Democracy Now, January 06, 2010

In an extended interview, award-winning journalist and activist Allan Nairn looks back over the Obama administration’s foreign policy and national security decisions over the last twelve months. “I think Obama should be remembered as a great man because of the blow he struck against white racism,” Nairn says. “But [...] the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off… but he chose not to do so.” He continues, “In fact, as far as one can tell, Obama seems to have killed more civilians during his first year than Bush did in his first year, and maybe even than Bush killed in his final year.”
Source: www.democracynow.org/2010/1/6/obama_has_kept_the_machine_set

Siriel-Media comment : Nairn gives real examples of how US and NATO forces wilfully target and murder civilians and he asks the right questions concerning how we would feel if foreign forces bombed civilians and murdered people freely in our own country. Nairn has the capacity to speak the hard truth calmly, as it is, and to look at the horrible truth beyond our self-serving lies and propaganda. A rare hard look at reality (but remember, it is a reality we can change).

Malalai Joya, elected by the people of Farah, and banned from parliament for denouncing criminals of war (though her democratic mandate was to last till the current elections), spoke to an audience of 300 at Conway Hall in central London (July 2009). She has survived five assassination attempts, had her passport taken away by Karzaï, and must constantly take various precautions in Afghanistan. We invite you to hear what a woman fighting for human rights and justice has to say…

Support our “Surge for Peace”
   The letter (appended below) to Ottawa City Council comes from an Afghan woman MP who expresses her clear opposition to the use of Ottawa facilities for any military trade shows.

Malalai Joya is an elected Afghan Member of Parliament. However, in May 2007 she was barred from Parliament for three years because she had denounced the many foreign-backed warlords and drug barons who dominate her government. While the Afghan Parliament passed a law giving immunity to all Afghan’s who have committed war crimes over the previous 25 years, it also passed a law saying that Afghan MPs could not criticise each other.

So it is permissible to have MPs in Afghanistan’s parliament who are war criminals, but it is not permissible to have MPs in that Parliament who dare to risk death threats for merely criticising the presence of those war criminals. This is the democracy that Canada helped to install and is now protecting. Canada helped the US to replace Taliban warlords with other warlords from the “Northern Alliance” who killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Kabul alone during the 1990s.

On May 21, 2007, Malalai Joya – the young MP dubbed “the bravest woman in Afghanistan” by the BBC – was unjustly suspended from the Afghan National Assembly. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Afghanistan on that day and, two years later, has still yet to make any statement about Joya’s mistreatment.

“Canada’s participation in this war in Afghanistan has been justified with rhetoric about women’s rights, yet Harper and the Conservatives remained silent when Malalai Joya was ousted from her elected position and again did nothing meaningful when Karzai signed the anti-women provision which sanctioned rape in marriage,” said Parvin Ashrafi, a women’s rights activist with the Iranian Centre for Peace, Freedom and Social Justice and a member of Friends of Malalai Joya—Canada.

What are the risks of an attack against Iran, considered completely crazy by most, according to Eric Margolis (journalist and author), Phyllis Bennis (Senior Analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author) and Paul Heinbecker (former Canadian Chief Foreign Policy Advisor and former Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations).

August 6, 2008

It is the 63rd anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US Dept. of Energy estimates the 5 year death toll from the bomb at Hiroshima alone to be over 200,000, the vast majority of whom were civilians. In the piece below, John Pilger readily debunks the myth that the bombing of Hiroshima was either needed or intended to end the war in the Pacific.

This anniversary has a particular significance, coming as it does at a moment when Israel is intensifying its belligerent posturing towards Iran, culminating perhaps in Benny Morris’ recent threat / prediction in the New York Times of a nuclear attack.

Pilger reminds us that we have seen this all before: the intensive disinformation campaign (in this case, a positive will to forget the International Atomic Energy Agency and US intelligence agencies’ reports that Iran does not pose a nuclear threat), and the campaign of racist vilification.

Trita Parsi talks about the effect of threats on Iranian public opinion
   Trita Parsi was born in Iran and grew up in Sweden. He earned a Master’s Degree in International Relations at Uppsala University, a second Master’s Degree in Economics at Stockholm School of Economics and a PhD in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He has served as an adviser to Congressman Bob Ney (R-OH18) on Middle East issues and is a co-founder and current President of the National Iranian American Council (www.niacouncil.org).

Dr. Parsi is the author of Treacherous Alliance – The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007).

Heating Up: The Battle for the Jewish Voice and the Jewish soul

Dear Mom, Dad, your Zionist friends, and Bob Dylan too,

I’ve got news for you all: The times they are a changin’! Remember last Passover ?  Remember when we sat around the Seder table and listened to you rant about Israel`s victimhood ?  About how ethnic cleansing really isn’t that bad ?  And about how if they try to kill the Jews this time, we will at least take them all with us ?  Remember the rolled eyes of my cousins and the looks we exchanged thinking you were all nuts ?

(Click title or picture to read the rest)

Pilger continues to be one of those rare journalists with words that resonate for international activists and humanists. In this article, he recalls the moral courage of Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, assistant secretary-generals of the UN, who actively denounced, loud and clear, the sanctions against Iraq as a crime against humanity.

On March 28, 2008, Naomi Klein gave the keynote address at the event at Canada’s first ever Independent Canadian Jewish Conference, attended by over 100 Jews against the occupation of Palestine from over a dozen organizations in over 20 cities across Canada.

The video of her talk is now online and covers the upcoming 60th anniversary celebrations of the founding of Israel, the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement, and the significance of the growing Jewish anti-occupation movement in Canada. »»»