Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports. The German-based dpa news service relayed the paper's story.
Twelve hours. One circuit of the sun from horizon to horizon, one course of the moon from dusk to dawn. What was once a natural measurement for the daily round of human life is now a doom-laden interval between the voicing of an autocrat's brutal whim and the infliction of mass annihilation halfway around the world.
Twelve hours is the maximum time necessary for American bombers to gear up and launch an unprovoked sneak attack – a Pearl Harbor in reverse – against Iran, the Washington Post reports….And when this attack comes – either as a stand-alone "knock-out blow" or else as the precursor to a full-scale, regime-changing invasion, like the earlier aggression in Iraq – there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no hearings, no public debate. The already issued orders governing the operation put the decision solely in the hands of the president: he picks up the phone, he says, "Go" – and in twelve hours' time, up to a million Iranians could be dead.
Another simulation by scientists, using Pentagon-devised software, was even more specific, measuring the aftermath of a "limited" nuclear attack on the main Iranian underground site in Esfahan, the magazine reports. This small expansion of the Pentagon franchise would result in stellar production figures: three million people killed by radiation in just two weeks, and 35 million people exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing radiation in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Bush has about 50 nuclear "earth-penetrating weapons" at his disposal, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Bush himself pointedly refused to take the nuclear option "off the table" this week. But what's more, Bush has made the use of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his "National Security Strategy of the United States," issued last month, The Progressive notes. While reaffirming the criminal principle of "pre-emptive" attacks on perceived enemies which may or may not be threatening America with weapons they may or may not possess, Bush declared that "safe, credible and reliable nuclear forces continue to play a critical role" in the "offensive strike systems" that are now a key part of America's "deterrence."
Now this paranoid sect has at last seized the commanding heights of American power....
And they have found a most eager disciple in the peevish dullard strutting in the Oval Office. Under their sinister tutelage, Bush has eviscerated 40 years' worth of arms control treaties; officially "normalized" the use of nuclear weapons, even against non-nuclear states; rewarded outlaw proliferators like India, Israel and Pakistan; and is now destroying the last and most effective restraint on the spread of nuclear weapons: the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The treaty guarantees its signatories – such as Iran – the right to establish nuclear power programs in exchange for rigorous international inspections. But Bush has arbitrarily decided that Iran – whose nuclear program undergone perhaps the most extensive inspection process in history – must end its lawful activities. Why? Because the country is led by "madmen" in thrall to pure evil, impervious to reason, who one day may or may not threaten America with weapons they may or may not have.
So the NPT is dead. As with the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, it now means only what Bush says it means. Force of arms, not rule of law, is the new world order. The attack on Iran is coming….
Monday, 31 March 2008
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Wretched of the earth
Once again Israel defies an impotent international community which offers nothing but timid calls for ceasefire on "both sides." And once again Palestinian suffering and death tolls continue to break records in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967.
Perhaps it is easy to dismiss this suffering by blaming the victims and resorting to ready cliches. Indeed, Israeli propagandists go out of their way to repeat the sound bite: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and since then the Palestinians have been firing rockets on our southern towns. This sound bite might fly in the western media; after all it resonates with a simplistic world view that ignites stereotypes which have been in the making for centuries, producing demonic and degrading representations of Muslims and Arabs. It becomes easy to describe the Palestinians in this context as the carriers of incomprehensible and irrational rage. This kind of representation has intensified since September 2001 with the "rediscovery" of Israel, and its supreme court, as a western lighthouse amid the darkness of the Middle East.
When examined closely, however, reality rules out crude explanations of "violence without reason" and "terrorism without context." It becomes apparent that one cannot seriously discuss a legitimate resistance to a prolonged and horrendous military occupation within the context of the "war on terrorism." Moreover, even if one finds a place to critique some practices of the oppressed one should keep in mind the root of the problem: it is the occupation, not the resistance. No rhetorical device can conceal the reality of colonialism by transforming it either to a mere "conflict" between equally culpable sides or to portray the occupier as the retaliating victim.
In his most recent report of January 2008, the UN rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories has recounted Israel's actions in Gaza, calling them "war crimes" and demonstrating how these have been relentlessly producing a humanitarian crisis. Indeed, more than 80 percent of Gaza's Palestinians are living below the poverty line and depend on the food aid supplied by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. In recent years Israel has destroyed power plants and other civilian facilities, reduced the fuel and electricity supply, and closed the borders. Palestinians' basic human needs, such as movement, food and medical treatment, became totally dependent on the whims of Israeli security technocrats and political demagogues.
Israel should not be allowed to escape its responsibility. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, wounded, imprisoned, or handicapped only in recent years, and the thousands of houses that have been demolished can testify to the cruelty of one of the longest military occupations in recent modern history.
The Palestinians, however, cannot wait till the international community self-awakes into action. They will have to continue to resist in order to assert and restore their humanity. And for that purpose they will have to overcome their own internal differences and unite. Indeed, the long walk toward Palestinian freedom is overwhelming and becoming even more demanding of Palestinian blood. Yet, history informs us that the Palestinians will eventually have their freedom like the South Africans, Algerians, Egyptians, Indians and others.
Click here for full story
Perhaps it is easy to dismiss this suffering by blaming the victims and resorting to ready cliches. Indeed, Israeli propagandists go out of their way to repeat the sound bite: we withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and since then the Palestinians have been firing rockets on our southern towns. This sound bite might fly in the western media; after all it resonates with a simplistic world view that ignites stereotypes which have been in the making for centuries, producing demonic and degrading representations of Muslims and Arabs. It becomes easy to describe the Palestinians in this context as the carriers of incomprehensible and irrational rage. This kind of representation has intensified since September 2001 with the "rediscovery" of Israel, and its supreme court, as a western lighthouse amid the darkness of the Middle East.
When examined closely, however, reality rules out crude explanations of "violence without reason" and "terrorism without context." It becomes apparent that one cannot seriously discuss a legitimate resistance to a prolonged and horrendous military occupation within the context of the "war on terrorism." Moreover, even if one finds a place to critique some practices of the oppressed one should keep in mind the root of the problem: it is the occupation, not the resistance. No rhetorical device can conceal the reality of colonialism by transforming it either to a mere "conflict" between equally culpable sides or to portray the occupier as the retaliating victim.
In his most recent report of January 2008, the UN rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied territories has recounted Israel's actions in Gaza, calling them "war crimes" and demonstrating how these have been relentlessly producing a humanitarian crisis. Indeed, more than 80 percent of Gaza's Palestinians are living below the poverty line and depend on the food aid supplied by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. In recent years Israel has destroyed power plants and other civilian facilities, reduced the fuel and electricity supply, and closed the borders. Palestinians' basic human needs, such as movement, food and medical treatment, became totally dependent on the whims of Israeli security technocrats and political demagogues.
Israel should not be allowed to escape its responsibility. The tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed, wounded, imprisoned, or handicapped only in recent years, and the thousands of houses that have been demolished can testify to the cruelty of one of the longest military occupations in recent modern history.
The Palestinians, however, cannot wait till the international community self-awakes into action. They will have to continue to resist in order to assert and restore their humanity. And for that purpose they will have to overcome their own internal differences and unite. Indeed, the long walk toward Palestinian freedom is overwhelming and becoming even more demanding of Palestinian blood. Yet, history informs us that the Palestinians will eventually have their freedom like the South Africans, Algerians, Egyptians, Indians and others.
Click here for full story
Equality
The world had condemned Israel’s callous treatment of Gaza, where 1.5 million souls are imprisoned, starved, humiliated and subject to being picked off at whim, yet the Israeli government remains impervious to criticism.
Over the past days, over 100 Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israel’s war machine; at least half were civilians and children. Israel says it is targeting workshops where homemade rockets are put together. Who would have thought so many women and toddlers would be working away in such places.
They’re not, of course. If Israel knew where those workshops were, the rockets headed in Israel’s direction would have been stopped long ago. No, this was a brutal exercise in collective punishment. They knew that innocents would die and they went ahead anyway.
Then about mandatory Holocaust education in British and French schools, organized school trips to Auschwitz and the French president’s scheme whereby French 10-year-olds would forge a personal link with a Holocaust victim of his own age.
I quoted President Sarkozy as saying, “Nothing is more moving for a child than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, at the dawn of the 1940s had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew”.
Wouldn’t it be equally as moving for a child to learn about a living child, who would love to have the same games and experience the same hopes as he, but who, today, has the bad fortune to be defined as a Gazan?
But Western compassion is selective. It is framed at state levels by individuals who would prefer to eulogize those whose lives were cruelly cut short over half-a-century ago than people dying now whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And it is framed by a media that gladly floods their broadcasts with gruesome historic pictures and films of Nazi death camp inmates, yet shirks from showing viewers the ashen faces of dead Palestinian children lying on cold mortuary slabs — naturally, to avoid upsetting viewers.
Governments that exercise control or influence media to keep such horrors from permeating the homes of ordinary people are shrewd. They know full well that most ordinary folks operate under a moral code and would be outraged to see the suffering and carnage perpetrated by Israel in the Middle East.
Rather than risking inciting the public with the ugly truth, the media feeds us with the crude antics of Britney or Paris, Oscar ceremonies, ball games, music videos or the minutiae of an investigation into a missing blond-haired five-year-old.
Ponder on the morality of the media-inspired public response to Madeleine McCann as opposed to Gaza’s maimed and orphaned babies. According to the British newspaper Independent, there were 465 stories about her in the British press, the family received 1.1m pounds in public donations, while a host of celebrities — including Simon Cowell, Sir Richard Branson and J.K. Rowling — offered rewards totaling 2.6m pounds.
Remember the extensive media coverage, reserved for captured Israeli soldiers, which encompassed every detail of their personal lives? How many of you are familiar with the name Gilad Shalit? How many of you know the name of even one dead Gazan child?
Perhaps we all need to search our consciences when it comes to fundamental questions of morality when a living Israeli soldier is worth more airtime than dozens of Palestinian children enduring the kind of suffering most of us can’t even imagine; day after day, year after year.
Unless we fight to retain the part of us that makes us human, we might as well give in to the laws of the jungle: Dog eat dog, might is right. As I write, members of the UN are arguing over the wording of a resolution proposed by Libya. Arab states want a strong condemnation of Israel’s strikes on Gaza. The usual suspects, the US and Britain, are demanding a watered-down version heaping most of the blame on the Palestinians.
In other words, a people incarcerated and struggling to find food and medicines are the villains, while their rich and powerful jailor is the innocent victim. If that’s an example of the morality adhered to by Israel and its friends, they can keep it.
Yesterday, the Israelis shut down their Gaza operations just in time for the visit of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Jerusalem today. It wouldn’t do to embarrass their American guest now would it? Moral, the Israeli government isn’t. Polite to those who hold the purse strings and the weapons they are. Let’s give them some credit, eh!
For full story
Over the past days, over 100 Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israel’s war machine; at least half were civilians and children. Israel says it is targeting workshops where homemade rockets are put together. Who would have thought so many women and toddlers would be working away in such places.
They’re not, of course. If Israel knew where those workshops were, the rockets headed in Israel’s direction would have been stopped long ago. No, this was a brutal exercise in collective punishment. They knew that innocents would die and they went ahead anyway.
Then about mandatory Holocaust education in British and French schools, organized school trips to Auschwitz and the French president’s scheme whereby French 10-year-olds would forge a personal link with a Holocaust victim of his own age.
I quoted President Sarkozy as saying, “Nothing is more moving for a child than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, at the dawn of the 1940s had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew”.
Wouldn’t it be equally as moving for a child to learn about a living child, who would love to have the same games and experience the same hopes as he, but who, today, has the bad fortune to be defined as a Gazan?
But Western compassion is selective. It is framed at state levels by individuals who would prefer to eulogize those whose lives were cruelly cut short over half-a-century ago than people dying now whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And it is framed by a media that gladly floods their broadcasts with gruesome historic pictures and films of Nazi death camp inmates, yet shirks from showing viewers the ashen faces of dead Palestinian children lying on cold mortuary slabs — naturally, to avoid upsetting viewers.
Governments that exercise control or influence media to keep such horrors from permeating the homes of ordinary people are shrewd. They know full well that most ordinary folks operate under a moral code and would be outraged to see the suffering and carnage perpetrated by Israel in the Middle East.
Rather than risking inciting the public with the ugly truth, the media feeds us with the crude antics of Britney or Paris, Oscar ceremonies, ball games, music videos or the minutiae of an investigation into a missing blond-haired five-year-old.
Ponder on the morality of the media-inspired public response to Madeleine McCann as opposed to Gaza’s maimed and orphaned babies. According to the British newspaper Independent, there were 465 stories about her in the British press, the family received 1.1m pounds in public donations, while a host of celebrities — including Simon Cowell, Sir Richard Branson and J.K. Rowling — offered rewards totaling 2.6m pounds.
Remember the extensive media coverage, reserved for captured Israeli soldiers, which encompassed every detail of their personal lives? How many of you are familiar with the name Gilad Shalit? How many of you know the name of even one dead Gazan child?
Perhaps we all need to search our consciences when it comes to fundamental questions of morality when a living Israeli soldier is worth more airtime than dozens of Palestinian children enduring the kind of suffering most of us can’t even imagine; day after day, year after year.
Unless we fight to retain the part of us that makes us human, we might as well give in to the laws of the jungle: Dog eat dog, might is right. As I write, members of the UN are arguing over the wording of a resolution proposed by Libya. Arab states want a strong condemnation of Israel’s strikes on Gaza. The usual suspects, the US and Britain, are demanding a watered-down version heaping most of the blame on the Palestinians.
In other words, a people incarcerated and struggling to find food and medicines are the villains, while their rich and powerful jailor is the innocent victim. If that’s an example of the morality adhered to by Israel and its friends, they can keep it.
Yesterday, the Israelis shut down their Gaza operations just in time for the visit of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Jerusalem today. It wouldn’t do to embarrass their American guest now would it? Moral, the Israeli government isn’t. Polite to those who hold the purse strings and the weapons they are. Let’s give them some credit, eh!
For full story
The defense budget for Israel in 2008 will be NIS 51.3 billion, thereby setting yet another new record for defense spending. What to spend it on ?
The world community is encouraged to celebrate and commemorate two occasions this year: Israel's theft of Palestine and the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights.
As the British government announces that the educational curriculum is to now include school children visiting Auschwitz “lest we forget” the horrors of the Holocaust and to learn that such inhumanity must never be repeated, the Vice Israeli Minister for Collective Punishment and Serial Killing (sorry, “Defence”) Matan Viilnai, threatened a new “Holocaust” in the Gaza Strip.
Surely, a far better education for the young would be to stay with their counterparts in Gaza and experience the real thing. Rows of children’s shoes and silent gas chambers are terrifyingly thought provoking, but pretty yesterday, when it can actually be lived: real human remains, real blood and even those reduced to real ashes - the real thing, in real time, at a Mediterranean venue near you. A learning experience never to be forgotten.
The 1.5 million souls to whom Gaza is home are entrapped, with no place to hide, pounded from ground and air, by tanks, F-16's and Apache attack helicopters (courtesy of the “land of the free”) in a reign of terror unleashed by “the only democracy in the Middle East”. As little Gaza is set to become the next Sabra and Shatila massacre (with the advanced warning ringing round the globe) the world's governments deafen with their shameful, craven silence. War criminal turned Middle East “peace envoy” in our Kafkaesque world, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair Q.C., was unconcerned, taking a break from his stressful life counting his piles of ill gotten gains, holidaying at an African game park owned by Virgin Airways founder, Richard Branson.
America's shoe in, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, has seemingly borrowed his predecessor Kofi Annan's two word lexicon (“concern” and “regret”) and announced his “concern” at the situation. That, only after he had spoken of Israel's threat from home made rockets, fired by the resistance, before verbally tiptoeing round Gaza's threat from weapons of mass destruction fired by the land baggers.
Jordan's King Addullah did better, citing Israel's “state terrorism, in violation of all international covenants”, with his acting Foreign Minister, Nasser Judah, demanding a halt to the carnage and slamming Israel's violation of “international law”. Rogue states, as Israel, America and Britain, however, care naught for international law, the former two countries stolen and settled on the blood and beloved land of others and Britain, over centuries having plundered and culled across a swathe of the entire globe with impunity.
As the bodies, and the pathetic remains of humanity, a foot, a leg, a head, a hand, a torso and the injured mount, Israel's Prime Minister Olmert stated that Israel was: “... taking an elementary step in self defence”. One of his Ministers told the BBC that the killing and the destruction of infrastructure would continue.
Olmert and his shameful excuse for governmental law makers, of course, are not ending the fragile lives of human beings. They are targetting “terrorists” and “Hamas”.
Should not those suspected of crime be brought before the law rather than summarily executed ? Israel's actions in Gaza are indeed “state terrorism”.
Hamas, of course is a democratically elected government, fully entitled to its followers. Under the new world disorder, sovereignty of elected government also means nothing, to which Saddam Hussein and his colleagues graves are testimony.
And in the new world language, the untried executed are declared “insurgents”, “Taleban”, “terrorists”, statements near never questioned. There are no mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, no toddlers, teenagers, children, infants. The names and ages of countless dead are the silent scream which addresses this monumental, murderous lie. A family breakfast as the sun's rays spread, dispersing the night's cool, turns to carnage. Kids playing football become seared flesh against the dusty pitch, shouts and laughter forever silenced, in an instant.
A source with considerable expertise also believes that: “The devilish weapons (in Israel's) most extensive armoury (include those) I think designed to disfigure and amputate, so that the loved ones are terrorised.”
A third of the victims of this declared Holocaust are children. There is no kinder transport, no child evacuees sent to safety for the duration. Babies are being buried. Normal people nurture the young. They wake numerous times in the night, for years, to creep and check that the sleeping miracle they have created is still safe, warm. Their heart swells at the waking smile. They wash, cream, dress this new being in special clothes, dream up treats, carry him or her, hugged close, breathing in the special scent of hair and skin. They clutch a small hand in a fledgling walk and speed up to catch them when they run, should they be in danger of tripping, falling. Normal people do not kill kids.
"Uncle, I do not want to die; I want my dad", a toddler screamed as doctors tried to treat burn wounds across her body in Gaza’s main Shifa Hospital. The girl was injured in a house which the Israeli army said was used to store and make weapons, reported the Jordan Times (2nd March.) Israel's “democracy” spreads abnormality at every level. For most benefitting from democracy, few toddlers would even know what dying was.
One image speaks for all the child victims and those left behind, as a result of Israel's criminal actions. It is a father, bent low, laying a small, wrapped child, in a grave, hewn in hardened earth of burned ochre, the sides tooled with care. The little figure looks utterly lost, unbearably vulnerable, searingly alone, the grave seemingly so large. The father, the family will have watched as it was covered and filled in, leaving that mite for ever alone, in rain, shine, cold, heat, unable to ever again wake in the night to stroke the hair, comfort a fear. No faith could ever ease such pain, replicated again and again by America's client state.
"Shame on the Arabs, shame on the Muslims, shame on humanity...” said Tawfek Shaban, a forty four year old school teacher, of Israel's actions.
Shame on humanity indeed. A friend, currently in Palestine, compares the world's shocking indifference to the remarkable Amira Hass's allusion “to what her mother, Hanna saw when women were being taken to the death camps as German women looked on in silence.” Hass wrote: “The vortex is sucking louder and the world looks on from the side.”
My friend concluded: “Palestine is the hinge of humanity. If the world's people turn away, look from the side, the vortex will become a typhoon.”
Prime Minister Olmert sees it differently. Striking at “Hamas”, he said, only advanced the cause of peace.
As the British government announces that the educational curriculum is to now include school children visiting Auschwitz “lest we forget” the horrors of the Holocaust and to learn that such inhumanity must never be repeated, the Vice Israeli Minister for Collective Punishment and Serial Killing (sorry, “Defence”) Matan Viilnai, threatened a new “Holocaust” in the Gaza Strip.
Surely, a far better education for the young would be to stay with their counterparts in Gaza and experience the real thing. Rows of children’s shoes and silent gas chambers are terrifyingly thought provoking, but pretty yesterday, when it can actually be lived: real human remains, real blood and even those reduced to real ashes - the real thing, in real time, at a Mediterranean venue near you. A learning experience never to be forgotten.
The 1.5 million souls to whom Gaza is home are entrapped, with no place to hide, pounded from ground and air, by tanks, F-16's and Apache attack helicopters (courtesy of the “land of the free”) in a reign of terror unleashed by “the only democracy in the Middle East”. As little Gaza is set to become the next Sabra and Shatila massacre (with the advanced warning ringing round the globe) the world's governments deafen with their shameful, craven silence. War criminal turned Middle East “peace envoy” in our Kafkaesque world, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair Q.C., was unconcerned, taking a break from his stressful life counting his piles of ill gotten gains, holidaying at an African game park owned by Virgin Airways founder, Richard Branson.
America's shoe in, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, has seemingly borrowed his predecessor Kofi Annan's two word lexicon (“concern” and “regret”) and announced his “concern” at the situation. That, only after he had spoken of Israel's threat from home made rockets, fired by the resistance, before verbally tiptoeing round Gaza's threat from weapons of mass destruction fired by the land baggers.
Jordan's King Addullah did better, citing Israel's “state terrorism, in violation of all international covenants”, with his acting Foreign Minister, Nasser Judah, demanding a halt to the carnage and slamming Israel's violation of “international law”. Rogue states, as Israel, America and Britain, however, care naught for international law, the former two countries stolen and settled on the blood and beloved land of others and Britain, over centuries having plundered and culled across a swathe of the entire globe with impunity.
As the bodies, and the pathetic remains of humanity, a foot, a leg, a head, a hand, a torso and the injured mount, Israel's Prime Minister Olmert stated that Israel was: “... taking an elementary step in self defence”. One of his Ministers told the BBC that the killing and the destruction of infrastructure would continue.
Olmert and his shameful excuse for governmental law makers, of course, are not ending the fragile lives of human beings. They are targetting “terrorists” and “Hamas”.
Should not those suspected of crime be brought before the law rather than summarily executed ? Israel's actions in Gaza are indeed “state terrorism”.
Hamas, of course is a democratically elected government, fully entitled to its followers. Under the new world disorder, sovereignty of elected government also means nothing, to which Saddam Hussein and his colleagues graves are testimony.
And in the new world language, the untried executed are declared “insurgents”, “Taleban”, “terrorists”, statements near never questioned. There are no mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, no toddlers, teenagers, children, infants. The names and ages of countless dead are the silent scream which addresses this monumental, murderous lie. A family breakfast as the sun's rays spread, dispersing the night's cool, turns to carnage. Kids playing football become seared flesh against the dusty pitch, shouts and laughter forever silenced, in an instant.
A source with considerable expertise also believes that: “The devilish weapons (in Israel's) most extensive armoury (include those) I think designed to disfigure and amputate, so that the loved ones are terrorised.”
A third of the victims of this declared Holocaust are children. There is no kinder transport, no child evacuees sent to safety for the duration. Babies are being buried. Normal people nurture the young. They wake numerous times in the night, for years, to creep and check that the sleeping miracle they have created is still safe, warm. Their heart swells at the waking smile. They wash, cream, dress this new being in special clothes, dream up treats, carry him or her, hugged close, breathing in the special scent of hair and skin. They clutch a small hand in a fledgling walk and speed up to catch them when they run, should they be in danger of tripping, falling. Normal people do not kill kids.
"Uncle, I do not want to die; I want my dad", a toddler screamed as doctors tried to treat burn wounds across her body in Gaza’s main Shifa Hospital. The girl was injured in a house which the Israeli army said was used to store and make weapons, reported the Jordan Times (2nd March.) Israel's “democracy” spreads abnormality at every level. For most benefitting from democracy, few toddlers would even know what dying was.
One image speaks for all the child victims and those left behind, as a result of Israel's criminal actions. It is a father, bent low, laying a small, wrapped child, in a grave, hewn in hardened earth of burned ochre, the sides tooled with care. The little figure looks utterly lost, unbearably vulnerable, searingly alone, the grave seemingly so large. The father, the family will have watched as it was covered and filled in, leaving that mite for ever alone, in rain, shine, cold, heat, unable to ever again wake in the night to stroke the hair, comfort a fear. No faith could ever ease such pain, replicated again and again by America's client state.
"Shame on the Arabs, shame on the Muslims, shame on humanity...” said Tawfek Shaban, a forty four year old school teacher, of Israel's actions.
Shame on humanity indeed. A friend, currently in Palestine, compares the world's shocking indifference to the remarkable Amira Hass's allusion “to what her mother, Hanna saw when women were being taken to the death camps as German women looked on in silence.” Hass wrote: “The vortex is sucking louder and the world looks on from the side.”
My friend concluded: “Palestine is the hinge of humanity. If the world's people turn away, look from the side, the vortex will become a typhoon.”
Prime Minister Olmert sees it differently. Striking at “Hamas”, he said, only advanced the cause of peace.
Apartheid - 2nd Class Citizens (Example) : An Israeli life is worth 10 Arabs ! at least
Around 10:30pm on the night of February 28, M and his wife S spoke in low tones in a dark room dimly lit by a battery-operated lamp. They were trying to decide if it was still safe to send their children to school and decided in favor because the elementary school building is in a safer part of the city near a number of international offices. The electricity in the building had been out 10 hours by then and the couple pulled blankets around them to keep warm in the damp winter air. They live on the 6th floor of Shifa Tower, an 11-story apartment building housing more than a hundred families.
When the blast occurred that took out the Interior Ministry building across the street, there was no time to think about what to do. M flew into his children's bedroom and threw himself over the sleeping body of his son, Basel, to shield the young boy's body from the glass shattering in the windows beside his bed. Then after a matter of seconds the three young children, two girls and the boy, were taken to the windowless kitchen, all of them now fully awake and crying out in terror. M threw blankets and pillows around them where they huddled for the night in restless sleep and dreams of horror, their mother sobbing silently over them as she caressed their faces.
M returned to the children's room in time for the second deafening blast that made him put up his arms instinctively. When he let them down and looked out into the night sky, it was all brown, the earth from underneath the destroyed buildings was swirling around outside the bedroom windows and he could see nothing but flying debris, smoke and a wall of dirt. For some time he could not hear well, only watch-dazed- hypnotized by the silence after the aerial strikes.
In the morning, no one went outside. "This is a black day in Gaza," M wrote; "a holocaust as (Israeli deputy defense minister Matan) Vilnai put it. There is an attack every five or ten minutes. It keeps our nerves on edge and our senses strained. There is so much rage at what is happening; especially the scenes of murdered children and babies. I am so busy I don't know how to describe my feelings. I work to avoid feeling because right now that's too unbearable."
Watch as A, a Hamas soldier, runs for his life into his house. His pursuers miss shooting him so they launch three rockets into the house on the edge of Jabalya camp killing everyone inside (four family members). They are angry now so every house in the way gets the same treatment and without the "militant" to guide their next moves: rockets fired into the interiors of homes with no knowledge of who is inside. Eye-witnesses report this and worse: a six month old baby girl becomes tiny body parts with her mother and brother. A small child is cut apart by shrapnel and screams that she doesn't want to die just before leaving this world. The mothers and fathers cannot protect them so they weep and scream at the funerals that this side of the world never views, especially during basketball season.
Who really cares about these children? Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn't their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don't get it.
The night strikes from F-16s and helicopter missiles continued throughout the day on Friday the 29 and into the first weekend in March, unceasing in their ferocity and indiscriminate killing revenge for the death early last week of an Israeli student at Sapir College outside Sderot. For every one Israeli life, scores of Palestinians must die. God help us now that two Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting on occupied land, against unwilling slaves; killing innocent people to maintain a 60-year-old injustice. Brace yourself, Gaza. You will pay dearly for the continuation of this crime.
Peace would require relinquishing regional hegemony. Peace would demand sharing the land and the resources equally. Peace might, heaven forbid, require democratic decision making in a region where the Israelis are not better, more entitled, more deserving of Their Way than everyone else in the neighborhood. Well, sorry, but these are not on Israel's agenda.
Israel's Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit who bellowed that if it were up to him, Israeli soldiers going into Gaza should shoot "everything that moves" like babies and toddlers, grandfathers and mothers, orange trees and wasted-away donkeys pulling cartloads of rotten vegetables; like flowers and seabirds, chickens and goats, rats and cockroaches. A scorched-earth policy will suffice. They'll create their apocalyptic wilderness and will call it peace.
When the blast occurred that took out the Interior Ministry building across the street, there was no time to think about what to do. M flew into his children's bedroom and threw himself over the sleeping body of his son, Basel, to shield the young boy's body from the glass shattering in the windows beside his bed. Then after a matter of seconds the three young children, two girls and the boy, were taken to the windowless kitchen, all of them now fully awake and crying out in terror. M threw blankets and pillows around them where they huddled for the night in restless sleep and dreams of horror, their mother sobbing silently over them as she caressed their faces.
M returned to the children's room in time for the second deafening blast that made him put up his arms instinctively. When he let them down and looked out into the night sky, it was all brown, the earth from underneath the destroyed buildings was swirling around outside the bedroom windows and he could see nothing but flying debris, smoke and a wall of dirt. For some time he could not hear well, only watch-dazed- hypnotized by the silence after the aerial strikes.
In the morning, no one went outside. "This is a black day in Gaza," M wrote; "a holocaust as (Israeli deputy defense minister Matan) Vilnai put it. There is an attack every five or ten minutes. It keeps our nerves on edge and our senses strained. There is so much rage at what is happening; especially the scenes of murdered children and babies. I am so busy I don't know how to describe my feelings. I work to avoid feeling because right now that's too unbearable."
Watch as A, a Hamas soldier, runs for his life into his house. His pursuers miss shooting him so they launch three rockets into the house on the edge of Jabalya camp killing everyone inside (four family members). They are angry now so every house in the way gets the same treatment and without the "militant" to guide their next moves: rockets fired into the interiors of homes with no knowledge of who is inside. Eye-witnesses report this and worse: a six month old baby girl becomes tiny body parts with her mother and brother. A small child is cut apart by shrapnel and screams that she doesn't want to die just before leaving this world. The mothers and fathers cannot protect them so they weep and scream at the funerals that this side of the world never views, especially during basketball season.
Who really cares about these children? Every Palestinian is a militant because everyone (sooner or later) wants Israel off their land, out of their lives, and forgotten like a horrible dream. It is for this reason that they are all equal targets: none of them is intelligent enough to understand that their land isn't their land, their lives are not their lives, and their horrible dream is their present and future. Have no pity on those who don't get it.
The night strikes from F-16s and helicopter missiles continued throughout the day on Friday the 29 and into the first weekend in March, unceasing in their ferocity and indiscriminate killing revenge for the death early last week of an Israeli student at Sapir College outside Sderot. For every one Israeli life, scores of Palestinians must die. God help us now that two Israeli soldiers have been killed fighting on occupied land, against unwilling slaves; killing innocent people to maintain a 60-year-old injustice. Brace yourself, Gaza. You will pay dearly for the continuation of this crime.
Peace would require relinquishing regional hegemony. Peace would demand sharing the land and the resources equally. Peace might, heaven forbid, require democratic decision making in a region where the Israelis are not better, more entitled, more deserving of Their Way than everyone else in the neighborhood. Well, sorry, but these are not on Israel's agenda.
Israel's Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit who bellowed that if it were up to him, Israeli soldiers going into Gaza should shoot "everything that moves" like babies and toddlers, grandfathers and mothers, orange trees and wasted-away donkeys pulling cartloads of rotten vegetables; like flowers and seabirds, chickens and goats, rats and cockroaches. A scorched-earth policy will suffice. They'll create their apocalyptic wilderness and will call it peace.
Monday, 3 March 2008
Wipe Israel off the map or bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust
The Media who became obsessed with "wipe Israel off the map" misquote scurry to defend Vilnai after disgraceful comments .
"The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Vilnai told the Army Radio on Friday.
However, in a Reuters report, despite the fact that the rest of the statement was translated into English, the incendiary word "holocaust" remained in its original Hebrew version - "shoah".
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," the media blindly repeated the quote ad infinitum, and it became second nature for them to carelessly drop it into any propaganda piece intended to hype Iran's supposed threat to Israel and the world.
Barely a day goes by that Israeli, American and British warhawks don't spew the phrase like a broken record in an attempt to create a catchy cliché and brand market the next jaunt of imperial blood-letting.
No matter that, according to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word "map," instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population.
To claim Ahmadinejad has issued a rallying cry to ethnically cleanse Israel is akin to saying that Churchill wanted to murder all Germans when he stated his desire to crush the Nazis. This is about the demise of a corrupt occupying power, not the deaths of millions of innocent people.
Refering to Nazis, the West Bank's largest charity, the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS),
Mohamed Qasrawi, an official at the ICS.
Qasrawi said Israel is trying to destroy Palestinian educational and economic institutions in order to subjugate Palestinians to the Israeli occupation. "It is clear they want us to leave, to emigrate, so that Jews will take over our homes, land and businesses. It is Nazism without gas chambers... but the outcome, which is national annihilation, is the same."
"The more Qassam (rocket) fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves," Vilnai told the Army Radio on Friday.
However, in a Reuters report, despite the fact that the rest of the statement was translated into English, the incendiary word "holocaust" remained in its original Hebrew version - "shoah".
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map," the media blindly repeated the quote ad infinitum, and it became second nature for them to carelessly drop it into any propaganda piece intended to hype Iran's supposed threat to Israel and the world.
Barely a day goes by that Israeli, American and British warhawks don't spew the phrase like a broken record in an attempt to create a catchy cliché and brand market the next jaunt of imperial blood-letting.
No matter that, according to numerous different translations, Ahmadinejad never used the word "map," instead his statement was in the context of time and applied to the Zionist regime occupying Jerusalem. Ahmadinejad was expressing his future hope that the Zionist regime in Israel would fall, not that Iran was going to physically annex the country and its population.
To claim Ahmadinejad has issued a rallying cry to ethnically cleanse Israel is akin to saying that Churchill wanted to murder all Germans when he stated his desire to crush the Nazis. This is about the demise of a corrupt occupying power, not the deaths of millions of innocent people.
Refering to Nazis, the West Bank's largest charity, the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS),
Mohamed Qasrawi, an official at the ICS.
Qasrawi said Israel is trying to destroy Palestinian educational and economic institutions in order to subjugate Palestinians to the Israeli occupation. "It is clear they want us to leave, to emigrate, so that Jews will take over our homes, land and businesses. It is Nazism without gas chambers... but the outcome, which is national annihilation, is the same."
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