Month: April 2004

“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
– Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001.

Simple, straight-forward and very true.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) today stopped distributing emergency food aid to some 600,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip, or approximately half of the refugees receiving UNRWA food aid in the occupied Palestinian territory, following restrictions introduced by Israeli authorities at the sole commercial crossing through which the Agency is able to bring in humanitarian assistance.

Stocks of rice, flour, cooking oil and other essential foodstuffs that UNRWA provides to refugees reduced to poverty, or otherwise affected by a humanitarian crisis now in its 42nd month, have been fully depleted.

The severe economic hardship of the children and adults in Gaza is well documented by US AID and other sources. Preventing the access of humanitarian aid will exacerbate already existing conditions of starvation and malnourishment.

– Sign petition to open gates to allow food into Gaza.

“They think power in Iraq should come out of the barrel of a gun…that is intolerable.”
— Paul Bremer (US Administrator of Iraq), on the insurrection

Look who’s talking!

Related Links:
– Iraqi Battalion Refuses to ‘Fight Iraqis’
– US to ‘capture or kill’ Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr

[via Je Blog, Jalan-Jalan]

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 10 – Moneer Munthir is ready to kill Americans.

For months, he has been struggling to control an explosion of miserable feelings: humiliation, fear, anger, depression.

“But in the last two weeks, these feelings blow up inside me,” said Mr. Munthir, a 35-year-old laborer. “The Americans are attacking Shiite and Sunni at the same time. They have crossed a line. I had to get a gun.”

“To be honest, we weren’t like this before,” he said of his friends and him. “But we’re religious people, and our leader has been threatened. We would be ashamed to stay in our houses with our wives at a time like this.”

This is just an example of how Anti-US outrage is uniting a growing Iraqi resistance.

[More: NY Times]
[Via: Current Affairs]

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called for a Pentagon investigation of a photograph circulating on the Internet that apparently shows an American soldier mocking an Iraqi child.

The photo sent to CAIR seems to be of an American soldier standing next to two Iraqi children who are giving the thumbs-up sign. One child holds a hand-lettered sign in English that reads: “Lcpl Boudreaux killed my Dad,
th(en) he knocked up my sister!” (“Knocked up” is American slang for making someone pregnant out of wedlock.)

“If the United States Army is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, this is the wrong way to accomplish that goal,” said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad.

Awad said CAIR has also received an anonymous letter from a soldier who recently returned from Iraq that claims a commanding officer engaged in inappropriate conduct with prepubescent Iraqi girls.

This is disgusting!

[More: CAIR]
[via Bouillabaisse]

Lately, Senator John Kerry has been reassuring voters that he will be as pro-Israel as President Bush. He has expressed his support for Sharon’s policy of unilateral disengagement, building of the so-called security barrier and the political isolation of Yasser Arafat.

The candidate’s present position toward Middle East peace contradicts his past support of the Oslo peace process and provides a surprising contrast to his views when he was a young anti-war leader in the early ’70s.

Last year Kerry told an Arab-American audience that the so-called security barrier that Israel was building was “an obstacle to peace.” Now he claims he has no problem with the barrier.

In summer 2003, Mr. Kerry published an article in a Brown University publication titled, “A Powerful Journey, An Essential Dream,” where he wrote, “in this difficult time we must again reaffirm we are enlisted for the duration – and reaffirm our belief that the cause of Israel must be the cause of America – and the cause of people of conscience everywhere [emphasis mine].” Kerry ends his article with a slogan associated with the religious pro-settler bloc, “am yisrael chai” or long live the people of Israel.

I think that it looks like no matter who is president of the United States, things don’t look like they’ll change at all for the suffering Palestinians.

[Source: Electronic Intifada]