This is a video of my appearance on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. For context, I’d encourage viewers to read my articles in Political Insight and Le Monde Diplomatique.
The Pakistani Taliban have claimed responsibility for an attack on the US consulate in Peshawar on Monday. Is Pakistan paying the price for battles waged by the United States in the region?
This article appeared in the Political Studies Association‘s excellent new publication Political Insight.
by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
No nation has ever made a frank avowal of its real imperial motives. It always claims to be primarily concerned with the peace and prosperity of the people whom it subjugates. — Reinhold Niebuhr
The ironies of US President Barack Obama’s Nobel acceptance speech in Oslo were widely noted. Not since Theodore Roosevelt had a Nobel laureate used the acceptance ceremony to make a case for war. Both men appealed to St Augustine’s authority to support the justness of their cause. However, when Roosevelt spoke he had already concluded the peace for which he was honoured; Obama’s lies distant in the purgatory of ‘hope’. In the present he remains at war — as Henry Kissinger was, when he picked up his prize — having recently ordered the second major escalation of his brief presidency. Kissinger’s war simmered on for two more years; Obama’s will likely last longer.
Afghanistan may well become Obama’s Vietnam, but his diversion is not Cambodia, or Laos, it is nuclear-armed Pakistan. History sometimes repeats itself both as tragedy and farce.
Weeks before Obama described al-Qaeda as a threat on a par with Nazi Germany, national security adviser, General James Jones, told CNN that the organisation had fewer than a hundred men in Afghanistan. Driven by institutional inertia and vulnerable to the charge of weakness, Obama appears unable to disengage. Instead he has borrowed Bush’s rhetoric of good and evil and joined the fear factory. He has subsumed al-Qaeda and the Taliban into a singular threat of global proportions whose defeat he pronounced ‘fundamental to the defense of our people’. Afghanistan, he argued,will not be pacified until the Taliban’s allies in Pakistan are vanquished. Precipitate withdrawal will restore the Taliban to power, and create a safe haven for al-Qaeda to plan more terrorist attacks on the west.
The war continues at Nebi Salah:
More footage from Nebi Salah, this week:
Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 2.04.2010”
Activestills Youtube channel:
Around 200 Palestinians, Israelis and internationals walk from the Nativity Square to the direction of Jerusalem, against the restrictions imposed by the Israelis especially restrictions on the right to worship and freedom of movement as many Christians will not be able to go to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter in Jerusalem. The crowd managed to outnumber and surprise the Israeli soldiers and security forces at Bethlehem checkpoint and managed to walk through. After having walked 300 meters on the road to Jerusalem, they were stopped by Israeli soldiers. After having declared the march over and as they were walking back to Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers attacked the crowd and violently arrested around 15 persons, among them a Palestinian cameran, an Israeli photographers, members of the popular committee from Al Ma’sara, and staff from Holy Trust.
In heavy rain and under heavy threat, all the weekly demonstration insistently ensued, across the West Bank. The village of Al Ma’asara demonstrated against the latest arrest and torture of the local demonstration organizer, Omar Alaaeddin:
Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 26.3.2010”
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.
Continue reading “Palestinian Organizer Tortured in Israeli Jail”
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.
Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 19.3.2010”
by Scotland Against Criminalising Communities
The Annual Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), laid before Parliament last Thursday, confirms that a Government propaganda unit set up to tackle terrorism intervened to influence British public opinion during the Israeli attack on Gaza last year. The report also outlines a number of other steps taken by the Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), including the creation of a network of community organisations. RICU is linked to the UK Government’s Prevent programme for preventing “violent extremism.”
Activities of this sort distort democracy in the UK. They aim to mobilise public and voluntary sector workers and ordinary people as propagandists for controversial Government policies. They poison public debate by linking opposition to the Government’s foreign policy to support for “extremism.” And they do all this within a framework of Government initiatives already notorious for the massive intelligence-gathering that they involve.
Continue reading “Taxpayer-funded ‘anti-Terror’ unit involved in propaganda effort over Gaza”
Chapter XXV of Part Three of the Goldstone Report was dedicated to Repression Of Dissent In Israel, Right To Access To Information And Treatment Of Human Rights Defenders. I personally remember the fear of speaking out, I felt at the time. It was a tense environment and a hands-on lesson in democracy (or lack there of).
The Israeli environment, today, is calmer to a degree; Most probably due to the short memory span of the typical Israeli. Yet the authorities (the only ones with property rights to this memory span) are exponentially getting more and more nervous about world perception of Israel. This nervousness manifests in many different and desperate ways, I’ve written about, but today I’d like to focus on what’s becoming more and more flagrant: The repression of leftist activists.
Amira Hass as a Measure to Oppression
When I started seeing Amira Hass in the Sheikh Jarrah protests, I was almost as giddy as a groupie. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that if she’s covering repression of the Jewish (for sake of clarification only) left, then she’s taking time off of covering much more atrocious transgressions against Palestinians. And though her enjoyment of taking part in actual democratic practice was obvious, she was on the job, and the article was soon to follow:
The Israel Defense Forces says it is using information on Israelis who demonstrate against the separation fence in a bid to deny them entry at nearby checkpoints… It also appears that the IDF is observing the routes the activists take to reach the villages.
Continue reading “Can We Call it “Just Another Fascist Regime in the Middle East” yet?”
In Nebi Salah The soldiers were eager and waiting, within the village when the march had reached its outskirts. Under the cover of the clashes between the army and the village youth, some villagers managed to reach their natural spring, only to find settlers swimming in it. Soldiers who eventually got to the group politely ordered the settlers to leave, while attacking the demonstrators with tear-gas in order to push them back to the village. The two groups had regrouped back in the village, where Border Police officers shot at demonstrators from behind the stone terraces that crosshatch the fields between the village and the settlement. It took the army until seven in the evening to retreat:
The injured 14 year old boy, Ehab Barghouthi, has awaken from his coma, caused by a rubber coated bullet to his head, fired by an Israeli army Soldier.
Continue reading “The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 12.3.2010”
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