Hey NATO: Do not burn Korans or make others think you’re burning them

Advice of the Day: Disposing of Korans should be done with the utmost care. Especially if you’re NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and you’re in Afghanistan. And apologize quickly if you do not follow these common sense standards, like so: “ISAF personnel at Bagram Air Base improperly disposed of a large number of Islamic religious materials which included Korans,” said Gen. John R. Allen. “When we learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped them. The materials recovered will be properly handled by appropriate religious authorities.” There are photos of burned/damaged Korans floating around the wires. There are some here, but note we’re only linking this. (photo by Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images)

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Reuters reports that the head of the Syrian Red Crescent, Abdulrazak Jbero, was shot while traveling from Damascus to Idlib. Though too early to speculate over whether or not this was an assassination, circumstance remain unclear.

Iraq’s Unwanted People: A documentary about being LGBT in Iraq

Bradley Secker, a U.K based photojournalist, spent two months living in Damascus, Syria in autumn 2010. He spent his time locating LGBT individuals that had fled Iraq in fear of being persecuted because of their sexuality. Gaining the trust of these individuals meant Bradley could see inside the closed diaspora of Iraqi LGBT refugees first hand. His primary aim was to create a photo essay with written, first hand testimonies.

On return to the U.K, Bradley started work on ‘Iraq’s unwanted people’, a short documentary highlighting the problems faced by Iraqi LGBT individuals. The film shows two personal accounts of men living in fear as refugees in Syria. Through photos, interviews and moving image, the film hopes to pose the question as to how, and why, such acts of violence and brutality can be overlooked in a new ‘free’ Iraq.

Contact GRN for more information.

[via:equalitopia:Peter Galazka on Google+]

WATCH: Hamza Al-Khatib, Syrian Boy, Brutally Killed In Custody [GRAPHIC VIDEO]

A 13-year-old Syrian boy detained by government forces has been brutally killed, his wounds displayed in a shocking video. The boy, identified as Hamza al-Khateeb, was shot, burned, and had his penis cut off when his body was returned to his family.

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We must recognize the efforts of the courageous, such as Manal al-Sherif, who risked social and legal punishment for her push for women’s rights. As the AP reports:

Authorities detained a Saudi woman on Saturday after she launched a campaign against the driving ban for women in the ultraconservative kingdom and posted a video of herself behind the wheel on Facebook and YouTube to encourage others to copy her.

Manal al-Sherif and a group of other women started a Facebook page called “Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself,” which urges authorities to lift the driving ban. She went on a test drive in the eastern city of Khobar and later posted a video of the experience.

More on women challenging the ban on driving here.

WATCH: Disappearance, then discovery leads to ‘honor killing’ outrage

CNN reports on Ayah Baradiyya, a young Palestinian women in the West Bank, murdered by her uncle and whose killing has incited a call to the Palestinian Authority to change the penal code that barely punishes those who slaughter for “honor.”

Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s interview with TheWrap.com elaborates on his views regarding the death of Osama bin Laden. Below is a brief excerpt which highlights why anyone could be skeptical, if not appalled, by how the Obama administration—with its conceit of rule of law and habeas corpus—delivered “justice.”

Is Obama lying about how Bin Laden died?

Common sense tells you he was executed. That was the plan all along. Just tell us that and quit treating us like children. I have a lot of faith in Obama, but we’ve received three different stories in three days. We heard, “There was a firefight.” “He used a woman as a shield.” Now it turns out none of these things were true. He wasn’t armed.

Does it matter if he was executed? Do you think he deserved a trial?

I am a Catholic, and the position of the Catholic Church and the Pope is that we are 100 percent against the death penalty unless it is in self-defense. Look at the Nuremberg Trials. We didn’t just pop a bullet in the heads of the worst scum in history. We thought it was important to put them on trial and expose their evil. In a democracy we believe in a system of justice and we believe in a judicial system that gives people a day in court…and then we hung them. It doesn’t mean we can’t hang them afterward.

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Osama bin Laden : cold war veteran

Al-Qaida’s mastermind knew only too well how to manipulate US foreign policy to make America behave like an imperial tyrant

By Mark Weisbrot

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 May 2011

The killing of Osama bin Laden is being celebrated by the US media and government officials who spin it as one of the most important events since 11 September 2001. To the extent that it weakens al-Qaida, that would certainly be a gain. But it is worth taking a sober look at the reality behind all the hype.

Bin Laden, who – like Saddam Hussein and other infamous mass murderers – was supported by the United Stated government for years before he turned against it, changed the world with the most destructive terrorist act ever committed on US soil. But the reasons that he was able to do that have as much to do with US foreign policy at that particular juncture as with his own strategy and goals.

Bin Laden’s goal was not, as some think, simply to bring down the US empire. That is a goal shared by most of the world, who – fortunately for us – would not use terrorist violence to further this outcome. His specific goal was to transform the struggle between the United States and popular aspirations in the Muslim world into a war against Islam, or at least create the impression for many millions of people that this was the case. As we look around the world 10 years after the attack, we can see that he had considerable success in this goal. The United States is occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, bombing Pakistan and Libya, and threatening Iran – all Muslim countries. To a huge part of the Muslim world, it looks like the United States is carrying out a modern-day crusade against them, despite President Obama’s assertions to contrary Sunday night.

This situation, along with the United States’ continued role of supporting the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, pretty much guarantees a steady stream of recruits for any terrorist movement of the kind bin Laden was organising, for the foreseeable future. In that sense, bin Laden was successful.

This is somewhat remarkable considering that, as many observers have pointed out, bin Laden at first appeared to have made a tactical blunder with the attacks of 11 September 2001, since this caused him to lose his base in Afghanistan – the one Islamic state that was at least sympathetic to his organisation. But after President Bush decided to use 9/11 as a pretext not only for invading Afghanistan, but also Iraq, these wars combined to put bin Laden and his movement back in business on a larger scale.

Could bin Laden have known that the US response to 9/11 would have made his movement even stronger, even if he lost his base in Afghanistan? I would say it is likely. While it was not predictable that President Bush would necessarily invade Iraq – although it was a strong possibility – it was foreseeable that the US government would seize on 9/11 to create a new overarching theme for its interventions throughout the world.

For a decade prior to the 9/11 attacks, Washington was without such an overall ideological framework. Until 1990, there were four decades of a “war against communism” that was used to justify everything from the overthrow of non-communist democratic governments in the western hemisphere (Guatemala, Chile, etc) to large-scale warfare in Vietnam, as well as hundreds of military bases throughout the world. The Soviet Union collapsed, the cold war ended, but the military bases and interventions continued. Prior to 9/11, the military interventions had to be done on an ad hoc basis (for example, “enemy-of the-month” as in Panama or the first Iraq war). But this is a weak basis for mobilising public opinion, and, in general, Americans have to be convinced that their own security is at stake in order to acquiesce to most sustained military adventures.

The “war on terror” was made to order for the post-cold war era, and enthusiasts such as then Vice President Dick Cheney noticed this immediately, before any wars were launched. Within five days of the 9/11 attacks, Cheney was on television proclaiming that the war against terrorism was “a long-term proposition”: the “kind of work that will take years”.

Indeed, it has, and with US drone strikes in Pakistan killing civilians and generating more hatred weekly, a cycle of violence is perpetuated that can go on for many years to come.

Of course, this was not inevitable. Ironically, the killing of bin Laden confirms what the left has maintained since 2001: that the occupation of Afghanistan was not necessary or justified in order to go after bin Laden. The killing of bin Laden was mainly an intelligence operation – the US did not have to invade or occupy Pakistan in order to carry it out. The same would have been true while he was in Afghanistan.

And now that he is gone, calls in Afghanistan for the US to leave are already intensifying; and they are picking up in the US, as well.

Since bin Laden is now dead, we will never know what he was thinking when he planned the 9/11 attacks. But as someone who was Washington’s ally during the cold war, he could easily have understood how these attacks would likely lead to a “war on terror” that would strengthen his movement. Despite being a fanatical terrorist, bin Laden knew his enemy.

[Photo: Osama bin Laden smiles as he sits in a cave in Afghanistan’s Jalalabad region while fighting in the Afghan-Russian war in 1988. (AFP)]

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Chris Hedges, former foreign correspondent for The New York Times for nearly 20 years, wrote a cautionary response last night to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination at TruthDig.com. I want to highlight his concluding section below which Hedges hones in on a core dysfunction in US presence in the Middle East—how the tactic of terrorism is a response to the “collective humiliation that we have imposed on the Muslim world,” which in return begets ever violence as a “solution” to end terrorism:

We responded exactly as these terrorist organizations wanted us to respond. They wanted us to speak the language of violence. What were the explosions that hit the World Trade Center, huge explosions and death above a city skyline? It was straight out of Hollywood. When Robert McNamara in 1965 began the massive bombing campaign of North Vietnam, he did it because he said he wanted to “send a message” to the North Vietnamese—a message that left hundreds of thousands of civilians dead.

These groups learned to speak the language we taught them. And our response was to speak in kind. The language of violence, the language of occupation—the occupation of the Middle East, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—has been the best recruiting tool al-Qaida has been handed. If it is correct that Osama bin Laden is dead, then it will spiral upwards with acts of suicidal vengeance. And I expect most probably on American soil. The tragedy of the Middle East is one where we proved incapable of communicating in any other language than the brute and brutal force of empire.

And empire finally, as Thucydides understood, is a disease. As Thucydides wrote, the tyranny that the Athenian empire imposed on others it finally imposed on itself. The disease of empire, according to Thucydides, would finally kill Athenian democracy. And the disease of empire, the disease of nationalism … these of course are mirrored in the anarchic violence of these groups, but one that locks us in a kind of frightening death spiral. So while I certainly fear al-Qaida, I know its intentions. I know how it works. I spent months of my life reconstructing every step Mohamed Atta took. While I don’t in any way minimize their danger, I despair. I despair that we as a country, as Nietzsche understood, have become the monster that we are attempting to fight.