Towards a global perspective . . .

The London Times online headline says Israel Stations Nuclear Missile Subs off Iran.   The article says that the subs have already spent time in the region, but a “decision has now been taken to insure the presence of at least one of the subs.” The New York Times headline says U.N. Says Iran Has Fuel for Two Nuclear Weapons.  They go on to say that “Iran has now produced a stockpile of nuclear fuel that experts say would be enough, with further enrichment, to build 2 nuclear bombs. ” What does that mean?   Iran has had the same amount of nuclear materials from the start.   It has taken them 10 years to enrich it to to 3%.   To be used in a bomb, it has to be enriched to 95%.   With relation to Iran, The NY Times is constantly trying to find a way to make newsworthy the absence of news.

But, there is some real news and the world press is reporting it: Read the rest of this entry »

Our priceless friend and ally, Israel, has just assaulted a flotilla of supplies with 800 civilian activists aboard and several tons of building materials, food, toys and various necessities.   There was live coverage online from the lead ship, broadcast through a Turkish news station.    Live TV coverage of a war crime, this is today’s media.  This is our world.   Even so, as time will show, Israel managed to come up with a conflicting story and a video of their own to prove it, only a few hours later.  They are ingenious and persistent.

There were around 600 people on the lead ship where the most serious confrontation took place, all unarmed civilians.   Al Jazeera and the Turkish station have video of a stairway crowded with people with people in life jackets.  You can hear a loudspeaker in the background directing people to go to their rooms and wait.   The reporter from Al Jazeera says that at least two are dead and there are an unknown number of injured.  Speedboats race alongside and around the ship.  Helicopters hover overhead.  He says that he is going to join them, and the scene ends, but the Turkish coverage continues. Floodlights are flashing over the deck as uniformed soldiers board the ship from the air and the sea.     Read the rest of this entry »

It has been brought up that I might seem to be advocating for Kurdish independence from Iran.  That was not my point.  I  support civil rights for the Kurds in Iran and everyone else there as well.   But my point was that the Kurds have been disenfranchised within the ‘modern’ countries where they reside, and that the European colonialists, by alternately supporting their quest for civil rights, and sovereignty, then opposing them at their convenience and for the furtherance of their own purposes, has seriously aggravated the problem.

The situation of the Kurds in Iraq is, I think, very fragile at present.  The convenience to the US of their independence is passing.  Yet they have used it well over the last 10 years, and it would be a good thing if they were rewarded for their success.  For them to become, at least, a self governed, federalist state of Iraq and be free to continue their progress would be good for the Kurds and good for Iraq.   They have much recent experience in developing a working state infrastructure to share.   And, their assertion of self direction and self government would be a safety valve of sorts for all of the Kurds in the region.  Of course this would only be true if the Kurds possessed the freedom in the countries where they reside to speak their language and and express their ethnicity without fear of reprisal.

This is my response to the previous entry, a poetic description of the conditions under which many Kurds live, and have lived for the last century.   The letter was posted on Facebook by a friend of the author, a Kurdish dissident in Iran, who was recently executed after about 5 years on death row in Iran’s notorious Evan Prison. The Kurds have many sad stories.  The story below is similar to other stories the Kurds tell.  And the ending is consistent as well, with the Kurdish experience.  The Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, are “those who don’t fear death.”

I spent some time in Kurdish Iraq last summer.  They are doing pretty well there right now.  But, they have terrible stories to tell and their suffering continues in their feelings for lost relatives and friends and homes. Across the northern mountainous region of the Middle East and Persia, the Kurds are, and have been persecuted and disenfranchised for a hundred years and more.   Read the rest of this entry »