FRANCE’S NATIONAL Assembly and Senate have voted to extend the country’s military intervention in Mali. A resolution passed both houses of parliament on April 22. Not a single vote was cast in opposition.

Three days later, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 2100, creating a policing mission beginning July 1, 2013. The mission is called by its French acronym MINUSMA. Its projected size is 11,200 soldiers and 1,440 police.

France invaded the north of Mali with fighter aircraft and 4,000 soldiers on January 11. The Mali government and its French benefactor had lost control of the area in 2012 to Tuareg and other national groups fighting for autonomy and independence. Rightist Islamist forces that oppose the sovereignty aspirations of the national minorities then briefly rose to military dominance in the region. It is their presence that served as the key pretext for the French intervention and now for a foreign, military and police occupation of undeclared duration.

Presently, there are some 6,000 soldiers from African countries serving in a “peacekeeping” role in the south of Mali, while French soldiers are engaged in combat with Islamists in the north. Also, what’s called a military training mission by the European Union has some 200 soldiers on the ground and hundreds more providing supplies and equipment.

The U.S. is a key backer of the French intervention. It has significantly boosted its military presence in West Africa during the past decade and recently opened a drone airbase in neighboring Niger.

Ali Abunimah: Boycotting Israel as a stance for justice is going mainstream —€“ Israelis can no longer pretend theirs is in an enlightened country

 … When we look back in a few years, Hawking’s decision to respect BDS may be seen as a turning point – the moment when boycotting Israel as a stance for justice went mainstream.

What is clear today is that his action has forced Israelis – and the rest of the world – to understand that the status quo has a price. Israel cannot continue to pretend that it is a country of culture, technology and enlightenment while millions of Palestinians live invisibly under the brutal rule of bullets, bulldozers and armed settlers.

gravesofgrass:

paxamericana:

Kunduz, Afghanistan, 2002 - Steve McCurry

It’s a white thing…you wouldn’t understand.

Game over, hipsters. This is the single-most ironic instance of tee-shirt-wearing ever.

 … The images of the Boston bombing reminded me of things I saw in southern Helmand province, not the streets where I usually do my Christmas shopping. Many witnesses described the marathon carnage as “a war zone,” and indeed it was: mangled flesh, shocked faces, splattered blood.

 … I deployed to Afghanistan believing my presence in that country would help stop attacks such as Boston’s from happening. But instead, my war has spilled over, striking the city where my 22-year-old brother goes to school and where my mom, until recently, felt perfectly safe eating lunch outdoors.

THE SPRING fighting season in Afghanistan began this month with explosions of violence all over the country.

Taliban suicide bombers dressed as Afghan soldiers attacked a courthouse in Farah Province and killed 53 people. A NATO convoy carrying five Americans was blown up by suicide bombers in Zabul province. Among the dead was a U.S. diplomat. On April 7, a joing Afghan-NATO airstrike in Kunar Province killed 12 children and one woman, and injured six other women.

The civilian deaths triggered a by-now familiar response from the U.S. military, the mainstream media and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. A spokesperson for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) released a statement saying, “ISAF takes all reports of civilian casualties seriously, and we are currently assessing the incident.” But much later, coalition forces will quietly, with little media attention, take responsibility for the slaughter, offer apologies to the families and offer cash payments.

In an attempt to justify the killing of civilians, the U.S. military claimed that the women and children were family members of senior Taliban commanders—guilty by association. And once again, the press reminded us that the Taliban and other anti-government groups are responsible for 81 percent of all civilian deaths—another way to minimize the death and destruction that NATO is responsible for. Never acknowledged, though, is that there wouldn’t be civilian deaths caused by an insurgency if there wasn’t a war and occupation by the U.S.

Per usual, President Karzai talked out of both sides of his mouth and accused the Taliban of using civilians as human shields and then condemned ISAF for killing innocent women and children. Two months ago, Karzai ordered a complete ban on Afghan security forces calling in NATO airstrikes in residential areas. But NATO doesn’t answer to the president of Afghanistan. According to political analyst Habib Hakimi, airstrikes will continue when it’s “tactically necessary.” Which is often.

In the war on Afghanistan, civilian deaths are nameless and faceless collateral damage. There won’t be heartfelt stories about 12 children’s lives tragically cut short by a U.S. air strike.

In this recent round of casualties, the mainstream media focused on 25-year-old Ann Smedinghoff, who worked for the State Department as a public diplomacy officer. She was killed on a trip to deliver books to a new school in Qalat. Secretary of State John Kerry said she was “a brave American determined to brighten the light of learning through books written in the native tongue of the students that she had never met, but whom she felt compelled to help. And she was met by cowardly terrorists determined to bring darkness and death to total strangers.”

As if the mission of the U.S. State Department is to deliver books to Afghan children. In fact, it is the U.S. war machine that has brought darkness and death to the people of Afghanistan for over 11 years.

Ignoring the role played by US actions is dangerously self-flattering and self-delusional

“We should spend some time thinking seriously about why so many people around the world - “Terrorists” - want to attack the US as opposed to, say, Japan, or Peru, or South Africa, or Brazil, or Mexico, or Portugal, or South Korea”

News reports purporting to describe what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told US interrogators should, for several reasons, be taken with a huge grain of salt. The sources for this information are anonymous, they work for the US government, the statements were obtained with no lawyer present and no Miranda warnings given, and Tsarnaev is “grievously wounded”, presumably quite medicated, and barely able to speak. That the motives for these attacks are still unclear has been acknowledged even by Alan Dershowitz last week (“It’s not even clear under the federal terrorism statute that this qualifies as an act of terrorism”) and Jeffrey Goldberg on Friday (“it is not yet clear, despite preliminary indications, that these men were, in fact, motivated by radical Islam”).

Those caveats to the side, the reports about what motivated the Boston suspects are entirely unsurprising and, by now, quite familiar:

“The two suspects in the Boston bombing that killed three and injured more than 260 were motivated by the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials told the Washington Post.

“Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ‘the 19-year-old suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings, has told interrogators that the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan motivated him and his brother to carry out the attack,’ the Post writes, citing ‘US officials familiar with the interviews.’”

In the last several years, there have been four other serious attempted or successful attacks on US soil by Muslims, and in every case, they emphatically all say the same thing: that they were motivated by the continuous, horrific violence brought by the US and its allies to the Muslim world - violence which routinely kills and oppresses innocent men, women and children …

A friend writes:

Elizabeth Warren at the MIT funeral ceremony said Boston was “locked down by the terror of a few”. No, Warren. Boston was locked down by the state. Boston was locked down by thousands of local, state, out of state and federal police looking for a wounded 19 year old. Boston was locked down with tanks on the streets, house to house searches and racist fear mongering.

And then Joe Biden, (right after he mutters for 10,000 people to hear), that she “looks beautiful today”, goes to the mic, to invoke 9/11 and say they will not give in to fear, when it was fear mongering that effectively shut down the city last week. He goes on to say, in a country still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, with 600 military bases in other people’s lands around the planet, that al Qaeda“cannot destroy us, they cannot occupy us”. He calls the Tsarnaevs “two knockoff jihadis in Boston”. He uses the word jihadi a couple of times, to very intentionally equate an Islamic term with the horror of the marathon bombing.

He only once says something about “apostles of a decent faith”, but he says it in passing, so you wouldn’t really think twice about it, he never actually uses the word “Islam”. He never says “Islam is a decent faith”. So when people ask, “who could do this?”, they now have an Arabic word for it, they now have a face and a faith. They see Muslims, and it doesn’t matter what fear and terror is inflicted on us, it doesn’t matter that a Saudi man recovering from his burns has still not been apologized to for the despicable way he’s been treated by the media and state. No. Biden tells us the country hasn’t given in to fear, hasn’t closed its borders. What’s his proof? He gestures towards MIT’s president, of Venezuelan origin, and says “Listen to his accent!”. Seriously.

Making this rebloggable by request. Some fool asked me the following. My response is below.

i’m gonna go ahead and request that you shut up about things regarding boston this week, especially the pictures of military and law enforcement pointing guns at people. everything they did this week was to protect us and they took every precaution to keep us safe and i am incredibly grateful. if you weren’t here, you don’t get to pass judgement on anything they did.

Anonymous

Local news interviewing people in Watertown, MA, who were all forced to evacuate their homes at gunpoint early this morning as military-police raided scores of area homes and cleared them of all occupants. They were unable to bring with them medications, clothes, belongings. They have been out of their homes now for over 12 hours. One man (who wins the understatement of the year award) said, “It was a little stressful being woken up by police at the door who were pointing big guns at me and my daughter, who I was holding in my arms, and telling us that we had to leave immediately.”

This is a photo taken in Watertown, MA, as cops and soldiers go door-to-door looking for terrorists

===

From Iraq and Afghanistan to your front door.

“FRANCE IS in Mali for the long haul.” That was the headline of France’s daily newspaper Le Monde on February 4. The newspaper’s front page, as well as pages 2 and 3, were devoted to a discussion over “what next” for France in Mali.

The views of Le Monde’s editors were explained in a front page editorial. Describing in the politest of terms France’s historic role in Africa as a slave and colonial power, and summarizing the political situation in Mali and West Africa as a “struggle against narco-Islamists,” the newspaper argues for a long-term, Haiti-style tutelage of Mali.

In April 1977, thousands of disability rights activists across the country held protests outside of the 8 regional offices of the federal government’s Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). They were demanding that the Carter administration begin enforcing laws to prevent discrimination against people with disabilities.

In D.C., the HEW office was occupied by 300 people for 28 hours. In San Francisco, however, 120 people occupied the HEW office for a total of 25 days. When the HEW Director cut off the phones, electricity, and posted guards at the doors to deny any food from getting in, the community rose up.

The Butterfly Brigade — a group of gay men who patrolled the streets of San Francisco deterring anti-gay violence — helped the occupiers to develop an ad hoc telecommunication system. Labor unions donated money, support, and services.

Perhaps most impressively, the Black Panther Party prepared and delivered at least one hot meal a day to the disabled protesters for the duration of the occupation.

By the end of April, the federal government relented and the HEW began enforcing Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which was the first piece of legislation in U.S. history to explicitly prohibit discrimination against people with disabilities in any federal institution or those receiving federal funds.

There’s bitter irony in the UN’s recognition of a much-diminished Palestinian state on the anniversary of its 1947 partition plan.

Yesterday, the general assembly voted to admit Palestine as a state with observer status. Despite assurances to the contrary, the new state is likely to undermine the status of the PLO at the UN. Whereas the PLO represented all Palestinians, the PA only represents West Bankers. This recognition has diminished the Palestinian state geographically from 43% of historic Palestine granted by the partition plan to less than 18% of it (possibly 10%, if we factor annexations, settlements, military areas, etc), and has reduced Palestinians from 12 million people to 2.4 million West Bankers, 40% of whom are refugees.

The vote is essentially an update of the partition plan of 1947, whereby the UN now grants Jewish colonists and their descendants 80-90% of Palestine, leaving the rest to the native inhabitants, and it risks abrogating the refugees’ right of return.

A small minority native to the West Bank (about 1.3 million people), for whom the PA claims to speak, will gain UN status as a state under occupation, while the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank (1 million people), along with six million other refugees, risk losing their right of return.