Wedding Weekend

It's a three day weekend, with four weddings and a bridal shower. One of those celebrations was for my younger brother, the others were of good friends.

It's easy during such joyous moments to let the suffering of our our brothers and sisters abroad casually slip our minds. This story of an Afghan wedding reminded me of that and moved me to tears:

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan (CNN) -- At least 20 people were killed and more than 60 injured in Afghanistan when a U.S. plane dropped a bomb on a wedding party as celebrants fired into the air, an Afghan defense spokesman said Monday.
. . .
Many of the wounded from the bombing in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan were taken to a nearby hospital in Kandahar. Among the wounded were a 7-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl, both of whom were said to be the only surviving members of their families.

Wedding guests were celebrating and firing up into the air just before the bomb struck, Dr. Gulbudin said.

Source: CNN
Additional Information: IHT

During the summer wedding season, let's please remember to make dua. Make dua for the happy new couples, but also make dua that one day, soon, our brothers and sisters abroad could enjoy the ease and happiness we so often take for granted.

Greetings from Guantanamo Bay

Welcome to "Taliban Towers" at Guantanamo Bay, the most ghoulishly distasteful tourist destination on the planet.

As these astonishing mementoes show, the US authorities are promoting the world's most notorious prison camp as a cheap hideaway for American sunseekers – a revelation that has drawn international anger and condemnation.

Just yards from the shelves of specially branded mugs and cuddly toys, nearly 300 "enemy combatants" lie sweltering in a waking nightmare.

It is six years since foreign prisoners, many captured in Afghanistan, were first taken to this US-occupied corner of Cuba. Yet even now, no charges have been brought against them.

While the detainees lie incarcerated, visitors can windsurf, take boat trips and go fishing for grouper, tuna, red snapper and swordfish.

The United States' 1.5million service personnel and Guantanamo's 3,000 construction workers are eligible to visit the "resort", which boasts a McDonald's, KFC and a bowling alley.

They even have a Wal-Mart supermarket.

The vacation comes at a knock-down price: just $42 (£20) per night for a suite of air-conditioned rooms, including a kitchen, bathroom, living room and bedrooms.

But it is the souvenirs that have led to the greatest criticism. One T-shirt from the gift shop is decorated with a guard tower and barbed wire. It reads: "The Taliban Towers at Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."

Another praises "the proud protectors of freedom". A third displays a garish picture of an iguana and states: "Greetings from paradise GTMO resort and spa fun in the Cuban sun."

A child-sized shirt says: "Someone who loves me got me this T-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

There are mugs inscribed with "kisses from Guantanamo" and "Honor Bound To Defend Freedom".

The Guantanamo holiday trade was exposed by Zachary Katznelson, a British-based human rights lawyer and spokesman for Reprieve, the group leading the international campaign against the camp.

"When I see the conditions the prisoners have to cope with and then think of the T-shirt slogans, I am appalled," he said. "To say I am repulsed is an understatement. Unbelievable as it may seem, the US authorities are proud of the 'souvenirs' and what they are doing."

Mr Katznelson represents 28 of the detainees and makes regular visits to the prison.

"The military keeps a tight hold on everything that is available in Guantanamo Bay and someone senior has given their approval for this disgusting nonsense," he said.

Full Story: Daily Mail

The Mamma Mia Anti-War Movement

From The Cat's Blog

Today ZNet offered its progressive readers two interesting articles; one by Cindy Sheehan and the other one by Amy Goodman. Good articles. They make sense and light important aspects of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can only hope that people reading these two articles can also remember (better: guess) that there are 1 million Iraqi killed by this illegal, immoral war of aggression and a country completely destroyed.

The same with Afghanistan, where, day after day, the US and its allies keep slaughtering children, women, innocent people and these heroic actions of our boys and girls go unreported by mainstream media but also by many among the so-called alternative ones. Meanwhile what is called the anti-war movement’s policy makers close their eyes on that front, the just war.

What is called the "anti-war movement" doesn’t even consider to use the word “resistance” while we are presented, day after day, with the compassionate side of patriotism. As US peace movement’ spokesperson (by the way, by whom and when she was elected?) Phyllis Bennis recently wrote, “I don't think we gain strength by making sympathy with resistance fighters a demand of our movement.”

But that sympathy is always granted to the mass murderers, our troops.

Read on here

Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine'

How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.

Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise [apartheid] Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.

No one asked - on our side - which particular [apartheid] Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over?

And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".

I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an [apartheid] Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?

All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).

Read on at: The Independant