The World

SACSIS seeks to examine global issues, particularly as they relate to South Africa.

Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17: It Was Putin's Missile!

Picture: A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 similar to flight MH17 that was shot down over Ukraine, courtesy Neuwieser/flickr. Pepe Escobar - And here's the spin war verdict: the current Malaysia Airlines tragedy - the second in four months - is "terrorism" perpetrated by "pro-Russian separatists", armed by Russia, and Vladimir Putin is the main culprit. End of story. Anyone who believes otherwise, shut up. Why? Because the CIA said so. Because Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton said so. Because batshit crazy Samantha "R2P" Power said so - thundering at the UN, everything duly...

Will the BRICS Bank Be a Game Changer for Africa?

Picture: Financial Express Alexander O'Riordan - Last week Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) announced they are joining forces to establish a BRICS alternative to the World Bank. The BRICS bank will be capitalised to the tune of $50 billion or about the same size as the World Bank’s loan to Brazil. While the size of the initial capital allocation does not stack up in comparison to the World Bank’s, this could still prove to be a significant opportunity to change the global system more in favour of the...

Gaza & the Long History of Liberal Brutality

Picture: Boys in Gaza fenced in behind a barricade courtesy Dale Spencer/flickr Richard Pithouse - As the Israeli state rains its murder on the people of Gaza we are confronted with a stark demonstration of the ways in which there is, in so many quarters, official sanction for according radically different values to human lives. Some of us are taken as sacrosanct, others as disposable. It has often been suggested that in the case of Israel and Palestine the inequality in the value ascribed to human life can be rendered as a mathematical ratio. In this calculus there is no such thing as a...

Israel Is Captive to Its 'Destructive Process'

Picture: A young girl injured during Israel Chris Hedges - Raul Hilberg in his monumental work “The Destruction of the European Jews” chronicled a process of repression that at first was “relatively mild” but led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination and ended with mass murder. “The destructive process was a development that was begun with caution and ended without restraint,” Hilberg wrote. The Palestinians over the past few decades have endured a similar “destructive...

A View from Gaza: We Hug the Children as the Bombs Fall

Picture: Palestinian Children courtesy Tijen Erol/flickr Mona El-Farra - GAZA – Written Between 3 am and 4 am early Wednesday morning, July 9, 2014. The Israeli warships continue shelling...It is dark. I do not know what is going on and I can hear successive bombing. I am thinking of all the people I know tonight, especially my colleagues at the hospitals who are working under severe pressure and lacking basic medical supplies. Stay strong. I heard they bombed the area around the European hospital east of Khan Younis in Southern Gaza...Then the...

Israel/Palestine: Children's Lives in the Balance - Is One Worth More Than Another?

Picture: Protest sign at Israeli consulate in Boston courtesy "The guy by the door...", a blog hosted by Harvard University. Medea Benjamin & Pam Bailey - With the news that the bodies of three missing Israeli teens had been found in a field not far from the stretch of road where they disappeared June 12, people everywhere reacted rightly with sorrow and anger. Eyal Yifrah, 19, Gilad Shaar, 16, and Naftali Fraenkel, also 16, were students who lived with their families in a Jewish-only settlement near the Palestinian city of Hebron in the West Bank. The settlement and others like it have been declared illegal by the International Court of...