I will be mirroring a few blog posts, and then I am going to give you some links to go to. There is so much out there, readers, that I can hardly keep up. I salute my sources, which you can see to the right.
The first one they gave me shattered my heart.
"Massacre in Gaza"
You see those kids there? Aaah!
And how about the kids in this next post?
"Save the Children? Not if they’re Palestinian"
11May08
In an interview today about the cyclone in Burma, Foreign Secretary David Miliband assured viewers that British aid would be channeled through “organisations like Save the Children, who rightly have a very high reputation.”
Save the Children is indeed a reputable organisation, but Miliband’s respect for it seems to be rather selective. Earlier this year Save the Children UK co-authored a report describing a “humanitarian implosion” in the Gaza Strip. It emphasised that the “unprecedented humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, where children comprise over half the population, is “man-made, completely avoidable and, with the necessary political will, can also be reversed.” That is, unlike in Burma, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is completely manufactured. It is not a consequence of some unforeseen natural disaster, but is rather the intended result of policies designed to force the “impoverishment of an entire population.” The report concluded that the current Israeli and international approach is “failing at all levels” and called for an end to the siege and “political dialogue with all Palestinian parties.”
So how did Miliband respond to this grave analysis from an organisation which he recognises has “a very high reputation”? Did he, as with Burma, listen to the “humanitarian experts…who make all the difference on the ground” and change policy accordingly? Not quite. Instead the British government, which along with the U.S. has been unswerving in its support for the devastating collective punishment of Gaza since Hamas took office in February 2006, continues to facilitate the Israeli siege and oppose political engagement with Hamas. Where Miliband criticised the “malign neglect” of the Burmese junta in preventing aid agencies from functioning properly, he failed to condemn the Israeli government for doing - as he himself acknowledges - exactly the same thing. As a result the people of Gaza continue to suffer and die. It appears that, for David Miliband and the British government, some children are worth saving while others are perfectly expendable."
"No, I Will Not Be Celebrating"Nor am I.
Palestinians participate in a West Bank ceremony to commemorate the Nakba, or the catastrophe, describing the uprooting of Palestinians with the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. Muhammed Muheisen / Associated Press
by THERESE MUGHANNAM-WALRATH May 13, 2008
"Celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel are already under way all over the world. President Bush is scheduled to go to Israel to add American support and congratulations to the Israelis.
Even though I recognize the importance and the need for an Israeli state for Jewish people, I will not be celebrating. I and many other people will be remembering the nakba or catastrophe that happened in 1948. I am a Palestinian-American, born in Jerusalem right before the United Nations decided to divide the country of my birth and give over half of it to the creation of a Jewish state. Because our media have kept alive, and rightly so, the plight of the Jewish people culminating in the Holocaust, I would like to recount the other side of the story, which has been carefully kept out of our awareness in the United States.
Many people still have no idea why those people have been fighting each other for centuries. That is the first myth I'd like to eradicate. People in my family remember what life was like in pre-1948 Palestine. They remember how Palestinians and Jews worked in orange groves together, how the women shared clubs and their children shared nurseries. One of my relatives fondly remembers how her father would often sit with his Jewish friend under an olive tree outside their kitchen. The two men would spend hours playing backgammon and sipping lemonade, laughing loudly and enjoying each other's company. The conflict in Israel/Palestine is not centuries old, nor is it a religious conflict. The conflict is about land.
For those who want to learn, there is plenty of declassified material published by brave Israeli historians, such as Ilan Pappe, which paints a very different picture of what took place in 1948 when more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced. My family fled the terror and chaos of war and went to Jordan where we stayed for a few years until we were able to come to America. Other refugees, now numbering millions, are still living in diaspora, most in refugee camps all over the Arab world.
Rightly or wrongly, these refugees still feel passionately about the injustice done to them, and some still hold onto the keys to homes they fled, symbols of the tragedy visited upon them, and hoping for some compensation for their losses.
For more than 15 years, I have been involved in trying to help bring about understanding and reconciliation between Arabs, especially Palestinian Arabs, and Jews. With that in mind, I was able to travel to Israel/Palestine twice last year in order to visit relatives and to explore with Israeli and Palestinians groups what are the obstacles to peace.
Three minutes into Jerusalem, I saw the infamous wall Israel is building against all international law. Hundreds of miles of a very high concrete wall, in many places snaking way beyond the green zone, separates people from one another, from their olive trees, place of work, school, or shopping, as well as from much needed water sources.
I had seen pictures of this monstrosity, but standing next to it my heart wept. I saw checkpoints everywhere, again deep inside the West Bank, the purpose of which could only be to humiliate ordinary people and make their lives more unbearable. And then there were the strategically placed imposing settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land.
Jerusalem, the city of my birth, is now completely surrounded by these settlements, standing like ramparts. Gaza was off limits. A daily unfolding tragedy for both sides.
No, I will not be celebrating. I will be praying that leaders there will come to their senses. That people here will have the courage to open their hearts and minds to question long held assumptions and to press our government to facilitate a lasting peace based on justice, which all Palestinians and Israelis desperately need and deserve.
Therese Mughannam-Walrath is a Santa Rosa resident and Roman Catholic whose family fled Jerusalem in 1948."
"Newly born infant, two elderly men die due to Gaza siege"
"GAZA, (PIC)-- Three Palestinian patients including a two-day-old infant and two men in their sixties died in Gaza on Monday due to lack of proper medication and Israeli refusal to allow them treatment outside the Strip.
Medical sources reported that the two-day-old infant Yousef Zakout died due to the lack of proper medication bringing the number of victims of Gaza siege to 150.
Earlier on Monday two old patients died in central and southern Gaza Strip, the sources said, adding that Mohammed Abu Hweishel, a cancer patient, had repeatedly asked for permit to leave the Strip for treatment but the Israeli occupation authority turned down his requests.
Ahmed Abul Naja, 62, died in the European hospital from liver inflammation, the sources said, noting that his condition rapidly deteriorated due to the absence of adequate treatment in Gaza.
The IOA imposed-siege on Gaza blocked travel of seriously ill Palestinian patients and with absence of proper medication dozens of them died and hundreds others fear a similar fate."
"Remembering 1948 and looking to the future" by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 13 May 2008
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| Twenty-six-year-old Jamila Merhi was forced from her family's home in Akbara village near Safad, Palestine in 1948. Now, 86, she lives in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon and still holds onto a copy of her family's deed for their land in Palestine. (Matthew Cassel) |
This month Israel marks the 60th anniversary of its founding. But amidst the festivities including visits by international celebrities and politicians there is deep unease -- Israel has skeletons in its closet that it has tried hard to hide, and anxieties about an uncertain future which make many Israelis question whether the state will celebrate an 80th birthday.
Official Israel remains in complete denial that the birth it celebrates is inextricably linked with the near destruction of the vibrant Palestinian culture and society that had existed until then. It's not an unfamiliar dilemma for settler states. The United States, where I live, has found that even the passage of centuries cannot absolve a nation from confronting the crimes committed at its founding.
As the noted Israeli historian and staunch Zionist Benny Morris put it in 2004, "a Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them." He went on, "there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing."
He couldn't have said that! Please tell me he did not say that!
But if one is not prepared to openly justify ethnic cleansing, there's only two real options: to deny history and take comfort in an airbrushed story that paints Israelis as brave, divinely inspired pioneers in a desert devoid of indigenous people and beset by external enemies, or to own up to the consequences and support the enormous redress needed to bring justice and peace.
Just before Israel's founding, Palestinians of all religions made up two thirds of the settled population of historic Palestine, while Jewish immigrants, recently arrived from Europe, made up most of the rest.
Among those uprooted was my mother, then nine years old. Now living in Amman, she remembers a happy childhood in her native Jerusalem neighborhood of Lifta. My grandfather owned several buildings and many of his tenants were Jews, including the family who rented the downstairs apartment in their house.
Early in 1948 -- before any Arab states' armies got involved -- she and her entire family, indeed all the inhabitants of several neighboring West Jerusalem areas, were forced out by Zionist militias. On 7 February that year, Israel's founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion told members of his party, "From your entry into Jerusalem, through Lifta-Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, through King George Street and Mea Shearim -- there are no strangers [i.e. Arabs]. One hundred percent Jews." So it was that the Palestinians became "strangers" in the land of their birth.
Since that time millions of refugees and their descendants who lost their homes, farms, groves, livestock, factories, stores, tools, automobiles, bank accounts, art work, insurance policies, furniture and every other possession have lived in exile, many in squalid refugee camps maintained by Israel and Arab states. Over 80 percent of the Palestinians now besieged and starved in the Gaza Strip are refugees from towns now in Israel. But what Palestinians could never be forced to part with -- and this we do celebrate -- is our attachment to our homeland and the determination to see justice done.
Palestinians all over the world are commemorating the start of our ongoing tragedy, but we are also looking forward. We are at an important turning point, where two things are happening at once. First, despite ritual declarations of international support, the prospect of a two-state solution has all but disappeared as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are caged into walled reservations by growing Israeli settlements and settler-only roads -- a situation that resembles the bantustans of apartheid South Africa.
Second, despite Israel's efforts to keep Palestinians in check, the Palestinian population living under Israeli rule is about to exceed the five million Israeli Jews. Today there are 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and another 1.5 million Palestinians who are nominally citizens of Israel. Sometimes called "Israeli Arabs," Palestinians in Israel are increasingly restive about their second class status in a Jewish state that regards them as a hostile fifth column. While Palestinians in Israel call for equal rights in a state of all its citizens, some Israeli Jewish politicians threaten them with expulsion to the West Bank, Gaza Strip or beyond.
Official projections show that by 2025, Palestinians, due to their much higher birth rate, will exceed Israeli Jews in the country by two million and though few in the international community have woken up to this reality, a surgical separation between these populations is impossible.
Israeli leaders understand what they are up against; Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said last November: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished."
This struggle has already begun as more and more Palestinians, recognizing that statehood is unrealistic, debate and adopt the one-state solution, offering Israelis and Palestinians equal rights in the land they share. Last year, I was part of a group of Palestinians, Israelis and others who published the "One State Declaration." Inspired partly by South Africa's Freedom Charter, we set out principles for a common future in a single democratic state. Most Israelis, unsurprisingly, recoil at comparisons with apartheid South Africa. The good news for them is that the end of apartheid did not bring about the disaster many feared. Rather, it was a new dawn for all the people of the country.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). A version of this essay was originally published by The Sydney Morning Herald.
The one-state solution is the only viable one now.
Please see: Memory Hole: Future Vision of Israel
And given what I have posted here, I'm waiting for the hammer to fall on me.
Maybe the jerks think my fussing and fuming (along with the profanity) will noose me. The fact is, I DON'T CARE ANYMORE!!
I know some want us to be polite and "respectful," or use ridicule and humor and I respect that, but I've done that for OVER FIVE YEARS and WAS DISRESPECTED FOR IT!!!! I wrote the papers for years and was just dismissed, so....
As for the comedy shows, I just DON'T FIND THEM FUNNY anymore because the WAR CRIMES are SO GREAT!! Of course, Stewart covered team torture meeting in secret, while the MSM generally ignored it or made it one of their one day specials!
I came on here in September '06 for three things actually: 9/11 Truth after I finally woke up; to END the IRAQ OCCUPATION; and to keep the Republicans from stealing the '06 elections.
Well, you can see how those issues are turning out, and honestly, it has been a rather frustrating two years. That's why you are getting the (unbelievably) TAMER BILE, but the BILE NEVERTHELESS!!!
Until the INHUMAN MONSTERS who have seized control of this planet are REMOVED FROM POWER and these MASS-MURDERING OCCUPATIONS CEASE then, I'm sorry, you get the rants!
Start behaving like decent human beings and not mass-murderers, and I'll be gone!
