Isnin, 12 September 2011

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Lim Lip Eng

Posted: 12 Sep 2011 07:10 AM PDT

Lim Lip Eng


Hunger strike protester collapses

Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:49 AM PDT

Source: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/2011/09/12/hunger-strike-protester-collapses/ (By Teoh El Sen, 12/9/2011)
One of 10 men from a logging company staging a hunger strike relay against the Pahang government collapsed this morning and had to be sent to the hospital here.
Shareholder Ramli Suleiman, 46, is the second person to have 'burnt out' after surviving only on liquids for five days. The first was 68-year-old John Chong who was sent home on Saturday morning after suffering from intense pain. A doctor diagnosed that Chong cannot continue the strike as the man's hernia had relapsed. Both men started the strike last Thursday.
Earlier today, Ramli was found in a weakened and incoherent state, lying in a makeshift tent in front of the Loke Hup temple in Segambut. Alerted to his condition, Segambut MP Lim Lip Eng called for an ambulance to the scene. While being carried to the ambulance by medical personnel, Ramli was seen struggling and muttering: "Biar saya, biar saya (leave me alone)". He was sent to the Kuala Lumpur Hospital. Two other men, shareholders Lim Ting Sin, 68, and Pang Chow Seng, 70, have now taken over to from the two continue the hunger strike. The 10 men, directors and shareholders of of logging firm Seruan Gemilang Makmur Sdn Bhd, want the Pahang government to abide by a court ruling to pay their company RM70 million.
'Pahang MB a lawless hooligan'
The company had in 2002 sued the state for breaching a logging contract and the Kuantan High Court ruled in their favour in May 2007. It ordered the Pahang government to pay them more than RM37 million plus interest of 8% per annum. The total came close to RM70 million. When they started the strike on Sept 8, the group said they would do it in pairs and if anyone of them collapsed, others would take their place, saying "death" was preferable to injustice.
Seruan Gemilang manager Lee Sin alleged today that Pahang menteri besar Adnan Yaakob had lied in a statement to the media yesterday concerning the case. "He said that the state was still looking at possible legal remedies, but we know for a fact that we've exhausted all available legal avenues," said Lee, who then threw a challenge to Adnan. "If it's true that we can still can appeal in court, we will stop the hunger strike. But if you're lying and we have no other way, then you should settle the debt immediately," he said.
"The menteri besar is a lawless hooligan," said Lee. "We are old and I'm retired now, so I'm doing this. As Malaysians and we should be abiding the law, especially the state government. "Even if they don't do anything, at least we are highligthing the matter and letting the public know what the state is doing," said current protester Lim, camped under a tree today.
Also read: 'Give us justice or death'

Charles Santiago

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 11:18 PM PDT

Charles Santiago


Endless War, Lies and Terror: The Decade Since 9/11

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 05:55 AM PDT

By Mark Weisbrot

I grew up during the Cold War, and my elementary school teachers told me that the difference between us and the Communists was that they thought the end justifies the means, but we didn't.  It wasn't true then, of course – American armed forces in Vietnam bombed villages, slaughtered civilians, and threw people out of helicopters.  But at least our leaders had to pretend that they had some moral superiority to their enemies.  Now we have seen torture and assassination institutionalized and justified at the highest levels.  New crimes are continually uncovered:  documents recently captured by Libyan rebels indicate that Washington was sending prisoners to Gadaffi's government for interrogation, i.e. torture.

So that is one of the casualties of 9-11, in addition to the 3000 people brutally murdered on that fateful day in 2001:  a moral degeneration among our political leaders who, it must be acknowledged, were already at a low level when it came to respect for human life in the rest of the world.  But the world should know that the views presented by our major media and politicians do not necessarily reflect the consent of the governed.  In a recent poll [PDF] conducted by the Pew Research Center , the public was evenly divided on the question of whether the 9/11 attacks may have been the result of our foreign policy.  This is especially impressive because it means that nearly half the country came up with this idea on their own, as it has been scrupulously avoided in ten years of media blather about "how 9/11 changed the world."  If we had anything approaching a reality-based media, that number would probably be upwards of eighty percent. Only a quarter of those surveyed by Pew thought that the wars had made Americans safer; the majority thought the wars increased the chance of terrorist attacks or made no difference.

According to recent polls, a majority of Americans think that the U.S. should not be fighting in Afghanistan [Quinnipiac, August]; a majority thinks that the U.S. should withdraw its troops as soon as possible; [Pew, June] and two-thirds say the threat of terrorism will stay the same when the U.S. withdraws its troops. [CBS/New York Times, June]

The most important way that 9/11 changed the world, as tens of millions of Americans understand, is that it provided an over-arching theme and a rationale for the kinds of military adventures, invasions, bombings, interventions and atrocities that our government had previously carried out under other pretexts.  For half a century the "war against Communism" served this purpose. It didn't matter that governments overthrown in Iran, Chile, Guatemala or elsewhere had no connection to the Soviet Union; or that the Vietnamese were fighting for their own independence.  It was an excuse, with a whole world view that shaped the country's most important institutions, and it provided a justification for empire.

Then came that awkward decade after the Berlin Wall fell and Washington had to rely on ad hoc excuses, as in the invasion of Panama or the first Iraq War.  People like Vice President Dick Cheney knew immediately after the towers went down that this was not just a tragedy but an opportunity that would serve their interests for years to come, beginning with the unnecessary wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it was the more liberal "enablers," especially in the media, that made everything possible.  Bill Keller was executive editor of the New York Times until returning to writing for the paper this month.  In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the paper printed such journalistic gems as the infamous "aluminum tubes" report – fake evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program — and other stories that, as the newspaper's own public editor would write, "pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you could almost sense epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors.”   Keller reminisces this week about "the I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might."

"It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations," he writes, " including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack [now at the Brookings Institution]."

Keller poses the question: "[K]nowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the [Iraq] war?"  After reviewing the costs of the war, in money and lives [he says "at least 100,000 Iraqis" were killed but the best estimates are closer to a million], he concludes that "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder."  But "Whether it was wrong to support the invasion at the time is a harder call."

It's not a hard call for most of America, or the world for that matter. Keller is asking the wrong question. The more important question is how the executive editor of the New York Times can be so confused between right and wrong, when tens of millions of Americans, including many intelligent children, can see right through the crap that we are bombarded with every day.

I'm only picking on the Times because it represents the liberal wing of our establishment media. Most of the rest is much worse. This is one of the great structural problems that must be confronted every day by Americans who would like their country to become a civilized member of the community of nations.

The military-industrial complex is of course another enormous obstacle. General James L. Jones, Obama's National Security Advisor, explained to journalist and author Bob Woodward, in his book Obama's Wars, why "the United States could not lose the war [in Afghanistan] or be seen as losing the war.":
If we're not successful here," Jones said, "you'll have a staging base for global terrorism all over the world. People will say the terrorists won. And you'll see expressions of these kinds of things in Africa, South America, you name it. Any developing country is going to say, this is the way we beat [the United States], and we're going to have a bigger problem.
Before he took the job as Obama's National Security Advisor, Jones was hauling down $2 million a year, paid for serving on the boards of corporations, lobby groups, and military contractors including Boeing and Exxon-Mobil. This is a form of corruption more costly to the United States than anything that our elites regularly denounce in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan.

If all this sounds pessimistic, with President Obama having escalated the war in Afghanistan, and mostly continuing the foreign policy of George W. Bush's second term, things are not nearly so hopeless as they may seem. First, some of what we are seeing is not structural, but situational. The United States is facing its worst economic failure since the Great Depression. This has drawn attention away from our wars, and given the foreign policy establishment more leeway than they normally would have to proceed without regard to public opinion. President Obama decided early on that he was not going to expend or risk any political capital trying to change U.S. foreign policy, since his re-election would depend on domestic issues. And many other political actors have made similar decisions, not always for purely opportunistic reasons.

Second, the fact that Obama, a perceived liberal and the country's first African-American president, is in the White House, has kept protest to a minimum. If a Republican president were doing the same things, there would be people in the streets and a lot more of the kind of grass-roots organizing that we saw in Wisconsin. And Washington would be paying a bigger political price in the rest of the world for its crimes, as it did when George W. Bush was president.

Nonetheless, the peace movement remains quite strong and is exerting pressure every day in ways that generally go unreported. This summer, 96 percent of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives went against their president and voted to establish a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. This was a result of the organized efforts of the peace movement.

Americans will end these wars and change the foreign policy that got us into them, the same way we got out of Vietnam or cut off congressional funding to right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua in the 1980s: through persistent organizing, educational work, and pressure on the government – especially the Congress. That is how we will eventually become a republic, as most Americans want, instead of an empire.


Lim Kit Siang

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 11:03 PM PDT

Lim Kit Siang


Revision of M’sian history should not be one-sided

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 11:01 PM PDT

By Sulok Tawie | 11 September 2011 The Sun Daily KUCHING (Sept 11, 2011): Sarawak Teachers' Union president William Ghani Bina said today that any revision of the school's history textbook must be to correct the one-sided history on the formation of Malaysia. "It is important that the new history textbook highlight the correct version [...]

Malaysia in the Era of Globalization #82

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 07:21 PM PDT

By M. Bakri Musa Chapter 9: Islam in Malay Life Reform in Islam Educating Ulamas on Modern Economics By educating Muslims generally and the ulama in particular on such modern and useful concepts of economics, and replacing such loaded terms as interest and insurance with the morally neutral terms as rewards on savings and risk [...]

PM’s blame game

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 08:39 AM PDT

— The Malaysian Insider Sep 10, 2011 SEPT 10 — So far the only people not blamed for the mishandling of the Bersih 2.0 rally are Al-Qaeda, Chin Peng, Kermit the Frog and Ayah Pin. You get the drift, right. It seems that the order to turn Kuala Lumpur into a war zone and treat [...]

Religious issues hurting Najib’s chances

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 03:16 AM PDT

The Malaysian Insider Sep 11, 2011 KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 11 — A raid on a church by Muslim authorities has raised religious tension in Malaysia and could cost Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak votes in an election set for 2013 but which many expect to come much earlier. The raid has sparked an angry [...]

Lip service laced with poison

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 03:09 AM PDT

— Douglas Tan The Malaysian Insider Sep 11, 2011 SEPT 11 — Ever since I was young, my father has taught me that when you tell lies, it is far more difficult to remain consistent. You have to tell a lie to cover up the original lie, and you also have to remember what the [...]

MY VOICE FOR NATION

Posted: 11 Sep 2011 01:43 PM PDT

MY VOICE FOR NATION


Is BN governmnet truly committed to diversity and 1 Malaysia concept?

Posted: 10 Sep 2011 07:16 PM PDT

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