Nobel Peace prize

Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Arrested for Arranging to Rape Multiple Young Children

Posted by Lou on October 5, 2018
Posted in: Crime, Criminology, Nobel Peace prize, Pedophilia, Sex trafficking, Sexual deviancy, Sexual exploitation. Leave a comment

Some humans are just too despicable.

Image result for Joel Davis

Joel Davis

“Indeed, the hypocrisy in Davis’ case is beyond obvious, especially given the fact that he had written an op-ed for the Huffington Post in 2014 in which he boasted that his organization, Youth to End Sexual Violence, was helping to prosecute those who exploit children for sex.”

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(MPN) — The 22-year-old co-founder of a charity that advocates for victims of sexual violence was arrested on Tuesday in New York for possession of child pornography and for working to arrange sexual encounters with children as young as two years old. Joel Davis — who helped found Youth to End Sexual Violence, and chaired the UN’s International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict — has been charged with several counts, including attempted sexual exploitation of a minor and enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity, after exchanging messages with undercover federal agents earlier this month.

During those text message exchanges, Davis had told undercover law enforcement officers that he was sexually interested in children of all ages, including infants, and had sent the officers explicit photographs of infants and toddlers. Some of the photos showed the minors engaged in sexual activity with adults.

Davis, who had previously been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 and had served as the U.S.’ Youth Ambassador on Sexual Violence in Conflict, also told the officers of his intention to engage in sexual activities with an undercover officer’s nine-year-old daughter and the two-year-old daughter of the officer’s girlfriend. He is alleged to have gone into great detail about the sexual activities he wished to perform with the children.

A full copy of the complaint against Davis is available here.

After his arrest, Davis allegedly admitted that he had abused a 13-year-old boy in the past and that he kept pornographic images of children on his phone.

Conduct Unfathomable as It Is Sickening
Joel Davis, chairman of Youth to End Sexual Violence, poses with Zainab Bangura, the UN’s SRSG-SVC.

 

In a statement, U.S. Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, said:

The conduct alleged against Joel Davis is as unfathomable as it is sickening, and as this case demonstrates, law enforcement will keep its watchful eye on the darkest corners of the internet to bring predators to justice.”

FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. also condemned Davis, stating:

Having started an organization that pushed for the end of sexual violence, Davis displayed the highest degree of hypocrisy by his alleged attempts to sexually exploit multiple minors. […] Crimes against children such as those alleged are taken very seriously by the FBI, and we continue to work tirelessly to investigate those who place the most helpless members of the American public at risk.”

Indeed, the hypocrisy in Davis’ case is beyond obvious, especially given the fact that he had written an op-ed for the Huffington Post in 2014 in which he boasted that his organization, Youth to End Sexual Violence, was helping to prosecute those who exploit children for sex.

At the time, Davis wrote:

Youth to End Sexual Violence is one example of how youth-led organizations around the world are standing together in solidarity – demanding a seat at the discussion table for youth survivors, activists, and leaders. We are also using media and technology to share the global call to prevent, protect, and prosecute, and working with governments and civil society organizations to report on how young people are affected by warzone rape.”

Despite the public persona he sought to create, Davis was yet another child predator hiding in plain sight.

Rohingya and the Myth of Buddhist Tolerance

Posted by Lou on September 16, 2017
Posted in: Buddhism, Corruption, Crimes against humanity, Criminology, Genocide, Islam, Islamophobia, Myanmar, Nobel Peace prize, Religion, Rohingya. 4 Comments

 Source: Rohingya and the Myth of Buddhist Tolerance

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by M. Reza Pirbhai

September 13, 2017

Photo by DYKT Mohigan | CC BY 2.0

When old and young are systematically rounded up and shot. When women are gang raped and their babies thrown into waterways to drown. When their homes and businesses are burned. When all the atrocities of ethnic cleansing are plain to see, international law leaps into action. Global bodies and their constituent states work to simultaneously put an end to the atrocities, provide refuge for survivors and bring perpetrators to book, no matter the identity of the offender or the victim. Or so we are told. For as the on-going slaughter and displacement of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims reveals, international law is not so blind.

Since their citizenship rights have been progressively revoked between the 1940s and ‘80s, thousands of Rohingya men, women and children have been subjected to murder and rape, their villages have been raised to the ground and more than a million have fled to neighboring countries without much protest from the world beyond. Even the UN’s late attempts to investigate the most recent barbarities have fallen short of constituting a full Commission of Inquiry and independent investigators have been blocked from entering Myanmar by the Buddhist-led government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung Sang Suu Kyi. “Just imagine, for a minute,” Columbia University’s Hamid Dabashi urges in a recent article, “if it were Jews or Christians, or else the ‘peaceful Buddhists,’ who were the subjects of Muslim persecutions.” Given the attention Muslim violence ceaselessly garners, the reason behind the apparent lack of outrage to protect the Rohingya is clear to him: “Something in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination is cancerously callous. It does not see Muslims as complete human beings.”

Even when one acknowledges that Muslim Bangladesh (where about 500,000 Rohingya have sought refuge) has long sought to prevent their “infiltration,” Dabashi’s point hits home. According to the UNHCR, ordinary Bangladeshis have opened their villages and towns to the latest influx of Rohingya refugees, providing food, clothing and shelter. And even the state’s seemingly cold-hearted actions only reflect Bangladesh’s inability to accommodate its Rohingya co-religionists without international support, which is clearly not forthcoming. Furthermore, various Muslim-majority governments, as well as the Organization of Islamic Conference, have begun pledging funds and voicing the deep concerns expressed by their constituencies. But is it just the dehumanization of Muslims in the Euro-American imagination that seems to be at play in their voices falling on deaf ears beyond? What of the contrasting image of ‘peaceful Buddhists’?

Academia is in fact rife with examples of scholarship that touts the tolerance and inclusiveness of Buddhists and the general argument is nothing new. According to Thomas A. Tweed, Professor of History at Notre Dame University, increasing awareness of religious diversity due to colonial expansion and Christian missionizing led Euro-American Enlightenment intellectuals repelled by Christian sectarianism to consider Buddhism to fit the bill of the “natural religion” (or “perennial philosophy”) they sought, one that exuded “tolerance” toward people of different faiths and was amenable to scientific progress. So convinced were they that some, such as the nineteenth century German-American scholar Paul Carus, even chastised Asian Buddhists when they launched polemical assaults on Christian missionaries, accusing the Asians of using language the “Buddha certainly would not…” So was born the pervasive myth, characteristically articulated by the early twentieth century Swedish-American Theosophist Herman Vetterling, that Buddhism is “a religion of noble tolerance, of universal brotherhood, of righteousness and justice,” and that in its growth as the religion of a global community it had not “caused the spilling of a drop of blood.”

Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Michael Jerryson, picks up where Tweed signs off to show that the tendency to associate Buddhism with tolerance did not die in the early twentieth century or remain bound in an ivory tower. In the wake of World War II, it found its way into the writings of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, marching further forward in time with such works as Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and by the 1980s assumed political dimensions in the form of the Free Tibet Movement. And finally, who can forget (even if you want to) Keanu Reeves in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha.

Social history, however, tells a different tale than Orientalists and popular culture. For every instance of forbearance, history also provides examples of violent intolerance legitimated by Buddhist doctrines and conducted by practitioners. As many ancient Jain and Brahmanical texts speak of persecution at the hands of Indian Buddhists, as Buddhists accuse their South Asian competitors of the same. And consider Jerryson’s examples of the sixth century Chinese Buddhist monk Faqing, who promised his 50,000 followers that every opponent they killed would take them to a higher stage in the bodhisattva’s path. Or recall that with the advent of nationalism, Buddhist monks rallied to the cause as with Japanese Rinzai support for the military campaign against the Russians in 1904-5, or Zen and Pureland Buddhist justifications of the Japanese invasions of China, Korea and Singapore during World War II. Buddhism has been corrupted in these places, they argued, and violence is necessary to insure that ‘true’ Buddhism is restored and preserved. The same rhetoric – of some fundamental Buddhism under threat – also underwrites the more recently nationalized bigotry and violence that Buddhist monks and laypersons have unleashed on non-Buddhists in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and, last but not least, Myanmar.

“No religion has a monopoly on ‘violent people’,” Jerryson astutely concludes, “nor does any one religion have a greater propensity for violence.” All religions are vast complexes of thought and institutions and devotees of each can always find legitimacy for hostility or hospitality toward the other depending on mundane needs or wants. It is for this very reason that the apparent disconnect between historical Buddhism and the sustained Euro-American myth of its tolerance is as malignant as the perpetual dehumanization of Islam and Muslims is cancerous. These Buddhists have long been the good guys and those Muslims the bad in this lore. Each is a necessary fiber in the liberal fabric of Euro-American imagination that veils the gaze of international law when it comes to the murder and displacement of the Rohingya.

More articles by:M. Reza Pirbhai

M. Reza Pirbhai is Associate Professor of History at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar. His latest book is Fatima Jinnah: Mother of the Nation (Cambridge, 2017).

Obama The War Criminal Butcherer of Women and Children

Posted by Lou on January 13, 2017
Posted in: Crimes against humanity, Criminology, ljf, Nobel Peace prize, Obomber, Terrorism, USA, War, War crimes. 1 Comment

Dear Obomber, Nobel Peace Prize winner, you have been a disgrace to humanity and to all of those who believed you could do anything. Pathetic.

Source: Obama The War Criminal Butcherer of Women and Children – PaulCraigRoberts.org

With permission from

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org

Paul Craig Roberts

Jan 11, 2017

There is no doubt that US President Barak Obama is a war criminal as are his military and intelligence officials and most of the House and Senate.

Obama is the first president to keep the US at war for the entirety of his eight-year regime. During 2016 alone the US dropped 26,171 bombs on wedding parties, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, schools, people in their homes and walking their streets, and farmers tilling their fields in seven countries: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. http://blogs.cfr.org/zenko/2017/01/05/bombs-dropped-in-2016/

What does the administration have to show for eight years of illegal military interventions in seven countries, none of which comprised a danger to the US and against none of which the US has declared war? Terrorism was created by US invasions, no wars have been won, and the Middle East has been consumed in chaos and destruction. Worldwide hatred of the United States has risen to a record high. The US is now the most despised country on earth.

The only purposes of these crimes is to enrich the armaments industry and to advance the insane neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony. A tiny handful of despicable people have been able to destroy the reputation of the United States and murder millions of peoples, sending waves of war refugees to the US and Europe.

We call these “wars,” but they are not. They are invasions, largely from the air, but in Afghanistan and Iraq from troops on the ground. The invasions by air and land are entirely based on blatant, transparent lies. The “justifications” for the invasions have changed a dozen times.

The questions are: If Trump becomes president, will Washington’s massive crimes against humanity continue? If so, will the rest of the world continue to tolerate Washington’s extraordinary evil?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

Why The Nobel Peace Prize Is A Complete Joke

Posted by Lou on October 21, 2016
Posted in: Corruption, Nobel Peace prize, Politics. 1 Comment

Source: Why The Nobel Peace Prize Is A Complete Joke

http://www.trueactivist.com

By

Posted on October 21, 2016
Numerous war criminals, such as Barack Obama and Henry Kissinger, have won the Nobel Peace Prize over the years, which seems fitting as Alfred Nobel himself was known as “the merchant of death”.

santosandobama

2016 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, and 2009 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, US President Barack Obama have both been responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths.

Since its founding in 1901, the Nobel Peace Prize has ostensibly been the most prestigious international award recognizing those who have done “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” However, the Norwegian committee, which chooses the peace prize winner annually, uses no formal definition of “peace” and has been criticized for the politicizing the award numerous times.

Peace certainly was not a forté of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish arms dealer who created the prizes which bear his name. Nobel invented dynamite in 1867 and was the owner of Bofors AB, a steel producer that Nobel transformed into a major manufacturer of cannons and other weapons. Today, what remains of Bofors is owned by Saab AB and United Defense Industries. His reputation during his lifetime was so notorious that newspapers labeled him “the merchant of death” due to the massive wealth he received “finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.” Perhaps, it is no surprise then that the Nobel “Peace” Prize has been awarded to several war criminals over the course of its 115-year history.

Past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize include Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of State as well as Shimon Peres, a “founding father” of Israel who was largely responsible for their covert nuclear program. Kissinger’s award was especially controversial as two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest. Kissinger received the award in 1973 alongside Le Duc Tho, of North Vietnam, for the “peace” agreement ending the Vietnam War. Le Duc Tho refused to accept the award alongside Kissinger, claiming that the peace agreement was a sham. Kissinger, that same year, had organized a bloody coup in Chile, which overthrew the democratically elected president Salvador Allende and replaced him with brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, who went on to rule for 17 years. This year’s winner of the Nobel peace prize, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, is the head of one of Colombia’s wealthiest families and, as president, has overseen the genocide of Colombia’s largest indigenous group, the Wayuú. This genocide has resulted in the death of 14,000 children in only 5 years.

Yet, the peace prize winner whose actions have most flagrantly belittled all that the prize purports to stand for is current US president Barack Obama. In 2009, Obama was awarded the prize for Obama’s promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and for Obama’s “outreach” to the Muslim world. Even Obama expressed that he felt undeserving of the award and used his acceptance speech to promote the decidedly Orwellian idea of a “just war.” Obama’s “outreach” to the Muslim world has since materialized in the form relentless bombing campaigns in 7 Muslim countries, which have caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties, as well as the rise of terror groups such as ISIS and Al-Nusra, which have benefited handsomely from US arms deals.

 

In addition, Obama’s “promotion” of nuclear nonproliferation resulted in Obama’s plan – announced this January – to “modernize” the US nuclear arsenal at a cost of $1 trillion over the next 30 years as well as the likelihood of nuclear war with Russia higher than ever. Obama has also overseen the country’s largest arms deal with Saudi Arabia, funder of ISIS and murderer of Yemeni civilians, with over $115 billion arms sold over his 8 years as president. It seems that Obama, perhaps more than any other questionable recipient of the award, fully displays the schizophrenic nature of the Nobel Peace Prize – the public promotion of peace alongside a dark, sinister history of promoting and profiting from war.

The Power Pizza has Three Slices (however you slice it)

Posted by Sha'Tara on September 22, 2016
Posted in: Capitalism, Civilization, Disinformation, Earth, Economic collapse, Elites, Gaya, History, Ignorance, Indoctrination, Love, Nobel Peace prize, Nuclear weapons, Propaganda, Reality, Religion, Science, Slavery, Violence, War. 4 Comments

     [thoughts from    ~burning woman~    by Sha’Tara]

I felt the need to write a follow-up to the essay, “How far back must we go?”  So here’s a bit of an explanation and fill-in using the Earth world view I was taught to see by “the Teachers” some years back.  Having no argument with their explanations, I present that world view here as my own which of course it now is. 

The forces of mind control and repetitive actions due to programming, come in threes.  I first clued into this from my doctrine-heavy Christian upbringing in which the three main Powers were a godhead of a father, a son and a holy spirit.  This is dogma and must be believed in when one is confirmed in the Catholic Church.  There are little variations to this dogma in any other Christian cult.  It’s the basis for the whole faith.  This awareness explains why Christianity was able to grow so rapidly into a world-dominating religion and remains the leading force of religious power even today.  Remove one or two of these “persons” from Christianity and the house of cards collapses into meaninglessness, much as Islam is currently experiencing – they don’t have a Trinitarian god.  Keep this in mind: Power comes in threes.    

This isn’t about religion.  This is about daily Earthian reality and how it all works.  Basically, all of earth people’s lives are circumscribed by faith.  You have to believe “in” certain dogmas (in science and economics they’re called “theories”) for the System to work – and by that I don’t mean it must make sense, it does not, never did, never will – but it certainly works well, just as well as did the Spanish inquisition.  There is purpose behind it all, and that purpose is the exercise of Power Over.  The less the number of power holders and the greater the number of oppressed, the more Power accumulates to the holders of it.  No elitist power, from the would-be gods down through the hierarchy, is ever manufactured.  All of it is forcefully extracted from billions of victims and slaves of the Power Holders. 

How do they do this?  How do they steal your power?  Through lies, disinformation and the blatant, deliberate spreading of fear, which leads to mindless hate, which leads to wars and genocide.  I just watched “High Plains Drifter” with Clint Eastwood.  An old story of greed, violence and retribution.  Basic story: “The Stranger” who never gives his name rides into the town of Lago as a drifter.  Challenged, he shoots three gunmen and is hired to protect the townspeople from three other gunmen due to be released from jail and certain to come calling for being railroaded by the town’s leaders.  Unbeknownst to the leaders, “The Stranger” is in town to avenge the killing of an honest sheriff by the entire town in cahoots with a mining outfit stealing gold from protected government land (a reservation?).  To achieve his ends, “The Stranger” proceeds to sow dissension, suspicion, fear and hate among the townspeople who are all guilty of collusion in the death of their sheriff.  In the end, the town is destroyed, its leaders killed and the three gunmen who had been hired to kill the sheriff are killed by “The Stranger”.  Then he rides out of town, mission accomplished. 

We like these kinds of simplistic stories where the lone “good guy” wins against impossible odds, and the villains are exposed, jailed or killed.  But that is not what happens on earth, quite the opposite.  We slave for the villains; we support them, raise statues to them, give them peace prizes, name towns, universities, streets after them.  We vote them into office so they can further oppress and kill us with endless wars, meaningless labour, manufactured poverty, denial of basic justice and health care.  And we give them all our money and more because we fear each other more than we hate them. This we know.  Yet we cannot, ever, escape this destiny of subservience.  If we get to hate them enough to overthrow them we immediately replace them with characters of the same mindset or even worse. 

I said the forces of oppression come in threes.  These are what I call the gods: Religion, the State and Money.  Childishly simplistic concepts that shouldn’t ever see the light of day outside a sand box or playpen.  Yet they rule the world (and much more!) and are never seen for what they are.  And what keeps them in power?  Three other very basic concepts: faith, hope and love.  These are even presented as virtues in the Christian New Testament: 1Co. 13:13 “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”  Indeed, you could attach faith to Religion; hope to the State apparatus; love to Money: three for three.  An ever winning combination for the Powers.

How desperately Earthians need to believe such things are true by simple description.  Yet the same people do everything in their power to deny every assertion ever made about love particularly.  How many people stop dead in their tracks and ask themselves this honest question: why doesn’t love work?  No one, because the answer would be devastating.  Love’s power is to destroy what faith and hope pretend to build up.  Yes, I say pretend, because they too are lies.  They uphold a triumvirate of endless, circular oppression.  Faith says, believe it even when every common sense in your mind says it’s a lie.  Hope then says, stick with this belief and things will work out for the good in the end.  Love says, if it feels good do it.  Don’t think about it.  Don’t reason it.  Just do it.  That could be the perfect motto for “free enterprise” capitalism.

A brief side trip with love.  In a small US town (Wichita Falls, Texas) earlier this month a 20 year old man kills a 13 year old girl he was obsessively “in love with” by shooting her 14 times.  Ain’t love grand.  Going back a few millennia, for God, love meant wiping out all sentient air-breathing living creatures on an entire world… “Ge. 6:7 So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth — men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air — for I am grieved that I have made them.”  I know others who love the world as much as God does.  Monsanto comes to mind… in fact the whole military industrial complex just loves the world to bits, literally, with its chemicals, cluster bombs and nukes. 

Anyone with a grain of common sense and an iota of knowledge of history would be able to see through these forces of oppression.  But of course the Powers don’t allow people to draw such a conclusion.  There is a powerful programming at work that maintains a permanent delusion that says change comes from switching allegiance between the Powers.  For a time, Religion rules the world.  Then the State rules.  When both have demonstrated their utter corruption, Money comes to the fore and forces all and sundry to worship at its altars.  Bankers and “business” now rule the world and push for globalism through oppression and bloodshed so they can gain ever more power.  Now you can see what corruption actually is, but it’s too late to save your civilization.  When the last head of the triumvirate of power loses it as we are experiencing now, that is the end of the civilization the gods raised, murdered with and finally plundered to the bare bones.    

Now some people are beginning to clue in that Money in the guise of capitalism is just another corrupt Power.  But what do they talk about as a replacement?  As a counter force?  Some speak of people coming together under a “loving” deity, let’s call her “Gaia” or some such nice motherly name, and some continue to believe that Government can be cleansed of its corruption, can rein in the power of Money and bring some kind of justice and peace to the world.  And for some, Money will solve everything, it just needs to be applied in the right places.  Never mind that these ideas have never worked.  Never mind that it’s impossible to rid any Power of its internal rot.  Logic and common sense do not rule here: faith, hope and love do.  And there are only three possible choices that people as collectives can pick from: Religion, Government or Money.  The Power Pizza has three slices.  These may vary in size but there is, and can only be, but three slices.  And, according to the status quo (which public education reinforces so everybody will believe this) nothing of consequence exists outside the outer circumference of the Power Pizza.

Behold your gods, O Earth!

Desmond Tutu Names “Palestine’s Mandela” for Nobel Peace Prize

Posted by Lou on June 11, 2016
Posted in: Activism, Apartheid, Genocide, Israel, Nobel Peace prize, Palestine, South Africa. Leave a comment

South African activist, Desmond Tutu, has nominated imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouthi, for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Source: Desmond Tutu Names “Palestine’s Mandela” for Nobel Peace Prize

http://theantimedia.org

June 10, 2016   |

Michaela Whitton

(ANTIMEDIA) United Kingdom — Anti-apartheid activist and Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, has nominated imprisoned Palestinian leader, Marwan Barghouthi, for a Nobel Peace Prize. The first black Archbishop of Cape Town, himself a living symbol of a liberation struggle, was also awarded the prestigious prize in 1984 for his opposition to South Africa’s brutal racist regime.

The African-Anglican leader, who is well known for his message of reconciliation, joins a number of rights groups and politicians in nominating the senior Fatah leader for the prize. In a letter sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, cited by Al Arabiya, Desmond Tutu describes Barghouthi — who is often referred to as “Palestine’s Mandela” — as a symbol of the Palestinian people’s struggle for freedom.

On Wednesday, he took to his official Twitter account to make the announcement: “I have nominated imprisoned Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouthi for #NobelPeacePrize 2017. For peace and justice,” he wrote.

Barghouthi is widely respected among Palestinians. Arrested in 2002 during the Second Intifada, the senior Fatah official is one of a large number of elected representatives imprisoned by Israel, in what the Archbishop has called “a blatant attack against the Palestinian nation, democracy and rights.”

The phrase, “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” has never been clearer than in Barghouthi’s nomination for the peace prize, as Israel continues to refer to him and the rest of the Palestinian political prisoners as terrorists. But human rights activist Tutu disagrees, and after witnessing the systematic humiliation of Palestinians, previously compared Israel’s treatment of them to the South African regime.

“Their humiliation is familiar to all black South Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government,” he said.

In a dire reflection of the imprisonment of a nation and the negation of its rights, 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners languish in Israeli jails. Archbishop Tutu claims the freedom of the prisoners is a prerequisite for the freedom of the Palestinian people.

Laying out his reasons for nominating “Palestine’s Mandela,” Barghouthi, for a Nobel Peace Prize, he added:

“I call on the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to seize this occasion to bring attention back to the question of Palestine and to the calls for a just and lasting peace, a prospect Marwan Barghouti continues advocating for despite years of imprisonment and isolation.”

Snowden among Nobel Peace Prize Nominees

Posted by Lou on February 2, 2016
Posted in: Edward Snowden, Espionage, ljf, Nobel Peace prize, Peace, Political science, Politics, War, Whistleblowers. 1 Comment

Dear Nobel Peace Prize Committee members: We hope you will give this hero the  medal. While you are thinking on this, do consider taking back the medal you gave to the Obomber. He has been making a mockery of your decision since by bombing innocent civilians all over the planet. This is your chance to redeem yourselves. Otherwise, you will be looked upon as an obsolete useless organization.

Source: PressTV-Snowden among Nobel Peace Prize tips

http://www.presstv.ir

Feb 1, 2016In this October 26, 2013 file photo, demonstrators hold placards supporting former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden during a protest against government surveillance in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)
In this October 26, 2013 file photo, demonstrators hold placards supporting former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden during a protest against government surveillance in Washington, DC. (AFP photo)

US whistle-blower and former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden is among the top candidates for the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize which is awarded in Oslo, Norway.

“2016 may finally be Edward Snowden’s year … His leaks are now having a positive effect,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, head of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo told Reuters, putting him on top of his list of candidates.

In the wake of Snowden’s leaks of details of the US government’s spy programs, many countries have been reforming laws to restrict surveillance programs, helping human rights, Harpviken said.

Snowden began leaking classified intelligence documents in June 2013, revealing the extent of the NSA’s spying activities, including the massive collections of phone records of Americans and foreign nationals as well as political leaders around the world.

The US government has filed espionage charges against Snowden, who has been granted asylum in Russia.

An award of the $930,000 prize to Snowden would be a huge snub by NATO member Norway to US President Barack Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate.

However, the award to Obama was widely criticized in the United States and the rest of the world. It came just nine months after Obama became president.

Harpviken said US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, had the second best chance of winning for their role in negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran last year.

“Huge numbers of nominations are still coming in,” said Olav Njoelstad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. The committee will have its first meeting on February 29 and announce the winner in October.

Nobel Peace Prize-Winner Obama Dropped 23,144 Bombs in 2015

Posted by Lou on January 12, 2016
Posted in: Hypocrisy, Iraq, Nobel Peace prize, Political science, Syria, USA, War. Leave a comment

composite of obama and bush

Source: Nobel Peace Prize-Winner Obama Dropped 23,144 Bombs in 2015

http://sputniknews.com

12.01.2016

The United States in the past year dropped more than 20,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, according to a study by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

In an article published January 7, Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at CFR, states that since January 1, 2015, the United States has dropped an estimated 23,144 bombs in those six countries: 22,110 in Iraq and Syria; 947 in Afghanistan; 58 in Yemen; 18 in Somalia; and 11 in Pakistan.

“This estimate is based on the fact that the United States has conducted 77 percent of all airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, while there were 28,714 US-led coalition munitions dropped in 2015. This overall estimate is probably slightly low, because it also assumes one bomb dropped in each drone strike in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, which is not always the case,” Zenko writes.

Despite dropping tens of thousands of bombs over the past 17 months, Washington’s strategy has failed to defeat Daesh and other Islamic militant groups, Zenko observed.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban control more territory than at any point since the 2001 US invasion, according to a recent analysis in Foreign Policy magazine.

Iraqi forces secure an area in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's Anbar province, on January 10, 2016, after retaking the city from Islamic State (IS) group jihadists
© AFP 2015
Well-Armed, Well-Funded: Iraqi Leader Reveals Daesh’s Deep Pockets

Zenko notes that the primary focus of Washington’s counter-terrorism strategy is to kill extremists, and that far less attention is paid to prevent a moderate individual from becoming radicalized.

As a result, “the size of [Daesh] has remained wholly unchanged,” Zenko writes.

In 2014, the Central Intelligence Agency estimated the size of Daesh to be between 20,000-31,000 members. On Wednesday, Colonel Steve Warren, a spokesman for the US-led coalition, estimated the group at 30,000 members, despite Pentagon claims that 25,000 Daesh members have been killed in US air strikes.

At the same time, the Pentagon claims that only six civilians have “likely” been killed in the course of the bombing campaign.

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