Huqul al-Nakhl

Once again, the Zionist entity closely watches the ongoing political crisis in Lebanon and gives its own analysis. 

 
Hezbollah proved last week that it is the strongest force in Lebanon and could have seized power if it had wanted to, Israel’s military intelligence chief said in remarks published on Thursday.
 
“Hezbollah did not intend to take control… If it had wanted to, it could have done it,” Major General Amos Yadlin said in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz.
 
Lebanon was rocked last week by the worst violence since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war between the Lebanese national opposition and the ruling bloc’s militias. But Yadlin said Hezbollah did not want to follow the example of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas, which seized power in the Gaza Strip in June by ousting the forces of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
 
Hezbollah, a movement formed after Israel’s large-scale invasion of Lebanon in 1982, “understands that if it took power it would have to assume responsibility and expose its numerous weak points,” he said.
 
“Hezbollah proved that it was the strongest power in Lebanon… stronger than the Lebanese army.” He said Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and Syria, continued to pose a “significant” threat to Israel as its rockets could reach a large part of Israeli territory.

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America supports human rights - what a crock!

The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child.

Although 2,400 of the juveniles were captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, only 500 are still held in detention facilities in that country. The administration’s report, which was made public yesterday by the American Civil Liberties Union, says that most of the detained Iraqi youths were “engaging in anti-coalition
activity.”

As of last month, 10 juveniles were still being held in Bagram, Afghanistan, out of 90 that had been captured in that country since 2002, according to the report.

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With spectacular fanfare and a plethora of highlighted events, Israel celebrated its 60th birthday on 18 May 2008.

According to an Israeli government website called Israelfestival.com, the festival included “non-stop entertainment, [a] fashion show, a variety of ethnic food for sale, Israeli folk dancing, arts and
crafts, Israeli and Jewish cultural and heritage pavilions and art exhibits”.

The centrepiece ceremony takes place in West Jerusalem and be attended by Israel’s political and military leaders as well as foreign dignitaries. Among those expected are US President George W Bush,
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Israeli media and non-governmental organisations have already begun celebrations in earnest. For example, Israeli television has begun airing a new series called Shishim (meaning “60″), which looks back at the six decades since Israel was created in May 1948. The series, which began 31 March, is divided into six episodes, each devoted to one of the decades following the founding of the state.

Israel hopes that the high-pitched celebrations will serve as an opportunity to promote Israel and enhance its questionable standing abroad. “It is an opportunity to celebrate our achievements, our
successes, our national being,” boasted Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who was not yet born in 1948.

From the Zionist viewpoint, Israel is a story of success. Today, Israel is a political and military force to be reckoned with, even if its power is based on the patronage of foreign entities. A country of
no more than seven million people, including nearly 1.5 million non-Jews (mainly Palestinians), Israel more or less directs the politics and policies of world’s only superpower, the United States, thanks mainly to powerful Jewish lobbies in Washington.

The power of the Jewish lobby largely explains how massive American financial and military support is to Israel, which is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. Were it not for this nearly unlimited
financial, economic, technological, political and military backing, Israel would never have been able to survive, especially given its predator tactics.

Israel, which has been mounting a vitriolic incitement campaign against Iran for its acquisition of nuclear technology, is a nuclear power on par with other established nuclear powers, and its military
supremacy — at least until summer of 2006 — has covered the vast bulk of the Middle East from Turkey to Iran and from North Africa to east and central Africa.

Economically, Israel is also a regional economic superpower, with a GNP bordering on $0.5 trillion. In fact, Israel is among a few pioneering states in the field of electronics and the development of
new generations of medicine, with Israeli pharmaceutical firms’ share of the world market reaching billions of dollars.

Notwithstanding all its success and achievements, Israel remains a state based on racism, apartheid and criminality against the Palestinian people whose homeland it seized and whom it is trying to
obliterate to this day. To be sure, Israel has failed. Palestinians remain, both as a human entity and as a national entity.

Israel, in order to achieve its goals, always sought to acquire, by hook or by crook, as much Palestinian land as possible while taking in as few Palestinian people as possible. The policies and tactics employed by Israel to achieve this goal are both blunt and insidious and amount to ethnic cleansing and the international crime of genocide. Israel has institutionalised racism, bulldozed hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages, shamelessly confiscated Palestinian land and property, including private homes, and recently built the so-called “Separation Wall” in the West Bank, aimed first and foremost at annexing to Israel as much Palestinian land as possible.

On top of all of this, Israel has perfected the practice of state-sponsored mass terror; a deliberate policy aimed at making Palestinian life as unbearable as possible with the ultimate goal of forcing Palestinians to leave their homes and land altogether. This is done in broad daylight; in full view of key world powers, such as the US, EU, Russia and China, which either keep silent or issue a few terse and innocuous words about the need to stick to a peace process that has form but very little substance.

Today, as Israel is getting ready to celebrate its 60th birthday, the massive theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem and its surroundings, continues unabated. Against all odds, the Palestinian people have survived. Indeed, Palestinian resilience to Israeli oppression is legendary — a trait that continues to baffle and frustrate Israeli strategists. Perhaps it is this resilience that is encouraging influential Israeli political, military and religious leaders to openly call for genocide of the Palestinians.

Recently, Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai threatened to “inflict a greater holocaust” on Palestinians. Similarly, a growing number of rabbis associated with the two largest religious camps in
Israel, the Haredi ultra-Orthodox religious sector and the national Zionist religious sector, issuing one edict after the other, permitting soldiers to murder at will Palestinian civilians, including children, on the grounds that in war all among the enemy population ought to be treated as combatants, including children.

One might imagine that this is exaggerated, but it is not. Recently Rabbi Yisrael Rosen, director of the Tsomet Institute, a religious seminary attended by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, declared: “All
of the Palestinians must be killed; men, women, infants, and even their beasts.” And the chief rabbi of the City of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, urged the state and the army recently to hang the children of
a Palestinian fighter who last month attacked the Merkaz Haarav Centre, run for Jewish settlers in West Jerusalem, killing eight pre-military Talmudic students in retaliation for the killing by the Israeli army of more than 130 Palestinians, most of them innocent civilians, in the Gaza Strip.

The mushrooming of fascist impulses is not confined to the religious sector. In March, the Israeli media quoted Knesset members and former cabinet ministers as threatening to extend discriminatory laws against non-Jews in ways reminiscent of Nuremberg Laws passed in Nazi Germany. One Israeli Knesset member reportedly told his Arab colleague: “the day will come when we will kick you out of this house.”

Such instances raise no eyebrows in a country where some rabbis, like David Batsri, openly teach that non-Jews are animals and donkeys. A recent opinion survey published this week showed that as many as 75 per cent of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing of Arabs from mandate Palestine — Israel proper and the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
Understandably, the poll drew angry reactions from the Israeli Arab community. Jamal Zahalqa, an Israeli Arab Knesset member, suggested that Arabs are being treated in ways similar to the way Jews were treated in the Third Reich ahead of World War II.

“The hateful smell of racism and fascism is wafting everywhere in this country. You must know that we didn’t come to Israel from abroad… On the contrary; it was Israel that invaded us. We are the indigenous people of the land, and we receive our legitimacy from our belonging to this land, not from having Israeli citizenship,” he said.

Zahalqa described the poll as “additional evidence underscoring the growing rampancy of racism and fascism in Israel as a result of the ongoing waves of hate against everything and anything Arab.”

The fears of Zahalqa and other Israeli Arabs are real. Recently, hundreds of Arab residents from Jaffa, Lod and Ramleh took to the streets to protest against the planned eviction by the state of thousands of Arab residents from Jaffa. Authorities had issued warrants for the evacuation and destruction of hundreds of homes, claiming infringements on building regulations. The state also claimed that, “the families [had] lost the right to continue living in their homes, since these homes belonged to their parents … “

“We are here and we won’t leave. We will either live on this land or die on this land. We will not let you touch our lands or our holy places,” said Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the Arab movement in Israel. “All your rulings belong in the trashcan. We are not afraid of you. We will continue to live in our homeland,” he added.

Last year, Richard Falk, a renowned American Jewish professor of international law and practice, wrote an article entitled “Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust,” in which he warned that Israel was moving towards the perpetration of a holocaust against the Palestinians. “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not,” said Falk.

Justifying the Israel-equals-Nazi analogy, Falk argued that developments in Gaza (the blockade against its estimated 1.5 million inhabitants), were especially disturbing because they expressed
vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its backers to subject an entire human community to life- endangering conditions of maximal cruelty. “The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating into a collective tragedy,” Falk wrote.

In sum, from the standpoint of fascism, Israel has much to celebrate in terms of political and military achievements. But in terms of justice, morality and humanity, one struggles to name a country on
earth that so openly practices oppression and racism. As such Israel, on its 60th birthday, remains what it was when born six decades ago: a state built on blood, murder, theft and lies.

Is Israel about to change its ways? Don’t hold your breath, Israeli leaders might say. Unless, that is, you’re Palestinian.

in Ramallah

Source

Interesting take on the situation by Lawernce of Cyberia:

“Crying and shooting” is the term used in Israeli political discourse to describe those Israelis who agonize over what they are doing to the Palestinians, but carry on doing it anyway. It’s a way for Israelis to feel better about themselves, by reasserting their liberal, progressive and humanitarian values, even as they carry out illiberal, regressive and murderous actions.

There was a wonderful example of the phenomenon last week in a column written for Ha’aretz by Bradley Burston. He wrote an agonized column - Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism - about the disproportionate number of civilians among the Palestinians killed by the IDF, and specifically about Israeli’s collective refusal to acknowledge their responsibility for the killings.

But his column is like one of those non-apologies you make when you know you should apologize for something, but you’re not really sorry. When instead of saying “I’m sorry for what I did”, you say “I’m sorry if you were offended”, as if it’s the offended feelings that are the problem, not the fact that you said something offensive in the first place.

incident that set off Burston’s “soul-searching” was the killing of Myassar Abu Mu’attaq, and her four children - Rudayna (6) Hana (3), Saleh (4) and Mousad (15 months), photo left by Mohammed Abed for AFP - whose home was destroyed by an Israeli shell as the family sat down to breakfast.

(The IDF initially acknowledged the family had been killed by one of their tank shells which had gone off course, but subsequently claimed that they weren’t really responsible because although they had fired the shell, it had not really hit the house, but had struck instead two nearby Palestinian gunmen who were carrying large amounts of explosives that were detonated by the Israeli shell and indirectly
blew up the Abu Mu’attaq house. This is a variant of the “Ghalia Defence” that the IDF came up with when it shelled a Gaza beach in June 2006, but denied any responsibility for the deaths of the Ghalia
family who had been having a picnic there, claiming that although they fired six shells at the beach - one of which they could not account for - the errant shell could not have killed the Ghalia family who
must have been killed instead by Palestinian munitions hidden under the sand that might have been inadvertantly detonated by the Israeli bombardment. That’s a close echo of what the IDF claims about the Abu Mu’attaq killings: the IDF knows it fired the shells, knows the civilians at the receiving end are dead, but subsequently introduces some intermediate mechanism - mines under the beach, exploding backpacks - that deflects responsibility to an intermediate agent, and allows the army that fires the shells to maintain the pretense that even when it kills civilians its intentions are pure. There’s probably a technical name in medical literature for this phenomenon of shifting blame for guilty actions to an intermediate party).

Full article

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad here on Thursday labeled the Zionist regime as a “stinking corpse” and said those who think they can revive the corpse of this fabricated and usurper regime are in mistaken.

Lambasting the 60th anniversary of establishment of the Zionist regime, he said those who attend such a shameful ceremony should bear in their mind that their names will be listed as Zionist criminals.

Addressing Majlis representatives, he said the philosophy of existence of the Zionist regime is now under question and the usurper and fabricated regime is moving towards annihilation. The Zionist regime is a puppet for bullying powers, he said adding that the global arrogance established the Zionist regime 60 years ago in Palestine to continue its historical straggles with the Muslim
world but after the Lebanese nation slapped it in the face, they are like dead rats.

“If any regional countries assist the Zionist regime, they will burn in fire arising from nations’ hatred,” said the president.

“If some think that they can make any change in the global calculations, they are in mistaken because nations around the world will bury them ,” concluded President Ahmadinejad.

The Lebanese resistance fighters’ actions purifying the capitol from para-military fighters and connected to Walid Jumblatt and the 14^th of March Political Movement was Hizbollah’s second preventive strike against the complicated Ameircan-Israeli plans against Hizbollah. The public force of the resistance lead by Hizbollah surprised the hands that were at work after suspicious activity was seen and before it was too late for them to do anything. Capturing 800 para-military fighters made the plan of acting against the resistance from inside Beirut until the Mediterranean Sea unpractical. Some other actions that the popular resistance was able to do in 24 hours were blocking all roads leading to the airport, stopping the activities of some television, radio, and newspaper outlets (such as Al-Mustaqbal and al-Sharq). This confused the enemies’ plots. These measures occurred hours after Hizbollah’s Secretary-General’s speech and news conference where he laid it all out for the opposition who is in authority. The authorities who operate by Saudi Arabian money and who are representatives of America and Israel in Lebanon tried to destroy Hizbollah’s political, informational, and security strength in a few moves. If they were successful they would have been the groundwork for implementing America’s stratedgy of crippling Hizbollah.

About three months after Hajj Imad Mughniyeh’s, Hizbollah’s high commander, assassination which has been said to have been carried out by Jumblatt’s and Saudi Arabian security forces helped by Israeli spy agents, many accusations have been made against Hizbollah by Walid Jumblatt and newspapers connected to the 14^th of March Political Movement. They tried to put public pressure on Hizbollah to disarm themselves. They claimed that Hizbollah, with the cooperation of Wafiq Shaqir (the head Beirut’s airport security), put video cameras around the airport in order to be able to control political figures movement and possible carry out assassinations. Another accusation was that Hizbollah overhears governmental phone conversations with their own phone system. The Siniora government, which is itself an illegal government, made a move by firing Shaqir and planned to cut Hizbollah’s phone system – which is a successful informational tool and one of the factor’s behind their victory in the 33-Day-War. Add this to the addition of American warships in Lebanese waters and the leakage of the American-Israeli plan to bomb Beirut and assassinate the leaders of the resistance including Sayyid Hassan Nasrullah.

Hizbollah is known in Beirut to be exclusive and because of this the authorities thought that they would be successful in a cold-war against them. They thought that they would be destroyed without war and without bloodshed. But, Hizbollah’s sudden move purifying Beirut and taking control of the country, which will probably end in Siniora’s resignation, shows that Sayyid Hassan Nasrullah and his people have completely surprised their enemies. Just as they did 2 years ago in the summer – shook up Israeli’s plans of a huge attack on Lebanon - they did it again now.

Sayyid Hassan Nasrullah once again showed that he is an ancestor of Ali bin Abi Talib (a)!

www.insight-info.com

And they say that free speech exists in the West! That is a crock. The only thing that one is free to say are opinions in line with the government - anything else will be punishable. Here is an article showing how people who criticize the Israeli regime are smeared.

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is
nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

Click to see full article here

Its good to see that there are good Jews out there!

The Iranian Jewish community will not mark Israel’s 60th Independence Day, incoming Iranian Jewish parliamentarian Siamak Morsadegh said Wednesday.

Speaking to Reuters, Morsadegh said this was in protest of Israel’s responsibility for the “murder of totally innocent Palestinian civilians.”

“We are in complete disagreement with Israel’s conduct,” he said. “We are Iranians. We have no relations with Israel.”

The Iranian Jewish leader told Reuters that Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, particularly Gazans, demonstrated “anti-human behavior … they kill innocent people.”

Morsadegh went on to claim that Jews in Iran enjoyed freedom of religion and other rights. “There are no specific problems for Jews in this country,” he said.

Source

This is an article showing that there is another Israeli spy case emmerging from the United States after the John Pollard inncident. It astonishes me to see that although Israel gets caught red-handed spying and conducting actions to the detremint of the United States the US government continues its unconditional support of the Israeli regime and continues to give the rouge state millions of dollars a year. The citizens of America must wake up to this and put an end to this problem - spend American tax dollars on Americans!

This is an exerpt from the article. To read the full article click here.

 

Israeli sources are reporting that the FBI investigation of the Ben-Ami Kadish spy case resulted from a leak coming from inside the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The information on Kadish and on a number of other Americans who have spied for Israel was provided to the FBI anonymously, leading to the Bureau’s opening of a full nvestigation. One source reports that the National Security
Agency was provided with Yosef Yagur’s current phone number and address and was able to obtain corroborating information on the case by tapping the phone.

Touching poem - must see