$$$$$ Pollsters For Hire $$$$$ We Will Produce The Results You Want Or Your $$$ Back!

"The Centre for Opinion Polls and Survey Studies at An-Najah National University in the northern West Bank city of Nablus issued on Wednesday the results of a Palestinian Public Opinion the centre conducted. In that poll 73.9% of respondents supported handing over the responsibilities of the Gaza Strip crossings to the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas......"

***

The results are phonier than a $3 bill. As it so happened, this $$$"poll"$$$ was supposedly conducted at about the same time that Al-Jazeera (Arabic) had an online poll on the same subject. After 4,000 people had responded to the Al-Jazeera poll, Abbas had received support by only about 11%, a virtual tie with the choice of an international administration of the crossing. Only after a pronounced and directed voting for Abbas by some of the Fatah supporters did his support increase marginally.

Here is the final tally of the Al-Jazeera poll, with 15,584 people responding:

Abbas to run the crossing..............................14.6%
The Haniyyeh government to run the crossing....74.3%
An international administration of the crossing...11.1%

The Pharaoh's Lie Machine Revving Up!

Report: Egypt thwarts suicide terror attack against Israel

"Five Palestinian terrorists carrying explosives belts and reportedly planning a suicide attack against Israel were apprehended by the Egyptian authorities recently in recent days, the Egyptian daily al-Ahram reported Wednesday......"

Bush's delusions die in Gaza

The mass jailbreak of Gazans into Egypt revealed the bankruptcy of both Israel's policy of collective punishment and Bush's attempt to make Mideast peace.

By Gary Kamiya
Salon.com

"......The Rafah breakout shows the limits of Washington's policy of trying to cajole and bully "moderate" Arab regimes into doing our bidding. Right-wing commentators are fond of disparaging the "Arab street," but people power, it turns out, can still make a decisive difference in the Middle East. When popular outrage gets too great, even bought-and-paid-for despots like Mubarak have to yield to it. The situation closely parallels what happened during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, when Israel tried to bomb the Lebanese into overthrowing Hezbollah. The moderate Sunni regimes initially condemned Hezbollah but were forced by public outrage to reverse course, just as Mubarak was......."

Normalizing Air War From Guernica to Arab Jabour

by Tom Engelhardt

".....For those who know something about the history of air power, which, since World War II, has been lodged at the heart of the American Way of War, that 100,000 figure might have rung a small bell.

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War (a prelude to World War II), the planes of the German Condor Legion attacked the ancient Basque town of Guernica. They came in waves, first carpet bombing, then dropping thermite incendiaries. It was a market day, and there may have been as many as 7,000-10,000 people, including refugees, in the town, which was largely destroyed in the ensuing fire storm. More than 1,600 people may have died there (though some estimates are lower). The Germans reputedly dropped about 50 tons or 100,000 pounds of explosives on the town. In the seven decades between those two 100,000 figures lies a sad history of our age.

Arab Jabour, the Sunni farming community about 10 miles south of the Iraqi capital that was the target of the latest 100,000-pound barrage, has recently been largely off-limits to American troops and their Iraqi allies. The American military now refers generically to all Sunni insurgents who resist them as "al-Qaeda," so in situations like this it's hard to tell exactly who has held this territory.

At Guernica, as in Arab Jabour 71 years later, no reporters were present when the explosives rained down.....

From Barbarism to the Norm

The air war is simply not visible to most Americans who depend on the mainstream media. In part, this is because American reporters, who have covered every other sort of warfare in Iraq, simply refuse to look up.


It should be no surprise then that news of a future possible escalation of the air war was first raised by a journalist who had never set foot in Iraq and so couldn't look up. In a December 2005 piece entitled "Up in the Air," New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh suggested that "a key element of [any] drawdown plans, not mentioned in the president's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. … The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what."

After Hersh broke his story, the silence was deafening....."

NATO and Israel: Instruments of America's Wars in the Middle East

by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya

Global Research, January 29, 2008

".....Alarming statements that have been insinuating a looming attempt by Tel Aviv to attack Iran have been made repeatedly since 2004 and have been getting stronger. At the 2008 Herzliya Conference, an annual Israeli conference on national security, John Bolton encouraged Tel Aviv to bomb Iran while mentioning the September 2007 Israeli air strike on Syria as a precedent for another attack. [23] In a state of irony, Ehud Barak started making claims in late-January, 2008 that Iran is in the final stages of manufacturing nuclear warheads while the Israeli government was announcing the success of missiles that carry nuclear warheads. [24]

Paris has also suggested that Israel will start a war against Iran; in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Nicolas Sarkozy stated that the likelihood of Israel starting a war against Iran are far greater than an American attack on Iran. [25] The U.S. Homeland Secretary, Michael Chertoff, has also confirmed that the U.S. would not launch any attacks against Iran in an interview with RIA Novosti. [26]

Iran and Syria have stated that they are ready to protect themselves and would retaliate to any Israeli aggression. [27] All around the Middle East the forces that are resisting foreign control are on alert for some form of Israeli hostility. “If Israel launches a new war against Lebanon, we promise them a war that will change the face of the entire region,” the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has also warned Tel Aviv in anticipation of renewed Israeli aggression in the Middle East during a public ceremony in Beirut. [28]......"

Attempts to Diminish Palestinian Aspirations, by Imad Hajjaj

Recovering Stolen Land Replaced by Recovering an AID Package
Right to Self Determination Replaced by Right to Entry of Food (Juice)
Right of Refugee Return Replaced by Donors Financial Packages

Arab Solidarity

(Click on cartoon to enlarge)
By Khalil Bendib

The 'war on terror' licenses a new stupidity in geopolitics

The language loved by Bush and Musharraf has translated into a global disaster bringing death and misery to millions

Simon Jenkins
Wednesday January 30, 2008
The Guardian

"....To Bush, the "war on terror" is the ruling mantra of his politics of fear. Since 9/11 gave a prop to his weakening presidency, his language has scaled new heights of alarmist rhetoric. It has validated every internal repression and every external war. "He who is not with us is against us," he cries. Terrorists everywhere are "opposing the advance of liberty ... evil men who despise freedom, despise America and aim to subject millions to their violent rule".

As the sociologist Ulrich Beck has written, "properly exploited, a novel risk is always an elixir to an ailing leader". By declaring a threat so awful as to be intolerable, a politician can limit the liberties of a free society in the name of risk-aversion. Musharraf utters hardly a sentence that does not contain the word terror.....

This so-called war on terror has filled the pockets of those profiting from it. It has killed thousands, immiserated millions and infringed the liberty of hundreds of millions. The only rough justice it has delivered is to ruin the careers of those who propagated it. Tony Blair was driven to early resignation. Bush has been humiliated and Musharraf's wretched rule brought close to an overdue end. It may be an ill wind that blows no good, but it is hardly enough."

Passports to progress

Israelis and Palestinians alike should join me in taking dual citizenship - for we share one destiny

Daniel Barenboim
Wednesday January 30, 2008
The Guardian

"I have often said that the destinies of the Israeli and Palestinian people are inextricably linked and that there is no military solution to the conflict. My recent acceptance of Palestinian nationality has given me the opportunity to demonstrate this more tangibly.....

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict there was and still is an inability to admit the interdependence of their two voices. The creation of the state of Israel was the result of a Jewish-European idea which, if it is to extend its leitmotif into the future, must accept the Palestinian identity as an equally valid leitmotif. The demographic development is impossible to ignore.....The total number of Palestinians living within Israel and in the occupied territories (that is, greater Israel for the Israelis or greater Palestine for the Palestinians) is already larger than the Jewish population......

For my part, when the Palestinian passport was offered to me, I accepted it in the spirit of acknowledging the Palestinian destiny which I, as an Israeli, share. A true citizen of Israel must reach out to the Palestinian people with openness, and at the very least an attempt to understand what the creation of the state of Israel has meant to them.

May 15 1948 is the day of independence for the Jews, but the same day is al-Nakba, the catastrophe, for the Palestinians......

In any occupied territory, the occupiers are responsible for the quality of life of the occupied, and in the case of the Palestinians, the different Israeli governments over the past 40 years have failed miserably......."

Blessing in disguise for Hamas

Israel's campaign against Hamas has not broken its resolve or turned the people of Gaza against it

By Azzam Tamimi
(director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought (IIPT), London)
The Guardian

".....A significant outcome of the conference was the endorsement of Hamas as leader of the Palestinian struggle. This is reminiscent of what happened in the late 1960s when, after the Karamah battle in the Jordan valley in August 1968, the Arafat-led Fatah movement rose to prominence, took over the leadership of the PLO and gained recognition from Palestinians and Arabs alike as the legitimate leader of the struggle against Israeli occupation.....

Having shunned Hamas for months, both Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now keen to work with the movement to resolve the crisis. Egypt has invited Hamas and Fatah to Cairo for talks and Saudi Arabia invited Khalid Mish'al, Hamas's political bureau chief, to Riyadh where he has had talks with top officials. The primary concern for all parties now is restoring order to the borders between Egypt and Gaza......

The Egyptians know well that if their borders with Gaza were breached once they could be breached many times more should the population of the strip continue to be subjected to sanctions and forced to act in this way. They know well too that Hamas is in charge and that nothing could be done without its involvement. They do, however, wish to see Mahmoud Abbas involved so as to bestow some form of "legitimacy" on what they do......

If - and when - it happens Hamas would be willing to enter into a medium or long-term truce depending on what Israel is willing to give back to the Palestinians. In the meantime, whatever Israel resorts to in order to weaken Hamas is only likely to strengthen it further. This has been the trend since the summer of 1988 that saw the first major mass detention campaign against Hamas by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza. "

Power of the people

Nada Elia writing from US, Live from Palestine, 29 January 2008

".....And even as I am writing this, news comes in that Israel has killed Mohammad Harb, the Gaza leader whose forces blew up sections of the wall, allowing Palestinians to stock up on essentials. Harb paid with his life for the temporary freedom of my people, the people who democratically elected him as their representative, despite immense pressure from Israel and the US to "elect" a peon of the occupation. So I do not want to forget. Harb was the people's choice, and it is people power that brought the wall down.

And that is one model we can all emulate, wherever we are. If disenfranchised Palestinians could bring down a wall constructed by the region's most heavily-armed nuclear power, backed by the world's uberpower, then all oppressed peoples, everywhere, can do it too.

Today, for a brief moment, it feels great to be Palestinian."

A break in the siege

Osamah Khalil, The Electronic Intifada, 29 January 2008

".....Walking the length of the now partially demolished Rafah wall one is struck by two contrasting and competing realities. On the one side lies the sliced and twisted remnant of Israel's siege policy backed and underwritten by Washington, a clear demonstration that a people can only be suppressed and oppressed for so long. On the other side is the human cost, the over 3,000 houses demolished by Israel in plain view of the world, as they built the wall in preparation for their "withdrawal" from Gaza.

The remnants of those houses remain, creating a vast moonscape of blasted concrete and sand, roughly a kilometer wide and several kilometers long. My friend Fida, a teacher and blogger from Rafah, points out where her house once stood, as well as those of her grandfather, grandmother, uncles, aunts, and other relatives. Beyond the sea of demolished houses are those still inhabited but riddled with bullet and shell holes, some dating from the beginning of the second intifada in 2000 and others more recent. Her young cousin Walaa explains, "this is our life," and it sums up both realties....

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's policy of punishing Gaza while "rewarding" the West Bank with aid and attention, while still supporting Israel's occupation of both with even greater aid, is now in tatters. Moreover, the renewed peace process, which has yet to demonstrate a single improvement in the lives of Palestinians in spite of the claims of some delusional and self-serving proponents, will now be under even greater pressure to show results......"

Hamas is not the real issue

Israel's strategy in Gaza is about showing the Palestinians who is in control and lowering their expectations

By Neve Gordon
The Guardian

Contributed by Lucia in Spain

".....The experiment in Gaza is, in other words, not really about the bombardment of Israeli citizens or even about Israel's ongoing efforts to undermine Hamas. It is simply a new draconian strategy aimed at denying the Palestinians their most basic right to self-determination. It is about showing them who is in control, about breaking their backs, so that they lower their expectations and bow down to Israeli demands. The Palestinians understood this and courageously destroyed their prison wall while crying out into the wilderness for international support. Instead of the expected outrage, the only response they received was a weak echo of their own cry for help."

Finally, a popular uprising

By Amira Hass

Contributed by Lucia in Spain

"The fall of the Rafah wall was a fitting combination of planning and the precise reading of the social and political map by the Hamas government, mixed with a mass response to the dictates of the overlord, Israel.

Quite a few people in Rafah knew that "anonymous figures" had secretly been destablizing the foundations of the wall for several months, so that it would be possible to knock it down easily when the time came - but the secret didn't leak. The hundreds of people who began leaving Palestinian Rafah right after the wall was breached did so despite the risk, and the precedent of the Egyptians shooting at those who infiltrate through the border.

The leadership and public of Gaza, as two elements of the occupied people, were partners in the courageous and necessary step of breaking the Israeli rules of the game. The breach of the wall is a clear manifestation of the conception and temperament of a popular resistance among the Palestinian people, which for various reasons, were dormant in recent years.....

No wonder. Then, like today, Israel worked to heap privileges on senior Palestinian Authority officials and their associates, granting them some freedom of movement. The officials publicly condemned the restrictions on the movement of the general public, while submissively accepting their privileges. Therefore, their political imagination was unable to provide practical plans of action against the separation of Gaza from the West Bank, and against the reality of incarceration faced by the majority of their people....

This boycott contributes to the severance that Israel works so diligently to intensify. The longer the delay in direct talks between the two leaderships over practical ways of lifting the siege of Gaza, the greater the concern that indeed, as Hamas officials argue, the Ramallah government listens to the United States and to Israel - but not to the will of its own people."

Hamas demands border control role

Al-Jazeera

"Hamas has said that it must have a role in the control of the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza, and that old arrangements are no longer valid.

That has caused rising tension between Hamas and Egypt, and little hopes for a breakthrough during crucial meetings on Wednesday.

Egyptian leaders will hold talks in Cairo on Wednesday with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, as well as Hamas leaders.

Israel, on the other hand, says it will not oppose a deal that would see the Palestinian Authority (PA) of Abbas take control of Rafah, according to officials....

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, strongly criticised on Tuesday the idea of returning to the 2005 border arrangements.

He said the idea was "an international Israeli conspiracy, in which some regional elements and Ramallah [Fatah] are participating".....

Meanwhile, tensions along Gaza's frontier with Egypt flared again on Tuesday when Egyptian forces tried to prevent Palestinian vehicles from driving into Egypt.

Hamas fighters intervened, firing into the air to clear the way for the cars to pass.

They threatened to blast open new holes in the border if Egyptian forces refused to back down.

Egyptian forces strung barbed wire along some of the gaps between two gates leading into the Palestinian territory, while riot police were deployed on roads from Rafah to the border crossings.

A security force of around 20,000 has been deployed in north of the Sinai peninsula since Saturday, an Egyptian source told the AFP news agency."

The Surge in Gaza

By Natasha Mayers - Common Dreams

Medical supplies in Gaza running low

Report, The Electronic Intifada, 29 January 2008

"JERUSALEM, 28 January (IRIN) - The Israeli-imposed restrictions on imports to the Gaza Strip are threatening the lives of vulnerable patients, the Oxfam aid agency has said.

"Oxfam International is gravely concerned about the life and safety of the civilian population residing in the Gaza Strip," Oxfam's director said in a statement on 25 January.

"In Shifa hospital in Gaza city, 135 cancer patients are currently unable to receive treatment due to the lack of basic medications," Oxfam said....."

Hamas Warns of Israeli Conspiracy over Rafah Crossing

Al-Manar

"29/01/2008 Islamic Resistance Movement of Hamas has dismissed as an Israeli-led conspiracy PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's proposal to deploy his own, Western-trained forces at the Rafah crossing along with the EU monitors.

Palestinian Authority said Monday that it had reached a deal with Egypt to take control of the Gaza border. Hamas spokesman Sami Abu-Zuhri dismissed the proposal, calling it an "Israeli-led international conspiracy with the participation of some regional parties" which would exclude them from controlling the border. "We tell all parties that we will not allow the return of old conditions at the crossing," Abu-Zuhri said.

Interim Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad asked Hamas not to "interfere", saying "they should just simply get out of the way and allow this to happen''.

In Rafah, however, it was Hamas forces that were very much in control, working closely with Egyptian border guards and riot police to seal one of the three breaches and organize traffic at the other two. "There has been continuous and direct cooperation with Egyptian security officials over the last couple of days,'' said a Hamas security official. "They asked us to only allow trucks to enter and not civilian cars to make the operation as orderly as possible".

Hamas insists on having a say in the administration of the border, the opening of which has given it a tremendous lift among inhabitants of Gaza who have been sealed off from the outside world for the past two years. "Hamas affirms that the time of (Israeli) siege is over, and it will not allow any party to bring back our people to the cage,'' Abu Zuhri said.

Taher Nunu, another Hamas government spokesman, earlier said that "no one can exclude the (Hamas) government here from the crossing arrangements or any other issue. This is the legitimate government''.

Some form of agreement on who controls the border may come on Wednesday when a Hamas delegation will hold separate meetings with Egyptian officials in Cairo. A delegation of Hamas, representing the Islamic movement's politburo Chief and the government based in Gaza, will visit Egypt Wednesday for discussions over border crossing points, the Hamas spokesman said Monday. "The visit comes upon an Egyptian invitation and following contacts between the movement and the Egyptian leadership," Abu Zuhri said.

Representatives of the Palestinian Authority will not participate in the talks because they refuse to deal with Hamas. Abbas plans to run Gaza crossings but excluding Hamas in the process. Abbas' plan adopts a US-brokered deal, signed in November 2005, to open Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt borders with European Union monitoring as the third party and pro-Abbas security services taking control of the Palestinian side of the passages.

But Abu Zuhri said his movement endorses "a new mechanism and new arrangements to open the crossing," stressing that the international agreement on Rafah "was something from the past." "What we need is a Palestinian-Egyptian crossing point... Hamas will present its vision in this regard to Egypt," Abu Zuhri added. "

Popular front man

Unjustly notorious for his PFLP's plane hijackings, George Habash gave vital inspiration to the secular democratic strand of modern Arab politics

By Karma Nabulsi
The Guardian

"......An eyewitness to the ethnic cleansing of tens of thousands of people from his home town of al-Lydd in July 1948, and who was transformed forever by that unhealed event to serve the cause of his people for six decades, Habash provides an essential lesson to Palestinians today. The flourishing of more than one political party in the national arena remains the guarantor of not only democracy, but the proven engine for achieving independence - as long as those parties are driven by principle and not simply a desire for power. A colleague visiting Habash in hospital shortly before he died told him how young Palestinian men from a different political party had just destroyed the walls of Gaza in an audacious act, setting free nearly 2 million people from their intolerable imprisonment. George Habash smiled cheerfully and said: "You see the day will come when these borders will fall and Arab unity will be achieved."

Lucretius celebrated these unforgettable "vitai lampada", the torchbearers who bring new hope to us in each generation, "like runners passing on the lamp of life"."

The state of the (Iraqi) union

By Pepe Escobar
Asia Times

"....Occupied of the world, unite
As the occupation/quagmire slouches towards its fifth year, it's obvious the US cannot possibly "win" the Iraqi war - either on a military or political level - as Republican presidential pre-candidate John McCain insists. Sources in Baghdad tell Asia Times Online if not in 2008, by 2009 the post-"surge" Sunni Arab resistance is set to unleash a new national, anti-sectarian, anti-religion-linked-to-politics offensive bound to seal what an overwhelming majority of Iraqis consider the "ideological and cultural" US defeat......"