A Million Dead
January 31, 2008
Opinion Research Business (ORB)’s latest findings are out, and they confirm the Lancet estimates. Another blow to the propagandists busy erasing evidence of the genocide they have inflicted on Iraq.
LONDON (Reuters) – More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups.
The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes.
Day of Reckoning in the US Glasshouse
January 31, 2008
World Economic Forum: The Davos Agenda. Joseph Stiglitz on the US economic travails.
There is a growing consensus: America is going into a marked slowdown, if not a downright recession. There will be a large gap between potential growth – usually estimated at 3 per cent to 4 per cent – and actual growth, meaning lost output of hundreds of billions of dollars. America actually faces three separate but related problems; a credit crunch, a debt crisis and a macroeconomic problem.
A decade ago, America roundly criticised the countries of East Asia for their lack of transparency and inadequate regulation. But, as the old aphorism goes, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Money was lent to hundreds of thousands of Americans beyond their ability to pay. What was called financial innovation meant that borrowers didn’t even have to pay the accrued interest; at the end of the year, they owed more than at the beginning. Liar mortgages had been invented, requiring no evidence of income or ability to pay.
Science before Darwin and Newton
January 31, 2008
‘It’s time to herald the Arabic science that prefigured Darwin and Newton’, writes Jim Al-Khalili. ‘In this era of intolerance and cultural tension, the west needs to appreciate the fertile scholarship that flowered with Islam’.
Watching the daily news stories of never-ending troubles, hardship, misery and violence across the Arab world and central Asia, it is not surprising that many in the west view the culture of these countries as backward, and their religion as at best conservative and often as violent and extremist.I am on a mission to dismiss a crude and inaccurate historical hegemony and present the positive face of Islam. It has never been more timely or more resonant to explore the extent to which western cultural and scientific thought is indebted to the work, a thousand years ago, of Arab and Muslim thinkers.
Jottings on the Conjuncture
January 31, 2008
Recently when I met Tariq Ali in London, he suggested I read Perry Anderson’s editorial in the current issue of the New Left Review. I had forgotten about the matter until I noticed this attack on the New Left icon by a member of the UK Israel Lobby on the Guardian‘s blog (abiding recent convention the fellow generously concedes Anderson is not an ‘antisemite’, following it immediately with the ubiquitous ‘but’). The piece must have really hit its mark if the Britcons have had to let loose their poodles of war. I was compelled to read, and I must say, I am thoroughly impressed. The analysis here is nuanced and sophisticated and well worth the read.
The contemporary period—datable at one level from the economic and political shifts in the West at the turn of the eighties; at another from the collapse of the Soviet bloc a decade later—continues to see deep structural changes in the world economy and in international affairs. Just what these have been, and what their outcomes are likely to be, remains in dispute. Attempts to read them through the prism of current events are inherently fallible. A more conjunctural tack, confining itself to the political scene since 2000, involves fewer hazards; even so, simplifications and short-cuts are scarcely to be avoided. Certainly, the notations below do not escape them. Jottings more than theses, they stand to be altered or crossed out.
i. the house of harmony
Azzam Tamimi on Hardtalk
January 31, 2008
I am glad that the very obnoxious Tim Sebastien has been replaced by a sensible interviewer.
‘Israel’s campaign against Hamas has not broken its resolve or turned the people of Gaza against it’, writes Azzam Tamimi.
Blessing in disguise for Hamas
The opening of the Palestinian National Conference in Damascus could not have come at a better time. January 23 was the day when the people of Gaza could no longer tolerate the world’s indifference and the inaction of their fellow Arabs next door. The women’s march on the previous day, which ended with a confrontation at the gate separating Palestine from Egypt, seemed to have been the trigger. Hours later, under the cover of night, young Gazan men blew up the wall that had been contributing to the suffocation of 1.5 million people.
No one is guilty in Israel
January 30, 2008
From the archives. Gideon Levy, on the Beit Hanun massacre. (Published on the 12th of November 2006)
Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can’t claim he didn’t mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can’t claim he didn’t mean to kill innocent inhabitants.
Therefore it takes considerable gall and cynicism to dare to claim that the Israel Defense Forces did not intend to kill inhabitants of Beit Hanun. Even if there was a glitch in the balancing of the aiming mechanism or in a component of the radar, a mistake in the input of the data or a human error, the overwhelming, crucial, shocking fact is that the IDF bombards helpless civilians. Even shells that are supposedly aimed 200 meters from houses, into “open areas,” are intended to kill, and they do kill. In this respect, nothing new happened on Wednesday morning in Gaza: The IDF has been behaving like this for months now.
The Ghost of Rambo
January 29, 2008
Twenty years after he last sprayed bullets across America’s movie screens, John Rambo has returned in Rambo, a 93-minute feature in which Sylvester Stallone’s bulky soldier wields a bow, a machine gun, and his muscle-bound, 215-pound body against another army of foreign villains. If you’re rolling your eyes, you’re not alone: According to Rotten Tomatoes, just 38 percent of the new film’s reviews have been favorable, with its critics deploying such phrases as “torture porn,” “jingoistic imperialism,” and “the Schindler’s List of B-list butchery.”
For the most part I’ll have to join in the jeers. This is basically a paint-by-numbers action picture that has almost as little to say as its laconic protagonist. But I can’t dismiss the Rambo franchise entirely, and even this entry shows a brief glimmer of something thoughtful beneath the monosyllabic grunts and the CGI gore.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bombs Away Over Iraq
January 29, 2008
Looking Up. Tom Engelhardt on ‘Normalizing Air War from Guernica to Arab Jabour‘.
A January 21st Los Angeles Times Iraq piece by Ned Parker and Saif Rasheed led with an inter-tribal suicide bombing at a gathering in Fallujah in which members of the pro-American Anbar Awakening Council were killed. (“Asked why one member of his Albu Issa tribe would kill another, Aftan compared it to school shootings that happen in the United States.”) Twenty-six paragraphs later, the story ended this way:
“The U.S. military also said in a statement that it had dropped 19,000 pounds of explosives on the farmland of Arab Jabour south of Baghdad. The strikes targeted buried bombs and weapons caches.”In the last 10 days, the military has dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of explosives on the area, which has been a gateway for Sunni militants into Baghdad.”
And here’s paragraph 22 of a 34-paragraph January 22nd story by Stephen Farrell of the New York Times:
“The threat from buried bombs was well known before the [Arab Jabour] operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.”
Liberty, democracy, brutality
January 28, 2008
‘Many EU politicians treat Israel as a state that holds the highest European ideals dear. But this is hogwash’, writes David Cronin of the excellent Inter Press Service.
Diplomatic pressure from the European Union has been credited as being partly responsible for how Israel allowed some deliveries of food, medicine and fuel to Gaza over the past few days.
But you would never guess that senior EU officials had been flexing their metaphorical muscles if you saw one particular document distributed to the Brussels press corps.
Penn on the Bush-Cheney Junta
January 28, 2008
This is a bit old, but only came across the audio now.
An Open Letter to the President…Four and a Half Years Later
Four and a half years ago, I addressed the issue of war in an open letter to our President. Today I would like to again speak to him and his, directly. Mr. President, Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice et al: Indeed America has a rich history of greatness -indeed, America is still today a devastating military superpower. And because, in the absence of a competent or brave Congress, of a mobilized citizenry, that level of power lies in your hands, it is you who have misused it to become our country’s and our constitution’s most devastating enemy. You have broken our country and our hearts. The needless blood on your hands, and therefore, on our own, is drowning the freedom, the security, and the dream that America might have been, once healed of and awakened by, the tragedy of September 11, 2001.
