Transcend Media
PEACE JOURNALISM PERSPECTIVE
EDITORIAL
by Johan Galtung, 5 Mar 2012 - TRANSCEND Media Service A disconnect between speech and action is Obama’s trade mark. A key to his global fascism: instead of acknowledging wrongs of US foreign policy, he hides his extra-judicial killings with drones and JSOC’s (Joint Special Operations Command) in, maybe, 120 countries. Covert, CIA, less overt, Pentagon; with little Congress control. JSOC has been operating an extra-legal “kill-capture” campaign that a former counterinsurgency adviser calls “an almost industrial scale counterterrorism killing machine”.
NOBEL PEACE LAUREATES
by Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace laureate – TRANSCEND Media Service “The only people who can solve Syrian problems are the Syrians themselves. The international community must insist that all international and human rights laws be upheld by the Syrian government and that they enter a dialogue with all opposition groups whose voices have a right to be heard and not ‘silenced’ by persecution, torture and/or killings.”
OTHER COMMENTARIES
NEWS
by Anissa Haddadi – International Business Times WikiLeaks has started publishing more than five million emails hacked by Anonymous from the servers of Stratfor, a US intelligence gathering company. An email sent by Chris Farnham, senior officer for Stratfor, to an internal unnamed source inside the company titled “Israel/Iran Barak Hails Munitions Blast in Iran” provides details about who would benefit from an Israeli attack on Iran, and say such a plan would be motivated by economic factors.
by Russia Today – TRANSCEND Media Service Twitter has sold billions of archived tweets believed to have vanished forever. A privacy row has erupted as hundreds of companies queue up to purchase users’ personal information from the new database. Every time you use social networks you become mere product – it’s an idea we will all have to get used to. So, should we give up worldly goods and hide in a Tibetan monastery till the end of our days, or start putting up a fight to protect our privacy?
IN FOCUS
by Naomi Wolf – Project Syndicate Burning a conquered people’s sacred texts sends an unmistakable message: you can do anything to these people. As Heinrich Heine put it, referring to the Spanish Inquisition’s burning of the Koran, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” Jews understand that very well: from the Inquisition to Cossack massacres to Kristallnacht, the aggressors destroyed Torahs as a logical and well-understood precursor to destroying Jews.
by Amy Goodman - Truthdig The White House is holding a gala dinner this week, honoring Iraq War veterans. Bradley Manning is an Iraq War vet who won’t be there. He is being court-martialed, facing life in prison or possibly death, for allegedly releasing thousands of military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks revealing the casualties of war. President Barack Obama would better serve the country by also honoring Assange and Manning. We should pursue the truth, not its messengers.
by Robert Fisk – The Independent Once a Roman city, where the crusaders committed their first act of cannibalism – eating their dead Muslim opponents – Homs was captured by Saladin in 1174. Under post-First World War French rule, the settlement became a centre of insurrection and, after independence, the very kernel of Baathist resistance to the first Syrian governments. By early 1964, there were battles in Homs between Sunnis and Alawi Shia. A year later, the young Baathist army commander of Homs, Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Tlas, was arresting his pro-regime comrades. Is the city’s history becoming a little clearer now?
BY TRANSCEND MEMBERS
by Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service Cheerleading is no revolution. That society is not going anywhere humanistic. The current discourse of revolutionary changes is nothing but a self-interested spin from vultures and vampires of all stripes and colours, native and foreign.
by Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Serivce Winston Churchill once famously declared that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind. Most probably he was right.
NONVIOLENCE
by Miki Kashtan – Waging Nonviolence When I first heard that Gandhi was viewed as “the enemy” by many Dalits in India (formerly called “untouchables”), I was dumbfounded. How and why could Gandhi be seen as having betrayed the Dalits when he opposed untouchability even in the face of active discomfort on the part of close associates?
by Yousef Munayyer – Al Jazeera More than ever, polling data shows, Palestinians are supporting nonviolent resistance. A series of polls of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza which included a question on nonviolence reveals an undeniable trend in the past 18 months. In June of 2010, 51 per cent of Palestinians polled responded that nonviolent resistance was a preferred alternative to stalled negotiations. In a poll at the end of 2011 that number jumped to over 61 per cent.
ASIA & THE PACIFIC
by International Crisis Group – TRANSCEND Media Service Nearly three years since declaring victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the government has weakened democratic institutions, deepened ethnic polarisation and aggravated the country’s long-standing impunity for human rights violations. The former warzones in the north and east are heavily militarised and controlled from Colombo, while disappearances, killings, torture, gender-based violence and other abuses continue with impunity throughout the island. Sri Lankans who speak out about the situation risk reprisal.
EUROPE
by Al Jazeera – TRANSCEND Media Service The former prime minister of Iceland has gone on trial in a special court in Reykjavik on charges of negligence over his handling of the country’s 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the country’s banking system.
by Ellen Russell - Rabble All of us owe a debt of gratitude to the people of Iceland. They took a stand and held their ground when all of the forces of international capital were allied against them.
LATIN AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN
by Prof. James Petras – TRANSCEND Media Service Between April 21 -23 [2012], the National Patriotic Council will convoke thousands of activists from most of the major urban and rural social movements and trade unions, human rights groups and indigenous afro-colombian movements, who will meet to unify forces and launch what promises to be the most significant new political movement in recent history. The democratization of Colombia requires the growth of independent social movements, judicial investigation and prosecution of ex narco-President Álvaro Uribe and his closest collaborators, and needs to extend to the present Santos regime.
MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA
by The Voice of Russia – TRANSCEND Media Service Speaking on the first anniversary of the anti-Gaddafi revolution in Misurata Monday, interim Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa Abdeljalil warned of complete national disintegration if the rival tribes and clans that had laid hands on Gaddafi’s arsenals continued to refuse to submit to the authority of the central government.
by Al Jazeera – TRANSCEND Media Service Government requests torture investigator to delay visit, while strengthening restrictions on visits by rights groups. The UN human rights office in Geneva said on Thursday [1 Mar 2012] that Bahrain had formally requested that the visit of the special rapporteur on torture be delayed until July. Bahrain, an ally of the United States and home to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, is ruled by the Sunni Muslim al-Khalifa family, and has been under pressure to institute political and rights reforms since its violent crackdown on the uprising.
NORTH AMERICA
by Patrick J. Buchanan - LewRockwell Pat Buchanan makes the conservative antiwar case.
by Laura Melendez-Pallitto and Robert Pallitto – Foreign Policy in Focus Psychologists’ involvement in torture has done damage to the reputation of the profession, and the boards’ unwillingness to act undermines the integrity of ethics rules. It is both unconscionable and absurd that a psychologist can lose his or her license for Medicaid fraud but not for involvement in torture.
PALESTINE / ISRAEL
by Associated Press – The Washington Post Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. observer, told reporters after a council meeting on the Mideast on Tuesday [28 Feb 2012] that he sent a letter inviting the 15 council members “to see with their own eyes the reality of the Palestinian people in the occupied territory” including Israel’s “illegal” settlement building.
THE UNITED NATIONS
by Rene Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service 8 March is the International Day of Women first proposed by Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women in Copenhagen in 1911. Zetkin, who had lived some years in Paris and active in women’s movements there, was building on the 1889 International Congress for Feminine Works and Institutions held in Paris under the leadership of Ana de Walska.
MEDIA
by Robert Fisk – The Independent Like other correspondents, Robert Fisk has risked his life to ‘witness history’. But after almost four decades, he feels ambivalent towards his profession. – “Funny, though, that the newsrooms of London and Washington didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm to get their folk into Gaza as they did to get them into Homs. Just a thought. A very unhappy one.”
ENVIRONMENT
by Janette Sherman and Joseph J. Mangano – San Francisco Bay View The epidemic increase in childhood and adult cancer has occurred since World War II, when both chemical and radiological pollution spread over the world. Half a century later, there is no longer any doubt that radioisotopes in concert with industrial chemicals have caused this epidemic. Unless the earth stops turning and the laws of chemistry, biology and physics are rescinded, the radioisotopes being released from Fukushima will cause worldwide harm to life. It is in our hands to prevent another Chernobyl or Fukushima.
by Cassandra Anderson, Natural Society – TRANSCEND Media Service February 27, 2012 – Monsanto tentatively agreed to a $93 million settlement with some residents of Nitro, West Virginia. Nitro is a small town that got its name from manufacturing explosives during WWI. It was also the site of a Monsanto chemical plant that manufactured 2,4,5-T herbicide that was half of the Agent Orange recipe. Monsanto has now set a precedent for settling claims, and hopefully some good attorneys will seize the opportunity in order to hold Monsanto accountable.
MILITARISM
by Luke McKenna and Robert Johnson – Business Insider-Military & Defense Business is booming for a growing army of private military contractors, who take their military training and offer it to the highest bidder. Modern-day mercenaries are stationed throughout the world fighting conflicts for governments that are reluctant to use their own troops. Security giant G4S is the second-largest private employer on earth.
CAPITALISM
by Mac McClelland – Mother Jones My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.
SHORT VIDEOS
by Amy Goodman – Democracy NOW! The whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has begun publishing what it says are 5.5 million emails obtained from the servers of Stratfor, a private U.S.-based intelligence-gathering firm known to some as a “shadow CIA” for corporations and government agencies.
by Denkmal Film - TRANSCEND Media Service Scientists Speak the Truth
IN-DEPTH VIDEOS
by Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert – Russia Today The Stratfor bimbo and the bank that is in bed with it. WikiLeaks as the modern day Gutenberg press.
JOKE OF THE WEEK
by TMS Editor Q. What did the fish say when he swam into the wall?
Image by bossbob50 via Flickr
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