When Peace Beckons, Threaten Holocaust
February 29, 2008
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| Palestinian medics carry a wounded child after an Israeli missile destroyed the labor union headquarters in Gaza, 28 February 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
‘Israeli minister threatens “holocaust” as public demand ceasefire talks‘, writes Ali Abunimah of the excellent Electronic Intifada.
Israeli officials began damage limitation efforts after the country’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip with a “holocaust.”
The comments came a day after Israeli occupation forces killed 31 Palestinians, nine of them children, one a six-month-old baby, in a series of air raids across the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that the attacks were in retaliation for a barrage of rockets fired by resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip which killed one Israeli in the town of Sderot on Wednesday, 27 February. Palestinian resistance groups, including Hamas, said the rockets were in retaliation for the extrajudicial execution of five Hamas members carried out by Israel on Wednesday morning. Israeli occupation forces have killed more than 200 Palestinians since the US-sponsored Annapolis peace summit last November. In the same period, five Israelis have been killed by Palestinians.
BBC’s Holocaust Denial
February 29, 2008
BBC published a report on its website entitled “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’” where Israel’s deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai was repoted threatening Gaza with a ‘holocaust’. However, if you visit the same report now, you will notice that the headline has been modified to read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster’”. This is clever: an Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable for those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s Nazi-like behavior. The ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the current headline shifts culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militans’ instead. (I just checked and BBC has changed the headline yet again to now read “Israel warns of invasion of Gaza”; checkout the excellent NewsSniffer to keep track of any further changes to the original report).
Sadly for the BBC, some of us keep an eye. Search for the original article and you’ll notice that it is still there in the cache. But once you click on it, you will be transferred to the santizied page. I have taken a screen shot, just in case.
BBC is a truly transnational agent; while its operations are underwritten by the British taxpayer, it frequently serves as a propaganda organ for a foreign state.
STV Evidence of Sheridan Witch-hunt
February 28, 2008
STV have obtained statistics on perjury cases that further suggest socialist politician Tommy Sheridan, his friends and family are the victims of a political witch-hunt.
stv news can reveal the perjury investigation into Tommy Sheridan has topped the million pound mark. Forty thousand police hours have been spent on the probe which is the first perjury case at Lothian and Borders in nine years. Crown Office figures suggest perjury cases arising out of civil trials are virtually non -existant.
The Three Trillion Dollar War
February 28, 2008
Aida Edemariam meets Joseph Stiglitz to assess ‘the true cost of war’. ‘In 2005, a Nobel prize-winning economist began the painstaking process of calculating the true cost of the Iraq war. In his new book, he reveals how short-sighted budget decisions, cover-ups and a war fought in bad faith will affect us all for decades to come’. (Also check out Democracy Now‘s in depth coverage of the subject)
Fitful spring sunshine is warming the neo-gothic limestone of the Houses of Parliament, and the knots of tourists wandering round them, but in a basement cafe on Millbank it is dark, and quiet, and Joseph Stiglitz is looking as though he hasn’t had quite enough sleep. For two days non-stop he has been talking – at the LSE, at Chatham House, to television crews – and then he is flying to Washington to testify before Congress on the subject of his new book. Whatever their reservations – and there will be a few – representatives will have to listen, because not many authors with the authority of Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winner in economics, an academic tempered by four years on Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and another three as chief economist at the World Bank (during which time he developed an influential critique of globalisation), will have written a book that so urgently redefines the terms in which to view an ongoing conflict. The Three Trillion Dollar War reveals the extent to which its effects have been, and will be, felt by everyone, from Wall Street to the British high street, from Iraqi civilians to African small traders, for years to come.
And It Grinds On…
February 28, 2008
‘Missile Kills 13 in Pakistan‘, Reuters reports. While everyone is hailing the return of ‘secular democracy’ to Pakistan, they forget that these are precisely the kleptocrats the ravages of whose rule had led the nation to welcome the dictator when he overthrew them. If these extrajudicial assassinations continue, the insurgency is only like to spread further East.
WANA, Pakistan, Feb 28 (Reuters) – A missile struck a house in a Pakistani region known as being a safe haven for al Qaeda early on Thursday, killing 13 suspected militants including foreigners, intelligence officials and residents said.
The attack took place near Kaloosha village in the South Waziristan tribal region on the Afghan border.
“The blast shook the entire area,” said resident Behlool Khan.
The World’s Most Wanted
February 27, 2008
Noam Chomsky on International Terrorism.
On Feb. 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hezbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”
Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as “one of the U.S. and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, “A militant wanted the world over,” an accompanying story reported that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 and so ranked only second among “the most wanted militants in the world.”
Still no Justice for October 2000 Killings
February 27, 2008
A few years back when an Israeli officer emptied his magazine into a 13-year-old Palestinian school girl, the international outrage resulted in the officer being sentenced. This duly made headlines. However, shortly afterwards the officer was released and handed $17,000 for the distress caused him. As the following report from Jonathan Cook reveals, such incidents are not an anomaly, but emblematic of ‘justice’ as conceived in Israel.
On 2 October 2000, as the Israeli army was beginning its ruthless crackdown on the second intifada in the occupied territories, 17-year-old Aseel Asleh joined tens of thousands of other Palestinian citizens across Israel in taking to the streets in protest and in a show of solidarity with their kin across the Green Line.
A firm believer in nonviolence, Asleh wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a prominent Jewish and Arab coexistence group, Seeds of Peace, as he marched alongside family, friends and neighbors through his town of Arrabeh in northern Israel.
Fanatics, Mountebanks and Drillers
February 26, 2008
A Bloody Oil Film. Saul Landau and Farah Hassan on There Will Be Blood.
“There Will Be Blood” implicitly warns against fanatics in an era when one form of that breed occupies the White House and other major mountebanks consume countless daily hours of TV and radio time.
“I see the worst in people,” confesses self-made oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in director Paul Thomas Anderson’s gritty California epic, “There Will Be Blood.” This statement alone should warn audiences that they should proceed cautiously before identifying with this protagonist. The opening of the film shows a minutes-long, no-dialogue sequence of Plainview mining for silver under harsh conditions and breaking a leg without uttering a complaint. So intensely does he feel the need to find mineral wealth that extreme physical suffering offers no obstacle. The abrasive sounds of mining and the sight of men working invoke John Huston’s “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” “Blood” should remind studios that audiences don’t need flashy cuts or intricately choreographed violence and special effects to get lured into the drama of a movie.
The Calm Before the Conflagration
February 26, 2008
Chris Hedges on the explosive new developments in Iraq.
The United States is funding and in many cases arming the three ethnic factions in Iraq—the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs. These factions rule over partitioned patches of Iraqi territory and brutally purge rival ethnic groups from their midst. Iraq no longer exists as a unified state. It is a series of heavily armed fiefdoms run by thugs, gangs, militias, radical Islamists and warlords who are often paid wages of $300 a month by the U.S. military. Iraq is Yugoslavia before the storm. It is a caldron of weapons, lawlessness, hate and criminality that is destined to implode. And the current U.S. policy, born of desperation and defeat, means that when Iraq goes up, the U.S. military will have to scurry like rats for cover.
The supporters of the war, from the Bush White House to Sen. John McCain, tout the surge as the magic solution. But the surge, which primarily deployed 30,000 troops in and around Baghdad, did little to thwart the sectarian violence. The decline in attacks began only when we bought off the Sunni Arabs. U.S. commanders in the bleak fall of 2006 had little choice. It was that or defeat. The steady rise in U.S. casualties, the massive car bombs that tore apart city squares in Baghdad and left hundreds dead, the brutal ethnic cleansing that was creating independent ethnic enclaves beyond our control throughout Iraq, the death squads that carried out mass executions and a central government that was as corrupt as it was impotent signaled catastrophic failure.
Pariah or Prophet?
February 26, 2008
I am delighted to hear that Ralph Nader is running for president once again. While the Democrats have rushed to denounce him, frankly, they have only a slim chance of beating McCain if they continue on their present Republican-lite course. Nader’s entry should help liven up the debate and put Democrats on the spot.
Here is Chris Hedge from February 2007 explaining why he’d be supporting a Nader candidacy should he run again.
I can’t imagine why Ralph Nader would run again. He has been branded as an egomaniac, blacklisted by the media, plunged into debt by a Democratic Party machine that challenged his ballot access petitions and locked him out of the presidential debates. Most of his friends and supporters have abandoned him, and he is almost universally reviled for throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
I can’t imagine why he would want to go through this one more time. But when Nader hinted in San Francisco that he might run if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee, I knew I would be working for his campaign if he indeed entered the race. He understands that American democracy has become a consumer fraud and that if we do not do battle with the corporations that, in the name of globalization, are cannibalizing the country for profit, our democratic state is doomed.
