Just International

Remove Fraser Anning from parliament :One million people standing up for decency!

By Kate Ahmad

Wow! One million signatures and it’s still heading up.

One million people opposed to the hateful rhetoric of Senator Anning.

One million people saying that it’s not ok to persecute a group of people based on their religion.

One million people standing in solidarity with the devastated Christchurch Muslim community.

One million people who care to preserve the peaceful, multicultural society we live in.

Thank you so much for your kindness and co-operation.

Journalist Jenna Price from the Sydney Morning Herald covered our story here: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/more-than-800-000-sign-petition-to-have-anning-removed-from-parliament-20190316-p514rl.html

Look forward to further updates tomorrow

Sign here.

Tell Congress: Stop Fueling War in Yemen

Yemen is facing a massive humanitarian catastrophe and we need your help to stop it. American aid is crucial to the Saudi war effort, and removing our assistance would limit Saudi attacks and maybe even push them to the negotiating table.

Here’s the language that will be sent to Congress:
As your constituent, I urge you to take action to end American complicity in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. We cannot sit by while our government increases suffering in a country devastated by conflict, cholera, and famine. I strongly urge you to co-sponsor and support the War Powers Resolution introduced in the House by Rep. Ro Khanna and in the Senate by Sen. Bernie Sanders. The privileged resolution would end U.S. military involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

What’s Going in Yemen?

Since March 2015, the U.S. has supported an Arab military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in a civil war in Yemen. The war, that pits an armed Yemeni rebel group called the Houthis against the Yemeni government, has resulted in massive civilian casualties, and the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. It has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis and wounded more than 40,000, the majority of whom were civilians. The United Nations has stated that U.S.-supported airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition are the leading cause of civilian casualties. Meanwhile Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented coalition airstrikes that have repeatedly targeted schools, hospitals, weddings, public markets, water and sanitation systems, and other vital civilian infrastructure – all probable war crimes carried out with U.S. support.

The coalition’s destruction of such vital civilian infrastructure has created the conditions necessary for the world’s largest humanitarian crisis – a crisis even larger than Syria according to the UN. The coalition has also used starvation as a weapon of war by blockading and interfering with the delivery of vital humanitarian and commercial assistance, which the majority of Yemeni civilians depend on for survival. Thanks to the war, more than 8 MILLION people are now on the brink of starvation and Yemen is home to the largest and fastest growing cholera crisis ever documented. Every 10 minutes, a Yemeni child under 5 dies from starvation or disease. It’s time to end America’s role in this suffering.

The United States’ Role in Yemen’s Civil War

Congress has never authorized America’s involvement in this war in Yemen, yet for almost three years the United States has literally fueled the conflict and its war crimes. Since the beginning of the intervention in March 2015, the United States has provided midair refueling to coalition jets, shared intelligence for targeting assistance, other logistical support, and sold U.S. bombs to the coalition. Throughout the war, Saudi Arabia and its allies have targeted civilians, hospitals, schools, and farms with American made bombs dropped by planes refueled by America. Meanwhile, the US has provided Saudi Arabia and its allies political cover while they deliberately use starvation and disease as weapons of war, putting 8 million Yemenis a step away from famine. None of this brutality would be possible without continued American support.

What does this bill do?

America’s unconstitutional war in Yemen has never been authorized by Congress. Congress has the power to use a resolution to end U.S. military involvement in the Saudi-led coalition’s war in Yemen. It would end U.S. refueling of and intelligence-sharing to coalition warplanes conducting aerial bombings in Yemen. It invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was passed in the wake of Vietnam to empower Congress as the sole body that can declare war. This legislation is our best chance to end America’s role in this unconstitutional war and push for peace, which is the only significant way to relieve the suffering of the Yemeni people.

Our public dollars should not be funding Saudi and UAE war crimes in Yemen. Will you sign our petition and call Congress today to urge them to support the Sanders-Lee resolution?

Sign here

Tell the U.S. Congress and President to Finally Allow Ending the Korean War

THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT

The primary impediment to peace in Korea is located thousands of miles from Korea in Washington, D.C. We respectfully demand that it get out of the way.

To: The United States Congress and President

​​​​While U.S. mass media ignores or demonizes the people of North Korea, it is all too easy to forget that there are millions of children, factory workers, and peasants being brutalized by cruel U.S. and U.N. sanctions.

A century ago, Woodrow Wilson promised self-determination to smaller nations but denied it to Koreans, and gave the Empire of Japan the green light to continue its colonialist violence. After the Pacific War, the U.S. and the USSR split the country in two. Syngman Rhee — a George Washington University graduate just like Juan Guaidó​ — was imported to serve as dictator of South Korea. The United States labeled anyone who resisted him a “communist” and helped Rhee torture and kill them.

The Korean War resulted from the division of the country and subsequent provocations from both sides, one of them heavily backed by the United States. The U.S. military invaded the North in the autumn of 1950 and destroyed the country, flattening nearly every city. The United States has retained wartime control of the South Korean military, maintained a major occupation of South Korea, and refused to allow a peace agreement to end the war ever since.

In the past two years, the democracy-loving people of South Korea have brought Moon Jae-in to power and the U.S. and North Korean leaders together. As a result, North Korea has not tested any new missiles, has returned U.S. soldiers’ remains, and has begun dismantling nuclear sites and demilitarizing the Demilitarized Zone. The United States has scaled back its threatening war rehearsals.

Now the United States needs to support an end to the war. Petty impediments like partisanship and major disagreements on unrelated topics need to be set aside for the sake of peace. Nuclear war, scientists now understand, is not containable. If it happens on Earth, it threatens the whole Earth. Those unable to act against the risk of the mass killing of people distant and different from themselves still can and must act against the risk of nuclear apocalypse.

Sanctioning the people of North Korea for decades has utterly failed to accomplish anything other than great human suffering. It is time to end the war, end the sanctions, allow families to reunite, and begin planning to bring U.S. troops home to the United States.

SIGN THIS PETITION

PETITION: EXONERATE LAROUCHE

THE JAN. 27, 1989 JAILING OF LYNDON LAROUCHE DEFINED AN ERA, WHICH NOW MUST END

WE CALL UPON PRESIDENT TRUMP TO EXONERATE LAROUCHE!

Many Americans sat in stunned amazement earlier this month as the venerable New York Times and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s apparatus moved to put the President of the United States, Donald Trump, on trial for treason, because he dared to meet and converse with Russian President Vladimir Putin; because he has referred to NATO as being “obsolete” and questioned its role; and because he fired his director of the FBI, James Comey, as the Constitution prescribes he has the authority to do. Jaws dropped as it became public that top echelons of the FBI, the CIA, and the Democratic Party—all on instructions from British intelligence—had been, and still are to this day, engaged in an active coup d’état against the elected President of the United States. Many of you reading these lines today are rightly aghast at the fact that these actors, although they have not yet achieved their objective, have so far gotten away with their plot, and that they act with seeming impunity. “How is that possible?” you ask yourself and your friends.

To find the answer to that question, you only need look to the events of Jan. 27, 1989—precisely 30 years ago—when Lyndon H. LaRouche and a group of associates were railroaded into prison with lengthy sentences, for crimes they never committed. The frame-up and jailing of LaRouche, facilitated by years of lying media vilification of LaRouche and his movement, which continues to this day, was carried out by the same British-run political apparatus—in many cases, by the same individual hit-men, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller—that today is out to topple the President of the United States.

And it is because they were able to carry out that injustice against LaRouche 30 years ago, despite massive opposition nationally and internationally from prominent civil rights and human rights leaders, elected officials and legal scholars, that they are at it again today, on a grander scale.

In fact, the five-year jailing of Lyndon LaRouche defined an entire era of modern U.S. history, much as the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy did.

There is no exaggeration in that statement. Ramsey Clark, who served as Attorney General of the United States under President Lyndon Johnson, and who also represented LaRouche in his appeals to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, stated in an April 26, 1995 open letter to then Attorney General Janet Reno:

“I bring this matter [the LaRouche case] to you directly, because I believe it involves a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.”

Clark also said:

“The purpose can only be seen as destroying— it’s more than a political movement, it’s more than a political figure; it is those two. But it’s a fertile engine of ideas, a common purpose of thinking and studying and analyzing to solve problems, regardless of the impact on the status quo, or on vested interests. It was a deliberate purpose to destroy that at any cost… In what was a complex and pervasive utilization of law enforcement, prosecution, media, and non-governmental organizations focused on destroying an enemy, this case must be number one.”

With LaRouche’s jailing, America and the world were deprived of their most illustrious statesman and economist.

Because LaRouche’s policies for replacing the deadly looting of Wall Street and the City of London with a just New World Economic Order of universal, high-tech development were not implemented, hundreds of millions of people around the world remained in poverty and tens of millions perished unnecessarily. It has only been with China’s recent adoption of policies very similar to those proposed by LaRouche up to 50 years ago, that the genocide has stopped in at least large parts of the planet.

Because LaRouche’s SDI policy, as adopted and proposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, was sabotaged and not carried out, the world today teeters at the edge of thermonuclear confrontation. Only a return to LaRouche’s original design of the SDI ballistic missile defense system—based on new physical principles and cooperation with Russia and China, not against them—can now pull us back from the brink.

Because LaRouche’s proposal for cooperation between East and West after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany—famously forecast by LaRouche in October 1988—was rejected, and LaRouche was hauled off to jail scarcely three months later, Russia was ravaged and the West looted under Thatcher, Bush, and Mitterrand. And a wave of permanent wars was unleashed, which is with us still today.

Because LaRouche’s proposed war on drugs against London’s Dope, Inc. banking apparatus was never implemented, a drug epidemic today is poisoning our nation and the world.

And because LaRouche’s policies for generating a new Renaissance of classical culture and science were swept aside, we now stare into the pit of hell of a New Dark Age that is engulfing our youth in particular.

Some among you may disagree. Some may think that no jailing of a single man, no matter how unjustly, could possibly cause such results. But those thinking that way have yet to understand how real history works, how ideas are the driving force of humanity’s advance. In fact, the entire body of LaRouche’s life work and his extensive scientific writings, address precisely that central question: the role of man’s unique creativity in shaping his own history, and that of the physical universe around him. Read and study LaRouche if you wish to understand why the British Empire so fears him.

On March 30, 1984, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a Draft Memorandum of Agreement Between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., with a vision for the future which remains as scientifically valid today as it was 35 years ago. In it, LaRouche stated:

The political foundation for durable peace must be: a) The unconditional sovereignty of each and all nation-states, and b) Cooperation among sovereign nation-states to the effect of promoting unlimited opportunities to participate in the benefits of technological progress, to the mutual benefit of each and all.

The most crucial feature of present implementation of such a policy of durable peace is a profound change in the monetary, economic, and political relations between the dominant powers and those relatively subordinated nations often classed as “developing nations.” Unless the inequities lingering in the aftermath of modern colonialism are progressively remedied, there can be no durable peace on this planet.

Insofar as the United States and Soviet Union acknowledge the progress of the productive powers of labor throughout the planet to be in the vital strategic interests of each and both, the two powers are bound to that degree and in that way by a common interest. This is the kernel of the political and economic policies of practice indispensable to the fostering of durable peace between those two powers.

It is time that the damage done by LaRouche’s incarceration three decades ago be repaired—not only because such a terrible injustice was done to LaRouche, but because that injustice has emboldened the British Empire to use the same methods against a sitting President of the United States, which endangers all of humanity. What better way to defend the United States of America and all of humanity than to exonerate LaRouche, ensure that his policies are at last adopted, and recognize his ideas for what they are, the acts of one of history’s greatest geniuses, affording him his rightful place in history?

Sign here.

Sign the petition to stand #ForPalestineRefugees

PALESTINE REFUGEES NEED YOUR SOLIDARITY MORE THAN EVER
TAKE ACTION NOW!

Palestine refugees have suffered from a historic injustice, and now their access to essential services is at risk.

On 31 August, 2018, our biggest donor announced it would no longer fund UNRWA.

-Education for over 500,000 children

-Health for 3.5 million people

-Emergency food and cash assistance for almost 2 million people

-Dignity and security for 5.4 million people

Sign the petition #ForPalestineRefugees to send a clear message to decision makers that Palestine refugees are not alone.

The petition asks decision makers to:

Preserve the integrity of humanitarian funding.
Protect the rights of Palestine refugees.
Keep UNRWA schools open, health clinics running, and emergency food and cash distribution systems functioning.

Show your support and stand #ForPalestineRefugees.

The petition will be delivered to decision makers at the United Nations General Assembly.

*The #ForPalestineRefugees petition is an initiative of the #DignityIsPriceless Campaign. By signing this petition you agree to be kept informed about how you can help support this campaign and UNRWA’s work.

 

Sign the petition here.

Deleting Muslims

Dear friends across India,

In a few days, India will delete as many as 7 million Muslims in Assam State from its master list of “citizens” because they speak the wrong language and worship the wrong God.

Husbands, wives, and children could be torn apart and left to rot in prison camps.

This is how genocides begin – how the nightmare of the Rohingya began. But it’s all unfolding quietly — if we raise a massive alarm calling for the UN Secretary-General and key governments to intervene – we can stop this horror on our doorstep before it starts:

The Assam government has already begun quietly building another new prison camp and deploying troops.

Like the Burmese regime that attacked the Rohingya, the government claims they’re acting against illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. But the vast majority of the people targeted are just poor, illiterate Muslim citizens without “proper” documentation. They’ve never needed it before!

António Guterres, the Secretary General of the UN, has pledged to fight on behalf of those who can’t: “I will raise my voice. I will take action. I will use my rights to stand up for your rights.” We need to hold him to those words because right now the Bengali Muslims in India have no one to speak for them on the global stage — except us. Sign the petition below and together we can stop a road to genocide in Assam:

The rise of virulent Hindu nationalism is behind this aggressive move to render millions of Muslim people in India stateless and vulnerable. History teaches us that these movements know no limits except the ones citizens set for them. Let’s draw a line in Assam, and send a message to governments everywhere – we’re watching.

With hope and determination,

Sign the petition here 

Emma, Nate, Ricken, Antonia, Flora, Alice, Wissam, Danny and the entire Avaaz team

 

Free Khalida Jarrar, Palestinian parliamentarian and feminist

Palestinian leader Khalida Jarrar, a leftist, feminist parliamentarian imprisoned by the Israeli occupation, has been jailed without charge or trial since 2 July 2017. As her friends, family and comrades awaited her release, they were instead informed on 14 June that her administrative detention had been renewed for the third time for an additional four months. Take action to demand the immediate release of Khalida Jarrar and her fellow Palestinian prisoners!

As Palestinians march in Gaza in the Great Return March, and as they take to the streets in the West Bank in the Lift the Sanctions movement, the Israeli occupation is extending Khalida Jarrar’s detention without charge or trial to keep this strong, powerful leader off the streets and away from her people.

Khalida’s administrative detention renewal is scheduled to be approved by an Israeli military court on 2 July. Before this approval happens, it is important that international solidarity is heard, loudly and clearly, demanding her freedom!

Khalida Jarrar is a longtime advocate for the freedom of Palestinian prisoners, the Vice-Chair of Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and its former Executive Director. A member of the Palestinian Legislative Council elected as part of the leftist Abu Ali Mustafa Bloc, associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, she chairs the PLC’s Prisoners Committee.

She is also an outspoken leader in the fight to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes in the International Criminal Court. She is a member of a Palestinian commission charged with bringing complaints and files before the international court about ongoing Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, from attacks on Gaza to land confiscation and settlement construction to mass arrests and imprisonment.

This is not the first time she has faced arrest and persecution. In 2014, she resisted – and defeated – an Israeli attempt to forcibly displace her from her family home in el-Bireh to Jericho. Only nine months later, in April 2015, she was seized by Israeli occupation forces and ordered to administrative detention, imprisonment without charge or trial. After a global outcry, she was brought before Israeli military courts and faced 12 charges based on her political activity, from giving speeches to attending events in support of Palestinian prisoners.

After she was released in June 2016, she resumed her leading role in the Palestinian liberation movement, only to be seized once more on 2 July 2017 and once again thrown in prison with no charges and no trial. Her administrative detention was already renewed for another six months in December 2017, and it is clear that the Israeli occupation has no intention of releasing Khalida, one of the leaders among the 6,200 Palestinian prisoners (including nearly 500 administrative detainees) in Israeli jails.

She, along with her fellow administrative detainees, boycotts the Israeli military courts that rubber-stamp their military detention orders. They are demanding an end to the practice of administrative detention, first brought to Palestine by the British colonial mandate before being adopted by the Zionist occupation. Administrative detention orders can be issued for up to six months at a time, and they are indefinitely renewable. Palestinians have spent years at a time jailed without charge or trial under administrative detention.

Within the Israeli occupation prison, she has played a leading role in supporting the education of the minor girls held there, organizing classes on human rights and in review for mandatory high school examinations when the prison authority denied the girls a teacher.

We know that the Israeli military court hearing is a sham. But it is more important than ever that our voices are heard and our actions are visible throughout the next week to demand freedom for Khalida Jarrar. Protests are already being organized in New York and elsewhere around the world. Join us and take action!

Sign the petition here.

Thank You to Google Employees Who Reject the Business of War

GOOGLE EMPLOYEES AND ALL WORKERS EVERYWHERE

We the undersigned applaud those employees of Google who resist allowing Google to work in the business of war. We want to express our deep gratitude for your willingness to take this critical stand. The particular new dangers of automated weapons provide one more reason to make mass killing a thing of the past and to move public policies to a world beyond war.

We further want to encourage all workers at all companies in all countries, including at Google, to expand this effort until it results in a firm commitment to reject all military contracts — until every company meets the demand of Google’s employees to “publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither [this company] nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

*****

Note that Google’s new statement of principles says “[W]e will not design or deploy AI in the following application areas: . . . Weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” but says nothing about non-AI military contracts.

 

 

To: Google employees and all workers everywhere
From: Chandra Muzaffar

We the undersigned applaud those employees of Google who resist allowing Google to work in the business of war. We want to express our deep gratitude for your willingness to take this critical stand. The particular new dangers of automated weapons provide one more reason to make mass killing a thing of the past and to move public policies to a world beyond war.

We further want to encourage all workers at all companies in all countries, including at Google, to expand this effort until it results in a firm commitment to reject all military contracts — until every company meets the demand of Google’s employees to “publicize, and enforce a clear policy stating that neither [this company] nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”

 

Sign this petition here : https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/thank-you-to-google-employees-who-reject-the-business-of-war?link_id=1&can_id=a4f488f42ad134d4357acc4bfa4bb613&source=email-re-link-that-works-thank-google-employees-who-reject-war&email_referrer=email_366780&email_subject=re-link-that-works-thank-google-employees-who-reject-war

 

NO to U.S. military transports through the eastern German state of Brandenburg and other regions of Germany

NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION (NATO)

Between May and June 2018, over 100 U.S. military convoys are planned to cross the eastern German state of Brandenburg and other regions of Germany towards Eastern Europe. According to NATO propaganda, these U.S. troops, as well as other NATO troops, will serve to protect the Baltic States from the “aggressor Russia.”
However, large parts of the population in Brandenburg know that the aggressor is NATO. It is the United States, the leading NATO country, which has positioned nuclear weapons and a missile defense shield against Russia within Europe. It is NATO that has moved closer and closer to Russia’s borders during the last two decades.

By acting in this way, the NATO states risk provoking war, which entails unforeseeable dangers not only for Germany and Europe, but for the entire world.

In this sense, the protest of the citizens of Brandenburg against the U.S. military transport is a concrete contribution toward bringing together a common resistance — in Germany, the United States, and the whole world – against U.S. military bases worldwide, which form the backbone of NATO aggression.

Great hopes are to be put in the Coalition against U.S. Foreign Military Bases and in forming a truly global coalition against U.S, and NATO military bases in the world.

This statement originated by Potsdam Peace Coordination.

Tell Facebook to Stop Deleting Accounts at the Direction of Governments

Facebook has been deleting accounts at the direction of governments, including the Israeli, U.S., Chinese, and German governments.

Facebook has used the rationale that the accounts it has deleted were inciting violence. Yet Facebook refrains from deleting many accounts that very openly encourage violence.

Please sign this petition to Facebook, and then, on the next page, click to visit and like our new page on Facebook called Facebook Uncensored:

Facebook should apply its policy consistently for deleting accounts that encourage violence, and not at the direction of any government. It should also apply the same policy to the many government accounts that encourage violence, including war and police violence.

Sign up for your action alerts here: https://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=13214