Η δασκάλα που διχάζει

του Ηλία Κανέλλη

Τα Νέα
29 Δεκεμβρίου 2010

Η βράβευση της δασκάλας Χαράς Νικοπούλου από την Ακαδηµία Αθηνών «για τηναυταπάρνηση και την εθνοπρεπή της στάση κατά τη διάρκεια της υπηρεσίας της ως δασκάλας στο Μεγάλο Δέρειο του Νοµού Εβρου τα έτη 2004-08» είναι, επιεικώς, ατυχής. Πιθανόν, τα μέλη της Ακαδηµίας να πείσθηκαν ότι η στάση τής άλλοτε «δασκάλας του Εβρου» ήταν εθνοπρεπής από τους επαίνους που της απονεµήθηκαν σε τηλεοπτικές εκποµπές με ροπή προς τη συνωµοσιολογία και τα ΟΥΦΟ.

Στην πραγµατικότητα, βράβευσαν μια εκπαιδευτικό η οποία παρέκαµψε τα αναλυτικά προγράµµατα του υπουργείου Παιδείας, αγνόησε την ιδιαιτερότητα της μειονοτικής περιοχής και, θεωρώντας ότι αυτό είναι το πατριωτικό της καθήκον, επιχείρησε να καταργήσει την εκπαίδευση στη μειονοτική γλώσσα και, γενικώς, χώρισε τους μαθητές της βάσει γλωσσικών και θρησκευτικών διαφορών. Ενδεικτική της μεθόδου της είναι η εικόνα που εύκολα μπορεί κανείς να βρει στο Ιντερνετ, όταν την 25η Μαρτίου ένα κορίτσι της μειονότητας, η μικρή Εµινέ, είπε το «πατριωτικό» ποίηµα: «Βάλε τους Τούρκους εµπροστά / σαν τον χασάπη τα τραγιά κ.λπ.».

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Kichka

Patriot Gays

by William Saletan

Slate
December 20, 2010

"Don't ask, don't tell" is history. The House and Senate votes to repeal it, backed by President Obama's promised signature, are a cultural milestone. But where is this revolution going? Are we abandoning moral judgments about sex, or just rethinking them?

To social conservatives, DADT's demise is a collapse of values. It's an abandonment of "character," an attempt at "reshaping social attitudes regarding human sexuality" that would "destroy the military's moral backbone." A focus group participant sums up their fear: "People view the military as the last bastion of morals and what is good. If we break that down here … What's left?" The initial worry of these groups, bolstered by the military's report on repealing DADT, is that straight, unmarried personnel will demand the same partner benefits accorded to gays.

Conservatives tend to exaggerate the slippery slope from homosexuality to anything-goes. But many of the arguments for repealing DADT, coupled with ongoing efforts to reform military sex laws, do point in that direction. During the Senate debate, Majority Leader Harry Reid and his colleagues repeatedly argued that the military shouldn't care "who you love." They called that question a matter of "personal liberty." Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif, told her colleagues that after repealing DADT, "there is more work we have to do on this whole issue. There is still a lot of unfairness in our laws—partners not being able to have the same rights as married couples. That is another whole issue we will work on."

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Senate Repeals ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

New York Times
December 18, 2010

Capping a 17-year political struggle, the Senate on Saturday repealed the Pentagon’s ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.

By a vote of 65 to 31, the Senate sent the bill to President Obama, who had campaigned on ending the Clinton-era policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allows gay members of the armed forces to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret. A cloture vote of 63-33 earlier in the day had indicated that there was easily enough support to push the measure to final passage. The House had passed the measure, 250 to 175, on Wednesday.

“By ending ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the cloture vote. “And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love.”

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Η συμμαχία Χίτλερ-Στάλιν ευνόησε το Ολοκαύτωμα

της Κατερίνας Οικονομάκου

Ελευθεροτυπία
18 Δεκεμβρίου 2010

Πρόκειται για ένα από τα πιο φιλόδοξα και πολυσυζητημένα βιβλία ευρωπαϊκής Ιστορίας του 20ού αιώνα, που εκδόθηκαν τα τελευταία χρόνια. Ξανακοιτάζοντας τον Β' Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο, ο Τίμοθι Σνάιντερ θέτει νέα ερωτήματα, κάνοντας χρήση όλων των πηγών που έχει στη διάθεσή του ο σύγχρονος ερευνητής μετά τη διάλυση της ΕΣΣΔ.

Το βιβλίο αρχίζει με μια παρατήρηση για τον χώρο και το χρόνο: ανάμεσα στη Βαλτική και τη Μαύρη Θάλασσα, ανάμεσα στο Βερολίνο και τη Μόσχα, εκτείνεται μια γεωγραφική ζώνη την οποία ο Σνάιντερ αποκαλεί «πεδία αίματος». Σήμερα αυτή η ζώνη περικλείει τη δυτική Ρωσία, τα κράτη της Βαλτικής, τη Λευκορωσία, την Ουκρανία και το μεγαλύτερο τμήμα της Πολωνίας.

«Αν εξετάσει κανείς αυτήν την περιοχή, θα διαπιστώσει ότι τα περισσότερα ναζιστικά εγκλήματα και ένα δυσανάλογα μεγάλο ποσοστό από τα σοβιετικά εγκλήματα έλαβαν χώρα εκεί και όχι κάπου αλλού», λέει ο Σνάιντερ, καθηγητής Ιστορίας στο Yale. «Η περίοδος κατά την οποία και ο Χίτλερ και ο Στάλιν είναι στην εξουσία, είναι η ιστορική στιγμή κατά την οποία σε αυτή την περιοχή έχουμε το Ολοκαύτωμα αλλά και τις μαζικότερες δολοφονίες στην ιστορία της Ευρώπης».

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Ελευθερολογία πριν και μετά το Διαδίκτυο

του Πάσχου Mανδραβέλη

Καθημερινή
17 Δεκεμβρίου 2010

Συνήθως τα έγγραφα που οι κυβερνήσεις θέλουν να μείνουν κρυφά, έρχονται στη δημοσιότητα κατά μερικές δεκάδες σελίδες. Τόσες συνήθως μπορούν να φωτοτυπηθούν και να διαρρεύσουν στον Τύπο. Οχι όμως στην εποχή της πληροφορικής τεχνολογίας. Χωρίς αυτή δεν θα μπορούσε να υπάρχει κάτι σαν το κίνημα των WikiLeaks. Για ένα απλό λόγο: 251.287 διπλωματικά έγγραφα, που ήταν η τελευταία φουρνιά, είναι αδύνατον να φωτοτυπηθούν και να μοιραστούν. Μπορούν όμως να αντιγραφούν και να αποσταλούν ψηφιακά με το πάτημα ενός κουμπιού.

Στην εποχή προ της πληροφορικής τεχνολογίας υπάρχει μόνο μια σχετικά μεγάλη διαρροή εγγράφων. Το 1967, ο υπουργός Αμυνας των ΗΠΑ Ρόμπερτ Μακναμάρα, έδωσε εντολή να αποτυπωθεί η πορεία και η κατάσταση του πολέμου στο Βιετνάμ. Το έργο των 36 αναλυτών, που πήρε την ονομασία «Εγγραφα του Πενταγώνου», απαρτιζόταν από 3.000 σελίδες ιστορικής ανάλυσης για τον πόλεμο και 4.000 επίσημα έγγραφα. Από αυτές τις 7.000 σελίδες διέρρευσε ένα μεγάλο κομμάτι κατ' αρχήν στους New York Times και κατόπιν σε 15 ακόμη εφημερίδες των ΗΠΑ.

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Margaret Thatcher: Free Society Speech (1975)

Margaret Thatcher does a spot of spring cleaning and sweeps away socialism in this early rallying speech from the Conservative Party Conference of 1975. Four years later, Thatcher would become Prime Minister and this speech bodly outlines the kind of values upheld by her government and exemplifies her commitment to the free market, a property-owning democracy and the rights of the individual.

British Court Orders Leader of WikiLeaks Freed on Bail

New York Times
December 14, 2010

After a week in detention facing possible extradition, Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks antisecrecy group, was ordered released on $310,000 bail by a court on Tuesday as he challenges a Swedish prosecutor’s demand for his extradition to face questioning about alleged sex offenses.

Judge Howard Riddle ordered that Mr. Assange appear again in court on Jan. 11. He also said that between then and now he must reside at Ellingham Hall, a Georgian mansion in Bungay, eastern England, owned by Vaughan Smith, the founder of the Frontline Club, which is used mainly by journalists. Mr. Assange must spend every night at the mansion and will be electronically tagged so the police can track his movements, the judge said.

Additionally, Mr. Assange will be under curfew every day from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will be required to report daily to the police from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. His passport is already with the police and, under the terms of his bail, he is not permitted to try to travel abroad.

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Focus on the Policy, Not WikiLeaks

by Ron Paul

LewRockwell.com
December 13, 2010

We may never know the whole story behind the recent publication of sensitive U.S. government documents by the WikiLeaks organization, but we certainly can draw some important conclusions from the reaction of so many in government and media.

At its core, the WikiLeaks controversy serves as a diversion from the real issue of what our foreign policy should be. But the mainstream media, along with neoconservatives from both political parties, insist on asking the wrong question. When presented with embarrassing disclosures about U.S. spying and meddling, the policy that requires so much spying and meddling is not questioned. Instead, the media focus on how so much sensitive information could have been leaked, or how authorities might prosecute the publishers of such information.

No one questions the status quo or suggests a wholesale rethinking of our foreign policy. No one suggests that the White House or the State Department should be embarrassed that the U.S. engages in spying and meddling. The only embarrassment is that it was made public. This allows ordinary people to actually know and talk about what the government does. But state secrecy is anathema to a free society. Why exactly should Americans be prevented from knowing what their government is doing in their name?

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John Lennon vs. Bono: The death of the celebrity activist

by William Easterly

Washington Post
December 10, 2010

The recent release of the Beatles' music on iTunes, coupled with the anniversary of John Lennon's tragic death in New York City 30 years ago this past Wednesday, has brought on a wave of Beatles nostalgia. For so many of my generation, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, Lennon was a hero, not just for his music but for his fearless activism against the Vietnam War.

Is there a celebrity activist today who matches Lennon's impact and appeal? The closest counterpart to Lennon now is U2's Bono, another transcendent musical talent championing another cause: the battle against global poverty. But there is a fundamental difference between Lennon's activism and Bono's, and it underscores the sad evolution of celebrity activism in recent years.

Lennon was a rebel. Bono is not.

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Liu Xiaobo Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony: China Among 19 Countries To Turn Down Invitation

Associated Press/Huffington Post
December 7, 2010

China and 18 other countries have declined to attend this year's Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honoring imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, Nobel officials said Tuesday as China unleashed a new barrage deriding the decision.

Chinese officials in Beijing called Liu's backers "clowns" in an anti-Chinese farce – comments that came only three days before the Dec. 10 Nobel peace prize ceremony in Oslo.

Beijing considers Liu's recognition an attack on China's political and legal system, and says the country's policies will not be swayed by outside forces in what it calls "flagrant interference in China's sovereignty."

Liu, 54, is serving an 11-year sentence on subversion charges brought after he co-authored a bold call for sweeping changes to China's one-party communist political system known as Charter 08.

Countries that have turned down an invitation to Friday's ceremony include Chinese allies Pakistan, Venezuela and Cuba, Chinese neighbors such as Russia, the Philippines and Kazakhstan, and Chinese business partners such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Other countries not appearing at the Oslo City Hall ceremony include Ukraine, Colombia, Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Iraq, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Serbia and Morocco.

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The Death of Neoconservatism: Six Questions for C. Bradley Thompson

by Scott Horton

Harper's Magazine
December 2010

C. Bradley Thompson, a political science professor at Clemson University, has recently teamed up with Yaron Brook to write Neoconservatism: An Obiturary for an Idea, a classical-liberal critique of the neoconservative movement. The book systematically examines the economic, political, and cultural underpinnings of neoconservatism, exploring its relationship to the philosophy of Leo Strauss and its influential and menacing ideas about warfare. I put six questions to Thompson about the book:

1. At the core of your book is the notion that neoconservatism is dead. But consider that Politico recently published an analysis of Obama’s Middle East policies in which ten of eleven persons quoted were neocons (the eleventh was a Palestinian). The Washington Post’s editorial page is rapidly becoming a neocon fortress. Is it really time to talk about the “death” of neoconservatism?

The short answer is both “no” and “yes.” The neocons still dominate the conservative think-tank world, and they are a major presence in the media. They play a major role in defining the ideas of the conservative intellectual movement and the policies of the Republican Party. On one level, they are far from irrelevant and must be taken seriously.

Why then an obituary? The title plays off the title of one of Irving Kristol’s most important essays, “Socialism: An Obituary for an Idea,” which was as much prognostic as it was diagnostic. Professional obituarists also often write the biographical parts of a death notice long before their subjects die. Our book, then, should be read as prolegomena to any future obituary. We also hope our obituary for neoconservatism serves, paradoxically, as the murder weapon as well. Readers might imagine Charlotte Corday writing and publishing Marat’s obituary as she traveled to Paris.

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Conditions Deplored for Migrants Being Held in Greece at Turkish Border

New York Times
December 7, 2010

While Frontex, the European Union border agency, has sent a special force to close the Greek-Turkish land border to illegal immigration, a human rights group visiting the area said on Monday that they had found more than 800 migrants being held in “inhumane” conditions in Greece, with 120 minors including 9 girls locked up in one overcrowded facility containing 450 people.

Greece’s northeastern land border has become a big crossing point for economic migrants and refugees trying to enter the European Union now that sea routes to Italy and Malta have been closed. In October, Greece requested help from Frontex, which on Nov. 2 sent 175 agents, a helicopter and detector equipment to the region to halt the arrivals.

Gil Arias Fernández, deputy executive director of Warsaw-based Frontex, said in Athens last week that migrant numbers had dropped by 44 percent since the operation began, with 4,720 people intercepted in November compared with 7,586 the previous month; 13 smugglers had been arrested, too.

But members of Human Rights Watch, a Washington-based rights body, issued a statement in Brussels on Monday saying that they had found Afghans, Eritreans, Iraqis, Algerians, Syrians, Iranians and Moroccans in “degrading” conditions at four of the five detention centers along the border, and that Frontex could not “turn a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis for migrants in the Greek border region.”

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Εικόνες ντροπής από τη κράτηση μεταναστών στον Έβρο καταγράφει η Human Rights Watch

Το Βήμα
6 Δεκεμβρίου 2010

Τους «υπερπλήρεις χώρους κράτησης» των αλλοδαπών στον Έβρο, τις κακές συνθήκες υγιεινής και τους τρόπους πίεσης για να μην υποβάλλονται αιτήσεις για πολιτικό άσυλο καταγράφει η διεθνής οργάνωση Human Rights Watch σε έκθεσή της υπό τον τίτλο «Ελλάδα: Τέλος στις Απάνθρωπες Συνθήκες Κράτησης για τους Μετανάστες».

Η οργάνωση συστήνει στις ελληνικές Αρχές να μεταφέρουν άμεσα στο άδειο κέντρο κράτησης στη Σάμο τους αλλοδαπούς που βρίσκονται στους υπερπλήρεις χώρους κράτησης στον Έβρο ενώ κρούει τον κώδωνα κινδύνου για τα 120 ασυνόδευτα ανήλικα που κρατούνται για εβδομάδες στο Κέντρο Κράτησης Φυλακίου από Αφγανιστάν, Ερυθραία, Ιράκ, Αλγερία, Συρία, Ιράν, Μαρόκο.

Συγχρόνως, συστήνεται η κατάσταση στην Ελλάδα να τεθεί ως επείγον θέμα στη προσεχή διάσκεψη των υπουργών Εσωτερικών στις Βρυξέλλες στις 9 και 10 Δεκεμβρίου.

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Greece: End Inhumane Detention Conditions for Migrants

Human Rights Watch
December 6, 2010

Greek officials should immediately transfer migrants from overcrowded and inhumane detention sites in the Evros region to an empty facility on Samos Island and protect the 120 unaccompanied migrant children among them, Human Rights Watch said today. These migrants have crossed into Greece from Turkey in recent weeks and months, and come from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Algeria, Syria, Iran, and Morocco.

The number of migrants arriving in northern Greece from Turkey has risen dramatically in 2010. They include asylum seekers, unaccompanied children, single women, and families with young children. Human Rights Watch conducted research in the northern region of Greece during the first week of December and witnessed conditions so overcrowded that detainees cannot even lie down to sleep. Women and children are crammed in cells with men. Toilet facilities are so limited that guards sometimes escort detainees to defecate and urinate in nearby fields. These conditions clearly risk the health and safety of detainees, and constitute inhuman and degrading treatment, in violation of binding international law, Human Rights Watch said.

"Authorities told Human Rights Watch last year that they transferred migrants from the islands to the north to prevent overcrowding." said Simone Troller, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. "But now they need to respond to the overcrowding in the north, which is creating dangerous, unhealthy conditions."

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Athens mosque plan faces new hurdles

Guardian
November 28, 2010

A controversial bid to build a mosque in Athens has assumed new, more dramatic proportions amid threats by the far-right to stop its construction and a denial by the renowned Anglo-Iraqi architect, Zaha Hadid, that she is involved in its design.

Tensions have soared in the only EU capital where Muslims are still forced to pray in underground basement flats and garages in the absence of a proper place of worship.

Two weeks after a neo-fascist party won its first-ever seat on Athens council in local elections – highlighting growing Greek hostility over the country's rising immigrant population –opposition to the decades-old project has grown.

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Russia’s Dictatorship of Law

New York Times
Editorial
November 20, 2010

Russia’s newly outrageous legal treatment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former owner of the country’s largest oil company, is a reminder that Russia has yet to grasp the idea of equal justice under law — especially when the Kremlin decides someone is in the way.

Mr. Khodorkovsky was convicted in 2005 on trumped-up charges of fraud and disobeying a court order and lost his company to Kremlin loyalists. Russians call his sort of case “telephone law,” imposed by the politically powerful through a call to the courthouse. With his sentence almost up, he was just tried again on suspect charges of embezzling and money-laundering. The judge is expected to reach a decision in December.

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Myanmar patients face eviction after Suu Kyi visit

Associated Press/Yahoo News
November 20, 2010

Myanmar's government ordered more than 80 people at a shelter for patients with HIV and AIDS to leave following a visit by newly freed democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, the center's organizers said Saturday.

Suu Kyi, released a week ago from seven years under house arrest, visited the shelter on the outskirts of Yangon on Wednesday, promising to provide it with badly needed medicines. She also addressed a crowd of more than 600 who came to see her.

A day after her visit, government officials told patients they would have to leave by next week or face legal action because the center's permit was not being renewed, said Phyu Phyu Thin, a pro-democracy activist who founded the operation. By law, home owners must seek government permission every two weeks to allow visitors to stay overnight.

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Rap and Metal on Planet Islam

by James M. Dorsey

Reason
December 2010

Nabyl Guennouni, 30, is a heavy metal singer and band manager in Morocco. He also sits on a jury that selects rising talents to perform at Casablanca’s annual L’Boulevard des Jeunes Musiciens, a six-day extravaganza in two soccer stadiums that has become North Africa’s largest underground music festival, with some 160,000 visitors each year. This marks a dramatic change for Guennouni. When he and 13 other black-shirted, baseball-capped, middle-class headbangers tried to organize a music festival seven years ago, the police dragged them from their homes and charged them with wooing young Moroccans into Satanism, with a bonus count of promoting prostitution. Morocco’s legal system allows a maximum sentence of three years for such attempts to convert Muslims to another faith.

Egged on by conservative Islamist politicians, who six months earlier had doubled their number of seats in parliament, prosecutors produced as evidence against Guennouni fake skeletons and skulls, plaster cobras, a latex brain, T-shirts depicting the devil, and “a collection of diabolical CDs,” which they described as “un-Islamic” and “objects that breach morality.” In cross-examination, the government attorneys asked the defendants such questions as, “Why do you cut the throats of cats and drink their blood?” Al Attajdid, a conservative daily, depicted the musicians as part of a movement that “encourages all forms of delinquency, alcohol and licentiousness which are ignored by the authorities.” One of the trial judges maintained that “normal people go to concerts wearing suits and ties” and that it was “suspicious” that some of the musicians’ lyrics had been penned in English.

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Vikram David Amar A Preview of Possible Outcomes of the Upcoming Proposition 8 Argument Before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

by Vikram David Amar

FindLaw
November 19, 2010

On December 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear oral argument in the federal constitutional challenge to Proposition 8 -- California's voter-enacted ban on same-sex marriage. While the identity of the three judges to whom the appeal has been assigned won't be known until a week before the argument, the time is ripe to sketch out at least some of the possible outcomes of the Ninth Circuit proceedings.

On one hand, the Ninth Circuit might decide the merits of the constitutional challenge and affirm U.S. District Judge Walker's conclusion that Proposition 8 violates the Fourteenth Amendment because discrimination against same-sex couples in the marriage context violates their fundamental liberty rights under the U.S. Constitution's due process clause, and/or is irrational under its equal protection clause.

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«Είδα μητέρα με το οκτώ μηνών μωρό της σε κελί-τεκέ»

Το Βήμα
20 Νοεμβρίου 2010

Ενα βήμα πριν από τον διασυρμό βρίσκεται η Ελλάδα καθώς έχει λάβει αυστηρή προειδοποίηση από το Συμβούλιο της Ευρώπης να αντιμετωπίσει την αστυνομική βία, διαφορετικά θα εκδοθεί δημόσια καταγγελία εναντίον της. «Στα 20 χρόνια ύπαρξης της Επιτροπής για την Πρόληψη των Βασανιστηρίων και της Απάνθρωπης Συμπεριφοράς έχουν πραγματοποιηθεί μόνο τέσσερις ή πέντε δημόσιες καταγγελίες» λέει σε αποκλειστική συνέντευξή του προς το Βήμα ο Μάριο Φελίτσε, επικεφαλής της αντιπροσωπείας που επισκέφθηκε την Ελλάδα τον Σεπτέμβριο του 2009 και έδωσε την περασμένη εβδομάδα στη δημοσιότητα μια έκθεση-καταπέλτη για την συμπεριφορά των αστυνομικών, τις συνθήκες κράτησης των λαθρομεταναστών και την κατάσταση των ελληνικών φυλακών.

Αστυνομικό τμήμα οδού Μοναστηρίου στη Θεσσαλονίκη. Η Επιτροπή του Συμβουλίου της Ευρώπης βλέπει ένα μωρό οκτώ μηνών να κρατείται μαζί με τη μητέρα του σε ένα κελί το οποίο μοιράζονται με μια κρατούμενη που καπνίζει σαν φουγάρο. «Η μητέρα ήταν μη καπνίστρια.Ακόμη και μόνη της,δεν έπρεπε να κρατείται στο ίδιο κελί με κάποια που καπνίζει συνέχεια, πόσω μάλλον που είχε και το μωρό» λέει ο κ. Φελίτσε. «Οι αρχές οφείλουν να δείχνουν μεγαλύτερη ευαισθησία». Επιπλέον, «δεν υπήρχε ζεστό νερό για να πλύνει το παιδί ούτε της παρείχαν πάνες ή άλλα προϊόντα για την υγιεινή του».

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Παραβιάσεις

Το Βήμα
Κύριο Άρθρο
20 Νοεμβρίου 2010

Η έκθεση του Συμβουλίου της Ευρώπης περιγράφει με μελανά χρώματα την κατάσταση στις ελληνικές φυλακές. Ξυλοδαρμοί, βασανιστήρια, ναρκωτικά, συνωστισμός, κανένας σεβασμός στα δικαιώματα των γυναικών κρατουμένων και συνθήκες άθλιες στα κρατητήρια των αστυνομικών τμημάτων. Αυτή η κατάφωρη παραβίαση των ανθρωπίνων δικαιωμάτων δεν είναι ανεκτή κατάσταση σε μια σύγχρονη Δημοκρατία.

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Δείτε επίσης

TV Channel, Part Owned by Murdoch, Gets Threats in Iran

New York Times
November 19, 2010

In little more than a year, the Persian-language satellite television channel beamed into Iran by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and a prominent Afghan family has rapidly become one of the most popular stations in the country.

A little too popular, it appears.

This week, a long-running campaign led by the Iranian government to undermine the channel, Farsi1, took a menacing turn: A group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army hacked into Farsi1’s Web site, as well as several sites owned by the Mohseni family, and posted a cryptic but sinister warning.

“The allies of Zionism should know this,” said the message, which stayed on the Web sites for about six hours on Thursday. “Dreams of destroying the foundation of the family will lead straight to the graveyard.”

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Honoring Liu Xiaobo

New York Times
Editorial
November 19, 2010

China’s autocrats have tried pretty much everything they can think of to stop the world from celebrating the courage of Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned democracy activist. It tried to bully the Nobel committee into not awarding Mr. Liu this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. When the committee went ahead, China confined Mr. Liu’s wife to her home, barred others from attending the ceremony, and warned governments not to go.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has rightly decided to proceed with the Dec. 10 awards ceremony. The rules say the prize must be presented to the winner or a member of his family. So the committee is expected to postpone bestowing the medal and the $1.5 million award but read some of Mr. Liu’s writings aloud.

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The Uproar Over Pat-Downs

New York Times
Editorial
November 19, 2010

Americans understand the need for security screenings at airports and are remarkably patient. So there is no excuse for the bumbling, arrogant way the Transportation Security Administration has handled questions and complaints about its new body-scanning machines and more aggressive pat-downs.

The Times reported on Friday that civil liberties groups have collected more than 400 complaints since the new pat-downs began three weeks ago. That is a minuscule number compared with all the people who flew. But there are far too many reports of T.S.A. agents groping passengers, using male agents to search female passengers, mocking passengers and disdaining complaints.

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Why I Still Believe in the Future

by Bernard Baruch

Wall Street Journal
November 20, 2010

Baruch (1870-1965) was a financier and an adviser to Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt and Truman. He read this text over CBS radio in 1953; it has been reprinted many times since, including in the book, "Edward R. Murrow's This I Believe: Selections from the 1950s Radio Series" (2010).

When I was a younger man, I believed that progress was inevitable—that the world would be better tomorrow and better still the day after. The thunder of war, the stench of concentration camps, the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb are, however, not conducive to optimism. All our tomorrows for years to come will be clouded by the threat of a terrible holocaust.

Yet my faith in the future, though somewhat shaken, is not destroyed. I still believe in it. If I sometimes doubt that man will achieve his mortal potentialities, I never doubt that he can.

I believe that these potentialities promise all men a measure beyond reckoning of the joys and comforts, material and spiritual, that life offers. Not utopia, to be sure. I do not believe in utopias. Man may achieve all but perfection.

Paradise is not for this world. All men cannot be masters, but none need to be a slave. We cannot cast out pain from the world, but needless suffering we can. Tragedy will be with us in some degree as long as there is life, but misery we can banish. Injustice will raise its head in the best of all possible worlds, but tyranny we can conquer. Evil will invade some men's hearts, intolerance will twist some men's minds, but decency is a far more common human attribute, and it can be made to prevail in our daily lives.

I believe all this because I believe, above all else, in reason—in the power of the human mind to cope with the problems of life. Any calamity visited upon man, either by his own hand or by a more omnipotent nature, could have been avoided or at least mitigated by a measure of thought. To nothing so much as the abandonment of reason does humanity owe its sorrows. Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in private and public life, have been the consequence of action without thought.

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Freedom from fear

Economist
November 18, 2010

It was hard not to be moved both by the demeanour of Aung San Suu Kyi when she was freed from house arrest in Yangon on November 13th, and by the popular reaction to her freedom. Her grace, courage and good humour seem undiminished. Meanwhile, the thousands who flocked to her gate demolished the myth that she is no longer central to Myanmar’s politics. Yet in the euphoria of the moment, it was easy to forget that those politics, too, are in essence unchanged. The foundations for the optimism she herself professes seem flimsy.

Since she was first locked up in 1989, Miss Suu Kyi has twice before been “freed”, only for it to become apparent that she had in effect simply been moved into a larger prison, so strict were the limits on her activities. This time she emerges into a changed world. Until this week she had, for instance, never used a mobile phone or surfed the internet. The political landscape in Myanmar is also altered, even if the first elections for 20 years, held on November 7th, were designed to strengthen the grip on power of the ruling junta, whose party has claimed a massive victory.

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Repeal It. Now.

New York Times
Editorial
November 18, 2010

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, made the right call this week in pledging to push for repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy during the lame-duck session of Congress. The odds of ridding the country of the destructive ban on gay soldiers serving openly will diminish greatly in the next Congress when Republicans take over the House and gain strength in the Senate.

The House has approved a bill authorizing repeal, pending completion of a Pentagon review, and the Senate tried to do the same in September only to be blocked by the threat of a Republican-led filibuster. Now it is urgent for the Obama administration and Senate Democrats to try again in the brief lame-duck session.

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The Ghailani Verdict

New York Times
November 18, 2010

The verdict in the first federal trial of a former Guantánamo detainee has unleashed the usual chest-thumping and fear-mongering from the usual politicians. They are disappointed that the defendant was only convicted of one count of conspiring to blow up American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 — a crime for which he will probably serve a life sentence.

That clearly wasn’t enough for Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican who will be the next chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He showed a shocking disdain for the 12 jurors, who deliberated more than four days. He described their verdict as a “total miscarriage of justice.”

Senator John McCain proclaimed on the “Imus in the Morning” program that the verdict proved that all terrorism cases should be tried in military commissions, which he said were set up to “get the job done.”

It’s not clear what job Mr. McCain had in mind, unless he meant guaranteeing guilty verdicts, on all counts, all of the time, no matter what the facts are in a case. President George W. Bush created such a system. The Supreme Court rightly declared it unconstitutional.

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Chinese Woman Imprisoned for Twitter Message

New York Times
November 18, 2010

A Chinese woman was sentenced to one year in a labor camp on Wednesday after she forwarded a satirical microblog message that urged recipients to attack the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, human rights groups said Thursday.

The woman, Cheng Jianping, 46, was accused of “disturbing social order” for resending a Twitter message from her fiancé that mocked young nationalists who held anti-Japanese rallies in several cities last month. The original message sarcastically goaded protesters to go beyond the smashing of Japanese products and express their fury at the heavily policed expo site.

Ms. Cheng added the words: “Charge, angry youth.”

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Nobel Winner’s Absence May Delay Awarding of Prize

Wall Street Journal
November 18, 2010

During the depths of the cold war, when the Soviet physicist and human rights advocate Andrei D. Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Kremlin barred him from leaving the country. But the authorities allowed his wife to collect the award in his stead.

Confronted with a similar challenge in 1983, the Polish authorities permitted the wife of the trade unionist Lech Walesa to travel to Oslo on his behalf. In 1991, the son of the Burmese opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi delivered the acceptance speech for his mother, who was being held under house arrest.

But the Chinese government has come up with a less magnanimous approach to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to give the peace prize to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, 54, who is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion. Mr. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, has been held incommunicado since news of the award broke last month, and the government has been waging a muscular offensive to rebrand the prize as a Western ploy to undermine the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power.

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Thank the Courts

by Linda Greenhouse

New York Times
November 18, 2010

“America has reached a fork in the road, and the time has come to make a decisive choice,” Daniel J. Popeo, chairman of the Washington Legal Foundation, wrote this week in his monthly column in The Washington Examiner. The choice he posited was between continuing to endure judicial intervention in the conduct of the war on terrorism and “returning control over national and homeland security decisions to the executive and legislative branches.”

I don’t mean to single out the Washington Legal Foundation, a respected conservative research and litigation organization. It is hardly alone in its ritualized framing of a dichotomy between law and national security.

And that’s the point. That the courts — and the lawyers who bring cases to them — are a threat to the country is a trope that has penetrated deep into public consciousness. The typical accompanying warning against “Miranda rights for terrorists” resonates with the doom-saying of an earlier generation of conservatives to the effect that courts make it impossible to keep the streets safe from common criminals.

Now, as then, politicians who would stand up for the courts do so at their peril, or presumed peril. Mark the Obama administration’s painful indecision about what to do with the self-described mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as Exhibit A. A New York jury’s acquittal this week of Ahmed Ghailani, the accused embassy bomber, on all but one of many charges provided an utterly predictable platform for Republican politicians to denounce the use of civilian courts to try terrorism cases.

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Αφγανός μετανάστης κατήγγειλε ξυλοδαρμό από αστυνομικούς

Τα Νέα
19 Δεκεμβρίου 2010

Τον ξυλοδαρμό του από αστυνομικούς καταγγέλλει Αφγανός μετανάστης και δηλώνει ότι θα καταθέσει εναντίον τους μήνυση. Ο 43χρονος Αφγανός συνελήφθη μαζί με το 2,5 χρονών παιδί του έξω από σούπερ μάρκετ στο Περιστέρι και οδηγήθηκε στο ΑΤ Περιστερίου, όπου υπέστη το βασανισμό. Οι αντιρατσιστικές οργανώσεις έχουν ενημερώσει για το περιστατικό την Ύπατη Αρμοστεία του ΟΗΕ για τους Πρόσφυγες και τη Διεθνή Αμνηστία και ζητούν την διεξαγωγή έρευνας και την απόδοση ευθυνών.

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