Palestinian Pundit

To members of the European Parliaments who Oppose the War

by Hassan Jum'a Awwad
(Head of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions)

"Peace be upon you and greetings to you all,

We wish to clarify certain matters relating to events in Iraq for our friends among the members of the US Congress. It is common knowledge that the occupation spared neither the old nor the young, and that Iraq is passing through the most difficult of times because all and sundry are hounding it and covet a share of its riches. We see no good reason for linking the passing of the feeble Iraqi oil law to the withdrawal of the occupation troops from Iraq.

Everyone knows that the oil law does not serve the Iraqi people, and that it serves Bush, his supporters and the foreign companies at the expense of the Iraqi people who have been wronged and deprived of their right to their oil despite enduring all difficulties.

We ask our friends not to link withdrawal with the oil law, especially since the USA claimed that it came to Iraq as a liberator and not in order to control Iraq's resources.

The general public in Iraq is totally convinced that Bush wants to rush the promulgation of the oil law so as to be leaving Iraq with a victory of sorts, because his project is failing every day and the occupation is collapsing in all parts of Iraq.

We wish to see you take a true stance for the children of Iraq, and we always say that history will remember those who advance peace over war.

With my regards,"

"Five US soldiers were killed and three went missing when their unit was attacked south of Baghdad, the US military has said.

The attack on a patrol of seven US soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter occured early on Saturday morning.

The US military said the attack took place at 4:44am near Mahmudiya, about 30km south of the capital.
Mahmudiya is a stronghold of Sunni Arab fighters opposed to the US-backed government in Iraq.

Troops who arrived later found five of the soldiers dead and the other three remained missing, according to a statement from Major-General William Caldwell, the chief US military spokesman in Iraq.

"The quick reaction force reported finding five members of the team killed in action and three others whose duty status and whereabouts are unknown," Caldwell said......"

Iraqi Party For Shi'ite 'Revolution' Changes Name

"May 12, 2007 -- One of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite political parties has dropped the word "revolution" from its name.

The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) will henceforth be known as the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq.

Party leader Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, a top Shi'ite cleric, announcing the name change at a news conference today, said the word "revolution" has become "unnecessary."

The party, which was founded as an opposition movement in exile in Iran in 1982, is one of the most powerful blocs in the Iraqi government."

***

There was never a "Revolution" in SCIRI to start with! It was nothing but empty and useless rhetoric to cover up its collaboration. The same applies to the father and creator of SCIRI, namely the "Islamic Revolution" of Iran. What revolution? They are the most reactionary silent collaborators with the Great Satan.

Fatah spokesperson welcomes visit by King Abdullah II

"Bethlehem – Ma'an – Fahmi Za’arir, the spokesperson of the Fatah movement on Saturday welcomed tomorrow's visit of King Abdullah II to the Palestinian territories.

King Abdullah will discuss the political developments which face the Palestinian cause with President Mahmoud Abbas, "especially given the reactivation the Arab Peace Initiative in Riyadh".

The spokesperson stated that "the Palestinian –Jordanian relations remain strong and the Jordanian role is always welcomed."

He asked for Jordan to continue their efforts for dissolving the siege.[Hell, they are an integral part of the siege!]

"We appreciate the support of King Abdullah for the Palestinian issue, and his visit to have a summit with President Mahmoud Abbas."

Za'arir stated that the meeting will also discuss ways to support the reactivated Arab peace initiative, "which is the main thing to discuss following the Riyadh summit," he concluded."

By Mike Luckovich

Arab Puppet Meeting With Israel to the Palestinian: Son, We are Older and Wiser than You and You Must Listen!
By Hamed Najeeb

"NABLUS, (PIC)-- The Hamas Movement on Saturday lashed out at Arab official meetings with Israel, saying that the Arab countries should rather focus their efforts on breaking the siege imposed on the Palestinian people.

A West Bank spokesman for the Movement said in a press release that the Arabs should have rather opted to lift the political and economic siege imposed on the Palestinians.

He underlined that the meeting of Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers with their Israeli counterpart was providing the Hebrew state with the help it direly needed at present to overcome the impact of the Winograd report, which held the Israeli political and military leaders responsible for the defeat in their war waged against Lebanon last summer.

The spokesman recalled that Israel ever since the Arab peace initiative was voiced in the Beirut summit in 2002 had declared its absolute rejection of it as evident in former Israeli premier Ariel Sharon's words that the initiative was not "worth the ink it was written with".

However, the present Israeli political leadership chose to invest the Arabs' insistence on this initiative to seek normalization of relations with the Arab and Islamic countries without having to pay any price in return, he opined.

The spokesman advised the Arab countries to make use of the apparent weakness of American hegemony in the region and the deteriorating internal Israeli conditions and to seek other alternatives to achieve the Arab people's interests."

***

Of course Hamas does not say a word about its partner in the "unity government," namely the Palestinian Karzai Abbas. He is guilty of far more than Egypt and Jordan; he is supposed to represent Palestinian interests after all.

For how long will Hamas continue to speak from both corners of its mouth?? The Palestinian people can't take Hamas seriously while it is in bed with traitors.

Jordanian Prime Minister rejects talk of confederation with Palestinian territories

"Bethlehem – Ma'an – The Jordanian Prime Minister, Dr Ma'rouf Al-Bakhit, stated on Friday that "the time is not now ripe for any talks about a confederate or federated union between Jordan and Palestine, or any form of formal relation". He maintained that such discussion "is harmful for the interests of both sides"......

An Israeli newspaper reported that the former Jordanian premier, and also the head of the negotiating delegation between Jordan and Israel, Abdus-Salam Al-Majali, had suggested a Jordanian peace plan to Israeli Prime Minister Olmert.

The plan was allegedly based on the annulment of the decision to cut the union between Palestine and Jordan, ratified in 1988. In addition, Jordan expressed readiness for "a confederate union with the Palestinian Authority", which the newspaper claimed would be announced before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state."

uruknet.info

"An Iraqi who asked not to be identified had disclosed some of the US activities such as assassinations and bombings in markets that aim at sparking sectarian fighting among Iraqis so as to facilitate the partition of the country.

He pointed out that he that he worked with the US occupation troops for about two and a half years and then was able to flee from them to an area outside Baghdad where, he hopes, the Americans will not be able to get to him......

The former collaborator said that the Americans have a unit for "dirty jobs." That unit is a mix of Iraqis, Americans, and foreigners and of the security detachments that are deployed in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. This unit doesn’t only carry out assassinations, but some of them specialize in planting bombs and car bombs in neighborhoods and markets. This unit carries out operations in which wanted people whom the American army does not want killed are arrested.

The former collaborator said that "operations of planting car bombs and blowing up explosives in markets are carried out in various ways, the best-known and most famous among the US troops is placing a bomb inside cars as they are being searched at checkpoints. Another way is to put bombs in the cars during interrogations. After the desired person is summoned to one of the US bases, a bomb is place in his car and he is asked to drive to a police station or a marked for some purpose and there his car blows up."

The testimony of the former collaborator is consistent with some western reports that have disclosed the involvement of US military personnel in bombings that target Iraqi civilians. The British reporter Robert Fisk, AMSI noted, had recently met with Iraqis in Syria concerning such "black operations" carried out by the Americans......"

An Interesting Story

The plan to link Jordan and West Bank was presented to Israel and Palestinians last week by a high-ranking Jordanian emissary

"......Earlier, our Middle East sources revealed: Amman proposes a new state framework linking Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to be established before the rise of an independent Palestinian state. Amman is not thinking in terms of confederation or the West Bank’s reversion to annexed Hashemite territory, the status it held before Jordan’s 1967 war defeat.

Former Jordanian prime minister Abdul Salem Majali, who led the negotiations which culminated in the 1994 peace accord with Israel, presented the outline to Israeli and Palestinian leaders. It also calls for Jordanians to be part of the Palestinian team holding final-status negotiations with Israel. Amman is acting out of concern for the shaky Palestinian Authority.......

The king, he said, had not yet signed off onto the project whose exact shape has yet to be determined. It was gaining support among the heads of Jordan’s security services as a strategy for fortifying the kingdom against the shocks of the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, which would leave the kingdom exposed on two fronts: Iraq, where Amman expects the US military to start pulling out in late summer, and the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is on its last legs. Its breakdown would engulf the territory in the sort of chaos and violence which has swept the Gaza Strip.......Sources close to Israeli security circles doubt the tottering Palestinian Authority will survive long enough to see the final shape of the Jordanian plan. Amman will then have to choose another Palestinian partner, an alternative to Abbas."

Abu Mahjoob (Imad Hajjaj)

A Great Editorial (Arabic)

عبد الباري عطوان

".....الحصار المالي فرض علي حكومة حماس لانها تعتبر ارهابية في نظر الولايات المتحدة وباقي الدول الاوروبية السائرة في فلكها وفلك اسرائيل، وها هي حماس تتخلي عن هذه الحكومة عمليا، والمناصب الرئيسية فيها، علي امل القبول بها، وهي الفائزة في انتخابات ديمقراطية شرعية اشادت امريكا نفسها بنزاهتها، ولكن كوفئت بالمزيد من المقاطعة وشاهدنا دولة بلجيكا تطرد احد وزرائها بطريقة مهينة (باسم نعيم وزير الشباب والرياضة) وتمنعه من المرور في اراضيها، او حتي اجواء منطقة الشينغن الاوروبية جميعا.
قالوا لقادة حماس يجب ان تتخلوا عن وزارات السيادة، الواحدة تلو الاخري، فالمالية حتي لا تستخدموا خزائنها في تمويل عمليات الارهاب ، فقدمتها علي طبق من ذهب للسيد سلام فياض الصديق الشخصي للسيدة كوندوليزا رايس، واقترحوا التنازل عن وزارة الخارجية لانه من غير اللائق ان يتولاها شخص غير حليق يكون من صميم واجبات عمله اللقاء مع نظرائه الاوروبيين الانيقين وروائح البخور تنبعث من ملابسه وليس العطور الفرنسية الراقية، فتنازلت مكرهة. ثم جاء دور وزارة الداخلية، والتي اعتبرتها حماس حقا من حقوقها، فتعطلت عملية تشكيل الحكومة لعدة اسابيع، وبدأت التهديدات الرئاسية بحل الحكومة والعودة الي نغمة الاستفتاء او الدعوة الي انتخابات مبكرة، مترافقة بتهديدات امريكية برصد 86 مليون دولار لدعم الحرس الرئاسي. وعندما رضخت حماس لكل هذه الابتزازات، وقبلت بوزير داخلية طيب مسالم، يمكن ان تزوجه ابنتك، خرج السيد محمود عباس رئيس السلطة بمرسوم الغي هذه الوزارة عمليا وحوّل صلاحياتها الي مستشار الامن القومي العقيد محمد دحلان، الشخص الذي يحتل رأس قائمة الكراهية بالنسبة الي الغالبية الساحقة من كوادر حماس، ناهيك عن قياداتها في الداخل والخارج علي حد سواء. فلم تجمع حماس علي كراهية رجل غيره.
الجامعة العربية بدأت التطبيع مع حكومة اولمرت بالتقسيط المريح. اليوم وزيرا خارجية مصر والاردن، وغدا رئيس وملك البلدين، وبعد غد يتوسع الوفد التطبيعي ليشمل دولا اخري لم تقم علاقات دبلوماسية او تجارية مع الدولة العبرية، والمقصود هنا الامارات العربية المتحدة والمملكة العربية السعودية صاحبة النسخة الاصلية من المبادرة، والعنوان هو خلق اجواء ملائمة للسلام علي حد توصيف السيدة رايس اثناء اجتماعها بنظرائها وزراء خارجية الرباعية العربية .
هذه المواقف العربية الرسمية الرخوة والمستجدية للسلام من حكومة اسرائيلية منهارة وفاقدة الشعبية، ومنقسمة علي نفسها، ما كان لها ان تتم لولا وجود سلطة فلسطينية ضعيفة برئيس مستكين، ورئيس وزراء متساهل، وفلتان امني مخجل بكل المقاييس.
الرئيس عباس قال انه سيحل السلطة اذا لم يرفع الحصار عن الشعب الفلسطيني، والسيد اسماعيل هنية حدد مهلة ثلاثة اشهر لحل الحكومة التي يرأسها. ولا نعتقد ان أيا من الرجلين جاد في تهديداته، فلو كانا جادين فعلا ويفعلان ما يقولان، لما وصلنا الي درجة ان هذه السلطة واكثر من مئة عنصر امني وميليشيات تابعة لها باتت عاجزة عن تحرير صحافي اختطفته عائلة فلسطينية في غزة.
عندما كنا نطالب بحل هذه السلطة المهزلة في زمن كانت احواله واحوال الشعب الفلسطيني افضل كثيرا، وكان هناك زعيم لا يساوم، ولا يهرب من الارض المحتلة، ويقبل ان يموت تحت الحصار الاسرائيلي، اتهمنا السيد عباس، والمحيطون به بأننا ضد المشروع الوطني الفلسطيني ومكتسباته. الآن، وبعد خراب مالطا يهدد السيد عباس بالشيء نفسه.
التطبيع العربي الرسمي بدأت عجلته في الدوران، والمبادرة العربية بدأت تعود الي طبعتها الاصلية، اي التطبيع الكامل قبل ان يتحقق الانسحاب الكامل، والسبب هو غياب القيادة العربية الشجاعة، وانعدام الحرص علي المصالح العربية الاستراتيجية. والا بماذا نفسر خوف جميع القيادات العربية، ورضوخها لأوامر رئيس امريكي يلفظه الكونغرس، وسعادة وزيري خارجية دولتين عربيتين باللقاء مع نظيرتهما الاسرائيلية، وبحضور حرس الاخيرة في الصورة، وكأنها لا تثق بالدولة العربية الاكبر التي تستضيفها.
الرد علي هذا التطور الخطير والمهين، اي اقدام القيادات العربية علي حماية نفسها امريكيا، بالتفريط بالحقوق العربية والاسلامية الاستراتيجية، والتطبيع مع الدولة العبرية، يجب ان يأتي فلسطينيا اولا، لان الشعب الفلسطيني هو الذي سيدفع ثمن هذا التوجه. علي السيدين عباس وهنية ان يكفا عن خض الماء والغرق في تفاصيل تافهة علي حساب القضايا الاساسية، وعقد مؤتمر صحافي عالمي، يعلنان فيه سويا مشاركة حقيقية في القرار الأهم، وهو حل هذه السلطة وجميع مؤسساتها اليوم، وليس بعد ثلاثة اشهر، فهذا العمل هو ارفع انواع المقاومة واشرفها، وعلي العالم ان يتحمل المسؤولية، مسؤولية قراره بتجويع هذه الاسود الفلسطينية."

Hizbullah leader says Saudi peace initiative rescues Israel from difficult situation after last summer 'defeat'

"Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused the Arab world of running to Israel's rescue following its "defeat" at the hands of his group in last summer's war by renewing a land-for-peace offer to the Jewish State.

"I tell the Arab world, 'Israel is spread out before you. You are welcome to learn its strengths and weaknesses.' But at a time when Israel is so weak, the Arabs are renewing the Arab Peace Initiative in order to save (Prime Minister Ehud) Olmert," Nasrallah said.....

"If another war breaks out we will fight better than we did in July," he said, referring to the 34-day conflict that erupted on July 12 when Hizbullah gunmen abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border attack.

Nasrallah ridiculed Peretz who has said in the past that Israel would push the Shiite group north of the Litani River in southern Lebanon,
saying Hizbullah never left the area south of the river.

"I laughed when I heard Peretz saying 'We will prevent Hizbullah from returning south of the Litani River.' Did we ever leave this area? All the area's residents are our supporters," Nasrallah boasted.......

"Israel's disrespect and arrogance in Lebanon lead to its defeat … by the willingness and wisdom of the resistance," he carried on.

"The United States knows for certain that radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is still living next door in Iran, a senior State Department official said Friday, disputing aides to the anti-American religious and political leader.

"We know he's out of the country, we don't (merely) think" so, said David Satterfield, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's top adviser for Iraq. "He's in Iran, which is where he has been since mid-January.".....

"I can't speculate on why Muqtada al-Sadr has chosen to reside in Iran," Satterfield said. "I can only note the political circumstances."

U.S. officials have said that al-Sadr slipped out of Iraq during preparations for President Bush's 12-week-old troop buildup and a joint U.S.-Iraqi security sweep that was focused on chaotic Baghdad.

They have not provided photos or other proof, generally citing the sensitivity of intelligence-gathering in Iraq....."

"As concerns grow that terrorists might attack a major American city with a nuclear bomb, a high-level group of government and military officials has been quietly preparing an emergency survival program that would include the building of bomb shelters, steps to prevent panicked evacuations and the possible suspension of some civil liberties.....

The efforts to prepare a detailed blueprint for survival took a step forward last month when senior government and military officials and other experts, organized by a joint Stanford-Harvard program called the Preventive Defense Project, met behind closed doors in Washington for a day-long workshop.

The session, called "The Day After," was premised on the idea that efforts focusing on preventing such a strike were no longer enough, and that the prospect of a collapse of government order was so great if there were an attack that the country needed to begin preparing an emergency program......"

These are the faces of militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades who will be murdered next by Israel. Here they pose with their weapons during a rally in the West Bank city of Nablus, Friday, May 11, 2007. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

THIS IS NO RESISTANCE! THE COMMANDERS OF THESE POOR YOUTH ARE CRIMINALS FOR EXPOSING THEIR IDENTITY AND ARE GUILTY IN THE CRIME OF THEIR FUTURE DEATH, AS MUCH AS ISRAEL IS. IT IS TIME FOR THE FIGHTERS NOT TO OBEY THEIR STUPID COMMANDERS AND TO LOOK OUT FOR THEMSELVES. THEY SHOULD START LEARNING ABOUT GUERRILLA RESISTANCE ON THEIR OWN, BECAUSE THEIR COMMANDERS WILL NOT TEACH THEM.

Cheney warns Iran to keep sea lanes open

"ABOARD USS JOHN C. STENNIS - From an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, Vice President Dick Cheney warned Iran on Friday the U.S. and its allies will keep it from restricting sea traffic as well as from developing nuclear weapons.

"We'll keep the sea lanes open," Cheney said from the hangar deck of the USS John C. Stennis as it steamed about 150 miles from the Iranian coast.

Cheney is touring the Middle East asking Arab allies to do more to help Iraq and to curb Iran's growing power in the region.....

The vice president made clear the United States' intentions on the rivalry. "We'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region," he said......

With two U.S. carrier groups now in the region, the vice president declared, "We're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open."

The carrier was in the Gulf about 20 miles off Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Cheney is spending time there after a two-day tour of Iraq.

Standing in front of five F18 Super Hornet fighters and a huge American flag in the cavernous hangar deck — one flight below the carrier's flight deck — Cheney sounded a hard line both on holding firm in Iraq and confronting Iran if necessary.....

"We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces," he added. U.S. officials have said that some of the sophisticated roadside bombs used against U.S. troops in Iraq have come from Iran......"

هنية يدعو العرب والمسلمين إلى تسديد تعهداتهم المالية للشعب الفلسطيني

"وجّه رئيس الوزراء الفلسطيني إسماعيل هنية، نداء للأمتين العربية والإسلامية، لتسديد التعهدات المالية التي التزم بها الجانب العربي والإسلامي للشعب الفلسطيني، لمساعدته على كسر الحصار الجائر المفروض عليه.

وفي كلمة هاتفية ألقاها خلال مهرجان "حق العودة"، الذي نظمته حركة المقاومة الإسلامية "حماس" في رام الله, اليوم الجمعة (11/5)؛ شدّد هنية على أنه لا يمكن التنازل عن حق العودة أو التفريط به، باعتبار حق اللاجئين في العودة إلى ديارهم من أهم الثوابت الوطنية الفلسطينية.

وأضاف رئيس الوزراء الفلسطيني "إننا لا نقبل بأنصاف الحلول، ولن نساوم على حق العودة المقدس"، كما ورد في كلمته التي قوبلت بهتافات حارة من الجماهير الفلسطينية المحتشدة.

وكان رئيس الوزراء الفلسطيني إسماعيل هنية قد خاطب يوم السبت الماضي نحو خمسة آلاف شخص من وفود فلسطينيي أوروبا، وتعهد لهم في مؤتمرهم السنوي المنعقد في مدينة روتردام الهولندية، بصيانة حق العودة وعدم إتاحة المجال للمساومة عليه.
"

Democracy Now!
With Amy Goodman

".....AMY GOODMAN: We return now to London to Tariq Ali, historian and one of the editors of the New Left Review, as well as author of many books, including Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London, Terror. He joins us from a London studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Tariq.....

AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ali, President Bush in Washington, D.C., said he'll miss Tony Blair and that he's ready to work with his presumed successor, Gordon Brown, confident that he, quote, “understands the consequences of failure in Iraq.” Talk about that statement and also who Gordon Brown is.

TARIQ ALI: Well, I think Bush is right. He will miss Blair. I mean, you can't have a more loyal politician in Europe than Blair. I mean, he's done virtually everything the United States has asked for, and not just after 9/11. Even prior to that, he was extremely pro-Washington in everything. He never raised any questions. So I think Washington will miss him. Mercifully, very few people in this country will.

Now, as to his successor, Gordon Brown, he backed the war in Iraq, as he himself said yesterday, and it was felt it was necessary. He backed the war in Afghanistan, felt that that was completely necessary -- and think that they wiped out all the problems with this. But they're completely wrong. On all the central issues of the day, there is no difference between Blair and Brown. The tone Brown adopts will probably be marginally less aggressive, but in terms of substance, there's nothing to choose between them.

And this is essentially yet another New Labour trick: OK, we’ve got rid of the big bad war monger, and we’ve got a decent prime minister again. But this guy is also a war monger. The difference is he is more intelligent than Blair....."

The question is:

Do you expect major changes in British policy towards Iraq after the replacement of Blair?

With more than 2,500 responding so far, 82% said no.

by Linda McQuaig
The Toronto Star

"It was almost enough to revive one’s faith in Canada as a functioning democracy, not to mention a member of the civilized world.

After two weeks of unrelenting pressure – led by the media and the opposition parties in Parliament – the Harper government was forced to abandon a deal that made Canada complicit in torture in Afghanistan.

Before we go farther, let’s emphasize that the much-improved deal governing the treatment of our detainees in Afghanistan came about despite the sustained and determined efforts of the Harper government to thwart such monitoring of human rights.

For more than a year, the Conservatives had been content to hand over detainees to Afghan custody, despite ample evidence – including from Canadian officials – that Afghanistan routinely tortures those in its custody.....

Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin wrote last week that the “new Canada has abandoned the independent strain we had” and that, in our growing closeness to Bush’s America, we are “consorts now.”

That sort of subordinate role is clearly what the Harper government, as well as some elite military and media types, have in mind for us.

But it doesn’t seem to be what the Canadian public is willing to accept.

This Afghan saga reminds me of the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian engineer tortured in Syria. In both cases, Ottawa tried to downplay a growing scandal about Canadian complicity in torture. But Canadians demanded accountability and eventually forced Ottawa to abide by the rule of law, not the lawless ways of the Bush administration.

It seems that, while our political leaders may be comfortable accommodating Bush, most Canadians have yet to develop a taste for toadying."

By Khalid Amayreh

"“I didn’t know that in order to protect a few people, farmland had to be confiscated and crops had to be destroyed; I didn’t know that in order to provide security for a few people, hundreds had to be kept waiting at checkpoints and roadblocks before being allowed to return home exhausted, that is if they are not killed.” Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, March 28, 2002, during a visit to the West Bank......

And in case a murder is not committed, a home is demolished, a school child is crippled by a Jewish sniper’s indifferent bullets, a farm is bulldozed, a grain field is torched, or a new colony is started on stolen Arab land seized at gunpoint from its lawful proprietors, all in the name of Jewish nationalism.

It is more than the wide Wild West here; it is actually very much like pre-war Germany when the Third Reich effectively encouraged Germans to have a free season on Jews, on their lives, homes and businesses.

Let us have just a few examples of what the so-called “chosen people” did in the West Bank in the past 48 hours.....

True, these crimes don’t yet constitute a fully-fledged holocaust. However, the collective accumulative effect of these crimes which have been going on for nearly sixty years and are continuing unabated will ultimately have the effect of a holocaust. Yes, the brutal ugliness of the Israeli occupation, despite its all its criminal manifestations, may not be exactly identical to what the Third Reich did more than sixty years ago.

But the Israeli occupation is not a static phenomenon or a one-time episode, but an ongoing process the ultimate purpose of which is to obliterate the Palestinian people, either through physical genocide, or at least a partial physical genocide, or by making the daily life of ordinary Palestinians unbearable (as a result of the brutal persecution meted out to them), so much so that Palestinians would either immigrate or succumb to Israel’s genocidal designs.....

However, it is abundantly clear that Israel’s undeclared strategy is to uproot every single Palestinian from Palestine in order to fulfill Zionism. And if genocide, or at least a partial genocide, is what it takes to achieve this criminal goal, there is no doubt whatsoever that Israel will, when the time allows, resort to the wildest possible scenarios to achieve its goals. After all, genocide is part and parcel of the Zionist ideology which is based on East European fascist traditions.....

I am saying this because when one listens to Zionist leaders, such as Elie Wiesel and Benyamin Netanyahu, for example, one will easily get a feeling that Zionism, which is drifting menacingly to right-wing religious and jingoistic fascism, are effectively asking the world, especially the west, to compensate Jews for the holocaust by allowing them to commit a holocaust against the Palestinians.

Indeed, there are a number of European countries, such as Germany, that are already effectively consenting to this macabre equation, which explains European complicity in starving millions of Palestinians by blocking their access to food and work, and by saying next to nothing about the unlawful and immoral seizure by Israel of Palestinian tax revenue money.

In conclusion, I believe that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians should be treated at least as a holocaust-in-the-making, if only to forestall the possibility of it evolving into a fully-fledged holocaust. I know and the world knows that the holocaust didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and the ovens. It began with the enactment of racist laws against Jews, with a book, a kristlnacht and similar acts, the kind of which Israel and her terrorist soldiers and Gestapo-like settlers have been doing to the Palestinians."

Jordan's king to meet with Abbas next week in Ramallah

By Haaretz Service and DPA

"Jordan's King Abdullah II is due to visit Ramallah Sunday for talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, officials in Abbas' office said on Friday.

A Palestinian senior official said that the king would arrive by helicopter, and would hold a short visit in Ramallah with Abbas.

The official said that the two would discuss the political situation in the region, and Arab countries' efforts to promote regional peace, including the Arab Peace Initiative.....

An Arab League delegation is also due to pay an unprecedented visit to Israel to discuss the plan, the sides announced Thursday.

Three weeks ago, Israeli and Jordanian officials said Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had invited Abdullah to make a historic visit to Jerusalem in mid-May and the king was weighing the invitation......."

Americans are sick of the unrepentant arrogance of this elite. But the realisation has come at a very heavy cost

Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian

".....And yet to visit the US at present, as I have done, is to experience an overwhelming sensation of drastic impending change. It's not merely that President Bush, to whom Blair so disastrously tethered himself, is "in office but not in power". Most Americans can't wait for him to go, Congress is beyond his control, and the Senate majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, has told him that the war in Iraq is lost - for which statement of the obvious Reid was accused of "defeatism" by the vice-president, Dick Cheney.....

Along with the collapse of Bush's authority, all these episodes are connected to the great disaster in Iraq. And all illustrate the hubristic, impenitent arrogance of the people who have been guiding America's destiny - as well as ours, alas - for the past six years. What one senses so acutely are the conditions building for a political perfect storm, which will engulf and destroy the whole neoconservative project.

In Washington I took part in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, my old sparring partner and drinking companion (mots justes, all of them), who supports Bush with a defiance worthy of a better cause. He surpassed himself by insisting that his friend Wolfowitz is a wronged man. A World Bank committee reportedly disagrees, and has found that Wolfowitz did violate the bank's rules in the matter of his lady friend's salary......

....One who did understand is Matthew Parris, the former Tory MP. Before the 2004 presidential election he said he wanted Bush re-elected: his presidency was halfway through an "experiment whose importance is almost literally earth-shattering" and should be played out to its inevitable failure.

But that failure must be demonstrated beyond contradiction. "The theory that liberal values and a capitalist system can be spread across the world by force of arms... should be tested to destruction ... The president and his neoconservative court should be offered all the rope they need to hang themselves."

His wish has come true; neocons are dangling all around us. In a flicker of self-knowledge, Wolfowitz told a recent World Bank meeting: "I understand that I've lost a lot of trust, and I want to build that trust back up." But it's too late, for him and all the other courtiers. They never really enjoyed the trust of most Europeans, let alone Africans and Asians, and they have now lost the trust of the American people.

All the readings on the barometer and the wind gauge say the same thing. The perfect storm is gathering. Unfortunately the collapse of the neocon project comes at a very heavy cost, not only to the people of Iraq but to all of us. "

By Steve Bell, The Guardian

"PRETORIA – South African Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils Thursday accused Israel of conducting a policy against the Palestinians that was worse than apartheid.

Speaking on the sidelines of a UN meeting on the situation in the Palestinian territories, Kasrils said South Africa’s townships had never been attacked by helicopter gunships and tanks, in contrast to the military means employed by Israel.

“The analogy between apartheid and Israel’s occupation of Palestine is often made. It is not the same thing. The occupation is absolutely worse,” Kasrils told reporters.

“It is important that we tell the Israeli authorities they are behaving like fascists when they do certain things, although we are not calling it a fascist state.”
Kastrils called on the United States and European Union to lift their economic and political embargo of the Palestinian Authority now that Hamas and Fatah have joined in a government of national unity.

He said the meeting would, among things, prepare for demonstrations marking the 40th anniversary year of the Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer at the United Nations, said the gathering had been organised in Pretoria to deliver lessons from South Africa about how it had dismantled apartheid.

“An unjust system was defeated here and they have been elsewhere. We can do it in Palestine too,” he said...."

Feature: Gaza's fish break the blockade

"Gaza - Yousef Alhelou - Joy has filled the hearts of hundreds of Palestinian fishermen in the Gaza Strip this week as they expressed their happiness over the most plentiful fishing season in 40 years, especially in the shadow of the Israeli navy restrictions on fishing off Gaza's coast.

There are some 433 boats registered at Gaza's port, but only a few of them are seaworthy; fewer still risk the Israeli-imposed ban on Gaza's fishermen. Collectively, Palestinian fishermen have seen their monthly catch drop from 823 tones in June 2000 to as low as 50 in late 2006.

The number of registered fishermen has also dropped significantly, from as many as 5,000 in the 1980s to less than 3,000 today, according to the UN. At least 35,000 Gazans directly rely on the fishing industry for subsistence, amid poverty levels that the UN pegs at more than 80 percent in Gaza......

Palestinian fishermen are routinely arrested and shot at by the Israeli navy. In the past year, four fishermen have been killed after being attacked by Israeli forces. Dozens have been arrested.

Palestinians are often compelled to fish within a few hundred meters of the beach, or even cast their homemade nets from the shoreline.

Under current restrictions, Palestinians are allowed to fish only up to six nautical miles off the Gaza coast, whereas a deal in 2002 between the UN and Israel allowed for fishing up to 12 miles off the coast and the Oslo Accords of 1993 gave fishing rights for up to 20 miles.

This spring was a surprise for fishermen and drew smiles on their faces as their nets yielded sardines, which Gazans always crave for.....

Munir Al-Hessi, fisherman, said: "I'm very excited. This season is a surprise for all of us. Other fishermen and I are subject on a daily basis to the Israeli gunboats and vessels and we risk our lives to feed our families, but today, I earned $500! Finally, I will be able to support my family."

Hani Gandil, 48, said while buying sardines: "I usually buy frozen fish but when it comes to sardines, I buy them fresh. This season, the sardines seem bigger and more numerous. May God protect the fishermen, who risk their lives to carry out their job in order to feed their children and bring us these sardines."

Hamdi Baker, 42, fisherman, said: "Today the sardines broke the blockade!"....."

"Bethlehem - Ma'an - Diplomats, parliamentarians, representatives of the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations, along with civil society and media personnel, gathered on Wednesday in Pretoria, South Africa for the UN African Meeting on the Question of Palestine.

The two-day meeting, which was sponsored by the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People-Africa, aims to bolster African solidarity with the Palestinian people, as well as build on recent international and regional momentum to bring the Israeli and Palestinian sides back to the negotiating table," according to press statements.

“South Africa firmly believes in the Palestinian peoples’ inalienable right to self-determination and the fact that there was no military solution to the conflict,” Essop Pahad, a minister in the office of President Thabo Mbeki, said opening the meeting on Wednesday, according to a press statement. He added that South Africa firmly believes that there can be no peace in the Middle East unless a sustainable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is found......

Apartheid

"We believe that the country of Oliver Tambo, of Nelson Mandela and other renowned freedom fighters is the appropriate venue for holding this meeting,” the Senegalese chairman of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Paul Badji, said at the meeting, taking place in post-apartheid South Africa.

Many other participators did not hesitate to draw parallels between apartheid-era South Africa and the situation today in the occupied Palestinian territory.

Mr. Pahad of the South African president's office said, "Comparing the situation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territory with the situation of South Africa’s during apartheid, while Israel denied such intention or purpose, its oppressive actions -- closures, checkpoints extrajudicial killings, among others -- in contravention of international humanitarian and human rights law, certainly belies that stance."

The press statement added, "In a poignant address Gideon Levy, columnist for Ha'aretz, Tel Aviv, said it was very unpleasant to sit and hear accusations against one's country, but it was much more unpleasant to sit and listen to such accusations knowing that they were justified."

Levy also said that the similarities between the occupation and apartheid, as well as the differences, should rightly be on the table. “Roads” in the occupied Palestinian territory are not really roads, he said, because they are impassable. Israel's legal system metes out different punishments to different people and there are different rules for Palestinians and different rules for Israelis, he added.

Yasmin Sooka, the executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights in Pretoria, said the situation of the Palestinian people had a huge resonance with South Africans, "for those who had lived under apartheid had believed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would have been solved long before the back of apartheid had been broken," the press statement said. However, she had hope, she said, particularly since the world had witnessed “old enemies” in Great Britain and Ireland sitting down at the same table after so many years of tension. She stressed that the solution to the question of Palestine should be based on the search for justice.

The two-day meeting will be followed on Friday 11 May by the UN Public Forum in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, to be held at the University of Pretoria. "

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Tom Toles

An Israeli-Produced Pacifier for Palestinian Babies
By Baha Boukhari

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"BAGHDAD - Popular wisdom in Iraq rules that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, with a simple fatwa, or even a single word, could bring the US occupation to an abrupt end. So why doesn't he?......

Sheikh Mohammed al-Roubaie is a top cleric with the Imam al-Rabani organization, affiliated with the marjaiyya (highest-ranking clerics) , which he defines as "the government of the people". He insists there is "no separation between religion and politics". He blames the current "crisis" on the fact that "people are not following the religious leaders. Religious thinking is responsible for solving people's problems. But not all learned men who put on a turban are truly religious." .....

The Sistani question
Roubaie said Sistani is like the principal in the marjaiyya. His rulings are obeyed "in general, but there are also the followers of individual marjas". Roubaie candidly admitted, "There are differences among the marjas. Some think it's better for the Americans to stay, otherwise there will be civil war. Others think they should leave. There is no united opinion." Personally, he feels "bad" about the divergences.

Roubaie explained why Sistani cannot issue a fatwa to get rid of the occupation: "He doesn't have such a privilege, he knows that a lot of people would die. The only one who would have such a privilege is Imam Mahdi." As the Prophet Mohammed and the Imam Mahdi (prophesied redeemer of Islam) "are not situated in real life now and are thinking about more important things", it's unlikely Sistani will directly tell President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to pack up and go.....

Roubaie let it escape that "only Sistani and al-Hakim" have a close relationship with the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki - an observation that is a political treatise in itself. It means that what Sistani wants is the consolidation of the political power of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), which is led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim......."

Report, Al-Haq, 10 May 2007

"Over the course of the last three months, Al-Haq has documented four incidents, the facts of which are summarised below, involving the extrajudicial executions of eight Palestinians in the Jenin area. The number of incidents, all of which involved disturbingly similar facts, indicates that, far from being isolated acts, the extrajudicial execution of Palestinians continues to be a widespread practice. Indeed, during the last year, Al-Haq has documented numerous other deaths attributable to Israeli extrajudicial executions......"

By Scott Ritter

".....It’s a shame for these Legionnaires that the Iraqis couldn’t have turned out to be blond, blue-eyed Germans who looked like us, and whose women could be wooed with chocolate and nylon stockings by the noble American liberator and occupier. Or, short of that, passive Japanese, who freely submitted their women to the massage parlors and barracks of their American conquering heroes while their men rebuilt a shattered society. The simplistic approach of many of the American Legion’s most hawkish advocates for the ongoing disaster in Iraq seems to be drawn from a selective memory which seeks to impose a carefully crafted past experience dating back to the last “good war” (i.e., World War II), expunged of all warts and blemishes, onto the current situation in Iraq in a manner which strips away all reality.

It turns out that the Iraqis aren’t like German or Japanese people at all, but rather a fiercely independent (if overly complex) nation deeply resentful of a so-called liberation which has brought them nothing but pain and agony, primarily at the hands of those who have, unbidden, “freed” them from their past. The fact that the Iraqis resent the ongoing American occupation, and choose to express this resentment through violent resistance instead of submissive passivity, is in turn resented by many of the Legion’s membership......

Thus, in a blind effort to find meaning in her son’s death, this mother is willing to inflict suffering on other American families. This may sound like a harsh indictment, but she indicts herself. The same mother concludes the article with the following quote: “I told President Bush last summer that the biggest insult anyone could hand me would be to pull the troops out before the job is complete. If we’re going to quit, at that point I’ll have to ask, ‘Why did my son die?’ ” The question she should have been asking long before his death was, of course, “Why might my son die?” That she failed to do so, and now seeks to send others off to their death in a cause not worthy of a single American life, is where she and those of her ilk stop receiving my sympathy and understanding.

The American Legion magazine, in its May 2007 issue, belittles those who speak out against the war. “While our forefathers gave us the right and privilege to challenge our leaders,” one father of a fallen Marine writes, “the manner and method that some people have chosen to use at this time only emboldens the enemy.” Reading between the lines, freedom of speech is treasonous if you question the motives and actions of those who got us involved in the Iraq war. Alan Dershowitz can only wish that there had been more “good Germans” speaking out about the policies of Adolf Hitler before the Holocaust became reality.

I yearn for a time when “good Americans” will be able to stop and reverse equally evil policies of global hegemony achieved through pre-emptive war of aggression. I know all too well that in this case the “enemy” will only be emboldened by our silence, since at the end of the day the “enemy” is ourselves. I can see the Harvard professor shaking an accusatory finger at me for the above statement, chiding me for creating any moral equivalency between the war in Iraq and the Holocaust. You’re right, Mr. Dershowitz. There is no moral equivalency. In America today, we should have known better, since we ostensibly stand for so much more. That we have collectively failed to halt and repudiate the war in Iraq makes us even worse than the Germans."

"ABU DHABI — Bahrain has reported preparations for a war between Iran and the United States.

Bahraini officials said the Gulf Arab kingdom has been working with Western allies to protect strategic sites from Iranian missile strikes amid any war with the United States. They said Bahrain has been introducing measures to protect against Iranian infiltration and respond rapidly to any missile or insurgency strike.
On April 25, Al Khalifa was quoted as telling the official Bahrain News Agency that the kingdom established a committee to plan for war, Middle East Newsline reported. He said the panel would prepare for emergency supplies and strategic facility protection.

"We at the Interior Ministry have made plans to deal with the possible threats," Bahraini Interior Minister Rashid Bin Abdullah Al Khalifa said.

Al Khalifa said he hoped that Iran would not be attacked. At the same time, the interior minister said Bahrain applied for membership of the International Atomic Energy Agency in an effort to acquire early warning of a nuclear threat.

In late April, Bahrain and the United States conducted the largest emergency response exercise in the Gulf Cooperation Council state. The exercise envisioned an Iranian missile strike on the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which contains about 3,000 sailors and Defense Department staffers.....

Vice President Richard Cheney's trip to the region is meant to reaffirm U.S. commitment to Gulf and Arab security.

Cheney plans to meet UAE President Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Saudi King Abdullah, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah. Officials said the trip was decided in late April amid tension with the Saudi leadership......"

"NEW YORK Former Los Angeles Times Baghdad Bureau Chief Borzou Daragahi says he doubts the "surge" in Iraq will work, and describes Iraq citizens as "hostile" and "humiliated" after four years of war.

Asked by Brian Lamb, in a forthcoming C-SPAN interview, about his personal views on the war, he replied: "I think at this point, it just – it seems like it’s become a disaster. I mean, I don’t think anyone could dispute that. It’s just going very, very, very, very badly." He said he had mixed feelings about the invasion but "As time wore on, though, as the bodies mounted, it just seems more and more like a really bad mistake."

The interview will be broadcast Sunday night.

Daragahi, a Pulitzer finalist in 2005, admits to deceiving his family, and editors, on some occasions about life in the war zone.....

--On why he believes the military surge won't work:

"Because there is not - even according to General Petraeus' own guidebook for fighting counterinsurgencies, they're not using soldiers, they're not using enough troops to accomplish their goals...But also, more fundamentally, I don't think that they can do this militarily. I don't think the fundamental problems in Iraq right now are military problems."

-- On why Iraqis feel humiliated:

"Iraqis are rather hostile and feel humiliated. And that's the key thing that maybe some of our policymakers don't understand. The presence of the U.S. soldiers is very humiliating to the Iraqis. Even those who, in their minds know that it's necessary to have the soldiers there, at least some kind of force there preventing an all-out civil war from getting even worse...I don't think they appreciate American culture."....."

Mousa Abu Marzook: Assistant to Chief Windbag, Mash'al

A Good Piece

by Chris Floyd

"Are you confused by the ever-shifting terminology employed by the Masters of War and their frequent banquet buddies, the Media Mavens, when conveying the overarching geostrategic sociopolitical complexities of the Dear Leader's liberation of Iraq? Well, fear not, befuddled reader; your humble correspondent is here to help, with this handy-dandy update of The Newspeak Lexicon.

Today's phrase is: "Political Progress." This sinuous and supple little passage has greased many a clumsy reality over the transom of public discourse, allowing both purveyors and consumers of conventional wisdom to ignore the incontinent, pustulous, blood-smeared elephant of aggressive war standing there stinking up the well-appointed drawing rooms of the American Establishment......

Thankfully, the New York Times is on the case. In a prominent story there today, we learn that "political progress" in Iraq now consists of one of the major parties in the government deciding not to quit. Yet.......


So there you are. We have American casualties swelling with the still-rising wave of the Bush-McCain-Romney-Giuliani-Lieberman surge, with even more deaths expected as the escalation crests. We have American soldiers flung into the brutal service of the Bush Regime's criminal enterprise becoming more brutalized and criminalized themselves – with thousands of troops admitting that they have beaten or despoiled innocent civilians, and tens of thousands embracing the torture of prisoners and rejecting the very notion that the people they have come to "liberate" should be treated with dignity and respect, according to the Pentagon's own examination of the fraying mental health of its forces. We have Iraqi citizens cowering in fear of the American-trained "security" forces of their own government. We have the ghetto-building campaign by the occupying liberators sealing whole quadrants of Baghdad into open-air prisons whose inhabitants are left to the tender mercies of the violent sectarians locked in with them, creating "mini-Islamic republics," as one Iraqi government official admitted to The Independent. We have literally millions of Iraqis fleeing their homes, eating the bitter bread of exile in foreign lands or else on the run from ethnic cleansing inside Iraq – one of the greatest population displacements since World War II. We have a never-ending hellstorm of death and chaos, lies and looting, incompetence and arrogance – and unfathomable, unendurable human suffering – all of it spawned by the illegal, immoral and unnecessary war of aggression launched at the order of George W. Bush, and championed or countenanced for years by the "great and the good" of American society.

But the fact that one of the political factions licensed by the conquerors has decided not to leave the government for the time being means that "political progress" is being made in Iraq. So says the supreme arbiter of conventional wisdom in the American press."

داود جنين قتله الاحتلال ببطن أمه

عاطف دغلس-نابلس

"رصاصة انطلقت من فوهة بندقية الاحتلال أردت داود قتيلا، ولم تدعه حتى يخرج للحياة ويعرف بعدها ما إن كان يستحق القتل أم لا.

ففي جريمة تعد من أبشع الجرائم التي ارتكبها الاحتلال بحق الفلسطينيين، قتل جنود الاحتلال جنينا في بطن أمه في مخيم عين بيت الماء غرب المدينة، فجر اليوم الخميس.

حكاية الجريمة
زوج مها رأفت القاطوني روى للجزيرة نت حكاية قتل طفله قائلا، إن جنود الاحتلال اقتحموا المخيم قرابة الساعة الواحدة بعد منتصف الليل، حيث دارت اشتباكات بينهم وبين المقاومين، فكان الرصاص يدخل كل حدب وصوب.

وأضاف أن زوجته أفاقت على صوت الرصاص، وذهبت كي تخرج أولادها من الغرفة التي ينامون فيها وأتت بهم إلى غرفتها، "وما هي إلا لحظات حتى سمعت زوجتي تصرخ بصوت ضج به المخيم، وبعد ذلك ذهبت لأرى ماذا حدث، فإذا بها تنزف بشكل رهيب، وقد انطرحت أرضا".

وقال "كانت رصاصة واحدة أطلقها جنود الاحتلال، واخترقت جسد زوجتي الحامل في شهرها السابع، واخترقت كذلك رأس طفلي الجنين لتقسمه نصفين، وتخرجه ميتا من بطن أمه قبل أن يرى نور الحياة".

وأشار رأفت إلى أن قوات الاحتلال ادعت أن المقاومين هم من أطلقوا النيران على منزله، لكنه فند ادعاءهم قائلا "الذي أطلق النيران هم جنود الاحتلال، لأنهم كانوا يحتلون بناية الصوصة والتي تقع فوق منزلنا مباشرة، وعندما أطلقت النيران على الجنود، أخذوا يطلقون النيران بشكل عشوائي على منازل المواطنين، حيث كسر زجاج منزلنا نتيجة تلك النيران قبل أن تصاب زوجتي".

وأضاف "لقد طلبنا سيارة إسعاف لإنقاذ زوجتي، لكن جنود الاحتلال منعوها من الدخول إلى المخيم، واستمرت زوجتي تنزف لأكثر من ساعة".

وما زالت مها ترقد على سرير الشفاء بالعناية المكثفة بمستشفى رفيديا الجراحي بمدينة نابلس بعد أن أخرج الأطباء جنينها ميتا.

من جانبها أكدت المصادر الطبية في مستشفى رفيديا أن الرصاصة أطلقت بقصد القتل، لأنها كانت من مسافة قريبة جدا، مشيرة إلى أن الرصاصة استقرت في رأس جنينها، وتم إخراجها بعد إجراء عدة عمليات جراحية لها ولجنينها.

وأوضحت هذه المصادر للجزيرة نت أن مها لم تعد قادرة على الإنجاب في المستقبل، "لأن رحمها تفتتت إلى أجزاء".

....."

Livni, Mubarak agree Arab League delegation to visit Israel on Saudi plan

"Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak agreed during a meeting Thursday in Cairo that a team of Arab League representatives will visit Israel in the coming weeks for talks on the details of the Arab peace initiative, first drafted by Saudi Arabia in 2002, and reaffirmed by the Arab League in March.....

During the two-hour session, Livni and Mubarak discussed the security situation in the Gaza Strip, arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza through the Rafah crossing, the firing of Qassam rockets and the strengthening of Hamas.

Livni said that "the present situation in Gaza is unacceptable" and emphasized that Israel expects the Arab world to support and legitimize the moderate sides of the Palestinian Authority, so that these moderates will have more political flexibility.

Livni, speaking after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo earlier on Thursday, said the meeting with the Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers would be a historic first between Israel and representatives of the Arab League. "I do believe that the Arab world when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is important. It can support the process, it can give Israel a political horizon and it can help the Palestinians make further progress when it comes to future agreements between Israel and the Palestinians," she said.

She did not mention the territorial demands of Syria and Lebanon or the question of Palestinian refugees, which the Arab states want solved as part of their peace package......"

***

Here is the plain English translation of what Livni said:

Israel expects Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries to control and eliminate any Palestinian resistance to the forthcoming settlement that will be imposed on the Palestinians. Usrael expects the Arab puppets to strengthen the Palestinian Karzai and to arm him. The Arab League is going to provide the Arab cover for the imposed final settlement that will go over the heads of the Palestinians since it will abrogate most of the Palestinian rights. In the meantime Israel demands and expects full normalization with all Arab countries represented by the Arab League.

Bush's Zombie Shuffles Off

By TARIQ ALI
CounterPunch

"......A true creature of the Washington Consensus, Blair was always loyal to the various occupants of the White House. In Europe, he preferred Aznar to Zapatero, Merckel to Schroeder, was seriously impressed by to Berlusconi and, most recently, made no secret of his desire that Sarkozy was his candidate in France. He understood that privatisation/deregulation at home were part of the same mechanism as the wars abroad. If this judgement seems unduly harsh let me quote Sir Rodric Braithwaite, a former senior adviser to Blair, writing in the Financial Times on 2, August, 2006:

"A spectre is stalking British television, a frayed and waxy zombie straight from Madame Tussaud's. This one, unusually, seems to live and breathe. Perhaps it comes from the Central Intelligence Agency's box of technical tricks, programmed to spout the language of the White House in an artificial English accent...

Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years--to take the highlights--we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair's total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?..."........"

By Jim Lobe
Asia Times

"WASHINGTON - In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to create a "Rapid Reaction Media Team" (RRMT) designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi "face" for its efforts, according to a report obtained by the independent National Security Archive (NSA), which released it on Tuesday.

The partially redacted three-page document was accompanied by a longer PowerPoint presentation that included a proposed six-month, US$51 million budget for the operation, apparently the first phase in a one-to-two-year "strategic information campaign"......

Both the paper and the slide presentation were prepared by two Pentagon offices - Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which, among other things, specialize in psychological warfare, and the Office of Special Plans under then under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith - in mid-January 2003, two months before the invasion, according to NSA analyst Joyce Battle.....

The PowerPoint presentation called for the RRMT to identify and vet Iraqi media experts and "anchors", and train a group of Iraqi journalists to staff the new networks.

The RRMT should also "identify the media infrastructure that we need left intact, and work with CENTCOM targeteers to find alternative ways of disabling key sites", including, presumably, those media outlets whose messages were not consistent with the themes the Pentagon wished to convey.

"Evidently, the Baghdad headquarters of the Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera was not part of 'the media infrastructure that we need left intact'," noted the NSA's Battle, who pointed to the April 8, 2003, US missile attack that hit the network's Baghdad bureau, killing reporter Tariq Ayoub. The Pentagon had been extensively briefed on the bureau's location before the invasion, and the offices were well marked as a TV facility.

Al-Jazeera's Kabul bureau, which was in a downtown office building, was also destroyed by two "smart bombs" during the US air campaign in Afghanistan in late 2001. In April 2004, during an extended battle covered by Al-Jazeera - for Fallujah, Iraq - President George W Bush suggested attacking the network's headquarters in Qatar during a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to leaked notes of the talks. "

The joys of living in the Iraq that George "liberated," as told by:

Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

".....Convert or else
If you are a Christian and you want to keep living in Dora, you must convert to Islam. Not only that, you must also cooperate with al-Qaeda in Iraq, and must accept al-Qaeda refugees into your house when they are trying to escape hot pursuit. If you refuse, you will be killed.

By some perverted math, al-Qaeda in Iraq has established that if you don't want to convert, you must pay $1,600 per person - plus the assurance that you won't denounce anything concerning al-Qaeda in Iraq's activities. Residents confirm that "some people paid" and are still in Dora. But "some converted"; recently there has been talk of 24 men, six women and three girls who did so. What is certain is that the majority of Christians have left. Amel Zaya paid $7,600 to Jobouri to stay in Dora with her family, and also for "protection". She now runs a restaurant.

So how is the US occupation army reacting to all this madness? The bombastic way. Less than two weeks ago, the Buaitha area of Dora was subjected to an artillery barrage and no fewer than 24 explosions from US Base Falcon - in broad daylight. There's no evidence that al-Qaeda in Iraq has been debilitated by this "tactic" - not exactly the subtlest way to fight confessional cleansing and win hearts and minds. "

Violent clashes in Nablus during 4-hour Israeli incursion; unborn baby shot dead

"Nablus - Ma'an - An unborn baby was killed during the Israeli army's latest incursion into the West Bank city of Nablus last night.

During violent clashes in 'Ein Beit Al-Ma' (No. 1) refugee camp in Nablus city on Thursday at dawn, the Israeli forces opened fire on 7-months' pregnant Maha Muhammad Ri'fat Qatuni, 29, as she was inside her house, causing serious abdominal injuries.

Palestinian medical sources told our Nablus correspondent that an Israeli bullet penetrated Mrs. Qatuni's womb and directly hit the unborn baby's head.

The sources added that, once the Israeli authorities allowed the Palestinian ambulance cars to reach a heavily bleeding Mrs. Qatuni, she was transferred to Rafidia hospital in west Nablus in a critical condition. She underwent an immediate surgical operation.


An eyewitness in Nablus told our correspondent that more than 30 Israeli military vehicles broke into Nablus city after midnight on Wednesday......"

"Bethlehem - Gaza - Ma'an - Palestinian Information Minister Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi has played down the reaction to the news that his ministry has banned the broadcasting of a children's program on Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV because it conveys political messages.

Barghouthi said in conversation with Ma'an that Al-Aqsa TV stopped broadcasting the program itself after they reviewed the program in regards to its message. Barghouthi also denied issuing an order to end the program.

He stressed the need to be cautious when making children's programs so that these programs would not be exploited by bodies that monitor these programs in order to incite international public opinion against the Palestinian people and harm the Palestinian cause......"

Next: Write His Memoirs, Market a Book (Confessions of a Former Poodle) and Appear on 60 Minutes?

It is time we renounce killing masses of people in order to solve international disputes

by Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamad

Global Research, May 10, 2007

"The war in Iraq is getting worse. More and more American soldiers are being killed. Of course Iraqis are being killed in greater numbers.

This war was started by President Bush and supported by Prime Minister Tony Blair. They had lied in order to invade Iraq.

What has this war gained for America and Britain? Nothing except the unnecessary deaths of American soldiers, destruction of Iraq and higher oil prices. There is no democracy in Iraq, for which American soldiers were supposed to die.

Invading a country today does not end in conquest and subjugation of the people. The occupying forces would be continuously attacked by guerillas and terrorists.

War is no longer an option for even the most powerful countries in the settlement of international disputes.

Killing people to achieve a national objective is primitive and barbaric.

Modern wars kill and destroy more.

The majority of those killed are non-combatants; old people, sick people, children and babies.

War makes a mockery of our claims to be civilised, to care for human life, human rights etc.

War reduces us to being brutish animals.

It is time we renounce killing masses of people in order to solve international disputes. It is time we renounce WAR! Defensive war would not be necessary in the absence of wars of agression. Trillions of dollars would be saved as nations scale down their war machines.

I appeal to the American people to reject candidates in the Presidential primaries and election who do not reject killing people, who do not reject war as a policy option for the United States of America.

Elect only candidates who categorically declare they reject war and killing people.

If the United States does this, then candidates in elections in other countries will have to reject war.

Americans – you have a duty to yourselves – you have a duty to humanity at large.

Please do not fail in this moral duty."

Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad

Chairman,

Perdana Global Peace Organisation

By Imad Hajjaj

By Tom Toles

Please Welcome the Gazastan "Army"

"Gaza – Ma'an – Palestinian interior minister, Hani Al-Qawasmi, on Thursday denied that the deployment of the Palestinian security services in Gaza Strip today marked the start of the implementation of a new security plan. Following his meeting with Prime Minister Haniyeh, he stated, "this is a personal effort by the officers, not any more."

He continued, "I have demanded several things from Haniyeh, in order to set the initial steps for the implementation of the security plan."

The Palestinian security services have on Thursday started deploying across the northern and central Gaza Strip, in preparation for deployment all over the Gaza Strip. This suggested that they were beginning to implement the long-awaited security plan, ratified by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Isma'il Haniyeh, who pledged to offer support for the interior minister's execution of the plan.

A Palestinian security source told Ma'an that "the plan will be implemented in stages, to culminate in completely imposing law and order, after controlling the state of chaos, which currently prevails in the streets".

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, added, "The plan started with the deployment of large security forces from the police, the preventive security and the intelligence services, in addition to reinforcements from the national security service in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip. These forces established a joint operation room in the headquarters of the police department in Gaza City"."

***

This is Condoleezza's planned deployment, preparing for the putsch; celebrate, NOW!

Contributed by Datta

"At the latest Doha Debate held at the prestigious Oxford Union in the United Kingdom on May 1st, two-thirds of the student audience approved a motion claiming that Israel's supporters are stifling Western debate about Israel's actions.

The event at the world famous debating society of Oxford University marked the first time the Doha Debates have been held outside Qatar.

The Debate took place amid mounting controversy over the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and accusations that it has suppressed criticism of Israel - a charge that the lobby vigorously denies.

Norman Finkelstein, an American academic and a leading critic of Israeli policies, argued in favour of the motion claiming that the pro-Israel lobby sows confusion to avoid being held to account. The journalist and writer Andrew Cockburn also supported this view, claiming there are "red lines" in discussing Israel that no politician or journalist in the US would dare cross for fear of being demonised or driven out of public life.

Dr Martin Indyk, former US Ambassador to Israel and Director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, argued strongly against the motion, saying that the recent 'firestorms' around President Carter's book and the Walt and Mearsheimer report are proof of a lively debate on the subject . His fellow panellist David Aaronovitch, the British journalist and broadcaster, dismissed accusations of conspiracy around the lobby and said that there simply isn't a lobby in the UK in the same way that there is in the United States.

A group of students from universities and high schools in Doha travelled to the UK to join students from Oxford to question the speakers."

Interview, Flashpoints Radio, 9 May 2007

"EI co-founder Ali Abunimah was interviewed on Flashpoints Radio on Monday, 7 May 2007. He joined host Nora Barrows-Friedman to discuss the persecution of Azmi Bishara, who recently resigned from the Israeli Kenesset and is now effectively living in exile, unable to return to his country. Abunimah told Barrows-Friedman, "The reason Israel announced the investigation when Bishara was outside the country, and then ... announced that he could face the death penalty if he returned, was that Israel wants him out of the country because they do not want the Palestinian community in Israel to be galvanized around the message of democracy, to forge connections with the rest of the Palestinian community -- those in the diaspora and those in the West Bank and Gaza. And Bishara, by far and away, is the key figure that has in recent years been able to do that. So this is an attack on the entire community and it is an attempt to maintain or forestall ... change to the Apartheid system which exists in Israel.""

Click Here to Listen

A Conversation with Norman Finkelstein

By KATHRYN WEBER
CounterPunch

"Norman Finkelstein is the target of a witch-hunt that could cost him his job teaching at DePaul University in Chicago.

An outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights as well as a renowned scholar with a reputation for exceptional teaching, Finkelstein is being considered for tenure at DePaul. He won strong support from the political science department and the personnel committee of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but DePaul's dean refused to back his application for tenure.

Finkelstein's longtime adversary, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, has publicly campaigned against Finkelstein getting tenure at DePaul. DePaul's provost will make his decision before June, and the university president has until June 15, the last day of the quarter at DePaul, to issue his final word.

Students and faculty have come to Finkelstein's defense. Hundreds signed a petition of support, and pickets and meetings were organized to draw attention to the case. Students began wearing armbands this week to show their solidarity, and plans are in the works for a week of support events starting May 21, culminating in a demonstration and town hall meeting on May 24.......

WHAT DO you think the state of academic freedom in the U.S. today?

I'M NOT as hysterical about these issues as other people. Mine is kind of an unusual case, because I don't confine my activity to academia. I speak before large numbers of audiences and I'm a known quantity outside the ivory tower, and so I pose many more problems to the powers that be than most academics.

I could be wrong on this subject, but I don't think that academic freedom is being threatened. There are some cases, but my case is simply unusual because I'm a political activist outside the ivory tower of academia.

DO YOU think that professors have an obligation to engage in political activity?

THEY DON'T have an obligation as professors; they have an obligation as citizens. They have the luxury of devoting their working life to trying to ferret out the facts and the truth about what's going on.

For most other working people, their working lives are devoted to jobs which have minimal levels of personal gratification and have very little to do with mental activity of the sort that creates informed citizens. So since you have the luxury of sitting around and reading books, you do have an obligation as a citizen to pursue and expose the truth."

-- World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure

Democracy Now
With Amy Goodman

"The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein - one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy - has taught at DePaul for the past six years. Finkelstein’s two main topics of focus over his career have been the Holocaust and Israeli policy. We speak to two world-renowned scholars in these fields: Raul Hilberg, considered the founder of Holocaust studies, and Avi Shlaim, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shlaim calls Finkelstein a “very impressive, learned and careful scholar”, while Hilberg praises Finkelstein’s “acuity of vision and analytical power.” Hilberg says: "It takes an enormous amount of courage to speak the truth when no one else is out there to support him."..........

AVI SHLAIM: I am. I was born in Baghdad. I grew up in Israel. I served in IDF. And for the last forty years, I have lived in Britain, and I teach at Oxford. My academic discipline is international relations, and I am a specialist in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

And I think that there is no -- that we must be very careful to separate questions of anti-Semitism from critique of Israel. I am critical of Israel as a scholar, and anti-Semitism just doesn't come into it. My view is that the blind supporters of Israel -- and there are many of them in America, in particular -- use the charge of anti-Semitism to try and silence legitimate criticism of Israeli practices. I regard this as moral blackmail. Israel has no immunity to criticism, moral immunity to criticism, because of the Holocaust. Israel is a sovereign nation-state, and it should be judged by the same standards as any other state. And Norman Finkelstein is a very serious critic and a very well-informed critic and hard-hitting critic of Israeli practices in the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians.

His last book, Beyond Chutzpah, is based on an amazing amount of research. He seems to have read everything. He has gone through the reports of Israeli groups, of human rights groups, Human Rights Watch and Peace Now and B’Tselem, all of the reports of Amnesty International. And he deploys all this evidence from Israeli and other sources in order to sustain his critique of Israeli practices, Israeli violations of human rights of the Palestinians, Israeli house demolitions, the targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants, the cutting down of trees, the building of the wall -- the security barrier on the West Bank, which is illegal -- the restrictions imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and so on and so forth. I find his critique extremely detailed, well-documented and accurate......."

Click Here to Watch, Listen or Read Transcript

The Dick Checking on HIS Deadenders

By Robert Scheer

"As Paul Wolfowitz twists in the wind after being found guilty in a World Bank investigation of public payola to his girlfriend, it does seem that his career might finally be coming to an end. Pity that the Iraq debacle, which Wolfowitz promoted, was not sufficient reason for removing him from public office; instead, President Bush rewarded “Wolfie” with a promotion to head the World Bank. Add him to the rapidly growing list of Bush alums whose career trajectory suddenly plummets upon the disclosure of a pattern of lying obvious to most observers but not to the president himself.

To understand why scum consistently rises to the surface of the Bush administration, it is best to refer to the wisdom contained in the final memoir of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. In an excerpt published in 2006, Vonnegut observed that “George W. Bush has gathered around him ... most frighteningly, psychotic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.” .....

Such rich rewards for folks ostensibly fighting world poverty would not seem troubling to the PPs Vonnegut referred to, as they are suffering from a malady that renders them morally tone-deaf. Citing what he calls the classic medical text on PPs, “The Mask of Sanity,” Vonnegut noted in his “Custodians of Chaos” piece: “Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These are people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

“PPs are presentable,” Vonnegut reminds us, lest we be fooled by their equanimity on talk shows, “they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!” Vonnegut includes the executives who gave us the Enron and WorldCom scandals with the neoconservatives to indicate the malady’s extent......

Then, too, this lying lout will no doubt be rewarded with something similar to the $4-million contract that former CIA Director George Tenet recently received to share a few details of how he went about betraying us."

بقلم د : إبراهيم الحمامي

" في موضوع "إعادة استنساخ" تطرقت وبشكل سريع لأهم نقاط "الفوضى الخلاقة" الأمنية التي يُعد لها وبشكل مستمر ومتواصل رموز أوسلو ممن تلبّسوا ثوب الوطنية والوفاق بعيد اتفاق مكة، استعداداً لمرحلة مقبلة تكون لهم فيها الغلبة ليحسموا آخر خطوات السيطرة على مفاصل حياة الشعب الفلسطيني - أو هكذا يتوهمون - ووعدت بتفصيل الملف الأمني وتوثيقه بالمعلومات والحقائق وهو ما سيكون اليوم بإذن الله.

على مدار سنة كاملة وتحديداً منذ شهر أبريل/نيسان من العام 2006 بدأت خطوات الإنقلاب العسكري الأوسلوي تظهر للعيان، رغم أن الدلائل تشير أن الإعداد بدأ قبل ذلك بفترة ليست بالقصيرة، ووضحت صورة كانت قد غابت عن ذهن البعض، أن المتآمر الرئيسي على هذا الشعب هم عصابة أوسلو، لأنهم وإضافة لكل خطوات الإفشال للحكومة العاشرة من سحب صلاحيات وتذكر منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية فجأة والتلويح بالاستفتاء وحجز الأموال عبر حساب خاص بمحمود عبّاس وغيرها من الأمور المخزية، إضافة لكل ذلك جاء تحركهم العسكري والذي توّج بالمجازر التي ارتكبها حرس عبّاس في غزة في شهر فبراير/شباط من هذا العام والعربدة غير المسبوقة والتي بلغت ذروتها بإحراق الجامعة الإسلامية في غزة.

نقول أن الإعداد بدأ قبل ذلك بفترة ليست بالقصيرة، ولا بد من توثيق ذلك حتى لا يرمى الكلام جزافا، ولنراجع بعضاً مما قاله رموز أوسلو قبل الانتخابات التشريعية الأخيرة - وليس بعدها - استعداداً لمواجهة لم يتراجعوا عنها حتى هذه اللحظة، وهو ما سنثبته أيضاً بالدليل الموثق:

......."

The political ructions of the past week can't hide a progressive resurgence - even in the belly of the capitalist beast

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday May 9, 2007
The Guardian

"It has not been a happy week for the left. The sharpest blow came on Sunday, no softer for being expected. Ségolène Royal's defeat will extend to 17 unbroken years the right's lock on the French presidency. Remarkable this, when you consider France's place in the progressive imagination as the great European bulwark against both globalisation and America's plans for unipolar world domination. Even in France, which stands up to Ronald McDonald and George Bush, the left cannot win.....

But look more closely. Behind those depressing headlines lurk some encouraging signs, hints that progressives might yet have their day again - some of them from the last place you'd expect......

Which brings us to the big surprise. Europeans speak of the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American model as a synonym for turbo-charged, take-no-prisoners capitalism. Yet there are some signs, tentative for now but noticeable all the same, that movement is under way even in the US, inside the belly of the capitalist beast. They come partly in reaction to the ever worsening state of inequality in that country.....

This talk connects to the world beyond America in two ways. First, some inside the US are beginning to see a global picture. A new book, Second Chance by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the cold war hawk who served as national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, includes a startling phrase. No leftist, Brzezinski detects what he calls a "global political awakening", a stirring across much of the developing world, among those who are "conscious of social injustice to an unprecedented degree and resentful of its deprivations and lack of personal dignity". Thanks to television and the internet, the global have-nots can now see all that the haves are enjoying at their expense. The hard-headed Brzezinski sniffs revolution in the air.

The second (and related) impact is on the status of the US as a model to the rest of the world. Last weekend a clutch of political scholars gathered in Oxford for a New York Review of Books conference on "The new face of American capitalism". Several suggested that, thanks to a weakening dollar and a narrowing in the performance gap between the US and Europe, the US model was beginning to lose its shine. The debacle in Iraq had also badly damaged American prestige......."

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"BAGHDAD - This is the 24-square-kilometer theater where a great part of Iraq's future is already being played out; a vital element in US President George W Bush's surge; the place Pentagon generals dream of smashing into submission; one of the largest and arguably most notorious slums in the world: Sadr (formerly Saddam) City.

Sadr City is also, along with Gaza and the West Bank, the theater of the already evolving 21st-century war, pitting the high-tech Western haves against the slum-dwelling Third World have-nots. If the Bush administration had any intention of conquering any hearts and minds in Iraq, this is where it would be trying the hardest. Reality spells otherwise......

The Pentagon is now spinning murky stories of "secret cells" in Sadr City loaded with EFPs (explosively formed penetrators), bombs made in Iran used in most attacks by the Mehdi Army against the US in Sadr City. Residents angrily deny it: they say the Americans are attacking the neighborhood, not the other way around, and they have nothing to do "with the Iranians". The Mehdi Army may have access to these bombs on the black market, but this does not mean they are being armed by Tehran.

The key problem is Shi'ite-Shi'ite violence. The Badr Organization, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and effectively trained by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is now clashing with the Mehdi Army in Sadr City itself. This boils down to a rivalry between eminent families fighting for political hegemony - al-Sadr and al-Hakim (Abdul Aziz al-Hakim heads the SCIRI). The fighting could expand - with horrific consequences. Muqtada has already issued orders for the Mehdi Army to cool down.

As for Amrika, there's no way the US will conquer any hearts and minds among more than half the population of Baghdad. And should the Pentagon go for the much-feared "battle of Sadr City", there will be only one way to yell "mission accomplished": by perpetrating a mass genocide. "

By Patrick Cockburn
Asia Times

"......Some problems facing the US and Britain in Iraq have not changed since Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Getting rid of the Iraqi leader was far easier than finding a successor regime that would not be more dangerous to US interests. It is a dilemma still unresolved more than four years into the occupation......The nightmare for Washington was to find that it had conquered Iraq only to install black-turbaned clerics in power in Baghdad, as they already were in Tehran......

For their part, the Shi'ites have become increasingly suspicious that the US and Britain do not intend to relinquish real control over security to the elected Iraqi government. There were many examples of this. For instance, in the Middle East the most important force underpinning every government is the intelligence service. In theory, the Iraqi government should get its information from the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) that was established in 2004 by the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. But a peculiarity of the INIS is that its budget is not provided by the Iraqi Finance Ministry but by the CIA.

Over the next three years, the CIA paid US$3 billion to fund its activities. During this time it was run by General Mohammed Shahwani, who had been the central figure in a CIA-run coup in 1996 against Saddam that had failed disastrously.

For long periods he was even banned from attending Iraqi cabinet meetings. A former Iraqi cabinet minister, who was a member of the country's National Security Council, complained to me that "we only get information that the CIA wants us to hear". Iraqis did not fail to spot the extent to which the power of their elected government was being trimmed. The poll cited above showed that by this spring only 34% of Iraqis thought their country was being run by their own government; 59% believed the US was in control. The Iraqi government had been robbed of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.

Many Iraqis similarly see sectarianism as the work of the Americans. This is not entirely fair. Sectarian differences in Iraq were deeper under Saddam and his predecessors than many Iraqis now admit. But in one important respect, foreign occupation did encourage and deepen sectarianism. Previously a Sunni might feel differently from a Shi'ite but still feel they were both Iraqis. Iraqi nationalism did exist, though Sunni and Shi'ite defined it differently. But the Sunnis fought the US occupation, unlike the Shi'ites, who were prepared to cooperate with it. After 2003, the Sunnis saw any Shi'ite who took a job as a policeman as not only a member of a different community, but as a traitor to his country. Sectarian and national antipathies combined to produce a lethal brew.

The war in Iraq that started in 2003 has now lasted longer than World War I. Militarily, the conflicts could not be more different. The scale of the fighting in Iraq is far below anything seen in 1914-18, but the political significance of the Iraq war has been enormous. The United States blithely invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam to show its great political and military strength. Instead it demonstrated its weakness.

The vastly expensive US war machine failed to defeat a limited number of Sunni Arab guerrillas. International leaders such as Blair who confidently allied themselves to Washington at the start of the war, convinced that they were betting on a winner, are either discredited or out of power.

At times, Bush seemed intent on finding out how much damage could be done to the US by the conflict in Iraq. He did so by believing a high proportion of his own propaganda about the resistance to the occupation being limited in scale and inspired from outside the country.

By this year, the Bush administration was even claiming that the fervently anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents were being equipped by Iran. It was a repeat performance of US assertions four years earlier that Saddam was backing al-Qaeda. In this fantasy world, constructed to impress American voters, in which failures were sold as successes, it was impossible to devise sensible policies.

The US occupation has destabilized Iraq and the Middle East. Stability will not return until the occupation has ended. The Iraqi government, penned into the Green Zone, has become tainted in the eyes of Iraqis by reliance on a foreign power.

Even when it tries to be independent, it seldom escapes the culture of dependency in which its members live. Much of what has gone wrong has more to do with the US than Iraq. The weaknesses of its government and army have been exposed. Iraq has joined the list of small wars - as France found in Algeria in the 1950s and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s - that inflict extraordinary damage on their occupiers. "

By Imad Hajjaj

Financial Times

"Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian deputy foreign minister who attended last week’s conference on Iraq’s future at Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, has offered Tehran’s co-operation to the US in developing an “exit strategy” from Iraq.

Mr Araghchi on Tuesday said America and Iran had the “same interests” in a stable Iraq and that direct talks leading to a “face-saving withdrawal” were possible with Washington’s goodwill.......

“Their invasion was a disaster – let there not be a disastrous withdrawal,” he said in an interview. “Yes, immediate withdrawal could lead to chaos, civil war. No one is asking for immediate withdrawal of foreign forces. But there should be a plan.”

Mr Araghchi, a career diplomat seen as a potential interlocutor with Washington, insisted the US presence was part of Iraq’s problem.

“Iraq is suffering a vicious cycle. There are foreign forces who have occupied Iraq and justify their presence under the pretext of the ‘war on terror’ and there are terrorists who claim they are fighting occupiers.”......"

Orwellian theories are being acted out in Israel - as persecution against Palestinians begins to echo 1984.

Comment in the Guardian
By Nimer Sultany

"It is one thing to read George Orwell and Franz Kafka, it is quite another to live their texts. For us - Palestinians - Orwell and Kafka are not works of fiction but concrete reality.

Israel's persecution of Azmi Bishara, the prominent Palestinian scholar, head of the National Democratic Assembly and - until recently - member of the Israeli Knesset, is only the recent articulation of this reality. After all, this is not the first Israeli attempt to criminalise Bishara or other Palestinian political leaders. The state hopes that by reframing his political agenda as treason, incitement to violence and support of terrorism, his ideas will lose legitimacy, his community will be intimidated and the establishment will not need to deal with the challenge that the Palestinian citizens of Israel present to the ideology of the state through their demands for equality......

Israel is in effect presenting Azmi Bishara with two similar "options": to end up as either a Kafkaesque or an Orwellian protagonist. The former was executed, the latter was brainwashed and forced to betray his world waiting for an impending execution.

Meanwhile Bishara, as a genuine civil rights leader, is resisting the attempt to drag him into Kafka's Trial by Big Brother and his Thought Police. He courageously holds his ground: "We will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world.""

Joint report with Hamoked - Center for the Defence of the Individual,

Global Research, May 7, 2007

".....admitted that ISA (formerly the General Security Service) interrogators employ "exceptional" interrogation methods and "physical pressure" against Palestinian detainees in situations labeled "ticking bombs". B'Tselem and HaMoked - Center for the Defence of the Individual have examined these interrogation methods and the frequency with which they are used, as well as other harmful practices. The report's findings are based on the testimonies of 73 Palestinian residents of the West Bank who were arrested between July 2005 and January 2006 and interrogated by the ISA. Although it is not a representative sample, it does provide a valid indication of the frequency of the reported phenomena......

"Special" Interrogation Methods

In addition to routine measures, in some cases, probably those considered "ticking bombs", ISA interrogators also use "special" methods which mostly involve direct physical violence. The sample witnesses described seven such methods:

1) Sleep deprivation for over 24 hours (15 cases);


2) "Dry" beatings (17 cases);


3) Painful tightening of handcuffs, sometimes while cutting off blood flow (5 cases);


4) Sudden pulling of the body while causing pain in the hand joints which are cuffed to the chair (6 cases);


5) Sudden tilting of the head sideways or backwards (8 cases);


6) The "frog" crouch (forcing the detainees to crouch on tiptoes) accompanied by shoving (3 cases);


7) The "banana" position - bending the back of the interrogee in an arch while he is seated on a backless chair (5 cases).......

The ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian detainees by soldiers and ISA interrogators do not take place in a void, but rather under the auspices of the Israeli law enforcement system......"

فاضل الربيعي

"يخطئ العراقيون إذا اعتقدوا أن "سور الأعظمية العظيم" هو سور عزل طائفي القصد منه عزل "طائفة بعينها" عن بقية الطوائف، وسوف يخطئون أكثر إذا ما ركزوا أنظارهم على هذا البعُد وحده في المسألة وتناسوا أو أهملوا رؤية الأهداف الحقيقية "ما وراء السور" وهي كثيرة بكل تأكيد......

.....

هل تتذكرون جملة "الأميركيون سوف ينتحرون عند أسوار بغداد؟" التي أطلقها الرئيس الراحل صدام حسين أثناء الغزو الأميركي للعراق، وتوعد فيها قوات الغزو بمواجهة مصير محتوم هو الانتحار؟

لم تكن هناك أسوار في بغداد قط لا أثناء الحرب ولا قبلها. فهل كان الرئيس الراحل عندما وقف ليقول لشعبه إن الغزاة سينتحرون على أسوار عاصمتهم يتخيل مجرد تخيل أن معركته الأخيرة سوف تُخاض عند "بوابات" وهمية وأسوارِ لا وجود لها؟ أم أنه كان يتوقع قيام الأميركيين ببناء أسوار من هذا النوع، وأنهم سوف يواجهون تحت حجارتها العملاقة مصيرهم المحتوم؟

إذا لم يكن الأمر كذلك وهو لا يتعدى نطاق المصادفة وحدها، فهل يحق لنا التساؤل عن مغزى هذه المصادفة؟ ولماذا تخيل أصلا أن في بغداد أسوارا عملاقة سينتحر تحت حجارتها جنود يائسون من اقتحام "القلعة"؟

القليلون فقط، ربما يتذكرون هذه الجملة، وقلة منهم سيخطر لها أن تربط بين سور الأعظمية العظيم وأسوار بغداد؟ في كل الأحوال لن يكترث أحد لا بالأمس ولا اليوم بهذه النبوءة حتى لو صحت. ولكن الجميع مع ذلك سيشعر بالفزع من فكرة تحققها.

لقد انصرفت أنظار بعض المحللين أثناء الغزو إلى أن المقصود منها الإشارة إلى بوابات بغداد القديمة. بيد أن كل ما يتذكره العراقيون عن "أسوار وبوابات بغداد" التاريخية (الأثرية) لا يكاد يتجاوز المعلومات المدرسية الشائعة لأن هذه الأبواب صارت أثرا بعد عين ولم يبق منها شيء يُذكر.

بعض العسكريين العراقيين مثلا (وبعض العرب كذلك) وفي إطار تفسير النبوءة، ارتأوا –آنذاك- أن المقصود من إطلاقها الإشارة إلى مداخل بغداد العسكرية، وأن هذه المداخل ستكون على نحو ما أشبه بالبوابات التي سوف يقتل أو يموت عند أسوارها كل من يجرب اقتحامها؟

لكن ومع دخول الاحتلال عامه الخامس، وبينما يتصاعد الجدل داخل الولايات المتحدة الأميركية حول موعد الانسحاب نهائيا من هذا البلد التعيس؛ فإن على العراقيين ومهما كان رأيهم بنبوءة صدام حسين أو موقفهم من فترة حكمه، التفكير جماعيا بخلاصهم من كابوس العيش داخل "غيتوات" لها بوابات ألكترونية رهيبة سوف يتحكم فيها اليوم جنود؛ وفي المستقبل ستحكم بها من "وراء السور" حراس آليون، من ذاك النوع الذي تخيله مؤلف رواية 1984.

إنه نوع جديد من "الحكام" ونوع جديد من الحراس لأجل نوع جديد من العبيد."

Palestinian attorney general laments lack of executive authority to impose law and order

"......Al-Mughanni called on all the Palestinian security services to cooperate with the general prosecution and to carry out its decisions in order to uncover the assailants and bring them to justice as soon as possible......."

".....In press statements he made Tuesday, Barghouthi asserted that the good news was Kawasmi’s annulment of the resignation, and returning to his job, underlining that the PA unity government is confident in itself and in its ability to break the unjust siege on the Palestinian people.

“There is no talk whatsoever on resignations, early elections, dissolving the PA unity government or disbanding the PA as a whole or any matter of this kind”, Barghouthi further underscored.

He added that although the alternative of the PA unity government would be the eminent collapse of the PA as a whole; yet, he added, there is no intention to reach that point as the PA unity government won’t abandon its responsibilities towards the Palestinian people at all cost......"

The true measure of the overwhelming Iraqi tragedy is that people in Baghdad are now yearning for an ersatz Saddam Hussein. For many, former premier Iyad Allawi is just such a man. "We have cooperation with all national groups," Allawi's spokesman tells Pepe Escobar. What he does not say is that Allawi also has the support of the US.

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

".....Allawi used to be referred to in Baghdad as "Saddam without a mustache". The ex-Ba'athist and former darling of US and British intelligence also became "the butcher of Fallujah" after ordering the massive assault on the Sunni resistance stronghold in November 2004. Not to mention his push against Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's followers in Najaf, also in 2004.....

....To this end Allawi is even talking to the Sadrists. Ibtisan al-Awadi, a former member of Parliament for the Iraqi List, which has four ministers, is the negotiator in charge.

The development is quite surprising, considering the extremely strained relationship between Allawi and Muqtada because of the attack on Najaf. But the fact is nobody at the moment - except for the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Da'wa Party - seems to be supporting Maliki.....

Allawi has been to Saudi Arabia building alliances - unlike Maliki, who has been snubbed by King Abdullah. Allawi travels as much as most Iraqi politicians, who spend most of their time in Cairo, Amman, Damascus or, for that matter, London. Not bad for a hefty US$15,000-a-month salary. During recent festivities, members of Parliament received "gifts" to the tune of almost $60,000 each.

Shabander (Allawi's spokesman) sounded like an Israeli politician when he argued Allawi's point for defending the Adhamiyah wall that is being built by US forces to separate Sunnis and Shi'ites. "This is not a wall; it's a partition barrier that the security forces find useful for controlling who enters and who exits a dangerous zone. It's not an isolated wall. People who are against the wall are just blowing it out of proportion." This "against the wall" crowd happens to include the population of Adhamiyah itself......"

The question is:

Do you support that the Palestinians stop firing rockets in return for increased movement rights for the Palestinians under occupation?

With over 1,100 responding so far, 74% said no.

The lobby argues that good Americans spy for Israel.

by Justin Raimondo

"Is there a First Amendment right to engage in espionage? Dorothy Rabinowitz seems to think so. Describing the actions of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former top officials of AIPAC, the premier Israel lobbying group, who passed purloined intelligence to Israeli government officials, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist characterized them as “activities that go on every day in Washington, and that are clearly protected under the First Amendment.” If what Rabinowitz says is true—if passing classified information to foreign officials is routine in the nation’s capital—then we are all in big trouble.

On Aug. 4, 2005, Rosen, Weissman, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with violating provisions of the Espionage Act that forbid divulging national defense information to persons not authorized to receive it. The indictment traces the treasonous trio’s circuitous path as they met in the shadows—in empty restaurants, at Union Station in Washington, on street corners. Rosen and Weissman sought out and cultivated Franklin, milking him for information that they dutifully transmitted to their Israeli handlers. According to Rabinowitz, however, they were merely “doing what they had every reason to view as their jobs”—which is true, assuming they understood their jobs to be spying for Israel......

Tell not sell: unlike the majority of post-Cold War spies, the AIPAC-Franklin espionage ring wasn’t centered around financial gain but ideology. Franklin is a dedicated neoconservative, a minor yet key player in the neocon network, who served in the military attache’s office in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1990s and was a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst with expertise in Iranian affairs working in Douglas Feith’s policy shop.

The counter-intelligence unit was hot on Franklin’s trail, and they watched his every move—his wholesale transfer of top-secret information on Iran, al-Qaeda, and other intelligence of interest to Israel to Rosen and Weissman, who funneled it to their contacts in the Israeli Embassy. The FBI gave Franklin enough rope to hang himself, and then moved in, showing up at his door and confronting him with his treachery. A search of his home and office turned up a veritable lending library of classified documents dating back years, all of which had doubtless been made available to the Israelis. Faced with the probability of a long prison stretch, Franklin agreed to wear a wire to his subsequent meetings with Rosen and Weissman. In the months that followed, the FBI built its case, recording conversations and following the AIPAC duo......

In light of Judge Ellis’s recent ruling that in this trial the Espionage Act is going to be interpreted narrowly and that the burden is on the prosecution to show that the defendants knowingly harmed U.S. national security interests, the defense might be expected to make a pitch similar to Berenbaum’s—that, instead of prosecuting Rosen and Weissman, we ought to be pinning medals on their chests.

The AIPAC defendants weren’t spies, they were merely ahead of the curve, anticipating the day when a distinction is no longer being made between American and Israeli interests. That is the line we are hearing, as the curtain goes up on the trial of Rosen and Weissman. Whether the jury or the public falls for it remains to be seen."

"The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United States are working with other states in the Middle East to sponsor covert action against Iran, according to a report in this month's edition of The Atlantic. The report also suggests that covert attacks may occur against Iran's oil sector.

David Samuels, in a lengthy article on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East, reports that the US is promoting a campaign against Iran that includes covert action.

Last fall, he writes, "Rice and her colleagues in the administration decided to embark on a daring and risky third course: a coordinated campaign, directed with the help of the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates....The bill for the covert part of this activity, which has involved funding sectarian political movements and paramilitary groups in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories, is said to amount to more than $300 million. It is being paid by Saudi Arabia and other concerned Gulf states, for whom the combination of a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq and a nuclear-armed Iran means trouble."......"

Banlieue-Storming Victory
By Steve Bell, The Guardian

By Mike Luckovich

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Bendib

Mr. Sheridan's Strange Award

By SONJA KARKAR
CounterPunch

"Every now and then, journalists who have shown excellence in their work are rewarded. A prize that recognises their investigative skills and critical thinking is a worthy achievement; a prize that rewards them for using their profession to "conspicuously" support a foreign state in conflict, is not. Rather, it raises questions about their impartiality, good judgment and integrity. Their professionalism can no longer be trusted.

It happened in Australia this past week. Greg Sheridan, billed as "the most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australian journalism" by his newspaper "The Australian" was awarded the annual Jerusalem Prize by the State Zionist Council of NSW. According to its president Frank Levy, "The prize is awarded to someone who fosters and supports the state of Israel and its ideologies, the concept of the Jewish homeland and the Jewish community, particularly in Australia."

Sheridan saw nothing wrong in accepting the prize, but many Australians did.....

For an experienced foreign affairs journalist, Sheridan shows an amazing reluctance to examine the realities of Israel's "democracy" at work. His article relies on the same old and now-debunked myths and arguments that no self-respecting journalist ought to employ. Even if Sheridan is convinced that "Israel is a democracy in good standing" he ought to be asking for whom? Israel has made no secret of its intention to be a Jewish state only, so it is no wonder that Israel's 1.2 million Palestinian citizens ­ the survivors and descendants of the 1948 Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine--see themselves increasingly isolated and alienated from Israeli society. It won't be long before Israel will have to declare its hand: is it "a state of the Jewish people throughout the world" as it defines itself, or a state of all its citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish? Perhaps Sheridan sees this as yet another issue that must be left for Israel's "vibrant, genuine problem-solving democracy" to solve. In the meantime, Sheridan should indeed congratulate himself on the "great honour" of being awarded the Jerusalem Prize for no other reason than having supported Israel so "conspicuously"."

"Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Monday praised a U.S. plan that aims to set the stage for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks by setting a timetable for both sides to take confidence-building steps.

"The American document, which the Palestinian leadership has received, included important steps to achieve security in the Palestinian territories," Abbas was quoted as saying by the Palestinian official news agency WAFA.

The plan, Abbas said, was a first step towards "easing the suffering of the Palestinian people," WAFA reported.

The proposal calls for a timeline for "benchmark" moves, including a crackdown by Palestinian security forces on rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza and an easing of Israeli restrictions on Palestinians.

Palestinian militant groups, however, including the Fatah-aligned Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, urged Abbas to reject it. Israel has also voiced reservations over some aspects of the blueprint.

"The U.S. plan is totally rejected. We urge President Mahmoud Abbas not to deal with it because it aims to satisfy Israel's security and cause internal tension among Palestinians," said Khaled al-Batsh, an Islamic Jihad leader.....

"We want it to be implemented. We hope to see the Israelis implement it," said top Abbas aide Saeb Erekat.....

Abbas, in a meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas in Gaza on Sunday, failed to persuade him to support the U.S. timeline or reach agreement on a division of security responsibilities, an official close to the talks said.....

Hamas, which leads a Palestinian unity government, has also flatly rejected the U.S. plan, under which Abbas would start deploying his Fatah-dominated forces by mid-June to halt rocket fire and smuggling by Gaza militants.

"I do not think that President Abbas lives in isolation from the Palestinian people or that he will take a decision that contradicts the Palestinian consensus, which advocated the right to resist occupation by all forms," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said.

Abu Qusai spokesman of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, said the U.S. proposal "should not even be discussed.""

Dahr Jamail, Electronic Lebanon, 7 May 2007

"BEIRUT, May 7 (IPS) - As reconstruction resumes in the heavily bombed southern Beirut district Dahiyeh, the signs are evident of a rebuilding of resistance against Israel and the U.S.-backed government, largely by way of increased support for Hezbollah.

Hezbollah is leading much of the reconstruction. Dahiyeh was bombed by the Israelis last year because it was seen as a Hezbollah stronghold. At least 15,000 houses were destroyed.

Many local people accuse the U.S.-backed Lebanese government of refusal to help reconstruction in pro-Hezbollah areas like Dahiyeh.....

Foreign donors pledged more than 7 billion dollars in aid and loans at a meeting in Paris in January to help rebuild this nation of four million. Three of the biggest contributors where the United States, France and Saudi Arabia. All three are seen by the opposition as supporters of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, and his allies Saad Harriri and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.

Michel Samaha, who was minister for information 1992-1995 and again 2003-2004, told IPS that Siniora, Harriri and Jumblatt are seeking to strengthen themselves by "having on their ruling agenda the priorities of the United States in Lebanon, the priorities of the Zionists in the United States, and especially the neo-cons in the Middle East."

The anger against such policies is obvious in Shia areas......"

An Important Story

"Khan Younis – Ma'an – The commander of the Palestinian national security in the Gaza Strip, Brigadier Jamal Kayid, announced on Monday that the national forces are in the process of establishing a unified Palestinian army.

The army is intended to comprise soldiers from each of the Palestinian factions, with the national security services as the central command.

Kayid declared that the Palestinian national security services protect the Palestinian national project for the Palestinian people.[Fancy and misleading rhetoric]

He says that the opinion of some Palestinians with regards to the national security service is "narrow-minded, especially considering the sacrifice that so many made as martyrs in the Palestinian struggle."

Kayid added, "Our plan to rehabilitate and train the security services is ongoing and we have accomplished 75% of the amalgamation of the forces."

He urged the security forces to avoid political disputes and affirmed that the "forces are a military establishment representative of all Palestinians".

Kayid commended president Abbas' decision to assimilate the military police, intelligence and liaison into the national security forces, describing the decision as "very wise." "

***

It is obvious that the puppet Abbas has not only accepted the Usraeli plan to trade "relaxation of freedom of movement" for the crackdown on and the crushing of the resistance, but this signals that he will meet Condoleezza's time table. This Palestinian puppet army will next be deployed no later than June 1 and the CIA asset Dahlan will by that date present to Rice his plan for the coming crackdown.

It is going to be a bloody and hot summer, but you still have time to celebrate "Palestinian unity" and to welcome the new "Palestinian army."

With Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem meeting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, relations between the two countries have been turned on their head. The United States' anti-Syria rhetoric is being replaced by the grudging acceptance that Damascus, in cooperation with Saudi Arabia, has a lot to offer on Iraq

By Sami Moubayed
Asia Times

"......Last week's meeting at the Sharm al-Sheikh resort in Egypt to discuss Iraq was a turning point in Syrian-US relations, described by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal as "a new thing that we welcome".

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem met with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last Thursday. It was the first encounter of a US and a Syrian foreign minister since Colin Powell went to Damascus in 2003, and Rice's first encounter with the Syrians since the Bush team came into office in 2001.

Moualem said the 30-minute meeting was "frank and constructive"; Rice proposed that the Americans join the Syrian-Iraqi security committees that have been at work on border security since 2003. Moualem agreed, stressing, however, the need to strengthen political and diplomatic ties between Damascus and Washington, and in restoring a US ambassador to Syria.

His tone echoed that of Rice on several issues, mainly, implementing Maliki's Baghdad security plan, disarming the militias, amending the constitution, and revisiting the de-Ba'athification laws.

Syria proposed a timetable for withdrawal of US troops, but only Iran supported this suggestion, and the final resolution of the conference came out instead with a vague statement saying that withdrawal is conditional on the training of Iraqi troops.

At her press conference, Rice steered clear of any anti-Syrian rhetoric, stressing that the US still has diplomatic ties with Damascus. All press reports confirm that the issue of Lebanon, which aggravates Syrian-US relations at this stage, was not raised by Moualem and Rice.....

In March, European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana went to Syria, embraced the Syrians and offered a set of incentives to bring Damascus back into the international community, on the condition that it cooperates with Europe on Lebanon. Many diplomats and people in the Arab world laugh when the international tribunal is mentioned, saying that it most certainly will - when created - be hollowed out from any anti-Syrian material.

Interestingly, there is a lot of talk in Damascus that US presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton will be stopping by in Syria. This speculation was heightened when Clinton defended Pelosi's visit to Syria in a radio interview. Clinton said the Speaker had done "the right thing", adding, "We have to engage these countries."

Bush, however, said meetings like those of Solana and Pelosi simply "do not work" because they have been tried in the past by US officials. Yet last week it was not the Democrat Pelosi meeting with Assad, it was none other than Rice meeting with Syria's minister of foreign affairs.

And Rice means Bush. Something must have changed in Damascus - and Washington. The answers can be found in Baghdad, and almost equally in Riyadh. The more Syria can offer in Iraq - and cooperate with Saudi Arabia - the more its isolation will come to a grinding halt."

A Lifeline for the People of Iraq??
By Hamed Najeeb

The News Headline: A Belgian Village Refuses to House a U.S. Military Base
The Arab: Look How Stingy These People in Belgium Are; for a Few Square Metres of Land!
By Naser Jafari

"Bethlehem - Ma'an - Former member of Knesset and head of the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom, Uri Avnery, and Israeli historian Dr. Ilan Pappe are to debate "Two States or One State?" in a special public debate organized by Gush Shalom Forum, on Tuesday, May 8, in Tel Aviv.

In a press release published ahead of the debate, Gush Shalom says: "Among part of the Israeli peace activists there is an increasing feeling that occupation and settlement have already passed the point of no return, that for all intents and purposes the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is already one state, and that the only remaining question is whether this single state would be an Apartheid state where one people oppress and trample upon the other, or a democratic state where equality prevails.

"Those who support this position, represented by Dr. Ilan Pape, call for the creation of such a democratic political framework by giving the vote equally to all inhabitants between the Jordan and the Mediterranean on the basis of “One Person – One Vote”. This, in the explicit knowledge that thereby the Jewish character of the State of Israel would be abolished and in its place there would be a state of which all institutions will equally express the interests and aspirations of both peoples.

Ilan Pappe is a senior history lecturer at the University of Haifa and author of "A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples" and "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine." He was quoted on March 11 in the Washington Post as saying, "Zionism is far more dangerous to the safety of the Middle East than Islam." Pappe, who has been consistently persecuted over his "revisionist" stance and his support for a boycott of Israeli academics, is leaving Haifa University later this year to take up the post of chair of history at the University of Exeter in England, UK. In regards to critical comments by Pappe that some Jewish university students in the UK had become "ambassadors of Israel," the London-based The Times Higher Education Supplement quoted Pappe on 6 April as saying, "The Semites who suffer racism today are Muslims, not Jews."


Gush Shalom continues in the press release: "The opposing view, expressed by former Knesset Member Uri Avnery, holds that the situation is far from irreversible, that it is possible and necessary to put an end to the occupation, bring about the creation of a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders living in peace with Israel, make united Jerusalem the capital of both states and dismantle the settlements. Avnery remarks that the great majority of Israeli citizens have never regarded the Occupied Territories as part of Israel, not even after forty years of Israeli rule, and that among both peoples there is a solid majority supporting the implementation of the two-state solution – which is therefore the only one that can be actually implemented."......"

By Juan Cole

"Rightwing nationalist Nicolas Sarkozy, is the next president of France. He campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform that veered uncomfortably close to that of Jean-Marie LePen, though he did make a provision for affirmative action. Sarkozy will try to break the unions, and his view of the immigrants who rioted in 2005 over joblessness as "scum" bodes ill for social peace. An Arab blogger's view of Sarkozy's police tactics is eye-opening.

Sarkozy's message, that he wants to restore pride in Frenchness, wants to promote free market reforms, and worries that France has lost control of its borders all sounds Reaganesque. Just as Reaganism was a form of American ("white") nationalism, so Sarkozyism is a form of French nationalism. And just as Reagan's nationalism had a class location in the upper middle classes and the rich, so too does Sarkozy's "French" nationalism......

Sarkozy's French nationalism (he uses the French equivalent of "France: Love it or leave it!"-- a sentiment pioneered by LePen) will clash with the realities of French multiculturalism. France's Muslims are estimated at anywhere from 4 million on up, but I favor the 4 million figure (the population of metropolitan France is about 60 million, so this is 6.6 percent)......

Sarkozy intends to create an Orwellian "Ministry of Immigration and National Identity." He rubbed the practicing Muslims the wrong way when he came out in favor of the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and he supported banning the headscarf for Muslim school girls......

In his acceptance speech, Sarkozy said he would try to be president of all the French. I hope he meant to include the workers and immigrants. If not, his tenure could be turbulent."

by Michael Schwartz and Tom Engelhardt

"......Ever since, oil has played a remarkably small part in the consideration of, coverage of, or retrospective assessments of the invasion, occupation, and war in Iraq (unless you lived on the Internet). To give but a single example, the index to Thomas E. Ricks' almost 500-page bestseller, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, has but a single relevant entry: "oil exports and postwar reconstruction, Wolfowitz on, 98." Yet today, every leading politician of either party is strangely convinced that the key "benchmark" the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki must pass to prove its mettle is the onerous oil law, now stalled in parliament, that has been forced upon it by the Bush administration. In the piece below, TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz follows the oil slicks deep into the Gulf of Catastrophe in Iraq. He offers a sweeping view of the role oil, the prize of prizes in Iraq, has played in Bush administration considerations and what role the new oil law is likely to play in that country's future.......

It seems clear that what the oil law has the power to do is substantially escalate the already unmanageable conflict in Iraq. Active opposition by the parliament alone, or by the unions alone, or by the Sunni insurgency alone, or by the Sadrists alone might be sufficient to defeat or disable the law. The possibility that such disparate groups might find unity around this issue, mobilizing both the government bureaucracy and overwhelming public opinion to their cause, holds a much greater threat: the possibility of creating a unified force that might push beyond the oil law to a more general opposition to the American occupation.

Like so many American initiatives in Iraq, the oil law, even if passed, might never be worth more than the paper it will be printed on. The likelihood that any future Iraqi government which takes on a nationalist mantel will consider such an agreement in any way binding is nil. One day in perhaps the not so distant future, that "law," even if briefly the law of the land, is likely to find itself in the dustbin of history, along with Saddam's various oil deals. As a result, the Bush administration's "capture of new and existing oil and gas fields" is likely to end as a predictable fiasco."

Iraqis need political reconciliation, not occupation; and U.S. troops shouldn't referee a civil war.

A Los Angeles Times Editorial
(A mediocre editorial, but the trend is encouraging)

"WHATEVER THE future holds, the United States has not "lost" and cannot "lose" Iraq. It was never ours in the first place. And however history will judge the war, some key U.S. goals have been accomplished....

But what now? After four years of war, more than $350 billion spent and 3,363 U.S. soldiers killed and 24,310 wounded, it seems increasingly obvious that an Iraqi political settlement cannot be achieved in the shadow of an indefinite foreign occupation. The U.S. military presence — opposed by more than three-quarters of Iraqis.....

This newspaper reluctantly endorsed the U.S. troop surge as the last, best hope for stabilizing conditions so that the elected Iraqi government could assume full responsibility for its affairs. But we also warned that the troops should not be used to referee a civil war. That, regrettably, is what has happened.

The mire deepens against a backdrop of domestic U.S. politics in which support for the ill-defined mission wanes by the week. Better to begin planning a careful, strategic withdrawal from Iraq now, based on the strategies laid out by the Iraq Study Group, than allow for the 2008 campaign season to create a precipitous pullout......

As Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. war commander, has acknowledged, the solution to Iraq's problems cannot be military. Yet political progress has been backsliding. It was only frantic White House intervention last week that prevented the resignation of the last Sunni leaders in the Shiite-dominated Cabinet of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. The Sunnis say the Maliki government is sectarian, corrupt and incompetent; and they're right. The Bush administration should convene national peace and reconciliation talks as early as possible — say June 1. All of Iraq's parties, tribes, ethnic and sectarian factions, except for Al Qaeda, should be invited to the table.

But an important element needs to be taken off the table: American blood. The U.S. should immediately declare its intention to begin a gradual troop drawdown, starting no later than the fall. The pace of the withdrawal must be flexible, to reflect progress or requests by the Iraqis and the military's commanders. The precise date for completing the withdrawal need not be announced, but the assumption should be that combat troops would depart by the end of 2009.
We are not naive. U.S. withdrawal, whether concluded next year or five years from now, entails grave risks. But so does U.S. occupation. The question is how best to manage the risks.....

First, there is the grim prospect of a bloodbath in Iraq. But the best way to forestall slaughter is political reconciliation, not military occupation. Second is the worry that Al Qaeda will establish a beachhead in Al Anbar. Yet Iraqis have already turned against the foreign fighters. Third, the neighbors may meddle. Alarmists fear an Iranian proxy state in Baghdad; southern Iraq is already allied with Tehran. But Iraq's neighbors are more likely to be helpful once withdrawal is assured, and instability is not in their interests, especially without a U.S. occupier to bleed.

Having invested so much in Iraq, Americans are likely to find disengagement almost as painful as war. But the longer we delay planning for the inevitable, the worse the outcome is likely to be. The time has come to leave."

By Imad Hajjaj

Ottawa’s deal to inspect prisoners shows it hasn’t learned from war history in Afghanistan

by Eric Margolis
The Toronto Sun

"How did Canada, one of the world’s most respected, law-abiding nations, become a party to the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and a violator of the Geneva Conventions?The story begins in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The Soviet KGB created a mirror-image secret police for its Afghan puppet government, KhAD.

Having been pursued by KhAD agents, I can speak with personal knowledge of this subject.....

In 2001, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, allied itself to the Northern Alliance, and overthrew the Taliban. A figurehead, Hamid Karzai, was put in power. Real power, however, was held by the Communist-dominated Northern Alliance.

Once the Northern Alliance took Kabul, the KhAD, rechristened NDS, was quickly re-established. The old Communist torturers and war criminals went back into business.

Today, an estimated 60% of NDS personnel are former KhAD agents. Canadian and U.S. forces fighting to pacify southern Afghanistan have been routinely handing captives and suspects over to the NDS secret police — in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

This dirty secret was finally exposed to Canadians by a major Globe and Mail investigation.....

How did Canada get into this mess? Conservative politicians in Ottawa saw a chance to win new voters by whipping up jingoism in a jolly little war against “evil” Muslims that was supposed to be a slam dunk.

Chest-thumping generals leapt before they looked. The men in Ottawa responsible for getting Canadians stuck ever deeper in this ugly conflict had no knowledge whatsoever about Afghanistan, its tribal politics, or history.

Senior officers and politicians who claim not to have known they were handing over prisoners to the Afghan secret police for torture are either stunningly ignorant or lying......

Canadians who still believe the fairy tale that their forces in Afghanistan are “nation building” or doing social work should reflect on the grim fate of prisoners their soldiers handed over to the mercies of the Afghan secret police.

Ottawa’s deal this week with Kabul for inspection of NDS prisoners is a sham. The KhAD had the same empty “agreement” with human rights groups in the 1980s.

It’s bad enough Canada’s troops are defending Afghanistan’s warlords who run its booming heroin industry. Now Ottawa is hand in glove with the Communist Party’s veteran torturers. Well done, Ottawa."

A Good Piece

By Frank Rich
N Y Times

".....That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war’s creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers’ payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state’s recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch......

Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. “But that statement wasn’t true,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet......

Ms. Rice’s latest canard wasn’t an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up for the president’s outrageous statement three days later. “The decision we face in Iraq,” Mr. Bush said Wednesday, “is not whether we ought to take sides in a civil war, it’s whether we stay in the fight against the same international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11.” Such statements about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive — and no less damaging to our national interest — than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11 connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn’t get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to make the same tragic error twice.....

Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin’s questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn’t recall or didn’t know.

No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice’s Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues “when I have a chance to write my book.” Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on “60 Minutes” but under oath."

Afghan soldier kills 2 U.S. troops

"KABUL, Afghanistan - An Afghan soldier shot and killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded two more outside a top-security prison near Kabul Sunday, a U.S. military spokesman said.

The gunman was shot dead by other Afghan troops at Pul-e-Charkhi prison, 20 miles east of Kabul, said Maj. Sheldon Smith, a spokesman for the Combined Security Transition Command, a body that trains and mentors Afghan security forces.

The Americans were providing external security for the prison when they were shot, Smith said. U.S. and Afghan authorities were trying to determine the motive for the attack, he said.

"All indications are" that the shooter was a member of the Afghan National Army, Smith said......"

"May 5, 2007 - It’s hard to say which is worse news for Republicans: that George W. Bush now has the worst approval rating of an American president in a generation, or that he seems to be dragging every ‘08 Republican presidential candidate down with him. But According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, the public’s approval of Bush has sunk to 28 percent, an all-time low for this president in our poll, and a point lower than Gallup recorded for his father at Bush Sr.’s nadir. The last president to be this unpopular was Jimmy Carter who also scored a 28 percent approval in 1979. This remarkably low rating seems to be casting a dark shadow over the GOP’s chances for victory in ‘08. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds each of the leading Democratic contenders beating the Republican frontrunners in head-to-head matchups.

Perhaps that explains why Republican candidates, participating in their first major debate this week, mentioned Bush’s name only once, but Ronald Reagan’s 19 times. (The debate was held at Reagan’s presidential library.)....."

Bushes Disguised as Palestinian "Presidential Guard"

By Gideon Levy

".....The demonstrators testified as 100,000 witnesses: Israeli society is continuing to look for the lost coin under the lantern, and not in the right place. "We are a flock seeking a shepherd," said the moderator of the event, Osnat Vishinsky, whose son was killed in the Gaza Strip, aptly defining the shepherdless flock of demonstrators that until only yesterday wrapped itself in the silence of the lambs or in cries of "hooray for the war," and was now applauding her words.

What did the masses want? "Olmert, go home." Is this an aim or only a means? And when Olmert goes home, what exactly will happen? Not one word was said about this. The ranks must be maintained. This also applies to the other unifying slogan, "Elections Now." And what will happen after the elections? The opposition leader, Likud MK Benjamin Netanyahu. One Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be replaced by another prime minister who resembles him. Is that what this crowd wants?.....

This protest is just as hollow as the leadership against which it is aimed. Bereaved parents mourned their children from the stage, but no one suggested how to prevent the next war. A mass demonstration that had called for conducting peace talks with Syria, ending the occupation or responding positively to the Saudi initiative is what could have really prevented killing, but this is not on the agenda of this shallow protest. Courage is needed for that, and the masses won't come. "Steaks for the air force but no water, weaponry and ammunition for the infantry," read one placard, expressing the sentiment that was felt here more than anything else: The last war was not managed properly. Had it only been managed properly, had we only killed and not been killed, there would have been no demonstration.

Why, for example, is there no protest against the Israel Defense Forces? After all, the Winograd report, which was cheered here, determined that the chief of staff and the IDF led the government by the nose with false promises about the war. But the IDF stands above any protest. Why? And why is there no protest against the use of war as the first means in Israel's arsenal of responses? Why is there no protest against the destruction and killing we sowed in Lebanon? Or against the image of Israel as a warmongering state that lives by its sword?....."

Iranian parliament bans Al-Jazeera reporters over perceived insults

"Iran's parliament has banned Al-Jazeera television reporters from entering the group's building to protest perceived insults by the network against Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Iran's official news agency IRNA reported Sunday.

The controversy started last week when the Egyptian host of an Al-Jazeera talk show, Ahmed Mansour, questioned Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's leadership credentials and whether he authored his own religious edicts.

The Majlis (parliament) has decided to ban reporters of the network from
enentering until it formally offers an apology over insulting Ayatollah Sistani, IRNA quoted the parliament speaker, Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, as saying.

"We strongly support Shiite clerics, especially Ayatollah Sistani," he added......"

Human rights organization publishes report saying almost all Palestinian detainees suffer physical, mental abuse during interrogations, despite High Court ruling that limits use of violence against prisoners. Group calls on government to ban torture immediately

"The Israeli security forces regularly abuse and torture Palestinian detainees, despite a High Court of Justice ruling from 1999 limiting the use of force in investigations, the B'Tselem human rights group reported Sunday.

Based on the testimonies of 73 prisoners, gathered between July 2005 and January 2006, the report reveals that all detainees suffer different forms of abuse and violence against them while in custody.

Sixty-eight percent of the detainees interviewed for the report said that they were subjected to complete or almost complete detachment from the outside world throughout their interrogation; 64 percent reported that they were held in solitary confinement and experienced sensory deprivation; 54 percent complained of sleep deprivation; 73 percent said that they were withheld food or provided with poor quality food during their questioning. Almost all detainees (96 percent) said that they were kept bound in painful positions; 73 percent complained of being subjected to verbal abuse and humiliation, and 64 percent said they suffered threats such as the arrest of close family members or the razing of their house. The report also revealed that 49 percent of the detainees were beaten and 67 percent reported suffering at least one physical injury.

"It can be stated that the Shin Bet's routine interrogation policy mostly includes violating the prisoners' human rights and the use of measures aimed at breaking their spirit and obtaining information from them against their free will and contrary to what the High Court of Justice defined as fair and reasonable questioning," the report said......"

The PA security forces stand guard during an operation to search for tunnels on the border between Egypt and the southern Gaza strip May 5, 2007. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA)

N Y Times

"ARIEL SHARON wakes up from his long coma in a sweat and says he’s had a terrible nightmare. “What was it?” ask his aides. “I dreamed we were back in Lebanon.”

The bitter joke, which has been making the rounds here since the war against Hezbollah last summer, goes to the heart of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s broken career. For a quarter-century, Lebanon has been the graveyard of Israeli politicians reckless enough to venture there.

Some, like Menachem Begin, never emerged again. That may be the fate of Mr. Olmert......

So Lebanon has become a marker, he said, for “the inability of the Israeli public in general, and the political system in particular, to adapt to the fact that it can’t hold governments and armies to the same standards in Lebanon that it was holding them to before 1982 — before Lebanon.”

In 1982, Mr. Sharon, as defense minister, pressed Mr. Begin into a full-scale attack on the P.L.O. and Yasir Arafat, to deny them Lebanon as a theater of operations for attacks on Israel.

At first, the war went spectacularly well, and Mr. Arafat had to slink off to Tunis. But Mr. Sharon and Israel fell victim to the classic trap of assuming that Lebanon could be restructured to Israel’s liking. The hand-picked Christian president, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated nine days before he was to take office; the initially welcoming Shiites of southern Lebanon revolted against their occupiers. Hezbollah, with the help of Iran, took hold.....

Shai Feldman, director of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University, said, however, that it was easy for Mr. Olmert to be seduced by the claim that “air power alone can do it.”

“That thesis,” Mr. Feldman said, “fell on very receptive ears, and for good reason — because the civilian and military leadership were traumatized by the 18 years in Lebanon.” The half-hearted war, he said, “was precisely the heritage of the demons of Israel’s previous experiences in Lebanon.” "

Minister of education speaks out against calls to dissolve the PA

".......The minister was primarily addressing those who call for dissolving the Palestinian Authority (PA). He says "we have to stop at this point and think of the PA that we want to dissolve. Shall we be like a father, who had several children, and when he became obliged to meet their needs he deserted them?"......"

***

The "minister" is in favor of keeping his position and his privileges so that he may continue "serving the needs of the children." Of course he does not tell us that the PA was created in the Oslo process to primarily serve the needs of the occupation and to relieve it from such burdens. If anything the PA has increased the burdens on the "children."

I say dissolve the farce NOW!

Windbag du Jour: Ziad Abu Amre (the PA's "foreign minister")



"The PA foreign ministry has warned of the "serious repercussions" on stability and security in the region in the event the US-led western economic siege imposed on the Palestinian people persisted......."