Six recent ‘toons from the great Andy Singer

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For a good nuanced read that puts the recent flare-up in perspective, see Pankaj Mishra’s At war with the utopia of modernity (Guardian CiF). An interesting essay can also be found in Michael Parenti’s Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth, and the mainstream Chinese perspective in Bevin Chu’s The Strait Scoop: Tibetan-Chinese Are Not American Indians. See also Soraya Ulrich’s The Tibet Card and Richard M Bennett’s Tibet, the ‘great game’ and the CIA (commented upon and excerpted below)*.

© Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

* Added 27 March:

1.

Soraya Ulrich’s The Tibet Card, in which she writes about just why the US might find Tibet of strategic interest, with resources constituting one of many reasons: “Tibet has the world’s largest reserve of uranium, and in addition to gold and copper, large quantities of oil and gas were discovered in Qiangtang Basin in western China’s remote Tibet area.“ Read the rest of this entry »

Some time-pressed picks and recommended reads on this reprehensible fifth anniversary of the US neocon-led invasion. Cartoon credit: Carlos Latuff, Iraq war: Five Years

• Salon Iraq Roundtable, Robbing the cradle of civilization, five years later

• Jim Lobe, Reasons Revisited: Why Did the U.S. Invade Iraq?

• Dahr Jamail, Five Years, And Counting

• Patrick Cockburn, This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie

• DN!, Half a Decade of War: Five Years After Iraq Invasion, Soldiers Testify at Winter Soldier Hearings

• Juan Cole, Five years of Iraq lies

• John Ross, What Do We Owe Iraq?

• Seamus Milne, There must be a reckoning for this day of infamy

• Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘We live in a nightmare. Death and carnage is everywhere’ Ali, Baghdad resident Read the rest of this entry »

More visuals added

Courtesy Carlos Latuff, Mr. Fish, David Baldinger, Benjamin Heine, Michael Leunig, Derkaoui Abdellah, Clay Bennett, Egyptian football player Mohamed Aboutrika, Khalil Bendib, T. @ Boomerang, Za3tar.

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I hope some of us get a laugh of recognition from this cartoon, as I did. Hat-tip to Monte who clipped it at xkcd.

Addendum: An observant reader has noted that there is an additional message when you mouse-over the cartoon. It is: “What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they’ll keep being wrong!”

Amid the illegal occupation and the murderous blockade of Gaza by the IOF, here’s some inspired dissent. Artist Peter Kennard meets members of a new generation of artistic dissenters in a movement spearheaded by artist Banksy, whose art has featured in Occupied Palestine as well as his native UK.

Art attack

by Peter Kennard | New Statesman | 17 January 2008

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It’s Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called “Santa’s Ghetto”. Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.

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A great satirical piece by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams (caution: language).

A Feeling I’m Being Had

by Scott Adams

I was happy to hear that NYC didn’t allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom of speech.

I hate Ahmadinejad for all the same reasons you do. For one thing, he said he wants to “wipe Israel off the map.” Scholars tell us the correct translation is more along the lines of wanting a change in Israel’s government toward something more democratic, with less gerrymandering. What an ass-muncher!

Ahmadinejad also called the holocaust a “myth.” F*ck him! A myth is something a society uses to frame their understanding of their world, and act accordingly. It’s not as if the world created a whole new country because of holocaust guilt and gives it a free pass no matter what it does. That’s Iranian crazy talk. Ahmadinejad can [bleep] me. Read the rest of this entry »

Accompanied by the superlative cartoonists Andy Singer and Carlos Latuff, here is Pepe Escobar in a piece aptly entitled Welcome to Planet Gaza (Asia Times Online, 22 Sept 2007). For a related piece, see also Chris Marsden, Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza.

Just added: see also Sonja Karkar, The Quality of Mercy in Gaza, Counterpunch (25 Sept) and Chris Doyle, Life Behind the Wire, Guardian CiF (24 Sept)

Escobar reflects upon the recent decision by the apartheid Israeli regime to designate the occupied territory of Gaza, for which it has responsibility it is attempting to abrogate, a “hostile entity”, and rendering the region’s population as Unpeople in the service of neocon US and Israeli exceptionalism. He writes:

It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded “international community”? It’s the standard “three monkeys” - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.

This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet’s decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a “hostile territory” has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun “gradually” to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.

Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza’s hospitals will not be affected.

There’s more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha’aretz so nicely put it, this is just a “plan to limit services to civilians”.

Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.

This comes on top of other “restrictions” already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be “fundamental humanitarian needs”. Read the rest of this entry »

From the Fars News Agency, via Global Research, seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centres have sent a letter addressed to their counterpart at Colombia University, Lee Bollinger, inviting him to provide responses to 10 questions by Iranian academics and intellectuals.

Perhaps we can add a few questions of our own for Mr Bollinger.

I’ve added the visuals –click on thumbnails to view the full-size.

The following is the full text of the letter:

Mr. Lee Bollinger
Columbia University President

We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran, hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at Columbia University.

We would like to inform you that President Ahmadinejad was elected directly by the Iranian people through an enthusiastic two-round poll in which almost all of the country’s political parties and groups participated. To assess the quality and nature of these elections you may refer to US news reports on the poll dated June 2005.

Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.

Your comments, filled with hate and disgust, may well have been influenced by extreme pressure from the media, but it is regrettable that media policy-makers can determine the stance a university president adopts in his speech.

Your remarks about our country included unsubstantiated accusations that were the product of guesswork as well as media propaganda. Some of your claims result from misunderstandings that can be clarified through dialogue and further research.

During his speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad answered a number of your questions and those of students. We are prepared to answer any remaining questions in a scientific, open and direct debate.

You asked the president approximately ten questions. Allow us to ask you ten of our own questions in the hope that your response will help clear the atmosphere of misunderstanding and distrust between our two countries and reveal the truth.

1- Why did the US media put you under so much pressure to prevent Mr. Ahmadinejad from delivering his speech at Columbia University? And why have American TV networks been broadcasting hours of news reports insulting our president while refusing to allow him the opportunity to respond? Is this not against the principle of freedom of speech?

2- Why, in 1953, did the US administration overthrow Iran’s national government under Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh and go on to support the Shah’s dictatorship?

3- Why did the US support the blood-thirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran, considering his reckless use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers defending their land and even against his own people?

4- Why is the US putting pressure on the government elected by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza instead of officially recognizing it? And why does it oppose Iran’s proposal to resolve the 60-year-old Palestinian issue through a general referendum?

5- Why has the US military failed to find Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden even with all its advanced equipment? How do you justify the old friendship between the Bush and Bin Laden families and their cooperation on oil deals? How can you justify the Bush administration’s efforts to disrupt investigations concerning the September 11 attacks?

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Background: There has been some brouhaha over the past week in Australian politics over the fact that Labor and Federal Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd had a minor heart operation 17 years ago.

Here is cartoonist Tandberg in The Age:

Key events in John Howard’s heartless politics: Tampa and the “children overboard” deception; the placement of asylum-seekers and children in detention; the Siev X disaster in which 353 asylum-seekers perished; participation in the illegal and immoral 2003 Invasion of Iraq; the Redfern Riots, Macquarie Fields Riots and Cronulla Riots; and the military intervention into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities.

Image below created by Justice Design who designed the art and lay-out for the book Globalize Liberation (ed.) David Solnit (image on p. 175 here).  There are three full sample chapters available online from each of the three parts of the book at Justice Design’s site.

This also recalls a fortuitous screen-shot somebody captured, previously featured (understanding that Bush is merely the figurehead for the current criminal corporatocracy):

Viva la alternative media, so we don’t end up with this:

(Cartoon: Rupert Murdoch announces his latest takeover to the world press)

Mark’s website is here.

Dan Brook imaginatively writes about the discovery of a new element: Capitalisium -

Capitalisium is a very volatile, dynamic, and toxic element, containing 1 positron, 1 neutron, and 1 huge electron along with boards of electrons, various vice electrons, hundreds of executive electrons, thousands of mid-level electrons, and millions of satellite electrons, and it appears to be growing over time, therefore always increasing its already heavy atomic weight. In spite of its constant growth, Capitalisium’s nucleus is clearly on the right, yet the element is remarkably self-centered.

… Capitalisium is way larger than any other element, indeed possibly larger than all others combined, and it constantly seeks to incorporate or otherwise use the other elements to power itself. Indeed, about half the world’s power is already stored up in a mere 2% of elements — which happens to be mostly Capitalisium. To accomplish this, Capitalisium seems to use a vast and complex network of proleterions and peons, overseen by bossons, greedons, scamons, and other exploitatrons, all of which are filtered through mass marketrons. This process tends to create a small albeit caustic class of free market radicals, which spread globally and are highly corrosive to Democracium (Dm).

While consuming the energy of other elements, Capitalisium produces some necessities, but also a tremendous amount of junk and waste, which often mimic the look of necessities. Capitalisium also emits massive and unsustainable quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), the major greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, which may be the market’s biggest externality. Read the rest of this entry »

Jewish American peace activist Anna Baltzer has been doing exemplary peacework in Palestine for awhile now, so it is wonderful to see dear friend Ben Heine, the brilliant Belgian artist, take up the great suggestion to draw Anna’s caricature-portrait. Ben drew an inspired portrait modeled on Michaelangelo’s famous Pietà and has just posted a great feature of Anna’s work here. Thanks to Ressentiment for the heads up on Anna’s work and website.

In these two video snippets from her DVD (available here), Anna speaks directly about her experiences and describes the situation in Palestine on the ground from first hand experience. Her testimony about the experiences of ordinary people and not simply that of statesmen is delivered in a clear and lucid manner with reference to her own photographs and visuals.

More:

Anna’s website | Blog | Book | DVD | Photo albums | Yahoo group-list

Roadblocks and Settlements (6.41)

Outposts, Israeli peace activists and refuseniks (10.07)

Anna’s website | Blog | Book | DVD | Photo albums | Yahoo group-list