The Clipboard is my clip blog - a place where I post news articles from the internet that I found interesting. The part in italics is an excerpt from a news article that I found interesting; my own commentary if any is in Roman text. You may follow the "read the full article" link below each post to view the full text of the article and citation of the website that I found it at.March 18, 2008 | 10 Rabi al-Awwal 1429 Hijriah
A more perfect union
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. (link)
Obama hits it out of the park again. In my opinion, he didn't need to give this speech and shouldn't have had to. He is running for president not for chief spokesman on race in America. But the moment came and he seized it. This is why I support him so strongly.
January 20, 2008 | 11 Muharram 1429 Hijriah
The Great Need of the Hour
I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.
We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.
We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.
We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.
And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own. (link)
This is a beautiful and also powerful speech.
September 01, 2007 | 17 Shaban 1428 Hijriah
British army chief attacks US as 'intellectually bankrupt' over Iraq
The former head of the British Army has attacked US postwar policy, calling it "intellectually bankrupt".
General Sir Mike Jackson, who headed the army during the war in Iraq, described as "nonsensical" the claim by the former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that US forces "don't do nation-building". He has also hit back at suggestions that British forces had failed in Basra.
Mr Rumsfeld was "one of the most responsible for the current situation in Iraq," Gen Jackson says in his autobiography, Soldier. He describes Washington's approach to fighting global terrorism as "inadequate" for relying on military power over diplomacy and nation-building. (link)
Tell on!
May 03, 2007 | 15 Rabi al-Akhir 1428 Hijriah
UK and US must admit defeat and leave Iraq, says British general
A retired British army general says Iraq's insurgents are justified in opposing the occupation, arguing that the US and its allies should "admit defeat" and leave Iraq before more soldiers are killed.
General Sir Michael Rose told the BBC's Newsnight programme: "It is the soldiers who have been telling me from the frontline that the war they have been fighting is a hopeless war, that they cannot possibly win it and the sooner we start talking politics and not military solutions, the sooner they will come home and their lives will be preserved." (link)
This is the same guy who called for Blair to be impeached.
February 22, 2007 | 3 Safar 1428 Hijriah
Blair announces Iraq troop withdrawals
The US government tonight welcomed Britain's decision to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, despite its own surge of more than 20,000 soldiers to the country.
Tony Blair announced a cut of more than 2,000 UK personnel in Basra by the end of the summer, in a special statement to parliament today...
...Mr Blair revealed that, since the successful completion of Operation Sinbad in the South, he would be able to authorise the pullout of some UK troops.
The current total of 7,100 will be cut to 5,500 in the coming months, and to 5,000 by the end of the summer, the prime minister told MPs. (link)
Hell of a long wait (almost a year since this was last updated; it all started here). Not as much as some might have hoped for, but a good start, and somebody convinced Blair to do it even as the U.S. is escalating in Iraq. What did they do, put a gun to Blair's head?
October 13, 2006 | 20 Ramadan 1427 Hijriah
Army chief: British troops must pull out of Iraq soon
General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the army, dropped a political bombshell last night by saying that Britain must withdraw from Iraq "soon" or risk serious consequences for Iraqi and British society.
In a blistering attack on Tony Blair's foreign policy, Gen Dannatt said the continuing military presence in Iraq was jeopardising British security and interests around the world.
"I don't say that the difficulties we are experiencing round the world are caused by our presence in Iraq, but undoubtedly our presence in Iraq exacerbates them," he said in comments that met with admiration from anti-war campaigners and disbelief in some parts of Westminster. (link)
Bravo, General Dannatt! I'm surprised they didn't fire him for this.
August 13, 2006 | 17 Rajab 1427 Hijriah
Bush tried to defund bomb-detection work
As the British terror plot was unfolding, the Bush administration quietly tried to take away $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new explosives detection technology. Congressional leaders rejected the idea, the latest in a series of Homeland Security Department steps that have left lawmakers and some of the department's own experts questioning the commitment to create better anti-terror technologies. (link)
Yes, we've heard this before. And we are supposed to believe that the Bush Administration are "tough on terrorism". They're fucking incompetent, is what they are. Look to what they do not what they say.
July 17, 2006 | 20 Jumada al-Akhir 1427 Hijriah
The west must recognise that Israel's agenda is in conflict with its own
The problem is that the premise of the question is false. It assumes that Israel shares our view that a de-escalation followed by negotiation is the best route to a settlement. It assumes, therefore, that when Israeli ministers complain of having "no partner for peace", they actually want one. A much more sensible approach would be to credit them with having the intelligence to know exactly what they are doing and to work backwards from there.
If so, it might become apparent that far from wanting a partner with which to negotiate, the Israeli government is acting with the specific intention of forestalling that possibility. There is nothing particularly new in this. The extremists on both sides have always formed a kind of tacit alliance, with the supporters of "greater Israel" and "no Israel" understanding their joint interest in preventing any moves towards a compromise peace. That is the main reason why Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas as it emerged in the 1980s. Unwilling to negotiate with the secular nationalists of Fatah, even as they were moving towards support for a two-state solution, the Israeli authorities thought it would be a clever idea to promote their Islamist rivals.
In the case of the current crisis, it is no accident that it occurred at precisely the moment when the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was gaining the upper hand in the latest round of that struggle. By using the threat of a referendum to force Hamas to accept the existence of Israel as the basis for a final settlement, Abbas had created the most promising opening for peace in six years. Faced with internal division and the loss of political initiative, Hamas militants understood that the only way to prevent it would be to trigger another cycle of violence. In turn, the Israel government, whose interests were also threatened by the Abbas initiative, recognised that it had an equally good reason to oblige. The effect of Hizbullah's intervention and Israel's over-reaction has been to put peace even further down the agenda.
The plain truth is that Israel thinks that it can get more by imposing a solution through force than by negotiation and is not interested in any kind of peace process. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, pays lip service to the road map, but he has already received American endorsement for his fallback position, artfully dubbed "unilateral convergence". George Bush has described it as a "bold idea". Armed with the knowledge that he will continue to enjoy American patronage if the road map fails, Olmert has set out to ensure that it does just that. Bush's diplomacy has been truly inept.
It's high time western governments grasped the fundamental truth that Israel is pursuing an agenda that conflicts directly with their own. In the context of the fight against terrorism and the need to promote international cooperation, the west's interest must be to remove the Palestinian question as a source of grievance among mainstream Muslims in a way that guarantees justice for the Palestinians and security for Israel. A settlement of this kind is perfectly feasible and has been outlined in countless documents and initiatives over the years, most recently in the Geneva accords. But the main reason it has proved illusive is that Israel is not, and never has been, prepared to make the territorial compromises required. It still believes that it is entitled to the victor's spoils by annexing large tracts of Palestinian land. (link)
Read the whole thing.
July 07, 2006 | 9 Jumada al-Akhir 1427 Hijriah
Europe's response to the siege of Gaza is shameful
The EU should admit that the Palestinians have no partner for peace. They will only have one if Israel recognises Palestine's right to function. Statements that Israel recognises a Palestinian state's right to exist are empty as long as Olmert expands Jewish settlements and the separation wall, and refuses to spell out how that state can operate as a viable entity. Without the right to function, the right to exist is hollow.
Olmert and his Labour party allies must also come clean on the last serious Israeli peace formula, the Barak proposals which were put at Taba five years ago. The Palestinians did not accept them, but political circumstances were inauspicious - a fading Baruk government and an ill Yasser Arafat. The same proposals might be acceptable now and should be revived. If Kadima thinks of imposing or offering anything less than Taba, then Israel cannot claim to want an end to the conflict.
Finally, Israel must renounce violence, in particular the assassinations of Palestinian leaders. The number of civilians killed in these attacks this year alone far exceeds the number of Israeli victims since Hamas declared its ceasefire last year. The facts do not support the notion that Israel is "retaliating" to provocations. Last week's Palestinian attack on a military outpost followed much greater carnage by Israeli shells. (link)
Read the whole thing.
July 04, 2006 | 6 Jumada al-Akhir 1427 Hijriah
Blowing up democracy on Fourth of July
America, Happy Fourth of Ju-lying.
On this day to celebrate the birth of democracy, we mourn the death of our Founding Fathers' ideals.
President Bush recently lashed out against reporters for divulging a secret government program that monitors international banking transactions. He called such newspaper revelations "disgraceful" acts that help terrorists.
Bush, an underwhelming intellect in college, presumably slept through history class -- you know, the part where Thomas Jefferson, says, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."
It is funny how the president gets more worked up about a free press doing its job under the Constitution than about rogue American soldiers torturing suspects in Abu Ghraib, or U.S. troops allegedly raping an Iraqi girl, killing her family and burning her body, or the administration's own ad hoc system of military tribunals that flies in the face of U.S. and international laws, or government spooks plowing through phone records. (link)
What's truly un-American is the violations of civil liberties and of international law that Bush and his supporters are so proud of.
