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

 

 

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British MP George Galloway

Stop Gaza Massacre protest London, Saturday 3 , January 2009

(Video)

 

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Former London Mayor, Ken Livingstone

Stop Gaza Massacre protest London Saturday 3 January 2009

(Video)

 

 

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Annie Lennox – Performer

Stop Gaza Massacre protest London Saturday 3 January 2009

(Video)

 

 

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60 Videos Condemning Israeli Aggression in Gaza

(Videos)

 

 

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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)

The Guardian, London, UK

Saturday 10 January 2009

Article history

 

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)

 

 

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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.

(Read More)

 

 

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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."

(Read More)

 

 

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Washington’s Gaza Cease-Fire Abstention Stuns UN Security Council

 

Julian Borger and Ian Black

The Guardian – London, UK

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)

 

 

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Who Will Save Israel From Itself?

 

By Mark LeVine
Aljazeera.net

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)

 

 

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Bob Simon on Palestine/Israel

An enlightening video interview with Bob Simon of 60 Minutes on the Charlie Rose show

 

 

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Israel’s “Wall” Dwarfs the Berlin Wall

 

 

 

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