‘US plot against Hamas’ revealed

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In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

‘US plot against Hamas’ revealed

Fatah fighters battled Hamas in the street as Gaza’s unity government fell apart [Reuters]

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One document, dated March 2007, states “the plan will enable the Palestinian leadership to be more credible in the eyes of Israel and the others”.

But, when that plan failed, the US set up an operation to fund Fatah fighters and drive Hamas out.

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In Cairo, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, justified the arming of Fatah, saying the situation had called for it.

She said she had not read a report in Vanity Fair magazine which quoted a former US intelligence official said to be knowledgeable of the US plans to overthrow Hamas after it failed to convince Abbas to dissolve the cabinet.

US support

 

“It is very clear that Hamas is being armed. And it is very clear that they are being armed in part by the Iranians,” Rice said on Tuesday.

In depth

Timeline West Bank-Gaza split In video US pledges arms to Fatah

“So if the answer is that if Hamas gets armed by the Iranians and nobody helps to improve the security capabilities of the legitimate Palestinian Authority security forces, that’s not a very good situation.”

Rice said that international forces, including the US, would therefore continue to work with the PA to bolster its forces to keep security in its mandated region.

Responding to Rice’s comments about Iranian support for Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, the exiled Hamas political leader, told Al Jazeera Rice was “lying”.

 

“Their main concern is to provoke Iran,” Meshaal said. “I’m saying it again if they have proof of this let them produce it”.

 

“Everyone knows the origins of the Israeli weapons, it’s American made while our men are using very simple homemade arms,” he said.

The US has openly supported Fatah and after Hamas seized control of Gaza in June 2007, the US announced an $80m funding deal for Fatah’s security services in the West Bank.

Nour Odeh, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Ramallah, said that many Palestinians would be upset that Fatah appeared to have played into the hands of an American foreign policy that wanted to make an example out of Hamas, whom the US labels a “terrorist” organisation.

Emerging evidence

 

Hamas won democratic elections in January 2006, prompting Western governments, which have refused to engage with Hamas, to threaten to withdraw financial aid to the Palestinians.

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Left with little international support, by June that year Hamas and Fatah had agreed to form a unity government but were unable to broker a conclusive end to factional fighting on the streets of Gaza.

Allegations the US sought to remove Hamas in a coup dates back to 2006, after the group had come to power through Palestinian elections.

 

The leaked documents include a memo sent to Fatah officials, apparently by a senior US diplomat in Jerusalem in November 2006, encouraging Fatah to declare a state of emergency and take control.

 

The memo stated: “If Hamas does not agree [to accept a new government] within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

 

The plan was ignored by Abbas who instead formed a unity government with Hamas in 2007, intended to bring an end to fighting between the two factions.

The unity government, agreed in February 2007 with the mediation of Saudi Arabia, appears to have prompted the second document and a plan to oust Hamas by force, with the US bolstering Mohammed Dahlan, the head of Fatah’s security forces.

But the unity government failed to end factional fighting and in June Hamas seized Gaza, dividing the Palestinian territories into Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank.

 

Plot denied

 

The US on Tuesday denied the coup plot allegations.

 

“There is no accuracy to that story. I’ve checked and there is no truth to it,” Sean McCormack, the US state department spokesman, said.

 

A statement from the office of Mohammad Dahlan, the former head of the Palestinian national security council, called the Vantiy Fair article “highly inaccurate and misleading”.

 

“Accordingly there was (and remains) no secret plan to carry out a coup against Hamas,” said the statement.

 

“Although the US offered its financial support for the plan to reform the PA’s [Palestinian Authority's] security forces (by offering assistance for non-lethal equipment as requested by the PA), financial support was never received.”

No official US stamps or seals appear on the document.

source: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/935DF029-9ECA-4133-BCD3-7DC26FB80E4A.htm

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Sunni Insurgents Exploit U.S.-Sponsored Militias

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In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Sunni Insurgents Exploit U.S.-Sponsored Militias

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Mar 3 (IPS) – For months, U.S. President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus have been touting the programme of recruiting tens of thousands of Sunnis into U.S.-financed “Awakening Councils” as a master stroke of Iraq strategy which has weakened al Qaeda in Iraq and helps reduce sectarian conflict through “bottom up reconciliation”.

But the mainstream Sunni insurgents who have been fighting al Qaeda appear to have outmaneuvered U.S. strategists by using Awakening Councils to pursue their interests in weakening their most immediate enemy, reducing pressures from the U.S. military and establishing new political bases, while continuing to mount attacks on U.S. and Iraqi government forces.

The biggest question surrounding the strategy from the beginning was whether it the Awakening Councils — called “Sahwa” in Arabic — would be a haven for Sunni insurgents.

High-ranking U.S. officers issued public assurances last year that former insurgents would not be allowed to enter the programme, but last month, Iraqi government officials, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, began raising the spectre of “infiltration” of the Awakening groups by al Qaeda or “Baathists”. Those are terms which have often been used by Shiite leaders to refer to the mainstream Sunni insurgents.

The U.S. command responded by denying that they have been infiltrated systematically by either al Qaeda or other “extremists”. At a Feb. 17 press briefing, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith admitted that individual extremists may have infiltrated some units, but rejected the idea that any “complete unit” of the Awakening had gone “bad”.

Nevertheless, by the end of 2007 it had become clear the Sahwa were dominated in many places by the Sunni insurgent groups, and U.S. specialists were openly acknowledging it. The 1920 Revolution Brigades, a major Sunni armed resistance organisation, is the primary element in the Sahwa in Diyala Province as well as in parts of Anbar Province. One commander of the Brigades, Abu Marouf, brought 13,000 of his fighters into the Sahwa in Anbar. His background as an insurgent commander is well-known locally but has never been acknowledged by U.S. officials.

Meanwhile, the 1920 Revolution Brigades also continues to wage war against U.S. forces. In March 2007, it announced the creation of two separate military “corps”, one of which, the “Iraqi Hamas”, was clearly intended to continue military operations against the U.S. military in Diyala and other Sunni provinces.

The 1920 Revolution Brigades did not join a new “political council of the Iraqi resistance” formed in October to unify the Sunni armed organisations fighting the U.S. occupation — at least in its own name. But the Iraqi Hamas “wing” of the organisation, which continues to be affiliated with the parent organisation, did join the new council.

The de facto security force in Amiriya district of Baghdad is under the command of Abu Abed, a former Iraqi army captain who led a unit of another major resistance organisation, the Islamic Army of Iraq (IAI). He claims that the local Sahwa is drawn from both IAI and the 1920 Revolution Brigades. The IAI has distanced itself from Abu Abed, at least publicly, but that move should be understood in light of the great reluctance of Sunni armed organisations to admit that they are cooperating overtly with institutions associated with the United States.

A recent incident in which U.S. troops killed or detained members of the Sahwa during operations against insurgents suggested that the line separating the Sunni insurgents targeted by the U.S. military and the Sunnis working with the U.S. military was nonexistent.

On Feb. 13, U.S. forces carried out an attack on an insurgent target west of Kirkuk, killing six insurgents and detaining 15. But members of the local Awakening Council complained that the six people killed and some of those detained were members of the Sahwa.

One of those detained was the head of the local 700-hundred-member Sahwa and leader of the Baghzawi tribe.

Col. Martin Stanton, who is in charge of reconciliation and engagement for the Multinational Corps-Iraq, acknowledged to the New York Times last December that the Awakening Council members came from the Sunni insurgency.

He described the Sunnis who joined the U.S. paramilitary groups as having been “hammered” by both al Qaeda and the United States. Stanton suggested that joining the Awakening groups was “probably a distasteful choice” for them, “because, after all, they viewed us as invaders, and they probably still do, but it was a survival choice and they made it.”

Stanton had told investigative journalist Spencer Ackerman in November that the participants in the Awakening groups hadn’t made “a fundamental break” with the insurgency.

Participation in the Sahwa appears to serve the interests of mainstream Sunni insurgent organisations at multiple levels. It has isolated al Qaeda’s “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) and associated jihadist groups, which in turn causes some guerrillas factions to come back to the mainstream insurgency.

It also may have reduced U.S. military pressures on the Sunni nationalist insurgents. As the lines between pro-ISI and anti-ISI Sunni insurgents have hardened during 2007, U.S. military operations have apparently focused more on ISI and the insurgents aligned with it and less on the mainstream insurgents fighting against al Qaeda.

The U.S. command in Iraq provides no data indicating how many of its operations are directed at each of its adversaries. But Dan Gouré, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a conservative Virginia think tank, told IPS he estimates that the U.S. military command in Iraq has been targeting ISI in 60 percent of its operations and other Sunni insurgents in 30 percent of them. The other 10 percent, he says, are focused on the Shiite Mahdi Army.

Insurgents are still mounting about 700 improvised explosive device (IED) attacks every month, according to the latest statistics issued by the U.S. command. Although they are not broken down by source, the vast majority are certainly carried out by the same Sunni insurgent organisations that fight al Qaeda and have contributed tens of thousands of men to the Sahwa.

Participating in the Sahwa also gives insurgent groups a new semi-legal political base. When the rape and murder of two Sunni women, allegedly by Shiite militiamen, provoked Sunni protests in Baquba against the government earlier this month, hundreds of 1920 Revolution Brigades fighters belonging to the Sahwa demonstrated to demand the dismissal of the provincial police chief. The organisation’s spokesman in Baquba said they would “take up arms” against the police and U.S. troops if their demands were not met, as reported by IPS Feb. 13.

One U.S. colonel with long experience in Iraq told Lt. Col. Douglas McGregor (Army ret.), a senior fellow at the Straus Military Reform Project, that the Sunni insurgents’ participation in the Sahwa may be a transitory stage in a “fight, bargain, subvert, fight approach” to achieving their long-term aims, as McGregor testified before a subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Feb. 8.

Those aims include the complete withdrawal of U.S. occupation forces and reducing the power of a Shiite-dominated government they believe represents Iranian interests in Iraq.

The Sunni insurgent strategy of flooding the U.S.-sponsored paramilitary forces with their own fighters appears to make the Sunni insurgency stronger than ever. Far from being a device for “bottom up reconciliation”, the Awakening Councils have added powder to the powder keg of Sunni-Shiite tensions.

*Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

(END/2008)

source: http://www.ipsnews.org/news.asp?idnews=41436

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Pro Torture Zionist Professor Demonizing Islam and Arabic Culture?

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

=== News Update ===

Pro Torture Zionist Professor Demonizing Islam and Arabic Culture?

Worshippers of Death

By Alan M Dershowitz

03/03/08 “Wall Street Journal” – — Zahra Maladan is an educated woman who edits a women’s magazine in Lebanon. She is also a mother, who undoubtedly loves her son. She has ambitions for him, but they are different from those of most mothers in the West. She wants her son to become a suicide bomber.

At the recent funeral for the assassinated Hezbollah terrorist Imad Moughnaya — the mass murderer responsible for killing 241 marines in 1983 and more than 100 women, children and men in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994 — Ms. Maladan was quoted in the New York Times giving the following warning to her son: “if you’re not going to follow the steps of the Islamic resistance martyrs, then I don’t want you.”

Zahra Maladan represents a dramatic shift in the way we must fight to protect our citizens against enemies who are sworn to kill them by killing themselves. The traditional paradigm was that mothers who love their children want them to live in peace, marry and produce grandchildren. Women in general, and mothers in particular, were seen as a counterweight to male belligerence. The picture of the mother weeping as her son is led off to battle — even a just battle — has been a constant and powerful image.

Now there is a new image of mothers urging their children to die, and then celebrating the martyrdom of their suicidal sons and daughters by distributing sweets and singing wedding songs. More and more young women — some married with infant children – are strapping bombs to their (sometimes pregnant) bellies, because they have been taught to love death rather than life. Look at what is being preached by some influential Islamic leaders:

“We are going to win, because they love life and we love death,” said Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. He has also said: “[E]ach of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.” Shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden told a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”

“The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,” explained Afghani al Qaeda operative Maulana Inyadullah. Sheik Feiz Mohammed, leader of the Global Islamic Youth Center in Sydney, Australia, preached: “We want to have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam. Teach them this: There is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid.” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech: “It is the zenith of honor for a man, a young person, boy or girl, to be prepared to sacrifice his life in order to serve the interests of his nation and his religion.”

How should Western democracies fight against an enemy whose leaders preach a preference for death?

The two basic premises of conventional warfare have long been that soldiers and civilians prefer living to dying and can thus be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed; and that combatants (soldiers) can easily be distinguished from noncombatants (women, children, the elderly, the infirm and other ordinary citizens). These premises are being challenged by women like Zahra Maladan. Neither she nor her son — if he listens to his mother — can be deterred from killing by the fear of being killed. They must be prevented from succeeding in their ghoulish quest for martyrdom. Prevention, however, carries a high risk of error. The woman walking toward the group of soldiers or civilians might well be an innocent civilian. A moment’s hesitation may cost innocent lives. But a failure to hesitate may also have a price.

Late last month, a young female bomber was shot as she approached some shops in central Baghdad. The Iraqi soldier who drew his gun hesitated as the bomber, hands raised, insisted that she wasn’t armed. The soldier and a shop owner finally opened fire as she dashed for the stores; she was knocked to the ground but still managed to detonate the bomb, killing three and wounding eight. Had the soldier and other bystanders not called out a warning to others — and had they not shot her before she could enter the shops — the death toll certainly would have been higher. Had he not hesitated, it might have been lower.

As more women and children are recruited by their mothers and their religious leaders to become suicide bombers, more women and children will be shot at — some mistakenly. That too is part of the grand plan of our enemies. They want us to kill their civilians, who they also consider martyrs, because when we accidentally kill a civilian, they win in the court of public opinion. One Western diplomat called this the “harsh arithmetic of pain,” whereby civilian casualties on both sides “play in their favor.” Democracies lose, both politically and emotionally, when they kill civilians, even inadvertently. As Golda Meir once put it: “We can perhaps someday forgive you for killing our children, but we cannot forgive you for making us kill your children.”

Civilian casualties also increase when terrorists operate from within civilian enclaves and hide behind human shields. This relatively new phenomenon undercuts the second basic premise of conventional warfare: Combatants can easily be distinguished from noncombatants. Has Zahra Maladan become a combatant by urging her son to blow himself up? Have the religious leaders who preach a culture of death lost their status as noncombatants? What about “civilians” who willingly allow themselves to be used as human shields? Or their homes as launching pads for terrorist rockets?

The traditional sharp distinction between soldiers in uniform and civilians in nonmilitary garb has given way to a continuum. At the more civilian end are babies and true noncombatants; at the more military end are the religious leaders who incite mass murder; in the middle are ordinary citizens who facilitate, finance or encourage terrorism. There are no hard and fast lines of demarcation, and mistakes are inevitable — as the terrorists well understand.

We need new rules, strategies and tactics to deal effectively and fairly with these dangerous new realities. We cannot simply wait until the son of Zahra Maladan — and the sons and daughters of hundreds of others like her — decide to follow his mother’s demand. We must stop them before they export their sick and dangerous culture of death to our shores.

Mr. Dershowitz teaches law at Harvard University and is the author of “Finding Jefferson” (Wiley, 2007).

source: http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB120450617910806563.html

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CAIR: Muslim Ejected from Louisiana Mall Over Hijab

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

=== News Update ===

CAIR: Muslim Ejected from Louisiana Mall Over Hijab Posted 3/3/2008 2:51:00 PM
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 2/29/08) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on local, state and national law enforcement authorities to investigate a recent incident in which a Muslim woman was allegedly ejected from a Louisiana shopping mall for refusing a security guard’s demand to remove her religiously-mandated headscarf, or hijab. CAIR said the 54-year-old woman and her daughter-in-law were leaving the food court of the Oakwood Mall in the New Orleans suburb of Gretna, La., on February 22 when a security guard approached them and allegedly told the older woman that she had two options: remove her headscarf or leave the mall. (The woman’s daughter-in-law was not wearing a headscarf.) The guard did not offer an explanation for his demand. During the long walk out of the mall, the guard reportedly followed the women and even called for back-up. The daughter-in-law told CAIR that the two women felt “humiliated” by the stares of other shoppers as the guard followed them out of the mall. When two more guards came to the scene, they did not offer assistance to the women, but they did confirm the reason for the first guard’s ejection order. The family, all of whom are American citizens of Palestinian heritage, has retained an attorney and is exploring their legal options. “It is unbelievable that an American of any faith would be denied access to a public area merely because she wished to carry out the requirements of her faith,” said CAIR National Legal Counsel Nadhira Al-Khalili. “We call on local law enforcement authorities and the FBI to determine whether any civil rights or criminal laws were violated during this disturbing incident.” CAIR, America’s largest Islamic civil liberties group, has 35 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. - END - CONTACT: CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-488-8787 or 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com; CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin, 202-488-8787, E-Mail: arubin@cair.com; CAIR Strategic Communications Director Ahmed Rehab, 202-870-0166, E-Mail: arehab@cair.com http://www.cair.com/ArticleDetails.aspx?ArticleID=24324&&name=n&&currPage=1&&Active=1 === -muslim voice- ______________________________________ BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

U.N. chief condemns Israel after bloody day in Gaza

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

=== News Update ===

Sun Mar 2, 2008

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned Israel for using “excessive” force in the Gaza Strip and demanded a halt to its offensive after troops killed 61 people on the bloodiest day for Palestinians since the 1980s.

Addressing an emergency session of the Security Council in New York after four days of fighting in which 96 Palestinians have been killed, many of them civilians, Ban also called on Gaza’s Islamist militants to stop firing rockets.

The 1.5 million Palestinians crammed into the blockaded, 45 km (30-mile) sliver of coast, enjoyed a relative respite early on Sunday from Israeli air strikes and raids. Two Israeli soldiers died in a ground assault on Saturday. An Israeli civilian was killed by a rocket in a border town on Wednesday.

“While recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself, I condemn the disproportionate and excessive use of force that has killed and injured so many civilians, including children … I call on Israel to cease such attacks,” said Ban.

“I condemn Palestinian rocket attacks and call for the immediate cessation of such acts of terrorism,” he said.

But with public anger boiling in Israel, there was no sign the government was ready to call off an offensive that took troops deeper into Gaza on Saturday and in larger numbers than at any time since Israel ended a 38-year occupation in 2005.

The Islamist Hamas movement, which seized control of Gaza last June by routing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s forces, vowed to maintain what it says is a self-defense strategy unless Israel agrees to end all military action.

Areas from which Hamas has launched rockets that have killed three Israelis in the past year saw heavy clashes on the ground on Saturday and air strikes continued to pound buildings and homes that Israel said were used by militants. In some of these attacks, children as young as six months have been killed.

Israel says militants use the population as cover by firing from built-up areas and blamed Hamas for the civilian deaths — at least 30 occurred on Saturday.

Senior Israeli diplomat Daniel Carmon dismissed suggestions Israel was guilty of war crimes. “Hamas bears sole responsibility for the violence,” he told the Security Council.

Palestinian officials said the day’s bloodshed was the worst since an “intifada” or uprising against Israeli occupation broke out in 2000, halting an earlier peace process. Not since a first intifada in the 1980s had so many died in a day, they said.

U.N. RESOLUTION

Diplomats said the Security Council was unlikely to adopt a Libyan resolution that condemns Israel’s killing of civilians but makes no mention of the Palestinian rocket fire.

The United States, Israel’s closest ally and a veto-wielding member of the Council, made clear its understanding of the Israeli position, while regretting loss of life on both sides.

“There is a clear distinction between terrorist rocket attacks that target civilians and action in self-defense,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

European diplomats said they believed the world body should at least make some comment on bloodshed which some say jeopardizes the new U.S.-backed peace talks between Israel and Abbas, who holds sway now only in the occupied West Bank.

Abbas’s chief peace negotiator Ahmed Qurie called off a meeting scheduled for Monday with his Israeli counterpart, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israeli officials said.

But Abbas, who echoed widespread Palestinian outrage at Israel’s tactics by calling it “more than holocaust”, had taken no decision to abandon the peace process, aides said.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to meet Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week to try to accelerate faltering negotiations which President George W. Bush hopes can forge a peace deal before he leaves office in January.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said: “If Israeli aggression continues, it will bury the peace process.”

At least 30 gunmen were killed on Saturday, medical staff and Hamas said. Among targets was the empty office of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, formerly Abbas’s prime minister.

The rocket fire has put Olmert under pressure to act. But the government, chastened by a costly war against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon in 2006, is wary of an outright invasion.

While Abbas would shed few tears if Israel destroyed Hamas, he risks losing already patchy support in the West Bank if he is not seen to be speaking out against the Israeli military action.

He declared Sunday a day of national mourning.

(Additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch, Adam Entous, Avida Landau and Alastair Macdonald in Jerusalem and Ali Sawafta and Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah)

(Writing by Alastair Macdonald, editing by Ralph Gowling)

source: http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2868601720080302?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

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Israel keeping true to its racist words

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

=== News Update ===

Israel keeping true to its racist words

Rami Almeghari, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2008

Palestinians carry the body of Salsabeel Abu Jalhoumm, a 21-month-old girl who was killed early on Sunday when an Israeli air strike hit near her home in the northern Gaza Strip, 2 March 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Following Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s Friday warning that the Gaza Strip faces “a holocaust” if homemade rocket fire continues, Vilnai’s aides rushed to downplay the remarks, claiming the minister did not mean a holocaust exactly.

However, the following day, the Israeli army, through ground forces and helicopters in the sky, killed 61 Palestinians in Gaza, at least ten of them children. Since Wednesday, 26 March, Israeli occupation forces have killed at least 77 Palestinians in Gaza and injured approximately 130, including children who won’t live to see their first birthday.

Vilnai’s racist declarations against the Palestinian people are certainly not the first from a high-ranking official in the allegedly democratic state of Israel.

Last Thursday, 28 February, Israeli cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit said that the solution to the rocket fire would be for Israel to “hit everything that moves with weapons and ammunition.” Earlier in the month, during a cabinet session Sheetrit stated that “exactly what I think the [Israeli army] should do [is] decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

Genocidal statements calling for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians are not reserved for those in Gaza, however. The extreme rightist Yisrael Beitenu party leader and former Deputy Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who was born in Moldova and immigrated to Israel at the age of 20, advocates for the “transfer” or ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinian citizens in Israel and has declared that Palestinian members of the Israeli Knesset who meet with Palestinian leaders from the West Bank and Gaza should be executed as traitors.

Before Lieberman was Rehavam Ze’evi, the assassinated Israeli tourism minister and founder of the fascist Moledet party which makes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians part of its party platform. Regarding the 180,000 Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and Gaza working for substandard wages in Israel before the state imposed a total closure, Ze’evi described them in a 2001 radio interview as “a cancer” and advocated that “[Israel] should get rid of the ones who are not Israeli citizens the same way you get rid of lice.”

Dehumanizing the Palestinians has been necessary for Israel to justify its actions ever since, and even before, the state was declared on destroyed historic Palestine in 1948 and then in 1967 when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Taken together, they indicate the historic effort to destroy Palestinian national aspirations and this is what Israel is trying to do in Gaza, which Nobel prize winner and late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin once wished would be swallowed by the sea.

Gaza is no stranger to devastation. In 1956, for example, former Israeli prime minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon moved troops under his command into the town of Khan Younis where a massacre was committed. Since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Israel has been particularly cruel to Gaza, committing crime after crime without sanction from the so-called international communiy. The firing of homemade rockets — no match to Israel’s US-supplied and funded military arsenal — came only after decades of violent Israeli oppression against Palestinians trying to shake off the military occupation.

Fourteen Israelis have been killed by the crude rockets since Palestinian resistance began firing them in 2001, while approximately 300 Palestinians were killed just in the few months since the renewed peace process was declared in Annapolis in November of last year. Nearly 5,000 Palestinian men, women and children have been killed since 2000, all “terrorists” in the eyes of Israeli intelligence chief Yuval Diskin.

Though he may have passed on, the words of deceased Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat ring ever true thirty years since he uttered them: “Those who call us terrorists wish to prevent world public opinion from discovering the truth about us and from seeing the justice on our faces. They seek to hide the terrorism and tyranny of their acts, and our own posture of self-defense.”

Rami Almeghari is currently contributor to several media outlets including Palestine Chronicle, IMEMC, The Electronic Intifada and Free Speech Radio News. Rami is also a former senior English translator at and editor in chief of the international press center of the Gaza-based Palestinian Information Service. He can be contacted at rami_almeghari at hotmail.com.

source:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9361.shtml

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Penulis Buku Best Seller Tentang Holocaust, Mengaku Telah Berbohong

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

=== News Update ===

Penulis Buku Best Seller Tentang Holocaust, Mengaku Telah Berbohong

Kebohongan meski ditutup-tutupi sedemikian rupa, suatu saat pasti akan terungkap juga. Buku Misha:A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, karya penulis Belgia bernama Misha Defonseca yang menjadi buku best-seller, ternyata buku yang tak lebih berisi kebohongan dan dan tak lebih dari buku fiktif belaka.

Baca Selengkapnya di: http://www.eramuslim.com/berita/int/8303130253-penulis-buku-best-seller-tentang-holocaust-mengaku-telah-berbohong.htm

PERNYATAAN: Email ini dikirim dari fasilitas ‘Rekomendasikan ke Rekan’ yang ada di situs Eramuslim (www.eramuslim.com). Fasilitas ini kami sediakan mempermudah pengunjung berbagi informasi.

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The Gaza Genocide

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

=== News Update ===

by Laila El-Haddad in Gaza

Sunday, March 02, 2008

We celebrated Yousuf’s fourth birthday today. We ate cake. And we counted the bodies. We sang happy birthday. And my mother sobbed. We watched the fighter jets roar voraciously on our television screen, pounding street after street; then heard a train screech outside, and shuddered. Yousuf tore open his presents, and asked my mother to make a paper zanana, a drone, for him with origami; And we were torn open from the inside, engulfed by a feeling of impotence and helplessness; fear and anger and grief; despondence and confusion.

“We are dying like chickens” said Yassine last night as we contemplated the media’s coverage of the events of the past few days.

Even the Guardian, in a wire-based piece, mentioned the Palestinian dead, including the children, in the forth to last paragraph.

In fact, a study by If Americans Knew found that the Associated Press Newswire coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict significantly distorts reality, essentially over-reporting the number of Israelis killed in the conflict and underreporting the number of Palestinians killed. The study found that AP reported on Israeli children’s deaths more often than the deaths occurred, but failed to cover 85 percent of Palestinian children killed. A few years ago, they found that the NY Times was seven times more likely to comment on an Israeli child’s death than a Palestinian one’s.

Is it only when Israeli deputy minister Matan Vilnai used “shoa” to describe what will come to Gaza that some media outlets took note. Here was an Israeli government official himself invoking the Holocaust, of his people’s most horrific massacre, in reference to the fate of Gaza. But it was not necessarily because Gazans may suffer the same fate that they were perturbed, but rather that this event, this phrase-genocide or Holocaust- could be used with such seeming levity; that using such a loaded term may somehow lessen the true horror of the original act.

It is as though what has been happening in Gaza-what continues to happen, whether by way of the deliberate and sustained siege and blockade, or the mounting civlian death toll, is acceptable, and even encouraged Illan Pappe has said that Genocide “is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip” after much thought and deliberation.

But the real genocide in Gaza cannot or will not be assessed through sheer numbers. It is not a massacre of gas chambers. No.

It is a slow and calculated genocide-a Genocide through more calibrated, long-term means. And if the term is used in any context, it should be this. In many ways, this is a more sinister genocide, because it tends to be overlooked: All is ok in Gaza, the wasteland, the hostile territory that is accustomed to slaughter and survival; Gaza, who’s people are somehow less human; we should not take note; need not take note; unless there is a mass killing; or starvation.

As though what is happening now was not a slow, purposeful killing; a mass strangulation; But the governments and presidents of the civilized world, even our own “president” (president of what?) are hungry for peace deals and accords; summits and states; so they say, “let them eat cake!” And we do.

source: http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com/2008/03/gaza-genocide.html#links

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-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW