Explanation / Verklaring
Persoonlijk
|
31 December 2005 | 16:30:57
English
This is my
archive of articles that I read daily, and I might find useful in the future.
You are free to read them or just ignore them. There is a reference to the
original source.
Nederlands
Op dit logje bewaar ik artikelen voor mijn eigen gebruik. Vind
je ze interessant, dan ben je welkom om ze te lezen.
Mijn echte weblog staat bij www.mihai.punt.nl
Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah.
Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up
with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and
the indifference of the international community! We want to scream and
break this wall of silence, injustice and indifference like the Israeli
F16’s breaking the wall of sound; scream with all the power in our
souls in order to release this immense frustration that consumes us
because of this fucking situation we live in; we are like lice between
two nails living a nightmare inside a nightmare, no room for hope, no
space for freedom. We are sick of being caught in this political
struggle; sick of coal dark nights with airplanes circling above our
homes; sick of innocent farmers getting shot in the buffer zone because
they are taking care of their lands; sick of bearded guys walking
around with their guns abusing their power, beating up or incarcerating
young people demonstrating for what they believe in; sick of the wall
of shame that separates us from the rest of our country and keeps us
imprisoned in a stamp-sized piece of land; sick of being portrayed as
terrorists, homemade fanatics with explosives in our pockets and evil
in our eyes; sick of the indifference we meet from the international
community, the so-called experts in expressing concerns and drafting
resolutions but cowards in enforcing anything they agree on; we are
sick and tired of living a shitty life, being kept in jail by Israel,
beaten up by Hamas and completely ignored by the rest of the world.
There is a revolution growing inside of
us, an immense dissatisfaction and frustration that will destroy us
unless we find a way of canalizing this energy into something that can
challenge the status quo and give us some kind of hope. The final drop
that made our hearts tremble with frustration and hopelessness happened
30th November, when Hamas’ officers came to Sharek Youth Forum, a
leading youth organization (www.sharek.ps) with
their guns, lies and aggressiveness, throwing everybody outside,
incarcerating some and prohibiting Sharek from working. A few days
later, demonstrators in front of Sharek were beaten and some
incarcerated. We are really living a nightmare inside a nightmare. It is
difficult to find words for the pressure we are under. We barely
survived the Operation Cast Lead, where Israel very effectively bombed
the shit out of us, destroying thousands of homes and even more lives
and dreams. They did not get rid of Hamas, as they intended, but they
sure scared us forever and distributed post traumatic stress syndrome to
everybody, as there was nowhere to run.
We are youth with heavy hearts. We carry
in ourselves a heaviness so immense that it makes it difficult to us
to enjoy the sunset. How to enjoy it when dark clouds paint the horizon
and bleak memories run past our eyes every time we close them? We
smile in order to hide the pain. We laugh in order to forget the war.
We hope in order not to commit suicide here and now. During the war we
got the unmistakable feeling that Israel wanted to erase us from the
face of the earth. During the last years Hamas has been doing all they
can to control our thoughts, behaviour and aspirations. We are a
generation of young people used to face missiles, carrying what seems
to be a impossible mission of living a normal and healthy life, and
only barely tolerated by a massive organization that has spread in our
society as a malicious cancer disease, causing mayhem and effectively
killing all living cells, thoughts and dreams on its way as well as
paralyzing people with its terror regime. Not to mention the prison we
live in, a prison sustained by a so-called democratic country.
History is repeating itself in its most
cruel way and nobody seems to care. We are scared. Here in Gaza we are
scared of being incarcerated, interrogated, hit, tortured, bombed,
killed. We are afraid of living, because every single step we take has
to be considered and well-thought, there are limitations everywhere, we
cannot move as we want, say what we want, do what we want, sometimes
we even cant think what we want because the occupation has occupied our
brains and hearts so terrible that it hurts and it makes us want to
shed endless tears of frustration and rage!
We do not want to hate, we do not want
to feel all of this feelings, we do not want to be victims anymore.
ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control,
limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings,
sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart
aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious
bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we
want!
We want three things. We want to be
free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that
too much to ask? We are a peace movement consistent of young people in
Gaza and supporters elsewhere that will not rest until the truth about
Gaza is known by everybody in this whole world and in such a degree
that no more silent consent or loud indifference will be accepted.
This is the Gazan youth’s manifesto for change!
We will start by destroying the
occupation that surrounds ourselves, we will break free from this
mental incarceration and regain our dignity and self respect. We will
carry our heads high even though we will face resistance. We will work
day and night in order to change these miserable conditions we are
living under. We will build dreams where we meet walls.
We only hope that you – yes, you reading
this statement right now! – can support us. In order to find out how,
please write on our wall or contact us directly: freegazayouth@hotmail.com
We want to be free, we want to live, we want peace.
Israel High Court rullings about occupation
|
13 September 2010 | 12:25:39
Israel High Court rullings about occupation
“14. The Judea and Samaria areas are held by the State of Israel in belligerent occupation. The long arm of the state in the area is the
military commander. He is not the
sovereign in the territory held in belligerent occupation (see The Beit Sourik
Case, at p. 832). His power is granted him by public
international law regarding belligerent occupation. The legal meaning of this view is twofold:
first, Israeli law does not apply in these areas. They have not been "annexed" to
Israel. Second, the legal regime which applies in these areas is determined by
public international law regarding belligerent occupation (see HCJ 1661/05 The
Gaza Coast Regional Council v. The
Knesset et al. (yet unpublished,
paragraph 3 of the opinion of the Court; hereinafter – The Gaza Coast Regional
Council Case). In the center of this
public international law stand the Regulations Concerning the Laws and Customs
of War on Land, The Hague, 18 October 1907 (hereinafter – The Hague
Regulations). These regulations are a
reflection of customary international law. The law of belligerent occupation is also laid out in IV Geneva
Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War 1949
(hereinafter – the Fourth Geneva Convention). The State of Israel has declared that it practices the humanitarian
parts of this convention. In light of
that declaration on the part of the government of Israel, we see no need to
reexamine the government's position.”, Israel High Court Ruling Docket H.C.J.
7957/04, Mara’abe v. The Prime Minister
of Israel, 21 juni, 2005
“27. We
accept that the military commander cannot order the construction of the
Separation Fence if his reasons are political. The Separation Fence cannot be
motivated by a desire to “annex” territories to the state of Israel. The
purpose of the Separation Fence cannot be to draw a political border. In
Duikat, at 17, this Court discussed whether it is possible to seize land in
order to build a Jewish civilian town, when the purpose of the building of the
town is not the security needs and defense of the area (as it was in Ayoob),
but rather based upon a Zionist perspective of settling the entire land of
Israel. This question was answered by this Court in the negative. The Vice-President of this Court, Justice
Landau, quoted the Prime Minister (the late Mr. Menachem Begin), regarding the
right of the Jewish people to settle in Judea and Samaria. In his judgment,
Justice Landau stated:
The view
regarding the right of the Jewish people, expressed in these words, is built
upon Zionist ideology. However, the
question before this Court is whether this ideology justifies the taking of the
property of the individual in an area under control of the military
administration. The answer to that depends upon the interpretation of article
52 of the Hague Regulations. It is my
opinion that the needs of the army mentioned in that article cannot include, by
way of any reasonable interpretation, national security needs in broad meaning
of the term.
In the same
spirit I wrote, in Jam’iyat Ascan, at 794, that
The
military commander is not permitted to take the national, economic, or social
interests of his own country into account . . . even the needs of the army are
the army’s military needs and not the national security interest in the broad
meaning of the term.
In Jam’iyat
Ascan, we discussed whether the military commander is authorized to expand a
road passing through the area. In this context I wrote, at 795:
The
military administration is not permitted to plan and execute a system of roads
in an area held in belligerent occupation, if the objective is only to
construct a ”service road” for his own country. The planning and execution of a system of roads in an occupied territory
can be done for military reasons . . . the planning and execution of a system
of roads can be done for reasons of the welfare of the local population. This planning and execution cannot be done in
order to serve the occupying country.”, Israel High Court Ruling Docket HCJ
2056/04, Beit Sourik Village Council v. The Government of Israel
Dick Cheney's Fantasy World
|
19 December 2008 | 09:10:27
Dick Cheney's Fantasy World
Despite the facts, the vice-president still insists that Saddam Hussein
could have produced weapons of mass destruction
By Scott Ritter
December 18, 2008 "The Guardian" -In yet another attempt at revisionist history by the outgoing Bush administration, vice-president Dick Cheney, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, took exception to former presidential adviser Karl Rove's contention that the US would not have gone to war if available intelligence before the invasion had shown Iraq
not to possess weapons of mass destruction. Cheney noted that the only
thing the US got wrong on Iraq was that there were no stockpiles of WMD
at the time of the 2003 invasion. "What they found was that Saddam
Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass
destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic
feed stock."
The vice-president should
re-check both his history and his facts. Just prior to President Bush's
decision to invade Iraq, the UN had teams of weapons inspectors
operating inside Iraq, blanketing the totality of Iraq's industrial
infrastructure. They found no evidence of either retained WMD, or
efforts undertaken by Iraq to reconstitute a WMD manufacturing
capability. Whatever dual-use industrial capability that did exist
(so-called because the industrial processes involved to produce
legitimate civilian or military items could, if modified, be used to
produce materials associated with WMD) had been so degraded as a result
of economic sanctions and war that any meaningful WMD production was
almost moot. To say that Saddam had the capability or the technology to
produce WMD at the time of the US invasion is a gross misrepresentation of the facts.
While one can make the argument that Saddam had the people, insofar as
the scientists who had participated in the WMD programmes of the 1980s
were still in Iraq and, in many cases, still employed by the
government, these human resources were irrelevant without either the
industrial infrastructure, the economic base or the political direction
needed to produce WMD. None of these existed. The argument Cheney makes
on feed stock is even more ludicrous. Precursor chemicals used in the
lawful manufacture of chemical pesticides were present in Iraq at the
time of the invasion, but these were unable to be used in manufacturing
the sarin, tabun or VX chemical nerve agents the Bush administration claimed existed inside Iraq in stockpile quantities prior to the invasion.
The same can be said about Iraqi biological capability. The discovery after the invasion of a few vials of botulinum toxin
suitable for botox treatments, but unusable for any weapons purposes,
does not constitute a feed stock. And as for the smoking gun that the
Bush administration did not want to come in the form of a mushroom
cloud, there was no nuclear weapons programme in Iraq in any way shape
or form, nor had there been since it was dismantled in 1991. Cheney's
dissimilation of the facts surrounding Iraqi WMD serves as a
distraction from the reality of the situation. Not only did the entire
Bush administration know that the intelligence data about Iraqi WMD was
fundamentally flawed prior to the invasion, but they also knew that it
did not matter in the end. Bush was going to invade Iraq no matter what
the facts proved.
Cheney defended the
invasion and subsequent removal of Saddam from power by noting that
"this was a bad actor and the country's better off, the world's better
off with Saddam gone". This is the argument of the intellectually
feeble. It would be very difficult for anyone to articulate that life
today is better in Baghdad, Mosul, Basra or any non-Kurdish city than
it was under Saddam. Ask the average Iraqi adult female if she is
better off today than she was under Saddam, and outside of a few select
areas in Kurdistan, the answer will be a resounding "no".
The occupation of Iraq by the United States
is far more brutal, bloody and destructive than anything Saddam ever
did during his reign. When one examines the record of the US military
in Iraq in terms of private homes brutally invaded, families torn apart
and civilians falsely imprisoned (the prison population in Iraq during
the US occupation dwarfs that of Saddam's regime),
what is clear is that the only difference between the reign of terror
inflicted on the Iraqi people today and under Saddam is that the US has
been far less selective in applying terror than Saddam ever was.
At a time when the US and the world struggle with a resurgent Iran, the
Iranian-dominated Dawa party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki governs Iraq today in name only.
The stability enjoyed by Iraq today has been bought with the presence
of 150,000 US troops who have overseen the ethnic cleansing of entire
neighbourhoods in cities around Iraq, and who have struck temporary
alliances with Shia and Sunni alike which cannot be sustained once
these forces leave (as they are scheduled to do by 2011).
Invading
Iraq and removing Saddam, the glue that held that nation together as a
secular entity, was the worst action the US could have undertaken for
the people of Iraq, the Middle East as a whole and indeed the entire
world. For Cheney to articulate otherwise, regardless of his
fundamentally flawed argument on WMD, only demonstrates the level to
which fantasy has intruded into the mind of the vice-president.
Canadian
resource companies are under fire in Peru. On October 21, Cesar Zuniga,
the president of the Achuar indigenous group FENAP, told a local radio:
"We, as indigenous people, reject the Canadian company Talisman. We do
not want them working in our territory. We want the Peruvian state to
respect us, and the armed forces to stop helping the company."
The indigenous communities believe oil
development causes ecological harm and leads to social conflict. "We do
not want our forests, rivers and earth polluted, because this is our
natural market... We have proof that pollution already exists, damage
to nature and to indigenous people in the communities where petroleum
activities are developed. For 37 years in the Achuar brother
communities of the Corrientes River, petroleum has not brought any
development to them; on the contrary they are sick and poverty
stricken."
The Achuar say they will physically
remove Talisman if the company does not stop working on their lands by
November 15. "If they do not want to leave we will force them out."
Reuters reported that the Calgary-based company "said it had no plans
to pull out of Peru."
Already this year Canadian resource
companies in Peru have been responsible for a number of socially
damaging events; an oil and gas company entered an area inhabited by a
nomadic tribe that has refused contact with the outside world; a mine
destroyed pre-Columbian carvings; the government declared a state of
emergency over fears that arsenic, lead and cadmium from a mine near
Lima could pollute the capital's main water supply. And in recent years
Toronto-based Barrick Gold's operations in the country have been
engulfed in a number of violent protests, one of which left a couple of
protesters dead.
"In Peru," notes McGill professor
Daviken Stuenicki Gizbert, "40% of conflicts involving local
communities are over mining. The majority of the mining sector in Peru
is Canadian."
Before 1990, no Canadian mining
company operated in Peru. Now, Canadian corporations dominate the
country's mining sector with a hundred mines. As an illustration of the
size of Canadian mining investment in Peru, in late 2006 Scotia Bank
announced plans to expand its banking in the country to do more
business with mining clients. Driven by resource companies, Canadian
direct investment in Peru is worth billions of dollars.
The most high profile mining conflict
in Peru took place earlier this decade at Vancouver-based Manhattan
minerals $US 240 million project in Tambo Grande, a small town in the
north of the country. This open pit gold mine, financed by Export
Development Canada, would have forced half of the town's 16,000
residents to relocate while creating only a few hundred jobs. Godofredo
Garcia Baca, a leader of the anti-mining opposition movement, was shot
and killed under suspicious circumstances.
A community referendum was held with
the question: "Do you agree with the development of mining activities
in the urban area; urban expansion area; agricultural zone and
agricultural expansion zones in the district of Tambogrande?" More than
93% of 27,015 residents participated in the referendum and over 73% of
the population responded "no" to the question.
The overwhelming success of the
nonbinding referendum forced the company to put the project on hold.
Still, Francisco Ojeda Irofrio, the president of the Front in Defense
of Tambo Grande and Mayor of the municipal government of Tambo Grande,
explains: "The company continues trying to buy us or scare us. They
follow us, they record us, they infiltrate our meetings. They have a
man there who worked for ten years with [disgraced former president
Alberto] Fujimori, and before that was a leftist, burning cars and
confronting the army, making a big mess. Now, in Tambo Grande, he hires
local people to confront us."
Manhattan Minerals obtained its
concession in Tambo Grande six months after participating in a
Department of Natural Resources trade mission to Peru. Ottawa has
supported many individual mining projects in the country. The federal
government has also worked to provide the industry with a profitable
investment climate.
In 2002, the Canadian International
Development Agency [CIDA] began a $9.6 million Mineral Resources Reform
Project, which provides technical assistance and technological support
to the country's Ministry of Energy and Mines. The official goal of the
Mineral Resources Reform Project is "development of activities oriented
to the consolidation of the institutional capacity of the sector, which
means the services provided by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, and to
contribute to the generation of greater confidence in the Ministry and
its regional offices."
CIDA's push to improve the prospects
for Canadian miners through the Mineral Resources Reform Project
warranted a visit earlier this year by the Conservative's Minister of
International Cooperation. "Ms. [Bev Oda]," Embassy Magazine reported
in January, "arrived in Peru meeting with the Latin American nation's
energy and mines minister, as well as Canadian and Peruvian mining
companies and NGOs to discuss mining sector reform."
Five months later the federal
government signed a trade agreement with Peru largely designed to
improve the prospects for Canadian investors. According to Foreign
Affairs, "an investment chapter in the Canada-Peru FTA [free-trade
agreement] locks in market access for Canadian investors in Peru and
provides greater stability, transparency and protection for their
investments."
In truth the FTA - with environmental
and labor safeguards that are "even weaker than NAFTA's" - subverts
meaningful democracy. "The FTA with Peru," notes mining critic Dawn
Paley, "eliminates the possibility that Peru would enact such a thing
as the recent 'Mining Mandate' passed in Ecuador by the Constituent
Assembly, which suspends all large scale mining activity (exploration)
in Ecuador for 180 days while a new Mining Law is written." Above all
else Ottawa wants to remove any future Peruvian government's ability to
raise taxes, change mining regulations or expropriate properties.
It's time we challenge Ottawa's support for predatory resource companies in Peru.
Yves Engler is currently finishing a
book on Canadian foreign policy tentatively titled Uncle Sam's Nephew:
Tales of Canadian Imperialism. He is the author of two books: Canada in
Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton) and
Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical.
Authoritarian Development and U.S. Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
By Bradley R. Simpson; Stanford University Press, 2008, 376 pp.
In
1965, following a coup by General Suharto, the Indonesian military
massacred upwards of 800,000 people and imprisoned an estimated million
more in an attempt to liquidate the Communist Party (PKI). The United
States government gave both moral encouragement and logistical support
to the mass killings, including weaponry and lists of suspected PKI
members to be targeted for assassination. Mainstream newspapers like
the New York Times wrote laudatory pieces in praise
of the genocidal Suharto government, referring to it as a "gleaming
light in Asia" because of its fervent anticommunism and openness
towards foreign investment and free trade. C.L Sulzberger added, in the
crude racism of the day, that "the killing had attained a volume
impressive even in violent Asia, where life is cheap."
Finally, the Story of the Whistleblower Who Tried to Prevent the Iraq War
|
30 September 2008 | 08:11:37
Finally, the Story
of the Whistleblower Who Tried to Prevent the Iraq War
Sep 29, 2008 By Norman Solomon
Of course
Katharine Gun was free to have a conscience, as long as it didn't interfere
with her work at a British intelligence agency. To the authorities, practically
speaking, a conscience was apt to be less tangible than a pixel on a computer
screen. But suddenly -- one routine morning, while she was scrolling through
e-mail at her desk -- conscience struck. It changed Katharine Gun's life, and
it changed history.
US generals planning for resource wars
|
23 September 2008 | 00:03:03
US generals planning for resource wars
Mon, Sep 22, 2008
ANALYSIS:The US military sees the
next 30 to 40 years as involving a state of continuous war against
ideologically-motivated terrorists and competing with Russia and China for
natural resources and markets, writes Tom Clonan
Olmert: There's no such thing as 'Greater Israel' anymore
|
16 September 2008 | 00:29:41
Olmert: There's no
such thing as 'Greater Israel' anymore
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and Reuters
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday reiterated his position that the vision of Israel
holding onto the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of its sovereign territory
was finished.
"Greater Israel is over. There is no such thing. Anyone who talks that way
is deluding themselves," Olmert told the cabinet during its weekly
meeting.
He added, though, that this had not always been his stance: "During Camp
David I thought that [then prime minister] Ehud Barak's concessions were too
much, and I told him as much.
"I thought that land from the Jordan River through
to the sea was all ours, but ultimately, after a long and tortured
process, I arrived at the conclusion that we must share with those we live
with, if we don't want to be a bi-national state."
35 Years After Original 9/11
|
14 September 2008 | 10:15:11
35 Years After
Original 9/11
New Transcripts
of Kissinger's Role in Chilean Coup
By
Peter Kornbluh
13/09/08 "HuffingtonPost" -When Henry
Kissinger began secretly taping all of his phone
conversations in 1969, little did he know that he
was giving history the gift that keeps on giving.
Now, on the 35th anniversary of the September 11,
1973, CIA-backed military coup in Chile, phone
transcripts that Kissinger made of his talks with
President Nixon and the CIA chief among other top
government officials reveal in the most candid of
language the imperial mindset of the Nixon
administration as it began plotting to overthrow
President Salvador Allende, the world's first
democratically elected Socialist. "We will not let
Chile go down the drain," Kissinger told CIA
director Richard Helms in a phone call following
Allende's narrow election on September 4, 1970,
according to a recently declassified transcript. "I
am with you," Helms responded.
This compact, meaty volume ought to be on the reading list of every candidate for national office -- House, Senate or the White House
-- in November's elections. In an age of cant and baloney, Andrew
Bacevich offers a bracing slap of reality. He confronts fundamental
questions that Americans have been avoiding since the collapse of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, first of all: What is the
sole superpower's proper role in the world?
In
1965, following a coup by General Suharto, the Indonesian military
massacred upwards of 800,000 people and imprisoned an estimated million
more in an attempt to liquidate the Communist Party (PKI). The United
States government gave both moral encouragement and logistical support
to the mass killings, including weaponry and lists of suspected PKI
members to be targeted for assassination. Mainstream newspapers like
the New York Times wrote laudatory pieces in praise
of the genocidal Suharto government, referring to it as a "gleaming
light in Asia" because of its fervent anticommunism and openness
towards foreign investment and free trade. C.L Sulzberger added, in the
crude racism of the day, that "the killing had attained a volume
impressive even in violent Asia, where life is cheap."