No hope left
Saleh Al-Naami
“I challenge Ismail Haniyeh or Mahmoud Abbas to be able to live under the circumstances I do for just three days. I’m certain that if they experienced my circumstances for just this short time, they would end the dialogue farce so as to put an end to this miserable reality,” says journalist Mohamed Al-Jamal, whose house in the southern Gaza Strip’s Rafah City was destroyed on the second day of the recent Israeli war on Gaza. Until now he has no shelter for himself and his family and has to stay with relatives. Al-Jamal doesn’t hesitate to hold Hamas and Fatah — and their leaders — responsible for the miserable situation he, his displaced family, and tens of thousands of other Palestinians are in. He told Al-Ahram Weekly, “If these leaders had the slightest sense of responsibility towards the Palestinian people, and particularly the families who have undergone the catastrophe of having their houses destroyed, they would have ended the rift between them and led the national dialogue to success.”…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53596
|
|
Israeli Refusal to Cooperate With United Nations Investigation Represents an Attempt to Shield Alleged War Criminals from Justice
PCHR – Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is concerned at recent Israeli statements implying that the State of Israel will not cooperate with the independent investigation established by the United Nations Human Rights Council. The investigation is led by Justice Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal f or the former Yugoslavia, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Both tribunals were established by the United Nations Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. The independent fact finding mission is mandated to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law, related to the recent 23 day Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53600
|
|
CIA Watchdog Report Says Detainees Died During Interrogations
Jason Leopold
…In an interview with Harper’s magazine last year, Mayer said Helgerson “investigated several alleged homicides involving CIA detainees” and forwarded several of those cases “to the Justice Department for further consideration and potential prosecution.” “Why have there been no charges filed? It’s a question to which one would expect that Congress and the public would like some answers,” Mayer said. “Sources suggested to me that… it is highly uncomfortable for top Bush Justice officials to prosecute these cases because, inevitably, it means shining a light on what those same officials sanctioned.” In her book, The Dark Side, Mayer wrote that Helgerson was “looking into at least three deaths of CIA-held prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq.”…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53601
|
|
A new Palestinian patient die due to siege
Sameh A. Habeeb
Siege on the Gaza Strip is still chasing Palestinian to death. A Palestinian man mid of his fifties died an hour ago due to inability of getting the needed medication and treatment. Nai’m El Ejla, 58, turned to be severely sick directly after the war on Gaza. Doctors in Gaza failed in diagnosing his case which was vague till the death. He was stuck on the borders with Egypt many times. He tried to travel to Israel for treatment but failed too.
Ebrahim, 24, journalist from Gaza and son of Mr. Nai’m reported for the Palestine Telegraph of his father’s death…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53598
|
|
Boycott campaign urges Iran to cut ties with settlement-linked companies
Ma’an News
Palestinian civil society groups called on Tehran to cut ties with two French companies profiting from work in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday. A day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took center stage as a critic of Israel at a UN conference in Geneva , the Palestinian Campaign for Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) criticized Iran for business ties with Veolia Environment and Alstrom. Acco rding to the Tehran Times, the Tehran Municipality is involved in negotiations with Veolia Environment for the development of the city’s urban transport system. Alstom has a headquarters in Tehran and received a number of large contracts, including a 192 million euro contract with Iran’s state railways in 1999 and a larger 375 million euro contract to supply 50 turbo compressors to Iran in 2002…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53597
|
|
Lieberman tells Russian newspaper: U.S. will accept any Israeli decision
Lily Galili and Barak Ravid, Haaretz
The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office. “Believe me, America accepts all our decisions,” Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets. Lieberman granted his first major interview to Alexander Rosensaft, the Israel correspondent of one of the oldest Russian dailies, not to an Israeli newspaper. The role of Israel is to “bring the U.S. and Russia closer,” he declared. During the interview, Lieberman said Iran is not Israel’s biggest strategic threat; rather, Afghanistan and Pakistan are…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53595
|
|
Obama’s adviser in Trinidad: the real face of “change”
Bill Van Auken
One telling measure of the real nature of the “change” that Obama is bringing to US-Latin American relations is the selection of his chief adviser for the Trinidad summit, Jeffrey Davidow. A career foreign service officer, Davidow was assigned in 1971 to the US embassy in Chile as a political officer, a post often occupied by covert CIA agents. He remained in the country until 1974. This covered the period of the preparation of the US-backed military co up against the elected government of President Salvador Allende in September 1973 and the consolidation of General Augusto Pinochet’s junta through bloody political repression…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53594
|
|
Connecting CIA Torture to Abu Ghraib
Robert Parry
… Most significantly, the Bush administration let the interrogation policy spill over into U.S.-occupied Iraq, where ambushes of American and allied troops were regarded as the legal and moral equivalent of terrorist attacks against civilians on U.S. soil, one of the memos, dated May 30, 2005, makes clear. That belief, in turn, appears to have set the stage for the Abu Ghaib prison abuse scandal. The memo – written by Steven Bradbury, then acting head of the Justice Depa rtment’s Office of Legal Counsel – describes the criteria for identifying a “high value” detainee who would be a candidate for “enhanced interrogation techniques.” While describing the supposedly restrictive nature of the criteria, Bradbury actually reveals how broad the category was…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53593
|
|
Internal contradictions
Fatah remains rife with discord, its leaders stumbling along the road of the Palestinian cause
Khaled Amayreh
Despite numerous promises and assurances for political reform within the Fatah movement, the mainstream faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) is still unable to hold its long overdue Sixth Congress. The last time the supposedly annual Fatah convention was held was in Algiers in 1988 when Yasser Arafat declared the “independence of Palestine”. Fatah leaders, inclu ding its formal leader Mahmoud Abbas, and Secretary-General Ahmed Qurei, have been vowing to hold the Sixth Congress for several years. However, no sooner had a date for holding the conference been designated than postponement was decided due to “unforeseen circumstances” and “in order to ensure the success of the conference”. The recurrent — and seemingly endless — postponements have created a lot of frustration and disenchantment within Fatah’s rank and file, especially at the grassroots and intermediate levels. Activists and regional leaders have been accusing the “leadership” of flying in the face of the movement and preferring to appease certain regional and external powers…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53602
|
|
Piracy off the Promised Land: The Ramming of the Dignity with Clear Lethal Intent
David Halpin
…Wide publicity has been given to piracy in Somalian waters since Captain Phillips of the American-crewed Maersk Alabama was captured. The arrival of a US missile cruiser and US destroyer added the tension and glamour required by the Hollywood confederation. The killing of three young Somalians and the release of the captain provided the blood and the triumph for the star spattered banner. Piracy in the Gulf of Aden and along the long shoreline of Somalia started in 1995 in response to rapacious fishing, mostly by Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean vessels. The dumping of toxic waste by European nations stoked more resentment.1 Foreign fishing boats were the first targets but when these got protection from local warlords, the Somalian pirates turned to commercial and cruise shipping. With at least 20,000 vessels on passage they had plenty to choose from. Since the US navy Seals shot their men, over sixty more seamen have been taken hostage. Why is it that little is heard of the piracy off the coast of the Zionist entity and the strip it dominates called Gaza? In contrast to the actions of young Muslim fishermen from an impoverished and broken Somalian nation, the entity carries out its piracy under the title of the Israeli Occupation Force, out of a country with the greatest wealth and with the pretense of a fully fledged legal system…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53591
|
|
Gaza artists deliver hope out of the womb of destruction
Iqbal Tamimi
Israel should realize by now that the Palestinian nation is indestructible. A nation that was born from the womb of a great civilization is hard to defeat regardless of the methods or the variety of arms used to attack them. Nothing ever will break their spirit. Israel keeps destroying and Palestinians keep rising up from the ashes, green and willing to rebuild. Israel has bombed everything in Gaza during the latest 21 day assault including hospitals an d the only museum in the Strip. But the artists of Gaza who even do not have any materials to experiment with, have been able to make their statement heard out of the rubble…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53590
|
|
The Corporate Media and Critical Thinking in Education
Kim Petersen
In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s hapless protagonist Winston Smith is required to iterate the Party slogan: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”1 Orwell adumbrated a world where past and present are controlled by the message. The corporate media, marketing world, and others also realized the power of the dominant message. Hence, it is not surprising that those with a vested interest wou ld seek to control the message. One way of doing this is to control the media for, as Marshall McLuhan popularized decades ago, “The medium is the message….
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53589
|
|
Signs of worsening malnutrition among Gazan children
IRIN
Rising poverty, unemployment and food insecurity in Gaza, compounded by the recent 23-day Israeli offensive, have increased the threat of child malnutrition, say UN agencies, health ministry officials and healthcare NGOs in Gaza. UN World Health Organization (WHO) officials are concerned by the warning signs, including rising malnutrition indicators – like increased cases of stunting, wasting and underweight children – and continuing high rates of anaemia among chi ldren and pregnant women. A Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)/World Food Programme (WFP) qualitative food security assessment for Gaza in 2008 and early 2009 points to increasing food insecurity compared to 2007, said FAO food security adviser Erminio Saco based in Jerusalem; and according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) food acquisition and energy consumption in Gaza declined by 10 percent between 2005 and 2007…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53587
|
|
Prominent Lawmaker Caught Up In AIPAC Scandal
By Daniel Luban
A U.S. government investigation of Israeli spying caught a prominent Democratic congresswoman discussing what is alleged to be a “quid pro quo” deal involving the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Washington’s powerful hawkish pro-Israel lobby. Representative Jane Harman of California was recorded in 2005 on a National Security Administration (NSA) wiretap promising a suspected Israeli agent that she would intervene on behalf of two AIPAC staffe rs accused of passing classified information to the Israeli government, and her interlocutor responded by promising to help get Harman appointed to a top congressional intelligence post, according to an article published Sunday by Congressional Quarterly (CQ)…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53586
|
|
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY ~~ HOW QUICKLY THE LESSONS ARE FORGOTTEN
Desertpeace
It is difficult to not remember the holocaust if you live in Israel…. it is not something that occurred in history, it is something that is unfolding right here, right now. We read of the horrors in our history books…. we continue reading about them in our daily newspaper reports… ‘NEVER TO FORGIVE….. NEVER TO FORGET’ ‘NEVER AGAIN’. Those are two of the most famous quotes associated with the holocaust. Two quotes that have completely lost there meaning. They are literally shoved down our throats every day by the ADL and other groups associated with AIPAC…. not in the context of what they mean…. but as justification of the crimes committed by the zionists today…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53585
|
|
Israel Reinstates Punitive House Demolitions
Valentina Azarov for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)
A house demolition in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher.
The Israeli government has been demolishing houses in East Jerusalem and across the West Bank and Gaza Strip since it commenced its belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territories in 1967. There are three main types of house demolitions: operation, administrative and punitive. The last type is not only the most barbaric from a moral point of view but more importantly, from a legal perspective, constitutes collective punishment in the form of property destruction and generates some of the gravest violations of international humanitarian law, constituting a war crime when amounting to intentional and systematic “wanton destruction.”…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53603
|
|
Norwegian lawyers to accuse Israeli leaders of war crimes
AFP
Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert and other top officials could face legal action in Norway over the Gaza offensive after six Norwegian lawyers said Tuesday they would accuse them of war crimes. The lawyers, who plan to file their complaint with Norway’s chief prosecutor on Wednesday, said they will call for the arrest and extradition of Olmert as well as former foreign affairs minister Tzipi Livni, Defence Minister Ehud Barak and seven senior Israeli army officers…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53604
|
|
A Shooting at the Wall in Bil’n
The Death of Bassem
By FRANK BARAT
On April the 17th, like any Fridas afternoon for the last four years, the small village of Bil’in, north of Ramallah, was preparing for the usual demonstration against Israel’s annexation wall (some people call it apartheid wall or separation wall. The Israeli government refers to it as the security fence). The village of Bil’in has, since the mid-eighties, lost more than 60 per cent of its land for the purpose of new Israeli settlements and the construction of the wall. The inhabitants of the village used to live mainly from agriculture and olive trees plantations but more and more the community of Bil’in has been foreced to rely on the work of its women to survive. Embroidery has become one of the main resources of the place, located a few kilometres away from Tel Aviv. (On a nice day, you can see the “inaccessible”-for the Palestinians- beach from the rooftops of Bil’in)…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53584
|
|
Israeli settler runs over and kills Palestinian man in Jerusalem
Ghassan Bannoura – IMEMC
An Israeli settler ran over and killed a Palestinian man in east Jerusalem on Tuesday morning. Local sources said Mohamed Ali, 27, from Shu’fat refugee camp in Jerusalem, was crossing a street near the illegal settlement of Pisghat Za’ev and the French Hill when the settler ran him over causing fatal injuries…
Read the full article / Leggi l’articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=53592
|
|
|
