Still Homeless in Baghdad

With 1.6 million internally displaced persons and an unemployement rate of 40-65%, Dahr Jamail reports about the plight of Iraqi families dispossessed and left homeless by the war.

“We only want a normal life,” says Um Qasim, sitting in a bombed out building in Baghdad. She and others around have been saying that for years. Um Qasim lives with 13 family members in a brick shanty on the edge of a former military intelligence building in the Mansoor district of Baghdad.
Five of her children are girls. Homelessness is not easy for anyone, but it is particularly challenging for women and girls.

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Gasbag for a Punching Bag

hitchens_mudmask

What else could one say, except: ha-ha-ha! (Also check out this interesting report on Hitchens’s speech at the AUB)

As a professional provocateur and vocal supporter of the war in Iraq, Christopher Hitchens has been engaged in countless verbal punch-ups with his ideological opponents, most of them conducted from the safety of a TV studio.

However, when the controversial author, journalist and broadcaster defaced a political poster on a visit to Beirut last week, he found himself at the wrong end of a bruising encounter that has left him walking with a limp and nursing cuts and bruises.

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War Whore

A Camp Follower Who Aims to Please. Norman Finkelstein exposes another fraud — how Anthony Cordesman ‘proved’ at the behest of the American Jewish Committee that Israel fought a clean war.

white wash latuff Israel crimes

Anthony H. Cordesman, a leading military analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has published a “strategic analysis” of the Gaza massacre.(1) He reaches the remarkable conclusion that “Israel did not violate the laws of war.” The report is based on “briefings in Israeli [sic] during and immediately after the fighting made possible by a visit sponsored by Project Interchange, and using day-to-day reporting issued by the Israeli Defense Spokesman.” Cordesman omits mention that Project Interchange is funded by the American Jewish Committee.

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NYU students and other city students in solidarity have taken NYU

England set the precedent for the world. We at Strathclyde set a precedent for Scotland. And then it spread across the Atlantic. First it was Rochester, and now its NYU. This is historic.

NYU BUILDING TAKEOVER!!!

At approximately 10pm tonight (Feb. 18), students of Take Back NYU! took over the Kimmel Marketplace. They have blockaded the doors and declared an occupation! They presented their demands to the NYU administration. They read as follows:

DEMANDS

We, the students of NYU, declare an occupation of this space. This occupation is the culmination of a two-year campaign by the Take Back NYU! coalition, and of campaigns from years past, in whose footsteps we follow.

In order to create a more accountable, democratic and socially responsible university, we demand the following:

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NWFP’s Sensible Compromise

The NWFP government has made a sensible decision. Pakistani military has no deterrence power in the region. The ill-conceived counter-insurgency operation has only hurt civilians, and has allowed the insurgency to spread. One only hopes the ceasefire is not undermined once again by the clowns in Islamabad at the behest of their Washington masters.

‘Our rulers: erratic, fearful and full of deceit‘, writes Shireen M Mazari, a sober defense analyst.

Just when one was about to commend the President for finally seeing the light in terms of agreeing to the NWFP government signing a deal with the TNSM for peace in Swat, we witnessed the usual backtracking from the Presidency, if Ms Rehman the official propagandist is to be believed. That, in turn, led to the ANP government being pushed into a state of confusion over what exactly it had signed on to in the agreement it made in front of representatives of all the major political parties – barring the JI which refused to attend. This has marked all the negotiations and agreements made to end militancy and violence earlier also – not just in Swat but also in FATA where US drones always put paid to any peace through negotiations.

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Making History at Hampshire College

The wonderful Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews Brian Van Slyke and Ali Abunimah on the Hampshire College’s divestment from Israel.

Afghan Pitfalls

Into the Chasm. M. Shahid Alam offers a reality check to the new imperialists in Washington.

As the United States prepares to escalate its eight-year war against the Taliban, it might be useful to weigh its chances of success.

Consider, first, the fate of three previous invasions of Afghanistan by two great European powers, Britain and Soviet Union, since the nineteenth century.

These invasions ended in defeat – for the Europeans.

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St Andrews University Student Occupation

Having presented a petition signed by over 30 academics and 700 students to the Principal of the University, around 50 St Andrews University students have occupied Lower College Hall in protest at the University’s links with the Israeli occupation.

We, the concerned students of the University of St. Andrews demand that the university condemns the illegal bombing and genocide in Gaza and Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians. In particular, as an educational establishment we urge that it shows practical solidarity with the Islamic university of Gaza and other schools and colleges damaged during the bombing.
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Cancel ZF Propaganda Effort ‘Israel Day of Science’

On the 16th the following letter appeared in the Guardian calling on two UK science museums to cancel Israel’s Day of Science in light of the attack on Gaza.

Today a letter in defence was published by Clive Margolis.  He believes that Israel shouldn’t be accused of criminality “unless the facts have been put before a court of law and found to be true.” Clive should examine the verdict of the International Court of Justice which, in 2004, found Israeli colonisation of Occupied Palestinian Territory illegal:  “Recalling that the Security Council described Israel’s policy of establishing settlements in that territory as a ‘flagrant violation’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court finds that those settlements have been established in breach of international law.”   The whole action in Gaza is a crime in defence of 60 years of illegal colonisation and occupation.  Not to mention that many of those refugees bombed in Gaza have been denied their right, enshrined in International human rights law and UN Resolution 194, to return to their homes in Israel from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.  The smaller war crimes he disputes are of lesser significance and I’m not sure what more evidence he needs than the photographs of White Phosphorus landing on civilians.

The Socialist Worker reports that the Stop the War Coalition and activists in the UCU union in Manchester are mobilising to stop this insulting event from happen at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi).  Could we be in for more occupations?

Science should not be used as a PR tool to gloss over the crimes of Apartheid Israel.

Quite extraordinarily, the Science Museum in London and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry have both been made available (on 3 and 5 March respectively) for an event called “Israel Day of Science”. The museums argue they are not sponsoring the event, but have merely hired out their premises. This subtle distinction is unlikely to be appreciated by the many thousands of all ages and faiths who have repeatedly taken to the streets round the country to protest against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

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The Independent’s Knee and Jerk

Hugo Chavez’s activities usually elicit a knee-jerk response from most of the British media. The title of the latest Independent’s leading article summarizes it well: “A perilous new twist in the Venezuelan revolution“.  Now consider, Venezuela conducts an open and fair referendum on the term limits on the president, and this is termed “perilous” and “… hope that, for the sake of the Venezuelan people, it does not end up dragging the country back into the mire of authoritarianism.”  Why should a referendum be construed as a peril? If anything a referendum is a bona fide democratic procedure and thus it should enhance the democratic nature of Venezuelan society.

The Independent’s editorial writers state: “The scrapping of term limits will do nothing to help build confidence in the rule of law. All free nations need firm checks on executive power. Developing nations like Venezuela need these checks just as much as richer countries.”  Why do they criticise a Venezuelan referendum meant to expand term limits while in the UK there are no term limits at all for Prime Ministers, and most other political offices?  Technically, in the UK, the same Prime Minister could cling on to power for decades, but, for some unspecified reason, it is only when Chavez seeks an extension of his term that there is a problem with it. And is the extension of president’s term really detrimental in Venezuela’s observance of “the rule of law”?  And when was the last time these same editorial writers pontificated about Hosni Mubarak’s investiture-for-life as Egypt’s decades-long president? The simple answer is: they haven’t done so. In the case of corrupt and dictatorial “presidents” who cling on to power for decades, e.g., Hosni Mubarak, or the autocratic monarchs of the Gulf States, the editorial writers are mostly silent.  It is clear that a double standard seems to apply.

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