Hakimullah Mehsud: US is our enemy, not Pakistan
October 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Looks like the drone attack which purportedly eliminated the Taliban leadership killed yet more innocents. Hakimullah Mehsud is alive and well, and gave a press conference right in Srarogha. ‘In truth we don’t want to fight the Pakistan Army’, said Mehsud, ‘Our aim is to remove the Americans from this region and to fight the Americans’.
AlJazeeraEnglish — 06 October 2009 — This week, Pakistan’s interior minister said that military operations carried out against the Taliban in the Swat valley, and North and South Waziristan had “broken the back” of the Taliban.
However, South Waziristan is home to an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters and it was here that Hakimullah Mehsud, the new Taliban leader, ended rumours that he had been killed by a recent drone attack.
Kamal Hyder reports from Islamabad.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Ros-Lehtinen Discovers Antidote to Honduran Tourism Crisis in Visiting US Congress Members; Coup Leader Admits that Lifting of Emergency Decree Does Not Apply to All Media Outlets
October 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL).
Two days prior to the scheduled visit to Honduras of a delegation from the Organization of American States (OAS), an abridged version of international diplomacy arrived in Tegucigalpa yesterday morning in the form of Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee who was nonetheless defined as US Senator by prominent Honduran newspapers. Ros-Lehtinen starred in a mid-day press conference at the presidential palace, an event also qualifying as abridged based on the lack of representatives of the anti-coup press.
The absence from the conference of Channel 36 TV and Radio Globo – the two media outlets forced off the air last week with coup president Roberto Micheletti’s decree of a state of emergency – was called into question when Micheletti assured the audience that his decree had been completely revoked. The possibility that the coup government might thus return confiscated broadcasting equipment to its rightful owners was promptly declined, however, when Micheletti declared that said owners would have to earn back their rights in a court of law.
Bring on The Third Intifada!
October 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
After hearing that the Palestine Liberation Organization has decided to abandon a resolution requesting the Human Rights Council to forward Goldstone’s report to the UN Security Council, the thought flashed through my head that if I was Palestinian, I’d vote Hamas. What could have possibly possessed them, but a sheer disconnect from their people? One must ask, is their money that good?
Fatah Vs. Hamas
On many occasions, we that are born free (all is relative) find it hard to understand Palestinian mentality. Just this week, I’ve had exhausting debates about the safety of children, during the Bil’in weekly protest. Though I can’t defend or agree with allowing your children to be near the fence, when the army is 101% likely to fire gas grenades, I firmly believe that mindsets under occupation are something we don’t fully understand. Maybe when I’m a mother to a child that’s been snatched from his bed at night, arrested, beaten and interrogated, I’ll have a different perspective on danger.
By the same token, I believe it may be extraordinarily hard to make that fateful choice, when you’re at the voting booth. Although Hamas has been cynical towards its people during the Gaza massacre (claiming to have “won the war” and other flamboyant rhetoric), as if militaristic ego was a top priority; If I were Palestinian this latest in a long line of PLO sell-outs would seem much more cynical, to me.
Gracias Mercedes Sosa
October 4th, 2009 § 4 Comments
The “voice of the voiceless ones,” Mercedes “La Negra” Sosa, passed away today at the age of 74. Her songs provided an inspirational soundtrack for so many of Latin America’s freedom fighters, famous and unknown. Harry Belafonte once said: “you can cage the singer, but you can’t cage the song” — this also applies to Sosa, even after her death. Her words will continue to soar through the hearts and minds of those fighting for freedom and justice forever.
Why The Population Bomb Is a Rockefeller Baby
October 3rd, 2009 § 6 Comments
From the vaults: this piece by Steve Weissman was originally published in Ramparts in 1970. Ramparts was a literary quarterly for the left-leaning cognoscente that ran from 1962 to 1975 and whose contributors included Tariq Ali and Alexander Cockburn. Only a select few articles have made it online or been digitised. This is now one of them, a piece sent to us by Michael Barker. Its interesting to see what has — and hasn’t — changed in the population debate and political climate in the four decades since.
Steve Weissman, ‘Why The Population Bomb Is a Rockefeller Baby’, in Ramparts, Eco-Catastrophe (1970), pp. 27-41.
Paul Ehrlich is a nice man. He doesn’t hate blacks, advocate genocide or defend the empire. He simply believes that the world has too many people and he’s ready at the drop of a diaper pin to say so. He’s written his message in The Population Bomb, lectured it in universities and churches, and twice used America’s own form of birth control, the late-night Johnny Carson Show, to regale bleary-eyed moms and dads with tales of a standing-room-only world, a time of famines, plague and pestilence.
President Blair
October 2nd, 2009 § 1 Comment
If the Irish vote to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, Tony Blair, former British prime minister and current lecturer on faith, peace, and Palestinian submission, is expected to become the European Union’s first president. I wrote the following hymn to Blair in October 2007, when the unpleasant prospect of his presidency was first raised.
I’ve often thought that Abu Hamza al-Masri, the ex-imam of Finsbury Park mosque, must have been designed in a CIA laboratory. Not only did he – before his imprisonment – fulminate in a shower of spittle against various brands of kuffar, he also had an eye patch and a hook for a hand. You can’t imagine a more photogenic Islamist villain.
If my supposition is correct, then Tony Blair may well have been invented by the Iranian secret service, for of all the neo-cons he’s the one who most looks the part. I refer to the physiognomic combination of weakness and fury, the slight chin wobbling beneath that eye with its wild glint of certainty – the staring left eye, fixed on something the rest of us can’t see, something that makes reality irrelevant – and the teeth both fierce and mouselike, and the shininess of both forehead and suit. Most politicians wear suits, but few suits declare ‘hollow salesman’ so much as Blair’s. The voice too – the hurried speech and breathy tones of a public schoolboy approaching orgasm – that repulsive aural mix of complacency, stubbornness and privilege.
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Auxiliary Archbishop of Tegucigalpa Conducts Lengthy Monologue on the Importance of Dialogue; US Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Agrees, in Between Suffering Bouts of Amnesia
October 2nd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
After nearly three nomadic months of convening with leaders across the American continent, Honduran President Mel Zelaya reappeared in Honduras last week with the declared aim of engaging in dialogue with the coup government in order to resolve the national political crisis. Coup president Roberto Micheletti has demonstrated a lack of interest in any such conversation taking place outside a court of law but continues to lament what he observes to be an international refusal to listen to his side of the story; additional obstacles to dialogue were observed in the September 30 edition of the Channel 5 morning news program Frente a Frente – Face to Face – where the program’s title was called into question by the fact that auxiliary archbishop of Tegucigalpa Juan José Pineda was the only one talking.
Monseñor Pineda, current pioneer for dialogue in Honduras and maintainer of verbal relations with legitimate and illegitimate governments alike, expressed his satisfaction at the growing prospects for national conversation, which he explained via the imagery of concentric circles emanating from a pebble dropped in the water. According to Pineda, who later implied that he himself was the dropper of the pebble, the spreading of the concentric circles resulted in the opening of more and more doors to dialogue; evidence of the success of the Monseñor’s combined heap of metaphors was that he was now receiving text messages, emails, posted letters, and actual phone calls from Hondurans anxious to contribute their ideas to the dialogue process, which thus far appeared to center around Pineda’s communications with individual Hondurans.
The Absurdity of the Dalai Lama
October 2nd, 2009 § 28 Comments
Dalai Lama: "I love President George W. Bush"
He has been quoted as saying “Sleep is the best meditation.” May I suggest his holiness wake up to the fact that the two wars started by his friend George W. Bush are the clearest violations of his own espoused principles of peace and non-violence. Really, does no one else find it absurd that the Dalai Lama has on multiple occasions since 2001 stood unopposed to the brutal, barbaric and illegal wars first in Afghanistan and later Iraq? This sought-after personality loved by celebrities, the CIA, political leaders and civilians alike restated today in Calgary that “It’s hard to tell which category the current military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq will eventually fall into.”
Arundhati Roy: Is there life after Democracy?
October 1st, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Arundhati Roy: “I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.”
Award winning author, essayist and activist Arundhati Roy was recently interviewed on Democracy Now! where she discussed her new collection of essays entitled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, with Amy Goodman. Roy has been a thorn in the side of imperialist powers and a fierce critic of globalization and free market capitalism for years. Her writing style is infused with that unique blend of sharp wit and intellect that seems to penetrate every aspect of her work. Field Notes was recently released by the non-profit, progressive book publisher and distributor Haymarket Books, which has been publishing new and old works by a variety of social justice authors since 2000.
On the question of how the notion of democracy plays out in reality as opposed to as just an ideal Roy notes:
… what I think is beginning to be very clear now is that we see now that democracy is sort of fused to the free market, or to the idea of the free market.
