Musafir' Musings

Sarah sent us this photo from her beloved St. Ives last summer.
We had the privilege of meeting Sarah in person, once among
the snow-clad mountains of Norway and once in her home in
Rodmell, East Sussex. ~Editor, Another World Is Possible.

In Memory of Sarah Meyer

Sarah Meyer of Rodmell, East Sussex, died of complications from bladder cancer shortly after 11:00 PM on 3rd March 2010. She was 73. Cremation service has been scheduled for 19th March. In accordance with her wish, ashes will be scattered at the Cornish Coast.

This is a tribute to Sarah, not a lament for her.

From anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common in the 1980's to marching against the war foisted on us by Bush and Blair, Sarah was a valiant, dedicated fighter against aggression and injustice. In Bosnia, Sarah conducted homeopathic/Jungian clinics for doctors and psychiatrists in Zagreb and Split, as well as two in the war zone.

Her posts under Index Research covered a wide range of topics -- from wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to torture; Guantanamo; intrusive surveillance of civilian populations; Israel's use of cluster bombs in Lebanon; war crimes, including use of white phosphorus shells in highly populated areas in Gaza; the environment, and her own experience of being afflicted with cancer.

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Stephen Lendman

As an isolated incident, it would be appalling and criminal. As a regular occurrence, it's state-sponsored terrorism against defenseless children, subjected to barbarism by Israeli soldiers committing crimes against humanity to crush their will for wanting to live free on their own land - what Westerners take for granted; what Palestinians since 1948 haven't had, and since 1967, under military occupation denying their very humanity.

Nora Barrows-Friedman does heroic reporting for Pacifica Radio's KPFA Flashpoints Radio and as an activist/teacher/journalist in Occupied Palestine during regular visits. On March 8 on the Electronic Intifada, she wrote about Amir al-Mohteseb, a 10-year old Hebron child, arrested, detained, and savagely beaten after his 12-year old brother Hasan endured similar treatment a week earlier.

On March 7 at 2AM, "Israeli soldiers (broke) into (his) house, snatch(ed) Amir from his bed, threatened his parents with death by gunfire if they" interfered, took him down the stairwell, and brutally beat him causing internal abdomen bleeding, requiring overnight hospitalization. "In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half."

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Chris Floyd

Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose imperial war? Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose a horrendous corporate boondoggle that will effectively kill genuine health care reform for years, if not generations? This is what happens to you: The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich.

Yes, if you stand up against endless, pointless, profiteering slaughter in foreign lands, if you stand up against an astonishingly brazen, deeply dirty deal cut in the White House itself to enrich some of the most brutal, rapacious corporate sharks ever to feast, quite literally, on the bodies of nation's working people and the poor, then those Fightin' Progressives at Salon.com will come around and slap you with the cold, wet fish of their withering scorn.

They will join with the very model of a modern major general of the "Progressive Forces," Commander Kos his own self, to belittle you and denounce you -- no, not just denounce you, but accuse you, on national television, of being directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

That's right; according to the Commander, if Dennis Kucinich dares to vote against whatever corporate blank check the bought-and-sold bagmen in Congress and the White House come up with to deliver millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans into the clutches of the health care and insurance conglomerates (which, as our Progressives themselves rightly remind us, are the ones with the real "death panels"), then Kucinich will be a mass murderer of Americans on a scale far outstripping the petty efforts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban during the long twilight struggle of our noble global Terror War.

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Alan Sabrosky

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu once remarked to a Likud gathering that "Israel is not like other countries." Oddly enough for him, that time he was telling the truth, and nowhere is that more evident than with Jewish nationalism, whether or not one pins the "Zionist" label on it.

Nationalism in most countries and cultures can have both positive and negative aspects, unifying a people and sometimes leading them against their neighbors. Extremism can emerge, and often has, at least in part in almost every nationalist/independence movement I can recall (e.g., the French nationalist movement had The Terror, Kenya's had the Mau Mau, etc.).

But whereas extremism in other nationalist movements is an aberration, extremism in Jewish nationalism is the norm, pitting Zionist Jews (secular or observant) against the goyim (everyone else), who are either possible predator or certain prey, if not both sequentially. This does not mean that all Jews or all Israelis feel and act this way, by any means. But it does mean that Israel today is what it cannot avoid being, and what it would be under any electable government (a point I'll develop in another article).

The differences between Jewish nationalism (Zionism) and that of other countries and cultures here I think are fourfold:

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Paul Joseph Watson

Schools can install cameras in bathrooms and spy on kids via laptops, but parents treated as pedophiles for taking innocent photographs of their own children

Yet another story about a school installing surveillance cameras in bathrooms reminds us that, while parents are treated as pedophiles for taking photographs of their own children, any perversion whatsoever is acceptable as long as it is conducted by those deemed to be in a position of authority.

"Outraged parents have hit out at a school in Birmingham after pupils discovered CCTV cameras in the school's toilets," reports Sky News.

"Youngsters at Grace Academy in Chelmsley Wood claim they returned from half-term to find staff had installed the cameras without notifying them or their parents."

The report points to another recent case in Britain, where a school in Salford filmed children in various stages of undress changing into their gym kit.

Parents slammed the move as a "total invasion of privacy" and many students refused to use the bathroom, but the school claimed that installing cameras to watch children in the most intimate setting possible was perfectly normal because "children want to feel secure".

So as long as it's done in the name of safety and security, watching children in bathrooms is acceptable? The golden rule seems to be - you're only allowed to engage in such behavior if you happen to be ascribed some position of authority.

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Dahlia Lithwick

It can be argued that when Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol accused nine lawyers in Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department of being the "al-Qaida Seven," working in the "Department of Jihad," they were simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that would get them on a talk show. This is, after all, America. The right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution.

You would think, however, that when Cheney and Kristol launched their execrable "Keep America Safe" web ad, they would have been very, very careful with their words. In the ad they accuse seven Justice Department lawyers and two colleagues—all of whom had represented Guantanamo detainees—of being members of the Department of Jihad. A screen shot of Osama Bin Laden and a creepy voice-over asks of these attorneys, "Whose values do they share?" Thanks to people like Kristol and Cheney, people take accusations of this sort very seriously. The Justice Department reports being swamped with panicked phone calls since the ad started running this week. In 2010, calling someone a Bin Laden-loving jihadist isn't just meaningless partisan hackery.

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Eleanor Bell

Eight women have been killed this year in the Mexican border
city of Ciudad Juarez. (Reuters: Tomas Bravo)

When Rubi Hernandez realised her 14-year-old daughter Iris was missing, she did not wait the mandatory 72 hours before going to the police.

In the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, mothers of the "disappeared" have learned to move quickly. Ms Hernandez went on a one-woman PR campaign to publicise her daughter's disappearance. "We called all the local radios. We used the internet. People were putting up posters," she said.

Iris disappeared on May 2, 2005. Two days later police handed her mother the young girl's earrings. The police had not bothered to remove the charred pieces of ear still attached to them. It was almost all that was left of the 14-year-old, whose body had literally melted away after being thrown in a rubbish bin and covered in lime. Iris Hernandez became a statistic in Juarez's bloody profile.

With a population of just 1.5 million, Juarez has one of the highest murder rates in the world. Young women are targeted in sadistic sexual violence known as "femicide". In 2008, state authorities reported 86 slayings of women. Eight women have been killed this year.

The homicide rate for women in Juarez far exceeds the Mexican national average and is three times that of Tijuana, a border city of comparable size, according to a recent Inter-American Commission Report.

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Andrew Stephen

There is now every possibility that Obama will be defeated in 2012.

Did I ever say "I told you so" about Barack Obama? If I did, I never meant to and will never do so again. Besides which, it's too soon to deliver a definitive verdict on his presidency, especially when it remains to be seen whether he can achieve the miraculous feat of reforming health care. It grieves me, though, to report that a CNN poll has found that 52 per cent of Americans now think he does not deserve a second term in the White House. Even the hitherto Obamaniacal Washington Post - doubtless picking up on my idea that Hillary Clinton has her eye on a nomination to the US Supreme Court - is mooting that Obama should stand aside for Clinton in 2012, with the understanding that President Clinton II would nominate him for her first vacancy on the court.

Pundits are already predicting a possible Armageddon in the midterm elections this November, in a rerun of 1994 when Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. These days it is compulsory for every US politician to swear solemnly that this year's elections are the only ones on their minds. The truth, however, is that more and more attention is being paid to an election being held in less than 1,000 days - the next presidential polling day, which will either put Obama back into the White House for a second term or give the country a new, 45th president. Inside the Obama camp, strategising for what insiders are calling "the re-elect" has already begun.

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Tom Minchin

Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley [1]

The IPCC Is "Corrupt from top to bottom"

I met Lord Monckton at a luncheon in Melbourne during his recent tour of Australia. I was surprised journalists here had not thought to ask him how his views on climate science had evolved. Why had he become so interested in climate science fraud and its political implications? The Q and A that follows is the result of an interview conducted with him after his return to Scotland on February 15.

I began by asking him what had started him on the road to his YouTube-covered speech exposing the draft Copenhagen treaty:

Minchin: What first made you suspect the "climate change" research of recent decades was skewed?

Monckton: The CEO of a boutique finance house in the City of London asked me to have a look at "global warming" because his analysts could not decide whether it was real or not. I first realized something was wrong when I wanted to find out how to convert radiative forcings in Watts per square meter to temperature in Kelvin, but not once in 1,000 pages did the IPCC's 2001 science assessment report reveal the existence of the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, without which one cannot even begin the calculation. So obscurantist was the IPCC's methodology for determining climate sensitivity that it took me two years to research the underlying equations, some of which I had to derive for myself. A scientific establishment that was confident of its results would have explained the matter clearly and concisely.

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Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood looks at how Israel’s incessant abuse of the Palestinian people’s rights and freedoms, and its trampling on their dreams, lie behind almost every act of suicide bombing.

”Here in the West few of us can fully comprehend what turns a bright, intelligent person into a suicide bomber. But then, we don’t have a jackboot on our throat. We don’t have our front door battered down in the middle of the night by military thugs, our family abducted, our home bulldozed and our land confiscated.”

The suicide bomber wrote that he began to live the day he came to know he was to die. Where did he get this passion to kill? – Mahesh Bhatt

Here in the civilized West we hate suicide bombers with a passion.

We’re taught that the proper way to blow fellow humans to smithereens is to do it from 40,000 feet.

Or failing that, send Apache helicopter gunships at street level firing their laser-guided missiles and 30mm cannon.

Or failing that, turn loose our main battle tanks to shred and vaporize the “enemy”, reduce their homes to rubble with depleted uranium (DU) shells and spread birth defects for generations to come.

Nowadays we don’t even have to leave home to do it. We can train our really brainy chaps to steer armed drones to the target from the comfort of an armchair. B-52s, F-16s, Apaches, drones and tanks – that’s the ticket.

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