British authorities are investigating how six British nationals apparently had their identities stolen by suspected Mossad agents on a mission to assassinate a Hamas leader in Dubai.
IOA Editor: Another Mossad Murder Inc. story, and the various details of how it compares to past “cases.” The Book where good and evil deeds are recorded is filled with Mossad assassinations. As usual, left out of the public discussion is any questioning of the legitimacy of murder as a foreign policy. But in a world run by armed thugs, mostly “Western Democracies” gone wild, anything goes.
DUBAI: Police are hunting 11 suspects with European passports, including a woman, for the murder in a Dubai hotel room of a top militant of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, the Gulf emirate’s police chief told AFP on Monday.
In her appeal Dayan stated that the program aired a live recording of Captain R. reporting back to his commander during the incident saying that he had “confirmed the kill,” by firing two bullets at her at close range.
Historian Howard Zinn’s remarkable work, including his most famous book, A People’s History of the United States, is summarized best in his own words. His primary concern, he once explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of the great moments of history–a record that would be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if torn from such roots. Howard, who died Jan. 27 at 87, was devoted to the empowerment of these unknowns.
Israel is waging a covert assassination campaign across the Middle East in an effort to stop its key enemies co-ordinating their activities.
Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist.
IOA Editor: Conveniently, Israel’s ‘experts’ equate criticism of Israeli actions — mostly, directly connected to the Occupation, and the Occupation itself — for which Israel has deservedly earned the title “pariah state,” with denial of its right to exist. This is an old Hasbara trick: You criticize us, you’re really saying Israel has no right to exist. Left out of the discussion is “The right to exist as what?” As an occupying state? An Apartheid state? The term “delegitimization campaign” is actually turned on its head: It is the Israelis who are attempting to delegitimize their critics by calling them “delegitimizers,” trying to blur the distinctions between “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites, consistent with old Israeli propaganda practices: If you criticize us, and you’re not Jewish, you’re an anti-Semite. (And if you are Jewish, you’re sick – afflicted by “self-hate,” etc. See Ur Shlonsky’s recent email exchange on the Academic Boycott.) Those of us old enough have heard this some four decades ago.
The IOA is proud to be a very small part of the “worldwide network… [having] no hierarchy or overall commander…” We steadfastly reject the Occupation and strongly criticize Israel’s long record of violations of international law.
“Israel knows that the non-violence struggle is spreading and that it’s a powerful weapon against the occupation,” said Neta Golan, an Israeli activist based in Ramallah. “Israel has no answer to it, which is why the security forces are panicking and have started making lots of arrests.”
The Tel Aviv District Court rejected a petition this week against a decision to lease land in Jaffa’s Ajami neighborhood for the exclusive use of members of the religious Zionist community.
A fact sheet prepared by the Center for Constitutional Rights
It could be expected that a country that has ruled another nation for many years would show tolerance toward manifestations of unarmed protest against the occupation and its ills… The suppression of public protest under the transparent guise of protecting state security does not augment Israel’s international standing. Such a policy gives a bad name to “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Palestinians were shocked on Thursday after Israeli TV aired a graphic video showing a senior official caught on a hidden camera soliciting sex from a job applicant. The video, parts of which aired on Israel’s Channel 10 earlier this week, was shot by former Palestinian intelligence officer Fahmi Shabaneh, who has accused the Western-backed Palestinian Authority of widespread corruption.
UPDATE:
Ha’aretz: Abbas suspends PA aide embroiled in sex tape scandal
Ma’an: Abbas dismisses Rafiq Husseini, appoints investigation committee
The Israeli parliament passed on first reading… a bill that would grant tax breaks to residents of the Golan Heights, a move likely to anger Syria from which Israel seized the territory. The bill, which needs to be approved at three further readings before becoming law, was supported by 67 of the 120 members of parliament.
IOA Editor: As most Israelis must know by now, Syria’s president Assad is ready to make peace with Israel based on the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. Now the Knesset has shown him that it is not threatened by his peace overtures, and that it would much rather have a piece of Syria than peace with Syria.
UPDATE: Syrian official: Golan benefits proves Israel doesn’t want peace
“The Karni crossing won’t resume operating,” said one. “At least not as long as Hamas controls the Strip.” Until June 2007, Karni was the principal cargo crossing into Gaza, despite a series of terror attacks that targeted both the crossing and the surrounding area.
IOA Editor: The strangulation of Gaza will continue. And now we know, from official sources, that it is not due to “terrorism.” Separately, as Amira Hass reports in Expulsion without trucks, Palestinians continue to be squeezed out of the occupied West Bank, as a matter of long-standing Israeli policy. And Hamas is not in power on the West Bank, at least not yet. Ethnic cleansing is the overall purpose of Israeli actions, now and in the past.
It is a matter of regional planning policy that expropriates vacant lands and restricts Palestinian development, and of the denial of the indigenous people’s natural rights: the right of inheritance and cultivation, the right to freedom of movement, the right to work, the right to family life, and the right to housing and education by choice. This… sums up the history of the occupation from 1967 to today. It is the government’s guiding policy in East Jerusalem and lies at the foundation of the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Jerusalem’s mayor threatened last week to demolish 200 homes in Palestinian neighbourhoods of the city in an act even he conceded would probably bring long-simmering tensions over housing in East Jerusalem to a boil.
U.S. news coverage of the conflict relentlessly presents the news within this Israeli narrative, primarily because powerful forces in this country find that narrative useful for U.S. strategic interests in the region, and U.S. journalists tend to fall in line with that view.
(Video) Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador to United States, gives speech at University of Californian, is interrupted by students shouting, ‘How many Palestinians have you killed?’, ‘Israel is a murderer’. Ten students detained.
Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah. Some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus surrounded the building as soldiers searched rooms, turning the office upside down and confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes.
Every year since March 2002, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization have reiterated their support for the Arab peace initiative. Hopefully they will do so again next month at the Arab League summit in Tripoli. The initiative offers Israel normalization with all Arab League members in return for a withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967.
The activists’ lawyer described their arrest as part of a campaign by Israel to choke off weekly demonstrations by Palestinians, left-wing Israelis and foreign activists against Israel’s West Bank separation barrier as peace efforts remain at a stalemate.
Amira Hass: Tufakji has for years been researching Israel’s settlement policy and the ways by which Palestinian land is taken over, as well as planning policy which discriminates against Palestinians. He heads the cartography department of the Arab Studies Society, established in 1980 to document the social, political and cultural history of the Palestinians.
IOA Editor: Knowledge is power. Clearly, those Palestinians armed with the facts pose the greatest security risk to Israel.
B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Machsom Watch, Breaking the Silence and their ilk are nudniks, they are one-sided, they pick up any story floating around, often giving exaggerated credence to hearsay testimony and they have a tendency for overkill, conflating every report into a phenomenon. Yet we couldn’t do without them.
IOA Editor: Indeed, without them, liberal Anglo-Saxon Jewish immigrants such as Mr. Pfeffer could themselves become targets of the neo-fascist camp that is rapidly rising in Israel as a counter-movement to domestic human rights organizations and to Israel’s international critics. This Israel-centric commentary is presented here to show the tremendous pressure Israeli rights organizations are operating under, and the limited support they receive even from relatively-friendly media such as Haaretz.
“They’re using me to attack in the most blatant way the basic principles of democracy and the values of the Declaration of Independence: Values of equality, tolerance, social justice and freedom of speech,” she added. On Thursday, Chazan received an e-mail from Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief David Horovitz, informing her the newspaper would cease publishing her column. Chazan had provided the daily with one of its few leftist voices in recent years.
IOA Editor: Democracy for Jews only. The Declaration of Independence has been a part of Israel’s democratic facade since 1948: it never stopped Israel from robbing the Palestinian people of their homeland and turning them into refugees and third class citizens of the Only Democracy in the Middle East. In addition, unlike the US Constitution, the “Declaration” is just that: a non-binding statement without any legally enforceable powers.
Ridgen and Rossier’s new compelling documentary about controversial Jewish-American academic Norman Finkelstein is to open soon at Anthology Film Archives. The film has already played in prominent festivals around the world including the Sheffield Doc/Fest documentary festival, IDFA in Amsterdam and the Jewish Film Festival in Jerusalem.
The decision to develop Iron Dome appears to have been, from the start, an effort to keep the Rafael scientists employed and compensate the company for not benefiting from the research and development funding for the Arrow system, which is being developed by Israel Aerospace Industries.
IOA Editor: So much for Israeli security and for defending our people from Gaza-based terrorism. There’s no business like War Business (there’s even an Irving Berlin Broadway-tune to go with it). Israeli war profiteering is an important part of the equation. See also:
Amira Hass: Israel knows that peace just doesn’t pay
Who Profits?
Wikipedia – Iron Dome
Jonathan Cook: [Israel's] finance ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programmes”. [The] co-author of the report said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements… In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report notes, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.
“Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to assassinate [Mahmoud] al Mabhouh in Dubai. We will issue an arrest warrant against him.”
According to Yossi Melman, Israel’s Mossad assassinated Mabhouh. See: Mossad killing of terror chiefs has little impact on Israel-Hamas war.
“These organizations are trying to help Hamas in [its] fight against Israel,” argues Im Tirtzu chairman Ronen Shoval. “They are slandering the State of Israel and the Israeli soldiers around the world.”
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem warned Israel on Wednesday about launching any war against his country, saying it would turn into a wider conflict. “Israelis, do not test the power of Syria since you know the war will move into your cities,” Muallem told journalists in the Syrian capital Damascus.
The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006.
Howard Zinn: 1922-2010
Amy Goodman interviews Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Alice Walker, and Anthony Arnove.
Additional Videos:
“Three Holy Wars” – May 2009
The Daily Show with Jon Stuart – 6 Jan 2005
Introducing A People’s History
On human nature and aggression – 2004
On civil disobedience – 2002
Sharvit-Baruch… was concerned by the Goldstone report’s negative effect on Israel’s legitimacy in the global arena, and that Israel could potentially turn into “a kind of South Africa or Serbia” or a “criminal” or “racist” state in international opinion…. [S]he added, “We are now in a situation in which we need to give our friends – who don’t want to see lawsuits filed against us in their own courts – the tools to do away such claims, along with other charges against us,” she said. “If they need a commission of inquiry then that’s what we’ll give them,” she added.
IOA Editor: Israel is clearly very concerned about damage to its image in the aftermath of the Goldstone report. Yet, if there is any ‘regret’ here, it is strictly a tactical PR and legal issue: Let’s help our friends help us get out of the legal mess our own Gaza war-crimes put us in.
In a rare speech to an Israeli audience, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Tuesday that Israel must show the Palestinians that it is beginning to roll back the occupation, and that the way to do that is primarily by stopping both settlement construction and IDF incursions into Palestinian areas.
IOA Editor: So, “it’s the Occupation, stupid,” eh? Some of us have been saying it for over four decades.
Also The Washington Post: Palestinian premier gives a key address…
[M]any, across the political spectrum, are deeply uncomfortable with the shift in policy that has turned the Palestinians, from historical “brothers,” into something like enemies… [T]he columnist Fahmi Huwaydi remarks that Egypt’s “strategic vision has changed, and Egypt has come to reckon the Palestinians and not the Israelis a danger. And if this sad conclusion is correct, then I cannot avoid describing the steel wall…as a wall of shame.”
MP Zahalka: “Imagine the outcry if a Jewish representative in the US or Britain was expected to swear loyalty to his country as a Christian state.”
An illuminating e-mail exchange between Ur Shlonsky, professor of linguistics at the Universite de Geneve, and the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation. As Shlonsky points out, it is remarkable when accusations of anti-Semitism, or “self-hating Jew” (the version used for Jews), come from the executive director of a major research-funding agency.
