Author: paulm100m

A Letter to the Editor-Palestine

On November 26 2013, the UN General  Assembly   voted to proclaim 2014 the International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was requested to organize relevant activities in cooperation with governments, the UN system, intergovernmental organizations, and significantly, civil society.  The seven countries who  opposed the proclamation were Israel,  United States, Canada, Australia,Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshall Islands. The vote was 110-7, with 56 abstentions.

I would ask  that  readers take some time to read the accounts of what has happened to Palestine and the Palestinian people since “ The Catastrophe”,  the” Nakba, when in 1948 Israeli  troops and gangs  brutally forced out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians  from the lands and houses they  had lived  in  for centuries, killing many in  the process .

This dispossession,  65 years later,  is ongoing;  each  day  more Palestinians are  uprooted from their homes, their houses and   orchards bulldozed and new “settlements  for Israeli Jews only built over the rubble. The brutality, intensity and magnitude of the occupation is for some reason, a matter for silence by Western governments. Perhaps sharing in the guilt of the Nazis in the Jewish genocide in  Europe, they turn  a blind eye to  the ghettoization of the Palestinian people.  The victim of violence has indeed become the perpetrator. In the West  Bank, the Israeli government  have walled the population in ,  has carefully calculated the minimal  calorific intake to  keep each  Palestinian alive, and has  over many years reduced West  Bank Palestinians lives to  subsistence level, reliant on  “illegal” tunnels supplying food from  Egypt, while health , water and sewage systems crumble. This systematic policy is designed to force Palestinians to abandon their homeland to allow more Israeli settlement. What is urgently needed is for our New Zealand government to finally stand up to Israel and their US supporters and say “enough is enough” and permit international law to prevail.  A separate Palestinian state is now no longer viable after 65 years. What is required therefore is, in the spirit of peace and reconciliation, a process of restoration of justice.  Modelled on the Treaty of Waitangi  process and the South African  Peace and Reconciliation process,  a  unity government of all  religions and politics across Israel  and  the rump  of Palestine  needs to be set  up. This government would oversee the return of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who  have been  dispossessed  over the past 65 years , the release from jail  of the many thousands of  Palestinian  political prisoners (men  women and children) , and the full  compensation or return of lands lost since the occcupation.

Nelson Mandelas’ vision of reconciliation and hope for the future can result in an   Israel/Palestine state that brings a message of hope to the Middle East. The alternative is not worth imagining..

 

References:

2014: International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People: Richard Falk

The Lonely Primate

In the 2008 book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection  by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, the  case is made that loneliness is an essential  and life-preserving  trait of being human. To  feel the fear of being unintentionally alone is what  keeps us safe; making us run  back to the safety of the clan. And  not just  a psychological  reflective process,  but an in-built physiological response to  the need to be part of the collective of ‘our” group.

trial2Could it be that the need to be  together drives every  one  of our “modern-day” activities: that  avoiding loneliness is the reason  why  we live in  towns and cities, why  we play sports, why we work  together, why  we fight together in  armies, why  we destroy the natural  environment around ourselves to  group together in bigger and bigger clans – that all  these activities are simply  excuses for us to  connect with our fellow primates? – that these activities are essentially meaningless except to  remove our fear of being alone.

The Social  Role Valorization  philosophy ,  developed by  Wolf Wolfensburger in  the 1970s,  offered   a model  and methodology  of inclusion for people with disabilities into  society.  Wolfensburger argued that   for people with disabilities  to have  equal status with the non disabled in  society, they  must have valued roles in  society.  The theory presupposes that   any person, to  be fully human, must   feel  and be included in  the human group  /society they  are geo-spacially part of -in other words, they  must feel themselves part of the clan and be welcomed as part of   the clan.   Wolfensburger argued that it was ‘meaningful’  activity that provided that  acceptance and value.

However, given  that  many,  if not most,  human  activities are intrinsically value-less and meaningless taken in isolation ( eg sports and war),  it would instead appear that the  core of being valued is  simply  the capacity to maintain   contact  with other humans in  a  manner that allows  reciprocal  communication and hence provides reciprocal protection and safety.

Could it be that  this “market-driven” world of consumerism  and destruction has been  elaborately constructed simply to  assuage this vulnerable soft little primate, who  cannot even see in  the dark, from  his  fear of being alone?

 

“The Government and the police have a duty to protect the public and our national security”- from truth

In the latest  absurdity upon  absurdity in this  fictitious “war  on  terror”, the UK Police have defended their actions in holding and interrogating for 9 hours  Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda on the grounds that Miranda was suspected of terrorism  because  he may  have been relaying truthful  information about  a wide range of Western governments’  illegal   spying on   its citizens.

As the headline above notes; the UK Police’s rationale for the infringement of Miranda’s rights,  was that they  “had a duty to  protect the public and our national  security ” (from  such unwarranted journalism).  With  both  the UK and US police forces being increasingly accused of both corrupt  and violent behaviour, it is little wonder the public  in  those countries feel  a sense of betrayal by  the state.  Who are their police and armed forces in  fact  protecting?

Certainly the deliberately manufactured farce of  muslim  terrorism ( funded with enthusiasm  by  the CIA, and various other “intelligence” western  agencies around the globe- not to mention our “allies”-  the Saudis), is providing an ever more thinly stretched excuse for heavy handed enforcement behaviours,  surveillance and the  erosion of civil  rights.

Who and what  is  it all for?

DublinBaysmallIt would appear that much of this deterioration in  rights and freedoms is simply to  improve the profits of those international  corporates ,  whether media, arms manufacturers ,  energy  companies telecommunications or security companies that  are able to buy the required  influence in  western  “democracies”.

As it becomes increasingly clear  that  we  are nearing the end of the free capitalistic lunch-with  the remainder of  the world’s  natural  resources  being rapidly frittered away for a few quick  bucks  – the corporate billionaires are rushing for the exits, and trampling us “little people” in  the stampede.

 

How our Fellow Animals make Primates of us all

Over the last 20 years there has been increasing scientific evidence of the reality that “animals” vary little from homo sapiens in terms of their capacity to feel, to have cognition and to be aware of their circumstances. That very ‘useful’  set of historical assumptions  of the lack of true ‘awareness’ of other species compared to  homo  sapiens, which has enabled those of us who  wish to kill  or hurt other species on  the grounds of their implicit inferiority to  humans, has now been fully discredited.

Tilly1
Tilly

It is therefore inevitable that, over the next few decades, a global ethical and moral shift to the full valuing of other sentient life on our little planet will occur. This will in turn translate into a massive reduction in meat eating by homo sapiens and the need for environments where other species are respected and protected. While this world-wide ethical  and moral  shift  and its translation  into  alternative action to  value other species as we would our own, may currently appear absurd to my dear readers, it is worthwhile to  consider how rapid the global moral  and ethical  shifts against issues such  as slavery or the rights of women have occurred in  the last  200 years.

It is therefore vital that  both  states and individuals  start to  explore both the implications of that shift in  attitude towards   species other than our own, and to  assist  in  driving that  change towards a better world for all of us who  inhabit this little blue world.

While the challenges to the economic environment  of those state entities whose economies are predominantly reliant  on the export of meat  are  undoubtedly immense if we are to  shift  to a  no-kill  economy;  the opportunities as a world leader in environmental  and species ethics  and practice are also  enormous.

The evidence for the greater efficiency and sustainability of a non-meat based agrarian economy is out there now; we can start to plan for this inevitable change or be sidelined by other more ethical and forward looking economies.  No-kill agricultural produce that is produced in a fully environmentally sustainable way, will be in huge and ever-increasing demand as the ethical  and moral  framework of our  species shifts its awareness in  the decades to come.

Given the indisputable evidence that other animals than homo sapiens have the same value and senses as ourselves, it is imperative that all laws regarding the management of animals ensure that no cruelty or suffering is permitted under government regulation.

In just one of many examples of research into  animal  behaviour that  explores the real  capacities of  other species,  the recent  Guardian article on the work  of Tetsuro Matsuzawa at  the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University exposes how chimpanzees on  a number of cognitive fronts are superior to  homo sapiens .

It is important to  note that  all  research  by homo sapiens is naturally slanted to  place positive  attributes on  those skills that  are traditionally deemed “human”,  and to either ignore , minimise,  ridicule or even simply not observe those skills and attributes  of other species that  are less familiar to us or deemed by  humans to be not important or irrelevant. In addition,   our sensory range  as humans limits our capacity to  even understand at  a basic level ,  th edepth of  awareness of many other species.

One revealing comment by  Prof. Matsuzawa in  the Guardian article is his statement that “As humans evolved and acquired new skills – notably the ability to use language to communicate and collaborate – they lost others they once shared with their common simian ancestors. “Our ancestors may have also had photographic memories, but we lost that during evolution so that we could acquire new skills,” he says. “To get something, we had to lose something.”  As the supremely arrogant and species-centric organisms that humans are;  we have  glorified our  skills, while ignoring our sensory  and cognitive deficits in  comparison  to other species on the planet.

Perhaps our most unique  skill, is our capacity to   manipulate our environment  to  suit our own ends. It is likely to also be our, and the rest of the species on this planet’s , undoing.

Postscript

A recent article in  The Guardian entitled “The American lawyer seeking human rights for chimpanzees” examines with  some incredulity and implied mirth at  the idea-that  a US lawyer is campaigning for chimpanzees  to have the same legal rights as human beings.  The article references the NonHumanRights Project ;  one of the first  of many  human organisations devoted to  rights and equality for all sentient beings on this planet.

George Galloway and the “Killing of Tony Blair”

The obscene, machiavellian  and calculating Tony Blair may  finally get  his come-upance.

George Galloway,  UK   MP, has launched a crowd-funding project  via    Kickstarter   entitled “The Killing of Tony Blair”, to raise £100,000   so  that George Galloway  can   produce a  film  about Tony Blair and his life of exploitation and mass murder for profit.

Blair@ Karimov
Karimov, (L) the brutal Uzbekistan dictator, and the smiling Tony Blair (R) (courtesy of Craig Murray’s blog)

If this film  can really make a mark  with the public, there is a real chance that Blair and other war  criminals like him ,  will be making  their excuses  before the International  War Crimes Tribunal in  short order .

As of 28th  September,  the project had raised  £87,141  towards its £100,000 goal.

Make your donation now and make a real  difference for the future- lets stop  the killers!

The Slaves of the World

A recent Guardian article about the lives of  migrant workers in  Qatar highlights the issues of forced labour and slavery in  middle eastern and some European countries.

As the Guardian article notes; Qatra has the highest ratio  of migrant workers to  the domestic population in the world; more than 90%.  Aidan McQaude of Anti-Slavery International has no hesitation in calling many of these migrants not just  forced labour, but true slaves;   people who  are treated as objects.

Craig Murray,  ex British ambassador to  Uzbekistan  and long time campaigner against   child labour/slavery in their cotton  fields, notes that  both the tolerance and the exploitation of slavery or cheap  labour inevitably goes right to  the top. In Uzbekistan’s case,  to its  torture loving  President Karimov and his daughter (who  are such good friends with Tony Blair!) .  Anti Slavery  International  describes the working conditions for children  in the cotton  fields thus:  Cotton production in Uzbekistan is a state orchestrated forced-labour system. The Government of Uzbekistan forces over a million children, teachers, public servants and private sector employees to pick cotton under appalling conditions each year. Those who refuse are expelled from school, fired from their jobs, and denied public benefits or worse. The Government harasses and detains citizens seeking to monitor the situation.

In  Qatar’s case, the official responses to  the accusations  of slavery  are so  far at odds with the reality on  the ground ,  that it would be very  surprising that  the government authorities and companies involved did not have full cognisance of the systemic  exploitation occurring.

Asia News notes that  the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)  highlighted “contradictions with Qatari law” that fail “to give workers any real rights or protection from slavery conditions.”

ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said the visa sponsorship system in Qatar allows the exaction of forced labour. “Under Qatari law, employers have near total control over workers. They alone choose if a worker can change jobs, leave the country or stay in Qatar,” she said.

In 2012, the Labour Relations Department in Qatar’s Labour Ministry received 6,000 worker complaints. The top concerns facing workers included exploitation, delays in paying wages, violence and work-related safety issues and fatalities.

In one of those most malignant of ironies, Qatar is one of the richest  countries in  the world for its Qatari  citizenship  population of 300,000 (total  population of 1.9  million)

Similarly, across the border in  Saudi  Arabia, the Guardian  in January  2013, noted that  45 foreign maids faced beheading  by  the State executioner . The International  Labour Organisation’s (ILO) Committee of Experts on the Application of (Labour Rights) Conventions  noted in  2012 that in Saudi  Arabia the   vulnerable situation of migrant workers, particularly domestic workers who are excluded from the provisions of the Labour Code, who are often confronted with employment policies such as the visa “sponsorship” system and subjected to abusive employer practices such as the retention of passports, non-payment of wages, deprivation of liberty and physical and sexual abuse which cause their employment to be transformed into situations that could amount to forced labour.

The Himalayan Times in July 2012  stated that up  to  3,000   migrant workers  from Nepal alone  had died in Saudi  Arabia since  2000.

The GypsyHowever as Migrant Rights notes, the abuse of workers is not limited to Qatar or Saudi Arabia, abuse is epidemic and systemic  in  the middle east and beyond.

As I have noted in  a previous blog , “We are all Immigrants”,  none of us have any rights to  this piece of land we currently  plant our feet on. We are simply travelers, as were our ancestors before us. And to  be fully human ,  we must  welcome those new travelers amongst  us too. And yet we continue to  play  this foolish and deadly game of  “us’  and the “others”.

French  attitudes towards  the Roma are also  indicative of the mindless attitude of those in  power towards those who believe that  simply because they  and their ancestors happen to have lived in  a geographically bounded state territory  for some time, they  are entitled to certain  privileges, and those who  are recent comers are not. The brutal   and barbarous attitude by  many in Australia towards  the “boat people” from  Asian countries, is a supreme example of this  vicious mind-set.

The concept of “citizenship” is a useful mirage,  a fiction created by states to  marginalize some populations.

In  reality any person  who lives under the jurisdiction of a state geographic entity needs to be protected by  its laws;  whether they be  occupiers of the lands for many generations,  recent  migrants,  asylum seekers, or migrant workers.

As  As’ad AbuKhalil,  aka the Angry Arab states, it is the ignorance of racsim that  drives these  brutal policies and systems of exploitation and terror.

Memento Mori

I am  reminded of my own inevitable mortality by  this,  as  always,  superb  and quirky literary  piece by  Lewis Lapham entitled Memento Mori ; The Death of American Exceptionalism — and of Me .

It is a  reminder that  we do  not live forever;  and why  should we should choose to want to?

Daleksmall
                     The Dalek

Yes, this life brings  to each of us a  superb melodrama of emotional  highs and lows ,  both wonderful  and tragic moments,  physical pain  and ecstasy.  But perhaps for me, it will not be a sad day  when  this feeble little ego; constructed upon  nothing but fear  and ignorance, departs this mortal  coil.

But what is indeed sad and tragic,  are those of us who continue to   hurt  our own and other species on  this little planet we chance to  be on, to  inflate our little fragile make-believe egos.

Sustainable Agriculture: It is possible

Over the years, there have been many discussions about the  potential to  create large-scale organic  farming enterprises to  replace the disastrous  impacts of chemical farming.

A lovely article by  Tom Philpott of Mother Jones outlines  one  attempt by  some US farmers to break  the  dead-end cycle of spraying,  tilling and loss of environment caused by commercial  farming, using no-plough methods and winter “cover crops”. While this method does not completely eliminate  the toxic impacts of spraying ;  it does go  a long way  to  develop  large-scale sustainable  farming practice.

Another “new” farming concept is  is the use of charcoal  in  soil.  Native american indians used Terra preta in pre-Columbian times to  create long term sustainable gardens in  environments where high  rainfall  leaching should have made sustainable agriculture impossible.

The ShortcutGiven  that  at  least  a third of commercially produced food is wasted, it would seen perfectly feasible to  create food sources closer to  food  consumers, allowing less wastage in  transit,  and better targeting of food production to  need.

We dont need the environmental  destruction that is touted as necessary  by  agribusiness to  create sustainable  global food production. We don’t need to  keep  killing our essential  insects   with  insecticides, spraying weedicides to  control  the plants we dont want,   constantly digging up  the soil to  destroy  its structure and life, and  destroying more and more natural  environments  and the plants and animals that live there, for short-term gain. We can live a  wonderful  sustainable and more joyful life through  living instead of buying.

 

Laurent Fabius: The Little Lion of Syria

Now that  Assad’s government in Syria has agreed to hand over supervision of its chemical  weapons to the United Nations, some of the wind in the sails of the West’s determination to  attack Syria has dissipated.

Damascus in Flames1926
Damascus in flames as a result of the French air raid on 18 October 1925
http://schools-wikipedia.org/wp/d/Damascus.htm

Yet France and its Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius are determined to  ensure that  a military strike remains likely, with  France’s tabling of a UN resolution that   would require “serious consequences” if the chemical  weapons handover was not completed according to  UN  requirements  or on  time.  Currently it is unclear what  is motivating Fabius’ need to  be the leader of the dogs of war against  Syria.  It is possibly some attempt by  the Socialist  government to  regain  some political support in  France-although every French   poll is indicating that   French  involvement in  Syria would have the entirely opposite effect.  Or is it an  attempt to  revive the glories of colonial  France by re-bombing Damascus all over again , as it did in  1925-26 when those dark-skinned natives dared to  fight for their own freedom  from  their French  oppressors?

Or is it simply a matter of cash?,   as  Wayne Madsen  reports  for Iranian  Press TV, where he states that  the Saudi Arabian spy chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al  Saud has been spending large amounts of Saudi  oil  money to  “pay off” key members of the US Senate and House leadership  as well as key  ministers of the French  government.

It may  also be that   Fabius’  war-mongering,  like the UK foreign minister’s  William Hague’s foreign policy decisions,  appear  wholly  based on  unconditional support for the Israeli  state and its expansion.  Hague the UK Foreign  Minister , who , in an interview with the Israeli website YNetNews describes himself as  “a natural friend of Israel”.  Any actions that  turn Shi-ite against  Sunni in the countries surrounding Israel  have to be,  they reason, good for Israel.

Its my guess, that  Al Qaeda think  otherwise…

What is certain is that  “Western” bombing of Syrian  infrastructure will  cause  even  greater suffering than  Syrians from  both  sides  are experiencing now. The experience of Libya in the last Western  bombing campaign, is sadly  illustrative.  And what  should by  now be evident to  anyone  is that bombings or cruise missiles are not “precision targeted’  despite the hype .  They frequently make errors both in  their electronic targetting and,  as is so often  the case, the targeting coordinates are  based on  unreliable inadequate or false information.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia,Qatar, the UK, France and the US have been steadfast  that there should be no  negotiations while Assad is in  power;  in  other words,  that  Assad’s forces will have to be defeated first before there are “negotiations”!-these are not the principles of those who  espouse peace and reconciliation- what  they appear to  want is the destruction of the Syrian  state, with their pundits arguing ( as they have  done in Iraq) that  Syria must be broken up into  its constituent sectarian geographies. Such  a breakup, (largely fomented by  those outside powers themselves) will  certainly not benefit the Syrian  citizens of those enclaves,  but will  certainly benefit  Israel (in the short term) and Saudi Arabia’s salafist mercenaries.

__________________________________________________________________________

Links

Moon of Alabama covers many of the issues regarding how a chemical  weapons transfer might occur.

A very  French (and implausible) take on  French  jingoism  for war  in Syria

The New (Syrian) War to end a War

Once again  the United States is beating the drums for war;  just one more country it can  save by  killing its  population and destroying its infrastructure. The ludicrous nature of the arguments for war  put forward by  Obama, Kerry and  McCain  speak  volumes about the intellectual  capacity of those 3 gentlemen.

Bombing and murdering  another country’s people doesn’t stop  the bombing and murdering;  negotiations do. In  the end;  every  time,  the two parties must  come to  the table and talk.  However negotiating is, I recognise,  a  hard thing for bullies to  condescend to  do.

Perhaps wishful thinking on  my part,  but there does seem to be a growing understanding in  the world communities that these endless US wars in the Middle East  are in  fact  just pretexts for  destroying sovereign nations that might oppose US or Israeli interests in  the region.

It is instructive to listen to  Al Jazeera  attempting to whip  up  fear  that  the Assad government will do this or that if it is not stopped- the propaganda line is so obvious and implausible that  most people will  simply turn their news off.

The recent experience of what  happens when NATO and the US “liberate” another dark  skinned country ; Libya,Iraq, Yemen should be enough for anyone to  recognise that  liberation by  Western countries is not a benign  experience.  And as  Press TV notes, the US administration’s assessment  of “high  confidence” that  the Syrian  Assad regime carried out the chemical  attack  is an amazing piece of sophistry.   Since when was anyone convicted and sentenced to death  based on “high confidence”  that they had committed that offence?    Before we murder thousands  of people, and destroy  their capacity to live ordinary  lives-lets please have some evidence.  But that may be way too much to ask.

_______________________________________________________________________

Links

A great  article by  David Swanson  at  Washington’s Blog succinctly outlines the insanity of yet  another war.

A lovely article at  Just  World News from Helena Cobban on  the lunacy  of this war  and AIPAC’s lobbying

A   summary of the current  (9th  September 2013) state of affairs re Syria by  Lara Setrakian  at  Syria Deeply