The Times reports that a team of US-Nato special forces descended on a village in Kunar and apprehended 10 Afghans, including 8 schoolchildren — grades six, nine and ten — and executed them in cold blood. Seven of the children belonged to a single family, and many were handcuffed before being shot. Following is the lament of an Afghan poet who has endured enough of the freedom brought him by the so-called Operation Enduring Freedom.
(I am unable to translate this right now, maybe later. But the pictures speak for themselves).
Here are the thuggish Egyptian police harassing senior citizens and children on Israel’s behalf. It appears Egyptians are better at fighting for Israel than they were fighting against it.
Video clip from Thursday morning demonstration in Cairo, Egypt. Egyptians and internationals in the Gaza Freedom March assembled to protest Egypts crackdown on their freedom of movement. Police attempted to blockade some activists in their hotels, and allowed only a small number to travel to the border with Gaza. Video by Kayvan Farchadi with Sam Husseini.
One year after Israel’s war on Gaza, Al Jazeera talks to the UN special rapporteur Professor Richard Falk on Palestine and asks him about his views on that war, the impact of the Obama presidency and the future of the peace process.
On the 27th of December, I joined 24 other Israeli activists and with them tried to directly breech the siege on the Gaza strip, by marching south from Zikim beach. From the Anarchists Against the Wall website:
A high ranking officer present told the demonstrators that he could not promise that he and his men will avoid opening fire at them if they proceed. Challenging the legality of the siege, activists tried to cross the line of soldiers, and some even got into the sea, trying to swim around the barrier. The activists were soon stopped by the police, using motored water vessels and horses. 16 were arrested in suspicion of violating a military order, later to be released at the Sderot police station, but barred from returning to the area near Gaza for two weeks.
Revolted by the BBC’s frequently obsequious attitude toward the Israeli spokesman Mark Regev, Anne Key, a friend of PULSE, sent the following letter of complaint. We encourage readers to also register their complaints (Please copy us in at editor@pulsemedia.org when you write).
Dear Sir, Madam,
I am writing to complain about the BBC’s persistently subservient attitude when interviewing Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli government.
Marking the first-year anniversary of Israel’s war on Gaza (“Operation Cast Lead”), in which 1,417 Palestinians were killed (including 313 children and 116 women), Mr Regev was once again given free reign to “explain” Israel’s motives for Operation Cast Lead. The interviewer barely challenged Mr Regev throughout the interview.
Contrary to what Mr Regev asserts, the Israeli Army did not attack “key Hamas targets”. Conducting an estimated 2,300 air strikes, Israel indiscriminately targeted schools (including a school run by the UN), homes, hospitals, mosques and even flourmills. 8,000 homes were completely destroyed, 33,767 families had their houses damaged, 200,000 people were displaced, among them 112,000 children.
Sam Husseini speaks to Paul Jay of the Real News from Cairo. He is also liveblogging here.
Also check out Kirstie and Angus MacLean’s updates and the always excellent coverage by our good friends at Mondoweiss. Ali Abunimah is also liveblogging from Cairo. Stephen Walt has written about the absence of coverage in the US media (here and here). This is what presumably prompted the New York Times to give some coverage today (albeit on page A8). Democracy Now, as always, has the best coverage of all.
Roger Waters is an outspoken critic of Israel's apartheid wall
UPDATE: A video message by Waters added below.
27 December 2009 — My name is Roger Waters. I am an English musician living in the USA. I am writing to express my great admiration for and solidarity with the 1360 men and women from 42 different countries around the World who are gathering in Egypt, preparing for The Gaza Freedom March. We all watched, aghast, the vicious attack made a year ago on the people of Gaza by Israeli armed forces and the ongoing illegal siege. The suffering wrought on the population of Gaza by both the invasion and the siege is unimaginable to us outside the walls. The aim of The Freedom March is to focus world attention on the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza in the hope that the scales will fall from the eyes of all, ordinary, decent people round the world, that they may see the enormity of the crimes that have been committed, and demand that their governments bring all possible pressure to bear on Israel to lift the siege.
I use the word ‘crimes’ advisedly, as both the siege and the invasion have been declared unlawful by United Nations bodies and leading human rights organizations. If we do not all observe international law, if some governments think themselves above it, it is but a few short, dark, steps to barbarism and anarchy.
You possess the world’s fourth most powerful military according to your own estimates, yet find yourself delegitimized in the international arena, unable to impose control over either your perceived enemies, or your internal settler-anarchist “brothers”. You are desperately arresting nonviolent leaders that resist your military occupation while also fearing for the travel plans of your leaders implicated in war crimes. It would seem current events are spiraling out of your grasp. How do you reverse this worrying order of events?
A hint was provided Saturday morning when a joint Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Shin Bet raid killed three alleged members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, one of two groups that claimed responsibility for the recent murder of a settler near Nablus in the occupied West Bank. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, two of the three shooting deaths by the IDF were carried out like executions, and eyewitness testimony alleges the two victims were executed from close range once identified, despite putting up no resistance. A senior IDF official lent support to these testimonies when he told Israel Radio that the militants had not fired on the IDF troops and that two of the dead were known to have been unarmed at the time. However, he explained that they were assassinated because they were believed to be responsible for the settler’s death. In response B’Tselem called for an army investigation into the allegations of extrajudicial execution.
P U L S E 