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William John Cox
What does a shootout at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the confessions of a Khmer Rouge jailer and the murder of a Kansas medical doctor have in common? The answer is "children," and how they suffer from being targeted and used by extremists to advance their own hateful agendas.
In 1981, acting as a public interest lawyer, I represented a Holocaust survivor who had been a 17-year-old boy when his entire family was murdered in Nazi concentration camps. We sued a group of radical right-wing organizations that denied the Holocaust and, as a publicity ploy, had offered a reward for proof it had occurred.
by chycho
On 27 February 2009, the Conservative government revived a bill to impose automatic jail terms for drug-related crimes, “which would send people to jail for growing as little as one marijuana plant for the purpose of trafficking.” On June 8, the House of Commons passed this bill, Bill C-15, which “has been widely criticized by criminal justice experts, who point to the total failure of mandatory minimum sentencing in the United States to deter or reduce the amount of drug crimes occurring.” This bill now only needs Senate support to become law.
by Stephen Lendman
On May 26, the UN Human Rights Council issued a report titled "Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights, Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Including the Right to Development - Report of the Special Rapporteur (Philip Alston) on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions."
Alston was damning in his criticism regarding "three areas in which significant improvement is necessary if the US Government is to match its actions to its stated commitment to human rights and the rule of law:"
(1) Its imposition of the death penalty under which innocent people are executed. Alston was shocked about "glaring criminal justice system flaws," citing Texas and Alabama as examples, but many other states are as derelict. He criticized politicized judges and recommended that Congress "should enact legislation permitting federal court habeas review of state and federal death penalty cases on their merits."
William C. Carlotti
Systemic anti-semitism no longer exists in United States society---not politically, not economically, not philosophically, not academically. Its anachronistic expressions in various venues are akin to a regurgitation of the earth as the center of the universe that haunted Copernicus and nearly got Galileo at the stake; or the flat earth postulations as they were promoted by the Christian monk Cosmos Indicopleutes.
As a matter of fact, if we examine all of those matters that would be the practical effects of anti-semitism we find that they simply do not exist. Some few examples of the many that can be cited about government, about academia, about think tanks ---The median income of the Jewish community is higher than the median income of the rest of our population. The median income in the United States is about $25,000 a year. That means that one half of all Americans earn more than that, and one half earn less. The median Jewish American income is double that, i.e., $50,000 a year. About 40% of American High School graduates go to college. However, 85% of Jewish American high school graduates go to college. There are 13 Jewish members in the United States Senate and 30 Jewish members of the United States House of Representatives.
By Khalid Amayreh, Occupied East Jerusalem
There is no doubt that Benyamin Netanyahu’s odious screed at Bar Ilan University Sunday night was a slap in the face to all those who gave the so-called “peace process” between the Palestinian people and Israel the benefit of the doubt.
First, it was a brazenly direct affront to President Obama who thought rather naively that nice words about peace would make the Israeli leadership change its fascistic mindset and reconsider it colonialist approach toward the Palestinian people. Just last week, Obama reasserted America’s commitment to the safety and security of Israel as if the Zionist entity, which possesses hundreds of nuclear warheads, was facing any real threats from its neighbors.
Allen L Roland
Something important happened in Iran this weekend and its color is green. The idea of adopting the color Green was begun, for the first time in an Iranian election, by supporters of Mr Moussavi, who apparently lost to fundamentalist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a disputed election. However, in the process, Green has now become the color of national protest:
Something important happened this weekend in Iran's presidential election and it resembled the tactics, organization, mud slinging and perhaps even vote manipulation of recent American national elections.
As the Washington Post reported ~ "As Iranians go to the polls Friday to choose a president, the country is more deeply polarized than at any time since the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah 30 years ago. After a bitter campaign that included personal attacks on some of Iran's leading families, both sides are preparing to contest the results, and many Iranians wonder whether the social and economic rifts exposed by the election will deepen."
by Philip Henshaw
Economic theory is based on the observed regularities of the past. Some are considered as general principles, or “natural laws” that are expected to never change. From a systems view, though, such laws are emergent properties of the complex system they are regularities of, and prone to change as the system changes form.
Growth systems, for example, invariably change form when they climax, but the present laws of economics describe a complex system that has perpetual growth that never changes form. The question is partly how to tell when such changes might be appearing. Complex systems may vary a great deal without indicating a change in the form of the whole system. What would raise the question are events of kinds that are never supposed to occur at all.
Mary Pitt
Don't look now but your base is slipping! You may ask anyone involved in the Katrina disaster how important those few little grains of sand sliding off to the side can be. Nobody seemed to notice when the levees that held back the waters of Lake Ponchartrain began deteriorating but we all now know that they were the precursers to calamity.
In the same way, a few of your supporters were disgruntled when your first cabinet appointees were simply re-treaded from the Bush and Clinton administrations. We can appreciate that you needed a few key people with experience from Day One but, rather than they adapting to your point of view, you appear to have accepted their influence to shift your own views to coincide with that of the leaders for whom they previously worked!
eileen fleming
Occupied East Jerusalem, June 13, 2009- Over thirty CODE PINK activists met with a few of the soon to be 1,500 homeless residents of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, located minutes away from the Temple Mount and the Al Aqsa Mosque.
On June 8, 1998, under the cover of darkness, members of the fundamentalist nationalistic settlement group Elad [a Hebrew acronym for: To the City of David] entered four Palestinian homes, threw out the furniture and raised Israeli flags on the property.
Roland Michel Tremblay
At this time we cannot state that this world is moral, just or ethical, whatever the area of society: political, religious, corporate and even people taken individually. Life is more like a struggle and a fight to survive than anything else. We have reached an all time low. What can society expect of its citizens, if all they ever encounter is pettiness, selfishness, unfairness and punishment? Well then, we should expect war at every turn, and this is what we witness everyday everywhere. But there is hope for humanity.
There is always a larger picture to everything, to any situation, to any debate or attack, no matter how small it is. Should there not be some sort of ideal world we could all live in, where everyone would be allowed to find happiness, or at least some sort of compromise which could make it all acceptable and liveable?
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