Month: March 2009

Palestinian Israelis

We tend to focus on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza and to forget about their relatives in the refugee camps of Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and especially those inside the 1948 borders of Israel. It is becoming increasingly urgent to learn about the so-called ‘Arab-Israelis’, for two reasons. First, because their plight illustrates that Zionism, even without an occupation, requires some form of apartheid. Second, because as Israel’s Palestinian community grows to more than 20% of the total, and as fascist movements flourish, this community is increasingly at risk of another large-scale ethnic cleansing. Adalah is a good place to start researching the legal, political and economic discrimination against Arabs in Israel. Jonathan Cook’s website and his book, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State, are excellent resources. Here is a recent article by Cook on Israel’s denial of basic services to the Bedouin population.

Bedouin Baby’s Power Struggle with Israel
Little Ashimah Abu Sbieh’s life hangs by a thread — or more specifically, an electricity cable that runs from a noisy diesel-powered generator in the family’s backyard. Should the generator’s engine fail, she could die within minutes. Continue reading “Palestinian Israelis”

Israeli authorities ban Palestinian Cultural Festival

An Al-Haq press release reports on one of the many Zionist attempts to eliminate Palestinian cultural identity:

A ceremony celebrating Jerusaelm as the Capital of Arab Culture 2009 in the West Bank city of Tulkarem, 22 March 2009. (Mouid Ashqar/MaanImages)

As an organization dedicated to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), Al-Haq condemns the repressive actions taken today [Saturday 21 March 2009] by the Israeli authorities in banning peaceful cultural activities organized as part of the Palestinian Cultural Festival marking the declaration of Jerusalem as the “Capital of Arab Culture 2009.”
Continue reading “Israeli authorities ban Palestinian Cultural Festival”

Intimidating Muslims

Brian Whitaker writes a good article on New Labour’s intimidatory tactics against British Muslims. And here is an unusually excellent editorial from the Guardian. The branding of the Istanbul Declaration as extremist is designed to ensure that nobody engages with it, and it deserves to be engaged with. Although I don’t identify with the religious language myself, or like the globalising flourish at the end, I don’t see anything terribly objectionable about the declaration, which is posted after the Whitaker article.

Following the recent muddle over Hezbollah, the British government continues to dig itself deeper into the mire with its “anti-extremism” policy.

Hazel Blears, secretary of state for communities and local government, is trying to engineer the resignation of Daud Abdullah, deputy secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain. She may not like Abdullah or agree with his views but, frankly, it’s none of her business. The MCB is not a government body and can appoint whoever it wants as its deputy secretary general.

Continue reading “Intimidating Muslims”

Gaza war crimes investigation: Israeli drones

Clancy Chassay asks why Israeli drones with optics capable of seeing the colour of a target’s clothes killed so many Palestinian civilians during the recent Gaza invasion. Part Three of Three. Watch Part One and Part Two.

Mounir al-Jarah slowly takes down the bricks he used to wall up the entrance to his sister’s courtyard. Inside, flesh still clings to the walls; blood-soaked furniture and family items lie broken and mangled.

Mounir’s eyes search around the old house as he recounts the events of 16 January, when a rocket fired from an unmanned aerial vehicle killed his sister, her husband and four of her children.

Continue reading “Gaza war crimes investigation: Israeli drones”

Gaza war crimes investigation: Attacks on medics

Clancy Chassay asks why 16 medical workers were killed and more than half of Gaza’s hospitals were hit during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Part Two of Three. Watch Part One and Part Three.

Medical staff and ambulance drivers who attempted to assist casualties of the Israeli invasion of Gaza have told the Guardian that they were attacked by Israeli forces while trying to carry out their job.

The offensive left 16 medics dead. Nearly all of them were killed by Israeli fire while trying to save lives, and many more were wounded. According to the World Health Organisation, more than half of Gaza’s 27 hospitals were damaged by Israeli bombs. Two clinics were completely destroyed and 44 others received damage.

Continue reading “Gaza war crimes investigation: Attacks on medics”

Gaza war crimes investigation: human shields

Clancy Chassay investigates claims from three brothers that the Israeli military used them as human shields during the invasion of Gaza. Part One of Three. Watch Part Two and Part Three.

Israel has been accused of using Palestinian human shields during its invasion of Gaza, a breach of the Geneva conventions that prohibit intentionally putting civilian lives at risk.The Guardian has interviewed three Gazan brothers who described how they were taken from their home at gunpoint, made to kneel in front of tanks to deter Hamas fighters from firing and sent by Israeli soldiers into Palestinian houses to clear them.

“They would make us go first, so if any fighters shot at them the bullets would hit us, not them,” said 14-year-old Al’a al-Attar.

Continue reading “Gaza war crimes investigation: human shields”

Palestine: to exist is to resist

therapy today cover palestine exists resistTherapy Today, the monthly journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) had a 4 page piece in its March edition together with a front page picture, “Palestine: to exist is to resist” which gave quite a detailed account of the psychological trauma inflicted on Palestinian people, particularly children.

Under pressure from supporters of the Zionist state of Israel the editor, Sarah Browne pulled the article from their web page yesterday. Seemingly this pressure was a phone call telling them “that they’d find out they’d been very unwise to publish such a one-sided piece etc” and a couple of emails.

It might be worth email her saying that caving in to such pressure and withdrawing such an accurate piece does not serve the best interests of BACP members.  (Thanks to Ian for this).

Her email address is: sarah.browne@bacp.co.uk

Here is the article retrieved from google cache.

Palestine: to exist is to resist
Notes on the psychological impact of military occupation in Palestine
by Martin Kemp and Eliana Pinto
Continue reading “Palestine: to exist is to resist”

The Big Takeover

‘The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power’. Matt Tabibi of Rolling Stone on ‘How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution’.

It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).

Continue reading “The Big Takeover”

Miles to go before I sleep

Robert Frost

For the past 6 months, I have had to stay up late most nights to work on my thesis, usually until 4 am but sometimes longer. That is because I find it harder to focus before midnight. There is always the temptation of cinema, literature, music or the company of friends, so I always have to remind myself of Frost’s famous response to a similar situation: ‘But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep’.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

US seeks to expand covert war in Pakistan

The United States has been heavily criticised for the high number of civilians being killed by drone missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That controversy was high on the agenda during a visit by the head of the CIA to Pakistan.

The US, meanwhile, is considering expanding the fighting to Balochistan province, as Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reports.