On March 20, anti-war and international solidarity activists globally will mark the sixth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the US-led coalition of the willing.
Tony Iltis
Thousands of civilians have been killed or injured and hundreds of thousands are in danger from hunger and disease, as the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) continues its brutal offensive against the Tamil people in the island’s north-east.
In a speech to military troops at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina on February 27, US President Barack Obama announced that most of the 142,000 US soldiers in Iraq will be withdrawn by August 2010, leaving behind a “residual force” of 50,000 troops.
Five children were shot dead by Australian troops on February 12, near the village of Sarmorghab in Oruzgan province.
As of February 12, it was still unclear who will end up forming the next Israeli government following the February 10 parliamentary elections, with negotiations to form a new ruling coalition possibly continuing for six weeks.
However, what is clear is that regardless of who the eventual prime minister is or which parties are in the cabinet, the brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is set to intensify.
Somalia is often cited by Western politicians and journalists as the archetypical failed state, with no functioning state since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, and with power contested by warlords, Islamists, clan militias, armed criminal gangs and even pirates.Somalia is often cited by Western politicians and journalists as the archetypical "failed state", with no functioning state since the collapse of the last central government in 1991, and with power contested by warlords, Islamists, clan militias, armed criminal gangs and even pirates.
Israel is an apartheid state. This is the explanation for the appallingly assymetrical nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict, graphically demonstrated in the latest carnage in Gaza.
If Western politicians and media are to be believed, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is an anti-Semitic, religious fundamentalist, terrorist outfit that forms part of an al-Qaeda (or, alternatively, Iranian) led movement to violently impose Islamic law on the world, and dedicated to the annihilation of Jews.
The January 14 announcement by the Sri Lankan government that its forces had completed the capture of the Jaffna Peninsular, effectively bringing all of the historic Tamil nation in Sri Lanka’s north-east under military occupation, was a grim reminder that the Israeli assault on the Gaza ghetto is not the only holocaust at the start of the new year.
In a 1969 interview, then-Israeli PM Golda Meir, referring to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, said: “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people … and we came and threw them out and took their country … They did not exist.”
On November 16, in his first interview since his election victory, US president-elect Barack Obama told the CBS program 60 Minutes that his administration would close the notorious US concentration camp on the illegally occupied Cuban territory of Guantanamo Bay, and end the use of torture.
The November 7 Sydney Morning Herald reported that an advisor to US president-elect Barack Obama, Jeffrey Bader, had stated that the “first priority” of the Obama administration would be to seek a greater contribution from Australia to “winning the war in Afghanistan”.
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