EL WAHDA

Tahrir Square responds to Mubarak's resignation

2011-02-11T18:27:00.001-08:00

Triumph as Mubarak quits - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-11T18:15:00.000-08:00

Egypt is free

2011-02-11T18:09:00.000-08:00

Egypt: Why is Israel so Blind? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-09T18:07:00.000-08:00

Egypt: Why is Israel so Blind? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

2011-02-09T17:54:00.000-08:00

Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

The danger to Egypt's revolution comes from Washington

2011-02-07T16:20:00.000-08:00

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 6 February 2011

Protesters stand in front of grafitti calling on the US government to stay out of Egypt's affairs, 2 February. (Matthew Cassel)

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books).

The greatest danger to the Egyptian revolution and the prospects for a free and independent Egypt emanates not from the "baltagiyya" -- the mercenaries and thugs the regime sent to beat, stone, stab, shoot and kill protestors in Cairo, Alexandria and other cities last week -- but from Washington.

Ever since the Egyptian uprising began on 25 January, the United States government and the Washington establishment that rationalizes its policies have been scared to death of "losing Egypt." What they fear losing is a regime that has consistently ignored the rights and well-being of its people in order to plunder the country and enrich the few who control it, and that has done America's bidding, especially supporting Israel in its oppression and wars against the Palestinians and other Arabs.

The Obama Administration quickly dissociated itself from its envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner, after the latter candidly told the BBC on 5 February that he thought President Hosni Mubarak "must stay in office in order to steer" any transition to a post-Mubarak order ("US special envoy: 'Mubarak must stay for now'," 5 February 2011).

But one suspects that Wisner was inadvertently speaking in his master's voice. US President Barack Obama and his national security establishment may be willing to give up Mubarak the person, but they are not willing to give up Mubarak's regime. It is notable that the US has never supported the Egyptian protestors' demand that Mubarak must go now. Nor has the United States suspended its $1.5 billion annual aid package to Egypt, much of which goes to the state security forces that are oppressing protestors and beating up and arresting journalists.

As The New York Times -- always a reliable barometer of official thinking -- reported, "The United States and leading European nations on Saturday threw their weight behind Egypt's vice president, Omar Suleiman, backing his attempt to defuse a popular uprising without immediately removing President Hosni Mubarak from power." Obama administration officials, the newspaper added, "said Mr. Suleiman had promised them an 'orderly transition' that would include constitutional reform and outreach to opposition groups" ("West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition," 5 February 2011).

Moreoever, the Times reported, the United States has already managed to persuade two of its major European clients -- the United Kingdom and Germany -- to back continuing the existing regime with only a change of figurehead.

Suleiman, long the powerful chief of Egypt's intelligence services, has served -- perhaps even more so than Mubarak -- as the guarantor of Egypt's regional role in maintaining the American- and Israeli-dominated order. As author Jane Mayer has documented, Suleiman played a key role in the US "rendition" program, working closely with the CIA which kidnapped "terror suspects" from around the world and delivered them into Suleiman's hands for interrogation, and almost certainly torture ("Who is Omar Suleiman?," The New Yorker, 29 January 2011).

High praise for Suleiman's work has also come from top Israeli military brass. "I always believed in the abilities of the Egyptian Intelligence service [GIS]," Israeli General Amos Gilad told American, Palestinian Authority and Egyptian officials during a secret April 2007 meeting whose leaked minutes were recently released by Al Jazeera as part of the Palestine Papers. "It keeps order and security among 70 millions -- 20 millions in one city [a reference to the population of Egypt, actually closer to 83 million, and to Cairo] -- this is a great achievement, for which you deserve a medal. It is the best asset for the Middle East," Gilad said.

The notion that anyone, let alone US officials, could believe that Suleiman would lead an "orderly transition" to democracy would be laughable if it were not so sinister. Much more likely, the strategy is to try to ride out the protests and wear out and split the opposition, consolidate the regime under Suleiman's ruthless grip with the backing of the Egyptian army, and then enact cosmetic "reforms" to keep the Egyptian people politically divided and busy while business carries on as usual. Under any Suleiman "transition" political activists, journalists and anyone suspected of being part of the current uprising would be in grave danger.

From the American perspective, the strategy can be likened to what happened in the summer of 2008 when the house-of-cards international financial system started to collapse. Think of the Tunisian regime of deposed dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as the investment bank Lehman Brothers. When a run on the bank began, the United States government refused to provide it with financial guarantees to bail it out, and it quickly went bankrupt.

But when the panic spread and even larger "too big to fail" financial firms including massive insurance company AIG began to see their positions suddenly deteriorate, the United States government stepped in to bail them out with hundreds of billions of dollars.

The Egyptian regime is the AIG of the region and what we are seeing now is an American attempt to bail it out. If Egypt goes under, the United States fears that the contagion would spread as Arab publics realize that the US-backed despots who rule them can be replaced, and that the toppling of these regimes whose only promise to their people has been "security" is not the end of the world but the start of renewal.

Of course, no analogy is exact. Whereas, allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse was a calculated decision, the United States did not see the revolution in Tunisia, or the uprising in Egypt coming. "Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton infamously declared on 25 January, the day the anti-regime protests broke out ("US urges restraint in Egypt, says government stable," Reuters, 25 January 2011).

Clinton's cluelessness is reminiscent of her predecessor Condoleezza Rice's famous words ("didn't see it coming") in relation to Hamas' victory in Palestinian legislative council elections in 2006.

According to The New York Times, Obama himself is unhappy with US intelligence failures in the Arab world ("Obama Faults Spy Agencies' Performance in Gauging Mideast Unrest, Officials Say," 4 February 2011). For close watchers of the United States, this obliviousness is no mystery.

As Helena Cobban has observed, the Israel Lobby, "AIPAC and its attack dogs," have conducted such a thorough "witch-hunt" over the past quarter century "against anyone with real Middle East expertise that the US government now contains no-one at the higher (or even mid-career) levels of policymaking who has any in-depth understanding of the region or of the aspirations of its people" ("Obama's know-nothings discuss Egypt," 28 January 2011).

But it is even worse than that. The US "policy" establishment seems only capable of viewing the region through Israeli eyes. This is why for so many officials and commentators the concerns of Israel to maintain a brutal hegemony trump the aspirations of 83 million Egyptians to determine their own future free from the shackles of the regime that has oppressed them for so long.

And different futures are possible. On the minds of many observers is the "Turkish model" of constitutional democracy, economic resurgence and foreign policy independence, all under the rule of a "moderate" Islamist party. Turkey, once closely in the orbit of the United States, started to break out with its refusal to allow the US to use the country's bases for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

In recent years, Turkey has developed a deliberate "360 degree" foreign policy doctrine which includes maintaining relations with Europe and the United States, while restoring close ties with all its neighbors among them Iran and Arab countries, and assuming a greater regional mediating role. Since 2009, Turkey's once close alliance with Israel has deteriorated sharply, even though ties have not been cut. These shifts, along with its ubiquitous consumer and cultural products have given Turkey enormous regional influence and appeal.

Turkey has its own specific history and is no more perfect than any other country. But the bigger point is that subservience to the United States and Israel is not Egypt's only option. The worst case scenario from the American viewpoint is to have three major regional powers, Iran, Turkey and Egypt, that are not under Washington's control.

Of course Turkey is carving out its own path and Egyptians are struggling to go their own way which may be very different. There's no reason either to believe that Egypt would become "another Iran" as ceaseless Israeli propaganda suggests. But given a free choice, Egypt is not likely serve the "interests" of the United States and Israel the way the Mubarak regime has.

One example is that Egypt might dispense with US aid and still come out ahead by simply selling its natural gas on international markets rather than to Israel at what is reported to be a deep discount. Another is that a truly independent Egypt would eschew serving as Israel's proxy in enforcing the criminal siege of Gaza and stoking intra-Palestinian divisions.

By coming to the streets in their millions, by sacrifing the lives of some of their very finest, the Egyptian people have said that they and they alone want to decide their nation's future. Mubarak as a person is already irrelevant. The confrontation is now between the Egyptian people's desire for democracy and self-determination on the one hand, and, on the other, US insistence (along with its clients in Egypt and the region) on continuing the old regime. Let us offer whatever solidarity we can from wherever we are to help the Egyptian people to win.

Two years after Gaza massacre

2010-12-27T11:20:00.000-08:00

The ambulance which Arafa Abd al-Dayem was loading when he was fatally struck by an Israeli-fired dart bomb.

Ahmed Abu Foul in the destroyed Palestine Red Crescent Society station, Ezbet Abed Rabbo.

The Gaza massacre and the struggle for justice
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2010

The Gaza massacre, which Israel launched two years ago today, did not end on 18 January 2009, but continues. It was not only a massacre of human bodies, but of the truth and of justice. Only our actions can help bring it to an end.

The UN-commissioned Goldstone Report documented evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in an attack aimed at the very "foundations of civilian life in Gaza" -- schools, industrial infrastructure, water, sanitation, flour mills, mosques, universities, police stations, government ministries, agriculture and thousands of homes. Yet like so many other inquiries documenting Israeli crimes, the Goldstone Report sits gathering dust as the United States, the European Union, Palestinian Authority and certain Arab governments colluded to ensure it would not translate into action.

Israel launched the attack, after breaking the ceasefire it had negotiated with Hamas the previous June, under the bogus pretext of stopping rocket firing from Gaza.

During those horrifying weeks from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, Israel's merciless bombardment killed 1,417 people according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.

They were infants like Farah Ammar al-Helu, one-year-old, killed in al-Zaytoun. They were schoolgirls or schoolboys, like Islam Khalil Abu Amsha, 12, of Shajaiyeh and Mahmoud Khaled al-Mashharawi, 13, of al-Daraj. They were elders like Kamla Ali al-Attar, 82 of Beit Lahiya and Madallah Ahmed Abu Rukba, 81, of Jabaliya; They were fathers and husbands like Dr. Ehab Jasir al-Shaer. They were police officers like Younis Muhammad al-Ghandour, aged 24. They were ambulance drivers and civil defense workers. They were homemakers, school teachers, farmers, sanitation workers and builders. And yes, some of them were fighters, battling as any other people would to defend their communities with light and primitive weapons against Israel's onslaught using the most advanced weaponry the United States and European Union could provide.

The names of the dead fill 100 pages, but nothing can fill the void they left in their families and communities ("The Dead in the course of the Israeli recent military offensive on the Gaza strip between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009," PDF Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 18 March 2009).

These were not the first to die in Israeli massacres and they have not been the last. Dozens of people have been killed since the end of Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," the latest Salameh Abu Hashish last week, a 20-year old shepherd shot by Israeli occupation forces as he tended his animals in northern Gaza.

But the tragedy does not end with those who were killed. Along with thousands permanently injured, there is the incalculable psychological cost of children growing up without parents, of parents burying their children, and the mental trauma that Israel's offensive and the ongoing siege has done to almost everyone in Gaza. There are the as yet unknown consequences of subjecting Gaza's 700,000 children to toxic water supply for years on end.

The siege robs 1.5 million people not just of basic goods, reconstruction supplies virtually nothing has been rebuilt in Gaza), and access to medical care but of their basic rights and freedoms to travel, to study, to be part of the world. It robs promising young people of their ambitions and futures. It deprives the planet of all that they would have been able to create and offer. By cutting Gaza off from the outside world, Israel hopes to make us forget that the those inside are human.

Two years after the crime, Gaza remains a giant prison for a population whose unforgivable sin in the eyes of Israel and its allies is to be refugees from lands that Israel took by ethnic cleansing.

Israel's violence against Gaza, like its violence against Palestinians everywhere, is the logical outcome of the racism that forms the inseparable core of Zionist ideology and practice: Palestinians are merely a nuisance, like brush or rocks to be cleared away in Zionism's relentless conquest of the land. This is what all Palestinians are struggling against, as an open letter today from dozens of civil society organizations in Gaza reminds us:

"We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of Israel's white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression."

Those of us who live outside Gaza can look to the people there for inspiration and strength; even after all this deliberate cruelty, they have not surrendered. But we cannot expect them to bear this burden alone or ignore the appalling cost Israel's unrelenting persecution has on the minds and bodies of people in Gaza or on society itself. We must also heed their calls to action.

$79,000 of our $100,000 goal raised. Can you help us make it the rest of the way so we can keep publishing through 2011?

One year ago, I joined more than a thousand people from dozens of countries on the Gaza Freedom March in an attempt to reach Gaza to commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre. We found our way blocked by the Egyptian government which remains complicit, with US backing, in the Israeli siege. And although we did not reach Gaza, other convoys before, and after, such as Viva Palestina did, only after severe obstruction and limitations by Egypt.

Yesterday, the Mavi Marmara returned to Istanbul where it was met dockside by thousands of people. In May the ship was part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which set out to break the siege by sea, only to be attacked and hijacked in international waters by Israeli commandos who killed nine people and injured dozens. Even that massacre has not deterred more people from seeking to break the siege; the Asian Convoy to Gaza is on its way, and several other efforts are being planned.

We may look at all these initiatives and say that despite their enormous cost -- including in human lives -- the siege remains unbroken, as world governments -- the so-called "international community" -- continue to ensure Israeli impunity. Two years later, Gaza remains in rubble, and Israel keeps the population always on the edge of a deliberately-induced humanitarian catastrophe while allowing just enough supplies to appease international opinion. It would be easy to be discouraged.

However, we must remember that the Palestinian people in Gaza are not objects of an isolated humanitarian cause, but partners in the struggle for justice and freedom throughout Palestine. Breaking the siege of Gaza would be a milestone on that march.

Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament and a passenger on the Mavi Marmara explained last October in an http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11599.shtml with The Electronic Intifada that Israeli society and government do not view their conflict with the Palestinians as one that must be resolved by providing justice and equality to victims, but merely as a "security" problem. Zoabi observed that the vast majority of Israelis believe Israel has largely "solved" the security problem: in the West Bank with the apartheid wall and "security coordination" between Israeli occupation forces and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and in Gaza with the siege.

Israeli society, Zoabi concluded, "doesn't feel the need for peace. They don't perceive occupation as a problem. They don't perceive the siege as a problem. They don't perceive oppressing the Palestinians as a problem, and they don't pay the price of occupation or the price of [the] siege [of Gaza]."

Thus the convoys and flotillas are an essential part of a larger effort to make Israel understand that it does have a problem and it can never be treated as a normal state until it ends its oppression and occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and fully respects the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees. And even if governments continue to stand by and do nothing, global civil society is showing the way with these efforts to break the siege, and with the broader Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).

Amid all the suffering, Palestinians have not celebrated many victories in the two years since the Gaza massacre. But there are signs that things are moving in the right direction. Israel begs for US-endorsed "peace negotiations precisely because it knows that while the "peace process" provides cover for its ongoing crimes, it will never be required to give up anything or grant any rights to Palestinians in such a "process."

Yet Israel is mobilizing all its resources to fight the global movement for justice, especially BDS, that has gained so much momentum since the Gaza massacre. There can be no greater confirmation that this movement brings justice within our grasp. Our memorial to all the victims must not be just an annual commemoration, but the work we do every day to make the ranks of this movement grow.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books).

Palestinian property destroyed as Israeli settlements grow

2010-12-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 2 December 2010

In the Khirbet Yerza village in the Jordan Valley, members of the Anabousy family stand in front of their home one day after it was destroyed by Israeli forces, 25 November. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills)

Israeli bulldozers and armed soldiers implemented a swath of demolitions of Palestinian homes and structures for more than a week in multiple areas across the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley.

On 24 November, two bulldozers and approximately 200 soldiers swarmed the farming village of Abu al-Ajaj in the Jordan Valley, destroying livestock pens and sheds. Ma'an News Agency reported that the demolition came two weeks after the state confiscated village land in preparation for the expansion of a nearby illegal Israeli settlement colony ("More Bedouin structures demolished in Jordan Valley," 24 November 2010).

The Jordan Valley Solidarity (JVS) group, a network of Palestinian grassroots community organizations from all over the Jordan Valley, stated that several baby goats were killed and Israeli settlers accompanied the soldiers as the bulldozers razed the land. "Both [the soldiers and the settlers] laughed and cheered as the destruction took place," the group reported in a news release ("The occupation forces demolished 4 barracks in the Jordan Valley," 24 November 2010).

JVS added that an Israeli court declared a settlement expansion freeze for the nearby settlement of Massua, but the destruction happened nevertheless, and the settlers are intent on building despite the freeze. "Five years ago the settlement started to expand onto a small piece of land that belongs to the Bedouin community," JVS reported. "Since then, settlers haven't stopped grabbing land from the Palestinian shepherds."

Most of the Jordan Valley is located in Area C, an area which comprises 60 percent of the West Bank. Under the Oslo accords signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s, the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip were carved up into areas A, B and C, the latter of which indicates full Israeli control. Under the Oslo regulations, Area C, which includes East Jerusalem, is administered and controlled by the Israeli government and its military. Approximately 40,000 Palestinians live in Area C.

Also on 24 November, dozens of villagers in Bani Hassan attempted to fight back against Israeli troops as bulldozers razed the village, which is near the Palestinian town of Salfit and the illegal Ariel settlement bloc. Agricultural land and land reclamation equipment was demolished, according to a report published by Ma'an ("Israel bulldozes PA-backed projects," 24 November 2010). At the same time, near Bani Hassan in the Wadi Qana area, Ma'an reported that crews from the Israeli Civil Administration and the Society for Protecting Nature in Israel "arrived with bulldozers which demolished the Wadi Qana rehabilitation project, [costing] the Palestinian finance ministry $120,000 US." A water canal was destroyed, as were parts of a reservoir and agricultural irrigation systems.

On the same day, in East Jerusalem, dozens of Israeli police flanked a bulldozer in the at-Tur neighborhood near the Mount of Olives as it destroyed the home of Abed Zablah. A father of five, Zablah had obtained a court order to halt the demolition of his home earlier in the day, according to a report by Agence France Presse. But by the time he had returned home from the court, Israeli forces had already leveled his house ("Israel razes Palestinian home in E. Jerusalem," 24 November, 2010).

Al-Araqib destroyed for seventh time

Days earlier, Israeli forces once again demolished the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Naqab (Negev) desert on 22 November, the seventh time since July 2010. In a press release, human rights group Amnesty International stated that "at least 50 of the 250 residents of al-Araqib village are again living in the ruins of their homes, attempting to rebuild them. Others are camping in tents in the village cemetery ("Israel condemned over Bedouin village demolition," 25 November 2010).

Amnesty International added, "[a]s in previous demolitions, no eviction or demolition order was presented to the inhabitants. Israeli authorities have previously detained residents and their supporters when they demanded to see a demolition order ... Israeli media reported in early 2010 that the government had decided to triple the demolition rate of Bedouin constructions in the Negev. As the government does not recognize the villagers' land tenure, it maintains that their settlements are illegal."

The village of al-Araqib was razed to the ground on 27 July 2010, when approximately 1,000 Israeli riot police raided the area as dozens of homes were destroyed. Villagers who returned to their land constructed shelters after the July demolition, but those were destroyed again on 4 August, 10 August, 17 August, 13 September, 13 October, and last week. Amnesty International admonished the Israeli government in its press statement. Philip Luther, Amnesty's Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: "We condemn these repeated demolitions that aim to forcibly evict the residents of al-Araqib from the land they have on lived for generations ... The fact that the village has been demolished seven times in four months shows that this is not some administrative mistake but a conscious Israeli government policy of dispossession."

A home in al-Isawiyye after it was destroyed by Israeli forces on 30 November. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills)

East Jerusalem

Meanwhile, in East Jerusalem on 22 November, bulldozers destroyed buildings in al-Isawiyye and Hizma. According to the same report by Amnesty International, livestock pens and small homes used by farmers were demolished.

The next morning in the Jabal Mukkaber neighborhood, also in Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted a Palestinian family from their home, following a court ruling that declared the home to be owned by Jewish settlers.

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) stated that immediately after evicting the Qarain family, Israeli police handed the building over to settlers affiliated with the Elad settlement financing organization.

"The settler group is currently undertaking work on the premises to fortify the building," stated ICAHD in its report ("Palestinian family forcibly evicted in Jabal Mukkaber," 24 November 2010). "Elad's activities focus on moving extremist national-religious settlers into the heart of Palestinian neighborhoods in areas encircling the Old City, and particularly those neighborhoods which form the last contiguous Palestinian fabric of Jerusalem, connecting the West Bank with the Old City. This area has been eyed as a future Palestinian capital since peace negotiations in the mid-'90s, and includes the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, Ras al-Amud and Jabal Mukkaber."

ICAHD stated that the grounds for eviction of the Qarain family "remain unclear."

"Regardless of the Israeli court order, any transfer of Israeli civilians into occupied East Jerusalem remains a clear breach of international law which absolutely prohibits the transfer of civilians into occupied territory, regardless of the method used to gain the property," the ICAHD report added.

A week later, on 30 November, Israeli forces demolished yet another home in al-Isawiyye. Jerusalem municipal bulldozers, escorted by border guards and police, destroyed a home and a printing shop, according to Ma'an News Agency. Protesters were attacked by police, who shot tear gas ("Bulldozers demolish home, workshop in Jerusalem," 30 November 2010).

Southern West Bank and northern Jordan Valley

On 25 November, the wave of demolitions continued in the southern West Bank and the northern Jordan Valley area. The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC) released a report stating that Israeli forces raided the village of al-Rifayaia, east of Yatta in the south Hebron hills, where they demolished a 250-meter house. PSCC said the house was home to two families of twenty persons, 16 of them minors ("Israeli forces demolish mosque as West Bank demolitions wave continues for the second day in a row," 25 November 2010).

PSCC reported that hours before the al-Rifayaia demolitions, Israeli bulldozers destroyed four homes, three animal shelters and a recently-renovated mosque in Khirbet Yerza, home to more than 120 individuals. The Jordan Valley Solidarity group added that the area is "highly militarized with three military camps including Samrah, Almaleh and Kopra camp. In the past, the community has faced constant military harassment. As a result, most of the homes in the area had received demolition orders ("New demolitions in the Jordan Valley," 25 November 2010).

And on 29 November, Israeli forces handed out demolition orders to a mosque and the owners of two homes in the al-Masara village near Bethlehem. Ma'an News Agency reported that six military jeeps raided the village and took photographs of the mosque and the homes ("Israel hands demolition orders to village mosque, homes," 29 November 2010).

While Israel continued its policies of frequent demolition of Palestinian property, a settlement colony in East Jerusalem announced new construction of Jewish-only housing units.

According to a report by the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, Israel approved a plan to expand the settlement of Gilo, near Bethlehem, which will add 130 housing units on land in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Safafa ("130 new housing units approved in East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo," 30 November 2010).

In an address to the United Nations marking the 33rd annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared on 29 November that Israel's resumption of settlement expansion was a "serious blow to the credibility of the political process," and that the state was obligated to cease settlement activity under international law ("Secretary-General's message on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People," 29 November 2010).

Gaza: The Killing Zone

2010-11-13T15:10:00.001-08:00

life in Gaza is a constant gauntlet of Israeli sniper fire, military rockets and army bulldozers. No one is safe. In light of the escalating tensions, we're bringing back one our most moving documentaries, a hard-hitting expose of life in the Occupied territories. We speak to the children caught in the crossfire and find out the true cost of Israel's targeted assassinations policy.

NO words can describe the barbaric terrorist activities done in palestine

Gaza: The Killing Zone

2010-11-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Slingshot hiphop - Palestine RAP

2010-10-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

As Israel fires on activists, BDS movement claims victories

2010-10-27T17:09:00.000-07:00

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 25 October 2010

A home in Nabi Saleh village is occupied by Israeli soldiers, 22 October 2010.

At least fifteen Palestinians were injured in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Friday, 22 October, when Israeli forces opened fire at a demonstration against the wall and ongoing land confiscation.

Villagers "marched alongside Israeli and international supporters towards the village lands, where Israel is building the wall," the Palestinian News Network (PNN) reported. "Soldiers fired rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas at them, injuring 15 civilians, one critically. Troops also fired tear gas into homes, burning three houses. Soldiers took a fourth house and told the owner they would use it as a military post for 45 days" ("Fifteen injured, Three Homes Burned In Nabi Saleh Village," 22 October 2010).

That same day, in the village of al-Masara near Bethlehem, one international activist was wounded and two others were arrested by Israeli soldiers during a similar weekly protest against the planned construction of the wall. "Israeli soldiers stopped the protesters near the local school and used tear gas and sound bombs to force them back. A French activist sustained head injuries from a tear gas bomb and soldiers arrested two other internationals," according to PNN. ("One Injured, Two Arrested, During Wall Protest Near Bethlehem," 22 October 2010).

Elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, PNN reported that three Palestinian youths were injured that same day by Israeli-fired tear gas canisters during a protest in the village of Bilin. Villagers have waged regular, nonviolent demonstrations for several years against the encroaching Israeli wall and the nearby settlement colonies. Eight-year-old Lamma Abu Rahma, 17-year-old Muhammad al-Khatib and 17-year-old Ahmad Burnat were hit in the legs and feet by the tear gas grenades. ("Three Civilians Injured During Weekly Bil'in Anti Wall Protest," 22 October 2010).

In related news, EU representatives and consuls general in Jerusalem released a statement on 20 October condemning the imprisonment of Abdallah Abu Rahme, a leader of the nonviolent resistance movement in Bilin who was recently sentenced by a military court to one year in Israeli prison. "The EU considers Abdallah Abu Rahme a human rights defender who has protested in a peaceful manner against the route of the Israeli separation barrier through his village of Bilin," said the statement. "The EU considers the route of the barrier where it is built on Palestinian land to be illegal. The EU supports the key role of human rights defenders in promoting and furthering of human rights" ("EU Representatives Regret Israeli Military Court Sentence," 20 October 2010).

Meanwhile, around the globe, solidarity activists accelerated efforts to hold Israel accountable for its repressive policies, as well as corporations that profit from Israel's human rights abuses.

Ireland

The Irish government has officially refused to grant weapons manufacturer Israel Military Industries a contract to supply 10 million bullets to the Irish Defense Forces, the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) confirmed. Organizers had waged a seven-month campaign of lobbying, letter-writing and protesting outside the constituency offices of Ireland's defense minister Tony Killeen.

In an 11 October press release, the IPSC National Chairperson Freda Hughes stated "We commend the Irish government's actions in this instance. For the Irish government to have bought bullets from Israel -- the same bullets that have been used to murder thousands of Palestinians over the past decade -- would have given succor to that rogue state, and given the impression that it can do what it likes to the Palestinian people and not suffer any consequences. The IPSC is proud of our campaign around this issue, and have no doubt that it played a role, albeit unacknowledged, in bringing about this decision" ("Victory as Palestine campaigners welcome Government scrapping of 'Israeli bullets' deal, warn against future deals," 11 October 2010).

Scotland

On 6 October, student activists in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh were able to shut down a career fair at Edinburgh University in protest of the inclusion of a major weapons manufacturer, BAE Systems, which produces and sells arms and equipment to the Israeli military. According to a press release issued by Edinburgh University Students for Justice In Palestine, a dozen students entered the career fair, holding the Palestinian flag and banners that read "BAE - Blatant Absence of Ethics" and "BAE sells - Israel kills" ("Students Shut Down Careers Fair in Protest," 7 October 2010).

"Upon being asked to leave by security, the students held a 'die-in' in front of the stall, to symbolize all the people killed by BAE's weapons," the press release stated.

"BAE Systems is the world's second-largest arms producer," the the students' statement added. "It makes fighter aircraft, armored vehicles, artillery systems, missiles, munitions and much more. In 2008, company sales exceeded £18.5 (USD $29) billion, with about 95 percent of these being for military use. BAE has been under investigation for corruption and was, as a result, forced earlier this year to pay a £30 (USD $40) million fine in the UK and one of $400 million in the US. BAE's arms are sold indiscriminately around the world, with military customers in over 100 countries. These countries include Israel."

Norway

In Norway, a petition calling for a widespread institutional cultural and academic boycott of Israel has quickly gathered a hundred signatories, following major divestment actions by the Norwegian government ("Call for an academic and cultural boycott of the state of Israel"). Norway's state sovereign wealth fund -- which is the third-largest in the world, holding more than $300 billion -- recently moved to divest from both Elbit Systems and Africa Israel. The two Israeli corporations are deeply involved with the construction of Israel's wall and the ongoing settlement industry in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in violation of international law.

The Norwegian petition, drafted by academics and activists in support of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, has been signed by academics, writers, musicians, cultural workers and sports figures, including Egil "Drillo" Olsen, the coach of the Norwegian national soccer team. Following the Israeli commando raid and deadly attack on the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla in May, a national public opinion poll found that approximately 40 percent of all Norwegians had already begun to boycott Israeli products or were in favor of doing so.

Spain

After a broad-based grassroots campaign in the town of Cigales, a town in Spain's Valladolid province, the city council voted to remove bottled water produced by the Israeli company Eden Springs Ltd. from all municipal buildings.

In a press release, activists with the Platform for Solidarity with Palestine-Valladolid stated that with this decision, "the City Council joins the international movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions against the State of Israel. The City Council of Cigales has taken this decision after a strong mobilization of its [residents], including demonstrations, signature event and public awareness campaigns" ("El Ayuntamiento de Cigales retira la marca israelí de agua embotellada Eden de sus dependencias," 21 October 2010).

Activists say that this is the third successful boycott campaign against Eden products this year in the Valladolid province. In June, teachers and workers at a nursing school at the University of Valladolid pressured the administration to remove Eden water from vending machines; and the City Council of Villanueva de Duero, a nearby town, removed Eden from its municipal buildings as well.

Asia

The Asia to Gaza Caravan, a group of approximately five hundred activists from seventeen different Asian countries, plans to gather in New Delhi, India, on 1 December. Activists intend to march through 18 cities in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt in an effort to pressure Israel to lift the siege and blockade on Gaza.

Organized by Asian People's Solidarity for Palestine, activists will be carrying humanitarian supplies intended for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, with the march culminating at the Rafah crossing into southern Gaza.

According to the campaign's website (www.asiatogaza.net), organizers say that the caravan will coordinate with existing and new solidarity groups during the march. "The aim of this campaign is to build a diverse and inclusive Asian solidarity for the Palestinians and against the blockade that denies the Palestinians their rights," state the organizers on the website.

Egypt

In Egypt, more than three hundred activists affiliated with the "Viva Palestina" organization arrived in the port town of al-Arish with humanitarian aid -- including more than $5 million worth of medical equipment and food supplies, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz ("Viva Palestina Activists Deliver Tons of Aid to Gaza Strip," 21 October 2010).

United States

At Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the university's undergraduate council, representing 6,700 undergraduate students, voted on 18 October to approve a bill calling on Harvard President Drew Faust "to establish a commission of concerned faculty, students and administrators to investigate" their decision to honor Martin Peretz. The council also "fully condemned" Harvard's decision to accept a $650,000 fund for undergraduate social studies research named after Peretz.

Martin Peretz, a former Harvard professor, is the editor-in-chief of the Washington DC-based New Republic magazine, and recently wrote in an op-ed that "Muslim life is cheap," and that Muslims should not be afforded free speech rights under the US Constitution. Peretz has also opined that Palestinians are "unfit" to govern their own country, and that Arabs in general are "genetically" predisposed to violence.

Peretz also wrote that many African-Americans "are afflicted by cultural deficiencies" and that "in the ghetto a lot of mothers don't appreciate the importance of schooling." He also claimed that "Latin societ[ies]" exhibit "characteristic deficiencies" such as "congenital corruption" and "near-tropical work habits."

Protesting Peretz' honoring by the university, more than four hundred students and faculty signed a letter written by student organizations including the Harvard Islamic Society, the Black Students Association, Latinas Unidas, the Society of Arab Students and the Progressive Jewish Alliance. "Such an invitation lends legitimacy and respectability to views that can only be described as abhorrent and racist in their implication that the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution should be withheld from certain citizens based on their religious affiliation," the organizations stated ("Student Letter Criticizes Marty Peretz," The Harvard Crimson, 20 September 2010).

The bill gained the support of both the university student president and vice president, and passed two council committees before reaching the student union floor and passing by a wide margin: 26-7, with four abstentions.

Canada

And finally, Palestine solidarity activists and groups convened last weekend in Montreal, Canada, for the BDS Conferénce Montréal. The conference, organizers state on the website bdsquebec.org, "aim[ed] to regain the momentum of the international BDS campaign in Quebec, and bring together organizations that stand in solidarity with the plight of Palestinians. Through a collaborative approach, organizations can work together to start building a popular BDS movement in order to educate and inform the Canadian public." Community and international activists, such as Omar Barghouti, coordinator of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel and the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, and members of the Congress of South African Trade Unions presented panel discussions and workshops over the weekend to hundreds of attendants.

The fifth Viva Palestina convoy arrives in Gaza, 22 October 2010.

Israel finds allies in Europe's Christian fundamentalists

2010-10-03T18:25:00.000-07:00

David Cronin , The Electronic Intifada, 28 April 2010
David Cronins book Europe's Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation will be published in November 2010 by Pluto Press.

Anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders is among Israel's right-wing friends in Europe. (Koen Van Weel/ANP)

Flip through any issue of a major newspaper from the past decade and it is a safe bet you will be confronted with a warning about the dangers of religious extremism. So how could the mainstream media have failed to notice the growing influence of fundamentalists on the European Union's relations with one of its nearest neighbors: Israel? The explanation might lie in how the zealots in question are not Islamic but Christian.

Since September last year, the European Parliament's official delegation to the Knesset has been headed by veteran Dutch politician Bastiaan Belder. This has meant that the chief interlocutor with Israel for the EU's only directly-elected institution has been a man who makes Dick Cheney look moderate.

Belder belongs to the Political Reformed Party (known by its Dutch acronym SGP). Within the Netherlands, this Calvinist grouping has long been controversial because of its opposition to women's suffrage. Even though it has been forced to reverse its male-only membership rule by a 2003 court ruling, it has not yet fielded a female candidate in an election.

The party's literal interpretation of scriptures is especially pronounced in its policy on the Middle East. Adhering strictly to a Christian Zionist ideology, it views the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 as the fulfillment of a Biblical prophecy. "For the SGP solidarity with the Jewish people is not negotiable," one of its key documents on foreign affairs states. "Therefore, we are committed to a secure existence for Israel in the territory that God has assigned to the Jewish people. The Jews are the 'beloved of the father's will,' to which the Lord assigned their country, as is written in the Old Testament."

Intriguingly, the same document displays a profound anti-Semitic bias. It identifies Judaism as a heresy and argues that Jews must convert to Christianity if they are to evade damnation. Islam, meanwhile, is described as a threat that needs to be "countered" because it "keeps people away from salvation."

In his 11 years as a member of the European Parliament (MEP), Belder has consistently defended Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Frequently, his rhetoric is indistinguishable from the propaganda peddled by the Israeli diplomats with whom he is in regular contact. During a visit to Jerusalem in February, he contended that Israel would have nothing to fear if it set up an "independent" investigation into the conduct of its attacks on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009. "When you are convinced that you did everything to prevent civilian casualties, when you have the moral high ground, show it and no one can blame you," he said.

Under Belder's chairmanship, meetings of the Parliament's delegation to Israel have generally been one-sided affairs. Last December, the main guest speaker at one such meeting was Emanuele Ottolenghi, then the Brussels representative of the American Jewish Committee, one of the most powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in Washington. Ottolenghi has penned a book (Under a Mushroom Cloud, published in 2009) and several pamphlets that make the case for waging war against Iran over its alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons. By contrast, Ottolenghi has portrayed Israel's nuclear capability as necessary for stability in the Middle East, claiming that Arab leaders sleep soundly under the shadow of Israels nuclear umbrella.

Fortunately, Belder has not had everything his own way. Last year the Parliament's delegation to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) sought a discussion with him on how its work could be coordinated with that of his delegation. Initially, Belder turned down this request but when pressured by other MEPs, he agreed in the past few months that joint meetings between the two delegations could be held. Proinsias de Rossa, an Irish MEP who chairs the delegation to the PLC, said he had made "various overtures" to Belder and was "brushed aside for a long time." However, Belder eventually accepted the principle that each delegation should be kept informed of the other's activities and "we are now cooperating very well," de Rossa added. Belder did not respond to my requests for a comment.

While only a handful of Dutch politicians espouse the same religious views as Belder, his unwavering support for Israel has been echoed by larger parties in the Netherlands. Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, a center-right Christian Democrat, will be garlanded as a "friend of Israel" in June when the American Jewish Committee presents him with an award. Verhagen has claimed that Israel "has no desire to see people in Gaza suffer." His comments were made when he travelled to the southern Israeli city of Sderot last year; Verhagen refused to venture across the nearby border crossing into Gaza to see for himself if Israel was making its 1.5 million inhabitants suffer.

Without doubt, the Netherlands' blood-splattered history helps explain some of the enduring attitudes towards Israel -- 70 percent of the Dutch Jewry were wiped out in the Holocaust. "After World War II, there was quite a lot of enthusiasm [in the Netherlands] about the small State of Israel," said Henri Veldhuis, a Calvinist theologian and a Palestine solidarity campaigner. "These new heroes fueled our faith. Some years later, there was guilt about the Holocaust and how most Jews in Holland were killed or deported. These deep feelings about faith and guilt are still quite strong in our churches."

Veldhuis, whose work for Palestinian rights has led one of his co-religionists to dub him a "follower of Hitler," says that the essential problem with the SGP and the like-minded ChristenUnie (the two parties contested last year's European Parliament election as a combined force) is that they view their reading of the Bible as more important than international law. "For me, this is quite shocking," he said.

A general election is scheduled to take place in the Netherlands in June after the Labor Party recently walked out of the government in protest at efforts to prolong the Dutch involvement in the war in Afghanistan. Many pundits expect the flamboyant anti-Muslim firebrand Geert Wilders to perform strongly in this summer's poll. The electoral list that he leads includes several candidates who have previously worked for the pro-Israel lobby in the Netherlands. Among them are a former Dutch representative for Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Nonetheless, the increasingly brutal nature of the occupation of Palestine has caused some Dutch politicians to reconsider their support for Israel, according to Ghada Zeidan from United Civilians for Peace, a Utrecht-based human rights group. "People are outraged here," she said. "Even some of the more conservative political parties like the VVD [one of the main opposition parties], who are seen in Holland as 'friends of Israel' are asking questions. I can see some movement at the moment but I also should say that the Israel lobby in general remains rather strong."

It would be comforting if Belder could be dismissed as unrepresentative of mainstream Dutch or European society. Yet he has proven to be an astute networker at a time when Israel's political establishment is eagerly courting allies in the Brussels institutions with a view to deepening its diplomatic and economic ties with the EU. His close links with Israeli officialdom indicates that he is appreciated as someone who slavishly defends Israel's agenda in an assembly it frequently regards as hostile. However extreme he may be, it would be foolish to ignore him.

Protection by any means necessary

2010-09-30T15:38:00.000-07:00

Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 29 September 2010

Matthew Cassel is based in Beirut, Lebanon and is Assistant Editor of The Electronic Intifada. His website is justimage.org. A version of this essay was originally published by the Guardian's Comment is Free and is republished with permission.

This month, Palestinians in Lebanon commemorated the 28th anniversary of a crime whose perpetrators remain unpunished and whose victims still wait for justice. In September 1982, the Israeli army surrounded the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. For nearly three days, Israeli forces allowed their allies in the right-wing Lebanese Christian Phalange militia to enter the camps and massacre more than a thousand Palestinian refugees and Lebanese citizens. All of the victims -- men, women and children -- were unarmed civilians.

The massacre was the culmination of Israel's invasion of Lebanon and more than two months of siege of West Beirut which eventually forced the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to withdraw from the country. PLO fighters relinquished their heavy weapons to the Lebanese army and in a symbolic act of resistance, left Beirut with their small arms still at their sides. However, the majority of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, exiled since 1948 when Israel was established on top of their homes, remained behind. Dispersed throughout the country's dozen or so refugee camps, Palestinians were left virtually unprotected.

The PLO withdrew from Beirut only after agreeing to a US-mediated ceasefire with Israel. They were given reassurances by Washington that Israel would not harm Palestinian civilians remaining in the camps. However, these reassurances proved to be shallow, and after waging an invasion of Lebanon that killed nearly 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and devastated much of the country, Israel invaded and occupied the practically defenseless Lebanese capital.

Prior to this somber anniversary, a writer argued in the Guardian's Comment is Free site that Palestinian weapons were the key issue preventing Palestinian refugees from obtaining basic civil rights in Lebanon, which the state has denied them for 62 years. He described the camps as "heavily armed" and the refugees living there as gripped by an "illusion of martial security" ("Disarming Lebanon's Palestinians," Ahmed Moor, 8 September 2010).

As someone who has lived in Lebanon for several years, I was struck by these assertions. Anyone familiar with Lebanese politics recognizes them as the typical refrain of the right-wing, whose adherents object not only to providing Palestinian refugees with basic rights but their very presence on Lebanese soil. Nor do these characterizations come close to accurately describing the camps or the Palestinians in Lebanon I know. The camps today are far from being heavily armed, especially when compared to the various Lebanese militias or the Lebanese army.

I thought I would visit the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which today are essentially one camp resembling a slum, and speak with Palestinian refugees about the issue of trading in their weapons for rights.

Inside a small call center in the camp, frequented by mostly Palestinians without credit on their mobile phones and foreign workers calling home, I spoke to a young man named Osama. He told me: "The issue of our arms and our civil rights are unrelated. Lebanese should give us rights as Arabs, as human beings living among them like Palestinian refugees in Jordan and Syria."

"Our weapons don't necessarily make me feel safer," he added, "especially with the internal problems that we have in the camps here like in Palestine. But if we were to give them up, we'd have no protection. At least with our weapons if we die, we die standing and not like in Sabra and Shatila when we were massacred without even one weapon to resist. If the Lebanese army was able to protect us from Israel, then there would be no need for Palestinians to have weapons."

At the headquarters of the Najdeh Association just outside the camp, I spoke with executive director Laila al-Ali. Founded in the 1970s, Najdeh is an nongovernmental organization that runs social programs in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps and is the leading organization behind the "Right to Work Campaign" for Palestinian refugees. Al-Ali, a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Shatila, explained, "It's not the Lebanese who are looking for assurances or guarantees from the Palestinians, it's the Palestinians who need this guarantee from the Lebanese. Palestinians don't feel safe."

Al-Ali said that only a few groups and individuals have weapons in the camps. She added that the argument claiming these small arms are a prerequisite to granting Palestinians rights is merely "Lebanese [rhetoric] trying to deny Palestinians their human and civil rights."

I asked her about a recent law passed by the Lebanese parliament that made minor changes to the restrictions on the ability of Palestinian refugees to work in the country. Al-Ali stated bluntly: "It gives them nothing. The Lebanese mentality needs to be changed, they cannot continue dealing with Palestinians from the security perspective [alone]."

Back in Shatila, others shared her sentiments. I walked into a barbershop owned by Ahmed, who explained while snipping away at a man's hair that "We keep weapons for protection. Even between the Lebanese there is no stability. Today they are together and tomorrow they're not. In the past we only had our weapons to protect ourselves. Like during the [1985-88] war of the camps, our weapons protected us from the [Lebanese Shia] Amal movement."

I turned to a young man named Omar who was finishing a deep pore cleansing. Bearing a pistol on his hip, Omar is a member of one of the camp's security branches. "The weapons are not the reason for denying us rights, this is a pretext for the Lebanese to take our weapons," he said. "If we lose our weapons, we lose the right to go back to Palestine. I carry my weapon because it's not worth throwing away. The weapons are the peoples' property."

Unprompted, a taxi driver named Mahmoud with a freshly trimmed mustache jumped in. "Once we lose the weapons we'll be slapped from all directions," he said. "I will never accept to give up our weapons. The Lebanese will never be able to protect our cause. It's not their cause, and nobody can protect it but ourselves."

After speaking with dozens of individuals in the camp, all of whom refused to give up their right to bear arms, I asked a friend to take me to someone in the camp who he thought would disagree. He brought me to his 66-year-old grandmother, Miyasar, a refugee who has been forced to flee her home at least five times since 1948 and now lives in Shatila.

Before I could even finish asking her the first question about trading rights for arms, Miyasar closed her eyes, shook her head and said: "The Lebanese cannot give us rights, they can't even give themselves rights. Each group is by itself with its own weapons -- Hizballah has guns, Amal has guns, the Future [movement] has guns. The Lebanese are the ones who need help, not the Palestinians."

She added, "When the Israelis came they said, give up our guns. We did and look what happened! Even a donkey that falls in one spot learns not to fall in that same spot again. We have no faith in Lebanese to give us rights. We will keep our weapons until we go back to Palestine."

May Allah Help The People Of Palestine

2010-09-13T19:56:00.000-07:00

S O A 1924 Soldiers of Allah History

2010-09-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

The truth about the state
It wasn't always like this
Let us look back in time
History reminds us
One army
One land
One central authority
Crushing the romans
Persians put in fear
The Ummah like a Lion
No need to shed a tear

When the village was attacked by the kufar
The Khalife heard
The sister cry &
Prepared for war
Attacking the city

Destroying it
from existence
Lesson # 1
Don't ever
Mess with Muslims

The Imam of the Ummah is a shield where he protects the Ummah and where the Ummah fights behind him
Where is this shield today to protect the Ummah?? What happen to this shield to honor and dignify the Ummah???
In 1917 Prime Minister of Britain after entering Jerusalem stated the crusade war has ended
In the same year the French general, goro went to the grave of Salahudeen-Ayubi
Salahudeen-Ayubi, the one who 730 years prier crushed the crusades and liberated Palestine & Syria
he went to his grave in Damascus and kicked it and said wake up oh Salahudeen we hare here

How did they do this
to you and me
We turn on the TV
and all we see
is a world full of casualties
a generation in agony
our Ummah is in misery
let us go back
to beginning of the century
and review our history

from one side
to the other side of the globe
the system of Islam
Ruled over the world
They went to the Muslims
for the all their solutions
from mathematics to biology
to the advancements in technology

the kafir women
use to imitate our women
they wanted the same respect
that the Muslims sisters were given while the enemies of Islam
were trying to twist the Quran
trying to write a Surah like Allah s they all failed miserably
& many of them responded with

Ashhadu -an la Ilaha Ilallah wa Ashhadu- anna Muhammadun rasullullah

Allah has challenged the humanity until the day of judgment to produce a Sura or an Aya like the Quran
And Allah assures that they will never be able to make an Aya like it
The kufar plan and work to destroy this Deen and Allah affirms that we too are planning
and if all the people of the world got together they still could not and will never be able to put even a scratch a side of a muster seeds on the throne of almighty Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala

Life of Prophet Mohammad SAW YUSUF ISLAM

2010-08-30T13:19:00.000-07:00

Life of Prophet part 1

Life of Prophet part 2

Life of Prophet part 3

After the Flotilla, will Turkey emerge as a force for Palestinian rights?

2010-06-13T20:42:00.000-07:00

Murat Dagli, The Electronic Intifada, 9 June 2010
Murat Dagli is a PhD candidate in Middle East History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Turkish flags can be seen at protests around the world against the Israeli attack on the Flotilla. (Matthew Cassel)

After the bodies of the nine Turkish activists killed by Israeli forces on the Mavi Marmara on 31 May returned home, tens of thousands participated in the funerals and burials in two of Istanbul's major mosques the following day and during Friday prayers. The anger toward Israel only intensified after surviving passengers began recounting the extent of the atrocities during Israel's attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and the abuse they suffered during detention.

Israel, with the usual support from Washington, continues to deny any wrong-doing and claims that the interception was fully legitimate and the loss of lives was the unfortunate result of acts of self-defense by its commandos who were "attacked."

Meanwhile, Turkish flags and the posters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are prominent in demonstrations around the world. Erdoğan's profile and popularity was already high in the Arab world due to his televised confrontation with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in 2009 over Israel's attack on Gaza earlier that year.

After years of disappointment with successive Arab regimes, Turkey appears to be taking a regional leadership role. While better and closer relations between Turkey and the Arab world are welcome developments, and there is hope for a momentum building up for the Palestinian cause, the ambiguities of the Turkish stance are apparent and raise important questions.

Should the current crisis with Israel be interpreted as a singular event in which Turkey gave a strong response or as the inevitable culmination of a completely new foreign policy orientation?

In the midst of the heightened pace of activism, diplomatic activity and political maneuvering, it is important to analyze the dilemmas of the Turkish political scene, and distinguish rhetoric from political realities.

Within days of the flotilla crisis starting, influential Turkish newspapers such as Hürriyet, Vatan and Milliyet expressed reservations about escalating the tension with Israel.

Underlying these reservations are a variety of concerns from the economic repercussions of a prolonged political crisis to turning this tension into a permanent "blood-feud." More importantly, the foundations of these cautionary remarks are based on the deep-seated convictions about Turkey's foreign policy model.

Even though "peace at home, peace in the world" is said to be the guiding principle of Turkish foreign policy since the foundation of the republic in 1923, Turkey's foreign policy has in fact consistently been Western oriented. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, seen as the most Westernized institution in Turkey and a leading force in Western-oriented aspirations of the Turkish Republic, has also continuously sought a significant degree of autonomy from domestic political changes.

In this context, the appointment of Ahmet Davutoğlu, a professor of International Relations and an intellectual figure close to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), initially created a good deal of tension and resistance within the ministry. Therefore, Ankara's further involvement, let alone explicit claim for leadership in the Middle East, can be expected to be a cause of great concern for a considerable portion of the Turkish establishment.

Further aggravating this sense of urgency are long-established popular Turkish misconceptions about the Middle East, as backward, underdeveloped and uncivilized. Hence, the sense that Turkey's turn to the East away from the West, will be seen as a step backward by some of Turkey's elites.

Even though an undeniable shift in Turkish foreign policy has occurred over the past decade, it is still unclear whether these changes are truly substantial or if the anxieties of a complete reversal in foreign policy are the result of a world view which fears that Turkey can only be oriented in one direction or another.

A key element of Turkey's new foreign policy is the search for more autonomy. As a result of the new power configurations in the region after the end of the Cold War (including wars in Iraq and the Caucasus), Turkey, especially under Davutoğlu's tenure as Foreign Minister, has sought to assert its position as the major power broker in the region.

In this respect, neither Erdoğan's confrontation with Peres at Davos in 2009, nor the recent nuclear brokerage between Iran and Brazil are singular events. Rather, they should be seen as expressions of a new-found self-confidence and willingness to act autonomously.

The fact that Israel found itself as the main "target" in these instances reveals more about Israel's uncompromising desire to dictate its political and military will rather than a complete sea-change in Turkish foreign policy.

An ever more isolated Israel is prone to view any deviation from the norms that have been established in the region in the last 50 years as a major threat to its "security." Given the context of the changing power dynamics, Israel's brutal interception of the Flotilla could be seen as a planned strategy to teach a lesson to a new opponent, rather than a quarrel between old friends.

At the same time one of the most important questions is the extent to which these new foreign policy initiatives are merely political maneuverings for a domestic audience. Despite the harsh condemnations of Israel by the prime minister, the parliament as well as President of the Republic Abdullah Gül, Ankara has so far followed a careful diplomatic strategy.

Turkey's ambassador to Israel has been recalled, and plans to transport water and natural gas to Israel have been put on halt and a couple of military maneuvers have been cancelled. Yet no major military deals have been revoked so far.

Even more than these discrepancies between rhetoric and reality, the AKP's political discourse and practices reveal the structural dilemmas in Turkish politics and their impact on how the Palestinian cause is perceived and represented.

While the loss of lives understandably turned the attention to Turkey, it should be remembered that the Flotilla was not an active state policy, but was a civil and international initiative. Moreover, relations between the AKP and the human rights and relief group Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH) which participated in the Flotilla have not always been cordial.

However, the AKP appears to be attempting to seize and ride the tide of sympathy and concern for the passengers. Although visiting the wounded activists in their hospital bed can be seen as an act of concern and support, the fact that senior party officials welcomed the returning activists at Istanbul airport can also be seen as an attempt to co-opt the movement.

Turkey, with its well-established state tradition, has masterfully followed the traditional diplomatic route of attempting to protect and defend its citizens from breaches of international law by working within the appropriate international institutions.

Yet this same state tradition weighs heavily on state-civil society relations, as the state almost reflexively seeks to dominate any autonomous civil initiative. In this sense, the AKP's political maneuvers are not to be seen merely as party strategy, but are also manifestations of deeply internalized state discourses and practices of Turkish political culture.

In this respect, the widespread arguments in Turkish media and of political parties across the board that Israel has made its biggest mistake so far, and that relations have reached a point of no return, owe more to a nationalist discourse.

This nationalist discourse emphasizes (and exaggerates) the prominence of the Turkish state in place of offering a long-term analysis of Israeli policies in the region. It appropriates the popularity of movements initiated by nongovernmental organizations while at the same distrusting their independence. Thus it risks diverting attention away from generating tangible solidarity and understanding for the Palestinian cause and reducing the issue to a crisis between Turkey and Israel.

Thus, rather than taking part in the world-wide support for Palestinian rights, and supporting civil society initiatives, the AKP's statist reflexes may actually serve to weaken the international dimension of the support and make it more vulnerable to propaganda attempts that portray Israel's illegal acts as a righteous struggle against a radical Islamist threat.

In addition to these deep-seated features of Turkish political culture, there may also be more immediate reasons why the AKP government may want to use this crisis for its own political purposes. Despite the rhetoric of making changes and taking some reluctant steps, the AKP government has to date hardly delivered on its promises. Two major factors stand out: the perennial Kurdish problem and the recent change of leadership in the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP).

The resumption of attacks by the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) has left more than 30 soldiers dead in the last two months. As a result, the AKP has come under increasing criticism both from the Kurdish parties and groups as well as opposition political parties.

As the AKP tries to play the leadership card in the Middle East, those who are critical of the party argue that there are more pressing and immediate domestic problems and accuse the AKP of using foreign policy adventures to mask its failure at home. While this isolationist discourse is partly motivated by the above-mentioned prejudices about "backwardness" of Middle Eastern politics, and suspicions of a possible alliance between Israel and the PKK, it remains true that the Kurdish problem is the Achilles' heel not only for the AKP, but also for the Turkish polity.

However, in spite of the AKP's highly-dubious record, there is no reason why the two objectives, that is, further democratization at home, and a more active foreign policy in the Middle East, should be seen as mutually exclusive rather than compatible and reinforcing political objectives.

As for the most recent developments in the main opposition party, a sex scandal involving the former leader of the CHP, Deniz Baykal, led to a significant change in the party's leadership. Although there was a wave of enthusiasm among the supporters of the CHP, it remains to be seen if the emergence of a new leadership also corresponds to a substantial change in party ideology.

The new CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu hinted at broadening the party's base from the mostly urban middle, and upper middle classes to the underprivileged groups of the suburbs. Yet an initial rise in popularity has been short-lived in the face of the recent crisis. Instead, the AKP has tried to make the most of Erdoğan's charismatic leadership and wrest the momentum away from the CHP, at least for now.

It is only natural to expect the AKP to turn the recent crisis to their advantage. It is also an opportunity to test the leadership qualities of those in power. However, it is worth noting that the charismatic leadership easily turns into a cult of personality, and as such, can become an impediment for a more democratic and participatory political culture as can be learned from examples such as Russia's Vladimir Putin or Italy's Silvio Berlusconi. Erdoğan is also quick to assume the role of undisputed chief and personalize politics rather than act as the leader collective decision-making. The personalization of politics and the cult of personality have rarely been helpful in establishing the foundations of a solid and viable political structure.

As an Islamist political party and movement, the AKP also faces a dilemma in its contradictory attitudes towards Egypt and Sudan, to give only two relevant examples. While Israel's policies towards Gaza are harshly condemned both by the state and civil initiatives, there is silence over Egypt's blockade. While the rhetoric of solidarity and humanitarian aid against Israel's oppressive policies in Palestine fly high, no major statement has been made or protest held against Egypt's own contradictory policies toward Israel.

Furthermore, while the Sudanese government has been accused of genocide by the International Criminal Court, the AKP's policies towards Sudan have been accommodating to say the least. In this respect, critics are quick point out that conservative and Islamist movements in Turkey have not displayed the same degree of sensitivity when it came to a variety of human right violations either at home or in other countries in the Middle East. In this regard, many warnings have already been voiced in order not to turn an important occasion to mobilize mass support against Israeli state policies into an anti-Semitic discourse, which, taking into consideration past practices toward minorities in contemporary Turkey and widespread ignorance about the historical background of the Palestinian plight, is always a present danger.

Finally, another tendency prevalent in both the Turkish media and the political discourse of the AKP is the reduction of the Palestinian problem to the predicament of Gaza by exclusively concentrating on conditions in the besieged territory. Since the specific purpose of the Freedom Flotilla was to draw attention to the Israeli blockade in Gaza, it is only natural that Gaza has been the center of attention in the last week. However, the exclusive emphasis on Gaza is not confined to the latest developments, but is the culmination of a longer process that was only intensified by the latest events.

In this sense, it should be recognized that unless the question of "who speaks for the Palestinians" is always kept in mind and discussed unfailingly, the broader dimensions of the Palestine issue -- in all its aspects from the right of return, the realities on the ground in the West Bank, to the crisis of Palestinian leadership -- can be replaced with reductionist views and expectations.

Many people hope that loss of lives on the Flotilla was not in vain, that they mark an new phase in a worldwide mobilization to put more pressure on Israel to end its occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people.

What is at stake is to preserve this hope, building on the momentum gained through painful sacrifices, and turn them into concrete policies. While nurturing hope it is even more important not to fall for false promises, and to be alert against the excesses of political rhetoric.

It is true that Turkey's involvement can prove to be highly valuable to further the Palestinian cause. But Turkey's involvement and potential are preconditioned on recognizing its own internal dilemmas. Apart from taking the necessary steps for further democratization and creating the conditions for a more participatory public sphere at home, this means refraining from appropriating civil initiatives for narrow party interests, moderating statist reflexes, strictly nationalist discourses and resisting the cult of the leader.

Turkish involvement must be constructed in terms of cooperation and solidarity, and must be seen as a learning process rather than one-dimensional help of a regional power seeking to play a leadership role. Instead of reviving the anachronistic and useless rhetoric of an Ottoman golden age, which can easily give way to the condescending attitude of those who see themselves as the heirs of a great empire, it would be more promising to demonstrate genuine willingness to learn from Palestine and the Palestinians. The Palestinian mirror is, after all, a litmus test for those who really want to engage in a struggle for justice, peace and equality.

Israel’s excuses

2010-06-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

…israeli authorities have the liberty to ban, allow and confiscate any aid that is sent to Gaza at will, and announce that they are providing Gaza citizens with all the aid and supplies they need and therefore the freedom flotilla flight was an unnecessary stunt?!

40 Different nationalities aboard the ships, from Turkey, Greece and Ireland headed to Gaza, to the Gaza port (which israel says is under palestinian authority control) to provide these citizens with toys for their children, wheel chairs for the thousands cripples by israel’s continuous raids, medicine for those few survivors, flour, and other Survival needs!

Out of these 40 nationalities are a parade of countries: Irish, Australian, French, South African, Greek, American, German, Turkish, besides arab nationals, and many more. Are all these brave souls mistaken in their aid call?! if they had solid facts that the aid needed was reaching Gaza they wouldn’t have worked night and day for months to collect the necessary aid, put their lives at risk to do what seems like a true moral call?

Solidarity with the Freedom Flotilla

2010-06-02T20:52:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the Israeli attack on an unarmed aid flotilla headed towards Gaza, a large crowd of protesters converged in Vancouver in a show of solidarity for the Palestinian People.

The protest was called by a coalition of groups as response to the brutal assault by the Israeli Defense Forces on the humanitarian aid ships.

MASSACRE AT SEA

2010-06-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

International solidarity and the Freedom Flotilla massacre

Editorial, The Electronic Intifada, 31 May 2010

Israeli naval ships flanking the Mavi Marmara

Early this morning under the cover of darkness Israeli soldiers stormed the lead ship of the six-vessel Freedom Flotilla aid convoy in international waters and killed and injured dozens of civilians aboard. All the ships were violently seized by Israeli forces, but hours after the attack fate of the passengers aboard the other ships remained unknown.

The Mavi Marmara was carrying around 600 activists when Israeli warships flanked it from all sides as soldiers descended from helicopters onto the ship's deck. Reports from people on board the ship backed up by live video feeds broadcast on Turkish TV show that Israeli forces used live ammunition against the civilian passengers, some of whom resisted the attack with sticks and other items.

The Freedom Flotilla was organized by a coalition of groups that sought to break the Israeli-led siege on the Gaza Strip that began in 2007. Together, the flotilla carried 700 civilian activists from around 50 countries and over 10,000 tons of aid including food, medicines, medical equipment, reconstruction materials and equipment, as well as various other necessities arbitrarily banned by Israel.

As of 6:00pm Jerusalem time most media were still reporting that up to 20 people had been killed, and many more injured. However, Israel was still withholding the exact numbers and names of the dead and injured. Passengers aboard the ships who had been posting Twitter updates on the Flotilla's progress had not been heard from since before the attack and efforts to contact passengers by satellite phone were unsuccessful. The Arabic- and English-language networks of Al-Jazeera lost contact with their half dozen staff traveling with the flotilla.

News of the massacre on board the Freedom Flotilla began to emerge around dawn in the eastern Mediterranean first on the live feed from the ship, social media, Turkish television, and Al-Jazeera. Israeli media were placed under strict military censorship, and reported primarily from foreign sources. However, by the morning the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli soldiers who boarded the flotilla in international waters were fired upon by passengers. Quoting anonymous military sources, the Jerusalem Post claimed that the flotilla passengers had set-up a "well planned lynch." ("IDF: Soldiers were met by well-planned lynch in boat raid")

The Israeli daily Haaretz also reported that the Israeli soldiers were "attacked" when trying to board the flotilla. ("At least 10 activists killed in Israel Navy clashes onboard Gaza aid flotilla")

This narrative of passengers "attacking" the Israeli soldiers was quickly adopted by the Associated Press and carried across mainstream media sources in the United States, including the Washington Post. ("Israeli army: More than 10 killed on Gaza flotilla")

Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon stated in a Monday morning press conference that the Israeli military was acting in "self-defense." He claimed that "At least two guns were found" and that the "incident" was still ongoing. Ayalon also claimed that the Flotilla organizers were "well-known" and were supported by and had connections to "international terrorist organizations."

It is unclear how anyone could credibly adopt an Israeli narrative of "self-defense" when Israel had carried out an unprovoked armed assault on civilian ships in international waters. Surely any right of self-defense would belong to the passengers on the ship. Nevertheless, the Freedom Flotilla organizers had clearly and loudly proclaimed their ships to be unarmed civilian vessels on a humanitarian mission.

The Israeli media strategy appeared to be to maintain censorship of the facts such as the number of dead and injured, the names of the victims and on which ships the injuries occurred, while aggressively putting out its version of events which is based on a dual strategy of implausibly claiming "self-defense" while demonizing the Freedom Flotilla passengers and intimating that they deserved what they got.

As news spread around the world, foreign governments began to react. Greece and Turkey, which had many citizens aboard the Flotilla, immediately recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. Spain strongly condemned the attack. France's foreign minister Bernard Kouchner expressed "profound shock." The European Union's foreign minister Catherine Ashton called for an "enquiry."

What should be clear is this: no one can claim to be surprised by what the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights correctly termed a "hideous crime." Israel had been openly threatening a violent attack on the Flotilla for days, but complacency, complicity and inaction, specifically from Western and Arab governments once more sent the message that Israel could act with total impunity.

There is no doubt that Israel's massacre of 1,400 people, mostly civilians, in Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was a wake up call for international civil society to begin to adopt boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel similar to those applied to apartheid-era South Africa.

Yet governments largely have remained complacent and complicit in Israel's ongoing violence and oppression against Palestinians and increasingly international humanitarian workers and solidarity activists, not only in Gaza, but throughout historic Palestine. We can only imagine that had former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni indeed been arrested for war crimes in Gaza when a judge in London issued a warrant for her arrest, had the international community begun to implement the recommendations of the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, had there been a much firmer response to Israel's assassination of a Hamas official in Dubai, it would not have dared to act with such brazenness.

As protest and solidarity actions begin in Palestine and across the world, this is the message they must carry: enough impunity, enough complicity, enough Israeli massacres and apartheid. Justice now.

Israeli settlers attack Palestinian mosques

2010-05-11T11:31:00.000-07:00

Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 11 May 2010

A Palestinian man reacts to the scene in Lubban al-Sharqiya's local mosque after settlers carried out an arson attack. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)

LUBBAN AL-SHARQIYA, occupied West Bank (IPS) - "There is immense anger as well as a feeling of vulnerability and fear when a place of sanctuary and holiness is subject to indiscriminate violence," says Issa Hussein.

"Despite living under a brutal military occupation and being subjected to regular attacks by Israeli settlers for decades, normally places of worship were spared," Hussein, a spokesman from this Palestinian village, near Nablus, in the northern West Bank, told IPS.

"People could forget about the economic hardship, the political oppression and their personal problems for a few hours a week as they retreated to pray in the mosque."

All this changed dramatically for the agricultural village of 3,000 residents a few weeks ago.

Israeli settlers from one of the three surrounding illegal settlements, which have been built on land belonging to Lubban al-Shariqiya and other Palestinian villages, carried out an arson attack on the local mosque.

The Israeli Civil Administration, which administers the occupied West Bank, originally denied that Israeli settlers had been involved, and instead blamed an electrical short-circuit.

However, Israeli fire-fighters who later came to investigate the gutted mosque said arson was the likely cause and ruled out the possibility of an electrical fire.

"The part of the mosque where the fire broke out was undergoing renovations and the electricity had been turned off," explained Hussein.

"Furthermore, some villagers heard cars drawing up at about 3am in the morning of the attack and saw settlers getting out of the vehicles and going into the mosque," said Hussein as he took IPS on a tour of the charred and gutted mosque.

Curtains from windows had been torn down to help the fire burn. Qurans, which are usually piled up at one end of the mosque, had been moved to the other end and placed in piles next to the bathroom.

On top of, and adjacent to, the pile of Qurans were shoes which had all been arranged into a Star of David sign, Judaism's chief emblem.

The vandalism of deliberately attacking a holy place in a deeply religious society, combined with the use of provocative and offensive symbolism, was not lost on the villagers.

"We would never store the Qurans near a toilet or put shoes anywhere near our holy books. Everybody is forced to take their shoes off at the door before they even enter the mosque," Hussein told IPS.

This attack is just the latest in a string of attacks on Palestinians and their property, including mosques, as Israeli settlers up their "price-tag policy."

The settlers have warned that for every illegal settlement outpost dismantled, restraining order issued or settler arrested in the West Bank, they will carry out retaliatory attacks against Palestinians, their homes, places of business, motor cars, agricultural fields, livestock and mosques.

Not a weekend goes by without Palestinians being assaulted, olive trees cut down or uprooted, fields set alight and cars stoned or burnt.

In December, a mosque in the nearby village of Yasuf was gutted and burnt. In April, Star of David and racist anti-Arab slogans were spray painted on a mosque in the village of Huwarra. Several cars were also set alight.

In turn settlers driving near Palestinian villages have also been subjected to stone-throwing and periodic attacks with Molotov cocktails by Palestinians, damaging vehicles and in some instances causing injuries.

However, Israeli military investigators believe the attacks on mosques are part of a deliberate policy by settlers and have uncovered information about future settler plans to attack mosques.

A number of settlers were arrested by Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet's Jewish department, but these arrests preceded more attacks on Palestinians. As of now it is not certain whether any charges will be pressed against those arrested.

The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry, condemned the settler attacks.

"I condemn these attacks. It is vital that the Israeli government impose the rule of law and that those responsible for such crimes are brought to justice," said Serry.

The special coordinator's statement also expressed concern over "a number of attacks upon mosques in recent months, as well as violence against Palestinian property and individuals by extremist settlers."

"This is not the first time we have been subjected to settler attacks. They have burnt our crops on a regular basis. They also machine-gunned to death an elderly man and woman in 1990 near out village after Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York," Hussein told IPS.

Meir Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defense League as well as the ultra right-wing and fascist Kach party which espouses the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

It was outlawed by the Israeli Knesset or parliament for being racist but it continues to attract supporters in Israel.

Members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) visited Lubban al-Sharqiya the same day that IPS was there and promised that the mosque would be rebuilt as soon as possible.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whose term expired last January and has been in power under contested emergency powers, has personally ordered its reconstruction.

Will Obama adopt a dangerously simplistic peace plan?

2010-05-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 3 May 2010

A peace plan brought to the Obama Administration is hardly a "bold gesture." (Pete Souza/White House)

A new conventional wisdom is rapidly taking shape that the United States can resolve the 130-year-old conflict in Palestine by advancing its own peace plan. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former US Congressman Stephen Solarz outlined such a plan in The Washington Post recently, and argued that President Obama could boost its prospects with a "bold gesture" -- a trip, to Jerusalem and Ramallah in the company of Arab and other leaders to unveil it ("To achieve Mideast peace, Obama must make a bold Mideast trip," 11 April 2010).

Strong supporters of Israel have pushed back that "imposing peace" would not work, but few Palestinian voices have been heard. Indeed, from a Palestinian perspective, this idea is dangerously simplistic, and more likely to deepen festering injustices and fuel, rather than resolve conflict.

The "comprehensive solution" Brzezinski and Solarz propose is nothing of the kind because the conflict cannot be reduced to a mere border dispute between Israel and a putative Palestinian state. They propose for example "a territorial settlement based on the 1967 borders, with mutual and equal adjustments to allow the incorporation of the largest West Bank settlements into Israel."

This is deceptive; the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute just 22 percent of historic Palestine between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which Palestinians formed the overwhelming majority prior to their expulsion and flight as Israel was created in 1948. Official Palestinian acceptance of the two-state solution was a concession unprecedented in the history of any nation because it involved surrendering the 78 percent of the country on which Israel was established. To demand that Palestinians further divide the remainder represents no compromise by Israel. It merely ratifies Israel's systematic colonization of West Bank land since 1967 in flagrant defiance of international law.

The proposed "land swap" to compensate Palestinians for annexed Israeli settlements is illusory. The majority of the half million Israeli settlers are concentrated in and around Jerusalem -- the heart of the would-be Palestinian state. Yet the lands that Israel might consider handing over in compensation are small barren tracts far away from population centers. If there are such lands that could compensate the French for Paris, the British for London or Americans for New York City, then there might be lands that Palestinians could accept instead of Jerusalem.

Even more devastating to Palestinian rights, Brzezinski and Solarz float "a solution to the refugee problem involving compensation and resettlement in the Palestinian state but not in Israel." This they call "a bitter pill" but argue that "Israel cannot be expected to commit political suicide for the sake of peace."

Palestinian refugees have an internationally-recognized legal right to return to their homes and lands, but Israel has always denied this on the sole grounds that Palestinians are not Jews. Thus Gaza, where 80 percent of the population are refugees, is essentially a holding pen for humans of the "wrong" ethno-religious group. Would Brzezinski and Solarz be so sanguine about accommodating Israel's discriminatory character if its grounds for refusing the return of refugees was that they had the "wrong" skin color?

I write from downtown Pretoria, once the all-white capital of the South African apartheid state, which also argued that ending white rule would be "political suicide." The notion that people of different groups cannot or should not mix is belied by the vibrant multiracial reality in the streets of Pretoria outside my window today.

And precedents for the actual return of refugees abound. Under the US-brokered 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnia war, almost half a million refugees and internally displaced persons returned home with international assistance, to areas that had become dominated demographically and politically by members of another ethno-national community -- an enormous achievement in a country with a total population of 3.5 million and deep traumas as a result of recent war.

Other than Israel's discriminatory aversion to non-Jews it is difficult to see why Palestinian refugees could not also return to their lands inside Israel, the vast majority of which remain uninhabited.

By endorsing Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish state," Brzezinski and Solarz not only ratify the violation of the fundamental rights of refugees, but consign another 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to permanent second-class status within an increasingly intolerant and ultranationalist Israel. A more likely outcome than "two states living side by side in peace" is that Palestinian citizens of Israel will come under increasing threat of expulsion to the Palestinian state -- in other words, a new round of ethnic cleansing.

The vision of a truncated, demilitarized mini-state in no way fulfills basic Palestinian aspirations and rights and would bring no more peace or dignity than the bantustans which apartheid South Africa tried to establish for its black citizens to forestall and delay demands for equality and democracy. Nor would a trip by Obama do anything to revive shop-worn ideas that have gained little real support either among Palestinians or Israelis since they were first proposed at the failed Camp David summit in 2000.

Margaret Thatcher once said that partitioning South Africa to create separate black and white states would be like "trying to unscramble an egg," and could lead to tremendous bloodshed. It is time to recognize that this truth also applies to Palestine/Israel and to seek political solutions similar to the one here, or the settlement in Northern Ireland, that embrace rather than attempt to deny diversity, equality and justice for all who live in that land.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. This article was originally published by The Hill and is republished with the author's permission.

Medical solidarity with Gaza: in conversation with Mads Gilbert

2010-04-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Stefan Christoff, The Electronic Intifada, 19 April 2010

Mads Gilbert treats a wounded patient at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital during Israel's assault on Gaza. (Mohamed Al-Zanon/MaanImages)

Ahead of the English publication of his book Eyes in Gaza (co-authored with Dr. Erik Fosse), Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert spoke to The Electronic Intifada about what he witnessed during Operation Cast Lead, Israel's three-week long assault on the Gaza Strip starting in December 2008, during which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands more injured.

Gilbert was one of the few internationals admitted into Gaza during the bombardment. His work at Gaza City's main al-Shifa Hospital was followed closely around the world, as he provided updates on the medical situation to international media while working with Palestinian colleagues to treat horrific injuries, primarily among civilians.

Gilbert's medical mission built on decades of direct medical support work in Palestine but also longstanding solidarity work in Norway with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

In conversation, Gilbert focused specifically on the legacy of those living with the wounds of war in Gaza more than a year since Operation Cast Lead, while offering a unique perspective of a medical doctor working in tandem with the growing global Palestinian solidarity movement.

Stefan Christoff: You were one of the few internationals allowed into Gaza during the Israeli bombardment last winter. Can you share with us your memories on the decision to travel from Norway to enter Gaza during the Israeli bombings just after Christmas 2008?

Mads Gilbert: Once the Israeli attack started on 27 December 2008, we set-up an emergency medical team to leave for Gaza, a long-standing tradition in the Norwegian solidarity movement. We started this in 1981 and since then we have been consistently present in Palestine including during both intifadas. For the last 15 years we have worked in Gaza on medical solidarity projects, undertaking teaching and medical training projects while doing direct medical work.

As soon as possible, we departed from Norway, myself and doctor Erik Fosse, flying to Cairo with solid backing from the Norwegian government via a grant of $1 million for the mission and also support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which negotiated our way into Gaza with Egyptian authorities.

After arriving Cairo on 29 December, we traveled to al-Arish [the Eygptian border town] and tried to enter Gaza on 30 December but there were bombings at the border and finally on New Year's Eve, we entered Gaza in the early morning.

On arriving in Gaza we reported directly to the Palestinian Ministry of Health and they informed us that we would be working at al-Shifa hospital. At al-Shifa hospital Erik Fosse worked mainly in the emergency room and I worked mainly in the operating room.

We stayed there for 12 days and nights. After 12 days we were replaced by the second NORWAC (Norwegian Aid Committee) team, so NORWAC had a presence at al-Shifa throughout the three weeks of Israeli attacks.

SC: Why did you feel it was important to offer direct medical services in Gaza during the bombing?

MG: We have experience working in Gaza for many years and have seen the usefulness of coming to the support of the Palestinians. Not that the Palestinians can't manage themselves; al-Shifa is a good hospital with an amazing staff of 400 doctors and 600 nurses. Also, they are unfortunately world-leading experts in disaster medicine, but in such circumstances a supportive presence from outside can equal more than quantitative support measured by your hands. It is about giving strength and hope. Over the years it has become clear that this is a core quality of medical solidarity.

SC: After the UN-commissioned Goldstone report was released there was some media coverage on the deaths in Gaza inflicted during the Israeli bombardment, but too often we hear statistics and not the human stories behind the numbers. You were on the ground at al-Shifa and developed relationships with the war wounded in Gaza. Could you convey the stories of those living with the wounds of war in Gaza and the long term health impacts stemming from the Israeli bombardment?

MG: Gaza was already in a very difficult position before the bombing started. I returned to Norway from Gaza in late October 2008, before the last war, from a teaching mission at al-Azhar University. During that trip I spent time at both al-Quds and al-Shifa hospitals, meeting with my colleagues, and at that time before the war everyone told me that they can't take the siege much longer because they are lacking everything, all basic medical supplies.

Both the healthcare system and the population of Gaza were forced down on their knees by the long-lasting Israeli siege. Compounding this was the bombing that killed 1,400 Palestinians and injured 5,400. In total, 13 Israelis were killed and three of those Israelis were civilians, while among the 1,400 Palestinians killed, 28 percent were children under 18 years old, and every second injured was a woman or a child.

So the losses for families in Gaza are extensive, painful and long-lasting; you will never forget that your child was killed by a human hand. It is critical to outline that this was not a natural disaster, not a tsunami or an earthquake; this was a 100 percent made-man disaster, pre-planned and executed in the most meticulous way by Israeli commanders, under the leadership of the Israeli government.

Everyone around the world can experience a sudden loss and sadness when someone in their family or a close friend dies unexpectedly, in a car accident for example. But when so many deaths in such a small population are made-man and totally preventable it only adds to the intense burden left behind.

The psychosocial impact of all these losses to a society is very hard to measure, all the children in Gaza are traumatized by the siege and this last onslaught only added to that trauma burden. The majority of children in Gaza have witnessed a rocket attack or artillery fire directly on their own homes, prior to Operation Cast Lead. Palestinians in Gaza are a very traumatized and squeezed population due to the siege. Still, the Palestinians in Gaza manage to prevail.

SC: Can you speak about your most recent trip to Gaza after the bombardment?

MG: During my last visit to Gaza, last August, I traveled all over for a few weeks and met a large number of the families and patients that I participated in the treatment of during Operation Cast Lead. What was most striking is that the Palestinians in Gaza maintain their dignity, their culture, their humanity, against all odds.

The people of Gaza always are warm and welcoming despite the siege, despite the fact that they haven't been able to rebuild their homes due to lack of building materials allowed into Gaza. All the $5.4 billion dollars that has been pledged by the international community to rebuild Gaza is sitting in the banks, given that Israel will not allow any serious amount of building material to enter Gaza.

SC: Can you outline the current situation in Gaza as the Israeli siege continues?

MG: Gaza is facing a quadruple burden; first the siege, then the attack, the human losses and the continued siege with no hope in sight for an extremely burdened population who have done nothing wrong except for being Palestinian. So there is no verdict or international judge that justifies the killing and the siege on Gaza. This is an innocent population that is being collectively punished by the State of Israel, contrary to international law. The Israeli attack was a war crime but this point has to be pronounced formally by the International Criminal Court.

The long-term physical impacts of the war are clear today in Gaza. Many wounds that have been inflicted are painful to live with, first because war wounds are painful but also because the provisions for clinics and rehabilitation resources in Gaza are quite limited.

In Gaza there is a very good artificial limb shop, the Gaza Municipality Artificial Limb Center, that was on the brink of being closed down in 2006. However it was kept open after a huge fundraising campaign in north Norway -- as one of our many outlets of solidarity work we decided to direct funds to Gaza's artificial limb shop and they make very good prostheses.

Gaza's major artificial limb shop has provided orthopedic support, technical support like limbs or wheelchairs, to more than 700 patients with direct support from north Norway as a specific example.

SC: Many injured by the Israeli bombardment last winter lost arms or legs. Can you outline the reality of the Palestinian war-wounded, those living today with serious injuries?

MG: All over Palestine, in the West Bank, in Gaza and also in Lebanon there are people of all ages without arms, legs or even eyes, like those shot in the eyes with rubber bullets during the first intifada, all of them subjected to the weaponry of the Israeli army.

So the entire process of rehabilitation for the war-wounded is a huge undertaking, a process generally left to Palestinian civil society in Gaza, which is already completely drained due to the long-lasting siege.

Also take into account that according to the Goldstone report, Israel bombed multiple schools and many have not been rebuilt, so for the young children with war wounds and physiological trauma, it's extremely important to get back to normal life, to go to school, to find a good teacher who can care of them, to find some sort of reality after the mayhem created by the bombardment. When schools aren't rebuilt it means makeshift schools, triple shifts for teachers at the schools and double classes in each classroom, adding to the burden.

Those with amputations will hopefully receive artificial limbs but even with an artificial limb they then need serious training and resources for the training are limited due to the siege. Also, when you are 14 years old, it takes a great deal of patience to learn to use an artificial limb.

So the siege doesn't only limit food and fuel but also the ability for Palestinian society to rehabilitate all the war-wounded. The ongoing collective punishment and military attacks during the siege results in huge physiological trauma for the children, so rehabilitation for all the children is really difficult.

In order to heal, children need to have space to talk about their experiences, to make drawings, to be listened to by caring adults who have the capacity and surplus energy to listen to the children. All this healing process is lost in the everyday struggle to survive, to find basic sustenance.

SC: Beyond the impacts from Operation Cast Lead what the critical points stemming from the ongoing siege?

MG: Water supplies in Gaza are extremely scarce. Gaza has the lowest annual liter-per-capita usage in the world and 80 percent of the water available is below the minimum water quality standard as defined by the World Health Organization.

Gaza's sewage systems are broken and bombed. All the sewage-cleaning machines are missing parts. Much of Gaza's infrastructure has been targeted and is not being repaired due to the siege.

Tromsoe, Norway, my hometown, is a twin city with Gaza City, so the conditions of life in the municipality of Gaza, for the 550,000 inhabitants, are known quite well to me and others in Norway. Palestinians in Gaza have nothing. There aren't even cars and trucks to take care of the solid waste collection, so the mayor was forced to rent 300 to 400 donkey carts to organize garbage collection.

Gaza is a prison for 1.5 million Palestinians. Fifty percent are under 15 years old and the average age in Gaza is 17 years, so it is largely a child population being exposed not only to a siege but also repeated military attacks from drones, airplanes and Apache helicopters.

Every night the Palestinians in Gaza relive their worst nightmares when they hear drones; it never stops and you are never sure if it is a surveillance drone or if it will launch a rocket attack. Even the sound of Gaza is frightful, the sound of the Israeli drones in the sky.

However, let's not pity the Palestinians in Gaza; mercy and pity shouldn't be the dominating feelings after learning about Gaza. What the Palestinians, as people in a dire situation, need is respect and solidarity. Palestinians in Gaza need to get back on their own feet and the way that we can support them is to try to change the policy of our own governments, so that the US and Israel are forced to lift the siege.

It is a shameful situation for the world, that in 2010 we are witness to 1.5 million people being starved. There is solid scientific evidence that child mortality is not decreasing, stunting among children is increasing, malnutrition is increasing, all this from an Israeli-made hunger for the population in Gaza, with the full support of the US.

How can we accept this in 2010?

If we can't respect and stand up for the basic human rights or humanity of the Palestinians, what is the meaning of the humanistic foundations that western society claims to be standing on? What will the history books write about Gaza?

SC: Returning to Norway after your experiences in Gaza, the shops are open, people are on the streets, but Gaza is a totally different reality. How difficult is it for you to convey the realities in Gaza, given the extreme contrast between the situation in Norway or in North America and the situation in Gaza?

MG: An important question. In a simple way we have tried to become a voice for the voiceless, for the people in Gaza and in occupied Palestine because although the Palestinians do have a strong voice and narrative they are often not listened to and don't get access to the mainstream media.

Palestinians are silenced and we are trying to break that silence, as brave people in Israel are also doing. It is really important to underscore that we should fight against the demonization of the Israeli people in the way that Israeli leaders are demonizing the Palestinian people, because at the end of the day if we can't talk to our enemies we will end in disaster worldwide. Dialogue is central to finding a real solution.

Palestine really touches on our basic human values and is in many ways the mother of all wars today. My main obligation is not my solidarity work in Gaza but my work to convey the reality in Gaza to people outside.

There is a duty I have been given by those patients, those killed, those living with amputations, all those who shared their lives with me as a doctor, as a friend. It is my duty to convey their stories to as many people in Norway and anywhere else, so that more people in Norway and globally stand up and say that they refuse to accept the current situation in Gaza, regardless of political points of view but simply on a human level.

SC: As a medical doctor, what are your thoughts on the global movement in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom today?

MG: In a sense it comes down to a simple question of solidarity, which means that we have to support not pity. We have to be critical and not frightened by threats or accusations of being anti-Semitic because critiquing the Israeli government certainly is not anti-Semitic.

Now the Canadian government is pursuing an absurd line that attempts to claim that critiquing the Israeli government is anti-Semitic, which is totally outrageous. Should Israel be the only state on earth exempted from real political criticism?

The global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is critically important and we have been pushing forward this campaign in Norway. The Norwegian State Pension Fund divested from Elbit Systems last September, a subsidiary of the company that provides the Israeli army with unmanned aerial vehicles [drones]. Also we are working towards institutional boycott within major universities in Norway and this is moving in a positive direction.

It is key to step outside of the consumerist box of everyday life in the north, to stop always wanting more than we already have -- a good way to do that is to travel, travel to the West Bank, to Gaza and see for yourself the situation.

We are all living as history is being written -- our actions write history. Pretending to be neutral equals complicity; that is the old wisdom of history.

Everyone has the duty to be educated on the reality in Palestine and other injustices around the world, to speak out on these critical issues. Let us not take for granted that our political leaders are speaking the truth because more often than not politicians aren't speaking the truth.

Every voice counts, we must refuse to be silent because silence is the biggest enemy of justice.

Stefan Christoff, a journalist and contributor to The Electronic Intifada, is also active with Tadamon! (http://www.tadamon.ca/) and is at http://www.twitter.com/spirodon

Journalist threatened with extradition, arrest by Mossad

2010-04-15T10:55:00.001-07:00

Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 13 April 2010

An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned at the weekend they would "remove the gloves" to track him down.

The Shin Bet, Israel's secret police, said it was treating Uri Blau, a reporter with the liberal Haaretz daily newspaper who has gone underground in London, as a "fugitive felon" and that a warrant for his arrest had been issued.

Options being considered are an extradition request to the British authorities or, if that fails, a secret operation by Mossad, Israel's spy agency, to smuggle him back, according to Maariv, a right-wing newspaper.

It was revealed yesterday that Blau's informant, Anat Kamm, 23, a former conscript soldier who copied hundreds of classified documents during her military service, had confessed shortly after her arrest in December to doing so to expose "war crimes."

The Shin Bet claims that Blau is holding hundreds of classified documents, including some reported to relate to Operation Cast Lead, Israel's attack on Gaza in winter 2008 in which the army is widely believed to have violated the rules of war.

Other documents, the basis of a Haaretz investigation published in 2008, concern a meeting between the head of the army, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the Shin Bet in which it was agreed to ignore a court ruling and continue carrying out executions of Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories.

Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet, who has said his organization was previously "too sensitive with the investigation," is now demanding that Blau reveal his entire document archive and take a lie-detector test on his return to identify his sources, according to Haaretz. The newspaper and its lawyers have recommended that he remain in hiding to protect his informants.

Haaretz has also revealed that, in a highly unusual move shortly before Israel's attack on Gaza, it agreed to pull a printed edition after the army demanded at the last minute that one of Blau's stories not be published. His report had already passed the military censor, which checks that articles do not endanger national security.

Lawyers and human rights groups fear that the army and Shin Bet are trying to silence investigative journalists and send a warning to other correspondents not to follow in Blau's path.

"We have a dangerous precedent here, whereby the handing over of material to an Israeli newspaper ... is seen by the prosecutor's office as equivalent to contact with a foreign agent," said Eitan Lehman, Kamm's lawyer. "The very notion of presenting information to the Israeli public alone is taken as an intention to hurt national security."

The Shin Bet's determination to arrest Blau was revealed after a blanket gag order was lifted late last week on Kamm's case. She has been under house arrest since December. She has admitted copying hundreds of classified documents while serving in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, in charge of operations in the West Bank, between 2005 and 2007.

Under an agreement with the Shin Bet last year, Haaretz and Blau handed over 50 documents and agreed to the destruction of Blau's computer.

Both sides accuse the other of subsequently reneging on the deal: the Shin Bet says Blau secretly kept other documents copied by Kamm that could be useful to Israel's enemies; while Blau says the Shin Bet used the returned documents to track down Kamm, his source, after assurances that they would not do so.

Haaretz said Blau fears that they will try to identify his other informants if he hands over his archive.

Blau learned of his predicament in December, while out of the country on holiday. He said a friend called to warn that the Shin Bet had broken into his home and ransacked it. He later learned they had been monitoring his telephone, email and computer for many months.

In a move that has baffled many observers, the Shin Bet revealed last week that Blau was hiding in London, despite the threat that it would make him an easier target for other countries' intelligence agencies.

Amir Mizroch, an analyst with the right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper, noted that it was as if Israel's security services were "saying to Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Hizballah and Iranian intelligence agents in London: 'Yalla, be our guests, go get Uri Blau.'" He added that the real goal might be to flush out Blau so that he would seek sanctuary at the Israeli embassy.

Kamm is charged with espionage with intent to harm national security, the harshest indictment possible and one that could land in her jail for 25 years. Yesterday another of her lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, appealed to Blau to return to Israel and give back the documents to help "minimize the affair."

"The real question is whether this exceptionally heavy-handed approach is designed only to get back Kamm's documents or go after Blau and his other sources," said Jeff Halper, an Israeli analyst. "It may be that Kamm is the excuse the security services need to identify Blau's circle of informants."

Blau has already published several stories, apparently based on Kamm's documents, showing that the army command approved policies that not only broke international law but also violated the rulings of Israel's courts.

His reports have included revelations that senior commanders approved extrajudicial assassinations in the occupied territories that were almost certain to kill Palestinian bystanders; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely captured; and that the defense ministry compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law.

Although the original stories date to 2008, the army issued a statement belatedly this week that Blau's reports were "outrageous and misleading." No senior commanders have been charged over the army's lawbreaking activities.

B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said its research had shown that "in many cases soldiers have been conducting themselves in the territories as if they were on a hit mission, as opposed to arrest operations."

It added that the authorities had "rushed to investigate the leak and chose to ignore the severe suspicions of blatant wrongdoings depicted in those documents."

A group of senior journalists established a petition this week calling for Blau to be spared a trial: "So far, the authorities have not prosecuted journalists for holding secret information, which most of us have had in one form or another. This policy by the prosecution reflects, in our view, an imbalance between journalistic freedom, the freedom of expression and the need for security."

However, media coverage of the case in Israel has been largely hostile. Yuval Elbashan, a lawyer, wrote in Haaretz yesterday that Blau's fellow military reporters and analysts had in the past few days abandoned their colleague and proven "their loyalty to the [security] system as the lowliest of its servants."

One, Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent with the country's largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, who is said to have been approached by Kamm before she turned to Blau, is due to testify against her in her trial due next month.

Chat forums and talkback columns also suggest little sympathy among the Israeli public for either Kamm or Blau. Several Hebrew websites show pictures of Kamm behind bars or next to a hangman's noose.

A report on Israel National News, a news service for settlers, alleged that Kamm had been under the influence of "rabidly left-wing" professors at Tel Aviv University when she handed over the documents to the Haaretz reporter.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

Talking Palestine to power

2010-04-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, 12 April 2010

Israel claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme its crimes. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Today, there is no excuse for not knowing the truth about Palestine, especially what is happening in Gaza. Even taking into account the disinformation spread in mainstream media, there are enough glimpses one gets of a ravaged Gaza and a brutalized people that should compel us to ask questions. There are enough websites and blogs easily available for anyone to learn more, even if it requires sifting through and evaluating the available information. Certainly, the alarm bells should be ringing when our political leaders declare undying fealty to Israel or cavalierly wear it as a badge of honor, despite the documented reports of Israel's war crimes by human rights groups and official enquiries.

But the world lacks courage from government leaders, acquiescent mainstream media, nongovernmental organizations dependent on government support, academics looking for tenure and populations too long fed on a diet of Zionist myths. People are terrified of being labelled anti-Semitic, a mendacious charge against anyone criticizing Israel. Palestinians too, afraid of being further shunned and disadvantaged in countries that give them refuge, so often remain silent. Not only do people fear repercussions, but speaking the truth or even just hearing it has a way of taking people out of their comfort zones. They fear their troubled consciences may require them to act and so they bury their heads deeper into the sand where they hope even the sounds of silence might be extinguished.

This then is the challenge for advocates the world over. How does one talk Palestine to power if one cannot even talk Palestine to the people who are in fear of the powerful?

In the face of media saturation with Zionist viewpoints and the new "Brand Israel" campaigns, many wanting to advocate for Palestine might feel defeated, but time and again we see that the power of one can be enormously effective.

The great scholar and public intellectual Edward Said showed more than anyone else that individuals can make a difference in the public defense of Palestine. He particularly saw the intellectual's voice as having "resonance."

But one does not need to be an intellectual. Said's words can just as aptly apply to any one of us. He said avoidance was "reprehensible" and in his 1994 book Representations of the Intellectual, described it as "that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming too controversial; you need the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is ... to remain within the responsible mainstream ... ."

In 1993 when almost everyone else thought the handshakes at the White House steps would seal the negotiated Oslo accords and at long last give the Palestinians their freedom and bring peace to the region, Edward Said saw that these accords would merely provide the cover for Israel to pursue its colonial expansionism and consolidate its occupation of Palestine. However, he knew to criticize Oslo meant in effect taking a position against "hope" and "peace." His decision to do so flew in the face of the Palestinian revolutionary leadership that had bartered for statehood.

Although Said was denounced for his views, he was not prepared to buy into the deception that he knew would leave the Palestinians with neither hope nor peace. And just as he predicted, each fruitless year of peacemaking finally exposed the horrible reality of Oslo as Palestinians found themselves the victims of Israel's matrix of control, a term first used to describe the situation by Israeli professor Jeff Halper in 1999. And this domination of one people over another without any intention of addressing the injustices against the Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homeland, has undeniably reduced Israel to an apartheid state.

The Palestinians have nothing left worth calling a state and they are facing an existential threat on all fronts. Yet, some intellectuals are still talking about a two-state solution in lock step with politicians, a mantra that is repeated uncritically, even mendaciously, in the mainstream media.

This pandering to an idea for decades has been undermined by the furious sounds of drills and hammers reverberating in illegal settlements throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the catastrophic societal ruptures engineered in Gaza. Now those sounds are muffled by the rhetoric of "economic peace," "institution-building," "democracy," "internal security" and "statehood." They are words that must be challenged at every opportunity, for they are not mere words, but dangerous concepts when isolated from truth on the ground.

It is no use talking about "economic peace" when industrial estates built for Palestinian workers are intended to provide Israel with slave labor and cheap goods. It is useless to support "institution-building" when Israel continues to undermine and obstruct those programs already struggling to service Palestinian society. It is a lie to speak of "democracy" when fair elections in 2006 had Israel and the "international community" denying Hamas the right to govern. It is a charade to accept "internal security" when arming and training Palestinians to police their own people covers for Israel's and America's divide-and-conquer scheme. It is hollow to speak of "statehood" when Israel keeps stealing land and building illegal settlements that deprive the Palestinians of their homes and livelihoods while herding them into isolated and walled-in ghettoes.

Edward Said was proven right. Now, it is our turn to speak the truth and act fearlessly, regardless of the censure we are likely to encounter. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is believed to have said that truth passes through three stages: "first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; third, it is accepted as being self-evident." Today, we are at the third stage: the 11 million Palestinians living under occupation, apartheid and as stateless refugees are the living truth. That is Israel's Achilles' heel.

The Palestinians are no longer the humble shepherds and farmers that Zionist forces terrorized into fleeing to make way for the Jewish State of Israel. A new generation wants justice and it is demanding it eloquently, nonviolently and strategically. Their message: no normal relations with Israel while it oppresses Palestinians, denies their rights and violates international law. And boycott, divestment and sanctions have to be legitimate tools for challenging a state that claims exceptionalism no matter how extreme and criminal its actions.

The temptation of course is always to opt for the path of least resistance. Therefore, we must appeal to the individual, not even to sacrifice for others, but to recognize that no matter where we live in this global village, we are all vulnerable if we do not stand up for universal human rights and uphold the principles and application of international law.

Despite his own Zionist affiliations and loyalty to Israel, Justice Richard Goldstone saw the danger of tailoring his UN-backed report on war crimes in Gaza to exonerate Israel. He had the decency and courage to put the rule of law and humanity ahead of the savage condemnation he knew would come from talking truth to power.

The same can be said of Richard Falk, the Jewish professor emeritus from Princeton University and UN special rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories, who was denied entry into Israel because he described Israel's siege on Gaza as a "Holocaust in the making" ("Israel deports American academic," Guardian, 15 December 2008). Israel's treatment was insulting enough, but now shamefully, the Palestinian Authority has asked the Human Rights Council to "postpone" his report on Gaza and, as Nadia Hijab reported, is asking him to resign ("PA's betrayal of human rights defenders the unkindest cut," Nadia Hijab, 14 March 2010).

These are honorable men, but we too can stand on principle in smaller ways, whether that is refusing to buy Israeli goods at our local store, boycotting an Israeli-government sponsored event or exposing and protesting the collusion between governments and corporations with Israel. That is what it means to become part of a worldwide civil movement that will do what our leaders will not: pressure Israel to dismantle the matrix of control on Palestine and make reparations for the decades of injustices it has perpetrated against its people.

It is indeed possible for all of us to "squeeze out of reality some of its potentialities," the reality that University of Melbourne Professor Ghassan Hage has said is found in those utopic moments that come from challenging our own thoughts, fears and biases. In that space lies the untapped power we seek, to speak the truth without fear or favor. In that space lies the potential for political change. In that space, there will always be hope for Palestine.

A version of this essay was originally published on the website of Labour Friends of Palestine & the Middle East (UK)

Sonja Karkar is the founder and president of Women for Palestine and one of the founders and co-convener of Australians for Palestine in Melbourne, Australia. She is also the editor of www.australiansforpalestine.com and contributes articles on Palestine regularly to various publications. She can be contacted at sonjakarkar A T womenforpalestine D O T org.

US military aid to Israel violates domestic, international law

2010-04-10T09:22:00.000-07:00

Nahida H Gordon, The Electronic Intifada, 7 April 2010

Should the US government, based on international and domestic law, cut military aid and cease the transfer of weapons to Israel? (Luay Sababa/MaanImages)

The Middle East Study Committee of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has published "Breaking Down the Walls", a report to be submitted to the church's 219th General Assembly this July.

Some of the report's 39 recommendations have drawn harsh criticism. The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared in a 22 February action alert that "adoption of this poisonous document by the Presbyterian Church will be nothing short of a declaration of war on Israel and her supporters" ("Presbyterian Church USA Ready to Declare War Against Israel: Take Action Now").

Such attacks make exaggerated claims and misrepresent the recommendations. The Committee's intent is not to make war but rather peace.

One factually misleading claim is the Simon Wiesenthal Center's assertion that "the report calls for the US to withhold financial and military aid to Israel." In fact, the report "calls on the US government to exercise strategically its international influence, including the possible withholding of military aid as a means of bringing Israel to compliance with international law and peacemaking efforts" (p.53).

As one can easily see, the Committee's recommendation is nuanced and calls on withholding military aid as a last resort.

Within this context it is appropriate to consider whether the US government, based on international and domestic law, should cut military aid and cease the transfer of weapons to Israel.

According to the International Law Commission (ILC), the official UN body that codifies customary international law, "A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if: (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State" (Article 16 of the International Law Commission, "Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts," (2001) which were commended by the General Assembly, A/RES/56/83).

In other words, if you knowingly help someone commit a crime, you are also liable for that crime. The ILC states that international law also "prohibits conduct that involves patterns of blatant abuse and complicity in such a pattern of blatant abuse."

According to Amnesty International, since 2001, the US has been by far the major supplier of conventional arms to Israel. Also since 2001, Israel launched military invasions of Lebanon and Gaza, causing extensive loss of civilian human life and destruction of property, including homes ("Fueling conflict: foreign arms supplies to Israel/Gaza," Amnesty International, February 2009, p.21).

Section 502B of the US Foreign Assistance Act stipulates that "no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights" and section 4 of the Arms Export Control Act authorizes the supply of US military equipment and training only for lawful purposes of internal security, "legitimate self-defense," or participation in United Nations peacekeeping operations or other operations consistent with the UN Charter.

Since the US government gives no military assistance to any of the Palestinian resistance groups, the question with regard to US military aid and transfer of weapons applies only to Israel.

And with regard to Israel, the UN-commissioned Goldstone report found that the Israeli forces in Gaza committed grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention which included willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, extensive destruction of property and use of human shields. Other findings were that the Israeli forces committed a series of acts that deprive Palestinians of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy and that these findings could lead a competent court to find that the crime against humanity were committed.

A particularly abhorrent use by Israel of weapons provided to it by the US government is the use of white phosphorous which when it comes into contact with skin burns deeply through muscle and bone, continuing to burn until deprived of oxygen. It can contaminate other parts of the victim's body or even those treating the injuries, as documented by Amnesty International. Moreover its use in civilian areas is prohibited under international law.

Based on international and domestic US laws, and the Goldstone report's finding that Israel committed grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the US government, in providing military aid and the transfer of arms to Israel, has violated its responsibility not to participate in the internationally wrongful acts of another state.

With these observations in mind, I personally believe that the recommendation of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Middle East Study Committee to withhold military aid to Israel as a last resort -- in attempting to enforce international law vis-a-vis the occupation of Palestinian territories and the human rights violations against the Palestinians -- is a mild statement, indeed. Particularly so in light of Amnesty International's "calling on the UN, notably the Security Council, to impose an immediate, comprehensive arms embargo on all parties to the conflict, and on all states to take action individually to impose national embargoes on any arms or weapons transfers to the parties to the conflict until there is no longer a substantial risk that such arms or weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law."

As the Middle East Study Committee states, "We deeply value our relationships with Jews and Muslims in the United States, Israel and the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East. Yet the bonds of friendship must neither prevent us from speaking nor limit our empathy for the suffering of others. Inaction and silence on our part enable actions we oppose and consequences we grieve."

N H Gordon is a professor of statistics and member of the Presbyterian Church (USA) Middle East Study Committee. Professor Gordon, a life-long Presbyterian and currently a church Elder, is a Palestinian-American who experienced, first hand, the 1948 Palestinian Nakba as a child.

Long Live Palestine - LowKey

2010-03-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

Massive props to Lowkey for laying truthful and eye-opening bars on this track. He has displayed huge support and love for the people of Palestine, which should not just be shared by Muslims or Palestinians, but by EVERY HUMAN because support for innocent and oppressed people is irrespective of religious faith or nationality. As a HUMAN it is your responsibility to accept that it is simply WRONG to bomb and use toxic phosphorus compounds as weapons against UN-ARMED people who have no means to defend themselves.

Lowkey says "Nothing is more anti-Semitic than Zionism", this is impossible to deny because Judaism and Zionism are two completely different philosophies. During the past two thousand years of existence of Jews, they have been DIVINELY decreed exile and no Jew had ever intended to end this exile and establish any independent political sovereignty in any land. This was in place to ensure that not only the Jews, but the people as a whole fulfil the commandments of the Torah. However the Israeli state has been created by Zionists within the past 100 years. The ultimate mission behind this is to detach the Jewish people from Judaism and replace it with an affinity and loyalty to a racist, murderous political movement. This movement is Zionism and leaders have deceived, terrorised, manipulated the media and have used clever and false propaganda as mechanisms in the manufacture of this state, which is a catalyst for the NWO.

But although Zionist leaders have global political power and unlimited finances at their disposal, their plans of deceiving the entire world have failed. This is because although they plan, God also plans, and He is the best of planners. The truth remains, that the law of the Torah clearly states that the Jewish people are FORBIDDEN to have their own state. It is important to stress, that Zionism is NOT representative of Judaism and Jews have never selected the Israeli leaders. It is also vital to know that many Rabbis and Jews oppose Zionism, and I honour them and the many Jews who marched alongside myself in protest against this genocide. I want to remind Israeli Jews to uphold to their true faith and its teachings.

It should be known that most of the United States Bill of Rights and founding principles correlate with the religious principles and teachings of the people of Palestine. The American government has continually supported the Zionist state of Israel despite the fact that George Washington wanted America to be a country that HAS NO PASSIONATE ATTACHMENT TO ANY FOREIGN NATION. I would therefore like to remind Americans to be TRUE AMERICANS and to uphold to their founding principles.

رَبَّنَا وَلاَ تُحَمِّلْنَا مَا لاَ طَاقَةَ لَنَا بِهِ وَاعْفُ عَنَّا وَاغْفِرْ لَنَا وَارْحَمْنَا أَنتَ مَوْلاَنَا فَانصُرْنَا عَلَى الْقَوْمِ الْكَافِرِينَ

http://www.myspace.com/lowkeyuk

2010-03-16T18:53:00.000-07:00

"The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure-- in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months, a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation". Desmond Tutu

Action Alert: Gaza photo exhibition threatened with closure

2010-03-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East sent out this action alert. The video features some of the photos in the exhibit.

Human Drama in Gaza, Photo Exposition, Cinéma du Parc, 3575 Parc Ave., Montreal, Jan. 15 Feb. 28 , 2010

On Monday, Feb. 15th, Cinema du Parc received an email insisting that CJPME’s Photo Exposition, Human Drama in Gaza, be immediately removed from the Cinema. The email was from a legal representative of Gestion Redbourne PDP Inc., the owners of the building housing Cinema du Parc. The Cinema has hosted dozens of expositions in the past three years, and this is the first time that such action has been taken. This move on the part of Redbourne seems entirely political, to muzzle the message of Human Drama in Gaza.
Cinema du Parc has been great partner in the hosting of the Exposition in Montreal.

Amir, ten years old, abducted by Israeli soldiers from his bed

2010-03-11T12:43:00.000-08:00

Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from Hebron, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 8 March 2010

Amir and his mother just hours before he was abducted by Israeli soldiers. (Nora Barrows-Friedman)

Amir al-Mohtaseb smiled tenderly when I asked him to tell me his favorite color. Sitting in his family's living room last Thursday afternoon, 4 March, in the Old City of Hebron, the ten-year-old boy with freckles and long eyelashes softly replied, "green." He then went on to describe in painful detail his arrest and detention -- and the jailing of his 12-year-old brother Hasan by Israeli occupation soldiers on Sunday, 28 February.

Hours after our interview, at 2am, Israeli soldiers would break into the house, snatch Amir from his bed, threaten his parents with death by gunfire if they tried to protect him, and take him downstairs under the stairwell. They would beat him so badly that he would bleed internally into his abdomen, necessitating overnight hospitalization. In complete shock and distress, Amir would not open his mouth to speak for another day and a half.

In our interview that afternoon before the brutal assault, Amir said that on the 28th, he was playing in the street near the Ibrahimi Mosque, on his way with Hasan to see their aunt.

"Two of the soldiers stopped us and handcuffed us," Amir said. "They brought us to two separate jeeps. They took me to the settlement and put me in a corner. I still had handcuffs on. They put a dog next to me. I said that I wanted to go home. They said no, and told me I would stay here forever. They refused to let me use the bathroom. They wouldn't let me call my mother. They blindfolded me and I stayed there like that until my father was able to come and get me late at night."

Amir's detention inside the settlement lasted nearly ten hours. "The only thing that I thought about was how afraid I was, especially with the dog beside me. I wanted to run away and go back to my house," he said.

Amir and Hasan's mother, Mukarrem, told me that Amir immediately displayed signs of trauma when he returned home. "He was trying to tell me a joke, and trying to laugh. But it was not normal laughter. He was happy and terrified at the same time," she said. "He wet himself at some point during the detention. He was extremely afraid."

Amir revealed that he hadn't been able to sleep in the nights following his detention, worried sick about his brother in jail and extremely afraid that the soldiers would come back (which, eventually, they did). Today, approximately 350 children are languishing inside Israeli prisons and detention camps, enduring interrogation, torture and indefinite sentences, sometimes without charge. The number fluctuates constantly, but thousands of Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 16 have moved through the Israeli military judicial system over the past decade since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada. Israel designates 18 as the age of adulthood for its own citizens, but through a military order, and against international law, Israel mandates 16 as the age of adulthood for Palestinians. Additionally, Israel has special military orders (#1644 and #132) to be able to arrest and judge Palestinian children -- termed "juvenile delinquents" -- as young as 12 years old.

"This way, they have a 'legal' cover for what they are doing, even though this is against international laws," said Abed Jamal, a researcher at Defence for Children International-Palestine Section's (DCI-PS) Hebron office. "However, in Amir's case, they broke even their own laws by arresting and detaining him as a ten-year-old boy. These laws are obviously changeable according to Israel's whim. We have yet to see a prosecution for crimes such as these."

I asked Amir and Hasan's father, Fadel, to describe how one is able to parent effectively under this kind of constant siege.

"It's not safe for the children to go outside because we've faced constant attacks by the settlers and the soldiers," he explained. "This by itself is unimaginable for us. And now, we have one son in jail and another traumatized ... they're so young."

On Sunday, 7 March, exactly a week after Hasan's arrest and Amir's detention, the family and members of the local media made an early-morning journey to Ofer prison where Hasan had been held since his initial arrest. After a lengthy process in which the Israeli military judge admitted that the boy was too young to stay in prison, Hasan was released on the condition that he would come back to the court to finish the trial at a later date. This trial followed the initial hearing last Wednesday at Ofer, where Maan News Agency reported that the judge insisted that Fadel pay the court 2,000 shekels ($530) for Hasan's bail. According to Maan, Fadel then publicly asked the court, "What law allows a child to be tried in court and then asks his father to pay a fine? I will not pay the fine, and you have to release my child ... This is the law of Israel's occupation."

Consumed by their sons' situations, Mukarrem and Fadel say they are trying to do the best for their family under attack. "What can we do?" asked Fadel. "We lock the doors. We lock the windows. We have nothing with which to protect our family and our neighbors from the soldiers or the settlers. If a Palestinian kidnapped and beat and jailed an Israeli child, the whole world would be up in arms about it. It would be all over the media. But the Israelis, they come into our communities with jeeps and tanks and bulldozers, they take our children and throw them into prison, and no one cares."

DCI-PS's Jamal reiterates the point that international laws made to protect children under military occupation have been ignored by Israel since the occupation began in 1967. "Most of the time, we try to do our best to use the law, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention for the Rights of the Child as weapons against this brutality," said Jamal. "All of these laws exist, but Israel uses their own military laws as excuses to defy international law. As Palestinians, we have to work together to create solidarity against this brutality. Through our work, we try to tell the international community what's going on with Palestinian children to create a wide berth of support against this situation. We believe that the only way this will stop is through the support of the international community."

Amir slowly began speaking again 36 hours after the beating by Israeli soldiers. Zahira Meshaal, a Bethlehem-based social worker specializing in the effects of trauma in children, said that Amir's "elective mutism," a symptom of extreme psychological shock caused by his beating and detention, is a common response, but that it is a good sign that he began talking again. "This is a reaction of fear on many levels. Amir's house and his family are his only source of security," said Meshaal. "This was taken away from him the moment the soldiers invaded his home. It's easy to attend to the immediate trauma, but the long-term effects will undoubtedly be difficult to address. He'll need a lot of mental health services from now on."

Meshaal comments on the nature of this attack in the context of the unraveling situation inside Hebron. "We are talking about a place that is on the front lines of trauma," she said. "This is an ongoing and growing injury to the entire community. Parents have to be a center of security for their children, but that's being taken away from them. Especially in Hebron, the Israeli settlers and soldiers know this, and use this tactic to force people to leave the area. It's a war of psychology. This is a deliberate act to make the children afraid and force people to leave so that their children can feel safer."

At the end of our interview last Thursday, Amir sent a message to American children. "We are kids, just like you. We have the right to play, to move freely. I want to tell the world that there are so many kids inside the Israeli jails. We just want to have freedom of movement, the freedom to play." Amir said that he wants to be a heart surgeon when he grows up. His mother and father told me that they hope Amir's own heart -- and theirs -- heals from last week's repetitive and cumulative trauma at the hands of the interminable Israeli occupation.

Nora Barrows-Friedman is the co-host and Senior Producer of Flashpoints, a daily investigative newsmagazine on Pacifica Radio. She is also a correspondent for Inter Press Service. She regularly reports from Palestine, where she also runs media workshops for youth in the Dheisheh refugee camp in the occupied West Bank.

Interview: "Anything you want, we can bring to the Gaza Strip"

2010-03-11T12:22:00.001-08:00

Jody McIntyre writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 10 March 2010

Abu Hanin working in his tunnel on the border with Egypt. (Jody McIntyre)

Jody McIntyre is a journalist from the United Kingdom. He writes a blog entitled "Life on Wheels" which can be found at jodymcintyre.wordpress.com. He can be reached at jody [dot] mcintyre [at] gmail [dot] com.

The siege on Gaza is tightening as the Egyptian government continues construction of an underground steel wall at the Rafah border with Gaza to block the tunnel trade. The tunnels, which journalist Robert Fisk has described as "the lung through which Gaza breathes," are the only means in which most basic goods like food and medicine reach the besieged population in Gaza. Jody McIntyre spoke with Abu Hanin, a Palestinian laborer from Gaza who works in one of the tunnels at the border with Egypt.

Abu Hanin: My name is Abu Hanin, I am 29 years old, from Rafah, on the Palestinian side, and I work in the tunnels. I am married, with five daughters and one son, and my wife is now pregnant with twins, so after that we'll be ten overall.

Jody McIntyre: Do you talk to your family before you go out to work?

AH: They say to me every morning, "We hope you come back safe and sound," because they know where I am going out to work. When I leave my wife, I see tears in her eyes, and when I get back, I see happiness. It's like going out to fight a war, every day.

JM: Why are you working in the tunnels?

AH: Because of the dire situation this is the only work here. There is no way to live but from the tunnels. Every day you leave your home, without guaranteeing that you'll be back. You're working while being surrounded by death ... you are digging your tomb with your own hands.

JM: How are the tunnels built?

AH: They are all built with our own hands. The tunnels range from 7 to 35 meters in depth. After you dig down, you draw your line to Egypt. You determine the width, usually one to three meters, and the distances, usually a kilometer but sometimes 200 to 300 meters ... however you like, you can build it!

JM: What goods do you bring in through the tunnels?

AH: Anything you want, we can bring to the Gaza Strip. Everyone knows about the smuggling that happens here; we smuggle animals, water, cars ... and even people, for example, if someone wants to come to get married. I'm serious!

Most of the goods come from al-Arish. You are deemed as a "smuggler" -- you are not working at [Israeli-controlled] Erez or Karni crossing, so you are not an official worker, you are a smuggler. So the people in al-Arish bring the goods to the entrance of the tunnel on the Egyptian side, quickly sneak them in, and we bring them over to Gaza.

The tunnels for the cars are so expensive to build, because it has to be three meters wide, [and as tall] as if you are walking in a room. Imagine that you are walking in a room, that is 1.5 kilometers under the ground, and then imagine how much that costs to build.

You may be shocked, but we have brought in camels. Imagine the size of a camel! We put the animal on a sled-like contraption, and it rides into the tunnel down a slope. We have lamps in the tunnel, and every time we turn a lamp off, the animal will walk forward towards the next light, until it reaches the well at the other end. Then we handcuff the animal, and bring it up -- this part really is quite perilous ... people have lost their legs. Donkeys are the most lethal.

JM: How many tunnels are there overall?

AH: It's difficult to know exactly ... but I'd say around 1,250. It's funny to think that every stride you take around here, there are different tunnels underneath you!

JM: Isn't it dangerous to have so many clustered together?

AH: No, on the contrary, it can work to our advantage, because if any sand collapses, we can cross over into a neighboring tunnel. If people get stuck in their tunnel, we can dig across into another tunnel and help them out, otherwise they would suffocate from lack of oxygen. We have learned that oxygen stays for 12 hours in the soil, so after that has passed you need to get out.

JM: What equipment do you have in the tunnels?

AH: We have electricity. Oxygen, we don't care about so much -- now, we are so used to being suffocated all the time, that we don't like to be up in the open air! We prefer to spend most of our time down in the tunnels. We also have an intercom system so that we can talk with each other, lamps so that we can see and water, tea and instant coffee to drink ... it's like a whole different life under the ground.

JM: Apparently, before the siege of Gaza was tightened in 2006, wages were higher for tunnel laborers?

AH: Yes, that is true. Wages for tunnel laborers have dropped by a third. Now, there is more demand, more tunnels and more laborers. There were tens of tunnels, now there are hundreds, and on top of that thousands of laborers. We work in two shifts, each tunnel needs around 30 workers for the day shift, and another 30 for the night. One shift to take the goods down on one side, and one to drag them up at the other side.

JM: The work must take a lot of energy, so how do the older laborers cope?

AH: All the guys over 35 years of age work at the surface of the tunnels, to collect the goods and transfer them to the vehicles. But underground you need to have young, agile guys. The exit of the tunnel in Egypt is like a bomb; you have to open the trap door, quickly get all the goods in and then close the door as quickly as possible, because if the police see us it would be a complete disaster.

JM: How many people have died working in the tunnels?

AH: Many people have died ... every month there are more casualties in the tunnels from Israeli air strikes. We are dealing with fear like a nightmare, a nightmare that rains down on you 24 hours a day. Every day you are working in the tunnels, you are wondering if you will get out alive. Many times the sand has collapsed ... death is inevitable from this kind of work.

JM: Is the Egyptian government pressurizing you by building the steel wall?

AH: Of course, but our guys can find a solution. Nothing will prevent us ... this is our only source of life!

JM: How will the steel wall affect the tunnels?

AH: The Egyptians are digging underground in order to establish this steel wall. After digging, they pour sand, and then pour iron, making a structure 28 meters in length ... it's the same structures that the Israelis previously built in Gaza. It consists of layers, layer after layer, until it is fixed in the ground. However, the tunnels are not a new project, and many are still not affected, some old men have built cities under this ground.

The thing we are afraid of now is that the Egyptians will supply the iron with electricity, making a lethal electric fence, and add sensors to flood the land below, which would make our mission impossible. The Egyptians are more clever than the Americans and Israelis put together ... in order to satisfy them, they will destroy 50 kilometers of land to establish this "electric water pool!"

JM: Will it be easy to penetrate the steel wall?

AH: God willing, because the tunnels were dug by the hands of our ancestors, not us. If they could build these tunnels with their bare hands, then we will not be stopped be a steel wall, we will cut down the wall! Even if they put water, electricity, even if they put human beings down there to stop our tunnels, we will evade them! You know why? Because this is our only source of life left.

JM: Have the tunnels been beneficial for Egyptians?

AH: Very much so ... I went there with the owner of this tunnel, and the laborers from Egypt take home $1,000 dollars. Imagine a normal Egyptian makes 5-10 pounds ($1-2) a day from work, and the tunnel workers are making 550 pounds a day. To them it is unbelievable, the tunnels have made them rich. The factories, the shopkeepers ... they have all benefited from the tunnels.

There are 80 million Egyptians and we are only 1.5 million, but we have greatly influenced their economy because there is such a high rate of unemployment in Egypt, and each tunnel creates 30 to 50 new jobs.

JM: Would you ever leave this job for alternative employment?

AH: Now, frankly, no. Even if the wages dropped, the tunnel work is in our blood now. Even if there is no work we still go down into the tunnels. We get accustomed to this life.

JM: How do you see your future?

AH: I don't have a future. As it is, there is no future in Gaza. I go across the entire width of Gaza on my motorcycle in 20 minutes. How can you see a future from within a box of matches? I take my sons from the house to school and back ... they are so fed up. We will live and die with the same routine. There are some people who feel afraid of working in the tunnels, so they only have the walls of their home and their UNRWA [the UN agency for Palestine refugees] card to protect them. This is Gaza.

Building international solidarity during Israeli Apartheid Week

2010-03-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

Ilaria Giglioli, The Electronic Intifada, 1 March 2010

(Israeli Apartheid Week)
Ilaria Giglioli is an IAW organizer at the University of Toronto.

In March 2005, a group of activists from the Arab Student Collective at the University of Toronto launched the first Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). The aim of the week was two-fold. On one hand, it sought to break the wall of silence and misrepresentation around what was happening in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip at the time of the second Palestinian intifada. On the other hand, it aimed to situate direct military violence against Palestinians within the broader context of Israel's apartheid policies. Focusing on the broader system of Israeli apartheid allowed activists to link the construction of the Apartheid Wall in the occupied West Bank, settler violence and home demolitions to a broader system which systematically discriminated against the civil and political rights of Palestinian citizens in Israel, or 1948 Palestinians, and denied the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland.

Six years later, IAW is taking place in more than 40 cities in five continents, and is a key event in the yearly calendar of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, launched by more than 170 Palestinian civil society organizations on 9 July 2005. Outside its North American and European centers, IAW is also taking place in South Africa, Palestine, Lebanon and Australia. South African anti-apartheid activists have played a key role in the promotion of IAW, including former African National Congress member Ronnie Kasrils who opened IAW in London, New York and Toronto in 2009.

Situating the Palestinian struggle in the context of anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements has also allowed strong alliances to be forged at the local level. In Canada, for instance, IAW has worked to build solidarity with First Nations communities, and is endorsed by a broad base of progressive organizations. This focus is also reflected in the themes tackled during the week itself. In Toronto, for example, the 2010 IAW program includes a night focusing on the environmental costs of apartheid, another on queer solidarity activism in the anti-apartheid movement and one on "Fighting Racism, Fighting Apartheid." Overall, IAW has become an arena to promote a broad anti-colonial and anti-racist vision and to build solidarity between movements working towards this vision and resisting settler colonialism throughout the world.

Forming these types of alliances has been important to resist attempts to shut down IAW. These are not limited to harassment and verbal abuse by Zionist groups on campuses; over the years, organizers have faced ongoing institutional harassment, including last-minute cancellation of room bookings and the banning of Apartheid Week materials. In fall 2008, for instance, room bookings for an IAW organizing conference in Toronto were cancelled on short notice by the university under pressure of local Zionist groups. Similarly, in March 2009, the University of Pisa, Italy, denied university venues to IAW organizers. In the same year, the poster for the 5th International Israeli Apartheid Week was banned at Carleton University in Ottawa and Trent University in Peterborough.

IAW has also been the object of investigation by the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA), a highly contentious initiative that has been defined by the Canadian Independent Jewish Voices as an "attempt to attack free speech and silence criticism of the Israeli government's oppressive and illegal policies" and "to label criticism of Israel and its behavior, as well as organized efforts to change them, as anti-Semitic and to criminalize both."

Attempts at shutting down IAW on campuses are in line with growing efforts of the Israeli government to crush the BDS movement. To the present time, this crackdown has primarily targeted Palestinian grassroots activists within the occupied West Bank, including Mohammad Othman Jamal Juma' from the Stop the Wall Campaign, recently released from prison.

However, a recent report published by the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, and presented at the 10th Herzliya Conference in February 2010 identifies a global campaign of "delegitimization" of Israel -- which includes the BDS movement and IAW -- as one that "is effective, possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years." As such, it also underlines the need for Israel to engage in a substantial diplomatic counter-effort to sabotage the movement.

While this means that organizers will face increasing obstacles in the coming years, it also testifies to the growing strength of the BDS movement, which has reached fundamental targets in the last year, including the divestment of the Norwegian state pension fund from Israeli military contractor Elbit Systems in September 2009. On university campuses, the year 2009 marked the first campus-based divestment, as on 7 February the Board of Trustees at Hampshire College in the United States divested from six Israeli companies directly involved in human rights violations against Palestinians. Similar divestment campaigns have been launched on various university campuses, including Carleton University in Ottawa. Last year also saw the Canadian Union of Public Employees pass a motion in support of the boycott at its provincial meeting in Windsor.

It is in this context that the 6th International Israeli Apartheid Week is centered around "Solidarity in Action: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions," celebrating the achievements of the past five years and preparing the next ones. A diverse program of events -- lectures, demonstrations, film screenings and other cultural activities -- will take place throughout the world between 1-14 March 2010.

Ali Abunimah: Campus BDS Conference keynote speaker

2010-02-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse delivers the keynote address at the 2009 Campus BDS Conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

Canada's neoconservative turn

2010-02-26T09:38:00.001-08:00

Yves Engler, The Electronic Intifada, 26 February 2010

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs Lawrence Cannon (right) meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in March 2009. (AFP)
"An attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada."
- Peter Kent, Junior Foreign minister, 12 February 2010

In my new book Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid I argue that the trajectory of this country's foreign policy has been clear. The culmination of six decades of one-sided support, and four years into the government of Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper: Canada is (at least diplomatically) the most pro-Israel country in the world.

Since the book went to print a couple of months ago the Conservatives have launched a more extreme phase of Israel advocacy. Groups in any way associated with the Palestinian cause have been openly attacked and Ottawa has taken a more belligerent tone towards Iran.

In the beginning of February, Ottawa delighted Israeli hawks by canceling $15 million in funding for the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). The money has been reallocated to Palestinian Authority judicial and security reforms in the West Bank. At the same time, Canada doubled the number of troops involved in US Lt. General Keith Dayton's mission to train a Palestinian force to strengthen Fatah against Hamas and to serve as an arm of Israel's occupation.

Only a few weeks earlier, Israel apologists sang Harper's praise when his government chopped $7 million from Kairos, a Christian aid organization that had received government money for 35 years. During a visit to Israel, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said Canada had "defunded organizations, most recently like Kairos, who are taking a leadership role" in campaigns to boycott Israel. Palestinian advocacy was also the reason Ottawa failed to renew its funding for Montreal-based Alternatives, an international solidarity organization, which received most of its budget from the federal government.

The Conservatives chose a different tactic with the arm's-length government agency Rights and Democracy. Instead of cutting its budget, they stacked the board with hard-line supporters of Israel. Last week, Maclean magazine reported that "The Rights and Democracy board is now predominantly composed of people who have devoted much of their life to an unequivocal position: that no legal challenge to Israel's human rights record is permissible, because any such challenge is part of a global harassment campaign against Israel's right to exist."

The new "Israel no matter what" board members hounded the organization's president, Remy Beauregard, until he died of a heart attack after a "vitriolic" meeting a month ago. Once in charge, the new board voted to "repudiate" three $10,000 grants given to Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups (B'Tselem, Al-Haq and Al Mezan). On Wednesday, the Toronto Star reported that the "Conservative-appointed [Rights and Democracy] board secretly decided to close the agency's Geneva office, distancing itself from a United Nations body it viewed as anti-Israeli."

Internationally, Harper has used his pulpit as host of this year's G8 to pave the way for a possible US-Israeli attack on Iran. "Canada will use its G8 presidency to continue to focus international attention and action on the Iranian regime," explained the prime minister on 9 February.

While Ottawa considers Iran's nuclear energy program a major threat, Israel's atomic bombs have not provoked similar condemnation. The Harper government has repeatedly abstained on votes asking Israel to place its nuclear weapons program under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) controls.

A week ago Ottawa criticized China, a key trading partner of Iran, for refusing to follow Western dictates regarding the Islamic Republic. "I think China should step up to the plate and do something here," Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said.

While they are silent on the appalling record of the pro-West monarchy in Saudi Arabia and the dictatorship in Egypt, Canadian officials regularly berate Iran. "This regime continues to blatantly ignore its international obligations, and this threatens global security," Cannon said last week.

At times Canadian words have been even more menacing. A 17 February Toronto Star article was headlined: "Military action against Iran still on the table, Kent says." Peter Kent, the junior foreign minister, explained that "It may soon be time to intensify the sanctions and to broaden those sanctions into other areas." He added: "I think the realization [is] that it's a dangerous situation that has been there for some time. It's a matter of timing and it's a matter of how long we can wait without taking more serious preemptive action."

"Preemptive action" is likely a euphemism for a bombing campaign. Canadian naval vessels are already running provocative maneuvers off Iran's coast and by stating that "an attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada," Kent is trying to create the impression that Iran may attack Israel. But isn't it Israel that possesses nuclear weapons and threatens to bomb Iran, not the other way around? Of course that would be a reality-based analysis, not something George W. Bush's Canadian clones favor.

THE FIVE COCKRINGS DIED

2010-02-24T10:26:00.000-08:00

Olympic Tent Village in DTES

2010-02-18T09:10:00.000-08:00

Residents of a neighbourhood in Vancouver that is often referred as the countrys poorest postal code set up a tent encampment in a vacant Downtown Eastside lot to advocate for housing and to shelter the neighbourhoods homeless population.

Weekend Roundup of Olympic Resistance

2010-02-17T08:14:00.000-08:00

A historic mobilization in Vancouver against the 2010 Winter Olympics has pushed back hard against the International Olympic Committee and the six billion dollar sporting event. People of all political persuasions joined together to reject the Olympic industry, holding conferences, marches, and carrying out direct action aimed at undermining the image of the Olympics - an image which critics say obscures the negative social and environmental impacts the Games bring with them. The primary slogan of the resistance movement is "no Olympics on Stolen Native Land," referring to the immoral and illegal occupation of indigenous lands by settlers.

Indn Arts'n Action - Make it Real.

2010-02-04T15:54:00.000-08:00

Five Ring Circus;
The Olympics portraying a false image of indigenous reality.
Interurban Gallery - 1 East Hastin
Conversation exploring false images in promotion and culture, with a particular focus on the Olympics and the realities facing indigenous peoples.

Fisk lashes out at West in Middle East

2010-01-31T14:51:00.000-08:00

RT's Peter Lavelle spoke to Robert Fisk in Lebanon, who's one of the most renowned journalists and authors on the subject.

SAIA Carleton Divestment Campaign

2010-01-31T14:28:00.000-08:00

"It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians
at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.
Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through." --- Desmond Tutu

SAIA demands that Carleton University immediately divest its stock in BAE Systems, L-3 Communications, Motorola, Northrop Grumman, and Tesco, and adopt a Socially Responsible Investment policy.

". . . the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, against Israel presents not only a progressive, anti-racist, sophisticated, sustainable, moral and effective form of civil, non-violent resistance, but a real chance of becoming the political catalyst and moral anchor for a strengthened, reinvigorated international social movement capable of reaffirming the rights of all humans to freedom, equality and dignity and the right of nations to self-determination." --- Omar Barghouti

The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 2

2010-01-29T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 1

2010-01-29T16:01:00.000-08:00

My family's ongoing Nakba story

2010-01-27T10:44:00.000-08:00

Mohammad Alsaafin writing from Doha, Qatar, Live from Palestine, 26 January 2010

Israel restricts the freedom of movement of Palestinians through the imposition of an ID system. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills.org)

One of the most traumatic effects wrought upon Palestinian society by the 1948 Nakba, or the dispossession of historic Palestine, is the physical separation it forced upon Palestinians, between those in the diaspora and the refugees, between those living in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and those who became citizens of Israel. Yet this process is ongoing to this very day, and targets even individual families, like mine. This is our story.

My dad was born in the Gaza Strip in 1962, the son of refugees, and left to the United Kingdom along with his wife and first son (myself) in 1990 to pursue his PhD at the University of Bradford. By 2004, I had a brother and two sisters, and our entire family moved back to Palestine, this time to the town of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. My father was working as a foreign journalist licensed by the Israeli Government Press Office and we were living in our country on yearly renewable Israeli work visas.

In 2005, I was turned back by Israeli border agents at the Sheikh Hussein Bridge as I attempted to cross into Jordan to visit my aunt. The agents told me that since I was born in the Gaza Strip in 1988 I had been issued a Gaza ID by the Israeli occupation authority and was therefore not allowed to legally reside in the West Bank. Additionally, I was informed that from then on, Israel would not recognize my British passport. I was able to return to Ramallah that day, but for the next four years I risked daily arrest by Israeli troops on the way to Birzeit University, where I was studying, and for a year after that while I was working in Ramallah. This summer, I left the West Bank to find work abroad, and was told by the Israelis that I would not be allowed to return home.

Despite this reprehensible situation, the rest of the family was thankfully spared such hardship. My dad continued working relatively unhindered as he moved across what is now Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza, and my mother and siblings enjoyed freedom of movement across the West Bank and inside Israel. This all changed very suddenly last August when, on a routine trip to Gaza where my dad had several assignments and where he wanted to visit his ailing father, he was detained by Israeli security at the Erez checkpoint, and was harassed, stripped of his press credentials and told -- as I was four years earlier -- that his British passport was worthless in Israel. He was also informed that he too had an Israeli-issued Gaza ID and thus would be treated as a Gazan, deprived of the most basic freedom of choice and movement and barred from ever returning to his wife and children in Ramallah. He was sent into Gaza, where he appealed to Israeli rights organizations, and as a British citizen to the British consulate and to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, now the Quartet's Middle East envoy, for the right to leave Gaza and see his wife and children, if only for a day. The Israeli organizations were unable to help, the consulate was unable to circumvent a wall of Israeli bureaucracy, and Tony Blair chose to ignore our letter calling for assistance. In order to save his job, my dad had to give up hope of being allowed back into the West Bank, and left Gaza through Egypt in December.

At the time that my dad was stripped of his press credentials and work visa, my mother and siblings back in Ramallah were forced to accept their own Israeli-issued ID cards. Incredibly, my mother was given a Gaza ID despite being born abroad, raised in the West Bank and still owning a copy of her original West Bank ID! She now lives in constant fear of arrest and deportation by Israeli troops; if she were to leave the West Bank she would also be banned from returning to our family and home in Ramallah.

Meanwhile my brother and sister, who were both born in the UK and are now university students, have bizarrely been issued with West Bank ID cards, even though their parents and older brother were given Gaza IDs.

As a result of all of this, our family has been torn apart. My father is finally out of Gaza, but he is unable to see his children unless they travel abroad to meet him. My mother is in the West Bank, afraid to even leave Ramallah and risk being detained and deported at an Israeli army checkpoint. She is unable to leave the West Bank while my father and I are unable to enter. We don't know how long it will be before we can see each other again -- the Israeli authorities have said that they will not change my mother's ID.

Israel has treated my family like criminals for being Palestinians. We have been punished, displaced and deprived from each other's company. Our extended family was torn from its land in 1948 and expelled to refugee camps. In the 1990s, Israel's policy of closure solidified our separation, particularly from my father's side in Gaza. Now Israel's racist and draconian demographic policies have separated my parents, my siblings and myself, just like they separate Jerusalemites who wish to marry other Palestinians from the West Bank, or Palestinian citizens of Israel who are legally barred from marrying Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.

This is one of the many faces of the ongoing Nakba today, and I urge more individuals and families who have suffered like this to speak out. The world must realize the true nature of Israeli apartheid, and the cruel separation of families is one more reason why Israel must be boycotted.

Mohammad Alsaafin is from the Palestinian village of Fallujah, ethnically cleansed by Israeli forces in 1949. He was born in the Khan Younis refugee camp and lived in the UK and US, before moving back to Palestine to study at Birzeit University.

"Jerusalem is in danger"

2010-01-22T16:44:00.000-08:00

Nimer Sultany, The Electronic Intifada, 21 January 2010

Israeli authorities have attempted to silence Sheikh Raed Salah (center) through physical violence, movement restrictions and jail time. (Meged Gozani/Activestills.org)

Once again, Israel resorts to show trials. Sheikh Raed Salah, a prominent political and religious leader of the Palestinian minority, was sentenced on 13 January by an Israeli court to nine months of imprisonment. This is his second conviction in recent years. This time the allegation was that he assaulted a policeman and obstructed police work during a demonstration at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

The legal jargon notwithstanding, the persecution of Salah is part and parcel of two processes already underway -- the crackdown on Arab leaders and political activists inside Israel and the Israeli campaign for creating facts on the ground in Jerusalem to entrench the illegal occupation.

Indeed, in recent years Israel has been intensifying its Judaization of Jerusalem by building new Jewish neighborhoods, evicting Arab families from their homes, house demolitions, refusing to grant building permits to Palestinian Jerusalemites to force them to leave, stripping them of their residence status under dubious excuses, isolating Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and restricting the numbers and ages of Palestinians allowed to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque.

The attempt to change the geography and demography of Jerusalem has been a relentless Israeli project since the occupation of the city in 1967 and its subsequent de jure annexation. While this "legal" annexation has been rejected by the international community as a violation of international law, action has been limited to verbal protests and condemnation.

This project shows that Israel is making genuine efforts to undermine peace prospects by complicating the core issues. By unilaterally precluding certain options and transforming Palestinian legitimate aspirations into unrealistic fantasies these policies render any negotiations futile and add to the absurdity of the defunct "peace process." The gravity of these policies is only magnified when one takes into account the expansive Israeli territorial understanding of "Jerusalem."

The connection between the sheikh and the city is well-known. Salah, who has been prevented by Israeli orders from entering Jerusalem in recent months and has been prevented by other orders from leaving the country, has actively challenged these Israeli policies. When Israel restricted West Bankers from visiting al-Aqsa, Salah brought thousands of Palestinian citizens to pray in the mosque and visit Jerusalem. When Israel performed excavations in the al-Aqsa surroundings, Salah and his followers were the first to protest. When Israeli extremists announced their plans for the destruction of al-Aqsa mosque, Salah held rallies to raise awareness. When Israel tried to separate the Palestinian citizens from their brethren in the occupied territories, Salah and his movement organized aid to the latter. In short, Salah turned al-Aqsa into a rallying cry to defend the Arab and Islamic identity of Jerusalem and Palestine -- an identity that Israel is denying and trying to erase.

Salah has also a vision for the empowerment of the Palestinian citizens, calling them the "self-sufficient society." Salah, who was the mayor of one of the largest Arab communities inside Israel, reached the conclusion that there is a need to build civil society institutions to proffer the social services that the state has failed to provide. This need arises given the collective, systematic and long-standing discrimination against the Palestinian minority.

Given this backdrop, and given Salah's vocal opposition to the Israeli practices in the occupied territories, it is no wonder that Israel is trying to criminalize his political activity, silence him, restrict his movement and deter his community. The transformation of ideological struggles into legal proceedings in court rooms is an old trick. It is an attempt to avoid political contestation and public dialogue on Israeli taboos. It is an attempt to stigmatize the opponents of the regime as outlaws.

It is hard to conceal the political nature of Salah's trial, however. Salah, the head of the extra-parliamentary Islamic movement, has been identified by the security apparatus as a threat to the ideology of the state and was the target of several physical assaults by policemen, and was even shot in October 2000. Some of his movement's nongovernmental organizations were closed by military orders and their newspaper was subject to temporary closure orders. And he has been repeatedly demonized in the Israeli media for more than a decade.

Thus, it is hard to believe that in the Israeli judicial system, which disproportionately convicts more Arabs than Jews, an average judge would look impartially at this pious, yet politically active, Muslim. Indeed, the judge could not help himself but express in the ruling his dislike of Salah's facial expressions during the trial. Salah, then, was supposed to respect the mockery of justice masquerading as law.

This is by no means the only irony at work. Facing a group of "witnesses" from the police force, Salah's testimony had no chance. While Salah is going to prison, Israeli policemen who killed 13 Arab demonstrators in October 2000 remain at large. In show trials like these, in which the legal outcome is predictable, the legal system becomes no more than a tool at the hands of the establishment to advance its ideological goals.

Israel hopes that its silencing of a prominent voice of protest will advance its goals towards the colonization of Palestine in general and the Judaization of Jerusalem in particular. However, the intensification of oppression invites an intensification of protest. Thus, Israel's moves will bring peace neither inside nor outside its 1967 borders.

As the Israeli crackdown on Palestinian activists increases, it becomes necessary for all those who care about freedom, equality and justice to voice their protest as well. Indeed, as Salah would say, "Jerusalem is in danger."

"Humanity cannot be divided": Gaza shows solidarity with Haiti

2010-01-21T11:42:00.000-08:00

Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 20 January 2010

The relatives of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails gather symbolic donations in solidarity with earthquake-stricken Haiti, 18 January 2010. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

"We have been living a man-made disaster actually for the past 62 years," said Palestinian parliamentarian Jamal al-Khudari, a chairman of the Gaza-based Committee to Break the Siege. "We would like to send out a message of solidarity to the people of Haiti, who are now facing a natural disaster. Despite the harsh conditions Gaza people live under here -- the Israeli blockade and military actions -- people here sent symbolic assistance to their brothers and sisters in Haiti."

The committee collected a a symbolic amount of food and some cash donations for earthquake-stricken Haiti, where tens of thousands have been killed and countless others were injured and displaced.

Here in Gaza, the Israeli occupation's measures -- including the blockade that has been imposed for more than two and a half years now -- have had their own devastating impact.

"As a humanitarian worker here, I can say that it has been really amazing to see that some needy people including women and children wanting to deliver food, toys, clothes and cash to disaster-affected people in Haiti. The scene in front of the office for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza was really amazing," Gaza City resident Hussam al-Madhoun told The Electronic Intifada.

However, for some in Gaza, the lack of attention paid by the "international community" to their plight leaves a bitter taste.

Fatima al-Helou, a mother of three children, expressed her full solidarity for those currently suffering in the impoverished island but added, "I think that the world that is now supporting the Haiti region, should also help Gazans get rid of a three-year-old Israeli siege on Gaza. Humanity cannot be divided. I definitely sympathize with those currently suffering in Haiti, but I also call upon the international community to help me, for I am suffering as well."

Since June 2007, Israel has enforced a nearly hermetic closure of Gaza's border crossings, preventing the free movement of both people and goods, only opening the border intermittently. According to international aid agencies, Israel has allowed only 42 trucks of raw building materials into the coastal enclave during 2009, despite that several thousand homes, governmental buildings, schools and mosques were destroyed during Israel's attack on Gaza last winter. More than 1,400 were killed and thousands more were injured during the three-week-long attack.

Israel's siege has had a devastating impact on Gaza's economy. Ninety-five percent of local industries in the region have been forced to shut down, the unemployment rate has risen to more than 60 percent, while more than 80 percent of Gaza's 1.5 residents are dependent on food aid.

Despite Gaza's own dire situation, there are those anxious to show their solidarity and empathy with Haiti.

Yaser al-Yazji, a lawyer with the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, said, "We hope to collect [donations] as best as we can to help the people of Haiti. We do feel sad for the people of Haiti as they have been killed or displaced, the way we are being affected by the Israeli occupation. As earthquakes kill or displace thousands of people, the Israeli occupation does the same to us."

I am Israel

2010-01-19T17:06:00.000-08:00

The United States, Israel and the retreat of freedom

2010-01-15T14:35:00.000-08:00

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 14 January 2010

Epitomizing freedom: an Israeli soldier aims a gas grenade launcher at a Palestinian demonstrator in the occupied West Bank. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

The world is suffering from a "freedom recession" according to a new report from the American think tank Freedom House ("Freedom in the World 2010," 12 January 2010).

Established in 1941, Freedom House markets itself as "an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights." Its board of directors, chaired by a former US deputy secretary of defense, is a who's who of Democratic and Republican former US government officials, prominent neoconservatives and Israel lobby stalwarts such as Tom Dine, former executive director of AIPAC. In 2007, more than two-thirds of its $16 million budget came directly from the United States government.

Not surprisingly then, Freedom House's report reveals more about the groupthink of the US establishment -- especially with respect to its continued efforts to dominate the Middle East and ensure Israel's supremacy -- than it does about the countries surveyed.

Focusing on two categories of "freedom" -- "civil liberties" and "political rights" -- the report divides the world's 194 countries into three groups: "free" (89), "partly free" (58), and "not free" (47).

Interestingly, Freedom House records "declines in freedom" in "countries that had registered positive trends in previous years, including Bahrain, Jordan, Kenya and Kyrgyzstan." Jordan was one of only six countries to move from the "partly free" category to "not free." What does it say about US "democracy promotion" that Jordan, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan -- major political and military operating bases for the "war on terror" and US-led occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- have become less free as their dependence on the US has increased?

Sadly, while the report frets that "the most powerful authoritarian regimes [such as Russia and China] have become more repressive, more influential in the international arena, and more uncompromising," it has nothing at all to say about the US role in restricting freedom and spreading mayhem around the world. Sometimes this is truly absurd as the report points to "continued terrorist and insurgent violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen," but fails to note that two of these countries are under direct US military occupation (Afghanistan and Iraq) while the US is intervening militarily in the other three. (The report presents a mixed picture for the US-occupied countries; both are "Not Free" but Iraq allegedly became more free during 2009 and Afghanistan less free.)

Rather than offer any introspection on the inverse relationship between US efforts at global domination on the one hand, and the spread of freedom on the other, the report's overview essay concludes with a call for more vigorous intervention: "The United States and other democracies should take the initiative to meet the authoritarian challenge ..."

Freedom House's approach to Israel provides the starkest example of the abyss into which liberal thinking has fallen on the relationship between colonialism and freedom. Israel, we are told, "remains the only country in the [Middle East] region to hold a Freedom in the World designation of Free." We are informed euphemistically that "The beginning of the year [2009] was marred by fierce fighting between the Israeli military and the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip."

There is no mention of the deliberate targeting by Israel of Gaza's civilian infrastructure and the resulting massive destruction, and death and injury to thousands of Palestinian civilians. Nothing is said of the denial of fundamental political, civil and human rights, or freedom of movement, association and education to four million Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation and siege in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There is no mention of the systematic discrimination, and social and political exclusion faced by 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, nor of the denial of the right of return of millions of Palestinian refugees.

There is an acknowledgment that "Hundreds of people were arrested during demonstrations against the Gaza conflict, and the parliamentary elections committee passed a measure banning two political parties from national elections, though the ban was quickly overturned by the Supreme Court."

Despite this, on the tables accompanying the report, "Israel" receives the highest score of "1" for political rights, and a very respectable "2" for civil liberties -- on a par with Italy and Japan. The overall impression is of minor glitches that could occur in any exemplary "Western" democracy.

Then on a separate table of "Disputed Territories" we find "Israeli-occupied territories" and "Palestinian Authority-administered territories" both listed. Both are given the designation "Not Free" and nearly the lowest scores for political rights and civil liberties. There is no narrative to explain who is responsible for this dire state of affairs. This convenient separation allows for all the ugly realities of what "free" Israel does in the occupied territories to be pushed out of sight and ignored.

But in what scheme can Israel be awarded freest of the free status when for two-thirds of its existence, since 1967, it has ruled directly over millions of disenfranchised Palestinians through violence and repression? The idea that the political regime in Israel's pre-1967 boundaries can be looked at as a "democracy" even while the situation in the occupied territories can be criticized as undemocratic is very widespread among Israelis and American liberals.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has been excoriated (and recently forced to apologize) by the Israel lobby for calling the situation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip "apartheid." Yet even he had simultaneously claimed that within its pre-1967 boundaries, "Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew." True, Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote and are accorded civil rights far wider than their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But even Israeli Jews commonly concede that Palestinian citizens suffer systematic and severe disadvantage and total exclusion from key political decisions about the country.

Israeli Jewish leftists (a rapidly dwindling group) and Western liberal sympathizers tend to view Israel within its 1967 boundaries as a flawed democracy -- perfectible with a reallocation of resources and less discrimination against non-Jews, even as they remain fully invested in maintaining Israel as a "Jewish state" with a Jewish demographic majority.

They view the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the original sin that corrupted a purer Zionist vision, and thus remain fixated on the chimera of "ending the occupation" through a "two-state solution." Once this nirvana is reached, so they believe, Israel can resume its destiny as a liberal democratic state among others.

But it is not just the discrimination and limited rights of Palestinian citizens and other non-Jews that undermine the claim that Israel -- considered separately from the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- is a democracy. Nor is it even that Israeli settler-citizens in the West Bank have full voting rights for the Israeli parliament while Palestinians in the same territory have none. It is that "Israel" and the "occupied territories" are two sides of the same coin.

Israel's 1948 and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and ongoing repressive rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are not exceptional or temporary conditions. They are constitutive of the situation that allows Israeli Jews to currently claim they live in a (flawed) liberal democracy.

To be clear, the argument is not that conditions in Israel and the occupied territories are indistinguishable; rather it is that they form a single interdependent system. Israeli Jews can "freely" elect a Jewish government in Israel only because most Palestinians have already been ethnically cleansed. Thus the maintenance of this "liberal democratic" Jewish space depends directly on the permanent denial of fundamental rights to Palestinians.

Palestinian citizens of Israel -- who form 20 percent of the population within Israel's pre-1967 boundaries -- are, as noted, accorded limited liberal rights. This helps boost Israel's external image as a "wonderful democracy," but if the exercise of these rights ever threatens Jewish domination, they are curtailed. Examples include the constant legal harassment of Palestinian members of the Knesset, and various legislative projects for loyalty oaths or to ban commemoration of the Nakba, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians. Overwhelming Israeli Jewish opposition to calls by Palestinians in Israel for the country to be a "state of all its citizens" is an indication that Israeli Jews value their own supremacy over democracy.

Israel has sometimes been described as an "ethnocracy" -- a state where one ethnic group dominates and enjoys a wide range of liberal rights which are denied to others. But these liberal rights depend directly on the successful repression of the non-privileged ethnic group(s). As rebellions by the disenfranchised require ever greater levels of repression and violence to control, the repression must also be turned inwards.

In recent days, Israel extended for six months a ban on Sheikh Raed Salah, an Israeli citizen, and leader of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, from traveling to Jerusalem, Israel's ostensible capital, where he had been exercising his civil rights to campaign against Israeli efforts to "Judaize" the city. (Separately Salah was also sentenced to nine months in prison for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a 2007 demonstration; a conviction condemned as political persecution by other Palestinian leaders inside Israel.)

Such repression does not only affect non-Jews. The United Nations-commissioned Goldstone report noted "that actions of the Israeli government" within Israel, during and after Israel's invasion of Gaza last winter, "including interrogation of political activists, repression of criticism and sources of potential criticism of Israeli military actions, in particular nongovernmental organizations, have contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent with the government and its actions in the Occupied Territories is not tolerated."

These means of "internal" repression resemble the movement bans, censorship and other forms of harassment that the South African apartheid regime began to deploy in its late stages against dissenting whites, eroding the "liberal democratic" space they had for so long enjoyed at the expense of the country's black majority.

Maintaining a Jewish-controlled "liberal democratic" regime in Palestine/Israel is incompatible with the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians. It emphatically depends on their permanent violation, especially the right of return. But the exercise of the inalienable rights of Palestinians -- an end to discrimination against Palestinian citizens, dismantling the 1967 occupation regime, and the right of return for refugees -- is fully compatible with Israeli Jews exercising the human, civil, political and cultural rights to which they are unquestionably entitled.

As a first step toward imagining and creating such a framework, we have to ditch the absurd idea reproduced by Freedom House, that Israeli Jews can epitomize perfect freedom while imposing perfect tyranny and dispossession on a greater number of human beings who belong to the same country.

ALL OUT AGAINST THE 2010 WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES!

2010-01-11T17:51:00.000-08:00

ALL OUT AGAINST THE 2010 WINTER OLYMPIC GAMES! The 2010 Winter Olympics will take place in Vancouver & Whistler, on unceded Indigenous land, from February 12-28 2010. We call on all anti-capitalist, Indigenous, housing rights, labour, migrant justice, environmental, anti-war, community-loving, anti-poverty, civil libertarian, and anti colonial activists to come together to confront this two-week circus and the oppression it represents. We are organizing towards a global anti-capitalist and anti-colonial convergence against the 2010 Olympic Games. * BASIC SCHEDULE: The basic plan thus far is: - Conference and People’s Summit on Wed Feb 10- Thurs Feb 11 - Fri Feb 12: Take Back Our City! “Welcome” the 2010 Olympic Torch with Free Games, Free Speech, and Free Food! Beginning with a festival at the Vancouver Art Gallery at 3 pm, followed by a parade and protest to BC Place Stadium. Details, including childcare arrangements, at: http://2010welcoming.wordpress.com/
- Autonomous days of action on Sat Feb 13 and Mon Feb 15 including
anti-corporate actions, rallies to oppose militarization, and more.
- On Sun Feb 14th, we will be standing with the 19th Annual Women’s
Memorial March to honour all the missing and murdered and women in the
DTES (this is not an anti-Olympic protest). Details at:
http://womensmemorialmarch.wordpress.com/
We will also be updating our website with additional anti-Olympic events
occurring during the month of February:
http://olympicresistance.net
or
http://no2010.com

Brother Ali - Uncle Sam Goddamn

2010-01-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

La Rage - Keny Arkana

2010-01-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

La Rage (The Rage) by French female rap artist Keny Arkana. Released in 2006, La Rage refers to global politics and the 2005 riots in the banlieues (ghettos) of Paris which spread to other cities in France:
Keny Arkana is part of La Rage Du Peuple (The Rage of the People), a music collective formed in 2004 in Marseille, activists in the alter-globalization movement.

Gaza and the path to accountability

2010-01-06T09:59:00.000-08:00

Sunera Thobani, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2010
Sunera Thobani teaches Women's Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (University of Toronto Press: 2007). She traveled to Gaza in September 2009 with the Rachel Corrie Foundation Delegation.

(Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

By protecting Israel from accountability for its war crimes in Gaza, the US, UK and Canadian governments are also ensuring their own impunity.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs David Milliband acted swiftly to withdraw the warrant for the arrest of former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, one of the architects of last winter's Israeli attack on Gaza. A British magistrate issued the warrant under universal jurisdiction laws in response to allegations of war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza. This prompted Brown to phone Livni and assure her she was "welcome" in Britain, and Milliband stated his government's intention to remove the power of UK magistrates to issue any such future warrants against Israeli politicians.

As foreign minister, Livni used the Israeli-dubbed "Operation Cast Lead" to brand herself as an astute politician who would ride to power on the bodies of dead Palestinians. She became a media darling in the West, and the Gaza attack was to be the ticket to her rise to prime minister. However, although the attack killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and wounded thousands more, Livni's political ambitions did not materialize quite as planned. Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman out-hawked her, and the Palestinians are still paying the price for the invasion. Gaza remains under a murderous siege, enforced by the Israelis and backed by its Western allies and Egypt.

A number of reasons have been put forward for the British government's eagerness to protect Israeli politicians from the threat of arrest. These include Britain's staunch support for the State of Israel since its inception; the organizational strength of Zionist lobbies, and in particular, their ability to impact the outcome of electoral politics; and lastly, the desire to avoid being branded anti-Semitic. While these are certainly important considerations, there is yet another pressing concern that has received little attention. This is a concern shared by the Americans and Canadians, and it speaks directly to the specificity of this particular moment in the so-called War on Terror. Indeed, this concern may well eclipse all other considerations for the moment.

The US, UK and Canadian governments are all embroiled in attempts to immunize themselves from accountability under international law for their own actions in the War on Terror. Protecting Israel from international law has therefore acquired an added urgency, not only in the interests of the Zionist regime, but also in the interests of the US and its two staunchest allies in the War on Terror, Britain and Canada, to remain beyond the reach of international law. In other words, if Israeli politicians can successfully be taken to court under international law for committing war crimes, the precedent would greatly embolden attempts to do likewise with American, British and Canadian politicians in relation to their actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In September 2009, the UN-mandated Goldstone report on Israel's invasion was released. Placing the treatment of civilian populations at the heart of the investigation, Judge Richard Goldstone, who was the Prosecutor for the International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, found Israel's attack on Gaza (as well as specific actions by Palestinian groups, including Hamas) to amount to war crimes. The Israelis refused to cooperate with the Goldstone mission, unlike the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas. Public hearings were held in Gaza. The Goldstone report called for credible independent internal investigations of Israel's actions in Gaza which included: the deliberate bombing of civilian sites (including the Palestinian Legislative Council building, a Gaza prison, two hospitals, shelters and houses); the killing of civilian police forces; the use of mortars to hit "armed" Palestinian groups in the vicinity of large numbers of civilians; the destruction of food production factories, of water and sewage treatment facilities; and the direct killing of civilians. All were deemed violations of international law. In the absence of such independent investigations, the report called for the matter to proceed to the International Criminal Court.

In light of Israel's refusal to cooperate with its mission, the Goldstone report unequivocally stated its "support for reliance on universal jurisdiction" as an avenue for further investigation and action on "grave breaches" of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and to "prevent immunity and promote international accountability." Israel rejected the report's findings, accusing Judge Goldstone -- a Zionist and strong supporter of Israel -- of anti-Israel bias. Other supporters of the report were likewise attacked as being anti-Semitic. The US ambassador to the UN, Dr. Susan Rice, admonished the report's authors, and the US House of Representatives voted 344 to 36 to call on the Obama Administration to reject it. The Obama Administration has maintained this position and also exerted immense pressure on the Palestinian Authority to withdraw the report from consideration at the General Assembly of the UN. Neither the UK nor Canada supported the Goldstone report.

Many of the acts identified in the Goldstone report as constituting violations of international law are reported to have taken place in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The disproportionate killing of civilians in both countries is being tracked by human rights organizations; civilian sites are regularly reported to have been bombed, and targeted assassinations of "terrorists" are also reported to routinely kill family members of these alleged "terrorists," as well as other bystanders. Collective punishment also seems to be meted out regularly, and the civilian infrastructure has been demolished in many places. There is also the question of the torture of detainees captured, held or transferred by US, British and Canadian forces. Indeed, some legal scholars have questioned the very legality of both the Afghan and Iraq "wars" and occupations.

As the Guardian reported on 26 November 2009, the UK's Chilcot Inquiry recently heard that the government of former Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to participate in the American invasion of Iraq a year before it actually took place. Any concern about Saddam Hussein's alleged amassing of weapons of mass destruction and his ties to al-Qaeda were nothing more than a red herring, and in any event, proved to be the result of falsified intelligence reports. Moreover, on 14 November, the Telegraph reported that British soldiers -- men and women -- have been dogged since 2003 with allegations of torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in their custody. Noting that 33 allegations of torture, rape and sexual abuse have surfaced about particular incidents, the Telegraph stated that "a pre-action protocol letter has been served on the [Ministry of Defense]" by a lawyer representing Iraqis subjected to this abuse. It also cited British Armed Forces Minister Bill Rammell calling for "formal investigations" into the matter.

Meanwhile, Canadians are mired in their own allegations of complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Senior diplomat Richard Colvin testified to a parliamentary committee that many of the Afghan detainees captured by Canadian soldiers were innocent civilians who were most likely abused or tortured by the Afghan authorities to whose custody they were delivered. He has further testified that despite his warnings to the Canadian government about this likelihood, no action was taken by the government to avert this possibility. Malalai Joya, the Afghan Member of Parliament who fled the country after being suspended from that body, has substantiated Colvin's claims. She has also added that many of those tortured and raped were women and children. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on 26 November that Defense Minister Peter McKay and former Chief of Defense Staff General Rick Hillier both denied Colvin's allegations. However, if Colvin's claims are vindicated, it could well be the case that the Canadian government was complicit in the torture and abuse of these detainees under the rules of international law.

If Israel can now be hauled before the International Criminal Court, who might it be next? If Israeli politicians can be arrested by warrants issued under universal jurisdiction, why not officials from the US, Britain and Canada as well? Who knows how quickly and how far things could unravel? If one occupying power could be held liable for war crimes, why not the other occupying powers who may have also engaged in collective punishment, in the destruction of civilian infrastructure, in the torture and killing of civilians? Where might it all end?

In seeking to protect Israel from the Goldstone report and Israeli politicians from the threat of arrest in the UK, the British, American and Canadian governments might well be engaged in a battle to save their own skins in the face of an emboldened legal activism. Gaza may well be the gateway to anti-imperialist accountability in the 21st century.

Israel resembles a failed state

2010-01-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2009

(Nidal El-Khairy)

One year has passed since the savage Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but for the people there time might as well have stood still.

Since Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones -- more than 1,400 persons, almost 400 of them children -- there has been little healing and virtually no reconstruction.

According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed into Gaza during the year.

Promises of billions made at a donors' conference in Egypt last March attended by luminaries of the so-called "international community" and the Middle East peace process industry are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege, supported by the US, the European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, continues.

Amid the endless, horrifying statistics a few stand out: of Gaza's 640 schools, 18 were completely destroyed and 280 damaged in Israeli attacks. Two-hundred-and-fifty students and 15 teachers were killed.

Of 122 health facilities assessed by the World Health Organization, 48 percent were damaged or destroyed.

Ninety percent of households in Gaza still experience power cuts for four to eight hours per day due to Israeli attacks on the power grid and degradation caused by the blockade.

Forty-six percent of Gaza's once productive agricultural land is out of use due to Israeli damage to farms and Israeli-declared free fire zones. Gaza's exports of more than 130,000 tons per year of tomatoes, flowers, strawberries and other fruit have fallen to zero.

That "much of Gaza still lies in ruins," a coalition of international aid agencies stated recently, "is not an accident; it is a matter of policy."

This policy has been clear all along and it has nothing to do with Israeli "security."

From 19 June 2008, to 4 November 2008, calm prevailed between Israel and Gaza, as Hamas adhered strictly -- as even Israel has acknowledged -- to a negotiated ceasefire.

That ceasefire collapsed when Israel launched a surprise attack on Gaza killing six persons, after which Hamas and other resistance factions retaliated.

Even so, Palestinian factions were still willing to renew the ceasefire, but it was Israel that refused, choosing instead to launch a premeditated, systematic attack on the foundations of civilized life in the Gaza Strip.

Operation Cast Lead, as Israel dubbed it, was an attempt to destroy once and for all Palestinian resistance in general, and Hamas in particular, which had won the 2006 election and survived the blockade and numerous US-sponsored attempts to undermine and overthrow it in cooperation with US-backed Palestinian militias.

Like the murderous sanctions on Iraq throughout the 1990s, the blockade of Gaza was calculated to deprive civilians of basic necessities, rights and dignity in the hope that their suffering might force their leadership to surrender or collapse.

In many respects things may seem more dire than a year ago.

Barack Obama, the US president, whom many hoped would change the vicious anti-Palestinian policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, has instead entrenched them as even the pretense of a serious peace effort has vanished.

According to media reports, the US Army Corps of Engineers is assisting Egypt in building an underground wall on its border with Gaza to block the tunnels which act as a lifeline for the besieged territory (resources and efforts that ought to go into rebuilding still hurricane-devastated New Orleans), and American weapons continue to flow to West Bank militias engaged in a US- and Israeli-sponsored civil war against Hamas and anyone else who might resist Israeli occupation and colonization.

These facts are inescapable and bleak.

However, to focus on them alone would be to miss a much more dynamic situation that suggests Israel's power and impunity are not as invulnerable as they appear from this snapshot.

A year after Israel's attack and after more than two-and-a-half years of blockade, the Palestinian people in Gaza have not surrendered. Instead they have offered the world lessons in steadfastness and dignity, even at an appalling, unimaginable cost.

It is true that the European Union leaders who came to occupied Jerusalem last January to publicly embrace Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister -- while white phosphorus seared the flesh of Gazan children and bodies lay under the rubble -- still cower before their respective Israel lobbies, as do American and Canadian politicians.

But the shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel's own actions transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism, racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist order maintained by frequent massacres.

The universalist cause of justice and liberation for Palestinians is gaining adherents and momentum especially among the young. I witnessed it, for example, among Malaysian students I met at a Palestine solidarity conference held by the Union of NGOs of The Islamic World in Istanbul last May, and again in November as hundreds of student organizers from across the US and Canada converged to plan their participation in the global Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions modeled on the successful struggle against South African apartheid in the 1980s.

This week, thousands of people from dozens of countries are attempting to reach Gaza to break the siege and march alongside Palestinians who have been organizing inside the territory.

Each of the individuals traveling with the Gaza Freedom March, Viva Palestina, or other delegations represents perhaps hundreds of others who could not make the journey in person, and who are marking the event with demonstrations and commemorations, visits to their elected officials and media campaigns.
Against this flowering of activism, Zionism is struggling to rejuvenate its dwindling base of support. Multi-million dollar programs aimed at recruiting and Zionizing young American Jews are struggling to compete against organizations like the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, which run not on money but principled commitment to human equality.

Increasingly, we see that Israel's hasbara (propaganda) efforts have no positive message, offer no plausible case for maintaining a status quo of unspeakable repression and violence, and rely instead on racist demonization and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims to justify Israel's actions and even its very existence.

Faced with growing global recognition and support for the courageous nonviolent struggle against continued land theft in the West Bank, Israel is escalating its violence and kidnapping of leaders of the movement in Bilin and other villages (Mohammad Othman, Jamal Juma' and Abdallah Abu Rahmeh are among the leaders of this movement recently arrested).

In acting this way, Israel increasingly resembles a bankrupt failed state, not a regime confident about its legitimacy and longevity.

And despite the failed peace process industry's efforts to ridicule, suppress and marginalize it, there is a growing debate among Palestinians and even among Israelis about a shared future in Palestine/Israel based on equality and decolonization, rather than ethno-national segregation and forced repartition.
Last, but certainly not least, in the shadow of the Goldstone report, Israeli leaders travel around the world fearing arrest for their crimes.

For now, they can rely on the impunity that high-level international complicity and their inertial power and influence still afford them. But the question for the real international community -- made up of people and movements -- is whether we want to continue to see the still very incomplete system of international law and justice painstakingly built since the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi holocaust dismantled and corrupted all for the sake of one rogue state.

What we have done in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the rest of Palestine is not yet enough. But our movement is growing, it cannot be stopped, and we will reach our destination.

The impact of closure and attacks on the Gaza Strip

2009-12-30T12:49:00.000-08:00

The following is the introduction to a new report from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights entitled "23 Days of War, 928 Days of Closure: Life One Year after Israel's Latest Offensive on the Gaza Strip":

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has released this report in order to highlight the reality of life in the occupied Gaza Strip, and to illustrate the dramatic deterioration in the human rights situation brought about by 928 days of continuous illegal closure, as well as numerous offensives, incursions and attacks.

Over the course of 42 years of occupation, Israeli occupation forces have consistently violated international law. These violations have been well documented and reported, yet despite a significant level of media and political attention, the international community has continued to grant Israel impunity, a fact recently illustrated by the international reaction to the publication of the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the Goldstone Report). This impunity, which has been a consistent feature of the occupation, has resulted in continuous and escalating violations of international law, and the denial and violation of Palestinian civilians' fundamental human rights. This reality was graphically underlined by Israel

It is evident that if the rule of law is to be respected -- if it is to prove capable of protecting civilian populations -- then it must be enforced. Victims' rights to the equal protection of the law, and an effective judicial remedy must be upheld, Israel and individual Israeli officials and soldiers must be held to account for their actions.

International human rights law and international humanitarian law form the core bodies of law referenced in this report. However, PCHR wishes to emphasize that the international community may also be in violation of their own legal obligations. Common Article 1 of the Four Geneva Conventions requires all High Contracting to respect and ensure respect for the Conventions in all circumstances; there is no valid pretext, legal or otherwise, for not respecting the Conventions in their entirety. Article 16 of the International Law Commission's Articles on State Responsibility for Internationally Wrongful Acts places an obligation on the individual states of the international community not to aid or assist the commission of an internationally wrongful act. Such aid and assistance includes, inter alia, financing the wrongful acts in question. Article 41 explicitly prohibits States from rendering aid or assistance sued to maintain the situation created by a serious breach of international law. By continually covering the financial cost associated with Israel's illegal actions in the occupied Palestinian territory, individual States are in breach of their own international obligations, and complicit in the occupation's violations of international law.

“If everything is anti-Semitism, then there is no anti-Semitism at all.”

2009-12-27T11:23:00.000-08:00

Posted on December 24 2009 by Cecilie Surasky under Anti-semitism , BDS.

Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney .

“If everything is anti-Semitism, then there is no anti-Semitism at all.”
The (Israeli) Alternative Information Center’s Michael Warschawski has this to say on the use, and the empyting of all meaning, of the charge of anti-Semitism:

Every time the State of Israel is confronted with substantial international criticism for its political behavior and its violations of basic international standards, it counter-attacks by using the infamous tool of accusations of anti-Semitism. One remembers the campaign on anti-Semitism launched by Ariel Sharon and his friends throughout the world, Jews and non-Jews, after the murder of Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza in September 2000, in order to create a diversion (in the very words of Roger Cukierman, then chairman of the French Jewish umbrella organization—CRIF) and to transform the victim into a victimizer and the victimizer into a victim: for more than two years, western media “exposed” the anti-Semitism of the critics of Israel instead of denouncing the massacres committed by the Israeli military in Gaza and the West Bank.Sixty five years after the end of WWII, the ashes of the victims of Nazi genocide have not yet disappeared from the sky of Poland, and the accusation of anti-Semitism remains connected to one of the bloodiest crimes of the twentieth century; as French journalist, Daniel Mermet, one of the targets of this campaign, pointed at, “no accusation can be worse, and even after you are proved not guilty of charge, the bad smell of such an accusation will be with you forever.”

The massacre in Gaza, a year ago, provoked a world-wide outrage, bigger even than in 2000-2002. The U.N. was forced to appoint an inquiry commission, and its report—the Goldstone report—is devastating for Israel. Moreover, for the first time since the establishment of the State of Israel, an international campaign calling for sanctions against Israel for its innumerous violations of international law, has been successful in drawing huge public attention and initiating a great number of mobilizations and initiatives around the world.

For the Israeli government and its friends, the time has come to take from the shelf the rusty old weapon of anti-Semitism accusations, a message that was heard loud and clear by the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, Jason Kenney. At the Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism, held in Jerusalem on 16 December, the Minister stated: “We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism.” So far so good, but he continued: “We have defunded organizations, most recently like Kairos, who are taking a leadership role in the boycott (against Israel).”

Accusing Kairos, an umbrella organization that includes most of the Christian churches in Canada, of anti-Semitism is ridiculous and pathetic. Ridiculous, because the record of Kairos is crystal clear on that issue of BDS and it its position is not the one that Minister Kenney accuses it of, and pathetic, because it is a re-heated dish that will not work a second time.

Already in 2004, there were signs indicating that the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism by Israeli propaganda machine was losing its efficiency and even becoming counter-productive; no doubt that, five years later, only a few people will accept to be blackmailed by such an outrageous false-accusation.

Worse, however, is that this old/new maneuver by “friends” of Israel like Kenney, is a symptom of the banalization of anti-Semitism. If everything is anti-Semitism, then there is no anti-Semitism at all. But, unfortunately, anti-Semitism has not disappeared from our world, and manipulating it for goals that have nothing to do with it, is playing right into the hands of the real anti-Semites.

To Jason Kenney, one must say very clearly “stay out of our struggle against anti-Semitism, and do not try to manipulate it for causes totally foreign to the anti-racist values which are motivating it. It is too important and too serious to be instrumentalized by your political agenda.”

We are proud of the success of the international BDS campaign. Minister Kenney may disagree with it, but hands off of any accusation of anti-Semitism concerning our campaign. Anti-Semitism is a dangerous threat to the public health of our societies and so are accusations that are manipulated for a political agenda that has nothing to do with it.

Winning prize for peace while advocating war

2009-12-17T19:28:00.000-08:00

Sayed Dhansay, The Electronic Intifada, 11 December 2009

United States President Barack Obama has just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. His nomination had been controversial, not least because he is continuing and escalating two illegal wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also because it was awarded to him at the beginning of his term, before he has proven a genuine willingness to promote peace.

Though his eloquent and moving speech in Cairo last June spoke of "peace," "mutual respect" and "new beginnings" with the Arab and Muslim world, his administration's foreign policy has thus far proven otherwise. The glaring contradiction between his words and actions are nowhere else more obvious than in his dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In his acceptance speech yesterday, President Obama quoted former US President John F. Kennedy's advice on attaining peace: "Let us focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions."

As a first step toward achieving that evolution, Obama advised that "all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." Those standards -- international humanitarian law -- were however not applied by Obama to Israel in its devastating attack on the Gaza Strip last winter.

Though the UN-commissioned Goldstone report accused Israeli forces of committing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity in Gaza, Obama's representatives at the UN Human Rights Council voted against a resolution that adopted the report's findings. In addition, his government attempted to discredit the report by claiming that it was biased against Israel and flawed from the outset. This is hard to believe considering that its author is a jurist of international acclaim, not to mention a Jew with strong ties to Israel.

Obama also advocated that "Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure." Yet when it comes to Israeli intransigence, Obama appears unwilling to demand the same level of accountability or exert any pressure at all.

Israel has flouted international law with impunity for 42 years with its settler-colonial project in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem. Israel's illegal wall continues to annex Palestinian land, while home demolitions in East Jerusalem occur now almost on a weekly basis. Here, Obama has not "exacted a real price." Instead he has rewarded Israel with billions of dollars of continued military assistance, and caved in to pressure by backtracking on his original policy that a comprehensive settlement freeze be a prerequisite for resumed peace negotiations.

Though US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Middle East peace envoy George Mitchell hailed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ten-month freeze as an "unprecedented step to achieving peace," facts on the ground showed otherwise. Netanyahu declared openly that settlement construction would resume at full pace after the elapse of the ten-month period.

This week, the Israeli Peace Now movement reported that construction in West Bank settlements currently outweighs that within Israel's pre-1967 borders. Journalist Gideon Levy hit the nail on the head when he described this freeze as "just another scene in Israel's masquerade" in the Israeli daily Haaretz.

Obama also warned those who violate international law by "brutalizing their own people." He said that there must be consequences for genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo or repression in Burma. He failed however to mention the brutalization of Palestinian citizens of Israel, the slow genocide in Gaza or the repression in the occupied West Bank.

A recent report by Israel's Interior Ministry revealed that 4,577 Palestinians were stripped of their right to live in East Jerusalem in 2008, an all time record in 42 years of occupation. Residency revocation in Jerusalem last year was 21 times higher than the average over the last 40 years. Israel treats native Palestinians in East Jerusalem as if they were foreign residents whose presence can be revoked at will, even though these Palestinians did not come to Israel. Rather, Israel came and imposed itself on them with its internationally unrecognized annexation and occupation of the city from 1967 until present.

An Amnesty International study published in October accused Israel of denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water. While Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank have lush gardens and sparkling swimming pools, some 180,000 Palestinians have no access to running water. The report states that Israelis use up to four times more water than Palestinians, while the settler population alone uses more water than the entire West Bank Palestinian population of about 2.5 million.

Though his presidency terminated in January of this year, Mahmoud Abbas and his collaborationist Palestinian Authority (PA) continue to be propped up by the Obama administration. Obama preaches the value of democracy, yet his government fails to recognize the democratically-elected Hamas government. Instead, the US continues to endorse Israel's siege on Gaza which has resulted in a humanitarian catastrophe of such proportion that some Gazans have even resorted to faking cancer in the hope of escaping the isolated coastal territory.

President Obama also stated in his speech that "I believe peace is unstable where citizens are denied the right to speak freely or worship as they please, choose their own leaders or assemble without fear." Perhaps he should have then taken the opportunity to mention the systematic repression of any outward opposition to the PA or Israel by PA security forces. Then again, if he did so, he would be forced to acknowledge that these very police are trained in their art by none other than US General Keith Dayton and funded by US taxpayers.

While he champions the right to freedom of worship, Obama avoids the fact that his "loyal and true friend," Israel, routinely denies Palestinians the right to freely access the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. He criticizes Burma for its religious repression, but is silent on the continuous incursions into one of the world's holiest sites for Muslims by the Israeli army and extremist settlers.

Obama claimed as a centerpiece of his foreign policy the need to "prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them." He reminded his audience that it was incumbent on all of them to ensure that Iran and North Korea do not "game the system."

While his administration is leading the efforts to increase sanctions against Iran, we hear no mention of Israel's nuclear arsenal, even though it has demonstrated time and again its brazen willingness to use grossly indiscriminate, deliberate and massive firepower on civilian targets, as witnessed in the 2006 Lebanon war and during last winter's assault on Gaza.

The most disturbing aspect of President Obama's speech however was its unabashed justification of war. The leader of the liberal, democratic free world was accepting the world's most coveted peace prize. And the overarching theme of his address was that it was impossible to eradicate violent conflict. Obama's colleagues in the Knesset may well have been pleased to hear this.

"There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified," Obama said. This fatalistic attitude lends itself more to a Rumsfeld-Cheney "bombing for freedom" ideology than that of someone accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

Furthermore, it sends a very dangerous signal to the Israeli government who know that they have America's protection in institutions tasked with upholding international law. It provides no impetus for Israel to end its occupation, lift its draconian siege of Gaza or embrace the only viable option that it has left -- peaceful transition that will protect the rights of Palestinians and Israelis within the framework of a secular, bi-national, democratic state.

In fact, it only further emboldens Israel to accelerate its process of ethic cleansing and colonization, and use military force to achieve these ends. Indeed, many Zionists believe that it is after all morally justifiable to use violence to rid "Greater Israel" of anyone who is not Jewish. The comments of Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi that the Israeli military's "next round of hostilities will be even more intense" is quite revealing in this regard.

What is surprising, is that President Obama seems to realize the folly of his very own "just war" doctrine. Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., he states that "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem. It merely creates new and more complicated ones."

If any modern conflict has proven this to be incredibly accurate, it is that of the Israelis and Palestinians. No amount of arrest raids, land confiscation, home demolitions or massacres can bring about peace. These do not solve the social problems of dispossession, statelessness and disenfranchisement. Nor do they quell the desire for freedom and self-determination. Indeed, they only serve to create new and more complicated problems.

By Obama advocating war as an acceptable foreign policy, he is only serving to create new, more complicated problems in the Middle East. Instead of promoting the dead two-state solution with a moribund puppet regime, he should acknowledge the fundamental root cause of this conflict -- that of the dispossession of a people from their native homeland. Without this, there will be no practical, attainable peace.

Billboard Against Military Aid to Israel

2009-12-06T09:38:00.000-08:00

Posted on December 5 2009 by Cecilie Surasky under Free speech.

Back in April, after gaining approval for text and design, anti-occupation activists in New Mexico signed a contract with Lamar Advertising to display 10 billboards (pictured at left) for 8 weeks. But after only 3 weeks, and a pressure campaign on Lamar that included personal threats, the billboards all came down. Billboard critics did not like the call for no military aid, and some said that the “Stop Killing Children” message, which referred to the death of some 300 children in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, was evocative of anti-Semitic blood libel myths. Yet, repeated efforts to alter the text and design to meet the changing standards of Lamar were unsuccessful.

The Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition working to “end to the ten year commitment of $30 billion in U.S. taxpayer-funded military aid pledged to Israel in 2007 by the Bush administration,” reports they have a new set of billboards (below) with a new company and slightly altered message. Seventy-five percent of US military aid to Israel is, by law, given to US arms manufacturers.

Monde de FOU ! fin des temps .....

2009-12-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

Resistance without Reservation; The Indigenous in Canada (part III)

2009-12-03T14:58:00.000-08:00

David Dennis was one of the Keynote speaker at the Resistance without Reservation event as part of Indigenous Sovereignty week. Event Organized and hosted by the No One Is Illegal on Thursday October 29, 2009.
David Dennis a Nu-Chan Lith Nation and President-Elect of the United Native Nations. David was instrumental in the formation of the Native Youth Movement and has been active in indigenous land struggles and urban indigenous issues for decades.

Resistance without Reservation; The Indigenous in Canada (part II)

2009-12-01T15:24:00.000-08:00

Kat Norris was one of the Keynote speaker at the Resistance without Reservation event as part of Indigenous Sovereignty week. Event Organized and hosted by the No One Is Illegal on Thursday October 29, 2009.
Kat Norris; founder of indigenous Action Movement and survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School and member of the American Indian Movement. Most recently she has been organizing against police abuses and her biggest success is the Frank Paul Inquiry.

Scahill and Olbermann on Blackwater: Murderous Crusaders for Christ

2009-11-27T17:45:00.000-08:00

Armed criminal units are let loose on the civilian population of Iraq death by rape and murder are all on the agenda. This private army is Americas eternal shame it has been involved in murder and killing people for sport in Iraq thereby taking over from Saddam Hussein in killing and abusing unharmed civilians trying to go about their daily lives . SHAME ON THE U.S.A.

Resistance without Reservation; The Indigenous in Canada (part I)

2009-11-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

Dustin Rivers was one of the Keynote speaker at the Resistance without Reservation event as part of Indigenous Sovereignty week. Event Organized and hosted by the No One Is Illegal on Thursday October 29, 2009.
Dustin Rivers: a young and outspoken Skwxwú7mesh-Kwakwakawakw activist, artist, and writer.He's had an obsession with history from a early age, but also raised in a time of cultural re-generation, he uses his ancestors legacy of political uprising to accomplish his vision of decolonization.

The elephant in the room: Israel's nuclear weapons

2009-11-24T08:02:00.000-08:00

(Nidal El Khairy)

At a White House press conference on 18 May 2009, US President Barack Obama expressed "deepening concern" about "the potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon by Iran." He continued:
"Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would not only be a threat to Israel and a threat to the United States, but would be profoundly destabilizing in the international community as a whole and could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East."
By his side was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the room with them, there was an elephant, a large and formidably destructive elephant, which they and the assembled press pretended not to see.
I am, of course, referring to Israel's actual nuclear weapons systems, with which Netanyahu is capable of doing to numerous cities in the Middle East, including Tehran, what the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Obama's remark that "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon" would be "profoundly destabilizing" and "could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East" is profoundly dishonest. In reality, the race started in the early 1950s when Israel launched its nuclear weapons program.
The significance of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is not that Iran would become a threat to Israel and the US, but that Israel and the US would no longer contemplate attacking Iran. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of self-defense -- a state that possesses nuclear weapons doesn't get attacked by other states.
David Morrison, The Electronic Intifada, 29 June 2009

Canwest’s Global War on Satire

2009-11-17T12:12:00.000-08:00

Riz Khan - Amira Hass: Covering the other side- 22 Oct09

2009-11-15T11:53:00.000-08:00

Amira Hass (Hebrew: עמירה הס‎; born 1956) is a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist and author, mostly known for her columns in the daily newspaper Ha'aretz. She is particularly recognized for her reporting on Palestinian affairs in the West Bank and Gaza, where she has also lived for a number of years.

Hass was the recipient of the Press Freedom Hero award from the International Press Institute in 2000, the Bruno Kreisky Human Rights Award in 2002, the UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in 2003, the inaugural award from the Anna Lindh Memorial Fund in 2004 and Hrant Dink Memorial Award in 2009

Torch Relay Kick off

2009-11-06T11:29:00.000-08:00

Victoria; Friday, October 30, 2009

The anti-olympic festivities commenced with speakers and performers that addressed
a big crowd of people wearing costumes and halloween masks at the Centennial square. Hundreds of people converged to the square to make their voice heard; their issues were related to poverty, environmental destruction, native rights, and other injustices .
Dancers, musicians, zombies and demonstrators snake marched through downtown victoria for several hours blocking an intersection in front of the the RBC, disrupting traffic, and occupying a part of the olympic torch route. The crowd remained peaceful while engaging in civil disobedience, and successfully opposed the multimillion dollar Olympic security apparatus.

Fighting Fascism

2009-11-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

From Submedia.tv

1.What?
2. Crispy Pigs
3. Hot in Roch City
4. Olympig Harassment
5. Vienna Occupation
6. Old school bank robber
7. Coal River Blast
8. 350 or 250
9. Modest Mouse
10. Torch Hypnosis

THE EMPIRE OF "THE CITY" (World Superstate)

2009-10-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

City of London + City of Vatican + City of columbia are the 3 independant states within states wich composes the empire of the city. The first is financial control over earth economy, the second is religion control over the earth and the third one is military control over the earth. Together they make the very unholy trinity which forms the egyptian pyramid that we can see on the back of the privately owned federal reserve note that is used as american dollar to maintain the colony in debt and under the Queen. Many people realize that this mystifying situation, in which an alleged democratic and self-governing nation is actually controlled against the will of the people, is a clear indication that there must be a very powerful and well-financed occult organization which plans and directs world affairs, and for lack of a more specific identification thie suspected secret organization is popularly referred to as the International Financiers, Banksters cartel or "The Crown corporation".

End Game

2009-10-06T08:11:00.000-07:00

A World Without Islam By Graham E. Fuller

2009-09-29T19:24:00.001-07:00

What if Islam had never existed? To some, it's a comforting thought: No clash of civilizations, no holy wars, no terrorists. Would Christianity have taken over the world? Would the Middle East be a peaceful beacon of democracy? Would 9/11 have happened? In fact, remove Islam from the path of history, and the world ends up pretty much where it is today.

Graham E. Fuller is a former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA in charge of long-range strategic forecasting.

Extract from the article
"In the West's focus on terrorism in the name of Islam, memories are short. Jewish guerrillas used terrorism against the British in Palestine. Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil "Tigers" invented the art of the suicide vest and for more than a decade led the world in the use of suicide bombings--including the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Greek terrorists carried out assassination operations against U.S. officials in Athens. Organized Sikh terrorism killed Indira Gandhi, spread havoc in India, established an overseas base in Canada, and brought down an Air India flight over the Atlantic. Macedonian terrorists were widely feared all across the Balkans on the eve of World War I. Dozens of major assassinations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were carried out by European and American "anarchists," sowing collective fear. The Irish Republican Army employed brutally effective terrorism against the British for decades, as did communist guerrillas and terrorists in Vietnam against Americans, communist Malayans against British soldiers in the 1950s, Mau-Mau terrorists against British officers in Kenya--the list goes on. It doesn't take a Muslim to commit terrorism.

Even the recent history of terrorist activity doesn't look much different. According to Europol, 498 terrorist attacks took place in the European Union in 2006. Of these, 424 were perpetrated by separatist groups, 55 by left-wing extremists, and 18 by various other terrorists. Only 1 was carried out by Islamists. To be sure, there were a number of foiled attempts in a highly surveilled Muslim community. But these figures reveal the broad ide-ological range of potential terrorists in the world.

Is it so hard to imagine then, Arabs--Christian or Muslim--angered at Israel or imperialism's constant invasions, overthrows, and interventions employing similar acts of terrorism and guerrilla warfare? The question might be instead, why didn't it happen sooner? As radical groups articulate grievances in our globalized age, why should we not expect them to carry their struggle into the heart of the West?"

Source: SNUFFYSMITH'S BLOG

It's the ENd of the World as We know it And I feel Fine Season 3 Episode 15

2009-09-23T10:41:00.000-07:00

UN inquiry finds Israel guilty of Gaza war crimes

2009-09-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

Israel "punished and terrorised" civilians in Gaza in a disproportionate attack in its three-week offensive on the territory earlier this year, a United Nations report has found.
Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the inquiry, said on Wednesday that he found evidence Israel targeted civilians and used excessive force in the assault, which was launched on December 27, 2008.
"The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defence Force," Goldstone, a former South African justice, said.
More than 1,400 Palestinians - about a third of them women and children - were killed in the offensive. Thirteen Israeli died during the same period, mostly due to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip .
The US state department reacted to the report, telling Al Jazeera that they had "concerns about some of the report's recommendations", without giving specifics.
Washington said that the mandate given for the report had been "one sided and unacceptable" but that Goldstone had attempted to broaden the scope of the report "to cover abuses on all sides of the conflict".
Goldstone's report, which came at the end of a six-month inquiry and will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council later this month, said Israel deliberately attacked civilians, failed to take precautions to minimise loss of civilian life and cited strong evidence that Israeli forces committed "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions.
He said: "In the months since the end of the war, various rights groups both domestic and international have provided evidence of Israel’s war crimes."
Goldstone said the evidence included accounts of "the shooting of civilians holding white flags ... the deliberate and unjustifiable targeting of UN shelters ... and the killing of over 300 children whilst the Israeli Army had at their disposal the most precise weaponry in the world"

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Super Soak THE OLYMPIC TORCH

2009-09-15T11:53:00.001-07:00

Under The Volcano 09

2009-08-21T08:25:00.000-07:00

Festival of Art and Social Changes; Day of Workshops, Artisan market, Info fair, and more......

Hip Hop & Media Against Displacement, Colonization & Gentrification Vancouver

2009-08-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

No One is Illegal with the support of W2 Flack Block Gallery presented the acclaimed and award winning; Invincible.
Invincible; a Detroit based MC and Activist known for her creation of media that resist displacement, gentrification, colonization, occupation, obstruction of movement, and denial of right of return.
She Screened and discuss her hybrid docu-music-video "Locus" and "People Not Places", both videos show the relationship between gentrification and colonization and ways that people are dealing with them.
At the end of the screening, Invincible lead a participatory workshop about local organizing strategies and ways to bring new people and energy into the local anti-displacement projects in Vancouver and surrounding area.

NEW WORLD DISORDER DELAYED TILL 2012

2009-08-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

New world disorder delayed by credit crunch say beefy wankers er wealthy bankers- Holocaust in Gazza, but nothing like the Jewish one says camp commandant - In the UK new Identity passport cards for babies embryos fetus and Students - Hello catatonic cattle people.

Hip Hop Vs Terror

2009-08-08T07:33:00.000-07:00

Mc Dollar

2009-08-03T18:29:00.000-07:00

Documentary sparks uproar at Jewish film fest.

2009-07-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
by Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival has come under siege after deciding to show a documentary about Rachel Corrie, a Washington state 23-year-old killed in 2003 while trying to prevent an Israeli military bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian’s home.

Whether Corrie naively put herself in harm’s way in support of terrorists or was intentionally killed by the Israeli military is the nexus of the controversy.

Compounding the issue, festival organizers invited Corrie’s mother, Cindy, to speak after today’s showing at the Castro Theatre of the film “Rachel”. It is one of 71 films at this year’s festival, which includes two films profiling kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

The reaction has been outrage. The festival board’s president stepped down from her role, opening-night ceremonies were boycotted by some, and Israel Consul General Akiva Tor said it was a “big mistake to invite Mrs. Corrie”.

At the core of the debate are questions about how broadly Jews can discuss Israel within their own community – and how Jews represent Israel to the broader world. It is also overlaid with accusations of the “new anti-Semitism,” prejudice that is disguised as particular criticisms of Israel, the only Jewish state.

“The furor is much larger than this one film or this one speaker,” said Peter L. Stein, the festival’s executive director. “It reveals a rift in our community that we all need to help understand and hopefully heal”

Ska-p - Intifada

2009-07-22T11:27:00.000-07:00

SKA-P

is a Spanish Ska group formed in Vallecas (a neighborhood of Madrid, Spain) in 1994. Most of their songs feature an infectious and energic vibe and feature lyrics about non-conformity, criticism of capitalism and racism, and their defense of equal justice, plus taking part in various multicultural, alternative and anti-globalization festivals.

The Other Arars Where the Exception is the Rule

2009-07-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

The Other Arars Where the Exception is the Rule from Driss Abassi on Vimeo.

Adil Charkaoui one the five men in Canada living under a security certificate.
He was in Vancouver on June 26, 2009 for an event sponsored by No One Is Illegal-Vancouver, BC Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Muslim Union, Council of Canadians - BC / Yukon Region, Canadian Islamic Congress, and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

CHARKAOUI spoke on Security Certificates and Secret Trials and the Canadian state’s complicity in the torture of Maher Arar.

The Sutikalh Camp june 20 / 09

2009-07-02T20:51:00.000-07:00

On May 2, 2000, members of the St'at'imc nation and their allies established a permanent camp near Melvin Creek, located off Highway 99 between Mt. Currie/Pemberton and Lillooet, in the southern Interior region of BC.

Known as Sutikalh, the St'at'imc winter spirit of the area, the camp was set up to stop government and corporate plans to build a $500 million all-season ski and recreation resort in an untouched Alpine mountain area.

Car - Free Vancouver Day 2009 Commercial Drive

2009-06-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

June 14, 2004 was Car Free Vancouver day

This year it was enjoyed in Kitsilano, Main Street, the West End, and Commercial Drive.

The Car Free Day on Commercial Drive was a day of Joy, fun, connections, and discover for some.
It was also an open platform to the several local activist groups to communicate they concerns to the community.

Eight Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Olympics

2009-06-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Resist 2010: 8 Reasons to Oppose the 2010 Winter Olympics documents the negative impacts of the 2010 Games to be held in Vancouver, Canada, and chronicles the ongoing resistance by Indigenous & other social movements.

Magic is powerless to stop censorship of Harry Potter actress

2009-05-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

JINSA advocates censorship, military strikes on “partisan” media outlets

2009-05-27T08:45:00.000-07:00

JINSA is the hard-line, Likudnik Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. They boast a pretty powerful line-up of present and former advisors including Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. If you’re looking for groups to blame for helping to get us into the endless war and now occupation of Iraq, JINSA is certainly a great place to start.

The new edition of their house organ includes this remarkable gem, Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars, from retired US army officer Ralph Peters who says openly what we all suspect to be true every time an Al Jazeera office accidentally gets blown up in a war with the US, or the Israeli Defense Forces accidentally shoot a reporter. Revealing both constitutional contempt and the creepy linkages between right-wing Jews and fundamentalist Christian Zionists, Peters actually calls the media godless “neo-pagans” and advocates not only censorship but military strikes. The media, he insists, are a “hostile third party” in war, and must be treated as such.

by Cecilie Surasky
Muzzlewatch

Quote of the week

2009-05-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

I'm concerned about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attempted Censorship of Play Seven Jewish Children

2009-05-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

From the "MuzzleWatch" news

B’nai Brith Canada has asked Toronto’s mayor to “use his good offices” to prevent the staging of a controversial play at a city-owned theater.

The Jewish human rights group says “Seven Jewish Children” by British playwright Caryl Churchill is “blatantly propagandist” and “aimed at delegitimizing not only Israel but its Jewish supporters worldwide.”

The good news is that you can watch Caryl Churchill’s Play, Seven Jewish Children, right now. It’ll take under 10 minutes. Make sure you have your box of tissues with you.

Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, who call Churchill “one of the most important and influential playwrights living,” recently wrote in The Nation about the play’s UK production:

While some British critics greatly admired the play, which was presented by a Jewish director with a largely Jewish cast, a number of prominent British Jews denounced it as anti-Semitic. Some even accused Churchill of blood libel, of perpetrating in Seven Jewish Children the centuries-old lie, used to incite homicidal anti-Jewish violence, that Jews ritually murder non-Jewish children. A spokesman for the Board of Deputies of British Jews told the Jerusalem Post that the “horrifically anti-Israel” text went “beyond the boundaries of reasonable political discourse.”

We emphatically disagree. We think Churchill’s play should be seen and discussed as widely as possible.

Though you’d never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn’t also direct and incendiary. It is. It’s disturbing, it’s provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn’t arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

Israel-based human rights activist Rebecca Vilkomerson wrote in a letter, also in The Nation:

I’ve read Caryl Churchill’s play, “Seven Jewish Children—A Play for Gaza” three times, and cried through each reading. As a mom and an activist, living in Tel Aviv and raising two daughters, I found the play to be devastating and true. Beyond that, it is remarkably compassionate and clear in its historical consciousness and the awareness that our deepest urges, to protect our children, can have terrible moral consequences. There’s not an anti-Semitic word in it.

As my Israeli husband said, “she captured exactly how it really is to live here.”

We constantly struggle with the questions of when and how and what to tell our children about what is happening all around them. That’s why, for example, I take my older daughter to events
supporting the shministim, the highschoolers refusing to be drafted into the army. Perhaps, as Solomon and Kushner write, “this girl will grow up to work for justice.”

That ability to open peoples’ eyes, not anti-semitism, is what is so scary to those who attack Churchill’s play.

Churchill was inspired to write the play after Israel’s terrible invasion of Gaza this winter which killed nearly 1,500 Gazans and injured thousands more. As the mother of a 6-year-old myself, I would have been among the first of the thousands who did leave Sderot because of the Qassam rockets. And before that, had I or other Gazans been allowed to leave– I would have been the first in line to get out of Gaza, grasping my son’s hand tightly at the checkpoint, so we could get food and medical care.

But the Israeli military’s endless pounding of some 1.5 million Gazans, half of them children, with literally no place to go, made the army look more like a vicious and out of control drunkard, than a smart tactitian. Once again, the attitude that “we’re going to teach them a lesson,” through bombing Gaza into oblivion didn’t bring real safety but did ensure an entire new generation of deeply traumatized Palestinian children.

While there are numerous exceptions, Churchill investigates what exactly happened not just to the Israeli but to the entire Jewish (institutional) collective which by and large has either defended or actively support this kind of uncontrolled violence brought down on the heads of another people. How does our profound trauma as Jews, which lives with all of us and surfaces often at the strangest of times, transform into the callousness about Palestinian and Arab lives that has become commonplace at so many Jewish dinner tables?

Don’t look for any understanding from Frank Dimant, a leader with Canada’s B’nai Brith, who wants to shut down Seven Jewish Children. He obviously hasn’t spent much time at Israeli dinner tables lately.

“The City of Toronto should not allow a venue that it funds to be the staging ground for a divisive play that promotes anti-Jewish hatred,” Frank Dimant, the organization’s executive vice president, said in a statement. “As its name denotes, ‘Seven Jewish Children’ does not even pretend to target Israel exclusively. It is clearly aimed at maligning Jews, depicting them as oppressors of Palestinians, blood-thirsty aggressors and child killers. It disturbingly inverts history, using Holocaust imagery to allege that the Jews, once the victims, are actively teaching their own children callous disregard for the suffering of others.”

Apartheid, more alive than ever

2009-05-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from the speech of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the Durban Review Conference on racism in Geneva on April 20.

Over the last centuries, humanity has gone through great sufferings and pains. In the Medieval Ages, thinkers and scientists were sentenced to death. It was then followed by a period of slavery and slave trade. Innocent people were taken captive in their millions and separated from their families and loved ones to be taken to Europe and America under the worst conditions. A dark period that also experienced occupation, lootings and massacres of innocent people.

Many years passed by before nations rose up and fought for their liberty and freedom and they paid a high price for it. They lost millions of lives to expel the occupiers and establish independent and national governments. However, it did not take long before power grabbers imposed two wars in Europe which also plagued a part of Asia and Africa. Those horrific wars claimed about a hundred million lives and left behind massive devastation. Had lessons been learnt from the occupations, horrors and crimes of those wars, there would have been a ray of hope for the future.

The victorious powers called themselves the conquerors of the world while ignoring or down treading upon rights of other nations by the imposition of oppressive laws and international arrangements.

Ladies and gentlemen, let us take a look at the UN Security Council which is one of the legacies of World War I and World War II. What was the logic behind their granting themselves the veto right? How can such logic comply with humanitarian or spiritual values? Would it not be inconformity with the recognized principles of justice, equality before the law, love and human dignity? Would it not be discrimination, injustice, violations of human rights or humiliation of the majority of nations and countries?

The council is the highest decision-making world body for safeguarding international peace and security. How can we expect the realization of justice and peace when discrimination is legalized and the origin of the law is dominated by coercion and force rather than by justice and the rights?

Coercion and arrogance is the origin of oppression and wars. Although today many proponents of racism condemn racial discrimination in their words and their slogans, a number of powerful countries have been authorized to decide for other nations based on their own interests and at their own discretion and they can easily violate all laws and humanitarian values as they have done so.

Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering and they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine. And, in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.

The Security Council helped stabilize the occupying regime and supported it in the past 60 years giving them a free hand to commit all sorts of atrocities. It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defending those racist perpetrators of genocide while the awakened-conscience and free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutalities and the bombardment of civilians in Gaza. The supporters of Israel have always been either supportive or silent against the crimes.

....

World Zionism personifies racism that falsely resorts to religions and abuses religious sentiments to hide its hatred and ugly face. However, it is of great importance to bring into focus the political goals of some of the world powers and those who control huge economic resources and interests in the world. They mobilize all the resources including their economic and political influence and world media to render support in vain to the Zionist regime and to maliciously diminish the indignity and disgrace of this regime.

This is not simply a question of ignorance and one cannot conclude these ugly phenomena through consular campaigns. Efforts must be made to put an end to the abuse by Zionists and their political and international supporters and in respect with the will and aspirations of nations. Governments must be encouraged and supported in their fights aimed at eradicating this barbaric racism and to move towards reform in current international mechanisms.

There is no doubt that you are all aware of the conspiracies of some powers and Zionist circles against the goals and objectives of this conference. Unfortunately, there have been literatures and statements in support of Zionists and their crimes. And it is the responsibility of honorable representatives of nations to disclose these campaigns which run counter to humanitarian values and principles.

It should be recognized that boycotting such a session as an outstanding international capacity is a true indication of supporting the blatant example of racism. In defending human rights, it is primarily important to defend the rights of all nations to participate equally in all important international decision making processes without the influence of certain world powers.

And secondly, it is necessary to restructure the existing international organizations and their respective arrangements. Therefore this conference is a testing ground and the world public opinion today and tomorrow will judge our decisions and our actions

…..

I also want to lay emphasis on the fact that Western liberalism and capitalism has reached its end since it has failed to perceive the truth of the world and humans as they are.

It has imposed its own goals and directions on human beings. There is no regard for human and divine values, justice, freedom, love and brotherhood and it has based living on intense competition, securing individual and cooperative material interest.

Now we must learn from the past by initiating collective efforts in dealing with present challenges and in this connection, and as a closing remark, I wish to draw your kind attention to two important issues:

Firstly, it is absolutely possible to improve the existing situation in the world. However it must be noted that this could be only achieved through the cooperation of all countries in order to get the best out of the existing capacities and resources in the world. My participation in this conference is because of my conviction to these important issues as well as to our common responsibility of defending the rights of nations vis-à-vis the sinister phenomena of racism and being with you, the thinkers of the world.

Secondly, mindful of the inefficiency of the current international political, economic and security systems, it is necessary to focus on divine and humanitarian values by referring to the true definition of human beings based upon justice and respect for the rights of all people in all parts of the world and by acknowledging the past wrong doings in the past dominant management of the world, and to undertake collective measures to reform the existing structures.

In this respect, it is crucially important to rapidly reform the structure of the Security Council, including the elimination of the discriminatory veto right and to change the current world financial and monetary systems.

It is evident that lack of understanding of the urgency for change is equivalent to the much heavier costs of delay.

It's the End of the World as We know it and I feel FINE

2009-05-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

This week: Hamthrax NAFTA Flu Super Pork Pandemic Flatulent Toxic Ass Amonia COKECANUCK T.R.E.A.S.O.N. Gabriel Teodros Political Boxes What is Anarchy?

http://submedia.tv

Cheerless Labor Day in Gaza.

2009-05-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

>

Gaza's economic crisis - Part I

Gaza's economic crisis - Part II

F.H.A.T.W.A

2009-04-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

Vancouver City; guilty of Social Cleansing

2009-04-22T13:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday April 19, 2009, the City of Vancouver was put on trial because of it’s disinterest in the well being and it's persecution of the poor and the homeless.
The City of Vancouver is voting bylaws to clean the parks and the streets of the undesirables; the poor and the homeless, to take them out of the public eyes in the city east end,
The City doesn’t want their rich and tourist to look at the indigenous people of that area, so the best way and legal way to do it is to vote new laws to clear all these people from their homes and the streets.
These people are the most vulnerable one in the society we live in, they are already suffering and straggling, some of them have more problems with addiction, they are the first victim of this bad economy with all Social cut.
The City is creating tremendous stress on it’s more vulnerable people, not only by voting new bylaw to kick them out of the streets, but but also by not doing anything against the increasing real estate prices that throw them on the streets.
The number of people on the street grow every day and the city is doing nothing for them, instead of helping them by building more low income housing and more shelters, the City is ticketing them just for being alive and there.
The City doesn’t feel as obligated to the poor people of the east side, as she feel obligated to uphold it’s contractual obligation to the IOC, and the 2010 Olympics.
The people have realized that the Colonial and Capitalist; the government court at what ever level wont give a fair justice to the poor and the homeless, so they realized that only a people court would look at the facts and lesson to the more vulnerable and traumatized and give them a fair trial.
The people court is the only one on the people side, the only one that looked into the people interest.
It was time for the people to come out to voice their dissent and anger.

The new empire

2009-04-07T06:33:00.001-07:00

The end of the big war saw the emergence of a new kind of conquerors acting under the American flag. They’re more powerful than republican or democrat; the big corporations.
They have managed to build an empire, the first world empire built mostly without the military or an emperor. For the most part, it’s been built by economics backed by the American military when negotiations fail.
A fairly small group of men ran most of these corporations and through them they ran the American government and practically every other government in the world. They are the equivalent of the empire and they’re in control regardless of who is in power in the white house or congress, they are in power.
This new conquerors identify a third world country with a valuable resources, on behalf of that country, the corporation arrange for a loan from an organization like the world bank. The loan is not given to the country but is instead used by the corporation to build infrastructure in that country, the kind that only benefit the very rich that is in collaboration with the new conqueror but not the poor. The country is left with a huge debt, so huge they can’t repay it. Their only solution is to sell their resource for really cheap to the corporation, which also enslaved the big majority of the country; the poor. They became the new era slave working for nearly nothing while the corporation made all the money. The corporation doesn’t only use the poor as slave, make the riche and the corrupt richer, but the leader become their puppet and use his or her voice on the geopolitical scene for their own benefit.
But a broken financial market induced by a poorly planned war and more people mobilizing around the world against these conquerors will brink this world powerful empire to his knees.

When Existance and Resistance are one

2009-03-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

From SubMedia; The Stimulator's Last Fuckin Show

2009-03-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

The five Cockrings of Death

When does a man have right to fight without being called a Terrorist.

2009-02-27T18:05:00.001-08:00

Terrorist is a powerful word, label placed on violence that can never be accepted in a civilize society.

It uses to be said that one man terrorist is another man freedom fighter.

American have listed dozens of organizations and labelled them as terrorist but 9/11 has changed everything, you’re either with the foreign American policy or you’re a part of the axes of evil, you’re with the terrorists.

9/11 marked a new phase in human history; the US introduced a new doctrine that aimed to eradicate anything it considered terrorism. An ideological world wind swept through the west political institution media think tanks. An attempt by neocon politician to redefine the world; they called it the global war on terror. Word used in order to escalate the conflict beyond simply the perpetrators of 9/11. The war on terror phrase was used to provide a moral basis for a conflict that have only purpose to secure western interest in the East for generations, but how does this war on terror unfold in countries where these western army are seen as the occupation.

There is no global consensus on terrorism; the pro American governments define it, as the deliberate targeting of civilians, excluding bombs dropped on population centers during war times, arguing dishonestly that the killing of civilians is never the intent in war time. For peoples being bombed, it doesn't matter if it was intended or not, action by state actor or not there is something else defined by the west as state terrorism.

Americans decide who is a terrorist and who is freedom fighter; all the government that help in the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had their despot and unconstitutional rulers legitimized and turned to heroes by the west. But the resistance that wants to stop the killing, the destruction, the corruption, and the occupation are labelled terrorist.

The world nation can't agree on workable definition, as the right definition should include the terrorism caused by the west, so the difficulty that causes problem to the intellectuals and politicians, the struggle to find and graft a workable definition that won't be restricted to the west definition of terrorism. A definition restricted to the terror against the US but exclude the US terror against others.

Despite the lack of agreement within United Nations or consensus among academics and politicians; it is very easy in the US to tell who is a terrorist, they have the list. After 9/11 several groups and individuals were added to the list, individuals and groups that are heavily scrutinize. Anyone linked to these organizations was investigated, those suspected of providing funds or aids were arrested, most of the time without the necessary proof. Most of them were tortured or even killed without legal proceeding, but not on a western soil, the suspected terrorists were packed and shipped to some allies countries where torture is still a normal practice.

It seemed that terrorism according to the west definition is the only one dictating the world rules, but there is lot of inconsistency, it seems that some terrorist organizations are more accepted than others. Some listed organizations are more useful to the neocons plans than other. They're far from being investigated or persecuted, congress pass resolutions praising this groups and the CIA provide them covered funding. The enemies of my enemies are my friends even if they're on the list.

The US has constructed it first new military doctrine without a clear definition of who is the enemy. The west seems locked in a conflict based on a borderless, timeless, and unsuccessful war on terror.