Below you will find the response to Chomsky, Zinn, Tariq Ali, ... as well as their original letter. Moreover, one of the initial signatories has written a short note withdrawing her initial support for the letter.

-rg

----------------------------

Dear All - I urge u to read this and the last post to get an
understanding of the situation concerning Nandigram. Thanks to Pervaiz
for this. Bests Anjali

Response to Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn et al on
Nandigram

We (the undersigned) read with growing dismay the
statement signed by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and
others advising those opposing the CPI(M)'s
pro-capitalist policies in West Bengal not to "split
the Left" in the face of American imperialism. We
believe that for some of the signatories, their
distance from events in India has resulted in their
falling prey to a CPI(M) public relations coup and
that they may have signed the statement without fully
realising the import of it and what it means here in
India, not just in Bengal .

We cannot believe that many of the signatories whom we
know personally, and whose work we respect, share the
values of the CPI(M) - to "share similar values" with
the party today is to stand for unbridled capitalist
development, nuclear energy at the cost of both
ecological concerns and mass displacement of people
(the planned nuclear plant at Haripur, West Bengal),
and the Stalinist arrogance that the party knows what
"the people" need better than the people themselves.
Moreover, the violence that has been perpetrated by
CPI(M) cadres to browbeat the peasants into
submission, including time-tested weapons like rape,
demonstrate that this "Left" shares little with the
Left ideals that we cherish.

THE MIDDLE EAST HAS HAD A SECRETIVE NUCLEAR POWER IN ITS MIDST FOR YEARS
George Monbiot

The Guardian
Tuesday November 20, 2007

When will the US and the UK tell the truth about Israeli weapons? Iran
isn't starting an atomic arms race, it's joining one

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear
weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could
be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should
expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions
on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I
also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic
pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would, of
course, be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain
their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty -
are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Bush claims,
the proliferation of such weapons "would be a dangerous threat to
world peace", why does neither man mention the fact that Israel,
according to a secret briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency,
possesses between 60 and 80 of them?

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of "nuclear
ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear
weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a
formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to
keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country
with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction. The fiction of ambiguity
is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai
Vanunu handed photographs of Israel's bomb factory to the Sunday Times,
he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad
agents, tried in secret, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He
served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again -
for six months - soon after he was released.

However, in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud
Olmert, accidentally let slip that Israel, like "America, France
and Russia", had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were
furious. They attacked Olmert for "a lack of caution bordering on
irresponsibility". But US aid continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security
Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was
developing a nuclear device (what it didn't know is that the first one
had already been built by then). The contrast to the efforts now being
made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4
Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its nuclear
programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs
to the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would
make the US "the principal supplier of Israel's military needs" for
the first time. In return, it should require "commitments that would
make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go
nuclear". Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required:
France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range
missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence
secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to
Washington), Rabin "did not dispute in any way our information on
Israel's nuclear or missile capability".

He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced
that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to us". On November
27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted Israel's assurance that
"it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce
nuclear weapons".

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2007

Pious Populist
Understanding the rise of Iran's president Abbas Milani
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who won a surprise election victory in 2005, has descended into infamy in the United States as a dangerous demagogue and an anti-Semite. Ahmadinejad must be taken seriously, however, and not just for his threats, verbal outbursts, and political provocations. Wherever he speaks and whomever he addresses, Ahmadinejad is always communicating with a domestic audience of millions of citizens in Iran, as well as with the rest of the Muslim world. He knows his audience well and, while he may convey an air of clumsy haphazardness, his discourse and demeanor express a meticulously crafted, politically astute message of pious populism. He is very much a product of recent Iranian history, and understanding his early years and rise to power provides insight into current circumstances in Iran, his own likely course of action, and the prospects for Iranian political reform.
Born on October 28, 1956, Ahmadinejad was the fourth child of a poor family who lived in a small village not far from Tehran, Iran's capital. A few years later, his father moved the family to Tehran, part of a massive migration of Iranian villagers to cities that began in the late 1950s, stimulated by policies undertaken by the Shah in response to American pressures.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then Shah of Iran, had first come to power in 1941, and was restored to his throne with American and British help in a 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. After the coup the Shah was widely understood as, in the words of a U.S. ambassador, "a ward of the U.S." In the late 1950s American advice mattered. With the Cold War raging and concern about oil supplies on the rise, the Eisenhower administration worried that the Shah's repressive regime would incite a social revolution. The resulting pressure to liberalize, which mounted during the Kennedy years, compelled the Shah to introduce a series of socioeconomic reforms collectively known as the White Revolution ("white" for its supposed nonviolent nature).
The reforms granted women the right to vote and participate in the political process, secularized education and increased access to schools, and tried (unsuccessfully) to enable Iran's religious minorities—principally Baha'is, Jews, and Christians—to take the oath of office on a holy book of their own choosing. The centerpiece of the "revolution," though, was land reform. With that, along with other elements of the White Revolution, the Shah, U.S. analysts thought, would trade support from the traditional but corrupt landed gentry for that of a newly enfranchised peasantry and a bourgeoning middle class of technocrats, teachers, and shopkeepers. The Kennedy administration hoped land reform would first bring about dramatic social change and then—as predicted by contemporary theories of modernization—political transformation and a more liberal polity.
But Iran's land reform program was troubled from the start. Although a sizeable number of peasants received land, each plot was usually too small to sustain an entire family. Moreover, rising oil revenues were turning Tehran and other big cities into virtual El Dorados. Instead of producing an enfranchised peasantry and an urban middle class, land reform led millions of villagers to migrate to the cities in search of better lives, expediting the movement of people like the Ahmadinejads to Tehran.
Politically, things were no better. The secular opposition—left and center—never accepted the reforms as genuine. Embittered by the 1953 coup against a powerfully nationalist prime minister, they did not regard the Shah's regime as legitimate; it was, they said, a puppet of the United States, incapable of bringing about genuine change. The Shah himself, convinced that economic growth would guarantee his own survival, was unwilling to share political power with the new middle class, and certainly not with the poor masses converging on the cities. Nor, even more importantly, did the Shah's regime make any effort to socially integrate families like the Ahmadinejads, who had flocked to the cities but were uncomfortable with the cosmopolitan ethos they found there. Moreover, from the beginning the conservative clergy viewed the White Revolution as an affront to Islam and a dangerous move toward Western modernity: Ayatollah Khomeini immediately denounced the proposed reforms, led the clerical opposition, and spent eight months under house arrest for his speeches against the Shah, the reforms, and an impending bill granting U.S. citizens immunity from prosecution in Iranian courts. His arrest, in 1963, provoked powerful urban protest, the so-called uprising of 15 Khordad 1342, which led to a large number of deaths—thousands according to the opposition, 400 according to more reliable sources.
The pressure on Iran to liberalize, which had continued through much of the 1960s, ended with the Nixon administration. The Nixon doctrine rejected the idea that the United States should police the world and pushed instead for strengthening local military powers, with Iran serving as the new hegemonic force in the Persian Gulf. Given carte blanche to buy new weapons systems, the Shah—faced with growing political pressure from below—grew increasingly authoritarian. Ignoring the letter and spirit of the Constitution, he banned all the existing parties and crafted a one-party system. Calling the party Rastakhiz (meaning "resurgence" or "rebirth"), he decreed that every Iranian must join it and eventually ordered party officials to develop an ideology for the country "based on the laws of dialectics."

Pakistan's two worlds

Saskia Sassen

November 7, 2007 7:00 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/saskia_sassen/2007/11/pakistans_two_worlds.html

I arrived in Lahore, Pakistan from Mumbai Sunday night. All flights were operating normally, no matter the state of emergency. On Monday I was driven around Lahore. I saw only bustling shops and bazaars. No closed shops, no drawn shutters.

Yet when I stepped back briefly into my international hotel and watched the major western news channels, available only via satellite, all I saw was extremely violent police repression of protesting lawyers.

As the day proceeded, the same dynamic repeated itself - a stark disconnect between what I saw on television and my experience of the city's streets. And Lahore was the centre of arrests of lawyers on that day.

It is becoming evident that the geography of conflict and repression in Lahore is extremely specialised. It involves only certain spaces and certain groups: lawyers, opposition members and media. And this is all the western media were focused on.

But the critical issue is: will the street rise? That is the concern on Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf right now. My experience of the street in Lahore tells me the answer is no. In its day of greatest violence, Lahore turned out to contain two separate worlds: that of violent repression and a larger, bustling, diffuse world of daily life. A thousand is a lot of arrested lawyers, but it can drown in a city of 7 million, especially when the local media have been closed.

The first time these two worlds intersected in my experience was Monday evening, at the conclusion of an invitation-only talk I was giving at one of Lahore's premier institutions. The prominent lawyer who was to host the post-talk dinner had been taken from his home and arrested only an hour earlier. And three professors who were meant to come had also been arrested.

the PR machine is killing culture.

This isnt worth taking that seriously, because it isnt very interesting or critical culture. The fact that culture with an "indy aesthetic" has this kind of financial backing isnt the surprising part.

But it is worth having a better understanding of 2 things about this situation, which are significant for cultural producers regardless of your appreciation for vice magazine or their online TV shows.

1) The mystification of the economies of cultural production - who makes what, how they make it, how its payed for and how it is distributed.
2) Publicity and Scale - how does something get "popular" - capture the imagination's and attention spans of millions of people.

November 19, 2007
A Guerrilla Video Site Meets MTV

By ROBERT LEVINE
Vice magazine has built a small media empire out of a raw, ironic sensibility, risqué photographs and a willingness to deal in taboo subjects.

On VBS.tv, the video Web site the company runs, viewers can find short videos about independent music, extreme sports and, of course, some nudity. But there are also a surprising number of ambitious news reports, like an interview with Hezbollah’s self-proclaimed “mayor of Beirut,” investigations of environmental abuse, and a story about a Colombian date-rape drug.

What’s even more surprising is the company that finances most of these projects: Viacom.

Late last year, the Viacom-owned MTV Networks Music and Logo Group made a deal to start VBS, with financing from MTV and content from Vice, which also sells ads.

Peace is possible

The Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh tells Ian Black that despite widespread pessimism surrounding talks in Annapolis a change of focus could go on to yield spectacular results

Saturday November 17, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

The Palestinian philosopher and intellectual Sari Nusseibeh. Photograph: Ian Black
 
Like so many Palestinians of his generation, Sari Nusseibeh looks back at years of struggle that have achieved precious little. His entire adult life has been spent in the shadow of conflict with Israel and it is difficult to find even a glimmer of optimism that it is going to be resolved any time soon.
Yet Nusseibeh, a prominent intellectual and philosopher, believes it could be. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, and Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, should, he argues, launch a new peace process at the forthcoming Annapolis conference - and then campaign among their respective electorates for a mandate to negotiate a final peace settlement.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

An appropriate response to this might be "bukra fil mish-mish" - a colloquial Arabic phrase that roughly translates as "pigs might fly".
It is easy to demolish his rosy scenario: each leader may fail to deliver; each risks being hobbled by opponents on his own side. Olmert has to win over hawks opposed to evacuating settlements and dividing Jerusalem. Abbas's enemies in the Islamist movement Hamas, now running Gaza, accuse him of selling out to the Zionists. And any progress could be nipped in the bud by a Palestinian suicide bombing or Israeli air strike.
All true, Nusseibeh agrees mildly. But, he insists in an interview, success is still possible.
"If you think about it, when we talk about politics and history and how events unfold, sometimes we talk as if it's all about metaphysical forces. We assume, like in this case, that there are objective impossibilities. I am a pragmatic philosopher. And when you look a bit more closely you realise that in the final analysis it's not so complicated. It can be reduced to the actions of a person, and that person can in fact make a lot of difference."
Nusseibeh is soft-spoken, tweedy and academic. But the professorial style is misleading: conversations about Kant provided him with cover from Israeli eavesdropping when he was involved in the first intifada (uprising), producing the clandestine leaflets that shook the occupation to its core.
He may never have fired a shot or thrown a stone in anger, yet his ideas are a powerful antidote to fatalism and the (increasingly widespread) argument that after 40 years Israel's control over the West Bank, its Palestinians caged into disconnected bantustans, is now an irreversible reality.

Tide Or Ivory Snow?

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire." I'm
not used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence, it's exactly
what I'd like to speak about tonight...

ARUNDHATI ROY
Transcript of full speech by Arundhati Roy in San Francisco, California
on August 16th, 2004.

I've been asked to speak about "Public Power in the Age of Empire."
I'm not used to doing as I'm told, but by happy coincidence,
it's exactly what I'd like to speak about tonight.

When language has been butchered and bled of meaning, how do we
understand "public power"? When freedom means occupation, when democracy
means neo-liberal capitalism, when reform means repression, when words
like "empowerment" and "peacekeeping" make your blood run cold - why,
then, "public power" could mean whatever you want it to mean. A biceps
building machine, or a Community Power Shower. So, I'll just have to
define "public power" as I go along, in my own self-serving sort of way.

In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In
Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people.
Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is
quite separate from "the people." This distinction has to do with the
fact that India's freedom struggle, though magnificent, was by no
means revolutionary. The Indian elite stepped easily and elegantly into
the shoes of the British imperialists. A deeply impoverished,
essentially feudal society became a modern, independent nation state.
Even today, fifty seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished still
look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider. The
somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their bellies, see
it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things.

Either way, for most Indians, sarkar is very separate from public.
However, as you make your way up India's social ladder, the
distinction between sarkar and public gets blurred. The Indian elite,
like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard to separate itself
from the state. It sees like the state, it thinks like the state, it
speaks like the state.

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of the distinction
between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society. This
could be a sign of a robust democracy, but unfortunately, it's a
little more complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things,
it has to do with the elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S.
sarkar and spun out by the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary
Americans have been manipulated into imagining they are a people under
siege whose sole refuge and protector is their government. If it
isn't the Communists, it's al-Qaeda. If it isn't Cuba.
it's Nicaragua. As a result, this, the most powerful nation in the
world - with its unmatchable arsenal of weapons, its history of having
waged and sponsored endless wars, and the only nation in history to have
actually used nuclear bombs - is peopled by a terrified citizenry,
jumping at shadows. A people bonded to the state not by social services,
or public health care, or employment guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for
further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of
self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S
government's Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia,
turquoise, salmon pink.

To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the United
States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the U.S.
government from the American people. It is this confusion that fuels
anti-Americanism in the world. Anti-Americanism is then seized upon and
amplified by the U.S. government and its faithful media outlets. You
know the routine: "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms" . . .
etc.. . . etc. This enhances the sense of isolation among American
people and makes the embrace between sarkar and public even more
intimate. Like Red Riding Hood looking for a cuddle in the wolf's
bed.

Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people behind you is a
tired old horse, which politicians have ridden into power for centuries.
But could it be that ordinary people are fed up of that poor old horse
and are looking for something different? There's an old Hindi film
song that goes yeh public hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public, she knows
it all). Wouldn't it be lovely if the song were right and the
politicians wrong?

Before Washington's illegal invasion of Iraq, a Gallup International
poll showed that in no European country was the support for a unilateral
war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks before the
invasion, more than ten million people marched against the war on
different continents, including North America. And yet the governments
of many supposedly democratic countries still went to war.

The question is: is "democracy" still democratic?

Hard to find any article on Georgia that is really sharp, but this is interesting for its confusions - rg

GEORGIAN REVOLUTION TURNS ANTI-RUSSIAN

RIA Novosti
17:29 | 06/ 11/ 2007

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Yelena Shesternina)

The new Georgian revolution does not yet have an official name, but
unofficially it is called the "Revolution of Thorns" (a reference
to the previous "Rose Revolution"), the "Revolution of Nails" (the
authorities allegedly ordered nails to be thrown on the roads into
Tbilisi to stop "anti-government elements") and the "White Revolution"
(the demonstrators are wearing white wrist bands and scarves).

The revolution, which began on the fourth anniversary of the "Rose
Revolution," has found a new enemy - Russia. This is the only thing
on which the opponents, who have been rallying on Rustaveli Avenue
against Mikhail Saakashvili for more than four days, agree on with
their president.

On Tuesday, the opposition leaders unexpectedly sent part of the
protesters to the Russian embassy. They bore slogans saying, "Moscow,
you can have Saakashvili," which is confusing because the opposition
knows that Moscow has no need for the Georgian leader.

Likewise, it is not clear what changed the protesters' mood, as before
the demonstration the opposition had done its best to reconcile with
Moscow, promising it "improved relations" if it wins the elections.

Have they been influenced by the speech of Irakli Okruashvili, a
former Georgian Defense Minister facing several charges in Georgia,
who fled to Munich? He unexpectedly appeared on air on the TV channel
Imedi, which was broadcasted live on a large screen in the square,
and said that he intended to rejoin the opposition.

He denounced Saakashvili for the umpteenth time, calling him "a
modern-day Hitler," but he did not as much as mention Russia, although
he had criticized it regularly when he was Defense Minister. Was it
his appearance on the screen that provoked the inexplicable behavior
of Moscow haters in Georgia?

Diary
Mike Davis
Every year, sometimes in September, but usually in October just before Halloween, when California’s wild vegetation is driest and most combustible, high pressure over the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau unleashes an avalanche of cold air towards the Pacific coast. As this huge air mass descends, it heats up through compression, creating the illusion that we are being roasted by outbursts from nearby deserts, when in fact the devil winds originate in the land of the Anasazi – the mystery people who left behind such impressive ruins at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon.
There is little enigma to the physics of the winds, though their sudden arrival is always disturbing to greenhorns and nervous pets as well as to lorry drivers and joggers (sometimes scythed by razor-sharp palm fronds). Technically, they are ‘föhns’, after the warm winds that stream down from the leeward side of the Alps, but the Southern California term is a ‘Santa Ana’, probably in ironic homage to Mexico’s singularly disastrous 19th-century caudillo. For a few days every year, these dry hurricanes blow our world apart or, if a cigarette or a downed power line is in the path, they ignite it.
They also offer lazy journalists the opportunity to recite those famous lines from Raymond Chandler and Joan Didion, in which the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever. But just as one shouldn’t read Daphne du Maurier to understand the workings of nature in Cornwall, one shouldn’t read Chandler to fathom the phenomenology of weather and combustion in Southern California. A better choice would be Judy Van der Veer, an unfairly forgotten writer who spent most of her life ranching in the rugged hills near the hamlet of Ramona, 35 miles north-east of downtown San Diego. Despite the BBC’s incurable penchant for portraying Southern California through the prism of celebrity, it wasn’t Malibu, but Van der Veer’s Ramona that was the epicentre of the Witch Creek fire, the largest and most destructive of the recent firestorm swarm. Like one of the cattle queens played by Barbara Stanwyck, Van der Veer rode line and mended her own fences and from the saddle of her cow-pony Delilah she had a clearer view of chaparral ecology than did Chandler through his gin bottle or Didion through the rolled-up window of her speeding car.

Resistance Is Surrender
Slavoj Žižek

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.
Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).
Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.
Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’
Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.
Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

Turkey is a thorn in the side of a cosy western consensus

The prospect of an attack on northern Iraq reveals a hollow global consensus on intervention - and a European identity crisis

Slavoj Zizek
Tuesday October 23, 2007
The Guardian

Recent days have seen Dick Cheney and Tony Blair point belligerent fingers at Tehran, but both spoke in the slipstream of Bernard Kouchner, who a month ago warned the world that it should prepare for war over Iran's nuclear programme. "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," said the French minister of foreign affairs. The swell of rhetoric - which culminated in President Bush's assertion last week that a nuclear-armed Iran could provoke a third world war - is gravely undermined by what Sir John Holmes, the UN's emergency relief coordinator, has called the "taint of Iraq", and the weapons of mass destruction pretext for invasion. Why should we believe the US and its allies now, when we were already so brutally deceived?

Article continues

There is, however, another aspect of Kouchner's warning that is much more worrying. When the newly elected French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, nominated Kouchner, the great humanitarian, as the head of Quai d'Orsay, even some of Sarkozy's critics hailed this as a pleasant surprise. Now the meaning of this nomination is clear: the return of the ideology of "militaristic humanism". The problem with militaristic humanism resides not in "militaristic" but in "humanism". Under this doctrine, military intervention is dressed up as humanitarian salvation, justified according to depoliticised, universal human rights, so that anyone who opposes it is not only taking the enemy's side in an armed conflict but betraying the international community of civilised nations.
This is why, in the new global order, we no longer have wars in the old sense of regulated conflict between sovereign states in which certain rules apply (the treatment of prisoners, the prohibition of certain weapons, etc). We instead confront violations of the rules of universal human rights; they do not count as wars proper, and call for the "humanitarian pacifist" intervention of the western powers - especially in the case of direct attacks on the US or other representatives of the new global order. One can hardly imagine a neutral humanitarian organisation such as the Red Cross mediating between the warring parties, organising the exchange of prisoners, and so on. For one side in the conflict already assumes the role of the Red Cross - it does not perceive itself as one of the warring sides but as a mediating agent of peace and global order.

The key question is, thus: who is this "we" on behalf of whom Kouchner, Blair et al are speaking? Who is included in it and who is excluded? Is this "we" really "the world", the apolitical community of civilised people acting on behalf of human rights? We got an unexpected answer (or, rather, a complication) to this question last week, when, in defiance of pressure from the US, Turkey's parliament overwhelmingly granted permission for its government to launch military operations into Iraq in pursuit of Kurdish rebels. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, while visiting Turkey, declared his support of Turkey's right to take action "against terrorism and terrorist activities".

Hard to believe that a piece like this (minus all of the patriotic language which is of course being used very tactically to speak to all of america) could get published by msnbc, owned by GE & Microsoft. Hard to believe the guy who wrote it was a sports commentator 20 years ago. -rg

The Presidency Is Now a Criminal Conspiracy

by MSNBC.com
Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Bush may not observe the rules, but the country abides by them

It is a fact startling in its cynical simplicity and it requires
cynical and simple words to be properly expressed: The presidency of
George W. Bush has now devolved into a criminal conspiracy to cover
the ass of George W. Bush.

All the petulancy, all the childish threats, all the blank-stare
stupidity; all the invocations of World War III, all the sophistic
questions about which terrorist attacks we wanted him not to stop,
all the phony secrets; all the claims of executive privilege, all the
stumbling tap-dancing of his nominees, all the verbal flatulence of
his apologists…

All of it is now, after one revelation last week, transparently
clear for what it is: the pathetic and desperate manipulation of
the government, the refocusing of our entire nation, toward keeping
this mock president and this unstable vice president and this
departed wildly self-overrating attorney general, and the others,
from potential prosecution for having approved or ordered the illegal
torture of prisoners being held in the name of this country.

"Waterboarding is torture," Daniel Levin was to write. Daniel Levin was
no theorist and no protester. He was no troublemaking politician. He
was no table-pounding commentator. Daniel Levin was an astonishingly
patriotic American and a brave man.

Brave not just with words or with stances, even in a dark time when
that kind of bravery can usually be scared or bought off.

Charged, as you heard in the story from ABC News last Friday,
with assessing the relative legality of the various nightmares in
the Pandora's box that is the Orwell-worthy euphemism "Enhanced
Interrogation," Mr. Levin decided that the simplest, and the most
honest, way to evaluate them … was to have them enacted upon himself.

Daniel Levin took himself to a military base and let himself be
waterboarded.

Mr. Bush, ever done anything that personally courageous?

Zionism's Bad Conscience
Joel Kovel
Let me begin with some blunt questions, the harshness of which matches the situation in Israel/ Palestine. How have the Jews, immemorially associated with suffering and high moral purpose, become identified with a nation-state loathed around the world for its oppressiveness toward a subjugated indigenous people? Why have a substantial majority of Jews chosen to flaunt world opinion in order to rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands into a huge concentration camp and driven its occupied peoples to such gruesome expedients as suicide bombing? Why does the Zionist community, in raging against terrorism, forget that three of its prime ministers within the last twenty years Begin, Shamir and Sharon are openly recognized to have been world-class terrorists and mass murderers? And why will these words just written and the words of other Jews critical of Israel be greeted with hatred and bitter denunciation by Zionists and called "self-hating" and "anti-Semitic"? Why do Zionists not see, or to be more exact, why do they see yet deny, the brutal reality that this state has wrought? The use of the notion of denial here suggests a psychological treatment of the Zionist community. But in matters of this sort, psychology is only one aspect of a greater whole that includes obdurate facts like forceful occupation of land claimed by and once inhabited by others. The phenomena of conscience are of course processed subjectively. But they neither originate within the mind nor remain limited to thoughts and feelings.

Thanks to Beena for this ...
xxanj

The papers are full of news of protests all over the country -- and police brutality. The tempo is picking up as the PPP weighs in. Today's News carried a front page picture of police attacking a PPP demonstrator, the force of the blow breaking the stick on the man's back.

PPP is going ahead with it's protest tomorrow, which the PFUJ has also declared as a "Black Day" after unsuccessful negotiations with the government (the Federal Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani and Secretary Information Anwar Mahmood). Their four demands are: withdrawal of the two amended Ordinances against print and electronic media, resumption of tv news channels and FM-radio; action against police officials responsible for manhandling journalists: withdrawal of notices against two newspapers under PPO-2007: and immediate appointment of the Chairman Implementation Tribunal for Newspapers Employees. Besides "Black Day" on Friday, PFUJ members will boycott officials functions, hold protest camps Nov 14-17, Global Action Day Nov 15, and countrywide demonstration on Nov 20.

Besides CNBC-Pakistan and Business Plus (yesterday) BBC and CNN are back on air in Pakistan, as well as Indus Vision. The govt wants the electronic media bosses to accept certain conditions before they'll let them broadcast news. Channels like Geo, Aaj & ARY are till holding out, despite huge revenue losses. Business, sports
and entertainment have been allowed but not for these channels.

Today AFP reported from Lahore that the anti-terrorist court has
freed 300 lawyers on bail - this is a total falsehood as the bail
hearing has been fixed for Nov 10th. So someone is spreading
misinformation. Only two women were released.

Ali Cheema on NPR - recently released activist (and economist at
LUMS) http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16107657
(thanks Ayesha)

>From Omar Khan in the Bay area: Commentary and Pak-American reaction
to the crisis from Jaiza. We will continue to post reactions across
the U.S. on both Youtube and www.jaiza.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zJFGXxJ4-s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5X5FWNFx9w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHlDTOIkYdg

Below, a comment I wrote (unpublished), please don't circ for a couple of days. thanks
beena

I do not know why i fall for these articles sometimes (i say this because the entire pre-electoral noise / hype machine can be engrossing for all of the wrong reasons). But an article about a small radio ad that goes far in analyzing one of the main republican candidates and new york's former mayor. -rg

THIS IS ONE DANGEROUS MAN: IT'S GEORGE BUSH WITH BRAINS
Michael Tomasky in Washington, michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk

The Guardian
Monday November 5, 2007

New York's former mayor Rudy Giuliani is living up to his reputation
as someone who will do and say anything for power

People of Britain: congratulations are in order. You have now joined
ferret owners, sidewalk artists, hot dog vendors, publicly funded
attorneys for poor people, low-income community college students,
museum curators, a couple of innocent black men shot dead by the
police, the sections of the New York City charter governing rules
of succession to the mayoralty and, of course, Hillary Clinton,
as objects of Rudy Giuliani's demagoguery and wrath.

You may by now have heard the story. In a radio ad that his campaign
prepared for New Hampshire voters, Giuliani tells listeners that
he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 and goes on to say:
"My chance of surviving cancer - and thank God I was cured of it -
in the United States: 82%. My chances of surviving prostate cancer
in England: only 44% under socialised medicine."

The numbers are false. The actual five-year survival rate in Britain
is 74%, which is still lower than America's, but obviously high
enough for the figure not to have constituted fodder for a campaign
commercial. (Even the remaining, much smaller difference, is largely
explained by more widespread screening in the US, which catches many
more incidents of prostate cancer that are non-lethal).

It turned out that Giuliani's numbers were from a seven-year-old
article in a conservative policy journal. The article was written by
his own healthcare policy adviser, who admitted that his comparison
was a "crude" interpretation of a study by a respected health policy
group. The group, in turn, said the article's author had grossly
misused its numbers.

Pakistan Sinks Deeper Into The Night

By Tariq Ali

04 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org

For anyone marinated in the history of Pakistan yesterday's decision by the military to impose a State of Emergency will hardly comes as a surprise. Martial Law in this country has become an antibiotic: in order to obtain the same results one has to keep doubling the doses. What has taken place is a coup within a coup.

General Pervaiz Musharraf ruled the country with a civilian façade, but his power base was limited to the Army. And it was the Army Chief of Staff who declared the emergency, suspended the 1973 Constitution, took all non-government TV channels off the air, jammed the mobile phone networks, surrounded the Supreme Court with paramilitary units, dismissed the Chief Justice, arrested the President of the Bar association and the civil rights activists of the Human Right Commission of Pakistan, thus inaugurating yet another shabby period in the country history.

Why? They feared that a Supreme Court judgement due next week might make it impossible for Musharraf to contest the elections. The decision to suspend the Constitution was taken a few weeks ago. Benazir Bhutto, was informed and left the country. She is reportedly on her way back. Till now she has offered no comment on the new martial law, despite the fact that a senior leader of her party, Aitzaz Ahsan has been arrested for denouncing the coup. Intoxicated by the incense of power she might now discover that it

Remains as elusive as ever. If she supports the latest turn it will be an act of political suicide. If she decides to dump the General(she has accused him of breaking his promises and it will be difficult for her to remain allied to a dictator) she will be betraying the confidence of the US State Department, which pushed her in this direction. At a recent off-the-record gathering at Ditchley Park(a British Foreign Office think-tank), the would-be Secretary of State, James Rubin, became short-tempered when Pakistani participants challenged his view that Bhutto was a decisive player in the 'war on terror' on the Western borders of the country.

The two institutions targeted by the Emergency are the judiciary and the lively network of independent TV stations, many of whose correspondents supply information that can never be gleaned from politicians. Geo TV the largest of these continued to broadcast outside the country. Hamid Mir, one of its sharpest journalists, reported yesterday afternoon that according to his sources the US Embassy had green lighted the coup because they regarded the Chief Justice as a nuisance and 'a Taliban sympathiser'.

Thanks to Beena in Pakistan for these communiques...

At around 5 pm all the TV news channels were taken off the air. This
meant 'emergency declared' - soon confirmed. We were at the close of a
meeting in Karachi to discuss the Citizens Charter, and sent out a
press release (below) incorporating the info we had - Judges Colony in
Islamabad sealed; ALL TV news channels taken off air; judges asked to
take a new oath.

Since then, these updates have come in: Judges were asked to take a
new oath (eight had refused) under a PCO (provisional constitional
order); Supreme Court bench headed by the CJ set aside the PCO; Army
entered Supreme Court where Bar was in session & 'escorted' the CJ
out; CJ has been terminated. Aitzaz Ahsan arrested. Constitution
suspended. Mush is supposed to address the nation 'some time this
evening' according to PTV, the only news channel now working.
According to another report 18 out of 28 Sindh High Court judge have
been 'sacked'.

Message from Farooq Sulehria of the Labour Party Pakistan: "Though the
regime is likely to use Taliban-occupation of certain districts as a
pretext it is most likely that emergency is imposed to pre-empt a
court ruling against Mushraaf's re-election. Emergency means that all
basic democratic rights will be suspended while courts would have
their powers curtailed. Pakistan has been in grip of political crisis
and regime was facing growing mass resentment. This emergency is a
desperate attempt to cling to power."

beena

PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION

Lift emergency, restore democracy, demands citizens' group

KARACHI, Nov 3, 2007: Participants at a meeting of concerned citizens
held to discuss a citizens' charter for democracy expressed outrage at
the imposition of emergency. They condemned it as an unjustified step
and and demanded that it be lifted with immediate effect.

The group opposed the extreme measures being taken in the name of
emergency, including the oath that judges have been asked to take, the
Judges' Colony in Islamabad being sealed off and the television
channels being taken off air. The meeting, attended by various
concerned citizens from different sectors of society, termed the
imposition of emergency as part of the intimidating tactics being used
to pressurise the judiciary in light of the forthcoming judgement on
the presidential elections.

The group has resolved to join the lawyers and other citizens
demanding the lifting of emergency, and holding of free and fair
elections under an interim government. The meeting included members of
Pur Aman Karachi (Uzma Noorani of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan,
Anis Haroon of Aurat Foundation, and artist & curator Niilofur
Farrukh) besides several other citizens including businessman Nadeem
Khalid, consultant Naeem Sadiq, Asad Umar from the corporate sector,
political science professor Sahar Shafqat, human rights lawyer Abira
Ashfaq, educationist Tahseen Hussain, student Haya Hussain, blogger
Awab Alvi, and journalists, Shahid Husain and Beena Sarwar.

Next Update
There is widespread outrage at the emergency, and a feeling of deja vu
for those of us who remember the Zia years. 'He's done this to
keep himself in power' is the general feeling (no pun intended),
expressed by our chowkidar, a young fellow who had not been able to
hear the news because all the radio channels were also blocked,
including BBC.

There are likely to be several demonstrations all over the country
(some people in Karachi are meeting at 3 pm), but of course the real
numbers will only come out if BB gives a call. And Nawaz Sharif
apparently has said he will support her in the fight against the
emergency, so the PML-N should come out too.

Despite rumours that she was heading to Pakistan to take over as
caretaker Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto has taken a strong stand
against the emergency rule. She made a statement while still in Dubai
and flew back this evening, landing at Karachi airport around 9 pm.
There were reports that she was being pressurised to go back which
she refused, challenging them to arrest her. She reached Bilawal
House around 12.10 pm - with her own security, not police escort.

Interestingly, this was just about the time that Musharraf made his
address to the nation (an hour later than scheduled) - wearing a
sherwani this time rather than a suit & tie. Brought back memories of
Zia's sacking of Junejo (three months later Zia was gone). This time
the PM remains in office, but the CJ has been sacked.

Mush made no mention of elections - but implied that they would not
be held when he said that the governors, Chief Ministers and
assemblies would continue to function. I loved his comment about
allowing the media to function, and all the channels that have been
allowed to go on air. In 1999 when he took over, he said, 'there was
only PTV'. Well today too, there was only PTV, because the cable
operators had been directed to take all the news channels (including
CNN & BBC) off the air. Apparently this directive did not work in
Lyari (strong PPP constituency in Karachi). Details of his speech on
geo.tv & dawn.com

We went to see what was happening at Bilawal House about 1 am. There
was hardly any police around, and just a few dozen men milling around
outside Bilawal house. She was addressing a press conference inside
with about 60 journalists. According to a news report (Jang) she said
the emergency was basically martial law & the people are fully aware
and will resist it; it had been imposed as a preemptive measure
against the expected court judgement (against Musharraf as
president). She added that this will increase extremism & that
arresting the judges will weaken the legal system. She demanded an
immediate lifting of the emergency and the restoration of the
Constitution.

On Friday I filed a story for IPS about 'judicial activism' and its
impact on Pakistan's political situation - but they couldn't carry it
today and I had to update it today - http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?
idnews=39917 (text below).

On the IPS website I came across this excellent report about the
judiciary being freed from the executive in Bangladesh this past
Thursday - http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39901

We could also learn a few lessons from the people's movement in
Nepal...

beena

[I was looking for some articles by the author since he was writing something related to a video we have been working on, and found this very interesting take, which resonated a lot from my only experience in ireland. -rg]

Dispatches from a reluctantly multicultural country

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland

Since the famine of the 1840s Ireland has been a net exporter of economic migrants, who have settled round the world in search of a better life. Now immigrants from the world have arrived to do the same in booming Ireland.
By Colin Murphy

As the rest of Ireland was sheltering from the sleet and hail on a stormy St Patrick’s night, or huddling into the pubs for one of the biggest nights of drinking in the year, the burghers of a small seaside village on the west coast were heading to a newly-built hotel for its charity opening function. The four-star luxury hotel, built by a local property developer, is 400 metres from end to end. It boasts “extra-spacious bedrooms”, a “superb dining experience”, a jacuzzi tub in the bridal suite and a “leisure and wellness centre”.

Some of the Polish labourers who built the hotel were accommodated on site in mobile homes, with erratic water and electricity supplies. Up to six men shared one caravan. A site canteen provided free soup daily at lunchtime, though if the workers wanted vegetables in the soup, they had to contribute to a fund to buy them. We spoke to five workers who told us this. According to the developer John Murphy (not his real name), that’s all “rubbish”.

Mariusz Kopczak, a carpenter, was one of those workers. He worked approximately 78 hours a week for a total of $598, at an hourly rate of $8 which was two-thirds of the minimum wage in Ireland and less than half of the legally-binding construction industry rate. Kopczak worked from 7pm to 6am seven days a week on the night shift; when he worked by day, his hours were 8am to 6pm Monday to Saturday, but he only did eight hours on Sunday. In four months on the site, he had one day off, caused by an injury to his toe.

John Murphy said he paid the workers $18 an hour “with their benefits and all that taken into consideration”. That is still less than the legally-binding industry rate, for workers with at least 12 months of experience in construction. He said those benefits included accommodation and the use of his vans, with diesel provided. But the Polish workers “weren’t carrying their own weight” and some were stealing diesel from the site at night. “There’s payslips here if they want them,” he said. “If they were being paid as badly as that, why didn’t they leave?”

Kopczak did leave, and is now looking for other work in Dublin.

John Murphy has also a large number of houses for sale on a nearby site, starting at $658,000, but it’s slow work selling them. With all the hassle about workers and their papers, he sounds disillusioned: “I don’t need this grief.” He’s thinking of going back to being “a small building company” as he was before.

Benazir assassination attempt: From carnival to carnage

Beena Sarwar

KARACHI: "Jaanisar-e-Benazir" - ready to die for Benazir - proclaimed
the white t-shirts of the Pakistan Peoples' Party workers responsible
for security around the welcome convoy of former Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto when she returned to Pakistan on Oct 18 after almost
nine years of self-exile.

The convoy took around nine hours to cover the eight kilometers from
Karachi's Jinnah International Airport to the Karsaz Road
intersection. Thronged by thousands of jubilant but peaceful
supporters, most of them on foot, Bhutto's 20-foot armoured truck
flanked by a heavy police escort barely moved at snail's pace. It
carried on its rooftop the entire top leadership of the PPP, who had
insisted on joining Bhutto there despite the misgivings of her
security advisor Rehman Malik, a former intelligence chief.

The security nightmare this scenario presented became a reality soon
after midnight. Two loud explosions, one after another, targeted
Bhutto's truck as it inched ahead. PPP workers and police showed
presence of mind in quickly evacuating the unharmed PPP Chairperson
and hurrying off to her Karachi residence, Bilawal House.

Addressing a press conference the following day, Bhutto acknowledged
that after the first explosion, instead of running away and saving
themselves her `Jaanisars' courageously surrounded the truck,
deflecting a direct hit by a second attacker.

One explosion set fire to a police van next to the truck. Flames
shooting up into the darkness illuminated the scene of carnage,
corpses and scattered limbs around. Several policemen were killed on
the spot, along with a television cameraman and some fifty Jaanisars.
The initial casualties of a few dozen quickly mounted as victims
succumbed to their injuries. With a death toll of over 140 dead and
500 injured this is the worst such incident in Pakistan's history.

The geopolitical stakes of 'Saffron Revolution'
By F William Engdahl

There are facts and then there are facts. Take the case of the recent mass protests in Burma or Myanmar, depending on which name you prefer to call the former British colony.

First it's a fact which few will argue that the present military dictatorship of the reclusive General Than Shwe is right up there when it comes to world-class tyrannies. It's also a fact that Myanmar enjoys one of the world's lowest general living

standards. Partly as a result of the ill-conceived 100% to 500% price hikes in gasoline and other fuels in August, inflation, the nominal trigger for the mass protests led by saffron-robed Buddhist monks, is unofficially estimated to have risen by 35%. Ironically the demand to establish "market" energy prices came from the IMF and World Bank.

The UN estimates that the population of some 50 million inhabitants spend up to 70% of their monthly income on food alone. The recent fuel price hike makes matters unbearable for tens of millions.

Myanmar is also deeply involved in the world narcotics trade, ranking only behind Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan as a source for heroin. As well, it is said to be Southeast Asia's largest producer of methamphetamines.

This is all understandable powder to unleash a social explosion of protest against the regime.

It is also a fact that the Myanmar military junta is on the hit list of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration for its repressive ways. Has the Bush leopard suddenly changed his spots? Or is there a more opaque agenda behind Washington's calls to impose severe economic and political sanctions on the regime? Here some not-so-publicized facts help.

Behind the recent CNN news pictures of streams of monks marching in the streets of the former capital city, Yangon, calling for more democracy, is a battle of major geopolitical consequence.

The major actors
The tragedy of Myanmar, whose land area is about the size of George W Bush's Texas, is that its population is being used as a human stage prop in a drama scripted in Washington by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the George Soros Open Society Institute, Freedom House and Gene Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution, a US intelligence asset used to spark "non-violent" regime change around the world on behalf of the US strategic agenda.

The siege of Gaza is going to lead to a violent escalation

Far from helping settle the Middle East conflict, the US and Europe
are fuelling it with their contempt for democracy

Seumas Milne
Thursday November 1, 2007
The Guardian

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable gap between the western world's
apparent recognition of the dangers of Palestinian suffering and its
commitment to do anything whatever to stop it. This week the
collective punishment of the people of Gaza reached a new level, as
Israel began to choke off essential fuel supplies to its one and a
half million people in retaliation for rockets fired by Palestinian
resistance groups. A plan to cut power supplies has only been put on
hold till the end of the week by the intervention of Israel's attorney
general.

Article continues
Both moves come on top of the existing blockade of Gaza imposed by
Israel since last year's election of Hamas and the confiscation of
hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes it is obliged to pass on as
part of previous agreements. And instead of being restrained by the US
or European Union, both have deepened the crisis by imposing their own
sanctions and withdrawing aid. The result has, inevitably, been
further huge increases in unemployment and poverty. But far from
discouraging rocket attacks, they have risen sharply - though the
ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths has been running at more than
30 to one, compared with four to one at the height of the intifada
five years ago.

The UN's senior official in Gaza, Karen Koning-Abu Zayd, yesterday
branded Israel's intensification of the Gaza siege as a violation of
international law: despite its withdrawal two years ago, Israel
continues to control all access to the Gaza Strip and remains the
occupying power both legally and practically. Not that the situation
is much better in the occupied West Bank. Despite the US and Israel's
fatal backing for the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his
emergency government of a non-existent state, Israeli demolitions,
land seizures, settlement expansion, assassinations, armed incursions,
segregated road-building and construction of the land-grabbing
separation wall continue apace in the territory where Abbas's nominal
writ supposedly runs.

There are now 563 checkpoints in the West Bank, squeezing this already
constricted piece of land into apartheid-style cantons, and making
free movement or normal economic activity entirely impossible. All
this is in contravention of international law; much of it directly
violates UN security council resolutions, such as resolution 446
against Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. But, whereas
the occupied people face sanctions and international isolation, the
occupiers pay no penalty at all. On the contrary, they are aided and
armed to the hilt by the US and its allies.

DESMOND TUTU LIKENS ISRAELI ACTIONS TO APARTHEID
by Adrianne Appel

Inter Press Service
Published on Monday, October 29, 2007

BOSTON - South African Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu compared
conditions in Palestine to those of South Africa under apartheid,
and called on Israelis to try and change them, while speaking in
Boston Saturday at historic Old South Church."We hope the occupation
of the Palestinian territory by Israel will end," Tutu said.

"There is a cry of anguish from the depth of my heart, to my spiritual
relatives. Please, please hear the call, the noble call of our
scripture," Tutu said of Israelis.

"Don't be found fighting against this god, your god, our god, who
hears the cry of the oppressed," Tutu said.

Tutu spoke with political activist and lecturer Noam Chomsky and
others to a largely religious audience about "The Apartheid Paradigm
in Palestine-Israel," a conference sponsored by Friends of Sabeel
North America, a Christian Palestinian group.

Israeli policy toward Palestine is an inflammatory topic in the
U.S. and is not commonly discussed in large, public forums.

In Boston, complaints were lodged with Old South Church in the weeks
prior to the event, in an effort to halt the conference. The Committee
for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting complained that Sabeel is
"an anti-Zionist organisation that traffics in anti-Judaic themes,"
according to press reports.