Our refusal comes first and foremost as a protest of the separation, control, oppression and killing policy held by the state of Israel in the occupied territories, as we understand that this oppression, killing and routing of hatred will never lead us to peace, and they are all contradictory to the basic values a society that pretends to be democratic should have.
'This summer Dinko Sakic, the 86-year-old former commander of Jasenovac, the notorious second world war concentration camp, was buried in his Ustashe uniform, the Croatian equivalent of the Nazis. After the war, Sakic emigrated to Argentina but returned after Croatian independence in 1991. He was welcomed back like a celebrity. In his interviews, Sakic repeated that he regretted nothing. What Sakic should have repented was that tens of thousands of inmates in Jasenovac were murdered under his command. He also personally executed two Jewish prisoners ... At his funeral a Dominican priest, Vjekoslav Lasic gave a speech in which he advised Croats to admire Sakic and to take him as an example.'
Interesting noises from the BBC following items on our front page and here in the diary telling how spooks keen to taint the al-Qaida brand spun a line to documentary makers, the better to reinforce the impression that the terrorists are in crisis. "We are pushing this material to UK media channels, eg, a BBC radio programme exposing tensions between AQ leadership and supporters," the experts wrote in a leaked document. We noted that a programme, Al-Qaida's Enemy Within, was broadcast on Radio 4 on August 7. It was repeated on the World Service on Wednesday. The BBC said there was no link between the Whitehall spinning and the programme as transmitted, though Nicola Meyrick, the executive editor of radio current affairs, now reveals on her blog that the reporter and producer "did have some contact" with the spooks while the programme was being made. However they did not meet them until the main batch of interviews had been completed, Meyrick insists. The spooks supplied her team with briefing materials, but she says they didn't use them. It was "a completely independent and impartial piece of journalism", she writes. And so we could conclude that the spooks were exaggerating. It's happened before, apparently.
The Iraqi Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation (MoPDC) and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs (MoLSA), in separate reports, said that millions of Iraqi children are orphans, without shelter, or imprisoned in Iraqi and American controlled prisons. Recent statistics conducted by the MoPDC reveal that "the number of orphaned Iraqi children has reached 4-5 million and that there are some 500,000 street children."
A further study conducted for the UNDP by the Fafo Institute for Applied Social Science, found that "acute malnutrition among Iraqi children has almost doubled since the US invasion despite UN efforts." The study based on a survey of 22,000 Iraqi homes said that approximately 400,000 Iraqi children now suffer from malnutrition and said that acute malnutrition has increased to 7.7 percent since March 2003 for those aged between six months and five years.
Officials from Childhood Voices Association, a children's non-governmental organization, say that "there are 11,000 children addicted to drugs in Baghdad alone, that many girls aged 12 to 16 years old have been victims of rape, and that many girls aged 12 years and above have endured sexual harassment." The organization also quotes international reports stressing that "more than 1 million Iraqi children have entered the labor market with the increase in the rate of poverty (one third of Iraq's population live under the poverty line) and that they suffer violence and sexual abuse."
According to their report, 1.3 million children aged 8 to 16 years old, equal to 6.1% of the population, have become workers. It is also being reported that 1300 children are currently being held in detention centers and in government prisons."
Instead of a show that intrudes upon, patronises and humiliates "ordinary" people, I suggest one that intrudes upon, patronises and humiliates TV presenters and the executives behind these abominations; a show that takes apart their lives, foibles and failings and then helps them reconstruct themselves in a manner more acceptable to the prejudices of the programme's target demographic.
"This week, we'll be meeting Tabitha. She's a successful television presenter with her own production company, but she doesn't know which lap-dancing club her coke-addled boyfriend is currently favouring, and is still trying to prove her worth to a father who always seemed to love her older sister more. She recently spent more than she pays her char per annum to have her home 'spiritually cleansed', owns a wardrobe worth more than the average house and hasn't worn the wrong thing since her second-form end-of-term disco. Nonetheless, she wouldn't be able to tell you the name of the prime minister without Googling, and can't find her own £40,000 wet-room without her PA relaying directions via her BlackBerry. Tonight, we're going to help her calculate the true worth of her existence using our famous vacu-ometer. Then, after we've talked her down from the ledge, we'll have our regular consultant Deirdre on hand to give Tabitha some tips on building relationships with people whose affection won't be conditional upon her haircut."
The show is going to be called: So You Want to be a Bit Less of a Twunt.
In New York, the police department took control of school safety in 1998 under the Giuliani administration; by the 2005-06 school year, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the city employed 4,625 school safety agents and at least 200 armed officers, making the NYPD School Safety Division the 10th-biggest police force in the country—larger than those of Washington, DC, Detroit, Boston, or Las Vegas. "We are treating the kids like potential criminals," says Donna Lieberman of the NYCLU. In January, a five-year-old named Denis Rivera was handcuffed behind his back by an NYPD school safety officer for throwing a tantrum in his kindergarten class in Queens.
"There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway."
The CIA has in fact been closely involved in Georgia since the Soviet collapse. But under the Bush administration, Georgia has become a fully fledged US satellite. Georgia's forces are armed and trained by the US and Israel. It has the third-largest military contingent in Iraq - hence the US need to airlift 800 of them back to fight the Russians at the weekend. Saakashvili's links with the neoconservatives in Washington are particularly close: the lobbying firm headed by US Republican candidate John McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has been paid nearly $900,000 by the Georgian government since 2004.
But underlying the conflict of the past week has also been the Bush administration's wider, explicit determination to enforce US global hegemony and prevent any regional challenge, particularly from a resurgent Russia. That aim was first spelled out when Cheney was defence secretary under Bush's father, but its full impact has only been felt as Russia has begun to recover from the disintegration of the 1990s.
George Bush kept human rights high on the Olympic agenda today by calling for freedom of expression and religion just hours before he was to attend the opening ceremony.(From today's 'Guardian')
"The abuse was horrendous, it was physical, as well as psychological. It was torture," Sharp said. "When you're locked up in such a place and treated so horrifically, they don't exactly give you a calendar, but she says it was a very long time, years for sure ... They [her captors] were Americans, there's no doubt about it."(From today's 'Guardian')
While Sharp declined to give details of the alleged abuse, Siddiqui's sister, Fauzia, told a press conference yesterday in Islamabad that Siddiqui had been "raped repeatedly". Sharp said Siddiqui was not getting proper treatment for a bullet wound, which may have gone septic.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn represented the dubious moral claims of the protagonists during the Cold War, especially the American-led side. There is no doubt that Solzhenitsyn's literary greatness or genius was highly exaggerated, and the Nobel committee's decision is only one proof. This man who was lionized as a symbol of freedom was a fascist, through and through. If American knew more about him and his views they would think twice about honoring his memory. He hated everything about America and Americans, and complained about the music that Americans listened to. He argued that Americans unlike other people would not fight for an ideal. He was truly an obscurantist, anti-Semite, reactionary, traditionalist, misogynist, and a man living in the past--the medieval past. He volunteered in communist organizations early and not so early in his life, and then later would claim that he was a struggler against communist tyranny. In fact, he dreamed of writing a definitive history of the Bolshevik Revolution, before he decided to celebrate the pre-Bolshevik past. He defended the successor organization to the KGB, and would express the most reactionary views against progress and freedom. And the numbers he claimed about the communist past and the number of prisoners were simply invented by him."Angry Arab" (As'ad Abu Khalil)
