Israel’s Right to be Racist

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The matter-of-factness with which the state of Israel claims the right to treat non-Jews as lesser animals is shocking and annuls any move towards peace, writes

Joseph Massad*

*The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. His latest book is The Persistence of the Palestinian Question; Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians.

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Israel’s struggle for peace is a sincere one. In fact, Israel desires to live at peace not only with its neighbours, but also and especially with its own Palestinian population, and with Palestinians whose lands its military occupies by force. Israel’s desire for peace is not only rhetorical but also substantive and deeply psychological. With few exceptions, prominent Zionist leaders since the inception of colonial Zionism have desired to establish peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs whose lands they slated for colonisation and settlement. The only thing Israel has asked for, and continues to ask for in order to end the state of war with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours, is that all recognise its right to be a racist state that discriminates by law against Palestinians and other Arabs and grants differential legal rights and privileges to its own Jewish citizens and to all other Jews anywhere. The resistance that the Palestinian people and other Arabs have launched against Israel’s right to be a racist state is what continues to stand between Israel and the peace for which it has struggled and to which it has been committed for decades. Indeed, this resistance is nothing less than the “New anti- Semitism”. Read more



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The real scandal at the World Bank

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The Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world

by Johann Hari

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While the world’s press has been fixated on the teeny-weeny scandal over whether the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz helped to get his girlfriend a $300,000-a-year gig next door, they have been ignoring the rancid stench of a far bigger scandal wafting from Wolfie’s Washington offices.This slo-mo scandal isn’t about apparent petty corruption in DC. It’s about how Wolfowitz’s World Bank is killing thousands of the poorest people in the world, and knowingly worsening our worst crisis - global warming - every day.

Let’s start with the victims. Meet Hawa Amadu, 70-something, living in the muddy slums of Accra, the capital of Ghana, and trying to raise her grandkids as best she can. Hawa has a problem - a massive problem - and the World Bank put it there. She can’t afford water or electricity any more. Why? The World Bank threatened to refuse to lend any more money to her government, which would effectively make it a leper to governmental donors and international business, unless it stopped subsidising the cost of these necessities. The subsidies stopped. The cost doubled. Now Hawa goes thirsty so her grandchildren can drink, and weeps: “Am I supposed to drink air?” Read more



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Stand Up or Perish as a Nation

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by Abid Ullah Jan*

*Abid Ullah Jan is the author of the very popular book in Islamic circles The End of Democracy and other important books and Articles. He is a part of the Independent Centre for Strategic Studies and Analysis (ICSSA).

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Without a vision Pakistan has no way out from the multitude of problems it is facing. However, a clear sign of almost everyone groping in the dark is a notice inserted in an English daily (April 21) by Treasury MNA Minoo Bhandara, which reads:

Quaid-i-Azam’s Speech of 11th August 1947. A Constitutional (Amendment) Bill has been moved in the National Assembly, which purports to include the famous speech of the Quaid or its salient features, as a substantive part of Article 2 of the Constitution.”

The next day, a columnist wrote in the same newspaper: “May I suggest to friend Minoo that while this is done (hopefully, it will be done), he may add to it two other most relevant sentences. From Jinnah’s speech to the people of Australia on February 19, 1948: ‘But make no mistake, Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it,’ and from his speech a few days later to the people of the United States of America: ‘In any case, Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission.’” Read more



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The Perils of Extremism

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by Touqir Hussain*

*The writer is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, US

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WHY is it hard to fight extremism in Pakistan? Because we are all guilty at least by association. Extremism essentially reflects our long but unsuccessful struggle to find a national purpose and identity and an open and stable political process that promotes tolerance and liberal habits of the mind and supports justice for all, not only for the citizenry but also for the minorities and smaller provinces.

This failure has caused an understandable sense of despair especially among the weak and the vulnerable, a mindset most conducive to falling prey to illusions and emotions and to searching for transcendental solutions. No wonder the extremists, specially the religious kind, are having a field day. They have a constituency.

The state has made its own contribution. Successive governments have pandered and provided political space, to the Islamists, both the pacific type seeking an electoral route to power and willing to work within the system and the extremists. Read more



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Getting Out of Iraq

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By Hussein Agha*

*Hussein Agha is Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the author, with A.S. Khalidi, of A Framework for a Palestinian National Security Doctrine (May 2007).

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Overt political debate in the Middle East is hostile to the American occupation of Iraq and dominated by calls for it to end sooner rather than later. No less a figure than King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, arguably the United States‘ closest Arab ally, has declared the occupation of Iraq “illegal” and “illegitimate”. Real intentions, however, are different. States and local political groups might not admit it — because of public opinion — but they do not want to see the back of the Americans. Not yet. Read more



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‘Devastating’ Bill Moyers Probe of Press and Iraq Coming This Week

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by Greg Mitchell

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NEW YORK (Commentary) The most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq will appear next Wednesday, a 90-minute PBS broadcast called “Buying the War,” which marks the return of “Bill Moyers Journal.” E&P was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

While much of the evidence of the media’s role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new, it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes from interviews (with the likes of Tim Russert and Walter Pincus) along with numerous embarrassing examples of past statements by journalists and pundits that proved grossly misleading or wrong. Several prominent media figures, prodded by Moyers, admit the media failed miserably, though few take personal responsibility. Read more



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America’s Moral Menopause

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The world would be better off if the US renounced its self-appointed role of global policeman, and examined the corruption of moral values borne of imperial ambition.
by Ayman El-Amir

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For almost 200 years, the US has claimed the moral high ground in world affairs. As it prospered, it looked on a wretched global scene of war, poverty, dictatorship, conquest, exploitation, colonial rule and the denial of human rights. Imbued with a new sense of global power following allied victories in World War I and World War II, the US soon changed from the acclaimed position of moral guru to that of the scion of imperial power. When the US withdraws from Iraq in defeat it will leave the Middle East/Gulf region in a state of unparalleled chaos and instability, a political vacuum remaining that not even massive US military presence in the region could fill. It has unleashed forces it cannot control and is trying to contain them by maintaining a decrepit status quo. The short-lived American empire is inexorably entering its period of political and moral menopause. It would do the US, and the turbulent world it has created, well if it retreated from its failed ideology of neo-conservatism into an era of neo- isolationism. Read more



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USA: Cornering the Market on Morality

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William Blum interviewed by Jason Miller

(including satirical commentary by Miller)

“We have morality on our side….”

—William Blum

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Ironic words flowing from the pen of a man who has devoted forty years of his life to hard-core dissent against the United States, the most moral nation in the history of civilization.

We are a nation founded upon bedrock principles of Christianity.

Would Christ not have approved of chattel slavery, the Native American genocide, and the millions of “savages” we have slaughtered to expand our borders and to maintain “Pax Americana?” Those who have died to sustain our peace and prosperity were but martyrs for a cause greater than themselves. In a sense, each one of them was a little Jesus. Read more



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Calling Out Idiot America

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By Scott Ritter

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The ongoing hand-wringing in Congress by the newly empowered Democrats over what to do about the war in Iraq speaks volumes about the level of concern (or lack thereof) these “representatives of the people” have toward the men and women who honor us all by serving in the armed forces of the United States of America. The inability to reach consensus concerning the level of funding required or how to exercise effective oversight of the war, both constitutionally mandated responsibilities, is more a reflection of congressional cowardice and impotence than a byproduct of any heartfelt introspection over troop welfare and national security.

The issues that prompt the congressional collective to behave in such an egregious manner have more to do with a reflexive tendency to avoid any controversy that might disrupt the status quo ante regarding representative-constituent relations (i.e., re-election) than with any intellectual debate about doing the right thing. This sickening trend is bipartisan in nature, but of particular shame to the Democrats, who obtained their majority from an electorate that expressed dissatisfaction with the progress of the war in Iraq through their votes, demanding that something be done. Read more



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Please God, deliver us from the banality of evil

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by Jason Miller

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“I do not hesitate one second to state clearly and unmistakably: I belong to the American resistance movement which fights against American imperialism, just as the resistance movement fought against Hitler”.

—Paul Robeson

Virtually every day our mendacious corporate media publicizes the farcical “debate” between officials of the Bush Regime and Congress. While numerous polls have indicated that over 2/3 of US Americans want an end to the war in Iraq, and voters positioned the Democrats to exercise the will of the people, the war rages on.

Between the Gulf War, the subsequent US-driven draconian UN economic sanctions, and the seemingly endless US invasion and occupation of Iraq, well over a million Iraqis are dead. Infrastructure essential to vital human needs, including transportation, health, utilities, water, and sanitation has been decimated. Depleted uranium will continue to visit misery and death upon the Iraqi population long after the imperial invaders have been sent packing, as we were in Vietnam. Read more



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
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