Category: Israel

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While we wait …

And watch and listen …

Our national politics, let alone our international political predilections are nearly too sickening at present for words anyway. While the rodent postures and preens over indigenous causes which he has patently ignored for 10 years, he is touting devious plans to allow forced entry to aboriginal communities – cornucopia for mining interests? He is preparing for the campaign of his miserable ratty existence, the outcome of which despite the woeful Liberal polling is by no means assured.

Little Johnny’s immoral counterparts and allies, the terrorist state of Israel and its bevy of international cowering zealot minions with their individual imperial ambitions, piously condemn the popular democratically elected so-called ‘terrorist’ government of the overly occupied terrorities in favour of their now allies of convenience, the terrorist Fatah brigades. Terminally blinkered Western proponents of democracy thus are seen to regard democratic governments as legitimate if they undemocratically support policies which their electors patently do not.

There is a reason the people threw out Abbas’ Fatah party in last year’s election. Palestinians see the leading Fatah politicians as unimaginative, self-serving and corrupt, satisfied with the emoluments of power. Worse yet, Palestinians came to realize that the so-called peace process championed by Abbas (and by Yasser Arafat before him) had led to the permanent institutionalization — rather than the termination — of Israel’s 4-decade-old military occupation of their land. Why should they feel otherwise? There are today twice as many settlers in the occupied territories as there were when Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat first shook hands in the White House Rose Garden. Israel has divided the West Bank into besieged cantons, worked diligently to increase the number of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem (while stripping Palestinian Jerusalemites of their residency rights in the city) and turned Gaza into a virtual prison.

Divide and conquer the good old colonialist way – again, for the umpteenth disastrous time since the Zionist invasion, when the Zionists first introduced terrorism to Palestine. Is As’ad from the Angry Arab News Service too optimistic when he declares:

The Palestinians need a new political organization: neither Fath nor Hamas. NOW.

As’ad also points out that

A new poll among Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank reveals the obvious: that most Palestinians are neither for Fath nor for Hamas: more than 40% of Palestinians indicated that they are “independent”.

United Stupids Suicide bomber barbieYet even if there was an alternative political force, it would be nanoseconds before the Israeli government stereotyped them as terrorists in order to engineer the obligatory, traditional nobbling of peace initiatives, so their land thieving on the West Bank and breaches of international law could continue behind the usual smokescreen of convenient, manufactured ‘beleaguered’ victimhood.

As Jeffery Sachs observes:

For the past 10 years, the greatest practical barrier to peace has been Israel’s failure to carry out any true withdrawal to its 1967 borders, owing to the political weight of hundreds of thousands of settlers in the West Bank and the religious and secular communities that support them. This remains the crucial truth; the rest follows as tragedy. Even when the US or Israel have tabled peace offers, such as at Camp David in 2000, they have included convoluted ways to sustain the West Bank settlements and large settler populations, while denying an economically viable and contiguous Palestinian state.

Sachs fails to note that inevitably it is the enabling activities or lack thereof of the Israeli government which have bolstered the continued thievery and oppression. At all times, it has been within the power of that democratically elected government to restrain its extremists and to act within the ambit and intention of UN Res 242 in order to obtain peace.

Continue reading “While we wait …”

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In no uncertain terms

What will be the repercussions from today’s revelations from the internationally respected Red Cross that

Israel is using its rights as an occupying power under international law “in order to further its own interests or those of its own population to the detriment of the population of the occupied territory”.
With the the separation barrier, the establishment of an outer ring of Jewish settlements beyond the expanded municipal boundaries, and the creation of a dense road network linking Israeli neighbourhoods and settlements in and outside Jerusalem, the report says, Israel is “reshaping the development of the Jerusalem metropolitan area” with “far-reaching humanitarian consequences”.

Given the stranglehold the Zionists have on western governments, media and public opinion, and although there are signs that the support Israhell has enjoyed for its reprehensible activities are waning, probably very little.

As usual, Israhelli officials obsfucate, deny culpability, refuse to admit the validity of international law in regard to return of territories seized via warfare, and thumb their noses at warranted criticism.

Israeli officials rejected the premise that Jerusalem was an occupied territory. “It is not. Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and offered full citizenship at the time to all of Jerusalem’s residents. These are facts that cannot be ignored,” a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Mark Regev said.

Israel was “committed to a diverse and pluralistic Jerusalem, to improving the conditions of all the city’s inhabitants and to protecting their interests as part of our sovereign responsibility”. He added: “If any population in Jerusalem is thriving and growing, it is the Arab population.”

Demographic facts on the ground in Jerusalem are likely to inpinge on Zionist control soon. There are also positive signs that even United Stupids dignatories are disapproving of Israhell’s past crimes in the area.

Ambassadors from European Union states are to boycott celebrations of the 40th anniversary of Israel’s conquest of Arab East Jerusalem this week – in the opening shot of what promises to be a challenging summer for Israeli diplomacy.

The United States ambassador, Richard Jones, is also expected to join the Europeans in snubbing the celebrations .

What Israelis commemorate as the “reunification” of their historic Jewish capital is seen by most of the international community, not to mention the Palestinians, as a unilateral attempt to pre-empt a key issue in any peaceful solution. One-third of the city’s 725,000 residents are Palestinians, who have opted to reject offers of Israeli citizenship. Along with most other countries, the Europeans keep their embassies in Tel Aviv.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian parliament, yesterday welcomed the European boycott as a blow for international law and peace. “The Israelis,” she said, “cannot get away with creating facts on the ground and then forcing everybody to fall in line”.

[Thanks to Antony Lowenstein for the above two links.]

There can be no doubt that Israhell is willing to continue to run the gauntlet in order to cling to lands it has misappropriated, that further oppression in order to accomplish this is still the primary modus operandus of the Zionist apartheid state. Such intransigence, of course, will not bring about conditions to promote a peaceful outcome for the region. Peace would mean compromises. On past performances, Israhell is unlikely to give an inch – to do so might initiate a collapse of its whole unsavoury, colonialist edifice.

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Shattered

MotherLeaves from the past swirl about my shattered country

Phoenician glass cuts deep
within the wall to end all walls
My heart is occupied with grief of ages

Living when there is no hope
too hard to bear
the purple calling in my body is despair
my womanhood, logic and future denied

Oppressor and oppressed bound
and bloodied by hate

Like a beautiful, fragile tea set, the elegant device she’d made lay upon the table. Amirah scooped it up peremptorily, for it was deceptively sturdy, fastening the webbed belt about her body beneath her loose cotton blouse.

Plenty of time. Into her pocket she placed her folded poem, hoping to finish it on the bus during the interminable hot, angry checkpoint waits. The guards knew her well, they would smile lewdly at her and joke about her flashing dark eyes.

‘Amirah, princess of the territories, give us a kiss’, they would laugh, swaggering with their Utzis.

At first she ignored them, yet later, as her plan evolved, she would smile shyly in return, to build their trust. After months, they would not search her, even when all others were pried and poked when the enemy rampaged in revenge.

For three years following her degree’s completion, she had settled for a menial maid’s job in Tel Aviv, studying for her PhD in physics at night and weekends, her ticket to freedom – perhaps even to America. Then her mistress’s husband began to seek her out. One afternoon while the mistress was out with her rich, gossiping socialite friends, he had forced her to the bed and taken her. She had to trash the sheets and endure a scolding after she told her mistress she had burnt them whilst ironing.

And then, her uncle was captured, implicated in a tunnel building project to smuggle in food and medicine to the sanctioned, beleaguered city. The enemy had arrived at her parents’ home and bulldozed it whilst she scrubbed the enemy’s pots in the pretty modern villa by the glistening sea. Gone were her thesis notes and her computer, buried in the pitiful rubble of their lives. Her wise grandmother was nearly killed by the cruel, inexorable blades, hounded and taunted by the soldiers as she fled, hobbling down the street. The oppressors had everything except peace. Amirah wondered if they had ever really wanted it.

At university, Amirah had spoken against violence.

‘We are bound by violence, we are chained by it to them and we must break the cycle,’ she argued. ‘Resistance is legitimate under international law, yet violence will not work. They use it against us. Don’t you see?’

She had not despaired, although her brother still walked with crutches from the blows he received from the enemy when five years old. A stone he’d thrown at a tank missed and hit a soldier. With an education, she would be able to pay for him to walk again.

Nearly everyone had lost a relative, or knew of a house that had been crushed, sometimes with people still inside. The collective punishment was a brutal, never-ending scourge. What else was there to do but fight, to wear the enemy down with a despairing reaction to the oppression, to never let them know security whilst they denied it to others. Responsibility was never taken by the powerful and the weak were blamed for objecting to their punishment, justifying more delays for peace settlements, more land thievery for more enemy settlements and their hideous ghetto wall.

Amirah did not know whether the wall was to keep the horror in, or to keep it out. After her parents’ house was demolished and her future along with it, she too saw horror everywhere.

Amirah left her flat and caught the bus. The guards winked at her at the checkpoint.

‘How are your studies, Amirah?’ ‘When are you going to America, Amirah?’

Amirah smiled at them, her tears held captive by resolve. Today at the final checkpoint, it was a short wait, a miracle.

Palestinian women protestThe ancient bus lurched its winding way to the leafy, well-to-do suburb by the sea. She walked to the plaza and sat on a bench. Amirah pretended to examine something in her satchel as she set the timer.

Within, she could feel the enemy’s baby move, and she gasped. From her pocket, she took the half-finished poem, scrutinising it carefully before screwing it into a ball and tossing it behind the bench. Tears threatened to erupt, and Amirah clenched her fists. Not long to wait now.

‘You dropped something’, a kindly voice spoke in the enemy’s guttural tongue.

‘It’s nothing,’ she replied, ;just a poem’.

‘May I read it?’ The interloper was a young pregnant woman in her late twenties or early thirties, with a guitar strung across one shoulder. She flattened the sheet and began to read.

‘It isn’t finished’.

‘I know,’ said Amirah. ‘I can’t think of an ending. It makes me too sad.’

‘It is very good, perhaps we can finish it together?’

‘But you are the enemy,’ Amirah whispered. Two minutes and there would be no more broken promises, no more fear and hurt.

‘I’m Danish, here to study archaeology.’ The woman smiled.

Amirah looked at her, saw unexpected warm eyes and her heart leapt.

Then she thought of her unfinished poem and in a blazing torrent, unannounced, the final words came.

Even in the silence of the desert
my soul knows no peace
it must walk this land forever,
free, yet within your reach
where you are not my enemy
and revenge is washed away
by joy.

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Saudi King lectures the Coalition of the Gobbling

True Love of Oil, Profits and Israel

At a two day summit in Riyadh aimed at pushing the Arab peace plan for Israel and Palestine, in a significant about face, the Sauds have rounded on the incompetent Coalition of the Gobbling warmongers.

Saudi King Abdullah, whose country is a close US ally, slammed Wednesday the “illegitimate foreign occupation” of Iraq in an opening speech to the annual Arab summit in Riyadh.

“In beloved Iraq, blood is being shed among brothers in the shadow of an illegitimate foreign occupation, and ugly sectarianism threatens civil war,” Abdullah said.

He also said that Arab nations, which are planning to revive a five-year-old Middle East peace plan at the summit, would not allow any foreign force to decide the future of the region.

What will be the reaction of the United States to such impudence? The original neocon plan called for the transformation of the middle east using Saudia as a pivot to democratise the region, with Egypt the eventual prize. Saudia is thus throwing a big spanner in the works by projecting its power and biting the hand that feeds it.

Saudi leaders are keen to promote the beleaguered Sunni cause in Iraq, which is presently endangered by overwhelming Shite power, including within the Shite dominated and United States’ backed puppet Iraqi government. The summit is expected to adopt a resolution calling for more power sharing with the former Sunni elite.

The Iraqi government has immediately dug in its heels, telling the Sauds they

did not need a “diktat” from the Arabs on how to amend its constitution and boost national reconciliation.

The Arab League wants to resume negotiations with Israhell, offering normalisation for acceptance of terms including withdrawal of all land occupied in 1967, the creation of a Palestinian state and return of Palestinian refugees.

Despite mutterings from Israeli officials about the Arab plan being a “starting point”, it is likely that rightwing Israeli zealots who, with the support of Doodoo bush and the Israel first lobby, will insist on retaining lands they have stolen through warfare. Acceptance of the right of return of refugees driven from their land in the Nakba catastrophe in 1948 is seen by the Israeli rightwing, religious nuts and fanatical settler movement as tantamount to destruction of their pariah apartheid state, despite the clear legal basis for such return under international law.

At the summit, Hamas is calling for an end to the western boycott of Palestine and is seeking financial support from the Arab states to the tune of $2.7b.

Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud Al Faisal projected firmness, warning Israel

not to expect any further diplomatic overtures, telling a British newspaper: “What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done.”

“If Israel refuses [the plan], that means it doesn’t want peace and it places everything back in the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers, but in the hands of the lords of war.”

And that, my friends, will suit the Netanyahooites and religious zealots down to the ground, to the detriment of Israel’s future security and prosperity.

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Coalition of the Gobbling vs Iran V11

Hate in mediaThe United Stupids are now pushing for more pressure against Iran in the UN Insecurity Council, while

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator again signaled that Tehran would be willing to engage in “constructive and logical” negotiations with the United States.

Additionally

Iran’s proposal to cap its enrichment at very low levels may be winning some support in Europe.

This is not enough apparently for the Coalition of the Gobbling, who want complete suspension of enrichment. There is a distinct possibility that the United Stupids and United Kooks are choosing precisely the same deliberate path of deception which led to their illegal invasion of Iraq.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reiterated this weekend that she would negotiate with Mottaki as soon as Iran had suspended enrichment.

Iran is not in breach of the NPT – and even the US does not claim it is. The US claims rather that Iran is untrustworthy, and therefore should be denied the rights it has under the treaty.

Like all non-nuclear weapons signatories, Iran maintains the right to have access to nuclear technology, to build nuclear power plants, and to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.

Hans Blix, the last weapons inspector in Iraq before the illegal invasion, warns that

“humiliating” Iran over its uranium enrichment could spawn intransigence. “It’s an observation I’ve made before regarding Iraq,” he told reporters in New York today.

“Why did the Iraqis behave as they did in the 1990s (and) send away the UNSCOM inspectors and close the door to them?” he asked, referring to the UN Special Commission mandated to inspect Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War.

“One element was ‘humiliation’,” he said. “It was not rational of them to stop the inspections, it really worked against their own interest and yet I can see that the humiliation, the fury, was such that they said, ‘To hell with it’,” said Blix.

Iran does not have the capacity at this time to produce nuclear weapons and such capacity by all authoritative sources is years away. The UN’s nuclear watchdog (IAEA) continues to call for de-escalation of the rhetoric and reliance on negotiations, and has reported that there is no evidence of nuclear weapons production.

Israel on the other hand has an arsenal of 200-400 nukes, a threat to the rest of the region for decades. There are no guarantees that at some point in the future, religious and/or political fundamentalists won’t be in power in Israhell. At present, in its continued violation of international law in regard to its occupation of Palestine and Syrian territory, Israel remains an extreme provocation to its neighbours to develop nuclear parity, and if not nuclear parity, chemical or biological weaponry for deterrence.

On several occasions since 1974, countries in the region lobbied in the UN for the Middle East to become a nuclear weapon free zone. The only dissenting voice was Israel. If we are to have peace in the world, and especially if we are to avoid a nuclear holocaust, there must be a universal, not a selective, commitment to the rule of law and international security.

It is important to stress that it was the United States which first introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East starting in 1958 and has continued to bring tactical nuclear weapons on its planes and ships ever since.

Other countries in the Middle East which are predominantly Sunni, including the fundamentalist Saudi tyranny, are not keen on Iran becoming a dominant power in the region either. The United Stupids and Israhell have both met recently with Saudia, (and so has Iran). With the demonisation of Iran by United Stupids, United Kooks and Israel in full swing, Israhell and the neoziotards are palpably keen for the Coalition of the Gobbling to do the dirty work, with the main impetus coming from AIPAC.

Israeli Defense Force chief artillery officer Gen. Oded Tira has griped that “President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran,” adding that since “an American strike in Iran is essential for [Israel’s] existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iran issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure.” Tira urges the Lobby to turn to “potential presidential candidates … so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran,” while Uri Lubrani, senior advisor to Defense Minister Amir Peretz, tells the Jewish Agency’s Board of Governors that the US “does not understand the threat and has not done enough,â” and therefore “must be shaken awake.”

Fundo rabbis in Israel are leading children into prayers against Ahmadinejad – the media propaganda machine is running at full bore to demonise Iran

claiming its leader is a new Hitler and that Jews are threatened with another Holocaust.

A more accurate reading of the situation might be to say that Israel is determined to protect the monopoly of nuclear weapons, which it has enjoyed in the Middle East for more than 40 years.

Concurrently, the Israeli government warns of a regional arms race. Guess who started it, mate? here comes the old blowback denial again.

Condisleazer

Update:

The United Stupids are to have talks with Iran, Iraq and Syria in Baghdad about Iraqi security. The old carrot and stick approach – while the Iranians are threatened with fleets and sanctions, the Stupids will expect them to be cooperative especially since they are deigning to parley with them. What will the Stupids offer? There is doubt about whether Iran is actually destabilising Iraq anyway – the propaganda the Stupids tried to sell that the Iranians were back the insurgency was laughable. The insurgency is predominantly Sunni, and Iranians are Shite. The Iraqi government is majorly Shite as are the Sadr nationalists. Do the Stupids want the Iranians to start backing the Sunnis?

Whilst any talks are a positive sign, the United States may well be sussing out the enemy at close hand under a false pretext. It’s probably too much to hope for that the Stupids might have woken up that the only real, workable long term solution for the whole region, before things go too far, is to start lobbying for a nuke weapon free zone. Whether Israhell would cooperate is another matter, yet if the Stupids insisted, Israhell must follow or risk its benefactor’s largesse and support.