NPR Music with special guest Manu Chao
September 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
US cable tells of Israel’s ‘harsh measures’
September 7th, 2011 § 1 Comment
US government officials have been well aware of Israel’s harsh methods of dealing with peaceful protests in the occupied Palestinian territory of West Bank for quite some time, according to a recently leaked WikiLeaks diplomatic cable.
A cable from the embassy in Tel Aviv from February 16, 2010, titled “IDF plans harsher methods with West Bank demonstrations”, reveals a premeditated effort by the Israeli army to use force against peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank.
In the cable, the US ambassador to Israel noted that government officials considered any rally as grounds for use of military force.
The Pending US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement: False Claims Versus Hard Realities
September 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by James Jordan
This article appeared at Upside Down World.
With a little more than a year until the 2012 elections, the White House and Congressional leadership are anxious to pass pending Free Trade Agreements (FTA) as soon as possible.
Most worrisome of all is the pending FTA between the US and Colombia. Corporate leaders and US and Colombian government officials with their public relations operatives are peddling lie after lie to justify passage.
The following guide put together by The Alliance for Global Justice will help people to better understand and counter the falsehoods they will be hearing in the coming weeks.
Distinguishing between fact and fiction with claims regarding the pending US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
CLAIM: Passing the FTA will put the US in a better position to pressure Colombia to improve its labor and human rights record.
REALITY: US intervention in Colombia has caused more problems than it has helped and the FTA would only make things worse. Recent investigations by the Colombian Attorney General have uncovered extensive US involvement regarding domestic spying by former President Álvaro Uribe’s administration. Information was shared with and analyzed by embassy staff and domestic spying programs were funded by the CIA. Activities included gaining access to the bank accounts, following the families and bugging the offices of Colombian magistrates.
Targets also included labor leaders. According to an August 20, 2011 Washington Post article: “Another unit that operated for eight months in 2005, the Group to Analyze Terrorist Organization Media, assembled dossiers on labor leaders, broke into their offices and videotaped union activists. The United States provided equipment and tens of thousands of dollars, according to an internal DAS report, and the unit’s members regularly met with an embassy official they remembered as ‘Chris Sullivan.’”
The Coming Conflict
September 7th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Soumaya Ghannoushi in the Guardian on the emerging conflict between the NATO-backed TNC, which mainly consists of old regime people, and more grassroots revolutionary forces.
After six months of defiant resistance, fiery speeches, chilling threats and blood-curdling brutality, Gaddafi has finally fallen on his sword. His collapse, however, is far from the end of the story. Instead, it heralds the start of a more complicated chapter in his country’s history. As tanks surround Gaddafi’s last outposts in Sirte, the cold war over the country’s future gathers pace. The common enemy has been forced out of the scene, and now the vast differences between those he had brought together return to occupy the centre stage.
The vacuum created by Gaddafi’s departure is now filled by two polarised camps. The first is the National Transitional Council (NTC), made up largely of ex-ministers and prominent senior Gaddafi officials who jumped from his ship as it began to sink. These enjoy the support of Nato and derive their current power and influence from the backing of western capitals. The second is composed of political and military local leaders who have played a decisive role in the liberation of the various Libyan cities from the Gaddafi brigades.
Faiz Shakir, Author of “Fear, Inc” Report on Islamaphobia
September 6th, 2011 § 1 Comment
A new report by the Center for American Progress called, “Fear Inc: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America,” shows how a small group of self-proclaimed experts backed by a host of donors are spreading fear and hostility toward Muslims in the United States.
In the following clip, Faiz Shakir, an author of the report, speaks with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
DSEi: playground of the power elite
September 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
by Brenda Heard
DSEi 2009: Guy Tinsley of the Nottingham-based branch of Heckler & Koch, a German arms manufacturer
The images have become commonplace. Pick-up trucks laden with rocket launchers and machine guns. Dusty men with their rifles, poised as so many Rambo’s. Billows of smoke that linger after the bomber has flown on to its next target. These are the images of contemporary conflict. Differences of socio-political opinion are settled by bloody confrontation.
True, violent conflict is as old as mankind itself. True, self-defence is a necessity, even a responsibility. But the business of war has become the norm rather than the exception. The significance of this development lies not merely in the multitude of violent and unnecessary deaths—but more so in our readily viewing this reality with a novel brand of bold nonchalance.
In business-speak for international arms dealing, DSEi—Defence & Security Equipment International—boasts that its biennial exhibition ‘provides a time-effective opportunity to meet the whole defence and security supply chain’. DSEi further promises that this year’s event will exceed attendance figures from 2009: 25,170 attendees; 1280 exhibitors; 98 countries; 70 official delegations; 27 national pavilions. Just have a look at its slick website offering ‘infinite opportunities’ to those who would jump on the weapons carousel.
The DSEi exhibit organiser, Clarion Events, offers a patronising disclaimer:
While we would all wish to see a world in which no nation has any need of equipment for defence or peacekeeping, it is not the world we live in now.
The Kuffiyeh is Arab
September 6th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Shadia Mansour and Dead Prez. This track should be huge.
UN School of Etiquette: How to Conduct an “Appropriate” Blockade
September 6th, 2011 § 1 Comment
Just as I arrived in Bil’in for the Friday weekly demonstration, word came that the UN Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Inquiry on the 31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident (a.k.a. “The Palmer Committee Report”) has named the blockade of the Gaza Strip “legal and appropriate”. Which is rather surprising, seeing as the blockade was defined by the UN as “illegal” as well as “illegal and inhumane”, time and time again. (And again.)
Financial Times betrays Thomas Friedman
September 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Today marks the release of yet another book by Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ prolific foreign affairs columnist whose articles over the years have exposed such trends as the “collective madness” of Palestinians and the progress in Mexican baby names to more NAFTA-friendly alternatives than Juan, such as Alexander and Kevin.
Friedman’s latest book, endearingly titled That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, is coauthored by Friedman’s “intellectual soulmate”, the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum—a longtime staple of Friedman columns and a purveyor of such predictable notions as that “The real threat to world stability is not too much American power. It is too little American power”.
Despite having admitted to an audience in Istanbul that his two previous bestsellers—The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded, marketed as wakeup calls concerning globalization and clean energy, respectively—really “have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart” and are instead “basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself”, Friedman managed to advertise That Used to Be Us as “the first book I’ve really written about America” during an interview with Fox’s Don Imus earlier this year.
Slightly more surprising than Friedman’s continuing habit of self-contradiction is a recent less-than-favorable review of the new book on the website of the Financial Times, the institution that in 2005 partnered with Goldman Sachs to bestow upon Friedman the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat. Friedman responded to the honor by referring to the pair as “two such classy organizations”, before finally conceding two years after the 2008 financial crisis that Goldman Sachs is perhaps in fact “utterly selfish”.
Apartheid Art Not Welcome
September 3rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
Congratulations to BRICUP, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, and the Boycott Israel Network for disrupting a performance of the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra at the London Proms to such an extent that the BBC was forced to take its Radio 3 live broadcast off the air. The IPO has a ‘partnership’ with the murderous Israeli Defence Forces and acts as a key element of ‘Brand Israel’, whitewashing the crimes of the apartheid state. Below, a letter from concerned musicians to the Independent explains why apartheid art is not welcome here.
Proms exploited for arts propaganda campaign
As musicians we are dismayed that the BBC has invited the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra to play at the Proms on 1 September. The IPO has a deep involvement with the Israeli state – not least its self-proclaimed “partnership” with the Israeli Defence Forces. This is the same state and army that impedes in every way it can the development of Palestinian culture, including the prevention of Palestinian musicians from travelling abroad to perform.
