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The 2005 bombs in London shook the world. They reminded everybody of the Madrid bombings of 11th March 2004, or of what has become known as ‘Nine Eleven,’ to name only two of the tragedies that currently unsettle the world. Innocent civilians live in fear – not only is the West, also in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Middle East, in African countries and other world regions. In many cases, the West is the “addressee” and we have perpetrators acting as ultimate humiliators of the Western world. Taking down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, proud symbols of Western power, was a cruel “message of humiliation.” Paralysing world hubs such as London and Madrid is another “message of humiliation.” Humiliation has to do with “putting down.” The word humiliation has at its core “humus,” which means “earth” in Latin. Indeed, the Twin Towers were taken down to the level of the ground,...

Sixty years ago on Aug. 6th the city of Hiroshima was destroyed by one single atomic bomb, a weapon produced by the most advanced and expensive scientific project of its time. Today there are terrorist groups who in the near future might have the capacity and the wish to explode a nuclear bomb with the same terrifying effect as the Hiroshima bomb. An expert group has for NATO described and in summary form published a study on the possibility and consequences of a terrorist nuclear explosion in a big city. The study was produced by members of Centre for Strategic and International studies in Washington and Nuclear Threat Initiative, led by the former senator Sam Nunn. As example they choose a detonation in the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, Belgium. The study, named Black Dawn, was recently presented for the NATO parliamentarians. I participated in the presentation as a medical...

LONDON – A ‘no’ to Turkey starting negotiations to enter the European Union on October 3rd “will have centuries of implications”, as one influential academic, Husseyin Bagci, put it to me last week. It would push a wounded Turkey back into the arms of the nationalists, even perhaps the hard line fundamentalists, and be grist to the mill of those who argue that the Christian Western world will always consider itself superior and apart from the Muslim one. It would, as the provost of Istanbul’s Bahcesehir university, Eser Karakas, told me, make clear that Europe has no interest in becoming the great power that Turkey could help make it with its large population and army, able to play an influential role in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and not being subordinated always to the policies of the U.S.. Yet if there are no good reasons for a...

LONDON – While Europeans debate their economic sclerosis and the Americans their growing deficits most of the rest of the world is moving forward and upward, especially so if we are talking about numbers of people not of countries. Every time I come to Turkey I have to blink. Not that long ago the big cities were overridden with shantytowns and poverty stalked every village. Now, if not truly European as the Turks so earnestly want, the country makes a good attempt at emulating European standards- few shanty towns, fast roads all over the place, handsome bridges, well dressed children, a fast rising growth rate, a highly successful manufacturing export sector, rapidly improving heath and educational services and a remarkably obvious presence of educated woman in positions of responsibility. But Turkey, while an exception in the Middle Eastern Muslim world in that it both lacks oil and distributes the wealth it...

David Ray GriffinDet Nye Pearl HarborForuroligende spørgsmål om Bush-administrationen og 11. september320 sider, paperbackForlaget Progressive PublishingUdgivet på dansk i august 2005ISBN: 87-91560-02-0Normalpris 160 danske kroner Se under artiklen hvorledes du kan anskaffe bogen – også på tilbud. David Ray Griffin, amerikansk professor i religionsfilosofi, har skrevet en bog, der er bemærkelsesværdig på mere end én måde. I forordet gør TFF-Associerede Richard Falk opmærksom på det bemærkelsesværdige i, at de mange uafhængige undersøgelser – kritiske til den officielle udlægning af terrorangrebet d.11.september 2001, – som Griffins bog dokumenterer, har kunnet undholdes offentlig spredning. “Det vil ganske sikkert forandre vores opfattelse af, hvordan den konstitutionelle demokrati fungerer på De Forenede Staters højeste ledelsesniveau. Der fremstår et billede af verdenshistoriens magtfuldeste stat i dyb krise hvad angår politisk legitimitet”. Indvidere skriver Richard Falk: “Hvis Det Nye Pearl Harbor fik den folkelige opmærksomhed og den mediebevogenhed den fortjener, så ville den i grunden forandre den offentlige debat og positivt påvirke fremtiden....

LONDON – In Washington and other Western capitals there is a view gaining ground that a popularly elected government in the Middle East is better than a shaky autocratic client. Maybe there is some element of truth in this. Yet there is still a marked reservation about going the extra mile and accepting that a free and open poll might bring Islamist parties to power. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said a few measured things about the need for next week’s Egyptian presidential election not to be a forgone conclusion but the U.S. is hardly keeping the pressure on, presumably fearing an opening will be exploited by the Muslim Brotherhood with its “secret agenda”. We have still not come far enough from the 1990 elections in Algeria when France, the former colonial master, and the U.S., ignored the fact that the Islamists had clearly won a majority and...

LONDON – The statistics had arrived on the Swedish prime minister’s desk that morning, his first day back at work after his summer vacation, cycling around the villages near his summer estate. It was good news. Gorän Persson, now in his ninth year of office, told me that the growth rate for this year will be near 3% and next year more than 3% – enough, he said, to maintain Sweden’s trajectory of the last decade which was “above the average for the European Union” and, in particular, “as good as the Anglo-Saxons, Britain and the U.S.” (Although he admitted that for the U.S. he was referring to per capita growth, so as to discount the effect of its fast population growth due to rapid immigration.) This begged the first question- how does this self-confessed socialist state do it? What is the secret for success when Swedish taxes are the...

Först Hans Levanders rapport från resan till Pyongyang med kollegan Gunnar Westberg. Sedan Westbergs öppna brev till USA:s utrikesminister Condoleezza Rice och hans reflektioner över nödvändigheten av att hjälpa Nordkoreas folk. Efter deltagande i IPPNW:s regionala konferens i Hiroshima 20&endash;21 augusti 2005 fortsatte Gunnar Westberg och undertecknad Hans Levander till Pyongyang, huvudstaden i Nordkorea. Vi mellanlandade först i Beijing där vi sammanstrålade med två läkare Lars Pohlmeier och Stephan Kolb samt en medicinstudent Lena Selig samtliga från vår tyska systerorganisation. Vi fem flög den 23 augusti från Beijing till Pyongyang dit vi var inbjudna av den nordkoreanska IPPNW-föreningen Korean Anti Nuke Peace Physicians, KANPP. Ankomsten Vi tog oss således med flyg från Beijing till Pyongyang, ett nordkoreanskt flyg som går denna sträcka två gånger per vecka. Med på planet var personer som arbetar med internationellt bistånd, diplomater, en del representanter från Nordkorea vilka vi kände igen då de alla bär...

LONDON – We are all, left and right, pro war and anti war, frozen in the headlights of Iraq. Even many of those who campaigned vigorously against the war are frightened to be bold and say the troops should come out. Anarchy is the state of political disarray we have long been acculturated to fear. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” wrote Yeats. To walk away is the height of irresponsibility. But is it? An insurgency working in its home terrain enjoys advantages that are just as formidable as any precision-guided weaponry that soldiers of the coalition can deploy. The insurgents may not have ground down the American and British troops but they have certainly created enough mayhem to instil sufficient fear in every Iraqi and expatriate workman so that the economy remains almost where years of sanctions and two aerial bombardments left...

On August 6 & 9, 2005 It is 60 years ago Fight nuclearism, the ultimate terror ! PressInfo 225, July 26, 2005The Real Threat is Nuclear TerrorismThe tragedy of the terrorist bombs in London only foreshadows much worse future catastrophes if the world continues on its current course. But there are four things we can do to secure the survival of humankind without nuclear weapons. “It is much more realistic to get rid of all nuclear weapons than waiting until they are used, whether deliberately or by accident,” says Dietrich Fischer in this PressInfo that leads up to the 60th Anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. TFF PressInfo 147 from 2002Can we learn to live without the bomb?The, perhaps provocative, thesis of this analysis is that we have:a) underestimated the human, psychological, existential and cultural-cosmological aspects of the nuclear age;b) we have worked far...

LONDON – We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stonewall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he had to give a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. “My fear”, he remarked, “is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on a wall.” Charles de Gaulle once observed, “After a nuclear war the two sides would have neither powers, nor laws, nor cities, nor cultures, nor cradles, nor tombs.” Nikita Khrushchev, who presided over the Soviet Union in the days of the Cuban missile crisis, later wrote, “When I learned all the facts about nuclear power...

LONDON – Didn’t somebody once say that it’s not over until the fat lady sings? Never was this more apposite than when applied to Northern Ireland. Despite their recent pledge to renounce the armed struggle the IRA is not going to just fade away. Neither will the protestant militias. And certainly not, despite ill health, will the rabid, protestant preacher, Ian Paisley, of whom it was recently said, “He is no more representative of Christianity than Osama bin Laden is of Islam”. He has his son in waiting, just as the IRA will still have access to fertiliser, just as soon as they feel they are not getting their due. The extremists are doing better than they have ever done at the polls, and the province, once the safest place in Europe to bring up a teenage daughter, now appears to have an unfailing ability to produce a steady supply...