…Neglected Genocides

On the absurdly named island of Newfoundland, existed a society of Original Peoples known as the Beothuk. They had lived on the island for a couple of millennia until the Europeans came to the rich fishing grounds off its shores. A genocide of thousands occurred. Numerically, it is not enormous, but it represented the complete obliteration of the Beothuk.

The genocide that was wreaked on the Original Peoples of the western hemisphere numbers up to 100 million. [1] But the corporate media of Turtle Island seldom mentions the number and the genocide. Moreover, there are no well known museums dedicated to the genocide of the Original Peoples.

The Longevity of Human Memory

While the magnitude of the killing is revelatory, it can serve as a distraction. The focus should be on the circumstances that brought about the abhorrent killing of other humans and learning how to avoid such calamities in the future.

Annan focused on remembrance and protecting the uniqueness and exclusivity of the Holocaust. He stated, “It must be remembered, with shame and horror, for as long as human memory continues.”

Annan has questionable credibility to pronounce on matters of human dignity. After all he is the UN figurehead who labeled the US-UK aggression of Iraq as illegal and yet — while he is helpless to do much about it without damage to his important self — allows the crime to stand unopposed by the UN secretariat. The ongoing US-UK perpetrated genocide that has claimed over a million Iraqi lives is a horror and Annan’s inaction is a shame. It speaks to the longevity of his own memory.

What kind of remembrance is it when members of the victimized group immediately set out on their own genocidal bloodbath? In the aftermath of WWII, Zionist Jews went on to wipe Palestine off the map. The de facto UN approbation of the Nakba came in the form of UN General Assembly Resolution 273 that recognized the ethnically cleansed state of Israel in 1950. [2] The Zionist state stands in contravention to a plethora of UN resolutions and Geneva Conventions but because of US support it escapes relatively unscathed. The UN covers up a Zionist massacre in Jenin, pays little heed to Zionist assassinations of Palestinian leaders, whimpers when its own people are killed by Zionists, and yet prostrates itself to Zionist-US imperialist dictates, as in the UN investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese president Rafik Hariri and those near him — an assassination that best suits the aims of Zionists and US imperialists.

The UN has the blood of Rwandans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, and the men of Srebrenica on its hands. It is the authority responsible for the behavior of UN troops raping young girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. What gives with all the platitudes about remembrance when genocides are raging as Annan speaks? The shame and horror.
dissidentvoice.org

…Sources inside the Houston Police Department (HPD) have confirmed officers in recent weeks have been taking part in nuclear disaster drills, adding more fuel to the fire that the city is being targeted by the “enemies within” the Bush administration for a nuclear attack.

“In the last week I have multi-checked with sources of mine in the Houston Police Department and confirmed that HPD has been running nuclear disaster drills,” said former Army Intel Capt. Eric May, who is trying to alert Americans of a possible nuclear strike in the upcoming days, possibly to take place in the Texas City or Houston metro area.

“Accordingly, I’ve been calling my personal contacts, among them HPD CID Sergeant John Karshner and HPD Internal Affairs Lt. Felix Garcia, to let them know that the set-up is on.”

Capt. May, who once backed the government’s position while serving his country, became disillusioned after 911, saying facts surfaced making it “crystal clear” the enemy wasn’t Al Qaeda but an “enemy within,” or the Bush-New World Order Cabal.

Since realizing 911 was an inside government job, Capt. May has used every ounce of his military training, energy and intelligence to try and stop the Bush administration and what he calls its “phony war on terror.” His info-war on terror can be better understood by a Google search of Ghost Troop Bibliography, taken from the name of his cyber-unit called Ghost Troop.

Capt. May said the Al Qaeda scare has been contrived and manufactured by the Bush Cabal in an effort to cover-up the real criminals and culprits in the White House. Saying every so-called terrorist attack escalates in size and body count, he is warning Americans that the next one will involve a nuclear blast on American soil.
globalresearch.ca

…For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson culled self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial bias that measures the speed of people’s associations between black or white faces and positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations between explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435 congressional districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces — evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.

“Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president,” said Banaji, “but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice.”

Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the results matched his own findings in a study he conducted ahead of the 2000 presidential election: Volunteers shown visual images of blacks in contexts that implied they were getting welfare benefits were far more receptive to Republican political ads decrying government waste than volunteers shown ads with the same message but without images of black people.
washingtonpost.com

…The poll came up with some powerful findings which this article will discuss. For starters 85% of Democrats are more likely to support a candidate who supports impeachment.

100% of the African Americans in the poll– 109– now believe that the Iraq war was unjustified. Zero percent of the African Americans polled support the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court. 80.3% oppose it and 19.7 percent are not sure. That helps explain the huge drop in support PA Senatorial candidate Bob Casey sees from African Americans when they learn his positions. How huge?

Casey loses virtually 50% of his African American support (think Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) I was shocked until I checked the poll’s issue question demographics and found how strongly the African American Community feels about those two issues.
opednews.com

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR- t’s unusual for a controversial economic issue to be fought on moral grounds. But ACORN, a public advocacy group, has been winning a higher “living wage” for workers in state after state, city after city, by appealing to voters’ sense of justice.
“It’s probably the best [argument] we have,” says Jen Kern, director of ACORN’s Living Wage Resource Center. A decent income is a moral matter of “fairness,” she says. Those who “play by the rules of the game should be able to support themselves by their work.”

“A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you poor,” agrees Paul Sherry, coordinator of the Let Justice Roll Living Wage Campaign, a church-based coalition in Cleveland seeking to raise low wages.

According to the father of classical capitalism, Adam Smith, a Scottish professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University in the 1700s, the “invisible hand” of self-interest ensures the most efficient use of resources in an economy, and public welfare is a byproduct.

Today Americans are mostly content to let market forces – that is, the law of supply and demand – determine the wage levels for the multiplicity of jobs, professions, and positions that make the economy work. It would be extremely difficult for a bureaucratic group to make detailed, comparative judgments as to the real value of various occupations and place a specific wage level on each.

But at some point, the extremes in wages resulting from what is called “free enterprise” begin to violate people’s sense of common justice. They chuckle, then, at the portrayal in a Boston Globe cartoon of two bosses in a fancy office saying to three workers: “Why should you have a minimum wage? We don’t have a maximum wage.”

As it is, an employee working full-time at the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour makes $10,712 a year, about $1,000 above the official poverty level for an individual ($9,654).
commondreams.org

Nat’l Guard Reports Recruiting Gains
WASHINGTON – National Guard officials said Monday that recruiting has accelerated so much in recent months that they expect to expand the Guard even as the Bush administration proposes to shrink it.

The National Guard Bureau, the Pentagon office that administers the Guard, issued a statement outlining a recent turnaround in recruiting and predicting that it will continue to rise this year. The Guard is “aggressively working” to reach the 350,000-troop level by the end of the current budget year on Sept. 30, it said.

…In its statement Monday, the National Guard Bureau emphasized recent gains on the recruiting front. In the final three months of 2005, the Guard signed up 13,466 recruits, compared with its goal of 12,605. It was the first time since 1993 that the Guard exceeded its goal during the fall quarter of the year.

Mark Allen, a National Guard Bureau spokesman, attributed the improvement to a new advertising campaign, a large increase in financial incentives and a near doubling of the number of recruiters, from 2,700 to 5,100.

…Nearly 2 million people lived in Detroit in the 1950s; today it has fewer than 900,000. According to the Census Bureau, more than a third of those people lived at or below the federal poverty line in 2004, the largest percentage of any U.S. city with a population of 250,000 or more.

Detroit’s 2005 unemployment rate was 14.1 percent, more than 2 1/2 times the national level.

The city has announced deep cuts in services over the past year to cope with an enormous deficit. Hundreds of municipal employees have been laid off, bus service has been scaled back, nine recreation centers have been shuttered, and bulk trash pickup has been canceled.

“We’re forgotten people,” Workman said.

Walking home from a bus stop, 54-year-old Raymond Parker said recent development in the city would not help him.

“They’re building up for the middle class,” said Parker, who works at a soup kitchen and does not have a car or a telephone. “I don’t knock it, but until I get to that pay scale, it wouldn’t affect me.”

Detroit, which logged 374 homicides last year, consistently ranks at or near the top of an annual list of the most dangerous cities compiled by Morgan Quitno Press.

City officials say Super Bowl visitors should not be intimidated by the statistics, saying downtown is relatively safe.
breitbart.com

The gutted industrial midwest is one of the fruits of globalization. “Motor City”: right.

…Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar told CNN on Monday that a long-term truce (hudna) with Israel is possible if Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders and releases Palestinian prisoners.

“We can expect to establish our independent state on the area before ’67 and we can give a long-term hudna,” Zahar told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Zahar laid out a series of conditions that he said could lead to years of co-existence alongside Israel. He said that if Israel “is ready to give us the national demand to withdraw from the occupied area [in] ’67; to release our detainees; to stop their aggression; to make geographic link between Gaza Strip and West Bank, at that time, with assurance from other sides, we are going to accept to establish our independent state at that time, and give us one or two, 10, 15 years time in order to see what is the real intention of Israel after that.”

Asked about Hamas’ call for Israel’s destruction, Zahar would not say whether that remains the goal. “We are not speaking about the future, we are speaking now,” he said.

Zahar argued that Israel has no true intention of accepting a Palestinian state, despite international agreements including the Road Map for Middle East peace.

Until Israel says what its final borders will be, Hamas will not say whether it will ever recognize Israel, Zahar said. “If Israel is ready to tell the people what is the official border, after that we are going to answer this question.”

Asked whether Hamas would renounce terrorism, Zahar argued that the definition of terrorism is unfair.

Israel is “killing people and children and removing our agricultural system – this is terrorism,” he said. “When the Americans [are] attacking the Arab and Islamic world whether in Afghanistan and Iraq and they are playing a dirty game in Lebanon, this is terrorism.” He described Hamas as a “liberating movement.”
haaretz.com

Amr Moussa relaunches Beirut initiative for Middle East peace
DAVOS, Switzerland – The Arab League will move as quickly as possible to help raise funds for the Palestinian Authority, Secretary General Amr Moussa told Haaretz over the weekend.

Moussa said the Palestinian economic situation was one of the most important topics and had to be dealt with promptly.

He also called on the parties to return to the initiative introduced at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut, as a means of advancing the peace process. The Beirut initiative includes recognition of Israel alongside implementation of UN resolutions 242 and 338, which from an Arab perspective means a full withdrawal from the territories.

“Every Arab government must commit itself to the Beirut initiative that was approved by all the parties except Ariel Sharon,” Moussa said during discussions at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

“The initiative is based on peace with Israel and states that the time has come to turn over a new page and end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Arab community will have to get everyone to accept the Arab peace initiative.”

Senators Back Bush’s Stance on Hamas
WASHINGTON — Senior lawmakers from both parties Sunday threw their support behind President Bush’s pledge to withhold aid to the Palestinian Authority until the militant Islamic group Hamas renounces terrorism and its commitment to the destruction of Israel.

…Using the anti-terrorist cause as a cover the United States has occupied Afghanistan, Iraq and will soon move to impose their “democratic order” on the Greater Middle East, Shebarshin said. “The U.S. has usurped the right to attack any part of the globe on the pretext of fighting the terrorist threat,” Shebarshin said.

Referring to his meeting with an unnamed al-Qaeda expert at the Rand Corporation, a nonprofit research organization in the U.S., Shebarshin said: “We have agreed that [al-Qaeda] is not a group but a notion.”

“The fight against that all-mighty ubiquitous myth deliberately linked to Islam is of great advantage for the Americans as it targets the oil-rich Muslim regions,” Shebarshin emphasized.

With military bases in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, Shebarshin said, the United States has already established control over the Caspian region — one of the world’s largest oil reservoirs.
mosnews.com

01/29/06 “Turkish Press” — — Teheran is getting ready to counter a “preemptive strike” by USA and Israel. The Air Force Command of the Revolutionary Guard has ordered its Shahap-3 Missile Units to keep their mobile missile ramps in motion in preparation for such an attack. Responding to this order, in darkness of the night the primary missile ramps have been moved to Kirmanshah and Hamedan, and the reserve ramps to Isfahan and Fars regions.

The above actions are the basis for the efforts of the USA to attract Russia and China, as well as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt to its side, and for commenting that a military intervention is always on the table. These actions are also the basis for Israel’s overt preparation for a possible offensive action and for making authoritative announcements that it “will not permit Iran” to proceed with its nuclear plans. Suddenly, all these activities have created a renewed global atmosphere of war. They are spreading anxiety and paranoia.

Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East. It has never accepted any international agreement on nuclear weapons, and has never allowed inspections of its nuclear facilities. Yet, it is aggressively beating the war drums as if Iran is the country involved in nuclear development in the area. What kind of innocence is this?

Attacks to selected centers in Iran are foreseen to take place sometime in March-June.
informationclearinghouse.info

Iran gives UN inspectors access to nuclear site
UN nuclear inspectors have visited sites related to the former Lavizan military complex in Iran in what is a key concession in the UN investigation of the Islamic Republic’s contested nuclear program, diplomats have told AFP.

Newsweek Exclusive: Direct Talks—U.S. Officials and Iraqi Insurgents
They have much to discuss. For one, Americans and Iraqi insurgent groups share a common fear of undue Iranian influence in Iraq. “There is more concern about the domination by Iran of Iraq,” says a senior Western diplomat, “and that combination of us being open to them and the dynamics of struggle for domination of violence has come together to get them to want to reach an understanding with us.” Contacts between U.S. officials and insurgents have been criticized by Iraq’s ruling Shiite leaders, many of whom have longstanding ties to Iran and are deeply resented by Sunnis. “We haven’t given the green light to [talks] between the U.S. and insurgents,” says Vice President Adel Abdel Mehdi, of the Shiite party, called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

…Now — suddenly — the administration has switched directions. Early last week White House officials told Mr. Baker and other Louisiana politicians not only that they refused to support the development corporation he proposed but that they’d asked congressional leaders to cancel planned hearings on the Baker bill. At his news conference last week, Mr. Bush claimed, strangely, that “the plan for Louisiana hasn’t come forward yet.” Was he misinformed or deliberately misleading?
washingtonpost.com