2 March 2020 — The Electronic Intifada
Myles Holmes, an anti-Muslim and anti-gay pastor, will speak Monday at AIPAC just days after suggesting torture and death for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. (via Facebook)
Pastor Myles Holmes, an anti-Muslim and anti-gay bigot, is scheduled to speak about evangelical support for Israel at the conference of the powerful lobby group AIPAC on Monday.
20 February 2014 — Counterpunch.org
It is no secret that Barack Obama is one of the supreme illusionists of modern times. The disconnect between his words and his deeds is so profound as to be almost sublime, far surpassing the crude obfuscations of the Bush-Cheney gang. Their projections of unreality were more transparent, and in any case were merely designed to put a little lipstick on the pig of policies they were openly pushing (militarism, tax cuts for the rich, etc.). Indeed, the Bushists delivered their lines like bored performers at the end of a long run, not caring whether they were believed or not — just as long as they got what they wanted.
1 November 2013 — The Hampton Institute
Part 1: Political Language and the ‘Mafia Principles’ of International Relations
Part 2: Barack Obama’s Global Terror Campaign
Part 3: America’s “Secret Wars” in Over 100 Countries Around the World
While the American Empire – and much of the policies being pursued – did not begin under President Obama, the focus of “Empire Under Obama” is to bring awareness about the nature of empire to those who may have – or continue – to support Barack Obama and who may believe in the empty promises of “hope” and “change.” Empire is institutional, not individual. Continue reading
4 September 2013 — — Strategic Culture Foundation
For the first time through the two-year old Syrian conflict, the United States has mentioned the holy cow – «boots on the ground». The Secretary of State John Kerry has pleaded that the US Congress should approve the use of American ground troops although the Obama administration may not intend to take recourse to such action.
1 September 2013
Grassroots pressure has forced President Obama to seek approval from Congress for an attack on Syria. But Obama is hell-bent on ordering a missile assault on that country, and he has two very important aces in the hole.
14 December, 2010 — Andy Worthington
1.
Since its founding in December 2006, WikiLeaks, which was established as, essentially, a secure information clearing house for whistleblowers around the world to provide sensitive information, some of which would then be released to the public, and which was reportedly set up by “Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa,” has declared that its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations.” From the release of a single document in December 2006 — a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, which “had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China,” and which “called for the execution of government officials by hiring ‘criminals’ as hit men” — WikiLeaks has received millions of documents, and has, amongst other achievements, exposed corruption in Kenya, made available the Standard Operating Procedure for Guantánamo from 2003 and 2004 (and compared the changes), attacked Scientology, exposed Sarah Palin’s emails, and published a membership list of Britain’s far-right BNP.
4 September, 2010 — VTJP
News
International Middle East Media Center
Barghouthi: “Construction Continues In Dozens of Settlements”
IMEMC – 4 Sep 2010 – Saturday September 04, 2010 – 18:10, Palestinian Legislator, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, stated that while Israel is heading to peace talks with the Palestinians, its government continues its illegal settlement activities in the occupied West Bank and in occupied East Jerusalem.
26 July, 2010 — Information Clearing House
Afghanistan War Logs:
Massive Leak of Secret Files Exposes Truth of Occupation
By Nick Davies and David Leigh
Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops · Covert unit hunts leaders for ‘kill or capture’ · Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato · Read the Guardian’s full war logs investigation
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26016.htm
How US Marines Sanitised Record of Bloodbath
By Declan Walsh
War logs show how marines gave cleaned up accounts of incident in which they killed 19 civilians.
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article26024.htm
19 January, 2010
While the mass graves are being filled up in Haiti and international opinion devotes some fleeting moments of attention to this unhappy nation, all we hear about is misery, poverty, corruption, chaos. This of course was to be expected. Haiti is seen as simply another “failed state” one can only feel sorry for and which will need international intervention. Few people remember – if they ever knew – that Haiti has a glorious past. It was the people of Haiti who two hundred years ago made the first serious attempt to turn the lofty principles of the French into palpable reality.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Haiti, in those days Saint Domingue, was France’s richest colony. Haiti’s sugar-plantations and Haiti’s African slaves provided the economic backbone also of revolutionary France. After the fall of the Bastille, both Haiti’s white slave-owners and emancipated Haitian mulattoes sent representatives to the revolutionary convention in Paris. Haiti’s slave and plantation owners were relieved that the French monarchy and French commercial controls had collapsed which opened up an interesting new market in neighboring United States. Haiti’s mulattoes were enthralled by French revolutionary principles. A Haitian mulatto leader, Lacombe, insisted that freedom, brotherhood and equality were principles which ought to be observed also in Haiti. He was immediately hanged by irate French slave owners.
2 December, 2009 — Global Research – Workers World – 2009-11-15
Just how powerful is the U.S. military today?
Why is the largest military machine on the planet unable to defeat the resistance in Afghanistan, in a war that has lasted longer than World War II or Vietnam ?
Afghanistan ranks among the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world today. It has one of the shortest life expectancy rates, highest infant mortality rates and lowest rates of literacy.
The total U.S. military budget has more than doubled from the beginning of this war in 2001 to the $680 billion budget signed by President Barack Obama Oct. 28. The U.S. military budget today is larger than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. The U.S. arsenal has the most advanced high-tech weapons.
The funds and troop commitment to Afghanistan have grown with every year of occupation. Last January another 20,000 troops were sent; now there is intense pressure on President Obama to add an additional 40,000 troops. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. More than three times as many forces are currently in Afghanistan when NATO forces and military contractors are counted.
Eight years ago, after an initial massive air bombardment and a quick, brutal invasion, every voice in the media was effusive with assurances that Afghanistan would be quickly transformed and modernized, and the women of Afghanistan liberated. There were assurances of schools, roads, potable water, health care, thriving industry and Western-style “democracy.” A new Marshall Plan was in store.
Was it only due to racist and callous disregard that none of this happened?
26 August, 2009 — Joe Bageant
Lay off the footwork and throw a punch!
Almost a year after the Great Giddy Swarming of the Obamians last November, some of the revelers are waking up with one booger of a hangover. And they are asking themselves, ‘What were we thinking when we had that tenth drink of Democratic Party Kool-Aid?’ It was a clear cut case of seduction and date rape. The spike in the drink was, of course, hope. Poor pathetic American liberals. Forever doomed to be naive freshmen at the senior beer bash.
We try to take comfort in that we won’t have to listen to or look at John McCain or Sarah Palin for four years, except in the American Legion Magazine and in Palin’s case, as a centerfold in the next issue of Middle Aged Skin. OK, we really are grateful. But could the pathetic McCain-Palin clown act possibly have created much more havoc than what we are seeing?
Case in point: I got up this morning to the headline: ‘Social Security Checks to Shrink.’ Surely this makes a slew of Generation Xers cackle with glee. But some of us are trying to stay drunk on that check until our date with a heart attack or one of those death panels the Republicans are yammering about. Since January I’ve been telling my wife we could expect Social Security to start shrinking. Ever the concerned citizen, she replies ‘Can’t you find another jag to get on? Eight months for god sake!’
15 August 2009
I contend that ever since the first slave ship left the shores of Africa, the ideology of racism has been central to the success of capitalism. Without it and the wealth that slavery produced, Europe and its bastard offspring, the United States, would never have accumulated the capital that made today’s world possible. And if the corrosive and utterly destructive effects of the ideology of racism were not apparent to you before the election of Barack ‘Hope & Change’ Obama, then surely by now they should be, and especially its effects on the ‘left’.
14 August, 2009 — Atlantic Free Press
There is apparently no path blazed by George W. Bush that Barack Obama will not eagerly follow. Surges, assassinations, indefinite detention, defense of torture, senseless wars and rampant militarism — in just a few short months, we’ve seen it all.
To this dismaying record of complicity and continuity, we can add an increasing direct involvement in the horrific, hydra-headed conflict in Somalia, whose latest round of fiery hell was instigated by the American-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopia in late 2006. Under Bush, U.S. forces were deeply and directly enmeshed in the murderous action, dropping bombs on fleeing refugees, ‘renditioning’ other refugees to the tender mercies of Ethiopia’s notorious prisons, and even sending in death squads to clean up after missile strikes and bombings. (For background, see ‘Silent Surge: Bipartisan Terror War Intensifies in Somalia.’)
30 July, 2009 — Palestine Chronicle
The current standoff between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue of ‘settlements’ has raised the prospect of defining a new chapter in US/Israel relations.
Media reports suggest that since Obama’s administration took office a new sense of optimism prevails regarding a “peace deal” between the Zionist state and the Occupied Palestinians.
Yet, many skeptics have justifiably raised the question about whether America’s first black president is the harbinger of real relief for Palestinian quest for freedom or merely an excuse for a new false dawn.
Worshipping Heroes Is Not The Same As Learning Their Life Lessons
New York, New York: What a time for Iconomania, none of it critical, none of it questioning, none offering deeper perspective or leading to very revealing coverage.
Politicians may rule but celebrities dominate in a culture where every pol dreams of shaping an aura that inspires hero worship and adoration. That was Barack Obama’s trump card with his eloquence often blinding us to the substance of his stances.
First there was Michael Jackson’s death with wall-to-wall coverage dominated by our info-tainment media where show biz and news biz merges more easily than media companies.
13 July, 2009 — Black Agenda Report
Enrique Ortez Colindres may be a coup plotter from the original ‘banana republic,’ but as a white man he feels comfortable calling the president of the United States a ‘little black sugar plantation worker’ and other Spanish variations on ‘nigger.’ Ortez’s comments were not deemed newsworthy by most of the U.S. Media.
‘Ortez referred to Obama as ‘that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing.”
On June 29, the day he was installed by Honduran coup leaders as the country’s new interim foreign minister, Enrique Ortez Colindres repeatedly used racist slurs to describe U.S. president Barack Obama.
Using the word ‘negrito,’ a well-recognized and profoundly racist epithet, whose literal translation means ‘little black man’ or ‘little black boy,’ Ortez referred to Obama as ‘that little black boy who knows nothing about nothing’ [‘ese negrito que no sabe nada de nada’] and ‘a little black man who doesn’t know where Tegucigalpa is’ [‘el negrito, no conoce donde queda Tegucigalpa’]. In another case, he told the Honduran newspaper El Tiempo (translation from DailyKos):
“I have negotiated with queers, prostitutes, leftists, blacks, whites. This is my job; I studied for it. I am not racially prejudiced. I like the little black sugar plantation worker who is president of the United States.”
For more than a week after they were uttered, Ortez’s slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world: The Chinese and French wire services Xinhua and Agence France Presse covered them, among others . But besides online sites like Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, the story was mostly ignored by U.S. journalists, who otherwise freely quoted Ortez about Honduras’ coup and constitutional crisis.
‘Ortez’s slurs were a big story in Latin American and around the world.’
That wasn’t the case when Hugo Chavez called George W. Bush the devil in an address at the U.N. in 2006. Then the arguably lesser insult was discussed for days in the U.S. media.
Wednesday, July 8, offered big new developments in the story when a U.S. diplomat in Honduras complained about the slurs and Ortez offered a brief apology. Then, later that afternoon, Ortez was fired and replaced by the coup government’s president.
But today, two days later, the New York Times has yet to mention any aspect of the story, and the Washington Post only ran a brief 120-word Associated Press report about the apology (though nothing about the resignation) on July 9–its readers only then learning about the original slights.
And so it would appear that, at least in this case, few U.S. journalists think it’s much of a story when a high-ranking foreign official, otherwise in the news, launches a racist attack, even one that targets the president of the United States.
BAR Editors’ Note: The New York Times belatedly reported the story of Ortez’s blatant slurs on July 11, following the FAIR piece. The Times noted that Ortez was installed in a new job – as minister of justice and government of the majority non-white country!
This article was previously published in the blog of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
A few months back, in “From State Secrets to War to Wiretaps: Two Sides of the Same Coin”, former FBI language specialist and also the founder / director of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds reflected upon the first leg of the Obama administration. It was not a settling pensivity.
She first noted the perpetual “rationalizing…defense …[and] illogical excuses [of] ‘He’s been in office for only 20 days, give the man a break!’ and ‘He’s had only 50 days in office, give him a chance!’ and currently, ‘be reasonable – how much can a man do in 120 days?!’” before asking if we mightn’t call it all a “swindling of the voters”. Her real gripe was the State Secrets Privilege statute because, appropriately enough, she was historically “the first recipient of this ‘privilege’ during the now gone [Bush] Administration”. Her use of “privilege” was, of course, a properly snide irony, and she was now targetting the slim black man who promised an end to Washington DC secrecy (“When I am president we won’t work in secret to avoid honoring our laws and Constitution” – candidate Obama, 2007). She also was irate that Obama was allowing his admin to use the act (statute, whatever) in three important judicial cases: “Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v. NSA”. More than a little outraged, she noted that “[i]n the Al Haramain case, Obama’s Justice Department has threatened to have the FBI or federal marshals break into a judge’s office and remove evidence already turned over in the case”, an explicit example of the old we have the might; thus, we have the right Mr. Obama pledged to exterminate in America’s legal affairs.
17 June, 2009 – Counterpunch
A civil war is brewing in Pakistan. Thanks to President Barack Obama, who is shifting the American war from Iraq to ‘the real enemies’ operating from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Cash-strapped Pakistan could not defy Obama persuasion and decided to wage a war against its own people, the Pashtuns inhabiting the Northern Province and the tribal areas of Waziristan. Decades ago, Pakistan waged a similar war against its own people, the Bengalis in East Pakistan. In 1971, the Pakistani military charged to wipe out Mukti Bahini, a Bengali resistance force, paved the way for the nation’s dismemberment. In 2009, the military is charged to eliminate the Taliban, a Pashtun resistance force. History is repeating itself in Pakistan—as it frequently does for nations that do not learn from past mistakes.
With a willful caricature of the Pashtuns, who are successfully resisting the occupation of Afghanistan, Obama advisers are forcing Pakistan, a subservient ally, to help win the war in Afghanistan. This help is suicidal for Pakistan. The civil war will unleash intractable sectarian, ethnic, and secessionist forces. As the warfare intensifies in coming months, Pakistan will face economic meltdown. If the civil war spins out of control, Pakistan’s nuclear assets would pose a security threat to the world, in which case Pakistan might forcibly be denuclearized.
3 June, 2009 – MRZine – Monthly Review
Talks between Barack Obama and the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships over the past fortnight have unleashed a flood of media interest in the settlements Israel has been constructing on Palestinian territory for more than four decades.
The US president’s message is unambiguous: the continuing growth of the settlements makes impossible the establishment of a Palestinian state and therefore peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
It is one he is expected to repeat when he addresses the Muslim world from Cairo tomorrow.
The implication of Mr. Obama’s policy is that, once Israel has frozen the settlements, it will have to begin dismantling a significant number of them to restore territory needed for a Palestinian state.
3 June, 2009 – Black Agenda Report
Like the campaign of Barack Obama, some would turn the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court into another occasion for nonstop celebration of the American story in which humble orgins and hard work win out over racism. While it is important to refute the racist assumptions and lies of Republicans, the Sotomayor nomination should be put into context. It should be compared with the other two nominations of nonwhites to the court, and should be the beginning of a discussion of what a just and democratic society must demand from its courts — more nonwhite faces in high places? More rights for corporations? Or more justice for people?
The bubble of false reality that is corporate media’s coverage of the nomination of Sonia Maria Sotomayor begins with the racist rants of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and a host of Republican senators and talking heads. It encompasses a torrent of righteous air and ink denouncing the racists, along with an inspiring story of humble origins, hard work and determination to succeed. It feeds the ongoing narrative of America’s ultimate triumph over old fashioned racism by allowing highly qualified and carefully vetted minorities to join its ruling elite. And it includes the view of places like Business Week, which designate the nominee “centrist” and a “moderate,” a view that corporate media revealingly agree is nonpolitical,” which means that the prerogatives of America’s business elite are not now and never will be up for discussion.
Absent from the conversation around the Sotomayor nomination are all but the most cursory review of her legal career before being appointed a federal judge by George Bush — a mere twelve years of legal experience, five as a prosecutor for the D.A.’s office in Manhattan, and another seven as partner at the international law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. The mainstream media does not publish summaries of the decisions she has made in seventeen years on the bench. Although much is made of the fact that she will be only the third judge not a white man to sit on the high court, few detailed comparisons are made between her legal career and those of Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. Finally there are no attempts to discuss the unique, and not always positive role that the US Supreme Court plays or ought to play in the life of the country.
The New Dark Age 