October 16, 2007

Follow the Leader

The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby

By PAUL FINDLEY

“There is an open secret in Washington. I learned it well during my 22-year tenure as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. All members swear to serve the interests of the United States, but there is an unwritten and overwhelming exception: The interests of one small foreign country almost always trump U.S. interests. That nation of course is Israel.

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue give priority to Israel over America. Those on Capitol Hill are pre-primed to roar approval for Israeli actions whether right or wrong, instead of at least fussing first and then caving. The White House sometimes puts up a modest and ineffective show of resistance before it follows Israel’s lead.

In 2002, President Bush publicly ordered Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to end a bloody, destructive rampage through the Palestinian West Bank. He wilted just as publicly when he received curt word from Sharon that Israeli troops would not withdraw and would continue their military operations. A few days later President Bush invited Sharon to the White House where he saluted him as a “man of peace.”

I had similar experiences in the House of Representatives. On several occasions, colleagues told me privately that they admired what I was trying to do in Middle East policy reform but could not risk pro-Israel protest back home by supporting my positions.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/findley10162007.html

Richard Rose ---

The TRUTH about your “Nazi-Zionist” ideology and your IDF child killers must bring you and your ilk some very deep and penetrating pain!

We, the American People are slowly waking up to your Zionist AIPAC, mainstream news media’s deceptions!

http://www.worldpeaceforum.ca/live/media/nurit-pele d-elhanan-on-racism-and-education

Nurit Peled-Elhanan on Racism and Education
By Kitty Cresswell-Riol [June 27-2006]

VANCOUVER - In a session of the International Peace Education Conference at the World Peace Forum today, Nurit Peled-Elhanan warned of racism embedded within educational textbooks distributed in Israeli schools.

Nurit, an Israeli lecturer in language and education at Hebrew University, was awarded the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights by the European Parliament.  But foremost, she is a mother of a 13-year-old daughter killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. She has also become an outspoken peace activist and member of the Families Forum, a group committed to stopping the war in the Middle East. Nurit sees education as the channel through which a culture of peace can be created.

Nurit’s presentation highlighted racism instilled within Israeli school literature against Palestinians and the way in which they are not shown as modern, productive human beings - only as stereotypical scarf-wearing Arabs, masked terrorists, or third world ‘Oxfam images’ and refugees.

She discussed how, in educational literature, the world outside Israel is described as split between Jews and non-Jews and that by generalizing the non-Jewish population of Israel and Palestine as “Arabs” and referring to their situation as “a problem,” through photographs and text, they have been impersonalized and simplified.

As examples, Nurit presented maps, some of which leave Palestinian areas empty of geographical symbols as though they contain no data, historical or social, and illustrations of distorted facts to exaggerate particular points.

Nurit also discussed the use of materials in texts that distort records of massacres and consistently glorify Israeli troops. She noted the utilization of biblical phrases within geography textbooks to justify and legitimize Israeli occupation.

Nurit’s work remains controversial within Israel. She nevertheless, continues to lecture and has been invited to speak to the Israeli Ministry of Education in July.

#107082 by Robert on 10/14 at 5:26 pm
(456 comments total)

ILAN PAPPE, A BRAVE JEWISH ISRAELI HISTORIAN, TALKS ABOUT ISRAEL’S ETHNIC CLEANSING OF THE PALESTINIANS!

FANATIC HARDCORE ZIONISTS WILL NOT LIKE WHAT ILAN PAPPE HAS TO SAY ABOUT ISRAEL AND ITS RACISM!

George Galloway talks about Israel and Palestine with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. 

Click on the links for a total sequence of 3 parts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhfEWqBvav0&feature;=Pl ayList&p=F18C8A0CAA556AD6&index=0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTk4FwkvFmo&feature;=Pl ayList&p=F18C8A0CAA556AD6&index=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQU_H1zclQk&feature;=Pl ayList&p=F18C8A0CAA556AD6&index=2

#106926 by Brian S on 10/13 at 11:44 pm
(Unregistered commenter)

“Robert, If you leave Israel alone, they’ll leave you alone.  I would live among Israelis any time rather than among Muslims--in any country.  Some experience poisoned you somewhere along life’s path, I think.

I guess Mr. Hitchens’ readership wasn’t as high as he liked, so he decided to lob a huge word grenade into the ether.  I promise you, Mr. Hitchens, that you’d be a lot more welcome in Israel than any Muslim country--being an atheist and all.  Jews are much more tolerant of people than Muslims.”

==============================================
Brian, S...You would just fit well into that “Racist Zionist” Israeli society...Just a take a first glimpse at your “tolerant” fanatic Jewish Zionists.

Swedish Human Rights worker viciously attacked by Israeli settlers.

They were confronted by 100 settlers in small groups, who started chanting in Hebrew “We killed Jesus, we’ll kill you too!”

Take a look at the horrifying bloody pictures/scenes & read the details of how brutal Zionism really is among the settlers/Israelis & the IDF, child killers.

May be you would prefer NOT to show this and others to Americans...You prefer to let things stay just as they are...Eh?

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=687

Tony Blair “genuinely” shocked that world is round

Blair admits he is shocked by discrimination on the West Bank

10.13.2007 | The Independent
By Donald Macintyre in Hebron

While his aides munched tuna bagels thoughtfully provided by the Israeli military, a shirt-sleeved Tony Blair peered intently at a map showing the two main cargo crossing-points that will function between the West Bank and Israel once the 450-mile separation barrier between them is complete.

Why, Mr Blair wanted to know from his host, an Israeli general in civvies, couldn’t goods also be moved directly across the border from the nearby Palestinian industrial park that he is pressing Israel to approve?

“Why can’t they go straight through?” Ah, that would be difficult, the general explained, requiring a whole new expensive security apparatus to check goods going into the park.

We are a long from way from No 10. At Tarqumia to be precise, just inside the West Bank and one of those crossing points – a forbidding grey antenna and camera-studded complex of checkpoints still under construction. Mr Blair is on the road, grappling with the mind-numbing complexities of how the physical security infrastructure of the occupation has squeezed the Palestinian economy.

It is a theme reinforced for him in Hebron, the Palestinian city whose core was once the thriving commercial hub of the southern West Bank. Its mayor, Khaled Osaily, briefs him extensively about how much of its old city is boarded up, stripped of Palestinian life because of the presence of some 800 Jewish settlers, and their military protectors.

As Mr Blair’s convoy threads out of the city through the afternoon Ramadan traffic afterwards, Mr Osaily compliments Mr Blair on his thirst for facts. No, they had not talked much about the prospects for the forthcoming US-convened Annapolis conference on which hopes of any revival of a peace process have no been vested by the international community and in the preparations for which Mr Blair is intimately involved. “He is a practical man,” said Mr Osaily. “He asked many questions about daily life here. We talked about the economy, about movement, about security. He wanted to know details.”

Mr Blair gave the Israeli daily Yedhiot Ahronot his stock answer yesterday to questions about what he has learnt since taking the job. “I have learnt the depth of Israel’s concern for security, and I have learnt the depth of the Palestinians’ distress caused by the occupation.”

Certainly he accepts Israel’s view that Palestinians should not have a state until it can reasonably guarantee its neighbour’s security. Hence the importance he attaches to the efforts that US General Keith Dayton is making to beef up Palestinian security forces. Indeed he has been telling diplomats and others that the emergency Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayad, does not enter Nablus because he will not make the deal with the militias needed to guarantee his security.

He was shocked by what he was told about conditions in Hebron and diplomats say he was genuinely taken aback by his trip to the West Bank sector of the Jordan Valley – where Palestinians are allowed to dig wells only a third as deep as Israelis – at the exploitation of resources by the rich Jewish agricultural settlements at the expense of closed in Palestinian farmers. And he has been privately dismissive – rather more so perhaps than he was as Prime Minister – of the argument by some Israelis that security comes first, with economics and a political deal well behind it. “All three have to happen together” he has told diplomats – which is what he sees Annapolis as being about. This week he has been concentrating on the economics and is pressing Israel to permit job growth in the West Bank’s Area C, where it has direct as well as total control – including a Japanese government plan for an “agro-industrial” park in the Jordan Valley.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=1256

ALWAYS the VICTIM: ISRAEL’S PRESENT WARS

By Tanya Reinhart

“It was possible for Israel to handle this incident as all its predecessors, with at most a local retaliation, or a prisoner exchange, or even better, with an attempt to solve this border dispute once and for all.”

“In the Israeli discourse, Israel has always been the innocent victim of vicious aggression from its neighbors. This perception of reality has only intensified with its two recent wars - against the Palestinians in Gaza and against Lebanon. On this view, in both cases Israel has manifested its good will - it ended the occupation of the Gaza strip in 2005, just as it ended the occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000. But, on this perception, the other side reciprocated with unprovoked rockets attacks on Israel. This world view was well summarized by Brigadier General Yosi Kuperwaser, who has just finished his term as head of the research division of the Israeli Military Intelligence: “I think the Palestinians themselves do not want the occupation to end. This is to understand why they are pursuing us with rockets from Gaza, where the occupation ended. What is this pursuit? An attempt to force us to shoot at them?” [1]

The Israeli army’s offensive in Gaza is not about the Israeli soldier captured there. As senior security analyst Alex Fishman widely reported, the army was preparing for an attack months earlier and was constantly pushing for it, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its government. The army initiated an escalation on 8 June when it assassinated Abu Samhadana, a senior appointee of the Hamas government, and intensified its shelling of civilians in the Gaza Strip. Governmental authorization for action on a larger scale was already given by 12 June, but it was postponed in the wake of a global reverberation caused by the killing of civilians in the air force bombing the next day. The abduction of the soldier released the safety-catch, and the operation began on 28 June with the destruction of infrastructure in Gaza and the mass detention of the Hamas leadership in the West Bank, which was also planned weeks in advance. [2]

As obvious in Kuperwaser’s words, the Israeli narrative is that when Israel evacuated its settlers from the Gaza Strip, it has also ended its occupation there and the Palestinians’ behavior therefore constitutes ingratitude. But there is nothing further from reality than this description. In fact, as was already stipulated in the Disengagement Plan, Gaza remained under complete Israeli military control, operating from outside. Israel prevented any possibility of economic independence for the Strip and from the very beginning; Israel did not implement a single one of the clauses of the agreement on border-crossings of November 2005. Israel simply substituted the expensive occupation of Gaza with a cheap occupation, one which in Israel’s view exempts it from the occupier’s responsibility to maintain the Strip, and from concern for the welfare and the lives of its close to a million and a half residents, as determined in the fourth Geneva Convention.

Israel does not need this piece of land, one of the most densely populated in the world, and lacking any natural resources. The problem is that one cannot let Gaza free, if one wants to keep the West Bank. A third of the occupied Palestinians live in the Gaza strip. If they were given freedom, they would become the center of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, with free access to the Western and Arab world. To control the West Bank, Israel needs full control of Gaza. The new form of control Israel has developed is turning the whole of the Strip into a prison camp completely sealed off from the world.”

(Tanya Reinhart was Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Media Studies at Tel Aviv University and as of January 2007, a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU. Tanya Reinhart passed away earlier this year.)

http://www.stateofnature.org/alwaysTheVictim.html

January 29, 2007

“We Are All Victims of the Occupation”

Let Our Children Live

By NURIT PELED-ELHANAN

“Bassam Aramin spent nine years in an Israeli prison. He belonged to Yasser Arafat’s Al Fatah in the Hebron area and attempted to throw a grenade at an Israeli army Jeep in occupied Hebron. Last Wednesday morning, an Israeli soldier in a jeep in his village of Anata, on the West Bank, shot his nine year old daughter, Abir, in the head. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry in Abir Aramin’s death. Neither the police nor the courts have questioned anyone. There will be no investigation. As far as the Israeli Defense Forces are concerned, the shooting did not happen. The army’s official account of her death is that she was hit by a stone that one of her classmates was throwing “at our forces.”

We who live in Israel know that stones thrown by 10 year olds do not blow brains out. Just as we see every day the Israeli jeeps circling Palestinian children on their way to and from school and greet them with stun-bombs, “rubber” bullets and riot control gas.

A bullet penetrated Abir Aramin’s skull, while she was walking to school with her sister. I saw her just afterwards at Hadassah Hospital, where she slept quietly in a huge hospital bed. Abir’s face was white. Her huge eyes were closed. By then, she was already brain dead, and the doctors decided to allow the rest of her to die. I saw clearly that her head had been shot from behind, and I will testify under oath to that fact. A young student who witnessed her shooting told journalists that the Israeli border police, who are part of the IDF, drove up to the girls as they came out of their school examinations. “The girls were afraid and started running away. The border police followed them in the direction in which they were retreating. Abir was afraid and stool against one of the shops at the side of the road. I was standing near her. The border policeman shot through a special hole in the window of his jeep that was standing very close to us. Abir fell to the ground I saw that she was bleeding from the head.”

Abir Aramin is dead. The doctors at Hadassah will not disclose the cause of her death to her parents or her friends. Her family has requested an autopsy. Her father, Bassam Aramin, is one of the founders of Combatants for Peace. My son, who served as an Israeli soldier in the occupied territories, is also a member. They are friends. Bassam told us that he cannot rest until his daughter’s killer convinces him that nine year old Abir threatened his life or the life of the other soldiers in his jeep. I fear he will never have the chance to rest.

Abir Aramin has joined the thousands of other children killed in this country and the territories it occupies. She will be welcomed by my own little girl, Smedar. Smedar was killed in 1997 by a suicide bomber. If her killer had survived, I know he would have been sent to prison for his crime.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/peled01292007.html

ITZW...I am really laughing at your deranged fanatic behavior...you need some help badly! You are sly as a snake.

Go ahead and post another one of your zionist “fits” posts!

You think that you are clever and crafty. You did NOT divert the TOPIC at all!

You are just a plane ole FOOL.

Inherit The Zionist Wind(ITZW)...Your deranged comment made me laugh. ITZW, you are NOT fooling anyone here; your sneaky ways and habits are well known on truthdig. Your mind is severely “infected “with that evil zionism...just as Nurit Peled-Elhanan calls it “MIND INFECTION”.

ITZW...keep spewing your stupid frothy garbage. You sound like that other deranged zionist fanatic, lefty=ephraim/pesach. Check on him...he may be in the same psyche ward.

Happy trails...your head is forever locked in that zionist box!

Inherit The Zionist Wind...THIS ONE IS FOR YOU & YOUR ILK. DECEPTION IS A WAY OF LIFE FOR YOU. YOU ARE FULL OF HATE AND EVIL ZIONISM. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE! JUST KEEP HOWLING!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

N(ational)P(rostitute)R(adio) tries to get Carter to retract book’s title (wouldn’t its subscribers love it?) but he stands his ground

Jimmy Carter Defends ‘Peace Not Apartheid’

01.25.2007 | NPR.org

“Morning Edition, January 25, 2007 · Former President Jimmy Carter finds himself in a defensive posture after criticism of his new book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The best-seller has generated a passionate response in critics who say it is slanted toward Palestinians, and full of inaccuracies.

Since the book was published, Carter says he has been branded an anti-Semite and a bigot. Reaction to the book included the resignation of 14 members of a Carter Center community board, who say Carter puts too much blame on Israel.

Carter responded to those charges at Brandeis University this week, where he was later rebutted by Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz.

In that appearance, the former president defended the book’s accuracy, save one passage Carter now calls “terribly worded,” that seemed to justify terrorism by Palestinians on Israeli citizens.

Carter says he was not completely surprised that his choice of the word “apartheid” in the book’s title garnered criticism.

Yet Carter says he hopes his book will raise awareness about conditions for Palestinians in the West Bank.

Here’s the conversation with Steve Inskeep in full:”

Click on link for the rest of the story:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=851
-----------------------------------------------------
ITZW...What do you think would happen to a Palestinian, Christian, Moslem if he were to been seen eating regular bread instead of “matza” while passing by a synagogue full of worshipers or one of the Ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods/section in Israel during the Jewish Passover?

What do you think the Israeli police or Jewish worshipers would do?

Hmmm....???

#106269 by alan winters on 10/11 at 10:03 am
(Unregistered commenter)

Your moral equivalence is appalling.  Jews don’t teach hatred, intolerance and murder, whereas Arabs do.  That’s a big difference.  Guns can be used for murder (Arabs) or defense (Jews).
=============================================
a. winters...your post is a typical ignorant fanatic zionist post. How is that AIPAC/Zionism/Israel’s “Inetrnet Megaphone” working for you and your ilk?

“Apparently you were severely “Mind Infected” with your zionism=racism’s ideology. You have that severe zionism’s tunnel vision. Are you able to get your head out of that zionist box?

Take a look at what Dr. Nurit-Peled Elhanan, an Israeli professor, has to say about what Jewish kids are taught. She should know a lot more than you or me. And she does!
*****

Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Education Or Mind Infection?
Tuesday, 10 October 2006

Education Or Mind Infection?

(Speech given at Connecticut College, New London, CT)

All of you dead children were deceived, because your death has achieved nothing at all and the world goes on living as if your blood had never been shed. Because the leaders of the world keep playing their murderous games, using you as their dice and our grief as fuel for their killing machines. Because children are abstract entities for generals and grief is a political tool. Living at both sides, that of the victims and that of the killers, I keep asking myself, what are the means by which good Israeli children are turned into murdering monsters, what are the means by which they are so mind-infected as to kill and torture and humiliate other children, their parents and grandparents, and sacrifice their own life for nothing but the folly and megalomania of their chiefs? In the so-called Western enlightened world everyone feels very well-founded when they blame Islam for suicide bombing and terror. But who would ever blame Judaism for murder? And yet, Ulta Orthodox Jewish children who have never left Brooklyn know that to kill Arabs is a ‘mitzva’ (holy commandment) for they are ‘vilde hayeths’ (wild beasts). And Israeli children actually commit the crimes of slaughter and

torture. Neither Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter are the cause for murder and terror. Racist education is. American imperialism is, and Israeli ruthless regime of occupation is. The women and children who suffer most from western violence today are Muslim women but racism has its way and the blame for their suffering is attributed to their being muslim.

The western world today is infected with fear of Islam and of the muslim womb. Great France of liberte egalite and fraternite is scared of little head-scarved girls, Jewish Israel calls in public speeches and schoolbooks the Arab citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the enemy from within. As for the Palestinians refugees living under occupation, they are defined in Israeli History schoolbooks as a ‘problem to be solved”. Not long ago the Jews were a problem to be solved.”

(Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a Lecturer in Language Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.)

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0610/S00129.htm

#106133 by Brent W on 10/10 at 6:02 pm
(Unregistered commenter)

“I’m not privy to the source of your raw hatred of Jews, but the statistics don’t exist to convince me that those following Judaism are somehow more deadly and destructive than Islamics.”
=========================================

Brent W....I am NOT anti-Judaism at all. I share the same views as Dr. Sara Roy’s views (see comment #106187) regarding what Judaism meant to her, her mother and father.

I am anti-Zionism and its racism. I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit “The Holy Land” with my wife and kids several years ago. We stayed there 9 weeks. We were able to visit the Israeli cities and the Palestinian towns, villages and much more. We saw how the Israelis lived and how the Palestinians lived under an oppressing Occupation.

If a person were a Jewish citizen, he/she was from the elite class. If a person were Christian/Moslem, he/she was a third and fourth class Israeli citizens.

Myself, wife and kids have seen the most horrific forms of racism practiced by the Israeli personnel/staff, IDF and others against Palestinian civilians. We saw it on a daily basis and were totally shocked by it. We saw it with our own eyes.

It is fortunate that we have many Jewish scholars, intellectuals like Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Sara Roy, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Tanya Reinhart, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Uri Avnery, Jennifer Loewenstein, Raul Hilberg and many more...who are on the side of TRUTH, justice, fairness, tolerance, rescue, human rights, humanity and PEACE.

They are NOT on the side of Zionism’s ideology of racism, Apartheid, oppression, Occupation, ethnic cleansing. They are NOT on the side of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ben Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Israel’s generals, Israel’s brutal IDF, fanatic zionist zealot’s Zionism.

There are extremists on both sides of the aisle. Everyone fights with their own abilities - the Israelis have US made helicopters, missiles, tanks, fighter jets, cluster bombs and carpet bombings and tens of thousands of the most sophisticated weapons...all the way to Nuclear weapons (WMD’s).

The Palestinian have some primitive home-made explosives, stones and themselves.

I do NOT support such actions or see this as the solution.

If one were to ask any Israeli to put himself in a similar situation of brutal occupation and oppression for over 40 years with their land, water resources, farms, olive groves being stolen and homes bulldozed in front of their eyes—everyone would do the same, including the current Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.

ZIONISM = RACISM/APARTHEID!

HUMAN RIGHTS AND EQUAL JUSTICE FOR ALL PEOPLE IS THE SOLUTION!

“How Can Children of the Holocaust Do Such Things”

“A Jewish Plea”

By SARA ROY

April 7 / 8, 2007

“For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives, they taught me, we cease to be Jews.

Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who writeabout Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be “a kind of solution,” a useful, hostile “other” to borrow from Edward Said. That any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.”

“Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable--indeed, for some, an act of heresy--to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure?”

“What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression? Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more.  For too many among us they are no longer but necessary and good-we cannot live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing validity and purpose.”
***************************************************

An outstanding article by Sara Roy and one that exposes her Judaism vs Zionism.

Here is the link to Sara Roy’s article:

http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html

IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS. EVEN WITH A THOUSAND WORDS, HOW CAN ONE DESCRIBE THE LOOK IN THE EYES OF A 13 YEAR OLD PALESTINIAN BOY BEING USED BY ISRAEL’S BRUTAL IDF AS A “HUMAN SHIELD” ?

THE SIMPLE ANSWER IS THAT THERE ARE SOME STORIES & TRUTH THAT CAN ONLY BE TOLD WITH PICTURES.

Take a look & read the TRUTH of this story:

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=1018

“ONE OF THE FEW VIDEOS THAT GOT AWAY FROM THE ISRAELI CENSORS”

“It’s so tough being a NAZI”

“When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem’s hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel’s Channel 2 broadcast the tape last weekend. The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell during the army’s March 8 assault on the Aida refugee camp. The army wouldn’t comment and foreign journalist weren’t allowed inside the camp.

But the Israeli media were allowed to ride along with the soldiers, and they went right into the Hawarjeh home. An Israeli camera recorded the army blowing off the door, and found Huda Hawarjeh bleeding on the floor.

The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh’s story about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers doing little to help her for one hour while she bled to death in front of her five children.

Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the hospital but couldn’t.

Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the Bethlehem area that day.

The Israeli army allows the media such close access on the understanding it can embargo anything it doesn’t want broadcast.

The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo anyway.

The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn’t like what they saw.

Channel 2 showed Hawarjeh begging soldiers to allow an ambulance through. The camera captured the terror of the woman’s daughter, and her brother’s attempt to stop her from showing the soldiers her fear.”
==================================================

SO LONG AS “NO FOREIGN JOURNALISTS” ARE ALLOWED TO RECORD ISRAEL’S IDF SOLDIERS TERROR CRIMES, THEN ALL MUST BE OK WITH THE KILLINGS OF INNOCENT PALESTINIAN WOMEN & CHILDREN. NO ONE CAN FIND OUT ABOUT & NO ONE CAN PROVE IT!

Here is the link to Israel’s IDF soldiers inflicting terror & murder on un-armed Palestinian civilians.

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=897

Pre-Packaged Opinions on Israel and Palestine
Jeffrey Goldberg’s Prison

By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN 10/6/07

“Goldberg also alludes to Israeli prisons which had a meaner reputation than Ketziot such as Dahariya and Gaza Beach camp (Ansar Two). It is instructive to juxtapose Goldberg’s description of Gaza Beach camp (Rafiq had been held there before Ketziot) with that of an Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, who served there:

Goldberg: Here is where young Palestinians were assimilated into the apparatus of occupation, where the Shabak extracted from the Arabs what they could and then trucked them to the desert. The policy of Ansar Two was consistent: Prisoners being prepped for interrogation were made to stand on the basketball court under the sun for four, or five, or six hours. They were forced to raise their arms, and they were not allowed to sit, or drink. When Rafiq’s arms dropped from exhaustion, he was struck.Rafiq was smacked around a bit [during interrogation].

Shavit: Most Palestinians are awaiting trial; most were arrested because they were throwing stones or were said to be members of illegal organizations. Many are in their teens. Among them, here and there, are some boys who are small and appear to be very young.The prison has twelve guard towers. Some Israeli soldiers are struck--and deeply shaken--by the similarity between these and certain other towers, about which they have learned at school. The unjust analogy with those other camps of fifty years ago won’t ago away.And I, too, who have always abhorred this analogy, who have always argued bitterly with anyone who so much as hints at it, I can no longer stop myself. The associations are too strong.Like a believer whose faith is cracking, I go over and over again in my mind the long list of arguments, the list of differences.But then I realize that the problem is not in the similarity-for no one can seriously think that there is a real similarity-but that there isn’t enough lack of similarity. The problem is that the lack of similarity isn’t strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes, the accusing images. Maybe the Shin Bet [Shabak] is to blame for this--for the arrests it makes and what it does to those arrested. For almost every night, after it has managed, in its interrogations, to “break” a certain number of young men, the Shin Bet delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of the friends of the young men. Then the soldiers go out almost every night to the city and come back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten.And soldiers crowd together in the “reception room” to look at them when they undress. To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as they tremble with fear. And sometimes they kick them--one kick more, before they put on their new prison clothes....Or maybe the doctor is to blame.

You wake him up in the middle of the night to treat one of those just brought in--a young man, barefoot, wounded, who looks as if he’s having an epileptic fit, who tells you that they beat him just now on the back and the stomach and over the heart. There are ugly red marks all over his body. The doctor turns to the young man and shouts at him. In a loud, raging voice he says: May you die! And then he turns to me with a laugh: May they all die! Or maybe the screams are to blame. At the end of the watch, you sometimes hear horrible screams from the other side of the fence of the interrogation section,hair-raising human screams. Literally hair-raising.In Gaza our General Security Services [Shabak] therefore amount to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly run Gulags. Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers. In Gaza it’s all straightforward and clear. There’s no place to hide.

http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein10062007.html

Visit http://www.giyus.org/ to see how “they” do it.  I attribute a lot of the last few pro Israel-Zionist comments on this and other blogs by unregistered commenters by this very useful Zionism/AIPAC/Israel’s organizational tool.

ITS ISRAEL/ZIONISM’S PROPAGANDA “INTERNET MEGAPHONE”!

B’TSELEM - The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights HUMAN RIGHTS in the Occupied Territories.

Fatalities

Click on the numbers for a list of individual names and details about the circumstances of their death.
29.9.2000-30.9.2007

Occupied Territories

Israel
Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces
4204 63
Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians
41
Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians
233 471
Israeli security force personnel killed by Palestinians
234 87
Foreign citizens killed by Palestinians
17 36
Foreign citizens killed by Israeli security forces
10
Palestinians killed by Palestinians
541

Additional data (included in previous table)
Occupied Territories
Israel
Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces
858 3
Israeli minors killed by Palestinians
39 80
Palestinians killed during the course of a targeted killing

367

Palestinians who were the object of a targeted killing
218
Palestinians killed by Palestinians for suspected collaboration with Israel
120
Palestinians who took part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces
1359 55
Palestinians who did not take part in the hostilities and were killed by Israeli security forces ( not including the objects of targeted killings).
2023 5
Palestinians who were killed by Israeli security forces and it is not known if they were taking part in the hostilities
603 3

Notes:

1. The data may change due to ongoing research, which produces new information about the events .
2. The figures do not include :

* Palestinians who died after medical treatment was delayed due to restrictions of movement .
* Palestinians killed by an explosive device that they set or was on their person .
* 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel killed within Israel by the Israeli Police in October 2000 .
* One Jewish Israeli citizen killed within Israel by a Palestinian-Israeli citizen in October 2000 .
* Two Jewish Israeli citizens and One member of the Israeli security forces, killed by a Palestinian citizen of Israel in Nahariya in September 2001 .
* Four Palestinian-citizens of Israel killed by IDF gunfire in the Territories .
* One Palestinian-citizen of Israel killed by Border Police gunfire within Israel in July 2003 .
* Five Palestinian citizens of Israel killed by an absconded IDF soldier on a bus in Shfar’am, within Israel , in August 2005 and the shooting soldier, beaten to death by Palestinian-citizens of Israel.
* Seven members of the Ghaliya family (the two parents and their five children, one an adult), who were killed in June 2006 in an explosion on the coast by Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip. The cause of the explosion remains unclear.
* One Palestinian resident of a-Sheikh Sa’ed was killed on May 2007 during a fire exchange between Palestinian militants and Israeli policemen at the a-Sheikh Sa’ed checkpoint in East Jerusalem.
* One Twelve-year-old Israeli child who, in August 2007 while on a family visit in the village of Saida in Tulkarm district, was killed by undercover troops who had come to arrest his brother and his brother’s friend, who were wanted by Israel.
* One Israeli citizen from Kfar Qana, who was killed in August 2007 in the Old City in East Jerusalem after he grabbed a security guard’s weapon.

http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp

#105848 by Inherit The Wind on 10/09 at 12:45 pm
(Unregistered commenter)

Statistics

Number of sources Robert has cited that were biased, propagandistic, or openly anti-Semitic: 100%

Number of legitimate, mainstream sources with verifiable information that Robert has cited: 0%

(Typically, Robert would have you think that Michael Rivero’s pschotically paranoid, anti-semitic, tin-foil-hat whatreallyhappened.com is a source to be taken seriously. All of Robert’s sources are the same kind of useless propaganda.)
=================================================

Inherit The Zionist Wind (ITZW)...Your above post is your typical fanatical “zionist” side-tracking tactic.Its just about the same-ole crap that you have been posting on truthdig. Its your same same-ole Zionist / AIPAC propaganda methods… ‘anti-semitic, holocaust, Hitler, neo-nazi, Jew haters...and so on.

ITZW...YOUR ZIONIST-NAZI ISRAEL HAS COMMITTED THE WORST CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY. ITS BRUTAL NAZI IDF ARE CHILD MURDERERS. WHY DON’T YOU TELL US THE GIDEON LEVY IS A SELF-HATING JEW AND IS A LIAR?

ITZW...YOU ARE GETTING AWFULLY DESPERATE, BUT YOUR ZIONIST-NAZI WAYS AND LIES JUST WON’T WORK AND CANNOT STAND UP AGAINST THE “TRUTH”!

Mohammed al-Dura lives on

07/10/2007 By Gideon Levy

The concern Israel demonstrates for the fate of one Palestinian boy touches the heart: Again, note what a fuss is being made about the case of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Our heart is impervious to the fate of other children who have been killed.

All of these are tasteless questions designed to divert attention from the truly important issues: According to data collected by human rights group B’Tselem, Israel is responsible for killing more than 850 Palestinian children and teenagers since al-Dura was killed, including 92 in the past year alone. Last October, we killed 31 children in Gaza. This is what should have raised a storm and not the measurements by the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command.

Al-Dura refuses to step down from the stage because he has become an icon of the Palestinian struggle and a symbol of Israeli brutality. A thousand Nahum Shahafs will not succeed in blurring the unequivocal fact that a scandalous killing of children is taking place in the territories.

Even if the director of the Government Press Office, Danny Seaman, is right in determining that the film made by the reliable and experienced French journalist Charles Enderlin was “staged,” and even if he succeeds in clearing Israel from responsibility for this killing, what will we say about the other children who have been killed? That their killing was also “staged?” That the IDF did not kill them through carelessness and contempt for their lives; by being trigger-happy and even acting with premeditation? If Israel were really interested in improving its “public relations,” it would embrace the al-Dura family instead of all the foolish investigations. It would provide compensation to the family and show the world that it is truly and sincerely sorry about the death of one child.

The question of who killed al-Dura is like the question of what Joseph Trumpeldor mumbled before his death. The myth in both cases is already stronger than any investigation. Al-Dura became a symbol because his killing was documented on videotape. All the other hundreds of children were killed without cameras present, so no one is interested in their fate. If there had been a camera in Bushara Barjis’ room in the Jenin refugee camp while she was studying for a pre-matriculation test, we would have a film showing an IDF sniper firing a bullet at her head. If there had been a photographer near Jamal Jabaji from the Askar camp, we would see soldiers emerging from an armored jeep and aiming their weapons at the head of a child who threw stones at them. But these children did not become symbols; there are no stamps bearing their portraits, no streets named after them and no songs composed for them as with al-Dura because they were not filmed at the time of their deaths.

Al-Dura became a symbol because every struggle needs a symbol, a shrine for the masses of dead and the anonymous heroes. The assumption that the IDF soldiers firing at Palestinians at the Netzarim junction killed the boy cradled in his father’s arms exactly seven years ago is the most reasonable one. As far as we can remember, there has been no other case in which Palestinians fired at the IDF and hit a Palestinian child.

But even if there is some doubt, it is certain that the IDF has killed and is killing children. So this ridiculous focus on who killed al-Dura, a question that will never be resolved, is no more than a tempest in a putrid teapot. There should be a tempest, a great and mighty one, but one focused on an entirely different issue: Why is the IDF continuing to kill children at such a frightening pace, and why doesn’t Israel take responsibility for this and compensate the families of those killed? But no one is conducting “investigations” about this.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=1253

Statistics

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation.

It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.

Below are charts of nine little-known statistics.
Please click on any statistic for the source and more information.

Statistics Last Updated: September 19, 2007

Israeli and Palestinian Children Killed Since September 29, 2000

118 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 952 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000. (View Source)

Israelis and Palestinians Killed Since September 29, 2000

1,024 Israelis and at least 4,274 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000. (View Source)

Israelis and Palestinians Injured Since September 29, 2000

7,633 Israelis and 31,531 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000. (View Source)

Daily U.S. Aid to Israel and the Palestinians

The U.S. gives more than $7,023,288 per day to the Israeli government and military and gives no money to the Palestinians. (View Source)

UN Resolutions Targeting Israel and the Palestinians

Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none. (View Source)

Political Prisoners and Detainees

1 Israeli is being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 10,756 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel. (View Source)

Demolitions of Israeli and Palestinian Homes

0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 4,170 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since September 29, 2000. (View Source)
=========================================
See charts, statistics and details; click on link/URL:

http://www.ifamericansknew.org

Dissenting at your own risk
By CECILIE SURASKY
Special to the Star-Telegram

“Last year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel’s occupation. My talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself “America’s pro-Israel Lobby.”

A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program’s funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.

Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.

Why is Israel’s increasingly brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic support that makes it possible?

In a society built on the free exchange of ideas, as Walt and Mearsheimer point out, one answer can be found by looking at the many self-appointed gatekeepers, such as Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League, or Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who use their Jewish identity as both a shield and cudgel. They work diligently to silence those who question ill-conceived policies of the Israeli and U.S. governments.

Non-Jewish critics, even former President Carter, are denounced as anti-Semites. Special ire is reserved for Jewish dissenters, who are branded as “self-hating” or “marginal,” while Muslim and Arab-Americans are easily smeared and even criminalized with charges of supporting terrorism.

Stunned by the stifling of dissent, we decided to start a Web site, Muzzlewatch, to track the incidents. Just as we launched, Stanford Middle East Studies Professor Joel Beinin was disinvited from a speaking engagement at a high school with just 24 hours’ notice.

After an unprecedented campaign of outside interference waged by Dershowitz, Professor Norman Finkelstein was refused tenure by DePaul University because of his criticism of U.S.-Israeli policy. Palestinian-American anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj is fighting a political campaign to deny her tenure at Barnard.

Even Walt and Mearsheimer, who are getting plenty of exposure, couldn’t have asked for better proof of their point that the lobby works to stifle dissent when an embarrassed head of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs told them that their scheduled speech was canceled. (They did speak before the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth on Sept. 17.) This was apparently because Foxman was not available that day to “balance” their talk.

(They had initially been booked by themselves. The talk was not rescheduled.)

Many groups that started with the important work of fighting real anti-Semitism now rely on anti-Semitism to insist that to show one’s love of Jews, one must offer uncritical support to Israel. They are especially displeased by Jews who believe that enabling Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights is not good for anyone.

Unless this atmosphere of intimidation is confronted, Americans will continue to lack access to information and perspectives necessary to formulate effective Middle East policies, virtually ensuring that Israel and the United States will be at war for many years to come.”

‘The Israel Lobby’

http://podcast.dfwworld.org/2007_09-17_The_Israel_Lobby.MP3
(Cecilie Surasky is communications director for the Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace.)

http://www.star-telegram.com/245/story/255318.html