Racism

/#.Vuk88JPhAeM”>Amnesty International knows what it is all about. AI uses words such as “alarmingly shortsighted”, “inhumane”, “dehumanising”, “moral and legally flawed” and “EU and Turkish leaders have today sunk to a new low, effectively horse trading away the rights and dignity of some of the world’s most vulnerable people.” And “By no stretch of imagination can Turkey be considered a ‘safe third country’ that the EU can cosily outsource its obligations to,” says Iverna McGowan, Head of Amnesty International’s European Institutions Office. When Amnesty International expresses itself this way, we should listen very very carefully. I do and I’ve signed Amnesty’s Open Letter to Swedish prime minister Löfvén protesting that Sweden too may join this inhuman and law-violating agreement with Turkey. Hurry up, it is tomorrow! Behind every refugee stands an arms trade, stands militarism.

By Jonathan Power Is Islam violent? ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In Pakistan, there is Lashkar-e-Taiba and the attempted murderer of the schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai. Immigrant Moroccan men roughly pushing women and fondling them in the crowd in Cologne. Murderous bombs in Paris. Ayan Hirsi Ali, a Somali female author who was raised a Muslim, writes, “Violence is inherent in Islam- it’s a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder.” The late Harvard professor, Samuel Huntington, argued that in the later years of the last century and the early years of this an uncannily high percentage of the world’s violent conflicts took place between Muslims and non-Muslims: Turks versus Greeks, Russians versus Chechens, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians versus Serbs, Armenians versus Azeris, Uighurs versus Han Chinese, Indian Hindus versus Muslims, and Arabs versus Jews. Yet most Muslims don’t commit acts of violence. If Islam is intrinsically violent then roughly...

Five years ago In 2011 when it all began, an educated conflict analyst or otherwise conflict competent person would have said about the conflict in Syria that it was a very complex thing, caused by history, environment, traumas, external factors, the economic situation, etc. And that al-Assad and his government was certainly an important reason but far from the only one. The conflict expert would have warned against at last four ways of thinking: a) any interpretation that put all the good people on one side and all the bad people on the other – because there are no conflicts in the world with only two such parties; b) any idea that the conflict could be solved by siding with the presumed good ones and going against the bad one(s); c) every attempt to ‘weaponise’ the conflict and increase the level of violence, the duration of the conflict and the human...

/01/tff-pressinfo-359-why-anti-refugee-policies-in-denmark-and-sweden/”>Article 3/4 – TFF PressInfo # 359 Sweden Permit a digression to neighbouring Sweden. Sweden has – shamefully – not only closed its borders for people without valid documents, scrapped the right to asylum embedded in the Human Rights Declaration. It has declared (January 28, 2016) that it intends to deport 60.000-80.000 refugees already inside Sweden. It was Sweden’s ambassador, the courageous Harald Edelstam, who in 1973 stood at the stadium in Santiago after the Pinochet coup and murder of president Allende and told thousands that they would always be welcome in Sweden. Thousands came and made a good life in Sweden. (There were 90 Chileans living in Sweden before the coup, today over 40,000). A small internationalist country took humanitarian leadership and we could all be proud. But we can’t take that many people now, I hear many say. The head of the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and...

/01/tff-pressinfo-357-denmark-decency-and-decay-14/”>Article 1/4 Article 2/4 But why? One can point to many reasons for such a tragic development in an otherwise decent, wealthy and hitherto well-respected country. • It’s become too easy to go to war. The generation of politicians who might have a sense of war are long gone. If you take property owned by people who have fled thousands of kilometres because their life opportunities have been smashed and who carry just what they could grab in a hurry and carry – you simply have no idea of what life is like in a war zone. Neither do you see any need for advisers. • Only a small percentage of Danish politicians have any international experience, no special competence, in international affairs – in sharp contrast to the 1970s-80s. • Knowledge, broad civic education and cultured manners have been replaced by marketing consultants, styling experts, and fast politics salesmanship....

/01/tff-pressinfo-357-denmark-decency-and-decay-14/”>The first part of four here 2001 – the ‘war on terror’ The war on terror was initiatied after 9/11 – Afghanistan 10/7. Denmark went along without thinking. The idea came from Washington, so what was there to think about? At the time about 400 people were killed in international terrorism per year; today the Global Terror Index informs us that 32.000 people are killed in terrorism. It must be the stupidest war in modern time and the majority of the victims are found in the Middle East, not in Europe and not in the US. But we bomb – and create more terrorism. And more refugees. Politics having become anti-intellectual and devoid of ethical considerations, few connect the dots. Fewer see Denmark’s own co-responsibility for causing the problems and even fewer see the moral responsibility of taking care. No, steal their belongings. Iraq It was prime minister, Anders Fogh...

; the second cuts down on the already meagre daily benefit and the third extends the family reuinion period from 1 to 3 years. 81 MPs voted yes, 27 No, 1 abstained and 70 MPs were absent. The main argument is that Denmark wants to “signal” that asylum seekers should go elsewhere. Otherwise marketing-conscious politicians have overlooked that there are millions upon millions out there who are not asylum seekers and they get an extremely bad impression of Denmark. Like they did when Denmark put ads in Middle Eastern newspaper some time ago to deter potential refugees. The three laws – of which the first clearly provokes memories of what the Nazis did to the Jews – are just a peak point in a long (mal)development of Denmark’s foreign policy. It can be characterised by incremental absence of ethics, solidarity, compassion, empathy and sound human judgement – all concepts outside...

Prefatory Note This post consists of my written text for a public presentation on the theme of “Edward Said’s Humanism and the Rejection of the State Department’s Definition of Anti-Semitism” at a conference at Fresno State University, Nov. 6, 2015 bearing the title “Universities at the Crossroads: The Assault on Academic Freedom,” which was the last event of the “Edward Said Lecture Series” organized by Professor Vida Samiian of the Department of Linguistics at FSU. My talk as given departed considerably from this text. In these remarks, I will present the following analysis: (1) The most ardent Zionist forces have longed tried to conflate criticism of Israel and Zionism with hatred of Jews, the traditional understanding of anti-Semitism, but this effort has intensified recently, and even has been endorsed by the US Government and is currently under consideration by the University of California and elsewhere; (2) Examine the definition of...

The process has now gone full circle, from Sykes-Picot Agreement negotiated from 1915 to 16 May 1916, about control of the Ottoman Empire, when beaten, to England now joining France in bombing Syria. “Violence In and By Paris” two weeks ago was wrong about England wanting to stay out: the House of Commons on 02 Dec 2015 voted 397 to 223 for bombing; 56 Labor MPs for, only 7 Conservative MPs against. Russia played a minor role in Sykes-Picot as now also in bombing maybe mainly the opposition to Assad. As Robert Savio points out, “They all fight to the last Syrian.” The likelihood of an atrocious Paris 13 November type violence in London went up many points. And Russia had a civilian plane bombed. The USA is as addicted to bombing as a hammer to a nail, not only to use allies and train locals. James A. Lucas, “The...

French president Hollande has declared war – war on terror, George W. Bush style. Like September 11, 2001 wasn’t a war, Paris November 13 wasn’t a war. It was a criminal act. The war on terror has been an exceptionally stupid war. In the years before 9/11 about 400 people died worldwide by terrorist attack. The Global Terror Index informs us that 32.600 died in 2014 – 80 times more! And, still, the only answer everywhere is: More war on terror. The only – intelligent – exception is Italy whose PM has announced that Italy is going to counter terrorism by investing billions of Euros in culture, art and creativity – showing the world what civilisation is. Politicians and the mainstream media seemingly try to make us believe – as if we were uneducated – that we in the West are the main victims and innocent victims at that. We...

We have war and peace, theory and practice. And deeper down cultures of war and peace, notions of what the world is or could be. The latter is not necessarily peace, could also mean removing obstacles to war. Timothy Snyder, “Hitler’s World” (NY Review of Books, 24 Sep 2015) and Greg Grandin, “The Kissinger Effect: The relentless militarism of the national-security state and its perverse justification begin with Henry Kissinger” (The Nation, 28 Sep 2015) are both on that line. Hitler’s World derives from Darwinist struggle for niches, with survival of the fittest. His niche is not the whole world but what is needed to feed the German people, and here Ukraine plays a major role. The food chain is key to the image, with humans on top, eating animals and plants, but not eaten by them. So also for the human species, divided in races with the Aryan race...

The Oregon community college was “the 45th school shooting this year in America; the 142nd school shooting since the Newton massacre in 2012”, Matthew Albracht–Peace Alliance–who adds: 25% of women experience domestic violence, 6 million children witness it every year, 28% of children are bullied during the year and they are 2 to 9 times more likely to commit suicide. What can be done? Here 10 points: Gun control, of course. But the point is not only sales control but possession control with very strict laws for possession and making illegal possession a federal crime. With an average of at least one lethal weapon per citizen, there are enough arms to continue shootings; sales control is insufficient. States and municipalities can endorse this ahead of time for Weapons Free Zones in America, as places where life is safer. There will still be armed police around. Less violent foreign policy, of...