Teens held over mosque arson: Britain
Press TV -December 5, 2010
Britain’s police have arrested four teenagers in connection with a “racist” arson attack on a mosque in Staffordshire, which damaged the newly completed building.
Staffordshire police said three men and a woman, aged 16 to 19, were arrested after an investigation into the fire at the mosque in Hanley, Stoke-On-Trent.
A blaze alert came at around 6:30 after CCTV footage showed smoke coming out of the building.
Police said they are examining any connection between damage to a nearby gas main and the fire, which did not affect the mosque’s structure.
“We are treating this incident as a racist attack on a religious building,” said Chief Inspector Wayne Jones, who called the attack ‘appalling.’
“Local neighborhood police officers are meeting with members of the community to keep them informed and to address their concerns and obvious anger about this criminal incident,” Jones added.
Police said they are questioning the four suspects while reviewing CCTV footage from the area and leading house-to-house inquiries.
Stoke-On-Trent has been the scene of racial tensions against ethnic minorities including Muslims after the far-right British National Party won five seats at the local council elections in May.
Ethnic minorities comprise some 7 percent of the city’s population.
Professor Richard Falk on Universal Jurisdiction
Dr. Hanan Chehata | Middle East Monitor | 03 December 2010
The Middle East Monitor (MEMO) hosted UN Special Rapporteur Prof. Richard Falk for a series of events this week including a parliamentary briefing on the issue of Universal Jurisdiction. The following is an extract from the talk he delivered in the House of Commons:
The issue of universal jurisdiction is of special interest at this time because of the apparent effort to give assurances to Israeli leaders that they won’t be subject to a legal process if they come here (to the UK); and that of course is in reaction to the problems that the former Foreign Minister [Tzipi] Livni had when she cancelled her trip [to the UK last year].
I think it is important to realise that the whole idea of universal jurisdiction is to take account of the weakness of international institutions in upholding international criminal law. There has always been the sense that national judicial institutions reinforce the norms of international law and take account of that institutional vacuum that exists in international society; this has been a historical practice in relation to piracy and to other kinds of international crimes that were a threat to the international community as a whole. The idea of Nuremberg after World War Two was that crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity and war crimes are also offences against the whole of international society. There is an interest on the part of all states in trying to implement those norms of international criminal law. The American Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg said the law the state applied to the German survivors of World War Two will not be respected unless those who sit in judgement uphold it in relation to their own behaviour; that it was a promise to the future.
It seems to me that if a country such as Britain, which has a proud constitutional tradition, reserves the implementation of international criminal law just for those the government doesn’t like at the time – in other words if international criminal law is used for prosecuting Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic but not the friends of the government – then you discredit, in a fundamental way, the rule of law which really does depend on equals being treated equally. If that is not done then double standards become very manifest; it also has the effect of saying that geopolitics and foreign policy always trump the law. Again, that is an unfortunate way of thinking in an increasingly globalised world where the discipline of international law is very important as a way of restraining and containing foreign policy within appropriate boundaries. I’ve said often that US foreign policy would be much more successful had the Americans chosen to respect international law in the last several decades; that most of the failures of American foreign policy have correlated with deviations from international legal norms. Hence, in that sense I think a lot is at stake with this whole idea of universal jurisdiction.
Putting it now in the Israel-Palestine context, universal jurisdiction is part of the struggle against impunity for the Israeli military and the country’s political leaders. That impunity has been possible both because Israel itself doesn’t impose accountability on those who perpetrate violations of international criminal law and because the US, and to some extent European countries, have given a geopolitical insulation to Israel in relation to its responsibilities as a sovereign state.
Thus, part of the wider stage of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is a shift in tactics on the Palestinian side much more in the direction of non-violent symbolic instruments of soft power. They include this much more robust global solidarity movement that has concentrated on building a boycott and divestment campaign which has been surprisingly effective, even in the United States. It has been increasingly a matter for university campuses, for instance, even at conservative universities. Part of this issue of impunity and accountability was also raised by the UN’s Goldstone report and by the international law panel appointed after the flotilla incident of May 31st;all of these issues converge to suggest that at this time the most effective way of implementing international law is both through the activism of civil society and through national legal institutions. One of the dimensions of the flotilla incident that is interesting and worth noticing is that Israel, for the first time, abandoned the claim that it was entitled to impose a comprehensive blockade. Everything the UN tried to do had had no effect, but this flotilla incident and the outrage associated with the way in which it was attacked led the Israeli leadership to say that henceforth humanitarian goods, fuel, food and medicine would be allowed to enter Gaza without restriction. Of course, even though Israel then “eased” the blockade it hasn’t ended it and the most recent statistics show that the blockade has actually been tightened in such a way that the people of Gaza get only about 28% of the goods that they were receiving prior to the blockade. So there is still very severe pressure on the Gazan population, which is forcing them to rely on some black market economy through the tunnels and which is generally an extension of the collective punishment of a whole population; that is a violation of Article 33 of the Geneva Convention that unconditionally prohibits collective punishment as an instrument of occupation.
Following the main text of his talk Prof. Falk and the MPs discussed a number of issues in addition to universal jurisdiction, including the issue of the illegal arrest of Palestinian children.
The Native American analogy doesn’t work
By Ali Abunimah | Mondoweiss | December 5, 2010
Earlier today Phil Weiss did a post mentioning Native Americans and the argument that American historical sins immunize the Israelis from the Palestinian right of return.
Citing the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans as a way to justify not recognizing the Palestinian right of return, as I’ve often heard people do, is usually disingenuous. The situation is comparable up to a point and then breaks down. Native Americans were ethnically cleansed as Palestinians were and are being ethnically cleansed. As a percentage of the US population today, Native Americans constitute less than one percent. We should support doing everything possible to recognize and support their rights, including returning traditional land as has happened to greater or lesser degrees in other settler-colonial countries including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The main reason people can flippantly say “well if you support the Palestinian right of return then you should support Native Americans returning to their land” in order to justify Israel not recognizing the Palestinian right is that there are simply so few Native Americans that the question does not really arise. Native Americans in the United States are struggling for survival, justice and recognition, but generally not by seeking the return of land that is now, say, a neighborhood of Chicago. Their struggle came poignantly to light recently in the affair of the US refusal to recognize tribal passports of the Iroquois Lacrosse team that was supposed to travel to the UK (link here).
But imagine if the situation were more analogous to Palestine today in terms of numbers. Imagine if Native Americans constituted 30, 40, or 50 or even 20 percent of the population of the United States and that they lived in sealed reservations in conditions similar to those in the Gaza Strip or refugee camps in the West Bank or Lebanon?
If there were 30, 70 or 100 million people who identified as Native Americans and existed in such conditions, no one would be able to so flippantly dismiss either their right to return to their original lands or any challenge they would make to the legitimacy of the United States. The United States would have a legitimacy crisis and bloodbath on its hands.
The only reason the United States can so easily ignore the rights of Native Americans is that they suffered near-genocide. Palestinians today are 50 percent of the population in their historic homeland and cannot simply be ignored as they could be if they were one percent. This is why Benny Morris said in 2004 that yes, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was necessary and justified to create Israel, but if Ben-Gurion had made a mistake it was that he did not “finish the job.” The United States, Canada, Australia did “finish the job” and those are the settler-colonial states that survive. French Algeria, Portuguese Mozambique, Rhodesia, Apartheid South Africa, Protestant-ruled Northern Ireland and Israel are the settler-colonial states where the native population remained either a majority or a substantial minority that could challenge the legitimacy of the state. How many of them are left?
Finally, it is disingenuous to make this an issue solely about property rights. Property rights are a difficult issue that would affect a fraction of Palestinians and Israelis. Most Palestinians, however, could return to land in Israel that is currently empty. Israelis reject the right of return primarily on ethnoreligious grounds: they just don’t want too many Palestinians polluting the “Jewish democracy.”
START for Israel; START against Iran
Ali Gharib | Lobe Log | November 22nd, 2010
Earlier today on National Review’s The Corner blog, Foundation for Defense of Democracies head honcho Cliff May wrote:
I’m now hearing from more than one source on the Hill that the Obama administration has just added a new argument in favor of lame-duck ratification: failure to adopt START will “hurt Israel.”
May demurs, naturally (the New START is an Obama Administration initiative, after all), then tells a joke, sets up a straw man, and knocks it down. May thinks the Obama administration scare tactic will be that without START, Russia’s nukes will start “somehow leaking out and getting into the hands of Iran’s bad boys or other terrorists.”
But that wasn’t the Israel angle played by Jewish groups later in the day — though their tack does have something to do with Iran.
Laura Rozen reports for Politico:
Both the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) cited the importance of passage of the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms reduction treaty in order to maintain American-Russian cooperation in countering the Iran nuclear threat.
“We are deeply concerned that failure to ratify the New START treaty will have national security consequences far beyond the subject of the treaty itself,” the ADL said in a letter sent to every Senator Friday.
“The U.S. diplomatic strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons requires a U.S.-Russia relationship of trust and cooperation,” ADL continues. “The severe damage that could be inflicted on that relationship by failing to ratify the treaty would inevitably hamper effective American international leadership to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
The New START treaty may indeed be a necessary step for global security, but questions should be raised about linking it to Iran. This support by pro-Israel groups may prove to haunt U.S. policy towards Iran in the future.
One might compare this tack in pushing START to the sort of message Benjamin Netanyahu took away from meeting with Barack Obama about engaging in Palestinian-Israeli peace talks: that getting the job done (or at least getting to the table) will help the U.S. isolate Iran and contain its nuclear ambitions.
How many of these bargains can Obama enter into before he must pay the piper and make the ultimate escalation against Iran? If the diplomatic strategy fails, then what?
Perhaps this is pointing out the obvious: Something is truly amiss when a treaty to limit nuclear proliferation is being sold as the way to defend and protect a country that has an ever expanding — and clandestine — nuclear arsenal.
Update:
Obama Pushes START Treaty to Top of Legislative Agenda
By Jim Lobe | IPS | December 2, 2010
WASHINGTON – With time running out before he faces a much more hostile and Republican Congress, President Barack Obama appears to have made Senate ratification of the pending New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia his top legislative priority.
Not only has he bowed to Republican demands to allocate more money for Washington’s nuclear arms programme, but he has suggested that he’s also willing to cave in to Republican demands to extend tax cuts for high-income households – despite record federal deficits – in order to gain START ratification.
And he’s getting considerable help from big guns in what remains of the Republican foreign policy Establishment, including five former secretaries of state whose service spanned the last five Republican administrations.
In an op-ed heralded by the White House on the eve of its publication in Thursday’s Washington Post, former secretaries Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Colin Powell concluded that the New START was “clearly in our national interest” and should be ratified. […]
Obama, who had promised during the 2008 election campaign not to raise taxes on households earning 250,000 dollars a year or less, had hoped that allowing the cuts to expire on those earning more than that would help cut the federal deficit by several hundred billion dollars over the next few years.
His apparent willingness to compromise on this issue in order to secure START is causing growing dismay among his supporters. … Full article by Jim Lobe
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6 MAJOR US foreign policy failures of the post-Cold War era
By Adam Garrie | The Duran | September 14, 2017
In the 1990s, US officials, all of whom would go on to serve in the George W. Bush White House, authored two short, but deeply important policy documents that have subsequently been the guiding force behind every major US foreign policy decision taken since the year 2000 and particularly since 9/11.
These documents include the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–99 fiscal years (more commonly known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine). This document, as the name implies was authored by George W. Bush’s deeply influential Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as well as I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who served as an advisor to former US Vice President Dick Cheney.
The other major document, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, from 1996 was authored by former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee in the administration of George W. Bush, Richard Norman Perle.
Both documents provide a simplistic but highly unambiguous blueprint for US foreign police in the Middle East, Russia’s near abroad and East Asia. The contents of the Wolfowitz Doctrine were first published by the New York Times in 1992 after they were leaked to the media. Shortly thereafter, many of the specific threats made in the document were re-written using broader language. In this sense, when comparing the official version with the leaked version, it reads in the manner of the proverbial ‘what I said versus what I meant’ adage.
By contrast, A Clean Break was written in 1996 as a kind of gift to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who apparently was not impressed with the document at the time. In spite of this, the US has implemented many of the recommendations in the document in spite of who was/is in power in Tel Aviv.
While many of the recommendations in both documents have indeed been implemented, their overall success rate has been staggeringly bad.
Below are major points from the documents followed by an assessment of their success or failure. … continue
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