Liberty, democracy, brutality

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

=== News Update ===

Liberty, democracy, brutality

Many EU politicians treat Israel as a state that holds the highest European ideals dear. But this is hogwash

By David Cronin

29/01/08 “The Guardian” — -Diplomatic pressure from the European Union has been credited as being partly responsible for how Israel allowed some deliveries of food, medicine and fuel to Gaza over the past few days. But you would never guess that senior EU officials had been flexing their metaphorical muscles if you saw one particular document distributed to the Brussels press corps.

This was a transcript of a speech given by the European commission’s vice-president, Franco Frattini, during a visit to Israel.

In a week when the UN berated Israel for violating international law by blockading Gaza, it seems extraordinary that Frattini should indulge in some flagrant fawning towards his hosts.

According to his prepared script for a conference entitled Israel at 60: test of endurance, Frattini did not allude once to the blockade imposed on Gaza, even though the UN considers it to be an illegal act of “collective punishment”.

Instead, he insinuated that opponents of Israel in Europe were guilty of antisemitism. “This prejudice, this stance against Israel and Jews, has no place in today’s Europe,” he said.

Read those words again: “This stance against Israel and Jews”.

How can opposition to a country’s government be equated with hostility towards adherents of a religion?

When Frattini was serving as Italy’s foreign minister, there was no shortage of people appalled at the buffoonery of his boss, Silvio Berlusconi. Nobody, though, could seriously have suggested that taking issue with Italy’s then premier was synonymous with an antipathy towards Catholics.

Of course, genuine bias against Jews – or people of any other faith – is deplorable. But European policymakers are not helping to promote tolerance when they accept facile reasoning from the Israeli government.

Depressingly, we have been down this road before.

In 2003, an EU-financed opinion poll found that Europeans regarded Israel as the number one threat to world peace. Rather than examining why that was the case, a number of European politicians made it plain they were embarrassed by the findings.

Also during his visit, Frattini told the Jerusalem Post that Europe “cannot leave Israel alone” in its efforts to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

He omitted to mention that if Iran was hoping to join the nuclear club, it would be emulating Israel, which finally confessed in December 2006 to having weapons of mass destruction.

Never shying away from some self-congratulation, Frattini took credit for how Hamas was placed on the EU’s list of proscribed organisations when he chaired the union’s council of foreign ministers in 2003. He claimed, too, that Hamas had provoked “Israel’s armed response” in the Palestinian territories and that “Israel lives and exists according to the same traditions and values as European citizens”.

Whatever one thinks of Hamas, this is clearly hogwash. Anybody who looks seriously at the Middle East conflict would conclude that Palestinian violence is a reaction to the relentless brutality and provocation of Israeli forces. That doesn’t excuse for a second the horrific consequences of suicide bombing. But it does help explain them.

As for the argument about “European values”, I assume these refer to the principles on which the EU is nominally based: “liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and the rule of law”.

But the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has calculated that of the 810 Palestinians killed by the occupying forces in Gaza in 2006 and 2007, just 360 belonged to an armed organisation.

By what logic – other than a very twisted one – can Israel’s state-approved slaughter of civilians be considered as proof that it upholds values we are supposed to cherish?

source: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cronin/2008/01/liberty_democracy_brutality.html

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Dark Truths About the Israeli Occupation

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

=== News Update ===

Dark Truths About the Israeli Occupation

By: Daniel Levy, Washington Monthly. Posted January 29, 2008. on: 29.01.2008 [12:10 ]

Can Israelis ever recover from the self-inflicted damage of becoming a brutal occupier?Unfortunatelly who will never recover is this poor child.VC

Edith Zertal and Akiva Eldar end their exhaustive study of Israeli settlement policy with a poignant question: Is it possible, they wonder, that Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will become a “first step in Israel’s journey of liberating itself from the enslavement to the territories that it occupied in 1967, and which have occupied it since then and have brought it to the verge of destruction”? Negotiations that have been set in motion by the Annapolis peace conference in November will likely provide a partial answer. Zertal, a leading Israeli historian, and Eldar, a chief political columnist and a former Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, have recently published Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. It is a detailed history of Israel’s nearly forty-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with a painful contention at its core. The occupation, say Zertal and Eldar, has wounded Israel’s very psyche, damaging both its sense of self and its moral standing in the world. “The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments,” write the authors, “and have brought Israel’s democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss.”

The Hebrew version of this book was a best-seller in Israel, and sparked a debate there on the devastating realities and consequences of Israeli settlement policy. It would be useful to replicate that debate here in the United States — in the belly, as it were, of the enabler. The book’s unflinchingly provocative title is matched by a narrative that pulls no punches, and the cast of villains (there are precious few heroes) runs the gamut from Jewish militia terrorists and their supporters in the Rabbinate to Labor Party apologists for the settlers and feckless judges who looked the other way as settlers created illegal outposts within Palestinian territory.

There are two sides to the settlement coin. The first is the settlers themselves, who are for the most part religiously inspired, unswervingly motivated, and highly effective. Religious Zionism was very much in the backseat of the Zionist enterprise until 1967, but once Israel assumed control of Judea and Samaria (as the settlers refer to the West Bank), the national religious camp saw its moment to seize the ideological steering wheel of state.

Their method was to create facts on the ground — that is, to quickly build settlements — and then get the political system on board by a number of means. The first step was persuasion (“We are all Jews surrounded by a sea of enemies”), followed by integration (the settlers’ tentacles reached into all branches of government), and then coercion (the use of intimidation, threats, and violence). Any dubious action could be “koshered” by a shared appeal to Jewish history and Zionist destiny. If all else failed, there was the threat of Arab terror, which the settlers had a key role in encouraging. For believers, there was a religious justification and meaning — a theology of settlement, if you like. The final ingredient was an approach to the Palestinians that was at best colonial and at worst murderous. The new Lords of the West Bank arrogantly dismissed the region’s indigenous population, and when the Palestinians showed opposition, settler militias and terrorist groups were formed (yes, Jewish terrorist groups). In 2001, an Israeli group named the Committee for the Defense of the Roads claimed responsibility for the drive-by killing of a six-month-old Palestinian baby and her family. Similar groups carried out additional attacks, and between 1980 and 1984, before the First Intifada began, twenty-three Palestinian civilians were killed in violent attacks by settlers, mostly involving firearms (often army issue). American readers might be shocked to discover that a religiously sanctified cult of martyrdom and “redemptive death” among elements of the Israeli settler community even exists at all, and then horrified at the extent of its destructiveness.

The other side of the settlement coin is the State of Israel, and the keyword here is complicity. Nothing would have been possible — or permanent — without the cooperation of Israel’s army, legal system, and government bureaucracy, and the political leadership of all mainstream parties. The heroes who have fleetingly appeared — former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chiefs of Staff Haim Bar-Lev and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, Head of Intelligence Shlomo Gazit, human rights attorney Talia Sasson, and principled opposition politicians Yossi Sarid, Dedi Zucker, and Avrum Burg — have been no match for the huge cast of villains, facilitators, and mute bystanders. The banality and bureaucracy of the settlement enterprise carried — and continues to carry — the day.

There are approximately 460,000 settlers (including those in East Jerusalem) in the settlements; they nearly doubled their numbers during the fifteen-year-long failed peace process. Given all this, the question for American peace conference planners is whether the settlement project can in fact be rolled back. Despite repeated requests and occasional assurances, the expansion of the settlement and control system in the occupied territories has never been stopped. The settlement advocates have always had other rabbits to pull from the hat: distinguish a broadly defined “natural growth” from overt expansion; call a new settlement an “outpost”; build a security barrier deep inside Palestinian territory.

During U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s October visit to the region to plan the peace summit, Rice suddenly faced media headlines (and considerable embarrassment) about new Israeli land confiscations east of Jerusalem. Former Secretaries of State Kissinger, Baker, and Albright (among others) would all have sympathized.

As for the Palestinian leadership, they have never — whether from weakness or naivete — demanded a settlement freeze as a precondition for negotiations, and neither has the United States.

Of the three towering figures on the Israeli political stage for most of the post-1967 era — Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and Shimon Peres — only one emerges with any credibility, or even decency. If this entire story has a tragic hero, it is Rabin. He was the settlers’ nemesis, popularizing opposition to them in his 1992 election campaign, promising to divert funds from settlements to education, and describing their movement, Gush Emunim (“Block of the Faithful”), as “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.” Rabin fought (and usually lost to) the settlers’ establishment facilitators at every turn. Ironically, Lords of the Land comes out almost exactly a dozen years after Rabin’s murder, just as right-wing religious settler groups are mounting their first concerted campaign for the pardoning of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir.

Predictably, opposite Rabin stood Ariel Sharon. Sharon was the father of the settlement project in the army and the Knesset, but most of all in the various ministries he controlled at different times. As great facilitator, Sharon allocated land and water rights to settlements. As agriculture minister in the Menachem Begin government from 1977 to 1981 during sensitive negotiations with Egypt, he authorized new settlements. As infrastructure minister under Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Sharon defended the Israeli system of control at a time when new settlements had become a huge diplomatic headache. And even as Netanyahu was holding talks with Yasser Arafat at the Wye plantation near Washington, D.C., Sharon commanded his West Bank followers to “seize every hilltop” in the Palestinian territories.

As prime minister in 2004-05, when Sharon finally championed the disengagement from Gaza, Sharon’s erstwhile supporters turned on him and vilified him as a Judenrat leader and a Nazi. But in the historical balance sheet, as Zertal and Eldar make clear, the 7,000 settlers he evacuated from Gaza barely register when they’re set alongside his “accomplishments” in the West Bank.

Perhaps most unexpectedly to an international audience, Shimon Peres also stood opposite Rabin. If anyone is still taken in by the heavily self-concocted image of Peres as visionary peacemaker, this book will serve as a myth-shattering antidote. Peres, who became Israel’s new president on July 15, 2007, undermined Rabin’s efforts to reign in settlements. The settlers flattered Peres with appeals to the timeless Zionist pioneering spirit — and, it seems, he could never resist flattery. (He famously celebrated a tree-planting ceremony with the settlers of Ofra in 1976, one year after they illegally established the first settlement in the heart of a Palestinian population center.)

Zertal and Eldar’s otherwise marvelous book is sometimes difficult to follow and has a tendency to be somewhat disjointed thematically and chronologically. It also examines the territories from an almost exclusively Israeli perspective: the Palestinian and American angles are largely beyond its scope. The international, and especially American, reader would have benefited if this book had been edited for a special American version rather than published as a straight translation from the Hebrew.

Several themes of interest are teasingly touched on but not elaborated. We are reminded, for instance, that Baruch Goldstein, the man who indiscriminately opened fire on Palestinian worshippers in Hebron (killing twenty-nine and wounding more than a hundred) and around whom a cult of hero worship has developed, was from Brooklyn, New York. But there is no discussion here of the overrepresentation of American Jews among the ideological settler hard core. The financial and political support from certain U.S. groups (both Jewish and evangelical) that is enjoyed by the settlers makes a frustratingly truncated appearance. The book’s most glaring problem is the lack of a systematic discussion of U.S. policy toward the settlements over the last forty years. (In the run-up to Annapolis, for instance, a repetitive historical pattern of Israeli behavior was on show again — a pattern that flits between humiliating provocation and polite avoidance but never amounts to the cessation of an activity that contravenes U.S. policy.)

What we do get from Eldar and Zertal is a highly informative, accurate, and well-sourced account of Israel’s own March of Folly. We learn that there are already “two separate states for two hostile peoples” and that they exist in the West Bank itself, “where the Palestinians and the settlers have separate systems of roads, services, and laws.” The whole story is there, from the first act of settlement just three months after the conclusion of the 1967 war to the most recent construction of outposts, bypass roads, and separation barrier.

The record of the second Bush administration on the subject is incredibly inauspicious, with regard not only to settlement policy but also the entire Mideast peace process. During George W. Bush’s tenure, the White House has made several public plays on the issue, has been snubbed each time — and then has retreated. First, the 2001 Mitchell Report called on Israel to “freeze all settlement activity.” President Bush’s much-referenced June 2002 speech repeated the call. (“Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop,” he declared.) The “Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” launched in 2003, defined a settlement freeze as including natural growth and the dismantling of outposts. Then, when Bush and Sharon exchanged letters in 2004, the American commitment was watered down to “restricting settlement growth” to within “defined construction lines” and “removal of unauthorized outposts.” Coming out of Annapolis, the Bush administration has shown no signs of getting any tougher on the settlement issue.

There is one final point, and it should give Zertal and Eldar’s book an appeal beyond the club of Israel-Palestine specialists: Lords of the Land can be read as a “How-Not-To” guide on counterterrorism. The story of Israel and the territories shreds the playbook on the global war on terror, presenting a world in which real grievances and injustices crucially matter. Far from any glib division of the world into good and evil, terrorism has roots, reasons, and a past — indeed, there is a direct link between settlements, military occupation, and terrorism. Zertal and Eldar explain in great detail why the Al-Aqsa Intifada (the Second Intifada), launched in 2000, might also be called the Settlements War. Massive, disproportionate firepower and military hubris (using the Israel Defense Forces as a club against the enemy, apparently against the wishes of ministerial-level leaders, including the defense minister’s appointed ceasefire negotiator) led to an escalation of violence and the Palestinians’ use of suicide bombings. Similarly, in 1994, Hamas violated their own prohibition against using suicide bombings that indiscriminately target civilians only after the Goldstein outrage against Muslim worshippers in Hebron. In 1996, Hamas ended an ongoing informal truce only following the Israeli liquidation of a leading militant, Yihye Ayash — a sequence that was to tragically repeat itself during the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

By the beginning of the new millennium, many Israelis began to understand the absurdity of viewing the occupation as simply a war on Palestinian terror. They understood the urgent need to address legitimate Palestinian grievances. Then along came an angry post-9/11 America, with a stunningly simplistic and misguided framing of the war on terror. This framing is a mistake in whose shadow we all continue to live.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/75213/?page=entire

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Israeli Chief Rabbi: Ethnically cleanse the Gazans

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

=== News Update ===

Israeli Chief Rabbi: Ethnically cleanse the Gazans

Check out the blue eyes. Real biblical, hunh?

—

		Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger (File).

Monday, January 28, 2008 – Last update – 16:20 28/01/2008

Report: Chief Rabbi says move Gazans to a Palestine in Sinai

By Saul Sadka

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger has been quoted as calling for Gazans to be transferred to the Sinai Peninsula, to a Palestinian state whichj he said could be constructed for them in the desert.

In an interview in English with the British weekly The Jewish News, the chief rabbi also said that while peaceable Muslims should be allowed to pray in Jeruasalem mosques, they should recognize that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews. Muslims have Mecca and Medina, he was quoted as saying, adding that “you don’t need a third place.”

Metzger called for Britain, the European Union and the United States to assist in the construction of a Palestinian state in Egypt’s Sinai Desert.

According to Metzger, the plan would be to “take all the poor people from Gaza to move them to a wonderful new modern country with trains buses cars, like in Arizona – we are now in a generation where you can take a desert and build a city. This will be a solution for the poor people – they will have a nice county, and we shall have our country and we shall live in peace.”

Metzger was quoted as telling the paper that the plan was new and he had not presented it to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

“I have thought about it with some wise people only in the last two weeks, and I think it is a great idea – nobody spoke about it before.” He expressed his intent to discuss the matter with Olmert and anticipated that the idea would find popularity among Israelis. He prefaced his comments by pointing out that he could not advise on political matters as he is a religious leader in Israel, noting that according to the law he “cannot be involved in political situations.”

Muslims ‘don’t need a third place
Metzger also called for Muslims to have the freedom to return to pray in mosques on condition that they do so peaceably: “We will welcome every Palestinian man who wants to pray in his mosque. Every Friday they can come, but with one condition, without violence. We have the same feeling about prayers, we want to give you respect but let us live and believe our land is the Holy Land and Jerusalem belongs to us. You have another place, Mecca and Medina, you don’t need a third place.”

In the interview Metzger also described Jerusalem as “the capital city forever to the Jewish nation.” He argued that Muslims have no connection to Jerusalem commenting that “behind the Kotel we have a mosque. But when they pray even though they are in our holiest place, they face Mecca. Their back is to Jerusalem. So you can see from only one sign that it does not belong to them. They have nothing – no connection.”

The tenure of Metzger, 54, appointed as chief rabbi in 2003 for a ten-year term, has been marked by controversy. In 2006 Attorney General Menachem Mazuz called on him to resign his post in a report which alleged that he had accepted discounted hospitality at a number of Israeli hotels – a call that Metzger rejected.

Metzger has also proposed the establishment of a “religious United Nations” comprised of religious leaders from around the world, and was named one of the 12 most influential international religious figures in a recent CBS documentary entitled In God’s Name.

Video of the interview is available by clicking here.

source: http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2008/01/israeli-chief-rabbi-ethnically-cleanse.html

Related
Laying the grounds for Israel’s interest in the Sinai

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There’s the Big Lie, and then there’s the Really Big Lie

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

=== News Update ===

There’s the Big Lie, and then there’s the Really Big Lie

Curt Maynard

There’s the “Big Lie,” everyone has heard of it, you know the one, the one where Hitler allegedly advocated propagandizing a lie so huge, so preposterous, that nobody would believe it to be a lie – rather they would assume it to be true, based on the premise that nobody could possibly develop a lie so unlikely and ridiculously evident and expect anyone to believe it, therefore such a lie must be true.

Then there’s the really big lie, and that is that Hitler ever advocated foisting such an enormous and outrageous lie on anyone – he never did – what he did do however, was point out in his political autobiography Mein Kampf that Jews had utilized the “Big Lie,” over the centuries and that they had mastered its use on the unsuspecting. Yes reader, that’s right, the big H never advocated utilizing the “Big Lie,” all he did was state that Jews were the originators of the “Big Lie,” and that they had utilized it over the years in often successful efforts to deceive large numbers of people.

It is interesting that the very people the big H accused of frequently utilizing the “Big Lie,” in order to deceive the public are the same ones that have done more than anyone else to lie about the fact that Hitler supported and actively campaigned for its use. Abraham Foxman, the Director of the Anti-Defamation League, utilized the term in his book Never Again, numerous times, and each time he applied it in such a way as to direct the reader’s attention to the idea that only an anti-Semite could be capable of lying to such a degree.

What are the facts? Read on dear reader. Below are the actual words of Adolf Hitler, please note that when he details the “Big Lie,” he does so not to advocate its use, but instead to direct attention to the fact that Jews are the ones to have utilized the Big Lie and to have mastered its point and purpose.

“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes. From time immemorial, however, the Jews have known better than any others how falsehood and calumny can be exploited. Is not their very existence founded on one great lie, namely, that they are a religious community, where as in reality they are a race? And what a race! One of the greatest thinkers that mankind has produced has branded the Jews for all time with a statement which is profoundly and exactly true. Schopenhauer called the Jew “The Great Master of Lies”. Those who do not realize the truth of that statement, or do not wish to believe it, will never be able to lend a hand in helping Truth to prevail.”[1]

So as you can see, Hitler wasn’t advocating lying to one’s people, he was pointing out the fact that Jews know better than anyone else how to initiate the big lie for their own purposes. Note too please, that Hitler mentioned the equally true fact that the “grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it,” just as did 9-11 – yes dear reader, 9-11 was not an operation carried out by 19 Arabs trained in Afghanistan, that is part of the “Big Lie,” I suggest you start looking at the same people Hitler spoke of more than seventy years ago.

One recent example of the “Big Lie,” in action and foisted by the same people the big H accused of being so proficient with its use, is this canard that the two “kidnapped,” Israeli soldiers are to be transferred in some manner from Lebanon to Iran. There is without any doubt only one beneficiary of a war with Iran, and that’s Israel. Israel and its Jewish American Fifth Column in the United States have been banging the drums of war against Iran for many years now, and they will do anything within their power to persuade moronic Americans that Iran represents a serious threat to the security of the United States. This is a lie; Israel is the problem, not Iran. Take a moment, relax, and consider this. In the early 1980s various Lebanese factions, Christians, Muslims, and Druze mostly were frequently kidnapping one other and occasionally an American, Syrian or Israeli, in an effort to further whatever agenda it was they were trying to draw attention to. Not once did any of them ever find it necessary to take their hostages outside Lebanon; in some cases they held on to them for years.[2] Why now then does Hezballah suddenly find it advantageous to do so? The reason of course is that Israel and its Fifth Column in the United States [Read Mainstream Media] finds it advantageous to their cause – to draw the United States into a war against both Syria and Iran – leaving Israel safe to impose its will in the Middle East. In this writer’s opinion, there may not even be any Israeli soldiers that were kidnapped, it could be part of the “Big Lie,” after all; we are forced to accept the word of a pathological liar, the state of Israel. The truth is, Americans have absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe the government of Israel, it has lied to us in the past, it has been caught red handed in the past engaging in the “Big Lie,” it attacked an American ship in 1967 in an effort to make it look like the Egyptians did it, but were unsuccessful at sinking the U.S.S. Liberty, thus leaving witnesses around to expose them and their nefarious actions later.[3] In the 1950s the Israeli’s attempted to bomb American assets in Cairo, once again in an effort to frame Egyptians, but one of the bombs exploded prematurely blowing the lid off Israel’s covert operation.[4]

In the end dear reader, the intelligent man disregards anything the mainstream media says – literally – the media as it is today is nothing more than the mouthpiece of Jewish Supremacism and its salient or access into your thoughts and those of your neighbors. If you are truly interested in the truth, start by turning off the television.

[1] Source: Mein Kampf, p. 134 as cited in Wikipedia
[2] Terry Anderson being one example.
[3] This didn’t stop Israel from pressuring the Johnson administration to stop the subsequent investigation – in 2003 the head of the investigative team, Captain Ward Boston, signed an affidavit stating that he was forced to wrap up the investigation concluding that the attempt to sink the USS Liberty was an accident, not an intentional act, despite the fact that he felt the Israeli’s intentionally attacked the Liberty, knowing it was an American ship.
[4] This incident is known as Operation Suzannah or the Lavon Affair, it isn’t a state secret, Israel has acknowledged its role and the Israeli Minister of Defense, Pinhas Lavon resigned as a result of the mission’s failure, which is just another way of saying he failed because he and Israel had been caught.

source: http://curtmaynardsblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/theres-big-lie-and-then-theres-really.html

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THE RACISM OF ZIONISM … A SHORT HISTORY

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

=== News Update ===

January 29, 2008 at 12:44 pm (History, Israel, zionism)
(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

Zionists love to shout ‘racist’ at those who rightfully speak out against it’s evils and it’s inherent racial ideology.

But upon close examination, we see the zionist for the disgraceful racist he truly is. He likes to use the phrase ‘anti-semite’, but he remains silent in the face of thousands of Jews who detest zionism and are angry with these sick devils for giving Jews a bad reputation.

THIS video shows how zionism developed into the racist ideology it is today… let them shout all they want to, FACTS ARE FACTS…. and ZIONISM IS RACISM!

Source of video

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Israel jail Russian granny for helping her daughter emigrate back to Russia

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

=== News Update ===

Israel jail Russian granny for helping her daughter emigrate back to Russia

Israel Locks up Russian Granny

By: Iran Daily on: 29.01.2008 [23:08 ]

MOSCOW, Jan. 29–A 69-year-old Russian Israeli woman is beginning a six-year jail term in Israel because of helping her granddaughter leave the occupied territories.

Isabella Belfer is the oldest person to be sent to prison in Israel and could spend the rest of her life behind bars, Alalalm.ir reported.

Isabella has been convicted of helping her daughter kidnap her granddaughter and take her out of Israel.

“The punishment is harsher than I think it should be. A woman of her age, of her health condition, who is a grandmother, should never have been punished this harshly,“ Tzion Amir, a leading Israeli lawyer, said.

The case was brought to the courts by Isabella’s son-in-law Yaron Rotem who was married to her daughter, Marina, for two years. The couple had a daughter, Lilach, whom Isabella took to Russia to her mother.

Yaron claims that he doesn’t want to “take Lilach out of Marina’s hands“, but says that if Marina doesn’t come back to Israel, her mother should go to jail.

Belfer had hoped until the last moment it wouldn’t happen but despite her age, health, and doing what she still believes was the right thing to do, she is going to jail.

“I feel very weak, both morally and physically. I understand that in the end I am going to jail. The question is how long I will survive there or if I will die straight away,“ said the convicted grandmother.

“I would never in my life have imagined that I could go to prison. There is a Russian saying that you can never run away from prison or poverty. I never thought it could be said about me,“ Belfer said.

Israel has witnessed a significant drop in immigrations after 1999 and has set laws to stop migration out of the occupation lands.

In 1999 nearly 77,000 from all over the world immigrated to Israel, but the rate continued to decline and in 2006 only less than 20,000 entered there.

Israeli officials are also worried about the decline in the patriotism of Jewish youth. A poll conducted by the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center showed 44 percent of them would seriously think of leaving Israel if it would result in an improved standard of living abroad.

The Israeli regime has an estimated population of 7.1 million, with over 3 million immigrants that entered the occupied territories since 1948.

http://www.iran-daily.com/1386/3051/html

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So, now Israel has become so desperate that is has laws to prevent emigration out of Israel. They’re even willing to put an old woman in jail for helping her daughter escape Israel.

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Operation Desert Slaughter

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

=== News Update ===

Operation Desert Slaughter

Operation Desert Slaughter Thoughts on Holocaust Memorial Day by Felicity Arbuthnot Global Research, January 28, 2008

It is seventeen years since America and Britain embarked on their ‘Final Solution’ for the population of Iraq.

The forty two day carpet bombing, enjoined by thirty two other countries, against a country of just twenty five million souls, with a youthful, conscript army, with broadly half the population under sixteen, and no air force, was just the beginning of a United Nations led, global siege of near mediaeval ferocity. Having, as James Baker boasted they would, reduced ‘Iraq to a pre-industrial age’, the country was denied all normality : trade, aid, telecommunications, power, sanitation, water repairs, seeds, foods, pharmaceuticals, medical equipment.

As I write, seventeen years ago, Iraq would be entering the second week of a barbaric, near twenty four hour a day, carpet bombing, which, then, as now (lest we forget – yet again) scrupulously ignored Protocol 1, Additional to the Geneva Convention of 1977: ‘It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies such as irrigation works (denying them) to the civilian population or to the adverse Party … for any motive.’

The blitzkrieg on Iraq deliberately targeted all ‘indispensable to survival’.

Within twenty four hours, most was destroyed. The electricity went off within two hours, leaving patients on life support machines and vital equipment, babies in incubators, or those on oxygen to die. Refrigerators defrosted, all medicine needing refrigeration, blood banks and vital saline solutions for the injured were destroyed. Food rotted and between the bombing and the bank closures (latter for fear of looting) replacements were scarce to unbuyable.

In Najav, seventy dialysis patients, ‘old friends’, said the senior nurse in charge of the unit, died for want of electricity. The water supply was deliberately destroyed, parts denied subsequently by the pathetic, US-UK dominated Sanctions Committee – a Committee without a backbone between them – and remains lethal to this day.

This was the plan by US Central Command, it seems, all along. The destruction of Iraq’s water system has been described by Professor Nagy and Stephanie Miller as: ‘a slow motion holocaust’. Few could have put it better.

(See: How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water. by Thomas J Nagy : http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/NAG108A.html )

The telecommunications tower was also one of the earliest casualties, an elegant, soaring, structure on the edge of Baghdad’s Mansur district. It lay, broken and crumpled, as did the remains of those who worked inside it. Iraq was thus cut off from the world, the extent of the bombing and atrocities largely unknown for considerable time. Iraqis throughout the world had no way of knowing if their families, friends, loves, were dead or alive. Radio and television stations across Iraq were blitzed so no warnings to populus could be given (journalists too have special protection in wars, but decision makers, seemingly are not only illiterate, but ignore legalities.)

Hospitals, health clinics, schools and kindergartens were bombed, education eradicated so totally that the stores for educational materials, in buildings separate from the schools (usually in a central distribution point some miles away) were also bombed. Agriculture in all forms was deliberately targeted. Chicken farms bombed, flocks of sheep and goats, broadly half of all buffalo were killed, dairy farms obliterated. Crops, food processing factories reduced to rubble. A war crime stupendous in its immensity, for which not one murderous, genocidal, infanticidal, decision maker or pilot has stood trial.

Pharmaceutical factories were bombed, the medical syringe factory was destroyed. And in an especially psychotic policy, the countries who were Iraq’s trading partners and had built factories and installations for the country, bombed those which they had built. America’s gung-ho goons whooped over bombing the Pepsi and Coca Cola factories. ‘Bravery’ doesn’t come more deviant, sub-normal and retarded than that.

Due to the use of defoliants and napalm, half of all Iraq’s trees, including the great, ancient palms, died. Remaining palms did not bear their succulent fruit for about five years. In the tranquil, family farming settlements, amongst the palms, women and livestock alike aborted and often died. Survivors consistently described a ‘vapor’ coming from the ‘planes, then the horrific aftermath, affecting those living in the shelter of the palm groves or copses of trees, where dwellers settled for relative cool from Iraq’s searing summers. And, of course, in this decimation from above, which dropped more ordinance daily than was dropped daily in the second world war, five times more explosive power was dropped than on Hiroshima.

The weapons used were depleted uranium, which continues to irradiate Iraq and the region, the people, flora and fauna -and will continue to do so for four and a half billion years. ‘..protection of the natural environment against widespread, long term and severe damage’, is another absolute dictate under the Geneva Convention. It proscribes absolutely ‘… damage to the natural environment (prejucing) the health and survival of the population.’ Contraventions don’t come bigger than condemning inestimable generations yet unborn, to death and deformity. The Nuremberg Principles are exercised by the treatment of both civilians and prisoners and the: ‘… murder or ill treatment …of prisoners of war … further, extermination … and other inhuman acts against any civilian population’.

The ‘inhuman acts’, committed against the Iraqi people in 1991 constitute war crimes which, since no one was brought to justice, one can only hope haunt those responsible for all time.

The slaughter on the Basra Road, after the ceasefire, the fleeing civilians and retreating troops, ripped to pieces, or incinerated in General Norman Schwartzkop’s ‘turkey shoot’. The whole war, of course, was nothing else. Saddam Hussein had offered, indeed, started to retreat from Kuwait before the carnage began, but as ever, for the United States, conciliation was ‘too late’. Buses, lorries, cars were also targeted throughout the forty two day massacre. Lorries carrying medicines, meat, essentials were burned, with their drivers. Western troops took their repulsive ‘trophy photos’, with the pathetic remains of the incinerated and dismembered.

When the (UK) Observer, to its credit, printed the picture which became the symbol of the 1991 atrocities, the Iraqi soldier, with his near melted face welded to the windscreen of his vehicle, there was an outcry. The sensitivities of readers should not be exposed to such horrors. Maggie O’Kane, writing in the Guardian Weekly (16th December 1995) describes searingly, reality. Relatives, praying, hope against hope, that those they loved, had somehow miraculously survived the hadean inferno that was the Basra Road massacre. “On the day the war ended, at a bus station south of Baghdad, dusk was falling and the road was covered with weeping women.

The Iraqi survivors of the `turkey shoot’ on the Basra Road were crawling home with fresh running wounds. Their women were throwing themselves at the battered minibuses and trucks, pulling, pleading, begging. `Where is he, have you seen him ? Is he not with you ?’ Some fell to their knees on the road when they heard the news.

Others kept running from bus, to truck, to car, looking for their husbands, their sons or their lovers – the 37,000 Iraqi soldiers who would not come back. It went on all night and it was the most desperate and moving scene I have ever witnessed.” There was worse. Think of the excesses of horrors the Western media has deluged its readers with over the years, those perpetrated by people of other cultures, with other features: Stalin, Pol Pot, indeed Saddam Hussein and consider this in Maggie O’Kane’s article: ‘

When Sergeant Joe Queen returned to his home town of Bryson City North California, after the Gulf war, the first thing he saw was a huge banner draped outside Hardees Burger Restaurant, which read: `Welcome Home Joe Queen.’ Joe Queen, who’d been awarded a bronze star, wanted to chill out after the war, but Bryson City wouldn’t let him Joe, 19-years old, had gone straight from Desert Storm to become one of the first American troops to cross the Saudi border in an armored bulldozer. His job was to bury the Iraqis alive in their trenches and then cover over the trenches real smooth so the rest of the Big Red One, as The First Armored Mechanized Brigade is called, could come nice and easy behind him. ‘Joe Queen doesn’t know how many Iraqi troops he buried alive on the front line.

But five years later, in his military base in Georgia, he remembers well how it worked:

`The sand was so soft that once the blade hits the sand it just caves in right on the sides, so we never did go back and forth. So you are traveling at five, six, seven miles an hour just moving along the trench… You don’t see him. You’re up there in the half hatch and you know what you got to do. You did it so much you could close your eyes and do it… I don’t think they had any idea because the look on their faces as we came through the berm was just a look of shock. `While I was retreating, I saw some of the soldiers trying to surrender, but they were buried. There were two kinds of bulldozers, real ones, actual ones, and also they had tanks and they put something like a bulldozer blade in front of them. Some of the soldiers were walking towards the troops holding their arms up to surrender and the tanks moved in and killed them. They dug a hole in the ground and then they buried the soldiers and leveled it.’ One survivor described the friends buried alive, who he had laughed with, eaten with …’I really don’t know how to describe it. We were friends. I ate with some of them. I talked to some of them. I cannot express how I felt at that moment….. I saw one soldier and his body was just torn apart by a bulldozer. The upper part was on one side and the lower on the other side.’

I hope your nightmares and those of your colleagues haunt for all time Joe Queen. May the specter of those for whose live burial you and your murderous colleagues were responsible, follow in all your footsteps, for all time.

These mass graves also carry the names of the leaders who ordered the decimation of Iraq in 1991,their military Commanders and soldiers, on every one of them. Ironically, the mass graves of Saddam Hussein have seemingly not materialized, just war graves and those from the uprising encouraged by the US and UK at the end of the 1991 decimation. The war, of course, never ended. The thirteen year subsequent embargo cost maybe one and a quarter million lives.

Additionally, the US and UK, bombed Iraq (illegally) until the (illegal) invasion of 2003. In 2002, they stepped up their destruction of life, limb and of entire housing projects with families within, children playing, doing homework, flocks of sheep and goats with their child shepherds. ‘Approximately a year before the United States initiated Operation Southern Focus, as a change to its response strategy, by increasing the overall number of missions and selecting targets throughout the no-fly zones to disrupt the military command structure in Iraq. The weight of bombs dropped increased from none in March 2002 and 0.3 in April 2002 to between 8 and 14 tons per month in May-August, reaching a pre-war peak of 54.6 tons in September 2002.’ (Wikipedia.)

A recent study by the Centre for Public Integrity, has also uncovered lies of impeachable stature, leading to invasion, by the Bush Administration..

‘The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them, or had links to al Qaeda, or both. ‘Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq’s links to al Qaeda, the study found. That was second only to Powell’s 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al Qaeda.’ (http://www.publicintegrity.org )

Iraq’s post invasion (2003-2007) excess under five mortality has been estimated at over one million. In Afghanistan, post invasion, at 1.9 million (2001-2007.)

For another humanitarian abomination of our time, the Israeli siege of the Gaza strip (June 2007 and ongoing) total excess death figures are elusive. CIA figures for infant mortality, however (2004) are woeful at 23.54 per thousand births. Sweden (2007) just 2.76 per thousand births. Given Israel’s withdrawal of electricity and just about all needed to sustain life since last June, some serious statistical data is needed – and relentless and absolute demands for humanity and human rights for our global neighbors in Gaza, Iraq and Afghanistan, the forgotten of Lebanon’s ‘Simmer Rain’ decimation, by ‘we the people …’ Like Joe Queen’s genocidal actions, the atrocities committed in these countries are being carried out in our name. ‘Silence is complicity’. (For much more shameful complicity – since 1950 – please see Dr Gideon Polya: ‘Body Count’, an academic, key and indispensable work: http://www.globalbodycount.blogspot.com)

‘There was no one left to kill’, declared General Norman Schwartzkopf after the Basra Road bloodbath, where even the injured holding white flags, and doctors accompanying them were obliterated. ‘Morally, we won’, an Iraqi doctor told me shortly afterwards. Indeed. ‘We are the new Jews’, is an oft heard, Arab refrain now.

As I write, on Holocaust Memorial Day, it is impossible not to reflect that is does not take forced labor camps, forced transport and Zyclon B to create a holocaust. When the figures of the dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, reach six million, as the world stands by, will they too get their own Holocaust Memorial Day? Will we all, regardless of color or creed, ever learn, before it is too late?

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7920

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Taliban now seriously in the fight, war begins: NGO

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

=== News Update ===

Go to Google News

An Afghan soldier

Jan 18, 2008

KABUL (AFP) — The Taliban last year “seriously rejoined the fight” in Afghanistan, an NGO security group said in a report that concluded the country was “at the beginning of a war, not the end of one.”

It has also become clear that the Taliban’s “easy departure” in 2001, when a US-led invasion drove them from power, was “more of a strategic retreat than an actual military defeat,” the Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) said.

“A few years from now, 2007 will likely be looked back upon as the year in which the Taliban seriously rejoined the fight and the hopes of a rapid end to conflict were finally set aside by all but the most optimistic,” ANSO said.

About 1,980 civilians were killed in 2007 — half by insurgents and the rest almost equally by soldiers or criminal groups, the group said.

Insurgents killed 15 NGO workers, four of them foreigners, last year, compared with 24 in 2006 and eight in 2005, the group said. Eighty-eight NGO staffers were abducted in 2007, most of them by insurgents, out of a total 555 kidnappings, it said, without providing numbers for previous years.

Abductions and killings were likely to escalate this year, with growing links between insurgents and criminal gangs increasing the threat, ANSO said.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is helping the government fight insurgents, is “in fact just now entering a period of broad and deep conflict, the outcomes of which are far from certain,” it said.

ISAF may number about 41,000 soldiers but “realistically” could not have more than up to 7,000 for combat, with the rest mostly support staff or prevented from fighting because of national restrictions, the group said.

The size of the Taliban force was unknown, but estimates ranged from 2,000 to 20,000.

“There would not appear to be any capacity within ISAF to stop or turn back anticipated AOG (armed opposition groups) expansion,” the report said.

“In simple terms, the consensus amongst informed individuals at the end of 2007 seems to be that Afghanistan is at the beginning of a war, not the end of one.”

source : http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iDugGs2bipi4e7NnotBK_jSVGQjw

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MASS MURDERER’S Final State of the Union: Repression at home that is certain to continue, Aggression abroad is on!

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

=== News Update ===

MASS MURDERER’S Final State of the Union: Repression at home that is certain to continue, Aggression abroad is on!

By: Bulov on: 29.01.2008 [23:40 ]

George W. Bush used his eighth and final State of the Union speech Monday night to outline an agenda of continuing wars of aggression abroad together with social reaction and political repression at home that is certain to continue well past his leaving office a year from now, no matter which party wins the 2008 election.

Yet the ritualistic annual affair—marked by obscene applause and cheering from both Democratic and Republican legislators for a man who should be standing trial as a war criminal—was overshadowed by the deepest crisis confronting US and world capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The entire affair was dominated by the most pervasive feature of American political life—the immense disconnect between the masses of American working people and the thin financial aristocracy that controls and whose interests are represented by both major political parties.

Bush began his address with a salute to the “collective wisdom of ordinary citizens” and an affirmation of his supposed conviction that government must “trust in the ability of free people to make wise decisions.”

Yet, after seven years in office he is without question the most despised president in American history. The latest opinion poll released this week by the Washington Post and ABC News shows Bush’s approval rating at its lowest ever, 32 percent, with only 30 percent approving his actions in Iraq—which constituted the center of his speech—and just 28 percent approval for his handling of the economy.

In short, the people he claims to trust have rejected not only the war but his entire presidency, which continues in office and imposes its policies thanks to the complicity of the ostensible political opposition, the Democratic Party.

The contrast between the depth of the economic crisis facing millions of Americans, on the one hand, and the political indifference and paucity of the proposals emanating from Washington on the other, could not have been starker.

Bush used the speech to press the Democratic-led Congress to enact without amendment or debate a $150 billion fiscal stimulus package that most economic analysts acknowledge will do nothing to stave off the growing meltdown of the financial system touched off by the bursting of the US housing market bubble.

The plan touted by Bush amounts to $150 billion—two thirds of it in the form of rebate checks expected to be sent out by next June and one-third of it in more tax breaks for business.

Under conditions in which major Wall Street banks have already been forced to write off hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, and the fall in average house prices—the sharpest since the Great Depression of the 1930s—is further impoverishing average Americans by a rate of approximately $2 trillion a year, this package represents little more than a pathetic attempt by both parties to appear to be doing something at the cheapest price possible.

“As we meet tonight, our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty,” Bush declared. He continued, “And at kitchen tables across our country, there is concern over our economic future. In the long run, Americans can be confident about our economic growth.”

The reality is that the policies set by the Bush administration and the Democratic-led Congress alike have nothing to do with the mythical average Americans huddled around their kitchen tables trying to balance their budgets. Rather, economic decisions are determined by the interests and demands of the bankers and businessmen sitting at boardroom tables on Wall Street, awarding themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses and severance packages even as their speculative financial operations threaten to unleash massive economic suffering for the vast majority of the population. This is the social layer that funds and controls both major political parties.

Thus, while the Federal Reserve Board has enacted repeated rate cuts to bail out major Wall Street investors, Bush’s speech promised nothing of substance for the estimated one million people who face foreclosure on their homes over the coming year.

“Americans can be confident about our economic growth,” Bush proclaimed. Based on what? The subprime mortgage meltdown is not the expression of a temporary and conjunctural economic downturn, but rather a profound crisis gripping the entire international financial system. Its roots are found in the decline of American capitalism’s position on the world markets and the turn by the ruling elite towards rampant speculation, accompanied by outright fraud.

This past seven years of the Bush administration have seen US household debt double, while federal debt has shot up by two thirds, reaching a combined level equal to 168 percent of the US gross domestic product. Despite the injection of massive amounts of credit into the economy, the US has seen the weakest growth in employment and production since the 1930s.

For millions upon millions of working people the present financial crisis will spell social disaster, as trillions of dollars in the value in home equity—upon which many have depended for loans to bridge the gap between rising costs and stagnant wages—are wiped out and the credit crunch extends throughout the economy, provoking mass layoffs and shutdowns.

Not a hint of these economic and social realities crept into Bush’s speech. Instead, he repeated his yearly mantra of demanding that tax cuts for the rich be made permanent, assuring the continued transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars in social wealth from the majority of the population to the top one percent. As always, it was this line that drew the most enthusiastic and sustained applause.

Most of Bush’s speech consisted of a laundry list of right-wing nostrums that could barely be described as proposals. He railed against “earmarks,” the method used by members of Congress from both parties to direct funding towards specific local projects, which account for less than a drop in the bucket compared to the projected deficit of $400 billion for the coming year, swelled largely by the massive spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On health care he opposed any government-funded program while promoting “consumer choice”; on education he urged support for a school voucher program that would divert money from public education. This was joined with a call for free trade and opposition to “human cloning.”

In one section of the speech, Bush praised the “armies of compassion” for bringing “a new day to the Gulf Coast.” He touted his administration’s contribution—the hosting of a North American summit with Canadian and Mexican officials in New Orleans in April. This, under conditions in which—two-and-a-half years after Hurricane Katrina—tens of thousands of the city’s residents remain homeless and tens of thousands of homes stand abandoned and gutted, constituting a national disgrace.

Bush declared that the country could no longer afford spending on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—in contrast to its ability to pour money into bailing out Wall Street. He called on Congress to enact immigration reform, while offering no concrete proposal, even as the presidential candidates in his own party compete in the demonization of immigrant workers.

All of this empty rhetoric on domestic issues served merely as a prelude to the real questions of concern for Bush, the wars of aggression that his administration launched and is continuing abroad and the attacks on democratic rights at home, both carried out under the mantle of a “global war on terrorism.”

He pointed to his recent decision to send 3,200 more US Marines to Afghanistan to “fight the terrorists,” bringing both Republican and Democratic legislators to their feet to applaud the military escalation.

He touted the military “surge” launched by the administration nearly a year ago, sending another 30,000 US troops into the occupied country of Iraq.

“The Iraqi people quickly realized that something dramatic had happened,” said Bush. “Those who had worried that America was preparing to abandon them instead saw tens of thousands of American forces flowing into their country. They saw our forces moving into neighborhoods, clearing out the terrorists, and staying behind to ensure the enemy did not return.”

Every poll conducted in Iraq has proven that the Iraqi people in their overwhelming majority support the immediate withdrawal of American troops. The US occupation of their country has spelled a historic catastrophe, resulting in the deaths of over one millions Iraqis and turning over five million into either exiles or internal refugees.

Once again, the praise for the bloody work being carried out by the US military against the people of Iraq drew a standing ovation from Democrats and Republicans alike.

While pointing to the planned withdrawal of 20,000 US troops from Iraq—a measure imposed by the strains placed upon the US military by the protracted occupation—as a success, Bush made it clear that what is planned is a permanent occupation of the country.

“Our objective in the coming year is to sustain and build on the gains we made in 2007, while transitioning to the next phase of our strategy,” he said. “American troops are shifting from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and, eventually, to a protective overwatch mission.”

This again is the policy of both parties, which are united in their defense of the strategic interests of US imperialism in general and in the effort to assert US hegemony over Iraq and the oil reserves of the Middle East and Central Asia in particular.

To this same end, Bush repeated his bellicose threats against Iran, declaring that the regime in Teheran embodied “the forces of extremism.” In what constituted an implicit threat of war, he declared, “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf.”

Once again, Democrats joined Republicans in a standing ovation, symbolizing the support of the leading figures within the ruling establishment for stepped-up aggression against Iran.

In terms of the “war on terrorism” at home, Bush demanded that Congress renew legislation giving the administration expanded powers of domestic spying, while granting a blanket immunity to telecommunications companies that have illegally handed over private records to the government.

The Democratic response to Bush’s speech was delivered by Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas, who invoked unity between “working people and business owners, Americans all” and proclaimed that she was eschewing a “partisan response” to Bush’s speech for an “American response.” The speech, like that of Bush, was as devoid of a comprehension of the social crisis confronting millions as it was of any serious or concrete proposals to confront it.

The political message contained in this speech was unmistakable. Those seeking an alternative to the Bush administration’s agenda of permanent war, the destruction of democratic rights and attacks on the living standards and social conditions of American working people will not find it in the Democratic Party and its election campaign in 2008. Genuine political opposition to these policies can come only through the emergence of a new political movement of working people based upon a socialist alternative to militarism and social inequality.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/jan2008/bush-j29.shtml

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“Jackasses with Guns”: Mercenaries Terrorize Iraq

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

=== News Update ===

“Jackasses with Guns”: Mercenaries Terrorize Iraq

By Ali Gharib, IPS News. Posted January 27, 2008.

Out of the dozens upon dozens of reports of abuses by private contractors as part of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only one prosecution of a contractor has taken place.

This, says a new report from Human Rights First, epitomizes the woefully insufficient response by the U.S. government to hold private contractors accountable for abuses against local nationals.

“Holding contractors responsible for criminal abuses has not been a high priority of the U.S. government,” said the report, “Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity,” which is based on interviews, court records, government reports, declassified documents and other documentary sources. “At times the government has appeared to view this issue with shocking indifference.”

“There was little in the way of standards for hiring and training security contractors. There was no oversight of their activities. And most glaring of all, there was absolutely no legal accountability for misconduct,” said Congressman David Price of North Carolina at a press conference to launch the report last week.

The report said that while the legal framework to deal with abuses by private security contractors is already in place, the U.S. Justice Department and in some cases the Defense Department have done little to respond to such charges, often forgoing investigations, let alone prosecutions.

“The Justice Department bears primary responsibility for this inaction,” said the report. “Today most private security contractors operate in an environment where systems of criminal accountability are rarely used. This has created a culture of impunity.” The now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein issued CPA Order No. 17 which gave contractors immunity from the Iraqi justice system, but the report says that this does not affect the ability of the U.S. government to go after its own citizens.

Speakers at the press conference and the report itself both said that the military does take some steps to curb criminal activity in Iraq. More than 60 U.S. military personnel have been court marshaled for deaths of Iraqi nationals through the pre-existing internal military criminal justice system.

However, just one contractor has been tried for violence or abuse towards local nationals, says the report, which examined over 600 classified Serious Incident Reports (SIRs) on incidents involving the use of force by or attacks upon private security contractors in Iraq over a nine-month period in 2004-2005.

Contractors have emerged in recent years as a critical part of the war effort. In previous wars, contractors played a much smaller role, but now they make up a major part of the U.S. force in Iraq.

Even following President George W. Bush’s troop surge, private contractors working for the U.S. still outnumber military personnel in Iraq, with roughly 160,000 soldiers and 180,000 contractors.

The shift was part of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s doctrine of fighting wars with fewer troops but has its origins in the “peace dividend” of the early 1990s that saw the end of the Cold War thereby allowing for less defense spending.

The vast numbers of contractors in the forefront of wars, however, has not been accompanied by a bureaucratic system to deal with accountability. The U.S. Code of Military Justice, a Pentagon Criminal Investigations Unit and the military chain of command do not exist for contractors.

When the incidents of alleged contractor abuse began to publicly surface — largely focused on the role of contractors carrying out interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison — Rumsfeld said that the contractors were largely responsible for policing themselves.

“Contractors should not be responsible for law enforcement,” said Columbia University law professor Scott Horton, noting that this is the primary function of the Justice Department. “The bottom line is that the Justice Department has gone AWOL.”

With the executive branch taking few steps to deal with the issue, public outrage at news coverage of some of the incidents has prompted Congress to take some steps to strengthen oversight of contractors.

A bill passed in the House of Representatives solidifies Justice Department jurisdiction over contractors working as part of U.S. efforts in Iraq, and a nearly identical bill is due for action in the Senate. But the report warns that jurisdiction has not been a major obstacle. Rather, the problem has been insufficient “political will and resources.”

The report suggests mandating congressional oversight with regard to private security contractors and creating and funding a specific office within the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

“This is an issue of resource deployment,” said Horton, noting that of the 200 or so Justice Department personnel in Iraq, none of them work in law enforcement.

The report came at the end of a turbulent week for contractors. Human Rights Watch called last week for the Iraqi government to pass a law rescinding CPA Order No. 17 — an effort that passed the Iraqi cabinet but has thus far languished in parliament.

Blackwater Worldwide, one of the best known security contractors because of its large number of contracts and alleged involvement in abuses, has retained the services of a third Washington lobbying firm to deal with the fallout from several violent incidents. Last September, in a case that garnered widespread attention, Blackwater employees protecting a State Department convoy reportedly fired without provocation into a crowd of Iraqis, killing at least 17 people. The shooting led to some discussions about how to deal with contractor accountability, but the Human Rights First report says the new agreement between the State and Defense Departments “falls far short of mandating accountability.”

The continuing abuses, said the panelists at the press briefing, negatively impact the war on terror, creating problems both for the regular military as well as U.S. foreign policy in general.

Horton said that military personnel in Iraq had called private security contractors “jackasses with guns.” He told IPS that with insurgent fighters sometimes unable to distinguish between the two, contractor abuses could bring negative attention to the military.

Retired naval Rear Admiral John Hutson, who served as the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 1997 to 2000, warned that if abuses continue unchecked, the U.S. will “suffer consequences to our reputation overseas and our effectiveness as a fighting force.”

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/74955/?page=2

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Insurgents kill five U.S. soldiers in Iraq

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

=== News Update ===

Mon Jan 28, 9:46 AM ET BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Five U.S. soldiers were killed when their patrol was hit by a roadside bomb and then came under small arms fire in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Monday, the U.S. military said.

The military said U.S. and Iraqi forces had secured the area following the incident, which was one of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops in months. There were no further details.

Iraqi army and police also reported that clashes had broken out in the Haysuma neighborhood, a known al Qaeda stronghold in eastern Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city 390 km (240 miles) north of Baghdad.

The Mosul attack against the U.S. patrol takes to 36 the number of soldiers killed in Iraq this month, up from 23 in December but similar to levels in October and November.

Mosul has been in the spotlight after Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Friday that Iraqi forces were preparing for a “decisive” offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq to push the Sunni Islamist militants out of their last major urban stronghold.

Iraqi tanks and helicopters began arriving in Mosul with troop reinforcements on Sunday.

U.S. military officials on Sunday said their own operations around Mosul were continuing.

U.S. military commanders say al Qaeda, blamed for most serious bombings in Iraq, has regrouped in northern provinces after being squeezed out of the western province of Anbar and from around Baghdad during security crackdowns last year.

source : http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080128/ts_nm/iraq_soldiers_dc

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 29 January 2008

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

=== News Update ===

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Tuesday, 29 January 2008

Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.

Tuesday, 29 January 2008.

• Resistance fighters ambush US column near al-Habbaniyah Tuesday evening.
• Bomb damages US Humvee near al-Hadithah.
• Mortar shells blast into “Green Zone” Tuesday afternoon.
• Sectarian murder spree continues: three more bodies found dumped in Baghdad Tuesday.
• US-backed tribal collaborator police walk off their posts on strategic highway in al-Mushahadah to protest lack of pay.
• Car bomber blasts US patrol in al-Mawsil Tuesday.
• Puppet police commander in al-Basrah admits: “all the crimes committed in al-Basrah were carried out by members of the police or in police cars.”

Al-Anbar Province.
Al-Habbaniyah.

Resistance fighters ambush US column near al-Habbaniyah Tuesday evening.

In a dispatch posted at 10:41pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that Iraqi Resistance fighters ambushed a US military column as it came out of the American al-Habbaniyah base, 70km west of Baghdad, on Tuesday evening.

Yaqen reported eyewitnesses as saying that the battle lasted for about half an hour during which time local people heard cries from the US troops who called in warplanes to extract them from their situation. The Resistance fighters, then called off the attack and withdrew in order to minimize casualties, witnesses said.

Witnesses said that US aircraft continued to hover over the American column for more than an hour, firing flares in order to ward off incoming rockets.

Al-Hadithah.

Bomb damages US Humvee near al-Hadithah.

In a dispatch posted at 10:27pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded under a US patrol on the highway to al-Hadithah, 270km northwest of Baghgdad.

Yaqen reported Major ‘Abdallah al-Hadithi of the puppet “al-Anbar Province Operations Command” as saying that the bomb destroyed large parts of a US Humvee. Al-Hadithi provided no information regarding US casualties, if any.

Al-Fallujah.

Bomber blows up at entrance to puppet police station in al-Fallujah midday Tuesday.

In a dispatch posted at 1:50pm Baghdad time Tuesday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a person blew himself up near a puppet police station in the middle of al-Fallujah, 60km west of Baghdad, midday Tuesday.

Yaqen reported source in the puppet police as saying that a man blew himself up near the entrance to a puppet police station in the Nazal neighborhood of the city, wounding nine persons, three of them severely. A second would-be bomber later approached the scene after first-aid workers had arrived but puppet policemen killed him before he could detonate his payload. A third would-be bomber reported fled the scene when crowds left the area, but the puppet police were still searching for that individual as of the time of reporting.

Baghdad.

Mortar shells blast into “Green Zone” Tuesday afternoon.

In a dispatch posted at 7:10pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that three mortar shells blasted into the top-security area around the Republican Palace in downtown Baghdad – the area dubbed the “Green Zone” by the Americans – on Tuesday afternoon.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet “Interior Ministry” as saying that the shells landed at separate intervals. No information on the nature or extent of casualties or damage was available.

Sectarian murder spree continues: three more bodies found dumped in Baghdad Tuesday.

In a dispatch posted at 6:55pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that the Iraqi puppet police recovered the bodies of three more victims of sectarian murder that had been dumped around Baghdad on Tuesday.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that one of the bodies was found in the ash-Sha‘b neighborhood, a second in the al-‘Amil neighborhood, and a third in the southern Baghdad suburb of ad-Durah. All had been bound and blindfolded and showed signs of torture and all were shot to death.

Collaborator commander in Sab‘ al-Bur area killed in bomb blast.

In a dispatch posted at 6:10pm Baghdad time Tuesday evening, the Yaqen News Agency reported that ‘Abbas ad-Dulaymi, the chairman of the collaborationist “Awakening Committee” in the Sab‘ al-Bur area to the south of Baghdad, was killed when a bomb exploded in his car on Monday.

Yaqen reported an eyewitness as saying that the “Awakening” collaborationist movement accused several of ad-Dulaymi’s bodyguards of being responsible for planting the bomb in his car.

Ad-Dulaymi was driving his car at the time the bomb exploded and no one else was injured in the blast.

Bomb wounds three in Baghdad’s al-Yarmuk area Tuesday morning.

In a dispatch posted at 2:25pm Baghdad time Tuesday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded on the main road in the ad-Dakhiliyah neighborhood in Baghdad’s al-Yarmuk district before noon Tuesday.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that three people were wounded in that attack.

Mortar shell wounds two in eastern Baghdad.

In a dispatch posted at 2:25pm Baghdad time Tuesday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a mortar shell of unknown origins blasted into a residential area of al-Fadiliyah in eastern Baghdad, wounding two people.

Yaqen reported a puppet police source as saying that the wounded people ewere taken to hospital for treatment.

Explosion in eastern Baghdad Tuesday morning.

In a dispatch posted at 2:25pm Baghdad time Tuesday afternoon, the Yaqen News Agency reported that an explosion occurred on the main road in the al-Qanat Street area in the Zuyunah neighborhood of eastern Baghdad on Tuesday morning.

Yaqen reported eyewitnesses as saying that the blast occurred near the Tuesday Market in the area. One witness reported seeing plumes of smoke rising from the area and added that puppet regime forces closed off the scene after the blast, causing traffic jams.

Armed men kill two “Awakening” police collaborators in ad-Durah Tuesday morning.

In a dispatch posted at 10:20am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that armed men stormed the home of two brothers, members of the collaborationist “Awakening” police in the southern Baghdad suburb of ad-Durah on Tuesday morning.

Yaqen reported a source in the ad-Durah puppet police as saying that the attackers killed both of the collaborators on the spot.

Bomb wounds five puppet army troops in Baghdad Tuesday morning.

In a dispatch posted at 10am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by a puppet army patrol near the al-Jumhuriyah Bridge in the al-Bab ash-Sharqi district of Baghdad on Tuesday morning.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that the blast wounded four of the puppet army troops and six other people.

Bomb wounds five puppet policemen in al-Karradah.

In a dispatch posted at 10am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by a puppet police patrol near the Technology University in Baghdad’s al-Karradah district.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet police as saying that the blast wounded five patrolmen and three other people.

Salah ad-Din Province.
Al-Mushahadah.

US-backed tribal collaborator police walk off their posts on strategic highway in al-Mushahadah to protest lack of pay.

In a dispatch posted at 1:38am Baghdad time Wednesday morning, the Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq (AMSI) reported that more than 230 collaborator “Awakening” tribal policemen walked off their American-backed jobs in protest against a two-month delay in their pay.

The AMSI reported an official with the collaborationist “Awakening Council” in al-Mushahadah, 35km north of Baghadad as saying that the collaborator policemen walked away from 10 checkpoints that they were supposed to be guarding on behalf of the Americans and their puppet regime on the strategically vital main road that runs from Baghdad, through al-Mushahadah to the northern provinces of the country.

The puppet official, who refused to be identified, said that the collaborators had only received US$130 over the last two months. Each of the tribal collaborators was supposed to be receiving $300 every month in a program set up by the US occupation.

For over a year, the United States has been using money to try to create a Sunni tribal puppet police force, so as to reduce US reliance on its Shi‘i sectarian allies, many of whom have close ties with various elements in the Iranian clerical regime.

Balad.

Bomb attack targets journalists with al-Furat satellite TV station Tuesday afternoon.

In a dispatch posted at 11:15pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a bomb exploded by a car carrying broadcasters for the al-Furat satellite TV station in the city of Balad, 80km north of Baghdad on Tuesday afternoon.

Yaqen reported a source in the Salah ad-Din Province puppet police as saying that the attack left two of the broadcast team dead. Journalist Fatimah al-Hasani, the director of the news department at al-Furat was seriously wounded in the blast. She was evacuated to a hospital for treatment. The news team was on its way to visit Balad when the attack occurred.

Sulayman Bak.

Puppet regime administrator severely wounded in ambush Tuesday afternoon.

In a dispatch posted at 7:55pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that fighters armed with machine guns opened fire on the motorcade carrying Talib Muhammad Mustafa, the puppet administrator of the Sulayman Bak area near Tuz Khurmatu, about 250km north of Baghdad, on Tuesday afternoon.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet “Operations Center” for Salah ad-Din Province as saying that the armed men sprayed Mustafa’s car with a hail of bullets and then left. Mustafa and his driver were severely wounded. Both were later taken to hospital for treatment.

The Tuesday afternoon attack was the second attempt on the life of the puppet regime official in the last two weeks. Mustafa and three of his companions were wounded in a car bomb attack on his motorcade on Wednesday 6 January.

Ad-Dulu‘iyah.

Bomb kills three elementary school girls in ad-Dulu‘iyah.

In a dispatch posted on its Arabic website at 5:07pm Tuesday Beijing time (12:07pm Baghdad time), the Xinhua News Agency reported that a bomb exploded near ad-Dulu‘iyah, 97km north of Baghdad, Tuesday morning.

Xinhua reported Major Ra‘d al-Jabburi of the puppet police as claiming that the bomb went off by a group of primary school girls on their way to school to take their mid-term exams in the al-Huwayjah al-Bahriyah area to the west of ad-Dulu‘iyah. Al-Jabburi said that the blast killed three of the school girls on the spot and wounded two more of them. The girls ranged in age from seven to nine years, al-Jabburi said.

Ninwa Province.

Al-Mawsil.

Car bomber blasts US patrol in al-Mawsil Tuesday.

In a dispatch posted at 11:26am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that a car bomb exploded by a US patrol in eastern al-Mawsil.

Yaqen reported a spokesman for the puppet regime’s Ninwa Province Operations as claiming that a person drove an explosives-laden car into a US patrol in the al-Ba ‘th neighborhood of eastern al-Mawsil on Tuesday, wounding 10 civilians, some of them severely. The official spokesman for the American-installed regime offered no information regarding the nature or extent of US casualties and as of the time of reporting the Americans had made no statement on the attack.

Al-Qadisiyah Province.
Ad-Diwaniyah.

Puppet police arrest two Jaysh al-Mahdi commanders in ad-Diwaniyah Tuesday.

In a dispatch posted at 7:20pm Baghdad time Tuesday night, the Yaqen News Agency reported that puppet “Emergency Police” arrested two commanders of the pro-Iranian Jaysh al-Mahdi militia in the city of ad-Diwaniyah, 180km south of Baghdad.

Yaqen reported a source in the puppet “Emergency Police” in ad-Diwaniyah as saying that the puppet force arrested Salim Sawwadi and Nasr Sawwadi in a raid on their hom on Salim Street in the al-Jumhuri neighborhood of the city Tuesday.

In recent months the United States has been trying to reduce Iranian influence in Iraq by reversing the way it makes use of the sectarian divisions it relied on in invading and occupying the country. The US initially encouraged and supported Shi‘i sectarian clerical elements based in Iran and relied on them as supporters in the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and thereafter. But in late 2006 and especially in 2007 the US began to create Sunni collaborationist bands, many of them of tribal origin and has begun to rely on them, shifting away from the Shi‘i sectarian parties and militias.

Accordingly, the Jaysh al-Mahdi, formerly a member of the US-installed puppet regime, has become the target of US and puppet regime forces, in particular in Baghdad and the cities of southern Iraq. Americans and their Iraqi puppet regime allies have killed or captured a large number of the militia’s commanders and cadres.

Al-Basrah Province.
Al-Basrah.

Puppet police commander in al-Basrah admits: “all the crimes committed in al-Basrah were carried out by members of the police or in police cars.”

In a dispatch posted at 11:44am Baghdad time Tuesday morning, the Yaqen News Agency reported that Muhan al-Furayji, the puppet regime’s Commander of Operations in al-Basrah, had told a press conference that there are in al-Basrah 28 parties and movements, 75 percent of which maintain armed militias. The militias, he admitted, are fighting each other for power in the city.

Yaqen reported al-Furayji as saying “when we arrived in al-Basrah last year there were 15,462 policemen here. And when we would meet with the chairman of any party in the city he would act proud and say, ‘I’m the one who formed the police force,’ meaning that the police were formed by political parties, each one with its share.”

Al-Furayji went on to say: “we have statistics showing that all the crimes committed in al-Basrah were committed either by police cars or by members of the police force.” He explained that the different parties were fighting each other and that in the past four years the parties have formed armed groups recruited from unemployed persons and career criminals released by Saddam Hussein in 2002. Those parties and armed groups say that they are the authority and represent the state.”

Al-Furayji told the press conference that puppet “Prime Minister” Nuri al-Maliki – who is a member of the Shi‘i sectarian Da‘wah party – had ordered that the government agencies be brought under control of the US-backed Shi‘i factional regime in Baghdad. “We have begun to do that in actuality,” al-Furayji said, “purging the institutions of corrupt members after we found that many of them had been committing crimes.”

The puppet police commander in al-Basrah said that “one of the reasons for the deterioration of the security situation is the fight going on between the various parties.” He said that another factor was the “open land borders with neighboring countries and also the open “border” on the sea and waterways.

Al-Furayji said, however, that his regime had taken a number of measures to enhance the puppet army and security forces’ ability to impose the “rule of law” – meaning the rule of the American backed sectarian regime in Baghdad – upon the city.

Despite the picture he painted of gangster-dominated sectarian police engaging in turf wars with each other in the streets of Iraq’s southern city, the police commander asserted that the puppet regime forces had made a step forward on behalf of the regime’s security program and called for launching a stage of construction and building in the city of al-Basrah.

http://www.albasrah.net/pages/mod.php?mod=art&lapage=../en_articles_2008/0108/iraqiresistancereport_290108.htm

Sources:
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22324&3de138520598545d9da535df046e004a
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22323&7d6177dbd2795dadff4f014986f97e16
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22317&5a65df86dcda590280bb6d88488c17ec
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22310&c4e231d86b815096ed19aabf2b6215b3
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22309&abe3b901396f4752fe20a7e54245c6b3
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22307&e0dfdf87a4cac4a88bba10da5eb73458
http://www.iraq-amsi.org/news.php?action=view&id=22306&d027b45ed4fdc49c4116882be079b5bb
http://www.islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=58914
http://www.islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=58894
http://www.islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=58874
http://www.islammemo.cc/article1.aspx?id=58862
http://www.arabic.xinhuanet.com/arabic/2008-01/29/content_568841.htm
http://www.arabic.xinhuanet.com/arabic/2008-01/29/content_568789.htm
http://www.arabic.xinhuanet.com/arabic/2008-01/29/content_568720.htm
http://www.arabic.xinhuanet.com/arabic/2008-01/29/content_568688.htm
http://www.arabic.xinhuanet.com/arabic/2008-01/29/content_568279.htm
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4921
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4920
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4919
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4918
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4917
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4916
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4913
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4912
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4911
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4910
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4909
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4908
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4907
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4905
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4904
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4903
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4902
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4901
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4900
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4899
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4898
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4897
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4896
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4893
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4893
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4892
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4891
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4890
http://www.yaqen.net/?p=4889
http://www.freearabvoice.org
http://www.albasrah.net/pages/mod.php?header=res1&mod=gis&rep=rep

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Bush Administration’s 935 Lies to Iraq War Part 1 of 3

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

=== News Update ===

Bush Administration’s 935 Lies to Iraq War Part 1 of 3

Posted Jan 28, 2008 10:41 AM PST

Category: COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS

Bush Administration’s 935 Lies to Iraq War Part 2 of 3

Bush Administration’s 935 Lies to Iraq War Part 3 of 3

The Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

source : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xz9Ew1UBBj0

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Iraqi Occupation : One Day = $720 Million

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

=== News Update ===

Iraqi Occupation : One Day = $720 Million

2 Minute Video

The Iraq war has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of U.S. military personnel. It is also costing $720 Million dollars each day – dollars that could be spent in much more constructive ways.

source: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19233.htm

===

-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW

Why blame Islam? Individuals, not religions, carry out inhuman acts.

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

=== News Update ===

Why blame Islam? Individuals, not religions, carry out inhuman acts.

Dr. M. A. QAZI <drmaqazi@yahoo.com> (Jan 27, 2008)

Johnstown, PA: Islam is a religion of peace, accepted and practiced by more than 1.25 billion people worldwide. It is the fastest-growing religion in the world, and if it was what some critics claim, why should the people from all walks of life from around the world keep embracing Islam? Where is the sword now?

In Islam, a person has the right to defend himself, his family, his country or his neighbor(s), which justifies the resistance being offered by the people of Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir and Palestine, to attacks on their soils by the so-called liberators, who are actually the occupiers.

The Holy Qur’an clearly states that if a person saves one life, it’s as if he saved humanity, and if a person kills one human being, it’s as if he killed humanity.

What is happening in the enslaved Muslim countries is a natural reaction to occupation, bombings, killing and terrorizing of innocent civilians (children, old men and women), rapes, in addition to looting of resources, national antiques and artifacts, above all destruction of property by the occupiers.

Terror breeds terror.

We assure those who bash Islam that if there was no occupation in this world by foreign invaders, there would be no resistance – the so-called terror.

We would like those who criticize Islam to explain the following acts committed by the Christians on Jews, other Christians and Muslims alike, throughout history:

– Hundreds of thousands of Muslim men, women and children killed by the crusaders, who were Christians.

– Inquisition of Jews and Muslims from Spain by Queen Isabella, a Christian.

– Millions of people killed by the European and American Christians during the two world wars.

– Hundreds of thousands of Christians killed every year by the Irish Christians, including the British and the IRA, both Catholics and Protestants, during the past few centuries. Why are they not blamed to be “Christian Terrorists?”

Both of them believe in Jesus Christ, who told them to turn the other cheek, and both of them believe in the same Lord, Who commanded that “Thou shall not kill.” Period.

– Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, was a Catholic. Are all Catholics terrorists?

Last but not least, the bombings, killings, rapings and lynchings of both American Indians and black slaves (Afro-Americans) during the past 200 years in the United States. What about them?

Will those filled with hate for Islam blame Christianity for the above inhuman acts by Christians in various parts of the world since its inception?

If not, then why are they blaming the religion of Islam for what is a natural reaction to occupation of Muslim countries by foreign invaders?

Most importantly, these folks should know that the three great Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have one common basis, and that is one God Almighty.

“All men (and women) are created equal, and we all are one nation under Almighty God,” is a statement according to the Holy Qur’an and is very well elucidated in the U.S. Constitution.

Lastly, yet importantly, as brothers in humanity, we recommend those filled with hate get an education in the history of Islam and Muslims, before they dare to write nasty letters full of personal, ingrain hate and vendetta.

We would be pleased to provide anyone with free copies of the Holy Qur’an and Islamic literature in English, which would help them to understand the truth about Islam and Muslims and get rid of hate from their systems, God willing.

May God Almighty show you the light, Amen.

Dr. M. A. Qazi
President/CEO
OVERSEAS CONSULTANTS

P.O. Box 5192
Johnstown, PA 15904
United States of America

Phone: 814-262-7489
Fax: 814-266-9371
Mobile: 814-270-1422

E-mail: drmaqazi@yahoo.com; drmaqazi@hotmail.com
qazi@atlanticbb.net; drmaqazi@overseasconsultants.us

URL: http://www.overseasconsultants.us

World Wide Web Page: http://www.overseasconsultants.com

source : www.montrealmuslimnews.net

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-muslim voice-
______________________________________
BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW