The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.

Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest. (full article…)

My captors harbored many delusions about Westerners. But I also saw how some of the consequences of Washington’s antiterrorism policies had galvanized the Taliban. Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged. America, Europe and Israel preached democracy, human rights and impartial justice to the Muslim world, they said, but failed to follow those principles themselves. (full article…)

The council has a long history of focusing on Israel, while ignoring human rights abuses in other member states like China and Saudi Arabia. (full article…)

By the Israeli military’s count, 1,166 people were killed in the war: 295 noncombatants, 709 of what it called Hamas terrorist operatives, and 162 men whose affiliations remain undetermined.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 1,417 died: 926 civilians, 236 combatants and 255 police officers.

Israel says about 400 Gazans die of natural causes every month, possibly accounting for the discrepancy in the numbers. (full article…)

Of course the NYT fails to mention that hundreds of sick Palestinians have died after being denied permission to leave Gaza by the Israeli government. The author also does not write that Israel’s manipulation of figures was rejected by Israeli human rights organizations.

True, Obama didn’t ask for this. It was obvious, from his halting delivery and slightly shamefaced air last Friday, that he wishes the Nobel committee hadn’t put him in this spot.

But he still wasn’t brave enough to tell it no. (full article…)

Offsetting the need for reform is a deep Mediterranean resignation (full article…)

After the June 28 coup, President Obama joined the region in condemning the action and calling for President Zelaya to be returned to power, even though the Honduran president is an ally of Mr. Chávez, America’s biggest adversary in the region. (full article…)

In an article discussing the $400,000 being spent by the coup regime on lobbying the US Congress, the Times gives extended coverage of their ridiculous propaganda, provides no context, and does not once provide the perspective of President Zelaya or his supporters. The offer only this token sentence, which is then negated by aligning Zelaya with Hugo Chavez. But according to the standards of the NYT, this justifies the coup… They have made this very clear in their shoddy coverage since the ordeal began last August.

Not all are persuaded. Glenn Greenwald, an author and a left-leaning blogger for the online magazine Salon, called the parallels with the charges that Iraq had so-called weapons of mass destruction in 2002 “substantial and disturbing.”

“The administration is making inflammatory claims about another country’s W.M.D. program and intentions without providing any evidence,” he said.

Gary Sick, an expert on Iran at Columbia University, said that ever since 1992, American officials had claimed that Iran was just a few years away from a nuclear bomb. Like Saddam Hussein, the clerical government in Iran is “despised,” he said, leading to worst-case assumptions.

“In 2002, it seemed utterly naïve to believe Saddam didn’t have a program,” Mr. Sick said. Now, the notion that Iran is not racing to build a bomb is similarly excluded from serious discussion, he said. (full article…)

Most Iranians express acceptance of the outcome of the Presidential election. Eighty-one percent say they consider Ahmadinejad to be Iran’s legitimate president, and 62 percent say they have a lot of confidence in the declared election results, while 21 percent say they have some confidence. Just 13 percent say they do not have much confidence or no confidence in the results. In general, eight in 10 (81%) say they are satisfied with the process by which authorities are elected, but only half that number (40%) say they are very satisfied. (full article…)

They expected the military operation to be condemned as grossly disproportionate. They expected Israel to be lambasted for not taking sufficient care to avoid civilian casualties. But they never imagined that the report would accuse the Jewish state of intentionally aiming at civilians. (full article…)

The two candidates’ starkly different reactions to that ruling was supposed to underscore one of the true differences between them: that Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, would insist on adherence to core Constitutional liberties even while prosecuting the War on Terror, but McCain wouldn’t. Yet here we are, barely more than a year later, and the Obama DOJ is filing a legal brief chock full of Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments about how “Habeas rights under the U.S. Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram” and “No court has ever extended the Great Writ so far” and granting such rights “risks opening habeas claims brought by detainees in other theaters of war during future military actions” and doing so would pose “impediments to the military mission and threats to the national interest.” As The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote about the District Court proceeding: “The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.“

The report, the bulk of which focused on the Israeli violations, said that during the war, Israeli forces engaged in a deliberate policy of collective punishment in furtherance of “an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population” through blockades and the destruction of food, water and sanitation systems of its people.

In one case, armored bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically flattened the chicken coops of a farm that reportedly supplied 10 percent of the Gazan egg market, killing all 31,000 chickens inside. In another, the forces carried out a strike on a sewage plant wall, sending 200,000 cubic meters of raw sewage into neighboring farmland, the report said. The panel did not find a justifiable reason for the Israelis’ actions in either case. (more…)

The only real solution %u2014 one that replaces the profit motive with actually keeping us healthy and operates in most civilized nations on the planet %u2014 has already been taken off the negotiating table by our government-corporate plutocracy, and that is a single-payer system.(more…)

Despite a recession that knocked down global arms sales last year, the United States expanded its role as the world’s leading weapons supplier, increasing its share to more than two-thirds of all foreign armaments deals, according to a new Congressional study.

The United States signed weapons agreements valued at $37.8 billion in 2008, or 68.4 percent of all business in the global arms bazaar, up significantly from American sales of $25.4 billion the year before. (more…)

The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.” (more…)

They removed him over fears that he was trying to undermine the Constitution and extend his tenure. (more…)

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline. The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown. (more…)

The Iraqis really want the U.S. occupiers to stay? Yeah, only if every poll in existence is wrong about the overwhelming desire that the U.S. get out now.

Mr. Zelaya, who took office in 2006, has moved steadily to the left during his presidency, railing increasingly against the country’s elite, who he says have opposed his politics of inclusion. Critics accuse Mr. Zelaya, who comes from a well-off family of landowners, of blatant populism and of doling out cash to try to solidify a shaky political base. (more…)

The U.S. Congress recently approved additional funding for the training in Jordan of three more battalions of the Palestinian national security force, and by the end of the year the Palestinian Authority will have a total of seven battalions at its disposal whose training was supervised by the Americans. (more…)

Notice that Isabel Kershner’s report in The New York Times does not mention U.S. training specifically and refers only to mysterious “western funds”.

Hamas is facing an energized Fatah in the West Bank and is increasingly unpopular in Gaza. (more…)

I know it may come as a surprise to Thomas Friedman but unpopular as Hamas may be, Abu Mazen and Fatah are even more unpopular. Friedman’s use of the word “energized” simply means “U.S./Israeli-trained proxies”. But that doesn’t fit his silly narrative of “space” opening up for democracy thanks to the United States. Doesn’t he remember the failed coup attempt aimed at undermining the Palestinian elections? Paid and sponsored by the U.S.

And why did he basically repeat everything he wrote in an op-ed a few days ago? Same op-ed, different title. Not only is he weak (for lack of a better word) on his facts, but he’s lazy…

Third, the Bush team opened a hole in the wall of Arab autocracy but did a poor job following through. In the vacuum, the parties most organized to seize power were the Islamists — Hezbollah in Lebanon; pro-Al Qaeda forces among Iraqi Sunnis, and the pro-Iranian Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Mahdi Army among Iraqi Shiites; the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza. (more…)

So according to Friedman, none of these situations is in any way unique or region-specific. Nope. This kind of generalized political analysis is so refreshing.

At first, this dialogue took place primarily through violence. Liberated from Saddam’s iron fist, each Iraqi community tested its strength against the others, saying in effect: “Show me what you got, baby.” (more…)

During a telephone interview Tuesday with President Obama about his speech to Arabs and Muslims in Cairo on Thursday, I got to tell the president my favorite Middle East joke. It gave him a good laugh. (more…)

I’ll say it again: I can’t stand Thomas Friedman.

Pre-State Jewish Underground Leader Dies.

“The punks thought they could roll over us,” Vice mutters. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” (more…)

“An old man sat with his back to the village — he could not bear to watch it burn,” said Yisrael Cohen, a Jewish militia officer, recalling the conquest of an Arab village. “From a burning courtyard a young boy came running to me laughing; he wanted to play. He came up and I took him into my arms and he hugged me. What will I do with him, I thought. It was such a contradiction to what was going on around us.” (more…)

The New York Times is such a master at disguising Israeli crimes in a cloak of romanticism and feel-good nostalgia. You really have to give them credit. I mean, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began months before the Arab armies invaded — entire families were killed, women raped, villages razed, hundreds of thousands forcibly expelled (not “evacuated” as the article claims) from their homes. But all this is irrelevant to the NYT… We are meant to empathize with this poor man who struggles with the difficult task of ethnic cleansing.

Wrong. Instead, they went with a poetic Getty image: little children peaking over a little wall. How enchanting! (more…)

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…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

Thousands of tribesmen on Saturday attended the funeral prayers of the victims of Friday’s drone attacks in the North and South Waziristan Agencies. They condemned the killings and asked US President Barack Obama to spend the money on the welfare of the tribal people instead of killing them with sophisticated weapons. . . They claimed that all those killed in the attack were innocent and local villagers, who had nothing to do with militancy or Taliban.(more…)

Branding foreign journalists “spoiled crybabies” unwilling to make “a little effort” to get into Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, Government Press Office head Danny Seaman denied Sunday there had been any ban on their entry into the Strip during the battle. (more…)

Just like an Israeli propaganda chief to call the international media “crybabies” while placing a media ban on Gaza so harsh that even the New York Times and CNN questioned Israel’s intentions.

“Israel has never restricted media access like this before, and it should be ashamed,” says Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. CNN’s Ben Wedeman complains it feels like North Korea. (more…)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “Guy walks into a bar …” No, not that one — this one: “This is the most critical year ever for Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy. It is five minutes to midnight. If we don’t get diplomacy back on track soon, it will be the end of the two-state solution.” (more…)

I do believe that the violence in the Middle East has roots deep in history, and in the competition of the three monotheistic faiths, each of which claims divine title to much of the same land. (more…)

Oh really Mr. Moyers? The conflict is religious is it? It has nothing to do with decades of brutal occupation and Zionist dispossession? What a refreshing perspective.

“Everybody’s busy rebuilding now,” said a manager of one digging team. “In a month, it will be back to normal.” (more…)

Look at New York City. Look at the major newspapers. They have a Zionist agenda. They do. I’m not Jewish. I’m not anything. I don’t care about the Israelis. And I’m not anti-Semitic. It’s just a fact. I suggested to my publisher writing a book on Israel, and he said forget it. You can’t talk about the reality of Israel. The only place you can talk about the reality of Israel is in Israel. They tell you things you will never hear in the United States. … For instance, why are people on Gaza so unhappy? Well, if you had to live in a prison, wouldn’t you be unhappy? You would never get that in the New York Times. Look at the New York Times; it’s almost an extension of Israel. (more…)

In Gaza, Ms. Abu Halima said that when her family was hit, “fire came from the bodies of my husband and my children.”

“The children were screaming, ‘Fire! Fire!’ and there was smoke everywhere and a horrible, suffocating smell,” she said. “My 14-year-old cried out, ‘I’m going to die. I want to pray.’ I saw my daughter-in-law melt away.” (more…)

“We will not give up. In the next Knesset we will pass the Citizenship Law, which will put a border on the disloyalty of some of the Israeli Arabs,” he added. (more…)

The Israeli government’s stated war goals were relatively modest: to reduce Hamas’s ability and will to fire rockets and to change the security equation in the south. (more…)

Isabel Kershner really takes the cake when it comes to waving the Israeli flag for the New York Times. I mean, Steven Erlanger and Ethan Bronner are mere rookies when it comes to writing racist polemics. Just look at this lousy article. Israel’s goals in Gaza were “modest”? Where does this subjective assessment come from? Well, who cares… Because apparently Palestinian goals are never “modest”. No, that would just be absurd.

I am not sure whether the top Israeli propaganda award should go to Steven Elranger or Ethan Bronner or Isabel Kershner of the Times. I mean all three did their best to explain and justifiy Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians. Look at this article by Erlanger: “Whatever the military and political results of Israel’s 21-day war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is again facing serious accusations and anguished questioning over the legality of its military conduct.” I always wait for the word “anguish” which is often used in Zionist propaganda to refer to “the suffering” of…the Israeli killers. So if the massacres of butchery by Israel reaches a certain point, some “liberal” Zionists express concern for the “anguish” of the Israeli killers. (more…)

Steven Erlanger, in a particularly appalling article, excuses Israel’s grotesque behavior in Gaza. He no longer even attempts to justify his reporting of Israeli allegations as fact; he simply accepts it all verbatim:

“Hamas fighters are also putting civilians at undue risk by storing weapons among them, including in mosques, schools and allegedly hospitals, too, making them potential military targets.” (more…)

Really Mr. Erlanger? Have you seen these weapons yourself? Have you perhaps received this information from a source within the Hamas leadership?

No, of course not.

There is something called “war propaganda” and the New York Times has proven that it is more than ever an arm of the Israeli terrorist propaganda. Isabel Kershner is one of many propagandists for Israeli terrorism in the New York Times. Just look at this passage: “But Israel tightened the military pressure on Hamas on Thursday, perhaps to push it closer to a cease-fire that would meet the Israeli aim of stopping Hamas rocket fire into Israel.” So Kershner is saying that Israel continued the killing and destruction in Gaza (which she refers to as “tightening the military pressure”–and when you add the word military you immediately give murder legitimacy), was intended for good pursposes. She adds that “perhaps” it is for a cease-fire. When she adds “perhaps” she is admitting that she has no proof and not even claim by Israeli propagandists but that she is willing to invent a purpose for the killing. This brief passage should win the award for one of the most offensive justification of murder in Gaza. Isabel Kershner deserves at least a blender from the Israeli terrorist military. (more…)

And the Israelis, too, are resorting to tricks. (more…)

Apparently only the morally depraved evil-doers of Hamas are expected to use booby traps. Erlanger’s morally superior Israelis have resorted to trickery… It’s almost as if he believes trickery is something new to Israeli tactics in the Occupied Territories.

How Israel Gets Away With Murder

Before boarding my flight this morning, I picked up a copy of the New York Times (I had forgotten what a strange printing dimension it is – very narrow) and discovered this picture adorning the front page:

According to the caption, the image depicts, “Soldiers rested on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza during the three-hour cease-fire on Wednesday”

Apparently the Times has taken to printing exposés on the exhaustion of Israeli killers in the Gaza Strip. I mean, how tragic that they spend their days slaughtering women and children… You can almost picture feel Ethan Bronner cringing at this sorry sight, just before he writes another lousy article justifying the murder of civilians.

Most notably, after more than eight days of Israeli bombing and Hamas rocket launching in Gaza, The New York Times had produced exactly one editorial, not a single commentary by any of its columnists, and only two op-eds (one already published elsewhere). The editorial, several days ago, did argue against the wisdom of a ground invasion – - but even though that invasion had become ever more likely all week the paper did not return to this subject. (more…)

To the Editor:

If Israel feels threatened these days, imagine how the Palestinians feel (“Why Israel Feels Threatened,” by Benny Morris, Op-Ed, Dec. 30).

Gaza is a virtual prison, and the West Bank is on its way to being chopped up into apartheid-like cantons. Palestinians inside of Israel do not enjoy full citizenship and are sitting ducks for attacks by Israelis that go unprosecuted.

For years, the concern in the media has always been existential threats to Israel. In the meantime, what kind of existence is left or possible for Palestinians both in and outside of Israel?

Mr. Morris says the Iranian president’s denial of the existence of homosexuality in Iran “underscore[s] his irrationality.” State denial of facts was not invented by Iran. Does not Israel’s denial of its own state terrorism underscore its irrationality?

Christopher Stone

New York, Dec. 30, 2008

The writer is an associate professor of Arabic at Hunter College.

One excellent way to show your concern for wounded veterans is not to make so many of them. (more…)

The New York Times didn’t seem to mind going to war at the time, but now they are a paragon of pacifism.

The New York Times is reporting about an “apparent evolution” in president-elect Barack Obama’s thinking on Iraq, citing his recent statements about his plan to keep a “residual force” in the country and his pledge to “listen to the recommendations of my commanders” as Obama prepares to assume actual command of US forces. “At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Mr. Obama and his national security team has been akin to the senior officer corps’ letting out its collective breath,” the Times reported. “[T]the words sounded to them like the new president would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels.”

The reality is there is no “evolution.”

Anyone who took the time to cut past Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric of “change” and bringing an “end” to the Iraq war realized early on that the now-president-elect had a plan that boiled down to a down-sizing and rebranding of the occupation. While he emphasized his pledge to withdraw US “combat forces” from Iraq in 16 months (which may or may not happen), he has always said that he intends to keep “residual forces” in place for the foreseeable future.
(more…)