A Peace Initiative by the World's Women and Children

Collective Punishment of Wanton Violence and Destruction Against Gaza Civilians is Unacceptable

It appears that the 72-hour humanitarian ceasefire truce that was negotiated by the UN and the US has collapsed; the ceasefire had held for only two hours. 

According to the Haaretz, two Gaza  soldiers were spotted near "near the shaft of an infiltration tunnel" and were apparently shot. This news was reported one minute before the cease-fire went into effect (i.e. 8 am Israeli time). It is unclear when or where exactly this incident occurred, and whether it was related to the later reports of an incident at 9.30 am where two Israeli soldiers were killed, and one was allegedly captured by Gaza soldiers.

7:59 A.M.  An IDF paratroopers unit opened fire overnight at two Gaza militants who were spotted standing near the shaft of an infiltration tunnel. Direct hits were reported. In addition, IDF forces uncovered and destroyed two other tunnel shafts. (Gili Cohen) 

1:36 P.M. IDF soldier missing in Gaza, feared taken captive.

Gaza militants opened fire at IDF troops operating in the southern Gaza Strip at 9:30 A.M., and it is feared an Israeli soldier has been taken captive by Gaza militants, the IDF Spokesman says.

What has been verified by independent sources was that the Israeli military has resumed shelling in the Gaza area of Rafah, with Palestinian casualties (some 53 died), and it looks set to continue.

The Israeli's Justice Minister warned on her Facebook: “Hamas paid and will continue pay a heavy price. And if it wasn’t sufficiently clear to anyone yet, now the world knows who’s responsible for the destruction and the blood of civilians in Gaza.”

This could be more Israeli posturing before pulling out IDF ground troops from Gaza unilaterally, and without agreeing to any cease-fire demands from the Palestinian side. 

Or Israel could use this incident as a justification for continuing to kill more Palestinians, albeit at a safer distance through air strikes instead of risking its ground troops.

Either scenario does not bode well for the Palestinian civilians, and merely reinforces the status quo - Gaza remaining under a horrific and unsustainable siege (one that has been in place since 2007).

The world's super-power is clearly unwilling to do what it takes to enforce an immediate cease-fire. It is occupied over the dilemma of providing for one of its "best friends in the world" by giving Israel $225 million to boost its Iron Dome system and ensuring that its American "children have a future" by not increasing America's debt. We will see which priority wins out eventually.

When Obama demanded an immediate cease-fire last week during the massacres in Shujaiyya, it was promptly ignored by Israel.

International Flotilla of Only Women and Children: Break the Siege in Gaza

What can people of conscience do then? Besides the boycotts, prayer vigils and speaking out against the wanton violence?

Over the last few days, there was some excitement over the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH)'s announcement that it would send another flotilla packed with medical supplies, generators and prefab homes to Gaza later this year. It reportedly was seeking armed protection from the Turkish army and the UN. IHH had sent in a similar flotilla in 2010, but it was raided by the IDF. Nine activists on board the ship were shot and killed by IDF commandos. The flotilla's aim to break the siege then was unsuccessful.

A recent report claims that IHH will apparently not be sending in a second flotilla. The report claims this agreement was reached after Israel agreed to allow Turkey to fly in aid to Gaza (this is yet to be verified by independent sources).

However, the flotilla idea is nevertheless an idea worth looking at, perhaps with some tweaks. A second flotilla sent in at this time would signal to Israel that the international community will not stand for wanton violence and destruction against a civilian population. The impact on children and women have been devastating (40% of the Gaza population is under 14 years of age).

What better way for the world to show its peace-loving stance, then by sending its own women and children in an international flotilla to Gaza at this crucial time? 

In the first flotilla, the passengers were mostly international activists, and volunteers from around the world, including men. 

Sending only women and children from around the world (perhaps apart from male crew needed to steer the ship) can be a symbolic act - paying tribute to the scores of innocent women and children affected by Israel's collective punishment on Gaza.

Having only women and children passengers on board the ship also leaves the passengers free from being accused by the IDF as being potentially dangerous (as happened with the first flotilla). Journalists and independent observers should board the ship and check it to ensure only legitimate aid and supplies are carried (i.e. no weapons).

Admittedly, this also leaves the women and children passengers completely vulnerable to potential IDF attacks, just as the the women and children of Gaza are open to attacks. But that itself is a huge symbolic statement, and Israel would find it hard pressed to attack a ship of only women and children, especially one that is represented by all of the countries in this world. One that would be watched by everyone in the world.

Since international law deems that an attempt by a state-sponsored organization to break a blockade by another sovereign state can be viewed as an act of war against the latter state, then this initiative should be driven by women and children that represent as many countries in the world as possible - A peace initiative spearheaded by individual women and children of the world FOR the women and children of Gaza.

If diplomacy has not broken the siege of Gaza for years now, and cannot stop the wanton bloodshed, maybe it is time for the rest of us - people of conscience - to step in and act.

Add your own ideas, start talking, and spread it. 

Is the Violence and Destruction in Gaza a Deliberate Israeli Policy?

Is the Deadly Violence and Destruction in Gaza a Deliberate Israeli Military Policy?

Israel's Operation Protective Edge military campaign against Gaza is now entering its seventh day. The death toll in Gaza is rapidly rising (reaching 183 as of July 14, 2014), and it has now surpassed the death toll in the last major Israeli military campaign in Gaza, i.e., Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012, which saw 171 Palestinians killed. 

The Israeli government has repeatedly stated that it is prepared to continue the aerial bombardment of Gaza despite the rising civilian casualties (the UN has reported that 77% of the Palestinians killed in the bombardment are civilians and two-thirds of the injured are women and children). It has also stationed thousands of its troops on the border with Gaza, with warnings that a land invasion is imminent. And on July 13, 2014, it was reported that the Israeli military had made its first ground incursion into Gaza, exchanging fire with Hamas soldiers, with an intent to disable a Hamas rocket site. This came a day after a particularly bloody aerial bombardment campaign in which at least 53 Palestinians were killed in their homes. Soon after this land incursion, it was reported that the Israeli military dropped leaflets in 3 neighborhoods of a northern Gaza area called Beit Lahiya, telling its residents to leave their homes before an impending attack. There are 70,000 Palestinians living in the Beit Lahiya area. Although, Hamas dismissed the Israeli warnings as "psychological warfare", the UN reported that at least 4000 Palestinians from Beit Lahiya have fled to Gaza city, holing up in UN-run schools; up to 17,000 Palestinians in all from northern Gaza have sought refuge in various UN facilities.

The UN also reports that the Israeli military has made phone calls to households in various Gaza neighborhoods, playing recorded messages, warning its residents to evacuate their homes - while people have not taken heed thus far, the UN reports that should things worsen in coming days, 300,000 Palestinians could be displaced.

Bombs Dropped in Gaza by the Israeli Military

Even if the mainstream media and certain world leaders attempt to sanitize (or even rationalize) the brutality of the aerial attacks on the Palestinians, and the consequent catastrophic destruction of people's living spaces and essential infrastructure in Gaza, the devastating human toll of Israel's military campaign on the civilians in Gaza is evident via the social media, where raw images are published and shared. 

Israel's standard refrain of self-defense, which it has used repeatedly in previous military campaigns against Palestinians, i.e., the air strikes are meant to disable Hamas' ability to send rockets into Israel, do not easily resonate with as many people, as it may have done in the past. By the Israeli military's own account, its Iron Dome missile shield is successfully intercepting the Hamas rockets. So far, there has been no reports of Israeli fatalities or serious injuries from the Hamas rocket fire compared to the large numbers of fatalities and injured civilians in Gaza that has been inflicted by the Israeli military. Furthermore, despite the deadly air strikes that Israel claims is targeting Hamas rocket installations "hidden" in civilian residences/mosques/hospitals/schools, Israel has not reported an abatement of Hamas rockets fired into their country. This then lends credence to the growing criticism that Israel is using disproportionate force.

In Israel's two other recent major military campaigns against the Palestinians, one can argue that there is an observable pattern of Israeli military engagement with the Palestinians - an engagement that inflicts as much human suffering and deadly carnage, and infrastructure destruction to Palestinians so as to demonstrate Israeli military dominance and thus gain a period of peace through deterrence. 

This engagement policy was apparently developed out of Israel's failures during the 2006 war with South Lebanon, which led to the Dahiyah Doctrine.

In 2008, one top Israeli military officer is quoted saying with regards to the Dahiyah Doctrine: "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases," he said. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized." 

Another top Israeli military officer states: "The answer to rocket and missile threats from Syria, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip is a disproportionate strike at the heart of the enemy's weak spot, in which efforts to hurt launch capability are secondary. As soon as the conflict breaks out, the IDF will have to operate in a rapid, determined, powerful and disproportionate way against the enemy's actions. This strike has to be carried out as quickly as possible, through prioritizing strikes at its assets, rather than chasing after launch sites. Such a response is likely to be remembered by decision makers in Syria and Lebanon for many years, thus deepening deterrence." 

Some months after the above comments by the Israeli generals, the Israel's Operation Cast Lead began with devastating consequences, amid revelations that even chemical warfare was used by Israeli military against the civilian population in Gaza.

Operation Cast Lead (2008): Palestinians killed - 1,391. Israelis killed - 13.

Operation Pillar of Defense (2012): Palestinians killed - 171. Israelis killed - 6.

Operation Protective Edge (2014): Palestinians killed so far (July 14, 2014) - 183. Israelis killed - 0.

By one journalist's account, Hamas rocket firings, which averaged 240 per month in 2007 had dropped to five per month in 2013, which was at a "tolerable" level, with no Israeli fatalities, barring the six during exchanges in Operation Pillar of Defense in 2012.

If there was relative peace throughout these last few years, why then have the situation escalated drastically?

Possible Purposeful Escalation by Israel

Some have suggested, such as an American Jewish group and a Jewish writer that the Israeli government created an incendiary environment that was conducive to an escalation after three Israeli young men were kidnapped and murdered. Racist commentary targeted at Arabs in the Israeli media creating mass hysteria, false accusations, raiding Palestinian homes, and arbitrary arrests and detainment of hundreds of Palestinians during a three-week search for the missing young men; all of this done, when it was already known that the men had been killed a mere hours after being abducted by unknown assailants. This crucial information was with-held creating a tense situation

Israel pinned the blame on two Palestinian men that they claimed were Hamas members, an assertion that was denied by the men's family members and friends, as well as Hamas itself. After a Palestinian boy was kidnapped and burned alive in a revenge attack, things further deteriorated. And still, Hamas wanted to avoid conflict. Its political head, Khaled Meshal even went so far as to ask Turkey to intervene in the crisis with Israel and to convey a message that Hamas was interested in calming things down.

When Israel killed a Hamas member on June 29 in an air strike, and the Hamas rockets started again (the first since the 2012 cease-fire), which allowed Israel to begin its air strikes with impunity.

Restoring the Power Balance

It has been suggested that Hamas had begun to build up an arsenal of weapons while the Morsi administration was governing in Egypt, allegedly with the latter's help. While it may be difficult for Hamas to do so now with the Sisi administration in Egypt, the perception that Hamas was re-building military capability might have been enough of a concern to Israel. For instance, in March 2014, the Israeli navy claimed to have intercepted a ship headed to Gaza - on board were 40 rockets with 100 mile range.

In this current engagement, Hamas has managed to send rockets to Dimona (location of Israel's nuclear reactors) which is located nearly 65 kilometers from Gaza. And Israeli military spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that a Hamas rocket that struck the town of Hadera, more than 70 miles from Gaza was, similar to those found on the ship stopped by Israel in march. Lerner was quoted as saying: “We said back then that this was a game-changer."

If Israel indeed took advantage of the situation surrounding the three missing (then murdered) young Israeli men, then they may have done so to restore its perceived notion of a power balance. And it is doing so by using its tried and tested Dahiyah Doctrine to display disproportionate power to inflict as much violence and destruction as necessary.

So when Khaled Meshaal of Hamas says that the war was "forced upon us", there would appear to be some truth to it. And as usual, it is the people of Gaza that suffers.

Boston Marathon Attacks: Foreign Terrorists or Sick Americans?

Boston Marathon Attacks and the Guessing Game as to who the Perpetrators are

With sinking trepidation in my heart, I perused the news about the recent Boston marathon attacks. It was almost inconceivable that this had occurred in a city so dear and near to my consciousness – a city that had left its indelible presence on my very being. This was the city where I had experienced many firsts from the insignificant first date to the momentous first car purchase to the financially empowering first real job, and innumerable other firsts; it was my home for more than one third of my life.

Boston was never the glamorous Los Angeles, nor was it the exciting New York that everyone knew and dreamt about. But to me, part of Boston’s charm was in its unchanging quiet strength. Now the world’s eyes are upon this city, and sadly for all of the wrong reasons.

The reaction to the attacks has been predictably swift. Instantly, there were speculations that this was an act of terrorism by foreign perpetrators. Scores of Muslim Americans, and Muslims worldwide instinctively braced themselves for a backlash, while hoping that the perpetrators would not happen to share their faith. Muslim organizations, no less the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, felt compelled to issue out strong declarations of condemnation, lest there were doubts. Within days, troubling news reports emerged of  people of Muslim ethnicity being targeted: Muslim women in their give-away headscarves being harassed and threatened; Muslim man beaten up in New York; and false accusations of being the marathon perpetrators.

One of the more troubling reactions to me was that of a young Saudi Arabian foreign student who happened to be at the scene. He found himself under scrutiny almost instantly by a fellow bystander who had tackled him after the attacks because he had been acting "suspiciously" before and after the attacks. Despite being injured like so many of the other spectators who were unfortunate enough to have been there that day, he, unlike the others, was interrogated, and then had his apartment searched. He was labeled as a potential suspect, and had his name and his Facebook pictures propagated by certain segments of the all-too-eager and all-too-willing new media, despite statements to the contrary by law enforcement. Hours later, it became apparent that the Saudi student had nothing at all to do with the attacks. His "suspicious" behavior notwithstanding.

Outside of the US, another kind of reaction is gaining traction. As soon as the news of the Boston attacks hit, people began tweeting and forwarding news reports that 30 children and women at a wedding in Afghanistan had been killed by US air strikes on the very same day! The emphasis was on whether it was justified that this news went under-reported while the death of one child in Boston was at the foremost of the news. Was the life of an American child more news-worthy (and hence more valuable) than one of an Afghan child? The incident in the widely circulated report turned out to have actually occurred in 2002. Still it takes nothing away from the main point – a quick check of recent news pulls up disturbing information. For instance, just recently, on April 7, 2013, 11 Afghan children were killed in an airstrike by US-led NATO coalition forces. And as anyone that follows the news would know, this is not an isolated incident, but as a result of a systemic NATO plan of dealing with insurgents in Afghanistan with airstrikes and drone attacks. Civilians are often caught in the cross-fire.

Most of us know this happens. And most of us choose not to react. Our eyes gloss over the news reports of deaths of innocent civilians. After all, this happens in faraway lands where violence is part and parcel of life there. But when it happens in familiar ground, in lands that are most like ours, only then do we pay attention.

As it is with me. I cam across one picture of a man whose leg was torn by the bomb blast, his arteries clearly visible. This was one image that was actually befitting the usual graphic advisory warning. This made me think about the many lost limbs elsewhere too.

Above, a picture of Syrians showing their solidarity Bostonians.

It does not matter who did this - so this dichotomy of who could have possibly done such a dastardly act - foreign terrorists OR sick Americans that does not exist. Whatever the perpetrator's motivations are, anyone who wished harm on innocent people in this way have to be sick in their minds. So ultimately, these perpetrators, whoever they are, are simply sick terrorists.

We need to check ourselves and our reactions when such unfortunate incidents happen.

Stop. Be human. It isn't difficult.

Deadly Clashes Erupt in Libyan City

Aljazeera has just reported that clashes have erupted in the Libyan city of Zawiya.

"We are fighting with the pro-Gaddafi followers. Gaddafi followers still exist and we're still tracking them down and capturing them. We will clean the country of them."

Mohamed Sayeh, a member of Libya's interim government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), played down the fighting.

He told the Reuters news agency it was an attack of men from Zawiya who wanted control of the Imaya military base, and who had been misled by a rumour that Gaddafi loyalists were in the area.

The incoming prime minister, Abdurrahim El-Keib, has promised to disarm the country and set up a national army, but has yet to announce a concrete timetable or form a government.

Source: Aljazeera

The statement - We will clean the country of them - is ominous at a minimum. I wonder if this portends a future civil strife in Libya.

The armed men in Libya are not going to disarm willingly, and they do appear bent on ridding the country of opponents (or any perceived opponents).

This does not bode well at all for Libya.

An Article Worth Reading: Oxford University Professor Avi Shlaim on Gaza War

I came across this article sometime ago. It was published at the Guardian Online on Jan. 7, 2009. I meant to put it up because I thought it was a good article worth the time to read. The writer is an Israeli, an ex-IDF personnel, and someone who had actually fought in Israel's wars. He is now a professor at a top university in the UK. His conclusions bear attention....

How Israel brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe
By Avi Shlaim, Oxford University Professor of International Relations

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life in War and Peace.

Article Obtained from the Guardian (UK).

The World Watches As Gaza Burns

I can understand why so many people choose not to follow the news. Being oblivious to the pain and suffering of people so far removed would allow one to work, play and live psychologically unencumbered. But I am one of those who has to follow the news - in the past, staying informed was part of what I had to do for several reasons, partly educational and professional, now it's become a part of who I am.

So I am often haunted by horrific accounts of the injustice, turmoil and violence brought upon the innocent through the actions of humankind. And the images that stay in my mind are often the faces of the most defenseless - children caught in the middle of a strife they cannot comprehend. Be it the beseeching big eyes of the nameless Rwandan child on Time magazine way back then, or little Mohammad al-Dura's final moments as he huddled by his father amidst gunfire. God only knows how many other innocents suffer, robbed of a childhood, or are taken away in violence.

The continuing crisis in Gaza bothers me for many reasons - now I have to contend with new images to add to my already burdensome gallery of conscience. When people accuse the Israeli military of being baby killers, I do think, given the facts on the ground, it's a literal assessment of the reality.

It is difficult to rationalize the continuation of a mission with an aim of "preventing rocket fire capability" when it's still not achieveable after 19 days and nearly 1000 Palestinian deaths (most of them civilians, and over 300 of them children). By comparsion, deaths incurred by the Israelis through Hamas rockets is a handful (but apparently a handful too much in the unjust scale of human life value). The disproportionate death ratio should be evidence enough that the "weaponry" arsenal of Hamas is limited and out-dated, compared to the Israeli arsenal, which is the best and modern weaponry available (obtained from the US).

Depending on where you stand, the Israeli attacks can be viewed as an act of defense in response to rocket attacks, or an illegal act under international law, which requires the occupier (Israel) to maintain responsibilities and obligations to the people (Gazans) it is occupying; that is not do all the things Israel did prior to the attacks.

But one would be hard pressed to argue that Israel's defense argument is still valid given the situation unfolding - Israel has now committed blatant criminal acts, for example, through the use of chemical weapons (Human Rights Watch has reported that Israel is dropping them into Gaza's dense residential areas) and the preventing medical personnel from carrying out their duties in evacuating the wounded (Red Cross found barely alive children next to their dead mothers in a village).

Israel has argued that the continuation of the sporadic rocket fire is justification enough to carry out the war, never mind the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of their miliary actions. But to expect Hamas to stop their attempts at defense when faced with Israel's relentless onslaught is farcical. Like it or not, Hamas is the democratically elected representative of the Gaza people - it is their duty to protect the citizens.

Someone (I would expect the more powerful nation) has to be the one to say enough is enough - but Israel has refused to step up to its obligations to be a responsible nation. What bothers Israel most is that Hamas is even attempting to fight back, posturing and showing defiance in the face of death. What Israel fears by withdrawing would be Hamas declaring a victory, by virtue of having survived the onslaught.

Israel desires an outright psychological defeat in the minds of the Palestinians more than anything else - but it fails to understand that a people with nothing to lose, have nothing to fear.

A Palestinian child, when asked by a reporter why he chose to throw stones at an unseen enemy, and not run to cover when the Israeli air strikes began, replied that it was pointless to run when the bombs would reach him faster than wherever he could run to.

Human Rights Watch: Israel Violating International Law by Using Chemical Weapons

Have you seen the videos of air bombs falling ito Gaza and wondered what the whitish powder was? Well, it's not smoke from the fires apparently. Human Rights Watch have reported that the white powder is actually from the white phosphorous bombs that Israel is dropping into Gaza.

Well, this is a violation of international law (never mind the fact that the war was already a violation of international law).

While international law allows such chemical weapons to be used in battlefields as a smokescreen, the material is considered dangerous in residential areas due to the severe burns it inflicts, as well as its highly flammable quality.

From Haaretz:
"Based on his observations last week, HRW military analyst Mark Garlasco determined that the IDF is using the material, although the army has not confirmed its use.

In 2006 Israel acknowledged for the first time that it had attacked Hezbollah targets during the second Lebanon war with phosphorus shells. Until then Israel had maintained that it only used such bombs to mark targets or territory.

Phosphorus has been used by armies since World War I. During World War II and Vietnam the U.S. and British armies made extensive use of phosphorus. During recent decades the tendency has been to ban the use of phosphorus munitions against any target, civilian or military, because of the severity of the injuries that the substance causes".

Using such chemical weapons in densely populated Gaza is a criminal act.

Seems that the rule of law is only for the select few.

This is how a dead victim of phosphorus bombs looks like.

If you are American, here is what you can do, as suggested by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR):

URGENT ACTION REQUESTED: (As always, be POLITE and RESPECTFUL.)

1. Call your U.S. Representative and urge her or him to ensure that any resolutions or statements coming from Congress are balanced and promote peace with justice. This will ensure that the international community does not perceive that the U.S. government is divided on the goal of bringing a just and durable peace. (Find suggested talking points below.)

Call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask for your representative's office.

2. Call the House Speaker and Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and urge them to ensure that any resolutions or statements coming from Congress are balanced and promote peace with justice. This will ensure that the international community does not perceive that the U.S. government is divided on the goal of bringing a just and durable peace. (Find suggested talking points below.)

(If you are not a constituent be sure to mention that you are calling them in their leadership roles. If you reach an answering machine, feel free to leave a message.)

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House
Phone: (202) 225-0100
Webform: http://speaker.house.gov/contact/

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA)
Phone: 202-225-4695
Webform: http://www.house.gov/berman/contact/
Berman is chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Call the committee at: 202-225-5021

Sample talking points:

I urge you to ensure that any congressional resolutions or statements relating to the Middle East conflict are balanced and promote peace with justice in the region.
Balanced statements will ensure that the international community does not perceive that the U.S. government is divided on the goal of bringing a just and durable peace.

As you may know, Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians block efforts to bring peace with justice to the Middle East, harm our nation’s image and interests worldwide and strengthen voices of extremism in the region.

The Palestinian people must be given some hope of freedom from Israeli occupation and domination and Israel’s immoral and illegal collective punishment of the Palestinian people living in the Gaza Strip must end.

I also believe American taxpayer dollars should not be used to for weapons that kill civilians.

3. Sign CAIR's Online Petition urging our nation's leaders to speak "in favor of peace and justice for all parties in the current humanitarian crisis unfolding in the Gaza Strip." When completed, the petition will be sent to elected officials nationwide and will be given to members of the current and incoming administrations. Go to: http://petition.cair.com/

4. Pray for all those who are suffering and oppressed.

The Atrocities Continue in Gaza - The Children Suffer

It is 15 days and counting. To date the Israeli military operation have caused 854 Palestinians to be killed in Gaza; aid workers say that one-third of that figure are children. Keeping in mind that more than half of the population in Gaza are children, that figure may be much higher than reported. There are also 3680 injured Palestinians.

Reports by aid workers who have managed to enter the embattled areas have depicted the scenes as devastating - little children, weak and barely clinging on to life were found next to their dead mothers, little toddlers dead, and dead bodies of an extended family strewn in a village.

A UN aid worker described the Gaza civilians as being“the meat in the sandwich,” because they cannot flee anywhere since the borders are closed.

Here are some interesting facts obtained from a New York Times article - you can get a sense of how the atrocities are being perpetuated.

"The Israelis say they are also using new weapons, like a small-diameter smart bomb, the GBU-39, which Israel bought last fall from Washington".

"Israeli intelligence officers are telephoning Gazans and, in good Arabic, pretending to be sympathetic Egyptians, Saudis, Jordanians or Libyans, Gazans say and Israel has confirmed"

"They aim the missiles at empty areas of the roofs to frighten residents into leaving the buildings, a tactic called a knock on the roof".

"The most important strategic decision the Israelis have made so far, according to senior military officers and analysts, is to approach their incursion as a war, not a police operation".

"Civilians are warned by leaflets, loudspeakers and telephone calls to evacuate battle areas. But troops are instructed to protect themselves first and civilians second".

"As the commander of the army’s elite combat engineering unit, Yahalom, told the Israeli press on Wednesday: “We are very violent. We do not balk at any means to protect the lives of our soldiers.” His name cannot be published under censorship rules."

"While The New York Times and some other news organizations have local or Gaza-based Palestinian correspondents, any Israeli citizen or Israeli with dual citizenship has been banned for more than two years from entering Gaza, and any foreign correspondent who did not enter the territory before a six-month cease-fire with Hamas ended last month has not been allowed in".

"Israel has also managed to block cellphone bandwidth, so very few amateur cellphone photographs are getting out of Gaza".

"In one widely reported episode, 43 people died when the Israelis shelled a street next to a United Nations school in northern Jabaliya where refugees were taking shelter. The United Nations says no militants were in the school"

The few pictures of the war in Gaza that have come out are horrific. It is all the more worse because Gaza has so many young children, and they bear the brunt of the war in more ways than just the physical risk of death. It would be easy to look away from such horror, but I think it is important to bear witness to the pain of the innocent.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “Fear the cry of the oppressed, for there is no barrier between it and God."

Fiqh-us-Sunnah, Volume 3, Number 1

What CAN we do to stop this injustice?

We can pray for there to be peace, and for the innocent deaths to stop.

We can spread what we know about this conflict through our writing and speaking.

When we hear misinformation, we should do what we can to stop it from spreading. The worst thing you can do is to stay silent because you are afraid of speaking the truth for fear of being labelled "extremist", "anti-semite" or "terrorist-lover" when you know different.

Speak out against injustice, for your silence may one day come to hurt you too.


Dead Mother and her Dead Children

Grieving over a Dead Baby

Dead Palestinian Children

A Palestinian man carries his son wounded in Israeli army operations into Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009. (AP Photo/Ashraf Amra)

Palestinians carry a boy into Shifa hospital in Gaza City, wounded during the Israeli army operation in Gaza, Sunday Jan. 4, 2009. (AP Photo/Ashraf Amra)

A Child holds a banner reading, " Don't Kill the Children," during a protest after Friday prayer in front of the U.S. embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Jan. 9, 2009

Analysis of Israel's Motives in Gaza

Israel's Motives

The following is my attempt at an analysis of Israel's motives behind the Gaza massacres.

Israel has said that the aim of its military operations in Gaza is to stop Hamas from launching rockets into Southern Israel. It is portrayed as a defensive act framed under "war on terror". Israel say it has tried to target key Hamas installations and infrastructures that enable the rocket attacks. So far, they have air bombed shopping centres, public squares, police stations, residential housings, mosques, universities and schools, and in the process also destroyed more than half of Gaza's ambulances.

That in itself shows the difficulty of Israel's attempt in achieving its objective in a place like Gaza: densely populated with little safe haven for civilians to run to when the bombs start falling. The UN has estimated that at least one-third of the casualities so far in Gaza are civilians. With the ground offensive underway, that number will only increase. As an indication of what may come to pass, Human Rights Watch reported that the last time Israeli tanks moved into Gaza, more than half of the Palestinian casualities were civilian.


Gaza by Latuff

There is no way Israel can limit its damage to Hamas installations or militants without adversely affecting the civilian population, and Israel knows this. Given the extent of the damage from Israel's military actions - the heavy costs bourne by the Gaza civilian population, the media reporting of the casualities that serves only to fuel public shock and anger against Israel's actions, and the eventual detereoration of Israel's public image worldwide, why would Israel even embark on such a mission? It is pure madness on Israel's part?

On the contrary, there is method (or a rationale) to this. Israel's military incursion is part of a broader plan to enforce a peace on its own terms. Yes, Israel is after peace (it needs peace), but it is after a peace that is established on its own terms.

However, Israel cannot achieve what it wants through an agreement with Hamas. Ever since Hamas was democratically elected by the Gaza people in 2006, it has been a constant thorn at Israel's side. Efforts to stymie Hamas' ability to govern under the mandate of the Gaza people had the effect of strengthening its appeal. Despite what Israel did (essentially turning Gaza into a prison camp through illegal blockades - Gazans had no control over its own borders - land, air and sea, and were reduced to begging for food, medicine and fuel) Hamas only grew stronger in Gaza, and this weakened the only other party in Gaza that Israel could negotiate with.

Negotiating with Hamas would have been unthinkable for Israel - not because of the rocket attacks, nor because Hamas was deemed a "terrorist group" (afterall history has shown that Israel negotiated with the formerly labelled terrorist group, PLO) but because it would have been perceived by people (especially Arab people) as having been forced by Hamas' militant stance. And that would not have bode well for Israel's future security - a country surrounded by a sea of Arab neighbors. Already Israel believes that the net effect of Israel's pull-out from Lebanon in 2006 was to embolden Hamas who had hoped to emulate Hezbollah's achievements in that regard.

Israel was widely perceived to have lost its teeth - and indeed the defeat in Lebanon showed the limits to the Israeli military. Compound that perception with the rise of Hamas in Gaza, who had effectively solidified its position in the past two years.

The Israeli military operations then aim to accomplish three objectives (1) the forcible weakening (or removal) of Hamas (2) demonstrating the might of the Israeli military (3) re-establishing Israel's deterrent power by signaling to Arab nations that Israel can act militarily under the frame of defense (or war on terror) if it chooses to, and it will not be reined in by the world.

How can Israel benefit from achieving the objectives above? Firstly, it re-establishes Israel to a position of power. Second, peace or cease-fire negotiations with the remmants of Hamas (whoever is left standing after the war) and the PA in West Bank would now be acceptable to Israel since it would be stemming from its renewed position of power, and also because Hamas would not be in a position to dictate terms, weakened as it is. The underlying assumption would be that the civilian population would be war-weary enough to support opportunities for peace, even if under terms that are undesirable. Already efforts are underway to turn the Gaza civilian population against Hamas - recordings, such as this one as reported on CNN, are played in phone calls to Gaza civilians:"Urgent message, warning to the citizens of Gaza. Hamas is using you as human shields. Do not listen to them. Hamas has abandoned you and are hiding in their shelters."

This assumption can backfire though because the Israeli operations have not discriminated between Hamas and the civilian population. Besides Hamas has had a track record of providing for the Gaza civilian population, and beleaguering Hamas might sway people to their side.

Still, any peace process (or any ceasefire agreement or truce) would likely be pushed by the world community under the guidance of the new Obama administration, compelled by the horrors of the recent war. But any peace that ensues from such an agreement though may be short-lived, especially if the terms are overtly favoring one party over another. And as a new generation of Palestinians form, the cycle of violence may begin once more.

A hefty price for strategizing toward the short-term gains.

Israel's Attacks on Gaza

Israel has refused to cease its attacks on Gaza despite the massive humanitarian crisis unfolding there. Gaza civilians who had already been deprived of food, medicine and fuel for months before the attacks, are now overwhelmed by the carnage inflicted on them by Israel.

Gaza hospitals are unable to cope with the overwhelming numbers of injured people flooding the hospital. Hospital staff are overworked, and they also operate in fear of their own lives as even Gaza medical personnel are not safe from the Israelis bombs. Israelis are bombing ambulances. They have no way of alleviating the pain of those suffering, as they lack much-needed medical supplies. Not every injured Gazan is able to make it to the hospital anyway, some prefering to stay home and suffer for fear of being bombed on route to hospitals, or as an NYT article put it:"risk driving through streets of pummeled buildings and concrete shards".

But Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has audaciously claimed that "there is no humanitarian crisis and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce".

The soon-to-be US president, Obama Barack has already happily set the tone for his new administration's dealing with Israel by giving the greenlight for Israel's continued genocidal acts now and in the future: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” Obama said. “And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

Israel claimed initially that their attacks were a response to Hamas's act of sending rockets into Israel after the six-month cease-fire ended on Dec. 19. They claimed that their primary mission in the attacks is to stop Hamas from firing rockets into civilian areas of Israel.

But anyone who has been following the developments, know that Israel prevented open border crossings at Gaza to the detriment of its civilian population for long months.

Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said in a statement that considering "the cruelty and unlawfulness of the Gaza blockade ... it would seem mandatory for the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law."

He added: "Some governments of the world are complicit by continuing their support politically and economically for Israel's punitive approach."

Israel have tried their utmost since Hamas became the elected government in Gaza to weaken Hamas' position, prevent them from governing and providing for their people. Israel's main intention all along has been to topple Hamas, and futher weaken Gazans so that they remain unrepresented by a government that actually advocates on their behalf.

The lack of response from the world has only solidified Israel's murdereous intent.

Israel will continue until Gaza is sufficiently decimated. Israel does not want to deal with anyone on an *equal* basis, much less the Palestinians. The only peace acceptable to Israel would be the one dictated to by Israel.

Meanwhile, the weak, vulnerable and the most innocent of the Gaza population - the children - suffer.

"But there were several children in another intensive care unit on Tuesday. Among them was Ismael Hamdan, 8, who had severe brain damage as well as two broken legs, according to a doctor there. Earlier that day, two of his sisters, Lama, 5, and Hayya, 12, were killed.

“I prepared them breakfast that day in the garden,” said their mother, Ayda, 36. “They had the tea, bread and thyme. Lama wanted a second pita, but we all teased her saying, ‘Keep it for lunch.’ She told us, ‘Don’t worry, God will provide us with bread.’

“She made all of us laugh,” the mother said. “I cleaned after them and collected the garbage. Ismael volunteered to dump the garbage, but Hayya and Lama joined him. The garbage can is in front of the house, a five-minute walk away. All of a sudden I heard the news from a neighbor, and I ran barefoot to the hospital. A relative collected the bodies of Lama and Hayya on a donkey cart.

“The neighbors ran trying to save Ismael, who was the only one breathing,” she said. “They say my kids flew 40 meters before hitting the ground.”

Ismael died Wednesday night."

Source: NYT, Dec. 31, 2008

Ismael, before he passed away. Dec. 31, 2008.
Source: Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

These Palestinian children do not have the chance to live a proper childhood that so many of us elsewhere take for granted. Do they not have the right to grow up, to exist?

If Palestinian children are not caught in the crossfire first, they are forced to grow up faster than they should. The excerpted NYT news report below has a journalist obtaining comments from two young Palestinian boys on the political situation, as if they were grown-ups. How warped is that?

Approach two Israeli boys of that same age and you will see the vast difference - Israeli boys would be cocooned safely in their homes, coddled by their parents, and armed with video games as boys that age usually are.

Palestinian boys are forced to defend themselves with stones. That is unjust.

At the Shuafat refugee camp on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem on Sunday, masked Palestinian youths burned tires and used slingshots to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers.

Mohammed, 13, predicted bloody Hamas reprisals. “Hamas will be the one that will bomb green Egged buses, and we will go back to the way it was,” he said, referring to the Israeli bus carrier that is often a target of suicide bombers.

Others were more doubtful. Ahmad, 14, said he supported “neither one nor the other,” complaining that Hamas and Fatah spent too much time fighting each other instead of working for Palestinian unity.

Source: NYT, Dec. 29, 2008

Dead Palestinian Child Carried. Jan. 1, 2009.
Source: Ismail Zaydah/Reuters

Israel is always adamant that everyone acknowledge their "right to exist". But one only has rights, if one is responsible. When a murderer attacks with impunity, he is deemed a danger to society. When he is caught, his rights are taken away, and he is locked up. In some other societies, he is even put to death.

When Israel has reneged upon its responsibilities to be a responsible nation in the world, time and time again, one has to ask if it has come time for Israel's rights to be taken away.

No longer can I say with my conscience intact that present day Israel has the right to exist, in the manner it has been existing. I do not mean all Israelis should be put away in jails, or murdered. Rather perhaps a superpower should occupy Israel (much like the way US had occupied Iraq), disarm the state, and force it into compliance - that is, force it to accept a just two-state solution so that finally the Palestinians can have their turn to exist and live the good life that has been denied them for too long.

Of course, this will not happen.

But for the first time in my life, I think I can fully appreciate it when people state that Israel has no right to exist - certainly, Israel as it is today has no right to exist - it is nothing more than a murderous thug.

And murderous thugs should be restrained.

If enough of us in this world are vocal enough about our abhorence towards Israel's acts, then perhaps our leaders would be compelled to restrain Israel, and help it change its behavior.

Is that too much to hope for?

Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoe At Bush

This would be funny, under different circumstances - an Iraqi man throws his shoes at President George W. Bush during a a news conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The shoes missed their target (sadly, I wouldadd) and instead landed against the wall behind the two leaders.

The room erupted in chaos and the Iraqi man was dragged away. Bush later claimed that the room (other Iraqi reporters) were shouting their apologies.

The assailant was later identified as television correspondent Muntadar al-Zeidi.

"This is a farewell kiss, you dog," he yelled in Arabic. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

Excerpts from an AP report:
"The crowd descended on al-Zeidi, who works for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt. He was wrestled to the ground by security officials and then hauled away, moaning as they departed the room. Later, a trail of fresh blood could be seen on the carpet, although the source was not known. In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt."

The mass murderer gets shoes thrown at him. Big deal. Iraqi children, women and men have had to contend with shells, bombs, strip searches, imprisonment, humilliation and contempt as a result of Bush's pugnacious war policies. So kudos to the journalist who had the guts to do what so many of us wish we could. Throwing shoes is the least of what this man deserves.

It is not only the Iraqis such as al-Zeidi who are counting to the days when Bush will no longer be President. The world looks foward to it. Good riddance.

I hope that the Iraqi journalist is not tortured in prison by his fellow Iraqis.

One Jewish Suggestion to Counter Terror

I received an email from CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) a few days ago with a link to an article published in an American-Jewish newspaper called the 5 Towns Jewish Times. The author of the article had advocated the killing of innocent Muslim civilians as an "appropriate response" to terror acts committed by those claiming to be co-religionists.

Only a few hours after the article was posted online (and after I had visited it myself), the article link on the website was no longer valid. A search of the 5 Towns Jewish Times showed that the article had been removed. However, the print version of the article is still available in a PDF format of the whole newspaper.

I thought I would post the article on my blog for readers to make an independent assessment of the thought-processes of this Jewish writer. And the thought-processes of the 5 Towns Jewish Times editor who had believed it was ethical to publish the article.

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The Appropriate Response To Islamic Terror
BY LAWRENCE KULAK

Some of the greatest discoveries of medical science, most notably penicillin, have been made by sheer accident. It is a signal tragedy of our times that, in the all too conspicuous absence of competent statesmanship among the leadership of democracies around the world, the solutions to certain international security issues must also be discovered by accident.

About six months ago, there was an article published in the New York Times about an incident in Afghanistan where the U.S. military, while attempting to take out a certain Taliban terrorist, dropped a bomb on a tent that was occupied by members of his extended family, killing several women and children. The particular terrorist that was being hunted was not home at the time, although there were several others that were part of the same terrorist network who were also killed. This story ostensibly was published for the purpose of demonstrating the "horrors" of warfare, focusing primarily on the women and children in the tent who were killed, by all accounts of the U.S. military spokespeople, unintentionally.

In our dangerous age of political tentativeness and compromised militaries, however, there is an overwhelming probability that even top-ranking U.S. military commanders were unaware that they may have accidentally stumbled upon the solution to international terror.

I’ll never forget how, during the last Lebanon war with Hezbollah, an Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrant who had survived Stalin approached me, gesturing with his hand while repeating the word "tzetlach" ("notes" or "letters" in Yiddish). He was referring to the pieces of paper which were dropped by the Israeli Air Force over Lebanon warning civilians of the bombs that were about to be dropped. In the process, the Hezbollah terrorists were also warned, which may have allowed them to escape to the north in large numbers and ultimately force Israel to belatedly engage its ground troops, leading to numerous casualties and the loss of the war.

"Did Stalin drop tzetlach when he bombed Berlin during the Second World War?" my Russian immigrant friend asked, obviously comparing the militant, pro-Hezbollah Lebanese civilians to the citizens of Germany during the Holocaust. The United States, it seems, did in fact originally institute the practice of dropping leaflets over an enemy population, as it did before it bombed Dresden and Berlin, but apparently Stalin had his own ideas.

Israel was apparently afraid to stray from the U.S. precedent even if it meant risking the loss of a war. In terms of Jewish law, I think that the issue is probably clear. While no army should go out of its way to harm a civilian population in times of war, during the legitimate pursuit of an enemy that has instigated an attack against its people, a nation may defend itself with whatever means necessary, even if it includes causing death to civilians. Those who are inclined to issue knee-jerk gasps to this common sense state of affairs that is etched in the Mosaic law are probably easily forgetful of the fact that Muslim countries are routinely targeting innocent civilians via their terrorist proxies and leaving the standing armies of nations alone.

This is more or less what recently occurred in Mumbai, India. Although the attack had all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda penetration into local Pakistani Muslim terror groups, there is ample evidence of complicity by the Pakistani Intelligence Service (known as the ISI.) which has a long and well-known history of facilitating acts of terror in Indian-held Kashmir. Reports indicate that a rogue element of the ISI recently forged a link with a local terrorist commander linked to Al Qaeda, which then embarked upon a plan to target Westerners in Mumbai. The Mumbai attack signifies a change of course for Al Qaeda, which until this point had refrained from attacking India because of India’s prior course of neutrality vis-à-vis Islam’s conflicts with the West, and because of the need for its use of India as a transfer point to fly undetected in and out of Pakistan and the Afghan regions. This perhaps explains in part why India’s naval security was in such a state of low awareness and why there was not a perceived need to update their police department’s anti-terrorist training. (The Jewish Center was allegedly targeted specifically for attack for reasons stemming from the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.)

Whatever the level or degree of the Pakistani government’s complicity in the attack that is ultimately that this operation could not have been accomplished without assistance from Pakistani Intelligence. This factor makes the Mumbai attack as much of an attack on India’s sovereignty as it was an attack on its civilians and foreign visitors. As such, it cries out for some type of retaliatory attack by the Indian government.

Aside from India, however, the attack on the foreign nationals of Israel, the United States, and Great Britain by proxy also constitutes an act of war against these countries and therefore legitimizes the infiltration of Pakistani territory for the purpose of pursuing the aggressors. While a generalized war with Pakistan should not be contemplated or pursued, it may be unavoidable, depending upon the vigilance with which Pakistan seeks to defend the terrorists within its borders.

The retaliation that is undertaken should strike hard at the training bases, madrassa schools, and homes of all the properly identified terrorist commanders and fellow terrorists of those identified in the attack, in a series of sustained surprise attacks over a period of time that is aimed at total eradication of the entire network that coordinated this attack.

Any and all collateral damage in the form of casualties to friends, relatives, or anyone connected to the lives of these terrorists should be swiftly ignored. Public opinion and what is written in the newspapers should also be ignored by nations seeking to avenge the death of its innocent civilians.

When terrorists undertake to hide behind a sovereign government and to attempt to hide within its borders, it becomes the responsibility of that government to take swift action to flush them out and to neutralize them. Pakistan has obviously not done this, and is itself responsible for failing to purge itself of rogue commanders who facilitated the carnage in Mumbai. It must now step aside and let the foreign governments whose citizens have been mercilessly attacked take the proper course of action. George W. Bush certainly knows how to do it, and if his heart will be in the right place, so does Barack Obama.

As for the Islamic terrorists themselves, there has been a universal ineptitude in understanding their mentalities and how they work. Primarily because of leftist leaders and public sympathy with revolutionary mindsets, which have in cancerous fashion infiltrated the efficient workings of Western governments and Israel, the tactics that are necessary to defeat Islamic terror have been suppressed and discarded as politically incorrect. Many will remember how before Shimon Peres encouraged Prime Minister Rabin to embark on his infamous peace process with Arafat, the latter advocated "breaking the bones" of Arab rioters in the West Bank and Gaza as a means of putting down the intifada. Those means were apparently used for a period of time by Rabin, with much success, until his government decided to embark on a seriously unwise course of conciliation with premeditated and avowed murderers. President Bush also delivered a setback to his own war on terror when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he labeled Islam a peaceful religion that had been hijacked by radical elements. By making that statement, the president all but rejected the possibility of taking drastic action to eliminate entire terrorist networks that would of necessity cause the mass deaths of other potential operatives, and those others clandestinely associated with the actual terrorists, who provide means of support.

Contrary to all attention that has been given to the Muslim shaheed’s pursuit of the 72 virgins, the idea of martyrdom in Islam is really more of an exaggerated spin-off of good old fashioned American machismo and hero worship. A Muslim will seek martyrdom in order to bring honor to himself and to his family, just as a Muslim will kill others even within his own family to prevent or offset a similar association with dishonor or shame. If he knows that his family will all be killed, and there will be nobody left after him to claim that honor, he will be left with little reason to pursue his murderous mission.

One of the main daggers which Israel has thrust into its own heart was the government’s decision to abort the practice of demolishing the homes of terrorists. The prospect of rendering his own family homeless and desperate served to deter a potential terrorist from killing himself and anybody else by reducing the honor and machismo associated with the act. The notion of the 72 virgins is only a reward for the achievement of an act that brings honor to himself and his family, but there is nothing honorable in Islam about bringing harm to one’s family. Perhaps this is the underlying reason why, since the war of terror has begun, we have been unsuccessful in tracking down Bin Laden. And if, as many feared before the presidential election, Barack Obama is really sympathetic to the Muslims radicals, it might also explain why his main promise in continuing Bush’s war on terror was to pursue this archterrorist through the hills of Pakistan. If Bin Laden is killed and hence martyred, it will only bring honor to himself and his family, who will be very much intact and alive. That will only give rise to more militant imams and more terrorist leaders.

Moreover, the only way to deal with Islamic terrorists is the same way in which they deal with their victims. Muslims believe in the literal interpretation of the Biblical doctrine of an eye for an eye, and they do not have respect for anything perceived as a lesser standard of justice. They killed our innocents, and unless we kill theirs, they will go on killing ours. The Torah, however, preaches a doctrine which, if implemented by the West, could finally put an end to all Islamic terror: If somebody is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first.
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Israeli State Terrrorism - What do you think?