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Watch what happens when you mix broken foreign policy with religion…
“One of Pakistan’s most influential clerics has renounced his support for polio immunisation, claiming that the programme is a cover for American spies.”
Pakistan needs less of this particular brand of religious stupidity. The stupid is compounded by the bullshite American cloak and dagger games being played in Pakistan.
“But now he says he cannot back the policy after it emerged that the CIA had used a fake hepatitis drive to hunt for Osama bin Laden last year.
Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who organised the vaccination campaign, has been sentenced to 33 years in prison and his actions caused a wave of paranoia about foreign aid workers.”
Thank you America your botched war is screwing up yet another county in your drive to be the imperial power of this century as well. Newsflash – China isn’t going to let you; get over yourself and stop killing brown people for not agreeing to be vassals.
“Pakistan is one of three countries where the disease remains endemic. Only 22 cases have been reported this year – compared with 59 in the same period in 2011 – and hopes were high that it could soon be declared polio free.
However, hard-line clerics have long opposed what they suspect is a Western conspiracy against Muslims. As a result health workers carefully cultivated moderate leaders, who issued fatwas – or religious rulings – declaring vaccination to be in line with Islamic teaching.”
There is just so much wrong going on here. Vaccinations to eradicate polio are a fundamentally good idea. This fundamentally good idea is trumped though when Western spy agencies use them to further their foreign policy goals. Then you get backlash like this:
But Haq said that it made no sense for foreign agencies to keep children free from disease while bombing Pakistan.
“If you people are that much curious about the health of people living over there, it means that you are keeping these people alive just to kill them by drones,” he said.
The sad fatalism of marginalized people. Wrong, but understandable given the circumstances. Never forget that we are categorically *not* the good guys for much of the world. If we’d taken the time and effort simply not to perpetuate misery and destruction on poor coloured folk we might actually have some respect in the world.
I know of a few parents who having a decidedly unmerry christmas this year, and every year after because their children were murdered by U.S drone aircraft.
After Jon Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, claimed in June that no civilians had been killed in US drone attacks in nearly a year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 US attacks during that period.
Overall, drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 780 civilians, including 175 children. The bureau documents 309 CIA drone strikes carried out since 2004 that have killed as many as 2,997 people. Over 85 percent were launched by the Obama administration, an average of one strike every four days. Yet the casualties of the US drone war rarely receive mention in the corporate media, except when described as “Islamic militants” or “suspected terrorists.” This is challenged not only by the bureau’s data, but also by gruesome photographs of drone victims taken by local journalists.
The Guardian described the images captured by Noor Behram, a journalist from the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, whose work appeared in an exhibition at London’s Beaconsfield gallery in August:
The photographs make for difficult viewing and leave no doubt about the destructive power of the Hellfire missiles unleashed: a boy with the top of his head missing, a severed hand, flattened houses, the parents of children killed in a strike. The chassis is all that remains of a car in one photo, another shows the funeral of a seven-year-old child. There are pictures, too, of the cheap rubber flip-flops worn by children and adults, which often survive: signs that life once existed there. A 10-year-old boy’s body, prepared for burial, shows lipstick on him and flowers in his hair – a mother’s last loving touch.
Here is my wish for the holiday season – I wish the American people will find a way to look outside the prison of their mainstream media and see what is being committed in their name, become righteously angry and put a stop to killing of innocent people.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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