“Islamo-fascist slut” fights back (peacefully)

The Comments boards here on JWN have hosted some really great discussions. They also, sadly, host some really nasty, commercially generated spam, much of it pornographic, that I’m constantly trying to control, ban, push back, fight, and reduce. Sorry to all readers about my shortcomings in that rergard.
… And then, there’s “Michael Patton”, a person who comes onto my Comments boards here, accuses me of being an “Islamo-fascist slut” and in addition lets fly with strings of deeply ignorant, xenophobic accusations and innuendoes that make the Comments boards feel very hostile indeed…

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Qom, Islam, views of democracy…

(Writing started Friday morning, Teheran airport.)

Yesterday, Thursday, was one of the most interesting days of this whole,
two-month-long visit to the Middle East. In the morning, Bill and
I went to Qom, the religious-studies center where Ayatollah Khomeini
and numerous other architects of Iran’s Islamic revolution received their
intellectual training. In the afternoon, we spent nearly four hours
at a conference in the Education Ministry where cutting-edge thinkers from
today’s Iran– including one wearing the robes of trained mullah– grappled
with fundamental issues in the relationship between religion and democracy.

But I guess that before I take you through that day, I’d better back up
a little…

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From Teheran

We got to Teheran. Never made it to Mashhad for reasons I’ll explain later. Today we had a great tour round the bazaars here. We’re being hosted by an extraordinarily kind and very religious Iranian family, after the plans for Mashhad fell through. More later.

Catching up with Nir Rosen

I’m a bit behind with my reading. I just want to bookmark this piece by Nir Rosen, written in October I think. He was embedded with an Armored Cavalry Regiment in western Iraq.
The piece is titled “The wrong Ayoub”. It uses the description of a unit forcefully breaking into a guy’s house, wounding him, and arresting him– only later to discover he was the “wrong” Ayoub– to illustrate the atrociously poor level of intelligence the unit was relying on.
This part, at the very beginning, is also very troubling:

    According to a major from the Judge Advocate General’s office working on establishing an Iraqi judicial process, at least 7,000 Iraqis are being detained by US forces. Many languish in prisons indefinitely, lost in a system that imposes English-language procedures on Arabic speakers with Arabic names not easily transcribed.
    Some are termed “security detainees” and held for six months pending a review to determine whether they are still a “security risk”. Most are innocent. Many were arrested simply because a neighbor did not like them. A lieutenant-colonel familiar with the process adds that there is no judicial process for the thousands of detainees. If the military were to try them, that would entail a court martial, which would imply that the United States is occupying Iraq, and lawyers working for the administration are still debating whether it is an occupation or a liberation.

To Iran!

So! We’re off early tomorrow. We got our visas yesterday, and our tickets today. We have tickets to Teheran for tomorrow and shall then somehow find a flight to Mashhad where our conference (“Islam and Democracy”) starts on Wednesday morning. The whole trip will be incredibly rushed– we might have to leave Mashhad on Thurs. evening to catch our flight back here, Friday… Oh well, it should be interesting.
I haven’t been to Iran since the 1978-79 revolution. A whole generation has grown up there since then…
Btw, I was just surfing the BBC website. They have a new, experimental, “hosted” blog-type thing there, with contributors from Iraq. It went up on their site today and will run in the first instance for two weeks.
So far, the contributors (all of whom have been invited to contribute by the Beeb, I think) include five Iraqis, one British contractor and one US army lieutenant.
It struck me as a little stilted. Certainly it lacks the intimacy, verve, and passion of Faiza’s blog, and those run by her sons, etc. The US army guy, Bryan Suites, comes across as incredibly Chief Wiggles-y, and the British contractor tells us only that he works, “for an international company in the International or Green Zone in Baghdad.” So what is his business, exaactly? The Iraqi contributors all tell us what they do. Even Suites does. But not “Stuart Ritchie”. Whoever he is.
A quick glance at what’s up there so far revealed a few interesting descriptions of things. But I think I’ll stick with the real blogs by Iraqis that I’ve been reading up till now.
Zeyad, over at Healing Iraq, had an interesting post up on November 20. (Actually, it’s the most recent one he has up there, as of now.) He was describing, in very vivid and factual terms, how the rash of attacks that plagued Baghdad around then felt to him and his family.
At the end, he noted:

    One can’t help but notice that the clerics who usually incite holy wars in Iraq against the US occupation on the expense of Iraqis are based in countries allied to the US such as Qatar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. On the other hand, you have Sheikh Salah Al-Din Kuftaro, son of Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro, the late Grand Mufti of Syria, publicly denouncing the behaviour of Iraqi insurgents yesterday during Friday prayers at the Kuftaro mosque in Damascus. He described them as the “present day Kharijites” and their actions as “unislamic”.

That’s a really interesting observation.
Kuftaro was the Sheikh we went to visit in Damascus last week, as described in the second half of this JWN post.

Fallujah war crimes evidence

The Boston Globe‘s Anne Barnard was embedded with a task force from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division throughout much of the battle of Fallujah. She had an account of her experiences in yesterday’s paper that provides excellent, firsthand evidence of the issuing of commands that seem clearly to contravene the Geneva Conventions, especially in regard to the use of grossly disproportionate violence inside the city.
I note that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada’s Louise Arbour, has already expressed her concern about the level of violence used by the US in Fallujah. I can’t remember if she also said she’d like some form of action to be taken on this? Frankly, I don’t know what form such action might take. The US is, as we know, not a signatory of the ICC. The only other forms of legal-type action that could be taken would be a case brought by another state in the ICJ (but which state would do it? “Iraq”?? Ha-ha-ha) — or, a prosecution from within the US military for contraventions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is supposed to include all the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
I guess political action inside the US is the only thing, at this point, that can rein these guys in.
Anyway, I’ll just quickly take from Barnard’s excellent account the four clearest points–most of them taken from before-action briefings that she attended– where I see the laws of war apparently being contravened:

    (1) To avoid booby traps and ambushes, battalion leaders told the men to fire at houses and buildings before entering them. That made for a trail of destruction. There was no way to know for sure if they were hurting noncombatants, even in a city where most residents had fled.
    [Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]

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Palestinian elections-2

Marwan Barghouthi as the Palestinians’ Mandela? It has always been
a possibility. And it is one that, despite the Fateh Revolutionary
Council’s recent decision to back Abu Mazen as the movement’s candidate in
the upcoming PA elections, is still being actively considered by many
in the upper echelons of Fateh.

I imagine that in the first instance that would be “Mandela, the representative
of all the nationalist prisoners, whose release becomes an international
cause célèbre“, rather than “Mandela, the wily political
prisoner who manages to negotiate a far-reaching political deal with his
captors, while always keeping within the discipline of his movement”… Though
that other step may come later, God willing.

Except for this: remember just how many years Mandela had to be in jail (28),
before he reached his deal with De Klerk… By that standard, it would
be another 23 years or so till the Palestinians and Israelis reached their
deal. A depressing thought, altogether.

Anyway, this prospect of Fateh launching a broad campaign to focus on “Free
Barghouthi”, echoing the “Free Mandela” movement in which so many of us participated
back in the 1970s and 1980s, is just one of the things I learned about by
reading this
article, from Saida Hamad in East Jerusalem, in the online version of
Hayat today. I even, as an exercize in my Arabic-language reading
skills, wrote out a complete translation of the piece in English…

(Why is this happening? We were planning to be on our way to Teheran
today. But the Iranian visas didn’t come through until just after the
departure of the flight we were supposed to be leaving Beirut on. There’s
a possibility we can get another flight, Tuesday. Meantime, I don’t
want to be sitting here in our apartment in Beirut twiddling my thumbs…)

So anyway, the four most interesting things in Hamad’s piece were these:

  1. The info about the possible “Free Barghouthi” campaign. As you
    can see from the translation I provided, the “old guard” guys in Fateh reportedly
    promised this to Marwan as part of the quid pro quo they offered
    him in return for him agreeing not only not stand against Abu Mazen in the
    January elections, but also (gulp), actually to support him… The other
    parts of the quid pro quo were: (a ) A commitment to hold the 16th
    meeting of Fateh’s policymaking General Conference no later than August,
    so that both the Central Committee and (I assume) the Revolutionary Council
    can be renewed there through democratic means… (In contrast to much past
    practice.) Plus (b) the possibility that in connection with the “Free
    Barghouthi” campaign, Abu Mazen would name Marwan as his “Vice Presidential”
    candidate in the PA election…So far, it looks as though Marwan drove a
    pretty hard bargain…

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Testimonies from Fallujah

Terrible, searing testimonies now coming out from inside Fallujah. If you can only read one, I suggest this one from a Russian (or, Turko-Russian?) doctor who’d been working in one of the city’s hospitals. (Not clear which.)
Look especially at the references he makes to the results of the extreme water shortage inside the city:

    Together with Americans the flies invaded the city. They are millions. The whole city seems to be under their power. The flies cover the corpses. The older is corpse, the more flies are upon it. First they cover a corpse as by some strange rash. Then they begin to swarm upon it, and then a gray moving shroud covers the corpse. Flies swarm upon some ruins as gray monstrous shadows. The stench is awful.
    The flies are everywhere. In the hospital wards, operating rooms, canteen. You find them even where they cannot be. In the “humanitarian” plastic bottle with warm plastic-stinking water. The bottle is almost full, simply someone opened it for a second and made a gulp, but this black spot is already floating there…
    It is a general crisis with water. There are simply no clean sources. The local residents fetch water from the river, muddy, gray and dead. You can buy anything for water now. The sewage system is broken, the water supply is broken, and electricity is absent in the city.
    I am afraid to imagine what will happen in two weeks. Hepatitis will take toll of thousands. They say already that people at the outskirts are in fever with the symptoms of typhus. But one cannot verify it. They prohibited moving in the city…

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Families in pain

Be sure you’re sitting down before you click on this link, which shows scenes from funerals of some of the US military personnel killed in Iraq during October and November.
The site where I found the pics, cryptome.org, also carries an invitation to kill George Bush, from which I completely disassociate myself. However, I think they’ve done a great service by compiling and presenting a number of collections of very moving photos (mainly AP photos) of the funerals of those killed in action. The link I give is to the latest of those pages.
I cried when I scrolled slowly through this collection.
Then I also thought of the even greater number of Iraqis killed in the present war, and the extremely degrading situations in which the mortal remains of many of them have been left… I also thought of the extreme anguish suffered by Iraqi family members who do not know if their loved ones are dead or alive, and can only imagine the torment of, for example, a wounded family member left to rot and to dehydrate in some bombed-out house inside Fallujah.
Is it better to know or not to know “the whole truth” about the fate of a threatened loved one?
Is it better to launch a war in the face of a presumed threat, or to seek to have one’s concerns addressed through methods other than war and violence?
How can we inform US voters better than before about the true human costs of war?
Why hasn’t President Bush gone to a single one of these funerals?
No answers here. Only questions.

U.S. Quaker activism against war

The Friends Committee on National Legislation is a public interest lobby founded by American members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), that for more than 60 years has sought to “[connect] historic Quaker testimonies on peace, equality, simplicity and truth with peace and social justice issues which the United States government is or should be addressing.”
On November 14, FCNL’s governing committee adopted two important documents. The first sets out the “Legislatve Priorities ” on which FCNL will focus during the term of the upcoming (109th) U.S. Congress. The second is a Minute on Moral Values. You can find both texts here.
The Legislative Priorities build directly on the historical testimonies of Quakers– against war, and for a radical commitment to human equality and human wellbeing. So here, after all the deliberation that the FCNL decisionmakers engaged in, are the five top priorities that they identify:

    * Remove all U.S. military forces and bases from Iraq, and fulfill U.S. moral and legal obligations to reconstruct Iraq through appropriate multinational, national, and Iraqi agencies.
    * Promote a framework for national and international security that includes peaceful prevention and resolution of deadly conflicts, active pursuit of arms control and disarmament, adherence to international law, support for the United Nations, and participation in multilateral efforts to address the root causes of war and of terrorism.
    * Restore and assure full civil liberties for all persons in the United States or under its jurisdiction, and promote human rights around the world through international institutions and treaties.
    * Change federal budget, tax, and fiscal policies to reduce military spending, meet pressing human needs, and address structural economic violence.
    * Promote long-term protection of the environment and eliminate a critical cause of violent conflict by reducing oil consumption and accelerating development and use of renewable energy sources.

I am so happy and energized by the clarity of this listing! Quakers may be small in number, but throughout the 350-year-long life of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), they– we– have often played a crucial catalytic role in bringing about real structural change in the societies in which we live.
And now, we are all citizens of the world…

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