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Author Topic: Still An Abiding Faith In Force 2
majorvictory64
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posted 10 December 2005 02:57 PM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Blast off! We can hit Iran, warns Sharon

quote:
IN the week when Israel successfully test-fired its latest Arrow rocket, Ariel Sharon hinted that military action could halt Iran's nuclear programme.

"Such a capability exists," the Israeli prime minister said.

Sharon added that Israel would not sit idly by if diplomacy fails.

"Israel, and not just Israel, cannot accept a situation in which Iran has nuclear weapons," he said.

"Israel is not helpless and is taking all the steps it needs to be taking."

Foreign experts speculate that Israel, which bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981, could take similar action against Iran if it believes the Islamic republic is on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week joined the clamour for a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

"I will continue the tradition established by Menachem Begin, who did not allow Iraq to develop such a nuclear threat against Israel, and by a daring and courageous act gave us two decades of tranquillity," Netanyahu said. "I believe that this is what Israel has to do." The situation was made more serious by an announcement by a Iranian news agency that Iran would begin construction on TWENTY nuclear reactors.

Work will begin in March. One of them is to be funded by Russia at a cost of $1 billion. Iran already has a reactor under construction at Bushehr.

Israeli officials called it a "very dangerous move."



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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posted 11 December 2005 01:44 AM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Sunday Times: Sharon readying IDF to attack Iran

quote:
The British daily The Sunday Times reported Sunday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has told military officials to prepare for a possible attack on Iranian nuclear targets to take place at the end of March.

World War 3 is gonna start.


From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Peech
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posted 11 December 2005 05:49 PM      Profile for Peech   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
It could all be sophistry

Israel should be wiped off the map

quote:
Iran's new president created a sense of outrage in the west yesterday by describing Israel as a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the face of the earth". Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who is more hardline than his predecessor, told students in Tehran that a new wave of Palestinian attacks would be enough to finish off Israel.

The populist leader's comments, reported by the state-run media, come at a time when Tehran is under pressure over its suspect nuclear weapons ambitions and alleged involvement in attacks on British troops in Iraq.
He said: "Anybody who recognises Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury, [while] any [Islamic leader] who recognises the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world." He was addressing a conference titled The World Without Zionism.


And this:

quote:
Iran has signed a deal to buy Russian tactical surface-to-air missile systems.
Iran plans to buy 29 TOR-M1 systems designed to bring down aircraft and guided missiles at low altitudes, Reuters reported.

Kerry on: Iran's Threat

quote:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Democratic Senator
John Kerry denounced remarks by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioning the Holocaust and suggesting that Israel should be relocated to Austria or Germany.

"For the leader of any country to question whether the Holocaust happened and suggest Israel be moved to Europe is beyond unacceptable," the former Democratic presidential candidate said in a statement.

"If President Ahmadinejad has any doubts about the Holocaust, he should have the guts to visit Auschwitz or talk to Holocaust survivors about the horrors they can never forget."

The Iranian leader said Thursday that if Germany and Austria believed Jews were massacred during World War II, then a state of Israel should be established on their soil -- comments Kerry termed a "hateful assault" against Israel.

"President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an extreme ideologue whose hateful attacks against our ally Israel must be condemned in the strongest possible terms all over the world," the Massachusetts Democrat said.

"This is worse than just reprehensible rhetoric from the head of the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism," said Kerry.


Analysis of Iranian President's remarks

quote:
Ahmadinejad's rise to power came as a big surprise in Iran. It was hard to predict that the relatively obscure candidate, who was mayor of Teheran for two years, and who was known as a conservative, would be elected to a presidential term. When Ahmadinejad came to power, many around the world wondered about the new leader’s identity, a question that is now becoming easier to answer.


"In my opinion, his declarations stem from a lack of experience," Menashri says. "Ahmadinejad is convinced that he received a mandate to act on his extreme ideology, but older, more experienced leaders, such as Rafsanjani, needed over 20 years to realize that the view from the top is different.”


[ 11 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]


From: Babbling Brook | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 12 December 2005 03:50 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Israeli killed in W Bank stabbing

This sums up the frustration factor completely.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Peech
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posted 12 December 2005 07:38 PM      Profile for Peech   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Hmmm frustration as a defence or an excuse for murder, I think I have heard that before.....

[ 12 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]


From: Babbling Brook | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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posted 12 December 2005 08:17 PM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
You're as bloody bad as Stockholm butting his know-it-all nose into BC politics.
From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Peech
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posted 12 December 2005 09:24 PM      Profile for Peech   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Edited to remove reaction to above.

[ 12 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]


From: Babbling Brook | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
al-Qa'bong
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posted 12 December 2005 11:34 PM      Profile for al-Qa'bong   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Should Israel Give Up its Nukes?

quote:
In a sudden attack of common sense, a Pentagon-commissioned study released in mid-November suggests an approach to nuclear nonproliferation in the Middle East that might actually be accepted by the people of the region. What is this breakthrough idea? That U.S. policies begin not with a country that currently lacks nuclear weapons - Iran - but rather with the one that by virtually all accounts already has them - Israel.

To avert Iran's apparent drive for nuclear weapons, concludes Henry Sokolski, a co-editor of "Getting Ready for a Nuclear-Ready Iran," Israel should freeze and begin to dismantle its nuclear capability.



From: Saskatchistan | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 13 December 2005 02:44 AM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Peech:
Hmmm frustration as a defence or an excuse for murder, I think I have heard that before.....

[ 12 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]


Yes frustration, anger resentment are often causes, and also are often raised as defence issues when dealing with an accused. One of the keys to preventing murder and otehr kinds of assault is removing sources of frustration.

There was a story about an IDF soldier who not long ago moved to the US, and murdered the husband and wife who took him in. Would you suggest that the fact of the murder itself negates the possible relevance of PTSD to the act?


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 13 December 2005 10:42 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
ISRAEL'S SACRED TERRORISM

quote:
HISTORY, particularly recent history, is characteristically presented to the general public within the framework of a doctrinal system based on certain fundamental dogmas. In the case of the totalitarian societies, the point is too obvious to require comment. The situation is more intriguing in societies that lack cruder forms of repression and ideological control. The United States, for example, is surely one of the least repressive societies of past or present history with respect to freedom of inquiry and expression. Yet only rarely will an analysis of crucial historical events reach a wide audience unless it conforms to certain doctrines of the faith.

"The United States always starts out with good intentions." With this ritual incantation, a liberal critic of American interventionism enters the area of permissible debate, of thinkable thoughts (in this case, William Pfaff, "Penalty of Interventionism," International Herald Tribune, February 1979). To accept the dogma, a person who is unable to tolerate more than a limited degree of internal contradiction must studiously avoid the documentary record, which is ample in a free society- for example, the record of high-level planning exhibited in the Pentagon Papers, particularly the record of the early years of U.S. involvement in the 1940s and early 1950s when the basic outlines of strategy were developed and formulated. Within the scholarly professions and the media the intelligentsia can generally be counted on to close ranks; they will refuse to submit to critical analysis the doctrines of the faith, prune the historical and documentary record so as to insulate these doctrines from examination, and proceed to present a version of history that is safely free from institutional critique or analysis. Occasional departures from orthodoxy are of little moment as long as they are confined to narrow circles that can be ignored, or dismissed as "irresponsible" or "naive" or "failing to comprehend the complexities of history," or otherwise identified with familiar code-words as beyond the pale.

Though relations between Israel and the United States have not been devoid of conflict, still there is no doubt that there has been, as is often said, a "special relationship." This is obvious at the material level, as measured by flow of capital and armaments, or as measured by diplomatic support, or by joint operations, as when Israel acted to defend crucial U.S. interests in the Middle Last at the time of the 1970 crisis involving Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians. The special relationship appears at the ideological level as well. Again with rare exceptions, one must adopt certain doctrines of the faith to enter the arena of debate, at least before any substantial segment of the public.

The basic doctrine is that Israel has been a hapless victim-of terrorism, of military attack, of implacable and irrational hatred. It is not uncommon for well-informed American political analysts to write that Israel has been attacked four times by its neighbors, including even 1956. Israel is sometimes chided for its response to terrorist attack, a reaction that is deemed wrong though understandable. The belief that Israel may have had a substantial role in initiating and perpetuating violence and conflict is expressed only far from the mainstream, as a general rule. In discussing the backgrounds of the 1956 war, Nadav Safran of Harvard University, in a work that is fairer than most, explains that Nasser "seemed bent on mobilizing Egypt's military resources and leading the Arab countries in an assault on Israel." The Israeli raid in Gaza in February 1955 was "retaliation" for the hanging of Israeli saboteurs in Egypt-it was only six years later, Safran claims, that it became known that they were indeed Israeli agents. The immediate background for the conflict is described in terms of fedayeen terror raids and Israeli retaliation. The terror organized by Egyptian intelligence "contributed significantly to Israel's decision to go to war in 1956 and was the principal reason for its refusal to evacuate the Gaza Strip" (Israel- The Embattled Ally, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

To maintain such doctrines as these, or the analysis of alleged fact that conform to them, it is necessary scrupulously to avoid crucial documentation. Safran, in his 600-page study, makes no use of major sources such as the diaries that Livia Rokach reviews here, relevant parts of which had been made public in 1974, or the captured Egyptian documents published in Israel in 1975, or other sources that undermine these analyses (see footnotes 19, 20). Much the same is true of the mainstream scholarly literature and journalism fairly generally.

Moshe Sharett's diary, to which Livia Rokach's monograph is devoted, is undoubtedly a major documentary source. It remains outside of "official history"-that version of history that reaches more than a tiny audience of people unsatisfied by conventional doctrine. It is only reasonable to predict that this will remain true in the United States as long as the "special relationship" persists. If, on the other hand, Israel had been, say, an ally of the Soviet Union, then Sharett's revelations would quickly become common knowledge, just as no one would speak of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1956.

In studying the process of policy formation in any state, it is common to find a rough division between relatively hard-line positions that urge the use of force and violence to attain state ends, and "softer" approaches that advocate diplomatic or commercial methods to attain the same objectives- a distinction between "the Prussians" and "the traders," to borrow terms that Michael Klare has suggested in his work on U.S. foreign policy. The goals are basically the same; the measures advocated differ, at least to a degree, a fact that may ultimately bear on the nature of the ends pursued. Sharett was an advocate of the "soft" approach. His defeat in internal Israeli politics reflected the ascendancy of the positions of Ben Gurion, Dayan and others who were not reluctant to use force to attain their goals. His diaries give a very revealing picture of the developing conflict, as he perceived it, and offer an illuminating insight into the early history of the state of Israel, with ramifications that reach to the present, and beyond. Livia Rokach has performed a valuable service in making this material readily available, for the first time, to those who are interested in discovering the real world that lies behind "official history."

Noam Chomsky, January 1, 1980



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
Peech
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posted 13 December 2005 06:36 PM      Profile for Peech   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Cueball:
Would you suggest that the fact of the murder itself negates the possible relevance of PTSD to the act?

Frustration or PTSD is not a defence to murder. ALthough I expect PTSD might negate the Mens Rea or Acteus Reus on rare occasions. However I agree that it certainly fans the flames. Question: don't you think the average Israeli is frustrated? They want peace too. So to quote a good friend of mine (you)
quote:
"we need to look for solutions not justifications!"

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]


From: Babbling Brook | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
Peech
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posted 13 December 2005 06:42 PM      Profile for Peech   Author's Homepage        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by al-Qa'bong:
Should Israel Give Up its Nukes?

In an ideal world yes. In reality, some would argue that would be equivalent to suicide.
Let's hope the ideal world becoems a reality soon.


From: Babbling Brook | Registered: May 2005  |  IP: Logged
DrConway
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posted 13 December 2005 07:38 PM      Profile for DrConway     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
If I have a gun and you have a gun, the most logical alternative that produces the result we both want is to put the guns down, assuming neither of us is a particularly homicidal nut.
From: You shall not side with the great against the powerless. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Cueball
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posted 13 December 2005 09:06 PM      Profile for Cueball   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Peech:

[ 13 December 2005: Message edited by: Peech ]



Actually it is part of a plea, called extenunatuing circumstance, mental stress amd temporary insanity.

Besides, I thought your beef was with Palestinians killing inoocent civilians. Here is a Palestinians taking out and IDF guy at a road block. Sorry its not murder its armed resistance and its legal to engage in armed resistance against an occupying army.


From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Michelle
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posted 13 December 2005 09:35 PM      Profile for Michelle   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by DrConway:
You're as bloody bad as Stockholm butting his know-it-all nose into BC politics.

DrConway, you know better than that. Consider this a warning to knock it off.


From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 11 January 2006 05:43 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The Ten Commandments are on the way

quote:
...Sharon's illness is not very different from what happened until now, all through the last year, as memory was gradually erased, for example by scholarly discussions comparing Sharon to Charles de Gaulle. We are forced to grant "forgiveness" for the past in the name of the present, which is supposedly different from the past.

It wasn't after the stroke that the Lebanon War turned into a four-letter word; it wasn't after the stroke that Sabra and Chatilla turned into bothersome annoyances. True, Sharon built settlements and now he has dismantled some of them. Yes, he will do the same thing in the West Bank. What's the "same thing"? The wall? The destruction of the livelihood of tens of thousands more Palestinians? Closing them up in ghettoes like the Gaza Ghetto? Nighttime shellings under the cover of Orwellian language, which the media in its entirety helped build?

Here, this is the most dangerous element in the Sharon cult of personality: turning the present into a "peace process." Politicians and especially everyone who was afraid of the "agenda," that change that burst into the world when Amir Peretz was elected chairman of the Labor Party, took part in this.

In that context, even the discussion of the Sharon legacy has become part of the game. For the sake of that "legacy" people are ready to forget the little ambivalence that Israeli culture has allowed those who made their living from blood. Yitzhak Rabin at least acknowledged that ambivalence. It's enough to read his speech on receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize to understand that even if he didn't have a legacy, he had some sensitive insight into the valley of death through which we walked.

Sharon is waved as a single flag: a winner. The Sharon legacy is success. Success at what? At war and business and building an image. Here is the historical moment the Israelis longed for: to look like a success story.



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
Naturefreak
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posted 11 January 2006 11:23 AM      Profile for Naturefreak        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Cueball:

Yes frustration, anger resentment are often causes, and also are often raised as defence issues when dealing with an accused. One of the keys to preventing murder and otehr kinds of assault is removing sources of frustration.



Oh yes. In Biblical, pre-Muslim times these people were "frustrated" as well. If they stopped concentrating on killing people and got down to work, maybe the Israelis and the Arabs could live together. As Golda Meir said (not exact quote) "the Middle East will have peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate ours".


From: Peterborough | Registered: Jan 2006  |  IP: Logged
eau
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posted 11 January 2006 07:46 PM      Profile for eau        Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
with all due respect to Ms Meier, I have no reason to think that Arab women love their children less than any one other group of mothers.

Child murder is not uncommon in western culture, we are certainly not short of examples. Because some people murder their own children does not mean we all do.Generalisations are always dangerous.


From: BC | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 19 January 2006 05:06 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified

quote:
By Norman G. Finkelstein

01/15/06 "Aftenposten" -- -- The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions: 1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and 2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel's real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad. This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel's defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity. These include:

Illegal Killings. Whereas Palestinian suicide attacks targeting Israeli civilians have garnered much media attention, Israel's quantitatively worse record of killing non-combatants is less well known. According to the most recent figures of the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'Tselem), 3,386 Palestinians have been killed since September 2000, of whom 1,008 were identified as combatants, as opposed to 992 Israelis killed, of whom 309 were combatants. This means that three times more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed and up to three times more Palestinian civilians than Israeli civilians. Israel's defenders maintain that there's a difference between targeting civilians and inadvertently killing them. B'Tselem disputes this: "[W]hen so many civilians have been killed and wounded, the lack of intent makes no difference. Israel remains responsible." Furthermore, Amnesty International reports that "many" Palestinians have not been accidentally killed but "deliberately targeted," while the award-winning New York Times journalist Chris Hedges reports that Israeli soldiers "entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

Torture. "From 1967," Amnesty reports, "the Israeli security services have routinely tortured Palestinian political suspects in the Occupied Territories." B'Tselem found that eighty-five percent of Palestinians interrogated by Israeli security services were subjected to "methods constituting torture," while already a decade ago Human Rights Watch estimated that "the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated" was "in the tens of thousands - a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is under three-quarters of one million." In 1987 Israel became "the only country in the world to have effectively legalized torture" (Amnesty). Although the Israeli Supreme Court seemed to ban torture in a 1999 decision, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel reported in 2003 that Israeli security forces continued to apply torture in a "methodical and routine" fashion. A 2001 B'Tselem study documented that Israeli security forces often applied "severe torture" to "Palestinian minors."?

House demolitions. "Israel has implemented a policy of mass demolition of Palestinian houses in the Occupied Territories," B'Tselem reports, and since September 2000 "has destroyed some 4,170 Palestinian homes." Until just recently Israel routinely resorted to house demolitions as a form of collective punishment. According to Middle East Watch, apart from Israel, the only other country in the world that used such a draconian punishment was Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In addition, Israel has demolished thousands of "illegal" homes that Palestinians built because of Israel's refusal to provide building permits. The motive behind destroying these homes, according to Amnesty, has been to maximize the area available for Jewish settlers: "Palestinians are targeted for no other reason than they are Palestinians." Finally, Israel has destroyed hundred of homes on security pretexts, yet a Human Rights Watch report on Gaza found that "the pattern of destruction?strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat." Amnesty likewise found that "Israel's extensive destruction of homes and properties throughout the West Bank and Gaza?is not justified by military necessity," and that "Some of these acts of destruction amount to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes."



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 30 January 2006 04:30 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The problem with democracy

quote:
And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power

By Robert Fisk

01/28/06 "The Independent" -- -- Oh no, not more democracy again! Didn't we award this to those Algerians in 1990? And didn't they reward us with that nice gift of an Islamist government - and then they so benevolently cancelled the second round of elections? Thank goodness for that!

True, the Afghans elected a round of representatives, albeit that they included some warlords and murderers. But then the Iraqis last year elected the Dawa party to power in Baghdad, which was responsible - let us not speak this in Washington - for most of the kidnappings of Westerners in Beirut in the 1980s, the car bombing of the (late) Emir and the US and French embassies in Kuwait.

And now, horror of horrors, the Palestinians have elected the wrong party to power. They were supposed to have given their support to the friendly, pro-Western, corrupt, absolutely pro-American Fatah, which had promised to "control" them, rather than to Hamas, which said they would represent them. And, bingo, they have chosen the wrong party again.

Result: 76 out of 132 seats. That just about does it. God damn that democracy. What are we to do with people who don't vote the way they should?

Way back in the 1930s, the British would lock up the Egyptians who turned against the government of King Farouk. Thus they began to set the structure of anti-democratic governance that was to follow. The French imprisoned the Lebanese government which demanded the same. Then the French left Lebanon. But we have always expected the Arab governments to do what they were told.

So today, we are expecting the Syrians to behave, the Iranians to kowtow to our nuclear desires (though they have done nothing illegal), and the North Koreans to surrender their weapons (though they actually do have them, and therefore cannot be attacked).



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 07 February 2006 02:05 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Worlds apart

quote:
Said Rhateb was born in 1972, five years after Israeli soldiers fought their way through East Jerusalem and claimed his family's dry, rock-strewn plot as part of what the Jewish state proclaimed its "eternal and indivisible capital". The bureaucrats followed in the army's footsteps, registering and measuring Israel's largest annexation of territory since its victory over the Arab armies in the 1948 war of independence. They cast an eye over the Rhateb family's village of Beit Hanina and its lands, a short drive from the biblical city on the hill, and decided the outer limits of this new Jerusalem. The Israelis drew a line on a map - a new city boundary - between Beit Hanina's lands and most of its homes. The olive groves and orchards were to be part of Jerusalem; the village was to remain in the West Bank.
The population was not so neatly divided. Arabs in the area were registered as living in the village - even those, like Rhateb's parents, whose homes were inside what was now defined as Jerusalem. In time, the Israelis gave the Rhatebs identity cards that classified them as residents of the West Bank, under military occupation. When Said Rhateb was born, he too was listed as living outside the city's boundaries. His parents thought little of it as they moved freely across the invisible line drawn by the Israelis, shopping and praying inside the walls of Jerusalem's Old City.

Four decades later, the increasingly complex world of Israel's system of classification deems Said Rhateb to be a resident of the West Bank - somewhere he has never lived - and an illegal alien for living in the home in which he was born, inside the Jerusalem boundary. Jerusalem's council forces Rhateb to pay substantial property taxes on his house but that does not give him the right to live in it, and he is periodically arrested for doing so. Rhateb's children have been thrown out of their Jerusalem school, he cannot register a car in his name - or rather he can, but only one with Palestinian number plates, which means he cannot drive it to his home because only Israeli-registered cars are allowed within Jerusalem - and he needs a pass to visit the centre of the city. The army grants him about four a year.

There is more. If Rhateb is not legally resident in his own home, then he is defined as an "absentee" who has abandoned his property. Under Israeli law, it now belongs to the state or, more particularly, its Jewish citizens. "They sent papers that said we cannot sell the land or develop it because we do not own the land. It belongs to the state," he says. "Any time they want to confiscate it, they can, because they say we are absentees even though we are living in the house. That's what forced my older brother and three sisters to live in the US. They couldn't bear the harassment."



From: Toronto | Registered: Oct 2004  |  IP: Logged
majorvictory64
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posted 11 February 2006 01:43 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Blood on His Cuffs

quote:
For a Palestinian doctor in Gaza, calming the living while preparing the dead goes hand in hand

GAZA -- Outside the morgue of Kamal Odwan Hospital, hundreds of angry and distraught young Palestinian men try to rush the door when it opens even just a crack. They plead, beg, and shout. And when they pound their fists on the metal door it makes a sound like thunder.

But in a strange and chaotic human equilibrium, those already on the inside push back until the door closes again.

Once it is latched, then, like an airlock, the same process takes place again, but this time on the inside. Now the door to the refrigerated vault swings wide open, and the men press forward for a look inside.

Some are pointing camera phones. Most just crane their necks. They get only a moment before the door swings shut again. Some step back with relief, while others cover their faces with their black and white checked keffiyehs.

In the Israeli-Palestinian war of attrition, this is how the Palestinians on the Gaza Strip identify their dead.

"Most of these people come to the hospital after they hear the bombardment or news on the radio," says Dr. Raed Arini, a Palestinian surgeon here. "They come to the hospital to see who was wounded and who was killed, whether they are their friends or their relatives, their cousins, their commanders--their passions lead them to the hospital."

Arini's face is a mixture of empathy and exhaustion. He looks older than his 30 years--partly, he concedes, because of his volunteer work. A thoracic specialist, he has volunteered for conflict-related medical care for the past three years.

"I'm often shocked by what I see," Arini says. "There are days when it seems unendurable. I'm a doctor, but I'm also a human being."



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majorvictory64
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posted 26 February 2006 01:06 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Forbidden to Go Home Together: Separate and Unequal

quote:
At the Hizma junction, which is for Israelis only, the "seam administration of the Defense Ministry has not yet hung the signs that it already hung on the road leading from the settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim to Jerusalem. The signs are hung alongside the road and at the military checkpoint, and say, in Hebrew and Arabic, "Passage is for Israelis only. Transporting and/or movement of people who are not Israelis is forbidden through this passage."

The yellow signs explain who is an Israeli. The definition is in the major general's order, and is the standard definition used in military orders declaring "a closed military area" to Palestinians, where only Israelis are allowed to enter. "An Israeli," says the order and the sign, "is a resident of Israel, someone whose residency is in the region [meaning the occupied territory - A.H.] and is an Israeli citizen [a settler - A.H.] or one who is eligible to become an immigrant according to the Law of Return-1950 and someone who is not a resident of the region but has a valid entry permit to Israel [a tourist - A.H.]

A military source confirmed to Haaretz that a decision has been made to allow Palestinians who work for international organizations to travel, with their foreign co-workers, through two passages designated for Israelis only "instead of making them go to the ends of the earth" to passages designated for Palestinians only. The problem with the separate passages is not only that they are remote and distant, as the military source admits; the problem is not only the wasted time involved in reaching those passages, the revolving doors that suddenly are locked, the humiliating crowdedness, the alienating technological devices or that most of the "passages" effectively legitimize more land expropriation and annexation of Palestinian territory to Israel. The problem is that they are another building block in the policy of separate development for Jews and non-Jews, another expression of the mentality that cloaks itself in security but whose real purpose is to preserve the hegemonic privileges of Jews, at the expense of the Palestinians in the territories conquered from them.

This policy of separate development of two demographic groups in the same territorial region - the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli army is the sovereign - began with the first settlement. It continued and deepened as the settlements proliferated and grew into separate demographic-territorial pockets where Israeli law, which does not apply to the original inhabitants of the area, is in force.

The residents of those territorial pockets also won extra rights, which are denied to the native neighbors and the non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Like the right to choose where they want to live, on both sides of the Green Line. Protected by the superiority of the ruling military force, territorial borders were set and bureaucratic limits were placed that a priori limit the separate development of the native Palestinians: The area available to them is gradually shrinking, water quotas are dwindling in comparison with what is made available to Jews, freedom of movement is limited, and economic development is shackled and controlled.

With time, and with international accommodation and the increase in the number of Israelis who benefit from the system, the settlements are being transformed from "Israeli territorial pockets" to Jewish territorial contiguity, in which there are poor, rights deprived, over croweded and inferior "populated pockets" of the Palestinians.



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majorvictory64
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posted 04 March 2006 08:24 AM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Break Down That Wall

quote:
Every time when I am in Bil'in and other places in occupied Palestine, I can't help thinking what a paradise this country would be if there were peace, peace based on justice and mutual respect.

URI AVNERY

A final score of 1:1 may not be the most impressive, but for the youngsters of Bil'in it was a glorious achievement. For them, it was not the result that was important, nor even the match itself (against a team from the nearby town of Betunya). What was important was where it took place: on an improvised football field that was hastily leveled on the land that was stolen from the village by the Separation Wall.

The match was a part of a unique event. In the poor, little village, with its 1500 inhabitants, which few had ever heard of before the start of its heroic battle against the Wall, an "International Conference on the Joint, Non-violent struggle Against the Wall" took place. In the framework of this event, which lasted for two days, a range of activities was organized: reports and debates about the struggle, the award of honor shields to the families of the nine people who lost their lives in the fight against the Wall, the planting of olive saplings on the stolen land, the inauguration of the football field and the match itself.

I had the honor of being invited to deliver one of the opening speeches, before an audience of 300 people - inhabitants of Bil'in, members of the Palestinian parliament, representatives of the struggle in several areas along the Wall, Israeli peace activists and delegates from European solidarity groups. This is what I said:



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majorvictory64
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posted 21 April 2006 01:29 PM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Israel's Policy: Starve the Palestinians

quote:
Israel exists as a major military force in the world and a silent member of the nuclear club. Yet it cries wolf that Hamas threatens its existence.

On the third anniversary of America's invasion of Iraq broadcast in full shock and awe to the world via green TV screens that all might see the night devastation of the city, another invasion was underway in Gaza, a silent invasion of human rights that, in its barbarity, casts its own shock and awe, the starvation of the people of Gaza by closure of that prison's gates by Israeli IDF. David Shearer of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OCHA) stated, "What we were warning before was that stocks (of wheat) were getting low. Today we are saying stocks are gone, and the end point has been reached." Israel has closed Gaza's commercial lifeline, the Al-Minter Crossing, these past 50 days in peak harvest time, preventing the export of goods and stopping the import of bread supplies. 3,594 MT of wheat flour contracted to local mills did not enter. Now there is no bread and the 70% of Palestinians living below the poverty line have no food. This barbarity one does not expect from the people who cried for protection from fascist forces when they were under siege.

Perhaps as we watch the Israelis enter their voting booths on the 28th, we might hope that the branding of Israel as a genocidal nation might cause a twinge of moral outrage and put into office a government that would seek reconciliation with the Palestinians rather than devastation of them. Perhaps the world communities might get a chance to see behind the veil of silence that shrouds what takes place in Palestine and keeps the horror from the eyes of Americans and Europeans. Perhaps a new Israeli government would recognize that the election of Hamas is an opportunity for peace since it represents the views of the vast majority of Palestinians and not a threat to be discounted because it did not represent voters in Israel. Perhaps a free democratic election tells us something we don't want to admit: justice must be sought for all, not just those the Israelis want to appease because they do what Israelis want. Perhaps the Israeli wall of silence that makes the reality in Palestine invisible to all can be breached because of the democratic elections that have taken place in Palestine if the Israelis will match that effort.

The sower of deceit spreads his seed upon the fertile soil of ignorance, waters it with repetition, and covers it with silence. For five years, America and Israel, under Bush and Sharon, have spread seeds of deceit on minds made fertile to receive it by a controlled press, titillation news programs, and a disinterested public made lethargic by discomfort and fear. But in 2005 the seeds had germinated, broken through the soil and cast their evil smell over the lands, here and in Palestine. Now Bush and the American people await the disassembling of the Bush regime as the Libby lies, the Abramoff payoffs, the DeLay lobbying industry, the Rumsfeld Defense debacle, the torture scenes that never end, the Katrina catastrophe, the isolation of the United States by unilateral arrogance, the terror caused by our subservience to Sharon and his inhumane imprisonment of Palestinians, the ineluctable civil war that engulfs our liberated friends in Iraq, the impending repetition of Iraq in Iran, and death by debt once we are forced to disembark from Iraq's shores, tear apart the fabric of America.


[ 29 April 2006: Message edited by: majorvictory64 ]


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majorvictory64
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posted 29 April 2006 09:05 PM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Bullet in the right eye

quote:
By Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank

24 April, 2006

When Ruba Mahmoud Awayes left her home in the small village of Nus Jbeil, outside Nablus, for college recently, she never thought she would return home a few days later with only one eye.

Yet, this is exactly what happened to the 21-year-old college student, who painstaking recounted her nightmare to PT.

“My friend and I were leaving campus on Sunday, 9 April, and walking toward the taxi cabs that would take us to the village. Suddenly, I felt a strong object smacking my right eye. I felt my entire head exploding. I didn’t know what was happening to me, I collapsed and found myself in the Rafidia hospital,” says the 3red year IT student.

“There were no soldiers, no military vehicles, nothing, no helicopters hovering above. It was as if the bullet came from nowhere. If I had known there was shooting , I would have docked it or moved to a safer place or returned to campus.”

Ruba said she didn’t know if the soldier who shot her did it deliberately.

“This is irrelevant. They knew damn well their bullets would hit somebody, and that was ok for them as long as the victim was a Palestinian. It doesn’t matter if he or she is innocent or not. The important thing for them is to kill or maim or cripple a Palestinian.”

At the Rafidia hospital, doctors soon found out that the 21-year-old student had just lost her eye as a result of a rubber-coated bullet. They called her father in the village, telling him that his daughter was seriously wounded in the eye and that she ought to be transferred immediately to the Saint Johne's eye hospital in East Jerusalem for an operation called “evisceration.”

Devastated by the bad news, the distraught father, Mahmoud Awayes, didn’t know what to do as he possessed no permit from the Israeli army to enter Jerusalem. Still worse, an Israeli army roadblock was erected at the entrance to the village where soldiers were preventing any body from leaving. Eventually, the family contacted a relative who is living in Nablus and got him to accompany Ruba to Jerusalem.

Arriving at the Saint Jones eye hospital, doctors decided to operate on her immediately.

“We found that her entire eye was smashed by the impact of the bullet, everything was smashed, the cornea, the retina, the internal blood vessels, the entire eyeball was smashed,” said Humam Shomali, the treating ophthalmologist.

“We had no choice but to eviscerate her entire eye, which we did. We also placed a polystyrene ball in place of the eyeball.”



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majorvictory64
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posted 03 May 2006 11:30 PM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The Untold Story of Israel's Bomb

quote:

By Avner Cohen and William Burr
Sunday, April 30, 2006; Page B01

On Sept. 9, 1969, a big brown envelope was delivered to the Oval Office on behalf of CIA Director Richard M. Helms. On it he had written, "For and to be opened only by: The President, The White House." The precise contents of the envelope are still unknown, but it was the latest intelligence on one of Washington's most secretive foreign policy matters: Israel's nuclear program. The material was so sensitive that the nation's spymaster was unwilling to share it with anybody but President Richard M. Nixon himself.

The now-empty envelope is inside a two-folder set labeled "NSSM 40," held by the Nixon Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives. (NSSM is the acronym for National Security Study Memorandum, a series of policy studies produced by the national security bureaucracy for the Nixon White House.) The NSSM 40 files are almost bare because most of their documents remain classified.

With the aid of With the aid ofrecently declassified documents , we now know that NSSM 40 was the Nixon administration's effort to grapple with the policy implications of a nuclear-armed Israel. These documents offer unprecedented insight into the tense deliberations in the White House in 1969 -- a crucial time in which international ratification of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was uncertain and U.S. policymakers feared that a Middle Eastern conflagration could lead to superpower conflict. Nearly four decades later, as the world struggles with nuclear ambitions in Iran, India and elsewhere, the ramifications of this hidden history are still felt.

Israel's nuclear program began more than 10 years before Helms's envelope landed on Nixon's desk. In 1958, Israel secretly initiated work at what was to become the Dimona nuclear research site. Only about 15 years after the Holocaust, nuclear nonproliferation norms did not yet exist, and Israel's founders believed they had a compelling case for acquiring nuclear weapons. In 1961, the CIA estimated that Israel could produce nuclear weapons within the decade.

The discovery presented a difficult challenge for U.S. policymakers. From their perspective, Israel was a small, friendly state -- albeit one outside the boundaries of U.S. security guarantees -- surrounded by larger enemies vowing to destroy it. Yet government officials also saw the Israeli nuclear program as a potential threat to U.S. interests. President John F. Kennedy feared that without decisive international action to curb nuclear proliferation, a world of 20 to 30 nuclear-armed nations would be inevitable within a decade or two.

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations fashioned a complex scheme of annual visits to Dimona to ensure that Israel would not develop nuclear weapons. But the Israelis were adept at concealing their activities. By late 1966, Israel had reached the nuclear threshold, although it decided not to conduct an atomic test.



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majorvictory64
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posted 19 May 2006 11:50 PM      Profile for majorvictory64     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
On privation and war

quote:
Almost completely without notice in American media, children and the infirm are also quickly becoming the victims du jour in the latest, strikingly vicious effort by the United States and its European allies to help Israel keep the Palestinians under lock and key. That would be the economic blockade, including the suspension of humanitarian aid and the refusal by Israel to pay taxes legitimately owed to the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The boycott is intended to collectively punish all Palestinians for having had the temerity to not back the enemy-approved choice in January's election, quite possibly the freest and fairest expression of electoral democracy in the Middle East since Iran's democratically elected government was overthrown by (sense a long term trend here?) the United States, over a half-century ago, in 1953.

The first victims of this latest attempt to make Palestinians civilians suffer for the tangled politics of the region have been, not surprisingly, those least able to defend themselves. In Gaza, whose entire access to the outside world is controlled by currently closed Israeli border crossings, four patients on kidney dialysis have died due to lack of supplies. There are further reports of Type I diabetics having faltered due to lack of insulin, syringes, sugar, and even refrigeration. Supplies of other essential medicines are rapidly dwindling. Food, too, is running out in many quarters in what apparently boils down to an intentional policy of mass starvation, initiated and countenanced by the West. Gaza has been the worst hit, but residents of the more populous West Bank are also suffering. The Palestinian economy, needless to say, is nonexistent. As Palestinians are one of the only populations in the world suffering (now for 39 years!) under the control of an occupying military government, the fate of victimized civilians, legally lays entirely on the heads of Israel. But the fingerprints of Bush neocons are also clearly all over this. (If this precedent or logic were to be applied elsewhere, think of what might happen to all of us who are guilty, like the Palestinians, of nothing more than living in a jurisdiction that supports politicians considered vile elsewhere in the world. At least Hamas actually won its election.)

Politically, the insistence of the West on collectively punishing Palestinians in the hopes that they will abandon their backing of the terrorist political party Hamas for the previously ruling, monumentally corrupt Fatah Party seems to have backfired. First, Palestinians began rallying behind Hamas in even greater numbers. Thus far, the hoped-for-by-the-West calls for a quick new election never materialized. Instead there was an uneasy stalemate, as Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is still P.A. President, and therefore controls Executive Branch functions while Hamas controls Legislative Branch matters. But this week, in response to the endemic corruption and favoritism in the Fatah-controlled P.A. security forces, Hamas announced that it was creating its own militias to provide security for Palestine, drawing on the armed wings of various allied groups. Rhetoric quickly heated up into confrontations, and the ugly prospect of a Palestinian civil war now looms. Just what the long-suffering Palestinian civilians need. Israeli leaders, always big fans of divide and conquer, are doubtless terribly amused at the delightful prospect of Palestinians killing each other. However, if any kind of civil war does break out within Palestine, the primary victims will, alas, assuredly be yet more civilians.


[ 19 May 2006: Message edited by: majorvictory64 ]


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