If we needed any more proof that the U.S.A and Israel do NOT WANT PEACE, it appeared today, even more blatantly than before.
Fatah and Hamas have finally reached an agreement on a new government where the more important portfolio (Interior minister, foreign minister.....) haven been given to "neutral" people (not from Fatah or Hamas). The new government list will be submitted to parliament, which will surely approve it.
The palestinians are now waiting for the International community's answer. They have been stripped of any financial help since Hamas got  "democraticly" (one word they do love to use) elected, and badly need some money back. Palestine is a third world country, living next to a super rich one...Israel.

What has been the response of Israel (and the U.S.A as those two always agree). NOT GOOD ENOUGH! Not even that actually, they said that this new government was a bad thing, not good news. WHY? Cos' they still do not recognize the right of Israel to exist!!!!! For fuck sake, how long are they going to fuck us with this over used sentence? And if you turn things around, who is not recognizing who? Israel exist, is a rich country, super armed, with a bully of a best friend. Palestine doesn't exist, doesn't have friends (even the arab world is now listenning more and more to the U.S.A) and is disapearing even before its going to be created!!

Also, what no one ever mention is the fact that Israel want Hamas and co to recognize Israel as "a democratic and Jewish state".....don't you see the problem here? How can you be democratic...and Jewish at the same time??? Democratic means "the people" in their whole, therefore if democracy exist only for jews...it is NOT democracy. Arabs, christians....also leave in Israel (even if a lot of their rights are denied), they too have the right to democracy (like buying land, marry freely......).
The day Israel will ask Hamas to recognize Israel as a "State of all its citizens", I am sure that they will duly oblige.

But once more, the media are absent, do not ask the right questions, and will never do. Once more, its us the people guarants of  democracy who have to fight, and help others around the world.

Go to www.palestinecampaign.org and give them a hand.

THANKS.

Goodbye, 2006! Hard to Call It Vintage

Ahoy 2007! It Just Could Be Bobby Byrd's Year

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

No task is more important for any newspaper than to impart the news convincingly to the people and their government that a war is lost or futile or wrong.. The failure of America's major newspapers in 2005 and 2006 to disclose the U.S.'s defeat in Iraq has been as disastrous as the earlier failure to challenge the government on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

As for Saddam Hussein--some whiners complain he didn't get a fair trial. What do they think these trials are for, for heaven's sake? Here's what I wrote when he was captured back in December 2003:

"All the U.S. wants is for the former Iraqi president to be hauled into some kangaroo court and, after a brisk procedure in which Saddam will not doubt be denied opportunities to interrogate old pals from happier days like Donald Rumsfeld, be dropped through a trap door with a rope tied around his neck, maybe with an Iraqi, or at least a son of the Prophet pulling the lever."

Just one more reason why you need read nothing but CounterPunch.

Sixty-nine countries still retain the death penalty. The most recent to abandon it was the Philippines, in 2006. Mexico and Liberia in 2005. Greece and Turkey (along with Bhutan, Samoa and Senegal in 2004). There is some small progress in human affairs.

That said, let's scroll quickly through the calendar, as it unfolded in a few of my bulletins on this site.

 

January 18

Three very leftists pass on. Sanora Babb died on December 31, aged 98. Harry Magdoff died on New Years Day, at 92. Frank Wilkinson died a day later, at 91.

My line has always been that to get really old it pays to have been a Commie or at least a fellow traveler. In younger years they tended to walk a lot, selling the party paper. They talked a lot and above all, they never stopped thinking. The quickest way to kill someone is to send them off to quasi-solitary, torn from their comfortable nest and thrown into a nursing home or into managed care, where people talk about them at the tops of their voices, referring to them in the third person. You can see them dying before your eyes, their brains turned to mush. It takes about a year to kill them off, unless a "surprise birthday party" wipes them out even earlier.

Trotskyists tend to be more feverish and stressed out, hence less likely to turn the bend into their Nineties. As for Maoists (over here) , I don't know. As Chou En Lai answered, when asked what he thought of the French Revolution, Too soon to tell. The ex-Maoists I know are mostly still in their mid-60s.

 

January 19

From the opening moments of the Judiciary Committee's hearings it became instantly clear that Alito faced no serious opposition. On that first ludicrous morning Senator Pat Leahy sank his head into his hands, shaking in unbelieving despair as Senator Joe Biden of Delaware blathered out a self-serving and inane monologue lasting a full twenty minutes before he even asked Alito one question. In his allotted half hour Biden managed to pose only five questions, all of them ineptly phrased. He did ask two questions about CAP but had already undercut them in his monologue by calling Alito "a man of integrity", not once but twice, and further trivialized the interrogation by reaching under the dais to pull out a Princeton cap and put it on.

In all, Biden rambled for 4,000 words, leaving Alito time only to put together less than 1,000. A Delaware newspaper made deadly fun of him for his awful performance, eliciting the revealing confession from Biden that "I made a mistake. I should have gone straight to my question. I was trying to put him at ease."

The Democrats have forgotten how to ask tough questions. The last Democratic senator who knew how to do it was John Edwards.And even if the Democrats could remember how to put a nominee on the spot, their nerve has gone. They think any tough challenge to any nominee will come and haunt them.

Year after year the Democrats have called for loyalty from dubious liberals, crying that the bottom line is the Supreme Court. In January, the bottom line was right there in the nominee's chair, in the form of Sam Alito and the Democrats ran away. Senator Diane Feinstein told the press, "I don't see the likelihood of a filibuster. This might be a man I disagree with. But it doesn't mean he shouldn't be on the court. I was impressed with his ability to maintain a very even demeanor."

January 24

I'd got so used to Nicholas Kristof's January visits to prostitutes in Cambodia that it was a something of a shock to find him this January in Calcutta's red light district instead.

As readers of his New York Times columns across the past three years will know, Kristof heads into south east Asia around this time--a smart choice, weatherwise--to write about the scourge of child prostitution. One can hardly fault him for that, even though Kristof's bluff, busy-body prose is particularly irksome as he takes his pet peeve out for an annual saunter, the way A.M. Rosenthal did for years with female circumcision in Africa.

So far as I know, Rosenthal never actually bought a young African woman to save her from circumcision. Maybe they aren't for sale. In 2004, Kristof did buy two young Cambodian women--Srey Neth for $150 and Srey Mom for $203--to get them out of the brothels in Poipet, and took them back to their villages.

There was something very nineteenth-century abut the whole thing, both in moral endeavor and journalistic boosterism, though presumably there was a twentieth-first century footnote as to whether Kristof billed the Times for the purchase money and transport expenses or listed the girls as a charitable deduction on his own tax return, which could have led to sharp interrogation by some cynical IRS auditor.

In January of 2005, Kristof was back in Cambodia to report that while Srey Neth was doing well, learning to be a hair stylist, Srey Mom was back in the brothel, probably because she needed the drugs. Even in 2005 some of us had our doubts, since Srey Mom wouldn't leave the brothel until Kristof sprang not only the $203 but also some extra cash for her cell phone and some jewelry she'd hocked. Mind you, most girls would put cell phones ahead of moral renaissance.

February 14

Paranoid America--by which I mean its governors--has long dreamed of foolproof technology to guard the Homeland from subversion, or penetration by alien hostiles.

In its latest variant, the vaunted technology comes in the form of the sweeps by the computers of the National Security Agency, programmed to intercept hundreds of millions of phone, email and fax messages. These days, as much as a third of global communications are on fiber-optic cable routes that pass through the United States.

So, "data mining" by artificially programmed computers is a proceeding that is not only constitutionally illegal but a technological fantasy. The Post quotes Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, as saying pattern-matching techniques that "look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."

March 9

Americans are in a fever about possible "Arab control" of mainland ports along both coasts of the United States. The whole storm is ludicrous. When it comes to America's national security and penetration of the mainland by foreign capital, there are bigger worries. This very week, the week of the Chicago Auto Show, the widely read magazine Consumer Reports lists the ten safest cars sold in America this year. They are all Japanese, mostly Hondas, and mostly made in U.S.-based plants put up after Japanese and other foreign automakers were welcomed in by the U.S.A. thirty years ago, partly as a way of undercutting the Union of Autoworkers. This same month the headlines here have been full of stories about the collapse of the top two U.S. automakers--General Motors and Ford--in the face of foreign competition. Well over 100,000 American workers are to lose their jobs, thus vastly increasing U.S. insecurity. Hundreds of thousands more U.S. workers have already lost their jobs to India, China, Mexico, and other low-wage nations because that is the way American business, backed by the U.S. government, wants it.

March 15

Milosevic's death in his cell from a heart attack spared Del Ponte and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ­ICTY -- (itself a kangaroo tribunal set up by the United States with no proper foundation under international law or treaty) the ongoing embarrassment of a proceeding where Milosevic had made a very strong showing against the phalanx of prosecutors, hearsay witnesses and prejudiced judges marshaled against him.

There are now charges and countercharges about poisons and self-medications. Milosevic's son says his father was murdered. The embarrassed Court has claimed Milosevic somehow did himself in by tampering with his medicines. But no one contests the fact that Milosevic asked for treatment in Moscow--the Russians promised to return him to the Hague--and the Court refused permission. As the tag from the poet A.H.Clough goes, "Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive Officiously to keep alive".

The trial had been going badly from the point of view of the prosecution (which included the judges) for most of its incredible duration. Here is what Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist, wrote in the Guardian newspaper of London, in 2003,

" But not only has the prosecution signally failed to prove Milosevic's personal responsibility for atrocities committed on the ground, the nature and extent of the atrocities themselves has also been called into question In the case of the worst massacre with which Milosevic has been accused of complicity-of between 2,000 and 4,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995-Del Ponte's team have produced nothing to challenge the verdict of the five-year inquiry commissioned by the Dutch government-that there was 'no proof that orders for the slaughter came from Serb political leaders in Belgrade.'

March 19

(This was a joint bulletin by Jeffrey St Clair and me.) Across the past year the peace movement didn't do much, so far as we could tell. There are thousands of excellent local efforts, but no national agenda, no overall strategy for ending the war. As popular opposition to the war across the country has mounted, the demonstrations have got smaller! We ascribe this in large part to the disastrous fealty of the leadership of at least two of the big organizations to the Democratic National Committee. This explains why UPFJ, for example, was missing in action for most of 2004. The national leaderships of the peace movement have failed but were bailed out by two great champions who changed the political picture. The first was Cindy Sheehan.

The second champion was Jack Murtha, the 73-year-old former U.S. Marine and life-long hawk who turned on the war in a sensational press conference on the Hill in November, calling for "immediate withdrawal" and repeating that call in vigorous interviews and speeches.

Here was no peacenik turning against the war. But the day he did, the Democratic delegation in Congress fled him, almost to the last man and woman. In its present form the Democratic Party has ceased to be a credible opposition.

Is this too cruel? Surely the Democrats have some fight left in them. After all, the first edition of the Patriot Act in 2002 passed with only one No vote in the Senate. Russell Feingold's. When the second edition of the Patriot Act passed in recent weeks, there were ten votes against, one from a former Republican, Jeffords of Vermont. The Democrats invented a new form of "safe opposition" here. When Russ Feingold tried to lead a filibuster against the Patriot Act, his Democratic colleagues conducted "test votes" where many of them puffed up their chests and boldly said they opposed the Patriot Act. Then they came to the real vote, chests subsided and the numbers dwindled to eight.

Feingold has now introduced into the Senate a censure motion of the President, charging him with violating the law in the NSA eavesdropping. Dana Milbanke in the Washington Post had an entertaining piece describing the panic of Feingold's Democratic colleagues when asked for their views on his motion.

Barrack Obama of Illinois: "I haven't read it."

Ben Nelson of Nebraska: "I just don't have enough information."

John Kerry of Massachusetts: "I really can't [comment] right now."

Hillary Clinton of New York rushed past reporters shaking her head, then trying to hide behind the 4'11" Barbara Mikulski.

Charles Schumer of New York, who would normally run over his grandmother to get to a microphone: "I'm not going to comment."

Mary Landrieu of Louisiana: "Senator Feingold has a point he wants to make. We have a point that we want to make, talking about the budget."

Chris Dodd of Connecticut: "Most of us feel at best it's premature. I don't think anyone can say with any certainty at this juncture that what happened [i.e., the NSA's eavesdropping] is illegal."

 

For the full article, click on http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12302006.html

Palestinians are being denied the right to non-violent resistance

Human Rights Watch has lost its moral bearings

by Jonathan Cook

.November 30, 2006

If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties -- a grandmother -- chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp.
 
Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.
 
It is equally difficult not to pause and wonder at the reasons for her suicide mission: according to her family, one of her grandsons was killed by the Israeli army, another is in a wheelchair after his leg had to be amputated, and her house had been demolished.
 
Or not to think of the years of trauma she and her family have suffered living in a open-air prison under brutal occupation, and now, since the “disengagement”, the agonising months of grinding poverty, slow starvation, repeated aerial bombardments, and the loss of essentials like water and electricity.
 
Or not to ponder at what it must have been like for her to spend every day under a cloud of fear, to be powerless against a largely unseen and malign force, and to never know when death and mutilation might strike her or her loved ones.
 
Or not to imagine that she had been longing for the moment when the soldiers who have been destroying her family’s lives might show themselves briefly, coming close enough that she could see and touch them, and wreak her revenge.
 
Yet Western observers, and the organisations that should represent the very best of their Enlightenment values, seem incapable of understanding what might drive a grandmother to become a suicide bomber. Their empathy fails them, and so does their humanity.
 
Just at the moment Fatma was choosing death and resistance over powerlessness and victimhood -- and at a time when Gaza is struggling through one of the most oppressive and ugly periods of Israeli occupation in nearly four decades -- Human Rights Watch published its lastest statement on the conflict. It is document that shames the organisation, complacent Western societies and Fatma’s memory.
 
In its press release “Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks”, which was widely reported by the international media, HRW lambasts armed Palestinian groups for calling on civilians to surround homes that have been targeted for air strikes by the Israeli military.
 
Noting almost as an afterthought that more than 1,500 Palestinians have been made homeless from house demolitions in the past few months, and that 105 houses have been destroyed from the air, the press release denounces Palestinian attempts at non-violent and collective action to halt the Israel attacks. HRW refers in particular to three incidents.
 
On November 3, Hamas appealed to women to surround a mosque in Beit Hanoun where Palestinian men had sought shelter from the Israeli army. Israeli soldiers opened fire on the women, killing two and injuring at least 10.
 
And last week on two separate occasions, crowds of supporters gathered around the houses of men accused of being militants by Israel who had received phone messages from the Israeli security forces warning that their families’ homes were about to be bombed.
 
In language that would have made George Orwell shudder, one of the world’s leading organisations for the protection of human rights ignored the continuing violation of the Palestinians’ right to security and a roof over their heads and argued instead: “There is no excuse for calling [Palestinian] civilians to the scene of a planned [Israeli] attack. Whether or not the home is a legitimate military target, knowingly asking civilians to stand in harm’s way is unlawful.”
 
There is good reason to believe that this reading of international law is wrong, if not Kafkaesque. Popular and peaceful resistance to the oppressive policies of occupying powers and autocratic rulers, in India and South Africa for example, has always been, by its very nature, a risky venture in which civilians are liable to be killed or injured. Responsibility for those deaths must fall on those doing the oppressing, not those resisting, particularly when they are employing non-violent means. On HRW’s interpretation, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela would be war criminals.
 
HRW also applies a series of terrible double standards in this press release.
 
It refuses Palestinians the right to protect homes from attack, labelling these civilians “human shields”, even while admitting that most of the homes are not legitimate military targets, and yet it has not said a word about the common practice in Israel of building weapons factories and army bases inside or next to communities, thereby forcing Israeli civilians to become human shields for the army.
 
For full article go to http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=107&ItemID=11526