Category Archives: Middle East

Iraq: 10 Years After Invasion | Costs of War

Iraq: 10 Years After Invasion | Costs of War.

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PROTEST AT SC STATEHOUSE TO CALL FOR CEASEFIRE IN GAZA

Emergency Gaza Protest!

SATURDAY Nov. 17th @4pm

There will be an emergency Gaza protest on Saturday November 17th at 4pm at the South Carolina Statehouse.

Demonstrators call on President Obama, Israel, Hamas to end escalating violence & a ceasefire in Gaza!  

Escalating violence in Gaza between Israel and Palestinian militants took a decided turn for the worse on Wednesday as Israel broke a tenuous truce and assassinated Hamas military commander Ahmed Jabari in a string of airstrikes in Gaza.  Hamas and Palestinian militant groups have retaliated by firing rockets deep into Israel, including at Tel Aviv.  Over twenty Palestinians including children have been killed in the ensuing Israeli airstrikes and; three Israeli civilians were killed when rockets launched by Palestinian militants struck an apartment in Israel, the first Israeli civilian fatalities from rocket attacks this year.  Israeli troops are massing on the border with Gaza and a ground invasion. 

“It is well-known that Israel’s targeted killings of Palestinian militants in Gaza provoke rocket attacks in retaliation,” says President David Matos, who has traveled to Israel/Palestine twice on peace missions.  “Israel deliberately escalated the violence by carrying out  this targeted assassination .”  At the same time, Matos notes that “an all out war in Gaza will be literal murder on both Israeli and Palestinian civilians caught in the cross-fire; it will take de-escalation on both sides to avoid that disaster.”

While the parties on the ground must de-escalate to avert further bloodshed, the US has considerable influence over Israel via the over $3 billion in military aid the US furnishes Israel every year.

“We call on President Obama to pressure Israel to stop its escalations and step back from the brink of war,” says Matos.  “If President Obama goes along with more violence, blood will be on his hands.”

Institute for Middle East Understanding Timeline of Escalating Violence~

http://imeu.net/news/article0023227.shtml

Web: www.carolinapeace.org

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A Peoples’ Primer on U.S.-Iran Relations

U.S. military bases in the Middle East

 

POLITICAL HISTORY OF IRAN

  • 1908: Oil is discovered in Persia.
  • 1914: Russian, British, and German troops occupy the country during WWI.
  • 1935: Reza Shah had the official name of the country changed from Persia to Iran.
  • 1941: During WWII, Reza Shah is forced by the Allies to grant the throne to his son, Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi due to his alleged pro-German sentiments.
  • 1951, the Majlis (Parliament of Iran) named Mohammad Mossadegh as new prime minister by a vote of 79–12, who shortly after nationalized the British-owned oil industry (see Abadan Crisis). Mossadegh was opposed by the Shah who feared a resulting oil embargo imposed by the West would leave Iran in economic ruin. The Shah flees Iran.
  • 1951: Prime Minister Mosadegh nationalizes Iran’s oil industry.
  • 1953: With British and U.S.  help, Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi returns to Iran via CIA’s  Operation Ajax.
  • 1953-1979: Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi makes Iran a rentier state (economy based on the selling of some commodity) based on oil and import substitution industrialization (focus on capital-intensive industry) which led to the neglect of agriculture and small-scale production.

The 1953 Iranian coup d’état was the first time the U.S. used the CIA to overthrow a democratically elected, civil government. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, encouraged by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a defender of transnational corporate power, agreed to send the Central Intelligence Agency in to depose Mossadegh ending democracy in Iran.

Click Link for “History of Iran & USA in 10 min”

The operation – code name “Operation Ajax” – took less than a month in the summer of 1953. Continue reading

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Footnotes to the book of the setback | By Nizar Qabbani

Friend,
The ancient word is dead.
The ancient books are dead.
Our speech with holes like worn-out shoes is dead.
Dead is the mind that led to defeat.

Our poems have gone sour.
Women’s hair, nights, curtains and sofas
Have gone sour.
Everything has gone sour.

My grieved country,
In a flash
You changed me from a poet who wrote love poems
To a poet who writes with a knife.

What we feel is beyond words:
We should be ashamed of our poems.

Stirred
By Oriental bombast,
By Antartic
(Antar, pre-Islamic poet & hero that was a symbol of an uneaten knight) swaggering that never killed a fly,
By the fiddle and the drum,
We went to war
And lost.

Our shouting is louder than our actions,
Our swords are taller than us,
This is our tragedy.

In short
We wear the cape of civilization
But our souls live in the stone age.

You don’t win a war
With a reed and a flute.

Our impatience
Cost us fifty thousand new tents.

Don’t curse heaven
If it abandons you,
Don’t curse circumstances.
God gives victory to whom He wishes.
God is not a blacksmith to beat swords.

It’s painful to listen to the news in the morning.
It’s painful to listen to the barking of dogs.

Our enemies did not cross the border
They crept through our weakness like ants.

Five thousand years
Growing beards
In our caves.
Our currency is unknown,
Our eyes are a haven for flies.
Friends,
Smash the doors,
Wash your brains,
Wash your clothes.
Friends,
Read a book,
Write a book,
Grow words, pomegranates and grapes,
Sail to the country of fog and snow.
Nobody knows you exist in caves.
People take you for a breed of mongrels.

We are thick-skinned people
With empty souls.
We spend our days practicing witchcraft,
Playing chess and sleeping.
And we the ‘Nation by which God blessed mankind’?

Our desert oil could have become
Daggers of flame and fire.
We’re a disgrace to our noble ancestors:
We let our oil flow through the toes of whores.

We run wildly through streets
Dragging people with ropes,
Smashing windows and locks.
We praise like frogs,
Swear like frogs,
Turn midgets into heroes,
And heroes into scum:
We never stop and think.
In mosques
We crouch idly,
Write poems,
Proverbs
And beg God for victory
Over our enemy.

If I knew I’d come to no harm,
And could see the Sultan,
I’d tell him:
‘Sultan,
Your wild dogs have torn my clothes
Your spies hound me
Their eyes hound me
Their noses hound me
Their feet hound me
They hound me like Fate
Interrogate my wife
And take down the names of my friends,
Sultan,
When I came close to your walls
And talked about my pains,
Your soldiers beat me with their boots,
Forced me to eat my shoes.
Sultan,
You lost two wars.
Sultan,
Half of our people are without tongues,
What’s the use of people without tongues?
Half of our people
Are trapped like ants and rats
Between walls´.
If I knew I’d come to no harm
I’d tell him:
‘You lost two wars
You lost touch with children’

If we hadn’t buried our unity
If we hadn’t ripped its young body with bayonets
If it had stayed in our eyes
The dogs wouldn’t have savaged our flesh.

We want an angry generation
To plough the sky
To blow up history
To blow up our thoughts.
We want a new generation
That does not forgive mistakes
That does not bend.
We want a generation
Of giants.

Arab children,
Corn ears of the future,
You will break out chains.
Kill the opium in our heads,
Kill the illusions.
Arab children,
Don’t read about our windowless generation,
We are a hopeless case.
We are as worthless as water-melon rind.
Don’t read about us,
Don’t ape us,
Don’t accept us,
Don’t accept our ideas,
We are a nation of crooks and jugglers.
Arab children,
Spring rain,
Corn ears of the future,
You are a generation
That will overcome defeat.

(Translated by Abdullah al-Udhari) Continue reading

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F.B.I. Searches Antiwar Activists’ Homes | Walter Lippmann

 
[CubaNews] October 05, 2010

Dear Friends –
 
Please read this note carefully, and, if you agree with the thrust of what it’s saying, copy and post it to any other lists where you can.
 
Thanks in advance.
 
The Grand Jury is being convened in Chicago tomorrow. All the help we can generate to protest this can only be helpful.
 
Last week, activists in many US cities joined in public protests against FBI raids targetting anti-war activists in several mid-western cities. I joined something like 100 people here at the Federal Building in downtown L.A. on Tuesday evening, along with a broad representation of left activists. Here’s a report from that demonstration:
 
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs3105.html  This extremely important story has been largely, but not entirely blanked out of the national media. Amy Goodman covered it in an extensive way on DEMOCRACY NOW, and the left and alternative press has given good coverage, but the dominant corporate media has given it minimal play.
 
Though people who are active specifically around Cuba weren’t targeted THIS time, we must always keep in mind that Washington, which has sponsored or turned a blind eye to terrorist attacks against Cuba, has characterized Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism”. This has a wide array of consequences, not least of which is that anyone who wishes to bring about normalization of US relations with Cuba, and end to the US blockade, or takes a stand politically in favor of the Cuban Revolution could be targeted just as were the folks in the Mid-West. They have had their homes invaded, their property seized, and been called before the grand jury tomorrow in Chicago.
 
Fidel Castro has been writing about Colombia and about the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in recent years, and most recently just a few days ago.
 
Recall the recent Colombian government attack on a key FARC base, which resulted in the death of its military commander. President Obama publicly congratulated the Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, for a job well done.
Thus the timing of these raids, at a time when protest against US foreign policy is urgently needed, underscores the importance of the right to protest here in the United States. Similarly, the removal of Piedad Cordoba from her Colombian Senate seat, BANNED FROM OFFICE FOR EIGHTEEN YEARS, though no criminal charges have been filed against her, should help everyone to understand the importance of democratic rights broadly. Her constituents have thus been denied political representation, just by decision of some official of the Colombian government.
 
 Fidel Castro: Piedad Cordoba and Her Fight for Peace
http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/reflexiones/2010/ing/c300910i.html
 
 
PRI’S “THE WORLD: Colombian senator “collaborated” with FARC
By The World ⋅ October 4, 2010

http://www.theworld.org/2010/10/04/colombian-senator-collaborated-with-farc/
 
The Committee to Stop FBI Repression, uniting diverse voices opposed to the raids and the threats to the civil liberties of all, has been formed and has called a range of actions demanding and end to the attacks. Several items will follow this one. All make essentially the same point: An injury to one is an injury to all. Stop the raids, end the repression, and file no charges. It’s not illegal to protests US foreign policy.  While the US government says it’s trying to bring democracy to the world, it’s actively working to thwart the expression of democratic rights here
in these United States of America.
 
When I called the White House, I spoke, after a very short wait, with a volunteer who said she would take my comment, but not my name, and see to it that the President receives notice of the expression of opinion. Let’s hope many call.
 
The Grand Jury convenes in Chicago tomorrow, so the more who call, the more can public opposition be made manifest. This could help press the government to draw back.

WALTER LIPPMANN
    Los Angeles, California
    Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
   
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/

    “Cuba – Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo”

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