AS THE WORLD SQUIRMSã
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Note: Some items contained herein may have additional
formatting, emphasis and hotlinks added for context and perspective ~ Owen |
Stop Gaza Massacre protest
London, Saturday 3 , January 2009
(Video)
Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone
Stop Gaza Massacre protest
London Saturday 3 January 2009
(Video)
Stop Gaza Massacre protest
London Saturday 3 January 2009
(Video)
60 Videos Condemning Israeli
Aggression in Gaza
(Videos)
UN Human Rights Chief Accuses
Israel of War Crimes
Official calls for investigation into
Zeitoun shelling that killed up to 30 in one house as Israelis dismiss 'unworkable'
ceasefire
Rory McCarthy (in Jerusalem)
Saturday 10
January 2009
The United Nations' most senior human rights official said last night that the Israeli
military may have committed war crimes in Gaza. The warning came as Israeli troops pressed
on with the deadly offensive in defiance of a UN security council resolution
calling for a ceasefire.
Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has called for
"credible, independent and transparent" investigations into possible
violations of humanitarian law, and singled out an incident this week in
Zeitoun, south-east of Gaza City, where up to 30 Palestinians in one house were
killed by Israeli shelling.
Pillay, a former international criminal court judge from South Africa, told
the BBC the incident "appears to have all the elements of war
crimes". (Read More)
Red Cross Accuses Israel of
Unacceptable Conduct in Gaza
Martin Fletcher
and Azmi Keshawi
The Times –
London, UK
January 9, 2009
For four days Red Cross officials pressed the Israeli
military for access to bomb-shattered homes in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza
City. Finally Israel promised safe passage with the help of a Red Cross rescue
team and four ambulances from the Palestine Red Crescent Society. What they
found exceeded their worst fears.
In one house they
discovered four small children - alive but terrified, emaciated and too weak to
stand – lying on mattresses next to 12 corpses including those of their
mothers. In a second house they found three dead bodies. In a third they found
15 survivors of the Israeli bombardment, several of them wounded.
“I never expected to see
such a horrifying scene. I never saw anything like it in my life,” Abed el-Aziz
Abu Aisha, 22, told The Times. “It was like a very ugly scene from a horror movie.”
They had to drag the
injured to the ambulances in a cart because barriers erected by the Israeli
army made it impossible to bring the vehicles close enough. The rescuers
evacuated 18 of the wounded and 12 others who were suffering from exhaustion.
They took away two corpses and planned to return later to fetch 13 others.
Ron Paul: Rising in Opposition
Against Washington’s “Strong Support for Israel”
The Cognitive Disconnect of Washington’s
Zionist Congressionals
David
Edwards and Muriel Kane
Rawstory.com
January
9, 2009
Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) spoke on Friday in opposition to
a non-binding House resolution (pdf)
expressing "strong support for Israel" in its invasion of Gaza and
decrying Hamas as a terrorist organization that has put "hundreds of
thousands of Israelis in danger."
"I rise in opposition to this resolution, not because I am taking sides
and picking who the bad guys are and who the good guys are." Paul stated. "I'm looking at this more from the angle of being a United States
citizen, an American, and I think resolutions like this really do us great
harm."
"The
weapons being used to kill so many Palestinians are American weapons, and
American funds, essentially, are being used for this," continued Paul.
"There's a political liability, which I think is something that we fail to
look at, because too often there's so much blowback from our intervention in
areas that we shouldn't be involved in."
Washington’s Gaza Cease-Fire Abstention Stuns UN Security Council
Saturday 10
January 2009
A UN resolution calling for an end to the fighting in Gaza was weakened at the last minute by a
surprise US abstention, it emerged yesterday.
Diplomatic sources said the US was closely involved in the drafting of the
security council resolution calling for a ceasefire and that Condoleezza Rice,
the secretary of state, had defended it in the face of pressure from Israel.
The US abstention, at the final vote, stunned British and French diplomats. (Read More)
Who Will Save Israel From Itself?
January
11, 2009
(Mark LeVine is
a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and
is the author of Heavy Metal
Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to
be published An Impossible
Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.)
(Excerpt)
One by one the
justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unravelling. The
argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a
six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such
as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but
by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.
The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report
titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that the June 19 truce was only
"sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by ...
"rogue terrorist organisations".
Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement"
occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without
provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege
the next day.
According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University
study, this fits a larger pattern in
which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of
all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with
only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
Indeed, the
Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing
credibility.
During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday,
Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the
importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the
Sinai.
He claimed that such tunnels were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln
tunnels," and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys
had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two
small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on
their way to a private zoo.
Israel's
self-image
The claim that
Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed,
as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the
pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with
them.
With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a
building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way
to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an
enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart.
Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe" and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the
Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the
reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded
it. (Read More)
An enlightening video interview with Bob
Simon of 60 Minutes on the Charlie Rose show
Israel’s “Wall” Dwarfs the Berlin Wall
(Click on Dot Above for most recent edition of - As The World Squirms)