Shoe-throwing journalist seeks Swiss home

The Iraqi journalist who launched his shoes at outgoing United States President George W. Bush is seeking political asylum in Switzerland, his lawyer has said.

Mauro Poggia told the Tribune de Genève daily that he would write to the Swiss foreign ministry this week on behalf of the journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi.

However, a younger brother in Baghdad has denied the information, saying it was "a lie".

The 29-year-old journalist for the Al-Baghadadia television channel faces up to 15 years in prison for the incident on December 14, which made him a hero in the Arab world.

"It is the farewell kiss, you dog," Zaidi shouted after his shoes sailed past the ducking US president. Bush is widely unpopular in the region for the 2003 intervention in Iraq.

The Iraqi journalist has reportedly been beaten in custody and his lawyer said he could no longer work as a journalist in Iraq "without suffering terrible pressure".

In Geneva, Zaidi could "very well work as a journalist at the United Nations," he added.

Prise de parole Josef Zisyadis, député national suisse

Prise de parole Josef Zisyadis, député national suisse ( A Gauche toute ! / POP & Gauche en mouvement)

Manifestation nationale
Berne 10 janvier 2009

Palestine, Palestine ! Pourquoi les Etats du monde t’ont-ils abandonnés ?

Gaza, Gaza ! Pourquoi la communauté internationale t’a-t-elle abandonné ?

Si nous sommes descendus dans la rue aujourd‘hui, c’est pour exprimer notre rage, notre dégoût, notre révolte devant la lâcheté internationale face à un Etat voyou. C’est à nous les peuples du monde, les citoyens du monde de reprendre le flambeau de la solidarité internationale face à ce génocide crapuleux.

Le martyr du peuple palestinien de Gaza a assez duré. Nous disons CA SUFFIT !

• Halte à l’agression militaire !
• Levée immédiate du blocus !
• Application du droit international !
• Arrêt de la collaboration militaire Suisse-Israël !

En tant que dernier député suisse qui a visité Gaza et rompu le blocus avec 12 autres parlementaires au début novembre 2008, je revois en ce moment les visages de ces hommes et femmes, de ces enfants, de ces jeunes, de ces médecins, de ces responsables municipaux, de ces pêcheurs que j’ai rencontrés, déjà épuisés par des mois de blocus israélien et égyptien. Que sont-ils devenus ? Sont-ils encore vivants ? 800 tués, des milliers de blessés innocents pour que des ministres israéliens puissent gagner leurs élections…

Une fois encore ce sont les civils innocents qui paient le prix de cette guerre ignoble, au mépris de la Convention internationale de Genève.

Un million et demi d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants payent, sont punis pour avoir mal voté aux dernières élections démocratiques. La rééducation par la violence militaire pour qu’ils fassent un choix conforme à l’Etat israélien et à l’occident.

Il faut que cesse le double jeu que paye de son sang le peuple palestinien. La complicité active des États-Unis, le soutien tacite des régimes arabes en place, la passivité de l’Union européenne, le silence assourdissant de la Suisse ont encouragé le cynisme des va-t-en-guerre des dirigeants israéliens.

Notre pays, la Suisse doit cesser toute collaboration militaire avec un Etat voyou, expression qui qualifie exactement un comportement étatique qui bafoue le droit humanitaire, la protection des civils.

Qu’attend le Conseil fédéral pour rappeler son ambassadeur en Israël et expulser l’ambassadeur israélien en Suisse ? Oui ou non sommes-nous détenteurs de la Convention de Genève ?

N’avons-nous pas ce devoir d’humanité à proclamer à la face du monde ? La Suisse doit traîner les dirigeants politiques et militaires israéliens devant le Tribunal pénal international pour crimes de guerre.

Il n’y aura jamais de solution militaire au conflit israélo-palestinien. Il n’y a que la paix et la négociation qui sont la seule issue pour les peuples de cette région. C’est pour cela que nous sommes dans la rue.

C’est pour cela que nous sommes des citoyens du monde engagés au moment où les dirigeants de ce monde ont capitulé. Demain, il faudra reconstruire tout ce qui aura été consciemment détruit.

Nous serons là pour mettre en place tous les jumelages, toutes les coopérations entre le peuple palestinien de Gaza et la population de notre pays.

Frères palestiniens nous sommes à vos côtés ! Frères militants anti-colonialistes israéliens nous sommes à vos côtés !
(seules les paroles prononcées font foi)

'Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion' - exiled Israeli academic

by Apostolis Fotiadis - Inter Press Service

ATHENS: Support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities exposed Ilan Pappe to death threats last year, forced him to resign as senior lecturer of political science at the University of Haifa, and leave the country. His argument that the creation of Israel in 1948 was followed by a policy of cleansing Israeli territory of Arabs, his support for the Hamas resistance despite rejecting its political ideology, and the denouncement of Israeli academia for justifying the occupation of Palestine have made him an unwanted person in Israel.

But still he remains a firm believer that the only way to improve this reality is by exposing its worst aspects.

In an interview with IPS, Pappe discusses the current situation in Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict 60 years after it began.

IPS: Can Barack Obama's victory make a difference?

IP: I think people who strive to hold the post of the strongest person in the world are not interested in moral issues, or are really moved by suffering and oppression. Obama is no different, and the morality of the issue or the suffering of the Palestinians would not move him. He would move in a different direction if he and his advisers would feel that showing less support for Israel enhances their political power. So far this is not the case. It is better to be pro-Israeli to win American elections and be re-elected for the second term. If there is any hope, this is from a second term, when the powerful men are brought back to their normal human size again, and may begin to think like you and me about injustice, oppression and occupation.

IPS: Are we today experiencing the worst moment of the Arab-Israeli conflict since it first began?

IP: I still think the worst moment was 1948 and the ethnic cleansing; but it is very bad indeed. It is the final stages of the Israeli unilateral attempt to divide the West Bank into two parts, one annexed to Israel and the other maintained as a big prison camp, or a Bantustan at best. The situation in the Gaza Strip is worse, there the "prison" is already in place, and because of the resistance by the Palestinians to the imprisonment, Israel launches an escalating policy of massive killings. The world seems indifferent, and the Arab world uninterested.

IPS: During his last visit to the region US President George W. Bush described Israel as an example of progress and democracy in the Middle East. How objective do you find his view?

IP: A society that endorses a 40-year occupation of another people cannot be a liberal one. A society that discriminates against 20 percent of its population because they are not Jews cannot be described as progressive. The problem in Israel is not the role of religion or tradition; it is the role of Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion.
This ideology allows the army to play a significant role in most of the domestic and foreign policies, and it is probably right to say that Israel is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.

IPS: To what extent does the United States follow a policy of aggravating conflicts in the region while simultaneously calling for revival of the peace process? Does something similar happen with Palestinian militants who capitalize on people's rage? Are we experiencing an organized hypocrisy in the Middle East?

IP: I am not sure everyone is hypocritical in the same way or degree. Political elites in general are manipulators of people's tragedies and dreams, but they do differ. The worst is the American administration as in its case the gap between words and actions is the widest.
Talk of peace accompanies acts of war, support for negotiations in Palestine are actually the endorsement of Israel's occupation etc.
Israeli politicians are more transparent, their racism and oppressive plans are quite clear, but nobody in the West, and in particular Europe, is willing to do anything.
On the other hand the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not a paragon of honesty, and in fact this is why the Hamas [Movement] won the election [in 2006], but Hamas is trapped in an abnormality that would disable any political group from behaving differently. This is why the PA has to be dismembered.

IPS: On the other hand do you agree with those who see an advance of radical Islam never seen before in Palestine?

IP: Religion will continue to play for a long time a role in the life of the Palestinians, politically and socially. Whether it would be an aggressive stance or a constructive one depends entirely on the occupation and its oppressive realities. Once they are gone there is a better chance for building a political set-up that includes, rather than excludes, various ideological movements.
The advance of Hamas has a regional and local dimension. In the regional dimension it is part of the overall disappointment with the political regimes and their Western supporters. Locally, it is more directly connected to the occupation and the failure to liberate Palestine by the more secular forces. Most of Hamas support comes from the political vacuum and people's sense of defeat.

IPS: How has the abuse of history influenced the Arab-Israeli conflict up until today, and is there a way back to an objective understanding of what has happened?

IP: History was used especially in Israel to justify past criminal policies. This is the main abuse of history. It is also abused in the way that the historical narratives are employed to educate the next generations in one-dimensional, nationalist, one could say even, racist, mould. The most deplorable part of it is the abuse of the Holocaust memory which is used in Israel to Nazify the Arabs and the Palestinians, and justify criminal policies against them.

IPS: Where will this policy of suffocating Palestinians finally lead? Leaving aside the humanitarian aspect, can it become the reason for a new explosion of the Arab-Israeli conflict?

IP: It will not be a reason for another conflict, as the Arab regimes do not seem to care. But it can lead in the short term to the uprooting of Palestinians from [Gaza], genocide and ethnic cleansing. In the long run, it will make more difficult for future Palestinian generations to forgive and reconcile, and this could endanger the survival of Israel and the Jews living in it, as the Arab world and the Muslim world one day can change and become more effective and united, and Israel may lose its protector: the United States.

IPS: Has peace any chance left after 60 years of war, and if yes, what is the direction?

IP: There is no chance for peace in the near future because the conditions for it are very fundamental changes in the reality, which take time. Israel has to be de-Zionized before peace is possible, and peace has to include the return of the Palestinian refugees, otherwise it would be a futile exercise. However, one can still hope that first from the outside, through pressure, sanctions etc. and then from the inside, led by the growing number of young Israeli activists who are getting organized and effective, new energies would come to allow this transformation to take place. I think it will happen, it is hard to say when, but only working for it can bring it about.

The Daily Star Lebanon

Cluster bombs claim another victim in South Lebanon

By The Daily Star and Agence France Presse (AFP)

TYRE: A Lebanese man was killed on Thursday by a cluster bomb dropped by Israeli forces during the 2006 war in Lebanon, a police official said.

Hisham al-Ghossein, 39, was killed in the village of Qantara, near the Southern town of Marjayoun, after stepping on the bomb while working in his field, the official said.

The munitions dropped by Israel during its devastating air war against Lebanon in July-August 2006 included at least a million cluster bomblets, according to the United Nations.

Unexploded ordnance has killed or injured 257 people since the conflict ended in August 2006, according to the UN Mine Action Coordination Centre (MACC). Of those killed, at least 30 were civilians.

Cluster munitions spread bomblets over a wide area, though they often do not explode on impact, effectively turning them into anti-personnel land mines.

MACC said that 43 percent of the land affected by the munitions has been cleared since the end of the 2006 war.

After more than a year of negotiations, diplomats from 109 countries agreed at Dublin in late May on a treaty that would outlaw the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions, which have killed and injured thousands of civilians over the last four decades.

Twenty-eight countries are known to manufacture cluster munitions, some 14 have deployed them in conflicts and at least 76 countries have stockpiles of the weapons.

Six of the world's leading users and producers - Russia, China, the United States, Israel, India and Pakistan - did not attend the conference.

Human rights groups complained Washington had been pressuring its allies and lobbying hard behind the scenes to weaken any deal.

The Daily Star, with AFP

Article: 'They hate us because of our policies' - US legislators

By Agence France Presse (AFP)


WASHINGTON: Anti-Americanism is at record levels thanks to US government policies such as the war in Iraq, and Washington's apparent hypocrisy in abiding by its own democratic values, a panel of US lawmakers said Wednesday. A House of Representatives committee report based on expert testimony and polling data reveals US approval ratings have fallen to record lows across the world since 2002, particularly in the Islamic world and Latin America.

It says the problem arises not from a rejection of US culture, values and power but primarily from its Washington's policies, such as backing authoritarian regimes while officially promoting democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

"Our physical strength has come to be seen not as a solace but as a threat, not as a guarantee of stability and order but as a source of intimidation, violence and torture," said Democrat Bill Delahunt, chairman of the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights and Oversight.

"We have dangerously depleted what [19th-century President Ulysses S.] Grant... identified as our greatest source of international power - our reputation for what he called conscience. I would substitute the phrase 'moral authority,'" the congressman added.

The report says that specific policies are to blame for falling approval ratings, notably the 2003 invasion and continuing occupation of Iraq, support for some repressive governments, what is referred to as a "perception" of bias in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and the torture and abuse of prisoners.

It says "disappointment and bitterness" have grown from the impression that "proclaimed US values of democracy, human rights and rule of law have been selectively ignored by successive administrations" for national security or economic ends.

The committee also says unilateralism, particularly in military action, has led to "anger and a fear of attack that are transforming disagreements with US policy into a broadening and deepening anti-Americanism."

These factors, as well as various US visa and immigration issues, have helped to create a "growing belief in the Islamic world that the United States is using the 'war on terror' as a cover for its attempts to destroy Islam," the report concludes. - AFP, with The Daily Star

The Daily Star Lebanon

Lebanon's feuding factions reach agreement

By HUSSEIN DAKROUB, Associated Press Writer

Lebanon's feuding factions reached a breakthrough deal Wednesday that ends the country's 18-month political stalemate, but also gives the militant Hezbollah group and its allies veto over any government decision.

The deal, reached with the help of Arab mediators, was immediately praised by Iran and Syria, which back Hezbollah. But it appears certain to accelerate fears in the West over Hezbollah's new power.

Pro-government politician and parliament majority leader, Saad Hariri, seemed to acknowledge his side had largely caved in, spurred by a sharp outbreak of violence earlier this month after months of stalemate.

"I know that the wounds are deep and my injury is deep, but we only have each other to build Lebanon," he said after the announcement of the deal, which was brokered after five days of talks in Qatar.

Hezbollah's chief negotiator, Mohammed Raad, downplayed the group's win.

"Neither side got all it demanded, but (the agreement) is a good balance between all parties' demands," he said.

The Bush administration seemed to be trying to put the best face on the deal even though it gave more power to Hezbollah, considered a terrorist group by Washington and Israel.

"We view this agreement as a positive step toward resolving the current crisis," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. "We call upon all Lebanese leaders to implement this agreement in its entirety."

The election of a compromise president — the head of Lebanon's mostly neutral army — was expected Sunday, Lebanon's state news agency reported.

The Hezbollah-led opposition won both its demands with the deal: veto power in a new national unity government, and an electoral law that divides Lebanon into smaller-sized districts, allowing for better representation of the country's various sects.

A few bursts of celebratory gunfire broke out in Beirut after the announcement. Lebanese television stations, which broadcast the Qatar ceremony live, showed Lebanese politicians and their Arab hosts congratulating and hugging one another.

The talks in Qatar and the deal were a dramatic cap to Lebanon's worst internal fighting since the 1975-90 civil war. At least 67 people were killed when clashes broke out between pro-government groups and the opposition in the streets Beirut and elsewhere earlier this month.

As Lebanon came close to a new all-out war, Arab League mediators intervened and got the sides to agree to hold last-ditch negotiations in the Qatari capital, Doha, to resolve the crisis.
But the resulting deal was a major victory for Hezbollah.

Opposition-allied Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri also spoke at the Doha ceremony, saying that an opposition tent encampment across from the government building in downtown Beirut would be dismantled Wednesday.

Berri called such action a "gift" from the opposition, hailing the Doha agreement.

Within an hour, pickup trucks began hauling mattresses and supplies away from the encampment, which has paralyzed the commercial heart of the Lebanese capital for more than a year. Opposition supporters dismantled tents and took apart wooden boards used in the encampment.

In Iran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said the Lebanese deal was an "example of regional integration for achieving stability and tranquility."

Syria also promptly endorsed the deal, with Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem saying "Lebanon's security and stability are important and vital to Syria's security and stability."

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he was "personally very happy" about the Doha agreement and said it was now "up to all the Lebanese to use this accord to build the basis for national reconciliation."

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said the Lebanese should draw lessons from what happened and called on them to reject violence. He also called on Arab states to help support Lebanese forces, which kept a neutral role during the latest clashes.

"We must ... pledge never to resort to arms to resolve our political differences," Saniora said at the Doha ceremony. "We should accept each other and hold dialogue to solve the problems. We want to live together and we will continue that. We have no other choice."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was a "great success for Lebanon and all the Lebanese, whose courage and patience never failed despite the ordeals they have been through."
As part of the deal reached at dawn Wednesday, Hezbollah and its political allies would receive veto power in the country's new national unity government. The Syrian-backed opposition would get 11 seats in the Cabinet, while 16 seats would go to the U.S.- and Western-backed parliament majority.

The remaining three would be distributed by the elected president. Previously, the opposition held six seats in the Cabinet.

The agreement, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, states that the factions "pledged to refrain" from taking up weapons to resolve disputes and that the "use of arms or violence is forbidden to settle political differences under any circumstances."

The government had sought a concession in Doha that Hezbollah would not again turn its guns on fellow Lebanese as in fighting earlier this month, but the broad clause referring to all Lebanese armed groups was apparently as much as it achieved.

Lebanese Telecommunications Minister Marwan Hamadeh said while the agreement "forbids internal use of weapons," it also "calls for dialogue ... on the whole subject of arms."

Hamadeh also said both sides were satisfied with the new election law. The legislation is significant because it will determine how the sides distribute power in the capital and directly influence the outcome of the next parliamentary elections in 2009.

Lebanon has been without a president since Emile Lahoud stepped down in November, and rival factions have been unable to resolve their differences over a future government.

Both sides have agreed on Gen. Michel Suleiman, the army chief, as a consensus candidate. But parliament had been unable to muster a quorum to meet because of disagreement on other remaining issues — including the formation of the national unity government and electoral law.

Hamadeh also said legislators from the parliament majority, who have been living abroad fearing for their safety after a wave of bombings targeting mainly anti-Syrian lawmakers and politicians, would be asked to return to Beirut to vote for the president in parliament.

The agreement was struck after host Qatar stepped up pressure Tuesday, offering the rival factions two drafts on how to end the deadlock and a day to consider the proposals.

The 18-month standoff started when Hezbollah-led opposition lawmakers resigned from the government in November 2006 to protest the Cabinet's refusal to grant them enough seats to ensure veto power.

The Qatar deal was also a triumph for the tiny energy-rich Gulf state. The Lebanese stalemate had defied mediation efforts by other Arab and European countries, including shuttle diplomacy in the last year by the foreign minister of France, Lebanon's former colonial ruler.

Source: Associated Press (Yahoo News)

AFP: Libyan envoy stands by Israel-Nazi comparison

Libyan envoy stands by Israel-Nazi comparison

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

UNITED NATIONS: Libya's deputy UN ambassador insisted Thursday that the situation in the Gaza Strip is actually "worse" than what happened in Nazi concentration camps, a day after similar remarks sparked a walkout of Western envoys in the Security Council. "It is more than what happened in the concentration camps because there is the bombing, daily bombs in Gaza," Ibrahim Dabbashi told reporters. "It is worse," the Libyan diplomat added, pointing out that there were no such bombings on concentration camps during World War II.

He said he made the controversial remarks in Wednesday's Security Council debate "as an argument" to buttress Libya's case that the 15-member body needed to act to end the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.

"I think if those statements are correct, they reflect a degree of historical ignorance and moral insensitivity that is one of the large reasons why this council is unable to act on Middle East issues and why peace in the Middle East is so difficult," US Deputy Ambassador Alejandro Wolff retorted.

"To compare the situation in Gaza, with all its difficulties, with concentration camps in Nazi Germany is as I described ... historically inaccurate and fundamentally at odds with efforts to try to make peace in the Middle East," he told reporters.

Libya is the lone Arab member on the 15-member council and acts as a spokesman for the Arab group at the UN.

Wednesday's Western walkout came as council members failed to reach agreement on a compromise statement on the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. In previous months, the council had several times tried and failed to agree on a statement regarding the crippling Israeli siege of Gaza.

Earlier Thursday, Israel hailed Western diplomats for their UN walkout a day earlier.
"They did what was called for in such a situation and we applaud that," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel. Israel imposed a punishing blockade on Gaza after the Islamist Hamas movement seized control of the Palestinian territory in June, ousting forces loyal to pro-American Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. - AFP

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=91443

Saudi king calls for interfaith dialogue

By DONNA ABU-NASR and ABDULLAH SHIHRI, Associated Press Writers

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - King Abdullah is calling for a dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews, the first such proposal from this strictly Muslim kingdom at a time of mounting tensions between followers of Islam and those of other religions.

In a speech late Monday, Abdullah said the country's top clerics gave him the green light to pursue his idea. Their backing is crucial in a religiously conservative society that expects decisions taken by its rulers to adhere to Islam's tenets.

The monarch, whose kingdom follows a severe interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism and bans non-Muslim religious services and symbols, said he discussed the idea with Pope Benedict XVI when they met at the Vatican last year.

"The idea is to ask representatives of all monotheistic religions to sit together with their brothers in faith and sincerity to all religions as we all believe in the same God," the king told delegates to a seminar titled "Culture and the Respect of Religions."

His remarks were reported by the official Saudi Press Agency.

"I have noticed that the family system has weakened and that atheism has increased. That is an unacceptable behavior to all religions, to the Quran, the Torah and the Bible," Abdullah said. "We ask God to save humanity. There is a lack of ethics, loyalty and sincerity for our religions and humanity."

Abdullah's call is significant. The Saudi monarch is the custodian of Islam's two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina, a position that lends his words special importance and influence among many Muslims.

His message for tolerance comes at a time of mounting Muslim anger over the republication by Danish newspapers of cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad and the weekend high-profile conversion of a Muslim commentator to Roman Catholicism.

Abdullah did not say whether Muslim clerics from Saudi Arabia would be willing to meet with Jewish leaders from Israel. Saudi Arabia and all other Arab nations except Egypt and Jordan do not have diplomatic relations with Israel and generally shun unofficial contacts.

In Israel, Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger welcomed Abdullah's call. "Our hand is outstretched to any peace initiative and any dialogue that is aimed at bringing an end to terror and violence," he said in a statement.

Rabbi David Rosen, head of inter-religious relations at the American Jewish Committee, said he was "delighted" by the Saudi announcement.

"Religion is all too often the problem, so it has to also be the solution, or at least part of the solution, and I think that the tragedy of the political initiatives to bring peace has been the failure to include the religious dimension," Rosen said.

Since coming to power in August 2005, Abdullah has taken steps to encourage dialogue among his kingdom's Sunni Muslim majority and its other Muslim sects, including Shiites. His meeting with Benedict was the first between a Saudi monarch and a pope.

Abdullah said he plans to hold conferences to get the opinion of Muslims from other parts of the world as well as meetings "with our brothers in all religions which I mentioned, the Torah and Bible, so we can agree on something that guarantees the preservation of humanity against those who tamper with ethics, family systems and honesty."

Abdullah said that if such an agreement is reached, he plans to take his proposal to the United Nations.

How Can Israeli Holocausts In Gaza Be Seen As A Scar On Western Conscious?

By Ali Al-Hail

ccun.org, March 24, 2008

Many observe that, selectivity, partiality, prejudice and bias imprint Western Foreign polices. Most notably, those of the United States of America. As regards, no subtle difference seems to be detected between what's called 'Democrats' and 'Republicans'.

Ms. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives was seen by many to have been emotively, overwhelmed by the Tibetan unrest that, had 'enigmatically,' erupted on March 10. Her meeting with the dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, in Northern India on Friday, had clearly, manifested her dubious initiative.

Many argue that, since Tibet is part of China, Ms Pelosi may have offended the Chinese government, by not visiting Beijing instead, to discuss the issue. Her call on China to end its rule at the Tibet has widely, been perceived as typical of US double standard doctrine.

Apparently, the controversial number of fatalities amongst Tibetans, as whether they were nearly, 10 or 100, had prompted Ms Pelosi view about the Chinese. All of a sudden, a discerning humanity emerged out of her political performance.

Three weeks go, when Israel massacred 37 children and 7 breast-fed-babies in addition to more than 100 civilians, including women, elderly, and handicapped, Ms Pelosi was being hypnotized by the Israeli Lobby. No one heard of her, calling on Israel to end its 4-decade-occupaion of Palestinian lands, in the same way, she urged the Chinese to end their rule of the Tibet.

Similarly, no one heard of Ms Pelosi's, 'the human democrat' human side, while Gazan children's and breast-fed-babies' blood and flush were spreading everywhere, by the Israeli-US-made-F16 missiles. This trendy attitude is needless to mention, applicable to almost entirely, all representatives of Western governments. Thus, Ms Pelosi is not, and won’t be an exemption.

According to George Galloway, the British Labor Independent even Tony Blair, the QUARTET's representative to Israel and the Palestinian lands, happened to have swallowed his tongue and his conscious, during the Israeli holocausts in Gaza (George Galloway, Bahrain, quoted by Al Jazeera TV, March 20th).


Professor, Dr. Ali Al-Hail, Professor of Mass Communication, Twice Fulbright

Award Winner, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Vice-President Of Qatar Fulbright Group, CSR Award Judge and Board Member of AUSACE, ASC, IABD, NEBAA, BEA, IMDA and EAJMC American Associations.

Israeli police ban Palestinian event

By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM - Israeli police on Tuesday broke up a Palestinian event meant to promote Jerusalem as the world's next "Arab Cultural Capital."

The Palestinians want next year's celebrations to strengthen their claim to the disputed city. But Tuesday's crackdown sent a strong signal that Israel will not go along with the decision by the 22-member Arab League to bestow its cultural prize on Jerusalem.

"We want to exploit this for Jerusalem," said Ahmad al-Ruweidi, head of the Jerusalem unit in the office of the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Two years ago, the Arab League quietly designated Jerusalem its 2009 "Arab Cultural Capital," an honor that rotates among Arab countries. Winners typically use the occasion to showcase their attachment to Arab culture, sponsoring poetry, music, dance performances, lectures, school activities and sporting events.

In Jerusalem, it's not that simple. Israel says the entire city is its undivided and eternal capital. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem — captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war and site of key Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites — as the capital of a future state.

The dispute over Jerusalem is the most contentious issue in peace talks, and a Palestinian cultural celebration could easily be seen as a political message, angering Israel.

On Tuesday, Palestinian organizers planned to announce the winner of a contest to design a logo for the cultural campaign at the Palestinian national theater in east Jerusalem. But when they arrived, the doors were locked and police stood outside.

"Police arrived at the scene and showed them a warrant signed by the minister of internal security banning the convention," said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

About 50 participants attempted to hold a news conference outside, but police broke it up. They said two people were briefly detained during a scuffle.

"We have the right to practice our culture in Jerusalem. We have the right to dance," said Bassem al-Masri, a campaign organizer.

Israeli government officials had no comment on next year's planned celebration, saying they were unaware of the Arab League's decision. But Israel forbids virtually all Palestinian political activity in the city.

Illustrating the challenge, the logo competition winner, Khaled Hourani, could not attend Tuesday's event because he lives in the West Bank and didn't have time to apply for an Israeli permit to enter Jerusalem.

His winning logo shows a multicolored 8-point Islamic star alongside a silhouette of Jerusalem's Old City, with barbed wire transposed over images of a mosque and a church.

Since Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip need permits to enter the city, organizers concede it will be extremely difficult for performers and audiences to attend next year's event. About 180,000 Palestinians live in east Jerusalem.

On Monday, Israeli police detained al-Ruweidi, who said he was questioned for several hours about projects for next year's event. Police said he was questioned because he recently traveled to Lebanon, an enemy state.

The event also won't attract Arab superstars — a key part of festivities in other Arab countries. Most Arab countries don't have relations with Israel, and their citizens are not allowed to visit Israel, which controls the city.

Performers from Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab countries at peace with Israel, refused to visit in protest against Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

The Arab League annually rotates the title of Arab Cultural Capital among cities of the region. Damascus, the Syrian capital, currently holds the honor.

The Arab League initially pegged Jerusalem as culture capital for 2011, but two years ago, the Iraqi government pulled Baghdad from the 2009 slot, citing security problems.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders hope to reach a final peace agreement, including a deal on Jerusalem, by the end of the year.

Since peace talks began last year, the Israeli government has emphasized its claim to the city by announcing plans to build hundreds of new homes in east Jerusalem neighborhoods built after 1967.

Palestinians and the international community view the move as settlement building — forbidden under the terms of U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan.

"Israel must understand we are Arabs," said al-Ruweidi, the Palestinian presidential adviser. "We listen to Arab songs, and our loyalty is to Arabic culture."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080325/ap_on_re_mi_ea/jerusalem_culture_clash;_ylt=Ar8mzCkukB._81QwrfOfyRpvaA8F

Tragedy of Israel and Palestine

By Mark Levine

The father of 18 days-old newborn Palestinian baby girl Amira Abu Asr, who was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers, mourns during her funeral on March 5 [GALLO/GETTY]

Americans have grown so accustomed to the disastrous dynamics operating between Israelis and Palestinians today that the failure to reach a peace deal amid the soaring death tolls assumes an aura of normalcy in their minds.

This reflects a situation we imagine ourselves to be powerless to help change and only adds to the tragedy unfolding in the Occupied Territories and Israel as well.

Today the world's attention has turned to the aftermath of the murder of eight students of an ultra-Zionist Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, established by the founder of religious zionism, Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook in 1924.

Last week the focus was the ongoing war in Gaza, which will likely be the centre of attention next week as well.

The attacks on religious students in the midst of study and prayer - coupled with the ongoing rocket attacks from Gaza on the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon - are already being offered as the latest examples of continued Palestinian unwillingness to make peace with Israel more than two years after its unprecedented withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.


World's largest prison

Shanbo Heinemann, a pro-Palestinian activist, is injured in a protest against the wall [GETTY]

But there are many problems with this argument; firstly, most of the acts of Palestinian resistance to the occupation have always been non-violent.

Equally important is the fact that while Israeli civilians no longer live in Gaza, Israel's military presence has never ended.

Tel Aviv withdrew civilian settlers and then threw away the key to what has now become the world's largest prison.

Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and the architect of the settlement movement, was willing to sacrifice Gaza in order to ensure Israel held onto the major settlement blocs of the West Bank, which today house more than 250,000 settlers (almost double that number if one includes the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem).

The settler population of the West Bank also doubled during the years of the Oslo "peace" process - which began when Abu Dahim was about 12 and ended when he was 19 - without a whimper of complaint from the United States.

By the time Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, was assassinated in 1995, Palestinian leaders were warning that the continued settlement expansion was "killing" the peace process and would sooner or later lead to a "revolution" from the street.




Matrix of control

The presence of well over 100 settlements has necessitated a matrix of control in which 80 per cent of the West Bank be declared off limits to Palestinians.

It also meant the destruction of thousands of homes and olive and fruit trees (the backbone of an otherwise closed Palestinian economy), the confiscation of 35,000 acres of Palestinian land, and the creation of a network of bypass roads, military bases.

The 400-kilometre, 8-metre-high "separation wall" also pierces deep into Palestinian territory, cutting into at least three isolated cantons.

Together, the settlement system has made the idea of creating a territorially and economically viable Palestinian state impossible to implement.

With the eruption of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 whatever infrastructure of peace had been created during Oslo was quickly dismantled by both sides.

By mid-2002 Israel began deploying a strategy of managed chaos, in which a near total closure of the Territories, coupled with a destruction of much of their economic and political infrastructure, turned the intifada into what Palestinians term an "intifawda," a neologism that brings the violence of the intifada together with the chaos, or "fawda" of a society living in a barely functioning state and economy.



Dividing Palestine

Israel's separation wall cuts a broad path through Palestinian olive groves [GALLO/GETTY]

Israeli planners gambled that by splitting the West Bank from Gaza, deepening the occupation of the former while freeing itself of the settlements in the latter, and routinely deploying disproportionate violence (including tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s, and heavily armed troops) against all signs of resistance, Palestinian society would begin turning on itself.

Indeed, Israel hoped for this when it clandestinely supported the emergence of Hamas two decades ago, with the goal of building up a rival to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that would have them fighting each other rather than figuring out more successful strategies of fighting the occupation.

But, even as Palestinians fight each other, resistance to the occupation has continued. Most of it is comprised of various forms of non-violence (marches, sit-ins, and attempts to stop home demolitions or replant uprooted fields or groves).

These are rarely covered by the international media, and are usually met with violence by the Israeli military or settlers.

Fairly or not, however, it has been Palestinian violence, and especially suicide bombings and now rocket attacks on civilians, that have defined their resistance to the ongoing occupation.


Suicidal suicide attacks

And in this regard the actions have been nothing short of suicidal - Palestinian "resistance" to the occupation seems to have been scripted by Israel as it has suited the interests of the Israeli governments in power since 2000. As Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston recently put it:

"The Palestinians have kept their ultimate doomsday weapon under tight wraps for 40 years ... Israeli senior commanders could only pray that the Palestinians would never take it out and put it to actual use ... non-violence. This is one reason why, for decades, Israel did its best to head off, harass, and crack down on expressions of Palestinian non-violence."

If Palestinians ever decided to just "get up and walk" en masse to the Erez Crossing separating Gaza from Israel and the major West Bank check points like Qalandiya and used hammers and picks to tear them down, there would be almost nothing Israel could do, short of a massacre in full view of the world's cameras.

But Palestinians have become so stuck in the ideology of summud, (which naturally become a national imperative after a million Palestinians were uprooted in the 1948 and 1967 wars), or defiantly staying put, that they have rarely taken the strategic or moral offensive.

When they applied the moral approach during the first intifada, Israel's harsh crackdown coupled with PLO dominance of Palestianian politics, ensured the de-politicisation and disempowerment of the first "intifada generation".

Two weeks ago, when a few brave Palestinians tried to organise a peaceful march to the Erez border crossing to build on the momentum gained by breaching the border fence between Gaza and Egypt, they were stopped far from the border by a line of heavily armed Hamas policemen.

Soon after, the day's ration of rockets was fired into the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, wounding two Israeli children.

Israel responded with a new rounds of attacks by Israel, killing and wounding more Palestinians.


How to stop?

A few years ago, in a particularly violent moment of the intifada, I interviewed a senior Hamas leader at his office in Gaza. After the usual boiler plate questions and answers, I finally grew exasperated and said to him, "Look, let's put aside the question of whether you have the right to use violence, particularly against civilians, to pursue your ends. The simple fact is that the strategy has not worked."

His response stunned me with its honesty: "We know the violence doesn't work, but we don't know how to stop."

In a mirror image of Israeli strategic thinking, Hamas has remained unable to break free of the dangerously outdated paradigm that says violence, particularly against civilians, can only be met by even more violence until the other side yields.

Aside from the moral turpitude of such thinking by both sides - not to mention blatant illegality according to international law - the reality, at least in the near term, is that the human and political cost of such a policy for Israel is far lower than for Palestinians, who have very little time left before their dreams of independence are crushed for good.

Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, has himself admitted, the day Palestinians give up on the dream of an independent state will be the day Israel will "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

Dysfunctional dynamics

But so dysfunctional are the current dynamics that neither side seems willing to take the first step away from the abyss.

In such a situation, only a strong outside party can force the warring sides to make the hard compromises necessary to achieve a just and lasting peace.

This was the job the US signed up for in 1993, when Bill Clinton, then president, witnessed the signing of the first Oslo agreement on the White House lawn. But we have failed miserably in our self-appointed role as "honest broker."

It's not just that US has unapologetically taken Israel's side on almost every major issue since then.

During the Oslo years the US worked hand in glove with the Israeli and Palestinian security services to stifle dissent within Palestinian civil society, or the Legislative Council, to a process that was moving away from rather than towards a just and lasting peace.

And with the militarisation of US foreign policy after September 11 and the sullied occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel has had even greater carte blanche to inflict precisely the kind of damage upon Palestinian society we are witnessing now in Gaza.


Blood of children

By refusing to press Israel - as many Israeli commentators, and an increasing number of US policy-makers as well, urge - to negotiate with Hamas we have not just enabled the current violence, but are directly responsible for it.

Hamas has declared its willingness to negotiate a two-state solution, albeit under conditions to which Israel has little incentive to accept.

The blood of Israeli and Palestinian children that appears on TV is on our hands too.

It would be nice if we could imagine that the next US president will have the courage to "change" this dynamic. But there is little chance of that.

The only hope is that Israeli and Palestinian societies come together to stop the violence their leaders keep inflicting on them before the delusions of victory on both sides cross the line into psychosis.

Mark LeVine is professor of history at UCI Irvine and author or editor of half a dozen books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and globalisation in the Middle East, including Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel and Palestine, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil, and the forthcoming An Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens of History.


Source: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BB1E373A-50F9-403A-9263-98D09D584A31.htm

Criticizing Israel is Not an Act of Bigotry

Jewish Opposition to Israeli Human Rights Crimes is Growing

Criticizing Israel is Not an Act of Bigotry

By JASON KUNIN

A grassroots revolt is underway in Jewish communities throughout the world, a revolt that has panicked the elite organizations that have long functioned as official mouthpieces for the community. The latest sign of this panic is the recent publication by the American Jewish Committee of an essay by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, entitled Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism, which accuses progressive Jews of abetting a resurgent wave of anti-Semitism by publicly criticizing Israel.

This is the latest attempt to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism in order to silence or marginalize criticism of Israel. This approach is widely used in Canada. Upon becoming CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Bernie Farber declared that one of his goals was to "educate Canadians about the links between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism."

It is misleading for groups like the Canadian Jewish Congress to pretend that the Jewish community is united in support of Israel. A growing number of Jews around the world are joining the chorus of concern about the deteriorating condition of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as the inferior social and economic status of Israel's own Palestinian population.

In a world where uncritical support for Israel is becoming less and less tenable due to the expanding human rights disaster in the West Bank and Gaza, leaders of Jewish communities outside Israel have circled their wagons, heightened their pro-Israel rhetoric, and demonized Israel's critics. These leaders imply that increased concerns about Israel do not result from that state's actions, but from an increase in anti-Semitism.

Despite this effort to absolve Israel of responsibility for its treatment of Palestinians, Jewish opposition is growing and becoming more organized. On Feb. 5, a group in Britain calling itself Jewish Independent Voices published an open letter in The Guardian newspaper in which they distanced themselves from "Those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain and other countries (and who) consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power above the human rights of the occupied people." Among the signatories of the letter were Nobel-prize winning playwright Harold Pinter, filmmaker Mike Leigh, writer John Berger, and many others.
This development follows the emergence of similar groups in Sweden (Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace), France (Union Juive Francaise pour la paix, Rencontre Progressiste Juive), Italy (Ebrei contro l'occupazione), Germany (Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost), Belgium (Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique), the United States (Jewish Voice for Peace, Brit Tzedek, Tikkun, the Bronfman-Soros initiative), South Africa, and others, including the umbrella organization European Jews for a Just Peace and the numerous groups within Israel itself. In Canada, the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (ACJC) has been founded as an umbrella organization bringing together Jewish individuals and groups from across the country who oppose Israel's continued domination of the West Bank and Gaza.

Criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic, nor does it "bleed into anti-Semitism," a formulation that says essentially the same thing. Some genuine anti-Semites do use Israel as a cover for maligning the Jewish people as a whole, but it is fallacious to argue that anyone who criticizes Israel is anti-Semitic because anti-Semites attack Israel. There are some anti-Semites who support Israel because they are Christian fundamentalists who see the return of Jews to Jerusalem as a precondition for the return of Christ and the conversion of Jews to Christianity, or because they are xenophobes who want to get rid of Jews in their midst. Anti-Semites take positions in support of and in opposition to Israel.

It is wrong to criticize all Jews for Israel's wrongdoings, yet Israel's leadership and its supporters in the Diaspora consistently encourage this view by insisting that Israel acts on behalf of the entire Jewish people.

This shifts blame for Israel's crimes onto the shoulders of all Jews. But Jewish critics of Israel demonstrate through their words and deeds that the Jewish community is not monolithic in its support of Israel.

Defenders of Israel often argue that Israel is forced to do what it does -- to destroy people's homes, to keep them under the boot of occupation, to seal them into walled ghettos, to brutalize them daily with military incursions and random checkpoints -- to protect its citizens from Palestinian violence. Palestinian violence, however, is rooted in the theft of their land, the diversion of their water, the violence of the occupation, and the indignity of having one's own very existence posed as a "demographic threat."

To justify Israel's continued occupation and theft of Palestinian land, the state and its defenders attempt to deny Palestinian suffering, arguing instead that Palestinian resentment is rooted not in Israeli violence, but rather in Islam, or the "Arab mentality," or a mystical anti-Semitism inherent in Arab or Muslim culture. Consequently, pro-Israel advocacy depends upon on the active dissemination of Islamophobia. Not surprisingly, engendering hatred in this manner inflames anti-Jewish sentiment among Arabs and Muslims. None of this is a recipe for making Jews safe.

Jewish people can help avert the catastrophic effects of Israeli behaviour, but only by taking a stand in opposition to it.

Jason Kunin of Toronto is a member of the administration council of the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians.

This article, which originally appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press, was written with help from other council members, including Cy Gonick and Dr. Mark Etkin, both of Winnipeg, Andy Lehrer of Toronto, Sid Shniad of Vancouver and Abraham Weizfeld of Montreal.

Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/kunin02242007.html

Does Iran's President Want Israel Wiped Off The Map - Does He Deny The Holocaust?

An analysis of media rhetoric on its way to war against Iran - Commenting on the alleged statements of Iran's President Ahmadinejad .

By Anneliese Fikentscher and Andreas Neumann
Translation to English: Erik Appleby

04/19/06 "Kein Krieg!" -- -- - "But now that I'm on Iran, the threat to Iran, of course -- (applause) -- the threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace; it's a threat, in essence, to a strong alliance. I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally, Israel, and -- (applause.)" George W. Bush, US-President, 2006-03-20 in Cleveland (Ohio) in an off-the-cuff speech (source: www.whitehouse.gov) But why does Bush speak of Iran's objective to destroy Israel?

Does Iran's President wants Israel wiped off the map?

To raze Israel to the ground, to batter down, to destroy, to annihilate, to liquidate, to erase Israel, to wipe it off the map - this is what Iran's President demanded - at least this is what we read about or heard of at the end of October 2005. Spreading the news was very effective. This is a declaration of war they said. Obviously government and media were at one with their indignation. It goes around the world.

But let's take a closer look at what Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. It is a merit of the 'New York Times' that they placed the complete speech at our disposal. Here's an excerpt from the publication dated 2005-10-30:

"They say it is not possible to have a world without the United States and Zionism. But you know that this is a possible goal and slogan. Let's take a step back. [[[We had a hostile regime in this country which was undemocratic, armed to the teeth and, with SAVAK, its security apparatus of SAVAK [the intelligence bureau of the Shah of Iran's government] watched everyone. An environment of terror existed.]]] When our dear Imam [Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian revolution] said that the regime must be removed, many of those who claimed to be politically well-informed said it was not possible. All the corrupt governments were in support of the regime when Imam Khomeini started his movement. [[[All the Western and Eastern countries supported the regime even after the massacre of September 7 [1978] ]]] and said the removal of the regime was not possible. But our people resisted and it is 27 years now that we have survived without a regime dependent on the United States. The tyranny of the East and the West over the world should have to end, but weak people who can see only what lies in front of them cannot believe this. Who would believe that one day we could witness the collapse of the Eastern Empire? But we could watch its fall in our lifetime. And it collapsed in a way that we have to refer to libraries because no trace of it is left. Imam [Khomeini] said Saddam must go and he said he would grow weaker than anyone could imagine. Now you see the man who spoke with such arrogance ten years ago that one would have thought he was immortal, is being tried in his own country in handcuffs and shackles [[[by those who he believed supported him and with whose backing he committed his crimes]]]. Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world."
(source: www.nytimes.com, based on a publication of 'Iranian Students News Agency' (ISNA) -- insertions by the New York Times in squared brackets -- passages in triple squared brackets will be left blank in the MEMRI version printed below)

It's becoming clear. The statements of the Iranian President have been reflected by the media in a manipulated way. Iran's President betokens the removal of the regimes, that are in power in Israel and in the USA, to be possible aim for the future. This is correct. But he never demands the elimination or annihilation of Israel. He reveals that changes are potential. The Shah-Regime being supported by the USA in its own country has been vanquished. The eastern governance of the Soviet Union collapsed. Saddam Hussein's dominion drew to a close. Referring to this he voices his aspiration that changes will also be feasible in Israel respectively in Palestine. He adduces Ayatollah Khomeini referring to the Shah-Regime who in this context said that the regime (meaning the Shah-Regime) should be removed.

Certainly, Ahmadinejad translates this quotation about a change of regime into the occupied Palestine. This has to be legitimate. To long for modified political conditions in a country is a world-wide day-to-day business by all means. But to commute a demand for removal of a 'regime' into a demand for removal of a state is serious deception and dangerous demagogy.
This is one chapter of the war against Iran that has already begun with the words of Georg Meggle, professor of philosophy at the university of Leipzig - namely with the probably most important phase, the phase of propaganda.

Marginally we want to mention that it was the former US Vice-Minister of Defence and current President of the World Bank, Paul D. Wolfowitz, who in Sept. 2001 talked about ending states in public and without any kind of awe. And it was the father of George W. Bush who started the discussion about a winnable nuclear war if only the survival of an elite is assured.

Let's pick an example: the German online-news-magazine tagesschau.de writes the following about Iran's president on 2005-10-27: "There is no doubt: the new wave of assaults in Palestine will erase the stigma in countenance of the Islamic world." Instead of using the original word 'wave' they write 'wave of assaults'. This replacement of the original text is what we call disinformation. E.g. it would be correct to say: "The new movement in Palestine will erase the stain of disgrace from the Islamic world." Additionally this statement refers to the occupation regime mentioned in the previous sentence.

As a precaution we will examine a different translation of the speech - a version prepared by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), located in Washington:

"They [ask]: 'Is it possible for us to witness a world without America and Zionism?' But you had best know that this slogan and this goal are attainable, and surely can be achieved. [[[...]]] "'When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah's] regime must go, and that we demand a world without dependent governments, many people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], 'Is it possible [that the Shah's regime can be toppled]?' That day, when Imam [Khomeini] began his movement, all the powers supported [the Shah's] corrupt regime [[[...]]] and said it was not possible. However, our nation stood firm, and by now we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America. Imam [Khomeni] said: 'The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [U.S.] should be ended.' But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it. Nobody believed that we would one day witness the collapse of the Eastern Imperialism [i.e. the U.S.S.R], and said it was an iron regime. But in our short lifetime we have witnessed how this regime collapsed in such a way that we must look for it in libraries, and we can find no literature about it. Imam [Khomeini] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented. And what do you see today? A man who, 10 years ago, spoke as proudly as if he would live for eternity is today chained by the feet, and is now being tried in his own country [[[...]]] Imam [Khomeini] said: 'This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.' This sentence is very wise. The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise. Is it possible that an [Islamic] front allows another front [i.e. country] to arise in its [own] heart? This means defeat, and he who accepts the existence of this regime [i.e. Israel] in fact signs the defeat of the Islamic world. In his battle against the World of Arrogance, our dear Imam [Khomeini] set the regime occupying Qods [Jerusalem] as the target of his fight. I do not doubt that the new wave which has begun in our dear Palestine and which today we are also witnessing in the Islamic world is a wave of morality which has spread all over the Islamic world. Very soon, this stain of disgrace [i.e. Israel] will vanish from the center of the Islamic world - and this is attainable."
(source: http://memri.org, based on the publication of 'Iranian Students News Agency' (ISNA) -- insertions by MEMRI in squared brackets -- missing passages compared to the 'New York Times' in triple squared brackets)

The term 'map' to which the media refer at length does not even appear. Whereas the 'New York Times' said: "Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map" the version by MEMRI is: "Imam [Khomeini] said: This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history."

MEMRI added the following prefixed formulation to their translation as a kind of title: "Very Soon, This Stain of Disgrace [i.e. Israel] Will Be Purged From the Center of the Islamic World - and This is Attainable". Thereby they take it out of context by using the insertion 'i.e. Israel' they distort the meaning on purpose. The temporal tapering 'very soon' does not appear in the NY-Times-translation either. Besides it is striking that MEMRI deleted all passages in their translation which characterize the US-supported Shah-Regime as a regime of terror and at the same time show the true character of US-American policy.

An independent translation of the original (like the version published by ISNA) yields that Ahmadinejad does not use the term 'map'. He quotes Ayatollah Khomeini's assertion that the occupation regime must vanish from this world - literally translated: from the arena of times. Correspondingly: there is no space for an occupation regime in this world respectively in this time. The formulation 'wipe off the map' used by the 'New York Times' is a very free and aggravating interpretation which is equivalent to 'razing something to the ground' or 'annihilating something'. The downwelling translation, first into English ('wipe off the map'), then from English to German - and all literally ('von der Landkarte löschen') - makes us stride away from the original more and more. The perfidious thing about this translation is that the expression 'map' can only be used in one (intentional) way: a state can be removed from a map but not a regime, about which Ahmadinejad is actually speaking.

Again following the independent translation: "I have no doubt that the new movement taking place in our dear Palestine is a spiritual movement which is spanning the entire Islamic world and which will soon remove this stain of disgrace from the Islamic world".

It must be allowed to ask how it is possible that 'spirtual movement' resp. 'wave of morality' (as translated by MEMRI) and 'wave of assaults' can be equated and translated (like e.g tagesschau.de published it).


Does Iran's President deny the Holocaust?

"The German government condemned the repetitive offending anti-Israel statements by Ahmadinejad to be shocking. Such behaviour is not tolerable, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated. [...] Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed Ahmadinejad's statements to be 'inconceivable'" (published by tagesschau.de 2005-12-14.

But not only the German Foreign Minister Steinmeier and the Federal Chancellor Merkel allege this, but the Bild-Zeitung, tagesschau.de, parts of the peace movement, US-President George W. Bush, the 'Papers for German and international politics', CNN, the Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, almost the entire world does so, too: Iran's President Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust.
What is this assertion based on? In substance it is based on dispatches of 2 days - 2005-12-14 and 2006-02-11.

"The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stepped up his verbal attacks against Israel and the Western states and has denied the Holocaust. Instead of making Israel's attacks against Palestine a subject of discussion 'the Western states devote their energy to the fairy-tale of the massacre against the Jews', Ahmadinejad said on Wednesday in a speech at Zahedan in the south-east of Iran which was broadcasted directly by the news-channel Khabar. That day he stated that if the Western states really believe in the assassination of six million Jews in W.W. II they should put a piece of land in Europe, in the USA, Canada or Alaska at Israel's disposal." - dispatch of the German press agency DPA, 2005-12-14.

The German TV-station n24 spreads the following on 2006-12-14 using the title 'Iran's President calls the Holocaust a myth': "The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stepped up his verbal attacks against Israel and called the Holocaust a 'myth' used as a pretext by the Europeans to found a Jewish state in the center of the Islamic world . 'In the name of the Holocaust they have created a myth and regard it to be worthier than God, religion and the prophets' the Iranian head of state said."

The Iranian press agency IRNA renders Ahmadinejad on 2005-12-14 as follows: "'If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II - which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why the Palestinian nation should pay for the crime. Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions.' [...] 'If you have committed the crimes so give a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to them to set up their own state there.' [...] Ahmadinejad said some have created a myth on holocaust and hold it even higher than the very belief in religion and prophets [...] The president further said, 'If your civilization consists of aggression, displacing the oppressed nations, suppressing justice-seeking voices and spreading injustice and poverty for the majority of people on the earth, then we say it out loud that we despise your hollow civilization.'"

There again we find the quotation already rendered by n24: "In the name of the Holocaust they created a myth." We can see that this is completely different from what is published by e.g. the DPA - the massacre against the Jews is a fairy-tale. What Ahmadinejad does is not denying the Holocaust. No! It is dealing out criticism against the mendacity of the imperialistic powers who use the Holocaust to muzzle critical voices and to achieve advantages concerning the legitimization of a planned war. This is criticism against the exploitation of the Holocaust.

CNN (2005-12-15) renders as follows: "If you have burned the Jews why don't you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to Israel. Our question is, if you have committed this huge crime, why should the innocent nation of Palestine pay for this crime?"

The Washingtonian ''Middle East Media Research Institute' (MEMRI) renders Ahmadinejad's statements from 2005-12-14 as follows: "...we ask you: if you indeed committed this great crime, why should the oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? * [...] If you committed a crime, you yourselves should pay for it. Our offer was and remains as follows: If you committed a crime, it is only appropriate that you place a piece of your land at their disposal - a piece of Europe, of America, of Canada, or of Alaska - so they can establish their own state. Rest assured that if you do so, the Iranian people will voice no objection."

The MEMRI-rendering uses the relieving translation 'great crime' and misappropriates the following sentence at the * marked passage: "Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions." This sentence has obviously been left out deliberately because it would intimate why the Israeli state could have forfeited the right to establish itself in Palestine - videlicet because of its aggressive expansionist policy against the people of Palestine, ignoring any law of nations and disobeying all UN-resolutions.

In spite of the variability referring to the rendering of the statements of Iran's President we should nevertheless note down: the reproach of denying the Holocaust cannot be sustained if Ahmadinejad speaks of a great and huge crime that has been done to the Jews.

In another IRNA-dispatch (2005-12-14) the Arabian author Ghazi Abu Daqa writes about Ahmadinejad: "The Iranian president has nothing against the followers of Judaism [...] Ahmadinejad is against Zionism as well as its expansionist and occupying policy. That is why he managed to declare to the world with courage that there is no place for the Zionist regime in the world civilized community."

It's no wonder that such opinions do not go down particularly well with the ideas of the centers of power in the Western world. But for this reason they are not wrong right away. Dealing out criticism against the aggressive policy of the Western world, to which Israel belongs as well, is not yet anti-Semitism. We should at least to give audience to this kind of criticism - even if it is a problematic field for us.

2006-02-11 Ahmadinejad said according to IRNA: "[...] the real holocaust should be sought in Palestine, where the blood of the oppressed nation is shed every day and Iraq, where the defenceless Muslim people are killed daily. [...] 'Some western governments, in particular the US, approve of the sacrilege on the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), while denial of the >Myth of Holocaust<, based on which the Zionists have been exerting pressure upon other countries for the past 60 years and kill the innocent Palestinians, is considered as a crime' [...]"

The assertion that Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust thus is wrong in more than one aspect. He does not deny the Holocaust, but speaks of denial itself. And he does not speak of denial of the Holocaust, but of denial of the Myth of Holocaust. This is something totally different. All in all he speaks of the exploitation of the Holocaust. The Myth of Holocaust, like it is made a subject of discussion by Ahmadinejad, is a myth that has been built up in conjunction with the Holocaust to - as he says - put pressure onto somebody. We might follow this train of thoughts or we might not. But we cannot equalize his thoughts with denial of the Holocaust.

If Ahmadinejad according to this 2006-02-11 condemns the fact that it is forbidden and treated as a crime to do research into the Myth of Holocaust, as we find it quoted in the MEMRI translation, this acquires a meaning much different from the common and wide-spread one. If the myth related to the Holocaust is commuted to a 'Fairy Tale of the Massacre' - like the DPA did - this can only be understood as a malicious misinterpretation.

By the use of misrepresentation and adulteration it apparently succeeded to constitute the statements of the Iranian President to be part and parcel of the currently fought propaganda battle. It is our responsibility to counter this.

Concluding:

A dispatch by Reuters confirms 2006-02-21: "The Iranian Foreign Minister Manuchehr Mottaki has [...] repudiated that his state would want the Jewish state Israel 'wiped off the map'. [...] Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been misunderstood. 'Nobody can erase a country from the map.' Ahmadinejad was not thinking of the state of Israel but of their regime [...]. 'We do not accredit this regime to be legitimate.' [...] Mottaki also accepted that the Holocaust really took place in a way that six million Jews were murdered during the era of National Socialism."

The next step is to connect the Iranian President with Hitler. 2006-02-20 the Chairman of the Counsil of Jews in France (Crif) says in Paris: "The Iranian President's assertions do not rank behind Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'". Paul Spiegel, President of the Central Counsil of Jews in Germany, 2005-12-10 in the 'Welt' qualifies the statements of Ahmadinejad to be "the worst comment on this subject that he has ever heard of a statesman since A. Hitler". At the White House the Iranian President is even named Hitler. And the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel as well moves over Iran's President towards Hitler and National Socialism by saying 2006-02-04 in Munich: "Already in the early 1930's many people said that it is only rhetoric. One could have prevented a lot in time if one had acted... Germany is in the debt to resist the incipiencies and to do anything to make clear where the limit of tolerance is. Iran remains in control of the situation, it is still in their hands."

All this indicates war. Slobodan Milosevic became Hitler. The result was the war of the Nato against Yugoslavia. Saddam Hussein became Hitler. What followed was the war the USA and their coalition of compliant partners waged against Iraq. Now the Iranian President becomes Hitler.

And someone who is Hitler-like can assure a hundred times that he only wants to use nuclear energy in a peaceful way. Nobody will believe him. Somebody like Hitler can act within the scope of all contracts. Acting contrary to contract will nevertheless be imputed to him. "Virtually none of the Western states recognize that uranium enrichment is absolutely legal. There is no restriction by contract or by the law of nations. Quite the contrary: Actually the Western countries would have the duty to assist Iran with these activities, according to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As long as a state renounces the bomb it is eligible for technical support by the nuclear powers." (Jörg Pfuhl, ARD radio studio Istanbul 2006-01-11) But - all this does not count if the Head of a state is stigmatized as Hitler.

Source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12790.htm

The Meaning of Gaza’s ‘Shoah’

Israel plots another Palestinian exodus

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

08/03/08 "ICH" -- -- Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicised remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust -- was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.

More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by Army Radio as Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground strikes on populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from Gaza that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit the centre of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon making headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with a senior public figure in Israel comparing his government’s policies to the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many news services referred to Vilnai’s clearly articulated threat as a “warning”, as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic natural event over which he and the Israeli army had no control.

Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the translation from Hebrew of Vilnai’s remark could do to Israel’s image abroad. And sure enough, Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the comparison, with both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, stating that a “holocaust” was unfolding in Gaza.

Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large “hasbara” (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained that the word “shoah” also meant “disaster”; this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.

However, no one in Israel was fooled. “Shoah” -- which literally means “burnt offering” -- was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic word “nakba” (or “catastrophe”) is nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai’s use of “shoah” as “holocaust”.

But this is not the first time that Vilnai has expressed extreme views about Gaza’s future.

Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on behalf of his boss, the Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to declare Gaza a “hostile entity” and dramatically reduce the essential services supplied by Israel -- as long-time occupier -- to its inhabitants, including electricity and fuel. The cuts were finally implemented late last year after the Israeli courts gave their blessing.

Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many other Israeli politicians, have been “selling” this policy -- of choking off basic services to Gaza -- to Western public opinion ever since.

Under international law, Israel as the occupying power has an obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian population in Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media reported Israel’s decision to declare Gaza a hostile entity. The pair have therefore claimed tendentiously that the humanitarian needs of Gazans are still being safeguarded by the limited supplies being allowed through, and that therefore the measures do not constitute collective punishment.

Last October, after a meeting of defence officials, Vilnai said of Gaza: "Because this is an entity that is hostile to us, there is no reason for us to supply them with electricity beyond the minimum required to prevent a crisis.”

Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that Israel should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza, though, in line with the advice of Israel’s attorney general, he has been careful not to suggest that this would punish ordinary Gazans excessively.

Instead he said disengagement should be taken to its logical conclusion: “We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come from another place”. He suggested that Egypt might be forced to take over responsibility.
Vilnai’s various comments are a reflection of the new thinking inside the defence and political establishments about where next to move Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, a consensus in the Israeli military quickly emerged in favour of maintaining control through a colonial policy of divide and rule, by factionalising the Palestinians and then keeping them feuding.

As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist the occupation effectively, Israel could carry on with its settlement programme and “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories, as the Defence Minister of the time, Moshe Dayan, called it.

Israel experimented with various methods of undermining the secular Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which threatened to galvanise a general resistance to the occupation. In particular Israel established local anti-PLO militias known as the Village Leagues and later backed the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would morph into Hamas.

Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah, has been the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories ever since, and has moved centre stage since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Growing antagonism fuelled by Israel and the US, as an article in Vanity Fair confirmed this week, culminated in the physical separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer.

The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not only geographically but also by their diametrically opposed strategies for dealing with Israel’s occupation.

Fatah’s control of the West Bank is being shored up by Israel because its leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have made it clear that they are prepared to cooperate with an interminable peace process that will give Israel the time it needs to annex yet more of the territory.

Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the peace process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but Israel’s military control and its economic siege only tighten from arm’s length.
In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to surrender to Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to Israeli and US machinations to topple it. Instead it has begun advancing the only two feasible forms of resistance available: rocket attacks over the fence surrounding Gaza, and popular mass action.

And this is where the concerns of Vilnai and others emanate from. Both forms of resistance, if Hamas remains in charge of Gaza and improves its level of organisation and the clarity of its vision, could over the long term unravel Israel’s plans to annex the occupied territories -- once their Palestinian inhabitants have been removed.

First, Hamas’ development of more sophisticated and longer-range rockets threatens to move Hamas’ resistance to a much larger canvas than the backwater of the small development town of Sderot. The rockets that landed last week in Ashkelon, one of the country’s largest cities, could be the harbingers of political change in Israel.

Hizbullah proved in the 2006 Lebanon war that Israeli domestic opinion quickly crumbled in the face of sustained rocket attacks. Hamas hopes to achieve the same outcome.

After the strikes on Ashkelon, the Israeli media was filled with reports of angry mobs taking to the city’s streets and burning tyres in protest at their government’s failure to protect them. That is their initial response. But in Sderot, where the attacks have been going on for years, the mayor, Eli Moyal, recently called for talks with Hamas. A poll published in the Haaretz daily showed that 64 per cent of Israelis now agree with him. That figure may increase further if the rocket threat grows.

The fear among Israel’s leaders is that “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories cannot be achieved if the Israeli public starts demanding that Hamas be brought to the negotiating table.

Second, Hamas’ mobilisation last month of Gazans to break through the wall at Rafah and pour into Egypt has demonstrated to Israel’s politician-generals like Barak and Vilnai that the Islamic movement has the potential, as yet unrealised, to launch a focused mass peaceful protest against the military siege of Gaza.

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jersualem, noted that this scenario “frightens the army more than a violent conflict with armed Palestinians”. Israel fears that the sight of unarmed women and children being executed for the crime of trying to free themselves from the prison Israel has built for them may give the lie to the idea that the disengagement ended the occupation.

When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration a fortnight ago in which they created a human chain along part of Gaza’s fence with Israel, the Israeli army could hardly contain its panic. Heavy artillery batteries were brought to the perimeter and snipers were ordered to shoot protesters’ legs if they approached the fence.

As Amira Hass, Haaretz’s veteran reporter in the occupied territories, observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorise most ordinary Gazans into a paralysed inactivity on this front. In the main Palestinians have refused to take the “suicidal” course of directly challenging their imprisonment by Israel, even peacefully: “The Palestinians do not need warnings or reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the unarmed as well, and they also kill women and children.”
But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to Gaza.

As a result, Israel’s immediate priorities are: to provoke Hamas regularly into violence to deflect it from the path of organising mass peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas leadership through regular executions; and to ensure that an effective defence against the rockets is developed, including technology like Barak’s pet project, Iron Dome, to shield the country from attacks.

In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period of “relative calm” in Gaza by initiating the executions of five Hamas members last Wednesday. Predictably, Hamas responded by firing into Israel a barrage of rockets that killed the student in Sderot, in turn justifying the bloodbath in Gaza.

But a longer-term strategy is also required, and is being devised by Vilnai and others. Aware both that the Gaza prison is tiny and its resources scarce and that the Palestinian population is growing at a rapid rate, Israel needs a more permanent solution. It must find a way to stop the growing threat posed by Hamas’ organised resistance, and the social explosion that will come sooner or later from the Strip’s overcrowding and inhuman conditions.

Vilnai’s remark hints at that solution, as do a series of comments from cabinet ministers over the past few weeks proposing war crimes to stop the rockets. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has said that Gazans cannot be allowed “to live normal lives”; Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, believes Israel should take action “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians”; and the Interior Minister, Meir Sheetrit, suggests the Israeli army should “decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it” after each attack.

This week Barak revealed that his officials were working on the last idea, finding a way to make it lawful for the army to direct artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighbourhoods of Gaza in response to rocket fire. They are already doing this covertly, of course, but now they want their hands freed by making it official policy, sanctioned by the international community.

At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of declaring areas of Gaza “combat zones” in which the army would have free rein and from which residents would have little choice but to flee. In practice, this would allow Israel to expel civilians from wide areas of the Strip, herding them into ever smaller spaces, as has been happening in the West Bank for some time.

All these measures – from the intensification of the siege to prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to the concentration of the population into even more confined spaces, as well as new ways of stepping up the violence inflicted on the Strip – are thinly veiled excuses for targeting and punishing the civilian population. They necessarily preclude negotiation and dialogue with Gaza’s political leaders.

Until now, it had appeared, Israel’s plan was eventually to persuade Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a return to its status before the 1967 war. The view was that Cairo would be even more ruthless in cracking down on the Islamic militants than Israel. But increasingly Vilnai and Barak look set on a different course.

Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai’s “shoah” comment: Gaza’s depopulation, with the Strip squeezed on three sides until the pressure forces Palestinians to break out again into Egypt. This time, it may be assumed, there will be no chance of return.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Gaza Holocaust in ‘Free’ Media

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