A “Jewish State”: I Can’t Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.

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In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

A “Jewish State”: I Can’t Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.

Lawrence of Cyberia

November 16, 2007

At one time, everyone knew that peace would break out all over the Middle East if the Palestinians would just recognize Israel. But then the PLO went and spoiled things by recognizing Israel, so there had to be a new excuse for not ending the Occupation. The new demand was that the Palestinians had to recognize Israel’s “right to exist”. And now, to ward off any danger that peace might raise its ugly head at Annapolis, here’s a timely new one: the Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists; that it has a right to exist; and that it has the right to exist as a “Jewish state”.

The implications of Israel’s demanding recognition as a state of the Jewish people rather than a state of all its citizens are complex, and I’m going to work on a separate post about that. But one really basic issue came to mind today when I read (via Desertpeace) this Ha’aretz editorial on the subject. To sum up the article: Ha’aretz thinks it’s absurd for the Israeli government to demand that the PLO recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, when it is the settlement policies of successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that have been, and continue to be, the greatest danger to Israel’s Jewishness. But what struck me most when I read the article wasn’t the strength or otherwise of Ha’aretz’s argument: it was the realisation that Israelis don’t seem to have a common understanding of what they mean by a “Jewish state”; yet they insist the Palestinians must recognize nonetheless that Israel is one.

When Olmert and Livni talk about Israel as a “Jewish state”, they mean essentially that it is a state that is for Jewish people, even if they don’t reside or have citizenship there. It would be very handy for them if they could force the Palestinians to accept this definition, because then they could go into final status talks with some of the more intractable issues – like how to resolve the Right of Return – pre-emptively swept off the table. After all, how can Palestinians have a right to return to their homes in a “Jewish state” when they’re not even Jewish, and non-Jews shouldn’t expect to be allowed to live in a “Jewish state” in the first place…

Various Israeli commentators have been up in arms this week because the PLO has made it clear it will never give Israel this kind of recognition. The PLO says that Palestinians, like everyone else, give diplomatic recognition to countries, not to demographic balances, religious leanings or political affiliations. In recognizing Iran, for example, they give formal acceptance to Iran’s sovereignty, its people and its borders, but not to its religious orientation. If Iran wants to call itself “The Islamic Republic of…”, that is purely an internal Iranian affair. It’s “Iran” that international diplomacy recognizes, not the Islamic-ness or Republic-ness of its political system. Similarly, if Israel wishes to call itself “The Jewish State of…”, that is an internal Israeli affair, which does not need and cannot demand recognition from the PLO or anyone else in the world community.

So what does the PLO recognize in regard to Israel? The PLO recognizes the state of Israel in its 1967 borders – an area which happens to have an overwhelmingly Jewish population – and is offering through its acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative a Right of Return that is implemented in agreement with Israel, i.e. a nominal one that won’t change the demographic balance there. So they offer recognition to a state that is de facto Jewish, and recognize the right of that state to peace and security within its recognized borders.

The one thing they won’t say is that Israel is formally a “Jewish state”, i.e. a state for Jews. Just as a Jewish American might recognize that the USA is a Christian country in terms of its dominant population and cultural traditions, but would never accept that it should be formally designated a “Christian state”, because that immediately defines Jews and other non-Christians as lesser citizens. For some outrageous no-doubt Islamofascist Jew-hating reason, the Palestinians similarly refuse to declare that Israel is constitutionally a state where Israelis of Palestinian descent are inferior citizens.

It seems absurd that Israelis will have hysterical fits when the PLO says it doesn’t recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, when Israelis themselves don’t agree in first place what exactly they mean by a “Jewish state”.

Israelis need to decide what it is they mean by a “Jewish state”, before they accuse the Palestinians of being unreasonable in rejecting it. Right now, I suspect that some of them are happy to conflate the two different understandings of what a “Jewish state” is; perhaps so that when the PLO rejects Olmert’s demand for a “state for Jews”, they can pretend the PLO is rejecting too the idea of Israel as a “state of Jews”. I suppose if you understand that the price of a universally-recognized Jewish-majority state in the 1967 borders is finally getting out of the Occupied Territories, and you really don’t want to do that, it’s a lot easier to derail peace talks by whipping up fears of being driven into the sea than to simply acknowledge you’re not willing to pay the price. It’s a bit like having the President of Iran say that the Occupation regime over Jerusalem will disappear from the pages of time, and then pretending that he really said he would “wipe Israel off the map”; because it’s always easier to invoke the Hitler bogeyman than to answer Ahmadinejad’s questions about why exactly Muslim-majority Palestine should be dismantled to make way for a sectarian Zionist state….

Maybe Israelis could take a short break from insisting on what the Palestinians must give them, and make up their minds what exactly it is they want. Then perhaps if they could actually listen to what they’re being offered, they might even be pleasantly surprised to find it’s something they could live with after all.

Photo: Anti-Zionist Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest the Israeli elections; Mea Shearim, March 2006. By Shabtai Gold.

The full story in

http://uruknet.info/?p=m38304&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Pentagon Cover Up: 15,000 or more US casualties in Iraq War

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Pentagon Cover Up: 15,000 or more US casualties in Iraq War

By Mike Whitney

11/17/07 “ICH” — – The Pentagon has been concealing the true number of American casualties in the Iraq War. The real number exceeds 15,000 and CBS News can prove it.

CBS’s Investigative Unit wanted to do a report on the number of suicides in the military and “submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Defense”. After 4 months they received a document which showed–that between 1995 and 2007–there were 2,200 suicides among “active duty” soldiers.

Baloney.

The Pentagon was covering up the real magnitude of the “suicide epidemic”. Following an exhaustive investigation of veterans’ suicide data collected from 45 states; CBS discovered that in 2005 alone “THERE WERE AT LEAST 6,256 AMONG THOSE WHO SERVED IN THE ARMED FORCES. THAT’S 120 EACH AND EVERY WEEK IN JUST ONE YEAR.”

That is not a typo. Active and retired military personnel, mostly young veterans between the ages of 20 to 24, are returning from combat and killing themselves in record numbers. We can assume that “multiple-tours of duty” in a war-zone have precipitated a mental health crisis of which the public is entirely unaware and which the Pentagon is in total denial.

If we add the 6,256 suicide victims from 2005 to the “official” 3,865 reported combat casualties; we get a sum of 10,121. Even a low-ball estimate of similar 2004 and 2006 suicide figures, would mean that the total number of US casualties from the Iraq war now exceed 15,000.

That’s right; 15,000 dead US servicemen and women in a war that–as yet–has no legal or moral justification.

Check it out the video at: CBS News “Suicide Epidemic among Veterans”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/13/cbsnews_investigates/main3496471.shtml

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US War Criminal : Iraq Occupation Facts

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

US War Criminal : Iraq Occupation Facts

Iraq Solidarity Campaign

November 17, 2007

FACTS: There are 8 Million Iraqis in need of emergency aid. 43% of Iraqis suffer from absolute poverty. Child malnutrition 19% in 2003 and 28% in 2007. 92% of Iraqi children suffer from Learning problems because of the situation.

According to the UNAMI report for the 1st April untill 30th June 2007 states: 47% of IDPs are not receiving their food rations. This is in contrast to a distribution rate of 96% before the war in 2003.At least 40% of the educated and experienced Iraqi workers have left the country. 70% of Displaced Iraqis are women.

From 2003-2005 Humanitarian funding dropped by 47%, while reconstruction rose 922%.According to the Amnesty International report, released in Sep 2007: there are half a million Iraqi children in Syria and Lebanon.

Amnesty estimates that less than 50 thousands of them are attending school.The situation in the Iraqi Health sector is catastrophic. There is no adequate water supply, with 50% in 2003 and 70% in 2007.80% are without proper sanitation.There are 100 widows and 400 orphans created everyday in Iraq (Iraqi Justice Ministry May 2007).

The full story in

http://uruknet.info/?p=m38327&hd=&size=1&l=e

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Mississippi Supreme Court, 1926: Waterboarding illegal torture

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Mississippi Supreme Court, 1926: Waterboarding illegal torture

Stephen Soldz

November 17, 2007

The Is That Legal? site informs us that, in 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court found that “the water cure” [aka "waterboarding"] was illegal torture, and threw out a conviction obtained with its use:

If It Was Torture in Mississippi, Then It’s Definitely Torture, Right?

A final word or two on this “waterboarding as torture” issue.

Waterboarding, known ironically in earlier times as “the water cure”, remains ­ in the view of this administration and many supporters ­ not torture. And if it’s not torture, then it’s not cruel and unusual punishment or a violation of due process.

But here’s the rub.

In 1926, the Mississippi Supreme Court called the water cure torture. No qualifiers. No hedging. Just plain, good ol’ fashion torture . . . and therefore a forbidden means for securing a confession. These men were hardly a group I’d call *activist* or *liberal* and certainly not bent on subverting our country in the name of coddling criminals.

In a case called Fisher v. State, 110 So. 361, 362 (Miss. 1926), Mississippi’s highest court ordered the retrial of a convicted murderer because his confession was secured by a local sheriff’s use of the water cure.

Here’s the court:

“The state offered . . . testimony of confessions made by the appellant, Fisher. . . [who], after the state had rested, introduced the sheriff, who testified that, he was sent for one night to come and receive a confession of the appellant in the jail; that he went there for that purpose; that when he reached the jail he found a number of parties in the jail; that they had the appellant down upon the floor, tied, and were administering the water cure, a specie of torture well known to the bench and bar of the country.”

Fisher relied on a case called White v. State, 182, 91 So. 903, 904 (Miss. 1922), in which the court took ­ as I understand history in those parts ­ the unusual step of reversing the murder conviction of a young African-American male, charged with killing a white man (it appears), because his confession was secured by *the cure*. The court said:

“. . . [T]he hands of appellant were tied behind him, he was laid upon the floor upon his back, and, while some of the men stood upon his feet, Gilbert, a very heavy man, stood with one foot entirely upon appellant’s breast, and the other foot entirely upon his neck. While in that position what is described as the “water cure” was administered to him in an effort to extort a confession as to where the money was hidden which was supposed to have been taken from the dead man. The “water cure” appears to have consisted of pouring water from a dipper into the nose of appellant, so as to strangle him, thus causing pain and horror, for the purpose of forcing a confession. Under these barbarous circumstances the appellant readily confessed . . . ”

If “the cure” was seen as a barbarous form of torture in Mississippi in the 1920’s, I guess I’m at a loss to understand exactly how our attitudes about the process have progressed to see it as an acceptable means of interrogation 80 years later.

I suppose, in light of this administration’s position on waterboarding, that both Fisher and White are teetering on irrelevance. Truly amazing.

What could be a better indicator of the extent to which we’ve descended into barbarism than that Congress and the Attorney General can seriously discuss whether waterboarding is illegal?

The full story in

http://uruknet.info/?p=m38333&hd=&size=1&l=e

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US HYPOCRISY : Accused Terrorist May Yet Face Justice

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

US HYPOCRISY : Accused Terrorist May Yet Face Justice

By Ali Gharib

Members of the Federation of Cuban Women rally in front of the U.S. Interests Section to protest the U.S. harboring of Posada-Carriles. Credit:Xanti Revueltas

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) – Since April, an accused terrorist mastermind has walked free in the streets of Miami, Florida while U.S. officials have refused to allow his extradition to Venezuela. That is, until the subject was finally broached this week on Capitol Hill.

Thursday’s hearing on suspected terrorist Luis Posada Carriles — an extremist anti-Casto Cuban exile — marks the first congressional foray into a drama where the Justice Department has severely bungled attempts to hold and prosecute a man described by the committee chairman as having “a reputation as a notorious terrorist” with “a well-documented history of violence.”

“What was significant about this hearing is that is signals the exercise of congressional oversight of the scandalous situation that the Bush administration has created with Luis Posada,” Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive’s Cuba programme, told IPS.

The hearing examined the story of a man with a 40-year record of violence across the Americas that sounds like it comes from the pages of a political spy thriller rather than photocopies of declassified Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency documents dug up by Kornbluh’s organisation, which works to declassify such evidence and provide it to the public.

The most notorious crime for which Posada is believed responsible was the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 people aboard, most of them Caribbean nationals.

Posada was also implicated in a series of terrorist bombings in Cuba in 1997 in which one person was killed and 11 wounded, as well as an alleged assassination plot against Cuban President Fidel Castro, for which he was ultimately pardoned by Panama’s U.S.-friendly President Mireya Moscoso, at the behest of Cuban-American members of Congress. Posada entered the U.S. illegally in 2004, and later applied for asylum here.

When his whereabouts became known, Posada was arrested by Homeland Security authorities and charged with immigration fraud. But these charges were dismissed in 2007 when the judge in the case cited misconduct in his naturalisation interview.

The slowly unfolding incident hints at a double standard in Washington’s stance toward terrorism, a battle that often requires the assistance of foreign governments.

Suspects with alleged ties to Islamic extremists are often detained indefinitely and subject to harsh treatment such as in the cases of “rendition” to countries known to practice torture. Simultaneously, a man with a like-minded foreign policy goal as the administration — namely regime change in Cuba — and accused of masterminding numerous attacks on civilian targets roams within U.S. borders unimpeded by authorities.

Though Posada has consistently denied charges of involvement in the first mid-air commercial bombing in the Western hemisphere, documents presented by Kornbluh, implicate Posada in the planning of act.

A cable from the FBI attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, said within a day of the bombing that a source had “all but admitted that Posada and Bosch had engineered the bombing of the airline.”

Orlando Bosch is another extremist Cuban exile and longtime collaborator and associate of Posada who has lived freely in Florida since a 1990 administrative pardon from President George H.W. Bush after Bosch’s detention as an “excludable alien.”

It was under Bosch’s leadership that the Coordination of the United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) was formed in a 1976 summit in the mountains of the Dominican Republic by several extremist anti-Castro groups when they sensed that the U.S. government’s efforts to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro were slowing down in the mid-1970′s.

According to documents released by the NSA, CORU has been labeled as “an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organisation.”

CORU launched what Kornbluh called “the summer of anti-Castro terrorist violence” in 1976. The six major operations culminated in the downing of Cubana flight 455 for which CORU took responsibility in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The story of Posada painted by the panels at the hearing was a broad picture of a man accused of — and in a few instances convicted of — everything from night-club and hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997, several plots to assassinate Castro, and involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair in the mid-1980s.

The attacks in 1997 targeting tourist destinations in Havana — acts reminiscent of Palestinian suicide bombers who attempted to slow Israeli nightlife during the second Intifada — are much easier to tie to Posada than the airplane bombing. Posada called a meeting with Bardach in 1998 to bring publicity to the incidents, which had been effectively swept under the rug by Cuba.

This could lead to an eventual indictment of Posada despite questionable destruction of some of the evidence by the FBI in 2003 in what was described as making space in the evidence room. It is here that Kornbluh’s third option comes into play.

“An indictment in this case would totally change the landscape of the Bush administration’s handling of the Posada case,” said Kornbluh, “and the landscape of U.S. policy towards Cuba.”

The hypocrisy of the U.S. government — with Bush having declared that any country harbouring terrorists is “just as guilty as the terrorist” — was not lost on any of the attendees at the hearing.

The full story in

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40103

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Islamophobia : Mapping or Mopping off Muslims

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Mapping or Mopping off Muslims

By: Dr. Aslam Abdullah

The police chief must not only withdraw this plan but apologize to the Muslim community for questioning their patriotism ..

Audio

11/14/2007 – Political – Article Ref: IV0711-3417

The Los Angeles Police Department seemingly has now taken up the task of cleaning bad Muslims off the streets of Los Angeles.

Their vague plan to map Muslim communities to identify potential hotbeds of terrorism is a severe infringement upon civil liberties.

The LAPD mapping plan makes a lot of assumptions about Muslims without any concrete evidence and promotes apprehensions about a people whose record as peaceful citizens of Los Angeles is transparent. With the lowest incidents of crimes in its ranks, the Muslim community is likely to become the number one suspect in the eyes of law enforcement agencies and through police actions in the eyes of the public once the plan comes into affect. Muslims will be religiously profiled. Those who already harbor ill feelings towards Islam and Muslims will use every possible opportunity to play with the sentiments of the people by spreading hatred and rumors and those among officials who want 15 minutes of fame on the media will exploit the situation to create panic and fear in the general public. Obviously, the LAPD plan makes lots of assumptions without spelling them out.

It assumes that Muslim communities harbor ill will towards the United States of America. It assumes that Muslims are anti-Americans. It assumes that Muslims are anti-national. It assumes that Islam promotes violence and extremism. It assumes that Muslims are a threat to the city and its residents. Seemingly, the plan, as it is, views the Muslim community as a hostile and enemy community. It views them with suspicion and considers them dangerous. The explanation as given by the LAPD police chief that the plan will help improve relations with the Muslim community is a total white wash. Obviously, as suggested by some experts on security issues, the plan must have been drawn by someone who has little to do with law enforcement procedures.

Most probably, as suggested by one expert, someone with deep hatred of Muslims and Islam must have authored it. There is no hard data that suggest that Muslim Americans or Muslims in Southern California were involved in any activity that can be termed as anti-national. Law enforcement agencies exist to protect citizens rather than harass or discriminate against them. If the LAPD had come up with a plan to map antisocial elements, criminals, drug addicts or gangsters, regardless of the communities they come from, it would have received the endorsement of Muslims and other communities.

The way Southern California communities have responded to the proposal clearly indicates that the LAPD has been over stepping its boundaries. We are not living in a police state. In democracies, measures like these fall in the preview of legislative bodies. As citizens, Muslim Americans have every right to question the validity of this measure from a national security perspective. This plan has the potential to damage the reputation of a dignified American community. It has the potential to sow the seeds of a greater conflict between the law enforcement agencies and Muslims. Moreover, it is a waste of precious national resources that could be used to providing much needed health care to our veterans, 20,000 of whom sleep on streets every day.

The police chief must not only withdraw this plan but apologize to the Muslim community for questioning their patriotism. Muslims and their organizations must prepare themselves for a long civil rights movement if this plan goes into effect. The Muslim leadership must come out with a citizen based campaign to protect the constitution, the national interest and the dignity of the community and do so fearlessly.

Dr. Aslam Abdullah is editor in chief of the Muslim Observer, director of the Islamic Society of Nevada and recently appointed director of programs at the Lahore based International Iqbal Institute of Research, Education and Dialogue. He can be reached at Aslamabdallah@aol.com

The full story in

http://www.iviews.com/Articles/articles.asp?ref=IV0711-3417

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Somalia: What the News Failed to Report

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Somalia: What the News Failed to Report

By RAMZY BAROUD – Nov 18, 2007

The people of Somalia are enduring yet another round of suffering as Ethiopian forces wreck havoc in the capital, Mogadishu. Apparently in response to an attack on one of its units, and the dragging of a soldier’s mutilated body through the city’s streets, an Ethiopian mortar reportedly exploded in Mogadishu’s Bakara market on November 9, killing eight civilians. A number of Somalis were also found dead the following day, some believed to have been rounded up by Ethiopian forces the night before.

To dismiss the war in Somalia as yet another protracted conflict between warlords and insurgents would indeed be unjust because the country’s history has consistently been marred by colonial greed and unwarranted foreign interventions. These gave rise to various proxy governments, militias and local middlemen, working in the interests of those obsessed with the geopolitical importance of the Horn of Africa.

Colonial powers came to appreciate the strategic location of Somalia after the Berlin Conference, which initiated the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The arrival of Britain, France and Italy into Somali lands began in the late 19th century and quickly the area disintegrated into British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland. Both countries sought expand their control, enlisting locals to fight the very wars aimed at their own subjugation.

World War II brought immense devastation to the Somali people, who, out of desperation, coercion or promises of post-war independence, fought on behalf of the warring European powers. Somalia was mandated by the UN as an Italian protectorate in 1949 and achieved independence a decade later in 1960. However, the colonial powers never fully conceded their interests in the country and the Cold War actually invited new players to the scene, including the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba.

One residue of the colonial legacy involved the Ogaden province of Somalia, which the British empire had granted to the Ethiopian government. The region became the stage of two major wars between Ethiopia and Somalia between 1964 and 1977. Many Somalis still regard Ethiopia as an occupying power and view the policies of Addis Ababa as a continuation of the country’s history of foreign intervention.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 provided an impetus for US involvement in the strategic region; only one month after the attacks, Paul Wolfowitz met with various power players in Ethiopia and Somalia, alleging that al-Qaeda terrorists might be using Ras Kamboni and other Somali territories as escape routes. A year later, the US established the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) to ‘monitor’ developments and to train local militaries in ‘counterterrorism’.

The US contingent was hardly neutral in the ongoing conflict. Reportedly, US troops were involved in aiding Ethiopian forces that entered Somalia in December 2006, citing efforts to track down al-Qaeda suspects. The Ethiopian occupation was justified as a response to a call by Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG), whose legitimacy is questioned. TGF, seen largely as a pro-Ethiopian entity, had been rapidly losing its control over parts of Somalia to the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) which came to prominence in January 2006, taking over the capital and eventually bringing long-sought stability to much of the country. Their attempts engage the US and other Western powers in dialogue failed, however, as a US-backed Ethiopia moved into Somalia in December 2006. On January 7, 2007, the US directly entered the conflict, launching airstrikes using AC-130 gunship. Civilian causalities were reported, but the US refused to accept responsibility for them.

The full story –
www.montrealmuslimnews.net

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