AMNESTY’S SCANDALOUS OBLIQUITY

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinians incinerated to death by Israel’s White Phosphorous bombs

In an apparent effort to sound “balanced” and “unbiased,” the London-based human rights group, Amnesty International (AI) , has urged the international community to halt arms sales to the Israeli apartheid regime and the Palestinian Islamic liberation movement, Hamas.

A report issued by the group on Sunday, 22 February, pointed out that arms supplied to “the two sides” were used in attacks on civilians and civilian objects” which constituted war crimes.

Non the less, a careful examination of the report shows a clear propensity on the part of AI to create a false symmetry between Hamas, a small liberation movement resisting a decades-old Nazi-like foreign military occupation, and Israel, a manifestly criminal state armed to the teeth, which has been committing every conceivable crime under the sun for the purpose of maintaining its colonialist occupation and brutal domination over the Palestinian people.

To be sure, no one claims that Hamas is completely blameless. Targeting innocent civilians is unacceptable.

However, equating the resistance of a long-persecuted people languishing under an evil military occupation, even if wrongs are done, with an immensely superior state terror unjustifiably perpetrated by an occupying power is morally unconscionable, to say the very least.

Indeed, doing so would be analogous to equating European resistance to the attacking Nazi armies during the Second World War, with the Nazi aggression itself.

Well, with all due respect to AI and its efforts to safeguard and defend human rights, there is no legal or moral equation between a rape victim’s right to defend herself against her attacker and the criminal act initiated by the rapist.

I am using this analogy because the enduring Israeli oppression meted out to the Palestinian people is an enduring act of rape.

Yes, firing home-made and other comparatively primitive projectiles on Israeli civilians is a regrettable act. However, the firing of these projectiles, which killed a few Israelis in 10 years of hostilities (virtually one Israeli per year), can’t be compared with the nearly complete annihilation of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and wholesale murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.

The excessive, disproportionate and often pornographic use of deadly violence against an essentially imprisoned and unprotected civilian population is more than just a mere miscalculation or faulty reasoning It is rather a deliberate war crime the perpetrators of which are vile war criminals who ought to be prosecuted and punished for their crimes.

More to the point, it is imperative that one gives context if one is truly interested in producing an honest and objective analysis of the recent outrage in Gaza.

Hence, one must be honest enough to remember that Israel had been forcing the 1.5 million Gazans to choose between dying quietly by succumbing to a genocidal hermetic siege that pushed most of the region’s inhabitants to the brink of a silent holocaust, or fighting back, using whatever primitive and extremely limited means at their disposal.

I strongly believe it is absurd and ludicrous, if not outright malicious, to compare Hamas with Israel as far as the use of violence is concerned.

Hamas is a small movement of persecuted Palestinians who have been on the receiving end of Israeli persecution and repression. Hamas poses no real or strategic threat to Israel, a military superpower which also, to a large extent, controls American politics and policies.

In its recent genocidal onslaught on Gaza, Israel used the deadliest weapons of death, including F-16 warplanes, apache helicopters, Merkava tanks, heavy artillery, depleted uranium, chemical agents that eat through the human flesh and eventually cause death, white Phosphorus, dart shells and a variety of other lethal weapons.

On the other hand, Hamas used notoriously primitive weapons, mainly to deter Israel from carrying out a genocide on a wider scale.

During that blitz, Israel knowingly and deliberately targeted civilian neighborhoods, apartment buildings, private homes, mosques, college dorms, university buildings, UN-run schools, grocery stores and businesses. It was a no-holds-barred rampage of murder and terror against an imprisoned and thoroughly starved civilian population.

As a result, as many as 7000 Palestinians were murdered, or maimed and injured, many with life-long deformities. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of other Gazans suffered long-lasting psychological traumas.

On the Israeli side, we are talking about a dozen Israeli fatalities , some of whom killed or injured by “friendly fire.”

So, we are dealing with an extremely lopsided situation where the death ratio is nearly 1 -100. Needless to say, one doesn’t have to be a great military expert to realize that this is not really a war, it is rather a huge massacre.

This is why, AI is called upon to call the spade a spade and refrain from hiding behind technical jargons that not only fail to communicate the facts about what really happened in Gaza but also give a false impression of symmetry in guilt between Israel and Hamas.

More to the point, it is important to remember that Israel didn’t impose the draconian blockade of Gaza as a retaliation for the largely innocuous firing of projectiles onto Israel. The criminal blockade was imposed, first and foremost, as a cruel punishment of Palestinians for electing a political party that Israel didn’t like.

Hence, the imposition of the siege, which is continuing unabated, is per se a war crime or a crime against humanity.

The world betrayed them, the Arab world stood silent, with some Arab regimes even colluding with Israel to perfect the siege in the hope that Gazans would turn against Hamas and bring it down.

And the hypocritical West had the audacity to blame the victims while babbling, as usual, about Israel’s right to defend itself.

This happened while an entire people was being imprisoned, starved, tormented and quietly exterminated, mainly for political reasons pertaining to Israeli territorial aggrandizement.

In short, it was the Nazi-like Israeli savaging of the Palestinians that made Palestinian resistance inevitable. The Palestinians, long tormented by this cruel occupation, have every legal and moral right to resist, using whatever means available to them.

Indeed, instead of blaming the victims for resisting their oppressors, the world, including AI , ought to tell Israel that it can’t just incarcerate 1.5 million civilians within the confines of an open-air prison, surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, tanks, landmines, and other state-of-the-art machines of death, and then expect the victims to display love and understanding toward their tormentors and oppressors.

Israel did transform the Gaza Strip into a real concentration camp, by denying the prisoner population access to fuel, electricity, food, medicine, medical care, and basic consumer products.

Meanwhile, the Israeli death machine never stopped murdering innocent Palestinians, nearly on a daily basis.

It is essential that AI and other human rights groups take these facts into account when dealing with the situation in Gaza.

Failing to do so, by cowering before Israeli pressure, would further corrode AI image as the world’s premier human rights organization.

PALESTINIANS RECONSIDER TWO-STATE STRATEGY

By Khalid Amayreh

RAMALLAH — While the west-backed Palestinian Authority is still clinging to the two-state solution as the only feasible strategy for ending the 40-year Israeli occupation, a growing number of Palestinian intellectuals and lay people are coming to the conclusion that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible in light of the ubiquitous proliferation of Jewish settlements. “There is no doubt that the two-state solution is dead. In fact it has been dead for quite a long time,” Laila el-Haddad, a Gaza-based writer, told IslamOnline.net. “The metastasizing of Jewish settlements, along with the overriding deliberate policies of ‘politicide’ have rendered the two-state solution impossible,” she believes. With their horizons constantly narrowed and lingering peace talks with Israel reaching a virtual dead-end, mainly over Israel’s refusal to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, Palestinians are increasingly advocating the one-state solution. “The only feasible, sustainable, and just solution is One state, with equal rights for all,” says el-Haddad. According to public opinion surveys, faith in the two-state solution has been steadily dwindling among Palestinians as they watch unmitigated Jewish settlement expansion swallows up more and more of their land. Since 1967, Israel has built more than 150 Jewish-only settlements on the occupied West Bank, inhabited by as many as half a million settlers. Most of the settlers are classified as “ideological settlers,” who believe that the West Bank is the “Biblical Land of Israel” which must never be given up even in return for a lasting peace with the Palestinians. Hence, many observers have come to believe that no Israeli government will be able, even if willing, to dismantle these large settlements which have become well-established demographic realities in the occupied territories. At the same time, there is a near unanimity among Palestinians and Arabs that without the elimination of at least the bulk of settlements and removal of most settlers, the goal of Palestinian statehood will be utterly unachievable. During the last few months, Ahmed Qurei’, chief negotiator and Fatah leader, warned that the PA would decide to abandon the peace process with Israel if “it becomes clear that the creation of a viable Palestinian state is no longer possible.” “We certainly will resort to the one-state solution. We will not allow Israel to impose apartheid on us for ever.” Tough Choices Hazem al-Qawasmi, an economist and prominent proponent of the one-state solution, argues that there is no viable alternative to it. “We must not be made to pay the price for Jewish settlement expansion. Israel has effectively killed the two-state solution for the purpose of liquidating the Palestinian cause,” he told IOL. “Hence, the Palestinians ought to struggle for a unitary and democratic state which would preserve our national existence and continued survival,” he believes. “The alternative would be national demise, especially in the long run.” Palestinians in general are fully aware that the one-state strategy is fraught with problems and having no guaranteed consequences. The firm Israeli rejection of the idea makes many Palestinians refrain from wholly embracing the quest for the one-state solution. They also think that decades of violence and bloodshed would make the implementation of this vision very unlikely. “The world is under no more of a moral or legal obligation to maintain Zionism in Israel than it was to maintain apartheid in South Africa,” Qawasmi insists. “The Palestinian people’s right to freedom and human rights override whatever rights Israel thinks it has to remain Jewish.” Palestinians opposed to the idea argue that Palestinian weakness vis-à-vis Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinian people and their leadership to handle the one-state idea successfully. Ziad abu Ziad, a former Palestinian negotiator, believes that most Israelis are not ready for peace and that the Israeli political leadership is unable to effect a real transformation in the public mood. “We can’t escape the fact that the expanding settlements leave no room for a prospective Palestinian state,” he told IOL. “I think that we should work on three levels. First, to guarantee the steadfastness of our people. Second, to try on the short term to mobilize international pressure on Israel to force it to stop its settlement activities as a step toward removing Jewish colonies from the occupied territories,” maintains abu Ziad. “Third, in the long term, we should prepare ourselves for a long , durable struggle to recover our rights.”

THIS IS WHAT WAS BANNED AT CARLETON UNIVERSITY IN CANADA

Related Post

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is an annual international series of events held in cities and campuses across the globe. The aim of IAW is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system
and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement.

Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is taking place in more than 40 cities across the globe (the number of cities is growing daily). This year, IAW happens in the wake of Israel’s barbaric assault on the people of
Gaza. Lectures, films, and actions will make the point that these latest massacres further confirm the true nature of Israeli Apartheid. IAW 2009 will continue to build and strengthen the growing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement at a global level.

ZIONIST DOG ATTACKS 100 YEAR OLD PALESTINIAN

One would think it is bad enough that the Israeli army constantly targets and kills innocent children…..but why stop at that? 100 year old people at rest in their own homes and beds are also equal and defenseless targets.

They can always ‘blame it on the dog’ just as we did when our homework wasn’t finished…..

100 year-old man attacked by Israeli army dog

In the early morning of February 20th at 2am, Israeli Forces invaded the town of Tamoun, located in the Tubas region of the northern occupied West Bank. Around 50 soldiers in seven jeeps surrounded two houses in the town, firing sound bombs and live ammunition before breaking into the residences.

Salem Fadel Bani Odeh (100)

During the course of the invasion, an army attack dog mauled the face of Salem Fadel Bani Odeh, aged 100 while he lay helpless in his bed. Two men, Na’el Odeh Bani Odeh, aged 23, Muhamad Mustafa Bani Odeh, aged 25, were also arrested by Israeli Occupation Forces. The windows of a nearby parked car were all shot out by army gunfire.

Salem Fadel Bani Odeh awoke to the explosions of sound bombs and live bullets. The door to his home was smashed down by soldiers, who entered the house and ordered everyone outside. But Salem, who is partially paralyzed and bedridden, could not move. As the soldiers searched the house, an army dog leaped up onto his bed and began biting his face and chest. Though nearly ten soldiers were inside the same room, they did nothing to stop the attack, and the dog continued to knaw on Salem’s face. Finally, after more than half an hour, the soldiers stopped the dog and called for an ambulance. Salem was taken to Rafidia Hospital in Nablus, where he remains in moderate condition with parts of one ear bitten off and bites on his face, chest and right shoulder.

According to Ha’aretz, the Israeli army has admitted that the incident occurred.

Source

HAMAS’ POPULARITY SOARING FOLLOWING ISRAEL’S GAZA BLITZ

By Khalid Amayreh in Ramallah

The latest public opinion survey in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has shown a dramatic rise in Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians, with a significant decline in Fatah’s public standing.

Moreover, the poll showed that a majority of Palestinians believed that the advent of the Obama administration in the U.S. wouldn’t make a big difference with regard to American efforts to resolve the Palestinian issue.

According to the poll, Turkey, Venezuela and Iran as well as Hezbullah are the most popular regional forces among Palestinians.

The results of the latest poll, conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) from 29-31 January, showed that nearly 48 % of respondents believed that Hamas came out of the Israeli blitz against Gaza victorious. Nearly 10 per cent opined that Israel won the war, while over a third of respondents, 37.4% said that neither side achieved victory.

The poll, surveying a random sample of 1,198 respondents, found a dramatic rise in the popularity of Hamas, especially in the West Bank.

In contrast, the popularity of the Fatah movement suffered a significant decline, especially in the West Bank.

When asked if general Palestinian elections were held today, 28.6% of respondents said they would vote for Hamas. Fatah’s standing declined from 34% last April to 27.9 in this poll.

According to the latest poll, trust in Hamas rose from 16.6% last November to 27.7 % in this poll. In contrast, the percentage of those who said they trusted Fatah fell down from 31.3% to 26%.

According to a press release by the JMCC, the rise in Hamas’ popularity occurred mainly in the West Bank, which is controlled by the Western Backed Palestinian Authority.

Similarly, the percentage of those who said they trusted Ismael Haniya, the Prime Minister of the Gaza-based Palestinian government, increased from 12.8% last October to 21.1 in this poll. Trust in PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas went down from 15.5% last October to 13.4 in this poll.

The poll showed that the percentage of those opining that the performance of the American-backed government of Salam Fayad is better than that of the Gaza-based government declined significantly from 36% last April to 26.9% in this poll.

However, those who believed that the performance of the Fayad government is worse than that of the Haniya’s government rose substantially from 29.1 to 40% per cent.

The latest poll also found that support for military resistance against the Israeli occupation rose from 49.5% last April to 53.5% in this poll.

Moreover, the poll showed a rise in the percentage of Palestinians opposed to peace talks with Israel.

Turkey, Venezuela and several other political and other entities have also become more popular among Palestinians, according to the latest poll.

Turkey received the highest point of 89.6 %, followed by Venezuela (80.6 %) .

The International Committee of the Red Cross received a satisfaction mark of (79. followed by UNRWA (78.6 %).

Qatar received a satisfaction mark of 68.3%, Hezbullah 66.9 %, the Muslim Brotherhood movement 57.6 % and Iran 55.9%.

The US received the satisfaction of only 2.8 of respondents, Britain, 10.4%, Germany 14.4 % France was the western country that received the satisfaction of the highest percentage of respondents, at 21.5 per cent.

Egypt and Jordan received 35.1% and 41.7 % respectively.

Finally, when asked which entity you would prefer to assume the task of reconstruction in the Gaza Strip, respondents gave the following answers: A majority of 30.6% said they prefer an international mechanism under UN supervision to assume this task. The second choice was for a Palestinian national unity government to oversee the reconstruction. More than 23% said they preferred the government of Hamas to do the job, while a minority of 13.7 % said they prefer the Palestinian Authority to assume the task.

The decline in Fatah’s popularity can be attributed to the widespread public dissatisfaction with the Ramallah regime’s lukewarm stance during the war.

Many Palestinians had the impression that at least some of the PA and PLO leaders adopted a “conspiratorial stance” during the Israeli invasion of Gaza.

Some PA officials had reportedly made remarks voicing the hope that Israeli would destroy the Hamas government in Gaza.

Some PLO leaders, such as Yasser Abed Rabbo, reportedly criticized Israel for ending the war too soon without “finishing off Hamas.”

Another important reason for Fatah’s dwindling popularity seems to have to do with the widespread suppression by PA security forces of public descent during the war.

PA security agencies prevented and in many instances violently suppressed pro-Hamas protests during the war.

Dozens of Palestinians, mainly Hamas sympathizers, have also been arrested by the PA security apparatus in the West Bank.

The latest opinion poll is not going to be a good news for PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

Abbas has been calling for early presidential and legislative elections in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip in the hope of ending Hamas’ government in the Gaza Strip.

ISRAELI FASCIST’S HISTORY EXPOSED

(Ben Heine © Cartoons)

BTW….. the image to the left was the reason Benjamin Heine was banned from Daily Kos, and me as well for defending him…..

Now HaAretz itself exposes this evil man as a fascist of long standing….
Truth slowly trickles out.

Elections 2009 / Haaretz exclusive: Avigdor Lieberman was member of outlawed radical Kach movement

_{By Lily Galili}

Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman was once a member of the
outlawed far-right party Kach, the movement’s former secretary general revealed on Tuesday.

Yossi Dayan said he issued Lieberman, a prime ministerial candidate whose current electoral campaign against Israeli Arabs has provoked outrage, with a party membership card when he was still a new immigrant to Israel. Kach was banned from running for the Knesset in 1988 for inciting to racism.

“I don’t recall to what extent he was active in the movement, but if he denies [this], I am ready to testify in any forum that Lieberman was indeed a member for a short amount of time,” said Dayan.

Ultra-nationalist activist Avigdor Eskin, meanwhile, remembers meeting Lieberman at Kahane’s office on Ussishkin Street in Jerusalem. “I remember this very well, because I arrived there one day after I immigrated to Israel in 1979,” he said.

Eskin came to public attention for having boasted of holding a pulsa dinura ceremony prior to 1995 assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. The ceremony, believed to be of kabbalistic origin, is aimed at conferring a death curse on the subject.

“Kahane saw him as a good guy. I also thought back then that he was not a Kach man ideologically, unless the only measure of this is the question of whether you like Arabs. According to what I remember, he handed out the movements’ publications among its small student group in the Hebrew University,” Eskin said.

He added that he met Lieberman in Kahane’s office a number of times, but to the best of his knowledge the Yisrael Beiteinu chairman was only involved in Kach for a number of months.

Yisrael Beiteinu relayed in response to the Haaretz report that, “We are not dealing with this orchestrated provocation. The success of Yisrael Beiteinu has created among its opponents a great quantity of lies and fabrications, which the political and media establishment knew beforehand.”

The revelation came one day after Israel’s most recognizable television anchor, Haim Yavin, branded Lieberman as “Kahane’s successor,” a reference to the murdered extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who headed Kach movement.

Former Kach members, for their part, actually reject the Kahane comparison. “He is a poor imitation of Kahane,” one said. Dayan, who was close to Kahane for over a decade, is disgusted by it.

“Not everyone who speaks against Arabs is a Kahane,” he said. “[Lieberman] can take a few elements, but to be Kahane is a whole doctrine. Nevertheless, I’m happy that he’s saying what he’s saying, because without a radical solution to the problem of Arabs in Israel it can’t be good here.”

ISRAELI WAR CRIMES BEING ‘LOOKED INTO’

Israel is great at…..

Image ‘Copyleft’ by Carlos Latuff