Breaking the great Australian silence – John Pilger
November 10th, 2009 § 2 Comments
UPDATE: Watch or listen to the video at PULSE .
John Pilger: “Official truths are often powerful illusions.”
Last week one of the world’s greatest living journalists, John Pilger, was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Never one to compromise his integrity or lower his voice in the face of intimidation or authority, Pilger focused much of his speech on urging Australians to cast a critical eye upon their own government, its policies (both domestic and foreign), as well as themselves. Unsurprisingly, Pilger’s words have been received with angry, defensive responses within Australia.
Pilger recently celebrated his 70th birthday, but he’s just as vibrant now as he was 40 years ago. Even after all this time, he’s still using his pen and voice to bring us the uncensored facts, while also managing to ruffle the feathers of those who prefer he be silent.
The following is Pilger’s award ceremony address.
Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.
I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths”. In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day” – a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.
Life in Hell: A Journalist’s Account of Life in Gaza – Mohammed Omer
November 10th, 2009 § 2 Comments
In a recent presentation to the Palestine Center in DC, the courageous and talented Mohammed Omer interviews fellow Palestinians in Gaza trying to survive the crippling blockade. « Read the rest of this entry »
Patriot Games
November 9th, 2009 § 5 Comments
In Pakistan they are better known as Busharraf and Mr. Ten Percent
As a realist I have no problem with Pakistan having a nuclear arsenal. It is a tough neighborhood and the international community has been selective in who it chooses to sanction. It tacitly supports the Indian nuclear program. In 2002, there was the possibility of restoring a nuclear-free balance of power. The Pakistani government had offered India complete nuclear disarmament which it refused. There has been a realignment since: India has a new ally–the United States–and both see the Pakistani arsenal as a nuisance.
‘Pakistan’s fears about the United States coöperating with India are not irrational,’ writes Seymour Hersh in an important new article.
Last year, Congress approved a controversial agreement that enabled India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States without joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making India the only non-signatory to the N.P.T. permitted to do so. Concern about the Pakistani arsenal has since led to greater coöperation between the United States and India in missile defense; the training of the Indian Air Force to use bunker-busting bombs; and “the collection of intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal,” according to the consultant to the intelligence community.
Viewed from Pakistan, therefore, the US obsession with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is more than a little hypocritical. Even the pliant Zardari laments the imbalance. Hersh notes:
Zardari offered some advice to Barack Obama: instead of fretting about nuclear security in Pakistan, his Administration should deal with the military disparity between Pakistan and India, which has a much larger army. “You should help us get conventional weapons,” he said. “It’s a balance-of-power issue.”
What does justice look like in Cambodia?
November 8th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Khmer children posing in front of a mass grave in Cambodia's notorious "Killing Fields." Many children hang around this and other memorial sites while faking sad faces so that affected tourists will give them money. We asked them to act like themselves.
I was in Cambodia in 2006 working with a small, grass-roots, non-profit organization dedicated to street children. One day while heading to a village located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (Cambodia’s capital), I passed by a massive construction site of what was to become the UN backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). My companion who had been living in Cambodia for the past several years scoffed at the site:
They are wasting all that money to prosecute a few old men who will be dead soon. And you’ve seen how the majority of Khmer people live today.
According to the official website, this court was created to try “serious crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime 1975-1979.” It became fully operational in 2007.
Orchestrated by the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian genocide resulted in the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians, beginning with the country’s elite and educated. Many were tortured and executed—hundreds of thousands died of starvation. Pol Pot’s vision of turning Cambodia into a peasant farming society involved herding the country’s educated and upper class citizens (although the poor were certainly not exempt if they were suspected of being enemies of the state) into the countryside to work in what later become known as the notorious “Killing Fields.” « Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan
November 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
A superb presentation by the great Daniel Ellsberg who suggests that the counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Vietnam.
Part One (of Two)
“Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide”
November 7th, 2009 § 5 Comments
settler graffitti in Hebron/al-Khalil
That there are striking parallels between white rule in apartheid South Africa and Zionist rule in Palestine – an analogy made by such mainstream figures as President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – should no longer be controversial. But calling Israeli apartheid by its name will occasion the usual screams of anti-Semitism and ignorance from Zionist quarters, and for comprehensible reasons: the most politically inept American student knows that apartheid is a bad thing, a crime to be battled, not supported with weapons, vetoes in the Security Council and billions of dollars in ‘aid.’ Therefore the apartheid label must be vigorously resisted by Zionists and their fellow travellers.
Ben White’s “Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide” begins by quoting Article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, UN General Assembly Resolution 3068, which defines the crime as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” The rest of White’s book leaves the reader in no doubt that the Zionist instance of apartheid fits the bill even better than the erstwhile South African version.
Warlord as Nobel Laureate
November 7th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
from Mother Jones magazine
by William Blum
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. (1)
Pakistan creates its own enemy
November 6th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Funeral for the eight civilians killed in the Pakistani military's failed attempt to assassinate militant leader Mangal Bagh Afridi (EPA)
The is a version of my Le Monde Diplomatique article updated for the Arabic, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese editions. It is also on Counterpunch, December 4-6, 2009 (It also appears in the February 2010 issue of the Japanese monthly Sekai)
On the day I arrived in Peshawar mid-September, the evening stillness was broken by nine loud explosions, each preceded by the sucking sound of a projectile as it arced into Hayatabad, the suburban sprawl west of the city. Their target was a Frontier Constabulary post guarding the fence that separates the city from the tribal region of Khyber.
When I lived here seven years ago, Hayatabad hosted many Afghan refugees; those with fewer resources lived in the slums of Kacha Garhi, along the Jamrud Road to the Khyber Pass. Many established businesses here and dominated commerce and transportation in parts of the city. Some would temporarily migrate to Afghanistan in summer where it was cooler. But Peshawar was a sanctuary, as Afghanistan was perpetually at war. Now the remaining Afghans are leaving because Afghanistan feels safer. There are checkpoints all over the city, many kidnappings, and during my visit, there were at least three suicide bombings and four rocket attacks, many of them targeting Hayatabad.
Robert Greenwald on Afghanistan
November 6th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films speaks about Afghanistan on Bob McChesney’s excellent Media Matters.
Robert Greenwald and McChesney discuss Afghanistan
Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist. Greenwald is the founder and president of Brave New Films. Under Greenwald’s direction, Brave New Films has produced a series of short political videos, including the Fox Attacks and Real McCain campaigns. Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation is currently producing Rethink Afghanistan, a groundbreaking documentary being released online in real-time; the film features experts from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S. discussing the United States’ flawed strategy in Afghanista
I Refuse to Buy a Poppy
November 5th, 2009 § 8 Comments
Steve Bell
Yesterday five British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman. Just as they keep promising that they’ve reached ‘decisive turning points’ in their battle with the Afghan resistance, British military officials immediately vowed that the ‘rogue’ policeman would be caught. Today the Taliban reports that the policeman is safe with them, and that he’s been greeted with flowers.
Our glorious patriotic press responds. Amusingly, the Daily Mail headline wrings its hands and squawks, “What kind of war IS this?” Because some people aren’t playing by the rules, you see. Instead of sitting quietly in their villages waiting for the drone attack, or perhaps sending their kids out to accept sweets and modernity from a rosy-cheeked English lad, some barbarians are actually shooting back at the invaders. How very unBritish. (To be fair to the Mail – which has never been fair to anyone – it does seem to be taking an anti-war stance today). Other sections of the media worry about the ‘loyalty’ of Afghan troops, as if love for foreign occupiers is a realistic standard of loyalty. Still others, even more clever, psychoanalyse the policeman, wondering if an argument with his commander pushed him to a moment of madness. But it really isn’t that complicated, as anybody who disabuses themselves of imperialist delusion can see. Very simply, people don’t like foreigners striding around their streets and fields with guns and assumptions of superiority. Afghans will kill British troops as surely as Britons would kill Afghan troops if they occupied this country.
