Suicides of Houston Army Recruiter and His Wife Leave Questions of Struggle That Endured After Iraq

Tweet War--huh! What is it good for?
Not humanity, obviously.

Portion below; whole sad story here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5788103.html

Mounting pressure

Making matters worse, Andersson felt uncomfortable in the role of salesman for the Army. He was painfully honest with prospective recruits, even if his candor turned them off, she said.

"He was morally opposed to putting more young men into that situation, where they could be injured or killed or see the things he'd seen," Maxey said.

His superiors repeatedly criticized him for failing to meet his goal of signing two new recruits a month and assigned him five-page essays or extra duty as punishment, she said. In February 2006, he was passed up for promotion to staff sergeant.

"It wasn't that he was lazy or not working. It's just that he was not getting recruits and being punished for it, constantly," she said. "It was just not the job for him."

Andersson was proud to be a soldier, but he wasn't cut out for recruiting, said his friend Chris Rodriguez.

Long hours, few days off and mounting pressure to deliver fresh volunteers made life "truly awful," Rodriguez said in a series of e-mails and a telephone interview with the Houston Chronicle from Anbar Province in Iraq, where he was serving a tour of duty at the time of Andersson's death.

''In the recruiting station I was at, a good third of the people went on antidepressants while working there," said Rodriguez, who met Andersson in Texas while assigned to the Houston Recruiting Battalion. "You could come to work as motivated as you wanted, but as soon as you passed the threshold of the doorway, it'd suck the life away from you. Looking around, you'd see miserable people."

If recruiters failed to sign up enough prospects, their commanders told them they were failures, Rodriguez said. "They tell you, 'That's why your buddy in Iraq doesn't have a full battalion, because you're letting him down,' "he said.

The stress took its toll. Back in Iraq, Rodriguez had nightmares about his time recruiting in Houston.

"The pressure recruiting puts on you wears you down so badly," he said. "We often said that we'd rather be in Iraq than recruiting. It's true."

No Wonder Iceland Has the Happiest People on Earth

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Tired of wondering which way to turn?
Writer John Carlin has given us a glimpse at a path out of our existential dilemma. Don't you think it would be possible for the people of the U.S. to take some lessons from the Icelanders?

Portion below (found on Information Clearinghouse); whole thing here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/18/iceland

If the bumblebee flies [see earlier part of article at link above], if Iceland is the world's best place in which to live, and one of the richest, it is because of the way governments have added enlightened policies to the island's pragmatic, inventive human raw material. 'I as a medical doctor and as a politician believe that there is an intimate link between the country's health and the quality of political decisions that are made,' said Dagur Eggertsson, Reykjavik's former mayor. 'We were the poorest of nations 100 years ago, but we all could read and we had strong women. On that we have now built strong policies. My point is that more important for the health of a country than not smoking and eating well are the social phenomena we stress here: equality, peace, democracy, clean water, education, renewable energy, women's rights.'

Dagur, like the many people I spoke to in Iceland who were proud of their country, was confident but not complacent; content but ambitious - and open to the world in all its diversity. That was manifest even at Asgeir's school, where I came across children from China, Vietnam, Colombia, even Equatorial Guinea.

When I was talking to Svafa about the better influences from the rest of the world that Iceland seemed to have wisely plucked, or just happened to have, we mentioned, as the prime minister had done, the humaneness of Scandinavia and the drive of the United States. We also discussed how the Icelanders - who have excellent restaurants these days and whose stamina for late night partying must come from the Viking DNA - seemed to have much of southern Europe's savoir vivre. Then I put it to her that there was an African quality to Iceland that the rest of Europe lacked. This was to be found in the 'patchwork' family structures Oddny had spoken of. The sense that, no matter whether the father lived in the same home or the mother was away working, the children belonged to, and were seen to belong by, the extended family, the village. Svafa liked that. 'Yes!' the pale-skinned power executive exclaimed, in delighted recognition. 'We are Africans, too!'

Partly by dint of travel, partly by accident, Iceland, we agreed, was a melting pot that had contrived to combine humanity's better qualities, offering a lesson for the rest of the world on how to live sensibly and cheerfully, free from cant and prejudice and taboo. Iceland could not be less like Africa on the surface; could not be further removed from the lowest country in the UNDP's Human Development Index, Sierra Leone. Yet the Icelanders have had the wisdom to take, or accidentally to replicate, the best of what's there, too. Without any hang-ups at all.

A Two-State Solution for the United States and Israel

Tweet Interesting idea, this. America--Israel: the two-state solution
Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19943.htm

In the American mind today, Israel stands for a policy of benign chauvinism, justified preemptive war, and provisional domination of the Middle East: the very policy the Bush administration has sought to graft onto the United States, while borrowing Israeli army rules of engagement for use in Iraq. Doubtless the unpopular president felt a certain exhilaration and nervous release in cutting down a member of his family (nationally speaking) in front of another family. But there was a personal as well as well as a generic reason for it. Probably Israel today seems to George Bush a friendlier place than most of America does. It is, to him, a sort of fifty-first state, a good deal like Texas but cleared of the protesters.

One might end here, merely observing that, that not for the first time, George W. Bush acted below the dignity of his office. Yet his defects were forgiven by his hosts; and that is not where the interest of the occasion lies.

When an American of such high visibility speaks without inhibition of American divisions to Israelis, one is made to reflect on the extraordinary censorship exercised by the American mainstream media against all allusion to the current political controversies in Israel. For example, the Israeli divisions over the oppressive treatment of the West Bank Palestinians. The word "appeasement" was misused by the president; but why should we not use it accurately? Why should Americans not follow the Israeli opposition, and speak of the appeasement by successive Israeli governments of the fanatical sects of settlers who seek to dispossess the Palestinians of their lands?

Condoleezza Rice broke the silence once. On a visit in October 2007, she said the sufferings of the West Bank Palestinians reminded her of the civil-rights struggles of American blacks in the South. Indeed, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar show in Lords of the Land, the more thuggish settlers in cities like Hebron have enjoyed many of the privileges that Americans associate with white gangs in the Jim Crow South -- a routine of harassment and ad-hoc violence against an inferior caste. The Israeli government acts as the federal government of the United States would have acted if it had said it could not move against the gangs because "these are our people."

Israel, Munich, and appeasement came up again when John McCain said, of Barack Obama's willingness to speak with diplomatic representatives of Iran, that one must never negotiate with anyone who calls Israel a "stinking corpse." But why should political thought be silenced and action obstructed by the trash talk of a small-time dictator? Demagogues say many things. It is in their nature not to be in a position to mean everything they say.

Nikita Khrushchev spoke for world communism in direr terms than these when he addressed to Americans the words: "We will bury you." Khrushchev went beyond calling his enemy a stinking corpse. He acknowledged that we were still alive, and said we were going to be turned into a corpse, and declared that he would be the one to do it. And Khrushchev actually held the levers of power in the Soviet Union -- something that cannot be said of Ahmadinejad in Iran. Yet President Eisenhower negotiated with Khrushchev, and President Kennedy negotiated with him, too. The idea that all contact with a hostile country that is not war, is therefore necessarily appeasement, is a poisonous offshoot of the Bush dogma which says "If you are not with us you are against us." Palestinians oppressed by Israeli settlers and looking anywhere they can for help are neither with the United States nor against us. If we treat them as enemies, they may well become enemies.

Another piece of the Bush doctrine -- a piece borrowed from Ariel Sharon, which John McCain seems poised to inherit -- is the idea that wars always improve the stature and increase the power of a warrior nation. Six years into the American occupation of Iraq, this ought to have become questionable. Yet John McCain's advisers on foreign policy are, to a man, neoconservatives -- supporters of the Lebanon as of the Iraq war, and disposed to flatter the militarism that is the most consistent trait of McCain's political temperament.

Israeli opinion covers a far wider range than American neoconservatism. In the Cooper Union debate on the "Israel Lobby" controversy, in September 2006, the former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said that the United States had become a Colossus -- "an intrusive colossus that is hated throughout the Arab world," because of its support for the Arab autocrats. The solution, Ben-Ami implied, was not for the U.S. to intrude still further into the affairs of the Middle East but to change its course and resist the promptings of organizations like AIPAC. He wondered why so many American lawmakers were intimidated by the lobby, since the most it could do was to stop someone from getting elected, and, where a public good was concerned, not to be elected or re-elected might seem a small sacrifice for a politician whose duty is to tell the truth.

Abbas Jabbar

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://gorillasguides.com/2008/05/18/abbas-jabbar/

Abbas Jabbar was two years old he was one of the children killed in the mortar attack on Mamil. Sadr City hospital officials originally gave the death toll as 4 but later upgraded the toll to 5 children killed and several wounded. In the first photo Abbas’ wrapped corpse is seen in the living room of his home. The man sitting beside his body to the left is his father Nadim, his mother and other family members are seen gathered round the corpse.

Nakba Quote of the Day--Lawrence of Cyberia

Tweet http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/

"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way."

-- From the open letter "J'Accuse", by Emile Zola; published in L'Aurore, 13 January 1898.

Boubacar Bah--One of 71 Prisoners Who Died in ICE Custody in Last 4 Years

Tweet Found on Angry Arab Newservice. I'm with Ralph Nader. These people are not "detainees." They are prisoners.

Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea living in Brooklyn, is one of 71 detainees to have died in the last four years in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An illegal immigrant confined to a detention centre after his green card application was rejected, Bah died after a fall that no one seems to have witnessed. ICE, which was set up by the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11, is responsible for the detention of a staggering number of people: 311,213 last year, a million since 2004. They are held in prisons in which, according to Mark Dow, the author of American Gulag (2005), ‘extreme forms of physical abuse are not just aberrations.’ The centre where Bah was detained is managed by Corrections Corporation of America, a firm set up in 1983 in Nashville by a group of investors that included a former chairman of Tennessee’s Republican Party. A pioneer in running private prisons, it has also been quick to specialise in immigrant detention, the fastest growing branch of the incarceration business.

CCA describes itself as the ‘nation’s largest provider of outsourced corrections management’, with 70,000 inmates and 16,000 staff. Its website speaks proudly of ‘similarities in mission and structure’ with the US army and makes a special appeal to veterans in search of work: ‘How will you make the transition from military to civilian life? CCA features a paramilitary structure: a highly refined chain of command, and policies and procedures that dictate facility operations.’

Transparency is not one of those policies and procedures. On the contrary: according to Dow, CCA ‘has warned its shareholders of the dangers of public scrutiny’. So it’s no surprise that CCA still hasn’t explained how Bah fell, or why he was shackled and left untreated for 15 hours afterwards. US immigration officials haven’t said anything either. Indeed, ICE operates in almost perfect opacity: it’s not obliged even to keep track of deaths among detainees, much less to report them publicly. When an immigrant dies in custody, the recorded cause of death can be as vague and tautological as ‘unresponsiveness’ – something the ICE knows all about.

Britain, which holds about 2500 people in ‘immigration removal centres’, isn’t much more open. The UK now has Europe’s most thoroughly privatised detention system, though the idea didn’t catch on immediately. In 1995, Jack Straw, then shadow home secretary, said: ‘It is not appropriate for people to profit out of incarceration.’ Two years later, with Labour in power, he’d changed his mind: ‘If there are contracts in the pipeline and the only way of getting the accommodation in place very quickly is by signing those contracts, then I will sign those contracts.’ One distinct advantage for the government is that it can’t be held legally accountable for the mistreatment of inmates not in its care. Today, seven out of ten immigration removal centres in Britain are privately run.

Instances of ‘self-harm’ are common in these places: in the last four months of 2007 alone, 42 detainees required medical attention after injuring themselves. Asylum seekers facing possible deportation to countries where they’re likely to be jailed, tortured or killed might well prefer to commit suicide, as Melanie McFadyean reported in the LRB (16 November 2006). Consider the case of Mañuel Bravo, who fled Angola disguised as a woman after his parents – opponents of the government – were murdered. When Bravo’s solicitor failed to show up for his asylum tribunal hearing in October 2002, he had to represent himself. Promised that he would be notified of the tribunal’s decision in a month, he spent the next three years waiting; until, at six one morning, with no warning, he and his 13-year-old son Antonio were arrested and transferred to Yarl’s Wood for deportation. Bravo hanged himself in a stairwell the following morning, his 35th birthday.

Yarl’s Wood, which has been managed by Serco since last year, has been racked by protests, riots and arson since the moment it opened in November 2001; more recently, it has been the scene of demonstrations by a group of mothers complaining about the wretched living conditions. According to one, parents are expected to wash baby bottles in the ‘toilet sink’. The conditions at Harmondsworth – a ‘fast-track’ centre run by Kalyx, a partner of CCA, and located conveniently close to Heathrow – are no better: the chief inspector of prisons likened it to a high security prison.

There is no sign of anyone coming to the detainees’ defence. In a landmark ruling in April denounced by the UN, the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal granted the Home Office the right to deport refugees to war zones – to places like Basra and Baghdad. Sweden approved 85 per cent of Iraqi asylum claims last year: Britain approved 13 per cent – that’s 500 Iraqis. ‘We are pleased,’ a spokesman for the Home Office said, ‘that the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal has found that conditions in Iraq are such that an ordinary Iraqi civilian is not at serious risk from indiscriminate violence.’ Quite how they found this isn’t clear.

Maybe these ordinary Iraqi civilians will be comforted to discover that the same firms detaining them in immigration removal centres are providing various ‘services’ in Iraq. They may, to take one example, land at an airport managed by Serco. Sodexho, Kalyx’s parent company, has gone into catering, but it’s not likely that repatriated Iraqi refugees will be eating the meals they prepare: the company’s eight-year, $881 million contract, signed in 2003, is to feed the US Marines.

Einstein: [Like] All Other Religions, [Judaism] Was “An Incarnation of the Most Childish Superstitions.”

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From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.

A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.

The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as describing the unidentified buyer as having “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” Among the unsuccessful bidders, according to The Guardian newspaper, was Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist.

The price makes the Gutkind letter one of the best sellers among Einstein manuscripts. That $404,000 is only a little less than the $442,500 paid for the entire collection of 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 1996. At that same auction a paper by Einstein and his best friend, Michele Besso, attempting a calculation that would later be a pivotal piece of his crowning achievement, the General Theory of Relativity, went for $398,500.

Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at the California Institute of Technology and head of the Einstein Papers project, said she was not surprised that the Gutkind letter, which was known to Einstein scholars, fetched such a high price.

“It is an important expression of Einstein’s thoughts and views on religion, on Judaism, on his views about God and religious texts,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said the letter, which was not written for publication, was “concise and unvarnished” and more straightforward than the metaphors he usually turned to in public.

Gerald Holton, a historian of science at Harvard and a longtime Einstein expert, also was not surprised. He said Einstein’s marketability had been improved by the last few years of hoopla about the 100th anniversary of relativity, which included his selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Century in 2000, and several new biographies. Dr. Holton described the letter as “a feat of eloquent Credo in short form.”

Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility,” he once said.

“If something is in me that can be called religious,” he wrote in another letter, in 1954, “then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”

Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God — as a metaphor for physical law; in his famous rebuke to quantum mechanics, “God doesn’t play dice”; and in lines like the endlessly repeated, “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.

Trying to distinguish between a personal God and a more cosmic force, Einstein described himself as an “agnostic” and “not an atheist,” which he associated with the same intolerance as religious fanatics. “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”

The problem of God, he said, “is too vast for our limited minds.”

Einstein’s latest words offer scant comfort to the traditionally faithful.

In the letter, according to the A.P. account, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

As for his fellow Jews, he said that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”

He claimed a deep affinity with the Jewish people, he said, but “as far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”

Support Matthis Chiroux--War Resister

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Matthis Chiroux is the kind of young American US military recruiters love.

"I was from a poor, white family from the south, and I did badly in school," the now 24-year-old told AFP.

"I was 'filet mignon' for recruiters. They started phoning me when I was in 10th grade," or around 16 years old, he added.

Chiroux joined the army straight out of high school nearly six years ago, and worked his way up from private to sergeant.

He served in Afghanistan, Germany, Japan, and the Philippines before he was honorably discharged and placed in the reserves.

As a reservist, he was due to be deployed next month in Iraq.

On Thursday, he refused to go.

"I stand before you today with the strength and clarity and resolve to declare to the military, my government and the world that this soldier will not be deploying to Iraq," Chiroux said in the sun-filled rotunda of a congressional building in Washington.

"My decision is based on my desire to no longer continue violating my core values to support an illegal and unconstitutional occupation... I refuse to participate in the Iraq occupation," he said, as a dozen veterans of the five-year-old Iraq war looked on.

Minutes earlier, Chiroux had cried openly as he listened to former comrades-in-arms testify before members of Congress about the failings of the Iraq war.

The testimonies were the first before Congress by Iraq veterans who have turned against the five-year-old war.

Former army sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith told the landmark haering of "lawless murders, looting and the abuse of countless Iraqis."

He spoke of the psychologically fragile men and women who return from Iraq to find little help or treatment offered from official circles.

Goldsmith said he had "self-medicated" for several months to treat the wounds of the war.

Another soldier told AFP he had to boost his medication to treat anxiety and social agoraphobia -- two of many lingering mental wounds he carries since his deployments in Iraq -- before testifying.

Some 300,000 of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or both, an independent study showed last month.

A group of veterans in the packed hearing room gazed blankly as their comrades' testimonies shattered the official version that the US effort in Iraq is succeeding.

Almost to a man, the testifiers denounced serious flaws in the chain of command in Iraq.

Luis Montalvan, a former army captain, accused high-ranking US officers of numerous failures in Iraq, including turning a blind eye to massive fraud on the part of US contractors.

Ex-Marine Jason Lemieux told how a senior officer had altered a report he had written because it slammed US troops for using excessive force in the face of a feeble attack -- they took four rounds of enemy fire.

Goldsmith accused US officials of censorship.

"Everyone who manages a blog, Facebook or Myspace out of Iraq has to register every video, picture, document of any event they do on mission," Goldsmith told AFP after the hearing.

Officials take "hard facts and slice them into small pieces to make them presentable to the secretary of state or the president -- and all with the intent of furthering the occupation of Iraq," Goldsmith added.

Chiroux stood fast in his resolve to refuse to serve in Iraq.

"I cannot deploy to Iraq, carry a weapon and not be part of the problem," he said.

One of thousands of US soldiers who have deserted since the Iraq war began in 2003, the young reservist vowed to stay in the United States to fight "whatever charges the army levels at me."

Many deserters -- defined by the army as someone who has been absent without leave for 30 days -- seek refuge in Canada.

In the hours following his announcement, Chiroux received some 300 emails of support, he told AFP.

"I've been offered places to stay in all 50 states if I want to lie low.

"I've told them, 'That's very nice, but I'm not trying to hide.'

"I want to stand up to the powers that be and send a message that there are still people in this country fighting for peace," Chiroux said, steadfast in his resolve to not report for duty on June 15.

Nakba As Seen from Belfast

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Belfast Mural

Found on Lenin's Tomb

Workers Monkey-wrenching the Occupation? 'Bout Time

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http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004416358_webchinook15.html

RIDLEY PARK, Pa. — The Defense Department says two military helicopters at a Boeing factory near Philadelphia were vandalized on the production line.

Federal officials are handing out fliers to workers Thursday at the Boeing Rotorcraft Systems plant offering a $5,000 reward in the vandalizing of the two H-47 Chinook helicopters.

The company found what it called irregularities in the helicopters Tuesday. Company officials and the military have not said what was found.

Congressman Joe Sestak says he was told that wires that appeared to be broken or severed were found in one helicopter. A suspicious washer was found in a second.

Bloomberg News reported that the plant resumed operations Thursday after a two-day shutdown.

California Supreme Court Overturns Gay Marriage Ban!

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Hurray!!!!!!

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- The California Supreme Court has overturned a voter-approved ban on gay marriage, paving the way for the state to become the second in the United States where gay and lesbian residents can marry.

The justices released the 4-3 decision Thursday, saying that domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage in an opinion written by Chief Justice Ron George.

Outside the courthouse, gay marriage supporters cried and cheered as news spread of the decision.

In striking down the ban, the court said, "In contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual's capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual's sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights."

The cases were brought by the city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples, Equality California and another gay rights group in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco's monthlong same-sex wedding march that took place at Mayor Gavin Newsom's direction.

"Today the California Supreme Court took a giant leap to ensure that everybody -- not just in the state of California, but throughout the country -- will have equal treatment under the law," said City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who argued the case for San Francisco.

Carlos Latuff--Pictures Worth A Thousand Words

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Lawrence of Cyberia--Nakba Quote Of The Day: Nathan Chofshi

Tweet From Lawrence of Cyberia Blog:

"We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed ... we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them."

-- Nathan Chofshi; cited in The Other Exodus by Erskine Childers.

Photo: Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 - names of depopulated villages embroidered onto canvas tent - by Emily Jacir.

Food Crisis Hits [Formerly Bountiful] Fallujah

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://gorillasguides.com/2008/05/13/iraq-food-crisis-hits-fallujah/

Whatever the reason, residents simply want relief. "We just want our lives back," said a college student who gave her name only as Nada. "We want to eat, buy clothes, get proper education and breathe pure air. No thanks to Americans for their effort to bring us democracy that killed half of us by their bombs and is now apparently killing the other half by starvation. Can you pass this message to the American people for us?"

According to the UN, at least four million people in Iraq do not have enough food, while approximately 40 percent of the 27.5 million population do not have access to clean drinking water. At least 30 percent do not have access to proper health services.

Newly Born Infant, Two Elderly Men Die Due to Gaza Siege

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GAZA, (PIC)-- Three Palestinian patients including a two-day-old infant and two men in their sixties died in Gaza on Monday due to lack of proper medication and Israeli refusal to allow them treatment outside the Strip.

Medical sources reported that the two-day-old infant Yousef Zakout died due to the lack of proper medication bringing the number of victims of Gaza siege to 150.

Earlier on Monday two old patients died in central and southern Gaza Strip, the sources said, adding that Mohammed Abu Hweishel, a cancer patient, had repeatedly asked for permit to leave the Strip for treatment but the Israeli occupation authority turned down his requests.

Ahmed Abul Naja, 62, died in the European hospital from liver inflammation, the sources said, noting that his condition rapidly deteriorated due to the absence of adequate treatment in Gaza.

The IOA imposed-siege on Gaza blocked travel of seriously ill Palestinian patients and with absence of proper medication dozens of them died and hundreds others fear a similar fate.

http://tinyurl.com/4xxf3z

Save the Children? Not if they’re Palestinian

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http://heathlander.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/save-the-children/

May 12, 2008

In an interview today about the cyclone in Burma, Foreign Secretary David Miliband assured viewers that British aid would be channeled through "organisations like Save the Children, who rightly have a very high reputation."

Save the Children is indeed a reputable organisation, but Miliband’s respect for it seems to be rather selective. Earlier this year Save the Children UK co-authored a report describing a "humanitarian implosion" in the Gaza Strip. It emphasised that the "unprecedented humanitarian crisis" in Gaza, where children comprise over half the population, is "man-made, completely avoidable and, with the necessary political will, can also be reversed." That is, unlike in Burma, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is completely manufactured. It is not a consequence of some unforeseen natural disaster, but is rather the intended result of policies designed to force the "impoverishment of an entire population." The report concluded that the current Israeli and international approach is "failing at all levels" and called for an end to the siege and "political dialogue with all Palestinian parties."

So how did Miliband respond to this grave analysis from an organisation which he recognises has "a very high reputation"? Did he, as with Burma, listen to the "humanitarian experts…who make all the difference on the ground" and change policy accordingly? Not quite. Instead the British government, which along with the U.S. has been unswerving in its support for the devastating collective punishment of Gaza since Hamas took office in February 2006, continues to facilitate the Israeli siege and oppose political engagement with Hamas. Where Miliband criticised the "malign neglect" of the Burmese junta in preventing aid agencies from functioning properly, he failed to condemn the Israeli government for doing - as he himself acknowledges - exactly the same thing. As a result the people of Gaza continue to suffer and die. It appears that, for David Miliband and the British government, some children are worth saving while others are perfectly expendable.

Buddy Can You Spare A Dime

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Hamas condemns the Holocaust

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Bassem Naeem is the minister of health and information in the Hamas-led Palestinian administration in Gaza.

Portion below; whole thing here:
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bassem_naeem/profile.html

The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that deny or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including the Nakba of 1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession of the Palestinians.

But it should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.

And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".

Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.

It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful coexistence with all their neighbours. There are, today, more than six million Palestinian refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been detained at least once by the Israeli occupation authorities since 1967. Hundreds of thousands have so far been killed or wounded. Little concern seems to be caused by all of this or by the erection of an apartheid wall that swallows more than 20% of the West Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.

The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.

Our right to resistance against occupation is recognised by all conventions and religious traditions. The Jews are for us the people of a sacred book who suffered persecution in European lands. Whenever they sought refuge, Muslim and Arab lands provided them with safe havens. It was in our midst that they enjoyed peace and prosperity; many of them held leading positions in Muslim countries.

After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression, some Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their oppressors are the sons and daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and massacred.

Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves punished for someone else's crime. But we are well aware and warmly welcome the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish human rights activists in Palestine and around the world.

We hope that journalists in the west will begin to adopt a more objective approach when covering events in Palestine. The Palestinian people are being killed by Israel's machine of destruction on a daily basis. Nevertheless, we still see a clear bias in favour of Israel in the western media.

The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the Palestinians today. Britain was the mandate authority that handed over Palestine to Israeli occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to Palestine in pursuit of safety. We, therefore, expect the Europeans to atone for their historic crimes by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided international response to the tragedy of our people.

"Liberal" Israelis: Still Crying And Shooting After All These Years

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From Lawrence of Cyberia; portion below
Whole article here:
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2008/05/liberal-israeli.html

"Crying and shooting" is the term used in Israeli political discourse to describe those Israelis who agonize over what they are doing to the Palestinians, but carry on doing it anyway. It's a way for Israelis to feel better about themselves, by reasserting their liberal, progressive and humanitarian values, even as they carry out illiberal, regressive and murderous actions.

There was a wonderful example of the phenomenon last week in a column written for Ha'aretz by Bradley Burston. He wrote an agonized column - Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism - about the disproportionate number of civilians among the Palestinians killed by the IDF, and specifically about Israeli's collective refusal to acknowledge their responsibility for the killings.

But his column is like one of those non-apologies you make when you know you should apologize for something, but you're not really sorry. When instead of saying "I'm sorry for what I did", you say "I'm sorry if you were offended", as if it's the offended feelings that are the problem, not the fact that you said something offensive in the first place.

The incident that set off Burston's "soul-searching" was the killing of Myassar Abu Mu'attaq, and her four children - Rudayna (6) Hana (3), Saleh (4) and Mousad (15 months), photo left by Mohammed Abed for AFP - whose home was destroyed by an Israeli shell as the family sat down to breakfast.

(The IDF initially acknowledged the family had been killed by one of their tank shells which had gone off course, but subsequently claimed that they weren't really responsible because although they had fired the shell, it had not really hit the house, but had struck instead two nearby Palestinian gunmen who were carrying large amounts of explosives that were detonated by the Israeli shell and indirectly blew up the Abu Mu'attaq house. This is a variant of the "Ghalia Defence" that the IDF came up with when it shelled a Gaza beach in June 2006, but denied any responsibility for the deaths of the Ghalia family who had been having a picnic there, claiming that although they fired six shells at the beach - one of which they could not account for - the errant shell could not have killed the Ghalia family who must have been killed instead by Palestinian munitions hidden under the sand that might have been inadvertantly detonated by the Israeli bombardment. That's a close echo of what the IDF claims about the Abu Mu'attaq killings: the IDF knows it fired the shells, knows the civilians at the receiving end are dead, but subsequently introduces some intermediate mechanism - mines under the beach, exploding backpacks - that deflects responsibility to an intermediate agent, and allows the army that fires the shells to maintain the pretense that even when it kills civilians its intentions are pure. There's probably a technical name in medical literature for this phenomenon of shifting blame for guilty actions to an intermediate party).

Anyway, on the surface, Bradley Burston's column seems to be blowing the whistle on this self-righteous dissembling, calling the IDF's actions "our war crimes", "our terrorism". But once you get past the title, you find he doesn't really think it is a case of war crimes or terrorism at all. War crimes and terrorism imply an intention to kill the innocent, and Bradley Burston is certain there is never any such intention on the part of the IDF. It's not that they want to kill civilians, you see, it's just that in the imperfect world we live in, bad procedures and inaccurate weapons make them keep blowing up civilians again and again and again, whether they mean to or not:

We console ourselves, here on the Israeli side of the border, that, unlike the suicide bomber, the box cutter terrorist, the drive-by machine gunner, the Merkaz Harav gunman, the deaths of the children and their mother in Beit Hanoun were a terrible case of bad fortune.

We salve our doubts by stressing - and this is true - that the Israeli army never intentionally targets non-combatants. We protect our fragile consciences by suppressing case after case of Palestinian civilian casualties...

It would pay, in this regard, for us to recognize that despite cutting edge technology, we can aim neither tank shells nor missile with assurance.

The way we use them ... kills children.

Bradley Burston wants you to know how bad he feels that his army keeps killing innocent Palestinians, but he doesn't really want to take responsibility for the killings any more than the blame-shifting Israelis he criticizes in his article. He wants you to know he feels terrible about dead children - even the dead children of his enemy, see how liberal he is! - but he also wants you to believe that their deaths are essentially inadvertent, because the Israeli army never intentionally targets non-combatants.

What a load of rubbish.

5000 at Palestinian Rally in London

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