Terrorism (state and retail)

Seventy years ago, the atomic bombs known as Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima about 90,000 people were killed immediately; another 40,000 were injured, many of whom died in protracted agony from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians. Was there really a need to create this nightmare? Did this nuclear onslaught really oblige Japan to surrender?

The “Srebrenica massacre” is repeatedly referred to in the Western media as “the largest massacre in Europe since World War II,”1 and its alleged Bosnian Serb perpetrators have been relentlessly pursued by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1995 up to the present time (the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic are even now on trial for this and other purported crimes).

One-and-a-half year old Ali Saad Dawabsha became the latest victim of Israeli violence on July 31. He was burnt to death. Other members of his family were also severely burnt in a Jewish settlers’ attack on their home in the village of Duma, near Nablus, in the West Bank.

A gross violation of human rights gives rise to a set of state obligations, including that of providing remedies to the victims. Among such remedies is the duty to establish the true circumstances surrounding the violation and ensuring the identification and punishment of those responsible for it. The mass killings of 9/11 were, apart of being a huge crime, also a gross violation of the right to life of approximately 3,000 people. Yet legal literature has not dealt with this event from that perspective.

On July 20, 2015 the United Nations Human Rights Committee in its 7 page Concluding Observations Report adopted a number of critical observations of Canada’s human right practices, treatment of indigenous people and criticized Harper’s policies on Immigration and treatment of refugees. The Report was termed “A wake up call” on Canada’s human rights performance.

We should expect conflicts in which adversaries, because of cultural affinities different from our own, will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities.
— Department of Defense, 1999, with thanks to William Blum

On November 12, 2014 the American Psychological Association commissioned a study of the organization’s relationship with its own ethics guidelines, the national security establishment’s interrogation practices, and torture. Now released, the report by David H. Hoffman and others1 confirms the APA’s complicity in Department of Defense programs and the APA’s intentional misrepresentation of its role, deluding its membership and the American people.

 by Syria Solidarity Movement
 We are Palestinians and Palestinian organizations that declare our solidarity with the Syrian people in their historic struggle for survival, now in its fifth year.  We are in a unique position to understand and appreciate the challenges facing our Syrian brothers and sisters, because we face the same challenges.

A recent New York Times profile of Marco Rubio accurately describes the junior Senator from Florida, and member of the three-ring circus that is the Republican Presidential primary field, as Cuba’s “least favorite son.” The piece quoted a Havana resident as saying Rubio is “against Cuba in every possible way… Rubio and these Republicans, they are still stuck in 1959.” Presumably this view was representative of others that Times writer Jason Horowitz en

We are Palestinians and Palestinian organizations that declare our solidarity with the Syrian people in their historic struggle for survival, now in its fifth year.  We are in a unique position to understand and appreciate the challenges facing our Syrian brothers and sisters, because we face the same challenges.