Pro-peace

Contacts for interviews as well as analytical sources below the statement. Summary Scores of Western politicians state that Iran is a threat to its neighbours or even the world. But before we end up in yet another cruel war based on wrong assumptions and delusion, somebody should ask them the simple question: How do you know? – There is little, in fact, to back up these claims. Each time Iran spends 7 US$ on its military, the U.S. spends 700 US$, Israel 15,60 US$, Saudi-Arabia 44 US$ and the Arab Emirates 16 US$. Therefore, if Iran were to start a war, it would have to ignore the “balance of forces” of 1:110 with its basic opponents! – “To construct Iran as a threat, one must assume that its leaders are lunatics or suicidal. There’s no evidence they are,” says Jan Oberg, director of TFF, The Transnational Foundation in Sweden*. Argument...

We all feel desperate watching the horrible killing, feeling the suffering of the bereaved, the whole people. But, what to do? Could it be that the UN, and governments in general, have a tendency to make the same mistake, again and again, of putting the cart before the horse? The formula they use is generally: 1. Get rid of No. 1 as key responsible, using sanctions; then 2. Cease-fire, appealing to the parties, or intervening, imposing; 3. Negotiation among all legitimate parties; and from that 4. A political solution as a compromise between the positions. It looks so logical. There is a key responsible, President Assad, ordering the killing; get rid of him by all means. Then the cease-fire, the fire ceasing; then negotiation, and then the solution emerges. Logical, yes; but maybe not very wise.

Keynote Speech – Doha, Qatar Peak Oil: Challenges and Opportunities in the GCC-Gulf Cooperation Council Countries Distinguished Participants! The organizers deserve high praise for setting this key, almost existential for some, issue on the agenda for an international conference. Oil and gas being limited there obviously is a peak–in the North Sea some years ago for Denmark, the UK and Norway. But this conference is not only about whether the peak is behind us, right now, in the future, and in that case when; but about and then what. Diagnosis, prognosis, therapy. However, the peak may be more due to demand than to supply; more due to the problems caused by converting the energy stored in fossil fuels than to the extraction becoming too expensive to pay off. To the contrary, the more expensive the higher the profits as percentage of the costs, and given the oil-gas addiction the richest...

Book Review ZERO: THE CASE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS ABOLITION By David Krieger (published in 2013 by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation); $14.95 I have known David Krieger for the past twenty-five years, and he has never wavered, even for a day, from his lifelong journey dedicated to ridding the world of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. If I were given to categorization, I would label such an extraordinary engagement with a cause as an instance of ‘benign fanaticism.’ Unfortunately, from the perspective of the human future, it is a rather rare condition, posing the puzzle as to why Krieger should be so intensely inclined, given his seemingly untraumatized background. He traces his own obsession back to his mother’s principled refusal to install a bomb shelter in the backyard of their Los Angeles home when he was 12 years old. He comments in the Preface to ZERO that...

Ever since atomic bombs were exploded over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of World War II, end-of-the-world forebodings have been present in Western cultural consciousness. In the background of such thinking is the religious anticipation of a day of judgment when life in earth will be replaced by the consignment of everyone then living to either the hell of damnation or the heaven of salvation. The first type of end time thinking is based on the fear that the Promethean gift of technological innovation when carried to its omega point will produce a big bang terminal moment in the human experience. The second kind of end time thinking imagines that the gift of planetary life was a testing time for the human species that would end with endless punishment for the many and eternal rewards for a few, and was divinely programmed in a...

The first prognosis for the French invasion was a quick victory given their superior weaponry; and then the real war starts: guerilla. France is up against two very strong forces, Tuareg nationalism and Muslim islamism; cooperating and in conflict. They both easily mingle with others – they are parts of them – to better target the French. No Western country likes coffins coming home; train and equip locals to do the job, deal with semi-legitimate regimes, stretch UN resolutions: AfPak, Libya. US AFRICOM wants 4000 soldiers deployed in 35 African countries this year for anti-terror training. Some pass on weapons, some shoot in the air, some fight, deepening fault-lines like race–once slavers-slaves!–in Mali. The West gets desperate; the patience at home is limited. Time has come for state terrorism from the air, killing “strongholds”; maybe predator drones from Djibouti? Next in line: terrorism by both, hostages, “Special Operation Commands”, extrajudicial...

I took part last week in an illuminating conference on Syria sponsored by the new Center of Middle East Studies that is part of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. This Center has been recently established, and operates under the excellent leadership of Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, who previously together edited the best collection of readings on the Green Revolution in Iran published under the title The People Reloaded. The conference brought together a mixture of Syrian specialists, Syrian activists, and several of us with a more general concern about conflict in the region, as well as with human rights and as participants in the heated debates of recent years about the virtues and vices of ‘humanitarian intervention’, what is now being called ‘Responsibility to Protect’ of ‘R2P’ in UN circles and among liberals. I came to the gathering with a rather strong...

Yes, go beyond, transcend! That is our message, New Year or not. Take the US school shootings. The National Rifle Association’s vice president on TV: “the only person who can stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun”. That statement struck many cords. There is the deep US culture of Dualism – two kinds of people – and Manicheism – one bad, one good. There is Armageddon in the class room, the teacher or resident police pulling out the gun–bigger, better, more accurate–for the final battle, for the final and only solution. The NRA is riding on this DMA (Dualism/Manicheism/Armageddon) ground swell from below, and so are millions of others. It is concrete, feasible, and could start January 2013. There is confirmation from above: this is US foreign policy. The only way to stop a bad country with arms is a good country with...

Text of my remarks delivered in Cairo at joint UN/Arab League ceremony marking the observance of the 2012 International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 29 Nov 2012, some 10 hours prior to the historic vote in the UN General Assembly. Your Excellency, Dr. Nabil Elaraby, Secretary General of the League of Arab States, H.E. Barakat Al Fara, H.E. Amre Dou Al Atta, Dr. Mohammad Gimi’a, Bishop Macos – Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is an exceptional honor and challenge to speak on such an occasion. We meet at a tense historical moment with heavy potential consequences for the Palestinian people and for the peoples and governments of the region. I along with many others throughout the world share Nelson Mandela’s view that the denial of Palestinian rights remains the “the greatest moral issue of our time.” This 2012 International Day of Solidarity with the People of...

… was the title of the Symposium at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia-USA 17-19 Nov 2012. An example of the blossoming wave of peace studies all over the US; inter-disciplinary and international. Most papers were given by very promising students on most aspects of peace studies. It is inconceivable that this will not have a major impact on US foreign policy in a generation or so, particularly with the demographic shift from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males voting Romney to the negations of all of that, including Blacks, Latins and women voting Obama. And with that shift the idea of a Chosen People with a Promised Land and a Covenant with the Almighty making them exceptional and indispensable, above the law of ordinary states, will slowly die.

Exactly two years ago I wrote my first blog. Throughout this period it has been a bittersweet experience consisting of work, play, challenge, and occasional consternation. Many warm and generous responses have given me an appreciation of the distinctive satisfactions of cyber connectivity. Such pleasures have been somewhat offset by hostile commentary and related monitoring, not mainly for disagreements as to substance, but to find discrediting material, usually torn from context, that might induce me to resign or be dismissed from my unpaid UN position as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine on behalf of the Human Rights Council. What is most distressing is not the attacks that are well known to come with this territory, but the degree to which important government officials in the United States and at the UN so easily become willing accomplices in such malicious campaigns of defamation, and do so without ‘due diligence.’ Of course,...

Peace studies matter; same as health studies. We are born with the inclination to reject suffering, be it from violence or disease, and to seek wellbeing, call it peace, call it health. But we are not born with the knowledge and skills, theory and practice. We have found causes and conditions for health in the body-mind-spirit context, as in the World Health Organization’s focus on health as physical, mental and social wellbeing. We rejected illness as divine punishment for the sick person’s Evil and explored pathogens–factors carrying diseases–such as traumas (also from violence, wars), contagious diseases, stress diseases (cardio-vascular, malignant tumors, mental disorders), chronic diseases that we can learn to live with, etc. To be adamantly against disease and in favor of health was seen as necessary – adding human will to the healthy as a sanogen, a factor carrying health. But health studies were needed. Knowledge and skills were...