Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian “villages” incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, “fewer than 40 are still standing.” (more…)

The demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state, speaking of the recent Durban II conference, is another type of anti-Semitic trick against us. With all the giant states in the Middle East, it is the Jewish State that is required to share with the Palestinians the little territory that we have. (more…)

The Jerusalem District Court on Monday sentenced Shahar Butbika, who was convicted of kidnapping and killing a Palestinian youth from Hebron, to eight and a half years in prison. Fellow officer Dennis Alhazov, who documented the incident and was convicted of similar offenses, was sentenced to five and a half years in jail. (more…)

So kidnapping and murdering a Palestinian teenager by forcing him out of a speeding vehicle only warrants an 8.5 year prison sentence in Israel?

Of fine, it’s so rare that Israel prosecutes any of its soldiers for similar crimes… So I won’t even get into the murders and beatings committed on a daily basis against the occupied population. But the message sent by the Jewish state is clear: killing Palestinians is perfectly acceptable – just not in ways that arouse too much negative publicity.

The outdoor theater is being built next to the wall for the pope’s visit to Aida camp May 13. The Palestinians say they chose the spot to highlight life under Israeli military occupation.

However, the Israeli government has ordered the construction to stop, saying camp organizers lack the necessary permits and that the theater’s proximity to the wall poses a security risk. (more…)

The crowd approached the barrier, still singing. One man flew a paper kite shaped as a plane. “This land is a closed military zone,” an Israeli soldier shouted in flawless Arabic over a loudspeaker. “You are not allowed near the wall.” Then the soldiers fired a barrage of teargas.

It has been like this every Friday in the village of Bil’in for more than four years – the most persistent popular demonstration against Israel’s vast steel and concrete barrier. It is a protest founded on non-violence that is spreading to other West Bank villages. But it has become increasingly dangerous. (more…)

Police detain suspects, one of them a 70-year-old woman, seize computers used to upload material to website encouraging draft-dodging (more…)

Yet it is clear from a recently released and well-documented report by the Senate Armed Services Committee that such abuses were not committed by rogue service members or CIA agents who took matters into their own hands. The extreme interrogation methods were, according to the report, sought out and authorized by administration officials at the highest levels, including then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. (more…)

Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. Yep, we killed them. Yep, they were women and kids. Nope, they had, as far as we know, nothing to do with terrorism. Yep, it was our fault and we’ll pony up for our mistake.

This new tactic is a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in US raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself–those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night–just goes on. (more…)

The prosecutors call him “Hezbollah’s man in New York City,” because he offered this channel, which is apparently TERRORISM. He also sold porn, so you know he’s basically an Islamic fundamentalist and an amoral big city commie. (more…)

Hundreds of Iraqis protested against U.S. forces on Sunday after U.S. soldiers killed a man and a woman in an overnight raid that was condemned by the provincial governor. The U.S. military said it targeted “special groups” fighters. (more…)

In other words, the CIA’s own internal investigation could not confirm that “enhanced interrogation” had in any instance achieved the single goal that supposedly justified violations of American and international law: the disruption of a “ticking bomb” plot. (more…)

“Congressman, the crossings are no longer completely closed. There are many items that are being transported through the crossings. There are, as you know, some items that the Israeli government does not permit to cross,” Clinton responded. “The best way for us to help the people of Gaza is for Hamas to cease its rocket firing on Israel, to abide by the quartet principles, and the same principles that were adopted by the Arab peace initiative, which I have reiterated several times here today.” (more…)

Does she have a list of these “many” items, because I suspect we have a different understanding of the word…

Israel has taken a step towards expanding the largest settlement in the West Bank, a move Palestinians warn will leave their future state unviable and further isolate its future capital, East Jerusalem. (more…)

The clown of Jordan is very concerned about torture… in the United States. (more…)

The high number of its prison inmates is exceptional. The quality of its health care is exceptionally bad. The degree of its social inequality is exceptionally acute. Public education has gone into exceptional decline. The Americanization of the Holocaust and uncritical support for Israel have demonstrated an exceptional ability to gloss over uncomfortable truths, including broad American indifference to Hitler’s genocide as it happened. (more…)

I stood at arrivals with my suitcase and bags, waiting for Gerry to pick me up, and realized my life in Gaza was suddenly over. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, or both. (more…)

At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing – and efforts by human rights organisations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful. (more…)

Being pregnant, I couldn’t run fast. After about one hundred meters, the settlers caught me. One of them hit me in my right arm and left leg with his stick. The other settler threw a stone at me, which hit me in the left leg. Then one of them pushed me, and I fell onto some thorns. My arm and leg hurt a lot. When I fell, the two settlers left me and ran toward the farmers and other shepherds. I remained there, crying. I was in terrible pain. (more…)

A Palestinian was moderately-to-seriously injured Friday after an IDF tear gas canister hit him in the face during the weekly rally against the separation fence in the village of Na’alin near Ramallah, witnesses at the place said. (more…)

Miami names Shalit honorary citizen

Hamas, which the State Department considers a terrorist group, won Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, but the United States has refused to deal with the group until it meets conditions, including recognition of Israel. (more…)

Israel however, is not obliged to renounce violence, recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination or to abide by former agreements. Nope. These standards are reserved solely for Hamas.

Shortly after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory, the U.S. cooperated with Israel to arm and train Fatah elements in preparation for a violent coup against the Hamas leadership in Gaza, which then ruled Gaza jointly with Fatah. The scheme, later known as the Dayton Plan, was reportedly managed by Dahlan in coordination with U.S. Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton. (more…)

[N]ote that the March waterboardings were not for the purpose of increasing national security; they were intended to provide a propaganda victory for an illegal war plan. That is not just wrong, it is evil. (more…)

Last Friday, 17 April, during a demonstration in Bi’lin, in the Ramallah District, a soldier fired a tear-gas grenade from an increased distance at Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, 30. The grenade left a hole in his chest, causing massive internal bleeding, which led to his death. Two video clips filmed at the site prove that Abu Rahma was standing on the eastern side of the fence, about thirty meters from the soldiers, when he was hit. The video clips also show that during the incident, he did not throw stones, did not damage the fence, and did not endanger soldiers in any way whatsoever. (more…)

Brushing aside international criticism, Israel demolished a Palestinian house in East Jerusalem in the latest in a series of actions that critics say is racheting up tensions in the city, harming chances for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ammar Hudidon, a resident of the Jebel Mukaber neighbourhood and a father of seven children, said a bulldozer flattened his home yesterday after the Jerusalem municipality said he lacked building permits. Palestinians complain that the permits are virtually impossible to obtain. (more…)

Environmental hazards in the Gaza Strip, such as sewage contamination, have intensfied since Israel’s recent war on Hamas there because even basic infrastructure repairs are stalled by an ongoing border blockade of the territory, the UN’s environment chief said Tuesday. (more…)

“Someone who had a wall knocked down had it rebuilt at the absolute minimum cost,” a Palestinian resident of Khan Younis told Ynet, “but anyone who received compensation for broken windows prefers to close the windows off with nylon instead of installing new ones, in order to use the money received for daily living.” (more…)

According to a recently released Justice Department memo, CIA operatives subjected two al-Qaeda leaders — alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and high-level lieutenant Abu Zubaida — to 266 episodes of waterboarding. Mr. Mohammed is said to have been waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 — for an average of six episodes a day of what has been described as among the most terrifying and brutal forms of coercive interrogation. Mr. Zubaida was subjected to water torture 83 times during August 2002. There is no mention of how many times a third detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded. Had any foreign government or terrorist group treated U.S. citizens in this way, the country would have been appalled — and rightly so. (more…)

But Bonnie McCarvel, the MACA executive director, was not so diplomatic in an e-mail forwarding the letter to MACA supporters and members, in which she said: “While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made (us) shudder.” (more…)

As in previous cases of this kind, the justices (Levy, Grunis, and Na’or) accepted the state’s argument that demolition of the family home will deter others from carrying out similar acts. The justices approved the demolition, even though the state never contended that Dwiyat’s family assisted him or knew of his plans. (more…)

This comes at a time when the Israeli military itself has voluntarily ceased house demolitions—because they found the deterrent benefits to be negligible. And in many cases, these Nazi-style tactics intensify Palestinian solidarity and resistance.

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” The report undercuts the Obama administration’s case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002. The report also shows that the administration appears to have attempted to use the abusive techniques to shore up its case for war in Iraq. Interrogators employed the techniques, which are notorious for producing bad intelligence, to get detainees to make statements linking Iraq and al-Qaida. (more…)

What is significant about the Jaber family’s battle for their home is the way this fight is emblematic of the twin processes Israel has been using to Judaize the land: creeping annexation and delaying negotiations. Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip (as well as other Arab territories), the ethnic cleansing has been steady but slow, unlike the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in both 1948 and 1967. One house or neighborhood at a time, Palestinians are removed from their land. And just as the Jaber family finds the court continually delaying its decision about their home, for the last 16 years Palestinians have experienced the realities of the Oslo process as a delay process. (more…)

Waxman’s blunt statement that the goal of cap and trade is to raise energy prices was deeply off-message for green groups, which have long insisted that energy efficiency and conservation would prevent energy prices from rising. But it was only the latest in a series of setbacks for climate legislation. (more…)

The [Palestinian Authority] security forces arrested professor Abdul-Sattar Qasem, an author and lecturer in the Political Science Department of Al Najah University in Nablus, and reporter Murad Abu Al Baha’, from Betunia, West of Nablus. (more…)

In air attacks causing civilian deaths, 46% of victims of known gender were female, and 39% of victims of known age were children. Mortar attacks claimed similarly high proportions of victims in these two demographic groups (44% and 42%). By comparison, 11% of victims across all weapons types were Iraqi females, and 9% were children. The authors argue that their findings showing that air attacks (whether involving bombs or missiles) and mortars killed relatively high proportions of females and children is further evidence that these weapons should not be directed at civilian areas by parties to conflict because of their indiscriminate nature. (more…)

The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. (more…)

As Paul Woodward of the blog War in Context correctly points out, Obama’s determination not to pursue justice (he calls it retribution) suggests that “we no longer live in a world where the Nuremberg defense is untenable … ‘I was just following orders,’ has now become an honorable American justification for torture.”

Palestinian sources reported Friday that a local demonstrator was killed after being hit in the chest by a tear gas canister during a protest against the separation fence in the West Bank village of Bilin. (more…)

After Tristan Anderson, an American demonstrator, was seriously injured by an Israeli tear-gas canister last month, Israel denied the weapon that tear-gas canisters were being used as weapons. But as the Israeli human rights organization B’tselem points out, “Firing of this kind has already resulted in injuries, some grave, to dozens of Palestinians and Israeli and foreign citizens.” This is the daily reality of life under Israeli brutality…

I find it hard to believe that a man as intelligent as Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law, would equate the pursuit of justice with retribution. It makes it appear as if his decision is one of political expediency.

If holding the C.I.A. operatives accountable for violating federal or international laws is retribution, then the prosecution of ordinary citizens for crimes is also retribution.

The president does not have the authority to be selective about who should or should not be charged with a crime, and he has made a grievous error by confusing the pursuit of justice with retribution or retaliation. (more…)

“The release of CIA memos on interrogation methods by the US department of justice appears to have offered a get-out-of-jail-free card to people involved in torture,” Amnesty International said. “Torture is never acceptable and those who conduct it should not escape justice.” (more…)

And then the Obama administration invented a brand new radical argument that not even the Bush administration had espoused that says that the government is completely immune from any lawsuits for illegal spying, unless they deliberately or willfully disclose to the public what it is that they learned. So they basically said government officials are immune, when they break the law, from lawsuits, except in the narrowest of cases. (more…)

Somalia Piracy Began in Response to Illegal Fishing and Toxic Dumping by Western Ships off Somali Coast (more…)

Repressive actions are being carried out by de facto government forces in the Gaza Strip against Fatah Youth members preparing to mark Prisoners Day in Rafah, head of the youth council in the Gaza Strip Mahmoud Qanan said Thursday. (more…)

A federal appeals court says a former Israeli security chief cannot be sued in the United States for 15 deaths in a Gaza City bombing. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling Thursday in New York. The court said Avraham Dichter was immune under common law from being held responsible for the July 2002 bombing of an apartment complex. Dichter was director of the Israeli Security Agency at the time. A lower court rejected a 2005 lawsuit. It sought class action status for bombing survivors and victims’ families. (more…)

Western forces in Afghanistan acknowledged on Thursday they had killed six civilians in an air strike, just days after apologising for a similar incident that killed five. (more…)

Three months after the end of the war, much of the aid has either rotted or been irreparably damaged as a result of both rain and sunshine, and Egypt’s refusal to open the Rafah crossing.

“To be honest, most of this aid will never make it to Gaza,” a local government official told IPS on condition of anonymity. “A lot of the food here will have to be thrown away.” (more…)

The Israeli Anti-Drug Authority launched an ad campaign linking smoking marijuana with support for Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. (more…)

Another way of putting it would be to say that the co-conspirators agreed to cover each other’s backs so that they could collectively enjoy legal impunity.

Now that that impunity is in jeopardy, the lawbreakers are upping the ante by implying that exposing torture practices poses a national security threat. (more…)

Saying goodbye to people in Gaza is awfully poignant because you never know if you will see them again – or if they will be dead before you come back. (more…)

“Even the lure of billions of dollars in aid has not brought Fatah Sunnis in Judea and Samaria, i.e., the West Bank, any closer to Shiite supporters of Hamas in Gaza. These are two parallel lines that cannot meet, and this division will persist.” (more…)

This statement just reveals the deep knowledge possessed by so many Middle East “experts”.

In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that “conveyed outright bigotry against … the Jewish people.” (more…)

[R]ecent decisions by Costa Rica and El Salvador to restore relations with Cuba leave the United States as the only country in the hemisphere that does not officially recognize the government of the Caribbean island. (more…)

Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. (more…)

The White House offered no further details. But last week a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to Obama congratulating him for deciding to boycott the meeting, which is scheduled to begin Monday. (more…)

“Sooner or later, the world will realize that Iran wishes to take over the Middle East, and that it has colonial ambitions,” Peres said. (more…)

For some reason, Peres’s talk of “colonial ambitions” strikes me as either facetious or deeply cynical. Can anyone tell me why?

“I’ve come to the region nine or ten times,” Admiral Mullen told the clerics.

Mr. Holbrooke jumped in.

“And each time, things have gotten worse.”

Admiral Mullen, Mr. Holbroooke, and all the clerics laughed. (more…)

At approximately 08:00 a.m., the settlers – armed with pistols and machine guns – opened fired directly at Palestinian civilians and houses. The settlers and soldiers then advanced towards the houses, firing their weapons and tear gas. The Palestinian civilians responded with stones, in an attempt to prevent the attackers from entering the houses. Soldiers and settlers shot directly at Palestinian civilians, at distances ranging from 2 to 20 metres. The attack lasted for approximately 90 minutes, without interruption. (more…)

Some academics say that while the growing gap between theory and policy may have costs for policy, it has produced better social science theory, and that this is more important than whether such scholarship is relevant. Also, to some extent, the gap is an inevitable result of the growth and specialization of knowledge. Few people can keep up with their subfields, much less all of social science. But the danger is that academic theorizing will say more and more about less and less. (more…)

[L]eft unattended, Jewish settlement expansion within the eastern part of the city will reach a critical mass that will create a Balkanised stalemate, geographically and demographically, that would make the two- state solution impossible. (more…)

Mr. Oz favored the attack as an appropriate response to the rockets but wanted it called off within a few days rather than the three weeks it lasted. Meanwhile, he says, he has been saddened by some of the behavior of Israeli soldiers in Gaza. (more…)

I am so sick of hearing this man referred to by the Western media as a dove. He favored both the massacre in Gaza and the 2006 attack on Lebanon. I think that should put to rest any confusion.

*** Update ***

Angry Arab points out that Oz is lying when he says that “no streets were bulldozed to the ground” in East Jerusalem following Israel’s occupation of the city – the Moroccan Quarter was razed to clear way for the plaza that now lies just before the Western Wall.

A Saudi judge has refused for a second time to annul a marriage between an 8-year-old girl and a 47-year-old man, a relative of the girl told CNN. (more…)

But the Taliban… their values are unacceptable.

The Ministry of Social Affairs in the Gaza Strip reported that the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip left 1346 children orphaned, 437 dead and 1872 wounded. (more…)

Republicans are discovering that ‘god, guns and gays’ no longer fire up voters worried about keeping their homes and jobs. (more…)

Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent. (more…)

The oil sector, still Iraq’s most significant industry, is plagued by a rotting infrastructure. Pipelines in Basra are being kept together by “duct tape and spit”, according to one concerned American official. “They can burst at any minute.” Most Iraqis today might say much the same about their country. They are grateful for the temporary respite from extreme violence, but certain it will not take much to reignite the flames. (more…)

One of the great soundbites of the Obama election campaign was: “I want to end the mindset that got us into war.” So far, the Obama administration has paid more attention to linguistic adjustments (”war on terror” is out) without any clear evidence that it is willing to address the deeper issues of political transformation. (more…)

Clark University canceled a campus talk scheduled for later this month by controversial Holocaust scholar Norman Finkelstein, saying his presence “would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding,” and would conflict with a similar event scheduled around the same time. (more…)

Israeli Naval forces have abducted eight Palestinian fishermen (including two minors) from the Salateen area in north of the Gaza Strip. Additionally, the fishermen’s four hassakas (small fishing boats) have been taken by the Israeli Navy. According to eyewitnesses, the fishermen were only about 100 meters from the coast at the time of their abduction. (more…)

Residents of a Palestinian Christian housing project in the West Bank village of Beit Sahour say Israel is encircling their community with a security road to separate them from a nearby Jewish settlement. “With this situation they will put us in a cage, a zoo,” said William Sahouri, 42, a resident and member of the project’s housing committee. “We will not be able to expand.” (more…)

I have a message to all the Zionist hoodlums out there: for all of you who campaigned and harassed and intimidated and who treated academic life like an aspect of Zionist thuggery, Joseph Massad has received tenure. He called me yesterday from Cairo to break the great news to me and I could not wait to report it to his enemies and mine. It is with great pleasure and gratification that I break the news to all of you. No matter what dirty tricks you (i.e. Zionist hoodlums) have resorted to, and no matter what sleazy methods you have employed and no matter what sinister propaganda you have resorted to, dear Joseph Massad deservedly received his tenure. I am looking forward to Joseph’s contribution to Middle East studies at Columbia and elsewhere. And as `Abdun-Nasser told the colonial power back in 1956, I say: if you don’t like this news please feel free to go and drink from the Mediterrenean sea.

The United States has been training senior Palestinian security officials in an advanced officers course in Ramallah for top-brass, Haaretz has learned. The new course, entitled “senior leaders’ course,” is a two-month long program conducted in Ramallah with the assistance and supervision of the U.S., and is part of the project overseen by the U.S. security coordinator in the territories, Gen. Keith Dayton. (more…)

Rice explains: “I think the challenge in Iraq is not to lose focus. It is not a question of when American combat forces withdraw. The distance between what the Obama Administration is talking about and what we negotiated is very small, but Iraq is on its way to becoming a strategic asset, but it’s not there yet.” (more…)

We have been stuck in Cairo airport for nearly a day now. We are neither being allowed entry or exit by Egyptian authorities, who insist that as long as Rafah Crossing is closed, they are under strict orders not to allow Palestinians in. (more…)

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed – sometimes for hours – the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups. (more…)

We Didn’t Create a Paradise in Iraq, We Created a Hell

The Obama administration is expecting a clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. (more…)

April 9 was the sixth anniversary of the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in Iraq. The date passed without much remark in the United States, which is consumed with its own domestic economic problems and high rates of unemployment, rendering a distant foreign misadventure virtually invisible. Gone are the debates over whether a US military occupation could jump-start democratization throughout the Middle East, creating a shining city on a hill rather than an economic and political basket case. Gone are the confident assertions that the path to peace in Israel/ Palestine goes through Baghdad. Gone is the quixotic sabre-rattling against neighboring Iran, which was premised on the false notion that the US did not need Tehran to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

All gone, to be replaced by a yawning silence on this side of the Atlantic, with perhaps a touch of regret or shame among the sliver of observers who remembered the date at all. (more…)

The people living in these housing units, belonging to the al-Ghawe and Hanun families, are due to be forcibly removed from their homes this week, as the papers from the Israeli court they were served with are valid between 15 and 22 March. The courts have justified these evictions by saying that the land that the houses are built on is disputed. Yet, the houses were built under a joint construction project by the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956, 11 years before Israel occupied East Jerusalem. (more…)

Bush feels content with his presidency, friends said. Now he will try to explain his two terms by writing a book and building a presidential center at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University so that history will have the means to judge him fairly. (more…)

To further incite a strong, heated response from AbuKhalil, Tor pointed out that he never looked at him and said “I wish you would humanize me in some way, maybe by looking at me.” Looking straight ahead toward the crowded audience, AbuKhalil responded, “I will treat you like you treated Palestinians in Gaza.” (more…)

A campaign promoting atheism on London buses this year ultimately “served God’s cause” by reminding people of the importance of faith, especially to those who suffer, a papal preacher said Friday. (more…)