When all you have is bombs, everything starts to look like a target. And so, after years of providing Libya's dictator with the weapons he's been using against his people, all the international community - France, Britain and the United States - has to offer the people of Libya is more bombs, this time dropped from the sky rather than delivered in a box to Muammar Qaddafi's palace.
If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it's that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate - and that democracy doesn't come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.
President Barack Obama announced his latest peace-through-bombs initiative last week - joining ongoing US conflicts and proxy wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia - by declaring he could not "stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy and ... where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government."
Within 24 hours of the announcement, more than 110 US Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired into Libya, including the capital Tripoli, reportedly killing dozens of innocent civilians - as missiles, even the "smart" kind, are wont to do. According to The New York Times, allied warplanes with "brutal efficiency" bombed "tanks, missile launches and civilian cars, leaving a smoldering trail of wreckage that stretched for miles."
"[M]any of the tanks seemed to have been retreating," the paper reported. That's the reality of the no-fly zone and the mission creep that started the moment it was enacted: bombing civilians and massacring retreating troops. And like any other war, it's not pretty.
While much of the media presents an unquestioning, sanitized version of the war - cable news hosts more focused on interviewing retired generals about America's fancy killing machines than the actual, bloody facts on the ground - the truth is that wars, even liberal-minded "humanitarian" ones, entail destroying people and places. Though cloaked in altruism that would be more believable were we dealing with monasteries, not nation-states, the war in Libya is no different. And innocents pay the price.
Russia, the Arab League and others have said that coalition airstrikes have caused significant civilian casualties. Though the number of deaths are unconfirmed at this time, Reuters repots that the Arab League will be commissioning an analysis into health ministry claims that 64 civilians died in the initial flurry of missile strikes on Libya. The New York Times also reported that civilian cars were among those hit by coalition airstrikes.
If protecting civilians from evil dictators was the goal, though - as opposed to, say, safeguarding natural resources and the investments of major oil companies - there's an easier, safer way than aerial bombardment for the US and its allies to consider: simply stop arming and propping up evil dictators. After all, Libya's Muammar Qaddafi reaped the benefits from Western nations all too eager to cozy up to and rehabilitate the image of a dictator with oil with those denouncing him today as a murderous tyrant, and just a matter of weeks ago selling him the very arms his regime has been using to suppress the rebellion against it.
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In 2009 alone, European governments - including Britain and France - sold Libya more than $470 million worth of weapons, including fighter jets, guns and bombs. And before it started calling for regime change, the Obama administration was working to provide the Libyan dictator another $77 million in weapons, on top of the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million the Bush administration provided in 2008.
Meanwhile, for dictatorial regimes in Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, US support continues to this day. On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even gave the US stamp of approval to the brutal crackdown on protesters in Bahrain, saying the country's authoritarian rulers "obviously" had the "sovereign right" to invite troops from Saudi Arabia to occupy their country and carry out human rights abuses, including attacks on injured protesters as they lay in their hospital beds.
In Yemen, which has received more than $300 million in military aid from the US over the last five years, the Obama administration continues to support corrupt thug and president-for-life Ali Abdullah Saleh, who recently ordered a massacre of more than 50 of his own citizens who dared protest his rule. And this support has allowed the US to carry out its own massacres under the auspices of the war on terror, with one American bombing raid last year taking out 41 Yemeni civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, according to Amnesty International.
Rather than engage in cruise-missile liberalism, Obama could save lives by immediately ending support for these brutal regimes. But for US administrations, both Democratic and Republican, arms sales appear to trump liberation. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute documented that Washington accounted for 54 percent of arms sales to Persian Gulf states between 2005 and 2009.
Last September, The Financial Times reported that the US had struck deals to provide Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman with $123 billion worth of arms. The repressive monarchy of Saudi Arabia accounts for over half that figure, with it set to receive $67 billion worth of weapons, including 84 F-15 jets, 70 Apache gunships, 72 Black Hawk helicopters, 36 light helicopters and thousands of laser-guided smart bombs - the largest weapons deal in US history.
Instead of forking over $150 million a day to the weapons industry to attack Libya or selling $67 billion in weapons to the Saudis so they can repress not just their own people, but those of Bahrain, we - the ones being asked to forgo Social Security to help pay for empire - should demand those who purport to represent us in Washington stop arming dictators in our name. That might drain some bucks from the merchants of death, but it would give nonviolent protesters throughout the Middle East a fighting chance to liberate themselves.
The US government need not drop a single bomb in the Middle East to help liberate oppressed people. All it need do is stop selling bombs to their oppressors.
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Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION 2011!!! OVERTHROW THE TYRANT MUBARAK!!! NO MORE ILLUMINATI PUPPETS!!! egypt 2011 25 26 27 28 29 30 january cairo protests alexandria square parliament corrupt government nwo zionists middle east arabs revolutions uprising tunisia algeria news peaceful victory world fight puppets riots streets Muslims christians atheists democracy worldwide march masses people police fighting street killed wounded revolt
'The bloody Israeli sojourn in Gaza'
Controversial American Jewish scholar and specialist on the Middle East, Norman Finkelstein, says Israel committed massive atrocities in Gaza during the three-week war against Hamas militants.
Encircled by enemies again?
prime minister of Israel’s hawkish coalition government, makes no secret of his queasiness about Egypt’s upheaval and his fear that the peace treaty with Israel’s giant Arab neighbour could unravel after 32 years. The prospect of an Egyptian government that included the Muslim Brotherhood, let alone one that were led by it, plainly gives him the creeps. For one thing, it might open the Egyptian border with Gaza (see article), so strengthening the Brothers’ Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, whose charter calls for the Jewish state’s destruction. People close to Mr Netanyahu mutter darkly about the “Hamas-isation” of Egypt, a possibility that fills most Israelis, not just on the right, with dread. “Half of the Palestinian people have already been taken over by Iran,” says Israel’s prime minister, with barely a hint of conscious hyperbole.
The Egyptian upset is heightening a sense of encirclement that has not been felt so acutely by Israelis in decades. In Lebanon to the north, a pro-Western prime minister has recently been displaced by one backed by Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia that is armed and sponsored by Iran. To the north-east, Syria, also on friendly terms with Iran, seems resolute in its support for Hamas. Meanwhile Iran itself, Israel’s biggest bugbear in the wider region and governed by a mercurial president fired with righteous anger towards Israel, moves steadily towards getting a nuclear weapon.
Perhaps even more worrying for Israel is a rising fear that on its eastern flank the ruling monarchy in Jordan, the only Arab country bar Egypt that has a formal treaty with the Jewish state, is being shaken by an assortment of Islamists, tribal leaders, Palestinians (who make up a good half of Jordan’s people), disgruntled former security men and a middle class irritated by the royal family’s perceived extravagance.
In the past year relations with Turkey, once a rare friend of Israel in the Muslim world, have gone from cool to icy. In the words of one of Mr Netanyahu’s colleagues, Israel is surrounded by a “poisonous crescent”. “We are in the midst of a regional earthquake,” says one of his ministers, clearly horrified by its possible reverberations.
Meanwhile, peace talks with the Palestinians have broken down, apparently irretrievably. The chances of their revival during Mr Netanyahu’s term in office, which has two years to run, seem negligible. Mr Netanyahu roundly blames the Palestinians for their supposed intransigence, an analysis not shared by American or European mediators and monitors, who castigate Israel’s government for refusing to freeze the building or expanding of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the main bit of a future Palestinian state.
Mr Netanyahu lays particular stress on Israel’s claimed need, if a Palestinian state were to emerge on the West Bank, to retain a military presence there; neutral foreign forces, provided by NATO, as suggested in previous negotiations, would not suffice. “What will prevent infiltration through the Jordan Valley?” he asks. “It requires an Israeli presence to prevent a takeover by Iran’s proxies.” Ministers in Israel’s ruling coalition repeatedly raise the possibility that Hamas might one day oust Mr Abbas’s milder Palestinian party. Some argue that Mr Abbas’s peace talk is a tactical ploy. “A peace treaty does not itself guarantee peace,” warns Mr Netanyahu bleakly. With such suspicions to the fore of his thinking, it is hard to see how a deal based necessarily on mutual trust could ever be struck.
Israel’s centrist opposition leader, Tzipi Livni insists that she came close to sealing a peace deal in 2008 with the Palestinians when she was foreign minister in the government replaced by Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. She excoriates what she sees as Mr Netanyahu’s hawkish ineptitude and his apparent belief that Israel will always be surrounded by an army of enemies infused with a murderous anti-Semitism.
As if Israel’s predicament in a region that may soon become more hostile is not bad enough, two more fears are nagging away. Mr Netanyahu and his colleagues are plainly discomfited by what they see as a burgeoning campaign, especially in the West, to erode Israel’s legitimacy. They cite what they deem unfair attitudes over such issues as the Turkish flotilla Israel stopped from sailing to Gaza, killing nine Turks in so doing, and the UN’s Goldstone report critical of Israel’s war in Gaza in 2009. “We are being denied our legitimate right to self-defence,” sighs one of them. Israel’s growing isolation in forums such as the UN is a gnawing worry. “If we are thrown to the wolves, we have a problem,” says a minister.
Source : http://www.economist.com/node/18186996
The Egyptian upset is heightening a sense of encirclement that has not been felt so acutely by Israelis in decades. In Lebanon to the north, a pro-Western prime minister has recently been displaced by one backed by Hizbullah, the Shia party-cum-militia that is armed and sponsored by Iran. To the north-east, Syria, also on friendly terms with Iran, seems resolute in its support for Hamas. Meanwhile Iran itself, Israel’s biggest bugbear in the wider region and governed by a mercurial president fired with righteous anger towards Israel, moves steadily towards getting a nuclear weapon.
Perhaps even more worrying for Israel is a rising fear that on its eastern flank the ruling monarchy in Jordan, the only Arab country bar Egypt that has a formal treaty with the Jewish state, is being shaken by an assortment of Islamists, tribal leaders, Palestinians (who make up a good half of Jordan’s people), disgruntled former security men and a middle class irritated by the royal family’s perceived extravagance.
In the past year relations with Turkey, once a rare friend of Israel in the Muslim world, have gone from cool to icy. In the words of one of Mr Netanyahu’s colleagues, Israel is surrounded by a “poisonous crescent”. “We are in the midst of a regional earthquake,” says one of his ministers, clearly horrified by its possible reverberations.
Meanwhile, peace talks with the Palestinians have broken down, apparently irretrievably. The chances of their revival during Mr Netanyahu’s term in office, which has two years to run, seem negligible. Mr Netanyahu roundly blames the Palestinians for their supposed intransigence, an analysis not shared by American or European mediators and monitors, who castigate Israel’s government for refusing to freeze the building or expanding of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the main bit of a future Palestinian state.
Mr Netanyahu lays particular stress on Israel’s claimed need, if a Palestinian state were to emerge on the West Bank, to retain a military presence there; neutral foreign forces, provided by NATO, as suggested in previous negotiations, would not suffice. “What will prevent infiltration through the Jordan Valley?” he asks. “It requires an Israeli presence to prevent a takeover by Iran’s proxies.” Ministers in Israel’s ruling coalition repeatedly raise the possibility that Hamas might one day oust Mr Abbas’s milder Palestinian party. Some argue that Mr Abbas’s peace talk is a tactical ploy. “A peace treaty does not itself guarantee peace,” warns Mr Netanyahu bleakly. With such suspicions to the fore of his thinking, it is hard to see how a deal based necessarily on mutual trust could ever be struck.
Israel’s centrist opposition leader, Tzipi Livni insists that she came close to sealing a peace deal in 2008 with the Palestinians when she was foreign minister in the government replaced by Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. She excoriates what she sees as Mr Netanyahu’s hawkish ineptitude and his apparent belief that Israel will always be surrounded by an army of enemies infused with a murderous anti-Semitism.
As if Israel’s predicament in a region that may soon become more hostile is not bad enough, two more fears are nagging away. Mr Netanyahu and his colleagues are plainly discomfited by what they see as a burgeoning campaign, especially in the West, to erode Israel’s legitimacy. They cite what they deem unfair attitudes over such issues as the Turkish flotilla Israel stopped from sailing to Gaza, killing nine Turks in so doing, and the UN’s Goldstone report critical of Israel’s war in Gaza in 2009. “We are being denied our legitimate right to self-defence,” sighs one of them. Israel’s growing isolation in forums such as the UN is a gnawing worry. “If we are thrown to the wolves, we have a problem,” says a minister.
Source : http://www.economist.com/node/18186996
Israel's shame as Holocaust victims die in poverty
About 80,000 Holocaust survivors emigrated to Israel after WW2. Instead of finding ease and opportunity, many discovered only loneliness and grinding poverty. They accuse Israel of failing to give them the compensation paid by Germany. They say millions of dollars that was meant for them has been used to build the country instead.
Gazans still struggle to cross Rafah border even after the whole world supported Egypt's freedom
Crowds gather outside the office of Gaza's Borders and crossings Authority, in the southern city of Rafah. The people who have come here hope to register their names with border officials in order to gain permission to leave Gaza.
Government officials announced that the registration office would open its doors Sunday morning for the first time since anti government protests broke out in Egypt on January 25th. Since then the Rafah border, the only entrance into the Gaza that bypasses Israel, has been fully closed.
But the Egyptian authorities only authorize travel through the Rafah terminal for people who fall into 4 categories: patients with medical referrals, foreign passport holders, people with visas to other countries, who go straight to the airport, and students with proof of enrollment in their universities. For all others hoping to cross the border remains unrealized.
Approximately 1400 Gazans who were stranded in Egypt during the popular revolution were finally allowed to return home. But not all were fortunate enough to make it. Finally after obtaining travel permission this man accompanied his son, sick with Cancer, to Egypt. When they got there the country fell into turmoil and they returned home without seeing the doctor. The young man died only minutes after they crossed the border back into Gaza.
His illness progressed as we were waiting for travel permission. Even if we had seen the doctors in Egypt we knew it was too late by the time we got there because he fell into a coma. He is at peace now.
As Gaza is cut off form the outside world following years of Israeli siege, government officials have announced that negotiations with Egypt to fully open the border crossing are ongoing, and observers view the gradual easing of the closure as a good sign.
The former Egyptian regime enabled the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip by closing its borders with the territory, and with both Palestinian and Egyptian figures calling for the full opening of the border, Gazans can only wait and hope that with a new Egyptian leadership the 4 year long isolation of the territory will finally come to an end.
Safa Joudeh, Press TV, Gaza
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/166204.html
4.5 Million Orphans in Iraq: Protests Over Food and Shelter
Orphans join Iraq protests over food, shelter. Orphans join protests in Iraq to call for a better standard of living. Deborah Lutterbeck reports.
BAGHDAD — Fadel Mohammad Ra'ad, 10, is one of thousands of children who have lost their parents to the endless violence that has been gripping Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.
"My parents were killed in an explosion at the center of Baghdad last year, leaving me and my sister to no one," the child told IslamOnline.net in a Baghdad orphanage. "I have relatives but all of them have refused to take us in," he added choking at the memory. "We were forced to work to survive."
Children, like many other civilians, are the silent victims of violence in war-torn Iraq. "Violence in Iraq has vast characteristics. Sectarian violence, resistance against US troops, traditional behaviors and the fight against the hungry," explains Haydar Hassan Kareem, a sociologist.
The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs estimate that around 4,5 million children are orphans. Nearly 70 percent of them lost their parents since the invasion and the ensuing violence. From the total number, around 600,000 children are living in the streets without a house or food to survive. Only 700 children are living in the 18 orphanages existing in the country, lacking their most essential needs.
"Unfortunately the budget allocated to projects that help street children and orphans is decreasing day in and day out," notes an Iraqi Red Crescent employee refusing to give his name. "Worse still, almost no NGO is dedicating itself to this group of kids who are subject to trafficking and sexual abuses in the streets."
http://tv.globalresearch.ca/2011/02/45-million-orphans-iraq-protests-over-food-and-shelter
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