Protected: Interesting Radio Show I Listened To Last Night

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Read Full Post »

Interesting Radio Show I Listened To Last Night

Listened to an interesting Radio program last night about the abuse of a US citizen’s rights in the current anti-Moslem campaign being run by the current US Government and its agencies. If you want to listen to it you can go to this page –

Late Night Live

and select the Tuesday, 29 April show. Unfortunately you may have to listen before hand to a talk on the current dismantling of our universal health care system here in Australia by our government who is trying to push us into health system like that which operates in the US.

This is a brief summary and a website you can go to if you would like to find out more about Mike Hawash –

The Detention of Mike Hawash

Summary:
A discussion about the case of “Mike” Hawash, an Arab American computer software engineer, arrested by the FBI and held without charge for almost 6 weeks, and then charged with “conspiracy to levy war against the United States”, among other things.

An unknown number (certainly in the thousands) of people have been held within the U.S. since September 11 … the overwhelming majority are Moslems … some have been released, some deported … and detentions continue.

Mike Hawash’s case is gaining considerable public attention as a result of a campaign by family and friends to ensure his constitutional rights as an American citizen, in the face of extremely secretive security laws. They also want to highlight what some believe is a return to McCarthyist style persecution of American citizens.

Guests on this program:
Steven McGeady
Former Vice President at Intel Corporation; friend and former boss of “Mike” Hawash; instigator of public campaign to free Mike Hawash.

Further information:
Free Mike Hawash web site
Free Mike Hawash

Read Full Post »

Protected: The Eyes of A Child

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Read Full Post »

The Eyes of A Child

Read this piece in the paper today. It seems so depressingly true –

Look into the eyes of Ali Ismail Abbas: what do you see?
April 30 2003

Why is the world obsessed with the image of one little boy maimed by the war in Iraq? By Chris Goddard.

This is the story of Ali Ismail Abbas. Ali is the 12-year-old boy who had the misfortune to be at home in Iraq when a United States rocket arrived.

According to one newspaper report, the “hovel” he lived in was destroyed. So were his father and his five-months pregnant mother. He lost his brother. Some of his sisters were injured. Cousins and other relatives were also killed. The number of relatives who died varies from report to report.

What happened to Ali himself is not in dispute. After the terrible explosion, Ali woke up, soaked in blood, his sheets on fire. The Times of London reported that Jon Lee Anderson, the New Yorker correspondent who saw him in hospital, was shown a photograph of Ali before his treatment, his body blackened, one of his hands “a twisted, melted claw. The other arm had apparently been burned off at the elbow… two long bones were sticking out of it.”

That is not the photograph of Ali that we see now, however. We see photographs of Ali after his arms were amputated, the stumps and his body swathed in bandages, his face somehow unscathed, his eyes… What do we see in his eyes?

Almost all of us will retain images of this invasion of Iraq. There is the shot of a dead child, taken by Akram Saleh of Reuters, his or her face like porcelain, intact, appearing strangely at peace as only the dead can, but the rest of the head and body bound together, as if to stop bits falling out. There is the symbolism of statues toppling, footage of crowds (with one person wearing a Beckham shirt), a mother sobbing next to her injured toddler, suspects stripped and kneeling in the dirt, a boy liberating a bag of sugar as big as he is. The blood on a BBC cameraman’s lens. Those are my images. You will have yours.

The full cruelty and catastrophe of war has become something we cannot avoid. We are assaulted by it even when we try to avoid it. Susan Moeller, an American journalism professor, describes us all as “passive receivers of images”. That is akin to blaming the victim. The images home in on us, no matter how much we duck and weave. They are wrapped around our papers, they are inserted into television programs, even our children’s programs are “updated”.

Children have always suffered massive damage in war. Even when they are not themselves killed or maimed like Ali, they lose mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. As in my parents’ families, in the London Blitz, they lose uncles and aunts and other relatives, both actual and potential.

The world has a long history of treating children cruelly. Children worked as chimney sweeps, encouraged to work faster by the fires lit under them. Children were used to dip pottery figures into poisonous lead glaze. Slain infants, it was believed, could benefit sterile women, cure disease. Buried in the foundations of buildings, dead children strengthened the structure. The unwanted child was abandoned. Children were mutilated to alter their appearance.

Perhaps our new technologies have provided new ways of using children.

Most of us will now have an image of Ali Ismail Abbas, although it is hard to believe that the images we see are sanitised.

We do not see (but can read about) his arm that looked like, in Jon Lee Anderson’s words, “something that might be found in a barbecue pit”. Perhaps we are shown what it is believed we can tolerate, what is judged to be useful, what is required to show that he has been rescued.

As ABC TV’s Media Watch observed, Ali’s future is brighter “with the help of The Daily Telegraph, “his rescue was organised by The Courier-Mail team”, “by the Herald Sun’s team”, “by The Australian”. Many newspapers claim a part in his recovery.

Several charities and other papers have claimed his image. London’s Evening Standard and the Daily Mirror are reported to be using his face and torso to raise money for good causes.

What do we see when we look at the photographs of Ali? What do we see and think when we look into his eyes? I see the confusion and random cruelty of war. I see a child who, in the words of his uncle, “wants to be normal again” but can never be. I look for other children’s eyes, other bodies, other children we should be caring for but are not.

I think, such are our relations to children, that we need a particular child to “adopt”. Just as we “adopted” the bruised and battered face of Daniel Valerio, dead and beyond repair, so we “adopt” Ali Ismail Abbas who can never be mended. Perhaps, at heart, we tend to be indifferent to the present suffering of children in general, of children who need our help every day, but we find it difficult to ignore a child, a clearly identified, named, photographed, damaged and distant or dead child.

I wonder what Ali Ismail Abbas is thinking. I think of the words he has said, his anger at being repeatedly exposed to the stares of strangers. I wonder if we do this to him because he is 12 years old and because he is an Iraqi. After all, that is how he came to lose his arms, skin, parents, family and home. I reflect upon our sensitivities to photographs of “our” soldiers as prisoners. I wonder if any of the newspapers and charities have thought to ask his permission to use his photograph around the world in this way. Perhaps we use his photograph rather than that of a wounded adult because we do not feel we have to ask a child. Perhaps some of us believe that, after all he has lost, he will not miss his dignity and privacy.

I wonder if Ali Ismail Abbas knows that, perhaps, we need him more than he needs us, that he is helping us more than we can ever help him, that we didn’t want to do what we have done, that we really don’t know what to do now.

I see Margaret Drabble’s words, in The Millstone, that we claim that children forget and recover so readily because we dare not contemplate the fact that, in reality, they will always remember, they will never forget.

That is perhaps another part of the story of Ali Ismail Abbas.

Dr Chris Goddard is head of social work in the school of primary health care at Monash University and director of the Child Abuse and Family Violence Research Unit, a joint initiative with Australians Against Child Abuse.
Email: chris.goddard@med.monash.edu.au

Read Full Post »

Quiz Burgled from LDR

Shhhh! It’s a secret but I’m supposed to be –

free enneagram test

Read Full Post »

Quiz Burgled from LDR

Shhhh! It’s a secret but I’m supposed to be –

free enneagram test

Read Full Post »

Protected:

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Read Full Post »

139

I read this very thoughtful article yesterday from an American resident in Australia –

An American dissents, respectfully
April 23 2003

Goodwill, friends and progress have all been squandered on the adventure in Iraq, writes Bruce C. Wolpe.

I love my country. As an American privileged to live in Australia, I am terribly proud of the men and women who have served so valiantly in the Iraq war, done such heroic work and toppled a despot.

But America is my country, too, and I respectfully dissent against this war – not because it was wrong to oust Saddam Hussein but because the cost of having done so is likely to exceed what we will gain.

The fog of peace presents five crises for America – many with resonance in Australia as well.

1. The United States has lost the world’s goodwill that flowed from September 11.

It is no mean feat to squander the feelings of empathy and sympathy with America felt by millions of people worldwide. But the wilfulness of US foreign policy, its abjuring of the “humility” pledged by candidate George Bush in the presidential campaign and its relentless heavy hand have blurred, if not blinded, the clarity of vision many held for months after the attacks that America had been obscenely wronged. September 11 is an ever more distant memory. Much of the world – including much of the First World – is angry at America now.

2. The President of the US and the dictator of Iraq are seen in roughly equivalent moral terms.

It is astounding, and disgusting, but the way this war was conceived, and the diplomacy executed, meant the US and its allies lost a moral edge over the butcher of Baghdad in the eyes of the world, and it has not been recovered. There is no love for Saddam, but neither is there any for the US President.

This is an immense PR defeat, unprecedented since Ho Chi Minh gained ascendancy over LBJ in a war that was much more challenging morally than Iraq.

It is immensely sad to live overseas and have your country and President pilloried.

3. The US budget is busted for a decade or more.

Lyndon Johnson compounded the tragedy of the Vietnam War by making a grievous error of fiscal policy: the US could wage the war and have the Great Society at the same time, without paying for either. The result was the beginning of a bitter 30-year cycle of inflation, deficits, recession, stagflation.

The Bush prescription of breathtaking tax cuts with massive military expenditure will bring home deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars for as far as we can see. The US will be effectively bankrupt until fiscal sanity is restored, long after Bush leaves office.

4. The institutions that saw us through the Cold War are fractured.

The demands of this war, under the circumstances dictated by Washington and London, have greatly impaired NATO and called into question the relevance of the United Nations. Can either be effective in future?

To be sure, NATO survived the strains of the placement of Pershing missiles in Europe, and the UN survived years of infamy from its declaration that Zionism is racism and for abdicating its responsibilities in Africa and Serbia.

Perhaps the UN can come back from the wringer of American obstinacy and French mendacity. But no one is holding their breath.

5. Free trade is moribund.

Who can concentrate on the secret of the prosperity of the 1990s – free trade – when there is a rolling preoccupation with security, terrorism and war? Doha is nowhere; key deadlines are missed; a new global round of free-trade negotiations is in grave doubt.

Inaction on free trade condemns the global economy to sluggish growth ahead as we retreat into our defensive shells in a polarised world.

Notwithstanding all the above, there was one compelling reason to wage this war and remove Saddam: to remake the Middle East for decades to come. The status quo produced both al-Qaeda and paralysis between Israel and Palestine. It was hardly tenable.

As American commentator Johnny Apple has written, the US is today, as it was during the Reagan years, a revolutionary power. This is the meaning of Afghanistan and Iraq. Power talks, and now the American hegemon bestrides the region.

There will be new American military bases on Iraqi soil. It’s not bad to have Syria squeezed between Israel on the west and a new Iraq to the east. Or for Iran or Saudi Arabia, either, to feel the heat. (And North Korea seems to be beginning to get the message as well.)

But can the seeds of a new Middle East truly sprout from this war under the leadership of this President? We will not know for a good while. In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower told his associates: “The success of this occupation (of Germany) can only be judged 50 years from now.”

Tectonic geopolitical changes, like earthquakes, are messy. It took years for democracy to emerge in Japan and Germany after World War II. It took decades for democracy to come to South Korea after the Korean War. Democracy is still fragile in Russia, parts of eastern Europe and in several former Soviet republics 10 years after the end of the Cold War.

We have to weigh the promise of what might be against other lessons of history – Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt, the British leaving Iraq nearly a century ago, and Israel’s retreat from Lebanon.

Only the true believers, including many now associated with this President, really thought that Mikhail Gorbachev would tear down that wall and that the Cold War could be won. They were right.

I hope they are right today. But, even so, I have grave doubts that this was the only future we could craft, the only choice we had.

We have won the war in Iraq. But not the peace yet. The price has been terribly high, and I fear for the future of my country in this world.

Bruce C. Wolpe, a former US Democrat congressional aide, is manager of corporate affairs for Fairfax, owner of The Age.
bwolpe@mail.fairfax.com.au

Am currently reading About This Life by Barry Lopez and just finished another of his books, Arctic Dreams. I like the way he describes landscape, in a poetic but at the same time accurate way. It is especially beautiful the way he describes the effect of light on landscape and the interrelationship that can be developed between us and the land and the animals that live in it. These are both non-fiction. Arctic Dreams describing his travels in the Arctic and the history of exploration of the Arctic. Has really fired up again my desire to visit Greenland, Baffin Island, Alaska. The other is a more general travelogue style book with vignettes of his travels. Haven’t read any of his fiction but will probably search it out now.

Happy Birthday to Versailles Rose.

Read Full Post »

Protected: Bitter & Twisted

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Read Full Post »

Bitter & Twisted

Maybe. I get this guy ring me up out of the blue at work an hour or so ago. I don’t know how he got my number but I have not seen him for 20 years. After he left me at the airport telling me his parents had arranged a marriage for him with a good Indian girl back home. Now he feels guilty and wants to talk to me about it!

Men! I told him he did me a favour and that if we had got married we would have been divorced by now or I would have been totally miserable. I wonder what sparked off the attack of the guilts after all this time. Or maybe he’s just lonely. I gather the marriage didn’t work out.

How evil are you?

Read Full Post »