Abandoned…
Layla Anwar, An Arab Woman Blues
…Someone has abandoned the Feminine…someone has cut the umbilical cord, radically severed it from the Feminine…in Iraq. What is the Feminine traditionally associated with ? Nurture, Warmth, Attachment, Wholeness, Desire, Compassion, Love, Nourishment, Creativity, Matter – The Body, Sensuality, Life Giving, Protection, Tranquility, Sakinah… And these Iraqi women, this Feminine has been abandoned, waiting…it is caught/detained in a hospital ward, in a Sickness, in cell s, in one huge collective Prison, and it is waiting for…waiting for what ? It is waiting for Deliverance. It is waiting to be delivered from… Delivered from the clutches, from the claws of an Occupation, that has essentially raped the Feminine in Iraq. An occupation that has literally imprisoned the Feminine in cells and in hospital wards…an occupation where all are accomplices in the Abandonment of the Feminine…in the abandonment of Iraqi women…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=54704
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Gen. Taguba Says Telegraph Quoted Him Correctly on Prisoner ‘Rape’ Photos
Jeremy Scahill
Just a day after White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs smeared the entire British media over a damning report in one British paper, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba says that Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted him correctly when he told the paper last week he had seen pictures depicting heinous acts commited against prisoners by US personnel that “show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” On Friday, Gibbs said “you’re not gonna find ma ny of these [British] newspapers and ‘truth’ within say 25 words of each other.” While standing by his on-the-record remarks to the Telegraph, Taguba, however, now says that the photos to which he was referring were not among 44 pictures the ACLU is fighting to have released but which the Obama administration has blocked. He told Salon’s Mark Benjamin Friday night, “The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen. According to Benjamin, “The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.” At present, the Obama administration is blocking the release of some 2,000 photos allegedly depicting prisoner abuse and torture…
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On eve of GM bankruptcy
Obama administration targets the working class
Patrick Martin
The expected bankruptcy filing Monday by General Motors—for decades the largest US corporation and one of the country’s biggest employers—marks a turning point for both American capitalism and the American working class. Its significance is not only economic and financial. It is also a political milestone. The US government set the June 1 deadline which has forced the bankruptcy filing. The Obama administration holds the whip hand, having advanced $40 billion in bailout funds to the auto bosses, and the White House will effectively control GM, holding 72.5 percent of its stock and appointing a majority of its board of directors. In return for their collaboration, the administration is awarding the United Auto Workers executives a 17.5 percent stake in the downsized GM…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=54720
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Colonizing Culture
Dahr Jamail
The geo-strategic expansion of the American empire is an accepted fact of contemporary history. I have been writing in these columns about the impact of the US occupation on the people of Iraq in the wake of the “hard” colonization via F-16s, tanks, 2,000-pound bombs, white phosphorous and cluster bombs. Here I offer a brief glimpse into the less obvious but far more insidious phenomenon of “soft” colonization. That scholars and political thinkers have talked at length of such processes only establishes the uncomfortable reality that history is bound to repeat itself in all its ugliness, unless the human civilization makes a concerted effort to eliminate the use of brute force from human affairs…
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Settlements Activities over the Last Month
Palestine Monitor
In light of the recent meeting between Presidents’ Abbas and Obama (videos inside), the team at Palestine Monitor collected a set of headlines from the Ma’an News Agency. We hope that this small sample will provide a window into the realities of settlements on the daily life of those living in the West Bank….
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Obama Out-Bushes Bush on Preventive Detention
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
If George Bush had had the gall to propose changing the laws of the United States to allow people to be detained for long periods without even the intention of putting them on trial, progressives across the nation would be howling that the fascist hordes were at the gates. And they would be right. Even the do-nothing, scared-of-nearly-everything Congressional Black Caucus would be up in arms. George Bush and Dick Cheney empowered to imprison people without trial? Progressives everywhere would be justified in crying out against the threat to civilization as we know it. But when Barack Obama last week proposed the very same thing, preventive detention without trial, there was relative silence…
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US cybersecurity plan poses new war threats, attacks on democratic rights
By Tom Eley
President Barack Obama announced on Friday the creation of a new “cyber czar” position. The Cybersecurity Coordinator, who is yet to be named, would oversee billions of dollars in funding for developing and coordinating defense of the computer networks that operate the global financial system and domestic transportation and commerce, according to the administration. The position, which Obama said would report directly to him, results fro m a 60-day “cyberspace policy review” Obama ordered. Obama’s announcement was overshadowed by the US military’s imminent creation of a new military “Cyber Command,” detailed in a New York Times article published Friday. Obama has not even been presented with the military’s plan, nor did he mention it directly in his press conference. However, administration sources have said he will sign a classified order or set of directives later this month authorizing the creation of the Cyber Command…
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This suppression is symbolic of a state that fears its past
Nadim Rouhana
For the Palestinian citizens of Israel, life is becoming a collective Kafkaesque experience. For years, their state has been determined to buttress its Jewish identity by legal, constitutional, cultural, and political means, in spite of the fact that one in five of its residents is an Arab. This latest series of bills is just another part of that effort. In addition to the discrimination they already face in all walks of life, Palestinians will not be able to mourn the Nakba, the loss of their homeland, or express their opposition to Israel as a Jewish state…
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Pakistan’s war on civilians
Paul Rogers
…A United Nations source has estimated the flow of internal refugees since mid-May 2009 as 2.4 million people; by 29 May, the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) calculated that the figure exceeded 3 million. There are few examples of such vast and sudden movements in recent history; the scale of what is happening recalls the traumatic events prior to the founding of Bangladesh in 1970-71, when many millions of people fled from the Pakistani army across the border into India…The war in northwest Pakistan may still be in its early stages, but it is already operating with an intensity that is not fully appreciated beyond the region. Pakistani army sources are presenting the operation as an extensive and determined effort to isolate a relatively small group of extremist militias. But three factors – the failure to cope with refugees, the ability of the militias to disperse, and the rapid provision of aid by radical movements – suggests that the long-term effects of the army’s campaign could be to intensify Pakistan’s divisions…
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Open Letter from Gaza to the Government and People of Spain
Various undersigned
We write to you as Palestinians from Gaza to express our dismay at the proposal of the Spanish parliament to restrict the universal jurisdiction of Spain , particularly with regard to breaches of international humanitarian law. The proposal called for the existing legislation to be modified so that cases may only be pursued if they involve Spanish victims or if the accused is present on Spanish soil. At approximately midnight on 22 July 2002, an Israeli Air Force fighter jet dropped a 2,000 lb bomb on the densely populated Daraj neighborhood of Gaza city. The main target of the attack was the family home of Salah Shehada, Commander of the military wing of Hamas. The bomb killed Shehada and an additional seventeen civilians, including his wife, his daughter, eight children (including a 2-month old baby), two elderly men, and two women. In addition, seventy seven people were injured, eleven houses were completely destroyed and thirty two houses damaged, leaving many families homeless…
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65 years in jail for providing charity (to Palestinians that is)
Marcy Newman, body on the line
This week five men from the holy land foundation were sentenced to prison terms [...] If you funnel money to the Israeli terrorist army, it is tax-deductible in the US. And if you funnel money to any Palestinian group, you serve time in jail.…
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Three injuries, dozens of suffocation cases in peaceful Ni’lin anti-wall march
Palestinian Information Center
Three protesters were injured and dozens suffered tear gas suffocation when Israeli occupation forces attacked the weekly anti-wall march held at noon Friday in Ni’lin village, west of Ramallah. Despite the Israeli attempts to quell the march, the Ni’lin protestors managed to reach the Palestinian lands in the village where the Israeli occupation authority is expanding its apartheid wall. Palestinian citizens and foreign activists also stationed on rooftops and at doors of homes and blocked the arrival of IOF troops to the village…
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Video: Farmers under fire
International Solidarity Movement
A compilation video from real incidents when Palestinian farmers came under fire from Israeli soldiers shooting with live ammunition from jeeps and towers along the border to Gaza. All of the incidents occurred in the south-eastern border region east of Khan Younis, within the months since the ‘cease-fire’ following Israel’s war on Gaza. All the attacks have been against unarmed Palestinian farmers, including women and children, and internationals accompanying th em. The practise of firing at farmers and civilians in the area up to 1km from the border has been a conistent occurrence, with attacks increasing after Israel’s 3 weeks of massacring Gaza…
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