By Tom Vrabel 

We often hear in American political rhetoric that the war in Iraq is unjust, but that Afghanistan is the “good war”. It is important that we, as a nation, become aware that this is a false claim and that the War in Afghanistan has detrimental effects on Afghan civilian populations. It is not worth American tax-payer’s dollars and is threatening our safety as a nation. We should move towards a timetable for withdrawal of troops and reject the recent request to increase troops by 40,000.

Although it may seem tempting to send more troops to the region in an attempt to stabilize it, this would not improve the situation. Afghanistan has a history of resisting foreign occupiers. During the Soviet-Afghan war the Soviets deployed nearly 500,000 troops into Afghanistan. After ten years of a bloody war the Soviets were forced to withdraw troops. This reinforces the idea that we cannot solve the problem in Afghanistan through military means. Afghanistan has gained the nickname “The graveyard of empires” for a reason; over its history it has shown that it cannot be conquered by force. We must not go wrong where the Soviets did in the twentieth century, or where the British did in the nineteenth century.

It is at this crucial time in history that our policy on Afghanistan should be reconsidered, and we must realize that this war only empowers the Taliban. The Taliban gets considerable membership from people who have seen their houses bombed or friends die in the war. If one of America's major concerns is to dismantle the Taliban, then we cannot forget how the Taliban gained power in the mid 1990’s, by promising to end the violent power struggle between the U.S-funded Mujahedeen and other warlords. The same thing is happening now in the eastern region of Afghanistan, and is spreading all across the nation.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The mere presence of foreign soldiers fighting a war in Afghanistan is probably the single most important factor in the resurgence of the Taliban”. The United States support in Afghanistan is being hindered severely by the occupation. In fact, according to a poll done by ABC News in 2005 83% of Afghans had a favorable view of America but by 2009 this number has slipped to 47%. Read more »

Kathy Kelly spoke at the WNY Peace Center's 42nd Anniversary Dinner. Thanks to Alt Press for hosting.

November 3, 2009

Last night (Monday, November 2), Israeli Brigadier General (ret.) Effie Eitam gave a talk at the University at Buffalo. The talk, sponsored by Buffalo Hillel and the Jewish National Fund (JNF), has generated a good deal of controversy, including a protest during the talk. I’ll begin with an announcement I drew up drawing attention to some of General Eitam’s statements, and inviting people to the protest. The links give a good taste of General Eitam’s extreme positions:

protest Fascist effie eitam!
Monday, November 2, 7:00 p.m.
ub Student Union, 2^nd floor (map here)

Sometimes, people overuse the word “fascist”; sometimes, it fits just right.

Hillel of Buffalo and the Jewish National Fund are sponsoring a campus talk by Israeli Brigadier General Effie Eitam, a man so extreme that he has attacked Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert from the right! Israeli journalist Uri Avnery has called him “the #1 fascist in Israel.” General Eitam

—calls Palestinians a “ticking bomb” and a “cancer“ that Israel must cut out.
—admits that Israel attacked Palestinian schools in Gaza; advocates mass transfer of Gaza civilians and turning Gaza Strip into a “free hunting zone.”.
—organizes, as Housing Commissioner, illegal Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
—calls on Israel to expel West Bank Palestinians and colonize their land.
—demands that Israeli Palestinians be ethnically cleansed.
—advocates using Palestinian civilians as human shields in battle.
—calls nations other than Israel a “world of robots without souls.”
—worships warfare in classic fascist fashion: “In war, the most sublime things in man appear. . . . There is a certain uplifting, like the offering of a sacrifice.”

Stop the Hate! At 6:30 p.m. tonight, please join concerned UB students, faculty, and members of the community for the protest in the lobby of the Student Union. General Eitam’s lecture, allegedly open to the public, follows at 7:30.

It was one of the most energetic, unified, raucous, and impressive demonstrations I’ve seen on the UB campus. Thanks are due to primarily to UB Students for Justice in Palestine, and also to the Palestine-Israel Committee of the Western New York Peace Center, and many students, teachers, and other friends from the community.

The lecture room was packed: at least 100 people, maybe more. Moderator Dan Lenard began with a denunciation of our effort to present critical information about Eitam and to urge Hillel to cancel the lecture. General Eitam’s lecture was a mish-mash of Arab-hating, awkwardly-presented hasbara (Israeli boosterism and propaganda), and pure lies. He actually said that Iran is behind Al Qaeda (no, I’m not making this up), that Palestinians fled their homes in 1948 because Arab leaders ordered them to do so (a mythy debunked decades ago by Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers), that everyone should stop worrying about the Palestinians and let Israel take care of them (they certainly do seem inclined to do this, as the Gaza Massacre shows), that there was a constant barrage of rockets from Gaza until Israel invaded (simply a lie: see “Israel’s Fabricated Rocket Crisis”), and that Palestinians on the West Bank are desperate for Israel to maintain the Occupation and save them from Hamas. Eitam was practicing not just the Big Lie Theory, but the Multiple Hilarious Big Lies Theory. There simply was no time to address them all.

General Eitam devoted most of the evening to inciting a US war against Iran. Like so many American warhawks unfazed by the disastrous war we have waged to find Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapons, General Eitam is apparently indifferent to the baseline idiocy of this jingoistic campaign: two massive nuclear powers, one of them berserk enough actually to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, whipping themselves into a lather over the nuclear threat posed by a nation with no nuclear weapons. Eitam even included the most famous “quote” by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (in fact, Ahmadinejad never said it) about “wiping Israel off the map.” In a quietly terrifying suggestion, he observed that Harry Truman was absolutely right to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the horrors of the results. I don’t think we need to work too hard to see what this analogy implies for Iran. What would local media be saying if someone had appeared at UB urging Americans to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on Israel, or any other nation?

 Read more »