Tag: Lebanon

Internationally Trans

I figure international news includes the United States.  There’s a pretty even split between stories from other countries and national stories, presented so the public might know a little better what’s happening of interest to people in the trans community.

Poland

Anna Grodzka, 57, became the first ever Polish lawmaker to have had sex reassignment…which makes her the only current transsexual national legislator on the planet.  Spain’s Carla Antonelli is transgender, but has not had sex reassignment surgery.

Grodzka runs Trans-Fuzja (website is in Polish), a foundation which supports Poland’s transpeople and says she decided to run in order to promote the work of the foundation.  She won 19,451 in the Krakow II electoral district, making her the top vote-getter for Palikot’s Movement in that district and thereby winning one of the 460 seats in Poland’s lower house, the Sejm.

The world’s first transsexual MP was Georgina Beyer of New Zealand’s Labour Party, from 1999 until she resigned her seat in 2007.

Today, Poland is changing. I am the proof along with Robert Biedron, a homosexual and the head of an anti-homophobia campaign who ran for office in Gdynia.

–Anna Grodzka

Grodzka says that the time has come for sexual minorities to enjoy equal rights in Poland.

Enough of this concealing of the truth.  This group of people, even if small, has its rights and they should be respected. They should not be pushed into oblivion.

On her to-do list are legal partnerships, job security, and state funding of sex change procedures.

War Party

“For a President, the unit of measurement is real life.” Der Speigel rips apart the tissue of lies served up to an increasingly incredulous public. The once pro-Obama daily called the speech his ‘least truthful address’. Boink. When we’re talking about politicians, ‘least truthful’ is saying a lot:

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free…It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

This speech did not, however conjure up images of Jimmy Carter, or George H.W. Bush, although those comparisons will be made. Lebanon, battleships, high-jacked airliners, truck-bombs and dead marines, instead flooded back: pilots and passengers imprisoned in the heat.

Just how much damage this feckless narcissist is capable of wreaking on the world has yet to be seen, but even Republicans concede he’s off to a good start. Cheney isn’t yet content and doubtless won’t be until US planes are flying missions over Tehran, and maybe Islamabad.



Blackwater mercenaries
on the US payroll approved by a Dem Congress, with Dem oversight. The Dem White House authorizes private snatch and grab teams operating in Pakistan. This and the violence that 30,000 more US troops can generate will have to suffice. Of course, with all the firepower and troops on the ground, it’s hard to imagine a sudden outbreak of peace, but that could still happen. Well, it could..

The Taliban have a clear deadline when the US is planning to turn over power. Whether or not that deadline is binding is another question. Will the ‘situation on the ground’ compel merely a delay in withdrawal, or another surge, or perhaps even the draft. God knows Americans need jobs.

Republican Ronald Reagan took US Marines off the safety of their ships while launching broadsides from refitted ‘battle wagons’ cruising off the coast. Alert locals decided the right response would be to send a truck or two filled with explosives straight into the Marine barracks. Ronald Reagan needed to look tough and a whole lot of US troops ended up dead. But at least that part ended quickly.

Not my guy, Dems say. I oppose the Afghanistan surge, Dems say. Demonstrate against the surge, Dems say. The fact remains: Dems control the Senate and House. Republicans shut down government. Will Dems show similar backbone over war? I think we all know the answer to that question. The ‘progressive caucus’, tough on Fox, will bow and scrape; posture and preen in an orgy of pure CYA.

The speech at West Point truly was an historic opportunity. The speech could have been a clarion call to arms: we go in and stay to finish the job no matter how long it takes. He could have taken the boldest step and proclaimed: Campaign rhetoric is one thing, American lives are another; as President I’m authorizing the immediate withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq. The days of the US being the region’s policeman are over. That didn’t happen Der Spiegel froze reality in time. The moment has come and passed. Even Eugene Robinson admits another US president stood before the American people and lied his face off.

No defense exists from a US President who can’t stand the thought of being seen as weak. And for that, I suspect, once again over the next three or four years we’re all about to pay a very heavy price.

Condi, Condi, Condi…………………..

You gotta get your ducks all in a row there before tooting those horns:

At a press conference she and Zebari said the negotiators were close to signing the deal but cautioned it had not yet been clinched.

Everyone says how intelligent you are, and after all you’re the Secretary of State with a whole department working for you, or are they being allowed to.

Raytheon 6 Acquitted

On August 9, 2006, during the waning days of Israel’s offensive military operations in Southern Lebanon, a group of anti-war protesters from the Derry Anti-War Coalition occupied the Raytheon Munitions Plant in Northern Ireland.

OUR MOTIVATION was to prevent war crimes. Israel’s bombardment was causing carnage and destruction in Lebanon, and we knew they were using Raytheon manufactured bombs.

We were particularly outraged by the bombing of the town of Qana. Israel dropped a bomb on one complex there, killing 28 people, the majority of them women and children, crushed and suffocated beneath the rubble.

We believed this required an immediate response. We decided to take action to disrupt, delay and hamper Raytheon’s ability, in whatever way possible, to deliver weapons of mass destruction to Israel and participate in war crimes.

The civil disobedience of the anti-war activists shut down production at the Raytheon plant for three crucial days near the end of the offensive.

The “Raytheon 9” were eventually arrested and charged with Criminal Damage.  Six of those nine protesters were finally put on trial in May of this year.

During their three-week trial in Belfast, the Defendants argued that it is not a crime to resist a war crime. On Wednesday, the jury agreed.

Obama, Brooks, and Lebanon

Today’s New York Times features a column by David Brooks wherein Brooks claims that Obama’s statements about the current violence in Lebanon, “has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement.”  The statement which Brooks feels has that whiff is:

It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.

Leaving aside the question as to whether or not that would actually appease Hezbollah in some way (I would contend that Hezbollah is plenty enthusiastic about corrupt patronage systems and unfair distribution of goods and services, merely wishing that they be in charge of the corruption and unfair distribution), let’s focus for a moment on what is actually happening in Lebanon, and what Obama is saying should be done about it by the United States.

More math for those that do not count

Another surreal day in America. Everyone is talking about the “math” in the race for the Democratic nomination for president. Our war criminal in chief endorsed McCain to carry on his proud tradition of violence for profit. The corporate media laps up the most expensive presidential campaign in history. Meanwhile, halfway across the world, the Iraqi people continue to suffer because of our actions and inactions.  

Here is a story that every news outlet in America managed to ignore. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) just published a study of the mental health problems of Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon.  More than half of the refugees interviewed reported high levels of clinically significant emotional distress. What’s a few million traumatized people forced to flee their homes, jobs, schools, extended families, and country? Their suffering does not fit our narrative about the war.

Our presidential candidates have already spent more money on this election than our country has spent over the past five years to help the victims of our foreign policy in Iraq. That’s right.  Our presidential candidates have spent more than 300 million dollars, more than four times what has been spent to help refugees in a country we destroyed. Even with the proposed 125 million dollars for FY08/09, it will still be a drop in the bucket compared to the money spent on the presidential race.  

“Hiding behind civilians”

This being a brief round-up of several recent developments in the Middle East.

Firstly, a respected Israeli NGO published a report into the state’s treatment of its Palestinian citizens during last year’s Lebanon war. Readers will recall that, back in the summer of 2006, while Israel was busy destroying southern Lebanon killing close to 1,200 Lebanese civilians in the process, one of the main arguments used by its apologists to justify the atrocities was that the civilian deaths were the fault of Hizbullah, not the IDF, because the militia deliberately hid its fighters among the civilian population.