Come on Down For Your Freedom Medals
January 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
John Pilger puts forward his nominations for Bush freedom medals.
On 13 January, George W. Bush presented “presidential freedom medals,” said to be America’s highest recognition of devotion to freedom and peace. Among the recipients were Tony Blair, the epic liar who, with Bush, bears responsibility for the physical, social and cultural destruction of an entire nation; John Howard, the former prime minister of Australia and minor American vassal who led the most openly racist government in his country’s modern era; and Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, whose government, according the latest study of that murderous state, is “responsible for than 90 per cent of all cases of torture”.
Utter failure for Israel
January 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Gideon Levy opines that the Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel.
On the morrow of the return of the last Israeli soldier from Gaza, we can determine with certainty that they had all gone out there in vain. This war ended in utter failure for Israel.
Unseen Gaza
January 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
When Jon Snow went to report on the massacre in Gaza, he was barred from entering the conflict zone, along with other Western journalists. The following is a documentary film of his experiences.
Flat N All That
January 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Matt Taibbi takes on porn-stached New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s greenish ways. Taibbi goes positively Gonzo on NYT’s resident clown in this hilarious piece. Not to be missed. (Below I’ve also added Taibbi’s take on Friedman’s last bestseller).
When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.
Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene
11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.
The BBC refuses to broadcast Gaza charity appeal
January 23rd, 2009 § 2 Comments
The indispensable Media Lens has an important Rapid Response Media Alert. The BBC has already used your license fees to feed you foreign state propaganda, now it also wants you to be complicit in Israeli crimes. Don’t hesitate to register your protest.
Numerous members of the public have written to us expressing their bewilderment at the violence of Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza killing upwards of 1,300 people and wounding 4,200. To many witnessing the onslaught on their TV screens (especially Al Jazeera) this appeared to be an act of state sadism.
Israeli forces repeatedly bombed schools (including UN schools), medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.
On January 15, Helpdoctors.org reported that Al Quds hospital had been “again the target of bombing”. Some 50 patients, 30 in wheelchairs, fled as the burning hospital was “totally destroyed”.
Alarm Spreads Over Use of Lethal New Weapons
January 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
As more news of the brutality of the Israeli invasion comes to light, medical personnel based in Gaza speak of unprecedented suffering inflicted upon the civilian population. Aside from “clear and undeniable” evidence of the use of white phosphorus, according to Amnesty International, Israel is now accused of deploying so-called Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME) and other, hitherto unseen, lethal and indiscriminatory weapons of mass destruction.
Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone – completely severed by the weapon that hit her.
In Israel, detachment from reality is now the norm
January 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
An excellent article by Patrick Cockburn about the growing isolation of Israeli society from the crimes of its own state and the creeping intolerance of internal dissent, developments that spell gloom for the Palestinians.
I was watching the superb animated documentary Waltz with Bashir about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. It culminates in the massacre of some 1,700 Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in south Beirut by Christian militiamen introduced there by the Israeli army which observed the butchery from close range.
In the last few minutes the film switches from animation to graphic news footage showing Palestinian women screaming with grief and horror as they discover the bullet-riddled bodies of their families. Then, just behind the women, I saw myself walking with a small group of journalists who had arrived in the camp soon after the killings had stopped.
Two Petitions
January 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
If you haven’t already done so, please consider signing these petitions, and please pass the word on. The first is for British citizens and residents only, and it calls for the UK to impose an arms embargo on the apartheid state. The second is for all nationalities, and it calls on the UN General Assembly to create a tribunal to try Zionist war criminals.
The End of Abbas
January 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh inspect Haniyeh’s destroyed Gaza City office after an Israeli bombing in 2006. Samuel Aranda / Corbis
Obama began his ‘Middle East peace diplomacy’ by calling the ‘key figures’ in Palestine: war criminal Olmert, collaborating dictator Mubarak, and no-longer-president-of-anything Mahmoud Abbas. No calls to the organisation that democratically represents the Palestinians, of course. Here, Mouin Rabbani considers the future of inter-Palestinian relations, and concludes that one thing is certain: the demise of Abbas:
Speaking to his people on January 18, hours after Hamas responded to Israel’s unilateral suspension of hostilities with a conditional ceasefire of its own, the deposed Palestinian Authority prime minister Ismail Haniyeh devoted several passages of his prepared text to the subject of Palestinian national reconciliation. For perhaps the first time since Hamas’s June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip, an Islamist leader broached the topic of healing the Palestinian divide without mentioning Mahmoud Abbas by name.
Now we’ve all seen through the Israeli government’s excuses
January 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
Mark Steel asks the trillion dollar question: ‘If the Hamas rockets are so lethal, why doesn’t Israel swap an F-16 for some?‘
The worrying part about whether the ceasefire in Gaza can hold together will be whether the international community can stop the flow of arms to the terrorists. Because Israel’s getting their planes and tanks and missiles from somewhere and until this supply is cut off there’s every chance it could start up again.
The disregard for life from these terrorists and their supporters is shocking. For example Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, wrote that the purpose of the Israeli attack must be to “inflict a heavy death toll and heavy pain on the Gaza population”.
Replace “Gaza” with “western”, and that could have been written by al-Qa’ida. Maybe this is the problem: the Israelis are writing their policies by downloading statements from an Islamic Jihad website and just changing the place names. Also, if the Israelis think the Hamas rockets are as lethal as they say, why don’t they swap their F-16 fighters and Apachehelicopters for a few of them?
