Category: News

"Either we stop claiming we are children of Abraham, or we act as brothers and try to reconcile." Peace is not a goal in itself. Peace is the result of a certain quality of human relations. And if you want peace and security, pursue justice and integrity. And justice does not mean to settle accounts. Justice means to learn how to forgive, to make concessions, to reconcile.

Otherwise if I stand for my justice, and the Jew stands for his justice, the only one who decides is the one who has the might. Might makes right. And this is the most cruel thing.
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The election of a Democratic majority in the House and Senate is unlikely to result in any serious challenge to the Bush administration’s support for Israeli attacks against the civilian populations of its Arab neighbors and the Israeli government’s ongoing violations of international humanitarian law.

The principal Democratic Party spokesmen on foreign policy will likely be Tom Lantos in the House of Representatives and Joe Biden in the Senate, both of whom have been longstanding and outspoken supporters of a series of right-wing Israeli governments and opponents of the Israeli peace movement. And, despite claims—even within the progressive press—that future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a “consistent supporter of human rights,” such humanitarian concerns have never applied to Arabs, since she is a staunch defender of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon.
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WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — As Israeli bombs fell on Lebanon for a second week last July, the Rev. John Hagee of San Antonio arrived in Washington with 3,500 evangelicals for the first annual conference of his newly founded organization, Christians United For Israel.

At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.

He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”
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Now that the Democrats have won the House overwhelmingly, the media is falling all over itself to proclaim Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and dearest friend of Israel, a boy genius. Even that congenital liar and close friend of Ariel Sharon, the ever tendentious NYT neocon William Safire, came out of retirement to hail Rahm as the Karl Rove of the Dems and to spin the election in various ways designed to keep Emanuel’s influence alive.

But is Rahm a boy genius or did the Dem establishments succeed despite him and in fact despite itself? After all, the Dem establishment, partisans of oil, empire and Israel, chose Rahm to lead them. Let’s do the numbers to see how Rahm and his employers really did.
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This obscenity of oppression and murder does not faze the Democrats or any of Israel's Zionist supporters in the U.S. Whatever Israel wants is all right with the Democrats. The 110th Congress will screw the Palestinians just the way the Republican 109th did.
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New research disputes the government’s claim that media reports on the conflict in Iraq are unfairly biased against the coalition

“Our findings fail to offer strong evidence of media coverage that was autonomous in its approach to the official narratives and justifications for the war in Iraq,” the report says.
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“THANK GOD for the American elections,” our ministers and generals sighed with relief.

They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American people delivered to George W. Bush’s ass this week. They love Bush, after all.

But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom of the page.

THE FIRST revolutionary act is to call things by their true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?

“Accident” said a pretty anchorwoman on one of the TV news programs. “Tragedy”, said her lovely colleague on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between “event”, “mistake” and “incident”.

It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.
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The US has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution condemning an Israeli attack in Gaza that killed 18 civilians, including women and children.

The draft, which also condemned Israeli military operations in Gaza, followed Wednesday's attack in Beit Hanoun.

The US ambassador at the UN, John Bolton, described the text as unbalanced and politically motivated.

Ten of 15 Security Council members backed the resolution. Four abstained – Denmark, Japan, Slovakia and the UK.

This was the second time this year the US used its veto on a draft resolution on Israeli military operations in Gaza.
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Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya of the ruling Hamas group has said he is willing to resign if this will end a Western aid boycott.

His comments came after talks on a unity government with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Sanctions were imposed this year by Israel and Western countries, which see Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

"If we have to choose between the siege and myself, we must lift the siege and end the suffering," Mr Haniya said.
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[Photo: Sanaa Athamna lies dead with the bodies of her relatives Maysa and Maram. Eighteen members of the same family died in an Israeli artillery attack. Photograph: Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images]

Sanaa Athamna lay as if she slept, dead on a steel tray in the morgue of Beit Hanoun hospital. Across her forehead was a single, hairline fracture and beneath her eye a smudge of blood, the only visible marks of the destruction brought by the wave of Israeli artillery shells that struck her street in Beit Hanoun before dawn yesterday.

In her arms, hospital staff laid the bodies of her relatives: two sisters, Maysa, one, and Maram, three. Their mother Manal was also killed in yesterday's attack, but lay in a morgue at another hospital awaiting burial.

In all, 18 members of the extended Athamna family died when Israeli artillery struck their houses on Hamad Street. At least 14 of the dead were women and children. It was the biggest single Israeli strike in the Palestinian territories for four years and came only a day after the military had ended a six-day incursion in Beit Hanoun, a heavy battle which claimed more than 50 lives.

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