Author: Justin Podur

A report from the International Crisis Group, quite long, takes the view that ‘not only is the coup bad in itself, but worse, it will help the insurgency’, but has lots of information at any rate.

Just poking around at some sites I don’t look at often enough I came across this article on LiP Magazine about an ideology called ‘activistism’. I thought it made some good points and liked its honest tone. I would have a hard time endorsing all of the authors, but the article is definitely worth reading.

We had to wait a little bit but I think that some people have made some sense of the Iraq elections. Chomsky’s blog, Mahajan’s blog, Tariq Ali’s column, Linda McQuaig’s column, and no doubt others I’ve missed, all made the point that the Iraqi elections were not a victory for Bush, but for Sistani, who forced elections on the US.

Chomsky goes farther and says it was a victory for nonviolent resistance. The US has been able to use the most brutal actions of the Iraqi armed resistance as a pretext for their counterinsurgency, but have had a much more difficult time containing the mass protests that Sistani called. It reminds me of something Eqbal Ahmad said (in a book called ‘Confronting Empire’) about anticolonial movements – the task of an anticolonial movement is to achieve the moral isolation of the colonizer, to out-organize, but ultimately to delegitimate the colonizer (As an aside, I liked Mandisi’s short note about decolonization).

Eqbal Ahmad was talking about Palestine when he made those comments. And it’s worth talking about Palestine today. The sham of ‘hopes for peace’ is kicking into high gear and will soon drown everything else out (maybe it has already). A cease-fire has been declared. And yet if you watch the wire at IMEMC.org, or read StoptheWall.org, you’ll see that the ceasefire offers the Palestinians nothing, not even relief from invasions, arrests, detentions, checkpoints…

In order to push all this through, the whole model for what is happening has to be misrepresented. Instead of colonization, the model is two warring sides, who need to figure out a way to live in peace. So long as that’s what Israelis think and what people think in the West, from where pressure could be brought on Israel to stop the ongoing ethnic cleansing, the Palestinians will never get any real relief, let alone a just peace.

It is colonization. It is ethnic cleansing. It is not two warring factions. It is the world’s only superpower and its client against a defenceless population. There are no ‘painful concessions from both sides’ and no deal brokered by the colonizer’s arms dealer that can stop an organized project of colonization, especially if no one is willing to name it as such. Nor can such deals stop the resistance to colonization, though such resistance can be crushed. Everyone in the world knows by now that Palestinians will not be crushed without a fight. But it gets later and later in the day, and the rest of the world is rapidly losing its chance to tell the Palestinians that they are not alone.

First, a reasonably good source on what is happening is the International Nepal Solidarity Network. They are pulling mainstream coverage (what little there is) and posting it several times a day.

Continue reading “More on Nepal”

I want to do some more assessment of material coming out of Nepal today. But a few things first.

Yesterday was the end of ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ at the University of Toronto. It was organized by some energetic and brilliant young people who are called the ‘Arab Students Collective’. I didn’t attend the full week’s events, but I did attend last night’s closing event. There were two speakers, both extraordinary and actually complementary of one another in interesting ways.

Continue reading “So much to free speechify about, so little time…”

If you haven’t heard about the coup in Nepal, you shouldn’t blame yourself. After all, Nepal is a monarchy, so when the monarch asserts power, you can’t hardly call it a coup, can you?

Take a look at this anonymous note we got at ZNet. The entire country has been shut down. There is another piece on ZNet about this with a bit more analysis.

Continue reading “The Nepal Media Coup”

Full disclosure: I lacked the stomach to watch the whole thing, and anyway the television in the house was in intensive use (Gilmore Girls). But I caught the end, where Bush was talking about how America was the place of ‘big dreams’. From memory: “The abolition of slavery seemed like a big dream, until it happened.”

(I thought – yes, about 60 years after almost every other jurisdiction in the world and all the suffering and death implied there. And of course, the fact that every reference Bush makes to abolition is actually a coded message to his anti-abortion constituency).

Apologies for yet another absence.

It was technical difficulties again – a strange virus attack that had someone using my machine to send huge amounts of data (perhaps spam?). By the time I cleaned my machine my operating system was irretrievably damaged.

And so, those of you who have been advising me over the past weeks to switch to Linux – you have your wish. I am typing this from my old computer with a new operating system. There will be a time to talk about this more – I am getting more interested in both the technical side of these things and their larger implications.

Continue reading “Iraq’s election”