[Peace-discuss] Fw: Informed Comment: Muslim v Western death stats; Climate change, shhh; Palestinian checkpoints

Mon May 27 00:34:32 UTC 2013

The "short" film (bottom) is more than an hour long but worth checking out. Treatment is what you'd heard and worse... but the big surprise is that the film is Israeli made.

--- On Sun, 5/26/13, Informed Comment <jricole at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Informed Comment <jricole at gmail.com>
Subject: Informed Comment
To: jencart13 at yahoo.com
Date: Sunday, May 26, 2013, 3:13 PM

Informed Comment

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Informed Comment

Help Build a Hospital in Karbala, Iraq!

Who’s the Threat?  Western Powers have invaded and Killed Millions of Muslims

Rockets in Beirut Target Hizbullah as Violence spreads from Syria to Lebanon

Turkey:  Kissing Protest in Ankara

Media Ignores Climate Change Background of Increased Flooding (Media Matters Short)

Checkpoint: The Every Day Life of Humiliation for Palestinians (Short Documentary)

Help Build a Hospital in Karbala, Iraq!

Posted: 26 May 2013 11:33 AM PDT
Karbala, Iraq, doesn’t have enough good medical care.  The number one killer is heart attacks, but a whole range of ailments are not being effectively combatted.  There is an opportunity for us all to do something about that, now.  An Iraqi philanthropy backed by the well-known al-Qazwini family is  founding a state-of-the-art hospital there (click on this link to see more). 

(A tax-deductible donation  can be made here.) 
The Iraqi health system has collapsed.  The sanction years of the 1990s cut Iraq off from the world and cut the government revenues drastically.  (Sanctions were imposed by the US and the UN to punish Saddam Hussein but ended up devastating Iraqis in general). Then the US invasion and occupation caused a collapse of government and the power vacuum set off upheavals that forced many medical personnel to flee the country.  The ordinary people of Karbala have suffered.  Medical facilities are poor, the equipment is inadequate, and even basic hygiene is seldom maintained.  Many specialty operations (even just heart bypass surgery) are hard to do in country.  Even though Iraqi is theoretically an oil country, it hasn’t been able substantially to increase exports, and its amateur governmental officials, who have come in completely inexperienced and green, don’t have the capacity to deliver services.  I noticed on my recent trip to Baghdad how dowdy the
 place still seems, and the relative lack of new buildings and projects.  Besides, civil society activities like this are part of nation-building; it isn’t good for people to become dependent on oil states for everything.
Among the featured services of the new hospital:
 “Department of Cardiovascular medicine
This department will provide services on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiac diseases affecting the patient population. Catheterization and open heart surgeries will be provided to the patients who are in need of such interventions. Cardiac Bypass of coronary arteries and replacement of cardiac valves that control blood flow to and from the heart and pacemaker implanting devices to regulate the heartbeat will be part of the clinical specialty. Open heart surgery is a surgery in which the patient’s chest is opened and surgery is performed on the internal structures of the heart. This requires highly skilled and qualified specialists of medical team that are trained in multiple medical disciplines. These surgeries will be performed in fully equipped and technologically advanced surgical suites, which allow for close monitoring of the heart’s functions.  The hospital will be furnished with two fully equipped state of the art operating
 rooms/suites to accommodate open heart surgeries and two operating rooms/suites for cardiac catheterizing, defibrillation/cardio-version.” 

  Karbala grew up around the shrine of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who was martyred there in 680 with many of his family members and supporters, by the early Muslim Umayyad kingdom.  The heart-rending story of Imam Husayn’s sacrifice for justice has inspired authors as diverse as Gibbons and Mahatma Gandhi. And, of course, it inspired President Obama’s middle name.
 (Courtesy  Washington Post
Karbala has been an important city throughout medieval and modern Iraqi history.  Like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and many others, it is a pilgrimage city. People come from all over the Muslim world, primarily  members of the Shiite branch of Islam, which especially honors Imam Husayn (though many Sunni Muslims do, as well).  In fact, for its most important date on the ritual calendar,  an estimated 15 million pilgrims now show up, and perhaps 50 million people come through the year.  (These visitors are also disadvantaged by the insufficiency of medical facilities).
The contemporary population of Karbala province is probably 700,000 or so.  It suffered neglect under the Baath government of Saddam Hussein, and like all of Iraq it suffered from the US/ UN sanctions of the 1990s and then the upheavals and collapse of government after the US invasion of 2003.
Many Americans want to do something for a still-devastated Iraq.  This project is an excellent opportunity.  Physicians who want to pitch in can go spend some time helping out as the hospital facilities are built.
 Donations to the Imam al-Hujja hospital in Karbala can be made here.

Who’s the Threat?  Western Powers have invaded and Killed Millions of Muslims

Posted: 26 May 2013 10:27 AM PDT
Listening to Newt Gingrich, the great bloviator, go on this morning on the alleged Muslim threat, set me off.  Gingrich did his dissertation on Belgian educational policy in the Congo, where he managed to miss the genocide perpetrated by the Europeans.  Gingrich knows better, he is just hate-mongering.  But since he brought it up, it is Westerners like Gingrich (who supported illegally invading and occupying Iraq, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths) of whom one might justifiably be a little afraid…

Western countries invaded, occupied by Muslims, since 1798: Turkey in Cyprus since 1974?
Number of Westerners killed by Muslim powers since 1798: a few tens of thousands, most in the Ottoman wars in the Balkans and WW I

Muslim countries invaded and occupied by Westerners since 1798:  what is now Bangladesh (Britain); Egypt (France), much of Indonesia (Dutch); Algeria (France); Senegal, Mali, Niger, Chad (France); Moroccan Sahara, Ceuta (Spain); what is now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan (Russia); Tunisia (France); Egypt, Sudan (Britain); Morocco (France); Libya (Italy); Palestine and Iraq (Britain); Syria and what is now Lebanon (France); Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain (Britain); Iran (Britain, US, Soviet Union during WW II); Iraq (US 2003-2011) 
Number of Muslims killed by Western Powers since 1798: tens of millions

Africa in 1914

Rockets in Beirut Target Hizbullah as Violence spreads from Syria to Lebanon

Posted: 26 May 2013 12:42 AM PDT
 Four persons were wounded by GRAD rockets that fell in south-western Beirut, a Hizbullah stronghold, on Sunday.  The strikes come a day after the head of Hizbullah pledged to continue fighting for the al-Assad regime in Syria.
Most Sunni Muslims in Lebanon support the rebels against the Baath government, and so are annoyed with Hizbullah for its stance.
 Part of that speech is translated here:

Turkey:  Kissing Protest in Ankara

Posted: 25 May 2013 10:46 PM PDT
 After a subway official chastised a young couple in Ankara for kissing in public, internet activists organized a small flashmob at the Kurtuluş metro station in the Turkish capital, where lots of couples engaged in a public display of affection.  They attracted the ire of a group of religious men, but were protected by the police.
 Liveleakvideo has raw footage:

Turkey’s society is deeply divided between urban middle and upper middle class youth who differ little from their European peers in their interests and activities, and more conservative small-town populations or rural labor migrants into the big cities, whose mores are more like those of people elsewhere in the Middle East.  Of course, there are small-town secularists and big-city fundamentalists, too– it is a big complex society of 74 million people (falling between France and Germany demographically).
Since 2002, a conservative, pro-market government tinged with religious commitments has been in power, after decades of rule by militantly secular governments that favored a large public sector. The eclipse of secularism has caused deep resentments and grievances among some in the urban middle classes.

Media Ignores Climate Change Background of Increased Flooding (Media Matters Short)

Posted: 25 May 2013 03:17 PM PDT
As  The Scientific American noted a couple of years ago:
In a 2011 study published in Nature,

“. . . researchers examined daily records of rainfall, snowfall and sleet from more than 6,000 weather stations between 1951 and 1999.  They found  a rise in cases of extreme precipitation, such as rainstorms that deliver 100 millimeters of rainfall or more in 24 hours. The uptick could not be explained by natural climate fluctuations; instead it more closely matched what the patterns that computer models of climate predict for increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases. Humanity, in other words, has likely loaded the weather dice in favor of severe storms.”
Media Matters points out that this finding is cited by about 3% of newscasts on flooding in the US.
Ignoring Climate Context of Floods 

Checkpoint: The Every Day Life of Humiliation for Palestinians (Short Documentary)

Posted: 25 May 2013 01:51 PM PDT
 Checkpoint – Every Day Life in Palestine Documentary ( Subtitles ) 

” Published on Apr 27, 2013
A film showing the day to day reality of Palestinians subjected to demeaning humiliation at Israeli military checkpoints as they attempt to go about their daily lives in their own lands.
No political speeches. No opinions. Just an honest record of the drudgery and humiliation of dealing with checkpoints.
Supported by the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema and Television”

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