‘Stephen has a metaphor for Sean Penn: Sean Penn is a big mean jerk, and Stephen hates him.’ A Colbert Report classic, with metaphors drawn from Shakespeare, Eliot, Frost to Star Trek.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In this week’s Focus On Gaza we look at two blows suffered by the Israeli army. Firstly a UN report which brands the recent Israeli war on Gaza as illegal.
Secondly the chilling accounts of a disregard for civilian safety from its own soldiers involved in the operation, published this week in a leading Israeli newspaper.
George Galloway on Channel 4 News (UK) facing the national director of the ‘Jewish Defence League’ (JDL) of Canada, Meir Weinstein, on Galloway’s banning from Canada.
Looking at the JDL Canada website we find the group was established “in the late 1960s to confront and fight anti-Semitism.” One might wonder why they are interested in blocking Galloway from entering Canada; the story was originally that he was banned for his views on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is their first principle, ‘Ahavat Yisroel’, Love of Israel, and Galloway’s recent aid convoy to Gaza that is the real problem. I was surprised to see Weinstein on Channel Four, as he considers helping the starving people of Gaza a crime, you’d expect to see him on the BBC.
Also worth noting is that the JDL was described as a violent extremist Jewish organization in an FBI 2000/2001 Terrorism report.
Robert Fisk on the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and its implications for the plight of the Palestinians. Fisk draws parallels between Lieberman’s fascist campaign slogans and the discourse of viscious nationalists like Mladic, Karadzic and Milosevic.
Only days after they were groaning with fury at the Israeli lobby’s success in hounding the outspoken Charles Freeman away from his proposed intelligence job for President Obama, the Arabs now have to contend with an Israeli Foreign Minister whose – let us speak frankly – racist comments about Palestinian loyalty tests have brought into the new Netanyahu cabinet one of the most unpleasant politicians in the Middle East.
Continue reading “Lieberman – the worst thing that could happen to the Middle East”
Bruce Springsteen performs the title song from his new record on The Daily Show
Vodpod videos no longer available.
‘As anti-occupation leaders recognise, the US could still exploit their divisions in an effort to offset its strategic defeat’, writes Seumas Milne.
In a last-ditch attempt to rescue some wafer of credibility from the west’s most catastrophic war of modern times, the story is taking hold in Britain and the US that after six years of horror Iraq is finally coming good. So quickly has this spin become accepted truth that politicians and pundits now regularly insist that if only General Petraeus is allowed to work his surge magic on Afghanistan, all could be well in that benighted land as well. One recent report in the Sunday Telegraph even claimed that the 4,000 British troops still in Basra are regarded as “heroes and liberators” by Iraqis now that their £8bn mission has at last been “accomplished”.
As the seventh year of the US-led occupation of Iraq begins tomorrow, facts on the ground tell a very different tale. Last week more than 60 people were killed in two suicide attacks on Iraqi police and army targets in Baghdad, while on Monday a 12-year-old girl was shot dead by American troops in a checkpoint incident in Nineveh province. It’s true that violence is well down on its gory peak of a couple of years ago and the power supply is edging up – to the level the US promised to achieve five years ago, at about 50% of demand. But a US soldier is killed on average every other day, Iraqi police and soldiers are dying at a much higher rate, and reported Iraqi civilian deaths are running at over 300 a month.
Continue reading “To free Iraq, resistance must bridge the sectarian divide”
“The Gates” have forced Stephen Colbert to recontextualize his notion of what $21 million can be used for.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
In response to increasing boycott calls, by organisations such as the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, the Zionists have launched a Northern Ireland Friends of Israel lobby group. It would be more aptly titled Northern Ireland Friends of Occupation, Apartheid, Racism, Massacre and Continued Colonisation. From the Jerusalem Post:
The Northern Ireland Friends of Israel marked its launch in Belfast last week with addresses from trade unionists, politicians and community leaders, including veteran unionist Rev. Ian Paisley.
Paisley, “the controversial firebrand preacher turned peacemaker,” in NIFI’s words, spoke of the similarities between the struggles of Israel and of Northern Ireland against terrorism, prayed for peace in Jerusalem and called for peace in the Middle East akin to the past few years of calm Northern Ireland has enjoyed due to power sharing between his Democratic Unionist Party and the Irish Republican Sinn Fein.
Continue reading “Ian Paisley launches Northern Ireland Friends of Israel”
A new comprehensive report by the Dutch research group Profundo – prepared for the Sir Joseph Hotung Programme for Law, Human Rights and Peace Building in the Middle East, SOAS – details the economic ties of a long list of British companies to Israeli settlements and other breaches of international law committed by the Israeli state. An indespensable resource for those engaged in the BDS campaign. Here is the edited summary of the full report:
Since June 1967, Israel has occupied the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. These territories are beyond the “Green Line,” which is accepted as the provisional, de facto border of Israel, until the successful conclusion of the Middle East peace process confirms its permanent international frontiers. Israel has established civilian settlements in these occupied territories, which is illegal according to international law. The creation of these settlements is in violation of Israel’s obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 which was adopted to protect civilians during armed conflict. This was known by Israel in 1967 when the then-Israeli government first considered establishing civilian settlements in the territories it had captured during the 1967 War. Israel’s settlements in the Gaza Strip were dismantled in August 2005. In the West Bank and the Golan Heights, however, settlements are expanding and new ones are being established in breach of international law and, in relation to the West Bank, the Road Map.
Continue reading “UK economic links with Israeli settlements”
Based on a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report, containing testimonies by 14 “High Value Detainees” captured during the course of 2002 by US forces, Mark Danner reports about the “the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program” which “either singly or in combination, constituted torture” and “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase “War on Terror”—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was “a wartime president”—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.
P U L S E 