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Hassan Nafaa
As the pressure mounts on the occupiers of Iraq, Bush administration is faced with two alternatives. The first is to transfer power to an interim Iraqi government. This would allow USA troops to re-deploy in fortified positions away from the cities, reducing the risk of attack. The second alternative would be to manipulate circumstances in such a way as to precipitate a conflict with Iran or Syria, and then rely on the American people standing behind their president in such a crisis. The White House, for the time being at least, appears to have opted for the first alternative. We should not, however, discount a switch to the second.
Jacques Diouf
Why do we allow hundreds of millions of people to go hungry in a world that produces more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet? To put it bluntly, the problem is a lack of political will. Most hungry people live in rural areas of the developing world, far from the centres of power. They are forgotten by the media in developed countries.
One of the UK?s Leading Law Lords Speaks Out
At present we are not meant to know what is happening at Guantanamo Bay. But history will not be neutered. What takes place there today in the name of the United States will assuredly, in due course, be judged at the bar of informed international opinion. As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.
BBC News
Eduard Shevardnadze told reporters that he believes that USA diplomatic staff were involved in the campaign of opposition that unseated him from power on Sunday. He said he couldn?t understand why he had been abandoned, after giving Washington full support in foreign policy, including on Iraq. Someone should have told him, his office was too close to the Caspian basin.
Mike Odetalla
Eid al-Fitr marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and is usually an occasion for celebration and inward contemplation. This year, with the Muslim world under occupation of one sort or another by the ground troops of secular capitalism, with Muslims in the west suffering increased levels of discrimination, abuse, and attacks by racist thugs, and with the holy places in Palestine off limits to most Muslims, it is more likely to be contemplation than celebration that occupies the thoughts of Muslims this time around, and this in a different way than usual. Here, Mike Odetalla of the Philadelphia Inquirer gives us his thoughts and recollections.
Rebecca Solnit
The future was being modelled on both sides of the massive steel fence erected around the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Miami last Thursday. Inside, delegates from every nation in the western hemisphere but Cuba watered down some portions of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement and postponed deciding on others in an attempt to prevent a failure as stark as that of the World Trade Organization ministerial in Cancun two months before. Outside, an army of 2,500 police in full armour used a broad arsenal of weapons against thousands of demonstrators and their constitutional rights.
Samah Sabawi
Right-wing Israeli lexicographers have been doing dome revisions lately to the words, ‘Semite’ and ‘anti-Semitic’. Apparently a crack is created in the definition of anti-Semitism large enough to conveniently include two more groups of people: the first any Palestinians who oppose the illegal occupation of their land; the sencond group are those who have the moral courage to point out the atrocities committed by the Israeli Government in carrying out the occupation.
William Hardiker
There is little doubt that Iran and Syria are numbers Two and Three after Iraq, though perhaps not necessarily in that order, on the Bush neo-Cons “hit list” of “rogue states” identified for regime change in the near future. The only unknown is the manner in which the administration will accomplish policy that is undoubtedly, in diplomatic speak, ‘on the table ‘.
George Monbiot
I believe that there was a moral case for deposing Saddam by violent means. I also believe that there was a moral case for not doing so, and that this case was the stronger. But the key point, overlooked by all those who have made the moral case for war, is this: that a moral case is not the same as a moral reason. Whatever the argument for toppling Saddam on humanitarian grounds may have been, this is not why Bush and Blair went to war.
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