Category: News

Up to 1.6 million Iraqis have left their homes for other countries in “a steady, silent exodus” as a result of the war and sectarian violence, forcing the U.N. refugee agency to announce a shift in priorities.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said it plans to focus on the deteriorating humanitarian situation facing people who are fleeing, as opposed to those returning home.

“The enormous scale of the needs, the ongoing violence and the difficulties in reaching the displaced make it a problem that is practically beyond the capacity of humanitarian agencies, including UNHCR,” it said.
(more…)

The government will do all it can to discredit the latest estimate of civilian casualties since the invasion: 650,000

And finally, we can truthfully say that our foreign policy – based as it is on 19th-century notions of the nation-state – is long past its sell-by date. We need a new set of principles to govern our diplomacy and military strategy – principles that are based on the idea of human security and not national security, health and wellbeing and not economic self-interest and territorial ambition.

The best hope we can have from our terrible misadventure in Iraq is that a new political and social movement will grow to overturn this politics of humiliation. We are one human family. Let’s act like it.
(more…)

It happens once every few months. Like a periodic visit by an especially annoying relative from overseas, Condoleezza Rice was here again. The same declarations, the same texts devoid of content, the same sycophancy, the same official aircraft heading back to where it came from. The results were also the same . . .

Rice has been here six times in the course of a year and a half, and what has come of it? Has anyone asked her about this? Does she ask herself?
(more…)

Years of rivalry between the Islamic Hamas movement and the more secular Fatah is spilling over into a violent struggle for power, reports Rory McCarthy from Gaza City
(more…)

[Israel’s Apartheid system is tightening its grip over the lives of Palestinians]

Dr. Raphael Levine, the Hebrew University chemistry professor who accepted Ms. Salameh as his student, said he understood Israel’s security concerns but was baffled by the ban. “I think it is in Israel’s interest to strengthen the Palestinian middle class, and strengthening academic institutions in Palestinian areas is one sure way of achieving that,” he said.

“There is a Jewish tradition in which value is put on learning; Mr. Ben-Gurion said he wanted Israel to be a shining light to all nations,” he said, referring to Israel’s first prime minister. “You have to deliver on these things.”

“Both by sentiment and cold practicality, it is not in our interest to act like this,” Dr. Levine said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he is teaching at the University of California.

Meanwhile, Ms. Salameh, a high school science teacher, continues her life in Anata. She attends meetings as an elected member of the municipal council and is working to set up the village’s first women’s center.

She longs to begin work on her doctorate and one day become a role model for other Palestinian women and girls as the first woman to be a Palestinian professor of chemistry in the West Bank.
(more…)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (JTA) – A top staffer for billionaire philanthropist George Soros met recently with senior representatives of the dovish pro-Israel community to discuss setting up an alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, JTA has learned.

Morton Halperin, a director of Soros’ Open Society Institute and a veteran of senior positions in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, confirmed to JTA that the meeting took place late last month. He would not add details.

“It was a private meeting, it was an effort to get this off the ground,” said Halperin, who directs the institute’s U.S. advocacy.

The meeting focused on how best to press Congress and the Bush administration to back greater U.S. engagement toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how to better represent American Jews who don’t buy into AIPAC’s often hawkish policies.
(more…)

“I stressed to him that I was about to establish a desalination plant on the border of the Gaza Strip,” Zaslavsky related. “Peres burst out in response that he opposed it, because it did not concern us, and we did not need to worry about the Arabs, as they would look after themselves.” He claims that the project was consequently canceled.
(more…)

The death toll among Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion has now reached an estimated 655,000, a study in the Lancet medical journal reports today.

The figure for the number of deaths attributable to the conflict – which amounts to around 2.5% of the population – is at odds with figures cited by the US and UK governments and will cause a storm, but the Lancet says the work, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication.

“Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone,” write the authors, Gilbert Burnham and colleagues.
(more…)

Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation's largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News. Nothing.

The LA Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Associated Press each had one sentence, at most, telling about her. All three left out the details, the LA Times had her age significantly off, and the Washington Post reported that she had been killed by an Israeli tank shell.

It hadn't been a tank shell that had killer her, according to witnesses. It had been bullets, multiple ones, fired up close.
(more…)

ONCE, WHILE traveling in a taxi, I had an argument with the driver – a profession associated in Israel with extreme right-wing views. I tried in vain to convince him of the desirability of peace with the Arabs. In our country, which has never seen a single day of peace in the last hundred years, peace can seem like something out of science fiction.

Suddenly I had an inspiration. “When we have peace,” I said, “You can take your taxi in the morning and go to Damascus, have lunch there with real authentic Hummus and come back home in the evening.”

He jumped at the idea. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “If that happens, I shall take you with me for nothing!”

“And I shall treat you to lunch,” I responded.

He continued to dream. “If I could go to Damascus in my car, I could drive on from there all the way to Paris!”
(more…)