For Abir Aramin, No Sympathy from the Court

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Abir Aramin

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=233359

On Wednesday we, members of the Combatants for Peace movement – women of Mahsom Watch, members of the Forum of Bereaved Families for Peace and writer David Grossman – attended a hearing at the High Court of Justice on the matter of the closing, due to lack of evidence, of the investigatory file on the killing of ten-year-old Abir Aramin about three years ago.

The hearing, which had been scheduled for eleven o’clock, and then for nine o’clock, and then for ten o’clock, and then for one o’clock, began at two. Journalists ran to and fro in the corridor:

“Who died?” “A little girl?” “Really?” “Excuse me, sir, did your daughter die?” “Yes.” “Then you are Bassam Aramin?” “No, I am Rami Elhanan.” “Oh, sorry.” “So where’s that Aramin? And who are you?” “We are from Mahsom Watch.” “From what checkpoint?” “What are you doing here? And who are you?” “I am a friend.” “Of those Palestinians?” “Yes.” “How come? How can it be? Can I interview you? Did you too have a daughter who died? Really? When? How? What was her name? And after all that you are on their side?” [Smadar (14), the daughter of Nurit Peled Elhanan and Rami Elhanan, was killed in a suicide bombing on Ben Yehuda Str. on 4 September 1997]

But at the end of the day no Israeli reported on what happened.

Salwa and Bassam Aramin are not Jews and they are not Israelis. They live under a cruel occupation and they have experienced all it has to offer: exile, imprisonment and the killing of their small daughter Abir by a rubber bullet that was allegedly fired from the rifle of a Border Guard soldier who was sitting in an armored jeep and thrust the barrel of his rifle through the opening that was allegedly designed for that purpose and allegedly aimed and fired at the head of the girl who was standing beside her sister at a kiosk, allegedly buying candy during the break between the first class and the second.

The projectile was removed from under the girl’s body and transferred to the authorities. The eyewitnesses, as well as the Border Guard soldiers, testified that there was no alleged danger to their lives and that the shooting was done – if it was done – in contravention of instructions.

Two pathologists testified that it was probable that the fracture in Abir’s little skull could have been caused by a rubber bullet. The attending physician at the Hadassah Hospital said that it was not a live bullet. The video of the reconstruction of the incident was not given to the defense counsel or to the court, because the soldiers who allegedly carried out the shooting, that is, who thrust the barrel of the rifle through the opening that had been made especially for that purpose, aimed and fired at the head of the girl Abir, were featured in the recording.

The Counsel for the State, stammering, unprepared and unkempt, stood like a platoon commander in charge of new recruits with her back to the public and refuted the allegations: “So they found a projectile.” “So what?” “Who knows how long it had been lying there?” “So people gave testimony, so what?” “They (those Arabs) can say anything, does that make it testimony?” “So nobody was throwing stones at that spot, so what?” “On a nearby street stones were thrown.” “If you were in my place,” she laughingly says to Michael Sfard, Aramin's attorney, “you would have made morsels of them by now.”

Morsels.

Judge Beinish reminds Sfard – twice – that there have been such incidents in the past and that soldiers have rarely been put on trial or even indicted, so it would be best to just forget it. The State Counsel, with a laugh: I had the pleasure of attending such trials.

Morsels. Pleasure.

But Salwa and Bassam Aramin have no choice but to seek justice in an Israeli court. They demand that the truth come to light in a court of the occupiers – of the killers. “So that I can rest and so that Abir can rest,” Salwa says to the journalists. The perfect crime, Jean-François Lyotard once wrote, is not only the killing but also the suppression of the testimony and the silencing of the voices of the victims. And the greatest injustice is to compel the victims to seek justice in the court of their tormentors.

As Judge Beinish implied in her comments to Sfard, the blood of Palestinians is cheap in this country. No one has ever been punished for killing Palestinians – children, adults, newborns, old people. The Jewish murderers are all walking among us, free and happy.

Those who have murdered our Israeli children, the Palestinian suicide bombers, have at least said “let me die with the Philistines” (Judges 16:30) and spared us any questions about their presence in the world. The murderer of Abir Aramin no doubt spent that very evening in a bar (Shit! What a nasty day! A little girl walked right into my crosshairs!), and will continue to spend many more evenings in many more bars, while Abir’s parents seek justice from the occupier, from the oppressor.

My 17-year-old son Yigal sat in the courtroom all day with a shocked expression on his face. That night he took off for Auschwitz with his classmates.

For his sake I hoped, I prayed, I implored, I nearly shouted for the drowsy judges – Beinish, Arbel, Frocaccia – to find a spark of humanity, of motherly feelings, within themselves and to look into the eyes of Salwa, who never stopped crying, and at Bassam’s ashen face, and to say: the High Court of Justice sympathizes with you over the death of little Abir.

They didn't.

Come join us this Wednesday evening to protest an Anti-Iran , Anti-Peace WAR Conference!

Tweet We will meet outside the Temple between 6:00-6:30

Please forward this invite/call to your list

Event information below
==============================

======================

October 21, 2009 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Temple De Hirsch Sinai
Seattle Campus
1441 16th Avenue, Seattle, 98122

Moderated by radio personality Dave Ross, panel members will provide a look at the political situation within Iran today; an in-depth analysis of the options related to a nuclear-armed Iran; its strategic threat to the United States, Israel and the world; and an understanding of how we can respond.

PANEL MEMBERS:
Israel Consul General Akiva Tor
Jerusalem Post correspondent Yaakov Katz
AIPAC's deputy director of policy & government affairs Jeff Colman
=====================================




VoicesOfPalestine.org
http://www.voicesofpalestine.org
"Do you think you have seen it all?" Click here http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/showme.asp?dif=2&alb=aqsaint&title=Al-Aqsa+Intifadah&start_at=407

"Nukes Aside, the Real Problem with Iran"

Tweet Part of article below; continue reading all here: http://conflictsforum.org/2009/nukes-aside-the-real-problem-with-iran/

The country is emerging as a regional power. Is the West ready for that?

It was pure drama: The leaders of the United States, Britain, and France stepped onto the stage at the Pittsburgh Group of 20 meeting last week to unveil Western intelligence that showed that Iran had a second nuclear fuel enrichment facility under construction, which Iran had declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency the preceding Monday.

The Western leaders gathered in Pittsburgh implied that their revelation was just as devastating for Iran as a credible player.

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates subsequently pronounced Iran to be “boxed in” and “in a very bad spot now.” But anyone who listened to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s interview with Time magazine’s correspondent on the day of the presentation, and to subsequent Iranian statements, can gather that Iran, at least, does not see itself as boxed in.

Far from it. Mr Ahmadinejad exuded confidence and non aggressively counseled President Obama not to go down this route.

It might seem counterintuitive to most Americans and Europeans, but Ahmadinejad’s advice might be worth pondering.

The Pittsburgh dramatics, in a sense, signal the culmination of three pivotal events that took place in the Middle East some 20 years ago. The first was the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989, the second was the 1991 Gulf War, and the third was Yitzak Rabin’s victory in the 1992 Israeli elections.

The consequences from these momentous events are coming to a head for the US only now. Mr Obama’s course of action may determine whether this region is about to enter a new phase of bitter conflict or enter a new era of strategic change.

The first two events hobbled Iran’s traditional foes on its frontiers. Neither the imploded USSR nor Sunni Iraq, at war with a Western coalition led by the US, was in a position any longer to contain an emergent Iran. As a consequence, Iran’s place as a preeminent – if not the pre-eminent power – in the Middle East was guaranteed.

The arrival of a Labor government in Israel was pivotal to Iran becoming “the nuclear threat.” In a dramatic change of policy in 2002, Israel abandoned the Ben Gurion doctrine of allying Israel with the regional periphery (Turkey, Ethiopia, and Iran), an Israeli policy that persisted beyond the Iranian Revolution, and began to engage with its Arab “vicinity.”

To manage such a radical shift of talking peace to the former Arab “enemy,” a U-turn that bitterly split the Israeli electorate and alienated Israel’s supporters in the US, the Labor government in Israel began, from 1993 on, to identify Iran to its supporters in the US as the new existential “threat” – in place of the former threat of the “never-changing Arab inability to reconcile” with Israel. Subsequently the West would absorb the Iranian threat as its own, for very different reasons.

The significance of this for Obama is that he is not facing just the issue of Iran’s nuclear program. This program is rolled into a more substantive and sensitive issue that lies at the heart of the Iranian approach to negotiations.

Nuclear weapons issue apart – it’s a question of whether Israel and the US are able to come to terms with an Iran that is, and will be, a preeminent power in the region.

At present, these two issues have been conflated. Iran has signaled on various occasions that the nuclear issue could be resolved, but Iran first wants to know the answer to the wider issue: Can the US bring Israel to accept Iran as a principal regional power? Can the US itself accept such an outcome?

Obama's Peace -- Joseph Massad

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via Palestinian Pundit

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/968/op12.htm

For his continued wars against Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Iraqis, his support for the overthrow of democracy in Honduras, his abetting dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim worlds (which his government finances, arms, and trains in torture methods), his planning for a possible invasion of Iran, and his enthusiastic support for the racist Israeli settler colony (and its colonial wars and occupations against Palestinians), President Barak Obama received the Nobel "Peace" Prize. This comes as no surprise, as Obama joins a long list of recipients of this sham of a prize, who are distinguished for similar "peaceful" pursuits. These include terrorists like Menachem Begin, war criminals like Henry Kissinger, ethnic-cleansing colonial generals like Yitzhak Rabin, dictators like Anwar Sadat, corrupt politicians like Yasser Arafat, and imperial presidents like Jimmy Carter. Granting this overambitious power-hungry man the recognition of the Nobel committee is therefore most apt.

Obama's most recent pursuit of peace has been to force the corrupt Palestinian Authority to discard the United Nations-issued Goldstone Report which detailed the war crimes committed by Israel in its murderous war against Palestinian civilians in Gaza ten months ago. Indeed, the first Black American President has just enjoined the Palestinians and Arab and Muslim countries from the pulpit of the United Nations to recognize Israel's right to be a racist "Jewish State." One wonders what the American reaction would be if Palestinian and Arab leaders would call on Obama and on African Americans to recognize the right of the United States to be a white state.

This is the same Obama whose hubris was of such caliber that when he gave his infamous speech in Cairo several months ago he did not grieve the tens of thousands of Arab, including Egyptian, civilians killed by Israel's six decade-long wars and massacres against them; nor did he show solidarity with the millions of Arabs who were rendered refugees (including one million Egyptians during the War of Attrition) by Israel's barbaric bombings. Instead, Obama chose to give Arabs a lesson in European Jewish history and enjoined them to appreciate the holocaust committed by European Christians against European Jews and not the ongoing Nakba committed by European Jewish colonial settlers against Arabs. He has even forbidden Palestinians or other Arabs from ever attempting to destroy Israel's racist structures to end its racist rule. Indeed, Obama threatened Arabs that any attempt by them to destroy the racist basis of the Jewish state would be seen as tantamount to a holocaust. One wonders if he thinks ending segregation in the United States and Apartheid in South Africa were tantamount to the extermination of white people! This is also the same Obama who, in order to fend off the accusation of being Muslim, told us during his electoral campaign that not only was he a Christian, but that he prays to Jesus every night and that the blood of Jesus Christ will redeem him.

But general wisdom in the US has it that the election of Obama, even if it did not instantiate any change in US imperial policy abroad, has been the best thing that happened to most Americans, or at least to white liberal Americans and all African Americans, at the domestic level. This is a largely mistaken conclusion. Obama in my estimation is the worst thing that happened in recent years to African Americans, who continue to face institutional, structural, economic, cultural, social, and personal discrimination on a daily basis. The racism that informs US domestic policy and causes the poverty of African Americans is not unrelated to the racism that informs US imperial policies that impoverish Egyptians, Palestinians, Hondurans, Iraqis, and Afghanis.

Obama's election has been best for white liberal Americans whose conscience can be assuaged by pretending that they are not racist at all and that indeed America is no longer a racist place evidenced by the election of a black man to the presidency. The fact that today African Americans are less educated and poorer than they were in the 1960s is immaterial to this self-congratulatory logic. Neither is the fact that there are more African American men today (in relative and absolute numbers) in America's racist jails than there had been at the height of Apartheid in South Africa. As for Obama's ongoing policies on education and racialized crime, they of course continue the policies of his white predecessors in pushing for more corporatization of schools and jails and busting teachers unions in the interest of the white business class.

But Obama is the culmination of white liberal hopes entertained since the early seventies when the language of racism was transformed, as an effect of the cooptation of the Civil Rights movement, into a culturalist language. Black people were not inferior racially, white liberals averred, "their problem" was diagnosed as "cultural." The feeling was that if black Americans would simply speak and act like a fantasized white middle class and adopt its social and cultural values, they would cease to face discrimination and they would break the "cycle of poverty." Reform, it was decided, should aim to effect such transformation. The black middle class, formed in the late nineteenth century in the wake of the abolition of slavery, though a small minority among African Americans, was seen as a model to be emulated. Indeed white liberal remedies like Affirmative Action (the largest beneficiaries of which were and still are white women and not African Americans) when it benefited any blacks at all, it did so by benefiting the established small black middle class. It was conservative members of this class who, after reaping its benefits, would advocate against Affirmative Action. Thus, white women and middle class African Americans benefited from a program that improved little in the lives of most African Americans, while the latter would increasingly be blamed for benefiting from it at the expense of white men --a refrain used by most white conservatives and not a few white liberals!

As Derrick Bell has eloquently demonstrated, Affirmative Action is a cover for a system by which racism continues to be institutionalized and African Americans continue to be blamed for refusing to improve their lives despite alleged Herculean efforts on their behalf. Some of the culturalist arguments of white liberals centered on Affirmative Action's production of white-acting black folks who would join the ranks of "hard-working Americans," a racist code that refers to white people which Obama often invokes in his speeches. The fantasy of low-grade American television programs in the late 1970s and 1980s like "Different Strokes" and "Webster" was to demonstrate that if white families were afforded the opportunity to raise black kids, these kids would end up as model citizens; indeed, they could grow up to become presidents one day. It was culture, you see, not race!

Obama was of course not only raised by his white Christian mother and her family (something he --and Joe Biden --never tired of reminding us during his electoral campaign to fend off his paternal Muslim contamination), but even his black father was African and not African American. Passing him off as an example of what happens when African Americans are raised the "right way" is the pride and joy of white liberals enamored of their own culturalist-cum-racist ideology and inebriated by virulent American nationalism. Obama's continuation of America's imperial wars and aggressions is proof that if you put an African American in office who is raised "the right way," he will perform his imperial duties as well as any white president. Obama's winning the Nobel Peace Prize was therefore a major gain for white liberal Americans who can bask in the sun of their achievement. For after all, producing a few African Americans in the form of Barak Obama can and will silence whoever can still muster the courage to criticize this thoroughly racist system dubbed "American democracy" which continues to victimize most African Americans and much of the

Father of British Soldier Killed in Iraq Calls for Genocide Charges Against Blair

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8310903.stm

PART OF STORY BELOW:

"Saddam Hussein was tried for the deaths of 280 people in a village and he was hung for it. I think Tony Blair is responsible for a hell of a lot more than 280 people.

"If someone has done something wrong they should pay. If you do the crime you've got to do the time."

Mr Brierley and other relatives were responding to an appeal by inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot for the views of "those most affected by the conflict".

Another relative, Eddie Hancock, whose son Jamie died in Basra in 2006, said there was "a bitterness that borders on hatred" among relatives at Mr Blair's decision to take the UK to war in Iraq.

The families are angry with the former prime minister for using the threat of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction as a justification for Britain's support of the US-led invasion in 2003.

No evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was found.

Mr Hancock told Sir John he hoped his inquiry was "big enough to take down the protectionism surrounding Blair, brick-by-brick if necessary".

Speaking outside the hearing, he said: "I hope that Sir John will have the courage and fortitude and integrity to take no prisoners and I hope he will broaden his very narrow brief, and that will include naming names.

"If Tony Blair is found to be innocent he should be publicly exonerated. If he is found to be guilty and lied to the nation he should get it straight in the neck."

"U.N. Rights Council Endorses Gaza Report" -- But Shame on the U.S.!

Tweet http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/world/middleeast/17nations.html?hp

PART OF ARTICLE BELOW:

The United Nations Human Rights Council voted Thursday to endorse a report detailing evidence of war crimes committed by Israeli forces and Palestinian militants during the Gaza war, moving the inquiry a step closer to the Security Council and possible criminal investigations.

The resolution endorsing the report, which took place after two days of debate, passed by a vote of 25 to 6, with 11 nations abstaining. The resolution, virtually identical to a Palestinian proposal introduced earlier in the week, gained a slimmer margin in the 47-member council than its backers had hoped. Both the United States and Israel have warned that any progress on the report would undermine the prospects for peace talks with the Palestinians.

Most of the developing nations on council voted for the resolution, including the Islamic majority nations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, as well as China, India, Russia and Brazil, whose proposal for a toned-down version of the resolution did not have a significant impact on the adopted text.

Six nations, including the Netherlands, Italy and the United States, voted against the resolution, while five others, including France and Britain, both of which objected to the resolution, were officially recorded as absent and not included in the vote totals at all, according to the secretariat of the council.

“The clock on the report starts now,” said Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority’s United Nations ambassador in Geneva, adding that he hoped the Security Council in New York would take up the report, The Associated Press reported.

The Goldstone report on last winter’s Gaza war — so named for its lead investigator, South African jurist Richard Goldstone — found evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian actions amounted to war crimes, but it was more harshly critical of Israel.

It recommends that the Human Rights Council endorse the report and call on the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, to ask the United Nations Security Council to take up the report’s findings as a threat to the maintenance of international peace and security.

Further, it recommends that Israel and Palestinian authorities be given six months to show that they are conducting credible investigations into the allegations of war crimes. The Security Council is asked to monitor progress during those six months, and refer the charges to the International Criminal Court in the Hague if these domestic investigations are judged as inadequate.

The court’s lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, had no comment Friday on a possible war crimes probe into the Gaza conflict. The Palestinians have separately asked the court to take up the matter.

"Erdogan: Why does West single out Iran"

Tweet http://alethonews.blogspot.com/2009/10/erdogan-why-does-west-single-out-iran.html

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the world powers' constant focus on Iran's nuclear program is not fair.

"We don't want nuclear weapons in this region and this is what we have always called for. We have also voiced this to the Iranian officials and they stress that they don't have any intention of developing nuclear weapons," Erdogan told Al -Arabiya satellite channel.

"They [the Iranians] want to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes because they worry that the traditional energy resourses might not meet their needs in the future," Turkey's Yenisafak newspaper quoted Erdogan as saying on Wednesday.

"Besides, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no evidence indicating that Iran is developing nuclear weapons," he added.

"What upsets me is another thing: why those talking about nuclear weapons always pick on Iran? Why don't they discuss Israel? They only point the finger at Iran and North Korea," Turkey's Prime Minister said.

"We call on them to adopt a just behavior. We urge the UN Security Council and especially its five permanent members to take necessary precautions to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons."

Most experts estimate that Israel has at least between 100 and 200 nuclear warheads, largely based on information leaked to the Sunday Times newspaper in the 1980s by Mordechai Vanunu, a former worker at the country's Dimona nuclear reactor.

Israel, which has initiated several wars in the region in its 60-year history, maintains a policy of ambiguity over its military nuclear capabilities.

Award Winning Short Video: "No Way Through"

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Ctrl.Alt.Shift Film Competition Winner: No Way Through from Ctrl.Alt.Shift on Vimeo.

Israeli Soldiers Repeatedly Run Over & Kill Palestinian Student in WB

Tweet http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=58918&s2=15

JM: Where were you when you heard the news?

MT: On the day Fuad was killed, I was trying to get permission to visit his brother in prison. Fuad's uncle called and told me that something had happened at to my son at the school, and that they were at the hospital and I should try to come as quickly as possible, but he told me that Fuad was fine. He didn't want me to face the pain alone.

When I got to the hospital, I could see that my son was in bad shape -- many tubes were stuck into his body and nose, but he was still alive.

But when I went to stroke Fuad's arms, I could feel him dying inside. I quickly recited a passage from the Quran, to ask God to take my son to heaven. The rest of the family arrived to see Fuad, but the doctors took him away to another room to perform surgery. Unfortunately, it was too late.

JM: Was anyone at the scene when he was injured?

MT: Fuad was standing on the road [of his school] with a group of friends, when the Israeli military jeep suddenly swerved left off the main road toward them. All of his friends jumped out of the way in shock, but Fuad stayed where he was -- he stuck his hands in the air and waved his arms for the jeep to stop.

It ran straight into him, reversed over his body, and then drove forward again crushing Fuad underneath for a third time. All the teachers and boys shouted for the soldiers to stop so they could help their injured friend, but the soldiers instead closed the school gate so that nobody could get to Fuad. The teachers asked the soldiers if they realized what they had just done, but they replied, "We haven't done anything wrong. This is normal."

JM: Why do you think Fuad was killed?

MT: Why? Because he is Palestinian. As the soldiers said, this is normal. The Israeli army doesn't care about the life of any Palestinian, so this can happen any time -- they can kill anyone they like. When they ran Fuad over, they didn't even look under the jeep to see what had happened, but were more interested in closing the school gate so that nobody could help him.

They then called three more jeeps for back-up, and when they drove away, the jeep rode over Fuad's body, still trapped underneath, for a fourth time! This shows their blatant disregard for the lives of Palestinian boys.

One of Fuad's brothers, also a student at the school, saw this and jumped over the school gate to help Fuad, so the soldiers started kicking him and beating him with their guns until he was bleeding from his wounds. They didn't care -- they had murdered one boy, and then they wanted to kill his brother as well.

Fuad was left alone for 40 minutes. He wasn't dead yet, but nobody was allowed forward to help. Afterwards, the soldiers told the teachers that the whole thing was an accident, but still didn't even have the decency to call an ambulance, even though they had one on call just two minutes away. Only once the soldiers thought Fuad was dead did they re-open the school gate and let the people inside go to help him.

Maybe if the soldiers had shot my son I would be able to come to terms with his death, but for it to have happened in such an undignified manner is very difficult for me to comprehend. The road he was standing on is only for the school, and is around 40 meters away from the main road, so when they swerved left so sharply, they did it because they wanted to kill someone. By the time they had run over his body so many times, Fuad's liver was lying on the pavement. My brother wrapped it in plastic so that I wouldn't have to see it.

During the second intifada, there was an accident here in Yabad where an Israeli jeep lost control and flipped over. My brother, Fuad's uncle, saw this happen and went to help them, calling an ambulance and even helping to retrieve their weapons. The soldiers had been involved in an accident, not fighting, and you help anyone in an accident. But when Fuad was lying on the ground, close to his death, and the soldiers claimed it was an accident, they had no interest in calling an ambulance. Furthermore, every Israeli military vehicle has someone who is trained in first aid, in case one of the soldiers is injured, but they refused to help Fuad. All the teachers had cars to drive Fuad to the hospital, but the soldiers prevented them from doing so.

Now, none of the students want to go back to school, because they are afraid that they will be the next victim of this occupation. All the fathers want to send their children to different schools.

"Tony Blair and the Business of Covering up War Crimes" -- Jim Holstun, The Electronic Intifada

Tweet Part of this enraging article below; whole article here: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10827.shtml

On 7 October 2009, Tony Blair gave a lecture at a New York university. In responding to an unexpectedly direct student question, he publicly joined, for the first time, the US and Israeli Zionist consensus rejecting the Goldstone report.

On 27 June 2007, Blair left his job as UK prime minister under the cloud of the war on Iraq that he had concocted with former US President George W. Bush. Just hours later, he assumed his new position as the Special Envoy to the Mideast Quartet (EU, Russia, UN, US). He had long been a Zionist and a member of Labor Friends of Israel, and he received heartfelt farewells-and-hellos from Ehud Olmert ("A true friend of the State of Israel") and Tzipi Livni ("a very-well appreciated figure in Israel"). Palestinians living under Israeli occupation did not find this a very a promising development.

Though Blair spends only a week a month in the Middle East, he has managed to keep busy. He maintains a grueling, globe-trotting schedule of lectures, for which he receives up to $500,000. On top of this, he has been at work on his memoirs, for which he received a $7.3 million advance. Consulting work brought him $3.2 million (including a bonus) from J. P. Morgan Chase and $800,000 from Zurich Financial Services. By October 2008, he had amassed at least $19 million, far outdistancing even the enterprising Bill Clinton. He is thought to be the highest paid public speaker in the world.

Blair's schedule has caused some concern in the Middle East. His office insists that his "current role in the Middle East takes up the largest proportion of his time," but in late 2008, a Western diplomat in Jerusalem wondered if "his overstretchedness has produced a tactical blunder," while a UN official in Jerusalem said, "There is a general sense that he is not around" ("Lectures see Tony Blair earnings jump over #12," The Times, 29 October 2008). In September 2008, a coalition of Mideast aid groups accused the Quartet of "losing its grip," adding that its "failings could have serious ramifications for implementing international law around the globe" ("Aid groups: Tony Blair faces imminent failure in Middle East," The Times, 25 September 2008).

On 27 December 2008, Israel launched the Gaza massacre, which it dubbed "Operation Cast Lead." Eight days later, when asked about Blair's reaction, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown explained, "Tony's on holiday at the moment." While Blair found time to attend a private opening of the new Armani store in Knightsbridge, he found none to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, thus recalling his silence during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon ("As Gaza is torn apart by war, where is Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair? He's been on holiday," Daily Mail, 5 January 2009). In early January, Blair flew to Israel, but he did not condemn the Israeli assault. In February 2009, while Palestinians in Gaza were still digging themselves out and mourning their dead, he accepted a $1 million prize from Tel Aviv University as the "Laureate for the Present Time Dimension in the field of Leadership" (Press release, 2009 Dan David Prize, 17 February 2009).

On 1 March 2009, he finally made it to Gaza. He conceded "a huge amount of damage" and the deaths of "large numbers of civilians," but rejected as "not very sensible" any discussion of disproportionality in Israel's attacks ("Blair shocked at devastation on first Gaza visit as envoy," The Scotsman, 2 March 2009). Blair did not meet with Hamas leaders, and his visit to Gaza lasted only a few hours, for he had to make a pilgrimage to Sderot, the Gilad Shalit of western Negev settlements ("Middle East envoy Tony Blair in Gaza for first time," The Independent, 1 March 2009). In June, he visited Gaza a second time and, as proof of his deep humanitarian instincts, went so far as to say that the Palestinians were in a "tough situation" ("Former British PM Blair Visits Gaza Strip," Voice of America News, 15 June 2009).

On 15 September 2009, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, chaired by Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa, issued its 575-page report entitled "Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories." For three weeks after the Goldstone report's publication, Blair said nothing about it in public. Then, on 7 October 2009, he spoke at SUNY Buffalo (UB), where I teach, to a huge audience in the university's Distinguished Speakers Series. I didn't hear the lecture, for I was outside in a free speech corral (the first one to have appeared on my campus) with a group protesting Blair's invitation and his enormous lecture fee of $150,000, as confirmed to me by his exclusive agent, the Washington Speakers Bureau.

"A Bullet Journey" (for Hazza Shadid) & Something We Can Do About It

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A Bullet Journey??

film by Osama Qashoo

This film is a personal story made in memory of my friend Haza' who was killed while we were together. I was filming when one single bullet hit his heart, terminating his life forever and changing the lives of all those who knew him.

I managed to capture some footage of his death and in this film I am trying to show the journey of a bullet and the effect it leaves behind. It is a film to humanize those who are being killed by bullets so they are not seen only as numbers.

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On 11th October 2009, activists protested inside Sainsbury’s on Cromwell Street, West London to highlight the sale of Israeli and illegal Settlement produce by both Sainsbury’s and other major supermarket chains across the UK.

"You've Blood on Your Hands, Blair Told at Iraq Memorial"

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Original (via Citizens for Legitimate Gov't): http://www.scotsman.com/latestnews/You39ve-blood-on-your-hands.5721596.jp

FORMER prime minister Tony Blair was publicly snubbed by a bereaved father yesterday who accused him of having "blood on his hands" for sending troops to fight in Iraq.

Mr Blair, who has repeatedly defended his decision to lead Britain into the conflict, was rebuked by Peter Brierley, whose son, Lance Corporal Shaun Brierley, 28, was killed in 2003.

The clash came at a reception for guests who had attended a commemoration service marking the end of Operation Telic – the Iraq campaign – and honouring the 179 British personnel who died during the six-year conflict.

Mr Brierley refused to shake Mr Blair's outstretched hand at the event staged at the Guildhall in London and told the politician: "I'm not shaking your hand, you've got blood on it."

The former prime minister was ushered away and afterwards Mr Brierley, from Batley, West Yorkshire, said: "I understand soldiers go to war and die but they have to go to war for a good reason and be properly equipped to fight. I believe Tony Blair is a war criminal. I can't bear to be in the same room as him. I can't believe he's been allowed to come to this reception.

"I believe he's got the blood of my son and all of the other men and women who died out there on his hands."

His son was a 28-year-old radio systems operator with 212 Signal Squadron when he was killed in a road traffic accident in March 2003 in Kuwait while serving in Operation Telic.

Mr Blair had joined the Queen, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Iraq veterans and bereaved families at the St Paul's Cathedral service.

During his address, the Archbishop of Canterbury criticised "policy makers" for failing to consider the cost of the Iraq war.

Dr Rowan Williams, who has previously described the decisions that led to the conflict as "flawed", praised the "patient and consistent" efforts of troops on the ground.

The senior cleric said: "Many people of my generation and younger grew up doubting whether we should ever see another straightforward international conflict, fought by a standing army with conventional weapons.

"We had begun to forget the realities of cost. And when such conflict appeared on the horizon, there were those among both policy makers and commentators who were able to talk about it without really measuring the price, the cost of justice."

The Archbishop alluded to the controversial nature of the conflict, which brought hundreds of thousands of people on to the streets in protest in the run up to the war.

He said: "In a world as complicated as ours has become, it would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be."

But Dr Williams went on to praise the efforts of the forces on the ground, who he said were really the ones with the task of upholding Britain's "moral credibility".

The service was a solemn event where prayers were said for the fallen and a marble plaque from the Basra Memorial Wall – dedicated to the 179 British personnel who died – was blessed by the Archbishop as the monument is to be moved to the UK's National Memorial Arboretum.

Among the congregation were senior royals including the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales, Duchess of Cornwall, Prince William, the Earl and Countess of Wessex and the Princess Royal.

Obama Wins the Peace Prize -- Mr. Fish

Tweet http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/
(thanks Elliot)

On Obama's Peace Prize

Tweet UPDATE: Tom Lehrer said when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel: "Irony has died." The PULSE blog says it has died again. Here's the kind of diplomacy which Nobel seem to like:



*************

From on-point:

Khaled Al-Batsh, a leader of the militant Islamic Jihad in Gaza, condemned the award, saying it “shows these prizes are political, not governed by the principles of credibility, values and morals,” Reuters reported. “Why should Obama be given a peace prize while his country owns the largest nuclear arsenal on earth and his soldiers continue to shed innocent blood in Iraq and Afghanistan?”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/world-reaction-to-a-nobel-surprise/?hp

Another on-point:

myron c.

nh

October 9th, 2009

6:27 am

John Prine was wrong. A flag decal will get you into heaven.

Do people not realize that President Obama is the Commander in Chief of a military action against two countries? Is war truly peace?

To (justifiable) ridicule:

moose6 wrote:

heathergreeneyes wrote:
Didn't Obama just bomb the moon too?////

Well to be fair the moon had it coming. Sitting up there in the heavens. Looking down on us smugly. Controlling the tides. He needed to get taken down a peg or two. No celestial body should have that much power. ;)

Comments to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/09/AR2009100902278.html

"Obama's Witchhunt" (Wrong Time to Be Muslim in America) -- Stephen Lendman

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Parts of article below; whole article here: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15469

The FBI's top six news stories for the week ending September 25 were about arrests and/or indictments of suspected Muslim terrorists. Combined, they became the latest national security targets in America's war on Islam.

Waged relentlessly since 9/11, it continues unabated under Obama for the same political advantage George Bush sought by stoking fear to be used as a pretext to wage imperial wars and crack down ruthlessly at home with police state efficiency - today against Muslims, Latino immigrants, environmental and animal rights activists, and street protestors, tomorrow against anyone voicing dissent.

******

According to The New York Times, he was born on August 10, 1985 in a small Eastern Afghanistan village. In 1991 or 1992, his family moved to the Peshawar area of Pakistan - "ground zero in the US jihadist war and home to many Al-Queda operatives," according to the DOJ.

In the early 1990s, Mohammed Zazi, his father, came to Flushing, New York, drove a cab, worked 12-hour shifts, lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and prayed at the nearby Hazrat Abu Bakr Mosque. The younger Zazi was much like others in his high school, but he did poorly in his studies and dropped out before graduating. According to his step-uncle, Mr. Rasooli, "He was a dumb kid, believe me," but tried to make enough money to help his father.

He worked as a coffee cart vendor on New York streets, and said he drove back to New York to clear up related issues. According to an old customer, Imran Khan, he was back at his regular spot on the morning of September 11, 2009. Khan and others saw him joking and laughing with some old regulars, not heading off to detonate bombs.

In addition, an acquaintance named Rahul recalled Zazi saying about the 9/11 attacks: "I don't know how people could do things like this. I'd never do anything like that." Other friends agreed that he abhorred violence and called terrorism at odds with the teachings of Islam. He was a devout Muslim, grew his beard long, and occasionally wore tunics instead of more Western-style clothes.

On a 2006 trip to Pakistan, he married and hoped later to be able to afford to bring his new wife to America. Each year, he flew back to see her, including on August 28, 2008, the FBI-announced trip in its press release. Two months after he returned the following January, he filed for bankruptcy and moved to Colorado to live more cheaply and be close to an aunt and uncle in Aurora.

He worked as a shuttle van driver at Denver International Airport, applied for a limousine license, underwent an airport background check, then drove a van for the Big Sky Company and later ABC Transportation. In July, 2009, his parents left New York and joined him.

On September 25, New York Times writer Michael Wilson headlined his story, "From Smiling Coffee Vendor to Terror Suspect, and said:

"according to federal investigators, (Zazi worked on bomb materials) in a hotel suite he rented in Aurora," but unexplained was how he could afford it on his small income along with his regular apartment. Yet, investigators "say chemical residue they found in the kitchen there indicates he tried to heat up the beauty supplies (he bought) to help convert them in a bomb." But unexplained was how someone called "dumb" would be smart enough to make bombs for potentially the "biggest terror case since 9/11," according to CBS News. In federal court on September 29, he pleaded not guilty to all charges, but was held without bail pending trial

After Goldstone, Hamas Faces Fateful Choice -- Ali Abunimah

Tweet http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10821.shtml

The uproar over the Palestinian Authority's (PA) collaboration with Israel to bury the Goldstone report, calling for trials of Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza, is a political earthquake. The whole political order in place since the 1993 Oslo accords were signed is crumbling. As the initial tremors begin to fade, the same old political structures may appear still to be in place, but they are hollowed out. This unprecedented crisis threatens to topple the US-backed PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, but it also leaves Hamas, the main Palestinian resistance faction, struggling with fateful choices.

Abbas, accustomed to being surrounded by corrupt cronies, sycophants and yes-men, badly misjudged the impact of his decision -- under Israeli and American instructions -- to withdraw PA support for the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, forwarding the Goldstone report for further action. After all, the PA had actively sabotaged measures supporting Palestinian rights at the UN on at least two occasions in recent years without much reaction.

This time, torrents of protest and outrage flowed from almost every direction. It was as if all the suppressed anger and grief about PA collaboration with Israel during the massacres in Gaza last winter suddenly burst through a dam. "The crime at Geneva cannot pass without all those responsible being held accountable," the widely-read London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi stated in its lead editorial on 8 October. The newspaper called for the removal of Abbas and his associates who betrayed the victims of Israel's massacres and "saved Israel from the most serious moral, political and legal crisis it has faced since its establishment."

Naming collaboration -- even treason -- for what it is has always been a painful taboo among Palestinians, as for all occupied peoples. It took the French decades after World War II to begin to speak openly about the extent of collaboration that took place with the Nazi-backed Vichy government. Abbas and his militias -- who for a long time have been armed and trained by Israel, the United States and so-called "moderate" Arab states to wage war against the Palestinian resistance -- have relied on this taboo to carry out their activities with increasing brazenness and brutality. But the taboo no longer affords protection, as calls for Abbas' removal and even trial issued from Palestinian organizations all over the world.

Hamas too seems to have been taken by surprise at the strength of reaction. Hamas leaders were critical of Abbas' withdrawal of the Goldstone resolution, but initially this was notably muted. Early on, Khaled Meshal, the movement's overall leader, insisted that despite the Goldstone fiasco, Hamas would proceed with Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks with Fatah and smaller factions scheduled for later in the month, stating that reaching a power-sharing deal remained a "national interest."

As the tremors continued, however, Hamas leaders escalated their rhetoric -- seemingly following, not leading, public opinion. Mahmoud Zahar, a prominent Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, labeled Abbas a "traitor" and urged that he be stripped of his Palestinian nationality. Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, speaking before a hastily convened session of the Palestinian Legislative Council, said Abbas was personally responsible for the "crime" committed in Geneva, and a senior officer from the Hamas-controlled Gaza police force held a press conference to announce that Abbas and his associates would be subject to arrest if they set foot in Gaza.

All of this puts Hamas in a bind. Before the Goldstone report crisis, Hamas had signaled that it accepted the most recent Egyptian proposals for reconciliation. The Egyptian position paper can be described as technocratic -- it deals with mechanisms for elections, release of prisoners, the formation of committees and other matters. It does not resolve core political and philosophical differences over the role of resistance and armed struggle, which Abbas rejects and Hamas defends. Nor does it deal with the problem of PA "security coordination" with Israel which has resulted in the killing and arrest by the PA of numerous Palestinian resistance fighters and the closure of hundreds of Palestinian organizations and charities.

Despite the remaining gulf, Hamas wanted to sign a unity deal. Being part of a Western-recognized PA would be Hamas' ticket to the "peace process" -- something Meshal has made no secret that Hamas seeks, although on its own terms. Abbas was less keen on a unity deal, as he and his cronies still resist dealing with Hamas as a political force that has popular legitimacy. But after Goldstone, Abbas needs Hamas.

Hamas now cannot have it both ways: it cannot talk about "unity" and "reconciliation" with people that it -- and many Palestinians -- view as "traitors." To seek unity with such people is in effect to say that Hamas wishes to join a government of traitors. For the moment, Hamas is buying time and has asked Egypt to postpone the scheduled Cairo meeting later this month.

Hamas' long-term strategy of trying to join the slowly crumbling edifice of the Palestinian Authority now makes no sense. It now seems more likely that the deal will not go ahead, although Hamas is maneuvering to avoid blame, and to maintain its lifeline to Egypt, which backs Fatah. Perhaps the more likely outcome, at least in the short term, is a continued stalemate, where Abbas, now entirely dependent on Israeli and American forces to remain in power, limps on even though he has no legitimacy or credibility, and is widely despised.

The more difficult question for Hamas will be, what comes next? Will it try to muddle through as it has, or will it rally the Palestinian public to oppose and resist Abbas until the collaborationist PA is dissolved? This would be an enormous strategic shift -- Hamas would likely have to drop the trappings of "government" it has taken up since it won the 2006 legislative elections and return to its roots as a social movement and a clandestine organization.

It will not have much time to decide where it is going. The hopes raised by the Obama Administration's initial foray into peacemaking have been dashed in the wake of Obama's surrender to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over settlements, even though US Middle East envoy George Mitchell continues with utterly sterile "diplomacy" aimed at bringing the rejectionist Israeli government face to face in "negotiations" with the political corpse of Abbas. As Israel accelerates its colonization of the West Bank and its ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, there is increasing talk of a new intifada.

The political collapse underway offers all Palestinians -- including Hamas -- a new opportunity: to build a broad-based, internationally legitimate popular resistance movement that mobilizes all of Palestinian society as the first intifada did, and to reconnect with Palestinians inside Israel who face an existential threat from escalating Israeli racism. This movement must work with and enhance the global solidarity campaign to put maximum pressure on Israel -- and its collaborators -- to end their repression, racism and violence, and hasten the emancipation of all the people of Palestine.

Israel May Ban Islamic Movement -- Jonathan Cook

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http://www.jkcook.net/Articles3/0431.htm#Top

NAZARETH, ISRAEL // The Israeli government announced yesterday it would consider banning Israel’s Islamic Movement at the next cabinet meeting, in a significant escalation of tensions that have fuelled a fortnight of bloody clashes in Jerusalem over access to the Haram al Sharif compound of mosques.

The move followed the arrest of the movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, on Tuesday on suspicion of incitement and sedition. Police accused Sheikh Salah of calling for a “religious war” in recent statements in which he warned that Israel was seeking a takeover of the Haram, which includes the al Aqsa mosque.

Sheikh Salah was released a few hours later on condition that he stay away from Jerusalem for 30 days. The decision was widely interpreted as a move to damp down a possible backlash from Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, many of whom regard the sheikh as a spiritual leader. Police were deployed in large numbers throughout Jerusalem yesterday.

An Islamic Movement spokesman, Zadi Nujeidat, told the Haaretz newspaper: “We will continue our activities and call for a continued presence in and around the mosque. We are used to arrests.”

The move against the Islamic Movement follows a series of pronouncements from Sheikh Salah, echoing statements from Palestinian officials in the occupied territories, that have infuriated the Israeli government.

This week he called on Muslims who could reach the compound – access to which has been heavily restricted by the Israeli police – to “shield the [al Aqsa] mosque with their bodies”. Sheikh Salah himself has been barred by the courts from entering the Haram compound for several months.

At his annual “Al Aqsa is in danger” rally in his hometown of Umm al Fahm in northern Israel last week, he warned tens of thousands of supporters that Israel was trying to prise away control of the compound from the Islamic religious authorities. He added that, should Israel force a choice between martyrdom and renouncing al Aqsa, “we will clearly choose to be martyrs”.

Like many other Palestinian leaders, Sheikh Salah fears that, as well as “Judaising” East Jerusalem, Israel is engineering a takeover of the Haram – known to Jews as the Temple Mount because the remains of the destroyed first and second Jewish temples are believed to lie under the mosques.

He has raised repeated concerns that Israel is secretly digging under the mosques, as it did before opening the Western Wall tunnels in 1996. Then, clashes led to the deaths of 75 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers.

A delegation of Palestinian leaders from inside Israel who visited the compound yesterday warned that there was strong evidence of such excavations.

In an interview with Haaretz on Monday, Sheikh Salah also warned against “infiltration of extremist Jewish elements” into the compound – a reference to Messianic cults that want the mosques destroyed so a third temple can be built.

Muslim leaders throughout the region have expressed growing concern that the Israeli police are secretly escorting such groups into the compound following a decision by Israel in 2003 to allow non-Muslims to visit the Haram without oversight from the Islamic authorities.

Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, meanwhile, are unable to reach Jerusalem, and Israel has increasingly limited access to the mosques for Palestinians with Israeli IDs.

During clashes at the compound on Sunday, the Islamic Movement’s deputy, Kamal Khatib, and the Palestinian Authority’s minister in charge of Jerusalem, Hatem Abdel Khader, were arrested. Both were released on bail and banned from Jerusalem for 15 days.

Calls from Israeli officials for Sheikh Salah’s arrest and restrictions on the Islamic Movement have been growing all week.

The deputy prime minister, Silvan Shalom, of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, told Israel Radio on Tuesday: “Sheikh Raed Salah should be behind bars.”

The cabinet meeting on Sunday will discuss a law to ban the Islamic Movement being drafted by the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister. The bill is expected to be presented to ministers a week later.

The interior minister, Eli Yishai, of the Shas party, announced on Tuesday he would withdraw funding for imams who “incited” against Israel and was investigating whether he could fire them.

The Islamic Movement has rapidly grown in popularity by focusing on charitable and welfare work and has won control of several councils since the 1980s.

Despite eschewing terrorism, the movement is regarded with great suspicion by Israeli officials, who have shut down its charities and newspaper on several occasions. Sheikh Salah and four other leaders of the Islamic Movement were arrested in 2003 accused of supporting terrorism but released two years later in a plea bargain that significantly reduced the charges.

It is unclear how Israel would ban the Islamic Movement.

Analysts say the government could use the 1945 emergency regulations from British rule but the move would be unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny. Traditionally, the security establishment has argued that it is better not to push the Islamic Movement underground.

The US state department was reported this week to have expressed concern to Israel that it and the Palestinian Authority not “inflame tensions” over the Haram al Sharif.

"Palestinians seek new Leadership, Independence"

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http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/palestinian-refugees/2545-palestinians-in-london-call-for-accountability-over-goldstone-report-dilemma

Gaza, October 8, 2009 (Pal Telegraph) - Palestinian Return Center (PRC) held an urgent meeting in London, yesterday evening, to discuss the consequences of the withdrawal of the Goldstone report before submitting it to UN Human Rights Council of the United Nations. The meeting also discussed the needed and required Palestinian united position in response. A number of Palestinian Organizations, politicians and academics participated in the meeting where a constructive discussion took place for nearly 2 hours.

The participants came out with a number of recommendations in an attempt to face the recent challenges facing the Palestinians.

They have strongly condemned the Palestinian Authority for its "harassing" decision and requested an immediate accountability against those responsible.

"We call for immediate general elections that include all Palestinians in the occupied Palestine and outside. The elections would lead to form a new Palestinian National council that will elect a new leadership and executive committee to lead the Palestinian nation towards getting its rights and demands." Participants said

The Palestinian Unity was on the agenda as they have considered it is key and strategic objective towards achieving Palestinian goals and gaining back all rights. According to them, "Palestinian entire unity is a priority on basis of holding all responsible people accountable for their gross and flagrant mistakes against their people and their rights."

We call on all Palestinians to keep defending Jerusalem particularly after the last Israeli attacks and attempts to crack down the Palestinian existence in the city through the Judaizing policy.

Palestinians, from all factions including members of Fatah party, have strongly criticized the Goldstone vote postponement, holding Abbas responsible for the decision which was in their view a flagrant mistake.

It's remarkable that the Goldstone report issued late in September identifies war crimes committed during Israel's war on Gaza between last December and January. Israel was about to be criminalized but the postponement of the report would emphasize its abilities to sneak out from accountability.

Israeli launched a full-scale offensive in Gaza that left at least 1,400 Palestinians killed and over 5000 injured. The entire infrastructure in Gaza was destroyed as Israeli attacks targeted schools, hospitals, streets, water wills, sewage system, farms and police stations.

Qalqilya: Prison City -- Palestine Monitor

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No town in the West Bank suffers more restrictions than Qalqilya. The population is surrounded on all four sides by the wall, which separates them from their farmland and source of income. Nearby a large Israeli settlement plunders more essential resources. Worse still is the security which accompanies these structures, with dozens of checkpoints policing the town and nearby villages. Many of these serve no purpose at all, closing months after they appear, often in bizarre locations between Arabic villages.

Fortunately there is Machsom watch, a group of Israeli women dedicated to challenging checkpoints and land seizures. We spent a day travelling the area with them to see how these restrictions affect the population.

*********

It’s now 2pm and schools have closed for the day. A young boy waits while Israeli soldiers finish a lunch of hummus and olives. Eventually one of the men gets up long enough to wave him through, before returning to his lounge chair in the shade. Four Palestinian men sit on the street beside them, one is handcuffed and the others, his friends, are waiting for him to be released. It’s not the same man arrested before, who was released after Dalya called the soldier’s superiors to complain. This prisoner has been detained for attempting to reach his family in a neighbouring village.

To read whole report on QalQilya, go here: http://palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article1103

"Marx and Lenin Revisited" -- Paul Craig Roberts

Tweet Sometimes Mr. Roberts' hyperbole is off-putting. But his explanation of current dire economic events below -- including real unemployment over 21% -- rings too true to be shrugged off. Sometimes you just have to believe your eyes. Linda J. Read the whole article here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23643.htm

October 06, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics.

Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production of goods to financial capital’s accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments. Their predictions are far superior to the “risk models” for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.

In this first decade of the 21st century there has been no increase in the real incomes of working Americans. There has been a sharp decline in their wealth. In the 21st century Americans have suffered two major stock market crashes and the destruction of their real estate wealth.

Some studies have concluded that the real incomes of Americans, except for the financial oligarchy of the super rich, are less today than in the 1980s and even the 1970s. I have not examined these studies of family income to determine whether they are biased by the rise in divorce and percentage of single parent households. However, for the last decade it is clear that real take-home pay has declined.

The main cause of this decline is the offshoring of US high value-added jobs. Both manufacturing jobs and professional services, such as software engineering and information technology work, have been relocated in countries with large and cheap labor forces.

The wipeout of middle class jobs was disguised by the growth in consumer debt. As Americans’ incomes ceased to grow, consumer debt expanded to take the place of income growth and to keep consumer demand rising. Unlike rises in consumer incomes due to productivity growth, there is a limit to debt expansion. When that limit is reached, the economy ceases to grow.

The immiseration of working people has not resulted from worsening crises of over-production of goods and services, but from financial capital’s power to force the relocation of production for domestic markets to foreign shores. Wall Street’s pressures, including pressures from takeovers, forced American manufacturing firms to “increase shareholders’ earnings.” This was done by substituting cheap foreign labor for American labor.

Corporations offshored or outsourced abroad their manufacturing output, thus divorcing American incomes from the production of the goods that they consume. The next step in the process took advantage of the high speed Internet to move professional service jobs, such as engineering, abroad. The third step was to replace the remains of the domestic work force with foreigners brought in at one-third the salary on H-1B, L-1, and other work visas.

This process by which financial capital destroyed the job prospects of Americans was covered up by “free market” economists, who received grants from offshoring firms in exchange for propaganda that Americans would benefit from a “New Economy” based on financial services, and by shills in the education business, who justified work visas for foreigners on the basis of the lie that America produces a shortage of engineers and scientists.

In Marx’s day, religion was the opiate of the masses. Today the media is. Let’s look at media reporting that facilitates the financial oligarchy’s ability to delude the people.

The financial oligarchy is hyping a recovery while American unemployment and home foreclosures are rising. The hype owes its credibility to the high positions from which it comes, to the problems in payroll jobs reporting that overstate employment, and to disposal into the memory hole of any American unemployed for more than one year.

This Is Clear -- Angry Arab Newservice

Tweet http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/10/this-is-clear.html

For all the supporters of Palestine around the world, no effort on behalf of the Palestinian people is serious or effective if it does not target the Israeli occupation and their Palestinian collaborators. Activists for Palestine can't avoid to target and condemn the collaborationist regime in Ramallah. This is like opposing the Nazis but not opposing the Nazi collaborators. The PA collaborators have successfully convinced a few in the solidarity movement to avoid condemnation of the PA in the name of Palestinian unity. There is no unity, and there should not be unity, if it means an alliance with or recognition of the PA collaborationist regime. And what does Hamas do? Hamas never acts intelligently, in this matter or in any matter. I saw a Hamas official criticizing the PA stance in Geneva and then in the same statement express determination to continue the dialogue with Fath in Cairo. The struggle for Palestine has to take a new shape, and new language should be devised. People who have been long time supporters for Palestine should be aware that the Fath Movement today is different from the one that existed in the 1960s and 1970s. Fath is no more than armed collaborationist gangs that kill the Palestinian people on behalf of the Israeli state to minimize deaths to the occupiers. And notice that the new language of the Ramallah regime: the new buzz word is "khata'" (mistake or error). This is not mistake or error. A mistake is when you press the wrong button in the elevator. This is betrayal and treason.

PSC at Indigenous People's Day at Canadian Border

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Michelle K. and Linda J. took PSC solidarity greetings and the Leonard Peltier banner to IPD at the Border. It was a building year -- we were told that last year only about 5 folks attended. This year there was 20.

Michelle gave greetings from PSC and explained some of the connections between the plight of the Palestinians and Indigenous people here in the U.S. There were some Canadians folks at the gathering also. The MC congratulated Michelle on her remarks.

Hopefully next year, the event will grow again.

Linda J.

Bereaved Gaza Strip Families Demand Answers -- Ma'an News

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Samouni siblings [MaanImages]

http://www.uruknet.info/index.php?p=58545
October 3, 2009

Gaza – Ma’an – Families of Gaza war victims voiced their disappointment with the Palestinian request to postpone discussion of the Goldstone report at the UN Human Rights Council.

"This is not a political issue," they said, countering US demands leading to the quashing of the resolution that the report "be discussed in a constructive and non-divisive manner."

In Jabaliya, the Samounis, Baloushas, Subbehs, As-Silawis, Rayyans and Abed Rabbos demanded respect for the Goldstone report, and that Israel be taken to the International Criminal Court for its actions.

"This is a purely humanitarian issue," they insisted at a news conference in the Al-Salam neighborhood, "If Israeli leaders are not held accountable this could happen again."

"No one has the right to give up on our rights," one member of the Samouni family said. He had been with the over 50 Samouni men, women and children trapped in one home, who lost 26 members including 10 children and seven women over the course of just over a day on 3 January.

A member of the Rayyan family, whose patriarch Nizar Rayyan was a Hamas leader, lost Nizar’s four wives and ten children, Hayam Timraz, Nawal Kahlout, Eyman Kassab, Sherin Udwan, and ten of his children, Ghassan, Abdul-Qadir, Ayah, Maryam, Zaynab, Abdul-Rahman, Aysha, Halima, Osama and Reem who were between four and 17 years old. All 14 were killed, along with Nizar in the first days of January.

One of Nizar’s surviving children said she had been looking forward to seeing the Israeli leaders who ordered the strike on her family home put on trial for their crime.

Mr Balousha, father of the five Balousha sisters killed in the Imad Aqil Mosque where they were taking shelter on 29 December 2008, called the decision by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s delegate to the UN one that was "not in the interest of the Palestinian people."

The Abed Rabbo family, who lost two daughters when Israeli soldiers opened fire at close range while Khalid Abed Rabbo, his wife, mother and three children left their home holding white flags. They had run out of food. A third daughter and his mother were injured in the attack. Khalid spoke at the demonstration and denounced the role of the Palestinian Authority in postponing discussion of the Goldstone report.

The family of journalist Omar As-Silawi, who was killed when his home was targeted by Israeli airstrikes, now live in a tent because there are no reconstruction supplies allowed into Gaza. A relative of Omar said "the crime committed in Gaza is the largest and the ugliest and cannot be ignored."

The Subehs, whose home was also destroyed in the war, joined the demonstration and the bereaved families stood together and demanded rights organizations intervene to "put a stop to the Palestinian leadership’s decision" and demand Israeli leaders be put on trial.

Answering Critics of the Boycott Movement -- Electronic Intifada

Tweet The first part of the article answers the question of why we are not boycotting other bad acting countries besides Israel. Then this about why boycott can work as a way to an honest dialogue.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10805.shtml

Boycott is dialogue

Since the signing of the Oslo accords in 1994, many have walked down the path of dialogue -- I tried it for several years -- and found this to be a strategy to stall for time while the Israeli government was building facts on the ground. We saw dialogue become the slogan for former criminals to clean their bloody hands and appear as peaceful while they continued their strategies of oppression; Israeli President Shimon Peres has been the master of such tactics. I found on college campuses in the US where I studied that dialogue was a way to neutralize confrontation and sanitize a dirty conflict. But avoiding confrontation favors the status quo, and the status quo has been, until BDS, in favor of occupation.

The boycott movement is, to be sure, against this dialogue, but not dialogue in an absolute sense. In fact, at its very core, BDS is a movement that is premised on dialogue and of re-appropriating the meaning of dialogue to its rightful place -- one that sees a communication between two equal partners and not one where the occupier can force demands and dictate terms to the occupied. BDS is supposed to foster dialogue by locating those who are committed to real and consistent struggle against Zionism -- and this is most appropriately seen not in economic forms of boycott but in cultural and academic boycott where artists, musicians, filmmakers, academics and other cultural figures are able to come together, converse and build networks in the face of oppressive institutions that are the real target of these boycotts. Where economic boycott creates economic pressure, cultural boycott fosters dialogue and communication precisely because it shames and shuns those that directly collaborate with the Israeli government and its institutions.

The power of all these forms of BDS is in their recognition that true justice can only be achieved when Israelis and Palestinians work together for a common cause, when they realize that their struggle is shared, and when Israelis understand that they must sacrifice alongside Palestinians if they want true peace. The power of BDS is that it offers an alternative to the national struggles of Hamas and Fatah, and calls on Israelis to join Palestinians in their struggle, and to move beyond the comfort zone of preaching peace, and into the realm of action that requires a "no business as usual" attitude. Indeed, BDS provides the means to generate a new movement that can respond to the main Palestinian political parties that have made a mockery of a people's right to resist, despite their achievements of the past. A significant part of this is that BDS enables a discourse that moves beyond "ending the occupation" to place demands for the right of return and equal rights for Palestinians in Israel as top priorities.

If Israelis and Palestinians can build a movement together, can struggle together, then this movement will embody the world they wish to create, one that is shared. Thus, BDS is not a tactic for a national movement; as it gains strength it will prove to have foes on both sides of the nationalist divide. Its power as a tactic lies in its ability to foster a movement that challenges nationalist discourse. It can create the conditions to make possible a movement that recognizes that while national self-determination remains a central element in a world ruled by antagonistic nationalisms, it should not be constrained by traditional notions of nationalism based on superiority and ethnic exclusion, or by the force of current political parties. In this way, BDS is not anti-dialogue, on the contrary, it is a call out to Israelis to be partners in struggle. It is a call out to Israelis to take a step forward towards envisioning collectively an alternative relationship in the land of Israel-Palestine.

It is time to step out of our comfort zones, to confront, to not be satisfied in talking about tolerance and dialogue for the sake of dialogue. It is time to realize that people already recognize the humanity of the other, but that politics intervene to ensure "we" do not grant "them" this humanity. It is time to realize that it is not the Israeli who is targeted by BDS, but the Israeli government and Israeli institutions that collaborate in the occupation of the Palestinians, and degrade and demonize them. Finally, it is time to realize that BDS is a winnable, nonviolent strategy precisely because it works on slowly changing attitudes and building bridges towards a common vision of justice and equality, and because it creates a real feeling of loss, therefore real pressure, on Israeli governments and institutions, that go beyond the lip service of the "peace process."

"Abbas Helps Israel Bury Its Crimes in Gaza" -- Ali Abunimah

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Just when it seemed that the Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader Mahmoud Abbas could not sink any lower in their complicity with Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the murderous blockade of Gaza, Ramallah has dealt a further stunning blow to the Palestinian people.

The Abbas delegation to the United Nations in Geneva (officially representing the moribund Palestine Liberation Organization) abandoned a resolution requesting the Human Rights Council to forward Judge Richard Goldstone's report on war crimes in Gaza to the UN Security Council for further action. Although the PA acted under US pressure, there are strong indications that the commercial interests of Palestinian and Gulf businessmen closely linked to Abbas also played a part.

The 575-page Goldstone report documents evidence of shocking Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity during last winter's assault on the Gaza Strip which killed 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority noncombatants and hundreds of them children. The report also accuses the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas of war crimes for firing rockets into Israel that killed three civilians.

Goldstone's report was hailed by Palestinians and supporters of the rule of law worldwide as a watershed; it called for suspects to be held accountable before international courts if Israel failed to prosecute them. Israel has no history, ever, of holding its political and military leaders judicially accountable for war crimes against the Palestinians.

Israel was rightly terrified of the report, mobilizing all its diplomatic and political resources to discredit it. In recent days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that if the report were acted on, it would "strike a severe blow to the war against terrorism," and "strike a fatal blow to the peace process, because Israel will no longer be able to take additional steps and take risks for peace if its right to self-defense is denied."

Unsurprisingly, an early ally in the Israeli campaign for impunity was the Obama Administration, whose UN ambassador, Susan Rice, expressed "very serious concerns" about the report and trashed Goldstone's mandate as "unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable." (Rice was acting true to her word; in April she told the newspaper Politico that one of the main reasons the Obama Administration decided to join the UN Human Rights Council was to fight what she called "the anti-Israel crap.")

Goldstone, whose daughter has publicly described her father as a Zionist who loves Israel, is a former judge of the South African Supreme Court, and a highly respected international jurist. He was the chief prosecutor at UN war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

That the Goldstone report was a severe blow to Israel's ability to commit future war crimes with impunity is not in doubt; this week bolstered by the report, lawyers in the UK asked a court to issue an arrest warrant for visiting Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. That action did not succeed, but Israel's government has taken extraordinary measures in recent months to try to shield its officials from prosecution, fearing that successful arrests are just a matter of time. Along with the growing international campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, the fear of ending up in The Hague seems to be the only thing that causes the Israeli government and society to reconsider their destructive path.

One would think, then, that the self-described representatives of the Palestinian people would not casually throw away this weapon. And yet, according to Abbas ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi, the Ramallah PA shelved its effort at the request of the Americans because "We don't want to create an obstacle for them."

Khraishi's excuse that the resolution is merely being deferred until the spring does not pass muster. Unless action is taken now, the Goldstone report will be buried by then and evidence of Israel's crimes -- necessary for prosecutions -- may be harder to collect.

"Top Things you Think You Know about Iran that are not True" - Prof. Juan Cole

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http://www.juancole.com/
Here's part of the rest of a very useful article:

But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky.

Belief: Iran is aggressive and has threatened to attack Israel, its neighbors or the US

Reality: Iran has not launched an aggressive war modern history (unlike the US or Israel), and its leaders have a doctrine of "no first strike." This is true of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as well as of Revolutionary Guards commanders.

Belief: Iran is a militarized society bristling with dangerous weapons and a growing threat to world peace.

Reality: Iran's military budget is a little over $6 billion annually. Sweden, Singapore and Greece all have larger military budgets. Moreover, Iran is a country of 70 million, so that its per capita spending on defense is tiny compared to these others, since they are much smaller countries with regard to population. Iran spends less per capita on its military than any other country in the Persian Gulf region with the exception of the United Arab Emirates.


Belief: Iran has threatened to attack Israel militarily and to "wipe it off the map."

Reality: No Iranian leader in the executive has threatened an aggressive act of war on Israel, since this would contradict the doctrine of 'no first strike' to which the country has adhered. The Iranian president has explicitly said that Iran is not a threat to any country, including Israel.

Belief: But didn't President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threaten to 'wipe Israel off the map?'

Reality: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did quote Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that "this Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" (in rezhim-e eshghalgar-i Qods bayad as safheh-e ruzgar mahv shavad). This was not a pledge to roll tanks and invade or to launch missiles, however. It is the expression of a hope that the regime will collapse, just as the Soviet Union did. It is not a threat to kill anyone at all.

Belief: But aren't Iranians Holocaust deniers?

Actuality: Some are, some aren't. Former president Mohammad Khatami has castigated Ahmadinejad for questioning the full extent of the Holocaust, which he called "the crime of Nazism." Many educated Iranians in the regime are perfectly aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. In any case, despite what propagandists imply, neither Holocaust denial (as wicked as that is) nor calling Israel names is the same thing as pledging to attack it militarily.

"Is This What 'Shielding Afghans From Violence' Looks Like?"

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DERRICK CROWE
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23607.htm