Buddhists Have Their Vile Fundamentalists As Well

April 22nd, 2013 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Religion - (8 Comments)

Secular Americans may roundly criticize the irrationally violent tendencies of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but they tend to have something of a sweet spot for Buddhism. They often regard Buddhism as a relatively rational religion, with a focus on cultivating the clear operation of the mind, and an ethic of nonviolence.

Certainly, Buddhism has some texts that espouse an ethic of clear-minded nonviolence, but then, so do most religions. In practice, however, Buddhism can be as consumed with the irrational violence of fundamentalism as any other religion.

That appears to be the case in Myanmar. Human Rights Watch reports this morning that, in Myanmar, “…Buddhist monks organized and encouraged ethnic Arakanese backed by state security forces to conduct coordinated attacks on Muslim neighborhoods and villages in October 2012 to terrorize and forcibly relocate the population. The tens of thousands of displaced have been denied access to humanitarian aid and been unable to return home.”

Other excerpts from the report:

“The deadly violence that erupted between ethnic Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in early June 2012 in Burma’s Arakan State began as sectarian clashes in four townships. When violence resumed in October, it engulfed nine more townships and became a coordinated campaign to forcibly relocate or remove the state’s Muslims.”

“The October attacks were against Rohingya and Kaman Muslim communities and were organized, incited, and committed by local Arakanese political party operatives, the Buddhist monkhood, and ordinary Arakanese, at times directly supported by state security forces. Rohingya men, women, and children were killed, some were buried in mass graves, and their villages and neighborhoods were razed.”

“Arakanese residents and Buddhist monks have protested against international aid for Rohingya, physically blocked aid deliveries, and threatened aid workers.”

“Violence against Muslims in Burma has spread beyond Arakan State. Between March 20 and 22, mobs of Buddhists, led in some instances by Buddhist monks, attacked Muslims in Meiktila, Mandalay Region, following weeks of incitement through anti-Muslim sermons by members of the Buddhist monkhood.”

Whenever you think of the Dalai Lama, also think of this.

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Human Rights Under Barack Obama

May 25th, 2012 | Posted by Rowan in Barack Obama | Questions - (2 Comments)

Amnesty International has issued its annual report about the condition of human rights in all the nations of the world. The organization has this to say about human rights in the United States: “Forty-three men were executed during the year, and concerns about cruel prison conditions continued. Scores of detainees remained in indefinite military detention at Guantanamo. The administration announced its intention to pursue the death penalty against six of these detainees in trials by military commission. Some 3,000 people were held in the US detention facility on the Bagram air base in Afghanistan by the end of the year. Use of lethal force in the counter-terrorism context raised serious concerns, as did continuing reports of the use of excessive force in the domestic law enforcement context.”

Barack Obama has been President for more than three years now. Human rights conditions now existing cannot be attributed merely to leftover problems from the terms of George W. Bush.

Obama supporters: How do you react to Amnesty International’s description of human rights under President Obama?

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Obama Is Worse Than Bush On Rule Of Law, Says Rocky Anderson

December 22nd, 2011 | Posted by jclifford in Activism | Barack Obama | Democrats | Election 2008 | Election 2012 | George W. Bush | Liberty | Politics - (2 Comments)

Just as the Occupy Wall Street protest changed the focus of America’s U.S. economic discussion, Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson is changing the focus of the 2012 presidential election. For too long, there had been only the voices of the right wing Republicans and the center right wing Democrats. Now, along with Jill Stein, Rocky Anderson is bringing a real liberal voice to the 2012 election.

rocky anderson for presidentThat’s often not to the benefit of Barack Obama, who as President has taken the support of progressive Americans for granted. Rocky Anderson is more than happy to point out the many ways in which Obama has proven to be a terrible fit with Democratic voters’ political ideals.

In a recent interview with Wikinews reporter William Saturn, Rocky Anderson brought a harsh and clear focus on Barack Obama’s terrible record on civil liberties and the rule of law. Anderson told Saturn:

“He never stood up against torture or the other human rights abuses that were occurring during that time. He promised us before he received the Democratic nomination that he would join the filibuster in opposition to Congress providing retroactive immunity for the telecom companies for their illegal participation in the Bush surveillance program. And by the way, not all the telecom companies participated in that, they recognized that it was illegal so it wasn’t a matter of people were fooled about whether it was legal or not. But for those telecom companies that did violate the law, they should have been held accountable. But in the classic American way, the corrupt way that has developed in our system of government, three telecom companies spend some twelve million dollars on lobbyists during the course of three months they put on the press, Congress passed legislation providing for the retroactive immunity and among those voting for the immunity, now after he received the Democratic nomination was then-Senator Obama, completely betraying those that he had promised to join the filibuster. But it was just a sign of things to come, they always talked about the rule of law, he has greater contempt for the rule of law, I think, than George W. Bush. He comes into office, says, ‘oh, we’re going to look forward, not backwards’ in terms of holding accountable war criminals? And those were criminals not only under international law, the Geneva Convention, the Convention Against Torture, but under our own laws passed by Congress: War Crimes Act of 1996 and the federal torture statute. Clearly, an illegal act, and he says, lets just look forward, not backwards.’”

This statement brings back memories for me. Rocky Anderson reminds me that Obama’s troubling disregard for America’s constitutional rights was made quite clear during the 2008 presidential election. We spent a great deal of time here at Irregular Times during the summer and autumn of 2008 discussing Barack Obama’s support for the terrible FISA Amendments Act – a law that gave immunity to telecommunications corporations for breaking federal law by providing government spies with information about millions of Americans’ private communications data.

During the 2008 presidential election, Democratic apologists depicted Obama’s support for Big Brother government spying in the form of the FISA Amendments Act as a temporary aberration, a compromise made necessary by the election. They promised that, after Obama became President, he would reform the FISA Amendments Act. That didn’t happen. It turned out that Obama’s vote for the FISA Amendments Act was just a precursor of more compromises of constitutional rights to come.

Barack Obama has not brought the change that voters were looking for in 2008. He won’t bring us that change if he’s re-elected in 2012, either. Obama has continued and expanded George W. Bush’s attack on the Constitution, and there’s no reason to believe that he’s going to change his ways.

If you’re looking for real change, help Rocky Anderson get on the ballot in the coming year’s presidential election.

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Shame, Shame, Shame: Criminally Accused without Criminal Justice Rights, Obama Style

July 6th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Liberty | Politics - (1 Comments)

Shame on Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame for allegedly providing stuff to the militant organizations Shahab and Al Qaeda. If it’s true, that wasn’t a very nice thing to do. The charges have not been proven.

Shame on the United States Government for holding Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame on one of its warships in international waters for two months in military detention and interrogating him without the rights of someone accused of a crime — and only then, after getting what it wanted, sending him to the United States for criminal trial.

Shame on Rep. Howard McKeon, and not only for insisting that everyone call him “Buck.” A much bigger shame for Rep. McKeon is the form of his far-right criticism of the United States Government — not for holding someone in international detention without the rights guaranteed to criminal suspects and interrogating him outside the rules before charging him with a crime, but for eventually charging him with a crime. McKeon preferred that the U.S. Government keep a person in a brig without charges forever.

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More Kids Kept Captive In Guantanamo Prisons

June 8th, 2011 | Posted by jclifford in Barack Obama | Homeland Insecurity | Liberty - (1 Comments)

The people in the Guantanamo Bay prisons were the worst of the worst, Vice President Dick Cheney told us. Then, we learned that among the prisoners were teenage kids. There were seven kids under the age of 18, the Bush Administration reported to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. How could eight teenagers be honestly categorized among the worst of the worst?

Then, in 2008, the Guantanamo Testimonials Project conducted an investigation and discovered that, actually, there were twelve teenage prisoners put into the prisons of Guantanamo Bay. The Bush Administration, confronted with the evidence, admitted that it had lied, and agreed to the new number.

Now, the Guantanamo Testimonials Project has taken advantage of the Wikileaks document release, and searched for more information about juveniles kept prisoner at Guantanamo. In that search, they have found evidence that there are, or were, three more underage Guantanamo prisoners.

That’s a total of 15 kids locked away in Guantanamo prisons, when the government admitted to just 8.

Of course, there could be yet more kids kept imprisoned in Guantanamo – or in other prisons, even more secret, around the world. Our own government has established the practice of keeping large numbers of people prisoner without telling anyone about it.

That’s a plain violation of habeas corpus, the requirement that our government tell who it holds as prisoner, and where, and why. There may have been some temporary rationale for the suspension of habeas corpus in the few days after September 11, 2001. The Constitution allows the temporary suspension of habeas corpus rights in the event of the invasion of the United States. On September 11, 2001, it momentarily appeared that the United States just might be under invasion.

Before too long, though, it became clear that there was no general invasion – just one massive, violent criminal act. The attacks of that one day were not repeated. There was no constitutional basis for the continuation of the suspension of habeas corpus.

Yet, the work of Wikileaks and the Guantanamo Testimonials Project has revealed that, to this day, ten years after 2001, under Barack Obama, our federal government is continuing a de facto suspension of habeas corpus. They’re keeping people prisoner and not telling us about it.

The result of this long-term is the removal of trust. We can’t trust a government that locks people up without following the rules. We can’t know, if we don’t know who is imprisoned, that American citizens aren’t among the captives. We can’t know, aren’t told who is in prison, that imprisonment is being conducted in accordance with the law, and with the Constitution.

We have no reason to trust, when we have been lied to so thoroughly about Guantanamo, that there aren’t yet more lies, and yet more serious breaches of the Constitution taking place.

I remember, when Barack Obama became President, that we would finally get some truth from the federal government about what had been taking place under the War On Terror. What a disappointment Obama has been.

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World of Good Can Go Up In Smoke

July 16th, 2010 | Posted by jclifford in Economy | Ethics - (1 Comments)

Yesterday, Jim wrote about the donation to the World of Good community development and fair trade organization that has come out of our profit from the sale of sweatshop-free t-shirts with irregular designs. Then, as a reminder of why organizations like World of Good are important, we got a report from Human Rights Watch.

The report reveals that Philip Morris, the giant tobacco corporation, has been buying cheap tobacco from sources that use children for forced labor, “in virtual bondage”. “We were like slaves,” says the mother in one family trapped in this system of forced labor.

Fair trade networks and community development organizations give workers alternatives to the sweatshops and abusive farm networks that exploit extreme poverty and lax labor laws outside of the United States. When you buy fair trade and sweatshop-free goods, you keep money out of the slave labor networks. When you go to a store looking to buy something at low low prices, you’re helping the abuses continue…

…and when you buy Philip Morris cigarettes, you also get massive tumors filling up your lungs with vile black nasty gunk before you die. In cases like that, good ethics becomes a little more easy.

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Guantanamo In Lithuania

December 22nd, 2009 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in Liberal Links - (1 Comments)

The government of Lithuania confirmed today that the U.S. government has been operating two secret prisons within its borders. The prisons’ operations took place outside all systems of international law, meaning that they violated U.S. law as well. Reports call these “black site prisons” because they’re concealed from international monitoring groups such as the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Is this what Lithuania was liberated from the Soviet Union for – to serve as a site of secret detention camps for the United States outside of human rights laws?

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Immigrant Rights in Nebraska and Iowa Fall Away

September 28th, 2009 | Posted by Peregrin Wood in State and Local - (0 Comments)

Years ago, when we started the Nebraska Progressive Directory, we were happy to list the Immigrant Rights Network of Iowa and Nebraska. Now, we’re sorry to say that the network appears to have fallen away – just when immigrants in these midwestern states are especially in need of help.

Nebraska Appleseed is picking up some of the slack. The Department of Justice is coming in with a $50,000 grant to the Center for Human Rights at the University of Iowa. Will these other efforts make up the difference?

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