Archive
Egypt’s New Pharaoh And The Useful Idiots
Posted on December 17, 2012 by Akashma Online News
By Chris Hedges
When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran after 14 years in exile on Feb. 1, 1979, he set out to destroy the secular opposition forces, including the Communist Party of Iran, which had been instrumental in bringing down the shah. Khomeini’s declaration of an Islamic government, supported by referendum, saw him rewrite the constitution, close opposition newspapers and ban opposition groups including the National Democratic Front and the Muslim People’s Republican Party. Dissidents who had spent years inside Iran’s notoriously brutal prison system under the shah were incarcerated once again by the new regime. Some returned to their cells to be greeted by their old jailers, who had offered their services to the new regime.
This is what is under way in Egypt. It is the story of most revolutions. The moderates, who are crucial to winning the support of the masses and many outside the country, become an impediment to the consolidation of autocratic power. Liberal democrats, intellectuals, the middle class, secularists and religious minorities including Coptic Christians were always seen by President Mohamed Morsi and his Freedom and Justice Party—Egypt’s de facto political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—as “useful idiots.” These forces were essential to building a broad movement to topple the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. They permitted Western journalists to paint the opposition in their own image. But now they are a hindrance to single-party rule and are being crushed.
The first of two days of voting on a new constitution was held Saturday. According to reports Sunday, the document is being approved. The second round of voting, next Saturday, includes rural districts that provide much of the Brotherhood’s base of support, and it is expected to end in the constitution being ratified by the required 50 percent or more of Egypt’s 51 million voters. Opposition forces charge that the first round was marred by polling irregularities including bribery, intimidation, erratic polling hours and polling officials who instructed voters how to cast ballots. A large number of the 13,000 polling stations will have had no independent monitors; many judges, in protest over the drafting process, have refused to oversee the voting.
The referendum masks the real center of power, which is in the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood. The party has no intention of diluting or giving up that power. For example, when it appeared that the Supreme Constitutional Court would dissolve the panel—stacked with party members—that was drafting the new constitution, the Brotherhood locked the judges out of the court building. Three dozen members of the panel, including secularists, Coptic Christians, liberals and journalists, quit in protest. The remaining Islamists, in defiance of the judges, held an all-night session Nov. 29 and officially approved the 63-page document.
The draft constitution is filled with disturbingly vague language about democratic rights, civil liberties, the duties of women and the role of the press. It gives Islamic religious authorities control over the legislative process and many aspects of daily and personal life. One reason the constitution is expected to pass, apart from voting fraud, is because many liberals, secularists and Copts have walked away in disgust from electoral participation.
The Brotherhood, ironically, was not part of the vanguard that led the 18 days of protests in February 2011 that brought down Mubarak. It was reluctant, after decades of being severely repressed, to throw its weight behind the protesters clogging Tahrir Square. It said at first that it would not compete in the presidential election or run a full slate of parliamentary candidates. But once it saw the chaos, squabbling and disarray among its secular opponents, who ran three competing presidential candidates, it seized the opportunity.
Passages in the proposed constitution such as “The state is keen to preserve the genuine character of the Egyptian family” and the state guarantees freedom of the press except “in times of war or public mobilization” are vague enough to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to severely curtail women’s rights and ruthlessly silence press criticism. Morsi’s imperial presidential declaration of Nov. 22, until he rescinded it last week after street protests, effectively placed him above the law. Rescission of the decree will not, however, prevent the party from attaining dictatorial power.
The Brotherhood does not shrink from the use of deadly force. The violent street clashes between thousands of pro- and anti-government demonstrators outside the presidential palace last week left 10 dead and about 700 wounded. Some anti-government protesters said they were beaten in a makeshift detention and torture center that the Brotherhood set up close to the palace. Morsi showed no remorse. He announced in a nationally televised broadcast that anti-government demonstrators had confessed to being “paid thugs.” And the new government, to curb further street protests, including those that took place in Alexandria this weekend, has authorized the military to arrest civilians.
The Muslim Brotherhood, like all revolutionary parties that replace an ancien régime, has inhabited the traditional structures of power. Government ministers and cabinets have been appointed. Parliamentarians have been elected. Judges have been named. But actual power is held, as in most post-revolutionary societies, by parallel party organizations. There are two systems of authority. One is public and ceremonial. The other is secret and unassailable. It is this realization—that the formal positions of power no longer mean anything—that led to the withdrawal of 30 percent of the Constituent Assembly, including several presidential advisers. Public figures in official roles are window dressing.
Successful revolutionaries, as Crane Brinton wrote, “combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve other men as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme: they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had, and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers who expect the New Jerusalem around the corner. They are practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.”
Read more…
Stand Still for the Apocalypse
Posted on Nov 26, 2012 by Akashma Online News
 |
| AP/Elizabeth Dalziel |
|
In much of the world, including China and the United States, dirty energy remains cheap and plentiful, with disastrous consequences. |
By Chris Hedges
Humans must immediately implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe’s inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.
The 84-page document,“Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be Avoided,” was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population. The report comes as the annual United Nations Conference on Climate Change begins this Monday [Nov. 26] in Doha, Qatar.
A planetwide temperature rise of 4 degrees C—and the report notes that the tepidness of the emission pledges and commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will make such an increase almost inevitable—will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. And as these extreme events begin to occur simultaneously in different regions of the world, the report finds, there will be “unprecedented stresses on human systems.” Global agricultural production will eventually not be able to compensate. Health and emergency systems, as well as institutions designed to maintain social cohesion and law and order, will crumble. The world’s poor, at first, will suffer the most. But we all will succumb in the end to the folly and hubris of the Industrial Age. And yet, we do nothing.
“It is useful to recall that a global mean temperature increase of 4°C approaches the difference between temperatures today and those of the last ice age, when much of central Europe and the northern United States were covered with kilometers of ice and global mean temperatures were about 4.5°C to 7°C lower,” the report reads. “And this magnitude of climate change—human induced—is occurring over a century, not millennia.”
The political and corporate elites in the industrialized world continue, in spite of overwhelming scientific data, to place short-term corporate profit and expediency before the protection of human life and the ecosystem. The fossil fuel industry is permitted to determine our relationship to the natural world, dooming future generations. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, increased from its pre-industrial concentration of about 278 parts per million (ppm) to more than 391 ppm in September 2012, with the rate of rise now at 1.8 ppm per year. We have already passed the tipping point of 350 ppm; above that level, life as we have known it cannot be sustained. The CO2 concentration is higher now than at any time in the last 15 million years. The emissions of CO2, currently about 35 billion metric tons per year, are projected to climb to 41 billion metric tons per year by 2020.
Because about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect since 1955 is momentarily in the oceans, we have begun a process that, even if we halted all carbon emissions today, will ensure rising sea levels and major climate disruptions, including the continued melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets as well as the acidification of the oceans. The report estimates that if warming accelerates toward 4 degrees Celsius, sea levels will rise 0.5 to 1 meter, possibly more, by 2100. Sea levels will increase several meters more in the coming centuries. If warming can be keep to 2 degrees or below, sea levels will still rise, by about 20 centimeters by 2100, and probably will continue to rise between 1.5 and 4 meters above present-day levels by the year 2300. Sea-level rise, the report concludes, is likely to be below 2 meters only if warming is kept to well below 1.5 degrees. The rise in sea levels will not be uniform. Coastal areas in tropical regions will be inundated by sea-level rises that are up to 20 percent higher than those in higher latitudes.
“In particular, the melting of the ice sheets will reduce the gravitational pull on the ocean toward the ice sheets and, as a consequence, ocean water will tend to gravitate toward the Equator,” the report reads. “Changes in wind and ocean currents due to global warming and other factors will also affect regional sea-level rise, as will patterns of ocean heat uptake and warming. Sea-level rise impacts are projected to be asymmetrical even within regions and countries. Of the impacts projected for 31 developing countries, only 10 cities account for two-thirds of the total exposure to extreme floods. Highly vulnerable cities are to be found in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. For small island states and river delta regions, rising sea levels are likely to have far ranging adverse consequences, especially when combined with the projected increased intensity of tropical cyclones in many tropical regions, other extreme weather events, and climate change-induced effects on oceanic ecosystems (for example, loss of protective reefs due to temperature increases and ocean acidification).” Read more…
Meet the Peace Activists – Non-Violent Movement has started an invisible Revolution
Posted on June 30, 20 by Marivel Guzman, US and Omar Karem, Gaza
The Non-Violent Movement started by the conscience objectors of the world, the peace and social activists of the world has started an invisible revolution. One revolution that can not be stopped, because can not be seen, can not be attacked with soldiers or guns.
This revolution is the revolution of the ideas, the evolution of humanity where we the people have finally awaken, we can not be duped, lied or entertain with cheap propaganda any longer. We the people are shaping now our reality. We have taken the lead of the affairs of our world, we are walking the path to peace, using Non-violent channels. The governments of our countries are trying their best tactics, intimidation, false accusations incarcerations , and some other methods known too well from our history books, but they know that no matter how much they exert their power over some activists at the end we win.
We have the examples of the heroes of our time; Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gandhi, John Lennon, Rachel Corrie, Vitorrio Arrigoni and hundreds other around the world that were physically terminated, their message was not stopped with their departure, their message got stronger, it took life in its own, the governments know that once the wheels of revolution are in motion nothing can stop them. And with the peace movement shaping our world in a direction that they did not imagined, they are using their last cards. Now we can not stop we are the precursors of this invisible revolution, be proud of your role in these changing times, be ready.
I know many has asked the same question, when confronted with our new reality, they think that back in the 70’s during the Vietnam war the anti-war grass movements and the many individuals such singers and writers, did not achieved their goal. I say that we live in a different moment in time, first and all we are more mature as a society, the movements are unstoppable, we count with channels that our peace activists of the 70’s could never dream off will exist, we have them, we are using them and we know the tremendous reach of these channels, the Internet has open the doors for us to Unite and get stronger, where our message travel with the velocity of the light.
It is our duty to help our brothers. Enough of waiting for our leaders to “Do” anything, they have never have our best interest in mind.
Thank you all for your participation in this humanitarian mission that is a mission of Love.
It is not easy to embark in this process of peace, it’s not easy to leave your comfort zone and go to the unknown, but we find inner energy and courage to count ourselves in the every growing number of compassionate humans that we are. One day the world will flourish with peace all over, and the men and women that made it possible is you, the world citizen, part of the same family. With your simple thought of justice and peace for all
U.S. BOAT TO GAZA
The Audacity of Hope will sail as a human rights mission to help end the illegal Israeli naval blockade of Gaza.
The U.S. Boat to Gaza Campaign is collecting thousands of personal letters to the people of Gaza from people like you in the U.S., in an act of friendship and solidarity. These letters will be carried as our cargo on the U.S. Boat to Gaza when it sets sail in June 2011 in the next International Freedom Flotilla “Stay Human”.
Interview with Chris Hedges, author, journalist and former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief. During fundraising cruise in the New York City harbor on August 5th to raise funds for a U.S. ship to join the next International Flotilla to break the blockade of Gaza.
Hagit Borer (right) moved from Israel to the United States to study in 1977. She became an American citizen in 1992 and is currently a professor of linguistics at USC and a passenger on the Audacity of Hope. She self-identifies as an Israeli Jewish American. Yesterday the LA times published an Op-Ed by Borer titled “Getting on board with peace in Israel” in which she shares some experiences of her youth growing up in Jerusalem as well as reflecting on Israel today.
Here’s a brief segment:
A soldier helped me sneak into the Old City. Snipers were still at large and the city was closed to Israeli civilians. By the Western Wall, a myth to me until then, the Israeli army was already evicting Palestinian residents in the dead of night and demolishing all houses within 1,000 feet. Eventually, the area would turn into the huge open paved space it is today, a place where only last month, on Jerusalem Day, masses of Israeli youths chanted “Muhammad is dead” and “May your villages burn.”
It is a different Jerusalem now. It is not their Jerusalem, for it has been taken from them. Every day the Palestinians of Jerusalem are further strangled by more incursions, by more “housing developments” to cut them off from other Palestinians. In Sheik Jarrah, a neighborhood built by Jordan in the 1950s to house refugees, Palestinian families recently have been evicted from their homes at gunpoint based on court-sanctioned documents purporting to show Jewish land ownership in the area dating back some 100 years. But no Palestinian proof of ownership within West Jerusalem has ever prevailed in Israeli courts. Talbieh, Katamon, Baca, until 1948 affluent Palestinian neighborhoods, are today almost exclusively Jewish, with no legal recourse for the Palestinians who recently raised families and lived their lives there.
In his speech on Jerusalem Day, Yitzhak Pindrus, the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, assured a cheering crowd of the ongoing commitment to expanding the Jewish neighborhood of Shimon Hatzadik, as Sheik Jarrah has been renamed.
every single one of these people on the audacity of hope has a personal story of what drove them to break the blockade.
-
Passenger Robert Naiman talks about why he is going aboard the US Boat to Gaza with the Stay Human Flotilla at the end of the month.”I am the Policy Director of Just Foreign Policy (www.justforeignpolicy.org), which works to reform U.S. foreign policy to reflect the values and interests of the majority of Americans so the U.S. complies fully with international law and supports peace, diplomacy, and negotiated resolutions of conflict.. The blockade of Gaza violates international laws and norms in regards to collective punishment against a civilian population—a crime in which the U.S. is complicit. Furthermore, the U.S.-led diplomatic embargo of Hamas is an obstacle to Palestinian self-determination as well as a just and lasting negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I’m also concerned that the present U.S. policy could lead to yet another war in the region. I’m participating in this mission to call attention to the suffering faced by the civilians in Gaza under the blockade and to press for change in U.S. policy on the conflict.”
Kathy Kelly, 58, co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org) a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare. Since May of 2010, she traveled to Afghanistan four times, with delegations intent on learning more about conditions faced by ordinary people in Afghanistan, a country afflicted by three decades of warfare. Voices for Creative Nonviolence has been working closely with the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers in search of non-military solutions to end the war. In 2009, she lived in Gaza during the Operation Cast Lead bombing. She was also in Lebanon during and after the 2006 Israeli assaults on southern Lebanon.
- From 1996 — 2003, Voices activists formed 70 delegations that openly defied economic sanctions by bringing medicines to children and families in Iraq. Kathy and her companions lived in Baghdad throughout the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombing. She was sentenced to one year in federal prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites (1988-89) and spent three months in prison, in 2004, for crossing the line at Fort Benning’s military training school. She and her companions at the Voices home/office in Chicago believe that non-violence necessarily involves simplicity, service, sharing of resources and non-violent direct action in resistance to war and oppression.
Ken Mayers was commissioned as an officer in the United States Marine Corps upon his graduation from Princeton in 1958. He resigned that commission at the end of 1966 in disgust with American foreign policy and returned to the University of California at Berkeley where he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science. His doctoral dissertation was a policy analysis of minority business enterprise. He has been a peace and justice activist ever since, at the same time progressing through four successive careers. He taught political economy at Bennington College for six years, then worked in an interdisciplinary “skunk works” at Digital Equipment Corporation for 13 years followed by eight years as an independent consultant. For the past 12 years he has been the director of member relations for two international professional alliances. In the early 1980′s he and his late wife founded the Bennington VT chapter of the Beyond War Movement. In 1986 he joined Veterans for Peace (VFP) and in 2002 he founded the Santa Fe Chapter of VFP. He served on VFP’s national board of directors from 2004 to 2009, including five years as national treasurer. In December of 2009, Ken was part of the international Gaza Freedom March that got stuck in Cairo and protested in Tahrir Square and other Cairo locations for a week. He is currently a member of VFP’s Israel-Palestine Working Group. Ken is a fourth generation American of Jewish descent (non-practicing). His mother’s extended family lost at least 17 members in the holocaust. Ken is convinced that the Israeli government has learned the wrong lessons from those tragic years. He wants to demonstrate to his Palestinian brothers and sisters that even someone in his situation supports their desire for freedom. Since the government of Egypt turned him back from Gaza a year ago, he is determined to try again now.
Akashma Online News 
thank you Hagit Borer
Crew member Yonatan Shapira talks about why he is going aboard the US Boat to Gaza with the Stay Human Flotilla at the end of the month.
I was a captain in the Israeli Air Force and a Black-Hawk Pilot until 2003 when together with other pilots I initiated the pilots’ letter and refused to take part in the crimes of the occupation. Today I am a member of Boycott from Within, a group of Israeli citizens who are actively supporting the Palestinian call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. I have a Master degree in Peace and Conflict Studies, I facilitate dialogue groups and volunteer as a sailing instructor for children with disabilities. I’ve been sailing since I was a child and in September of 2010 I was a crew member on the Jewish boat to Gaza that was intercepted by the Israeli Navy. I work as a commercial pilot in the US and am still dreaming to be a musician.
Hedy Epstein was born in Germany in 1924. She was 8 years old when Hitler came to power in 1933. In 1939, she left on a Kindertransport (children’s transport) for England. Her parents and other family members perished during the Holocaust. After World War II she returned to Germany and worked as a research analyst at the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi doctors who performed medical experiments on concentration camp inmates.
Epstein came to the U.S. in 1948, and quickly became involved in civil rights, human rights and peace related issues, both professionally and in her personal life. In 1989, she visited Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cambodia as a peace delegate. Since 2003, she has visited the Israeli occupied West Bank five times, and has made four attempts to visit Gaza by land and sea. She has written and traveled extensively in the U.S. and Europe to speak about social justice issues, with an emphasis on the Israel/Palestine issue. In 1999, her autobiography — “Erinnern ist nicht genug” (Remembering is Not Enough) was published in German, in Germany.
Epstein will be on the U.S. Boat to Gaza, part of Flotilla 2, her fifth attempt to reach Gaza.