ON PRESIDENTS AND PRECEDENTS: IMPLICATIONS OF THE HONDURAN COUP
December 11th, 2009 § 1 Comment
By Joseph Shansky
First published in Upside Down World, 10 December 2009
President Obama was elected partly because of his promise to a large Hispanic constituency to give both new attention and new respect to Latin America. Judging from the US role in the military coup in Honduras, he must think that one of the two is enough.
For those who closely followed the coup and its aftermath, a tiny fear sat in the back of our minds. Eventually it was confirmed. As the State Department position shifted from condemning to condoning the illegal government, the outline of a bigger picture became clear. If this violent takeover were really to be approved by the US, it would mark a frightening new focus on the region.
In late June, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and forced out of the country. For the next five months, an illegitimate government, headed by Congressional leader Roberto Micheletti, suppressed the outrage of many Honduran citizens against this regime through a number of violent means including murder, torture, and detention of citizens.
Throughout this time, the US response to these allegations was silence.
What does courage look like?
December 11th, 2009 § 1 Comment
Student protester Majid Tavakoli was arrested on December 7, 2009.
While the majority of mainstream news media’s focus on Iran has returned to the debate over who has the right to control the country’s nuclear energy ambitions, Iranian students continue to risk their lives while protesting for their human and civil rights. Hundreds of Iranian men and women have been arrested and interrogated since the recent Iranian presidential election, and claims of torture and abuse of detainees continue to surface.
On December 7 Majid Tavakoli, a student at Amir Kabir University in Tehran, was reportedly violently arrested after giving a speech at one among several protests that were held around the country on Iran’s Student’s Day, or 16 Azar. 16 Azar commemorates the murder of 3 Iranian student protesters who were shot and killed by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s military during a large protest that occurred in 1953 against US Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to the country in support of the Shah’s government. Earlier that year the popular and democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq was overthrown by a CIA/MI6 sponsored coup which restored the Shah to power. The brutal and corrupt Iranian monarchy maintained control of the country until the revolution of 1979.
It has been reported that Tavakoli had already been imprisoned before for his activism, and that he was tortured during his detention. Tavakoli was well aware of the risks involved in giving his impassioned speech, but contended that it was the ”duty” of all students to make their voices heard despite the heavy air of fear and paranoia weighing upon them in solidarity with the protesters that have been imprisoned and tortured, as well as those who have been killed during the ongoing wave of protests which hit Iran following the 2009 election. Early on in his speech Tavakoli states:
Today is 16 Azar. It is our day. It is the day of students…
LIVE FROM HONDURAS: Honduran Coup Regime Erects Superficial Reality Around Elections
December 10th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Amused: Honduran coup president Roberto Micheletti and Supreme Court president Jorge Alberto Rivera Avilés. (Photo: Efrain Salgado/European Pressphoto Agency)
A few days prior to the November 29 elections in Honduras, Francisco Varela—the homeless man regularly stationed outside the drive-through of one of the ubiquitous Espresso Americano establishments in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa—acquired a campaign T-shirt for National Party presidential candidate and soon-to-be victor Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo. The shirt boasted a slogan associating Lobo with immediate change; prospects for such things in Honduras were however called into doubt by the fact that the recent attempt by Honduran President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya to hold a nonbinding public opinion survey in order to gauge popular desire to rewrite the Constitution had been met with a coup d’état.
Presumably in order to avoid having to discuss why popular consultations could not be reconciled with the interests of the Honduran elite, the golpista regime transformed the survey issue into a bid by Zelaya to install himself as eternal president of Honduras in violation of Constitutional articles prohibiting leaders from serving more than one 4-year term. These articles had appeared less important in 1985 when current coup president Roberto Micheletti, then a member of Congress, attempted to prolong the presidency of Roberto Suazo Córdova; other neglected articles included Article 102 prohibiting the expatriation of any Honduran—which did not prevent the armed forces from depositing the elected Honduran president in Costa Rica on the morning of June 28—and Article 2 establishing the Honduran people as the true rulers of Honduras, an honor which still did not enable public opinion surveys.
Economic Warfare: Israel vs America vs Iran
December 10th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Yesterday on KZYX radio Jeffrey Blankfort discussed his groundbreaking analysis of a Pew Research poll of Council on Foreign Relations members, which finds them less supportive of current US-Israel relations than the general public. Blankfort later interviews Grant Smith about how in the 1960s the US government fought the Israeli drive for nuclear weapons while attempting to register Israel’s US lobby as a foreign agent. Fast forward 46 years and Americans are now being asked to defend Israeli nuclear hegemony against regional rival Iran. Smith discusses other newly declassified documents from his new book, Spy Trade: How Israel’s Lobby Undermines America’s Economy revealing AIPAC and Israel’s joint efforts against American industry groups to win preferential market access.
NB. The interview starts at the 17 minute mark, you can skip ahead by moving the audio player cursor.
Five Books on Israel-Palestine
December 9th, 2009 § 4 Comments
The interview below was published in the Five Books section of The Browser. I chose five books on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Tell me about the Ilan Pappe book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Pappe has written a great historical work on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947/8 and he shows that it was organised and planned, called Plan D, or plan Dalit, and he has exploded the myths that were current until his work.
What myths?
Well, for example, that the Arab leaders told the Palestinians to leave, or that the Palestinians were Bedouin people who didn’t really live there anyway, and he showed that they were ordinary people in brick and mortar homes who were intentionally forced out. This is very important because the ethnic cleansing of Palestine is the original sin of Zionism and the root of the current problem.
For Iran’s Journalists: An Open Letter
December 9th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Editor’s Note: While we support the general message of this letter and stand in solidarity with the brave men and women of Iran who are fighting for civil and human rights from within the country, we take issue with the following statement which is disputable and out of place in the context of a letter like this:
…”the Iranian regime spends millions of dollars to causes unrelated to Iran’s national interests.”
The Honorable Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon
United Nations Headquarters
New York, New York
In the Name of Free Pen
December 2, 2009
Your honor,
We, the undersigned journalists, are deeply concerned and troubled about the fate of Iran’s journalism community.
Long before but especially since, the elections of June 2009, the regime in Tehran has clamped down on freedom of press and assembly. In 2008, more than 400 individuals, writers, journalists, and reporters, left Iran under mounting pressure. According to a report in the New York Times of October 12, 2009, nearly 2000 journalists have recently lost their jobs. The Paris-based organization Reporters without Border has reported that more journalists have fled Iran in the last year than during the first years after the 1979 Revolution. While these journalists have lost their livelihoods, the Iranian regime spends millions of dollars to causes unrelated to Iran’s national interests.
‘Covering the Middle East is a bit like Reading a Great Novel’
December 9th, 2009 § 2 Comments
British journalist Robert Fisk has been reporting on the Middle East for over 30 years but has not been offered the kind of platforms or widespread recognition that so-called journalists (can you think of more accurate titles?) like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times have (outside of progressive circles). In fact, despite all his years of experience and expertise, Fisk rarely appears on Western mainstream media outlets at all. Accordingly, during this recent brief interview clip Fisk comments on Osama Bin Laden, his reasons for and experience of reporting on the Middle East, and the Obama administration’s endeavors in Afghanistan. (Thanks, Tarik)
With regard to US President Barack Obama’s recently revamped Afghanistan policy be sure to also check out a pithy political cartoon by Patrick Corrigan of The Toronto Star after the jump!
Oh, the Irony!
December 8th, 2009 § 1 Comment
According to the UK Telegraph, lawyers in the United States are not too pleased about the verdict in the Amanda Knox trial. Amongst the unhappy is Harvard Professor of Law, Alan Dershowitz, a well-known advocate of unlawful-preventive-indefinite- administrative (it’s all the same anyhow) detention in the U.S and in Israel. Here’s an excerpt, with a few of the responses from bummed out lawyers in the United States:
Within minutes of the verdict on Friday, the cable news network CNN had given over its coverage to two American correspondents, both roundly condemning the trial and what they saw as a lack of evidence.
As they regularly did during the trial, the American media has been quick to wheel out domestic legal experts to rail against the iniquities of the Italian justice system.
Under the headline “An American in the Italian Wheels of Justice”, the New York Times quizzed senior academics but found none who approved of the verdict.
The Price of ‘Existing’ as a Muslim Today
December 8th, 2009 § 5 Comments
In the classic French novel, Adolphe, Benjamin Constant writes:
There are things that for a long time remain unsaid, but once they are spoken, one never ceases to repeat them.
How true this is of so many of the things we keep inside for a time. Think, for example, of how an argument with a loved one often reveals the things that we have felt, but carefully hidden from them. Once spoken, those words repeat themselves with a frequency that suggests that we are seeking vengeance for the time they spent in silence.
The same is true of our secret prejudices, which often remain unsaid until the moment ‘feels right’ or circumstances seemingly produce the ‘necessity’ for their articulation.
It appears that circumstances today have produced a space in which articulating anti-Islamic sentiment both ‘feels right’ and ‘necessary’. It is an environment marked by series of events invoked as evidence in the ever-growing case against Islam.
What the US Elite Really Thinks About Israel
December 8th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Senator William Fulbright had first called the US Congress an Israeli Occupied Territory
Our friend Jeffrey Blankfort on the surprising results of CFR survey — surprising, to the extent that it goes against the lefitst conventional wisdom which has accorded Israel the status of a ‘strategic asset’; much less so, however, when it comes to revealing the level ignorance about the situation in Pakistan. For background, also see Blankfort’s rejoinder to Joseph Massad’s fatuous attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
The Council on Foreign Relations is always near the top of the Left’s list of bogeymen that stand accused of pulling the strings of US foreign policy. It is right up there with the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, right? Wrong. If that was the case, those arguing that US support for Israel is based on it being a “strategic asset” will have a hard time explaining a Pew Research Center survey on America’s Place in the World, taken of 642 CFR members between October 2 and November 16. The Pew poll not only reveals that the overwhelming majority, two-thirds of the members of this elite foreign policy institution, believes that the United States has gone overboard in favoring Israel, it doesn’t consider Israel to have have much importance to the US in the first place.
