Year: 2010

The Wikileaks Afghanistan War Logs

In one of the biggest leaks in US military history, 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the war in Afghanistan obtained by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel. The files reveal hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops, ‘friendly fire’ deaths and shadowy special forces, painting, as the Guardian puts it, “a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan”.

Over the fold: Julian Assange on the war logs and war log links.

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BP Oil Spill Threatens Bayou Tribes

by Dennis Bernstein

For unlucky residents of the Gulf States, the BP oil-spill disaster, coming up on 100 days, could take another turn for the worst if one of the storms churning up tropical waters in the Atlantic Ocean blossoms into a full-blown hurricane and heads into the Gulf of Mexico.

For several already marginalized Native tribes living on the Louisiana Coast – many of them fishermen and shrimpers – a hurricane crashing through the oil-polluted Gulf now could destroy a way of life that has survived for centuries.

Already, the tribal land among the coastal bayous is disappearing faster than anywhere on the planet, the victim of unbridled oil exploration and dam building projects of the Army Corps of Engineers dating back to the 1930s.

“For us it’s more like a hundred years of oil disasters than a hundred days,” said Chief Charles Verdin of the Pointe au Chien tribe. “And really when you look at it … it’s business as usual. The tribes being ignored, forgotten, overlooked, and forced from their land.”

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Lynne Stewart Speaks

At the United National Peace Conference that took place this weekend in Albany, Ralph Poynter, the husband of imprisoned activist lawyer Lynne Stewart and coordinator of her defense committee, was invited to read his own statement and a letter from his wife about her incarceration, the prison industrial complex, the state of the antiwar movement, and the importance of resisting state oppression.

For more on Lynne Stewart’s case, read Jasmin Ramsey’s “People’s Lawyer Sentenced to 10 years in Prison.”

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Israel: Strategic Asset or Liability?

The following is a transcript of Ambassador Chas Freeman, Jr.‘s remarks, which begin around 17:00.

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Rumi On Reason

(adapted from his Fihi Ma Fihi )

M. Shahid Alam

Man seeks to know God, not because he is knowable;
not reasonably, but by reasoning he knows him.

When man accepted the trust, it was reason
he acquired, to say yes to his Creator.

Man is a moth, God a candle. When his wings
wrap around the candle’s flame,
why should they not burn –
and he perish in its fire?

A moth that shuns the candle’s flame
is not a moth. A candle that does not
draw the moth, that will not
burn it to ashes – is not a candle.

Man is not man if he denies God,
if he eviscerates his urge to know him.

A god that man can know is not
God, he is man’s alter ago.

— M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, Boston, and author of Israeli Exceptionalism (Palgrave: 2000). Visit his website – http://qreason.com – and write to him at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.

Why Jeff Goldberg Is Losing It

by M.J. Rosenberg

For two days, the Atlantic’s Jeff Goldberg has been calling Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and other critics of Bibi Netanyahu “anti-Semites.” Nothing new about that. For Goldberg, a major AIPAC neocon, all critics of Israeli policies are anti-Semites by definition. (See this good piece on Goldberg).

But why is he obsessing about Walt so much now?

It is because, in August, Goldberg is coming out with his big Atlantic piece calling on the United States to bomb Iran so that Israel does not have to.

But Goldberg has a problem. As an American who chose to serve in the Israeli army (he was a guard at a Palestinian prison camp), he fears that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer — who accused the Likud lobby of promoting war with Iraq in their groundbreaking bestseller — will point out that Goldberg is just about the least credible advocate for war with Iran.

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Israel not a democracy: Jonathan Cook interview

A worthwhile Russia Today interview with Nazareth resident, journalist and author, Jonathan Cook.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Bad Aroma: Off-Off-Broadway BDS Musical

Off-Off-Broadway BDS Musical Tour!

Via Adalah NY

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A Friendly Conversation with the Shabak

Yonatan Shapira

Activist Yonatan Shapira (you may know him from actions such as The Pilots’ Letter, Tutu Disruption, and The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) was summoned to a “friendly talk” with the Shabak [translation via Promised Land]:

Yesterday Rona from the Shabak called me and asked me to come talk to meet her in the police station on Dizengof st. (Tel Aviv). She refused to tell me what was it about, but made it clear I wasn’t going to be arrested, and that this is just an acquaintance or “a friendly talk”…

At five o’clock I got to the Dizengof police station and was sent to the second floor of the rear building, where a guy who presented himself as Rona’s security guard waited for me. I was taken to a room and subjected to a pretty intimate search to make sure I didn’t install any recording device on my testicles. After I was found clean I was let into Rona’s room. She was a nice looking girl, apparently from a Yemeni origin, in her early thirties.

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“Truth Alone Triumphs”: of David, Goliath, Stones, and Speech

“Azadi” is also the chant whose echoes swirl in the Kashmir Valley with greater resonance each day, from the minarets and playgrounds, boulevards and alleys, schools and courts, despite the crushing screeches of teargas and bullets of the Indian (in)security forces. It is “scriptured” into utterance by each breath of Kashmiri women, children, and men; calligraphed by their blood on their emerald valley; embroidered by their bones in Kashmiri Arabesque on worn cobblestones of the downtown; and papier-mâchéd in paisley tears on the blue of their beloved lakes.

by Huma Dar

“A Defiant Kashmiri woman being frisked by Indian Security Forces.” 2007. Uncredited photograph from a Kashmiri blogger

 

And the night’s sun there in Srinagar?  Guns shoot stars into the sky, the storm of constellations night after night, the infinite that rages on.  It was Id-uz-Zuha: a record of God’s inability, for even He must melt sometimes, to let Ishmael be executed by the hand of his father.  Srinagar was under curfew.  The identity pass may or may not have helped in the crackdown.  Son after son–never to return from the night of torture–was taken away.

… But the reports are true, and without song: mass rapes in the villages, towns left in cinders, neighborhoods torched.  “Power is hideous / like a barber’s hands.”  The rubble of downtown Srinagar stares at me from the Times.

… And that blesséd word with no meaning–who will utter it?  What is it?  Will the women pronounce it, as if scripturing the air, for the first time?  Or the last?

… What is the blesséd word?  Mandelstam gives no clue.  One day the Kashmiris will pronounce that word truly for the first time.  (Excerpt from Agha Shahid Ali’s “The Blesséd Word: A Prologue,” in The Country Without A Post Office,  1997: 16-17)

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