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I want to tell the world a story

About a home with a broken lantern

And a burnt doll

About a picnic that wasn’t enjoyed

About an axe that killed a tulip

A story about a fire that consumed a plait

a story about a tear that couldn’t run down

I want to tell a story about a goat that wasn’t milked

About a mother’s dough that wasn’t baked

About a wedding that wasn’t celebrated

And a baby girl that didn’t grow up

About a football that wasn’t kicked

About a dove that didn’t fly

I want to tell a story about a key that wasn’t used

About a classroom that wasn’t attended

About a playground that was silenced

About a book that wasn’t read

About a besieged lonely farm

And about its fruits that weren’t picked

About a lie that wasn’t discovered

A story about a church that’s no longer prayed in

And a mosque that no longer stands

And a culture no longer rejoiced

I want to tell a story about a muddy grassy roof

About a stone that faced a tank

And about a stubborn flag that refuses to lie down

About a spirit that cannot be defeated

I want to tell the world a story

Now light a little candle for Palestine

You can do it

Light a candle One little candle

Watch the darkness fade away

Just try it out

One ray of light

Wipes away the gloomiest

Jet-black nights

As the dawn breaks

Just observe

Can you see that

All the might of darkness

In the world

Cannot extinguish

The faintest flicker

Of a beam of light

Light a candle

One little candle

Watch the darkness fade away

You can do it

Hey.. WORLD

Did you hear me?

I am a Jerusalem-born Palestinian refugee living in exile for over 42 years. I was forced to leave my homeland, Palestine at the age of seven during the six-day war. I am a mathematician by profession. I started writing about three years ago when my friends insisted I should write about my memories, experiences, and feelings as a Palestinian. I did… but it all came out -for some strange reason- sounding -as I am told- like poetry! So I self published two books (I Believe in Miracles, and Palestine, The True Story. Write to me at: nahidayasin@googlemail.com

AUTHOR: Nahida

27 April, 2010

Poetryforpalestine Blog

Original article published on 15 July 2008

The first step in the quest for inter-community dialogue is the search for common ground. Religious and cultural differences divide Hindus and Muslims from each other. This diversity need not necessarily be seen as intimidating, however. In fact, the Quran explains that diversity is natural. The Quran instructs us thus:

‘If God so willed, He could make you all one people’ (16:93).

Commenting on the above-quoted Quranic verse, the noted Islamic scholar Imam Razi writes in his Tafsir-e Kabir that this refers to the fact of diversity of religions and customs among human beings.

Nature desires diversity, not uniformity. That is why we should aim not at eliminating these differences but, rather, to tolerate them in accordance with the demands of Nature.

Man is a social animal. It is ingrained in his nature to seek to live in peace with others. That is why there are no two communities in the entire world that have nothing in common between them. It was for the common purpose of protection, peace and justice that the Prophet entered into a treaty or pact with the Jews of Medina. This is an instance of practical inter-community dialogue based on common values and concerns.

The basic task before is to seek to develop and promote that spirit among both Hindus and Muslims that would urge them to ignore their differences and, instead, focus on what they have in common or on issues of common concern that can bring them closer to each other. We must not let what sets us apart overwhelm what we have in common. A key aspect that we Indian Hindus and Muslims have in common is our Indianness, the fact of belonging to the same land. Another key issue and concern that can bring us together is a common quest for preventing moral decline in our societies, which both Hindus and Muslims are faced with. Anti-religious forms of secularism and liberalism invented in the West that claim to have ‘liberated’ human beings from God have led to horrendous anarchy throughout the world, including in our own country. This calls for Hindus, Muslims and people of other faiths, who take their religions seriously, to work together to combat such dangerous tendencies. This is a duty we all owe to God and to humanity, which we must undertake in cooperation with each other.

Hindu-Muslim dialogue involves efforts at both the intellectual as well as practical levels. But, all these efforts can make no headway without sincerity of purpose. If these efforts are made simply for political gain or fame they can produce no positive results. Parties to the dialogue must be conscious of the fact that they need each other. They must realize that they can and, indeed, must, learn from each other. They must know that the progress of our common homeland, and, therefore, of each and every community that inhabits it, is impossible without Hindu-Muslim cooperation. For meaningful dialogue between Muslims and Hindus, both must consider themselves not as opponents but as friends, or at least as potential friends.

Hindu-Muslim dialogue, or inter-community dialogue more generally, must focus, among other issues, on addressing and removing mutual misunderstandings, which are often rooted in deeply-held but misleading negative stereotypical images of the ‘other’. Some of these misunderstandings are rooted in our traditional ways of thinking about the ‘other’. One such contentious issue is the way Muslims understand the status of the Hindus and their religion in terms of the shariah. While many ulema see nothing of worth in the Hindu religion and consider all the Hindus to be polytheists, some of them are of the view that the basic principles of monotheism and prophethood can be discerned in the religious traditions of the Hindus. The founder of the Dar ul-Uloom at Deoband, Maulana Qasim Nanotavi, was of the opinion that Ram and Krishna might possibly have been prophets of God and that is why Muslims must not say anything bad about them. Some scholars, including a leading Sanskrit scholar Pandit Ved Prakash Upadhyaya, claim that the Kalki Avatar or Antim Rishi mentioned in some Hindu scriptures actually refers to the Prophet Muhammad. If this is true, then obviously these scriptures cannot be said not to have been of divine origin.

Another issue that continues to be discussed in ulema circles is the status of Hindus in terms of the shariah. This question needs to be resolved in the interest of Hindu-Muslim dialogue. If, as the ulema claim, the Hindus, or many of them, are polytheists (mushriks), are they to be considered mushriks in the same sense as Muslims understood the pagan Arabs at the time of the Prophet? I personally believe that a distinction should be made between the two. Even the classical jurists and Quranic commentators differentiated between the Arab pagans, who virulently opposed the Prophet, and other pagan so that the commandment for jihad vis-à-vis the former did not apply in the same way to the latter. It is critical to distinguish the Hindus from the Arab pagans because of the tendency of many ulema to relate and apply Quranic verses about the pagan Arabs to the Hindus of today, as, for instance, the verse which says, ‘Strongest among men in enmity to the believers will you find the Jews and pagans’ (5:82). Clearly, this is unacceptable.

Yet another issue that must be clarified if Hindu-Muslim dialogue is to proceed is the distinction between Islam and Muslim history. We must not, as we often do, adopt a defensive attitude towards the latter by seeking to justify the misdeeds of Muslim rulers or argue, through erroneous interpretation of Islamic sources, that all the actions of the Sultans and Muslim religious figures were actually in accordance with the teachings of Islam. If the policies of many Muslim rulers of the early Islamic period, which many Muslims regard as a ‘Golden Age’, were not just un-Islamic but even anti-Islamic, how can we expect Muslim rulers of the later period, which Muslims consider to have been characterized by widespread deviation from Islam, to have been models of Islamic virtue?

A basic cause for mutual misunderstandings between Hindus and Muslims is lack of proper knowledge and awareness of each other. They have made no serious attempts to understand the religious traditions and beliefs of each other from their original sources, in an objective manner. Muslims have viewed Hinduism in a polemical fashion, not as the Hindus themselves understand it, and not using the same framework as the Hindus use to relate to their faith tradition. And vice versa. This explains the virtual absence of any literature that can enable Hindus and Muslims to understand each other seriously, in a balanced way. Not a single book of this sort on the religious traditions of the Hindus has been written by Muslims ever since Al-Biruni wrote his famed Kitab al-Hind more than a thousand years ago. Barring a few exceptions, our madrasas do not teach about other religions. That is why their students, our would-be ulema, have only a very superficial and partial understanding of Hinduism and other religions. This urgently needs to change.

A key form of Hindu-Muslim dialogue is for Hindus and Muslims to work together for common social purposes on a wide range of issues. The opportunities for this, however, are becoming alarmingly restricted today as, especially in urban areas in northern India, Muslims are becoming increasingly ghettoized, for various reasons. In recent years, especially in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the ensuing wave of anti-Muslim violence that culminated in the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat, there has been a perceptible trend of Muslims seeking to shift from mixed localities to almost wholly Muslim ghettos. Numerous leading ulema and other Muslim leaders have openly supported this trend, claiming that there are numerous Hadith reports wherein the Prophet had advised Muslims to do so. This, to my mind, is a wholly incorrect deduction from Hadith reports wherein the Prophet is said to have advised Muslims not to stay in the same localities as polytheists, because these reports actually relate to those Muslims who had stayed behind in pagan-dominated Mecca even after the Prophet had migrated to Mecca. Heavily outnumbered by their pagan opponents, their lives and properties were gravely threatened. This is the particular historical context for these Hadith reports. To argue, as some of our ulema do, that the same rule applies for Muslims in India, even in places where Muslims do not face any such threat, is incorrect. If Muslims were to restrict themselves to Muslim ghettos and thereby cut themselves off from people of other faiths, they would be unable to relate to, and interact with, others in the social, economic and political spheres, and would also have no opportunity to engage in the task of da‘wah or communicating the true message of Islam to them. Hence, this ghettoisation process must be reversed, for it is harmful particularly to the Muslims themselves.

In fact, Muslims must make all efforts to promote closer interaction at all planes with Hindus, rather than isolate themselves in a corner. In this regard, we would need to exercise a certain degree of flexibility in the matter of some fiqh rules about relations between Muslims and others that were developed in the period of Muslim domination and which may not be relevant in today’s context. In the light of these medieval fiqh prescriptions, many Muslims have grave reservations on a host of issues with regard to people of other faiths, such as participating in their functions, greeting them on their festivals, wishing them, exchanging gifts with them, and sharing in their joys and sorrows. In the face of this, it is imperative that we develop a contextually-relevant ‘fiqh for Muslim minorities’ (fiqh ul-aqalliyat) through which we can review and rethink these fiqh rules so as to enable us to adopt a more expansive and open stance on these matters.

Similarly, in line with medieval fiqh formulations, many Muslims take a very extreme position with regard to the prohibition of imitating or following the ways and customs of non-Muslims. Traditional understandings of this question also need to be reviewed if we are to establish closer links with Hindus and people of other faiths. On this issue, the influential medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Taimiyah, who is known for having adopted a rather extreme position in this regard, made a clear distinction between Muslims in a state of cultural domination and those in a condition where they are culturally dominated by others. In the latter case, he opined, for Muslims to adopt some of the external practices of non-Muslims might actually be desirable from the point of view of the Islamic cause. Indeed, he went on, it might even become necessary for this purpose. As he explained in his book Iqtiza us-Sirat ul-Mustaqim:

‘Saving oneself from imitating non-Muslims and distinguishing oneself from them applies only in the context of [Muslim] dominance. When in the early period [of Islam] Muslims were weak, this commandment was not given. This commandment was given only later, when Islam became dominant and acquired power. Likewise, today, Muslims living in non-Muslim lands are not obliged to distinguish themselves externally from non-Muslims, because this might cause them harm. Indeed, under some circumstances, it is appropriate or even necessary for Muslims to share [some of] the external practices of non-Muslims if this is in the larger interests of Islam or for a noble purpose.’

The time for Hindu-Muslim dialogue is now. It cannot be put off until later.

By Maulana Waris Mazhari

(Translated from Urdu by Yoginder Sikand)

Maulana Waris Mazhari is the editor of the New Delhi-based monthly Tarjuman Dar ul-Uloom, the official organ of the Graduates’ Association of the Deoband madrasa. He can be contacted on w.mazhari@gmail.com

Yoginder Sikand works with the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion at the National Law School, Bangalore.

We have no choice but to call a spade a spade. Those who still have a pinch of common sense find it easy to see how little realism is being left in today’s world.

When American President Barack Obama was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, Michael Moore said, “Now, earn it.” Many people liked the ingenious comment; it was a smart phrase, even though many found the decision of the Norwegian Committee an example of demagoguery and the exaltation of the apparently harmless petty-politics of the new US President, an African-American, a good communicator and a clever politician leading a powerful empire involved in a deep economic crisis.

The World Conference in Copenhagen was about to be held and Obama sparked off hopes that the United States would join the world consensus in favor of a binding agreement to prevent the ecologic catastrophe threatening the human species. What happened there was disappointing; the international public had become the victim of a painful deception.

At the recent World Conference of the Peoples on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Land held in Bolivia responses were offered filled with the wisdom of the ancient indigenous nationalities, invaded and virtually devastated by the European conquerors who, in search of gold and easy wealth, imposed for centuries their selfish cultures incompatible with the most sacred interests of mankind.

Two news reports received yesterday are an expression of the empire’s philosophy intending to make us believe in its “democratic, peaceful, selfless and honest” nature. Suffice it to read the text of said press dispatches dated in the US capital.

WASHINGTON, April 23, 2010. – US President Barack Obama is examining the possibility of deploying an arsenal of missiles with conventional non-nuclear warheads and a very powerful explosion capacity that can hit their targets anywhere in the world in about an hour.

Albeit the new super-bomb, delivered by Minuteman missiles, will not carry nuclear warheads their destructive capability will be similar, as confirmed by the fact that their deployment is foreseen in the recently signed START 2 agreements with Russia.

The Moscow authorities demanded, and managed to include in the agreement, that the United States will remove one of its nuclear warhead missiles for each one of these missiles.

According to reports in the New York Times and the CBS TV network, the new bomb known as Prompt Global Strike (PGS) should be able to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan, destroy a North Korean missile in full preparation or attack an Iranian nuclear site, ‘all of this without crossing the nuclear threshold.’

The advantage of having the military option of a non-nuclear weapon with the same effect of the targeted impact of a nuclear bomb is judged interesting by the Obama Administration.

The project had been initially undertaken by Obama’s predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, but it was blocked by Moscow’s protestations. The Russian authorities had said that given the Minuteman’s capability to deliver nuclear warheads, it was impossible to determine that the launching of a PGS did not mark the beginning of a nuclear attack.

However, the Obama Administration feels that it can give Russia and China the necessary guarantees to avoid misunderstandings. The missile silos of the new weapon will be raised in areas distant from the nuclear warhead deposits and they can be regularly supervised by experts from Moscow or Beijing.

The super-bomb could be delivered by a Minuteman missile capable of flying through the atmosphere at sound speed while carrying one thousand pounds of explosives. Then, extremely sophisticated equipment will enable the missile to release the bomb letting it fall with great accuracy on the selected targets.

Responsibility for the PGS project –at an estimated cost of $250 million only in its first experimental year—fell on General Kevin Chilton, commander of the US nuclear arsenal. Chilton explained that the PGS will be filling up a gap in the range of options currently available to the Pentagon.

‘At the moment,’ he said, ‘we can target any place in the world with non-nuclear weapons in a frame of time of no less than four hours.’ ‘For a faster action,’ he conceded, ‘we only have the nuclear option.’

With the new bomb, in the future the United States could act quickly and with conventional resources both against a terrorist group or an enemy country, in a much shorter time and avoiding international indignation over the use of nuclear weapons.

It is planned to start testing in 2014 and to have it available in the US arsenal by 2017. Obama will no longer be in power but the super-bomb can be the non-nuclear legacy of this President who was already awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

WASHINGTON, April 22, 2010. – A US Air Force non-piloted spaceship took off from Florida this Thursday, its military mission covered by veil of secrecy.

The automated spaceship or X-37B was launched from Cape Canaveral in an Atlas V rocket at the 19:52 hours local time (23:52 hrs GMT), according to a video distributed by the army.

‘The launching is imminent,’ said to the France Press Agency US Air Force Major Angie Blair.

The plane looking like a miniature spaceship is 8.9 meters long by 4.5 meters wingspan.

It has taken years to manufacture the reusable spaceship and the army has offered only vague explanations on its objective or its role in the military arsenal.

The vehicle has been designed ‘to create the ambiance of an “orbital laboratory” to put to the test new technologies and components before these technologies are assigned to ongoing satellite programs,’ stated the Air Force in a recent communiqué.

Officials have said that the X-37B will be landing at the Vandenberg Air Force base in California, although they did not say how long its first mission will last.

‘To be honest, we don’t know when it will return,’ said to the press this week Gary Payton, second assistant secretary of the Air Force space programs.

Payton indicated that the ship could stay in space up to nine months.

The aircraft, manufactured by Boeing, started in 1999 as a US National Space Agency (NASA) project and was later transferred to the Air Force, which has plans to launch a second X-37B by 2011.

Do they need anything else?

Today they face an enormous obstacle: the already unstoppable climate change. There is talk of the unavoidable rise of heat by more than two degrees centigrade, with catastrophic consequences. Within only 40 years, the world population will increase in 2 billion to reach the figure of 9 billion people in that short time. Harbors, hotels, tourist resorts, roads, industries and facilities close to the ports will be underwater in less time than a generation from a wealthy and developed nation needs to enjoy half their lives, the same nations that today selfishly refuse to make the least of sacrifices to preserve the survival of the human species. The farming land and the drinking water will be considerably reduced. The oceans will be contaminated and many marine species will no longer be edible while others will be extinct. This is not simply a logical assertion but the result of scientific research.

Through natural genetics and the transfer of various species from one continent to another, human beings had been able to increase food and other useful crop productions per hectare. Thus, for some time, man suffered less from the shortage of such food as maize, potato, wheat, fiber and other necessary products. Later, genetic manipulation and the use of chemical fertilizers also contributed to the solution of crucial needs but they too are coming to the end of their possibilities to produce healthy food for human consumption.

On the other hand, we are witnessing the depletion in barely two centuries of the hydrocarbons that it took nature 400 million years to create. Likewise, crucial no-renewable mineral resources required by the world economy are being depleted. At the same time, science has created the capacity to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of hours. The major contradiction of our times is precisely the capacity of the human species for self-destruction and its inability to govern itself.

The human being managed to raise its life possibilities to such limits as exceed its own capacity to survive, and in this battle they are consuming at an accelerated pace the raw materials available to them. Science made it possible to turn matter into energy, as in the case of the nuclear reaction, –through large investments– but there is no sign that turning energy into matter is even viable. The infinite cost of investments in the relevant research is showing the impossibility to achieve in a few decades what it took the universe tens of thousands of millions of years to create. Will it be necessary for Barack Obama, the wunderkid, to explain it to us? Science has experienced a remarkable growth but ignorance and poverty grow too. Can anyone prove the opposite?

Fidel Castro Ruz

April 25, 2010

By Fidel Castro

27 April, 2010

@ Cuba.cu

According to a recent report from US-based Pew Research Center, there are 1 billion 570 million Muslims living in the world today, and thus every fourth person on this earth is a Muslim. Is this report a good reason for rejoicing? I do not think so. On the contrary Muslim should do some exercise for self appraisal after this report. Why with 25 percent (1.5 Billion) in this world they are scientifically and technologically backward, politically marginalized and economically poor. Why their share of World GDP (60 trillion dollars) is hardly 3 trillion dollars which is less than the GDP of France (Population 70 Millions), about half of the GDP of Japan (Population 120 Millions) and one fifth of GDP of U.S. (Population 300 Millions). It is important to know that Christians constitute about 35% of the world population but control nearly 70% of the World’s wealth.

In case of Human Development Index too, ranking of Muslim countries, with the exception of some Oil producing Arab countries, is very low. In scientific field record of Muslim nations is dismal. Hardly five hundred Science Ph.D’s.are produced every year. This number is three thousand in U.K. alone. Out of the five hundred and odd Nobel Prizes in Science from 1901 to 2008, Jews, who are 0.2 per cent of the World population, got around 140 Prizes (25%) as against only one to a Muslim (the other one being declared non-Muslim by Pakistan), which is about 0.2% of the total Awards. What a sad commentary for Muslims as far as scientific achievements are concerned. Another disheartening report has appeared recently from Shanghai University which has listed top four hundred World Universities with high standard of teaching and research. None from the Islamic World finds a place in the list. This is really painful situation, particularly when compared with period of shining Islamic Civilization of middle Ages (7 th to 16th Century.) when all the standard universities were situated in the Islamic cities of Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo etc. Well known Science Historian Gillespie has recorded around 130 names of scientists and technologists who made great impact during middle ages. Out of this number 120 scientists belonged to Islamic world and only four from Europe. Is this not enough reason for Muslims to know their past critically, asses the present honestly and determine the future rationally.

I can add little more information (based on reports from several Agencies),not a happy one, about the so-called numerical strength of Muslims in coming years. With the present birth rate, Muslim population will be doubled in next 50 years. i.e. it would be around 3 billions. In that scenario Muslims will surpass the Christian population which stands today at about 2.3 billion but will only be doubled in 500 years. Once again that situation will not be good either for Muslims because with the present economic conditions prevailing in the Muslim World and the backwardness they are experiencing today, their growth in terms of population may still aggravates the economic problems instead of solving it. Doubling the population in next fifty years may still increase the economic gap between Muslims and Christians nations. Who will dominate the World thus in this century or the next century? Muslims with 5% of global wealth or Christians with 70% of world economic power. Muslims must understand that numerical strength of any nation or a country does not guarantee respect and dominance in the present day scientifically advanced world. It is only scientific knowledge which matters and which brings respect, power and wealth. There are many examples which prove the futility of higher population with lower economic and military power. For instance, powerful (economically, militarily, scientifically) small Jew community of Israel is considered a perpetual threat to a very large population (technologically backward) of Arab countries who feel rightly defeated and cheated. Another glaring example is of those small numbers of Muslims who are living in the West and but are happy with their economic prosperity whereas in many Muslim majority countries with large population, they are experiencing hardship of various kinds. Gross Domestic product of about 20 million Muslims living in Europe is higher than the entire Muslim population of Indian subcontinent which is around 500 million

Nissim Hasan, an Islamic Scholar of repute, has observed that “Diminishing Muslim vision of knowledge is singularly responsible for the decline of economic and political power of the Islamic civilization. We have failed now for centuries to become leaders of humanity. We have surrendered our vision, our faith and our reason to deadwoods”. Mahathir Mohammad (Former P.M., Malaysia) has rightly advised Muslims “to give up their illogical beliefs and regressing thoughts and be prepared to face the challenges of the fast changing social order (OIC Conference, Kuala Lumpur).

It is important to note that during their Rule of Spain (8th century Ad to 14th century A.D.), Muslim dominated the entire Europe as the Muslim Spain was hub of scientific activity and its earnings were higher than the earning of entire Europe. Today situation has changed topsy turvy. Today DGP of Christian Spain is higher than that of combined 12 Oil Producing Muslim Countries. It was not Spain alone that was a highly developed country in the Islamic World during Middle Ages, but all the regions and cities under Islamic Rule such as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Tripoli etc were humming with scientific activities. Islamic Society all over the world was considered to be highly developed scientifically, intellectually, culturally and economically. In contrast, as described by Donald Cambell- (Surgeon- France) “When Science flourished in the Islamic World, Europe was on dark ages and evils of pedantry, bigotry, cruelty, charms, amulets and relics were common there”(Muslim Medicine). It is important to note that during the Rise of Islam, world population of Muslims was hardly ten percent. According to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the great Visionary of India, this situation “started changing after sixteenth century when Muslim Society stagnated and followed the lifestyle of Europeans of Dark Ages. On the other hand Europeans (Christians) turned towards progressive thinking and scientific pursuits of Muslims” (Letters of Azad). Result was obvious. Muslim Society which dominated the World for about eight hundred years in all respect of human activity, started declining in their intellectual vitality, and were ultimately dominated by the Emerging Power of Europe. In this connection, observations of Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi, great Thinker of Islam, are very relevant and valid when he explains “After sixteenth century Muslims lost the interest in Enquiry and Physical Sciences and engaged themselves more in Metaphysical Sciences with the result they could not produce great men of knowledge (genius). Muslims forgot their own scientific thinking and followed only traditional knowledge. They, therefore, lagged behind in Science and Technology and thus became slaves of the West”. (Islam & the West). Sometime back political scientist Samuel P. Huntington expressed his view that the recent conflict between the West and the Muslim World is actually a Clash of Civilization. This is an absolute nonsense. In fact it is a clash between the rich and poor. Rich nations are dictating their terms and poor nations are subjected to exploitation and humiliations.

Poor nations, Muslims or non-Muslims, should understand that their survival depends entirely on global peace and their unnecessary conflict with the rich nations, particularly in the name of religion, will only land them into greater trouble and distress. Muslims can only regain their past glory, if they adopt scientific renaissance similar to European renaissance, more vigorously and faster than done by Europe. But before this is done, Muslims have to condemn and reject forces of extremism and promote true Islamic values of tolerance and moderation. Hatred of the West will do no good to Muslims. This will only lead to their greater miseries.

Hating the West but taking pride in getting Visas or Green Cards for living in the West is nothing short of hypocrisy and duplicity. Some Distinguished Rulers of Arab world in general and Saudi Arab King Abdullah in particular must be congratulated and supported for their recent initiative of interfaith dialogues and understanding between all the Faiths of the World. In a recently held Interfaith Conference, King Abdullah rightly observed that” Islam must do away with the dangers of extremism to present the religion’s “good message”. We must tell the whole world that we are a voice of justice and values and humanity, and we are a voice of coexistence. Islamic world faces difficult challenges from the extremism of some Muslims, whose aggressions target the magnanimity, fairness and lofty aims of Islam”. Establishment of Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue (DCID) at Qatar Capital to foster better understanding among followers of the different faiths for the cause of World Peace and Peaceful Coexistence, is a highly laudable step by Arab Rulers.

Muslims do not need empty slogans and misplaced religious fervour. It high time that they interact with the West as responsible nations. They must welcome Barrack Obama’s Cairo Speech which invites Muslims to join hands with the West for Global Peace and Prosperity. Obama’s initiatives should be supported, his hands strengthened so that he succeeds in his stupendous task of unity of all faiths for the cause of better Understanding and Peace on highly charged and disturbed Earth. President Hosni Mubarak has rightly observed that “Islamic civilization respects all the mankind and this must be made clear to the whole world, not by words, but rather by deeds and conduct.”

It is high time that close contact and cooperation is established between Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama and Muslim Nations in general and Arab Countries in particular. This will greatly help in weakening the Anti-Islamic Forces of the West, which have, no doubt, existed there, in some form and strength, since the period of Crusades.

(Issued by Sir Syed Scientific Society, Lucknow. Dr. M.I.H. Farooqi, Secretary of the Society, is the author of PLANTS OF QURAN and MEDICINAL PLANTS IN PROPHETIC TRADITIONS) Email: mihfarooqi@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

22 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Written by Dr. M.I.H. Farooqi

Posted: 24 April 2010 00:00

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

The energy crisis outlined in a Joint Operating Environment report from the US Joint Forces Command, comes as the price of petrol in Britain reaches record levels and the cost of crude is predicted to soon top $100 a barrel.

“By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 million barrels per day,” says the report, which has a foreword by a senior commander, General James N Mattis.

It adds: “While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India.”

The US military says its views cannot be taken as US government policy but admits they are meant to provide the Joint Forces with “an intellectual foundation upon which we will construct the concept to guide out future force developments.”

The warning is the latest in a series from around the world that has turned peak oil – the moment when demand exceeds supply – from a distant threat to a more immediate risk.

The Wicks Review on UK energy policy published last summer effectively dismissed fears but Lord Hunt, the British energy minister, met concerned industrialists two weeks ago in a sign that it is rapidly changing its mind on the seriousness of the issue.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency remains confident that there is no short-term risk of oil shortages but privately some senior officials have admitted there is considerable disagreement internally about this upbeat stance.

Future fuel supplies are of acute importance to the US army because it is believed to be the biggest single user of petrol in the world. BP chief executive, Tony Hayward, said recently that there was little chance of crude from the carbon-heavy Canadian tar sands being banned in America because the US military like to have local supplies rather than rely on the politically unstable Middle East.

But there are signs that the US Department of Energy might also be changing its stance on peak oil. In a recent interview with French newspaper, Le Monde, Glen Sweetnam, main oil adviser to the Obama administration, admitted that “a chance exists that we may experience a decline” of world liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 if the investment was not forthcoming.

Lionel Badal, a post-graduate student at Kings College, London, who has been researching peak oil theories, said the review by the American military moves the debate on.

“It’s surprising to see that the US Army, unlike the US Department of Energy, publicly warns of major oil shortages in the near-term. Now it could be interesting to know on which study the information is based on,” he said.

“The Energy Information Administration (of the department of energy) has been saying for years that Peak Oil was “decades away”. In light of the report from the US Joint Forces Command, is the EIA still confident of its previous highly optimistic conclusions?”

The Joint Operating Environment report paints a bleak picture of what can happen on occasions when there is serious economic upheaval. “One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest,” it points out.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010,

Written by Terry Macalister

Posted: 16 April 2010 19:41

40 years after the first Earth Day, we’re still staring down the barrel of environmental catastrophe. Here are five big approaches we can take to saving life on the planet.

Forty years ago we were living in a different world. Ohio’s Cuyahoga River had recently caught fire, nuclear testing had dispersed radioactive material across the West, California was reeling from a massive oil spill, Americans sputtered about their endless highways spewing leaded fumes as the country continued on a post-World War II path bent on industrializing food and farming while growing industry at all cost — pollution and chemicals be damned.

Michigan Senator Gaylord Nelson, with the help of young organizer Denis Hayes, is credited with lighting the fuse of the modern environmental era on April 22, 1970 with the first Earth Day — an event that garnered the support of an incredible 20 million Americans across the country.

Many Republicans and Democrats alike got on board. Government responded in the next few years by creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act, to name a few.

Yet, four decades later, we’re still staring down the barrel of environmental catastrophe. Many of those same pieces of legislation have been whittled away, and although we’ve made massive gains in many areas we are still faced with a global climate crisis, along with food and water systems that are being pushed to the brink, and are downright failing in many places. In a recent story, Denis Hayes recollects the first Earth Day and credits the event with embracing all people who are trying to help the planet — in any way big or small. But, Hayes says, we need to do more. The time has come for more radical action.

So what can we do? Here’s five good ideas that industrious greens in our mix are already working on — will you join in?

1. A Clean Water Trust Fund

Most people living in the U.S. are fortunate to have clean and safe drinking water available at their tap at a very low cost. We turn on the water and it comes out, we don’t have to think about where that water comes from. But what many people don’t know is that our water systems are on the verge of collapse. Lurking beneath our streets are 1.5 million miles of aging pipes. Food and Water Watch reports that U.S. cities have 250,000 to 300,000 water main breaks a year and we lose one-fifth of our water through leaks and contaminate our waterways with 1.2 trillion gallons of wastewater annually.

The price tag for fixing all this is going to be big. The EPA estimates that we have a potential funding gap of $150-400 billion between projected needs and current levels of spending over the next 10 years. The New York Times reported that, “There are 16,000 publicly owned wastewater treatment plants in the United States that operate 100,000 major pumping stations, 600,000 miles of sanitary sewers and 200,000 miles of storm sewers, according to U.S. EPA. That system received a grade of D- from the American Society of Civil Engineers in its latest ‘Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.'”

One of the reasons for this is a drop in federal funding in the last few decades. In 1978, 78 percent of money for new water infrastructure projects came from the federal government, but by 2007 that number had fallen to 3 percent. Additionally the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which many communities have relied on to help keep their water clean, has also been slashed. The federal government cut spending on this program by 66 percent from 1991 to 2007.

To counter this imbalance, water advocates have been calling for the creation of federal trust for clean water — similar to what already exists for highways and airports — and what has been created at the state level with North Carolina’s Clean Water Management Trust Fund.

Ken Kirk, executive director of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) said, “Communities currently bear 95 percent of the cost of clean water, and ratepayers will continue to see increases unless they see some financial assistance from the federal government to help them fill this gap. A clean water trust fund, financed broadly by fees potentially on such things as bottled beverages, flushable products, pesticides and agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals will help cities cover the staggering cost of meeting their water quality objectives.”

The Government Accountability Office recently released a report looking into the various funding strategies and how it could be structured and NACWA, along with other advocates like Food and Water Watch, is calling on Congress to create legislation for a clean water trust fund.

2. Eating for the Planet

Judging from the reception of Anna Lappe’s new book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, we are more than ready to shift our consciousness when it comes to eating. Diet for a Hot Planet outlines how we can transform our diets for a sustainable planet and prevent climate change.

“A key part of the core message is that it matters how your food was made,” said Lappe in an interview with AlterNet’s Jill Richardson. “The less processed the foods are, of course, the less energy used to produce it. And meat, particularly that raised in factory farms is many times more carbon-intensive than produce and vegetarian sources of protein. A Cornell study found that meeting the annual dietary needs of a typical meateater in New York State requires nearly five times as much farmland as that of a plant-centered eater.”

Eating lower on the food chain, eating local, knowing your farmer, skipping processed food, and buying products with minimal (or no) packaging are all helpful. Of course, we can’t stop the freight train of global warming simply with personal choices.

“What we’re talking about when we talk about the food and climate crisis is a system-wide failure,” said Lappe. “System-wide failures need collective actions to fix them.” This means greening our food infrastructure and changing our economic structure that supports agribusiness over sustainable agriculture. “We wouldn’t expect individuals to personally excavate subway tunnels, purchase a fleet of fuel-efficient buses, or lay down tracks for high-speed rail,” she said. “Similarly, we shouldn’t expect individuals to fix our broken food infrastructure on their own. We need public investment in climate-friendly food that makes choosing locally raised, organically grown, fresh whole foods as easy as grabbing a Big Mac, fries and shake at the drive-thru.”

Farm Sanctuary is one organization putting this idea into practice. Its Green Foods Campaign helps people reach out to their local governments to introduce resolutions to deal with the environmental and health impacts of the food we eat. “A Green Foods Resolution is a city or town council resolution designed to counteract the health threats, animal cruelty and massive environmental damage caused by animal agriculture by calling on citizens to eat lower on the food chain,” the organization explains. “This forward-thinking legislation enables cities to take responsibility for their carbon ‘foodprint’ by encouraging greater access to nutritious plant-based foods, supporting local farmers markets and community gardens, and educating citizens about the health and environmental benefits of consuming more plant-based foods.”

3. The Limits of Growth

Annie Leonard’s hit Internet film and book, The Story of Stuff, helped to popularize research about overconsumption. And the recent book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben drives the point home even further. For decades people have been talking about the threat of overpopulation — can our planet support so many people? When do we hit the breaking point? But in recent years, the mainstream discussion has been expanded to include the ever-pertinent addendum to the questions of population — is the problem the number of people we have or how much we are consuming? How do we know when we’ve hit the limits of growth? Can we and should we stop?

President Obama, McKibben writes, said, “It’s going to be an impossible task to balance our budget or even approximate it if we are boosting our growth rates.” But far more troubling, McKibben contends, is our mounting ecological debt: “Growth is what we do. Who ever really dreamed it might come to an end.”

But, faced with collapse, what are our options? There is another possibility, that “We might chose instead to manage our descent,” he explains. “That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline. That instead of trying to fly the plane higher when the engines start to fail, or just letting it crash into the nearest block of apartments, we might start looking around for a smooth stretch of river to put it down in.”

McKibben eloquently explains how “bigness” spells trouble and what we can begin to do to counter it — an idea that is also afoot elsewhere.

Filmmaker Dave Gardner will soon be releasing the documentary, Hooked on Growth: Our Misguided Quest for Prosperity, which takes on this critical question and offers an antidote for how we can become more sustainable. Already, the growth-centric ideas are being challenged on different levels with projects addressing Slow Food, Slow Money, Slow Design and the like, with communities teaming up to declare that less is more.

4. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Thinking small works well when it comes to finance, too. In recent years, people have been embracing the idea of microloans — small investments, sometimes as little as $20, that can go a long way in helping people in some of the poorest parts of the world. One company leading the way is Oikocredit, which helps provide financing to trade cooperatives, fair trade organizations and small-to-medium enterprises in the developing world.

“As one of the world’s oldest and largest international microfinance organizations, Oikocredit currently reaches 19 million poor entrepreneurs in over 70 countries with small loans that help them escape poverty,” explained Terry Provance, executive director of Oikocredit’s U.S. office. “Oikocredit is also one of just a few microfinance organizations with transparency and environmental clauses, and supports fair trade cooperatives in 70 countries. Last year, Oikocredit USA — the U.S. operation for Oikocredit International — received over $4 million from U.S. investors.”

When it comes to the environment, microfinance may be able to play a significant role. “With roughly 3.5 billion people around the world living on less than $2 a day, it is impossible for the poor to escape the cascading effects of climate change such as increasing mosquito populations and malaria, and droughts that make growing food unfeasible. Microfinance–small loans to the world’s working poor–is one proven method for giving working entrepreneurs the tools they need to adapt to these changes, and to engage in sustainable practices to help minimize their impact on the environment,” said Provance. “For instance, the loans allow the poor to build assets and invest in sustainable business practices that protect the environment versus exploiting it for immediate and desperate gain, such as slash and burn farming or using water-needy pesticides to grow food. The ability of microfinance to positively impact the environment increases as more people are lifted from poverty, and can provide a sturdy future for themselves.”

5. A Clean Energy Future

On April 21, the Department of Energy announced it had awarded $452 million in federal grants to 25 cities and states to help with programs to create clean energy jobs. Proponents of clean energy are fighting for funding as a new climate bill is poised to hand away many millions more to nuclear and coal initiatives. Nowhere is the battle between clean and dirty energy as visible as in Appalachia — where Big Coal reigns and the destructive practice of mountaintop removal (MTR) mining is blowing up whole ecosystems and destroying the communities around them.

But folks there have a vision for a different, cleaner future, in which the jobs are better and safer, too. Coal River Mountain is on the chopping block — facing annihilation from a mountaintop removal mining operation run by Massey Energy (you may have heard Massey’s name in the news lately after the deaths of 29 miners). But instead of seeing another mountain destroyed, locals have come up with a plan, and a damn good one, to cover those mountain ridges with wind farms.

“Set aside for a moment the many health and social ills of MTR–the toxic drainages, the dusty air, the undrinkable tap water–and still the economic argument alone for Coal River Wind is compelling,” wrote Ben Jervey for GOOD. He explains:

A 2007 wind potential study found capacity for 328 megawatts of clean energy on Coal River Mountain, enough to power 70,000 West Virginian homes. The revenue would produce $1.7 million in property taxes that would benefit the local communities. That’s over 50 times the $36,000-per-year that coal mining would generate in severance taxes, and the wind money wouldn’t dry up when the coal runs out in an estimated 14 years. (The coal revenue itself flows immediately out of state.) A wind farm would also create at least 50 permanent jobs that also last long after the coal would disappear. Again, this isn’t even to mention the external costs of public health and environmental quality.

One economic study found that by factoring in such externalities–health expenses, environmental cleanup costs and lost resources from tourism and ginseng harvesting–the Massey mines would wind up costing the community $600 million over their brief lifespans. Coal River Wind has the potential to rewrite the economics of mountaintop removal.

Faced with the enormity of our climate and energy problems, can replacing one coal mine with one wind farm make a dent in our quest for a more sustainable future? Of course! It makes a difference in the same way that investing $100 can change a family’s life; in the same way that personally knowing your farmer makes a difference in your health and the health of your community; in the same way that starting one teach-in on the environment in 1970 drew 20 million people and awakened a country’s consciousness.

So where will we be 40 years from now? Which road do we choose? How many people can we get to join us on that path?

22 April, 2010

Alternet.org

Written by Tara Lohan

Posted: 22 April 2010 00:00

Tara Lohan is a senior editor at AlterNet. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraLohan.

A July 2008 Fact Sheet Series titled, “Behind the Bars: Palestinian Women in Israeli Prisons” was jointly prepared by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Palestinian Counseling Center (PCC), and Mandela Institute. Along with background information, it covered Israel’s obligations under international law, prison conditions where they’re held, medical neglect, and their educational rights restricted or denied.

Relevant International Laws Protecting Prisoners and Civilians in Times of Conflict, Including Women

The 1949 Third Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war, replacing the 1929 Prisoners of War Convention. It broadened the categories of persons entitled to prisoner of war status and precisely defined the conditions and places of their captivity – especially with regard to allowed labor, financial resources, required treatment, and rules of judicial proceedings.

It specifically prohibited acts of:

— “Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

— Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;” and

— judicial guarantees “recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

The 1955 UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners requires “no discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

Other provisions apply to sleeping accommodations, sanitation, personal hygiene, clothing and bedding, food, exercise, medical services, discipline and punishment, instruments of restraint, information to and complaints by prisoners, contact with the outside world, books, religion, retention of prisoners’ property, notification of death, illness, or transfer, among other provisions to provide humane and proper treatment.

The 1974 UN General Assembly Declaration of the Protection of Women and Children in Emergency and Armed Conflict, requires all states engaged in armed conflicts and military occupiers:

“to spare women and children from the ravages of war. All the necessary steps shall be taken to ensure the prohibition of measures such as persecution, torture, punitive measures, degrading treatment and violence, particularly against women and children.”

The 1977 Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions….and relating to the Protections of Victims of International Armed Conflicts – supplements the four Geneva Conventions.

The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women protects them with regard to discrimination, human rights, judicial fairness, equality, reproduction, health, education, employment, and “fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural, civil or any other field.”

The 1988 Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under any Form of Detention or Imprisonment affirms their human rights and obligation for authorities to enforce them – especially for women, children, the aged, sick, or handicapped.

The 1999 Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women puts this measure “on an equal footing with International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the Convention against Torture and other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.”

Background

Since 1967, over 700,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated, including 10,000 women. Daily, from 15 – 20 men, women, and children are arrested.

During the second Intifada, Israeli security forces targeted women as well as men, subjecting them to mass arrests and mistreatment in detention, including torture and sexual abuse. From 2000 – 2008, more than 700 women were affected, many held without charge. Under military occupation, due process and judicial fairness conditions aren’t allowed because Israel denies them.

According to Addameer, women are held in vermin-infested cells or sections with “criminal prisoners;” subjected to regular body searches performed brutally by male guards; sexually harassed; denied rights the above laws require, including sufficient and proper food and clothing, medical care, recreation, and education; often placed in solitary confinement; beaten regularly in their cells; and denied contact with family and other prisoners.

In 2004, 120 were held; 17 were mothers; 2 gave birth in prison; 8 were under 18; and some were arrested to pressure their husbands, then told if their spouses had blood on their hands, their children would be killed.

In July 2008, 74 women were imprisoned, including two mothers with babies, subjected to the same harsh treatment. According to the Ahrar Center Prisoners Studies & Human Rights, the number was 140 in August 2009.

Prisons

Facilities were “designed for men by men and rarely do they meet women’s needs.”

Telmond Prison in Hasharon, north of Tel Aviv, is one of Israel’s largest prison complexes. It has a section for Israeli criminals, including juveniles, as well as Palestinian men, women, and children “security” detainees and other prisoners.

Damon Prison on Mount Carmel, near Haifa, was originally a tobacco warehouse and stable, its appalling conditions unfit for human habitation, especially, of course, for women and children.

Al-Jalameh Detention Center is a maximum security facility in Kishon, near Haifa.

Article 10 of the 1955 Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners states:

“All accommodation provided for the use of prisoners and in particular all sleeping accommodation shall meet all requirements of health, due regard being paid to climate conditions and particularly to cubic content of air, minimum floor space, lighting, heating and ventilation.”

Article 19 states:

“Every prisoner shall, in accordance with local or national standards, be provided with a separate bed, and with separate and sufficient bedding which shall be clean when issued, kept in good order and changed often enough to ensure its cleanliness.”

Nonetheless, Palestinian women endure severe overcrowding conditions, affecting their health and safety.

In Damon Prison, women are in three cells, each with 10, 13, and 14 occupants, but only 12 beds. In addition, no storage space is provided for clothes and other belongings. Other conditions include four restricted use common bathrooms outside cells with no showers for 37 women.

Telmond Prison has two type cells – small, four square meter ones for two prisoners, including a bathroom, and larger 20 square meter ones for up to eight women.

Al-Jalameh Prison bathrooms are separate from cell living areas, separated only by a curtain, denying women privacy, personal dignity, and minimum hygiene standards.

All prisons have uncomfortable iron bed frames with 3 – 5 centimeter badly worn, thin mattresses, causing back problems. Requests for better ones and wood frames were denied. No blankets are provided, so if able, families must send them. Only thin blankets and sheets are permitted, so are inadequate in winter with no central heating.

Hygiene standards are poor. Moreover, cells are cold in winter, and extremely hot in summer. They have one window covered by an iron sheet blocking sunlight, allegedly for security reasons. No gas or electric heaters are allowed, or consideration for other basic needs. Essential items like toothpaste, soap, shampoo, detergent and light bulbs aren’t provided. Women are on their own to get them.

Although international law mandates proper amounts of well-prepared nutritional food, what’s served is poor, unbalanced, and inadequate. At Telmond, a typical breakfast includes a spoon of yogurt, a slice of tomato, pepper and bread. Lunch is the main meal, consisting of small amounts of either bean soup with potatoes and eggs; rice and wheat soup; small salad, rice and schnitzel; rice, a single kebab and beans; fish and potatoes; meat, rice and hummus; or rice, bean soup and chicken – all poor quality in small amounts, some of it inedible.

At Telmond, women have canteen access every 15 days where items like beans, spices, tomatoes, other vegetables, olive oil, snacks, soft drinks, coffee, tea, pens, notebooks, and other products are available. Yet prices are much higher than in the Territories, creating an added hardship for women with few resources to make purchases.

Clothing provided is very inadequate, requiring families to send what they can, yet packages are sometimes withheld. Recreation, such as it is, is greatly restricted, women allowed outside in a narrow courtyard for short periods, mornings and afternoons.

Imposed punishments are often arbitrary, such as for destroying public property when their old mattresses decompose or paint comes off walls. Women also face collective punishment if a prohibited item is found in a cell.

Individual punishments include solitary confinement, strip searches by male guards, confiscation of personal items, intimidation, denying outside contact or canteen privileges, and harassing day or late night searches. They’re frequent and harsh, a detainee saying, girls scream, are sprayed with tear gas, are severely beaten, and some placed in isolation. When they’re searched, they’re forced to undress, and if resist, they’re handcuffed and guards do it with cell doors open for others outside to observe.

Medical Neglect

Currently, about 25% of Palestinian female prisoners suffer from untreated diseases, the result of inexcusable medical neglect. Malnutrition causes weight loss, general weakness, anemia, iron deficiency, and poor health. Because of poor sanitation and ventilation, insect infestations, lack of sunlight, cold winters, hot summers, dirt, isolation, and stress, diseases like rheumatism, skin rashes, asthma, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, sickle cell anemia, kidney, eye, and dental problems, emotional trauma, and others are commonplace. They’re poorly addressed or treated.

Incarceration also affects mental health, showing up in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, women in prison longest affected most but, with rare exceptions, none are treated.

From 2003 – 2008, four pregnant women gave birth under extremely difficult conditions with little pre or post-natal care. Hospital transfers entail being shackled, hands and feet, then chained to their beds until entering delivery rooms, then again after giving birth.

Yet doctors know that shackling during labor may cause complications such as hemorrhaging, decreased fetal heart rate, and if a caesarean is needed, even a short delay may cause permanent brain damage.

Imprisoned Palestinian Girls Denied Education

Girls as young as 16 are incarcerated with adults and denied any form of education, either vocational or continuation of their schooling. Israeli juvenile offenders, in contrast, may complete up to grade 12.

In 2008, five Palestinian girls, under age 18, were imprisoned. Four were high school students, unable to continue their education. Three of them were pending trial, one for over seven months, the other two from February and April 2008. A whole year or more may be lost, and if sentenced to lengthly incarcerations, perhaps no chance for personal development. As a result, affected girls are understandably depressed, not knowing what kind of future to expect or what more may happen to harm it.

Families may bring books once every three months if they’re able to enter Israel to do it. While general reading materials are allowed, technical publications and science books are prohibited as are encyclopedias, dictionaries, and large books, except with special permission.

The Tawjihi secondary education exam is the only opportunity for female prisoners. As a result, girls see it as the most important event in their lives, their reputations and futures riding on it. Yet at times, the exam is prohibited – for example, cancelled to impose collective punishment or because a Palestinian bringing it was obstructed at checkpoints, searched crossing the Green Line, again before entering the prison, or not allowed to come at all.

Eligibility for the exam requires registering with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education, typically done through families. As for the girls, everything is arbitrary, ad hoc, and uncertain as they’re afforded no institutionalized learning framework, forced instead to rely on their own resources to obtain materials and study them. Even at exam times, teachers can’t enter prisons to instruct formally nor may girls communicate with them by phone, letters, or other means. The combination of prison, isolation, uncertainty, and helplessness adds greater levels of stress, mental pressure, and anxiety.

For those who qualify and get the chance, higher education is only in Hebrew – at the Open University of Israel, an added burden for young girls with poor language proficiency. Those permitted to enroll have to pay all costs, including tuition, books and fees, that alone making university training unaffordable for most families struggling to get by. The cost of an Israeli education is five times what a Palestinian college charges.

Another prison regulation permits only sentenced prisoners to enroll, those administratively detained or awaiting trial are prohibited. And those allowed must apply at least five years ahead of scheduled releases, adding still another hurdle. As a result, no female prisoners are enrolled at the Open University. From 2000 – 2008, only three managed to do it for a portion of their incarceration, but at no time was it easy, and training in hard sciences are excluded.

Israeli justice is cruel and inhumane in violation of fundamental international laws, including Fourth Geneva’s Article 147 affirming the right to a fair trial, and Article 49 prohibiting individual or mass forced transfers or deportations from the occupied territory to that of the occupying power or any other country. Article 76 states that:

“all protected persons accused of an offense must be detained within the occupied country and if they are sentenced, they have to serve the sentence within it.”

Yet Palestinian men, women, and children are held in Israeli prisons far from families, rarely given permits to visit them. They’re incarcerated for resisting occupation. International law permits it. Israel systematically breaches it, subjecting Palestinian men, women and children to cruel and inhuman confinement and treatment – atrocities by any standard.

Their struggle is ours – to free them and return their dignity and rights, those afforded only to Jews, but not all in an increasingly unfair society favoring privilege over democracy and equality.

Written by Stephen Lendman

Posted: 24 April 2010 00:00

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

22 April, 2010

Countercurrents.org

Last week none of us had ever heard of an Icelandic volcano called Eyjafjallajokull, and still even now, very few of us can actually pronounce its name. The volcanic dust spewn forth across Europe as a result of its spectacular eruption has had a remarkable effect, leading to, among other things, the total grounding of the UK’s aviation fleet for several days until this morning. The headline on Metro, the free newspaper the person next to me on the train is reading as I write this, is “Fly, fly again”. It will take days to clear the backlog and to get things back to normal, but let us not pass up this opportunity to meditate on vulnerability and resilience, which led to major disruption to the air freighting of produce from Kenya and other places, thousands of people stuck in their Easter holiday destinations, and Liverpool Football Club having to travel to its Europa League fixture with Athletico Madrid on public transport . But perhaps rather than seeing it as the ‘misery’ most news broadcasts labelled it as, we might see it as good practice for the near future.

Two days ago, 400,000 Britons were stranded around the world, 268,000 across Europe, the rest mainly in the US, Home Secretary David Miliband calling for the ‘great British spirit’ to be invoked by stranded tourists. The navy fleet was on standby for a Dunkirk style ‘rescuing’ of Brits from the European mainland to get them home. A Royal Navy ship picked up tourists from Spain, the captain saying “it’s a warship so the civilians won’t be used to the austere conditions, but they will get fresh rations, fish and chips for dinner tonight and curry tomorrow. We will provide as many camp beds as we can, but it’s not a 5 star hotel. An Englishman who organised a flotilla of boats to sail to Dunkirk to pick up tourists in a restaging of the Dunkirk evacuations of World War 2, was turned back by French authorities who told him that such behaviour was anti-commercial and could affect the viability of French ferries (at least that’s the story as it was told to me, true or not, it’s a great story).

Kenya’s horticulture industry, mostly flowers such as roses, grown for the UK market, has been losing $2 million a day in exports, with tonnes of roses and other fresh produce being thrown away each day (at least they were ‘composted’, according to the Guardian). One of the tabloids headlines yesterday was “TFI Flyday!” such was the media jubilation at the return to the skies. However, as Heading Out at the Oil Drum notes, this might just be the beginning of a series of eruptions, this may be just the beginning, rather than just the end of a week-long interruption to business-as-usual.

As a result of the grounding of the UK’s planes, Europe’s carbon emissions from aviation fell by 60%. This great graphic from informationisbeautiful.net answers the question of what produces more CO2, the volcano, or aviation? In spite of the huge amount of carbon pumped out by Eyjafjallajokull, aviation is still a far greater polluter.

Of course that was partly offset by the rather large amount of carbon belched forth by the unpronounceable volcano, but I spent Monday reading a fascinating piece of research by Meinshausen et.al.(1). It puts into context what ‘misery’ actually means, and it goes way beyond a few days stuck in a foreign airport or composting roses. Runaway climate change, accompanied by 2 metre sea level rise, crippling impacts on agriculture and most other aspects of modern life, would be utterly catastrophic. While not wishing in any way to denigrate the experience of those who have had a stressful, costly and disruptive few days, perhaps looking at this experience as a dry run for an oil-strapped near future might be healthier.

Of course we have had these ‘wake-up’ moments before. In 2000 the lorry drivers went on strike, blocking refineries, and the UK was a few days away from a major food crisis. The same thing was threatened a few years later when Grangemouth refinery was blockaded. Then there was the oil price spike of July 2008, and the impacts of the oil price rises. There was the snow of last winter, many communities cut off and distribution of essential goods made rather tricky. Oh and I think there was the world nearly coming to the brink of economic meltdown quite recently if I remember rightly, although I’m told that is all fine and sorted out now.

Now we have the grounding of the entire UK air fleet, and still the press coverage focused on newly-weds stranded in their honeymoon locations, or school choirs stuck in the US, rather than questioning how utterly reliant we have become on aviation, and how perilously unresilient we have grown as a culture. One minor interruption and everything starts coming unstuck at the edges rather quickly, developing countries find their agricultural sectors on the edge of bankruptcy, school exams might have to be scheduled, we will be short of fruit and other imports, etc.etc.

Meinshausen et.al. look at what level of cuts in emissions we need to make if we are actually going to avoid runaway and catastrophic climate change. They estimate that there is about a 70% chance of staying under 2°C if global emissions are cut by 50% from 1990 levels by 2050, and that emissions would need to have peaked and started to decline by 2020, and that they would need to continue being cut beyond 2050, and would need to have reached zero before 2100. A cut of 72% by 2050 would give us an 84% chance of avoiding runaway climate change.

They suggest that a programme of reductions capable of producing cuts in emissions necessary to avoid a 2°C rise, would mean that by 2050, the annual UK personal carbon allowance would need to be between 1.96 and 1.10 tonnes of CO2e per year, a cut of between 86% and 92% on 1990 levels, a level of emissions similar to that of Mozambique today. In this context, there really is little or no place for aviation, and that’s before we add in the question of what, by then, planes would even be running on.

We are talking about reducing emissions, personally and societally, by over 90%. Personally I don’t think future generations will be especially bothered that I had a few days over Easter chilling out in Rome or snorkelling in Thailand as they come to grips with the irreversible nightmare they have inherited from us. They will almost certainly look at any interruption to our “Fly, fly again” collective madness as having been a good thing, and would have hoped that we might have learnt something instructive from it.

Profoundly thought-provoking though the implications of Meinshausen’s study is, it is seen by some as being the optimistic scenario. A different study by Helm et.al. argues that even this scale of cuts is unrealistic, because presently the emissions of different nations are based on production rather than consumption, that is, they don’t factor in the carbon emissions that go into making imported consumer goods, which could be seen as ‘outsourced emissions’. If emissions were allocated to countries on the basis on consumption rather than production, the UK’s emissions would increase by 50%. Then there’s the fact, as set out so clearly in the recent Climate Safety report, that we haven’t even reached 2°C yet, we have gone up 0. 8°C and are already seeing feedbacks starting that the IPCC didn’t think we’d see for many years yet.

A re-immersion in the climate change literature is always a chilling experience (the word ‘sobering’ doesn’t somehow feel anywhere near strong enough). We are talking about a profound shift, such as that set out in the excellent forthcoming ‘Zero Carbon Britain 2030’ report, that takes as its basis the need to cut emissions to zero by 2030. In that context, in spite of all the wonders that aviation brings to our lives, whether it be 2 weeks in Rome over the Easter hols or early spring broccoli, roses and green beans airfreighted from Kenya, we are going to have to let it go.

The Department of Transport argue that air passenger numbers will have grown by 200% by 2030 (this is, of course, the same government that argues that peak oil won’t be a concern until 2030 at the earliest), and 21% of all the UK’s transport emissions come from aviation. It is, however, the key element of our transport infrastructure that defies decarbonisation. The aviation industry is already nearly as fuel efficient as it could become, electric planes are a non-started, hydrogen powered planes put 2.6 times the water vapour that ordinary planes put into the upper atmosphere, and biofuels for planes would be a humanitarian disaster, hitting food security hard. We have no option than to consciously, intentionally and urgently design for the end of the aviation industry.

Listening to 5 Live yesterday morning the speculation was all about whether or not planes would get into the air today, like a ‘which-airport-gets-planes-back-in-the-air-first’ competition. Gave me a mental picture of Boeing 737s on runways up and down the country, white knuckles clenching joysticks, revving their engines ready to reconquer the skies as soon as they get the green light. The sky with no planes is clearly seen by some as abhorrent, like a football match with no players, or, in my own case, a garden with no vegetables growing in it.

Alain de Botton wrote a beautiful piece for the BBC, a Transition Tale in effect, writing about life in 2050 with no planes, and people thinking back to the day when people flew. Writing in yesterday’s Guardian, George Monbiot wrote that “over the past few days, people living under the flight paths have seen the future and they like it”. Would it really be that bad to have a vastly scaled back aviation industry? Of course not. I haven’t flown for four years, and it has had no adverse impact on my quality of life at all.

In talks I sometimes use the analogy of the 7 League Boots, how people in the world before oil couldn’t imagine being able to travel long distances in any way other than by foot or travelling on an animal. Now we have lost any sense that distant places are, well, quite distant. The Canaries is actually a long long way from the UK, it’s an island in the middle of the sea. New York is also really a very, very long way from London. Cheap oil and not giving a toss about our carbon emissions has enabled us to shrink distances and as George Monbiot put it yesterday;

“it made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature interjects, and we encounter – tragically for many – the reality of thousands of miles of separation. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all”.

Rather than seeing the past few days as an interruption to our inherent right to go wherever in the world we want to whenever we want to, perhaps we ought to reflect on the awesome power that fossil fuels have brought, albeit temporarily, to our lives.

Helm et.al. argue, as does James Hansen, that the ‘tipping point’ for the Earth’s climate was a 0.5°C increase on pre-industrial levels. Given that the global climate is already committed to a 1.4°C increase, this might seem an impossible task. As Spratt & Sutton write in ‘Climate Code Red’, “the fact that we have long passed this point in no way detracts from its importance as a policy goal, and a state to which we should wholeheartedly endeavour to return the planet”. The Climate Safety Report and the forthcoming second edition of Zero Carbon Britain argue that this means nothing less than a target of zero carbon within the next three decades, a target clearly far in advance of current UK government policy, which, as set out in the 2008 Climate Change Act, is to cut UK emissions by 34% by 2020 and at least 80% by 2050.

Is such an ambition feasible without some major rethinking of many of the assumptions that underpin a business-as-usual approach? I for one struggle to imagine that aviation has any place whatsoever in a world of volatile oil prices, liquid fuel shortages, where biofuels have taken a backseat to actually feeding the world’s population and where avoiding the undermining and irrevocable destabilisation of the world’s climate systems is afforded the seriousness it deserves.

As Rosie Boycott wrote in today’s Guardian, #

“… perhaps this cloud of ash will have a genuine silver lining. Maybe we’ll wake up to where our food comes from, the real price it costs to get here, and the vulnerability of the systems in place. By ramming home the message that what we eat is now at the mercy of acts of God – as well as dwindling resources such as oil and the threat of climate change – I sincerely hope we’ll all start to reconsider how and what we eat”.

Indeed. As George Monbiot concluded yesterday in his typically forthright style:

“we have a choice. We can start decommissioning this industry (aviation) while there is time and find ways of living happily with less of it. Or we can sit and wait for physical reality to simplify the system by more brutal means”.

Designing creatively for this inevitable transition will require a shift in our expectations, shifting what we think of as being the best thing to do when the kids have 2 weeks off school, and what we expect to find on supermarket shelves.

However, as Rafa Benitez, Liverpool manager, told 5Live yesterday after expressing his disapproval with UEFA for making them play their tie in Madrid in spite of the flying ban, and contemplating a very long journey made up to coaches, trains, and at the end, a plane, “we will adapt”. Of course we will, and be healthier, leaner and better connected for it, and we may just, still avoid runaway climate change. Let’s just not have a bank style bail-out for airlines please.

References.

(1). Meinshausen, M. Meinshausen, N. Hare, W. Raper, S. C. B. Frieler, K. Knutti, R. Frame, D. J. Allen, M. R. (2009) Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 degrees C. Nature 458, 1158-1162

22 April, 2010

Transition Culture

Written by Rob Hopkins

Posted: 23 April 2010 00:00

A NUN who has been superior at a Syrian monastery for the past 18 years has warned that media coverage of ongoing violence in that country has been “partial and untrue”. It is “a fake”, Mother Agnes Mariam said, which “hides atrocities committed in the name of liberty and democracy”.

Superior of the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery of St James the Mutilated in Qara, in Syria’s diocese of Homs, which is in full communion with Rome, she left Ireland yesterday after a three-day visit during which she met representatives of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Maynooth.

She told The Irish Times she was in Ireland “not to advocate for the (Assad) regime but for the facts”. Most news reports from Syria were “forged, with only one side emphasised”, she said. This also applied to the UN, whose reports were “one-sided and not worthy of that organisation”.

UN observers in Syria had been “moderate with the rebels and covered for them in taking back positions after the withdrawal of heavy equipment, as seen so tragically in Homs”, she said.

When it was put to her this suggested the whole world was out of step except for Syria, Russia and China, she protested: “No, no, there are 20 countries, including some in Latin America” of the same view.

The reason the media was being denied easy access to Syria currently was because in the Libyan conflict journalists placed electronic devices for Nato in rooms used at press conferences in that country, she said. “So Syria didn’t want journalists,” she said.

Christians make up about 10 per cent of Syria’s population, dispersed throughout the country, she said. The Assad regime “does not favour Christians”, she said. “It is a secular regime based on equality for all, even though in the constitution it says the Koran is the source of legislation.”

But “Christians are less put aside [in Syria] than in other Islamic countries, for example Saudi Arabia,” she said. “The social fabric of Syria is very diverse, so Christians live in peace.”

The “Arab insurrection” under way in that country included “sectarian factions which promote fundamentalist Islam, which is not genuine Islam”, she said.

The majority of Muslims in Syria are moderate and open to other cultural and interfaith elements, she said. “Wahhabism (a fundamentalist branch of Islam) is not open,” she added.

Christians in Syria were “doubtful about the future if the project to topple the regime succeeded”. The alternative was “a religious sectarian state where all minorities would feel threatened and discriminated against”, she said.

There was “a need to end the violence”, she said. “The West and Gulf states must not give finance to armed insurrectionists who are sectarian terrorists, most of whom are from al-Qaeda, according to a report presented to the German parliament,” she said.

“We don’t want to be invaded, as in Aleppo, by mercenaries, some of whom think they are fighting Israel. They bring terror, destruction, fear and nobody protects the civilians,” she said. There were “very few Syrians among the rebels”, she said. “Mercenaries should go home,” she said.

What she and others sought in Syria was “reform, no violence, no foreign intervention.” She hoped for “a new, third way, a new social pact where the right to autodetermination without outside interference” would be respected.

© 2012 The Irish Times

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Mon, Aug 13, 2012

The rich world is causing the famines it claims to be preventing.

I don’t blame Mo Farah, Pele and Haile Gebrselassie, who lined up, all hugs and smiles, outside Downing Street for a photocall at the prime minister’s hunger summit(1). Perhaps they were unaware of the way in which they were being used to promote his corporate and paternalistic approach to overseas aid. Perhaps they were also unaware of the crime against humanity over which he presides. Perhaps Cameron himself is unaware of it.

You should by now have heard about the famine developing in the Sahel region of West Africa. Poor harvests and high food prices threaten the lives of some 18 million people. The global price of food is likely to rise still further, as a result of low crop yields in the United States, caused by the worst drought in 50 years. World cereal prices, in response to this disaster, climbed 17% last month(2).

We have been cautious about attributing such events to climate change: perhaps too cautious. A new paper by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, shows that there has been a sharp increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers(3). Between 1951 and 1980 these events affected between 0.1 and 0.2% of the world’s land surface each year. Now, on average, they affect 10%. Hansen explains that “the odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small”(4). Both the droughts in the Sahel and the US crop failures are likely to be the result of climate change.

But this is not the only sense in which the rich world’s use of fuel is causing the poor to starve. In the United Kingdom, in the rest of the European Union and in the United States, governments have chosen to deploy a cure as bad as the disease. Despite overwhelming evidence of the harm their policy is causing, none of them will change course.

Biofuels are the means by which governments in the rich world avoid hard choices. Rather than raise fuel economy standards as far as technology allows, rather than promoting a shift from driving to public transport, walking and cycling, rather than insisting on better town planning to reduce the need to travel, they have chosen to exchange our wild overconsumption of petroleum for the wild overconsumption of fuel made from crops. No one has to drive less or make a better car: everything remains the same except the source of fuel. The result is a competition between the world’s richest and poorest consumers, a contest between overconsumption and survival. There was never any doubt about which side would win.

I’ve been banging on about this since 2004(5), and everything I warned of then has happened. The US and the European Union have both set targets and created generous financial incentives for the use of biofuels. The results have been a disaster for people and the planet.

Already, 40% of US corn (maize) production is used to feed cars(6). The proportion will rise this year as a result of the smaller harvest. Though the market for biodiesel is largely confined to the European Union, it has already captured seven per cent of the world’s output of vegetable oil(7). The European Commission admits that its target (10% of transport fuels by 2020) will raise world cereal prices by between 3 and 6%(8). Oxfam estimates that with every 1% increase in the price of food, another 16 million people go hungry(9).

By 2021, the OECD says, 14% of the world’s maize and other coarse grains, 16% of its vegetable oil and 34% of its sugarcane will be used to make people in the gas guzzling nations feel better about themselves(10). The demand for biofuel will be met, it reports, partly through an increase in production; partly through a “reduction in human consumption.”(11) The poor will starve so that the rich can drive.

The rich world’s demand for biofuels is already causing a global land grab. ActionAid estimates that European companies have now seized five million hectares of farmland – an area the size of Denmark – in developing countries for industrial biofuel production(12). Small farmers, growing food for themselves and local markets, have been thrown off their land and destituted. Tropical forests, savannahs and grasslands have been cleared to plant what the industry still calls “green fuels”.

When the impacts of land clearance and the use of nitrogen fertilisers are taken into account, biofuels produce more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels do(13,14,15). The UK, which claims that half the biofuel sold here meets its sustainability criteria, solves this problem by excluding the greenhouse gas emissions caused by changes in land use(16). Its sustainability criteria are, as a result, worthless.

Even second generation biofuels, made from crop wastes or wood, are an environmental disaster, either extending the cultivated area or removing the straw and stovers which protect the soil from erosion and keep carbon and nutrients in the ground. The combination of first and second generation biofuels – encouraging farmers to plough up grasslands and to leave the soil bare – and hot summers could create the perfect conditions for a new dust bowl.

Our government knows all this. One of its own studies shows that if the European Union stopped producing biofuels, the amount of vegetable oils it exported to world markets would rise by 20% and the amount of wheat by 33%, reducing world prices(17).

Preparing for the prime minister’s hunger summit on Sunday, the international development department argued that, with a rising population, “the food production system will need to be radically overhauled, not just to produce more food but to produce it sustainably and fairly to ensure that the poorest people have the access to food that they need.”(18) But another government department – transport – boasts on its website that, thanks to its policies, drivers in this country have now used 4.4 billion litres of biofuel(19). Of this 30% was produced from recycled cooking oil. The rest consists of 3 billion litres of refined energy snatched from the mouths of the people that David Cameron claims to be helping.

Some of those to whom the government is now extending its “nutrition interventions” may have been starved by its own policies. In this and other ways, David Cameron, with the unwitting support of various sporting heroes, is offering charity, not justice. And that is no basis for liberating the poor.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/sport-stars-get-behind-olympic-hunger-summit/

2. http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/

3. James Hansen, Makiko Satoa, Reto Ruedy, 2012. Perception of climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.1286.pdf

4. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here–and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html?hpid=z3

5. http://www.monbiot.com/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

6. OECD and UNFAO, 2012. Agricultural Outlook, 2012-2021.

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/agriculture-and-food/oecd-fao-agricultural-outlook-2012_agr_outlook-2012-en

7. Alessandro Flammini, October 2008. Biofuels and the underlying causes of high food prices. UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. http://bit.ly/P7V1Zt

8. Mariann Fischer Boel, European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, 13th March 2008. Biofuels: not a magic wand, but a valuable policy tool. Speech to the 2008 World Biofuels Markets Congress. http://bit.ly/MTPDdZ

9. R.Bailey, 2008. Response of Oxfam GB to the Gallagher Review. Oxfam. Cited by ActionAid, 2010. Meals per Gallon: the impact of industrial biofuels on people and global hunger. http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/meals_per_gallon_final.pdf

10. OECD and UNFAO, 2012. Agricultural Outlook, 2012-2021.

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/agriculture-and-food/oecd-fao-agricultural-outlook-2012_agr_outlook-2012-en

11. as above

12. ActionAid, 2010. Meals per Gallon: the impact of industrial biofuels on people and global hunger. http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/meals_per_gallon_final.pdf

13. PJ Crutzen, AR Mosier, KA Smith and W Winiwarter, 1 August 2007. N2O release from agro-biofuel production negates global warming reduction by replacing fossil fuels. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions 7, pp11191–11205. http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/7/11191/2007/acpd-7-11191-2007.pdf

14. Joseph Fargione, Jason Hill, David Tilman, Stephen Polasky, Peter Hawthorne, 7th February 2008. Land Clearing and the Biofuel Carbon Debt. Science. Doi 10.1126/science.1152747.

15. Timothy Searchinger, Ralph Heimlich, R. A. Houghton, Fengxia Dong, Amani Elobeid, Jacinto Fabiosa, Simla Tokgoz, Dermot Hayes, Tun-Hsiang Yu, 7th February 2008. Use of U.S. Croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouse Gases Through Emissions from Land Use Change . Science. Doi 10.1126/science.1151861.

16. “This figure may not include all emissions from direct land use change and excludes the emissions from indirect land-use changes considered in the ‘Gallagher Review’.” http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/verified-rtfo-biofuel-statistics-2010-11/

17. Grant Davies, 2012. Removing Biofuel Support Policies: An Assessment of Projected Impacts on Global Agricultural Markets using the AGLINK-COSIMO model. DEFRA. http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/11/meeting-energy-demand/bio-energy/5134-removing-biofuel-support-policies-an-assessment-o.pdf

18. http://www.dfid.gov.uk/What-we-do/Key-issues/Food-and-nutrition/

19. http://www.dft.gov.uk/statistics/releases/verified-rtfo-biofuel-statistics-2010-11/

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th August 2012

August 13, 2012