Month: April 2009

Free the torturers – and the rapists too!

Trust a Python to bring insight to a generally insane debate. ‘If Dick Cheney can trumpet the ‘success’ of his torture policies without fear of retribution, why can’t us ordinary criminals?’,  asks A Killer, aka Terry Jones.

I am over the moon about President Obama’s recent publication of the Bush administration’s torture memos. They come as a breath of fresh air for those of us banged up in Cook County Jail.

Obama’s announcement that “nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past” is the most reassuring news most of us here have heard in a long time.

Speaking as a multiple rapist and serial killer, I welcome the president’s clear view that “this is a time for reflection, not retribution”. Absolutely. We have indeed been “through a dark and painful chapter in our history” (in my case 17 years in the super-secure lockdown facility).

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A Crucial Distinction

peter-gooderhamWhy exactly did Britain lead a walkout of the UN anti-racism conference yesterday? True to form, rather than focusing on the obvious issue of what was said in the speech, and why the protesting governments considered it so objectionable, the media focused on the narrow diplomatic issues raised by the walkout itself. On BBC Newsnight Jeremy Paxman interrogated the UK Ambassador to the UN in Geneva in his usual manner,  firing off innocuous questions masked in an aggressive and irreverent tone. First he why the UK government had attended the conference in the first place.  He later accused the Ambassador of playing into the hands of the wicked Ahmedinajed. “What you have done today is exactly what someone like President Ahmedinajed wants,” Paxman complained, “He’s won today.”

One section of the interview however was revealing:

Jeremy Paxman: What is the difference between Zionism and racism?

Peter Gooderham: Well we see the two as being quite distinct…

Jeremy Paxman: Yeah what’s the difference?

Peter Gooderham: Well Zionism is a political movement related to the establishment of a homeland…

Jeremy Paxman [quietly]: So are some forms of racism.

Peter Gooderham:…a Jewish homeland, in the er…in what is now Israel and racism is something else. I mean racism is, I think we all know it when we see it and it’s not, it’s not that, and we have fought long and hard at the United Nations to keep that, to maintain that distinction.

So there you go. Zionism is not racism because we know racism when we see it and it’s not that. Just like we know terrorism when we see it, and it’s not this.

Ahmadinejad criticism of Israel sparks UN walkout en masse

Ahmadinejad has a habit of upsetting the West, this time outrageously explaining how Palestine WAS wiped off the map.  Only to be followed by a shameful shower of Nakba deniers walking out in disgust.

The Iranian president was famously misquoted as saying he wanted Israel wiped off the map, a phrase repeated often and attributed to him incorrectly.  It was repeated so often in Israel that it became part of the political lexicon, with one cabinet minister, Meir Sheetrit, tellingly slipping up in revealing that ”we must take a neighbourhood in Gaza and wipe it off the map”.  A year later and more than just one neighbourhood has disappeared.

Do actions speak louder than misquoted words?  Not in the West it seems where Ahmadinejad remains the favourite Bond villain.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticized on Monday, April 20, Israel’s racist practices against the Palestinian people, sparking a walkout by European delegates from the UN conference on racism.

“In fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine,” Ahmadinejad told the conference.

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A dick named Cox

What do you call someone who in 2009 believes that ‘Blair must have believed that WMD existed, since even the peace lobby did…[s]eeking to protect oil supplies wouldn’t have been an entirely ignoble concern…he might honestly have thought this would be in our own best interests. Alastair Campbell …could still have believed in the policy he was enforcing’ and thinks In the Loop is a bad film because it ‘excludes the part played by principle’?

There is much that one could criticize about the Armando Iannucci film In the Loop. That it couldn’t be as credulous as the tools in the New Labour press is not one of them. It is a travesty the British press should allow bovine oafs like David Cox to defile their pages.

Past is present in Latin America

Addressing the Summit of the Americas Obama explained “I didn’t come here to debate the past, I came here to deal with the future.” However, without accepting the role of the US in Latin America, which the States contemptuously titled its “backyard,” how can those in the backyard, who are now largely defined by their resistance to this status, agree consensus on a future? In the following report the Real News examine the past that Obama wants to ignore and they explore why that past is inextricably linked to the present and the future. The report also contains an excellent feature on Oscar Romero a liberation theologian assassinated by US backed right wing militia.

More from Al Jazeera:

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Where’s Rev. Wright When You Need Him?

Chris Hedges examines the boycott of the UN conference on racism explaining that “racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection.”

Barack Obama prays during services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in this 2004 photo. Obama resigned his 20-year membership in Trinity after controversial remarks by his longtime pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatened to derail his presidential candidacy.
Barack Obama prays during services at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago in this 2004 photo. Obama resigned his 20-year membership in Trinity after controversial remarks by his longtime pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright threatened to derail his presidential candidacy.

Israel and the United States, which could be charged under international law with crimes against humanity for actions in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, will together boycott the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Geneva. Racism, an endemic feature of Israeli and American society, is not, we have decided, open for international inspection. Barack Obama may be president, but the United States has no intention of accepting responsibility or atoning for past crimes, including the use of torture, its illegal wars of aggression, slavery and the genocide on which the country was founded. We, like Israel, prefer to confuse lies we tell about ourselves with fact.

The Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute CIA and Bush administration officials for the use of torture because it wants to look to the future is easy to accept if you were never tortured. The decision not to confront slavery and the continued discrimination against African-Americans is easy to accept if your ancestors were not kidnapped, crammed into slave ships, denied their religion and culture, deprived of their language, stripped of their names, severed from their families and forced into generations of economic misery. The decision not to discuss the genocide of Native Americans is easy if your lands were not stolen and your people driven into encampments and slaughtered. The doctrine of pre-emptive war and illegal foreign occupation is easy to accept if you are not a Palestinian, an Iraqi or an Afghan.

Continue reading “Where’s Rev. Wright When You Need Him?”

UN Anti-Racism Conference Boycotted for Tackling Racism

The Durban II UN conference on racism has suffered a series of blows as the USA, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands joined Israel, Italy and Canada in boycotting the talks.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has complained of a “disparaging media and lobbying campaign” against the UN conference on racism aimed at silencing criticism of Israel by those with “narrow, parochial interests” who demonstrate “reflexive partisanship.”

This can be seen in the UK where Denis MacShane MP (a member of Labour Friends of Israel) has pressured the government to withdraw if  “attacks on Jews are made” and the Jewish Human Rights Coalition (JHRC) has called on the government to withdraw completely, with notable success as the UK is now only sending a delegation, with no senior official.

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Chávez creates a new bestseller

Chavez gives a book to Obama during the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain
Hugo Chavez gives Barack Obama a copy of Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina (The Open Veins of Latin America) by Eduardo Galeano during a meeting at the Summit of the Americas. Photograph: Ho/Reuters

Chávez creates overnight bestseller with book gift to Obama. I was wondering which book it was that Chavez passed on to Obama at the summit of the Americas. He chose well: it was Eduardo Galeano’s classic The Open Veins of Latin America. ‘Sales surge for book about history of Latin America’s exploitation after exchange at summit of Americas’ reports Andrew Clark in the Guardian.

A 36-year-old historical tract attacking the imperialist exploitation of Latin America has become an improbable overnight bestseller after the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávezabruptly presented a copy to Barack Obama.

During a session of the summit of the Americas in Trinidad at the weekend, Chávez strode up to Obama, patted him on the shoulder and, with a friendly handshake, gave him a paperback copy of Eduardo Galeano’s 1973 work, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.

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Gaza, remember?

Gideon Levy writes that “it’s exactly three months since the much-talked-about war, and Gaza is once again forgotten. Israel has never taken an interest in the welfare of its victims. Now the world has forgotten, too.”

Alyan Abu-Aun is lying in his tent, his crutches beside him. He smokes cigarettes and stares into the tiny tent’s empty space. His young son sits on his lap. Ten people are crammed into the tent, about the size of a small room. It has been their home for three months. Nothing remains of their previous home, which the Israel Defense Forces shelled during Operation Cast Lead. They are refugees for a second time; Abu-Aun’s mother still remembers her home in Sumsum, a town that once stood near Ashkelon.
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