A Thanksgiving message

As Brother David Steindl-Rast says, whether one is religious or secular, it’s hard to argue against gratefulness.

How much gratefulness we feel has little to do with whether life seems abundant or filled with hardship. On the contrary, it hinges on the degree to which we are prey to the delusion that we are self-made, or instead have discovered that life is a process in which we endlessly stumble into the unknown.

Let’s never forget what a wondrous planet we live on — a place where staggering beauty can suddenly sweep up from the horizon.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

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The boys who cry ‘Holocaust’

Gary Kamiya writes: We’ve been through this before. As one of the most disastrous wars in our history is coming to an inglorious end, the same neoconservative hawks who dreamed it up are agitating for a new war that would make Iraq look like the invasion of Grenada — and using the ultimate trump card in American politics to silence debate over it.

When hawks begin beating the drums for war in the Middle East, Israel is usually a big reason why. That was true in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and it is doubly true with the current hysteria over Iran. Despite disingenuous claims to the contrary, the only reason the U.S. is even talking about war with Iran is Israel. As the invaluable M.J. Rosenberg, who knows the working of the Israel lobby as only a former card-carrying member can, notes, “It is impossible to find a single politician or journalist advocating war with Iran who is not a neocon or an AIPAC cutout. (They’re often both.)”

Ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency released its overhyped, old-news report on Iran’s nuclear program, Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. has been loudly calling for war.

If American politics did not contain an enormous blind spot, no one would pay any attention to what these discredited ideologues have to say. The Iraq war they championed turned out to be one of the biggest foreign-policy disasters in U.S. history. Their ignorant and Islamophobic view of the Middle East is as breathtaking as their bland willingness to commit America to yet another ruinous war against a Muslim country, this time one four times larger than Iraq and with more than twice as many people. They have a demonstrated track record of complete failure.

Yet these incompetent militarists are still taken seriously. And the reason is simple: They purport to be supporters of Israel. In American politics, you can get away with even the most cracked war-mongering as long as you claim to be “pro-Israel.” And the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card for anything having to do with Israel is the Holocaust.

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How students landed on the front lines of class war

Juan Cole writes: The deliberate pepper-spraying by campus police of nonviolent protesters at UC Davis on Friday has provoked national outrage. But the horrific incident must not cloud the real question: What led comfortable, bright, middle-class students to join the Occupy protest movement against income inequality and big-money politics in the first place?

The University of California system raised tuition by more than 9 percent this year, and the California State University system upped tuition by 12 percent. The UC system is seriously contemplating a humongous 16 percent tuition increase for fall 2012. This year, for the first time, the amount families pay in UC tuition will exceed state contributions to the university system.

University students, who face tuition hikes and state cuts to public education, find themselves victimized by the same neoliberal agenda that has created the current economic crisis, and which profoundly endangers democratic values.

The ideal that California embraced in its 1960 master plan for higher education, that it should be inexpensive and open to all Californians, is being jettisoned without much debate. The master plan exemplified the thinking on education and democracy typical of Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. In 1786, Jefferson wrote from Europe to a friend:

Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [of tyranny], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance. …

That is, Jefferson believed that the alternative to publicly funded education was the rise of an oppressive oligarchy that would manipulate the ignorant majority.

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Netanyahu views the Arab Spring with complete contempt

Haaretz reports: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday blasted Israeli and world politicians who support the Arab Spring revolutions and accused the Arab world of “moving not forward, but backward.”

In his sharpest Knesset comment since the wave of uprisings swept out of Tunisia and across the Arab states in January, Netanyahu expressed his complete contempt for the Arab people’s ability to sustain democratic regimes, and his nostalgia for Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. He said he feared the collapse of Jordan’s Hashemite monarchy and also reiterated his absolute refusal to make any concessions to the Palestinians.

“In February, when millions of Egyptians thronged to the streets in Cairo, commentators and quite a few Israeli members of the opposition said that we’re facing a new era of liberalism and progress…They said I was trying to scare the public and was on the wrong side of history and don’t see where things are heading,” he said.

But time has proved him right, Netanyahu said. His forecast that the Arab Spring would turn into an “Islamic, anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli and anti-democratic wave” turned out to be true, he said.

Netanyahu also slammed Western leaders, and especially U.S. President Barak Obama, who had pushed Mubarak to resign from power. At the time this was happening Netanyahu said in closed talks that the American administration and many European leaders don’t understand reality. On Wednesday, he called them “naive.”

“I ask today, who here didn’t understand reality? Who here didn’t understand history?” he called from the Knesset podium. “Israel is facing a period of instability and uncertainty in the region. This is certainly not the time to listen to those who say follow your heart.”
Netanyahu used the upheaval in the Arab world to justify his government’s inaction vis-a-vis the peace process with the Palestinians.

“I remember many of you urged me to take the opportunity to make hasty concessions, to rush to an agreement,” he said.

“But I will not establish Israel’s policy on illusions. There’s a huge upheaval here…whoever doesn’t see it is burying his head in the sand,” he said.

“That didn’t stop people from coming to me and suggesting we make all kinds of concessions. I said we insist on foundations of stability and security…all the more so now,” he said.

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Capitalism vs. the climate

Naomi Klein writes: There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.
 
He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

Here at the Heartland Institute’s Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren’t going to pass up an opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who specializes in harassing climate scientists with nuisance lawsuits and Freedom of Information fishing expeditions, angles the table mic over to his mouth. “You can believe this is about the climate,” he says darkly, “and many people do, but it’s not a reasonable belief.” Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him look like a right-wing Anderson Cooper, likes to invoke Saul Alinsky: “The issue isn’t the issue.” The issue, apparently, is that “no free society would do to itself what this agenda requires…. The first step to that is to remove these nagging freedoms that keep getting in the way.”

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will learn that Obama’s campaign promise to support locally owned biofuels refineries was really about “green communitarianism,” akin to the “Maoist” scheme to put “a pig iron furnace in everybody’s backyard” (the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels). That climate change is “a stalking horse for National Socialism” (former Republican senator and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt). And that environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano, editor of the denialists’ go-to website, ClimateDepot.com).

Most of all, however, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

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Journalist Mona Eltahawy: I was sexually assaulted by Egypt police

Mona Eltahawy, Egyptian-American journalist and columnist.

The Guardian reports: The US-based Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy has been released according to her personal twitter account after 12 hours in detention at the hands of Cairo security forces. An earlier tweet from the account @monaeltahawy said that she was sexually and physically assaulted while being held inside the interior ministry in Cairo, in the early hours of Thursday morning.

A US embassy representative in Cairo told the Guardian that the reports of her detention were “very concerning” and that “US embassy consulate officers are engaging Egyptian authorities”.

At 10:30am on Thursday, the former Reuters Middle East correspondent who has been lauded for her recent coverage of the Egyptian uprising, began tweeting that she had spent 12 hours in detention under the authority of interior ministry and military intelligence officials and that she had suffered a serious sexual assault by up to half a dozen members of the Egyptian security forces. She also said that she had been kept blindfolded for hours and also posted a picture of her severely bruised hand.

She also thanked supporters after #freemona began trending around the world on twitter.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday night, Eltahaway who is a columnist for various papers including the Toronto Star, the Jerusalem Report and Denmark’s Politiken, and has also written for the Guardian, described scenes in and around Tahrir Square including news that a relative of hers had been killed. She ended the message by damning the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) who have control over Egypt‘s transition.

At approximately 11pm GMT she wrote “Pitch black, only flashing ambulance lights and air thick with gas Mohamed Mahmoud #Tahrir”. At around the same time she then described the violence occurring around the gates of the American University in Cairo of which she is an alumnus.

“Across street from AUC gate I used to enter every day Mohamed Mansour. Can’t believe it. A cacophony sirens, horns, flashing ambulance lights” In a penultimate tweet she appeared to write “Beaten arrested in interior ministry”.

In one of her latest tweets after her release, Eltahawy says X-rays show her left arm and right hand are broken.

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After apology, Egypt’s military rejects quick end to its rule

The New York Times reports: Egyptian generals offered an unusual apology on Thursday for the killings of protesters in Tahrir Square, the iconic landmark of the country’s revolution, but rejected the demonstrators’ demands for an immediate end to military rule.

As violence around the square eased after five days of intense clashes, the military also insisted that parliamentary elections, scheduled for next Monday, would proceed as planned.

“We will not delay elections. This is the final word,” Gen. Mamdouh Shaheen, a member of the ruling military council told a news conference.

Maj. Gen. Mukhtar el-Mallah, another council member, told the news conference that the military would not relinquish power because to do so would be “a betrayal of the trust placed in our hands by the people.” Egyptians must focus on the elections, he said, not on street protests.

“We will not relinquish power because of a slogan-chanting crowd,” he said, according to The Associated Press, “Being in power is not a blessing. It is a curse. It’s a very heavy responsibility.”

On what had been the front line of the confrontation near the square, army troops in black helmets and visors replaced the police — reviled by many protesters — and a crane lowered cement barricades behind a line of coiled barbed wire to separate the protesters from the Interior Ministry building, near the library of the American University in Cairo.

“The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces presents its regrets and deep apologies for the deaths of martyrs from among Egypt’s loyal sons during the recent events in Tahrir Square,” two generals said in a statement on a Facebook page. “The council also offers its condolences to the families of the martyrs across Egypt.”

The message struck an apparently conciliatory tone as the ruling military commanders seek to defuse the crisis in time for the elections. But thousands of people remained in Tahrir Square, many demanding the ouster of Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the de facto leader and a longtime colleague of the deposed former president, Hosni Mubarak.

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Reporting Syria

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: The Syrian regime’s blanket ban on journalist access has some carefully selected exceptions. Robert Fisk, for instance, who seems to be compensating for the naive anti-Syrian and pro-March 14th line in his reporting of Lebanon over the last years by treating the statements of Syrian regime figures – professional liar Boutheina Shaaban is one – with great naivety. At least he didn’t apply the ‘glorious’ epithet to her which he used to describe Walid Jumblatt’s wife. Fisk’s book on Lebanon “Pity the Nation” is a classic, his account of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila remain fresh in the mind (the blood-footed flies clambering over his notebook), and for many years he was one of the very few English-language journalists with some real knowledge of the Middle East. Sadly, his knowledge doesn’t extend to a working familiarity with Arabic. In several recent articles he has informed us that that the slogan of the Ba‘ath Party – umma arabiya wahda zat risala khalida – means ‘the mother of the Arab nation.’ In fact it means ‘one Arab nation with an eternal message’. Fisk is confusing ‘um’ – mother – with ‘umma’ – nation. It’s a rather disastrous mistake. Someone ought to tell him about it.

Nir Rosen is an excellent journalist who clearly does speak Arabic and who makes the effort to talk to ordinary people rather than just politicians and PR people. His book “Aftermath” is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the American occupation of Iraq catalysed an outbreak of Sunni-Shia sectarian hatred across the Arab world. His recent visit to Syria (see here and here and here and here) seems to have been both above and below regime radar. While he appears to have been smuggled in to certain locations he also interviews such regime figures as the state Mufti Hassoun – someone once known for his touchy-feely liberalism and his campaign against honour killing now making absurd threats about armies of pro-Asad suicide bombers lying low in Western countries. Unfortunately, Rosen sees Syria through the prism of Iraq’s sectarian war. He expects to find expressions of sectarian hatred, and he finds them aplenty. He can’t be blamed for making it up, because sectarian hatred certainly does exist in Syria, and because he honestly reports what people say to him. The danger of this method, however, is twofold. First, his selection of informants necessarily reinforces his bias. He does interview some pro-regime Sunni figures (like Hassoun) but chooses not to interview Alawi, Christian, Ismaili or secularist figures who support the revolution. He doesn’t consider such people to be representative of the revolution because he’s decided that the dynamic must be sectarian, even if the Ismaili town of Selemiyeh has been demonstrating for months and secularists like Suhair Atassi are very prominent in the revolution’s Coordination Committees. (Indeed, Burhan Ghalyoun, the head of the umbrella Syrian National Council, to which many demonstrations have proclaimed allegiance, is fiercely anti-clerical).

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Report finds Bahrain systematically tortured political detainees

McClatchy reports: An international human rights panel concluded Wednesday that the Sunni Muslim government of the small gulf island of Bahrain carried out “deliberate” and “systematic” torture against many of the 2,929 people it arrested last spring during protests demanding more democracy.

The panel, headed by Egyptian-born U.S. lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, also said the Bahraini government systematically used excessive force in arrests, deprived defendants of due process in special military courts, and allowed an atmosphere of impunity to take hold, where no one was accountable for upholding Bahrain’s own laws.

Bassiouni also dismissed the Bahrain government’s allegations that Iran, whose population, like Bahrain’s, is majority Shiite Muslim, interfered in the uprising. The evidence presented to the commission “does not establish a discernible link” between specific incidents in Bahrain and the Iranian government, he wrote.

At least 35 people died in the two months after the protests began Feb. 14, including three police officers allegedly killed by demonstrators; 4,439 people were fired from their jobs and charged with joining the protests; and 534 students were expelled from university for the same reason, the report said. In addition, the government destroyed or severely damaged more than 40 places of worship, almost all Shiite.

Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, who established the commission in June, welcomed the report for identifying the “serious shortcomings” in his government’s response to the demonstrations. He promised legal reforms to ensure free speech and prohibit torture and said that officials who violated the law would be held accountable and replaced.

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Yemen president quits after deal in Saudi Arabia

The Guardian reports: After nine months of mass protests calling for his resignation, Ali Abdullah Saleh has signed an agreement in Saudi Arabia transferring his powers to the vice president in return for immunity from prosecution.

With the economy on the verge of collapse and bloody clashes breaking out between armed factions of the military, Yemenis are hoping the agreement will offer a way out of the ten-month long turmoil that has left hundreds dead and the country teetering on the brink of civil war.

Saudi state television showed a smiling Saleh sitting next to Saudi King Abdullah in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Wednesday as he signed four copies of the proposal. He then clapped briefly before speaking for a few minutes to members of the Saudi royal families and international diplomats, promising to cooperate with the new Yemeni government.

“This disagreement for the last 10 months has had a big impact on Yemen in the realms of culture, development, politics, which led to a threat to national unity and destroyed what has been built in past years,” he said.

The deal, drawn up by the gulf monarchies and supported by the US, allows Saleh to retain the honorary title of President while his deputy, ‘Abd al-Rabb Mansour al-Hadi, forms and presides over a government of national unity until early presidential elections in February. In return for signing Saleh and his family are to be guaranteed immunity from prosecution.

Saleh had clung to power despite months’ of street protests, defections by top generals, ambassadors and senior members of his government and a June bomb attack on his palace that left him bed-ridden for three months in a Saudi Arabian hospital. But the recent involvement of the UN along with the potential threat of sanctions and asset freezing seemed to have convince him to go.

Despite having backed out of signing on three previous occasions, the UN envoy Jamal Benomar, who has spent the past week shuttling back and forth between the president and his various opponents in Sana’a was able to get the two sides to reach a deal.

“The agreement can become an important milestone towards restoring peace and stability, maintaining national unity and territorial integrity, and laying the foundation for economic recovery,” Benomar, told reporters in the marble lobby of a hotel in Sana’a, shortly before boarding a plane to Riyadh along with opposition officials and foreign ambassadors for the official signing ceremony.

In a bizarre turn of events, the signing coincided with an announcement from the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Saleh would be travelling to New York for medical treatment after signing the agreement. Ban told reporters Wednesday that he talked with Saleh by telephone, and would be happy to meet with him in New York but provided no information about when Saleh planned to arrive in America, nor what treatment he would be seeking.

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Egyptian military using ‘more dangerous’ teargas on Tahrir Square protesters

The Guardian reports: Egyptian security forces are believed to be using a powerful incapacitating gas against civilian protesters in Tahrir Square following multiple cases of unconsciousness and epileptic-like convulsions among those exposed.

The Guardian has collected video footage as well as witness accounts from doctors and victims who have offered strong evidence that at least two other crowd control gases have been used on demonstrators in addition to CS gas.

Suspicion has fallen on two other agents: CN gas, which was the crowd control gas used by the US before CS was brought into use; and CR gas.

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