Song for Gaza
Are there any words left for the atrocities in which the the Israeli government is self-righteously revelling, in a pre election obscene blood orgy. Genocidal and depraved, flaunting its mighty weapons before the eyes of the world,it, Israel has rendered itself devoid of humanity, killing with impunity (827 people thus far) including humanitarian workers, medics, ambulances, hospitals, mosques, shops and hundreds of homes while governments, restricted by the hasbara-ridden ignorant, religiously superstitious, errant and culpable US government – let them never think that they are ‘good’ again, are suckered into the malignant victimhood of a pariah, necrophilic, human rights violating state. For Israel’s malevolent war crimes and crimes against humanity continue despite UNSC 1860, and their iniquities are beyond words. People have had no water for five days – a friend said that denying water was a favourite method of destruction used by the IOF as it saves using bullets on children, who dehydrate quicker than adults. Dead and wounded lie everywhere under rubble. Nowhere is safe, and there is no exit or place to hide because the Palestinian people’s foul jailor has locked in 1.5 million.
Whilst playing a terrified victim, Israel has viciously, inexcusably oppressed the Palestinian people, with a series of Machiavellian strategies denying their legitimate aspirations for 65 years.
Stalinesque is not too strong a descriptive word to use for the Israeli government’s actions.
America may have invited a bitter fate in return for its immorality, and indulging of its perverse most favoured state in its refusal to condemn, its inability to perceive war crimes involved in thesupply of weapons which are employed by the 4th most militarised state on the planet to commit collective punishment on a million and a half people. Possibly that is what the ghouls of finance, the trogs from the weapons industry, want – these parasites must feast from their loungerooms on the corpses of the wretched and dispossessed.
Would any other western nation, except for the similarly afflicted US, commit acts of such barbarity?
Anyone who is complicit in this abomination should seek medical attention as soon as possible – yet can there be a cure for virulent national sociopathy?
For a far better written first hand narration and background than I can provide, visit Rafahkid in the rubble that is Rafah.
The Gaza Dilemma
In a convincing wrapup of events leading to the holocaust being perpetrated on the essentially defenceless people of Gaza, John Pilger refers to the Dagan Plan.
Behind this sordid game is the “Dagan Plan,” named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon in his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Now head of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has seen the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, effectively a concentration camp. The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mohammed Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through a mostly supine, if intimidated western media, notably in America, that says Hamas is a terrorist organization devoted to Israel’s destruction and to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, long before its creation. “We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.” In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor. This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.” Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic. Neither is its proposal of a ten-year truce as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition: that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders. As every annual vote in the UN General Assembly demonstrates, 99 per cent of humanity concurs. On 4 January, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and perhaps finally into Jordan. This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”
Although the UN has passed Resolution 1860 calling for a cease fire, Israel is continuing its strikes against anything that moves or doesn’t move in the beleaguered Gaza Strip.
This is unacceptable. The US may already been dragged into being accomplice to war crimes on the eve of Obama’s inauguration – is this Bush’s last petulant tantrum too?
Francis A. Boyle An Israeli War Crimes Tribunal – An Israeli War Crimes Tribunal (ICTI) May be the Only Deterrent to a Global War
Not that again – still at least some folks are waking up to the Machiavellian possibilities neocons may be hoping to ignite in these last desperate days of Straussian ponderosity.
Ari Shavit writes in Haaretz of that perennial classic, the White Man’s Burden
George E. Bisharat Israel Is Committing War Crimes – Hamas’s violations are no justification for Israel’s actions.
Pentagon denies arms shipment to Israel linked with Gaza fighting – interesting because the first time we looked the story said US was sending 3000 tons of ammo on a merchant ship.
In fact, here it is sitting on Reuters UK. So who’s the anonymous informant, and which story is true? ??
U.S. seeks ship to move arms to Israel
Fri Jan 9, 2009 11:42pm GMT
By Stefano Ambrogi
LONDON (Reuters) – The U.S. is seeking to hire a merchant ship to deliver hundreds of tons of arms to Israel from Greece later this month, tender documents seen by Reuters show.
The U.S. Navy’s Military Sealift Command (MSC) said the ship was to carry 325 standard 20-foot containers of what is listed as “ammunition” on two separate journeys from the Greek port of Astakos to the Israeli port of Ashdod in mid-to-late January.
A “hazardous material” designation on the manifest mentions explosive substances and detonators, but no other details were given.
“Shipping 3,000-odd tons of ammunition in one go is a lot,” one broker said, on condition of anonymity.
“This (kind of request) is pretty rare and we haven’t seen much of it quoted in the market over the years,” he added.
The U.S. Defense Department, contacted by Reuters on Friday in Washington, had no immediate comment.
The MSC transports amour and military supplies for the U.S. armed forces aboard its own fleet, but regularly hires merchant ships if logistics so require.
The request for the ship was made on December 31, with the first leg of the charter to arrive no later than January 25 and the second at the end of the month.
The tender for the vessel follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
A German shipping firm which won that tender confirmed the order when contacted by Reuters but declined to comment further.
CHARTERS “RARE”
Shipping brokers in London who have specialized in moving arms for the British and U.S. military in the past said such ship charters to Israel were rare.
Israel is one of America’s closest allies and both nations regularly sell arms to each other.
A senior military analyst in London who declined to be named said that, because of the timing, the shipments could be “irregular” and linked to the Gaza offensive.
The ship hired by the MSC in December was for a much larger cargo of arms, tender documents showed.
That stipulated a ship to be chartered for 42 days capable of carrying 989 standard 20-foot containers from Sunny Point, North Carolina to Ashdod.
The tender document said the vessel had to be capable of “carrying 5.8 million pounds (2.6 million kg) of net explosive weight,” which specialist brokers said was a very large quantity.
The ship was requested early last month to load on December 15.
In September, the U.S. Congress approved the sale of 1,000 bunker-buster missiles to Israel. The GPS-guided GBU-39 is said to be one of the most accurate bombs in the world.
The Jerusalem Post, citing defense officials, reported last week that a first shipment of the missiles had arrived in early December and they were used in penetrating Hamas’s underground rocket launcher sites.
(Reporting by Stefano Ambrogi; editing by Michael Roddy)
UPDATE ON SHIP
Greek bloggers used Twitter to pressure the Greek government to halt the arms transfer.
Delivery of the munitions was suspended, just as the Greek government was coming under fire from opposition parties, and Amnesty International was calling for an arms embargo.
At first, official sources contested the story from the international news agency Reuters on January 9. But it was picked up by Twitter users and investigated after Indy.gr – an offshoot of the Indymedia Athens group – provided a translation of the article in Greek.
ADDENDA
1:10 p.m. Here’s one for the Israel Info Guys in Tel Aviv and New York.
You know the “human shields” line that Hamas hides behind civilians, especially women and children, to conduct their nefarious activities? Well, a released Gazan detainee has offered an inconvenient twist — at least for Israel:
In the first day (of the ground offensive) special forces stormed Beit Lahiya. Maybe a thousand soldiers landed on rooftops then began arresting people….They used us as human shields in military positions they established inside Gaza Strip before they drove us to a prison in Beersheba. They made us sleep on gravel, or on the sand. They stripped us of our clothes.
And here’s a little footnote: “They used a bulldozer to pile up the bodies of the dead.”
Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim – How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
@AJGaza: UN says more than 15,000 people are now internally displaced after fleeing their homes in an attempt to avoid the fighting in #Gaza
Sunday Leader editor & Columbo government critic assassinated
Outspoken government critic and editor of the Sunday Leader in Columbo, Lasantha Wickramatunga was assassinated as he drove to work yesterday by unidentified gunmen on motorbikes.
There have been several attacks on and attempts to intimidate journalists in Sri Lanka in recent times while the government has been engaged in bloody campaigns against LTTE troops in the northern Tamil areas.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa condemned the killing of Mr. Wickramatunga as an attempt to discredit the government while the Leader of the Opposition and a former Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, accused the government of silencing its critics.
Mr. Rajapaksa described Mr. Wickramatunga as a close friend and a courageous journalist and maintained “the heinous crime points to the grave dangers faced by the democratic social order of our country, and the existence of forces that will go to the furthest extremes in using terror and criminality to damage our social fabric and bring disrepute to the country.”
Addressing a news conference along with other Opposition leaders, Mr. Wickremesinghe alleged that the murder of the Sunday Leader editor was part of an anti-democratic conspiracy.
The Committee to Protect Journalists “called on concerned ambassadors in Colombo to weigh in forcefully and immediately with President Mahinda Rajapaksa to put an end to the attacks raining down on Sri Lanka’s media.”
The killing follows the January 6 early morning assault by about 15 masked gunmen on Maharaja TV (MTV) studios outside Colombo. Earlier, some state media had called the station “unpatriotic” for its coverage of the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). CPJ called for an impartial parliamentary inquiry into the attack, saying the government has been a prime suspect in attacks on journalists in the past. Rajapaksa has condemned today’s killing as well as the attack on MTV.
Bob Dietz, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator said
“The assassination of Lasantha Wickramatunga signals that the government is unable or unwilling to protect the country’s journalists who dare to report critically. The international community in Colombo must act quickly to bring pressure on President Rajapaksa to reverse this murderous trend.”
The Sunday Leader is well known for being critical of Rajapaksa’s government. In a recent editorial, the paper accused the president of stepping up the war with the secessionist LTTE in order to stay in power.
Wickramatunga’s editorial admonished the Columbo government severely for its pre-election tactics:
What is perhaps most offensive about Rajapakse’s attempts to manipulate the electorate in the face of an election is how much he takes for granted the fickleness of his Sinhala-Buddhist following. Nothing could better personify the “Sinhalaya modaya” stereotype than the President’s disdain for his own people. And they love him for it. So long as a steady stream of Tamils are exterminated, there is little to impede Rajapakse’s cruise to yet another victory.
The dead journalist also criticised the UNP opposition for its non-committal policies:
Sadly for both Ranil Wickremesinghe and Karu Jayasuriya, they have failed to convey effectively to the country their concerns about the issues of our time. As a party, the UNP is yet to decide whether or not it supports the war and if so, whether it subscribes, for example, to the present practice of aerially bombarding Tamil villages labelled as LTTE hideouts in the north.
To say it opposes the war but nevertheless congratulate the army on capturing Paranthan or Killinochchi, however, is morally and intellectually dishonest. After all, the government would not dare bombing LTTE hideouts in the south – let us say in Wellawatte – for fear of collateral damage. Yet, in the remote townships of the Wanni, such bombardment has now become routine, with enormous cost to the civilian population.
The attacks on Tamil villages by Sri Lanka’s government mirror those of Israel on the people of Gaza. Both parties under attack have had national aspirations under occupation for 60 years, and both peoples can trace continuous existence in their native lands. Before British rule, Tamil and Sinhalese coexisted in two kingdoms –
the Tamil Kingdom comprising the north and eastern parts and the Sinhalese Kingdom(s) the western & southern parts of Ceylon. There were brief periods when the whole of Ceylon came under a single ruler. Otherwise, there existed two or more Kingdoms and the Tamil Kingdom always one of them. The Tamil Kingdom, later came to be called the Jaffna Kingdom existed as a separate polity for centuries. The first war between a Tamil King who ruled Anuradhapura and a Sinhalese king from the south was fought in the 2nd century BC.
In the case of Palestine however, Zionist colonialisation of Palestinian land began in the 1880s with the advent of kibbutzs set up by European Jews.
When Sri Lanka declared independence from the British in 1948, its constitution incorporated the state with its official religion as Buddhism. The Tamil people are predominantly Hindu. Success in the first election by Sinhalese Buddhist candidates enabled the passing of
“the Ceylon (Parliamentary Elections) Amendment Act No.48 of 1949 which deprived the Tamils of their franchise as well. This category of Tamils who had 7 seats in the Parliament and held balance of power in a further 20-30 electorates failed to elect even a single member in the elections to the parliament held in 1953.”
Tamils were further marginalised in 1956 with the passing of the Sinhala Only Act:
The enactment of this Act, quite contrary to the hitherto official policy of recognising both Sinhalese and Tamil as Official languages, made Tamils second class citizens in their country of birth overnight.
The Tamil people staged a non-violent demonstration against the stripping of their rights and were met with violence.
The peaceful Satyragraha by the Tamils to protest against the Sinhala Only language policy at Galle Face Green overlooking the Parliament in Colombo was broken up by Sinhalese hoodlums. This was followed by Island wide riots in which hundreds of Tamils lost their lives and property worth millions destroyed. The 1956 riots was the beginning of a series of racially motivated Tamil pogroms by Sinhalese covertly encouraged by successive governments and overtly supported by the security forces. These pogroms with increased ferocity and venom were repeated in 1958, 1961, 1977, 1979, 1981 and 1983.
The government of Sri Lanka has still failed to address the just, legitimate rights of the Tamil people, instead pursuing violent means to crush “the Other”. As usual, violence met with violence in return. The Tamil Tigers (LTTE) are claimed to be “the official army of the Tamil people”.
@Jinjirrie http://is.gd/eX8R Lasantha Wickramatunga ed of Sunday Leader & govt critic shot by unidentified gunmen in Columbo http://is.gd/eXak
Israelis protest against their government’s attack of Gaza
Independent Australian Jewish Voices has protested against Israel’s offensive and collective punishment of the Gazan people.
We are Australian Jews who join thousands in Israel and around the world condemning ongoing Israeli military attacks on Gaza. Together with Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, we condemn the current war as “inhuman, superfluous” and “abominable”.
While Israel has the right to protect its citizens and to demand an end to the crime of Palestinian rockets that target civilians, this cannot be used as a pretext for the grossly disproportionate military assault on Gaza because it was Israel that violated the fragile truce on November 4, 2008. Furthermore, Israel ignored Hamas’ diplomatic initiatives to re-establish the cease-fire since it expired on December 19.
The war on the population of Gaza comes after the Israeli blockade that had already created a severe humanitarian crisis under which the Palestinians suffered from lack of food, electricity, medicines, hospital equipment and other basic necessities of life. The blockade was condemned by the UN as a violation of international law and, like the massive Israeli air-strikes, constitutes illegal collective punishment prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
We call for an immediate end to attacks on civilians by Palestinians and Israelis. However, since Palestinians have no means of self-defence against the most powerful military force in the Middle East, we particularly call on Israel to end its brutal assault on the vulnerable Palestinian people of Gaza and to reconsider its rejection of the UN Security Council’s call for a cease-fire.
Israel has refused to accept Hamas’ consistent offer of negotiations since its election win in 2006.
As Syd Walker points out, the IAJV highlights the facts which the Israeli hasbara machine is desperately attempting to counter.