"We're talking about creating the conditions for people to have a decent, dignified life, with their health and education needs covered. Before, all that was marginal for the population." - Social Movement Leader and Parliamentarian Estela Hernandez
Source: The Nation
Public defenders know that the trouble with our justice system extends far beyond abusive policing
One has to admire the way we, as a country, have paid tribute to the lives of Rafael Ramos and Wenijan Liu, the two New York police officers shot to death while sitting in their police cruiser. We have rallied to support their families across ideological lines, demanding that they be remembered with dignity and honor.
But, juxtaposed against continued protests over police mistreatment of black men, they also help to highlight the fact that other lives are not valued at all.
Source: JuanCole.com
Sharif and Said Kouashi, the two brothers for whom the French police are searching, were born in Paris of Algerian parents, Mokhtar et Freiha Méguireche, according to a profile published by Le Monde. Said was born in 1980. Sharif was born in 1982. The brothers were poor and unemployed. Sharif did not finish school. The Kouashi brothers sometimes delivered pizza to make a little money. They were involved in petty crime as teenagers.
Then in early 2003 at the age of 20, Sharif Kouashi and his brother Said started attending the al-Da`wa Mosque in the Stalingrad quarter. They had showed up with long hair, smoking, and lots of bad habits. The mosque gave them a sense of purpose. Sharif told his later lawyer, “Before, I was a delinquent.”
The world-system is in serious trouble and it is causing pain to the vast majority of the world’s population. Pundits and politicians grasp at straws. They magnify every momentary, and usually transitory, occurrence of slight improvements in the various measures we are accustomed to using.
It is still not about Islam, even if the media and militants attacking western targets say so. Actually, it never was. But it was important for many to conflate politics with religion; partly because it is convenient and self-validating.
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
The attacks in France are a blowback from intervention in the Arab and Muslim world. What happens there happens here too
The official response to every jihadist-inspired terrorist attack in the west since 2001 has been to pour petrol on the flames. That was true after 9/11 when George Bush launched his war on terror, laying waste to countries and spreading terror on a global scale. It was true in Britain after the 2005 London bombings, when Tony Blair ripped up civil liberties and sent thousands of British troops on a disastrous mission to Afghanistan. And it’s been true in the aftermath of last week’s horrific killings at Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris.
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