by Stephen Lendman, SENIOR CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
“Entrapment is…manufactured to manipulate fear and justify America’s global war on terrorism. Nearly always, Muslims are charged. It’s part of America’s war on Islam.”
Incarcerated Muslims. Minorities continue to constitute the overwhelming majority of prisoners.
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With around 2.4 million incarcerated, America has by far the world’s largest prison system. Two-thirds in it are Black or Latino.
Most held are non-violent. Over half are for drug related charges. Around 75% are Blacks or Latinos. On all charges, many are persecuted political prisoners.
In her book titled, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Michelle Alexander called today’s Jim Crow a modern-day elitist-designed racial caste system. Believing poor Blacks (and Latinos) are dangerous and economically superfluous, America’s gulag became an instrument of social control. According to Alexander:
“Any movement to end mass incarceration must deal with (it) as a racial caste system, not (a method) of crime control. We need an effective system of crime prevention and control in our communities, but that is not what the current system is. (It’s) better designed to create crime, and a perpetual class of people labeled criminals, rather than to eliminate crime or reduce the number of criminals.” Read more…
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Comrades in Arms
Above: the Witmer sisters in Baghdad. Two of them served in the same unit.(Photo: bigredhair.com/)
From the Book
RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War
By William T. Hathaway
I received this letter from an ex-soldier.
Hi Mr. Hathaway,
I got your letter (forwarded) asking for information for your book. To answer your first question, Yes, I’m enjoying living in Holland. I’m becoming the little Dutch girl — the little Black Dutch girl, but that doesn’t bother people here. They’re very tolerant and internationally minded.
As for the rest of your questions, at first I didn’t think I could answer them. They reminded me too much of an essay test in school. Plus it’s not exactly pleasant to remember back on all this stuff, you know. I’m trying to leave it behind and start a new life. Read more…
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CounterPunch Diary
Pro-Assad demonstration. The country may be divided, but many genuinely support the government.
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Founding Editor, Counterpunch
This article appeared originally at Counterpunch.org
Support Counterpunch if you can.
Few spectacles have been more surreal than senior US officials – starting with the President, the Secretary of State and the US ambassador to the UN – solemnly lecturing Assad and his beleaguered Syrian government on the need to accommodate rebel forces whose GCC sponsors are intent on slaughtering the ruling Alawite minority or driving them into the sea.
At one grimly hilarious moment last Friday, these worthy sermons were buttressed by a message from Ayman al-Zwahiri, the head of al-Qaeda, therefore presumably the number one target on President Obama’s hit list, similarly praising the ‘Lions of Syria’ for rising up against the Assad regime. Al-Qaeda and the White House in sync! Read more…
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By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Priggish, obscurantist parties like the Republican, with an unapologetic mean-spirited platform of reactionism, can only survive in nations where politics is hopelessly Orwellian.
Dolan, stirring the pot with more calls for medievalism.
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For years progressives in the United States have been stating the Republicans and their platform simply don’t change over time. That back to the time of Reagan and in certain respects back to Hoover and even before him to McKinley, the GOP has been the party of the rich and the Corporate Power. That since Reagan, their platform, dressed up to be sure, has been focused on tax cuts for the rich, the destruction of the pitiful “safety net” that the US has for its poor, the turning back of the clock on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the repeal of environmental, labor, financial markets and workplace regulation, in more recent times joined by a heavy emphasis on using the government to enforce particular religion-based positions on such matters as abortion rights, who can marry whom, the uses of stem-cell research. And so and so forth. Read more…
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“Western politicians and media are not yet fighting World War III, but they are talking themselves into it.”
“Free Syria” can mean many things, depending on who’s shouting it.
by DIANA JOHNSTONE
Paris
What if pollsters put this question to citizens of the United States and the European Union :
“Which is more important, ensuring disgruntled Islamists freedom to overthrow the secular regime in Syria, or avoiding World War Three?”
I’ll bet that there might be a majority for avoiding World War III. But of course, the question is never framed like that. Read more…
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