Polish Americans for Barack Obama

When in Doubt, Blame Immigrants and ACORN - from "Media Matters"

Fire Is Born — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:18:13 EDT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 7, 2009
1:37 PM

CONTACT: Media Matters
Brandon Hersh (202) 471-3205
bhersh@mediamatters.org

When in Doubt, Blame Immigrants and ACORN: Media Conservatives Choose Scapegoats Over Substance WASHINGTON - April 7 - Today, Media Matters for America released a study documenting how conservative media figures have repeatedly used undocumented immigrants and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as scapegoats in recent discussions of major news stories. As the study details, time and again, these charges have been based on misleading claims or outright falsehoods.

"Media conservatives have made a sport of vilifying ACORN and immigrants. In lieu of engaging in substantive policy debates, they simply point fingers at the poor and disenfranchised. It is both dishonest and irresponsible," said Media Matters spokesperson Erikka Knuti.

Media Matters' study documents numerous examples of media conservatives returning to their favorite scapegoats, including:

EXPANSION OF THE STATE CHILDREN'S HEALTH INSURANCE PROGRAM

In reporting on or discussing the 2009 expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), many in the media asserted or uncritically repeated the claim that the bill would provide health benefits to undocumented immigrants. In fact, the legislation includes a citizenship verification process and explicitly states that "[n]othing in this Act allows Federal payment for individuals who are not lawfully residing in the United States."

2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS

Several conservative media figures have claimed or suggested that excessive lending to undocumented immigrants was responsible for the financial crisis, but have failed to cite any credible evidence to support that claim. They also advanced the idea that ACORN contributed to the housing crisis by "bullying" banks into lending irresponsibly to minorities, and in many instances, asserted that the group used the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to intimidate banks into making risky loans. But as Media Matters has documented, the assertion that the CRA had anything to do with the financial crisis has been widely discredited.

2009 AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT

In their coverage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, many in the media falsely asserted or uncritically reported accusations that the legislation would provide tax credits to undocumented immigrants. In fact, the bill limited the Making Work Pay tax credit to individuals with Social Security numbers, thereby excluding undocumented immigrants. Numerous media figures have also claimed that ACORN would benefit from the legislation -- to the tune of $4.19 billion. In fact, the act does not mention ACORN or otherwise single it out for funding; ACORN itself has said that it is ineligible for the funds. The false claim was based on a misrepresentation of a provision in the House version of the bill that would have appropriated $4.19 billion "for neighborhood stabilization activities related to emergency assistance for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes authorized under division B, title III of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008."

U.S. CENSUS

Reporting on the 2010 U.S. Census, many in the media have focused on ACORN's reported role as a national partner with the Census Bureau in its effort to recruit more than 1 million temporary workers to knock on doors and baselessly suggested that the group will fraudulently influence the count in favor of Democrats or that the Obama administration is politicizing the process. In fact, ACORN is reportedly one of "more than 250" groups that are partnering with the Census Bureau to recruit workers.

2008-2009 MINNESOTA SENATE RECOUNT

In covering the Minnesota Senate recount, many in the media seized on a Republican talking point that Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has "ties" to ACORN, in many instances using it to suggest that he would be biased toward Democratic challenger Al Franken over Republican incumbent Norm Coleman.

Full Research Item HERE.

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Media Matters for America is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.

World Drug Report 2008

Fire Is Born — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:31:57 EDT

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The World Drug Report presents comprehensive information on the illicit drug situation. It provides detailed estimates and trends on production, trafficking and consumption in the opium/heroin, coca/cocaine, cannabis and amphetamine-type stimulants markets. The drug problem is being contained but there are warning signs that the stabilisation which has occurred over the last few years could be in danger. Notable amongst these is the increase in both opium poppy and coca cultivation in 2007, some growth in consumption in developing countries and some development of new trafficking patterns. There have also been encouraging contractions in some of the main consumer markets. This year, almost one hundred years since the Shanghai Opium Commission in 1909, the Report presents an historical review of the development of the international drug control system.

Who killed the electric car?

Fire Is Born — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:14:36 EDT

From the Los Angeles Times

The Rick Wagoner vehicles: Hits and misses

There's the EV1, Hummer H2, Malibu and the Volt -- all emblematic of GM during Wagoner's leadership. By DAN NEIL

11:29 PM PDT, March 30, 2009

"As Rick Wagoner rides off to whatever biz-school sinecure he's destined for, his nine years at the helm of General Motors Corp. will be evaluated in many ways and by many hands.

And yet, fairly or not, auto company chief executives are best remembered for the cars produced during their tenure. People still refer to the Cadillac Cimarron as a "Roger Smith" car, and the Ford Mustang will somehow always belong eternally to Lee Iacocca.

The four vehicles offered here are emblematic of Wagoner's time and leadership, of challenges met and opportunities missed.

They will forever be Wagoner cars.

General Motors EV1

Wagoner has said the biggest mistake he ever made as chief executive was killing the EV1, GM's revolutionary electric car, and failing to direct more resources to hybrid gas-electric research. This admission is acutely painful for green-car advocates who know GM squandered its early lead in electric-hybrid technology.

The EV1 began in the 1990s as a response to a zero-emission vehicle mandate by California's Air Resources Board. GM built about 2,500 EV1s in 1996-99 and leased them to consumers in California and Arizona.

When, finally, GM and other automakers managed to get California to soften its zero-emission mandate in 2002, Wagoner promptly canceled the program. GM ordered the cars confiscated and destroyed.

From an accountant's point of view -- and Wagoner was, first of all, a counter of beans -- the decision was correct. The cars cost far more than GM could sell them for, and maintaining a service infrastructure for the exotic cars was also expensive. Then there was the potential liability; there were reported cases of the batteries overheating.

But from a public relations perspective, the decision to haul off and crush the cars was an unmitigated disaster. EV1 advocates picketed outside GM's West Coast offices in Thousand Oaks, spammed the automaker with angry e-mails and ranted on TV news programs.

The crowning blow was the release of Chris Paine's 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The film alleged there was a grand conspiracy among the oil companies, the government and the car companies. The EV1 saga was thus a failure of both style and substance.

Hummer H2

It is too easy to say that the Hummer H2, a civilian riff on the military's "HMMWV" (High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee), is an example of everything that was indictable and wrong about GM: an oversized, guzzling Goliath; a blundering bully of the road; rude and reactionary.

The 6,614-pound, 6-foot-8 monster provoked howls of protest from environmentalists when it debuted in 2002.

"It was just so over the top," said Michael Marsden, an auto culture historian at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., in an interview last year. "It had excess written all over it, the SUV times 10. Everything about it suggested not practical, not reasonable. It was consumerism at its peak."

Wagoner wasn't exactly wrong in signing off on the Hummer H2 (built under contract by AM General at a factory in Indiana). In fact, the vehicle was a cult hit and became a totem of wheel-spinning bling excess, favored by pro athletes, hip-hop stars and other auto extroverts. The Hummer brand instantly became one of the strongest in the GM portfolio.

And yet, those sales -- which peaked in 2003 at about 35,000 -- later cost GM dearly in terms of public perception. The company had provided an easy target, a made-to-order villain in the national debate about fuel economy, war for oil, and global warming. When fuel prices began to climb last year, Hummer's fragile mystique collapsed, as did sales. Hummer H2 sales in 2008 totaled 6,095 units.

Hummer's fall also reflects another error in Wagoner's product strategy: Too much of GM's profits relied on large trucks and SUVs, which made the company highly vulnerable to volatility in fuel prices.

GM announced last year that, as part of its reorganization plan, it would sell Hummer. Wagoner had another failed brand on his record.

Chevy Malibu

One of the great frustrations for GM partisans has been the fact that cars built by subsidiaries overseas were often better than the ones designed and built for the North American market.

Wagoner, with a strong push from GM product czar and Vice Chairman Robert Lutz, helped change that. The 2008 Malibu is the result. Built on GM's global Epsilon platform -- engineered by Opel and shared with the Saturn Aura and Pontiac G6 -- the current-generation Malibu is a fine car, with up-to-date engineering, suave and artful styling and good quality.

Among other critical acclaim, the Malibu won the 2008 North American Car of the Year award at the Detroit auto show (in I called the Malibu "a fine-drawn and harmonious design, pretty but chastened with Teutonic seriousness").

The Malibu has been a fairly steady seller. With GM's total sales off 49%, Malibu sales are off 23% for the first two months of this year compared with the same period in 2008 -- better than arch rivals Honda Accord and Toyota Camry. Even so, with 2008 sales totaling 177,089, the German-engineered Malibu has not come close to threatening those competitors. The Accord's 2008 sales totaled 372,789, and the Camry chalked up 436,617 sales.

Chevy Volt

A large part of Wagoner's legacy has yet to be written and will depend on the outcome of the highly anticipated Chevy Volt. A range-extended electric sedan -- using a small gasoline engine to charge the batteries that drive electric motors -- the Volt has redeemed GM in the eyes of many environmentalists.

On a memorable evening in November, the Volt was the guest of honor at a party at director Chris Paine's house in Santa Monica. Paine had vilified GM in "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

With all the chaos and downsizing at GM, Wagoner and Lutz remained committed to bringing the Volt to market by late 2010. It seems likely that GM brass does not want to relive the miseries of the EV1 episode. And yet, the Volt cannot hope to restore GM to profitability.

In fact, as noted in the government's auto task force report on GM's viability, the Volt is "likely to be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term."

Even so, the Volt is a dramatic advance in the technology of the automobile, a fundamentally different way to look at transportation. Whether Wagoner supported the Volt program purely for PR purposes or out of some awakened sense of corporate conscience, it deserves a measure of our respect. And so does he."

dan.neil@latimes.com

Poland will bolster its 1,600-strong contingent in Afghanistan with 400 more troops

Fire Is Born — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:25:04 EDT

Poland will send 400 more troops to Afghanistan: PM Tue Mar 24, 2009 11:55am EDT

"WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland will bolster its 1,600-strong contingent in Afghanistan with 400 more troops to help improve security in the leadup to an August election there, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday.

NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said recently the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan will need some 4,000 extra soldiers to secure Afghanistan's presidential poll.

"We have taken today a decision to formally ask the president to increase our contingent by 400 soldiers," Tusk told a news conference.

"It is related to the elections in Afghanistan and we are all aware the situation there will not be any easier over the weeks to come. Sending more troops is justified from the point of view of our own forces' security there," Tusk added.

Poland, NATO's largest ex-communist member, had previously said it would not increase its forces in Afghanistan as it looks to make budget savings because of a sharp economic slowdown.

Poland's Defense Ministry recently agreed to cut spending plans this year by 2 billion zlotys ($601.5 million), but Tusk said it could afford the 35.1 million zlotys needed for the troop reinforcements.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who as commander-in-chief must approve the additional deployments, has spoken in favor of increasing Poland's engagement in Afghanistan and is widely expected to approve Tusk's request.

The government also said in a statement it had put a further 200 troops on standby in Poland for possible rapid, short-term deployment in Afghanistan if required."

(Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, editing by Gareth Jones)

Obama’s Silence on Immigration Can’t Last Long: Albert R. Hunt

Fire Is Born — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:37:31 EDT

Obama’s Silence on Immigration Can’t Last Long: Albert R. Hunt

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Commentary by Albert R. Hunt

March 2 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama, in his speech to Congress last week, painted a canvas of issues breathtaking in scope: creating jobs, rescuing banks, overhauling the health- care system, reforming education, fixing Social Security and reversing the nation’s direction on energy -- all this year.

In the 6,134-word speech, which briefly touched on Afghanistan and the Middle East, one crucial issue wasn’t mentioned: immigration.

The agenda is so full that the political circuits may be overloaded. Some argue the urgency is eroding with the deteriorating economy. The number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. has plunged -- down to as few as 300,000 last year, or less than half what it was several years ago -- with more leaving now than arriving.

And the politics are even tougher than in the last Congress, when the bipartisan effort of Senators Ted Kennedy and John McCain and President George W. Bush exploded in emotional recriminations by Republicans and crass calculations by some Democrats. With joblessness having soared since then, it is tougher to argue that the economy needs these workers.

Still, the notion that illegal immigration can be finessed is a mirage. The problem will only get worse, and so will the politics. Obama, 47, a Democrat, would have to renege on his campaign promise to push a major immigration overhaul along the lines of the Kennedy-McCain measure in his first year.

There are industries -- agriculture, food service, construction -- that rely on immigrants. They are going through down times, yet they’ll need more people when they bounce back.

No Easy Case

That’s true of the overall economy, says Tamar Jacoby, a scholar who favors an overhaul of the immigration system.

“Immigration reform may be harder in the middle of a recession, to make the case that we need more workers,” Jacoby says. “But the only way out of a recession is to grow out of it, and we need workers to do that.”

Even with the dropoff in the number of illegal aliens -- there are still an estimated 11.5 million in the country, or about 4 percent of the population -- the social tensions are worsening. Highly publicized raids are disrupting communities and generating furious resentment among Hispanics.

The new Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, wasn’t even notified of a raid in Washington State last week.

And 40 percent of inmates in federal prisons are Hispanic, half of them in for committing immigration crimes, not because they are violent criminals, according to the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center. That’s a huge cost to society.

‘Waited Too Long’

Given the full agenda, some say the White House should wait on immigration until after the next congressional elections in 2010. That, Jacoby warns, would be a mistake. “Bush waited too long, and then he didn’t have the juice.”

Two Democrats who are now among the most critically situated on the issue, former Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, were impediments in the last Congress, although both are immigration-reform advocates.

Emanuel worried that the issue would hurt House Democratic candidates in conservative districts, and Schumer clashed with Kennedy, the architect of the Senate bill, over strategy.

Emanuel is now White House chief of staff, and Schumer has taken over the Senate’s immigration subcommittee from the ailing Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat who is focusing all his political efforts on health care.

Politics Changed

Those two smart politicians no doubt appreciate a changed political landscape, with a bigger-than-expected Latino turnout last November. “Both Schumer and Emanuel understand the 2008 election was a game-changer,” says Frank Sharry, founder and director of the pro-immigration group, America’s Voice.

Earlier fears that immigration had hurt Democrats in 2006 in an Illinois House race and a special election in Massachusetts were trumped by several dozen races where immigration-bashing failed and advocates of the Kennedy-McCain- type measure succeeded.

Dramatic illustrations came in the heavily Hispanic states of New Mexico and Arizona. Three years ago, nine of the 11 House members from those states were Republicans; today eight of the 11 are Democrats, in large part because of Hispanic voters.

The impact wasn’t only in Western states. In places such as Virginia and North Carolina, a smaller number of Hispanic voters provided winning margins.

One Survived

One incumbent Democrat whom House Republicans were confident of defeating last November was Representative Paul Kanjorski of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Republican candidate was the mayor of Hazleton, whose local crackdown included fining landlords for renting to illegal immigrants and inspired a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet on Election Day, Kanjorski survived.

In the presidential race, McCain unfairly suffered, because the Republicans became identified as the anti- immigration party. Obama carried the Latino vote by better than 2-to-1, with a big turnout.

As an issue that divides constituencies, immigration is more of a problem for Republicans. Still, there are tensions among Democrats. Major elements in organized labor -- mainly the AFL-CIO -- are hostile to permitting more liberal procedures for future immigrants; deals will have to be struck.

Reid Faces Voters

It’s instructive, however, that a driving force for action may be Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who was lukewarm in the last Congress. Reid faces re-election in Nevada in 2010 in a state whose Hispanic population now accounts for almost a quarter of the total. Those voters helped Obama win Nevada last November.

While the agenda that Obama laid out is stunning in its scope, the president and his politically astute chief of staff are likely to conclude that stalling isn’t an option on immigration. Emanuel wants to “clean up his image” with Hispanics, says one top Obama adviser.

If so, immigration-reform advocates insist they’re ready. “I expect we’ll have a come-to-Jesus moment in June, and Rahm will check on how many Republicans there are for the bill,” says Sharry. “If there’s any sign of economic stabilization, we’ll be ready to go.”

(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 1, 2009 10:50 EST

Change in the USA

Sebastian — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 11:33:56 EST

Hello now Im gonna write a blog about political stuff. I wanna know if there is already a change noticeable in the USA?

Some of My Favorite Quotes

Polak Maly — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:56:24 EST

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Founding Father and Former President, Thomas Jefferson

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – Former President, Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” – Founding Father, Benjamin Franklin

Where We Are and Some Thoughts What We Can Do About It

Polak Maly — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:55:31 EST

Some hard facts:

U.S. unemployment rate at 7.6% as of January 2009. 600,000 jobs lost in January alone. With a U.S. population approaching 304 million, that is 23 million people that are out of work. At the peak of the great depression in with unemployment at 25% in 1933, the population was at 125 million and 31 million people were out of work.

Total public and government debt taking into account reserve banking and all the created asset and derivative bubbles is at over $70 trillion. With gross domestic product (GDP) at $14 trillion and falling, that means every person in the US needs to allocate all their real value and compensation produced for at least the next five years to repay the debt. The three larges foreign buyers and holders of us debt are china with $682 billion held in the form of U.S. Treasury Securities, Japan with over $577 billion, and Britain with over $360 billion in holdings as of November 2008. Total foreign debt amounts to over $3.1 trillion or about 21% of U.S. GDP. This does not come free, as the U.S. government pays interest on these loans which takes away from health care, education, public spending, and other social programs.

The trade deficit. In November alone, U.S. imports of goods and services have exceeded exports by over $40.4 billion adding more burden into the already catastrophic public and government debt. The top 3 U.S. trade partners are Canada with 17.7 % of the total, China with 11.9%, and Mexico with 10.8%. As of November 2008 total U.S. imports in goods and services for the year amounted to $1.96 trillion, whereas exports were at $1.21 trillion leaving a net loss of $750 billion.

Some Proposed Solutions:

Basic income guarantee in the form of negative tax credits. Every person in the U.S. working or not would be guaranteed a monthly stipend in the amount of $1,000 in the form of negative tax incentive. With rising income, let’s say over $12,000 the amount of the stipend would began diminishing at a given interval to where after making, let’s say $36,000 the a person would be obligate to start paying taxes at a prescribed interval. With less than 10% making below $12,000 annually, an unemployment rate of 5%, and another 25% making below $36,000, the government burden would amount to about $1.08 trillion dollars, that is less than the $1.5 trillion in proposed defense spending for 2009.

Import Certificates. Buffett's plan proposes creating a market for import certificates that would represent the right to import a certain dollar amount of goods into the United States from other countries. These certificates would be issued to US exporters in an amount equal to the dollar amount of the goods they export, and can be sold to importers, who must purchase them in order to legally import goods. The price of an import certificate is set by free-market forces, and therefore ultimately is dependent on the balance between imported and exported goods through supply and demand.

Proceeds from the sale of import certificates would encourage exporters (who would gain that extra money in addition to the proceeds of their exports) and discourage importers (who would need to pay the additional cost to acquire import certificates as well as the cost to acquire the goods they are importing)

This system would essentially create a broad-based tariff on imports to the United States. Unlike traditional tariffs, however, this would not favor any particular industry or punish any particular country. Market forces would also keep the tariff at exactly the amount required to achieve trade balance, eventually eliminating it when it is no longer necessary. (www.wikipedia.com)

Another idea would be to close the over 200+ U.S. Military bases and installations located all over the world and use the resources on rebuilding U.S. real producing industrial base and economic infrastructure.

Some of My Own Definitions About the Economy

Polak Maly — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:53:19 EST

Some Definitions:

What is an economy? An economy is a place where people bring whatever goods and/or services they can produce and trade them with other participants for the goods and/or services they offer. Since it does not make much sense to divide goods and/or services into units, individual productivity is saved and divided into units with the help of currency recognized by other participants as a means of exchange.

How do we create value? We create value through the production of real goods and/or services that are nonpredatory in nature. In return, we are paid a real wage that suffices our real needs and creates additional demand for real goods and/or services.

What is a multiple effect? A multiple effect is what happens when as a result of supply and demand for real value. When individuals are compensated with real wages, they have the means to demand real value, thus creating additional jobs and those participants likewise, and so on. On the other hand, when individuals are compensated less than the value of their real work, they are reluctant to spend and create additional demand, thus destroying jobs and creating a further decline, and so on.

What is free trade? Free trade is a way for ecologically diverse macroeconomic groups to specialize in what they have and advantage over and exchange that with a likewise group for a good and/or service they have a disadvantage in. Modern trade deviates from this understanding as it is based on differences in cost and price regimes. Real value of goods and/or services as well as the means of exchange differ from one regime to another. In that sense regimes with higher cost and price regime have every incentive to exploit the real value of the regimes with lower costs and prices.

What is the market? The market is comprised of all participants creating real value that have the means are willing to trade their goods and/or services with other participants. As participants move from higher to lower cost and price regimes, the real value of production and individual compensation begins to diminish creating a multiple effect. This can only be sustained temporarily through predatory lending and asset bubbles. Once banks run out of reserves, people start panicking, and bubbles burst until finally all market and economic activity slows and comes to a stop.

What is the role of banks? The role of banks is to fill in the void when individual compensation falls below real productive value, thus creating a predatory, debt based, economy that creates no real value, but enslaves society into eternal debt. It gives rise to panzi schemes and speculative bubble casinos that, according to, according to Richard Cook, “[skimishes] the cream off the top of the producing economy by financing consumption and facilitating the most irresponsible types of speculation in the real estate, equity, hedge fund, and derivative markets.”

Safa Joudeh a journalist living with her family in Gaza City reports for Time.

Fire Is Born — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 18:25:09 EST

How strong is your support for Israel's actions today? Is the recent resolution by Congress representing your belief? Call your representatives to help the peace process, no matter which side you are on. Help senator Kucinich's resolution which calls for an immediate ceasefire and unobstructed Humanitarian Aid in Gaza: http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/CenterDoug/gGxFQy (quick link in comments) And thanks, O-Doug! fib

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Monday, Jan. 12, 2009

Holding Out in Gaza: Waiting for the Israelis

By Safa Joudeh / Gaza City

As Israeli tanks push deeper and deeper into the Gaza Strip from the north, south and east each night, we feel certain that come morning, Phase Three of the Israeli offensive will be upon us. Yet the Israeli military seems insistent upon teasing the population, playing a ruthless game of terror against those living in neighborhoods that are at the forefront of the incursions, which are heavily bombarded each night. Each afternoon, four families of relatives who live only five minutes away from us gather their blankets, cloths and valuables, and arrive at our front door, fearing that this will be the night. Each morning they return to their homes, thankful that, so far, only minimal damage has been done to their houses during the night. Each morning the Israeli military retreats to their original posts, on the outskirts of the neighborhoods. So far.

But others living here are not so lucky. One friend whose family and extended family live in the southern area of Gaza City told me that 10 homes have been evacuated, and 120 people have fled to a small house, also in the same Zatoun district, but further into the city. They got out just in time. Last night the 10 homes were either bulldozed or set on fire. They've lost everything, but their only aim at this moment is to stay safe and stay alive. (See pictures of Israel's assault on Gaza.)

Even those of us who haven't been forced out of our homes are living in constant fear of having to do so, in daily terror of the Israeli military's next move. Israel has infiltrated the local news channels and radio broadcast. While watching the news, the screen goes black and a message comes up for a few moments. It says something along the lines of "You will witness our wrath." We turn off the television and turn on the radio, only to hear the transmission being interrupted and another message from the Israeli military comes forth: "Leave your homes for your own safety! Gather in the center of your town! This is the IDF" [Israel Defense Forces] And even if you decide to give up both TV and radio, these messages will get to you through the phone. Almost all of the residents of the Gaza Strip have been receiving recorded messages from the IDF over the phone telling us that we will pay a high price for the actions of Palestinian fighters. There's nothing we can do. Phones are indispensable. We need to keep in touch with family and friends.

As if to make sure that terror rains down on the Gaza population, Israel has been dropping thousands of leaflets from the sky, conveying various messages. Some of these messages advertise intensified attacks against the area, claiming that weapons and munitions stores would be targeted, while others warn of new methods of fighting to come. But perhaps the most perplexing and frightening of these notes are the ones calling on the residents of the area to leave their houses, urging them to cooperate with the IDF and contact it by e-mail or phone (both provided) to report "terrorist activity."

Such notes are baffling. They assume that the resistance is an organized army with bases, weapons storage facilities and organized affiliations. Most people are confused as to who these notes refer to. The Hamas we know is a political, religious and social organization. Most of the population at large is uninvolved in that entity's military activities. (See pictures of life in Gaza under Hamas before the Israeli assault.)

The word "catastrophe" is on everyone's lips. People cannot help but recall the similar scenes from 60 years ago. But in 1948 the Israeli goal was the expulsion of the Palestinian people. This time around, it seems as though their goal is elimination.

So, where are the residents of these areas supposed to go for safety? There has already been a massive influx of people from the northern half of Gaza Strip into Gaza City, while the thousands of families in the southern and eastern areas of Rafah have left their homes to be destroyed by Israeli forces there, moving farther inward. Some people stay with relatives or friends. Almost all of the 80 apartments in my building complex are already accommodating more than one refugee family, as are most homes in the city, and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency shelters are overflowing with people.

Many families have nowhere to go and end up staying in their homes. These people would leave if they could, but the Gaza Strip is sealed off from all directions and surrounded by the Israeli military forces. So while Israel claims to "warn" them prior to destroying their homes over their heads, in reality they are not giving them any other option. Many people feel that it would be more merciful not to give "warnings." That way, these people would not have to anticipate their imminent deaths.

Amid all this, some still have the presence of mind to act on principle. Some family friends who live in the Jabalia area, where the refugee camp is, left their home the first two days, then decided to go back at whatever cost. Part of their home has been bombed since, but they remain there with no plans of leaving. They prefer death to indignity.

Safa Joudeh is a journalist living with her family in Gaza City.

Israel to Get $30bn US Defense Aid - In America we need jobs NO WARS

Lech Alex Bajan — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 13:44:39 EST

Israel to Get $30bn US Defense Aid - In America we need jobs NO WARS

Israel to Get $30bn US Defense Aid

RAMALLAH/GAZA CITY, 30 July 2007 — Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday announced a new $30 billion US defense aid package to preserve Israel’s regional military superiority, as he appreciated Washington’s wishes to boost moderate Arab states through weapons sales.

"This is an increase of 25 percent for the military aid to Israel from the United States. I think this is a significant and important increase in defense aid to Israel," Olmert said at the opening of the weekly Israeli Cabinet meeting.

Olmert added that the aid package was offered during his meeting with US President George W. Bush in Washington on June 20.

"This would mean a lot to Israel’s security, and this is a good opportunity to thank President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice," Olmert said.

Other Israeli ministers stressed during the Cabinet meeting Israel’s need to secure its "quality advantage" over its neighbors in the Mideast and the US’ major role in maintaining this advantage.

"Defense aid to Israel is still a top priority for the United States," Olmert told the Cabinet, adding that Israel enjoys more financial assistance than other countries in the Middle East.

"We have renewed agreements and a renewed commitment from the Americans that would help preserve our advantage over the Arab countries," Olmert said, referring to reports by the New York Times and the Washington Post that the US is mulling a $20 billion arms deal with Gulf states and increasing military aid to Egypt to $13 billion over 10 years.

The deal with Gulf states includes advanced satellite-guided bombs, upgrades to their fighter jets and new naval vessels. It has reportedly raised concerns in Israel and among its supporters in the Congress. However, Olmert said that Israel fully understood the US’ need to support the moderate states in the region.

"We understand the US’ need to assist the moderate Arab states, which are standing in one front with the United States and us in the struggle against Iran," Olmert said, referring to its nuclear program.

Israeli security officials called the increase in military aid "an unusual achievement."

According to Israeli diplomatic sources, the final details about the new aid package to the Jewish state will be worked out during the visit by US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns to the region, adding that his visit is slated for mid-August.

US defense aid to Israel began in 1973 but a regular 10-year aid plan — with the previous one expiring this summer — was institutionalized in 1977 as part of the Egypt-Israel peace agreement, the official said.

The military aid is made up of 75 percent US military hardware, ranging from ammunition to warplanes, with the other 25 percent in cash, which goes mainly toward securing new Israeli-made weapons.

There is one extremely easy way for the US government to do that - and that way is, the US government could stop participating in terror, and stop supporting it when others do it! That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously - as I said, over 90 percent world-wide.

You do the math: draw up a table, putting in one column the number of people affected by US terror directly or indirectly, and in the other, the number of people affected by terror against the US and its allies. If the US stops participating in and supporting terror, the level of terror world-wide would become a tiny fraction of what it is today."

- Prof. Noam Chomsky, MIT Oct 18, 2001

Noam Chomsky Interview on CBC (Part 1 of 2)

Support Our Allies - They Support US?

"...For Your Freedom and Ours..."

Gen. T. Kosciuszko (Poland and America's Patriot)

POLAND IS GETTING ONLY 25-40 $ MILLIONS per year

- Poland sent combat troops to Iraq, Afghanistan , Kosovo, Panama, Haiti, Polish Army's Peacekeepers in Golan Heights, Americans during the war.

- Polish troops are responsible for security in 1 of the 4 zones in Iraq

- 20,000 soldiers from 17 countries served under Polish command

Poland sent its elite commando unit, GROM, which means thunder. It helped secure the port at Umm Qasr, which was vital to delivering aid to Iraq. The unit also secured nearby oil platforms before they could be sabotaged.

In the first Gulf War, Polish intelligence officers snuck into Iraq to rescue a group of CIA operatives trapped behind enemy lines.

Poland's secret agents disguised CIA agents as Polish construction workers and smuggled them out of Baghdad.

This was not the first time Polish soldiers risked their lives for our freedom. Generals Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kosciuszko were two of the first foreigners to fight in the American Revolution. Kosciuszko designed and oversaw the construction of West Point. After that, he returned to Poland, where he led a democratic uprising. As a result of that fight, Poland had the first written democratic constitution in Europe, second in the world only to the U.S.

USA DEPORTED POLISH WOMAN IN US SINCE 1989 PERFECT CITIZEN FORMER SOLIDARITY, PERFECT MOTHER, NO CRIMES

I have to bring to your attention. What kind of:

How autocratic our Homeland Security in US is.

New US military aid to Israel and the Lieberman-Kyl amendment bring the US closer to war with Iran, say Greens

GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES

http://www.gp.org

For Immediate Release:

Monday, October 8, 2007

Contacts: Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, mclarty@greens.org

Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org

Greens: Bush has no credibility on Iran, but Democrats and Republicans are lining up behind Bush's next military disaster

WASHINGTON, DC -- Green Party leaders strongly cautioned that the combination of a $30 billion military aid package for Israel and growing threat of a US or US-backed Israeli attack on Iran could trigger a major regional conflagration in the Middle East.

"There's little doubt that the $30 billion in US taxpayers money sent to Israel will be used for two things: to maintain Israel's illegal and murderous military occupation of Palestinian lands, and to prepare for a military assault on Iran," said Paul "zool" Zulkowitz, a member of the Green Party's Peace Action Committee (GPAX). "The new military aid for Israel and the Lieberman-Kyl amendment, passed on September 26 with strong bipartisan support, have brought the the US closer to war with Iran."

Greens stressed that White House claims that Iran is assisting Shiite militias in Iraq and plans to produce nuclear weapons for possible use against Israel or western nations have been contested. Iran has denied such intentions; Greens noted that such use would amount to suicide for Iran.

"The Bush Administration, after its deceptive rationales for invading Iraq, should have no credibility on Iran or any other foreign policy," said Justine McCabe, Connecticut Green and co-chair of the party's International Committee. "Unfortunately, Democrats -- especially presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- have signed on to the AIPAC-Neocon-Republican line that an attack on Iran is 'not off the table.' If a global war starts because Bush ordered an attack, it'll be a bipartisan disaster, like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the continuing Middle East crisis."

In one scenario, confirmed by Newsweek, Vice President Cheney considered asking Israel to launch a missile attack either on a nuclear power site in Natanz, Iran, or on an alleged Syrian-Iranian-North Korean nuclear installation in northern Syria, which might result in a retaliatory strike that would motivate a larger US military assault on Iran. Israel has already launched an air strike on the suspected Syrian site in September.

"The Lieberman-Kyl amendment designates Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a 'foreign terrorist organization.' The amendment makes the Iran military a target in President Bush's 'war on terror.' This is a major step towards a military confrontation with Iran, whether the attack comes from the US or Israel or both," said John V. Walsh, delegate from the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party to the Green Party's National Committee.

The Green Party has called for an international effort towards nuclear disarmament of all Middle Eastern and western Asian nations, including Israel and Pakistan, which are known to possess nuclear weapons, as part of a greater global nuclear disarmament project. Greens have called the Bush Administration hypocritical for condemning Iran while expanding US nuclear weapons programs and after removing the US from antinuclear treaties. The party has called for the US to rejoin the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and eliminate American nuclear weapons. Greens have also accused the Bush Administration of squandering pro-US sentiment that exists among many Iranians in its attempt to vilify their country.

The Green Party has sharply criticized both Democrats and Republicans for maintaining support for Israel's six-decades-long violations of civilian human rights and bowing to the demands of AIPAC and certain Christian rightwing lobbies that the US endorse the Israeli government's military ambitions and ethnic policies. (Israel has placed the Gaza Strip under siege and threatens to cut off water and fuel supplies, to punish civilians over rocket attacks launched by militias.)

The Green Party calls for negotiation by both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a cut-off in US military aid to Israel; and an economic boycott of Israel until the latter recognizes full human rights, including the right of return for Palestinians and abolition of internal apartheid laws. Greens have called for support for Israeli and Palestinian groups seeking peaceful resolution, observance of human rights, and a halt to all violence and coercion directed against civilians.

German soldiers fighting the 1944 Warsaw Uprising

He was surprised they were ordered to burn what was already burned. The petrol they were supposed to use wasn’t the right quality either. Townhouses woldn’t burn easily. After work they went back to Mokotów district, where they lived several soldiers in one room. They felt safe there: the gates to German-controlled part of the city were guarded by 50 German soldiers.

Yet everyday they drank spirit. One friend of his couldn’t cope with this work. He poured petrol over himself and set himself on fire.

When Erich watched Polanski’s Pianist on tv, things came back to him. ‘It wasn’t at all as showed in this movie. Many people lived in ruins - not only Szpilman. Several hundred at least’, he convinced. ‘They walked out at night. I saw them, when we went out to the ruins, driven by curiosity, once. We saw how they pull burned potatoes from cellars. There were no orders to shoot at these people’

ISRAELI soldiers fighting the PALESTINIAN GAZA Uprising

The conflict did not begin in 1967, and anti-Zionism and Arab objections to the existence of Israel did not begin then either. All of the ills that have befallen the Arabs of Palestine result in large part from their refusal to allow Jewish settlement in their midst. Violent opposition began with the riots and massacres of the 1920s, and continued in the 1948 war of independence. Despite the opposition of Palestinian Arabs, the Jews of Palestine built a state, and because of the war, the Arabs of Palestine were deprived of their own chance for self determination. Their opposition to Israel was expressed as Palestinian Arab nationalism in the formation of the Fatah and the PLO, well before 1967. These organizations aimed to destroy all of Israel, "occupied" by the "Zionist entity." Given that position, it was hardly likely that Israel could negotiate peace with the Arabs of Palestine.

Gamal Nasser closed the straits of Tiran and threatened to annihilate Israel in 1967. The PLO declared that their goal was to evict every Jew who had entered Israel after 1917. Jordanian guns fired continuously on Jerusalem and other parts of Israel despite warnings to stay out of the conflict. Israel was forced to defend itself. The territories were conquered primarily as "hostages for peace." This was an Israeli government decision, and it was repeated often and openly in public speeches by Israeli officials in the summer of 1967. However, it soon became apparent that there would be no peace negotiations. At the Khartoum conference, the Arab states vowed, "no peace, no negotiations, no recognition." In their 1968 covenant, the PLO vowed to "liberate" all of "Palestine" - including Israel.

Until 1967, the West Bank was part of Jordan and Gaza was administered by Egypt. Israel did not prevent the Palestinians from forming a state, but they did not do so. The 1949 armistice borders were never recognized by any Arab state. They were meant to be the basis of peace talks, not permanent borders, but the peace talks never happened. In international law, an occupied territory is territory of another sovereign that has been conquered in war. Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank, and Egypt never claimed the Gaza strip as part of its territory. The Palestinians do not have a state, and have said they do not want a state with interim borders. Therefore the legal status of these territories as "occupied" is dubious. Nonetheless, many Zionists have come to recognize that another people live in Gaza and the West Bank. The Arabs of Palestine have declared themselves to be a nation, just as we Jews recognized our own nationhood in the Zionist movement. Most Zionists now recognize that we must take cognizance of Palestinian national aspirations. However, at the same time, and by the same logic, the Arabs of Palestine and their supporters must honor the Jewish right to self determination.

The occupation was for many years relatively benign. Palestinian Arabs worked in Israeli towns and Israelis visited Arab towns. There was no "Apartheid" and the checkpoints were usually a formality.

A part of the Zionist public believed that the newly conquered territories should be part of Israel. They included areas that had held Jewish communities for many years, as well as holy places of the Jewish religion such as the wailing wall in Jerusalem, the tomb of Rachel near Bethlehem, and the tomb of Abraham in Hebron. They included areas such as Gush Etzion, Atarot and the old city of Jerusalem, where Jewish communities had been ethnically cleansed and expelled or forced to flee in 1948. Nonetheless, initially, the majority consensus in Israel was that most, or all of these territories would be returned in return for a genuine peace offer.

As the years passed, attitudes hardened. In 1975, the UN passed the infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution. Israeli political sentiment veered to the right in reaction, and the Labor government was forced to allow the founding of Elon Moreh. In 1977, the rightist Likud party came to power. They believed in the cause of Greater Israel, and they gave settlement expansion a big boost. However, even the leader of the Likud, Ariel Sharon, has come to understand that it is wrong to rule over another people. Israel is withdrawing from the heavily populated Gaza strip, taking the calculated risk that this area may become a base for intense terrorist activity against Israel, under the control of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad extremists. These organizations believe it is their holy duty to wipe Israel off the map.

Optimism over a reasonable solution that would allow self-determination for both sides was born in the Oslo accords. Unfortunately, though the PLO officially renounced violence in the Oslo accords, Palestinian Arab extremist organizations began a series of lethal terror attacks, forcing Israel to institute a harsh regime of checkpoints, and to build "Jews only" bypass roads to Jewish settlements. In 2000, the negotiations broke down and the Palestinian Arabs resorted to terror attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli cities. At one point, there were 130 Israeli casualties in a single week. To control the bombings, Israel stepped up the regime of checkpoints and is building a security fence. These measures undoubtedly cause regrettable hardship to the Palestinians. However, they were implemented reluctantly. They are not the result of an "apartheid" ideology, as critics claim, nor are they attempts to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians. They are security measures implemented with the greatest reluctance. In particular, the security fence contradicts the "Greater Israel" ideology and is certainly not a product of radical Zionism.

The occupation is more benign than its critics would have you believe. The "evils of the occupation" have been deliberately exaggerated by Palestinians and enemies of Israel. Officials of the Palestinian Authority spread false rumors that Israel was injecting Palestinian children with AIDs and distributing poisoned candies, that Israel had dumped radioactive waste in the West Bank, that Israel was irradiating Palestinians and giving them cancer at checkpoints, and that Israel had killed over 500 Palestinians in Jenin in operation "Defensive Wall." Several anti-Zionist writers insisted that the Israeli government is engaged in a diabolical plot to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, offering no proof at all. None of these rumors and announcements have any truth to them. They are part of a propaganda war aimed at justifying terrorism and extremist demands.

Isn't Israel doing to Palestinians what the Germans did do the Jews - Another "Holocaust"?

One of the most diabolical claims of anti-Zionists is that Israelis are like Nazis, and are perpetrating an Holocaust in the Palestinians. Israelis are not putting Palestinians in gas chambers or starving them to death. Israel is fighting a war, against a vicious and implacable enemy. The Jews of Europe were innocent citizens who were selected by the Nazis for extermination solely because of their religion. Israel has instituted security measures that are cause hardships for the Palestinians and are sometimes harsh. Occasional excesses, committed by Jewish and Muslim and Druze IDF soldiers alike are not the result of evil conspiracies or racist ideology, but errors of individuals that are the sad and inevitable result of a war that has been forced on Israel.

Ami Isseroff

MORE INFORMATION

Green Party of the United States

http://www.gp.org

202-319-7191, 866-41GREEN

Fax 202-319-7193

Featured Organization: American Jews for a Just Peace (AJJP)

Fire Is Born — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:13:50 EST

Sign the Open Letter to Israeli Soldiers

Click here to add you name to an Open Letter to Israeli Soldiers.

Welcome

American Jews for a Just Peace (AJJP) is an alliance of activists in the United States working to ensure equal rights, safety, and dignity for all the people of historic Palestine. AJJP operates as an alliance of autonomous chapters and individual members across the United States. AJJP is a grassroots, membership-driven network with the goal of coordinating our collective work under a shared name and agreed statement of Common Ground principles.

We are a predominantly Jewish organization, but welcome the full participation of all people of good will who agree with our Common Ground.

Gaza massacres must spur us to action

"The rationalization for Israel's massacres, already being faithfully transmitted by the English-language media, is that Israel is acting in "retaliation" for Palestinian rockets fired with increasing intensity ever since the six-month truce expired on 19 December (until today, no Israeli had been killed or injured by these recent rocket attacks).

"But today's horrific attacks mark only a change in Israel's method of killing Palestinians recently. In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel."
—Ali Abunimah (Electronic Intifada)

Emergency Alert: Take Action to End Israeli Attacks on Gaza

AJJP Press Release: Call to Stop the Bombing in Gaza

Protest in Tel Aviv

Enough of the massacre on Gaza (placard, right). The sign in the background says: Solidarity with the families of Sderot, Ashkelon and Gaza.

Trees of Reconciliation

Check out our new Trees of Reconciliation project.

Support the Shministim!

The Shministim are Israeli high school seniors—596 of them at the last count—who are taking a strong and principled position against the occupation of Palestine and the oppression of Palestinian citizens of Israel. They are refusing military service in order to focus world attention on the injustice and cruelty of the occupation.

AJJP urges all progressives to show their support now for these courageous young Israelis. Their stand takes courage because they are imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, and often multiple times. Each refusal to serve is treated as a new crime. Some shministim have been imprisoned for up to two years. Four of them are serving repeat prison sentences now for their principled opposition to the Occupation.

New Profile, a group that supports the shministim, is itself under criminal investigation for counseling them. Read the open letter from the shministim here.

CO Tamar Katz refused to wear a military uniform when she returned to Military Prison no. 400 for the third time on 1 Dec., and was therefore placed in the Isolation Ward of the prison.

We now received information that the prison authorities are mistreating Tamar, probably in an attempt to pressure her to wear a uniform against her decision. More specifically, Tamar is not allowed to make phone calls to her family, not allowed to change clothes, and has even been denied the opportunity to wash her teeth.

This calls for some special action to be taken. First and foremost, Tamar herself needs moral support. You can write her messages of encouragement to her prison address:

Tamar Katz
Military ID 5396326
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579389

But please be sure to back them up with messages sent by e-mail to shministim@gmail.com, as other messages will take much longer to arrive and might well be blocked.

Alternatively, you can fax your letter of support for the shministim directly to:

Commander of Military Prison No. 400
Military Prison No. 400
Military postal number 02447, IDF
Israel.
Fax: ++972-3-9579389 Mr. Ehud Barak
Minister of Defence
Ministry of Defence
Hakirya,
Tel-Aviv 64743,
Israel.
E-mail: sar@mod.gov.il or pniot@mod.gov.il
Tel.: ++972-3-6975540 or ++972-3-6975423
Fax: ++972-3-6976711 Avichai Mandelblit,
Chief Military Attorney
Military postal code 9605, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-569-4

"What You Don’t Know About Gaza "

Lech Alex Bajan — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:19:53 EST

"What You Don’t Know About Gaza "

By Rashid Khalidi

View This Article Online

NEARLY everything youve been led to believe about Gaza is wrong. Below are a few essential points that seem to be missing from the conversation, much of which has taken place in the press, about Israels attack on the Gaza Strip.

THE GAZANS Most of the people living in Gaza are not there by choice. The majority of the 1.5 million people crammed into the roughly 140 square miles of the Gaza Strip belong to families that came from towns and villages outside Gaza like Ashkelon and Beersheba. They were driven to Gaza by the Israeli Army in 1948.

THE OCCUPATION The Gazans have lived under Israeli occupation since the Six-Day War in 1967. Israel is still widely considered to be an occupying power, even though it removed its troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. Israel still controls access to the area, imports and exports, and the movement of people in and out. Israel has control over Gazas air space and sea coast, and its forces enter the area at will. As the occupying power, Israel has the responsibility under the Fourth Geneva Convention to see to the welfare of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

THE BLOCKADE Israels blockade of the strip, with the support of the United States and the European Union, has grown increasingly stringent since Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. Fuel, electricity, imports, exports and the movement of people in and out of the Strip have been slowly choked off, leading to life-threatening problems of sanitation, health, water supply and transportation.

The blockade has subjected many to unemployment, penury and malnutrition. This amounts to the collective punishment with the tacit support of the United States of a civilian population for exercising its democratic rights.

THE CEASE-FIRE Lifting the blockade, along with a cessation of rocket fire, was one of the key terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. This accord led to a reduction in rockets fired from Gaza from hundreds in May and June to a total of less than 20 in the subsequent four months (according to Israeli government figures). The cease-fire broke down when Israeli forces launched major air and ground attacks in early November; six Hamas operatives were reported killed.

WAR CRIMES The targeting of civilians, whether by Hamas or by Israel, is potentially a war crime. Every human life is precious. But the numbers speak for themselves: Nearly 700 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed since the conflict broke out at the end of last year. In contrast, there have been around a dozen Israelis killed, many of them soldiers. Negotiation is a much more effective way to deal with rockets and other forms of violence. This might have been able to happen had Israel fulfilled the terms of the June cease-fire and lifted its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

This war on the people of Gaza isnt really about rockets. Nor is it about restoring Israels deterrence, as the Israeli press might have you believe. Far more revealing are the words of Moshe Yaalon, then the Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff, in 2002: The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."

CNN Confirms Israel Broke Ceasefire First

Lech Alex Bajan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:29:14 EST

CNN Confirms Israel Broke Ceasefire First

"Which Israel do we have before us? What will become of its standing in the world, which is now watching the events in Gaza?"

Fire Is Born — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:57:56 EST

And there lie the bodies

By Gideon Levy

Tags: israel, gaza, hamas

The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape's topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe's diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.

Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.

They liquidated Nizar Ghayan? Nobody counts the 20 women and children who lost their lives in the same attack. There was a massacre of dozens of officers during their graduation ceremony from the police academy? Acceptable. Five little sisters? Allowed. Palestinians are dying in hospitals that lack medical equipment? Peanuts. Whatever happened to the not-so-good old days of Salah Shahadeh? When we liquidated him in July 2002, we also killed 15 women and children. At least back then, moral qualms were raised for a moment.
Here lie their bodies, row upon row, some of them tiny. Our hearts have turned hard and our eyes have become dull. All of Israel has worn military fatigues, uniforms that are opaque and stained with blood and which enable us to carry out any crime. Even our leading intellectuals fail to speak out on what havoc we have wreaked. Amos Oz urges: "Cease-fire now." David Grossman writes: "Hold your fire. Stop." Meir Shalev wants "a punitive operation." And not one word about our moral image, which has been horribly distorted.

The suffering in the south renders everything kosher, as if the horrible suffering in Gaza pales in comparison. Everyone is hungry for revenge, and that hunger is excused by the need for "deterrence," after it was already proved that the killing and the destruction in Lebanon did not achieve it.

Yes, I know, war is war. After all, they brought this on themselves. They are a terrorist organization and we are not. They want to destroy us and we seek peace. Still, is there nothing here that will stop this blood pipeline? Even those whose hearts are hardened by "moral righteousness" will have to momentarily halt the bombing machine and ask: Which Israel do we have before us? What will become of its standing in the world, which is now watching the events in Gaza? What are we inflicting on the moderate Arab regimes? And what of the simmering popular hatred we are sowing throughout the world? What good will emerge from this killing and destruction?

It is doubtful whether Hamas will be cut down to size as a result of this wretched war. Yet, the face of the state has been cut down to size, as have civilian elites who are apathetic and scared. The "peace camp," if it ever existed, has been cut down to size. Attorney General Menachem Mazuz authorized the Ghayan killing, regardless of the cost. Haim Oron, the leader of the "new left-wing movement," supported the launch of this foolish war.

Nobody is coming to the rescue - of Gaza or even of the remnants of humanity and Israeli democracy. The statesmen, the jurists, the poets, the authors, academe, and the news media - pitch black over the abyss. When the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel: The blood pipeline it laid has been completed.

HUGO CHAVEZ: "I call on the world to stop this madness."

Fire Is Born — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:25:59 EST

Israeli envoy to Caracas expelled

Venezuela has ordered the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Caracas in protest at Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip.

A number of diplomatic staff have been expelled along with Shlomo Cohen.

President Hugo Chavez has strongly condemned Israel for its actions and called on Israelis to stand up against their government.

Venezuela is the first country to take such a diplomatic step in protest at the violence in Gaza.

"The Israeli army is cowardly attacking worn-out, innocent people, while they claim that they are defending their people," Mr Chavez said during a visit to a children's hospital in Caracas.

"I call on the people of Israel to stand up against that government, to demand, to put a hand on their hearts and look at their children, and I call on the world to stop this madness."

Shortly after, the foreign ministry released a statement ordering the expulsion of Mr Cohen and some of his staff, in what they said was a show of solidarity with the Palestinians.

The BBC's Will Grant in Caracas says Mr Chavez often uses strong language to criticise Israel and is a close ally of Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of Israel's main enemies.

Venezuela also has a large Arab community who have welcomed the government's move, our correspondent adds.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7814857.stm

Published: 2009/01/07 01:19:04 GMT

© BBC MMIX

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for an immediate end to fighting in the Gaza - 195 of the 600 Palestinians killed are children!

Fire Is Born — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:06:42 EST

UN chief demands Gaza ceasefire

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called for an immediate end to fighting in the Gaza Strip during a meeting of the UN Security Council in New York.

The US and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have backed a French-Egyptian ceasefire proposal.

Israel says it has agreed to set up a humanitarian corridor to allow aid into the Gaza Strip.

On the ground in Gaza, explosions were heard through the night. Israel says it carried out more than 30 air strikes.

Mr Ban criticised both Israel for its bombardment of Gaza and Hamas for firing rockets into Israel and urged Security Council members in New York to act "swiftly and decisively to put this crisis to an end".

"We need urgently to achieve Palestinian unity and the reunification of Gaza with the West Bank within the framework of the legitimate Palestinian Authority," he added.

More than 600 Palestinians are now believed to have been killed since Israel began its offensive 11 days ago. Palestinian health ministry officials say at least 195 children are among those killed.

An Israeli attack on Tuesday on a school building, which Israel says was sheltering militants, left at least 30 people dead and 55 injured, UN officials say.

Israel, which has vowed to reduce rocket attacks from Gaza on its territory, has lost seven soldiers on the ground. Four people within Israel have been killed by rockets.

In another development, Venezuela ordered the expulsion of Israel's ambassador in protest at the Gaza offensive and its "flagrant violations of international law".

Support for truce

The ceasefire plan proposed jointly by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would bring together all the main parties and take all measures to end the conflict in Gaza.

The plan envisages the resumption of the delivery of aid to Gaza and talks with Israel on border security, a key issue for Israel as it says Hamas smuggles its rockets into Gaza via the Egyptian border.

Welcoming the proposal, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for a "ceasefire that can endure and that can bring real security".

The contours of a possible diplomatic agreement are in place, the BBC's Laura Trevelyan reports from the UN.

However, if Israel continues to control the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza and can choose to stop it at any time this seems unlikely to command the support of Hamas, she notes.

Thus frenetic diplomacy in New York and in the Middle East is likely to continue.

Israel's ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, did not say whether Israel would accept the proposal but said it would take it "very, very seriously".

Israel has proposed suspending attacks in specified parts of Gaza to allow people to stock up on essential goods.

The military will open up "areas for limited periods of time, during which the population will be able to receive the aid", the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said.

Andrew Whitley of the UN relief agency told the BBC that any relief in the conditions of the people of Gaza could only be a good thing:

"People have been weakened by 18 months of blockade and siege. They've been getting very little food, electricity or heat for a long time, and so they are in a very weakened condition."

School carnage

UN officials have said that the al-Fakhura school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was being used as a refuge for hundreds of people when it was hit by Israeli shell-fire.

The Israeli military said its soldiers had come under mortar fire from Hamas militants inside the school. A spokesman for Hamas denied there had been any hostile fire coming from the school.

In all, at least 70 Palestinians and five Israeli soldiers were killed on Tuesday.

Israel says its offensive is stopping militants firing rockets but at least five hit southern Israel on Tuesday, injuring a baby.

Casualty claims in Gaza cannot be independently verified. Israel is refusing to let international journalists into Gaza, despite a supreme court ruling to allow a limited number of reporters to enter the territory."

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In pictures: Gaza casualties mount

YOUR PICTURE GALLERY IS NOW LOADING...

At least 30 people, including children, were killed in an Israeli air strike on a United Nations-run school in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian medical sources.

Many Palestinian families across Gaza have fled their homes for UN-run schools and shelters, as Israel's military operation in Gaza reached its 11th day.

Israeli forces earlier refocused attacks in the Gaza Strip to include the southern town of Khan Younis.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad said their fighters had engaged Israeli soldiers with machine-guns and rockets in Gaza City, where residents reported loud explosions and heavy gunfire.

Plumes of smoke rose above the territory as Israeli infantry, supported by helicopters and tanks, clashed with Hamas militants.

Four Israeli soldiers were killed by fire from one of their own tanks in northern Gaza early on Tuesday, while at least 70 Palestinians were reportedly killed.

Relatives of an Israeli soldier killed in the Gaza Strip on Monday mourned his loss at his funeral in Jerusalem.

Elsewhere in Jerusalem, Israelis prayed for the well-being of troops fighting in Gaza.

Later, Palestinians in the West Bank city of Ramallah took part in a candlelit vigil in support of Gaza.

Protests against Israel's military offensive continue in many countries around the world, including Syria, where images of Israeli leaders were burnt.

Palestinian medical officials say at least 110 people have died since the ground assault began on Saturday, while Israel says it has killed 130 Hamas fighters.

Aid agencies in Gaza speak of appalling conditions for treating casualties of the continuing Israeli bombardments.

Back 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Next

UN condemns attack on Gaza school - this is a BBC interview of some humanitarian caliber

Fire Is Born — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:13:20 EST

UN condemns attack on Gaza school

John Ging, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, has said the region is 'on the cusp of catastrophe'.

He was speaking after an Israeli air strike killed three Palestinians who were seeking refuge in a school run by the UN just outside Gaza City.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7813762.stm

Parlamento venezolano condena a el estado de Israel por cometer crimines de guerra contra la poblacion de Gaza Palestina

Lech Alex Bajan — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:02:13 EST

Parlamento venezolano condena a el estado de Israel por cometer crimines de guerra contra la poblacion de Gaza Palestina

Gaza deadly update. "Who is speaking on behalf of the children?"

Fire Is Born — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:57:29 EST

AP – Palestinian boys inspect the rubble at a building following

Israeli forces' operations in Rafah refugee …

GAZA CITY, Gaza – An Israeli bombardment struck outside a U.N. school where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge on Tuesday, the U.N. and Palestinian medics said, killing at least 30 people — many of them children whose parents wailed in grief at a hospital filled with dead and wounded.

An Israeli official said its soldiers came under fire from militants hiding in the school and that the building stored Palestinian munitions.

Despite international criticism over civilian deaths and calls for a cease-fire, Israeli soldiers edged closer to two major Gaza towns. A total of 58 Palestinians were killed Tuesday — with just two confirmed as militants, health officials in Gaza said.

The explosions marked the second time in hours a U.N. school came under attack. It was the deadliest assault since Israel sent ground forces into Gaza last weekend as part of a larger offensive against the ruling Hamas militant group that has killed nearly 600 Palestinians.

Nearly half of the dead are civilians, according to U.N. and Palestinian officials.

"There's nowhere safe in Gaza. Everyone here is terrorized and traumatized," John Ging, the top U.N. official in Gaza, said after the first strike on the compound of a U.N. school killed three people in a courtyard. The school has served as a shelter for Gaza City refugees fleeing the blistering 11-day offensive.

A Palestinian rocket — one of two dozen fired from Gaza on Tuesday — wounded an Israeli infant.

Dr. Bassam Abu Warda, director of Kamal Radwan Hospital, said 34 people were killed in an Israeli strike outside a second U.N. school in the northern Gaza town of Jebaliya. The United Nations confirmed 30 were killed and 55 injured by tank shells.

But an Israeli official said "hostile fire" was directed at the soldiers from within the school. He said soldiers returned fire and multiple explosions went off, presumably emanating from munitions stored there. The official spoke on condition of anonymity pending a formal army announcement.

The attack occurred at midafternoon, at a time when many people in the densely populated Jebaliya refugee camp were out and about. Many of the refugees apparently had stepped outside the shelter to get some air, thinking an area around a school was safe.

Palestinian militants frequently fire from residential areas. However, Mohammed Nassar, a medic who treated the wounded, said he did not see any gunmen among the casualties.

Footage broadcast on Hamas' Al Aqsa TV showed gruesome scenes at the hospital. At first, medics carried in at least five younger boys who were laid out on the hospital floor. It was not clear whether they were still alive.

Other medics then started unloading bodies of older men who had been stacked up in the back of an ambulance, three high, and were dragged without stretchers. One man's legs had been turned into bloody stumps that dragged on the ground as he was pulled from the ambulance.

In later scenes, the emergency room was packed, with all beds occupied and barely a patch of ground where there was not a body or a doctor standing. In other rooms, there were blood stains on the floor and other bodies lying there, with medics running to each of them to take their pulses.

"I saw a lot of women and children wheeled in," said Fares Ghanem, another hospital official. "A lot of the wounded were missing limbs and a lot of the dead were in pieces."

Majed Hamdan, an AP photographer, said he rushed to the scene shortly after the attacks. At the hospital, he said, many children were among the dead.

"I saw women and men — parents — slapping their faces in grief, screaming, some of them collapsed to the floor. They knew their children were dead," he said. "In the morgue, most of the killed appeared to be children. In the hospital, there wasn't enough space for the wounded."

He said there were marks of five separate explosions, all in the same area near the school as the refugees were outside at midday to escape the confines of the crowded building.

U.N. officials say they provided their location coordinates to Israel's army to ensure that their buildings in Gaza are not targeted.

Speaking shortly after the first attack, Maxwell Gaylard, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories, demanded an investigation.

"As one of the most densely populated places in the world, it is clear that more civilians will be killed," he said. "These tragic incidents need to be investigated, and if international humanitarian law has been contravened, those responsible must held accountable."

The international Red Cross said an ambulance post was hit as well on Tuesday, injuring one medical worker.

Israel launched its offensive on Dec. 27 to halt repeated Palestinian rocket attacks on its southern towns. After a weeklong air campaign, Israeli ground forces invaded Gaza over the weekend.

Nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed. Ten Israelis have died since the operation began, including a soldier who was shot on Tuesday.

United Nations staff estimate around 15,000 people have fled to 23 U.N.-run schools they have turned into makeshift refuges. U.N. food aid has halted in the northern Gaza Strip because officials fear residents would risk their lives to reach distribution centers.

Tanks rumbled closer to the towns of Khan Younis and Dir el Balah in south and central Gaza but were still several kilometers (miles) outside, witnesses said, adding that the sounds of fighting could be heard from around the new Israeli positions. Israel already has encircled Gaza City, the area's biggest city.

The rising civilian death toll has drawn international condemnations and raised concerns of a looming humanitarian disaster. Many Gazans are without electricity or running water, thousands have been displaced from their homes and residents say that without distribution disrupted, food supplies are running thin.

"This is not a crisis, it's a disaster," said water utility official Munzir Shiblak. "We are not even able to respond to the cry of the people." He said about 800,000 residents in Gaza City and northern parts of the territory had no access to running water from Tuesday. Gaza's overall population is 1.4 million people.

Israel says it won't stop the assault until its southern towns are freed of the threat of Palestinian rocket fire and it receives international guarantees that Hamas, a militant group backed by Iran and Syria, will not restock its weapons stockpile. It blames Hamas for the civilian casualties, saying the group intentionally seeks cover in crowded residential areas.

Visiting southern Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he hoped to stop the offensive soon, but said it would depend on Hamas' willingness to stop attacks and stop its smuggling of weapons into Gaza from neighboring Egypt.

"We have no interest in endlessly continuing the campaign. It will stop when the conditions that are essential for Israel's security are met," he said in the rocket-scarred town of Sderot.

The army says it has dealt a harsh blow to Hamas, killing 130 militants in the past two days and greatly reducing the rocket fire. Hamas is believed to have 20,000 fighters.

Israeli forces have seized the main Gaza highway in several places, cutting the strip into northern, southern and central sectors and preventing movement between them. Israel also has taken over high-rise buildings in Gaza City and destroyed dozens of smuggling tunnels — Hamas' main lifeline — along the Egyptian border.

Late Monday, a paratroop officer and three Israeli infantrymen were killed in two separate friendly fire incidents, the military said. Heavy Israeli casualties could threaten to undermine what so far has been wide public support for the operation.

A high-level European Union delegation met with President Shimon Peres on Tuesday in a futile bid to end the violence. Commissioner Benita Ferraro-Waldner acknowledged Israel's right to self-defense, but said its response was disproportionate.

"We have come to Israel in order to advance the initiative for a humanitarian cease-fire and I will tell you, Mr. President, that you have a serious problem with international advocacy, and that Israel's image is being destroyed," she said, according to a statement from Peres' office.

In Geneva, the international Red Cross said Gaza was in a "full-blown" humanitarian crisis. Its head of operations, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, said the few remaining power supplies could collapse at any moment.

Israeli leaders say there is no humanitarian crisis and that they have allowed the delivery of vital supplies.

The EU delegation was one of a flurry of diplomatic efforts to forge a cease-fire. French President Nicolas Sarkozy left Israel after a day of meetings with leaders.

Europe "wants a cease-fire as quickly as possible," Sarkozy said Monday, urging Israel to halt the offensive, while blaming Hamas for acting "irresponsibly and unpardonably."

International Mideast envoy Tony Blair said ensuring weapons smuggling to Hamas is halted would be a key step to restoring calm.

Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Blair said that stopping Hamas' rocket supply would be a "very significant advance in terms of Israel's security," which would allow Israel to halt its offensive and relieve the suffering of Gaza's civilians.

He would not give details of an international proposal to stop the flow of weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

Israel's operation has angered many across the Arab world and has drawn criticism from countries such as Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, which have ties with Israel and have been intimately involved in Mideast peacemaking.

___

Barzak reported from Gaza City, Weizman from Jerusalem.

Against Israeli Apartheid Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina (07/02)

Fire Is Born — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:00:14 EST

Against Israeli Apartheid

Desmond Tutu and Ian Urbina (07/02)

(International Herald Tribune, The Nation (magazine), Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Morning Call (Allentown, PA), Cairo Times, Middle East Times, Manila Times)

The end of apartheid stands as one of the crowning accomplishments of the past century, but we would not have succeeded without the help of international pressure -- in particular the divestment movement of the 1980s. Over the past six months a similar movement has taken shape, this time aiming at an end to the Israeli occupation.
Divestment from apartheid South Africa was fought by ordinary people at the grassroots. Faith-based leaders informed their followers, union members pressured their companies' stockholders and consumers questioned their store owners. Students played an especially important role by compelling universities to change their portfolios. Eventually, institutions pulled the financial plug, and the South African government thought twice about its policies.
Similar moral and financial pressures on Israel are being mustered one person at a time. Students on more than 40 US campuses are demanding a review of university investments in Israeli companies as well as in firms doing major business in Israel. From Berkeley to Ann Arbor, city councils have debated municipal divestment measures.
These tactics are not the only parallels to the struggle against apartheid. Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar.
Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled "Not in My Name." Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience.
To criticize the occupation is not to overlook Israel's unique strengths, just as protesting the Vietnam War did not imply ignoring the distinct freedoms and humanitarian accomplishments of the United States. In a region where repressive governments and unjust policies are the norm, Israel is certainly more democratic than its neighbors. This does not make dismantling the settlements any less a priority. Divestment from apartheid South Africa was certainly no less justified because there was repression elsewhere on the African continent. Aggression is no more palatable in the hands of a democratic power. Territorial ambition is equally illegal whether it occurs in slow motion, as with the Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories, or in blitzkrieg fashion, as with the Iraqi tanks in Kuwait. The United States has a distinct responsibility to intervene in atrocities committed by its client states, and since Israel is the single largest recipient of US arms and foreign aid, an end to the occupation should be a top concern of all Americans.
Almost instinctively, the Jewish people have always been on the side of the voiceless. In their history, there is painful memory of massive roundups, house demolitions and collective punishment. In their scripture, there is acute empathy for the disfranchised. The occupation represents a dangerous and selective amnesia of the persecution from which these traditions were born.
Not everyone has forgotten, including some within the military. The growing Israeli refusenik movement evokes the small anti-conscription drive that helped turn the tide in apartheid South Africa. Several hundred decorated Israeli officers have refused to perform military service in the Occupied Territories. Those not already in prison have taken their message on the road to US synagogues and campuses, rightly arguing that Israel needs security, but that it will never have it as an occupying power. More than 35 new settlements have been constructed in the past year. Each one is a step away from the safety deserved by the Israelis, and two steps away from the justice owed to the Palestinians.
If apartheid ended, so can the occupation, but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined. The current divestment effort is the first, though certainly not the only, necessary move in that direction.

[Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his work against apartheid. Ian Urbina is associate editor with the Middle East Research and Information Project.]

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is acting like in 1939 Britain did

Lech Alex Bajan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:27:23 EST

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is acting like in 1939 Britain did

Zbigniew Brzezinski to Scarborough: "Stunningly Superficial"

Donald Trump On President George W. Bush

"War is hell" - The Iraqi Refugee Crisis

Fire Is Born — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:58:08 EST

Home » National Campaigns » Support Iraqi Women

The Iraqi Refugee Crisis

HOW YOU CAN HELP

CLICK HERE TO DONATE NOW!

There is a growing humanitarian crisis in Iraq. As the question of troop withdrawal becomes more about "when" not "if," Americans must face the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world- and we must do something about it.

Click here to donate to help Iraqi women and children refugees and internally displaced persons.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

War is hell, and this hell can be especially deep for mothers. Less than $600 million (less than the $720m the U.S. spends each day to wage the war) has been slated for emergency relief, basic health services and education for the millions of Iraqis who have been forced from their homes and are now living abroad or are Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

COLLATERAL REPAIR

CODEPINK is honored to be partnering with the "Collateral Repair Project," a grassroots movement created to provide support to the milions of Iraqis who had to leave behind their homes and crumbling communities and are trying to feed, clothe and educate their families in the wake of a violent occupation. Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK cofounder will be traveling to Syria and Jordan to meet with our partners at Collateral Repair Project and other groups to share stories and see what we as Americans can do to stand in solidarity with our Iraqi sisters and brothers. Read the first of Medea's report back from her trip here.

LEARN MORE

The Geneva Conventions stipulate that,

"A force occupying territory has a duty to supply the population with food and medicine "to the fullest extent of the means available to it" (G4, art. 55). If any part of the population of an occupied territory is inadequately supplied, the occupying power shall facilitate relief by humanitarian agencies (G4, art. 59). However, the provision of assistance by humanitarian agencies does not relieve the occupying force of its responsibilities to meet the needs of the population." (Excerpt from Human Rights Watch)

Although it was predicted and became true that the US invasion would provoke a humanitarian crisis in Iraq, no one prepared for what has become the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. Today, 8 million Iraqis live in poverty and more than 15% of the population have fled their homes. More than 2 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries and an estimated 2.4 million are internally displaced. Despite urging from many different quarters that economic development and reconstruction are key to stabilizing Iraq, Iraqis are left with inadequate support from the Iraqi Government, the UN, the US or other international donors. According to the recent Testimony of Bill Frelick before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus,

"The Bush Administration has boosted its 2008 emergency request to fund the Iraq and Afghan wars to $196.4 billion, bringing the total price tag to more than $800 billion. Less than one-fifth of 1 percent of that request, $240 million-less than the amount the U.S. spends each day to wage the war-is slated for emergency relief, basic health services and education for the 4.4 million Iraqis who have been forced from their homes. While the Administration's war spending could be characterized as profligate, it has been pinching pennies when it comes to meeting the war's human costs. Its humanitarian response has not only been stingy, but prosaic."

Jordan, Syria and even provinces within Iraq have closed their doors to Iraqi refugees because of the lack of international assistance to help provide for the massive influx of Iraqis fleeing from their homes. Recent reports from the Iraqi Government, UN agencies and international NGOs all warn of the threat to Iraq's orphaned and vulnerable children.

Resources

Below are links to recent reports & studies, statistics, articles, and NGOs providing information on the current humanitarian crisis in Iraq, with special emphasis on the growing refugee crisis.

Fact Sheets
These handouts give an overview to the consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation from an Iraqi perspective. The refugee crisis piece outlines the humanitarian catastrophe of the war, and the refugee resettlement piece talks about Iraqi families coming to the United States and tells people what they can do to support this growing community. It includes a seven-point section on the path forward.

Download "The Iraqi Refugee Crisis" (spring/summer update)
Download "Iraqi Refugee Resettlement" (new)

Articles

A Surge for Refugees
New York Times Editorial, April 22, 2008
"IT is a grave humanitarian crisis: 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in deplorable and declining conditions in Syria and Jordan."
Refugees? What Refugees
New York Times Opinion, September 27, 2007
The I-told-you-so phase of the Iraq invasion is thankfully ending. What is needed now is consensus on American responsibility. That starts with a more open door to Iraqis in flight. Mr. President, say something.

Doors closing on Iraqi displaced
BBC - October 10, 2007
A growing number of Iraqi provinces are refusing entry to displaced people, the UN refugee agency has said. The head of the UNHCR Iraq Support Unit told the BBC up to 11 governors were restricting access because they lacked resources to look after the refugees.

Reports & Studies

Uprooted and Unstable: The Refugee Crisis in Iraq
Refugees International, 4/15/2008
Describes a vacuum of humanitarian assistance created by the failure of the Iraqi government and the international community to administer aid to civilians.

The Human Cost of War: The Iraqi Refugee Crisis
Testimony of Bill Frelick before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus
Bill Frelick delivered testimony at the November 15, 2007, member briefing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. The briefing updated Caucus members on the situation of the estimated 4.4 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced persons in the region.
Click here for a number of resources & reports from the Iraqi International Initiative on Refugees
Lack of money, visa problems prompting Iraqi refugees to return home
IRIN reports (November 22nd) : Lack of funds and the Syrian government’s refusal to renew their visas, more than the perception of improved security in Iraq, are prompting some Iraqi refugees in Syria to return to Iraq, according to personal refugee accounts and figures from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Global Policy Forum: Iraq's Humanitarian Crisis: The international relief system has not been able to respond to the growing humanitarian challenges. International agencies have themselves faced serious problems in reaching Iraqis at risk. Iraq's humanitarian emergency has reached a crisis level that compares with some of the world's most urgent calamities.
(This site also contains an excellent archive of recent reports and articles)
Iraqi Refugees: A Lot of Talk, Little Action
Refugees International, 11/14/2007
The situation for Iraqi refugees in the Middle East continues to deteriorate, while the scale of the crisis continues to dwarf the international response. As the number of displaced Iraqis has reached an unprecedented level - more than 4.5 million - Iraq's neighbors have increased restrictions on the refugees. These restrictions are at least partially a response to the lack of support received from the United States and other donor governments, as well as the government of Iraq itself, to lessen the tremendous burden that the host countries are assuming.
Oxfam Reports Growing Humanitarian Crisis in Iraq
By Damien Cave, July 31, 2007
Poverty, hunger and public health continue to worsen in Iraq, according to a report released Monday by Oxfam International, which says that more aid is needed from abroad and calls on the Iraqi government to decentralize the distribution of food and medical supplies.
Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons: A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis?
Congressional Research Service for the People, October 3, 2007
Summary: The humanitarian crisis many feared would take place in March 2003 as a result of the war in Iraq continues to unfold as a result of post-war insurgency and sectarian violence. It is estimated that in total (including those displaced prior to the war) there may be as many as 2 million Iraqi refugees who have fled to Jordan, Syria, and other neighboring states, and approximately 2.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced within Iraq itself. This report provides an analysis of the current crisis, including the conditions for those displaced in Iraq and the refugee situations in Syria, Jordan, and elsewhere.
UNICEF concerned at conditions for orphans and vulnerable children in Iraq
AMMAN/GENEVA/NEW YORK, 22 June 2007
UN warns of growing humanitarian crisis in occupied Iraq
By Kate Randall, 26 April 2007
A new United Nations report on human rights in Iraq paints a devastating portrait of the conditions of life facing the civilian population as the US occupation enters its fifth year. The report from the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) covers the period from January 1 to March 31, 2007, which includes the beginning of the Bush administration's Baghdad "surge," Operation Law and Order.
A Displacement Crisis
Internal Displacement Monitoring Center ,March 30 2007
More than 727,000 people are estimated to have been internally displaced due to sectarian and generalised violence in Iraq between February 2006 and March 2007. Together with tens of thousands more displaced by ongoing military operations, and more than one million by the abuses of the former regime of Saddam Hussein, this leads to a total of nearly 1.9 million people currently estimated to be displaced within Iraq. In addition, some 2 million Iraqis fled to neighbouring countries as of March 2007.
Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA)
Online Petition in Support of the Future of Academic Freedom in Iraq
CARA is doing considerable work to raise awareness of the plight of Iraqi academics and what can only be described as the wholesale destruction of the Iraqi education system. Over 280 Iraqi academics have been assassinated since 2003 and thousands more have fled to neighbouring countries and beyond.This petition aims to highlight the UK government's responsibility and role in safeguarding and supporting them in the immediate, to ensure they survive to fulfil their crucial role in the future reconstruction of Iraq’s higher education sector. SIGN CARA's online petition in support of Academic Freedom in Iraq.

Videos & Multimedia Projects

Fleeing to Jordan
Current TV, By Jennifer Jo Utz
An in depth look at one refugee family and the many levels of challenges that face them was an effective way at illuminating the predicament of Iraqi emmigrants.
Video Highlights from Iraq Action Days
Video: Rep. Alcee L. Hastings on the Iraqi Refugee Crisis On April 30. 2008, a photo exhibit highlighting the desperate seriousness of the Iraqi Refugee Crisis was held on Capitol Hill. Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL) was one of the speakers at the affair. Ms. Gabriela Bulisova photographed the refugees at sites she recently visited in both Iraq and Syria.
‘Giving a voice to Iraqi children’, a 20 minute film by Sonia Azad, 12 years old
Sonia is also traveling with Kathy Kelly, of Voices of Creative Non-Violence and Voices in the Wilderness UK, on a UK speaking tour regarding the Iraqi Refugee Crisis. www.voicesuk.org

Warsaw 1942 Getho Palestine Gaza 2009 must see and do something

Lech Alex Bajan — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:50:50 EST

Warsaw 1942 Getho Palestine Gaza 2009 must see and do something

The Warsaw Uprising 1944 / Powstanie Warszawskie

The Warsaw Ghetto

"The Warsaw Ghetto"

POLISH MINISTRY OF INFORMATION

PRINTED AS A PRESS BULLETIN

Extermination of the Polish Jewry "What Happened in the Warsaw Ghetto"

London – Tuesday 1st December 1942 – No 57

The Polish Government has recently received from Poland the following on the measures taken by the German authorities to exterminate the population of the ghetto.

The Origin of the Warsaw Ghetto:

The German authorities created the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940. All the Jews in the city were ordered to transfer to the Jewish quarter assigned to them by 1 November 1940, while all the Aryans were ordered to remove elsewhere out of this quarter.

The Jews were allowed to take only personal articles with them, and were forbidden to take their furniture, though in practice this rule was not strictly observed. All the Jewish shops and businesses in the Aryan areas of the city were closed down and sealed.

The original terminal date for the transfer was postponed to 15 November 1940, after which Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto. But Aryans were allowed to enter without passes down to 25 November 1940. After that the ghetto was completely closed, the entire area was surrounded by a wall and the right of entry and exit was granted only to the holders of passes issued by a special German office.

One entrance to the Warsaw ghetto

Anyone leaving the ghetto without a pass became liable to the death sentence, and the German courts have passed such sentences in a large number of cases. Even after the ghetto was closed a large number of commercial and industrial enterprises owned by Aryans were left within the walls.

All the trading and commercial businesses were transferred outside the walls by the spring of 1941, but Aryan industrial enterprises were left inside and gave employment to both Aryans and Jews.

Life in the Ghetto

After the sealing of the ghetto official intercourse with the outside world was maintained through a special German department, the Transferstelle.

In the spring of 1942 at a period when relations between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw had been systemized, trade between the two parts of the city averaged a sum of 13 groshe daily per head of the ghetto population

At this same period a kilogramme (2 ¼ lbs) of bread cost over ten zlotys and a kilogramme of potatoes some five zlotys. From the earliest days of the ghetto commerce with the outside world was based chiefly on smuggling, which was carried on, on a large scale.

The Germans themselves participated in this violation of their own prescriptions, drawing large incomes from trading profits and bribes. In economic terms this illegal trade consisted of the selling up of Jewish property and possessions in exchange for food.

Jews wait to receive food coupons at a welfare office located at 14 Mranowska St.

The ghetto depended on smuggling for its food supplies, as the amount supplied on the ration cards was much lower even than that allowed to Poles, and was quite inadequate to maintain life.

It amounted to about half a kilogramme of bread per person weekly, and hardly anything to else. As time went on large workshops were organised for Jews to work on German orders. But smuggling remained the chief form of trade with the outside and when it came to an end during the period of “liquidation” of the ghetto the disparity between prices in the Jewish quarter and outside became even greater.

Bread inside the ghetto cost 60 to 85 zlotys a kilogramme, outside it was 8 to 12 zlotys, sugar was 400 to 450 zlotys a kilogramme inside and 35 to 70 zlotys outside, potatoes were 16 to 30 zlotys a kilogramme inside, and 3.50 zlotys outside.

The mortality rate inside the ghetto rose steadily month after month. This was due not only to the terrible need of the people, but to the harsh winters of 1940/41 and 1941/42, epidemics of spotted typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.

Every day dozens of bodies were found in the streets – in 1941 the mortality amounted to some 13 percent of the total population, and during the first quarter of 1942 it amounted to over 15 percent, per annum. On the other hand, the birth rate fell almost to nothing.

None the less the population of the Warsaw ghetto remained almost stable throughout all the period of its existence. Officially it was about 433,000, but in fact it fell to 370,000. The reason is that more Jews were continually being driven into the ghetto from other countries such as Germany and Holand as well as from various smaller towns and places around Warsaw.

The Strengthening of Anti- Jewish Measures

A Jew stopped by German police in the ghetto

The occupying authorities continually resorted to various forms of terror steadily growing in violence and accounting for dozens of victims inside the ghetto every day, apart from the daily executions carried out beyond its confines.

Armed and uniformed Germans would pour into a house at night, drag out those destined as victims and kill them in the street. Adult Jews found outside the ghetto walls were shot on the spot, while children were drowned in clay pits or thrown into the towns canals.

After the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union and the German occupation of the Eastern areas of Poland, in July 1941, news began to arrive of mass machine-gunning of Jews in the more easterly towns and local centres.

At first the stories were hardly to be believed, but they were confirmed again and again by eyewitnesses. In the winter and early spring of 1942 these mass murders of tens of thousands of Jews grew more and more systematic.

Burying the dead in the Warsaw Ghetto

Throughout the whole of the Vilno province only one centre of Jewish life was left in the city of Vilno itself, where some 12,000 Jews remained. In the city of Vilno over 50,000 Jews were murdered, in Rowne 14,000 in Lwow 50 percent of the Jewish population, and in Kowel 10,000.

Later similar reports were received from Stanislawow, Tarnopol, Stiryj and dozens of other smaller towns. It became obvious that the terror was moving westward from the eastern borders, while in the extreme west, in Poland’s “incorporated” western provinces, Jews had already been completely eliminated, only specialist craftsmen working for the German army being left, herded in isolated barracks.

New methods of extermination were being applied. The use of poison gas was resorted to for ten thousand people in Chelm. A camp was organised at Belzec for the special purpose of execution by electrocution and here in the course of about a month, in March and April 1942 80,000 Jews from the Lublin, Lwow and part of the Kielce provinces were executed.

Out of Lublin’s 30,000 Jews only 2,500 were left, 70 of these being women. Auxiliary to the main work of extermination the Jews were being deported from the smaller centres of population and concentrated in the larger towns. In the course of these operations alone some 10 percent, lost their lives.

Himmler Orders Extermination

After Himmler’s visit to the General Gouvernment in March 1941, and his order for the extermination of 50 percent, of the Jews by the end of 1942, there could no longer be any doubt that this great mass murder could be halted only by events of great military and political importance.

In the spring of 1942 the news came that a new extermination camp had been opened at Sobibor, in Wlodawa County. It was expected that the work of liquidating the Warsaw ghetto would begin in the middle of April, and then at the end of May.

In June the rumour spread that it had been postponed for a time. But Himmler’s visit to the General Gouvernment in the middle of July 1942 hastened the execution of the plans and intensified their severity as compared with the original design.

Mass Murder under the Guise of Deportation

Notice announcing the death penalty for those who assist Jews who have left the ghetto without authorization

Preliminary to the liquidation, steps were taken aimed at eliminating foreign Jews from the scope of the measures. To this end a registration of all such Jews was carried out on 17 July 1942, and they were then interned in the Pawiak prison.

From Monday, 20 July onward the task of guarding the ghetto bounds was entrusted to strong cordons of junaks, i.e. security battalions consisting of Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians and certain Soviet prisoners of war of these nationalities, as well as of Russian whites.

After this the Polish police performed only auxiliary service at the exit gates. This change also marked the end of the smuggling between the ghetto and the rest of the Warsaw, while the numbers of Jews shot at the boundaries increased.

The Junaks opened fire at windows of houses adjacent to the ghetto walls. Large forces of German police, armed with machine-guns, were also posted at every exit, an SS man being placed in charge of each post.

German police on motor-cycles patrolled the ghetto walls continually day and night. These preparations were watched by ghetto inhabitants with feelings of dread and terror.

On 21 July 1942 at eleven a.m. German police cars drove up to the building of the Jewish Council in Grzybowska Street. The SS officers who arrived in them ordered the Chairman Mr Czerniakow to summon the members of the Council.

German police and SS arrest Jews on Nowolipie Street in the Warsaw ghetto

On their arrival they were all arrested and carried off in police cars to the Pawiak prison. After a short period of detention the majority of them were released. About the same time police cars drove into the ghetto’s streets. Uniformed Germans broke into the houses looking chiefly for members of the Jewish intellectual class, and killing them on the spot, in their homes, not troubling to identify them.

Among those who were thus killed was a non-Jew Professor Raszej, who, armed with an official pass, was visiting the ghetto in the course of his medical duties. At the same time round-ups were made in the streets, these being noteworthy for the fact that only the better-dressed people were detained.

It later transpired that these passers-by who were fortuitously arrested, and also those members of the Jewish Council who were detained, were to be used as hostages.

So the day passed without either Mr Czerniakow or any other member of the Jewish Council, being informed of what it all meant and what was planned.

Next day, 22 July after ten o’clock a.m. police cars again drove up before the Jewish Council building. When those members of the Council who had been released were summoned, a long order on the “trans-settlement of the Jewish population of Warsaw” was dictated to them.

The essential details were given in the placard which was afterwards posted up, the other details concerning the technique of the deportations:

The number to be deported daily was 6,000
These persons were to be assembled in the building of the hospital on Stawki Street, which was to be emptied for the purpose at once. They were then to be taken to the “transhipment” point at Stawki Street, where there were railway sidings used for the ghetto official trade and industries.
The persons subject to deportation were to be handed over by the Jewish civil police every day before 4p.m, the first consignment to be supplied that same day, 22 July 1942 at 11 o’clock. The members of the Jewish Council with the arrested hostages would answer with their heads for the strict fulfilment of this order. At the express German request the first persons to be assembled for deportation that same day were those held in the Jewish prison, shelters etc.

On 23 July 1942, at seven p.m. two uniformed Germans again arrived at the building of the Jewish Council. They demanded to see Mr Czerniakow. Shortly after they had left his office after the interview he committed suicide.

It is not exactly known, what was the subject of their conversation, for Czerniakow said nothing to anybody about it before his death. But, from the notes he left and also a letter to his wife, it appears that he had been ordered to produce not six thousand but ten thousand people for deportation the following day, and thereafter at the rate of 7,000 a day.

After his death Mr Lichtenbaum, an engineer, became Chairman of the Jewish Council.

The Deportation Order

Jews forcibly deported from the Warsaw Ghetto

Next day ten thousand were in fact assembled at the transhipment point, and 7,000 every day after. The quota was made up of people taken from their homes or rounded up in the streets.

In order to encourage the Jewish police to greater activity the Germans obviously showed them favouritism at this stage: for instance, they provided them with safe-conducts stamped with the German police stamp, which freed from deportation not only their families (wives and children) who were excluded from deportation by the order, but other relations also.

As the order of 22 July 1942, excluded from deportation all workers in the large German – owned enterprises, together with their families, there was considerable competition among the inhabitants of the ghetto to obtain work in these enterprises, or rather to obtain certificates stating that they worked there.

Sums running into thousands of zlotys were paid for such certificates, the money, of course, being pocketed by the German owners of the works etc. It later transpired that not only these certificates of employment, but even the safe- conducts given to the Jewish police had no real value, for the Germans did not respect them and, despite their own order, arbitrarily deported anybody and everybody, without regard to their documents.

Jews from the Warsaw ghetto are boarded onto a deportation train at the Umschlagplatz

The actual process of deportation was carried out more and more brutally every day, and after some days the Germans themselves actively engaged in the work, with the aid of the junaks, independently of the Jewish police.

The Germans cordoned off a whole block of houses, entered the courtyard and opened fire. This was intended as a signal for everybody to leave their homes and assemble in the yard.Anyone who failed to get out quickly enough or who tried to hide was killed on the spot. All infirm, old and crippled people were also killed in their homes.

No consideration was shown for families as such, wives were torn away from their husbands, and children, even quite small tots, from their parents.

Mass Murders

To the accompaniment of incessant firing, at the transhipment point the Germans separated any old and infirm who had escaped so far, carried them straight to the Jewish cemetery, and killed them there.

Every day between sixty and a hundred persons were disposed of in this way. The others were packed into goods trucks, 120 people being crushed into trucks with room for forty. The people choked with lack of air, but the tracks were sealed up and the trains set out.

The floors of the trucks were covered with quicklime and chlorine. The route taken by such a train was marked by the bodies alongside the lines. The deportees were carried off to three execution camps at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor.

Here the trains were unloaded, the condemned were stripped naked and then killed, probably by poison gas or electrocution. For the purpose of burying the bodies a great bulldozer has been taken to Treblinka, and this machine works without stopping.

The stench of the decomposing bodies has nauseated all the peasants for three miles around and forced them to flight. In addition to Treblinka, there were also camps at Belzec and Sobibor.

A sign in Polish from the Belzec killing center that reads, "Attention! All belongings must be handed in at the counter

It has not been possible to ascertain whether any of those who have been carried off have been left alive. We have information only of extermination. Out of the 250,000 people deported only two small transport trains, four thousand people altogether, were sent to work behind the front line in the Brzesc and Malachowicze direction.

As a rule young and physically healthy people escaped this fate, because of their value as labour power, the main victims being old and infirm and children. All the children in the children’s homes and shelters were carried off.

Among these was an orphans’ home run by Janusz Korczak a well known Polish writer. He refused to leave the children, though he would have been allowed to remain. He and the manageress of the home went with the children to the assembly point.

The deportations have been going on unbrokenly ever since 22 July – every day between three and ten thousand people are carried off. Those who are left convulsively cling to the faint hope that they may escape the fate of those who have gone.

By 1 September some 250,000 people had already been carried off. For the month of September 120,000 ration cards were printed, for October only 40,000.

According to information obtained from the German Labour Bureau (Arbeitsamt) which confirmed the figure as to the number of ration cards prepared for October, only 40,000 skilled workers are to be left in the ghetto, held in barracks, as suitable for German war production.

Meantime, the Germans were taking steps to murder off the Jews of the smaller localities outside Warsaw. These murders took place under the very eyes of the Polish inhabitants, who were shocked to the depths of their souls.

Children were shot, pregnant women were killed, people who attempted to run away and hide were hunted like animals, and hundreds of bodies in the streets, by the wayside, along the railway lines were seen by large numbers of Poles.

The liquidation of the ghettos in the nearby places of Falenica, Rembertow, Nowy Dwor, Kaluszyn and Minsk Mazowiecki was carried out during a break in the work of deporting the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto, from 20 August to 24 August. The deportations from the Warsaw ghetto began again on 25 August.

Jews forced to board trucks for deportation

It is impossible to give a brief review of the steps taken by the Germans to eliminate the Warsaw ghetto- concludes the report received from Poland – without attempting to give people free from the German terror some idea of the scale and intensity of the mass murders which by 1 September 1942, had been committed on some 250,000 Jews, and which are still going on.

Any such attempt to give the people of Great Britain or America some idea of these unprecedented mass murders must begin by appealing to them to believe things that would seem incredible. They must get it clearly in their consciousness that all these things are true, the truth amid which we have to live and die.

The facts which we relate are not specially selected – they are facts of everyday existence in Poland. They are not isolated facts, every one of them can be matched by tens and hundreds of similar facts every day.

Since 22 July last anything from several dozen to several hundred Jews have been murdered every day in Warsaw, by shooting in the streets and houses. These murders are committed every day during round-ups of people who are carried off to be killed. Among the six to ten thousand people rounded up every day, for deportation, between fifty and a hundred old people, cripples, and infirm are taken to the cemetery to be shot and buried.

If anyone has any doubt whether it would be possible to kill off five, six or ten thousand people in one day, they can be convinced by the thousands of witnesses at Otwock, Rembertow, Siedlce, Minsk Mazowiecki, Lomza and many other localities.

People at each of these places have seen anything from two to ten thousand people murdered in the course of a few hours.

That gives some idea of the mass scale of these murders. The brutality with which they are carried out is on the same scale. These people carried off to death have to endure the maximum of suffering. Not less than a hundred people are packed into trucks suitable for forty. The trucks are sealed, the floors are covered with a thick layer of un-slaked lime. Sometimes, in order that the effect of the lime shall be greater, the deportees are ordered to take off their boots and shoes.

A Jewish man walks with three young children alongside a deportation train in the Warsaw ghetto

To inflict further suffering on mothers the children are torn from them. Orphanages are carried off in their entirety. The staffs do not abandon their children. But they can do no more when the moment comes for loading into trucks. The children are loaded into separate trucks, and the staffs are sent off by other trains.

For a German to shoot someone on the spot is regarded as an act of humanity, as is throwing anyone out of a sixth floor window. When one of the murderers throws a mother and her child out of the window on to the stones below, he evidently has a very soft heart. Such incidents are noted by the dozen every day.

Some of the acts of brutality are horrible even amid this horror. A pregnant Jewess escaped from the ghetto, and took shelter in a house in the Grochow district of Warsaw, where she was protected by Poles, and gave birth to the child.

But a German gendarme found her, shot her on the spot, and trampled the newly born infant to death. Must we tell you even more? Surely that is enough to indicate the scale of the cruelty?

As an indication of the scale of despair among the people let us tell you of the suicides. The suicides not only of individuals but of whole families together. By gas or by cyanide.

Every day someone takes poison. Several people, even up to a score, will commit suicide in one hour. To prevent people taking poison the chemists’ shops in the ghetto have all been closed.

Numbers of people have gone mad. Some of the victims implore the junaks to shoot them. But they have to pay for the privilege. The junaks demand fees of a hundred zlotys for shooting.

Annexes To The Report

Report Annex mentioning extermination at Belzec

Extraordinary Report from the Jew – extermination Camp at Belzec 10 July 1942

According to information from a German employed at the extermination camp, it is situated in Belzec, by the station, and is barred off by barriers of barbed wire. Inside the wire, and all round the outside, Ukrainians are on guard.

The executions are carried out in the following fashion:

When a trainload of Jews arrives at the station in Belzec, it is shunted by a side track up to the wire surrounding the place of execution, at which point there is a change in the engine crew and train guards.

From the wire onward the train is serviced by German drivers who take it to the unloading point, where the track ends. After unloading, the men go to a barracks on the right, the women to a barracks situated on the left, where they strip, ostensibly in readiness for a bath.

After they have undressed both groups go to a third barracks where there is an electrified plate, where the executions are carried out. Then the bodies are taken by train to a trench situated outside the wire, and some thirty metres deep. This trench was dug by Jews, who were all executed afterwards.

The Ukrainians on guard are also to be executed when the job is finished. The Ukrainians acting as guards are loaded with money and stolen valuables: they pay 400 zlotys for a litre of vodka, 2,000 zlotys and jewellery for relations with a woman.

Notes:

This is faithful transcript of the document, mistakes have not been corrected.

Sources:

The National Archives KEW

PRO

Holocaust Historical Society

US NARA

USHMM

Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942

Before World War II started on September 1, 1939, there were 375,000 Jews living in Warsaw, as many as in all of France, and more than in the whole country of Czechoslovakia. Only the city of New York had a larger Jewish population than Warsaw.

Israelis Demolish Arab Homes in Jerusalem Sept. 11, 2001

A weeping Ashia Abu Nab sits atop the rubble of her demolished home after Israelis destroyed it, in Jerusalem September 11, 2001

Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW1-_JmXQt0

A man carries the body of one of three children killed yesterday in Israeli shelling of the northern Gaza Strip's seafront, at the morgue of Beit Lahia hospital 10 June 2006. Hamas ended an 18-month ceasefire today, firing 11 rockets at Israel. A statement by the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas' armed wing, said the attacks were in response to the killing of 10 Palestinians, including three young children, by Israeli artillery fire yesterday. Medical sources said five of those killed at the beach were members of the Ghali family from Gaza. AFP PHOTO/ SAMUEL ARANDA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3LGonpdHPk

Powstanie Warszawskie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZtc5vSoZtc

Evidence of What The Nazis Did To The Jews In Warsaw / Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZtc5vSoZtc

Jewish Hate Caught on tape

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hefIti-uFUo

Warszawa Walczy

Gaza Reality!!

If Americans Knew

Read this open letter to President Elect Barack Obama and sign it. Check the organizations that sponsor the letter.

Fire Is Born — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:41:18 EST

Sign Our Open Letter to President-Elect Obama

We Need a Change in Israel/Palestine Policy

Dear President-Elect Obama,

Congratulations on your historic election as the next President of the United States.

Last year, you pledged to “take an active role, and make a personal commitment to do all I can to advance the cause of [Israeli-Palestinian] peace from the start of my Administration.” We are eager to work with you to fulfill this goal.

To do so, your Administration should break with past policies of unconditional support for Israel's illegal military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine to support human rights, international law, and equality.

We agree with Aaron David Miller, a 25-year State Department Middle East negotiator and adviser on Arab-Israeli affairs, who wrote that “For far too long, many American officials involved in Arab-Israeli peacemaking, myself included, have acted as Israel's attorney, catering and coordinating with the Israelis at the expense of successful peace negotiations.”

To become an honest and effective broker, your Administration should:

* Insist that Israel ends its siege of the Gaza Strip. Israel has deliberately impoverished the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip and caused a humanitarian catastrophe of dire proportions by prohibiting the delivery of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity. Your Administration should insist on the illegality of collective punishment and support the human rights of Palestinians such as freedom of movement as a first step towards ending Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip.

* Demand a freeze in the construction of settlements and Israel's Wall in the West Bank. Israel's West Bank settlements, including those in East Jerusalem, are all illegal under international law,and the International Court of Justice ruled in 2004 that Israel's Wall is illegal and must be torn down. Halting this construction should be a first step toward completely dismantling the infrastructure of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and others have labeled “apartheid.”

* Hold Israel accountable for its misuse of U.S. weapons. In 2007, the United States and Israel agreed to increase military aid to Israel by 25% over the next decade, totaling $30 billion. During the Bush Administration, Israel killed more than 2,000 innocent Palestinian civilians who took no part in hostilities, oftentimes with U.S. weapons in violation of the Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts. Your Administration should hold Israel accountable for these violations of U.S. law and cut off military aid as required by law, rather than increase it.

* End the U.S. veto protecting Israel at the United Nations. The United States has used its veto power at the UN more than 40 times since 1972 to shield Israel from the consequences of its violations of human rights, UN resolutions, and international law. Your Administration should work with, not in opposition to, the international community so that human rights, UN resolutions, and international law are applied and enforced uniformly.

* Base a just peace on human rights, international law, and equality. Such a policy is the only way to ensure the legitimate security needs of all peoples and can only be achieved by engaging in dialog with all interested parties. A just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace includes the complete end of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip; a resolution to the Palestinian refugee issue consistent with international law and UN resolutions, including the right of return and/or compensation; and full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. A policy denying Palestinians these internationally-guaranteed rights will only lead to yet another failed “peace process”.

Signed by,

National Organizations
1. African American Islamic Institute
2. American Jews for a Just Peace
3. Americans for a Just Peace in the Middle East
4. Black Voices for Peace
5. Code Pink: Women for Peace
6. Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
7. Council for the National Interest
8. Doctors for Global Health
9. Episcopal Peace Fellowship
10. Fellowship of Reconciliation
11. Friends of Sabeel North America
12. Global Exchange
13. Interfaith Peace-Builders
14. Middle East Children’s Alliance
15. Middle East Peace Fellowship
16. Middle East Research and Information Project
17. Muslim Student Association West
18. National Hip Hop Political Convention
19. National Lawyers Guild
20. Nonviolence International
21. Peace Action
22. Presbyterian Peace Fellowship
23. Progressive Democrats of America
24. Unitarian Universalists for Justice in the Middle East
25. United for Peace and Justice
26. US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation
27. Voters for Peace
28. War Resisters League
29. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—U.S. Section

Alabama
1. Birmingham Interfaith Human Rights Committee, Birmingham
2. North Alabama Peace Network, Huntsville

Alaska
1. Alaskans for Peace and Justice, Anchorage

Arizona
1. Islamic Reform, Tucson
2. Local to Global Justice, Phoenix
3. Peacemaking Committee, Faith Presbyterian Church, Sun City
4. Women in Black—Phoenix, Phoenix
5. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—Tucson Branch, Tucson

California
1. 14 Friends of Palestine, San Rafael
2. Academic Mentorship Program at UCLA, Los Angeles
3. Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace and Justice, Oakland
4. Bay Area Women in Black, Oakland
5. Beacon Presbyterian Fellowship, Oakland
6. Berkeley Institute of Biblical Archaeology and Literature (BIBAL), Rodeo
7. Coachella Valley Movement for a Democratic Society, Desert Hot Springs
8. Conversation with Connection, Los Angeles
9. Couples Center, Sebastopol
10. Crabgrass, San Francisco
11. Deep Hum Productions, Berkeley
12. Ecumenical Peace Institute, Berkeley
13. El Cerrito Green Party, Kensington
14. Friends of Deir Ibzi’a, Berkeley
15. Global Information Services, Greenbrae
16. Greenwood Earth Alliance, San Francisco
17. Holy Cross Melkite-Greek Orthodox Church, Placentia
18. International & Multicultural Education, University of San Francisco, San Francisco
19. International Imaging, Pasadena
20. Jews against Zionism, Sacramento
21. MAIZ -- Movimiento de Acion, Inspirando Servicio, San Jose
22. Middle East Needs Peace, San Jose
23. Middle East Policy Advisory Council, Oakland
24. Nick Dibs for Congress, Long Beach
25. Northeast Los Angeles Radical Neighbors for Peace through Justice, Los Angeles
26. Northern California International Solidarity Movement, El Cerrito
27. Office of the Americas, Los Angeles
28. Pacifica Peace People, Pacifica
29. Parrot Software Services, Menlo Park
30. Peace Political/Human Rights for All, Concord
31. Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, Palo Alto
32. Resource Center for Nonviolence, Santa Cruz
33. Sacred Music Events, Auburn
34. San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, San Francisco
35. San Jose Peace and Justice Center, San Jose
36. September 11 Action, Danville
37. Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Nonviolence, Berkeley
38. Some of All Parts, Oakland
39. Students for Justice in Palestine-University of California Santa Barbara, Goleta
40. Students for Justice in Palestine—University of Southern California, El Monte
41. The Added Edge, Inc., Vineburg
42. Timothy Crofton Real Estate, Fremont
43. Tri-City Peace and Justice, Fremont
44. Venturans for Justice in Palestine, Ventura
45. Vista Medical Group, Colton
46. Western Regional Advocacy Program, San Francisco
47. Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—Berkeley/East Bay Branch, Oakland
48. Zionism Explained, Oakland

Colorado
1. Christian Peacemakers Teams of Colorado, Longmont
2. Colorado Jews for a Just Peace, Boulder
3. Colorado Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Denver
4. Friends of Sabeel—Colorado, Boulder
5. Longmont Citizens for Justice and Democracy, Longmont
6. Musical Missions of Peace, Longmont
7. Obamans for Change in the Americas, Glenwood Springs
8. Pax Christi Metro Denver, Wheat Ridge
9. Pax Christi of the Pikes Peak Region, Colorado Springs
10. Peace and Justice Task Force, Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church, Denver
11. Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Boulder
12. Strength through Peace, Fort Collins
13. Willow Way Wellness, Longmont

Connecticut
1. Bridgeport Islamic Community Center, Bridgeport
2. Greater New Haven Peace Council, New Haven
3. People of Faith CT, West Hartford
4. We Refuse to Be Enemies, New Britain

District of Columbia
1. Episcopal Peace Fellowship DC, Washington
2. House of Creative Writing, Washington
3. Malcolm X Day Committee, Washington
4. Sharing Jerusalem, USA, Washington

Florida
1. AGSPEC Enterprises Inc., Delray Beach
2. Brevard Patriots for Peace, Melbourne
3. Florida Palestine Solidarity Network, Bradenton
4. Florida Peace Action Network, Hudson
5. Hindus for Peace and Justice, West Melbourne
6. Humanists for Peace, West Palm Beach
7. Jiffi Print, Coconut Creek
8. Patriot Rebel, Santa Rosa Beach
9. Pax Christi Northeast Florida, St. Augustine
10. Society for a Just Peace in Palestine, Rollins College, Lake Mary
11. Stafford Farms, Ocala
12. Tallahassee Network for Justice and Peace, Tallahassee
13. We Are Wide Awake, Clermont
14. We Can Take It, St. Petersburg

Georgia
1. Athens for Justice in Palestine, Duluth
2. Foundation for Global Community, Atlanta
3. Free All with Truth, Decatur
4. Southern Energy Network, Athens

Hawaii
1. Center for Nonviolent Education and Action, Kurtistown
2. World Peace Society, Holualoa

Idaho
1. Alliance for Community Transformation, College of Idaho, Caldwell
2. Boise Brown Berets, Boise
3. Women in Black Boise, Boise

Illinois

Rice, Bush, and Gaza - a very long April 2008 overview by David Rosen

Fire Is Born — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:26:46 EST

The Middle East

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, whose secret Palestinian intervention backfired in a big way. Photo illustration by Chris Mueller; left, by Debbie Hill/Sipa Press; right, by Issam Rimawi/ApaImages/Polaris; background by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters/Corbis.

The Gaza Bombshell

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, the author reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

by David Rose April 2008

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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804?printable=true&currentPage=all

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by David Rose April 2008

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

To hear an interview with David Rose and to see documents he uncovered, click here.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.”

On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, Fatah, the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They took us to a house in north Gaza,” abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us to a room on the sixth floor.”

The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white tiled floor, where abu Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others were driven to a market square. “They told us they were going to kill us. They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the legs of his trousers to display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They shot our knees and feet—five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.”

Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.

A clue comes toward the end of the video, which was found in a Fatah security building by Hamas fighters last June. Still bound and blindfolded, the prisoners are made to echo a rhythmic chant yelled by one of their captors: “By blood, by soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!”

There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling Hamas. Dahlan insists that abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge, but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be brutal.

Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the U.S. president described him as “our guy.”

The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Palestinian territories since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With the 1993 Oslo accords, the territories acquired limited autonomy, under a president, who has executive powers, and an elected parliament. Israel retains a large military presence in the West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say, ‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very hopeful.”

The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.

It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.

According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

Preventive Security

Bush was not the first American president to form a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan. “Yes, I was close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met Clinton many times with [the late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of diplomatic meetings aimed at reaching a permanent Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the Palestinians’ negotiator on security.

As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, it’s easy to see the qualities that might make him attractive to American presidents. His appearance is immaculate, his English is serviceable, and his manner is charming and forthright. Had he been born into privilege, these qualities might not mean much. But Dahlan was born—on September 29, 1961—in the teeming squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and his education came mostly from the street. In 1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth movement, and he later played a leading role in the first intifada—the five-year revolt that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. In all, Dahlan says, he spent five years in Israeli jails.

Muhammad Dahlan at his office in Ramallah, January 2008. Photograph by Karim Ben Khelifa.

From the time of its inception as the Palestinian branch of the international Muslim Brotherhood, in late 1987, Hamas had represented a threatening challenge to Arafat’s secular Fatah party. At Oslo, Fatah made a public commitment to the search for peace, but Hamas continued to practice armed resistance. At the same time, it built an impressive base of support through schooling and social programs.

The rising tensions between the two groups first turned violent in the early 1990s—with Muhammad Dahlan playing a central role. As director of the Palestinian Authority’s most feared paramilitary force, the Preventive Security Service, Dahlan arrested some 2,000 Hamas members in 1996 in the Gaza Strip after the group launched a wave of suicide bombings. “Arafat had decided to arrest Hamas military leaders, because they were working against his interests, against the peace process, against the Israeli withdrawal, against everything,” Dahlan says. “He asked the security services to do their job, and I have done that job.”

It was not, he admits, “popular work.” For many years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles. Dahlan says these stories are exaggerated: “Definitely there were some mistakes here and there. But no one person died in Preventive Security. Prisoners got their rights. Bear in mind that I am an ex-detainee of the Israelis’. No one was personally humiliated, and I never killed anyone the way [Hamas is] killing people on a daily basis now.” Dahlan points out that Arafat maintained a labyrinth of security services—14 in all—and says the Preventive Security Service was blamed for abuses perpetrated by other units.

Dahlan worked closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and he developed a warm relationship with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who stayed on under Bush until July 2004. “He’s simply a great and fair man,” Dahlan says. “I’m still in touch with him from time to time.”

“Everyone Was Against the Elections”

In a speech in the White House Rose Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction.

Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by launching the second intifada—a renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full authority of a legislative body.”

Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader, was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’ ”

In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side of the Hamas victory. “Unpredictability,” she said, is “the nature of big historic change.” Even as she spoke, however, the Bush administration was rapidly revising its attitude toward Palestinian democracy.

Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable Israelis—such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency—shared this view. But if America paused to consider giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds long,” says a senior State Department official. “The administration spoke with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”

The first step, taken by the Middle East diplomatic “Quartet”—the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations—was to demand that the new Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept the terms of all previous agreements. When Hamas refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of aid to the Palestinian Authority, depriving it of the means to pay salaries and meet its annual budget of roughly $2 billion.

Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, especially into and out of the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 64 Hamas officials, including Legislative Council members and ministers, and even launched a military campaign into Gaza after one of its soldiers was kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and its new government, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient.

Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas in the hope of establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 2006, Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. They met at the Muqata, the new presidential headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.

America’s leverage in Palestinian affairs was much stronger than it had been in Arafat’s time. Abbas had never had a strong, independent base, and he desperately needed to restore the flow of foreign aid—and, with it, his power of patronage. He also knew that he could not stand up to Hamas without Washington’s help.

At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as she expressed her nation’s “great admiration” for Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors, however, Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who witnessed their meeting. Isolating Hamas just wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.

Abbas, one official says, agreed to take action within two weeks. It happened to be Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during daylight hours. With dusk approaching, Abbas asked Rice to join him for iftar—a snack to break the fast.

Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”

“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait until after the Eid,” he said, referring to the three-day celebration that marks the end of Ramadan. (Abbas’s spokesman said via e-mail: “According to our records, this is incorrect.”)

Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the official claims, she told an American colleague, “That damned iftar has cost us another two weeks of Hamas government.”

“We Will Be There to Support You”

Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready to do America’s bidding. Finally, another official was sent to Ramallah. Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service officer with many years’ experience in the Middle East. His purpose was to deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.

We know what Walles said because a copy was left behind, apparently by accident, of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State Department. The document has been authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian officials.

“We need to understand your plans regarding a new [Palestinian Authority] government,” Walles’s script said. “You told Secretary Rice you would be prepared to move ahead within two to four weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively.”

The “talking points” memo, left behind by a State Department envoy, urging Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to confront Hamas. Enlarge this. Page 2.

The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: … they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

Walles and Abbas both knew what to expect from Hamas if these instructions were followed: rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the memo states, the U.S. was already working to strengthen Fatah’s security forces. “If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically,” the script said. “We will be there to support you.”

Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] team” to include “credible figures of strong standing in the international community.” Among those the U.S. wanted brought in, says an official who knew of the policy, was Muhammad Dahlan.

On paper, the forces at Fatah’s disposal looked stronger than those of Hamas. There were some 70,000 men in the tangle of 14 Palestinian security services that Arafat had built up, at least half of those in Gaza. After the legislative elections, Hamas had expected to assume command of these forces, but Fatah maneuvered to keep them under its control. Hamas, which already had 6,000 or so irregulars in its militant al-Qassam Brigade, responded by forming the 6,000-troop Executive Force in Gaza, but that still left it with far fewer fighters than Fatah.

In reality, however, Hamas had several advantages. To begin with, Fatah’s security forces had never really recovered from Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s massive 2002 re-invasion of the West Bank in response to the second intifada. “Most of the security apparatus had been destroyed,” says Youssef Issa, who led the Preventive Security Service under Abbas.

The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers. “We are the ones who were not getting paid,” Issa says, “whereas they were not affected by the siege.” Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas Legislative Council member in the West Bank, agrees. He puts the amount of Iranian aid to Hamas in 2007 alone at $120 million. “This is only a fraction of what it should give,” he insists. In Gaza, another Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.

The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not control Gaza’s streets—or even protect its own personnel.

At about 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 2006, Samira Tayeh sent a text message to her husband, Jad Tayeh, the director of foreign relations for the Palestinian intelligence service and a member of Fatah. “He didn’t reply,” she says. “I tried to call his mobile [phone], but it was switched off. So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didn’t know where he was. That’s when I decided to go to the hospital.”

Samira, a slim, elegant 40-year-old dressed from head to toe in black, tells me the story in a Ramallah café in December 2007. Arriving at the Al Shifa hospital, “I went through the morgue door. Not for any reason—I just didn’t know the place. I saw there were all these intelligence guards there. There was one I knew. He saw me and he said, ‘Put her in the car.’ That’s when I knew something had happened to Jad.”

Tayeh had left his office in a car with four aides. Moments later, they found themselves being pursued by an S.U.V. full of armed, masked men. About 200 yards from the home of Prime Minister Haniyeh, the S.U.V. cornered the car. The masked men opened fire, killing Tayeh and all four of his colleagues.

Hamas said it had nothing to do with the murders, but Samira had reason to believe otherwise. At three a.m. on June 16, 2007, during the Gaza takeover, six Hamas gunmen forced their way into her home and fired bullets into every photo of Jad they could find. The next day, they returned and demanded the keys to the car in which he had died, claiming that it belonged to the Palestinian Authority.

Fearing for her life, she fled across the border and then into the West Bank, with only the clothes she was wearing and her passport, driver’s license, and credit card.

“Very Clever Warfare”

Fatah’s vulnerability was a source of grave concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of activities to give Hamas the impression that we were still strong and we had the capacity to face them,” he says. “But I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.” He had no official security position at the time, but he belonged to parliament and retained the loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza. “I used my image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that “Gaza needs only a decision for Hamas to take over.” To prevent that from happening, Dahlan waged “very clever warfare” for many months.

According to several alleged victims, one of the tactics this “warfare” entailed was to kidnap and torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force. (Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but admits “mistakes” were made.) Abdul Karim al-Jasser, a strapping man of 25, says he was the first such victim. “It was on October 16, still Ramadan,” he says. “I was on my way to my sister’s house for iftar. Four guys stopped me, two of them with guns. They forced me to accompany them to the home of Aman abu Jidyan,” a Fatah leader close to Dahlan. (Abu Jidyan would be killed in the June uprising.)

The first phase of torture was straightforward enough, al-Jasser says: he was stripped naked, bound, blindfolded, and beaten with wooden poles and plastic pipes. “They put a piece of cloth in my mouth to stop me screaming.” His interrogators forced him to answer contradictory accusations: one minute they said that he had collaborated with Israel, the next that he had fired Qassam rockets against it.

But the worst was yet to come. “They brought an iron bar,” al-Jasser says, his voice suddenly hesitant. We are speaking inside his home in Gaza, which is experiencing one of its frequent power outages. He points to the propane-gas lamp that lights the room. “They put the bar in the flame of a lamp like this. When it was red, they took the covering off my eyes. Then they pressed it against my skin. That was the last thing I remember.”

When he came to, he was still in the room where he had been tortured. A few hours later, the Fatah men handed him over to Hamas, and he was taken to the hospital. “I could see the shock in the eyes of the doctors who entered the room,” he says. He shows me photos of purple third-degree burns wrapped like towels around his thighs and much of his lower torso. “The doctors told me that if I had been thin, not chubby, I would have died. But I wasn’t alone. That same night that I was released, abu Jidyan’s men fired five bullets into the legs of one of my relatives. We were in the same ward in the hospital.”

Dahlan says he did not order al-Jasser’s torture: “The only order I gave was to defend ourselves. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t torture, some things that went wrong, but I did not know about this.”

The dirty war between Fatah and Hamas continued to gather momentum throughout the autumn, with both sides committing atrocities. By the end of 2006, dozens were dying each month. Some of the victims were noncombatants. In December, gunmen opened fire on the car of a Fatah intelligence official, killing his three young children and their driver.

There was still no sign that Abbas was ready to bring matters to a head by dissolving the Hamas government. Against this darkening background, the U.S. began direct security talks with Dahlan.

“He’s Our Guy”

In 2001, President Bush famously said that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be “trustworthy.” According to three U.S. officials, Bush made a similar judgment about Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three officials recall hearing Bush say, “He’s our guy.”

They say this assessment was echoed by other key figures in the administration, including Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, the man in charge of Middle East policy at the State Department. “David Welch didn’t fundamentally care about Fatah,” one of his colleagues says. “He cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a bitch you had to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.”

Avi Dichter, Israel’s internal-security minister and the former head of its Shin Bet security service, was taken aback when he heard senior American officials refer to Dahlan as “our guy.” “I thought to myself, The president of the United States is making a strange judgment here,” says Dichter.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who had been appointed the U.S. security coordinator for the Palestinians in November 2005, was in no position to question the president’s judgment of Dahlan. His only prior experience with the Middle East was as director of the Iraq Survey Group, the body that looked for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.

In November 2006, Dayton met Dahlan for the first of a long series of talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Both men were accompanied by aides. From the outset, says an official who took notes at the meeting, Dayton was pushing two overlapping agendas.

“We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus,” Dayton said, according to the notes. “But we also need to build up your forces in order to take on Hamas.”

Dahlan replied that, in the long run, Hamas could be defeated only by political means. “But if I am going to confront them,” he added, “I need substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”

The two men agreed that they would work toward a new Palestinian security plan. The idea was to simplify the confusing web of Palestinian security forces and have Dahlan assume responsibility for all of them in the newly created role of Palestinian national-security adviser. The Americans would help supply weapons and training.

As part of the reform program, according to the official who was present at the meetings, Dayton said he wanted to disband the Preventive Security Service, which was widely known to be engaged in kidnapping and torture. At a meeting in Dayton’s Jerusalem office in early December, Dahlan ridiculed the idea. “The only institution now protecting Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza is the one you want removed,” he said.

Dayton softened a little. “We want to help you,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Iran-Contra 2.0”

Under Bill Clinton, Dahlan says, commitments of security assistance “were always delivered, absolutely.” Under Bush, he was about to discover, things were different. At the end of 2006, Dayton promised an immediate package worth $86.4 million—money that, according to a U.S. document published by Reuters on January 5, 2007, would be used to “dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.” U.S. officials even told reporters the money would be transferred “in the coming days.”

The cash never arrived. “Nothing was disbursed,” Dahlan says. “It was approved and it was in the news. But we received not a single penny.”

Any notion that the money could be transferred quickly and easily had died on Capitol Hill, where the payment was blocked by the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. Its members feared that military aid to the Palestinians might end up being turned against Israel.

Dahlan did not hesitate to voice his exasperation. “I spoke to Condoleezza Rice on several occasions,” he says. “I spoke to Dayton, to the consul general, to everyone in the administration I knew. They said, ‘You have a convincing argument.’ We were sitting in Abbas’s office in Ramallah, and I explained the whole thing to Condi. And she said, ‘Yes, we have to make an effort to do this. There’s no other way.’ ” At some of these meetings, Dahlan says, Assistant Secretary Welch and Deputy National-Security Adviser Abrams were also present.

The administration went back to Congress, and a reduced, $59 million package for nonlethal aid was approved in April 2007. But as Dahlan knew, the Bush team had already spent the past months exploring alternative, covert means of getting him the funds and weapons he wanted. The reluctance of Congress meant that “you had to look for different pots, different sources of money,” says a Pentagon official.

A State Department official adds, “Those in charge of implementing the policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where it would end up—with a military showdown.” There were, this official says, two “parallel programs”—the overt one, which the administration took to Congress, “and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the salaries of security personnel.”

Israel and the Palestinian territories. Map by Joyce Pendola.

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.

But there are also important differences—starting with the fact that Congress never passed a measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid to Fatah and Dahlan. “It was close to the margins,” says a former intelligence official with experience in covert programs. “But it probably wasn’t illegal.”

Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations which are trying to ruin everything”—namely, Hamas.

Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments had to be approved by Israel, which was understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art arms into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t talking about heavy weapons,” says a State Department official. “It was small arms, light machine guns, ammunition.”

Perhaps the Israelis held the Americans back. Perhaps Elliott Abrams himself held back, unwilling to run afoul of U.S. law for a second time. One of his associates says Abrams, who declined to comment for this article, felt conflicted over the policy—torn between the disdain he felt for Dahlan and his overriding loyalty to the administration. He wasn’t the only one: “There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over this,” says Cheney’s former adviser David Wurmser. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”

During a trip to the Middle East in January 2007, Rice found it difficult to get her partners to honor their pledges. “The Arabs felt the U.S. was not serious,” one official says. “They knew that if the Americans were serious they would put their own money where their mouth was. They didn’t have faith in America’s ability to raise a real force. There was no follow-through. Paying was different than pledging, and there was no plan.”

This official estimates that the program raised “a few payments of $30 million”—most of it, as other sources agree, from the United Arab Emirates. Dahlan himself says the total was only $20 million, and confirms that “the Arabs made many more pledges than they ever paid.” Whatever the exact amount, it was not enough.

Plan B

On February 1, 2007, Dahlan took his “very clever warfare” to a new level when Fatah forces under his control stormed the Islamic University of Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and set several buildings on fire. Hamas retaliated the next day with a wave of attacks on police stations.

Unwilling to preside over a Palestinian civil war, Abbas blinked. For weeks, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had been trying to persuade him to meet with Hamas in Mecca and formally establish a national unity government. On February 6, Abbas went, taking Dahlan with him. Two days later, with Hamas no closer to recognizing Israel, a deal was struck.

Under its terms, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas would remain prime minister while allowing Fatah members to occupy several important posts. When the news hit the streets that the Saudis had promised to pay the Palestinian Authority’s salary bills, Fatah and Hamas members in Gaza celebrated together by firing their Kalashnikovs into the air.

Once again, the Bush administration had been taken by surprise. According to a State Department official, “Condi was apoplectic.” A remarkable documentary record, revealed here for the first time, shows that the U.S. responded by redoubling the pressure on its Palestinian allies.

The State Department quickly drew up an alternative to the new unity government. Known as “Plan B,” its objective, according to a State Department memo that has been authenticated by an official who knew of it at the time, was to “enable [Abbas] and his supporters to reach a defined endgame by the end of 2007 The endgame should produce a [Palestinian Authority] government through democratic means that accepts Quartet principles.”

Like the Walles ultimatum of late 2006, Plan B called for Abbas to “collapse the government” if Hamas refused to alter its attitude toward Israel. From there, Abbas could call early elections or impose an emergency government. It is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the constitutional authority to dissolve an elected government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.

Security considerations were paramount, and Plan B had explicit prescriptions for dealing with them. For as long as the unity government remained in office, it was essential for Abbas to maintain “independent control of key security forces.” He must “avoid Hamas integration with these services, while eliminating the Executive Force or mitigating the challenges posed by its continued existence.”

In a clear reference to the covert aid expected from the Arabs, the memo made this recommendation for the next six to nine months: “Dahlan oversees effort in coordination with General Dayton and Arab [nations] to train and equip 15,000-man force under President Abbas’s control to establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal forces.”

The Bush administration’s goals for Plan B were elaborated in a document titled “An Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency.” This action plan went through several drafts and was developed by the U.S., the Palestinians, and the government of Jordan. Sources agree, however, that it originated in the State Department.

The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.”

The drafts called for increasing the “level and capacity” of 15,000 of Fatah’s existing security personnel while adding 4,700 troops in seven new “highly trained battalions on strong policing.” The plan also promised to arrange “specialized training abroad,” in Jordan and Egypt, and pledged to “provide the security personnel with the necessary equipment and arms to carry out their missions.”

A detailed budget put the total cost for salaries, training, and “the needed security equipment, lethal and non-lethal,” at $1.27 billion over five years. The plan states: “The costs and overall budget were developed jointly with General Dayton’s team and the Palestinian technical team for reform”—a unit established by Dahlan and led by his friend and policy aide Bassil Jaber. Jaber confirms that the document is an accurate summary of the work he and his colleagues did with Dayton. “The plan was to create a security establishment that could protect and strengthen a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel,” he says.

The final draft of the Action Plan was drawn up in Ramallah by officials of the Palestinian Authority. This version was identical to the earlier drafts in all meaningful ways but one: it presented the plan as if it had been the Palestinians’ idea. It also said the security proposals had been “approved by President Mahmoud Abbas after being discussed and agreed [to] by General Dayton’s team.”

On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The secret was out. From Hamas’s perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.

“We Are Late in the Ball Game Here”

The formation of the unity government had brought a measure of calm to the Palestinian territories, but violence erupted anew after Al-Majd published its story on the Action Plan. The timing was unkind to Fatah, which, to add to its usual disadvantages, was without its security chief. Ten days earlier, Dahlan had left Gaza for Berlin, where he’d had surgery on both knees. He was due to spend the next eight weeks convalescing.

In mid-May, with Dahlan still absent, a new element was added to Gaza’s toxic mix when 500 Fatah National Security Forces recruits arrived, fresh from training in Egypt and equipped with new weapons and vehicles. “They had been on a crash course for 45 days,” Dahlan says. “The idea was that we needed them to go in dressed well, equipped well, and that might create the impression of new authority.” Their presence was immediately noticed, not only by Hamas but by staff from Western aid agencies. “They had new rifles with telescopic sights, and they were wearing black flak jackets,” says a frequent visitor from Northern Europe. “They were quite a contrast to the usual scruffy lot.”

On May 23, none other than Lieutenant General Dayton discussed the new unit in testimony before the House Middle East subcommittee. Hamas had attacked the troops as they crossed into Gaza from Egypt, Dayton said, but “these 500 young people, fresh out of basic training, were organized. They knew how to work in a coordinated fashion. Training does pay off. And the Hamas attack in the area was, likewise, repulsed.”

The troops’ arrival, Dayton said, was one of several “hopeful signs” in Gaza. Another was Dahlan’s appointment as national-security adviser. Meanwhile, he said, Hamas’s Executive Force was becoming “extremely unpopular I would say that we are kind of late in the ball game here, and we are behind, there’s two out, but we have our best clutch hitter at the plate, and the pitcher is beginning to tire on the opposing team.”

The opposing team was stronger than Dayton realized. By the end of May 2007, Hamas was mounting regular attacks of unprecedented boldness and savagery.

At an apartment in Ramallah that Abbas has set aside for wounded refugees from Gaza, I meet a former Fatah communications officer named Tariq Rafiyeh. He lies paralyzed from a bullet he took to the spine during the June coup, but his suffering began two weeks earlier. On May 31, he was on his way home with a colleague when they were stopped at a roadblock, robbed of their money and cell phones, and taken to a mosque. There, despite the building’s holy status, Hamas Executive Force members were violently interrogating Fatah detainees. “Late that night one of them said we were going to be released,” Rafiyeh recalls. “He told the guards, ‘Be hospitable, keep them warm.’ I thought that meant kill us. Instead, before letting us go they beat us badly.”

On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to authorize the biggest Egyptian arms shipment yet—to include dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A few days later, just before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in Egypt, the coup began in earnest.

Fatah’s Last Stand

The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the coup would not have happened if Fatah had not provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the party that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the political choice.” The arrival of the first Egyptian-trained fighters, he adds, was the “reason for the timing.” About 250 Hamas members had been killed in the first six months of 2007, Barhoum tells me. “Finally we decided to put an end to it. If we had let them stay loose in Gaza, there would have been more violence.”

“Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister for the Haniyeh government, who now leads Hamas’s militant wing in Gaza. “He was the one planning a coup.”

Zahar and I speak inside his home in Gaza, which was rebuilt after a 2003 Israeli air strike destroyed it, killing one of his sons. He tells me that Hamas launched its operations in June with a limited objective: “The decision was only to get rid of the Preventive Security Service. They were the ones out on every crossroads, putting anyone suspected of Hamas involvement at risk of being tortured or killed.” But when Fatah fighters inside a surrounded Preventive Security office in Jabaliya began retreating from building to building, they set off a “domino effect” that emboldened Hamas to seek broader gains.

Many armed units that were nominally loyal to Fatah did not fight at all. Some stayed neutral because they feared that, with Dahlan absent, his forces were bound to lose. “I wanted to stop the cycle of killing,” says Ibrahim abu al-Nazar, a veteran party chief. “What did Dahlan expect? Did he think the U.S. Navy was going to come to Fatah’s rescue? They promised him everything, but what did they do? But he also deceived them. He told them he was the strongman of the region. Even the Americans may now feel sad and frustrated. Their friend lost the battle.”

Others who stayed out of the fight were extremists. “Fatah is a large movement, with many schools inside it,” says Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which continue to fire rockets into Israel from Gaza. “Dahlan’s school is funded by the Americans and believes in negotiations with Israel as a strategic choice. Dahlan tried to control everything in Fatah, but there are cadres who could do a much better job. Dahlan treated us dictatorially. There was no overall Fatah decision to confront Hamas, and that’s why our guns in al-Aqsa are the cleanest. They are not corrupted by the blood of our people.”

Jaberi pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

The fighting was over in less than five days. It began with attacks on Fatah security buildings, in and around Gaza City and in the southern town of Rafah. Fatah attempted to shell Prime Minister Haniyeh’s house, but by dusk on June 13 its forces were being routed.

Years of oppression by Dahlan and his forces were avenged as Hamas chased down stray Fatah fighters and subjected them to summary execution. At least one victim was reportedly thrown from the roof of a high-rise building. By June 16, Hamas had captured every Fatah building, as well as Abbas’s official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlan’s house, which doubled as his office, was reduced to rubble.

Fatah’s last stand, predictably enough, was made by the Preventive Security Service. The unit sustained heavy casualties, but a rump of about 100 surviving fighters eventually made it to the beach and escaped in the night by fishing boat.

At the apartment in Ramallah, the wounded struggle on. Unlike Fatah, Hamas fired exploding bullets, which are banned under the Geneva Conventions. Some of the men in the apartment were shot with these rounds 20 or 30 times, producing unimaginable injuries that required amputation. Several have lost both legs.

The coup has had other costs. Amjad Shawer, a local economist, tells me that Gaza had 400 functioning factories and workshops at the start of 2007. By December, the intensified Israeli blockade had caused 90 percent of them to close. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population is now living on less than $2 a day.

Israel, meanwhile, is no safer. The emergency pro-peace government called for in the secret Action Plan is now in office—but only in the West Bank. In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition—including the new Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.

Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free rein to militants intent on firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the heart of Ashkelon at will,” says Jaberi, the al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city of 110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I assure you, the time is near when we will mount a big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

On January 23, Hamas blew up parts of the wall dividing Gaza from Egypt, and tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed the border. Militants had already been smuggling weapons through a network of underground tunnels, but the breach of the wall made their job much easier—and may have brought Jaberi’s threat closer to reality.

George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice continue to push the peace process, but Avi Dichter says Israel will never conclude a deal on Palestinian statehood until the Palestinians reform their entire law-enforcement system—what he calls “the chain of security.” With Hamas in control of Gaza, there appears to be no chance of that happening. “Just look at the situation,” says Dahlan. “They say there will be a final-status agreement in eight months? No way.”

“An Institutional Failure”

How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the administration—who until last year were inside it—blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for legacy. Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the elections, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton.”

With few good options left, the administration now appears to be rethinking its blanket refusal to engage with Hamas. Staffers at the National Security Council and the Pentagon recently put out discreet feelers to academic experts, asking them for papers describing Hamas and its principal protagonists. “They say they won’t talk to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”

It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have been any better—for the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for America’s allies in Fatah—if the Bush administration had pursued a different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

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The Proof Is in the Paper Trail While reporting “The Gaza Bombshell,” David Rose acquired an extraordinary trove of documents showing how the U.S. pressured its Palestinian allies to take on Hamas—a strategy that proved disastrous when Hamas staged what appears to have been a pre-emptive coup in Gaza last June. Here are some of the key records he discovered. WEB EXCLUSIVE March 5, 2008 Web special: Michael Hogan interviews David Rose. var FO_hiddenPlayer = { movie:"/images/flash/media/HiddenPlayer.swf", width:"1", height:"1", majorversion:"7", build:"0", flashvars:"lcId="+MediaPlayer.getUid() }; UFO.create(FO_hiddenPlayer, "hiddenPlayer");

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1 These “talking points” were left behind in Ramallah by a State Department envoy. Palestinian and American officials say they formed the basis for State Department official Jake Walles’s discussions with Palestinian president and Fatah party leader Mahmoud Abbas in late October or early November 2006. According to the memo, Walles urged Abbas to dissolve the Hamas-led government if Hamas refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist, promising that the U.S. and its Arab allies would strengthen Fatah’s military forces to deal with the likely backlash from Hamas.

2 “Plan B” refers to a State Department strategy that was devised after Abbas made a deal in January 2007 to form a unity government with Fatah and Hamas—much to America’s dismay. This early, two-page draft, which has been authenticated by senior State Department officials who knew of its content at the time and by Palestinians who saw it in Abbas’s office, outlines possible scenarios for Abbas to expel Hamas from power and to boost his security forces to deal with the inevitable violent fallout.

3 Plan B evolved into this “action plan for the Palestinian Presidency”—a blueprint for a full-blown coup against Abbas’s own unity government. This was one of several drafts presented by a joint American-Jordanian team. Officials who were knowledgeable at the time say it originated with the State Department. Its security appendix reveals details of the secret talks between Palestinian strongman Muhammad Dahlan and Lieutenant General Keith Dayton.

4 The final draft of the action plan adopted large sections of the previous documents wholesale, but presented the plan as if it had been conceived from the beginning by Abbas and his staff. This draft has also been authenticated by officials knowledgeable at the time. Note especially the third section, on security.

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Read this open letter to President Elect Barack Obama and sign it. Check the organizations that sponsor the letter.

Fire Is Born — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:22:04 EST

Thank you!FireIs Born

As we greet the vast challenges and momentous opportunities that lie ahead...

Fire Is Born — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:39:37 EST

Can’t see this email? View it as a web page »
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Dear ACLU of Northern California Members & Friends,

Happy New Year to you! As we greet the vast challenges and momentous opportunities that lie ahead, we invite you to join us in a toast:

Together we will move mountains in 2009 - to restore our Constitution, to transform hope into action to strengthen civil rights, and to safeguard civil liberties for all people in every community across Northern California.

(If you're not currently in a room packed with courageous defenders of the Bill of Rights, envision it so and raise your glass.)

Truly, we are primed in 2009 to do our part to help build an America that inspires a rare and well-earned kind of pride. Your participation - via email and in the real world - will be critical to our success.

And now, an offering. ACLU supporters tend to be critical thinkers, often with steady intrigue for the lessons of history and an eye to the ways that the exercise of power shapes human experience. To help fuel our collective knowledge base and inspire conversation, we asked a few booklovers among our current and former staff for a sampling of their 'best picks' - books that they read in 2008 and wholeheartedly recommend. Each of the books reviewed below concerns themes related to freedom, liberty and dignity. We hope you enjoy them. (If you do, please let us know.)

Wishing you knowledge, determination, and wisdom,

Laura Saponara
Communications Director

FOR The American Tax payers,If Americans Knew What Israel Is Doing! VIDEO WAS CENSORED!

Lech Alex Bajan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:24:51 EST

Why are Obama & Clinton Silent about Israel's Massacre of Palestinians in Gaza?

Lech Alex Bajan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 10:49:54 EST

Why are Obama & Clinton Silent about Israel's Massacre of Palestinians in Gaza?

Israel destroys Hamas homes, flattens Gaza mosque

Lech Alex Bajan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:28:47 EST

Israel destroys Hamas homes, flattens Gaza mosque

A Palestinian protester runs with a burning tire as another throws stones at Israeli troops, not seen, during clashes at a demonstration against Israel's military operation in Gaza, in the Shuafat refugee camp, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, Friday, Jan. 2, 2009. Israel showed no sign of slowing a blistering seven-day offensive against Gaza's Hamas rulers, destroying homes of more than a dozen of the group's operatives Friday and bombing one of its mosques a day after a deadly strike killed a prominent Hamas figure.(AP Photo/Dan Balilty)

By IBRAHIM BARZAK and MATTI FRIEDMAN – 23 hours ago

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel bombed a mosque it said was used to store weapons and destroyed the homes of more than a dozen Hamas operatives Friday, but under international pressure, the government allowed hundreds of Palestinians with foreign passports to leave besieged Gaza. Israel has been building up artillery, armor and infantry on Gaza's border in an indication the week-old air assault on Gaza's Hamas rulers could soon expand with a ground incursion.

At the same time, international calls for a cease-fire have been growing, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected in the region next week to push for a halt to the violence. Israel has so far been cool to a truce, and in a setback for diplomatic efforts, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had no plans to come to the region.

"Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas," she said. Hamas seized control of Gaza from Abbas' Fatah forces in 2007 and Abbas set up a rival government in the West Bank.

Rice charged Hamas "has used Gaza as a launching pad" for firing rockets into the Jewish state and that, as a result, the Palestinians in Gaza have had "a very bad daily life." She said the U.S. supports a "durable and sustainable" cease-fire, but any end to fighting would depend on the willingness of Hamas to stop firing rockets into Israel.

The offensive spurred anti-Israel protests in the Middle East, the Muslim world and in parts of Europe on Friday.

Israel attacked new targets and Palestinians fired at least 30 rockets into southern Israel. But Israel still opened its border with Gaza to allow nearly 300 Palestinians with foreign passports to flee.

"There is no water, no electricity, no medicine. It's hard to survive. Gaza is destroyed," Jawaher Haggi, a 14-year-old Palestinian American, said after crossing into Israel. She said her uncle was killed in an airstrike when he tried to pick up medicine for her cancer-stricken father, who later died of his illness.

Many of the evacuees were foreign-born women married to Palestinians and their children. Spouses who did not hold foreign citizenship were not allowed out.

Israel's Foreign Ministry said most of the evacuees were Russian or Eastern European, and they were allowed to leave at the request of foreign embassies. They said the decision was not related to military plans.

Israel began the aerial campaign Dec. 27 to try to halt weeks of intensifying Palestinian rocket fire. It has dealt a heavy blow to Hamas, but failed to halt the rockets. Friday's attacks hit homes in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, wounding four Israelis, police said.

Before the airstrikes, Israel's military called some of the houses to warn of an impending attack. In some cases, it also fired a sound bomb to warn civilians before flattening the homes with missiles, Palestinians and Israeli officials said.

Israeli planes also dropped leaflets east of Gaza giving a confidential phone number and e-mail address to report locations of rocket squads. Residents stepped over the leaflets.

Israel used similar tactics during its 2006 war on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

After destroying Hamas' security compounds, Israel turned its attention to the group's leadership. Warplanes hit some 20 houses believed to belong to Hamas militants and members of other armed groups, Palestinians said.

Most of the targeted homes appeared to be empty, but one man was killed in a strike in the Jebaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

Separate airstrikes killed five other Palestinians — including a teenage boy east of Gaza City, and three children — two brothers and their cousin — who were playing in southern Gaza, according to Health Ministry official Moaiya Hassanain.

More than 400 Gazans have been killed and 1,700 have been wounded in the Israeli campaign, Gaza health officials said. Hamas has said about half of the dead were members of its security forces.

The U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for the Palestinians Territories estimated that more than 100 of the dead were civilians, many of them women and children. The U.N. also warned of a health and food crisis in Gaza, despite an increase in humanitarian shipments.

Three Israeli civilians and one soldier have died in the rocket attacks, which have reached deeper into Israel than ever before, bringing an eighth of the country's population of 7 million within rocket range.

The mosque destroyed Friday was known as a Hamas stronghold, and the army said it was used to store weapons. It also was identified with Nizar Rayan, the Hamas militant leader killed Thursday when Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on his home.

That airstrike killed 20 people, including all four of Rayan's wives and 11 of his 12 children. The strike obliterated the four-story apartment building and knocked down the walls of others around it.

Israel's military said the homes of Hamas leaders are being used to store missiles and other weapons, and the hit on Rayan's house triggered secondary explosions from the stockpile there.

Israel has targeted Hamas leaders in the past but halted the practice during a six-month truce that expired last month. Most of Hamas' leaders went into hiding at the start of the offensive.

Fear of Israeli attacks led to a sparse turnout at Friday prayers at mosques throughout Gaza, although thousands attended a memorial service for Rayan. Throngs prayed over the rubble of his home and the destroyed mosque nearby.

An imam delivered his sermon via a car loudspeaker as the bodies of Rayan and other family members were covered in green Hamas flags. Afterward, a sea of mourners marched with the bodies.

"The Palestinian resistance will not forget and will not forgive," said Hamas lawmaker Mushir Masri, calling the assassination a "serious" development. "The resistance's response will be very painful."

While keeping up the military pressure, Israel has offered a small opening for the intense diplomatic efforts, saying it would consider a halt to the fighting. But it has attached the strict condition that international monitors enforce the truce. The last truce was repeatedly violated by Palestinian rocket and mortar fire.

Israeli police stepped up security and restricted access to Friday prayers at Jerusalem's al-Aqsa Mosque, barring all males under 50 from entering. The prayers ended without incident, although youths in a nearby neighborhood clashed with anti-riot police on horseback. No injuries were reported.

Jerusalem's mufti, Mohammed Hussein, said only 3,000 Palestinians attended prayers because of the restrictions, which he condemned as contradicting "the principle of freedom of worship."

In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Palestinian police broke up a demonstration by about 3,000 Hamas supporters and arrested about a dozen people. Police also broke up a similar protest in nearby Qalandia. There were anti-Israel protests in Hebron, Nablus and elsewhere in the West Bank.

Barzak reported from Gaza City; Friedman from Jerusalem.

Worldwide protests denounce Israel

Lech Alex Bajan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 14:04:22 EST

Worldwide protests denounce Israel

Palestinians demonstrate in the Israeli town of Sakhnin [AFP]

Angry protests against Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip have continued throughout the world, with two of the largest demonstrations taking place in London and in Sakhnin in northern Israel.

Other large demonstrations were staged in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir, Lebanon, Turkey and the West Bank.

Protesters in Kabul pumped their fists into the air and shouted slogans against Israel and the United States, while in Srinagar activists burned an effigy of Ehud Olmert, Israel's outgoing prime minister.

In Ramallah in the West Bank, Palestinians seeking national unity marched through streets and there were clashes with Israeli riot police.

Israel protests

In the northern Israeli town of Sakhnin up to 150,000 Israeli-Palestinians have protested against Israel's offensive.

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Latest news and analysis from Gaza and Israel
Crowds waving Palestinian flags and brandishing pro-Palestinian placards chanted "Gaza will not surrender to the tanks and bulldozers!" and "Don't fear, Gaza, we are with you!"

Thousands of police were deployed on the outskirts of the town and across northern Israel following a number of violent protests against the Gaza operation in recent days.

Following a minute's silence, Mazem Ghanaim, Sakhnin's mayor, called for an immediate halt to the Gaza offensive.

Ghanaim said: "The Israeli occupation forces is conducting crimes in Gaza before the eyes of the international community. We call for an immediate stop to the Gaza offensive."

He also said Gaza fighters should halt their rocket fire against southern Israel.

Mohammed Barakeh, an Israeli-Palestinian politician, said the Sakhnin demonstration was "our answer to the Israeli threats against the Palestinian people in Gaza".

"We are determined to stand alongside our brothers in Gaza to stop the bloodshed and massacre," he said.

Mubarak 'coward'

Israeli-Palestinians have staged several big demonstrations since Israeli warplanes launched air assaults on Gaza.

Some protesters in Sakhnin called Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president, a "coward" and accused him of "collaborating with the Americans".

In Europe, demonstrators have taken place across Britain with the biggest rally in London.

Tens of thousands of protesters including singer Annie Lennox, human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger and Ken Livingstone, the city's former mayor, marched through the capital.

Shoes litter Whitehall in London in protest against Israel [AFP]
Marchers on the event organised by the Stop the War Coalition were to leave old shoes for Gordon Brown, the country's prime minister, at his Downing Street residence, in the spirit of an Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush, the US president.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Alexei Sayle, a British writer and entertainer, said: "I think we should withdraw our ambassador from Tel Aviv, we should call an immediate halt to European Union-Israel trade negotiations, we should start looking at a boycott of Israeli products and a boycott of Israel's financial services."

Protests were also held in Manchester, in northwest England, and in Glasgow in Scotland.

The march caps a week of demonstrations in London, including a rally outside Egypt's embassy on Friday, urging Cairo to open its crossing with Gaza to allow refugees through.

'Killer Israel'

Hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian activists and schoolchildren protested in front of the United Nations building in Beirut.

One protester said he hoped the Lebanon-Israel borders would be opened so that he could go to fight alongside Palestinians.

Murad, a Palestinian refugee, said: "We want to at least be able to go and fight. We want Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah, the Hezbollah secretary-general] to do anything to open the borders so we can go and fight and, God willing, we will be victorious."

In Ankara, Turkey's capital, about 5,000 people shouted "killer Israel" during an anti-Israeli rally as anger mounted in a country traditionally considered an ally of Israel.

The demonstration is the second largest in Turkey in as many days.

The protesters, who turned out in freezing weather, shouted "resist and win freedom" in support of Hamas.

Many waved Palestinian flags and wore headbands with Arabic scripts.

The fighting has troubled Turkey's efforts to help broker peace between Israel and its Arab opponents, forcing Turkey to suspend its mediation between Israel and Syria and leading to resignations by some of Turkey's politicians from a Turkish-Israeli friendship group.

Why Gaza Matters To Us

Lech Alex Bajan — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 11:09:44 EST

Why Gaza Matters To Us

On December 30, I attended a rally/memorial for Gaza in Dearborn, Michigan. Dearborn is home to the largest community of Arab and Arab-American people within US borders.

I went with two young women who have focused on Palestinian human rights, and were in Palestine last year doing work with youth to develop a creative and nonviolent response to the wall, and a third young woman who is learning about the situation much as I am.

One point of the conversation on the way to the rally focused on how, in the Geneva conventions, collective punishment is a war crime. The tactics used by Israel in response to the use of rockets by Hamas - sound bombs, blocking food and medical supplies into the area, and now days of air strikes - these are forms of collective punishment, effecting and killing children, women, civilians, elderly.

When we arrived to the area near the rally and memorial, the streets were lined with clusters of people. We met up at an Arab bakery, got warmed up. Whole families were in attendance, together. One of the women who’d been to Palestine last year says it was that way there, that you are expected to understand your political situation and be involved at any age.

As soon as we got to the actual rally, we saw sign with a shoe taped to it, one of the more humorous I’ve seen in a while. Most folks were holding Palestinian flags. There were chants - “Free, free Palestine!”, “1, 2, 3, 4 - Stop the Killing, Stop the War!!”, and “Muslims/People, United, Will Never Be Defeated” by a side group. Several chants were happening at a time, reminding me that its hard to be organized in grief, under attack. The waves of powerlessness keep you chaotic. We didn’t stay for very long, and I was overwhelmed by the need to do more, overwhelmed by the jaded tones of Palestinian voices knowing that it is too late, the blood is everywhere.

I don’t know how it feels to be Arab, seen as a terrorist monolith, with displacement and massacre of my people approved of by the major super powers of the world. It would seem that to be Palestinian, now, means that sophisticated technology is being used to build walls through your land, tear down your home, bomb and strike you; and if you respond with rockets, you are called a terrorist, and expendable.

I do know that the majority of people of color in the US came here either because they were stolen from their own lands and brought to work here, or displaced from their homelands by war, poverty or persecution, and driven to be in this space. Many of us had our cultures erased or diluted in this process, and have forgotten what it means to be connected to the ancestral land of our people. I can’t overemphasize the depth of this loss of culture and place; I know it makes it hard for many people in the U.S. to even understand the displacement that has been happening in Israel-Palestine since 1948.

I know that most of the people I surround myself with every day look back on the massacres of Native Americans as a point of irreconcilable grief and shame in the founding of the U.S. It is not enough to say it was sad but oh well, that’s how history progresses. It’s the part of history that keeps us from the future we want. The cowboys vs. indians games many of us were taught to play as children are fabled re-imaginings of colonization, much like the current heroes vs. terrorist stories being presented today around the world, amplified in Israel and the US. It is shameful, and sensational.

How many times must we allow the same thing to happen before we learn no good can come of it?

We get to a point like this when we look at history in a shallow way, or in a reactive way. It’s very hard, with the Holocaust of Jewish people in our recent collective history, to clearly see what is happening in Israel now. And yet, this is very clearly a cycle of trauma playing out - to avoid extinction, a campaign was launched for Israel as a place for a people without a place…unfortunately, the place was inhabited, and the struggle of those inhabitants with the growing settler population and expansion of Israel has been a bloody mess since then. In July 2008, Barack Obama (then a presidential candidate) voiced the key argument from the Israeli government - Hamas is firing rockets at civilian Israeli homes and they must defend themselves.

This is a short sighted analysis. The fact is that Palestinians have been under attack since 1948, attacks on their homes, farmland and right to exist. Their efforts to exist, to participate as a democratic society up against a force increasingly funded and armed by the U.S. has so far earned Palestinians no right to defend themselves. Palestinians, in response, democratically elect a body that promises to fight and defend their homeland. Ceasefires and negotiations are all shadowed by the constantly constructed Wall, the ongoing displacement and enclosure of Palestinian civilians, the growth of checkpoint culture, the denial of a right to return which would mean a right to truly coexist.

What is deeply needed is a truth and reconciliation process, with ownership taken on all sides. Instead, as is happening more and more with nations that obstruct the desires of the U.S. and its allies, the small and violent and desperate attempts at warfare (in reaction to extinction of their culture and people) by a smaller body are labeled terrorism, and they are marked for obliteration by a larger body that gets the OK to do so with the silence and lack of action by economic global partners. This happened in Germany during World War II, this happened during the founding of the U.S., this happened in South Africa during Apartheid.

Friends know that I tend to root (and organize and mobilize) for the underdog. But this has been hard to write about or maneuver, as I’ve had Jewish friends who I respect tell me I don’t understand, that it is more complicated than I am seeing. History is certainly overwhelmingly complex, and I don’t believe that good vs. evil is the way of the world - but I do believe that humans participate in evil actions, can slowly become complicit in evil policy, driven by fear.

It is beginning to feel, to me, that those friends of mine simply cannot accept the reality of what is being done in their name, by their families, by their people. I am an American citizen, it is hard to sleep knowing the things my country is doing around the world, and I work on many levels to change the course of this country, recognizing the privilege/responsibility of citizenship I was born into. As an American, I am part of the funding body of all that Israel does, and from that vantage point, this is not so complicated: Gaza is a massacre, checkpoints and walls and limiting medical and food supplies - these are signs that an apartheid is happening, and the Israeli government is evolving Zionism into something akin to an Afrikaner or even Nazi politic, even as thousands of people in Israel join hundreds of thousands around the world to protest this murderous direction.

The more that Palestinians are pushed against a wall, the less likely peace is possible.

The United Nations shares much of my analysis, perhaps as uselessly. Even President Jimmy Carter has referred to Israeli’s current political approach as apartheid. The governments of 3 countries (the US, Egypt, and Israel) are allowing this moment - having denied the Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere adequate food and medicine for months, largely impassable borders on both sides (Egypt’s government has held a closed border against the desires of it’s people), and now after rockets were fired - apparently more for prison break style attention than impact - it gives Israel the opportunity to obliterate these people, one walled prison at a time.

Many Palestinians in other parts of their homeland stay quiet, not wanting to bring the murderous eye onto them. The Palestinian rights activists I talk to are numb, bitter and hopeless; others of us try to rally something more than grief and confusion - wishing we could change the course of this.

As people of color who have our own various histories of resisting the erasure of our cultures from this planet against the spread of military-corporate assimilation, we must stand with the Palestinians, speak out, and take action. The anger and mourning we feel should drive us to break the cycle of domination vs. extinction. Fear, including the righteous fears of Jewish people who want to exist, and the righteous fears of Palestinians that they will be relegated to life in a walled prison and never allowed to be home - these fears are not going to create a world in which peace is possible. We must approach the Israeli people as brothers and sisters who have gone astray in the wake of their own trauma, help them to clean the blood from their hands, and come home to the human family.

I am including (click for more) the best piece I have read so far that frames the situation in Gaza, and encourage you to consider it and pass it along. I welcome thoughts and responses, welcome others to move out of silence!

Gaza and the Ghetto
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland in what it termed initially a “defensive war”. The invasion was in part justified by the Nazi desire to reunify what it considered historic German territory and to claim Lebensraum for a race that considered itself superior to those that surrounded it in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only the Jews, but the Slavic races, were considered inferior, less than human, and regarded as populations that could be transferred to make room for Aryans.
It was, of course, the Jews who bore the brunt of Nazi racism. By 1940, the Nazis had begun to concentrate Poland’s Jewish population into ghettos in the main cities prior to their planned transport to the camps. In Warsaw, the largest of these ghettoes, three or four hundred thousand Jews were enclosed in less than 5% of the city, walled in by a 10-20 foot high wall, and gradually strangled by starvation and the shortage of all goods, including fuel and power. Malnutrition and disease was rampant and the exits and entrances of the ghetto were closely controlled. Resistance was subject to collective punishment: tens of Jews could be murdered in retaliation for the least act of defiance. In 1943, in the face of imminent transportation and the annihilation of the Jewish population, the remaining Jews in Warsaw organized combat brigades. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began. Despite the overwhelming force of the German Army and the utter inadequacy of their own weaponry, they fought a desperate struggle in the name not only of the Jews of Poland but of Poland’s right to resist fascism and occupation. “It is a fight”, they proclaimed to the Poles beyond the ghetto walls, “for our freedom, as well as yours; for our human dignity and national honour, as well as yours….”

An inspiration to resistance movements throughout Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is remembered less as a lost cause than as the heroic struggle that it was. Though crushed by German armour and military power, in hand-to-hand and street-to-street fighting, the Jewish resistance in Warsaw stands as a symbol of the right of an oppressed people to resist occupation, collective punishment, genocide and ethnocide.

Yet imagine if the policy of appeasement had continued and Nazi Germany had made good its claim to occupy land that it considered part of the historic homeland of its people. Suppose Poland had gradually been settled, as was planned, with German families who might for the most part have desired to make peaceful and prosperous lives for themselves on the new lands they believed were rightfully theirs. Suppose Pearl Harbour had never happened, and the United States had not entered the war against the Axis powers: France and Britain would have concluded some form of peace with Hitler’s Germany, probably on the face-saving pretext of fighting a global war against Soviet communism, while the small nations of Eastern Europe would have been abandoned to their fate. Germany, instead as being seen as a nation of Nazis and war criminals, would have been understood as the bulwark of Europe’s defense against the Soviet Union, while the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Polish resistance that supported them would have been remembered, if at all, as the “bandits” that the German generals knew them as. History, as we know, is rewritten by the victors.

Gaza too is a ghetto. One and a half million Palestinians, most of them refugees dispossessed of the lands and homes that were theirs for centuries, inhabit the most densely populated square miles of the Middle East if not the world. They are hemmed in by security walls and barbed wire fences, unable to move in or out without the permission of Israel, the occupying power. They have lived in a permanent state of siege, unable to conduct free trade with the rest of the world, virtually unable to visit the West Bank, unable even to fish in the sea off their coasts, subject to perpetual surveillance and control by land, sea and air. Their hospitals lack even the most essential medicines; power and water are controlled by the Israeli government; all goods that enter or leave this virtual prison camp do so by permission of the occupying power. The siege of Gaza has been one long collective punishment inflicted upon the population for their temerity in having elected, in free and open elections, a party, Hamas, that Israel and their ally, the United States and European Union, condemn as terrorists. Their principal crime is to deny the right to exist of a state that has dispossessed their people, occupied their lands, denied their historical existence, subjected them to ethnic cleansing, torture and collective imprisonment, destroyed their olive groves, walled them in behind a “security fence” designed to impede movement and access to farm land, schools, universities and places of work. And all these measures have been openly declared, by an Israeli minister in government, to be designed to suffocate Gaza into submission.

All this, the siege and its terrible effects on a civilian population struggling to survive in the most inhuman conditions imaginable, was ongoing before the current Israeli assault on the population of Gaza, its police force as well as old people and school children, infants and invalids. This is not an act of “defense” on the part of Israel, but a bloody continuation of a war of offense, differing only in the intensity and publicness of its brutality and in its abrupt, bloody and systematic nature. It is a war of collective punishment against a population whose resistance is less in its occasional and mostly harmless retaliatory rocket attacks than in its simple refusal to give in. It is an offensive war, like the 2006 and 1982 wars against Lebanon, and against a people whose right to resist occupation is inscribed in international law. It is a war whose crimes—once again--include the indiscriminate, because inevitable and foreseen, slaughter of civilians, including infants and children, attacks on non-military institutions including mosques, a university and a television station, and the deliberate planning of an assault whose proclaimed ends far exceed the suppression of the purported casus belli, the rocket launching sites. It is a war designed to destroy the civil infrastructure of Hamas and to break the will of the Palestinians in Gaza to continue their resistance.

The right of the Palestinian people to resist is as indubitable as the right of the Jews of Warsaw to resist the Nazis, or of the Polish or French people to fight against their occupation by the Nazis. Israel is not the West’s proxy in the so-called global war against terrorism. It is a state that itself inflicts terror, and does so with a force and brutality far exceeding anything available to the most violent of terrorist organizations. It is a state whose colonial aim, to occupy and to settle land historically occupied by another people in order to provide unlimited Lebensraum for its own ethnic group, is evidenced every day in the continuing expansion of the illegal settlements on the West Bank. It is an apartheid state, whose self-declared constitution as a “Jewish State for a Jewish People” should have no more international legitimacy than South Africa’s “white state for a white people” or Northern Ireland’s “Protestant State for a Protestant people”, both of which finally fell to a combination of military and civil resistance and international opprobrium.

It is long beyond time for Israel, now the exception in every respect among nations, to be held accountable to the norms of international law. It is time for Israel to be subjected to the same scrutiny as any other state that bases its polity on sectarianism and racism, that has established one set of laws for one ethnic group and another for the rest. It is time for Israel to by judged by the international law that everywhere condemns extended occupation, condemns collective punishment, war against civilians, population transfers or ethnic cleansing, dispossession of the occupied people and the settlement of their lands. It is time for us to name Israel what it is so long as it continues to pursue the most extreme of Zionist visions: a colonial, apartheid state with neither legitimacy nor a deserved place among the community of democratic nations.

It is time for us to cease the appeasement of Israel. Even the most ardent of appeasers of Nazi Germany never supplied Germany with arms or foreign aid, with fighter planes with which to bomb civilians, never labeled the resistance to Nazism “terrorism”, never actively participated in the German stranglehold on the ghettoes where it confined its subject populations. “Constructive engagement” did not work with South Africa; numerous U.N. General Assembly resolutions that have expressed the virtually unanimous international condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its wars against its neighbors have not worked. It is time for the truth about Israel to be disseminated, even against the most effective control of the western media by Israel’s lobbyists. It is time for all who care about justice and peace, for human rights, for the fate of the innocent and the oppressed, the stateless and the dispossessed, make our voices heard. Let it not be said that in their most extreme hour of need, the Palestinian people were abandoned by the world, as the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were abandoned in 1943.
David Lloyd,
Los Angeles,
December 30, 2008

take all junk foods out from our schools and hospitals cause for American Health problems

Lech Alex Bajan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:49:13 EST

take all the junk foods out from our schools and hospitals cause for American Health problems!

All Jacked Up - The Economics of Junk Food (Health Ranger)

Super Size Me opening

Or we see the real proglem Must see:

Gerson Therapy - Part 4 of 11 Natue of the World cure 5000 people cure from cancer with no options

ideas for historic ceremonies‏

FREELANCE WRITER — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 13:41:25 EST

To ,                  Dear   David PLOUFFE ,

                 I have birilliant     ideas   i would like to share   with you , with washington post com. ,
than with   The huffingtonpost ...time com. forbes com.and democratic party committe  of USA.
                 january.20 .2009 will be Historic   Day   for USA.and the world...Historic day because   will beswearing ceremonyat washington D.C.
To   join   congressional committee   for   inaugural   ceremonies   in Washington D.C.   Democratic   party of    USA. Should select   only six   The   world people for that   ceremony as honourable guest...Those six people should be none American citizen but American friends    and who have been work and support   President - Elect   of USA. Barack Obama   since several months ...During primary and general election of presidency of USA.
                 Democratic Party of USA.   Should choose- select   only six world people because   the world   population is six billion people ... each personof that six people will represent one billion people as sembolic ...those six world people should select   like in the list Below And   Democratic Party of USA.
And American embassy in their counntry    should inform them for the invitation ...
                                                    1 - )   One person, from MEDİTTERREANEAN countries...will represt also all Europe...
                                                    2 - )    One person , from   MİDDLEEAST...
                                                    3 - )    One person , from   CHİNA...will represent all Asian
                                                    4 - )    One   person , from AFRİCA...
                                                    5 - )    One   person , from   LATİN   AMERİCA...
                                                    6 - )     One person , from   ESCİMO ...INDİANA...
Democratic    of USA. Sould   invite   those   six   people and make payment for their hotel   room in Wahington   D.C.   And buy airplane return ticket   and get   their   Visa for USA...And   the world media will tell about it...and first harmony showing that   CHANGE   ARRİEVE    TO USA.
                              With kind    and   warm regards.

                              P.C.   When Democratic   Party   of USA. select those six   world people as quest of honour to the Inaugural   ceremonies in Washington   D.C.
Than kindly , keep remember   i would like very much tobe one of themin meditterreanean   group
Because   i work very hard   for Democratic Party of USA. since several months...also it sits my right to feel that    HİSTORİC CEREMONİES İN WASHİNGTON D.C. on the date of january .20.2009
I mnot an American citizenbut i work more than alot of american citizenfor support   and protect   keep contact and write blogs ...for President - Elect of USA. Barack Obama

November.26.2008
Time :      14.50
Kahta   - Turkei                                                                                    yours         sincerely ,
                                                                                                                 Mustafa   YILDIRIM
                                                                                                                  Freelance writer

Address :

New merhaba   otel
02400 - Kahta - Turkei
mobil phone :   ++ 90   ( 537 ) 358 .29. 49

SAY "THANKS" TO THE EARTH, FIGHT BUSH POLICIES TODAY

Fire Is Born — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 12:19:21 EST

Urge the Department of Agriculture to act now to save bees

"Although honey bees are crucial to producing about one-third of all the food we eat, the Department of Agriculture has failed to meet crucial research needs to determine the cause of colony collapse disorder, which is devastating hives across the country. Urge the Department of Agriculture to act now to save bees."

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council ) has several more issues on the stove than the bees. Beaches, mountain tops of Appalachia, your usual whales, and more. You can use their well informed sample letters and add a paragraph of your own, which I did. In case of the bees the paragraph was:

“I believe that we need more research in the area of the Native American bees and the indigenous horticulture and epiculture, for very obvious reasons. These bees have lived in the Americas for millenia and may provide a genetic solution to the problem. I also think that the American public should be educated about all facets of Native American / indigenous American horticulture and silviculture of the Americas. We have models there to follow and admire, which can save the Planet.

Also please let me know how we can make USDA account for how these 2007 funds I mention above have been used and let us know what further funds are needed. “

This is a great site, you will find through them all the representatves in your area, which you can use to write about other issues. And these will be coming, not going. We have a job to do.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

http://www.nrdc.org/action/default.asp

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

HERE ARE RELATED POST FROM YESTERDAY ON MY BLOG:

Janet Napolitano opposes the border fence, is a good choice

THE FIRST 100 DAYS - AMERICAN INDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL OFFICE

Border or Nature? ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSITION RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION - NOVEMBER 2008

Thanksgiving is about harmony with all American Nature

Celebrate Thanksgiving with me and take action to save American Nature. This is a great site that makes your action easy.

HOW TO FIND THESE POSTS ON MY BLOG

FOR THE NEW READERS:

YOU FIND MY BLOG ON THIS SITE BY CLICKING MY “NAME IN BLUE” WHICH IS “FIRE IS BORN”. IF YOU REGISTER AND MAKE A PROFILE YOU CAN ALSO CREATE YOUR BLOG HERE ON THIS SITE. WELCOME! PROFILE IS OPTIONAL AND SO ARE DONATONS. BUT GIVE SOMETHING TODAY. IT CAN BE YOU LIFE EXPERIENCE THAT YOU SHARE WITH US. WE NEED EXPERIENCE AND YOUR IDEAS, VISION, AND HOPES. SPELL THEM HERE. SPELL THEM RIGHT OR SPELL THEM WRONG BUT TELL THINGS AS THEY ARE. SEARCH GROUPS AND JOIN THEM. MAKE O-FRIENDS. TAKE ACTION TODAY! YES WE HAVE PHONE CALLS TO MAKE.

CALL GEORGIA NOW. YOU ILL FIND A LINK TO PHONEBANKING ON YOUR PAGE. IT IS EASY AND YOU MAY REDISCOVER YOURSELF BY CALLING STRANGERS. WELL, THEY ARE OUR FELLOW AMERICANS. WE NEED TO WIN GEORGIA'S SEAT IN THE SENATE. OUR GUY IS MARTIN, NOT CHMBLISS! ON MY SITE YOU WILL ALSO FIND RELATED POSTS.

All Obama bloggres! Have a Happy and Safe Thanksgiving!

Let's call Georgia, this week, before their Dec 2 run off Senate election! See the link on your page.

Fire Is Born — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:10:10 EST

SARAH PALIN PROMISSED TO BE THERE ON DEC 1.

LET'S BEAT HER TO IT!

"Former GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin will make four campaign stops in Georgia just one day before the state’s voters head to the polls in a runoff election that could determine whether Democrats win unfettered control of Congress.

The campaign of GOP Sen. Saxby Chambliss announced Tuesday morning that Alaska Gov. Palin and Chambliss will hit the campaign trail together on Dec. 1.(...)".

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/IrishMusiciansforObama/gGxXxQ/commentary#comments

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

DEMOCRATS NEED THIS SENATE SEAT!

Karol Wojtyla, Pope from Poland for the free world the unpublished images

Lech Alex Bajan — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:24:11 EST

Karol Wojtyla, Pope from Poland the unpublished images 1 (1942-1956

John Paul II, WE LOVE YOU

part1

Karol Wojtyla, the unpublished images - part 2 (1962-1970)

Karol Wojtyla, the unpublished images - part 3 (1970-1978)

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Loading...Karol Wojtyla, the unpublished images - part 4 (1978)

Karol Wojtyla, the unpublished images - part 5 (the end

Giovanni Paolo II - Karol Wojtyla

Videos Channels Playlists advanced

Loading...Jan Pawe 2; II Częstochowa - John Paul II Czestochowa 1983

Ron Paul's Message to OBAMA!

Lech Alex Bajan — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:29:10 EST

American Stasi

Dave — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:25:40 EST

Dear President-elect Obama,

I have received your letter thanking me for your support this electoral cycle. You are most welcome. I should point out that I supported you largely because you more closely represented my interests than John McCain did, given that I am a gay Buddhist environmentalist pro-union pro-feminist pro-choice socially liberal and anti-war anti-death penalty kinda guy.

We do disagree on a number of issues. While to be sure the only way any voter will agree 100% with their chosen candidate is if they are that candidate, there are a few things still which need to be said. I hope you will listen now.

A little while back, you voted in favor of the warrantless wiretap, which disturbed me greatly. You see, my family is from Eastern Europe, and I have served there in the Peace Corps myself as well as having traveled across the region. Although the Iron Curtain has long since rusted away, the scars of governments which refused to respect the privacy of their citizens still remain upon the minds of many in this region. I have personally seen the paranoia and distrust of both government and fellow citizen embedded in the souls of people whose ancestors stayed in the old country while mine fled. This fear paralyzes many otherwise innovative and brilliant people from doing things that could help their countries compete economically with the West, from adopting social programs that would benefit the entire population, and from forming functional governments capable of healing old wounds.

And the same not only can but probably will happen here as well if we continue to live under a system where private communications between individuals are monitored and everyone is held suspect. If we continue to follow the policies of a President that has treated all Americans as potential enemies of the state, we are doomed. You are probably aware that our fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan have had and continue to have their private communications with their families recorded. As I am sure you know, the distance and time separating these heroes from their spouses has sometimes resulted ina degree of loneliness, which many have attempted to deal with through intimate conversations of a sexual nature between the soldiers/sailors/airmen and their spouses via telephone or email, and that these conversations have been also eavesdropped in upon, referred to by NSA personnel as 'hot phone sex' and laughed at by the aforementioned intelligence operatives. In a time of war, this sort of insult delivered to our fighting forces is undignifying and unpatriotic. If we truly support our troops, let's at least give them a little privacy.

Americans at home should also enjoy privacy, free from government intrusion into their personal lives and communications. True, intelligence can be gathered by violating this which could be used to protect the state. But at what cost? When we sacrifice our civil liberties, particularly our right to privacy, on the altar of national security, we come dangerously close to the paranoid regimes that ultimately destroyed themselves in Eastern Europe and across Russia. I for one do not want to see the same hollow expressions of unease in the eyes of my countrymen that I saw in the eyes of those who were old enough to live through those regimes in Europe. If we truly want to protect out liberty, if we really give a damn about liberty and democracy and the right to hold a dissenting opinion, then we must, as a moral imperative, restore the FISA courts and end the random surveillance of Americans, particularly those who have offered to risk their lives to defend the very state that trusts them so little as to pry into their sex lives by listening to their intimate telephone and email conversations with their spouses. This is shameful, and it must stop.

Is this the USA? or the USSR?

End the warrantless wiretap immediately, Mr. President-elect.

Thank you,

Dave Bart

Washinton Post reporting: The latest from "a friend" about Hillary's SOS

Fire Is Born — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:45:36 EST

"(...) One friend said Clinton is ready to accept the job although the Obama transition team and Clinton's Senate spokesman said nothing has been finalized. But for the first time, her office officially confirmed that she is discussing the job with Obama.

"We're still in discussions, which are very much on track. Any reports beyond that are premature," said Philippe Reines, Clinton's spokesman and senior advisor.(...)"

I HOPE THE PRESIDENT ELECT WILL HAVE A QUIET WEEKEND WITH FAMILY - DESPITE ALL THOSE PHONECALLS! THEY HAVE AN ANSWERING MACHINE, DON'T THEY?

Human rights groups say there are more than 20,000 ethnic Georgians unable to return to their homes in South Ossetia

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:21:54 EST

Amnesty International Calls for Georgia War Crimes Investigation By Mandy Clark
London
18 November 2008
Clark report - Download (MP3)
Clark report - Listen (MP3)

"An independent report on the war between Russia and Georgia in August, is calling for an investigation into the conduct of all parties during the hostilities. The London-based human rights organization, Amnesty International, says it is concerned serious rights violations took place at the time.

Bombed café in the centre of Tskhinvali, South Ossetia, Aug 2008Amnesty says all sides in the August conflict may have committed abuses. In its new report, Amnesty says Georgian and Russian forces and militia fighters in the breakaway South Ossetia region should be investigated for war crimes during the conflict.

Amnesty's John Dalhuisen says there is strong evidence of human rights violations, noting concerns over "indiscriminate attacks by Georgian forces on entering Tskhinvali and then Russian forces in reply.

"Amnesty is also very concerned with the "looting, pillaging and destruction of civilian property essentially by South Ossetian forces and militia groups in aftermath of the conflict," said Dalhuisen.

The war erupted when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili launched a military operation against separatists in the breakaway province of South Ossetia to bring them under Tbilisi's control.

Russia responded with overwhelming military force, pushing deep inside Georgia. Dalhuisen says an in-depth investigation needs to take place and recommends an international humanitarian fact-finding commission established under the Geneva convention that both Georgia and Russia agree to.

The remains of a shell that hit a house in Thaelman Sreet, in Tskhinvali, South OssetiaThe New York-based group, Human Rights Watch agrees. It says Georgian and Russian forces used cluster bombs in the conflict and the group's representative in Tbilisi, Giorgi Gogia, says those bombs that failed to explode have now become de-facto landmines.

"We have called for both sides to provide the strike data to the de-mining organizations to raise awareness and conduct education programs for the civilians that have gone back in the affected areas," said Gogia. He says Human Rights Watch is also calling on both sides to sign the Cluster Bomb treaty in December.

Professor Sergei Arutiunov, a Caucasus expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, says abuses in South Ossetia must be exposed. But, he says, the army also needs the support of trained police forces in the breakaway region.

"Armies are not geared for police work, to maintain order," he said. "Marauding and criminal activity happens even after a short war." This "chaos must be rooted out."

Though the hostilities have ended, human rights groups say there are more than 20,000 ethnic Georgians unable to return to their homes in South Ossetia - with no prospect of doing so in the near future."

Russians and Georgians are talking, but "as individuals without identifying the side they represent."

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:06:00 EST

Georgia, Russia Conclude Talks

By VOA News
19 November 2008

Russian Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigori Karassine and members of delegation arrive for second round of talks at UN offices in Geneva, 19 Nov 2008Russia and Georgia have wrapped up a round of talks aimed at easing tensions after a five-day war in August over Georgia's breakaway region of South Ossetia.

The United Nations and European Union sponsored Wednesday's eight-party talks in Geneva. Officials from South Ossetia and from the breakaway region of Abkhazia attended the meeting, along with a representative from the United States.

Officials did not say much about today's discussion. But Russia's deputy foreign minister confirmed that the parties are set to hold another round in Geneva next month.

Georgia has said it wants an international peacekeeping presence in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are now patrolled by Russian forces.

Russian forces swept into Georgia August 7, following Georgia's military effort to regain control of South Ossetia. Moscow subsequently recognized South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states.

Wednesday's meetings were held in two working groups, rather than in a formal plenary session. Delegates are meeting as individuals without identifying the side they represent.

Abkhazia's Deputy Foreign Minister Maxim Gvinjia was pessimistic ahead of the meeting. He said he expects results "many, many years" from now.

Georgian and Russian delegates walked out of inaugural talks in Geneva last month. Georgia objected to Russian demands that officials from South Ossetia and the other separatist region, Abkhazia, be seated at the talks.

Meanwhile, exchanges of gunfire are reported outside a Georgian village near the boundary of South Ossetia.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP, AP and Reuters.

Ford does not need bailout! The Detroit two?

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:23:49 EST

"(...) Ford, relatively speaking, is loaded. The company still had $18.9 billion in cash at the end of the third quarter despite having burned through $7.7 billion in that period — half of which was tied to halting the production of F Series pickups because of slow sales. The company recently introduced a new version. Ford Credit, the company's finance arm, remains profitable because, unlike GM's 49%-owned bank, GMAC, it doesn't have a subprime mortgage business. On top of that, Ford can still draw on credit lines totaling $10.1 billion. "We are doing everything we can to create a relevant company for the long term," Mulally told the committee.

That includes balancing out Ford's U.S. product line by importing small, fuel-efficient models that have been doing well in Europe, where high fuel costs have been a constant for decades. European auto sales have also declined this year, but Ford has picked up market share. "We are shifting from an emphasis on large trucks and SUVs to a more balanced portfolio that also emphasizes smaller and more fuel-efficient vehicles here in the U.S.," Mulally said. "By the end of 2010, two-thirds of our spending here will be on cars and crossovers — up from one-half today." So if Congress doesn't pass an auto bailout plan, Ford could actually prosper by not failing. (See the 50 worst cars of all time.)(...)"

Asian Pacific Americans jockeying for key positions in the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:05:10 EST

Focus on APA Appointments in Obama Administration

Nichi Bei Times,

News Report, Kenji G. Taguma,

Posted: Nov 17, 2008

newstrust_icon = 'http://newstrust.net/images/ntbuttons/newstrust_review_link.gif';

"SAN FRANCISCO -- While the mad dash to the finish line ended with the election of the nation’s first African American president, a new race has begun, with perhaps equal if not more flurry: Asian Pacific Americans jockeying for key positions in the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

The Nichi Bei Times asked attorney Dale Minami, a member of Obama’s Asian American Pacific Islander Executive Committee, about his thoughts on potential Asian Pacific Americans (APAs) in an Obama administration.

Also providing insight was Congressman Mike Honda (D-San Jose), who as chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee is arguably the most influential Asian American politician in the country.

“I suspect there’s about close to a couple of thousand appointments that are available,” said Honda, who added that over the past couple of months, Asian Americans across the country have been asked to prepare their applications.

In regards to Cabinet-level appointments, Minami suggested a number of APAs who could lead certain departments: Honda (D-San Jose) at the Department of Education, former San Jose Congressman and Presidential Cabinet veteran Norman Mineta at a variety of posts, Illinois Veterans Affairs Director Tammy Duckworth at the head of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, former Washington Governor Gary Locke as attorney general, U.S. Army General Eric Shinseki or Major General Antonio Taguba as head of the Department of Defense, and longtime U.S. Senator Daniel K. Inouye as ambassador to Japan.(...)"

JAN Paul Pope from Poland for the free world

Lech Alex Bajan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:38:02 EST

JAN Paul Pope from Poland for the free world

Schwarzenegger opens climate summit with Obama

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:20:49 EST

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iMYGz51DMfI3b3W-En-7-55su38gD94HPBM80

ERIC HOLDER as in WIKIPEDIA today

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:28:10 EST

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Holder

Holder, Orszag, climate change... and more news on November 19

Fire Is Born — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:15:20 EST

November 19, 2008 Holder Seen as Pick for Justice Post as Obama Begins to Settle on His Team By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team has signaled to Eric H. Holder Jr., a senior official in the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, that he will be chosen as attorney general, but no final decision has been made, people involved in the process said Tuesday.

Mr. Holder would be the first African-American to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

As a top adviser to Mr. Obama, he has long been considered the front-runner for the job of attorney general because of his extensive record as a prosecutor and a judge and a well-honed reputation inside Washington. Mr. Obama’s advisers appear to have overcome concerns that Mr. Holder’s involvement in a presidential pardon scandal as President Bill Clinton left office in 2001 might cloud his nomination for the job.

Word that Mr. Holder was likely to be nominated as attorney general leaked out as Mr. Obama also began settling on other members of his team and signaling his policy priorities upon taking office.

Mr. Obama is set to hire Peter R. Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, as the White House budget director, people involved in the transition said. They said the leading candidate at this point for another top post on the economic team, director of the National Economic Council, is Jacob Lew, who was Mr. Clinton’s budget director.

While Mr. Obama has yet to name any of his cabinet secretaries, his early choices for White House staff positions and the names currently at the top of the list for staff and cabinet jobs suggest that his administration could be heavily stocked with Democrats who served under Mr. Clinton. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, under consideration to be secretary of state, was said by an adviser to be torn about giving up her Senate seat.

In his only public appearance on Tuesday, Mr. Obama indicated that he intended to move rapidly on one of the most ambitious items on his agenda, tackling climate change. Speaking to a bipartisan group of governors by video, the president-elect said that despite the weakening economy, he had no intention of softening or delaying his ambitious goals for reducing emissions that cause the warming of the planet.

“Now is the time to confront this challenge once and for all,” Mr. Obama said. “Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response.”

He repeated his campaign promise to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050 and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies.

Some industry leaders and members of Congress have suggested that Mr. Obama’s climate proposal would impose too great a cost on an already-stressed economy — having the same effects as a tax on coal, oil and natural gas — and should await the end of the current downturn. A bill similar to Mr. Obama’s plan failed to clear the Senate this year, largely because of concerns about its impact on the economy.

Mr. Obama rejected that view, saying that his plan would reduce oil imports, create jobs in energy conservation and renewable sources of energy, and reverse the warming of the atmosphere.

“My presidency will mark a new chapter in America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” he said.

Mr. Obama said that although he would not attend a meeting on climate change sponsored next month by the United Nations, he had asked members of Congress who would be attending to report back to him on what the United States could do to reassert leadership on global climate policy.

Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has been a consistent skeptic on global warming science and legislation, said Tuesday that Mr. Obama might be getting out ahead of his own party on climate change. Mr. Inhofe noted that nearly a third of Senate Democrats had opposed the similar climate change bill that came to a vote this year.

“President-elect Obama will face an even tougher sell in the years ahead, with economic concerns remaining front and center,” Mr. Inhofe said.

In Washington, Michelle Obama and her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, visited the White House on Tuesday, the final day of a two-day trip devoted to scouting out private schools for the young girls. Katie McCormick Lelyveld, a spokeswoman for Mrs. Obama, said Laura Bush had invited Mrs. Obama for her second visit to the White House — she and Mr. Obama visited last week — so the girls could get a feel for their new home-to-be.

During their trip to Washington, Mrs. Obama and her daughters also toured Sidwell Friends School and Georgetown Day School, two private schools they are considering.

Members of Mr. Obama’s transition team said Tuesday that no decision had been made on the attorney general spot and denied reports that Mr. Holder, 57, had already been selected.

People involved in the transition process said, however, that the decision appeared all but certain once the process of vetting of Mr. Holder was completed. If Mr. Holder is selected as attorney general and confirmed by the Senate, his biggest challenge, legal observers agree, will be to restore the credibility of a department that was badly battered by political scandal during the Bush administration. The dismissal of eight United States attorneys in 2007 and other controversies opened up the Justice Department to accusations that it had routinely let politics trump legal considerations.

Mr. Holder first met Mr. Obama at a small dinner party in 2004 welcoming him to Washington. The two lawyers, each the son of immigrant fathers, were seated next to each other at the dinner, and Mr. Holder said he was immediately impressed by the new senator.

Mr. Holder went on to serve as an adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign on legal issues and served on the two-member vice-presidential selection team that led to the choice of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as Mr. Obama’s running mate.

Now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington & Burling, Mr. Holder served as a federal prosecutor, a trial court judge, and United States attorney for the District of Columbia before becoming the top-ranking aide to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997. He was regarded as a strong ally for federal prosecutors and helped shape Mr. Clinton’s program to put 100,000 police officers on the street.

His last days at the Justice Department in 2001 were marred by his peripheral involvement in Mr. Clinton’s pardon of the fugitive financier Marc Rich, as Republicans sharply criticized Mr. Holder as failing to oppose the pardon and allowing the White House to bypass the normal pardon review process at the Justice Department.

Mr. Holder told the Clinton White House at the time that he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable” on the idea of pardoning Mr. Rich, whose former wife, Denise Rich, had contributed heavily to Mr. Clinton’s presidential library.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, which reviews nominees for attorney general, told reporters on Tuesday that while he had not taken any position on the prospect of Mr. Holder as attorney general, his role in the pardon of Mr. Rich should be “a factor to consider” in any confirmation.

With the battered economy the most immediate problem facing him when he takes office in January, Mr. Obama interviewed Mr. Orszag in Chicago last week for the cabinet-level job of director of the Office of Management and Budget, people familiar with the transition said.

Mr. Obama’s budget director will have to scramble to draft a proposed budget to be ready soon after the Jan. 20 presidential inauguration, and to help with the economic stimulus proposals that Mr. Obama has said he will offer after taking office.

Like several other candidates for top posts, Mr. Orszag is a protégé of Robert E. Rubin, former Treasury secretary to Mr. Clinton, and shares Mr. Rubin’s centrist approach to fiscal policies and concern about big deficits.

Mr. Orszag was also considered for the job of director of the White House National Economic Council, which coordinates the work of the president’s principal economic and fiscal advisers. That post is expected to go to Mr. Lew, another Clinton White House veteran who is now chief operating officer of Citi Alternative Investments, a unit of Citigroup, where Mr. Rubin is a director.

While the economic crisis has forced Mr. Orszag to focus on the $700 billion bailout program and various stimulus proposals before Congress, his emphasis has otherwise been on health policies. He has sought to draw attention to the growing costs for Medicare and other federal programs that are driving the projections of unsustainable budget deficits. Recently, for example, he gave a speech highlighting studies on potential cost savings from preventive medicine and more cost-efficient treatments.

Reporting was contributed by Jackie Calmes, Rachel L. Swarns, Helene Cooper, Jeff Zeleny and Peter Baker.

The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza By JONATHAN COOK

Fire Is Born — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:03:45 EST

"They Are All Hamas"

The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza

By JONATHAN COOK

"The latest tightening of Israel’s chokehold on Gaza – ending all supplies into the Strip for more than a week – has produced immediate and shocking consequences for Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

The refusal to allow in fuel has forced the shutting down of Gaza’s only power station, creating a blackout that pushed Palestinians bearing candles on to the streets in protest last week. A water and sanitation crisis are expected to follow.

And on Thursday, the United Nations announced it had run out of the food essentials it supplies to 750,000 desperately needy Gazans. “This has become a blockade against the United Nations itself,” a spokesman said.

In a further blow, Israel’s large Bank Hapoalim said it would refuse all transactions with Gaza by the end of the month, effectively imposing a financial blockade on an economy dependent on the Israeli shekel. Other banks are planning to follow suit, forced into a corner by Israel’s declaration in Sept 2007 of Gaza as an “enemy entity”.

There are likely to be few witnesses to Gaza’s descent into a dark and hungry winter. In the past week, all journalists were refused access to Gaza, as were a group of senior European diplomats. Days earlier, dozens of academics and doctors due to attend a conference to assess the damage done to Gazans’ mental health were also turned back.(...)"

Moderators, it is time for CHANGE!

Fire Is Born — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:02:54 EST

Moderators!

Are you for CHANGE?

Please remove this blogger now!

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/blog/robhill

He is impostering for an Obama suporter. - the real Obama Guy, our Friend.

enough is enough!

We the people are asking.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo