[video] Israeli Jew stabbed by Israeli Jew who thought he was Palestinian

When the hate for your fellow human being is so intense that you stab him not knowing he is Israeli just like you are. This world is fucked.

SOURCE:

 

[video] Ceasefire Reveals Horrific Images Of Gaza Neighborhoods Reduced To Rubble By Israeli Airstrikes

More destruction, more civilian deaths.

 

Must See: Israeli soldiers fire on Al Jazeera correspondent (Video)

Source: Transracial

This was absolutely riveting. I keep thinking they would fire on her and actually kill her during her report. These protesters are fearless and shows you that Middle East peace is far from being achieved. This reporter should commended for her bravery and some might say stupidity for risking her life to tell this story.

via Al Jazeera

Israeli soldiers have fired tear gas on Palestinians protesting against the Israeli separation barrier which cuts through their West Bank village.

The soldiers also fired tear gas at Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera’s correspondent who was covering the event live from near the village of Bilin.

Soldier says Rabbis pushed “Religious War” in Gaza

via Reuters

JERUSALEM, March 20 (Reuters) – Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive theywere fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper in the second day of revelations that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009”).

They were leaked from a Feb 13 meeting of armed forces members to share their Gaza experiences.

Some veterans, alumni of an Israel Defence Force (IDF) military academy, told of the killing of civilians and their impression that deep contempt for Palestinians pervaded the ranks of the Israeli forces.

Haaretz and the daily Maariv, which also published the accounts, quoted over half a dozen soldiers and airmen. The institution’s director, Danny Zamir, confirmed that Thursday’s published accounts were authentic.

In longer excerpts in its Friday “Week’s End” edition, the daily quoted ‘Ram’ as saying his impression of the 22-day operation was “the feeling of an almost religious mission”.

There was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”, he said. The corps’s pamphlets told the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, but the rabbinate’s message imparted the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.

Jewish Leaders Blast Clinton Over Israel Criticism

In a swift about face from her views as New York’s senator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now hammering Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

As First Lady, Clinton raised eyebrows when she kissed Suha Arafat.

Since she was then seeking a Senate seat the resulting brouhaha caused her to “re-think” her positions.

“I’m a very strong supporter of Israel,” Clinton said back in February 2000.

On Thursday, as Secretary of State she had yet another about face in the form of angry messages demanding Israel speed up aid to Gaza. Jewish leaders are furious.

“I am very surprised, frankly, at this statement from the United States government and from the secretary of state,” said Mortimer Zuckerman, publisher of the New York Daily News and member of the NYC Jewish Community Relations Council.

“I liked her a lot more as a senator from New York,” Assemblyman Dov Hikind, D-Brooklyn, said. “Now, I wonder as I used to wonder who the real Hillary Clinton is.”

Clinton’s decision to hammer Israel comes as the Clintons and President Barack Obama are planning to give the Palestinians $900 million toward the rebuilding of Gaza in the wake of the Israeli offensive that was sparked by Hamas rocket fire.

“We are working across the government to see what our approach will be,” Clinton said.

“I don’t believe that we should be in a position at this point to do anything to strengthen Hamas,” Zuckerman said. “We surely know what Hamas stands for as I say they are the forward battalions of Iran.”

[video] Ron Paul says Israel started Hamas

The state of Gaza Strip has been very quiet since Pres. Obama has taken office, and basically all the tragedies there have been virtually blocked out from the mainstream news outlets. While browsing youtube looking at some nonsense I found this very riveting video from Ron Paul speaking about the creation of Hamas.

Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of Israeli State

via Alternet

What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same “children of Israel” described in the Old Testament?

And what if most modern Israelis aren’t descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn’t “return” to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora — the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews’ exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh’s clutches — is all wrong?

That’s the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.

Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land — holy in all three of the world’s major Abrahamic religions — based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There’s probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.

Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale — familiar to all Jewish families — of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the “Jewish people” — sons and daughters of ancient Judea — wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners — from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.

Israel strikes Gaza after militant rocket fire

via Yahoo

JERUSALEM – Israel threatened “harsh and disproportionate” retaliation after Gaza militants fired at least 10 rockets and mortar shells across the border Sunday and warplanes later bombed the area where Hamas smuggles in weapons from Egypt through tunnels.

The flare-up raised the risk of growing violence in the days leading up to Israel’s parliamentary elections on Feb. 10.

Since an unwritten truce ended Israel’s offensive in Gaza two weeks ago, rocket and mortar fire from the Palestinian territory ruled by Hamas has increased steadily. Israeli retaliation, including brief ground incursions and bombings of rocket launchers and smuggling tunnels, is also intensifying.

“If there is shooting at residents of the south, there will be an Israeli response that will be harsh and disproportionate by its nature,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet.

Israel launched its three-week offensive with the aim of ending years of Hamas rocket fire at southern Israel. It left nearly 1,300 Palestinians dead, more than half of them civilians, according to Gaza officials. Thirteen Israelis were killed, including three civilians.

A late afternoon mortar barrage on the southern Israeli village of Nahal Oz, next to the Gaza border fence, wounded two soldiers and a civilian, the military and rescue services said. Earlier, a rocket landed near a kindergarten, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Late Sunday, Palestinians reported huge explosions as Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on the Egypt-Gaza border area, where Hamas operates tunnels to smuggle in weapons, food and other goods, Palestinians said.

[video] President Obama on Al-Arabiya: First Formal Interview As President With Arab TV Network

Wow.This is a definitely a new administration. In your wildest dreams can you imagine George Bush doing this interview with an Arab Network. The infamous shoe throw a couple of months back tells it all.

via Huffington Post

Barack Obama struck a note of foreign policy confidence Monday night, telling an Arabic news station that al Qaeda leaders and Osama bin Laden “seem nervous” now that they don’t have George W. Bush as a recruiting tool.

In his first formal interview since taking office, the president spoke with the Dubai-based station Al Arabiya on topics pertinent to the Arab and Muslim worlds. Much of the interview was spent defining the new approach that the United States would implement in that region: respectfulness over divisiveness, listening over dictating, engagement over militarism. But the president drew the line when it came to terrorist organizations.

“Their ideas are bankrupt,” he told host Hisham Melhem, when asked to respond to recent audio clips from al Qaeda leadership calling him various epithets. “There’s no actions that they’ve taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.”

Pressed later in the interview to comment on Bush’s use of the term ‘War On Terror,’ and the implications that the phrase held, Obama once again distanced himself from his White House predecessor.

Newsweek: Israel Has Fewer Friends Than Ever, Even in America

via Newsweek

As Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton begin to use their uncommon authority and intelligence to implement a new American international agenda, it might behoove them to read a speech given some years ago in Beijing. It read in part: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights for one and for all. Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard. Women must enjoy the rights to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure.”

Secretary Clinton was first lady when she spoke those words at a United Nations conference on women in 1995. Some of the participants wept to hear an influential American commit to a view of the world so many of them shared: that the way for nations to prosper was to pay attention to women’s rights, women’s welfare and women’s concerns.

Obama urges Israel to open Gaza borders

This guy really seems like he’s determined to completely steer this country on a different course. I definitely applaud him for this. He was silent while he awaited his chance to speak his peace, and when he said something it was a statement full of character. Kudos to Obama.

via FT

President Barack Obama urged Israel on Thursday to open its borders with Gaza.

The plea came in a speech that signalled the new US administration’s shift from Bush-era policy on the Middle East and the world as a whole. In a high-profile address on his second day in office, just hours after he signed an executive order to close the centre at Guantánamo Bay, Mr Obama proclaimed that the US would “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians” in the wake of this month’s Gaza war.

“The outline for a durable ceasefire is clear: Hamas must end its rocket fire: Israel will complete the withdrawal of its forces from Gaza: the US and our partners will support a credible anti-smuggling and interdiction regime, so that Hamas cannot re-arm,” the US president said.

“As part of a lasting ceasefire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime, with the international and Palestinian Authority participating.”

President Obama’s first call ‘was to President Abbas’

via Times Online

President Obama placed the Middle East at the forefront of his first hours in office yesterday as he sought to make good on his promise of “ushering in a new era of peace”.

In a flurry of telephone calls from the Oval Office, he reached out to leaders in the region and vowed to engage immediately in pursuit of a permanent Arab-Israeli settlement.

The spokesman for President Abbas revealed that Mr Obama had told the Palestinian leader that their conversation was his first with a foreign statesman since taking office. Mr Obama also spoke to President Mubarak of Egypt, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, and King Abdullah of Jordan.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said that the talks with Middle East leaders underlined a “commitment to active engagement in pursuit of Arab-Israeli peace from the beginning of his term”. He added: “In the aftermath of the Gaza conflict, he emphasised his determination to work to help consolidate the ceasefire by establishing an effective anti-smuggling regime to prevent Hamas from rearming, and facilitating, in partnership with the Palestinian Authority, a major reconstruction effort.”

Gaza war tourism – Keren Levy: I’m a little bit fascist

[note:] Don’t mind the Yiddish in the beginning. The translation comes through in due time for you to hear an Israeli lady say she hopes the army wipes the city of Palestine off of the face of the Earth. Despicable fail.

How Israel brought Gaza to the Brink of Humanitarian Catastrophe

via Guardian UK

A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas police headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

By Avi Shlaim

The only way to make sense of Israel’s senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by “an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders”. I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel’s vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration’s complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza’s prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

Cynthia McKinney: We Lived to Tell the Story: Lebanon Rescued Us

 

via Davey D

Yesterday, we met with the President of Lebanon, the Chief of the Military, and the Interior Minister who all thanked us for responding and risking our lives on a mission of mercy; we profusely thanked them for rescuing us.

What would we have done, stranded out at sea, prohibited from reaching our destination, low on fuel, with a badly damaged boat if Lebanon had not accepted us? Lebanon sent their ships to find us. Lebanon rescued us. Lebanon welcomed us. And we are truly thankful.

It’s official now. We’ve been told that the sturdy, wood construction of our boat, Dignity, is the reason we are still alive. Fiberglass would probably not have withstood the impact of the Israeli attack and under different circumstances, we might not be here to tell the story. Even at that, the report that came to us yesterday after the Captain and First Mate went back to Sour (Tyre) to inspect the boat was that it was sinking, the damage is extensive, and the boat will take, in their estimation, at least one month to repair. Tomorrow, we will bring the Dignity from Sour to Beirut. And now, we must decide what to do and from where we will do it and how we are to get back to wherever that might be.

[video] US Military Aid Underpins Gaza Offensive

Obama Remains Mum on Middle East Flare Up

via Mail Online

Barack Obama remained silent over the violence in Gaza as Israel today threatened to continue its attacks for weeks.

Instead, the President-elect is continuing his 12-day Christmas holiday in Hawaii and was seen enjoying a round of golf.

He joined a group of friends at a private club near his £6million rented, beach-front holiday home yesterday.

Shh: Mr Obama, who is staying silent on the Israeli attacks, asks the crowd to be quiet as he finishes his putt

Meanwhile, 9,000 miles away in the Middle East, Israel today rejected any truce with Hamas and said it was ready for ‘long weeks of action’ in the Gaza Strip.

 

 Observers said that at least ten people were killed and another 40 injured as up to 16 bombs were dropped by Israeli warplanes during early morning attacks.

The targets included the offices of Hamas prime minister Ismael Haniyeh, police stations and Gaza’s treasury and foreign ministry buildings.

Palestinian officials say more than 385 people have been killed since Saturday. Four Israelis have died in rocket fire.

Sites linked to Hamas’ military wing Izzadin Kazzam were also hit, including the home of the Gaza division commander.

The death toll so far in Gaza is estimated at 320, with five Israeli fatalities, and hundreds of injuries.

Grief: Palestinian mourners carry the body of four-year-old Haya Hamdan in Gaza

Palestinian Group Urges Snoop to Cancel Israeli Performance

Snoopberg

via Nahright/Allhiphop

In the midst of continued violence between Israeli and Palestinian forces, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has released a statement condemning Snoop Dogg’s scheduled September 18 performance in the Jewish state.

The group, which mantra calls for a “comprehensive economic, cultural, and academic boycott of Israel,” has expressed shock that Snoop would make an appearance in Israel at a time when the region is full of strife and tenuous peace talks.

How Does the Stir-Up Over Rachel Ray’s Choice of Fashion Relate to Hip Hop?

The recent stir-up over Rachel Ray wearing a kiffeyeh has me wondering how do they view Hip-Hop’s current fascination with the PLO fashion item? From Harlem hipsters to Soho posers, the scarves have become a staple on the downtown fashion scene and subsequently all over the world because Hip Hop in New York does set the trend. So how do they feel about us rocking a symbol of Palestinian liberation?

Bush’s Role in Palestinian Civil War

Amidst the political turmoil that is ravaging Palestine as it descends into all-out war with Israel, Vanity Fair has a compelling piece detailing the American involvement in these tragic turn of events.  For those who are always questioning how America always ends up in the middle of Middle Eastern conflicts this article details how Bush and Condelezza Rice assisted in the rampant instability that is erupting into chaos in this region of the world.  Meddling in other people’s affairs and pushing their own agenda on the world, this article will take you step by step into the backward planning process that has left this administration with the distinction of being the worst ever in office.  This debacle once exposed will rank up there with historic blunders like the Bay of Pigs, Iran-Contra and the Iraq invasion.  And they have the nerve to be harping on frivilous issues this election cycle like a candidates choice of dress or supposed “inexperience.”  If Americans only had a clue.  To read this compelling article in its entirety CLICK HERE.