Dinosaur in Denial
March 31st, 2011 § 2 Comments
Until recently it seemed that Syria, along with wealthy Saudi Arabia, was the state least likely to fall to the revolutionary turmoil sweeping the Arab region.
The first reason for the Asad regime’s seeming stability is Syrian fear of sectarian chaos. Beyond the Sunni Arab majority, Syria includes Alawis (most notably the president and key military figures), Christians, Ismailis, Druze, Kurds and Armenians, as well as Palestinian and Iraqi refugees. The state has achieved a power balance between the minorities and rural Sunnis while building an alliance with the urban Sunni business class. This means that Syria is the best place in the Middle East to belong to a religious minority, certainly better than in ‘liberated’ Iraq or in the Jewish state, and for a long time domestic peace under authoritarianism has looked more attractive than the neighbouring sectarian and strife-torn ‘democracies’ in Lebanon and Iraq (the American dismantling of the Iraqi state provided a serious blow to Arab democratic aspirations, neo-con fantasies notwithstanding).
Report from Land Occupations in Post-Coup Honduras
March 31st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Jesse Freeston reports for The Real News Network on the land conflict in the Lower Aguan region of Honduras, the continued killing of campesinos, and general repression by the regime of Pepe Lobo.
Battle for Benghazi: the first shots
March 31st, 2011 § 2 Comments
New footage has emerged from the first moments of the uprising in Libya, showing gunmen – who appear to be Gaddafi loyalists – shooting unarmed protesters dead.
With armed men dragging people from Benghazi’s mosque, others were left to die on the streets.
Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton reports from the city.
The Enduring Palestine Land Day
March 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Brenda Heard
For nearly three decades the Palestinian people had been brutalised and belittled. Then on 30 March 1976 they took a collective stand. They were not the nomadic nuisance denounced by the Western Israeli Alliance. They were a people with the same inalienable rights as any people. And they would determine their own fate.
They held a general strike and demonstrated against the recently announced intention of the Israeli forces to further snuff out Arab viability in the Galilee region. But the Israeli armed forces would not tolerate what they viewed as insubordination; they turned their weapons on the protestors, killing six outright, injuring dozens and arresting those who persisted in raising their voices. The Western Israeli media quickly put down the fatal day as an outbreak of rioting Arabs. But the estimated 400,000 Palestinian people who had participated in the strike knew better.
BDS flash mob at Grand Central Station, NYC (Updated)
March 30th, 2011 § 6 Comments
Information Wars
March 30th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Part I of this episode of Al Jazeera’s Empire is available here.
Information is power and in the age of the information revolution, cyber and satellite communication is transforming our lives, reinventing the relationship between people and power. How will governments deal with the information revolution?
Like this:
How Europe’s universities aid the Israeli occupation
March 29th, 2011 § 2 Comments
by David Cronin
One of the most enjoyable things that has happened since I wrote a book on Israel’s relations with Europe is that I have been asked to speak at various universities. So when an invitation appeared in my email inbox to visit King’s College London (KCL), I immediately accepted. Big mistake.
The request came from the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), a partnership between King’s College and the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. I only became aware of the partnership one day before I was scheduled to address an ICSR seminar in January. Following a hasty consultation with some friends in the Palestine solidarity movement, I withdrew from the event, informing the organisers that I fully supported the campaign to boycott Israeli goods and institutions.
Set up in 2008, the ICSR boasts on its website that it is “the first initiative of this kind in which Arab and Israeli academic institutions can work together”. This appears to be a reference to how the Jordan Institute of Diplomacy is also involved in its research on political violence. However, the participation of an academic body from an Arab state does not exonerate the ICSR for embracing the Herzliya centre, which has long tried to cloak Israeli apartheid with intellectual gravitas.
Each year the IDC hosts the Herzliya security conference, attracting Israel’s political, military and business elite, as well as illustrious foreign guests. Speakers at this conference can spout racist invective without fear of being challenged; in 2003, Yitzhak Ravid, a senior researcher with Israel’s weapons development authority Rafael called for coercive measures to curb the birth-rate among Palestinians. “The delivery rooms in Soroka Hospital in Be’ersheba have turned into a factory for the production of a backward population,” he said, alluding to an area with a considerable number of Bedouin inhabitants.
Neoconomics 101: Conscription and War as Wealth
March 29th, 2011 § 4 Comments
Yesterday Antiwar.com published Grant F. Smith’s book review “Neoconomics: Conscription and War as Wealth“ discussing Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s 2009 book Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.
A 19 minute radio interview is available today.
2:19 Israeli conscription and societal cohesion
2:43 Bomb releases to electric car batteries
3:13 Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres as entrepreneurs
4:21 An international entitlement: preferential US market access
5:55 Are US entrepreneurs battle tested?
6:36 Start-up Nation’s exclusive focus on supply-side
7:20 US consumer market buys 40% of total Israeli exports
7:39 $10 billion in yearly trade surplus as aid to Israel
« Read the rest of this entry »
Fake Venezuelan money financing Nicaraguan protests in Honduras
March 28th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Honduran Red Cross apprehends Venezuelan-Nicaraguan posing as tear gas inhalation victim
In response to the ongoing teachers’ strike in Honduras, the demands of which include an end to the privatization of public education, the illegitimate Honduran government that came to power following the 2009 coup against President Mel Zelaya has declared the strike illegal, threatened to fire striking teachers and to possibly dissolve teachers’ unions.
In typical fashion, the obsequious Honduran media has been trotting out propaganda headlines, such as today’s top news in El Heraldo: “Counterfeit dollars financing teacher protests.” In the body of the article, we of course discover that the possibility that fake money is arriving from abroad to fuel the strike is merely (supposedly) being investigated by authorities.
Defense Minister Marlon Pascua is quoted as saying:
I can’t definitively point to a specific country, but you all can imagine who might be interested in financing these kinds of operations in Honduras in order to sow unrest and anxiety.”
For the benefit of the unimaginative, El Heraldo subtly specifies that Pascua “did not dare confirm whether he was talking about Venezuela or [other] UNASUR countries.”
Shoe thrower targets Iraq’s PM
March 28th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The great Muntadhr Al Zaydi is alive and kicking.
Protests have also been taking place in Iraq – as demonstrators there call for sweeping reforms. In their midst is Muntadhr Al Zaydi, the man known internationally for throwing a shoe at former US president George Bush.
He had to stay away from his country for months after serving jail time, but he is now back on the streets of Baghdad. He is on a mission that is again putting him at odds with authorities.
Al Jazeera’s Rawya Rageh explains.
