November 2010
Vol 10, No 11
CURRENCY WAR : TO BE OR NOT TO BE By Farooque Chowdhury
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t is now currency theatre. Exchange rates are policy weapon. A currency war is raging. Opinions differ. But the reality is there, a charged reality, a reality with high unemployment, countries with huge debt problem, countries artificially devaluing their currencies. All these are symptoms of the crisis the capitalist system is going through. Economic super powers baffled by the financial crisis are facing each other. Exchange rates are being used to puzzle out domestic problems. This in turn may lead to a trade war around the world, may derail the fragile global recovery, the cherished dream of the mainstream. George Soros, the billionaire currency investor reputed to have made $1bn by “breaking the Bank of England” during the Black Wednesday fiscal crisis in 1992, has warned: A global “currency
war” pitting China versus the rest of the world could lead to the collapse of the world economy. Guido Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister coining the phrase – Currency War – said: We’re in the midst of a currency war. Zoellick, the World Bank head, however, doesn’t foresee that the world is moving into currency war. Although he admits: There is tension. “Tensions can lead to trouble ...” Strauss-Kahn, the International Monetary Fund head echoed: A currency war risks undermining the global recovery. “The momentum [of economic co-operation] is decreasing.” The recently concluded IMF meeting,witnessed exercises without concrete action on exchange rates. The final communiqué seemed a setback for the US. A significant sign it carried. Japan, Brazil, Peru and other countries are trying to beggar thy neighbor. Brazil
has doubled a tax on foreign purchases of local bonds, South Korea has warned of new trading limits, and Greece and Turkey are trying to expand exports. Countries are seeking to devalue currencies to boost exports and jobs. China with its $2,450bn in reserves in June 2010, 30 percent of the world total, 50 percent of its own GDP and largest in the world, has reaffirmed plans for currency appreciation at its own pace. Turn to next page
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LEAKING THE TRUTH.............It has now been
FORCES OF FAITH TRUMPS LAW IN AYODHYA CASE
revealed that one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States in 2009—2010 was..........................................P 2
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By Siddharth Varadarajan................................P 4
T HE US-S AUDI M ILITARY D EAL AND GLOBAL EXPENDITURE.............The
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US plan to sell US 60 billion dollars worth of military equipment to Saudi Arabia will not contribute to peace and security in the Middle East. .....................................................................P 3
MAIREAD M AGUIRE 10 Y EAR D EPORTATION FROM ISRAEL?
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T OP T EN Q UESTIONS A BOUT C HILE M INE COLLAPSE
FACING UP TO A REFLECTION
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By Seth P. Robinson.........................................P 10
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continued from page 1 Soros wrote in the Financial Times: “China has emerged as a leader of the world. They control not only their own currency but actually the entire global currency system,” he said. A nervous Europe pitifully learns from Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel economics laureate: Euro may not survive. Its future is looking “bleak”. Memories of strong euro during its childhood days make speculators nostalgic. The US and Britain have flooded their economies with liquidity and have kept interest rates extremely low. Thus they have effectively devalued their currencies. Germany with huge trade surpluses, and Ireland, Portugal and Greece with deficits are putting intense pressure on the euro. Europe fractured now with cracks is having a row over exchange rates. Banks are again in “business as usual”. Investors have claimed that China was deliberately keeping the yuan, the Chinese currency, low to keep exports cheap. This is hurting US competitors. Manufacturers in the US contend that the yuan is undervalued by as much as 40 percent and this has cost millions of US manufacturing jobs by making Chinese goods cheaper in the US market and American products more expensive in China. With high unemployment, a miserable GDP, and declining economic power the US finds no other way than running its printing presses to the limits and pointing the finger of accusation: China is keepng its currency low. Geithner tells: China’s actions set off “a dangerous dynamic.” Along with the US economy czar, the IMF
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seemingly has taken a tougher line with China, which has refued to let the yuan appreciate more rapidly fearing that it could lead to social turmoil. US House legislation says China is a currency manipulator. But still China produces profit for a section of US capital. The reality is pushing pundits to change positions. Matías Vernengo, Assistant Professor, at the Economics Department and the Latin American Studies Program of the University of Utah, wrote in TripleCrisis (Oct. 5, 2010): The current unemployment crisis has led Paul Krugman to suggest that the US would be justified in raising tariffs on Chinese goods. In the recent crisis, Krugman seems to believe that the impossibility of using fiscal policy, for political reasons, renders the US similar to a developing country. China, it seems, has all the desire to avoid Japan’s Lost Decade. China wants to buy Greek bonds. But European policymakers are worried that this would push up the euro against the yuan. There are contradictions between China and the Eurozone countries. The strained Sino-Japanese relation is also there. Contradictions among capital are surfacing with long-term implications. The trend in currencies shows competing economic interests. With manipulation and speculation, and with a secular deficient domestic demand the matured capitalist world is striving to survive by resorting to export-led growth. The conflict over exchange rates means that major capitalist countries are now trying to conquer their crisis by conquering bigger portions of markets.
LEAD ARTICLE The coming months will be challenging. The global financial system is still in a period of significant uncertainty and remains the Achilles’ heel of the economic recovery. According to the IMF, “Nearly $4 trillion of bank debt will need to be rolled over in the next 24 months.” The IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report says, “Governments will have to inject fresh equity into banks, particularly in Spain, Germany and the US, as well as prop up their funding structures by extending emergency support. Progress toward global financial stability has experienced a setback since April ... [due to] the recent turmoil in sovereign debt markets.” With this backdrop the currency conflict has increased the world system’s vulnerability. Capital’s present striving for increasing exports is only for the sake of its own survival. It is trying to increase overseas market but is not willing to assist domestic consumers. Its “struggle” for competitiveness is its “struggle” for higher profits. But it cannot escape contradictions. The currency conflict shows deep rooted contradictions, counting days for surfacing. It shows signs of significant shifts in geopolitics. 12 October, 2010 Farooque Chowdhury is an ex-editor of Paribesh patra, an environmental periodical. He is the author of numerous books, the latest one is The Age of Crisis.
Source: Countercurrents.org
STATEMENTS LEAKING It has now been revealed that one of the 25 most censored news items in the United States in 2009—2010 was a report on “ The War Crimes of the US General, Stanley McChrystal” by that outstanding investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh. Hersh shows that McChrystal who headed the Joint Special Operations
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Command (JSOC) during the presidency of George Bush junior ran a highly secretive elite unit directed towards “black operations.” The unit, which reported to Vice-President Dick Cheney, specialized in the assassination of individuals in foreign countries who it deemed a threat to US interests. Though
such assassinations were against US law, they were carried out, Hersh alleges, in various countries in Latin America and the Middle East. The unit and the JSOC were also implicated in the torture of prisoners in secret ghost detention continued next page
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continued from page 2 centres. Camp Nama in Iraq was one such facility which was concealed from the International Committee of the Red Cross(ICRC), tasked with ensuring that an occupying power complies with the Geneva Conventions. It appears that since Barack Obama assumed the presidency in January 2009, the JSOC has become less clandestine and more regulated. These revelations about General McChrystal should be seen in the larger context of the massive military leaks pertaining to Afghanistan and Iraq since July 2010. In that month WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange exposed to the public 75,000 military reports on civilian massacres, tortures and detentions in connection with the US led war in Afghanistan. They implicated not just the US armed forces and its NATO partners but also the Afghan government. The cruel misdeeds of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are also laid bare in those documents. In October, WikiLeaks released almost 400,000 military messages related
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to the war in Iraq which showed how prisoners had been tortured, raped and murdered by Iraqi security personnel; how private US military contractors such as Blackwater, now renamed Xe services, killed civilians ; and how the US army sought to cover up civilian death tolls. The leaks also tell us that hundreds of civilians were murdered at checkpoints. Al-Qaeda’s exploitation of children and the mentally challenged in suicide bombings are detailed in various military dispatches just as they also spell out the involvement of Iranian agents in the training and arming of Iraqi militants. The leaks in a sense confirm what Afghan and Iraqi war veterans have been sharing with American journalists for years. But the mainstream media, dominated by corporate interests sometimes linked to the US military machine, have chosen to ignore the truth knowing full well that it would have jeopardized their interests and the interests of the political establishment. It is not surprising that certain mainstream media outlets are now going all out to character assassinate Julian Assange.
THE US - SAUDI MILITARY DEAL The US plan to sell US 60 billion dollars worth of military equipment to Saudi Arabia will not contribute to peace and security in the Middle East. The biggest arms deal ever in history, it provides for the sale of jetfighters and helicopters to oil-rich Saudi Arabia over a period of 15 to 20 years. US officials have stated that it will enhance the security of its key allies in the region, especially in the context of the alleged threat from Iran. The Saudis, according to Pentagon sources, are worried about Iran’s missile arsenal. Independent political analysts, however, do not regard Iran as a threat to its Arab neighbours. While the rhetoric of some of its leaders may be belligerent, Iran’s diplomatic moves since the late nineties have been aimed at strengthening its ties with states in the Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia.
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S T A T E M E N T S We should not allow those who speak – or leak— the truth to be subjected to such injustice and indignity. Global public opinion should rally around Assange. We should also come to the defence of Private Bradley Manning, the 22 year-old, who leaked classified military information including a video of a US army helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians in 2007, and is now in military detention in Virginia in the US. Citizens groups should demand his unconditional release. More important, both the horrendous human rights violations committed by the US and its allies and the Afghan and Iraqi governments, on the one hand, and the excesses of those who are resisting occupation, on the other, should be condemned by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World (JUST). Malaysia. 31 October, 2010.
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There are perhaps other motives behind the US-Saudi deal which have not been highlighted in the mainstream media. The sale reinforces US military hegemony in a region that it perceives as vital for its triple interests - Israel, oil and geopolitical control. In this regard, it should be borne in mind that the US military would retain operational control over the weaponry purchased by the Saudis. Since the sale is huge, it will also help to fill the coffers of corporate weapons manufacturers at a time when the US economy is in deep trouble But the consequences for the Middle East could be dire. It could encourage both friends and foes of the US to increase their military expenditure. This could ignite an arms race in the region. An arms race in turn could intensify tensions in the Middle East which is already a cockpit of conflict. An arms race could also skew the priorities
of individual states and lead to the subordination of other more important goals such as the eradication of poverty or the elimination of illiteracy or the minimization of corruption. This is why countries in Asia should be careful about expanding their military budget. They should not allow weapons manufacturers and arms merchants— supported by political leaders— to dupe them into making unnecessary military purchases. This danger is all the more real today than in the past since some of the countries in the region are rich and maybe the targets of those who are hellbent on pursuing their business-cumpolitical agenda. Indeed, escalating military expenditure is a global challenge. Global military expenditure in December 2009 stood at 1.5 trillion US dollars. This represents a six percent increase in real continued next page
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continued from page 3 terms over 2008. Compared to 2000, it is a 49 percent increase! Worse, the entire UN budget— the budget of the body charged with maintaining global peace— in 2009 was only 1.8 percent of global military expenditure in that year. It is significant that the US alone accounted for 46.5% of global military expenditure in 2009. The respected Swedish peace institute, SIPRI, observes that massive US military expenditure is one of the contributory factors to the decline of the US economy in the last
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decade. It is worth noting that for a few years after the end of the cold war in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, global military expenditure went down but in the last 10 years it has gone up again. It is now 2.7 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) which translates into US 225 dollars per person in the world! There is no doubt at all that global military expenditure has to be curbed and controlled for the good of humankind. It will be no easy task. For the vested interests that sustain military budgets in
A R T I C L E S most countries are powerful. Nonetheless, we have to persevere. Perhaps for a start, governments with low military budgets, anti-war, pro-peace civil society groups and those sections of the media with a conscience, should come together to plan the mass mobilization of public opinion against mammoth military spending. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World (JUST). Malaysia. 24 October, 2010.
ARTICLES TOP TEN QUESTIONS ABOUT CHILE MINE COLLAPSE By Juan Cole The corporate mass media (especially television) did not treat the Chilean mine collapse as a labor story but rather as a feel-good human interest story. It not only avoided asking hard questions about why the near-disaster occurred and why the mine workers could be treated like guinea pigs by their employers, it actively obscured these questions. I saw a psychobabbling guest of Tony Harris on CNN actually talking about how the Chilean government is the father figure for the miners and their supporters and people are turning to it for succor and inspiration. I threw up a little in my mouth. So here are the questions that a social historian would ask about the sorry episode, and which I never heard anyone on television news ask during all
the wall to wall coverage: 1. What were the miners mining? (A.: Gold and copper). 2. Did the high price of gold and the fact that the mining company was close to bankruptcy cause the company executives to cut corners? 3. Are the mine owners guilty of criminal negligence? 4. Why did the San Estaban mining company reopen the mine so quickly after an earlier tunnel collapse severed the leg of a mine worker? 5. Why is there no accountability for the mine owners? 6. Is George W. Bush-style deregulation of the mining industry by the Chilean government part of the problem here? 7. What is the influence of big gold and copper corporations over US policy?
8. Are copper and gold mine owners stronger in relation to workers and have they escaped government regulation because the US engineered a coup in 1973 to destroy the Chilean Left? 9. Was the San Estaban mining company’s ability to marginalize the union and to disregard input from the workers rooted in American-imposed corporate privilege? 10. In other words, was the trapping of these workers in the first place Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s fault? 14 October, 2010 Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Source: JuanCole.com
FORCE OF FAITH TRUMPS LAW AND REASON IN AYODHYA CASE By Siddharth Varadarajan If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging
dispute over a piece of property in Ayodhya on the basis of an unverified and unsubstantiated reference to the “faith and belief of Hindus.”
New Delhi: The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has made judicial history by deciding a long pending legal
The irony is that in doing so, the court has inadvertently provided a shot in the arm for a political movement that cited
the very same “faith” and “belief” to justify its open defiance of the law and the Indian Constitution. That defiance reached its apogee in 1992, when a 500year-old mosque which stood at the disputed site was destroyed. The legal and political system in India stood silent continued next page
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continued from page 4 witness to that crime of trespass, vandalism and expropriation. Eighteen years later, the country has compounded that sin by legitimising the “faith” and “belief” of those who took the law into their own hands. The three learned judges of the Allahabad High Court may have rendered separate judgments on the title suit in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case but Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on one central point: that the Hindu plaintiffs in the case have a claim to the disputed site because “as per [the] faith and belief of the Hindus” the place under the central dome of the Babri Masjid where the idols of Ram Lalla were placed surreptitiously in 1949 is indeed the “birthplace” of Lord Ram. For every Hindu who believes the spot under the central dome of the Babri Masjid is the precise spot where Lord Ram was born there is another who believes something else. But leaving aside the question of who “the Hindus” referred to by the court really are and how their actual faith and belief was ascertained and measured, it is odd that a court of law should give such weight to theological considerations and constructs rather than legal reasoning and facts. Tulsidas wrote his Ramcharitmanas in 16th century Ayodhya but made no reference to the birthplace of Lord Rama that the court has now identified with such exacting precision five centuries later. The “faith and belief” that the court speaks about today acquired salience only after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a political campaign in the 1980s to “liberate” the “janmasthan.” Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter of what is right and wrong in law. Nor can the righting of supposed historical wrongs become the basis for
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dispensing justice today. In 1993, the Supreme Court wisely refused to answer a Presidential Reference made to it by the Narasimha Rao government seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu temple once existed at the Babri Masjid site. Yet, the High Court saw fit to frame a number of questions that ought to have had absolutely no bearing on the title suit which was before it. One of the questions the court framed was “whether the building has been constructed on the site of an alleged Hindu temple after demolishing the same.” Pursuant to this question, it asked the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a dig at the site. This was done in 2003, during the time when the BJP-led
National Democratic Alliance government was in power at the Centre. Not surprisingly, the ASI concluded that there was a “massive Hindu religious structure” below, a finding that was disputed by many archaeologists and historians. The territory of India — as of many countries with a settled civilisation as old as ours — is full of buildings that were constructed after pre-existing structures were demolished to make way for them. Buddhist shrines made way for Hindu temples. Temples have made way for mosques. Mosques have made way for temples. So even if a temple was demolished in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Masjid, what legal relevance can that have in the 21st century? And if such demolition is to serve as the basis for settling property disputes today, where do we draw the
A R T I C L E S line? On the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi can be seen the remnants of a Hindu temple, perhaps even of the original Vishwanath mandir. Certainly many “Hindus” believe the mosque is built on land that is especially sacred to them. The denouement of the Babri case from agitation and demolition to possession might easily serve as a precedent for politicians looking to come to power on the basis of heightening religious tensions. Even assuming the tainted ASI report is correct in its assessment that a Hindu temple lay below the ruins of the Babri Masjid, neither the ASI nor any other expert has any scientific basis for claiming the architects of the mosque were the ones who did the demolishing. And yet two of the three High Court judges have concluded that the mosque was built after a temple was demolished. From at least the 19th century, if not earlier, we know that both Hindus and Muslims worshipped within the 2.77 acre site, the latter within the Babri Masjid building and the former at the Ram Chhabutra built within the mosque compound. This practice came to an end in 1949 when politically motivated individuals broke into the mosque and placed idols of Ram Lalla within. After 1949, both communities were denied access though Hindus have been allowed to offer darshan since 1986. In suggesting a three way partition of the site, the High Court has taken a small step towards the restoration of the religious status quo ante which prevailed before politicians got into the act. But its reasoning is flawed and even dangerous. If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging. 01 October, 2010 Siddharth Varadarajan is the Strategic Affairs Editor of The Hindu and editor of Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy. Source: The Hindu.
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By Michael Moore Enormous pressure has been put on the Imam to stop his project. We have to turn this thing around. Are we going to let the bullies and thugs win another one? I am opposed to the building of the “mosque” two blocks from Ground Zero. I want it built on Ground Zero. Why? Because I believe in an America that protects those who are the victims of hate and prejudice. I believe in an America that says you have the right to worship whatever God you have, wherever you want to worship. And I believe in an America that says to the world that we are a loving and generous people and if a bunch of murderers steal your religion from you and use it as their excuse to kill 3,000 souls, then I want to help you get your religion back. And I want to put it at the spot where it was stolen from you. There’s been so much that’s been said about this manufactured controversy, I really don’t want to waste any time on this day of remembrance talking about it. But I hate bigotry and I hate liars, and so in case you missed any of the truth that’s been lost in this, let me point out a few facts: 1. I love the Burlington Coat Factory. I’ve gotten some great winter coats there at a very reasonable price. Muslims have been holding their daily prayers there since 2009. No one ever complained about that. This is not going to be a “mosque,” it’s going to be a community center. It will have the same prayer room in it that’s already there. But to even have to assure people that “it’s not going to be mosque” is so offensive, I now wish they would just build a 111-story mosque there. That would be better than the lame and disgusting way the developer has left Ground Zero an empty hole until recently. The remains of over 1,100 people still haven’t been found. That site is a sacred graveyard, and to be building
another monument to commerce on it is a sacrilege. Why wasn’t the entire site turned into a memorial peace park? People died there, and many of their remains are still strewn about, all these years later.
and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
2. Guess who has helped the Muslims organize their plans for this community center? The JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER of Manhattan! Their rabbi has been advising them since the beginning. It’s been a picture-perfect example of the kind of world we all want to live in. Peter Stuyvessant, New York’s “founder,” tried to expel the first Jews who arrived in Manhattan. Then the Dutch said, no, that’s a bit much. So then Stuyvessant said ok, you can stay, but you cannot build a synagogue anywhere in Manhattan. Do your stupid Friday night thing at home. The first Jewish temple was not allowed to be built until 1730.
3. The Imam in charge of this project is the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. Read about his past here.
Then there was a revolution, and the founding fathers said this country has to be secular — no religious nuts or state religions. George Washington (inaugurated around the corner from Ground Zero) wanted to make a statement about this his very first year in office, and wrote this to American Jews: “The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. ... “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens ... “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit
4. Around five dozen Muslims died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Hundreds of members of their families still grieve and suffer. The 19 killers did not care what religion anyone belonged to when they took those lives. 5. I’ve never read a sadder headline in the New York Times than the one on the front page this past Monday: “American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?” That should make all of us so ashamed that even a single one of our fellow citizens should ever have to worry about if they “belong” here. 6. There is a McDonald’s two blocks from Ground Zero. Trust me, McDonald’s has killed far more people than the terrorists. 7. During an economic depression or a time of war, fascists are extremely skilled at whipping up fear and hate and getting the working class to blame “the other” for their troubles. Lincoln’s enemies told poor Southern whites that he was “a Catholic.” FDR’s opponents said he was Jewish and called him “Jewsevelt.” One in five Americans now believe Obama is a Muslim and 41% of Republicans don’t believe he was born here. 8. Blaming a whole group for the actions of just one of that group is anti-American. Timothy McVeigh was Catholic. Should Oklahoma City prohibit the building of a Catholic Church near the site of the former federal building that McVeigh blew up? continued next page
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continued from page 6 9. Let’s face it, all religions have their whackos. Catholics have O’Reilly, Gingrich, Hannity and Clarence Thomas (in fact all five conservatives who dominate the Supreme Court are Catholic). Protestants have Pat Robertson and too many to list here. The Mormons have Glenn Beck. Jews have Crazy Eddie. But we don’t judge whole religions on just the actions of their whackos. Unless they’re Methodists. 10. If I should ever, God forbid, perish in a terrorist incident, and you or some nutty group uses my death as your justification to attack or discriminate against anyone in my name, I will come back and haunt you worse than Linda Blair marrying Freddy Krueger and moving into your bedroom to spawn Chucky. John Lennon was right when he asked us to imagine a world with “nothing to kill or die for and no religion, too.” I heard Deepak Chopra this week say that “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, ‘Let’s give it a name and call it religion.’ “ But John Adams said it best when he
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wrote a sort of letter to the future (which he called “Posterity”): “Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present Generation to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.” I’m guessing ol’ John Adams is up there repenting nonstop right now. Friends, we all have a responsibility NOW to make sure that the Muslim community center gets built. Once again, 70% of the country (the same number that initially supported the Iraq War) is on the wrong side and want the “mosque” moved. Enormous pressure has been put on the Imam to stop his project. We have to turn this thing around. Are we going to let the bullies and thugs win another one? Aren’t you fed up by now? When would be a good time to take our country back from the haters?
A R T I C L E S donate a dollar or ten dollars (or more) right now through a secure pay pal account by clicking here. I will personally match the first $10,000 raised (forward your PayPal receipt to webguy@michaelmoore.com). If each one of you reading this blog/email donated just a couple of dollars, that would give the center over $6 million, more than what Donald Trump has offered to buy the Imam out. C’mon everyone, let’s pitch in and help those who are being debased for simply wanting to do something good. We could all make a huge statement of love on this solemn day. I lost a co-worker on 9/11. I write this today in his memory. 14 September, 2010 Michael Moore is an Academy Awardwinning filmmaker and author. He directed and produced Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Sicko. He
I say right now. Let’s each of us make a statement by donating to the building of this community center! It’s a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization and you can
has also written seven books, most recently, Mike’s Election Guide 2008. Source: MichaelMoore.com
MAIREAD MAGUIRE 10 YEAR DEPORTATION FROM ISRAEL By Mairead Maguire Mairead Maguire was deported from Israel at 4 a.m., on Tuesday 5th October, 2010 and arrived back in Belfast later that afternoon. Maguire had arrived in Israel on Tuesday 27th September, to attend a Nobel Women’s Initiative visit, and support those working in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories – particularly women groups – for human rights and justice. On arrival she was detained in Ben Gurion Detention Centre, Tel Aviv. The Israeli security tried to forcefully deport Maguire the following day but she peacefully resisted sitting quietly on the tarmac beside the plane refusing to be forcefully deported. The Pilot of KLM refused to allow her to be forcefully taken on by Israeli Guards, so she was taken back into detention, where she remained for 7 days in solitary confinement, and harsh conditions, causing her to be hospitalized at the end
of a week. During the seven days, she had 3 court appearances to appeal her conviction of 10 year deportation from Israel. At the Supreme Court appeal Maguire on speaking to the 3 Judges said she loved the Israeli and Palestinian people and was saddened by their suffering. However, she insisted peace will not come to Israel until the Israeli Government ends Apartheid. She also made in the Supreme Court, an appeal through the media, for the Israeli Government to end Apartheid and Ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. On arriving home Maguire said ‘I am sorry to be deported for 10 years from Israel and have asked my attorneys, Adalah, to challenge this order on my behalf, as I very much wish to return to Israel and the occupied Palestinian terrorities to support all those working for change. I do not feel I have been treated justly by
the Israeli Court. In June 2010, my colleagues and I on the ‘Rachel Corrie’ boat, were illegally hijacked in international waters by the Israeli Navy, whilst trying to break the siege of Gaza and bring humanitarian aid to people, suffering under illegal collective punishment by Israel. I am not a criminal and ask ‘how can I be deported from Israel when I had been taken at gunpoint and forced to come to Israel against my will in June, 2010?’ ‘ I wish the three Supreme Court Judges had been braver and upheld their proposal to the Israel State prosecution, that I be allowed to stay for a few days and join the NWI. However, they showed how little independence the Israeli Judiciary have, and obeyed the Israeli Security authorities, who were determined to continued next page
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continued from page 7 uphold my 10 year deportation from Israel, a form of silencing those who are critical of Israeli policies. Sadly also the Israeli media were very selective and negative regarding me, carrying misrepesentations such as reporting I was in a plane and shouting and creating a scene, clearly Israeli
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propaganda against me. In truth I went to Israel in good faith with nothing but love for Israelis and Palestinians and wishing a good future for both people to live in justice and peace. Because I am critical of the Israeli Government policies it does not make me an enemy of Israel or her people, but an upholder of an ethic of human rights and nonviolence, and a believer that peace is possible between
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A R T I C L E S both peoples when justice reigns. It is my sincere hope I can return to Israel and the occupied Palestinian terrorities, to meet my friends soon again.’ 8 October, 2010 Ms. Maguire is the leader of Peace People. She is also a member of JUST’s International Advisory Panel (IAP) Source: Peace People
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By Eric Margolis Ever since 9/11, readers keep asking me my views on these attacks. I have been barraged with emails until my head spins with engineering studies about melting steel, controlled explosions, claims about nefarious plots, and wreckage analysis. One of the most colorful theories comes from Gen. Hamid Gul, former director of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, ISI. He insists that 9/11 was staged by Israel’s Mossad and a cabal of rightwing US Air Force generals. I inspected the ruins of the New York’s Twin Towers, atop which I often dined, right after the attack. Downtown Manhattan was enveloped by a hideous, stinking miasma from the attack. I have never smelled anything so awful. It took me days to scrub the foul odor off my body. As a native New Yorker, I was shaken to the core by 9/11 – but hardly surprised, as I had predicted a major attack on the US nine days earlier. While visiting the Pentagon to consult on the Mideast, I also inspected its outside wall hit by the third hijacked aircraft. I saw photos of the impact site and could not understand what had happened to all the aircraft wreckage. There was almost none. In 1993, I was hijacked over Germany on a Lufthansa flight bound for Cairo. The Ethiopian hijacker took us all the way
back to New York City. The hijacker was threatening to crash our A310 jumbo jet into Wall Street. Our flight was shadowed by US F-15 fighters that had orders to shoot, if necessary. Where, then, was US air defense on 11 Sept. 2001? A day after 9/11, I was asked on CNN if Osama bin Laden was behind the attack. ‘We have yet to see the evidence,’ I replied. I maintain this position today. Bin Laden denied he or al-Qaida was behind 9/11 and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. The plot was hatched in Hamburg, Germany and Madrid, Spain, not in Afghanistan. A Pakistani, Khaled Sheik Mohammed, claimed he was the mastermind – after being tortured by neardrowning 183 times by the CIA. While denying involvement, Osama bin Laden did say he believed the attack on New York was in part motivated by Israel’s destruction of downtown Beirut during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon that inflicted some 18,000 civilian deaths. Tapes that appeared to confirm bin Laden’s guilt were clumsy fakes. They were supposedly “found” in Afghanistan by the anti-Taliban Afghan Northern Alliance, which was created and funded by Russian intelligence. I had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and told CNN viewers that
he was not the man in the tapes. After 9/11, Secretary of State Colin Powell promised Americans the State Department would issue a White Paper detailing bin Laden’s guilt. Afghanistan’s Taliban government asked for this document before it would extradite bin Laden, as the US was demanding. The White Paper was never produced, and the US ignored proper legal procedure and invaded Afghanistan. We still wait for evidence. I remain uncertain that Osama bin Laden was really behind the attacks. Much circumstantial evidence points to him and al-Qaida, but conclusive proof still lacks. One thing is certain: the attacks were planned and mounted from Germany, not Afghanistan. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudis, two from the United Arab Emirates, one an Egyptian and a Lebanese. By the way, I’ve said ever since 9/11 that the danger and size of al-Qaida has been vastly exaggerated – as an explosive report this week by the London’s esteemed International Institute for Strategic Studies has just confirmed. AlQaida, dedicated to fighting the Afghan Communists, never had more than 300 members at its peak. Today, according to CIA chief Leon Panetta, there are no more than 50 alQaida men in Afghanistan. Yet President continued next page
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Barack Obama has tripled the number of US troops in Afghanistan to 120,000 because of what he calls the al-Qaida threat. What is going on? Many people abroad believe al-Qaida is an American invention used to justify foreign military operations. I do not share this view. Osama bin Laden was never a US agent, though his group indirectly received funds from CIA to fight the Communists. Back to 9/11. I still cannot understand how amateur pilots could manage to maneuver in low to hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As a Pakistani intelligence agent told me, “if they were really amateur Arab pilots, they would have crashed into one another, not the World Trade Center!” The arrest of Israeli “movers” filming the attack and dancing with joy, and the subsequent arrest of groups of Israeli “students” supposedly tracking the would-be hijackers remains a deep mystery. So does the immobilization of US air defenses. The US 9/11 Commission was a whitewash, as are all such government commissions. They are designed to
obscure, not reveal, the truth. A 2006, a Scripps Howard/Washington Post poll found that 36% of the 1,000 Americans sampled believed the US government was behind 9/11. Many Americans still do not believe the official version of 9/11. Neither do many Europeans. The entire
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Muslim world believes 9/11 was the work of Israel and far right American neocons, led by Dick Cheney. If the official story about 9/11 is true, the attacks caught the Bush administration asleep on guard duty. Bush’s incompetent national security advisor, Condoleeza Rice, brushed off serious warnings of the impending attack and actually cut spending on anti-terrorism just before 9/11. The White House and media were quick to blame Muslims who hated America’s lifestyle and values, launching the concept of “Islamic terrorism” – i.e. that the Muslim faith, not political issues, prompted the attacks. This dangerous canard has infected America, leading to a rising tide of Islamophobia. This week’s continued uproar over a Muslim community center in downtown New York, and a Florida preacher’s threat to burn Korans, are the latest doleful example of cultivated religious hatred. The suicide team that attacked New York and Washington made clear its aim was: a. to punish the US for backing Israel’s repression of Palestinians; and b. what they called US “occupation” of Saudi Arabia. Though they were all Muslims, religion was not the motivating factor. As the CIA’s former bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer rightly observed, the Muslim world was furious at the US for what it was doing in their region, not because of America’s values, liberties or religion. These motives for the 9/11 attack have been largely obscured by whipping up hysteria over “Islamic terrorism.” The planting of anthrax in New York, Florida and Washington soon after 9/11 was clearly designed to promote further antiMuslim furor. The perpetrators of this red herring remain unknown. But the anthrax attack hastened passage of the semitotalitarian Patriot Act that sharply limited the personal freedoms of Americans and
A R T I C L E S imposed draconian new laws. Faked bin Laden videos and audio tapes. Planted anthrax. An intact Koran implausibly found at ground zero. Evidence in a hijacker’s bag that had somehow failed to make his ill-fated flight. Immediate claims that al-Qaida was behind the attacks. Those amateur kamikaze pilots and collapsing towers. Perhaps most damning, tapes taken in London of meetings between President George Bush and PM Tony Blair revealed a sinister proposal by the US president to provoke war with Iraq by painting US aircraft in UN colors, then buzzing Iraqi air defenses until they fired on them, thus providing a “casus belli.” Bush also reportedly told Blair that after Iraq, he would “go on” to attack Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan. In 1939, Nazi Germany dressed up soldiers in Polish uniforms to provoke a border fire-fight to justify Berlin’s ensuing invasion of Poland. Bush’s plan was of the same ilk. A president who would contemplate such a criminal operation might go a lot further to achieve his imperial dreams. As a veteran journalist, to me, all this smells to high heaven. There are just too many unanswered questions, too many suspicions, and that old Roman legal question, “cui bono” – “to whose benefit?” On 28 February, 1933, fire, set by a Dutch Jew, ravaged the Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag. While the Reichstag’s ruins were still smoking, Adolf Hitler’s government declared a war against “terrorism.” A “Decree for the Protection of People and State” was promulgated suspending all legal protections of speech, assembly, property, and personal liberties. The Reichstag fire allowed the government to round up “terrorism” suspects without due process of law and made police powers near absolute. Sounds familiar? Here’s another startling continued next page
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continued from page 9 coincidence. Two years before 9/11, a series of mysterious apartment building bombings in Russia killed over 200 people. “Islamic terrorists” from Chechnya were blamed. Panic swept Russia and boosted former KGB agent Vladimir Putin into full power. Russian security agents of FSB were caught red-handed planting explosives in another building, but the story was hushed up. A former FSB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who tried to reveal this story, was murdered in London by radioactive polonium. Similarly, the Bush administration’s neocons shamelessly used 9/11 to promote the invasion of Iraq. Just before the attack, polls showed 80% of
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Americans erroneously believed Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. Dr. Goebbels would have been proud. So what, in the end, can we conclude? 1. We still do not know the real story about 9/11. 2. The official version is not credible. 3. 9/11 was used to justify invading strategic Afghanistan and oil-rich Iraq. 4. The attacks plunged America into wars against the Muslim world and enriched the US arms industry. 5. 9/11 boosted pro-Israel neoconservatives, formerly a fringe group, into power, and with them America’s totalitarian far right. 6. Bush’s unprovoked war against Iraq destroyed one of Israel’s two main enemies. 7. 9/11 put America in what may turn out to be a permanent state of war with the
A R T I C L E S Muslim world – a key goal of the neoconservatives. But I’ve seen no hard evidence to date that 9/11 was a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up. Just, perhaps, the Mother of All Coincidences. In the end, it may just have been 19 angry Arabs and a bumbling Bush administration looking for someone else to blame. 16 September, 2010 Eric Margolis is the author of War at the Top of the World and the new book, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World.
Source: Mycatbirdseat.com
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By Seth P. Robinson Recently, a couple of weeks after I returned to the U.S. from a two-month research internship at JUST, I had the following exchange with a hygienist at a dentist’s office: “I’m studying religion,” I said, “Uh, comparative religion, that is.” “Oh, okay.…What did you do this summer, anything interesting?” she replied. “Well, I just got back from some work in Malaysia. It was incredibly eyeopening.” “Malaysia, huh? Wow, that’s great. You were doing missionary work there?” I exhaled sharply, incredulous that my well-meaning interlocutor, smiling down at me as she poked at my teeth, had come so naturally to such an abhorrent conclusion. The subtext of her reply was unmistakable: Why would an American with a professed interest in religion go to a “faraway land” in the “Orient,” if not to proselytize the “poor backward natives”? Sweetly, offhandedly, and with perhaps the best of intentions, the good woman
had committed a grave cultural foul. And yet I said nothing. I felt neither indignation nor pity. I was, rather, terrified. For I heard something chillingly familiar in the woman’s glib speculation, and it struck a nerve—a nerve newly hardwired to a haunting memory from my time in Malaysia…. My second week at JUST, I submitted a research proposal soliciting “Malaysian” perspectives on “Western” self-critiques of Enlightenment rationalism. Truth is, I felt—and indeed am in some measure— complicit in the American-led hegemony of which JUST is rightly critical. To ease my “liberal guilt,” I tried to locate the error of my culture’s ways—longing, like a deathbed convert, to right some terrible wrongs before it is “too late.” I pitched the proposal to Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, who had agreed to supervise my research. He acknowledged the tenacity of my bid for “Western selfhelp,” which involved developing a case for an ethics of embodiment, a literal “fleshing out” of disembodied Western
epistemologies. I intended to present the work of Malaysian scholar–activists of various ethno-religious backgrounds as case studies in this moral tradition, which I had traced to the work of feminist, postcolonial, and anti-oppression legal scholars from the U.S. and Europe. But I was startled when, almost without explanation, Dr. Chandra urged me to rethink my research angle. He was terse and nondirective—for reasons that I, exasperated at the time, would only later come to appreciate. I began to think a great deal about Dr. Chandra’s dissuasion. After work that day, I went for a walk in downtown Petaling Jaya. I kept seeing passers-by looking at me askance—or was I merely imagining it? I passed silently by and later reasoned with myself: “Well, they have every right to look at me that way, given the baggage of representation I bring with me wherever I go. If only I could harness that tacit critique of my ‘Westernness,’ I could finally justify my now-abandoned project ‘from the ground up’!” continued next page
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continued from page 10 And then, one feverishly hot night, as I lay prone on my bed in a rented room, it dawned on me. I began to shiver with an inner tremor, the kind that originates in the pit of your stomach, radiates across your chest, surfaces at your skin and makes it crawl. It was the “terror of otherness” come to shatter my ego’s allconsuming horizon. I felt what I had only before thought: what it is like, paraphrasing Levinas, to be demanded, disposed, obsessed, and judged by “the other.” The indictment rained down on me “from on high,” eroding the martyrdom of my self-chiding research gambit, until all that remained was the chiseled form of a face. It was Dr. Chandra’s face and the face of the woman who handed me a towel at the gym and the faces of the pedestrians who wondered what on earth I was doing in P.J. It was a prophetic face; its weathered lines foretold a trespass old as the “New World.” My self-serving agenda would have exploited the lives of my Malaysian contacts, mining them for empirical data to support my a priori theories about “embodied agency” and “religious subjectivity,” objectifying them with “the best of intentions.” But for those faces, and the felt obligation to listen to them, to “be” as much for them as for my self, I would have seen what I had wanted to see: a social trend, a religious phenomenon, a philosophical construct to assimilate into my identity, easing my guilt and acquitting me of my complicity in a system of global hegemony. All this I would have projected onto and in place of the other, denying her the capacities for sight, sense, and salvation—the very capacities she, by the ineliminable fact of her being, always already makes intelligible and possible for me, as another self, to exercise at all. And so I trembled in the dentist’s chair, remembering how I, no less than the hygienist who called me on my “mission,” had adopted the totalizing
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logic of neocolonialism. But as I learned from the balance of my research at JUST, there is more to raising human dignity than the transcendent accountability of fear and trembling. The ghostly face of the other took on positive form and immanent context in my subsequent interviews with 16 people—Islamic scholars, Buddhist laypeople, a Hindu activist, and “non-confessional” social scientists in Malaysia and Singapore. Their warmth and goodwill welled forth from the hopeful certainty that, as several of them agreed, in every way that really matters, we are all far more alike than we are different. At each interview, disparities in privilege and power invariably conspired in the background; indeed, these structural realities can and often do ward off would-be collaborators from the tables of interreligious and civilizational dialogue. Some of my interviewees chose to foreground the asymmetries at our periphery (e.g., those due to North-dominated academic discourses) - asymmetries which, if overlooked or elided, would suppress or skew the measured accountability that solidarity against hegemony would require of different parties. But however they may have dealt with our differences, all of the people with whom I spoke made at least an effort to reach across the table to embrace our commonality.
differences, deeper than the individual or group ascriptions we covet and abhor; that it goes “all the way down” to where even terror cannot touch it, to “shared human experiences,” “eternal values.” Here, beyond the pale of the particular, there is no “self” or “other”; here we can
At a time when a proposed Muslim community center and prayer space in New York City elicits raw fear and blind suspicion, the prophetic terror of otherness remains a vital, but hardly sufficient, stimulus to adopting reflexive ways of being “selves” as individuals and as communities. All too often, in fact, fear stymies our soul-searching and provokes an outturned rage, a rage against the dying of an identity we cannot bear to let slip through our fingers. Terrified but also emboldened by the example of my interlocutors, I managed to “let go for dear life” this summer long enough to learn that identity need not be a zero-sum game, a missionary’s quest; that what binds us fast goes deeper than our
Seth P. Robinson, research intern at JUST from June to August 2010, is currently completing an undergraduate degree in religious studies at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, USA. He plans to pursue graduate study in religious ethics with a focus on issues surrounding religious pluralism, religion and politics, and constructive responses to globalization.
take heart but must not linger, lest our dialogue attenuate into facile platitudes. For how can we negotiate the pressing demands of “global citizenship,” if not as situated selves, with all the historical asymmetry that entails? Solidarity, I have learned, means prizing what is universal as it necessarily manifests itself: in and through particular lives, at the meeting of real faces that are too terrified, and too captivated, to gaze with impunity or look away in shame August, 2010
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