Iraq’s Lepers
August 9, 2008
This is why Al Jazeera is a head and shoulder above all competitors in the mainstream. You will never see something like this on CNN or BBC. As far as they are concerned, the ’surge’ is working and all’s hunky dory.
Untreated, it leaves sufferers with skin sores and weak muscles and can leave patients unable to walk. Leprosy, is a curable disease that’s been wiped out in most countries. But in Iraq – leprosy sufferers in the south are kept in appalling conditions, and receive little treatment.
Nicole Johnston has this report.
The Trial
August 4, 2008
Alexander Cockburn on the Ongoing Persecution of Sami al-Arian.
Efforts to free Sami al-Arian have now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. On July 30 an appeal was lodged with the Court by his attorneys, led by Professor Jonathan Turley.There are few prospects in the justice system so grimly awful as when the feds decide never to let go. Rebuffed in their persecutions of some target by juries, or by contrary judges, they shift ground, betray solemn agreements, dream up new stratagems to exhaust their victims, drive them into bankruptcy, despair and even suicide. They have all the money and all the time in the world.
Several months ago I wrote here about the appalling vendetta conducted by the US Justice Department against Sami al-Arian, a professor from Florida who had the book thrown at him in 2003 by Attorney General Ashcroft. As I described it back then, Dr al-Arian was charged in a bloated terrorism and conspiracy case and spent two and a half years in prison, in solitary confinement awaiting trial.
In December 2005, a Tampa jury hung 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal on nine charges. In a plea deal, the government dropped eight of them and demanded Al-Arian plead guilty to a watered-down version of one charge. Normally a hung jury with so large a number of the jurors voting for innocence would mean the prosecutors would not demand a retrial. But given the Justice Department’s vindictiveness in this case and that it might insist on just such hugely expensive and protracted proceedings, Al-Arian’s lawyers urged him to accept the offer. Under the plea agreement—which the government betrayed—Dr. Al-Arian pled guilty to one charge of providing nonviolent services to people associated with a designated terrorist organization.
Israeli Strip Searches
August 3, 2008
Letting AP in on the Secret – the indefatigable Alison Weir who last year had produced an important report on the Israeli strip searching of children follows up with more on the IOF’s sordid practices.
On June 26th a young Palestinian photojournalist named Mohammed Omer was returning home from a triumphant European tour.
In London he had been awarded the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for journalism – the youngest recipient ever and one of the few non-Britons ever to receive the prestigious prize.
In Greece he had been given the 2008 journalism award for courage by the Union of Greek Journalists and had been invited to speak before the Greek parliament.
In Britain, the Netherlands, Greece, and Sweden he had met with Parliament Members and been interviewed on major radio and TV stations.
In the US several years before, he had been named the first recipient of the New America Media’s Best Youth Voice award.
The Vigilante State
July 21, 2008
Ali Abunimah’s brief on Collective Punishment and Collective Impunity in Israel, for the Palestine Center Information.
The blood of the victims is screaming out at us; the blood of the innocent is calling on all of us to wake up; to make the Arabs of east Jerusalem realize that terrorism comes with a price. A painful price. A price paid by the terrorist’s family, his relatives, brothers, and brothers-in-law.
The above quote was written by an Israeli journalist in the largest circulation daily Yediot Aharonot a day after Hussam Dwaiyat, a 30-year-old Palestinian from occupied East Jerusalem, ran a bulldozer into several vehicles in Jerusalem, overturning a bus, killing three people and injuring several dozen others.1 Calling for “collective punishment,” the commentator added, “It has to be the kind of punishment that has a revenge component.” Meanwhile, dozens of Israeli protestors gathered outside the Dwaiyat family home in the Sur Bahir neighborhood chanting, “Right here, right now, destroy this house.”2
These sentiments were not marginal; they reflected the mood of Israeli political and military leaders, many of whom declared Palestinians to be collectively guilty and called for measures of collective punishment against Dwaiyat’s relatives, specifically, and the Palestinian civilian population more generally.
This paper examines Israel’s use of collective punishment of Palestinians and its affording of collective immunity to Israeli Jews who commit crimes against Palestinians.
Israeli Executioners
July 20, 2008
Imagine how the press would react if this were a Chinese soldier shooting a Tibetan like that.
An Israeli human rights group has just released graphic video footage obtained during clashes between Israeli troops and demonstrators protesting against the separation barrier on the West Bank. The video has sparked outrage, as it shows what appears to be an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian at close range. Al Jazeera’s Emma Hayward reports.
Fortress Britain
June 26, 2008
Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008
__________________________________
“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.
In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
Read the rest of this entry »
Atrocity Without Borders
May 17, 2008
Damadola, in Bajaur, Pakistan struck by 2-drone missiles; US suspected to be behind bombing
More Here
Where Are the Suicide Bombers?
April 22, 2008
Strong stuff, from Amira Hass (via Norman Finkelstein)
In the middle of November a new method of “smuggling” Palestinians into Israel was exposed: in the northern Jordan Valley, two cars from East Jerusalem disguised to look “police-like” were used in an attempt to transport Palestinians without permits through the Bezek crossing. The same week a private smuggling attempt from the West Bank to Israel came to light: a woman was transporting someone concealed in her car, and by her behaviour she aroused the suspicions of soldiers at a checkpoint. This was reported in passing on the radio, as a curiosity. Neither of the two incidents represented a security danger; they were merely additional attempts by unemployed people to work in Israel. There are probably hundreds like them every month, who have not yet been discovered en route to “infiltration” into Israel in a desperate search for livelihood and food for their children. It could even be added: while heroically endangering themselves.
The discovery of a breach in the “separation wall” immediately sets off security alarms in Israeli ears. If those routes are known to workers, then they are probably also known to organizations that espouse suicide bombing. Can the fact that those routes have not been used lately to send suicide bombers be attributed only to the activities of Shabak [Israel's internal intelligence agency and security police -- trans.], or is it due in part — or perhaps mainly — to the fact that the various organizations have changed their approach? Or maybe there is something more: there are organizations and splinters of organizations that are probably looking for candidates for suicide attacks. But today, unlike in the past, the atmosphere of support for suicide attacks — which was motivated mainly by the desire to avenge the many civilians that the IDF killed immediately after September 2000 — is not prevalent.
Holy Land, Unholy Deeds
April 20, 2008
Mario Vargas Llosa, the famous Peruvian author, on ‘How Arabs have been driven out of Hebron‘. I may not like Vargas Llosa’s politics — once a progressive, he made a sharp move to the right after a fistfight with Gabriel Garcia Marquez — but he is without a doubt one of Latin America’s greatest authors.
Hebron is the image of desolation and pain. I’m talking of the H-2 sector, the oldest part of this ancient city, which is under Israeli military control and where some 500 colonos – settlers – live in four settlements. It is one of the holiest places of Judaism and Islam, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where in February 1994, the settler Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned Muslims at prayer, killing 29 and wounding dozens.
To protect these settlers, the zone bristles with barriers, camps and military posts, and is overrun by Israeli patrols. But such mobilisation will soon be unnecessary because this part of Hebron, subject to ethnic and religious cleansing, will soon have no Arab residents.
A Double Standard
April 14, 2008
Palestinians versus Tibetans. ‘Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet‘, writes Gideon Levy. Neither, I might add, have people in the US. All the arguments by Levy — whom I consider a true moral giant — also apply to the US liberal champions of Darfur. (thanks Paulo)
Israelis have no moral right to fight the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The president of the Israeli Friends of the Tibetan People, the psychologist Nahi Alon, who was involved in the murder of two Palestinians in Gaza in 1967 — as was revealed in Haaretz Magazine last weekend — chose to make his private “atonement” by fighting to free Tibet, of all places. He is not alone among Israelis calling to stop the occupation — but not ours. No small number of other good Israelis have recently joined the wave of global protest that broke out over the Olympics, set to take place in Beijing this summer. It is easy; it engenders no controversy — who would not be in favor of liberating Tibet? But that is not the fight that Israeli human rights supporters should be waging.
To fight for Tibet, Israel needs no courage, because there is no price to pay. On the contrary, this is part of a fashionable global trend, almost as much as the fight against global warming or the poaching of sea lions.
