Palestine: Peace not Apartheid

Poor Jimmy Carter! He dared to criticize the state of Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, and the attack on him is relentless. Main stream media in U.S. ignores the substance of the book and focuses on the controversy about the title, and parades the latest personalities who have bashed Carter for it.

I heard a couple of interviews that Carter gave about his book. Among all the questions he was asked, there was one question that he couldn’t satisfactorily answer:

If Jimmy Carter, a respected ex-president and a Nobel Peace Laureate, is attacked by the Israeli lobby when he tries to raise a balanced conversation about this, how do you expect any American politician dare to do it?

Back Again

After a long absence, I am back again. Hopefully, I'll keep this blog updated more often from now on.

Bush is beating his drum of war again. He apparently doesn't care how disastrous his foreign policy has been. It doesn't matter either that Americans are overwhelmingly against Iraq war. He is already talking about Iran, and preparing ground for another disaster in Middle East, and the idiot Iranian president, Ahmadinejad, is helping him along.

I saw Kissinger in a PBS TV interview the other day. He said he has given Bush a reading assignment! A 600 page book about the Algerian war : "A Savage War of Peace", so he can understand the parallels between what France went through back then and what the U.S. is going through in Iraq. I am not sure if he can finish all 600 pages before his presidency is up!

Also, Kissinger was very straight-forward and honest about what U.S is doing in Iraq: Control of energy resources of the world. None of that usual nice words about democracy or freedom for Iraqis, or anything about defeating terrorism, etc. He doesn't disguise his colonial/imperial way of thinking. With his record, I don't think he could, even if he wanted to!

Free Akbar Ganji

This is a letter drafted by "Feedom for Akbar Ganji" weblog to all organizations and people concern with human rights and freedom of speech around the world. Please publisize this case as wide as possible:

Akbar Ganji is the longest-serving political prisoner in Iran’s journalistic community, jailed for expressing his opinion in defense of freedom and the professional rights of journalists. He was convicted by high-ranking judiciary officials in the Islamic Republic for criticizing government officials, and has so far spent more than sixty-one months in prison. Since his imprisonment, Ganji has published “The Republican Manifesto,” a work that outlines plans for achieving an open and democratic society, and has invited the people to engage in civil disobedience. These actions have brought him further wrath from the officials of the judiciary, who are abusing their legal powers to silence his voice, so much so that even his attorney, Dr. Nasser Zarafshan, has been sent to prison.

At 7 PM on Thursday, May 19th 2005, Ganji went on an indefinite hunger strike to protest his unfair and illegal treatment, including the refusal to grant him medical leave. This is while he is severely ill and is in dire need of special medical attention. We Iranian journalists and bloggers are extremely concerned about Ganji’s health, and we call on human rights organizations to take immediate measures to pressure Iran’s judiciary to release and treat him. In the present circumstances, international human rights organizations and freedom-loving people all over the word are responsible for the protection of Akbar Ganji’s life.

May Day

It is interesting that May 1st, the International Workers Day, is celebrated all over the world except in the country of its origin, the U.S. With all the jobs being shipped overseas by multi-national corporations in search of cheap labor, I am not sure if American workers feel much international solidarity these days anyway. And that is unfortunately how the world is right now, the exploited have to compete with each other to survive on their share of ever shrinking piece of the pie that is left over after the big guys have filled their guts up to their noses!

But don't despair, there are rare glimpses of hope every now and then.

Blindness

I usually don’t read fiction. I think I just don’t know how to appreciate it. Whenever I pick up a book of fiction, I just want to know what happens next and how it all ends. I ignore all the power of imagination that the writer has put into developing characters, details of events, and how the characters interact and think, etc. That is the beauty of the fiction and I just zoom through all that. So, when a good friend of mine suggested reading “Blindness”, a book by Jose Saramago, the 1998 Noble prize winner in literature, I kind of reluctantly picked it up, but was immediately drawn into it.

Saramago’s writing in this book has a unique style. All the characters’ conversations, thoughts, events, the writer’s own commentary, are all strung together in sentences, that flow like a stream, but so powerful and so clear that the reader feels caught up in the middle of it all. It makes the reader hear what the characters are saying and thinking, and experience the events with them.

The plot is also quite unique and strange. A contagious illness of sudden blindness spreads through the population quickly. This sudden disaster gives such a shock to the society that the normalcy of life goes away and everything starts to fall apart. Order is replaced by chaos, and the society goes toward a complete breakdown and disintegration. The survival instinct brings out the worst in the human beings, but in the middle of all the darkness and turmoil, you can still see traces of human sprit prevail, that which makes us different from instinct driven animals.

I highly recommend this book.

Happy New Year

First day of spring is the Iranian New Year, Norooz. I wish this year is a year of Peace for everyone. To learn more about the history of Norooz and the customs around this occasion, read this article.

Global Domination

Military domination and Economic domination two sides of the same coin

Apostasy

According to the lawyer for Mojtaba Sami’nejad, a jailed Iranian blogger, Mojtaba is charged with Apostasy, a charge that carries a death sentence under the religious law in Iran, a law that reminds us of the terror of Inquisitions of centuries ago, and should have no place in 21st century.

Although in Koran, there is a direct statement that says there is no compulsion in accepting the religion, it has not prevented the religious authorities to create strange and contradictory laws regarding Apostasy. They call for a death sentence for a man, and a life sentence for a woman if convicted of Apostasy. Their strange law also prevents those born or raised in Muslim families to "repent" to avoid the harsh sentence.

Unfortunately, U.S. government’s involvement in protesting against human right abuses such as this one is self serving and is done not for the sake of human rights, but to further the Bush Administration’s agenda of total domination over Middle-East and its Black Gold of oil, and it usually has an opposite effect. But the protest of international community, including U.S. citizens and non-governmental organizations can have a positive effect in preventing Islamic regime in Iran impose harsh sentences on Iranian dissidents and prisoners of conscience such as Mojtaba Sami’nejad.

Please help publicize this case in any way you can. There is also this report from International Pen organization with more detail about this case and other similar cases. You can also sign this internet petition to protest against this human right abuse in Iran.

Disinformation

In the world of espionage, two obvious tasks are spying on other side and keeping the other side from spying; but there is a third task: feeding wrong information to the opponent to deceive him. For this task to be effective the messenger must be credible, like the spies of the other side themselves are recruited to feed back wrong information. British intelligence service claimed it had every German spy on its payroll during WWII for this purpose.

So, in the age of information, it must come as no surprise that these old techniques of the espionage world are now practiced in the governments of so-called modern democracies as a way of control. A little after the September 11th terrorist attack, it came out that U.S. military was planting disinformation in the mainstream news media in the forms of legitimate news items as part of their so-called war on terrorism, the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) it was called. There was some grumbling among journalists that their integrity was compromised, OSI officially closed down, but its practices were generally justified as a necessity of war and as another legitimate weapon for defeating the enemy, the weapon of deception.

But now it is becoming more and more apparent, that these practices of disinformation are getting a more wide-spread use. From the paid commentators that pushed Bush’s agenda in the public opinions, to now these Public-Relation video segments produced by U.S. government disguised as news items and presented by media as real news.

In the societies that want to keep the appearance of freedom of press and democracy, there is only one way to make the interest of few appear as the interest of many, and that is to manufacture the public opinion by bending the truth, distorting it, and creating an alternate reality for the millions of their captive audience. In the age of information, news media has become the “trusting” double agents feeding the unsuspecting side, the people, disinformation.

A Letter from George

Dear Concerned Iranian,

I know you expect me to ease your concerns and tell you that I will exhaust all diplomatic options and all those nice things, but no, I am going to be honest with you here.

When God called on me to be the president of the most powerful nation on earth, he wanted me to fulfill His mission, to defeat the wicked ones, the evil, by my sword. As my bible says: (Job 27:7,14) "May my enemies be like the wicked, my adversaries like the unjust!... However many his children, their fate is the sword; his offspring will never have enough to eat.”

You may not understand, but ask your Ayatollahs, they’d understand. We think alike, the Ayatollahs and I. But, my God has granted me bigger guns.

I know you might have heard me talk about freedom and democracy, but let me tell you what this is really all about. Oil is a creation of almighty, stored under the earth for His children, His chosen ones, to take. Who made you the sole heir to this God-given, precious, sweet smelling, velvety black gold of power and wealth? (Oh, how my mouth waters just thinking about it).

I used to run an Oil business, so I know something about it (Some say my business was a failure, but I beg to differ, if it was such a failure, how come I made a heck of a lot of money from it?). We will do anything for Oil. Look at history, look what we did to Mosadeq, look how we carved up Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and what we are doing to Iraq. See what we tried to do to Venezuela (Chavez thinks he got away, but his time will come soon enough). What do you think makes you so special?

Learn from Saudis. They may not have freedom or democracy, but see how they embraced our corporations and our military. Some of my best friends are members of Saudi royal family. They are good loyal friends, I say jump and they say how high. My family has done lots of business with them.

My intelligence people tell me that if you have any nukiller weapons program, you are probably still years away from making the bomb, but that’s not the point. Saddam didn’t have nukiller weapons, but we invaded Iraq anyway, and Israel has lots of them, but do you see me invading Israel? So, I told Rummy to cook me some intelligence and bring me battle plans (I love this guy so much, it makes Laura jealous sometimes).

Let me sum it up. Make no mistake about it, you either belong to us or you are against us (that’s what I wanted to say in my axis-of-evil speech, but those goddamn speechwriters edit every sentence I write).

You may not have liked what I told you, but I am a straight talking Texan (I was actually born in Connecticut, but was “born again” in Texas). I told you as it is, and I know I am right, as my bible says: (Job 27:6 ) I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it; my conscience will not reproach me as long as I live.

Sincerely,
George