AS THE WORLD SQUIRMSã

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Note: Some items contained herein may have additional formatting, emphasis and hotlinks added for context and perspective ~ Owen

More Than 1000 Palestinians Murdered As Israeli Slaughter Continues - Civilian Deaths Near 700, Says Rights Group

Alternet.org

January 15, 2009

Children 'Paying Price of Gaza War'

Children [and civilians] are bearing the brunt of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has said.

Aljazeera.net

January 15, 2009

Children are bearing the brunt of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) has said.

More than 300 children have been killed and hundreds more wounded in Israel's aerial and ground assault, Ann Veneman, Unicef's executive director, said in a statement released on Wedneday.

She said: "Each day more children are being hurt, their small bodies wounded, their young lives shattered. This is tragic. This is unacceptable.

"They are bearing the brunt of a conflict which is not theirs.

"As fighting reaches the heart of heavily populated urban areas, the impact of lethal weapons will carry an even heavier toll on children."

Eradicating Hamas

“It now seems clear the last disastrous act of the Bush administration was giving Israel a green light to launch its final solution campaign against the Hamas government in Gaza. Just when we thought it was impossible for this calamitous president and Svengali Dick Cheney to do any more damage to the world or to America’s interests, they loosed one final Parthian shaft into the heart of the Mideast.”

by Eric Margolis

LouRockwell.com

January 15, 2009

As I said last week, Israel is handing a "fait accompli" to President Barack Obama. Its squabbling politicians primarily launched this war to boost their chances in upcoming elections, but also to destroy Hamas while their protector, George Bush, was still in the White House.

A short-term success, perhaps. But these Israeli politicians will pay a heavy price in the long term for this slash-and-burn policy. The world will turn further against Israel and see it, as too many critics claim, as a brutal oppressor. Comparisons with the Warsaw ghetto uprising will inevitably be made. More important, any hope for a real peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors has been set back for years.

Equally, America will be blamed for the carnage in Gaza. In my latest book, American Raj, I try to explain why there is so much anger and hatred directed in there against the United States. Gaza is now exhibit "A."

While our media mostly repeats Israel’s side of the argument, people across the Muslim world hear nightly of Gaza’s agony and horror – and will soon see TV footage. Everyone knows the F-16’s, helicopter gunships, and self-propelled heavy artillery raining death on Gaza come from the US courtesy of American taxpayers. Everyone knows the White House has been blocking action to succor the Palestinians and ordering its Arab satrap regimes to stay quiet – or, as in the case of Egypt, keep the prison gates locked.

If 9/11 was payback for Beirut, 1982, then the next attack on the US or its citizens abroad will likely be labeled, "Gaza." (Read More)

After Israel's shelling of the United Nations headquarters in Gaza, Palestinian firefighters and UN employees

work to put out fires and salvage sorely needed food supplies.

Thursday: UN Outraged After Israel Shells Its Gaza Aid Compound

International Herald Tribune (IHT)

January 15, 2009

UN Headquarters in Gaza Ablaze After Being Hit by Israeli 'White Phosphorus' Shells

The Times – London, UK

January 15, 2009

UN Accuses Israel Over Proscribed Phosphorus Munitions

BBC

January 15, 2009

The head of the UN aid agency in Gaza has accused the Israeli military of firing what was believed to be white phosphorus shells at its compound. ...

Israel Humiliates America

By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jan 15, 2009, 00:24

“Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution [Gaza] to a UNSC [UN Security Council] vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it.” Olmert said. “I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He [Bush] got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call.”

[PM: Rice left embarrassed in UN vote, By Yaakov Lappin , Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2009]

“Let me see if I understand this,” wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. “On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit -- and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship.”

Olmert gloated as he told Israelis how he had shamed US Secretary of State Condi Rice by preventing the American secretary of state from supporting a resolution that she had helped to craft. Olmert proudly related how he had interrupted President Bush’s speech in order to give Bush his marching orders on the UN vote.

Israeli politicians have been bragging for decades about the control they exercise over the US government. In his final press conference, President Bush, deluded to the very end, said that the whole world respects America. In fact, when the world looks at America, what it sees is an Israeli colony.

Responding to mounting reports from the Red Cross and human rights organizations of Israel’s massive war crimes in Gaza, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted 33-1 on January 12 to condemn Israel for grave offenses against human rights.

On January 13, the London Times reported that Israelis have gathered on a hillside overlooking Gaza to enjoy the slaughter of Palestinians in what the Times calls “the ultimate spectator sport.”

It is American supplied F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships, missiles, and bombs that are destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and murdering the Palestinians who have been packed into the tiny strip of land. What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons. It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes.

Yet in his farewell press conference on January 12, Bush said that the world respects America for its compassion.

The compassion of bombing a UN school for girls?
The compassion of herding 100 Palestinians into one house and then shelling it?
The compassion of bombing hospitals and mosques?
The compassion of depriving 1.5 million Palestinians of food, medicine, and energy?
The compassion of violently overthrowing the democratically elected Hamas government?
The compassion of blowing up the infrastructure of one of the poorest and most deprived people on earth?
The compassion of abstaining from a Security Council vote condemning these actions?

And this is a repeat of what the Israelis and Americans did to Lebanon in 2006, what the Americans did to Iraqis for six years and are continuing to do to Afghans after seven years. And still hope to do to the Iranians and Syrians.

In 2002, I designated George W. Bush “the White House Moron.” If there ever was any doubt about this designation, Bush’s final press conference dispelled it.

Bush talked about connecting the dots, but Bush has failed to connect any dots for eight solid years. “Our” president was a puppet for a cabal led by Dick Cheney and a handful of Jewish neoconservatives, who took control of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and “Homeland Security.” From these power positions, the neocon cabal used lies and deception to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, pointless wars that have cost Americans $3 trillion, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, their pensions, and their access to health care.

“These obviously very difficult economic times,” Bush said in his press conference, “started before my presidency.”

Bush has plenty of liberal company in failing to connect a $3 trillion dollar war with hard times. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities blames Bush’s tax cut, not the wars, for “the fiscal deterioration.”

Bush told the White House Press Corps, a useless collection of non-journalists, that the two mistakes of his invasion of Iraq were: (1) Putting up the “mission accomplished” banner on the aircraft carrier, which, he said, “sent the wrong message,” and (2) the absence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction that he used to justify the invasion.

Although Bush now admits that there were not any such weapons in Iraq, Bush said that the invasion was still the right thing to do.

The deaths of 1.25 million Iraqis, the displacement of 4 million Iraqis, and the destruction of a country’s infrastructure and economy are merely the collateral damage associated with “bringing freedom and democracy” to the Middle East.

Unless George W. Bush is the best actor in human history, he truly believes what he told the White House Press Corps.

What Bush did not explain is how America is respected when its people put a moron in charge for eight years.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal
Email Online Journal Editor

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)

How Israel's Propaganda Machine Works

By James Zogby

The Huffington Post

January 9, 2009

As in past Mideast conflicts, both the media story line and political commentary here in the U.S. has closely followed Israel's talking points on the war. This has been an essential component in Israel's early success and in its ability to prolong fighting without U.S. pushback. Because it recognizes the importance of the propaganda war, Israel fights on this front as vigorously and disproportionately as it engages on the battlefield. Here's how they have done it: (Read More)

A Besotted Behemoth: Washington’s Militarized, Bankrupt Empire

Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)

“The United States maintains more than 700 bases around the world and is pushing to set up even more. What are these bases doing, how is the Pentagon rethinking their functions, and how can we reduce this military footprint?”