umkahlil

More later on this, but even in my haste to get outta here and to work couldn't resist this comment from "cutnpaste" on a little hasbara story in the Guardian on the Beatles invitation to Israel's commemoration of its sixty (plus) years of home-wrecking, village destroying, and people dispossessing, maiming, and killing:

Wonder what songs the Beatles would play if they had played Israel- here are some ideas (rubbish I know; it's late)

Back from the USSR (to steal land)
I am the war criminalGet back (to Jordan and Egypt Arab scum)
In an occupiers garden
Haifa Sketler
Here comes the Sinai
Please Mr US Congressman
Sheba Fields forever
Hapiness is a warm cluster bomb
Money (That's What I Want)
With a Little Help from My Friends
We never give you your money
She's Leaving Home (after her family lived there for 2000 years)
Taxman
While my Gaza gently weeps
Twist (reality) and shoot
The Ballad of Sabra and Shatila
A day in the life (of a starving Gazan child)

Palestine Center for Human Rights, Gaza PCHR is publishing a series of "Narratives Under Siege" on their website. "These short articles are based on personal testimonies and experiences of life in the Gaza Strip, and we hope they will highlight the restrictions, and the humanitarian crisis, being imposed on the people of Gaza."

The first one begins

Moin Ali Mahmoud Al-Wadiya was working in the Al-Zaytoun district of East Gaza City when Israeli Occupying Forces invaded Al-Zaytoun on January 15. The forty-eight year old mechanic immediately tried to flee the intense IOF shelling, but when he stopped in order to drag a critically wounded civilian to safety, the ground beneath him exploded. When he regained consciousness in Gaza City's main al-Shifa Hospital, Moin al-Wadiya had lost his left foot. His right leg is smashed, and he has serious lacerations across his stomach. "I have six children," he says, "but now there is no one to support my family."

For the rest of Moin al-Wadiya's story and a photo, please go here.

For Immediate Release
January 27, 2008

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, mourns the passing ofDr. George Habash. We also celebrate his life and resistance as one of the most influential and principled leaders of the Arab struggle for liberation,unity, and equality. Dr. Habash never wavered from the path that we, as Palestinians, have the right and duty to return and reclaim our homeland, stolen from us in 1948 by the combined forces of European Zionism andWestern imperialism. Dr. Habash's political work found expression in the creation of the Arab Nationalist Movement followed by The Popular Front forthe Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He never wavered from his belief in the popular (people's) struggle, and that it was the people themselves who determined their destiny.

Dr. Habash was an outspoken opponent of the Oslo accords and of all the capitulation schemes for accommodating the occupier. After the formation of the Palestinian Authority he stated "Ramallah and Gaza are parts of my beloved Palestine and they are so dear to me, but I want to go back to LYD, my city". He also made it clear that he would never return to any part of Palestine while his city was under occupation. Dr. Habash believed his return was non-negotiable: "You can negotiate as you want but my right toreturn is not for any president to discuss."

Dr. Habash was always confident that the future belongs to our Arab nation.When asked in 1998 of the message that he wanted to pass to future generations, his response was: "human history moves in a progressive direction. I say that confidently and hopefully. But hopes, wishes, anddreams alone will not achieve our objectives. One cannot roll back the wheel of history, but we can make sure that the lessons of the past are not dissipated. History is a register open to whoever has the determination and ability to merit an entry therein. I am full of hope that the generations of our children and grandchildren will have a future that is brighter than our present."

The prelude to that brighter future became manifest last week in Gaza. As Dr. Habash was enduring his final illness, the people of Gaza broke down the wall at the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The Palestinian Arab people, welcomed by their Arab Egyptian brothers and sisters, broke through a barrier that was used to maintain the months' long siege of murder and starvation by the occupiers of our land. This defiance and brave resistance to 60 years of dispossession and occupation has uplifted our struggle and brought us closer to our return. They are a fitting tribute tothe work and life of Dr. Habash. May he rest in peace.

Until return,
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013,
USATel: 760-685-3243 Fax: 360-933-3568E-mail: info@al-awda.orghttp://al-awda.org/

Thanks to Lawrence of Cyberia for finding this at Al-Jazeera. Earlier post about Mohamed Aboutreika, dubbed "the smiling assassin" for his scoring with a smile, and midfielder for Egypt's team, the Pharoahs, at the Africa Cup of Nations here.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3E4F1FD5-CB24-407F-AC7C-94C4AF97E293.htm Dr. Habash and his wife, Hilda

Jehad Zamel, left, 18, Maha Zamel, right, 17, both of North Bergen, N.J., and Noura Abdul Zahra, center, 19, of Baltimore, Md., attend a protest against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip outside the Israeli Consulate Saturday, Jan. 26, 2008 in New York. Protestors attend a rally against Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip outside the Israeli Consulate Saturday, Jan. 26, 2008 in New York.(AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

This is a comment I left on a Guardian story about Holocaust Remembrance Day, 'Confronting Our Past':

The following is a link to 'Remembrance and Arabs,' a very moving reflection about what Holocaust Remembrance Day means to Arabs, in particular, Palestinians:

http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/raa.htm

And the following is from Sonia Karkar's 'The Ghosts of Deir Yassin':

" . . . the Israeli museum commemorating the Jewish holocaust, Yad Vashem sits on top of a hill overlooking the graveyard of Deir Yassin, while the limestone buildings of the former Palestinian village are used as an Israeli mental institution."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12530

This is a comment I left on Soumaya Ghannoushi's Guardian story "Gaza Explodes."

Many of the commentators to the editorial [Breach in Gaza] from the Washington Post to which Petra MB (Comment 1082263) linked criticise the paper for its complicity with Israel's war crimes against the people of Gaza.

A couple (Read them all; they overwhelmingly support the Palestinians refusal to submit to its brutal occupiers and dispossessors):

"This editorial is completely sickening, because it endorses war crimes.
What "movement toward peace" does the foolish editorial writer have in mind? Israel's killing of 35 Palestinians in 4 days in the Gaza Strip? The wave of kidnappings of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army? The writer's concern for the "terrorized" residents of Sderot (less than 12 killed in 8 years) would be touching if he showed a shred of sympathy for the 1.5 million Gazans who have been unable to move beyond the Gaza Strip (close to 2,000 killed in 6 years, more than 11,000 wounded in that same time period).

You know, you don't have to like Hamas, but that doesn't mean that you can conduct killing sprees in areas in which Hamas members live. Inflicting collective punishment against 1.5 million Palestinians is a war crime, and it is shameful that the Washington Post endorses such homicidal behavior."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012303327_Comments.html

"Your comment leaves me with no other conclusion: that the WashPo is an arm of the Jewish state's Ministry of Propaganda."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012303327_Comments.html#

Several expressed the following sentiment:
"I am so greatly disappointed at this view expressed by the Post. If I was in Gaza I would have knocked down that prision wall a long time ago. Shame on you."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012303327_Comments.html#

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/letters.asp?edition_id=10

Rami G. Khouri
"Stalemate in Palestine after 60 years"
January 19, 2008

This is a perfect headline, and its amazing how headlining a few choice words can express so much. Communication really is the key to getting the message across and convincing people to care. I wish there were more columnists able to write honestly and compassionately about Palestine.

I think you are very right about the stalemate created by the violence between Israel and Palestine, as well as the fact that Israel will not be able to crush Palestinian resistance. However, the picture is much wider than what happens on the ground within the perimeters of what was once historic Palestine.

Apartheid Israel's real strength is in its ability to gather support and funds worldwide. Zionists really are quite good at PR and propaganda, knowing how to speak as well as who to speak to, thus ensuring that outside support sustains Zionist conquest through thick and thin. Meanwhile, Palestinians, trapped and tormented by racist Israeli laws and walls and constantly forced to contend with the ugly reality of Israel, become more and more furious and frustrated that the justness of their cause is not immediately apparent to the Western world. Many then foolishly cater their side of the conversation to appeal to a sympathetic radical fringe, rather than realizing that the radicalization of the conversation only alienates mainstream outsiders - in particular mainstream America - ensuring that Zionist fundraisers will continue to own and manipulate the conversation to their advantage.

In light of that, I like how you end your article, stressing the importance of negotiations based on respecting international law. It is so simple, and so right, as is full respect for the Palestinians refugees' inalienable right of return to their original homes and lands as clearly affirmed by UN Resolution 194 in 1948.

Anne Selden Annab
Pennsylvania, USA

From Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem
24 January, 2008

In his rabid efforts to impose socialism on independent Ukrainian farmers (the Kulaks), Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered his Red Army to completely cut off Ukraine from the rest of the world. All roads were sealed, all border crossings were closed. Nothing was allowed to go into or come out of the country. Farmers were searched and looted of food and fuel.

Then, soon, Ukrainians began dying of hunger, cold and sickness in great numbers.

The genocide reached its heights in the winter of 1932-1933 when Stalin’s Jewish aide, the notorious mass murderer Lazar Kaganovitch, was dispatched to the Ukraine to accelerate the process of extermination of millions of farmers, middle-class businesspeople and intellectuals. By this time, Ukrainians, facing one of the harshest man-made famine in history, were forced to eat pets, dogs, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. According to some sources, parents even ate infant children.

It is true the situation in Gaza is not identical to the great Ukrainian famine. However, it is also true that the present nightmare in Gaza is menacingly exacerbating by the hour and if the world doesn’t stop the Nazi-minded Israeli leadership sooner than later, Gaza will certainly become an updated version of the Ukrainian genocide.

We must not take chances. Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, as well as the rest of the ruling class in Israel are more or less trying to emulate Kaganovitch and Genrich Grigorivic Yagoda, another Soviet Jewish mass murder who probably killed or caused the death of more people than Hitler ever did.

But unlike Kaganovitch and Yagoda, who didn’t seek to hide their genocidal campaigns, Olmert is lying through his teeth about Israel’s genocidal designs against Gaza’s 1.5 million blockaded inhabitants. His claims that Israel will not allow a humanitarian crisis in Gaza are as valid as a veteran whore’s pretensions about her unscathed chastity.

There is no doubt that Israel is effecting a slow-motion genocide in Gaza. This is evidenced from the shocking state of dilapidation and destitution overwhelming the tormented enclave which has been reduced to the largest open-air concentration camp in the world.

According Karen Abu Zayd, Commissioner-General for UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, the closure of Gaza by Israel is without precedent.

“Palestinians are effectively incarcerated. The overwhelming majority can’t leave or enter Gaza. Without fuel and spare parts, public health conditions are declining steeply as water and sanitation services struggle to function. The electricity supply is sporadic and has been reduced further along with fuel supply in these past days. UNICEF reports that the partial functioning of Gaza City’s main pumping station is effecting the supply of 600,000 people. Medication is in short supply and hospitals are paralyzed by power failures and the shortage of fuel for generators. Hospital infrastructure and essential pieces of equipment are breaking down at an alarming rate, with limited possibility of repair or maintenance as spare parts are not available….Concrete is in such short supply that people are unable to make graves for their dead. Hospitals are handing out sheets as funeral shrouds.”

Abu Zayd is a great human being and she deserves all praise for her heroic efforts to mobilize the international community to stop the Gaza catastrophe before it blows up irreversibly in the face of the world.

However, it is amply clear that here measured description of the Gaza nightmare is a huge understatement of reality, because Gaza is dying thanks to the sustained genocidal blockade the children, grand children and great grand-children of the holocaust are imposing on these helpless and thoroughly tormented Palestinians.

On Wednesday, 23 January, tens of thousands of penned-in and starved Gazans poured into Egypt after gunmen blasted through the Israeli-built wall separating the Egyptian and Palestinian halves of Rafah. One TV station described the moving outpouring of humanity in Rafah as the “world’s greatest prison escapade.”

The scene of men, women and children pouring through the breaches on foot, by car, or in donkey carts to buy food and other staples and essential goods suggested that Gaza is really facing an extremely difficult situation bordering on an attempted genocide.

The frozen indignation had to been vented. The powder keg had to go off. Only the imbeciles, like George Bush, were surprised by the turn of events.

This is what happens when you pen-in a million and a half human beings in crowded prison, without food, without fuel, without electricity and without hope, while telling a morally-desensitized world that “I am not going to allow a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

As the wall came tumbling down in Gaza, it is imperative that Palestinians and their supporters, the millions of free-minded men and women around the world, including many conscientious Jews who value freedom and justice, don’t underestimate the evil intentions and designs of the Zionist entity.

Israel, an evil state ruled by evil politicians who have no regard for morality and humanity. As such, this state will not just sit down and let the Palestinians enjoy a rare moment of triumph, however small and costly it may be.

Barak and Olmert are simply too nefarious and too Satanic to allow a smile to appear on the innocent faces of Gaza children.

This is why it is very likely that Barak, a man who possesses the evilness of Adolph Hitler and the callousness of Joseph Stalin, will try to carry out a new massacre or spate of assassinations to “balance the formula.”

Indeed, Israel has already said that it will tighten the blockade of Gaza and is pressuring the Egyptian government to collude with Israel in order to further torment and starve the helpless Gazans.

Israel simply wants to make sure that Palestinians suffer and die as quietly as possible in order not to provoke the moral conscience of the world. Israel thinks, probably rightly, that a quiet genocide is an unwept genocide that would eventually vanish into oblivion and allow the perpetrators to get away with minimal incriminations.

But, nay, we must never allow ourselves to suffer quietly or indeed die quietly. We must leave no stone unturned until we mobilize the conscience of the world against this evil state that claims to be Jewish but is thinking , behaving and acting like the Gestapo, SS and Wehrmacht.

We must mobilize all free men and women in the four corners of the world in order to prevent Israel from turning Gaza into another Auschwitz, another Treblinka, another Bergen Belsen… another Theresienstadt. We must cross all the red lines if necessary in order to prevent a possible Gaza holocaust from occurring.

The heroic men and women who blasted the wall of shame in Rafah deserve all admiration. We salute them for their sublime act of moral defiance in the face of brute force and moral callousness.

We salute them for flying in the face of cool political calculations. May they live to see the banners of freedom flutter Occupied Jerusalem.

Finally, it is important that we, the peoples of the world who refuse to be enslaved by the promiscuous New World Order, understand that the battle of Gaza is everyone’s battle. It is a battle for the soul of humanity, it is a battle for the moral conscience of the world. It is a battle for light versus darkness, justice versus oppression and truth versus mendacity.


It is a battle that we must not allow ourselves to lose.

[Photo]In Ramallah demonstators protest the war crimes perpetuated by Israel on Gaza.

One of the most gleeful of the Israeli goons behind the war crimes in Gaza is Ehud Barak and present Defense Minister, who gets off on dressing up like a woman and killing poets while they sleep.

Kamal Nasser, however, Barak's victim in 1972, has achieved through his words and deeds, immortality. His words inspire hope and inspiration for generations of Palestinians.

Ehud Barak, along with his Zio-nasty buddies, will only be remembered as a heinous ethno-supremacist racist war criminal, who takes pleasure in bombing the poverty-stricken refugees from whose stolen lands they operate.

Most Palestinians tonight are probably just silently screaming like me. How much longer does this go on? How in the hell can people look at pictures of kids on dialysis machines and in incubators that may be turned off? How come bigoted Jewish immigrants from all over the world get to live on stolen Palestinian land? Seventy-five percent of the people in Gaza are refugees who were ethnically cleansed when Palestine was severed by the idiots at the United Nations sixty years ago.

But, amazingly, a powerful photo-essay emerged today amid all the Zionist manufactured misery. Its title: "As long as there is Life, there is hope." It is a stunning story and photos of ethnically cleansed Lifta, rendered by the son of its victims. And while its residents may visit, they may not live there, but it's OK for Jewish squatters from all over the world to live in what remains of their houses that weren't demolished. "As long as there is life, there is hope" is one of many examples that the old have not passed on without teaching us to remember; we have not followed the pernicious plan of the enemy and forgotten Palestine . . . like Kamal Nasser, the contemptible Barak's victim, we will one day return "to pick the fruits." Whenever disheartened by the world's impotence to stop the criminal acts of Israel, we must remember the following words of the voice that Barak in drag couldn't kill, and we will, one day disperse the darkness of this so-called civilization:

If my songs should reach you
despite the narrow skies around me,
remember that I will return to life,
to the quest for liberty,
remember that my people may call on my soul
and feel it rising again from the folds of the earth.

Photo of Israel's bombing of the Palestinian Interior Ministry,
which had a wedding party nearby, injuring 46, and killing a woman.

Immigrant Jews from Europe and the US, who enjoy rights and privileges in two countries denigrate Ben White for advocating for Palestinians while living in Brazil. Humanitarians throughout the world have taken up the cause of the Palestinians.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/01/today_slingshot_hip_hop_httpww.html

Watch this video of Dam's "Meen Erhabe?" (Who's the Terrorist?) before accepting what this review says, which is thoroughly lacking in development and concrete details. And that's exactly what I would write if one of my students wrote such a thin paper.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1394941590455913170&hl=en

My comment on Petra Marquardt Bigman's "A Meeting of Minds," which makes an unconvincing analogy between advocates of one state and Zionist settlers.

As an aid to understanding the issue as an ongoing process for Zionists to attain maximum land with minimum Palestinians, consider instead of the usual malarkey, "The Jews accepted partition; the Palestinians didn't," the actual partition plan (not to mention the ethnic cleansing: "Ben Gurion depopulated 250 villages and expelled half the total refugees before the state of Israel was declared on 15 May 1948 and before any Arab regular soldier came to reverse the ethnic cleansing" http://www.plands.org/articles/16.htm).

The partition plan:

"Partition was seen by the Palestinians as imposing unilateral and intolerable sacrifices on themselves. The reasons for their opposition were the same as in 1937, except that the UN partition plan gave the proposed Jewish state 50 percent more territory than the 1937 plan had. The area of the Jewish state according to the UN plan would actually be larger than that of the proposed Palestinian state (5,500 square miles as compared with 4,500 square miles) at a time when the Jews constituted no more than 35 percent of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land. Within the proposed Jewish state, Jewish landownership did not in fact exceed 600 square miles out of the total area of 5,500 square miles. Nearly all the citrus land (equally divided in ownership between Jews and Palestinians), 80 percent of the cereal land (entirely Palestinian-owned), and 40 percent of Palestinian industry would fall within the borders of the proposed Jewish state. Jaffa, the Palestinian state's major port on the Mediterranean, would be altogether cut off from its hinterland, and Gaza would lose its traditional links with the wheatlands of the Negev. Hundreds of villages would be separated from communal fields and pastures. The Palestinian state would lose direct access both to the Red Sea and to Syria. The economic union between the two states, on which partition had been postulated, was known beforehand to be impracticable. The patchwork of subunits into which partition would divide the country bore little relationship to the human and social realities on the ground."

Khalidi, Walid. Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948.Washington DC: Institute For Palestine Studies, 1991.

Jonathan Cook's latest article, "Ungenerous Occupier, Israel's Camp David Offer Exposed," on what was really offered at Camp David is quite elightening as to Israel's intentions for a viable Palestinian state (not).

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9181.shtml

Nothing's changed and in light of the evidence the comparison between the state subsidised settlers and the proponents of one-state just doesn't wash. Israel has always coveted the land without its people, and it's doing a bang up job of getting rid of Palestinians in one way or another and settling Palestinian land with Jews.

One state, two state; I personally could care less, as long as our elders from Jaffa and Haifa are as free to return and to walk the streets of their hometowns as the privileged Jewish immigrants from Peru, India, Germany, the UK, et al are.

But Israel also has a myriad of procedures in place to keep those with Palestinian ethnicity, even with American passports, out of Palestine. It was obvious to me when I had to undergo a humiliating three hour interrogation and strip-search at Ben Gurion airport, pretty much the standard procedure for anyone with even a grandfather named Jameel. Think I'm in any hurry to go back?

Posts like this are just buying time until Israel has finished penning in the Palestinians and helping itself to the resources and land it covets for American Jews who want to play cowboy on someone else's property. And they're no different than their predecessors, the ethnic cleansers of 1947-48.