Year: 2004

“Few would question Israel’s right to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks like the one yesterday, even to build a security wall if that were an appropriate means. It is also clear where such a wall would be built if security were the guiding concern: inside Israel, within the internationally recognized border, the Green Line established after the 1948-49 war. The wall could then be as forbidding as the authorities chose: patrolled by the army on both sides, heavily mined, impenetrable. Such a wall would maximize security, and there would be no international protest or violation of international law.”

“…What this wall is really doing is taking Palestinian lands. It is also ? as the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Israel’s war of “politicide” against the Palestinians ? helping turn Palestinian communities into dungeons, next to which the bantustans of South Africa look like symbols of freedom, sovereignty and self-determination.”

“It is misleading to call these Israeli policies. They are American-Israeli policies — made possible by unremitting United States military, economic and diplomatic support of Israel. This has been true since 1971 when, with American support, Israel rejected a full peace offer from Egypt, preferring expansion to security. In 1976, the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement in accord with an overwhelming international consensus. The two-state proposal has the support of a majority of Americans today, and could be enacted immediately if Washington wanted to do so.”

by: Noam Chomsky
For: The NY Times

[For full article: Click Here]

[via Aron’s Israel Peace Weblog]

“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]