UN’s Ban Ki Moon comes to the defence of Israel
By Jean Shaoul
A United Nations inquiry concluded that Israel’s military forces carried out direct and intentional strikes on its premises during the assault on Gaza earlier this year. Israel was therefore responsible for the deaths and injuries of UN personnel and civilians, as well as extensive damage to its property. The inquiry, led by Ian Martin, a former secretary general of Amnesty International, found that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) was “involved in varying degre es of negligence or recklessness with regard to United Nations premises and to the safety of United Nations staff and other civilians within those premises, with consequent deaths, injuries, and extensive physical damage and loss of property.”…
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Barghouthi on Netanyahu: Israelis looking to procrastinate for another twenty years
PNN
Benjamin Netanyahu says that the principle of two states for two peoples is “non-viable in the foreseeable future.” This is a significant risk, comments Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi of the Palestinian National Initiative and Legislative Council. Israeli settlement expansion, despite its illegality under international law, is on the rise, particularly in East Jerusalem. The Israeli government is working quickly and has expressed its “concern” over the lack of communication with the new US administration, meaning that the Obama government is not offering the full green-light. However, the Israelis have used the last period of Palestinian internal struggle and the adjustment in the US to quickly impose more facts on the ground. By the time two-states are “viable” in Netanyahu’s eyes, the notion will be an impossible one, exactly what he is looking for…
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Pelosi, Democrats & Torture
Booman Tribune
Last night on the Rachel Maddow Show the issue of the briefings Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats received on the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation techniques was a major topic of the program. Pelosi has previously admitted she had received a briefing on theenhanced interrogation techniques torture practices the CIA and the military “might use” which had been declared as legal by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, but that she was never told that torture had been, or ever would be, actually being used on terrorist suspects or other detainees. Well, yesterday, the Washington Post printed a story citing documents they received from anonymous “Intelligence Officials” claiming that Pelosi was briefed in 2002 on the torture tactics that CIA interrogators were then using against “high value” Al Qaeda prisoners…
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Hamas and Fatah are poles apart
Phil Sands
Efforts to form a unified Palestinian government look set to collapse this week, with apparently irreconcilable differences still separating Hamas from Fatah. Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who remains president of the Palestinian Authority despite his term of office having expired, is reportedly planning to ask his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, to form a new administration in the coming days. If this happens it will exclude Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement that controls the G aza Strip, and effectively undermine upcoming talks designed to bring about a coalition government…
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Netanyahu: “We will never cede the Golan Heights”
Saed Bannoura – IMEMC
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stated that Israel will never withdraw from the Golan Heights as the area is considered a “strategic advantage” in case of a military conflict with Syria, Israeli online daily, Haaretz, reported. The statements of Netanyahu came in an interview with Russian-language reporters on Thursday, and his statements were published by several Israeli Russian-language websites. Haaretz added that Netanyahu said he is n ow ready to stand up to the American President, Barack Obama, to tell him that Israel would not give up on “matters that affect Israel’s security”…
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Coalition for Jerusalem’s letter to Pope Benedict XVI
Coalition for Jerusalem
His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Your visit to the Holy Land your Holiness comes, at a time when the indigenous people of this land, both Muslims and Christians are suffering under an extremely brutal military occupation. A great injustice has smothered this land over sixty years and the people, the victims, are Still suffering its ramifications today. Israel’s continuing military occupation of Palestinian territories Since1967, has furthered thi s injustice by separating and isolating, discriminating against, killing, incarcerating, prohibiting the movement and access to the Holy places for prayer, blockading, starving and denying medical treatment of millions of Palestinians. Over 3.5 million Palestinians are still living in refugee camps, waiting with patient desperation for the implementation of their human, ethical and moral right to return to their homes…
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General Sees a Longer Stay in Iraq Cities for U.S. Troops
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The top American general in Iraq said Friday that one-fifth of American combat troops would stay behind in Iraqi cities even after the June 30 deadline that the United States and Iraq had set for the departure. The estimate by Gen. Ray Odierno, at a Pentagon briefing, was the most specific yet for the extension of American combat operations in Baghdad and Mosul. American combat troops have largely moved out of most other urban areas in Iraq, G eneral Odierno said…
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Gaza: pursuit of the laws of war
If the UN fails to further investigate crimes committed during the conflict it will ensure stalemate, and more suffering for civilians
Tom Porteous
The Israeli government and its supporters have lashed out at the report of the UN board of inquiry into Israeli attacks on UN installations during Israel’s latest offensive in Gaza. The report, they say, is biased, tendentious and inaccurate. According to Robbie Sabel, writing in Comment is Free, the “unbalanced report” does “little to bring understanding or justice to the conflict in Gaza”. The full report has not been published, but there’s little in the summary that UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon sent to the security council on Tuesday to support such claims. On the contrary, it provides careful but compelling evidence that Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) violated the laws of war during their military operations around UN installations in Gaza…
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War without Context: Fatah, Hamas and Flawed Language
Ramzy Baroud
…it’s typical to read such deceptive news reports as that of Ibrahim Barzak of the Associated Press: “Hundreds of Palestinian patients have been trapped in the Gaza Strip, unable to travel abroad for crucial treatment for cancer and other diseases, because of political infighting between Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers and their Palestinian rivals.”… Barzak makes no mention of the Israeli factor in the decried Palestinian rivalries, and the only reference to the US in his report was that of the “U.S.-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which controls the West Bank.” Is Barzak serious? Even if we willingly overlook the fact that Palestinian rivalry has little influence on Israel’s decision to block the Gaza borders, thus subjugate its inhabitants, and purposely disregarded the US-led international campaign to isolate Gaza and its government, how can one allow such a misreading of so obvious a fact: since when does Abbas “control” the West Bank? What should one make of the Israeli military occupation of several decades, the hundreds of illegal Jewish settlements, the countless checkpoints, ‘bypass roads’, numerous ‘military zones’ and the giant Israeli wall, an entire matrix of control, in fact, which has been described by many leading international observers as “apartheid”?…
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The Arabs and the US
Galal Nassar
…If the Arabs are to hone their potential effectively and up their esteem in others’ eyes they must first settle their internal differences, starting with reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. How can we possibly enter into a dialogue with our enemies when we cannot even speak with each other? How can we effectively negotiate with strangers when we are unable to reach agreement within our own ranks, leaving the field wide open for the enemy to play one of our factions off against the other? Who are those who might ally themselves with “our” cause supposed to aid and support? The advocates of peace talks or the advocates of resistance? The “moderates” or the “extremists?” To make matters worse, the Palestinian-Palestinian rift is spreading. Instead of a synthesis in Palestine, we have deepening contradictions in the rest of the Arab world, to the extent that they threaten to solidify into unbridgeable divides…
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Obama Aide Puts Israel’s Nukes in the Diplomatic Mix
Analysis by Helena Cobban*
Last month in Prague, President Barack Obama vowed that he would seek a world without nuclear weapons. On Tuesday, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller spelled out that this policy would apply to Israel, as well. Speaking at a conference on the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Gottemoeller said that “Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States.” Israel is judged to have between 100 and 200 advanced nuclear weapons either ready to deploy, or only a few minutes away from being so…
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