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US Discriminatory Immigration Policies Toward Haitians
Stephen Lendman
It's a familiar story for Haitians - last in, first out for the hemisphere's poorest, least wanted, and most abused people here and at home. Most recently it was highlighted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials announcing the resumption of over 30,000 deportations to a nation reeling from poverty, repression, despair, the devastation from last summer's storms, and occupation by UN paramilitary Blue Helmets - since 2004, illegally there for the first time ever to support and enforce a coup d'etat against a democratically elected president, at the behest of Washington.
What Happened to the American Media?
Earlier today I was reading THIS POST at Ice Station Tango and it brought to mind a documentary I saw a couple of years ago on CBC's excellent news magazine The Fifth Estate. I couldn't remember what it was called, but it wasn't hard to find. It's called Sticks and Stones. In short, it's an examination of the 'left-wing bias' exhibited by the US media, focusing on FOX "news", Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. I didn't know that it was available for viewing on line or I would have posted it long ago.
Now that questions are being asked about the role of FAUX, CNN, and others in manipulating the American public into supporting policies that have damn near destroyed the country, it is not only still relevant, it is MORE relevant than ever. YOU MUST WATCH THIS!!
Targeting Israel with Boycotts, Divestment, Sanctions, and Prosecutions
Stephen Lendman
Enough is enough. After 61 years of Palestinian slaughter, displacement, occupation, oppression, and international dismissiveness and complicity, global action is essential. Israel must be held accountable. World leaders won't do it, so grassroots movements must lead the way.
In 2004, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote:
"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure - in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation."
What's So Bad About Israel?
Michael Neumann
"So Israel stands out among other unpleasant nations in the depth of its commitment to gratuitous violence and nastiness: this you expect to find among skinheads rather than nations."
It's hard to say what's so bad about Israel, and its defenders--having nothing better to use--have seized on this. Some do so soberly, like Harpers publisher John R. MacArthur, who thinks Israel comes off no worse than the Russians in Chechnya, and much better than the Americans in Vietnam (Toronto Globe and Mail, May 13th, 2002). Others do so defiantly. True, Israel has taken the land of harmless people, killed innocent civilians, tortured prisoners, bulldozed houses, destroyed crops, yada yada yada. Who cares? What else is new?
Israel's authoritarian transformation
Sharon Weill & Valentina Azarov
Israeli riot police in Haifa at a Gaza solidarity demonstra-
tion, December 2008. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)
One of the main issues raised during the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip -- apart from a considerable number of allegations of violations of international humanitarian law that will not be dealt with here -- concerns the functioning of rule of law in Israel in cases regarding the freedoms of expression, opinion and access to information. The state did all that was in its power (and far beyond) to silence the voices that opposed the government's policies and operations in Gaza.
Those events were one major component of the process that led to the results of the elections to the Israeli parliament, in which a party, Yisrael Beiteinu, whose leader advocates a manifest racist and authoritarian agenda, has become the third political force in the country. The state's policies that will be examined in this article -- the ban on protests, the restrictions on freedom of expression and the disqualification of Arab political parties -- are a part of the transformation of Israel into an authoritarian regime based on segregation.
The Last Hero
ddjango
I was a very young boy when Dwight Eisenhower ran for president. I wore an "I Like Ike" button. I liked Ike 'cuz he had a great button. My dad voted for Adlai. Ike was my hero 'til everybody started talking about how much golf he was playing while the Russkies were kicking our ass all over the planet . . .
I was thirteen when John Kennedy came up to bat. He was just about everybody's hero, 'specially if you were an Irish Catholic Bostonian like I was. It was several decades before I found out the truth about his presidency and I finally threw him in the old hero hamper . . .
It will always disturb me that Ronald Reagan is a hero for so many Americans, except as a deification of American selfishness. To credit the man with "bringing down" the Soviet Union and all but destroying international communism is disingenuous at best. The USSR collapsed of its own weight of corruption and imperial overstretch, complete with its own Vietnam-like Afghanistan quagmire, just as the US and its empire are imploding now, the result of the ideology and policies of the Reagan years.
To the citizens of the UK, you are about to go into lockdown: Birth of fascism in real time
By chycho.
In 2007 I came across a chilling bit of news from the UK that sent shivers down my spine.
The news was about Samina Malik, a 23-year-old cashier and poet, who was “arrested and jailed for her violent prose and visiting terror web sites.” Malik’s defenders argued that she was charged with a thought crime, while prosecutors emphasized that:
“Samina Malik was not prosecuted for writing poetry. Ms. Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.”
Never Forget The Lessons Of Yesterday For The Sake Of Tomorrow
Vincent Guarisco
"You can walk away from these stories today, but if you choose to follow them they will become a profound part of you and will deeply affect your life." ~~Anthony Guarisco, Founder and director, International Alliance of Atomic Veterans (IAAV, with AAV here in the US), to photo-journalist James Lerager. (Note: Anthony was the first of many Atomic Veterans Lerager interviewed)
In a world full of mind-wrenching turmoil, I am a gentle dreamer searching for some soulful serenity. But in reality, my dreams are not always so pleasant when I revisit the arc of history when our pentagon warmongers worked day and night to demonize our own Stars and Stripes when they unleashed nuclear hell-on-earth to establish the most powerful military presence on earth. Indeed, the Hibakusha people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know this lesson well. Just as surely as all 300,000 Atomic Veterans (including my father) know they are the government's best-kept-secret when they were quickly deemed "expendable" by Uncle Sam's nuclear weapons testing programs.
ICONS AND GEO-POLITICS or MUST RUSSIA BAIL OUT UKRAINE? 'A Very European Story'
Gaither Stewart
Symbols and objects held sacred by a whole people form a more powerful protective barrier than the highest of walls. Even the Great Wall of China was more a scarecrow than a real barrier to Mongol invaders. In that figurative sense I have imagined here the Russian icon as a historical defense of Russia against circling invaders, against mercenary armies and menacing space shields.
(Rome) Even though Russian icons have little meaning in the USA, religious icons lie at the roots of pictorial art in Slavic East Europe. For the seven hundred years from the 11th century until the time of Peter the Great, the icon practically was the only indigenous pictorial art of the vast territories of the Eastern Slavs, which later, in fact, coincided with the former USSR. Though a mysterious object, the icon, that is, the sacred image, or the sacred representation that the museum visitor easily passes up for more conventional art, is nonetheless both pure art … and at the same time sacred art.
EVIL are these means and avowed ends
By Carolyn Bennett
In a sense there are only Means and means must be judged against firm and impartial standards of morality and legality. If an End though a means is envisioned as an end, it too must stand and be judged impartially as moral or immoral, just or unjust, legal or illegal, humane or inhumane. Ends contrived by men never justify means. Given this—
The world watches Israel as it enters another corrupt phase in a sixty-year era of corruption—means upon means. Thomas Paine said “A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men” (and women). In its fraudulent cause Israel has caused deaths and displacements of hundreds of thousands of people who never harmed or threatened Jews.
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