Derrick O’Keefe, Rabble.ca, 30 April 2010

TIME has named Malalai Joya to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Joya has become renown around the world as a courageous advocate of women’s rights and a fierce critic of the NATO war in Afghanistan. The full list and related tributes appear in the May 10 issue of TIME, available on newsstands on Friday, April 30, and now at time.com/tk.

When I first heard this news, I thought it might be an indication that the editors of TIME were open to spreading a dissident’s message about the increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan. Alas, the write-up by Ayaan Hirshi Ali about Joya disabused me of this optimistic notion. Instead of describing Joya’s reasons for opposing the NATO occupation of Afghanistan, Hirshi Ali, the author of Infidel who now works for the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, admonishes Joya:

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Josh Buermann: things I learned from “capitalism, a love story”

As Michael Moore is in the business of making money from a government protected intellectual monopoly that costs American taxpayer money to enforce, you are supposed to pay additional money to watch it. Here instead is “Quants”, from VPRO. It’s not about the quant who was being stalked by Clinton’s Treasury Secretary. It’s not about management idiots trying to get down the pants of their nerd subordinates. It’s about brilliant people who devote their lives to destroying shit they don’t understand. A little parable about humanity it is. The Dutch public paid for this doc much as the American public paid to enforce Moore’s private monopoly, except, having been paid for up front instead of sideways, you can watch it here or anywhere for free

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by Michael Barker

“Regrettably the doctrinal human rights community has largely closed its eyes and ears to the many ways in which its discourse has been politically and economically sullied. In not undertaking the task of constructing a political economy, or an ecology, of human rights, the doctrinal mainstream has allowed the discourse to be all-too-frequently harnessed to the service of contemporary imperialism and rapacious global capitalism. The hard political questions are deftly side-stepped.”
—Nick Rose, 2008. (1)

(Swans – May 3, 2010) Doctrinal human rights groups, while attracting the attention and support of many well meaning citizens, are in fact — in a perverse testimony to the logic of capitalism — protectors of corporate rights not human rights. As such organizations fail to challenge the primary driver of human rights abuses… an exploitative political and economic system, they ultimately promote the type of legalistic band-aids that legitimize capitalism’s systemic violence as occurring as a result of some sort of unfortunate aberration. “[T]he great paradox of human rights is that mirroring the story of an ever-expanding corpus of international law ratified by ever-greater numbers of states, hundreds of millions of people have been dispossessed of their land and livelihoods and thrown into abject poverty.” Indeed, as activist-researcher Nick Rose concludes: “The pretense that human rights are above politics and economics has long outlived whatever doubtful utility it may once have had, and must be abandoned forthwith.” (2) This, however, is unlikely to happen in the case of groups like Human Rights Watch (HRW) whose very founding was tightly connected to capitalist development priorities (see “Hijacking Human Rights“); consequently, in such cases it is perhaps more appropriate to abandon the group rather than seek to reform such a vibrant expression of capitalist “humanitarianism.”

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MentalRev — Palestinian Children in the rural village of at-Tuwani speak of their encounters with violent Israeli Settlers in the South Hebron Hills of Occupied Palestine.

The Mural Speaks – Olympia-Rafah Solidarity Mural Project
May 8th, 2010, Evening
Approximately 8:30PM, (exact time TBA)
State and Capitol Way, Downtown Olympia

The goal of the Olympia Rafah Solidarity Mural project is to use art, culture and technology in innovative ways to increase the strength, visibility and connections of the movements for social justice not only in Palestine and Israel, but also in the US and throughout the world.  Over the course of a year, approximately 200 artist, activist and social justice organizations from Olympia to the bay Area, across the USA to the West Bank and Gaza in Palestine have participated in the Mural project by designing individual leaves for the olive tree.  Each Image will have several Audio and video tracks accessible by phone as well as the mural’s website.

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