Palestinian Pundit

You Would Think That He is Always Posing for a Toothpaste Commercial.
That is Because His Handler (Ahmad Yousef) is an Advertising Man.
Yousef Says, "Keep Grinning, Habila."

The Little King Brought the Instructions from Washington to the Stooge "Brother Abu Mazen."
Jordan's King Abdullah (R) welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on his arrival at the Royal Palace in Amman March 10, 2007.

Demonstrators burn home-made American Flags during a protest against the visit of U.S. President George W. Bush to Uruguay in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, March 9, 2007. (AP photo)




Demonstrators protest against US President George W. Bush's visit to Uruguay. Bush will hold trade talks with his Uruguayan counterpart Tebare Vazquez as mass protests continued to dog his five-nation tour of Latin America.(AFP)

By Kurt Nimmo

"If anything can be said about the neocons and the Israelis, it is that they are tenacious, they are completely dedicated to the “creative destruction” plan in the Middle East, and short of arrest, conviction, and imprisonment they will not rest. It can be said that the deception game launched in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq by these dedicated traitors was at best sloppy, as it was easy to pick apart the “facts” spoon-fed to the corporate media by the neocon lie factory known as the Office of Special Plans. Of course, at the end of the day, the fact this effort was at best slipshod was of little concern because the neocons understand well the intellectual lassitude, the habitual indifference of the average American, unable or unwilling to give a whit about the future of the country or, for that matter, the future that will be suffered by his own family.

Once again, the corporate media is feeding us a main course of half-truth and fabrication as the neocons and Israelis prepare to invade Iran, the next target on their total destruction roster. “A high-ranking Iranian general who may have defected is in Northern Europe, where he is being questioned about Iran’s role in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and other terrorist acts,” the neocon New York Sun tells us. “Ali Reza Asghari, 63, whose grim face was displayed on Israeli TV last night, was spilling valuable secrets to an American intelligence team as a prelude to defecting to the United States,” the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, reports. “Asghari was Iran’s deputy minister of defense and former top official of the notorious Revolutionary Guards. Experts said his secrets, should they fall into American or Israeli hands, could have devastating consequences for the Iranian regime.”......

“In a scene straight out of a John le Carré spy novel, Asghari disappeared Feb. 7 from an Istanbul hotel where he was staying on a private trip —possibly with his family—and has vanished without a trace.” According to the Australian, taking its reportage leads in Jerusalem, Asghari “defected and sought asylum in the US,” taking along his family, although this is not confirmed.

Naturally, for suspicious types as your humble blogger, well-steeped in history and possessing a honed skill of reading between corporate media lines, the obvious conclusion here is that Asghari was abducted while on vacation with his family in Turkey—likely by the Mossad, CIA, a combination of both, or by way of freelance contracted by the aforementioned. “It is likely Asghari has been abducted by Western intelligence services,” said Iran’s top police officer, General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam.......

However, this does not explain the initial report, carried in the Washington Post and Israel’s Yedioth Ahranot (as announced in the Hebrew headline at the left), more or less bragging about the abduction of Asghari......

Selling the Iranian nuclear program scare tactic is a long term project, as even the most hysterical Israeli shill—usually billed as an “expert,” as Walid Phares above, same as I am expert on quantum physics—tells us the Iranians are a few years away from patching together a nuke, thus admitting Israel can breath a sigh of relief as it will not be nuked anytime soon, that is if you buy the poorly spun Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Iran’s feverish scramble to build nukes (in addition, we are expected to believe the leadership of Iran consists of Jim Jones knock-offs, happily courting suicide).

In order to spike the punch, we are now told a general—at first reported abducted by the Mossad, subsequently revised to be a harmless defection, complete with family and “vital documents” detailing Iranian mischief—will spill the beans “on Iran’s links to groups in Iraq. These include the Mehdi Army of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and the Badr organization,” according to the Belfast Telegraph, a quite remarkable turn of events, as “US and Iranian officials are to sit down at the same negotiating table today at an international conference in Baghdad to attempt to curb sectarian violence in Iraq. The conference will also include delegates from Syria, Saudi Arabia and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.”

Finally, as if to satisfy the Israelis, who reportedly encouraged this “defection”—sort of like the defection of diplomats earlier this year at the Iranian Consulate in Iraq—the good general will apparently tell-all on Hezbollah, the perennial Israeli enemy, never mind Hezbollah did not exist prior to Israel invading Lebanon and killing, imprisoning, and torturing thousands of people. Danny Yatom, the former head of Mossad and a member of the Knesset, “described the missing general as very important and said that he would be able to shed light on one of the murkiest chapters in recent Middle East history. From the early 1980s Iran funded, trained and armed members of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, which began as a small Shia Muslim militia but is today the most powerful paramilitary force in the Levant,” the Times Online reports, or rather reads from the official history. Again, no mention of the fact there would be no Hezbollah, or for that matter Hamas, if not for the predacious behavior of the small, albeit armed to the teeth—thanks to clueless Americans—Israeli state........

But never mind. Asghari’s information, arriving in the nick of time, as the neocons face off against the Iranians at a conference in Baghdad, will provide a momentary boost for the all-murder, all-the-time agenda of the neocons. It is but another ingredient added to the toxic brew sold to the clueless out here in Bushzarro world, a distillation of hatred, lies, and murderousness that will ultimately end up in World War Four, as the neocons fondly call it. "

Report, Committee to Protect Journalists, 10 March 2007

"New York, March 8, 2007 - The Committee to Protect Journalists is concerned that two journalists were bruised by Israeli stun grenades at an Israeli military checkpoint between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah today.

Rami al-Faqih, a correspondent for the local Al-Quds Educational Television, and Iyad Hamad, a cameraman for The Associated Press, were each hit this morning as Israeli border police fired at journalists covering a peaceful protest marking International Women's Day at the Qalandia checkpoint, the journalists told CPJ.

"We are troubled by these reports that Israeli border police deliberately fired at journalists," said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. "We call on Israeli authorities to thoroughly investigate this incident immediately and to instruct its forces to allow journalists to do their job unhindered."

Al-Faqih, who said he was holding a microphone with the station's logo, told CPJ he was hit in the foot and fell to the ground. Iyad Hamad, a cameraman for AP, was similarly injured when he was hit in the legs by a stun grenade, AP photojournalist Nasser Shiyoukhi told CPJ.

The journalists alleged that Israeli border police fired deliberately at them, and noted that none of the protestors were hit by the grenades, which they said emits plastic shrapnel. Video footage, they said, showed that the journalists weren't among the demonstrators.

Israeli National Police Spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told CPJ that border police used minimum force -- only three stun grenades -- to disperse protestors when they forcefully tried to enter an area that was "out of bounds." Rosenfeld said that after the Israeli border police asked demonstrators to disperse from the closed area, "the press should have left the area quietly and dispersed with the ladies who were present at the scene" to maintain their safety and prevent injury.

Rosenfeld added that no official reports were filed with the border police by the media organizations regarding the journalists' injuries.

Israeli soldiers and border police have previously used stun grenades against journalists. Most recently, on February 26, Israeli soldiers fired several stun grenades at a group of around 12 photographers and cameramen, including Nasser Ishtayeh and Emilio Morenatti of the AP and Jaffar Ishtayeh of Agence France-Presse, to prevent them from covering its search and seizure operation in the West Bank city of Nablus, the journalists told CPJ.

On February 16, Israeli soldiers fired teargas at several cameramen and photojournalists covering clashes between the soldiers and Palestinian stone-throwers near the West Bank city of Hebron, according to AP's Shiyoukhi and journalists at the scene. When the journalists got within 30 meters of the Palestinian youths, Israeli soldiers fired teargas canisters at their feet. Shiyoukhi told CPJ he was overcome by the gas and his colleagues brought him to a hospital in Hebron. Shiyoukhi alleged that the Israeli soldiers fired deliberately at the journalists since they were a clear distance from the Palestinian stone-throwers."

Report, DCI/PS, 10 March 2007

"In 2006, Israel continued its policy of arresting and imprisoning Palestinian children. Some 700 Palestinian children (under 18) were arrested by Israeli soldiers over the course of the year. Of these, around 25 children were held on administrative detention orders, imprisonment without charge or trial. The overwhelming majority of those arrested in 2006 were boys; there were eight girl child prisoners who served sentences at different points during the year. Of these, four had been arrested in 2006.

At any given point during the year, there were between 340 and 420 Palestinian children held in Israeli prisons and detention centers in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), with around 380 held at the end of the year. Of these, around 300 were being held in central prisons, either pending trial or after having been sentenced. The remaining 80 were being held in interrogation and detention centers. The number of children arrested in 2006 brings the total number of Palestinian children arrested by Israel since the beginning of the second Intifada in September 2000 to approximately 5,200.

Palestinian child political prisoners routinely face violations of their human rights during the arrest through imprisonment process. They are exposed to physical and psychological abuse, often amounting to torture. They are denied prompt access to an attorney and often denied contact with their families and the outside world. Many are held without charge or trial. They face substandard, often inhumane, conditions of detention, both in the facilities where they are initially held and interrogated and in those where they await trial and serve their sentence.

Moreover, they are frequently denied access to proper medical care. In many cases, the arrest, interrogation and imprisonment experience has psycho-social effects that extend far beyond the period of detention.

To download the Palestinian Child Political Prisoners 2006 Report (PDF) click here.

By Amjad Rasmi, Arab News.

The Sydney Morning Herald

"MANY HAD WRITTEN off the chances that Arundhati Roy would return to the world of fiction. Her astounding first novel, The God of Small Things, won the Booker in 1997. Ten years and 6 million copies later there was still no repeat of the lyrical, whirling debut. Instead Roy turned to lobbing literary Molotov cocktails at Enron, George Bush's war on terror and the World Trade Organisation in the form of incendiary polemics. No one could accuse her of having writers' block: she churned out six books, collections of her essays with titles such as Power Politics and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

Dispensing with story-writing, she pursued a career in social activism, appearing at anti-war rallies and using her celebrity to raise the profiles of unfashionable causes - Kashmiris on death row, the rights of tribal communities in India, hardscrabble suicides in the country's farming belt.......

Roy says India today, like pre-revolutionary France, is poised "on the edge of violence". As she sees it, the country of her birth is not coming together but coming apart - convulsed by "corporate globalisation" at an unprecedented, unacceptable velocity. "The inequalities become untenable."......

Roy's dire predictions about India have left her isolated when mainstream opinion seems convinced that the country, with its nuclear bombs and slick Bollywood movies, is the next superpower-in-waiting. Roy says some parts of the country, such as the western state of Gujarat - the scene of a bloody pogrom against Muslims five years ago - are off limits to her because of her campaigning.

A few years ago she was briefly imprisoned for contempt of court while protesting against the country's controversial Narmada Dam project. The God of Small Things produced obscenity charges and a court case that ran for a decade, only to be dismissed last month.

She first shot to prominence in 1994 with a scathing film review entitled The Great Indian Rape Trick, about the movie Bandit Queen, in which she questioned the right to "restage the rape of a living woman without her permission".......

Unlike other Indian-born writers who have relocated to the US and Europe, Roy is determined to remain a thorn in the side of the establishment in India. "Here you see what's happening. People are driven out of villages, driven out of the cities, there's a kind of insanity in the air and all of it held down by our mesmeric, pelvic-thrusting Bollywood movies. The Indian middle class has just embarked on this orgy of consumerism."

But she admits that the kinds of non-violent protests she has taken part in for a decade have failed in India, a republic founded on the Gandhi-ite principles of peaceful resistance. "I am not such an uninhibited fan of Gandhi. After all, Gandhi was a superstar. When he went on a hunger strike he was a superstar on a hunger strike. But I don't believe in superstar politics. If people in a slum are on a hunger strike, no one gives a shit."

Roy says activists have been "exhausted" by their attempts to influence the courts and the press and now says she does not "condemn people taking up arms" in the face of state repression.

"It would be immoral for me to preach violence unless I were prepared to resort to it myself. But equally, it is immoral for me to advocate feelgood marches and hunger strikes when I'm not bearing the brunt of unspeakable violence. I certainly do not volunteer to tell Iraqis or Kashmiris or Palestinians that if they went on a mass hunger strike they would get rid of the military occupation. Civil disobedience doesn't seem to be paying dividends."

Instead of the Indian state caving in to the moral righteousness of the numerous causes Roy supports, she says it merely moved to co-opt its adversaries. The power of argument, even in the world's biggest democracy, has been shrunk by the argument of power.

Roy says she was aghast to learn that a fellow Indian environmental campaigner accepted a million-dollar award from the transnational metals firm Alcan, which has been accused of grabbing tribal land in eastern India. The tentacles of big business have learned to embrace non-government organisations. The result, she claims, is that the charitable trusts of Tata, India's largest private company, fund "half the activists in the country".

She feels frustrated by the state's ability to brush aside non-violent resistance movements. "This has sapped the energy from people's movements. The very Gandhian Narmada movement [the grassroots group which campaigned against big dams in India] knocked on the door of every democratic institution for years and has been humiliated. It has not managed to stop a single dam from going ahead. In fact the dam industry has a new spring in its step."

Roy says she had given ideological opponents a handy hate figure. "In India I'm portrayed more as a hysterical, lying, anti-national harridan....."

By Tony Karon

"So, is the U.S. going to attack Iran? I’ve been in South Africa for much of the past month, and the question kept recurring among observers of the international scene. Nobody knows the answer, of course, for the simple reason that it’s unlikely that a decision has been taken. To be sure, as Michael Klare points out, President Bush’s rhetoric suggests that he’s already decided to bomb Iran. And the Administration, served as ever by a willfully naive media corps stoking misconceptions, is certainly preparing the public for a confrontation. And there’s no question that the folks who brought you the Iraq war would very much like to see a second front opened in Iran. At the same time, however, there are a number of powerful countervailing forces in play that will restrain President Bush’s more hawkish instincts — it’s clear, already, that the bomb-Iran crowd faces considerable hostility in the U.S. Congress, among the key U.S. Sunni-Arab allies in the region (on whose behalf Washington claims to be challenging Iran) and, very importantly, among the uniformed leadership of the U.S. military. And the leadership in Iran, aware of the danger, appears to be moving to calm tensions on a wide array of fronts (moves that allow the pragmatists in Washington to craft a narrative — for domestic consumption — arguing that pressure on Iran has strengthened the U.S. hand to negotiate with Iran, and that negotiations can now proceed)......."

"Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, has called George Bush, the US president, a "political cadaver" and blasted US policies as "imperialist" as he led 20,000 supporters in an anti-American rally.

Chavez shouted "Gringo go home!" on Friday night to raucous applause in a crowded football stadium in the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires.

Alluding to Bush's waning years in office, Chavez said: "The US president today is a true political cadaver and now he does not even smell of sulphur anymore. "What the little gentleman from the North now exudes is the smell of political death and in a very short time he will be converted into cosmic dust and disappear from the stage."

Chavez added that he did not come to "sabotage" Bush's visit, saying the timing was a coincidence, even as Bush landed in neighbouring Uruguay for a 36-hour visit.

He said: "This act was organised to say 'No!' to the presence of the imperial boss in these heroic lands of our America, in the heroic lands of South America."

'Against the poor'

"North America for the North Americans, South America for the South Americans. This is our America!" he said, standing under a large sign reading "Bush and Imperialism, Out!" and "Yes to Latin American unity!"......

Chavez said Bush's five-nation tour would fail to improve America's image and dismissed his pledges of US aid as a cynical attempt to "confuse" Latin Americans.

On Argentine state television, the Venezuelan leader on Friday, said: "It seems he's just now discovered that poverty exists in the region".

At the stadium rally, about 20,000 people, including men and women with children in tow, applauded Chavez. Claudio Hernandez, a Chilean, said: "We are here to show our support of Chavez and our repudiation of Bush and imperialism. We are against Bush because of his oil wars and his other policies."

Anti-American and anti-Bush sentiments run high in the countries on Bush's tour, particularly over the war in Iraq and US trade negotiations......

In Argentina, many still blame Washington for tolerating the country's brutal military regimes of 1976-1983, when thousands of dissidents were tortured and killed.

The organisers of Chavez's rally included Mercedes Merono of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group still searching for sons and daughters who vanished after being arrested under military rule. Merono said: "This counter-rally is extremely important. Bush seeks to take advantage of Latin America while Chavez supports the region's independence."....."

"The Hamas-run Palestinian Education Ministry on Saturday rescinded a controversial decision to pull an anthology of Palestinian folk tales from school libraries and destroy copies, reportedly over mild sexual innuendo, following a widespread public outcry.

Education Minister Nasser Shaer, of Hamas, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he had not been informed of this week's decision to ban the book, Speak Bird, Speak Again. Some 1,500 copies of the book were destroyed - the most direct attempt by the militant Muslim group to impose their beliefs on Palestinian society.

I have decided to correct the illegal measures that were taken regarding disposing the book, Shaer said.

A group of prominent intellectuals planned to protest the book ban in Ramallah on Saturday. They said they intended to proceed with the march, even after Shaer's announcement.

The 400-page anthology of folk tales narrated by Palestinian women was first published in English in 1989 by the University of California at Berkeley. It was put together by Sharif Kanaana, a novelist and anthropology professor at the West Bank's Bir Zeit University, and by Ibrahim Muhawi, a teacher of Arabic literature and the theory of translation.

At the time of the first publication in Arabic, in 2001, the Palestinian Culture Ministry requested 3,000 copies and had them distributed in schools, Kanaana said last week. Kanaana said that two of the 45 tales contained what some might consider vague sexual innuendo, referring to body parts in colloquial Arabic."



وزير التربية الفلسطيني يتراجع عن حظر كتاب قول يا طير

تراجع وزير التربية والتعليم الفلسطيني في الحكومة المكلفة ناصر الدين الشاعر عن قرار سابق له بسحب كتاب تراثي من مكتبات المدارس وسط احتجاجات من مثقفين وأكاديميين فلسطينيين على هذا القرار.



وأعلن الشاعر أنه قرر إلغاء قرار سابق لإحدى اللجان بوزارته بإتلاف الكتاب التراثي "قول يا طير" والذي تضمن ما قالت الوزارة إنها عبارات جنسية وتخدش الحياء العام.

وقال الوزير أمام عشرات المتظاهرين -أمام مقر وزارة التربية والتعليم في رام الله- إنه قرر العدول عن كافة الإجراءات التي قال إنها غير قانونية واتخذت بدون علمه، مشيرا بذلك إلى سحب الكتاب وإتلاف نسخه في مكتبات المدارس التابعة لوزارته.

وكان الشاعر قال قبل المظاهرة التي نظمت في المدينة من قبل عدد من المثقفين إنه قرر إعادة الكتاب للتداول في المدارس، ولكن فقط بين المدرسين وأوضح أن "هذا الموضوع سيعرض على الجهات المختصة لعمل ما تراه مناسبا بما يضمن استمرار المعلمين في استخدامه".

ورفع المتظاهرون -الذين بعثوا بالأمس رسالة احتجاج إلى الرئيس الفلسطيني محمود عباس والمجلس التشريعي- لافتات للمطالبة بمحاسبة وزير التربية والتعليم، وشعارات تندد بقرار وزارته.

وأعد الكتاب -الذي يتضمن أمثالا شعبية حكتها نساء فلسطينيات باللغة العامية- الروائي وأستاذ الأنثروبولوجيا بجامعة بيرزيت الدكتور شريف كناعنة وإبراهيم مهوي وهو مدرس للأدب العربي ونظرية الترجمة.

Masri: World should move before the ticking bomb explodes in the region

"GAZA, (PIC)-- Palestinian lawmaker and Hamas’ prominent political leader Mushir Al-Masri has affirmed that the persistent IOA aggressions on the Aqsa Mosque could inflict adverse repercussions on the world’s stability and would explode the ticking bomb in the face of the Israeli occupation government.

Masri’s warnings came during an enthusiastic speech he delivered before the Palestinian masses who participated in pro-Aqsa demonstrations organized by the Movement in Gaza city on Friday......."

Report, B'Tselem, 9 March 2007

"Testimonies taken by B'Tselem reveal that during the army's operation in Nablus in late February, soldiers used two Palestinian children, a fifteen-year-old boy and a eleven-year-old girl, and a twenty-four-year old man as human shields. The use of human shields constitutes a flagrant breach of international humanitarian law and is explicitly and clearly prohibited by Israeli military orders. B'Tselem wrote to the Judge Advocate General and demanded that he immediately order a Military Police investigation into the matter......

According to the testimonies, on the first day of the operation, around five o'clock in the morning, soldiers came to the house of the 'Amirah family, in the Old City, and removed all the occupants from the house and took them to a nearby house, where other Palestinians were also being held. Then the soldiers ordered one of the family, 15-year-old 'Amid to accompany them in their search of three other houses. According to 'Amid's testimony, the soldiers pushed him with the barrels of their rifles and forced him to enter rooms of the house in front of them, open cabinets and empty out the contents, and open windows. In one instance, according to the testimony, a soldier shot several shots into the room......

The picture that emerges from the testimonies, and particularly the description of the firing into the rooms in the testimonies of 'Amid and Samach 'Amirah, indicate that the soldiers feared the houses they searched hid armed militants or that explosives had been planted in them. In other words, the mission the two minors and the adult were forced to conduct undoubtedly included an element of danger and it seems clear that the soldiers were aware of this......"

By Mike Whitney

"The United States has been defeated in Iraq. That doesn’t mean that there’ll be a troop withdrawal anytime soon, but it does mean that there’s no chance of achieving the mission’s political objectives. Iraq will not be a democracy, reconstruction will be minimal, and the security situation will continue to deteriorate into the foreseeable future.

The real goals of the invasion are equally unachievable. While the US has established a number of military bases at the heart of the world’s energy-center; oil output has dwindled to 1.6 million barrels per day, nearly half of post-war production. More importantly, the administration has no clear strategy for protecting pipelines, oil tankers and major facilities. Oil production will be spotty for years to come even if security improves. This will have grave effects on oil futures; triggering erratic spikes in prices and roiling the world energy markets. If the contagion spreads to the other Gulf States, as many political analysts now expect, many of the world’s oil-dependent countries will go through an agonizing cycle of recession/depression.

America’s failure in Iraq is not merely a defeat for the Bush administration. It is also a defeat for the “unipolar-model” of world order. Iraq proves that that the superpower model cannot provide the stability, security or guarantee of human rights that are essential for garnering the support of the 6 billion people who now occupy the planet. The mushrooming of armed groups in Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Somalia foreshadows a broader and more violent confrontation between the over-stretched American legions and their increasingly adaptable and lethal enemies. Resistance to the imperial order is on the rise everywhere......

These new coalitions are an indication of the massive geopolitical changes that are already underway. The world is realigning in reaction to Washington’s aggression. We can expect to see these groups continue to strengthen as the administration pursues its resource war through force of arms. That means that the “old order”--the United Nations, NATO and the transatlantic Alliance--will come under greater and greater strain until relations are eventually cut off......

An America defeat in Afghanistan could be the straw that breaks NATO’s back. The administrations’ global schema depends heavily on support from Europe; persuading the predominantly white, western nations to join the battle and secure pipeline corridors and landlocked energy supplies throughout Central Asia. Failure in Afghanistan would send tremors through Europe’s political landscape and give rise to a generation of anti-American politicians who will seek to dissolve relations between the two traditional allies. But a breakup seems inevitable. After all, Europe has no imperial aspirations and its economies are thriving. They don’t need to invade and occupy countries to get access to vital resources. They can simply buy them on the open market......"

"The Iraqi judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death has fled Iraq and sought asylum in the UK.

Al Jazeera's correspondent in London quoted British official sources as saying on Friday that Raouf Abdel-Rahman, a member of Iraq's Kurdish minority, has requested political asylum in Britain with his family.

Rahman headed the Supreme Iraq Criminal Tribunal that heard Saddam's genocide trial and found the former Iraqi president guilty, leading to his execution.

Saddam was accused of killing more than a hundred Shia in the village of Dujail following a failed assassination attempt on him.

Besides sending Saddam to the gallows, Rahman had also sentenced two other top Saddam aides to death in the same trial.

The two were Saddam's half brother and former intelligence chief, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court.

They were found guilty along with Saddam of involvement in the Dujail killings in 1982."

"GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - Mayan priests will purify a sacred archaeological site to eliminate "bad spirits" after President Bush visits next week, an official with close ties to the group said Thursday.

"That a person like (Bush), with the persecution of our migrant brothers in the United States, with the wars he has provoked, is going to walk in our sacred lands, is an offense for the Mayan people and their culture," Juan Tiney, the director of a Mayan nongovernmental organization with close ties to Mayan religious and political leaders, said Thursday.

Bush's seven-day tour of Latin America includes a stopover beginning late Sunday in Guatemala. On Monday morning he is scheduled to visit the archaeological site Iximche on the high western plateau in a region of the Central American country populated mostly by Mayans.

Tiney said the "spirit guides of the Mayan community" decided it would be necessary to cleanse the sacred site of "bad spirits" after Bush's visit so that their ancestors could rest in peace. He also said the rites _ which entail chanting and burning incense, herbs and candles _ would prepare the site for the third summit of Latin American Indians March 26-30......."

"The State Department has hired two native Arabic speakers to monitor Arabic political discussion forums on the Internet and to overtly participate in them in an effort to correct misperceptions about U.S. policy in the Middle East.
The small "digital outreach team," which also includes a supervising Foreign Service officer, was created in December by Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, as part of her campaign to prevent mistakes and speculation about the United States from being accepted as truth, officials said.
"We want to make sure that U.S. views are present in the Arabic cyberspace," said Jeremy Curtin, acting coordinator of the Bureau of International Information Programs at the State Department.
"The two people who were hired just before Christmas monitor Arabic sites on current affairs in the Middle East and other issues we are interested in," he said. "They identify themselves as U.S. government employees."
Mrs. Hughes, a close friend and former adviser to President Bush, was appointed in 2005 to help improve perceptions of the United States overseas, particularly in the Arab and Muslim world, which suffered because of the Iraq war and other U.S. policies......"

Can the Arabs Produce One Like Him in This Generation?
I Have My Doubts.

Celebrate: They Are Meeting Again Sunday....
Only 233 Summit Meetings With Brother Abu Mazen (who is authorized by Hamas to "negotiate") Remain Until The West Bank is Fully Negotiated Away...

War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century

By SAMEER DOSSANI

"Sameer Dossani: Let's talk about the recently passed Iraqi oil law. It's well known that the law was drafted in the U.S. and then consulted on by very few Iraqis all loyal to Prime Minister Noori al-Maliki, then finally pushed through the Iraqi parliament. This law paves the way for regionalization and privatization of Iraqi oil. What's the U.S. economic agenda in Iraq and will it be able to carry that agenda out, given the disastrous nature of the occupation so far?

.....

SD: The difficulties surround the occupation Iraq has deflected the U.S.'s attention away from other parts of the world, including Latin America. Recently, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and others such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Evo Morales of Bolivia, have been talking about regional trade agreements such as ALBA and, in the case of Venezuela, aid packages that are supposedly designed to actually benefit local populations as opposed to transnational companies. Critics claim that these policies are a) unsustainable, because they depend on revenues from Venezuela's oil wealth, and b) self serving for the government of Hugo Chavez. What is your response to these criticisms?.....

SD: In Latin America, Venezuela is only one part of the general discontent that is driving governments away from the IMF. But in other parts of the world, notably Africa, the IMF and its neoliberal diktaats are as strong as ever, and the predictable result is that extreme poverty is still on the rise. Other countries -- for example India -- are not under this pressure but still are wildly pursuing neoliberal economic policies. What hope do you see for citizens and movements in these places? Are there lessons to be learned from the case of Latin America? How can we in the U.S. be supportive of struggles for economic justice in these places?......"

By Mike Lane.

A protestor wearing a T-shirt with the image of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, fixes billboards that read "Get out Bush" at the entrance of a state-owned oil company Petrobras facility visited by US President George W. Bush in Guarulhos, east of Sao Paulo, Friday, March 9, 2007. (AP Photo)

دول الخليج تربط مساعداتها بتولي فياض وزارة المالية الفلسطينية

"وذكر أن حركة فتح ستسمي وزيرين مستقلين أحدهما هو زياد أبو عمرو للخارجية، بينما ستسمي حماس ثلاثة مستقلين من ضمنهم وزير الداخلية.
واكدت مصادر فلسطينية لـ القدس العربي ان دول الخليج طالبت الرئيس عباس بتعيين فياض للمالية، وانها لن تحول اي اموال للسلطة الا من خلال فياض. ونسبت مصادر فلسطينية موثوقة الي الرئيس عباس قوله ان دول الخليج بما في ذلك السعودية ودولة الامارات طلبت منه تعيين فياض وزيرا للمالية. واما بالنسبة لوزارة الداخلية قالت مصادر فلسطينية ان اللواء جمال أبو زايد هو المرشح الأقوي لتولي الحقيبة بعد ان تم تفضيله علي اللواء المتقاعد خضر معروف.
"

***

Reliable Palestinian sources have told Al-Quds Al-Arabi that the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, told Abbas to install Salam Fayad as the "finance minister," and that any financial support from these countries to the PA will go only through Fayad.

Fayad so happens to be Washington's as well as the World Bank's favorite and a personal friend of Bush. Just connect the dots to see where this "unity government" is going and don't forget to congratulate Habila about such a wise "choice."

"Police have clashed with thousands of Brazilians protesting at a visit by the US president and his push for an ethanol energy alliance with the Latin American country.

Riot police used tear gas and batons to disperse more than 6,000 protesters holding a largely peaceful march through Sao Paulo's financial heart just before George Bush arrived.

In Porto Alegre, more than 500 people chanted "Get out, imperialist!" as they marched to a Citigroup bank and burned an effigy of the US president.

Brazil has mounted its biggest ever security operation in Sao Paulo with about 4,000 officers on hand during Bush's visit......

Brazil is the world's biggest exporter and consumer of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

It has been enthusiastic about proposals to join forces with the US and create a world wide market for ethanol.

But not everyone is optimistic.

Mariana Schwarz, a 25-year-old publicist said: "We know that Bush and the United States are known for exploiting weaker countries into deals that will only benefit themselves without worrying about the environment."

Suzanne Pereira dos Santos, an activist with Brazil's Landless Workers Movement said: "Bush and the United States go to war to control oil reserves, and now Bush and his pals are trying to control the production of ethanol in Brazil. And that has to be stopped,"


Graffiti reading "Get Out, Bush! Assassin!" appeared on walls near the locations that Bush will drive past as he begins a Latin American tour that also includes stops in Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico......

Despite concerns over unity in Latin America, if Bush's plan is to counter the Chavez charm offensive in the region, Washington may have its work cut out.

Lula Da Silva, Brazil's president, has made it clear that his priority is unity between Latin American states, which includes, rather than isolates, Venezuela."

Afghanistan – worse than Iraq
By Justin Raimondo

"......The real war, the Democrats argue, is not in Iraq – which never had anything to do with Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, or 9/11 – but in Afghanistan. This is their big critique of the Iraq war: not that it's wrong, immoral, a murderous disaster that surely indicts us in the eyes of the whole world – only that it is diverting resources away from another military occupation that shows no signs of winding down.

Yet the war in Afghanistan is being played exactly as the occupation of Iraq is being played – as if we are trying to establish a semi-permanent presence. In both countries we have held elections, and used our military to prop up a government that has very little actual power. In Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, our nation-building efforts are doomed to fail.

As Michael Scheuer points out, the Afghans have been badly underestimated by the US-NATO coalition, and they are even now in the process of repeating history and driving out the invaders, just as they drove out the Soviets, the Brits, and the legions of Alexander the Great.

The Taliban and their allies are returning to Afghanistan, having received additional training and an influx of aid from around the Muslim world: Scheuer estimates their numbers are at least equal to the coalition forces. And these aren't just new recruits, although there are more than enough of those, but seasoned veterans of the Afghan wars who are eager to get on with the fight......"

Washington's escalation of threats against Iran is driven by a determination to secure control of the region's energy resources

Noam Chomsky
Friday March 9, 2007
The Guardian

"In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq, tales surface of Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Iraq - a country otherwise free from any foreign interference - on the tacit assumption that Washington rules the world......

For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world......

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources......."

B'Tselem: IDF used Palestinian girl as human shield in Nablus

By Reuters

"Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian girl as a "human shield" during an operation against militants in the West Bank town of Nablus last week, an Israeli human rights group said on Thursday.

The IDF said it was checking the information from the B'Tselem group, which monitors Israeli actions in the occupied territory. Israeli law bans the military from using human shields.

B'Tselem said the girl, Jihan Daadush, told its interviewers that IDF soldiers had entered her family home and questioned her and her relatives about the whereabouts of gunmen who had fired at them during the raid.

The soldiers, she said, threatened to arrest her unless she led them to a nearby house.

"[A soldier] ordered me to go towards the house," B'Tselem quoted the girl as saying. "Three soldiers walked behind me. When we reached the house, there were a lot of soldiers. The soldiers ordered me to go inside the house and I went inside."

B'Tselem said Jihan told them the soldiers shone flashlights and asked about the rooms of the house. There was no mention in the report of whether troops found militants inside. The girl said two soldiers then returned her home.

"[One of the soldiers] told me, 'Thank you, but don't tell anyone,'" the girl said, according to B'Tselem. "I was afraid they would kill me or put me in jail. I am still afraid the soldiers will invade the city again and take me away."

B'tselem also said the army had used a 15-year-old Palestinian boy and a Palestinian man for a similar purpose during the five-day raid of Nablus, a militant stronghold.

The IDF ended the operation on March 1. During the incursion, troops shot dead a Palestinian civilian who had observed the raid from his rooftop. Soldiers also detained 11 suspected militants."

An Excellent Article
By Roni Ben Efrat, Challenge, 8 March 2007

"......As for the bloody strife between Hamas and Fatah, here the Saudis mounted the best show in town. The Mecca Summit based its format on Camp David and Shepherdstown; each were billed as a last ditch effort, with terrific momentum leading up to them. They failed, however, whereas in Mecca no hint of possible failure was allowed. The final terms were established in advance. Even Syria blessed the outcome, hoping that the Saudis would put in a good word for it with the West.

The agreement itself, which is the basis for a Palestinian unity government, is extremely misleading. At the head of the unity government will be the present PM, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, but his deputy will be from Fatah. Hamas will have 9 ministers and Fatah 6, but there will also be 5 independents and 4 from other parties. The Finance Minister will be the universally respected Salam Fayyad. The Interior Minister, who has yet to be agreed on, will be from Hamas's list of independent candidates. Hamas retained its position of not recognizing Israel, but it accepted the earlier agreements signed by the PLO. It refused to say it would adhere to them, as Fatah wanted, but on the other hand it gave up a clause it had always included before: that it would only recognize those agreements "which serve the Palestinian people." Both sides promised not to slide again into conflict. Both felt the harsh criticism coming from the Palestinian street.

On the surface - but only there - it looked as if Hamas had come out ahead:

1. From the moment of its election in January 2006, Hamas wanted a national unity government with Fatah, but the latter refused, thinking it could undermine the Hamas regime by getting the West to withhold funds. Now Fatah has given up this ambition.

2. The formulas of the Mecca agreement contain no essential concessions by Hamas. (Israel can claim that the Quartet's demands have not been met.)

3. Because the accord was signed at Mecca, Hamas receives pan-Arab legitimacy for its position. The Saudis will pressure the West to recognize the new government. Moreover, the latter can now receive a billion dollars in funds from the Arab league.
All this, as said, is appearance. In Mecca both sides swept differences under the rug. The real test of their unity will come when their government is pressed to accept the conditions set by the Quartet and Israel. It must do so to unfreeze the West's donations. Hamas cannot govern without this money, the lack of which triggered the clashes. To get it, however, Hamas will have to go along with the line that seeks accommodation.

Here, once again, Hamas reveals a characteristic lack of consistency. We saw this first a year ago, when it chose to take part in elections that were based on an infrastructure provided by the Oslo Accords. It accepted the Oslo framework without the content. Now it deepens its entrapment by entering a unity government, hoping to gain Western funds without accepting Western conditions. Saudi Arabia has won a brief span of glory, but what about the Palestinian people?

Certainly, there's no question as to the horror of the bloody scenes we witnessed between Fatah and Hamas. They occurred in utter opposition to the popular will. The Palestinian street rejoiced sincerely over the Mecca Agreement.

The problem, however, is: unity for the sake of what? The Oslo Accords did not establish the basis for a true Palestinian state, rather the mold for a state dependent on handouts: a donations state, which would serve Western and Israeli interests. From the beginning, the donations were intended to finance a political entity composed of corruptible, docile elitists like those in other Arab regimes. The Palestinian Authority, under Fatah leadership, wasted a whole decade without establishing an infrastructure and without creating real jobs. It purchased quiet by handing out cash in paper bags to the workers of a bloated public sector.

The election of Hamas did not bring a change of direction. Even if we acknowledge that the movement is not corrupt, it offered no alternative to the donations state. On the contrary, the notion of charity rather than work is a principle of the Hamas movement. Now this notion has become the basis of the entire unity government. Unless the latter can thaw Western coffers, the streets will again erupt.

Thanks to Mecca, then, the situation of the Palestinian people has become even more entangled: its leaders in both Hamas and Fatah have bound it more strongly to the regional interests of the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The particular Palestinian problems will have to wait for a different balance of forces.

The war between Fatah and Hamas created a superfluous conflict, whose settlement puts the ball in Hamas's court. The demands will now be on Hamas, not Israel, especially the demand to release abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit and to stop the Qassam rockets. Furthermore, Israel and the US can now apply all their weight in getting Hamas to meet the Quartet's conditions: to disband terrorist organizations, to abide by former agreements, and to recognize Israel.

These things happen at a time when many of the senior leaders in Israel are mired in scandals of sex or corruption. The tie between money and politics is deepening social gaps. The immorality of Occupation has spread to all walks of life. The last shadow of a political agenda (the Convergence Plan) disappeared in the summer's Lebanon war.

We should not wonder that Israel, having bound its fate to America, would display political shortsightedness and a lack of social sensitivity. What is worrisome, rather, is that the Palestinian people, having suffered so long, hitches its interests to the wagon of the Saudi kingdom, instead of cultivating, from within itself, an alternative voice that will reflect its needs. Between the corrupt Arab regimes and the path of Islam, a third way must be found, secular and realistic, that will rebuild the society on a new class basis. National unity, yes, but not for the sake of a donations state, rather for the sake of a state that can achieve Palestinian rights! Only a self-reliant state, based on a viable economy, will pull the rug from beneath the feet of the bully next door. "

Negroponte as Tour Director

By ROGER BURBACH
CounterPunch

"Bush's trip to Latin America is a calculated effort to counter Hugo Chavez's growing influence in the region and to separate the "bad left" from the "good left", namely Uruguay and to some extent Brazil. He hopes to add them to the dwindling bloc of pro-US nations, including Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico which he is visiting.

From the beginning the trip is provoking wide spread opposition. He will be greeted by demonstrators in Montevideo, Uruguay who are opposed to the special trade agreements being negotiated with the government of Tabare Vasquez. Even members of his ruling party, the Broad Front, are active in organizing the demonstration.

Across the border in Argentina, which Bush will not visit, massive demonstrations are being organized to coincide with his stay in Uruguay. And to add insult to injury, Hugo Chavez, is flying in to take part. While President Nestor Kirchner will not be participating, lower level government officials are. This comes on the heels of a series of commercial and economic accords that Kirchner just signed with Chavez on a trip to Caracas, including the founding of the Bank of the South, which is seen as an alternative to US dominated institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank......

All three countries are raising the banner of socialism. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez is intent on leading the country to a "new socialism for the twenty-first century." In Bolivia Evo Morales governing party is called Movement Towards Socialism, a "party of a new type" comprised largely of social movements. And in Ecuador, Rafael Correa in his inaugural address in January called for an opening to the "new socialism for the twenty-first century" and declared that Ecuador has to end "the perverse system that has destroyed our democracy, our economy and our society."

When Bush returns and finds out that his trip has done little to alter the growing leftist trend of Latin America, the iron fist of the new Deputy Secretary of State, John Negroponte, will take control of US policy. Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras helped run the contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980's, which murdered thousands of innocent civilians in Honduras as well as Nicaragua, and he is known to believe that more aggressive measures have to be taken against Chavez and the gathering storm in Latin America. He comes to his new post after serving as Director of National Intelligence, and prior to that ambassador in Bagdhad. Given that Condoleezza Rice has little expertise in Latin America, Negroponte will set policy for the region, overriding the few remaining moderates in the State Department's office of Hemispheric Affairs.

With Negroponte we can expect a marked increase in US covert operations, aimed not only at Chavez in Venezuela, but also at the other governments and the popular movements in the region that are leading the charge against the historic US domination of Latin America and are bent on constructing more equitable societies."

Two Windbags for the Price of One

This is How Palestinians Observed Women's Day
Palestinians hold Palestinian flags during a demonstration on International Women's Day at the Qalandiya checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah March 8, 2007. REUTERS

By Genevieve Cora Fraser

"After visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem recently, a group of German bishops crossed over into Occupied Palestine and compared Israeli treatment of Palestinians to Nazis treatment of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Bishop Gregor Hanke of Eichstaett reported, “This morning we saw pictures of the bestial Warsaw Ghetto at Yad Vashem, and in the evening we were in the ghetto of Ramallah. It gives one the creeps,” he said.

Cardinal Joachim Meisner, who served as bishop of Berlin when it was divided by the Communist-built Berlin Wall, commented when crossing a checkpoint into eastern Jerusalem, “This is something that is done to animals, not people.” He later explained to reporters, “I never thought I would see something like this again in my life.”

Walter Mixa, the bishop of Augsburg spoke of Palestinians facing "ghettoization with almost racist characteristics.” When asked to clarify his comment he replied, “I wanted to say that building the wall between Israel and the Palestinian autonomous areas, as well as the many Israeli settlements, amounts to a degree of provocation from the point of view of the Palestinian population.”

As might be expected, the bishop’s statements have been condemned as anti-Semitic, just as President Jimmy Carter has been accused of anti-Semitism for daring to tell the truth about Israeli-American policies in his best seller, “Palestine - Peace Not Apartheid.”

Israel’s killing, maiming, imprisonment, torture and abuse of Palestinian men, women, children and elders is supported by Congress with US tax dollars. "

By William S. Lind

"......Then, the lead story in today's Washington Post begins with this paragraph:

"Senior House Democrats, seeking to placate members of their party from Republican-leaning districts, are pushing a plan that would place restrictions on President Bush's ability to wage the war in Iraq but would allow him to waive them if he publicly justifies his position."

That's not pushing a plan, it is pushing on a rope, and the House Democratic leadership knows it. You can almost hear their giggles as they offer the antiwar voters who gave them their majority one of Washington's oldest dodges, "requirements" the Executive Branch can waive if it wants to.

The kabuki script currently goes like this. Congressional Democrats huff and puff about ending the war; the White House and Congressional Republicans accuse them of "not supporting the troops;" and the Democrats pretend to be stopped cold, plaintively mewing that "Well, we all agree we have to support the troops, don't we?"

"Supporting the troops" is just another dodge. The only way to support the troops when a war is lost is to end the war and bring them home. Nor is it a challenge to design legislative language that both ends the war and supports the troops. All the Democratic majorities in Congress have to do is condition the funding for the Iraq war with the words, "No funds may be obligated or expended except for the withdrawal of all American forces from Iraq, and for such force protection actions as may be necessary during that withdrawal." If Bush vetoes the bill, he vetoes continued funding for the war. If he signs the bill, ignores the legislative language and keeps fighting the war in the same old way, he sets himself up for impeachment.

What's not to like?

For the Democrats, what's not to like is anything that might actually end the war before the 2008 elections. The Republicans have 21 Senate seats up in 2008, and if the Iraq war is still going on, they can count on losing most of them, along with the Presidency and maybe 100 more seats in the House. 2008 could be the new 1932, leaving the Republican Party a permanent minority for twenty years. From the standpoint of the Democratic Party's leadership, a few thousand more dead American troops is a small price to pay for so glowing a political victory......

The likely result of all this Washington dodging is that events on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere will outrun the political process. That in turn means a systemic crisis, the abandonment of both parties by their bases and a possible left-right grass roots alliance against the corrupt and incompetent center. In that possibility may lie the nation's best hope."

By Michael Scheuer
Asia Times

"Afghanistan is again being lost to the West, even as a coalition force of more than 5,000 troops launches a major spring offensive in the south of the country. The insurgency may drag on for many months or several years, but the tide has turned. Like Alexander's Greeks, the British and the Soviets before the US-led coalition, inferior Afghan insurgents have forced far superior Western military forces on to a path that leads toward evacuation. What has caused this scenario to occur repeatedly throughout history?

In the most general sense, the defeat of Western forces in Afghanistan occurs repeatedly because the West has not developed an appreciation for the Afghans' toughness, patience, resourcefulness and pride in their history. Although foreign forces in Afghanistan are always more modern and better armed and trained, they are continuously ground down by the same kinds of small-scale but unrelenting hit-and-run attacks and ambushes, as well as by the country's impenetrable topography that allows the Afghans to retreat, hide, and attack another day.

The new twist to this pattern faced by the Soviets and now by the US-led coalition is the safe haven the Afghans have found in Pakistan. This is the basic answer to why history has found so many defeated foreign armies littering what Rudyard Kipling called Afghanistan's plains.

The latest episode in this historical tradition has several distinguishing characteristics. First, Western forces - while better armed and technologically superior - are far too few in number. Today's Western force totals about 40,000 troops. After subtracting support troops and North Atlantic Treaty Organization contingents that are restricted to non-combat, reconstruction roles - building schools, digging wells, repairing irrigation systems - the actual combat force that can be fielded on any given day is far smaller, and yet has the task of controlling a country the size of Texas that is home to some of the highest mountains on Earth.

Second, the West underestimated the strength of the Taliban and its acceptability to the Afghan people. When invading in 2001, the West's main targets were al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their senior lieutenants, and because the operation specifically targeted a group of top leaders, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was not sealed, and so not only did the pursued troika escape, so did most of their foot soldiers......

The future for the West in Afghanistan is bleak, and it is made more discouraging by the fact that much of the West's defeat will be self-inflicted because it did not adequately study the lessons of history......"

The Mubarak regime is heading for a succession crisis. By trying to strangle Egypt's Islamists, it has strengthened them

Timothy Garton Ash in Aswan
Thursday March 8, 2007
The Guardian

"In front of the towering golden sandstone entrance to the temple of Edfu stands an imposing granite statue of a falcon, some 12ft tall, representing Horus, a premier league Egyptian god. Sculpted into his chest is a small figure of one of the Greek rulers of Egypt at the time when the temple was built. To buttress his political legitimacy, the alien neo-pharaoh had not merely wrapped himself in the flag but carved himself into the stone of a powerful god. The rulers of Egypt have been playing this game for thousands of years - and they are at it again today......

Later, there was Allah, of course, and his messenger Muhammad. For the 19th-century Albanian-born Muhammad Ali Pasha, the new divinity was European-style modernity. For Napoleon and Lord Cromer there were the western gods of progress and civilisation, carried by the bayonet and the Gatling gun. For Nasser, the architect of post-colonial Egypt, there was pan-Arabism but also socialism, with added Islam.

Now they're changing gods again at the pharaoh's palace. Twenty-six years into the reign of President Mubarak, amendments are proposed to the constitution.......

Politics, seen from this perspective of 5,000 years of Egyptian history, is something very different from what you find in US civics textbooks. It's not about the installation of this or that logically and legally constructed political system, based on this or that ideology. It's about rulers borrowing, bending and merging gods, ideologies and legal systems, adapting to internal and external forces, mixing coercion and patronage, sharing some of the spoils where necessary, but always with the goal of maximising your own power and wealth, and hanging on to it for as long as possible - for yourself, and your children, and your children's children. Those who take the legitimating religion or ideology too seriously - be it Osirisism or socialism - are missing the point. The gods come and go; what endures over the millenia is men's lust for power and wealth, and their vain quest for immortality......

For many of those who live 10 to one room in the poorer quarters of Cairo, the great myth remains that of the Muslim Brotherhood, with its brilliantly simple slogan "Islam is the solution". So long as it is banned, the Brotherhood does not need to demonstrate how exactly Islam is the solution. It can hardly be expected to produce detailed, specific policies, let alone to deliver on them. In fact, the Mubarak regime is performing the Brotherhood a great service by continuing to persecute it. Trying to strangle Islamism, it feeds its growth.....

Whatever happens in the transition from Hosni Mubarak over the next decade - whether we get President Mubarak II, or a candidate supported by the military, or someone else - I would bet on one thing: the Islamic component in the legitimating god-mix of Egyptian politics is likely to grow stronger, not weaker. If you find that worrying, I can suggest only one faint consolation: in time, it will pass. The process may take decades, but one day Islamism, too, will join the 5,000-year line of the gods that failed."

Steve Bell on Iraq and the CIA leak trial.
The Guardian

The Palestinians under military, political and economic siege are calling for help....
Arab official: just wait for the next two or three summits and we will solve your problem.
By Hamid Najib

The Little King Reporting to His Bosses

Didn't I Tell You He Would Be Kissing Babies Soon?
That Ahmad Yousef Knows How to Stage Habila.

Syria rejects making changes to Saudi peace initiative

"Syria on Wendesday voiced opposition to changing the Saudi peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League five years ago and cast doubts over Israel's willingness to make peace in region.

The Arab League is expected during its annual summit in Saudi Arabia later this month to focus on the possible revival of the 2002 initiative to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Syria cautioned against making changes to the initiative saying it "absolutely rejected for some hostile fingers to toy, directly or through brokers, with the agenda of the [upcoming] summit so that its decisions would come in harmony with the Israeli and American interests," the Tishrin government newspaper reported in a front-page editorial.

On Sunday, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said in a speech during an Arab foreign ministers meeting in Egypt that the Arab peace initiative "expressed an Arab consensus and will not be redrafted as demanded by some foreign powers."

Senior government sources told Haaretz last week that Israel expects the Arab League to adopt a revised version of the plan during the Riyadh summit.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni presented Israel's demands last Thursday, saying "It is impossible for Israel to accept the Arab peace initiative in its current formulation."

First and foremost, she said, Israel objects to the document's section on the Palestinian refugees, which was not part of the initial Saudi draft, but was added at the 2002 Arab League summit in Beirut.

The new article inserted at the 2002 Beirut summit, however, demanded a "just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem, to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194," and that resolution calls for allowing the refugees to return to Israel......"

***

Mark my words: The changes Israel demands have already been accepted by the Saudis; it is a question of translating the documents from Hebrew to Arabic and presenting them to Arab "leaders" (including the Palestinian variety) to sign at the Riyadh "summit". Hamas will hail the Saudi plan as a "historic turning point," and Habila will state that even the Prophet Mohammad is pleased with the Saudis for their leadership and pan-Arab support.

Celebrate early and often!

The IOF Raided Abbas' Own Military Headquarters in Ramallah Today....
It Kidnapped About 50 of Abbas' "Military Intelligence" Personnel...
But Abbas (and Hamas) Don't Seem to Mind....
Brother Abu Mazen Will be Hugging and Kissing Olmert Next Week....
He Will be Offering Him an Extended Truce From Hamas, and Asking Him to Accept the FAMAS Government.....

Now That is a Cause to Celebrate, Big Time!

A CounterPunch Special Investigation

Ketcham's Story
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

"In this special report we print a carefully reported narrative by Christopher Ketcham. He's a journalist whom publications such as Harper's and Salon.com have been happy to publish. Indeed, it was in May of 2002 that Salon featured on its site a 9,000-word story by Ketcham on the so-called Israeli "art students" whose curious activities before 9/11/2001 around U.S. government offices and in locations in many cases identical to those frequented by the 9/11 hijackers had been the subject of much speculation......

It is not as though Ketcham is alone in probing the background and activities of the celebrating Israelis. Justin Raimondo, of Antiwar.com has been a pioneer in exploring this same series of events and questions and he deserves great credit for his spirited stories on the matter, which can be found on his site and in his concise and powerful book, The Terror Enigma. The Israeli connection has also been the topic of a fine piece of investigation published in The Forward in 2002. The Forward's sensational discoveries were studiously ignored by the press. ("Old story.", "unsubstantiated") Similarly, the saga of the "art students" has been the object of careful investigation and broadcast pieces by Fox News' Carl Cameron.

Yes, when it comes to Israel and the U.S. press we are familiar with obstructions to raising edgy topics. That's why we're glad we have CounterPunch, to welcome good reporters like Ketcham in from the cold."

A CounterPunch Special Investigation

What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

"....Torpedoing the FBI Probe....

The Israeli "Art Student" Spies

There is a second piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli "art students", detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's Office of Security Programs......

Choking off the press coverage

There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC News colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the president of ABC News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell but ABC News came through the management insulated [reporters] from the pressure"......

What did Mossad know and tell the U.S.?

Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that two senior agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 "to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation"......

The Questions That Await Answers

Remarkably, the Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey waterfront a celebration that consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and, according to the FBI, "high-fiving" ­- in the Machiavellian light of geopolitics. "Their explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin told me, "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting [Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy for Israel's circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing for Israel"......"

Israel cool to PA offer of truce for end to boycott

".....A senior Hamas official told Haaretz on Tuesday that if Israel agrees to persuade the international community not to boycott the new Palestinian unity government, the Palestinians "will offer a promise from Hamas and Fatah of a total cease-fire with Israel, including a complete halt to Qassam [rocket] fire and suicide bombings."

But said Prime Ehud Olmert's spokeswoman Miri Eisen, "We need to see that you can actually implement the ceasefire [in Gaza] before we can consider an extension."......

But a senior leader of Islamic Jihad, a group that carried out a suicide bombing in Israel in January and did not sign a Gaza truce in November, said it opposed the idea raised in negotiations on finalizing a unity government.

"We cannot talk about calm while the Zionist aggression is continuing against our Palestinian people in the West Bank and the escalation against Islamic Jihad members and leaders," the leader, Khaled al-Batsh, said.

Israel has killed three Islamic Jihad militants in raids in the occupied West Bank since a Jan. 29 suicide attack in the Red Sea resort of Eilat killed three Israelis.

Batsh said his group was planning attacks to avenge the deaths of its men.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to deliver this offer at his upcoming meeting with Olmert, Palestinian sources said. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, thought according to the Palestinians, the date has not yet been finalized......."

***

As I said yesterday, Hamas is now indistinguishable from Fatah and is likely to clash with Islamic Jihad, soon. Celebrate, now!

US President George W Bush is headed Brasilia way to try to counter the growing influence of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. He might as well stay home. Chavez is the king of Latin America, and the number of potential US allies among the pseudo-populist regimes, such as in Brazil, is diminishing by the day.

A Very Good Article

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

".....The Bush reception won't be exactly of the Rolling Stones variety. Massive protests are scheduled everywhere - even in countries where he is not showing up. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez - Bush's continental nemesis - will address a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, probably in a soccer stadium, as US Secret Service paranoia turns Sao Paulo into an immense Green Zone.

This had to be, fundamentally, a Bush-against-Chavez tour. Inevitably, it is also a Bush-against-Ahmadinejad tour. Last month, strengthening ties with Latin America, the Iranian president visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which in the neo-con scheme of things qualify, along with gas-rich Bolivia, as the southern "axis of evil".

For the Bush visit, the White House/State Department tactic is once again imperial "divide and rule'. Mercosur - the South American common market that is evolving as a true, indigenous integration model - will be actively bombarded, via different strategies targeting Brazil and Uruguay. Venezuela became a full Mercosur member last year.

Brazil is the big prize. The White House/State Department dream is semi-officially to crown President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as a "moderate reformist" capable of representing a continental alternative to the revolutionary Chavez. The masses all over South America are not buying it......

Whatever cozy deals with Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Felipe Calderon in Mexico, and polite reception by Lula in Brazil and Vazquez in Uruguay notwithstanding, the fact is that all along South American streets Chavez is king and Bush is - in the words of Brazilian union leaders - the No 1 "terrorist".....

The masses all over South America have already compared these advances with the abject failure of neo-liberalism. There may be flagrant polarization - but that concerns the absolute majority of national populations, along with most governments, against discredited former progressives, client regimes and small but powerful supporting oligarchies. In a nutshell, this spells doom for Bush's proposed anti-Chavez coalition......

And then there's sinister death-squad expert John Negroponte as Condoleezza Rice's No 2 at the State Department. Rice knows absolutely nothing about Latin America, so Negroponte may soon be in charge of the region. This will mean renewed merciless war against Chavez, Morales and Correa.

It's not coming from Lula, Vazquez or even Kirchner. Millions in South America - and millions all over the world - have already noticed that the shock of the new is coming from Chavez, Morales and Correa. Much more than Asia or Africa, South America, politically, is now the most progressive and hopeful region in the world - forging, in a messy, imperfect, even utopian but always exciting way a compound of real alternatives to the ravages of neo-liberalism while Washington, from the peaks of its unrivaled full-spectrum dominance, has nothing to offer but war, death and devastation. "

Call it the new "axis of evil", or at least of unpopularity. A new poll sponsored by the BBC lumps Iran, Israel and the US together as the world's least-liked nations. A little more than half of the respondents said they had mainly negative views of the three countries.

By Jim Lobe
Asia Times

"WASHINGTON - A majority of people from around the world hold predominantly negative views of Israel, Iran, and the United States, according to a survey of more than 28,000 respondents in 27 countries.

The survey, which was sponsored by the British Broadcasting Corp's World Service and designed by Globescan and the Washington-based Program for International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), found that 56% and 54% of all respondents said they had mainly negative views of Israel and Iran, respectively.

Fifty-one percent and 48% said the same about the United States and North Korea, respectively.

At the other end of the spectrum, 54% said they felt "mainly positive" about both Canada and Japan, while the European Union and France, with 53% and 50% "positive" ratings, were the next highest among the 12 countries or regions rated in the survey.

"It appears that people around the world tend to look negatively on countries whose profile is marked by the use or pursuit of military power," said PIPA director Steven Kull.

"This includes Israel and the US, which have recently used military force, and North Korea and Iran, who are perceived as trying to develop nuclear weapons," he said, adding, "Countries that relate to the world primarily through soft power, like Japan, France, and the EU in general, tend to be viewed more positively."......"

Palestinian "Unity Government"
By Naser Jafari

Saga of Washington's discredited WMD claims leads to the conviction for perjury of Dick Cheney's key aide

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

"In a massive new blow to the credibility of the White House, Vice-President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff Lewis Libby has been convicted of obstruction of justice, perjury and lying to the FBI, during the investigation into the leaking of the identity of a CIA agent.

After a seven-week trial, the jury found Libby guilty yesterday on four of the five counts against him. Ever calm in court, Libby merely blinked as the verdict was read out. Defence lawyers immediately said they would seek a fresh trial, and if that failed, lodge an appeal. In theory Libby faces up to 25 years in jail, though federal sentencing guidelines mean he is likely to receive a far shorter term.......

But there is no concealing the extent of the damage. Libby is not only the most senior Bush administration official to face - and now be convicted of - criminal charges. As chief of staff to arguably the most powerful vice-president in US history, he was one of the two or three most important policy-makers at the White House after the President and Vice-President.

The trial, in which neither Libby nor his former boss testified, threw no new light on the handling of the WMD intelligence used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But it revealed the obsessive sensitivity of the Vice-President's office to any attack on its pre-war use of intelligence, and its determination to discredit critics.

At one point the prosecution produced a specimen of the offending article, annotated by Mr Cheney himself, asking who Mr Wilson was, and whether he had been sent on his 2002 fact-finding mission to Africa as a "junket" organised by his wife. The guilty verdict against Libby is thus bound to tarnish further the reputation of both Mr Bush and Mr Cheney, whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the President......"

Washington's attempt to pave the way for another invasion by fomenting anti-Shia sectarianism in the Middle East will fail

Azzam Tamimi
Wednesday March 7, 2007
The Guardian

"Despite the horrific failure of its adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, the US is now said to be preparing to attack Iran. Meanwhile, all disputes in the Middle East have suddenly turned into sectarian conflicts and Iran is portrayed as the main culprit. Nothing now seems comprehensible to the western media and political establishments unless seen through the prism of Iranian ambitions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and even more distant conflicts such as Somalia and Darfur. Opponents of Iran and of whomever Iran is thought to support in the region no longer want us to see US interventions as the main issue - let alone the primary cause of the mayhem enveloping the entire Middle East.......

Now the Americans and their Arab allies in the region seem convinced that their Iranian adversary is the real winner from the occupation of Iraq. The threat to US interests has been compounded by the refusal of the Iranians to abandon their nuclear programme. The US-Shia alliance in Iraq has backfired on America. Now, as the fourth anniversary of the invasion approaches, a US-Sunni alliance seems to be in the making to pave the way for an attack against Iran. It is widely believed in the region that the meeting in Jordan on 20 February between Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and the intelligence chiefs of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates was aimed at preparing the ground. The idea appears to be for the Sunni world, which until recently would have been opposed to any attack on Iran, to see the merits of a US strike. The role of Washington's friends in the region would be to portray Iran as the real threat to both Arabs and Sunnis. The best climate for achieving such an objective is sectarianism not only inside Iraq but across the region.

But the new US-Sunni alliance is likely to backfire, as the US-Shia alliance did. If one of the latter's repercussions was a Sunni backlash, wait and see what an Iranian-backed Shia explosion of anger will do to our world. And the anger will not be confined to Shias. The US-Sunni alliance is in fact a coalition with the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan - which falsely claim to represent Sunni Islam and are loathed by their populations - along with their backers in the west. If Iran is attacked, it is highly unlikely that the Sunnis will be indifferent; just as they stood by Hizbullah last summer, they will stand by Iran. The attempt to create a US-Sunni alliance has already failed to convince most Sunnis that Iran - rather than the US - is the real enemy."

Hamas vows full cease-fire if Israel helps end aid boycott of PA government

"If Israel agrees to persuade the international community not to boycott the new Palestinian unity government, the Palestinians "will offer a promise from Hamas and Fatah of a total cease-fire with Israel, including a complete halt to Qassam [rocket] fire and suicide bombings," a senior Hamas official told Haaretz on Tuesday.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas plans to deliver this offer at his upcoming meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Palestinian sources said. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, thought according to the Palestinians, the date has not yet been finalized.

However, the Hamas official warned, if Israel presses for a continuation of the international boycott and refuses to work with the unity government, the existing partial cease-fire will be in danger......."

***

At this rate Hamas will be denouncing Palestinian resistance as "terrorism" in no time, just like "brother" Abu Mazen, all in the name of "national unity." I can see the day when Hamas clashes with Islamic Jihad; just give Ahmad Yousef some time.

Celebrate, Now!

By Eric Margolis

"......Many Pakistanis oppose the US occupation of Afghanistan, support their old anti-communist ally, Taliban, and think better of Osama bin Laden than George Bush. Many senior and junior officers in Pakistan’s military and powerful intelligence service, ISI, feel similarly and are bitter at Musharraf for abandoning Taliban and resistance groups fighting to oust Indian rule in divided Kashmir.

Musharraf is thus caught between Washington’s growing demands and his own people, who increasingly accuse him of being an American tool. Washington simply does not understand it has pushed the isolated, unpopular Musharraf too far already. If he is blown up or overthrown, Pakistan and its 40–60 nuclear weapons, could turn into an even bigger and more dangerous hotbed of anti-western activity. The next army corps commander who takes over may not be as amenable to Washington’s demands as Pervez Musharraf.

Meanwhile, Washington is increasingly blaming its Afghanistan fiasco on whipping boy Pakistan, just as the Vietnam defeat was blamed on infiltration from Cambodia and Laos. Recently, a remarkably ill-informed Canadian defense minister foolishly proposed sending Canadian troops into Pakistan’s tribal agencies to “fight terrorists.”

Picking a fight with old, loyal ally Pakistan is both morally wrong and fraught with untold dangers. The US has forgotten how it forced another compliant military ruler, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, into policies his people hated. He was assassinated, to national joy.

Negotiating a deal with Taliban and other Afghan resistance forces is the only way out of the current morass, not undermining Pakistan or expanding a war that is already lost."

Women's basic rights are being rapidly eroded in Iraq and occupation forces seem to have forgotten their promises of empowerment.

Haifa Zangana
The Guardian

"The regime in Baghdad's Green Zone is busy organising a celebration of a different kind for this year's International Women's Day on 8 March. Among its highlights will be the execution of four Iraqi women. This follows on from its decision to honour four of its Iraqi officers accused of raping a young woman Zainab Abbas Hussain al-Shummary. The office of prime minister had forged an American medical report. Long gone are the colourful parades of Iraqi women commemorating their achievements. Now we only have parades of death, where the "liberated" and "empowered" Iraqi women and girls, covered head to toe with hijabs and abayas, will queue at police stations, prisons, detention camps, hospital's "fridges" and crowded morgues looking for the disappeared, kidnapped or their assassinated loved ones......

Let us start by talking death sentence. Bearing in mind that executions of women were formally prohibited under Iraqi law from 1965 on the grounds that women are life-givers and life-nurturers.

The four women sentenced to death and in imminent danger of execution are Samar Sa'ad 'Abdullah, Wassan Talib, Zeynab Fadhil, and Liqa' Qamar. Ages 25-31. They were tried individually for murder, kidnapping, and the murder of several members of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad. All denied the accusations and Amnesty International is questioning the circumstances which led to the sentences by the central criminal court of Iraq (CCCI) between 2005-2006. Two of the women have young children with them: Zeynab Fadhil has her three-year-old daughter, Liqa' Qamar her one-year-old daughter, who was born in prison. The death penalty was reinstated in August 2004 by the "sovereign" interim government.......

The rapes of Abeer, Zainab and Wajda are just few of many other cases documented by Iraqi human rights organisations and UNAMI. According to Mohamed Iraqi MP Al Dainey in a recent interview on Al Sharqiya TV, 1053 documented cases of rape by the occupation forces, militias and Police took place in Iraq since 2003......"

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"“Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq." That's the title of the ground breaking report being released today at the UN.

The announcement follows on the heels of two high-profile cases of Sunni women allegedly raped by Shiite security forces last month.

The report documents the systematic use of violence committed by Islamist militias against Iraqi women. Methods of violence include widespread honor killings, torture, assassination and rape. The report reveals the most extensive violence against women has been committed by Shiite militias armed, trained, and financed by the United States.

The author of the report is Yifat Susskind who is here in the studio with me. Also joining us is Houzan Mahmoud. She is the International Representative of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq. Welcome to Democracy Now!.....

YIFAT SUSSKIND: Well, I mean, you summed it up well, Amy. There’s been, since the US invasion, a virtual epidemic of all forms of gender-based violence in Iraq, a sharp rise in violence against women in the public sphere, women being harassed, beaten, assassinated, raped. Much of it is directed by Islamist militias on both sides of the sectarian divide.

But what is really remarkable is that much of the violence -- in fact, the most widespread violence -- in many instances is being carried out by these militias who are essentially the armed wings of the political parties that the US has boosted to power in Iraq. So these are sort of shock troops of political parties that are closely allied with the United States. At a certain point, the US was providing military training and arms and money to these militias, in the hopes that they would sort of step up where the official Iraqi army had not and were to combat the anti-US insurgency.

You know, there's a lot of pieces that, you know, we've seen in the press sort of in bits and pieces. But what we haven't seen is kind of the story of the Iraq war told from the perspective of Iraqi women, and that's what we aim to do in the report.....

AMY GOODMAN: Houzan, how difficult, dangerous is it to talk about this issue? Right now, you’ve just had a fatwa issued against you?

HOUZAN MAHMOUD: Yes, that’s true. Just last week.

AMY GOODMAN: So who has issued this fatwa, and how do you know it was?

HOUZAN MAHMOUD: Yeah, I received an email, and the email said that “You will be killed by middle of March, because you have been campaigning against Islam.” And it says Ansar al-Islam, which is a notoriously Islamist jihadist group based in Kurdistan. And they've been infamous, basically, for killing and beheading people in the villages in Kurdistan.

AMY GOODMAN: You're originally from Kurdistan in northern Iraq.

HOUZAN MAHMOUD: Yes, I am. ........"

Click Here to Watch, Listen or Read Transcript

The Golden Noose Award for 2007 Goes to Arab Officialdom for Utter Failure

"As Extremist a Neocon and Warmonger as It Gets"

By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch

""Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. We can either make tactical accommodations with the regime there in return for modest (or illusory) sharing of intelligence, reduced support for some terrorist groups and the like, or do everything in our power to support a civil society that loathes the mullahs and yearns to overturn their rule. It will be wise, moral and unpopular (among some of our allies) to choose the latter course. The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden"

The guy who wrote that, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on November 20, 2001, was Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. As the Director of the Strategic Studies department at SAIS, he has been called "the most influential neoconservative in academe.".......

So here's a man to watch, as Bush/Cheney policy towards Iran evolves. Others are Elliott Abrams (Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy), and Abram Shulsky (head of the Pentagon's "Iran Directorate"), both students of Leo Strauss and comfortable proponants of using "noble lies" to manipulate public opinion to generate support for more imperialist wars. They may be desperate men at this point, when they read, for example, the recent Washington Post/ABC poll that shows 63% of Americans do not trust the Bush administration "to honestly and accurately report intelligence about possible threats from other countries."

They may well fear that if they can't "take the current when it serves"---by their use of noble lies, their ongoing paid, corrupt, discrete if obvious presence in the mainstream press--they will lose their ventures. Their usefully ignorant, manipulable cruel cowboy has less than two years left in the saddle, and great deeds cry out to be done!

The neocon agenda is plain enough. If only the dissident generals can be silenced! If only the assailants of the Israel Lobby can be quieted by bullying accusations of anti-Semitism! If only the war-weary American people can be made to understand that it's "moral and wise" to attack Iran! Because it's planning genocide! Because it's planning what Hitler couldn't do---wipe out the Jews! Then we can defeat the Evil which is Iran! And Syria! And the Shiite population of southern Lebanon!......"

A majority of people believe that Israel and Iran have a mainly negative influence in the world, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

It shows that the two countries are closely followed by the United States and North Korea.
The poll asked 28,000 people in 27 countries to rate a dozen countries plus the EU in terms of whether they have a positive or negative influence.

Canada, Japan and the EU are viewed most positively in the survey......"

By M K Bhadrakumar
Asia Times

"The intense pressure from Washington on President General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan to be cooperative in the "war on terror" is yielding dramatic results, although perhaps not of the kind initially anticipated.

The Pakistan-Iran relationship, which has never been easy, has nosedived to a low point in recent weeks, even as Musharraf remains under pressure to do more in clamping down on al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas.

The moot point is to what extent Musharraf is willingly cooperating with US regional policy against Iran. He is skating on thin ice. He may endear himself to Washington as a brave leader in the Muslim world, but Pakistani public opinion is averse to serving the US agenda over Iran. This contradiction is fraught with dangers. It can only further accentuate Musharraf's isolation within Pakistan and add to the country's overall political uncertainties.

Washington could be miscalculating that only the Shi'ites in Sunni-dominated Pakistan will feel alienated by Musharraf's unfriendly attitude toward Tehran. The fact is, in emotive terms, the average Pakistani citizen is bound to view US hostility toward Iran as yet another instance of Washington's "crusade" against the Islamic world.....

All this says that, apart from sundry other minority groups of minuscule size, such as the Turkmens, Talysh, Qashqai, Lurs, Gilaki or Mazandarani, with hardly any surplus of militant ethnic nationalism available for inciting, the Balochs (who form roughly 2% of the population) offer themselves as the obvious choice for Washington to train its terrorism weapon against the Iranian regime......

However, there is a sideshow to these happenings that is no less profound. US intelligence operatives must be laughing all the way to Washington that they could manage with such ease what their suave diplomats (and wily Congress members) have had a hard time achieving in recent years - arresting Islamabad and New Delhi from finalizing the $7 billion Iran-Pakistan-India gas-pipeline project. In geopolitical terms, the project holds the definite potential to forge a unified Asian energy market, with deep implications for US energy security......"

This poll exposes the lack of credibility of the Mubarak government in Egypt. The question is:

Do you believe that the Egyptian government is serious in pursuing Israeli officials implicated in the mass killing of Egyptian prisoners of war?

With over 1,200 responding so far, here is the breakdown:

Yes.............3%

No.............97%

Reviving the Arab "Peace" Initiative
By Baha Boukhari

Nine U.S. soldiers killed north of Baghdad

"Nine American soldiers have been killed and four wounded in two separate attacks in northern and north-eastern Iraq, the US military has said.

"Six Task Force Lightning soldiers were attacked while conducting combat operations in Salah ad Din province on March 5," a statement said on Tuesday.

"The soldiers died as a result of injuries sustained following an explosion near their vehicles."

In a second incident on the same day, three American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Diyala. One soldier was wounded......."

Speak Bird, Speak Again
Palestinian Arab Folktales
Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford
© 1989 The Regents of the University of California

This is the book Hamas' "ministry of education" decided to burn. You can read it online.

A Disturbing Article Contributed by Lucia

Dr Kana'nah: Burning my book "speak bird, speak again" is like burning my son

"Ramallah - Ma'an - Professor of sociology and anthropology at Bir Zeit University, Ashraf Kana'nah, has commented on the decision of the Palestinian ministry of education to burn copies of the book he collated with his colleague, Dr Ibrahim Mhawi. The book, collated from Palestinian oral narratives, is entitled "Speak bird, speak again". Dr Kana'nah described the ministry's decision as "cultural terrorism"; while the ministry claims that stories in the book contain "immoral expression".

Kana'nah told Ma'an's correspondent in Ramallah that "those who conducted such measures are not related to academia", since he found no more than three references to sexual activity in a 400 page book.

Dr Kana'nah expressed his disturbance over the burning of his book, saying that "every book one writes is continuity of his own ideology, as much as the son is the biological continuity of his father." He added that it was the ministry of culture who decided to distribute the book at the schools, and they also funded the printing of 3000 copies.

The book was misinterpreted, explained the author, "since it was not meant to be taught to children, as it is taught at the masters and doctorate level [in literature studies]". Kana'nah himself taught the study of the book in the masters programs at Bir Zeit University. In addition, the English version of the book is studied as part of literature courses at both Berkeley and Chicago Universities. It was the best-selling Palestinian academic text book in foreign countries.

"The book should be read by teachers at schools, rather than be given to students, and if the teacher is embarrassed to read some expressions, which the students hear every day, he does not deserve to be a teacher," declared Dr Kana'nah.

The ministry of education allegedly endorsed a decision at the beginning of February to destroy all copies of the book, "Speak bird, speak again" at the libraries of governmental schools under the pretext of containing "filthy expressions".

This book, first published in 1989, contains forty-five folktales drawn from a collection of two hundred tales narrated by women from different areas of historic Palestine (the Galilee, the West Bank, and Gaza). The stories collected were chosen on the basis of their popularity, their aesthetic and narrative qualities, and what they tell about popular Palestinian culture dating back many centuries. In order to maintain the specificity of these tales, it was necessary to transcribe them in the original colloquial dialect in which they were narrated. The tales are accompanied by an in-depth study that compares them to similar cultural products in Arab and world cultures.

For his part, member of the Palestinian People's Party's politburo, Haidar Awadallah, described the decision as "a threat to liquidate the democratic heritage of the Palestinian people and their cultural, literary and ideological pluralism". This is done on behalf of "a fundamental, superficial and close preaching."

Ministerial reaction

Palestinian minister of education, Dr Nasser Addin Ash-Shaer, denied on Monday that his ministry had taken the decision to burn copies of the folktales, claiming that he only heard the news in the media.

Ash-Shaer told Ma'an that the issue "is not about a school's text book, but it is a book that was written in the informal accent which the educational orientation of the ministry found inappropriate for the accent." The minister also denied the news reported about the ministry's decision to burn the book or destroy the copies.

The minister added, "there has been no such decision, and we are not against the people's heritage. Besides, the book is available in the book stores, but it arrived in the schools without our knowledge, and so, the ministry's office is still checking the issue... the book is written in an informal language, which is inappropriate to be taught at schools, as schools teach the formal Arabic only. Furthermore, the book includes filthy expressions, which we can not afford to accept in our schools, and so it is being withdrawn from the libraries only.""

BBC survey claims Israel has least positive image in the world

"LONDON  Israel, Iran and the United States are the countries with the most negative image in a globe-spanning survey of attitudes toward 12 major nations. Canada and Japan came out best in the poll, released on Monday.

The survey for the British Broadcasting Corp.'s World Service asked more than 28,000 people to rate 12 countries  Britain, Canada, China, France, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia, the United States and Venezuela  as having a positive or negative influence on the world.

Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent......"

Windbag du Jour






MP Tafesh asks USA, EU to revise bias in favor of Zionists

"AL-KHALIL, (PIC)-- MP Khaled Tafesh on Monday urged USA president George Bush to revise his policies in the Middle East especially in Palestine and to spare the lives of his soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He asked the USA and the EU countries, which are biased in favor of Israel, to stop backing the culprit against the victim and appealed to them to lift the oppressive siege on the Palestinian people imposed more than a year now to punish them for electing Hamas to rule them......."

***

Such leadership! This guy is speaking in exactly the same way the Palestinians begged the British in the 1920s. Nothing learned in 90 years; keep begging, brother!

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"Robert Fisk is a veteran war correspondent and one of the world"s most experienced journalists covering the Middle East. He has reported from across the Arab world for the past thirty years. He was in Iraq in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, in the early 1990s during the Persian Gulf War and most recently during the U.S. invasion and occupation. He has also reported on the civil wars in Algeria and Lebanon, the Iranian revolution, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and Israel"s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

Robert Fisk joins me in our firehouse studio......

AMY GOODMAN: You mention Lebanon. Let's talk about the situation there today. This is where you have been based for the last thirty years.

ROBERT FISK: Thirty-one, almost, now, yeah. Yes, I mean, I was, you know, like I suppose most Lebanese, I felt, up until July the 12th, the beginning of the war between Hezbollah and the Israelis last summer, that maybe Lebanon had a chance. You know, it was being rebuilt. There wasn't enough money trickling down from the top to the bottom; it was still a lopsided society with the Shiites being the poor and the oppressed as usual. But I thought until we came across -- you know, even when the Shiites pulled out of the government, which was a very serious matter because it meant that once again we were emphasizing the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics, that there might be some form of compromise.

But once we had that strike, which turned so violent -- you know, I turned up on Corniche Mazraa in the western part of Beirut, and there must have been 7,000 people, Muslims, Shiites and Sunnis, chucking rocks and stones at each other. There were seven Lebanese soldiers trying to get between them. I went with them taking pictures. I mean, the stones were bouncing off the soldiers. People were chucking rocks from the top of sixteen-story buildings. It was very dangerous. I thought, civil war was going to restart that day.

And one of the dangerous things at that point was that the young people who were involved were too young to remember the civil war, which of course actually ended in 1990. They might have a faint memory. They would have heard their parents talking about it. And they didn’t realize how quickly it would escalate, how quickly you could deteriorate. Even Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah -- well, the Hezbollah is a very disciplined organization, of course -- was shocked at the speed with which his strike, his civil disobedience strike, descended into total street violence. Then, of course, two days later, guns came on the streets.

Very dangerous situation, because it keeps going back into a sort of semi-denial of the political crisis. We think, OK, well, Lebanon is out of the news, it’s OK again. But the reality is that Lebanon is in great danger of splintering apart again. And I went out, a short time, a short while ago, before I came to America, for dinner in a Sunni area of Beirut. It's a mixed area, but mostly Sunni, and I remember saying, well, how are you getting on with your Shiite neighbors these days? And the woman at the table said, well, actually, most of them have gone on holiday. They've left their keys with their neighbors. They have gone to stay with relatives elsewhere.

Now, that's how it begins. That’s how it happened in Baghdad, people moving out of Sunni areas, people moving out of Shiite areas, if they’re a different religion. One of the frightening things that happened during those January days of violence, including the area where there was shooting used, is that the scenes of street combat were on the same green line of the civil war. In other words, the old fracture between east and west, Beirut and parts of West Beirut, reopened at the exact -- Hazmieh -- exactly the same point. I spent parts of the civil war at Hazmieh watching the fighting, and there, on the same piece of road, it broke apart again. It's like, you know, you keep stitching it up, and it comes undone.

AMY GOODMAN: What about Seymour Hersh's report, where he says that the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia are pumping money for covert operations in many areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria and Iran, in an effort to strengthen Saudi-supported Sunni Islam groups and weaken Iranian-backed Shiites. Some of the covert money has been given to jihadist groups in Lebanon with ties to al-Qaeda.

ROBERT FISK: Look, Seymour Hersh said that we were going to invade Iraq, and I thought we wouldn't, and he was right and I was wrong. So when Seymour Hersh says we're going to bombard Iran, I remain silent. When Seymour Hersh tells me -- he was in Beirut, of course; he met Nasrallah there -- that we’re pumping money into Sunni extremist groups, I think, well, hang on a second, he got it right and I got it wrong on Iraq.

Look, the truth of the matter is that these various organizations -- and there are some al-Qaeda-type groups, groupuscules, tiny ones in Lebanon, and I’ve met them -- they don't need money from outside. They've got money. Everyone in Lebanon who’s got weapons has money. It's like the same nonsense: we talk about how the Iranians are teaching the Iraqi Shiite insurgents to make bombs. Iraqi insurgents know how to make bombs. They don't need the Iranians to come and teach them. I don't think a lot of money is reaching these people. What I do think is that these various extreme groups are quite possibly being mobilized or encouraged by elements within the -- what we now call the American-supported Lebanese government -- what a kiss of death that is for the Siniora government -- encouraged to remain where they are and to be available in certain circumstances.

You know, a large number of the killings that have taken place in Beirut are not necessarily carried out by the Syrians. Hariri, I think, was a Syrian-engineered plot, yes. But, for example, Pierre Gemayel’s murder, a lot of Lebanese say, well, maybe it was another Christian group behind that. One of the things you find in Lebanon is that there are various groups, some of them Palestinian -- we call them extremists or terrorists, whatever you like -- who are available to help anyone. They can make temporary alliances. They don't need to be given $5 million on the quiet by someone with American money.

The real danger now, you see, is that with an ideological government like you have and like we, I suppose, think we have, we constantly want to assist people who will join us in our campaign. You can go back to Afghanistan. We wanted the warlords on our side against bin Laden. Now we're saddled with the warlords, which is why we can't stamp out the opium trade or the drugs trade. In Iraq, we started --
........"

Click Here to Watch, Listen or Read Transcript of This Long Interview

Afghan Media: US Troops Deleted Images

"Afghan journalists covering the aftermath of a suicide bomb attack and shooting in eastern Afghanistan Sunday said U.S. troops deleted their photos and video and warned them not to publish or air any images of U.S. troops or a car where three Afghans were shot to death.....

A freelance photographer working for The Associated Press and a cameraman working for AP Television News said a U.S. soldier deleted their photos and video showing a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing. The AP plans to lodge a protest with the American military.

The photographer, Rahmat Gul, said witnesses at the scene told him the three had been shot to death by U.S. forces fleeing the attack. The two AP freelancers arrived at the site about a half hour after the suicide bombing, Gul said.

"When I went near the four-wheel drive, I saw the Americans taking pictures of the same car, so I started taking pictures," Gul said. "Two soldiers with a translator came and said, 'Why are you taking pictures? You don't have permission.'"

It wasn't clear why the accredited journalists would need permission to take photos of a civilian car on a public highway.

Gul said the U.S. troops took his camera, deleted his photos and returned it to him. The journalists came across another American, showed their identification cards, and he agreed that they could take pictures.

A Western military official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to release the information said the troops were Marine Special Operations Forces, the Marine Corps component created in February 2006 of the U.S. Special Operations Command.

"The same soldier who took my camera came again and deleted my photos," Gul said. "The soldier was very angry ... I told him, 'They gave us permission,' but he didn't listen."

Gul's new photos were also deleted, and the American, speaking through a translator, warned him that he did not want to see any AP photos published anywhere. The American also raised his fist in anger as if he were going to hit him, but he did not strike, Gul said.

Lt. Col. David Accetta, a U.S. military spokesman, said he did not have any confirmed reports that coalition forces "have been involved in confiscating cameras or deleting images."

Khanwali Kamran, a reporter for the Afghan channel Ariana Television, was in a small group of journalists working alongside Gul. Kamran said the American soldiers also deleted his footage.

"They warned me that if it is aired ... then, 'You will face problems,'" Kamran said.

Taqiullah Taqi, a reporter for Afghanistan's largest television station, Tolo TV, said Americans were using abusive language.

"According to the translator, they said, 'Delete them, or we will delete you,'" Taqi said.

A freelance cameraman for AP Television News said that about 100 yards from the bomb site, a U.S. officer told him that he could not go any closer to the scene but that he could shoot footage. The cameraman asked not to be named for his own safety.

"Then I started filming the suicide attack site, where there was a body and U.S. soldiers, and farther away, there was a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death," he said.

As he was filming, he said, a U.S. soldier and translator "ordered us not to move." The cameraman said they were very angry and deleted any footage that included the Americans, as well as part of an interview from a demonstration. Hundreds of Afghans had gathered to protest the violence.

Reporters Without Borders condemned the actions of the U.S. forces, saying they dealt with the press poorly.

"Why did the soldiers do it if they don't have anything to hide? The situation is very tense in Afghanistan, and the media should be able to report about it freely and safely," said Jean-Francois Julliard, a spokesman for the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders."

ISLAMABAD: Former ISI Chief, Gen (retd) Hameed Gul has said that the Untied States is paving the way to use Pakistan's territory for its expected attack on Iran in order to shift the blame of its failure in Afghanistan to Pakistan.

"Talking to a private TV Channel, Gen (retd) Hameed Gul said that NATO forces have intensified their activities on Pak-Afghan border as they are frustrated due to their failure in Afghanistan.

Former ISI Chief has said that US backed Karzai government has been completely failed in Afghanistan and the United States has now realized that they are now facing strong resistance from Taliban.

General (retd) Hamid Gul said that its an American policy to use different tactics to pressurize Pakistan and the main objective of recent visit of US Vice President Dick Cheney to pressurize Pakistan as US would need Pakistan's support and Balochistan land to attack Iran. He said that it may be the possibility that Pakistani government is refusing the United States to given permission to use its land......"

US seizes Afghan shooting footage

"US forces in Afghanistan tried to confiscate video and destroy photographic evidence taken after a shooting incident that left at least 10 civilians dead, witnesses have told Al Jazeera.

Footage obtained by Al Jazeera shows the scene in Nangarhar province immediately after US forces opened fire following a car bomb attack on their convoy. The footage included a scenes of local people in shock, treating the wounded and pulling bodies from the debris left by the shooting......

'Complete lie'

Witnesses say the suicide bomber had acted alone, that there were no accomplices and that US troops had panicked, firing at anything that moved immediately after the attack.

One told Al Jazeera: "There were no gunmen, this is a complete lie. This is a peaceful area, we don't have guns."

The dead included an 80-year-old man, whose grand-son said: "A bomb exploded, my grandfather sat in a car and at that time American soldiers were shooting into my grandfather's car."........"

Preparing for the Arab "Summit"

Obama, the Lobby, and the next war

By Justin Raimondo

"It had to happen sooner or later, and Barack Obama's startling rise to near the top of the Democratic presidential pack made it sooner – I'm talking about his speech to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It starts out with a riff about his ride in an IDF helicopter and how this made him "truly see how close everything is and why peace through security is the only way for Israel." But of course the Palestinians are just as close to the Israelis as the Israelis are to them – and the Israelis have far more arms (provided by the U.S.) and are surely not averse to using them. So what is "the only way" for the Palestinians? Yet there can be no "peace through security" for the Palestinians, since there is no security from Israeli air strikes and repeated invasions of Palestinian territory.

The maudlin emotionalism of Obama's appeal is nowhere more apparent than in this speech, and nowhere more inappropriately one-sided. But, here, listen to Obama tell it:

"Our helicopter landed in the town of Kiryat Shmona on the border. What struck me first about the village was how familiar it looked. The houses and streets looked like ones you might find in a suburb in America. I could imagine young children riding their bikes down the streets. I could imagine the sounds of their joyful play just like my own daughters. There were cars in the driveway. The shrubs were trimmed. The families were living their lives."

Oh, please spare us! Does Mr. Obama really not know that there are – or were – similar communities in the occupied territories? Does he really not know that countless Palestinian villages – with "houses and streets like you might find in a suburb in America" – have been demolished by Israeli tractors? Can Obama imagine a young Palestinian child riding his bike down the street – can he imagine his joyful play? Can he imagine a car in the driveway, the shrubs trimmed – the families living their lives in the moment before the Israelis wiped it all out in their ruthless campaign of conquest and ethnic cleansing?......

As if that wasn't enough, he went on to endorse yet another prospective war, assuring his audience that he is willing to sign on to both prongs of the renewed Israeli-American aggression in the region. Obama touts his proposal for a "phased redeployment" (never say "withdrawal"!) from Iraq as giving us a chance to focus on the real threat to peace in the region: Iran. Bravely coming out against Holocaust denial – that Obama sure is a risk-taker! – this rising Democratic star delivered a truly Orwellian account of the Lebanese-Israeli war......

Obama quails at the very thought that the Palestinians would have a government that includes Hamas, but nowhere does he mention that Hamas was elected. Nor does the presence of the party of Avigdor Lieberman in the Israeli government raise so much as an eyebrow. Israel is praised by Obama for being "the only established democracy," but Palestinian elections and Israeli elections – like Palestinian lives and Israeli lives – are not to be equated......

Obama went before AIPAC, skillfully executed the ritualized gestures of obeisance without too brazenly defying his antiwar constituency, and in this way proved his mettle. The exact meaning of this ceremony was prefigured in "The Israel Lobby," a Harvard University study by Professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:

"The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing U.S. support, because a candid discussion of U.S.-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favor a different policy."......

But Obama is a horse of an entirely different color, and, no, I'm not talking about his skin color. He is not an alternative to the still hawkish Democratic Party establishment – hawkish, that is, compared to the average American voter – but only the appearance of one. He's all form and no content – a perfect replica of rebellion for the new millennium: slick, bromidic, and phony as all get-out. He's the Democrats' Wendell Willkie, the man who came out of nowhere, a public relations creation. Obama will disarm the Left on account of his color and overwhelm the Right on the sheer strength of his star power. Or so his strategists dream. In the end, however, our foreign policy will remain pretty much the same: aggressive, arrogant, and the cause of our ultimate undoing. "

An Important Analysis (Arabic)

"عبد الباري عطوان

05/03/2007

تتصاعد الأحاديث، في السر والعلن، حول ادخال تعديلات علي مبادرة السلام العربية تسقط الشق المتعلق بحق العودة وهو الشرط الذي تفرضه الدولة العبرية لقبولها والاعتراف بها.
هذه الاحاديث تتزامن مع اقتراب انعقاد القمة العربية العادية في الرياض في اواخر الشهر الحالي، والزيارة التي من المقرر ان تقوم بها السيدة كوندوليزا رايس وزيرة الخارجية الامريكية إلي المنطقة بعد عشرة ايام.
الصحف العبرية تتحدث هذه الايام باسهاب عن اللقاءات التي اجراها ويجريها الامير بندر بن سلطان بن عبد العزيز امين عام مجلس الامن القومي السعودي مع مسؤولين اسرائيليين من اجل التنسيق بشأن الملف النووي الايراني وكيفية معالجته، وتعديل مبادرة السلام العربية بما يؤدي الي تقديم صيغة مبتكرة تلتف حول حق العودة، وتجعله محصورا باراضي الدولة الفلسطينية المستقبلية، اي في الضفة والقطاع وتوطين اللاجئين في مناطق اقامتهم في سورية ولبنان والاردن اذا ما فضلوا البقاء في مخيماتهم.

........

الشعب الفلسطيني لا يتعرض للتجويع والحصار بسبب خياره الديمقراطي فقط، وانما لتيئيسه، واجباره علي قبول صيغة التسوية الجديدة، والتنازل عن حق العودة بشكل نهائي، علي اعتبار ان هذه التسوية هي ثمرة توافق عربي ودعم كامل من قبل الدول الاسلامية السنية الرئيسية، أي ان عليه ان يرضخ للإرادتين العربية والاسلامية اذا اراد ان يحصل علي لقمة الخبز له ولأطفاله.
وليس صدفة ان تكون النقطة الأبرز علي جدول اعمال حكومة الوحدة الوطنية هي كيفية مأسسة التسول، ورفع الحصار، وايصال المساعدات العربية والدولية، والتجاوب بشكل مباشر او غير مباشر مع شروط اللجنة الرباعية الدولية.
المطلوب حكومة فلسطينية تجيد التسول وتنضم لتحالف محور المعتدلين ، وتسهل المشروع الامريكي الجديد لضرب ايران ومفاعلها النووي، واسقاط النظام السوري، وانهاء المقاومة باعتبارها ارهابا، اما المقابل فربما يكون دولة مؤقتة منزوعة الكرامة، وبلا حدود واضحة، ولا سيادة، فقط رشوة مالية ضخمة، تكون عبارة عن حقنة تخديرية مؤقتة، ريثما ينجح المشروع الامريكي الجديد، ثم يتم مسح كل ذلك والتراجع عنه، تماما مثلما حدث لاتفاقات اوسلو وصيغة الحكم الذاتي التي تمخضت عنها. ألم تتخل الولايات المتحدة عن افغانستان ومجاهديها بعد نجاح مشروعها في طرد السوفييت وإذلالهم؟
"

What Palestinian "Unity" Talks Need

"Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh failed to make progress on talks toward forming a unity government, an official said early Monday.

Hamas cabinet spokesman Ghazi Hamad said they hoped to present a government by the end of the period allotted to Haniyeh, which expires in two weeks.

"We have not completed the consultations today. They will continue over the coming days," he said ......."

بقلم : د.إبراهيم حمّامي

"قد نتفهم أن يتلهى سياسيو فلسطين وقادتها باتفاق مكة وتشكيل حكومة الوحدة الوطنية، وقد نجد لهم عذراً في محادثاتهم ولقاءاتهم الماراثونية للتباحث في الوزارات والوزراء، وقد نفهم انشغالهم المطلق بتفسير وتحليل الكلمات من نوعية "احترام" و"التزام"، ومن الممكن أن نستوعب أن خروج حكومة الوحدة الوطنية أمر مفصلي هام في تاريخنا المعاصر، لكن ما لا يمكن أن يستوعبه عقل أن يذبح الشعب الفلسطيني ولا يستوجب ذلك وقفة منهم جادة حاسمة في وجه آلة الإجرام الحاقدة التي تعيث خراباً وتدميراً بكل ما تطاله، وفي وضح النهار، وعلى مرأى ومسمع من العالم الذي يضغط على شعبنا صباح مساء ليركع ويخضع.

منذ اللحظات الأولى لتوقيع اتفاق مكة والاحتلال يصعّد من وتيرة هجماته على شعبنا الصامد في محاولة يائسة لضرب معنوياته والتأثير على قراره بالمقاومة المشروعة العادلة، وبلغت ذروة الاعتداءات قبل ايام باقتحام مدينة نابلس في حملة همجية بربرية، لم يكن نصيبها من القيادة الفلسطينية إلا التنديد والاستنكار.

ضعف الرد الفلسطيني، أو لنقل انعدامه، خاصة مع وجود طرف فلسطيني يصر على اللقاء مع المحتل دون شروط، بل يزيد على ذلك مطالبته بتثبيت التهدئة الهشة في جزء من فلسطين ليذبح جزءا آخر منها، وطرف آخر يعتبر أن اي عدوان هو لإجهاض اتفاق مكة، اللاموقف هذا والتمسك بحبائل الوهم شجّع المحتل على التمادي أكثر وأكثر، وأرسل رسالة واهنة لكنها واضحة مفادها: لسنا بصدد اتخاذ أي خطوات من اي نوع سياسية أو شعبية أو جماهيرية أو غيرها، لأن التمسك باتفاق مكة هو الرد الوحيد لنا، ومولد حكومة جديدة تحت أي مسمى ودون تحفظات - حتى ولو كان من ضمن وزرائها افسد الفاسدين أو من تلطخت اياديهم بدماء شعبنا- هو المواجهة الوحيدة لدينا!

قبل أن يسيء البعض الظن، فلست بحال ضد اتفاق الشعب الفلسطيني وحقن دمائه، ولا ضد حكومة الوحدة الوطنية، لكني وبصراحة تامة ضد أن يتحول الاتفاق والحكومة لشماعة نعلق عليها ضعفنا وعجزنا، لتصبح عذرنا الدائم وتبريرنا لانتصارنا المعنوي على المحتل، وضد أن تطغى أخبار الاتفاق والحكومة على أخبار الحرب الحقيقية التي يشنها المحتل الغاصب على شعب فلسطين، في ظل إما تعتيم إعلامي أو تركيز غير مبرر ولا مفهوم على زيارات الزعماء ومباحثات الأخوة ولقاءات وتصريحات القادة.

معالم الحرب الحقيقية ظهرت واضحة جلية لتشمل كل شيء وبكل الوسائل مما استدعى صدور بيانات استغاثة من نابلس لم تلق آذانا صاغية بعد، وهذه بعض الجرائم التي ارتكبت بحق أبناء شعبنا وقضيته وحقوقه خلال ال 24 ساعة الماضية، دون أن تجد لها مكاناً حقيقياً لا اعلامياً ولا سياسياً ولا شعبياً، والقادم أعظم

إعدام ثلاثة من مقاتلي "سرايا القدس" ، الذراع العسكري لحركة الجهاد الإسلامي في مدينة جنين بدم بارد وهم: أشرف السعدي، أحد قادة السرايا في جنين، وبلال أبو ناعسة، وعلاء بريكة .

إعادة اجتياح مدينة نابلس وللمرة الثانية خلال يومين بأكثر من 140 آلية وعربة عسكرية مدعومة بالجرافات العسكرية ومن جميع المحاور وسط تحليق طائرات الاستطلاع، وتقسيم المدينة ومحاصرة مستشفياتها الثلاثة رفيديا والوطني والاتحاد.

في عمل جبان: إختطاف عدد من أقارب من تسميهم قوات الإحتلال مطلوبين للضغط عليهم لتسليم أنفسهم منهم والدة أمين لبادة، وشقيقات وأشقاء مهدي أبو غزالة

اقتحام موجات البث للمحطات المحلية وبث إعلانات خاصة بجيش الإحتلال

اجبار فتاة فلسطينية في العشرينات من عمرها تحت تهديد السلاح على التجرد من ملابسها قبل اعتقالها ومصادرة ما بحوزتها من حقائب وأمتعة وذلك على حاجز الكونتينر شمال شرق بيت لحم .

الإعلان عن مخطط لبناء حى إستيطاني جديد في القدس يضم 11 ألف وحدة سكنية بالقرب من حاجز قلنديا، هو الأكبر في منطقة القدس منذ عام 1967 !

إختطاف النائب حاتم قفيشة من كتلة "التغيير والإصلاح" في الخليل

إصدار أمر بإغلاق فندق "الكومدور" في حي الطور في القدس الشرقية، من المفوّض العام للشرطة موشي كرادي، وذلك لمنع عقد المؤتمر الصحفي الذي كان مقرراً عقده، من قبل شخصيات دينية، إسلامية ومسيحية، يتم خلاله توقيع وثيقة "العهد والميثاق" لحفظ القدس والأقصى وسائر المقدسات الإسلامية والمسيحية.

تسريب أنباء عن خطة لاجتياح قطاع غزة برياً بحجة الأنفاق.

رغم إعلان الحرب وأدلته السابقة هناك من سيطرح سؤال مشروع: ماذا يمكن لنا ان نفعل؟ لكن ايضاً إجابته مشروعة لمن أراد أن يقف موقفا شجاعا حاسما، ومن هذا المنطلق وحتى نخرج من باب التشخيص والتحليل نقترح ونطالب بما يلي:

الإعلان الفوري عن وقف المباحثات والمفاوضات مع أعضاء اللجنة الرباعية وكل وفود العالم حتى يتوقف العدوان وبشكل فوري غير مشروط.

تحديد شروط فلسطينية واضحة لا لبس فيها قبل لقاء أي مبعوث من أهمها رفع الحصار الجائر وإطلاق سراح الأسرى والإفراج عن الأموال المحتجزة وتحرير المعابر

تجميد كل مؤسسات السلطة الفلسطينية والاعلان عن إضراب شامل ومفتوح يستثنى منه قطاعي الصحة والتعليم.

النزول إلى الشوارع والساحات والميادين ومواجهة المحتل جماهيرياً وشعبياً في كل نقاط التماس .

التركيز إعلامياً وفي جميع الوسائل على ممارسات الإحتلال وجرائمه

هل هذه الخطوات أمر واقعي يمكن تطبيقه أم خطوات مثالية حالمة؟، بالتأكيد هي قابلة للتطبيق لسبب بسيط أن ما تحتاجه هو قرار فلسطيني بحت، ولنتذكر ان السلطة والحكومة وغيرها هي احتياجات دولية ايضاً لتهدئة الأوضاع، وإذا كان العالم يفرض على الشعب الفلسطيني حصاراً جائرا، مطالباً إياه بالرضوخ للمحتل، فعلى ذات العالم أن يتحمل مسؤولياته كاملة في وقف العدوان، أو ليتحمل عواقب انتفاضة فلسطينية ثالثة باتت أقرب من أي وقت مضى.

نعم تعب الشعب الفلسطيني وأنهكه الحصار والمقاطعة، ونال منه الجوع والفقر، لكن هل يعتقد اي منا أن المحتل سيتركنا وشأننا بحكومة وحدة وطنية أو بدونها؟ وهل إدارة شؤوننا اليومية يعني غض الطرف عن ممارسات المحتل؟ وبالتأكيد لسنا بيائسين أو عاجزين حتى عن قول كلمة "لا"، كما يدعي حافظ البرغوثي في مقاله المعنون "العجز" حين قال: أن الفلسطينيين عاجزون عن إدارة شؤونهم، وكأنهم قصّر بحاجة إلى رعاية ولي أمر، مضيفا أن "العجز سمة المرحلة الفلسطينية الراهنة، عجز القيادات وعجز الكوادر وعجز المقاومة وتسرب هذا العجز إلى المواطن الذي بدا يائسا مما يحدث".

على قيادات الشعب الفلسطيني تقع مسؤولية حماية الشعب واتخاذ ما يلزم للدفاع عنه، وفي ظل ميزان قوى غير عادل وظالم علينا أن نتسلح بكل ما لدينا وليس أقله رفض ما يجري واعلان العصيان على العالم برمته، لأننا نملك أقوى سلاح على الإطلاق وهو قرارانا وإرادتنا، إلا إذا ارتضينا - كما ارتضى البعض- أن نتحول لوكلاء للمحتل، أو لشعب همه الوحيد بطنه، ليأكل ويشرب وينام كالأنعام أو أضل سبيلا... معاذ الله.

الإحتلال قائم وموجود على كل حبة تراب من فلسطيننا الحبيبة وباعتراف حتى من اعترف بالمحتل وشرعيته، ليتحمل الاحتلال نتائج احتلاله بدلاً من تجميله بأوهام السلطة والسيادة، وليتحمل العالم معه تبعات ظلمه ودعمه للجلاد على حساب الضحية، ولنقف ولو لمرة تحت راية واحدة وبصوت واحد وباتفاق واحد - وليكن اتفاق مكة- لنمارس حقنا المشروع المكفول بكل شرائع السماء والأرض، لنبني مجتمعنا وحكومتنا ومؤسساتنا، لكن في نفس الوقت لنواجه الاحتلال البغيض.

هذا أضعف الإيمان! "

Once in a while, Kurt Nimmo goes over the edge; this article is an example. I disagree with this article by Nimmo and I strongly agree with what Seymour Hersh has reported. Saudi Arabia and the rest of the "moderate" Arab kennel have been working to stir anti-Shia sentiment and to agitate against Iran for sometime. The boy king of Jordan has been warning about a so-called Shia crescent, so has Mubarak. The "moderate" mongrels were openly cheerleading for Israel against Hizbullah last summer. The facts on the ground in Lebanon support what Hersh reported about Al-Qaeda-affiliated "Sunni" groups in Lebanon receiving arms and financing from the Siniora government and outside financiers, including KSA. Just because Ahmadinejad met King Abdullah does not prove that KSA is working to reduce sectarian tensions. The trip could have been to deliver a warning by Iran that this sectarian war that KSA is inflaming (on behalf of Usrael) could easily consume the Arab "moderate" leaders and their regimes.

A senior Palestinian leader who was involved in the discussions in Mecca that led to the agreement to establish a so-called "national unity government" was told bluntly by Saudi officials, "a Sunni-Shia war is coming, which side are you on?"

Tony Sayegh

"......If so, this does not explain why “Sunni and Shi’ite heavyweights Saudi Arabia and Iran” are working together “to fight the spread of sectarian strife that threatens to spill over from their neighbor Iraq,” according to Reuters. “Saudi King Abdullah held talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was on his first official trip to Saudi Arabia. A Saudi official said earlier the kingdom would seek Iran’s help to ease sectarian tensions in Iraq erupting into full-blown civil war.” If indeed Saudi Arabia is working with the neocons to undermine the influence of the Shi’a in Lebanon—and if we are to believe Hersh and his “sources,” Iran itself—how do we explain Abdullah and Ahmadinejad making nice?....

Considering this, it makes perfect sense Sy Hersh, writing for a “liberal” magazine revamped by Tina “Lady Evans” Brown, who got her start working for the “conservative” Sunday Telegraph, would serve as a disinfo conduit, writing one article after another taking the neocons to task, much to their chagrin."---Kurt Nimmo.

By Mike Luckovich

Hillary Clinton knew years before she voted for the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein didn't have WMDs -- Bill Clinton lied about Iraq's weapons programs to justify attacking the country in 1998.

By Scott Ritter

"Senator Hillary Clinton wants to become President Hillary Clinton. "I'm in, and I'm in to win," she said, announcing her plans to run for the Democratic nomination for the 2008 Presidential election.

Let there be no doubt that Hillary Clinton is about as slippery a species of politician that exists, one who has demonstrated an ability to morph facts into a nebulous blob which blurs the record and distorts the truth. While she has demonstrated this less than flattering ability on a number of issues, nowhere is it so blatant as when dealing with the issue of the ongoing war in Iraq and Hillary Clinton's vote in favor of this war.

This issue won't be resolved even if Hillary Clinton apologizes for her Iraq vote, as other politicians have done, blaming their decision on faulty intelligence on Iraq's WMD capabilities. This is because, like many other Washington politicians at the time, including those now running for president, she had been witness to lies about Iraq's weapons programs to justify attacks on that country by her husband President Bill Clinton and his administration.......

"So it is with conviction," Hillary said at the moment of her vote, "that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our Nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him -- use these powers wisely and as a last resort. And it is a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein -- this is your last chance -- disarm or be disarmed."

It turned out Saddam was in fact already disarmed. And it turned out that Hillary's husband, President Bill Clinton, knew this when he ordered the bombing of Iraq in 1998. Hillary can try to twist and turn the facts as she defends the words she spoke when casting her fateful vote in favor of a war with Iraq. But no amount of re-writing history can shield her from the failed policies of her very own husband, policies she embraced willingly and whole heartedly when endorsing war.

Run, Hillary, run. But your race towards the White House will never outpace the hypocrisy and duplicity inherent in your decision to vote for war in Iraq. "

The fools of PA Chairman Abbas' guard standing in formation outside his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

By Reuters

"Forces loyal to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and the ruling Hamas movement are pushing ahead with expansion plans despite a unity government deal, Palestinian and Western officials said.

Workmen in the West Bank city of Jericho said they have stepped up construction of a 16-acre base for Abbas's presidential guard and are putting the finishing touches to a "college" for his intelligence service.

Since the power-sharing deal between Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas Islamists was signed on February 8 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the presidential guard has set up a makeshift camp on newly-appropriated land next to the Karni commercial crossing in Gaza and has started training rerecruits there.

"This is a military base that needs money to be equipped, whether there is Mecca or not," a presidential guard commander said as shirtless recruits marched in formation behind him. "We have no lack of human resources but we lack equipment. Hamas has mortar bombs. Hamas has rockets. We don't have that."

The Islamic militant group Hamas has likewise been busy building up its own "executive force" to 12,000 members, double the current size. "We are working hard to accomplish that," spokesman Islam Shahwan said.

Zakaria al-Qaq, a security expert at al-Quds University, said the unity government deal between Fatah and Hamas political leaders may have stemmed factional fighting for now, but there was little trust between rival forces in the field.

"The Mecca agreement may look good, but on the ground it's not doable. The mobilization is still the same, the preparation is still the same, on both sides," he said.

Israeli intelligence services believe Hamas is stockpiling weapons for another round of fighting, either with Fatah or Israel, according to government officials.

"We're getting our money," a contractor at the presidential guard base in Jericho said as workers used a steamroller to level the new training grounds. The contractor said major construction work at the site should be completed in a month, but it was unclear when the new recruits would arrive.

Across from the ruins of Jericho's 8th century Hisham's Palace, the new "Security Sciences College" is close to opening its doors. Abbas's intelligence service has started placing job ads in local newspapers and hopes to begin classes this summer....."

***

Don't stop the celebrations for FAMAS, just pretend that Abbas is really a "Palestinian" president.

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007

"I first met Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama almost ten years ago when, as my representative in the Illinois state senate, he came to speak at the University of Chicago. He impressed me as progressive, intelligent and charismatic. I distinctly remember thinking 'if only a man of this calibre could become president one day.'

On Friday Obama gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago. It had been much anticipated in American Jewish political circles which buzzed about his intensive efforts to woo wealthy pro-Israel campaign donors who up to now have generally leaned towards his main rival Senator Hillary Clinton.

Reviewing the speech, Ha'aretz Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner concluded that Obama "sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as Bush, as friendly as Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Obama passed any test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period."......

Obama offered not a single word of criticism of Israel, of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians.

There was no comfort for the hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza who live in the dark, or the patients who cannot get dialysis, because of what Israeli human rights group B'Tselem termed "one cold, calculated decision, made by Israel's prime minister, defense minister, and IDF chief of staff" last summer to bomb the only power plant in Gaza," a decision that "had nothing to do with the attempts to achieve [the] release [of a captured soldier] nor any other military need." It was a gratuitous war crime, one of many condemned by human rights organizations, against an occupied civilian population who under the Fourth Geneva Convention Israel is obligated to protect.

While constantly emphasizing his concern about the threat Israelis face from Palestinians, Obama said nothing about the exponentially more lethal threat Israelis present to Palestinians. In 2006, according to B'Tselem, Israeli occupation forces killed 660 Palestinians of whom 141 were children -- triple the death toll for 2005. In the same period, 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, half the number of 2005 (by contrast, 500 Israelis die each year in road accidents)......

There was absolutely nothing in Obama's speech that deviated from the hardline consensus underpinning US policy in the region. Echoing the sort of exaggeration and alarmism that got the United States into the Iraq war, he called Iran "one of the greatest threats to the United States, to Israel, and world peace." While advocating "tough" diplomacy with Iran he confirmed that "we should take no option, including military action, off the table." He opposed a Palestinian unity government between Hamas and Fatah and insisted "we must maintain the isolation of Hamas" until it meets the Quartet's one-sided conditions. He said Hizbullah, which represents millions of Lebanon's disenfranchised and excluded, "threatened the fledgling movement for democracy" and blamed it for "engulf[ing] that entire nation in violence and conflict."......

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!".

But Obama's gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national scene. In 2003, Forward reported on how he had "been courting the pro-Israel constituency." He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker -- now his national campaign finance chair -- scion of the liberal but staunchly Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967). He has also appointed several prominent pro-Israel advisors......."

By Salim Nazzal

"Since publishing the Sunday times report in January 2007 that Israel is training two squads of planes to attack Iran the reports about attacking Iran whether from the USA or Israel or both has been intensified in the later period. In the view of Chomsky the American Israeli war on Lebanon last July 2006 is part of the American policy "to wipe out the deterrent so as to free up the United States and Israel for an eventual attack on Iran". http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3999 .


Some reports linked between the late Rice visit to the region and the preparation towards striking Iran nuclear facilities a matter that has not been neither confirmed nor denied by Washington and Israel. But the language spoken in both states indicates that this question has not been far from the thinking.

However the last report that Israel got the permission of three Arab countries to use its air space to attack Iran is casting more light not only on the intention of Israel which has never been unknown but confirming the Israeli policy to "integrate" in the region through playing on the sectarian differences which is an old Israeli policy, according to Ina'am Ra'ad the late secretary of the Syrian party: "The diary of Moshe Sharette revealed the correspondence amongst the three Israeli statesmen, David Ben Gorion Moshe Sharette and Eliaho Sasson in February and March 1954, as to the splitting of Lebanon and the whole area into sectarian homelands, which were to emerge in the event of a civil war and turmoil"......

The "new" American approach has become based on who support its policy and who does not which confirmed the suspicion of the Arab democratic forces that the Us has not made a break with its historical policy which was based on supporting the oppressive regimes which serve the Us interests. On that base the Us has coined the terms (the moderate Arab countries!) vis avis (the extreme Arab countries!) to differentiate between those countries which accept its policy and who are not. This policy goes in harmony with the American/Israeli deconstruction policy to divide the region between moderates and extremes, as if demanding the rights of the Palestinians as formulated by the united nation resolutions 224,181 and 194 has become an extreme position while the silence on the Israeli daily violations in Palestine is moderation. The American political writer Seymour Hersh refers to the change in the American policy towards adopting the policy of playing off the sectarian differences in the so called (redirection) policy of the United States in its efforts to isolate and probably attack Iran......

Obviously, the USA has become near to the Israeli position in the question of playing off the sectarian elements, and in adopting the policy of encouraging all sorts of divisions with the aim to weaken the forces which resist the American and the Israeli domination projects in the region. Nevertheless, apart from the question of the credibility of (the airspace permission report) which was denied by the secretary general of the Arab league the point is that it consolidates earlier analysis that deconstructing the region is the title which summarized the Israeli policy since the times of Ben Gorion is being adopted by the Bush administration. However the Arab secretary general denial does not free Arab leaders from taking a strong position against any possible attack against Iran. Arab leaders need to remember that their position in supporting the American invasion to Iraq has aided the Us and Israel to play on the sectarian divisions in the region which threatening the integration and the stability of each Arab country......"

Windbag du Jour: Musa Abu Marzouq of Hamas

Obama told of family's slave-owning history in deep South

An amateur genealogist has revealed a surprise in the family tree of the black contender in the race to be the Democrats' presidential candidate

"It is a question that few thought a man aiming to be America's first black President would ever have to answer: did your family once own slaves? But that question is now likely to be asked of Senator Barack Obama, who is bidding for the 2008 presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, in part on the appeal of his bi-racial background.

As the son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother, Obama has seemed to embody a harmonious vision of America's multiracial society. However, recent revelations have thrown up an unexpected twist in the tale.

Obama's ancestors on his white mother's side appear to have been slave owners. William Reitwiesner, an amateur genealogical researcher, has published a history of Obama's mother's family and discovered that her ancestors have a distinctly shadowy past.
Reitwiesner traced Obama's great-great-great-great-grandfather, George Washington Overall, and found that he owned two slaves in Kentucky: a 15-year-old girl and a 25-year-old man. He also found out that Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Duvall, also owned a pair of slaves listed in an 1850 census record. They were a 60-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman. In fact, the Duvalls were a wealthy family whose members were descended from a major landowner, Maureen Duvall, whose estate owned at least 18 slaves in the 17th century........"

A Good Article Contributed by Datta

Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide our potential enemies

By Robert Fisk

"Why are we trying to divide up the peoples of the Middle East? Why are we trying to chop them up, make them different, remind them - constantly, insidiously, viciously, cruelly - of their divisions, of their suspicions, of their capacity for mutual hatred? Is this just our casual racism? Or is there something darker in our Western souls?

Take the maps. Am I the only one sickened by our journalistic propensity to publish sectarian maps of the Middle East? You know what I mean. We are now all familiar with the colour-coded map of Iraq. Shias at the bottom (of course), Sunnis in their middle "triangle" - actually, it's more like an octagon (even a pentagon) - and the Kurds in the north.

Or the map of Lebanon, where I live. Shias at the bottom (of course), Druze further north, Sunnis in Sidon and on the coastal strip south of Beirut, Shias in the southern suburbs of the capital, Sunnis and Christians in the city, Christian Maronites further north, Sunnis in Tripoli, more Shias to the east. How we love these maps. Hatred made easy......

We did the same in the Balkans. The Drina Valley of Bosnia was Muslim until the Serbs "cleansed" it. Srebrenica? Delete "safe area" and logo it "Serb". Krajina? Serb until the Croats took it. Did we call them "Croats"? Or "Catholics"? Or both on our maps?

Our guilt in this sectarian game is obvious. We want to divide the "other", "them", our potential enemies, from each other, while we - we civilised Westerners with our refined, unified, multicultural values - are unassailable. I could draw you a sectarian map of Birmingham, for example - marked "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" (there not being many Christians left in England - but no newspaper would print it. I could draw an extremely accurate ethnic map of Washington, complete with front-line streets between "black" and "white" communities but The Washington Post would never publish such a map.

Imagine the coloured fun The New York Times could have with Brooklyn, Harlem, the East River, black, white, brown, Italian, Catholic, Jew, Wasp. Or the Toronto Globe and Mail with French and non-French Canadian Montreal (the front line at one point follows the city Metro) or with Toronto (where "Little Italy" is now Ukrainian or Greek), and colour the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim, of course. But we don't draw these Hitlerian maps for our societies. It would be unforgivable, bad taste, something "we" don't do in our precious, carefully guarded civilisation......

And we go on talking to our Sunni monarchs in the Middle East - we listen to their raving about the "Shia crescent" - no wonder we hate Shia Iran so much. And we go on dividing and scissoring up the lands, and printing more and more of our racial maps and I do wonder most seriously if we wish to promote civil war across this part of the world, and you know what? I rather think we do."