TOKYOPROGRESSIVE 7-5-06

UPDATED JULY 23

Japan and Asia

North Korea
The Washington Post reported today that North Korea’s missile testing prompted “a hastily called session of the UN Security Council after the Stalinist state unnerved the region.”

The Associated Press reported on June 14: “The Air Force successfully tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile early Wednesday, officials said. The missile traveled 4,800 miles in about 30 minutes before its three warheads struck targets at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the western chain of the Marshall Islands [in the Pacific]…”
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14816002.htm

ALICE SLATER, aslater@gracelinks.org, http://gracelinks.org/nuke
President of the GRACE Policy Institute, which works on issues of nuclear power and the environment, Slater said today: “We are reaping the whirlwind when the North Korean government launches this shocking series of missile firings. The U.S. has been hurling missiles over the Pacific, most recently in June, after the Korean threat was reported as a ‘provocation’ to U.S. interests. Russia is getting into the act, too, having launched a ballistic missile on June 29, from a submarine in the Barents Sea, at a target nearly 4,000 miles away in the Pacific. It is folly to think we can tell North Korea what to do, when we are unwilling to restrain our own missile testing.

“We ought to be negotiating a treaty to ban all missiles. Instead, the Bush administration has pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an agreement we had with Russia not to provoke a missile arms race, brazenly asserting our U.S. right to ‘dominate and control the military use of space,’ proclaimed in the mission statement of the U.S. Space Command.”

IAN WILLIAMS, uswarreport@igc.org, http://www.ianwilliams.info
Author of the book “The U.N. For Beginners,” Williams said today: “The manner in which the Security Council is dealing with Israel and North Korea is quite an interesting exercise in hypocrisy.”

“Israel has just announced it’s moving into civilian areas [in Gaza], and was already in egregious violation of international law and a multitude of UN Security Council resolutions. It has ripped up the ‘Road Map’ and, despite occasional hot air from ambassadors, the U.S. government has made sure nothing is done about it.

“Meanwhile, whatever you may think of the provocative…actions of the North Korean government, it is not violating any international statute — there is no treaty governing missile launches — but there is a rush to put the issue on the Council agenda.”

An old article on North Korea and U.S. policy that is still helpful. Meanwhile, the Union of Concerned Scientists saya that now there is more of a need than ever for diplomacy rather than Bush-style antagonisms. Both Bush and fellow war-hawks Abe and Koizumi want to convince people that a strong military is needed, but many say the U.S. military presence in Japan actually INCREASES the danger. Plus, the Missile Defense System that Japan and the U.S. are persuing is just false security used to justify big military expenditures.

And who says the U.S. is dedicated to peaceful coexistence? Certainly not the Pentagon, which exaggerates the theat to the U.S. to jsutify its own belligerency. And all along the U.S. media reports what the Pentagon says as fact, but ignoring the equally disturbing fact that the U.S. has for decades threatened North Korea with nucelar destruction.

See also the excellent ‘The North Korean Problem,’ Japan and the US: The Politics of Hypocrisy

Koizumi’s Kingdom of Illusion
What has this man and his band of neo-liberal LDP “assasins” given Japan? The loss of jobs,”reduction of salaries, increases in social security payments and reductions in benefits…over one million households subsist[ing] on welfare….the suicide rate [leaping] from around 22,000 per year to over 30,000, subordination to the US [despite a nationalist pose]” and estrangement from the rest of Asia but, in the words of the late Masaharu Gotoda, Japan will have to lapse into “hell,” before the eyes of the people are opened.

Palestine/Israel
BNN SATIRE: Poll: 68% of American Christians would refuse to live in same building as an American Jew
From the BNN Department of Change One or Two Words in an Israeli Media Article and See How it Flies Then: Sixty-eight percent of Americans would refuse to live in the same apartment building as an American Jew, according to the results of an annual poll released Wednesday by the Center for the Struggle Against Racism. The “Index of Racism Towards American Jews,” conducted by Geocartographia, revealed only 26 percent of Americans would agree to live with Jewish neighbors in the same building…

Israel’s Aggression
The daily horrors emerging from Iraq have caused a majority of people in the United States to oppose Bush’s war there. Meanwhile, the humanitarian crisis Israel has created in the occupied territories hovers below the radar for most Americans….

When will Israel learn?
The message is that Palestinians should not resist – they should just wait for the Israelis in their homes, schoolyards and on the streets, ready to die. Palestinians should not defend themselves or defend their children; they simply need to wait to be killed without resistance because any resistance, even if it comes from a victim, is an act of terror…

Stop illegal collective punishment
Israel continues to carry out fly-bys with resulting super-sonic booms over the Gaza Strip. These actions lead to psychological torture which causes damage in children whose lives have turned into a continual nightmare….In the Gaza Strip there is an intermittent food shortage which is used to exert forbidden pressure on the Palestinian civilian population [in violation of] the Geneva Conventions [which say that] “in no event shall actions…be taken which may be expected to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause its starvation or force its movement.” Additionally, the power stations in Gaza were harmed by Israeli attacks resulting in an acute shortage in electricity. One of the consequences of this action is that the water pumps, which use electricity, are only partially operational, creating a shortage of drinkable water…

“Israel Advocacy” in North America and how it hijacks the notion of anti-Semitism
The creation of CJPAC is part and parcel of the dramatic restructuring which the Canadian Jewish establishment has undergone in recent years… For decades, elements of corporate Canada represented by a fundraising federation structure closely tied with the United States and Israel have been increasing their control over mainstream Canadian Jewish organization…

Happy Birthday?

4th of July: Put Away the Flags (Howard Zinn)
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed… and…..Patriotism & The Fourth of July　(Howard Zinn)　
Mark Twain, having been called a “traitor” for criticizing the U.S. invasion of the Philippines, derided what he called “monarchical patriotism.” He said: “The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: ‘The King can do no wrong.’ We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had—the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it, all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”