Al Kitab club members (six to 10 people) will meet in a comfortable place (someone’s home, a quiet café, or a room in a public library) once a month to discuss and reflect on a book.
Where does the question of race figure in President Obama’s political calculations, for surely he cannot be ignorant of the historical relationship between race and torture in the American experience?
The tortured body has long been the site for the most spectacular display of the politics of race: the utter violation and dehumanization of black and other bodies of colour has been central to the colonial and imperialist expansion of American and European powers.
Amidst the media fanfare that marked the Obama Administration’s first 100 days in office, the five-year anniversary of the release of the Abu-Ghraib photographs by the CBS went largely unmarked.
Today is a day to watch history unfold before our eyes. But today is also a day to think about the ongoing struggle to make history, to achieve social and global justice, and to put an end to empire.
Photo: Anirudh Khul: raining shoes at U.S. Consulate in Montreal.
Inspired by Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who launched a pair of shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush this past week in Baghdad, local activists in Montreal held a mass shoe-throwing directed at the U.S. Consulate and the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting centre in downtown Montreal this past Saturday.
«C’est un baiser d’adieu, chien !»
Daily Star, Tuesday, March 25, 2008.
Photo: Displaced woman carries humanitarian aid from the Iraqi Red Crescent.
BAGHDAD: While the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion stands at 4,000, up to three times as many Iraqi soldiers have died – and the number of civilians killed runs into tens and probably hundreds of thousands. The icasualties.org Web site, based only on published reports, shows that around 8,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have died since the March 2003 invasion. Last year, however, the Iraqi government put the figure at 12,000.
There is no agreement when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly as many deaths are never reported in the media.
Report from Human Rights Watch.
Photo: Iraqi Refugees
(Beirut, December 4, 2007) – Lebanese authorities arrest Iraqi refugees without valid visas and detain them indefinitely to coerce them to return to Iraq, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
“Iraqi refugees in Lebanon live in constant fear of arrest,” said Bill Frelick, refugee policy director for Human Rights Watch. “Refugees who are arrested face the prospect of rotting in jail indefinitely unless they agree to return to Iraq and face the dangers there.”
Download / Podcast the program from the Rabble Podcast Network.
Listen to an interview with the Washington editor of Harpers Magazine, Ken Silverstein, who recently published an article entitled, “Parties of God: The Bush doctrine and the rise of Islamic democracy”, which examines the current democratic developments in the Middle East within the context of the U.S. supported War on Terror.
By Antonia Juhasz, San Francisco
TODAY more than three-quarters of the world’s oil is owned and controlled by governments. It wasn’t always this way.
Until about 35 years ago, the world’s oil was largely in the hands of seven corporations based in the United States and Europe. Those seven have since merged into four: ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and BP. They are among the world’s largest and most powerful financial empires. But ever since they lost their exclusive control of the oil to the governments, the companies have been trying to get it back.
