Wayne Besen - Author, Activist, Columnist, Public Speaker

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Souheila Al-Jadda wrote a compelling op-ed in USA Today. Here is an excerpt:

In Dubai, a district called Media City, which is considered a "free-speech zone," hosts many of the world's leading international media outlets, including CNN, BBC World Service and others.
At my hotel outside the "zone," I tried to read an article online but was denied access by government censors. A screen popped up saying the website did not conform to the Emirates' social and religious values.

The Dubai Press Club chairperson, Mona Al Marri, explained that the government blocks mainly websites containing sexual content to protect family values. But the story I wanted to read was about Israel, not about sex.

Perhaps President Bush would garner more international support for reform in the Arab world if he addressed the dismal state of free speech there. Even Arabs wouldn't be able to argue with him on this point, at least not publicly.

15 Comments:

Fuck free speech in the UAE.

The more important issues are:

1.) they have ties to 9/11
2.) they regularly arrest and jail gays
3.) they refuse to recognize Israel
4.) they still recognize the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan

There's a breath of impeachment blowing through the wind.

My fingers are crossed and I'm doing my part to get the word out.
posted by Christopher, at 3/02/2006 1:30 PM

And lets not forget that after the US and other foreign military pull out of Iraq, there will be no free speech there either among other things. Gays will still be outlawed and imprisoned for just being who they are. So much for the democracy that Bush will claim to have established. We don't even have it in America under his regime. What a disaster this entire war has been.

Robert, NYC.
posted by Anonymous, at 3/02/2006 1:45 PM

If we have to deal with Iran (as Mr. Besen has suggested here) the U.S. may never pull out of the Middle East at any part of the lifetimes of those who write and read this blog.

But, successful, free nations don't have to attack others. In order to make that region a conglomeration of successful, free countries there have to be other measures taken beside war.

And again, if you're going to truly advance your cause you'll have to develop a realistic, truth-based, positive opposition to George W. Bush's republican successor.
posted by Kurt W, at 3/02/2006 1:58 PM

Fuck you kurt, why should we positive about a heinous inept piece of shit like bush; and you'll get more truth here than you ever will from the bushies. And cut the arrogant shit about a "republican successor", if you think this country is going to elect another repukelikan after what bush did, you're just dreaming you big fairy.
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An extract from a textbook of history on planet Eurotopea in the year
2503

Mankind learnt, through the U.S. experience, that affluence and power,
combined with ignorance, human insensitivity and selfishness, was the
greatest WMD that humanity would ever experience.

DURING THE 20th-21st century, there was a country called the U.S. on
planet Earth that became home to some of the most talented and creative
people around the world who came to its door to escape oppression or
due to lack of opportunities in their own country. These immigrants and
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the richest and the most affluent country on Earth at that time. The
U.S. became the world leader not only in respect of creativity in
science and technology that was used for the benefit of mankind but
also, unfortunately, in respect of development and stockpiling of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and newer technologies of warfare on
an unprecedented scale.

This made the government and the people of the U.S., representing just
4 per cent of the population of the world, look only towards
themselves, oblivious of the rest of the world. Generation after
generation, they became increasingly self-centred, and the economy of
the country began to depend largely on the sale of arms and on
exploitation of the rest of the world. The U.S. lost touch with the
ground reality on Earth. It elected at the beginning of the 21st
century a President whose knowledge of history and geography was
confined to a place called the White House in which he lived and from
where, he naively believed, he could control, direct and order the rest
of the world which, he thought, was only awaiting his instructions.

A saga of lies and deceit

The foreign policy of the U.S. gradually became a saga of lies and
deceit, of greed and vanity, of ignorance and insensitivity, of
selfishness and cruelty, of victimisation and injustice, of bribery and
exploitation. And mankind learnt, through the U.S. experience, that
affluence and power, combined with ignorance, human insensitivity and
selfishness, was the greatest WMD that humanity would ever experience.

It was this WMD that destroyed human civilisation on earth.
Fortunately, for the human species, by this time, the international
search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, also headquartered in the
U.S., had discovered our planet, Eurotopea, as one where the atmosphere
and other conditions conducive to life, were similar to those on Earth.
Mankind also developed means of travelling to Eurotopea.

That is how our ancestors came here. We must continuously remind
ourselves that we do not do a U.S. here, for there is no other planet
to escape to that we know of as of now. That is why this lesson becomes
important.

The ten cardinal sins of the U.S. that destroyed human civilisation on
Earth are given below. (The term "assassins" is a corrupted form of
"U.S.'s sins"). The examples given below are only illustrative and far
from exhaustive.

1. Double standards: The U.S. continued to trade with, what it called,
rogue nations, while preventing other countries around the world from
doing such trading. It invoked the charter of the United Nations (U.N.)
when such an action was in its interests but it totally ignored the
U.N. and acted against its mandate whenever it wished to do so.

The U.S. had the Earth's largest stock of WMD - nuclear, chemical and
biological - and was the only country ever to use nuclear weapons,
and the first one to use chemical weapons; yet it did not want any
other nation to have any such weapon even for self defence, unless it
had full control over the nation or a strategic alliance with it, as
was the case with Israel and Japan.

The U.S. helped the governments (as in Chile) that violated all human
rights when it suited it, but it did nothing against countries (such as
South Africa during the days of apartheid) that violated basic human
rights with a vengeance.

2. Lies: Exactly 500 years ago, the U.S. waged a devastating war
against Iraq in which a large number of innocent men, women and
children were killed and disabled for life, on the pretext that Iraq
had stockpiles of WMD and was harbouring terrorists, knowing fully well
that none of this was true. By this time, the U.S. came to be regarded
as a model of spreading around the world inaccurate and false news
through its control of the press and media.

3. Establishment of a nexus led by the U.S. between its own government,
other pliable governments around the world, the multinational
corporations (MNCs), and bureaucracy: The U.S. became the greatest
bribe-giver in human history on Earth. It corrupted governments and
bureaucracy all over the world, with enormous harm to the common
people. It supported unethical multinational corporations like Union
Carbide that led to the famous Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1983, and Monsanto
that (for example) attempted to control seed production in countries
such as India through marketing seeds of doubtful quality for the
Indian conditions.

It helped the multinationals, by controlling international
organisations, to find a market in developing countries for those
products that had either been banned or were considered inferior to
similar newer products in the U.S. and in other developed countries
that were its allies. Not only that, it prevented the production of
these products within the developing countries by "bribing" the
authorities concerned. An example would be the oral polio vaccine for
which the market ceased to exist in the U.S. and other developed
countries by the end of the 20th century; it was, therefore,
recommended to be used in the developing countries in preference to the
safer, better and more effective injectable polio vaccine that was
being used in the developed countries.

4. Exploitation: It forced, through bribery of one kind or another,
pliable governments and bureaucracy around the world to agree to
signing international agreements such as GATT, TRIPS and UPOV which
were heavily weighted in favour of the U.S. and the other developed
countries at that time, and equally heavily weighted against the
developing countries. The purpose of these agreements was to allow
exploitation of developing countries by the U.S. and its allies in such
a way that the U.S. eventually acquired total control over the destiny
of the people of the developing countries and their enormous and
enviable resources such as oil, mineral, and plant wealth.

5. Aggressive behaviour and lack of sensitivity: Between 1945 and 2003,
the U.S. bombed China, Korea, Guatemala, Indonesia, Cuba, Congo, Peru,
Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Lebanon, Libya, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Iran, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan,
Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Not only did the U.S. invade Iraq in 2003
without any viable reason whatsoever, it also ensured the destruction
of one of the most precious heritages of mankind in terms of
manuscripts and artefacts dating back to several millennia. This act
put to shame the burning of the Alexandria library by the Romans, some
two millennia earlier.

6. Murders: One of the declared policies of the U.S. was to murder
world leaders that were inconvenient. One well-known victim of such a
policy was Allende of a small country called Chile.

7. Surreptitious control of agriculture: The U.S. realised that
agriculture was the major means of sustenance of a large number (say 70
per cent) of people in the populous developing countries such as India
and Nigeria. Therefore, to obtain control over these countries, one
only needed to control their agriculture which, in practical terms,
meant controlling seed and agro-chemicals production. The U.S. used
every possible means - illegal, immoral or unethical - to acquire
this control. Its companies attempted to market in the 1980s, totally
ineffective agro-chemicals in India, through high-pressure advertising.
If these fake chemicals had been used to the extent to which the U.S.
companies wanted them to be used, the agricultural productivity in the
country would have gone down to a level which would have demanded
dependence on the U.S. for supply of food.

8. Violation of international law and of human rights: The U.S.
violated the provisions of at least 15 articles of the international
convention concerning prisoners, in its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay
in the later half of the 20th century.

Even in the early part of the 21st century, the U.S. continued to
provide a large subsidy to its agriculturists against the provisions of
WTO which it had itself created. It waged in 2003 a war against Iraq
that was illegal and against all international norms.

9. Creation of terrorists, guerrilla warfare, fundamentalists and
dictators: The later half of the 20th century on Earth was
characterised by the emergence of terrorists, guerrilla warfare,
fundamentalists and dictators, and the U.S. was responsible for them
all. It, with the help of another country called the U.K., created
Israel, throwing out hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were
living in that area for thousands of years. That led to the evolution
of terrorism as Palestinians had no other recourse to fight the above
inhuman and illegal action. Later, the U.S. invaded Vietnam and lost
badly there, but only after Vietnamese had invented guerrilla warfare.
The U.S. created terrorists and dictators like Osama bin Laden of
Afghanistan, Ayatullah Komeni of Iran, and Saddam Hussein of Iraq; it
is amusing that, in the later years, the U.S. waged war against the
same people that it had brought to power when it suited its interests.

10. Victimisation and intolerance of dissent: The early 1950s in the
U.S. were characterised by the emergence of a doctrine called
McCarthyism which called for liquidation (de facto or de jure) of
anyone suspected of any contact or relationship with any other person
suspected of having any connection or sympathies with any communist
organisation or ideology.

After the U.S. mounted the above-mentioned attack on Iraq in 2003, over
90 per cent of the people of the world, including people of most of the
developed countries, became disillusioned with the U.S., and came
together, cutting across all other barriers such as political, social,
linguistic or economic, to oppose the U.S.'s war on Iraq. It is then
that, as a retaliation, the war against the people of the planet Earth
by the U.S. started, which ended in decimation of culture after
culture, civilisation after civilisation, people after people, and
country after country. In this process, as is a natural law, the
aggressor was also dismembered, disfigured and destroyed. Eventually,
following an internal revolt, the U.S. also ceased to exist.

Fortunately, a group of wise people, representing fairly the then human
civilisation on Earth, had anticipated this course of events and
prepared to leave Earth for our planet in an operation which would go
down in the history of our universe as one of the most daring and
effective, that saved human civilisation. THIS IS HOW PEOPLE IN OTHER
PARTS OF THE WORLD THINK OF THE U.S
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