Noam Chomsky delivered two key lectures in London at LSE and the Institute of Education this week. As both were sold out within hours, before they were ever adverstised, the lectures on Thursday 28th October was streamed live to 12 universities in the UK, and projected to large audiences. To see and hear Chmosky’s lecture in full, use the link below:
The video as well as an audio file are now available on
http://www.soas.ac.uk/events/event52739.html
Settler shoots Palestinian in Jerusalem: Ma’an News
Bethlehem – Ma’an – Right-wing Israeli settlers attacked the Salah family on their way to Friday prayers in a bid to take over their home in the East Jerusalem community of Beit Safafa on Friday, Israeli and Palestinian officials said.
The settlers, 12 according to Palestinian sources, six according to Israeli media, and three according to the Jerusalem police chief, pulled up in a car with an eviction order for the family home of Ali Ibrahim Salah and his children.
Salah said the buildings shelter 55 residents, 30 of which are under 12 years old and include his children, Ismail, Mohammad, Mahmoud, Ahmad. He said the settlers claimed they bought the homes from their Armenian owners.
The Palestinian News Network quoted Sheha Salah as saying that her husband had purchased the buildings from its owners in 1966, and had the documents to prove the validity of the sale. Israel’s High Court issued an eviction order on the home in August, giving the family one month to vacate the premises.
An argument erupted as the settlers demanded the family get out of their home. One of the settlers, reportedly all in their 50s, was armed with a gun, and fired on the family members. Israeli sources differed saying between one and four were injured, most of them youth.
The following family members were admitted to the Al-Maqased Hospital in East Jerusalem after the attack:
Daoud Salah, 18, sustained blows to the head and extensive bruising on his foot
Mohammad Salah, 48, sustained bruises to his lower back after being hit with an iron bar
Sheha Salah, 89, sustained bruises to his head and neck
Ismail Slah, 60, was shot with a live bullet in his hand
Ali Ibrahim Salah, 95, sustained moderate bruises to his body after being struck several times
The Israeli news agency Ynet said the middle-aged extremists fled the scene after the shooting, but were later found and detained.
An Israeli police spokesman had a different version of the incident, saying, “Three Jewish people came to the home in Beit Safafa to deliver the eviction order to the family then fighting erupted. It seems one of the Jewish people opened fire with his personal weapon and injured one of the Arab residents in the hand… then the Jewish people fled the scene driving their car.”
Following their release from the hospital, members of the Salah family were summoned to the police station for interrogation.
Protest at Daniel Ayalon’s meeting at LSE: Blip.TV
The racist Daniel Ayalon, moutpiece of the Israeli government, was invited by the lSE management to speak to staff and students. Enraged by this invitation, a large group of students have made their views known:
Bethlehem student deported to Gaza: Ma’an News
Bethlehem – Ma’an – Israeli forces forcibly “deported” Berlanty Azzam, a Bethlehem University student, to Gaza overnight after detaining her at a military checkpoint on Wednesday.
“I pray that no one else goes through the same experience,” she said over the phone from Gaza, recounting her last hours in the West Bank.
Born in Gaza, Azzam, 21, was sponsored by the university for study in the West Bank and had been living in Bethlehem since 2005, the university confirmed. She received a travel permit from the Israeli military to cross from Gaza to the West Bank in 2005.
On Wednesday, however, she was heading home to Bethlehem from a job interview in Ramallah, and arrived at the “container” checkpoint at 1pm. Israeli forces checked her ID and held her until 7pm without explanation. Then they blindfolded and handcuffed her, put her in a jeep and told her they were taking her to “Etzion Israeli coordinating office,” she said.
She described the journey as silent. Most of the trip no one spoke to her or told her where they were taking her, she said.
They stopped somewhere along the way, and she remembers being in a place that looked like a cafeteria. She asked to use the restroom, and the soldiers kept her blindfolded all the way to the restroom door. They were there for what Berlanty estimates was about 15 minutes. Then she was put back in the army jeep, and the journey continued.
Hours after the journey began, the jeep came to a stop. Soldiers took her out, removed the blindfold and handcuffs and told her, “You are in Gaza.”
“I haven’t been to Gaza for four years,” she replied. “I didn’t know the way, and it was dark. It was an empty area.”
“Give me directions,” she told the soldiers, “I don’t know where to go.” They just gestured for her to continue, following behind, so she kept walking until she came to a gate. That gate opened, she went through it, then through another one, to ultimately find de facto government police and her parents waiting for her on the other side.
Asked how the family was doing, her father said, “Well you know how things are here.”
Education officials appealed to concerned supporters and asked them to “demand that they [Israel] release Berlanty Azzam immediately so that she can resume and complete her last year of studies at the Vatican-sponsored Bethlehem University.”
“The Israeli military has banned Palestinian residents of Gaza from studying at Palestinian universities in the West Bank,” according to Bethlehem University Vice President Brother Jack Curran, in a statement issued just before the deportation.
He added, “Military authorities are holding this 4th year Christian student in the Sharon Detention Center near Netanya in Israel and are threatening to ‘deport her’ to Gaza ‘for trying to complete her studies at Bethlehem University.'”
Matthew Kalman, a writer for the Chronicle for Higher Education, spoke to Sari Bashi, Berlanty’s lawyer and executive director of the human rights group Gisha. “I spoke to her today for about 10 minutes until the army took away her cellphone. She’s terrified. She’s 21. She has never been in detention and doesn’t know what’s happening to her.”
The lawyer continued, explaining, “We asked the army to let her go… [but] they said no. They did agree to wait until after our lawyer visits in the morning. They won’t deport her pending an opportunity for our lawyer to file a court petition.”
She was nevertheless deported overnight, without ever speaking to her lawyer.
With disappointment, Azzam adds, “When I reach the point that I will graduate, now I’m being held back again.” A fourth-year business administration student, she only had three credits left to go.
And while the world was getting involved against Iran:
Lebanon warns UN: Israel planning to attack us: Ha’aretz
Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Nations has warned that Israel is exhibiting signs of an imminent attack on his country, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Hayyat reported on Friday.
Ambassador Noaf Salaam sent missives to the United Nations secretary general and to the Security Council condemning Israel’s recent artillery fire on the village of Houla, the site where a Katyusha rocket was fired at the Upper Galilee last week.
Salaam called the artillery fire a clear violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty as well as of UN Resolution 1701, which saw a truce between Israel and Lebanon following the 2006 war.
According to Al-Hayyat, Salaam described in his missive repeated Israeli threats against the Lebanese government and citizens, an expression he believes signals Israeli plans for to attack.
Salaam also said that the Israeli decision to bomb Lebanese territory following every Katyusha attack delayed and prevented Lebanese forces from investigating the rocket attacks.
Lebanese troops found and dismantled four rockets ready for launching near the border with Israel last Wednesday, a day after the Katyusha was launched from the southern village.
The Katyusha fire was the first such incident since last month, and the ninth since the Second Lebanon War.
The attack drew a rapid response from Israeli artillery in a brief flare-up across the border. Neither the rocket nor the artillery caused casualties.
And if you were wondering why Obamah and Hilary sound more and more like Israeli generals, read below:
The IDF has become Israel’s diplomatic channel to the West: Ha’aretz
Regular visitors to Tel Aviv’s northern beaches were surprised this week to find Tel Baruch beach strictly off-limits, guarded by makeshift barbed-wire fences and joint patrols by Israel Defense Forces soldiers and burly American men – and a few women – in desert camouflage.
The biennial Juniper Cobra exercise, aimed at improving coordination between American and Israeli missile defense systems, has become almost routine for the two armies since its inception in 2001, but this time there were a number of marked differences. Not only was this the largest joint Israeli-American military exercise in history, it was also the largest exercise of its kind by U.S. forces.
“This is the first time we’ve deployed all these systems, the THAAD missile, the Aegis system and the X-band radar all together against threat scenarios,” Colonel Tony English, commander of the Germany-based 357th Air Defense Brigade told reporters this week near Tel Aviv.
The exercise has major strategic significance not only for Israel, but also for the world as a whole. While Israel is developing a multilayered missile defense system, whose long-range Arrow missile component is operational while the others are on schedule in terms of development, the U.S. X-band radar system deployed in the Negev has tripled Israel’s ability to detect missiles fired from the east (in other words, from Iran’s direction).
The X-band system – the first and only permanent deployment of U.S. troops in Israel – together with the additional systems demonstrated during Juniper Cobra, which the U.S. would provide Israel on short notice in an emergency situation, greatly enhances the defensive shield over the country.
On the diplomatic level, the promise of emergency deployment could serve to reassure Israel that it need not act hastily.
For the United States, this year’s Juniper Cobra provided the first opportunity to practice deploying an entire mobile missile defense envelope. Following President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel plans to build a permanent missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, the U.S. trend is to move to mobile solutions. While exercising their interoperability with Israeli missile defense units, the Americans were also proving something to themselves: that in a global situation, where the threat may come tomorrow from Iran, North Korea or an increasingly unstable Pakistan, they are capable of flexibility.
Give and take
There was, however, a slightly less positive undertone to Colonel English’s remarks, implying that just as this defense can be extended to America’s allies, it can also be withdrawn. The entire setup, including the X-band radar system, which in a few weeks will celebrate its one-year anniversary on Israeli soil, can be disassembled within a few hours, moved overland and then loaded onto C-17 transport aircraft and redeployed anywhere in the world.
But no one, at least in the U.S. military, is currently talking about reducing Washington’s security commitment to Israel. Although relations between the countries’ leaders are at a low, their armed forces have never been closer. IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi never tires of telling guests that he speaks with the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, at least once a week on the secure line between their offices.
As Israel appears to be increasingly isolated diplomatically, the relationship between Western and Israeli military leaders is beginning to resemble a convenient back channel for the exchange of information on Syria as well as on Iran, Hezbollah and Islamist threats. During Ashkenazi’s three-day stay in Germany this week, the official press releases emphasized mainly the visits by Israel’s No. 1 soldier to Holocaust-related sites, such as the villa on Lake Wannsee where the Final Solution was decided upon. But the truly pressing matters on Ashkenazi’s agenda were far from historical. In just three weeks he has met with the chiefs of staff of the five largest armies in NATO – the United States, Britain, Canada, France and now Germany.
“The army chiefs are a very useful diplomatic channel,” one IDF General Staff officer says. The content of Ashkenazi’s meetings with Germany’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Wolfgang Schneiderhan, was of course not made public. But at a time when the major Western countries are engaged in a frustrating dialogue with Iran over the future of its nuclear program, there is little doubt over what could have been of joint interest to the two generals. Israel, in particular, has a clear interest in conveying its viewpoint to the senior military advisors of these nations’ leaders.
But the military relationship between Israel and Germany goes much deeper than just dealing with the current Iranian problem. German shipyards are building two Dolphin class submarines for the Israel Navy, which according to foreign reports are capable of launching ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads. The German government is funding one-third of the costs of the new submarines. The three Dolphins previously delivered to Israel were funded fully by Germany. Meanwhile, last week the Israel Navy began talks with the Blohm & Voss shipyard over the possible construction of two new corvettes (warships).
The military know-how goes both ways. This week a new deal for the purchase of Israel Aerospace Industries Heron unmanned aerial vehicles by the Luftwaffe was announced. The deal is believed to be worth $90 million at present, with additional orders in the pipeline.
The Heron system, consisting of drones and command and control cabins, will be shipped immediately to Afghanistan. The German units that are part of the NATO effort there urgently need flexible, real-time air surveillance capability to help counter the Taliban in the once-peaceful northern sector. In the past few months the insurgents have drawn the troops deployed there into the bloodiest fighting experienced by German soldiers since World War II.
Officially, Israel has no involvement in the fighting in Afghanistan. The last thing the Western armies struggling to gain the confidence of the local Muslim population need right now is to be linked to the “Zionist entity.” But the new German unmanned aerial vehicles will join similar Israeli-designed drones – used by Canada, Spain and the United States – in the sky, while on the ground will be combat vehicles covered in armor plating designed on Kibbutz Sasa, in the Upper Galilee.
But cooperation with Israel goes further than just the supply of hardware. Many of the forces facing threats from suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) operate according to doctrines adapted from those developed by the IDF when facing Hezbollah and armed Palestinian organizations.
Furthermore, in recent months, the similarity of the threat facing the IDF and its Western counterparts has grown. Analyses by the forensic laboratory of the IDF Ground Forces’ technological logistics directorate show a distinct technological advance in the IEDs used against the IDF near the border with the Gaza Strip. One senior officer stationed in that sector said last week, “They are not really improvised anymore.” In any event, from information supplied by the British and U.S. armies, it seems that the devices in Gaza are almost identical to those used by the Taliban in Afghanistan, including the recent incorporation of tungsten.
The new materials and expertise almost certainly came from bomb experts smuggled into Gaza through tunnels under the Egyptian border. Since the end of Operation Cast Lead more than 10 months ago Hamas has virtually ceased carrying out operations against the IDF. All of the attempted attacks have been traced to Islamic Jihad groups that flout Hamas’ authority. Like the Taliban, these groups are now being funded and trained by Al-Qaida.
In a related development, U.S. Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker visited Israel this week to study methods of dealing with battlefield trauma. A senior IDF physician who met him asked Schoomaker to take him to Afghanistan.
“I said that Afghanistan is now the place to learn about battlefield trauma, we could gain a lot through the experience,” the physician related. “But he said, ‘Don’t even ask, you know it’s impossible, we’ll have to keep meeting here.'”