A turning point in Europe. Chris Marsden

Via: WSWS.

Wednesday’s general strike in Greece, involving two million workers in the public and private sectors, marks a turning point in the political situation throughout Europe. It represents the most significant manifestation of a growing movement of resistance to the attempt by Europe’s governments and corporations to make workers pay for the economic crisis and the multibillion-euro bailout of the banks.

At the very onset of this new movement of the working class, two fundamental characteristics have emerged: the movement assumes a cross-border and international character, and the workers immediately come up against the bankruptcy of their old trade union and political organizations—all of which are wedded to a nationalist program.

Indeed, austerity measures are being imposed by governments of the official “left” no less than those of the “centre” and “right.”

This week saw a succession of strikes and protests throughout Europe:

On Monday, Lufthansa’s 4,500 pilots in Germany struck. In France, air traffic controllers struck alongside workers at six French oil refineries. British Airways cabin crew voted by over 80 percent to strike.

On Tuesday, protest rallies took place in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia against the austerity measures of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) government of José Zapatero. Trade unions in the Czech Republic announced that public transport would be halted next week.

A one-day general strike of the public sector is planned for March 4 in Portugal over the extension of a wage freeze as part of measures to cut the deficit from 9.3 percent of gross domestic product to 3 percent by 2013. French pilots have also announced plans to strike later this week.

These strikes and protests are only the initial response by Europe’s workers to the offensive being waged against them. The broadest mobilizations have been in those countries where the most savage cuts have been announced.

U.S Started A War Of Aggression Against Afghanistan Over 30 Years Ago. By James A. Lucas

Via: Counter Currents.

Interference by the U.S. in the internal affairs of Afghanistan has been a tragic chapter in our nation’s history.

Over three decades ago, there were social movements in Afghanistan to improve the standard of living of its people, to provide greater equality for women, and there was a functioning, if imperfect, democracy. However the U.S., using subversion, weapons and money was able, as the leader of coalition of nations, to stop progress in these areas of human welfare.

In fact, the gains that had already been made were actually reversed. By 2010 the economic and social status of Afghans has been set back generations; women’s status has deterioriated to such an extent that the prevalence of self-immolation has increased among discouraged women, and there is no democracy now, with the U.S. making major decisions as an occupying power.

With President Obama’s recently announced military buildup, our nation’s leaders are on the verge of doing the virtually impossible – making the situation even worse. But the most cataclysmic aspect of this chronology of events is that the U.S. and the world are less safe, since the image of the U.S. in the world is that of the world’s leading military power attacking possibly the poorest nation on earth.

Afghanistan in the late 1970s was a predominantly poor, rural and moderate Muslim nation. Although they were second class citizens, women were allowed to unveil and had the right to vote. From 1933-1978 women started to enter the workforce and become teachers, nurses and even politicians. They worked to end illiteracy and forced marriages. Most of these advances were mostly in Kabul , the most modern and populous city in Afghanistan , although in most of the rural areas women were treated as property. 1

In the 1970s Afghanistan also had serious economic problems, one of which the concentration of ownership of most of the land in the hands of tribal and religious leaders (mullahs). Only 3% of the rural population owned 75% of the land.

Labor unions were legalized, a minimum wage and a progressive income tax were established and a separation of church and state was adopted.

We must never forget Gaza. By Khalid Amayreh

Via: Uruknet.

Despite a slight improvement in the general humanitarian situation, the Gaza Strip remains a disaster area. In fact, in terms of the sheer destruction of homes and infrastructure, the coastal enclave can be compared to quake-stricken Haiti, with the main difference lying in the fact that while the Caribbean island’s calamity was a natural disaster, the Gaza disaster was inflicted by the criminal Israeli regime.

Today, Israel continues to prevent a large number of consumer products from entering Gaza. This policy, often justified by security considerations, has actually nothing to do with security. It is a deliberate measure aimed at further tormenting the inhabitants of Gaza by showing them that Israel has the final say and that they would have to submit themselves to the Zionist will. This is how the Nazis behaved toward the inhabitants of the Ghetto Warsaw, forcing them to smuggle food and other consumer products into the camp.

What is more scandalous is that the Zionist regime is adamantly preventing the entry into Gaza of building materials needed for the reconstruction of the estimated 40,000 homes destroyed, either completely or partly during last year’s Nazi-like onslaught against the impoverished territory.

Unfortunately, this callous and criminal policy is not being challenged by the international community which keeps issuing platitudinous remarks about the need to meet the humanitarian needs of the people of Gaza, this is while thousands of Gazans, whose homes were destroyed by the Nazis of our times, remain without shelter and are totally exposed to the elements of nature.

Where Is the Outrage? By William Fisher

Via: Truthout.

Last week, a federal judge ruled that the families of two men who died in detention at Guantanamo couldn’t sue the government because their imprisonment as enemy combatants had been approved by a Combat Review Status Tribunal – a CRST.

The same CRST’s the Supreme Court found “inadequate.”

Following a two-year investigation, the military concluded that the men – the two whose families were the plaintiffs in last week’s court case, plus another – had committed suicide. But recent firsthand accounts by four soldiers stationed at the base at the time of the deaths have raised serious questions about the cause and circumstances of the deaths, including the possibility that the men died as the result of torture.

The deaths of the three men at Guantanamo were the subject of a jaw-dropping article in Harper’s Magazine by Scott Horton, an attorney who has written extensively on US detention policy and practice. Horton wrote, “The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report – a reconstruction of the events – was simply unbelievable.” None of these men had any links to terrorism and two of them had already been cleared for release.

Horton went on to explain that, “According to Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.”

To which Dahlia Lithwick responded in Slate: “The NCIS report failed to question why it took two hours for these suicides to be discovered despite the fact that guards checked on prisoners at 10-minute intervals. Horton, reporting on interviews with four members of the military intelligence unit assigned to guard Camp Delta, suggests that the men died at “Camp No” (as in, “No, it doesn’t exist”), an alleged black site at Guantanamo, and were then moved to the clinic. A massive cover-up followed. Official stories hastily changed from claims that the three men had stuffed rags down their own throats to the elaborate hanging plot.

Tangled Up in Yoo

Canada’s neoconservative turn. By Yves Engler

Via: Electronic Intifada.

“An attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada.”
- Peter Kent, Junior Foreign minister, 12 February 2010

In my new book Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid I argue that the trajectory of this country’s foreign policy has been clear. The culmination of six decades of one-sided support, and four years into the government of Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper: Canada is (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world.

Since the book went to print a couple of months ago the Conservatives have launched a more extreme phase of Israel advocacy. Groups in any way associated with the Palestinian cause have been openly attacked and Ottawa has taken a more belligerent tone towards Iran.

In the beginning of February, Ottawa delighted Israeli hawks by canceling $15 million in funding for the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The money has been reallocated to Palestinian Authority judicial and security reforms in the West Bank. At the same time, Canada doubled the number of troops involved in US Lt. General Keith Dayton’s mission to train a Palestinian force to strengthen Fatah against Hamas and to serve as an arm of Israel’s occupation.

Only a few weeks earlier, Israel apologists sang Harper’s praise when his government chopped $7 million from Kairos, a Christian aid organization that had received government money for 35 years. During a visit to Israel, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Canada had “defunded organizations, most recently like Kairos, who are taking a leadership role” in campaigns to boycott Israel. Palestinian advocacy was also the reason Ottawa failed to renew its funding for Montreal-based Alternatives, an international solidarity organization, which received most of its budget from the federal government.

The Conservatives chose a different tactic with the arm’s-length government agency Rights and Democracy. Instead of cutting its budget, they stacked the board with hard-line supporters of Israel.

Home Evictions: Living the Unimaginable. By Hajr Al-Ali

Via: MIFTAH.
Imagine one day that your home is invaded and you and your family are forced onto the street. Imagine now, that others are allowed to occupy your house, one which has belonged to your family for generations. Imagine that every day since then, your family is subjected to harassment by both the police and the new occupants of your home; that the paltry tent you set up for shelter is repeatedly torn down.

For Nasser Ghawi, his wife, and their five children, this is not hard to do. First evicted in 2002, and after nearly a decade of battling in Israeli courts for the right to keep their home, they were once again forcefully evicted on August 9, 2009. Since then, they have been living in a tent across the street from their home in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Recently, this tent was destroyed by Israeli police for the twelfth time. Having personally met Nasser’s family, a group of friends of mine coordinated a small fundraising initiative to buy Nasser and his family another two tents, but to no avail. We learned soon after that Israeli police had confiscated both, one in the morning and the other in the evening of the same day. When asked what he needed, Nasser finally said, “Chairs. We need chairs to sit on.” For most of the day, Nasser sits in front of his house, newly decorated with Israeli flags, watching as Jewish settlers unabashedly go in and out, often stopping to verbally assault him and his family. Still, despite this, despite the verbal taunts, stints of imprisonment and violence from police and settlers – one of whom threatened him with an M-16 – Nasser refuses to leave, remaining on his property as a form of protest against the injustice of Israel’s “second Nakba.”

JORDAN: Where Iraqi Women Are Also Fathers. By Hanan Tabbara

Via: IPS.

Back in Najaf, Iraq, Khayzaran and her family lived in a well-kept house. They had two cars and a small orchard. Her children, two girls and three boys, attended school and came home to modest feasts.

But when her husband, Saad, received death threats, they abruptly packed their lives into a few suitcases and left home, relatives and all that is familiar behind. They sidestepped many obstacles and dead bodies along the way to reach safety outside the inferno that Iraq had become.

Khayzaran’s husband and their eldest son, Khaled, were granted asylum in Austria, but she found herself stuck in Jordan, becoming both “the mother and the father” to the two younger boys, Mohammed and Ali, and to the girls, Fatima and Hajar.

“We left unexpectedly. Most of our belongings are still in Iraq. My husband’s family sold some of them to help us flee,” Khayzaran said, as she braided bamboo sticks into baskets and food trays that she sells on street corners during the day.

Jordan was supposed to have been a temporary stop, a waiting room, until the firestorm in Iraq calmed down. But as the violence in her home country escalated, Khayzaran knew that there was no going back.

She registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and applied for asylum, but she and her younger children were denied it for lack of appropriate documentation.

According to UNHCR estimates, over 4.7 million Iraqis have been displaced since the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, with at least 700,000 of them settled in refugee camps in Jordan.

WHY IRAN? Give Iran a Break! By Debbie Menon

Cartoon Khalil Bendib

Via: Salem-News.

Iran has not attacked another country militarily. The track records of the US, Israel, the UK and France are very different. These so called “democracies” have a bloody history of invading other countries on flimsy excuses.

There are parallels, between the western media rhetoric about Iraq’s nuclear threat prior to the US invasion and the rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear programme today. In repeatedly misinterpreting the statements of Iran’s Ahmadinejad, the US-Israel media paints him as the Hitler of the Middle East. There was no reality check before Iraq and there is no reality check now.

Iran has been a consistent supporter of the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and called for a nuclear weapons free Middle East.

The comments of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against Israel have been repeated by some of Iran ‘s leaders since 1979 and constitute no practical threat. A tit-for-tat response.

The statement attributed to him that “Israel should be wiped off the map” is a distortion of the truth and has been determined by a number of Farsi linguists, amongst them, Professor Juan Cole, to be a mistranslation.

What he actually said was that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”.

Ahmadinejad has made clear that he envisions regime change in Israel through internal decay.

The classic lie in the western Media, of course, is the lie that he had stated that: “Israel must be wiped off the map.”

Most media groups in the west fall in line with that thinking.

Dissident Jews: Unwanted in Germany? By Raymond Deane

Via: PULSE.

A European country that scapegoats a Semitic people, persecutes defenders of human rights by stripping them of employment, and denies freedom of speech to Jews: surely a description of Germany during the Third Reich?

Yes, but unfortunately also a description of Germany at the outset of the 21st century.

In the wake of German Chancellor Merkel’s craven speech to the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) two years ago, I wrote: “a penance is being paid for Germany’s past crimes… by the Palestinians to whose plight Merkel is so indifferent…. By scapegoating the victims of its former victims, Germany is compounding its past crimes.”  (Scapegoat upon Scapegoat, Electronic Intifada, 20 March 2008).

Just one year later I described the case of Hermann Dierkes,  forced to resign his position as representative of Die Linke (The Left Party) on Duisburg city council after tentatively advocating a boycott of Israeli goods. I commented: “It appears that freedom of speech, supposedly one of the proudest acquisitions of post-Fascist Germany, is readily suppressed when exercised to advocate positive action against the racist, politicidal institutions and actions of the Zionist state.” (A public stoning in Germany, Electronic Intifada, March 2009).

I mentioned as something of an anomaly Thomas Assheuer’s application of the “antisemite” label to Canadian Jewish author Naomi Klein (Die Zeit, 15 January 2009) because of her support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. In the light of recent developments this seems far less anomalous.

Corporate media silent on Colombian paramilitaries’ confession to 30,000 murders. By Les Blough

Via: Axis of Logic.

Apparently, the corporate media doesn’t consider it to be newsworthy: the confession to a Colombian prosecutor of 30,000 murders by paramilitaries who are linked to the Alvaro Uribe regime. To date, Associated Press, Reuters and their contracted media outlets remain silent on this latest news. If it had taken place in Somalia, China, Syria, North Korea, Iran or any of Washington’s perceived enemies, we would be seeing it on a CNN special report, backed up on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. The last prominent NYT article reporting in January, 2007 on Colombian paramilitary death squads provided President Uribe with cover, stating:

“Senior members of Mr. Uribe’s government and Mr. Uribe himself have said that anyone shown to have had illegal ties to the paramilitaries, which terrorized Colombian cities and the countryside in the nation’s internal war, which has gone on for decades, and made fortunes in cocaine trafficking, should be prosecuted in courts of law…

“Many Colombians credit Mr. Uribe for declining levels of murders and kidnappings and robust economic growth.”

Only Pravda (February 19) reported that Colombian paramilitaries have admitted to over 30,000 murders over the last 20 years. That report is included below in its entirety. Here, we wish to take a brief look at the reasons for the silence of the corporate media on matters that threaten the Uribe regime.

The Road to Armageddon. By Paul Craig Roberts

Via: Foreign Policy Journal.

The Washington Times is a newspaper that looks with favor upon the Bush/Cheney/Obama/neocon wars of aggression in the Middle East and favors making terrorists pay for 9/11. Therefore, I was surprised to learn on February 24 that the most popular story on the paper’s website for the past three days was the “Inside the Beltway” report, “Explosive News,” about the 31 press conferences in cities in the US and abroad on February 19 held by Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, an organization of professionals which now has 1,000 members.

I was even more surprised that the news report treated the press conference seriously. How did three World Trade Center skyscrapers suddenly disintegrate into fine dust? How did massive steel beams in three skyscrapers suddenly fail as a result of short-lived, isolated, and low temperature fires? “A thousand architects and engineers want to know, and are calling on Congress to order a new investigation into the destruction of the Twin Towers and Building 7,” reports the Washington Times.

The paper reports that the architects and engineers have concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency  (FEMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provided “insufficient, contradictory and fraudulent accounts of the circumstances of the towers’ destruction” and are “calling for a grand jury investigation of NIST officials.”

The newspaper reports that Richard Gage, the spokesperson for the architects and engineers said: “Government officials will be notified that ‘Misprision of Treason,’ U.S. Code 18 (Sec. 2382) is a serious federal offense, which requires those with evidence of treason to act. The implications are enormous and may have profound impact on the forthcoming Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial.”

There is now an organization, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth. At the main press conference in San Francisco, Eric Lawyer, the head of that organization, announced the firefighters’ support for the architects and engineers’ demands. He reported that no forensic investigation was made of the fires that are alleged to have destroyed the three buildings and that this failure constitutes a crime.

Mandated procedures were not followed, and instead of being preserved and investigated, the crime scene was destroyed. He also reported that there are more than one hundred first responders who heard and experienced explosions and that there is radio, audio and video evidence of explosions.