Peace and Justice Post

By Ghali Hassan | Axis of Logic exclusive, Mar 5, 2008,

In response to Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s terror, Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defence minister, threatened Palestinian with a holocaust. Vilnai told Israeli Army Radio: “[the Palestinians] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah (holocaust) because we will use all our might to defend ourselves”. An occupying power (aggressor) has no right to self-defence. The deliberate killing of innocent and defenceless Palestinians is not self-defence; it is terrorism.

For nearly sixty years, Jews – Israeli in particular –, have exclusively used the word “holocaust” to describe crimes committed against Jews by the Nazis, ignoring the Nazi’s millions of none-Jewish victims. The holocaust is not only being used as a Zionist tool (a weapon) to shield Israel from any criticism, but also to manipulate the public and gain Israel sympathy as a “victim state”. In addition, Israeli leaders use the holocaust as a justification for ongoing Israel’s terror and war crimes against the Palestinian people. The creation of Israel brought unimaginable suffering on the Palestinian people and turned them into holocaust victims.

According to Gaza-based journalist Mohammed Omar of rafahtoday.org, at least 130 Palestinians, including 39 children and 10 women were murdered by the Israeli army in the last days of February 2008. Even babies as young as six-month-old are targeted by Israel’s terror. In addition, more than 370 children were injured. Only one Israeli settler and two Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian resisting Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza, the perfect pretext for mass murder of Palestinians. The home-made Palestinian rockets used by the Palestinian Resistance are nothing compared with the F-16s bombers, helicopter missiles, cluster bombs and artillery shells used by the Israeli war machine against defenceless Palestinian population under brutal occupation.

Continued . . .

China View, March 5, 2008

RAMALLAH, March 5 (Xinhua) — Israeli troops arrested 27Palestinians in West Bank on Wednesday as part of overnight raids that the army carried out on a near-daily basis, Palestinian security sources said.

Eleven Palestinians were arrested in Jenin, seven in Qalqilya, four near Nablus and five in Ramallah city, the sources said, adding that the Israeli army cordoned off Qalqilya without revealing the reasons.

Israel arrested scores of Palestinians in regular incursions in the occupied West Bank, saying the people were detained for interrogation and many of them were wanted by Israel.

The detentions did not scale down despite efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

US Maintains Ships in Mediterranean As Regional Tensions Mount

PAULINE JELINEK | Wiredipatch.com, March 5, 2008 EST

AP News

The U.S. Navy switched out warships patrolling in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, maintaining a show of strength during a period of tensions with Syria and political uncertainty in Lebanon.
Officials said it was a routine, planned deployment but it was an action sure to draw attention in the Mideast, where an announcement on U.S. presence last week caused a political stir in Lebanon.

The USS Cole guided missile destroyer and support ships passed through the Suez Canal at midday Wednesday, heading from the Mediterranean Sea into the Red Sea, canal officials said. In Washington, a Navy official said the Cole had been relieved by the guided missile destroyer USS Ors and the guided missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.

Both the canal official and navy official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of talking about ship movements.

“It’s a sign of our commitment to stability in the region … a stabilizing force and commitment to our allies,” Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday of the U.S. presence.

“I think it prevents miscalculations,” he told Pentagon reporters.

The deployment of the USS Cole had sparked criticism from Hezbollah and from pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon, who are locked in a political standoff with the pro-U.S. government. It also sparked criticism from Syria.

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora has said his government did not ask for the ships and that they were not in territorial waters. Some in his coalition said they were surprised by the deployment.

Continued . . .

This week’s Russian elections were “limited” and “less than free and fair”, according to western monitors. The last elections in Iraq, by contrast, were “a triumph for democracy”. The forthcoming elections in Zimbabwe and Iran have been pre-emptively dismissed as a travesty. Those in Pakistan were, by general consent, an affirmation of freedom.

Democracies are like two-year-olds: adorable when they belong to you, but you never see them as others do. Downing Street had a problem with the new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, since the procedure by which he was chosen was little short of feudal. Yet Gordon Brown could hardly slap him on the back as the victor in some great electoral tourney. Medvedev might hit back with a joke about western leaders also being slid into office by friends and predecessors – and at least he had an election of sorts. The British prime minister wisely muttered something noncommittal and put down the phone.

We are in the midst of an astonishing festival of elections in countries as diverse as Russia, Pakistan, Iran, Taiwan, Kenya, Georgia, Armenia, Cyprus, Thailand, Serbia, Zimbabwe, Spain and Italy. And then there is the daddy of them all, America’s primaries. Only one generalisation can be made of them, that no generalisation applies.

Democracy is the new Christianity. It is the chosen faith of western civilisation, and carrying it abroad is the acceptable face of the Crusader spirit. In reinterpreting Tony Blair’s interventionism, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, spoke recently of the west’s “mission” to promote democracy, even by economic and military warfare. With his eyes fixed on Iraq and Afghanistan, Miliband contrived both to assert that “we cannot impose democratic norms” and then demand that we do just that.

Continued . . .

Jurist, March 3, 2008
Joshua Pantesco

[JURIST] UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak [UN profile] told AP on Sunday that multiple sources have confirmed that the US detained terror suspects at the US military base on the British island of Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003, a claim which the US has previously denied. According to Nowak, his sources are “credible” and include former detainees at Diego Garcia.

Nowak’s claim directly conflicts with a statement [text; AP report] made by US CIA Director Michael Hayden [official profile] last Thursday:

There has been speculation in the press over the years that CIA had a holding facility on Diego Garcia. That is false. There have also been allegations that we transport detainees for the purpose of torture. That, too, is false. Torture is against our laws and our values. And, given our mission, CIA could have no interest in a process destined to produce bad intelligence.

Last Thursday, UK Secretary of State David Miliband [official profile; BBC profile] retracted a previous statement that no US military planes had ever stopped at Diego Garcia to refuel during extraordinary rendition flights [JURIST news archive] and admitted that US planes had stopped at Diego Garcia [JURIST report]. Miliband also said that “the US Government has assured us that no US detainees have ever been held on Diego Garcia.” Nowak first reported the Diego Garcia allegations [JURIST report] in 2005. AP has more.

• Ian Black, Middle East editor
• The Guardian,
• Thursday March 6 2008

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are living through their worst humanitarian crisis since the 1967 war because of the severe restrictions imposed by Israel since the Islamist movement Hamas seized power, a report says today.Movement is all but impossible and supplies of food and water, sewage treatment and basic healthcare can no longer be taken for granted. The economy has collapsed, unemployment is expected to rise to 50%, hospitals are suffering 12-hour power cuts and schools are failing – all creating a “humanitarian implosion”, according to a coalition of eight UK humanitarian and human rights groups.

The data was collated before the recent escalation in Hamas rocket fire and Israel’s incursion, which saw 106 Palestinians, at least half of them civilians, killed in five days alone. One Israeli civilian and two soldiers were killed in the same period.

The situation in Gaza is “man-made, completely avoidable, and with the necessary political will can be reversed”, say the groups, which include Oxfam, Amnesty and Save the Children.

Continued . . . 

 Spiked, March 5, 2008

The apparent rise of religion, and the crisis in secular thinking that it implies, has been a recurring theme at discussions held by the Institute of Ideas in recent years. One of the most intriguing aspects of this is the fact that the mantle of ‘radicalism’ seems to have passed from secular politics to religion. This is the focus of the second in a series of three debates on religion and secularism organised by the Institute of Ideas in partnership with the Bishopsgate Institute in London, which takes place tomorrow evening. I’ll be arguing that the best response to religious radicalism is not a plea for moderation, but rather a dose of radical thinking in politics.

Karl Marx famously described religion as ‘the opium of the masses’, something that gave solace to the oppressed and downtrodden, but which offered little in the way of solutions to their problems. Indeed, in modern history religion has generally been a conservative force, reconciling people to the status quo and their place within it, and with a few exceptions religious leaders have either endorsed secular authority, or acted as a pacifying influence on rebellious elements. It is historically unusual, then, that religion today is associated with political radicalism.

Continued . . .

Khaleej Times, March 5, 2008

(AFP)

ISMAILIYA, Egypt – A US warship deployed off the coast of Lebanon has passed through the Suez Canal and is heading for the Gulf, an official with the canal authority told AFP.

“The USS Cole has crossed the Suez Canal and is making its way to the Gulf,” the official said.

The United States sent the guided-missile destroyer to waters off the coast of Lebanon on February 28, in what US officials said was “a show of support for regional stability” amid concerns over Lebanon’s protracted political crisis.

During a stop in Cairo on Tuesday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the deployment of the destroyer off Lebanon was aimed at “defending (US) interests and the interests of its allies.”

Lebanon has been without a president since last November amid political feuding between the Western-backed ruling parliamentary majority and the opposition, backed by Syria and Iran.

The majority accuses Syria of blocking efforts to elect a new president in Lebanon, which was under Syrian military domination for 29 years until Damascus withdrew its troops in April 2005.

The pro-Syrian Hezbollah last week slammed the presence of the Cole as military interference and the Western-backed government insisted it did not ask for the warship to be sent.

 Lucinda Marshall /Dissident Voice, March 5th, 2008

As women throughout the world gather to observe International Women’s Day on this, the 100th anniversary of the New York City Bread and Roses March, they do so in the face of a seemingly intractable culture of impunity that enables increasingly horrendous acts of violence against women.

In Kenya, women are being gang-raped in refugee camps. In Afghanistan, young girls are forced into marriage. In Mexico and Guatemala women continue to disappear, the victims of brutal rapes and murder. In Iraq, women are being indiscriminately killed in the name of male honor. In the U.S. military, women are more likely to be assaulted by their fellow soldiers than by any enemy. The list, truly, is endless.

Continued . . .

Ilan Pappe, The Electronic Intifada, March 5, 2008

Mourners stand beside the body of Salsabeel Abu Jalhoumm, a 21-month-old girl who was killed early on Sunday when an Israeli air strike hit near her home in the northern Gaza Strip, 2 March 2008. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) In several articles published by The Electronic Intifada, I claimed that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while continuing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. I asserted that the genocidal policies are a result of a lack of strategy. The argument was that since the Israeli political and military elites do not know how to deal with the Gaza Strip, they opted for a knee-jerk reaction in the form of massive killing of citizens whenever the Palestinians in the Strip dared to protest by force their strangulation and imprisonment. The end result so far is the escalation of the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians — more than one hundred in the first days of March 2008, unfortunately validating the adjective “genocidal” I and others attached to these policies. But it was not yet a strategy. However, in recent weeks a clearer Israeli strategy towards the Gaza Strip’s future has emerged and it is part of the overall new thinking about the fate of the occupied territories in general. It is in essence, a refinement of the unilateralism adopted by Israel ever since the collapse of the Camp David “peace talks” in the summer of 2000. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, his party Kadima, and his successor Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, delineated very clearly what unilateralism entailed: Israel would annex about 50 percent of the West Bank, not as a homogeneous chunk of it, but as the total space of the settlement blocs, the apartheid roads, the military bases and the “national park reserves” (which are no-go areas for Palestinians). This was more or less implemented in the last eight years. These purely Jewish entities cut the West Bank into 11 small cantons and sub-cantons. They are all separated from each other by this complex colonial Jewish presence. The most important part of this encroachment is the greater Jerusalem wedge that divides the West Bank into two discrete regions with no land connection for the Palestinians.  Continued . . .