Day by day Archive

March 1, 2010

HH: Goldilocks and the Three Bears
HH: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

EDITOR: Israeli Apartheid Week

This week, the BDS campaign is at last spreading far and wide across the globe, through the Apartheid Week campaign. It certainly seems to mark the gradual transformation of pubic opinion on this issue, and predicates a likely political change in the future. This is why the tag on anti-semitism has been automatically attached to this activity by Zionist propaganda makers.

Universities across the globe mark Israeli Apartheid Week: Haaretz

LONDON – A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.

University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.
Since they were first launched in 2005, the events have become some of “the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar,” according to its organizers.

Its aim, they state on their Web site, is to “contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”
Though many of the details about those events were not being promoted on the Apartheid Week Web site, it did list several events being offered by Israelis.

Among them is Shir Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, who is scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam entitled “Could the Economic Policies of Israel be Considered a Form of Apartheid?”
In addition, Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak is screening his 2006 documentary “Bil’in Habibti,” about Israel Defense Forces violence, at Boston-area universities.
Jeff Halper, the Israel-based professor of anthropology who is co-founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was scheduled to speak on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS” at Glasgow University.

The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is “atrocious,” said David Katz, a member of Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has long fought the comparison between that country’s racial segregation and Israel’s ethnic divisions.
“They are free to do as they please, but it’s atrocious,” he said of the participating Israelis. “I think they don’t understand the analogy they are making… which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid.”
“It’s like calling things ‘holocaust’ which are not the Holocaust or terming something ‘genocide’ which is not genocide,” said Katz.

As part of efforts to counter the Apartheid Week events, one Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not an apartheid state.
“The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions,” Pogrund has said. “Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better.”

In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.
“If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also… attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.
“The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line,” he said.

No country would accept Netanyahu’s conditions for peace: Haaretz

By Akiva Eldar
The decision to add the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb to the list of historical heritage sites up for renovation was not made with the intention of inflaming tempers and sabotaging efforts to revive final-status talks with the Palestinians. It was merely a routine move by a rightist government, further proof that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “two states” speech at Bar-Ilan University was a milestone on the road to nowhere. The only difference between “the rock of our existence” that launched the Western Wall tunnel violence in 1996 and the 2010 model is that this time Netanyahu is wearing a mask, trying to pass himself off as peace activist Uri Avnery, with the generous help of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The prime minister, as we all know, simply can’t wait for renewed final-status talks to get underway, but Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to back down and is setting “conditions that predetermine the outcome of the negotiations,” as Netanyahu told Haaretz a week ago. Indeed, the Palestinians have made their participation in indirect talks conditional on, in part, a construction freeze during the talks in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. They have the audacity to claim that it is Netanyahu’s demand to expand settlements during negotiations along with the assertion of Jewish ownership over sensitive sites which are the conditions that predetermine the outcome of the talks.

The Palestinian demand for a total freeze on settlement construction, including that required for natural population growth, is not, in Netanyahu’s words “a condition that no country would accept.” Israel accepted that condition in the road map seven years ago. In an article in the journal of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in December 2009, Prof. Ruth Lapidoth, recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize for Legal Studies, and Dr. Ofra Friesel write that the Netanyahu government is obligated by the road map, which was ratified by the Sharon government. A former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, Lapidoth stresses that the 14 remarks (not reservations, as they are usually termed) that Israel appended have no legal validity. And since the U.S. government promised no more than to relate “fully and seriously” to these remarks, they don’t have any diplomatic validity, either.

Netanyahu argues that Sharon reached an oral agreement with George W. Bush that the construction freeze would not apply to the “settlement blocs” and that the United States would take into account natural-growth requirements. The prime minister therefore expects the Palestinians to honor not only formal agreements to which they were a party, but also informal understandings reached behind their backs between Israel and America. Yet when the Palestinians demand an acknowledgment of understandings they reached with the Olmert government on a number of final-status principles, Netanyahu says this is a “precondition that predetermines the outcome of negotiations.”

The prime minister also contemptuously rejects the Palestinian demand that the talks be resumed where they were halted in December 2008. He is not prepared to even listen to the parameters for a final-status agreement proposed by Bill Clinton in December 2000. Netanyahu insists he has the right to start negotiations from square one, ignoring every agreement already reached with the Palestinians. He has even forgotten the Wye River Memorandum of 1998, under which he undertook, in Clinton’s presence, to transfer 13 percent of Area C to the Palestinians.

Netanyahu sticks only to those clauses in the interim agreement (Oslo 2) that removed responsibility for the Palestinians’ welfare from Israel’s hands and left Israel in control of Area C (60 percent of the West Bank). And of course, Netanyahu is totally committed to those clauses that require the Palestinians to combat terrorist infrastructure and incitement and refrain from asking the United Nations to condemn the injustices of the occupation.

Netanyahu is setting conditions for negotiations that no country would accept. His opposition to a settlement freeze and his refusal to resume talks where they left off expose his Bar-Ilan declarations as a cunning diversionary tactic. As his chief spokesman, President Shimon Peres, is wont to declare, “You have to tell the people the truth.” The dismal truth is that, behind the mask, Netanyahu is still the same old Bibi.

EDITOR: The Dubai murder story that will not die down

The murder of one Palestinian in Dubai refuses to disappear from the front pages. Is it possible that Israel has gone too far for the general public sensibilities this time? We should not be celebrating too soon. After all, it certainly did go too far during the 22 days of the carnage in Gaza? While the public revulsion aroused by each wave of brutalities seems to subside after some time has passed, there is also a public memory which keeps building up, a memory of the systemic nature of Israeli Zionist methods and means, and to this end the Apartheid Week is crucial. Thus, this growth of the rejection of Israel’s impunity is also important, even, as now, it is only played on a formalistic level.

Australia police expected in Israel to probe Dubai hit passports: Haaretz

Australian investigators are expected in Israel in the coming days to question several dual nationals whose names have been connected to the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Israel agreed to allow two to three Australian police officers to question the dual citizens, after Australia’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday requested approval from the Israeli envoy in Canberra to dispatch the investigators.
Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20 in what police say they are almost certain was a hit by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Australia last week said it was not satisfied with the Israeli envoy’s explanation about the use of fraudulent Australian passports in the killing, after three people holding Australian passports were listed among 15 new suspects.

Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they operated in disguise and used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports.
Media reports last week said that Australian authorities had approached Israel in the 1990s to seek assurances that its passports would not be used in Mossad activities after it was feared Israel had doctored New Zealand passports.
During that meeting, the reports claimed, the Israelis said they condoned such identity theft, with Australian participants describing their response as “enraged self-righteousness.”

On Saturday, investigators from Britain’s Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrived in Israel to interview dual nationals whose names were used on British forged passports tied to the killing.
‘Two suspected Dubai assassins traveled to the U.S. after the hit’
At least two of the 26 suspected members of the team that tracked and killed Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month traveled to the U.S. shortly after his death, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Records show one of the suspects entered the U.S. on January 21 using an Irish passport and another arrived in the U.S. February 14 using a British passport, reported the Wall Street Journal, quoting “a person familiar with the situation.”
Investigators are uncertain whether the two are still in the U.S. Police suspect the alleged hit squad members used fraudulently issued passports, and that the two may have left the U.S. using different travel documents.
Spokesmen for the U.S. State Department and Interpol both declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
People with the same names as many of the suspects live in Israel and say their identities were stolen. The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest.

Israel has not denied or confirmed it played any role but Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said there was nothing to link Israel to the killing.
Dubai police have also identified two U.S. financial companies they believe issued several of the credit cards used by at least 14 suspects in the alleged killing.

Continue reading March 1, 2010

February 28, 2010

US Pushes for War with Iran: Brasscheck TV


Police ‘in Jerusalem holy site’: BBC

The compound contains sites holy to both Jews and Muslims
Israeli police say they have entered a compound in Jerusalem containing the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites.
Police said they entered the compound to disperse at least 20 Palestinians who were throwing stones at visitors.
The site also contains the Western Wall, a sacred site for Jews.
Tensions have been high in recent days following clashes in the West Bank town of Hebron over Israel listing two disputed shrines as heritage sites.
Contested site
A Palestinian official said the group of youths had spent the night in the al-Aqsa mosque to prevent what they believed to be Jewish extremists from praying at the sensitive site.
An Israeli police spokesman said calm had been restored to the compound and visits resumed.
The spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Muslim men under the age of 50 had been barred from the site, while older men, women of all ages and children had been permitted to enter.

The Jerusalem complex, known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as Temple Mount, has long been contested.
Clashes erupted at the site last September after Muslims threw stones at people they believed to be Jewish extremists trying to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque.
A visit to the compound in 2000 by then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon, later prime minister, led to clashes that escalated into years of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The compound containing the mosque lies in Jerusalem’s Old City, which has been controlled by Israel since they captured it in the 1967 war.
Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven from the spot in the complex marked by the Dome of the Rock.
The site is holy to Jews because it is where the First and Second Temples were built according to the Old Testament, with the Western Wall still remaining.

GAZA: Avatar on Earth: YouTube

Four policemen wounded at Temple Mount clashes: Haaretz

Four Israeli policemen were wounded by Palestinian stone hurlers on Sunday, as clashes continued after Muslim worshippers barricaded themselves in a mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount compound.

So far, 7 Palestinians have been arrested in the violent riots.

Israel police broke into the Temple Mount compound in Jerusalem’s Old City, after Palestinian worshippers hurled stones at non-Muslim visitors of the holy site.
Police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said police entered the compound when about 20 Palestinians threw stones, but that the protesters had quickly taken cover inside the mosque.
The incident was over quickly, but the area remained tense. In the past, violence at the site – known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary – has erupted into deadly battles.
Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said police dispersed the 20 masked protesters, saying “calm was quickly restored,” and that “about a thousand tourists have since visited the site.”

However, small groups of masked Palestinians continued to clash with police elsewhere in Jerusalem’s Old City and in a nearby neighborhood just outside the walled area.
Police overnight restricted the entrance to the Mosque to a minimum age of 50, and holders of blue (Israeli) identity certificates as a precaution.
Israeli police do not usually enter the area, other than in response to incidents. Police did not enter the mosque.
One protester was arrested as the rock-throwing protests spread to the alleyways of the old walled city, Ben-Ruby added.
Adnan al-Husseini, a Palestinian official in charge of Jerusalem, said Palestinian youths had spent the night at the mosque saying Jewish hardliners had threatened to enter the site.

The holy site has been a frequent flashpoint of violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Tensions have been on the rise in Jerusalem and Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory over stalled peace talks which haven’t convened since before a Gaza war in December 2008.
The incident comes after more than 300 Palestinians in Hebron clashed with Israeli security forces on Thursday, while commemorating the 29 Muslims killed in an attack by Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein at the Ibrahimi Mosque 16-years ago.
Hadash chairman Mohammed Barakeh who joined the Palestinian protestors alongside some 30 more Israelis, criticized Israel Defense Forces soldiers for attacking the peaceful demonstrators, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his recent move to add the Tomb of the Patriarchs to the list of National Heritage sites.
“Netanyahu is an expert at lighting fires, and is turning the wheel backwards by repeating his mistakes from his first cadency as Prime Minister,” Barakeh said following the demonstration.
“The Netanyahu-Barak government is pushing towards a regional explosion in order to damage any chance of progress,” he added.

IDF soldiers attempted to disband the protest by hurling smoke grenades. Barakeh said that they all suffered from smoke inhalation.
Following an outburst of violence in Hebron, where the tomb is located, Khaled Esseleh, the mayor of Hebron, said: “I’m hoping there won’t be more clashes but this is a very sensitive religious issue, and Netanyahu just lit the fire.”
Earlier, the Obama administration criticized Israel for designating two shrines in the West Bank as Israeli national heritage sites.
The criticism came as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said she hopes long-stalled peace talks between Israelis and the Palestinians will resume.

Clinton told a congressional committee that groundwork is being laid to restart the talks with the help of U.S. envoy George Mitchell.
She did not say exactly when the negotiations might resume, but her remarks come amid a flurry of U.S. diplomatic activity in the region

Gaza 2009: We Will Not Forget

EDITOR: Egypt’s ugly face

After years of aggression towards the Gaza residents, in order to make the Israeli illegal blockade mosre efficient, and building the steel wall, to stop the importation of food and fuel into the starved strip with more than 1.5 million inhabitants, so punished for exercising their democratic right to vote, now Egypt is to assist Israel crucially by exporting gas to it, rather than deny Israel this crucial resource which it denies the gazans. How depressing.

Egypt lifts ban on gas to Israel: BBC

The supreme court in Egypt has overturned an earlier ruling by a lower court that banned gas sales to Israel.
The new ruling requires that the government should make clear the quantity of gas it exports to Israel and how much it charges.
Lawyers had argued that the gas was being sold at preferential rates.
Egypt’s gas trade with Israel is controversial, as many Egyptians are opposed to links between the two countries – despite a 1979 peace deal.
Some opposition figures in Egypt are against the sale of gas to Israel because they disagree with its policies towards the Palestinians.
This ruling ends a legal battle which stirred up public controversy.
Over a year ago, lawyers had successfully argued for a ban on natural gas exports to Israel, claiming the price was below the international market level.
The supreme administrative court has said that the lower court which made that ruling has no jurisdiction in cases of this kind because they involved state sovereignty.
Pipeline flow
It did add, however, that Egypt should take steps to monitor the price and quantity of its exports ensuring domestic needs are met before selling gas abroad.
Gas started flowing to Israel from Egypt through a pipeline in 2008, under an agreement contracted to last for 20 years.
In reality, supplies were never cut off when there was a court ruling banning sales.
It was ignored by the government, pending a review.
The final legal decision is unlikely to enjoy wide support in Egypt.
Although the country has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979, Israeli policies in the Palestinians territories make it unpopular with many Egyptians.
During the conflict in Gaza, there were increased calls to stop gas exports.

Gaza: The Killing Zone: YouTube

Continue reading February 28, 2010

February 27, 2010

Palestinians form new faction in Lebanon: Jerusalem Post

By RACHELLE KLIGER
The National Body for the Protection of Permanent Rights opposes negotiations but will not take up arms.

A group of ten Palestinian figures announced the formation of a new Palestinian faction in Beirut on Wednesday.

The organization, The National Body for the Protection of Permanent Rights, aims to preserve the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora, including those living in refugee camps.

“The living condition of the Palestinian people has reached boiling point because of Israeli political obstinacy, and the American support of this,” Bilal Al-Hassan, a Palestinian journalist, writer and co-founder of the organization said at the launching ceremony. “This situation will now be translated into action and advancement.”

The exact nature of the movement’s policies remains unclear but leaders of the organization plan to meet in May to “decide on its actions democratically.”

The movement, which is declaredly independent, opposes negotiations and supports resistance against the Israeli occupation but insists armed combat is “not its objective”.

“There are martyrdom factions for this purpose that engage in resistance and we give them our blessing,” Al-Hassan told the London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat.

“By establishing a Zionist entity on Palestinian land, [the Zionists] are targeting Arabs,” the movement’s manifesto says. “Resisting the occupation in all its forms is an obligation, not just a right. Any talks about a just and permanent peace which is based on recovering parts of the land that were occupied in 1967 or even all of it would effectively accomplish the Israeli aim of this war which is to garner acceptance of Israel’s existence and legitimacy, without solving the Palestinian issue and without granting them their rights.”

“Achieving peace between the Arab and non-Arab nations and individuals can be done regardless of their sectarian roots and religious inclinations but peace is not obtainable with the occupation,” it continues. “The Oslo approach is a second nakba [catastrophe], but the difference is that this nakba was furnished by the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

So far, 70 Palestinian figures have signed the movement’s manifesto.

Ali Hweidi, director of the Palestinian Organization for the Right of Return (Thabit) an organization which assists Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, said his organization supported the new initiative.

“Thabit supports this body because it is preserving Palestinian rights,” he told The Media Line.  “This body is a reflection of many years of the Palestinian situation, especially after the Oslo [Accords] in 1993.”

“They’re calling for preserving Palestinian rights, the right of return and for no more settlements in the Palestinian territories,” he said. “At the same time they want a reconstruction of the PLO.  This is the voice of the Palestinians on the ground inside the camps,” he said referring to over 400,000 Palestinian refugees currently living in camps in Lebanon.

Some have questioned whether the initiatives will indeed serve the Palestinian people.

“We have more than 40 secular parties within the Palestinian political spectrum,” Mohammed Dajani, a Palestinian university professor who established Wasatia, a Palestinian movement advocating moderation to achieve coexistence and development, told The Media Line.

“So the question is whether you want one more, or whether you want to bring together most of those small parties under one umbrella to unify efforts,” he said. “What we don’t need is more fragmentation within Palestinian society. If there will be a coalition that will call for unity and will bring hundreds of divided groups, then it will be helpful to promote the Palestinian cause. Otherwise it will cause division.”

Dajani said the Oslo process had its flaws, but warned against dismissing it completely and going back to the drawing board.

“We need to learn from the past,” he said. “I don’t think that establishing a party in Lebanon calling for no negotiations reflects the reality on the ground. If you don’t want to negotiate, how can you accomplish your goals?”

There is a party here that is occupying our land and you have two options,” Dajani explained. “Either you use the military approach, which has failed and will not work, or you take the diplomatic approach. If you take the diplomatic approach how can you achieve goals without negotiating with the other side?”

The new movement was formed on the backdrop of halted talks between Israelis and Palestinians. Negotiations broke off when the term of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ended and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas added the condition of a total freeze on Israeli building in post-1967 communities. Despite a 10-month building freeze offered by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas maintained that the condition requires an unlimited and absolute freeze that includes East Jerusalem.

Analysts suggest that the stalemate in negotiations is fueling sentiments of frustration among Palestinians with regards to any future solution. The internal Palestinian dispute between Fatah and Hamas is also impeding any movement on the ground.

The founders of the organization include Bayyan Al-Hout, Muhammad Abu Meizar, Munir Shafiq, Salah Al-Dabagh, Bilal Al-Hassan and former Arab Israeli lawmaker Azmi Bishara.

Bishara is a Palestinian Christian who headed the Arab Balad party in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. His resignation in 2007 came against the backdrop of alleged criminal charges including espionage and treason.

Dubai police: We have 100% DNA proof of one assassin: Haaretz

Dubai police said on Friday they have DNA proof of the identity of at least one of the killers of senior Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in the emirate country last month.

“We have DNA evidence … from the crime scene. The DNA of the criminals is there,” Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim said on the Arab satellite television Al-Arabiya.
He said police had “categorical DNA proof on one of the assassins” and fingerprint evidence from several other suspects, providing “100 percent” proof of their identities.
Dubai said it was seeking at least 26 people it suspectd of involvement in the assassination in January.

Last week Interpol added 11 suspected assassins to their most wanted list, all of whom were apparently using forged passports.
The individuals who were charged by Dubai police as responsible for the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh were tagged with “Red Notices,” according to the Interpol’s official website.
The website also specifies that Interpol chose to publish the photos of the suspected assassins since the identities the perpetrators allegedly used were fake, using fraudulent passports to aid them in accomplishing their aim.
Also, the Dubai police chief ahi Khalfan Tamim said Interpol should issue a warrant to help locate and arrest the head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad if the organization was responsible for the killing of a Hamas militant in Dubai.

Meanwhile, a Haaretz probe discovered that the passport photographs of the agents who assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai were doctored so the agents would not be identified.
The discovery casts doubt on claims that the espionage agency that carried out last month’s hit on the senior Hamas operative committed grave errors.
Various features of the people in the photographs, such as eye color or the line of a lip, were changed – slightly enough so as not arouse suspicion at passport control, but still enough that the real agent could not be recognized.

Clinton presses Israel to ease blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza: Haaretz

The United States pressed Israel on Friday to ease its blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, an issue Arab officials have urged Washington to address at it tries to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters she had an extended discussion with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak about the Mediterranean coastal strip, which was severely damaged in an Israeli offensive launched in December 2008.
More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the three-week war in Gaza, which Israel launched following months of rocket fire from the territory into Israel.

Israel has said its blockade of Gaza aims to prevent Hamas, which is hostile to Israel and which seized control of Gaza in 2007, from acquiring weapons or materials that could be used for military purposes.
Some analysts believe the blockade has strengthen Hamas’ hand because of its control over smuggling through tunnels from Egypt. It is also a major irritant to Arab states whose support is vital to resuming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
“We discussed it at length and Sen. Mitchell and I made clear some of the concerns that we had and some of the ideas about what more could and should be done,” Clinton told reporters after she and U.S. special envoy George Mitchell met Barak. “We hope to see progress there.”

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks stalled after the Gaza offensive. Despite calling the Arab-Israeli conflict a priority from the start of his administration, U.S. President Barack Obama’s efforts have failed to revive them.
The United States has long urged Israel to ease restrictions on Gaza, where building materials, among other things, remain in chronic short supply and have slowed reconstruction for the territory’s 1.5 million residents.
Speaking before his meeting with Clinton, Barak said the issue was complicated by the continued captivity of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was seized in 2006 by militants who tunneled into Israel from Gaza.

Barak told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank Hamas continues to be deterred from launching major attacks on Israel because of the late 2008, early 2009 Israeli offensive but it also continues to rearm.
“They are well-deterred. But still they are accumulating more, longer-range rockets through the smuggling system that goes all the way from Iran through Africa to the Gaza Strip,” he said.
“And the situation is not fully stable,” he added. “We still have the abducted soldier (Shalit) and that complicates some aspects of the normalization of the situation.”

Daniel Levy, an analyst with the New America Foundation think tank, noted Clinton was pressed by senior Arab officials as well as ordinary citizens about the situation in Gaza when she visited the Gulf last week.
“The threat to the peace talks is renewed violence in Gaza… but equally problematic for the United States is what the secretary heard in Qatar and Saudi Arabia … ‘what are you doing for Gaza?'” Levy said. “It undermines the credibility of the United States.”

The administration also lost credibility in the Arab world last year when it appeared to soften its demand for a total freeze on Israeli construction in Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in Jerusalem, a step widely seen as undercutting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
U.S. officials hope Abbas can be persuaded to give up his desire for an absolute halt to settlement construction before resuming talks, particularly if he gets backing from Arab states. They hope this might be forthcoming at an Arab League summit in Tripoli in March

Continue reading February 27, 2010

February 26, 2010

EDITOR: The BBC starts working at last

The Dubai murder is a story which runs and runs again; the more time passes, the more complexities and incongruities are unravelled. More than a month after the murder in Dubai, the BBC publishes a proper report, for the first time. Until now, they contended themselves with being fed by the other sources: Al Jazeera, Haaretz and the Guardian, in the main. Now at last they have conducted some research on the operation, and the report is comprehensive; it gives one the impression that they were not overkeen to properly discuss the events before – a position closely reflecting that of the UK goverment, at least not on the editorial level.

Dubai killing shines unwelcome spotlight on Mossad: BBC

In 1973, a Moroccan waiter working in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer was shot dead by agents of the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad, who mistook him for Ali Hassan Salameh, a Palestinian behind an attack during the previous year’s Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes died.
Two members of the hit squad were arrested the next day as they reused a getaway car to travel to the airport.
One of them, an inexperienced Danish-born volunteer, provided police with a paper trail that led to the capture and imprisonment of several of his comrades, and sparked a diplomatic incident.
Wanting to recoup the expenses he had incurred during the operation from his Mossad handlers, he had kept his receipts.
Twenty-seven years later, a paper trail – though this time electronic – has once again exposed the work of a group of assassins, pointed the finger of suspicion at Israel, and raised questions about the future of covert operations in foreign countries.
On Wednesday, the police in Dubai identified a further 15 suspects in the killing last month of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a leader of the Palestinian Islamist militant group Hamas, raising the number believed to have taken part to at least 26.

As with the previous 11, investigators were able to give the names, nationalities and passport numbers the suspects had used, the photographs inside their fraudulent passports, and provide high-resolution CCTV footage showing what they had done.
Using immigration records and receipts from the credit cards used by 14 of the suspects, the authorities were also able to discover the movements of all 26 into and out of Dubai both during an earlier mission last year and around the time of Mr Mabhouh’s death.
According to officials, the suspects flew into Dubai on board separate flights from Europe on 18 and 19 January. Five of them left after less than 24 hours on 19 January – when the killing took place – while the others departed the next day.

Though the paper trail then appears to end, the names and details on the UK passports used by eight of the 12 suspects have so far turned out to belong to British-Israeli citizens living in Israel. All of them have denied involvement.
Even before the apparent link to Israel emerged, Hamas had blamed Mossad for Mr Mabhouh’s death.
Then on 15 February, Dubai police chief Lt Gen Dhahi Khalfan announced that he was nearly “100%” certain that Israeli agents had masterminded the killing.
The five Western countries whose passports were faked – the UK, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia – also reacted angrily and immediately demanded explanations from Israeli diplomats.
The Israeli diplomats replied that there was no proof of Mossad involvement, although they did not deny it, in line with their government’s policy of “ambiguity”.
‘Couldn’t be Israel’
Israel’s media and former Mossad agents initially praised the agency for carrying out another successful assassination abroad, but soon Dubai revealed unprecedented information about the operation and it emerged that Israeli citizens had had their identities stolen.

Some commentators have since gone so far as to question whether it was even a Mossad hit, citing contradictions in the initial reports of Mr Mabhouh’s death, the large number of suspects, their inability to evade detection, and the apparent decision by two of them to travel by boat to Iran last year.
“Twenty-six agents, perhaps even 30, sent to assassinate one person? Granted if they could flee the scene by sea, how could one think that Mossad agents would take cover in Iran? I ask myself. Even if they have unprecedented self-confidence the likes of which are unknown?” wrote Yossi Melman in Haaretz.
A former Mossad agent, Rami Igra, also dismissed its involvement due to the assassins’ failure to disable CCTV cameras at key moments and their use of passports belonging to foreign nationals living in Israel.
“It was so stupid, it couldn’t be Israel,” he said. “You don’t go over the speed limit in a place where there are going to be cameras, because you are going to be photographed.”
“The whole thing shows that whoever did it was very unprofessional.”
‘Long-term operation’
Some details about Mr Mabhouh’s killing do, however, tally with past statements by retired Mossad agents with knowledge of the reprisals for the Munich attack.
They say the assassinations were carried out by large numbers of people, in stages. For instance, an investigation by the Norwegian government found 14 people had been involved in Lillehammer.

Once they knew where the mission would take place, the teams would go through practice runs in Israel and arrive at the location no more than a few days in advance, withdrawing as soon as it was over, they add.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who is now a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, says Wednesday’s revelations did not change his opinion that Israel was behind the assassination in Dubai.
“This most likely was a Mossad operation. All the signatures – European passports, the way the team moved quickly to leave the country – cumulatively paint a pretty convincing case,” he told the BBC News website.
Mr Riedel says it would have been highly unusual for the hit squad to have visited Dubai using the stolen identities last year just for reconnaissance, as the police claim, and that this may have been an attempt to eliminate the Hamas leader that had failed.
He also doubted that all of the suspects had been in the Gulf just for one mission.
“What the Dubai authorities are uncovering now is not just the assassination team, but probably the entire Mossad station,” he explains. “Dubai would be a perfect place to carry out not just a one-off operation, but a long-term one against Iran.”

A retired officer for Mossad’s covert-operations division, who writes under the pseudonym Michael Ross, agrees that there may have been more than one operation in motion in Dubai.
“If this is a Mossad operation, this is an unprecedented number of combatants deployed for an operation of any kind,” he told the BBC News website.
“Given the relatively scant operational manpower resources available to Mossad, the general rule of thumb has always been, ‘never send two when one is enough and never send three when two is enough’.”
Mr Ross says the use of a mix of cloned, manufactured and authentic passports by the assassins “do not follow any document protocols that I recall”. The use of credit cards from US bank is also “very odd”, he says, given the co-operation between Israel and the US.
“It would be disingenuous to say Israel wasn’t involved in some fashion, but I think there are more aspects and international players involved in this case than are visible to the naked eye,” he adds.
‘Authentic’ documents
The Dubai killing has also raised questions about the future of covert operations.

With the widespread introduction of CCTV, biometric identification data and interconnected immigration control centres, will agents be able to continue to fake passports and work abroad undetected as they could a decade ago?
Many countries’ new passports have chips that hold easily verified data such as retina scans, which are both unique and unfakeable – though the chips may be faked. The data generated when someone takes a flight, crosses a border, uses a credit card or makes a call makes it increasingly easy to find them even if they change their identity.
“Biometrics pose a real problem for the use of alias identities by intelligence services. Officers travelling and operating under cover will have to make sure their documents are ‘authentic’,” says Mr Ross.
He believes the assassins did not anticipate that the Dubai authorities would be so comprehensive in their investigation or generate so much attention.

Many countries’ new passports have chips that hold easily verified data
“We live in the surveillance era and this is now an integral component of planning for modern intelligence-gathering and covert operations. No top-tier intelligence service conducts operational activity without first gathering all the necessary operational intelligence required – especially concerning existing security measures in place.
“In my view, there was a gross underestimation of the reaction of the Dubai authorities given the UAE’s close relationship with the West and the rather odious past activities of Mr Mabhouh, who used no less than five alias identities himself.”
Mr Riedel says Israel will not necessarily mind the adverse coverage, however, as it sends a clear message to militants that Mossad can target them wherever they are.
Intelligence agencies will simply find something to counter every technological advance, as they have in the past, he adds.
“The game of espionage is not about to go out of business because of CCTV.”

Arab source: Mitchell wanted to quit over U.S. bias for Israel: Haaretz

An Arab political source said Friday that special U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell has requested to resign due to his frustration with the way the Obama administration has been handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a Nazareth-based daily.
Hadith a-Nass reported that Mitchell’s request stemmed partly from to his own failure to advance the resumption of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and also from his perception that certain elements within the State Department hold biased favor toward Israel.

The White House turned down Mitchell’s request, according to Hadith a-Nass.
No verification of the report was available.
Peace talks were halted more than a year ago over the war in the Gaza Strip and have not resumed, due largely to a Palestinian demand that Israel first impose a complete freeze on building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Israel’s refusal to do so.
A new working paper released by the Palestinian indicates that the Palestinian Authority has warned it may abandon its support of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which outlines a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel.
The Palestinians are instead intending to pursue the creation of a binational state between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, according to a document drafted by the PA’s veteran chief negotiator.

EDITOR: The NYT position on Palestine/Israel

I have pointed out more than once or twice that the NYT is takinga clear position on Palestine: they report good news stories from Israel, but when the news is less auspicious, it seems to be absent from their pages altogether. Jonathan Cook deals here with the NYT Jerusalem bureau chief, and has a unique relationship to Israeli Jewish society, as has been widely reported. The reporting of his son serving in the Israeli army was brushed away by the NYT as some irrelevant pest; let us consider the possibility of a reporter for any of the western media, whose son is a Hamas fighter, for example? Are you joking? Surely, such a person could not be trusted to be objective, with his son in Hamas?

What people do not see or hear can hardly disturb them…

Jonathan Cook: Ethan Bronner and Conflicts of Interest: IOA

A recent assignment of mine covering Israel’s presumed links to the assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh provoked some more thoughts about the New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner. He is the Jerusalem bureau chief who has been at the centre of a controversy since it was revealed last month that his son is serving in the Israeli army. Despite mounting pressure to replace Bronner, the NYT’s editors have so far refused to consider that he might be facing a conflict of interest or that it would be wiser to post him elsewhere.
Last week, when suspicion for the assassination in Dubai started to fall on the Mossad, a newspaper editor emailed to ask if I could ring up my “Israeli security contacts” for fresh leads. It was a reminder that Western correspondents in Israel are expected to have such contacts. The point was underlined later the same day when I spoke with a leftwing Israeli academic to get his take on Mabhouh’s killing. I had turned to this Ashkenazi professor because he counts many veterans of the security services as friends. At the end of the interview, I asked him if he had any suggestions for people in the security services I might speak with. He replied: “Talk to Eitan Bronner. He has excellent contacts.” Naively, I asked how I could reach this expert on the veiled world of the Israeli security establishment. Was he employed at the professor’s university? “No, ring the New York Times bureau,” he responded increduously. Oh, that “Eitan”!
A more interesting question than whether Bronner is now facing a conflict of interest over his son serving in the Israeli army is whether the NYT reporter was facing such a conflict long before the latest revelations surfaced. Could it be that it is actually incumbent on Bronner, as the NYT’s bureau chief, to have such a conflict of interest?
Consider this. The NYT has form when it comes to turning a blind eye to reporters with conflicts of interest in Israel — aside, I mean, from the issue of the reporters’ ethnic identification or nationality. For example, I am reminded of a recent predecessor of Bronner’s at the Jerusalem bureau — an Israeli Jew — who managed to do regular service in the Israeli army reserves even while he was covering the second intifada. I am pretty sure his bosses knew of this but, as with Bronner, did not think there were grounds for taking action.
Shortly after I wrote an earlier piece on Bronner, pointing out that most Western coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict is shaped by Jewish and Israeli journalists, and that Palestinian voices are almost entirely excluded, a Jerusalem-based bureau chief asked to meet. Over a coffee he congratulated me, adding: “I’d be fired if I wrote something like that.”
This reporter, who, unlike me, spends lots of time with the main press corps in Jerusalem, then made some interesting points. He wishes to remain anonymous but has agreed to my passing on his observations. He calls Bronner’s situation “the rule, not the exception”, adding: “I can think of a dozen foreign bureau chiefs, responsible for covering both Israel and the Palestinians, who have served in the Israeli army, and another dozen who like Bronner have kids in the Israeli army.”
He added that it is very common to hear Western reporters boasting to one another about their “Zionist” credentials, their service in the Israeli army or the loyal service of their children. “Comments like that are very common at Foreign Press Association gatherings [in Israel] among the senior, agenda-setting, elite journalists.”
My informant is highly critical of what is going on among the Jerusalem press corps, even though he admits the same charges could be levelled against him. “I’m Jewish, married to an Israeli and like almost all Western journalists live in Jewish West Jerusalem. In my free time I hang out in cafes and bars with Jewish Israelis chatting in Hebrew. For the Jewish sabbath and Jewish holidays I often get together with a bunch of Western journalists. While it would be convenient to think otherwise, there is no question that this deep personal integration into Israeli society informs our overall understanding and coverage of the place in a way quite different from a journalist who lived in Ramallah or Gaza and whose personal life was more embedded in Palestinian society.”
And now he gets to the crunch: “The degree to which Bronner’s personal life, like that of most lead journalists here, is integrated into Israeli society, makes him an excellent candidate to cover Israeli political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life. The problem is that Bronner is also expected to be his paper’s lead voice on Palestinian political life, cultural shifts and intellectual life, all in a society he has almost no connection to, deep knowledge of or even the ability to directly communicate with … The presumption that this is possible is neither fair to Bronner nor to his readers, and it’s really a shame that Western media executives don’t see the value in an Arabic-speaking bureau chief living in Ramallah and setting the agenda for the news coming out of the Palestinian territories.”
All true. But I think there is a deeper lesson from the Bronner affair. Editors who prefer to appoint Jews and Israelis to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are probably making a rational choice in news terms — even if they would never dare admit their reasoning. The media assign someone to the Jerusalem bureau because they want as much access as possible to the inner sanctums of power in a self-declared Jewish state. They believe – and they are right – that doors open if their reporter is a Jew, or better still an Israeli Jew, who has proved his or her commitment to Israel by marrying an Israeli, by serving in the army or having a child in the army, and by speaking fluent Hebrew, a language all but useless outside this small state.
Yes, Ethan Bronner is “the rule”, as my informant notes, because any other kind of journalist — the goyim, as many Israelis dismiss non-Jews — will only ever be able to scratch at the surface of Israel’s military-political-industrial edifice. The Bronners have access to power, they can talk to the officials who matter, because those same officials trust that high-powered Jewish and Israeli reporters belong in the Israeli consensus. They may be critical of the occupation, but they can be trusted to pull their punches. If they ever failed to do so, they would be ejected from the inner sanctum and a paper like the NYT would be forced to replace them with someone more cooperative.
When in later years, these Jerusalem bureau chiefs retire from the field of battle and are promoted to the rank of armchair general back at media HQ – when they become a Thomas Friedman paid to pontificate regularly on the conflict — they can be trusted to talk to those same high-placed officials, explaining their viewpoint and defending it. That is why you will not read anything in the NYT questioning the idea that Israel is a democratic state or see coverage suggesting that Israel is acting in bad faith in the peace process.
I do not want here to suggest there is anything unique about this relationship of almost utter dependence. To a degree, this is how most specialists in the mainstream media operate. Think of the local crime reporter. How effective would he be (and it is invariably a he) if he alienated the senior police officers who provide the inside information he needs for his regular supply of stories? Might he not prefer to turn a blind eye to a scoop revealing that one of his main informants is taking bribes, if publishing such a story would lose him his “access” and his posting? This is a simple cost-benefit analysis made both by the reporter and the editors who assign him that almost always favours the powerful over the weak, the interests of the journalist over the reader.
And so it is with Israel. Like the crime reporter, our Jerusalem bureau chief needs his “access” more than he needs the occasional scoop that would sabotage his relationship with official sources. But more so than the crime reporter, many of these bureau chiefs also identify with Israel and its goals because they have an Israeli spouse and children. They not only live on one side of a bitter national conflict but actively participate in defending that side through service in its military.
This is a conflict of interest of the highest order. It is also the reason why they are there in the first place.

Continue reading February 26, 2010

February 25, 2010

Dubai Murder by Khalin Bendib

Australia warns Israel: Forging passports isn’t an ‘act of a friend’: Haaretz

Australia warned Israel on Thursday that if it was involved in the alleged use of three fraudulent Australian passports in a Dubai assassination it would not be considered the act of a friend, the foreign minister said.
The Canberra government called in Israel’s ambassador after three Australians were named as suspects in the assassination of a Hamas official at a Dubai hotel last month.
Dubai authorities are investigating the use of at least 26 possibly fraudulent passports in connection with the Jan. 19 slaying of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel room in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said investigations were still under way, but the three Australians were also apparently innocent victims of identity theft.

“I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as an act of a friend,” Smith said.
In an interview with Australian radio, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also emphasized the severity of the situation. “We will not be silent on this matter. It is a matter of deep concern. It really goes to the integrity and fabric of the use of state documents, which passports are, for other purposes,” Rudd told Australian radio.
“Any state that has been complicit in use or abuse of the Australian passport system, let alone for the conduct of an assassination, is treating Australia with contempt and there will therefore be action by the Australian government in response,” said Rudd.
Dubai police say they are near certain that members of Israel’s Mossad spy agency killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. A list of 11 people suspected in the assassination released last week by Dubai included the names of six British-born Israelis, whose names appeared on forged British passports thought to have been used by the killers.

Dubai on Wednesday identified 15 new suspects in the assassination; Haaretz has learned that 10 of them also share the names of Israelis who hold dual citizenship.

Obvious Role for US Investigators in Dubai Murder Case: Al Jazeera TV

Financial institutions based and incorporated in the United States have now been fingered by Dubai Police as having issued credit cards to some of the now dozens of suspected assassins of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
The fraudulent cards were said to be used to book hotel rooms and pay for air travel.
The firms allegedly involved include Meta Financial Group Inc, based in Storm Lake, Iowa, and Payoneer, a New York-based online payment company that provides pre-paid Mastercards.
Payoneer also has a research and development centre based in Tel Aviv.   (I find it mildly amusing that Payoneer is pimped out on the Birthright Israel website).

I also find the Payoneer connection interesting given that its CEO is Yuval Tal, a former Israeli special forces commando. Mr Tal did not exactly conceal his prior affiliations when he appeared on Fox News during the 2006 Lebanon war. He opined then that “this is a war that Israel cannot afford to lose”.
If Tal or his Payoneer firm are in any way involved in the conspiracy to help a foreign intelligence service (like, say providing Mossad operatives with credit cards), he may soon find himself in his own battle with little prospects of winning – in a US courtroom.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the lead agency with statutory authority and responsibilities for investigating foreign espionage activities on US soil.  It’s a job they take seriously and with a proven record of not shying away from the numerous instances when America’s special ally played foul.

As an initial inquiry, I imagine case agents will subpoena all financial records associated with the fraudulently issued credit cards. This would include the original credit card applications, which requires such things as a delivery address (to mail the card to), social security numbers, dates of birth, and employment information.
If the applications were made on paper, then the documents may contain all manner of evidence, from handwriting samples to fingerprints. There will be a similar trail to pore over if the applications were made over the phone or electronically via computer.
I also smell money laundering, as the money was supposedly dumped into prepaid accounts to conceal its purpose and origination. So US investigators may even want to tap in on the US treasury department’s crack financial investigator, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN).

Don’t be put off by FINCEN’s location in a Northern Virginia building that resembles a toilet seat. They have all manner of ways of putting a ring around financial transactions and credit reports in all reaches of the world.
There is still no word on whether or not the US has begun co-operating.  On paper, there should be no reason why they would not. The Emirates are a friendly country to the United States and a member of INTERPOL. They have also been a key country used by the US administration to apply pressure on Iran, so presumably they want to keep them happy.
It’s not clear if the FBI is silently participating or if its officials are fence-sitting.
If it’s the latter, then they may want to consider the following:  if a foreign national was murdered on US soil with the help of credit cards issued in the Emirates, what sort of co-operation would they demand?

Hamas leader’s son ‘spied for Israel’: The Independent

The son of one of the founders of the Hamas militant group was exposed today as a top Israeli informant who helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, codenamed “the Green Prince” by his handlers, was one of the Shin Bet security service’s most valuable sources, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said.
His reports led to the arrests of several high-ranking Palestinian figures during the violent uprising that began in 2000, the newspaper said.
Yousef’s father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, was a founding member of the Islamic militant group Hamas in the 1980s. He is currently serving a six-year sentence in an Israeli prison for his political activities.
The younger Yousef converted to Christianity and moved to California in 2007.

The revelation deals another setback to Hamas, which is reeling from the assassination of a leading member in Dubai last month. There have been reports that an insider assisted the killers.
Yousef’s memoir, “Son of Hamas,” is being published next week in the US.
Yousef could not be contacted for comment, but an excerpt from the book on his Facebook page plugs it as “a gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices.” It describes Yousef’s journey as one that “jeopardised Hamas, endangered his family, and threatened his life.”
It also says Yousef’s relationship with the Shin Bet helped thwart an Israeli plan to assassinate his father.

Yousef told the paper Shin Bet agents first approached him in prison in 1996 and proposed he infiltrate the upper echelons of Hamas. He did so successfully and is credited by Israel with saving hundreds of Israeli lives.
Yousef said he hoped to send a message of peace to Israelis, though he remained pessimistic about the prospects for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He had particularly sharp comments for Hamas, the Iranian-backed movement that seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and has been branded a terrorist organisation by Israel and the West.
“Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels,” he said.

EDITOR: While this is written in the specific UK context, it deals with a global phenomenon affecting the ‘western’ nations as a whole, hence also important in the Middle east context. Gaza and Palestine play a central role in European, North American and Global politics, and used to fan the flames of Islamophobia.

This tide of anti-Muslim hatred is a threat to us all: The Guardian

The attempt to drive Islamists and young Asian activists out of the political mainstream is a dangerous folly

If young British Muslims had any doubts that they are singled out for special treatment in the land of their birth, the punishments being meted out to those who took part in last year’s London demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza will have dispelled them. The protests near the Israeli embassy at the height of the onslaught were angry: bottles and stones were thrown, a Starbucks was trashed and the police employed unusually violent tactics, even by the standards of other recent confrontations, such as the G20 protests.

But a year later, it turns out that it’s the sentences that are truly exceptional. Of 119 people arrested, 78 have been charged, all but two of them young Muslims (most between the ages of 16 and 19), according to Manchester University’s Joanna Gilmore, even though such figures in no way reflect the mix of those who took part. In the past few weeks, 15 have been convicted, mostly of violent disorder, and jailed for between eight months and two-and-a-half years – having switched to guilty pleas to avoid heavier terms. Another nine are up to be sentenced tomorrow.

The severity of the charges and sentencing goes far beyond the official response to any other recent anti-war demonstration, or even the violent stop the City protests a decade ago. So do the arrests, many of them carried out months after the event in dawn raids by dozens of police officers, who smashed down doors and handcuffed family members as if they were suspected terrorists. Naturally, none of the more than 30 complaints about police violence were upheld, even where video ­evidence was available.

Nothing quite like this has happened, in fact, since 2001, when young Asian Muslims rioted against extreme rightwing racist groups in Bradford and other northern English towns and were subjected to heavily disproportionate prison terms. In the Gaza protest cases, the judge has explicitly relied on the Bradford precedent and repeatedly stated that the sentences he is handing down are intended as a deterrent.

For many in the Muslim community, the point will be clear: not only that these are political sentences, but that different rules apply to Muslims, who take part in democratic protest at their peril. It’s a dangerous message, especially given the threat from a tiny minority that is drawn towards indiscriminate violence in response to Britain’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and rejects any truck with mainstream politics.

But it’s one that is constantly reinforced by politicians and parts of the media, who have increasingly blurred the distinction between violent and non- violent groups, demonised Islamism as an alien threat and branded as extremist any Muslim leader who dares to campaign against western foreign policy in the Muslim world. That’s reflected in the government’s targeting of “nonviolent extremism” and lavish funding of anti-Islamist groups, as well as in Tory plans to ban the nonviolent Hizb ut-Tahrir and crack down ever harder on “extremist written material and speech”.

In the media, it takes the form of relentless attempts to expose Muslims involved in wider politics as secret fanatics and sympathisers with ­terrorism. Next week, Channel 4 Dispatches plans to broadcast the latest in a series of undercover documentaries aimed at revealing the ugly underside of British Muslim political life. In this case, the target is the predominantly British-Bangladeshi Islamic Forum of Europe. From material sent out in advance, the aim appears to be to show the IFE is an “entryist” group in legitimate east London politics – and unashamedly Islamist to boot.

As recent research co-authored by the former head of the Metropolitan police special branch’s Muslim contact unit, Bob Lambert, has shown, such ubiquitous portrayals of Muslim activists as “terrorists, sympathisers and subversives” (all the while underpinned by a drumbeat campaign against the nonexistent Afghan “burka”) are one factor in the alarming growth of British Islamophobia and the rising tide of anti-Muslim violence and hate crimes that stem from it.

Last month’s British Social Attitudes survey found that most people now regard Britain as “deeply divided along religious lines”, with hostility to Muslims and Islam far outstripping such attitudes to any other religious group. On the ground that has translated into murders, assaults and attacks on mosques and Muslim institutions – with shamefully little response in politics or the media. Last year, five mosques in Britain were firebombed, from Bishop’s Stortford to Cradley Heath, though barely reported in the national press, let alone visited by a government minister to show solidarity.

And now there is a street movement, the English Defence League, directly adopting the officially sanctioned targets of “Islamists” and “extremists” – as well as the “Taliban” and the threat of a “takeover of Islam” – to intimidate and threaten Muslim communities across the country, following the success of the British National party in baiting Muslims above all other ethnic and religious communities.

Of course, anti-Muslim bigotry, the last socially acceptable racism, is often explained away by the London bombings of 2005 and the continuing threat of terror attacks, even though by far the greatest number of what the authorities call “terrorist incidents” in the UK take place in Northern Ireland, while Europol figures show that more than 99% of terrorist attacks in Europe over the past three years were carried out by non-Muslims. And in the last nine months, two of the most serious bomb plot convictions were of far right racists, Neil Lewington and Terence Gavan, who were planning to kill Muslims.

Meanwhile, in the runup to the general election, expect some ugly dog whistles from Westminster politicians keen to capitalise on Islamophobic sentiment. With few winnable Muslim votes, the Tories seem especially up for it. Earlier this month, Conservative frontbencher Michael Gove came out against the building of a mosque in his Surrey constituency, while Welsh Tory MP David Davies blamed a rape case on the “medieval and barbaric” attitudes of some migrant communities.

As long as British governments back wars and occupations in the Middle East and Muslim world, there will continue to be a risk of violence in Britain. But attempts to drive British Muslims out of normal political activity, and the refusal to confront anti-Muslim hatred, can only ratchet up the danger and threaten us all.

Continue reading February 25, 2010

February 24, 2010

EDITOR: Dubai murder further revelations

It seems that most of the Mossad agents have had a role in this operation… now, before any new addition, already 26 agents were identified on this murder job. It seems they were quite concerned with the followup movie which Spielberg must be already working on – there is a broad canvas for many characters; indeed, there might be a musical there! What with their tennis shorts and hockey sticks, it will definitely be a hit. Question: How many Israelis do you need to kill a Palestinian? Answer: as many as possible, but more if they hold UK passports.

Dubai police identify 15 more suspects in Mabhouh murder: The Guardian

Six new suspects in killing of Hamas official were carrying British passports

Dubai police today identified 15 more suspects wanted over the murder of a senior Hamas official in the Gulf emirate last month, including another six who used British passports.
The announcement brings to 26 the total number of people suspected of involvement in Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s assassination, which is widely believed to have been the work of Israel’s secret service, the Mossad. Israel has refused to comment on the accusation.
The six new British names are Mark Daniel Sklar, Roy Alan Cannon, Daniel Mark Schnur, Phillip Carr, Stephen Keith Drake and Gabriella Barney.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the government believed their passport details had been fraudulently used in connection with the assassination.
“We can confirm that six more UK passports have been identified. We will seek to make contact with these individuals and offer consular assistance as we have the previous individuals. We continue to work closely with the Emirati authorities. The foreign secretary and others have made clear we expect full Israeli co-operation.”
It was not immediately clear whether the six new individuals were also resident in Israel.
Dubai police say the newly named suspects provided “logistical support” for the operation.

At least three women were involved in the hit, one of whom used a UK passport. Other suspects were travelling on passports issued by Australia and New Zealand.
The total number of UK passports linked to the case has risen to 12, and French passports to five. The suspected hit squad flew in from Munich, Paris, Rome, Milan and Hong Kong.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has described as an outrage the alleged abuse of British passports and an investigation is under way by the serious organised crime agency, Soca. The EU has also condemned passport abuse, without mentioning Israel.

The Dubai authorities said some of those named today were believed to have played preparatory roles in the killing. Many of the suspects had credit cards that were issued by the same US bank.
The authorities have been using immigration records and CCTV images of the suspects to try to piece together what happened in the hours before Mabhouh’s murder.
Israel has said Mabhouh played a key role in smuggling Iranian-supplied rockets into the Gaza Strip and was involved in the abduction and killing of two soldiers 20 years ago.

Hamas leader’s son ‘spied for Israel‘: The Independent

The son of one of the founders of the Hamas militant group was exposed today as a top Israeli informant who helped prevent dozens of suicide bombings and other attacks.

Mosab Hassan Yousef, codenamed “the Green Prince” by his handlers, was one of the Shin Bet security service’s most valuable sources, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said.
His reports led to the arrests of several high-ranking Palestinian figures during the violent uprising that began in 2000, the newspaper said.

Yousef’s father, Sheik Hassan Yousef, was a founding member of the Islamic militant group Hamas in the 1980s. He is currently serving a six-year sentence in an Israeli prison for his political activities.
The younger Yousef converted to Christianity and moved to California in 2007.
The revelation deals another setback to Hamas, which is reeling from the assassination of a leading member in Dubai last month. There have been reports that an insider assisted the killers.
Yousef’s memoir, “Son of Hamas,” is being published next week in the US.
Yousef could not be contacted for comment, but an excerpt from the book on his Facebook page plugs it as “a gripping account of terror, betrayal, political intrigue, and unthinkable choices.” It describes Yousef’s journey as one that “jeopardised Hamas, endangered his family, and threatened his life.”

It also says Yousef’s relationship with the Shin Bet helped thwart an Israeli plan to assassinate his father.
Yousef told the paper Shin Bet agents first approached him in prison in 1996 and proposed he infiltrate the upper echelons of Hamas. He did so successfully and is credited by Israel with saving hundreds of Israeli lives.
Yousef said he hoped to send a message of peace to Israelis, though he remained pessimistic about the prospects for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict. He had particularly sharp comments for Hamas, the Iranian-backed movement that seized control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and has been branded a terrorist organisation by Israel and the West.
“Hamas cannot make peace with the Israelis. That is against what their God tells them. It is impossible to make peace with infidels,” he said.

Rachel Corrie’s family bring civil suit over human shield’s death in Gaza: The Guardian

Parents want case to highlight events that led to American activist’s death under Israeli army bulldozer

Peace activist Rachel Corrie died while protesting in front of a bulldozer trying to destroy a Palestinian home in Rafah in March 2003. Photograph: Denny Sternstein/AP

The family of the American activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago, is to bring a civil suit over her death against the Israeli defence ministry.

The case, which begins on 10 March in Haifa, northern Israel, is seen by her parents as an opportunity to put on public record the events that led to their daughter’s death in March 2003. Four key witnesses – three Britons and an American – who were at the scene in Rafah when Corrie was killed will give evidence, according the family lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein.
The four were all with the International Solidarity Movement, the activist group to which Corrie belonged. They have since been denied entry to Israel, and the group’s offices in Ramallah have been raided several times in recent weeks by the Israeli military.
Now, under apparent US pressure, the Israeli government has agreed to allow them entry so they can testify. Corrie’s parents, Cindy and Craig, will also fly to Israel for the hearing.

A Palestinian doctor from Gaza, Ahmed Abu Nakira, who treated Corrie after she was injured and later confirmed her death, has not been given permission by the Israeli authorities to leave Gaza to attend.
Abu Hussein, a leading human rights lawyer in Israel, said there was evidence from witnesses that soldiers saw Corrie at the scene, with other activists, well before the incident and could have arrested or removed her from the area before there was any risk of her being killed.
“After her death the military began an investigation but unfortunately, as in most of these cases, it found the activity of the army was legal and there was no intentional killing,” he said. “We would like the court to decide her killing was due to wrong-doing or was intentional.” If the Israeli state is found responsible, the family will press for damages.

Corrie, who was born in Olympia, Washington, travelled to Gaza to act as a human shield at a moment of intense conflict between the Israeli military and the Palestinians. On the day she died, when she was 23, she was dressed in a fluorescent orange vest and was trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. She was crushed under a military Caterpillar bulldozer and died shortly afterwards.
A month after her death the Israeli military said an investigation had determined its troops were not to blame and said the driver of the bulldozer had not seen her and did not intentionally run her over. Instead, it accused her and the International Solidarity Movement of behaviour that was “illegal, irresponsible and dangerous.”
The army report, obtained by the Guardian in April 2003, said she “was struck as she stood behind a mound of earth that was created by an engineering vehicle operating in the area and she was hidden from the view of the vehicle’s operator who continued with his work. Corrie was struck by dirt and a slab of concrete resulting in her death.”

Witnesses presented a strikingly different version of events. Tom Dale, a British activist who was 10m away when Corrie was killed, wrote an account of the incident two days later.
He described how she first knelt in the path of an approaching bulldozer and then stood as it reached her. She climbed on a mound of earth and the crowd nearby shouted at the bulldozer to stop. He said the bulldozer pushed her down and drove over her.
“They pushed Rachel, first beneath the scoop, then beneath the blade, then continued till her body was beneath the cockpit,” Dale wrote.
“They waited over her for a few seconds, before reversing. They reversed with the blade pressed down, so it scraped over her body a second time. Every second I believed they would stop but they never did.”
While she was in the Palestinian territories, Corrie wrote vividly about her experiences. Her diaries were later turned into a play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, which has toured internationally, including to Israel and the West Bank.

Other foreigners killed by Israeli forces
Iain Hook, 54, a British UN official, was shot dead by an Israeli army sniper in Jenin in November 2002. A British inquest found he had been unlawfully killed. The Israeli government paid an undisclosed sum in compensation to Hook’s family.
Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old British photography student, was shot in the head in Rafah, Gaza, in April 2003 while helping to pull Palestinian children to safety. In August 2005 an Israeli soldier was sentenced to eight years for manslaughter.
James Miller, 34, a British cameraman, was shot dead in Gaza in May 2003. He was leaving the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah refugee camp at night, waving a white flag. An inquest in Britain found Miller had been murdered. Last year Israel paid about £1.5m in damages to Miller’s family.

Continue reading February 24, 2010

February 23, 2010

Mossad Death Squads, by Carlos Latuff

Dubai: Four more Europeans suspected in Hamas official’s killing: Haaretz

The United Arab Emirates has identified four more European passport-holders suspected in the Dubai killing of a Hamas commander last month, a source in the UAE familiar with the investigation said on Tuesday.
“The UAE has identified two British suspects holding British travel documents, and as part of the ongoing investigation has shared the information with the British government,” the source said.
Two more suspects holding Irish passports were also identified, the source added.
The Dubai authorities had already released the identities of 11 people who traveled on forged British, Irish, French and German passports to kill Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a hotel on January 20.
European Union foreign ministers protested on Monday against the hit squad’s use of forged European passports, but stopped well short of blaming Israel for the undercover action.
“The EU strongly condemns the fact that those involved in this action have used fraudulent EU member states’ passports and credit cards acquired through the theft of EU citizens’ identities,” the bloc’s ministers said in a statement.
The bloc’s statement was approved as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was visiting the EU capital of Brussels. He met his British and Irish counterparts, David Miliband and Micheal Martin, and dined with the EU foreign policy supremo, Catherine Ashton.

Lieberman told his Irish counterpart that the Arabs nations blame Israel for anything that happens in the Middle East. He added that there are many other power struggles in the region which could have resulted in the operation.
“The Arabs have a tendency to blame Israel for anything that happens in the Middle East,” he said, adding that the region “has many internal struggles within groups and states which are not as democratic as Israel is.”
Asked whether she would question Lieberman over the Mossad’s alleged involvement in the killing, Ashton said she would “raise a number of things, including that.”
But she stressed that until the matter is cleared up by investigators, the EU would not jump to conclusions.
“We can’t move from a position where some press reports say that something has happened to a position saying: therefore we have to take action,” Ashton said.
She did acknowledge, however, that the member states concerned, which have launched investigations of their own, “have been extremely angry about what has happened.”
Miliband said his Israeli counterpart told him he “had no information at this stage.”
“It is very important that people know that we continue to take this issue very seriously indeed,” Miliband said after talks with Lieberman.
Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday reiterated his condemnation of the assassination and insisted “nothing positive” comes of such killings. He added that France cannot accept such “executions.”

EDITOR: The following item is of great importance and is very comprehensive. Due to its great length, only the first part is included here. To read the whole article use the link below:

Mossad’s most wanted: A deadly vengeance: The Independent

In just 60 years, Israel’s secret service has become a byword for ruthlessness and audacity. As the storm surrounding its Dubai operation intensifies, Gordon Thomas, author of the definitive history of Mossad, reveals the inside story of its most daring hit

Tuesday, 23 February 2010
On Saturday morning, 2 February 2008, a man emerged from the U-Bahn, the city’s railway system, and stood outside the subway exit on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s elegant shopping quarter. He had started his journey in one of the eastern suburbs of the city and its purpose was contained in the briefcase he carried. A car pulled up, the driver opened the passenger door and together they drove off.

Who the man was and what he had been asked to do was known, apart from the driver, to only Meir Dagan and a handful of senior Mossad officers in Tel Aviv. They had patiently waited for the car’s passenger to obtain what they wanted.

Six months before, the driver introduced himself to the man as Reuben. It was not his real name: like all other details about his identity, it remained in a secure room where the names of all current katsas [field agents] were kept in Mossad headquarters. A few days ago, the man had left a message at one of the agreed dead letter-boxes, which Reuben regularly checked, to the effect that he was ready to deliver what he had been asked to provide in return for a substantial sum of euros, half as a down payment, the balance on delivery of what was now in his briefcase.
They were photos of Imad Mughniyeh. After Osama bin Laden, he was the world’s most-wanted terrorist.

Long before the al-Qa’ida leader had launched his pilots against New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon in Washington, Mughniyeh had introduced suicide bombers into the Middle East. The Hizbollah terrorist mastermind had read an account of the Second World War Japanese kamikaze pilots in Hizbollah’s own newspapers, Al Sabia and Al Abd, which had praised the pilots for their sacrifices. In the alleys and souks of Beirut, Mughniyeh had persuaded families it was a matter of honour to provide a son, or sometimes even a daughter, for similar sacrifices. They had remained the human weapons of choice against Israel and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. Down the years those who had chosen to die were remembered in Friday prayers in the shadowy coolness of the mosques, after the rhetoric of the muezzin calling for the destruction of all those who opposed Hizbollah.

The deaths of the young bombers were lauded and their memories kept alive. Mughniyeh told their families the souls of their children needed no more, that their suicide bombings would be remembered forever and assured them a place in Hizbollah’s version of Heaven.

Like Bin Laden, Mughniyeh had been hunted across the Middle East and beyond by Mossad, the CIA and every other Western intelligence service. But each time he came close to capture, he escaped, the trail gone cold. Until now. On that cold winter day in February 2008, with a bitterly harsh wind from the Polish steppes whistling through the streets of Berlin, Reuben drove along past the smoke-blackened ruins of the Gedächtnis-Kirche, the church that was a memorial to the Allied bombing raids of the Second World War, a grim contrast to all the other buildings that made the city look like any other European capital.

At some point the man produced a file from his briefcase and, in return, replaced it with an envelope Reuben handed over containing the balance of the fee for the images in the file.

The cover of the grey-coloured document bore the stamp of what was once one of the most powerful agencies in the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, itself at one time the most important satellite nation in the former Soviet Union. The stamp identified the file as once belonging to the Stasi, the security service of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security.

In the 40 years of its existence, the Stasi had employed 600,000 full-time spies and informers, roughly one secret policeman for every 320 East Germans. The Stasi had its own imposing headquarters in East Berlin, interrogation centres around the city, its own hotels and restaurants in the countryside and clinics where only Stasi staff and their families could be treated. One clinic, close to the River Spree, had facilities to perform plastic surgery including facial reconstruction for Stasi agents and sometimes carefully selected members of terror groups with which the Stasi had close connections.

The citizens of East Germany awoke in November 1988 to find the collapse of the Berlin Wall then, with bewildering speed, the resignation of the GDR’s Politburo and the official end of the Stasi’s reign of terror. But not everything had ended. The clinic near the Spree had remained in business, offering its skills to those with the funding to pay for plastic surgery.

The file now in Reuben’s possession contained photos of Imad Mughniyeh which had been taken at the clinic after his surgery. His face looked very different from the one that had last filled the pages of newspapers and magazines after a Hizbollah rally in September 1983 before once more disappearing in 1984, by which time he had established an even-more murderous reputation than any other terrorist of the 1980s.

This was the era when the Venezuelan-born Marxist Carlos the Jackal’s claim to notoriety had begun with the taking of 42 Opec oil ministers hostage in Vienna in 1975. Carlos had then embarked on a reign of terror before Mossad had tipped off French intelligence as to where they could grab him in Sudan and bring him to trial in Paris for his crimes on French soil, where he continues to serve a life sentence.

Like Carlos, Abu Nidal had become another headline-grabbing terrorist after he ordered the gunning down of innocent men and women as they waited to board their Christmas flights in Rome and Vienna airports in 1985. Nidal had finally been killed by a team from kidon, Mossad’s unique unit that conducted legally approved assassinations. But for a quarter of a century Imad Mughniyeh had avoided assassination.

Now, on that February morning, the file in Reuben’s possession could bring closer his death for some of the worst crimes committed on Israel’s doorstep – Lebanon. In 1983, he had plotted the attack against the American embassy in Beirut. Among the 63 dead were eight members of the CIA, including its station chief in the Middle East. A year later, Mughniyeh arranged for the kidnapping of William Buckley, the CIA replacement station chief in battered Beirut.

Next, he arranged the bombing of the US Marines’ barracks near the city’s airport, killing 241 people. In between, he had carried out hijackings and organised the kidnapping of Western hostages, including Terry Waite, who had gone to Beirut to try to negotiate with Hizbollah’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, to free the hostages Hizbollah already held. Along with Buckley, Waite – the emissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury – had been incarcerated in what became known as the Beirut Hilton, the underground prison beneath the city.

Imad Mughniyeh had been responsible for the murder of over 400 people and the torture of even more. America had placed a bounty of $25m on his head. One by one Mossad’s menume, the Hebrew title by which each director general is known, plotted Mughniyeh’s downfall. Men like the cool Nahum Admoni (1982–1990), the quiet-voiced Shabtai Shavit (1990–1996), the relentless Danny Yatom (1996–1998) and Efraim Halevy (1998–2002), the menume his staff called the “grandfather of spies”, had all chaired endless secret meetings to plan the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh.

Their agents had tracked him to Paris only for him to once more slip away, as he had done in Rome and Madrid. For a while the trail led to Minsk in the Ukraine and then to the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union. There were reports he was in Tehran, living under the protection of the fundamentalist regime. But each time the hunt had petered out. In 2002, Meir Dagan took over Mossad. He did what all his predecessors had done: he studied the growing number of files that listed how close Mossad agents had come to capturing Mughniyeh. At times they had been close, very close. But somehow he had still wriggled free. The suicide bombings had continued. For Dagan it became an article of faith that, as the 10th menume, he would finally terminate Mughniyeh’s reign of terror.

EDITOR: An interesting pr0posal from Harvard academic: Curb Palestinian births!

There is no end to the creativity of Zionist science and imagination, we all know… yet here Mr. Cramer of Harvard harks back to some historical parallels which need not be mentioned for the benefit of intelligent readers… The solution to the Middle East problems is to reduce the number of Palestinians, by curbing births! It can be greatly aided by reducing international aid, he also suggests, and that this would “happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status.” It will also happen faster if Israel continues to block food and medicines. What an ingenious solution! A blinding bolt of light from Harvard! Why didn’t they think about it earlier? It seems clear that some Zionist have already started planning a Final Solution.

Harvard Fellow calls for genocidal measure to curb Palestinian births: The Electronic Intifada

Report,  22 February 2010
A fellow at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Martin Kramer, has called for “the West” to take measures to curb the births of Palestinians, a proposal that appears to meet the international legal definition of a call for genocide.

Kramer, who is also a fellow at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), made the call early this month in a speech at Israel’s Herzliya conference, a video of which is posted on his blog (“Superfluous young men,” 7 February 2010).
In the speech Kramer rejected common views that Islamist “radicalization” is caused by US policies such as support for Israel, or propping up despotic dictatorships, and stated that it was inherent in the demography of Muslim societies such as Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. Too many children, he argued, leads to too many “superfluous young men” who then become violent radicals.

Kramer proposed that the number of Palestinian children born in the Gaza Strip should be deliberately curbed, and alleged that this would “happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies to Palestinians with refugee status.”
Due to the Israeli blockade, the vast majority of Palestinians in Gaza are now dependent on UN food aid. Neither the UN, nor any other agencies, provide Palestinians with specifically “pro-natal subsidies.” Kramer appeared to be equating any humanitarian assistance at all with inducement for Palestinians to reproduce.

He added, “Israel’s present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim — undermine the Hamas regime — but if they also break Gaza’s runaway population growth, and there is some evidence that they have, that might begin to crack the culture of martyrdom which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men.” This, he claimed, would be treating the issue of Islamic radicalization “at its root.”
The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, created in the wake of the Nazi holocaust, defines genocide to include measures “intended to prevent births within” a specific “national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

The Weatherhead Center at Harvard describes itself as “the largest international research center within Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” In addition to his positions at Harvard and WINEP, Kramer is “president-designate” of Shalem College in Jerusalem, a far-right Zionist institution that aspires to be the “College of the Jewish People.”
Pro-Israel speakers from the United States often participate in the the Herzliya conference, an influential annual gathering of Israel’s political and military establishment. This year’s conference was also addressed by The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and, in a first for a Palestinian official, by Salam Fayyad, appointed prime minister of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.

Kramer’s call to prevent Palestinian births reflects a long-standing Israeli and Zionist concern about a so-called “demographic threat” to Israel, as Palestinians are on the verge of outnumbering Israeli Jews within Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories combined.
Such extreme racist views have been aired at the Herzliya conference in the past. In 2003, for example, Dr. Yitzhak Ravid, an Israeli government armaments expert, called on Israel to “implement a stringent policy of family planning in relation to its Muslim population,” a reference to the 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Continue reading February 23, 2010

February 22, 2010

Special BDS poster designed by Carlos Latuff

Killed Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh betrayed by associate, says Dubai police chief: The Guardian

Two more fraudulent Irish passports linked to Palestinian’s killing, officials say
The father of killed Palestinian militant Mahmoud al-Mabhouh holds up a photograph of his son Photograph: Hatem Moussa/APIan Black

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, the Hamas official assassinated in Dubai, was betrayed by a close associate, the emirate’s police chief claimed as it emerged today that the Palestinian’s murderers used more fake Irish passports.
Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim described whoever leaked details of Mahbouh’s arrival to his assassins as “the real killer”, Abu Dhabi’s al-Khalij newspaper reported. Tamim said last week he was 99% certain Israel’s Mossad secret service was responsible.

Mabhouh, said by Israel to have been smuggling Iranian weapons and money into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, was murdered in his room at the al-Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai on January 19. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement.
Tamim, voicing suspicion of an “agent” in Hamas’s ranks, urged it to investigate. But the Islamist movement has blamed its Fatah rival, which controls the West Bank, for helping the alleged Israeli hit team. Two Palestinians from Gaza who once worked for Fatah security are in custody in Dubai after being handed over by Jordan.

Nahru Massoud, a senior figure in the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, the military wing of Hamas, has denied he was being investigated for involvement. He had been in Abu Dhabi but left the UAE before Mabhouh’s murder, he told Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV from Syria. Fatah officials had claimed he was under arrest in Damascus.
In Gaza, a Hamas MP, Salah Bardawil, said on Saturday that Mabhouh had unwittingly helped his killers by making travel plans online and discussing them on the phone, implying he was under surveillance by the Mossad. The claim was denied by Mabhouh’s brother Fayek.

Dubai police now say up to 18 suspects used altered British, Irish, French and German passports before the killing. Officials said today that at least two more fraudulent Irish passports had been linked to the killing and that some of the suspects had visited the city on a reconnaissance mission.
Tamim described the murder as “no longer a local issue, but a security issue for European countries”.
David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and his Irish counterpart, Michael Martin, are both due to meet the Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, tomorrow in Brussels, where the passports issue is certain to be raised. Britain has insisted it had no prior knowledge of the assassination or the fraudulent use of its passports.

The Foreign Office said it did “not recognise” a Sunday newspaper report claiming a British minister had been briefed that Israeli immigration officials had copied the passport details. “The defrauding of British passports is a very serious issue,” a spokesman said. “The government will continue to take all the action that is necessary to protect British nationals from identity fraud.”
UK officials have said no action is likely before the completion of an investigation into the affair by Soca, the Serious Organised Crime Agency.

The National, the UAE’s leading English-language paper, yesterday described Britain’s outrage over the passports as “less full-throated than one might have expected.”
It added: “Israel’s wilful violation of another nation’s sovereignty to commit a murder deserves all the indignation it garners. But that so many passports have been used fraudulently is not just a matter of national shame, it is a matter of global security. There are many questions that remain. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the assassination plot is as much a European problem now as a Middle Eastern one.”

Mossad agents now wanted, by Carlos Latuff
Mossad agents now wanted, by Carlos Latuff

EDITOR: The War in Iran is coming soon

The unmistakable sound of war drums is in the air, and the politicians have now given way to the generals. The daily annoncements should remind all those without Alzheimer of the period in 2003 before the war on Iraq started. Is anyone fooled by this maneuver? The die has been cast in Washington, and Tel Aviv is preparing in earnest. To suprised by this war would be criminal negligence.

U.S. places Iran nuclear issue on pressure track: Haaretz

The United States is placing its efforts to thwart the Iranian nuclear program on a “pressure track,” head of U.S. Central Command general David Petraeus said in an interview to a U.S. network on Sunday.
Speaking to NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Petraeus said that he thought “that no one at the end of this time can say that the United States and the rest of the world have not given Iran every opportunity to resolve the issues diplomatically.”

“That puts us in a solid foundation now to go on what is termed the pressure track,” the U.S. general said, adding that “that’s the course on which we are embarked now.”
The United States is leading a push for a fourth round of United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran because of suspicions it is secretly developing a nuclear arsenal.
Washington has been supported from fellow Security Council members Britain and France, while Russia, which has been more reluctant to impose more sanctions, has said it was now “very alarmed” by a recent IAEA report which said Iran may be working to develop a nuclear-armed missile.
Iran denies it is trying to develop a nuclear weapon and says the
accusations of Western countries are baseless.

Asked on how close Iran was to reaching nuclear capabilities, Petraeus said that “it is certainly a ways off, and we’ll probably hear more on that from the International Atomic Energy Agency when it meets here in the, in the next week or so.”
“There’s no question that some of those activities have advanced during that time. There’s also a new National Intelligence Estimate being developed by our intelligence community in the United States. We have over the course of the last year, of course, pursued the engagement track.”
“The U.N. Security Council countries, of course, expressing their concern. Russia now even piling on with that,” Petraeus said.

“We will have to see where that goes and whether that can, indeed, send the kind of signal to Iran about the very serious concerns that the countries in the region and, indeed, the entire world have about Iran’s activities in the nuclear program and in its continued arming, funding, training, equipping and directing of proxy extremist elements that still carry out attacks,” the U.S. general added.
When asked whether a single country, even if that country is the United States, stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Petraeus said that the U.S. would “have to embark on the pressure track next,” adding it was the job of combatant commanders to consider the what-ifs, to be prepared for contingency plans.”

“I’m not saying this in a provocative way. I’m merely saying that we have responsibilities, the American people and our commander-in-chief and so forth expect us to think those through and to be prepared for the what-ifs. And we try not to be irresponsible in that regard,” the central command chief said.
On Saturday French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said world powers would have to take new action against Iran in the next few weeks if Tehran continues to reject Western proposals on its disputed nuclear program.

Fillon said he was worried by a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week which said
“We have read the new report (on Iran) by the IAEA…and it is very worrying,” Fillon told a news conference in Damascus alongside his Syrian counterpart Naji al-Otari.
“We proposed dialogue to Iran for several months and for the moment all the propositions have been turned down,” he said. “If the situation does not change, we have no other solution but to look into new measures in the coming weeks.”
China has so far resisted imposing more sanctions.

Continue reading February 22, 2010