Flashback: U.S. apologized to Iran in 2000 for past actions

The Clinton Administration tried this tactic. President Clinton confessed in “unprompted” remarks that “Iran … has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you 50 or 60 or 150 years ago.”

Then in 2000, at a state dinner in Washington, Secretary of State Madeline Albright directly apologized for specific past American actions toward Iran, from our role in orchestrating the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, to our backing of the Shah, to our backing of Iraq in its war with Iran. Albright also highlighted President Clinton’s personal belief that America “must bear its full share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations.”

The bit about Albright comes from this old page-one LA Times story.

Israel apologetic at Davos 09 over Gaza

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Prime Minister of Turkey, left, speaks just before he leaves the stage in front of Shimon Peres, President of Israel, right, during a plenary session on Middle East peace at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill," Erdogan told Peres, wagging his finger. "I know very well how you hit and killed children on beaches."

Israeli President Shimon Peres launched a lengthy and fiery defense of his country's assault on Gaza over the past month. Mr. Peres gave all the examples from Turkey and raised his voice pointing his finger Turkish prime Minister Erdogan. Mr. Peres tried to accuse and question Turkey and Turkish PM by asking what Erdogan would do if rockets were fired at Istanbul every night. The debate with Erdogan and Peres was also attended by UN secretary Ban Ki-moon, who issued an emergency appeal for the raising of 613 million U.S. dollars to help the Palestinian population after the attack on Gaza. The fundraising is intended to resolve the emergency situation of water, food, and medical supplies for the next 6-9 months.

More than 5,000 people greeted Turkish prime minister Erdogan upon his return to Turkey this morning, waving Turkish and Palestinian flags. Erdogan was returning from Davos, from the World Economic Forum, where he walked away from a televised debate with Israeli president Shimon Peres, about the war in Gaza. The Turkish prime minister left the program after the moderator of the debate gave him only one minute to reply to a long and impassioned statement by Peres in defense of the Israeli offensive.

Erdogan said: "I find it very sad that people applaud what you said. There have been many people killed. And I think that it is very wrong and it is not humanitarian." He then left the set, vowing that he would not return to Davos.

In Istanbul, the crowds acclaimed Erdogan with banners thanking him and hailing him as a new "world leader." The prime minister tried to downplay his stance, directing his protest at the moderator who did not give him enough time. But his words against the Israeli policy in Gaza remain.

"My reaction was directed at the moderator. I think that if we have moderation in this way, we won't really get out of Davos what we all come here to get out of Davos, and it would cast a shadow over efforts to reach peace," he told reporters at the meeting.

"President Peres was speaking to the Prime Minister of Turkey – I am not just some leader of some group or tribe, so he should have addressed me accordingly.

Each of the four speakers in the debate on the Middle East was to have delivered a five-minute speech. Mr Ban, the UN Secretary-General, spoke for eight minutes and Mr Erdogan for 12.

Mr Ignatius intervened to silence the head of the Arab League after 12 minutes, but Mr Peres then spoke uninterrupted for 25 minutes, raising his voice, pointing fingers and challenging the other panellists over what they would do in Israel's position.

Shoe Statue : Iraqi Honoring al-Zeidi

A statue dedicated to the man who threw his shoes at President Bush has been erected in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown. Many Iraqis considered it poetic justice when a journalist tossed his shoes at President George W. Bush last month.

Now the bizarre attack has spawned a real life work of art. A sofa-sized statue of the shoe was unveiled Thursday in Tikrit, the hometown of the former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari described the fiberglass-and-copper work as a tribute to the pride of the Iraqi people.

The statue is inscribed with a poem honoring Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who stunned the world when he whipped off his loafers and hurled them at Bush during a press conference on Dec. 14.

In the Arab world, even showing someone the sole of a shoe is considered a sign of disrespect.

Bush’s Secret Counterterrorism Law Book—and the Demands to Release It

Last week, President Barack Obama formally repudiated certain counterterrorism tactics, including coercive interrogation, that his predecessor's administration had gone out defending.

Said Dick Cheney in one parting television interview touching on aggressive interrogation: "I can't claim perfection," but "I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization we needed to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department."

Then-President Bush put it more simply. He told CNN's Larry King, "I got legal opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal."

They were talking about legal analyses generated by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a small but powerful corps of lawyers who give "authoritative legal advice" to the executive branch. OLC opinions, or "memos," effectively tell executive agencies, including the military, what they may or may not do as a matter of law. Questionable conduct backed by a favorable OLC memo will almost always pass muster. In other words, OLC memos serve as law in the executive branch.

But Bush and Cheney neglected to mention that many OLC memos assessing their strategies for interrogation, detention, surveillance and prosecution remain secret. With an ardent advocate of government openness -- and critic of Bush policies -- slated to take over the OLC, however, people may soon know more.

Some of the memos are by now well-known, for example the August 2002 memo that narrowed the definition of torture. But many counterterrorism-related OLC memos, including all those addressing the administration's domestic warrantless wiretapping program, still haven't been released.

ProPublica has compiled the first interactive list of these crucial records -- missing and known.

These memos laid the legal foundation to many of Bush's most criticized counterterrorism efforts -- the claims of unilateral executive authority to surveil, detain, and try terrorism suspects, unfettered by Congress or international law. Their disclosure could reveal what move was considered when, why and at whose behest.

Read the full text here.

Get to know The Men Behind the Memos.

Obama Charts A New Direction With Muslim World: ‘We Are Offering A Hand Of Friendship’

Yesterday, President Obama sat down with Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television for his first formal interview in office. The interview was notable not only for the substance of Obama’s remarks, but also for the symbolism of directly reaching out to Muslims so early in his presidency. Obama said that his job “to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.”

Host Hisham Melhem noted that President Bush had framed the struggle against extremism as a “war on terror,” using terminology like “Islamic fascism” to describe America’s adversary. “You’ve always framed it in a different way,” Melhem said. Obama then talked about the advantages of shifting away from Bush’s language:

OBAMA: I think that you’re making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations — whether Muslim or any other faith in the past — that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith’s name.

“But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship,”

Watch Obama's First Formal Interview on Al-Arabiya TV.



Even babies know to choose between Obama and Bush.

Letter from David Soul to the BBC

Regarding the BBC's unwillingness to support the appeal for relief to the people of Gaza:

It is unconscionable that the BBC refuses to make a distinction between "unbiased reporting" (which apparently means, bending to lobbying pressure) and supporting the humanitarian action that is so urgently needed in GAZA ... whoever may be responsible for causing the destruction.

Over 3,000 innocents in GAZA caught in the cross- fire are dead or wounded ... families have been decimated ... whole communities have been leveled ... infrastructure has been destroyed ... and you refuse to join humanitarian efforts to bring aid to them.

What is the matter with you people? Are you blind or just spineless?

Innocent people urgently need supplies of food, water, medicines, shelter ... yes, and limbs too ... as a result of the annihilation of GAZA. Meanwhile, the BBC puts its corporate tail between its legs and hides behind the thinly-veiled excuse of "impartiality".

What's the difference between supporting an appeal for aid to the victims of a Tsunami and supporting a relief effort to the innocent victims of war ... any war?

As an independent broadcaster, the public mandate of the BBC should be to place it squarely on the side of HUMANITY. That being so, the BBC should be at the forefront of reporting the whole story even as it supports the greater cause of HUMANITY.

Shame on you! You have lost my respect and until the BBC can show me true "impartiality", the BBC can have my TV license back.

Written by David Soul
Monday, 26 January 2009

Reported here.

Read also UN nuclear chief boycotts BBC over Gaza appeal and TV appeal for Gaza raises £1m despite BBC and Sky refusal.

Talk More of Defending Palestinians and Less of Securing Israel.

Similar to the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces slowly learned they had had nowhere to go except to kill more civilians. The Israeli forces neither exhibited many destroyed rocket launchers nor demonstrated harm to the supposed 10,000 Hamas armed insurgents. Except for the longer range Grad rockets, many of the rockets and mortars that shelled Israel were homemade devices. Therefore only the Grad rockets and some Qassam rockets, few of which did much damage, were smuggled into Gaza. Hamas demonstrated no military capability; that is no capability and not just limited capability– no surface to air missiles, no anti-tank rockets, no organized attacks on invading soldiers. Media descriptions of coming battles never materialized. Fighting, which requires two combatants, was an exaggerated word. Israeli forces moved forward without much fear of attack and with only ten reported deaths, of which five were accidental. Since Hamas didn’t display many weapons with which to fight, how much smuggling of meaningful armaments could have occurred? Neither facts nor images supported reports of weapons caches and weapons destruction. Israel’s soldiers must have felt contrite and questioned what they were doing.

Did rocket fire, which had been happening continuously since 2002, cause the conflagration? The initial break in the lapsed truce, which caused no casualties, followed Israel’s neglect of Hamas’ pleas. Combine Israel’s ongoing refusal to give the slightest recognition to a democratically elected Hamas government with the world’s refusal to counter Israel’s intransigence and we have, not the reason, but the cause of the latest conflict.

The forces that control actions of the world community seemed to have been guided by only what served Israel’s interests rather than what was beneficial for the world, what would stabilize the Middle East and what would be helpful to the Palestinians. Although casualties are always disputed, most reports indicate that the inability to deter Israel’s attack resulted in the deaths of more than 1300 Palestinians, wounding of more than 5400, damage to more then 22,000 buildings, including United Nation structures, mosques, universities, a medical school and almost every police station. Predictions have Gaza’s flimsy gross domestic product being reduced by 85 percent or almost to nothing.

Hamas survived and Gaza was partially destroyed. A credible conclusion is that if Israel could not succeed in the former tactic, it was eager to accomplish the latter result.

A legitimately elected government Hamas requested halts to a punishing blockade and to attacks on its citizens in the West Bank and Gaza. Silence. More pleading and more silence. Finally, militants fire an uncontrollable salvo of rockets, positioned so no fatalities could occur, alerting Israel and a complacent world that Hamas could no longer permit its people to be starved into surrender.

Hamas’ demands deserved discussion. Instead, Israel responded with missile strikes, which instantly killed 250 Palestinians, assured retaliating rockets would finally kill Israelis and signaled an eventual violence against Gazans and a politically motivated invasion of the territory.

The attack on Gaza cannot remain an isolated incident that slowly fades into history. This attack has been etched into the psyche of an embittered Arab world. Sympathy for the Palestinians has been extended worldwide. These phenomena have dictated a new look at the Middle East contestants and a new approach to resolving the conflict. It’s possible we will witness more talk of defending the Palestinians and less of securing Israelis, more efforts by Arab nations of uniting the Arab world and its factions and less efforts by the western world to dictate a path to unification, more attempts to resolve Middle East problems and less considerations to Israel’s agendas.

Text taken from Israel Faces the Gaza Aftermath : From Self-deception to Self-destruction by Dan Lieberman.

Read also 'Ugly reality' of Israel's atrocities.

"Dahiya Doctrine" Devastation

..... Israel is a Violent country

Dahiya Doctrine. named after the Beirut suburb IDF destroyed in the 2006 Lebanon war, it's how future ones will be fought. IDF Northern Command chief Gabi Eisenkot explained:

"What happened in the Dayiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force at the heart of the enemy's weak spot (civilians) and cause great damage and destruction. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages (towns or cities), they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved."

According to Col. Gabriel Siboni (in October 2008), the idea is to use enough "disproportionate force (to inflict) damage and met(e) out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes....With the outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and threat it poses....The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets....be aimed at decision makers and the power elite....in Lebanon....at Hezbollah....(at) economic interests and the centers of civilian power."

Disproportionality will "make it abundantly clear that the State of Israel will accept no attempt to disrupt (a state of) calm. Israel must be prepared for deterioration and escalation, as well as for a full scale confrontation....This approach" applies to Gaza as well....(It) will increase Israel's long term deterrence (and) leave the enemy floundering in expensive, long term processes of reconstruction."

For General Yoav Galant, it was to "send Gaza decades into the past." Disturbing reports indicate that Lebanon may be next to complete the unfinished business of the 2006 war.

On October 6, 2008, prominent award-winning Israeli media figure Yaron London wrote about "The Dahiya strategy" for the Israeli English language Ynetnews.com. His tone was belligerent and provocative in saying:

"Israel finally realizes that Arabs should be accountable for their leaders' acts." In the next Lebanon war, "we won't bother to hunt for rocket launchers....Rather, we shall destroy (all of) Lebanon and won't be deterred by the protests of the world."

We'll "pulverize the 160 Shiite villages that have turned into Shiite army bases, and we shall not show mercy when it comes to hitting the national infrastructure of a" Hezbollah-controlled state. "This strategy is not a threat. (It's) an approved plan (because) the whole of Lebanon is an Iranian outpost. (It's) entirely malicious. (It's) an enemy....Everyone is Nasrallah....nations are responsible for their leaders' acts....(Gazans) are all Khaled Mashal....Lebanese are all Nasrallah....Iranians are all Ahmadinejad....We need to make the fear we sow among them greater."

Most Israelis share these views. So do Kadima, Likud, Labor, and IDF officials. Past leaders as well, including David Ben-Gurion in saying:

"It's not important what the world says about Israel....if we don't show the Arabs that they have to pay a high price for killing Jews, we won't continue living.... (we must) adopt....an aggressive defense; with every Arab attack we must respond with a decisive blow: the destruction of the place or the expulsion of the residents along with the seizure of the place....

The wisdom of Israel is the wisdom of war, nothing else....We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services....we (must go on) the offensive....smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria."

Ben-Gurion and later Israeli leaders invoked scripture and self-defense to justify disproportionate force, war crimes, genocide, and occupation. "Dahiya" has a long history. Its current form is the latest version.

Read further Israel Killed Everything but the Will to Resist by Stephen Lendman.

A word of advice from doctor leaving Gaza

Dr. Saeed Abuhassan was bidding farewell to the doctors he'd worked with in Gaza. He was returning to his work in the United Arab Emirates. But before leaving, he paused to give us a word of advice.

"You know, the most important thing you can tell people in your country is that U.S. people paid for many of the weapons used to kill people in Gaza"

"They are lying to us about democracy and Western values."

"If we were sheep and goats, they would be more willing to help us."

Read further Gaza: Worse Than an Earthquake by Kathy Kelly.

Video: Inside Gaza's Al Shifa Hospital

The Agenda for an International Legal response against Israel atrocities

First, we must immediately move for the de facto suspension of Israel throughout the entirety of the United Nations System, including the General Assembly and all U.N. subsidiary organs and bodies. We must do to Israel what the U.N. General Assembly has done to the genocidal rump Yugoslavia and to the criminal apartheid regime in South Africa! Here the legal basis for the de facto suspension of Israel at the U.N. is quite simple:

As a condition for its admission to the United Nations Organization, Israel formally agreed to accept General Assembly Resolution 181 (II) (1947) (partition/Jerusalem trusteeship) and General Assembly Resolution 194 (III) (1948) (Palestinian right of return), inter alia. Nevertheless, the government of Israel has expressly repudiated both Resolution 181 (II) and Resolution 194 (III). Therefore, Israel has violated its conditions for admission to U.N. membership and thus must be suspended on a de facto basis from any participation throughout the entire United Nations System.

Second, any further negotiations with Israel must be conducted on the basis of Resolution 181 (II) and its borders; Resolution 194 (III); subsequent General Assembly resolutions and Security Council resolutions; the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions of 1949; the 1907 Hague Regulations; and other relevant principles of public international law.

Third, we must abandon the fiction and the fraud that the United States government is an "honest broker." The United States government has never been an honest broker from well before the very outset of these negotiations in 1991. Rather, the United States has invariably sided with Israel against the Palestinians. We need to establish some type of international framework to sponsor these negotiations where the Palestinian negotiators will not be subjected to the continual bullying, threats, harassment, intimidation and outright lies perpetrated by the United States government.

Fourth, we must move to have the U.N. General Assembly impose economic, diplomatic, and travel sanctions upon Israel pursuant to the terms of the Uniting for Peace Resolution (1950), whose Emergency Special Session on Palestine is now in recess.

Fifth, the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine must sue Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague for inflicting acts of genocide against the Palestinian People in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention!

Sixth, An International Criminal Tribunal for Israel (ICTI) can be established by the UN General Assembly as a "subsidiary organ" under article 22 of the UN Charter. Article 22 of the UN Charter states the UN General Assembly may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions. The purpose of the ICTI would be to investigate and Prosecute suspected Israeli war criminals for offences against the Palestinian people.

Text taken from International Law and Israel's War on Gaza by Francis A. Boyle.

U.S. Must Back Down on Iranian Uranium Enrichment

There’s really only one solution. Only one way for Obama to get himself out of the box his predecessor Bush, Dick Cheney and the neocons have put him in. He has to affirm Iran’s inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium.

Somewhere along the road American public opinion, which history shows can be easily persuaded of things that just aren’t true, has bought several highly questionable propositions:

1. Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
2. Iran’s nuclear program can have only one purpose, the production of nuclear weapons.
3. The Iranian leadership wishes to, and has threatened to, wipe Israel off the face of the map.
4. Given all of the above, Iran’s progress towards nuclear enrichment must be stopped in order to prevent a second, “nuclear” Holocaust.

These propositions — Big Lies that that become better established with each retelling — are in fact easily refutable.

1. The U.S. intelligence community itself doesn’t believe that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program. In November 2007 all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies produced a National Intelligence Estimate that declared “with high confidence” that Iran had suspended any such program as of 2003. Dick Cheney’s office tried to suppress that report and with George Bush told the chagrined Israeli government he would ignore it. (Recall that Cheney and the neocons surrounding him insisted with equal vigor in opposition to IAEA evidence to the contrary that Iraq had an active nuclear program in 2001 that could produce a “mushroom cloud over New York City”?)

We’re not talking about some liberal blogs challenging the Bush-Cheney claims here. We’re talking about the Central Intelligence Agency, Army Military Intelligence, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, etc. Highly trained, professional, critically-thinking researchers whose best judgment is: Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program.

Repeat (because this is so important): U.S. intelligence doesn’t believe Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

2. Cheney on many occasions insisted that Iran, with its vast petroleum wealth, could only have one reason to seek nuclear power. But successive U.S. administrations from the 1960s urged Iran, when it was ruled by the Shah (whom the CIA had placed in power), to develop a nuclear energy program. U.S. corporations such as General Electric were deeply invested in that program.

3. Iran has rarely attacked another country in the last thousand years, and never in modern times. On the contrary it has been the victim of aggression, most notably in the Iran-Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein, attacked in 1980. The U.S. supported Iraq; Donald Rumsfeld visited Saddam twice, offered aid including satellite intelligence crucial to the Iraqi war effort. The idea that Iran aspires to initiate war with a country a thousand miles away because of ingrained anti-Semitism among the leadership is very questionable. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel, with representation in the Parliament (Majlis). Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not called for Israel to be “wiped of the map” but once quoted Ayatollah Khomeini (who died in 1989) as stating that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time.” As Professor Juan Cole explains, “Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope — that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.” The claim that Iran has “repeatedly stated its intention to destroy the state of Israel” is pure alarmist propaganda peddled by those calling openly for the bombing of Iran!

4. Iran’s advancement towards nuclear enrichment is a progress towards something realized not only by countries with nuclear weapons (including, one must emphasize, Israel, which unlike Iran never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty) but by Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. Again: nuclear enrichment is not a crime but an inalienable right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty whereby nations agree not to produce nuclear weapons in exchange for assistance in developing peaceful nuclear programs under carefully monitored conditions. The rules allow them control over the entire “nuclear fuel cycle” under IAEA inspections.

The idea that Iran is a special exception to the rules is an obvious conceit of the Bush-Cheney era propaganda. The idea that if normal rules apply, and Iran proceeds as usual and gets its nuclear reactors online, nukes will forthwith rain down on Israel (with its 200 warheads) and produce a second Holocaust (frying Israeli Jews and Palestinian alike) is wild, paranoid fantasy.

So let Obama say, unequivocally: We recognize and respect Iran’s right to have a peaceful nuclear program monitored by the IAEA, to enrich uranium, to master the nuclear cycle—just like any other normal nation.

Should he not do so, the burden is on him to explain why, as the candidate of “change” and “hope,” who on Inauguration Day told the Muslim world he would seek “a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect” he continues the Bush-Cheney policy of vilification, insinuation, and Zionist pandering in connection with this issue.

Article by Gary Leupp, a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion at Tufts University, and author of numerous works on Japanese history.

A decisive loss for Israel

Thousands of Palestinians attend a rally organized by Hamas in Gaza City days after Israel declared a unilateral ceasefire, 20 January 2009.

Israel's objectives from the war on Gaza were set long before its launch:

1. to remove the Hamas movement and government, achieve the reinstallation of the Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, in Gaza, and end the armed resistance.
2. restore the Israeli public's wavering confidence in its armed forces after its defeat by Hizballah in 2006.
3. boost the coalition government in the coming Israel elections.

What did it achieve?

The killing of large numbers of civilians, children and women, and the destruction of homes, ministry buildings and other infrastructure with the most advanced United States weapons and other internationally banned chemical and phosphorous elements. Almost 2,000 children were killed and injured in desperate pursuit of political goals. Many international organizations called these attacks war crimes, yet barely a word of denunciation was uttered by any western leader. What message does the European Union mean to send Palestinians by its shameful silence on these crimes, when it speaks incessantly on human rights?

If anything, the last three weeks, and previous 18 months, have proved that the Palestinians can never be broken by either starvation, economic strangulation or brutal attack. European leaders have only one option: to recognize the outcome of a democratic process they had called for and supported.

The aggression failed to undermine or weaken the Hamas-led government, or turn Palestinians against Hamas. If anything, public support is stronger than ever in Palestine and worldwide. Hamas's military capabilities have not been hurt, either. This explains Israel scurrying to sign such a strange agreement with the US to stop arms reaching Hamas. It is doomed to fail. As the former Israeli chief of staff Moshe Yaalon and Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, Israeli forces failed to achieve their objectives.

Why is Israel allowed a continuous flow of the most lethal arms, including banned weapons, while national resistance movements are denied the means of defense? International laws permit occupied nations to resist their occupiers, and that is a right we aim to utilize to the full.

Israel must accept the reality that it is incapable of breaking the Palestinian resistance. Similarly, Europe must accept that bringing back Abbas on an Israeli tank is not an option. Nor are attempts to win by "diplomacy" what the might of the Israeli military failed to secure by force. To state that all aid for Gaza reconstruction must go through the illegal government of appointed Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad suggests there is no end to some parties' exploitation of Palestinians. We will never cease to pursue national unity, but we will never allow it to be attained by compromising Palestinian rights.

And to President Obama we say:

"the wave of hope that met your election was heavily dampened by your silence on the Gaza massacre. This was compounded by your pre-election statement siding with the Israeli settlers of Sderot. You would do well to know the history of the places of which you speak. Sderot, which may be known to some as an Israeli town, lies on the ruins of Najd, a Palestinian village ransacked in May 1948 by Zionist terrorist gangs. Villagers were forced from their beds and homes with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, rendering them refugees for the next 61 years. That is the story of Sderot. It is never a good start to get your tyrant and victims mixed up, but there is still room for a revival of passionate optimism. Only if you decide to fairly address the issue of the 6 million Palestinian refugees and the ending of occupation of Palestinian lands, including Jerusalem, will you be able to start a new relationship with the Muslim world."

Reported here by Mousa Abu Marzook, The Electronic Intifada, 23 January 2009 .

U.N. special rapporteur on torture calls on U.S. to prosecute Bush and Rumsfeld

In remarks that aired on German television last night, Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, urged the U.S. to pursue former President George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld on charges that they authorized torture and other harsh interrogation techniques:

“Judicially speaking, the United States has a clear obligation” to bring proceedings against Bush and Rumsfeld. […] He noted Washington had ratified the UN convention on torture which required “all means, particularly penal law” to be used to bring proceedings against those violating it.

“We have all these documents that are now publicly available that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld,” against detainees at the US prison facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nowak said.

Indeed, a bipartisan Senate report released last month found that Rumsfeld “bore major responsibility” for abuses committed at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and other military detention centers. Just last week, a Bush administration official overseeing Gitmo trials said Rumsfeld approved the torture of one particular detainee. Bush himself said last year that he was aware of his advisers’ discussions on torture and recently admitted that he personally authorized waterboarding Kalid Sheik Muhammad.

Text taken from here.

Outrage and Impotence of UN as Gaza Burned

United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon expressed his "outrage" and the President of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, accused Israel of violating international law.

"Gaza is ablaze," he told the UN General Assembly, "it has been turned into a burning hell."

The UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Professor Richard Falk, characterized the Israel offensive as containing "severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law."

What other have to say.
Francis A. Boyle, internatonal Attorney said,

"Saying is one thing.", "doing is another."
"You can never trust the United Nations to do the right thing for the Palestinians. "The Palestinians have always been on their own, and they know it."

"Abandoned and betrayed by the entire world now for 60 years."

He accused the UN creating the problem in the first place by what he described as the "illegal" partitioning of the Palestine Mandate that led to a massive displacement of the indigenous Arab population.

Boyle, meanwhile, says the legal tools are available to enforce resolutions and international law, but Finkelstein believes it is not simply a question of law, but rather a lack of political will.

"The UN is not impotent," he said. "It chooses to be silent because it is composed of craven slaves of the United States."

Professor George Bisharat from the Hastings College of the Law at the University of California says the United Nations owes the people of Palestine a moral debt.

"The UN is deeply implicated in the injustices and violations of rights of the Palestinians over the last six decades."

"It is not at all clear that the General Assembly had the legal authority to partition Palestine, and the plan it passed in 1947 violated the rights of the indigenous people of Palestine to self-determination."

"The United Nations has owed the Palestinian people a moral debt since that time and one that it has never effectively paid."

"The UN will likely never become a venue sympathetic to Palestinian rights until it undergoes substantial reform and democratization."

Norman G. Finkelstein, author and political scientist, expressed his frustration at the inaction of global leaders, and the inability of the United Nations to even enforce its own resolutions.

"The world does nothing."

"Most states are led by cowards and slaves of the United States. The only ones showing any courage right now are the UN agencies in Gaza. Their representatives are telling the truth."

Under the current circumstances, says Finkelstein, Israel believes it can act with impunity.

"Why should Israel care? The world is doing nothing. The only hope is public opinion, which is light years ahead of the elected representatives."

Dr. Mohammad Marandi, head of the Department of North American Studies at Tehran University shares Finkelstein's low opinion of UN leadership.

"While the UN staff in Gaza are doing heroic work, their statements are not reflected by the higher authorities of the UN or the countries that are represented there."

"The only thing that will impact events on the ground is a change of attitude by the United States or an increase in resistance [to US influence] by countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

"It is ironic that the United States considers the UN and the UN Security Council to be legitimate bodies, but their key ally Israel never accepts their resolutions."

The Israeli offensive against Gaza triggered massive anti-Israel protests around the world, and according to Kole Kilibarda, an organizer with the Toronto-based Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA), they have an important role to play.

"It is a mistake to view the UN in monolithic terms, and in no way should its actions or inaction serve as a substitute for individuals to organize themselves in their communities to fight and struggle for what they see as just."

"Social change has never come from the UN."

"At its best, the UN has only managed to legitimize what social movements had fought for over decades and sometimes centuries."

But Kilibarda says it is clear the Israeli leadership is indifferent to the overwhelming majority of world opinion that has condemned their attack.

"Israel was ready for this reaction and it is obvious that the 'media war' was prepared months in advance in an attempt to prevent a repeat of Israel's PR fiasco during its 2006 attack on Lebanon."

"The fact is Israeli leaders only care about the opinion of politicians in Washington and other world capitals. So long as these governments see a strategic interest in supporting Israeli apartheid as a means of repressing the self-determination of the people living in the Middle East, Israel will continue on its course."

Is it just about land?

Territory is certainly the major issue behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since 1967, Israel has sabotaged every attempt at peace, including funding Hamas as a counter to Fatah, since it knew that Hamas at that time rejected the idea of a two-state solution. But now that Hamas has repeatedly agreed to peace based on the 1967 borders, Israel has had to find other obstacles to sabotage the peace process. Pulling out of Gaza in 2005 was only a prelude to building more settlements on the West Bank—it was meant to kill the two-state solution, not support it. There is more than enough historical documentation to argue that Israel does not want a two-state solution because it does not want to give up the Palestinian territory it has already annexed.

But behind the conflict over land is the deeper and more intransigent issue of racism, and the apartheid state that Israel is building speaks volumes to the bigotry that lies at the heart of the zionist project. It is embedded in Israeli laws, is inculcated early in Israeli children, and the Israeli press reports that anti-Arab racism is making ideas like population exchange and racial segregation more acceptable to the Israeli population. This can only further the true Israeli agenda of pushing the Palestinian population onto Egypt and Jordan, or keeping it locked indefinitely within an apartheid state.

Gaza, and the Islamic Resistance Movement (aka: Hamas), are paying the price for 60 years of terror, dispossession, and duplicity on the part of Israel and its U.S. and European allies.

Good Bye Bush and Reminding Obama

Israel was most complimentary, of his intentions if not necessarily of his achievements.

"Of all the U.S. presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush," the Jerusalem Post daily wrote during Bush's final visit.

Last week columnist Caroline Glick wrote Bush "recognizes Israel and the U.S. share the same enemies and they seek to destroy us because we represent the same thing: freedom. But Bush never learned how to translate personal views into policy."

As Barack Obama is sworn in as President of the United States of America, we are more mindful than ever of the Promises for Peace he made to the American people during his campaign, especially his promises to:

1. End the war in Iraq
2. Shut Down Guantánamo
3. Reject the Military Commissions Act
4. Stop Torture
5. Work to eliminate nuclear weapons
6. Hold direct, unconditional talks with Iran.
7. Abide by Senate approved international treaties.

More of Obama Promises listed in PolitiFact.com and the Obameter: We're tracking Obama's promises.

Read further the article Editorials Worldwide Pillory Bush One Final Time by Erik Kirschbaum.

Read also the article Obama Supporters in DC Want Bush Arrested by David Swanson.

UK Jewish MP: Israel Acting Like Nazis in Gaza

Jews Shut Down Israeli Consulate for 3 Hours (Los Angeles)

We stand with the majority.
We will not be silent on Gaza.

10 Jews Chain Together to Block Driveway and Entrance
Wednesday, January 14, 2009 Los Angeles

Early this morning, Jewish activists in a historic first in Los Angeles, chained themselves to the entrance of the Israeli Consulate and blocked the driveway to the parking structure, blocking all traffic in and out of the building. "We sent a clear message to the world that LA Jews are part of the global majority in opposition to the Israeli siege of Gaza," said Lenny Potash a 72-year old protester who was cuffed to eight other activists, blocking the driveway to the consulate. The activists were joined by 50 other supporters and who chanted "LA Jews say, End the Siege of Gaza" and "Not in Our Name! We will Not be Silent!" Protesters also held up signs reading "Israeli Consulate: Closed for War Crimes."

"We succeeded today in letting Jews and other Americans of conscience know that it is safe to speak out against the policies of the Israeli government and that the Israeli lobby does not speak for everyone," said Robin Ellis, a Registered Nurse who also risked arrest to block the consulate entrance. "We are committed to escalating non-violent activities in the future to end the siege and win justice for Palestinians," Ellis said.

The group of activists were an ad-hoc, multi-generational group of LA Jewish residents, including members of the recently founded International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. They shared a commitment to ending the Israeli siege on Gaza and an end to Israeli apartheid. The demonstration will kick off a wave of demonstrations across the United States uniting Palestinians, Jewish people, and other Americans outraged by the siege.

"We are shocked and outraged at Israeli's latest act of violent aggression against the Palestinian people. Killing over 950 people, including 250 women and children, bombing schools and mosques and then calling it self-defense—that is the worst kind of hypocrisy. It also amounts to war crimes," said Hannah Howard, a local member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. "We shut down the Israeli consulate today because as Jewish people we cannot allow business as usual while violence is being done in our name."

Action participants also spoke out against the US government's unconditional support for Israel's siege and its ongoing war against the Palestinian people. "While US-funded F16's rain down bombs on the people of Gaza, our elected officials locally and nationally offer unqualified support." said Marsha Steinberg, a retired union representative. "Our government must stop sending billions of dollars in military and economic aid to the Israeli war machine," Goldberg said. In the coming week, concerned Americans from all backgrounds will call on the new Presidential administration to make a 180 degree change in policy.

"While the end of the siege on Gaza is our most immediate priority, this is only the latest chapter in Palestinians' 60 plus year experience of occupation and ethnic cleansing. Peace and justice in the region will only come when Palestinians have freedom and control their own destiny," said Lisa Adler, a community organizer in Los Angeles and another member of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network. "Even before the siege began, Israel's inhumane months-long blockade of Gaza created a major humanitarian crisis. We must end the siege. And we are building a nonviolent international movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions that brings an end to Israel's policies of occupation and apartheid and advances the Palestinian struggle for justice," said Adler.

Article taken from here.

Read further the following DECLARATIONS.

UN High commissioner for Human Rights report on Gaza (Rauthor Richard Falk is himself Jewish)
http://gazasiege.org/docs/gaza_crisis_08/GazaCrisis_UN_Falk_Pressrelease_12_27_08.pdf

Red Cross: Israel breaking Int'l law, letting children starve in Gaza
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1053877.html

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said that the situation in Gaza was "completely and utterly unacceptable based on every known standard of international law and universal humanitarian principles and values.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gjiqWO2pxDjmb0u29sn4O5e8LC0w

Israeli Human Rights groups: Clear and present danger to the lives and well-being of tens of thousands of civilians: An Israeli Call For Urgent Humanitarian Action In Gaza
http://www.btselem.org/English/Press_Releases/20090114.asp

Human Rights Watch demands Israel stop using White Phosphorus incendiary shells on civilian populations
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/10/israel-stop-unlawful-use-white-phosphorus-gaza

World Health Organization condemns Israeli attacks on hospitals
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2009/Gaza-health-20090115/en/index.html

Hitler Israel Now

THE GRANDCHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS FROM WORLD WAR II ARE DOING TO THE PALESTINIANS EXACTLY WHAT WAS DONE TO THEM BY NAZI GERMANY...

Photographic evidence : Compare the Nazi Regime with that of Israel Regime.

BUILDING WALLS & FENCES TO KEEP PEOPLE IN PRISONS.

CHECK POINTS NOT TO ALLOW PEOPLE BASIC FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

ARRESTS & HARASSMENTS

DESTROYING HOMES & LIVELIHOODS

THE KILLING OF CHILDREN

THE ISRAELIS PRACTICE THE SAME TACTICS

Pictures taken from here.

Palestine is Fighting for ALL of us

...they were colonized for 60 years, they were fighting for their freedom against the apartheid regime of Israel, they were elected democratically, yet NATO, US, EU, UNSC, SAUDI, Egypt starved them, demonized them, blocked them, sieged them and killed them....

Every one of the great powers and their collaborators hope that by attacking Heroic GAZA they can push back and demoralize the struggle in the whole region.

Yet working and poor people, mobilizing globally,and swelling the streets in ever greater number, stand with Gaza

GAZA is a harbinger of wider war against oppressed people of the world. We are on the eve of a global capitalist crisis. This means massive insecurity, cutbacks in ALL social programs, unemployment for millions.

Millions of working people will seek to fight back against a system of endless war and greater and greater divide of enormous wealth for a handful and poverty for the overwhelming majority. Increasingly they will identify with and take heart from the many forms of resistance they see around them.

We need to militantly support Hamas the democratically elected choice of the people, who is being demonized, hunted, and assassinated by the Zionists, as is every heroic fighter.

We need to make it clear that we support the Right to resist, the Right to fire rockets, the Right to dig tunnels, the Right to organize the people against sure starvation and blockade that Israel has criminally imposed.

For decades the Palestinian struggle has been the shining example to all the world of a people, who refuse to submit to a colonial domination, apartheid conditions, The most brutal form of segregation and subjugation.

We salute the heroic forces in Lebanon, led by Hezbollah, who organized such a devastating set back to Israel in 2006.

We stand with the people of Syria and with Iran, who in the face of U.S./Israeli threats have been steadfast.

We applaud the people of Venezuela and Bolivia who have shown such great solidarity with the struggle in Gaza as they organize to build a more just society.

We must intensify the struggle against NATO, the U.S. /European Union military arm. Now we need to connect the criminal role of NATO in Afghanistan, of NATO in the Balkans, in Georgia and now with the phony ceasefire - NATO military forces are proposed for Palestine!! NATO is the U.S. shield to do what Israel alone can no longer do.

We are proud to have helped to organize many thousands of people in the streets emergency demonstrations day after day for three weeks in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and many other cities.

We must sustain an ongoing movement to BOYCOTT, DIVEST and to impose SANCTIONS on the Israeli state and War crimes charges on its leaders. We must demand an accounting from our own governments.

We need to continue and deepen all these actions to find the best way of throwing a giant SHOE—into the gears of the imperialist and Zionist war machines.

Gaza stands for global resistance. It is resistance of a whole people against starvation, blockade, and siege.

World solidarity is a responsibility – Palestine is fighting for ALL of us. We must fight for Palestine!

The article was written by Sara Flounders, Palestine Inspires Global Resistance! at the Palestine Plenary Session titled "In Defense of Gaza" of the Beirut International Forum for Resistance, Anti-Imperialism, Peoples’ Solidarity and Alternatives – Jan 17, 2009

Why 78% of Israelis Support the War in Gaza

The world's media have been camped on the Israeli border with Gaza.

One of my students was arrested yesterday and spent the night in a prison cell. R’s offence was protesting the Israeli assault on Gaza. He joins over 700 other Israelis who have been detained since the beginning of Israel’s ruthless war on Gaza: an estimated 230 of whom are still behind bars. Within the Israeli context, this strategy of quelling protest and stifling resistance is unprecedented, and it is quite disturbing that the international media has failed to comment on it.

Simultaneously, the Israeli media has been towing the government line to such a degree that no criticism of the war has been voiced on any of the three local television stations. Indeed, the situation has become so absurd that reporters and anchors are currently less critical of the war than the military spokespeople. In the absence of any critical analysis, it is not so surprising that 78% of Israelis, or about 98% of all Jewish Israelis, support the war.

But eliding critical voices is not the only way that public support has been secured. Support has also been manufactured through ostensibly logical argumentation. One of the ways the media, military and government have been convincing Israelis to rally behind the assault is by claiming that Israel is carrying out a moral military campaign against Hamas. The logic, as Eyal Weizman has cogently observed in his groundbreaking book, Hollow Land, is one of restraint.

The Israeli media continuously emphasises Israel’s restraint by underscoring the gap between what the military forces could do to the Palestinians and what they actually do. Here are a few examples of the refrains Israelis hear daily while listening to the news:

• Israel could bomb houses from the air without warning, but it has military personnel contact – by phone no less – the residents 10 minutes in advance of an attack to alert them that their house is about to be destroyed. The military, so the subtext goes, could demolish houses without such forewarnings, but it does not do so because it values human life.
• Israel deploys teaser bombs – ones that do not actually ruin houses – a few minutes before it fires lethal missiles; again, to show that it could kill more Palestinians but chooses not to do so.
• Israel knows that Hamas leaders are hiding in al-Shifa hospital. The intimation is that it does not raze the medical centre to the ground even though it has the capacity to do so.
• Due to the humanitarian crisis the Israeli military stops its attacks for a few hours each day and allows humanitarian convoys to enter the Gaza Strip. Again, the unspoken claim is that it could have barred these convoys from entering.

The message Israel conveys through these refrains has two different meanings depending on the target audience.

To the Palestinians, the message is one that carries a clear threat: Israel’s restraint could end and there is always the possibility of further escalation. Regardless of how lethal Israel’s military attacks are now, the idea is to intimidate the Palestinian population by underscoring that the violence can always become more deadly and brutal. This guarantees that violence, both when it is and when it is not deployed, remains an ever-looming threat.

The message to the Israelis is a moral one. The subtext is that the Israeli military could indiscriminately unleash its vast arsenal of violence, but chooses not to, because its forces, unlike Hamas, respect human life.

This latter claim appears to have considerable resonance among Israelis, and, yet, it is based on a moral fallacy. The fact that one could be more brutal but chooses to use restraint does not in any way entail that one is moral. The fact that the Israeli military could have razed the entire Gaza Strip, but instead destroyed only 15% of the buildings does not make its actions moral. The fact that the Israeli military could have killed thousands of Palestinian children during this campaign, and, due to restraint, killed “only” 300, does not make Operation Cast Lead ethical.

Ultimately, the moral claims the Israeli government uses to support its actions during this war are empty. They actually reveal Israel’s unwillingness to confront the original source of the current violence, which is not Hamas, but rather the occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem. My student, R, and the other Israeli protesters seem to have understood this truism; in order to stop them from voicing it, Israel has stomped on their civil liberties by arresting them.

From the article How to Sell “Ethical Warfare” by Neve Gordon who teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. One can read about his book Israel’s Occupation and more.

Bringing Bush and Cheney to justice

Pepe Escobar: Where is the special prosecutor?

Time for Israel to be put on trial

by Elna Sondergaard, The Electronic Intifada, 17 January 2009

A Palestinian UN worker inspects debris after an Israeli air strike on a UN school in Gaza where civilians were seeking refuge, 17 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The brutal and indiscriminate Israeli attacks on the Palestinian population in Gaza during the last weeks have entailed numerous violations of basic norms of international law, such as the principles of proportionality and distinction (between civilians and combatants; and between civilian and military targets). Military acts such as intentionally targeting schools and other civilian facilities are considered violations of international humanitarian law in relation to which the state of Israel bears responsibility -- but they also constitute serious crimes under international law (e.g., war crimes and eventually crimes against humanity) in relation to which individuals should stand trial.

The international community agreed to this principle of individual responsibility for international crimes in the wake of the Second World War; genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes were considered totally unacceptable and individuals committing such crimes should be held accountable. The rational behind the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945 was clear: without a trial, justice and peace would never prevail. This idea of individual accountability has subsequently been implemented in the case law of the ad-hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague will develop it further in the future.

Applying this standard of justice to the hostilities in Gaza obviously leads to the conclusion that the language of politicians remains insufficient to address the latest atrocities and that the time has come for a trial of individual Israeli soldiers, commanders of the Israeli army and other high ranking army officials, and more importantly of the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert; the Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni; and the Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Eventually other cabinet ministers should also be tried, as those who are ultimately responsible for the disproportionate military operations in which thousands of civilians (including many children) have been killed and injured.

The crucial question is however: To which courts of justice can Palestinian victims bring their claims? There are Palestinian courts in Gaza but they have no jurisdiction over criminal cases involving Israelis. As stateless people, Palestinians have no state which could sign the Rome Statute with a view to seeking the adjudication of the ICC, or which would be entitled to bring a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague as Bosnia and Herzegovina did concerning the massacre at Srebrenica. Without a state, Palestinians are also denied the legal protection offered by classic interstate diplomacy.

Initiating criminal prosecution against Israelis within the Israeli criminal system would be a matter for the public prosecutor to decide. Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, most grave breaches of international humanitarian law, including willful killings of civilians, have not been investigated by the Israeli army, let alone the subject of prosecution. Most often the Israeli authorities have turned a blind eye to serious violations of international law. In the few cases when an investigation has been carried out by the army, it has been of very poor quality, and testimonies from Palestinian victims have not been considered. This fact is well known and has been convincingly documented by numerous human rights and non-governmental organizations. In other words: discrimination against Palestinians within the Israeli criminal system leaves them with no access to effective judicial remedies. As a result, Israeli courts will not be in a position to impartially and independently adjudicate criminal cases concerning Gaza.

The likely denial of proper domestic criminal investigation and prosecution leaves Palestinians with the option of seeking justice in other countries on the basis of universal jurisdiction. Although such criminal cases against Israelis have been brought to courtrooms in Belgium, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, these initiatives have not (yet) resulted in any trial of alleged Israeli perpetrators (the case in Spain is, however, still pending). Due to several political, legal and practical hurdles associated with adjudicating cases in foreign countries, these fora will probably not be available for the vast majority of Palestinian civilians from Gaza who have lost loved ones; been injured; displaced; or seen their houses being destroyed during the last weeks.

All this implies that prosecution of these international crimes will not be a domestic matter: Palestinians from Gaza rely solely upon the international community to provide proper remedies by putting alleged perpetrators on trial. The international community -- through the United Nations -- may seek such accountability either by referring the matter to the ICC (as the Security Council decided in the case of Darfur) or by taking the initiative to establish an ad-hoc tribunal with the mandate to adjudicate serious crimes committed by Israeli authorities in Gaza during the last weeks -- in addition to those committed as a result of the blockade of Gaza. The tribunal should also have the mandate to adjudicate crimes committed by Hamas when firing rockets into Israel.

A proper trial would provide the victims with the opportunity to tell their stories and to present their evidence to independent judges; Palestinian and Israeli victims would be equal -- the disadvantage of being stateless and the power imbalance between the two parties would no longer exist; testimonies of thousands of Palestinians would finally be heard -- people who have already suffered tremendously from the illegal Israeli occupation during which they have been deprived of the most basic human rights for over 40 years.

Such a trial might silence the endless accusations from both parties by opening up an impartial and legal assessment of relevant arguments. Such a trial would send the message that in modern times, all individuals have to take responsibility for their actions. Such a trial would also likely assist in efforts to prevent future atrocities in Gaza and support conditions for a long-term peace.

Putting perpetrators on trial would cost the international community nothing, but a lack of such individual responsibility and accountability would cost the civilians in Gaza dear leaving them without remedies and hope -- while politicians and soldiers would again be encouraged to think that they are exempted from the law and that they can get away with anything.

Thus, we cannot allow these crimes to remain untried.