ANONABULE

Walls of Shame

2009-11-20T19:41:00.002+08:00

On November 2nd many western leaders gathered at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany, to celebrate the downing of the notorious Berlin Wall. These hypocrite leaders; German Chancellor Merkel, French President Sarkozy, Russian President Medvedev, British Prime Minister Brown, US Secretary of State Clinton, and US President Obama, praised those who tore down the wall, emphasized the need to “overcome the walls of our time,” “keep fighting for freedom … so people get to live their dreams,” and emphasized that “all men are created equal … have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness,” yet none of them recognized the rights of Palestinians and Iraqis to their freedom, and none of them condemned the uglier Israeli separation and imprisoning wall that cuts the West Bank into smaller Bantustans, or the Baghdad wall that divides the city into smaller sections.

Contrary to their cajoling speeches the foreign policies of these leaders have encouraged the erection of these walls. Their political support and their citizens’ tax money had encouraged rogue Israel to violate international laws and to keep constructing its separation wall. The erection of the Baghdad concrete wall, similar to Berlin Wall, exposes the hollow rhetoric of Obama and Hillary

In 2004 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had ruled the Israeli wall as a flagrant violation of international laws. Fourteen out of the fifteen judges in the ICJ voted against the Israeli wall. The sole backer of the wall was US judge Thomas Buerghenthal, who echoed the sentiments of then US president Bush and the presidential candidate John Kerry.

Read further the article here.

Every War Begins with A Lie : is Taliban = 911?

2009-11-09T07:36:00.003+08:00

Google it and you'll find the Times report repeated and amplified 5,785 times more.

Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

Your eyelids are getting heavy. Taliban = 9/11. Taliban = 9/11.

And every war begins with a lie.

As the poet T.S. Eliot warned,

"The last temptation is the greatest treason
To do the right thing for the wrong reason."

Taliban = 9/11? Innocents, by the thousands and thousands, have paid and will pay in blood for this treasonous falsehood.

Read further Afghanistan by Hypnosis.

U.S. is not a mediator but an enemy of the Palestinian people

2009-11-08T07:58:00.004+08:00

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said on November 3, 2009 that the Palestinian Authority, and all Palestinian parties, must immediately end any and all illusions about the United States or its president, Barack Obama, and instead reject its "negotiations" based on surrender and rely on the Palestinian people and their resistance, unity and national rights.

Comrade Rayya Amin, of the Information Office of the PFLP, said that it must be abundantly clear that Barack Obama is nothing more than U.S. imperialism in new packaging, saying that the United States is an enemy of the Palestinian people and the Arab people, and all progressive and peoples' forces in the world. Comrade Amin stressed that the policy of the United States had not changed in any way, and was engaged in the same strategic alliance with Zionism and conquest of the Arab world that has always determined its actions. She demanded that the PA and all Palestinian, Arab and progressive forces cast aside any and all illusions about Obama and "change" and instead struggle to confront U.S. imperialism and the occupation.

Read further here.

ZAHIR EBRAHIM – At What Cost the Israel Lobby?: It's only an 'errand boy'!

2009-11-08T07:51:00.001+08:00

'Special Standard for a Special Friend Due to its “special relationship” with the U.S., Tel Aviv remains a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. … What about Israel? What has their lobby been doing? … At what point will Americans say: Enough!' — Jeff Gates, At What Cost the Israel Lobby? October 12, 2009

Read also The Evil Empire by Paul Craig Roberts.

ElBaradei Foes Leak Stories to Force His Hand on Iran

2009-08-27T20:29:00.002+08:00

Analysis by Gareth Porter | IPS News

Western officials leaked stories to the Associated Press and Reuters last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was "incorrect".

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear programme in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. Read more.

Jerusalem families waiting for US action

2009-08-18T22:30:00.003+08:00

by Marcey Gayer, The Electronic Intifada, 14 August 2009

In the early morning hours of Sunday, 2 August, a force of hundreds of police and border guards invaded the quiet East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and systematically evicted the sleeping Hanoun and Gawi families from their homes. The sun dawned upon a new reality: chaos in the streets, children crying and elders in anguish. The police blocked every entrance to the area, preventing friends from coming to the aid of the distressed families or even helping them to remove their belongings from their homes. Revealing prior coordination with the authorities, the homes were quickly occupied by ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers.

The Hanoun and Gawi families, consisting of 16 and 38 members, respectively, lived in their homes for 53 years. Built in 1956 by the UN and the Jordanian government (who had sovereignty over East Jerusalem at the time) as part of a temporary housing complex for refugees of the 1948 war, these were homes for those who already knew eviction and ethnic cleansing. However, this time the dispossession was accomplished "legally."

Since the 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has been building settlements along the eastern flank of Jerusalem to prevent expansion of its Arab neighborhoods. Moreover, within the past 20 years, the Israeli settlement project has begun encroaching upon the Arab neighborhoods themselves, installing nationalist Jewish families within their perimeters by force. Slowly but relentlessly, Israel is attempting to Judaize these neighborhoods in a manner designed not to attract international scrutiny and criticism.

Thus Maher Hanoun, the head of the Hanoun family, was ordered by Israeli courts to hand over the keys to his home to the Association of Sephardic Jewry on 19 July. Rather than comply with the court order, he held a press conference outside his house accompanied by several top officials, including Nils Eliasson of the Swedish Consulate representing the European Union, Robert Serry representing the UN, and Dr. Rafik Husseini of the Palestinian Authority. They all condemned the proposed eviction, calling it an affront to norms of international justice. In spite of US President Barack Obama's call to freeze Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, no representative from the US was present.

Hanoun, a 51-year-old salesman for the Nestle Corporation whose sales territory includes Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank, and Tel Aviv, is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and English. He is a man of culture and conscience, a believer in peaceful co-existence. He is soft-spoken, dignified and humorous, a devoted husband and the father of three wonderful children. He is the global everyman -- simple, honest, hard-working -- hardly deserving to be evicted from his home. But he and his family were evicted, simply because they are Palestinian.

Where does this all leave us? Maher Hanoun, his two brothers and their wives and children and the Gawis, 54 persons all together, are now sleeping under trees 50 feet from their former homes. Menacing armored vehicles are parked in front of each house and the neighborhood is overrun with police, border guards and stone-throwing settlers.

The dispossession of the Hanoun and Gawi families is a clear act of defiance directed at the Obama administration's call to freeze settlements. If it succeeds, this will be a green light for Israel to continue with its ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in East Jerusalem. Already five additional Sheikh Jarrah families have received court summonses and they are fated to join the Hanouns and the Gawis in the street if this supposedly "legal" land grab isn't stopped. If the new US president is to have any credibility on the international stage, he must keep faith with Maher Hanoun. Outside his home, Hanoun hung a big banner bearing President Obama's picture and the slogan "OBAMA,YES YOU CAN stop housing evictions in Sheikh Jarrah."

He and the world are still waiting.

Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv.

Watch also the clip - Homeless in Jerusalem.

More at The Real News

War on Terror - Pathways to Peace

2009-08-18T22:12:00.002+08:00

Zionism - Ruin of the Soul

2009-08-17T07:30:00.002+08:00

Role of US Militarism in Ahmadinejad’s Rise

2009-08-16T20:06:00.002+08:00

Many Americans have played important roles in Iran’s contemporary history, from Howard Baskerville (1885-1909), Iran’s "first American martyr" who, while helping the revolutionaries defend the city of Tabriz (in northwestern Iran) against the forces of Iran’s dictator of the time, Mohammad Ali Shah, was killed in 1909 in Tabriz, to Joseph Cochran (1855-1905) who was the founding father of Iran’s first modern medical school, Samuel M. Jordan (1871-1952) who is sometimes referred to as the father of modern education in Iran and founded the American College of Tehran (later renamed the Alborz high school), and others.

The United States also played a crucial role in forcing the Soviet Union’s forces evacuate Iran in 1946, after World War II had ended. In the Tehran Conference of 1943, Joseph Stalin promised Harry Truman and Winston Churchill that his forces will leave Iran after WW II ends, but he did not deliver on his promise until he was pressured by the U.S. But, since then, the history of the U.S. intervention in Iran’s internal affairs has been depressing, resulting in tyranny, bloodshed, and revolution.

It all began with the CIA-sponsored coup of 1953 that overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and started the era of the U.S. influence in Iran. In addition to its great political influence over the Shah of Iran, the U.S. helped establish and train the SAVAK, the Shah’s dreaded security services. These events ultimately led to the 1979 Revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed regime of the Shah. For decades the U.S. would not even admit its role in the 1953 coup. When Madeleine Albright did finally acknowledge it in 2000, she explained it based on the supposed Soviet military threat to Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic leftist students overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 53 American diplomats and staff hostage. The event should be viewed in light of Iran’s bitter experience of the 1953 CIA coup. The hostages were released on January 20, 1981. Then, in 1983, against the Algiers Agreement of January 1981 that freed the hostages, President Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Iran, most of which have remained in effect. Ever since, the U.S. goal has always been to hamper Iran’s economic development and to contain it militarily, which in turn have helped the radicals and hardliners to prevent the Iranian people from advancing their country on a democratic path.

Iran’s reform movement was born in the early 1990s. But, at every stage of its development, instead of being helped by the U.S. and its allies, it has been hurt by them.

On May 23, 1997, the Iranian people elected Mohammad Khatami, a moderate and progressive cleric, as their next president by a landslide. But, instead of helping Khatami by lifting at least a part of the U.S. sanctions against Iran, the Clinton administration continued to pursue its dual-containment policy, whereby both Iran and Iraq were to be contained by the U.S. military and economic might.

Even when Khatami called for a dialogue among civilizations, the U.S. did not respond favorably. The hard-liners pointed to the U.S. non-responsiveness as yet another sign that it was only interested in hampering Iran’s developments, and rebuked Khatami and his supporters for wanting to resolved the differences between the two nations.

Only in April 2000, after the reformists had swept the elections for the Iranian parliament, did President Clinton make a minor gesture toward Iran by lifting sanctions on the imports of Iranian rugs, pistachios, and caviar. But, it was too little too late. The Clinton administration was on its way out.

Then, came the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. The Khatami administration provided crucial help to the U.S. in Afghanistan by opening Iran’s airspace to the U.S. aircrafts, and providing crucial intelligence on the Taliban. Iran’s Afghan ally, the Northern Alliance that it had supported and trained for years, was the first force that entered Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and overthrew the Taliban. Iran also played a crucial role in the formation of Afghanistan’s national unity government in December 2001.

But, the Bush administration rewarded the Khatami administration by making Iran a charter member of the "axis of evil" in February 2002, and began threatening it with military attacks. This further hurt the credibility of the Iranian reformists who were advocating a rapprochement with the U.S.

The U.S. then invaded and occupied Iraq in the spring of 2003. The Shiite groups that had spent their exile years in Iran, and had been supported, trained, and funded by it, were put in power in Iraq, and were considered allies of the U.S., but the George W. Bush administration accused Iran of meddling in Iraq, and continued to threaten it with military attacks. The threats helped Iran’s hardliners to further suppress dissent in Iran.

In late April 2003 the Khatami administration presented a comprehensive proposal to the U.S., whereby it agreed to recognize Israel, help transform the Lebanese Hezbollah to a purely political group, and limit its nuclear program. Not only was the proposal spurned by the U.S., but it also admonished the Swiss ambassador to Iran for delivering the proposal to it (Switzerland represents the U.S. interests in Iran). Instead, the U.S. continued to threaten Iran militarily. Once again, Iran’s reformists were sacrificed by the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran and the Middle East.

Almost at the same time, the confrontation between Washington and Tehran began over Iran’s nuclear program. Although every report by the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that, aside from some minor non-compliance cases, Iran had abided by its obligations towards Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and its Safeguards Agreement; the Bush administration threatened Iran with military attacks more strongly than ever.

The U.S. threats greatly helped Iran’s hardliners to crackdown on the reformists. First, the press that had enjoyed relative freedom during the first few years of Khatami’s presidency, was suppressed, partly because the hardliners accused it of being an agent of foreign powers. The reformists were then purged from the Iranian parliament during the 2004 elections. Then, on the eve of Iran’s 2005 presidential election, George W. Bush basically said that the Iranian people should not vote, which actually provoked the conservatives and even some nationalists to vote in large numbers and help elect Ahmadinejad.

Once Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005, and began using harsh, but inconsequential, rhetoric against Israel, the U.S. ratcheted up its military threats against Iran. In a show of force, and in addition to surrounding Iran with the U.S. forces on three sides, the Bush administration dispatched two carrier battle groups to the Persian Gulf in May 2007, in order to frighten Iran. Dick Cheney used the deck of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis to threaten Iran, "We’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats."

All such threats were used by Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters to further suppress dissent in Iran, shut down independent and reformist newspapers and other publications, and accuse the reformist and democratic groups of being agents of the U.S. and other foreign powers. The constant pressure on the reformists and their oppression by the hardliners prevented them from organizing and confronting Ahmadinejad and his supporters more effectively.

Even after the supposedly realist Obama administration took over in January just a few months before Iran’s presidential election, and the President began looking for Iran’s unclenched fist, the threats against Iran did not stop, nor did their nature change. Asked if the military option was still on the table with regard to Iran, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said on Wednesday January 28 that, "The President hasn’t changed his viewpoint that he should preserve all his options. We must use all elements of our national power to protect our interests as it relates to Iran."

Thus, decades of U.S. hostility toward Iran, and sanctions and military threats and attacks have had a net result: the efforts by the courageous people of Iran in establishing a democratic political system has been thwarted by undemocratic and even neo-fascist groups, who have used the militarist policy of the U.S. toward Iran as their excuse to suppress freedom.

Text taken from here.

Is justice right side up?

2009-08-15T18:21:00.004+08:00

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones—the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

What makes the five nations with veto power in the United Nations inviolable? Is it of a divine origin that veto power of theirs? Can you trust those who profit from war to guard the peace? Is it fair that world peace is in the hands of the very five nations who are also the world’s main producers of weapons? Without implying any disrespect to the drug runners, couldn’t we refer to this arrangement as yet another example of organized crime?

Those who clamor, everywhere, for the death penalty are strangely silent about the owners of the world. Even worse, these clamorers forever complain about knife-wielding murderers yet say nothing about missile-wielding arch-murderers.

And one asks oneself: Given that these self-righteous world owners are so enamored of killing, why pray don’t they try to aim their murderous proclivities at social injustice? Is it a just world when, every minute, three million dollars are wasted on the military while at the same time fifteen children perish from hunger or curable disease? Against whom is the so-called international community armed to the teeth? Against poverty or against the poor?

text taken from here.

Torture Logic

2009-08-11T07:35:00.001+08:00

Recent reports that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to investigate illegal torture carried out during the Bush administration is a positive sign, especially given President Obama’s desire to avoid what he has called "a backward-looking" inquiry. When Holder began studying the brutal acts carried out in America’s name, some of them even exceeding the horrors authorized in the infamous Justice Department torture memos, he reportedly said it "turned my stomach." In "Tortured Logic," a video released by the ACLU today, you’ll hear well-known people like Oliver Stone, Rosie Perez and Philip Glass, among others, read from those chilling memos, which were disclosed as part of ACLU litigation:

Please note that by playing this clip You Tube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see You Tube’s privacy statement on their website and Google’s privacy statement on theirs to learn more. To view the ACLU’s privacy statement, click here.

Text taken from here.

Read the torture memos here.

Former FBI Translator: Bin Laden Worked for U.S. Right Up Until 9/11

2009-08-02T17:08:00.002+08:00

Before you hear what Sibel Edmonds has to say, you should know a little about her background.

Edmonds is a former FBI translator, who the Department of Justice's Inspector General and several senators have called extremely credible (free subscription required).

And some of Edmonds allegations' have already been confirmed by the British press.

Now, Edmonds is saying that Osama Bin Laden worked for the U.S. right up until 9/11,and that that fact is being covered up because the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years.

Outrageous claim, right?

Actually, there are several lines of confirmation of Edmonds' claim.

According to one of the most reputable French papers, CIA agents met with Bin Laden two months before 9/11, when he was already wanted for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” US officials later told CNN that “in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

In other words, American forces had many opportunities to capture Bin Laden, and yet failed to do so.

Indeed, even after 9/11, the U.S. military intentionally let Bin Laden evade capture. Outrageous? Don't believe it?

See for yourself:

The CIA commander in charge of the capture of Bin Laden during the invasion of Afghanistan said that the U.S. let Bin Laden escape from Afghanistan

A retired Colonel and Fox News military analyst said:
"We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it ....Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden."

French soldiers insist that they easily could have captured or killed Bin Laden, but that the American commanders stopped them

This is how a government treats its own agents, not foreign terrorists.

For background, you may wish to note that the government not only listened in on Bin Laden's calls, they also heard the hijackers' plans from their own mouths.

And the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

And a key Al Qaeda trainer actually worked with the Green Berets and the CIA and was an FBI informant.

And the CIA may have helped many of the 9/11 hijackers get their visas to the U.S.

And the former director of the National Security Agency said "By any measure the US has long used terrorism. In ‘78-79 the Senate was trying to pass a law against international terrorism - in every version they produced, the lawyers said the US would be in violation" (the audio is here).

And, as documented by the New York Times, Iranians working for the C.I.A. in the 1950's posed as Communists and staged bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected president (see also this essay).

Moreover, recently declassified documents show that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. If you view no other links in this article, please read the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.

And Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the Bush administration funded terrorist groups (see confirming articles here and here).

What does all this mean about Bin Laden? Make up your own mind.

Text taken from here.

Parroting the Two-State Solution

2009-08-02T08:21:00.003+08:00

European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana surprised observers on 11 July when he called, during a speech in London, for the UN Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state by a certain date even if no agreement had been reached between Israelis and Palestinians.

On its face, this proposal sounds dramatic. There must be some who still believe that a Security Council decision would result in real and drastic action. The reality, however, is that the Security Council is not the powerful executive organ it was created to be.

Yet Solana clearly angered Israel by daring to make such a proposal. Israel is not used to being surprised, and normally the big powers consult it before making any major statements about the Middle East situation. This time it seems Solana did not seek the proper Israeli permission. Yet the Israeli anger itself seemed to give added credence to the idea that Solana must have said something significant.

Solana praised the new peace initiative of US President Barack Obama and suggested that if that fails to bring about a binding agreement between the parties, then the "international community" should intervene through the Security Council. Specifically, Solana proposed:

"After a fixed deadline, a UN Security Council resolution should proclaim the adoption of the two-state solution. This should include all the parameters of borders, refugees, Jerusalem and security arrangements. It would accept the Palestinian state as a full member of the UN, and set a calendar for implementation. It would mandate the resolution of other remaining territorial disputes and legitimize the end of claims."

What this seemingly bold statement boils down to is that Solana wants the Security Council to join the chorus of those who have been singing the two-state solution song for decades. Instead of suggesting concrete measures to enforce previous and long-ignored UN resolutions, or to check Israel's violations which made a Palestinian state impossible, Solana simply wants the UN to recognize an imaginary Palestinian state as a full member of the UN.

If we try to put a positive spin on it, we could say that the "two-state solution" is already half way to being achieved. After all, one of the two states -- Israel -- has been in existence for more than 60 years, and moreover has been expanding its territory for all that time.

The problem, however, is that this "success" means that there is nowhere left for a second state. Solana, like many others, finds it easy to parrot the two-state solution, but does not have the courage to demand a complete end even to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip which began on 4 June 1967.

Text taken from here.

Israel’s Discriminatory Land Policies

2009-08-02T07:46:00.002+08:00

In 1973, former Israeli scholar, critic, and lifelong human rights activist, Israel Shahak (1933-2001), wrote a paper titled, “What is the Meaning of the Jewish State” in which he said:

“The real situation in Israel is really very simple: Israel is not an ‘Israeli’ state, or a state of its citizens but it is a ‘Jewish state.’” With regard to land, “More than 90% of the inhabited areas of the State of Israel are under the rule of the Jewish National Fund regulations, under which non-Jews cannot rent or buy a house or flat, open a business, in short cannot live. This land is called in Hebrew ‘the land’ saved. The land which belongs to non-Jews is called unsaved not national (meaning Jewish) and by buying or confiscating it from a non-Jew by a Jew, the land is supposed to be ’saved.’ ”

It’s only the beginning. Numerous privileges are afforded Jews alone that include:

not only the right to the land but to a mortgage or loan to finance it;
on confiscated West Bank land, “Jewish inhabitants enter into prepared houses, with water and electricity;” unconnected Arab villages are forbidden to use either; and
“A building project for the newly-married applies only for the Jewish newly-married and so forth; to be a Jew in a Jewish state is to be both a privileged being, and to be able to receive a lot of ‘easy’ money a non-Jew can not ever get.”

Read further here.

Nakba Denial by the Israel - they want us to remember Nazi Holocaust

2009-07-27T07:25:00.004+08:00

Israel's education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba – Arabic for the "catastrophe" of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.

The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud-led government of Israel's historical narrative over the Palestinian one.

The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah – normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their "war of independence": the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.

Netanyahu spoke for many Jewish Israelis two years ago when he argued that using the word nakba in Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Palestinians have always maintained that the 1948 refugees were the victims of Israeli "ethnic cleansing". But in recent years a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune.

Reflecting those changing perceptions, Ehud Olmert, Israel's last prime minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, referred to Palestinian "suffering" at the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.

Netanyahu's Likud takes a different view. "There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme," said the education minister, Gideon Saar. "The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis." There was bitter controversy in 2007 when nakba was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools only, by the then education minister, Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party.

"In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a 'catastrophe'," Saar told MPs in the Knesset yesterday. "There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe."

What their leaders have said:

We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.

–David Ben-Gurion, Prime Minister of Israel, 1948-53, 1955-63

There is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
–Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister of Israel, 2001-2006
There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
–Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1969-1974

The Zionist faith

2009-07-24T08:26:00.004+08:00

Their soldiers commit cold blooded murder; use human shields, kill innocent people, commit massacres and Israelis see nothing wrong with it. They simply adore some one like Rabbi Meir Kahane, they worship Rabbi Goldstein who mowed down Muslim worships in Hebron, they adore their own army that fires tank rounds at children playing on the beach, target civilian apartments, destroy farms and uproot century-old Olive trees for the hell of it. They simply stand up and cheered as their tanks, jets, artillery level Gaza, killing so many innocent women and children and simply destroying the entire Gaza Strip. It looked like the 4^th of July and they were cheering as the jets dropped phosphorous bombs on civilian targets. They cheered the power of their destructive force and they simply have no remorse for what they have done to so many hundreds of thousands of people. They are taught in their Yeshivas, killing Arabs is simply an act of divine order and is part of the new Zionist’s faith.

They try to create facts on the ground, through land and water theft, and they claim they are building a “security wall” rather than an “Apartheid Wall” knowing well they are simply stealing the land, the water, destroying farms simply because they see nothing wrong with it and then they tell the world it is for “security” as if only the Israeli Jews are entitled to have peace and security and the Palestinians are simply God’s trash. If they are talking security then let them build their own wall a mile high along the 67 borders and no one will give a damn. Let them live in the Ghetto they have formed around themselves.

The daily humiliations, millions of Palestinians had to endure should tell all of us something about this new Israeli “Jewish” psyche as part of a grand scheme to dehumanize the Palestinians just like the Nazis did when they commenced to dehumanize the Jews and ended up putting them in death camps. Palestinians have to wait for hours simply to go from one village to an adjacent village or to access their farms, and Israelis do this to supplement their land theft, ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Jerusalem, destruction and demolition of thousands of homes, with 6,000 Palestinian homes slated for demolition in Jerusalem. The Israelis simply do not see anything wrong with their occupation; they see nothing wrong with what they and their army and government are doing to the Palestinians. Israelis and their cousins in the US have some serious issues.

Text taken from Sami Jamil Jadallah - What is wrong with Israeli “Jews”? A whole lot!.

The Jericho Six

2009-07-24T07:49:00.003+08:00

On 25 April, 2002, four Palestinians were tried in a kangaroo-court by the Palestinian Authority and sentenced to between 1 to 18 years in prison. The four were accused of involvement in the assassination of the Israeli Tourism Minister, Rehavam Ze'evi, on October 17, 2001. The four were tried in an impromptu Palestinian military court that violated all established principles of international law guaranteeing a fair trial with proper legal representation.

Violations of their detention include:

The four defendants were tried in front of a military court despite the fact they are civilians. This is in direct violation of Palestinian law.
The trial was presided over by Brigadier-General Ribhi Arafat who has no legal qualifications and no authority to act as a judge.
The detainees were not provided with proper legal defence, rather, a soldier with no legal training was appointed to act in their defence.
The trial took only 2 hours and a written charge sheet was not presented to the defendants or before the court.
The four were found guilty despite the fact there was no written evidence or confessions from them presented to the court. The only material presented before the court were notes written by unidentified people from discussions held with the four defendants while they were imprisoned in Ramallah before the siege. There were no signatures or written verification of the veracity of these notes from the four defendants. These notes were presented as affidavits yet they were not prepared during formal interrogation or by any authorized personnel.
The trial took place in the Presidential Compound in Ramallah while it was surrounded by Israeli tanks and heavily armed soldiers. It was held behind closed doors and was not open to the public.

The four detainees have no right to appeal their sentences.

Following sentencing the four political prisoners were transferred to a Jericho Prison under the control of US and British supervisors. In addition to the four, two other Palestinian detainees, Ahmed Sa'adat and Fuad Shubeiki, were also transferred to Jericho Prison. The latter have not faced trial or been found guilty of any offense yet they remain incarcerated in Jericho.

The trial of the four and imprisonment of the six are a severe violation of international and Palestinian law. They are being kept in draconian conditions under the supervision of the US and Britain. According to press reports, the person in charge of this "supervision" is the former head of the notorious Maze Detention Center in Northern Ireland.

Is this what is meant by "reform" of the Palestinian Authority, "democracy" or "respect for the rule of law"? Apparently this is the case for the US, British, Israeli and Palestinian governments.

SOURCE: http://www.addameer.org/addameer/campaigns/jericho/index.html

also: http://sumoud.tao.ca/?q=node/view/553 (EXCELLENT SITE)

BREAKING NEWS: Hamas, Fatah: US wants Palestinians to abandon right of return

2009-07-21T22:53:00.004+08:00

They Will Return to their Home Land.

Senior Hamas and Fatah officials stated their objections on Sunday to what they said were US suggestions that Palestinians accept a land swap with Israel and give up the right of return.

The officials said that the US is pushing for a final status agreement with Israel that does not include the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and maintains so-called Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank.

Senior Fatah official Hatem Abdul Qader, who deals with Jerusalem issues, said “the United States is trying to deceive the Palestinians through these proposals, which they think are creative, but [exist] only in their imaginations.” He called for the US to take concrete steps to stop Israel’s expansion of illegal settlements as an alternative.

The official said, “If the United States cannot take small steps in this direction, then how it can make these big leaps that will not be accepted by the Palestinians?”

“The main challenge for this administration is to stop the settlements and land confiscation, particularly canceling the Israeli decision to confiscate 139,00 dunums [of land along the Dead Sea shores and to stop the settlement plans in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.”

If the US takes these “basic steps,” it could lead to “real peace,” he said. He also said that Palestinians refugees cannot give up the right to return to their homes in what is now Israel, basing their claim on UN Resolution 194. “Going around [Resolution 194] will not lead to real peace between Palestinians and Israelis.”

Meanwhile Hamas senior official Salah Bardawil said that “the issue of land swap was proposed since the Camp David negotiations … President Yasser Arafat rejected this at the time then and paid his life as a price for this rejection.”

Bardawil also said “We cannot accept anything that is proposed by the Americans regarding this issue.” He said “all Palestinian factions” believe that a resolution to the conflict should be based on an Israeli withdrawal from the land it occupied in 1967 (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), the creation of a Palestinian state, and the realization of the right of return.

He also stated Hamas’ “categorical rejection” of the alleged American proposals. “It’s a waste of time for the US administration headed by [Barack] Obama to begin its political maneuvers with a rejected argument.”

Text taken from here.

Children tortured before parents, raped, all covered up by Bush/Cheney

2009-07-21T22:40:00.004+08:00

Perhaps the worst incident at Abu Ghraib involved a girl aged 12 or 13 who screamed for help to her brother in an upper cell while stripped naked and beaten. Iraqi journalist Suhaib Badr-Addin al-Baz, who heard the girl’s screams, also witnessed an ill 15-year-old who was forced to run up and down with two heavy cans of water and beaten whenever he stopped. When he finally collapsed, guards stripped and poured cold water on him. Finally, a hooded man was brought in. When unhooded, the boy realized that the man was his father, who doubtless was being intimidated into confessing something upon sight of his brutalized son.

This PDF obtained by The Washington Post tells the whole story.

It takes Two to Tango - They just hate the Palestinian.

2009-07-18T08:53:00.003+08:00

In Israel : Testimony - Police severely beat Malak Abu Gharbiya on Tel Aviv beach, June 2009

I live in Jerusalem and sometimes go with friends to the beach in Tel Aviv. On Friday evening, 12 June, I went to Tel Aviv with my friends Muaiad Sha’ban, 21, ‘Alaa Sharaf, 21, Wasfi Zahdeh, 20, ‘Issa a-Safdi and Ibrahim Abu Diab. I drove. We got to the parking lot next to the beach near Jaffa around 10:00 P.M. We got out of the car, put some music on and talked. A few minutes later, we saw some guys I know from Jerusalem fighting. We went and broke up the fight.

A few minutes after that, two blue police patrol cars, Skodas, pulled up. They stopped next to my car. Around eight uniformed police officers got out. One of them was a woman. The guys who had been fighting ran away. My friends and I stayed by the car. A police officer came over to me. He was of average height, was heavyset, and had thin hair and dark-brown skin. “Moshe” was written on his name tag. He told me to give him my identity card. Then he went to speak with another officer, and I gave my ID to an officer who was standing next to me. He was tall, pale-skinned, and had brown eyes. His hair was combed back.

A few seconds later, Moshe came over again and asked about my ID card. I told him I had given it to his friend. He shouted, in Hebrew, “Do you think I’m playing with you?” I told him I wasn’t lying and that he should ask his friend. He kneed me in the stomach and punched me hard in the chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I fell onto the car and my head and back hit it. I told him, “Calm down and don’t hit me. You [plural] have the ID.” I asked the other police officers to help me. A few of them tried to stand between me and Moshe, to get him to leave me alone. Moshe hit me hard on the head with a black club, and I started to bleed. I felt dazed. I tried to defend myself. In the meantime, other police officers beat me with clubs and kicked me. They were beating me from all directions. This lasted for less than a minute. I lay on the ground, with police officers around me. They kicked me all over my body, mostly in my head. It hurt a lot. My head was bleeding badly. Moshe kicked me in the face and said, “I warned you I’d screw you.” Read further here.

In Egypt : "Who will hold us accountable?"

I will never forget the image of the elderly woman whose son was dying in a hospital in Egypt. She only wanted to be with him. Crying, her hand touching the glass window of the office of the Egyptian intelligence services, she pleaded, "Please, please. I beg you, show mercy, let me go in." Another woman sat by the State Security office, looking up at an officer blocking her path. "You promised to let me in," she said with her soft, tired and drained voice. "Please let me in" she repeated calmly with her tired voice, then she looked at me with wide, tearful, sad eyes.

I came to Gaza a week before Israel's winter invasion began. After seven months, I spent two days at Rafah crossing with the Egyptian authorities refusing to allow me to return to Lebanon, despite having all the necessary coordination documents, approval and permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Egyptian authorities made people wait in the arrival hall at the Rafah crossing, sitting on filthy floors where names for either the entry to Egypt or to return to Gaza were called by the voices of aggressive Egyptian police officers, or state security or intelligence personnel. After hours of waiting, two officers headed towards us: "you are being returned to Gaza." "No!" we would reply, "We have coordination documents!" But, the officers and intelligence personnel grew angrier and threw the papers in our faces humiliatingly: "This means nothing! Move on! Hurry!"

After being asked numerous times "what were you doing in Palestine for seven months," I answered the intelligence officer simply, "what you didn't do." Another officer asked, "How did you come to Gaza?" "By the boats" I replied, referring to the Free Gaza Movement ship that brought me. "So, now you know why you ... can't leave," he answered back. Read further here.

China Pushing Han into Xinjiang (Uyghurstan/Eastern Turkestan) angered muslim Uighur

2009-07-17T01:15:00.005+08:00

Uyghur protest in Munich 2008 against China policy. The "Kökbayraq" flag. This flag is used by Uyghurs as a symbol of the East Turkestan independence movement. The Government of the People's Republic of China prohibits using the flag in the country.

Following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the USA, China voiced its support for the United States of America in the war on terror. The Chinese government has often referred to Uyghur nationalists as "terrorists" and received more global support for their own "war on terror" since 9/11. Human rights organizations have become concerned that this "war on terror" is being used by the Chinese government as a pretext to repress ethnic Uighurs. Uighur exile groups also claim that the Chinese government is suppressing Uyghur culture and their religion islam, and responding to demands for independence with human rights violations.

Last week’s riots in Urumqi, resulting in 184 deaths, recall similar protests in Tibet last year, though only 19 people were killed there. Both Uighur and Tibetan exiles demonstrated during the Chinese Olympics, to little effect. Both regions, remote from the heart of Han China, were taken over under the communists, and are important strategically and as storehouses of mineral wealth to feed the new capitalist China’s voracious appetite. They remind us that old-fashion colonialism is alive and well. Neither the Uighurs nor the Tibetans have any hope of independence, but they rightly would like the Han to be less greedy and invasive.

Like Tibet, it is the flood of Han immigrants and the wholesale destruction of the local culture that is the problem. The massive recent influx of Han Chinese, who now make up more than 50 per cent of the population (70 per cent in the major cities Urumqi and Kashgar), has reduced Uighurs to a minority in their homeland, ominously called “Xinjiang” (New Frontier) in Chinese. The use of “Eastern Turkistan”, the traditional name for this region, is outlawed, along with the blue star-crescent Uighur flag. Ethnic Han Chinese dominate nearly all big businesses in the region. All Uighurs must study Chinese, and very few Uighurs can dream of going to university.

They have no official state, only a hollow autonomous region, along with large diaspora communities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the West. They number 8-10 million worldwide. There are Uighur neighbourhoods in Beijing and Shanghai. Their history is the story of an obscure nomadic tribe from the Altai Mountains rising to challenge the Chinese empire, founding their own in the 8th century, which stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria. Because of their strategic location on the Silk Road, they thrived on trade. They came under Han sovereignty only in the 17th century, but after numerous revolts expelled Qing officials in 1864 and founded an independent Kashgaria kingdom, recognised by the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Great Britain, which even had a mission in the capital, Kashgar. As usual British support depended on its imperial schemes and when the Chinese attacked in 1876, fearing Tsarist expansion, Great Britain supported the Manchu invasion forces. The Brits (excuse me, the Manchus) “won” and East Turkestan became Xinjiang.

Read further here.

"Any Sovereign Nation is Allowed to Bomb Another"

2009-07-14T22:17:00.001+08:00

Vice President Joe Biden, apparently speaking on behalf of the Obama administration, has just given Israel the green light to bomb Iran.

“Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else,” he told ABC’s “This Week” in an interview broadcast Sunday. “Whether we agree or not, they’re entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed. If the Netanyahu government decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that. That is not our choice,” he declared.

The statement is presented in logically abstract terms. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do what’s in its interest regardless of what “we” think, surely. How very reasonable—magnanimous, even, coming from the mouth of the vice-president of the superpower that’s in the last eight years brutally imposed its will on two sizable Southwest Asian countries.

But to test Biden’s universalist logic imagine yourself in 1939, substitute Germany for Israel and Poland for Iran and ask whether “any sovereign nation is” really “entitled to do that.”

Of course Israel doesn’t have any “sovereign right” to attack Iran! And Biden’s implied distaste for the attack (“That is not our choice”), which may presage a calculated distancing from an action in the future, doesn’t undo the fact that he explicitly validates such action here.

They’re entitled to do it, says Joe. Just as presumably they’re entitled to remain outside the nuclear nonproliferation treaty regime, and produce and stockpile the only nuclear weapons in the Middle East, while claiming that the Iranian nuclear program (begun under U.S. encouragement under the Shah) can only have military intentions and can only be designed to produced a “nuclear Holocaust” to destroy the Jews.

Just as presumably they’re entitled to deploy vast resources to pressure the U.S. government to bomb Iran for them. (But no worry about the impact on U.S. foreign policy. “There is no pressure,” says Joe, “from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed.” What he really means is: There’s actually a whole shitload of pressure from Israel on us to bomb Iran. But we might not do that. Because Obama thinks that the Israeli-demanded attack on Iran, like the assault on Iraq, might be a “strategic blunder.”)

One could argue, of course, that in positing Netanyahu’s “sovereign right” to bomb Iran, a nation which has not attacked another in modern times, Biden is just shooting off his famous mouth again. But there are at least two reasons his comments should be taken very seriously.

First of all, there is obviously much conflict within the U.S. power structure over the wisdom of a U.S. attack on Iran. The Israel Lobby demanding one may have suffered a defeat at the hands of the Pentagon, which sees such an attack as complicating the imbroglios it faces in Iraq and Afghanistan (and down the road in Pakistan?), and the intelligence community which knows that Iran does not possess a nuclear weapons program threatening the world.

Secondly, the state of Israel continues to depict the Islamic Republic of Iran as an “existential” threat to itself, while threatening to attack it with missiles if the U.S. does not do so. The Bush administration always endorsed Israel’s vilification campaign and conceded the possibility that it might act “on its own” (as though it could really do so without a green light from Washington). Dick Cheney told Don Imus on MSNBC in January 2005 that “Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel [sic (disinformation)], the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards.” He implied that if the U.S. didn’t take action, the Israelis would be justified in doing so.

This remains the U.S. position under the Obama administration. And having decided for geopolitical reasons to adopt a tougher line on Israel’s illegal settlements on the West Bank, Washington is perhaps particularly disinclined to deter Israel should it opt to create the mess of which Cheney spoke. “That was not our choice,” it will say.

WRITTEN BY GARY LEUPP here.

Dear Mr President...

2009-07-14T22:08:00.000+08:00

If the dead could speak...

2009-07-10T07:51:00.002+08:00

Robert McNamara, one of the "best and the brightest" technocrats behind the escalation of the Vietnam War, eventually came to regret his actions. But his public contrition, which included a book and a series of interviews for the documentary "The Fog of War," were greeted with derision.

"Mr. McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen," editorialized The New York Times in 1995. "Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades late."

McNamara's change of heart came 58,000 American and 2,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late. If the dead could speak, surely they would ask: why couldn't you see then what you understand so clearly now? Why didn't you listen to the millions of experts, journalists and ordinary Americans who knew that death and defeat would be the only outcome?

Though Errol Morris' film served as ipso facto indictment, its title was yet a kind of justification. There is no "fog of war." There is only hubris, stubbornness, and the psychological compartmentalization that allows a man to sign papers that will lead others to die before going home to play with his children.

McNamara is dead. Barack Obama is his successor.

Some call McNamara's life tragic. Tragedy-inducing is closer to the truth. Yes, he suffered guilt in his later years. "He wore the expression of a haunted man," wrote the author of his Times obit. "He could be seen in the streets of Washington--stooped, his shirttail flapping in the wind--walking to and from his office a few blocks from the White House, wearing frayed running shoes and a thousand-yard stare." But the men and women and boys and girls blown up by bombs and mines and impaled by bullets and maimed in countless ways deserve more vengeance than a pair of ratty Nikes. Neither McNamara nor LBJ nor the millions of Americans who were for the war merit understanding, much less sympathy.

Now Obama is following the same doomed journey.

Text taken from here.

The Holy Basin - the ignored facts.

2009-07-10T07:34:00.002+08:00

The Holy Basin contains well marked Christian and Muslim institutions and holy places that have had historical placement for millenniums. Although people of the Jewish faith had major presence in Jerusalem during the centuries of Biblical Jerusalem, which included rule by King Hezekiah and control by the Hasmonean dynasties, their control and presence were interrupted for two millennia. Extensive commentary has enabled the two thousand years of lack of control and presence to seem as if it never happened and that today is only a short interval from the ancient years of Hezekiah. Almost one thousand years of Christian and Crusader rule and more than one thousand years of Muslim rule are politely ignored, while their tremendous constructions and creation are not credited. Almost everything becomes nothing and a minor something becomes everything. Myth replaces reality. Spiritual quality replaces actual presence.

Some remains of Jewish dwellings and ritual baths can be found, but few if any major Jewish monuments, buildings or institutions from the Biblical era exist in the “Old City” of today’s Jerusalem. The often cited Western Wall is the supporting wall for Herod’s platform and is not directly related to the Second Temple. No remains of the Jewish Temple have been located in Jerusalem.

According to Karen Armstrong, in her book Jerusalem, Jews did not pray at the Western Wall until the Mamluks in the 15th century allowed them to move their congregations from a dangerous Mount of Olives and pray daily at the Wall. At that time she estimates that there may have been no more than 70 Jewish families in Jerusalem. After the Ottomans replaced the Mamluks, Suleiman the Magnificent issued a formal edict in the 16th century that permitted Jews to have a place of prayer at the Western Wall.

The only remaining major symbol of Jewish presence in Jerusalem’s Holy City is the Jewish quarter, which Israel cleared of Arabs and rebuilt after 1967. During its clearing operations, Israel demolished the Maghribi Quarter adjacent to the Western Wall, destroyed the al-Buraq Mosque and the Tomb of the Sheikh al-Afdhaliyyah, and displaced about 175 Arab families. Although the Jewish population in previous centuries comprised a large segment of the Old City (estimates have 7000 Jews during the mid-19th century), the Jews gradually left the Old City and migrated to new neighborhoods in West Jerusalem, leaving only about 2000 Jews in the Old City. Jordanian control after the 1948 war reduced the number to nil. By 2009, the population of the Jewish quarter in the Old City had grown to 3000, or nine percent of the Old City population. The Christian, Armenian and Muslim populations are the principal constituents and their quarters contain almost the entire Old City commerce.

In an attempt to attach ancient Israel to present day Jerusalem, Israeli authorities continue the attachment of spurious labels to Holy Basin landmarks, while claiming the falsification is due to the Byzantines, who got it all wrong.

King David’s Tower’s earliest remains were constructed several hundred years after the Bible dates David’s reign. It is a now an obvious Islamic minaret.

King David’s Citadel earliest remains are from the Hasmonean period (200 B.C.). The Citadel was entirely rebuilt by the Ottomans between 1537 and 1541 AD.

King David’s tomb, located in the Dormition Abbey, is a cloth-covered cenotaph (no remains) that honors King David. It has not been verified that the casket relates to David.

The Pools of Solomon, located in a village near Bethlehem, are considered to be part of a Roman construction during the reign of Herod the Great. The pools supplied water to an aqueduct that carried water to Bethlehem and to Jerusalem.

The Stables of Solomon, under the Temple Mount, are more likely a construction of vaults that King Herod built in order to extend the Temple Mount platform.

Absalom’s Tomb is an obvious Greek sculptured edifice and therefore cannot be the tomb of David’s son.

The City of David contains artifacts that date before and during king David’s time. Some archaeologists maintain there is an insufficient number of artifacts to conclude any Israelite presence before David. In any case any Israelite presence must have been in a small and unfortified settlement

The Jerusalem Archaeological Park within the Old City, together with the Davidson Exhibition and Virtual Reconstruction Center also tell the story. Promising to reveal much of a Hebrew civilization, the museums shed little light on its subject. The Davidson Center highlights a coin exhibition, Jerusalem bowls and stone vessels. The Archeological Park in the Old City contains among many artifacts, Herodian structures, ritual baths, a floor of an Umayyad palace, a Roman road, Ottoman gates, and the façade of what is termed Robinson’s arch, an assumed Herodian entryway to the Temple Mount. The exhibitions don’t reveal many, if any, ancient Hebrew structures or institutions of special significance.

Well known archaeologists, after examining excavations that contain pottery shards and buildings, concluded that finds don’t substantiate the biblical history of Jerusalem and its importance during the eras of a united Jewish kingdom under David and Solomon.
Margaret Steiner in an article titled “It’s Not There: Archaeology Proves a Negative” in the Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August, 1998, states:

…from the tenth century B.C.E. there is no archaeological evidence that many people actually lived in Jerusalem, only that it was some kind of public administrative center…We are left with nothing that indicates a city was here during their supposed reigns (of David and Solomon)…It seems unlikely, however, that this Jerusalem was the capital of a large state, the United monarchy, as described in Biblical texts.

CIA has Distributed 400 Million Dollars Inside Iran to Evoke a Revolution

2009-06-29T23:10:00.002+08:00

Former Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beig claims the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has distributed 400 million dollars inside Iran to evoke a revolution.

In a phone interview with the Pashto Radio on Monday, General Beig said that there is undisputed intelligence proving the US interference in Iran.

“The documents prove that the CIA spent 400 million dollars inside Iran to prop up a colorful-hollow revolution following the election,” he added.

Pakistan’s former army chief of joint staff went on to say that the US wanted to disturb the situation in Iran and bring to power a pro-US government.

He congratulated President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re- election for the second term in office, noting that Pakistan relationship with Iran has improved during his 4-year presidency.

“Ahmadinejad’s re-election is a decisive point in regional policy and if Pakistan and Afghanistan unite with Iran, the US has to leave the area, especially the occupied Afghanistan,” Beig added.

Confidential memo reveals US plan to provoke an invasion of Iraq

2009-06-24T07:43:00.002+08:00

A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.

The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.

Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.

The president expressed hopes that an Iraqi defector would be "brought out" to give a public presentation on Saddam's WMD or that someone might assassinate the Iraqi leader. However, Bush confirmed even without a second resolution, the US was prepared for military action. The memo said Blair told Bush he was "solidly with the president".

The five-page document, written by Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, and copied to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the UK ambassador to the UN, Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff, the chief of the defence staff, Admiral Lord Boyce, and the UK's ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer, outlines how Bush told Blair he had decided on a start date for the war.

Text taken from here.

Torture 101

2009-06-23T08:01:00.001+08:00

The Convention Against Torture (CAT) is the most important international human rights treaty that deals exclusively with torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The treaty went into effect on June 26, 1987, and was ratified by the U.S. in 1994. Countries that have signed the treaty are obligated to prohibit and prevent torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in all circumstances. The treaty also compels governments who ratified it to investigate all allegations of torture, to bring to justice the perpetrators, and to provide a remedy to victims of torture.

In this new video, Jamil Dakwar, Director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, explains more about international legal standards — including CAT — that criminalize acts of torture, as well as the United States’ obligations to seek accountability for torture.

Blinded By The Hypocrisy

2009-06-23T07:47:00.003+08:00

We lecture and threaten Iran and North Korea about the evils of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the US routinely tests our own WMD's from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California. And there will soon be another "test firing" of a Minuteman III nuclear missile from that base.

A protest is planned at the time of the next launch of a Minuteman III from Vandenberg. The target of the rocket will be the Ronald Reagan missile test range, Kwajalein atoll in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The protest will begin at the start of the launch window on midnight June 29. You can see launch details here.

The vigil will be held at the front gate of Vandenberg. The protest will continue until the rocket is launched.

The event is sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power is Space. Andrew Lichterman of the Western States Legal Foundation will be the keynote speaker at the front gate vigil.

We must become "dehypnotized" so we can see things as they are. The US uses the fear of other nuclear pipsqueak nations to get our own citizens to support massive US military buildups that are all about dominating the world.

If the US was genuine in wanting other nations to stop the development of their nuclear capability then we'd lead by example, as is required by the United Nations Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and we'd get rid of our own evil WMD.

But alas we don't do the honorable thing and the world looks at our mad ramblings and says - you are a hypocritical nation.

And they are right.

By Bruce Gagnon | Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

Israel Peace Plan

2009-06-22T08:38:00.000+08:00

Palestine : Its not only about occupation...

2009-06-19T07:47:00.003+08:00

Carter said, “Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are treated more like animals than human beings.” He added, "Never before in history has a large community been savaged by bombs and missiles and then deprived of the means to repair itself. The responsibility for this terrible human rights crime lies in Jerusalem, Cairo, Washington, and throughout the international community".

Read the full article President Carter and Citizen Activists Witness Deliberate Destruction in Gaza.

What is particularly dismaying about the position stated by Obama in Cairo - and since repeated constantly by his Middle East envoy George Mitchell - is that the United States is committed to the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." This formula is designed to sound meaningful, but these vague, campaign-style buzzwords are devoid of any reference to inalienable Palestinian rights. They were chosen by American speechwriters and public relations experts, not by Palestinians. The Obama formula implies that any other Palestinian aspirations are inherently illegitimate.

Where in international law, or UN resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of "dignity" and "opportunity?" Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all of Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a "state" instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return and the restoration of usurped rights. It is, after all, easy enough to conceive of a state that keeps Palestinians forever dispossessed, dispersed, defenseless and under threat of more expulsion and massacres by a racist, expansionist Israel.

Through history it was never leaders who defined rights, but the people who struggled for them. It is no small achievement that for a century Palestinians have resisted and survived Zionist efforts to destroy their communities physically and wipe them from the pages of history.

As long as Palestinians continue to resist in every arena and by all legitimate means, building on true international solidarity, their rights can never be extinguished. It is from such a basis of independent and indigenous strength, not from the elusive promises of a great power or the favors of a usurping occupier, that justice and peace can be achieved.

The American Empire is BANKRUPT.

2009-06-18T09:00:00.002+08:00

This week marks the end of the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. It marks the start of a terrible period of economic and political decline in the United States. And it signals the last gasp of the American imperium. That’s over. It is not coming back. And what is to come will be very, very painful.

Barack Obama, and the criminal class on Wall Street, aided by a corporate media that continues to peddle fatuous gossip and trash talk as news while we endure the greatest economic crisis in our history, may have fooled us, but the rest of the world knows we are bankrupt. And these nations are damned if they are going to continue to prop up an inflated dollar and sustain the massive federal budget deficits, swollen to over $2 trillion, which fund America’s imperial expansion in Eurasia and our system of casino capitalism. They have us by the throat. They are about to squeeze.

There are meetings being held Monday and Tuesday in Yekaterinburg, Russia, (formerly Sverdlovsk) among Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The United States, which asked to attend, was denied admittance. Watch what happens there carefully. The gathering is, in the words of economist Michael Hudson, “the most important meeting of the 21st century so far.”

It is the first formal step by our major trading partners to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If they succeed, the dollar will dramatically plummet in value, the cost of imports, including oil, will skyrocket, interest rates will climb and jobs will hemorrhage at a rate that will make the last few months look like boom times. State and federal services will be reduced or shut down for lack of funds. The United States will begin to resemble the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe. Obama, endowed by many with the qualities of a savior, will suddenly look pitiful, inept and weak. And the rage that has kindled a handful of shootings and hate crimes in the past few weeks will engulf vast segments of a disenfranchised and bewildered working and middle class. The people of this class will demand vengeance, radical change, order and moral renewal, which an array of proto-fascists, from the Christian right to the goons who disseminate hate talk on Fox News, will assure the country they will impose.

I called Hudson, who has an article in Monday’s Financial Times called “The Yekaterinburg Turning Point: De-Dollarization and the Ending of America’s Financial-Military Hegemony.” “Yekaterinburg,” Hudson writes, “may become known not only as the death place of the czars but of the American empire as well.” His article is worth reading, along with John Lanchester’s disturbing exposé of the world’s banking system, titled “It’s Finished,” which appeared in the May 28 issue of the London Review of Books.

“This means the end of the dollar,” Hudson told me. “It means China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran are forming an official financial and military area to get America out of Eurasia. The balance-of-payments deficit is mainly military in nature. Half of America’s discretionary spending is military. The deficit ends up in the hands of foreign banks, central banks. They don’t have any choice but to recycle the money to buy U.S. government debt. The Asian countries have been financing their own military encirclement. They have been forced to accept dollars that have no chance of being repaid. They are paying for America’s military aggression against them. They want to get rid of this.”

China, as Hudson points out, has already struck bilateral trade deals with Brazil and Malaysia to denominate their trade in China’s yuan rather than the dollar, pound or euro. Russia promises to begin trading in the ruble and local currencies. The governor of China’s central bank has openly called for the abandonment of the dollar as reserve currency, suggesting in its place the use of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights. What the new system will be remains unclear, but the flight from the dollar has clearly begun. The goal, in the words of the Russian president, is to build a “multipolar world order” which will break the economic and, by extension, military domination by the United States. China is frantically spending its dollar reserves to buy factories and property around the globe so it can unload its U.S. currency. This is why Aluminum Corp. of China made so many major concessions in the failed attempt to salvage its $19.5 billion alliance with the Rio Tinto mining concern in Australia. It desperately needs to shed its dollars.

“China is trying to get rid of all the dollars they can in a trash-for-resource deal,” Hudson said. “They will give the dollars to countries willing to sell off their resources since America refuses to sell any of its high-tech industries, even Unocal, to the yellow peril. It realizes these dollars are going to be worthless pretty quickly.”

The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.

There are three categories of the balance-of-payment deficits. America imports more than it exports. This is trade. Wall Street and American corporations buy up foreign companies. This is capital movement. The third and most important balance-of-payment deficit for the past 50 years has been Pentagon spending abroad. It is primarily military spending that has been responsible for the balance-of-payments deficit for the last five decades. Look at table five in the Balance of Payments Report, published in the Survey of Current Business quarterly, and check under military spending. There you can see the deficit.

To fund our permanent war economy, we have been flooding the world with dollars. The foreign recipients turn the dollars over to their central banks for local currency. The central banks then have a problem. If a central bank does not spend the money in the United States then the exchange rate against the dollar will go up. This will penalize exporters. This has allowed America to print money without restraint to buy imports and foreign companies, fund our military expansion and ensure that foreign nations like China continue to buy our treasury bonds. This cycle appears now to be over. Once the dollar cannot flood central banks and no one buys our treasury bonds, our empire collapses. The profligate spending on the military, some $1 trillion when everything is counted, will be unsustainable.

“We will have to finance our own military spending,” Hudson warned, “and the only way to do this will be to sharply cut back wage rates. The class war is back in business. Wall Street understands that. This is why it had Bush and Obama give it $10 trillion in a huge rip-off so it can have enough money to survive.”

The desperate effort to borrow our way out of financial collapse has promoted a level of state intervention unseen since World War II. It has also led us into uncharted territory.

“We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system,” Lanchester wrote in the London Review of Books. “There is no model or precedent for this, and no way to argue that it’s all right really, because under such-and-such a model of capitalism ... there is no such model. It isn’t supposed to work like this, and there is no road-map for what’s happened.”

The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.

Text taken from here.

Montazeri: ‘In This Day And Age, One Cannot Hide The Truth From The People’

2009-06-17T08:37:00.000+08:00

Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri is Iran’s mostprominent clerical dissident. He was the designated successor of Ayatollah Khomeini, but Montazeri’s criticisms of the authoritarian nature of Khomeini’s government earned him rejection by Khomeini, followed by years of house arrest.

Montazeri issued a statement today strongly supporting political and religious pluralism, and cautioning both the regime and the demonstrators against violence:

The distinction of a powerful government — Islamic or non-Islamic — is its ability to heed both similar and opposing views and, with religious compassion, which is a prerequisite of government, allow all the strata of society, whatever their political beliefs, to participate in the running of the country, instead of totally alienating them and constantly increasing their [the dissidents] number. Since this government is known as a religious government, I fear that the conduct and actions of the officials may ultimately harm the religion and undermine the people’s beliefs. [...]
I urge all the people, in particular the youth, to pursue the realization of their rights with patience and grace, to maintain calm and security in the country by virtue of sagacity and intelligence, and to refrain from aggression or any action that may harm their image and legitimate demand, and which would give an excuse to those of unfit character, who infiltrate the crowds, to create turmoil and disorder, and set people’s homes and belongings on fire, in a bid to generate an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. [...]
I advise all the officials, as well as the military and security forces, to uphold their religion and not sell their souls; they must understand that the term “officials are excused [because they are only doing their duty]” would not be accepted by the Almighty God on the Day of Judgement. They must regard the protesting youth as their own children, and refrain from violent and cruel actions. They must learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and understand that, eventually, those who oppress the people will receive their just comeuppance. In this day and age, one cannot hide the truth from the people through censorship, closures and restrictions of communication means.
In conclusion, I beseech the Almighty God to grant success to all those who serve Islam and the Muslims, and honor and glory to the dear Iranian nation.

Unlike allegations of vote fraud from American congressmen and former presidential candidates, this is the sort of statement, a respected clerical authority making an appeal for justice, tolerance, and non-violence on the basis of Islam, that could has the potential to really change the outcome on the ground. Hopefully more clerics will join with him.

Water Boarding of Abu Zubaydah and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed

2009-06-16T23:15:00.004+08:00

According to new transcripts from of a 2007 Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at Guantanamo Bay, detainee Abu Zubaydah said that his CIA captors told him after he was subjected to torture that “they had mistakenly thought he was the No. 3 man in the organization’s hierarchy and a partner of Osama bin Laden.” “They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’” Zubaydah said. Zubaydah, who was subjected to waterboarding 83 times in one month, also said that he nearly died in prison:

Abu Zubaida, a nom de guerre for Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, told the 2007 panel of military officers at the detention facility in Cuba that “doctors told me that I nearly died four times” and that he endured “months of suffering and torture” on the false premise that he was an al-Qaeda leader.

Despite President Bush’s rhetoric, Zubaydah’s torture “foiled no plots,” a point that one of his interrogators confirmed during a congressional hearing last May. The portion of the 2007 Combatant Review Status hearing transcript in which Majid Khan — an alleged associate of Khalid Sheik Mohammad — discussed his treatment at CIA black sites was “blacked out for eight consecutive pages.”

The Bush administration has also long justified its use of torture by claiming that it obtained valuable information from torturing 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Late last year, former Vice President Dick Cheney said, “Did it produce the desire results? I think it did.” He explained:

I think, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the number three man in al Qaeda, the man who planned the attacks of 9/11, provided us with a wealth of information.

But according to documents released by the Obama administration in response to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Cheney was lying. Mohammed told U.S. military officials that he gave false information to the CIA after withstanding torture:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA that concerned the location of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
“Where is he? I don’t know. Then he torture me,” Mohammed said. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”

The torture of Mohammed, who we know was waterboarded 183 times in one month, “underscores the unreliability of statements obtained by torture.”

In an interview with Fox News’ Brit Hume earlier this year, President Bush admitted that he personally authorized the torture of Mohammed. He said he personally asked “what tools” were available to use on him, and sought legal approval for waterboarding him:

BUSH: One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made.

Watch it:

Obama’s Cairo Speech: A Rhetorical Shift in US Imperialism

2009-06-14T07:41:00.004+08:00

Barack Obama’s Cairo speech heralds a shift from the Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, but not from the long-term aims of the U.S. empire.

The shift away from Islamophobic rhetoric can be underlined as follows:

Rejecting the “clash of civilizations” argument, Obama emphasized the shared common history and common aspirations of the East and West. Whereas the “clash” discourse sees the West and the world of Islam as mutually exclusive and polar opposites, Obama emphasized “common principles.” He spoke of “civilization’s debt to Islam” because it “pav[ed] the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment,” and acknowledged the contributions made by Muslims to the development of science, medicine, navigation, architecture, calligraphy and music.
Obama then took on many of the myths that became commonplace after 9/11. Breaking with the notion that Islam is inherently violent, Obama emphasized, several times, Islam’s history of tolerance. He quoted from the Koran to show that Islam does not accept violence against innocent people, and pointed to the tolerance shown by Muslims in Spain during the violent period of the Christian Inquisition.
He observed that Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey and Pakistan—all Muslim-majority states—had elected women to leadership roles and added that “the struggle for women’s equality continues in many aspects of American life.” He thus cast aside the notion that the enlightened West inherently recognizes women’s rights.
He rejected the widely held view that women who wear the veil are “less equal,” stating that this should be a woman’s choice. And he argued against actions taken by Western nations to dictate what Muslim women should wear, stating: “We cannot disguise hostility towards any religion behind the pretence of liberalism.”
Obama subtly acknowledged the U.S.’s double standards. He admitted that the U.S. had acted contrary to its “ideals” by instituting torture. He also noted that one nation should not pick and choose who should have nuclear weapons, a reference to the U.S.’s opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions and its lack of criticism of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
He further admitted to the U.S. role in the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, and to the ways that colonialism and the Cold War thwarted aspirations in other parts of the world. Marking a shift from the traditional one-sided emphasis on Israel’s problems, he described the Palestinians as a dispossessed people.

Yet as significant as these points are in challenging the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric under the Bush regime, Obama’s policy in the Middle East and South Asia does not signal a break with the policies of previous administrations. While there are minor points of difference with the Bush administration, Obama’s foreign policy stays within the broader framework of US imperial aims in the region.

In short, the U.S., like all empires, has always sought to disguise its real aims behind fine-sounding phrases and goals. While Obama’s speech is a step forward in that it eschews the hate-filled Islamophobic rhetoric of the Bush regime, it does little for the real Muslims and Arabs who continue to face discrimination, harassment, rendition, torture, war and occupation.

Text taken from here.

Does it pays for war in Afghanistan? Message to OBAMA

2009-06-13T08:39:00.003+08:00

EXCLUSIVE: Air Raid Victim Tells Obama to Leave Afghanistan at Once:

EXCLUSIVE: Afghan Refugee Describes Horror of US Bombings

The Darfur Deception

2009-06-11T20:12:00.001+08:00

by Muhammad Idrees Ahmad / June 10th, 2009

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror by Mahmood Mamdani, Verso, 2009.

"Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror" by Mahmood Mamdani

In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the fire-bombings of Japan during WWII, saying that “if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.

"Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.

2009-06-10T08:24:00.002+08:00

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a report confirming that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel and the West Bank to conduct this study. The resulting 300-page report, titled "Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law," represents 15 months of research and constitutes an exhaustive review of Israel's practices in the OPT according to definitions of colonialism and apartheid provided by international law. The project was suggested originally by the January 2007 report by eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, when he indicated that Israeli practices had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid.

Regarding colonialism, the team found that Israel's policy and practices violate the prohibition on colonialism which the international community developed in the 1960s in response to the great decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia. Israel's policy is demonstrably to fragment the West Bank and annex part of it permanently to Israel, which is the hallmark of colonialism. Israel has appropriated land and water in the OPT, merged the Palestinian economy with Israel's economy, and imposed a system of domination over Palestinians to ensure their subjugation to these measures. Through these measures, Israel has denied the indigenous population the right to self-determination and indicated clear intention to assume sovereignty over portions of its land and natural resources. Permanent annexation of territory in this fashion is the hallmark of colonialism.

Regarding apartheid, the team found that Israel's laws and policies in the OPT fit the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Israeli law conveys privileges to Jewish settlers and disadvantages Palestinians in the same territory on the basis of their respective identities, which function in this case as racialized identities in the sense provided by international law. Israel's practices are corollary to five of the six "inhuman acts" listed by the Convention. A policy of apartheid is especially indicated by Israel's demarcation of geographic "reserves" in the West Bank, to which Palestinian residence is confined and which Palestinians cannot leave without a permit. The system is very similar to the policy of "Grand Apartheid" in Apartheid South Africa, in which black South Africans were confined to black Homelands delineated by the South African government, while white South Africans enjoyed freedom of movement and full civil rights in the rest of the country.

The full report here ( 3 Mb Pdf)

What kind of Palestinian state will Israel allow to come into being?

2009-06-08T20:33:00.004+08:00

Manchester, England. 6th June 2008. Israeli historian Ilan Pappé speaks at a rally sponsored by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on the anniversary of al Nakba (the catastrophe). The catastrophe was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians carried out by the Zionists to establish the state of Isreal in 1948. Pappé exposed the suppressed history of this episode in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Pappé was formerly an academic at Haifa University. He now teaches at Exeter University in England.

Watch the clip.

No Sovereign Palestinian state in the real meaning of a state will come ever for Palestinians within the existing power structure in the Middle East.

The 1967 designed strategy is manifested in the Likud – Platform that stated,

“The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river. The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology, their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel’s existence, security and national needs."

To realize the architected prison, terms are mixed up. Terrorist is used instead of resistant; moderates instead of collaborators and subordinates and economic enticements instead of sovereignty and political aspiration. Collusive projects to maintain the status quo of the political landscape go on. The New-Middle East project that aimed at exterminating the resistance movement is one of them.

The only legitimate Palestinian authority and peace partner, in the eyes of the Israeli governments, is the one who accepts to act as a security contractor or a “watchdog” of their own people to control resistance in all forms under pretexts of fighting violence and terrorism and promoting a culture of “moderation”. The Likud - in their platform, demand blatantly that ‘The Palestinian Authority must wage a systematic war on the terror organizations and their infrastructure. The PA must not only intensify its efforts to prevent attacks, but act with determination to prevent potential terrorist acts by dismantling the terrorist infrastructure that has developed and expanded in PA areas since the Oslo accords’. Between the lines, that denotes the resistance to occupation in all sorts.

What does matter as a political end for Israel, the US and their allies is to realize the security of the Israeli state according to the sick mindset of Zionists that perceives the mere existence of Palestinians as a threat.

US rhetoric is full of devious political Language. How can you keep silent and rationalize the political act of blockade of 1.5 million people in Gaza?

Gilad Atzmon - For God's sake, Let them be Sad

2009-06-03T23:44:00.002+08:00

As part of their racist campaign against the indigenous Palestinians, Israeli lawmakers are now insisting upon making the commemoration of the Nakba illegal. Recently a number of Israeli cabinet and Knesset Members proposed a "draft law" that would criminalize the remembrance of 1948 Palestinian holocaust (Nakba) by Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Interestingly enough, the Jewish state that sets its raison d'être around the remembrance of Jewish suffering is attempting to ban Palestinians from doing exactly the same with their own.

As we know, Israel had wiped out every possible remnant of Palestinian existence on the ground. Palestinian villages, towns, orchards, fields and cultural assets had been erased soon after 1948. Currently, the Israeli lawmakers are taking the war against the Palestinian heritage one step further. It is not just a physical expulsion and erasure of facts on the ground, it is not just racially motivated ethnic cleansing, starvation, land confiscation, house demolition, bombing schools or spreading white phosphorous over populated neighbourhoods, from now on, Israel wants to invade the Palestinian mind. Israeli Knesset members insist upon eradicating the Palestinian collective memory. At least formally, they are trying to ban the right to remember.

Zionism and liberal Jewish thought have very little to do with humanism, ethics or universalism. If anything, Zionism and humanism are opposing concepts for the simple reason that Zionism is a racially orientated tribal philosophy and humanism aims at the universal.

Read further here.

How Important is Cheney's Admission that There was NEVER Any Evidence Linking Iraq and 9/11?

2009-06-03T23:32:00.002+08:00

Cheney said in an interview on Fox News:

"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9-11, there was never any evidence to prove that," he told the Fox host. "There was "some reporting early on ... but that was never borne out... [President] George [Bush] ... did say and did testify that there was an ongoing relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq, but no proof that Iraq was involved in 9-11."

How important is Cheney's admission?

Well, 5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

Moreover, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed,Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Moreover, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this, this, this and this.

Article taken from here.

Auschwitz survivor: "I can identify with Palestinian youth"

2009-06-03T23:22:00.003+08:00

What motivated you to write your book, The End of Judaism?

In the past, the European media have written extensively about extreme right-wing politicians like Joerg Haider in Austria and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. But when Ariel Sharon was elected [prime minister] in Israel in 2001, the media remained silent. But in the 1980s I understood the deeply fascist thinking of these politicians. With the book I wanted to distance myself from this. I was raised in Judaism with the equality of relationships among human beings as a core value. I only learned about nationalist Judaism when I heard settlers defend their harassment of Palestinians in interviews. When a publisher asked me to write about my past, I decided to write this book, in a way, to deal with my past. People of one group who dehumanize people who belong to another group can do this, because they either have learned to do so from their parents, or they have been brainwashed by their political leaders. This has happened for decades in Israel in that they manipulate the Holocaust for their political aims. In the long-run the country is destructing itself this way by inducing their Jewish citizens to become paranoid. In 2005 [then Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon illustrated this by saying in the Knesset [the Israeli parliament], we know we cannot trust anyone, we only can trust ourselves. This is the shortest possible definition of somebody who suffers from clinical paranoia. One of the major annoyances in my life is that Israel by means of trickery calls itself a Jewish state, while in fact it is Zionist. It wants the maximum territory with a minimum number of Palestinians. I have four Jewish grandparents. I am an atheist. I share the Jewish socio-cultural inheritance and I have learned about Jewish ethics. I don't wish to be represented by a Zionist state. They have no idea about the Holocaust. They use the Holocaust to implant paranoia in their children.

Bush's Shocking Biblical Prophecy Emerges: God Wants to "Erase" Mid-East Enemies "Before a New Age Begins"

2009-05-26T07:44:00.002+08:00

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elyse Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice.Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on "a mission from God" in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush's reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam's Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

Text taken from here.

Zionist in Action

2009-05-26T07:41:00.000+08:00

The Right To Return NOT The Right To Manage

2009-05-24T07:36:00.002+08:00

Today, May 15th marks the 61st anniversary of the Nakba, or Exile of Palestinians from their homes, villages and farms: driven out by the raging Jewish terrorist groups in their mission to establish the State of Israel. 45 years also passed since the establishment of the PLO as the Palestinian Liberation Organization dedicated to the liberation of Palestine from Zionists. Rather than liberation and the realization of the Right of Return, the PLO and its leaders of Arafat, Abbas and Qurai exchange the "Right of Return" for the "Right to Manage" the Jewish Occupation of what remained of historic Palestine, of course minus Jerusalem, minus all the land taken for Jewish Settlements and Jewish Roads and the Apartheid Wall and the more than 615 Israeli Security Checkpoints. 15 years passed since the signing of Oslo and the present Palestinian leadership continues to negotiate, failing at every step, failing to even achieve minor relief for the millions of Palestinians, such as the removal of one single checkpoint or allowing a dying mother to pass through to go to a hospital

Israel Regime : The Liar

2009-05-24T06:52:00.001+08:00

The Israeli Regime has been selling nothing but lies and delusions to the its people, as well as the rest of the world.

Policy Differences or High Crimes?

2009-05-23T09:03:00.000+08:00

Stop the Press! This is what Israeli Democracy Looks Like

2009-05-20T23:32:00.002+08:00

Controlling the message is vital for Israel and its apologists because truth, morality, and justice are inherently anathema to Zionism. It is through this control that, for decades now, the word Palestinian has been nearly synonymous with the word terrorist, and therefore any resistance to colonialism, imperialism, military occupation, and economic hegemony is deemed irrational, unprovoked, inhuman terrorism. By controlling this message, the Zionist propagandists are able to pull off an astounding slight of hand on reality: the oppressed becomes the oppressor, the culprit becomes the victim, illegal colonization is cultural liberation, aggressive expansion is righteous reclamation, genocide is self-defense, apartheid is security, and ethnic cleansing is peace.

Torture Continues under Obama

2009-05-20T08:22:00.003+08:00

by Washington's Blog

While torture under the Bush administration was horrible, at least it has stopped. Right? Wrong. Jeremy Scahill (the reporter who broke most of the stories on Blackwater) says that a military police unit at Guantanamo regularly brutalizes unarmed prisoners, including gang-beating them, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes and dousing them with chemicals. Specifically, whenever there is "disobedience" by the detainees - which can include praying, or having 2 styrofoam cups in their cell instead of 1, or refusing medication or failing to immediately respond when spoken to - the "Immediate Reaction Force" (IRF) is sent in. Scahill describes what happens next: When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to "Darth Vader" suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg... [The IRF teams then mete out brutal punishment, including] gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner's head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them -- sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end... [One prisoner was sprayed directly in the eyes with mace and gouged in the eyes and was then refused medical treatment, which resulted in permanent blindness in one eye. He also endured a "sexual attack". Another prisoner had a third prisoner's feces spread on him.] There was also torture using water: The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Scahill says that these are not "a few bad apples": The IRF teams "were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department," says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force "was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody," he says. "They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify" the beatings. Scahill's allegations are being confirmed by the Spanish torture investigation. Indeed: "Up to 15 people attempted to commit suicide at Camp Delta due to the abuses of the IRF officials," according to the Spanish investigation. One particular incident shows how brutal the IRF interrogators are: In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker [an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran] was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantánamo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell out the code word "red" if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop. According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described: They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he -- the same individual -- reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was 'red.' … That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: 'I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' Sgt. Baker said his head was slammed once more, and after groaning "I'm a U.S. soldier" one more time, "I heard them say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa,' you know, like … he was telling the other guy to stop." According to CBS: Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. "I said, 'Go get the tape,' " recalls Baker. " 'They've got a tape. Go get the tape.' My squad leader went to get the tape." Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, "There is no tape." The New York Times later reported that the military "says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident." Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day. "This was just one typical incident, and Baker was recognizable as an American," says Horton. "But it gives a good flavor of what the Gitmo detainees went through, which was generally worse." If they did that to a U.S. soldier during a training exercise, one who was given a special code word to have the interrogation stop, what they did to actual detainees had to have been much worse. The torture by IRF teams is continuing under the Obama administration. In fact, it is actually getting worse: The Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled "Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law," which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting "a ramping up in abuse" since Obama was elected.

Prosecute sins of Bush-Cheney era

2009-05-20T08:11:00.002+08:00

By Jack Cafferty, Currently employed by CNN but how long can that last?

(CNN) -- It doesn't go away by itself. Watergate "went away" when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace and left town never to be heard from in an official capacity again.

The Bush presidency is thankfully over...but the damage he and Dick Cheney did continues to press on the nerve of the American people like an impacted wisdom tooth. And until the questions surrounding arguably the most arrogant and perhaps most corrupt administration in our history are addressed, the pain won't go away.

From Nancy ("Impeachment is off the table") Pelosi to President Barack ("I want to look forward, not backward") Obama, the country is being poorly served by their Democratic government. And on this subject President Obama is dead wrong.

George W. Bush and his accomplices damaged this country like it's never been damaged before. And it's not just the phony war in Iraq or the torture memos that justified waterboarding. It's millions of missing emails and the constant use of executive privilege and signing statements.

It's the secretive meetings with Enron and other energy executives and the wholesale firing of federal prosecutors. It's trying to get the president's personal attorney seated on the Supreme Court and that despicable Alberto Gonzales sitting in front of congressional investigators whining, "I don't remember, I don't know, I...etc."

It's the domestic eavesdropping in violation of the FISA Court, the rendition prisons, and the lying. It's looking the other way while the City of New Orleans drowned and its people were left to fend for themselves.

It's the violations of the Geneva Conventions, the soiling of our international reputation and the shredding of the U.S. Constitution. It's the handing over of $700 billion to the Wall Street fat cats last fall, no questions asked. Where is that money? What was it used for?

It's the no-bid contracts to firms like Halliburton and Blackwater and the shoddy construction and lack of oversight of reconstruction in Iraq that cost American taxpayers untold billions.

If the Republicans were serious about restoring their reputation, they would join the call for a special prosecutor to be appointed so that at long last justice can be done.

It's too late for George W. Bush to resign the presidency. But it's not too late to put the people responsible for this national disgrace in prison.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jack Cafferty.

Who's Afraid of the CIA?

2009-05-19T20:20:00.000+08:00

Int'l study: Israeli control in occupied territories 'is a breach of the prohibition of apartheid'

2009-05-19T08:35:00.002+08:00

What follows are some of the highlights of the Executive Summary, but first a few observations. Describing Israel or Israeli policies in terms of apartheid has become more common in recent times, but has also provoked a strong backlash. It is interesting to note, therefore, that this study is a measured assessment written by legal experts on the specific ways in which Israel's policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) can be considered to be 'colonialism' and/or 'apartheid', as defined by international law. It is not, quite clearly and openly, saying Israel=South Africa.

The new report was carried out by the Middle East Project of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. The Middle East Project is:

an independent two year project of the HSRC to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy. Its funding was provided by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the Department of Foreign Affairs and the concerned international community.

Read further here.

Israel's Guantanamo Bay

2009-05-19T08:25:00.002+08:00

UN watchdog demands access to Israel's secret prisons

The United Nation's watchdog on torture has criticized Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as "Israel's Guantanamo Bay," and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating.

In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the camp, officially referred to as "Facility 1391," and allow access to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Findings from Israeli human rights groups show that the prison has in the past been used to hold Arab and Muslim prisoners, including Palestinians, and that routine torture and physical abuse were carried out by interrogators.

The UN committee's panel of 10 independent experts also found credible the submissions from Israeli groups that Palestinian detainees are systematically tortured despite the banning of such practices by the Israeli high court in 1999.

The existence of Facility 1391 came to light in 2002, when Palestinians were detained there for the first time during Israel's reinvasion of the West Bank.

61 years of Nakba, 418 Palestinian villages destroyed

2009-05-17T08:03:00.002+08:00

Palestinians remember and they are not defeated. They will not renounce their rights and their land. The land, the culture is their life, and no one has the right to deny it to them. One day, Palestinian wounds will heal, but until then, let no one forget. Let everyone bear witness to what the Israeli Jews and their supporters did to the Palestinian people.

Watch the clip.

This is not a Hollywood or Bollywood movie!

2009-05-17T07:57:00.003+08:00

Israel siege kills baby aged 2.

It was minutes or rather seconds between life and death for Feras. This baby, didn't fight Israelis, never shot at them, nor fired a rocket rather, his only fault was being, "a child born in Gaza".

Legality & Legitimacy of Palestine Arm Struggle

2009-05-17T07:45:00.003+08:00

“The (Israeli) occupation of (Palestine) is illegal and cannot be made legal. All that has derived from (it) is illegal and illegitimate and cannot gain legitimacy. The facts are incontrovertible. What are the consequences?”

“Peace, stability and democracy in (Palestine) are impossible under occupation. Foreign occupation is opposed by nature to the interests of the occupied people, as proven” by:

the forced diaspora;
many others internally displaced or in refugee camps for decades;
harsh military subjugation;
a regimented matrix of control;
the genocidal Gaza siege;
state-sponsored mass incarceration, violence, and torture;
the flaunting of international law and dozens of UN resolutions;
targeted assassinations;
the many tens of thousands of Palestinians killed, injured, or otherwise grievously harmed;
massive land theft and home demolitions;
the lack of judicial redress;
denying all rights to non-Jews; and
a decades-long reign of terror against defenseless Palestinian civilians.

Western propaganda tries to justify the unjustifiable, vilify ordinary people, call the legitimate government “terrorist,” rationalize savage attacks as self-defense, reject the rights of the occupied, and deny their self-determination.

“In (Palestine, people) resist the occupation by all means (including armed struggle), in accordance with international law. “The Commission on Human Rights has routinely reaffirmed” it. So have numerous General Assembly resolutions. The March 1987 Geneva Declaration on Terrorism states:

“Terrorism originates from the statist system of structural violence and domination that denies the right of self-determination to peoples….that inflicts a gross and consistent pattern of violations of fundamental human rights….or that perpetuates military aggression and overt or covert intervention directed against the territorial integrity or political independence of other states,” such as Palestine.

The UN General Assembly has “repeatedly recognized” the rights of “peoples who are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination (to) have the right to use force to accomplish their objectives within the framework of international humanitarian law.”

It also recognizes the legitimacy of self-determination seeking national liberation movements and their right to strive for and receive appropriate support for their struggle. Further, under the UN Charter’s Article 51, “individual or collective self-defense (shall not be “impair(ed) to respond against) an armed attack.”

In other words, armed force is a legitimate form of self-defense as distinguished from “acts of international terrorism,” especially by one state against another or any group, organization, or individual. Israel refuses to accept this. It continues an illegal occupation, calls armed resistance “terrorism,” and imposes its will oppressively and illegally.

Read further The Russell Tribunal on Palestine.

Joseph, the fifteen-month-old Palestinian Prisoner

2009-05-13T07:21:00.003+08:00

Fatima pleaded to meet her eight children to a lawyer during his visit to the prison, she suffers like all prisoners from the Gaza Strip, and she is disappointed of the lack of interested human rights organizations in Palestinian prisoners’ suffering. She said that the prisoners lack many basic needs, and that the Israeli prison administration refuse to provide them with the essentials, besides preventing them from gaining access to such needs sent to them by their families, besides being denied visits, she herself has not seen any member of her family for more than 20 months. Fatima was distressed because the prison administration confiscates the prisoner’s letters as well which are considered the only means of communication with their families considering the fact that the family visits are banned.

Fatima managed to send only one letter to her family when she was first detained: “the first cell they put me in is more like a grave under the ground, the sewage are overflowing, attracting lots of insects and the smell stinks. I developed skin infections and pimples all over my head, the place are a health hazard’ wrote Fatima.

Regarding the treatment she was receiving by the Israeli female prison wardens she wrote ‘the female soldiers used to ask me …since when I became a practicing Muslim, I told them since a long time when I was a little girl because I was raised in a practicing family…they used to shout in my face and call me a terrorist’ she wrote. ‘They tried to force me to miscarriage by offering me different medicines I refused to take, I told them babies are a blessing from God’ she explained in her letter.

Fatima and other Palestinian women prisoners have sent dozens of letters through the Red Cross to their families but none was delivered to their families they said, and they did not receive any letters sent to them by their families either, such procedures left the Palestinian women isolated totally suffering emotional distress. Such isolation was described by the prisoners as a tragedy. But Fatima’s tragedy is greater than any of the other women because her baby “Joseph” suffers the lack of many essentials that she could not provide him with in such state of total isolation, besides the fact that he was deprived of a normal life or enjoy seeing his father or any of his brothers being brought up in the most unusual way a child can be brought up in.

Ra'fat Hamduna Director of the Centre for Studies of prisoners called upon the authorities of the prisons and the legal system to facilitate a meeting between Fatima and her children, and is pressuring the occupation authorities to free her and her baby "Joseph", and ensure the essential needs of the prisoners must be met, especially providing them with the clothing needed, but until the writing of this article no accomplishments were made in this respect, and baby Joseph is still in prison with no contact of other children. I am worried, what kind of vocabulary he will pick up in prison. He never heard a bird, or giggles of other children, he is only used to hearing the doors of the cells slammed close.

Read further here.

Roxana Saberi's plight and American media propaganda

2009-05-13T06:59:00.002+08:00

An Iranian appeals court this morning announced that it was reducing the sentence and ordering the immediate release of Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, who was convicted by an Iranian court last month of spying for the U.S. and sentenced to eight years in prison. Saberi's imprisonment in January became a cause célèbre among American journalists, who -- along with the U.S. Government -- rallied to demand her release. Within minutes of the announcement, several of them -- including ABC News' Jake Tapper, Time's Karen Tumulty, The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder -- posted celebratory notices of Saberi's release.

Saberi's release is good news, as her conviction occurred as part ofextremely dubious charges and unreliable judicial procedures in Iran. And, as Ambinder suggested, her release most likely is a positive by-product of the commendable (though far from perfect) change in tone towards Iran specifically and the Muslim world generally from the Obama administration. But imprisoning journalists -- without charges or trials of any kind -- was and continues to be a staple of America's "war on terror," and that has provoked virtually no objections from America's journalists who, notably, instead seized on Saberi's plight in Iran to demonstrate their claimed commitment to defending persecuted journalists.

Beginning in 2001, the U.S. held Al Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj forsix years in Guantanamo with no trial of any kind, and spent most of that time interrogating him not about Terrorism, but about Al Jazeera. For virtually the entire time, the due-process-less, six-year-long imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. produced almost no coverage -- let alone any outcry -- from America's establishment media, other thansome columns by Nicholas Kristof (though, for years, al-Haj's imprisonment was a major media story in the Muslim world). As Kristof noted when al-Haj was finally released in 2007: "there was never any real evidence that Sami was anything but a journalist"; "the interrogators quickly gave up on asking him substantive questions" and "instead, they asked him to spy on Al-Jazeera if he was released;" and "American officials, by imprisoning an Al-Jazeera journalist without charges or meaningful evidence, have done far more to damage American interests in the Muslim world than anything Sami could ever have done."

In Iraq, we imprisoned Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein -- part of AP's Pulitzer Prize-winning war coverage -- for almost two years with no charges of any kind, after Hussein's photographs from the Anbar province directly contradicted Bush administration claims about the state of affairs there. And that behavior was far from aberrational for the U.S., as the Committee to Protect Journalists -- which led the effort to free Saberi -- documented:

Hussein’s detention is not an isolated incident. Over the last three years, dozens of journalists—mostly Iraqis—have been detained by U.S. troops, according to CPJ research. While most have been released after short periods, in at least eight cases documented by CPJ Iraqi journalists have been held by U.S. forces for weeks or months without charge or conviction. In one highly publicized case, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, a freelance cameraman working for CBS, was detained after being wounded by U.S. military fire as he filmed clashes in Mosul in northern Iraq on April 5, 2005. U.S. military officials claimed footage in his camera led them to suspect Hussein had prior knowledge of attacks on coalition forces. In April 2006, a year after his arrest, Hussein was freed after an Iraqi criminal court, citing a lack of evidence, acquitted him of collaborating with insurgents.

Right now -- as the American press corps celebrates itself for demanding Saberi's release in Iran -- the U.S. continues to imprison Ibrahim Jassam, a freelance photographer for Reuters, even though an Iraqi court last December -- more than five months ago -- found that there was no evidence to justify his detention and ordered him released. The U.S. -- over the objections of the CPJ, Reporters Without Borders and Reuters -- refused to recognize the validity of that Iraqi court order and announced it would continue to keep him imprisoned.

Read more the article by Glenn Greenwald here.

Q&A: The truth about Gaza

2009-05-10T00:17:00.002+08:00

Myth: Israel is a law-abiding nation seeking to live in peace with its neighbours.

The truth: In 1948, shortly after the embryonic UN gave 56% of Palestine to the largely immigrant, minority Jewish population, the Zionist forces drove out most of the indigenous Palestinians and took 78% of the land. They razed to the ground over 400 Palestinian villages, so that the refugees could not return. In 1967 they occupied the rest of Palestine, including Gaza, and began to settle their citizens in these areas, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In 2002 they began the construction of the 400mile long barrier, largely on Palestinian land, using it to take land and water resources from what is left of the West Bank. The centres of population in the West Bank have been isolated into ghetto-like enclaves, surrounded by the Israeli army and illegal settlements. Many methods are being used to drive Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed, in contravention of international law.

Israel is in violation of over 60 UN Resolutions, which call for the return of refugees, withdrawal of the settlers, dismantling of the wall and a lifting of the siege on Gaza.

Myth: Israel is threatened by its Arab neighbours

The truth: Egypt and Jordan have diplomatic relations and trade agreements with Israel. Lebanon and Syria do not, as Israel still occupies part of their territory. Nevertheless, on several occasions the Arab League has offered Israel full normalisation in return for a viable Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Israel has refused.

Myth: Israel withdrew its settlers and the army from Gaza in 2005, but the Palestinians rejected this peace offering and simply resorted to more violence.

The truth: Israel did withdraw 8000 settlers from Gaza, after 38 years of occupation — but immediately sent 30,000 more to the illegal settlements in the West Bank (which now has over 450,000 settlers).

At the same time, it placed extremely tight restrictions on all entry points to the Gaza Strip, making it almost impossible for the local economy to function. From 2005–7 the Israeli army killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children. From 2005–2008, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire.

Myth: Israel has for many years suffered terribly from thousands of missiles fired from North Gaza.

The truth: The first homemade Qassam missile was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001; the first fatality occurred in March 2007.

Up to November 2008 13 Israelis were killed by Qassam rockets. By contrast, between September 2000 and the end of November 2008 nearly 5000 Palestinians were killed, more than half of them in Gaza. The rockets have in the last year reached more distant targets, but in military terms they are ineffectual, compared to the fire-power of the US F-16s, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and naval gunships with which Israel is equipped.

Hamas say the missiles are in retaliation not only for the many deaths Israel has caused both in Gaza and the West Bank, but also for the continued occupation and expropriation of land (see above). They say they hope to end the occupation in this way, much as Israel was forced to end the occupation of South Lebanon by Hizbollah.

Myth: Hamas broke the recent ceasefire, prompting Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza.

The truth: In November 2008, during the six-month ceasefire, the Israeli army killed 14 Palestinians and tightened the siege on Gaza even more. In retaliation, Qassam rockets were fired on the Negev, killing no-one.

Israeli spokesmen have freely admitted that the assaults on Gaza were planned eight months ago — before the ceasefire. They clearly went into the ceasefire agreement without the intention of respecting it.

Myth: Hamas is an illegal terrorist organisation bent on Israel’s destruction. There is no possibility of Israel negotiating with them.

The truth: Hamas is a nationalist, Islamist organisation consisting of a political party, with a military wing, which for years was largely responsible for running hospitals and schools in Gaza, in a situation of military occupation. Even secular Palestinians saw them as efficient and non-corrupt.

When they came to power they offered Israel a ten-year truce, during which time negotiations could take place. Israel rejected this, and continued to quote earlier Hamas manifestos which called for the return of Palestinian land and property.

Myth: Hamas took over Gaza in a coup in June 2007, ousting the rightful government headed by Mahmoud Abbas.

The truth: Hamas won the 2006 general elections, which international observers considered free and fair, and formed a unity government in which MPs from Fatah and other parties were offered ministerial posts. However, in June 2006 Israeli troops abducted dozens of Hamas ministers and parliamentarians and put them in jail, while the US and other western governments joined Israel in refusing to recognise or speak to Hamas.

Israel and the US encouraged Fatah to stage a coup in Gaza, but Hamas pre-empted this in June 2007. Mahmoud Abbas is the elected President of the Palestinian people, but his party, Fatah, does not have a mandate.

Myth: Israel always tries to minimise civilian casualties — it is targeting only Hamas.

The truth: Israel has the most technically advanced weaponry in the world, with the exception of the US. Its computerised drone planes (which it sells to the UK) send back extremely detailed information about every square foot of the Gaza Strip. And yet hundreds of civilians have been killed and wounded, with the one power plant, ambulances, schools and hospitals being hit.

Myth: Any nation faced with missile or bomb attacks would respond with massive fire power.

The truth: For years Britain experienced terrorist attacks by the IRA, with many more fatalities than Israel has suffered. It never resorted to bombing civilian targets and infrastructure, but succeeded through patient negotiation.

Myth: Hamas uses the citizens of Gaza as ‘human shields’.

The truth: Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth, with 1.5 million inhabitants living in an area about 25 miles long and five miles wide. There are no caves or forests to hide in or operate from — only urban areas..

Myth: Israel has the welfare of the people of Gaza at heart

The truth: Since June 2007 Israel has sealed off the Gaza Strip from the outside world, so that it is almost impossible to get in or out, or to import or export goods. Patients used to be able to leave Gaza to seek medical treatment elsewhere, but in the last year Israel has denied permits to most patients and dozens have died.

Myth: The people of Gaza are not really suffering — this is exaggerated for propaganda purposes.

The truth: John Ging, director of the UN agency for refugees in Gaza, Professor Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories and representatives of Oxfam and other international aid organisations reacted angrily to Israel’s claims. For years they have been monitoring the situation and calling attention to the desperate and deteriorating plight of the people of Gaza.

Myth: People who criticise Israel are anti-Semitic.

The truth: To be anti-Semitic is to be racist towards Jews. But many Jews, and even Israelis, are highly critical of Israel’s policies. The policies of ethnic cleansing and seizure of land are rooted in Zionism, or the belief that Jews have exclusive rights to Palestine. To be anti-Zionist is to oppose this ideology and these policies. But Israel uses the anti-Semitism argument to intimidate people into silence.

Text taken with thanks to Palestine Solidarity Campaign: www.palestinecampaign.org

Ban Ki-moon's moral failure

2009-05-10T00:00:00.002+08:00

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference in Gaza City outside the UN headquarters, still smoldering from the Israeli bombardment of the facility, 20 January 2009.

Late last week, according to the BBC Arabic news website, a report was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon about the scale of destruction Israel inflicted on UN installations in Gaza. This was also mentioned on a BBC news bulletin on 1 May, but I could find little trace of this story anywhere else.

The brief news item stated that the UN report contained secret information supplied by Israel about an incident in which more than 40 Palestinian civilians were massacred when Israeli shells fell "outside" a UN school where many Palestinians were taking shelter. The secretary-general is reportedly considering how much of the information he can release without revealing the information supplied by Israel, the news item said, adding that the UN report concluded that Hamas fighters were not inside UN buildings but close to them.

Commenting on the report, the BBC said that it was informed by a diplomatic source, that the United States has informed Ban's office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks; in other words (mine, in fact) to Israel.

Read further here.

Karl Rove's Definition Of "Torture"

2009-05-09T23:50:00.002+08:00

It is worth remembering given the current state of the debate. Karl Rove has been aggressively arguing that nothing that the Bush administration did could be construed as torture, not even the Khmer Rouge technique of water-boarding, let alone the long-term sleep deprivation, stress positions, hypothermia, forced nudity, hooding, dietary manipulation, sensory deprivation and all the other "EIT"s his president authorized. And yet here was have an op-ed written last year in which the word "torture" is used quite clearly and defined quite precisely:

Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours. The torture so badly busted up his shoulders that to this day Mr. McCain can't raise his arms over his head.

This is called a "stress position." You can see an example of this CIA-approved, presidentially-authorized technique above (on a rare instance of it being photographed by a US soldier following orders to soften up detainees by forcing their limbs into painful positions for hours on end). Karl Rove needs to be asked on the record if he believes that John McCain is exaggerating when he says he was "tortured," and if he believes that McCain's interrogators were war criminals, and whether the confession McCain gave was true. At some point, these blatant double standards need at least to be explained - whether they are sustained by Karl Rove, Nancy Pelosi, or the New York Times. Because the issue goes to the heart of whether the US was governed by war criminals for seven years.

True Lies

2009-05-06T22:53:00.007+08:00

After the Shoah (The Holocaust), Jews had an opportunity to transform their fate, to turn a new page. They could even explore collectively the notion of forgiveness and mercy. A few Jewish intellectuals insisted that Jews must locate themselves at the forefront of the battle against racism and oppression. As it happened, it took just six decades for the Jewish national state to establish its primacy as the ultimate racist nation state that employs the ultimate sadistic ruthless oppressive tactics.

”Don’t frighten her,” says Churchill.

Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children, that was written and performed in the light of the last Israeli military devastating campaign in Gaza, turns the floodlights on the confusion within Jewish identity.

On the face of it, the short play is an historical journey form victimhood into aggression. In just nine minutes we are joining an expedition that departs in the horror of the Shoah:

“Don’t tell her they’ll kill her..
Tell her it’s important to be quiet..
Tell her to curl up as if she’s in bed..”
and eventually ends up with the Israelis taking the role of the Nazis

“Tell her they (the Palestinians) are animals
living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out,
….tell her I look at one of their children covered in
blood and what do I feel? Tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her…”

As much as Churchill’s reading of Jewish’s recent history as a transformation from innocence into ruthless barbarism is not a revelation, the message is delivered in a rather profound and sensitive manner.

Watch the clip.

Text taken from Gilad Atzmon - From Victimhood to Aggression: Jewish Identity in the light of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children.

Instead Churchill should...

Tell her she should reject discrimination and call for equal rights for all when she grows up… No… do not tell her that now… discrimination is a big word… just tell her every human being is special and we are all equal, you might have to tell her why some people are more equal than others. Tell her if the killing stops we will enjoy art, music, and literature… don't tell her that, just tell her that she will play outside as much as she wants, and she can play with all the children.

Tell her to demand an apology of the Israeli state to every mother who lost a child. No… don't… just tell her no more children are going to be killed.

Israeli proxy gets busy to silence Americans

2009-05-05T22:43:00.002+08:00

An American academic is to be prosecuted for drawing parallels between the plight of Gazans and that of the Jews who suffered under Nazi rule.

Jewish Sociology and Global Studies Professor William Robinson of the University of Santa Barbara in California sent the electronic post entitled 'Parallel photos of Nazis and Israelis' to 80 students in his class,Ynet reported on Thursday.

The message, mailed during Operation Cast Lead, enclosed 25 photos of Nazi victims and equated their predicament with that of the war-battered Palestinians.

The email also included an essay that stated, "Gaza in Israel's Warsaw - one big concentration camp for Palestinian… What we are witnessing is the slow process of genocide."

Two Jewish students immediately dropped the class and filed a formal complaint against Robinson with the Academic Senate Charges Committee. The 50-year-old professor has hired an attorney and his hearing has been slated for May 14.

Professor Robinson has explained in his own words that the issue at hand is that pro-Israel lobby groups have long been exploiting the term 'anti-Semitism' to push forward the goals of political Zionism.

US drop case against Israeli spies

2009-05-03T07:21:00.002+08:00

The decision to drop the case comes just days before Aipac is scheduled to begin its annual policy conference in Washington, which has often served as an advertisement of its influence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is scheduled to address the event via satellite.

Read further U.S. to Drop Spy Case Against Pro-Israel Lobbyists.

According to Netanyahu....

2009-05-03T07:09:00.002+08:00

According to the PCHR: from the beginning of the 2nd Intifada on 29.9.2000 till 20.12.2008 3,741 Palestinian civilians have been killed by the IOF and 1,130 have been killed in armed clashes with the IOF. 26,063 have been injured.
During the 2nd Intifada at least 37 Palestinian teachers were killed by Israel, 55 were wounded and 190 detained. No less than 12 Palestinian journalists and camerapersons were killed.
During the latest Israeli war on Gaza 1417 Palestinians have been killed by the IOF, 926 of them were civilians. 5303 were injured.
16 Palestinian medical personnel were killed, 25 wounded.
12 teachers were killed, 5 wounded.
No less than 21 farmers killed, 2 fishermen and 92 labourers were killed.

U.S. SPENDING IN IRAQ

2009-04-28T23:40:00.002+08:00

Spent & Approved War-Spending - About $800 billion of US taxpayers' funds spent or approved for spending through mid-2009. In April 2009, President Obama announced that he will seek an additional $76 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
U.S. Monthly Spending in Iraq - $12 billion in 2008
U.S. Spending per Second - $5,000 in 2008 (per Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on May 5, 2008)
Cost of deploying one U.S. soldier for one year in Iraq - $390,000 (Congressional Research Service)
Lost & Unaccounted for in Iraq - $9 billion of US taxpayers' money and $549.7 milion in spare parts shipped in 2004 to US contractors. Also, per ABC News, 190,000 guns, including 110,000 AK-47 rifles.
Missing - $1 billion in tractor trailers, tank recovery vehicles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and other equipment and services provided to the Iraqi security forces. (Per CBS News on Dec 6, 2007.)
Mismanaged & Wasted in Iraq - $10 billion, per Feb 2007 Congressional hearings
Halliburton Overcharges Classified by the Pentagon as Unreasonable and Unsupported - $1.4 billion
Amount paid to KBR, a former Halliburton division, to supply U.S. military in Iraq with food, fuel, housing and other items - $20 billion
Portion of the $20 billion paid to KBR that Pentagon auditors deem "questionable or supportable" - $3.2 billion
Number of major U.S. bases in Iraq - 75 (The Nation/New York Times)

Read further the statistic here.

"History will not forgive those who are partners in crime"

2009-04-27T07:58:00.001+08:00

In this videotape, Bassem Aburahma (nick named ElFeel, the elephant, for he was always thought of as a giant among his peers) is seen pleading with Israeli soldiers to wait (saying Raiga in Hebrew) as Palestinians, Israelis and Internationals protested the land confiscation and building of the apartheid fence on village land. The soldiers then shoot Bassem point blank with a high velocity gas grenade which kills him within five minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlbzuZ_50mU

and here is a video of the funeral the next day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F91H8sR64Ro
Please share these videos with media, politicians and others to see what is being done daily under occupation.

"My interest to hit Saddam Hussein"

2009-04-23T06:50:00.001+08:00

5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said "my interest is to hit Saddam".

He also said "Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement "judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time", is the statement "Hard to get a good case." In other words, top officials knew that there wasn't a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.

And yet, the government knew that Al Qaeda and Iraq were not linked. For example, "Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda".

And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.

And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed and continue to claim that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Indeed, President Bush's March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:

(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.

Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this.

Ahmadinejad's courageous dream of a just and equal global society

2009-04-22T19:59:00.002+08:00

WRITTEN BY AVIGAIL ABARBANEL (artwork by Alessio Marazzi)

I read or heard somewhere that Ahmadinejad's speech was denying the Holocaust. I just read the full text. There is no Holocaust denial in this speech at all. He is also labelled racist by Israel and of course he is not. He is not talking about the character of any people. He criticises Western governments for present and historical injustices against others and against their own people, and for greed and brutality. He is also talking about the inequality in the world community that gives countries like the US the right of veto in the UN Security Council, and the ability to get away with things like the attack on Iraq etc. He is trying to say that hypocrisy rules rather than justice, equality or freedom.

I don't know why everyone attacks this guy. He needs a little bit of editing perhaps, but his speech is right and good. I think it's fashionable to dislike him and dismiss him but his only crime is that he is not complying with the rules of 'politeness' in world diplomacy that mean that everyone ignores what isn't 'pleasant' or politically profitable to talk about, while in the meantime continuing to commit crimes against humanity and injustices everywhere. Ahmadinejad does not see himself bound by Western rules of political politeness and he has the courage to say what he thinks and what needs to be said, knowing full well that this makes him unpopular among world leaders. Wouldn't hurt if more leaders were prepared to speak more plainly and say things honestly.

Ahmadinejad talks about his dream of a just and equal global society. Is this wrong? When he talks about the destruction of Israel he is talking about an end to the exclusively Jewish state, which all anti-Zionists around the world including those from within Israel, are calling for as well. Israel likes to twist this around and say that he wants to destroy Israel or kill Jews. But that's not what he is saying. Funny that Israel with 200 nuclear weapons ready to deploy, and with a rogue government ready to attack civilians at any time, accuses others of developing nuclear weapons. Funny that an apartheid state accuses others of racism… But I guess there is nothing new under the sun. It's just that we want people in the mainstream media to sift through the material and show things as they really are, not as Israel or the US or even the Australian PM Rudd, say they are.

Ahmadinejad believes in god. Surely his understanding that god would want justice for everyone in the world regardless of nationality, should be shared by Jews and by Christians everywhere. Rudd and even Obama flaunt their religious beliefs and Israel's entire project is based on a belief in god (at least on the belief that god has given them the land). Anyone who believes in god should be able to easily identify with Ahmadinejad's just god and his vision of a healthy and just world community.

Anyway, in case you haven't read the speech here it is. I encourage journalists to print the speech so that readers can make up their own minds about it. It has been published in many sites, so it is available for people to read and judge for themselves. I don't want to see the the mainstream media just participating unwittingly in the hate campaign against Ahmadinejad that is based on Israeli propaganda needs rather than anything he is actually saying.

Avigail Abarbanel was born and raised in Israel. She is a professional psychotherapist and counsellor as well as human rights activist and director of the Canberra branch of Deir Yassin Remembered. Her site is:http://www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk/

The Arab World and Israel's Nuclear Arsenal

2009-04-19T20:14:00.003+08:00

Today, Israel is widely believed to possess 250-300 nuclear weapons, along with their delivery systems which include the Yariho (Jericho) missiles and the long-range F-15 and F-16 fighter warplanes.

Needless to say, these nuclear missiles are not trained toward Berlin or Warsaw but toward Muslim capitals such as Cairo, Damascus and Tehran.

Israel had consistently denied possessing nuclear weapons and for many years repeated ad nauseam the vague abracadabra that “ Israel won’t be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.”

In recent years, however, Israeli officials began to admit, although tacitly, that Israel is indeed a well-established nuclear state.

On 12 December, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Germany's Sat.1 channel that “Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly, threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel and Russia?"

Israeli strategists claim that the Jewish state needs the nuclear deterrent as a “doomsday” or “weapon of last resort” to prevent the possible destruction of the “Third Temple.”

However, this claim seems to be as mendacious and hypocritical as the stale lie that Israel won’t be the first state to introduce nukes to the region.

Hence, one can safely argue that Israel’s nuclear arsenal is intended not merely for “self-protection” or “self-preservation” but also for strategic-aggrandizement and spreading military supremacy all over the Middle East, from Iran to Morocco.

When translating this into simple political language, one reaches the inescapable conclusion that Israel’s ultimate goal is to enslave hundreds of millions of Muslims and Christians from Tehran to Mauritania and from Istanbul to Khartoum.

This is not a phobic assessment of the Israeli strategic doctrine and intentions. This is rather an accurate and realistic reading into Israel’s collective thinking.

From the Nile to the Euphrates

According to the late Yisrael Shahak, author of “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: the Weight of Three Thousand Years,” some rabbinic authorities see the borders of Israel as the following: In the south, all of Sinai and parts of northern Egypt up to the environs of Cairo; in the east, all of Jordan and a large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of Iraq south of the Euphrates, in the north, all of Lebanon and all of Syria and a huge part of Turkey!! (up to the Lake Van) and in the West, Cyprus.

According to Shahak, these are not, as one would think, anecdotal views among an eccentric rabbinic class. On the contrary, an enormous body of research and learned discussion based on these borders, embodied in atlases, books, articles and more popular forms of propaganda was published in Israel, often with state subsidies, or other forms of support.

Shahak adds that there are influential Jewish religious figures in Israel who believe that Israel will have to conquer these countries sooner or later on the grounds that doing so is a divinely commanded act.

This is why Muslims should be vigilant and constantly on the watch as to Israel’s real intentions. Muslim states should also pay more attention to what Israel does and less to what Israel says.

We Muslims don’t lack the resources to be powerful and deter our enemies. What we do lack is the will to be free, united, sovereign and truly independent.

So, what are we waiting for? Are we waiting for Israel to strike at Mecca and Medina, a possibility that should never be ruled out, given the nefarious nature of the Zionist entity?

Indeed, who would deter, let alone repulse Israel from embarking on the unthinkable? Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Or perhaps the hedonistic, illiterate and ignorant Sheikhs and Emirs and kings who think that erecting high buildings is the ultimate sign of progress and civilization?

The answer is clear. And unfortunately, only one country in the region, apart from the aggressor Israel, is serious about protecting its people from an external aggression of genocidal proportions.

This country ought to be lauded and praised for its dignified determination to be free, not castigated by impotent Arab states that continue to cede their respective sovereignty to the United States.

Read further this article by Khalid Amayreh here.

Read also Israel stands ready to bomb Iran's nuclear sites.

The War Crimes Act of 1996: Bush, Cheney and the Boys could be Indicted under US Law

2009-04-17T07:46:00.002+08:00

The War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute set forth at 18 U.S.C. § 2441, makes it a federal crime for any U.S. national, whether military or civilian, to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture, or inhuman treatment.

The statute applies not only to those who carry out the acts, but also to those who ORDER IT, know about it, or fail to take steps to stop it. The statute applies to everyone, no matter how high and mighty.

18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.

The penalty may be life imprisonment or -- if a single prisoner dies due to torture -- death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.

The general in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq stated this week that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top administration officials ORDERED that inhuman treatment and torture be conducted as part of a deliberate strategy. This confirms what the Pullitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam previously wrote.

Indeed, an FBI email declassified in December 2004 states that Bush signed an Executive Order authorizing torture (here is the list of documents obtained through a freedom of information act request, and take a close look, for example, at this one, which mentions the "executive order").

An expert on Constitutional law said that only Bush could have authorized the torture which has occurred.

It has also recently come out that, even after the torture at Abu Ghraib hit the news, torture still continues at that prison and, indeed, the U.S. is still torturing people worldwide. Even to the casual observer, it is obvious that the administration has no plans to stop, but has instead been working tirelessly to make it easier to carry out torture in the future.

Read further the article here from George Washington's Blog.

How Bush Abused Power?

2009-04-17T07:35:00.000+08:00

Traces of explosives in 9/11 dust, scientists say

2009-04-16T23:23:00.002+08:00

Tiny red and gray chips found in the dust from the collapse of the World Trade Center contain highly explosive materials — proof, according to a former BYU professor, that 9/11 is still a sinister mystery.

Physicist Steven E. Jones, who retired from Brigham Young University in 2006 after the school recoiled from the controversy surrounding his 9/11 theories, is one of nine authors on a paper published last week in the online, peer-reviewed Open Chemical Physics Journal. Also listed as authors are BYU physics professor Jeffrey Farrer and a professor of nanochemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

For several years, Jones has theorized that pre-positioned explosives, not fires from jet fuel, caused the rapid, symmetrical collapse of the two World Trade Center buildings, plus the collapse of a third building, WTC-7.

The newest research, according to the journal authors, shows that dust from the collapsing towers contained a "nano-thermite" material that is highly explosive. Although the article draws no conclusions about the source and purpose of the explosives, Jones has previously supported a theory that the collapse of the WTC towers was part of a government conspiracy to ignore warnings about the 9/11 terrorists so that the attack would propel America to wage war against Afghanistan and Iraq.

Jones made headlines in 2005 when he argued that the rapid and symmetrical fall of the World Trade Center looked like the result of pre-positioned explosives. He argued that fires alone wouldn't have been hot enough to crumble the buildings; and that even if struck by planes, the towers should have been strong enough to support the weight of the tops as they crumbled — unless they were leveled by explosives.

Celebrating Bush's Failures

2009-04-15T20:29:00.000+08:00

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Iqbal Tamimi - From a Saudi girl to USA President Obama ..please help

2009-04-14T23:52:00.002+08:00

One might think that the young girls in Saudi Arabia are not affected by what is happening in Gaza and other parts of Palestine, but this is not true, children in every part of the world are feeling the despair and pain of their peers. This lead 12 years old Judy Lu’ay Khashokji to write a plea to USA president Barak Obama. Expressing in her own simple and moving words her feelings of pain and sadness caused by what happened to the children of Gaza. Her feelings are an example of the feelings of millions of Arab and Muslim children who witnessed that attack on Gaza leaving the children drenched in blood inside their schools and while sleeping in their beds at what used to be their families’ homes.

When Israel commits its crimes against Palestinians, the damage is far beyond the Palestinian borders, and this is an important issue that should be kept in mind, an aggression on children anywhere in the world is our business because it bounces back on our children’s feelings, Palestinians or otherwise. The children all over the world saw families killed in Gaza, they saw children of their own age under the rubble with parts of their bodies amputated by the Israeli DIME bombs, and others burned down by white phosphorus bombs. Such images charged the young girl to write an open letter to the American president to interfere and do something to save the children, her message reads:

To President Obama
Friday, January 16, 2009

My name is Judy Lu'ay Khashokji, I’m 12 years old and I live in Saudi Arabia. My school is Almarefah school (school of knowledge) in Jeddah. I would like to tell you about the war in the Gaza Strip because it is the worst war I've seen in my life, you're the President of the most powerful country in the world, only you can stop the war in Gaza. I say this not only because we are Muslims, but because we are children, and we know how children feel when they lose their parents. Worse even when parents witness their own children die in Gaza before their own eyes. Children are dying without committing any crime or taking any action against Israel, and without having committed any wrongdoing. I know you're a father and you have beautiful daughters, we saw them on television, they are of our own age and the age of the children killed in Gaza. Imagine how would you feel if anything bad happened to them, some children and infants are dying because of the explosions. And when they want to take them to the hospital, some children with no heads and no hands or legs. This is not fake because I saw them in the news in front of my eyes, you will be able to see yourself on the Internet in the Arab News, and I know you can do something to stop this war, please do so quickly before more children die, so when I saw it on TV and I saw it I cried. In my dreams it was the worst nightmare I've seen in my life. I think you can stop the tears of my dreams and disappointments. Before I finish the letter I want to tell you I saw the picture in the paper crying father and three of his children dead.

With love
Judy Lu'ay Khashokji

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

2009-04-14T22:43:00.002+08:00

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo. By Scott Horton.

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human rights community on other points: they will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

Both Washington and Madrid appear determined not to allow the pending criminal investigation to get in the way of improved relations.

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington and former Under-Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

Read further the article from here.

U.S. shipped 989 munitions containers to Israel week before Gaza invasion

2009-04-13T07:58:00.002+08:00

In the dying days of the Bush administration, and a week before Israel launched an aerial bombing campaign, followed by a land invasion of the Gaza Strip, the U.S. military shipped 989 containers of munitions to Israel.

Each container was 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes. The shipment reportedly reached Israel last month at Ashod, 40 kiometres north of Gaza. The huge arsenal of munitions will replenish those expended in the Gaza War.

According to Amnesty International in the UK, the shipment included white phosphorous.

The international organization says 300 of the containers had been unloaded at Ashod in March by a German cargo ship, Wehr Elb.

"We are sure that the consignment contained arms and munitions." We have a strong suspicion that it contained white phosphorous which has been used against civilians in Gaza," Brian Wood, head of Arms Control Campaign at Amnesty International in London said late this week.

"The cargo ship had been chartered and controlled by US Military Sealift Command. It left the USA for Israel on December 20, one week before the start of Israeli attacks on Gaza. The vessel was carrying 989 containers of munitions, each of them 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes," he said.

"The world community including the Palestinians should be able to know where the remaining 680 containers on board the Wehr Elbe have gone and why the US is not transparent about the final destination of the dangerous cargo.

"A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to Amnesty International that "the unloading of the entire US munitions shipment was successfully completed at Ashdod on March 22," Wood pointed out.

The spokesperson had said the shipment was destined for a US pre-positioned munitions stockpile in Israel, he said. Under a US-Israel agreement, munitions from this stockpile may be transferred for Israeli use if necessary.

"There is a great risk that the new munitions may be used by the Israeli military to commit further violations of international law, like the ones committed during the war in Gaza," Wood said.

"Legally and morally, this US arms shipment should have been halted by the Obama administration given the extent of the evidence showing how military equipment and munitions of this kind were recently used by the Israeli forces for war crimes. Arms supplies in these circumstances are contrary to provisions in US law," he said.

Text taken from here.

Solidarity with the Palestinian Struggle

2009-04-09T07:43:00.004+08:00

There are moments in modern history when particular struggles galvanise millions around the world to act in solidarity.

This occurred during the Spanish Civil War, the struggle of the Vietnamese people against US imperialism and the liberation struggles of Southern Africa. The time has now come for progressive humanity to cut through the obfuscations, canards and calumnies and meaningfully support the resistance of the Palestinian people.

For more than 60 years Palestinians have alerted us to one outrage after another, injustices piled upon injustices without the commensurate scale of global solidarity required to make a significant difference to their lives. It is now in our hands to change this unconscionable situation. Not by appealing to the ruling classes of the world and their institutions -- which remain, in the face of abundant evidence, unmoved, callous and hypocritical. Which in fact sustain and provide succour to Israel’s apartheid and terror. It is rather by applying the most potent weapon we have learnt to rely on, forged and steeled through the tried and tested struggles of workers and oppressed people spanning time and space: solidarity. International solidarity in this sense in the words of the late Mozambican revolutionary, Samora Machel is “not an act of charity but an act of unity between allies fighting on different terrains toward the same objectives”.

Acts of defiance and determination against overwhelming odds continue to drive the will of Palestinians. Global solidarity activists need to be inspired and strengthened by this unleashing of creative energies; the fact that obstacles can be surmounted and the debilitating wastefulness of internecine and sectarian conflicts exposed.

Read further the article The campaign to isolate apartheid Israel - lessons from South Africa by Salim Vally.

Dima Omar - So what did we learn about anti-Semitism?

2009-04-07T08:15:00.003+08:00

No one expected a calm discussion during the debate entitled “Anti-Semitism – Alive and Well in Europe?”, which was organised by the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Along with Aaronovitch, the panel included Gilad Atzmon and the Observer columnist Nick Cohen.

Cohen certainly conceded that whenever Israel launches a fresh attack on Gaza or Lebanon, synagogues and Jewish cemeteries are attacked in the UK. Yet somehow he refuses to accept the correlation between Zionist policies and anti-Semitism. He wants us to believe that anti-Semitism is fuelled by pure hatred for the Jews. After all, Chinese property wasn’t attacked in the aftermath of the Tibetan clashes last year. Sudanese property wasn’t attacked when Darfur was in the media.

Well, Mr. Cohen, maybe it’s because China and Sudan are being condemned in the international community, especially in Britain, while Israel to this day is being hailed as the West’s indispensable partner. Maybe it’s because what Israel has committed in Gaza during “Operation Cast Lead” earlier this year has created more devastation than what happened in Darfur (and this is according to the head of the International Red Cross). Maybe it's because it is acceptable for British Jews to join the IDF, and actively take part in Israel's wars, while British Muslims or Chinese or whatever would never dare join a non-British army.

Read further the article here.

Israel and the Broader Middle East War

2009-04-07T07:48:00.001+08:00

Mahdi Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern and Central Asian affairs.

Motorola drops bomb fuse unit following boycott campaign

2009-04-06T07:39:00.003+08:00

Motorola has sold a controversial unit that produced bomb fuses and other equipment for the Israeli military, according to the Israeli financial newspaper Globes. The sale rids Motorola of some activities that had made it the target of a growing boycott in the US and worldwide. No explanation was offered in the media reports for the sale by Motorola Israel -- a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola -- of its unit called Government Electronics Department (GED) to the Israeli company Aeronautics Defense Systems Ltd.

The sale came just days after a 30 March protest in Brooklyn by The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI) kicking off a city-wide campaign to boycott Motorola over its support for Israeli apartheid. Ryvka Bar Zohar from NYCBI commented,

"We are heartened that Motorola has eliminated at least its production of bomb fuses for bombs that Israel dropped on the Palestinian and Lebanese people. But we will continue our campaign to boycott Motorola until it is clear that it has eliminated production and sale of all products used to support Israeli apartheid."

Human rights advocates in Boston and California also recently protested against Motorola. These campaigns build on the national "Hang Up on Motorola" campaign initiated by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, as well as initiatives by the Presbyterian and Methodist churches. University students have also recently taken up the call to boycott Motorola, achieving a divestment success at Hampshire College. Previously, Motorola had been the target of a successful boycott campaign for its support of the government of apartheid South Africa.

Motorola Israel produced fuses used in cluster, "bunker-buster," and other bombs. Cluster bombs are specifically condemned by an international consensus of human rights organizations, and banned by many countries. The US government has voiced concern over the use of these bombs and recently took steps towards a complete ban on their use. Human Rights Watch researchers reported that they found Motorola parts at the site of the bombing that began Israel's latest assault on Gaza that killed around 1,400 Palestinians, more than 400 of whom were children.

Read further here.

The 21st Arab League Summit - A Summit of Egos.

2009-04-05T07:33:00.002+08:00

The 21st Arab League summit held this week in Doha, Qatar ended up being little more than a summit of egos.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – just indicted for war crimes in Darfur by the International Criminal Court (ICC) – arrived to a red-carpet and hero’s welcome; Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak boycotted the entire gathering; Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi walked out during the opening session; King Abdullah II of Jordan left early, apparently for not having been greeted by the Emir of Qatar but by another member of the royal family; and Hamas was not even invited. Having accomplished little, the summit adjourned one day early.

Overshadowing the gathering of Arab leaders and the League’s stated agenda of ‘reconciliation’ between the decidedly pro-American, anti-Iranian camp of nations (represented by Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and those more willing to recognize Iran as an important regional power (namely Syria and Qatar), was the presence of al-Bashir.

In embracing al-Bashir and “rejecting” his indictment, the Arab League thumbed their noses at the West and the ICC, who called for his arrest but ignored the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. It may have been an understandable move by the League (which no doubt involved a bit of collective self-preservation), but certainly was not good public relations.

Next, attention was focused on the volatile and unpredictable Libyan leader. In the morning session, he railed against Saudi King Abdullah who he said was “made by Britain and protected by the United States.” The truth in those words were quickly lost however, when he went on to declare, “I am an international leader, the dean of the Arab rulers, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of Muslims, and my international status does not allow me to descend to a lower level.” He then stormed out of the hall.

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt chose not to attend the summit altogether, the second year in a row he has snubbed it. His reasons were juvenile and partially borne out of jealousy for Qatar upstaging Egypt’s traditional role as powerbroker in the Arab world and mediator of its internal disputes. It was after all the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad Ibn Khalifa al-Thani, who brokered the agreement last year between Lebanon’s March 8 Coalition (Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement) and the ruling March 14 Alliance, resulting in an equitable allocation of cabinet seats, eventual election of President Michel Suleiman and an end to the long standoff.

The Emir also convened an emergency Arab summit in Doha during Israel’s assault on Gaza earlier this year, and helped with reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah (and between King Abdullah and Qaddafi during the summit). His backing of Hamas in the Gaza war was another reason Mubarak kept well clear of Doha.

It was Sheikh Ibn Khalifa al-Thani who appeared to have made the most cogent and germane remarks, warning of the potential catastrophic effects the global economic crisis may have on the Middle East, stating, “… the Arab world is in the direction of the wind and the eye of the storm.”

With looming economic concerns, the brouhaha over al-Bashir’s presence, and some notable absences (the kings of Morocco and Bahrain also did not attend); little if any time was spent on the fallout from Israel’s barbaric attack on Gaza. Other than to reiterate the League’s endorsement of the 2002 Saudi Peace Plan calling for full recognition of Israel in exchange for a complete Israeli withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, the League’s position appeared stagnant at a dynamic time.

After an inhumane embargo which had deprived Gaza of basic humanitarian supplies and necessities, the use of white phosphorus against civilians by the Israel Defense Forces, and countless reports of the deliberate targeting of innocent men, women and children (first by Palestinian eyewitnesses, then verified by humanitarian agencies and now confirmed by Israeli soldiers), the Arab League was mute.

To prevent other leaders from boycotting the summit, the remarkable decision of not extending an invitation to Hamas – the democratically-elected Palestinian government –was made. In the meantime, Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory and demolition of homes continues unabated under the new leadership of a right-wing prime minister, a fascist foreign minister and a coalition of extremist religious parties.

Not only did the Arab heads of state fail to heal their deep rifts, they did not tackle the thorny issue of relations with Iran or even begin to address the ramifications an increasingly likely Israeli attack will have on the region. Instead, egos, petty disputes, red-carpet welcomes and diplomatic snubs held sway.

Once again, ordinary citizens of the Middle East this week were reminded why the Arab League has become an utterly irrelevant, feckless institution.

Article taken from here.

Could Bush Be Next?

2009-04-05T07:25:00.001+08:00

Any Movie About Palestinian Massacre?

2009-04-04T08:00:00.001+08:00

Report excoriates Israel's use of white phosphorous in Gaza

2009-04-02T07:41:00.003+08:00

Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher for HRW, said in a press conference in Jerusalem last Thursday that the evidence suggests the Israeli military intentionally used white phosphorus in Gaza for its incendiary properties.

"To us, the evidence suggests that the purpose in some of these cases may have been not to create a smokescreen, but to use white phosphorus specifically for its incendiary effect. Do we know that for sure? No, we don't. But, the evidence is suggestive that they used it for incendiary purposes," Abrahams told journalists.

The HRW report states that "the repeated use of air-burst white phosphorus in populated areas ... reveals a pattern or policy of conduct rather than incidental or accidental usage." These circumstances demand independent investigation, HRW says, and -- if warranted -- the prosecution of all those responsible for war crimes.

"The Israeli military and government is repeatedly blaming Hamas for civilian deaths in Gaza. Now, do we have something to say about Hamas' behavior in Gaza? Yes, we do ... This is the first in a series of reports we will be issuing. Its rocket attacks in Israel ... are a war crime. In the cases of this report ... we did not find evidence of Hamas using civilians as human shields. Now, were they in the area at the time of these attacks? In some cases, we believe they were, and that is documented in the report. We state very clearly where we believe Hamas was, and where it was not. The bottom line, and the crucial point, is even if enemy forces -- from the Israeli perspective, Hamas fighters -- are in the area, white phosphorus should not be used in civilian neighborhoods. And that's the bottom line," Abrahams stated.

The Israeli military issued a statement after the release of HRW report, saying that it was nearing the completion of its own investigation. In the statement, the military claims that its use of white phosphorus had been fully consistent with international humanitarian law.

But, Abrahams said, this shows that Israel has already drawn its conclusions before the investigation was finished. The Israeli military "at first denied repeatedly that white phosphorous was being used. Publicly and to the media, they denied that it was being used. Then, faced with incontrovertible evidence, photographs, that white phosphorus was being used, they back-tracked, and they said, well all the weapons that we use in Gaza are in compliance with international humanitarian law. And now, they tell us that they're opening an investigation. Well, quite frankly, we have a hard time accepting that at face value."

Abrahams also said that Israel "refused to give any details about the investigation, and these are the questions we want answered about the investigation: who's leading it? When will it be completed? What is the scope of the investigation? And, will its findings be made public? We don't have answers to any of those questions ... But, in fact, it doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter, because the statement yesterday concluded that the investigation already determined that the white phosphorus use was 'consistent with international humanitarian law.' So the findings have already been made public."

Moreover, HRW researchers are still denied access into Gaza through Israeli border crossings, Abrahams said, "and we can only conclude that this in an attempt to prevent us from conducting our investigations."

According to Abrahams;

"In our view, the Israeli military has been infected by a climate of impunity, going back over since 2005, the disengagement [Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza]. There is an attitude that soldiers can do what and how they want in Gaza, and this has had a direct impact on civilian lives. It has caused civilians to die. That's because soldiers believe they can get away with what they want -- no one is watching. And that's why investigations are so important, to break this climate of impunity."

Read the 71-pages-long Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, entitled "Rain of Fire: Israel's Unlawful Use of White Phosphorous in Gaza".

Article taken from here.

Shame on us!

2009-03-30T07:29:00.003+08:00

What will happen next? Will Palestinian kids be duped into playing music to Israeli pilots who exterminated Gaza children with White Phosphorus?

I am not against showing genuine sympathy with the victims of the holocaust. However, a sympathy that is manipulated to justify, rationalize or even extenuate the crime against humanity that is Israel is worse than a crime if only because it serves to promote and perpetuate oppression.

As human beings, we Palestinians do sympathize with all victims of Nazism, Stalinism and imperialism, the wept, the over-wept, and especially the unwept who constitute the vast majority of victims.

Having said that, however, I strongly believe that no honest person under the sun has the slightest right to demand that we pay the price for what the Nazis did or may have done to European Jews nearly 70 years ago.

We didn’t send Jews to the ovens. The Germans did. We didn’t starve Jews to death as Jews are doing to us today in the Gaza Strip.

We didn’t incinerate Jews in Gas chambers as Jews have recently incinerated Palestinian children with White Phosphorus.

Hence, of all people in this world, Palestinians must never be made to feel guilty for what the Nazis and other Europeans did to Jews. I say so because a feeling of guilt, even a modicum of guilt, on our part, would be construed or misconstrued as a vindication of Zionism, the Nazism of our time.

It is at least as insulting and humiliating as some Jews were forced or duped to play music to SS, Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers during the Second World War. In both cases, the act was meant to humiliate the victims and rob them of the last visages of human dignity.

And now, Jews in Israel are doing the same thing to Palestinians, Nazism’s vicarious victims.

Last week, a few innocent kids from the Jenin refugee camp were surreptiously taken to Tel Aviv to “cheer up and take part in peace-promoting activities.”

However, once there the kids were unceremoniously driven to a reception where they were made to play music and sing to “holocaust survivors,” some of them are former members of the Hagana and Irgun terrorist gangs who had taken part in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and expulsion of Palestinians form their homeland.

God knows how much Palestinian blood did these so-called “holocaust survivors” shed in 1948 and subsequent years. Certainly, Deir Yasin, Tantura, Dawaymeh, and the numerous other massacres were not committed by UFOs. They were committed in cold blood by these very people our children are now cheering up.

Shame on us a thousand times!

Some of the kids were instructed to utter words that should never be uttered by the victims of Zionism. One of the participants reportedly dedicated a special song to Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier taken prisoner by Palestinian fighters in Gaza nearly three years ago. No mention, not even an allusion, was made of the estimated 10,000 Palestinian political and resistance prisoners languishing in Israeli dungeons and concentration camps.

Read further this article here.