The Crooks Get Cash While the Poor Get Screwed
July 7th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Justice for all in Freedom’s Land? Probably not if you are poor or black, certainly not if you are both. Read this heartbreaking story by Chris Hedges:
Children leave a Chicago homeless shelter on their way to school. According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, more than half of children in low-income families have at least one parent who works full-time. (AP photo / Amy Sancetta)
Tearyan Brown became a father when he was 16. He did what a lot of inner-city kids desperate to make money do. He sold drugs. He was arrested and sent to jail three years later for dealing marijuana and PCP on the streets of Trenton, N.J., mostly to white kids driving in from the suburbs. It was a job which saw him robbed at gunpoint and stabbed in the chest. But it made him about $1,400 a week.
Brown, when he got out after three and a half years, was done with street life. He got a job as a security guard and then as a fork lift operator. He eventually made about $30,000 a year. He shepherded his son through high school, then college and a master’s degree. His boy, now 24, is a high school teacher in Texas. Brown would not leave the streets of Trenton but his son would. It made him proud. It gave him hope.
Zionist thugs vandalize bookstore in Paris
July 7th, 2009 § 5 Comments
Diana Johnstone, the great leftist writer living in Paris, describes a zionist thug (either Betar or LDJ) attack on Librairie Resistances. Books and computer equipment were destroyed. It is not the first time this happens.
The nazis used to burn books…
See also attached video.
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris
Thousands of books drenched in cooking oil – that is the latest exploit of the Zionist fanatics who regularly attack property and people in Paris and get away with it.
Mousavi and the Masses
July 7th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I find the use of someone’s alleged hard line past to dismiss their significance to a present political movement unpersuasive. Nevertheless, amidst all the hype it is always useful to get a different perspective.
Following the results of a disputed presidential election Iranians poured onto the streets in their tens of thousands to protest the re-election of incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The demonstrations were unprecedented both in their scale and nature and the largest of their kind since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Preventing ‘illegal Arab expansion’
July 7th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Jonathan Cook reports about the latest phase of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign:
Israel’s housing minister called for strict segregation between the country’s Jewish and Arab populations last week as he unveiled plans to move large numbers of fundamentalist religious Jews to Israel’s north to prevent what he described as an “Arab takeover” of the region.
Ariel Atias said he considered it a “national mission” to bring ultra-Orthodox Jews — or Haredim, distinctive for their formal black and white clothing — into Arab areas, and announced that he would also create the north’s first exclusively Haredi town.
The new settlement drive, according to Atias, is intended to revive previous failed efforts by the state to “Judaize,” or create a Jewish majority in, the country’s heavily Arab north.
Europe’s Endangered Muslims
July 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Last Thursday the Islamic Relief charity shop in Glasgow was badly damaged in an arson attack. Over in Germany, 32-year-old Egyptian mother Marwa Sherbini was stabbed to death by her assailant — in a courtroom! — for wearing the hijab. And now this: “Bomb seizures spark far-right terror plot fear“, reports David Leppard of Times.
Islamic Relief charity shop badly damaged in arson attack (H Yusuf)
A network of suspected far-right extremists with access to 300 weapons and 80 bombs has been uncovered by counter-terrorism detectives.Thirty-two people have been questioned in a police operation that raises the prospect of a right-wing bombing campaign against mosques. Police are said to have recovered a British National party membership card and other right-wing literature during a raid on the home of one suspect charged under the Terrorism Act.
In England’s largest seizure of a suspected terrorist arsenal since the IRA mainland bombings of the early 1990s, rocket launchers, grenades, pipe bombs and dozens of firearms have been recovered in the past six weeks during raids on more than 20 properties. Several people have been charged and more arrests are imminent. Current police activity is linked to arrests in Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
Is there life after democracy?
July 6th, 2009 § 5 Comments
I have pondered over this for some time, I am glad someone with better credentials than I is finally addressing it. ‘While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy?’ asks Arundhati Roy in this introduction to her new collection of essays. ‘What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.’
Arundhati Roy
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?’
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all ‘developing’ societies aspire to be is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.
France risks return to old Europe
July 6th, 2009 § 4 Comments
Pillar of non-old Europe. (Photo: EPA)
A June 23 article in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera entitled “Berlusconi: ‘Rapporti con Iran? Solo se condivisi con Usa e Israele’” registers the Italian premier’s pledge to tailor his country’s foreign relations to the needs of the US and Israel. The pledge came during a visit to Italy by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who then invited Berlusconi to Israel to address the Knesset and to inaugurate an annual incontro bilaterale between the two nations. In addition to gushing support for the demilitarization of any Palestinian state, Berlusconi gushed his appreciation for the invitation to visit friends in friendly realms whose friendliness showed no signs of abating: “Sarò molto lieto di visitare un amico, in un Paese amico che resterà amico per molti anni.”
Berlusconi’s emphasis on comradeship may have minimized the worries of an Israeli official featured in a June 23 Jerusalem Post article, who “said it was just ‘bad luck’ that [Netanyahu’s] visit was taking place in the midst of a salacious sex scandal swirling around Berlusconi, a scandal that is eating away at his credibility and will detract from [said] visit and any gestures of Italian-Israeli friendship the Italian leader may have wanted to bestow on the prime minister.” Additional gestures were bestowed following Netanyahu’s departure when Rome granted honorary citizenship to Gilad Shalit, raising the issue of whether Iran might start adopting Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
The blue velvet hills of my youth have been destroyed
July 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Raja Shehadeh, left, with a Palestinian farmer on a hillside overlooking Ramallah, West Bank.(Rina Castelnuovo)
‘Palestinians will never be able to undo the damage caused by these massive, illegal and politically motivated settlements,’ writes Raja Shehadeh, author of the Orwell Prize-winning book Palestinian Walks.
I can remember the appearance of the hills around Ramallah in 1979, before any Jewish settlement came to be established there. In the spring of that year I walked north from Ramallah, where I live, to the nearby village of A’yn Qenya and up the pine-forested hill. A gazelle leapt ahead of me. When I reached the top I could see hills spread below me like crumpled blue velvet, with the hamlets of Janiya and Deir Ammar huddled between its folds. On top of the highest hill in the distance stood the village of Ras Karkar with its centuries-old citadel that dominated the area during Ottoman times. I had been following the worrying developments of extensive settlement-building elsewhere in the West Bank and wondered how long it would be before these hills came under the merciless blades of the Israeli bulldozers. I didn’t have to wait long. A year later the top of the hill was lopped off and the settlement of Dolev, then a cluster of red-tiled Swiss-style chalets, was established.
A fight for the Amazon that should inspire the world
July 5th, 2009 § 1 Comment
“The uprising in the Amazon is more urgent than Iran’s”, writes Johann Hari of The Independent – “it will determine the future of the planet.” Hyperboles aside, this is truly an excellent piece of journalism. The silence and lack of solidarity from the ‘left’ in the West for the heroic struggles for survival of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America in the face of brutal political and economic repression is “shaming” indeed. “These people had nothing” writes Hari “but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?” Let’s see how things shape up during this week’s G8 summit in Italy but the prospects for a revival of the faltering alter-globalisation movement seem rather bleak, according to Ben Trott. (Also, have a look at Belen’s excellent piece on recent events in Peru, if you haven’t already.)
While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed – yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.
In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.
