Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

ISIL: a clear and present danger to world peace. Since the beginning of 2014—the year in which the world was to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I by leaping headlong into new situations fraught with grave threats for world peace—several regional conflicts have morphed into worldwide concerns. All of these are critical, difficult to solve and risky in that they pose a catalyst for world conflict: the war in Syria, the war in Ukraine, the exchanges of missile fire between the Israeli government and Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip, all of these have this year shaken the foundations of world peace. But perhaps the most immediate and high-profile of these threats has been the swift rise of the fundamentalist terror organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant or ISIL. Without a doubt, ISIL is a clear and present danger to world peace and democracy. But it is worthwhile reflecting that it is as much an indirect threat, because of how...

Last Monday marked the one-hundredth anniversary of the start of World War I, one of the two bloodiest and most horrendous conflicts in recorded history. It was known also as The Great War and more popularly as “the war to end all wars”. But it didn’t, of course. Barely more than two decades after it ended, the world would witness the start of World War II on September 1, 1939. That war would prove to be even more horrific and far more costly in human life than its predecessor, and with its end, the world would once more say, “Never again,” and give birth to multilateral institutions and worldwide treaties aimed at ensuring peace. And yet, peace has not come. Although the “advancement” of war technology (to the detriment, one might argue, of environmental and life sciences which must vie for funds, materials and human resources with the gnashing golden teeth of the First World’s war machine) has—until now, at least—kept the major powers from again engaging in battle directly, i...

Photo from the Rise up Times Some people divide the world into optimists and pessimists, into positive and negative thinkers, into “glass half-full and glass half-empty” types. Those people will probably try to tell you that it’s negative to focus on “the bad stuff” and conclude from this that the world is becoming an ever more violent, dangerous and heartless place and that this kind of thinking is, in the end, merely a perception brought on by ever-increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. They’ll tell you that there was always violence and chaos in certain parts of the world, but that those of us who didn’t live in those places simply didn’t know about it, whereas, today, everybody’s connected to everybody else all the time, so unlike before, we now know what’s going on in the rest of the world—instead of being blithely ignorant, one might conclude. Therefore, they will tell you, the idea that the world is growing more violent and war-like by the day is a mere erro...

The lightning surge of the Sunni militant ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a.k.a. ISIS) that took shape earlier this month appears to demonstrate that both Western-leaning Iraqi authorities and US intelligence have sorely underestimated this fundamentalist threat and extremist leaders’ capability to make good on it. In Mosul, the Arab country’s second largest city, over the past few days many defending officers and troops have thrown down their weapons and fled before the advance of a few thousand determined and well-seasoned militants, many of whom are believed to have previously been fighting in Syria’s civil war—neither on the side of the  repressive Bashar al-Assad regime nor for the pro-western rebels of the Syrian National Militia, but against all comers for their own cause: the establishment of a pan-Arabian fundamentalist Islamic state. Embattled Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki By the end of this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was under pressure to ...

An incident in high-profile civil disobedience in Egypt, where court actions and death sentences against citizen protests have been the focus of international controversy, this week struck a new parallel with the case of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan in a New York court, which I commented on in my previous blog post. http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2014/05/the-american-pussy-riot.html   The incident that I refer to is the sentencing of Mahienour El-Massry—sometimes dubbed “the voice of the Egyptian revolution” and a renowned defender of the rights of Egypt’s women—to two years in prison for protesting against recent violations of human and civil rights. A 28-year-old lawyer, Mahienour was tried and convicted of taking part in an unauthorized demonstration and of violating the country’s so-called Protest Law. The conviction refers to a December 3, 2013 protest demonstration in Alexandria that was broken up by police using tear gas and baton charges. ...

Pussy Riot members Naezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina The visit earlier this month of two of Russia’s Pussy Riot members to Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillian—who is in Riker’s Island jail in New York awaiting sentencing this coming Monday (May 19) for striking a police officer—sent out a symbolic message about some disturbing similaries between the standards for freedom of expression in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and in post-9/11 New York City. The incident in which Cecily has been tried and convicted took place on March 17, 2012 (Saint Patrick’s Day). It occurred during the eviction of protesters by New York City police from Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district. The park was the scene of a prolonged sit-in demonstration, which spread to other major cities across the country, organized by Americans fed up with the kind of complicity between big business and government that led to the 2007 stock market crash and subsequent Federal bailout—a multi-bi...