obviously it led to a lot of ill will.”

No welcome for Americans

There is no limit to the ill will that envelops Haditha, a pretty, palm-fringed, town of 43,000 bordering a lake in the heart of the desert province of Anbar. Outward signs of the violence that raged have been erased. The bridge over the Euphrates River, on which al-Qaeda in Iraq once publicly beheaded suspected collaborators before it was bombed by U.S. warplanes, has been repaired. The spot where the roadside bomb exploded has been paved over.

The house where seven members of the Hamid family died is empty, and the one where eight members of the Yunis family were killed is occupied by distant relatives.

Only the Anizi family still lives in the squat, dun-colored home in which four male relatives were gunned down in a back bedroom by two Marines. A third kept watch in a nearby room over the brothers’ elderly father, their wives and Khaled, then age 14, the son of one of the men.

Khaled tried to read the names on the Marines’ uniforms when they entered the house, “but they were covered with blood,” he said. “Their hands and vests were soaked in blood. They only wanted revenge. When they came, I could see tears in their eyes. When they left, they were laughing.”

“They are barbarians,” added Yusuf, Khaled’s uncle, the only surviving brother of the victims, who was away at the time.

After the killings were exposed by Time magazine in 2006, the attitude of the U.S. military changed, Yusuf said. The FBI came to investigate. The family received condolence payments of $2,000 for each of the four men. They were promised that those responsible would be brought to justice.

But then the attention faded. Yusuf heard through news reports that most of the charges brought against the Marines had been dropped. The U.S. military left its base in Haditha nearly two years ago, and local officials can’t remember the last time Americans visited the town. They wouldn’t be welcome if they did.

“We wish they never had come,” Yusuf, for whom the withdrawal brings no consolation, no sense of closure said. “The injustice is a bigger crime than the crime itself,” he said. “And now we know for sure justice will never be done.”

Correspondents Uthman al-Mokhtar and Asaad Majeed contributed to this report.

*****

Comment: So many many people lost their lives in Iraq because the US fought a bloody and selfish war that went nowhere but cost the lives of millions.

Is it just me or do some of the commentators above think that stating the obvious kinda absolves them from what was done to the Iraqi people?

You know very well that this war is not over in the American imagination. Hollywood and media outlets will re-imagine it for America.

That process is well on its way in popular culture renditions of the war and what it represents.

The soldier experience will be highlighted and humanized while Iraqis will play add-ons to the self-obsessed American psyche.

New Rambos and new heroes of the screen will erase this monumental murder that borders on genocide because it is hardly done.

Like Vietnam, we will be fed faked-out interpretations replete with hero-soldiers struggling to make sense of the war and their life back in the US.

Violent flashbacks will contextualize the soldier/US as hero-victim of the good they went to do 'over there'.

All the while Iraqis will be erased. They will hardly exist. Written out of their own lives.

We have been here countless times before.

Onward!

Delusional Cameron

2011-12-11T03:20:00.000+02:00

Credit

Gingrich: Palestinians An ‘invented’ People

2011-12-10T11:53:00.000+02:00

Salon.com
December 10, 2011.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is telling a Jewish cable channel that Palestinians are an “invented” people and that they are really Arabs who chose not to live elsewhere.

The Jewish Channel on Friday released excerpts of an interview in which the former House speaker says there was no Palestine as a state and that the residents there were part of the Ottoman Empire before the creation of the state of Israel.

Gingrich says Palestinians were historically part of the Arab community and that they had a chance to go many places.

Gingrich says the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has been, quote, “delusional.” He says President Barack Obama’s effort to treat the Palestinians the same as the Israelis is actually, as he puts it, “favoring the terrorists.”

*****

Comment: This from the man who is the Republican front-runner for the US presidency.

Is there no end to the idiocy?

Onward!

Rape in the US military: America's Dirty Little Secret

2011-12-10T11:21:00.000+02:00

Guardian (UK)
Lucy Broadbent
December 9, 2011.

A female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire

"It was eight years before I was able to say the word that describes what happened to me," says Maricella Guzman. "I hadn't even been in the Navy a month. I was so young. I tried to report it. But instead of being taken seriously, I was forced to do push-ups."

"I can't sleep without drugs," says Kate Weber. "But even then, I often wake up in the middle of the night, crying, my mind racing. And I lie there awake in the dark, reliving the rape, looking for a second chance for it to end with a different outcome, but he always wins."

Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. So great is the issue that a group of veterans are suing the Pentagon to force reform. The lawsuit, which includes three men and 25 women (the suit initially involved 17 plaintiffs but grew to 28) who claim to have been subjected to sexual assaults while serving in the armed forces, blames former defence secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates for a culture of punishment against the women and men who report sex crimes and a failure to prosecute the offenders.

Since the lawsuit became public in February, 400 more have come forward, contacting attorney Susan Burke who is leading the case. These are likely to be future lawsuits. Right now they are anxiously awaiting a court ruling to find out if the lawsuit will go to trial. The defence team for the department of defence has filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing a court ruling, dating back to 1950, which states that the government is not liable for injury sustained by active duty personnel. To date, military personnel have been unable to sue their employer.

Whether or not the case goes to trial, it is still set to blow the lid on what has come to be regarded as the American military's dirty little secret. Last year 3,158 sexual crimes were reported within the US military. Of those cases, only 529 reached a court room, and only 104 convictions were made, according to a 2010 report from SAPRO (sexual assault prevention and response office, a division of the department of defence). But these figures are only a fraction of the reality. Sexual assaults are notoriously under-reported. The same report estimated that there were a further 19,000 unreported cases of sexual assault last year. The department of veterans affairs, meanwhile, released an independent study estimating that one in three women had experience of military sexual trauma while on active service. That is double the rate for civilians, which is one in six, according to the US department of justice.

Read the rest here.

*****

Comment: An absolutely despicable situation. And, this report only deals with rape inside the US military.

What needs to be factored in are the rapes/sexual assaults of civilians where the US military is stationed or at war.

Does the US keep a tally of the number of rapes/sexual assaults inflicted by its military personnel on civilians (women and men) in their so called field of operations?

I can recall high profile cases in Japan in 1995 (Okinawa rape incident) and one in 2008. But what about Iraqi, Afghan, and other victims?

Another day, another disgusting story about the US military.

Onward!

"Freedom Rider: Black America at the Bottom"

2011-12-08T19:46:00.001+02:00

Black Agenda Report
Margaret Kimberley
December 7, 2011.

The nation’s economic news is grim indeed, and is the grimmest of all for black Americans. Recently released census data shows that while the median yearly income in this country is $50,000, it is only $32,000 for black people, the lowest of any other racial group in the country. Hispanics had a median income of $37,000, whites $49,000 and Asians $64,000.

Simply put, black Americans are at the absolute bottom of the economic heap in a county still teetering from the effects of a seemingly endless recession. The term recession is something of a misnomer because it does not adequately describe the worldwide crises endemic to capitalism. As western nations take their citizens on a dizzying race to the bottom with various austerity measures, the fate of people already on the bottom grows more precarious by the day.

It is not coincidental that the dismal economic prospects for black people has occurred at the same moment that black politics limps along on life support. Black politics traditionally affirmed a right, indeed an obligation, to speak directly to the needs and aspirations of the masses of people. It has been substituted with feelings of vicarious joy when a black person reaches a high office.

Enter Barack Obama, the beneficiary of both black loyalty and a system which he assessed astutely as being ready for the right black man to come along. He fills the duel roles perfectly, giving good feelings about his presence in the White House but this presence is a result of promising to do nothing that the 1% would find inconvenient.

Sadly, the bloom is not yet off of the Obama rose, with a continuation of bizarre poll results indicating that the group doing the worst has the greatest degree of optimism. But the income and other indicators don’t lie and don’t change because most black people still love the president who looks like them but who goes out of his way to ignore them and their needs.

While phony government figures claim that employment numbers are improving, more than 46 million Americans are now receiving food stamps, a record. As the leaders of European countries struggle to keep the crises of Greece, Italy and Spain from spinning out of control, it is tempting to anticipate the post capitalist world. The thought experiment is interesting, but one thing is clear. When the dust eventually settles, black people will be at the bottom of a destroyed system.

If Barack Obama is re-elected, it is likely that black support for him will also continue, and the downward spiral will continue too. What is the future of a group always living on the cusp of disaster when a huge disaster takes place? No one can predict if the world economy will collapse

Armageddon-like, or whether it too will limp along, under performing and slowly putting millions of people in ever more dire conditions.

It is difficult to imagine a worse scenario, but imagine it we must. The Obama phenomenon has silenced a people who were once the most likely to speak out against inequality and injustice. The death of movement politics has made black people the perfect victims of the descent of their nation’s and the world’s economies.

Barack Obama’s role in exacerbating the crisis goes unnoticed while tangential characters are given needless attention. Every hateful statement from the mouth of Newt Gingrich is dissected and railed against but Gingrich has not been in power in this country for a long time. He played no role in the bank bailout and he did not declare that Social Security would be placed on the budget cutting table. Obama did those things and put an already suffering group further and further behind.

There has been a ray of hope lately provided by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

The group condemned for a lack of focus has focused on neighborhoods with high housing foreclosure rates and acted to put people back into their houses. The Occupy Our Homes actions are doing what movements have always done, forcing the powerful to respond to popular demands.

Black Americans do not have to continue acting like sheep going to the slaughterhouse. They can remember their history of bold action. They do not have to continue being last on the income list, and the political list. If movement politics can be resurrected the group at the bottom now does not have to stay there. There is hope for a different future, if people are unafraid to remember how great changes came about in the past. (© 2011 Black Agenda Report)

Comment: Surprised?

You shouldn't be, really. All that Obomber nonsense is a ruse, really.

I was thinking the other day that my disbelief in the presidency of Obama was more about my fear that his presence would deal a severe blow to the struggle against racism.

I was wrong about him not being able to win the White House. Very wrong as it turned out.

But I was right about my fear.

His presidency is a smokescreen to make it seem as if most blacks and Latinos are reaping equal benefits. Forget Native folk, they don't exist.

And then the other night Harry Belafonte appears on SABC explaining to South Africans how racism is stopping Obomber from creating that race-free society he bragged about.

There is no such thing as race-free, non-racial, or post-race in a race obsessed state like the US. Why would anyone even believe such bullsh*t?

And why would a celebrity civil rights veteran like Belafonte make excuses for a Frankenstein ass like Obama?

Is Guantanamo closed? Black sites still open? Drone murders still the order of the day? Prisons full of black and brown?

That Uncle Tom did exactly what rich white folks thought he would. And he did it without paying mind to blacks, Latinos, and the poor in general.

He is, after all, a construct of white corporate America. He bailed their asses out with billions of tax money the rich hardly contributed to. And he left the poor chronically unemployed and scraping life together on food stamps.

That blank check Dr King talked about is still nothing more than a bounced check. If he was alive today Dr King would turn his back on that monstrosity they erected in DC to supposedly recall his "dream".

Obama ain't a damn dream. This murderer is a nightmare. And yet folks of color, most of them, will trot down on election day and vote his ass into office again.

And my white liberal friends will tell me that he is not perfect but he is not Bush, McCain, Caine, or Gingrich.

True. No doubt.

The f*cker is worse than all of them rolled up together. At least with those f*ckers we know what we getting.

And what are we left with after a term in office?

This slick corporate weapon has reduced the resistance to "Occupy" gestures. Even stalwarts of the struggle against racism have fallen for his ploy(s).

One of those, Cornel West, has found his damn senses at last.

The power of Obama is not his ability to make what he says come true. Truth is he f*cking straight out lied and still folks believe he really occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The power of Obama is his ability to lull people into a deeper false consciousness. He is one of the greatest sellers of snake oil ever.

So why should anyone be surprised that the usual folks are being screwed?

Same as it ever was. And we are not free.

Onward!

'Remains of 274 US Troops Dumped'

2011-12-08T16:35:00.004+02:00

PressTV
December 8, 2011.

Reports say the US has dumped the remains of nearly 300 American troops killed in action overseas in a landfill in the state of Virginia.

According to the Washington Post, report on Wednesday, the incinerated partial remains of at least 274 American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan had been sent to the King George county landfill in Virginia.

The US Air Force is reported to have dumped the cremated partial remains in the landfill between 2004 and 2008.

The report was based on database information at the Dover Air Base mortuary, where the remains of most war fatalities return.

The actual number is considered to be far more than what the military admitted to, before reportedly halting the practice in 2008.

The US military concealed the corpses' dumping from families who had authorized the military to dispose of the remains in a dignified and respectful manner.

Officials say there are no plans to alert the families of the deceased soldiers.

The landfill disposals were never formally authorized under military policies or regulations.

In another report, investigators found body parts of soldiers stacked up in the military morgue in Virginia. Some of the remains appear to have been stored months or even years awaiting identification and disposal.

According to icasualties.org, about 7000 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan and Iraq so far.

*****

Comment: They fought for their country in fake wars, were killed to support the greed of the elite, and then their bodies were dumped in a landfill as thanks.

Yep, that about sounds like what you can expect from the US government; no respect for the living nor the dead.

And the poor get f*cked on the regular.

Onward!

Zapiro on Cop 17

2011-12-08T11:43:00.000+02:00

Credit

NAACP Warns Black and Hispanic Americans Could Lose Right to Vote

2011-12-07T10:18:00.000+02:00

CommonDreams.org (repost from Guardian, UK)
Ed Pilkington
December 6, 2011.

Civil rights group petitions UN over 'massive voter suppression' after apparent effort to disenfranchise black and Hispanic people

The largest civil rights group in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is petitioning the UN over what it sees as a concerted efforted (sic) to disenfranchise black and Latino voters ahead of next year's presidential election.

The organisation will this week present evidence to the UN high commissioner on human rights of what it contends is a conscious attempt to "block the vote" on the part of state legislatures across the US. Next March the NAACP will send a delegation of legal experts to Geneva to enlist the support of the UN human rights council.

The NAACP contends that the America in the throes of a consciously conceived and orchestrated move to strip black and other ethnic minority groups of the right to vote. William Barber, a member of the association's national board, said it was the "most vicious, co-ordinated and sinister attack to narrow participation in our democracy since the early 20th century".

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter supression (sic) measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

Fourteen states have passed a total of 25 measures that will unfairly restrict the right to vote, among black and Hispanic voters in particular.

The new measures are focused – not coincidentally, the association insists – in states with the fastest growing black populations (Florida, Georgia, Texas and North Carolina) and Latino populations (South Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee). The NAACP sees this as a cynical backlash to a surge in ethnic minority voting evident in 2008.

In that year, black and Hispanic voters turned out in record numbers, partly in a wave of enthusiasm for Barack Obama. More than 2 million extra black voters turned out over 2004, an increase of 15%.

Among Hispanics, the upturn was even more pronounced. Two million additional voters attended the polls – a rise of 28% on the previous presidential election.

The scale of the assault on voting rights is substantial, according to experts on electoral law. The Brennan Center for Justice, based at New York University law school, estimates that the new measures could bar as many as 5 million eligible voters from taking part in choosing the occupant of the White House next year.

The 14 states that have embarked on such measures hold two-thirds of the electoral college votes needed to win the presidency. Put another way, of the 12 battleground states that will determine the outcome of the presidential race, five have already cut back on voting rights and two more are in discussions about following suit.

Ethnic minority groups are not the only sections of society at risk of losing their voting rights. The Brennan Center warns that young voters and students, older voters and poor income groups are also vulnerable.

The NAACP says voting rights are being whittled down at every stage of the electoral process. First of all, the registration of new voters is being impeded in several states by moves to block voter registration drives that have historically proved to be an important way of bringing black and Hispanic people to the poll.

Four states – Florida, Iowa, Kentucky and Virginia – continue to withhold the vote from anyone convicted of a criminal offence. In Florida, offenders who have completed their sentences have to wait at least five years before they can even apply to restore their right to register to vote.

Across the US, more than 5 million Americans are denied the right to vote on grounds that they were convicted of a felony, 4 million of whom have fully completed their sentence and almost half of whom are black or Hispanic.

Other measures have reduced the ease of early voting, a convenience that is disproportionately heavily used by African-Americans. Even more importantly, 34 states have introduced a requirement that voters carry photo ID cards on the day of the election itself.

Studies have showed that the proportion of voters who do not have access to valid photo ID cards is much higher among older African-Americans because they were not given birth certificates in the days of segregation. Students and young voters also often lack identification and are thus in danger of being stripped of their right to vote.

In Texas, a law has been passed that prevents students from voting on the basis of their college ID cards, while allowing anyone to cast their ballot if they can show a permit to carry a concealed handgun.

Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP's president, said the moves amounted to "a massive attempt at state-sponsored voter suppression." He added that the association will be urging the UN "to look at what is a co-ordinated campaign to disenfranchise persons of colour." (© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited)

*****

Comment: Hello Jim Crow! Welcome back to mainstream white American politics.

And blacks and Latinos were thinking it was OK to relax since Muslims occupy the racist hot-seat now.

That said, don't forget how George W. Bush got into office by defrauding black voters in Florida. Do you remember the "dangling chad" debacle?

It helped that W's brother, Jeb, was the governor of that piece of swamp land called Florida when the black vote was largely declared null and void.

Without Florida poor ol' Al Gore had to settle for making crap movies about the environment.

The NAACP is right to warn folks that Jim Crow is back in town and looking fit and healthy.

Then again, what does it matter if they vote?

I'm just saying. They put a sellout in the Crack House and sh*t only got worse. Even W. did not envision the extent to which Obomber would f*ck over people of color and the poor in the US - and the world.

And it was not like some of us were not calling Tom on his agent sh*t long before he got to be president.

Maybe blacks and Latinos should just voluntarily hand in the right to vote until slave reparations are paid and the Indians are given back their land.

Voting in a stolen country is kinda like being possessive over someone else's spouse.

It's simply delusional.

Onward!

Muslim Miss USA, Rima Fakih, is a Real American Dammit!

2011-12-06T16:07:00.007+02:00

A news report says that there are a whole grip of Islamophobes who believe that Miss USA, Rima Fakih, is a terrorist sympathizer.

The 24-year old Arab-American beauty queen's family is from Lebanon. This has led to her being called a "Hezbollah babe" by those who make it their business to demonize Arabs and Muslims.

And she is an Arab and a Muslim so they doing double duty all rolled up into one.

Poor Ms Fakih can't win for losing. Not even her skimpy bikini or stripper photos have convinced 'real' Americans that she is just like them.

You know, fake and sh*t.

Maybe if she released a sex-video like Kim Kardashian it may go a long way, no?

But to her credit, Rima has persisted against her innate propensity to blow sh*t up and found a way to prove to America that she is indeed one of them.

To do so this Muslim sista has gone the full hog, so to speak. And I mean full hog as in pig, varkie, oink oink like.

Last Sunday Miss America was caught drunk driving!

Yep you read that right my hijabi sista.

Miss America, a Muslim in the land of Muslim haters, was caught blitzed behind the wheel of a car.

She is now facing a charge of driving under the influence (DUI).

Bless her heart though. She never gave up trying to fit into American culture and its many many dysfunctions.

She is a credit to her race and deserves mad props even from the haters.

This sista is learning me a thing or three.

I am sure that the DUI will p*ss off the Saudis and the Tabligh Jamaat. The latter may even dredge up enough courage to muster a real grip and slap her wandering ass ... and what an ass hey?

The bearded ones will probably also point out that the dangerous cocktail of driving while being a woman (DWW) is what made her drunk, and very likely f*cked up her virginity too.

So don't be surprised if there is a call for some virginity testing.

Whatever the reaction from the holy gatekeepers may be, Rima now belongs in the US, if even with unfortunate and deviant genetics.

But f*ck all that. The fyne sista is finally free. She should be rewarded.

Dammit, give that woman a Bells. She deserves it ne. Oh and let her marry a white boy too, even if he has never heard of a bidet.

You know they have all kinds of wet wipes now, right?

Geez!

As for yours truly, I am building a drone in my backyard to spy on, and bomb, unsuspecting Muslim terrorists in my neighborhood.

I too want to be a real American if even here in the delusional dustbin of my birth.

Most people think I drink heavily anyway so just being pulled over won't cut it for me. And drunk driving in South Africa is a constitutional right.

Naaaa boet. I am joining the American fight against Muslim terror by building my own damn drone out of used Coke and Pepsi cans.

Soon every Tabligh and Taliban f*ck close to me will be under terrorist surveillance until Killary Hilton calls me back to the land of the free.

And then the Muslim world will know that I was not just a bad Muslim but also an undercover brutha who, like Rima, just wants to be loved by America.

Cheers!

Picture Credit

Update (December 7): Stuff is actually getting rough for home girl. She had a blood-alcohol level of more than twice the legal limit and an open container (~~champaign~~ champagne) in the the car when she was stopped by cops at 2.15am.

These are serious offenses in fun loving America and could lead to a substantial prison sentence.

So OK, what's a Muslim woman doing driving around at 2.15 am anyway? That's late enough to make her a lesbian by Saudi standards!

Iran Shoots Down US Drone

2011-12-05T10:31:00.000+02:00

The Guardian (UK)
December 4, 2011.

Iran's armed forces have shot down an unmanned US spy plane that violated Iranian airspace along its eastern border.

An unidentified military official quoted by the official Irna news agency on Sunday warned of a crushing response to any violations of Iranian airspace by US drone aircraft.

"An advanced RQ170 unmanned American spy plane was shot down by Iran's armed forces. It suffered minor damage and is now in possession of Iran's armed forces," Irna quoted the official as saying.

No further details were given.

Later a spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan said a surveillance drone flying over western Afghanistan had gone out of control late last week and may be the one Iran said it had shot down over its own airspace. "The UAV to which the Iranians are referring may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status," an ISAF statement said.

Iran is locked in a dispute with the US and its allies over Tehran's alleged nuclear programme, which the west believes is aimed at developing nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying the programme is designed to generate electricity and produce isotopes for medical use.

Tehran said in January it had shot down two other unmanned spy planes over its airspace which were operated by the US.

Iran itself has focused part of its military strategy on producing drones, both for reconnaissance and offensive purposes.

It announced three years ago that it had built an unmanned aircraft with a range of more than 600 miles, far enough to reach Israel.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, unveiled Iran's first domestically built unmanned bomber in August 2010, calling it an "ambassador of death" to Iran's enemies.

*****

Comment: It can't be can it boet?

I mean, a third world wannabe upstart uncivilized country like ~~Iraq~~ ... I mean Iran, shoots down a sophisticated piece of weaponry from god's country, hey?

Luckily though if you read up you will note that the drone is not really a drone and even if it was it was a malfunctioning one that went AWOL on its own.

And those uncivilized ~~Afghans~~ thought they shot down a drone.

Puhleaseee. Pakistan does not have the ability to shoot sh*t even if those camel jockeys are Iranian.

What the world of terrorist Muslims must know is that even when the US is failing at sh*t and seeing their ass, it is because they want it so.

Truth is, the US is never out of control even when they are out of control.

And those f*ckers think they can defend themselves against a country that wins even when they losing, hey?

Have those Hajis ever heard of Vietnam? Hey? The US ran from Charlie with their tails between their legs and still won the war.

Get real sand-n*ggers! The US is divine. It cannot lose. That was not a real drone.

So give it back already.

Onward!

'End of Virginity' if Women Drive, Saudi Cleric Warns

2011-12-04T14:16:00.002+02:00

BBC

December 2, 2011.

A report in Saudi Arabia has warned that if Saudi women were given the right to drive, it would spell the end of virginity in the country.

The report was prepared for Saudi Arabia's legislative assembly, the Shura Council, by a well-known conservative academic.

Though there is no formal ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, if they get behind the wheel, they can be arrested.

Saudi women have mounted several campaigns to try to overturn the ban.

Aside from the practical difficulties it creates, they say it is also illogical as in trying to keep them under family control and away from men, it actually puts them in daily contact with a male driver.

The issue has received huge international attention.

Some Saudi women feel it has attracted too much interest, obscuring other equally important issues.

As part of his careful reform process, King Abdullah has allowed suggestions to surface that the ban might be reviewed.

This has angered the conservative religious elite - a key power base for any Saudi ruler.

Now, one of their number - well-known academic Kamal Subhi - has presented a new report to the country's legislative assembly, the Shura.

The aim was to get it to drop plans to reconsider the ban.

The report contains graphic warnings that letting women drive would increase prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.

A Saudi woman who has campaigned for women drivers told the BBC that the report was completely mad.

She said the head of the Shura had assured women campaigners that he was still open to hearing the case for lifting the ban.

*****

Comment: Now if there ever has been a moment when you should sit down and just shake your head in disbelief, it may be now.

But before you really get a good shake going on over this typical Saudi idiocy please pay mind to the Australian member of parliament, Luke Simpkins, who says that Australians are secretly being converted to Islam by eating halal meat.

Yeah Tony you read that right. Or should I say Yusuf or Abdul or whatever your Muslim name is now. Are you circumcised by the way? ;0)

Oh oh the guffaw is not over.

Credit

Darren Lumb and Rachel Firth of the Yorkshire British National Party have concerns similar to the Aussie idiot who worries that halal meat is slowly converting/perverting the real God fearing people who also happen to be white.

Lumb and Firth are pissed that KFC, which they call Koran Fried Chicken, sells halal chicken!

So, idiocy is not a Saudi-only default position.

I wonder if the hymen of a virgin Muslim woman in a drive-thru through at a halal KFC is safe from automatic rupture?

Mmmmm ... now there is a revolutionary thought. Make cars and drive-thrus halal and virgin hymens will be kosher ... I mean halal.

I need more than a bucketful of aspirin.

Onward!

Ps. Are women riding motorcycles even more at risk? Huh Patty? :0)

Polemika: A Journal of the Aboriginal News Group

2011-12-04T11:38:00.000+02:00

Free PDF download here.

Onward!