America’s self-serving politicized double standard of ‘Justice’ - By Yvonne Ridley

America’s self-serving politicized double standard of ‘Justice’

By Yvonne Ridley

I wonder if Hillary Clinton really believes in the pompous invective that shoots from her lips with the rapidity of machine gun fire.

We had a classic example of it just the other day when she let rip in her grating, robotic monotones over a Moscow court’s decision to jail an oil tycoon.

To be fair to Clinton, she was not alone. There was a whole gaggle of disapproving foreign ministers who poured forth their ridiculous brand of Western arrogance which has poisoned the international atmosphere for far too long.

The US Secretary of State said Mikhail Khodorkovsky's conviction raised "serious questions about selective prosecution and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations".

Although Khodorkovsky, 47, and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, 54, were found guilty of theft and money laundering by a Moscow court, critics like Clinton say the trial constitutes revenge for the tycoon's questioning of a state monopoly on oil pipelines and propping up political parties that oppose the Kremlin.

Clinton's censure was echoed by politicians in Britain and Germany, and Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, urged Moscow to "respect its international commitments in the field of human rights and the rule of law".

Now while it may appear to be quite touching to see all these Western leaders express their outrage over a trial involving the one-time richest and most powerful man in Russia’s oil and gas industry, you have to ask where were these moral guardians when other unjust legal decisions were being made in US courts, for example?

So why have the Americans and Europeans rushed to make very public and official statements so quickly on a matter of oil and gas, in another country? Okay, so it is a rhetorical question!

But shouldn’t Clinton put a sock in it? The USA is still squatting in Cuba overseeing the continuing festering mess caused by one of the biggest boil’s on the face of human rights – yes, Guantanamo is approaching a decade of incarcerating men without charge or trial. At least Khodorkovsky had his day in an open court and can appeal.

 Instead of sticking her nose in to other country’s courts, perhaps the US Secretary of State would care to look into her own backyard and tell us why one of her soldiers was given a mere nine month sentence earlier this month after shooting unarmed civilians in Afghanistan?

And after he's served his sentence US army medic Robert Stevens can still remain in the army, ruled the military hearing. His defence was that he and other soldiers were purely acting on orders from a squad leader during a patrol in March in Kandahar.

Five of the 12 soldiers named in the case are accused of premeditated murder in the most serious prosecution of atrocities by US military personnel since the war began in late 2001. Some even collected severed fingers and other human remains from the Afghan dead as war trophies before taking photos with the corpses.

By comparison, just a few months earlier, Dr Aafia Siddiqui, was given 86 years for attempting to shoot US soldiers … the alleged incident happened while she was in US custody, in Afghanistan. She didn’t shoot anyone although she WAS shot at point blank range by the soldiers. The critically injured Pakistani citizen was then renditioned for a trial in New York. The hearing was judged to be illegal and out of US jurisdiction by many international lawyers.

Did Clinton have anything to say about that? Did any of the foreign ministers in the West raise these issues on any public platform anywhere in the world? Again, it’s a rhetorical question.

Of course a few poorly trained US Army grunts, scores of innocent Afghans, nearly 200 Arab men in Cuba and one female academic from Pakistan are pretty small fry compared to an oil rich tycoon who doesn’t like Vladamir Putin.

But being poor is not a crime.

Exactly how would the Obama Administration have reacted if Russian President Dmitry Medvedev criticized the lack of even handedness in the US judicial system and demanded Dr Aafia Siddiqui be repatriated? What would be the response if Medvedev called an international press conference and demanded to know why 174 men are still being held in Guantanamo without charge or trial?

Just for the record the US judicial system imposes life sentences for serious tax avoidance and laundering of criminally-received income – crimes for which the Russian tycoon has been found guilty. Sentencing will not take place until Moscow trial judge, Viktor Danilkin, finishes reading his 250-page verdict, which could take several days.

In her comments Clinton said the case had a "negative impact on Russia's reputation for fulfilling its international human rights obligations and improving its investment climate".

How on earth can anyone treat the US Secretary of State seriously when she comes out with this sort of pot, kettle, black rhetoric? This from a nation which is morally and financially bankrupt, a country which introduced words like rendition and water-boarding into common day usage.

My advice to Clinton is do not lecture anyone about human rights and legal issues until you clean up your own backyard. In fact the next time she decides to open her mouth perhaps one of her aides can do us all a favour and ram in a slice of humble pie.

* British journalist Yvonne Ridley is the European President of the International Muslim Women’s Union as well as being a patron of Cageprisoners.

Secular education in Catholic School v/s Madarsa education for Muslims

http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/india-unity/message/4494

--- Ghulam Muhammed <ghulam_muhammed2@...>
wrote:

>
> Sunday, February 27, 2005
>
>
>
> Dear Mr. Wasnik,
>
>
>
> I agree that Christian schools spread out among all
> other countries of the world, had quite a good
> presence in India too and had been in the forefront
> of non-religious education. However, you may be
> surprised that in a city like Mumbai, where Jesuits
> have a century old presence in educational field,
> with schools and colleges spread out in the length
> and breadth of the city, they found that in city
> centers the percentage of Muslim students in their
> schools had grown to be more than 50% and in some up
> to 70%. So much so, that after Bombay riots, when I
> was with a Muslim advocacy group IDRAAK that worked
> for communal harmony and interfaith dialog, the
> Jesuits had requested IDRAAK to arrange to teach
> Islam in their secular schools. They arranged a
> meeting of 50 principals and vice-principals from
> their schools with IDRAAK in which the fact came out
> that without any religious education, the Muslim
> students are fast becoming rowdies and unmanageable.
> (Imagine the same religious education
> is being attacked by the US as source of all terror
> in the world.) Jesuits wanted IDRAAK to arrange for
> religious education in their moral science classes
> for Muslim students, so that Muslim students should
> learn the basic morality of Islam and become better
> citizens. This will give you an idea, how Muslim
> education has suffered, after the advent of British
> Raj in India and modern education was identified
> with colonial and Christian rule. Muslim retreated
> in their mental ghettos and lost more than a
> century, focusing to ward off any incursion into
> their religious life. Only recently, the trend is
> reversed as highly educated class is warming up to
> the basic fundamentals of Islam and is confident
> that modern education need not be a threat to Islam
> and could even help Muslims as well as others to
> understand the deeper and more profound significance
> of Islamic teachings. So there is a definite
> two-pronged movement world over to merge religious
> and secular education to face modern
> challenges.
>
>
>
> It is here that motivated exercise, to denigrate
> Madrasa education, as something archaic and not
> compatible with some arbitrary liberal standards
> with blind spot for all things religious that
> characterizes some unhealthy superficial scholarship
> and militates against sincere efforts to reform
> Muslim education.
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

Alex Abella on how mad men technocratic elite are intent on starting World War III

Alex Abella on how mad men technocratic elite are intent on starting World War III

Insider Reveals Diabolical Secrets Of The Rand Corporation

Alex Abella

http://www.prisonplanet.com/insider-reveals-diabolical-secrets-of-the-the-rand-corporation.html

Cuban-born journalist and author Alex Abella was allowed exclusive access inside the RAND Corporation to view their archives. What he discovered was a plot driven by mad scientists, behaviorists, and generals who were intent on starting world war three and fleecing the American people in the process.

Once he was a skeptic on the subject of conspiracy theories and the new world order, but after his work with the RAND Corporation he is now convinced that this top secret think tank has been pulling the strings of American government for at least 60 years.

"We're all the bastard children of RAND and we don't even know it," remarks Abella, as he charts how RAND started off as an organization centered around building new weapons for the military but ultimately expanded into politics, science, history and economics and was closely allied with the Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations. RAND's decision in the 50's to re-model the globe towards a new world order changed everything, with the development of "rational choice theory," which turned people from being citizens into consumers, as rights and responsibilities were replaced with choices and people's lives slowly came to be dominated not by integrity or what they stood for, but by what they spent their money on.

RAND's ultimate goal was to have technocrats running every aspect of society in pursuit of a one world government that would be administered under "the rule of reason," a ruthless world where efficiency was king and men were little more than machines, which is why RAND studied the social sciences because they were at a loss to work out how to deal with people and how human beings did not always act in their own predictable self-interests.

There is no place for love, empathy or selflessness in the new world order that RAND and the Ford Foundation are working to create, and patriotism and altruism are adversarial to their aims.

Abella explains how RAND was instrumental in developing the strategy behind the use of nuclear weapons, and how they actively promoting nuking the entirety of Eastern Europe as well as China in case of problems in Western Europe, a policy that could easily have sparked off a catastrophic nuclear holocaust. RAND researchers believed that as long as 10 million Americans survived a nuclear war, the war was won.

Abella notes how RAND saw the United Nations as a template for one world government but that a new organization controlled by the U.S. would eventually supersede the UN and become the de facto world government, which is why RAND researchers such as John Williams advocated pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the Soviet Union, to make sure the United States would be the only country with the supreme power to impose its will on the rest of the world.

Speaking on the topic of false flag attacks, Abella notes that the staged Gulf of Tonkin attack and the planned Operation Northwoods false flag were both initially proposed in RAND documents, highlighting the total immorality with which RAND war games its scenarios, many of which are ethically repugnant in that they nonchalantly promote the genocide of entire populations with little regard for the consequences. Abella explains how RAND truly is a shadow government because it serves as a revolving door between the two, and how RAND is the cradle of the military-industrial complex and the birthplace of the technocratic elite that we are now
fighting against.

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