Sunday, March 18, 2012
Monsters & victims: the legacy of war
Boycott the Dowlympics 2012
War crimes mount in Afghanistan; antiwar protests must mount in response
Afghan parliamentary team says many Americans were involved in massacre in which army accuses one
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Afghan parliamentary team says many Americans were involved in massacre in which army accuses oneDirectly after the incident, Reuters reported multipl
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"Another civilian massacre and the savagery of our soldiers"

The bodies of Afghan civilians loaded into the back of a truck in Alkozai village of Panjwayi district of Kandahar (Photo: AFP)
Nima Shirazi
Nowhere has this vengeance been more tragically demonstrated than Afghanistan and upon an innocent and terrorized civilian population that bares absolutely no responsibility for the events that led the United States to invade and occupy the country over a decade ago.
According to the official U.S. government story, the attacks of September 11, 2001 were carried out by 19 hijackers, none of whom were from Afghanistan. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt and another from Lebanon. None of them lived in Afghanistan. They lived in Hamburg, Germany. They didn't train in Afghanistan, but rather in Sarasota, Florida. They didn't attend flight school in Afghanistan; their school was in Minnesota. The attacks were reportedly planned in many places, including Falls Church, Virginia and Paris, France, but not in Afghanistan.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Madness is not the reason for this massacre

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.
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The simple ugly truth of apartheid
Friday, March 16, 2012
Charlie loves kindergarten
Feng shui for the working poor
Thursday, March 15, 2012
The Chinese parliament
Slick & Slicker "saving" Africa
Cammy at the races
The three stooges
Watching "Kony 2012" in Uganda
Homeless in Dhaka
Homeless in Las Vegas
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Santorum wooing Florida
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Thwarting a popular revolution against tyranny
Neoliberal version of mother & child
Is it over yet?
Betty & the gargoyle are beaming ear to ear since they think they’ve hit pay dirt with the new generation of moochocrats: WWWWilly, KKKKaty, & Hairy (signifying primal idiocy), now referred to in US media as the “People’s Prince”. Hairy, the man of a dozen apologies for a dozen racist comments against Blacks, Pakistanis, & Arabs, is now doing photo ops galore with Black children to redeem his public image. It’s clear now this diamond jubilee gig will end long before it’s begun to be a pleasure. Tours of charities, tours of former colonies, groupies waving the imperial flag like mad. It looks to be a year chock full of unseemly deference & feudal homage--mostly by the US media. Mark my words, any anatomy of the cheering throngs would turn up ham actors, government officials & their kids, social climbers, & others bribed & coerced into service. (Photo by Leon Neal/AP)
Eurozone ministers throttle each other
Taking shelter from the storm
Children take shelter from a sandstorm on the outskirts of Islamabad. They are from Pakistan’s Mohmand region (on the Afghanistan border) where thousands of families have been displaced & separated as a result of Pakistani & US military operations in the region. It’s an impoverished area to begin with & thousands migrate abroad & within Pakistan to find work. Many migrants are unaccompanied minors. A third of children under 5 years-old suffer malnutrition & under half of the people do not have access to clean water & sanitation facilities. Some analysts claim the impoverishment is due to feudal relations in the district but these same analysts don’t mention the bombing & shelling or predatory practices of the capitalist government. (Photo by Anjum Naveed/AP)
@IDFSpokesperson tweets inaccurate video and fake civilian casualty statistics
"It began with "Israel's bogus case for bombing Gaza." But the Israeli military kept up its war of disinformation over the weekend. The military’s official Twitter account @IDFSpokesperson contributed to the creation of a false narrative by tweeting a dated video of rocket fire and reporting a fake statistic on civilian casualties."
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A picture worth a thousand lies
Monday, March 12, 2012
Musical & political collaboration between South African & Palestinian musicians
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Y4rLfja8488
Cooking fire or arson?
In mid-February, a fire at Gundlapochampally village about 6.2 miles/10 km north of Hyderabad, India, burned down a makeshift slum colony for 500 migrant construction workers employed on a housing project. Most of the men & women were away at work & only the elderly & children were at home during the fire. Seven people, including four children, were burnt alive & 100 huts were gutted. Officials said it was caused by a cooking gas cylinder explosion. Many workers allege that the fire was a deliberate act of arson to forcibly vacate the land for real estate development. Less than a month later (on Saturday), another major fire “broke out” in Hyderabad (Sai Nagar, Nagole area), taking the life of a 10-year-old girl, injuring many others, & leaving 500 families homeless. Here, women weep at the site of their gutted homes. Again, the families are migrant construction workers who were away at work with only the elderly & children at home. Officials have yet to identify the cause of the fire or to explain why it took 30 minutes to get to the site to contain the conflagration. Mass urbanization caused by predatory economic policies in rural areas & in every part of the world means that millions are crowded into slums, often of a makeshift nature. The cause of frequent fires is usually attributed to things like cooking accidents, gas pipeline explosions, electrical lines, or shoddy construction materials. There have been hundreds of fatalities. But the huge number & similar nature of these slum fires around the world raises questions, especially when coupled with the slum evictions going on everywhere. It resonates with the gentrification of older neighborhoods in the US & elsewhere (in the 1970s), where arson was used to forcibly evict residents & which also involved fatalities. (Photo by Mahesh Kumar A/AP)
Starvation in Yemen
Boycott Israeli ethnic cleansing
The people demand some blood
"This hooligan-like (Israeli) logic turns into part of a totally uninhibited language. We are allowed to assassinate, but you aren't allowed to respond: For the little, if any, of our blood spilled, you will pay with many liters of blood. This is a colonial logic, in which the West has permission to do what it pleases, while the natives do not. This, incidentally, is the logic in the campaign against Iran: You don't have permission to acquire nuclear facilities, only we do."
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Sunday, March 11, 2012
Tolerable Savagery: Israeli Killing of Palestinians
US soldier massacres 16 Afghan civilians
Another day, another crime in Afghanistan & another White House apology
Kony 2012 is another name for baloney 101
Kony 2012 is another name for boloney 101. It’s a war-mongering scam appealing to people’s compassion & social conscience but relying on widespread ignorance of Africa, it’s people, & it’s politics. The dead giveaway is the tone of the campaign: hysterical urgency. The film maker thought he would revive a moribund film career on the backs of the people of Uganda by combining war propaganda with cinematic devices of melodrama.
Anyone who grew up in the McCarthy era is well familiar with the hysterical method since we were taught communists used mind control & put fluoride in the water to corrupt the morals of youth--at the same time as we were asked to give pennies for the “poor pagan babies of Africa”. Media uses the hysterical voice selectively so as not to wear out its value. It’s primary purpose is to whip up war fever & convince thousands of kids to enlist in the military to take out an evil, monstrous tyrant--under the guise of making the world safe for democracy. (It first struck a discordant note with me when the US was drumming up support for Israel in the 1967 war. It was so overplayed that a political naif could recognize the manipulation & sought out the truth behind the hysteria.)
Media also used the hysterical voice against women’s liberation when they baited feminists as lesbians too ugly to get a man; they used it against Black power activists, portraying them as armed & violent thugs rather than freedom fighters & they continue to use it against Black youth, portraying them as violent gang members engaged in drug dealing--using hysteria to railroad them into prison. The hysterical voice--used to sell salacious gossip in tabloid journalism & to sell war, racism, & misogyny in respectable journalism--has been given a new lease on life through the rapid-fire nature of social networking.
The Kony 2012 campaign is not about Joseph Kony & the Lord’s Resistance Army. By reliable accounts, Kony is no longer even operative in Uganda. It’s about promoting US war designs in Africa under the banner of humanitarianism. It’s about the US-NATO war in Libya, US drones bombing in Somalia, & US Marines deployed in Uganda. In short, it’s about US military intervention & occupation in Africa. And it’s about competition for Africa’s abundant natural resources being played out in the entire region of east Africa between the US, China, European, & other countries.
Why haven’t the humanitarian war-mongers--the celebrities, athletes & billionaires the film maker appeals to--ever spoken out against US wars in Iraq & Afghanistan? Why haven’t they denounced US bombing in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia? Why have we never heard Clooney, Jolie, DeGeneres, Oprah, & this schmo, Jason Russell ever speak out about the plight of millions of Iraqi & Afghani refugees? Why do their tender hearts & indignation only beat in sync with US militarism & the Pentagon? And if US & UN concerns are humanitarian, why haven’t they been able to get food to millions of starving people all over the entire region of east Africa? Because believe me, they will have no problem moving in entire armies, or erecting air strips & military bases. Kony 2012 & Invisible Children may be a commercial bonanza in hoodies & posters but it is nothing but a war-mongering scam appealing to the best in people in order to make a handful of people rich at the expense of the people of Uganda. US out of Africa. (Photo of children of Uganda by Sue O’Connor)
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Democracy in America
Friday, March 9, 2012
Egyptians protest against US intervention in their country
Speaking to the oligarchy in their own language
Dumping: a metaphor for plunder
Homage to International Women's Day
This might be a testimony to human inventiveness. On the other hand, it could be a homage to something much cornier. Car designer, Sudhakar Yadav created this car with a top speed of 28 mph to celebrate International Women’s Day. Given the worsening conditions of life for millions of women, he might better have made it a steel-tipped boot & revved it up to 240. Here a worker test-drives it in Hyderabad, India. (Photo by Krishnendu Halder/Reuters)
Protestors again "turn violent" when attacked
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Psyckozy on the run
The global gold rush is on
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/12/amazon-gold-rush-peru-rain-forest_n_875482.html
Settlers war on Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem
Recent Israeli settler attacks on Christian holy sites and churches have highlighted the specific struggle faced by Christian Palestinians in Jerusalem.

"Price tag" and "Greeks out" scrawled on a car outside of Jerusalem's Monastery of the Cross
Christian holy sites and places of worship in Jerusalem have been violently attacked by Israeli settlers over the past several months. In the aftermath of the shameful slogans and “price tags” drawn on the city’s Baptist Church in West Jerusalem, on a Christian cemetery on Mount Zion and on the Greek Orthodox monastery in the Valley of the Cross, Elena Viola examines Christian Jerusalemites’ life in the ‘holy’ city.
Christians have inhabited Jerusalem since the time of Christ and his followers and have always lived amongst Muslims and Jews. Although the number of Christians in Jerusalem has never been high, primarily due to the conversions occurring during the advent of Islam and the big wave of Christian emigration in the aftermath of the 1947 and 1967 wars, this already restricted number of Christians continues to shrink.
From 32,000 community members prior to the 1948 Middle East War and subsequent establishment of the state of Israel, the Christian population in Jerusalem has dramatically dropped to some 8,000 individuals in 2011.
The faces of immigration
Is America in a perpetual state of war?
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
"Why Don't We Dialogue?" SJP-UCLA's IDF Walkout
We chose not to include footage of the man shouting at us, "You all look like terrorists!"
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
The great ocean garbage patches
The young face of immigration
In Ynet an Israeli writer can't see why colonialism is such a bad thing
Zionism will only cease being demonized when West stops to demonize colonialism
Rafael Castro
"Zionism will only cease being demonized in the politically correct corners of the West once our schools and film industry cease to demonize colonialism. The politically correct depiction of the colonialist as a racist and covetous brute must give space to the majority of well-meaning administrators that helped build roads, schools, and hospitals for the natives."
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Now if this, for the sake of the argument, were true then Israel isn't doing a good job at it because it's not building anything for the natives, rather systematically destroying the very fabric of their society..
A very insightful and knowledgeable analysis of the history and stakes of the Syrian revolution.
It’s time to take the ambiguity out of the (still) Syrian revolution.

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