The Corner Report

Post election popular support for Hezbollah appears to have increased.

By Franklin Lamb – Dahiyeh, Lebanon

While on the surface the pro-US team here did preserve its 'majority', the Hezbollah led opposition actually won the election by nearly ten percent of the popular vote. Of approximately 1,495,000 votes cast on June 7, 815,000 voted for the National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah while 680,000 voted for the March 14 government parties.

As Lebanon’s new Prime Minister, Saad Hariri labors to put together a coalition Cabinet, Hezbollah is currently stronger politically in Lebanon than it has ever been. The Party can largely determine the construction of the next Lebanese government and insist on key cabinet posts going to its allies, as it prefers keep a low profile and influence policy through quiet consultation rather than threats and muscle flexing.

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By Dr. Elias Akleh

For the last three weeks the Western media had bombarded us with what they called the Iranian stolen election. They allege that the election was fraudulent and that the masses went into the streets of Tehran protesting the results and demanding new election. The Iranian government is described as fascist and oppressive and is responsible for the chaos in the streets. The opposition is described as reformists and democratic, who are peacefully demonstrating in the streets demanding justice and freedom.

This brings memories of similar previous Western media campaigns about elections in different countries around the world such as 2004 Georgia’s election, 2002 Venezuela’s election, 1992 Mongolias’s election, 1991 Albania’s election, and 1990 Bulgarian election just to name a few, where elections were described as stolen and the winning parties as oppressive of the, usually pro-American, alleged peaceful demonstrators in the streets demanding freedom and justice.

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More than international 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the World Medical Association, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

Israel's watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Mohammed Al Habbash holds the photo of his daughter Shaza and niece Isra, both killed by an Israeli drone-launched missile on Jan. 4, 2009

Israel Should Release Camera Footage of Deadly Attacks
June 30, 2009

"Drone operators can clearly see their targets on the ground and also divert their missiles after launch. Given these capabilities, Israel needs to explain why these civilian deaths took place." -- Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM -- Israeli attacks with guided missiles fired from aerial drones killed civilians during the recent Gaza fighting in violation of the laws of war, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The attacks with one of the most precise weapons in Israel's arsenal killed civilians who were not taking part in hostilities and were far from any fighting.

The 39-page report, "Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles," details six incidents resulting in 29 civilian deaths, among them eight children. Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that these targets were combatants, as required by the laws of war, or that they failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups have reported a total of 42 drone attacks that killed civilians, 87 in all, during the fighting in December 2008 and January 2009.

"Drone operators can clearly see their targets on the ground and also divert their missiles after launch," said Marc Garlasco, senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. "Given these capabilities, Israel needs to explain why these civilian deaths took place."

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* Israel silent on whether drones carry weapons
* Rights group says drone operators didn't exercise caution

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM, June 30 (Reuters) - Missile-firing Israeli drones unlawfully killed at least 29 Palestinian civilians during the Gaza Strip war, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

Despite having advanced surveillance equipment, drone operators failed to exercise proper caution "as required by the laws of war" in verifying their targets were combatants, the New York-based monitoring group said, issuing a 39-page report citing six alleged strikes by remote-controlled aircraft.

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Thanks to Mazin Qumisyeh for this post and these notes:
The most outrageous news in this week's digest is the Israeli attack on the "Spirit of Humanity" boat in international waters, kidnapping human rights activists and confiscating humanitarian supplies bound for Gaza (just happened). This is simple piracy and shows that Israeli leaders have sunk to new lows on the morality scale. Please take action (see below for press release and action alert from the Free Gaza Movement). Unfortunately where I am now in the US (temporarily), the corporate media is largely silent on this event. But the internet is buzzing and each of us has a responsibility to send this information to all contacts and all media outlets we know. Reality can't be hidden."

ISRAEL ATTACKS JUSTICE BOAT; KIDNAPS HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS; CONFISCATES MEDICINE, TOYS AND OLIVE TREES
For more information contact:
Greta Berlin (English) tel: +357 99 081 767 / friends@freegaza.org
Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/Spanish): tel: +357 99 077 820 / sahara78@hotmail.co.uk

http://www.FreeGaza.org

[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30 local time] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.

“This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip,” said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. “President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that’s exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey.”

According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair.” Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel’s December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel’s disruption of medical supplies.

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GAZA - On 29 and 30 June 2009, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is hosting Ms. Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and author renowned for her criticism of corporate globalization and who has more recently called for a boycott of Israel to bring about the “end of the occupation”. Ms. Klein is visiting the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

On 29 June PCHR organized a field visit for Ms. Klein to the northern Gaza Strip, Gaza City, Rafah and Khan Yunis to witness the extensive destruction caused by Israeli forces and to meet with Palestinian victims and eyewitnesses.

Ms. Klein's visit also includes meetings with Palestinian public figures, businesspeople, representatives of civil society, human rights and women's organizations. She will also meet with mothers of Palestinian prisoners currently detained in Israeli jails. Ms. Klein will also hold meetings with PCHR's board and lawyers and attend public hearings of testimonies of victims of the latest Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip. The hearings are taking place as part of the United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission which is currently in Gaza.

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Australians in Melbourne protest Israel's assault on the Gaza Strip that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians, January 2009. (Takver)

By Peter Manning, The Electronic Intifada

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard have made no secret of their love for Israel.

Rudd, who leads the Labor Party, formally congratulated Israel in the Parliament on reaching 60 years of statehood in 2008. He forgot to mention the fact that Palestinians lost 78 percent of their land in 1948, millions have been refugees for the 60 years since and the rest live under Israel's military occupation.

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Obama's remark that "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon" would be "profoundly destabilizing" and "could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East" is profoundly dishonest. In reality, the race started in the early 1950s when Israel launched its nuclear weapons program

(Nidal El Khairy)

By David Morrison, The Electronic Intifada, 29 June 2009

At a White House press conference on 18 May 2009, US President Barack Obama expressed "deepening concern" about "the potential pursuit of a nuclear weapon by Iran." He continued:

"Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would not only be a threat to Israel and a threat to the United States, but would be profoundly destabilizing in the international community as a whole and could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East."

By his side was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the room with them, there was an elephant, a large and formidably destructive elephant, which they and the assembled press pretended not to see.

I am, of course, referring to Israel's actual nuclear weapons systems, with which Netanyahu is capable of doing to numerous cities in the Middle East, including Tehran, what the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Iran, by contrast, has no nuclear weapons. The US President said so himself in Prague on 5 April 2009 in his major speech on nuclear disarmament. "Iran has yet to build a nuclear weapon," he admitted.

Obama's remark that "Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon" would be "profoundly destabilizing" and "could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East" is profoundly dishonest. In reality, the race started in the early 1950s when Israel launched its nuclear weapons program.

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Uribe, left, was told by Obama to improve
Colombia's human rights record [AFP]

The US president has said that he expects Washington to eventually reach a free trade deal with Colombia.

After holding talks with Alvaro Uribe, his Colombian counterpart, Barack Obama said he had instructed Ron Kirk, the US trade representative, to work closely with Bogota on how to proceed with the free trade agreement.

"There are obvious difficulties involved in the process and there remains work to do, but I am confident that ultimately we [will] strike a deal that is good for the people of Colombia and good for the people of the United States," Obama said on Monday.

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By Claire Messud | June 29, 2009

I RECENTLY returned from a literary festival that was to have opened and closed in Jerusalem; but which, to our surprise, opened in France and closed in the United Kingdom.

Some 20-odd writers from the world over - including the popular British travel writer and comedian Michael Palin; Sweden’s preeminent thriller writer Henning Mankell; and Canada’s Giller Prize-winning M.G. Vassanji - found our events at Jerusalem’s Palestine National Theater shut down by machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers in flak jackets. On the first evening, with a Gallic flourish, Jean-Paul Ghoneim of the French Consulate opened the French Cultural Center impromptu, and hosted our event on nominally French soil: we paraded through the streets in our party clothes, bearing trays of canapés and looking, I’m sure, very threatening indeed.

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By Joharah Baker – Jerusalem

Israeli political tactics are based on a fundamental premise. Disregard the core and delve into the minutest of details. This way, the basis of any given argument is easily lost in details, a pinch here, a dash there. By the end of the hypothetical argument, you are nowhere near your original goal and now, ironically, have ten items more to negotiate than when you first started.

This is nothing new. In order to stall a final agreement and permanent solution, Israel creates facts on the ground, which then must be negotiated. While this has probably been Israel's tactic from as early on as the occupation of 1967 (or even earlier), it has become the most apparent since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. By then, of course, the bulk of Israeli settlements had been built on confiscated Palestinian land, thus solidifying the occupation in more ways than one.

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The ship carries three tons of medical aid, children's toys, and reconstruction kits..

By Free Gaza Team – Larnaca

The Free Gaza boat the 'Spirit of Humanity' departed Cyprus at 7:30am on Monday, 29 July.

Twenty-one human rights and solidarity workers representing eleven different countries were aboard. The passengers include Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The ship also carries three tons of medical aid, children's toys, and rehabilitation and reconstruction kits for twenty family homes.

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Israel's offensive damaged 47,000 houses, leaving many Gazans homeless [AFP]

Friday, June 26, 2009

By Sherrine Tadros, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza

Exactly six months ago - minutes before Israel launched its war - I was sitting in a coffee shop in Gaza City's main square.

Six months later, here I am again. At the same table, ordering the same drink from the same waiter who is talking about the same thing – no fuel, no electricity, no goods.

The untouched rubble of Israel's onslaught is becoming part of Gaza's landscape. Nothing here has changed, except the weather.

In 23 days, Israel's military managed to damage 47,000 homes in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people are still living in tents, just as I left them months ago, because Israel continues to block the entrance of building material.

The winter has come and gone, and now the blistering heat is their new challenge.

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A Palestinian man rests near the remains of his destroyed houses in the northern Gaza Strip. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Katie Nguyen

"There's no future in Gaza." Aid workers say that's the view being voiced throughout the coastal enclave which is struggling to recover after an Israeli offensive early this year flattened thousands of houses and damaged dozens of schools and hospitals.

Six months after the campaign, many families are still living in tents or homes with broken windows and smashed walls. Donkey carts are being used to clear away rubble. Thousands of people have no running water and there are frequent power cuts.

Aid groups say the suffering is made worse by Israel's two-year blockade of Gaza, which continues to frustrate reconstruction efforts and strangle the economy, forcing four out of five Gazans to rely on foreign aid.

"Gaza will remain in a state of abject destitution unless the blockade is lifted," said Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

=> Read more!

Jewish Telegraph Agency

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM -- American voters' support for Israel has dropped 20 percent in the past nine months, a new survey found.

Some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, according to the poll conducted for The Israel Project.

=> Read more!

By Mohammed Omer Released: 26 Jun 2009

June 26, 2008 is a day I will never forget. For the events of that day irrevocably changed my life. That day I was detained, interrogated, strip searched, and tortured while attempting to return home from a European speaking tour, which culminated in independent American journalist Dahr Jamil and I sharing the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize in London -- an award given to journalists who expose propaganda which often masks egregious human rights abuses.

I want to address the denials from Israel and the inaccurate reporting by a few journalists in addition to requesting state of Israel to acknowledge what it did to me, prosecute the members of the Shin Bet responsible for it and put in place procedures that protect other journalists from such treatment.

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Protesters outside the presidential palace voiced
their anger at the military-led 'coup' [AFP

Zelaya was elected for a non-renewable
four-year term in 2006 [File: AFP]

Manuel Zelaya, the president of Honduras, has called for "peaceful resistance" after the country's military forced him to leave the country.

After arriving in Costa Rica on Sunday, Zelaya said that he had been the "victim of kidnapping" when Honduran soldiers raided his home earlier in the day.

The military made its move after Zelaya vowed to go ahead with a referendum on constitutional changes, which the Central American nation's supreme court and attorney-general had declared illegal.

"They came to my house in the early hours of the morning and firing guns they broke the doors with bayonets and threatened to shout me," Zelaya told Venezuela's Telesur television station.

Factbox: Honduras
Second largest country in Central America
Population of 7.2 million
Second poorest country in the region
Economy forecast to grow less than two per cent this year
Relies on money from Hondurans in the US for more than 25 per cent of its gross domestic product
Former Spanish colony gained independence in 1821

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By Franklin Lamb – Dahiyeh, Lebanon

Some Legmen for the US Israeli lobby, and even some here in Lebanon appear barely able to contain themselves, such is their felt glee over the Lebanese and Iranian election results. Some supporters of Israel see these results as two recent victories while others calculate that Israel is scratching for some good news given that polling data from Israeli surveys show that more than 50% of its population favors bombing Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Another survey, late last month, found that nearly one third of Israelis polled said they would leave Israel if Iran gets a nuclear weapon which it likely will have-if it decides to-within the next 18 months according to estimates by the Israeli Defense Ministry. Meanwhile US visa applications have broken records, according to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv for three out of the past five months.

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There are many middle class people in Iran who would like a change of government.

By John Chuckman

A recent article called "Ahmadinejad Won, Get Over It" by Flynt and Hillary Leverett is not the only source with serious credentials offering reasonable, non-sensational explanations for events around Iran's presidential election.

Kaveh Afrasiabi, a scholar who once taught at Tehran University and is the author of several books, says many of the same things.

Close analysis of the election results gives absolutely no objective basis for making charges of a rigged election. Mousavi’s expected win – expected, that is, by the Western press and by Mousavi himself - never had any basis in fact.

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Has anything changed since the massacre in My Lai?

By Stuart Littlewood – London

Reports of prisoner abuse at the US prison at Bagram air force base in Afghanistan come as no surprise. They are just the latest example of the world’s biggest bully behaving badly as usual.

As if that weren't enough, I'm reading how some 83 people, mostly civilians, were killed and over 50 injured in three drone attacks within 12 hours in Lataka, South Waziristan.

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Hamas astuteness means it's no longer clear who's chasing who, argues Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

Hamas has been signalling its willingness to help, or at least refrain from obstructing, American-led efforts aimed at resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and creating a Palestinian state on territories occupied by Israel in 1967.

Last week, the Gaza-based Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh held a "cordial meeting" with visiting former US president Jimmy Carter. Carter toured the coastal territory, inspecting the havoc wreaked by Israel during its blitz against the blockaded enclave.

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Israel's obsession with nuclear weapons reveals just how ephemeral the Zionist project is, discovers Saleh Al-Naami

Head of Israel's Mossad Meir Dagan leant on a small staff in the company of his top aides as they waited in the room that opens into the Defence Ministry office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for permission to enter.

This scene used to repeat itself every Thursday at noon, but recently the meetings between Netanyahu and Dagan have intensified, with them now meeting as often as three times a week, the Israeli media reports. One reason for their hectic schedule is that Dagan is in charge of coordinating Israeli policy on the Iranian nuclear issue, and is required to present evaluations of Israeli responses to the Iranian nuclear programme. Yet the increase in the number of meetings also reflects how seriously Israel is taking Iran's nuclear endeavours, a fact that was expressed in Netanyahu's recent speech at Bar-Ilan University, where he said that the Iranian nuclear threat was currently the top threat facing Israel.

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Aziz Dweik

Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council Aziz Duweik, just released from an Israeli detention centre, has called for "immediate reconciliation" between Fatah and Hamas, saying the rift between the two factions was inflicting incalculable damage on the Palestinian national cause. Khaled Amayreh talked to Duweik in Ramallah

The 60-year-old professor called on both Fatah and Hamas to "immediately and unconditionally release all political prisoners. The message I am carrying is a message of unity and reconciliation," said Duweik, repeating the phrase three times.

He revealed that Hamas political leaders in Israeli jails were formulating a vision for overcoming the rift between Fatah and Hamas and restoring the "geographical unity" between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Duweik also urged the Palestinian masses to make every possible effort to get Israel to improve the virulent prison conditions facing elected Palestinian lawmakers in solitary confinement. He described conditions in Israeli jails as "uglier than ugliness", adding that some prisoners, like Nael Barghouthi, have spent 32 years in detention, without any hope for freedom anytime soon.

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By GLEN JOHNSON

The village is small and run-down. A couple of hundred residents. Green Hamas flags hang above the dirt street and wave in the breeze.

It is brutally hot. The buildings are plastered with images. One is a photo of a small Palestinian boy from the village. His face is smiling, superimposed over a picture of the West Bank Wall and a sniper tower.

At the age of 10 he was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers.

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The international Quartet on Middle East peace has called on Israel to halt Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories and open border crossings as a first step to advance peace.

The Quartet, comprised of the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations, made the appeal on Friday in the northeastern Italian city of Trieste.

The group is holding the meeting in an attempt to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

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Hamas leaders like Ismail Haniyeh, seen here with former US President Jimmy Carter in Gaza, have adopted the two-state solution against the resistance party constituents' interests. (Muhammad Al-Ostaz/MaanImages)

By Haidar Eid, The Electronic Intifada, 25 June 2009

When Hamas, unexpectedly, won the 2006 parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the message from the one-third of the Palestinian people living in those territories was clear: no more of the "peace process" facade -- with its untiring "two-state solution" slogan that never materialized, and no more of the bread crumbs offered to the new inauthentic NGOized, Osloized leadership classes. (In the years since the 1993 Oslo accords, funding NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- has been a major means for foreign governments to influence, co-opt and neutralize Palestinian politics. This process of "Osloization" made some Palestinian organizations more loyal to their funders than to their principles.)

Many of those who voted Hamas into power were not, in fact, supporters of the organization, but rather disgruntled Palestinians looking for change and reform after 13 years of futile, meaningless negotiations that did huge damage to the Palestinian cause and transformed it from a liberation struggle supported by millions all over the world into a dispute between "two equal parties," two countries fighting for border arrangements.

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Yasser al-Wadiya, Chairman of al-Wadiya Group in burnt out store room
Mr Wadiya says two storerooms were completely burned out

By Heather Sharp
BBC News, Gaza City

One of the building's corners stands on a precariously buckled concrete pillar.

But the small assembly line swishes on in the middle of the vast room, spitting out blue-wrapped ice lollies.

Al-Wadiya group, Gaza's largest food manufacturer, suffered extensive damage during Israel's 22-day military operation in January.

But six months later, recycled scrap metal covers a gaping hole, and the factory is making ice-cream again. Just.

Before the conflict, Chairman Yaser al-Wadiya employed 276 people to make 127 food products. Now 45 employees produce only four items.

Al-Wadiya ice-cream factory struggles to get back to business

"They damaged everything," he says, flicking through an album of pictures of charred vehicles and pointing out a heap of rubble that was once a biscuit factory.

Recovery has been "very difficult," he says, because of the Israeli blockade, which includes a virtual ban on all exports, and on imports of raw and construction materials.

Israel imposed the restrictions in an attempt to end rocket attacks on Israel and weaken Hamas, which seized control of the Strip in 2007.

Al-Wadiya group is Gaza's biggest food processing company, a family businesss established in 1954.

Israeli authorities say building materials can be used to make rockets, and to build the tunnels through which weapons and other goods are smuggled into Gaza from Egypt.

GAZA UNDER BLOCKADE: June 2009
40% unemployed
750,000 receive Unrwa food aid
No petrol or diesel since Nov 2008 (except UN)
Half required cooking gas allowed
Recently blocked items: light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts
Virtually no building materials allowed in
Source: Unrwa and World Bank

Mr Wadiya has bought some materials and machinery sold off from other damaged businesses, and imported much of the rest at inflated prices through the tunnels.

He paid $65 each for bags of cement that cost $5 before the blockade, he says.

"We will fix whatever we can," says Mr Wadiya, the third generation in the family business. "We are not going anywhere, this is our land."

The premises were damaged in the January Israeli operation. This building is still standing, but one corner was left barely standing - as shown in this photo, taken in the immediate aftermath.

Even before the conflict, the blockade had devastated Gaza's industrial sector.

By June 2008, all but 90 of Gaza's 3,900 industrial enterprises had ground to a halt, laying off 97% of their 35,000 staff, according to the Palestinian Trade Center, although things improved slightly in the six-month Israel-Hamas truce that followed.

In an air-conditioned office in Gaza City, Amr Hamad has just returned from giving his latest international visitor, Norway's foreign minister, a tour of Gaza's ruined industrial zone.

Mr Wadiya says the company's losses amount to $22.3m. He has picture after picture of destroyed vehicles - he says the company lost 27 in total.

The Palestinian Federation of Industries, which he heads, says many of the 324 businesses damaged in the Israeli operation were those that were still functioning.

He says the Israeli troops' destruction of economic infrastructure was "very much deliberate".

Mr Wadiya, for example, has photographs of caterpillar tracks amid the ruins of the biscuit factory, which he believes the Israelis finished off with bulldozers after hitting it from the air.

The company has laid off about 400 employees since the Israeli blockade began in June 2007. "Really they are struggling," says Mr Wadiya, "they can't believe they lost their jobs".

The UN's top humanitarian official, John Holmes, has accused Israel of the "systematic levelling" of Gaza's industrial area, where the al-Wadiya factory is located.

The site is close to the border with Israel, so a desirable rocket launching zone for Palestinian militants, but Mr Wadiya says his factory was surrounded by a 3m security fence.

The factories are in Gaza's industrial area, close to the border with Israel. Israel says it only targeted industrial buildings if they were used by Hamas, or if there was a "specific military need to do so".

The Israeli military says it "did not specifically target industrial premises".

They were damaged, it says, either because they were being used by Hamas, or because "there was a specific military need to do so".

The damage was "proportional", the military says, and due to Palestinian militants' use of civilian buildings for cover.

Both Israel and Hamas deny allegations that they violated international humanitarian law during the conflict.

Mr Hamad cites the case of al-Badr flour mill, Gaza's largest, the only one that was operating at the time and the only place in the Strip that can store large volumes of grain.

Mahmoud Hamada, manager of al-Badr flour mill, amid destroyed machinery
Mr Hamada says new machinery would cost $1.5m

Pigeons now fly in and out of a mess of charred machinery, open to the sky where a huge section is missing from the top two floors.

Manager Mahmoud Hamada says it was hit from both sides by F16s and helicopters on 16 January, following telephone warnings that the building would be targeted, but he insists there were no Hamas fighters in the area.

At the time of publication, the Israel military had not responded to questions about why either the flour mill or the al-Wadiya factories were attacked.

There were no casualties from the strikes, but his 35-year-old nephew, a doctor and father of five, plunged four floors to his death while trying to clear debris after the attack.

Mr Hamada says he needs 60 tonnes of iron, 200 of cement and some $1.5m worth of machinery to rebuild. But none of it is available.

He says, politically, he is neutral and simply cares about "how to bring bread for the people of Gaza".

A large section of the top two floors of the al-Badr mill was completely destroyed

This is typical, says Amr Hamad, of much of Gaza's business community - who he says tend to be either politically unaffiliated, or supporters of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority rather than the more militant Hamas.

"These people are very keen on good relations with Israel, because for them, peace means money," he says.

He says the business community is losing influence in Gaza, as it is replaced by black marketeers who run the tunnels, on which Hamas is widely thought to levy taxes.

An Israeli government official recently admitted to the BBC that the blockade, which is currently under review, may inadvertently benefit Hamas - but pointed out that easing it might be taken as a victory for the Islamic movement.

Mr Hamad is concerned that if things do not change soon, Gaza's industrial sector will be beyond recovery, leaving isolation, aid-dependency and unemployment that he believes would be "dangerous":

"I have grown up to know other people - Jewish, Muslim and Christians. The coming generations don't mix with Western people. They will not be able to accept others unless they mix with them."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8119457.stm"

The World Bank and IMF assume that corruption
can be removed by reforms [EPA]

By Professor Mushtaq H. Khan

In common usage, corruption is often used to refer to all types of immoral or harmful behaviour by public officials.

But in the social sciences and policy discussions, corruption refers specifically to the illegal use of power by politicians or bureaucrats for their own benefit.

The important point is that this definition does not presume that corruption is damaging, though it may be.

How damaging it is has to be established by theory and evidence, and here there is considerable debate.

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By Terry Lacey – Jakarta

The Iranian authorities, shocked by the massive popular protests against alleged election malpractices have blocked web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, blocked SMS messages, restricting use of cell phones, restricting the foreign media, and clamping down hard on protesters. (AP. Jakarta Post 23.06.09). The government side will cry foreign intervention. How much will they be right?

In a global electronic world Iranian resistance and NGO networks are active, financed and involved. How much are states involved in backing them? What sort of economic or even criminal interests got involved, and why? These are reasonable questions and not a criticism of those struggling for more freedom.

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The leader of the Palestinian group Hamas's political bureau has refused to recognize Israel as Jewish state.

At the same time, Khaled Meshaal has endorsed the idea of a two-state solution, accepting the creation of a Palestinian state within 1976 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The comments came in an address to supporters in the Syrian capital Damascus on Thursday.

"We reiterate our rejection of the so-called Jewish state of Israel and we warn of any lenience toward this principle," he said.

"The call by the Israeli leader for a Jewish state is nothing but a racist call, no different from Nazis and other calls denounced by the international community."

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Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has rejected a call by the French president to halt settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

Nicolas Sarkozy had on Wednesday made the plea to impose a "total freeze" on Israeli settlements after holding talks with Netanyahu in Paris, but the Israeli leader signaled that the settlements would remain.

"We will not build new settlements and we will not expropriate additional lands for settlements. We know that our people are living there and, pending a final, political settlement, they have to live a normal life," Netanyahu said.

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Abraham Hirchson, Israel's former finance minister, has been jailed for five-and-a-half years on theft and fraud charges.

Hirchson was also fined $115,000 on Wednesday by the Tel Aviv District Court for stealing about $600,000 from the National Federation of Workers and its subsidiary organisation, Nili.

=> Read more!

The allegations against Bank Leumi surfaced more than a decade ago.

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

Israel's second largest bank will be forced to defend itself in court in the coming weeks over claims it is withholding tens of millions of dollars in 'lost' accounts belonging to Jews who died in the Nazi death camps.

Bank Leumi has denied it holds any such funds despite a parliamentary committee revealing in 2004 that the bank owes at least $75 million to the families of several thousand Holocaust victims.

Analysts said the bank’s role is only the tip of an iceberg in which Israeli companies and state bodies could be found to have withheld billions of dollars invested by Holocaust victims in the country -- dwarfing the high-profile reparations payouts from such European countries as Switzerland.

“All I want is justice,” said David Hillinger, 73, whose grandfather, Aaron, died in Auschwitz, a Nazi camp in Poland. Lawyers are demanding reparations of $100,000 for Bank Leumi accounts held by his father and grandfather.

=> Read more!

Al Ahram
The Fatah leadership continues in disarray, its bets with Israel having failed and with no credentials for restoring Palestinian unity, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank

Despite efforts to put a good face on the latest meeting in Amman of Fatah's Executive Committee, the movement's highest decision-making body, the rift between Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and Abbas's opponents remains unresolved.

The two camps are deeply divided over the largely moribund political process with Israel, relations with Hamas as well as political and organisational reforms within Fatah. And the two camps continue to be divided over the convening of the movement's long overdue Sixth Congress. Fatah's last congress was held in Algiers in 1989.

=> Read more!

Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan (L) in Gaza.

By Emily Spence

Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, "Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as 'low level terrorism'." [1]

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960's by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi's Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance.

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The Obama administration scrapped a scheduled meeting between its Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell and hawkish Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu over his right-wing government's refusal to heed American calls for a settlement freeze.

"Once you've finished the homework we gave you on stopping construction in the settlements, let us know," Israel's Yediot Aharonot daily quoted an Israeli official as outlining Washington's message.

"Until then, there's no point in having Mitchell fly to Paris to meet you."

Mitchell was due to meet Netanyahu during his current visit to France before canceling it.

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Intelligence staff are inside Iran amid opposition protests, former US official Brent Scowcroft says.

The United States has intelligence agents in Iran, a former US national security adviser has told Al Jazeera, amid ongoing pressure against the Iranian government by protesters opposed to the official result of its presidential election.

Brent Scowcroft, responding to a question by Al Jazeera's Josh Rushing on whether it was naive to think that the US did not have intelligence agents in Iran, said on Wednesday: "Of course we do."

Scowcroft said on Wednesday he had no idea whether US agents had provided help to the opposition movement in Iran, who claim that the authorities rigged the June 12 election in favour of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incumbent.

"They might do. Who knows?" Scowcroft told Rushing for the Fault Lines programme.

=> Read more!

The Pentagon has denied it has any military operations under way in Pakistan

Up to 60 people have been killed after missiles were fired from a US "drone" at the funeral of a suspected Taliban commander of the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan, Pakistan officials have said.

The attack by the unmanned aircraft was carried out in the village of Najmarai in the Makeen district on Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence officials and witnesses said.

"Three missiles were fired by drones as people were dispersing after offering funeral prayers for [Taliban commander] Niaz Wali," an intelligence official told the Reuters news agency.

"I saw three drones, they dropped bombs," Sohail Mehsud, a resident of Makeen, said.

In depth

Profile: Baitullah Mehsud
Profile: The Pakistan Taliban
Witness: Pakistan in crisis
Inside Story: Pakistan's military
Riz Khan: The battle for the soul of Pakistan
Video: US denies carrying out drone raid in Pakistan

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Reviewed by Miriam Walton and Warren Bardsley

'Miriam's Legacy' - Patricia Rantisi. Author House, 2007. (ISBN 978-14343-0412-4)

2008 marked the sixtieth year of the birth of the State of Israel, but also the year that Palestinians commemorate the 'Nakba' (catastrophe). 1948 was indeed a year of utter catastrophe for the indigenous Palestinian people. Thousands of men, women and children were either massacred or driven from their towns and villages by Zionist armed forces to become refugees in Lebanon and inside Palestine itself.

Patricia Rantisi’s novel ‘Miriam’s Legacy’, based on historical facts, covers a period of almost a century and could not be more timely.

The story, told through the prism of four generations of one family, begins in 1982 in the refugee camp at Shatila, not far from Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Hundreds of Palestinian refugees were attacked and murdered by Lebanese militias as Israeli soldiers stood by and watched, including Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of Israel. As a young boy, Farres is witness to this massacre and the consequential horrors to follow.

=> Read more!

CNN and other Western media outlets have aired "unverified material" obtained from websites like Facebook and YouTube in their non-stop coverage of demonstrations in Iran.

By Matthew Cassel, The Electronic Intifada, 23 June 2009

Protestors, anywhere in the world, are extremely brave individuals whose reasons for demonstrating openly should be listened to and respected. Protest is democracy at work. However, too often, US and other Western-based media pick and choose which protests to cover and which to ignore completely.

The US media often celebrate themselves as the "freest and fairest" in the world, completely independent of a state unlike, for example, the media in Iran. Yet, an astute observer will notice that the US media generally choose stories and cover them in a way that play directly into the US's global agenda.

Who decides whether or not a particular issue is "newsworthy?" One would think that this is the role of the media, to cover issues like conflict or rights abuses as they happen around the world. Although, it seems this isn't the case. Most Western media appear to follow their government's lead when focusing on different issues and then cover them in a way fitting with the government's position, hence the complete domination of events in Iran in nearly every single Western media outlet and the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the protestors and the opposition as just. The current case of Iran makes it clear that it is governments who are directing the media's coverage, instead of the actual news organizations themselves.

=> Read more!

Introduction

The following is an excerpt from Rashid Khalidi's book, 'The Iron Cage', which discusses the April 2004 letter from US President George Bush to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Though written in 2006, this letter has taken on new significance of late because of US president Obama’s demand that Israel desists in further settlement expansions and the Israeli governments claim that this letter legitimizes continued expansion and provides the American government’s imprimatur for what Israel calls “natural growth” of the settlements. However, what Israel calls “natural growth”, is what looks to those who have studied the maps like the continued populating with Jewish settlers of large swaths of land mapped out in the West Bank and called ”settlement blocks.”

George Bush’s letter to Sharon was the result of limited discussion between the Israeli government and the Bush White House without any input from the Palestinians or their representatives and without any consideration of legal precedent, either from international law or from this history of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Bush’s right to give away land ends at the boundaries of his ranch in Crawford, Texas. This letter cannot be considered legitimate and should not constrain the Obama administration.

William James Martin

=> Read more!

By George Friedman

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

=> Read more!

Yitzhak Aharonovitch (right) with Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman

By Joharah Baker – Jerusalem

What unwritten law is out there that allows Israelis to sling racist insults at Palestinians with impunity? After all my years in this country and the absurdities that come along with it, this is one absurdity I still find hard to digest.

Obviously, my outrage has been most recently rekindled by Israeli Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who during a tour of the old central bus station in Tel Aviv called a Palestinian-Israeli policeman a "real dirty Arab." Once the words were out, the minister was forced to apologize, saying his remarks did not reflect his worldview. A spokesman for the ministry also issued a statement saying that, "in a moment of jest, and using common slang, the minister said what he said, not intending to hurt anyone."

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Ironically, Bob DePretis and his wife Margaret have lost their home trying to defend their right to develop their property.

By Gale Courey Toensing

SHARON, Conn. _ A lawsuit alleging defamation and other violations has been filed against a local attorney for distributing an email accusing a neighbor of having mob connections, and outlining a way to use that accusation to generate “revulsion” against his proposed property development plan.

Property-owner Bob DePretis filed the three-count complaint against attorney Michael Lynch in Litchfield Superior Court on April 14.
The complaint is based on an email Lynch sent to at least five people, claiming among other things that DePretis has “a maufia (sic) background.”

The lawsuit charges Lynch with defamation, tortious interference with business expectancy, and a violation of Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUTPA).

=> Read more!

Around 1,500 people will be homeless if the demolition programme proceeds in Silwan [EPA]

By Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Jerusalem

The Palestinian village of Silwan clings to a steep hillside facing the southern walls of Jerusalem's Old City.

In the valley below, Al Bustan neighbourhood stretches out in the shadow of Haram al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount. It is a setting rich in meaning for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

But the Israeli authorities in Jerusalem have plans for the network of narrow alleyways and walled compounds that make up Al Bustan.

They say the area has been ear-marked for parks and open spaces – and most of the homes here were built without permits.

Which is bad news for Khaled Mohammad Rouwady, his children and grandchildren who live crammed together in a few small rooms.

"They give building permits to the Jews... but the Arabs living here... they are finished" --
Khaled Mohammad Rouwady, Silwan resident

=> Read more!

Bilin has been a flashpoint for protests against
the Israeli separation wall and settlements [AFP]

A Canadian court is to consider a lawsuit brought by Palestinians from the West Bank town of Bilin who say two Canadian firms have committed war crimes by assisting in construction of Israeli settlements.

Activists filed the suit against Green Mount International and Green Park International - two Canadian companies contracted to build in the settlement of Modiin Illit, in a Montreal court, where the companies are registered.

=> Read more!

Where they see electoral fraud, we see imperial destabilization.

"Change for the poor means food and jobs, not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation... Politics in Iran is a lot more about class war than religion." -- Financial Times Editorial, June 15 2009.

By James Petras

Introduction

There is hardly any election, in which the White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition received over 53% of the vote.

=> Read more!

By Ramzy Baroud

The election victory of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is likely to complicate US President Barack Obama’s new approach to his country's conflict with Iran. The reason behind the foreseen obstacle is neither the US nor Iran’s refusal to engage in future dialogue but rather Israel’s insistence on a hard-line approach to the problem.

Iran’s presidential elections on June 12 were positioned to represent another fight between Middle Eastern ‘moderates’ vs. ‘extremists’. That depiction, which conveniently divided the Middle East – according to the prevailing US foreign policy discourse - to pro-American and anti-American camps was hardly as clear in the Iranian case as it was in Palestine and most recently in Lebanon.

=> Read more!

Haaretz

By Gideon Levy

It makes one green with envy: The scenes from Iran prove that some nations are trying to take their fate into their own hands. Some nations are not floating on the surface in sickly indifference, some are not looking around in endless complacence. And some are not following their leaders with the blindness of a herd. There are moments in the histories of certain nations when the people say enough. No more.

Czechs and Ukrainians, French and Russians, South Africans and Palestinians, Thais and Chinese, Lebanese and now Iranians have taken to the streets on at least one inspirational occasion and tried to make an impact. Some succeeded, some failed, but at least they tried. They did not surrender to their failed leaders, who dragged them from bad to worse. This is not only about rising up against a tyrannical regime; sometimes it's about a struggle for justice in democracies, too. That struggle is not conducted only in polls and elections; such struggles must spill out onto the streets. Here, too.

=> Read more!

By Uri Blau

Forty-three seconds: that's the duration of a video clip uploaded to YouTube less than a year ago under the category of "Comedy."

For the "hero" of the clip, an unidentified young Arab, they were probably eternally long seconds and far from amusing. He was forced to slap himself and sing to the jubilant shouts of the photographer and his buddies - all of them members of Israel's Border Police.

This clip, which has been viewed more than 2,800 times, shows the unknown Palestinian standing in a desert setting while a disembodied voice orders him in Hebrew to hit himself: "Yallah, start, do it hard!"

=> Read more!

Netanyahu said that a Palestinian state would need to be demilitarised [AFP]

By Lamis Andoni, Al Jazeera's Middle East analyst

It was billed as a peace speech, but Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, echoed the words of a colonialist conqueror when he delivered his much-anticipated policy speech at Bar Illan University.

Without ambiguity, he told the Palestinians that their existence and future hinges on their acquiescence - the relinquishing of their own history, rights and aspirations.

In effect, Netanyahu called on the Palestinians to accept total surrender.

=> Read more!

Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani plans to award international oil companies service contracts to develop six of Iraq's largest oilfields. (Photo: Ali-Saadi / AFP / Getty Images)

By Patrick Cockburn

To public fury, the country is handing over control of its oilfields to foreign companies.

Furious protests threaten to undermine the Iraqi government's controversial plan to give international oil companies a stake in its giant oilfields in a desperate effort to raise declining oil production and revenues.

In less than two weeks, on 29 and 30 June, the Iraqi Oil Minister, Hussain Shahristani, will award service contracts to the world's largest oil companies to develop six of Iraq's largest oil-producing fields over 20 to 25 years.

Senior figures within the Iraqi oil industry have denounced the deal. Fayad al-Nema, the director of the South Oil Company, which comes under the Oil Ministry and produces most of Iraq's crude, said on the weekend: "The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years. They squander Iraq's revenues." Mr Nema is reported to have since been fired because of his opposition to the contracts, which he says is shared by many other officials in Iraq's state-owned oil industry.

=> Read more!

A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what's going on in the Middle East.

The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.

By Saree Makdisi
June 19, 2009

On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that -- by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state -- ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as "an important step forward."

Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.

=> Read more!

From Stan Heller:

The New York Times buried references to former President Jimmy Carter's speech in Gaza deep on its website. Here it is:

"I first visited Gaza 36 years ago and returned during the 1980s and later for the very successful Palestinian elections. Although under occupation, this community was relatively peaceful and prosperous. Now, the aftermath of bombs, missiles, tanks, bulldozers and the continuing economic siege have brought death, destruction, pain, and suffering to the people here. Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are being treated more like animals than human beings."
For full speech, click on The Struggle

The Har Homa settlement in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu defied calls for a halt to settlement expansion in his speech on Monday. (ActiveStills)

Where in international law, or UN resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of "dignity" and "opportunity?" Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all of Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a "state" instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return and the restoration of usurped rights.

Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 17 June 2009

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed the true brilliance of his ideas presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University on 14 June, so we are pleased to offer this analysis.

First, Netanyahu wants Palestinians to become committed Zionists. They can prove this by declaring, "We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land." As he pointed out, it is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist dream that has caused conflict, but once "they say those words to our people and to their people, then a path will be opened to resolving all the problems between our peoples." It is of course perfectly natural that Netanyahu would be "yearning for that moment."

Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will not be enough, however. For the Palestinians' conversion to have "practical meaning," Netanyahu explained, "there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders." In other words, Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by abandoning the right of return. This is indeed logical because as Zionists, Palestinians would share the Zionist ambition that Palestine be emptied of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible.

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And will the US Government accept this (Zionist intransigence)? Absolutely, despite some inevitable verbal and diplomatic gymnastics. General Jones in the NSC is reportedly under political siege, and he is the only one of Obama’s senior defense and foreign policy advisers who is not either Jewish and in lock-step with Israel, or an Israeli partisan, and his departure will end what little open policy debate on this issue occurs within the Administration. Policy, after all, is people, and if the senior people are singing essentially the same pro-Zionist song, Netanyahu and company won’t have to worry about anything more substantial than slaps on their collective wrists with verbal wet feathers, and the Palestinians won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of achieving anything substantial – and that includes an end to the appalling suffering in Gaza.

(Thanks to Louie for posting.)

By Alan Sabrosky

The only thing surprising about Netanyahu’s speech Sunday is that some people profess to have been surprised by what he said, and that the US sees “progress” in it, as if something real can be crafted out of arrogance and duplicity.

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Samah El-Shahat, Al Jazeera's resident economist, will be writing a regular column analysing key elements that have contributed to the global financial downturn and its impact across the world.

The trickle-down effect doesn't work

As a development economist, I have seen many economics theories or so called 'magic bullets' for the world's ills come and go.

No, I am not that old, but economics, like fashion, has many theories that come and go and then make a come back retro style.

The problem is some of them have been largely discredited but they still make a return becaue they serve the interests of those with influence and power. So it has always been politically convenient to dress up self-interest in intimidating and opaque economics jargon.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the World Bank and the IMF believed that something called the 'trickle down effect' could save the world's poor.

In rough terms, 'trickle down' means if you give the rich tax breaks and support their industries, the wealth they create will ultimately benefit poorer people.

That is, money, just like rain, will start trickling down to us all. A theory that never worked, and African and South American countries that were made to pursue it got poorer not richer, and the poorer of those countries ended up paying a very high price.

=> Read more!

Navy officers made the discovery in a port in the
southern state of Yucatan [Reuters]

The Mexican navy has seized more than a tonne of cocaine hidden inside frozen sharks.

Navy officers cut open more than 20 shark carcasses filled with slabs of cocaine after checking a container ship at a port in the southern Mexico state of Yucatan, the navy and Mexican media said.

"We are talking about more than a tonne of cocaine that was inside the ship," Eduardo Villa, a navy commander, said after X-ray machines and sniffer dogs helped uncover the drugs.

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Avigdor Lieberman, the Zionist state's foreign minister, suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza during the Zionists' war last December and January.

By Saed Bannoura

Visiting Washington, Israeli Foreign Minister of the right-wing extremist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, Avigdor Lieberman, told the US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, that Israel will not freeze the construction and expansion of settlements.

Clinton demanded Israel to stop the settlements as agreed upon with the former president, George W. Bush.

Lieberman said that the "Jewish people were born in Judea and Samaria, and will die there", his statement totally disregarded the indigenous Palestinian people.

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Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh

GAZA -- The de facto government of Gaza is eager to exchange prisoners with Israel, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said on Thursday.

Haniyeh said in a statement that his Hamas-led government “is keen to conclude a honorable swap deal that would guarantee releasing the Palestinian prisoners jailed in the Israeli prisons, most importantly lawmakers.”

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OCCUPIED JERUSALEM -- Israeli Jerusalem Municipality workers were stoned as they distributed 33 home demolition orders in the Bustan neighborhood of Silwan, in Palestinian East Jerusalem Thursday morning.

The stones drove the municipal workers out of the neighborhood, but not before they delivered dozens of demolition orders. For the Odeh, Abu Thyab, Al-Ruweidy, Abu Sneineh, Abbasi and At-Tawil families, the orders claimed their homes were built without a permit from the city.

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Haaretz

After Obama's speech in Cairo, at which he almost acknowledged the Palestinian "Nakba" without mentioning it by name, most major Jewish-American groups reacted with caution. The Anti-Defamation League said it was "disappointed that the President found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars." This was code for "Nakba"-denial, as pernicious as Holocaust revisionism.

By Antony Loewenstein

During this year's AIPAC conference in Washington, Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the 7,000-plus crowd that the global movement to "delegitimize Israel" was gathering steam.

"These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment," he said. His sentiments were almost apocalyptic: "The stakes in that battle are nothing less than the survival of Israel, linked inexorably to the relationship between Israel and the United States. In this battle we are the firewall, the last rampart."
e age of Barack Obama has unleashed a global wave of Jewish unease over Israel's future and the Diaspora's relationship to the self-described Jewish state. It's a debate that is long overdue.

Zionist organizations in Australia campaigned loudly in May against the allegedly "anti-Semitic" play Seven Jewish Children, a ten-minute think-piece written by an English playwright accusing Jews of complicity in violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

A Jewish columnist for The New York Times, Roger Cohen, argued in June that the key word among Palestinians now is "humiliation."

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By Nizar Sakhnini

Partition of Palestine into two-states was introduced on 29 November 1947 when Resolution # 181 was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

Palestinian Arabs took to the streets in protest of tearing their home and giving away a major part of it to strangers. Palestinians’ rejection of partition was used as a pretext to justify the Zionist war aimed at ethnic cleansing Palestine from its Arabs and stealing their homes and lands.

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Transcript of former US President Jimmy Carter's Address to the United Nations Relief Works Agency's Human Rights Graduation in Gaza, June 16, 2009.

By Jimmy Carter - Gaza

Director of UNRWA operations John Ging, thank you for inviting me to Gaza. Distinguished guests, children of Gaza, I am grateful for your warm reception.

I first visited Gaza 36 years ago and returned during the 1980s and later for the very successful Palestinian elections. Although under occupation, this community was relatively peaceful and prosperous. Now, the aftermath of bombs, missiles, tanks, bulldozers and the continuing economic siege have brought death, destruction, pain, and suffering to the people here. Tragically, the international community largely ignores the cries for help, while the citizens of Gaza are being treated more like animals than human beings.

=> Read more!

Israeli soldiers have been routinely using violence against Palestinian children.

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth

The rights of Palestinian children are routinely violated by Israel's security forces, according to a new report that says beatings and torture are common. In addition, hundreds of Palestinian minors are prosecuted by Israel each year without a proper trial and are denied family visits.

The findings by Defence for Children International (DCI) come in the wake of revelations from Israeli soldiers and senior commanders that it is “normal procedure” in the West Bank to terrorise Palestinian civilians, including children.

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After touring Gaza, Carter said 'my primary feeling today is one of grief and despair'

Jimmy Carter has spoken of his "grief and despair" at seeing the destruction in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel's 22-day offensive on the territory.

"This is holy land for us all and my hope is that we can have peace ... all of us are children of Abraham," the former US president said during a joint news conference with Ismail Haniya, the deposed Hamas Palestinian prime minister, in Gaza City.

Following a tour of the area to see the effects of Israel's offensive, Carter said: "My primary feeling today is one of grief and despair and an element of anger when I see the destruction perpetrated against innocent people in January."

=> Read more!

Carter (R) meets Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh [Ma'anImages]

GAZA - Police in Gaza denied reports of an attempted assassination of former US President Jimmy Carter during his visit to Gaza Tuesday morning.

Carter arrived in the early morning and shortly after Israeli news agencies began reporting an attempt on his life.

The Israeli Hebrew daily Ma’ariv quoted a Palestinian Security source saying Hamas had foiled an assassination attempt on Carter shortly after he arrived in the area via the northern Erez crossing.

Spokesperson for the Hamas government police Islam Shahwan denied the reports, however, saying “the police and security services in Gaza conducted a security survey of the area before Carter’s visit,” and promised that no explosives or weapons apparatus were uncovered during the thorough survey.

=> Read more!

By Joseph Krauss

GAZA CITY (AFP) — Former US president Jimmy Carter on Tuesday denounced the deprivations facing Palestinians in Gaza as unique in history, asserting that they are being treated "like animals."

"Tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings," he said as he toured the war-torn, blockaded Gaza Strip.

"The starving of 1.5 million human beings of the necessities of life -- never before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then denied the means to repair itself," Carter said at a UN school graduation ceremony in Gaza City.

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Angelo Mozilo and His 300 Million Slapstick Foils

By MARK AMES

If I was an oligarch and I wanted to buy my spoiled little shit of a son a toy that would make him laugh and laugh for hours, I'd buy him a middle-class American. Because Americans are funny the way all dupes and chumps are funny. You can trick today's Americans time and again, and they always fall for it. And when you trick them, they stomp around dramatically and make a lot of blustery noise about "the people" who allegedly "aren't going to stand much more of this" because "our founding forefathers bla bla bla" and of course the ol' "you can fool some of the people some of the time, buttcha can't fool bla bla bla..." Basically, if you've seen your Elmer Fudd, then you've seen your American sucker in all of his cartoon comic-foil glory: a sentimental buffoon, a harmless chump whose guns don't fool anyone but himself.

Every day, Americans play the role of Elmer Fudd to the oligarchy's Bugs Bunny--if you look at it from the oligarchy's point of view, at least.

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By Haaretz Service

An American Al-Qaida member has for the first time acknowledged his Jewish ancestry, in an official video message released over the weekend by the international terrorist network.

Adam Yahiye Gadahn. who also goes by the name Azzam the American, declared his roots in a video which surfaced on Saturday, using the opportunity to urge Muslims to use "our weapons, funds and Jihad against the Jews and their allies everywhere."

=> Read more!

By George Friedman

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

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By REZA FIYOUZAT

The actual results of the 2009 presidential elections in Iran may never be known factually. But the actual tallies of the votes cast may have never had anything to do with anything in the first place.

This does not mean that, in the aftermath of the announcement of the election results, the outrage displayed on the streets by the supporters of the reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, America's favorite horse in the race, does not indicate real hurt. Those Americans who, to this day, are still bitter about the non-election of Al Gore in the 2000 debacle, can get an idea of the Iranians' sense of betrayal if they take their outrage at the clearly stolen outcome in 2000 and intensify it by a factor of ... oh, about a million.

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We all have the right not to be oppressed by others.
June 15, 2009

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight.

By Susan Abulhawa

Following Netanyahu's much anticipated policy speech, politicians and journalists, like mindless automatons, have set about repeating Israel's tired mantra that Palestinians should recognize Israel's right to exist. Never mind the fact that the PLO and Palestine Authority have obliged this ludicrous call, not once, but four times. And never mind that Israel has always denied Palestine’s right to exist, not only as a nation, but as individuals seeking a dignified life in our own homeland.

Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But that isn’t the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That’s why Palestine doesn’t need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That’s why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had – from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

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Tehran accuses the media of exaggerating
post-poll protests in the country [AFP]

Iran has taken steps to control the flow of information from both domestic and international news sources, accusing them of exaggerating reports of anti-government protests in Tehran, the capital.

On Monday, the government ordered the expulsion of a Spanish television crew who were covering the protests against the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, one of the journalists said.

"We are the unwelcome witnesses," Yolanda Alvarez of the RTVE public broadcasting network said.

"They want to get rid of all the foreign media ... the streets last night were full of ant-riot police. The reason there has been no repression (until now) is definitely because they know we were there," she said.

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In his June 14 speech, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the first time he would accept a Palestinian state, but set strict pre-conditions for its establishment. SPIEGEL ONLINE presents the full text of his speech.

Editor's note: The following is a translation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's June 14 speech as provided by his office.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu:
Honored guests, citizens of Israel. Peace has always been our people's most ardent desire. Our prophets gave the world the vision of peace, we greet one another with wishes of peace, and our prayers conclude with the word peace.

We are gathered this evening in an institution named for two pioneers of peace, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, and we share in their vision.

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Washington Post

The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.

By Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty
Monday, June 15, 2009

While Western news reports from Tehran in the days leading up to the voting portrayed an Iranian public enthusiastic about Ahmadinejad's principal opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, our scientific sampling from across all 30 of Iran's provinces showed Ahmadinejad well ahead.

Independent and uncensored nationwide surveys of Iran are rare. Typically, preelection polls there are either conducted or monitored by the government and are notoriously untrustworthy. By contrast, the poll undertaken by our nonprofit organizations from May 11 to May 20 was the third in a series over the past two years. Conducted by telephone from a neighboring country, field work was carried out in Farsi by a polling company whose work in the region for ABC News and the BBC has received an Emmy award. Our polling was funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

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Hamas called on the Palestinian Authority to halt coordination with Israel and reassess its positions vis-a-vis the occupation. Former Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose term ended in January, continues to collaborate with the Zionist Israeli government in detaining, arresting and killing Palestinians in the West Bank who support Hamas.

June 15, 2009

OCCUPIED PALESTINE - Palestinian officials from all political parties and factions have condemned a major policy speech by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, saying it had "closed the door" on moves to reach an agreement between the two sides.

In his address sunday, Netanyahu gave the slightest of nods to the creation of a Palestinian state, an issue he has avoided since taking power in April, but with a host of conditions attached -- conditions that would effectively legitimize the illegal Israeli occupation and require Palestinians to abandon their rights under the law for a sovereign, self-determining, independent state.

In Gaza, the democraticallty-elect Hamas government described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday evening as reflective of his inherent racism.

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The Academic Senate of the University of California at Santa Barbara has voted to investigate its own handling of complaints of academic misconduct against a sociology professor over his criticisms of Israel to students.

A committee of the Academic Senate began a preliminary investigation of the professor, William I. Robinson, in March, after two students filed formal complaints against him over a January e-mail message in which he likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza to Nazi atrocities against Jews. The complaints accused Mr. Robinson of anti-Semitism and alleged that he had violated the faculty code of conduct by using a university e-mail account to send students a message unrelated to “Sociology of Globalization,” the course they were enrolled in.

Mr. Robinson has protested that the Academic Senate panel undertook its investigation too hastily in response to pressure from the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel groups. The Chronicle subsequently reported that the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, Abraham H. Foxman, had personally met with university officials after the preliminary investigation had begun to urge them to take action against the professor. Several faculty organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, have issued letters or statements questioning whether the investigation was undertaken prematurely and without adequate cause.

=> Read more!

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/how-the-spooks-took-over-%20the-news-780672.html

In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy western intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale

By Nick Davies

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

=> Read more!

June 14, 2009

By Danny Fortson

This month an Iraqi politician will appear on television to open envelopes and reveal the winners of a long and hard-fought contest. In the balance hangs the wellbeing of 28m people, tens of billions of dollars of contracts and how much you and I pay for everything from yoghurt pots to petrol.

It should make good viewing. For the hopeful contestants, it has been a long wait — since 1972 to be exact. That was when the Iraqi oil industry was nationalised and foreign operators were booted out.

Now the oil giants have been invited back. At the ceremony on June 29 and 30, Hussain al-Shahristani, the oil minister, will reveal which of them will be the first to be let back into the south of the country, where most of its oil and gas resources are found.

Up for grabs are 20-year concessions to operate six huge oilfields and two gas fields. In all, 32 companies are bidding, including BP, Shell, Sinopec of China, Lukoil of Russia and Total of France.

=> Read more!

GAZA - Former US President Jimmy Carter on Sunday condemned Israel's "maltreatment of the people in Gaza, who are literally starving and have no hope at this time."

"According to the UN 41,000 of their homes are either severely damaged or destroyed. And for five months they haven't gotten a single sack of cement, or single sheet of plaster. They're being treated like savages," Carter said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

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img src="http://www.thecornerreport.com/media/blogs/links/barhoussunday.jpg" alt="" title="" width="300" height="205" />

GAZA - Fawzi Barhoum, the official spokesman of Hamas Movement in the Gaza Strip, has condemned the detention of five Hamas lawmakers at the hands of the militia of former PA chief and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem city on Sunday.

In an interview with the Palesine Information Center, Barhoum explained that the detention of the five elected Palestinian legislators is meant to spoil the Palestinian legitimacy, and to mar the efforts Egypt was and still is exerting to end the Palestinian political division and to achieve national reconciliation in the Palestinian arena.

=> Read more!

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE ZIONIST'S SPEECH

Sunday, Jun 14, 2009 2:12pm EDT

Following are highlights from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's keynote speech on Sunday about peace prospects with the Palestinians.

Translation from the Hebrew is by Reuters:

PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD, WITH CONDITIONS

"The territory in Palestinian hands must be demilitarised -- in other words, without an army, without control of airspace, and with effective security safeguards...

A fundamental condition for ending the conflict is the Palestinians recognising -- verbally, honestly, bindingly ... -- that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people.

If we receive this undertaking, for demilitarisation and the security arrangements required by Israel, and if the Palestinians recognise Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, we will be prepared for a true peace agreement, to reach a solution of a demilitarised Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state.

WEST BANK SETTLEMENTS

We have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating land for new settlements. But there is a need to allow settlers to lead normal lives, to allow mothers and fathers to raise their children like all families around the world.

PALESTINIAN REFUGEES

The Palestinian refugee problem must be resolved outside the borders of the state of Israel. On this, there is a broad international consensus.

I believe that with goodwill, and international investment, this humanitarian problem can be solved once and for all.

TERRITORIAL HANDOVERS BY ISRAEL

Many a worthy person has told us that withdrawal is the key to peace between us and the Palestinians ... But the fact is that every withdrawal has been accompanied by rockets and suicide attacks.

That claim purporting that withdrawal will bring peace with the Palestinians, or at least bring it closer, has so far not been borne out in practice.

JERUSALEM

Israel needs defensible borders and Israel's capital, Jerusalem, will remain united.

ABBAS VS. HAMAS

They must decide between the way of peace and the way of Hamas. The Palestinian Authority must impose law and order ... and overcome Hamas. Israel will not negotiate with terrorists trying to destroy it.

ARAB REGIONAL ENGAGEMENT

I appeal, from here this evening, to the leaders of the Arab states and say: Let's meet. Let's talk peace. Let's make peace. I am willing to meet with you any time, any place -- in Damascus, in Riyadh, in Beirut."

(Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Jon Boyle) (For blogs and links on Israeli politics and other Israeli and Palestinian news, go to www.blogs.reuters.com/axismundi)

http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSLE125425

Opium, famine and banks all played their part in this country's plundering of the globe. Now it's over, we find it hard to accept

By George Monbiot

Why now? It's not as if this is the first time Britain's representatives have been caught out. The history of governments in all countries is the history of scandal, as those who rise to the top are generally the most ambitious, ruthless and unscrupulous people politics can produce. Pushing their own interests to the limit, they teeter perennially on the brink of disgrace, except when they fly clean over the edge. So why does the current ballyhoo threaten to destroy not only the government but also our antediluvian political system?

The past 15 years have produced the cash-for-questions racket, the Hinduja and Ecclestone affairs, the lies and fabrications that led to the invasion of Iraq, the forced abandonment of the BAE corruption probe, the cash-for-honours caper and the cash-for-amendments scandal. By comparison to the outright subversion of the functions of government in some of these cases, the is small beer. Any one of them should have prompted the sweeping political reforms we are now debating. But they didn't.

=> Read more!

Camouflage-covered weapon's slithery movements controlled by computer

JERUSALEM - A robot snake with a camera and microphone in its head is the Israeli military's latest battlefield weapon, according to an Israeli TV report broadcast Monday.

Channel 2 showed video of the snake twisting into caves, tunnels, cracks and buildings, broadcasting pictures and sound back to a soldier controlling it with a laptop computer.

The "snake" appeared to be about 6 feet long. Covered by fabric in military camouflage colors, it slithered along the ground and climbed rocks, its segments connected with joints that flexed in several different directions. Channel 2 said military researchers studied real snakes to copy their movements.

The report said no price has been determined for the snake, which is in the experimental stage, but the Israeli military plans to deploy the robot with combat units. No target date was given.

The report suggested another role for the robot — carrying a bomb to blow up militants or a building. In that case, Channel 2 said, it would be a "suicide snake."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31255615/

Protestors in the eastern Peruvian Amazon region which is Ashaninka area. (PhotoL AIDESEP)

By Sam Urquhart

Peru's Amazon region has been locked down, after the death of perhaps 40 indigenous protesters and 20 police during an attempt to break up a blockade last Friday. Some reports put the death toll as high as 84, in the worst violence that the Amazon region has seen since the height of the Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s. [http://enlacenacional.com/2009/06/05/enfrentamiento-
entre-policias-y-nativos-en-bagua-deja-tragico-saldo/]

On 6 June, a peaceful blockade was allegedly fired upon by helicopters from the nation's army. Most of the dead were indigenous protesters, part of a contingent at the blockade in Bagua province which numbered thousands - all of them seeking to resist the expansion of energy exploration and logging into Peru's Amazon region. And many of them appear to have been not just peaceful, but asleep.

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Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, By Alastair Crooke, Pluto Press, London 2009.

By Ludwig Watzal - Bonn

With the failure of the 'war on terror' and the mess into which the Bush administration has led the United States, it is time for the new President Barack Hussein Obama to revise US policy from scratch.

All the decisions which Obama has taken regarding Guantanamo (not to speak of Bagram), torture, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, and random surveillance of emails and telephones, have been half-hearted. Obama does not talk constantly about the war on terror anymore, he just keeps on waging it. The new President appears increasingly as a Bush-light version: plenty of rhetoric but hardly any change. “Looking forward” should not be Obama’s sole concern but also “looking back” to assess the damage the Bush-warriors have done to the heart and soul of the United States and to bring the instigators to justice starting from the man in charge, downward. In the ongoing debate on torture Obama has already lost out to former Vice-President Dick Cheney, the person primarily responsible for the whole malaise and the Kafkaesque situation in the country.

=> Read more!

By Franklin Lamb – Dahiyeh, Beirut

"I will try to get you off the US Terrorism list if you can arrange a meeting for me with Hassan Nasrallah." - Jimmy Carter reportedly joking to Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah at their 6/9/09 meeting.

Some readers may recall a December 15, 2008 Report in Counterpunch entitled "Why Hezbollah Stiffed Carter." The former American President was in Beirut at the time to announce the Center’s Election Monitoring project and was disappointed when Hezbollah’s Mohammad Raad told the media that the National Lebanese Resistance would not be meeting with him. Carter wrote in his December 19, 2008 Report to the Carter Center: "This (recent trip to Lebanon-ed.) was something like a presidential visit in that we had long conversations with top officials, cabinet members and delegations of the many political parties. Hezbollah refrained from meeting with us but expressed approval of our election monitoring".

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GAZA – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech on Sunday at Bar Ilan University will add nothing new to the public discourse, leaders of various Palestinian factions said on Saturday.

Nafeth Azzam, a senior leader within the Islamic Jihad movement, said that its affiliates "do not expect anything new that would affect the core of Israel's stance and policies." The speech will be "misleading to the public opinion without adding anything new," he said.

=> Read more!

UNRWA Chief in Gaza John Ging in front
of bombed food warehouse

GAZA - The UN requested 11.2 million US dollars from the Israeli government for compensation to the world body for damages incurred during the December and January war on Gaza.

=> Read more!

Montreal opposition MP Irwin Cotler equates anti-Israel sentiments with inciting genocide.

A former Canadian minister has introduced a bill to the parliament, which if approved would prevent companies and individuals from investing in Iran.

The Iran Accountability Act (IAA), proposed by lawmaker and former Canadian justice minister Irwin Cotler, seeks to freeze the assets of those who contribute to Iran's nuclear program or its military infrastructure, the National Post reported.

=> Read more!

Israel has begun constructing thousands of new Israeli settlements

Lebanon's Hezbollah has condemned the international community's silence over Israel's attempts to Judaize Jerusalem (al-Quds).

Tel Aviv continues to erect new homes in the occupied Palestinian territories -- especially in the East Jerusalem -- right before the watchful eyes of international bodies, the movement said in a statement released on Friday.

It added that Israel is using Jewish settlers to implement its policy of changing the demographic feature of Jerusalem, seeking to turn the third-holiest Islamic city into a "Jew only" region.

Hezbollah also urged all Muslim nations, the Islamic Conference Organization and other concerned regional and international groups to do their utmost to pressure Israel into ending the Judaization of Jerusalem.

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Blown apart and maimed, if not killed, and then ignored, hundreds of children in Gaza are callously cut off from vital medical help, writes Ramzy Baroud*

His room is ready; the walls have fresh paint and my kids prepared a basket of chocolates and other treats to place beside his bed. They hung a poster on his door that has been decorated with coloured pens and glitter that says "Welcome Sobhi!" I have taught them that "Sobhi" actually means the "morning light", and that during his visit he will not be treated as a visitor, but as a brother. They have compiled a list of fun places to visit: parks, the beach and maybe a ferry ride.

Two weeks ago, my family, after months of anticipation, were scheduled to be the host family for a very special and unusual exchange programme for kids from Gaza to visit the United States. Our host child, Sobhi, was scheduled to arrive 30 May.

My family was excited and a little nervous. I noticed my wife taking every opportunity to share the news of the arrival of our special visitor. We call Sobhi's family from time to time, realising that sending a child off to a foreign land to live with a strange family can be unsettling for a parent. I think our occasional conversations are putting everyone at ease.

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After Obama's candid address in Cairo, Israel's prime minister is gearing up to swamp hopes of peace in impossible conditions and demands, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem

The right-wing Israeli government reacted to President Barack Obama's landmark speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on 4 June with a strange combination of confusion, ambivalence and apprehension. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had earlier rejected emphatic American demands for a total freeze of Jewish settlement expansion activities in the West Bank, remarked rather laconically that he shared Obama's vision for peace in the Middle East. His careful avoidance of comment on the reasserted "two-state solution" appeared aimed to forestall further deterioration in relations with the Obama administration.

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While Obama's Cairo speech may not have satisfied Arab hardliners, a change in prevailing winds, putting Israel on the defensive, has occurred, writes Ayman El-Amir*

US President Barack Obama did not wait long after his finely tuned speech from Cairo to the world's Muslims to follow up on the thorniest problem of the Middle East region -- the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He sent his Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, back to discuss with select capitals in the region practical steps to revive the deadlocked peace process. Mitchell realises from his previous visit, back in January-February, what a daunting task he faces. He now needs to restructure the peace process to achieve the "genuine progress, not just a photo op" task that President Obama assigned him in the first week of his presidency. Mitchell's first testing of the waters exercise back then impressed upon him the complexity of the task.

=> Read more!

Obama in front of the Sphinx during a tour of the Great Pyramids of Giza

While Obama has clearly distinguished himself from his predecessor, his address to the Islamic world should be met by Arab caution, writes Hassan Nafaa*

The speech that US President Barack Obama delivered from Cairo University last week was not just an impassioned appeal to Arab and Muslim emotions and a declaration that US policies towards the Arab and Islamic worlds have changed. Every detail in that speech indicates that it was painstakingly prepared and subjected to intensive revisions before being set in the final version that Obama recited so elegantly from the large assembly hall in the oldest modern university in the region.

=> Read more!

Al Ahram

Can a breath of fresh air become the wind of change? There is a chance, writes Ghada Karmi*

For many, Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last week was a breath of fresh air. It seemed to lay out a clear vision for transforming American relations with the Arab world from traditional exploitation and paternalism to mutual respect. At the heart of it was his determination to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Welcome sentiments, even if marred by the ritual Western obeisance to Jewish feeling -- he reiterated America's unwavering support for Israel, spoke of Jewish suffering in Europe and insisted on Israel's "right to exist", which he exhorted Arabs to recognise.

Yet the thrust of the speech was along promising lines. But will Obama now follow through on what he has started? To bring real change to the Middle East he will need to bring the policy he has started towards Israel to its logical conclusion. He has rightly demanded a halt to Israeli settlement expansion, relaying this message to Israel's prime minister and affirming it in his Cairo speech. Already, though, there are signs of faltering. Reports say that America will soften the pill for Israel by asking Arab states to normalise relations with the Jewish state ahead of substantive peace moves on its part, which is entirely the wrong approach to take.

=> Read more!

By SARA ROY

The recent meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu generated speculation over the future relationship between America and Israel, and a potentially changed U.S. policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysts on the right and left are commenting on a new, tougher American policy characterized by strengthened U.S. demands on Israel. However, beneath the diplomatic choreography lies an agonizing reality that received only brief comment from Obama and silence from Netanyahu: The ongoing devastation of the people of Gaza.

Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the U.S. and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

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Many Lebanese are proud of their well conducted voting day. (Franklin Lamb_

June 9, 2009

By Franklin Lamb - Hezbollah Election HQ, Dahiyeh

Hundreds of Muazzen called believers to Lebanon's Mosques at 3:35 AM this morning for the Al Fajr (the Dawn) prayer. The haunting and beautiful strains of "Allahu Akbar", (God is great) and "Ash-'hadu ana la elaha ella Allah", (I bear witness that there is no God but Allah) wafted from Minarets and flowed softly, pushed by the morning sea breezes, along Beirut's sandy, but trash strewn beaches at Ramlet al Baida. Drifting along the Corniche Mazzra and Raouche, below the American University of Beirut, they swirled around the silent and narrow streets and alleys of Lebanon’s Capitol and drifted east and up along her mountains. Caressing the mountain tops they embraced the majestic Basilica at Harrissa, high above Jounieh, topped by its 15-ton bronze statue of "Saydet Libnan" or Notre Dame du Liban.

Proclaimed the “Queen of Lebanon,” by the Patriarch of Antioch at the beginning of the last Century, this Blessed Virgin is a shrine with claimed healing powers for Pilgrims, and the patron saint of Lebanon’s Christians. She is held in the highest esteem by Shia and Sunni Muslims, as well as Druze. The Koran contains 253 references to Mary, two hundred more than in the New Testament.

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U.S. official Keith Dayton oversees the U.S. financing and arming of former Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's militia in his battle to snuff out members of the democratically elected Hamas government.t

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM--The Israeli Maariv newspaper revealed Monday that US officer Keith Dayton intends to increase the number of former Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s security forces in order -- under the guise of enforcing law and order -- to eliminate the Palestinian resistance spearheaded by Hamas in the West Bank and assassinate members of the democratically-elected Hamas government.

Dayton, who is in charge of overseeing and financing the security apparatuses under the command of ex-Palestinian Authority chief and ex-president Mahmoud Abbas, will increase the PA security units from three to 10 brigades, Maariv said. Abbas's term expired in early January and yet the U.S. continues to support him in his now unelected role as president.

=> Read more!

unidentified settler woman and child
following West Bank accident
June 9, 2009

BETHLHEM -- A group of young Palestinian men saved an Israeli woman and her four-month-old infant after her car flipped over on the main road in Tuqu village east of Bethlehem Tuesday afternoon.

According to one of the rescuers, Ahmad Sulaiman, the driver lost control travelling at high speed and flipped three times before landing in the center of the road leading to the nearby settlement.

A group of youth nearby rushed to the scene and worked to extract the woman and her child from the wrecked car while another of the youth called an Israeli ambulance. The woman and child were evacuated to hospital; there was no word as to the severity of their injuries.

=> Read more!

June 9, 2009

CAIRO - Hamas hopes the Egyptian-brokered talks set for 7 July will be successful, said party leader-in exile Khalid Mash’al following a rare meeting with Egyptian officials Tuesday.

He also warned, however, that a Palestinian Authority campaign was in process to “uproot” Hamas in the West Bank. Before entering into dialogue, he said, “these intolerable practices… impeding dialogue must be subdued.”

Mash’al lead a delegation of Hamas leaders to Cairo where they discussed the future of unity talks, following similar visits by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party on Sunday, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) on Monday.

=> Read more!

June 9 2009

JERUSALEM -- The illegal Israeli Occupation Authority forced a Palestinian citizen called Mohamed Ghosheh to demolish his home located in Souk Khan Al-Zeit in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem on Tuesday.

Palestinian local sources said that a large number of Israeli municipal civil servants escorted by Israeli policemen came to the area and threatened to fine Ghosheh around $25,000 if he did not demolish his house himself.

=> Read more!

Zoabi is one of three sitting members from the National Democratic Assembly (BALAD).

By Stu Harrison

"We don't live in the territories, we cannot throw stones and we cannot participate in the legitimate resistance against occupation", Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) told Green Left Weekly.

“We participate in the struggle so our own position as citizens. Our unique role is a political resistance and not, for example, an armed resistance.”

Zoabi is the first Palestinian woman to be elected to the Knesset, representing a so-called Israeli-Arab party. Israeli-Arab is a term used in Israel to describe the Palestinians that remained after the ethnic cleansing that accompanied Israel’s founding.

=> Read more!

By Nathaniel Popper, The Forward

Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.

But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.

"The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle)," Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its "Ask the Rabbis" feature.

=> Read more!

Israeli army demolishing Palestinian land - Photo by Jaume d'Urgell
June 8, 2009

By Katherine Orwell - IMEMC News

The Israeli army has been trying to take out water and electric systems of the small village Baq'a, north of the Southern West Bank city of Hebron on Monday morning. Around 5 people sustained injuries as they tried to stop the Israeli army from demolishing their water wells. Jeff Halper, from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) was arrested for trying to obstruct the military.

=> Read more!

Supporters of the US-backed March 14 bloc began to celebrate even before the official election results were out

Official results have confirmed the victory of Lebanon's March 14 coalition over the opposition Hezbollah-led alliance in the country's parliamentary elections.

Ziad Baroud, the interior minister, announced the figures on Monday, confirming what had already been predicted by the country's newspapers.

The results showed the Sunni-led March 14 coalition, led by Saad Hariri, the son of Rafiq Hariri, the assassinated former prime minister, winning 71 seats in the 128-seat parliament, while the Hezbollah-led alliance took 57.

=> Read more!

Barack Obama has sent Benjamin Netanyahu the message he most seeks.

By Jennifer Loewenstein

Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama have one thing very much in common: both of them have nearly the same vision for the future of “Palestine”. They may not recognize it yet, but sooner or later, whether Netanyahu remains in power or is replaced by someone who speaks Dove-Liberalese better, they will shake hands and agree that the only thing that really separated them in the early months of President Obama’s administration was semantics: the language each man used to describe what he saw for the future of Palestine, or “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” –a phrase that suggests there are two sides each with a grievance that equals or cancels out the other’s and that makes a just resolution so difficult to formulate.

How deeply have we been indoctrinated.

If President Obama’s speech in Cairo signified anything, it was that the likelihood of a dramatic shift in United States’ policy toward Israel in the coming years is almost nil. The rejectionist framework in which both states have pursued their policies for the past 33 years – or since the 1976 UNSC resolution that first acknowledged Palestinian national rights within the context of two states—is slated to continue. If Obama clarified anything in his lengthy, often patronizing, often obsequious speech in Egypt – a country whose leader epitomizes the tyrannical and repressive regimes so often the primary recipients of massive US foreign aid for doing as they are told – it was the fact that no threat to the status quo of the Bush-Clinton-Bush decades is waiting in the wings.

=> Read more!

June 8, 2009

BETHLEHEM - The US security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Keith Dayton, is preparing to submit a new plan aimed at enlarging Palestinian security services in the West Bank from three to 10 brigades.

According to the Israeli daily newspaper Ma'ariv, Dayton’s plan is meant to tighten PA control in the West Bank after fearing that Hamas will attempt to stage a coup and take control as in the Gaza Strip.

Dayton began supervising training of PA security services in the West Bank two years ago. Three brigades received training in Jordan under Dayton’s supervision, and they are now operating in the West Bank.

=> Read more!

June 8, 2009

GAZA -- A dozen Palestinian fighters on horses and in booby-trapped cars attacked Israeli patrols near the Karni crossing east of Gaza City on Monday morning, sources told Ma’an.

Initial reports said the fighters abducted an Israeli soldier before Israeli forces shelled them from the air. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli helicopters and artillery fired on the area.

Palestinian medical sources confirmed that four dead and two injured men were evacuated to Ash-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Three of the slain fighters were identified as Hani Tarabein, Tahir Issa, and Muhannad Al-Minawi, all from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

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Mon Jun 8, 2009 11:26am BST

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Middle East envoy Tony Blair's signature project in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip could collapse because of Israeli restrictions on bringing in equipment, an internal World Bank memo obtained by Reuters said.

The $75 million (110 million pound) north Gaza sewage treatment project was the centrepiece of an economic package spearheaded by the former prime minister to try to boost Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

In a June 4 memo to donors, the World Bank said Israel has prevented delivery of critical equipment to the project since March.

The equipment included pipes, cement and spare parts.

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Haaretz

From: June 1, 2009

By Barak Ravid

Tensions between Washington and Jerusalem are growing after the U.S. administration's demand that Israel completely freeze construction in all West Bank settlements. Israeli political officials expressed disappointment after Tuesday's round of meetings in London with George Mitchell, U.S. President Barack Obama's envoy to the Middle East.

"We're disappointed," said one senior official. "All of the understandings reached during the [George W.] Bush administration are worth nothing." Another official said the U.S. administration is refusing every Israeli attempt to reach new agreements on settlement construction. "The United States is taking a line of granting concessions to the Palestinians that is not fair toward Israel," he said.

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The minority Ultra-Orthodox Jews want ancient religious law to be upheld throughout Israel

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have thrown stones and vegetables at Israeli police who replied with water canons at a protest against the opening of a car park in Jerusalem.

The clashes at the Israeli city hall building on Saturday broke out after the protesters complained that the opening contravened religious law by occurring on the Jewish Sabbath.

"We [initially] understood this will be a quiet protest, that they will come and hold a prayer. When the people got here, we realised that things were different," Bruno Stein, a police officer, said.

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By STANLEY HELLER

Courageous Egyptian journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy put it straight in of all places the New York Times, “President Obama should not have decided to come to Egypt. The visit is a clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers. No words that Mr. Obama will say can change this perception that Americans are supporting a dictator with their more than $1 billion in annual aid.”

Not only is Mubarak a dictator, he’s an active collaborator in the strangulation of the Gaza Strip. Desperate Palestinians attempted to flee Israel’s Gaza Massacre, but were almost all turned away. Six months later humanitarian missions to bring Gaza supplies only get through if they include world renowned personalities or if they go on hunger strikes.

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Der Spiegel

By Juliane von Mittelstaedt in Gaza City

Four months after the war in Gaza, Palestinian lawyers have prepared 936 lawsuits against the Israeli military over alleged war crimes. Some of the cases could soon be tried at Spain's National Court under universal jurisdiction.

When Iyad al-Alami wants to survey the fallout of the Gaza war, he simply has to step out of his office and walk up the stairs to the top floor of the building where he works. There, piles of shrapnel, twisted missile shells and massive armor-piercing shells are stored. New material is added every day, filling the boxes that cover the floor and are stacked along the walls.

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By Gideon Levy

Neither Tel Aviv nor Ramallah held their breaths Thursday as the American president gave a speech in Cairo; the traffic in both crowded cities continued normally. Tel Aviv was indifferent, Ramallah sunk in desperation: Both cities have already had their fill of nice, historic speeches.

Nonetheless, no one can ignore the speech given by Barack Obama: The mountain birthed a mountain. Obama remained Obama. Only the Israeli analysts tried to diminish the speech's importance ("not terrible"), to spread fear ("he mentioned the Holocaust and the Nakba in a single breath"), or were insulted on our behalf ("he did not mention our right to the land as promised in the Bible"). All these were redundant and unnecessary. Obama emerged Thursday as a true friend of Israel.

The prime minister ordered the ministers to say nothing, but of course they could not help but invade the studios. Uzi Landau said that a Palestinian state is tantamount to an "Iranian state." Isaac Herzog appeared even more ridiculous when he said that the problem with the settlements is one of "public relations." In essence, both were busy with the same problem: How can we manage to pull the new America's leg as well? Israeli politicians have never before appeared as pathetic, as small as they did Thursday, compared to the bearer of promise in Cairo.

Indeed, there was promise in Cairo, of the dawn of a new age. A U.S. president talking about negotiations with Iran without preconditions or tacit threats, even willing to accept Iran having civilian nuclear capability; a president who talked about Hamas as a legitimate organization that represents part of Palestinian society, but that needs to relinquish violence; who spoke with empathy about Palestinian suffering; who spoke, believe it or not, about security not only for Israelis but also for Palestinians; who said that all the settlements are illegal; who called for nuclear disarmament of the entire region. All are sensational messages, headlines whose significance cannot be exaggerated, even if there are those who desperately tried to argue yesterday that "there was nothing new in his speech."

Not enough? Obama also spoke in Cairo (!) against denying the Holocaust, about the rights of women and Copts, and on the need for democracy tailored to each society's culture.

This is the thinking of a great leader, who walked with wisdom and sensitivity between the Holocaust and the Nakba, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Americans and Arabs, between Christians, Jews and Muslims. How easy it is to imagine his predecessor, George Bush the Terrible, in the same position: a complete opposite.

Our right-wingers were disappointed that he did not approve at least of Gush Etzion, and the peace lovers were disappointed that he did not offer a timetable. But a speech is just that, and the time for carrying things out is still to come.

But why waste words? Israeli news shows still opened Thursday with the Dudu Topaz story; that is what really interests Israelis. Never mind Obama; Israel has its own concerns.

haaretz.com

June 6, 2009

BEIRUT - Once again the United States has decided to put the Lebanese parliamentary elections under the spotlight in another instance of its “interference policy” in the internal affairs of the country.

US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffery Feltman said it would be naïve for some to think that the outcome of the Lebanese elections won't affect US policy in Lebanon.

In a joint interview with both dailies An-Nahar and al-Hayat on Saturday, Feltman said: "The election's outcome will naturally affect world's stance towards the new Lebanese government and the manner in which the United States and Congress deal with Lebanon. I believe the Lebanese are smart enough to understand that there will be an effect.”

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Obama's speech shows little real change. In most regards his analysis maintains flawed American policies

By Ali Abunimah

Once you strip away the mujamalat – the courtesies exchanged between guest and host – the substance of President Obama's speech in Cairo indicates there is likely to be little real change in US policy. It is not necessary to divine Obama's intentions – he may be utterly sincere and I believe he is. It is his analysis and prescriptions that in most regards maintain flawed American policies intact.

Though he pledged to "speak the truth as best I can", there was much the president left out. He spoke of tension between "America and Islam" – the former a concrete specific place, the latter a vague construct subsuming peoples, practices, histories and countries more varied than similar.

Labelling America's "other" as a nebulous and all-encompassing "Islam" (even while professing rapprochement and respect) is a way to avoid acknowledging what does in fact unite and mobilise people across many Muslim-majority countries: overwhelming popular opposition to increasingly intrusive and violent American military, political and economic interventions in many of those countries. This opposition – and the resistance it generates – has now become for supporters of those interventions, synonymous with "Islam".

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By Dan Lieberman – Jerusalem

Israel's latest strategy for complicating the peace process is to delay discussions of Jerusalem's future. Steering debate to other agendas enables Israel to establish more "facts on Jerusalem ground," which consists of annexing lands, constructing bypass roads and housing and preparing for the decisive moment that will allow expansion of the Maale Adumim settlement and the development of the E1 corridor. From a Palestinian perspective, the extensive E1 corridor will join settlements in a ring that separates East Jerusalem from the West Bank. This corridor will divide the northern and southern West Bank and will impede direct transit between Palestine Bethlehem, which is south of E1 and Palestine Ramallah, which is north of E1. Construction of the E1 corridor, portions of which are owned by Palestinians, could prevent the formation of a viable Palestinian state.

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By Franklin Lamb - Near the Syrian border northeast of Baalbek

I had not planned to watch Obama's Cairo speech on June 5, since I had an appointment in the plush Bekaa Valley, near Baalbek-Hermel with Shaykh Subhi Tufayli one of the founders of Hezbollah and its first Secretary General.

Shaykh Tufayli, still a revered cleric, was a participant in the August 1982 First Conference for the Downtrodden which, I argues in a forthcoming volume, was the essential organizing event at which Hezbollah can be said to have come into existence.

At the Conference with Subhi Tufayli, twenty seven years ago, were Lebanon’s now senior Shia cleric, Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Shaykh Muhammad Yazbak, the martyr Shaykh Raghib Harb, Shaykh Afif al-Nablsi and others who are still active in the Party.

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By John V. Whitbeck

President Barack Obama's much anticipated speech in Cairo was truly astounding. After all the months of lead-up and hype, few could have imagined that this speech would contain nothing of substance. Surely Obama would feel the need to announce some new initiative on at least one of the major matters of concern to the Muslim world. Perhaps a decision to develop a fully fleshed-out plan for a two-state solution, unilaterally or with the Quartet and/or the Organization of the Islamic Conference (King Abdallah of Jordan's "57 Muslim countries" willing to make peace with Israel), dealing with all the difficult issues, and to present it to Israelis and Palestinians as the last best chance for peace based on partition and the acceptance of Israel by the Muslim world. Or perhaps an international conference involving all concerned regional parties to seek solutions to the interlinked problems involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and/or Iran.

Surely he had to have some hopeful surprise up his sleeve. Wrong. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

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By Khaled Amayreh

ISRAEL this week said it was refusing to cooperate with a UN war crimes investigator who would look into war crimes perpetrated by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip during the brutal Israeli army offensive against the coastal enclave five months ago, reports Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem.

The UN mission, headed by Richard Goldstone, arrived in Gaza earlier this week through the Rafah border crossing after the Israeli authorities refused to allow the UN team to travel into Gaza from Israeli territory.

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Ramallah's assassination of a Hamas commander in the West Bank may be the straw that breaks the back of Palestinian national reconciliation efforts, writes Saleh Al-Naami

Israeli security chiefs still remember the angry reaction of former prime minister Ehud Olmert two years ago when the commander of the Israeli armed forces in the West Bank, Gad Shamani, told him that the efforts to assassinate Mohamed Al-Samman had ended in failure. Al-Samman was the West Bank commander of the Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, and Olmert's fury was due to the long list of commando operations that Al-Samman had either undertaken or overseen.

Last Saturday night, however, Israeli security chiefs had reason to feel relief as Al-Samman was finally killed -- though by the security forces of the Salam Fayyad government. Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces raided the building that Al-Samman and his aides had taken refuge in, and an armed struggle took place that ended in the killing of Al-Samman, his assistant, the building owner, and three members of the security forces. This incident that shocked the Palestinian street was described by leaders in the PA as "proof" that Fayyad's government was committed to the agreements signed with Israel.

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June 6, 2009

By Khalid Amayreh

In June 1967, when Israel launched the 6-day-war on Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Khalid Amayreh was 10 years’ old. In the following two-part article, he recollects the war, whose outcome and ramifications continue to trouble Palestine, the Middle East and the rest of the world:

In June 1967, I was ten years old. I remember how we were told to raise the white flag when the Israeli army surrounded our small village, Khorsa, 15 kilometres south-west of Hebron. We were told we would be shot and killed if we didn't raise the white flag aloft. The Jordanian soldiers left in disgrace and headed eastward, a few donned traditional women’s clothing in order to disguise themselves, while King Hussein urged us via Amman Radio to fight the Israelis “with our fingernails, with our teeth.” Well, how could we possibly fend off the mighty Israeli army with our teeth and fingernails?

Frankly, the Arab armies didn’t really put up any real fight against the Israelis. These armies reflected the utter political, moral and ideological decadence and bankruptcy of most contemporary Arab regimes. Indeed, maintaining the regime’s survival was the most paramount priority and strategy for the ruling elites and juntas of that time. Fighting Israel and liberating Palestine were not a real priority for these Arab regimes, despite all the rhetoric. Interestingly, this state of affairs remains unchanged even today, 40 years after the greatest Arab defeat in modern times.

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June 5, 2009

NI'LIN, Palestine -- A Palestinian demonstrator was killed and others injured after Isreali Occupation Forces opened fire at an anti-wall rally in the West Bank village of Ni'lin on Friday.

The International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that the wall is illegal.

The slain Palestinian was identified as Yousef Aqel Sadiq Srour, 36, who was shot in the chest with live fire, according to medics at the scene.

An Israeli military spokesperson initially denied that the soldiers used live fire, but later issued a statement justifying the man's death under the pretext that he "was a Hamas activist central to the weekly anti-separation fence protests," according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

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June 5, 2009

By Kevin Zeese

There is long-time saying about politicians: you cannot trust their words, but must judge them by their actions.

President Obama is very good with words, perhaps the best communicator we have seen in the White House in a generation. But now he has been in office long enough that he should be judged on his actions.

The direction of U.S. foreign policy is moving rapidly in the wrong direction on many fronts. It is time for the peace movement to step up its activities throughout the country and demand a change in course.

The U.S. passed the 5,000th death of a U.S. service member in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This death seemed to be barely noticed by a peace movement that during the Bush years highlighted every major milestone. This sad body count is the tip of the iceberg of the dire effects of these wars – mass deaths and maiming of civilians, millions forced to flee their homes described as “an exodus that is beyond biblical.”

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By ARNO J. MAYER

Israel is in the grip of a kind of collective schizophrenia. Not only its governors but the majority of its Jewish population have delusions of both grandeur and persecution, making for a distortion of reality and inconsistent behavior. Israeli Jews see and represent themselves as a chosen people and part of a superior Western civilization. They consider themselves more cerebral, reasonable, moral, and dynamic than Arabs and Muslims generally, and Palestinians in particular. At the same time they feel themselves to be the ultimate incarnation of the Jewish people’s unique suffering through the ages, still subject to constant insecurity and defenselessness in the face of ever-threatening extreme and unmerited punishment.

Such a psyche leads to hubris and vengefulness, the latter a response to the perpetual Jewish torment said to have culminated, as if by a directive purpose, in the Holocaust. Remembering the Shoah is Israel’s Eleventh Commandment and central to the nation’s civil religion and Weltanschauung. Family, school, synagogue, and official culture propagate its prescriptive narrative, decontextualized and surfeited with ethnocentrism. The re-memorizing of victimization is ritualized on Yom Ha Shoah and institutionalized by Yad Vashem.

Israel uses the Holocaust to conjure the specter of a timeless existential peril, in turn used to justify its warfare state and unbending diplomacy. Forever posing as the impossibly vulnerable Biblical David braving the Islamic Goliath, Israel insists all its cross-border wars and punitive operations are strictly defensive, preventive, or preemptive. Yet its leaders, many of them retired senior officers of the armed forces and intelligence services, attribute the exploits of the military to the advanced weapons, exemplary strategists, and uniquely principled citizen soldiers of the country’s formidable “Defense Forces,” one of the world’s mightiest fighting machines.

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June 4, 2009

The Israeli Maariv daily quoted US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, as saying that “Israel has been lying on the US for the past years,” and that “it’s time to stop this.”

According to Maariv, Mitchell was speaking in Washington during a meeting with a ‘prominent Jewish official in the US.” The Israeli daily added the the main focus during the meeting was on “growing confrontation” between President Barack Obama’s administration and the Israeli government. “Our policy is simple. The Israelis have lied to us all the time in the past years, but this is over now.”

Mitchell is expected in Tel Aviv in the coming days and will set an office in occupied Jerusalem comprising an expanded team, that will–according to Maariv- be worrisome for PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

By Stuart Littlewood – London

Whenever western leaders lecture us about a solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, they rely on those comfortable, woolly words "negotiation" and “peace process”… it’s a convenient crutch.

Kick away the crutch and they’d finally have to grasp the nettle of justice, something they have always avoided.

Justice is underpinned by law, but the operation of law in the Holy Land is conspicuously absent. The Arabs, I believe, want plain, simple justice. Why is this such a problem to a western alliance that claims to itself sweeping moral authority?

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By Gideon Levy

Benjamin Netanyahu can keep pretending it's just rain and Interior Minister Eli Yishai can continue berating the Obama administration for its "unacceptable" policies. National Union MK Michael Ben-Ari can keep shouting hysterically about our soldiers, and the settlers can keep putting us all in danger. But the issue has been settled in Washington.

Peace lies with them - U.S. decision-makers, led by Barack Obama. In other words, the future of the Middle East is a domestic American issue. Since Henry Kissinger determined that foreign policy is merely an extension of domestic policy, his maxim has never had such tremendous potential impact.

Washington will decide the fate of the West Bank settlements, and we can only hope it insists on their evacuation. Obama standing firm beside the revolutionary Mideast policy he has begun will light the torch of hope here, too. The battle of the titans, Netanyahu and Obama, is little more than a farce - let us recall the fable of the elephant and the bee, or the frog and the ox. Not all creatures can become as great as they think.

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Obama's speech was closely watched in both the US and the Middle East

By Rob Reynolds, senior Washington correspondent

In Barack Obama's highly anticipated speech in Cairo, there was something that struck me as distinctively American: His call for the peoples of the Middle East to put aside or quickly resolve decades and even centuries-old conflicts.

"Whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it," the US president said on Thursday.

Easier said then done, of course. The notion of "turning the page" comes easily to many Americans, but is odd and unsettling to cultures still living with the results of historic wrongs.

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June 4, 2009

By Hanan Awarekeh

Offering the Arabic greeting of Assalaamu Alaykum, or "peace be unto you", in the early part of his speech and quoting a passage from the Holy Koran and cited his father's Muslim background in a bid to highlight his sensitivity to Islamic grievances against the West, US President Barack Obama addressed the Muslim world from Cairo in the second leg of his 5-Day tour to the Middle East.

"America is not and never will be at war with Islam," Obama said. "We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims."

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QALQILIYA -- Around 1000 elements of the PA security apparatuses in the West Bank loyal to former PA chief Mahmoud Abbas are encircling a building in Qalqilia on Thursday claiming that Qassam Brigades activists were entrenched inside.

PIC reporter said that the security men in 70 military jeeps were encircling the home of Abdul Fattah Shreim, who is detained by those apparatuses, and were claiming that Qassam Brigades activists were hiding inside it.

He said that clashes erupted between the two parties and that the Security men arrested families of the Qassam operatives to pressure them into surrendering themselves.

Palestinian sources reported that Riyadh Zeinuddin, one of those security men, was killed in the standoff.

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Richard Goldstone in Gaza

BETHELEHM – The head of a UN fact-finding mission to Gaza said on Thursday that he would continue his investigation into alleged war crimes in spite of Israeli noncompliance.

Speaking at a news conference in Gaza, Justice Richard Goldstone said Israel was approached a number of times seeking its cooperation in the inquiry into the three-week attack on Gaza in December and January.

“The response,” he said, “was a complete refusal.”

“But we will not let that stop us from carrying out our mission,” Goldstone said, “… the refusal of cooperation will not in any way decrease the weight of our investigation,” adding that his team would also probe Israel’s own allegations of war crimes committed by its opponents.

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Notable reaction to President Barack Obama's speech Thursday to the Muslim world:
__

"President Obama is a brave president. ... We hope he will open a new chapter with the Islamic world and Arab nations in particular." — Mithwan Hussein, a Baghdad resident.
___

"Bush and Clinton said the same about a Palestinian state, but they've done nothing, so why should we believe this guy?" — Ali Tottah, 82, a Palestinian refugee speaking at the Baqaa refugee camp in Jordan.
___

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By Jeff Halper

Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words "two states" after his meeting with President Obama? All Israel held its breath. (He didn't). The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however. Obama, I believe, sincerely -- perhaps urgently -- seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a pre-condition, he understands, to getting on with larger, more pressing Middle Eastern issues. Netanyahu, who rejects even the notion of a Palestinian mini-state as grudgingly accepted by Barak, Sharon and Olmert, is seeking a permanent state of "warehousing" in which the Palestinians live forever in a limbo of "autonomy" delineated by an Israel that otherwise encompasses them. The danger, to which we all should be attuned, is that the two sides might compromise on apartheid -- the establishment of a Palestinian Bantustan that has neither genuine sovereignty nor economic viability.

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By Chris Hedges

The crisis faced by combat veterans returning from war is not simply a profound struggle with trauma and alienation. It is often, for those who can slice through the suffering to self-awareness, an existential crisis. War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

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Looking to increase security, Israel dropped leaflets last week warning residents to stay at least 1,000 feet from the border or risk being shot.

June 01, 2009

By Erin Cunningham

GAZA CITY - Israel's warning came from the sky, as it often does in the Gaza Strip. But this time warplanes dropped neither bombs nor missiles on the impoverished Palestinian territory, but thousands of tiny leaflets warning Gaza's residents to keep away from the 30-mile-long border they share with Israel.

Stay at least 300 meters (1,000 feet) from the border, the May 25 pamphlets advised Palestinians, or risk being shot by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Once a plush scene of rolling olive, citrus, and pomegranate groves, much of the border region is now just a barren landscape, marked only by the presence of IDF tanks, military watchtowers, and the occasional pop of gunfire.

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GAZA-- A report issued by Hamas Movement on Monday revealed that the Israeli occupation forces and the PA security forces in the West Bank had killed at least ten Palestinian citizens in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the past month of May.

The report, of which the PIC obtained a copy, confirmed that the IOF troops murdered seven Palestinian citizens, four of them in Gaza Strip and three in the West Bank; while the PA security forces under the command of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas assassinated three Palestinian fighters in the West Bank city of Qalqilia.

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GAZA - Hamas on Tuesday dismissed Israel's military maneuvers as muscle-flexing aimed at mending its soldiers' collapsed morale following the defeats in Lebanon and Gaza.

Fawzi Barhoum, the Hamas spokesman, said in a press statement that the rate of suicides and mental disturbances among the Israeli soldiers had increased dramatically following the Gaza war.

The war exercises are also aimed at boosting the Zionist military theory based on exaggerating Israel's military might to terrify Palestinian resistance forces and regional countries in a bid to continue imposing "Zionist hegemony" and to persist in its expansionist, aggressive project, the spokesman elaborated.

Barhoum asked the Arab and Islamic countries to start a new stage of uniting efforts and regional alliances in a bid to confront Zionist challenges and dangers on their land, people and sovereignty.

He also championed continued support for the Palestinian people's steadfastness and resistance forces to protect the land, people and holy shrines.

http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en

Nasrallah promised, 'Your .. divisions will be destroyed on our hills and mountains..'

By Nicholas Noe - Beirut

Over the last decade and a half, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Lebanon's militant Shiite movement Hezbollah, has steadily moved front and center in the often vitriolic (and regularly under-informed) Western debate over the threat that 'radical Islam' is said to pose to the world at large.

Now, as Nasrallah appears ready to lead what could be a new majority in the Lebanese Parliament, the steady stream of accusations and threats have, somewhat predictably, turned into a deluge – with Arab states, Arab media and prosecutorial offices far and wide at the forefront of efforts to paint him as public enemy Number One.

A central reason for all the attention in the past, of course, has been that Nasrallah and Hezbollah have managed – for better or worse, depending on your perspective – to inflict a series of increasingly significant setbacks for US and especially Israeli interests: the ignominious, unilateral withdrawal from South Lebanon by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in May 2000, the failure of the Bush administration to vanquish Hezbollah and Syria in one go following the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Premier Rafik Hariri, and, of course, the July 2006 war – vigorously encouraged by the Americans and lost by the Israelis.

=> Read more!

Roger Waters sprays graffiti on the wall
in Bethlehem in 2006

BETHLEHEM - A British rock legend and co-founder of Pink Floyd said on Tuesday he would give a concert instantly if Israel’s illegal West Bank wall is torn down.

Roger Waters made this pledge during a visit to Ayda Refugee Camp in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. The wall snakes around the camp, hemming it in with concrete.

The 65-year-old bassist and singer co-wrote Pink Floyd's iconic album “The Wall” and performed its title song in 1990 on the site where the Berlin Wall stood.

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Rightwing extremist Avigdor Lieberman's party grew to be Israel's third largest political party in the February election

The Israeli parliament has passed a preliminary reading of a bill that would mandate the imprisonment of anyone who calls for the end of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, according to the Jerusalem Post newspaper.

The bill was passed on Wednesday by the Knesset with the support of 47 members, or MKs.

Thirty-four MKs opposed and one abstained, the daily said.

Sponsored by Zevulun Orlev, an Israel Beiteinu MK, the bill stipulates one-year imprisonment of any person who makes "such public statement".

=> Read more!

Ref: 72/2009
Date: 02 June 2009
Time: 11:30 GMT
Press release

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) welcomes the arrival of the Human Rights Council Mandated Independent Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Strip. The mission is headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The mission also includes Professor Christine Chinkin, Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London; Ms. Hina Jilani, Advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan and former Special Representative of the Secretary General on Human Rights Defenders; and Colonel (retired from the Irish Armed Forces) Desmond Travers, member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI).

The Human Rights Council mission is particularly welcome in light of the Secretary General’s actions in relation to the recent report of the United Nations Board of Inquiry, which disregarded the Board’s recommendations, and pre-empted a discussion within the Security Council. Palestinian Human Rights organizations are today delivering an open letter to the Secretary General, detailing their objections to Mr. Ban’s actions.

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Judge Richard Goldstone leaves his hotel in Gaza

June 2, 2009

GAZA – Palestinian government officials in Gaza handed over documents, photos, and other materials to a UN fact-finding team that arrived in the Gaza Strip Monday to investigate possible war crimes and other violations of international law during Israel's assault on the territory earlier this year.

The 15-member team, headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, entered the Gaza Strip through the Rafah crossing on Monday after being denied visas to cross from Israel, despite multiple requests by the UN.

"We have come here to see, to learn, to talk to people in all walks of life; ordinary people, governmental people, administrative people," Goldstone said.


Richard Goldstone, left, and Ghazi Hamad, right, meet as the UN team begins its investigation in Gaza

The team plans to complete its fact-finding mission in a week, but Goldstone said they were likely to return within a month, before presenting a report in August.

=> Read more!

Teargas at Huwwara checkpoint

June 2, 2009

NABLUS/QALQILYA – Palestinians attacked Israeli soldiers and settlers in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, a day after settlers brutally beat six Palestinians near the city of Nablus.

Israeli forces closed the Huwwara checkpoint, the main entrance into Nablus, after a Palestinian teenager stabbed a soldier stationed there, wounding him moderately.

Witnesses told Ma’an that they saw a boy, estimated to be 15 years old, stabbing a soldier in the left shoulder. Ambulances rushed to the scene and removed the injured soldier, while troops locked down the checkpoint, denying passage to waiting Palestinians.

Eyewitnesses and Israeli sources said the boy was arrested and taken for questioning. The Israeli military said he is from a Nablus-area village, but withheld his name and other details.

=> Read more!

By SAEED SHAH AND WARREN P. STROBEL
McClatchy Newspapers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to expand its diplomatic presence in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The White House has asked Congress for - and seems likely to receive - $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.

The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of $740 million.

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A victim of settler violence in Nablus' Al-Arabi Hospital

June 1, 2009
NABLUS - Illegal Israeli settlers assaulted Palestinians, injuring six of them, at the Qedumim crossroads between the cities of Nablus and Qalqiliya, in the northern West Bank early on Monday morning.

The attacks were the first incident in a day of violence which the settlers say is a response to the Israeli government’s dismantling of unsanctioned settler “outposts.”

All settlements are considered illegal according to international law and the International Court of Justice.

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Settlers appear near a burning field [Ma'anImages]

NABLUS - Illegal Israeli settlers set fire to Palestinian-owned fields of wheat, barley, and olive trees in the northern West Bank villages of Burin, Asira, Surra, and Tell south of Nablus on Monday.

Witnesses told Ma’an that Palestinian firefighters faced difficulties accessing the areas on fire because settlers attacked them.

According to Ali Eid, head of the village council in Burin, the most serious fire was in the Jabal Salman area between Burin, Tell, and Asira. He asserted that fire burned large numbers of olive trees, and quantities of wheat, and barley. He also asserted that settlers obstructed fire fighters who attempted to extinguish the fire.

The settlers’ attacks are in protest against the Israeli government’s decision to evacuate an illegal settlement outpost in the area called Nahlat Yousei near the Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh. Sources reported that so far three trailers were evacuated from the outpost.

Maan News

June 1, 2009

HEBRON – An Israeli tear-gas canister expelled CS gas that injured two sisters in the Hebron-area village of Beit Ummar on Monday, local sources said.

The two sisters, 35-year-old Samira Ikhlil and her 14-year-old sister Samara, choked on the poisonous gas that Israeli soldiers fired at their house in Beit Ummar.

Local sources told Ma’an that "some the boys threw stones at an Israeli unit in the area, which for its part fired tear gas that entered their house, causing these two cases."

Medical sources described the cases as stable and said they received required treatment.

Maan News

June 1, 2009

BETHLEHEM -- The Israeli military said it detained 11 Palestinians during overnight raids in the West Bank early on Monday.

According to the military, Palestinians were seized from their homes near near Bethlehem, Ramallah and Hebron, and were “taken for questioning” at unknown locations. All the arrestees were “wanted” by the Israeli forces.

Maan News

May 31, 2009

BETHLEHEM - A high-ranking Israeli intelligence committed suicide on Sunday, Israel’s Channel 2 television reported.

The officer, who holds the rank of major, shot himself in the head in his office on Sunday morning, according to the televised report. The officer’s identity was withheld due to the “sensitive” nature of his work.

The Israeli intelligence apparatus has come under harsh criticism in recent days due to an ongoing scandal involving the exposure of an Israeli spy network in Lebanon.

Maan News

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak

WASHINGTON - Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will begin talks with top US officials in Washington on Monday amid a growing policy rift between the allies over issues including West Bank settlements.

According to AFP Barak is likely to spend time assuaging US concerns about Israel’s attitude toward peace with Palestinians when the talks were supposed to focus on bilateral military ties and Iran.

During the three-day trip, AFP reports, he is expected to meet Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Adviser James Jones and President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell.

Barak is also expected to discuss US arms sales to Israel, including a request for it to buy up to 75 fighter jets for more than 15 billion US dollars.

The Washington talks come two weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held his first meeting with Obama in Washington, and less than a week after Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did the same.

Right-wing Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly rejected the Obama administration’s calls to halt settlement expansion and commit to the creation of a Palestinian state. It is unclear if Barak, a member of the center-left Labor party, can ease tensions at this stage.
Maan News

May 1, 2009

GAZA - A UN fact-finding commission into alleged violations of international law committed during Israel’s recent offensive arrived in Gaza via Egypt’s Rafah crossing on Monday morning.

Israel has announced it will refuse to cooperate with South African jurist Richard Goldstone’s investigation, while Hamas, the ruling power in Gaza, says it welcomes the team, which was tapped by the UN’s Human Rights Council.

In a statement issued on Monday Hamas said it praised all efforts by human rights committees and organizations that work to reveal the truth about the Gaza war.

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By Stephen Gowans

The Obama administration’s recent get tough policy on Israel over expansion of West Bank settlements may seem to signal a welcome reversal in Washington’s Israel-first foreign policy, but it is anything but. On the contrary, it drives toward the same aims that have structured US Middle Eastern policy for decades: pacifying the Palestinians.

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