Monthly Archive for August, 2009

Walled Horizons – Narrated by Roger Waters (Pink Floyd founding member)


Part One | Part Two | h/t

Walled Horizons is narrated by and features Roger Waters (founding member of the rock band Pink Floyd), who visits the Wall in the Palestinian territories and comments on his observations as a musician and a songwriter who has written on walls. The film explores how Palestinians in urban and rural areas have been impacted by the Walls construction since the International Court of Justices Advisory Opinion in 2004, which declared the Walls route illegal. Several senior Israeli security officials are interviewed in the film, two of whom were directly responsible for planning the Wall route and who explain the Israeli position for constructing it. The film was made by the United Nations Jerusalem.

http://www.ochaopt.org

PNN: Jimmy Carter and religious Jews fast in solidarity with people of Gaza under siege

Palestine News Network
28 August 2009

eldersFormer US President Jimmy Carter and his wife fasted in solidarity with the people of the Gaza Strip who are living under siege.

About going without for days Carter laughed it off, saying “I didn’t miss the food at all, but I missed water.”

He said, “I spent all day thinking of the people of Gaza and the harsh conditions of life imposed on them by the embargo.” The former US President said that he prayed for the Palestinians of Gaza while fasting for the first time in his more than 80 years of life.

[Read the report]

David Swanson: Lynching of Cynthia McKinney urged by ‘journalist’ trained and paid by FBI

Hal Turner called her ‘a violent, black, racist, bitch’ whose lynching would teach other Blacks that ‘white people are tired of your bullshit, behave or die’

by David Swanson, SF Bay View, 24 August 2009

Visiting the Bay Area on a five-day fundraising tour for the SF Bay View, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney joins Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff at a gathering Friday, Aug. 21, at the Black Dot in West Oakland. Two days later, on Aug. 23, she learned that a “journalist” who had called for her lynching in 2006 was working at the time for the FBI. – Photo: Kamau Amen-Ra

Visiting the Bay Area on a five-day fundraising tour for the SF Bay View, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney joins Bay View publisher Willie Ratcliff at a gathering Friday, Aug. 21, at the Black Dot in West Oakland. Two days later, on Aug. 23, she learned that a “journalist” who had called for her lynching in 2006 was working at the time for the FBI. – Photo: Kamau Amen-Ra

Former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney sent an email around on Sunday in which she wrote:

“[I]t has just now come to my attention that a ‘journalist’ who suggested that I be lynched was actually being paid by our own government to say that. Now, when I reported it to the FBI, how in the world was I to know that he was at that time on the FBI’s payroll?”

“Hate blogger” Hal Turner’s lawyer said last week, and prosecutors agreed, that Turner was “trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative” and “worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an ‘agent provocateur’ and was taught by the agency ‘what he could say that wouldn’t be crossing the line.’”

[Read the report]

Sundance Chief to Fast at White House in Honor of Leonard Peltier: Seeks meeting with President Obama

Leonard Peltier
28 August 2009

As a result of Leonard Peltier¹s recent PAROLE DENIAL, Sundance Chief Ben Carnes, a member of the Choctaw Nation, will go to Washington, D.C.to stand & Fast in front of the White House between September 5 – 12, 2009, in hopes of securing a meeting with President Obama.

As a written, request for a meeting with President Obama made by The Leonard Peltier-Defense Offense Committee was denied earlier this year by the White House

We are also calling for a 24 – Hour, World Wide Birthday Vigil on September 11th, beginning at 8:45 AM through September 12th, 2009

[Read the full statement]


videosphere:

Arlette tells us what is was like for her as a young Lakota woman growing up during the last Lakota uprising at Wounded Knee in 1975.

Lhasa de Sela – The living road ‘My name’ (2003)

Jim Wall: Churches should stop talking and start acting for justice

US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
27 August 2009

James Wall, contributing editor of The Christian Century, has had about enough of faith communities talking and talking about peace in the Middle East without taking any action.

Wall has issued a call for U.S. churches to stop issuing resolutions and start putting pressure on Israel using the proven, effective tactics of boycott and divestment.

[Read the article]

Clemency for Leonard Peltier

Sign the petition:

http://FreePeltierNow.blogspot.com/2009/08/clemency-petition-online-sign-now.html

Laura Carlsen: Honduran Society Faces Contradictions of Illegitimate Institutions

Americas Program Coverage of the Coup in Honduras
Part 1: The Coup’s Version of ‘Order in the Court’
Laura Carlsen
25 August 2009

The workings of a modern-day democracy depend on the open and orderly day-to-day functions of institutions based on law. The international community has unanimously agreed that this does not exist in Honduras. But few people outside Honduras really understand what it means to live in a society where the institutions are in the hands of the same people who broke with the rule of law.

Tuesday was the preliminary hearing for 24 people arrested during protests held Aug. 11-12. The press and statements from those released on bail has confirmed that the day security forces picked up the prisoners they took them to an illegal detention center, improvised behind the Congress where, in another farce of justice, members rubber-stamped the ouster of the elected president Manuel Zelaya with ad hoc charges and a falsified letter of resignation. Men and women of all ages were thrown in together. They were stripped semi-naked, laid face down on the floor, and in many cases beaten.

Continue reading ‘Laura Carlsen: Honduran Society Faces Contradictions of Illegitimate Institutions’

DemocracyNOW!: Imprisoned Native American Activist Leonard Peltier Again Denied Parole

Bob Drogin: Lebanese man is target of first rendition under Obama

Contractor Raymond Azar is arrested in Afghanistan, hooded, stripped and flown to the U.S. His alleged crime? Bribery. A human rights activist calls the case ‘bizarre.’

By Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, 22 August 2009

Reporting from Alexandria, Va.

A Lebanese citizen being held in a detention center here was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration.

[Read the report]

Ann Wright: Could U.S. Officials Please Treat a Nobel Peace Laureate with Respect?

By Ann Wright, former U.S. Diplomat

Less than a month ago, in late July, 2009, Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire (http://www.peacepeople.com/) was travelling from Dublin, Ireland to Albuquerque, New Mexico to meet Peace Laureate Jody Williams to participate in peace events there. As she arrived at Dulles airport near Washington, DC, from Ireland on July 30, 2009, she passed through the regular immigration line, but then was detained in a special processing area over two hours causing her to miss her connecting flight to Albuquerque.

This is the second time Maguire has been detained by US Immigration in the past three months. On May 14, 2009, she was detained at the Houston, Texas, International Airport as she was returning from a 3 day conference in Guatemala, hosted by four of Nobel Peace Women Laureates. During the detention in Houston, Immigration officers questioned her about her visit in April, 2007, to the Palestinian village of Bil’in where she was injured by a rubber-coated bullet shot by Israeli military forces during a protest at the fence built by the Israelis in the village.

[Read the article]