Lawfare – Breaking News

War is Unsuitable for Children: Another YouTube outrage
by Cindy Sheehan

Last week, after being bombarded with pseudo-patriotic40of graveyards, gravestones and flags, I decided to begin posting40of maimed and killed Iraqis, but especially children and transform the mega-pseudo-patriotic Memorial Day to Remembrance of Victims of US Empire Day.

I got a great response to this and my friend and videographer, Clifford Roddy put together a short film called: finaledit, with the40I posted and with40that he took at a national cemetery in Santa Fe, NM where we were together for my Myth America book tour. I have a Cindy Sheehan You Tube page so we posted it there.

Read More »War is unsuitable for children another youtube outrage

By Alex Lantier

(source:  World Socialist Website)

At a White House briefing last Wednesday, President Obama personally joined the growing chorus of war threats against Iran coming from Washington and its allies.

Recent threats include remarks from US Defense Secretary Gates, who argued against “another war in the Middle East” in 2008, but stated last month that the US does “not accept the idea of Iran having nuclear weapons.” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said it was “still time for sanctions,” but that “at a certain point, we should realize that sanctions cannot work.”

It was against this backdrop that the White House called in selected journalists for a press briefing on Iran. They reportedly discovered only after arriving that the “briefer” at this apparently routine event was none other than the president himself.

Obama’s purpose was to deliver a blunt warning to the Iranian government: it could either surrender to US demands that it abandon its nuclear program, or face US attack.

Read More »Obama threatens Iran

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?

Read More »Into the inferno hollow language and hollow democracies

By Iqbal Jassat

In a recent interview, South Africa’s ambassador to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, Ted Pekane, made an intriguing observation:

“Currently we have no intention of breaking ties with Israel. That would be counter-productive. Our policy of engagement applies to Israel as well. Only if the [Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas] asked us to support the disinvestments and sanctions campaign against Israel would we consider packing our bags”.

This admission is the closest any senior foreign ministry official has come to in revealing an inherent weakness in this country’s relations with Israel/Palestine.

It is shocking too in that it implies our diplomatic engagement in the world’s number one conflict zone is blinded and being pursued while voluntarily having our hands tied behind our back!

More importantly, it discloses an intolerable weakness that inevitably is exploited by the stronger of the two sides. Israel is in effective control of all aspects of Palestinian life by virtue of the occupation and the multiple layers of restrictive measures that renders the occupied Palestinian population to its “mercy”.
Read More »Is south African foreign policy with Palestine tied in knots?