13 Year Afghan War "Over" - Dierdre Fulton in Common Dreams

2 Trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, the world is predictably less safe for the west than it was - and jihadism is much more entrenched.

With little fanfare, the United States and NATO formally ended the longest war in U.S. history with a ceremony in Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, leaving observers to wonder what—if anything—was achieved.

Over 13 years, U.S.-led war in Afghanistan claimed the lives of about 3,500 foreign troops (at least 2,224 of them American soldiers) and an estimated 21,000 Afghan civilians; most experts agree that the country is as violent as ever and that the death toll will continue to rise. Many say the war is over in name only.

In late September, the U.S. and Afghanistan signed a controversial Bilateral Security Agreement that allows for U.S. training, funding, and arming of the Afghan military; establishes long-term U.S. military presence in Afghanistan with access to numerous bases and installations in the country; and extends immunity to U.S. service members under Afghan law.

There will still be roughly 11,000 American troops in Afghanistan next year as part of the Resolute Support mission to train, advise and assist Afghanistan’s roughly 350,000 security forces. 

Writing for The Guardian, Will Hutton argues: "At a meta strategic level, the U.S. was wrong. The war against terrorism developed by George W Bush after 09/11 is a great failure. The reflex reaction to a heinous act of mass terror was not to outsmart, out-think and marginalize a new enemy - it was to get even by being even more violent, lawless and vicious. This lead NATO into the Afghanistan quagmire and a coalition into the other quagmire; Iraq. 

2 Trillion dollars later and hundreds of thousands dead or displaced, the world is predictably less safe for the west than it was - and jihadism is much more entrenched.

The full article is available here

Drones & Discrimination - Kathy Kelly in Tikkun

The U.S. is the undisputed world leader in incarceration, as it is the world leader in military dominance. 

On December 10 - International Human Rights Day, federal Magistrate Matt Whitworth sentenced me to 3 months in prison for having crossed the line at a military base that wages drone warfare. The punishment for our attempt to speak on behalf of trapped and desperate people, abroad, will be an opportunity to speak with people trapped by prisons and impoverishment here in the U.S.

The trial was based on a trespass charge incurred on June 1, 2014.  We carried a loaf of bread and a letter for Brig Gen. Glen D. Van Herck. In court, we testified that we hadn’t acted with criminal intent but had, rather, exercised our First Amendment right (and responsibility) to assemble peaceably for redress of grievance.

A group of Afghan friends had entrusted me with a simple message, their grievance, which they couldn’t personally deliver: please stop killing us.

It’s one thing to read about the shameful racism and discrimination of the U.S. criminal justice system. It’s quite another to sit next to a woman who is facing ten or more years in prison, isolated from children she has not held in years, and to learn from her about the circumstances that led to her imprisonment.  Many women prisoners, unable to find decent jobs in the regular economy, turn to the underground economy.

The U.S. is the undisputed world leader in incarceration, as it is the world leader in military dominance. Each time I’ve left a U.S. prison, I’ve felt as though I was leaving the scene of a crime. When I return to the U.S. from sites of our war making, abroad, I feel the same way.

Emerging back into the regular world seems tantamount to accepting a contract, pledging to forget the punishments we visit on impoverished people. I’m invited to forget about the people still trapped inside nightmare worlds we have made for them.

The full article is available here

Santa's Real Workshop: Town in China Makes World's Decorations - Oliver Wainright

Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world. 

Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. 

But it’s not. 

The likelihood is that most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you’ve draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 185 miles south of Shanghai – where there’s not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight.

Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world.  They're staffed primarily by migrant laborers, working 12 hours a day for a maximum of $200-300 a month.

Aiming at the lower end of the market, Yiwu’s sales thrived during the recession, as the world shopped for cut-price festive fun, but international sales are down this year. 

Still, according to Cai Qingliang, vice chairman of the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, domestic appetite is on the rise, as China embraces the annual festival of Mammon. Santa Claus, says the Economist, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus.

The beaming sales reps of Yiwu market couldn’t sound happier with their life sentence of eternal Christmastime. According to Cheng Yaping, co-founder of the Boyang Craft Factory, who runs a stall decked out like a miniature winter wonderland: “Sitting here every day, being able to look at all these beautiful decorations, is really great for your mood.”

It’s somehow unlikely that those on the other end of the production line, consigned to dipping snowflakes in red-swamped workshops for us to pick up at the checkout for $.99, feel quite the same way.

The full article is available here

The Hunger Games Economy - Jebediah Purdy in The Daily Beast

The enormous resonance of the story in The Hunger Games suggests it’s caught something many Americans sense: the rules we are currently living by are not the best we can do. We are living with our own Hunger Game.

What are our Hunger Games? I’d start with the economy. The fact that tens of millions of Americans still can’t afford health care—especially but not only in states that have resisted Obamacare—means that losing the game can literally mean dying. Statistically, rejecting the Medicaid expansion means more than a thousand early deaths every year in my state, North Carolina, mostly among the working poor. That’s just one rule of the game.

Because it’s hard to unionize, a worker who asks for more is likely to be replaced by someone who will ask for less.  Solidarity is harder, and people are pitted against one another.  The 29 coal miners who were killed in the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia four years ago were non-unionized, which made it easier for their bosses to ignore safety rules and press for ramped-up production over human life.  Don Blankenship, then-head of the company, has just been criminally indicted, but it’s five years too late.  His policies made the workplace a Hunger Games arena of its own.

At the start of each Hunger Games, the contestants scramble for a pile of survival gear and weapons before taking off for the woods to hunt one another.  In America, black children are born into families with about 10%—one-tenth—the average wealth of white families.  They are born in neighborhoods with fewer business owners, fewer professionals—fewer of the patrons who can spot their talent and send the real-world version of those little silver parachutes that drop into the Hunger Games arena to save our heroes.

The Hunger Games  Mockingjay’s moral core is solidarity: the Gamers start caring about one another and resisting the rule that only one contestant can survive the Hunger Games. 

The political pivot comes when they realize that there could be a world without Hunger Games at all.  The rules of this game are man-made.  They benefit some people and hurt many others—even the so-called winners, who survive by becoming killers, then become the celebrity playthings of Capitol elites.

But once we understand that it’s the rules of the game that are the problem, we can see that no one needs to be racist for the system to keep spitting out racist results.  No one needs to hate for a game to be hateful.  Even “fair” rules, which treat every person alike, are not really fair if the contestants scramble across the starting line in very unequal situations, some with swords and bows, some with a little rope and a box of matches.  The problem is that being a decent person in an indecent situation is not enough, even though it may also be all you can do.

This is especially hard to see because Americans, even more than other people, tend to see the rules of the market as natural and unchangeable facts.  In American life, the familiar version of market competition is often treated as like the Law of Gravity, the kind you can’t change and defy only if you don’t mind falling on your face.

The full article is available here

Ebola Coverage Puts Old Fears in New Virus - Janine Jackson

Ebola is less a story about a bizarre new disease and its unpredictably disastrous capacities, and more a sad old story about poverty and priorities. 

The epidemic has so far killed at least 4,800 people in West Africa. There is no reason to believe Ebola will or could exact analogous tolls here, because, despite ooga-booga stories about Africans carrying tainted “bushmeat” in their luggage (Newsweek, 8/21/14; FAIR Blog, 8/28/14), the forces behind the viral outbreak largely have to do with infrastructure deficits and lack of access to healthcare.

But sober and data-driven isn’t exactly US media’s style, particularly when dealing with a disease associated with There that is seen to be coming Here. The concoction of ignorance and breathlessness has generated some truly terrible coverage.

“Fears of the other” have attended perceptions of disease “ever since the germ theory first associated microbes with illness,” Washington told FAIR’s CounterSpin (10/24/14), citing “Typhoid Mary,” an Irish woman when they were a “despised minority,” along with accusations that Chinese people were spreading plague in 1900s San Francisco and charges that Jews fomented disease in Polish ghettos.

No one suggests that journalists should know more than medical professionals about a disease that is largely unfamiliar to most people, or strive to speak definitively about evolving events.

It is fair to insist that they delineate what they know from what they don’t, and resist speculation and rumor-mongering. Not just because these have no place in responsible public health reporting, but because misinformation has effects.

In this case, these include both the fanning of violent xenophobia —as we’ve already seen in the case of, for example, Senegalese-American boys in the Bronx being beaten up while their attackers shouted “Ebola!” (Gothamist, 10/27/14)—and the individual and societal problems resulting from a misunderstanding of relative risk.

The full article is available here

“Distancing” From Democratic Policies Caused Democrats To Lose - Dave Johnson at Our Future

For some reason, Democrats candidates didn't seem to consider the possibility that maybe being embarrassed to be a Democrat is not the best way to appeal to the Democratic voters.

In the recent midterm elections, progressive policies won at the ballot box, while many Democratic candidates lost.

Many of those Democratic candidates ran on “centrist” (i.e. “corporate”) platforms that distanced themselves from core Democratic policies and positions. Now they are learning that lots of Democrats decided not to vote for them, while the Republicans they were trying to appeal to still voted for Republicans.

Oddly, despite Obama's overall success, candidates chose to distance themselves from their own President and many of his progressive policies — like health care reform, protecting the environment, and giving the millions of immigrants who are here without documentation a path to legal residence and citizenship.

Granted, the right wing media and Republicans in Congress who are beholden to it have been on a 6 year, scorched-earth campaign to smear the Obama brand; irrespective of factual accuracy or how he has actually performed as President. 

But for some reason, Democrats candidates didn't seem to consider the possibility that maybe being embarrassed to be a Democrat is not the best way to appeal to the Democratic voters.

Voters who elected Obama in 2008 and 2012 expected delivery on change appropriate to the 21st century. The fact that the Democratic members in both houses failed to get behind the President when they had the votes to deliver changes in Education, Healthcare, and Energy Policies is not only bad governing, it's bad campaign strategy.

The full article is available here

Yearning for a World of Love and Justice - Rabbi Michael Lerner in Tikkun

To successfully transform our society from its current obsession with acquiring material goods, we need to help connect people with their deepest yearnings for a world of meaning and purpose.

We live in a world filled with loving and caring people.  We all crave a world filled with love and care.

Yet most of us doubt that we can experience a loving and caring world beyond our own private lives and homes.

Why? Because the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, which places greatest value on money and power, has infiltrated our personal lives, shaping our unconscious and conscious beliefs about “human nature.”

In the economic marketplace we are taught to look out for ourselves, maximize our profits, and do what we need to do to get ahead.  Predictably, we then build walls around us to protect ourselves.  The powerful drive within all of us to be loving and caring seems so “unrealistic” in this situation. 

To successfully transform our society from its current obsession with acquiring material goods, we need to help connect people with their deepest yearnings for a world of meaning and purpose.   We need to place priority on the extent to which institutions and policies nurture our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred and to respond to the grandeur of the universe with gratitude, awe, and wonder.

Then we will begin to rebuild trust in each other’s goodness and start to believe that compassion and kindness can flourish not only in our homes but in our communities and our workplaces as well.

The full article is available here

Obama's Failure to Communicate - David Corn in Mother Jones

Republicans (many of whom don't want government to be considered as an effective tool) benefit from public disgust—even if their constant obstructionism causes the sclerosis.

Obama has faced a structural problem. He hasn't been able to vanquish Republican obstructionism on his own. The anti-government forces of the GOP were in the happy position of knowing that if voters viewed Washington as dysfunctional Obama would bear much of that taint. Republicans (many of whom don't want government to be considered as an effective tool) would benefit from public disgust—even if their constant opposition caused the sclerosis.

The president and his party did not effectively present a competing story to counter the vague, fear-mongering, competence-challenging attacks Republicans mounted against Obama and his party.  Referring to its messaging efforts, one Obama adviser recently told me, "We suck. We're good during the campaign when people are focused. It's hard when they are not."

Obama and his team succeeded in transforming campaigning, integrating an intense focus on data and metrics with on-the-ground organizing. And they did it twice. But the president has not transformed politics. To beat back the expected oppositional waves of 2010 and 2014, he needed a playbook as unconventional, imaginative, and effective as those he used in 2008 and 2012.

Perhaps it is nearly impossible for a president and his aides to govern well in difficult times (crafting complex and often not fully satisfying responses to knotty problems at home and abroad) and promote clear political messaging that consistently cuts through the chaff and connects with stressed-out voters freaked out about the future.

Yet elections work…for those who use them.  And angry Republicans have once again taken advantage of Democratic disaffection, disappointment, apathy, or whatever. Now, in part because Obama could not convince voters in Iowa, Colorado, and elsewhere to stick with him and the policies he champions, many of his accomplishments are at risk, and the nation faces the prospect of more gridlock and chaos in Washington.

The full article is available here

Conservative Judge Rips Voter ID Laws - Brad Friedman in Salon

Conservative icon/federal judge changes mind on photo ID laws, issues blistering dissent against them.

Judge Richard Posner, the Reagan-appointed 7th Circuit Court of Appeals judge, was the one who approved the first such Photo ID law in the country (Indiana’s) back in 2008, in the landmark Crawford v. Marion County case which went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Posner’s ruling was upheld.

His dissent includes a devastating response to virtually every false and/or disingenuous right wing argument/talking point ever put forth in support of Photo ID voting restrictions, describing them as “a mere fig leaf for efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote for the political party that does not control the state government.”

This opinion, written on behalf of five judges on the 7th Circuit, thoroughly disabuses such notions such as:

• these laws are meant to deal with a phantom voter fraud concern (“Out of 146 million registered voters, this is a ratio of one case of voter fraud for every 14.6 million eligible voters”);
  
• that evidence shows them to be little more than baldly partisan attempts to keep Democratic voters from voting (“conservative states try to make it difficult for people who are outside the mainstream…to vote”);
  
• that rightwing partisan outfits like True the Vote, which support such laws, present “evidence” of impersonation fraud that is “downright goofy, if not paranoid”;
  
• and the notion that even though there is virtually zero fraud that could even possibly be deterred by Photo ID restrictions, the fact that the public thinks there is, is a lousy reason to disenfranchise voters since there is no evidence that such laws actually increase public confidence in elections and, as new studies now reveal, such laws have indeed served to suppress turnout in states where they have been enacted.
  

The full article is available here

Why Travel Ban Would Only Make Ebola Worse - Julia Belluz in Vox

Public health experts unanimously agree: sealing borders will not stop Ebola spread and will only exacerbate the crisis in West Africa — and heighten the risk of a global pandemic.

The fear of spread is understandable, especially as an Ebola outbreak appears poised to grow closer to home. America recently recorded its first Ebola death with the passing of a Liberian visitor Thomas Duncan, and the CDC announced the first-ever cases of Ebola transmission to two of Duncan's nurses.

As Ebola panic peaks, conspiracy theories are spreading fast. So now is the time when we need to check our irrational reactions to this horrible crisis and avoid policies that will divert scarce resources from actual remedies. And we know from past experience that airport screening and travel bans are more about quelling the public's fears and political expediency than offering any real boost to public health security.

Public health experts unanimously agree: sealing borders will not stop Ebola spread and will only exacerbate the crisis in West Africa — and heighten the risk of a global pandemic.

There are three reasons why it's a crazy idea. The first is that it just won't work to stop the virus. The weeks following 9/11, when people stopped getting on planes, provided influenza researchers with a natural experiment in what a travel ban might do to viral spread. They found it didn't stop influenza from moving, it only delayed flu season by a couple of weeks.

In CDC Director Tom Freiden's words, "Even when governments restrict travel and trade, people in affected countries still find a way to move and it is even harder to track them systematically." In other words, determined people will find a way to cross borders anyway, but unlike at airports, we can't track their movements.

The second reason a travel ban won't work is that it would actually make stopping the outbreak in West Africa more difficult. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,said, "To completely seal off and don't let planes in or out of the West African countries involved, then you could paradoxically make things much worse in the sense that you can't get supplies in, you can't get help in, you can't get the kinds of things in there that we need to contain the epidemic."

The third reason closing borders is a bad idea is that it will devastate the economies of West Africa and further destroy the limited health systems there. The World Bank already estimates this outbreak could cost West African economies up to $33 billion. That's a lot for any country, but especially when you're talking about some of the world's poorest. World Health Organization director Margaret Chan reminded us that 90 percent of any outbreak's economic costs "come from irrational and disorganized efforts of the public to avoid infection."

The full article is available here

Students, Teachers Turn Out in Force Against Censorship of History - Deidre Fulton in Common Dreams

The proposal—to establish a committee that would review course materials to ensure they promote patriotism and avoid encouragement of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—was the catalyst for two weeks of student walk-outs and teacher 'sick-outs.'

Several hundred students, community members, and educators packed a Jefferson County Board of Education meeting in suburban Denver on Thursday night, lambasting the conservative-majority board's proposal to censor the district’s history curriculum.

The proposal—to establish a committee that would review course materials to ensure they promote patriotism and avoid encouragement of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—was the catalyst for two weeks of student walk-outs and teacher 'sick-outs,' the latter of which closed several high schools on two days in September.

While board member Julie Williams, who has cited the Texas Board of Education as a model, refused to recall the proposal entirely, the protests appeared to have brought about a partial victory.

"The controversy over a history curriculum in Colorado is an argument over a very much bigger issue," public education expert Jeff Bryant wrote Thursday at the Education Opportunity Network blog.

"It’s about how we’re treating our nation’s youngest citizens with a substandard form of education that emphasizes fiscal efficiency over learning opportunity and standardization over individual needs and interests. And it’s about how we treat students as learners, imposing education as something done to them rather than with them."

The full article is available here

Reza Aslan Takes Down Bill Maher’s “Facile Arguments” On Islam - Prachi Gupta in Salon

“To say Muslim countries, as though Pakistan and Turkey are the same… it’s frankly, and I use this word seriously, stupid!”

Comedian Bill Maher recently made some comments about Islamic countries that characterized them as more prone to violence, misogyny and bigotry, and now religious scholar Reza Aslan has called Maher out on his own “bigotry.”

These arguments are not unique to Maher, making Aslan’s nuanced argument an essential one to keep in mind as we increase military action in the Middle East.

Here’s Aslan’s point: “To say Muslim countries, as though Pakistan and Turkey are the same… it’s frankly, and I use this word seriously, stupid!”

“The problem is that you’re talking about a religion of one and a half billion people,” he explained, “and certainly it becomes very easy to just simply paint them all with a single brush by saying, ‘Well in Saudi Arabia [women] can’t drive,’ and saying that’s representative of Islam. That’s representative of Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia’s laws are “extremist,” he noted, not just to Westerners, but even within the “the rights and responsibilities of Muslim women around the world.”

He also pointed out the U.S.’s own hypocrisy in calling out ISIS for its brutality while partnering with Saudi Arabia: “Look, Saudi Arabia is one of the most, if not the most, extremist countries in the world. In the month that we’ve been talking about ISIS and their terrible actions in Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia, our closest ally, has beheaded 19 people.”

Aslan explained, “Islam doesn’t promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you’re a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.”

The full article is available here

Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits? Lee Fang in The Nation

Talking heads like former General Jack Keane are all over the news media fanning fears of ISIL. Shouldn’t the public know about their links to Pentagon contractors?

If you read enough news and watch enough cable television about the threat of the Islamic State, the radical Sunni Muslim militia group better known simply as ISIL, you will inevitably encounter a parade of retired generals demanding an increased US military presence in the region.

But what you won’t learn from media coverage of IS is that many of these former Pentagon officials have skin in the game as paid directors and advisers to some of the largest military contractors in the world.

Ramping up America’s military presence in Iraq and directly entering the war in Syria, along with greater military spending more broadly, is a debatable solution to a complex political and sectarian conflict. But those goals do unquestionably benefit one player in this saga: America’s defense industry.

Keane is a great example of this phenomenon. His think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which he oversees along with neoconservative partisans Liz Cheney and William Kristol, has provided the data on IS used for multiple stories by The New York Times, the BBC and other leading outlets.

Retired General Anthony Zinni, perhaps the loudest advocate of a large deployment of American soliders into the region to fight IS, is a board member to BAE Systems’ US subsidiary, and also works for several military-focused private equity firms.

CNN pundit Frances Townsend, a former Bush administration official, has recently appeared on television calling for more military engagement against IS. As the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit that studies elite power structures, reported, Townsend “holds positions in two investment firms with defense company holdings, MacAndrews & Forbes and Monument Capital Group, and serves as an advisor to defense contractor Decision Sciences.”



“Mainstream news outlets have a polite practice of identifying former generals and former congressmembers as simply ‘formers’—neglecting to inform the public of what these individuals are doing now, which is often quite pertinent information, like that they are corporate lobbyists or board members,” says Jeff Cohen, an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College.

The full article is available here

Six Steps To Beat ISIS Without War - Phyllis Bennis in Foreign Policy In Focus

There is no military solution to the problem of ISIS. Military actions will not set the stage for political solutions; they will prevent those solutions from taking hold.

The bottom line is there is no immediate action that will make ISIS disappear. You can’t destroy an ideology—or even an organization—through bombing

As horrifying as the beheading of the two U.S. journalists was, revenge is never a good basis for foreign policy.A military strike might bring some immediate satisfaction, but we all know revenge is a bad basis for foreign policy, especially when it has such dangerous consequences.

We have to recognize that military solutions really don’t work. Have we forgotten the failures of the U.S. wars in the Middle East over these many years? We need to keep our focus on the medium- and long-term solutions, something not so easy to do in an election year.

Weakening ISIS requires eroding the support it relies on from tribal leaders, military figures, and ordinary Iraqi Sunnis.

Step One: Stop the airstrikes. Airstrikes defeat the important goal of ending popular support for ISIS, and instead actually serve to strengthen the extremist organization.

Step Two: Make real the commitment for “No boots on the ground.” The U.S. must also stop flooding the region with arms that only result in more violence against civilians, and end its policy of ignoring the violations of human rights and international law committed by its allies.

Step Three: Organize a real diplomatic partnership to deal with ISIS. Iran has more influence in Baghdad than Washington does. If we are serious about wanting to encourage the Iraqi government to accept a truly more inclusive approach, joint pressure from the U.S. and Iran holds the best chance.

Step Four: Initiate a new search for broader diplomatic solutions in the United Nations. That means working to build a real coalition aimed at using diplomatic and financial pressures, not military strikes, at the international level in both Iraq and Syria.

Step Five: Push the UN, despite Lakhdar Brahimi’s resignation, to restart real negotiations on ending the civil war in Syria. That means everyone involved needs to be at the table

Step Six: Massively increase U.S. humanitarian contributions to U.N. agencies for the millions of refugees and displaced people from both Syria and Iraq. The U.S. has pledged significant funds, but much of it has not actually been made available to the agencies, and more should be pledged and given.​

The full article is available here

The Truth About Sharia Law - Kevin Eckstrom in Religion News Service

Often what we try to ban is the very same thing we do not understand.
The story of Shariah in Indonesia's Aceh province is a telling lesson that what we think we know of Islamic law is often more complicated and nuanced in reality. It is the only province in the world’s most populous Muslim nation to impose Shariah.

But why was Shariah introduced in the first place?

Simple: politics.

Government officials in Jakarta were trying to delegitimize the separatist movement in Aceh, and by linking them with images of hard-line Islamic law, Jakarta calculated that the rebels would lose support at home and (especially) abroad.

Shariah is a daily fact of life in Aceh. But what does that actually mean?

For one, alcohol is hard to find, and public drunkenness is punishable by 40 lashes (how intense of a lash may be a matter of dispute between one end of the whip and the other). Intimate relations between unmarried adults can get you nine lashes, and gambling between 12 and 16. All Muslim women must wear a hijab in public. According to the Shariah Court, 53 cases were heard last year, down from 72 in 2012.

In more extreme (and rare) cases, human rights activists say women have been raped for suspected adultery, and proposals for implementing Shariah law have ranged from forcing women to ride side-saddle on motorbikes to requiring four witnesses to prove a rape.

But it’s important to note that Shariah law is only applied to Muslims; there is little to no threat of foreigners or non-Muslims being subjected to Shariah punishments. If you want a beer at your hotel, you can easily find one. Non-Muslim women can walk freely with their heads uncovered (except in a mosque).

The bottom line is that the imposition of Shariah was a cynical political ploy — and it worked. There were, and are, no wild-eyed fanatics seeking to impose their religious laws on other faiths. There is no Taliban running amok, guns blazing. Here, at least, Shariah mostly works in a democratic context, however imperfectly.

Back in America, a handful of states have moved to ban “foreign laws” from the courts — and by “foreign laws” they really mean Shariah. That, too, is a cynical political ploy designed to rally the base and alienate the opposition.

Too often, when we talk about Islam, we overlap religion with politics, or we see Islam through the distorted lens of Middle East turmoil or puritanical Arab culture. Still reeling from the trauma of 9/11, we project our own fears and misconceptions onto others, sometimes for our own purposes (political or otherwise).

Let’s be clear: Islam has its share of problems, as does Shariah. But often what we try to ban is the very same thing we do not understand. We see things in extremes, and fail to consider political, cultural or historical factors that shape the current context. When you pull back the veil a bit, you may be surprised by what you find.

The full article is available here

ISIS Is America's Legacy in Middle East - Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. 13 years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. 

When you think about it, from the moment the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan in October 2001 to the present, not a single US military intervention has had anything like its intended effect.

Each one has, in time, proven a disaster in its own special way, providing breeding grounds for extremism and producing yet another set of recruitment posters for yet another set of jihadist movements. Looked at in a clear-eyed way, this is what any American military intervention seems to offer such extremist outfits—and ISIS knows it.

All in all, the invasions, the occupations, the drone campaigns in several lands, the deaths that ran into the hundreds of thousands, the uprooting of millions of people sent into external or internal exile, the expending of trillions of dollars added up to a bin Laden dreamscape. They would prove jihadist recruitment tools par excellence.

Though the militants of ISIS would undoubtedly be horrified to think so, they are the spawn of Washington. Thirteen years of regional war, occupation, and intervention played a major role in clearing the ground for them. They may be our worst nightmare (thus far), but they are also our legacy—and not just because so many of their leaders came from the Iraqi army we disbanded, had their beliefs and skills honed in the prisons we set up (Camp Bucca seems to have been the West Point of Iraqi extremism), and gained experience facing US counterterror operations in the "surge" years of the occupation.

In fact, just about everything done in the war on terror has facilitated their rise. After all, we dismantled the Iraqi army and rebuilt one that would flee at the first signs of ISIS's fighters, abandoning vast stores of Washington's weaponry to them. We essentially destroyed the Iraqi state, while fostering a Shia leader who would oppress enough Sunnis in enough ways to create a situation in which ISIS would be welcomed or tolerated throughout significant areas of the country.

Americans prefer to believe that all problems have solutions. There may, however, be no obvious or at least immediate solution when it comes to ISIS, an organization based on exclusivity and divisiveness in a region that couldn't be more divided.

But we do have reasonable evidence from the past 13 years of what an escalating American military intervention is likely to do: not whatever it is that Washington wants it to do.

The full article is available here

From Left & Right: Calls to Demilitarize Police - John Nichols in The Nation

The restructuring of local police departments into what look like occupying military forces has become a national trend.  Democratic and Republican members of Congress have begun to step up on the issue.

When Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill called this week for the "demilitarization" of Ferguson, Missouri, she could have been talking about hundreds of other communities across the country.

In recent years, as the American Civil Liberties Union details in its remarkable new report, "War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing," the restructuring of local police departments into what look like occupying military forces has become "a nationwide trend."

That trend was illustrated for America and the world by scenes from Ferguson where, after a police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, tensions flared. Local police met protests not just with extreme tactics -- including the detention of journalists and the arrest of an elected alderman from neighboring St. Louis -- but with armored vehicles, heavy weapons and a show of military force that made matters worse.

With a bluntness that is rare for a U.S. Senator addressing the circumstances in a community in her state, McCaskill argued that "this kind of response by the police has become the problem instead of the solution."

"Since the 1980's the US government has enabled the militarization of the police force as part of its so-called War on Drugs. Post 9/11 politics opened the flood gates with grants from the federal government to prepare for the imminent terrorist threat.

 Now, as combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan have ended, the Pentagon is literally giving battlefield hardware away," says Kevin Martin, executive director of Peace Action, which has organized a campaign to press members of Congress on the issue. "The militarism of policing – both in terms of weaponry and tactics – is a threat to our freedom as great as any coming from outside our borders. It's time to put it to a stop."

Democratic and Republican members of Congress have begun to step up on the issue.

The full article is available here

Palestinian Christian: Western Christians Don't Understand Gaza/Israeli Conflict

"The Palestinian Christians, they don't live in an isolated area where oh, this is a Christian town. No, they live among the Muslims in Gaza and therefore as much as the Muslims are suffering, the Christians are suffering, not only in the Gaza strip but also in the West Bank."

"The Christians in the west, most of them, they don't know the realities here. They don't know who is occupying who, who is oppressing who, who is confiscating whose land, who is building walls to try and separate people from one another," said Alex Awad, who Pastors East Jerusalem Church.

"In the United States and much of Europe people — they just don't understand the realities on the ground," he added. "The news media doesn't tell [a] comprehensive story where the average person will understand the causes and effects," said Awad.

"The Palestinian Christians in Gaza today, they suffer as much as the Palestinian Muslims in Gaza. They are under bombardment. They have only eight hours of electricity of every 24 hours. They have a hard time getting fresh water," he said.

"The Palestinian Christians, they don't live in an isolated area where oh, this is a Christian town. No, they live among the Muslims in Gaza and therefore as much as the Muslims are suffering, the Christians are suffering, not only in the Gaza strip but also in the West Bank."

"We are part and parcel of the rest of the Palestinian people. We believe in Jesus Christ. We are still Palestinian Arabs. We speak the Arabic language. We consider ourselves Palestinian," he added.

Awad said that despite the shared sense of "being under the same yoke of oppression" that unites him with his fellow Palestinians, his "heart goes out to any Muslim, Christian, Jew, Israeli, whatever their title, who may be affected by this unnecessary war."

The full article is available here

Why Did Israel Provoke This War? - Henry Siegman in Tikkun

Why does Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’ continue to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank, and why did he use the tragic kidnapping and killing of three Israelis (which was not conducted by Hamas) as a pretext to bomb, then invade Gaza? 

The political and moral issues raised by these actions include Israel's violation of the cease-fire agreement that was in place since November 2012 and whether Israel’s civilian population could have been protected by nonviolent means that would not have placed Gaza’s civilian population at risk.  They also include Hamas' willingness to respond in kind - only perpetuating the cycle of violence - and their strategic placement of weapons in civilian areas.

Where, exactly, are Israel’s borders? It is precisely Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to identify those borders that places Israel’s population at risk. And the reason he has refused to do that is because he had not wanted the world to know that he had no intention of honoring the pledge he made in 2009 to reach a two-state agreement with the Palestinians.

But on July 12, as noted in The Times of Israel by its editor, David Horovitz, Netanyahu made clear that he has no interest in a genuine two-state solution. As Horovitz puts it, “the uncertainties were swept aside … And nobody will ever be able to claim in the future that [Netanyahu] didn’t tell us what he really thinks. He made it explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank.”

The Road Map for Middle East peace that was signed by Israel, the PLO and the United States explicitly ruled out any unilateral alterations in the pre-1967 armistice lines that served as a border between the parties. This provision was consistently and blatantly violated by successive Israeli governments with their illegal settlement project. And Netanyahu refused to recognize that border as the starting point for territorial negotiations in the terms of reference proposed by Secretary of State John Kerry.

The full article is available here

7 "Disposable" Items To Steer Clear Of - Kim Corkum at Postlandfill.org

Waste is not something we need to take for granted. It represents a fundamentally broken pattern of consumption.

The way we use and dispose of the Earth’s resources is fundamentally broken. We extract resources at ever-increasing rates to make consumer goods, which soon end up in landfills due to a lack of other solutions.

But our planet’s resources are not infinite, and our trash can be toxic.  If we don’t change course, we face resource depletion and growing toxicity in our air, soil, water, and bodies.

1. Plastic Water Bottles: 50 billion plastic water bottles are used each year. Although they are picked up by curbside recycling programs , only around 23 percent of these bottles are actually recycled. In addition plastic is not a sustainable material because it requires the extraction of more resources to make more water bottles.

2. Plastic Utensils: I know these seem like a quick and easy solution for having guests over or for your lunch at work. But in the long run these items end up in landfills and are detrimental to us. For each plastic fork, think about the petroleum oil that has to be extracted and the chemicals that will ooze out of it when it ends up in a landfill.

3. Ziploc Bags: stop wasting your money on these disposable plastic bags. They are hard to recycle and most curbside recycling programs do not accept them.

4. Batteries: disposable batteries are not only a waste of money but are very toxic when they enter landfills. They contain harmful metals like nickel,cadium, cobalt and they also contain mercury. If these chemicals leach into our environment, they are detrimental to our health and wildlife. Buy rechargeable batteries that can last up to 5,000 recharges.

5. Plastic Shopping Bags: Paper or plastic? How about neither! These bags are making their way into the ocean and are ending up in the bodies of our wildlife. Bring your own reusable bag when shopping at grocery stores, retail stores, etc. Find a smartphone app that will remind you to bring your reusable bags every time you are near a store here!

6. Pens and Ink Cartridges: Every school year we all buy new disposable pens and ink cartridges but where do the old ones go? Most likely they end up in landfills. To avoid this, buy refillable pens and ink cartridges.

7. Styrofoam: Resist accepting this packaging for left overs at a restaurant or for hot beverages at Dunkin Donuts. You cannot easily recycle this material and it breaks up into small toxic pieces in landfills. Bring your own containers to take extra food!

The full article is available here

House Votes to Push Millions Into Deeper Poverty - Bread For The World

Tax credits, like the child tax credit (CTC) and the earned income tax credit (EITC), keep more people – including children – out of poverty each year than any other federal anti-hunger program.

In a disturbing trend that prioritizes the wealthy over the most vulnerable Americans, the House today passed H.R. 4935 by a vote of 237 to 171.  Bread has dubbed it the “reverse Robin Hood” bill, which takes from the poor to give to the rich. The bill could push 12 million people—including 6 million kids--into poverty or deeper poverty while giving a tax break to households making $150,000 to $205,000.
 

In a media statement today, Bread for the World president, Rev. David Beckmann said,  “It is unacceptable that we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world and have one of the highest child poverty rates among developed countries. Our policies should help lower-income working families climb out of poverty - not push them deeper into it.”

We do not expect the Senate to take up the Child Tax Credit Improvement Act of 2014.  Instead, the bill, which does not extend critical improvements to the child tax credit for millions of low-income working families, could be considered as part of a tax extenders bill after the November mid-term elections.  Tax credits, like the child tax credit (CTC) and the earned income tax credit (EITC), keep more people – including children – out of poverty each year than any other federal anti-hunger program.

Bread is calling for any final bill on the child tax credit to include the 2009 improvements, which enable more low-income working families to receive a larger credit. Your advocacy helped build momentum and educate lawmakers that this is an issue the faith community cares about.

The full article is available here

Mr President, The Border Kids Are Refugees - Michelle Goldberg in The Nation

Many of the children — who largely hail from gang-ridden Honduras, the country with the world’s highest murder rate, and neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala — have valid claims to asylum.

The 52,000 unaccompanied children who have shown up at the border are fleeing gang violence and have valid claims to asylum.

The gratuitous cruelty of the U.S. right to these children isn’t much of a surprise.

More shocking is the response of the Obama administration, which is scarcely more hospitable. As the United Nations and others have said, the situation on the border, where 52,000 unaccompanied children have arrived from Mexico and Central America since October, is more a refugee crisis than an immigration one.

But rather than acknowledge this, the White House has suggested that it wants to strip some of these children of rights they have under the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by George W. Bush. According to The New York Times, Obama is considering seeking “flexibility” in the law’s requirements, which gives lone child migrants from countries other than Mexico and Canada the right to an immigration hearing and, in the interim, release into the “least restrictive setting that is in the best interest of the child.”

The administration must acknowledge that many of the children—who largely hail from gang-ridden Honduras, the country with the world’s highest murder rate, and neighboring El Salvador and
Guatemala—have valid claims to asylum. “The UN said that in their judgment, we should call this a refugee matter, and I think they’re right,” Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California. Indeed, she argues, calling the underlying problem gang warfare minimizes it: “These are armed warlords competing for governance of the countries.”

Treating this as a refugee crisis does not mean simply opening the borders, which could empower the smuggling rings that profit by bringing children to the United States. It means providing safety for the kids who are already here and working with the UN to create centers in their home countries where those whose lives are in danger can apply for asylum in the United States or other nations.

“To me, it’s recognizing reality,” Lofgren says. “You can say it’s not a refugee crisis, but it is, and we have tools in our toolbox, including UNHCR, to deal with a refugee crisis.”

The full article is available here

10 Supreme Court Rulings That Turned Corporations Into People - Alex Park in Mother Jones

Last week's decision is the latest in a 200-year-long line of rulings giving businesses the same rights as humans.

Last week's Hobby Lobby ruling charted new legal territory by granting corporations the same religious rights as real people. The rationale behind the decision—that expanding constitutional rights to businesses is necessary to "protect the rights of people associated with the corporation"—is far from novel.

A line of Supreme Court rulings stretching back 200 years has blurred the distinction between flesh-and-blood citizens and the businesses they own, laying the groundwork for Hobby Lobby and the equally contentious Citizens United ruling.

If a corporation has First Amendment rights, could it also claim Second Amendment protections? Amazingly, this is a question some scholars are seriously pondering.

As Darrell A.H. Miller wrote in his 2011 article "Guns, Inc." in the NYU Law Review, "If Citizens United is taken seriously, the Second Amendment, like the First Amendment and like many other provisions of the Bill of Rights, guarantees liberties to natural and corporate persons alike." Bang!

The full article is available here

To Understand Child Migration, Look Beyond the Border - Andrew Wainer

“Few people are elevating social and economic conditions that compel people to take such dangerous risks by crossing the U.S. border or sending their unaccompanied children in search of a better life, but they are conditions that must be addressed if we are serious about fixing this crisis.” - Rev. David Beckmann

The surge of unaccompanied children crossing the U.S. southern border is a humanitarian crisis. The solution to help these children lies in addressing the causes that are driving them to make the perilous journey alone. 

The causes of this surge are familiar. They appear to be an intensified version of the traditional drivers and dynamics of migration from Central America. 

Push factors. Poverty and violence are widespread in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. 

Pull factors. People are often driven by economic opportunity, safe haven, and the hope for potential legalization in the United States.

Transnational immigrant networks. The family, community, and economic links that connect Central Americans with the diaspora in the United States and other nations compel people to make the journey.

Stricter border enforcement and better care for recently arrived child migrants won't make the issue go away. It's not enough. It's a stopgap.

The full article is available here

Takeaways From the Hobby Lobby Case

Corporations can’t pray, but they do have religious rights.
Hobby Lobby isn’t a person. It’s a chain of crafts stores owned by a religious family. And though the evangelical Green family objects to parts of the Affordable Care Act’s emergency contraception mandate, it’s not the Greens but the company that writes the check for employees’ health insurance. The first question the justices had to answer was this: Does Hobby Lobby have religious rights? To many Americans, this sounds a little nutty. Does a craft store believe in God?

This court is rah-rah religious rights.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ court is shaping up to be pretty darn protective of that free exercise clause. Less than two months ago, the court ruled 5-4 that the town of Greece, N.Y., could regularly convene town meetings with sectarian Christian prayers. And in 2012, the court ruled 9-0 that a Lutheran school could fire a teacher who had some ministerial responsibilities, despite the government’s argument that her dismissal violated the Americans With Disabilities Act. In all these cases, the court sided with religious rights over other rights.

Hobby Lobby won, but the next company to cite religious objections might well lose.
The Hobby Lobby decision may certainly embolden religious employers to object to laws they consider burdensome. But that doesn’t mean they’re always going to win. The court made clear in this ruling that religion should not always trump the law, and said its decision applies to the contraception mandate, not other insurance mandates. The court also specified that an employer could not use religion to get an exemption from laws that prohibit discrimination — on the basis of race, for example.
The full article is available here

5 Torture Myths Debunked - Amnesty International

Torture is mostly practiced as a means of dehumanizing enemies.

Real life doesn't look like “24″ or “Zero Dark Thirty” – even in the U.S., torture is mostly practiced as a means of dehumanizing enemies. Amnesty International research shows that torture and other ill-treatment continue to be an issue in many countries. 

It also clearly shows that most victims of torture and other ill-treatment worldwide are not dangerous terrorists but rather poor, marginalized and disempowered criminal suspects who seldom draw the attention of the media and public opinion, either nationally or globally.

1. Torture is Mainly Used Against Terror Suspects and During War
The focus on torture and other ill-treatment in what the U.S. authorities then called the “war on terror” at the beginning of the century may have skewed the global picture.Torture continues in anti-terrorism contexts.

2. Torture is the Only Way to Get Information, FastTorture is a primitive and blunt instrument of obtaining information. Humane questioning techniques have proved to be efficient in obtaining information on crimes without the devastating personal, societal and legal consequences.

3. Some Forms of Torture Are Not That Bad
Torture doesn't come in levels. It is defined legally as an act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person to punish or obtain information. No torture is “lite.” All forms of torture are despicable and illegal

4. In Certain Circumstances, It Serves a Greater Good
Torture is never legal or acceptable. Countries that currently fail to punish it by law are violating internationally agreed standards. In legal terms, the absolute prohibition on torture and other ill-treatment is “non-derogable” – that is, it cannot be relaxed, even in times of emergency.

5. Only a Handful of the Worst Governments Use Torture
Over the past five years, Amnesty International has reported on torture or other ill-treatment in 141 countries and from every world region.  While in some of these countries, torture might be the exception, in others it is systemic, and even one case of torture or other ill-treatment is unacceptable.

The full article is available here

Why I'm A Pro-Life Leftist - Elizabeth Stoker

Human life is significant enough to allow wide latitude for. That is what necessitates the leftist part of my position.

Abortions are as much the result of a culture inhospitable to life as they are to the weak sources of support that arise out of that culture and the decisions of individual mothers.  It's useless and cruel to harass women seeking abortions at clinics. It does nothing to answer the echoing ethical question: What then should we do? It's not enough to say what we should not do.

The pro-life leftist position maintains that human life is so significant, so inherently valuable, so irreplaceable that it should be the central subject of political concern. To me, this requires a culture agreeing to put its money where its mouth is — that is, to provide robust support programs that render feasible the entire process of childbearing and childbirth, from pregnancy to child care to the total span of family life.

Programs that immediately come to mind include universal health care, which would obviate the incredible expenses of pregnancy, often costing in the thousands of dollars out of pocket; government-supported parental leave and policies protecting the employment of mothers; and a no-strings-attached child allowance.

A 2013 study featured in the journal BMC Women's Health found that financial reasons were the primary motive for 40 percent of women who sought abortions. In fact, financial concerns were the "most frequently mentioned theme" in women's explanations of why they needed an abortion. Other concerns included a lack of insurance, a lack of adequate housing, and a lack of stable living conditions. The study's authors note that for women seeking abortion, the decision is rarely simple; most women expressed multiple reasons that in culmination led them to believe they could not become mothers, and financial reasons were frequently at the core of those stacked concerns.

There is nothing especially mysterious about Finland, Sweden, or Norway that allows them to have such low child poverty rates — they merely choose, politically, to funnel public resources into preventing economic stress on parents and children. Accordingly, it's frequently the case that countries similar to the U.S. but with more robust social programs have lower rates of abortion: There are about 20 abortions per 1,000 women in the U.S., 7.8 per 1,000 in Germany, 14.3 in Denmark, and 11.1 in Finland.

Inequality and Polarization Rise In Tandem - Christopher Ingraham

Over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.
Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" has sparked a good deal of discussion on the rise of wealth and income inequality in the U.S. Separately, the mid-term election year has prompted the usual reckonings of growing political polarization and partisan gridlock.

What we often miss, however, is the historic links between the two: over the past 100 years or so, polarization and inequality have often moved in tandem.

We tend to think of our era as exceptional, both in terms of polarization and, to a lesser extent, inequality. But as the chart shows, the 2000s bear similarities to the early part of the 20th century on both measures, especially inequality.

We can further separate out the polarization figures by party. As Tom Mann noted in The Atlantic Monday, modern political polarization is largely a Republican phenomenon. The Republican party voters, he writes, "are more skewed to their ideological pole than Democratic Party voters are to theirs."

And indeed, as the charts below show, inequality is much more closely correlated with Republican partisanship than with Democratic partisanship. Those r-squared values noted on the charts are the key - higher numbers indicate a closer relationship between the variables plotted. And that value is much higher when you're looking at the relationship between inequality and Republican partisanship, versus Democratic partisanship.

The full article is available here

Color+City Matches Empty Walls With Street Artists - Holly Richmond in Grist

Walls separate. That’s their job. But unleash the PSHHH of an aerosol can of paint and maybe a wall can bring people together.

So thought Victor Garcia and Gabriel Pinheiro, two guys who founded Color+City with help from Google’s Cultural Institute. The website, which just won the Webby for City and Urban Innovation, connects graffiti artists with businesses and others who want their sad gray walls to get some color.

Wall- and façade-havers post photos of their space on the site, which artists peruse and then book for 15 days. (Street art doesn’t have a long shelf life.) The project was inspired by the way colorful murals have transformed São Paulo, Brazil. 

The full article is available here

The Answer To Injustice - Paul Robeson