Brookings poll uncovers some interesting information

This first question is hardly a surprise and should alert the Obama administration to the fact that the Arab population is not as stupid as they may have hoped. His speech in Cairo may have created hope, but that hope has dwindled and now the Arab peoples know the truth. Obama is no different. He will not deal justly with the middle-east, no more than any of his predecessors have.

These results here are very interesting. The way you hear it in the newspapers, everyone in Egypt and Saudi Arabia are opposed to Iran’s nuclear program. These numbers show a different story though. The Arabs polled were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Jordan and the UAE. Saudi Arabia and Egypt citizens comprised approximately 20% each of the people polled.

Of those polled, 61% said they were most dissappointed with Obama’s handling of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. They also saw our middle-east policy as being driven by a need to protect Israel and control oil. Also, 59% polled said that when they see a documentary about the Jewish Holocaust, they resent it because they feel it brings sympathy towards the Jews at the expense of the Palestinians. Very interesting. Similar to Ahmadinejad’s position.

77% also believed that Iran has a right to it’s nuclear program.

In a world where there is only one superpower, 35% wanted France to be that superpower! Only 7% wanted the USA.  Also beating out the USA were China, Germany, Britain and Russia. Pakistan just lost to the USA at 6%!

Two countries that pose the biggest threat to Arab Peoples? 88% Israel and 77% USA. Iran was 10%. Interesting.

Erdogan, Chavez and Ahmadinejad were the most admired world leaders (Obama wasn’t featured in this one).

Methinks it would behoove the people of the USA to look at why the people of Arab nations have these opinions. There are good reasons.

http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0805_arab_opinion_poll_telhami.aspx

Economic warfare against Gaza

Why is the blockade on Gaza in place?

Last week, after Israeli commandos killed nine volunteers on a Turkish-organized Gaza aid flotilla, Israel again said its aim was to stop the flow of terrorist arms into Gaza.

However, in response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.

“A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using ‘economic warfare,’” the government said.

I thought it was to stop terrorists from lobbing rockets over the border. But then, why would they have withheld soda pop and potato chips until now? Have you ever been hit by a flying potato chip before?

Israel’s cruel policy toward Gaza is exposed to the world and the US is virtually alone in supporting it.  Gotta stop.

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/09/95621/israeli-document-gaza-blockade.html#ixzz0qTW6Zw97

The Real Threat Aboard the Freedom Flotilla — In These Times

Chomsky speaks sense about what the real reason for the blockade is in the first place. He quotes Amira Hass as saying that the, “overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel’s military superiority.” Read his good article here:

The Real Threat Aboard the Freedom Flotilla — In These Times.

Derschowitz spouts propaganda in the WSJ and even I can refute him.

Wow. Alan Derschowitz is so far out in lala land that even an amateur blogger like me can refute him.  Take his most recent article which was surprisingly published in the Wall Street Journal, a paper that should have a more rigorous system for letting article show up on its pages, though of course now it is owned by Rupert Murdoch so….

Dershowitz starts off with this:

There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small “sacrifice” of the billion Muslims in the world.

I can find no reference to this alleged 2004 statement.  The statement everyone applies to Rafsanjani to scare people with is from his speech in 2001 where he said:

The colonialists will keep this base as long as they need it. Now, whether they can do so or not is a separate issue and this is my next point. Any time they find a replacement for that particular instrument, they will take it up and this will come to an end. This will open a new chapter. Because colonialism and imperialism will not easily leave the people of the world alone. Therefore, you can see that they have arranged it in a way that the balance of power favours Israel. Well, from a numerical point of view, it cannot have as many troops as Muslims and Arabs do. So they have improved the quality of what they have. Classical weaponry has its own limitations. They have limited use. They have a limited range as well. They have supplied vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction and unconventional weapons to Israel. They have permitted it to have them and they have shut their eyes to what is going on. They have nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles and suchlike.

If one day … Of course, that is very important. If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iran/2001/011214-text.html

It’s important to take these quotes in context.  Here, Rafsanjani is pointing out how the US is arming Israel with all sort of unconventional weapons and turning a blind eye to the possession of nuclear weapons in Israel.  He then says that IF the islamic world someday had nuclear weapons too, the US colonialist policy would come to a stand still because of what a nuclear weapons could possibly do to Israel.  He is not threatening Israel.  He is not saying we are trying to develope nuclear weapons so we can drop it on Israel.  He is trying to show how things would be if the other side developed nuclear weapons as well.  If you can find any other Rafsanjani alleged threats against Israel let me know please.

He goes on:

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas.

Do you really think that Hamas or Hezbollah would commit national suicide to drop a nuclear weapon on their neighbor?  Would Israel drop a nuclear weapon on Gaza? All moral consideration aside, it would be completely irrational as you would kill yourself too. Just not going to happen.

Next Derschowitz says:

The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.

This is his way of scaring people since so far, there has been no conclusive evidence that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program.  Iran is no friend with Al Queda. Many believe that the enemy of the Iranian state, Jundullah, is in cahoots with Al Queda.  Al Zawahiri has denounced Iran numerous times.  See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri#Relation_with_Islamic_Republic_of_Iran

Der then says:

But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.

I think that middle-eastern nations threatened by Israel already have a good reason to get into a nuclear arms race don’t you?  Make the middle east a nuclear weapons-free zone and see then if you have nuclear weapons on anyone’s agenda over there.  Incidentally, Iran has supported the concept of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the middle east but has been opposed by Israel and the US.

He then goes on with his scare-mongering which needs no specific rebuttal here as it is based on the idea that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons full speed ahead.  He goes on to say that Obama would be remembered like Neville Chambelain for letting Hitler get out of control.  He says:

History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world’s first suicide nation—a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.

Again, Der is twisting history to an unrecognizable pulp here.  Iran has never attacked anyone in it’s entire existence.  Iran was attacked by Iraq in the above-mentioned war and the US supplied Iraq with weapons and technology to massacre Iranians.  If anyone in the region can be thought of as a loose cannon, likely to attack another nation based on past behavioral patterns, it is the US and Israel! 

Der is easy to rebutt, but he gets to splash his trash on the pages of the Wall Street Journal and I get a few hits here on the radical mormon. Oh well, at least I do my part to bring works of darkness to light and renounce war and proclaim peace.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704869304575110042827617582.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

Israel kills again.

Israeli soldiers killed a 20 year old and wounded two kids, 15 and 16 years old.  They were unarmed.

GAZA (Reuters) – Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian and wounded two others in a confrontation near a Gaza Strip border crossing on Friday, the Israeli army and Palestinian medical workers said.

A rocket fired from Gaza struck later in an open area near an Israeli town, causing no injury, the army said. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for that shooting.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said the troops opened fire at Palestinians suspected of placing explosives near a security fence. One died of injuries, a second was taken to hospital and three others were seized, the spokeswoman said.

The fatality was the first since August along the tense border of the coastal territory ruled by Hamas Islamists that has remained largely quiet since an Israeli offensive that ended in January.

Gaza medics said they retrieved the body of a Palestinian who they described as unarmed and 20 years old after the incident at the Karni crossing in central Gaza, and that Israel had picked up another Palestinian, 16, who appeared to them to have been wounded critically.

A third wounded youth, listed as 15, was taken to a hospital in Gaza, the medics said.

http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE5AC1LR20091113

The Goldstone report is sustained by at least one wise politician in the US.

Great words from Dennis Kucinich on the verge of the resolution condemning the Goldstone report.  Why can’t we have more politicians like this?

“Today we journey from Operation Cast Lead to Operation Cast Doubt. Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist.

“Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of human dignity, the annihilation of the human spirit, the triumph of Orwellian thinking, the eternal prison of the dark heart of the totalitarian.

“The resolution before us today, which would reject all attempts of the Goldstone Report to fix responsibility of all parties to war crimes, including both Hamas and Israel, may as well be called the “Down is Up, Night is Day, Wrong is Right” resolution.

“Because if this Congress votes to condemn a report it has not read, concerning events it has totally ignored, about violations of law of which it is unaware, it will have brought shame to this great institution.

“How can we ever expect there to be peace in the Middle East if we tacitly approve of violations of international law and international human rights, if we look the other way, or if we close our eyes to the heartbreak of people on both sides by white-washing a legitimate investigation?

“How can we protect the people of Israel from existential threats if we hold no concern for the protection of the Palestinians, for their physical security, their right to land, their right to their own homes, their right to water, their right to sustenance, their right to freedom of movement, their right to the human security of jobs, education and health care?

“We will have peace only when the plight of both Palestinians and Israelis is brought before this House and given equal consideration in recognition of that principle that all people on this planet have a right to survive and thrive, and it is our responsibility, our duty to see that no individual, no group, no people are barred from this humble human claim.”

Israel murders through various means.

Here is another way that Israel murders Palestinians.  This sort of policy will doubtless lead to the deaths of Palestinians by starvation or other poverty related mortality:

Yunis al Masri was luckier than his two brothers from Gaza. Although the truck that  ploughed into their car as they travelled to work in Israel 24 years ago killed Jaber and Kamal instantly, Mr al Masri survived with shattered bones, internal bleeding and brain damage.

Today, aged 49 and after many operations, he has difficulty walking and problems remembering to do things. Any hope of working again was crushed in 1985 amid the car wreckage.

Like tens of thousands of other Palestinian manual labourers who worked inside Israel before Gaza was progressively sealed off to the outside world from the early 1990s, Mr. Al Masri had paid regularly into Israel’s social security fund from his salary.

Certified as disabled by an Israeli medical committee, he is entitled to a monthly allowance of $800 from Israel’s National Insurance Institute, out of which he has supported his wife and 10 children in their home in Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.

In early January, however, the transfers of disability benefits stopped arriving in his bank account in Gaza. About 700 other injured workers are in the same situation.

The reason, they have learnt, is that while the Israeli army was rampaging through the Gaza Strip during its winter assault, the Bank of Israel severed ties with Gaza’s banks.

The ending of financial relations between Israel and Gaza, in a deepening of the three-year blockade of the Hamas-ruled enclave, means Mr. al Masri and other disabled workers have been without a source of income for the past nine months.

Read many more examples of this sort of cruelty here:

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=15418

A short note on Obama’s speech.

Nice to see Obama admit in public that the US overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, which fact, along with the support of the Shah, has sort of culminated in our recent standoff with Iran over the last 30 years. 

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97071&sectionid=351020502

Now, it would be nice if he would start confessing to every other coup we’ve ever been involved in.

Some of the elements of his speech today were pretty laughable such as his castigating Hamas for not renouncing violence.  Is there any reason to ask Hamas to renounce violence when Israel just pounded Gaza killing 1300 Gazans?  The fact of the matter is that we’ve always wanted for the US and our client states to have a monopoly on violence.  Anyone else is just a terrorist. 

Additionally, demanding Hamas recognize Israel is a silly thing to ask since Israel doesn’t recognize Palestine and East Timor doesn’t recognize Indonesia and Taiwan doesn’t recognize China etc.  If we are going to start asking countries to recognize other countries, especially the ones that are taking your land and call part of your land their country… we’d better get started soon, because the list is pretty long. 

Despite his recent insistence that Israel freeze settlement expansion (only a small part of Israel’s daily crimes against Palestinian Arabs) Obama is still a staunch ally of Israel and his refusal to talk to Hamas is good evidence of that.  He will talk to everyone else, even recently saying he will talk to Hezbollah.  Why not talk to Hamas?  Remember, 64% of Israelis polled last year think that Hamas should be engaged diplomatically.  Barack won’t do it because of AIPAC.

Firsthand witness account of Israeli atrocity aftermath… US lawyers delegation

Mondoweiss has posted a letter from an American who was in a delegation that traveled to Gaza to investigate Israeli war crimes.  The letter writer writes thusly:

The things we saw that morning would turn out to be the hardest. We went to Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. In the parking lot we saw bombed out, twisted skeletons of ambulances before we were hurried into the building to meet with doctors. Standing in the middle of a care unit, I saw a little boy, about 5 years old, hobble down the hallway, holding his mother’s hand. He had a leg injury and looked in pain. The doctors wanted to show us the white phosphorous cases, since we had asked about that. The doctor pointed to two rooms with patients we could talk to. There were two women in the first one. The one closest to the door just stared at us blankly, not saying anything. It turns out she lost her whole family during the assault. A few of us went into the next room. There we found Mohammad lying in bed — heavily bandaged, missing his left eye. He told us the story of how his whole family was burned to death when two white phosphorous shells hit their family car. He was lucky enough to have been knocked out of the car by the first shell. He lay unconscious and burning on the ground, while several neighbors pulled him away. He didn’t see his family die — both parents, his brother, and his sister. they were in their car driving to a relative’s house to get away from the shelling in their neighborhood. it was during what was supposed to be a 3-hour ceasefire. Their car only made it 70 meters. He and his brother were both in college. His brother was going to graduate this year. As he told us that, a fellow delegate, Linda, who had been translating, suddenly burst into tears. Mohammad grabbed her hand and told her it was ok. Strange how people ended up comforting us. The doctor came in and told us they were changing a child’s dressing if we wanted to come see. We walked into a room to see a baby — about 2 years old — lying on a table. She suddenly sat up and I saw that one whole side of her face and head were severely burnt. I had assumed she was hit with a weapon of some kind, but it turns it was a classic case of “collateral damage”: she had run up to her mom when they started bombing near the house, while her mom was cooking. Then a bomb exploded nearby and the burning oil in her mother’s pan spilled all over this young girl’s face. While we stood there, she just cried and called for her mom. We all stood watching, feeling helpless and guilty.

We left the hospital and went to Al-Zeytoun, a farming community on the southern outskirts of Gaza City. It was one of the hardest hit areas at the beginning of the ground invasion. The neighborhood was almost entirely inhabited by members of the extended Sammouni family. The town was in the news a lot after soldiers evacuated home after home of Sammounis into one house, that they then shelled, killing dozens of people. We walked up the dirt road and saw the rubble. Only one or two buildings left standing; the rest were completely decimated. Scattered tents served as makeshift shelters. We split up into teams of two and began interviewing survivors. We found two women sitting silently in front of the rubble that used to be someone’s home. One of the women, Zahwa, described the night where she saw her husband executed in front of her with his hands above his head (Zahwa Sammouni is pictured above sitting in front of a tent. Her house was destroyed the night the soldiers came through the neighborhood). She then huddled with her children in a back room of the house as soldiers shot through the two windows above them. She showed us the bullet holes in the wall of the house, the heap of rubble that used to be her house, and the wounds in her back from being grazed with bullets while she hunched over her children. Her 10-year-old son showed us the shrapnel wounds in his leg and proudly displayed the large piece of shrapnel that he single-handedly pulled out of his chest that night. His cousins then gave us a tour of one of the few houses left standing — one that the soldiers had used as a base, after they rounded up all those in the neighborhood and demolished all the other houses. The house was a mess. All the family’s possessions were thrown around the outside perimeter. Bags of feces from the soldiers were strewn around outside. The inside was ransacked. The soldiers had covered nearly every surface with graffiti: “death to the Arabs”, “if it weren’t for Arabs, the world would be a better place”, “kill Arabs”. I feverishly took notes and photographs of the stories of Zeytoun, knowing I did not want to stop and think about what had happened here.

See the rest of his letter at this link:

http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2009/03/us-eyewitness-in-gaza-as-a-world-we-utterly-failed-the-palestinians-of-gaza-we-stood-and-watched-the.html

Israel wipes its hands of Gaza… with toilet paper it is holding at border-crossings

As an illustration of the punitive measures the Israelis are taking on allowing items into Gaza for humanitarian purposes, toilet paper is apparently sometimes not allowed in:

The United States is protesting to Israel over seemingly random restrictions on deliveries to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip of harmless goods such as soap and toilet paper, diplomats said Wednesday.

In one case, Israel blocked for weeks a World Food Program (WFP) shipment of chickpeas, used to make the Palestinian food staple hummus, the U.N. food agency said…

But U.S. and Western officials complain the limited list of humanitarian goods that Israel allows into Gaza changes almost daily, creating major logistical problems for aid groups and donor governments which are unable to plan ahead.

“It is totally surreal,” one European diplomat said of Israeli decision-making. “One day we had 600 kg (1,300 pounds) of pasta at the Kerem Shalom crossing but they said, ‘Today, pasta can’t go in’.”

Another Western diplomat said: “It’s ever-changing. One week jam is okay and the next week it’s not.”

In addition to soap and toilet paper, the officials cited restrictions that come and go on imports of certain types of cheeses, toothbrushes and toothpaste.

And, of course, what is Israel’s response to all of this?

In a letter of response, obtained by Reuters, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was cooperating with international organizations and would keep Gaza’s border crossings open to humanitarian assistance “for exclusively civilian needs.”

Of course it is well known that pasta, toilet paper, chickpeas, cheese and toothpaste, mixed together in the correct proportions, and strapped to the belt of a person with the proper motivation, could wreak havoc on Tel Aviv.  Or could it be a fear of waking in the morning and finding that the separation wall was TP’d?

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE52A5TA20090311?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=10112