Tag: Palestine

Lies, damn lies and statistics

There is plenty of documentation to make a case for the illegal nature of the Israeli government towards Palestinian Arabs both inside Israel and in the occupied territories. The longer it takes for America and the rest of the world to act and deny this voracious killer its meal of foreign aide and military hardware, the more likely we are to have these kinds of incursions onto foreign soil by the Israeli government.


wp_gazaThe Israeli war machine has killed over 800 Palestinians and  claims are their genocidal blood lust will be escalated, but finally there are cries, albeit faint, that Israel has committed war crimes.  It’s about time!  All one need do is look at the volume of work on the internet, indisputable pictures and videos which show the use of white phosphorous, the shooting of medical aid workers who were out attending to the wounded as well as hospitals and their facilities, the indiscriminate bombing of shelters for the homeless, and most notably the UN sponsored school where scores of people were killed, all civilians, by the murderous IDF to know that Israel has committed war crimes and should be censured by the international community.

The United Nations has accused Israel of evacuating scores of Palestinians into a house in the suburbs of Gaza City, only to shell the property 24 hours later, killing some 30 people.

In a report published today on what it called “one of the gravest incidents” of the 14-day conflict, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) complained that the Israeli Defence Force then prevented medical teams from entering the area to evacuate the wounded, including young children.

All of these actions come amidst the incontrovertible fact that Israel is the aggressor in this latest war on Palestinians.

Thus the latest ceasefire ended when Israel first killed Palestinians, and Palestinians then fired rockets into Israel. However, before attempting to glean lessons from this event, we need to know if this case is atypical, or if it reflects a systematic pattern.We defined “conflict pauses” as periods of one or more days when no one is killed on either side, and we asked which side kills first after conflict pauses of different durations. As shown in Figure 2, this analysis shows that it is overwhelmingly Israel that kills first after a pause in the conflict: 79% of all conflict pauses were interrupted when Israel killed a Palestinian, while only 8% were interrupted by Palestinian attacks (the remaining 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same day). In addition, we found that this pattern — in which Israel is more likely than Palestine to kill first after a conflict pause — becomes more pronounced for longer conflict pauses. Indeed, of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel unilaterally interrupted 24, or 96%, and it unilaterally interrupted 100% of the 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days.

Thus, a systematic pattern does exist: it is overwhelmingly Israel, not Palestine, that kills first following a lull. Indeed, it is virtually always Israel that kills first after a lull lasting more than a week.

The lessons from these data are clear:

First, Hamas can indeed control the rockets, when it is in their interest. The data shows that ceasefires can work, reducing the violence to nearly zero for months at a time.

Second, if Israel wants to reduce rocket fire from Gaza, it should cherish and preserve the peace when it starts to break out, not be the first to kill.

One can conclude that Israel is not interested in peace with its neighbors and that this information alone should be the impetus on which the world community denies Israel the blind eye it has lent the Israeli government for so long and impose the type of punishment reserved and codified for “evil doers” or breakers of international law.

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

“It is macabre,” Falk said. “I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.”

“There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances,” the rapporteur added. “The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be held accountable.”

The above stated view should gain more traction as time goes on.  There is plenty of documentation to make a case for the illegal nature of the Israeli government towards Palestinian Arabs both inside Israel and in the occupied territories.  The longer it takes for America and the rest of the world to act and deny this voracious killer its meal of foreign aide and military hardware, the more likely we are to have these kinds of incursions onto foreign soil by the Israeli government.

There are no civilians in Gaza only militants and the dying


dead-family-gazaThe Samouni family woke on Sunday morning to find themselves surrounded by camouflaged Israeli troops and dozens of tanks, who had set up a position in the rubble of what was once the large Jewish settlement of Netzarim. As dawn broke, the soldiers seized control of the highest buildings in the district and ordered several of the neighbours into the Samouni family home and there a dozen of them waited, without food and without water.

“All day Sunday there was shooting and bombing. We didn’t have anything to eat, we didn’t have water to drink – our water tanks had been damaged in the fighting,” said Wael Samouni, 32, who on a normal day would be manning his stall at the vegetable market. “We couldn’t sleep.”

“We were sitting and suddenly there was bombing on our house and everyone started to run. There were three rockets. I have no idea where they came from,” said Samouni. The rockets, believed now to be tank shells, hit the building and brought it crashing down. “I looked to my side, took hold of my boy Mohammad and I started to run. As I ran I looked back and saw on the floor my mother, two cousins and three of my children. All dead,” he said. Samouni and the others ran from the house, some raised white cloths as flags and they made it to a patch of safe ground where they were taken to hospital by car.

Israel has no problem killing civilians and labelling them terrorists.  In another development, Israel destroyed a UN sponsored school in Gaza killing scores of people who were sheltered there.  It’s not the first school they’ve destroyed.  The American school of Gaza and the Islamic University of Gaza’s women’s faculty were destroyed earlier.  Along with killing civilians, Israel wants to seriously damage the infrastructure of Gaza.

Death doesn’t discriminate but Israelis do


If you’re an Arab Israeli you’re far more likely to be killed by Hamas’  inaccurate “missiles” than if you’re Jewish and here’s why.

Homes in Jewish towns and settlements are required to have one room with reinforced walls and a steel door. Public bomb shelters are accessible, and protective barriers even have been erected in rural areas.

The Arab town of Rahat, population 45,000, is about 24 miles from Gaza and is situated on the outer perimeter reachable by the long-range rockets that Hamas has unleashed for the first time. Few homes here have a safety room, and there are no public shelters.

Once again, Israelis sacrifice human life for political associations and expediency, and sometimes it’s their own citizens who serve as fodder.

On another note, to underscore what was written previously here about how the IDF is intent on killing all within their grasp, not taking into consideration who is a combatant or not, comes news that the Red Cross has been refused entry into Gaza to treat the wounded.

A specialist medical team from the International Committee of the Red Cross has been unable to enter the Gaza Strip for the past three days, a spokeswoman for the organization said Sunday.

The team, comprised of two doctors and two nurses, was supposed to enter the enclave on Friday to help the local Palestinian medical staff, who were ‘exhausted’ and having trouble coping with the massive influx of injured people, she said.

The Israeli pogrom of Gaza continues unabated and in plain sight.  If there was any doubt before, let there be no doubt now, this military operation is intended to intimidate and humiliate the Palestinian people and has nothing at all to do with the security of the state of Israel.

A voice from the wilderness


It’s hard to believe the Bush administration denied the author of the piece below entry into the United States.  He is safely ensconced in the US’ main ally, the UK and writing pieces like this one:

An alliance

of values

Listening to the feelings expressed by Muslims around the world one gets a sentiment of anger and revolt mixed with a deep sense of helplessness. The current massacres are but a confirmation of the well-known: the “international community” does not really care about the Palestinians, and it is as if the state of Israel, with the support of the US and some European countries, has imposed a state of intellectual terror. Among the presidents and kings, nobody dares to speak out; nobody is ready to say the truth. All are paralysed by fear.

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is sometimes perceived, and experienced, as critical to the relationship between the west and Islam, many Muslims no longer know how to react. Is it a pure political conflict? What does Islam have to do with it? Should we make it an Islamic concern to call upon the ummah?

Muslims around the world are facing three distinctive phenomena. First, in the Muslim-majority countries or in the west, they see they can expect no reaction from governments, especially from the Arab states. Theirs is the guilty silence of the accomplice, the hypocrisy, the contempt for Palestinian lives. Second, western media coverage is alarming, with the majority buying the Israeli story: two equally powerful belligerents, with the victim of aggression (Israel) acting in self-defence. What a distortion! Yet the third phenomenon is interesting: while 73% of Europeans were backing Israel in 1967, more than 67% are supporting the Palestinians today. With time, understanding and sensitivity have moved: populations are not blindly following the games and hypocritical stands of their political elites.

Considering these factors, Muslims around the world, and especially western Muslims, should clarify their position. While refusing to turn the Israeli-Palestinian war into a religious conflict, they should not deny its religious dimension, and thus formulate an explicit stand. From an Islamic viewpoint, it should be clear that their resistance is not against Jews (antisemitism is anti-Islamic); to target innocent civilians must be condemned on both sides; and the objective should be for Jews, Christians and Muslims (with people of other religions or no religion) to live together with equal rights and dignity.

The Palestinians are never going to give up; and Israel, for all its awesome firepower, has not won the conflict. Muslims around the world should be a driving force of remembrance and resistance. Not as Muslims against Israel, the west or the hypocritical Arab states, but more widely, and constructively, for justice with all (religious or not) who refuse to be brainwashed or reduced to powerless spectators. It is time to create broad alliances and synergies around clear political objectives.

If the Middle East is teaching Muslims anything, it is to stop acting in isolation and return to the universal values they share with their fellow citizens. They should realise they are in and with the majority. Demonstrations and articles are crucial but we need to go further. To launch a global movement of non-violent resistance to the violent and extremist policy of the state of Israel has become imperative. The violence inflicted, in front of us, upon a population of one and a half million humans makes our silence, our division and even our limited emotional reaction undignified, insane and inhumane. A true and dignified resistance requires commitment, patience and a long-term strategy of information, alliance and huge, non-violent democratic participation.

Israeli academics speak out


I mentioned in a previous post how the debate about what’s going on in Gaza is a much more vigorous debate in Israel than it is here in the U.S. and I admitted my own confusion why that’s so.  One aspect of this phenomenon is that rarely the Israeli debate finds its way into American media, so this is my contribution to the exposure of that debate to us here in the mainland, the enablers of Israel’s wars of aggression.

Commenting on the Israeli attack against a Gaza university, two Israeli academics had this to say.

Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, who organized the petition, has been silent, as have his co-signatories from Princeton, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most others who signed similar petitions, like the 11,000 professors from nearly 1,000 universities around the world, have also refrained from expressing their outrage at Israel’s attack on the leading university in Gaza. The artfully named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, which organized the latter appeal, has said nothing about the assault.

While the extent of the damage to the Islamic University, which was hit in six separate airstrikes, is still unknown, recent reports indicate that at least two major buildings were targeted, a science laboratory and the Ladies’ Building, where female students attended classes. There were no casualties, as the university was evacuated when the Israeli assault began on Saturday.

Virtually all the commentators agree that the Islamic University was attacked, in part, because it is a cultural symbol of Hamas, the ruling party in the elected Palestinian government, which Israel has targeted in its continuing attacks in Gaza. Mysteriously, hardly any of the news coverage has emphasized the educational significance of the university, which far exceeds its cultural or political symbolism.

Established in 1978 by the founder of Hamas — with the approval of Israeli authorities — the Islamic University is the first and most important institution of higher education in Gaza, serving more than 20,000 students, 60 percent of whom are women. It comprises 10 faculties — education, religion, art, commerce, Shariah law, science, engineering, information technology, medicine, and nursing — and awards a variety of bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Taking into account that Palestinian universities have been regionalized because Palestinian students from Gaza are barred by Israel from studying either in the West Bank or abroad, the educational significance of the Islamic University becomes even more apparent.

Those restrictions became international news last summer when Israel refused to grant exit permits to seven carefully vetted students from Gaza who had been awarded Fulbright fellowships by the State Department to study in the United States. After top State Department officials intervened, the students’ scholarships were restored — though Israel allowed only four of the seven to leave, even after appeals by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “It is a welcome victory — for the students,” opined The New York Times, and “for Israel, which should want to see more of Gaza’s young people follow a path of hope and education rather than hopelessness and martyrdom; and for the United States, whose image in the Middle East badly needs burnishing.”

*snip*

By launching an attack on Gaza, the Israeli government has once again chosen to adopt strategies of violence that are tragically akin to the ones deployed by Hamas — only the Israeli tactics are much more lethal. How should academics respond to this assault on an institution of higher education? Regardless of one’s stand on the proposed boycott of Israeli universities, anyone so concerned about academic freedom as to put one’s name on a petition should be no less outraged when Israel bombs a Palestinian university. The question, then, is whether the university presidents and professors who signed the various petitions denouncing efforts to boycott Israel will speak out against the destruction of the Islamic University.

The answer to the last question is a resounding no. American academics and politicians are silent to the atrocities carried out by the Israeli government and such silence emboldens Israel to continue its slaughter.

Hat tip to Angry Arab News Service for posting this piece.

Israel’s existence is not in question


In the minds of the Arab world, Israel exists and will exist and they are no threat to Israel.  The problem is Israel is a threat to its neighbors; inspite of that there has been a muted response from Israel’s enemies.  Juan Cole offers a translation of Ayatollah Sistani’s comments on the Israeli aggression and even I am shocked at how mild mannered it is.

In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate

The beloved Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have, since noon yesterday, been subjected to a vicious attack and to continual strikes that have resulted so far in hundreds of victims being martyred or wounded.

This assault comes after a suffocating blockade to which this oppressed people has been subjected for several months. It had resulted in the creation of harsh humanitarian conditions as a result of lack of food, medicine, fuel and other necessities of daily life for the citizens.

Mere verbal expressions of condemnation and disapproval of what is being done to our Palestinian brethren in Gaza, and of solidarity with them, mean nothing before the immensity of this horrific tragedy to which they are being subjected.

The Arab and Muslim worlds are called upon, more than at any past time, to take practical steps in order to stop this continual aggression and to break this cruel blockade that has been imposed on that proud people.

We ask God, the Exalted, the All-Powerful to take the hands of all and lead them to that wherein lies goodness and righteousness. Verily, he is the All-Hearing, the Gracious.

Meanwhile, while everyone in corporate American media seems to hedge reporting on the massacre taking place in Gaza, Israeli media seems to have a more realistic handle on the catastrophe raging around their corporate media’s head.

Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: “Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn’t be provoked into anger… Not that the bully’s not right – someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction!”

Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon,the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation “Cast Lead” is only in its infancy.

poignantly poised Gordon Levy in Haaretz.  With pretty good moral clarity, Tom Segev writes:

It is admittedly impossible to live with daily missile fire, even if virtually no place in the world today enjoys a situation of zero terror. But Hamas is not a terrorist organization holding Gaza residents hostage: It is a religious nationalist movement, and a majority of Gaza residents believe in its path. One can certainly attack it, and with Knesset elections in the offing, this attack might even produce some kind of cease-fire. But there is another historical truth worth recalling in this context: Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the Land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians.

 

even though his conclusion is somewhat flawed and undermines what preceeded it.  What’s important is these ideas found their way in mainstream publications in Israel, yet aren’t even remotely mirrored here in the States. I could surmise that’s an indication of the moral strength of certain elements of Israeli media which is greater than their American counterparts. Honestly, I can’t account for the differences in reporting, but the American media is not doing any service to its customers by keeping them in the dark about Israeli trangessions, and our politicians are not working in the best interests of our country when they excuse the faults of a regime hell bent on death and destruction usually ending at our expense.

The misery continues


at the hands of the Israeli blitzkrieg, but this time on the high seas and in front of people who have a voice and have spoken out against it.  What’s striking is the perception by all too many that a legal action can be met with violent means; the boat clearly known as a relief boat in international waters is justifiably attacked and lives endangered.  This, according to some is an acceptable action, and shows the extent to which the Israeli spin is embraced and given voice.

More from Gaza


palestine_bound_boat Israel has never been interested in peace with its Palestinian neighbors, nor can it even seriously be considered a humane government when it comes to its relations with other countries.  The story of the Dignity, a boat which set sail from Cyprus with relief supplies for Gaza is one more recent example which highlights Israel’s genocidal nature.  Only 66 feet long and packed with supplies the Israelis had denied Gaza’s citizens for the last six months, the boat’s cargo was checked by Cyprian authorities before it set sail for Gaza and no doubt it’s movements were monitored by all concerned since it set sail.  So why have the Israelis attacked the boat and denied it entry to Gaza’s ports?

Israeli crimes on the high seas date back to the 1967 war when its forces attacked the USS Liberty which killed scores of American personnel and parallels can certainly be drawn with this latest attack.  Both attacks occurred at a time when Isarel was fighting a war of aggression and which they wanted no witnesses to their brutality.  Both attacks happened over an extended period of time and drove the vessel from the area it was to another more distant destination, but one interesting feature of this recent attack is the Dignity has a history with Israeli officials of bringing relief aid to Gaza without any problems before.  Why when following “standard operating procedures” to assuage Israeli concerns  would the Israelis deny them entry for a relief mission?  All the talk about concern for civilian lives and minimizing  civilian casualties, in the light of this latest development, can only mean the attacks on Gaza by Israeli forces are meant to terrorize all the inhabitants of Gaza, to frighten and humiliate them  and to make it more internationally acceptable to do so.

Hat tip to DesertPeace for this article.

The tightening grasp on media by the Israeli government


Now that the Gazan offensive is in full swing and the killing and murder are at a fever pitch, look for the Israeli government to bring out their apologists who will be able to convince you and me that things are not what they seem and it’s the Palestinians’ fault.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Saturday instructed the Foreign Ministry to take emergency measures to adapt Israel’s international public relations to the ongoing escalation in the Gaza Strip.

Livni instructed ministry officials currently on vacation in Israel to return immediately to their posts abroad, and to immediately mount public relations campaigns in their station countries, focusing on local media and public officials.

The Foreign Ministry is also looking to recruit speakers of foreign languages, in particular Arabic, Italian, Spanish, and German, in order to expand Israel’s public relations campaign with the representatives of foreign media outlets currently in Israel.

If you think there will be relief from Israeli spin on the Internet think again.  Israelis have always been afraid of unfettered access to information and so they’ve managed to wrap that loose end up as well.

The Anti-Defamation League announced Sunday its recent expansion into the world of YouTube, the on-line video-sharing site.

The US-based advocacy group has officially partnered with the digital media powerhouse in an effort to combat hate speech and other forms of abuse.

YouTube’s community guidelines define hate speech as “content that promotes hatred against members of a protected group” – a religious or ethnic minority, for example – without discussing the question of intent.

It is not clear what role, if any, the ADL will have in reshaping YouTube policy in this regard. As of now, the ADL appears merely to be supplementing YouTube’s current abuse-protection measures.

The media blitz of the Israeli machine is now in full swing and every excuse will be made for the aggressive and brutal attacks against Gaza’s population, especially when the ground invasion begins.  Grab as many sources of information as you can, while you still can.  It could very well be that an incident like this will be the catalyst for censoring news and keeping people in the dark.



The bestiality of the Israeli government


MIDEAST ISRAEL PALESTINIANSpalevictimTit for tat?  (On the left an Israeli building hit by Palestinians “rockets”; on the right a Palestinian building hit by Israeli fire.)  The Israeli government launched an attack during the Christmas season which was designed to insure there would be no peace on earth, or goodwill towards Palestinians.  Using the false pretense that the Palestinian firing of rockets was unprovoked and therefore an Israeli response was necessary, the bombardment of the Gaza strip is no less than genocide against a defenseless civilian population.

What else can  you expect from a government whose leaders had publicly made such statements as Gazans should not be allowed to “live normal lives (Ehud Olmert) or that  punishment should be inflicted “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians” (Avi Dichter) or that Israel should “decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it” (Meir Sheetrit) the intent of this latest act of murder is to inflict the maximum amount of casualties possible.  Some bloggers have even gone on to suggest that the lifting of the embargo by the Israelis was designed to offer them a window to kill the most number of civilians gathered to collect foodstuffs denied them by the Israelis for so long, but whatever the motive, the means were the use of the best military weaponry the state of Israel can finagle from America in their extermination of Palestinians.

Israel decided on a collective punishment policy after the Hamas electoral victory in ’07, and part of that punishment was in the form of the blockade which denied the Gaza Strip even the barest of essentials, electricity and food.  They did so while thumbing their noses at an international community which sought to chronicle Israel’s abuses.  The flagrant and exaggerated expulsion of Richard Falk, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories is just one example among many where the Israelis have ignored the “rule of law” and internationally recognized conventions while continuing to oppress the Palestinian civilian population.

As always, the Israelis blame their victim for Israeli transgressions, saying that recent rocket attacks at the end of the ceasefire are responsible for this latest Israeli slaughter.  And while large numbers of rocket attacks are thrown at the public in order to justify Israeli aggression, lost in the argument is that these Palestinian “rockets” are ineffective, inaccurate (only one Israeli casualty  since Palestinians started firing the rockets after the ceasefire) and essentially home-made munitions. What the Israelis have done however to get around the disproportionate nature of their aggression is to return to collectivism of the Palestinian population, equating all within the borders of Gaza as terrorist and therefore subject to elimination, no questions asked.

This latest Israeli atrocity occurs in plain sight before the world stage and yet Hamas and by extension the Palestinians are responsible.  In the light of such global response the likelihood Israel will stop such unparalleled genocide is nil.  Countless deaths will be exacted before the Israelis stop this latest slaughter and resume their obfuscation of Palestinian statehood and peace in the Middle East.  By accepting their line of reasoning, the US is also a willing and active participant in this bloodshed.  One can now see the reason behind the Bush Administration’s abandonment of international law in its treatment of people captured during the phony WOT; accepting the link between themselves and their ally Israel means the only way to escape international illegality is to propose it doesn’t accept the terms of what’s legal and illegal.  Therefore it’s necessary to call such actions as the Israeli attack on Gaza bestial, inhumane, psychopathic, sociopathic, murderous, because in a nation where laws are no longer adhered to, legal and illegal have no meaning.  That seems to be acceptable to the Israeli government and the rest of the world.

UPDATE I

Not even Israelis seem to take the firing of rockets by Palestinians seriously. Take the tone of this article (Latest Gaza Rockets Injure More Arab Children than Jews) which appears in an Israeli newspaper.  It refers to the rockets used by the Palestinians as ‘locally produced rockets’, meaning internal, meaning made in Gaza, meaning at the very most, crude, (We’ve spoken of the ineffective nature of such munitions.)  yet in the Israeli scheme of looking at things they justify the killing of scores of people; a culture of death brought to us by the party of death.

UPDATE II

Not that there’s anything new about this, but assertions by the Israelis that their attack was in response to alleged ceasefire breakdowns, or violations on the part of Hamas to the expired ceasefire are not true, according to this piece from Haaretz.

Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public – all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces “Cast Lead” operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning.

Sources in the defense establishment said Defense Minister Ehud Barak instructed the Israel Defense Forces to prepare for the operation over six months ago, even as Israel was beginning to negotiate a ceasefire agreement with Hamas…..

The expression in the above link to “misleading of the public” is ironic and a common feature of the Israeli government.



Obama under the Zionist lobby’s thumb


What’s going on?  First we have Martin Indyk who as far as we know has not been picked to be in an Obama administration making a statement that ‘ Israel can no longer expect “blank cheques” ‘ from America?!  On whose authority does a regular, or in Indyk’s case a highly irregular citizen of the US make such a statement?    Did he say that hoping to be appointed to something in Obama’s government, or was he merely testing the waters for his real bosses at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy to see how  such a statement would be received in America?

The real kicker is Obama’s pledge to attack Iran with nuclear weapons should it attack Israel first, that coming on the heels of pronouncements by the deputy director of national intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council’s Thomas Fingar that Iran has not diverted low-enriched uranium produced at a facility at Natanz, 160 miles south of Tehran, to weapons use, and that Iran did suspend its nuclear program back in 2003 at a time when that country was making peace overtures to the US.  So why does Obama want to pick a fight with Iran now and make the most war mongering Administration in American history seem like a peaceful one?  Perhaps politicians can’t accept the premise Iranians aren’t making nuclear weapons because its unfathomable a country could keep its promise all the while US lawmakers continue to lie about Iranian intentions?

Disturbing video out of Palestine


I blogged some time ago about the idea of people being armed with cameras to film Israeli aggression.  I didn’t think it was a good idea, or rather that it wouldn’t stop state sponsored terrorism against Palestinians.  The following video makes that point, in my opinion.

For as long as many reading this blog have been alive, blood has been shed on the sacred ground of the three major religions of the world.  We all know that; it’s not a pretty sight, and not something we need to see in order to convince the Israelis to stop their indiscriminate killing of Palestinians who’ve said time and time again they recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli state and seek the same in return. It won’t be long before they turn their weapons on the film makers, or declare cameras illegal, weapons of mass destruction.  Once again, the Israelis have shown they are impervious to the world’s eye.

Outrageous!


Court: Feeding Palestinian children a form of terrorism support, screamed the headline as I did my daily walk through the news.  The genocide of Palestinians continues under the hateful gaze of one of the worst administrations in American history and one of the most oppressive regimes in human history.  It’s not enough that Palestinians are being slowly starved to death by their Israeli oppressors, and denied the basic necessities in order to live.  Now comes word from America that people who are more affluent than the Palestinians languishing in Gaza, and even the West Bank, cannot aid them in any organized fashion for it’s considered terrorism. Look at the inhumanity of one of the greatest criminals to ever sit in the White House:

Mufid Abdulqader, a top Holy Land fundraiser whose Palestinian band played at the charity’s (Holy Land Foundation) events….. faces up to 55 years in jail….defendant Mohammad el-Mezain, a foundation co-founder, (who) is married to the cousin of defendant Ghassan Elashi, former Holy Land board chairman faces up to 15 years in prison while Elashi, who is already serving six and a half years for export law violations, faces up to life in prison. (D)efendant Shukri Abu Baker, Holy Land’s former chief executive officer faces up to life in prison and defendant Abdulrahman Odeh, Holy Land’s New Jersey representative, faces up to 55 years in jail.

and for what? “Prosecutors did not accuse the charity of directly financing or being involved in terrorist activity. Instead, they said humanitarian aid was used to promote Hamas and allow it to divert existing funds to militant activities,” and for that each defendant was given more than 50 years in prison!  I’d settle for 5 years for a president who is directly responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis in his phony war on terror, yet this court decision handed down, after jurors could not agree on verdicts on nearly 200 charges for the same defendants earlier, will be touted as a major victory.  Ironically, the Israeli blockade now in place was initiated supposedly because of terrorists attacks from Palestinian held territory, so obviously the defendants who’ve been in custody and their organization which has been dismantled are not responsible for the continued bloodshed there.  I don’t know why people can’t see that there will always be resistance to oppression; it’s a natural reaction and regardless of anything US courts do, there will be violence in Palestine until and unless Palestinians are given their rights to self-determination, but putting people in jail looks good and makes us feel even better.  Meanwhile, people continue to live, just barely, and die in Gaza.

baby-gaza