Dive into the archives.
- Couldn’t Have Said It Better
Let’s start with the most obvious. This is a cynical ploy by the Israeli government to divert attention from the findings of the UN report. Government officials have almost said as much. A foreign ministry official described the investigation by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth as “explosive PR material”. Hasson claims: “Had [the Israeli foreign [...]
- More Human Rights Abusers Terrified of any Precedent
China will oppose discussing the Goldstone report at the United Nations Security Council, Chinese members of parliament told a delegation of visiting Israeli officials in Beijing on Wednesday. (full article…)
- Goldstone on Lieberman
“What peace process are they talking about? There isn’t one. The Israeli foreign minister doesn’t want one at all.” (full article…)
- Richard Goldstone: My Mission – and Motivation
I sincerely believed that because of my own record and the terms of the mission’s mandate we would receive the cooperation of the Israeli government. Its refusal to cooperate was a grave error. My plea for cooperation was repeated before and during the investigation and it sits, plain as day, in the appendices of the [...]
- Israeli Aggression, By Remote Control
A U.N. investigation into explosions in south Lebanon indicated on Sunday that Israel had planted spy devices on Lebanese land in what a senior U.N. official said would be a violation of a ceasefire agreement. The UNIFIL peacekeeping force in Lebanon said its preliminary probe into two explosions in the south showed they had been [...]
- Glenn Greenwald on American Hypocrisy
One of the taboo topics in the American media is how the U.S. Government routinely violates the principles we espouse for, and try to impose on, the rest of the world. We systematically torture Muslims and then cover it up and protect our torturers while preaching accountability and the rule of law; we condemn deprivations [...]
- Don’t Worry, We Never Doubted It
American officials say Washington will likely exercise its veto power if report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza is brought to a Security Council vote. (full article…)
- I Forgive All But Japan, Norway and Belgium – What Gives?
The abstaining countries included: Bosnia, Burkina-Faso, Cameron, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Belgium, South Korea, Slovenia and Uruguay. (full article…)
- Zionists are Scared
The political echelon in Jerusalem has decided to use the explosion that occurred at the Hezbollah member’s house in Tyre this week to divert international attention from the Gaza war report to be debated in the UN starting Wednesday. Israel is hoping to put the spotlight on Hezbollah’s violation of Resolution 1701 that ended the [...]
- Zionist Integrity
“We are facing very large challenges. The first is renewing peace talks; they should be renewed without any preconditions,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting on Monday. (full article…) He added, “However, the peace process will not go forward unless the Goldstone Report is dropped. That’s our only precondition, even if in [...]
- Zionist Blackmail
One element of the blackmail, which reportedly has been exercised by the Israelis on the Palestinian Authority in order to persuade them not to go forward with consideration of the Goldstone report in Geneva, was a denial of the granting of a license to a second Palestinian cell phone company in the Occupied Territories. (full [...]
- I Wonder
How does Obama’s suppression of Israeli war crimes in the Goldstone Report factor into his silly prize?
- We Need More Swedens
Stockholm’s foreign minister urges UN human rights council to discuss report probing Gaza war despite expressed reservations as to its credibility (full article…)
- Calls Obeying U.S. Masters “Mistake”
A member of President Mahmoud Abbas’ inner circle says the Palestinian leadership made a mistake by suspending action on a Gaza war crimes report . (full article…) This entire episode makes we wonder if the U.S. is opening a way for Mohammed Dahlan to push Abbas aside.
- U.S. Pressure & the Lousy Palestinian Authority
In a startling shift, the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council dropped its efforts to forward a report accusing Israel of possible war crimes to the Security Council, under pressure from the United States, diplomats said Thursday. (full article…)
- And Israelis Have Fired Rockets At Palestine For 42 Years
It was misleading for the commission to examine only the 13 months from June 2008 to July 2009, she said. Palestinians in Gaza had fired rockets into Israel for eight years. (full article…)
- Culture of Impunity
“A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” Goldstone, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, told the UN Human Rights Council. “The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful [...]
- More “Change”
Barack Obama has talked down the importance of sealing a global deal on climate change before the end of the year, world leaders said yesterday. (full article…)
- Cheapening the Holocaust
No less demagogic was his attack on the Iranian regime. They shoot demonstrators there, he protested vehemently. As if they don’t do that in our Bil’in and Na’alin. Then came the kicker: Operation Cast Lead was a pinpoint attack. Israel telephoned thousands of people to tell them to leave their homes. Where to, Mr. Prime [...]
- Stephen Walt on the Goldstone Report
Nonetheless, it was disappointing that the Obama administration felt it had to denounce the report within days of its release, despite Goldstone’s impeccable credentials (former member of South Africa’s Constitutional Court and chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda) and his strong Zionist convictions. Israeli PM Netanyahu hasn’t been doing Obama [...]
- “Singled Out”
Arab states in the United Nations nuclear assembly on Friday won narrow approval of a resolution urging Israel to put all its atomic sites under the world body’s inspection and join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel deplored the measure for singling it out while many of its neighbors remained hostile to its existence, and said it [...]
- We Thought We Could Get Away With It
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…)
- (US-Backed) Yemeni War Crimes Getting Little Attention
In the most recent fighting, the army carried out three air raids and blew up houses in Saada city – under government control – on Friday. About 87 people died on Wednesday in an air raid at a makeshift camp for displaced persons in Harf Sufyan in Saada. Navi Pillay, the chief of the UN [...]
- Poor Coverage By The Economist
The Economist‘s reporting on the Middle East has been declining for the past year, but since when is the newspaper in the practice of apologizing for Israel? This came as quite a shock after years of what I considered to be fairly well-balanced and objective coverage — certainly the best coverage out of the Western [...]
- Unbalanced, One-Sided & Basically Unacceptable
We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable. (full article…) Strange, the same adjectives have been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.
- Routine Condemnation – For Routine Atrocities
“The mandate of the Goldstone Commission was one-sided from the outset. The initiative to establish the commission came from the UN Human Rights Council which is known for its routine condemnation of Israel.” (full article…)
- Joke of the Day
“Any comparison of Israel’s fight on terror with recent conflicts in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan etc. immediately shows that Israel holds itself to the highest ethical standard.” (full article…)
- The Gaza Massacre
“It wasn’t easy [for him],” Nicole Goldstone said. “My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard.” (full article…)
- This From an Israeli “Dove”
President Shimon Peres said Wednesday that the Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its military offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip earlier this year, “makes a mockery of history.” (full article…)
- I Agree With Israel (Perhaps For Different Reasons)
Israel called the Goldstone Commission Report “nauseating” on Tuesday … (more…)
- Every Crime Recorded
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 [...]
- Israeli War Crimes and the United Nations
The United Nations’ investigation into Israel’s recent massacre in Gaza has now concluded. In general I think the release of their 500+ page report is an important step forward in the process of holding Israel accountable for its horrendous actions earlier this year. Judge Richard Goldstone (whom I met at a talk in San Diego [...]
- Joke of the Day: Israel Citing UN Resolutions
“It is clear that the (rockets) were fired from an area located south of the Litani River in violation of UN Resolution 1701.” (more…)
- Ha’aretz Selectively Reads the 2009 Arab Human Development Report
You can download the 2009 Arab Human Development Report here – but if you do, I suggest that you spend more time reading it that the correspondents of Ha’aretz apparently did. I came across an editorial entitled, “It’s a sorry plight to be a citizen in many Arab states”—a self-styled distillation of the report’s findings… [...]
- The Bush Doctrine Becomes the Obama Doctrine
Fighting between Islamist militias and government-aligned forces has caused 204,000 people to flee Mogadishu since May and forced the closure of some of the Somali capital’s few health centres, the UN refugee agency said today. (more…)
- Guess How Much Slaughtered Palestinians Get in Compensation
Israel has pledged to pay compensation for material damage it caused by shelling UN property during its Gaza offensive more than six months ago, a UN official said on Friday. (more…)
- Blight Unto the Nations
“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity,” Falk said in a statement released in Geneva. (more…)
- Israeli Torture
The report, ‘Shackling as a Form of Torture and Abuse’, based on the evidence of over 500 prisoners, was released in advance of the UN International Day in Support of Torture Victims Friday, Jun. 26. It follows a report published in May by the UN Committee Against Torture that had criticised the continued mistreatment of [...]
- American Torture
“People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized,” Pillay, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement dedicated to victims of torture. (more…)
- Palau
With a population of around 20,800, Palau is one of the world’s least-populated countries. It was a US trust territory until it gained independence in 1994 and still maintains close ties to the US, as well as relying significantly on American aid. (more…) Makes you wonder why Palau always sides with Israel and the U.S. [...]
- Refusing To Cooperate
Israel has refused to cooperate with investigation of its conduct during an offensive on Gaza earlier this year, depriving Judge Richard Goldstone and his team access to military sources and victims of ongoing rocket attacks. (more…) Israel consistently complains that the UN fails to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli civilians while it unduly criticizes the [...]
- Covering Up Israel’s Gaza Crimes
Such investigations, the summary states, should be carried out by an “impartial inquiry mandated, and adequately resourced, to investigate allegations of violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza and southern Israel by the [Israeli army] and by Hamas and other Palestinian militants.” The board of inquiry corroborated the already existing masses of evidence collected by [...]
- “Human Rights”
When the 192-nation General Assembly meets next week to elect 18 new members to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council (HRC), most of the candidates will win their seats without breaking a political sweat because of the almost entirely non-competitive nature of the vote. (more…)
- Moral Failure
For Ban [Ki-Moon], then, Israeli bombing is good — although he would like perhaps to see a little bit less. But, in tune with his political masters, he considers Palestinians to have no right to any form of self-defense against the Israeli occupation, constant aggression and the Israeli, internationally-supported, deadly siege, with whatever means they [...]
- Branded anti-Semitic
The country’s gates were closed to the UN fact-finding mission headed by Jewish South African Richard Goldstone, as if it were Zimbabwe or North Korea, as if it had much to hide. The president brusquely rebuked the UN’s Ban Ki-moon and suggested he visits Auschwitz, until eventually the secretary general was forced to shrink from [...]
- Bethlehem, Strangled
Only 13% of the Bethlehem area is under the control of the Palestinian Authority – a new report released by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Thursday said. (more…)
- Political Cowardice
But in a covering letter attached to his own 27-page summary of the report, leaked last night, the secretary-general bluntly rejected [the UN report's] recommendations for further investigations into whether Israel had breached international law during the offensive, including by its use of white phosphorus. (more…)
- This is Zionism
In Nu’man, one of the villages the UN says is “living in limbo”, the situation is particularly dire. The village is surrounded on three sides by Israel’s West Bank barrier and on another by the Israeli settlement of Har Homa. The village entrance is blocked by an Israeli checkpoint to anyone other than Nu’man residents. [...]
- Gaza’s Environmental Devastation
Countless fruit groves across the Gaza Strip are now gone, entire farms bulldozed. The remains of thousands of destroyed homes emit toxic asbestos, while dilapidated infrastructure dumps raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea. An already deepening environmental crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip has been further compounded by the recent war. (more…) I’m sure you’ll [...]
- Victims of Zionism
The UN said it was particularly concerned about areas facing mass demolition, including Bustan in Silwan, just south of the old city, where the threatened destruction of 90 houses would lead to the displacement of 1,000 Palestinians. (more…)
- Anti-Semitic Tricks
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…)
- Environmental Hazards
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…)
- This is Zionism
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 [...]
- Fleeing the Nightmare
The UNHCR says that 4.7 million Iraqis have left their homes since the war began, up from 3.8 million two years ago. Iraqis are the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe. (more…)
- Noam Chomsky: “Exterminate All the Brutes”
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 [...]
- Kris Petersen: Waiting To Enter Gaza
If there is a single act that characterizes the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli occupation, it is waiting: waiting in lines to pass through the hundreds of checkpoints scattered across the West Bank, waiting for Israel to issue an identification card, waiting for permission to travel to the next village or out of [...]
- Human Shield
Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday. (more…)
- Yet Israeli Apartheid Continues
Report: Israel dropped from new Durban II draft
- Israeli War Crimes
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.” (more…)
- Back to School in Gaza
Schools in the Gaza Strip operated by the United Nations have reopened for the first time since the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants. (more…)
- Bill Fletcher on the Massacre in Gaza
The media continued to make excuses around the Israeli operations in Gaza. What was striking was the attacks on the United Nations facilities, which under other circumstances would have brought outrage in the major media in the United States; certainly if Hamas had accidentally hit a United Nations facility, there would have been charges of [...]
- Attack on the UN
Eighteen-year-old Mona Al-Ashkar says she did not immediately know the first explosion at the United Nations (UN) school in Beit Lahiya had blown her left leg off. There was smoke, then chaos, then the pain and disbelief set in once she realised it was gone – completely severed by the weapon that hit her. (more…)
- Manufacturing Consent
Despite subsequent probes by the UN and the IDF, which found that there had been no gunmen within the school compound hit by an IDF tank shell that killed up to 40 civilians, the major Hebrew dailies didn’t cover the probes in their news pages. (more…)
- American War Crimes
“Judicially speaking,” Nowak told the German broadcaster ZDF, “the United States has a clear obligation” to prosecute Rumsfeld and Bush for ordering interrogation methods at Guantanamo that contravened a UN convention on torture.” He added that there were publicly available documents “that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld.” (more…)
- Dead Children
Asked about the “most outrageous” incident he had witnessed, Ging said: “The dead children.” (more…)
- Ban Ki-Moon is “Heartbroken”
UN chief Ban Ki-Moon is apparently “heartbroken” and “grieved” over the Israeli massacre in Gaza, but the rockets in his opinion are “appalling and unacceptable”. 1300 dead over three weeks is “heartbreaking”; four dead from rocket-fire during the same period is “unacceptable”. Yep, that just about sums up Ki-Moon’s usefulness… Pathetic.
- Surprising
Among those who opposed the resolution were the United States and Israel. (more…)
- Bombing the UN
Chris Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said that the building had been used to shelter hundreds of people fleeing Israel’s 20-day offensive in Gaza. He said that pallets with supplies desperately needed by Palestinians in Gaza were on fire. “What more stark symbolism do you need?” he said. “You can’t put out white phosphorus with traditional [...]
- Israel Attacks UN Headquarters
The headquarters of the UN refugee agency and a hospital in Gaza were on fire today after being struck by Israeli artillery, injuring several people, a UN spokesman and witnesses said. (more…)
- Israel Lobby?
In the face of U.S. denials, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office confirmed Wednesday that he personally intervened to ensure that the U.S. abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 1860 last week. According to Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to abstain from voting on the resolution, which called for [...]
- Action, Not Words for Palestinians
His itinerary does not include a stop in Gaza because of the ongoing conflict. “I really wanted to visit Gaza at this time to share their sufferings,” he told reporters in Egypt, but said it was impossible because of the current circumstances. (more…)
- Gaza Killings Trigger Call for War Crimes Probe
“On an inter-governmental level, the war crimes process is essentially subject to geopolitical control, which means in practice that the criminal wrongdoing of the most powerful [the U.S. government] and its closest friends [Israel] get a free pass,” Richard Falk, a professor of international law and a U.N. human rights expert, told IPS. Despite widespread [...]
- Sara Roy on the Crisis in Gaza
The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip and continues its [...]
- This is Zionism
Israeli snipers killed two Palestinian aid workers who were reportedly trying to retrieve the body of a colleague who had been killed in a previous Israeli attack. The killings reportedly came during the three-hour pause to the bombing agreed to by Israel to allow humanitarian relief. (more…)
- Welcome to Hell
Last week, an Israeli attack outside a UN school killed nearly 40 people. Israel and Palestinian witnesses said militants carried out an attack from the area moments earlier. But it is Israeli fire, Israeli weapons and Israeli military that do the aiming – and Palestinian women and children being killed at a rate that is [...]
- Robert Fisk on Israeli Propaganda
I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very [...]
- Israeli Terrorism
Israel continued its assault on Hamas forces in Gaza Friday, despite the passage of a UN Security Council resolution calling for “an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire.” (more…)
- Israel’s War on the United Nations
A United Nations report that Israel ordered civilians into a building and then shelled it marks yet more evidence of widespread targeting of civilians in the Gaza assault. (more…)
- This is Zionism
The people in the compound, over 1,300 people—by the way, some of those, many of them had been told by the Israeli army to leave their houses and move to a safe place. Of course, Gaza is unique in being a war with a fence around it. But they nonetheless came—frightened, terrified, vulnerable—to our center. [...]
- Bombing Schools… and Then Lying About It
Christopher Gunness of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said the organization is 99.9 percent certain there were no militants or military activity in its school. (more…)
