Please click on the links to view the outstanding artwork and photographs.
And the bold is all him. I'm red.
"REAL PEACE AGREEMENT REACHED IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE"
"I have always maintained that peace will one day come to this region… not from government ‘talks’ and back room deals…. but from the people themselves.
Last night a huge step forward to that day took place when a leader of West Bank settlers, Rabbi Froman spoke with a dear friend of mine Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist closely associated with Hamas. Khaled’s reports appear on this blog almost every day of the week, his views are well known to my readers.
The following is from report in HaAretz….
Rabbi Menachem Froman of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa has for years been involved in interfaith dialogue toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
After a series of interfaith meetings, Rabbi Froman and Hamas-allied friend Khaled Amayreh succeeded in drafting a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
The two submitted the document, which covers the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, to the cabinet and to the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip.
According to them, Hamas leaders have agreed to the deal’s terms, but Israel has rejected them.
Did you catch the last line of that report? Hamas leaders have agreed to the deal’s terms, but Israel has rejected them.
WHY??? Is Peace not in the self interest of Israel?
Watch the video that is featured in THIS link, listen to the sincerity of these two fine men…. Let it be known that the people of Israel and Palestine want Peace…. let it be known that the government of Israel is preventing that from becoming a reality."
Which is why I have such a bug up my ass about Israel!
"ISRAEL // 1 STEP BACKWARDS, 2 STEPS TOO FAR"
"According to Khalid Amayreh, even Israel’s closest ally, the Palestinian Authority is getting fed up with Israel’s tactics….
Up in smoke
Even Fayyad admits there are no peace prospects, reports Khalid Amayreh from the West Bank …..
As sounds of the drums of war coming from Israel are getting louder and louder, Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders are showing growing signs of impatience with the slow-moving talks with Israel.
Visibly frustrated Palestinian officials have been speaking of Israel’s “lack of will” to reach a genuine final-status settlement that would end the 40-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip.
This week, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was quoted as saying that he didn’t see any real possibility for reaching a peace deal with Israel in the year 2008. Fayyad’s assessment is clearly at odd with President Bush’s outspoken predictions that 2008 will witness the creation of a sovereign and territorially contiguous Palestinian state.
Fayyad, a financial-data analyst by training, is not known for making hyperbolic statements. Hence, his pessimistic appraisal of peace talks with Israel should be taken seriously.
According to Palestinian officials, there are several reasons for Palestinian frustration: First, Israel’s understanding and interpretation of the roadmap (the main legal reference upon which Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are based) is substantially different from the Palestinian understanding of the American-conceived plan.
“Israel views the roadmap as negotiable and open to modifications. For our part, we are demanding that it be implemented right away without any further delay,” says Nimr Hammad, a political advisor to PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Hammad said, “Israeli practices were leaving no room for optimism. If talks with Israel fail we will call for an urgent Arab conference to take a collective stand.”
In fact, Israel and the PA have never been able to formulate a common understanding of the roadmap and what it exactly means. The main reason for that is Israel’s insistence that the territories Israel seized during the 1967 War are actually disputed not occupied. Obviously, this stand is inconsistent with the rule of international law and all UN resolutions pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On 11 February, Fayyad, in a speech to Arab Americans, diplomats and journalists, said Israel was reneging on commitments to the roadmap. “Annapolis was a major step forward, but I cannot say we are not having difficulties. In the two months following Annapolis, Israeli incursions and bombings of Palestinians and their property claimed the lives of 165 people, injured another 521, and caused untold damage to property. What I see has not happened, not happened to the extent it should or it can, is progress on these issues, progress on the implementation of commitments under the roadmap. I don’t see sufficient commitment on the part of Israel to the settlement freeze.”
Fayyad spoke of continuing Israeli settlement building particularly in East Jerusalem where Palestinians would like to have their future capital. He also complained about the continued presence of hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank, which he said were choking the Palestinian economy and seriously limiting Palestinian mobility in their own country.
Israel, however, seems to give little or no concerns to Palestinian objections. This week, the Israeli press quoted Housing Minister Zeev Boim as saying that, “bids will go out soon to build 1,100 apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem.” Boim, a former deputy defence minister, said 350 settler units would be built in the Har Homa settlement and 750 in Pisgat Zeev, north of Jerusalem. More to the point, the fundamentalist Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupliansky, has defied the Israeli government with regard to settlement expansion in East Jerusalem. According to Haaretz, Lupliansky vowed that he would turn Jerusalem into an “illegal outpost”.
There is no doubt that the Jerusalem issue and the large Jewish colonies built on the West Bank since 1967 make up the most difficult problem facing peace talks, in addition to the strategic issue of Palestinian refugees. Hatem Abdul-Qader, a PA official in charge of the Jerusalem File opined that Israel “simply wants to Judaise as much as possible of East Jerusalem to the point where there will be no Jerusalem left and then they will tell us what you see is what you get. But then the very idea of Palestinian statehood would be futile and impossible, and the entire two-state solution concept would be finished forever. Israel is simply killing the two-state solution by continuing Jewish demographic expansion in Arab East Jerusalem.”
There is an additional problem, or more correctly, excuse. Israel is utilising the situation in Gaza to the fullest to drag its feet with respect to peace talks with the Palestinians. It is preparing to launch a large-scale incursion into the blockaded coastal territory, controlled by Hamas. The declared goal is to stop the so-called rockets fired by Palestinian guerrillas onto Israeli territory. However, the real reason is to destroy the Hamas government in order to lower the ceiling of Palestinian national expectations.
Israeli leaders, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, have been warning non-stop that no peace deal would be possible and no Palestinian state could be created unless the homemade projectiles fired from Gaza onto neighbouring Jewish settlements were stopped. However, with the starved and blockaded Gaza under the authority of Hamas, Israel and the US know quite well that the PA leadership are helpless to put an end to the firing of the mostly futile rockets.
Palestinian officials see constant Israeli invocations of the rockets and Sderot as a red herring and an easy excuse to evade having to deal with the central issues of the peace process, including Jerusalem, the refugees and ending the occupation.
“Israel is only seeking excuses. Israel is more interested than anybody else in the continuation of the current situation in Gaza since these rockets, which are really just firecrackers, are used as a valuable propaganda asset to continue slaughtering the Palestinians in Gaza and indulging in stalling tactics in the West Bank,” said former PA security official Jebril Rajoub.
The hawkish Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak says openly Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is to destroy the Hamas government. However, a bloody and extended Israeli blitz into Gaza wouldn’t be without serious, even grave, political ramifications on the entire peace process.
“A bloody invasion of Gaza by Israel would turn Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups towards Al-Qaeda, and Mahmoud Abbas would be made to look like Antoin Lahd,” said one Hamas lawmaker in Gaza on condition of anonymity. Lahd was the quisling commander of the Israeli-backed defunct South Lebanese Army, who was forced to flee to Israel following the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000. “Without Hamas there can be no peace, and the entire area may turn into another Iraq.”
Please click on his link and go to this point in his article to see the picture, readers.
Actually, let's try and post it and see what happens:
A Palestinian girl mourns the death of a Hamas militant, who was killed in an Israeli air raid, during his funeral in GazaContinuing...
"BIG BROTHER MIGHT NOT BE WATCHING YOU FOR LONG"
"There might come a day in America when no one will be listening in on your private phone calls….private will mean just that…. PRIVATE!Laws supposedly passed to protect the nation and the world are in the process of lapsing… laws that eroded the very basic freedoms of Americans. These laws were made to ‘track the activities of suspected terrorist’….. but the fact is that everyone who disagrees with official government polices and, of course, every Muslim residing in the country is suspect…. by the arch terrorist himself.
The ‘eavesdropping law’ is just one of the many attempts to legalise the erosion of the Constitution itself…. it’s lapse will be a step in the right direction….BUT…. as of today, there are 340 days left for the Bush Administration to totally destroy the Constitution, the country and the world…. START THE COUNTDOWN TO FREEDOM!
The following is an interesting read…. from today’s Christian Science Monitor.
"House set to let warrentless evesdropping law lapse; President lobbied hard Thursday for renewal of Protect America Act, which expires Feb. 16."
Washington - Neither the White House nor House Democrats blinked in a standoff over renewal of a controversial eavesdropping law, now on track to expire at midnight Saturday.
President Bush said Thursday that failure to update the Protect America Act will “harm our ability to monitor new terrorist activities and could reopen dangerous gaps in our intelligence.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in response, dubbed such talk fear-mongering. The president has every authority to continue needed eavesdropping under another law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), she said. Moreover, the authorities granted under the temporary surveillance law enacted in August will carry on for a year, she added.
To House Democrats, what’s at stake is whether Mr. Bush – and future presidents – are accountable to Congress. “Whether the president is a Democrat or a Republican, they can’t act outside the law,” said Speaker Pelosi at a press briefing.
The issue is the sharpest confrontation over presidential powers since Democrats took control of Congress last year. “Oversight is an institutional obligation to ensure against abuse of power,” Pelosi said in a briefing on Thursday.
At the heart of the dispute is proposed retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that took part in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance after the 9/11 attacks.
Without liability protection – and facing lawsuits asking for billions of dollars in damages – such companies are going to be “less likely to cooperate” with the government on national-security matters in the future, Bush said Thursday. House Democrats say these companies, along with the president, must be held to the rule of law.
The new 2008 Protect America Act would expand and update the government’s ability to monitor technologies such as the Internet and cellphones. If the current law is allowed to lapse, the US will be unable to respond quickly to new terrorist threats, say Republicans and some Democrats, who are urging approval of a bill the Senate passed on Tuesday.
“The problem is what to do with the new tips, and they’re coming in all the time,” says Rep. Heather Wilson (R) of New Mexico.
“The House of Representatives is going to simply close up shop and leave town, saying that it’s not going to hurt America,” said Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Pelosi aides say that in the remote chance a previously unknown terrorist group must be surveilled, the administration can use FISA. “Under FISA, the attorney general can approve surveillance in minutes. Surveillance can begin immediately, and approval of the FISA court can be obtained within three days,” says Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami. Unlike last summer, when Congress first passed the Protect America Act, there is no backlog of cases to slow the process of obtaining surveillance approvals from the FISA court.
Pelosi says she has instructed key committee chairman to continue work on resolving differences with their Senate counterparts on this bill over the one-week presidential recess, which begins Friday.
In a related move, House Democrats also voted to approve contempt resolutions against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers for failing to testify in a House probe of the 2006 firings of nine US attorneys.
Republicans walked off the House floor to protest this vote, which passed 223 to 32, and over the refusal of House leaders to allow a vote on a bipartisan Senate version of the surveillance bill, which is backed by the White House. House Republicans say they have enough support from moderate Democrats to win a vote on the Senate bill, which passed this week on a strong bipartisan vote, 68 to 29.
Source"
"UN FINALLY AWAKENS TO THE ‘GRIM’ SITUATION IN GAZA"
"Sure took long enough! It’s been in the news, on TV…. they had every opportunity to know what the situation has been all this time… why are they so ’shocked’?
Perhaps it’s their way of justifying their silence until now…. a silence that is responsible for many deaths and suffering. Will that all end now that the UN is ’shocked’….. Not with a US VETO waiting for any condemnation of Israel’s actions.
UN shocked by ‘grim’ life in Gaza
BBC News
February 16, 2008
The UN’s top humanitarian affairs official has said he was shocked by the “grim and miserable” situation he witnessed on a visit to the Gaza Strip.
Undersecretary General John Holmes said it was the result of Israel closing its border crossings and the “limited food and other materials” allowed in.
Mr Holmes said 80% of Gaza’s 1.5m population now depended on food aid.
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said the situation could “very quickly return to where it was” if rocket attacks ceased.
Israel tightened its blockade of Gaza last month after a sharp rise in rocket attacks by militants based there.
The restrictions prompted militants from the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls Gaza, to blast holes in the border with Egypt on 23 January.
The breaches were sealed by Egyptian security forces only on 3 February, by which time hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had taken the opportunity to cross into Egypt and obtain essential supplies.
‘Basic dignity denied’
As part of a four-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Mr Holmes toured the Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, and the Karni industrial zone near the closed cargo crossing on the Israeli border.
“I have been shocked by the grim and miserable things I have seen and heard about during the day,” he told reporters at the main UN compound in Gaza City.
“[They] are the result of the current restrictions on the crossings into Gaza, and the very limited amounts of foods and other materials being allowed in.”
Mr Holmes, who is also the UN’s emergency relief co-ordinator, said the level of goods entering Gaza had dropped to 10% of what it was a year ago.
He said the Israeli restrictions had led to the collapse of the territory’s economy, which in turn caused widespread unemployment and poverty. As a result, some 80% of Gazans now depended on food aid, he added.
“All this makes for a grim human and humanitarian situation here in Gaza, which means that people are not able to live with the basic dignity to which they are entitled,” he said.
“So what is essentially needed is an opening of the crossings, a lot more goods coming in.”
The Desert Peace blogger is so much better than I am.
He's angry, too, but he doesn't curse and swear like I do.
I'm sorry, readers, but sometimes I just can't help it.
This world is so cruel and unfair, and when you pile lies on top of it, I GET ANGRY!
What is the worst is the repetition and agenda-pushing, though.
AmeriKa's Zionist-controlled MSM needs to stop that, and the NaZionist rulers of Israel need to END the OCCUPATION NOW!!!!!!
RIGHT NOW, and give the Palestinians there DIGNITY and beging to live in PEACE!!!!!!!
