Crimes against humanity

Five years after the ethnic civil war in Sri Lanka was won by the Sinhalese government, with massive killings of Tamil civilians in the last few months, the UN Human Rights Council authorized the High Commissioner of the HRC to investigate if human rights abuse occurred.
On a vote of 23 for, 12 against and with 12 abstentions, the HRC voted to promote reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka by having its High Commissioner, Navi Pillay, and her successor soon-to-be:

The Syrian civil war, insurrection, rebellion, revolt, uprising, call it what you will, was not home grown in Syria by Syrians with differing outlooks as to how their nation should be governed—as the mainstream media would have you believe—it was part of a strategy pre-planned by vicious, sociopathic foreigners called Neocons,  and they began their planning in 1991, following the first invasion of Iraq, code-named: Desert Storm.  To date, the major beneficiary of their diabolical planning has been Zionist Apartheid Israel, but that may be coming to an end.

Around 6:40am on Tuesday, February 19, a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed Jesus Flores-Cruz, a 41-year-old Mexican national, four miles east of the Otay Mesa port of entry in southern San Diego. Employing what has become an all-too-familiar explanation, authorities asserted that Mr. Flores Cruz, an unauthorized migrant, pelted the agent with rocks.

President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon…
— Malcolm X, December 1, 1963

For too long in this country, people supporting human rights and international law in relation to the Palestinian/Israeli issue have been reluctant to speak out. Many university faculty members didn’t want to get involved in an issue that they believed might cost them their jobs or tenure.

Omar is a 7-year-old boy from Gaza. His family managed to obtain the necessary permits that allowed him to cross the Erez checkpoint to Jerusalem, through the West Bank, in order to undergo surgery. He was accompanied by his father. On the way back, the boy and his father were stopped at the Qalanidya checkpoint, separating occupied East Jerusalem from the West Bank. The father needed another permit from the Israeli military to take his son, whose wounds were still fresh hours after the surgery, back to the strip. But the soldiers were in no obliging mood.

It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing …  or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being would be blown away by our species.

“When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head,” Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in her heartrending testimony.
Israa (not her real name) was arrested by US and Iraqi forces in 2010. She was tortured to the point of confessing to terrorist charges she didn’t commit. According to HRW’s “No One is Safe” – a 105-page report released in February 06 – there are thousands of Iraqi women in jail being subjected to similar practices, held with no charges, beaten and raped.

Toussaint, the most unhappy of men!
Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough
Within thy hearing, or thy head be now
Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den
O miserable Chieftain! where and when
Wilt though find patience! Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:
Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the common wind

[Note: Again, real national-level news from a small town, Spokane, in a small state, Washington. This is published now at Spokane Living Magazine. Great photos by my daughter, Makenna. A community college student in Spokane. What more does the world want than a radical revolutionary who write kick-ass better-than-that-Hunter/freak/Thompson AND also does straight ahead journalism?]
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