Ik merk dat diverse commentaren verdwenen zijn. Toch geen censuur van Indymedia?? Ik begrijp dat het kaf moest verwijderd worden onder de getuigenis van Thjoi, wegens denigrerend e racistisch, maar ook het koren is weggemaaid. Jammer. Al heb ik het stuk van Michael Parenti wel gesmaakt. Michael Parenti is trouwens één van de eerste ondertekenaars van de international Peace Appeal. Ik vond mijn gepost stukje: een getuigenis van Joe Quandt,lid van Voices in the Wilderness, vrij pakkend, en mét een terechte aanval op de V$-oorlogs$tokers en de VN. Er was ook een link naar http://www.msnbc.com/local/wnyt/M231364.asp waar je Joe Quandt live kan zien. In de commentaar kan je horen dat de situatie in Irak anders is dan de media voorhouden. Zo hebben de Iraakse vrouwen heel wat meer rechten dan in de hen omringende landen. Ik post het dus opnieuw. WE ARE HERE TODAY: OCTOBER 26, 2002 FROM BAGHDAD by Joe Quandt We are in Washington today to protest the foreign and domestic policies of our government. We are in Baghdad today to protest the foreign and domestic policies of our government. We are in Albany today to protest the foreign and domestic policies of our government. Let us have no illusions. In Baghdad, people ask me point blank, "Joe, the war.....when is it coming?" At 1st, I thought the question fatalistic. But the 8-year war with Iran in which 200,000 died, the Gulf War, which took possibly another 300,000, besides wrecking the entire infrastructure, the U.N. sanctions, which in 12 years have cost them an additional million and a half lives-22 years of sustained economic and military conflict have made Iraqis immune to illusions, in the matter of war. Let us, like the Iraqis, have no illusions. I was in the states a month ago when the House of Representatives sold the birthright of 1776. I was in Baghdad when the Senate followed suit. They have begun the process of making George II king in all but name. Every day we watch the extraordinarily creative posturing of the French and Russian governments, who in the end will cut a handsome deal with our government, and then think they've done very well for themselves. Political activist Ghazwan Al-Muhkti says that U.S. coercion and deal making is rendering the U.N. irrelevant. Former U.N. head of Iraqi relief programs Dennis Halliday was even more blunt: "The U.N. is dying." Have no illusions; the U.N. is not going to come to the rescue. You are here today perhaps because you understand how deeply your civil rights are being slashed at, and recreated in the image of the New World Order. Or you grasp all too well that U.S. arms sales around the world make inevitable the endless cycle of big and little wars to come, for the next hundred years. You realize that all future treaties are things of convenience, to be abrogated when their purpose has been served. That the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Accords, bans on nuclear and conventional weapon testing, research into alternative energy sources, all of these are only impediments to the agendas of this administration. That the War on Terrorism is simply a convenient place to focus American fears now that Communism is dead, and that this war on terrorism, the war on Afghanistan, the war for the oil of Iraq, are only the opening gambits in the U.S. bid to secure the fossil fuel reserves of the entire planet in order that they may dictate terms to the rest of the industrialized world. Ask the shoeshine boys, the art dealers, the cafe operators, the hotel staff, ask anyone in Iraq why the United States is coming here. They have no illusions. How many countries have been attacked by Iraq in the last 12 years?...................... How many countries have been attacked by the United States in the last 12 years? In the case of Iraq, it has been on a weekly basis. Lives mean nothing to this administration, yours or the Iraqis'. Have no illusions. So why are we here today? We are here because we must be. We are here because, in the words of Scott Ritter, "There's a drunk at the wheel, and we've got to get the keys away from him." We are here because the right of assembly has not been taken away from us....yet. We are here because our government is ruining the good name of the American people. We are here because we have children.....and parents.....and loved ones.....and cherished ideals, and everywhere our government drops a bomb, an Osama bin Laden seed is sown. We are here because the answer to war is only more war. We are here because we have problems in our schools, in Corporate America, in our inner cities, problems of violence, ignorance, and greed, and 100 billion dollars spent on brutalizing our brothers and sisters in another country would be better spent on our own problems than in legitimizing the theft of that nation's natural resources, to fill the pockets of the vultures who are running this country. As I wrote this last evening, I watched the sun setting over the Tigris River. Here, in the Cradle of Civilization, one is, perhaps, more keenly aware of the historical imprudence of our government's actions. We are here today because we must be. Because our hearts tell us that the clock is ticking, not quite as loudly as it's ticking for the Iraqis, but time is running out on the American Dream. Have no illusions: An attack against Iraq will be one of the cataclysmic events in American history, on a par with The Civil War and the Great Depression, because it will signal to the world that democratic principals and republican humanism have no more meaning in the American ethos than they did in Nazi Germany. And to send that message is to invite a return to barbarism, but on a scale we must shudder to contemplate. We are here today because we believe that the Battle Of Iraq will not signal the end of civilization as we have dreamt it, but rather, that it will be but the opening skirmish, for us here today, in the long overdo American War On Greed. Thank You