Category: World News & Politics

The United States refrained from condemning the killing of a top Hamas leader by Israel on Saturday and limited its criticism of the assassination …
Bush stood with Ariel Sharon three days ago and welcomed the Israeli leader’s plan…

In avoiding a condemnation of the Israeli strike, the statement reflected a formula the Washington routinely uses when Israel targets a Palestinian militant :

In Saturday’s statement, the White House said, “Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorist attacks”…

Meanwhile,
– The European Union condemned the killing as unlawful and “not conducive to lowering tension.”
– A spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the assassination violated international law and could lead to more violence in the Middle East.
– Pope John Paul II said the killing of Abdelaziz Rantissi and the hostage-takings in Iraq were “inhuman acts”.
– Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie accused the United States of giving a green light to the assassination.
– The outrage in the Arab world at U.S. policies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is helping fuel support across the region for an insurgency against American occupation in Iraq.

[via Je Blog]

Top Hamas leader Abd al-Aziz al-Rantisi has been killed by an Israeli helicopter missile strike on his car in Gaza City.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry official confirmed that the missile strike was a targeted killing.
“We tried to do it a few months ago. At that time, he managed to run away. This time we got him,” Meir said.

Two of his bodyguards were also killed in the attack that took place this evening.

Al-Rantisi, a co-founder of Hamas, has become one of its two main leaders since Israel’s killing of Hamas spiritual head Ahmad Yasin in Gaza on 22 March.

He had long depicted himself as a Hamas politician with no links to the military wing. But Israel had refused to accept the distinction, accusing him of being a top decision-maker on attacks and of using his media role to incite violence.

It’s clear that this is the policy that Israel will be embracing more and more; dirty assassinations and state terrorism.
Of course, why not?
With Israel getting the green light from the US and being sure that any UN resolution against it will be vetoed (just like the resolution after the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin), there’s nothing to hold them back or make them think twice about killing anyone they feel like killing.

And as Saeb Erakat just said:
“At the end of the day violence will breed more violence, hatred will breed more hatred.”

Leaders of Hamas and other Palestinian groups, as well as ordinary Palestinians are already promising revenge for these killings.

It seems like Peace is very far from being more than an illusion.

A new book by Bob Woodward on President Bush’s Iraq policy says that Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team.

Bush feared that if news got out about the Iraq plan as U.S. forces were fighting another conflict, people would think he was too eager for war.
Good going Mr. War President!

Bush and his aides have denied accusations they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al Qaeda terrorist threat before the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Obviously they were lying.

Woodward’s account shows the degree to which some members of the administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were focused on Saddam Hussein from the onset of Bush’s presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al-Qaida the top priority.

Woodward says Bush told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to start working on a fresh war plan on Iraq on November 21, 2001 — when U.S. forces and allies were only in control of about half of Afghanistan, and he told him to keep quiet about it. He wasn’t allowed to even tell CIA director George Tenet about it when he wanted to get information and planning help from him.

This also confirms Richard Clarke’s account of things; how this administration has been planning to invade Iraq from the start and how it was always their highest priority, even higher than anti-terrorism and national security efforts.

[Buy Book from Amazon]

“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]

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]