Baghdad Residents Protest at Wall
Hundreds of Iraqis have staged a protest against the building of a dividing wall between a Shia district of Baghdad and a Sunni area.
Residents of the Shula and Ghazaliya districts waved Iraqi fla
gs and chanted slogans rejecting both the proposed separation and the US occupation.
They demanded the government intervene to ensure the barrier is demolished.
The US military said the wall would reduce sectarian violence and stop the movement of weapons and militants.
Many Iraqis reacted angrily in April when US troops began building a barrier around the Baghdad Sunni enclave of Adhamiya to prevent it being attacked by Shia militants.
‘Planting sectarianism’
Tuesday’s demonstration saw many residents of Shula and Ghazaliya march between the two areas before gathering in front of the first completed section of the 2km (1.25 mile) wall.
Carrying banners reading “No to the dividing wall” and “The wall is US terrorism”, the protesters issued a statement demanding that Iraqi authorities intervene.
“The wall is in accordance with al-Qaeda’s plans,” the statement said, adding that it would “separate family from family”.
Hassan al-Tai, a leader of the Sunni Tai tribe, demanded the Iraqi government act against those “planting division and sectarianism amongst Iraqis”.
“The wall is dividing small neighbourhoods and will lead to the partitioning of Iraq,” he told the AFP news agency.
A Shia cleric at the protest, Abdul Baqir al-Subaihawi, insisted the wall would provide neither security nor stability.
“The government must maintain security in Baghdad rather than separate its neighbourhoods,” he added.
© 2007 BBC
“Mr. Bush, tear down this wall!” My Gods, what has happened to us?
Uhh, which side is the “Free Speech Zone?”
Just curious.
This is how the original colonial plan for governing Iraq has played out: Deliberate divisions, sectarian violence, a sophisticated nation reduced to irrational primitive ‘tribes’ for the scholarly American and Israeli ‘Arabists’ to explain in somber, simple words to the mass media and in the Halls of Congress. Oh how difficult is the White Man’s Burden!
You can just imagine these ‘veterans’ of former colonial conflicts saying over drinks in a club in the Green Zone decorated with art treasures looted from the museums and historical sites destroyed during Shock and Awe: “These darkies with their ancient blood feuds still think they have a country, ha, ha, ha….Lets just have our black ops boys place a few bombs in their places of worship and markets and place our bets on which of the ‘tribes’ takes the most heads. Or our Special Forces can mutilate a few tortured bodies for display - like we did in Viet Nam - a little psy-war against the Arabs. After the carnage, we can help ‘em ‘put those little trainer wheels’ on their little democracy bicycle - (to cite an insulting analogy often use on National Public Radio).” Pardon my imagined conversation.
This is social engineering at its finest. Colonial, racist and very Israeli.
Paul Bremer was the first enforcer of this policy - by dismantling all Iraqi governmental and civil institutions…even by banning the nationalist (not Baathist) celebration of July 14 - marking the Iraqi overthrow of the British-imposed puppet Monarch. Can anything be clearer than the aim and deliberation of the policy. The US Administration under Bush is not incompetent, there are no mistakes…these are the results of conscious, racist, genocidal policies. Try putting yourselves in the place of Baghdadis reduce to systematic, unremitting degradation by policies designed in Washington and Tel Aviv and enforced by semi-literate American soldiers barely out of their teens.
Enough of the walls in the Middle East from Bethlehem to Baghdad!
“The wall is in accordance with al-Qaeda’s plans,” the statement said, adding that it would “separate family from family”.
hmmm! Makes you wonder ; could Bush actually be working with Bin Laden? Then everything (Abu Ghraib, Guanatanamo, cessation of Constitutional rights, Spying, etc.) begins to make sense….?
Boycott all media, cancel subscriptions, send emails to them and their advertisers. Buy nothing or reduce spending on products or services from any international corporation; share with neighbors, family and friends those goods and services you do buy. Move all your money over to local credit unions. Insist that all level of government move our money into local credit unions. Liquidate your investments and redirect into local investment. Buy locally everything you can, soap; drinks, pop and otherwise; foods, apples to zucchinis organic and at local farmers’ markets, coops; eat at local restaurants. Only buy gift certificates from local providers for gifts this giving season. Start now so they can adjust production. From CSAs to local jewelry makers, dress makers, film makers, theater. Give the certificates for birthdays, as spontaneous gifts, for the holidays. Now. Go. Even 10% redirection of resources in this pattern will overwhelm the local providers and cause a huge build out in production while sending tremors throughout the mega corporations. Also we get to be in contact with more of our fellow citizens. More contact less alienation, less susceptible to divide and conquer. More interactions of substance and encouragement; more personal knowledge; more solidarity, self reliance. And the better the core of our democracy so then the increase of the responsiveness of our government to our call for peace, now; go!
The market will fix it…the merket will fex it…the markat wall fax et… de meerkat wull fux ot…
skeezyks– The free speech zone is on the “other” side
Ezeflyer chants:
The market will fix it…the merket will fex it…the markat wall fax et… de meerkat wull fux ot…
The market is a tool. It is our tool. It is an extension of our activity. It has been coopted by those with the power to do so for so long that it is also linked with our spiritual understandings and our concepts of governance. The market provides feedback and feedforward loops that are both generative and degenerative. The market is only one front yet it is one that we have a most immediate impact on.
So this chant can as easily be: The market: fix it; the merket: fex it; the markat: fax et; de meerkat: fux ot.
Only one front. Onward toward a Party of Democratic Capitalism; the Purple Party.
tlcs_3
Seeing as how the Bush family is so close with the Bin Laden family it doesn’t seem that far fetched.
Everything I have seen lately
I think Bin Laden is on the ranch at Crawford, TX.
Isnt this how it started in Warsaw in the 1903’s?
maybe we could make them wear red cresents on their clothes, or give them tattos?
I think this was what David Petraeus was referring to in his testimony when he referred to “gated communities.”
*** Walls ***
These walls
Being built,
Are merely
The outer
Manifestation,
Of the tragic
Walls,
Already in existence,
Inside
People’s heads
-And hearts.
When we demolish
The walls
Inside our heads
which
Sep
-erate,
Us - from - each - other,
Then we won’t build towering
Concrete
Walls, anymore.
First the healing:
(Inside)
Then comes the healing:
(Outside).
_____________________________
[U.C.D. Sept 2007]
skeezyks the free speech zone is UNDER the wall.
The Reptilicans’ thinking: “See, they’re protesting the wall, so the US has brought freedom to Iraq!”
I.e., for the denizens of Bushwellia, the wall itself is the free speech zone, and all the Iraqis who’ve been killed are a small price to pay for it.
Dichterfreund: I’m statring to love you along with CanuckChuck! Thank you….Bush is on the radio andI started screaming. Scared the hell out of my dogs. I think I’ OK now…..
tlcs_3, I thought that right from the beginning.
metroeloise - great ideas … We the people are the ones who hold the purses and wallets … and the long green in them. Ithaca, NY, has used it’s own currency for years … the Ithaca Dollar … and the local community is strong, tight knit, and green in energy in housing and other buildings. Let’s just do it with our regular U.S. dollars; we CAN do it, including not subscribing to those national rag news magazines and newspapers, the ones that lie both blatantly and by omission.
And Dichterfreund: - Reptilicans and Bushwailia [I modified that last.] Thanks. Added to my lexicon.
Robinea - you sure got it right about colonialism and racism and the whole nine yards. But even after a few hundred years, the same problem still exists here in the good old U.S. of A.
Un-common-dreams:
“These walls/Being built,/Are merely/The outer/Manifesttion/Of the tragic/Walls/Already
in existence/Inside/People’s heads/-and hearts. …”
Robert Frost in “Mending Wall”:
“… Before I built a wall, I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down! …”
All of this destruction and degradation of the Iraqi people, their homes, their land, their treasures … until they agree to a contract that gives 80 per cent control of their oil fields to EXXON et al. The Iraqi people are Nothing, a zero to these UnAmericans who now rule us with their savagery and unbridled greed. And to these UnAmerican leaders We the People are also Nothing, Zero, Zero, Zero … And that is demonstrated by the day in New Orleans and from sea to shining sea.
There has never been a time in our history like this. Somewhere up the line, looking back, we truly will know what we are made of as We the People and whether we demolished the walls that separated us from an out-of-control government that was/is really ours and that did/ does not belong to a group of self-serving military/industrial corporate fascists. De ja vu … all over again. And unlike the 1930’s and ’40’s, the only Americans who can save us this time are We the People.
I wonder how we’re going to do it and whether we will.
Cee: a good choice, that Robert Frost poem.
from whence, (a propos the US ‘hunters’ of their fellow beings) :
“The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair,
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.”
[for ‘dogs’ read: ‘the dark capitalist overlords’. For ‘rabbit’ read: any of the multiple victim nations of crazed US military aggression, etc]
(and) :
” What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.”
* offence / a fence * :::
-Walls built by ugly minds are often built offensively as much defensively, (vide: Israel, or Berlin). Such walls depict loudly and clearly the trembling, fearful, soulless, barren hearts of such wall builders.
Such walls are symptomatic of those who are in siege mentality, -they build walls like a child who’ll hide under a cotton sheet in the hope that The Bogyman won’t get them.
They build walls where, (if they weren’t so risibly, ridiculously, blindly devoid of all things wholesome, holy and good) -they would instead be demolishing such crass partitions.
Such walls are pretence at safety, offering no real security at all, -they simply symbolise the shambolic mess of the builder’s interior psyche, - a dire, often deadly fear-filled potage of imagined Bogeymen and deformed philosophies.
Those whose minds have broadened into a wider consciousness have no need of either offensive fences, nor defensive boundaries to shut out *The Light*.
An animal will cast scent upon the trail to tell it’s fellows who lives where, whilst the birds sing out their similar news.
But we, -ostensibly a higher race of beings, are still grubbing about with new and ugly walls, because we haven’t yet realised that Planet Earth is occupied by just ONE family of human beings, and that a *healthy* family has no need of a flurry of towering, permanent, impenetrable walls, totally isolating one from the other.
REAL intelligence works to bring down walls, not build new ones, which do not (actually) solve any problems. Such walls only (actually) exacerbate dysfunctional human relationships.
Such walls depict our leader’s tragic failures of diplomacy, and their intransigent unwillingness to do the right thing, at the right time.
Such walls are not built of the bricks of goodwill; they are built of hateful blocks and rocks.
~ Hard hands but still harder, calloused hearts build such walls as these.
We need to be the latter-day Joshuas!
We can be the ones circumnavigating our leader’s foolish walls, sounding *our* new notes, which in time will demolish the idiotic inflexible walls that separate brother from brother, and child from parent, and tribe from tribe…
What a very YOUNG race we are. ~ What a lot we have yet to learn.
xx
ezeflyer says:
The market will fix it…the merket will fex it…the markat wall fax et… de meerkat wull fux ot…
The meercat will fuck it? I reckon the meercat will do a better job of things than GW has done.