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Are Isaraeli courts staffed by nazi judges?

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Are Israeli courts staffed by Nazi judges?  

 
By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

Graffiti

Just as anti-Semitism became official policy in  Germany in the mid 1930s, it is seems hostility toward  Arabs, including  Israel’s own 1.5 million Palestinian citizens,  is becoming a de facto official policy of the Israeli state.

This ominous orientation is being constantly promoted by a number of manifestly racist cabinet ministers and Knesset members who declare openly that their aim is to make everyone in Israel “submit to the Jewish nature of the state.”

The brash racism is now permeating through the entire apparatus of the Jewish state, from the police, to the justice system, to the army, to the educational system and, of course, the media.

Last week, Israeli courts  showed off  their  racist credentials  when two Israeli settlers, a murderer and a would-be murderer were acquitted  of murdering a Palestinian and seriously wounding two others.

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Kashmiri mass graves demand attention as well mr Obama

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Kashmiri Mass Graves Demand Attention as well Mr. Obama!

By Momin Iftikhar

President Obama’s interview to CNN, disclosing that he has directed his national security team to look into the Dasht-e-Leili massacre of possibly thousands of Taleban prisoners by Afghan militias supported by the US, has come as a welcome acknowledgement of a tragedy that has been ignored by the US corporate media � and the US Government – for eight long years.

The heart wrenching episode involving the death of thousands of Taleban prisoners, rounded up in the final sweep of US Special Forces in Afghanistan, in Nov 2001 is no secret in Afghanistan. These captured Taleban fighters got suffocated during the two days transit to Sheberghan Prison in sealed cargo containers, without any food or water. The dead bodies were buried in mass graves, using bulldozes in a stretch of desert close to Sheberghan. Mass graves of Dasht-e-Leili were first reported by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in January 2002 but the mainstream US Media refused to latch on to the story in the prevailing mood dominant in the US in the aftermath of 2002.

A recently declassified 2002 State Department Intelligence Report, obviously made possible by the shifting US strategy in Afghanistan, bares it all – including the US tacit approval of the inhumane conduct of its Northern Alliance protegees who were delegated all the dirty work in cleaning up Afghanistan. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a long time Indian and CIA sponsored warlord has been held responsible for the massacre and the timings suggest that, through acknowledging his crimes, US is trying to soften the impact of his close association with the Karzai Government in the forthcoming elections. The acknowledgement of the crime against Taleban prisoners by Northern alliance warlords may help to focus attention on the fate of many Pakistani and Afghan Taleban who were flown to India for investigations and are reportedly lying in one of the many mass graves that dot the IHK landscape ; particularly in Baramula district.

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Into the inferno hollow language and hollow democracies

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Into the Inferno: Hollow Language and Hollow Democracies

Arundhati Roy

What can we do, now that democracy and the free market are one?
 
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By democracy I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
 
So, is there life after democracy? Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defence of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia . . . is that what you would prefer?”
 
Whether democracy should be the utopia that all “developing” societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn’t meant to suggest that we lapse into older, discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It’s meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy – too much representation, too little democracy – needs some structural adjustment.
 
The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasised into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximising profit? Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be?

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Martin amiss Iran fantasia

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Martin Amis’s Iran fantasia
 
Amis’s understanding of Iran is shallow and his take on Islamism superficial. Is this the best western liberalism has to offer?
 
Abbas Barzegar

Some 20-odd years ago, not out of any sense of patriotism or self-defence, young Iranians with bombs strapped to them dived under advancing Iraqi tanks. Khomeini promised them a few dozen virgins you see. Now, as Martin Amis tells us today, that evil genius’s followers, hungrier than ever, are combining apocalyptic zeal with advanced nuclear engineering to usher in the Messiah, destroy western civilisation, and kill every remaining Iranian who isn’t a mullah or mindless fanatic.
 
The myth that madness has motivated Muslims throughout 1,400 years of history and continues to drive political Islam today is a pretty old one, and I must say it is getting rather boring, so it’s especially hard to understand how a figure as prolific as Martin Amis can still make a good living out of it. Nonetheless, it seems that Amis is again ready to wear the fashionable Islam expert hat, this time gracing us with his profound insights on Iran, which even if dead wrong are at least momentarily entertaining.

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