Er du i tvivl? 5 argumenter for at stemme nej

 

På onsdag d. 1. juni skal vi træffe et vigtigt valg om Danmarks forsvarsforbehold i EU. Jeg kan godt forstå, hvis du hører blandt dem, der er i tvivl om, hvor du skal sætte dit kryds. Men er du i tvivl helt frem til stemmedagen, anbefaler jeg dig at stemme nej.

Et nej kan laves om, hvis EU-samarbejdet bevæger sig et godt sted hen i fremtiden. Et ja kan vanskeligt fortrydes. Her og nu synes jeg, at rigtigt meget taler imod en afskaffelse af det danske forbehold. 

Her følger 5 grunde til, at du bør stemme nej. 

Islamkritikkens 'call-out'-kultur

Det er faldet den islamkritiske debattør, cand.polit. Eva Gregersen for brystet, at ”demokratisk sindede muslimer” har ”glimret ved deres fravær” i debatten om, hvorvidt religionen islam og det liberale demokrati kan forenes.

For Gregersen, som har undersøgt sagen på egen hånd, ”står det klart, at islam har nogle alvorlige antidemokratiske knaster.” Hun har læst i de islamiske tekster, ”stillet nysgerrige spørgsmål” ved moskebesøg og læst den islamkritiske hollandske sociologs seneste debatbog om islam. Derfor virker det fra hendes perspektiv oplagt at spørge en muslimsk debattør, som er erklæret demokrat, hvordan han eller hun forener islam med det system, han eller hun er borger i. Gregersen mener på den baggrund, at den danske jurist, debattør og muslim med palæstinensisk baggrund, Tarek Ziad Hussein, der bekender sig til demokratiet, skylder et svar på, hvordan han kan forene islam og demokrati.

Ved et nærmere blik er ærindet galt fra start, og værre bliver det undervejs.

"Fem minutter i midnat," Meron Benvenisti om tostatsløsningen i 1982

Throwback fra New York Times, 1982. Anthony Lewis om 'fredsprocessen'. Abroad at home; 5 minutes to midnight:

"The Israeli Government already holds, or can easily take under a procedure it now uses, between 55 and 60 percent of the land in the West Bank. It is using most of the land not for pioneer settlements but for huge suburban developments. Israelis are attracted to them by cheap subsidized housing; at present rates 100,000 Israelis will live in the West Bank by 1987. [In 2011, the settler population was estimated at over 520,000 (320,000 in the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem)*]"

"Using official figures, the study throws the cold light of reality on an emotional subject. It shows that the Government of Israel has proceeded methodically and effectively toward de facto annexation of the West Bank - and that the process has gone very far. It is must reading for all those concerned about a political solution in the Middle East: Americans, Israelis, most urgently Arab leaders. For in terms of the West Bank's part in a solution the time is, as Mr. Benvenisti said, ''five minutes to midnight.''"

"A third reality illuminated by the study is that Israeli administration and legal changes are creating a dual system in the West Bank: one for Israeli settlers and the other, separate and unequal, for the Palestinian inhabitants. The new towns and settlements are administered as part of Israel in terms of budget and law. The Arab population is subject to the occupation authority."

___________

* Report of the independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, Human Rights Council 22nd session, agenda item, s. 7

Baruch Kimmerling om Camp David-forhandlingerne

Ehud Baraks "gavmilde tilbud" til palæstinenserne under Camp David-forhandlingerne i 2000 var mindre værd end de sydafrikanske bantustaner under Apartheid-regimet, mente den kendte (nu afdøde) israelske sociolog Baruch Kimmerling i New Left Review, 2003:

"The Israeli proposal, as transmitted to Clinton, was quite detailed. On territory, the Palestinians were to be offered 80:20—that is, 80 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip would be under the control and sovereignty of the Palestinian state; 20 per cent would be annexed to Israel,including seven settlement blocs which comprised around 80 per cent of the Jewish settler population; a viaduct would be built to link the Gaza Strip and West Bank. [...] It should be recalled that the Palestinians, from their perspective, had already made the ultimate concession, and thus were without bargaining chips. In the Oslo agreements, they had recognized Israel’s right to exist in 78 per cent of historical Palestine in the hope that, following the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan—and on the basis of the Arab interpretation of UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for withdrawal from territories occupied in 1967—they might recover the remainder, with minor border adjustments. Yet—although later there was a certain slackening of Israeli demands—talk continued concerning annexation of another 12 per cent or so of the West Bank in order to create three settlement blocs, thus dividing the Palestinian state into separate cantons, with the connexions between them very problematic. The Palestinians called the portions allotted to them bantustans; but the original enclaves created by the Afrikaners for South African blacks were far better endowed than those of Barak’s ‘generous’ proposal." (Min fremhævning)

Baruch Kimmerling: From Barak to the Roadmap, New Left Review 23, September-October 2003 
http://newleftreview.org/II/23/baruch-kimmerling-from-barak-to-the-road-map

Har Burma et atomvåbenprogram?

Det lader til, at Burma har et hemmeligt atomvåbenprogram. En afhopper fra militæret har lækket oplysninger om programmet, og den amerikanske atomekspert Robert Kelley har beskrevet programmets tekniske aspekter i en ny rapport: “I state this very clearly and strongly, this is a clandestine nuclear program”.

Trods Burmas forbindelser til Nordkorea og faren for spredning af atomvåben, har CIA imidlertid afvist, at der findes et sådan program i landet. Mediekendte spredningseksperter som David Albright og Olli Heinonen, der ofte råber vagt i gevær mht. eventuelle militære dimensioner i Irans erklærede program, afviser ligeledes, at der skulle eksistere et lyssky atomvåbenprogram i Burma. What gives?

I den anledning anbefaler jeg at læse atomjurist Dan Joyners træffende kommentar om inkonsistensen på Arms Control Law.

"Reading their critique of [Robert Kelley's] analysis was just like reading someone else’s critique, word for word, about their analysis of Iran... I swear these quotes literally make me laugh out loud."

"Costs of War" - ny rapport om krig fra Brown Uni

Udpluk fra researchholdets konklusioner (med mine fremhævelser):

• Our tally of all of the war’s dead — including soldiers, militants, police, contractors, journalists, humanitarian workers and civilians — shows that at least 330,000 people have died due to direct war violence.

• Indirect deaths from the wars, including those related to malnutrition, damaged health infrastructure, and environmental degradation, must also be tallied. In previous wars, these deaths have far outnumbered deaths from combat and that is likely the case here as well.

• 200,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict, and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as the violence continues. But most observers acknowledge that the number of civilians killed has been undercounted. The true number of civilian dead may be much larger when an adequate assessment is made [check here].

• While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (over 6,600), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with over 750,000 disability claims already approved.[2] Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified. 

• Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The number of war refugees and displaced persons --7.4 million-- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Oregon fleeing their homes.

Marc Lynch: Plan B i Syrien

"Currently, military aid to the rebels flows through Gulf and regional governments and private citizens directly to local commanders and fighting forces, while humanitarian aid is channeled primarily through NGOs operating with the consent of the Syrian government. This generates a distinctive political economy of war that has distinctly pernicious effects -- encouraging the fragmentation of the opposition, deepening geographic and political divides, discouraging a coherent political strategy, and creating rent-seeking incentives for ongoing warfare. The uncoordinated, often competitive, financing of favored proxies by outside players has actively contributed to emergent warlordism, intra-rebellion clashes, and the absence of a coherent political strategy."

Here’s Your Plan B - By Marc Lynch | Foreign Policy

Economist: Afghanske flygtninge i Iran lever som andenrangsborgere

More than 1m Afghans are registered as refugees in the Islamic Republic, which is also home to another 1.5m-plus illegal Afghan migrants. But a mixture of Iran’s worsening economic malaise and its government’s policies has prompted an exodus of Afghans back home or westward... Hamid, a 43-year-old legal refugee, has been living in Iran for over a decade. “They treat us very badly,” he says, visibly upset. “We don’t have the advantages of Iranians. We can’t have mobile phones or cars and they make the paperwork more complicated and expensive every year.” Referring to illegal refugees, he says “everything is about money. The police look for their houses, steal savings and then deport them.”

Afghan refugees in Iran: Go back home | The Economist

Iran blogger og aktivist Sattar Beheshti død i myndighedernes varetægt.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan, som dækker Iran (ganske godt) i Guardian, skriver:

Police picked up Sattar Beheshti, 35, from his home in the city of Robat-Karim in the southwest of Tehran last week.

His relatives said on Wednesday they had received phone calls from the prison authorities asking them to collect Beheshti's dead body from the notorious Kahrizak detention center on Thursday.

Beheshti's alleged death cannot be independently confirmed but Baztab, a news website close to Mohsen Rezaei, a senior politician, reported that the blogger has lost his life during interrogations.

"Sattar Beheshti, who was arrested by Fata [cyber] police, has died while being interrogated," Baztab reported. Iran is recently reported to have arrested a number of Facebook activists.

Although Facebook is blocked in the country, millions of Iranians access it through proxy websites or virtual private networks.

Sahamnews, a website close to the opposition leader, Mehdi Karroubi, said Beheshti had died "under torture" during an interrogation session with security officials.

"They called us today and asked us to collect his dead body tomorrow from Kahrizak," a family member told Sahamnews.

Kahrizak is a detention centre where Iran imprisoned many of the opposition activists caught up in the protests that followed the country's disputed presidential elections in 2009.

Before his arrest, Beheshti wrote in his blog: "They threatened me yesterday that my mother would wear black because I don't shut my mouth." [...]

Selvom det er fast kost i det iranske teokratur, er det altid chokerende at læse og høre om sådanne eksempler. Irans fængsler er fyldt med aktivister og almindelige borgere, som har udtalt sig mod regimet. Straffen er tortur ofte med døden til følge. Det anonyme iranske feministkollektiv Raha (som betyder "fri"), skriver sidste år i tidsskriftet Jadaliyya:

"Currently no form of independent organizing, political or economic, is tolerated in Iran. Attempts at organizing workers and labor unions have been particularly subject to violent repression. The crushing of the bus drivers’ union, one of the rare attempts at independent unionizing in the last few decades, is one of the better-known examples. The story of Mansour Osanloo, one of the main organizers of the syndicate, illustrates the incredible pressure and cruelty labor organizers and their families experience at the hands of the regime. In June 2010, his pregnant daughter-in-law was attacked and beaten up by pro-regime thugs while getting on subway. They took her with them by force and after hours of torture, left her under a bridge in Tehran. She was in dire health and had a miscarriage. These unofficial security forces continued to harass her at home in order to put psychological pressure on Osanloo, who is still in prison and is not yielding to the government’s demands to stop organizing. Currently, even conservative judiciary officials are complaining about violations of their authority by parallel security and military forces who arrest people, conduct interrogations and carry out torture, pressure judges to issue harsh sentences, and are implicated in the suspicious murders of dissidents. (In the past few months, not only political dissidents, but even physicians who have witnessed some of the tortures or consequences of them, have been murdered.)

No opposition parties are allowed to function. No independent media--no newspapers magazines, radio or television stations--can survive, other than websites that must constantly battle government censorship. The prisons are full of journalists and activists from across Iranian society. Conditions in Iran’s prisons are gruesome. Prisoners are deprived of any rights or a fair trial, a violation of Iranian law. After the election protests, killing, murder and rape of protesters and prisoners caused a scandal, which resulted in the closing of the notorious Kahrizak prison. Executions continue, however, as the government has meted out hundreds of death sentences in the last year. Iran has the second highest number of executions among all countries and the highest number per capita. In January 2011, executions soared to a rate of one every eight hours.

The women’s movement has been another major target of repression in the past few years. Dozens of activists have been arrested and imprisoned for conducting peaceful campaigns for legal equality; many have been forced to flee the country and many more are continually harassed and threatened. Women collecting signatures on a petition demanding the right to divorce and to child custody are often unfairly accused of “disturbing public order,” “threatening national security,” and “insulting religious values.” Ahmadinejad’s government employs a wide range of patriarchal discourses and policies designed to roll back even small gains achieved by women.

Ahmadinejad’s anti-immigrant positions and policies are the harshest of any administration in the past few decades. The largest forced return of Afghan immigrants happened under his government, ripping families apart and forcing thousands across the border (with many deaths reported in winter due to severe cold). Marriage between Iranians and Afghan immigrants is not allowed and Afghan children do not have any rights, not even to attend school. Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s government has been repressive toward different ethnic groups in Iran, particularly Kurds. It is promoting a militarist Shia-Islamist-nationalist agenda and escalating Shia-Sunni divisions." 

Den vigtigste tale i FN 2012 blev givet af Island

Jeg opdagede et blog-indlæg af Denis Fitzgerald, som dækker den islandske udenrigsminister Össur Skarphÿinssons tale til FN's Generalforsamling. Da der ikke har været nogen nyhedsdækning af talen, gengiver jeg den her på bloggen i sin helhed. Det er af mange grunde, som Fitzgerald skriver, en af "de mest kreative taler" der blev givet i FN i år.

Palæstina-lækket: en døende fredsproces

Del

Med sine nuværende 1.600 dokumenter er 'the Palestine Papers' den største lækage af fortrolige dokumenter om "fredsprocessen" i striden mellem Israel og palæstinenserne. 

Guardian-redaktør Seamus Milne og Mellemøstkorrespondent Ian Black vil over de næste par uger formidle dokumenterne videre i den britiske avis - suppleret med WikiLeaks-dokumenter fra det amerikanske konsulat i Jerusalem. Det samme vil Al-Jazeera, der også er det nyhedsbureau, der var først til at få dokumenterne udleveret.

Robert Greenwald's dokumentar: 'Rethink Afghanistan'

Del

Robert Greenwald's Rethink Afghanistan er uden sammenligning. Køb den på DVD her eller se den i seks dele på YouTube:

Anbefalet læsning om Israel-Palæstina konflikten

Zeev Maoz, 2006, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s National Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Læs review her.

Benny Morris, 2001, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Vintage. Professor Baruch Kimmerling skriver en lang artikel om Morris her.

Sara Roy, 2006, Failing Peace: Gaza and athe Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Pluto Press. Roy giver et foredrag om sin bog og om regionen her.

Avi Shlaim, 2009, Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. Verso. Læs et review af bogen her.

Norman Finkelstein, 2003, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Verso. Læs introduktionen til bogen her.

Victor Kattan, 2009, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949. Pluto Press. Se Kattan give et foredrag om sin bog her.

Noam Chomsky, 1999, The Fateful Triangle: United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Pluto Press. Se Chomsky give et foredrag baseret på de første udkast af bogen i 1989 her.

Rashid Khalidi, 2007, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Beacon Press. Se Khalidi give et foredrag om bogen her.

Charles Enderlin, 2003, Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in the Middle East, 1995-2002. Other Press. Læs review her.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, 2006, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy. Oxford University Press. Se debat mellem Finkelstein og Ben-Ami her.

Norman Finkelstein, 2008, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. University of California Press. Se review af bogen her.

Yosef Grodzinsky, 2004, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II. Common Courage Press. Se interview med Grodzinsky her.

Dagens Sang: Tom Lehrer - Who's Next (1965)

En sang om atombombespredningen