Kumaran Ira

Romani people sit next to their luggage shortly after arriving
from France at the international airport in Bucharest.

France’s Socialist Party (PS) government has threatened to forcibly dismantle Roma encampments in France, raising the spectre of mass expulsions of Roma. It also announced plans to force the Roma into “integration villages.”

PS Interior Minister Manuel Valls is leading the campaign to close down Roma camps. On July 31 he told Europe1: “Prefects have a mission to dismantle Roma camps when there is a court ruling. Things are simple. Yes, when there is a court ruling the camps will be dismantled.”

While preparing measures to expel Roma, there are also plans to place them in the so-called “integration villages.” There, the Roma would be forced to remain in ultra-cheap prefabricated housing and monitored by state employees and security forces.

According to Le Monde, there are five villages and three more are under construction in Lille, the hometown of PS First Secretary and Lille mayor Martine Aubry. Under the guise of providing social support for Roma, the purpose of such “villages d’insertion” is to ghettoize the Roma population.

Valls’s campaign against the Roma is a clear expression of the reactionary character of PS government, which is continuing the persecution of Roma and other immigrants from the previous government of conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In his speech in Grenoble on July 30,2010, President Nicolas Sarkozy called for dismantling Roma camps across France, penalizing families and stripping French citizenship from migrants. After his speech, Sarkozy’s government deported over 10,000 Roma to Romania and Bulgaria. An estimated 15,000 Roma live in improvised housing encampments on the edges of major cities throughout France.

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Jonathan Cook
Jonathan Cook Blog

The real obstacles to peace [are] Israel, its occupation and western complicity

Israel has barely put a foot right with the international community since its attack on Gaza more than three years ago provoked global revulsion.

The right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu has serially defied and insulted foreign leaders, including US President Barack Obama; given the settlers virtual free rein; blocked peace talks with the Palestinians; intimidated and marginalised human rights groups, UN agencies and even the Israeli courts; and fuelled a popular wave of Jewish ethnic and religious chauvinism against the country's Palestinian minority, foreign workers and asylum seekers.

No wonder, then, that in poll after poll Israel ranks as one of the countries with the most negative influence on international affairs.

And yet, the lower Israel sinks in public estimation, the more generous western leaders are in handing out aid and special favours to their wayward ally. The past few days have been particularly shameless.

It was revealed last week that the European Union had approved a massive upgrade in Israel's special trading status, strengthening economic ties in dozens of different fields. The decision was a reversal of a freeze imposed in the wake of the Gaza attack of winter 2008.

Amnesty International pointed out that the EU was violating its own commitments in the European Neighbourhood Policy, which requires that, as a preferred trading partner, Israel respect international human rights, democratic values and its humanitarian obligations.

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Stephen Lendman

Gore Vidal spent decades criticizing the religious right, US imperialism, perpetual wars, political extremism in the name of national security, America's military/industrial complex, and other political, social and economic injustices.

On July 31, Gore Vidal died from complications of pneumonia at his Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles home. He was 86. Many labels characterize him: distinguished author, essayist, playwright, historian, acerbic sociopolitical/cultural critic, freethinker, intellectual, and humanist. In 2009, the American Humanist Association (AHA) named him honorary president. Los Angeles Times writer Elaine Woo called him a "gadfly on the national conscience" and "literary juggernaut." He was that and much more. He'll be missed.

■ New York Times writer Charles McGrath said he was "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent."
■ Random House editor Jason Epstein called him "an American version of Montaigne."
■ As an essayist, New York Time Book Review writer RWB Lewis said he was "so good that we cannot do without him. He (was) a treasure of state."
■ London Guardian writer Richard Lea called him "one of the towering figures of American cultural and political life for more than six decades."

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Khalid Amayreh

The moral callousness and depravity eroding America, mainly as a result of Jewish domination, will boomerang sooner or later.

One of the grim signs underscoring the utter corruption of the American political environment is the ongoing tuneful and vapid contest between incumbent President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney to win the heart of the Zionist state of Israel.

The two are behaving like determined political whores, hell-bent on wining the biggest show on earth, without the slightest concern for or compunction about the moral price of their obscene embrace of the Jewish golem.

Israel is undoubtedly a crime against humanity; this is what it essentially was when the brat was misbegotten 64 years ago, and this is what it has always been ever since, a diabolical entity living and thriving on aggression, bellicosity and war.

Indeed, the fact that almost every American politician, let alone the President of the Republic, feels obliged to grovel at Israel's feet, or else commit political suicide, illustrates the moral degeneration corroding America's collective conscience.

Alas! How could 320 million Americans, considered among the smartest in the world, have allowed a few rich Jews to eviscerate America of its soul and moral values, so much so that the country of Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and Washington, has effectively succumbed to the harlot, becoming a willing whore eager to serve and appease the rapacious Jewish pimp?

John Winthrop dreamed of a shining city on a hill, must be turning in their graves, seeing their country teetering under the evil Jewish yoke, a yoke that has morphed America from a shining city on a hill, into a Goliath sword, spreading evil, oppression and death everywhere.

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Stephen Lendman

Since WW II, America lost every war it waged. Its only success was destroying nations and murdering millions. Imagine that legacy for current and future historians to address. Imagine how few will do it accurately and honorably. Imagine a nation glorifying wars in the name of peace.

Historians Charles Beard and Gore Vidal called them "perpetual war(s) for perpetual peace." Historian Harry Elmer Barnes addressed the same issue, saying:

"If trends continue....we shall soon reach this point of no return, and can only anticipate interminable wars, disguised as noble gestures for peace." "Such an era could only culminate in a third world war which might well, as Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested, leave only the pygmies in remote jungles, or even the apes and ants, to carry on 'the cultural traditions' of mankind."

Wars to end all future ones is popular fiction. Woodrow Wilson wanted war and got it. So did Roosevelt, Truman, and other US presidents. Wars and violence define America. They're normal, commonplace, and unending. Peace, tranquility, and security are illusions. So are democratic values and rule of law principles.

Pacifism in America is considered sissy and unpatriotic. Wars of aggression are called liberating ones. Patriotism means supporting them. It's also about advancing the nation's imperium at the expense of vital homeland needs and security.

Imagine what's coming if this madness isn't stopped. Nothing in prospect looks promising. Media scoundrels promote war. They cheerlead it. They glorify what they should condemn.

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Matthew J. Nasuti

NATO’s war may end but its pollution of the Afghan countryside will take centuries to repair.

The primary decision that NATO officials reached in Chicago this week was to leave behind an Afghanistan contaminated by a decade of hazardous military waste. The plan is for NATO to wash its collective hands of their toxic handiwork. There are estimated to be more than a thousand NATO dumpsites located in Afghanistan, holding thousands of tons of buried hazardous waste.

If these NATO officials had done this in Germany or the United States they would have been serving long prison terms for their environmental crimes, but Western officials are conveniently ignoring both national and international law in Afghanistan. Buried liquids and other wastes are a slow-moving and expanding time bomb, and therefore NATO officials are seeking to scurry home before the full extent of the problem can be assessed and the costs of cleanup calculated. United Nations officials, to their discredit, have opted to remain silent, revealing once again the Western bias of the UN against developing countries.

This author previously served in the U.S. Air Force and was involved in the Pentagon’s base environmental cleanup program, now called DERP (the Defense Environmental Restoration Program). He also later worked for Bechtel Environmental as a contracts manager.

It is a certainty that thousands of hazardous chemicals and materials were shipped to Afghanistan in NATO vehicles, electronics, weapons, explosives, machines and other equipment, along with millions of gallons of fuel, oil, hydraulic fluids, solvents, degreasers, de-icing fluids, pesticides, poisons and herbicides, etc.

Carcinogenic used oil would have been dumped into the soil, as would most other waste. Solid wastes would have been placed into a landfill or set afire in burn pits. The reports are that anything that broke and could not be repaired was buried or burned, creating a stunning soup of highly toxic contaminants at each military location. That is NATO’s toxic legacy.

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Peter Symonds

Human skeletons and items of clothing are seen in a mass grave un-
covered in northern Balkh Province in January. Construction workers
digging a car park found at least 10 human skulls. (Photo: Reuters)

The attempted suppression of an Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) report on atrocities and war crimes committed by Afghan governments and warlords from 1978 to 2001 is devastating exposure of the US puppet regime in Kabul.

The AIHRC, an organisation set up by the Kabul regime itself, has documented the criminal record of the warlords who run the regime and the powers that backed them, above all the United States.

The 800-page report, entitled “Conflict Mapping in Afghanistan Since 1978,” was prepared over a six-year period from 2005 by a team of 40 researchers working with international legal and forensic experts. It found evidence of 180 mass graves, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrests, rape, and the destruction of towns and villages. Commissioner Ahmad Nader Nadery reported that the report tallied a million killed—not all through war crimes—and another 1.3 million disabled.

The report catalogues the crimes committed by all sides in the wars that raged in Afghanistan, including the 1978–1992 Soviet-backed regime and the CIA-backed traditionalist mujahedin militias that fought it, overthrew it, and then divided Afghanistan between themselves.

It details the brutal civil war that followed the fall of the Soviet-backed regime, as Islamist warlords whom Washington had hailed as “freedom fighters” battled for power and control of resources, including the lucrative Afghan opium trade. Atrocities and human rights abuses continued under the Taliban—who were formed with Pakistani backing and tacit US support—as well as their rival northern warlords.

Unsurprisingly, current Afghan officials named as responsible for atrocities objected to the release of the report, only portions of which were leaked to the media.

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Ray McGovern

Prime Minister B. Netanyahu and Defense Minister E. Barak

The likelihood of hostilities with Iran before the presidential election in November is increasing.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's strong pro-Israel statements over the weekend, including his endorsement of Jerusalem as Israel's capital (a reversal of long-standing U.S. policy), increases the pressure on President Barack Obama to prove that he is an equally strong backer of Israel.

The key question is whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will interpret the presidential campaign rhetoric as an open invitation to provoke hostilities with Iran, in the expectation that President Obama will feel forced to jump in with both feet in support of our "ally" Israel. (Since there is no mutual defense treaty between the U.S. and Israel, "ally" actually is a misnomer — at least in a juridical sense.)

As we saw 10 years ago with respect to Iraq, if one intends to whip up support for war, one needs to find a casus belli — however thin a pretext it might be. How about juxtaposing "weapons of mass destruction" with terrorism. That worked to prepare for war on Iraq, and similar rhetorical groundwork for an attack on Iran is now being laid in Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu broke all records for speed in blaming Iran and Hezbollah for the recent terrorist attack that killed five Israelis in Burgas, Bulgaria, and in vowing that "Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror."

But what is the evidence on Iranian or Hezbollah involvement? Bulgarian officials keep saying they have no such evidence. More surprising still, government officials in Washington and elsewhere keep warning against jumping to conclusions. So far the "evidence" against Iran consists primarily of trust-me assertions by Mr. Netanyahu.

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