Archive | April, 2011

URGENT ACTION Ebrahim Sharif, one of several prominent opposition leaders detained in Bahrain in March, was transferred on or around 10 April to a military hospital in al-Riffa’, central Bahrain.  His family has not had access to him since he was detained.  Amnesty International fears he might be at risk of torture or ill-treatment. Ebrahim […]

Guy Hocquenghem.  The Screwball Asses.  Trans.  Noura Wedell.  Semiotext(e), 2010.  88 pp.  $12.95 “Speak to my ass.  My head is sick.” — Southern French proverb This little book was first published as an anonymous essay at the end of Félix Guattari’s Recherches no. 12, its March 1973 special issue titled Trois Milliards de Pervers [Three […]

  According to reports from Bahrain, doctors are disappearing as part of a systematic attack on medical staff.  Many physicians are missing following interrogations by unknown security forces at Salmaniya Medical Complex, Manama.  Although families have tried to contact administration officials, the administration denies any knowledge of their whereabouts.  According to family members, the physicians […]

  Among the arrested are human rights activist Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja, Wa’ad Secretary General Ebrahim Sharif, Haq Secretary General Hassan Mushaima. . . . Cf. Bahrain Center for Human Rights, <www.bahrainrights.org/en>; National Democratic Action Society (Wa’ad), <www.aldemokrati.org>; <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_Mushaima>. | Print  

On April 18, Standard and Poor’s (S&P), one of three “rating companies” that control that industry, revised its outlook on the safety of long-term US debt from “stable” to “negative.”  There are only two reasonable reactions to this announcement, although the usual business and political leaders are promoting their usual spins. We may dispense quickly […]

  Firing for Media Effect: Setting the “African” Agenda “We left behind our friends from Chad.  We left behind their bodies.  We had 70 or 80 people from Chad working for our company.  They cut them dead with pruning shears and axes, attacking them, saying you’re providing troops for Gadhafi.  The Sudanese, the Chadians were […]

Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  The cartoon above was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 18 April 2011.  | Print

Jesse Freeston: Over recent weeks, the regime put in place by a 2009 military coup has begun the process of destroying the Honduran teachers’ movement, a campaign that has turned Honduras’s cities into battlegrounds.  Opponents are calling it an example of what author Naomi Klein famously labeled the shock doctrine. Naomi Klein: The exploitation of […]

  On 4 April 2011, when David Chandler’s essay below was first published in e-IR, French and UN forces intervened in Ivory Coast on behalf of Alassane Ouattara and his forces, eventually deposing President Laurent Gbagbo on 11 April 2011.  Humanitarian pretexts were offered for that intervention, but rather perfunctorily, almost as an afterthought to […]

  Andrej Grubacic.  Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays after Yugoslavia.  Introduction by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.  PM Press, 2010. This is not a typical book review and I am not a detached reader.  The book’s author, Andrej Grubacic, is a friend and collaborator, a comrade in the truest sense of the word.  And as he makes clear throughout […]

  ثـــــورة غضــــــب Never will we accept humiliation We are the lovers of martyrdom Raise your voice and say it loud My cause is my nation, and my blood my weapon! Never will we accept humiliation We are the lovers of martyrdom Raise your voice and say it loud My cause is my nation, and […]

I was familiar with the content of compañero Raúl’s report to the 6th Congress of the Party. He had shown it to me a few days previously on his own initiative, as he has done on many other occasions without me asking him to because, as I already explained, I had delegated all my responsibilities within the Party and the state in the proclamation of July 2006.… Doing so was a duty that I did not hesitate for a second to fulfill.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced this Sunday that he will reactivate the peace proposal for Libya at the urging of his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  The Venezuelan leader called upon the nations of the world to form a larger commission to try to “stop this madness” of imperialist “aggressions” against the Libyan people. “Ahmadinejad asked […]

  A regular meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Syria, chaired by its Secretary General Comrade Ammar Bakdash, was held on 25 March 2011. . . . The Central Committee examined at length the manifestations of unrest in some cities in Syria, especially the unfortunate incidents in the town of Dara’a.  […]

The notion that Asian Americans are model minorities originated in the 1960s, mainly in reference to the socioeconomic gains of Japanese and Chinese Americans in particular.  It did not take long, however, for that very idea to be applied to Asian Americans as a whole, especially as it continues to be perpetuated by the mainstream […]

Adam Hanieh: Well, we’ve seen over the last few days a wave of repression [in Bahrain] that’s ongoing, repression against the protests after the Saudi troops went in on March 15, about a month ago.  As you said, there have been reports that up to 31 people have been killed during the demonstrations.  And now […]

  Cf. Egidia Beretta Arrigoni, “Vittorio non è mai stato così vivo come ora” (Il Manifesto, 17 April 2011); “The mother of pro-Palestinian activist Victorio Arrigoni reaffirmed that his body should not return via Israel. . . . Egidia Beretta replied that ‘Israel did not want him when he was alive and won’t have him […]

This morning at 10:00am I listened to the delegates’ debates at the 6th Congress of the Party.… There were so many commissions that, logically, I couldn’t listen to everyone who spoke.… They were meeting in five commissions to discuss a number of issues. Thereafter I, too, took advantage of the breaks to breathe calmly and eat some energy providing food. They surely had more of an appetite given their work and age.

“[T]he aim of aid is to ‘corrupt’ the governing classes.  Apart from the financial appropriations (which, alas, are well known and for which we are led to believe that the donors are in no way responsible), aid has become ‘indispensable’ as it is an important source of financing budgets and fulfils a political function. . […]

  Zenaida Velasquez is a sister of Ilse Velasquez, a Honduran teacher recently killed by the military-backed regime in Honduras. Dear Representative Nancy Pelosi: Right now I am in Honduras, my country of birth. I came here due to an emergency — bad news. . . My youngest sister, Ilse Ivania Velasquez Rodriguez, a dedicated […]