Tag: war crimes

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

Februray 21, 2010

Israel exports oppression, by Carlos Latuff

‘Netanyahu authorized Dubai assassination in early January’: Haaretz

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorized in early January the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, according to the Sunday Times.
Based on information obtained from “sources with knowledge of Mossad,” the paper reported that Netanyahu gave Mossad chief Meir Dagan the green light for the Dubai operation during a meeting at the Midrasha – the intelligence agency’s headquarters, in the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv.
The sources also said that the Mossad hit squad trained for the Dubai mission by secretly rehearsing in a Tel Aviv hotel.
Haaretz has learned that German officials are examining the identity of Michael Bodenheimer, the name that appeared on a genuine German passport allegedly used in last month’s assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai. The authorities in the city of Cologne, where the passport was issued, began a probe, and federal authorities are now considering a move of their own.
According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer, an Israeli, applied for a German passport from the Cologne authorities. Bodenheimer presented documents that proved German lineage, including his grandparents’ marriage certificate. He also showed his Israeli passport that was issued to him a year earlier in Tel Aviv.

The German passport was issued on June 18, 2009. That document was used by one of the assassination suspects in Dubai on January 19, a day before the killing.
According to Der Spiegel, Bodenheimer does not live in Cologne, as he had claimed in his application, and no other person by that name lives there. The magazine claims a man by that name lived in Herzliya until June last year.
Haaretz has learned that a Michael Bodenheimer lives in Bnei Brak. His wife told Haaretz in a telephone interview that “he has no German passport and he never asked for such a passport. He never visited Germany, except perhaps in transit on the way to the United States.”
His wife added that the ultra-Orthodox family does not have any family in Herzliya and that even though Bodenheimer’s grandparents were born in Germany, they emigrated to the United States, from where he immigrated to Israel 30 years ago.

“We are quiet people and are not used to so much attention,” she told Haaretz yesterday. “The past week since the news of this story broke has been difficult for us. The fact that someone is using his name does not make him involved in this story.”
Bodenheimer studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He has said he was astounded to see his name on the list of suspects, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.
“At first we didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” Bodenheimer’s daughter said. “The picture that was published doesn’t look like him at all. He is always busy with Torah study,” she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.
The German media have reported that the intelligence services of the country are certain that the Mossad was involved in the killing and that the foreign minister demanded that Israel explain why it used a German passport.

Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Yoram Ben-Ze’ev, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry, where he was asked about information that can shed light on the killing of Mabhouh.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said yesterday that he does not expect relations between Israel and European countries whose passports were used in the assassination to deteriorate as a result of the incident.
“I do not expect a crisis in relations because there is nothing linking Israel to the assassination. Britain, France and Germany are countries with shared interests with Israel in countering terrorism,” Ayalon said, naming three of the four countries whose passports were used. At least three of the suspects used Irish passports.

Meanwhile, Hamas blamed Israel again yesterday for the hit. At a press conference, Salah al-Bardawil, one of the group’s Gaza-based leaders, said he does not suspect that the Palestinian Authority was involved in the killing and that the entire affair was the responsibility of Mossad.
However, the Hamas official said that the two Palestinians arrested in Dubai in connection with the killing are former officers in the Palestinian security services and were employed in a firm owned by a senior member of rival Fatah.
The London-based newspaper Al-Hayat reported that this company is owned by Mohammed Dahlan, formerly a Fatah strongman in the Gaza Strip before its takeover by Hamas two and a half years ago.

Bardawil said that Mabhouh had put himself at risk by booking his trip through the Internet and risked a security breach by telling his family in Gaza by telephone which hotel he would be staying at.
Also yesterday, the daily newspaper Al-Bayan reported that Dubai police had new evidence implicating the Mossad in Mabhouh’s assassination, which included credit-card payments and suspects’ phone records.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized [from the passports],” Al-Bayan quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.

Meanwhile, a Qatar news agency reported that Egyptian officials promised Dubai counterparts that they would try to persuade Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of Mabhouh in their country.
Egyptian diplomats told the newspaper Al-Arab that Dubai has asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit.
Dubai police last week released photographs of 11 of the suspects. Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the suspects’ arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
On Friday, Britain offered new passports to six British citizens living in Israel whose identities were used by the suspects. This would protect them from inadvertent arrest by Interpol.

Report: German passport tied to Dubai hit wasn`t forged: Haaretz

German intelligence services investigating the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai have found that one of the suspected members of the assassination team carried a genuine German passport, according to reports Saturday in German media outlets, including Der Speigel.

According to the findings of German federal investigators, in June 2008 an Israeli man named Michael Bodenheimer – who shares the name of an Israeli whose identity was used in the Dubai operation – came to immigration officials in Cologne with the pre-World War II address of his grandparents. Bodenheimer acquired German citizenship on the basis of this data.
After his name was listed as one of the suspected members of the Dubai assassination squad, Bodenheimer, who lives in Bnei Brak and is of American origin, said that he did not know how his identity was stolen.
Dubai authorities have said 11 European-passport holders were involved in the assassination, and last week published their names and photographs. The list included six people with British passports, three with Irish passports, and one each from France and Germany.

Bodenheimer, who immigrated to Israel from the United States more than 20 years ago, studies at a kollel, a yeshiva for married men. He said he was astounded to see the UAE list contained his name, supposedly belonging to a German citizen.
“At first we didn’t understand what everyone was talking about,” Bodenheimer’s daughter said. “The picture that was published doesn’t look like him at all. He busies himself with Torah study,” she said, adding that he holds no citizenship other than Israeli and American.

A Hamas legislator on Saturday said Hamas strongman Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was assassinated in a Dubai hotel last month, put himself at risk by booking his trip through the Internet.
The Hamas legislator, Salah Bardawil, also told a news conference Saturday that Mabhouh took additional risk by informing his Gaza family by telephone at which hotel he would be staying.
Mabhouh’s family on Saturday denied that he acted recklessly, according to Army Radio.

Dubai police and Hamas have blamed Israel’s Mossad spy agency for the killing. However, Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Saturday that there was no evidence tying Israel to the killing of Mabhouh at a luxury Dubai hotel on January 20.
“I don’t forsee a crisis with European allies because there is nothing that ties Israel to the assassination,” Ayalon said at an event in Rehovot.
“Britain, France and Germany all share our interests in the battle against global terror,” Ayalon added. “Therefore, there will be no crisis. Instead our relations [with these countries] will continue to deepen,” Ayalon added.

Also on Saturday, Arabic-language daily newspaper Al Bayan reported that Dubai police had new evidence implicating Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad in the assassination of the Hamas commander, which included credit card payments and suspects’ phone records.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized [in the passports],” Al Bayan quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.

The newspaper did not provide further details. Mabhouh was found dead in his room in a luxury Dubai hotel on January 20, a day after arriving in the emirate.
Meanwhile, a Qatar news agency reported that Egyptian delegates promised Dubai officials that they would try to persuade Israel to officially apologize for the assassination of Mabhouh in their country.
Egyptian diplomats told Al-Arab newspaper that Dubai has asked Egypt to formally reprimand Israel for the hit.

Dubai police last week released photographs of 11 of the suspects. Interpol said on Thursday it had issued “red notices” for the suspects’ arrest in any of its 188 member countries.
On Friday, Britain offered new passports to six British citizens, living in Israel, whose identities were used by the suspects, to protect them from inadvertent arrest by Interpol.
Other suspects identified by Dubai used forged passports from Ireland, France and Germany.

Dubai says new evidence links Israel to hit: Ynet

London Times’ sources suggest former Fatah members may have led Mossad agents to Hamas’ Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, while Dubai’s al-Bayan daily says emirate’s police have credit cards info, phone records implicating spy agency in assassination
Two Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel may be linked to the assassination of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the Times reported Saturday.
According to the report, the two – Anwar Sheibar and Ahmad Hassanain, both former members of the Fatah security forces – may have led the alleged Israeli assassins to their target.
A senior Palestinian intelligence official quoted by the Times, said that it was “highly likely that both men had known al-Mabhouh personally during their time in military intelligence in the Gaza Strip.”

According to the Times, the US’ Federal Bureau of Investigation may also weigh in to the investigation, following reports that American credit cards were used in the operation.
Meanwhile, Dubai authorities said they have uncovered new evidence incriminating Israeli agents in the hit, including credit card payments and phone calls made by suspects, an Arabic-language Al Bayan daily reported on Saturday.
Police have already said the 11 suspects used forged passports in the names of innocent individuals of several European nationalities.
“Dubai police have information confirming that the suspects purchased travel tickets from companies in other countries with credit cards carrying the same names we have publicized (in the passports),” Al Bayan daily on Saturday quoted Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
“The new evidence… includes telephone communications between the culprits who have been detected,” Khalfan told the state-governed newspaper.
Following the release of the suspects’ photographs by Dubai authorities, Interpol issued “red notices” for their arrest in any of its 188 member countries.

Continue reading Februray 21, 2010

February 20, 2010

Obama keeps his promise, by Carlos Latuff

EDITOR: After intense pressure by a large number of organisations and individuals, led by BRICUP (British Committee for Universities in Palestine) the well-known botanist, David Bellamy has pulled out of a ZF event. The ZF now threaten to sue him… nice guys. It is also interesting to find how opponents to Israel are treated.

Zionist Federation may sue David Bellamy over talk pull-out: Jewish Chronicle

The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (Bricup) has claimed its campaign led TV botanist David Bellamy to pull out of a Zionist Federation science event.
Prof Bellamy was scheduled to be guest speaker at the Israel Blue White and Green event last week, but withdrew offering no explanation for his absence.
The JC understands that the ZF is now considering taking legal action against Prof Bellamy for breach of contract.

Bricup’s Jonathan Rosenhead said there was a “reasonable inference that his withdrawal is related to our letter to him asking him to do so”. Nevertheless, he admitted that the organisation had not had a response from Prof Bellamy.
Bricup supporters including Lord Ahmed and Baroness Tonge had earlier written to the botanist and academic saying he should be “outraged” by the “greenwashing of the occupation”.

Prof Bellamy’s agent, Olivia Guest, this week again declined to clarify why he had not attended the event.
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, secretary of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, (JBIG) was evicted from the session with Israeli scientists after shouting questions about Israel not allowing Palestinians fair access to water. She claimed she was “physically dragged out of the meeting” by CST security staff and “frog-marched up the stairs”.

A second JBIG activist said he had been “carried out” by CST. The pair said they were considering getting legal advice over the evictions.
But a CST spokesman said: “Bricup’s claims are exaggerated and untrue. Nobody was ‘carried’ anywhere.”
Alan Aziz, ZF director, said: “Two people were making speeches and shouting. People asked for them to be removed, we decided to remove them and CST carried out our wishes.”

He said discussions with Prof Bellamy’ agents were continuing.

EDITOR: A film by an Israel ex-paratrooper, Yariv, interviewing his colleagues from the army unit, and getting them to tell the truth about the brutalities and torture involved daily in the occupation, about the sadistic pleasure of oppressing the Palestinians they met every day. After 8 years he brings together some of them to exchange views about the formative experience of their twenties. The details, limited as they are in this 23-minute film, are still horrifying in their brutality; The banality of evil is staring at us from the screen. They admit not just to torture, but to multiple murders of Palestinians by beating this up.

When you watch this film, please do not expect a critique of Israel. It isn’t. Even for those who are prepared to admit the crimes they committed daily, it is not ever possible, it seems, to question the system that brutalised them, that made them into torturers and murderers; they look back with nostalgia, and in the last scene, meeting their commander who is now a Lieutenant Colonel, they all bond as if nothing wrong ever took place. “nothing has changed” they say to each other, as they join an army patrol after 8 years. Nothing indeed has changed to the better, and many things have become worse. Those Israelis cannot, and will not bring change; what they wish for is absolution, the grace of the murderer who is forgiven, but without asking for forgiveness, without facing the fact that they were the system of death and destruction, and the system continues with their support. Deeply depressing.

A Video by an Israeli Ex-soldier

EDITOR: As there are no good news stories to be had this week, the NYT has no news from Israel. Again. Why are we surprised? It is, after all, one of the most potent instruments of the Zionist Lobby, all the more potent for being underplayed and sophisticated. Check for yourself – no Dubai murder, no troubled public:

The New York Times

ne of the most potent instruments of the Zionist Lobby.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Omar Barghouti speaks on the BDS campaign

Omar Barghouti, a key member of PACBI, speaks in a YouTube video about the reasons for the boycott campaign and talks about the progress we have made and what we need to do next.

Daily realities in Palestine: The battle of Al Massara

EDITOR: Video of Israeli military attack on Palestinian nonviolent demonstration at Al-Masara on Friday, February 19, 2010. Without warning the Israeli army shoots concussion grenades and tear gas canisters. These daily brutalities are totally ‘normal’, and happen every day across Palestine.

Today there were demonstrations and confrontations in a number of locations in the occupied West Bank with three enduring particularly vicious Israeli attacks: Ni’lin, Bil’in, Al-Ma’sara.   It is impossible to be in many places at one time so I chose to go to Al-Ma’sara for their weekly demonstration.
There, the demonstrators decided to go on the main street and as soon as we got there, the occupation army attacked the peaceful demonstrators. There were no warnings but immediate volley of concussion grenades and tear gas canisters.  The soldiers chased people into the village and continued firing. I stayed close to the soldiers and tried to reason with them. In one instance they used a stun grenade to prevent me from talking to soldiers who are mindlessly obeying officers.  I could not help think of Nazis and Apartheid soldiers.  I persisted in trying to reason with them. As we were leaving, a higher ranking military intelligence officer stopped me and did get my name and coordinates.

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh

EDITOR: The Desecration of the Mamila cemetery in the name of ‘Tolerance’

This horrid story would be funny and bizarre, if it wasn’t so cruel and terrifying. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre is building its ‘Museum of Tolerance’ right on the Mamila ancient Moslem cemetery in Jerusalem. Imagine someone building such a museum on a Jewish cemetery somewhere… The Israeli government sees no problem with this – after all, hundreds of such Palestinian cemeteries were desecrated since 1948. The Tel Aviv Hilton and the city’s Independence Park are built on another such cemetery, so what’s the problem, really. Tolerance, naturally, does not extend to Arabs. Tolerance, indeed.

Jerusalem families come out against museum built on ancestors’ graves: The Electronic Intifada

Marian Houk,  19 February 2010

The grave of Ahmad Agha Duzdar al-Asali, the mayor of Jerusalem in the 19th Century, in the Mamilla cemetery. (Wikipedia)

Members of prominent Palestinian families from Jerusalem came out last week in protest against plans by the Simon Wiesenthal Center to build a Museum of Tolerance on top of part of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery where their ancestors are buried.
The initiative includes filing a petition in Geneva to various United Nations human rights bodies and to UNESCO, the Paris-based UN agency responsible for protecting the world’s cultural heritage. The petition was also addressed to the Swiss Government, which is the repository for the Geneva Conventions.

One family member behind the initiative said it is not just symbolic, but instead a full-blown campaign. He expects this issue to be included in a resolution being drafted for a March session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
In the East Jerusalem press conference at which this initiative was announced last week, petitioner Asem Khalidi noted that a number of men from Salah al-Din’s army, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders, were buried in the Mamilla Cemetery.
Much of the momentum behind the initiative comes from Palestinians who grew up and who still live in the Diaspora, many of them in the United States. Press conferences were held in Jerusalem, Geneva and Los Angeles, home of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (and the first Museum of Tolerance, built in 1993), which says it is moving forward with its plans despite passionate legal and moral opposition.

Mamilla Cemetery
The corner of the Mamilla Cemetery slated for construction was paved over in the 1960s, and used as a car park. When excavations began on the site in 2005, human remains were found, and the chief archeologist stated that he believed there were many thousands of graves in many levels in that section of the cemetery.
The cemetery is situated in West Jerusalem, which fell under Israeli control during the fighting that surrounded the proclamation of the self-declared Jewish state in mid-May 1948. There have been no new burials since that time. From the May 1948 war, until the June 1967 war when Israeli forces captured East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, the cemetery was inaccessible to many if not most of the Palestinian families concerned, who were living under Jordanian administration.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center claims that it has spent a lot of money on reburying — in “a nearby Muslim cemetery” — the remains it has excavated there. However, a press release announcing the initiative of the Palestinian families said that “It was an active burial ground until 1948, when the new State of Israel seized the western part of Jerusalem and the cemetery fell under Israeli control … The construction project has resulted in the disinterment and disposal of hundreds of graves and human remains, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown.”
The Los Angeles-based center broke ground for the Jerusalem branch of the Museum of Tolerance in a corner of the Mamilla Cemetery in May 2004. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger delivered the keynote address.

Families denied justice
There are 60 individual Palestinian petitioners from some 15 Jerusalem families including Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian Authority’s appointed Governor of Jerusalem; AbdulQader Husseini, the son of the late Faisal Husseini, who was the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Jerusalem; and Sari Nusseibeh, head of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis.

Rashid Khalidi, Professor of History at Columbia University in New York, who is also a petitioner, has been closely involved in organizing this effort. In an interview with Democracy Now! he explained that the petitioners are asking that the Mamilla Cemetery be treated as a heritage site. “This is a cemetery where people have been buried since the 12th century … The fact that it is still being desecrated, not just by this Museum, but by vandalism of the remaining tombs, is a scandal”. He said the families were also asking for “reinterment of the excavated remains under religious supervision”, with information provided to the families about exactly where “within the cemetery.”

Palestinian and Israeli co-petitioners include the organizations Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the Arab Association for Human Rights, Badil and the Zochrot Association.
Because it is in West Jerusalem, Palestinians have been hesitant to take any high-profile action asserting either physical or moral claims.
Until now, much of the opposition to the building plan has come from Israeli and Jewish rights activists who have argued, in part, that the construction on this site offended their Jewish beliefs and values. They have worked through the Israeli court system, and through appeals directed mainly to Israeli and international Jewish public opinion.

Gershon Baskin, co-director and founder of the Israeli Palestinian Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), told this reporter that the first he heard of the Museum of Tolerance project was in newspaper reports of the ground-breaking ceremony. “We came in only after the whole thing was licensed and all the legal proceedings were finished — and this is one argument that the court used against our petitions.”
The Israeli high court has recently dismissed another challenge and ruled that the Museum of Tolerance construction project is legal, and can proceed. Baskin believes that the legal avenues in Israel are now basically now closed.
Meanwhile, a private Palestinian offer to donate an alternative location for the Museum of Tolerance hasn’t been taken up by the Wiesenthal center.

At a public discussion sponsored by IPCRI in East Jerusalem in March 2009, attended by lawyers representing the Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance project in West Jerusalem, Dr. Mohammad Dajani of Al-Quds University in Abu Dis offered to donate alternative land for construction of the museum in Anata near the concrete wall that Israel is currently building around the Jerusalem area. The offer was for 12 dunams (one dunam is approximately 1,000 square meters). At that alternative site, Dr. Dajani said to the public meeting, both Israelis and Palestinians could visit the future Museum of Tolerance — which many Palestinians would not be able to do if it were built in the heart of West Jerusalem, as is currently planned.

The lawyers for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance merely smiled, without replying.

About six months ago, Dr. Dajani said, he was surprised by an Israeli military decision to confiscate, “for security reasons,” about half of the parcel of land he had offered for the museum project. Just this past week, he said, he received a new notification that the military intends to take the remaining six or so dunams as well. He said he is challenging the order.

Marian Houk is a journalist currently working in Jerusalem with experience at the United Nations and in the region. Her blog is www.un-truth.com.

Continue reading February 20, 2010

February 19, 2010

PACBI: Intellectual responsibility and the voice of the colonized: The Electronic Intifada

Statement, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, 17 February 2010

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has recently encountered a number of projects that while intending to empower the colonized Palestinians, in essence end up undermining their will and choice of method of struggle for freedom, justice and self-determination. The publication of a new book entitled The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories belongs to this category. The book project represents a classic example of how the collective voice of the colonized is ignored in the production of a scholarly work supposed to empower them.

While it is crucial for scholars in relevant fields to expose and analyze the colonial situation in Palestine, this academic imperative should not imply that one overlooks how scholarship engages this colonialism. That is, this book, as a collaboration of various scholars — Israeli and non-Israeli contributors — was completed with support from the Van Leer Institute. In other words, through working under the aegis of the Van Leer Institute, this project has cooperated with one of the very institutions that PACBI and an overwhelming majority of Palestinian academics and intellectuals have called for boycotting. As such, the research project which led to the production of the volume violates the criteria of the academic and cultural boycott as set by PACBI and widely endorsed in Palestinian civil society, including by the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) and University Teachers’ Association in Palestine (UTA).

Contrary to the claims of some left-wing Israeli academics that the Van Leer institute is an incubator for cutting-edge critical thinking and oppositional politics, the institute is firmly planted in the prevailing Zionist consensus and is part and parcel of the structures of oppression and domination. It subscribes to the “vision of Israel as both a homeland for the Jewish people and a democratic society, predicated on justice, fairness and equality for all its residents,” ignoring the oxymoron presented by this inherently exclusionary vision — a “Jewish State” of necessity discriminates against its “non-Jewish” citizens. The Van Leer Institute receives financial support from other Israeli universities and state institutions that are subject to boycott. Among its financial contributors and institutional “friends” are the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University; the Edelstein Center at the Hebrew University; the Israel Ministry of Science; the National Insurance Institute, Israel; and the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Furthermore, Van Leer, like all other Israeli academic institutions, has never taken a stance against Israel’s policies of occupation and racial discrimination, nor against the recent war of aggression on Gaza or the ongoing illegal siege of 1.5 million Palestinians there. The Van Leer is, therefore, an institution with strong links to establishment institutions in Israel. As such, it is complicit in maintaining and entrenching Israel’s regime of occupation and apartheid against the Palestinian people.

Though intellectual projects may aim to rigorously articulate the complex matrix of control that exists in Palestine, the intellectual process has a fundamental ethical and political component. As such, it is incumbent upon all scholars to realize that any collaboration which brings together Israeli and international academics (Arabs or otherwise) under the auspices of Israeli institutions is counterproductive to fighting Israeli colonial oppression, and is therefore subject to boycott.

A project involving only Israeli academics, on the other hand, receiving support from an Israeli academic institution, may be seen as a justifiable exercise of a right or an entitlement by Israeli scholars as tax payers and, as a result, may not per se be boycottable.

As the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement gains momentum globally, an increasing number of voices are emerging in support of this strategy as the most effective, nonviolent route to bring about change towards justice and durable peace based on international law and universal principles of human rights. The endorsement by various artists and academics of specific boycott actions in the past few years is welcome and well-known. It is the responsibility of the boycott supporters to understand the broadly-accepted boycott criteria and guidelines upon which this boycott is based and adhere to it, rather than attempting to invent or suggest idiosyncratic criteria of their own, as the latter would undermine the Palestinian guiding reference for the global boycott campaign against Israel.

It is crucial to emphasize that the BDS movement derives its principles from both the demands of the Palestinian BDS Call, signed by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations in July 2005, and, in the academic and cultural fields, from the Palestinian Call for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, issued a year earlier in July 2004. Together, the BDS and PACBI Calls represent the most authoritative and widely-supported strategic statements to have emerged from Palestine in decades; all major political parties, labor, student and women groups, and organizations representing Palestinian refugees all over the world have endorsed and supported these calls. Both calls underline the prevailing Palestinian belief that the most effective form of solidarity with the Palestinian people is direct action aimed at bringing an end to Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime, just as the apartheid regime in South Africa was abolished, by isolating Israel internationally through boycotts and sanctions, forcing it to comply with international law and respect Palestinian rights.

Since the formulation of these calls, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on defining the principles of the boycott movement. Rooted in universal values and principles, the BDS Call categorically rejects all forms of racism, racial discrimination and colonial oppression. PACBI has also translated the principles enshrined in its Call into practical guidelines for implementing the international academic and cultural boycott of Israel. However intellectually challenging and avant-garde some projects may be, by being oblivious to the Palestinian-articulated boycott criteria they in effect work against the internationally-embraced Palestinian struggle for justice.

EDITOR: Fisk on the Dubai events

In a short but concise interview, Fisk makes the point that the Dubai operation could not have taken place without the collusion and active assistance of the UK authorities – he is sure that the passports are real documents produced in the UK by the proper authorities, and only the pictures were swapped. This puts a whole new gloss on the UK government pitiful and embarassing silence, followed by ritual motions. This was not an Israeli-only operation,  but one conducted by the combined efforts of the usual suspects, Israel and its western allies.

Growing row over Dubai killing: Al Jazeera online

Dubai’s police chief says he is almost certain Israel was involved in last month’s assassination of a senior Hamas official.
Dahi Khalfan Tamim says, if proven, an arrest warrant should be issued for the man in-charge of Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent.
He says if Israel is behind the assassination, then Tel Aviv could find itself in a diplomatic crisis with some of its European allies. To listen, Click here

Dubai police chief in Mossad arrest call: BBC

Dubai’s police chief has called for the head of Mossad to be arrested if Israel’s spy agency was behind the killing of a Hamas boss in the emirate.
Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan said Interpol should issue a “red notice” to approve the arrest of Meir Dagan.
Israel shrugged off the calls, saying the Dubai police chief had provided no incriminating proof.
Mahmud al-Mabhouh, one of the founders of Hamas’s military wing, was found dead in a Dubai hotel on 20 January.
Several fake European passports – including six from the UK – are thought to have been used by his 11 suspected killers.
The UK government denies it had any prior knowledge of the fake British passports being used, although Shadow foreign secretary William Hague said it was “entirely possible” the government had been alerted.
And a British newspaper claimed on Friday the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, and the government had received a tip-off from Israel.
Red notice call
Lt Gen Khalfan has said he was “99% certain” Israel was involved in the assassination.
In a televised interview on Thursday, said: “If the Mossad were proven to be behind the crime, which is most likely now, Interpol should issue a red notice for the head of the Mossad because he would be a killer.”

If there was proof Israel had used British passports… relations between the UK and Israel would be in a crisis
The international police agency Interpol – which has issued arrest notices for all 11 suspects although it admitted their true identities were unclear – issues red notices to seek the arrest of wanted persons with a view to extraditing them.
An unnamed Israeli official denounced the red notice “threat” as “absurd”.
“The accusations are baseless,” the official told AFP news agency.
“Police have not explained the circumstances of [Mr Mabhouh’s] death, or even any proof that he’s been assassinated. All there is are videos of people talking on the telephone,” he said.
Diplomatic tensions have been building between Britain and Israel after it emerged on Monday that six of the passports used by the 11 suspected assassins were British.
They were clones of passports belonging to men who have dual British and Israeli citizenship.
Three Irish passports were also used, along with a French and a German passport.
Dubai police are investigating US-issued credit card accounts used to purchase plane tickets, which they say the suspects obtained with the fraudulent passports, the New York Times quoted an unnamed official as saying.
‘Outrage’
Friday’s Daily Mail quotes a British security source who claims the UK’s intelligence service MI6 and the government were told of the operation.
A Foreign Office spokesman said it was “not correct” to state Britain knew in advance about the passports.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband said the use of the passports was “an outrage”, and Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, was summoned to the foreign office on Thursday to discuss the issue.

Israelis Share Suspicions in Hamas Leader’s Killing: The New York Times

Isabel    Kershner
February 17, 2010 – 12:00am
The initial nods, winks and pats on the back here over the assassination last month of a senior Hamas official in Dubai are turning to puzzlement and concern as mounting evidence, including extensive surveillance videos, points to a remarkably clumsy operation many Israelis deem unworthy of their intelligence service, Mossad.
Officially, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the case, as is customary in delicate matters of intelligence and national security. But since the news of the assassination broke last month, Israel has unofficially made the story its own, with newspapers blaring congratulatory headlines and government ministers praising Mossad’s director.
However, then the Dubai police released images showing some of the 17 people suspected of being in the hit squad bumbling about in poor disguises, and Britain became infuriated by the use of faked British travel documents. Now Israelis are wondering whether their once-famed spy service could have been behind such a sloppy job or, in a John Le Carré-like twist, if Israel could have been framed.

On Wednesday, a commentator for the newspaper Haaretz, Amir Oren, wrote a front-page column about the case, calling for the Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, to step down.
“What must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success,” he wrote, “is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks.”
Israel wanted the Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, 50, for the capture and killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 and for smuggling weapons to Hamas in Gaza. On Jan. 19, he was killed in a Dubai hotel room.

On Monday, the Dubai police named 11 of the 17 people they suspect in the case. Among the names were those of three Irish citizens — of whom the Irish authorities have no record — and six British citizens living in Israel who appear to be victims of identity theft. The police also showed images culled from the ubiquitous closed-circuit TV system showing some of them in false beards, wigs and glasses, in almost comical attempts at disguise.
With the agents’ passport pictures now splashed across newspapers and television screens around the world, Israeli commentators said the agents, whoever they may really be, have been burned. Eitan Haber, a columnist in the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot and a close aide to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s, wrote Wednesday, “They cannot even go to the grocery store.”
In a first official reaction, the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Wednesday that Israel’s policy of “ambiguity” in such cases was “correct.”

“I don’t know why we are assuming that Israel, or the Mossad, used those passports,” Mr. Lieberman told Army Radio. “Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies.”
Three former senior Mossad officials contacted by a reporter on Wednesday refused to comment at all.
The British authorities said they believed the British passports the Dubai police had collected were “fraudulent.” Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a full investigation.

The six British citizens living in Israel — who woke up on Tuesday to find their names linked with the assassination — do not resemble the agents’ photographs from the passports bearing their names. Among the Britons was a physiotherapist, a technical writer and a repairman who lives on a kibbutz.
The name of an American-born Israeli was used by another of the suspects, who carried a German passport. That person studies in a religious seminary near Tel Aviv.

Three of the British citizens gave interviews to the news media on Tuesday, expressing their shock and some fear. By Wednesday they appeared to have gone incommunicado and did not answer or return a reporter’s calls.
Mr. Oren, in his front-page column in Haaretz, anticipated a diplomatic crisis over the suspicions that Mossad had counterfeited British passports.
“It is as if Israeli governments had never apologized to London for using British documentation,” he wrote, “as if they had not promised solemnly, when passports of Her Majesty’s subjects were found in a certain phone booth, that this would never happen again.”

Fake passports fuel questions about Israeli role in Hamas official’s slaying: The Washington Post

Howard Schneider
February 18, 2010 – 12:00am
Pressure mounted Wednesday for Israel to respond to speculation that its Mossad spy agency killed a Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel last month, with Britain’s prime minister promising to investigate the use of forged British passports by the alleged assassins and analysts in Israel taking unusual aim at the country’s vaunted undercover organization.
Of the 11 members of the squad that Dubai authorities say carried out the killing of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, six carried apparently fake British passports bearing the names of Israeli citizens. The British Foreign Office summoned the Israeli ambassador to a meeting over the matter Thursday, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown said a full inquiry will be mounted.

“The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care,” Brown said. “The evidence has got to be assembled about what has actually happened and how it happened and why it happened.”
Police officials in Dubai have not ruled out Mossad involvement in Mabhouh’s slaying, but they have not emphasized the possibility, either. Dubai, like the other small Persian Gulf states that make up the United Arab Emirates, does not have diplomatic ties with Israel, but it is also considered less hostile toward Israel than some other Arab countries.

In Israel, several prominent commentators engaged in surprisingly sharp criticism of an agency that in recent years has been credited with successes against militant groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as their patrons in Iran and Syria.
In the Haaretz daily, security affairs correspondent Amir Oren urged that Mossad head Meir Dagan be fired in the wake of an operation that had turned embarrassingly public — Dubai police this week released security camera video of the suspects in Mabhouh’s hotel and elsewhere. Others called for a commission of inquiry. Whether supportive or critical of the operation, virtually all commentators wrote from the assumption that the Mossad had been involved in it.
“Mabhouh was not an envoy of the Education Board of Gaza to Dubai. He was a top terrorist,” former Mossad agent Gad Shimron said in an interview. “There is no doubt about the Israeli footprints in this. The question is whether those who planned it took in the possibility that the Dubai police would be very efficient.”

Israel has a record of using foreign passports to conceal the movements of its undercover operatives and has run into diplomatic trouble with Canada, New Zealand, Britain and others over the practice. The Mossad agents who tried to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan in 1997, for example, carried Canadian documents.
The Dubai case has the added wrinkle that the names and some other data on the passports match those of Israeli citizens who immigrated here from Europe — and who were shocked to find themselves mentioned in the material released by Dubai police.

That has left Israeli officials in a quandary, on the one hand trying to maintain the country’s “policy of ambiguity” — neither confirming nor denying its involvement in covert operations — and on the other, having to explain how the names of some of its citizens ended up on forged documents cited in an international murder investigation.
In Israel’s first official comments on the matter, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Army Radio on Wednesday that despite the presence of the names, there is “no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad and not some other service or country up to some mischief.”

Tzachi Hanegbi, chairman of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said there are no plans to try to unravel why Israelis’ names appeared on the passports. If there is suspicion of identity theft or concern about implication in a murder, those involved should consult a lawyer, Hanegbi said.
“I don’t think the government is going to have anything to do with it,” he said.
Mabhouh, who was based in Damascus along with other Hamas exiles from the Gaza Strip, was a founding member of Hamas’s military wing. He was linked to the kidnapping and killing of two Israeli soldiers in the late 1980s and more recently is thought to have been involved in supplying arms and money to Hamas militants in Gaza. Hamas has blamed Israel for his death but has not said why he was in Dubai.
In Gaza, a spokesman for Hamas’s military wing announced that the group has formed a plan to avenge Mabhouh’s death.

Continue reading February 19, 2010