Palestinian Pundit

At least we felt safe under the extremists, say Kandahar residents too afraid to go out after dark

"Faiz Mohammed Karigar, a father of two, fled Kandahar when the Taliban held power in Afghanistan because he was against their restrictions on education. Now he wants the fundamentalists back.

"When the Taliban were here, I escaped to the border with Iran, but I was never worried about my family," he said. "Every single minute of the last three years I have been very worried. Maybe tonight the Americans will come to my house, molest my wife and children and arrest me.".......

The failure of Nato forces to deliver security and development and rising civilian casualties inflicted by Western forces in clashes with the Taliban have led to a loss of support in Kandahar. "How can we forgive the Americans?" asked Mr Karigar, who like most people here does not distinguish among the different elements in Nato. "I will fight them any way I can."......

Whatever the cause of the bloodshed, the local population almost always blames the foreign soldiers in their midst. Even moderate Afghans are openly declaring they will join the insurgency.

The British Government calls the Taliban "terrorists" and "extremists", but people in Kandahar associate it with security. Before the 2001 invasion, they say, they could walk the streets safely as long as they complied with the movement's strict interpretation of Islamic law. Now even a simple outing to the local market is seen as a risk, and the Taliban, established as a response to lawlessness in the 1990s, is gaining fresh strength.

"I think life under the Taliban was very good," said Maria Farah, a mother of five. "If we did not have a full stomach, we could at least get some food and go to sleep, and if we went out somewhere there were no problems. How about now? If we go out, we don't know if we will arrive home or not. If there is an explosion and the Americans are passing, they will just open fire on everyone. The security problems are too much here."......."

"April 7, 2007

This film present the israeli Mossad training in northern Iraq of the "Peshmerga," Kurdish forces, to push them to carry out killing and destruction of the Iraqis and carry out black ops."

Click Here to Watch This Video

The Palestinians Playing "Government" While Their Land is Disappearing Beneath Their Feet......
Playing Chief of the Reservation, Mr. Habila?

Contributed by Fatima

By Gideon Levy

"......The yellow iron gate between the village and the main road was open that night. The Mercedes raced toward its destination; Sana held Khaled, panting and convulsing, in the back seat. After about fifteen minutes, they reached the Atara checkpoint north of Ramallah, one of the toughest and cruelest in the West Bank, especially of late. At this hour there were no other cars waiting.
The driver stopped at the stop sign in front of the checkpoint, as required. After about a minute, a soldier emerged and approached them. In the back seat, Khaled's condition was worsening. His breath was getting shorter and his shaking was getting stronger.

"Where are you going?," the soldier asked, and the driver replied in his meager Hebrew: "To the hospital in Ramallah." The soldier asked for the ID cards of all the passengers. Daoud appealed to him: "Before the IDs, listen to me. We have a very sick baby in the car and I want to get him to the hospital on time, before it's too late."

The soldier heard him, says Daoud, but didn't show any signs of interest. He didn't even bother to glance in the back seat, to see their convulsing baby. "He didn't care. He wasn't deaf. He heard, but he didn't even ask, 'Where's the baby?'"

The Fakihs had passed this checkpoint several times en route to the hospital with their baby, and the soldiers had always let them through quickly as soon as they saw the sick infant. Not this time. This soldier insisted on collecting each person's ID card in turn. "I didn't have a choice so I handed him the ID cards," Daoud says. The soldier took the IDs cards and walked away from the car, toward the checkpoint. Khaled's condition continued to worsen.

Usually, Daoud says, the ID check takes just a minute or two, especially when the checkpoint is totally deserted, as it was that night. But not this time. After a wait of about five desperate minutes, Daoud called out to the soldier: "Soldier, soldier, excuse me, but I want to get to the hospital. My baby is in serious condition." "What are you yelling about?," the young soldier scolded Daoud, "Don't yell." Daoud was upset. "Look at the baby, he's going to die! Afterward you do whatever you want." The soldier turned away without saying anything.

Sana became hysterical. With Khaled in her arms, she began crying and shouting: "My baby... My baby is going to die!" Daould was desperate. "At that moment, I wanted to get out of the car, but I couldn't. They could shoot me, beat me, or delay me even longer. I chose to wait in the car. Waiting was better than getting out."

More long, fateful minutes that felt like an eternity passed. It was almost 1:00 A.M. Finally, the soldier came back. "Open the car," he instructed. The soldier checked the car, going through package after package, the one with the diapers and the one with the medicines and the milk, and so on. Daoud shouted: "I don't have time. Don't make my baby die here. He's dying." Sana's crying kept getting louder, the baby gasped harder for breath.

Sana grabbed the soldier by the arm. "Look at the baby," she pleaded. The startled soldier turned his weapon toward her. Then he relaxed and shined his flashlight on the baby's face. "What happened to the baby?," he asked. Daoud told him the baby was dying. "I'll go and bring you the ID cards," the soldier said, but not before pausing to check the trunk and to inspect the spare tire and whatever was under it - all by the book, the book of the occupation.

But then the most terrible thing of all happened: Khaled suddenly stopped shaking. His tiny hands dropped to his sides and his breathing became slow and heavy. "Our baby is dead!," wailed Sana, while Daoud tried to reassure her: "No he's not, just be patient and strong, now we're on our way."

The soldier brought back the ID cards. "Drive to the hospital quickly," he told them. Sana said there was no point now in going to the hospital. Next to Bir Zeit, they stopped the car to check on the baby's condition. Khaled was no longer breathing. Daoud told Sana that there was no point in continuing. "Our baby is dead." But Sana insisted that they continue on to the hospital, maybe the doctors could revive Khaled.

At 1:20 A.M. they arrived at the emergency room. The doctors examined Khaled, put him into an oxygen tent but then had to pronounce him dead. "There's nothing we can do for him now," they told the parents.

On the way home, having left their dead baby at the hospital, they passed through the Atara checkpoint again. "Where's the baby?," the soldier asked. "My baby died," Daoud answered him. "Died? Why?," asked the soldier. "He died, because I waited here at the checkpoint," Daoud said. "No, it's from Allah," the soldier replied........"

"Oh, Boy, I Don't Think They Like Us!"

A Good Spoof

By MARC LEVY
CounterPunch

"......Recruiters

Contrary to numerous reports depicting recruiters as bottom feeders, vultures, flim flam artists, used car salesmen, carney barkers, swindlers, grifters, gutless outlaws, sniggering ne'er-do-wells, heartless card sharps and the like, these honorable men and women offer prompt and accurate guidance to those who wish to serve our country in the present War on Terror. In spite of it being impossible to invade and occupy a concept (On War, Clausewitz , 1832); despite the "coalition of the willing" having nearly dried up; and given that a majority of Americans and Iraqis want the US out of Iraq, such concerns are of minor consequence to those who have full faith in our Commander in Chief.......

Basic Training

......At precisely 11AM drill instructors permit male recruits a one hour nap. Females may elect aroma therapy and/or pedicure. A gourmet lunch is served at 1PM. Afternoons are spent on tennis, badminton, or handball courts. At the 7PM. dinner (jacket and tie or cocktail dress and heels required) appetizers of Cajun Double Seared Shrimp, entrees of Escargot de Bridget, and hefty slices of Black Forest Brownies drizzled with organic fudge flakes are much in demand......

Deployment

All troops fly Business Class to Bagdad. Second, third and fourth tour vets are issued Very Frequent Flyer Cards. Arrived in Iraq, the new soldiers are awed at the sight of vermillion rose petals which dot the landscape as far as the eye can see.....

Sex

Periodically, soldiers may have the urge to fornicate. All fornicatory requests must be put in writing and submitted in triplicate to the Battalion Medical Officer, who will issue one Combat Condom per request. Upon completing the fornicatory act and placing the used Combat Condom in a UCCC (Used Combat Condom Convoy), the soldiers will stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Contrary to reports of male soldiers sexually harassing, molesting, assaulting or raping female soldiers (see below) the Army permits only authorized fornication, with a maximum of twelve fornicatory acts per year. Marines may fornicate thirteen times per combat tour. Navy and Air Force personnel do not have sex.......

Drugs

Although the UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that the 2006 opium harvest in Afghanistan will be 6,100 tonnes, more than thirty times 2001 production levels under the Taliban government, there is absolutely no illicit drug use by American soldiers in that country. Instead, during and after combat missions, American troops drink mocha lattes or vanilla frappuccinos to slake thirst, assuage fatigue and increase peer status. In Iraq, soldiers caught smoking hashish are subject to Sharia law......

Summary

Books like Cobra II (Gordon and Trainor, Pantheon, 2006 ), The Freedom (Christian Parenti, The New Press, 2005), and others of this ilk purport to objectively examine the Global War on Terror but merely serve to confound the populace, displease the President, and discomfort our fighting troops. The unexamined life is better. To pair and paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld and Hippocrates, "Life is short, war is long." Indeed, war builds character, strong bodies and sound minds. Though it may damage, ruin or scar the soldier, in the end, when we victors survey the beautiful wreckage of plundered landscape, the multitude lost and broken lives, still we lift our heads to inhale the acrid scent of battle, awed by our great endeavors. To be otherwise disposed would invite disaster. Yes, we who are triumphant must hold dear the belief that old soldiers never die but fade away, and we must trust that those younger will shortly follow."

Etymology and the Israel Lobby

By ARTHUR NESLEN
CounterPunch

"What do Einstein, Mahatma Ghandi, Ehud Olmert and, yes, me all have in common? We could each be censured for racism according to the European Union Monitoring Centre's 'working definition of anti-Semitism' which was last week adopted by the UK's National Union of Students as official policy.....

So it's actually a bit shocking to discover that it was largely drafted by a pro-Israel advocate who gives talks on how to elide the distinction between anti-Zionism and Jew Hatred. Kenneth Stern is the American Jewish Committee's expert on anti-Semitism and in 'Defining Anti-Semitism', a paper published by Tel Aviv University's Stephen Roth Institute, he explained how he developed the working definition 'along with other experts' in the second half of 2004.

Significantly, it involved crunching religious and racial hatred of Jews with what he labelled 'political' anti-Semitism. This latter, he claimed, has been 'otherwise known in recent years as anti-Zionism, which treats Israel as the classic Jew'. Political anti-Semites could thus include, for example, those who 'seek to disqualify Israel from equal membership in the community of nations', presumably by means of boycott initiatives. Naturally, comparing Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa is also, within Kenneth Stern's framework, 'an expression of antisemitism'......

But it could also include a litany of lobbyist shibboleths, such as:

"Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor); Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation... Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis; Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel."

Jewish peace activists have always baulked at this last point, dissociating themselves from war crimes committed in their names. Sadly, Ehud Olmert was not so circumspect when, on July 7, he told the United Jewish Communities that the invasion of Lebanon was 'a war fought by all the Jews'.

By the new standard though, it might be an anti-Semitic 'double standard' to single him out for criticism when the hateful words of the former Indian leader, Mahatma Ghandi, are still being taught in British schools. In 1938, Ghandi said he believed that 'Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.' Thus might he disbar himself from speaking at a British college today.

Einstein though would really bomb. After the Deir Yassin massacre that killed more than 250 Palestinian civilians in 1948, he signed a letter to the New York Times describing the Herut Party (a.k.a Likud) as 'closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties'. Its then-leader (and Israel's future prime minister) Menachem Begin, represented 'fascist elements' in Israel, and his party had 'openly preached the doctrine of the fascist state'. So Einstein, would flunk the EUMC's 'comparing Israeli policy to the Nazis' test.

But even higher forces than Einstein could fall foul of the Stern exam. After all, in Leviticus 25:23, God instructed Moses to tell the Jewish people that 'the land is mine; you are but tenants and travellers'. What was this if not denying the Jewish people the right to their self-determination? Haul Him up before the AJC, Kenneth......."

Abbas tells forces to help stop Gaza rocket fire

At graduation ceremony for his presidential guard Palestinian president tells security forces to work diligently to stop anarchy, useless Qassam launching

Reuters

"Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on Saturday for his security forces to step up efforts to prevent rockets from being fired into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

At a graduation ceremony for his presidential guard, Abbas was quoted by the official WAFA news agency as saying it was necessary that "all parties work with maximum effort, especially the presidential guard and national security forces, to spread security and safety in the homeland, end security anarchy and stop useless rockets."......"

***

What the stooge wants is not "security and safety in the homeland" but the security and safety of Israel and its colonies in the West Bank. These are the conditions of Oslo which he agreed to. His "forces" are primarily for this purpose.

Let us keep the "unity" celebrations going to celebrate this graduation of the "presidential guard."

By Kurt Nimmo

"Perhaps you remember Ralph Peters? He’s the United States Army Lieutenant Colonel formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence who redrew the map of the Middle East for Armed Forces Journal in June, 2006. In the article, entitled “Blood Borders,” Peters wrote that his “hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious communalism,” in other words, Peters has adopted the Israeli idea of busting up the Arabs, Kurds, and Persians into Bantustans.

Now we have Peters interviewed by Paul Kengor for the FrontPageMagazine website, a neocon operation run on Scaife and foundation grant money by the former Marxist turned neocon impresario and confidence man, David Horowitz.

“Once again, the Arab people, within Iraq and without, have failed themselves horribly,” Peters tells Kengor. “Their pettiness, their embrace of corruption, their social structures and their taste for internecine feuds and religious intolerance all have led them to make a hash of this unprecedented opportunity to build one rule-of-law democracy in the Arab world. Arabs have an ineradicable genius for failing themselves.”......

In short order, we have experienced amnesia in regard to the crimes perpetuated against the Iraqi people—indeed, we seem ready to sign off on the next attack, this time against Iran, as we are ignorant of the crimes committed against Iraq.

In the middle of all this, we get the platitudes of Ralph Peters, who is little more than an academic cartographer working in the service of the neocons. Peters’ “solution” to the “Arab problem,” indeed the “Islamic problem,” as viewed through an Israeli lens, is simply yet another paragraph—or more accurately, a footnote—in the clash of civilizations agenda, the racist and hubris-filled parti pris of the neocons who will, if not arrested and punished soon, destroy the planet or, at least, make it largely unrecognizable.

Contributed by Lucia

"QALQILIA, (PIC)-- An IOF unit at dawn Saturday broke into the home of a Palestinian family in Qalqilia city and kidnapped the mother of two detainees to force them to confess, father of the detainees told PIC.

He said that Israeli soldiers encircled the house and told them via loudspeakers to get out before breaking into and ransacking it at the pretext of searching it.

The father said that an Israeli intelligence officer called him bad names and told him, "We will take your wife to force your sons to confess".

He said that the soldiers then handcuffed his wife and took her away in one of their jeeps.

Palestinian legal sources said that the mother of Sa'eed and Omar Dhiab was taken to the Jalama interrogation center where her two sons are held to pressure them into confessing under threat of hurting their mother."

This systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in schools

A Good Piece

By Robert Fisk

".......Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles......

The story so far: Sami al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian, was a respected computer professor at the University of South Florida who tried, however vainly, to communicate the real tragedy of Palestinian Arabs to the US government. But according to Sugg, Israel's lobbyists were enraged by his lessons - al-Arian's family was driven from Palestine in 1948 - and in 2003, at the instigation of Attorney General Ashcroft, he was arrested and charged with conspiring "to murder and maim" outside the United States and with raising money for Islamic Jihad in "Palestine". He was held for two and a half years in solitary confinement, hobbling half a mile, his hands and feet shackled, merely to talk to his lawyers.....

In December, 2005, al-Arian was acquitted on the most serious charges and on those remaining; the jurors voted 10 to two for acquittal......Then prosecutor Gordon Kromberg insisted that the Palestinian prisoner should testify against an Islamic think tank. Al-Arian believed his plea bargain had been dishonoured and refused to testify. He was held in contempt. And continues to languish in prison.

Not so, of course, most of America's torturers in Iraq. One of them turns out to rejoice in the name of Ric Fair, a "contract interrogator", who has bared his soul in the Washington Post - all praise, here, by the way to the Post - about his escapades in the Fallujah interrogation "facility" of the 82nd Airborne Division......

As the reporter who first revealed the death of hotel worker Baha Mousa in British custody in Basra - I suppose we must always refer to his demise as "death" now that the soldiers present at his savage beating have been acquitted of murder - I can attest that Arab Muslims know all too well how gentle and refined our boys are during interrogation. It is we, the British at home, who are not supposed to believe in torture. The Iraqis know all about it - and who knew all about Mousa's fate long before I reported it for The Independent on Sunday.

Because it's really all about shutting the reality of the Middle East off from us. It's to prevent the British and American people from questioning the immoral and cruel and internationally illegal occupation of Muslim lands. And in the Land of the Free, this systematic censorship of Middle East reality continues even in the country's schools......"

Act Seven in the Same Worn Out Play
By Baha Boukhari

Haneyya: Siege on Palestinian people unethical, futile

"GAZA, (PIC)-- Ismail Haneyya, the PA premier, has described the western-led siege imposed on the Palestinian people as "unethical" and "futile", while charging the US administration with igniting tension in the region.

Haneyya told the Friday congregation in Breij refugee camp in central Gaza that the previous Hamas-formed government was under siege for a year to force it offer political concessions but to no avail.

He pointed out that international changes occurred regarding this siege, noting that a number of countries wished to accelerate political and financial relations with the PA while others declared they would not deal with the Hamas ministers in the new PA unity government, which he said is "unacceptable".

The premier accused the US administration with igniting tension in the region through refusing to lift the economic embargo on the PA government, which prevented local, regional and international banks from transferring funds directly to the government."

***

Amazing! Such penetrating wisdom. With "leaders" like him the Palestinians will be in the wilderness for the next forty years, at least.

"On the dusty streets of Cairo, once considered the most important capital in the Arab world, Egyptians mulled over the recent performance of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, with most concluding he deserved a thumbs-up.

The Iranian president’s eye-catching showmanship as he announced the release of the 15 British sailors and marines seems to have generated admiration laced with a hint of frustration – why couldn’t Arab leaders be like him and stand up to the west?

The fact that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad is the leader of a Persian, predominantly Shia nation, seemed not to matter. “I consider Ahmadi-Nejad a leader of the Arab people. He has the confidence. It upsets me that we don’t have such a leader,” says Mohamed Ali, a 20-year-old student.

As Sunni Arab leaders voice concerns about sectarian tensions they say are fuelled by Iran and its interference in Iraq and Lebanon and watch Tehran’s nuclear programme with suspicion, other, ordinary Arabs see Mr Ahmadi-Nejad as a breath of fresh air.

The feelings are compounded by the perception that moderate Sunni states, such as US allies Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, simply follow Washington’s bidding, analysts say.

Abdullah Alshayji, a professor of international relations and head of the US studies unit at Kuwait University, says the Iranian leader strikes a balance that resonates in the Arab world: candid and outspoken in his criticism of the west and Israel, while appearing as a humble man of the people......"

No time for lessons during student elections

Dana Shalash writing from Birzeit University, occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, 6 April 2007

"My students are robots that come in different colors: green, white, and red. Each is representative of a political party: Hamas, Fatah, and the Popular Front, respectively.

Birzeit University's campus has been overly crowded for the last few days. Eyes from both on and off campus are on the Student Council Elections, which some believe will gauge the outcome of potential early parliamentary elections.

Only eight students -- two were guests -- showed up to Wednesday's class. The other ten not showing up is the norm; out of their moral and/or partisan obligations most students skip classes -- lessons can wait but elections cannot. So we chose to discuss politics rather than English.......

I eventually rose up and closed the door to contain their increasing clamor. Unbelievable! They are all blind to the purpose of such a council. But disrespect, yelling, pointing fingers, and blindness have all become indispensable characteristics of us Palestinians.

They are all in dire need of financial help and counseling services, but none of them thought that this is why this council exists, and that they should elect the suitable individual, rather than the political party, that is willing to support them in their academic pursuits. The aforementioned "students'" parties have spent tens of thousands of dollars on the electoral campaign -- flags, posters, and banners that colored every single spot on campus. The estimated costs are believed to have otherwise financed dozens of deprived Palestinian students' tuition.

Awareness is a key notion that our students lack. They are brainwashed with partisan mantras and slogans, and sadly they are unwilling to hear out the other at all or even accept the others' right to believe differently."

What an Ass and a Palestinian Traitor!
Do The Palestinians Have Any Dignity Left?

A Good Article
By Gilad Atzmon

Contributed by Datta

"......Ahmadinejad doesn’t shy off. He says what he believes to be right. He believes for instance that if the Europeans feel guilty for their past crimes against the Jews, it is the Europeans who should face their past and take responsibility for the Jews rather than dumping them in the Middle East at the expense of the Palestinian people. Again, this thought is rational as well as implacably ethically grounded. Whether we like its implication or not is a different matter. Ahmadinejad may be seen by some as a Holocaust denier, yet as far as I can see, he is one of the very few statesmen who manages to internalise the real meaning of the Holocaust. He says No to racism. Accordingly, he believes that Israel, the ‘Jews only State’, a racially orientated nationalist entity, has no right to exist as such. Ahmadinejad has never called for the liquidation of the Israeli people but rather for the dismantling of the Zionist apparatus. Again, I see nothing ethically wrong with that.

In the last days, Ahmadinejad proved again that as far as humanism and peace seeking are concerned, he is ahead of his Western rivals. Seemingly, we have a lot to learn from our Muslim brothers. In this cultural clash, it is we, the West who have lost touch with the notions of empathy and ethics. May I suggest that we start to assume some level of responsibility for things and admit that it is not Blair and Bush who should be blamed, it is we the people who are failing collectively to listen to the cry of the other. Rather than blaming Blair and his shrinking circuit of supporters, we are the ones, the silent crowd who should launch into a serious self-searching process. If humanism, rationality, analytical thinking and ethics have been seen as Western cultural assets at a certain stage, it is currently the leaders of the so-called Muslim ‘fundamentalists’ who grasp the real meaning of those qualities far better than we do.

Ahmadinejad was there to remind us all what grace was all about. Seemingly, it is Ahmadinejad who evokes the feeling of goodness and it is Blair who couldn’t match it. It was Blair who couldn’t even recruit the minimal dignity and kindness to salute his foe. British columnists should know better. Ahmadinejad didn’t win by points; it wasn’t about winning a political battle. This was just another chapter in an ongoing clash between civilizations, between Good and Evil and as it seems, we are stuck at least momentarily with Bush, Blair and their Ziocon philosophy, not exactly the civilized one and not remotely the carrier of ‘goodness’, so to say."

By Joe Klein

"The first three months of the new Democratic Congress have been neither terrible nor transcendent. A Pew poll had it about right: a substantial majority of the public remains happy the Democrats won in 2006, but neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid has dominated the public consciousness as Newt Gingrich did when the Republicans came to power in 1995. There is a reason for that. A much bigger story is unfolding: the epic collapse of the Bush Administration.

The three big Bush stories of 2007--the decision to "surge" in Iraq, the scandalous treatment of wounded veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys for tawdry political reasons--precisely illuminate the three qualities that make this Administration one of the worst in American history: arrogance (the surge), incompetence (Walter Reed) and cynicism (the U.S. Attorneys)......"

And Who Isn't But Should Be?

By FRANKLIN LAMB
(Franklin Lamb has been in Lebanon researching a book for the past nine months. Hezbollah: a brief Guide for Beginners in expected in early summer, 2007)

CounterPunch

"It was a sign of the times last week (March 27) when House Armed Services Committee Staff Director Erin Conaton declared in a memo to committee staffers that the powerful committee was scrapping the Bush Administration shop worn phrase, Global War of Terrorism. Conaton's boss, Rep. Ike Skelton,( D-Mo) the new Chairman of the Committee commented that "the overused label had become an embarrassment and had lost its meaning".

Recent research in Lebanon has turned up information previously unavailable which sheds light of the misapplication of the Terrorism label by the Bush administration.....

In denying Hezbollah involvement in operations targeting American civilians, their leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah has stated:

"The truth of the matter is that there was something other than Hezbollah, called the Islamic Jihad, who kidnapped the hostages. There exist videocassettes, communiqués that bear the signature of the Islamic Jihad. It is independent form the party. It is absolutely incorrect that the Islamic Jihad is a cover name for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah remains on the US and Israel 'terrorism' list for purely political reasons and to punish the organization for its resistance to Israeli aggressions against Lebanon and Bush administration plans for the region."

It is time for the Bush administration to present its case and prove what terrorism Hezbollah has actually used against the American people in the 1980's in light of US government admissions that since 1999 there is no evidence that Hezbollah has engaged in 'Terrorism'.

It's time for the poker players to reveal their cards, or as they say down in Crawford.. ' y'all show 'em er fold 'em!"

by Ghada Chehade
Znet

"In the so-called war on “terror” the most powerful weapon being deployed is the word itself. In the post-9/11 geo-political climate, throwing in the word “terrorist” automatically mutes coherent and critical debate. Any valid and necessary criticisms of North American governments and their foreign policy are silenced and demonized with the use of that one word, while opposition to foreign invasion and imperialist plundering can be at once quelled and criminalized by deeming it terrorist. Canada’s anti-terrorist list is being used in this very way-as a vehicle for stifling, demonizing and criminalizing resistance to the North American imperialist project and Canada’s role in it. At the same time the word acts as subterfuge from the mass terror perpetrated by the US and its imperialist baby brother-Canada. What Canadian citizens need to ask is just who does this labeling protect? Does it protect the Canadian population who has never suffered at the hands of Hezbollah, or does is protect the Canadian government and business elite who are part of a North American project to ransack the world’s resources while discrediting and eliminating any parties that stand in the way? To understand the distinction we need to understand imperialism, as well as the one-sided and suspect way in which “terrorism” is currently defined.......

Shaping and manipulating public opinion is an essential part of the western imperialist project, and by demonizing their enemies western governments eliminate any need for critical debate. Canada’s terrorist list is currently being used in this very way: to demonize those who resist imperialism abroad and stifle any debate on the matter internally. In the case of geo-politics, governments are careful to package their imperialist resource grabs as “humanitarian interventions.” We need only think back to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, of which Canada was a part from the outset......."

by Alenjandro Nadal
La Jornada (Translated from Spanish by Supriyo Chatterjee)

"The crisis of 15 British sailors captured by Iran has brought up close the matter of a possible attack by the United States on that country. Very few think it is a logical option for Washington. But wars almost never start with rational analysis. Miscalculations and malignancy are the most common ingredients in the motives for conflicts.

For the White House, the need to attack Iran becomes more urgent every day. The perception is that as the end of the Bush administration approaches, the window of opportunity for an offensive is closing. As such, although it is not very logical to think that a President of the United States could hand over to his successor a recently-started war, that is precisely what is bound to happen in the current situation in the prevailing delirium in the Oval Office. There is no doubt that all the rules have changed after September 11......

But here is where it is outside the focus of a good part of the international debate. Washington’s objective is not to invade and occupy Iran. The central purpose is to eliminate it as an obstacle to controlling the resources of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. And, to achieve that, it is not necessary to invade the country. It is enough to destroy its military capacity, aerial and naval, something that the armed forces of the United States and its few allies can achieve in some week of selective bombardment. We should not forget that Pentagon has been preparing for decades to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to naval movement (and the Europeans, in an emergency, are going to be thankful).

In reply, Iran can unleash a nightmare for the Americans in Iraq. But the sacrifice of additional tens of soldiers in Baghdad is not something that is going to stop the dream of the Bush-Cheney duo. Within a month, the casualty figures of American soldiers in Iraq will exceed 3,300 deaths. The daily average of American casualties is about 2.3 so far in the war. The White House will not feel obliged to retire its troops from Iraq if the figure crosses four or five dead soldiers each day. The American people can react in other ways but by then they will be faced with a fait accompli.

In the twisted logic of Cheney and Bush, chaos and more casualties is what is going to oblige the United States to remain in Iraq. For these two characters, the Europeans, reluctant or otherwise, will have to accept that it is better to control the hydrocarbon riches of Central Asia and the Caspian than to abandon the region in the middle of chaos. The rules have changed, and Bush-Cheney are not prepared to let the opportunity go."

The devastation of south Lebanon has echoes of Angola's towns shattered by South Africa in the 80s

Victoria Brittain in Bint Jbeil
Friday April 6, 2007
The Guardian

"From the rocky hills above the south Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil you look down over a valley of wild flowers and goats, where the word Hizbullah is scored into the grass. Three miles away is the border with Israel, and the red-tiled roofs of its settlements which face Bint Jbeil, the symbol of the war that Israel lost last summer. In 18 years of Israeli occupation of 10% of Lebanon, Bint Jbeil was the capital of Hizbullah's resistance, and it was unsurprising that it took the early brunt of Israeli air strikes, tanks, and street fighting in the 34 days of war......

Israelis, too, know about the power of memory, and made an attempt here to rub it out. Another of their prime targets was the hill-top prison of Khiam, northeast of Bint Jbeil, where hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians were held and tortured by Israel's proxy, the South Lebanese Army, during the occupation. Khiam was the symbol of Israel's power, and the prisoners' will to resist it. Today, bleak Khiam is a heap of tangled rubble, watched over by a man who spent four years inside the prison and has been telling its story ever since. All he can show now is one small remaining corridor of cells, and an isolation punishment box which he can just fit his body inside.

But three years ago, when I was last here, the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal was a holiday, and there was an atmosphere of celebration under a forest of Lebanese and Hizbullah flags. Khiam then was a Hizbullah museum, where families were shown round by this same former prisoner. The Angolan government produced a white book detailing every attack by South Africa, and today Lebanese citizens are doing the same, documenting civilian losses, damage to housing, land and the environment in a website: warrecords-lebanon.org.

Memory and history will be served by this, but there will be a reckoning beyond it. South Africa learned to live with its apartheid crimes through its truth and reconciliation commission. Will Israel go down this route too?"

Iraqis hold a British soldier's helmet and pieces of a British military Warrior fighting vehicle as they cheer after a road side bomb on British patrol in Basra, Iraq, 550 kilometers (340 miles) southeast of Baghdad, Thursday, April 5, 2007. Four British soldiers and a Kuwaiti interpreter were killed Thursday in an ambush in southern Iraq, the British military said. The patrol struck a roadside bomb and was hit by small-arms fire about 2 a.m. in the Hayaniyah district west of Basra.

by Gabriel Kolko

"It is understandable that intelligent people should be preoccupied with the crises reported in the daily press, but they are best comprehended in their historical context. That context, and the crucial causes and motives guiding American foreign policy since 1950, are crucial to understanding the often bewildering and multidimensional events since the year 2000. George W. Bush and his cronies have done incalculable damage and committed terrible follies, but it is a fundamental error to assume that he is somehow original and the genesis of our present crisis.

It is much riskier to focus on particulars as if they have no precedents or are not part of an older, longer historical pattern. Indeed, a major fault of many assessments of US actions abroad is precisely such a disregard for the circumstances that led to them and their historical framework......"

Were the Brits ginning up a pretext for war in the Gulf?

By Justin Raimondo

".....This entire incident has been extremely odd, alright, but it isn't the Iranians who made it so. The behavior of the captured Brits is what struck me as truly bizarre. After all, two of them went on Iranian television, and, standing in front of a map, pointed out precisely where they were picked up by their captors – in what are clearly Iranian waters. Their televised apologies, it's true, were a violation of the Geneva conventions, but we in the West are hardly in the best position to raise that issue......

In any case, that was some pretty powerful – and convincing – video that the Iranians put out there, with relaxed and completely natural-looking-and -acting British sailors basically backing up what the Iranians said from the beginning. I agree with John McLaughlin: the Brits haven't been "entirely level with the world." Not that this would come as a surprise: as McLaughlin points out, Blair has long been among the chief manufacturers of alibis for the Bush administration.

The statements of the British sailors merely tend to confirm previously expressed doubts as to the actual coordinates released by the Brits. And now we hear the news – just released by Sky News – that they had been withholding an interview with one of the captives, Chris Air, filmed before his capture, in which he said they were indeed gathering intelligence on the Iranians. What it all adds up to, given what we know so far, is an incursion into Iranian waters that was in all likelihood deliberate......

Far from signaling a let up in the escalation of tensions, we are bound to see more such incidents – one of which will prove to be the tripwire for war......

We can stop the next war before it starts – but only if we catch the War Party at their game while they're playing it, and not after the fact, as in the case of Iraq. The Democrats are keen to cut off funding for a war that should never have started and could not have started without their cooperation: will they have the foresight and courage to defund the covert war against Iran before it becomes overt? I am not at all optimistic about this, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong......

The regime-changers, after all, are still in charge: Bush is a lame-duck, but he's still the big duck, and Blair is leaving, but isn't yet gone. Together, these two can do a lot more damage before they're safely out of office – and, given half a chance, they will.

The War Party may be discredited, reeling with defections, and genuinely hated by the majority of the English-speaking peoples, but I wouldn't count them out quite yet. The drama of the fifteen captives was just the beginning: there are plenty more provocations where that came from. This one backfired, it's true, but the danger is not past, or even decreased – because the next one may well succeed in sparking a conflict that will make the Iraq war look like a picnic in the park."

"Bethlehem - Ma'an - The electronic weekly poll on the independent Ma'an News Agency's Arabic-language webpage has revealed that the majority of participants believe the results of the Arab summit in Riyadh benefited mainly Israel and the USA.

8,610 readers participated in the poll, representing a sample of readers for one week.

15.77% of the participants thought that the results of the summit benefited the Arabs and Palestinians. On the other hand, 72.86% thought that it benefited Israel and the USA.

11.37% of participants did not specify their point of views in the subject.

The Arab summit in Riyadh was held on 27-29 March. It concluded its activities by adopting the Arab peace initiative as the Arab states' approach for reaching a peaceful reconciliation to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The Arab peace initiative comprises of offering Israel normalization of relations with all the Arab states in exchange for a withdrawal from all the territory it occupied in the 1967 war and an agreed, just solution to the Palestinian refugee question."

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Mike Luckovich

Israel's prime minister is engaged in a public relations exercise. Meanwhile, it is business as usual, as his army plans a wide ranging assault against Gaza

By Khaled Amayreh from East Jerusalem
Al-Ahram Weekly

"......Olmert's words are nothing more than double speak. The Israeli premier knows that without giving up the spoils of the 1967 War and allowing for the repatriation of the refugee, the chances of a durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and also with the Arab- Muslim world at large, are next to nil. Yet Olmert thinks that spin can replace true statesmanship. He is unwilling to pay the price for peace but instead indulges in diversionary tactics, extolling the need to hold direct discussions with Arab leaders.

Israel has been engaging in peace talks with the Palestinians for 15 years and with the Arabs for decades to no avail. What point can there be in holding further discussions beyond trying to cajole or bully the Arab side into accepting the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land by Ashkenazi supremists?.....

Olmert doesn't stop at refusing Arab and non-Arab peace overtures. He also wants to ignite a civil war among Palestinians and would like to see Arab states augment Israel's callous blockade of Gaza......

Olmert is also very weak politically with a majority of Israeli pundits predicting that his hobbled together government is unlikely to survive to the end of the year. That weakness could hold many problems for the Palestinians as Olmert is tempted to pursue further military adventures and engage in political posturing in a doomed attempt to secure public support. Indeed this week the Israeli chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, said that Israel was planning to launch a far- reaching incursion into the Gaza Strip to "prevent Hamas from growing stronger".....

Olmert is likely to continue to recite his calls for peace and repeatedly express his sincere and heart-felt desire to hold talks with Arab leaders. Meanwhile his government and army continue to rape the Palestinian people and steal chunk after chunk of their homeland. It is a strategy that will continue for as long as world leaders are willing to remain silent in the face of Israeli recalcitrance.

This week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel made another pilgrimage to Israel to ask for further atonement for the Holocaust. Merkel, who only met non-Hamas members of the Palestinian government, blamed the Palestinians for everything from the stalled peace process to crippling Western sanctions on them. One Palestinian official described Merkel's behaviour as "brazen and shameful".

"This woman, like all German leaders since [Konrad] Adenauer, feels enslaved by the Jews. I believe that even if Israel carried out a fully-fledged holocaust against the Palestinians, German leaders wouldn't even protest... German political whoredom seems to know no limits.""

Tempted by the trappings of statehood, Palestinian leaders forgot they had yet to build a state

By Azmi Bishara
Al-Ahram Weekly

"......The PLO was founded as a movement for refugees striving to liberate their land, not as a movement to fight the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It was founded in East Jerusalem at a time when that city was under Arab sovereignty and when the creation of a Palestinian entity meant the creation of a liberation organisation embodying the political aspirations and national identity of the Palestinian people. There was never any question of the creation of a state on only a portion of the land; indeed, in order to receive the Jordanian monarch's approval to hold the PLO constitutional assembly in Jerusalem the founders had to assure him this was not the intent......

There is a big difference between a real state and a hypothetical one, even if the latter's representatives can sit around a table imagining themselves equal to the former's representatives, even if Palestinian and Israeli kids can play in the same youth orchestra, conceived of by some European philanthropist as a way to illustrate the possibilities of mutual co-existence and brotherly love, as opposed to the same kids pelting each other with stones, even if Palestinian writers can engage in fruitful debate with their Israeli "counterparts" as an alternative to the "mutual exchange of violence", and even if Palestinians can "liberate" international peace prizes as the symbolic alternative to true liberation. There is a big difference. Unfortunately, today we are witnessing the consequences of the obfuscation of this difference.....

The result was that Israel was rewarded with a liberation movement that had abandoned its original calling, structures and alliances while the Palestinians were still without a state. The second result was that the 1967 boundaries were transformed from the eventual lines of a peace agreement, as was the case with Syria and Egypt, to the ultimate hope in eventual negotiations over a lasting solution to the Palestinian cause. The third is that the Palestinian people became one of "two sides", and now have to prove themselves worthy in order for the occupying power to negotiate with them. It seems even Islamist resistance movements such as Hamas are being lured into the game of proving themselves in an attempt to win the acceptance of the international community, an almost impossible task for any Islamist movement.

These may be the rules of the game of nations but they are not the rules by which national liberation movements should play. For the moment Hamas is hesitating at the threshold. If it steps across it will go down the same slippery path as the liberation movements that preceded it.

The PLO lost the structure, vision, alliances and rights of a liberation movement before it even became a state. Because it wanted the prerogatives of state so prematurely it had to accept the obligations of a state prematurely. This entailed not only calling off the resistance, as nations do once they achieve independence, but also fighting the resistance, now termed "terrorism"......

It was the Palestinian refugees that created the Palestinian national liberation movement. It was from beneath that umbrella that there emerged the anti- occupation resistance movements, on the one hand, and, on the other, the drive to create a Palestinian state as an end in itself.

Who among us has not met that loathsome specimen that is forever trying to shed his connections with the people who gave him the initial leg up on the ladder to success? Such people's sense of self- importance is so great that they suppress all memory of those to whom debts of gratitude are owed. Such inflated egos quickly reveal a propensity for other evil......

When refugees become too much of bother for the Palestinian state enterprise something is terribly askew. A state without the right to return is not just a perversion, it is a burden on the cause of Palestinian refugees, of Jerusalem and of the struggle against Zionism."

"Most Americans have little or no confidence in the information they receive from the military or the media about the situation in Iraq, according to a poll released Thursday.

The survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 52 percent have little or no faith in the military's portrayal of the four-year war, compared with 60 percent who feel the same way about the press reports of the conflict.

The figures are a far cry from the overwhelming confidence Americans had in the military and the media at the outset of the war in March 2003.

At the time, fully 85 percent said they had at least a fair amount of confidence in military information and 81 percent were confident the press was giving an accurate picture of the war.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said the poll findings mirror the public's perception of how well the war is going overall.

"People are questioning whether they are getting good information about how things are going and it's affecting the public's confidence in the government and military as well as the press," Dimock told AFP......"

Dr. Marcy Newman, Electronic Lebanon, 5 April 2007
(Dr. Marcy Newman is a Visiting Professor at the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut and a Fellow at the Initiative for Middle East Policy Dialogue)

"......Twice in the last month Pelosi delivered a speech -- of more or less the same message -- before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference and before the Israeli Knesset. In these speeches, she unequivocally stated: "When Israel is threatened, America's interests in the region are threatened. America's commitment to Israel's security needs is unshakable." Statements such as this have made Pelosi, along with her traveling companion Congressman Tom Lantos, one of the top ten recipients of AIPAC donations. She received a standing ovation for these sentiments in the Knesset where she linked the U.S. and Israel's "common cause": " a safe and secure Israel living in peace with her neighbors."

Perhaps Pelosi genuinely wants to secure peace in the region. If this were the case, however, we would have seen some indication of balance in her fact-finding mission. While in Israel, Pelosi discussed her visits with the families of Israeli soldiers taken last summer in Gaza and Lebanon, naming them and relaying stories about them. Not once was a Palestinian or Lebanese killed or wounded in Israel's wars dignified with any such humanizing gesture. Instead Pelosi focused entirely on Hezbollah's violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701 for failing to disarm. Not once did she mention Israel's almost daily violation of that same resolution with military jets invading Lebanese airspace or recent military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Moreover, she failed to mention Israel's continued occupation of Shaaba Farms and Ghajar, which are also violations of 1701; nor did she engage with serious discussions of the occupation of the Golan Heights or the Palestinian Territories with leaders in the region......."

The Happiest Day in Habila's Life......
He Finally Gets to Sit Down With an Englishman.....
Let the Celebrations Continue....

ياسر الزعاترة
Al-Jazeera

"..........

هكذا تبدو المنطقة برمتها في وضع انتظار لما سيجري بين الولايات المتحدة وإيران، في حين تبدو بعض الدول العربية المعنية بالخطر الإيراني أكثر من خطر المشروع الأميركي الصهيوني في حال من الاستنفار من أجل تسهيل الضربة العسكرية، ليس فقط بتعزيز الحشد الطائفي ولعبة عزل إيران عن محيطها العربي والإسلامي، وإنما أيضا، وهو الأهم، بتهدئة الملف الفلسطيني.

وما من شك في أن إيران بسلوكها الأرعن في العراق مازالت تساهم في تعزيز عزلتها، في وقت ينبغي عليها فيه أن تدرك أن الجماهير لا تأتمر بأمر أنظمتها، ولو لم يكن الموقف مقنعا بشكل من الأشكال، لما كان عزلها يسيرا بحال.

هنا يمكن القول إن القضية الفلسطينية ستدفع ثمن هذه اللعبة بإدخالها في متاهة جديدة تشبه متاهة أوسلو السابقة، في حين أن الجميع يدرك حقيقة النهاية القادمة في ظل معادلة إسرائيلية ترى فيما عرض في كامب ديفد عام 2000 تنازلا لا يمكن احتماله.

في المقابل يبدو من حق الكثير من المحللين أن يكونوا واثقين من أن المخطط الأميركي الإسرائيلي لن يمر، لأن الشعوب وقواها الحية التي أفشلت مشروع الغزو في العراق وأفغانستان وفي لبنان، هي ذاتها التي ستفشل هذا المخطط، بينما سيشكل العدوان الأميركي على إيران ورطة جديدة بما سيترتب عليه من تداعيات سيئة على المصالح الأميركية.

ولن يطول الوقت قبل أن تعود الساحة الفلسطينية إلى فعلها المقاوم من جديد، وبالطبع على وقع تكريس الهزيمة الأميركية في العراق، تلك التي لن تؤثر جوهريا في ميزان القوى الإقليمي فحسب، بل في ميزان القوى الدولي أيضا."

"The Prime Minister's Office issued a rare "clarification" Wednesday that, in gentle diplomatic terms, contradicted US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's statement in Damascus that she had brought a message from Israel about a willingness to engage in peace talks.

According to the statement, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert emphasized in his meeting with Pelosi on Sunday that "although Israel is interested in peace with Syria, that country continues to be part of the Axis of Evil and a force that encourages terror in the entire Middle East."....."

By Martin Rawson, The Guardian.

"Four British soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb attack in southern Iraq last night, the Ministry of Defence said today.

A Kuwaiti interpreter was also killed, and a fifth British solider seriously wounded in the incident, which happened during a patrol west of Basra.

The latest fatalities bring the British death toll in Iraq for the last few days to six, making it the worst week for British casualties since 10 British personnel died when an RAF Hercules plane crashed outside Baghdad on January 30 2005.

Today's casualties were the worst loss in a single incident since four British service personnel were killed in an attack on a coalition boat patrol last November.

Captain Katie Brown, a spokeswoman for the British military in Basra, said the patrol was attacked at about 2am local time in the Hayaniya district, west of Basra.

In London, an MoD spokeswoman said: "It is with deep regret that we can confirm that four British soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed in a roadside bomb attack against a Warrior patrol west of Basra this morning. Next of kin are being informed and no further details will be released until this process is complete."

The total death toll of British service personnel in Iraq since hostilities began now stands at 140......"

Two Iraqi Children
By Emad Hajjaj

The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Syria have created their own enclaves, from Little Fallujah to Little Mosul, where many have set up businesses. They pay in US dollars, dance to the tune of their own music and share one desire: to return to an Iraq free of occupying forces. Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have learned a lot if she had taken a stroll in Little Fallujah.

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

""Today's "zero point" returns Iraq to its own history, a history written with the ashes of incendiary fires, with its sons fleeing in all directions on the one hand, and its exiles returning to their own homes on the other. I truly do not know if distance today can be defined through the experiences of refugees, or the masses of displaced people, or the exiles returning to burning cities to live out a sense of loss. Distances begin to take on the forms of lines which have been drawn on ashen roads, resembling the traces of people who have lost their way and have never arrived." - Mohamed Mazloom, Baghdad poet, born 1963, exiled in Syria......

This proliferation of Little Iraqs accounts for the biggest exodus in the Middle East since the Palestinians were forced to abandon their own lands in 1948 as the State of Israel was being created. In every single month in Iraq at least 40,000 people are displaced. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there may be as many as 50,000 a month. Were that rate to continue, before 2020, all the population of Iraq would have been "liberated" from its own country.....

Whichever Iraq one picks in Damascus, the mantra is recited in unison. Any glimmer of hope for the future hinges on the Americans leaving - and the establishment, by Iraqis, with no foreign interference, of a non-sectarian government......

Ammar is emphatic: "There is no Sunni against Shi'ite. The Americans provoked it. Since the beginning they started talking about separate areas. In Baghdad most marriages are mixed." That's exactly his case. He is Shi'ite, his wife is Sunni. He says that "in all Arab countries we feel comfortable", but anyway he has entered a demand for a long-term visa to Australia. "We don't want to put pressure on the kindness of the Syrian people.".....

It's easy to forget that Hafez Assad's Syria and Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no diplomatic relations whatsoever from 1980 to 1997. Now every Iraqi showing up at the Syrian border automatically gets a one-month visa; they then apply for a three-month resident visa. Visa runs are common. Unlike in "liberated" Iraq, in Syria there's virtually no unemployment for Iraqis. Overqualified, young, educated Iraqis at least survive with dignity as Internet-cafe managers or restaurant waiters. Iraqis are admitted to Syrian schools and universities with no special prerequisites. The Syrian state pays half of their medical bills. No wonder there is also a boom in mixed Syrian-Iraqi marriages......

Syria recognizes - formally - that Iraqis are refugees who need to be protected. The administrations of George W Bush and Tony Blair, on the other hand, could never admit to the world they are the source of all this - "the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world" as defined by Kenneth Bacon, president of Refugees International.

Pelosi would have learned much more about the effects of the war on Iraq - and what Syria is actually doing about it - if she had traded the historic wonders of the Old City for a stroll in all-too-real Little Fallujah."

Israeli army invades Tulkarem after ordering all Palestinian security forces off the streets

"Tulkarem - Ma'an - The Israeli forces have returned to their policy of prohibiting Palestinian security forces from deploying in the streets during their military operations in the occupied West Bank.

On Wednesday evening, the Israeli army invaded the West Bank city of Tulkarem, and broke into several neighbourhoods, following orders to the Palestinian security services to withdraw from the streets.

Our Tulkarem correspondent reported that a number of Israeli patrols passed through the streets of Tulkarem, provoking the citizens. No arrests or storming of houses were reported.

This incursion into the city came after the Israeli army informed the Palestinian side in Tulkarem of its intention to conduct a security operation in the city. The Israeli side demanded that no members of the Palestinian security wearing military uniform or carrying arms appear in the streets of Tulkarem. They were ordered to stay in their bases.

Earlier on Wednesday evening, a Palestinian security force stopped a civilian Mercedes Benz minibus near the Iktaba road junction in east Tulkarem and was shocked to discover six Israeli Special Forces members in the vehicle. It appears that the Israeli soldiers were on a special undercover mission and had sneaked into Tulkarem disguised in civilian dress. The driver of the car showed an ID card revealing that he was from the 'Israeli Defence Forces' (IDF) and left the scene quickly.

Subsequently, the Israeli army informed their Palestinian counterparts to prevent Palestinian security men from appearing in the streets and informed them of their intention to carry out a security operation in Tulkarem.

Palestinian security sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, accused the Israeli occupation authorities of working to frustrate the Palestinian security forces' security campaign in the city. He added that he fears the Palestinian forces will not be able continue their law and order campaign in this atmosphere and in light of this Israeli decision."

***

"Palestinian forces will not be able continue their law and order campaign"

Some law and order! The law is Israel's law and the order is Israel ordering the Palestinian "security forces" to stay in their base; Whose security is it anyway?

If the Palestinians have any self-respect left, they should be in the streets demanding the termination of this collaborating "Palestinian government." This would be another occasion for Habila to smile and wave to the crowds.

Palestinian policemen inadvertently stop a minibus full of Israeli Special Forces in Tulkarem

"Tulkarem - Ma'an - As part of the ongoing Palestinian security campaign to impose the law in the northern West Bank city of Tulkarem, Palestinian policemen stopped a civilian vehicle, a Mercedes minibus, on Wednesday. The incident took place in the Iktaba suburb in east Tulkarem. The policemen were stunned when they discovered that the minibus was full of Israeli Special Forces.

Our Tulkarem correspondent quoted a security source as saying: "The Palestinian security forces who stopped the car gave the driver permission to pass because he showed an ID card which said that he belongs to the Israeli army. Then the car left swiftly."

The reporter added that the Israelis informed the Palestinian side following the incident that they intend to undertake a security operation in Tulkarem. Consequently, the Palestinian security forces withdrew from the streets."

***

"IOF, Have a nice day!"

Why Should American Blood and Taxes Be Spent on Propping Up a Sectarian Shi’a State Engaged in Ethnic Cleansing and Daily Human Rights Abuses?

A Time For Congressional Hearings

by Tom Hayden

"The time has come to understand the new de facto US policy in Iraq: to support, fund, arm and train a sectarian Shi’a-Kurdish state, one engaged in ethnic cleansing, mass detention and murder of Sunni Arabs.

If this description seems harsh, it is only because our minds are crowded with false or outdated paradigms. First was the dream of Baghdad as an exemplary democratic domino. Then the kumbaya notion of a unitary neo-liberal state with proportional representation and revenue-sharing among Shi’a, Kurds and Sunnis. All along, the US has described itself as a neutral arbiter among warring factions, a promoter of the rule of law and human rights in the Iraqi jungle.

Even as former US ambassador Khalilzad left Baghdad, he was struggling to clinch deals over oil revenue-sharing, reversal of de-Baathification laws, and inclusion of Sunni interests in constitutional reform and local governance. The Shi’a, muttering that Khalilzad was a Sunni apologist, seemed uninterested in anything but window-dressing reforms.


Whether by accident or design, the reality since 2006 is that the Shi’a, with Kurdish approval, are carrying out a sectarian war against the Sunni population with American dollars and trainers......

In short, the problem of sectarian police violence cannot be detached from the Frankenstein state that US policies have fostered in the vacuum after Saddam Hussein. More professional training and human rights seminars will never stop the Shi’a parties from taking their revenge made possible by American money, weapons, and political support. Only a US withdrawal deadline coupled with the urgent diplomatic offensive proposed by the ISG, can possibly save Iraq “from rapid decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences” as forecast in the NIE document.

The Congress should investigate just what kind of regime American troops are being ordered to defend with American dollars. If cutting off tax funding for the overall war is too much for our lawmakers at present, how can they justify the funding of secret prisons, official militias, ethnic cleansing of a US-sponsored dirty war? When did that become the authorized mission of our forces in Iraq?

There is a reason for the establishment’s fear of that the story of the dirty war will come out. The American people won’t stand for it....."

The Arab puppet is carrying a sign which reads, "down with America!"

By Ramzy Baroud

"In a spacious yet fortified United Nations compound in Rome, members of a Palestine committee at the General Assembly repeated old mantras: They vowed support for Palestinians, issued a press release and went for lunch.

The committee consisted of several UN ambassadors; all well-intended, sympathetic and concerned; nonetheless, they also knew too well that their efforts were, more or less, futile. One of the ambassadors, of a country not so friendly by American standards, exclaimed: “No matter how hard we try, America blocks our efforts.”....

These are not mere symbolic problems that can be addressed via a well-articulated Arab peace initiative or that can be solved via dialogue. Israel understands well that a Jewish state can only be established in a domain that is free from anyone who fails to subscribe to such a quality. Joseph Weitz, who was appointed by the Jewish Agency to head transfer committees in 1948 captured the underlying essence of the Israeli project since day one: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is not room for both peoples together in this country. ...We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solution is a Palestine without Arabs.”

From the early days of Ben Gurion’s transfer to Vladimar Jobotinsky’s “Iron wall” to today’s Separation Wall and purely Jewish colonies, the impetus of the Israeli project has never lost momentum. Meanwhile, Palestinians are in a constant state of transfer and re-transfer. It is undoubtedly clear that Israel will not achieve peace out of benevolence and through unconditional dialogue; it can only be pressured to do so. It neither needs Arab initiatives nor joint parliamentary meetings in which misunderstandings are smoothed over. We must either begin to think on that front, or quit wasting precious time in extravagant conferences, symposiums and NGO meetings."

Charlotte Kates, The Electronic Intifada, 4 April 2007

"Dr. Sami Al-Arian, Palestinian political prisoner, is being held in a prison hospital, after a debilitating 60-day hunger strike seeking to draw the attention of the nation and the world to the injustice visited upon him, jailed for his commitment to justice and dignity for his homeland. This is not a scene from an Israeli jail, however, but from a U.S. prison in North Carolina. Al-Arian's hunger strike ended at the pleas of his family -- yet without justice for Al-Arian, whose imprisonment is part and parcel of a U.S. government policy of targeting Palestinian activists, as well as the broader Arab, Muslim and South Asian communities, in an internal "war of terror" whose policies run parallel to that being waged abroad.

The case of Sami Al-Arian is a story of persecution, perseverance, and, ultimately, the determination of those in power to criminalize resistance and punish Palestinian activism, subverting not only the principles of justice but also their own criminal justice system in order to do so. Sami Al-Arian, 49, is a Palestinian refugee who has lived in the United States for over thirty years and has, for the last decade, alongside his prominent role as an activist and leader in the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities in the Tampa Bay, Florida area and nationally, his work as a professor of computer science at the University of South Florida, and his personal life as a husband and father to five children, waged a prominent battle to protect fundamental rights within the U.S. from an assault through secret evidence, racist detention policies, and an all-out assault on community organizing and solidarity work within targeted communities. Al-Arian has lived with over a dozen years of surveillance, and eight years of FBI agents shadowing his movements. Today, he is imprisoned, despite the fact that he was convicted of nothing by a jury, despite a parade of witnesses and years of harassment......"

Click Here for Part Two of this Article

What separates Israel from its neighbors is not democracy or respect for human and civil rights: it is the discriminatory fashion by which these rights are denied.

By Miko Peled
Special to PalestineChronicle.com

"Thanks to the Israeli press, people in Israel are informed regularly about their government's mistreatment of the 4.5 million Palestinians under their rule. Most of the information regarding the occupation of Palestine and the oppression of its people is well documented and accurately reported in the Israeli press. But even the most serious offenses are given a “kosher” stamp, so to speak, once the word “security” is attached to them.

There are ample examples of this, but few are as striking as the one provided in the March 23rd issue of the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. In this issue, there is an interview with the retired Chief Interrogator of the Shabak, Israel's internal secret security service, 79-year-old Arieh Hadar. Mr. Hadar admits to acts taken by the Israeli internal secret security service that have never before been revealed publicly.

Were Israel to be the democracy it claims to be, this man would be put on trial, or at least beg for amnesty in exchange for the damning testimony he provided. If Israel had the least amount of respect for human and civil rights, this interview would lead to an investigation and perhaps even arrests. But in the Israeli democracy men and women of this kind are above the law, and beyond incrimination. In Israel, the security apparatus is a sanctified system that no one dares to question, it is world of shadowy heroes to whom Israelis are made to believe they owe their lives. Mr. Hadar is interviewed as a hero who served his country instead of a villain that brought it shame......"

US attack against Iran goes in the short run, ultimately the US loses: The military losses will be felt throughout Iraq, the oil catastrophe will reverberate throughout the world.


An Excellent Article and Recommended Reading

By James Petras
PalestineChronicle.com

"An understanding of US imperial policy in the Middle East requires an analysis, which centres on four points:

1) The power and influence of Israel and the Zionist power configuration over US political institutions (Congress, the Executive branch, the mass media, the two major political parties and electoral processes), their economic leverage on investment and financial institutions (state and trade union pension funds, investment banks), their cultural domination of journals, the performing arts, magazines, films and newspapers. Zionist political, economic and cultural power is directed exclusively toward maximizing Israel’s military, economic and political expansion and superiority in the Middle East even when it conflicts with other US imperialist interests.

2) The capacity of the US Empire to construct and instrumentalize Middle East client states and mercenary forces to implement US policies. The most prominent and important current instruments of US policy in the Middle East include the puppet regime in Iraq, the Abbas-Dahlan group in Palestine, the Kurds in Iraq, the Sinoria-Harari-Jumblat regime in Lebanon, the Mujahideen-e Khalq Organisation, Kurds and Sunni tribalists in Iran and the puppet Somali ‘regime’ backed by Ethiopian-Ugandan mercenaries.

3) An alliance with right-wing regimes and rulers in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel to provide military bases, intelligence and political backing for the colonial occupation in Iraq, the division of Iraq, economic sanctions and war against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and any other clerical-nationalist and leftist movements in the Middle East.

4) The capacity to contain, repress and limit the opposition of the majority of the US public and a minority of Congress members to the current war in Iraq and a future war against Iran . The key problem for US imperialism is the discrediting of the civilian-militarists in the White House and their increasing tendency to resort to new political ‘adventures’ and ‘provocations’ to recover support and to concentrate dictatorial powers in the President’s office.

These ‘vectors’ of US Middle East policy are increasingly challenged from within and without, are subject to sharp contradictions and face the probability of failing. Nevertheless the ‘machinery’ of imperial power is still operating and defining the nature of US Middle East policy.....

For the first time in the history of world empires, a tiny ethnic-religious minority, representing less than 2% of the population is able to shape US policy in the Middle East to serve the colonial interests of a foreign country (Israel), which represents less than 1% of the population of the Middle East. The Zionist power configuration in the US with several hundred thousand fanatical activists, throughout the country, can mobilize close to 98% of the US Congress on any legislation favoring Israel , even when their approval prejudices major US oil multinationals. AIPAC (the America-Israel Political Affairs Committee) with one hundred thousand members and 100 full time agents writes over 100 pieces of Congressional legislation affecting US trade, military aid and sanctions policies favoring Israel every year. In March 2007, the leaders of both political parties, Congress and the Senate and over 50% of all members of the Congress attended and pledged allegiance to the state of Israel at the most recent AIPAC convention in Washington . This was despite the fact that two leaders of AIPAC are currently on trial for spying for Israel and face twenty years in prison!.....

However a US attack against Iran goes in the short run, ultimately the US loses: The military losses will be felt throughout Iraq, the oil catastrophe will reverberate throughout the world, the political consequences will be greater polarization against the US-Israel axis throughout Europe, Asia and of course, the Middle East. The result will be the final demise of the Bush regime and the total discredit of the Zionist-controlled Democratic Party. A major economic recession will incite open class and national conflicts. Once again, an imperialist war may be the midwife of revolutions: the Russian Revolution followed World War I, the Chinese Revolution followed World War II; will World War III lead to a new revolutionary cycle?"

Israelis want rematch in Lebanon

"It seems as though some Israeli military and political leaders are champing at the bit for a rematch with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon after the bloody nose the Israeli Defense Forces got there last summer.

The difference this time around? The IDF will go into Gaza, too -- and it is all part of a plan to neutralize Iranian proxies on Israel`s borders, one element of a strategic effort to prevent Iran getting nuclear weapons and overthrow the mullahs in Tehran.

The plan was laid out in Washington last month by Effie Eitam, a hawkish former general and darling of the orthodox hard right who now leads a small religious splinter group in the Knesset.

But Eitam is also head of the Knesset subcommittee overseeing the IDF`s lessons-learned exercise following the disastrous IDF operation in southern Lebanon last year, and on this issue, some analysts say, he speaks for a significant current of opinion within the Israeli military.......

Islamic militants equipped with anti-tank weapons and surface-to-surface missiles like those being stockpiled in Gaza and south Lebanon, he said, were 'something like Iranian missile batteries and Iranian infantry divisions.'

He called Gaza and south Lebanon 'two arms of Tehran closing around us.'

'The question is when and how those arms will be dealt with,' he said, adding it would be answered 'in the context of how we are going to defeat the whole ideological system' the Iranian revolution had spawned.

'If we don`t defeat this regime, this ideology,' and Iran is able to develop nuclear weapons, 'there will not be even one safe place' in the whole world.

For this reason, he said, the question was 'not only an Israeli one, although we are at the front line.'

The mullahs 'have to know that, if diplomacy fails, the alternative of a nuclear Iran is not acceptable.'

'Within the planning for that' confrontation, 'we will have to give consideration to their proxies here.'

Eitam said that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq 'before defeating the Iranian regime ... (would have) enormous strategic consequences.'

'We would witness a total collapse of U.S. credibility,' he predicted.

'The only way to bring about strategic change in the region is to defeat the Ayatollahs,' he said, advocating 'use (of) all means' including diplomatic measures and economic sanctions. But 'some military action is almost inevitable,' he warned......"

"......Now a new 'security' quartet has been formed to deal solely with the issue of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

The 'security' quartet consists of representatives from Israel, Egypt, the United States and the Palestinian Authority. Last weekend delegations from each of the quartet nations met in Cairo, the meeting was chaired by U.S. Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinians.

Tunnels

According to sources, the quartet expressed dissatisfaction with Egypt's attempts to wipe-out arms smuggling through tunnels into the Gaza Strip.

Israeli security sources stated that Egypt has pledged to intensify security cooperation with Israel with regard to arms-smuggling from Rafah to the Gaza Strip.

According to Haaretz, Egypt will also clamp down on Palestinian fugitives that reach the Sinai side of the Rafah crossing......

Haaretz claimed that Jordan transferred 3,000 M-16 rifles to Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, through the sheikh Hussein crossing between Jordan and Israel. Egypt transferred 2,500 AK-47 rifles to Abbas loyalists through the Rafah crossing. Egypt and Jordan also donated 3 million bullets for the rifles.

Security bodies loyal to Abbas bought heavy machine guns from an undisclosed source and managed to bring them into the territories......"

***

Long live PA-Israeli-Egyptian "security" cooperation. This should keep PM Habila smiling and waving.

The western rhetoric of apathy must not blind us to our obligation to challenge atrocities

Jonathan Holmes
(Jonathan Holmes is a writer, director and academic; his play Fallujah opens at the Old Truman Brewery, London, on May 1)

Wednesday April 4, 2007
The Guardian

"Rana Al-Aiouby was risking her life delivering essential medicine to the wounded in the Iraqi city of Fallujah when she witnessed first-hand the effect of chemical weapons deployment by US troops. Despite their prohibition under several international treaties and by the Geneva conventions, white phosphorus and a napalm derivative were used without discrimination on the civilian population of a city the size of Edinburgh throughout 2004.......

In the face of repeated independent verification, US forces have now acknowledged the use of chemical weapons, and yet there remains no sustained international outcry and no official response (let alone condemnation) from any government or the United Nations. The US has overthrown a regime while supposedly searching for phantom weapons of mass destruction, only to use such weapons on the newly "liberated" civilian population. The cold hypocrisy of such actions is outweighed only by its extravagant viciousness.

Seventy articles of the Geneva conventions were breached in the two separate months of siege warfare. Despite calls to abolish the conventions by the past and present Conservative leaders Michael Howard and David Cameron among others, they remain an essential bulwark against the bullying tactics of the powerful, and a poignant index of the increasing impunity of the neo-colonial project. Their ethos is that the innocent, the weak, the defeated and the injured be afforded all the protection possible in times of conflict. The ethos of the US government is that the weak and innocent are a hindrance to the acquisition of power and, occasionally, an opportunity for the expansion of profit.

In writing my play Fallujah, which weaves together eye-witness accounts from Rana and many others present during these attacks, what astonished me was the symmetry between the testimony of American soldiers and that of their victims: "Yeah, we napalmed those bridges," said Colonel Randolph Alles, of Marine Air Group 11, in an interview with James Crawley of the San Diego Union-Tribune. "The generals love napalm." The guys on the ground no longer bother dissembling, so confident are their masters that protest, should it happen, will be muted and ineffectual......"

The "Independent" European Stance

Bushitler

Why is the Wall Street Journal in favor of espionage?

By Justin Raimondo

"The title of Dorothy Rabinowitz's Wall Street Journal screed defending two accused spies, "First They Came for the Jews," telegraphs the strategy apologists for Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman will be using when the two AIPAC officials' trial on charges of espionage, scheduled for June 4, finally begins. It is also a smear so outrageous it almost defies belief. What that headline communicates is the warped conception that the U.S. government, in prosecuting two prominent lobbyists on behalf of Israel for handing over sensitive classified information to Israeli officials, is the equivalent of the Nazi regime.......

The defenders of Rosen and Weissman argue that this is a First Amendment case, but there is no First Amendment right to engage in espionage – or else why aren't the Rosenbergs considered martyrs to the principle of "free speech"? This isn't just about passing information to Israel. Franklin is an associate of neoconservative guru Michael Ledeen and fellow Pentagon analyst Harold Rhode, with whom he traveled to Rome in 2001 to attend an unauthorized meeting with Iranian "dissidents" and the scamster Manucher Ghorbanifar, of Iran-Contra fame (which Ledeen also played a key role in, as Israel's go-between). The Senate Intelligence Committee was supposed to be looking into this, along with the FBI, but somehow that investigation got stalled. Will the Democratic majority now take it up with alacrity? Don't bet the farm on it. The Lobby is a bipartisan powerhouse, and any hopes that the Democrats will take time out from embarrassing Alberto Gonzales to pull some really grisly skeletons out of the closet are dim, at best. Besides which, this is a nonpartisan scandal, one that – as we examine the unusually long timeline of the investigation into the Lobby's underground activities – implicates Democrats as well as Republicans.

It seems hardly surprising that the War Party would team up with agents of a foreign power in order to advance the cause of "regime change" throughout the Middle East. Especially in the case of Iran, Israeli patriots with American citizenship could easily convince themselves that Washington's interests and Tel Aviv's are perfectly consonant, even identical. That's why we get this odd "patriotic" theme from Rabinowitz – so blinded by ideology that she sees reason where there is only treason.

Franklin is being touted as a man who was simply ahead of his time: he saw the alleged danger to American soldiers in Iraq from Iranian operatives and went to AIPAC in order to do something about it. That he and his confreres in Feith's policy shop were engaged in provoking such a confrontation, and otherwise setting up a series of tripwires aimed at Tehran, is what will come out at the trial. Before they could do that, however, the Israelis had to gather as much intelligence about the U.S. government's internal deliberations – and the state of our own intelligence on Iran – as possible. Then and only then could they win the internecine war taking place between the neocons and the State Department "realists" – basically the same configuration of forces that fought it out in the prelude to war with Iraq.

It now appears that, having won, the neocons are reaping the fruits of the AIPAC spy ring's treason, as accusations fly of Iranian interference in Iraq and the next border incident could provoke an all-out conflict. The June trial (scheduled for the same day that, in 1986, Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard entered a guilty plea) will reveal much about how we got to this point – and, perhaps, open up the possibility of halting our headlong rush to war. That is, if the shooting hasn't already started…"

"Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in the University of Haifa's Department of Political Science, says he is moving to the UK because it is "increasingly difficult to live in Israel" with his "unwelcome views and convictions."

In an interview in The Peninsula, Qatar's leading English-language daily, during a visit last week to Doha as a guest of the Qatar Foundation, Pappe said: "I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening calls from people every day. I am not being viewed as a threat to the Israeli society but my people think that I am either insane or my views are irrelevant. Many Israelis also believe that I am working as a mercenary for the Arabs."

Pappe is to join the History Department at Exeter University, in southwest England. He is active in anti-Israel academic boycott efforts.

Referred to in the Peninsula article as "the only
Jewish academic in Israel who is vehemently critical of Zionism," Pappe said the only solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was the creation of a single state, shared by Jews, Arabs and others. He said that two independent states cannot coexist in "the land of Palestine."

He also said there was "no immediate solution to the crisis and only international pressure can force Israel to end the occupation and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinians." "Over the past six years, the Israeli government has become more oppressive, thanks to the strong support from the Bush administration. They now feel that they can do anything they want," he said.

The interviewer in Qatar admitted to being "a bit surprised" by Pappe's support for Hamas.

"A bit surprisingly," the paper wrote, Pappe said: "I support Hamas in its resistance against the Israeli occupation, though I disagree with their political ideology. I am for separating state from religion."

Pappe also questioned Israeli democracy: "Any state that perpetrates occupation cannot be called a democratic state," he said, adding that Israeli democracy was meant "only for Jews" and there is "no space for other communities."

The interview then looks at what has shaped Pappe's opinions: "Pappe's transformation from a 'typical Jew' to a strong critic of Zionism started in the 1980s while studying in the UK," it wrote.

"I reexamined the events of 1948, which changed my perceptions, and I realized how the Israeli state was formed at the expense of the Palestinians. I don't subscribe to the view that a community which has a claim to a land that goes back thousands of years had the right to occupy it by dispossessing indigenous communities," Pappe said......."

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"Nearly 400 civilians have been killed and over 550 wounded in fighting between insurgents and Ethiopian-backed troops in the Somali capital Mogadishu since Thursday, according to a local human rights group.
The toll, from the Elman Peace and Human Rights Organisation, was the first comprehensive count of casualties from what aid agencies are calling the worst fighting in Somalia in 15 years.

Nearly 50,000 people have fled Mogadishu in the last 10 days, according to the United Nations refugee agency. A total of 96,000 people left their homes during February and March.

Ethiopian tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships have fought against guerillas armed with machine guns, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. The guerrilla forces comprise fighters allied to the Somali Council of Islamic Courts and clan militias who are opposed to the transitional government and the Ethiopian occupation.

A lull in fighting on Monday gave residents a chance to pull several hundred bodies from the streets. Local hospitals have been overwhelmed with casualties......

AMY GOODMAN: A small African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia of some 1,200 Ugandan soldiers has failed to stem the violence. While the four days of fierce fighting subsided after a truce was negotiated Sunday, hundreds more Ethiopian troops have been seen arriving in Mogadishu over the weekend.

Salim Lone is a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq. We’re going to go to break. When we come back, we’ll talk about what’s happening in Somalia, also in Iraq......

SALIM LONE: You know, you describe the terrible scenes that are going on in Mogadishu. I just want to add that this is not only a terrible war, but also the most lawless war. It violates clearly -- the invasion by Ethiopia -- the UN Charter. The support of the US on the attacks by the US violated the UN Charter. But, in addition, there are two explicit UN resolutions by Security Council that this violates. The UN Security Council resolution in December said there should be no troops from regional -- neighboring countries going into Somalia as part of a peacekeeping force. And yet we have Ethiopian troops there, not as part of a peacekeeping force.

It’s also turned the whole region into a giant Guantanamo Bay. Human Rights Watch reported that over 100 people were kidnapped in Kenya. Kenya, the most stable and a very law-abiding country in Africa, was forced to kidnap suspected supporters of the ICU, the Islam Courts, and to hand them over to Somalia, which in turn handed most of them over to Ethiopia, where they have disappeared. So this is really a terrible war.

And another reason it’s so terrible is because for six months last year, from June to December, as reported by Democracy Now!, as reported by the New York Times, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Xinhua News Agency, every media in the world reported that the Islamic Courts Union had brought a high level of stability to Somalia, and they had done so without the massive use of force. So this is just, you know, a classic example of the US overreaching, relentless drive for domination, rather than caring for the stability and security of small nations......"

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

With Jewish intellectuals attacked as anti-Semitic by supporters of Israel, Israeli filmmaker and academic Haim Bresheeth* makes the case for a cultural boycott of his home country

A Very Good Article Contributed by Lucia

By Haim Bresheeth

"Over the last few months a campaign of vile propaganda has been waged, not for the first time, against liberal Jewish intellectuals who have angered the dominant Jewish communities of the main Western countries.

The charge? Anti-Semitism, no less. In different communities, an accusatory finger is pointed at those Jewish thinkers and artists who have dared to criticise Israel and its illogical, barbaric and counter- productive policies and actions. Anyone who strays from the simple line of full support for whatever Israel chooses to do, however infuriating, is tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism, used as a magical incantation against heretics outside the Zionist faith.

In Paris, the Philosopher Alain Finkielkraut found it acceptable to blame an Israeli filmmaker, Eyal Sivan, with more than anti-Semitism -- incitement to murder of Jews -- just for making a film, Route 181, with Palestinian Filmmaker Michel Khleifi. The film, a sophisticated expose of conditions for Palestinians within Israel and in the occupied territories, questions Israel's record of brutality and lawlessness. Nowhere in the film do they call, or condone calls, for any harm against Jews or Israelis. The film was widely shown in Israel itself, where the filmmaker works and teaches......

Across the pond, the American Zionist lobby, not known for its subtlety or adherence to simple facts, has found new victims, having managed to isolate the Linguist Noam Chomsky so that he cannot find an outlet on US media to voice his criticism of Israel. The new targets are Playwright Tony Kushner and prominent Historian Tony Judt. The charge? The same -- they have dared to disagree with Israel and its inalienable right to bomb, destroy and detain just about anything and anyone, anywhere in the Middle East. Apparently, as reported in the Observer in January, organised Jewry plans to "confront" such Jews with accusations of anti- Semitism, and much more besides......

All the above are part of a wider phenomenon: the closing of ranks within Jewish communities against the increasingly prevalent voice of Jewish critics of Israeli atrocities, both in Palestine and beyond. It was not such a long time ago that Israel, in one of its many reoccupations of the Gaza Strip, not only killed many Palestinian civilians, destroyed their only source of electricity, stopped the passage of food into the Strip, but also sealed the border, not allowing medical supplies through, exactly at the time they were most needed.....

In many communities, Jews have realised that it is time to stand up and be counted, exactly because of the abuse of the Holocaust and its use in defending that that is indefensible. Many have joined the growing boycott of Israel -- the trade, academic and cultural boycotts -- as non-aggressive options for public and international action against Israel and its continued aggression against Palestine and other Arab countries. That is the real source of worry for organised Zionist institutions; this growing snowball is starting to move, at last, collecting force and momentum along the way and swaying public opinion in a number of countries against Israel and its uncritical protection by Western powers.

The results of such protest actions can be foreseen. We witnessed the growth of the anti-apartheid movement from a small group of radicals and activists to worldwide action that swept away the South African regime and its injustices. This is what Israel and its allies in crime fear most -- a genuine popular movement that will force international involvement in finding a peaceful and just solution to the conflict after all Western-led attempts have failed miserably due to their total commitment to the Israeli cause and their implicit support for the continued occupation and its iniquities......."

A panel of experts convened by Rolling Stone agree that the war in Iraq is lost. The only question now is: How bad will the coming explosion be?

Contributed by Datta

"The war in Iraq isn't over yet, but -- surge or no surge -- the United States has already lost. That's the grim consensus of a panel of experts assembled by Rolling Stone to assess the future of Iraq. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again."

Those on the panel -- including diplomats, counterterror analysts and a former top military commander -- agree that President Bush's attempt to secure Baghdad will only succeed in dragging out the conflict, creating something far beyond any Vietnam-style "quagmire." The surge won't bring an end to the sectarian cleansing that has ravaged Iraq.......

How bad will things get in Iraq -- and what price will the world ultimately pay for the president's decision to prolong the war? To answer those questions, we asked our panel to sketch out three distinct scenarios for Iraq: the best we can hope for, the most likely outcome and the worst that could happen.

The Rolling Stone Panel

Zbigniew Brzezinski
National security adviser to President Carter

Richard Clarke
Counterterrorism czar from 1992 to 2003

Nir Rosen
Author of In the Belly of the Green Bird, about Iraq?s spiral into civil war, speaking from Cairo, where he has been interviewing Iraqi refugees

Gen. Tony McPeak (retired)
Member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War

Bob Graham
Former chair, Senate Intelligence Committee

Chas Freeman
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War; president of the Middle East Policy Council

Paul Pillar
Former lead counterterrorism analyst for the CIA

Michael Scheuer
Former chief of the CIA?s Osama bin Laden unit; author of Imperial Hubris

Juan Cole
Professor of modern Middle East history at the University of Michigan

........"

A Good Article

By Dahr Jamail

"DOHA, Apr 2 (IPS) - The al-Jazeera television network could be emerging as a freedom champion against U.S. pressures on the channel, leading media figures say.

"I support al-Jazeera because al-Jazeera has done more to propagate democracy in the Middle East region than anybody else, certainly more than the American government has done," media specialist Hugh Miles told IPS. "It's strange to me that people refer to al-Jazeera as a 'terrorist network' because that couldn't be further from the truth."

Miles spoke to IPS at the third annual al-Jazeera forum at Doha in Qatar Mar. 31 to Apr. 2. The forum highlighted the successful recent expansion of the network while also addressing difficulties that reporters face in the Middle East hot spots.

Miles, author of 'Al Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World' and an award- winning freelance journalist said former U.S. defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had got it wrong on al-Jazeera.

"Al-Jazeera has been called a 'terrorist network' or 'the voice of (Osama) bin Laden', but this just demonstrates deep ignorance of its history and the channel," Miles said......

Other leading voices at the forum spoke in support of the channel, that has been under frequent attack of all kinds. The forum, titled 'Media and the Middle East: Going Beyond the Headlines' brought journalists, international media leaders and scholars from around the world to discuss critical issues facing the media, with a focus on in-depth journalism.....

"There has been a four, five, six-year campaign against al-Jazeera," said Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists at a panel discussion. "This is a prejudice we cannot ignore."

Abdul Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Quds al- Arabi told IPS that "journalists should unite and raise our voices to say no to this kind of brutal treatment by the leader of the free world, by people who are representing freedom. We should stand united against the new wave of embedded journalism because this is censorship.

"Freedom of expression is said to be a part of Western values," Atwan added. "The American administration is destroying Western values by shooting journalists, by killing the messenger."

"The largest perpetrators of murdering journalists are governments," Frank Smyth, Washington representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said at the forum.

Many other journalists are detained without fair trial. Al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Hajj, a Sudanese national, was detained by the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December 2001. He has yet to be charged, and continues to be held as "enemy combatant" at Guantanamo Bay.

On Aug. 7, 2004, the U.S.-backed Iraqi interim government led by former CIA asset Iyad Allawi shut down the Iraq office of al-Jazeera, claiming that it was presenting a negative image of Iraq, and charging the network with "fueling anti-coalition hostilities."

Much of the difficulties governments have had with al-Jazeera have arisen because it gets stories other channels do not have. That makes it similar to the Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, said IPS director-general Mario Lubetkin. Al-Jazeera has much in common with IPS because the Arab network "goes for the news behind the news," and "because they cover the south," he said......"

***

The current online Aljazeera poll is relevant. It shows that less than 10% of Arabs think that Western media are fair or balanced.

Treatment of Israeli official spurs look at airport security

Contributed by Fatima

"JERUSALEM - By almost any measure, Rania Joubran is an Israeli role model. At 26, she's the youngest daughter of a sitting Supreme Court justice and an established lawyer who works for Israel's Foreign Ministry and speaks three languages.

She's also Christian Arab, not Jewish.

That distinction hit home for her a few weeks ago when she set off for a short vacation to Spain. What was supposed to be five days of fun began with a grilling by Israeli airport security and ended with a personal apology from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who pledged to look into long-standing complaints that the country condones a racist policy of treating all Arab travelers as possible terrorists.

"There is no doubt that the time for the current policy ran out a long time ago and has no place in an Israel which has raised the banner of equality between Arab and Jewish citizens," Joubran wrote to Olmert after being singled out for extra questioning by security when she left and when she returned to Israel. "It is not enough for the country to recruit Arab citizens to its service; the real test of the state's democracy is the treatment and respect it gives these citizens."

Her experience was hardly unusual. Even before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, security at Israel's Ben-Gurion airport was among the toughest in the world. It's difficult to find Palestinians or Arab-Israelis who don't have at least one story about a humiliating airport security check. For many, the screening, which can include strip searches and security escorts to the gate, is seen as an unavoidable inconvenience......."

This poll, which asks our readers if they think the U.S. and/or Israel will attack Iran in 2007, has been open since December of last year. Until about a month ago the percentage of those who said yes stayed under 50%, even though it outpaced those who said no. But currently, with 314 taking part in the poll, here are the opinions:

Yes, Iran will be attacked.......60%

No, Iran will not be attacked...29%

I don't know.......................12%

Therefore, by more than two to one, the feeling is that an attack is coming. The question is whether our readers are actually predicting events or are simply reacting to news headlines. It is probably both. Time will tell and we will not have to wait long, probably.

One of the least endearing features of Washington’s political/media hierarchy is its propensity for selective outrage, like what is now coming from George W. Bush about the “inexcusable behavior” of the Iranian government in holding 15 British sailors whom Bush has labeled “hostages.”

By Robert Parry

"This is the same President Bush who often mocks the very idea that international law should apply to him; he’s fond of the punch line: “International law? I better call my lawyer.” But Bush becomes a pious defender of international law when it suits his geopolitical interests.

The major U.S. news media predictably follows along, getting into an arms-crossed harrumph over foreigners trampling on the inviolate principles of international law, the same rules that should never constrain U.S. actions.

So, when British sailors were captured on March 23 after they may or may not have crossed over an ill-defined demarcation between Iraqi and Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf, the assumption in the U.S. media was that Iran must be wrong. After all, Bush has listed Iran as a charter member of the “axis of evil”; its leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a notorious hothead; and everyone knows the Brits always play by the rules.

Of course, left outside this narrow frame of reference was the gross violation of international law – the bloody invasion of Iraq in 2003 – that put the Brits there in the first place.

Back then, international law was deemed little more than a nuisance getting in the way of what President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair wanted to do, i.e. conquer Iraq, install a compliant government, "privatize" its resources, and threaten other countries in the region to get in line.

Bush regarded the United Nations Charter and its ban on aggressive war as some goofy experiment in multilateralism. Blair actually knew better. Though he recognized that the Iraq invasion would violate this fundamental tenet of international law, Blair went along anyway......

Suddenly, it was a new day with Bush and Blair fully committed to international law. Even a relatively minor Geneva transgression, such as filming captives eating, became a justification for unrestrained outrage.

Without any acknowledgement about their own abrogation of international law, the British and U.S. governments lifted these principles from the gutter, dusted them off and put them on a pedestal. The grand human rights defender, George W. Bush, lectured other countries about “inexcusable behavior” – and no prominent Western journalist called him to account for his contradictions."

The Union of Gaza Local Municipalities announced that 25 Gaza municipalities are on the verge of complete paralysis due to inability to provide services to residents in light of the economic embargo.

By Rami Almeghari in Gaza
PalestineChronicle.com

"The Um Al Nasser village, on the northern Gaza-Israel borders, woke up on Tuesday to tens of thousands of gallons of sewage water flooding it's small cottages.

Many of the villagers fled the scene, while weaker ones could not. Two elderly women and three children drowned in dirty water, facing a horrible fate, while at least 20 others were injured. Rescue teams rushed to save those who could be saved. The Bedouin village of Um Al Nasser was established by the Palestinian Authority in 1999 to house some one thousand Palestinian Bedouins, the majority of whom are shepherds or manual labourers.

Disaster struck on Tuesday when a 6.5 acre septic cesspool containing 20,000 cubic meters of sewage water collapsed completely. It had weakened over time and had sustained several hits during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Dr. Moawiya Abu Hasanain, spokesman of the emergency department at the Palestinian health ministry, said that what happened in Um Al Nasser required the health ministry to declare a state of emergency. The sewage flood could result in health complications and diseases in the area.

Sixty cottages have been completely destroyed and 226 others have been partially damaged due to this humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of families are now living in tents that have been supplied by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Why has this crisis happened? A question we asked the municipality officials of Um Al Nasser in light of repeated warnings by the Palestinian Environment Authority that a collapse of the cesspool was likely.

"We were surprised at 9:30 yesterday morning that a 26-dunum cesspool containing 20,000 cubic meters of sewage water, collapsed", Kamel Abu Qayeda, secretary of the Um Alnasser municipality initially answered. "The problem of sewage water disposal is not only faced by the municipality or the village of Um Alnaser, it is also encountered by the northern area in general, including the municipalities of Jabalya , Beit Lahya and Beit Hanoun", he maintained.

The collapse was likely, a warning that has not only been uttered by the official Palestinian body, but also by the local inhabitants of the village. Said Abu Safra, who has lost his 65 year-old mother and 3 year-old nephew said that the villagers had complained repeatedly of leakage of sewage water from the cesspool, reporting to the local government about such a concern, yet no one has responded positively.

Abu Safra said: “Let me give you an example, a neighbour of mine saw some leakage of water in the cesspool; so he informed those in charge. Yet, officials responded by claiming that the actual life of the structure would hold up for another month. ”We call on our brothers to come here and see the misery the village has just suffered", he appealed.

The villagers of Um Al Nasser are now living in the open air in cold spring weather, while their houses, personal belongings and some of their loved ones have been lost. They are waiting for food, assistance and shelter from an already untenable Palestinian authority, which has been exhausted enough by an economic embargo which has been internationally-imposed since last January’s parliamentary elections.

Head of the Palestinian environment authority, Yousef Abu Safiya, has stated that there are 40 other similar cesspools in the Gaza Strip which desperately need renovation. This would curb the breakout of similar humanitarian disasters in the future.

On March 24th, the Union of Gaza Local Municipalities announced that 25 Gaza municipalities are on the verge of complete paralysis due to inability to provide services to residents in light of the economic embargo that has led to the highest rate of poverty yet- approximately 80% of Gazans are now living below the poverty line. "

***

Don't expect a visit from Habila anytime soon; he doesn't like the smell of sewage. He prefers to travel by jet and meet equally impotent Arab presidents and kings.

Fears of expert sniper in Basra

"Fears that an expert sniper is operating in Basra are growing after two British soldiers were shot dead by single bullets in the past two days.

At least three have been killed and five wounded in the past six weeks by single shots. The marksman is equipped with a powerful rifle that can penetrate body armour, military sources believe.

Earlier this year, The Daily Telegraph reported that insurgents in Iraq had at least 100 Austrian Steyr sniper rifles the country had sold to Iran. The Teheran regime is widely recognised as a prime trainer of insurgents and provides them with money and equipment.

Iraqi intelligence sources have also said that Iranian security figures were operating in Basra as Teheran attempts to gain total influence in southern Iraq......"

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

"As we continue to look at the issue of Iraq and the US occupation, we turn to the acclaimed author and journalist, Naomi Klein. Naomi is a widely read columnist for the Nation magazine and the London Guardian. She is the author of the international bestseller "No Logo" and more recently of "Fences and Windows." She visited Iraq in 2004 and published an article later that year for Harper's Magazine titled "Baghdad Year Zero" in which she detailed the privatization of Iraq's state-dominated economy. She has continued to cover the issue and her forthcoming book on disaster capitalism is due to be published in the fall.
Naomi Klein recently spoke at an event here in New York celebrating the launch of Jeremy Scahill's first book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." In her talk, Naomi Klein spoke about the privatization of the state......."

Click Here to Watch, Listen or Read Transcript

Habila Never Tires of Waving, He is Always "Campaigning".....
He Waves Even When There is no One to Wave to.....He Waves to the Trees.....
These Are the Instructions of Ahmad Yousef

The Arab "Peace Initiative" and the Response to it
By Baha Boukhari

"BAGHDAD, April 2 — A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.

“What are they talking about?” Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!”

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

He added, “This will not change anything.”......"

Exclusive Report: How a bid to kidnap Iranian security officials sparked a diplomatic crisis

By Patrick Cockburn

"A failed American attempt to abduct two senior Iranian security officers on an official visit to northern Iraq was the starting pistol for a crisis that 10 weeks later led to Iranians seizing 15 British sailors and Marines.

Early on the morning of 11 January, helicopter-born US forces launched a surprise raid on a long-established Iranian liaison office in the city of Arbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. They captured five relatively junior Iranian officials whom the US accuses of being intelligence agents and still holds.

In reality the US attack had a far more ambitious objective, The Independent has learned. The aim of the raid, launched without informing the Kurdish authorities, was to seize two men at the very heart of the Iranian security establishment.

Better understanding of the seriousness of the US action in Arbil - and the angry Iranian response to it - should have led Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence to realise that Iran was likely to retaliate against American or British forces such as highly vulnerable Navy search parties in the Gulf. The two senior Iranian officers the US sought to capture were Mohammed Jafari, the powerful deputy head of the Iranian National Security Council, and General Minojahar Frouzanda, the chief of intelligence of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to Kurdish officials.

The two men were in Kurdistan on an official visit during which they met the Iraqi President, Jalal Talabani, and later saw Massoud Barzani, the President of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), at his mountain headquarters overlooking Arbil.......

The attempt by the US to seize the two high-ranking Iranian security officers openly meeting with Iraqi leaders is somewhat as if Iran had tried to kidnap the heads of the CIA and MI6 while they were on an official visit to a country neighbouring Iran, such as Pakistan or Afghanistan. There is no doubt that Iran believes that Mr Jafari and Mr Frouzanda were targeted by the Americans. Mr Jafari confirmed to the official Iranian news agency, IRNA, that he was in Arbil at the time of the raid......

For more than a year the US and its allies have been trying to put pressure on Iran. Security sources in Iraqi Kurdistan have long said that the US is backing Iranian Kurdish guerrillas in Iran. The US is also reportedly backing Sunni Arab dissidents in Khuzestan in southern Iran who are opposed to the government in Tehran. On 4 February soldiers from the Iraqi army 36th Commando battalion in Baghdad, considered to be under American control, seized Jalal Sharafi, an Iranian diplomat.

The raid in Arbil was a far more serious and aggressive act. It was not carried out by proxies but by US forces directly. The abortive Arbil raid provoked a dangerous escalation in the confrontation between the US and Iran which ultimately led to the capture of the 15 British sailors and Marines - apparently considered a more vulnerable coalition target than their American comrades."

The deafening silence of the new interior minister - editorial

"Bethlehem – Ma'an - editor in chief - The Palestinian factions chose a new interior minister, former general director of the Sharia courts in Gaza, Mr Hani Qawasmi.

Since then we have witnessed the opening moves of the new unity government, which focuses on two main issues, first is lifting the siege and second, an end to the disorder and lawlessness.

The siege is the issue which the minister of finance is to address and the other issue is the responsibility of Mr Qawasmi.

Silence

We have waited for the first week and then the second, we wanted to see the minister say something in a press statement or a speech or a short message or even an oppressive order, but up to this moment he has done nothing.

I do not deny that we are a people who want to see results in a hurry; we want to see the bloodshed ending and to move quickly to the era of law sovereignty.

I do not exaggerate when I say that we are still in the stage of getting to know the new minister, he is not politically known and is not a member of a faction.

We would like to see the minister, to speak to him about our problems, our pain and suffering, we want to talk to him and want him to talk to us.

Opinion?

Since the formation of the unity government, we are waiting for him to express his opinion about what is going on, about what he thinks about the Israeli threats to invade the Gaza Strip, the abduction of Alan Johnston and the launching of projectiles.

We want to see what he thinks about all the killing and daily clashes on the streets of the Gaza Strip, the bombing of internet cafes, the new formation of the new Fatah Special Force and the increase in crime, poverty and drugs-smuggling.

Qawasmi what do you have to say? "

***

It seems that the "unity celebrations" were for nothing.

A Good Analysis in Arabic

بقلم: عماد عفانة

".............

الأبعاد الإستراتيجية لقرارات القمة:

1- نخلص إلى أن المبادرة العربية التي تستند إليها القمة، والتي يجري تصوير عدم تعديلها كما لو كان انتصاراً كبيراًً للعرب، هي بمثابة إقرار نهائي، من قبل أصحاب الحق، وبغطاء عربي رسمي بشرعية وجود إسرائيل في قلب الأمة، وتنازل من النظام العربي عن أرض فلسطين التاريخية

وهذا يمثل إقراراً عربياً رسمياً بصحة الرواية الصهيونية للصراع على فلسطين التي قامت على الظلم والإرهاب، فهو إذا استسلام رسمي بغطاء الإجماع العربي ينسف مشروعية الحق العربي والإسلامي بأي شبر من فلسطين، ويعطي الحق والمشروعية للدولة اليهودية للتشبث بالأرض ومواصلة عدوانها وأطماعها وهيمنتها في قلب الأمة.

2- إن أكثر ما كان يخيف الحلف الصهيوني الأمريكي هو البعد الإسلامي والإمكانات الإسلامية في حسابات الصراع على فلسطين، لهذا كانت السعودية هدفا وصيداً ثميناً تم جره إلى حلبة الاستسلام العربي الرسمي في الاعتراف بإسرائيل وإنهاء الصراع على فلسطين وجسر الاعتراف والتطبيع، وبالتالي تخلص الحلف الصهيوامريكي من البعد

العربي الديني الإسلامي للقضية الفلسطينية وبحضور اكبر حركات المقاومة الإسلامية في فلسطين.

3- صحيح أن اتفاق مكة فتح أمام حماس أبواب الشرعية العربية بل والدولية، وشرعن وجودها على رأس سدة الحكم في أراضي السلطة، بما يعنيه ذلك من فتح الساحات الشعبية العربية أمام تحركات الممثل الفلسطيني الجديد، إلا أن الثمن يبدوا حسب هذا المخطط الرهيب اكبر من القدرة على التصديق، فحماس الإسلامية الراديكالية المقاومة استعملت كجزء من الغطاء للتنازل العربي الرسمي عن ثلثي فلسطين التاريخية لصالح إسرائيل بل وفتح أبواب العواصم العربية والإسلامية أمامها والتطبيع معها.

4- إذا كان هدف حماس البعيد من قيادتها لتيار المقاومة في فلسطين ليس من اجل تحرير فلسطين فهي تعرف أنها لا تستطيع ذلك ولكن من اجل إبقاء شعلة المقاومة متقدة في أذهان وضمير الأمة إلى حين توفر الأجواء والظروف لحرب التحرير الحقيقية، فان وجود حماس في القمة العربية التي تنازلت عبر المبادرة العربية

بالإجماع عن ثلثي فلسطين قد نسف هذا الهدف الذي عملت حماس من اجله طوال العشرين سنة الماضية.

وهذه النتيجة تضع حماس أمام امتحان غاية في الدقة والصعوبة وليس أمامها إلا النجاح فيه وإلا فستذوب في مسلسل التنازلات العربي كما ذابت فتح من قبلها، وهذا الامتحان يتمثل بمدى تمسكها بالمقاومة وعليها أن تثبت ذلك بتصعيد ملموس في عملياتها العسكرية بالتوازي التام مع تحركاتها السياسية فلسطينيا وعربيا ودوليا.

5- قرارات القمة لم تتطرق إلى انتصار المقاومة اللبنانية والتي لم يمضي عليها سوى بضعة أشهر، كما أغفلت هذه القرارات عن عمد الغرق الأمريكي الصاخب في وحل المقاومة العراقية، وعوضا عن استغلال أجواء الانتصار الذي أشاعته المقاومة في لبنان والعراق للضغط على أمريكا وإسرائيل لجهة تحقيق المصالح الفلسطينية

والعربية، قام العرب بتجيير الهزيمة الصهيوأمريكية لصالح المخططات الصهيوأمريكية، الأمر الذي ربما يمثل تهديدا لمشروعية المقاومة في العراق وفلسطين ولبنان في الدفاع عن الأرض والمقدسات، خصوصا وأن العرب عرضوا المبادرة العربية للسلام مع إسرائيل كخيار استراتيجي دون أن يكون له أي بديل يضغط على إسرائيل أو يدفعها لقبول المبادرة، في ظل الحديث عن الاستعداد الأمريكي لضرب إيران، بعد عزلها عن الأمة تحت دعاوى مذهبية وقومية، يجري تضخيمها خدمة لأغراض ومخططات أمريكية ."

Sabbah Blog

"In the following pages a light will be shed on the pictures of tragedy committed by Sharon’s gangs. In Jenin, humanity was squeezed under the chains of tanks, flesh and plants were mixed with iron and dust. What happened in Jenin was stripped out of the so-called human and international laws.

Tens of books will sooner or later appear documenting this vigorous crime, but we will try to shed a light on some statements released by people who witnessed the massacre........"


Over 140 buildings, most multifamily dwellings, were completely destroyed (green) in Jenin and more than 200 others (red) were seriously damaged. Hawashin district, where more than 100 buildings were razed, is at the center of the map. (source: Human Rights Watch)

A Good Article

By Elias Akleh
(Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer of Palestinian descent, born in the town of Beit-Jala. Currently he lives in the US)

"......The Arab leaders were supposed to deal with political crises in the Arab World such as occupation of Iraq, political division in Lebanon, and the Palestinian problem. Yet, as usual, they failed to come up with positive action plans to remedy any of these problems.

As for the occupation of Iraq, the Saudi King Abdullah acknowledged in his opening speech the fact that there is an illegitimate foreign occupation of Iraq, and the existence of an “ugly sectarianism threatening civil war”. His acknowledgement of this very-well known fact aimed to divert any popular blame from the Arab leaders toward foreign powers. He was trying to deny the fact that the forces of this foreign occupation had been launched from Arab countries, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan, in 1990 and again in 2003, to murder Iraqis and to destroy Iraq as a sovereign country. Late conservative counts of the murdered Iraqis reached to one million. Two other millions had evacuated their homes and ran away to adjacent countries.......

One wonders why would the Arab leaders revive their peace initiative since they know very well Israel’s response to it. Some attributed this to what they think is the American failure in Iraq. They think that the American administration needs Arab’s help in order to withdraw honorably from Iraq. They believe that Americans have a change in foreign policies due to the Democratic Party “taking over” the Congress......

These leaders are trying to divert the attention of their people away from the fact that many Arab countries had been willing contributors to this financial blockade in order to topple the democratically elected Hamas government. They wanted to mislead the people into believing that Palestine could not be regained since all the Arab armies combined are no match for the “undefeated” Israeli army. History shows that this “undefeated” Israeli army had been defeated many times.....

The peace initiative and the false hope of ending the Arab/Israeli conflict through the two states solution are just a political trick against Arabs to introduce the false hope that peace with Israel, Arab’s mortal enemy, is now possible through the present American administration, providing the Arab countries do not oppose the American policies in the region especially its aggression against Iran. US and Israel are planning to hit Iran shortly, and they want to neutralize any Arab opposition to US using Arab Gulf States as its launching pads, and to prevent any retaliation against Israel. The carrot of establishing a Palestinian state had been successfully used to neutralize Arab opposition to the American aggression in the region in 1990 Gulf War and in 2003 invasion of Iraq when some Arab countries were used as launching pads for the American forces to invade Iraq......"

The question is:

Do you have confidence in the fairness of Western media?

With more than 3,000 responding so far, 90% said no.

I apologize for those who do not speak Arabic, but this cartoon is hard to translate and would lose its meaning.

By GARY LEUPP
CounterPunch

"On March 31 the President of the United States made a statement pertaining to the 15 British sailors and marines unfortunately detailed in Iran: "The Iranians must give back the hostages. They're innocent. The Iranians took these people out of Iraqi waters. It's inexcusable behavior."

But since the American people don't trust George W. Bush, let's seek a second opinion. A credible authoritative one.

Let's ask the top Iraqi military officer in charge of guarding the Shatt al-Iraq waterway where the Brits were actually apprehended. This man is working for the U.S.-backed regime and probably not inclined to make up stuff to embarrass the U.S. president, who gives him his paycheck. So his opinion should be relevant here. Let's ask Brigadier General Hakim Jassim.

The good general told Associated Press the day after the March 23 incident: "We were informed [about the British troops' arrests] by Iraqi fishermen, after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there.'" ......

Bush is trying to depict the March 23 incident as a "hostage crisis," stoking memories of the 1979-81 Iran Embassy episode......

Just as the seizure of the Americans in 1979 needs to be understood in perspective, the detention of these Britons has to be understood in the context of the crime of the Iraq War itself. Whatever the actual coordinates of the vessel boarded and seized by the Iranians, why are the British policing the Shatt al-Arab waterway at all?.

They're there fighting an imperialist war. That war is going badly. The neocons still in charge in Washington (and building bridges to the resurgent Democrats led by opportunists competing to convey deference to AIPAC and embrace a hard line against Iran) wish to expand it to include the Islamic Republic. They work overtime organizing that project. That much should be obvious to anybody paying attention.....

I will not prophesy that the evil, dangerous persons (including fundamentalist Christians and secular Jewish neocons) responsible for the war on Iraq will purvey a Good Friday assault on Iran. But I won't be surprised if it happens, with apocalyptic ramifications. Perhaps only in the aftermath will redeeming regime change come here."

Bush, AIPAC and Palestine

By JAMES PETRAS
CounterPunch

"On Monday, March 26, 2007 in Northern Gaza a river of raw sewage and debris overflowed from a collapsed earth embankment into a refugee camp driving 3,000 Palestinians from their homes. Five residents drowned, 25 were injured and scores of houses were destroyed.......

The disaster at Umm Naser (the village in question) is emblematic of everything that is wrong with US-Israeli politics in the Middle East. The disaster in this isolated village has its roots first and foremost in Washington where AIPAC and its political allies have successfully secured US backing for Israel's financial and economic boycott of the Palestinian government subsequent to the democratic electoral victory of Hamas.

AIPAC's victory in Washington reverberated throughout Europe and beyond as the European Union also applied sanctions shutting off financing of all new infrastructure projects and the maintenance of existing facilities. At the AIPAC conventions of 2005 through 2007, the leaders of both major American parties, congressional leaders and the White House pledged to re-enforce AIPAC's boycott and sanctions strategy. AIPAC celebrated its victory for Israeli policy and claimed authorship of the legislation. In addition to malnutrition, the policy undermined all public maintenance projects.

Equally central to the disaster, Israel's massive sustained bombing attack on Gaza in the summer of 2006, demolished roads, bridges, sewage treatment facilities, water purification and electrical power plants. Northern Gaza was one of its many targets, putting severe strain on already precarious infrastructure and government budgets including the maintenance of sewage treatment plants and cesspools......

To the extent that any Palestinian leader can be held responsible, the finger points to the US and Israeli-backed PLO and its titular head Abbas who receives whatever 'humanitarian' aid flows into Palestine. The tens of millions of dollars of Palestinian import taxes held by Israeli banks were handed over to Mahmoud Abbas , to arm the anti-Hamas vigilantes. Over the past two decades the US-backed 'moderate' PLO leaders and crony 'capitalists' have diverted tens of millions of dollars and euros to their private overseas bank accounts, with the acquiescence of their European, US and Israeli patrons. What is a bit of Palestinian corruption if it means propping up an incompetent group of
pliant 'leaders'?.

The plight of the Umm Naser villagers deluged by their own sewage was neither an act of fate nor a result of local negligence or theft: It was a direct consequence of all that is wrong in US-Middle East politics, the taking sides with a brutal colonial power and its powerful voices and organizations in Washington. Umm Naser is written large throughout Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon: Millions of Arab villagers suffer the consequences of pre-emptive wars to secure Greater Israel as both President Bush and Vice President have publicly stated in justifying their aggression."

Contributed by Fatima

"Glamorous hostesses were allegedly paid tens of thousands of pounds from a BAE Systems slush fund to attend lavish parties where a Saudi prince and his entourage were guests of honour.

According to documents seen by The Sunday Times, the money was paid to Anouska Bolton Lee and Karajan Mallinder to meet mortgage, rent, credit card and council tax bills.

The two women went to parties in a penthouse suite at the Carlton Tower hotel in Knightsbridge attended by Prince Turki bin Nasser and other senior Saudis involved in the £40 billion al-Yamamah arms deal.

The claims will revive the controversy over the Government’s decision to order the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to abandon a long-running corruption inquiry, which had been examining BAE’s relationship with the Saudi regime.

The SFO had amassed a wealth of material and, since 2004, had been attempting to piece together the workings of the alleged £60 million slush fund. But the investigation was abandoned last December after consultations between the Prime Minister and Lord Goldsmith, QC, the Attorney-General.

The move followed pressure from Saudi Arabia, which had expressed anger at the SFO inquiry and was threatening to back out of a £10 billion deal to buy Eurofighter jets from BAE.

There were also claims that the Saudis would withdraw cooperation on counter-terrorism and intelligence.

Robert Wardle, the director of the SFO, said that the inquiry had been discontinued because of “the need to safeguard national and international security”......."

"Sen. John McCain strolled briefly through an open-air market in Baghdad today in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq.

NBC’s Nightly News provided further details about McCain’s one-hour guided tour. He was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit."

Watch Video

By Jamal Juma
PalestineChronicle.com

"Palestinians in our homeland and the Diaspora remember the 30th of May as Land Day. On this day in 1976, six Palestinians were killed and a hundred injured by Israeli forces as Palestinians went on strike against a massive land confiscation scheme in the Galilee. Land theft and colonization continues in the Galilee, Naqab and the West Bank until today.

More than 30 years later, we will again be out on the streets and in the fields confronting the Occupation. Over 20 protests and demonstrations will unite the people in villages and cities across the West Bank in a week of continuous mobilization, while Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line will hold protests against the ongoing racism and colonization of their lands. But is the world willing to see our protests and the reality on the ground?

In the West Bank, including Jerusalem , the Israeli Apartheid Wall, settlements and their road systems are de facto confiscating over half of our land and most of our water resources and agricultural fields. Israeli apartheid is creating something worse than Bantustans: Palestinian residential areas surrounded by 8-meter high cement walls and sealed by gates, checkpoints and terminals.......

In the meanwhile, the newly formed Palestinian government has to be integrated into these plans to ensure it underwrites the formula. The ongoing sanctions against the Palestinian people represent the backdrop of international pressure and such efforts.

In this situation, it is neither Palestinians nor those in the Arab world that strive for justice and self-determination that need a deal. The ongoing resistance in Palestine and Iraq is the unpredictable factor that might change the cards on the table. It is time to underline the principles of our struggle and the baselines for peace and justice: the end of the occupation, equality for all of our people within our homeland, the right of return to their homes for our refugees, Jerusalem, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and cultural and economic center of Palestine as our capital, are integral parts of our right to self-determination. It is only when diplomacy is forced to see and change the reality on the ground in Palestine and accepts the pillars of our struggle, human rights and international law that justice comes closer.

The demonstrations and protests all over Palestine for Land Day are thus yet another call to our leadership and the wider region that they at least second, if not lead, the steadfastness and resistance of the people. Approximately 97 villages in the West Bank are completely isolated and slated for destruction or ethnic cleansing and some 4,500 houses are under demolition order to make space for Israeli colonization. Dispossessed farmers watch industrial estates growing on their land in a system designed to exploit and control. Six out of ten Palestinians live below the poverty line. Yet the calls that lead the demonstrations do not ask for food or survival. It is the calls for dignity and rights – the full implementation of our rights – that brings the people onto the streets. Another popular Intifada is inevitably building up as long as our rights are ignored and our future confiscated. "

By Layla Anwar

Damn, she is a good writer!
I recommend reading the whole article

"Did you know that the 28th of March was the 7th International Sleeping Day?.....

Who said the Arab world is behind in innovations?
We too had our special day of sleep and it coincidentally took place the same day as the collective snooze in Bordeaux. However, ours was called the Arab Summit.

For those of you who don't know what the Arab summit is, I will give you a brief description. Heads of states, Excellencies, Ambassadors, Royalties, gather every few years to discuss the same agendas except at each Summit, you can be sure that the "Arab condition" has worsened. The reason is quite simple. "They" are either catatonically asleep or in some profound "reverie".

Does not really matter, the end result is always the same - No results.

A good example was Jalal Talabani, our kurdish peshmerga turned buffoon, the president of the New Iraq. He was in full oneiric vagary himself.
Jalal Talabani corpulently collapsed in one of these opulent golden armchairs, flushed rosy cheeks, blushing with puerile excitement at the wonderful developments taking place in Iraq. He stated unequivocally that the "liberation" of Iraq was the "best thing" that happened since the last Arab summit in 2002.....

His Excellency, Amr Moussa, the Ambassador of the Arab Leg - sorry meant League, having proclaimed the peace process dead a few months back, revived it. The Pharaonic high priest who previously embalmed mummies suddenly gave them the secret elixir of life. Who said we can't resuscitate the dead ?!

"Al Rayess" Hosny Mubarak assured us on the other hand, that the region could not handle more turmoil and another war. No shit? Al Rayess also forgot to mention that he (as well as the Saudi monarch) were the first to agree to the Coalition of the Brave Farts bombing of Baghdad on condition that this time around Saddam Hussein be removed from power......

As for the Palestinian "freedom fighter" Abbas, he was all smiles. He walked in and out as if he had just won a poker game except his deck of cards were left behind with Olmert.....

Now His Majesty, King Abdullah, the Monarch of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Don't you just love those long titles?) dared call the Iraq occupation "illegal".
Oh thank you your Highness. After 4 years of total destruction - I hope you did not lose too much sleep over it. In any event, he was quickly reprimanded by the White House for erring from the herd's line.....

Not really, since they too had joined al Rayess of Egypt in showering the American cowboys with money, logistics and blessings, profusely thanking their uncle Bush for finally delivering the long awaited promise. Regime change in Iraq......

And no one can accuse them of not being true feminists. They do take orders from a woman and are eager to serve, please and satisfy...always. Ask Condi Rice......

Called Zakariah.

- So what do you think of the Arab summit?
- What Arab summit? Come and see my condition first then talk to me about the Arab summit.
- But Talabani said there is an economic boom?
- An economic boom huh ? The only "booms" are his own farts and the explosions near my house...

Meanwhile in Northern Gaza.

300 people have fled from the sewage floods which killed two elderly women in their 70's, two toddlers and one teen age girl, injuring 35 others and destroying 100 homes.

Between occupied Iraq and its floods and occupied Palestine and its floods, who said there is no Arab unity ?!

You can go to sleep now, joining the lot from Bordeaux and Riyadh, but before you leave, let me offer you this poem as a lullaby. It was written by the famous Iraqi poet M.Al-Risafi during Her majesty's colonial rule in Iraq in the 30's and is entitled :

"Freedom as understood by the occupiers"

"People, do not speak
speaking is forbidden.
Sleep, sleep, and do not awaken
victory is only for those
who are asleep.
Postpone in advance
whatever you are supposed to do
and leave behind all understanding
for it is best that you do not understand.
Take root in your ignorance
for it is evil that you become learned men.
As for politics, leave it aside
lest you regret..."

Nite Nite"

By Silvia Cattori

"A source of life, water has become a major health problem in Gaza.

After the fear, the hunger, now it’s thirst.

Israel diverts 80% of the water resources in the West Bank and Gaza.

After fifty years of appropriating the most fertile and water rich land in Palestine, Israel is diverting Jordan’s water, which has given rise to reactions on the part of the UN. Since the 60s and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has profited by controlling the water resources of its neighbours. Sixty-five percent of water consumed by Israel comes from deep layers in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and the Golan Heights, annexed by force in 1981.

Since the year 2000, Israel has intensified its pillage of both surface and subterranean water through illegal measures. For example: Israel constructed the so-called “security wall” on the interior of Palestinian lands following the traces of basins of water. They also installed wells up to 500 metres deep all along the Gaza to take up water that from time immemorial flowed in the natural reservoir of Gush-Katif.

The intensive pumping effected by Israel has thrown the hydrostatic balance in disequilibrium. The result: in the Gaza Strip, seawater has infiltrated into the water layer. Today, 90% of the tap water coming from that layer is salty and utterly undrinkable, and homes only have access to water a few hours a day.

In the north of Gaza, where there is no separation between the water layers and dirty water, the sanitary situation linked to contaminated water has become extremely aggravated. The people are forced to drink this water, giving rise to an important increase in associated diseases, above all in children.

Well-to-do Palestinians have the means to buy bottled water. There are many religious charity organizations that have built their own water filtration stations and take it upon themselves to distribute small quantities of water to the most impoverished. Moreover, several municipalities have built their own filtration plants and have installed faucets where people can go to fill their water containers. But this doesn’t cover the entire population.

We think it is important to support the project Drinking Water in order to protect the health of these poorest inhabitants of Gaza, those who are the most touched by malnutrition.

The objective of this small project, A "Filter for Life", is modest but vital.

Contaminated and brackish water compromises the health of tens of thousands of the poorest people who have no other choice but to drink this water. A "Filter for Life" seeks to offer to the families of Gaza that live in the neighbourhoods where the water is dirty and polluted, an individual filter that purifies and desalinates tap water.

Every penny donated will go to the purchase of filters. The first beneficiaries: the poorest families, who because they lack the means to buy bottled water, must drink water that is salty and highly polluted. A donation is a way to protect those who are the most vulnerable, such as children, from a slow death."

"RAMALLAH, (PIC)-- The PA government has warned that the call of Israeli premier Ehud Olmert on Arab countries to sit and negotiate with him was an attempt to divide the Arab world.

Dr. Mustafa Al-Barghouthi, the PA information minister, charged that the Israeli occupation government is attempting to evade its political obligations for a just and peaceful solution in the region.

“It is clear that Israel is trying to overcome Palestinian legal rights, and directly negotiate with the Arab countries to normalize diplomatic relations with them without solving the Palestinian problem”, Barghouthi said in a press statement he issued and a copy of which was obtained by the PIC.

He also affirmed that Olmert wants to change the idea of an international conference with a comprehensive solution into a regional conference with partial and interim solutions.

On Sunday, Olmert called on the Arab countries to invite him to an Arab-sponsored “peace conference” to discuss and modify the Arab peace initiative, which his government promptly rejected on Thursday.

“By calling for such a conference, Olmert is obviously trying to drive a wedge between the Arab countries and the Palestinians in a bid to sideline Palestinian legal demands, including the right of return among other rights, and to overcome them”, the PA minister furthermore underscored.

Moreover, Barghouthi accused the Israeli occupation government of Olmert of enhancing settlement projects in the occupied Palestinian lands, stealing Palestinian people’s money, and strangling the PA economy among other suffocating practices."

"Bethlehem - Ma'an - Palestinian high-ranking sources expressed disappointment with the visit of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who Forbes Magazine considers to be the world's most powerful woman.

Impolite

The sources told Ma'an that "Merkel lacked all elements of common decency and respect; she was not polite as a high-ranking official like her should be and failed to observe basic codes of conduct."

They said that she did "everything possible to provoke the Palestinian people and underestimated the suffering of these people, but was the opposite on the Israeli side that is occupying the land and oppressing the Palestinians."

The sources said that the German chancellor was "interested only in the case of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but she did not say a word about 12,000 Palestinian prisoners including women, children, old people and sick people, in Israeli jails."

Bias

They also said that although she visited the families of the three captured Israeli soldiers in Lebanon and Gaza she refused to meet any of the families of the Palestinian prisoners.

The sources stated that the discrimination was obvious in her visit from the very beginning. "She refused to meet Abbas in Bethlehem to see the separation wall, which causes endless suffering to Palestinians, claiming that she might be reminded of the Berlin wall, which she observed daily when working in East Berlin."

The sources also said that Merkel refused to meet the representatives of the Christian Church in the Bethlehem. "She refused, even during Easter to witness the Israeli measures of restriction on Christians, banning them from entering the holy city of Bethlehem, which is surrounded by the separation wall."

The sources added that she also cancelled a meeting with the representatives of the Palestinians Non-Government Organisation's, such meetings have become convention the foreign diplomats and officials visiting the PA territories. Merkel did not give any reason for the cancellation.

With regard to her meeting with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the sources said that she "concentrated only on the issue of Shalit and did not pay much attention to the issue of peace process or the Israeli measures on the ground, which make the lives of Palestinians unbearable."

"She refused to meet any of the ministers despite the decisions of the Europeans to meet with some of the ministers, thus contradicting the trend of the EU."

The sources expressed deep disappointment because she received a doctorate degree from the Hebrew university in Jerusalem but refused to visit the city. "She refused to meet with its citizens and to see the kind of lives they are living and the way the Israelis are transforming the city and destroying its Arabian landmarks in violation of international legitimacy and resolutions."

Holocaust hangover

The result of the visit of Merkel, according to the sources, "raises the question about the impact of a biased Germany policy, how can such a policy play a role in reviving the peace process and how can Merkel be a fair party?"

Finally, the sources asked whether "the Palestinian people have to pay the price for the suffering of the Jews and the crimes committed against them?""

By Robert Fisk

"Our Marines are hostages. Two more were shown on Iranian TV. Petrol bombs burst behind the walls of the British embassy in Tehran. But it's definitely not the war on terror. It's the war of humiliation. The humiliation of Britain, the humiliation of Tony Blair, of the British military, of George Bush and the whole Iraqi shooting match. And the master of humiliation - even if Tony Blair doesn't realise it - is Iran, a nation which feels itself forever humiliated by the West......

The Iranians, you see, understand the West. And they understand it much better than we understand - or bother to understand - Iran.

We have forgotten the years of Allied occupation in the Second World War, the deposition of the pro-German Shah and then, humiliation of humiliations, the overthrow of the democratic Prime Minister, Mohamed Mossadeq, engineered by the CIA's Allen Dulles and an eccentric British scholar of Greek, an ex-Special Operations Executive operative - "Monty" Woodhouse by name - with a few guns and a pile of dollars. And the Iranians remember well, how back came the Shah of Iran, our "policeman" in the Gulf, the King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, descendant of Cyrus the Great, to stretch out the young Iranian men and women of the resistance on the toasting racks of their Savak torturers......

But behind all this lie some dark questions - with, I fear, some still unknown but dark answers. The Iranian security services are convinced that the British security services are trying to provoke the Arabs of Iran's Khuzestan province to rise up against the Islamic Republic. Bombs have exploded there, one of them killing a truck-load of Revolutionary Guards, and Tehran blamed MI5. Outrageous, they said. Inexcusable.

The Brits made no comment, even when the Iranians hanged a man accused of the killings from a crane; he had, they said, been working for London.

Are the SAS in south-western Iran, just as the British claim the Iranians are in south-eastern Iraq, harassing the boys in Basra with new-fangled bombs? Will the Americans release the five Iranians issuing visas to Kurds in Arbil whom they locked up a couple of months ago. No, says Bush. Well, we shall see......"

A Lousy Comment from the Supposedly "progressive" Guardian

By Simon Tisdall

"Uzi Arad, former director of intelligence at Israel's spy agency, Mossad, has made a lifetime's study of revolutionary Iran. If international sanctions and diplomatic arm-twisting fail to halt its suspect nuclear activities, he is clear what the west must do: bomb Tehran.

Israel's official policy, like Britain and the US, stresses peaceful pressure to secure Iran's compliance with its nuclear obligations. The so-called military option has been assiduously talked down ever since President George Bush appeared to talk it up in January. In any case, military experts say, air strikes would have limited success.

Mr Arad has no such inhibitions: "A military strike may be easier than you think. It wouldn't just be aimed at the nuclear sites. It would hit military and security targets, industrial and oil-related targets such as Kharg island [Iran's main oil export terminal in the Gulf], and regime targets ... Iran is much more vulnerable than people realise.".....

To say Iran has become an obsession for Israeli leaders is an understatement. Tehran's sinister hand is seen in all the key problems facing the country, including Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, and in the fostering of what Professor Amnon Rubinstein calls Israel's "sense of abandonment surrounded by a rising sea of Islamism"......

But perhaps the most startling shift in Israel's outlook is its increased willingness to "internationalise" the search for solutions, whether in Lebanon, where it agreed to an enlarged peacekeeping presence after last summer's war, in Palestine, where it has sought EU and other help in isolating Hamas, and in terms of improving relations with the UN......."

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Bendib.

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Global Research, April 1, 2007

"Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia—with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938—the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn’t happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now......

It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran ’s nuclear program, and the Security Council’s cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.

We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich . "

بقلم : أ.د/ يوسف رزقة

"ماذا وراء الأكمة؟ وهل أكمة قمة الرياض يمكنها أن تخفي ما خلفها؟ في عالم بات شفافاً بتطور تقنية الاتصالات.سؤال يطرحه كل مراقب متتبع للأحداث الأخيرة وسياقاتها الناظمة لها.

قبل أسابيع تشكلت (الرباعية العربية) في سياق التعامل مع رايس والرباعية الدولية، وفي ظلال قسمة الاعتدال والتشدد بالمفهوم الأميركي. تشكل الرباعية العربية حدث لم يحظ باهتمام كبير، غير أنه مرشح للقيام بدور مهم.

في الشهرين الأخيرين أنشأت رايس سياقاً جديداً في زيارات مكوكية لأطراف الصراع في منطقة الشرق الأوسط. ثمة اهتمام دبلوماسي مفاجئ بعد غياب أميركي إلى ما يزيد على ست سنوات، أسفر عن تبديل مكان انعقاد القمة من شرم الشيخ إلى الرياض كما تقول بعض المصادر الصحفية، وأسفر عن قرار إسرائيلي أميركي بلقاءات نصف شهرية بين (أولمرت عباس)، وأسفر عن لغة إسرائيلية جديدة إزاء المبادرة السعودية تتحدث عن نقاط إيجابية، ونقاط قابلة للتناقض وأسس صالحة؟! وفي الوقت نفسه رفض الإملاءات العربية بحسب بيرس وأولمرت وفي المقابل مديح للدور السعودي حيث يقول أولمرت "المبادرة السعودية تدل على زعامة الملك" . (يديعوت 27/3/2007م).

في ثنايا هذا السياق تبلور سياق أممي قاطر بقيادة بان كي مون حيث زار إسرائيل واطلع من خلال الطائرة المروحية على الخاصرة الضيقة لإسرائيل، كما اطلع على القدس والمستوطنات والجولان، وانتقل إلى قمة الرياض محملاً برسائل واضحة إلى الرباعية العربية، ومصطحباً معه بعد الحصول على الإذن السعودي مراسلة صحيفة يديعوت أحرنوت الإسرائيلية اورلي ازولاي لتغطية أخبار القمة العربية في أول ظهور علني لمراسل إسرائيلي في الرياض.

وفي موازاة هذا السياق المتمم لدائرة الحركة السياسية قبل الأكمة وخلفها كان اتفاق مكة المكرمة، وحكومة الوحدة الوطنية العتيدة، وزيارات خالد مشعل المكوكية للرياض، وتأكيده على أن حركة حماس (تدعم الإجماع العربي) في مقام عنوانه الإجماع على المبادرة العربية.

سياقات تتداخل مكوناتها أحياناً وتتعارض أحياناً أخرى، يتقدم أحدها ويتأخر آخر، ولكن وفق إرادة ناظمة وسلطة قادرة تؤكد على أن الأحداث تسير في اتساق ما وفق خطة باتجاه هدف محدد يجري بلورته في إطار الصراع الإسرائيلي الفلسطيني وفي إطار العلاقات العربية الإسرائيلية وإعادة ترتيب منطقة الشرق الأوسط، وترتيب أولويات الأطراف فيها.

رفضت قمة الرياض تعديل المبادرة العربية رغم زخم المطالب الإسرائيلية الأميركية في هذا الشأن، غير أنها جددت حياة المبادرة بعد خمسة أعوام من التجميد بحضور قيادة حماس، وربطت القمة (في كلمة عمرو موسى) بين تجديد المبادرة والبحث عن آليات عمل لتنفيذها، وفي الحديث عن آليات تنفيذ يكمن الشيء الأهم مما يقع ربما خلف الأكمة، ولعل ما جاء على لسان بان كي مون عن نية الرباعية الدعوة إلى قمة بمشاركة السعودية وإسرائيل والدول العربية المعتدلة، التي عبر عنها أولمرت بقوله: " إذا وصلتني دعوة فسأنظر في ذلك بإيجابية". ما يشرح جزءاً من الآلية التي تتبلور.

أولمرت لا يوافق على مبدأ حق العودة رغم أنه غير مذكور في المبادرة ولا يوافق على مبدأ الحدود المؤرخة بـ 4/6/1967م، وبيرس يرى أن المبادرة تمثل موقفاً عربياً وليس مبادرة مكتملة، وإنها بصيغتها الحالية نوع من الإملاءات العربية المرفوضة، والحل الجلوس إلى مائدة المفاوضات للتفاوض حول ما هو مختلف فيه، ولا بأس من البدء الفوري بتطبيق ما هو متفق عليه يقصد التطبيع والعلاقات الاقتصادية العربية الإسرائيلية.

واحد من المطلعين قال إن حكمة الملك عبد الله والدبلوماسية السعودية تجنبت خلافاً مؤكداً في حال طرح تعديلات على المبادرة العربية، وأنتج المستشارون بديلاً من نقطتين: الأول إحياء المبادرة العربية من جديد وضم حماس إليها والتوجه بها إلى الأمم المتحدة، والثاني البحث عن آليات تنفيذ وعقد لقاءات للرباعيتين العربية والدولية وإسرائيل واستبعاد أطراف الرفض، للبحث في التعديلات دون تسميتها بهذا الاسم، وإطلاق مصطلح التطوير أو معالجة القضايا العالقة (اللاجئين والحدود) يقول نظير مجلي: (لا يتوجب أن تكون لإسرائيل مشكلة في قضية اللاجئين، وذلك لأن المبادرة العربية تعطيها الفيتو وتشترط موافقتها على أي حل).

كلمة الأمين العام عمرو موسى والبيان الختامي فتح الباب موارباً حول إمكانية إيجاد حلول وسط لقضية اللاجئين وقضية الحدود، ويبدو أن الدبلوماسية الإسرائيلية تفضل معالجة قضية اللاجئين أولاً لأنها في نظرها أصبحت ناضجة على المستويين العربي والفلسطيني، ولأن قضية الحدود بها القدس اللغم الكبير الذي أفشل كامب ديفد باراك عرفات كلينتون.

الدبلوماسية العربية والفلسطينية تتحدث وعن قناعة حول (حل عادل متفق عليه لقضية اللاجئين)، أي حل تفاوضي تقبل به إسرائيل، وما تتفق عليه الأطراف يكون هو التطبيق الحديث لقرار 194. مبدأ التفاوض مقبول وآلياته مهدت لها ورقة جنيف، ولقاءات أبو مازن بيلين، والتصريحات العريبة، وقمة الرياض تجميع نشط لكل متعلقات المسألة. تجميع يستمد قوته من المكان ومن الدولة ومن القيادة السعودية الكبيرة، والحاجة الفلسطينية للعمق العربي والإسلامي.

بعض الخطابات في قمة الرياض أوحت للمستمع أن هناك حراكاً خارج إطار الرباعية الدولية، وكأن ثمة نوع من التمرد على دبلوماسية واشنطن في سنة الأفول (لغة قومية) (العراق المحتل، لا لتعديل المبادرة العربية!!) ولكن البيانات المكتوبة واللقاءات تحكي غير هذه القصة تماماً (راجع النصوص).

بقي أن نقول إن هناك مخططاً نشطاً لتبديل مركزية الصراع يؤسس لاستراتيجية متكاملة يخمد فيها الصراع الفلسطيني الإسرائيلي، والعربي الإسرائيلي لينشط صراع آخر في منطقة الخليج حول التسلح والطائفية والإرهاب، وهذا يقتضي طوي ملفات قديمة أهمها الملف الفلسطيني المستعصي على الحل بسبب التعنت الإسرائيلي والانحياز الأميركي.هذا التحول الاستراتيجي يتغذى برغبة رايس لأحداث اختراق سياسي على الساحة الفلسطينية يعزز فرصة الجمهوريين بعد بوش ما وزراء الأكمة فيما يبدو لي أمران مهمان وفي غاية الخطورة:

الأول: تبديل مركزية الصراع.

الثاني: آليات تفاوضية على حق العودة والحدود.

والرباعية العربية هي الجهة القادرة على احتواء الرفض الفلسطيني المتوقع في ضوء الحاجة الفلسطينية للعرب، وفي ضوء حاجة العرب لترتيب الأولويات والمصالح في ضوء التهديدات الجديدة وعلى الدبلوماسية الأميركية الإسرائيلية التوجه نحو العنوان، والعنوان اليوم السعودية والرباعية العربية ولا أحسب أن ما وراء الأكمة سيتخلف عن ارتياد الطريق المرسوم إلا في حالة الفيتو الاسرائيلي النابع من ضعف الحكومة؛ واللعب على الزمن، وتأجيل المقترحات إلى حكومة ديمقراطية في أميركا لأن اسرائيل ليست متعجلة بينما تفرض أمر واقع على الأرض يخدم مصالحها، والعرب يتسولون المفاوضات."

A Good Article

By Uri Avnery

"CAN A pantheress turn into a pussycat? Impossible, a zoologist would say. But last week, we saw it happen with our own eyes.

Condoleezza Rice came here to teach Ehud Olmert, once and for all, who is boss. The President of the United States wants to make order in the Middle East, and the government of Israel has to fall into line. Otherwise…

Two days later, nothing of the threat remained. Olmert refused again. And what happened? Nothing happened. The fearful pantheress slunk home, her tail between her legs.

Muammar al-Gaddafi, a unique combination of dictator and comedian, complimented the
"dark-skinned African woman", and disclosed that he likes her. She has but to raise her little finger, he said, and all the security chiefs in the Arab world, who are the real rulers of their countries, come running. But even Gaddafi did not argue that she had Israel on the run.

JULIUS CAESAR, as is well known, reported to the Roman Senate "I came. I saw. I conquered." Condoleezza could report to the US Senate: "I came. I saw. I capitulated." Who to? To a failing Israeli prime minister, whose popularity rating is approaching zero and who practically nobody expects to survive to the end of the year......

The united Arab world breathed new life into King Abdullah's peace plan, which offers Israel of recognition, peace and normalization with the entire Arab world, in return for its withdrawal to the borders of June 4, 1967. The plan pays lip service to a "just solution" of the refugee problem (and how could it avoid that?) but states unequivocally that any solution depends on Israeli agreement.....

All the Arab rulers who depend on the US are crying out that they cannot pledge their support as demanded, so long as the pus is still streaming from the occupation tumor. How can the King of Saudi Arabia and the President of Egypt rally their masses for a war against Iran, when they and their subjects are exposed on Aljazeera, morning, noon and evening, to the horrifying sight of the Israeli army attack dog sinking its teeth in the flesh of an old Palestinian woman and locking its jaws?.....

The two professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, won this round. In this clash between the national interests of the United States and the Government of Israel and its America fans, the Israeli side won......

Israel's largest mass circulation daily splashed a
sensational headline across its front page: "Olmert: Within Five Years We Can
Achieve Peace!" What? Five years? In 1993 we signed the Oslo accord, which foresaw the final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian people within five years. Since then, 13 years have passed, and even negotiations on this have not yet started.

It seems that the "five years" belong to the same world of illusions as Condoleezza's "political horizon": as you go forward, it recedes."

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, April 1, 2007

"The US has completed major military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf within a short distance of Iranian territorial waters. This naval deployment is meant to "send a warning to Tehran" following the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, which imposes major economic sanctions on Iran in retaliation for its non-compliance with US demands regarding its uranium enrichment program......

" This marks the first time the Stennis and Eisenhower strike groups have operated together in a joint exercise while deployed to 5th Fleet. This exercise demonstrates the importance the ability for both strike groups to plan and conduct dual task force operations as part of the Navy's commitment to maintaining maritime security and stability in the region."......

While the Russian report must be taken seriously, there is, however, no corroborating evidence, which would enable us to pinpoint the exact timeline of a military attack on Iran. Moreover, there are several important factors which suggest, from a military organizational standpoint, that unless we are dealing with a case of sheer political madness, the Pentagon is not ready to launch an attack on Iran.......

Of significance, Admiral Keating was also involved in the 2003 attack on Iraq as commander of US Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet.

While these key appointments point to a consolidation of the NeoCon military agenda in the Middle East, they also suggest that the US military would not launch a new phase of the Middle East war prior to consolidating these command appointments, particularly those at the level of US Central Command (CENTCOM), which is the key operational command unit in charge of the Middle East war theater......

Moreover, the appointment of an Admiral is indicative of a shift in emphasis of CENTCOM's functions in the war theater. The "near term" emphasis is Iran rather than Iraq, requiring the coordination of naval and air force operations in the Persian Gulf.......

The deployment of naval power prior to the March 2003 blitzkrieg against Iraq was on a significantly larger scale. In the early months of 2003, there were five US aircraft carriers within striking distance of Iraq plus one British aircraft carrier.......

The USS Nimitz nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and its accompanying battle group is currently on its way to the Persian Gulf., which would bring the number of aircraft carriers up to three.......

Iran is politically isolated. Unilateralism prevails within the corridors of the UN as well as within the Middle East war theater......

One would expect that separate "deals" were reached respectively with China and Russia, where certain commitments were met in bilateral discussions by Washington.......

Meanwhile, the US Congress is at war with the president regarding America's Iraq war strategy, but not a word is muttered on an impending war againsat Iran, as if it were totally irrelevant. The threats are real, an incident could trigger a war. The war criminals in high office desperately need this war to stay in power......

The Neocons in the Bush administration are in control of key military appointments: specifically those pertaining to Central Command (USCENTCOM), US Stratregic Command (USSTRATCOM) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff......"

Olmert invites Arab leaders to Israel

"Prime minister invites Arab leaders to meet with Israeli officials, declares Israel will attend Arab summit if invited. 'If the Saudi king initiates a meeting of the moderate states, I'll gladly arrive,' he says in meeting with German chancellor.

Israel will show up for a peace summit with Arab leaders if it is invited, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday evening.

During a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the prime minister said, "I want to take this opportunity of being here with the European Union president in order to invite all Arab leaders, including the Saudi king. "I am telling the heads of Arab countries that if the Saudi king initiates a meeting of the moderate states' leaders and invites both me and the Palestinian Authority president, I would gladly come there and speak our mind."......."

"BAGHDAD – While conducting a combat security patrol, two MND-B Soldiers died and two others were wounded when an improvised explosive device detonated near their unit southwest of the Iraqi capital March 31.

Four additional Soldiers were killed when a second improvised explosive device detonated near a separate unit responding to the initial IED strike southwest of the Iraqi capital April 1......."

By Kurt Nimmo

"Citizens of Lebanon, beware. Arieh Eldad has it out for you. After the scandal-ridden government of Ehud Olmert falls, probably within the next few weeks, a new government, likely led by Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, will attack Lebanon. “We have no choice. We will have to do it,” Eldad tells the neocon website, NewsMax. “Dr. Eldad explained that Israel was facing a new strategic threat, caused in part by its own failure to deal a crushing blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the impression of weakness last summer’s failed war created in the minds of Israel’s enemies.”......

Since Israel will certainly face defeat on the ground in Lebanon, as it did last summer, the only option will be to shock and awe the country into submission......

Arie Eldad, a member of the “right-wing” (that is to say, fascist) Moledet political party, heads the Ethics committee of the Knesset. Of course, when we talk about ethics here, we are talking about a brand of “moral principles” alien to the West and Christianity. According to Eldad, sanctions of the sort to be levied against Iran are based on Western logic. “But when states have missions that are bigger than life, they are not obeying the basic rules of logic that Western civilization obeys.” And what is are these “missions that are bigger than life”?

Ethnic cleansing. Moledet advocates the “voluntary transfer” of the Palestinian population out of the West Bank and Gaza. A few years ago, Moledet bought space on billboards around Tel Aviv, calling for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. “Only transfer will bring peace,” read the billboards.....

In other words, if AIPAC and the neocons cannot once again trick the American people into attacking Iran, as they tricked them into attacking Iraq in the name of Israel, the IDF will do it. Of course, this is nonsense, Israel will not go it alone against Iran. In fact, Eldad is simply spewing more rhetoric, as Israel has long expected the United States to attack and slaughter its enemies. If the invasion of Lebanon last summer demonstrated anything, it is that Hezbollah can hold its own and Israel is impotent to change the situation “on the ground,” in essence a result of its own unwavering policies of aggression, be it by way of direct military confrontation or black flag operations....

“Because Iran has built its nuclear plants in deeply buried, hardened facilities, it will be difficult if not impossible.”

Translation: simple high-explosives, depleted uranium, and millions of cluster bombs will no longer do the trick—it is time to nuke the Arabs and Muslims, as “Western logic,” i.e., use of nuclear weapons is unconscionable, does not apply....."

Henry Ford Never Envisioned This

Contributed by Lucia

By RON JACOBS
CounterPunch

".....In what is certain to be a revelation for many supporters of the state of Israel, Davis explains the car bomb's modern origins in the tactics of the Zionist terrorists known as the Stern Gang. This group, composed of men-some who went on to help rule Israel--was ruthless in its application of car bombs. They genuinely did not seem to care who died in the explosions they caused, although they preferred them to be Arab. It was the success of their terror campaign that helped "cleanse" Palestine of Palestinians so that Israelis could take the lands.....

The anonymous nature of the car bomb is what makes it appealing to those guerrilla groups that use them. It is also why they have an appeal to intelligence agencies whose goal is to discredit legitimate insurgent groups. From Saigon, where CIA agents assisted a Vietnamese warlord in his car bomb campaign against Saigon and Hanoi and after his death continued on their own, to Baghdad, where rumors fly daily about which governments are really behind the assorted bombings of that day, the car bomb has been used to manipulate the public and kill the rulers' enemies. Nowhere did this secret government affinity for car bombing have a greater effect than in the campaign of terror unleashed by then CIA director William Casey in Afghanistan. With the general approval of the Reagan administration, Mr. Casey's minions trained, armed and ran interference for the holy warriors of the Afghani mujahedin, providing car bomb technical assistance and materials. Of course, it is the descendants of that same group that Casey's company trained that would eventually hatch the various plots against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--car bombs with wings, as it were. More importantly, those acts have inspired many more such plots and acts, with no real end in sight....."

***

However, the article also adds this less than accurate statement:

"The Stern Gang's success would also prove to cause what we nowadays call blowback. Indeed, car bombs set off in civilian spaces have been a favorite tactic of the Palestinian resistance to Israel ever since its founding. Davis relates this story, too."

poverty and occupation

"The beduin village –north of jabalia refugees camp
Thursday 30th of March 31, 2007

Today I visited the camp of the displaced families of the village , accamppanied by the RC Society crisis intervention team , the team consist of , , 2 community health educators , a psychologist and a social worker , the aim of the visit is to evaluate the social , health and psychological different needs of the displaced families, and to plan the right intervention programme later on ,to support the families and to show solidarity with the community.

I met tens of children , as well as some huminatarian aid organizations , I visited the mobile clinic of the union of health work committees , where tens of children received medical check up,for mainly gastroentritis , upper respiratoty infections as well as cut wounds and trauma symptoms.

A lot of work need to be done for this community of 5000 population , where poverty , is prevelant , and the population suffers as well as most residents of Gaza , when the local councils budgets are scarce ( half of the PA budget comes from Palestinian government tax revenue, that is held by Israel ,) and while the westren embargo continues the local councils warned of anticiptated environmental disasters few days prior to the swege system collapse ,this swege plant that shouldnot be so close to this residential area,those people poverty forced them to be in such slum area , they did not have other choice.

Life continues in my country , occupation, westren sanctions , no law and order , interclashes, ,paralysed national unity government and cruel poverty that affects the whole population , but is too harsh on women and children.

Click Here to Watch Video and Read Transcript

"Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told radio host Bill Bennett that President Bush’s escalation is working. “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” he said. Today, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked McCain why Americans still aren’t able to safely leave the Green Zone in Iraq, the senator replied that Blitzer was giving three-month-old talking points:

General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don’t get it through the filter of some of the media.

But according to CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has been in Iraq for four years, McCain is “way off base.” He stated, “To suggest that there’s any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I’d love Sen. McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll.”

Ware also rebutted McCain’s assertion that Petaeus travels in an unarmed humvee: “[I]n the hour since Sen. McCain’s said this, I’ve spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There’s multiple humvees around it, heavily armed.”"

Iraqi war unwinnable: Kissinger

"TOKYO: Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said yesterday the problems in Iraq were more complex than the Vietnam War and that military victory was no longer possible.

Dr Kissinger, who helped engineer the US withdrawal from Vietnam, said he sympathised with the troubles facing US President George W. Bush.
"A military victory in the sense of total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population, isn't possible," he said.

The faceless, ubiquitous nature of Iraq's insurgency, as well as the religious divide between Shia and Sunni rivals, made negotiating peace more complex, he said.

"It is a more complicated problem," Dr Kissinger said. "The Vietnam War involved states, and you could negotiate with leaders who controlled a defined area."

An architect of the Vietnam War who has also advised Mr Bush on Iraq, he warned that a sudden pullout of US troops or loss of influence could unleash chaos.

"I am basically sympathetic to President Bush," he said. "I am partly sympathetic to it because I have seen comparable situations." "

To Palestinian Puppet: Keep That Red Carpet Stretched Out.....One "Dignitary" After Another....And Keep That Stupid Pasted Smile on Your Face.....
"Peace" Opium Anyone?

IDF prepared for possible major incursion into Gaza Strip

"The Israel Defense Forces last week completed its preparations for a possible major incursion in the Gaza Strip, including special training for most of the units that might be involved and an exercise at the command headquarters level. But military sources say the government prefers to avoid an escalation with the Palestinians.

At the end of last year, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz ordered that preparations be advanced for a possible action in the Gaza Strip that would use large numbers of ground forces. Infantry, armored units, artillery and intelligence units underwent training, mainly at the Tzeelim base in the South, and the Southern Command headquarters held an exercise last week.

The scenario for launching the operation was large-scale rocket fire on western- and northern-Negev communities and the abduction of soldiers. In the exercise, the Israel Air Force also responded against Palestinian terror targets......

The IDF also received approval to operate in a small area on the Palestinian side of the fence around the Gaza Strip to prevent the placing of explosive devices against Israeli forces patrolling the border, and to pinpoint tunnels for weapons smuggling......

Hamas is also digging tunnels, as well as bunkers in settled areas of the Gaza Strip, to stymie a ground attack. It is also improving its array of anti-tank missiles.

The IDF believes the chances of such an operation are slim because of government concerns in light of the poor outcome of the war in Lebanon. In an interview in Friday's Haaretz, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said such an action is not "the first thing I seek to do.""

"Head of Military Intelligence Major General Amos Yadlin said during a government session Sunday that Syria, Iran and the Hezbollah are preparing for war in the summer, and that Israel is closely monitoring the preparations.

According to Yadlin, Military Intelligence estimates that the war will be initiated by the U.S., and that Israel will be involved.

Yadlin said that the preparations by Syria, Iran and Hezbollah are defensive and that they aren't expected to initiate the war.

Yadlin noted that, as in the case of the six-day war, military conflict could erupt, despite that fact that neither side is interested in war, because of "the involvement of many players."

Regarding Hamas, Yadlin said that Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has warned that if the international financial embargo on Gaza is not lifted within three months, a third Intifada will breakout. Yadlin added that there are senior Hamas members that are displeased with the Saudi Arabian initiative, and that the military branch of Hamas has renewed its activity."