By Leah Anthony Libresco, The Huffington Post

16 June 2009

Twit:
(1) twerp: someone who is regarded as contemptible
(2) tease: harass with persistent criticism or carping; aggravation by deriding or mocking or criticizing

I’m guessing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is currently mostly concerned with the second definition. Since the preliminary results for the Iranian election were announced, a steady stream of updates has been accumulating on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites. (For Andrew Sullivan’s report on feeds to follow, click here).

The tweets are becoming so important to ongoing coverage of Iran, that Twitter has delayedpreviously scheduled maintenance so that the outage will occur in the early morning of Iran’s time zone and will therefore be minimally disruptive.

In addition to providing first hand reports on the violence (especially important now that most foreign journalists have been asked to leave), Iranian bloggers are using Twitter and Facebook to organize giant rallies in the streets of Tehran. One protester has even used Google Maps to track the location of government tanks.

Read more at The Huffington Post

The Times, 22 May 2008

Canon Andrew White’s family home is not exactly a rambling rectory, but with its peaceful village setting, immaculately tended garden and homely clutter, it is, by most people’s definition, idyllic and utterly conventional.

The problem for Canon White is that he is not a conventional man.

When, as he is occasionally given to do, he opines to his wife, a former lawyer, that perhaps he should be a normal parish priest, her response is always the same. “They couldn’t cope with you and you couldn’t cope with them,” she tells him.

Canon White is the so-called Vicar of Baghdad. Though nominally he resides in rural Hampshire, his church, St George’s, is situated 3,000 miles away, amid the razor wire and bombed-out buildings of Iraq’s capital. He spends an average three days a month with his wife and two young sons in the UK; the rest of the time, he is at his home away from home, a Portakabin inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified green zone - the six square miles that houses all foreign, military and diplomatic staff in what remains the world’s most dangerous city.

Read More

The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East

Documentary: The Vicar of Baghdad

By Christopher Dickey

Newsweek, 12 June 2009

When George Orwell was a young man in the 1920s, he served as a British policeman in the colony of Burma. On duty there he saw, as he put it, “the dirty work of empire at close quarters.” He deplored the “white man’s” oppression of the “native people” in “the East.” But what Orwell found most disconcerting was the trap his own country had fallen into. “When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys,” Orwell wrote a few years later in his essay “Shooting an Elephant.” “In every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

We may have moved beyond the paternalistic rhetoric of the early Orwell, but more recent jargon like “mission creep,” coined during the Somalia debacle of the early 1990s, covers similar ground. In fact, the history of the past century should have proved conclusively that empires are traps, draining enormous resources and eventually enormous prestige from those who build them. Whether past imperialists saw their missions as conquerors and occupiers or liberators, peacekeepers and nation-builders, or all of the above, those Western countries that have claimed “a foothold in a foreign land,” as the 19th-century naval strategist A. T. Mahan put it, have often found themselves serving interests that were no longer clearly their own.

The Obama administration is learning that lesson. It came to office a little more than four months ago committed to withdrawing from Iraq, and to stabilizing Afghanistan so it could get out of there, too. But we heard recently from U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey that plans have been drawn up in case American fighting forces have to remain in Iraq for another decade—and this despite a written agreement with Baghdad to pull all troops out by the end of 2011. Why? Not least because the Iraqis that the Americans helped put in power think they may need those forces to stay. Iraqi Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi recently told a small group of reporters that he is “very concerned” about what will happen if the Americans leave. So, he suggested, the United States might well be asked to remain.

Read More

by Norman Solomon

8 June 2009

It takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation.

Despite the pronouncements from high Washington places that the problems of Afghanistan can’t be solved by military means, 90 percent of the spending for Afghanistan in the Obama administration’s current supplemental bill is military.

Often it seems that lofty words about war hopes are boilerplate efforts to make us feel better about an endless warfare state. Oratory and punditry laud the Pentagon’s fallen as noble victims of war, while enveloping its other victims in a haze of ambiguity or virtual nonexistence.

When last Sunday’s edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline “Iraq War Deaths,” the newspaper meant American deaths — to Washington’s ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That’s the implicit message — from top journalists and politicians alike.

A few weeks ago, some prominent U.S. news stories did emerge about Pentagon air strikes that killed perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians. But much of the emphasis was that such deaths could undermine the U.S. war effort. The most powerful media lenses do not correct the myopia when Uncle Sam’s vision is impaired by solipsism and narcissism.

Read more at Common Dreams.org

by Tom Engelhardt

Tom Englehardt writes “…you only have to go a modest distance to conclude that we are the other great force on the planet that “doesn’t recognize borders.” Keep in mind that, right now, we’re fighting at least two-and-a-half wars thousands of miles from this sylvan campus, and in your name no less. When it comes to our “national security,” as we define it, borders turn out to matter remarkably little in a pinch, as long, of course, as they’re other people’s borders.

After all, we have established an extensive network of military bases, some gigantic, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and secured the right to treat them essentially as U.S. territory; we have hundreds of such bases, large and small, scattered across the Earth, most not in war zones, a startling number of them built up into impressive “little Americas.” It’s through them that we garrison much of the planet (something you will almost never see commented upon in the mainstream media, obvious though it may be). Our drone aircraft, flown by remote control from bases in the United States, now regularly patrol distant skies, as if borders did not exist, to smite our foes, whatever any locals might think. Typically, as far as we know, our secret warriors continue to fund, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, a Bush-era project, which also knows no borders, aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government.”

Read more at Common Dreams.org

Live-in Conference
28th - 30th June 2009
Presented by the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University Bundoora, Melbourne

The Prospects for Peace in the Middle East Live-in Conference presents a unique opportunity for people aged 20 to 30 to explore the challenges and opportunities for conflict resolution in the Middle East with diplomats, eminent scholars and leading public figures. Participants will be drawn from the three Abrahamic traditions.

The conference will explore in depth several conflicts in the Middle East including those involving Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran. Through lectures and powerpoint presentations by leading experts, question and answer sessions, small group discussions and simulation exercises the conference will provide an historical overview and an examination of the key issues in each conflict. Key questions that will be explored include: What are the prospects for peace in the Middle East? What role do the US, Russia and Europe take in this process? What is the role of civil society in the resolution of these conflicts? Can Australia play a constructive role in the Middle East peace process?

To RSVP or for more information contact Larry Marshall Phone: (03) 9749 2695 or email L.Marshall@latrobe.edu.au

PPME 2009 Conference Flyer (PDF File, 1.1mb)

Faith and Resistance for Peace and Life 
in the Age of U.S./Global Empire

With the powers of dance, music, testimonies and prayers, and enriched by multiple analyses, we Colombian peoples’ movements, and international delegates in solidarity, issue this joint call to the international community. In March 2009 at Bogotá, Colombians through Proyecto Justicia y Vida, joined with the Second People’s Forum of Peace for Life to focus Colombia’s armed conflict and struggle within a larger global context, under the theme, “Without Fear of Empire: Global People’s Resistance.” Peace for Life defines its peace and justice objectives in relation to the core issues of empire, state terrorism and militarized neoliberal globalization, especially as forged by the imperial power of the U.S.

The international delegation brought solidarity and support, with over 50 political activists, scholars, laity, pastors, priests, and peoples attending from every continent.  Hundreds of Colombians met in common purpose with international guests coming from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Fiji, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Norway, Palestine, Philippines, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South Korea, Tonga, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Together, we Colombians and international delegates, weave the strength of our resistance with our faith for a common struggle. Our struggle grows strong amid the destruction of peoples and lands that the U.S global empire—with its transnational corporations and Neoliberal policies—inflicts upon the peoples of Colombia and so many others.

Read the full text of the Bogota Declaration 2009 (PDF File, 84kb)

Alternatives to Empire: Constructing Alternatives to Empire from digital birdy video on Vimeo.

Constructing Alternatives to Empire is Part Four of a four part series of interviews conducted by Larry Marshall with Professor Joseph Camilleri and Reverend David Pargeter, two of the founders of The Alternatives to Empire Project.

Alternatives to Empire: Illusions of Empire from digital birdy video on Vimeo.

Illusions of Empire is Part Three in a four part series of interviews conducted by Larry Marshall with Professor Joseph Camilleri and Reverend David Pargeter, two of the founders of The Alternatives to Empire Project.

Alternatives to Empire: Obama and Empire from digital birdy video on Vimeo.

‘Obama and Empire’ is Part Two of a four part series of interviews conducted by Larry Marshall with Professor Joseph Camilleri and Reverend David Pargeter, two of the founders of The Alternatives to Empire Project.