Category: News

Election season 2006 is over, and we can say goodbye to the negative media ads and stories. Opposing sides fought one another with reckless abandon. Yet they never once thought of turning their struggle into a civil war. So why is the Bush administration claiming that it's pushing for democracy in the Middle East while it is taking steps that encourage a civil war between Hamas and Fatah?

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The failure of last year's so-called Arab Spring underscores the broader failure of U.S. policy in the Mid-East.

. . . Krauthammer is very possibly the worst journalist working in America today, a relentlessly pernicious force, never right about anything, who feels his commentary should not be shackled by the small-minded bonds of accuracy or logic. He was, however, hardly alone in his unabashed enthusiasm for Bush's Arab Spring.

. . . , the point is that, whatever we hope to accomplish, the only way we can do anything constructive is to begin draining from the American approach to the Middle East the overwhelming stench of imperialism that's surrounded it for decades. We need to operate through legitimate mechanisms, establish rules of the road that we and our allies will actually follow and, most of all, operate with a sensitivity to the actual desires and priorities of people who live in the region. Faced with a disaster the scale of our current policies, saying "sorry" and then trying the same thing over again isn't good enough.

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President Jimmy Carter’s courageous new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is due on bookstore shelves tomorrow (November 14, 2006). In it, Carter reportedly states, “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement.” As a result of such excerpts – and the title itself – Democrats in the U.S. Congress made significant efforts in October to distance themselves from their former leader who nevertheless maintains his standing as the conscience of the party. Several have publicly lambasted him and in doing so shown a profound disregard for basic facts pertaining to Israel’s subjugation of millions of Palestinians.

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The Iraqi death toll hit a record high in October, with more than 3,700 people losing their lives in the ongoing violence, according to a UN report.

The majority of the 3,709 people who died were killed in sectarian attacks – nearly 200 more than in the previous record month of July.

The brunt of the violence was borne in Baghdad, while the report also noted that women were increasingly victims.
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The last hope of halting Israel’s steady ghettoization of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and calculated destruction of the Palestinian economy is the imposition of sanctions against Israel, especially the revoking of the $9 billion in U.S. loan guarantees. If we allow Israel to complete its massive $2-billion project to ring Palestinians in militarized, pod-like encampments in Gaza and the West Bank with security barriers, walls and electric fences, we will condemn Israel and the Palestinians to endless cycles of violence that could ultimately, given the mounting rage and despair that grip the Middle East, doom the Jewish state.
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Tal: “What attracted you to the eviction of Palestinian Arabs during the War of Liberation?”

Morris: “Till then everyone in Israel spoke about Arabs who had just run away in 1948, but there existed no real historical research on it. There were two conflicting propaganda versions, one Arab and another Jewish. As one who received his education in Israel, I thought I knew that the Arabs had ‘run away.’ But I knew nothing else. The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes…The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies.”
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Following its invasion of Lebanon this summer, Israel was said to have largely lost the PR battle to Hizbullah, but armed with a major web offensive, it's fighting back
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The UN General Assembly on Friday night overwhelmingly passed a resolution
condemning the errant shelling of a Beit Hanun house which killed some 20
Palestinians.
Representatives of 156 countries voted in favor of the resolution, seven
objected and six abstained.

Voting “no” were the United States, Israel, Australia, the Marshall Islands,
Micronesia, Nauru and Palau. Abstaining were Canada, Ivory Coast, Papua New
Guinea, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
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Israel has dismissed a Middle East peace plan put forward by Spain, France and Italy.

The plan calls for a ceasefire and increased international intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

An Israeli official said parts of the plan were being discussed, but it was not being taken seriously as it was not co-ordinated with the EU or Israel.

The Spanish prime minister proposed the plan, saying the situation required urgent action by the outside world.

“We cannot remain impassive in the face of the horror that continues to unfold before our eyes,” Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said.
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Norway is pushing for an international meeting on cluster bombs that it hopes will lead to a worldwide treaty restricting the use of the munitions.

The move follows the failure of a United Nations conference to agree any curbs on cluster weapons.
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