SIL: Internationalizing the city of Jerusalem is rejected

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[ 07/06/2009 - 01:40 AM ]

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- The Supreme Islamic League in the occupied city of Jerusalem said Saturday that any attempt from any party to internationalize the city was strongly rejected, and would be opposed with firmness.

In a press release it issued, the SIL pointed out, "The people of Palestine in particular, and the rest of Muslims world-wide had rejected the idea of internationalizing the city of Jerusalem since it was first proposed in 1947 as part of UN resolution to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs, and the main reason for that rejection was the article pertaining to Jerusalem".

It added, "Since then, all the projects to internationalize the city were strongly confronted, rejected, and foiled; yet, here comes [US president} Barack Obama reviving the proposal again with the pretext that the city comprises the three religions, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism".

Moreover, the SIL explained that Jerusalem was first handed over to Muslims peacefully during the era of the second Muslim Caliph Omar Bin Al-Khattab, who gave Christians in Palestine the pledge of safety, which Muslims preserved over the past 14 centuries and until now.

"There were no synagogues in the city at that time, but if there were any, Omar would have given the same pledge to preserve those synagogues", the SIL underlined in the statement.

In this regard, the SIL stressed the sanctity of the city for Muslims, and that it constitutes part of Muslim faith, and thus, Muslims would protect and preserve the Muslim identity of the city at all cost.

Since the city fell under the Israeli occupation in 1967, the successive Israeli governments strived and still are striving hard to judaize the city and to distort its Muslim and Christian landmarks.

Finally, the SIL supported the religious edict issued by scholars of the Muslim Ummah prohibiting internationalizing the city or conceding, selling, and exchanging an inch of its soil.

Palestinians plan to file 936 lawsuits over over Gaza 'war crimes'

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Palestinian lawyers have prepared 936 lawsuits against Israel over alleged war crimes committed during its three-week offensive against Hamas in Gaza, the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza has recorded the cases, the magazine said, which include alleged incidents of children shot at close range, women burned by white phosphorus shells and entire families buried under their houses.

According to Der Spiegel, the center hopes to try the cases in Spain's National Court in Madrid, where a lawsuit was filed in January against senior Israeli officials over the 2002 killing of Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh.

"Winning a case, just one, would be enough," Iyad al-Alami, the head of the center, was quoted as saying. "Then I would retire immediately, because I would have achieved everything."

In April, The Israel Defense Forces announced on Wednesday that an internal investigation has determined that no civilians were purposefully harmed by IDF troops during the operation, which began December 27 last year.

Following the release of the investigation results, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the army's willingness to probe itself "once again proves that the IDF is one of the most moral armies in the world.

Source:

Read more...

Posted by Chet at 7:17 PM ,

936 Reasons Israel Is Quilty of War Crimes

Lebanon’s “Enthusiastic” General Elections Begins

Lebanon’s “Enthusiastic” General Elections Begins

07/06/2009 Lebanese voters began casting their ballots on Sunday in most ‘enthusiastic’ general election in Lebanon’s history.
The 7:00 am to 7:00 pm (0400 GMT to 1600 GMT) vote was taking place amid heavy security measures with the army and police deployed in force throughout the country to prevent security breeches.

In Beirut’s third district, the Head of the Future Movement MP Saad Hariri cast his ballot and called for massive turnout.
According to Al-Manar correspondent, prior to Hariri’s arrival to the polling station, police dogs scouted the area and were caught on camera, however, when Hariri left, men in civil clothes told cameramen to erase everything they had recorded. When asked why, the men in civil clothes refrained from answering.

Former President Emile Lahoud also cast his ballot in his hometown Baabdat. As he was leaving, Lahoud told reporters that there exists a conflict between two paths, one that sees Lebanon’s strength in its weakness and another that believes Lebanon’s strength in its strength.

In northern Metn, Al Manar correspondent reported fair turnout in early hours of Sunday. This district is likely to witness a strong election battle between MP Michel Aoun’s Change and Reform list and the March 14 list.

In Tripoli, north of Lebanon, our correspondent reported a normal election process amid expectations of a massive turnout later in the day. Our correspondent also said that, contrary to the law of elections, leaflets were found this morning in the northern city, urging voters to vote for one list against the other.

Long queues of voters in the southern city of Sidon were reported outside polling stations since the early hours of Sunday.
Similarly, in western Bekaa, voters seemed enthusiastic to take part in the democratic process amid expectations that participants may scratch out some March 14 candidates.

In Jizzine, the turnout in the morning hours was bashful to a certain degree. The turnout is expected to rise during the day.

In south Lebanon, in general, the voters are taking part in the process in the framework of referendum on the resistance and the arms of the resistance, as competition in this region is not as hot as some other districts. Voting in the Baalbek-Hermel district is also considered as a referendum.

There are 3.257 million eligible voters in Lebanon.
2200 local observers more than 200 international observers are taking part in monitoring elections.
Exit polls may become available successively after polling stations are closed at 7pm Beirut time.
Official results are expected Monday afternoon.

The Tone and the Music

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Uri Avnery is the sage of Israel. The founder of the Israeli peace movement, Gush Shalom, Avnery calls for the reinvigoration of the peace movement by direct engagement with politics as well as the emergence of an Israeli Obama, presumably, a leader of dual descent delivering a message of hope driven by a new language of peace.

By Uri Avnery

One man spoke to the world, and the world listened. He walked onto the stage in Cairo, alone, without hosts and without aides, and delivered a sermon to an audience of billions. Egyptians and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, Sunnis and Shiites, Copts and Maronites – and they all listened attentively.

He unfolded before them the map of a new world, a different world, whose values and laws he spelled out in simple and clear language - a mixture of idealism and practical politics, vision and pragmatism.

Barack Hussein Obama – as he took pains to call himself – is the most powerful man on earth. Every word he utters is a political fact.

“A historic speech,” pronounced commentators in a hundred languages. I prefer another adjective:

The speech was right.

Every word was in its place, every sentence precise, every tone in harmony. The masterpiece of a man bringing a new message to the world.

From the very first word, every listener in the hall and in the world felt the honesty of the man, that his heart and his tongue were in harmony, that this is not a politician of the old familiar sort – hypocritical, sanctimonious, calculating. His body language was speaking, and so were his facial expressions

That’s why the speech was so important. The new moral integrity and the sense of honesty increased the impact of the revolutionary content.

And a revolutionary speech it certainly was.

In 55 minutes, it not only wiped away the eight years of George W. Bush, but also much of the preceding decades, from World War II on.

The American ship has turned – not with the sluggishness everyone would have expected, but with the agility of a speedboat.

That is much more than a political change. It touches the roots of the American national consciousness. The President spoke to hundreds of million US citizens no less than to a billion Muslims.

The American culture is based on the myth of the Wild West, with its Good Guys and Bad Guys, violent justice, dueling under the midday sun. Since the American nation is composed of immigrants from all over the world, its unity seems to require a threatening, world-encompassing evil enemy, like the Nazis and the Japs, or the Commies. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, this role was taken over by Islam.

Cruel, fanatical, bloodthirsty Islam; Islam as the religion of murder and destruction; an Islam lusting for the blood of women and children. This enemy captured the imagination of the masses and supplied material for television and cinema. It provided lecture topics for learned professors and fresh inspiration for popular writers. The White House was occupied by a moron who declared a world-wide “War on Terrorism”.

When Obama is now uprooting this myth, he is revolutionizing American culture. He wipes away the picture of one enemy, without painting another in its place. He preaches against the violent, adversary attitude itself, and starts to work to replace it with a culture of partnership between nations, civilizations and religions.

I see Obama as the first great messenger of the 21st century. He is the son of a new era, where the economy is global and the whole of humanity faces the danger to the very existence of life on the planet Earth. An era where the Internet connects a boy in New Zealand with a girl in Namibia in real time, where a disease in a small Mexican village spreads all over the globe within days.

This world needs a world law, a world order, a world democracy. That’s why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic contours of a world constitution.

While Obama proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is returning to the 19th.

That was the century when a narrow, egocentric, aggressive nationalism took root in many countries. A century that sanctified the belligerent nation which oppresses minorities and subdues neighbors. The century that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism and to its response – modern Zionism.

Obama’s vision is not anti-national. He spoke with pride about the American nation. But his nationalism is of another sort: an inclusive, multi-cultural and non-sexist nationalism, which includes all the citizens of a country and respects other nations.

This is the nationalism of the 21st century, which is inexorably striving towards supranational, regional and world-wide structures.

Compared to this, how miserable is the mental world of the Israeli Right! How miserable is the violent, fanatical-religious world of the settlers, the chauvinist ghetto of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak, the racist-fascist closed-in world of their Kahanist allies!

One has to understand this moral and spiritual dimension of Obama’s speech before considering its political implications. Not only in the political sphere are Obama and Netanyahu on a collision course. The underlying collision is between two mental worlds which are as distinct from each other as the sun and the moon.

In Obama’s mental world, there is no place for the Israeli Right or its equivalents elsewhere. Not for their terminology, not for their “values”, and still less for their actions.

In the political sphere, too, a huge gap has opened up between the governments of Israel and the USA.

During the last few years, successive Israeli governments have ridden the wave of Islamophobia that has spread throughout the West. The Islamic world was considered the deadly enemy, America was galloping grimly towards the Clash of Civilizations, every Muslim was a potential terrorist.

Israel’s right-wing leaders could rejoice. After all, the Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs are Muslims, the Muslims are Terrorists – so that Israel was assured a central place in the war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

That was a Garden of Eden for racist demagogues. Avigdor Lieberman could advocate the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, Ellie Yishai could enact laws for the revocation of the citizenship of non-Jews. Obscure Members of the Knesset could grab headlines with bills that might have been conceived in Nuremberg.

This Garden of Eden is no more. Whether the implications will become clear quickly or slowly – the direction is obvious. If we continue on our path, we will become a leper colony.

The tone makes the music – and this applies also to the President’s words on Israel and Palestine. He spoke at length about the Holocaust – honest and courageous words, full of empathy and compassion, which were received by the Egyptians in silence but with respect. He stressed Israel’s right to exist. And without pausing, he spoke about the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, the intolerable situation of the Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own.

He spoke respectfully about Hamas. Not anymore as a “terrorist organization”, but as a part of the Palestinian people. He demanded that they recognize Israel and stop violence, but also hinted that he would welcome a Palestinian unity government.

The political message was clear and unequivocal: the Two-State Solution will be put into practice. He himself will see to that. Settlement activity must cease. Unlike his predecessors, he did not stop at speaking about “Palestinians”, but uttered the decisive word: “Palestine” – the name of a state and a territory.

And no less important: the Iran war has been struck from the agenda. The dialogue with Tehran, as a part of the new world, is not limited in time. As from now, no one can even dream about an American OK for an Israeli attack.

How did official Israel respond? The first reaction was denial. “An unimportant speech”. “There was nothing new”. The establishment commentators picked out a few pro-Israeli sentences from the text and ignored all the others. And after all, “these are just words. So he talked. Nothing will come out of it.”

That is nonsense. The words of the President of the United States are more than just words. They are political facts. They change the perceptions of hundreds of millions. The Muslim public listened. The American public listened. It may take some time for the message to sink in. But after this speech, the pro-Israel lobby will never be the same as it was before. The era of “foile shtik” (Yiddish for sneaky tricks) is over. The sly dishonesty of a Shimon Peres, the guileful deceits of an Ehud Olmert, the sweet talking of a Bibi Netanyahu – all these belong to the past.

The Israeli people must now decide: whether to follow the right-wing government towards an inevitable collision with Washington, as the Jews did 1940 years ago when they followed the Zealots into a suicidal war on Rome – or to join Obama’s march towards a new world.

SOURCE: Global Arab Network
June 6, 2009 Posted by Elias

The 1967-war revisited (Part II)

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Reporter: Editor Publisher Hiyam Noir

[ 07/06/2009 - 01:54 AM ]

By Khalid Amayreh

In June 1967, when Israel launched the 6-day-war on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Khalid Amayreh was 10 years’ old. In the following two-part article, he recollects the war, whose outcome and ramifications continue to trouble Palestine, the Middle East and the rest of the world:

Read Part 1

I personally witnessed numerous demolitions when I was eleven years old. The demolition, or blowing-up operation, would begin with declaring the village where the doomed house was located a closed military zone. The declaration would be made via loud speakers located atop military jeeps.

In the process, all males betweens the ages of 13 and 70 would be ordered to gather at the playground of the local school, where they were forced to stand with their heads bowed down. Very often, the soldiers would shoot over the heads of people with the purpose of terrorizing them. And anybody daring to raise his head would be kicked in the back by heavily armed soldiers. Civility and simple human decency were always absent, as is the case in these days, and there was no al-Jazeera or CNN to report on Israel’s shameful acts, so the Zio-Nazis always felt at liberty doing to us as they saw fit.

Then, the commanding officer in charge of the operation would give the doomed family ten minutes to salvage whatever meagre belongings they could. (These days they demolish our homes immediately without giving a grace period to get our belongings out).

The scene of young children comforting younger children is devastating. The distraught housewives would struggle to get their utensils and whatever mattresses and foodstuff out, lest they be crushed and irretrievable. A small child would rush to get his favourite toy or an enlarged picture of his late grandfather, before it was too late. Then the commanding officer would give the go-ahead signal and the house would become rubble in a few seconds.

Afterwards, the Red Cross would bring a tent, as a temporary shelter for the victims, otherwise the tormented family would simply make an enclosure and sleep under the trees, or, if the weather was cold, find a cave to live in until a permanent solution could be found. These were indelible images of misery I won’t ever forget, an ugly testimony to Israel's Nazi-like savagery.

Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, observed that the Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls “the Message to the Palestinians.”

The Message, Halper says, is “Submit, only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent.”

The implication and deeper meaning of the message is very clear. It is the “you (Palestinians) do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel.”

Halper reminds us that Zionism has been from the very inception a “process of displacement” and house demolitions have been “at the centre of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians” since 1948.

Halper elucidates the policy of house demolitions. In 1948, he says, Israel systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85% of the villages existing before 1948. And since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 21,000 Palestinian homes. More homes, he adds, are being demolished in the path of Israel’s Separation Wall, with the number of homes demolished estimated at 40,000 in the past four years.

And contrary to Israeli propaganda that Arab houses are destroyed for security reasons, Halper points out that the 95% of these demolished homes have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews to ensure the advance of Zionism.

In addition to the manifestly barbaric practice of home demolitions, the Israelis really ‘excelled’ in the widespread practice of physical and psychological torture, especially in the first few years of the Occupation. In fact, a villager by the name of Salim Mahmoud Safi from Khorsa, my village, was tortured to death in 1970.

And Israel often imprisons the bodies of Palestinians killed or tortured to death for years in order to further torment and inflict pain upon their families. This is a well-known fact here.

Born into a very poor family, I started working in Beer Sheva when I was thirteen as a construction worker and then as an assistant plasterer (Maggish in Hebrew). I did this usually during the summer break and occasionally on Fridays. However, I was always careful not to allow my ‘job’ to seriously undermine my school learning.

In Beer Sheva, or Bir al Sab’a as the city is known in Arabic, I was able to learn Hebrew as well as the Moroccan dialect spoken by many Jews who had immigrated from North Africa. Like Palestinians, most Moroccan Jews worked in the construction sector and doing other menial jobs. Some were street sweepers as well, and almost all of the beggars in the streets were Jews originating from North Africa.

I was able to tour the city, which in the 1980s and 1990s received tens of thousands of immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

In the Old Town, I saw the old Palestinian homes, which the Jews seized after expelling their original occupants and proprietors at gunpoint. I also saw the town’s mosque, which dates back to around 1911, when Palestine was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Israel converted the mosque into a ‘museum’ and later into a ‘House for the Artists.’ And when some local Israeli Muslim leaders petitioned the Israeli government to rehabilitate the holy place and allow the town’s Muslim community to pray there, the Israeli authorities said an emphatic “NO.” This is how the ‘only true democracy in the Middle East’ behaves toward its own non-Jewish citizens.

On some occasions, the people for whom I worked would not give me my wages. I worked with such famous construction firms as Rusco, Solel Bonei, Hevrat Ovdeim. I still retain my old Israeli work card.As Palestinian labourers, we were continually humiliated at Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks at the A’rad Intersection on the way to Beer Sheva. I remember a Jewish police officer who spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent beating one of my relatives savagely without a convincing reason.

I made many Jewish friends then, but the psychological barrier remained largely intact. I did intermix with some Tunisian and Moroccan Jews in A’rad, Beer Sheva and Dimona. However, their sense of superiority (and victory) over us always impeded the evolution of normal human relations between them and myself. They viewed us then, as they do now, as the Biblical equivalents of wood hewers and water carriers. We were only good for making coffee and doing the hard, menial works for the superior race, the chosen people. “Muhammed Ta’asi coffee” (“Muhammed! Prepare the coffee for the Jews”) they would scream scornfully at us in a condescending tone.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel as ‘day- labourers’, mostly in the construction and agricultural fields. They would wake up one or two hours before dawn in order to be able to reach the worksite before eight o’clock.

Work in Israel lured most able-bodied Palestinians who abandoned agriculture, which was not financially very rewarding. Indeed, at one point, a day-labourer became economically better-off than erstwhile middle-class professionals such as teachers, clerks and other civil servants.

The Israelis knew what they were doing. By the mid 1980s, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became the second biggest market for Israeli products after Europe. So, it was really a kind of indirect slavery. We worked in Israel, building multi-story buildings for would-be immigrants, and then we spent the wages we earned buying Israeli products, even Israeli produce, as Palestinian agriculture fell into neglect as greater numbers of Palestinians preferred to earn more money working in Israel than working their land which comparatively yielded little money.

I said it was a kind of indirect slavery because Palestinian workers in Israel, whose number in the mid-1980s reached more than 130,000, were deprived of social benefits and health insurance, and they had no political rights whatsoever. (end)

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DENIED INFAMY: THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY!

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DENIED INFAMY:

THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON THE USS

LIBERTY

By Alan Sobrosky

Americans respond badly to treachery. This may explain why they went into WWII against Nazi Germany with determination but against Imperial Japan with rage, even though Hitler was decidedly the more vicious enemy. The reason lay in Japan’s surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, described by then-President Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy.”

The Attack

Less catastrophic but more treacherous and deserving of infamy was the deliberate Israeli air and naval attack upon the USS Liberty, a clearly marked naval intelligence ship, on June 8, 1967. After several hours of aerial surveillance, unmarked aircraft attacked the USS Liberty with gunfire, rockets and napalm. This was followed by an attack by three motor torpedo boats, firing torpedoes and then machine-gunning the ship, its crew and their lifeboats. The ship managed to get out a call for help under extraordinary circumstances, but was nearly sunk, and more than 200 American sailors and Marines were killed or wounded. Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, and the US Government accepted that explanation.

Both lied, and Israel’s lies become evident when one examines the profiles of the USS Liberty and the Egyptian ship the Israelis supposedly thought they were attacking, plus a photo of the USS Liberty itself. Misidentification in a December gale in the North Atlantic might have been possible. On a June day in the Eastern Mediterranean, never, at least by any pilot with the visual acuity to take off and land his aircraft:

Remember that in 1967, Israel’s fighters and motor torpedo boats had to get close to use their on-board weapons against a target. Anyone seeing the radars and electronic arrays on the USS Liberty knew this was not some Egyptian tramp steamer. Finally, there is the USN designation “GTR5” on both sides of the bow & the stern, with the number larger than the letters — anyone approaching the ship close enough to attack cannot miss that designation, and know that this was a US Navy ship.

Why the Attack

But the Israelis attacked anyway, and tried very hard to sink the ship without any survivors while concealing their own identity. They were aided and abetted by US President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who personally recalled separate flights of fighters launched from the 6th Fleet’s aircraft carriers USS Saratoga and USS America, fighters whose arrival over the USS Liberty would have saved most American lives and cost the Israelis a number of aircraft and motor torpedo boats.

What Johnson and McNamara did is appalling. As a Marine who served in Vietnam, I have always despised them for their arrogance and incompetence. After understanding their role in the USS Liberty tragedy, I now despise them twice over for their cowardice and their dereliction of duty, and for giving precedence to a domestic Jewish lobby and their own political interests over the lives of Americans in uniform. At the very least, both were indictable accessories after the fact in the murder at sea of 34 Americans and a breach of international law, in open violation of their own oaths of office.

So why did the Israelis do it? One possibility is that for them, it was simply business as usual. Israel has a long history of attacking anything in its path – a civilian airliner, UN posts and officials, refugee camps, hospitals, the lot — and then denying culpability, so the question is not “why,” but “why not?” Another was to dispose of inconvenient witnesses to the murder of Egyptian prisoners and civilians at El Arish. A third was to cloak their strategy of involving Jordan so as to take East Jerusalem & the West Bank. And a fourth was to show other Arab countries that they had such influence in the US that they could do it and get away with it, and perhaps involve the US militarily on their side.

Fixing Things

Any of these would have sufficed. What is important to note is that the Israelis had no qualms about deliberately killing Americans and concealing their own identity, doubtless hoping to bring the US in on their side openly attacking Egypt — they won handily anyway, but they could not be certain of doing so at the beginning of the war. It is something to keep in mind as a possible precedent when we look later at the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 and made the US an active belligerent intent on destroying Israel’s enemies.

The tale of the USS Liberty needs to reach the American people. It needs to reach them in a medium that will convey the calculated nature of the attack and the outrage it should evoke. And it should conclude with the statements of so many people in positions of authority at the time who said categorically that the attack was deliberate, and of survivors who lost shipmates there and likewise are convinced that the attack was deliberate and that their own government abandoned them at the time of the attack, and betrayed them afterwards.

Few events are so calculated to enrage Americans as the image of a US ship being deliberately attacked and Americans being killed and wounded by a supposed ally, for its own local purposes. That this “ally’s” influence in the US government was so great that a US president ordered back fighters whose arrival would have prevented most of the 200 casualties on the Liberty from occurring would compound that outrage. And that this influence allowed Israel both to evade retribution at the time and to conceal knowledge of what happened from the American people, would add insult to compound outrage.

This is the factually accurate message Americans need to see and hear, and it is a message that could impact sharply on what members of Congress — whose jobs depend on votes even more than they do on Jewish money — would be prepared to do to or for Israel. It could also give President Obama political room for diplomatic maneuver IF he seriously would like to reorient the way the US does its business in the Middle East.

AIPAC, its cohorts and the hasbara crowd will howl. There will be the usual flurry of fabrications, denials, falsehoods, fear-mongering, character assassination and disinformation that is their specialty. But at the end of the day, more and more Americans will see graphic portrayals of an American ship attacked — and especially of uniformed Americans killed and wounded — by a foreign country named Israel, whose domestic clout within the United States in 1967 allowed them to do it with impunity, and whose extended clout since that time has already produced one American tragedy (9/11), taken the US into two wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) and is pointing the US towards two more wars (Iran and Syria). And there is a good chance that a growing number of Americans will say, “Enough! Never again….” and make things happen. Let us begin.

__________________________________________________

Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College.

June 6, 2009 - Posted by Elias

Israel "Worried" ahead of Lebanese "Fateful" Elections

Israel "Worried" ahead of Lebanese "Fateful" Elections
Hussein Assi Readers Number : 159

06/06/2009 Less than twenty-four hours ahead of the Lebanese parliamentary elections, the Israeli enemy was still expressing "worries" and "concerns" over a potential victory for the opposition, and therefore Hezbollah, in the "democratic" process…

While the Lebanese authorities were finalizing preparations for the Election Day, the Israeli enemy was continuing calculations, expressing concerns and developing worries…

What if the national opposition wins?
This is the question highly raised within the Israeli circles ahead of the elections, given that the Israelis believe that such victory is most likely going to take place…

According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the Zionist entity is witnessing a status of "increasing worries" during the hours that precede the Lebanese elections. Haaretz emphasized that the Zionist entity is scared of the possibility of witnessing a victory for the national opposition.

Meanwhile, other Israeli media outlets pointed to the "importance" of the Lebanese elections. In this context, a former Israeli intelligence official was quoted as predicting that the Lebanese opposition will make huge achievements on Sunday thanks to the "wide popularity" it enjoys.

"Everyone expects that Hezbollah will make huge achievements in the elections," the former Israeli official said, noting that the Resistance party enjoys a wide popularity. "We can't forget the role that Hezbollah allies will also play to strengthen their position," he added.

"Sunday will be the Election Day in Lebanon," an Israeli TV host said in turn. "These elections are very important for Israel, because it's very likely that Hezbollah will consolidate its strength in the elections," he added.

Elections' Supervision Body Bans Statement Made by Sfeir

Elections' Supervision Body Bans Statement Made by Sfeir

Hussein Assi Readers Number : 142

06/06/2009 A few hours ahead of the beginning of the "fateful" polls, an "electoral silence" prevailed in the country according to the electoral law...

However, the electoral silence was "broken" with a statement made by the Maronite Patriarch, a statement that was read by observers as a "violation" of the electoral law and somewhat an "attempt to influence" voters on the eve of the elections.

According to press reports, the elections' supervision committee wasn't "pleased" with Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir's statement and raised question marks over its "suspicious" timing. The Commission overseeing the elections was reportedly set to withhold Sfeir's statement and ban it from being broadcast in various forms of media.

However, the press reports said that interventions by March 14 forces prevented the commission from taking such resolution. But the commission issued a statement in which it reminded the media outlets of their duty to stop broadcasting any political position.

Lebanon Finalizes Preparations for "Long Electoral Day"
Sleiman Stresses Neutrality, Denies Interference in Elections
Lebanon Celebrates Campaigns' End, Readies for Election Day

The 1967-war revisited

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Reporter: Editor Publisher Hiyam Noir

6/06/2009 05:27:00 AM

By Khalid Amayreh
In June 1967, when Israel launched the 6-day-war on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Khalid Amayreh was 10 years’ old. In the following two-part article, he recollects the war, whose outcome and ramifications continue to trouble Palestine, the Middle East and the rest of the world:

Even before 1967, the Israeli army had been carrying out routine incursions into the West Bank, destroying poor people’s homes and killing innocent civilians, very much like what Israel has been doing in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Lebanon recently. I still vividly remember how the Israeli army, including tanks and warplanes, attacked the small nearby town of Sammou’, 25 kilometres south-west of Dura, in November 1966, destroying the town, virtually completely, and killing many civilians. You see the condescending Zionist mentality. They are never interested in genuine peace and coexistence with the peoples of the Middle East, but are only intent on subjugating and tormenting people with brute force. This was as much the case 40 or even 60 years ago as it obviously is now.

In June 1967, I was ten years old. I remember how we were told to raise the white flag when the Israeli army surrounded our small village, Khorsa, 15 kilometres south-west of Hebron. We were told we would be shot and killed if we didn't raise the white flag aloft. The Jordanian soldiers left in disgrace and headed eastward, a few donned traditional women’s clothing in order to disguise themselves, while King Hussein urged us via Amman Radio to fight the Israelis “with our fingernails, with our teeth.” Well, how could we possibly fend off the mighty Israeli army with our teeth and fingernails?

Frankly, the Arab armies didn’t really put up any real fight against the Israelis. These armies reflected the utter political, moral and ideological decadence and bankruptcy of most contemporary Arab regimes. Indeed, maintaining the regime’s survival was the most paramount priority and strategy for the ruling elites and juntas of that time. Fighting Israel and liberating Palestine were not a real priority for these Arab regimes, despite all the rhetoric.
Interestingly, this state of affairs remains unchanged even today, 40 years after the greatest Arab defeat in modern times.

For many years, Israel and its allies claimed that it was Israel that was attacked by the Arabs in 1967 and that all that Israel did was fight back for its very survival, which was at stake.

This is, of course, a big lie, as Israeli leaders themselves came to admit many years later.

The former Israeli President Ezer Weizmann (who was also a former commander of the Israeli air force) admitted in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 1972 that “there was no threat of destruction…but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could exist according to the scale, spirit and quality she now embodies.” 4

Similarly, the former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a notorious hawk, was quoted in Noam Chomsky’s book ‘The Fateful Triangle’ as saying that “in 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army’s concentrations in the Sinai desert didn’t prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”⁵

Yitzhak Rabin, another former Israeli Premier, had this to say about the so-called Egyptian threat to Israel.

“I don’t think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to the Sinai wouldn’t have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”⁶

This is not to say though that the Arabs, particularly the Egyptian and Syrian regimes didn’t do a lot of sabre rattling, threatening to destroy Israel. However, the Israeli leadership of that time and the Johnson Administration, as well as the British and Soviet (Russian) intelligence knew quite well that Nasser was only indulging in bellicose rhetoric and nothing more than that.

But, Israel, nevertheless, decided to attack with the central purpose being territorial expansion.

Needless to say, territorial expansion had always been a central goal of the Israeli strategy.

For example, Chomsky quoted the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as saying the following:

“The acceptance of partition (by Israel) doesn’t commit us to renounce Transjordan; one doesn’t demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”⁷

Gigantic defeat

The historical defeat of the Arab armies in 1967 (historical because Israel occupied the rest of Palestine, including al-Masjidul Aqsa, one of Islam’s holiest places) didn’t necessarily reflect any inherent Arab inferiority vis-à-vis Israel; it rather reflected the bankruptcy of the regimes.

In 1973, during the October or Ramadan war, the Egyptian and Syrian armies could have scored a decisive victory over Israel had it not been for the massive intervention of Israel’s guardian-ally, the United States. It is likely that the Arab armies could, under favourable circumstances, defeat the Israeli army, as demonstrated by Hezbollah in its war with Israel in the summer of 2006.

At the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, the Israelis launched what one may call a PR campaign, employing Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants from the Arab world and Druze officers. Some naïve people in our community, who had been disenchanted with the heavy-handedness of the Jordanian regime, prematurely began making positive remarks about the new occupiers. The reason for that is the often-made assumption that people tend to initially make positive statements about any conqueror.

Such people would speak auspiciously and optimistically about the fledgling Israeli era. They would make casual remarks like this: “Oh, they are better than the Jordanians, they are civilized and educated!” and “the Jews are educated people, they treat people with dignity and respect” and “under Israel’s rule, everybody is equal.” These people simply didn’t know what they were talking about.

But such feelings, which were not widespread among the people, didn’t last long, as the occupation army began revealing its ugly face by adopting stringent measures against us. Well, occupation and decency seemed then, as they do now, an eternal oxymoron. There is no such a thing as a civilized or enlightened or benevolent occupation. A foreign occupation is an act of rape, it is by nature a criminal and evil act, otherwise it would be something else.

Actually, the Israeli occupation is probably the worst occupation ever in the history of mankind, not only for its brutality, but for its durability as well.

Indeed, I would argue that, in many aspects, the Israeli occupation is probably worse than the Nazi occupation of Europe. The Nazis wanted to conquer, pacify and stabilize rather than ethnically cleanse and uproot non-German Europeans as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians.

Soon enough, the Israelis began confiscating the land and building settlements, employing all kinds of dirty tactics, including bribery, shadowy deals, deception, tricks, falsification of documents and outright coercion. They also resorted to the harsh policy of collective punishment such as demolishing homes as a reprisal for guerrilla attacks or membership in the PLO, especially in the Fatah organization, founded and headed by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. In our Palestinian culture, if you want to express extreme ill will towards somebody, you say “Yikhrib Beitak” – may your home be destroyed.

The Israelis sought to take full advantage of this weak spot in our social psychology. Thus, they demolished thousands upon thousands of houses. The demolitions, a clear-cut war crime under international law, have never ceased. Today, they do it mostly by bulldozers and by pinpoint bombing from the air. (See the chapter “Telephone Terror” I don’t know for sure the number of Palestinian homes Israel has destroyed since 1967. However, I can safely claim that they exceed the 15,000 figure.

In fact, the wanton demolitions of Palestinian homes and villages started immediately after the war. Indeed, immediately after hostilities were over, the Israeli army utterly destroyed more than 170 homes in the Maghariba and al-Sharaf neighbourhoods in the vicinity of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

In the third and fourth weeks of 1967, Israeli army bulldozers wiped out the Palestinian villages of Beit Nuba, `Imwas (Emmaus), and Yalu, all on the orders of Yitzhak Rabin.

Approximately twelve thousand people were driven away from their homes, many of them trucked to the River Jordan, others were sent wandering in the desert without food or water.

Eventually, the Israeli government, thanks to a generous gift of Canadian tax-payers’ money, built an infamy on the ruins of ‘Imwas. They called it Canada Park. This is Canada, which claims to be a guardian of human rights and the rule of international law!!!

Actually, Israel continues to behave in such a manner. As I write these words, the Jewish state is unearthing and destroying the ancient Muslim cemetery in West Jerusalem, the Mamanullah (or Mamillah) graveyard, in order to build the ‘Museum of Tolerance’ there!! Yes, Canada Park and Museum of Tolerance!! You see the depravity and brutal ugliness of these criminals? On July 26, 2007, European rabbis held a protest and prayer vigil in Brussels over a 600-year-old cemetery in Vilnius, Lithuania that they said was being used for construction. (See “Rabbis protest construction of Jewish cemetery”: www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa). Of course it is wrong to desecrate cemeteries, Jewish or non-Jewish. However, it is a sign of ultimate hypocrisy to unearth and smash the bones of dead Muslims in Jerusalem in order to build a Museum of Tolerance on the site of the former Muslim graveyard while Jewish leaders would rave and rant and protest when a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe is desecrated by authorities there.

Home demolitions would leave deep psychological scars in people’s memories. Children would return from school only to see their homes being destroyed by bulldozers driven by soldiers wearing helmets with the Star of David engraved on them. That Star of David, which we are told is originally a religious symbol, symbolized hate and evil and cruelty. Even today, I couldn't imagine a more hateful and evil symbol. It is very much comparable to the way Holocaust survivors view the Nazi Swastika.

Phobias, deep stress, neurosis and depression are among the disorders children of demolished homes would suffer as post-traumatic effects.

I personally witnessed numerous demolitions when I was eleven years old. The demolition, or blowing-up operation, would begin with declaring the village where the doomed house was located a closed military zone. The declaration would be made via loudspeakers located atop military jeeps.

In the process, all males betweens the ages of 13 and 70 would be ordered to gather at the playground of the local school, where they were forced to stand with their heads bowed down. Very often, the soldiers would shoot over the heads of people with the purpose of terrorizing them. And anybody daring to raise his head would be kicked in the back by heavily armed soldiers. Civility and simple human decency were always absent, as is the case in these days, and there was no al-Jazeera or CNN to report on Israel’s shameful acts, so the Zio-Nazis always felt at liberty doing to us as they saw fit.

Then, the commanding officer in charge of the operation would give the doomed family ten minutes to salvage whatever meagre belongings they could. (These days they demolish our homes immediately without giving a grace period to get our belongings out).

The scene of young children comforting younger children is devastating. The distraught housewives would struggle to get their utensils and whatever mattresses and foodstuff out, lest they be crushed and irretrievable. A small child would rush to get his favourite toy or an enlarged picture of his late grandfather, before it was too late. Then the commanding officer would give the go-ahead signal and the house would become rubble in a few seconds.

Afterwards, the Red Cross would bring a tent, as a temporary shelter for the victims, otherwise the tormented family would simply make an enclosure and sleep under the trees, or, if the weather was cold, find a cave to live in until a permanent solution could be found. These were indelible images of misery I won’t ever forget, an ugly testimony to Israel's Nazi-like savagery.

Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICHAD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, observed that the Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls “the Message to the Palestinians.”

The Message, Halper says, is “Submit, only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent.” 8

The implication and deeper meaning of the message is very clear. It is the “you (Palestinians) do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel.” 9

Halper reminds us that Zionism has been from the very inception a “process of displacement” and house demolitions have been “at the centre of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians” since 1948. 10

Halper elucidates the policy of house demolitions. In 1948, he says, Israel systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85% of the villages existing before 1948. And since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 21,000 Palestinian homes. More homes, he adds, are being demolished in the path of Israel’s Separation Wall, with the number of homes demolished estimated at 40,000 in the past four years. 11

And contrary to Israeli propaganda that Arab houses are destroyed for security reasons, Halper points out that the 95% of these demolished homes have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews to ensure the advance of Zionism. 12

In addition to the manifestly barbaric practice of home demolitions, the Israelis really ‘excelled’ in the widespread practice of physical and psychological torture, especially in the first few years of the Occupation. In fact, a villager by the name of Salim Mahmoud Safi from Khorsa, my village, was tortured to death in 1970.

And Israel often imprisons the bodies of Palestinians killed or tortured to death for years in order to further torment and inflict pain upon their families. This is a well-known fact here.

Born into a very poor family, I started working in Beer Sheva when I was thirteen as a construction worker and then as an assistant plasterer (Maggish in Hebrew). I did this usually during the summer break and occasionally on Fridays. However, I was always careful not to allow my ‘job’ to seriously undermine my school learning.

In Beer Sheva, or Bir al Sab’a as the city is known in Arabic, I was able to learn Hebrew as well as the Moroccan dialect spoken by many Jews who had immigrated from North Africa. Like Palestinians, most Moroccan Jews worked in the construction sector and doing other menial jobs. Some were street sweepers as well, and almost all of the beggars in the streets were Jews originating from North Africa.

I was able to tour the city, which in the 1980s and 1990s received tens of thousands of immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union.

In the Old Town, I saw the old Palestinian homes, which the Jews seized after expelling their original occupants and proprietors at gunpoint. I also saw the town’s mosque, which dates back to around 1911, when Palestine was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Israel converted the mosque into a ‘museum’ and later into a ‘House for the Artists.’ And when some local Israeli Muslim leaders petitioned the Israeli government to rehabilitate the holy place and allow the town’s Muslim community to pray there, the Israeli authorities said an emphatic “NO.” This is how the ‘only true democracy in the Middle East’ behaves toward its own non-Jewish citizens.

On some occasions, the people for whom I worked would not give me my wages. I worked with such famous construction firms as Rusco, Solel Bonei, Hevrat Ovdeim. I still retain my old Israeli work card.

As Palestinian labourers, we were continually humiliated at Israeli checkpoints and roadblocks at the A’rad Intersection on the way to Beer Sheva. I remember a Jewish police officer who spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent beating one of my relatives savagely without a convincing reason. I made many Jewish friends then, but the psychological barrier remained largely intact. I did intermix with some Tunisian and Moroccan Jews in A’rad, Beer Sheva and Dimona. However, their sense of superiority (and victory) over us always impeded the evolution of normal human relations between them and myself. They viewed us then, as they do now, as the Biblical equivalents of wood hewers and water carriers. We were only good for making coffee and doing the hard, menial works for the superior race, the chosen people. “Muhammed Ta’asi coffee” (“Muhammed! Prepare the coffee for the Jews”) they would scream scornfully at us in a condescending tone.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians worked in Israel as ‘day-labourers’, mostly in the construction and agricultural fields. They would wake up one or two hours before dawn in order to be able to reach the worksite before eight o’clock.

Work in Israel lured most able-bodied Palestinians who abandoned agriculture, which was not financially very rewarding. Indeed, at one point, a day-labourer became economically better-off than erstwhile middle-class professionals such as teachers, clerks and other civil servants.

The Israelis knew what they were doing. By the mid 1980s, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip became the second biggest market for Israeli products after Europe. So, it was really a kind of indirect slavery. We worked in Israel, building multi-story buildings for would-be immigrants, and then we spent the wages we earned buying Israeli products, even Israeli produce, as Palestinian agriculture fell into neglect as greater numbers of Palestinians preferred to earn more money working in Israel than working their land which comparatively yielded little money.

I said it was a kind of indirect slavery because Palestinian workers in Israel, whose number in the mid-1980s reached more than 130,000, were deprived of social benefits and health insurance, and they had no political rights whatsoever.

Before I leave this subject, I would like to say a few words about a specific phenomenon I frequently observed during my stint as a construction worker in Israel.

I remember that some Israeli construction companies would often dispatch a lesser number of buses to take Palestinian labourers, including myself, back home at the end of the workday. For example, two buses would be sent to take 250 workers, when the normal capacity of a single bus didn’t exceed 50-60 passengers.

This meant that many of the exhausted workers would be left standing in the corridor of the bus during the 2-hour trip back home in the West Bank. Eventually, the mostly uneducated labourers would begin thronging at the bus’s front door in order to get to an empty seat to spare themselves the bane of having to remain standing all the way from Bir al Sab’a to Dura.

I believe the Israelis did that deliberately at least on some occasions. Indeed, whenever there were scenes of labourers struggling and pushing to get on board the bus first, Israeli and Western photographers would suddenly appear from out of nowhere to catch the chaotic scenes for posterity.

Then, the disgraceful pictures would find their way to the front pages of American and European magazines and newspapers, further enforcing the already negative stereotypes maintained about the Arabs. This is the same criminal Israeli mentality that continues to vilify and demonize Palestinians these days by fabricating fake shows of young Palestinian boys fitted with explosive belts, provided by the Shin Bet, who are then made to appear before TV cameras at a certain junction in the West Bank to say that they were going to carry out suicide bombings because they hated Jews so much and wanted to have sex with 72 virgins in paradise!! And then an Israeli spokesman would appear on a Western TV channel rather confidently, saying that “There can be no peace with the Arabs until they love their children more than they hate Jews.”

In 1974, then an eleventh grader, I remember I took part in an anti-occupation demonstration in Dura. The occupation soldiers cornered me in one of the narrow streets of the small town, beating me savagely on the head using the butts of their rifles. They nearly killed me. I hated them, as I never posed a threat to their lives. They displayed no humanity or mercy and I was only shouting “Falastin Hurra” “Free Palestine.”

With my head bleeding heavily, I went to the local UNRWA clinic where I got my wounds stitched up. Upon returning home, far from receiving a prodigal son’s reception, my late father (May God have mercy on his soul) roughed me up further for interfering with the occupation army. He would rebuke me saying, “You think you will beat Israel when 22 Arab states couldn’t do it!!” Well, in a certain sense, I wouldn’t have blamed him. He was a man who saw his three brothers killed before his very eyes and he apparently didn’t want to see his son get killed at the hands of his brothers’ killers. “My son, we had already paid our dues,” he would say, in a half-choked voice. (end)

Endnotes

1 Shlomo Ben-Ami, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, Oxford University Press, 2006.
2 Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, p. 225. Penguin Books, 2000.

3 ibid

4. Haaretz Newspaper, 1972
5 Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, South End Press, USA, 1983.
6Ibid.
7Ibid.

8. Zionism as a Racist Ideology: Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide, Kathleen and Bill Christison, 8/9 November, 2003, http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-christison201103.htm.

9. ibid

10. ibid

11. Ibid

12. ibid
13Shulamit Aloni, We have Become a Barbarian People, Yediot Ahronot, 1 January, 2003.

14. ibid

15. ibid
16Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? Dodd, Mead, 1978.
17Paul Findley, They Dare To Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989.
18Professors John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy a Working Paper. http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011
19 Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Simon & Schuster, 2006.
20 Interview with Former President Jimmy Carter, The Forward, 15 Nov. 2006.21 Ibid.

22 ibid
23 LA Times, 12/05/2000.

24 DePaul University Finkelstein quits, Jerusalem Post, 7 September, 2007
25Haaretz, 4 March, 2007.
26 Ibid.

27ibid.

A Secret Hostile Plan Intended to Thwart Unity ?

link

6/06/2009 05:47:00 PM Reporter: Editor Publisher Hiyam Noir

Gaza Demo on Friday June 5 2009
Propa Image /PalestineFreeVoice

Hiyam Noir

GAZA - The office of the Interior Ministry in Gaza Strip claimed on Saturday that members of criminal groups are detained, awaiting investigation suspected of collecting information for the Palestinian Authority-Fatah, in Ramallah, about high officials in the Hamas’ leadership.

The statement from the Interior Ministry in Gaza City said “As we are endeavoring to maintain security and order, to protect our citizens and their property,the security services have doubled its investigations and seized several individs, member of suspect groups.

These groups continued to disturb the peace previous to and during the Israeli war against Gaza. Our initial investigations, revealed that these suspected groups were plotting new crimes against our political leaders and our resistance fighters."

Rally in Gaza City against killings of Hamas members in the WB

On Friday Hamas movement organized rallies in protest of the killing of two of its affiliates in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya two days ago.The particiants of the demonstration headed to the streets in Gaza City and gathered outside the Palestinian Legislative Council building.Banners with slogans were carried against the PA caretaker,Mahmoud Abbas, calling for revenge for the killing of the two slained Ezzedine Al-Qassam fighters in Qalqiliya.

Secret Hostile Plan Intended to Thwart Unity ?

Regarding the PA security forces attack on Hamas members in Qalqiliya, Abu An-Naja a senior Fatah official said in a press statement on Saturday that - "these events will undoubtedly affect the national dialogue, but we shall move forward toward ending the division,we are having a dialogue because of these problems, - otherwise we wouldn't be talking in the first place".

An-Naja denied media reports on Friday, suggesting that the PA caretaker and Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas might have intentionally thwarted unity talks in Cairo with Hamas movement, An-Naja,whom is the Fatah's representative to the conciliation committee in Cairo, said that the statements, which were published in the Al-Hayat quoting a Hamas official, are baseless.

Concerning demands for an internal conciliation committee to begin its work immediately, Abu An-Naja said that "the Fatah movement agreed on this proposal from the start,it is Hamas that has determined that this will be a one-time package." End

Read more about PA/Fatah attacks on Hamas

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EGYPT: 'Obama Talks Democracy, Endorses Dictatorship'

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Analysis by Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa Al-Omrani

CAIRO, Jun 5 (IPS) - Egyptian officials are lining up to praise U.S. President Barack Obama's address to the Islamic world delivered in Cairo Thursday. But local campaigners for political reform say the speech was disappointingly light on the issues of democracy and human rights.

"Obama spoke very briefly and in very general terms on these two subjects," opposition journalist and reform campaigner Abdel-Halim Kandil told IPS. "Despite the hype, Obama's speech was little more than an exercise in public relations."

Obama arrived in the Egyptian capital amid much fanfare Jun. 4, where he delivered a seminal address aimed at Arab and Islamic audiences. The U.S. President came to Egypt via Saudi Arabia, Washington's other main Arab ally in the region, where he spent a day meeting with Saudi Arabian leaders and officials.

Ahead of his speech, Obama also met with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Although talks were held behind closed doors, the two heads of state reportedly focused on regional issues, including the conflicts in Iraq and Central Asia, impending elections in Lebanon, and the volatile Israel- Palestine conflict.

Obama's much-awaited address, in which he called for "a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," covered a range of issues. These included the dangers of violent extremism; prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians; nuclear weapons proliferation; democracy; civil liberties; and economic development.

On democracy, Obama declared his belief that "all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose.

"Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights, and that is why we will support them everywhere," he said. "Governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable, successful and secure. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people."

Officials of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) hastened to praise the "historic" address.

"Obama's speech reignited hope for new U.S. policymaking," wrote Osama Saraya, editor-in-chief of state daily Al-Ahram. Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, head of Cairo's prestigious Al-Azhar school of Islamic learning (who is appointed by the President), declared that the address "succeeded in touching the hearts and minds of Muslims."

But local reform campaigners and human rights activists were considerably less impressed.

Bahaieddin Hasan, head of the Cairo Centre for Human Rights Studies, described the address as "superficial" and devoid of details. "There didn't appear to be any concern for either democratic reform or human rights," he was quoted as saying in the Friday edition of independent daily Al-Dustour. "This came as a major disappointment."

Hisham Kassem, a leading Cairo-based rights activist, agreed. "The Obama administration appears to have put human rights and political reform at the bottom of the agenda," he told IPS. "It's noteworthy that only 367 words of the speech out of a total of almost 6,000 were devoted to democracy and human rights. This tiny proportion appears to be an indication of Obama's priorities."

Kassem said that after a full five months in the presidency, Obama "still hasn't appointed an assistant secretary of state for human rights, while he has also done away with the Bush-era position of special envoy for human rights and political reform."

Kandil said that Obama's choice of Egypt - ruled by Mubarak under a draconian state of emergency for 28 years - sends the wrong message. Saudi Arabia that Obama visited earlier lacks even pretence of democracy.

"Obama's visit was a show of support for both the dictatorial Egyptian regime and the criminal policies of Israel regarding the Palestinians," he said. "It represents an acknowledgement of Egypt's role in serving U.S. and Israeli policy objectives, while totally overlooking the regime's dismal record on human rights and political reform.

"The government, in crisis due to skyrocketing inflation and enormous popular disaffection, is hoping that Obama's visit will somehow bolster its legitimacy and lengthen its dwindling lifespan," said Kandil.

Kandil is also coordinator of the pro-democracy Kefaya movement, which decided to boycott the event. "Instead of attending, Kefaya members staged a protest march in downtown Cairo on the eve of the speech in order to remind the U.S. President that he is visiting a dictatorship," he said.

Kandil said the new Obama administration differs from its predecessor "only in style and not in substance."

In 2004 and 2005, the George W. Bush administration pushed Cairo hard to invite broader political participation and human rights improvements. It later backtracked on these demands after unexpected victories by the Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement in parliamentary elections.

Kandil pointed to recent statements made by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates as a more reliable indicator of the Obama administration's long-term approach to the issue. Early last month, Gates, after meeting with Mubarak, announced that U.S. military assistance to Egypt would not be made conditional on Egypt's human rights record or the pace of democratic reform.
"Democratic change can't be expected to come from the White House, because, ultimately, the U.S. and Israel - like the regime itself - don't want real democracy in Egypt," said Kandil. "They know that if fair elections were ever held, they would be handily won by opponents of U.S. policy and the American-Zionist project in the region.

"And as for human rights, the U.S. is a constant perpetrator of rights violations in Iraq and Afghanistan - and now Pakistan - while simultaneously overlooking violations committed by Israel and its own Arab allies," he said. (END/2009)

Hamas: Resistance against occupation will continue

Link

[ 06/06/2009 - 10:41 AM ]


RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- Hamas Movement issued a statement in the West Bank on Saturday mourning the death of Yousef Akel, 37, who was killed by the Israeli occupation forces on Friday while taking part in a peaceful anti-wall demonstration.

Hamas said that the blood of Akel will not be wasted but would rather continue to ignite resistance against occupation.

The continuation of resistance is the Movement's main option to confront "Zionist crimes".

For its part, the national initiative party on Saturday denounced the IOF killing of Akel, who is the father of four children.

It accused the IOF of deliberately targeting Akel while taking part in a peaceful march.

The party said that the world community should stand up to the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and should impose sanctions on Israel to force it to end its daily crimes against the Palestinians.

The Israeli quelling of peaceful demonstrations would not deter the Palestinian people and their supporters from continuing in their struggle against the Israeli racist policies.

JERSALEM ~ FEEL THE RACIST LOVE!

Link!

MEET THE BEST ISRAEL HAS TO OFFER!
AND WE WONDER WHY THE SOLDIERS WENT MAD?
WE WONDER IF THERE ARE DECENT JEWS IN ISRAEL.
MEET THE MAN ON THE STREET.

"FEELING THE HATE IN JERUSALEM"

Joseph Dana, one of the co-creators of the video above, has written the following to explain why he and Max Blumenthal made the video, and what he thinks it shows:

It’s about entitlement, stupid.

Max and I went on to the streets of Jerusalem at ten o’clock on a Wednesday to ascertain the feelings of the young population about Obama’s upcoming speech in Cairo. As is often the case, the streets of central Jerusalem were not filled with native Israelis but American Jews.

Doubtlessly anyone who has visited Jerusalem has encountered the droves of American Jewish kids that are sent to Israel to study for a period of time from Teaneck or Westchester.

We asked people a simple question, “What do you think of Obama and Israel?” Most of the people that we talked to were dual American Israeli citizens. The answers in this video reflect the education and worrisome perspectives that many American Jews harbor towards Israeli politics. The sense of entitlement that the American Jewish community has when it comes to Israeli policy is on full raw display in the words of these young adults.

Based on our interviews these people were from high socio economic backgrounds and had developed thoughts about current Israeli politics. The question is why more journalists are not covering this story. All you have to do is walk the streets of Jerusalem and you will find dozens of people that harbor the same beliefs.

As a resident of Jerusalem, I can say that the people represented in this video are not members of a fringe group or simply drunk college kids. These people reflect the sentiments shared by many people in this country and this city.

These people and their families are the core of the opposition to meaningful peace between Israel and her neighbors. This is what Obama is up against.

A FEW MORE PERTINENT VIDEOS FROM
THIS BRAVE YOUNG JEWISH FILM MAKER

Inside the Occupation 2009 ~ Part One

Max Blumenthal tours the West Bank, providing an inside perspective of the often violent Israeli occupation of Palestine. Featuring freelance journalist Jesse Rosenfeld and David Jacobus.

Inside the Occupation ~ Part Two

Those houses are so close together I suppose that Israel is doing the Palestinians a favour by starving them skinny because few North Americans could squeeze between them to enter their homes At best only a foot or two wide!

TO READ AND LEARN MORE
BY THIS YOUNG PHOTOJOURNALIST,
HIS WORK CAN BE FOUND AT:

His blog, well written and read ~ MONDOWEISS

His YouTube Site ~ MBLUMENTHAL

On the Web ~ MBLUMENTHAL

Posted by Barbara L at 11:20 AM