by Jim Miles
Hamas vs. Fatah – The Struggle For Palestine. Jonathan Schanzer. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008.
I’m not sure where to start with this volume – other than to say it is a history so out of context and so biased in its language that it is essentially meaningless. If a scientist were to isolate human blood cells and study them under a microscope – and only blood cells under a microscope – they could learn and report about all sorts of facts about the cells, how the chemicals work, how different chemicals block certain other chemical reactions, how different components of blood will attack certain other components of blood, how the cells became less responsive to stimuli and ultimately die. In that out of context scenario, without considering other interactions and engagements with the hundreds of other factors involved in the overall body, the scientist could conclude that blood cells do not function properly and should be considered a rogue element within the body. But scientists aren’t that ignorant, only political scientists are.
Jonathan Schanzer does not describe himself as a political scientist, but rather as a scholar. Examined from a scholarly perspective, this work remains fully out of context and with a language bias that places it well outside a true scholarly effort. His brief biography states that he has travelled widely, including Israel and the Palestinian Territories and that he speaks Arabic and Hebrew. Along with the lack of scholarly rigour in the manner in which he uses sources, there is also a lack of scholarly insight that might have been gleaned from any visits to the Palestinian Territories if he had actually communicated openly with the Palestinian people.
The book jacket claims that this is a “ground breaking” work, but judging by the number of articles and books used in the reference notes, there is nothing really new here. With so many references from other resources, and so very little in the way of personal insight from interviews and experiences from the Palestinians, it could hardly be considered a groundbreaking work, nor scholarly. Further described as providing “a roadmap for a potential way forward” is also disingenuous, as the only solution provided is the old one of having the Palestinians acquiesce to all of Israel’s demands. It is, at best, a compilation of information concerning the political and militia fights between Hamas and Fatah, combined with a total lack of context and biased language.
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by Stephen Lendman
Imagine life under these conditions:
Living in limbo under a foreign occupier. Having no self-determination, no right of return, and no power over your daily life. Being in constant fear, economically strangled, and collectively punished.
Having your free movement denied by enclosed population centers, closed borders, regular curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, electric fences, and separation walls. Having your homes regularly demolished and land systematically stolen to build settlements for encroachers in violation of international law prohibiting an occupier from settling its population on conquered land.
Having your right to essential services denied - to emergency health care, education, employment, and enough food and clean water. Being forced into extreme poverty, having your crops destroyed, and being victimized by punitive taxes. Having no right for redress in the occupier's courts under laws only protecting the occupier.
Being regularly targeted by incursions and attacks on the ground and from the air. Being willfully harassed, ethnically cleansed, arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and slaughtered on any pretext, including for your right of self-defense. Having no rights on your own land in your own country for over six decades and counting. Vilified for being Muslims and called terrorists, Jihadists, crazed Arabs, and fundamentalist extremists. Victimized by a slow-motion genocide to destroy you.
According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Israel has conducted state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians for decades and intensively in Gaza. In a September 2006 Electronic Intifada article titled "Genocide in Gaza" he wrote:
"A genocide is taking place in Gaza....An average of eight Palestinians die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed. (It's become) a daily business, now reported (only) in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts. The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day," like shooting fish in a barrel. Why not, they're only Muslims, so who'll notice or care.
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by Tom Engelhardt
The Obama national security "team" — part of that much-hailed "team of rivals" — does not yet exist, but it does seem to be heaving into view. And so far, its views seem anything but rivalrous. Mainstream reporters and pundits lovingly refer to them as "centrist," but, in a Democratic context, they are distinctly right of center. The next secretary of state looks to be Hillary Clinton, a hawk on the Middle East. During the campaign, she spoke of our ability to "totally obliterate" Iran, should that country carry out a nuclear strike against Israel. She will evidently be allowed to bring her own (hawkish) subordinates into the State Department with her. Her prospective appointment is now being praised by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger.
The leading candidate for National Security Advisor is General James L. Jones, former Marine Corps commandant and NATO commander, who remained "publicly neutral" during the presidential campaign and is known to be personally close to John McCain and, evidently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as well. Not surprisingly, he favors yet more spending for the Pentagon. The reputed leading candidate for Director of the CIA, John Brennan, now head of the National Counterterrorism Center, was George Tenet's chief of staff and deputy executive director during the worst years of the CIA's intelligence, imprisonment, and torturing excesses.
The new Secretary of Defense is odds on to be… the old secretary of defense, Robert Gates, a confidant of the first President Bush. Still surrounded at the Pentagon by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's holdovers, he has had a long career in Washington as a clever apparatchik. He was the adult brought in — the story of how and by whom has yet to be told — to clean up the Bush foreign policy mess (and probably prevent an attack on Iran). He did this. He now favors no fixed timelines for an Iraq withdrawal, but a significant American troop "surge" in Afghanistan, "well north of 20,000," in the next 12-18 months. He has overseen the further growth of the bloated Pentagon budget and has recently come out for the building of a new generation of nuclear weapons. (Other candidates for Defense include former Clinton Navy Secretary and key Obama advisor Richard Danzig, who may end up — for the time being — as an undersecretary of defense, Clinton former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who might instead land the job as the Director of National Intelligence.)
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by Stephen P. Pizzo
Did you feel a rush last week as members of Congress dumped all over Detroit automakers, confronting them with their self-destructive, self-indulgent management of America's last remaining super-industrial base?
And how about the shellacking those guys who run CitiBank are getting from the press. Huh? Watching the news this month has been kind of like watching a virtual version of the French Revolution; “Off with their heads! Off with their heads!”
But what about our heads? After all, those high-rollers on Wall Street weren't dancing that dance alone. No siree. They had eager and willing partners. We were like unpopular kids at school who never got asked to dance at the ball.
But the Wall Streeters and Bankers reached out to us, asked us to dance, and we swooned into their arms.
And oh, did we dance! How we danced! We swirled to one commercial hit after another. And we loved it -- and we loved them. They swept us away to a place we had always been told we could reach, but never seemed within reach. But, as long as we danced, they lavished those things on us.
“But,” we sniffled, “we can't afford your SUV's?"
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by Media Lens
PART 1 - IN THEORY
Hectoring And Censoring - And Climate Catastrophe
Last week, Guardian News & Media (GNM) published ‘Living Our Values’, an independently audited account of the company’s annual performance on sustainability issues. GNM, which encompasses the Guardian, the Observer and guardian.co.uk, claims to have strong environmental ambitions. Its ongoing mission: to seek out and “explore subjects like climate change, environmental degradation and social inequality” in ever greater depth.
The Guardian’s ultimate aim is to be nothing less than "the world's leading liberal voice". (Siobhain Butterworth, ‘Open door. The readers' editor on... the Guardian's green and global mission,’ November 17, 2008)
An awkward point for the Guardian, mentioned by the audit, is that their environmental performance has been strongly criticised by one of their own columnists, George Monbiot. Last year, after a gentle nudge from Media Lens, Monbiot asked the Guardian and other newspapers to reject adverts for products and services that are particularly damaging to the climate: ads for gas guzzling cars and flights. He pointed out that, by accepting these ads, his editors "make the destruction of the biosphere seem socially acceptable”. (Monbiot, ‘The editorials urge us to cut emissions, but the ads tell a very different story,’ The Guardian, August 14, 2007)
In the same column, Monbiot described most of the negative responses he received to his proposal as “inadequate”.
The Guardian’s latest audit comments on the controversy:
"Our role is neither to hector our readers nor to censor on their behalf. Our editorial coverage informs and influences their choices."
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by Norman Solomon
On Friday, columnist David Brooks informed readers that Barack Obama’s picks “are not ideological.” The incoming president’s key economic advisers “are moderate and thoughtful Democrats,” while Hillary Clinton’s foreign — policy views “are hardheaded and pragmatic.”
n Saturday, the New York Times front page reported that the president — elect’s choices for secretaries of State and Treasury “suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center — right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues.”
n Monday, hours before Obama’s formal announcement of his economic team, USA Today explained that he is forming a Cabinet with “records that display more pragmatism than ideology.”
The ideology of no ideology is nifty. No matter how tilted in favor of powerful interests, it can be a deft way to keep touting policy agendas as common — sense pragmatism — virtuous enough to draw opposition only from ideologues.
Meanwhile, the end of ideology among policymakers is about as imminent as the end of history.
But — in sync with the ideology of no ideology — deference to corporate power isn’t ideological. And belief in the U.S. government’s prerogative to use military force anywhere in the world is a matter of credibility, not ideology.
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by Tim Buchholz
Well, it started with $700 billion. Actually, it started before that with the Fed helping Chase take over Bear Sterns, and then saving AIG, and then … well, you were there. But let’s get back to $700 billion. Under what some say were threats of “Marshall Law,” our government approved $700 billion taxpayer dollars (or future taxpayer dollars) to buy up bad mortgage assets off these struggling bank's books, and we were going to get the money back when the housing slump ended and the mortgages were resold. Then, Paulson decided that the money would be better served given as direct infusions to the banks, buying up stock (which could be bought back later) and thus giving the banks the capital needed to start loaning again. Didn’t Congress approve that money for buying bad assets? I’m not saying I like that idea any better, but isn’t that what our representatives voted for? Of course, the banks aren’t really using the money the way they were supposed to, and some are even using it to buy other banks, but we can’t put too many restrictions on the money, or the bailout won’t work, says Paulson.
So far Paulson has spent half of it, as well as two trillion in loans that he will not say who they went to, because too many restrictions will make the bailout fail. The next $350 billion has to be asked for and approved, and some say Paulson wants to save it for the next administration to take a swat at the problem. Then I read today from AP Economics writer Martin Crutsinger that Paulson is going to be using an additional $600 billion to, again, buy mortgage assets, good ones this time according to NPR, not the subprime ones. I thought they had changed their minds on that one, and if they spent $350 billion of what had been approved for this action, and can’t use the other $350 billion without approval, where did they find another $600 billion, without a big vote on Capitol Hill and campaigns being called off? Crutsinger says, “The Fed said it will purchase up to $100 billion in direct obligations from mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the Federal Home Loan Banks. It also will purchase another $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities, pools of mortgages that are bundled together and sold to investors.”
He goes on to say that the Fed is also releasing a program for the next phase of this crisis, the credit card, student loan and auto loan companies. Only $200 Billion will be needed for this crisis, for now. As Bush said about the rebailout of AIG, it may not be the last.
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by Bernard Weiner
Let's face it. Countries, like individuals, get lost sometimes -- really lost, ignoring the maps of morality and civil behavior, bringing shame and disrepute on themselves.
In terms of individuals, good people do weird stuff on occasion: run off, or inexplicably go on a bender, or visit purveyors of easy virtue, or get addicted, or use hate-speech in extremis and so on. Stuff happens.
Nations, too, often take leave of their senses. Crises occur. Citizens get frightened by something and don't know how to respond. A strong leader comes along and channels that fright, usually aiming it at perceived enemies, real or invented, or at least highly exaggerated.
The powers-that-be love crises and catastrophes; at such nodal points, the public is more malleable, more easily rolled. (See Naomi Klein's brilliant book ##"The Shock Doctrine.") ( www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/klein.htm )
And when these power-hungry rulers or elites grossly abuse their granted authority, the result often is social chaos, police-state laws, warped or broken economies, and often hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dead and maimed in ill-advised wars of choice.
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by Dave Lindorff
I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago, and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping again.”
Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get Americans back into the malls.
In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.
The problem facing America, and to a great extent the broader world economy, is that we’ve pretty much met basic human needs long ago, and now it’s about creating human wants and then convincing people that they need to buy more stuff and more services.
This is wrong in so many ways and on so many levels.
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by James Petras
The pro-Chavez United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won 72% of the governorships in the November 23, 2008 elections and 58% of the popular vote, dumbfounding the predictions of most of the pro-capitalist pollsters and the vast majority of the mass media who favored the opposition.
PSUV candidates defeated incumbent opposition governors in three states (Guaro, Sucre, Aragua) and lost two states (Miranda and Tachira). The opposition retained the governorship in a tourist center (Nueva Esparta) and won in Tachira, a state bordering Colombia, Carabobo and the oil state of Zulia, as well as scoring an upset victory in the populous state of Miranda and taking the mayoralty district of the capital, Caracas. The socialist victory was especially significant because the voter turnout of 65% exceeded all previous non-presidential elections. The prediction by the propaganda pollsters that a high turnout would favor the opposition also reflected wishful thinking.
The significance of the socialist victory is clear if we put it in a comparative historical context:
1.Few if any government parties in Europe, North or South American have retained such high levels of popular support in free and open elections.
2.The PSUV retained its high level of support in the context of several radical economic measures, including the nationalization of major cement, steel, financial and other private capitalist monopolies.
3.The Socialists won despite the 70% decline in oil prices (from $140 to $52 dollars a barrel), Venezuela’s principle source of export earnings, and largely because the government maintained most of its funding for its social programs.
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by William Bowles
 “This we do by rigging the parliament through official majorities, a restricted franchise and so forth” — From the minutes of the British Colonial Office, 14 December, 1959
Back in June of 2006 I wrote a piece, based on a story in the New African magazine on how the British government fixed the Nigerian ‘independence’ elections, so that the winner would be a compliant servant of the British government and of course, British and US capital (see ‘Hidden Histories’ 24 June, 2006).
Harold Smith and his wife Carol. For forty-eight years his story has been suppressed by the British media (Photo courtesy New African magazine).
The piece opened with the following quotation from the New African article, the only publication in the UK that had the courage to print the story about how the government fixed the Nigerian election. All the mainstream media caved into government pressure (no doubt a ‘D’ Notice was issued) to kill the story.
“You know why you’re here, Smith. And I want you to know that all your worst fears and suspicions are absolutely correct … I am telling you this because I want you to know how much trouble you are in … Smith, I want you to know that I personally gave the orders regarding the elections to which you objected … If you will keep your mouth shut, I can promise rapid promotion and a most distinguished career elsewhere … but you will not be allowed to work in the UK. You must understand that you know too much for your own good. If you don’t give me your word, means will be found to shut you up. No one will believe your story and the press will not be allowed to print it.” – Sir James Robertson, the then governor-general of Nigeria to Harold Smith in 1960.
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by Marjorie Cohn
First published in The Jurist
Since the Bush administration began transporting men and boys to Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, it has tried to prevent them from presenting their cases before a neutral federal judge. Indeed, the naval base was turned into a prison camp precisely to keep the detainees away from impartial courts. The government argued that federal courts had no jurisdiction over men detained on Cuban soil. Twice, the Supreme Court rejected that argument, finding that the United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control over the Guantánamo Bay base.
Finally, on November 20, in a stunning development, U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the government to release five Guantánamo Bay detainees “forthwith.” Finding that the government failed to prove the men were “enemy combatants,” the judge, in a rare comment, urged senior government leaders not to appeal his ruling. “Seven years of waiting for a legal system to give them an answer . . . in my judgment is more than enough,” he said.
The five detainees the judge ordered released are Lakhdar Boumediene, Mustafa Ait Idir, Hadj Boudella, Saber Lahmar and Mohammed Nechla. Judge Leon did, however, find that a sixth detainee, Belkacem Bensayah, was properly classified an enemy combatant.
It was the Supreme Court’s June 12, 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush (see Supreme Court Checks and Balances in Boumediene) that allowed Judge Leon to review the enemy combatant classifications. The high court upheld the Guantánamo detainees’ constitutional right to habeas corpus and made clear they were “entitled to a prompt habeas corpus hearing.” Judge Leon adopted the definition of "enemy combatant" used by the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which is “an individual who was part of or supporting Taliban or al Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. This includes any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported hostilities in aid of enemy armed forces.”
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by Dave Lindorff
It’s a safe bet that within the next several months, Congress will vote to bail out General Motors. It will be a colossal boondoggle involving, probably, upwards of $50 billion when it’s through, and it will fail in the end.
The reason is before our eyes. This bloated megacorporation is being run by idiots.
For years, as it became evident to everyone that oil prices were going to soar because demand has been exceeding both production and supply and will continue to do so, it has been obvious that to succeed, a car company had to offer well-made cars that could demonstrate high gas mileage. GM, perhaps more than any other company, ignored that reality and has been paying the price, watching its share of the car market wither.
Now the company, worth about what Starbucks used to be worth, its stock now down to where it was in the depths of the Great Depression, has bet the farm on a new car, the Volt, which it promises will, two years from now, be able to go all of 40 miles purely on electric power. It will have a motor too, and not a small one, but rather one the size of what you get in a typical conventional Honda Civic—1.4 ltr. That motor wouldn’t drive the car; rather it would keep charging the Volt’s huge lithium-ion battery so the car could keep going for a few hundred miles.
Wow.
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by Zahir Ebrahim
Dateline California, 11/23/2008,
I'd like to know why abolishing the “money as debt” paradigm that is legally implemented by the Federal Reserve System, isn'tLyndon LaRouche's overarching, coherent, and very first-order solution?
His prescription, as reproduced below, is only useful as a bandaid – or more accurately, as a topical treatment – of the current financial crisis, and by keeping the systemic illness intact, undiagnosed, latent, it leaves wide open the monetary conspiracy for world government under control of the private central banks:
' “This is the big explosion, detonating right now,” LaRouche warned. “And so far, I am offering the only coherent solution--bankruptcy reorganization of the entire global financial system--starting with the cancellation of all derivatives obligations. My solution poses an existential threat to the entire Anglo-Dutch financial system of globalization. I know it, many leading bankers and government officials around the world know it, and, of course, the British know it. This is why the fear has turned to outright panic. We are nearing the showdown moment.” ' ( LaRouche: From Fear To Panic As Derivatives Crash Hits,Nov. 21, 2008. )
Indeed, if one examines Larouche's documentary film “1932” about President FDR's New Deal presented in the backdrop of a broad swipe of Anglo-American history, one notices, amidst the excellent explanation of the British Empire and its organized global free trade, amidst accurate analysis of Lincoln's stance against the British imperialists, and amidst the insightful exposition of post Civil War miracle of industrialization of the American continent and the lead up to FDR, the bizarre praise of Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton was the first Secretary of Treasury of the newly founded United States of America, the man behind the Bank of North America, and the First Bank of the United States, America's own private central 'Bank of England'. Please visit the U.S. Treasury website, referenced in the letter below, which quotes Alexander Hamilton: “The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty.” The documentary “1932” at minute 63, in praise of FDR, narrates: “Hamilton lived in Roosevelt”!
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by Tom Engelhardt
By October 2005, when American casualties in Iraq had not yet reached 2,000 dead or 15,000 wounded, and our casualties in Afghanistan were still modest indeed, informal "walls" had already begun springing up online to honor the fallen. At that time, I suggested that "the particular dishonor this administration has brought down on our country calls out for other 'walls' as well." I imagined, then, walls of shame for Bush administration figures and their cronies -- and even produced one (in words) that November. By now, of course, any such wall would be full to bursting with names that will live in infamy. That October, we at TomDispatch also launched quite a different project, another kind of "wall," this time in tribute to the striking number of "governmental casualties of Bush administration follies, those men and women who were honorable or steadfast enough in their government duties," and so often found themselves smeared and with little alternative but to resign in protest, quit, or simply be pushed off the cliff by cronies of the administration.
Nick Turse led off what we came to call our "fallen legion" project with a list of 42 such names, ranging from the well-known Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki (who retired after suggesting to Congress that it would take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq) and Richard Clarke (who quit, appalled by how the administration was dealing with terror and terrorism) to the moderately well known Ann Wright, John Brown, and John Brady Kiesling (three diplomats who resigned to protest the coming invasion of Iraq) to the little known Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin (who resigned under pressure, possibly so that various Bush papers could be kept under wraps). By the time Turse had written his second fallen legion piece that November, and then the third and last in February 2006, that list of names had topped 200 with no end in sight.
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by Sherwood Ross
Pentagon death and disability payments for service personnel are far lower than private sector payouts for like causes, a Nobel Prize-winning economist says.
The families of civilian workers killed in an environmental accident routinely collect millions of dollars in court settlements but the official Pentagon payout to family survivors is a $100,000 “death gratuity” plus $400,000 in life insurance, write Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in their new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War”(W.W. Norton). Bilmes is an expert on government finance at Harvard and economist Stiglitz teaches at Columbia University.
The $500,000 sum “is a small fraction of the value used in even the narrowest economic estimates of the value of a lost life, what a person might have earned had he/she been able to fulfill his/her normal life expectancy,” the authors say. Juries frequently award much higher amounts in wrongful civilian death lawsuits, including one recent award for $269 million.
Using the economists’ “value of statistical life” measure, of $7.2 million for an employee killed in a workplace or environmental accident, the “hidden cost” to the public given 4,300 U.S. deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds $30 billion, the authors write.
And the $7.2 million yardstick is short, too, because in many cases “those killed in Iraq were young men and women in peak physical condition, at the beginning of their working lives. The true economic loss from their deaths could be much higher,” Stiglitz and Bilmes say.
Similarly, veterans’ families are being short-changed in payouts for traumatic brain injuries(TBI) — injuries that often prevent a veteran from holding down a job and require frequent trips to the doctor.
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by Ed Naha
I’m afraid of fire. Not in the Frankenstein monster sense - I don’t growl and toss furniture if someone lights a cigar near me or if a dwarf prods me with a torch. (Hmmm. Well, maybe I’d toss the dwarf.) But, if I see flames more than five feet high that are not attached to a fireplace or a drunkard’s barbecue, then my ponytail assumes Afro position.
I live in Santa Barbara, California.
Last week, it caught fire.
I was afraid.
In the span of twenty-four hours, I evacuated my wife and dogs from our home, spent a night in a Red Cross center sitting in a twenty-year-old station wagon while watching the flames spread, mutated into an inadvertent Google sensation and almost became a Fox News darling. It was more frightening than listening to Sarah Palin.
In the end, my family and my home emerged unscathed. 210 other families were not as lucky.
I’ve seen my share of fires out here, but this one was truly intense. On Thursday, the thirteenth, I took my nightly stroll at dusk and smelled smoke. I cut the walk short and came back home, turning on the local TV news. Nothing.
I went back into my office and started working. About 5:45, a hammer of wind smashed into the backyard with enough force to slam all the house screen inserts shut. We get Sundowner winds here, sort of like Santa Ana’s on crack. They come out of the desert, hit the mountains like a tsunami and howl through the valleys - banshees heading for the ocean, raising temperatures ten or twenty degrees after sunset in a matter of minutes.
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by Jeremy R. Hammond
There's been no shortage of controversy surrounding what has been termed the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the governments of the United States and Iraq. After battling away for most of the year at what the terms of the agreement should be, the text was at last finalized this month.
The terms of the agreement effectively allow the U.S. to continue to control billions of dollars of proceeds from the sale of exported Iraqi oil held in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It also contains numerous loopholes that could allow the continuing long-term presence of U.S. military forces and would effectively maintain U.S. jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.
Iraq's cabinet approved the agreement a week ago with 27 members voting in favor, out of 28 ministers who were present, with nine ministers absent. It is now being debated in the Parliament.
Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, Iraq's minister of defense, issued a dire warning that without the agreement and continued presence of U.S. forces, "then what happened in the Gulf of Aden will happen in the Arabian Gulf too. Pirates will start in these ports in a way you can't even imagine."
Governments often use fear tactics to push through controversial legislation. Before the U.S. invasion, members of the Congress were told that if they didn't authorize the President to use military force against Iraq, Saddam Hussein might attack the east coast of the United States with biological weapons from unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. More recently, members of Congress were warned that if they did not pass the highly unpopular bill taking taxpayers' dollars to bail out banking and investment corporations, there would be martial law in America.
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by Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.
The “Yes on 8” campaign in California that, for the time being, succeeded in revoking some citizens’ basic civil right to a civil marriage used scare tactics and non sequitur arguments based on misrepresentations, distortions, and deceptions. And they’re still at it.
The “Yes on 8” campaign – funded primarily by the Mormon Church ($20,000,000), the Catholic Church ($1,300,000 from the Knights of Columbus and “priceless” pulpit politicking by Catholic priests) as well as the minions of the Protestant Christian Right, such as James Dobson’s Focus on the Family ($622,000 in monetary and non-monetary contributions) and Don Wildmon’s American Family Association ($500,000) – flooded Californians’ television screens with ads claiming that if the Prop 8 failed, kindergarten children would have to be taught about homosexuality and gay marriage. They were misrepresenting, distorting, and deceiving:
A lesson about Prop. 8: Despite what proponents say, its defeat would not change what California's schools teach
Californians tend to be an open-minded crowd that wouldn’t take kindly to a campaign attacking homosexuality or attempting to strip away people's rights. So the well-financed and savvy backers of Proposition 8 have produced waves of advertising aimed instead at making voters believe that supporters of same-sex marriage are intent on stripping away everyone else’s rights, and that this ballot measure is the only way for traditionally religious people to retain them.
With the defeat of this proposed ban on gay marriage, they say, schools would begin indoctrinating children as young as kindergartners to be wholehearted supporters of such marriages. …
This is emotional stuff for many parents. But the dry reality of California education law tells a different story. Under SB 71, which passed in 2003, the Legislature set out the framework for comprehensive sex education, which includes the brief reference to marriage from which these dire Proposition 8 warnings are drawn: "Instruction and materials shall teach respect for marriage and committed relationships." Schools aren't required to teach comprehensive sex education, but if they do, this is one of many rules they must follow. The law also gives schools the option of discussing gender, sexual orientation and family life, though that's not required as part of the more comprehensive program.
Most important, the law contains paragraph after paragraph guaranteeing parents the right to review the material being taught and to have their children excused from all or any part of it. …
Proposition 8 would change none of that. The measure would do one thing: use the state Constitution as the device to take away an existing, fundamental right from a particular group of people, so that a loving adult in that group could not marry the person of his or her choice. …
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