Pages: << 1 ... 1297 1298 1299 1300 1301 1302 1303 1304 1305 1306 1307 ... 1328 >>
The UN Resolution That Time Forgot
Ghada Karmi
Sixty years ago, on 11 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed an important resolution about Israel and the Palestinians. It called on the newly formed Israeli state to repatriate the displaced Palestinians “wishing to live in peace with their neighbours…at the earliest practicable date”, and to compensate them for their losses. A Conciliation Commission was set up to oversee the repatriation of the returnees. Though never implemented and frequently ignored since then, Resolution 194 has haunted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ever since, and has proved the most insurmountable obstacle in all peace negotiations. It is the legal basis for the ‘right of return’, to which Palestinians have clung for sixty years.
Far from this fundamental plank of the Palestinian cause being protected and preserved, it has been used like a political football between the parties, sometimes to attack, sometimes to defend, and now as something to bargain over. Through this process the discourse about the right of return has become deliberately ambiguous or vague, responding to Israel’s anxieties. To assert, against this background of appeasement, that the right of return is the sine qua non of any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is viewed today as ‘unrealistic’ and old-fashioned, even an obstacle to peace, as if the passage of sixty years had disqualified the Palestinians from entitlement to their homeland. Israel, conversely, shows no such ambiguity in its perennial and unambiguous rejection of the right of return.
Making Islamophobia Mainstream
Steve Rendall & Isabel Macdonald
How Muslim-bashers broadcast their bigotry
A remarkable thing happened at the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) nominations in February 2007: The normally highbrow and tolerant group nominated for best book in the field of criticism a work widely viewed as denigrating an entire religion.
The nomination of Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within didn’t pass without controversy. Past nominee Eliot Weinberger denounced the book at the NBCC’s annual gathering, calling it “racism as criticism’’ (New York Times, 2/8/07). NBCC board president John Freeman wrote on the group’s blog (Critical Mass, 2/4/07): "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept. . . . Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia."
How Holbrooke Lied His Way Into a War
Sam Husseini
Richard Holbrooke, Lum Haxhiu
Despite being passed over for Secretary of State, Richard Holbrooke is reportedly still being considered for a prominent position in the incoming Obama administration.
Shortly before the bombing of Yugoslavia began in late March 1999, Holbrooke met with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. By his own account, Holbrooke delivered the final ultimatum to Milosevic -- that if Yugoslavia didn't agree to the Rambouillet text, NATO would begin bombing.
The Rambouillet text called for a defacto occupation of Yugoslavia. On major U.S. media, after the bombing of Yugoslavia began, Holbrooke claimed that what was called for in the Rambouillet text, despite Serbian protests, "isn't an occupation". Several weeks later, when confronted by a journalist familiar with the Rambouillet text, Holbrooke claimed: "I never said that". This was a lie, it was also a tacit admission that the Rambouillet text did call for an occupation (why else would Holbrooke deny saying it when he had?) So the U.S. demanded that Yugoslavia submit to occupation or be bombed -- and Holbrooke lied about this crucial fact when questioned about the cause of the war.
Madness, Work, and Rebellion
Kirsten Anderberg
During the Renaissance (the 14th -17th centuries), insanity possessed an air of divine intervention, of romanticism and wonder, such as that reflected in works such as Shakespeare's King Lear, Cervantes' Don Quixote, or the Fool card of the Tarot. Yet during this same period we also see the development of the "Ship of Fools." "Madmen" and "madwomen" were rounded up in towns throughout Europe during the Renaissance and sent to sea in these "Ships of Fools," to either be dumped overboard, or left on the streets of a foreign city. In the classical period (1750 - 1820), the "insane" were treated as though possessed by either demon or animal, reportedly due to moral weakness and/or idleness, and were rounded up, confined in institutions, and forced to work. The institution's owners and the industrialists split the profits from the insane population's labors. But "The Mad" would not work properly for "The Man." Church and State proclaimed idleness caused insanity at one point, and thought work to be insanity's cure. But they tried to force the "insane" to work and that became highly problematic. Thus people began to think that perhaps it was not idleness that made people "crazy," but rather "insanity" made people unable to work. This idleness, either way, was rubbing against industrialists' demands for society's "useless" segments (the insane, beggars, the homeless, abandoned children, the sick and elderly, etc.) to become their workforce, and thus the madman's idleness was deemed pride and rebellion, as an affront to God and the bourgeois order, and was even outlawed in many places over many centuries.
One third of Indian states want separation
Nasir Mahmood
The Indian Government referring to Mumbai carnage is acting like the Israeli tyrants, blaming for their own failure to Pakistan which is struggling with the same elements of terrorism and rogue groups.
What the people of India have to address and realize is the treatment of the Muslim communities in Gujrat and many areas, let alone their terrorism inflicted upon the innocent guard less Kashmiris. One would love to see the same people who are so easily driven by the sentiments endorsed through their Media tools to come out and protest against the Indian Government.
What about the Indian-Mossad relationship, credible evidence that the Mossad provides all kind of support to the Indian military, aid their intelligence development, exercising joint paramilitary programmes along the Siachin border with Pakistan. They are just caught in their own paradox of reality and disinformation.
Rogue Bush regime: US government is above the law
Paul Craig Roberts
The US government does not have a monopoly on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the US government.
It is now well documented and known all over the world that the US government tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the US government has had people kidnapped and “renditioned,” that is, transported to third world countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.
Also documented and well known is the fact that the US Department of Justice provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees. One torture advocate who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green light to the Bush regime’s use of torture is John Yoo, a South Korean immigrant who secured a US Justice Department appointment and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law. Members of Berkeley’s city council believe that Yoo should be charged with war crimes.
Operation Mockingbird: CIA Media Manipulation
Mary Louise
The CIA's secret activities, covert missions, and connections of control are all done under the pretense and protection of national security with no accountability whatsoever, at least in their minds. Considering the public is held accountable for everything we think, say, and do there is something seriously wrong with this picture. The CIA is the President's secret army, who have been and continue to be conveniently above the law with unlimited power and authority, to conduct a reign of terror around the globe.
The "old boy network" of socializing, talking shop, and tapping each other for favors outside the halls of government made it inevitable that the CIA and Corporate America would become allies, thus the systematic infiltration and takeover of the media.
SWAT Team Holds Family at Gunpoint for Hours
John-Loeffler / World Prout Assembly
Agents began rifling through all of the family's possessions, a task that lasted hours and resulted in a complete upheaval of every private area in the home. Many items were taken that were not listed on the search warrant. The family was not permitted a phone call, and they were not told what crime they were being charged with. They were not read their rights. Over ten thousand dollars worth of food was taken, including the family's personal stock of food for the coming year. All of their computers, and all of their cell phones were taken, as well as phone and contact records. The food cooperative was virtually shut down. There was no rational explanation, nor justification, for this extreme violation of Constitutional rights. Presumably Manna Storehouse might eventually be charged with running a retail establishment without a license. Why then the Gestapo-type interrogation for a 3^rd degree misdemeanor charge? This incident has raised the ominous specter of a restrictive new era in State regulation and enforcement over the nation's private food supply.
The Power Elite Playbook, Japan, Land of Western Industrialization Part 16 by Deanna Spingola
Deanna Spingola
In Japan – “For a thousand years, it was the policy of emperors and shoguns to keep the people ignorant, and to keep taxes high enough so families had to struggle to survive, because this kept them fully occupied and harmless.”
J. P. Morgan was involved in Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1867-1912) which replaced the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate with the restored imperial family. This trade-off of power was merely a cosmetic change. Assets were confiscated from the Tokugawa shoguns and used to build factories and railroads. These assets were then privatized into four major zaibatsu (conglomerates): Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Yasuda and Iwasaki. A zaibatsu could be comprised of mines, factories, banks, ocean fleets, insurance companies and export agencies. These four zaibatsus retained their exclusivity through kinship, marriage, school associations, bribes or any other secret or social arrangement. This is very similar to America’s elite class.
Anousheh Ansari: I am proud of being an Iranian Muslim
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari and Ahmadreza Tavassoli
The second anniversary of Anousheh Ansari's adventurous travel to the spatial station as the first Iranian space explorer passed over with the reticence of global media who have been busy analyzing the very earliest "side effects" of President-elect Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 US Presidential Elections.
In the heat of Ansari's space voyage, American media broached bunches of controversial issues such as the reluctance of half-blooded astronaut to introduce herself as Iranian or Muslim, but she never found the opportunity to clarify this.
Furthermore, most of the newspapers or websites dedicated their conversations to professional and technical matters when interviewing Anousheh Ansari which caused many stories to remain untold.
Following is the text of exclusive interview with the first female private space explorer Anousheh Ansari, the Iranian businesswomen who has perpetuated the name of Iran in the 2007 edition of Guinness World Records Book with her everlasting record.
<< 1 ... 1297 1298 1299 1300 1301 1302 1303 1304 1305 1306 1307 ... 1328 >>
