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Topic: Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp (Read 15127 times) |
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #45 on: 2009-01-09 11:05:00 » |
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Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
[ Hermit : In my opinion, and in the opinion of many of his fellow journalists, Robert Fisk is the world's preeminent Middle East journalist. Here he does a nice job of filling in the background to the horror being inflicted on the Palestinians. I think he does a fair job of extracting meaning from statistics.
Speaking of horror, thank-you very much Blunderov, for the link to the "Total Horrorshow" above. I used not to be sure about anything but the very occasional use of such images, as people tend to become very good at suppressing empathy when exposed to that level of slaughter on anything approaching a regular basis. Which of course goes some way to explaining why repression of this particularly brutal nature leads to resistance which most would regard as horrific.
Worth remembering as we look at these images, no matter what we are told by Israel and its amen chorus in the conventional media and thoroughly purchased Western politicians, just because a policeman wears a Hamas uniform doesn't mean that he doesn't train as a paramedic; to suppress crime; to protect the innocent; to maintain civil order; to direct traffic and to be a thinking, breathing, caring human being. Turning such a person into a screaming lump of shredded meat lying in the midst of the disassembled gory wreckage of his murdered colleagues does not make the world a better place for anyone - even when it is done by the Israelis with all the best rationalizations and propaganda in the world. Most people can intuit this when they see such images. Which is why Israel is going to extreme lengths to attempt to prevent it and why I think that the publication of these images is appropriate.
Read and weep.]
Source: The Independent Authors: Robert Fisk Dated: 2009-01-07
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.
What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie [ Hermit : Which we did, and this time at least, it was shown to be a lie. ] and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians. Not forgetting that a blockade - which has been in place for three yearsto starve the Palestinians into submission - is an act of war, so in fact the ceasefire was very unidirectional. ]
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Mermaid
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #46 on: 2009-01-09 16:33:56 » |
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israel's cyber war
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/israel-dns-hack.html
Wage Cyberwar Against Hamas, Surrender Your PC By Noah Shachtman EmailJanuary 08, 2009 | 1:10:27 PMCategories: Info War, Sabras
Hiwgrab A group of Israeli students and would-be cyberwarriors have developed a program that makes it easy for just about anyone to start pounding on pro-Hamas websites. But using this "Patriot" software, to join in the online fight, means handing over control of your computer to the Israeli hacker group.
"While you're running their program, they can do whatever they want with your computer," Mike La Pilla, manager of malicious code operations at Verisign iDefense, the electronic security firm.
The online collective "Help Israel Win" formed in late December, as the current conflict in Gaza erupted. "We couldn't join the real combat, so we decided to fight Hamas in the cyber arena," "Liri," one the group's organizers, told Danger Room.
So they created a simple program, supposedly designed to overload Hamas-friendly sites like qudsnews.net and palestine-info.info. In recent years, such online struggles have become key components in the information warfare that accompanies traditional bomb-and-bullets conflicts. Each side tries to recruit more and more people -- and more and more computers -- to help in the network assaults. Help Israel Win says that more than 8,000 people have already downloaded and installed its Patriot software. It's a small part of a larger, increasingly sophisticated propaganda fight between supporters of Israel and Hamas that's being waged over the airwaves and online.
Help Israel Win, which has websites in Hebrew, English, Spanish, French, Russian and Portugese, doesn't say much about how the program functions -- only that it "unites the computer capabilities of many people around the world. Our goal is to use this power in order to disrupt our enemy's efforts to destroy the state of Israel. The more support we get, the more efficient we are."
Analysis from iDefense and the SANS Institute, however, reveals that computer users put their PCs at risk when they run the Patriot software. The program connects a computer to one of a number of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers. Once the machine is linked up, Help Israel Win can order it to do just about anything.
The Patriot program does something "fishy," SANS Institute security specialist Bojan Zdrnja said, by retrieving "a remote file and sav[ing] it on the local machine as TmpUpdateFile.exe." That could easily be a "trojan," Zdrnja said, referring to a program that sneaks malicious code onto a computer.
"While at the moment it does not appear to do anything bad (it just connects to the IRC server and sites there -- there also appeared to be around 1,000 machines running this when I tested this) the owner can probably do whatever he wants with machines running this," Zdrnja wrote.
Liri, with Help Israel Win, conceded that "the Patriot code could be used as a trojan. However, "practically it is not used as such, and will never be."
"The update option is used to fix bugs in the client, and not to upload any malicious code... never have and never will," Liri said. "The project will close right after the war is over, and we have given a fully functional uninstaller to [remove] the application."
It's also unclear how much the Patriot program is really helping the Israeli side in the online information war.
La Pilla has been monitoring Help Israel Win's IRC servers for days. "They didn't make us download and install anything. Didn't make us [attack] anybody. I was basically just sitting idle on their network." The group claims to have shut down sarayaalquds.org and qudsvoice.net. But, as of now, the rest of the group's pro-Hamas targets remain online. Meanwhile, Help Israel Win has had to shift from website to website, as they come under attack from unknown assailants.
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #47 on: 2009-01-09 22:40:09 » |
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An Unnecessary War
Source: Washington Post Authors: Jimmy Carter (The writer was president from 1977 to 1981. He founded the Carter Center, a nongovernmental organization advancing peace and health worldwide, in 1982.) Dated: 2009-01-08
I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had fallen in that area, my wife, Rosalynn, and I declared their launching from Gaza to be inexcusable and an act of terrorism. Although casualties were rare (three deaths in seven years), the town was traumatized by the unpredictable explosions. About 3,000 residents had moved to other communities, and the streets, playgrounds and shopping centers were almost empty. Mayor Eli Moyal assembled a group of citizens in his office to meet us and complained that the government of Israel was not stopping the rockets, either through diplomacy or military action.
Knowing that we would soon be seeing Hamas leaders from Gaza and also in Damascus, we promised to assess prospects for a cease-fire. From Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who was negotiating between the Israelis and Hamas, we learned that there was a fundamental difference between the two sides. Hamas wanted a comprehensive cease-fire in both the West Bank and Gaza, and the Israelis refused to discuss anything other than Gaza.
We knew that the 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved, as the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food had found that acute malnutrition in Gaza was on the same scale as in the poorest nations in the southern Sahara, with more than half of all Palestinian families eating only one meal a day.
Palestinian leaders from Gaza were noncommittal on all issues, claiming that rockets were the only way to respond to their imprisonment and to dramatize their humanitarian plight. The top Hamas leaders in Damascus, however, agreed to consider a cease-fire in Gaza only, provided Israel would not attack Gaza and would permit normal humanitarian supplies to be delivered to Palestinian citizens.
After extended discussions with those from Gaza, these Hamas leaders also agreed to accept any peace agreement that might be negotiated between the Israelis and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the PLO, provided it was approved by a majority vote of Palestinians in a referendum or by an elected unity government.
Since we were only observers, and not negotiators, we relayed this information to the Egyptians, and they pursued the cease-fire proposal. After about a month, the Egyptians and Hamas informed us that all military action by both sides and all rocket firing would stop on June 19, for a period of six months, and that humanitarian supplies would be restored to the normal level that had existed before Israel's withdrawal in 2005 (about 700 trucks daily).
We were unable to confirm this in Jerusalem because of Israel's unwillingness to admit to any negotiations with Hamas, but rocket firing was soon stopped and there was an increase in supplies of food, water, medicine and fuel. Yet the increase was to an average of about 20 percent of normal levels. And this fragile truce was partially broken on Nov. 4, when Israel launched an attack in Gaza to destroy a defensive tunnel being dug by Hamas inside the wall that encloses Gaza.
On another visit to Syria in mid-December, I made an effort for the impending six-month deadline to be extended. It was clear that the preeminent issue was opening the crossings into Gaza. Representatives from the Carter Center visited Jerusalem, met with Israeli officials and asked if this was possible in exchange for a cessation of rocket fire. The Israeli government informally proposed that 15 percent of normal supplies might be possible if Hamas first stopped all rocket fire for 48 hours. This was unacceptable to Hamas, and hostilities erupted.
After 12 days of "combat," the Israeli Defense Forces reported that more than 1,000 targets were shelled or bombed. During that time, Israel rejected international efforts to obtain a cease-fire, with full support from Washington. Seventeen mosques, the American International School, many private homes and much of the basic infrastructure of the small but heavily populated area have been destroyed. This includes the systems that provide water, electricity and sanitation. Heavy civilian casualties are being reported by courageous medical volunteers from many nations, as the fortunate ones operate on the wounded by light from diesel-powered generators.
The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate level of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians, with the publicized agreement monitored by the international community. The next possible step: a permanent and comprehensive peace.
| Report: Israel Forced Civilians Into Single House, Repeatedly Bombed It UN Details Latest Gaza Incident as Death Toll Passes 800
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Jason Ditz Dated: 2009-01-09
Israeli ground troops ordered around 110 Palestinian civilians into a single home in Gaza City’s Zeitun neighborhood and ordered them to stay indoors on Sunday. On Monday morning, Israeli forces repeatedly shelled the building, killing at least 30 of the civilians inside. It then refused to allow ambulances to retrieve the dead and dying people for days.
This was the report released by the United Nations today based on eyewitness accounts from the survivors, and just the latest in an ever growing list of Israeli attacks on the civilian population of Gaza. Over the first two weeks of the Israeli attack, at least 800 people have been killed, and another 3,300 have been wounded. The vast majority of the strip has been without electricity since then, and a growing percentage are without clean water and dependent on intermittent humanitarian aid shipments for other basic necessities.
Israel has refused to comment on the latest allegations, but the United States defending the growing civilian toll, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying that in such a densely populated area it is really hard for Israel to avoid what it has been doing, which is killing scores of civilians on a near daily basis. Though Rice attributed the civilian toll to Hamas using them as human shields, there was one again no indication that these civilians, though directly attacked, were anywhere near any Hamas targets.
Senate Approves Resolution Backing Israel in Hamas Conflict
Source: Bloomberg Authors: Nicholas Johnston (Washington) Dated: 2009-01-08
The U.S. Senate unanimously approved a resolution expressing support for Israel in its conflict with Hamas, while the House of Representatives prepared to act on a similar measure tomorrow.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said the measure “expresses vigorous support” for Israel.
“The Israelis have every right to defend themselves against these acts of terrorism,” said Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Israel is in its 13th day of military operations against the Islamic militant Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip in an effort to stop rocket attacks against southern Israeli towns.
Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said they had personally spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to express their support.
“We support the state of Israel, very strongly as a national policy, because it is in our national interest to do so,” said Pelosi, a California Democrat. “We also defend any country’s right to defend itself.”
Reid said the resolution recognizes Israel’s right to self- defense, calls on Hamas to end rocket attacks on Israel and says any cease-fire must be “durable, enforceable and sustainable.” He said it also calls for the protection of civilians as well as an end to “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a strong and secure Israeli living in peace with an independent Palestinian state.”
“We all want a cease-fire, a real cease-fire on both sides,” Pelosi said. [ Hermit : But only after a sufficiently brutal process of ethnocide.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #48 on: 2009-01-10 10:56:09 » |
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Israel Rejected Hamas Cease-Fire Offer in December
Source: Inter Press Service Authors: Gareth Porter Dated: 2009-01-10
Gareth Porter is a historian. His latest book is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press).
Contrary to Israel's argument that it was forced to launch its air and ground offensive against Gaza in order to stop the firing of rockets into its territory, Hamas proposed in mid-December to return to the original Hamas-Israel cease-fire arrangement, according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the proposal.
The proposal to renew the cease-fire was presented by a high-level Hamas delegation to Egyptian Minister of Intelligence Omar Suleiman at a meeting in Cairo Dec. 14. The delegation, said to have included Moussa Abu Marzouk, the second-ranking official in the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, told Suleiman that Hamas was prepared to stop all rocket attacks against Israel if the Israelis would open up the Gaza border crossings and pledge not to launch attacks in Gaza.
The Hamas officials insisted that Israel not be allowed to close or reduce commercial traffic through border crossings for political purposes, as it had done during the six-month lull, according to the source. They asked Suleiman, who had served as mediator between Israel and Hamas in negotiating the original six-month Gaza cease-fire last spring, to "put pressure" on Israel to take that the cease-fire proposal seriously.
Suleiman said he could not pressure Israel but could only make the suggestion to Israeli officials. It could not be learned, however, whether Israel explicitly rejected the Hamas proposal or simply refused to respond to Egypt.
The readiness of Hamas to return to the cease-fire conditionally in mid-December was confirmed by Dr. Robert Pastor, a professor at American University and senior adviser to the Carter Center, who met with Khaled Meshal, chairman of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus on Dec. 14, along with former President Jimmy Carter. Pastor told IPS that Meshal indicated Hamas was willing to go back to the cease-fire that had been in effect up to early November "if there was a sign that Israel would lift the siege on Gaza."
Pastor said he passed Meshal's statement on to a "senior official" in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) the day after the meeting with Meshal. According to Pastor, the Israeli official said he would get back to him, but did not.
"There was an alternative to the military approach to stopping the rockets," said Pastor. He added that Israel is unlikely to have an effective cease-fire in Gaza unless it agrees to lift the siege.
The Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment Thursday on whether there had been any discussion of a cease-fire proposal from Hamas in mid-December that would have stopped the rocket firing.
Abu Omar, a spokesman for Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Syria, told CBS News Wednesday that Hamas could only accept the cease-fire plan now being proposed by France and Egypt, which guarantees an end to Israel's blockade of Gaza as soon as hostilities on both sides were halted. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said Israel would only support the proposal if it also included measures to prevent Hamas from re-arming.
The interest of Hamas in a cease-fire agreement that would actually open the border crossings was acknowledged at a Dec. 21 Israeli cabinet meeting – five days before the beginning of the Israeli military offensive – by Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel's internal security agency, Shin Bet. "Make no mistake, Hamas is interested in maintaining the truce," Diskin was quoted by YNet News agency as saying.
Israel's rejection of the Hamas December proposal reflected its preference for maintaining Israel's primary leverage over Hamas and the Palestinian population of Gaza – its ability to choke off food and goods required for the viability of its economy – even at the cost of continued Palestinian rocket attacks.
The cease-fire agreement that went into effect June 19, 2008, required that Israel lift the virtual siege of Gaza which Israel had imposed after the June 2007 Hamas takeover. Although the terms of the agreement were not made public at the time, they were included in a report published this week by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which obtained a copy of the understanding last June.
In addition to a halt in all military actions by both sides, the agreement called on Israel to increase the level of goods entering Gaza by 30 percent over the pre-lull period within 72 hours and to open all border crossings and "allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza" within 13 days after the beginning of the cease-fire.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials freely acknowledged in interviews with ICG last June that they had no intention of opening the border crossings fully, even though they anticipated that this would be the source of serious conflict with Hamas.
The Israelis opened the access points only partially, and in late July Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declared that the border crossings should remain closed until Hamas agreed to the release of Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier abducted by Hamas in June 2006. The Hamas representative in Lebanon, Usam Hamdan, told the ICG in late December that the flow of goods and fuel into Gaza had been only 15 percent of its basic needs.
Despite Israel's refusal to end the siege, Hamas brought rocket and mortar fire from Gaza to a virtual halt last summer and fall, as revealed by a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) in Tel Aviv last month. ITIC is part of the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), an NGO close to the Israeli intelligence community.
In the first days after the cease-fire took effect, Islamic Jihad fired nine rockets and a few mortar rounds in retaliation for Israeli assassinations of their members in the West Bank. In August another eight rockets were fired by various groups, according to IDF data cited in the report. But it shows that only one rocket was launched from Gaza in September and one in October.
The report recalls that Hamas "tried to enforce the terms of the arrangement" on other Palestinian groups, taking "a number of steps against networks which violated the arrangement," including short-term detention and confiscating their weapons. It even found that Hamas had sought support in Gazan public opinion for its policy of maintaining the cease-fire.
On Nov. 4 – just when the cease-fire was most effective – the IDF carried out an attack against a house in Gaza in which six members of Hamas' military wing were killed, including two commanders, and several more were wounded. The IDF explanation for the operation was that it had received intelligence that a tunnel was being dug near the Israeli security fence for the purpose of abducting Israeli soldiers.
Hamas officials asserted, however, that the tunnel was being dug for defensive purposes, not to capture IDF personnel, according to Pastor, and one IDF official confirmed that fact to him.
After that Israeli attack, the cease-fire completely fell apart, as Hamas began openly firing rockets into Israel, the IDF continued to carry out military operations inside Gaza, and the border crossings were "closed most of the time," according to the ITIC account.
Israel cited the firing of 190 rockets over six weeks as the justification for its massive attack on Gaza.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #49 on: 2009-01-10 14:30:40 » |
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How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe
[ Hermit : I picked up on Avi Shalom's excellent article from a link on Craig Murray's blog. "As Britain's outspoken Ambassador to the Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, Craig Murray helped expose vicious human rights abuses by the US-funded regime of Islam Karimov. He is now a prominent critic of Western policy in the region." (ibid.) I find Craig an indispensable insider commentator on the strange derring does of the neoLabour government of the UK and colonialists everywhere. We hold similar opinions on many things, not least Apartheid Israel] Quote:The Israeli attack on Gaza is unconscionable. It is wildly disproportionate and plainly the attacks on schools yesterday were only the most blatant examples of Israel's continual breaches of the laws of warfare - war crimes. But it is only an episode in the terrible ethnic cleansing and destruction of the Palestinian people by the Israelis who have stolen their land.
Let me say it loud and clear. I do not believe in Israel's right to exist. It is a militarised, evil entity founded on a racist premise and a lot of religious hokum. It should be replaced by a single, secular state in which the Palestinians are free to live, and in which they receive either their stolen lands or genuine equivalent financial compensation, in either case plus damages. |
[ Hermit : Clearly this last is the only possible way to deal with all that Apartheid Israel has left the Palestinians, having stolen their land, destroyed their institutions and driven them into such poverty that over 80% are now suffering from malnutrition.
I have marked up Avi's article for skimming, but it really deserves to be read in full if you have the time. ]
Source: The Guardian Authors: Avi Shlaim Dated: 2009-01-07
Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace. Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions
The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.
I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.
Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.
The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.
Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.
Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.
America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.
As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.
It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.
The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.
As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".
To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.
Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.
The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.
A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.
No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.
This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.
Caption: A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Blunderov
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #50 on: 2009-01-10 16:32:14 » |
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[Blunderov] Nancy (5th Column) Pelosi has, along with many others remarked that "Israel has every right to defend itself". At the risk of being arch I might retort that this may be so but that this does not mean that it is therefore entitled to exploit every "wrong" in the process. But I suppose Pelosi (and others) should be congratulated for elevating the concept of "the loyal opposition" far above and beyond the call of duty.
Of course what Pelosi really means is that Israel may do whatever it pleases with impunity. She simply sugar coats this outrageous equivocation with a tasty layer of "moral right" for the purpose of convenient public consumption. May her tribe decrease.
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #51 on: 2009-01-10 16:59:10 » |
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Q. When you don't even bother to dream up justifications to support a blatantly racist program of ethnic cleansing and genocide by a rogue government what does that make you?
A. Very useful to Israel.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Fritz
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #52 on: 2009-01-10 21:15:33 » |
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[Fritz]People are dieing and committees meet and politicians politic ... sigh
Source: YLE Date: 2009.01.09
Halonen Meets Israeli and Palestinian Representatives
Image: Mika Kanerva
President Tarja Halonen met with the Israeli Ambassador and Palestinian representatives on Thursday to discuss the current strife in Gaza.
Israeli Ambassador Avi Granot and Palestinian representative Nabil Al Wazir held talks with President Halonen separately at her official residence, at her invitation.
Eva Nevalainen, head of Press Relations at the President’s Office, said the President is concerned about the situation in Gaza and would like to see an immediate ceasefire.
In a New Year’s address, President Halonen called for an end to the cycle of violence in Gaza, and for a resolution of the situation by way of negotiations.
YLE
Source: Palestine Mission Date: 3 March 2005
President Halonen met Head of the Palestine General Delegation Dr. Zuheir Elwazer
Head of the Palestine General Delegation in Finland Dr. Zuheir Elwazer paid his farewell visit to President of the Republic of Finland Tarja Halonen on 10 February 2005.
President Halonen welcomed the positive steps that have been taken in the peace process in the Middle East.
3 March 2005
New Permanent Observer of Palestine Presents Credentials
VIENNA, 3 March (UN Information Service) -- The new Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Office at Vienna (UNOV), Zuheir Elwazer presented his credentials today to Antonio Maria Costa, Director-General, UNOV.
Prior to his current appointment, Mr. Elwazer was serving as Ambassador to the Government of Finland as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative (1984). He was additionally serving as non-resident Ambassador to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (1992).
Mr. Elwazer has served as a Member of the Palestinian National Council (1996); Member of the Fatah Revolutionary Council (1989); and Member of the Executive Committee of the General Union of Palestinian Students (1979).
Mr. Elwazer completed his studies in medicine at Jash University in Romania. He is married and has two children.
United Nations International Meeting on Question of Palestine to be held at Palais des Nations, Geneva 8-9 March
GA/PAL/977
GENEVA, 4 March (UN Information Service) - The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will convene a United Nations International Meeting on the Question of Palestine on 8 and 9 March 2005 at the United Nations Office at Geneva.
The theme of the Meeting is Implementing the ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the OccupiedPalestinianTerritory -- The role of governments, intergovernmental organizations and civil society.
The Meeting will focus on the significance of the Advisory Opinion, the responsibility of governments and intergovernmental organizations, as well as the role of parliaments and civil society in advocating adherence to international law. Experts will provide a legal analysis of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling and discuss the response by the parties and the international community.
The holding of this event is mandated by General Assembly resolutions 59/28 and 59/29 of 1 December 2004. Invited to the Meeting will be eminent personalities, internationally renowned experts, including Israelis and Palestinians, representatives of United Nations Members and observers, parliamentarians, representatives of the United Nations system and other intergovernmental organizations, the academic community, representatives of civil society organizations, as well as the media.
The opening session will start on Tuesday, 8 March 2005, at 10 a.m. in Conference Room XVI of Building A of the Palais des Nations. Statements are expected to be made by Sergei Ordzhonikidze, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva and Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General; Paul Badji, Chairman of the Committee; and Nasser Al-Kidwa, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Palestinian Authority (to be confirmed). This will be followed by a segment in which representatives of governments, intergovernmental organizations and United Nations bodies and agencies will be invited to make statements. The opening session will be followed by plenary sessions during which experts will make presentations on specific issues. Each plenary will have a discussion period. The official languages of the Meeting will be English and French. Documentation will be available, to the extent possible, in these two languages.
Plenary session I, The significance of the Advisory Opinion, will begin in the afternoon of Tuesday, 8 March, at 3 p.m. The session will provide a legal analysis of the Advisory Opinion by the International Court of Justice and analyse the response by the parties and the reaction of the international community. Speakers include Vaughan Lowe, Professor of Public International Law at All Souls College, Oxford; Michael Bothe, Professor of Law and President of the German Association for International Law, Frankfurt; Avner Pinchuk, Lawyer with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel; Anis Kassim, Legal Advisor of the Palestinian Defence Team to the ICJ, Amman; Pierre dArgent, Professor of International Law, Universiti catholique de Louvain; and Mahmoud Hmoud, First Secretary of the Permanent Mission of Jordan to the United Nations in New York.
Plenary session II, The responsibility of Governments and intergovernmental organizations in upholding international law, will start at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 9 March. During the session, experts and participants will discuss the primacy of international law, options for individual and collective actions by governments and the role of the United Nations. Speakers include Georges Abi-Saab, Honorary Professor of International Law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva; Pieter H.F. Bekker, former ICJ staff lawyer, Senior Counsel to Palestine in the ICJ advisory proceeding, New York; Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, Professor of Public Law, University of Paris VII; Michael Lynk, Professor of Law, University of Western Ontario; and Marcelo Kohen, Professor of Law, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva.
On Wednesday, 9 March, at 3 p.m., Plenary session III, entitled The role of parliaments and civil society in advocating adherence to international law, will look at the impact parliaments and inter-parliamentary organizations could have on the respect of international law, as well as the response of civil society and the media to the Advisory Opinion. Speakers include Daniel Vischer, Member of the National Council of Switzerland; Julia Wickham, Coordinator of the Labour Middle East Council, London; Jeff Handmaker, Researcher at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights; Rev. Bruce Gillette, Moderator of the Committee on Peacemaking for the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Wilmington, Delaware; Mark Lance, Member of the Steering Committee, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation; Anne Massagee, Legal Researcher, Al-Haq - Law in the Service of Man; and Alioune Tine, Secretary-General of Rencontre africaine pour la difense des droits de lh omme (RADDHO), Dakar.
The closing session of the Meeting will take place on Wednesday, 9 March, at 5:30 p.m. The report of the Meeting will be issued as a publication of the Division for Palestinian Rights of the United Nations Secretariat.
Participants are requested to register with the Secretariat either at its Office or prior to entering the conference room. The main Secretariat is located in Office A.541 on the 5th floor of Building A. The telephone numbers of the Secretariat at the Palais des Nations are (41-22) 917-6884, 917-6639, 917-6584, 917-6802, the fax number is 917-0742.
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Blunderov
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #53 on: 2009-01-11 04:51:29 » |
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[Blunderov] This map makes perfectly obvious what's going on.
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #54 on: 2009-01-11 10:03:23 » |
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More than that, they show why "peace negotiations" are purely a farce. That these Palestans are now completely non-viable. Particularly when the "right of return" is taken into account. Which is why the world has to involve itself on a major scale.
It may be interesting to know that the Jewish terrorists did not own the land the UN allocated them in 1947. At the time, the British were horrified at what the Americans proposed as a solution, but proved powerless to alter the massive inequity inflicted on the Palestinians - without compensation. What has happened since then is blatant ethnic cleaning on a scale far larger and more brutal than anything achieved by anyone else in modern times.
The UN General Assembly and the people of the world are now by and large persuaded that what we are seeing is genocide in all its nastiness, but the ongoing "purchase of politicians", especially in the USA, but also in Europe, using money sourced largely from the USA, has ensured that Israel gets a pass through the UN Security council vetoes and sanctions against the victims.
Today, as reflected in "Church of Virus BBS, General, Serious Business,RFA: The UN, Fifty years but Time to Die?", Hermit, 2009-01-06, I think that what is needed is a UN II with teeth before we can achieve any meaningful peace in the Palestine (or in several other nasty hotspots). Interestingly Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein both came to the conclusion that a UN like body with teeth would be required to end the pervasive and pernicious threat of global war and its horrible consequences. I see war as only one of the armada of "existential threats" facing us today, and think that we require a global refocus of resources away from each other and towards the common threats of:
- Insurmountable fossil fuel shortfalls by the early 2020s and the growing probability that we will not have developed viable alternatives
- Climate driven changes in the biosphere
- Global shortfalls of clean water
- Global shortfalls of fertilizer
- Global eutrophication of lakes, rivers, seas and oceans
- Global overtaking of depletion of saline fish, particularly oily fish stocks and their replacement by jellyfish
- The soaring threat of global pandemics and epidemics
- The economic catastrophe caused by unmitigated greed and completely unsustainable policies
- The threat of warfare caused by any of the other factors or general overpopulation driven craziness
- Insane population growth, massively exacerbated by USA policies and the RC church
- Most significantly, that many of these threats are overtaking us simultaneously, driven by fossil fuel enabled population growth.
I have recovered from the "Nasty Business Forum" with its limited access, a proposed approach to the Palestine/Israel Problem (to coin a phrase) [ infra]. As intimated on this thread, today I see 4.1 and 5.2.1 (The initiation of a Palestinian State) as being non-starters. At this point the reintegration of all the populations of the Palestine/Israel by the UN, in the same fashion as the UN instigated this mess, is the only humane approach, but as previously observed, an approach which fails to recognize the demographic and resource limitations in the same fashion as the Israeli government is also doomed to failure. In the same way, having destroyed what was the most industrialized, democratic and secular Arab nation in the Middle East, we can dispose of 6.1.
It is important to note that the eventual weaning of Israel from American subsidies of $ 5 billion per year or more would pay for the program in its entirety and allow the USA to become a much more significant donor to other challenging areas at no additional cost to tax payers.
Source: "Church of Virus BBS, Cathedral, Nasty Business, A Modest Proposal - the Art of the Possible: Stopping Middle East Violence" Authors: Hermit Dated: 2002-04-12
1 Immediate Notification of Global Concern
- 1.1 Unless Israel agrees that:
- 1.1.1 hostilities cease immediately
- 1.1.2 The terms in 1.3 are acceded to by Israel
- 1.2 The UN places a full trade, immigration and military embargo and blockade on Israel. The sole exception shall be aid supplied via the UN to alleviate hardship and suffering.
- 1.3 The blockade to be lifted when:
- 1.3.1 Israel submits to the deployment of an International peace keeping force.
- 1.3.2 Israel agrees to relinquish her weapons of mass destruction to the UN for safeguarding/eventual destruction.
- 1.3.3 Israel agrees to the immediate entry to discussions intended to lead to the implementation of the 1967 UN resolutions or other plan designed to create a pair of balanced, unitary states.
- 1.3.4 Israel agrees to the delivery of her politicians and military personnel accused of war crimes to the new International War Crimes Court for public trial and sentencing [but refer also 4.3 below].
- 1.3.5 Israel agrees to cooperate in detaining Palestinians indicted by the World Court
- 1.4 The US implements the blockade in conjunction with other nations.
- 1.5 Security Council guarantees territorial integrity of Israel and neighboring states.
- 1.6 A breach of 1.5 will lead to massive retaliation against the offender.
2 US Immigration(Other countries may offer similar opportunities)
- 2.1 The US offers all the people in Israel/Palestine and in Palestinian "Displaced Persons" camps who hold undergraduate degrees or better, three year working visas for themselves and their families to the US.
- 2.2 Each person moving to the US is offered assistance of up to $6,000, partially paid in the form of return tickets for themselves and dependents, the balance to be provided via US city/State authorities.
- 2.3 After a period of 3 years, anyone taking advantage of this offer who has been an income earner in the US (proved by tax payments) for longer than 2 years is eligible for permanent residence status.
- 2.4 The assistance money is distributed via States/cities in the US, which may not incur administration costs exceeding 5% of the total amount.
- 2.5 Normal INS procedures to be followed after the above.
- 2.6 Should assistance money be accepted, the immigrant would be be required to be domiciled in the area of administration for a period of 5 years, or the grant would become repayable.
3 Global Village
- 3.1 US action. All funds currently allocated to Israel are immediately transferred to the purchase of all rights to an area in Africa from a largely depopulated country with sufficient water supplies. This area is placed under the jurisdiction of the UN. Existing populations are transferred out of this area.
- 3.2 The area is cleared of landmines if necessary.
- 3.3 The area is divided into areas able to feed 15,000 people.
- 3.4 Groups of people 3,000 to 15,000 strong wishing to move to this area (from any location) are provided with "settler" funds from a revolving loan and moved to one of these areas.
- 3.5 Individuals moving to this area are required to individually accept the Helsinki accord on human rights as being binding on themselves and their heirs, and to agree to limit their population growth to replacement levels and in no case to exceed 15,000 people.
- 3.6 No weapons other than personal firearms are permitted.
- 3.7 Territorial integrity, and constitutional and appeal courts will be provided and guaranteed by the UN Security Council members.
- 3.8 Preference will be given to people from hotspots.
- 3.9 People moving to the "Global Village" will be able to earn money or repay loans by contributing to infrastructure building projects.
- 3.10 People within villages may choose any form of local government by means of a referendum. A referendum under UN auspices may be held at any time to select a new form of government.
- 3.11 All citizens will have a duty to assist UN staff at all times. One year of civic duty (armed or otherwise) will be required of all citizens.
- 3.12 A transaction tax will be levied at 4% of all transactions. This shall be the only permitted tax other than a resource access fee to be determined by the UN and assessed against land and other shared resource usage. The tax rate may be adjusted upwards in the event that the community is found to be in breach of its agreements.
- 3.13 All areas shall have English as their official language.
- 3.14 Basic health and teaching assistance shall be provided.
- 3.15 Villages shall be responsible for the upkeep of infrastructure installed within their territories.
- 3.16 The same solution will be offered to the inhabitants of other "hotspots" and other countries will be invited to join the "Global Village" through surrender of their autonomy.
- 3.17 No "Global village" member nor WTO member shall impose duties on goods exported from any "Global Village" except that transaction taxes may be levied by the UN in the event that the village is found to be out of complience with tax or other obligations.
- 3.18 On payment of a fee to be prescribed, members of the "Global Village" shall be eligable to receive power from the proposed Global Power Satellite System.
4 Establishment of a Palestinian State
- 4.1 A viable state be established, its borders to be patrolled by an International task force.
- 4.2 International court to determine reparations to be paid by Israel.
- 4.3 A Truth & Reconciliation Commission be established to deal with Palestinian and Israeli grievances. People accused of war crimes who cooperate with the TRC will have any sentences issued by the War Crimes court commutted.
- 4.4 A water management council be established to resolve resource issues.
5 Benefits
- 5.1 To the world
- 5.1.1 Immediate reduction of tension in Israel/Palestine
- 5.1.2 Final resolution of the "problem" of dispossessed people.
- 5.1.3 Long term removal of a threat of weapons of mass destruction.
- 5.1.4 Demonstrate the ability and will of the World to act together to prevent genocide and acts of terror.
- 5.2 To the Palestinians
- 5.2 1 Long term restitution of a viable state
- 5.2 2 End of their non-refugee status
- 5.2 3 End of Israeli genocide.
- 5.2 4 Reduction of population leading to less stress on the already critical water resources.
- 5.3 To Israelis
- 5.3 1 Long term provision of security and an end to terrorism.
- 5.3 2 End of threat to their viability.
- 5.3 3 End of unnecessary arms expenditure.
- 5.3 4 Reduction of population leading to less stress on the already critical water resources.
- 5.4 To The USA
- 5.4.1 Being recognized as a lawful part of the world as opposed to a rogue state.
- 5.4.2 Being relieved of concerns about being dragged into a Middle East conflict.
- 5.4.3 Clearly demonstrating her neutrality.
- 5.4.4 Resolving the question as to whether Israel is a law abiding or rogue state.
- 5.4.5 Removing the "5th column" concern created by US Zionist influence.
- 5.4.6 Rapidly reducing the cost of supporting Israel, estimated as exceeding $5 billion per year.
- 5.4.7 Reducing the probability of large scale Middle-East conflict.
- 5.4.8 Reducing the threat that the US may become the target of Muslim or Israeli acts of terror.
6 Iraq and other "problematic" countries
- 6.1 Mutatis Mutandis, the sanctions applied to Israel shall be applied to Iraq and other "problematic countries."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Fritz
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #55 on: 2009-01-11 14:34:09 » |
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[Fritz]Great Series of Maps on Palestine .... thx Blunderov; I will, with acknowledgment, use them to be even more annoying at the water cooler.
Quote:[Hermit]<snip>It is important to note that the eventual weaning of Israel from American subsidies of $ 5 billion per year or more would pay for the program in its entirety and allow the USA to become a much more significant donor to other challenging areas at no additional cost to tax payers.<snip> |
[Fritz]So, is the $5 Billion subsidies, tax dollars being sent, or a total including private funds from Americas ?
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #56 on: 2009-01-11 17:36:39 » |
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Public funds only. It would be a massive task to investigate the private funds going to Israel given that they are likely of a similar volume but probably from hundreds of thousands of sources.
It should not be missed that about half of all the "foreign aid" provided by the US to anyone is provided to Israel - and makes up about 3 billion of the $ 5 to 6 billion a year we have averaged and which, in total, dwarfs anything the US government has given any other recipient - including Americans. Indeed, measured on a per capita basis, the US government gives more money to Israel for its social services programs - free education, healthcare and pensions, than the US spends on its own largely non-existent equivalents. The other 3 billion is made up of loans to Israel for all sorts of things, usually requiring most of the money to be spent in the US (e.g. arms, agricultural, electronics, media sectors) and later forgiving the loans. This provides a very low visibility way (it is never budgeted) to get a quadruple benefit out of the money: for Israel the goods or services; for the earmarked supplier, fat government contracts; initially for the politician arranging it, all the kudos; but later a backhand from AIPAC can be expected to make the same politicians' primary task of raising funds much easier. Against all these wonderful "benefits" the fact that the hugely inflated cost eventually ends up on the US deficit paid by all tax payers has always been a problem for future generations and thus not something about which Americans have concerned themselves. A significant additional amount of what the USA calls its "foreign aid" budget is routed to other Middle East parties so long as they remain sweet to Israel. Egypt is a prime and current example. It is how Israel keeps the border shut. America merely has to suggest that if it were opened, the US would regretfully have to suspend grain shipments to Egypt to ensure complaisance never mind compliance.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Hermit
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #57 on: 2009-01-12 10:28:36 » |
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Reply 32 extended with the latest Israeli twist.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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letheomaniac
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #58 on: 2009-01-12 13:21:42 » |
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[letheomaniac] I've been glued to the news channels for days now. It has been particularly instructive to note the difference between CNN and Al Jazeera's coverage of the affair. The more I sit and watch the representatives of Israel mouth bullshit about how they were 'forced' to perpetrate these crimes, the more I see in my mind's eye a bloody-knuckled habitual wife beater standing over his broken wife roaring, "Why do you make me do this?! Why do you make me so angry?! Why won't you just do what I tell you for fuck's sake!". And sadly the folks I have been talking to today all say the same thing, something that would make that the aforementioned brute a happy man - "Why," they say, "do the Palestinians go up against Israel? They must know that they'll be crushed." And I think yeah, why did that lippy bitch have to open her mouth?
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"You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker
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Walter Watts
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Just when I thought I was out-they pull me back in
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Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #59 on: 2009-01-12 15:38:51 » |
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Quote from: letheomaniac on 2009-01-12 13:21:42 [letheomaniac] I've been glued to the news channels for days now. It has been particularly instructive to note the difference between CNN and Al Jazeera's coverage of the affair. The more I sit and watch the representatives of Israel mouth bullshit about how they were 'forced' to perpetrate these crimes, the more I see in my mind's eye a bloody-knuckled habitual wife beater standing over his broken wife roaring, "Why do you make me do this?! Why do you make me so angry?! Why won't you just do what I tell you for fuck's sake!". And sadly the folks I have been talking to today all say the same thing, something that would make that the aforementioned brute a happy man - "Why," they say, "do the Palestinians go up against Israel? They must know that they'll be crushed." And I think yeah, why did that lippy bitch have to open her mouth?
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Excellent analogy letheomaniac.
Walter
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Walter Watts Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!
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