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THE HANDSTAND |
NOVEMBER 2003 |
stop
press stop press stop
press stop press stop press  The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said yesterday that Mr. Bush should not be shielded from public anger about the Iraq war, and Londoners should not have to pick up the £4m policing bill. He said: 'To create a situation in which perhaps 60,000 people remain unseen would require a shutdown of central London which is just not acceptable.'" ONE GUEST WE WANT SHOT OF Nov 13 2003 TONY "Satchmo" Blair is asking us to think about the wonderful world that is the new Iraq before taking to the streets to protest against the Texan messiah who made it all possible. And it's a bad-taste joke that would have brought the house down at Baghdad's UN social club if a suicide bomber hadn't got there first. I'd like to ask our leader a few questions about the least welcome visitor to these shores since Mr Bubonic Plague jumped ship with his rat pack back in the 1350s. Is it a coincidence that George Bush will be patting you on the head again as TV's Celebrity Dog Special reaches its finale? When the collecting tin is pushed under Bush's nose for the Children In Need appeal tomorrow week, will an aide have to translate it as Collateral Damage In Need? Washington is demanding that the City of London be brought to its knees for three days. Wasn't the last person to do that named Adolf Hitler? And doesn't that tell you something? The US Secret Service also wants immunity from prosecution for any of its 250 armed agents who fire a gun on our streets. Bearing in mind the number of times America's finest marksmen killed Brits in Iraq, are you going to guarantee our safety against another round of friendly fire murders? More importantly, like the war itself, why is this visit happening, who is behind it and why now? What do British people gain, apart from civil unrest, a £5million police bill and our image as America's 51st state bolstered - making us further humiliated among friends and a more legitimate target for our enemies? Isn't it obvious that there is only one reason behind the first full state visit of an American president since 1918? That with an election round the corner, Republican hawks want to let the folks back home see Bush as a world statesman. And with the Queen being the only foreign woman outside of Nicole Kidman they recognise, and Blair the only foreign politician they have heard of, where better to come than lil ol' England for a global seal of approval? Which is why they demand our police keep the protesters out of sight. So they can censor the reality and send back propaganda images of a people gratefully welcoming a noble liberator. Just as they sent back lies from Iraq. Ask Private Jessica Lynch. What happened to our claims to be the cradle of democracy? How about our legendary tolerance of dissent? What have we become when we sacrifice the essence of our Brutishness' to roll a red carpet all the way to the White House for a fraud who shouldn't be there in the first place? Once again, Bush is using Blair and, once again, Blair lays down and takes it. Just as he did over Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, the Kyoto Agreement and crippling steel tariffs. I wouldn't be surprised when Dubya's up in the north-east with Blair that he lays claim, as all presidents must, to a field where his ancestors originated from... A field due east of Aberdeen. Called the Forties oil field in the North Sea. Then asks if he can send his pals from Halliburton and Texaco there to do a little digging around. And Blair says be my guest, buddy. Why spoil the habit of a lifetime. You wanna hand? http://www.mirror.co.uk/columnists/brianreade/ EU Plans For Divorce Could Set Back Financial Position Of Women ... British Barristers Object THE TIMES, London Friday 14 November, 2003, page 9 By Frances Gibb, Legal Editor Plans to harmonise the divorce laws across Europe could set back the financial position of women by 30 years, family barristers said yesterday. A White Paper is to be drawn up by the European Commission that could change the way judges split the assets of a divorcing couple, leaving many women far worse off. The rules on wills and inheritance could also be overhauled, removing the freedom of people in this country to leave their assets to anyone they wish. In their place could come stricter European-style inheritance laws, which state that people must leave property to their children or next of kin. The warning yesterday came from the Family Law Bar Association. Its chairman, Andrew McFarlane, QC, said: "The law relating to these issues in most other EU states is very different from the law in England and Wales. "There is the potential for there to be very serious consequences and radical change, so we think there needs to be serious debate as to what the best system is." The proposals are expected in a consultation paper from the European Commission next year as part of a move to harmonise procedural rules on divorce. But Mr McFarlane said that the proposed European Constitution allowed for harmonisation of the law itself. In the area of divorce, harmonisation could mean that the common law principles applied by judges when dividing a couple's assets were replaced by the civil code common across Europe. Leader of Danish party invites Saddam to seek political asylum ....???What do You think???? (Denmark population supported the Iraq War, HOAX??) The leader of the Danish Republican Party, Sooslashren Mosegaard has invited Saddam Hussein to seek political asylum in Denmark. In a statement conveyed to Al Bawaba via email, Mosegaard said the offer is "on behalf of the Danish people." "The Danish Republican Party does not sympathize with Iraq's former regime. But we do believe that everybody - even Saddam - is entitled to protection from inhumanly punishment," the statement of the Danish politician added. According to the danish law, as an asylum applicant in Denmark, Saddam Hussein can not be extradited to USA or other countries who employ torture or death penalty, the statement added. (Albawaba.com) 02-11-2003 Iraq:
Post-“Liberation” Disappointments Faces usually change with governments. But in a country where all laws can be easily twisted, this fact has also been modified. There is a growing amount of disappointment among the politically-independent Iraqis. The people are astonished to see the same old faces assume the post-Saddam offices. People who were known to have strong relationship with the former regime are the ones who hold the reins today. They have changed loyalties in an instant and continued to climb up the ladder. The problem is that many of those “genius” techno-hypocrites had once the authority to imprison or kill (in some cases) anyone objecting the rules and regulations of the regime and they ruthlessly exercised that authority. Of course, the coalition forces cannot be blamed, for how can they possibly find out the true nature of those “genius hypocrites” if they have cleverly inserted themselves amongst those who communicate and socialize with the coalition forces. It is rather difficult for the forces to discover their identity because most of the files proving membership to the Ba’th party have been destroyed. Those “indispensables” are not necessarily among the four higher ranks of the party, which means that they are not eligible for expulsion. This is especially true in many colleges, institutions and ministries, making it difficult for the people to believe that the long-awaited changes may one day be realized. Those “techno-hypocrites” regretfully still exist and are spreading fast like an epidemic. What Iraq needs first, to counteract this threat, is an overall revaluation of those technocrats who forced their way in at the expense of others. This can be achieved by holding a thorough investigation to check their background and whether they held the title of "a friend of the former president" or not, which can be one criterion among many others. On the other hand, Iraq can make use of the efficient
and skillful people who were intentionally put on pension
or have resigned for one reason or another. Those young
pensioners may be more efficient than the old
slave-drivers and the pampered laptops of Saddam who are
now enjoying the warmth of the coalition lap. Since when did 'Arab' become a dirty word? In Australia they're even trying to prevent Hanan Ashrawi from receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize Robert Fiskİ04 November 2003 Is "Palestinian" now just a dirty word? Or is "Arab" the dirty word? Let's start with the late Edward Said, the brilliant and passionate Palestinian-American academic who wrote - among many other books - Orientalism, the ground-breaking work which first explored our imperial Western fantasies about the Middle East. After he died of leukaemia last month, Zev Chafets sneered at him in the New York Daily News in the following words: "As an Episcopalian, he's ineligible for the customary 72 virgins, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's honoured with a couple of female doctoral graduates." According to Chafets, who (says the Post) spent 33 years "in politics, government and journalism" in Jerusalem, Orientalism "rests on a simple thesis: Westerners are inherently unable to fairly judge, or even grasp, the Arab world." Said "didn't blow up the Marines in Lebanon in 1983 ... he certainly didn't fly a plane into the World Trade Centre. What he did was to jam America's intellectual radar." When I read this vicious obituary, I recalled hearing Chafets' name before. So I turned to my files and up he popped in 1982, as former director of the Israeli government press office in Jerusalem. He had just published a book falsely claiming that Western journalists in Beirut - myself among them - had been "terrorised" by bands of Palestinians. He even claimed my old friend Sean Toolan, who was murdered by a jealous husband with whose wife he was having an affair, was killed by Palestinians because they disapproved of a US television programme about the PLO. So I got the point. You can kick a scholar when he's dead if he's a Palestinian, and kick a journalist when he's dead if you want to claim he was murdered by Palestinians. But now the same sick fantasies are taking hold in Australia, where a determined effort is being made by Israel's supposed friends there to prevent the Palestinian scholar Hanan Ashrawi - of all people - from receiving the 2003 Sydney Peace Prize this week. A Jewish writer in Sydney has bravely defended her - not least because the local Israeli lobby appears to have deliberately misquoted an interview she gave me two years ago, distorting her words to imply that she is in favour of suicide bombings. Ashrawi is not in favour of these wicked attacks. She has fearlessly spoken out against them. But SydneyUniversity has already withdrawn the use of its Great Hall for the presentation of the peace prize and the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, has dissociated the City of Sydney, sponsor of the prize, from the presentation. And just to show you what lies behind this - apart from the fact that Turnbull's husband Malcolm is trying to get a nomination for a parliamentary seat - take a look through the following exchange between Kathryn Greiner, former chairwoman of the Sydney peace foundation, and Professor Stuart Rees, the foundation's director: KG: "I have to speak logically. It is either Hanan Ashrawi or the Peace Foundation. That's our choice, Stuart. My distinct impression is that if you persist in having her here, they'll (sic) destroy you. Rob Thomas of City Group is in trouble for supporting us. And you know Danny Gilbert [an Australian lawyer] has already been warned off." SR: "You must be joking. We've been over this a hundred times. We consulted widely. We agreed the jury's decision, made over a year ago, was not only unanimous but that we would support it, together." KG: "But you're not listening to the logic. The Commonwealth Bank ... is highly critical. We could not approach them for financial help for the Schools Peace Prize. We'll get no support from them. The business world will close ranks. They are saying we are one-sided, that we've only supported Palestine." There is more of the same, but Professor Rees is standing firm - for now. So is Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein in Zmag magazine. Ashrawi, he says, "has endured campaigns of hate based on slander and lies for most of her life, from those who are intent on silencing the Palestinian narrative ..." But how much longer must this go on? Ashrawi, I notice, is now being called an "aging (sic) bespoke terror apologist" by Mark Steyn in, of all places, The Irish Times. And it's getting worse. Said's work is now being denounced in testimony to the US Congress by Dr Stanley Kurz, who claims that the presence of "post-colonial theory" in academic circles has produced professors who refuse to support or instruct students interested in joining the State Department or American intelligence agencies. So now Congress is proposing to set up an "oversight board" - with appointed members from Homeland Security, the Department of Defence and the US National Security Agency - that will link university department funding on Middle East studies to "students training for careers in national security, defence and intelligence agencies ..." As Professor Michael Bednar of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austen says, "the possibility that someone in Homeland Security will instruct college professors ... on the proper, patriotic, 'American-friendly' textbooks that may be used in class scares and outrages me." So it's to be goodbye to the life-work of Edward
Said? And goodbye to peace prizes for Hanan Ashrawi?
Goodbye to Palestinians, in fact? Then the radar really
will be jammed. West
Bank Palestinians “tend to view settlements like
Emmanuel as an obstacle to their independence.” For
settlements like Emmanuel Israel has, over its 35 years
of occupation, seized over half the West Bank’s land
and diverted most of its water. A hard core of
ultra-right-wing settlers has been committing vigilante
actions against the Palestinians for three decades. Most
of the world, with the notable exception of the US and
Israel, agrees that under the Fourth Geneva Convention of
1949 (it forbids occupying powers to settle their
citizens on occupied soil) all the settlements are
illegal. It distorts history to make the settlements seem
such a fact of life such that even those who most
grievously suffer their incursions merely “tend
to” find them obstacles to independence. In fact the
settlements are not only a grievous burden to the
occupied population, but to Israel as well. Far more than
“an obstacle to peace,” they are the crux of
the whole issue, and a massive security threat. To
Israeli settler violence it should be added that settler
terrorism isn't new, nor born of suicide bombings. But
its most dramatic manifestations include Jewish
underground assassination attempts in 1981 against
Palestinian mayors, leaving two maimed for life, settler
Baruch Goldstein's infamous mass murder of Palestinian
worshipers in a Hebron mosque in 1994, and the right-wing
extremist assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. Settler
rampages through towns and villages, shattering car and
house windows, and settler destruction of crops, have
been going on since I first reported in the area in 1979.
The extremist settler movement, Gush Emunim (Bloc of the
Faithful), established Israel's first settlements, made
official by the Labor government. That the settler terms
Judea and Samaria have been taken over by Israel’s
official government and are used by writers like Mr.
Radin(in a letter to the Boston Globe) instead
of “West Bank,” and that settler extremists
have been elected to Israel’s government, shows the
extent to which this movement is not a "lunatic
fringe," but terrifyingly official. Let’s see if I’ve understood Zev Hafetz’s column, (New London Day). His friend’s daughter wants to learn Arabic to help the US wage war against terror, but lurking in the groves of academe are pesky profs who refuse to teach Arabic because if they did, they’d be training future agents of US imperialism. I'd have thought it equally plausible that the dearth of good teachers of Arabic owed to the US’s incomparable parochialism and its dread of the deserts of Araby with its barely penetrable language full of "tribal nuance" and a thousand words for "camel" (Mr. Hafetz’s coy characterization of Arabic.) Speculation aside, Hafetz’s argument echoes recent Congressional testimony - that of a certain Dr. Stanley Kurtz who favors a pending Congressional bill [HR 3077] that would set up an International Education Advisory Board, its members to be appointed from Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the National Security Agency. Like Mr. Hafetz, Dr. Kurtz indicts programs where professors allegedly refuse to teach students who want to pursue Foreign Service and intelligence careers. The surveillance board Dr. Kurtz and HR 3077 promote would especially scrutinize Title VI-funded "area studies" programs (these include the Middle East.) For anyone like me who grew up during the McCarthy period and its aftermath, HR 3077 and those who echo its views should sound alarum bells. The thought police of that infamous era got "anti-American" profs fired and American curricula purged of "anti-American" materials - meaning commentary that did anything but praise Uncle Sam for his generosity in defense of global freedom. All this went on while the US was busy overthrowing democratically elected governments in Iran and Guatemala and shoring up fascistic governments in Greece, Turkey, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others. Then it was Reds under the Bed. Now, it’s any prof who dissents from the Bush administration’s policy of (to use top Bush-adviser Richard Perle’s words) "endless war" in the service of US "full-spectrum dominance" of the planet (this, of course, is not "tribal" ideology.) To set the record straight, most "area studies" programs do educate future members of the Foreign Service and CIA. A minority of such programs offers courses that include the work of dissenting intellectuals like the late Professor Edward Said (a figure Dr. Kurtz singles out for particular attack.) In fact such dissenting voices hardly have the influence the Right says they do. If they did, millions of Americans after 9/11 wouldn’t have plaintively bleated, "Why do they hate us so much?" President Bush’s answer was that "they" hate us because we’re so rich, free, and democratic. If folks like Mr. Hafetz and Dr. Kurtz have their way, the few voices of academic dissent will be silenced and academia will promote without opposition the silly, dangerous dogma that has led us into a maelstrom in Iraq, gravely impaired our economy, promoted world hatred of us, and ensured more, not fewer, acts of terror against us. In the contest between those who uphold academic freedom and those who want to crush it, the question who teaches Arabic and who doesn’t is a red herring Ellen Cantarow, Ph.D. 27 Austin Road Medford, MA 02155 - (781)396-0684 ELLEN CANTAROW, 27 Austin Road Medford,
MA 02155 Gold Republic Former Australian Gold Council chief executive and senior Liberal Party advisor, Greg Barns, has resurfaced as one of the driving forces behind a new IPO: Republic Gold. Barns, who joined with former Perseverance managing director John Kelly to create Republic, told MiningNews the company has raised $500,000 in seed capital and soon plans to release a prospectus to raise $5.6 million before listing on the Australian Stock Exchange. Republic, named as a result of Barns' stint as chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, was initially formed last year to bid for Ballarat Gold. "When we failed in our bid there, we decided to shift our focus to north Queensland where we picked up the tenements in the Hodgkins Basin," Barns said. Republic's portfolio in the basin includes a joint venture project with BHP Billiton covering 2700km.sq of prospective gold country. Also this year the company managed to acquire Marlborough Resources' 75% interest in the Lucky Draw/Burraga tenement located south of Bathurst in New South Wales for $250,000 and 6.25 million shares. "We picked up Lucky Draw because we felt it fit in with our strategy because it has early production schedule. As soon as we get the money and are listed we hope to be on the ground working on improving the resource. We're in a position where we don't want to be long-term explorers, we want to be gold producers and hopefully we can be in production at Lucky Draw by the end of next year and in the Hodgkins Basin within three years." Barns who is also on the board of another north Queensland gold company in Charters Towers Gold Mines, said for now these companies will remain his focus and he has no immediate ambitions to get back into politics. "I am still a political columnist for the Mercury in Tasmania and I have actually just finished a book called What's Wrong With The Liberal Party. But my focus is definitely in helping to develop both Republic Gold and Charters Towers Gold Mines." Source: Miningnews.net. |
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