Documents
(Published: 2004-12-09 04:28 AM)
April 27,2003: Middle East countries have been suffering from severe national and social problems but are now involved in a new process which started with the war on Iraq. Those severe problems are forcing the regimes to improve freedom and human rights. The prerequisites required for a solution are available now. The main characteristics of the new process are that the democratic unity issue involves both war and peaceful efforts. Although concrete results have not been achieved yet, as the Iraq case proves, if diplomatic and political methods, peaceful efforts, do not resolve the problem then the only option is war. Talking about peace, without offering a solution does not make any sense to people of the Middle East, who are suffering from severe problems. The collapse of the Iraqi regime will serve the interests of the society, and lead to social improvement.
(Published: 2004-12-02 07:25 PM)
Marxian materialism is, however, distinct from vulgar or bourgeois materialism because it rejects the very separation between the 'idea' and the material. What is novel in the Marxist formulation of materialism is that 'matter' itself is conceived dialectically. Marx's critique of idealism involves something quite different from, and very much more radical than, a straightforward inversion of idealism's supposed order of priorities, and the inversion metaphor is in important ways misleading.
(Published: 2004-11-26 07:21 AM)
This report is a narrative account of a campaign of extermination against the Kurds of northern Iraq. It is the product of over a year and a half of research, during which a team of Middle East Watch researchers has analyzed several tons of captured Iraqi government documents and carried out field interviews with more than 350 witnesses, most of them survivors of the 1988 campaign known as Anfal. It concludes that in that year the Iraqi regime committed the crime of genocide. Anfal- "the Spoils" - is the name of the eighth sura of the Koran. It is also the name given by the Iraqis to a series of military actions which lasted from February until September 6, 1988. While it is impossible to understand the Anfal campaign without reference to the final phase of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Anfal was not merely a function of that war. Rather, the winding-up of the conflict on Iraq's terms was the immediate historical circumstance that gave Baghdad the opportunity to bring to a climax its longstanding efforts to bring the Kurds to heel. For the Iraqi regime's anti-Kurdish drive dated back some fifteen years or more, well before the outbreak of hostilities between Iran and Iraq.
(Published: 2004-11-26 07:16 AM)
Amnesty International - August 2001. Torture is used systematically against political detainees in Iraqi prisons and detention centres. The scale and severity of torture in Iraq can only result from the acceptance of its use at the highest level. There are no attempts to curtail or prevent such violations or punish those responsible. This total disregard for a basic human right, the right not to be tortured or ill-treated, grossly violates international human rights law which prohibits torture in all circumstances. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which Iraq ratified in 1971, states that ''No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment''(Article 7).
(Published: 2004-11-26 07:09 AM)
This Briefing Paper details the ongoing campaign by the Ba'athist government of Iraq against the Ma'dan or so-called Marsh Arabs-the mostly Shi'a Muslim population that inhabits the marshlands (al-ahwar) in southern Iraq around the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Numbering some 250,000 people as recently as 1991, the Marsh Arabs today are believed to number fewer than 40,000 in their ancestral homeland. Many have been arrested, "disappeared," or executed; most have become refugees abroad or are internally displaced in Iraq as a result of Iraqi oppression. The population and culture of the Marsh Arabs, who have resided continuously in the marshlands for more than 5,000 years, are being eradicated.
(Published: 2004-11-26 07:00 AM)
Amnesty Iinternational Report (24 November 1999). This report addresses the range of Amnesty International concerns about human rights violations committed in Iraq in recent years, including arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, the death penalty, possible extrajudicial executions and forcible expulsion of non-Arabs.
INDEX: MDE 14/010/1999
(Published: 2004-11-23 06:16 AM)
The utterly preposterous idea is this: Explaining something in a scientific way does not diminish it. It enhances it. Let me tell you why. Understanding how things work, even your own brain, has a grandeur and a glory that no nonscientific explanation can come anywhere near.
(Published: 2004-11-23 05:37 AM)
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about.
(Published: 2004-11-10 12:00 AM)
(Published: 2004-11-06 11:56 AM)
from our old forum
(Published: 2004-11-06 12:00 AM)
The upcoming Iraqi and Kurdistani elections are one more window of opportunity that the Kurds cannot afford to lose. What they need is a full and aggressive partaking in the overall election process to send their elected officials to Baghdad and to make sure that the new Iraqi constitution would follow the same trail of the TAL and finally Kurdistan is recognized as a single federal territory within a democratic federated Iraq.
(Published: 2004-11-03 04:16 PM)
It is too late for the so-called Left in Australia to stand anywhere but condemned for its failure to support the successful war to liberate Iraq. It stood on the side of reaction, and the history books must place its leaders alongside the British pacifists of the '30s who, as George Orwell pointed out, gave comfort and objective support to Hitler. The pseudo-Left proved not just that it can be wrong but that in the name of anti-Americanism it can support fascism.
(Published: 2004-11-03 03:59 PM)
It is time to set minds at ease by raising the "specter" of "genetic determinism" and banishing it once and for all.
(Published: 2004-11-01 01:26 AM)
In his Foreign Policy article, Fukuyama identifies transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." Sounds ominous, no? But wait a minute, isn't human history (and prehistory) all about liberating more and more people from their biological constraints? After all, it's not as though most of us still live in our species' "natural state" as Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.
(Published: 2004-10-29 03:50 AM)
I would put the root cause down to the tyranny of the Ba’ath and, the totalitarian policies of the Ba’ath. Without that there would have been no wars, because the wars were created quite consciously and deliberately by that regime. The regime diverted resources of the State, almost completely towards the military and towards non productive spheres, the services, the welfare services were, again, deliberately starved of funds and neglected. So health and education were completely neglected. In fact there has been no investment in health in Iraq, and I’m not just talking about mental health now, since about 1983-84. So for the last 19 to 20 years of the regime there was no investment at all in the infrastructure of health. Teaching hospitals that were state of the art when I left them in the late 70’s, in 2003 they looked like shells. You know they were crumbling.
What a difference a month makes . . .
KADEK - IT IS TIME FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOLUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST
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