Signs of the Times News for Wed, 31 Dec 2008

Signs of the Times News for Wed, 31 Dec 2008: "http://www.sott.net/articles/show/171874-Barack-Obama-on-Israel-s-Siege-of-Gaza-No-comment-"
Remember the Truth is always there and even if you dont admit it publicy (like knowing there were No WMDs in Iraq) the rest of the world knows it. Do you want respect or Ire from people of the world..... People should be chanting "We Want Change" at his Inauguration and not let him be sworn in until he promises to cut Israel loose from US politics.

And the winner is......

......for the most war crimes in one day (and yes, more than the US)

The Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Convention, both in regard to the obligations of an occupying power and in the requirements of the laws of war.

Those violations include:

Collective punishment - the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.

Targeting civilians - the air strikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.

Disproportionate military response - the air strikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza's elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.

Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza's besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.

Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give Israel any right, neither as the occupying power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel's escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; on the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.

Israel has also ignored recent Hamas' diplomatic initiatives to re-establish the truce or ceasefire since its expiry.

Richard Falk, United Nations Special Investigator

finally someone who got it right.

Just read this , Robert Fisk - The Independent- Mon, 29 Dec

We hear the usual Israeli line. General Yaakov Amidror, the former head of the Israeli army's "research and assessment division" announced that "no country in the world would allow its citizens to be made the target of rocket attacks without taking vigorous steps to defend them". Quite so. But when the IRA were firing mortars over the border into Northern Ireland, when their guerrillas were crossing from the Republic to attack police stations and Protestants, did Britain unleash the RAF on the Irish Republic? Did the RAF bomb churches and tankers and police stations and zap 300 civilians to teach the Irish a lesson? No, it did not. Because the world would have seen it as criminal behaviour. We didn't want to lower ourselves to the IRA's level.

Perfect!!

Its like i have been looking for this comparison for years

Christmas again - celebrate the birth of Jesus with airstrikes

AZA, Dec. 24 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian Christians living in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip will not celebrate Christmas this year and do the midnight Christmas mass.

"I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel's latest massacres were broadcast around the world.


US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel's attacks, and others will follow.

Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school.

Shmerling's joy has been echoed by Israelis and their supporters around the world; their violence is righteous violence. It is "self-defense" against "terrorists" and therefore justified. Israeli bombing -- like American and NATO bombing in Iraq and Afghanistan -- is bombing for freedom, peace and democracy.

The rationalization for Israel's massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in "retaliation" for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).

But today's horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel's method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.

What the media never question is Israel's idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.



That is an Israeli truce. Any response to Israeli attacks -- whether peaceful protests against the apartheid wall in Bilin and Nilin in the West Bank is met with bullets and bombs. There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel's attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The Palestinian Authority in Ramallah has acceded to all of Israel's demands, even assembling "security forces" to fight the resistance on Israel's behalf. None of that has spared a single Palestinian or her property or livelihood from Israel's relentless violent colonization.




Once again we are watching massacres in Gaza, as we did last March when 110 Palestinians, including dozens of children, were killed by Israel in just a few days. Once again people everywhere feel rage, anger and despair that this outlaw state carries out such crimes with impunity.

"Tel Aviv's bombardment of the Gaza Strip is yet another brazen example of Israel's terrorist mindset and its gross violation of human rights," it adds.

The statement condemns the barrage of Israeli attacks on civilian non-military targets as being in stark defiance of the Geneva Convention and UN resolutions.

Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that no protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed, hence collective punishment and all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.



Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, rejected the Israeli government's claims that the air raids were in self-defence.

"This is a bloodbath, the bloodiest bloodbath since 1967," he told Al Jazeera. "This is an attack on the civilian population of Gaza."

Hundreds of Palestinians were injured in Saturday's attacks [GALLO/GETTY]
"They try to claim that this was done as a response to missiles, but they are denying the fact that the whole year not a single Israeli was killed by missiles. The first Israeli killed was only because of the Israeli invasion, the Israeli attack."

Many of the dead in Saturday's attacks were police officers, including Tawfiq Jabber, the Gaza chief of police.

Hospitals, already suffering from shortages due to an 18-month blockade on the Gaza Strip, said they were struggling to cope with the number of injured, which included women and children.

One of the buildings hit on Sunday was reportedly a warehouse used to supply local pharmacies with medicines.

"This is going to make us unable to supply any of the local families that depend on us," Dr Hussam Abu Hashem, the owner, told local Hamas radio. "It's a war against human beings."

The Israel-Hamas ceasefire expired on December 19, with Hamas arguing that Israel had violated the truce by preventing vital supplies from entering the Strip.

Hamas won control of the Palestinian Legislative Council in elections in January 2005. The international community refused to accept a Hamas-led government, demanding that the faction recognise Israel and renounce violence. Economic sanctions by the EU and US followed.

Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after bloody street battles against its rival, Fatah.

Bush Camp singing their own prases

All the talk this month and for another couple of weeks is about the Bush regime, patting themselves on the back for all the good work they have done over the past 8 years.
THIS MAKES ME SICK!!!
But a lot of people tend to believe the crap they spout, which makes me ever more sick....
Here is an example from the Guardian blog today that is very common.

Iraq and Afghanistan have been given the chance of a more liberal future. (Women in schools, democrats in office, etc etc)

Well if you watch our western news, then this would be true. But of course it ignores all the reported facts. i.e. Iraqs people are waiting for the US to go, so that it can have its own rules, not the Wests'. Afganistan has reported cases of Women having acid thrown over their face, for following the Wests' suggestions of changing their culture, the taliban will be back in charge within 12 months. Thats supposed to be positive ???

Al Queda have less of a safe haven for training in Afghanistan ("they ran the country and now they barely run a cave" - as Bush rightly said (I paraphrase slightly)).

Well i never... .Considering that most analysts put the Taliban in over 70% of control of the country, how does that make that less of a safe haven. In fact, i guess they can pretty much do what they want and with the capturing of NATO convoys, probably with better equipment than before.

Libya has been brought in from the terror camp.

Like that had anything to do with the US. The leader of the country found the right time to get away from the terrorist brand, and Europe jumped at the chance for some extra business. But when Libya was on the Security Council for the UN, back to refering them as a terrorist country, because they said the suffering in Gaza was wrong and wanted to condem Israel. Well we cant have that !!

Terrorists have been killed in the horn of Africa and their networks thereby made void.

Well apart from some US airstrickes on some villages, the Islamists look to regain there country again, once Ethiopia leaves. The only peace Somalia has seen in the last decade was when Islamists were running the country. But we cant have that !!

US and western bases have been established in an arc around the caucasus.

And that has made all those countries involved fearful of war.. Great Job again !! Well thanks to Bush for bringing up the fear of nuclear war again... we really appreciate that one !!

As a consequence of the above, Iran is hemmed in by western bases or western-leaning countries.

Well not exactly.... they have some US guys pretending to liberate Iraq and Afganistan, building bases next to the border of Iran and supplying some local rebels to attack the Iranian Police. Great Stuff... Something we can be proud of. What was the outcome of the stratergy of surrounding them. Oh yeah. They have spent millions beafing up their defence forces. Well thats not good if someone actually carries out their threat to attack Iran is it ??

Bush will be like Truman and Eisenhower - derided at the time, but later seen as the architects of a sensible policy in difficult circumstances - a policy that will last decades.

Simple answer to this one .... BULLSHIT!! Anyone with half a brain who does not learn history in the US or UK will learn of War Criminals that got away scott free and taught never believe anyone just because they smile when they say it.

Cheney and Rumsfeld took a lead role in much of this and I don't doubt they are proud.

Proud, Happy, Rich, Lucky they are not in Nurenburg for War Crimes.

Bush's success in Africa, where he has increased aid and thereby made a huge impact on reducing HIV and malnutrition, are more properly seen as his own triumph.

Trying to help with Aids, without helping with Water and Education has endangered anyone in Africa trying to help these people. Read the reports from people who are there and not the US PR group. The people there struggle with local beliefs and the lack of education. If the US spent less on War and carrying out War Crimes, we would likely have no Aids in the world today. But then we would also not be having a Global Meltdown, which is really going to screw the world.

So , thanks, but no thanks Bush Regime.... and here is my shoe to , to thow into the mix...

Merry Xmas, and have a happy new year. .... Millions wont !! :)