Experts widely concede that Israel cannot maintain its occupation and colonialism of the Palestinian territories (and siege of Gaza) except that it remains on a war footing.
The "DREAM Now Series: Letters to Barack Obama" is a social media campaign that launched Monday, July 19, to underscore the urgent need to pass the DREAM Act. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, S. 729, would help tens of thousands of young people, American in all but paperwork, to earn legal status, provided they graduate from U.S. high schools, havegood moral character, and complete either two years of college or military service.
Uri Avnery, founder of Israel's oldest peace activist group, Gush Shalom, often writes as an experienced insider into Israeli politics. In this article, "Hold Me Back!", Avnery tells us why Israel will never attack Iran, its nuclear ambitions notwithstanding. In doing so, he goes beneath the Israeli right wing preoccupation with Iran, which I have always interpreted as a red herring, a distraction from its attempts to colonize all of original Palestine, something Netanyahu is convinced can be done.
Reprinted by permission (in its entirety as requested).
Primarydoc just published a diary on Daily Kos contending that the site is contributing to false advocacy and Iran-bashing based totally on false propaganda, principally the long unsubstantiated notion that Iran was contributing to the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq.
The ad features these words, with background visuals,
Iranian Bombs Are Killing Americans
On The Battlefields of Iraq
It is accompanied by shots of an IED exploding and a picture of a helmet and rifle, usually a symbol of a dead soldier. The Website skin is the advertising strip across the the top of Dkos' front page and is prominent, and highly expensive.
The United States media often - and for good reason - portrays China and Russia as reluctant to implement sanctions on Iran. Rarely (too rarely), however, does it attempt to view the issue through a Chinese or Russian lens. Americans nearly never try to understand the complex motivations behind Chinese and Russian lukewarmness.
I will attempt to do that now. How do China and Russia think of Iran?
Probably in the same way we thought of Honduras. The lukewarm American opposition to the coup strikingly paralleled China and Russia's stances on Iran.
The leaders of the Islamic Republic know well the value of violence and brutality as political control mechanisms. In recent months, the authorities have unleashed random beating of protesters, arbitrary detention and torture, apparently including rape of detainees, running down protesters with motor vehicles, shooting with live ammunition into crowds of unarmed demonstrators resulting in fatalities, and apparent targeted killings. The recent executions of two young men, Mohammed Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmanipour, after legal proceedings that violated Iranian law as well as international standards, and the threat, encouraged by hardliners like Ayatollah Jannati, the Chair of the Council of Guardians, to execute more alleged protesters, are a piece of this long-established strategy of state terror to quell dissent.
On the eighth anniversary of 9/11, a professor of mine made a comment that caused a lot of soul-searching for me. He remarked, quite casually, that the United States is in decline.
Those words angered me. Nobody likes to hear their country characterized in that manner. But ever since then I've been considering that casual statement.
I think it accurately describes the state of our nation.
We are a nation in decline.
We are in decline for a variety of reasons, some more controllable and some less so. Economic weakness has something to do with it, as does the popularity of anti-Americanism (thank you, George Bush). Misadventures in the Middle East and the rise of China also play a participating role.
But enough about why we are in decline. What can be done to stop it?
The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades - or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States - more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.
The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.
How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments - for now - that those tensions have not boiled over.
I've said a few times in comments recently that I'm pretty optimistic, from my antiwar and similar perspective, on the Iran and sanctions issue. The reasons are various, but centered on the analysis of India career diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, who also believes the sanctions effort will fail. More on those ideas a couple paragraphs down.
As for my perspective, first of all, not that it's stopped the U.S. before but there is pretty much zero justification for U.S. saber-rattling, as indicated by the mundane headlines (i.e., Iran vows to stick with low-level nuclear enrichment) only two days after the three imperials (Obama, Sarkozy, Brown) news conference about a 'secret' low-grade nuclear 'facility' that was neither secret nor a facility, since it won't be a functioning one till construction ends 18 months from now. This is weak soup for crippling sanctions, naval blockades, and worse. Today, even weaker stuff, 'IRAN TESTS (short-range) MISSILES! Oh my gawd y-a-w-n, weak stuff for scaring us up and dealing death.
Secondly, and Bhadrakumar's analysis is critical here, despite Beltway pundits fishing for wish fulfillment, both China (emphatically) and Russia oppose sanctions on Iran. And this time the U.S. needs international cover, imho, or its 'X must prove it doesn't have WMD' campaign (Hillary Clinton) won't have the outcome (severe sanctions and an attack on Iran's nuclear power facilities) desired by the U.S. & Israeli military-industrial complexes.
Obama joined the leaders of Britain and France in accusing the Islamic republic of clandestinely building an underground plant to make nuclear fuel that could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iranian officials acknowledged the facility but insisted it had been reported to nuclear authorities as required.
Obama should try reading intelligence reports, like 2007's National Intelligence Estimate (the combined consensus report by all sixteen known U.S. intelligence agencies), which stated quite clearly that there is no concrete evidence of a weapons program in Iran. In July and August of this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the lack of evidence although it refuses to state anything definitively. Yet still Obama, the D.C. political establishment, and the corporate media continue to lie to the contrary.
We've already been lied into one failed war, lied into ramping up another failed war, are so hurting for fresh soldiers that the Pentagon is now actively accepting white supremacists, yet still the establishment seeks to lie us into another conflict. And some people have wondered why my signature now has an image of Obama and Bush morphed into one unholy beast. Now you know.
News is 'news' in our corporatacracy. Currently, for example, we have the Israeli-Warmongers-Only-Perspective 'News'. See below for how the release of a UN report on the war criminal conduct on both sides of the Gaza war is widely headlined in the mainstream news (to see how news of 320 dead Gazan children in that massacre is handled (hint: 'not at all'), see NPR's Linda Gradstein):
Where the Iranian spokesperson is allowed to dispel the headline's glaring implication in paragraph 20:
Javanfekr said Iran is ready to face the six powers and "during the talks we will definitely speak of banning nuclear arms globally because it is not a problem for us as we do not possess any nuclear arms."
So, obviously 'nuclear power' means 'nuclear power power'. Some of you got your war on before you realized that, right? That was the intent.
Meanwhile, McClatchy continues to be a source of news. Here it provides some reality on the domestic side, first the real health care catastrophe:
I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, I am selling t-shirts to raise money for amnesty. They can be found at www.everthustodeadbeats.etsy.com
They picture ahmadinejad with a caption of 'demockracy'. I will donate 50% of any profit to amnesty international, or perhaps a more specific charity if someone can point me in that direction. I would donate more but I have to miss work to make the shirts and like most on here I'm pretty close to hand to mouth living. Anyways, peace.
I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you dont know
Ill be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that youre home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside youre twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
cause I see you
The term Velvet Revolution was coined by a journalist after the first events and it caught on in world media and eventually in Czechoslovakia. The media, riding on an infotainment wave, saw this success and started the tradition of inventing and assigning a poetic name to similar events - see color revolution.
It is believed that the term originated from the various communist opposition groups which met in theaters such as the Laterna Magika, velvet referring to the velvet ropes found in all these theaters.[citation needed]
Another theory is that the revolution took its name from The Velvet Underground, an influential American rock and roll band. Václav Havel is a great fan of the Velvet Underground, and is a friend of Lou Reed, who was the principal singer-songwriter of the group, and told Reed after the collapse of communism, "Because of you, I am President."[13] The significance of music as an influence in the revolution is reflected in Frank Zappa (of whom Havel was also a lifelong fan), being asked by Havel to serve as a consultant for the government on trade, cultural matters and tourism.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It was Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. And Nico.
Little-noticed authority granted to the president several decades ago may be helping the architects of the crackdown in Iran. The unintended consequences are enough to justify a second look at whether those powers should stay in place.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.
For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little...which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we're getting into a proper context.
The goal of today's conversation is to give you a bit more of an "insider look" at today's news; and to do that we'll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we'll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we'll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we'll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.
Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.
STATE BLOGS
