Carlyle, Gabriel

Carlyle, Gabriel

Gabriel Carlyle

3 December 2009Comment

Readers who have attended recent national events such as Stop the War’s march against the war in Afghanistan, the Great Climate Swoop in Nottingham, or the Raise Your Banners music festival in Bradford, may have spotted something slightly unusual: namely, large numbers of Peace News being given away – to thousands of activists.

Have we lost the plot, you may be asking yourself? Why should anyone pay for PN when it’s been given away it for free? Don’t give-aways like this de-…

1 December 2009News

On 5 November, six of us – Katrina Alton and Steve Barnes of the London Catholic Worker, PN columnist Maya Evans, PN co-editor Milan Rai, Trident Ploughshares co-founder Angie Zelter, and myself – were found guilty of causing “serious disruption to the community” for our role in the “Die-in for NATO’s Victims in Afghanistan” at Britain’s military nerve centre at Northwood earlier this year.

During the trial in Watford, chief inspector Dempsey-Brench conceded that he had not…

1 December 2009Review

Jonathan Cape, 2009; ISBN 978-0224071093; 432pp; £20

In 2001 legendary non-fiction cartoonist Joe Sacco travelled to Gaza on an assignment for Harper’s magazine to report on the fate of Palestinians in the town of Khan Younis during the second Intifada.

That visit prompted him to follow up a reference he’d read many years earlier in Noam Chomsky’s book The Fateful Triangle: a short quote from a UN document concerning a massacre in the town during the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which scores of unarmed men were shot in their homes or lined-up…

1 November 2009News

Are those calling for withdrawal selling out Afghanistan’s women?

“To fight is not the solution. We have a mouth and a brain, we should talk.” Afghan Women’s Affairs Minister, Dr H.B. Ghazanfar
“Freedom, democracy and justice cannot be enforced at gunpoint by a foreign country; they are the values that can be achieved only by our people and democracy-loving forces through a hard, decisive and long struggle.” Afghan women’s rights activist Zoya.

Recently, I overheard a significant figure in the UK anti-war movement bemoaning the collapse…

1 November 2009News

Afghan anniversary actions

“This is last year’s protest,” he told us, smiling.

Ten minutes from the end of our eight-hour vigil opposite Downing Street – during which four of us had our details taken by the police for the crime of holding an “unauthorised” demonstration within 1km of Parliament – he had stopped to talk, apparently oblivious to the disruption he was causing to our name-reading ceremony.

95%

Smartly dressed, and apparently on his way from one Whitehall department to…

16 September 2009Feature

Hundreds of peace activists from around the world to break the Israeli siege on 1 January

To mark the first anniversary of Israel’s bloody 22-day assault on Gaza, hundreds of international activists will march nonviolently alongside the people of Gaza on 1 January 2010, breaching the illegal Israeli blockade.

The marchers (following a code of nonviolence) will leave Cairo on 27 December, cross into Gaza from Egypt and continue to the Israeli border. Amnesty International has called the blockade a “form of collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza [and] a…

1 September 2009News

Recent media coverage of the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan obscures an uncomfortable reality: that US/NATO forces are responsible for much – perhaps most – of the killing in Afghanistan today.

On 9-10 July, eight British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. In their front-page headline the next day, the Guardian branded it “The bloodiest day”, while the Sunday Telegraph called it “the bloodiest 24 hours in Afghanistan.”

Only, of course, it wasn’t.

1 September 2009Review

The Devil in Dover: A Journalist's Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-town America, New Press, 2008; ISBN 978-1595582089; 256pp; £18.99. Living with Darwin: Evolution, Darwin and the Future of Faith, OUP, 2007; ISBN 978-0195314441; 208pp; £11.99

In 2004 a group of fundamentalist Christians sitting on a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, voted to make their students “aware of… other theories of evolution, including, but not limited to, intelligent design” – creationism’s latest Trojan horse.

Eleven committed parents – including a Girl Scout leader, a devout Catholic and a physics teacher who taught summer Bible school – decided to take a stand, and sued the board for violation of their first amendment rights (“separation of…

1 September 2009News

This month, lance corporal Joe Glenton of the Royal Logistic Corps faces court martial for refusing to return to combat in Afghanistan. Glenton joined the army in 2004, and in 2007 went absent without leave after serving his first tour in Afghanistan. He is thought to be the first British soldier to openly resist government policy.

In a speech on 23 July organised by the Stop The War Coalition, lance corporal Glenton described his experience on the ground in the Middle East.

1 September 2009News

“I don’t think the public are up for it any more. Everything has changed. We as a nation don’t want to send out soldiers anywhere” – former foreign office minister Kim Howells

Though the British government has run a highly successful propaganda campaign, significantly boosting support for the war amongst the British public, the recent media furore over British casualties has been causing concern in Washington.

Some anxiety

A senior US official told the Financial…

1 September 2009News

The Afghan presidential election on 20 July – the results of which may not be known until mid-September – has already received a fair amount of critical coverage in the British press.

The Times reported that a third or more of those registered to vote (including one “Britney Jamilia Spears” of Kandahar) probably didn’t exist, and that the run-up to the polls had “been characterised by horse-trading between the candidates and an array of warlords and power-brokers who promise[d] to…

1 July 2009News

RAF pilots in Afghanistan are firing an increasing number of brutal “enhanced blast” thermobaric weapons, the Ministry of Defence admitted in May. Since the modified Hellfire AGM-114N weapons were bought from the US in May 2008, over 40 are known to have been fired. 20 were fired in 2008 (in seven months), while over 20 had been fired up to May this year (in five months).

Thermobaric weapons, known earlier as “fuel-air explosives”, cast a fine mist of fuel throughout a wide area,…

1 July 2009News

Opinion polls in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last few months have reinforced the message that the people of the region want a negotiated solution to the conflicts currently raging. Such a solution is more attainable, given recent progress in the Afghan national reconciliation process. In Afghanistan, the International Republican Institute (IRI) carried out a poll in mid-May, published in June, that showed 68% of Afghans think “the government should hold talks and reconcile with the…

1 July 2009Review

Theatre503, The Latchmere, 503 Battersea Park Road, SW11 3BW, 0207 978 7040, www.themountaintop.co.uk, 9 June – 4 July

Waging what one of his aides termed a “war on sleep”, Martin Luther King Jr spent the last months of his life trying to organise the Poor People’s Campaign: a new inter-racial, class-based movement among the poor, in which he hoped black preachers would play a key galvanising role.

Fighting insuperable odds to bring this vision to reality, King also found himself sucked into the struggle of striking sanitation workers in Memphis – and discovered that workers, ministers, unionists and…

1 June 2009News

Hamid Karzai has selected Mohammad Qasim Fahim – “one of the most notorious warlords in [Afghanistan], with the blood of many Afghans on his hands from the civil war” (according to Human Rights Watch) – as one of his two vice-presidential candidates in the August elections.

Human Rights Watch identified Fahim as a key commander in the February 1993 Afshar massacre, when about 800 members of the Shia Hazara minority were killed in Kabul. An international official in Kabul has…