Palestinian Organizer Tortured in Israeli Jail
March 24th, 2010 § 6 Comments
Omar Alaaeddin, a 25 year-old Palestinian from the village of al Ma'asara during his medical examination a day after his release from Israeli jail, on 23.03.2010.
I don’t usually do breaking news, because of a nasty habit I call “intellectualizing”. Every once in a while, however, I get a piece of news with details that rattle the soul. My emotional response, I guess (since there’s no one to hear anybody cry) is to post it here and hope for more exposure. I got the following words from the Popular struggle Coordination Committee’s Facebook group and the images from Activestills on Flickr:
Omar Alaaeddin, who is involved in organizing demonstrations in the village of alMa’asra south of Bethlehem, was arrested a week ago on Sunday at the Container Checkpoint, as he was making his way back home from Ramallah, with a group of students and university professors. The groups was in Ramallah to see a theater play.
US-Israel: Unsettled dispute
March 24th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Our friend Ali and John Mearsheimer on Al Jazeera International’s Inside Story.
It is the annual conference of the pro-Israel lobby in the US (AIPAC), where Israel and the US have been keen to take the heat off the settlement dispute and re-emphasising their friendship. Can differences be reconciled, will Israel take the US advice or will it impose its will? And how powerful is the Israeli lobby?
A Process of Change – Nasrallah to Petraeus
March 23rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
It’s important to remember that Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s speeches consist of more than mere rhetoric. One of the reasons for Nasrallah’s enormous popularity in the Arab and Muslim worlds is that, unlike other Arab leaders, he says what he means and means what he says. Hizbullah is the only force to have defeated Israel – once in 2000, when the brutal occupation of south Lebanon was brought to an end, and once in 2006, when Israeli troops attempted to reinvade in order to dismantle the resistance, but bled on the border for five weeks instead. During the 2006 war Israel bombed every TV mast it could find, but failed to put Hizbullah’s al-Manar off the air. Nasrallah spoke on al-Manar of “the Israeli warship that attacked our infrastructure, people’s homes and civilians. Look at it burn!” As Nasrallah uttered these words, a Hizbullah missile did indeed disable an Israeli warship, forcing Israel to move its fleet away from the Lebanese coast.
In mid-February 2010, Shaikh Nasrallah made a speech which may well mark a fundamental change in the Middle Eastern balance of power. The speech, quoted below, should not be read as a string of empty threats, but a signal of new weaponry and fighting capabilities.
Alan in Wonderland
March 23rd, 2010 § 2 Comments
Alan Dershowitz at the AIPAC annual conference calls Gen. Petraeus a bigot and tells him to ‘put up or shut up’. (In Yiddish it apparently means ‘support our troops’). If last year it was the BDS campaign that had the lobby riled, it appears this year it is the shattering of the taboo on Israel’s strategic costs to the US. There’s cause for modest celebration. Even Clinton failed to read entirely from the script. David Horovitz of Jerusalem post notes: ‘But there was no escaping the sense that she was trying to deliver a wake-up call to an Israel perceived by this administration, to some extent at least, as blundering intransigently toward disaster.’
Colombian Peace Community Photographs by Amelia Opalinska
March 22nd, 2010 § 1 Comment
March 23, 2010 marks the thirteenth anniversary of the peace community of San José de Apartadó in the Colombian department of Antioquia. Despite the community’s renunciation of violence and refusal to side with any of the parties to Colombia’s armed conflict, it continues to be a target of the army, paramilitary groups, and guerrilla organizations alike.
Click here to read an article I wrote after attending last year’s anniversary with Amelia Opalinska, whose photo series on the community appears below. Click here to read my response to a December 2009 article on the peace community by Wall Street Journal editorial board member and aspiring paramilitary Mary Anastasia O’Grady.
Click on each of the photos below to view a larger image.
Keep America Scared
March 22nd, 2010 § 2 Comments
Earlier this month, a bumbling Liz Cheney embarked upon a campaign to “Keep America Safe.” According to this latest attempt at fear mongering, Cheney claims that 9 lawyers who are currently working for the Justice Department and who have previous experience with representing Guantanamo detainees, are basically ‘terrorist’ sympathizers…if not worse. As usual, one of the best responses to this brand of lunacy comes from the inimitable Rachel Maddow, the great belier of absurdity.
Ghazal for Iranians Who Don’t Hate Arabs
March 22nd, 2010 § 9 Comments
To Rom, and Parichehr
Today I met Iranians who don’t hate Arabs.
They smiled and said “hey, selam,” even knowing I was Arab.
They didn’t have green eyes, yet they seemed to bear up
pretty well without them, and they don’t fault Arabs,
not all of us, at least, for Nahavand, and the bloody flare-up
at Karbala; after all, remember, Imam Husayn was Arab.
I was a little scared at first, but soon I scraped my chair up
closer and acknowledged half our poetry and science isn’t Arab.
Half? Two thirds! Three quarters! All Persian! I went clear up
to The Arabian Nights, to Ibn Sina; who says he was Arab?
The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 19.3.2010
March 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
In spite of the latest Israeli army attempts to stop the demonstrations against the wall, about 50 Israelis and 25 internationals joined Bil’in residents in protest. After the demonstration was declared over, the army infiltrated the village and fired gas and shock grenades at the youth, protecting their village with stones.
Colombian Elections Show Little Change Other Than Names
March 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Party of National Integration still not as popular as the null vote.
By Ken Kelley
Candidates from three right-wing parties allied with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe won a clear majority in both the Senate and lower house in elections held on March 14. The results are considered to be a sign of how Colombians will vote on May 30 when they choose a successor to Uribe, who was recently barred from seeking a third term.
Perhaps the biggest surprise was the emergence of the rightist Party of National Integration (PIN), which won 8 out of the 102 Senate seats, displacing the leftist Alternative Democratic Pole as the country’s fourth largest political party. The victorious PIN candidates were mostly relatives of ex-lawmakers now in jail or under investigation for ties to right-wing paramilitary groups. In a scandal that tarnished the previous Congress, 12 pro-Uribe legislators were jailed while another 80 are still under investigation.
