Vatican: Palestinians should return home

A Vatican official said Wednesday that Palestinian refugees have the right to return to their homeland and he hoped Israeli-Palestinian peace talks would address the issue.

Martino, who heads the Vatican’s office for migrants, said an agreement to restart peace talks, reached Tuesday in Annapolis, Md., was encouraging and that he hoped by this time next year concrete measures would be under way.

“It is my hope that all the parts of the problem are taken into consideration such as that of the Palestinian refugees, who like all other refugees, have the right to return to their homeland,” Martino said.

The Vatican often calls for justice for the Palestinians without specifically mentioning the right of return. It was not clear if Cardinal Renato Martino was expressing his own opinion or staking out a new Vatican position.

The Palestinian refugee issue, which has bedeviled previous Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, was not directly mentioned in the Annapolis statement, though the agreement pledges to resolve all “core issues” by the end of next year.

Millions of Palestinians want to return to properties their families lost after Israel’s 1948 creation. Israel opposes any return of the refugees, saying it would mean the end of the country as a Jewish state.

Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said Israel would agree to a return of the refugees only within the borders of a future Palestinian state.

“Israel also believes that Palestinian refugees should have the right to return to their homeland, which is the Palestinian state, which will be established within the framework of the negotiations,” he told The Associated Press in Washington.

Martino spoke at a news conference to launch Pope Benedict XVI’s annual message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees, which the Catholic Church marks on Jan. 13.

Source: AP via Yahoo! News

Pakistan’s Musharraf Steps Down as Army Chief

 

Pakistan's new army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, right, watches General Pervez Musharraf finish his speech during today's change of command ceremony.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 28 — A day after resigning as army chief, Pervez Musharraf will be sworn in as a civilian president on Thursday, leaving him with vastly reduced powers and Washington with a far more complex Pakistan to deal with in its fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Bowing reluctantly to pressure at home and abroad, Mr. Musharraf, 64, relinquished his military role in a somber ceremony on Wednesday, ending eight years of military rule. He turned over control of the army to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, 55, a former head of Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence, who is considered loyal to is former boss.

Yet the move sets up the potential of competing power centers in Pakistan, with a new army chief separate from the president and the recent return from exile of the country’s two main opposition leaders.

That is likely to complicate Bush administration anti-terrorism policy here, something officials in Washington had been hoping to avoid, and one reason they have supported Mr. Musharraf for so long.

In recent months, senior army commanders increasingly grumbled that President Musharraf was so engrossed in his own political survival that he had become distracted from battling the country’s spreading insurgency, Western military officials said.

Having an army chief who would be full time on the job will help the military, they said. General Kayani is expected to remove the army from the center of politics and focus on military tasks, something that will be welcomed in Washington, where he has been praised by Bush administration officials as someone they can work with.

An infantry commander, and a graduate of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, General Kayani has been described by Western diplomats and military officials as well-liked and by far the most able commander.

He has played a prominent role already in cooperating with the United States in the fight against terrorism, and is expected to continue that policy. He was promoted to full general and made Vice Chief of Army Staff in October. He immediately visited Pakistani units serving on the front lines in Pakistan’s tribal areas, indicating his priorities, a Western military official said.

Even after Mr. Musharraf takes his new oath on Thursday, he will confront considerable political challenges, but he will now have to deal with them without being able to leverage the authority of the military for himself.

He remains under intense pressure to lift his No. 3 declaration of emergency rule, which suspended the Constitution and the Supreme Court, and has been criticized by opponents and Western diplomats as a blatant move to have his election as president confirmed.

Before giving up his army post, Mr. Musharraf transferred the power to lift the de facto martial law to the presidency in a decree last week, and so when and to what extent emergency rule will be eased remains in his hands.

He is also under pressure to free scores of lawyers and judges who took to the streets to protest the move and who remain under house arrest. Once freed, they are likely to resume their campaign against Mr. Musharraf serving another term, which they still consider illegal.

Not least, with parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8, Mr. Musharraf will also have to deal with two political opponents who are freshly back from exile, the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif, the man he overthrew in a coup in 1999.

Both politicians have called for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation as president and for changes in the Constitution to curb the president’s powers over parliament. As leaders of Pakistan’s largest political parties, either could head the next government as prime minister, perpetuating their power struggles with Mr. Musharraf as president.

While the military under General Kayani is likely to support Mr. Musharraf as president, it is unlikely to intervene to save him in political tests of will, former general and political analyst, Talat Masood, said.

One indication of the mood is a letter that a group of 20 former generals, air marshals and admirals, including Mr. Masood, sent this week to President Musharraf calling on him to resign as head of state as well as chief of the army.

They called on him to lift the emergency and restore the constitution, withdraw curbs on the media and release political prisoners. Imposing the emergency as chief of army staff was bringing the armed forces into disrepute, they said.

“The actions he is taking are really detrimental to the state,” Mr. Masood said. They had encouraged other countries to interfere in Pakistan’s affairs, specifically Saudi Arabia and America, in a way they never had before, and caused Pakistan to lose international respect, he said. He also criticized Mr. Musharraf for suggesting that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons would not be safe if he were not in power, which he said was simply untrue.

One of the hardest things for Mr. Musharraf now may be to cease giving the commands.

“He’s the one who wants to sit in the driving seat,” said Pervaiz Elahi, who served as chief minister of the Punjab under General Musharraf. “As commander in chief and president I still see him as controlling the army for five years,” he said.

He added that he did not think General Kayani would seek to change anything. “Kayani is a person who just goes by the book,” he said.

While no longer controlling the army, Mr. Musharraf will retain some levers of influence both within the military and the intelligence services, like his personal relationship with Gen. Nadeem Taj, the head of the Inter Intelligence Services, officials said.

Yet others said that even with the extra powers given to the president in recent years, such as chairing the National Security Council, real power resides with the position of the chief of army staff. Unlike the American system, a civilian president in Pakistan is head of the armed forces on an ex officio basis.

“By the law of inertia he will continue to have some hold of the army,” said I. A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Yet he predicted that over coming months that influence would diminish. “He will still have ears in the army but he will not be able to dictate to them.”

Much depends on who forms a government after parliamentary elections, since military appointments among other things technically reside with the prime minister, said Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times.

Mr. Musharraf has often talked of the need for harmony between the presidency, the judiciary and the army, and in particular between the president, prime minister and chief of army staff. In a recent interview he indicated he hoped his supporters in the previous governing coalition would be returned with a majority again, but some of those members complain that his own mistakes over the past nine months have damaged their chances at the polls.

A series of high handed actions turned Mr. Musharraf from a popular domestic figure and a trophy of sorts for Washington — he signed up to the fight against terror immediately after 9/11 — to an embattled leader at home and an increasing embarrassment for the Bush administration.

His friends and critics, alike, point to his decision to dismiss the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry, in early March as his biggest blunder, one that inexorably led to the imposition of emergency rule on Nov. 3.

“He lost his head and tried to fire the Chief Justice,” said Humayan Gauhar, a friend and the ghostwriter of Mr. Musharraf’s memoir, In the Line of Fire.

The general was prompted by his fear that the increasingly independent court under Justice Chaudhry would eventually rule against him in his effort to be re-elected as president while he remained as army chief, Mr. Gauher said.

Because of his military mindset, Mr. Musharraf failed to calculate, Mr. Gauher said, that the chief justice would mount a popular movement of lawyers that stirred up latent opposition against the general.

“Asking the Chief Justice to retire was a command,” Mr. Gauher said. “I don’t think the refusal was ever in his scheme. A civilian would always keep that possibility in mind.”

The firing of the chief justice brought out a latent public dissatisfaction with military rule. The general’s refusal to give up his military post became the focus of the opposition and obscured many of President Musharraf’s earlier achievements, his supporters said.

When he seized power in 1999 and ousted Mr. Sharif, the former Prime Minister who returned to Pakistan last weekend, Mr. Musharraf was seen as a welcome newcomer who had the capacity to clean up the pervasive corruption in Pakistan’s politics. He described himself as a modernizer. He encouraged the opening of independent television stations, and freed up the statist economy.

Born in India in 1943, he came to Pakistan as a refugee at partition in 1947. That status made him an outsider to the feudal society that had produced most of the nation’s rulers.

In the beginning, he moved swiftly against corruption, said Farook Adam Khan, who served as prosecutor general for the National Accountability Bureau, in the first year of his rule.

But after a year, the general switched gears, Mr. Khan said, and stopped pursuing corruption cases and caving in to the religious parties in his coalition. The various efforts at reforms for women’s rights were watered down.

Mr. Musharraf’s supporters say that removing his uniform may come just in time for him to recoup some of the recognition he deserves and may help the president regain some of his popularity.

“As a president without uniform he will help us in the coming elections,” Mr. Elahi, the former minister who is being touted as a likely prime minister if his pro-Musharraf party retains its majority in parliament.

Carlotta Gall reported from Lahore. Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad. Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.

Source: New York Times 

‘We Have to Keep Pressing Hard Against an Attack on Iran’

We’ve got to keep pressing hard against an attack on Iran: The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.

Rhetoric flowing out of the White House indicates the Bush administration is planning a military attack on Iran. Officials in Saudi Arabia, a close Bush ally, think the handwriting is on the wall. “George Bush’s tone makes us think he has decided what he is going to do,” according to Rihab Massoud, Prince Bandar ben Sultan’s right-hand man. Saudi Social Affairs Minister Abdel Mohsen Hakas told Le Figaro, “We are getting closer and closer to a confrontation.”

As Bush and Cheney try to whip us into a frenzy about the dangers Iran poses, their argument comes up short. They say Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says there is “no evidence” of this. They say Iran is sending deadly weapons into Iraq to kill U.S. troops, but those devices can be manufactured in any Iraqi machine shop. Now the New York Times reports most of the foreign fighters in Iraq come, not from Iran, but from two Bush allies — Saudi Arabia and Libya. An estimated 90 percent of suicide bombings are carried out by foreign fighters. And senior U.S. military officials believe the financial support for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia comes primarily from Saudi Arabia.

Yet the Bush/Cheney polemics about Iran continue to escalate. In light of the lack of evidence Iran is actually developing nukes, Bush equated Iranian “knowledge” to make nuclear weapons with World War III. “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III,” he said recently, “it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” This substantially lowers the bar for a U.S. attack on Iran.

A few days after Bush warned of World War III, Cheney called Iran “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” adding, “The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences … We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” These threats are eerily reminiscent of his rants in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In an unprecedented move, the Bush administration labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. It appears the administration applied that label in an effort to trigger language in the 2002 Congressional authorization for the use of military force in Iraq. That authorization says, “The President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.”

Like Bush’s invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran would violate international and U.S. law. The U.N. Charter prohibits the use of military force except in self-defense or with the approval of the Security Council. Iran, which has not attacked any country for 2,000 years, hasn’t threatened to invade the United States or Israel. Rather than protecting Israel, U.S. or Israeli military force against Iran will endanger Israel, which would invariably suffer a retaliatory attack.

In making its case against Iran, the administration points to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s alleged comment that Israel should be wiped off the map. But this is an erroneous translation of what he said. According to University of Michigan professor Juan Cole and Farsi language analysts, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, who said the “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” Cole said this “does not imply military action or killing anyone at all.” Journalist Diana Johnstone points out the quote is not aimed at the Israeli people, but at the Zionist “regime” occupying Jerusalem. “Coming from a Muslim religious leader,” Johnstone wrote, “this opinion is doubtless based on objection to Jewish monopoly of a city considered holy by all three of the Abramic monotheisms.”

It seems significant that support for Ahmadinejad may be waning among the real power brokers in Iran, particularly the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Jomhouri Eslami daily in Iran, which has close ties to Khamenei, has denounced Ahmadinejad’s characterization of those opposed to his nuclear program as traitors.

If the United States attacks Iran, the results would be catastrophic. Three Europeans, including former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard and Yehuda Atai, a member of the Israeli Committee for a Middle East without Weapons of Mass Destruction, wrote in Libération, “We are being warned about it from all sides: The United States is at the brink of war, ready to bombard Iran. The only thing lacking is the presidential order.” Drawing parallels with the U.S. war in Iraq, they caution, “An attack against Iran, whatever its targets, its methods and its initial scope, will significantly aggravate the situation, achieving similar results, without even talking about the disastrous impact on the global economy.” They add, “It would be still worse if the insane idea of using tactical nuclear weapons — which exist — to prevent Iran from building, in spite of its denials, the nuclear weapons that recent IAEA inspections have found no trace of, were implemented.”

The threats against Iran appear to be politically motivated. Journalist Seymour Hersh’s extensive research has convinced him that Bush/Cheney will invade Iran. They likely think embroiling us in Iran will ensure a GOP victory in 2008. It will certainly make it harder for the next President to withdraw from Iraq once we are mired in Iran.

If Hillary Clinton becomes that next President, she will likely continue Bush’s foreign policy. Clinton, who favors leaving a large contingent of U.S. troops in Iraq, says nothing about disbanding the huge U.S. military bases there. Clinton is also rattling the sabers in Iran’s direction. She voted to urge Bush to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and she, too, misquotes Ahmadinejad about Israel.

As we go to the polls in the coming months, it is imperative we scrutinize the candidates’ positions on Iraq and Iran. The security of the United States, as well as the Middle East, is hanging in the balance.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the President of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.” Her columns are archived at marjoriecohn.com.

Source: AlterNet

Paul’s Supporters Confront Media

Early Halloween morning, “Taco John” posted a message-board call to arms: “Baltimore Sun Hit Piece…TAKE ACTION NOW!”

The paper’s political blog had an item marveling at how Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul had raised more money than “better-known Mike Huckabee, who is taken more seriously.” Taco John took to an Internet forum frequented by Paul supporters, providing a link to the offending item, as well as phone and email information for the newspaper’s public editor and advertising department. “They’re trying to pigeonhole us,” he wrote. “If we don’t fight back, they’ll keep doing it.”

Taco John, the online moniker of Isaac Lopez, a 32-year-old technology marketer in Vancouver, Wash., is one of many cyber-soldiers for Dr. Paul, the Texas congressman, gynecologist and vociferous opponent of the Iraq war. The Paul brigade has largely drawn attention for its fund-raising prowess, raising a record $4.2 million online in a single day in November and leaving the 72-year-old politician with more cash on hand than several rivals and a $1 million TV ad budget for New Hampshire. But some Paul supporters are displaying an aggressive side that seems to spill beyond advocacy into harassment of those who disagree or fail to show Dr. Paul sufficient respect.

Taco John, for example, posted contact information for a university professor who called Dr. Paul “unqualified to be president.” He also provided information on how to reach several reporters with whom he quibbled, as well as the Iowa Republican Party after it helped set rules for a debate — later canceled — that could have excluded the low-polling Dr. Paul.

Taco John — the handle comes from Mr. Lopez’s appreciation of former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway and tacos — is a neophyte activist, who says he was inspired by Dr. Paul’s libertarian platform.

Some blogs have booted Paul supporters for leaving incendiary comments. They have also been frozen out of Internet surveys and accused of electronic ballot stuffing; Dr. Paul rarely loses online straw polls even though he barely registers in national telephone polls. His supporters argue that they win online polls because there are more Paul supporters and they’re better organized.

Many of Dr. Paul’s supporters say they’re simply fighting a media and political establishment that won’t give him a fair shake. The big Nov. 5 “moneybomb” fund raiser was timed to coincide with Guy Fawkes Day and inspired by the 1980s comic-book series “V for Vendetta,” in which a vigilante in a Guy Fawkes mask wages war against a totalitarian British state.

The Paul campaign has also drawn support from antigovernment fringe groups and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Since mid-September, a large “Ron Paul for President” banner has flashed at the bottom of white-supremacist Internet forum Stormfront.org. “Really, we haven’t seen a candidate like Ron Paul in some time. The closest would have been Pat Buchanan” in 2000, says Don Black of West Palm Beach, Fla., the group’s founder and a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, who donated $500 to Mr. Paul’s campaign.

The Paul campaign has a hands-off approach when it comes to supporters’ activities and political backgrounds. While grateful for the money, aides insist they aren’t responsible for what supporters do online. “We don’t know who a lot of these people are,” says Jesse Benton, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Benton declined to make Dr. Paul available to comment. “Sometimes, Ron Paul supporters get a little overpassionate and maybe a little more shrill than what some might like,” Mr. Benton says. “For the most part, our supporters are polite and mannerly.” He has his own conspiracy theory: Some other candidates’ supporters may be masquerading as Ron Paul supporters to hurt his campaign.

The impassioned campaigning threatens Dr. Paul’s efforts to convince undecided Republicans that he appeals to more than antiwar libertarians and fringes of the Republican Party.

“Basically, it got to the point where someone could put up a post saying they were going to the bathroom, and a dozen Paultards would comment, ‘Vote for Ron Paul while you’re there,’ along with another dozen warnings of the Zionist conspiracy in the toilet,” says Erick Erickson, founder of popular conservative blog Redstate. A month ago, the site banned posts from some Paul supporters, branding them “MoRons.”

Afterward, the site was “deluged” with comments and “swarms and swarms” of hate mail, Mr. Erickson says. He changed the site’s phone number, and says other blog owners have contacted him seeking advice on discouraging Paul supporters from posting.

Cris Vanricma of Ludington, Mich., removed Dr. Paul from his bipartisan presidential poll, StrawPoll08.com, after receiving nasty emails from some Paul supporters, contending some polls that Dr. Paul wasn’t winning were rigged. The 31-year-old Web designer made a blanket offer: If the messages stop, the congressman goes back on. So far, Dr. Paul remains off the poll.

With issues like the Iraq war and civil liberties at stake, some supporters argue that now isn’t the time for half-measures. David Chesley, 33, of Van Nuys, Calif., put his law practice on hold so he could support Dr. Paul. Mr. Chesley says he was attracted by the congressman’s views on protecting the Constitution after what he considers President Bush’s assault on civil liberties since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “I have an obligation to make this my full-time job,” says the former Democrat. “All I do every day is go on the Internet or make phone calls or email the media.”

When he felt the media paid too little attention to the Nov. 5 fund raiser, Mr. Chesley, who posts as “RP2008″ on a Ron Paul message board, was furious. On Nov. 9, he urged others to “ceaselessly bombard” media outlets. “You need to organize, call, boycott, protest and sue the media that is lying to us, and if you don’t, it is your own d- fault if Ron Paul loses,” he wrote.

Some Paul supporters preach restraint. “I cannot stand to read another reporter/blogger complain about how they have received profane/threatening/intimidating responses from Ron Paul supporters,” wrote “Hestia,” a frequent poster on the Daily Paul, a popular pro-Paul site. “Sending hostile and abusive emails will not win supporters or encourage bloggers or reporters to write positive articles,” Hestia adds.

Source: Wall Street Journal

An Interview with Norman Finkelstein

On Islamo-Fascism and Other Vacuous Epithets

By WAJAHAT ALI

Wajahat Ali speaks to American political scientist and writer Dr. Norman Finkelstein about the denial of his tenure at DePaul University, anti-Semitism, and challenging the academic status quo on the Palestine-Israel conflict.

WAJAHAT ALI: In the recent DePaul University tenure controversy, you and a vocal community of supporters suggested “external pressures” forced the University to deny you tenure despite your overwhelming popularity and respect amongst your peers and students. What is your response to this denial?

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: I do not want to be a tenure martyr. It was for sure a disgusting ordeal. But my main concern now is to move on and put it behind me. Reasonable people do not doubt why I was denied tenure. The facts are straightforward. I easily met all the criteria of tenure at DePaul. I was denied tenure due to my vocal opposition to Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Regarding your scholarship, you question and challenge what some consider long-held assumptions regarding the Israeli-Palestine conflict, specifically the actual intentions and motivations of several parties, such as the Israeli government, the United States, and the Arab world. Currently, what do you believe are the most crucial and major obstacles that if removed, could establish some sustainable semblance of peace in that region?

The basic terms for settling the conflict are not a mystery. They are embodied every year in the same General Assembly resolution titled “Peaceful Settlement of the Palestine Question.” The resolution calls for full Israeli withdrawal to the June 1967 borders. The entire world apart from the U.S., Israel and this or that South Pacific atoll (Nauru, Palau, Tuvalu, Micronesia, Marshall Islands) supports this settlement. Once the U.S. and Israel accept the G.A. resolution, the basis will be in place to resolve the conflict.

In your book Beyond Chutzpah, you present evidence against Dr. Alan Desrhowitz’s book, Case for Israel, and conclude that his work is a mixture of plagiarism, shoddy research, and poor scholarship. If Dr. Dershowitz’s book is filled with so much error, how do such works become authoritative pieces on the subject?

To win acclaim in mainstream media on certain subjects you merely have to echo the party line; it has precious little to do with actual scholarship. The Nazi holocaust and the Israel-Palestine conflict are two such subjects. Terrorism is another one. I just read this ridiculous book by a so-called leading American intellectual named Paul Berman entitled Terror and Liberalism. The book is fact-free. Indeed, it might be called insane in a rational culture. It starts from the premise that no country in the world has done more for Muslims than the United States. That’s the central premise. You can imagine where it goes from there. Of course it’s a huge bestseller in the United States. It’s hard to imagine how debased U.S. intellectual culture is. Although, in all fairness, I doubt it has yet sunk to the level of France where Bernard Henri-Levy is called a philosopher.

In your controversial book, The Holocaust Industry, you make two arguments. One is that the promotion of the uniqueness of “Jewish suffering” experienced during the Holocaust is used to shield and deflect legitimate criticism of Israel. The second builds upon this and says that this promotion allows a powerful industry to label any such critic, no matter how legitimate, an Anti-Semite. How has this “labeling” played out in recent years in regard to critics of Israeli domestic and internal policies?

Whenever Israel comes under international pressure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict diplomatically or on account of its human rights violations, it revives the extravaganza called The New Anti-Semitism. In 1974 the Anti-Defamation League, an Israel lobby group in the U.S., put out a book called The New Anti-Semitism and in 1981 it put out another book called The Real Anti-Semitism. Right after the new intifada began, the Israel lobby again started with The New Anti-Semitism. The purposes of this agitprop are pretty obvious: to delegitimize all criticism of Israel as motivated by anti-Semitism and to turn the perpetrators into the victims. It seems to have less effect in recent years due to overuse: once you start calling Jimmy Carter an anti-Semite, people really begin to wonder.

Anyone who knows this “info-tainment industry” well knows that “scholarship” and polemical histrionics make loyal bedfellows, thus explaining the phenomenon of shock jocks, right wing radio hosts, and the rise of polemical pundits.
What is the role of the professional and ethical academic and historian, specifically one whose concentration deals with the Middle East, in today’s hysterical society? Does your experience with DePaul University signal a warning call to those who tread what some consider your controversial path?

I don’t think my personal experience has much wider meaning. I was targeted because I am politically active. I don’t limit myself to a professional audience of other academics. I have a public reputation, and it was this reputation that the Israel lobby was trying to discredit, successfully, as it turns out. But most academics speak to other academics.

The “Muslim World” has gained a considerable spotlight after 9-11 with pundits commenting on the “clash of civilizations,” “the roots of Muslim rage,” and the newest label suggesting an emergence of “Islamo-fascism”. You have had considerable experience with Muslims and Muslim Americans.Do you believe that a conflict exists between the so-called West and Islam? If so, how can we, as an American society, regain Muslim trust, confidence, and understanding specifically in light of the Iraq War, the Palestine-Israel conflict, and the aggressive rhetoric against Iran, which some Muslims claim is ample proof of a war on Islam rather than realpolitik?

“Islamo-fascism” is a meaningless term. If I am not mistaken, it was coined by the commentator Christopher Hitchens. The term is a throwback to when juvenile leftists, myself among them, labeled everyone we disagreed with a “fascist pig.” So this is a kosher-halal version of that epithet. Fascism used to refer to a fairly precise historical phenomenon, although it’s even doubtful that the term accurately encompasses regimes as different as Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. But when you start using the term to characterize terrorist bands who want to turn the clock back several centuries and resurrect the Caliphate, it is simply a vacuous epithet like “Evil Empire,” “Axis of Evil” and the rest.

Your parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp. Your published works and scholarship, although labeled Anti-Semitic by your critics, are generally dedicated by yourself to honoring and preserving the integrity of those victims, such as your parents from those you claim exploit their suffering for political ends. Like others in your field, you could have easily avoided controversy by agreeing with the mainstream. With all the issues you have faced as a result of your scholarship, what has motivated you to continue down this road?

Whenever I wonder why I do what I do – and I do have those moments of self-doubt – I put in my mind’s eye the suffering of my late parents, I think of my friends in the occupied territories, and the doubts vanish. I press on, knowing that soon I will pass from the scene, hopefully having done some good, and not too much evil.

Wajahat Ali is a playwright, essayist, humorist, and J.D. whose work, “The Domestic Crusaders,” (www.domesticcrusaders.com) is the first major play about Muslim Americans living in a post 9-11 America. He can be reached at wajahatmali@gmail.com

Source: CounterPunch

A False Choice for Pakistan

By Salman Ahmad

As Pakistan descends into political chaos, much attention has been given to two leaders competing for power — the current dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and the media-savvy former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. The White House appears to be backing Musharraf as its best bet in the “war on terror,” while much of the world’s media and Western liberal elite see Bhutto as a democratic savior for a country mired in Islamic fundamentalism.

Both fail to recognize the core problem plaguing Pakistani society: Without a strong and independent judiciary, Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state, will forever be at the mercy of dictators and power-hungry politicians. Lack of oversight and institutional accountability leads to coups, counter-coups and perpetual instability.

As an artist and social activist, I have worked with the governments of both Musharraf and Bhutto on peace initiatives and socially uplifting themes. I have been disillusioned by their lack of commitment to getting real work done; they appear to spend most of their time consolidating their power bases.

On several occasions after Sept. 11, 2001, I was invited to Musharraf’s house in Islamabad, and he even joined me onstage at a concert to help support a united front against extremism. I, like many members of my generation, initially believed Musharraf’s commitment to introducing an era of “enlightened moderation” in Pakistan, a nation that was hijacked by religious fanatics during the American-backed military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammed Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s.

We supported Musharraf because of his promises to fight extremism, bring accountability into politics, open up an independent media and reduce the immoral gap between Pakistan’s rich and poor. But no amount of governmental fear-mongering can make us look the other way while he imposes emergency rule, intimidates the media, dismantles the judiciary and muzzles dissent. Without respect for civil institutions, his flawed government is doomed to fail.

Yet Benazir Bhutto is no savior. The queen of hypocrisy, she has managed to hypnotize Western liberals with her claim to represent progressive elements in the Muslim world. Bhutto is a charlatan. How can she call herself a democrat while also appointing herself head of the Pakistan People’s Party for life? Her time as prime minister brought staggering levels of corruption and graft. Bhutto’s niece and sister-in-law accuse her of conspiring to murder her own brother, Murtaza, who challenged her power during her second term. She continues to see Pakistan as her personal feudal fiefdom to be plundered. A false prophet of democracy, she threatens to bring back the rule of the gangster rather than the rule of law.

During the late ’90s, I recorded a song called “Accountability” and made a video that satirized Pakistani politicians whose corruption scandals were being reported internationally. The response of Bhutto’s government was to ban the video and threaten my life. In the years since Bhutto fled Pakistan to escape corruption investigations, her desire to regain power has blinded her to the struggle being waged by Pakistanis on behalf of true democracy. A member of her own party, Aitzaz Ahsan, the lawyer who won Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry’s reinstatement as chief justice of the Supreme Court after Musharraf dismissed him early this year, languishes in jail — along with thousands of others. Meanwhile, Bhutto attends diplomatic receptions and makes speeches about freedom and liberty. While lawyers and human rights activists faced the threat of injury and death for standing up to Musharraf’s regime, she was in sunny Dubai, waiting for Washington’s go-ahead to return.

Pakistan’s future lies with neither of these “leaders.” The key to moving forward lies in the genesis of Pakistan’s freedom movement: Our nation’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, struggled and sacrificed to win our independence from Britain, setting clear examples of legal and political activism. Jinnah was a constitutional lawyer who blended Islamic and Western values of social justice. Sixty years later, most Pakistanis still see him as the best role model for our politics. He was tenacious, incorruptible and secular, but he said his inspiration was the prophet Muhammad, whom he called the greatest lawgiver in history.

The United States and its allies need to unequivocally support the Pakistani judges, lawyers, journalists and rights activists fighting for the rule of law. A strong Pakistani civil society would provide stability and a powerful institutional deterrent against violence and extremism. It is the best hope for discouraging future political and military actors from grabbing power unilaterally. The reward for such support now could one day be a democratic Muslim country at peace with itself and the world.

Shakespeare warned that a dictator’s first instinct is to “kill the lawyers.” He was right. It is the lawyers and the judiciary that are the hope and future of Pakistan. Let’s stand by them and not surrender to pharaohs and false prophets, whether they wear military uniforms or Hermes scarves.

The writer founded the rock band Junoon and is a U.N. goodwill ambassador on HIV-AIDS. He is a contributor to washingtonpost.com’s On Faith. His e-mail address salahmad@hotmail.com.

Source: Washington Post

Holocaust Denial, American Style

Institutionally unwilling to consider America’s responsibility for the bloodbath, the traditional media have refused to acknowledge the massive number of Iraqis killed since the invasion.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s flirtation with those who deny the reality of the Nazi genocide has rightly been met with disgust. But another holocaust denial is taking place with little notice: the holocaust in Iraq. The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million.

This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. It estimated 601,000 people killed due to violence as of July 2006; but if updated on the basis of deaths since the study, this estimate would also be more than a million. These estimates do not include those who have died because of public health problems created by the war, including breakdowns in sewerage systems and electricity, shortages of medicines, etc.

Amazingly, some journalists and editors – and of course some politicians – dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don’t believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.

The methods used in the estimates of Iraqi deaths are the same as those used to estimate the deaths in Darfur, which are widely accepted in the media. They are also consistent with the large numbers of refugees from the violence (estimated at more than four million). There is no reason to disbelieve them, or to accept tallies such as that the Iraq Body Count (73,305 – 84,222), which include only a small proportion of those killed, as an estimate of the overall death toll.

Of course, acknowledging the holocaust in Iraq might change the debate over the war. While Iraqi lives do not count for much in US politics, recognizing that a mass slaughter of this magnitude is taking place could lead to more questions about how this horrible situation came to be. Right now a convenient myth dominates the discussion: the fall of Saddam Hussein simply unleashed a civil war that was waiting to happen, and the violence is all due to Iraqis’ inherent hatred of each other.

In fact, there is considerable evidence that the occupation itself – including the strategy of the occupying forces – has played a large role in escalating the violence to holocaust proportions. It is in the nature of such an occupation, where the vast majority of the people are opposed to the occupation and according to polls believe it is right to try and kill the occupiers, to pit one ethnic group against another. This was clear when Shiite troops were sent into Sunni Fallujah in 2004; it is obvious in the nature of the death-squad government, where officials from the highest levels of the Interior Ministry to the lowest ranking police officers – all trained and supported by the US military – have carried out a violent, sectarian mission of “ethnic cleansing.” (The largest proportion of the killings in Iraq are from gunfire and executions, not from car bombs). It has become even more obvious in recent months as the United States is now arming both sides of the civil war, including Sunni militias in Anbar province as well as the Shiite government militias.

Is Washington responsible for a holocaust in Iraq? That is the question that almost everyone here wants to avoid. So the holocaust is denied.

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and has written numerous research papers on economic policy. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy

Source: AlterNet

MoveOn Takes On Facebook

MoveOn.org is turning its organizing prowess on one of the very tools it uses for its mobilizing efforts. The liberal group’s Civic Action division mounted an effort today against Facebook’s Beacon advertising feature, claiming it infringes user privacy and “sullies” social networking communities.

MoveOn is objecting to a new advertising technique that Facebook announced a few weeks ago that posts members’ purchases and activities on other websites in their Facebook profiles. Users can choose not to have the information posted from individual sites, or “opt out,” whereas with most Facebook applications associated with external sites, users must proactively choose to participate, or “opt in.” With the Beacon feature, if a user does not specifically decline participation, his or her Facebook friends will get a “news feed” notice about the purchase.

In an approach not that unusual on the social networking site, MoveOn has created a Facebook group to protest against Facebook, complete with link to MoveOn’s petition encouraging Facebook to “respect privacy.”

MoveOn is not anti-Facebook. Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn Civic Action, said his group is trying to “preserve the integrity” of the site.

“Facebook and similar sites have the potential to really revolutionize how we speak to each other in our society,” Mr. Green said. “When people see their privacy violated, it sullies the entire thing.”

He said MoveOn is worried people will abandon Facebook out of privacy concerns.

MoveOn’s demands could be satisfied by making the Beacon feature “opt in.” Right now, users who don’t want the information displayed need to opt out after purchases at each participating external site.

However, Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, said MoveOn is “misstating the way this process works.”
He said the purchase appears only in the news feeds of confirmed friends and on the individual’s profile (users have control over who can see their profiles), not to the “world.” Mr. Kelly also pointed out that two ways to opt out, at the point of purchase on the external Web site, via a box that pops up, but fades away in under a minute and the next time they sign into their accounts. If users ignore the notification, the purchase information will be displayed, but nothing happens until the user signs in.

“The fact that Facebook users across the country are shocked that their purchases are being showed to everyone they know shows that Facebook’s safeguards are not sufficient,” Mr. Green said.

At posting, the MoveOn’s protest group had more than 2,500 members. Wall postings expressed lots of outrage, but so far, at least, problems seemed to be limited to spoiled Christmas gift surprises and people being “creeped out” because a co-worker knew which movie they were going to see.

Still, Mr. Green sees this effort as part of a “simmering users rights movement,” which also went after MySpace, a Facebook rival, for what it viewed as censorship earlier this year.

Matt Hicks, a corporate spokesman for Facebook, stressed that site administrators are listening to user feedback.

“We have had a few instances where people were surprised, not necessarily angry, but surprised that their purchase showed up on their Facebook feed,” said Josh Mohrer, director of retail for BustedTees.com, a site that uses Beacon advertising, told the blog Webware. “I think when it becomes ubiquitous, which it most certainly will as Facebook things tend to be, that people will get used to it and see it as a good thing.”

[NYTimes.com is a client of Facebook’s new marketing effort, with a Facebook page created for the company itself. However, some travel features, which do use the Beacon feature, require active opt-in, according to a Times spokeswoman, and The Times is not using the social advertising feature because of concerns about user privacy.]

Source: New York Times

Why Israel Has No “Right to Exist” as a Jewish State

Thus Spoke Equality

Why Israel Has No “Right to Exist” as a Jewish State

By OREN BEN-DOR

Yet again, the Annapolis meeting between Olmert and Abbas is preconditioned upon the recognition by the Palestinian side of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Indeed the “road map” should lead to, and legitimate, once and for all, the right of such a Jewish state to exist in definitive borders and in peace with its neighbours. The vision of justice, both past and future, simply has to be that of two states, one Palestinian, one Jewish, which would coexist side by side in peace and stability. Finding a formula for a reasonably just partition and separation is still the essence of what is considered to be moderate, pragmatic and fair ethos.

Thus, the really deep issues–the “core”–are conceived as the status of Jerusalem, the fate and future of the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and the viability of the future Palestinian state beside the Jewish one. The fate of the descendants of those 750000 Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed in 1948 from what is now, and would continue to be under a two-state solutions, the State of Israel, constitutes a “problem” but never an “issue” because, God forbid, to make it an issue on the table would be to threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. The existence of Israel as a Jewish state must never become a core issue. That premise unites political opinion in the Jewish state, left and right and also persists as a pragmatic view of many Palestinians who would prefer some improvement to no improvement at all.Only “extremists” such as Hamas, anti-Semites, and Self-Hating Jews–terribly disturbed, misguided and detached lot–can make Israel’s existence into a core problem and in turn into a necessary issue to be debated and addressed.

The Jewish state, a supposedly potential haven for all the Jews in the world in the case a second Holocaust comes about, should be recognised as a fact on the ground blackmailed into the “never again” rhetoric. All considerations of pragmatism and reasonableness in envisioning a “peace process” to settle the ‘Israeli/Palestinian’ conflict must never destabilise the sacred status of that premise that a Jewish state has a right to exist.

Notice, however, that Palestinian are not asked merely to recognise the perfectly true fact and with it, the absolutely feasible moral claim, that millions of Jewish people are now living in the State of Israel and that their physical existence, liberty and equality should be protected in any future settlement. They are not asked merely to recognise the assurance that any future arrangement would recognise historic Palestine as a home for the Jewish People.What Palestinians are asked to subscribe to recognition the right of an ideology that informs the make-up of a state to exist as Jewish one. They are asked to recognise that ethno-nationalistic premise of statehood.

The fallacy is clear: the recognition of the right of Jews who are there–however unjustly many of their Parents or Grandparents came to acquire what they own–to remain there under liberty and equality in a post-colonial political settlement, is perfectly compatible with the non-recognition of the state whose constitution gives those Jews a preferential stake in the polity.

It is an abuse of the notion of pragmatism to conceive its effort as putting the very notion of Jewish state beyond the possible and desirable implementation of egalitarian moral scrutiny. To so abuse pragmatism would be to put it at the service of the continuation of colonialism. A pragmatic and reasonable solution ought to centre on the problem of how to address past, present, and future injustices to non-Jew-Arabs without thereby cause other injustices to Jews. This would be a very complex pragmatic issue which would call for much imagination and generosity. But reasonableness and pragmatism should not determine whether the cause for such injustices be included or excluded from debates or negotiations. To pragmatically exclude moral claims and to pragmatically protect immoral assertions by fiat must in fact hide some form of extremism. The causes of colonial injustice and the causes that constitutionally prevent their full articulation and address should not be excluded from the debate. Pragmatism can not become the very tool that legitimate constitutional structures that hinder de-colonisation and the establishment of egalitarian constitution.

So let us boldly ask: What exactly is entailed by the requirement to recognise Israel as a Jewish state? What do we recognise and support when we purchase a delightful avocado or a date from Israel or when we invite Israel to take part in an international football event? What does it mean to be a friend of Israel? What precisely is that Jewish state whose status as such would be once and for all legitimised by such a two-state solution?

A Jewish state is a state which exists more for the sake of whoever is considered Jewish according to various ethnic, tribal, religious, criteria, than for the sake of those who do not pass this test. What precisely are the criteria of the test for Jewishness is not important and at any rate the feeble consensus around them is constantly reinvented in Israel. Instigating violence provides them with the impetus for doing that. What is significant, thought, is that a test of Jewishness is being used in order to constitutionally protect differential stakes in, that is the differential ownership of, a polity. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is a recognition of the Jews special entitlement, as eternal victims, to have a Jewish state. Such a test of supreme stake for Jews is the supreme criterion not only for racist policy making by the legislature but also for a racist constitutional interpretation by the Supreme Court.The idea of a state that is first and foremost for the sake of Jews trumps even that basic law of Human Freedom and Dignity to which the Israeli Supreme Court pays so much lip service. Such constitutional interpretation would have to make the egalitarian principle equality of citizenship compatible with, and thus subservient to, the need to maintain the Jewish majority and character of the state. This of course constitutes a serious compromise of equality, translated into many individual manifestations of oppression and domination of those victims of such compromise–non-Jews-Arabs citizens of Israel.

In our world, a world that resisted Apartheid South Africa so impressively, recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist is a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism. The demand is that Palestinians recognise Israel’s entitlement to constitutionally entrench a system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights, differential capital investments, differential investment in education, formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and debate.

In the Jewish state of Israel non-Jews-Arabs citizens are just “bad luck” and are considered an ticking demographic bomb of “enemy within”. They can be given the right to vote–indeed one member one vote–but the potential of their political power, even their birth rate, should be kept at bay by visible and invisible, instrumental and symbolic, discrimination. But now they are asked to put up with their inferior stake and recognise the right of Israel to continue to legitimate the non-egalitarian premise of its statehood.

We must not forget that the two state “solution” would open a further possibility to non-Jew-Arabs citizens of Israel: “put up and shut up or go to a viable neighbouring Palestinian state where you can have your full equality of stake”.Such an option, we must never forget, is just a part of a pragmatic and reasonable package.

The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous population–750000 of them. The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the Israel state.

It would be unbearable and unreasonable to demand Jews to allow for the Right of Return of those descendants of the expelled. Presumably, those descendants too could go to a viable Palestinian state rather than, for example, rebuild their ruined village in the Galilee. On the other hand, a Jewish young couple from Toronto who never set their foot in Palestine has a right to settle in the Galilee. Jews and their descendants hold this right in perpetuity. You see, that right “liberates” them as people. Jews must never be put under the pressure to live as a substantial minority in the Holy Land under egalitarian arrangement. Their past justifies their preferential stake and the preservation of their numerical majority in Palestine.

So the non-egalitarian hits us again. It is clear that part of the realisation of that right of return would not only be a just the actual return, but also the assurance of equal stake and citizenship of all, Jews and non-Jews-Arabs after the return. A return would make the egalitarian claim by those who return even more difficult to conceal than currently with regard to Israel Arab second class citizens. What unites Israelis and many world Jews behind the call for the recognition of the right of a Jewish state to exist is their aversion for the possibility of living, as a minority, under conditions of equality of stake to all. But if Jews enjoys this equality in Canada why can not they support such equality in Palestine through giving full effect to the right of Return of Palestinians?

Let us look precisely at what the pragmatic challenge consists of: not pragmatism that entrenches inequality but pragmatism that responds to the challenge of equality.

The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and apologises for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there, they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area in Palestine. Compensation would be the last resort and would always be offered as a choice. This kind of moral claim of return would encompass all Palestine including Tel Aviv.

At no time, however, it would be on the cards to throw Israeli Jews from their land.An egalitarian and pragmatic realisation of the Right of Return constitutes an egalitarian legal revolution. As such it would be paramount to address Jews’ worries about security and equality in any future arrangement in which they, or any other group, may become a minority. Jews national symbols and importance would be preserved. Equality of stake involves equality of symbolic ownership.

But it is important to emphasis that the Palestinian Right of Return would mean that what would cease to exist is the premise of a Jewish as well as indeed a Muslim state. A return without the removal of the constitutionally enshrined preferential stake is return to serfdom.

The upshot is that only by individuating cases of injustice, by extending claims for injustice to all historic Palestine, by fair address of them without creating another injustice for Jews and finally by ensuring the elimination of all racist laws that stems from the Jewish nature of the state including that nature itself, would justice be, and with it peace, possible. What we need is a spirit of generosity that is pragmatic but also morally uncompromising in terms of geographic ambit of the moral claims for repatriation and equality. This vision would propel the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But for all this to happen we must start by ceasing to recognize the right Israel to exist as a Jewish state. No spirit of generosity would be established without an egalitarian call for jettisoning the ethno-nationalistic notion upon which the Jewish state is based.

The path of two states is the path of separation.Its realisation would mean the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalism for many years. It would mean that the return of the dispossessed and the equality of those who return and those non-Jew-Arabs who are now there would have to be deferred indefinitely consigned to the dusty shelved of historical injustices.Such a scenario is sure to provoke more violence as it would establish the realisation and legitimisation of Zionist racism and imperialism.

Also, any bi-national arrangement ought to be subjected to a principle of equality of citizenship and not vice versa. The notion of separation and partition that can infect bi-nationalism, should be done away with and should not be tinkered with or rationalised in any way. Both spiritually and materially Jews and non-Jews can find national expression in a single egalitarian and non-sectarian state.

The non-recognition of the Jewish state is an egalitarian imperative that looks both at the past and to the future. It is the uncritical recognition of the right of Israel to exist at a Jewish state which is the core hindrance for this egalitarian premise to shape the ethical challenge that Palestine poses. A recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state means the silencing that would breed more and more violence and bloodshed.

The same moral intuition that brought so many people to condemn and sanction Apartheid South Africa ought also to prompt them to stop seeing a threat to existence of the Jewish state as the effect caused by the refugee ‘problem” or by the “demographic threat” from the non-Jew-Arabs within it. It is rather the other way round. It is the non-egalitarian premise of a Jewish state and the lack of empathy and corruption of all those who make us uncritically accept the right of such a state to exist that is both the cause of the refugee problem and cause for the inability to implement their return and treating them as equals thereafter.

We must see that the uncritically accepted recognition of Israel right to exist is, as Joseph Massad so well puts it in Al-Ahram, to accept Israel claim to have the right to be racist or, to develop Massad’s brilliant formulation, Israel’s claim to have the right to occupy to dispossess and to discriminate. What is it, I wonder, that prevent Israelis and so many of world Jews to respond to the egalitarian challenge? What is it, I wonder, that oppresses the whole world to sing the song of a “peace process” that is destined to legitimise racism in Palestine?

To claim such a right to be racist must come from a being whose victim’s face must hide very dark primordial aggression and hatred of all others.How can we find a connective tissue to that mentality that claims the legitimate right to harm other human beings? How can this aggression that is embedded in victim mentality be perturbed?

The Annapolis meeting is a con. As an egalitarian argument we should say loud and clear that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.

Oren Ben-Dor grew up in Israel. He teaches Legal and Political Philosophy at the School of Law, University of Southampton, UK. He can be reached at: okbendor@yahoo.com

Source: CounterPunch

Why Pakistan’s breakdown arouses so much interest

Paul Workman, South Asia Bureau Chief

ISLAMABAD — I had to get a visa extension in order to stay in Pakistan longer than the two weeks journalists are normally allowed, so I made my way from one office to another, finally ending up at a white stucco building in suburban Islamabad. I sat down with all my paperwork, and handed it to a young man who had a friendly face and a good reach of English.

“There are so many journalists here,” he said. “Our country is in a lot of trouble.”

It’s a long time since I’ve covered a story that sustained the headlines for as many days as the crisis in Pakistan. Night after night, there seemed an insatiable demand to know what was going on, to the exhaustion of correspondents filing for a North American deadline.

So what’s the answer? Why would Pakistan’s breakdown arouse so much interest, even passion?

For one thing, the sight of thousands of lawyers in their black suits and white shirts, battling with police, was a startling image for North Americans, who generally hold lawyers in lower esteem than journalists. But in Pakistan, it was the lawyers who took up the front line of resistance, and in many ways, it was reminiscent of the struggle for democracy in Eastern Europe, and touched a nerve.

It was equally startling for North Americans to hear that independent TV stations had been taken off the air. This is 2007, the information revolution is upon us, and yet Pakistan’s military ruler simply pulled the plug on the most important and critical source of news available. TV junkies in the west don’t like or understand how anybody could do that. (One of the stations had a transvestite hosting a political interview show, which shows how far Pakistan has come.)

Even satellite signals were blocked and the sale of satellite dishes banned, and you can imagine how few people in Pakistan could afford to put a satellite dish on their roof. But that’s how far the military went to seal the country off. At our hotel, some days you could get the BBC and CNN, other days the signal was gone. We used it as a barometer for Musharraf’s state of mind.

Inside Musharraf’s mind

The irony is that General Musharraf, President Musharraf, considers himself a democrat and is obviously deeply insulted when anybody dares to call him a dictator. Yes, we’re talking about the same man who suspended the constitution, fired the country’s chief justice, threw thousands of people in jail, and loved to boast that one of his great achievements was liberalizing the media.

“Í have no ego, or personal ambitions to guard,” he told his first new conference, a week after imposing a state of emergency. I thought that would be great as a “quote of the week,” that you see in American news magazines.

Or this one, given to the BBC:

“Did I go mad? Or suddenly my personality changed. Am I Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”

At the same news conference, Musharraf seemed defiantly self-assured, considering that most of the leaders of the democratic world had taken a crack at him. It was startling to hear him say with such seriously-held conviction: “I did not violate the constitution, and the law of this land. I tried to correct the situation.”

No, he merely suspended the constitution, or put it in “abeyance” as the official order read.

At least Musharraf seems to have given up the pretense that he needed emergency law to fight terrorism in Pakistan. Few people inside or outside the country believed such a transparent, incredulous claim anyway. He wanted to purge the country’s supreme court of those who challenged, or “obstructed” his right to rule, and nothing, or anybody was going to stop him, not even a last-minute warning from his friends in Washington.

“I had to correct the source of the problem, and the source of the problem happened to be some elements of the judiciary.”

For a tough army commando, the general seems to have a thin skin, and is not above portraying himself as a victim, caught between “a rock and a hard surface.” (By the way, in his largely self-serving autobiography, Musharraf used the same phrase to justify some of his previous actions.) I get the impression this is a man who desperately wants the world to believe and respect him, and can’t understand why people would possibly think otherwise.

Fierce media under martial law

For a country under emergency law, the media have been ferociously critical of Musharraf. Editorials in the newspapers have been consistently fierce and disapproving. One of the local independent TV channels that is now back on the air, carries a logo in the top right corner that reads “Emergency” with the number of days since it was imposed.

And almost every day, there’s a demonstration by journalists somewhere in the country protesting against a new “code of conduct” that Musharraf insists all news outlets must adhere to.

One of the people protesting was a young Pakistani-Canadian journalist, pictured full-face in a local newspaper wearing a black gag over her mouth. Her conviction is impressive and I wondered what her parents back home were thinking.

Her editor perhaps put it best. “I’m very proud to say, we have the most fearless media right now in the world,”

A brighter future?

Musharraf is a military leader the west coddled and tolerated because it was looking for a good guy to help beat the Taliban and find Osama bin Laden. We wanted him to win. And that made him vitally important to Canadians because of the military mission next door in Afghanistan. There is still a belief that Musharraf possesses the power to stabilize the region, if he wants.

Yet in the last five years, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan has remained an open crossing point for Islamic fighters. Osama bin Laden is probably hiding out in Pakistan, along with the Taliban’s Mullah Omar, as they continue their war against the “infidel” forces of NATO. The situation is not getting much better.

So, with his declaration of emergency rule, patience with General Musharraf may be running out. The Americans have been very careful not to undermine his authority, but there are signs of discontent, and for the first time, people are talking and writing openly about his resignation, or eventual downfall.

In fact, the latest issue of Newsweek magazine to hit the stands here has a banner headline that any other dictator might happily quash, and then burn every copy he could find.

“After Musharraf,” it reads. “Why the future might look bright for Pakistan.”

Source: CTV News

Come on US, invade Canada – before others get the idea

From Mr Peter Watkins.

Sir, It has concerned me for some time that the current US administration has failed to see the benefits of invading Canada instead of wasting its time invading Iraq and now apparently considering an invasion of Iran.

The US has no more oil. Canada has enough to satisfy US demands for the next 100 years. The US needs electrical energy and fresh water. Canada has lots of both. Canada flooded 30 per cent of the province of Quebec to sell electricity to New York and all that fresh water in the Great Lakes would satisfy the thirsty ethanol crops in the Midwest. As climate change intensifies, a highly efficient shipping route, the North-West Passage, is opening up, and the US can’t have Canada control that critical asset or the oil under the Arctic ice cap.

Conquering Canada would be easy – on any day, there are more tyres on cars in Manhattan than there are Canadians. As with Iraq, it is simply a matter of showing that Canada is harbouring weapons of mass destruction and building nuclear weapons. Falsified discovery of “yellowcake” from Niger will not be necessary as a pretext for invasion. Canada has dangerous “yellow snow”, secretly deposited by Canadian men in winter. “Don’t eat the yellow snow” is a warning every child is given from birth.

There would be an immediate response from the United Nations Assembly if the US presented this danger to them. Think of all those nuclear reactors that Canada has built. It would be easy to create the perception that Canada was selling, or better yet, planning to sell, the technology to evil-doers. If the WMD argument is wearing thin, there is justifiable retribution. In 1812, those terrorist Canadians invaded the US, sacked and burned Washington and butchered US citizens. Surely it is not too late to retaliate. The trick is to keep enough Canadians alive to protect the National Hockey League (NHL).

There may be a better solution without bloodshed. Let’s get Canadians to vote to merge with the US. This is simpler than it might first appear. Just create a US separatist party in Canada for the next election and offer every Canadian US$1m to vote to merge with the US. This money would only be paid if the vote carries and, of course, would be tax-free. It would be a small amount to pay to acquire Canada’s mineral and timber resources and save the billions of dollars the US has spent on the Iraq war to date.

There is some urgency for the US administration to proceed quickly as the US dollar is falling like a stone, and China or Russia might get the same idea. There would be no better way to recycle over a trillion dollars of devaluing US Treasury bills that China holds than to use them as a down payment in the purchase of Canada. Let’s just hope a hedge fund doesn’t figure this out.

Source: Financial Times

Chavez: $200 oil if US attacks Iran

RIYADH (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told an OPEC summit on Saturday crude oil prices could double to $200 if the United States attacked his ally Iran.

“If the United States is crazy enough to attack Iran or commit aggression against Venezuela … oil would not be $100 but $200,” Chavez told the summit in the Saudi capital.

Chavez addressed a hall containing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a comrade-in-arms against Western influence.

Fears the United States or its ally Israel could attack Iran over its nuclear energy programme — which Washington says is a cover for developing atomic weapons — have helped drive world oil prices to record levels. Tehran denies the charge.

Oil has lapped against the $100-mark this month, prompting consumer nations to call on the exporter group to provide the market with more crude.

OPEC oil ministers said earlier this week in Riyadh that the summit, which ends on Sunday, will leave any decision on whether to raise OPEC output to a meeting in Abu Dhabi on December 5.

A draft final communique says only that OPEC seeks “stability of global energy markets” and oil ministers including Saudi Arabia’s say factors beyond their control limit OPEC’s powers.

That cleared the way for OPEC ministers to try to steer the summit towards relatively uncontroversial environmental issues.

The group “shares the international community’s concern that climate change is a long-term challenge”, the draft says.

OPEC Secretary-General Abdullah al-Badri said this week OPEC would be willing to play its part in developing carbon capture and storage technology to help reduce emissions in the air.

Though the draft makes no mention of an environmental fund with consumer countries to which OPEC would contribute — an idea floated in forums this week — King Abdullah told the opening session Saudi Arabia would give $300 million towards environmental research.

On Friday, Saudi Arabia steered the group towards rebuffing an attempt by Iran and Venezuela to highlight concern over dollar weakness in the summit communique.

The drop in the value of the dollar against other major currencies helped fuel oil’s rally to a record $98.62 last week. Yet it has also reduced the purchasing power of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.

ANTI-U.S. PLATFORM

Chavez’s address on Saturday set the stage for a summit that could see more anti-U.S. rhetoric emanate from the capital of one of its closest allies.

“OPEC must stand up and act as a vanguard against poverty in the world,” self-styled socialist revolutionary Chavez said.

“OPEC should be a more active geopolitical agent and demand more respect for our countries … and ask powerful nations to stop threatening OPEC.”

Saudi Arabia’s octogenarian leader, who sat stony-faced throughout the 25-minute speech, was heard joking to Chavez afterwards: “You went on a bit!” Ahmadinejad told reporters he would make his views felt on Sunday.

Saudi Arabia this month proposed setting-up a consortium to provide Iran with enriched uranium for peaceful purposes in an effort to defuse the tension between Washington and Tehran. Iran said it would not halt its own enrichment programme.

Worried by a resurgent Iran with potential nuclear capability, Gulf Arab countries, including OPEC producers Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, have said they will start a nuclear energy programme of their own.

Source: Reuters

Pakistan’s biggest news channels shut down

ISLAMABAD, Nov 17, 2007 (AFP) – Two leading private Pakistani television news channels broadcasting out of Dubai have been shut down amid pressure from military ruler Pervez Musharraf, the networks said Saturday.

Geo and ARYOne had been blacked out on cable here since November 3, when Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, but had still been available on satellite and the Internet until Friday night when they were fully closed.

Both channels said the government had been pushing them to stop showing their political talkshows.

‘We have been asked to shut down our transmission from Friday midnight,’ Kamran Khan, a senior official at Geo who hosts a popular talk show on the channel, told AFP.

After the shutdown, Geo showed a continous animated loop of its blue and orange logo, inscribed with the motto ‘Live and Let Live.’

At first resting on a tranquil sea, the logo is then shown being battered in an intense storm. The words flash up ‘Please inform them.’

Hamid Mir, another senior journalist at Geo, told AFP that the network’s employees would now hold protests, adding: ‘We will continue to protest until all of us are arrested.’

‘We were told at 9.30pm in Dubai that our transmission uplink would be shut down, as soon as we finished my talk show ‘Capital Talk’ in which we were discussing police maltreating Imran Khan’s sister during a protest,’ he said.

Mir said the closure came after Musharraf spoke to Dubai’s ruler to ask for the channels to be taken off air. The claim could not be immediately verified.

Imran Khan, a former cricket legend and a leading opposition figure, is currently detained by government and charged under the anti-terrorism act for opposing emergency rule.

Mir said the channel was receiving solidarity calls from the media around the world. ‘We are very thankful for it,’ he added.

Mohsin Raza, news director of ARYOne, said it was shut down in a similar manner.

‘We condemn it. Is this a joke with people or what?’ Raza told AFP.

‘This is being done just before elections so that people should be kept in the dark and far away from the truth,’ he added.

Pakistan’s electronic media regulator allowed international news channels BBC and CNN and two local stations, Aaj and Dawn, back onto screens Thursday.

Under emergency rule, the media are barred from publishing or broadcasting material that defames Musharraf, the armed forces or the government.

The order says there is a maximum punishment of three years in prison or a fine of 10 million rupees (166,700 dollars) for anyone who breaches the code.

Pakistani authorities Tuesday effectively banned the import of satellite television equipment, placing a further curb on coverage of the crisis.

Source: Arab Times

Pollsters and pundits retreating from the Ron Paul juggernaut

Pollsters and media pundits have been slowly starting the inventible retreat from the Ron Paul juggernaut. Throughout the campaign, media pundits and pollsters have been claiming that Ron Paul did not have support and was at only 1-4% in polls.

Two new polls in New Hampshire have now placed Paul at 7% and John Zogby told Sean Hannity today that he thinks Paul can get 15-18% in New Hampshire.

Media reports have also floated the idea that the once invincible Rudy Giuliani may not win any primaries until Super Tuesday, yet still be a viable candidate.

The sudden shift in opinions from the expert pollsters and pundits may be partly due to Ron Paul’s record 4.2 million dollar one-day money grab. The crowd of 5,000 people that showed up to a Ron Paul rally in Philadelphia this past Saturday might also have made it obvious that the polls have been wrong.

Pundits and pollsters are still clinging to the notion that Paul can’t win. They are citing polling data as evidence to back up their opinions.

This weekend in an interview right after the Philadelphia rally, Paul effectively linked two major issues in this campaign. Paul maintained that U.S. foreign policy is bankrupting America and adversely affecting the economy.

An article on Tuesday claimed that the Iraq and Afghanistan war costs are $1.6 Trillion dollars. Reports like that boost Paul’s message of military non interventionism and that ‘maintaining empire overseas’ is bankrupting the U.S.

If Paul can continue to link foreign policy, monetary policy, and the economy, his support may increase. Visit the USA Daily Forum to discuss this and other issues.

Source: USA Daily

Musharraf opponent, Imran Khan, seized & jailed in Pakistan

LAHORE, Pakistan: The opposition politician Imran Khan emerged from hiding Wednesday to the cheers of hundreds of students at a demonstration against General Pervez Musharraf at a university here, but he was quickly seized by hard-line students and turned over to the police, witnesses said.

In another development, Benazir Bhutto has started to rally opposition parties into a coordinated movement against Musharraf, her party spokeswoman, Sherry Rehman, said in an interview Wednesday.

Bhutto, a former prime minister who has been placed under house arrest in Lahore, has contacted the main opposition parties and has received a favorable response, Rehman said.

“She wants a one-point agenda – the restoration of democracy,” Rehman said.

Bhutto’s move to bring opposition parties into a united front against Musharraf is likely to increase the pressure on the military leader and strengthen calls for an end to emergency rule, under which the Constitution has been suspended and thousands of people have been placed under detention or house arrest.

“This is a logical reaction to the events of the last week and the brutal behavior of the state,” Rehman said. “They have locked up not only her, but thousands of party workers. The whole central leadership is under house arrest.”

[A police senior official told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Bhutto would remain under house arrest in Lahore for at least another day.

["The position for her will remain like this until at least tomorrow. Then the government will review what to do with her," the official said on condition of anonymity because the matter was politically sensitive and no decision had been taken to release her.]

Bhutto, who returned to Pakistan last month to contest elections under an agreement with Musharraf, has hardened her stance since he imposed emergency rule this month. On Tuesday she called for him to resign from both his posts of chief of the army and president and restore the country to democratic rule. She also urged the international community to stop backing him.

Among the parties she has approached are those of Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who is in exile in Saudi Arabia, and Khan’s Movement for Justice party.

Bhutto has also been in touch with the religious parties opposed to Musharraf, Rehman said.

Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician and the vociferous opponent of Musharraf who was seized Wednesday by hard-line students, was the only major opposition political figure who had not been placed under detention since the president imposed emergency rule on Nov. 3.

Khan’s appearance at Punjab University, one of the country’s oldest universities, was replete with high drama. Hundreds of students waited for him in front of Faisal Auditorium, chanting slogans like “Go Musharraf, Go” and “No to Emergency!”

Muhammad Asim, 25, a student of administrative sciences, explained that he was protesting against the suspension of fundamental human rights in Pakistan. He was holding a placard that read “Our hearts are crying with indignation.”

Students affiliated with the radical Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami were also present at the rally, raising slogans against President George W. Bush and the United States.

Khan, a style icon and symbol of defiance for Pakistani youth, was expected to speak to the students to rally them against Musharraf, said Saloni Bokhari, the president of the women’s wing of Khan’s political party.

Around noon, to the delight of his student supporters, Khan suddenly appeared, and several students hoisted him triumphantly into the air.

Khan, visibly pleased by the reception, was making a victory sign when he was seized by students belonging to Islami Jamiat-e-Talba, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami.

The students hustled him into a nearby building and detained him there for about an hour.

“We have taken him inside to prevent him from arrest and to make sure he joins the protest in an organized manner,” said one of the Islami Jamiat-e-Talba students.

But Khan was then put into a white van and driven off campus, where he was arrested. As the van moved through the melee, students smashed its windows.

A senior police official, Aftab Cheema, told The Associated Press that Khan was being held at an undisclosed location and would be charged with crimes yet to be determined.

Salman Masood reported from Lahore and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad.

Chaudhry honoredIftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the former chief justice of Pakistan who was fired by Musharraf, was awarded Harvard Law School’s Medal of Freedom for his resistance to emergency rule, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“As lawyers who value freedom and the rule of law, we at Harvard Law School want Chief Justice Chaudhry and all the courageous lawyers in Pakistan to know that we stand with them in solidarity,” Dean Elena Kagan said in a statement on the school’s Web site.

The school hopes Chaudhry will be able to receive the award once the emergency ends, Kagan said.

Musharraf fired Chaudhry on Nov. 4, accusing him of causing “turmoil” by “paralyzing the government and humiliating” Pakistani law enforcement officials.

The president has resisted pressure from President George W. Bush to restore the Constitution before the country holds promised general elections by Jan. 9.

The judge rejected the accusations by Musharraf and said he was fired to allow the government to rig the national elections.

He was removed to pre-empt a decision by Supreme Court judges, who were hearing a case challenging the president’s eligibility for another five-year term, Chaudhry said.

The dismissal marked the second time this year that the president had removed Chaudhry. In July he was reinstated after a panel of Supreme Court justices ruled that his suspension in March had been illegal.

In announcing the Harvard award, Kagan said, “We are proud to be their colleagues in the cause of justice, and we will do all we can to press for the prompt restoration of constitutionalism and legality in Pakistan.”

The Medal of Freedom was established by Harvard Law School to honor individuals who have worked to uphold the legal system’s fundamental commitment to freedom, justice and equality, the statement said.

Source: International Herald Tribune 

Related: NY Times: Opponent of Musharraf Is Detained in Pakistan