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Ferre
Cannabis Sacrament Minister.
Joined: 14 Apr 2003
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 Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 11:44 am Post subject: Howard and Bush are war criminals: They are afraid of you! |
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Howard and Bush are war criminals: They are afraid of you!
The following remarks were made by independent journalist John Pilger to a March 20 anti-war rally in Sydney.
The other day, the Aboriginal filmmaker Richard Frankland said this: “When you’ve got a voice, you’ve got freedom, and when you’ve got freedom, you’ve got responsibility. Negotiating with politicians doesn’t work. You’ve got to change attitudes.” That’s the task for all of us here today. It’s not an easy one. In fact, many good people in Australia and other countries believe their voice cannot possibly be heard: that the forces of bigotry and violence are far too powerful.
And yes, they are powerful. PM John Howard can lie repeatedly to the Australian people and get away with it - it seems. There is no Labor opposition in federal parliament. They’ve become a bad joke, to the point where Kevin Rudd, the opposition spokesman on foreign affairs, refuses to say anything critical of the government that is not immersed in crude sophistry.
We also know that those who are paid to keep the record straight, who are meant to challenge Howard’s lies and uphold our right to freedom of speech, a freedom that is a cornerstone of any true democracy - I refer of course to the media: journalists, broadcasters - we know where they stand. We know that, apart from a few honourable exceptions, they are not merely craven and silent, but occupy a place in this society not dissimilar to the media in the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe.
Throughout my career I have reported, often undercover, from countries ruled by repressive regimes where dissidents would read me reports in the press that were no more servile and false than the reporting you read every day in the Murdoch papers in this country. In Eastern European states, for example, the papers had tame correspondents in Moscow who would parrot the Kremlin line. Now read the Washington correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael Gawenda, and there is no difference. The same parroting of Bush’s dangerous absurdities, such as his claims of bringing democracy to the Middle East - when the very opposite is true.
Honourable exceptions aside, supine journalists, like cynical opposition politicians, like corporate academics, represent unaccountable, violent power and a corrupt democracy that today offers us no more choice than between a McDonald’s and a Hungry Jack’s. But they do not represent us. And they don’t speak for us. And they don’t speak for humanity. And they don’t speak for democracy. And they don’t speak for all the moral decencies by which most people live their lives. In fact, they speak for the very opposite.
I may have first understood this when I reported from repressive Czechoslovakia, with its Stalinist regime, in the 1970s. The dissenters who spoke out in that country seemed so few, yet I wondered why the regime went to such lengths to silence them and attack them and sneer at them, usually via the state press. I put this question to the great protest singer Marta Kubisova, whose thrilling voice sang the anthems of the Prague Spring in 1968. Meeting me in secret, she replied by reading to me the words of one of her most defiant songs, written by a banned Czech group called the Plastic People of the Universe. I have abridged it slightly.
“They are afraid of the old for their memory. They are afraid of the young for their innocence. They afraid of the graves of their victims in faraway places. They are afraid of history. They are afraid of freedom. They are afraid of truth. They are afraid of democracy. So why the hell are we afraid of them? ... For they are afraid of us.”
What all of you should remember on this second anniversary of the brutal assault on Iraq is that you are not alone: that you are part of a great worldwide movement that refuses to accept the dangers and moral indecencies of Bush and Blair and Howard. Yesterday, all over the world, people like you expressed their defiance and anger at the unprovoked attack on Iraq, a defenceless country, and the killing of more than 100,000 people and the theft of their resources and the poisoning of their land: all of it justified by demonstrable lies. Go back to a speech Howard made early in February 2003. He spoke for 53 minutes and lied about weapons of mass destruction at least 20 times: 20 lies in less than an hour. Even Bush and Blair would have trouble topping that.
Then he sent Australian troops off to take part in an invasion, which, under the universally acknowledged and respected terms of the Nuremberg judgment in 1946 - the cornerstone of international law - was “a paramount war crime”.
That’s not my rhetoric, nor is it agit-prop. It’s the law of civilised people. And it’s our job to help people understand the great crime committed in their name, and how those who claim to speak for us, such as the media, have normalised the unthinkable: as if no crime has been committed, as if thousands of people have not been murdered, as if it was all merely a respectable adjustment of the “world order”. My point is, they are not respectable; they may wear the suits of respectability and travel with their fawning courts, but they are prima facie criminals, be assured.
The other day, an ABC foreign correspondent was promoting his book of professional adventures in a Sydney bookshop. He told his audience that it was good to be back in a country where politicians at least didn’t kill each other. That’s true, but what he didn’t say was that the same politicians collude in the killing of men, women, and children in other countries: in Fallujah, where the truth remains unreported in the so-called mainstream media in this country - including the ABC, which has allowed itself to be intimidated by the Howard government for giving us, now and then, a glimpse of the truth about Bush’s criminal assault on Iraq.
The time is long overdue. That time is for journalists to break ranks and speak up. It’s time for teachers to write on their blackboards that great truism of Milan Kundera: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” It’s time for those who know the dangers, but who say nothing - academics, lawyers, union leaders, even members of parliament - to break their silence before their own privileges are undermined by the steady assault on centuries-old, hard-won civil rights, vividly expressed in the abandonment of Australians tortured in other countries by their government and the locking up of people in this country indefinitely; indeed, the erosion of the bedrock of our justice system: innocent until proven guilty.
Above all, never forget how important and right you are. It is you, in company with millions all over the world, who have taught again the great lesson of democracy. You didn’t stop the invasion of Iraq, but you and the millions like you, in Spain and Britain and France and Italy and Brazil and the US, have alerted the world to the true darkness of the regime in Washington and its collaborators.
More- http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5694
Whom to believe? US Media reports one death. Other sources say at least 29.
1 comment(s).
Some of us don’t trust the US media since the election on November 2, so we have taken to looking elsewhere for accurate news accounts. Since the US media doesn’t seem very interested in telling us what’s going on in Iraq, some of us have found other sources, like the one from which this story was lifted below. (The link will take you to the original, so you can judge for yourself.)
What is interesting is that the US media has reported ONE US death over the past two days. Maybe, if you’ve been watching all three networks, plus Fox, plus CNN, plus a couple of other cable news networks, you might have picked up as many as FOUR US deaths in Iraq over the past two days.
Here is a report from another source that claims AT LEAST 29.
So, read on, and ponder, whom are we to believe? Our own media, whom many of us know are puppets of the government and shade or outright hide the truth, or another source, which has, admittedly, their own agenda?
Original: http://www.uruknet.info/?p=10936
Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 5 April 2005. ’’Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org’’
resistancereport.jpeg
Tuesday, 5 April 2005.
Al-Anbar Province.
Ar-Ramadi.
Resistance car bomb targets US armored column in ar-Ramadi Tuesday afternoon.
An Iraqi Resistance car bomb exploded next to a patrol of three US armored vehicles and two Humvees in ar-Ramadi at 5pm Tuesday afternoon local time. The correspondent in ar-Ramadi for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that the blast completely destroyed one American armored vehicle and killed four US troops and wounded three more.
Residents of the al-Mal‘ab neighborhood where the attack took place told the correspondent that an explosives-laden white Toyota Supra was parked by the side of the main road leading to the center of the city exploded as a US armored patrol was passing. Afterwards, US forces encircled the area preventing journalists from approaching.
Hit.
Resistance pounds US al-Baghdadi base Monday.
More- http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5693
Palestinians forced thru radioactive X-ray scanner at checkpoint
4 comment(s).
GAZA CITY, April 2, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) - Amidst stark warnings of potential outbreak of chronic and deadly diseases, Israeli occupation troops have recently set up a “radioactive” glass room at the main Rafah crossing through which Palestinians have to pass to enter or exit the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian medics said that potential diseases include thrombocytopenic, sterility, congenital anomalies, cancer, leukemia, mental retardation and ductless glands disorder, warning that Palestinians are slipping toward slow death.
“I was forced by Israeli occupation troops to enter this scary room-like radiating device, which consists of glass and barbed wire,” Mohammad Al-Sadoudi, 40, told IslamOnline.net.
“Israeli troops were at least 10 meters away and Israeli citizens are not allowed to enter this room. I fear that I might be inflicted with cancer as I frequently use the (Rafah) crossing.”
Radioactive War
Osama Al-Assar, the administrative director of Rafah crossing, said Israel is launching a “radioactive war” against the Palestinians.
More- http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=5685
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