Tag: human rights

• February 5, 2015

  Buried in History…?

  “Onlookers sometimes fired rifles and handguns hundreds of times into the corpse while people cheered and children played during the festivities. Pieces of the corpse were taken by onlookers as souvenirs of the event [5]. Such was the case when James Irwin was lynched on January 31, 1930. Irwin was accused of the murder of a white girl in the town of Ocilla, Georgia. Taken into custody by a rampaging mob, his fingers and toes were cut off, his teeth pulled out by pliers and finally he was castrated. It still wasn’t enough. Irwin was then burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers (Brundage, p. 42). No one was ever punished for this barbaric killing. Black victims were hacked to death, dragged behind cars [6], burned, beaten, whipped, sometimes shot thousands of times, mutilated; the savagery was astonishing. How could ordinary people participate in such brutality?”

  So these

  …

• July 12, 2014

  “Blame Israel and Hamas both for Gaza’s civilian deaths”- from +972 Magazine

  Martin Luther King Jr.

   

  Let me share Larry Derfner’s latest article;

  Larry Derfner, Blame Israel and Hamas both for Gaza’s civilian deaths (July 11, 2014)

  Larry gets it perfectly, as more and better information emerges. A curse on both approaches to military solutions and killing. Mostly on both sides, the war crime result is from the political leaders not so much the military leaders. this is the emerging pattern from the USA to Russia as well. We have a global situation emerging of enormous firepower, ultimately in the hands of civilians who stay in power by showing a given constituency that they can be bastards to an enemy, whether that enemy is Hamas, Ukraine, or whoever. That means that we the people who give rise to such civilians bear the burden of responsibility for such male bravado in those leaders ignore all other means of problem solving. We are …

• July 7, 2014

  Harsh Observation and Revenge

   

  Harsh observation

  When you give peanuts to peacemakers and billions to weapons industries expect your children to die.

   

  Revenge

  When you burn someone to death, the lungs breathe the fire. But this is as true of a bomb from the sky as it is from a torch. 
  
  Most innocents are not killed in conflict by savage murder. Most die from ‘you hit me, so I hit you harder’. 
  
  It is the savage in all of us that is the real killer to be chained. We dismiss the terrorist and waltz back into war.
  
  The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them. Ezekiel 18:20. (6th Century BCE) Enough said on house demolitions, carpet bombing.

  Both …

• October 7, 2013

  Drowning the Arab Spring in Gulf Oil

  my recent piece on why the Middle East region continues to resist change following the Arab Spring: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=61723

  An except:

  “The excessive, concentrated wealth that extractions industries created has notoriously depressed the empowerment of millions of people throughout modern history. But considering the unprecedented role of oil as the lifeblood of the global economy, it should come as no surprise that oil politics and rivalries have an especially destructive retardation effect on freedom in the Middle East.

  Specifically, the rivalries of Qatar and Saudi Arabia are wreaking havoc on the legitimate rights of the Syrian people to resist the cruelties and tyrannies of the Syrian regime. They do so by allowing their citizens to fund jihadism that has undermined the emergence of a rational Syrian opposition that could be in a position to share power and eventually replace the current regime. The Gulf jihadist proxies know no compromise, no comprehension …

• May 19, 2013

  Figuring Out Our Values by Studying Our War Criminals

   

  Jorge Rafael Videla, the military junta leader who oversaw a ruthless campaign of political killings and forced disappearances during Argentina’s so-called Dirty War against dissidents in the mid-1970s, died on Friday in the Marcos Paz Prison in Buenos Aires, where he was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity. He was 87.

  At least 15,000 people were killed or “disappeared” during the junta’s campaign, according to government estimates. Human rights officials say the figure is closer to 30,000.

  It is gratifying to read of the death in prison of a man who had almost 30,000 people murdered. It is even more gratifying to learn that he spent his last thirty years of life in jail. The successful execution of the rule of law, the nonviolent approach to justice, is the single greatest rebuke to those who cry out for weapons on both sides of this world’s political spectrum. …

• June 8, 2012

  Syria’s Christian Conundrum

  by Hind Kabawat, CRDC Senior Research Analyst and Expert on Conflict Resolution

  This article was originally published by CNN here.

  One of the most perplexing aspects of the Syrian revolution is the deep ambivalence felt by so many of the country’s Christians when faced with the prospect of freedom after four decades of authoritarian dictatorship. Some Christians have enthusiastically embraced the prospect of democratic change and a more open civil society, but many have not.

  As a Christian, this provokes a great deal of sadness in me and others who are committed to transforming Syria into an open, democratic, inclusive, secular and religiously tolerant society. But the problem is that many, if not most, Christians in Syria do not believe that this will be the outcome of changing the regime.

  On the contrary, they believe the present regime — corrupt and repressive as it has been — is the …

• December 12, 2011

  Ineffective tightening of sanctions on Iran

  

  This article originally appeared on the Al Jazeeera English website on Dec. 12, 2011.  You can view it by clicking here .

  Washington, DC – There is a long record of the grim effects of sanctions in international struggles against those states deemed as “rogue”. Sanctions are seen as righteous instruments, a non-violent way to pressure problematic regimes to change. But when you really don’t care about a country or its people, then your true attitudes emerge in the way in which you use the sanctions instrument of policy.

  Let’s take Iraq. Based on estimates of the massive increase in child mortality rates through the years of the sanctions in the 1990s, anywhere from 300,000 to a million people lost their lives. But no one in Saddam’s inner circle, none of the wealthy, and none of the killers, died from those sanctions. Such sanctions were touted as an enlightened and …

• November 16, 2011

  The Strategic Value of Forgiveness

  A version of this essay appeared recently in the Jerusalem Report on November 21, 2011.

  The Arab Awakening is facing serious challenges, and some new strategic decisions are required that will end up being good for all the revolutionary movements afoot this year, in the Middle East, in Israel and beyond.

  The essential point is this: The Arab Street has demonstrated incredible heroism and nonviolent principles in the face of torture and death, and even Libya began as a very peaceful revolution, even if Libyans felt at some point that they had no choice but to fight. This is a paradigm shift of ethical and political values that will be remembered for generations. It may also signify a broad-based Middle Eastern democratic shift.

  The going is tough, however, because no revolution easily dislodges corrupt structures of power. The temptation is just too great for those immediately below the revolution’s chosen …