REPLICATING ISRAEL? Rs 8,000 cr fraud hits Satyam.Kasab is a Pak national, says Pak media.Sensex sheds 749 pts on Satyam fraud.SC stays non-bailable w

REPLICATING ISRAEL? Rs 8,000 cr fraud hits Satyam.Kasab is a Pak national, says Pak media.Sensex sheds 749 pts on Satyam fraud.SC stays non-bailable warrant against Raj Thackeray.10 million to lose job by March in export units


Troubled Galaxy Destroyed Dreams: Chapter 138

Palash Biswas

In pictures: Gaza conflict continues
Israel has continued its ground and air attacks in the Gaza Strip for a fifth day, after a week of bombing, in a bid to force Palestinian militants to stop firing rockets into Israel.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7815566.stm

Israel's top leaders mull ceasefire offer!Israel has killed more than 600 Palestinians in the fighting. School Children sheltered in UN School have been BLASTED and Indian Hindutva and FASCISM , habitula of GENOCIDE culture at home justifies it as United states of America does the same all in name of War Against terrorism meaning ETHNIC CLEANSING of Muslims worldwide! Is this going to be the super Highway of HINDU Indian Super Power? And WE have to have A GAZA CONFLICT against Pakistan!Equating the Palestinian militant group Hamas with the LeT terrorists who attacked Mumbai, the White House has said both were engaged in "despicable" acts in order to achieve their "political objectives." A media briefing dominated by Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip following the Hamas rocket attacks on the Jewish state, the White House spokesperson Dana Perino was asked if there were differences between Hamas terrorists and the terrorists, who are attacking from Pakistan against India.

"Obviously, they're two different groups," Perino said. "But I think at their base level they are despicable, evil human beings who use violence and murder in order to achieve political objectives," Perino said.

"So, in that regard, they are the same," she said in her reply.

How INTERESTED happens to be USA having signed the BIGGEST Defence DEAL with India is showcased in latest US DIPLOMACY involving South Asian geopolitics! Pakistan's increasingly turbulent border region poses threats not just to the US mission in Afghanistan, but also to neighbouring India
and the world beyond, according to President George W Bush's national security adviser. Thus the biggest foreign-policy challenge awaiting President-elect Barack Obama isn't Iraq or Afghanistan but Pakistan, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told the Wall Street Journal in an interview previewing a valedictory speech he plans to give on Wednesday

Both the Asian giants, the Sleeping dragon China as well selfstyled Super power failed MISERABLY to have any role in GAZA CONFLICT whereas With the U.S. applying scant pressure on Israel, the EU tries to step in to end the bloodshed. So far, little has been achieved!In the Gaza conflict, the European Union's diplomatic efforts are fractured!With the U.S. caught in limbo between two presidencies, Europe is trying to fill the diplomatic void by assuming a greater role in the international effort to end the bloodshed in the Gaza Strip.But a series of high-level official forays appears to have achieved little and once again laid the European Union open to criticism that it punches far below its weight in the diplomatic arena, if only because it can't seem to decide who does the punching and how hard.

Meanwhile,Malaysia: More than 2,000 Muslim restaurants in Malaysia will remove Coca-Cola from their menus as part of a boycott of American products in protest against Israel's bombardment of Gaza, officials said on Wednesday. American companies are being targeted becuase of the U.S. government's support of Israel, which is carrying out a military offensive on Gaza that is says is aimed at stopping rocket attacks from the Hamas-controlled territory. The nationwide boycott will be launched Friday by several Muslim groups after they seek God's blessings at Friday prayers, said Ma'mor Osman, secretary-general of the Malaysian Muslim Consumers Association which is leading the campaign.

On the other hand, Israel on Tuesday set a key condition for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, saying it would not agree to a truce unless it included Palestinians carry the body of a man killed in an Israeli air strike. (AFP Photo)
More Pictures
provisions to prevent Hamas from rearming.

"Preventing a Hamas arms buildup is the necessary foundation of any new calm arrangement. That is the make-or-break issue," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Regev said that was Olmert's message in talks on Monday with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who called in meetings with Israeli and Palestinians leaders for a rapid Gaza ceasefire.

It was one of the darkest days in history of corporate India. Early this morning, B Ramalinga Raju - the founder of Satyam Computers, one of India’s largest IT companies - dropped a bombshell when he sent a five-page letter to the stock exchanges ...Money Control reports!

In the last few days, two separate European delegations descended on the Middle East. One was led by the Czech Republic, which assumed the rotating presidency of the EU last week, and the other by the man who reluctantly gave up that post, French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Both delegations are urging a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that rules Gaza.

"Pressure should be exerted on all parties involved, including Hamas, in order for the guns to fall silent and peace to return," Sarkozy said Tuesday in Damascus, the Syrian capital, after meeting with President Bashar Assad. "There is no military solution in Gaza."

meanwhile BBC reports Israel has agreed "on the principles" of a ceasefire proposal, raising hopes of an end to its conflict with Palestinian militants in Gaza.

"The challenge now is to get the details to match the principles," Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said.

The Palestinian militant group Hamas said there were "positive signs but no agreement yet".

The development came as Israel halted military operations in Gaza for three hours to aid humanitarian efforts.

The lull, which began about 1100 GMT and ended shortly after 1400 GMT, was the first of what an Israeli spokesman said would be a daily ceasefire to allow Gazans to "get medical attention, get supplies... whatever they need".

News agencies reported that Gaza residents had rushed out into the streets during the lull to stock up on food and visit relatives in hospital.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7815929.stm



Replicating Israel? Blind Nationalism INCARNATED in rightist fascism parcticed by Brahaminical hegemony in India has been proved quite justified! The PLOT is Sugrically so much so PRECISE that the Omnipresent Omnipotent Indian Media Blacked out the most SENSATIONAL Newsbreak as BIGGEST EVER Defence deal is signed with United states of America. Now, latest development helps to sustain the War Hype continue. Ajmal Amir Iman 'Kasab', the lone terrorist captured during the Mumbai attacks, is a Pakistani national, a media report said on Wednesday, citing ‘preliminary investigation’ conducted by authorities in Pakistan. An unnamed ‘very senior government official’ told Dawn News channel that a preliminary investigation carried out by Pakistani law enforcement agencies had established that Kasab was a Pakistani national. The government is yet to take a decision on providing consular access to Kasab, the channel quoted official sources as saying. There was no official word on the development.

Gates estimates 2009 war costs at $136bn!

WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Robert Gates says military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would cost almost $136 billion for the 2009 budget year
that began October 1 if they continue at their current pace.

Speaking for neither his current boss, President George W Bush - nor his future one, President-elect Barack Obama - Gates told top lawmakers in a New Year's Eve letter that the Pentagon would need nearly $70bn more to supplement the $66bn approved last year.

"This estimate is my personal assessment and does not reflect the position of the Bush administration or the incoming Obama administration," Gates said.

The estimate would cover Pentagon operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other elements of the global war on terror.

An official request for war funding is coming after a review by the Obama administration, Gates said.

Israel's top leaders are meeting to discuss a cease-fire plan or whether to expand the Israeli offensive in Gaza.


The meeting of the "security Cabinet" comes a day after France and Egypt sketched a proposal to stop the fighting. The initiative was spurred on by an Israeli mortar strike near a UN school that the UN says killed 40 Palestinians.

The US has endorsed the proposal. Israel has yet to give its response.

Israeli officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because no decision has been made, say Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his top ministers will consider the proposal on Wednesday or whether to press ahead with the 12-day operation meant to stop rocket fire into Israel.



Give safe passage to Gaza refugees: UN

The United Nations on Wednesday asked neighbouring countries of Palestine to provide a safe passage to the civilians caught in the Israeli military offensive in the Hamas ruled Gaza strip.

"Those who are compelled to flee the Gaza Strip should be able to do so and to find safety and security in other countries according to international law," UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said.

There has been no large-scale movement out of Gaza because of the Israeli blockade. However, Guterres urged that "all borders and access routes concerned should be kept open and safe, and Palestinians endeavouring to leave Gaza should not be prevented from doing so."

He called for strict adherence to humanitarian principles in the ongoing conflict in Gaza, where an already dire situation has been made worse by the Israeli offensive.

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, John Holmes, told reporters that the humanitarian crisis is becoming "increasingly alarming," with the people of Gaza going hungry, often lacking power, water and other basic services.

Amid the worsening humanitarian environment, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has been struggling to carry out vital tasks such as distributing food and medical supplies.

"It is absolutely imperative that the immediate delivery of humanitarian assistance to the civilian victims of this conflict be facilitated, including access from Egypt and Israel," he said.
PTI

SC stays non-bailable warrant against Raj Thackeray!

The Supreme court on Wednesday stayed a non-bailable warrant issued by a Jharkhand court against MNS chief Raj Thackeray [Images] for his alleged statements and hate campaign against North Indians.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan also exempted Thackeray from his personal appearance in the Jharkhand court.

The apex court passed the direction on a petition filed by the controversial MNS Chief seeking transfer of the various cases filed in courts of Bihar and Jharkhand against him for his alleged statements and hate campaigns against north Indians.

Raj had also sought the transfer of these cases outside Bihar and Jharkhand to ensure a free and fair trial.

Poonch encounter: Army ready for final assault

Jammu: Army on Wednesday said that it was planning a final assault to neutralise the terrorists holed up in Bhati Dar in Poonch where an encounter between the ultras and security forces has been on for a week now.The operation has been "slow" in the area to minimise the casualties among the security forces, Lt Col A S N Acharya said here.The spokesman said that firing took place at two places in the area around 0630 hours and 0930 hours today and it was effectively retaliated by the troops.Bad weather and the hilly terrain of the area were acting as constraints for the army, he said, adding some food items and radio sets have been recovered since yesterday from the caves where the militants were holed up.


Presidentelect Barack Obama has described the US economy as "very sick" and predicted the situation will worsen! President-elect Barack Obama has warned Americans about the unparalleled prospect of "trillion-dollar deficits for years to come", saying the exploding budget gap underscores the need for long-term reform of US finances.

"We're already looking at a $1 trillion budget deficit or close to a $1 trillion budget deficit, and potentially we've got $1 trillion deficits for years to come," Obama told reporters Tuesday after a meeting with his economic and budget team.

Indian Economy has been claimed to reach One Trillion Dollar Status as much as INFLATED as the FREEsenSEX 20k status! But the Congress spokesperson assures India INCs to PUMP THREE TRILLOION DOLLRS into the killer money Mochine. Media never questions the JUGGLERY as it suits it. THree Trillion would be pumped to BAIL OUT India Incs out of One Trillion Dollar! This is the FUNNIY Picture of our Risilient Economy as well as Polity. Three lac Corore have been pumped to feed the Genocide culture. The STimulation seems to be INFINITE like HINDU DIVINITY! The GIST is the BITTERMOST PILL that the India INCs and MNCS as well as Political Parties, Media, Intelligentsia and Policymakers have no option but to sing AMERICANISED fascist TUNNE as SURVIVAL Strategy!

10 million to lose job by March in export units!Ten million people in the export sector will be out of job by March this year, as Indian goods find fewer buyers in the international market which is battling the worst crisis since 1929.

"There will be 10 million job losses by March," Federation of Indian Export Organisations president A Sakthivel said on Tuesday.

Indian exports, which account for just about 20 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, are a highly labour-intensive activity, employing 150 million people. Those in the handicrafts, textiles, knitwear, leather, and gem and jewellery sectors will be the worst affected.

As the countdown to a general election begins, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is keen to hit the ground running and feels that the twin issues of insecurity of life and livelihood will continue to resonate despite this manifesto not cutting much ice with voters in the recent state assembly polls. Party insiders disclosed that the BJP still wanted to build on the theme of terrorism and the widespread public insecurity that followed, especially after the Mumbai siege, and this explains its hurry to hit the campaign trail though the polls are at least three months away.

The party's prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani, takes the lead by stepping out on a 120-day whirlwind tour of more than 200 constituencies early February.

Advani provided an indication of the party's line in his new year message when he stated: "2008 has been a traumatic year for India both in respect of its economy as well as its security. The trauma has been mainly on account of the kind of government we have had in New Delhi."

I have been insisting since the first Gulf War ( I wrote a Intercative Novel in early nineties in Hindi, AMERICA SE SAVDHAN, be Aware of America and worte extensively on this topic. the novel had been published and read countrywide), that no Imperialist Power in the History of civilisation could escape from the Impact of War Economy. Recently, all throughour the RECESSION Global Melt Down , i have been explaining how misleading is the concet of SUBPRIME Crisis leaqding to unprecedented RECESSION! It has always been the crisis of WAR INdustry controlled by ILLMINITI and Zionism which esclated in all economies tagged with USCORE Economy. Thus, India could not respond despite so much so RISILIENCE Claims! FREE senSEX Shining INDIA and IMPORTED XXXXX Corporate Economy led by India INCs and MNCs is nothing but an INFLATED nasty Genocide weapon of Mass Destruction! United States of America is interested in in India mostly for Strategic reason. But it has been interested more as a Nation to capture the WEAPON Market in India, not in so called Consumer or retail market. because it has already been captured since Neo Liberalism and LPG introduced as we have no indigenous Production system and sold out all our Natural Resources! We have been AMERICANISED long before and have been diluted as PARASITES! USA did everything to appease Indian Brahaminical hegemony to CAPTURE the WEAPON and WAR Civil War markets in Asia!

But India becoming ISRAEL never supports US interests and Americanism would never allow it! At the SAME Time a Bollywood suitable SITUATION of ARMS Deal had to be created. IT HAS BEEN and the DEAL is SIGNED. The DEAL Process should not be exposed before imminnet Loksabha Polls as the ruling Hegemony has to mobilise its VOTE BANKS Multi ETHNICAL witout resolving the ethnic conflicts. rather ETHNIC Conflict helps to mobilise or polarise favourable vote bank Equation and it is the CHEMISTRY of HATE. Thus, Indians identifying themselves as HINDUS only never may be FEEL anything about the HUMANITY Bleeding in Middle east. Americanism does not allow.

Hence our Americanised Friends committed to HINDUTVA and fascism has no OPTION but to cry WAR and HATRED. COMPLETE DEHUMANISATION! Complete personality Disorder.. Acute DEMENTIA and DEGENERATION! I feel sorry for the POOR GUYS who never know their DESTINY as VICTIMS!

Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Israeli tank hits UN school, 40 killed
Jerusalem: At least 40 people were killed and scores injured in an Israeli strike on a UN school in Gaza strip, the fourth such attack today, Palestinian medics said.

With this attack, the death toll since the launch of the offensive on December 27 rose to over 620.
Hundreds of Palestinian refugees had taken shelter at the school located in the northern town of Jabaliya when an Israeli tank shelled the building, they said.


There was no immediate response from the Israeli forces but they said they were looking into the reports.

People inside the building had taken refuge from the raging conflict in the territory. The toll quickly rose as rescuers struggled through the rubble.


Earlier in the day, Israeli jets hit three UN-run schools in which 10 people were killed.


Israeli troops backed by tanks and helicopter gunships battled Hamas militants in all major Gaza towns as the country continued to reject appeals to halt the war.


The Israelis widened their offensive arc when its tanks rolled into the city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza Strip.


In today's fighting at least 22 people including four Israeli soldiers were killed and 50 others injured. All the four Israeli soldiers, all from the elite Golan Brigade were killed in a "friendly fire" when a tank, deployed as part of operation Cast Lead, accidentally fired a live round at their positions in an abandoned building in the Jabalya refugee camp.


So far a total of five Israeli soldiers have been killed in the conflict and a military spokesman in Tel Aviv said that among the Palestinian killed included 130 armed Hamas fighters.

Fears mount of Gaza conflict spill over in Europe
By JOHN LEICESTER – 23 hours ago

PARIS (AP) — Government officials and Jewish leaders are concerned the conflict in Gaza may spill over into violence in Europe, with attacks reported against Jews and synagogues in France, Sweden and Britain.

Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, Monday night.

A Jewish congregation in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, was attacked Monday night by someone who "broke a window and threw in something that was burning," said police spokesman Leif Nilsson. And on Sunday slogans, including "murderers ... You broke the cease-fire," were daubed on Israel's Embassy in Stockholm.

In Denmark, a 27-year-old Dane born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents is alleged to have injured two young Israelis last week in a shooting police suspect could be linked to the Gaza crisis. Belgium ordered police in Antwerp and Brussels to be on increased state of alert" Tuesday after recent pro-Palestinian protests ended in violence and arrests.

France has Western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities and a history of anti-Semitic violence flaring when tensions in the Middle East are high. In 2002, some 2,300 Jews left France for Israel because they felt unsafe. Even in normal times, anti-Semitic incidents are not uncommon.

President Nicolas Sarkozy warned in a statement Tuesday that France would not tolerate violence linked to the Gaza crisis. A day earlier, his interior minister said she was concerned about the prospect of contagion and met with the heads of the two main Muslim and Jewish groups and police officials to stress the need to "preserve national unity."

Jews in the small Strasbourg suburb of Lingolsheim in eastern France woke up Tuesday to find graffiti with words like "assassins" spray-painted on the outside walls of their synagogue. The community filed a complaint for "degradation of a place of worship," the mayor's office said.

Damage to the synagogue in Toulouse was limited to a blackened gate. Police said unlighted gasoline bombs were found in a car nearby and in the synagogue's yard. A local Jewish leader, Armand Partouche, said he believed the assailants fled when the building's alarm went off.

Local authorities promised Tuesday to boost security for synagogues and other Jewish sites in the city, Partouche said.

"We really fear that anti-Semitism will spring up again and that the current conflict will be transposed to our beautiful French republic," Partouche said.

French Muslim leader Mohammed Moussaoui condemned the attack, saying no motive could justify an assault on any place of worship.

Interior Ministry spokesman Gerard Gachet said police have not noted an increase in violence against Jews linked to the Gaza crisis. But he said tensions are likely.

In Britain, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish defense group, said it had seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since the start of Israel's offensive against Gaza. The group said it recorded 20-25 incidents across the country in the past week — a sizable increase from 2-3 incidents usually reported to the group over the Christmas-New Year period.

Police are investigating an arson attempt Sunday on a synagogue in north London. Assailants splashed liquid on the door and set it on fire. Police would not speculate on whether the attack was linked to the Gaza crisis.

In another incident last week, a gang of 15-20 youths walked along the main street in Golders Green, a largely Jewish neighborhood in north London, shouting "Jew" and "Free Palestine" at passers-by, said Community Security Trust spokesman Mark Gardner.

Associated Press Writers Jill Lawless in London, Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Malin Rising in Stockholm, Robert Wielaard in Brussels and Audrey Sommazi in Toulouse contributed to this report.

Gaza conflict adds fire to crude prices
Ashu Sinha
Monday, January 05, 2009 (New Delhi)
The Israel Hamas conflict has now become the reason for the latest jump in crude oil prices. Despite the worldwide criticism against its attacks, Israel is going ahead with ground offensive.

That could give further impetus to crude oil as it heads back to the $50 mark.

As Israel continues to pound Palestine with 400 Palestine residents killed, its offensive against the Hamas has given crude oil speculators a reason enough to push prices up.

Crude oil prices jumped nearly 23 per cent last week, the highest percentage in 22 years and the middle-east conflict ensures that it continues to rise.

The reason being that traders see shortfall in supplies as conflict escalates and the battle is not just confined to the attacks on the ground.

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iranian Foreign Minister said, “The biggest mistake of the Zionist regime would be entering Gaza on the ground. They have to know that nothing will be left of them (if they attack Gaza from ground).”

However, Shimon Peres, President of Israel said that if there were somebody that could stop terror with a different strategy, they would accept it.

“We shall not accept the idea that Hamas will continue to fire and we shall declare a ceasefire. It does not make any sense,” he said.

As hundreds of Palestinian refugees marched through the streets of camps in south Lebanon, oil traders said that the prices could head up, just like they have every time there has been an unrest in the Middle East.
http://profit.ndtv.com/2009/01/05231515/Gaza-conflict-adds-fire-to-cru.html

All options open to dismantle terror groups: India

Reuters
Posted: Jan 07, 2009 at 1425 hrs IST
New Delhi: India will keep all options open to dismantle ‘terror outfits’ after the Mumbai attacks in November, Defence Minister A K Antony said on Wednesday.
"Even after 26/11 (the date of the Mumbai attacks) there is no serious attempt to dismantle the terror outfits and that is the major worry," A K Antony said in New Delhi. "We will do everything to prevent this. For that we are examining all possible available options."

Indians safe in Gaza
7 Jan 2009, 2209 hrs IST, PTI

Indians in the Gaza Strip are safe, though "concerned",with the Indian mission in Tel Aviv constantly monitoring their situation since
violence flared up in the coastal enclave twelve days ago, leaving more than 650 people dead, including almost a third of them children.

"The Indian mission has been in touch with us and it gives us a lot of strength. We are very concerned with the developments and hear gunshots and exploding shells all around us with some shrapnel even falling in our backyard, but are so far unharmed," an Indian woman from New Delhi, now living in the Gaza city with her Palestinian husband and two children, said on conditions of anonymity.

"The mission has extended all help in case we want to leave Gaza but the thought of leaving my husband alone in this situation is scary. My children have Indian passports so they do not have any problems," she said.

Another Indian woman from Kashmir, also married to a Palestinian, said she is afraid that she "may not be able to come back soon" if she leaves the territory now.

"Two of my three children do not have Indian passports, so I will have to leave them here with my husband which is not an option at the moment though it seems to be getting really hard with each passing day. I am worried about my kids," she said.

Two nuns serving in Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charities have a moral dilemma with the thoughts of evacuating.

"We are very uncomfortable with the thought leaving all these handicapped children and old age people we work with in the middle of a crisis. We are staying," sister Chalen, hailing from Kunnoor district, said.

"What option we are examining I can't tell you now."
Gaza's Reality (Occupation 101 Movie Clip)
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=X0T3jMRNwV8


Israeli Attack on Palestinian Family on Gaza Beach
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=5WaCJn4hdjc



Is killing a Palestinian kid infront of his parents ok?
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj63KyuB1wA



Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See
http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=tW1-_JmXQt0


1. Still photos of Israeli assault on Gaza civilians

http://www.elfarra.org/gallery/gaza.htm

WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING


2. Raw video of Israeli bombing of Gaza marketplace

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21634.htm

Stop the Bombing – End the Siege of Gaza NOW!

January 6, 2008

The Canadian Peace Alliance is calling on all members and supporters to support existing demonstrations, or organize their own, this Saturday, January 10 to demand that the Canadian government call for an immediate end to the massacre in Gaza. We know that almost 600 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have been killed and thousands more maimed and wounded since the Israeli assault began, and many more will be killed as the humanitarian disaster worsens.

The Government of Canada has so far rejected calls for a ceasefire and is supporting the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza. As with the wars in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan, Stephen Harper has proven himself to be firmly in the camp of the war mongers of the outgoing Bush administration. This does not reflect the will of the majority of Canadians who want to see our country as an arbiter of peace rather than a country that supports the bombing of civilians.

Canadian Foreign Minister, Lawrence Cannon has blamed Hamas for starting this conflict by sending rockets into Southern Israel, yet the facts contradict this assertion. According to Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, “There was no substantial rocket fire from Gaza during the ceasefire until Israel launched an attack last November 4th directed at what it claimed were Palestinian militants in Gaza, killing several Palestinians. Also, it was Hamas that on numerous public occasions called for extending the truce, with its calls never acknowledged, much less acted upon, by Israeli officialdom.”

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has been worsening since the Israeli blockade began 2 years ago. International agencies, including the United Nations, have condemned the blockade which has severely limited necessities such as medical supplies and food. The Harper government has been one of the most vociferous supporters of this collective punishment and was the first government to end humanitarian aid to the Palestinians after the election of Hamas.

Since the Israeli bombing began eleven days ago, the crisis has worsened. More than 80 per cent of Palestinians are without needed food aid and hospitals are operating on the thousands of wounded without anesthetics or even basic pain killers. Electricity and communications have also been targeted resulting in isolation and deprivation for the 1.5 million people of Gaza.

The current assault on Gaza is an aggressive war that violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva Convention. Our government is now complicit in these war crimes. Canadians will not stand by while the conservative government supports the unilateral massacre of innocent people.

Demonstrations will be held throughout Canada this week. Click here for events listings.

Click Here to download the petition


Sign the PetitionHalt the Massacres in the Gaza Strip! Canada Must Demand an Immediate UN Investigation Into Israeli War CrimeTo All, if you would like to endorse the PH statement regarding Qana 3 massecare in Gaza, please email info@palestinehouse.com, thanksHalt the Massacres in the Gaza Strip! Canada Must Demand an Immediate UN Investigation Into Israeli War Crimes6th January 2009We, the undersigned, are outraged by the horrific massacre that occurred today in the Gaza Strip.Over 40 Palestinian civilians were killed after Israel bombed the United Nations Al Fahoura school in Northern Gaza. According to reports, Israel bombed this UN-operated school, located in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing many civilians who had sought
shelter from Israel's continued bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip. The tactics of the Israeli Army, using heavy artillery, helicopter fire and massive bombs from fighter jets on the Gaza Strip has caused more than 640 deaths and 3,000 injuries, some people being maimed for life.The residents of the Gaza Strip are living in one of the most densely populated places on earth. For 19 months, Israel has blockaded the residents of Gaza from access to water, electricity, food, and medicine. Hospitals are relying on backup generators for electricity and rolling electricity cuts leave patients in jeopardy. The lack of resources has led to patient deaths as they wait for medical attention. Even before Israel began its military assault ten days ago there was a massive humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. We emphasize that the victims of this latest bombing join a long list of Palestinians killed in pre-meditated massacres by Zionist and
Israeli forces over the last six decades. The names of these massacres - Deir Yassin, Kufr Qassem, Qana, Jenin to name a few - are etched in our collective memories as testimony to a people who have long endured the inaction of world powers to halt Israeli war crimes.This inaction must stop.Israel cannot be allowed to bomb with impunity a United Nations school in which men, women and children have sought sanctuary. The bombing of civilian populations is a violation of international humanitarian law and the laws of war including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Israel must be held to account for this and other war crimes.We call on the Canadian government to demand that the UN begin an investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Canadian government cannot remain silent any longer. Palestine House

Our spirit will not die

Here in Gaza, we citizens are starving and battling for survival. How can this possibly advance peace?


Sami Abdel-Shafi

Yesterday morning, I hurried up to the rooftop of my home to catch a glimpse of the sun rising. Columns of black smoke stretched sideways over Gaza's horizon, eerily symbolising how Israel's ground assault has already inflicted more indiscriminate suffering on ordinary people.
The Guardian, Monday 5 January 2009

Ba Salaam,
The link below is an interview with Phyllis Bennis who well places the Gaza massacre in its historical context. Analyses of this sort are extremely important from the viewpoint of rebuking some confused and conservative positions which like the recent commentary by Ibrahim Kharish, Senior Fatah official (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/hamas-fatah-israel-west-bank) put the blame on Hamas for Israel's atrocities." Ibrahim Kharish stated thus: "We should have courage enough to say that this could have been avoided and that actually Hamas led to this. By taking our people and our land in Gaza under its control by force they are treating the people as hostages ... Hamas is responsible for what is going on in Gaza, not only Israel." This is exactly the position that George W. Bush and Stephen Harper have taken, a position which is tacitly shared by some opportunist elements in Canada who use an Islamic garb to pursue their goal of obtaining a seat in the Senate.

Best

Mehrdad F. Samadzadeh

http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=3058


US asks Arab nations for $300 Billion to fund auto bailout 01 Jan 2009 The report comes from Saudi Arabia’s Arab News: "According to reports published in Al-Seyassah, a Kuwaiti newspaper, and some other Gulf newspapers, the United States has asked four Gulf states for financial aid close to $300 billion to face the fallout of the financial crisis and help prevent its economy from sliding into a painful recession. Washington is seeking $120 billion from Saudi Arabia, $70 billion from the United Arab Emirates, $60 billion from Qatar and $40 billion from Kuwait."

http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/us-asks-arab-nations-300-billion-fund-auto-bailout

“The battle...has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor’s chambers. Empire’s conquests are being carried out in your name.”
Arundhati Roy



Reuters

2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, part of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, began on 27 December 2008 (11:30 a.m. local time; 9:30 a.m. UTC)[21] when the Israel Defense Forces launched what they called Operation Cast Lead (Hebrew: ???? ????? ??????, Mivtza Oferet Yetzuka), targeting the members and infrastructure of Gaza's governing party, Hamas.[22][23][24] The conflict[citation needed] has been called the Gaza Massacre (Arabic: ????? ????) in the Arab World.[25][26][27][28]

A six-month truce between Hamas and Israel ended on 19 December 2008.[29][30][31] Hamas blamed Israel for breaching the truce[32][33] and for not lifting the Gaza Strip blockade, and Israel blamed Hamas for increased rocket fire directed at southern Israeli towns and communities.[34] Israel's stated objectives in this conflict are to end Palestinian rocket fire and prevent the rearming of Hamas. Hamas demands the cessation of Israeli attacks and an end to the Israeli blockade.[35]

At least 225 people were killed on the first day of the Israeli attack.[36] By the first evening, Israeli Air Force fighter-bomber aircraft had bombed roughly 100 Hamas-run buildings and compounds (including police stations, prisons, and command centers) in four minutes during the first wave of the strike.[37][38] Israel also hit what it identified as Hamas-run institutions and bases in all of Gaza's main towns, including Gaza City and Beit Hanoun in the north and Khan Younis and Rafah in the south.[39][40][41][42][43][44] The attacks have also hit civilian infrastructure, including mosques and housing, with a great number of civilian casualties reported. Israel asserts many of these hid weapons and personnel, and that it is not targetting civilians.[45][46][47][48][49][50][51] The Israeli Navy has shelled targets in Gaza, instituting at the same time a naval blockade of Gaza, which has resulted in one naval incident with a civilian boat.[52][53][54][55]

Hamas has intensified its rocket and mortar attacks against Israel throughout the conflict, increasing the distance of attacks to as far away as 40 kilometres (25 mi) from the Gaza border, hitting civilian communities like Beersheba and Ashdod. These attacks have resulted in civilian casualties and damage to infrastructure. All schools in the area are closed.[56][57][58][59]

The IDF started massing infantry and armor units near the Gaza border and engaged in an active blockade of Gaza.[60] On 3 January 2009, a ground invasion began, with mechanised infantry, armor, and artillery units, supported by armed helicopters, entering Gaza.[61][62]

Both Israel and Hamas are under pressure for a humanitarian truce.[63][64] While Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak intially stated that this will be a "war to the bitter end"[65], Israeli defense officials have suggested as recently as January 6 that the operation could be "over in the next 72 hours".[66] Hamas officials stated their openness to accepting a truce that ends the Gaza Strip blockade.[63]

International reactions to the conflict have either condemned the Israeli operation, Hamas' attacks, or both. Many countries and organisations have called for an immediate ceasefire and have expressed concern about the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.[67][68] Israel has stated that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but is willing to open up limited areas in the Gaza Strip for humanitarian purposes.[69]The International Red Cross, United Nations and aid workers have reported of intolerable conditions and a deepening humanitarian crisis.[70]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Israel%E2%80%93Gaza_conflict

The September 1993 Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements provided for a transitional period of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Under a series of agreements signed between May 1994 and September 1999, Israel transferred to the Palestinian Authority (PA) security and civilian responsibility for Palestinian-populated areas of the West Bank and Gaza. Negotiations to determine the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza stalled following the outbreak of an intifada in September 2000, as Israeli forces reoccupied most Palestinian-controlled areas. In April 2003, the Quartet (US, EU, UN, and Russia) presented a roadmap to a final settlement of the conflict by 2005 based on reciprocal steps by the two parties leading to two states, Israel and a democratic Palestine. The proposed date for a permanent status agreement was postponed indefinitely due to violence and accusations that both sides had not followed through on their commitments. Following Palestinian leader Yasir ARAFAT's death in late 2004, Mahmud ABBAS was elected PA president in January 2005. A month later, Israel and the PA agreed to the Sharm el-Sheikh Commitments in an effort to move the peace process forward. In September 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew all its settlers and soldiers and dismantled its military facilities in the Gaza Strip and withdrew settlers and redeployed soldiers from four small northern West Bank settlements. Nonetheless, Israel controls maritime, airspace, and most access to the Gaza Strip. A November 2005 PA-Israeli agreement authorized the reopening of the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt under joint PA and Egyptian control. In January 2006, the Islamic Resistance Movement, HAMAS, won control of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). The international community refused to accept the HAMAS-led government because it did not recognize Israel, would not renounce violence, and refused to honor previous peace agreements between Israel and the PA. HAMAS took control of the PA government in March 2006, but President ABBAS had little success negotiating with HAMAS to present a political platform acceptable to the international community so as to lift economic sanctions on Palestinians. The PLC was unable to convene throughout most of 2006 as a result of Israel's detention of many HAMAS PLC members and Israeli-imposed travel restrictions on other PLC members. Violent clashes took place between Fatah and HAMAS supporters in the Gaza Strip in 2006 and early 2007, resulting in numerous Palestinian deaths and injuries. ABBAS and HAMAS Political Bureau Chief MISHAL in February 2007 signed the Mecca Agreement in Saudi Arabia that resulted in the formation of a Palestinian National Unity Government (NUG) headed by HAMAS member Ismail HANIYA. However, fighting continued in the Gaza Strip, and in June, HAMAS militants succeeded in a violent takeover of all military and governmental institutions in the Gaza Strip. ABBAS dismissed the NUG and through a series of Presidential decrees formed a PA government in the West Bank led by independent Salam FAYYAD. HAMAS rejected the NUG's dismissal and has called for resuming talks with Fatah, but ABBAS has ruled out negotiations until HAMAS agrees to a return of PA control over the Gaza Strip and recognizes the FAYYAD-led government. FAYYAD and his PA government initiated a series of security and economic reforms to improve conditions in the West Bank. ABBAS participated in talks with Israel's Prime Minister OLMERT and secured the release of some Palestinian prisoners and previously withheld customs revenue. During a November 2007 international meeting in Annapolis Maryland, ABBAS and OLMERT agreed to resume peace negotiations with the goal of reaching a final peace settlement by the end of 2008.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/gz.html
Bollywood bids Bush goodbye with a parting shot



Reuters

New Delhi: Barely two weeks before George W. Bush leaves the White House, Bollywood is ready with a farewell present -- a film that takes pot shots at the outgoing U.S. president.

‘The President is Coming,’ set in Mumbai during Bush's trip to India in 2006, tells the fictional tale of six Indians vying for a chance to shake hands with the visiting head of state.

Bush is a running theme in the film and so are 'Bushisms' -- verbal slip-ups in his speeches -- that have gained notoriety during his eight-year presidency.

"Bush is more of a sort of metaphor for the things that America represents -- good or bad -- but he's also used as a bit of a punching bag because he's an easy target," said Kunaal Roy Kapur, the film's 29-year-old director.

Shot in a mock documentary style, the English-language film depicts a series of farcical tests conducted in a room at the U.S. consulate to single out a young Indian worthy enough to meet Bush.

‘The President is Coming’, adapted from a play of the same name, opens in Indian cinemas on Friday, just days before Barack Obama takes office on Jan. 20 as the first black U.S. president.

"It's definitely a nice little goodbye present for Bush," said Kapur.

WHO PLAYS BUSH?

There is no word yet on whether an actor plays the president's role in the film, although the director has said he used different ways to deal with the problem, including using video footage of Bush.

Television promos for ‘The President is Coming’ showed a person wearing a rubber Bush mask and a business suit walking past various Mumbai landmarks.

Kapur said the film, made at a cost of about 30 million rupees (approximately $618,000), would have lost much of its charm if Bush had not been the incumbent U.S. president.

"The premise wouldn't have been as much fun if any of the other presidents had been around," the first-time director said.

"The whole fun of it is that it's President Bush."
Reuters

India should learn to strike silently

B Raman



Nobody can question Israel exercising its right to self-defence, to protect the lives and property of its citizens from rocket attacks in Gaza by the Hamas, which has been going on for weeks and months now. As the deputy permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations -- in a press interview after the US had refused to join in the condemnation of Israel's action by the UN Security Council -- said, 'Israel, like all other members of the UN, has the right of self-defence. This right is not negotiable.'

Like Israel and other members of the UN, India too has the right to self-defence against acts of terrorism emanating from Pakistani territory and sponsored by the State of Pakistan. It has the right to retaliate against Pakistan and the duty to do so to protect the lives and property of its citizens.

The question is not whether we should retaliate. We should if we want Pakistan and the hordes of terrorists nursed by it to take us seriously. The question is, whether a direct military strike will be the wise and appropriate way of retaliating against Pakistan or whether we should do it through political and diplomatic measures, followed by deniable covert actions, if those measures do not make Pakistan change its ways.

For many years, Israel has been the victim of acts of terrorism by organisations such as the Hamas and the Hizbollah, sponsored mainly by Syria and Iran. Its retaliation has been directed against these terrorist organisations and not against their State-sponsors.

After the Arab-Israeli war of 1967 and the Yom Kippur war of 1973, Israel has indulged in military strikes in the territory of a sovereign state and a member of the UN only on two occasions -- against the Osirak nuclear reactor under construction in Iraq in the early 1980s, and against the Hizbollah's infrastructure in Lebanese territory in 2006. In the past, Israeli armed forces have operated in Lebanese territory on other occasions too.

Isreal's action against Osirak in Iraq was a success, but its action in Lebanon in 2006 against the Hizbollah was not. Despite its concerns over the nuclear sites in Iran producing enriched uranium, Israel has till now avoided any military strikes on these sites, despite public pressure from sections of the Israeli people to do so.

It did launch an attack on a suspected nuclear site in Syria last year, but as a deniable covert action and not as an admitted military strike. It has also indulged in covert actions against suspected Hamas operatives based in Syria.

It is able to indulge in openly admitted military strikes against the Hamas in Gaza because Gaza is not part of any sovereign State. In the past, Israel's retaliatory military strikes have been against terrorist organisations posing a threat to its citizens and property, and not against the States sponsoring them. Its actions against States sponsoring terrorism have been in the form of covert actions and not direct military strikes.

Practically all States facing the problem of terrorism have a covert action capability, because it gives them a third option if political and diplomatic measures fail. Without this option, a nation has to rely only on military retaliation, which could be messy when used against a next door neighbour. When a nation doesn't use military strikes and doesn't have a covert action capability, the State-sponsor and the terrorists sponsored by it develop contempt for such a nation.

The US has bombed Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation for their perceived anti-US acts, but it has never taken a similar measure against Cuba, its next door neighbour.

It has declared Cuba a State-sponsor of terrorism and constantly keeps trying to undermine its political stability and economy, but avoids direct military action against it, despite it being a superpower. America knows that military action against a neighbour could get messy.

It is hoped that the government draws the right lessons from its dilemma after the Mumbai terror strike and tries to revive our covert action capability, which was discarded more than a decade ago as an ill-conceived unilateral gesture to Pakistan.

(The writer is Additional Secretary (retired), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, New Delhi [Images] and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com)

http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/06raman-india-should-learn-the-art-of-silent-strikes.htm

Massacre of innocents as UN school is shelled

Obama breaks silence to express deep concern over civilian casualties

By Donald Macintyre and Kim Sengupta in Jerusalem
The Independent - UK
Wednesday, 7 January 2009

Hundreds of Palestinians had fled their homes for the refuge of the
al-Fakhoura school, hoping the blue and white flag of the UN flying over the
impromptu shelter would protect them from the Israeli onslaught. The UN had
even given the Israeli army the co-ordinates for the building to spare it
from the shells and air strikes raining down on the Gaza strip. But
yesterday afternoon tank shells exploded outside the school, sending
shrapnel into the crowds, killing at least 40 and wounding another 55.

It was the worst confirmed bloodshed of Israel's attack on Gaza and sparked
outrage and condemnation around the globe, with the US President-elect
Barack Obama breaking his 11-day silence, the UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon
calling the incident "totally unacceptable" and Gordon Brown describing the
conflict as "the darkest moment yet for the Middle East".

Within hours of the strike on the school, with the Palestinian death toll
topping 600 and pressure mounting on Israel to stop its crushing military
campaign, Egypt proposed an immediate ceasefire and talks with Israel and
Hamas on a long-term settlement, including an end to the Gaza blockade.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was in Cairo on the latest stop of a
two-day tour of the Middle East, said that his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni
Mubarak, was inviting "notably the Israeli side to discuss the issue of
border security without delay".

Arriving in New York for an emergency UN Security Council meeting, David
Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, welcomed the statement by Mr Mubarak saying
it "underlined the fast-moving nature of events". The world, Mr Miliband
told the Council, was witnessing in Gaza, "the horror of war piled upon
months of deprivation".

At the meeting, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas voiced support for the
Sarkozy-Mubarak ceasefire initiative. The killings at the school in Gaza
confirmed the "heinous crime being committed against our people," he said.

Israel had yet to respond to the initiative last night. However, a statement
was issued late in the evening announcing Israel's willingness to set up a
"humanitarian corridor" into Gaza for the safe delivery of emergency
supplies "to prevent a humanitarian crisis" there.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said Washington backed Mr
Mubarak's ceasefire proposal. "We need urgently to conclude a ceasefire that
can endure and that can bring real security," she told the Security Council.
"In this regard we are pleased by and wish to commend the statement of the
President of Egypt and to follow up on that initiative."

With Israeli troops moving further south into the cities of one of the
world's most crowded territories, the Palestinian death toll is beginning to
rival that in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Yesterday, the UN demanded an
immediate independent investigation into the latest school killings.

The emergency room of northern Gaza's Kamal Adwan hospital was packed to
overflowing after the carnage. "We have become quite used to noises of
explosions but then they started bringing in all those who had been caught
in the attack and it was a very bad sight," Dr Bassam Abu Warda told The
Independent.

"It was terrible, really terrible. We are living at a very difficult time
but even as doctors it is always hard to see children being hurt and we had
a lot of them today and we are not really equipped to deal with this type of
emergency here."

Majed Hamdan, a photographer, said he rushed to the scene shortly after the
attacks, which happened just as many of the refugees had ventured outside
for fresh air. "I saw women and men - parents - slapping their faces in
grief, screaming, some of them collapsed to the floor," he said. "They knew
their children were dead."

Gruesome footage on Hamas's al-Aqsa TV showed medics starting to unload the
bodies of men who had been stacked up in the back of an ambulance, three
high, and were dragged out without stretchers. The blood-caked stumps of one
man's legs bumped along the ground as he was pulled from the ambulance.

Responding to criticism of its hit on the school in the Jabalya refugee
camp, the Israeli military accused Hamas of "using civilians as human
shields". It said that the results of its "initial inquiry" was that mortar
shells had been fired from the school at forces operating in the area and
that, "in response to the incoming enemy fire, the forces returned mortar
fire", and said that this was not the first time Hamas had fired mortars and
rockets from UNRWA school premises in Gaza. Two Hamas militants, Imad Abu
Askar and Hasan Abu Askar, were among the dead, the army said.

John Ging, the operations director for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which
runs the school, expressed his outrage. "Those in the school were all
families seeking refuge," he said. "There's nowhere safe in Gaza. Everyone
here is terrorised and traumatised ... I am appealing to political leaders
to get their act together and stop this."

Ahead of the Security Council session, there were signs of tension between
the White House and the US State Department. "We would like an immediate
ceasefire, absolutely," a department spokesman, Sean McCormack, told
reporters before Ms Rice's departure for New York. "An immediate ceasefire
that is durable, sustainable and not time-limited." Minutes later, the White
House said this did not represent a shift in the US position.

Veering away from his mantra of "one president at a time", Mr Obama said
"the loss of civilian life in Gaza and Israel is a source of deep concern
for me." Gordon Brown said: "This is a humanitarian crisis. This is the
darkest moment yet for the Middle East and it affects the whole world."

Al-Qai'da's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, made an internet appeal for
Muslims to "hit the interests of Zionists and Crusaders wherever and
whichever way you can".

While the school killings represented the single biggest loss of life since
the Israeli offensive began on 27 December, details are emerging of other
incidents involving high numbers of civilian casualties. An Israeli human
rights agency, B'Tselem, and the UN's Office for the Co-ordination for
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) independently released reports that more than 30
members of the same extended family had been killed on Monday during the
shelling of a building in the northern Zeitoun district of Gaza City.

With foreign journalists currently prevented from entering Gaza and with
mobile telephone use in Gaza intermittent, it is virtually impossible to
verify details of all casualties.

In Israel, the Hamas rockets have continued to land. At least five hit
Israeli soil yesterday, including one in Gadera, 28km (17 miles) from Tel
Aviv. A three-month-old baby was hurt.

The Israel Defence Forces says seven Israeli soldiers have died during the
offensive: one during the air strikes, three more since the ground invasion
began and, late on Monday, three were killed and another 24 wounded by a
tank shell in a friendly fire incident.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/massacre-of-innocents-as
-un-school-is-shelled-1230045.html

Gaza Strip
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia




The Gaza Strip (Arabic: ???? ???? transliteration: Qi?a? Gazza/Qita' Ghazzah, Hebrew: ????? ???? Retzu'at 'Azza) is a coastal strip of land along the Mediterranean Sea currently governed by Hamas. It borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the north and east. It is about 41 kilometers (25 mi) long, and between 6 and 12 kilometers (4–7.5 mi) wide, with a total area of 360 square kilometers (139 sq mi). The area is not recognized internationally as part of any sovereign country but is claimed by the Palestinian National Authority as part of the Palestinian territories. Since the June 2007 battle of Gaza, actual control of the area is in the hands of the Hamas de facto government.

Israel governed the Gaza Strip from 1967-2005. Pursuant to the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Israel maintains control of the strip's airspace, territorial waters, and offshore maritime access, as well as its side of the Gaza-Israel border. This continued control has allowed the Israeli state, which opposes Hamas, to control the inflow and outflow of Gaza's essential resources, including food.[citation needed] When food is in short supply, Gazans have taken in food supplied by World Food Programme workers in the area.[citation needed] Israel's position is that reports of food or fuel crisis are "created and promoted by Hamas." According to Israel, "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" and Hamas purposely shuts down electricity and confiscates the fuel supplied by Israel to Gaza.[1]

Egypt governed the Gaza Strip from 1948-1967 and today runs the southern border between the Gaza strip and the Sinai desert, a border now famous for the breach in early 2008.

The territory takes its name from Gaza, its main city. It has about 1.4 million Palestinian Arab (or Gazan) residents.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip


Barack Obama says US economy is 'very sick'
President-elect Barack Obama has described the US economy as "very sick" and predicted the situation will worsen.

By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 6:49AM GMT 06 Jan 2009

His comments came before a meeting with Congressional leaders in an attempt to get them to back the $300 billion measures aimed at people on lower and middle income, assuring opposition Republicans their views would be considered.

"The economy is very sick," he said before meeting with Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid. "The situation is getting worse. ... We have to act and act now to break the momentum of this recession."

He said he expected that the latest US unemployment figures, due out later this week, would be sobering.

The complete recovery package would cost between $750 billion and $1 trillion [£630 billion] and include tax cuts for lower and middle income groups and relief for businesses over two years.

If passed, it would more than double the savings tax payers received in George W Bush’s tax reforms of 2001 and 2003. In real terms the cost would exceed that of the Vietnam War, which drained the treasury of $682 billion in current dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service

Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan” aims to “create or save” three million jobs by 2011 and would include public works projects and support for states that are struggling to balance their budgets.

On his first day of work since moving his transition operation from his home city Chicago to Washington, Mr Obama paid an important visit to Congress, where he served in the senate for four years before his historic election as the first African American election winner in November. Mr Obama has made clear he intends to work closely with Capitol Hill.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/4139542/Barack-Obama-says-US-economy-is-very-sick.html

Bush to host Obama, ex-presidents at White House
Washington: US President George W. Bush will host former presidents and his successor, Barack Obama, at the White House for a private meeting during lunch Wednesday, the White House said.

The meeting will mark the first gathering of all former presidents at the White House since 1981, spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Bush and Obama will hold a private one-on-one meeting before the expanded presidential gathering, she said.

Among the living presidents are Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with the current and future White House occupants Bush and Obama.

"President-elect Obama, I think, originally had the idea for this, but President Bush readily agreed, thought it was a great idea to get everybody together," Perino said.

Perino said the five men will likely discuss life as a president and raising children in the White House, but said details of their discussions will not be made public.

"All of us would love to be flies on the wall and listening to that conversation, but these are leaders who only understand what it's like to be in each other's shoes," she said.

While this is the first meeting of all former presidents at the White House in more than two decades, they have previously attended presidential funerals and ceremonies to inaugurate presidential libraries.

Source: DPA

Sensex sheds 749 pts on Satyam fraud!Shocked over how the financial manipulation went on in Satyam Computer Services for so long, industry said it was time corporate India stopped giving itself "self-congratulatory" awards and gave a hard look on deeper issues relating to corporate governance.

There are far too many "self-congratulatory awards being given out in terms of corporate governance and disclosures," FICCI President Rajeev Chandrasekhar said.


Mumbai The Bombay Stock Exchange benchmark Sensex on Wednesday suffered the most this year by losing 749 points on panic selling by funds after Satyam Computer said profit had been inflated for years, raising concerns of dim third-quarter earnings by blue-chip companies.
The Sensex, which had gained over 688 points in the last four sessions of 2009, tumbled below the crucial 10,000 point level, losing 749.05 points to reach 9,586.88. It touched the day's low of 9,510.15 and a high of 10,469.72 points, showing a wide fluctuation of nearly 960 points.

Satyam Computer crashed by Rs 139.15 or 77.69 per cent to close at Rs 39.95, after the Chairman announced the company had falsified accounts and assets for several years.

Amazingly, the company ADR on the US stock market -- Nasdaq -- closed higher by four per cent last night.

The declining Sensex recorded the biggest single-day loss in the past two months, after Satyam Computers Services, the country's fourth-largest software developer, plunged around 80 per cent, the highest since getting listed in 1992.

The 50-share National Stock Exchange index Nifty tumbled by 192.40 points at 2,920.40, after hitting the day's low of 2,888.20 points during the day.

Fuel prices may go down again: Deora

New Delhi India may cut fuel prices again, Oil Minister Murli Deora said on Wednesday, a month after the government last lowered state-set rates for petrol and diesel.
"We are looking at reducing prices of petrol, diesel and LPG. We are trying. There is a possibility. I cannot give you any time frame," Deora told reporters.

India cut gasoline prices by 10 per cent and diesel by 6 per cent in the first week of December, when it also announced other measures to lift wobbly markets in a slowing economy.

The likely cut in fuel prices, ahead of general elections due by May, will further reduce inflation, which has already fallen to a near 10-month low of 6.6 per cent.

Analysts say low inflation may fuel further cuts in central bank interest rates to help India's $1 trillion economy, which is expected to grow about 7 per cent in 2008/09, slowing from a blistering 9 per cent in each of the previous three years.
Reuters

It is quite a SHAME that a powerful quarter in India supports the MSSACRE in GAZA. Prominent Bangla Daily Anand Bazaar Patrika published from Kolkata has an ENVIable position as it has been alwyas supporting LPG Mafia pleading Economic reforms for so called development and industrialisation. At the same time, the selfstyled CRUSADER of Bangla nationality across the border, supports most the Bush Regime. It supported US aggression in Iraq and Afganistan. No wonder, it supports the ISraeli Operation in GAZA having a stringest stance in favour of WAR against Terrorism. The mainstream Media and even political parties have turned ZIONIST as they had always been Brahaminical!India as a Nation lost its reputation as the Leader of the Third world because it stands quite detached in the hour of HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHY! Rahre the Brahaminical hegemony ruling India and enslaving eighty five percent indigenous aboriginal people, tries its best to REPLICATE ISRAEL! As HAMAS is believed to be crushed in GAZA, the WAR Goddess of Blind Nationalism also wants SACRIFICE of INNOCENT people across the political border to WIPE OUT Muslim Terrorists in Pakistan!

But we have the most critical problem, ISRAEL never faced. The ZIONISTS run the governments and Economies of the World including United states of America . Israel is SOVEREIGN to act. Contrarily we are BONDED labour in the Peripherry ECONOMY Colonised by US Corporate Imperialism and we have to COMPLY with only US interets in south Asia. Knowing the inability of UPA government led by Italian Citizen Sonia Gandhi, the HINDUTVA forces have launched an all out Hate campaign against the Muslims and indigenous aboriginal people in India. Marxist
Hypocrites are also led by Brahaminical hegemony and they just complete the ritual condemning Israel. Hence, india and indian people lag behind all other third world countries resisting Zionist aggression worldwide!

Militants exchanging heavy gunfire with security forces in Bhati Dhar jungles of Poonch are suspected to be from Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group, army said on Wednesday, but did not specify any time frame for flushing them out.
"The holed up militants, who have been exchanging fire with the security forces for the last one week, seem to be from JeM based on the intercepts that we have got," Brigadier General Staff Brig Gurdeep Singh told reporters in Mendhar.

Unlike operation 'Sarp Nash' in 2003 during which security forces had come across bunkers built by militants, Brig Singh said in the current operation, there were no such reports of bunkers being set up by the ultras in the forest area.

The militants were using natural caves with rocks around them as hideouts in the region, he said.

Replying to questions on the operation that began on January 1, he said, "it is not possible to specify as of now how long the operation will last."

The officer said the undulating forest terrain in the region and the weather were acting as major constraints for the army in flushing them out.

What is happening in Gaza are extremely important because although the mass media is covering the story, and somewhat critical of Israel's actions, in general they are telling only part of the story. The overwhelming majority of the people in the US and elsewhere assume -- because the media hasn't given them any reason to believe otherwise -- that while Israel's slaughter of Palestinians is an "over-reaction", it was caused initially by Hamas' unwarranted firing of mortars at Israel. They haven't a clue as to why Hamas would do such a thing. They don't know that Palestinians are fighting against an illegal occupation of their land.

India is upgrading its MiG-27 fighters to sharpen their strike capabilities, officials said on Wednesday, even as experts say the recent Mumbai attacks have exposed the country's need to modernise its defence forces. Although the upgrade was planned well ahead of the attacks, officials said the defence ministry wants to speed up modernisation of its forces to tackle any future security threat. The upgrading comes at a time when tension runs high with Pakistan over Mumbai and India is saying it has all options open to deal with "terror outfits" in Pakistan.

In the country's biggest corporate fraud involving about Rs 8,000 crore, iconic IT company Satyam was hurtling towards disaster following the shocking disclosure of accounts fudging by its founder Ramalinga Raju, who then quit as chairman - leaving an uncertain future for the company and its 53,000 employees.
By the end of the day, the fourth largest IT company lost a staggering Rs 10,000 crore in market capitalisation as investors reacted sharply and dumped shares, pushing down the scrip by 78 per cent to Rs 39.95 at BSE. The NYSE-listed firm could also face regulator action in the US. The government, regulator SEBI and the industry reacted with shock and anguish over the turn of events that could tarnish India's corporate and raise vital issue like ethics, corporate governance and accounting and business practices.Acting in tandem, Corporate Affairs Ministry and SEBI announced that the episode would be probed and action taken against the perpetrators of the fraud that entails inflating profits and creating fictitious assets.
Just days after supporting the anti-terror measures in Parliament, chief ministers of various NDA constituents expressed their reservations over the new National Investigation Agency saying it would "disturb" the federal set-up of the country and sought tougher laws. The NDA parties, however, said they will support the Centre in its fight against terror.
Speaking at the Conference of Chief Ministers on Internal Security in New Delhi, BJP leader and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi said, "By setting up the National Investigation Agency, the Central government now obviously wants to take over upon itself the responsibility of fighting terror by sidetracking the states." He said the NIA has become a matter of "mazak" (joke) since it would take at least a month for the government to decide "which and what case to take up" once NIA starts functioning.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who belongs to JD-U, said consultations with states should have preceded enactment of the National Investigation Agency Act and other anti-terror laws. He wanted that NIA be barred from taking up any case not relating to terrorism without the consent of the state government.

"It appears the recent spurt in terrorist activities has led the Centre to rush through various legislations without adequate consultation with state governments," he said.

"The anti-terror measures taken by Union Government after the Mumbai attacks were encroachment on state's right and were against the federal structure of the country." He said that there are many lacunae in the NIA Act and "states could have also been involved in the decision process before enactment of the Act."

Kuldeep Nair writes quite clearly in the Telegraph:

BETWEEN THE LINES
- In terms of alliances, the US needs Pakistan more than India
Diplomacy - K.P. Nayar


Clasped close
There are many ways of preparing a balance sheet. A clever auditor will tell you, if you are a good client, how he can disguise a dismal accounting reality as an attractive investment prospect. The collapsed energy conglomerate, Enron, and its now deceased auditors, Arthur Andersen, are recent examples. What is true of accounting is equally true of diplomacy and statecraft.

As the Bush administration goes into the sunset, it is logical to seek a scrutiny of the balance sheet of Indo-US relations, especially in the outgoing president’s second term, when the world sat up and took note of a bilateral relationship that became important enough for the United Progressive Alliance government to stake its very existence on last year. Such a scrutiny has, indeed, become imperative because events since the November 26 terrorist attacks in Mumbai have exposed the myth of a strategic or natural alliance between India and the United States of America much like the Enron scam.

For this columnist, who has just returned from India to the ground realities of American strategic thinking, it is sad to see a government on Raisina Hill offering to go to Washington and to other world capitals, hat in hand, with “evidence” of terrorist designs on India from across the border with Pakistan.

If P.V. Narasimha Rao had been alive today, he would have told Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee that India’s fight against terror cannot be won by appealing to the goodwill of rulers in other countries — as the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, will do in Washington later this week — but only by putting in place a bold agenda for dealing with the cross-border threat and implementing it with cold and steely calculation.

Rao would have been speaking from experience. In 1993, shortly after the serial bombing of Mumbai, his government managed to obtain irrefutable physical evidence of a Pakistani plot to blow up Mumbai. It can now be told that the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s external spy agency, obtained the evidence after Pakistan’s then president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, presented that proof in Pakistan’s supreme court during Khan’s epic battle against the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, whom the president dismissed in April 1993, a month after the Mumbai bombings.

Sharif challenged his dismissal under Pakistan’s controversial eighth constitutional amendment. Khan knew that his future as president was doomed if Sharif won the case in the supreme court. He urged the court to hold part of its proceedings in camera and then presented evidence at the secret session that Sharif, as prime minister, not only knew about the Inter Services Intelligence plot to bomb Mumbai using Dawood Ibrahim’s underworld network, but had also given his go-ahead to it.

Lawyers for the State argued at this in camera sitting of the court that Sharif was unfit to be prime minister because he nearly took Pakistan to war with India by allowing the risky serial bombing of India’s premier metropolis. The supreme court quashed Sharif’s dismissal, reinstated him in office and cancelled Khan’s orders for fresh elections. Eventually, of course, both the squabbling politicians were persuaded by the army to resign and fresh elections brought in Benazir Bhutto as prime minister.

Barring India, few countries then realized that Pakistan was already on its way to being the epicentre of global terrorism. Other States were yet to experience the consequences of a process of nurturing terror that General Zia-ul-Haq had started. Besides, terrorism in Pakistan was still State-controlled; it was aimed at bleeding India, and the ISI was then in total control of such State-sponsored acts of terror.
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090107/jsp/opinion/story_10350288.jsp

Bush to host Obama, ex-presidents at White House
Washington: US President George W. Bush will host former presidents and his successor, Barack Obama, at the White House for a private meeting during lunch Wednesday, the White House said.

The meeting will mark the first gathering of all former presidents at the White House since 1981, spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Bush and Obama will hold a private one-on-one meeting before the expanded presidential gathering, she said.

Among the living presidents are Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with the current and future White House occupants Bush and Obama.

"President-elect Obama, I think, originally had the idea for this, but President Bush readily agreed, thought it was a great idea to get everybody together," Perino said.

Perino said the five men will likely discuss life as a president and raising children in the White House, but said details of their discussions will not be made public.

"All of us would love to be flies on the wall and listening to that conversation, but these are leaders who only understand what it's like to be in each other's shoes," she said.

While this is the first meeting of all former presidents at the White House in more than two decades, they have previously attended presidential funerals and ceremonies to inaugurate presidential libraries.

Source: DPA


exchange comes from a transcript of phone calls intercepted during the Mumbai attacks that was part of a dossier of evidence India handed Pakistan this week.

New Delhi says the evidence, which also included photographs of recovered weapons, data gleaned from satellite phones, and details from the interrogation of the lone surviving gunman, proves that the Mumbai siege was launched from across the border.

Pakistani authorities have dismissed the evidence as "a propaganda offensive" designed "to whip up tensions" in the region.

The transcripts, which were obtained by The Hindu newspaper, show that the 10 gunmen who carried out the attacks were in close contact with their handlers throughout the siege. India says the handlers directing the attacks that left 164 dead were senior leaders of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based militant group.

'Look for govt official'

"There are three ministers and one secretary of the cabinet in your hotel. We don't know in which room," the handler told a gunman inside the Taj Mahal hotel at 1510 hrs IST on the first night of the attack on November 26.

"Oh! That is good news. It is the icing on the cake!" he said.

The handler told him to find the government officials "and then get whatever you want from India." The handlers in Pakistan told another team of gunmen who had seized a Jewish center to shoot the hostages if necessary. "If you are still threatened, then don't saddle yourself with the burden of the hostages. Immediately kill them," he said.

He then added, "If the hostages are killed, it will spoil relations between India and Israel."

"So be it, God willing," the gunman replied.

Six Jewish foreigners, including a rabbi and his wife, were killed inside the Jewish center.

Be strong in the name of Allah
The gunmen were told several times not to kill any Muslim hostages. They were ordered, "Keep your phone switched on so that we can hear the gunfire."

Later in the night, nearly 24 hours after the attacks began, the handlers urged the gunmen to "be strong in the name of Allah"

"Brother, you have to fight. This is a matter of prestige of Islam. You may feel tired or sleepy, but the commandos of Islam have left everything behind, their mothers, their fathers."

Source: Associated Press

Inauspicious beginning, inglorious end


January 06, 2009
For America and the world, it has been a rollercoaster ride with George W Bush [Images] at the White House. It is arguable if the Bush presidency represents the lowest point in the perception of America across the world, but what is not is that Bush has made his country, and the world, a far different one -- some could even say, unsafe one -- than it was on January 20, 2001.
Matthew Schneeberger, an American reporter at rediff.com's editorial headquarters in Mumbai [Images], looks back on the 43rd president with wonder and amazement: How could things have gone so wrong?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's safe to say that George W Bush -- outside the most loyal of US Republican circles -- is an unpopular president, never mind that India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh [Images] believes Indians simply love him.

During 2008, his approval rating in the US dipped below 30%, bottoming out at 19%, the lowest on record. Lower than then US president Richard M Nixon in his final days in office, when he resigned in disgrace following the Watergate scandal.

This contempt manifested itself in the November 2008 US presidential and congressional elections, when Democrats took back the White House and established decisive majorities in both Houses of the US Congress. Pundits have called it a clear voter mandate, some claiming that the massively unpopular Bush and those connected to him have damaged the Republican Party's brand name for decades to come.

In 2008, Bush's last full year in office, the US economy shed an estimated 2.4 million jobs, its worst single year loss of employment in over six decades.

Why India is upset with George Bush & Co

This figure provides an exclamation point to a year's worth of bleak economic news and harrowing forecasts. Remember, when then president Bill Clinton [Images] left the Oval Office in January 2001, the unemployment rate was 4.2 per cent. Today, it's at 7 per cent and, by all accounts, spiralling upward.

Moreover, in 2000, the year before Bush became president, the US government reported a $236 billion annual budget surplus. By 2008, that surplus became a record $400 billion or $500 billion deficit (no one knows for sure). Not to mention the nearly $1 trillion in bail-out money the government has earmarked for various collapsing businesses in the past few months.

In fact, under Bush's eight-year stewardship, the federal deficit has almost doubled, from $5.6 trillion to $10.6 trillion. The dollar has been devalued. The financial sector is in crisis.

'The US is perceived as hypocritical'

Some of Bush's economic failures might be forgivable had he made major strides in the foreign policy arena. But today the US is mired in two expensive, protracted wars -- Iraq and Afghanistan -- and sustainable peace seems far-off in both countries. Globally, the perception of America has diminished, with Bush an easily identifiable symbol for the massive and growing anti-US sentiment in many parts of the world. Going to war in Iraq, virtually unilaterally and on dodgy intelligence, plus allegations of improper detainments at Guantanamo Bay and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, have raised questions about the US's commitment to human rights.

And, every step of the way, with his folksy rhetoric and lack of gravitas, Bush has provided endless fodder for late-night comedians, political commentators, academics and the international media.

Last month, just when it seemed that Bush's term might end quietly and without incident, an Iraq journalist hurled shoes and abuses at him in front of a worldwide audience, becoming an instant celebrity in the process. Photographs and videos of the incident will doubtless remain indelible images of the Bush presidency.

So how did we get to this point, where the US president -- the ostensible leader of the free world -- is disrespected in a most serious manner and the incident is considered funny and deserving?

What happened?

The presidency of George W Bush began on an inglorious note: he actually lost the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election.

Clinton's vice-president and the 2000 Democratic Party nominee Al Gore [Images], seen here with Bush, garnered 50,999,897 votes to Bush's 50,456,002, a difference of over 500,000 votes.

But because America determines her President through a group of 538 representative voters called the Electoral College, which essentially makes the contest a composite of 51 separate races (one in each of the 50 states plus one in Washington DC), by sweeping rural and less populous states, Bush was able to cobble together the Electoral College majority he needed for victory: 271 to Gore's 266. Bush was just the fourth candidate to have lost the popular vote and yet still win the election.

Exclusive: The George Bush interview!

It helped that his brother Jeb Bush was governor of Florida [Images] (the state's chief executive), the definitive state in the election. Had Gore won Florida -- and he lost there by only a few hundred votes, a race so close that the US supreme court was forced to make a ruling -- Bush would have never occupied the White House.

From the start, Bush was hounded by questions of legitimacy. Given the controversial circumstances surrounding his victory, many said he did not 'speak' for the American people. As a supposedly 'weak' president (in electoral terms), he would need to be conciliatory in his dealings with Congress and other branches of government.

And, in fact, during his campaign, Bush had run as a so-called 'Compassionate Conservative' who wanted to be a 'uniter' rather than a 'divider'.

In addition to traditional Republican promises like strengthening national defence and cutting taxes, he also made education core part of his platform, which helped him to siphon away many Democratic votes -- education is generally a 'Democrat' issue. But it also suggested that Bush would be willing to comprise. Congressional Democrats hoped his narrow victory and non-partisan campaign rhetoric would translate into pragmatic, non-partisan governance.

They were sorely, sorely mistaken.

Part II: After 9/11, Bush suddenly had political capital

Image: A photograph from 2000 of George W Bush and his Democratic rival for the American presidency, Al Gore, during one of their presidential debates. Photograph: Reuters
http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/06-bush-inauspicious-beginning-inglorious-end.htm

Satyam's Raju can get a 7-year jail term


January 7, 2009



Satyam Computer chairman B Ramalinga Raju can face seven years' imprisonment in addition to monetary penalties for forging accounts, breach of trust and misappropriating funds.

"He (Raju) can be charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code for falsification of accounts, cheating and breach of trust. These offences attract a maximum penalty of seven years," said a senior partner of law firm Titus and Company, Diljeet Titus.

Expressing a similar opinion, senior Supreme Court advocate C A Sundaram said, "If the admissions (made by Raju in his resignation letter) are true, it is a very serious matter. It would be violation of (the) SEBI (code), Company Law and the IPC."

Satyam Computer chairman Raju, in his resignation letter to the board, has admitted falsifying accounts and under-stating liabilities.

Another senior advocate and corporate law practitioner U K Chaudhary said the Satyam chief could be imprisoned for seven years under various provisions of company law. "Under section 628 of the Companies Act, which deals with misrepresentation of accounts, he could be punished for a maximum of 2 years along with penalty. However, the punishment term could be extended to seven years for producing false affidavits and other documents," he said.

In addition to Raju, Titus said "action should also be taken against chief financial officers, finance managers, and legal and tax advisors for their complicity in this episode".

Suggesting that the CBI should get into the case, he said if appropriate action is not taken, the Satyam fiasco would 'make a mockery of the Indian enforcement mechanism'.

Text: PTI

26/11 aftermath: Options before Obama
January 07, 2009 19:37 IST

The incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama [Images] has two options to deal with the fallout of the 26/11 terror attacks on Mumbai [Images]: (1) To support, and to garner international backing for, Pakistan's democratically elected leadership in order to enable it to act firmly against terrorist groups on its soil or (2) To designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism under United States law -- a designation that will involve considerable sanctions on a country that the outgoing George W Bush [Images] administration had named a 'major non-NATO ally'.



The contrasting policy options were made by specialist in South Asian Affairs Alan Kronstadt of the Congressional Research Service, in a report on 26/11 prepared by the CRS for the United States Congress.



The relevance of the document stems from the fact that the CRS is the policy research arm of the Congress. The House and Senate use the CRS to prepare extensive policy papers on issues of paramount importance; these reports then form backgrounders as relevant House and Senate committees discuss and frame necessary legislation.


The Kronstadt paper, extending to over 10,000 words and with exhaustive annotations, toes the generally accepted narrative in describing the attacks themselves. It is when discussing the fallout that the paper offers up original analysis and commentary.


Kronstadt defines US policy in South Asia as focused on preventing interstate conflict that could destabilize the region and lead to nuclear war, coupled with a more recent and inter-linked goal of fostering stability in Afghanistan.


From this, Kronstadt postulates that the to-do list for the 111th Congress, which will come into effect January 20, includes creating legislation that fosters greater US-India counterterrorism relations. And with regard to Pakistan, the report suggests that Congress needs to impose conditions on any further US assistance on quantifiable progress in the war against terrorism.


The report is scathing on the poor quality of India's response to the immediate threat, pointing out that then Home Minister Shivraj Patil [Images] only ordered India's elite National Security Guard commandos to the scene 90 minutes after the attacks began, and then through a series of bungles the commandos only landed on site 10 hours later, thus handing a tactical advantage to the militants. As a result, the report points out, two days elapsed between the initial engagement with, and final subjugation of, the terrorists.


Kronstadt goes into annotated depth to link the Lashkar-e-Tayiba [Images] to the attacks, and to underline the theory that the Jamaat-ud-Dawah is no more than the LeT flying under an assumed name, following its banning in the wake of the attack on India's Parliament.

Interestingly, while the LeT-JuD link is being denied by Pakistan, Kronstadt points out that Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan's current Ambassador [Images] to the United States, has in recent times commented upon Pakistan's "state sponsorship of jihad against India" and has described the LeT as "backed by Saudi money and protected by Pakistani intelligence services."



The reports cites a 2005 book by Haqqani in which the diplomat writes that earlier in the decade, the Inter Services Intelligence provided significant "severance pay" to jihadi leaders in return for their promise to "remain dormant for an unspecified duration."

Kronstadt writes: 'Among the alleged recipients of this ISI largesse were the LeT's Mohammad Hafeez [Images] Saeed and Masood Azhar, chief of the Pakistan-based, FTO-designated Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).'



Discussing the motivation behind the attacks, the report cites sources to suggest that it marks an escalation of the "war for Pakistan": 'an ongoing and essentially civil-level battle to determine whether Pakistan will be a moderate or an extremist state.'


The report also suggests that the attack is part of a "goal-oriented" effort to advance an overall strategy to defeat the US military and restore Taliban [Images] rule in Afghanistan -- a strategy the LeT is assumed to have bought into.


It also suggests that LeT's current goals transcend the Kashmiri separatism that has been its primary motivation, and are aimed at crippling the Indian state and conducting global war against a perceived "American-Zionist-Hindu" axis.


Arguing that the US intention of engaging with India more deeply in counter-terrorism is now established policy, the Kronstadt report says the Mumbai incident has elicited vocal calls for taking such cooperation to the next level.


While admitting that mutual distrust exists between the intelligence communities in both countries -- exacerbated by recent clandestine US efforts to penetrate Indian intelligence agencies -- the threat of Islamic terrorism spurs the need for more robust bilateral intelligence sharing and other official exchanges, including on maritime and cyber security.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/07mumterror-2611-aftermath-options-before-obama.htm



Where are groups that call themselves "human rights advocates" (like Human Rights Watch), who constantly publicize their critiques of countries like Cuba and Venezuela, but are silent on atrocities from Gaza to New Orleans to Oakland?
klw

Oscar Grant, young father and peacemaker, executed by BART police



Demand justice for Oscar Grant Wednesday, Jan. 7, 3-7 p.m., Fruitvale BART Station, Oakland
by Davey D

Oscar Grant, 22, murdered in cold blood by BART police just two hours into the new year, was the loving father of a 4-year-old daughter, a fact he told the police just as he was shot. He worked as a butcher at Farmer Joe’s Marketplace.

By now everyone has seen the horrific videos of an Oakland BART police officer shooting an unarmed Black man, Oscar Grant, while he lay face down on the ground and was fully cooperating. The man who was killed execution style was the father of a 4-year-old girl and was considered a peacemaker. In fact moments before he was shot he was pleading with his friends who were all cuffed up to calm down and be cooperative with police. Grant was seen begging the police officers, who had pulled tasers out and pointed them at the heads of his friends, not to shoot.

For reasons unknown to us, the police officer pushed Grant to the ground. One officer kneeled on his neck while the other officer pulled out a gun and shot him point blank in the back. The bullet went through his back, hit the ground and bounced back up and pierced his lung, killing him.

The police then ran around and terrified witnesses by taking away their cell phones and video cameras for “evidence.” The video, which was shot by a witness named Karina Vargas and has been seen by everyone on KTVU, was also going to be confiscated, except her train started moving as police attempted to snatch away her camera. The cops obviously did not see the other video cameras buzzing away.

What went down this New Year’s morning is a very disturbing sight and it has the entire city of Oakland on edge. Adding insult to injury is the refusal of BART police to acknowledge any wrongdoing. Police Chief Gary Gee says the tapes are inconclusive and he has thus far refused to even release the name of the police officer who is now on paid leave.

We have also come to find out that the young men along with Oscar Grant were snatched off the train by BART police who did not know whether or not these young men were involved in any sort of altercation. In short, it could’ve been any one of us pulled off the train that night.

Following is an interview broadcast Tuesday, Jan. 6, on Hard Knock Radio on KPFA 94.1 FM:

Davey D: I was listening to a number of speeches and old news clips that went all the way back to the murder of Bobby Hutton here in the city of Oakland and was remembering the harassment and the beat-down that Tupac Shakur got and going through just this long list of Black males who have been killed unceremoniously by the police department right here in the city all the way up to last year or the year before when everybody was down on protesting for the Jena 6 - and Gary King, 20 years old, was shot and killed in the back by an Oakland officer right here on 54th and Martin Luther King.

And this is just something that is ongoing and I guess the challenge before us in the aftermath of the execution of Oscar Grant, 22-year old father who was a peacemaker trying to get everybody to calm down - his friends, the police - who was seen on videotape around the world not struggling, cooperating, who was seen on videotape around the world, his face on the ground, his hands behind his back, as an officer shot him point blank, killing him.

And then that officer who our tax dollars are supposed to make sure that he protects and serves didn’t even have the courage to hold a press conference and say this is who I am and say his name. The last I heard he hadn’t even been interviewed. And then shame on the other officers around the Bay Area that saw this thing.

At a press conference Sunday called by John Burris, the family’s attorney, Oscar Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson, and his daughter’s mother, Sophina Mesa, comforted each other. – Photo: Dan Honda, Oakland Tribune

And we have people protesting all around the country and people upset, including our guests that we are going to talk to. You didn’t see any of them (other police officers) having a press conference to say, “Wow, we are appalled at the behavior of one of our own.” It’s something to think about.

In the studio this afternoon we have Evan Shamar, one of the individuals who was outraged enough to get a number of people to go down to the BART headquarters to protest what was going on, and on the phone line with us is another activist in the community, Dereca Blackman from Leadership Excellence. First of all welcome to the show.

Evan, I want to start off with you. What went through your mind as a young Black male when you saw this and where have things gone since you’ve seen this videotape and gotten word of what went down?

Evan: Just to premise my thoughts, no horror film can ever compare to the images which we saw. I want to start off by saying, a young developing human life was deemed insignificant by the ones sworn to protect and serve, to uphold justice, and the police wonder why they’re forced to carry around the stigma that we correspond with corruption.

They perpetuated this stigma to our reality and now we are left with Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old father - he’s just a memory now - and we’re supposed to swallow the fact that it may have been an accident. Well, I’m here to tell everybody, on behalf of everybody’s outrage, that we’re not going to swallow it; we’re not going to take it. This is not going to stop. We don’t want to see this officer put on administrative leave, we don’t want to see this officer terminated or fired, we will not stop until we see this police officer put on trial in an American courtroom for first degree murder.

Davey: That’s real talk right there. You know, talk about the type of exchanges that took place when you all went down to headquarters.

Evan: You know, we went down there; we were very peaceful. We had a small amount of people at first; then after a while people joined in and supported our efforts. The police were actually the most combative ones there if you really want to get down to it.

Davey: Combative in what way?

Evan: In the sense that they were trying to tell us to disburse, that we couldn’t be there when we even had a permit to be there. They were using physical force part of the time. I was actually a victim of one of the police officer’s physical force.

Davey: What did he do, put his billy club on you or … ?

Evan: One of the police officers actually … I got approached by a group of three officers and of course I was intimidated given the circumstances of what had happened. Three of them walked up to me and told me, “Sir, you’re going to have to get out of here” and one reached for his billy club and then reached for something. I don’t know what he was reaching for. The other one just took his forearm and positioned it as though it was a weapon and basically rushed me and threw me into somewhat of a bush. Now I didn’t fall but he rushed me.

Davey: Wow, and this is happening during the protest?

Evan: This is at the protest that we had organized that took place the day before yesterday.

Davey: Dereca Blackman, you’ve been an activist from Detroit all the way up here to the Bay. This movie we’ve seen so many times, what do you think we should do? The community that is outraged, what steps do you think they should start taking to move beyond the usual things that we’ve done in the past, which has been protesting and asking for some sort of redress from the mayor and government officials. That seems to not have changed, at least in our lifetimes. What do you think needs to happen next?

Dereca: Thanks again, Davey, for taking a lead on this issue and making sure that everybody has good information and thanks to Evan for putting together the rally for tomorrow. I think a lot of times when we talk about rallies and protests, people get frustrated because they don’t see it as part of a long-term solution. These are short-term solutions and they’re not going to solve long-term problems.

I think part of the issue is that long-term solutions require a variety of approaches and they require consistency. And we as a people have to look not just at what’s happening with this particular case, we need to look at what’s been a process that has continued to happen. And when you had John Burris (attorney for Oscar Grant’s family) on the other day, he was talking about some of the laws that have been passed that have facilitated this problem.

So we’re raising questions right now about police confiscating people’s cell phones for taking picture and videos of what was happening. What’s the legality behind that and how do we prompt ACLU and others to make a comment to those kinds of things happening.

What’s happening with the police officers’ union such that they’ve been able to pass measures and laws that allow them to not be interviewed so that they have time to get their story together? So now all of a sudden we’re hearing that he thought he was reaching for his taser. But they had days to get that story together as opposed to being interviewed on the spot about what happened.

So these are some of the things that we have to push back against. And we have to be vigilant. I think that this is a unique moment in history because all of us, whether it was through the election of Ron Dellums as mayor of Oakland or whether the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States came with a level of hope that we might have some integrity as individuals who would hold people accountable when things like this happen.

This is the moment. I think the legacy of Mayor Dellums in this city is right here on the line right now because if he doesn’t have the integrity to confront this issue - and it’s not necessarily about what he has the power to control. He has influence as a statesman and a local and national leader to make this issue of police accountability and police brutality relevant and important and discussed locally and nationally. He can make that happen.

And likewise, we need to take this issue all the way to the inauguration festivities and make sure police brutality becomes a part of the national agenda. I was mad about Abner Louima. I was mad about Amadou Diallo. I was sad at Gary King. I was sad at Sean Bell. Now I’m just tired, now I’m just fed up and we have to move with certainty - not just on short-term solutions but on long-term vigilance - to watch, monitor and maintain as laws are passed to facilitate the taking away of our rights.

Davey: That’s the voice of Dereca Blackman. Let me ask you, Evan, first of all before I get to my question, if you can let everybody know what is going on tomorrow, so if anybody who is listening if you could take down a piece of paper and pencil and write down this information so you can join the protests that are going on tomorrow. A lot of people have been wanting to know how they can plug in.

Evan: All right, so tomorrow we have a protest that’s going to take place from 3 to 7pm. We’d like everybody to get there at 3:00 at the Fruitvale BART Station where the victim was executed by the BART police officer. That takes place at 3 p.m. at Fruitvale BART and we will be set up in front of the vigil that has been set up by the friends and family. We ask that everybody come out with ambition, with vigor and with a voice.

Davey: Bring your cell phones and video cameras since the police made it a point to try …. Well, they took a number of cell phones is the reports we’re getting that might be under the auspices of having evidence. We would like everybody who comes out to the protest to be a citizen journalist …

Dereca: We just got a message, Davey, that some folks were down at Fruitvale today just to check things out and the police asked them if they had permits. So we already have an issue escalating right now that they are already blocking our rights to organize and peacefully protest. And we will be peaceful tomorrow and we want to make it clear that we do have a right to peacefully protest and we’re already having a strategy session around this issue of permits. We will rally tomorrow.

Evan: I actually sat down with, I was in City Hall yesterday and today for about three hours and I was trying to get this rally permitted. And they didn’t blatantly reject it but they gave me the run-around.

Davey: Let me ask you this: Here you are a young man in the city who is organizing people. You seem bright and you seem to be the type of individual that folks in power say we need more of. You know, you’re not somebody who is adding to the crime rate and the statistics or any of these things.

Have you heard from the city officials? Did Mayor Dellums look and see, “Hey, that’s somebody who was like me when I was a young man, trying to fight the power, so to speak”? Did you get any phone calls or encouraging conversations? Have people reached out to you to say we want to support you?

Evan: I haven’t. In fact, I’ve just been getting what I consider just discouraging information. I’ve actually gone down to the Mayor’s office where I was escorted out for bringing up the execution of Oscar Grant. They acted as though they didn’t want to speak about it.

I mean they’re not even trying to say ANYthing about what took place. This is just egregious and they’re not even saying anything. I mean we’re supposed to swallow that they’re sorry, that the officer may have gone for his taser? This officer went to something called a police academy, (had) extensive training that trained him on how to handle himself in a stressful situation, and now he’s trying to say that it was an accident?

You’re trained so that accidents don’t happen. We can’t let accidents cost human beings their lives. This man Oscar Grant was a father of a 4-year-old child and now that child doesn’t have a father to sleep with her at night. This is just ridiculous and we will not sit back and let this type of action by the ones who are sworn to protect and serve slide. We will just not sit back and let this happen. We will be on the front line.

Dereca said it best when she said this is the moment. Dereca, you are absolutely right. This IS the moment. We are on the front lines and it is time to stand our ground. We will not go quietly into the night. We are going to stand up for what is right and we will get justice for Oscar Grant.

Davey: That’s very sobering remarks. I want to thank you for coming in and sharing this with us. Dereca, any last comments that you would like to make to give people marching orders, some things to consider? We ask people to bring cell phones, to make phone calls to their local representatives, congressmen, assemblymen, mayor, whoever, and invite them to this rally and show up themselves and make sure that, as the old saying goes, the whole world is watching.

Dereca: Absolutely, so I think there are a number of things that people can do: We want to stay on top of our prosecutor; we want to make sure that this case is fully prosecuted. We want to continue to contact BART and talk to them about having an interview with this officer right away. We want to make sure that there’s a civilian review board. There will be a number of strategies that will be talked about at the rally tomorrow.

But I also want to say that this is not the only rally. This case has been picked up on the national media; it was on the front page of the CNN website. And I just got word that Harry Belafonte is going to be coming for another rally next week, so this is the first rally but there will be another one next Wednesday at a place to be determined.

So this is not just a rally, people. This is a movement that we’re asking you to come out, sign up and be a part of this. You can be a part of this in an ongoing way. We’re starting in Oakland but we’re taking this all the way to the White House.

Davey: We appreciate that. Evan Shamar, I would like you to make the connection to the very real tragedies that are taking place right now halfway around the world in a place called Gaza, in the Middle East. And we have a lot of our comrades and fellow activists and friends and allies that have been protesting since the days before Christmas for almost the same type of executions that seem to be routinely taking place (here).

Many innocent people are losing their lives on behalf of our tax dollars. Do you make the connection to the types of conversations that are going on overseas with what is taking place all too often with us and the police in cities like Oakland?

Evan: Absolutely, I like to refer to what’s going on overseas as just a blatant all-out massacre compared to what we have here that I consider to be a genocidal crockpot. What’s taking place here is it’s a slow-cook. We’re being eradicated slowly, one by one.

But what’s going on in Gaza is just disgusting. I can’t even really speak on it because I’ll get so …. It’s something that instills a certain level of disgust in me. I can’t talk about it all the time. But I definitely can make the correlation between the two. As I said, what we have is here is a genocidal crockpot and what’s going on in Gaza right now is a pure massacre.

And we’re actually going to be out on Saturday as well at the Civic Center protesting what’s going on over there because the bottom line is these are human beings. The human experience is a beautiful experience, and we can’t just deem it insignificant for no reason. I mean, I was talking to my buddies a few days ago about how many human beings have lived on planet Earth. There’ve been 120 billion human beings who have lived on planet Earth.

Let everybody have their turn. It’s our turn to have this experience. Don’t deem it insignificant - for your greed, for your corruption. Let us live. Let us live our lives. What’s going on in Gaza, what’s going on in Oakland, what’s going on all over the world, we have to put our foot down. We have to put our fists in the air in unity and say, “No more!” We won’t take this. It’s not a Black thing. It’s not a white thing. It’s not a yellow thing. We need to come together and stand up for what is right. And together we can do this.

Email Davey D at mrdaveyd@aol.com and visit daveyd.com. Listen to Davey on Hard Knock Radio Monday-Friday at 4 p.m. on KPFA 94.1 FM or kpfa.org.

http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/oscar-grant-young-father-and-peacemaker-executed-by-bart-police/

After 9/11, Bush suddenly had political capital


January 07, 2009
George Bush's presidency didn't begin well. Nor did it proceed well. Gone was the kinder, gentler America. Bush and his administration clearly believed in unilateralism, and didn't mind flexing muscle to show America means business, even to its allies, recalls Matthew Schneeberger in this second part of our ongoing series looking back at the Bush years.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

George W Bush had only been president for a few days when several high level American bureaucrats began doubting him.

Richard Clarke -- former White House chief counter-terrorism adviser and a respected figure in Washington, DC -- had this to say about his initial interactions with the new president: 'The contrast with having briefed his father (41st US President George Hebert Walker Bush) and (42nd US President Bill) Clinton and (former vice-president Al) Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by (then National Security Adviser Condoleezza) Condi Rice and (her deputy) Steve Hadley: 'Don't give the president a lot of long memos; he's not a big reader.' Well, s**t. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?'

First in the series: Inauspicious beginning, inglorious end

David Kuo, former deputy director at the White House, has said of the administration, 'I remember feeling like I was looking at people who had won a reality game ticket to head up the White House. There was this remarkable combination of hubris, excitement and staggering ignorance.'

And though Bush had won by the narrowest of margins, he conducted himself as if he had a clear mandate from the voters. On getting legislation pushed through the US Senate, which was evenly split at the time between Republicans and Democrats, his advisor Karl Rove's theory was that 'we only need 51 votes (out of 100)', meaning that sweeping changes -- like Bush's massive $1.35 trillion tax cut package, which heavily favoured the affluent -- were made by only the slimmest of margins. Partisanship and rancour, naturally, increased.

Clinton -- despite his personal shortcomings -- left America in an advantageous position in foreign affairs. He had emphasised dialogue, diplomacy and cooperation, guiding America to the head of many powerful international bodies. But suddenly, under Bush, it became clear that America's foreign policy agenda had changed; foreign politicians and bureaucrats too began to doubt the new president.

George Bush, the final flight

Joschka Fischer, at the time Germany's [Images] foreign minister, has been quoted describing how different the Clinton and Bush administrations were in day-to-day operations. 'This was the UK, France [Images], Italy [Images] and Germany, together with the US, on the phone (daily). And suddenly it stopped. We had very, very few (calls). The new administration was not interested any longer in a multinational coordination.'

An exasperated Bill Graham, at the time Canada's [Images] foreign minister and later defence minister, has said of the new US Secretary for Defence Donald Rumsfeld, 'Mr Rumsfeld was not about listening and being cooperative. Mr Rumsfeld was about getting the way of the United States. 'Don't get in my way or my juggernaut will run over you'.'

All of this came to a head when the United States unilaterally abandoned two international agreements: the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, and the US-Russia Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Though he'd only been president for six months, by the summer of 2001 Bush was becoming unpopular both domestically and abroad. September 10, 2001, polling data shows him to have had a 51% approval rating with Americans, an ominous sign for a newly elected president (they usually garner high ratings).

My words tarnished my image: Bush

The next day, September 11, the president visited a classroom in a Florida [Images] elementary school. He was there for a photo-op and to read aloud the children's story The Pet Goat. It was a live broadcast, intended to show Bush's commitment to education.

But that very same morning, 19 terrorists had hijacked four commercial airliners with the intention of inflicting grievous harm on the United States. They crashed two of the planes into New York City's iconic World Trade Centre, toppling the twin towers and killing over 3,000 people. They crashed another into the Pentagon [Images] -- the heart of the US Department of Defence -- killing 184. The fourth plane, rumoured to be destined for either the US Capitol building (where Congress meets) or the White House, crashed in rural Pennsylvania. It was the biggest and most deadly attack on US soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Most Americans interpreted it as an act of war.

The following morning, the classy French newspaper Le Monde carried an editorial titled 'We are all Americans'. Dozens of countries sent their condolences in a show of solidarity and promised to stand by America's side in her efforts to bring to justice those who perpetrated the attacks.

After an unremarkable and highly forgettable first eight months in office, Bush suddenly had political capital. And lots of it

But how would he spend it?

Matthew Schneeberger is an American reporter at rediff.com's editorial headquarters in Mumbai [Images]

Image: White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card informs President George W Bush [Images] about a second airplane flying into New York City's World Trade Centre, while the president was reading to the children at the Emma E Booker elementary school in Sarasato, Florida, September 11, 2001.Photograph: Win McNamee JDP/Reuters

http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/07-bush-suddenly-had-political-capital.htm

Biden to visit Pakistan: Report
January 07, 2009 17:52 IST
Last Updated: January 07, 2009 18:25 IST

US vice-president-elect Joseph Biden would be travelling to South West Asia, including to Pakistan, on a fact-finding mission this week leading a bipartisan Congressional delegation, but may not visit India.



Speaking to Congressional reporters after taking oath as a Senator for the seventh time, Biden revealed that he would travel to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan but made no reference to India as an itinerary for his upcoming visit.



"This will be my God-knows-how-many trips, I guess my 10th or 11th trip into Iraq and I don't know how many times in Afghanistan and Pakistan," Biden was quoted as saying by Politico, which is known for its extensive coverage of US Congress.



The details of his visit were being kept under wraps by his office for security reasons. Politico said Biden revealed the key stops of his upcoming foreign trip without even being asked. Biden would be leading the Congressional delegation in the capacity as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just days before he takes office alongside Barack Obama [Images] on January 20.

He would be accompanied by Senator John Kerry, the former Democratic Presidential candidate and the incoming Chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee. For security reasons, details of the trip and the countries to be visited were kept secret until now, with estimates suggesting countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan or India and parts of the Middle East.
http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/jan/07mumterror-biden-to-visit-pakistan.htm

The report, currently before the US Congress, was among the study materials for Senator John Kerry, who is scheduled to take over as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee replacing Vice-President Elect Joseph Biden. Kerry, along with Biden and senior Republican party members of the committee, are reportedly visiting the sub-continent this week, though for security reasons their schedule has been kept under wraps.
The Rediff News Bureau
'Manmohan's statement equivalent declaration of war'
Islamabad: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's accusation that Pakistan was using terrorism as an "instrument of state policy" can push the tension between the two countries in the wake of the Mumbai carnage toward the danger zone, analysts here fear.

The government and most experts were surprised with Manmohan Singh's statement. In Pakistan, the Indian prime minister is considered a "low profile and a decent politician".

"Such accusations at this stage can damage the efforts for normalisation of relations and can be very dangerous as forces in both the countries are on high alert," said security analyst Brig. (retd) Masood Akhtar.

Akhtar told IANS that the way "India is handling the issue seems that they are in a hurry to get hold of the people they have demanded from Pakistan".

"I am afraid that with the troops on borders any wrong step can push us into a serious problem," he said.

Talat Hussain, a senior journalist, said that the statement by Singh is "indirect declaration of war". Backing his point, he said that the prime minister has accused Pakistan of the Mumbai attacks meaning now India can retaliate to this.

He termed the statement as "ill-timed and a step in the wrong direction", adding India should have waited for Islamabad's response after providing evidence on the Mumbai attacks.


Singh is King of accusations
The News carried the prime minister's statement and Pakistan's reaction under headline "Singh is King of accusations and closing avenues of cooperation" in an obvious reference to Indian movie "Sinngh is King" that is being shown in 16 cinema halls of Pakistan.

Minister for Northern Areas and Kashmir Affairs Qamar Zaman Kaira said that the statement by the Indian prime minister is a serious blow to Pakistan's efforts for helping India in investigation of the Mumbai attacks and cooperation on other issues.


Election ploy?
He said: "The timing of the statement suggests that it was an election ploy by the Congress through which they can gain sympathy votes.

"The Indian attitude is highly regrettable and instead of resolving the problem, India was appreciating those forces who have destabilised the peace process between the two countries."
The minister termed the Mumbai attacks as an attempt by the hawkish and anti-peace elements and said: "I would say Indian rulers are becoming instruments in the hands of these people".


India whips up tension
The Pakistan government issued a rebuttal to the statement by Prime Minister Singh under the title "India whips up tension", terming the "allegations" as "unfortunate" and "a propaganda offensive".

The statement said: "Government of India was advised not to embark on political point scoring. Regrettably this advice has not been heeded. Pakistan is a victim of terrorism. This pernicious phenomenon is regionally pervasive. Pakistan has suffered more terror attacks than India. But we have not lost our equanimity."

It said that Pakistan "strongly rejects efforts at political and military coercion, which are counter-productive. India must refrain from hostile propaganda, and must not whip up tensions. It must also take steps to de-escalate its offensive military posture against Pakistan".

Source: Indo-Asian News Service

Pakistani using terror as 'state policy': PM
New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Tuesday squarely blamed Pakistan for the Nov 26 terrorist attack in Mumbai, calling the government there "fragile" and "irresponsible" and said it had "utilised" terrorism as an instrument of state policy against India.

“The governments in some of our neighbouring countries are very fragile in nature. The more fragile a government, the more it tends to act in an irresponsible fashion. Pakistan's responses to our various demarches on terrorist attacks is an example,” said Manmohan Singh while addressing a meeting of all the state chief ministers on the issue of internal security.

This is the first time the prime minister has explicitly singled out Pakistan's role in the 26/11 attacks and detailed how it continued to harbour terror groups that were antagonistic to India.
Sponsored terrorism

His statement comes close on the heels of Home Minister P. Chidambaram categorically rejecting the Pakistani theory that the people behind the Mumbai attacks were non-state actors.

“Terrorism, on the other hand, is largely sponsored from outside the country, mainly Pakistan, which has utilised terrorism as an instrument of state policy,” asserted the prime minister, a day after the government handed over material evidence to Pakistan linking Pakistani based militants to the Mumbai attacks.

Pointing out that terrorists were enlarging the canvas of threats concentrating on attacking economic, infrastructure, and iconic targets, Manmohan Singh urged greater vigilance along the 7,500 km coast line and better monitoring of maritime activity in territorial waters.

He also called for a strong sense of nationhood to withstand both types of threats.

“Our nation is clearly united in our determination to defeat both external as well as internal security challenges. Our determination and sense of nationhood derives from our inheritance of a great historical experience of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-caste and multi-lingual society.”


Pak whipping war hysteria
“Today, even as Pakistan engages in whipping up war hysteria, our nation remains steadfastly united and, if anything, the process of national consolidation is becoming stronger.”

Though India's external policies have been dictated by a desire to have a supportive neighbourhood, the prime minister lamented that was not possible.

“Unfortunately, we cannot choose our neighbours, and some countries like Pakistan have in the past encouraged and given sanctuary to terrorists and other forces who are antagonistic to India.”

“Consequent upon this, those incharge of the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan have resorted to other stratagems to infiltrate terrorists into India. Infiltration is occurring via Nepal and from Bangladesh, though it has not totally ceased via the Line of Control.”


Terrorists using Sea route
“We are aware that the sea route is another option that is now being exercised. A few interceptions have taken place, though we failed to intercept the 10 Pakistani terrorists who came by sea from Karachi.”

Delving at length on the role of Pakistan in the attacks, Manmohan Singh unequivocally stated that official agencies were involved.

“The terrorist attack in Mumbai in November last year was carried out by a Pakistan-based outfit, the Lashkar-e-Taiba,” he said.

“On the basis of the investigations carried out, (including by agencies of some foreign countries whose nationals were killed in the attack), there is enough evidence to show that, given the sophistication and military precision of the attack it must have had the support of some official agencies in Pakistan.”



Pattern in Mumbai attacks

The prime minister said he discerned a pattern in the Mumbai attacks that was to strike a blow on the country's economic and security interests.

“In the case of Mumbai, a definite link can be discerned between our economic and security interests. Targetting of foreigners, specially from the West, was obviously intended to convey an impression that India was unsafe as a destination for the West and western investments. “

“We need to effectively counter this impression. We need to ensure that another major terrorist attack does not take place on our soil. We must implement the policy of 'zero tolerance of terrorism' with total commitment.”

Manmohan Singh also made a strong case for coming up with the best of technological and human capabilities within the country to defeat terrorism in all its manifestations.

Indo-Asian News Service



Meanwhile, in ISLAMABAD, the chief of Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has said there will not be a war with India over November's terrorist attacks on Mumbai, Der Spiegel reported. Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha told the German magazine in an interview terrorism, not India, was Pakistan's enemy, and he said he took orders from the civilian president.
"There will not be a war," Pasha said. "We are distancing ourselves from conflict with India, both now and in general."

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh stepped up a war of words on Tuesday, saying for the first time the assault "must have had the support of some official agencies in Pakistan".

Pakistan has denied any involvement by state agencies and rejected Singh's accusation, saying India was ratcheting up tension and risked destroying all prospects of a serious and objective investigation.

Pasha said that soon after the Mumbai attack, Pakistan had anticipated an India military response.


India is spending $92 million to develop the fighters with precise navigational equipment, better weapons aiming and accurate ranging sensors for hitting ground targets.

"The hardware and avionics bit has already been fitted into 40 fighters, and the software is being loaded now," said Suranjan Pal, a senior Defence Research and Development Organisation official.

With the upgrading, the MiG fighters would last for another 10 years and have autopilot and auto weapon delivery facilities, a senior Indian Air Force official said.

India is looking to spend $30 billion on imports over the next five years to modernise its largely Soviet-era arms and is also trying to strengthen its navy by introducing new weapons systems.

The MiG-27 aircraft was originally built in the former Soviet Union in the mid-1970s before it was licenced to be produced in India.

India, fast becoming one of the world's biggest arms importers, wants to modernise its air force, the fourth largest in the world, to cope with possible security threats in the region, security experts said.

"This is something more than it meets the eye, India is now very keen to signal to all the people that are monitoring the country that India is modernising its defence units," says C. Uday Bhaskar, a strategic affairs expert. "It seems we are now putting all the pieces together."

India is also considering upgrading of its other fighter fleet, including Mirage 2000s, Jaguars and MiG 29s, ahead of procuring the new generation Sukhoi-30MKIs, officials said.

It has also invited bids for a contract to supply 126 multi-role fighter jets, potentially worth more than $10 billion.

Mumbai terrorists had links to UK, says MI5 chief
London Warning that the Mumbai attacks, in which the terrorists targeted public places, could become a ‘model’ for future terror strikes, Britain's intelligence service MI5 chief has said his agency has uncovered links between the gunmen who struck in the Indian metropolis and the UK.
Jonathan Evans, in a rare interaction with the media, said the terrorists, who attacked Mumbai in November, had indirect links with Britain.

"We have looked at individuals' communications, where they have been and so on and found they have got connections with most countries including the UK, but not of national security significance," he said.

But the MI5 director general warned that Mumbai could become a model for future terrorist attacks in the same ‘iconic’ way as September 11 strikes in the US.

"If the method used in Mumbai of using firearms in public places becomes adopted as a model, it changes our most likely scenarios," he added.

Evans said that scores of British Muslims were still travelling to terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan every year. Others are travelling to lawless areas of Somalia.

The main threats to Britain come from al-Qaeda's core in Pakistan and their ‘assets in this country’, he said.

"We continue to believe that the ability lies in Pakistan to attack the UK," Evans said, adding that 75 per cent of their investigations have connections with Pakistan.

26/11 attackers have links in Pakistan: Boucher
Washington Supporting India's views on involvement of Pakistan-based terror outfits in Mumbai attacks, the US has said those involved in the strikes have links in Islamabad.
US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, Richard Boucher, has said those involved in the Mumbai terror attacks have links in Pakistan.

"I would say it's clear that they had links in Pakistan, that the attackers had links that lead to Pakistani soil" Boucher said in Islamabad on Monday, according to transcripts released by State Department in Washington on Wednesday.

"And as far as exactly what those links were and who they were attached to and how they did this, I think that's a matter that's still under investigation," Boucher told reporters in response to a question.

Boucher, who talked with Pak leadership on this issue at length, reiterated that whoever was involved in this, needs to be held responsible. "But I also wouldn't jump to any particular conclusions," he said.

"It's important that anybody who was involved in this, in the planning and execution of this act, be brought to justice and held accountable. I think leaders in Pakistan are determined to do that. They're determined to pursue the investigation. And we'll have to watch as it unfolds to see where it leads," he said.

When asked about evidence given by India to Pakistan on Mumbai attacks, Boucher refrained from passing any judgment at this stage as the investigations were still on.

"I think we're at the stage where people need to share information, follow up leads, and determine everything they can about what happened," Boucher said.


ADC Demands Immediate Investigation into Israeli Massacre at UN School

PRESS RELEASE

Washington, DC | January 6, 2009 | www.adc.org | The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) calls on the United Nations (UN), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the International Community to investigate Israel's bombing of a UN-operated school in Gaza, killing over 40 Palestinians. ADC also called on the Bush Administration and President-elect Obama to publicly address and repudiate today's tragedy and the ongoing violence and humanitarian crisis. The bombing of civilian populations is a violation of international humanitarian law and the laws of war including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.


According to reports, Israel bombed this UN-operated school, located in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing many civilians who had sought shelter from Israel's continued bombardment and blockade of the Gaza Strip. The tactics of the Israeli Army, using heavy artillery, helicopter fire and massive bombs from fighter jets on the dense and overwhelmingly civilian Gaza Strip has caused more than 640 civilian deaths and 3,000 injuries, some people being maimed for life. The Israeli army said four of its soldiers had been killed in two separate friendly-fire incidents on Tuesday, when errant Israeli tank shells hit their positions and 60 Israelis have been injured by rocket attacks launched from Gaza into southern Israel.


The residents of Gaza, one of the most densely populated areas in the World, are surrounded by Israel's military occupation and they have no place to take refuge from the ongoing onslaught. More than 18 months ago, Israel began to blockade Gaza, leaving the residents of Gaza with limited to no access to water, electricity, food, and medicine. Even before Israel began its military assault ten days ago there was a growing humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, now the situation is even more dire and desperate.


Food is hard to come by because of Israel's ongoing blockade of Gaza and now it's even more expensive for those who can actually afford to buy food. Gaza's water authorities indicated wells in Gaza are not working due to lack of power and damage to the pipes, while others are operating only partially.


Hospitals are overwhelmed and lack basic necessities, if people can even get to the hospitals. Emergency aid workers have been unable to reach the wounded and supplies for hospitals are being held up and not reaching their destinations. Hospitals are relying on backup generators for electricity and rolling electricity cuts leave patients in jeopardy.




###
NOTE TO EDITORS: The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which is non sectarian and non partisan, is the largest Arab-American civil rights organization in the United States. It was founded in 1980, by former Senator James Abourezk to protect the civil rights of people of Arab descent in the United States and to promote the cultural heritage of the Arabs. ADC has 38 chapters nationwide, including chapters in every major city in the country, and members in all 50 states.
______________________________________________________________
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee | www.adc.org
1732 Wisconsin Ave., NW | Washington, DC 20007
Tel: 202-244-2990 | Fax: 202-244-7968 | Media@adc.org

Mossad role in Turkey coup plot revealed
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=77062§ionid=351020204

Tuncay Gueny is suspected of attempts to topple Turkish government.

Israel's national intelligence agency Mossad has been behind a failed
coup in Turkey, the Turkish daily newspaper, Milliyet reports.

A secret investigation into detained Ergenekon group members and
other studies outside Turkey indicate that Mossad orchestrated the
coup plot against the Turkish government, the report says.

The Ergenekon group is a Turkish neo-nationalist organization with
alleged links to the military, members of which have been arrested on
charges of plotting to foment unrest in the country.

Investigators uncovered evidence that show a Jewish rabbi named
Tuncay Guney, who worked for Mossad and fled to Canada in 2004, was a
key figure behind attempts to overthrow the Turkish government.

A document uncovered this week by the Sabah daily shows how Guney
purposefully infiltrated Ergenekon and another organization known as
JITEM, an illegal intelligence unit in the gendarmerie suspected of
hundreds of murders and kidnappings .

The rabbi was taken out of Turkey and sent to the US for protection
after his identity was exposed in an investigation by Turkish police,
according to Sabah.

Guney is also reported to have links with Israeli espionage
activities in Egypt. According to Egyptian security forces, at least
one of three suspects currently being pursued by the Egyptian
government for spying was in contact with Tuncay Guney.

Meanwhile, a separate report by Turkish daily Yeni Safak has claimed
that Turkish security forces have discovered some bags in Guney's
Istanbul house that include the Israeli flag and Mossad's slogan.

According to an earlier report by Aksamanother Turkish daily, Mossad
has been involved in several ambiguous events in Turkey.

The report claimed that Turkish security forces have discovered
documents that disclose information concerning suspicious investment
and economic activities by certain Jewish businessmen in Turkey.

The Jewish businessmen are alleged to have had significant relations
with individuals, political groups and cultural organizations, which
investigations show are affiliated to the Ergenekon group.

Turkish security forces have detained many members of the Ergenekon
group, including retired army generals, politicians, popular lawyers
and famous journalists. The individuals currently face trail on
charges of plotting to overthrow Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip
Erdoga.

http://www.counterpunch.org/khalidi01052009.html

January 5, 2009


Hello, This is the IDF...


Gaza Phone Tag
By MUHAMMAD ALI KHALIDI


“…hundreds of thousands of Gazans have received warnings in the form of telephone messages or fliers that their buildings are Israeli targets…”


-- New York Times, 1 January 2009


I sraeli soldier: Hello, Abdul, this is the Israel Defense Forces speaking…

Palestinian civilian: My name isn’t Abdul, I think you have the wrong number.

I: As I said this is the IDF, we never have wrong information.

P: So how can I help you?

I: I’m just calling to warn you to evacuate your place because of an imminent airstrike on a Hamas target in your building.

P: But there’s no Hamas in my building.

I: Not even on your street?

P: No, there was a Hamas member of parliament on the next street but you put him in jail.

I: Must be old information, anyway, there’s going to be an airstrike so you better go.

P: Can you tell me where you’d like me to go to?

I: It’s not my business, check into a hotel, stay with relatives on the beach, take a vacation in Cyprus, just go.

P: I’ve been unemployed for a year because of your siege so I can’t afford a hotel right now. My relatives just got bombed on the beach, in the Shati’ refugee camp. And I can’t get out of Gaza because no one can leave.

I: Don’t blame me, I’m just warning you.

P: So, if there were a Hamas guy in my building, what would prevent me from going to warn him so he could escape the airstrike?

I: Hmm… we hadn’t thought of that. I’ll make a note of it for my commanding officer.

P: Are you going to call everyone else in the building, or should I spread the word myself?

I: Do us a favor and tell the women and children. We’re mostly concerned not to harm children.

P: You mean, like the 634 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security personnel in Gaza since September 2000?

I: Maybe they weren’t civilians--we’re only concerned with civilian children.

P: As opposed to the terroristic children who attack you?

I: Hey, don’t make fun of the IDF, we’re a very sensitive army, we don’t take criticism well.

P: Sorry, it’s just that you haven’t been too concerned with children’s lives throughout this last ceasefire­you killed two teenagers on December 2. I guess they were just “collateral damage” from a targeted assassination.

I: Hey, it’s tough to be surgical, but we do our best. We don’t do what we call “Arab work”. No offense.

P: While you’re being so helpful, can you tell me when you might turn the power back on in Gaza?

I: I have no information on that.

P: Any idea when we can get fuel for our cars? Or medical supplies? Or food and water?

I: Listen, there’s no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, don’t believe the Hamas propaganda. Anyway, I’m only obeying orders, if it weren’t for me you would have been dead soon.

P: I still might be.

I: Yeah, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

P: I have to go now, I hear an F-16 overhead.

I: Right on schedule! And remember to stay away from mosques, they’re usually stuffed full of explosives.

P: (Hangs up)

Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto. He can be reached at: khalidi@yorku.ca

Why Cuba Still Matters
Diana Raby

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090105raby.php

The U.S.-Backed War on Gaza
The Silent Partner
By LARRY EVEREST
Shortly after darkness fell on Saturday night, January 3, Israel launched a massive land invasion of Gaza involving 9,000-10,000 soldiers, tanks, helicopters, and heavy artillery, engineering and intelligence forces, with the support of Israel’s Air Force, navy, and secret police and spy agencies. The ground invasion came after Israel, for the first time, unleashed an artillery barrage on Gaza, striking a mosque and killing at least 11 people. By the next day, Israeli forces had reportedly cut Gaza in half, “bisecting” it between north and south.

Seven straight days of Israeli bombing before the invasion had already resulted in an estimated 460 killed and 2,285 wounded (with the numbers increasing by the hour). Now more carnage looms with The New York Times (January 4, 2009) already reporting “Wounded civilians poured into the emergency room of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday, including women and children.” And Israel’s ban on journalists from entering Gaza means that much death and destruction has gone unreported.

In a despicable display of threat and false show of concern, Israel dropped leaflets over northern Gaza telling residents: “For your own safety, you are asked to leave the area immediately.” Yet Palestinians are trapped in Gaza by Israel. Where are they supposed to go?

This raises the specter that many people, unable to leave, will be murdered. And according to a March 2008 report on Israeli Channel Two (after a visit from U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice), Israel’s strategy may be “for the removal of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the northern Gaza Strip, namely from the region that the resistance uses for the launch of these rockets, and to move them toward Gaza City and to confine them there.” (See http://arablinks.blogspot.com/2008/03/after-meeting-condi-israeli-officials.html)

The forced removal of a civilian population is the textbook definition of ethnic cleansing and a war crime.

In the past several days the U.S. government has made its support for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza crystal clear. The U.S. was informed before Israel launched its attacks (and was reportedly involved in months of Israeli planning), and now CNN reports (January 4, 2009) that the U.S. military was “aware in advance of Israel’s plans to enter Gaza.”

So it is telling that on the very day of Israel’s invasion, President Bush gave his first public statement on Gaza—condemning Hamas, raising no criticism of Israel, and opposing a ceasefire, but instead justifying Israel’s attack: “This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas—a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel’s destruction.”

The same day, Secretary of State Rice strongly backed Israel and condemned any cease-fire that didn’t meet Israeli objectives. And the day before, a White House spokesperson said any decision on a ground invasion would be Israel’s to make—in other words, a bright green light for Israel from the U.S.
Meanwhile, President-elect Barack Obama has supported the Bush regime and Israel by refusing to publicly comment, while his spokespeople repeat campaign statements supporting Israeli action against Hamas.

Imperial Aims

The U.S. through Israel is aiming to tighten its imperial domination of the entire strategic region. And Israel, for its part, aims not only to aid U.S. imperialism in that, but to strengthen its own fortress-like settler state, even more ruthlessly oppressing and dominating the Palestinians.

The U.S., together with Israel, has a number of intertwining objectives it hopes to achieve with this military assault in Gaza. It wants to even more forcefully assert and hammer down the dominance of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. As part of its so-called “war on terror,” the U.S. wants to further undermine and push back Islamic fundamentalist forces that pose a challenge to the U.S. empire. And it wants to brutally put down the struggle of the Palestinian people and break their will to resist.

“Surgical” Strikes Targeting a Society

Israel claims that Hamas “started it,” and that now Israel is simply trying to defend itself against Hamas “terrorists,” in order to stop rocket attacks on Israel and the Jewish people.

Yet there is absolutely nothing just or legitimate about Israel’s targeting of Hamas.

For one, it was Israel that first broke the ceasefire in November and has refused to negotiate its renewal (while planning this attack for its own strategic objectives for over six months). Israel’s war is aimed at strengthening its stranglehold on Palestine, by defeating Islamic fundamentalist forces like Hamas that pose an obstacle to unfettered US-Israeli control. As one senior military officer put it, Israel’s goal was “making Hamas lose their will or lose their weapons.”

One Israeli spokesperson declared, “We have defined legitimate targets as any Hamas-affiliated target.” (Washington Post, January 2, 2009). Armed forces deputy chief of staff Brigadier General Dan Harel stated, “After this operation there will not be a single Hamas building left standing in Gaza.” (Ynet News)

The Palestinian people have a long history of fierce resistance and uprising against the brutal Israeli occupation. And Israel faces a lot of necessity to put down this struggle. This is why, while Israel is targeting Hamas as the governing party in Gaza with ties to Iran—it is also doing this as a way of breaking the back of the resistance of the masses, which has been a U.S.-Israeli goal for over 60 years. Consider the fact that “[H]undreds of thousands of Gazans have received warnings in the form of telephone messages or fliers that their buildings are Israeli targets.” (New York Times, January 2, 2009)

Or consider U.S.-Israeli objections to a resolution proposed by the Arab League calling for “an immediate ceasefire and for its full respect by both sides,” and for Israel to abide by the Geneva Convention with regard to protecting civilians in time of war. The U.S. attacked it as “unbalanced,” after earlier forcing the removal of language calling on Israel to lift its blockade of Gaza and stop the collective punishment of Palestinians. (Antiwar.com, January 1, 2009). So even abiding by basic international law concerning war crimes and crimes against humanity is intolerable for the U.S. and Israel, and an impediment to their criminal attacks on the Palestinian people!

The U.S. has also opposed calls for a cease fire, blaming Hamas for the fighting and demanding it stop firing rockets before Israel is required to halt its military assault—in effect blocking any diplomatic moves that could in any way impede Israel’s attack.

What Israel is doing in Gaza is like the Nazis confining people in the Warsaw ghetto during World War 2 and then seizing on their resistance to declare, “we’re are being attacked and anyone who says anything about the situation has to first agree on that—and before anything can be done to resolve the situation, the people in the Warsaw ghetto have to stop attacking us.”

The U.S. and Israel’s Broader “War On Terror” Aims

Israel’s military assault on Gaza is part of a broad U.S.-Israeli counter-offensive against Islamic fundamentalist forces and Iran in particular which is seen by both as crucial to their broader “war on terror” objectives. This war, really a war for empire, is aimed at crushing Islamic fundamentalist forces, peoples and states which stand in the way of U.S. designs, and restructuring the region in order to strengthen the U.S. This war has made the U.S.-Israel’s strategic relationship ever more pivotal today.

Israel’s long-planned attack on Gaza is aimed at rolling back Hamas’ January 2006 election victory and its summer 2007 seizure of power in Gaza, as well as Israel’s political defeat in its summer 2006 war against the powerful and reactionary Hezbollah Islamic fundamentalist forces in Lebanon—Israel couldn’t deliver on its promise to destroy Hezbollah, which instead emerged strengthened. It’s also aimed at restoring Israel’s military “credibility”: “to expunge the ghost of its flawed 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon and re-establish Israeli deterrence,” as the New York Times put it.

This war is also part of a broader U.S.-Israeli effort to roll back regional gains by Islamist forces, especially Iran, which is a large, relatively powerful and coherent Islamic theocratic state with enormous energy resources and its own reactionary ambitions. Iran has challenged U.S.-Israeli regional hegemony through its increasing influence in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, and the region generally. It’s also pursuing nuclear enrichment, which is considered intolerable in Washington and Tel Aviv, because even Iranian mastery of this technology could shift the regional military balance and impede U.S. and Israeli freedom of military action, even if Iran didn’t immediately make a nuclear bomb.

Hamas and the Iranian government do not offer the people a road to liberation and they do not break with imperialism in any fundamental way. These forces represent reactionary outmoded social relations. At the same time, it is important to be clear that it is U.S. imperialism, ruled by reactionary outmoded ruling strata, which has done and continues to do by far the greater damage and poses the greater threat to humanity (often, as in this case, acting through Israel).

Bush targeted Iran in his most recent radio address. Sallai Meridor, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., stated, “What you see in Gaza is made by Iran—it’s funded by Iran, the terrorists are trained by Iran, it’s supplied by Iran, the know-how to create short range rockets is Iranian,” calling Iran “an octopus,” with proxies in region and beyond the region.” (Press TV, December 30, 2008)
Former U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who remains a major voice in U.S. foreign policy, recently warned Fox News. “So while our focus obviously is on Gaza right now, this could turn out to be a much larger conflict. We’re looking at potentially a multi-front war.”

So the danger of this crime spiraling into even wider and more criminal war is very real. This is all the more reason to step up efforts to broadly educate people about what’s actually going on in Gaza, and to build very broad mass resistance—immediately.

Larry Everest is the author of Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda (one of the books that influenced the script of "W" - Oliver Stone’s just-released movie about George W. Bush),, a correspondent for Revolution (www.revcom.us) and a contributor to Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (Seven Stories). He can be reached via www.larryeverest.com.

http://www.counterpunch.org/everest01062009.html
Diana Raby is senior fellow at the Research Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool (UK) and is also professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto. She has written extensively on Latin America and is also active in solidarity movements such as the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and the Venezuela Information Centre (UK). Her latest book, Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today (London: Pluto Press, 2006), argues for the crucial importance of Venezuela, along with Cuba and the ALBA countries, in the renewal of the international left in this century.


In the early 1990s there was near unanimity in the media, in Western political circles, and even among academics that the collapse of the Cuban revolution was imminent. Even today, many observers regard it as only a matter of time for Cuba to undergo a transition to democracy (understood as a narrowly defined polyarchy) and a “market economy.”

But the fact that Cuban socialism has survived the extraordinary rigors of the “Special Period” and is still functioning nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall should give pause for thought. Even the prolonged incapacity of Fidel Castro and his subsequent resignation as president has not led to chaos or upheaval, as many predicted. Why then has Cuba survived, and what does it mean for socialist and progressive politics today?

The simple answer is that, for all its problems and deficiencies, the revolutionary order is still viable. Many Cubans still believe in socialist principles; they naturally grumble about shortages and restrictions, but have few illusions about the alternative on offer across the Florida Straits.

But why is this so? What makes Cuba different from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? To understand this it is necessary to go back to the origins of the revolution and the remarkable transformation that occurred from 1959 to 1963. Before the revolution, Cuba was a U.S. protectorate, a vast sugar plantation where venal “democratic” governments alternated with brutal dictatorships. The idea of a socialist revolution here—or anywhere else in the U.S. “backyard” of the Caribbean and Central America—was unthinkable. So on January 1, 1959, when the dictator Batista fled and the bearded guerrillas entered Havana and Santiago, almost no one anticipated the scope and depth of the changes that were to follow.

The Cuban transition to socialism was one of the most rapid and thorough anywhere in the world: the first and second Agrarian Reform Laws, the nationalization of virtually all large industries and services, the extraordinary literacy campaign and the establishment of free public education at all levels, free universal health care, and the organization of a popular militia and disciplined mass organizations from neighborhood level upwards, all in the space of four years or so.

Yet in the first six months of 1959 all the rhetoric was about democracy and humanism; socialism was scarcely even mentioned until mid-1960, and was not officially adopted as the goal until April 1961, two years and four months after the initial victory (during the Bay of Pigs invasion). The 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) which had led the armed struggle and seized power was a broad and heterogeneous movement that had serious differences with what was then Cuba’s Communist party, the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). The revolution was immensely popular, but many observers expected (or feared) that it would eventually suffer the same fate as Guatemala five years earlier, where the popular Arbenz government was overthrown by a CIA-sponsored coup.

The tremendous euphoria generated by the revolution in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, and its initial ideological flexibility, are fundamental for understanding its significance. Taking place in a region and at a time when U.S. hegemony was undisputed, where the great Mexican revolution had been neutralized and progressive movements like those of Sandino in Nicaragua, Grau San Martín in Cuba in 1933, Gaitán in Colombia, and Arbenz in Guatemala had been crushed by overt or covert U.S. intervention, the Cuban triumph had an immediate symbolic impact. On his first trip abroad after victory, to Venezuela in late January 1959, Fidel Castro was received by delirious crowds. In February the then Chilean Senator Salvador Allende declared that “The Cuban revolution does not belong only to you...we are dealing with the most significant movement ever to have occurred in the Americas,”1 and shortly afterwards Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the assassinated Colombian popular leader, proclaimed that the Cuban experience was “the beginning of the great liberation of Nuestra América [Our America].”2 Former president of Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas, author of the 1938 oil nationalization in that country, also gave enthusiastic support to Cuba.

The most obvious distinctive feature of the Cuban revolution—and the essential reason for its ability to avoid the fate of Guatemala, defeating the counter-revolutionary Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961—was the unprecedented military victory of the guerrillas of the Rebel Army over the forces of the dictator Batista. It was also this which would make it possible for Marxists subsequently to present the process as a textbook case of the Leninist thesis of armed workers’ revolution. But the force that seized power was not a Communist or Marxist party, it was a broad democratic movement with an eclectic ideology derived from Cuban and Latin American popular revolutionary traditions and vague notions of social justice and national liberation. The old Communists of the PSP, which did have some roots in the labor movement and among intellectuals but had been compromised by its earlier support for Batista, had initially condemned Fidel Castro and the guerrillas as “petty-bourgeois adventurers” and only started supporting the movement on the eve of victory, late in 1958.

This made it all the more surprising to many observers when the revolutionary leadership, represented above all by Fidel Castro, pushed ahead regardless of all obstacles in the initial three years from early 1959 to 1962, sweeping aside the wealthy Cuban elite and landlord class and defying Washington to expropriate sugar estates and ranches, nationalize industries, purge the state apparatus of Batista supporters, sign trade agreements with the Soviet bloc, and then declare themselves socialist. Was this premeditated sleight-of-hand by a covert Communist leadership, as alleged by many right-wing commentators in the United States? Or was it the indignant reaction of popular nationalists when faced with clumsy and uncomprehending U.S. hostility, as claimed by liberals?

The truth is more complex and more interesting. Having failed to achieve independence in the early nineteenth century along with most of Spain’s American colonies, Cuba later developed a powerful liberation movement with a pronounced popular and radical character. The mambíses, as the popular guerrillas in the thirty-year insurgency against Spanish rule (1868–98) were known, stressed social and racial equality and acquired a precocious anti-imperialist as well as anticolonial consciousness. This was succinctly expressed by the great man of letters and liberation fighter José Martí when he declared in his last letter in 1895: “Everything I have done unto now and all that I shall do hereafter has as its objective to prevent, through the independence of Cuba, the United States of America from falling with added weight on Our America.”3

This anti-imperialist spirit was expressed again in the struggle against the dictator Gerardo Machado (1925–33) and the abortive 1933 revolution, which was in many ways a precursor of 1959. Brutal repression combined with a desperate economic situation caused by the world depression led to a popular upheaval in which workers seized sugar mills and raised the red flag, students occupied the presidential palace, and the lower ranks of the army mutinied and overthrew the officer corps. A provisional government under a popular medical professor, Dr. Ramón Grau San Martín, decreed many progressive measures including an agrarian reform, intervention (government control) of the U.S.-owned Cuban Electric Company, a minimum wage, the eight-hour day, and female suffrage. But this revolutionary government had no organized political backing, and it soon became clear that the leader of the rebellious troops, Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, was an opportunist who was willing to work with the U.S. Embassy.

Under the new administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Washington had just proclaimed the Good Neighbor Policy and was reluctant to send in the marines. But with U.S. warships just off the coast, pressure was exerted on Havana and it came as little surprise when in January 1934 Grau San Martín was overthrown by Batista who now became the power behind the throne. The next twenty-five years would see a merry-go-round of weak puppet presidents, corrupt elected governments, and open dictatorship by Batista, with growing frustration and dis-enchantment among the majority of Cubans, whether workers, peasants, or middle-class. It was in particular the failure of Grau and his associates in the Partido Auténtico (the Authentic Party of the Cuban Revolution) which paved the way for Batista’s 1952–58 dictatorship and the real revolution which followed.

Although the young revolutionaries who coalesced around the activist lawyer Fidel Castro Ruz in the early 1950s had some familiarity with socialist ideas, their intellectual and political background was quite varied and eclectic. Fidel himself was a member of the Partido Ortodoxo which had broken away from the Auténticosa few years earlier in protest of their corruption and abandonment of the principles of 1933. The Ortodoxoleader Eduardo Chibás was a wealthy maverick who had been a student leader in 1933 and gained a mass following from 1949 to 1951 with passionate rhetoric against corruption in his weekly radio broadcasts. With his slogan “Vergüenza contra dinero” (“Honor against money”), Chibás revived the moral idealism which had been a keynote of Cuban radicalism ever since Martí. Chibás shot himself during his radio program in August 1951. There were mass demonstrations of mourning at his funeral, and his populist appeal was the inspiration of the ortodoxos, many of whom would join the M-26-7 a few years later.

Another key figure in the ideological origins of the new revolutionary movement was Antonio Guiteras, a young man who while still a graduate student at the University of Havana had become minister of the interior in Grau San Martín’s short-lived government. It was Guiteras who had been the driving force behind the radical measures decreed in those heady months of 1933, and when Grau was overthrown Guiteras went underground and formed his own insurgent movement, Jóven Cuba(Young Cuba), with an explicitly socialist program. As a popular figure and a socialist activist independent of the Communist Party, Guiteras was clearly a threat and it is not surprising that he was killed in 1935.

Guiteras was a representative of the autonomous Latin American Marxist tradition associated with the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui, and this would be an important influence on several prominent members of the M-26-7 such as Armando Hart. It was also the main ideological influence on the young Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara who would meet Fidel Castro and his comrades in Mexico in 1955 and become a central figure in the revolution.

But in many ways the fundamental inspiration of the M-26-7 insurgents was the Cuban popular revolutionary tradition of the mambíses, of José Martí and Antonio Maceo, the mulatto general of the liberation forces in the wars against Spanish rule; an ideology of radical egalitarianism, anti-imperialism, and agrarian self-sufficiency. It had much in common with broader Latin American traditions going back to Simón Bolívar with his ideal of continental unity and his distrust of gringo expansionism.
This is not to say that the Cuban revolutionaries of the 1950s were anticommunist or unaffected by European and international Marxist and socialist theories. But most of them were independent from the international Communist movement and also from other organized international tendencies such as the Trotskyists. This independence, and the ideological and tactical flexibility which went with it, was crucial to their success.

By drawing on national popular traditions combined with the sense of frustration and indignation against corruption, repression, and U.S. domination, the revolutionaries were able to achieve not only military victory but also mass popular support and enthusiasm. In January 1959 there was enormous euphoria combined with a sense that anything was possible, and this was expressed in the declarations of the leadership: “The revolution cannot be made in a day, but rest assured that we will carry out the revolution. Rest assured that for the first time the Republic will be completely free and the people will have what they deserve” (Fidel Castro, January 3);4 “the Revolution is as Cuban as the palm trees” and “many people have not yet realized the scope of the change which has occurred in our country” (Fidel, February 24);5 “On the First of January 1959 we had done no more than conclude the war of independence; the Revolution of Martí begins now” (Raúl Castro, March 13).6

In other words, without any reference to Marx, socialism, or class struggle, there was an unequivocal commitment to radical change and to serving the popular interest. Explicit ideological references were to the national revolutionary heritage: defending the agrarian reform in June 1959, Fidel declared that “what we are doing, you gentlemen who defend powerful interests, what we are doing is to fulfill the declarations and the doctrine of our Apostle [Martí], who said that the fatherland belonged to all and was for the good of all”;7 and in July 1959 he quoted Antonio Maceo: “The Revolution will continue as long as there remains an injustice which has not been remedied.”8

That these declarations were not mere rhetoric swiftly became clear as decisive action was taken in all areas of policy, and these actions served to increase the overwhelming popular support for the revolutionary leadership. With such massive support and with a monopoly of armed force, the new authorities in Havana enjoyed unprecedented freedom of action; internal opposition was virtually paralyzed and no political party or organization was able to contest the prestige of Fidel and the M-26-7 which had become in effect the national liberation movement of the Cuban people.

In these circumstances an a priori socialist program would only have been a hindrance: the strength of the revolution derived from its consensual and inclusive character. When socialism was declared, it was more a reflection of the new reality, an unexpected state of affairs which had come about as a result of a dialectical process. The strength of the popular demand for self-determination and social justice combined with the monopolistic structure of the Cuban plantation economy and the direct and inevitable confrontation with U.S. imperialism made a socialist solution the only viable way forward from early 1960 onwards if the revolution were not to collapse through division and incoherence. In terms of political economy, a good analysis of this dynamic is to be found in James O’Connor’s 1970 study, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba.9

The validity of this analysis was confirmed by interviews I conducted in Cuba in the 1990s. Several former members of the M-26-7, when questioned on the evolution of their ideology during the armed struggle and in the first two to three years after the victory of January 1, 1959, declared that their original outlook was democratic, anti-imperialist, and favorable to social justice, but not socialist and certainly not Communist or Marxist-Leninist. It was only at a certain point in the revolutionary transformation, which most of them identify as around mid- to late 1960 or 1961, that they came to the realization that what they were creating in Cuba was a form of socialism; and Fidel’s famous declaration to this effect during the Bay of Pigs invasion simply confirmed this in their minds: “Pues sí: ¡somos socialistas!” (“Well yes: we are socialist!”)

This is to my mind more than just a peculiarity of the Cuban process: it confirms the implications of Gramsci’s argument that for proletarian ideology—Marxist theory—to triumph, it must win the battle for hegemony and become “common sense.” Or to put it another way, the abstractions of Marxist theory must gel with the popular democratic traditions of a specific country before they can become hegemonic. This is perhaps the crucial error of most Communist (and also Trotskyist) parties: the idea that by preaching abstract Marxist-Leninist doctrine they can build an effective mass revolutionary movement.

The revolutionary euphoria of 1959–61 in Cuba had much in common with the broad-based democratic grassroots ideology of the antiglobalization and anticapitalist movements of recent times. The rejection of established parties and dogmas, the belief in direct action, the quest for new and original solutions: these were the characteristics of the creative ferment which swept Cuba in the early years of the revolution. True, from 1962 onwards this originality began to be compromised by the adoption of Soviet models as a result of the alliance necessitated by the Cold War context of the time, but despite this Cuba maintained important aspects of its autonomy and creativity. The “Cuban heresy” of the quest for the “New Man” and the emphasis on moral incentives was an example of this, as was the continued Cuban support for armed revolution in Latin America and Africa (in contradiction to the Soviet aim of “peaceful coexistence”).

After 1970 the apparent failure of the idealistic development strategy associated with “moral incentives” and the defeat of insurgent movements in many countries obliged Cuba to adopt a more orthodox Soviet-style policy. For some fifteen years this appeared to yield results, with high rates of GDP growth and economic stability. But by the mid-eighties it was clear that Cuba’s indebtedness to both the Soviet Union and the capitalist countries was becoming a problem, as was the combination of rigid bureaucratic centralism and material incentives under the Sistema de Dirección y Planificación de la Economía(Economic Management and Planning System).10

It was this which led to the launching of the “Rectification Campaign” in 1986 and to Fidel’s rejection of the Soviet policies of glasnost and perestroika. Seen by many as “Stalinist” or “conservative,” this rejection of Gorbachev’s policies was in fact anything but: it reflected the Cuban leader’s prescient understanding that this type of top-down liberalization would necessarily lead in a capitalist direction. It also reflected the belief that in Cuba, where—unlike the Soviet Union—grassroots participation and revolutionary idealism had not yet been totally crushed by decades of authoritarianism and sometimes brutal repression, socialism could be reinvigorated by a combination of visionary leadership and popular mobilization.
Cuba’s success in surviving the extraordinary rigors of the worst years of the “Special Period” in the mid-1990s cannot possibly be explained in any other way than by the continued vitality of the revolution. The scarcity and hardship was such that any other government would have collapsed in a matter of months. No one who visited Cuba in those years could fail to be impressed by the stoicism and commitment of the Cuban people when power supplies only functioned for a few hours a day, food rotted in the fields for lack of transportation to market, workers spent six hours a day getting to and from workplaces on foot only to find that nothing could be done for want of fuel, and the shelves of the stores were literally bare. This took place in a country that was deluged with images of U.S. consumer society and counter-revolutionary propaganda, and where everyone knew that the Berlin Wall had fallen and that the socialist countries of Eastern Europe had collapsed like ninepins. Yet in Cuba there was only one serious protest, in August 1994, and although some took to rafts to cross the Florida Straits in desperation, the majority remained faithful to the revolution.

A crucial factor in Cuba’s survival was the commitment and example of the leadership, especially Fidel. But another essential point was that the socialist orientation of policy was never abandoned: unlike Sandinista Nicaragua, which under severe pressure in the late eighties adopted IMF recommendations, liberating prices of basic commodities, and marketizing social services, Cuba maintained free universal health care and education and subsidized rates for housing and utilities. It also intensified—rather than abandoning—democratic consultation with the mass of the population regarding the measures to be taken. Just when former Communist leaders were falling over each other to embrace capitalism and Western governments were telling their populations there was no alternative to neoliberalism, the Cuban leaders embarked on an extensive process of consultation involving some 80,000 “workers’ parliaments” throughout the country in order to discuss the measures needed to resolve the economic crisis.

Despite the conventional notion of Cuba as a dictatorship (albeit, for those on the left, a benevolent one), the Cubans have always maintained that they have their own form of socialist democracy. After what happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, skepticism about this is understandable. But one of the great errors of progressive thought in recent decades has been the unquestioning acceptance of liberal polyarchy as the only valid form of democracy; rejection of Stalinist authoritarianism should not mean abandoning the Marxist critique of bourgeois liberalism.

Democracy in the true sense—rule by the people—necessarily begins in local communities, with people in neighborhoods and workplaces running their own affairs. In this respect Cuba has a vigorous system of local democracy. The direct nomination of candidates in community meetings and their election as municipal delegates of popular power in multi-candidate, secret-ballot elections, plus their obligation to report back in person every six months in not just one but several local meetings (with a real possibility of recall), guarantees a degree of local participation and control which compares favorably with many countries that have impeccable democratic credentials.11

It is true that at a higher level there are limitations, with provincial and national delegates being presented on lists with only one candidate for each post, so that the electorate’s only option is to accept or reject each candidate. Policy debates involve extensive popular input through such instruments as workers’ parliaments and consultations by commissions of the National Assembly, but such debates clearly operate within centrally designed parameters. Ultimately, it is undeniable that so long as the United States is actively committed to the overthrow of the revolution, the full and free expression of socialist democracy will be impossible in Cuba; but given the way in which bourgeois elites manipulate liberal polyarchy to prevent any serious challenge to the capitalist system, it is arguable that electorates in Western countries have less influence than Cubans on policy decisions in crucial areas such as finance, defense, and foreign policy.

But to argue the relevance of Cuba in today’s world it is clearly not sufficient just to defend the country’s socialist system against its critics. In the twenty-first century, does the island have anything to offer which is not just a holdover from the past?

The answer is that there are at least two areas in which Cuba has made vital contributions to the emergence of a new socialist or anticapitalist alternative. One is in environmental issues: initially as a matter of necessity, but now also as a matter of policy, it has undertaken a fundamental switch toward organic agriculture and the adoption of ecologically sustainable practices throughout the economy. For several years now it has pioneered the development of urban agriculture, with small plots on any available land being turned over to organopónicos, projects devoted to the intensive cultivation of a wide variety of fruit and vegetables, mostly by organic methods. As a result of this the city of Havana now produces 60 percent of its fruit and vegetables within city limits,12 and the scheme is now being adopted in Venezuela and other countries. The “Energy Revolution” has decentralized power generation so that electricity is less dependent on big power plants and more on small local generators which are more efficient and less vulnerable in emergencies. Incandescent light bulbs have been replaced throughout the country and there is large-scale investment in solar and wind power.13 Cuban officials now state categorically that both capitalist and traditional socialist models of energy-intensive development are unsustainable.

The second vital contribution to the emergence of a new alternative lies in Cuba’s support for Venezuela, Bolivia, and other Latin American countries now engaged in the struggle to create a new social and economic model. Commentators frequently focus on Venezuela’s aid to Cuba in the form of cheap petroleum, but the importance of Cuban assistance to the Bolivarian revolution should not be underestimated. Without the assistance of thousands of Cubans, Chávez would have found it almost impossible to implement the remarkable Barrio Adentro health mission or the Robinson literacy mission. Similarly, Evo Morales would have been unable to implement such programs in Bolivia, at least in the short run—and given the critical political situation in both countries, the short run was and is crucial.

But also in broader political terms, without Cuba, Chávez (and hence, at one remove, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay) would have had much greater difficulty in gaining credibility for projects of popular political empowerment implemented through the appropriation and transformation of the state. The political disorientation of the global left was such that only a totally unexpected movement like that of Chávez could offer a way forward; and without Cuba’s inspiration and support at crucial moments, Chávez might well have failed. Without Cuba, then, no Venezuela; and without Venezuela, no Bolivia, no Ecuador, and no Paraguay, and no revival (however imperfect) of Sandinista Nicaragua.

It is not, of course, that nothing would have occurred in these countries; but it is all too likely that without the Venezuelan example and without Cuba’s inspiration and practical assistance, the powerful popular movements that exist would have been unable to devise an adequate strategy to attain power and to use it effectively to reverse neoliberal policies. This does not mean that Venezuela or the other countries are simply copying Cuba. They are very clear that they are pursuing independent paths, borrowing from and supporting each other and Cuba, but without making the old mistake of trying to impose a uniform “orthodox” template.

Furthermore, the Cubans have been explicit in saying that they do not regard their own socialism as a blueprint to be copied. What Cuba provided was a living example, a demonstration that contrary to the conventional wisdom of the “New World Order,” the state is not powerless and that it is possible to build and maintain a noncapitalist alternative. What was not possible was to reproduce the Cuban strategy of armed revolution, and this was the great contribution of Chávez and the Venezuelans: to devise a new strategy which was neither purely military nor purely electoral, but a combination of popular mobilization, elections, and military support.

As the new project of “twenty-first century socialism” and the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) develops, Cuba also ties in with the cultural and ideological inspiration of the Latin American popular anti-imperialist tradition. As we have seen, the original Cuban ideology derived at least as much from Martí and the mambíses as from international socialist theory, and in this respect it gels perfectly with Chávez’s “Bolivarianism.” It can be argued that, while the Soviet tie was necessary at the time for the revolution’s survival in the Cold War context, it did lead to undesirable distortions in Cuban socialism, and that today Cuba, freed from the Soviet straitjacket and assisted by its Latin neighbors, is rediscovering its originality.
In this context the current Cuban reforms should not be seen as leading in a capitalist direction (at least not necessarily), but as adapting to the more flexible and dynamic project of “twenty-first century socialism” which will eventually find similar (but not identical) expression in Venezuela, Bolivia, and other countries. It will be based on a recognition that socialism can never be perfect, nor completely stable and secure, in an imperialist world, and that its survival and renewal will always depend on popular support and participation.14 The role of the state will still be important but it will allow much greater scope for local and grassroots initiative, and indeed, for what previously might have been condemned as capitalist material incentives. But this is based on a recognition that egalitarianism cannot be imposed by decree, and that the best guarantee against a return to capitalism lies in a vigorous culture of collective participation rather than in bureaucratic controls. Where the central state is and will remain crucial is in providing a coherent overall direction, minimizing the encroachment of global capital, and ensuring diplomatic, political, and military defense against imperialism.

Of course, over the years Cuba has made mistakes, and not all of them are attributable to Soviet influence. The initial economic strategy of crash industrialization soon proved impractical and was replaced by the reliance on large-scale sugar exports as a source of accumulation for more gradual diversification. Then in 1970 voluntarism led to near-disaster in the failed goal of the ten million ton sugar harvest. The 1968 “Great Revolutionary Offensive” led to the precipitous nationalization of small business, with grave consequences for the availability of consumer goods and services. There were also serious errors in cultural policy which have been extensively criticized. But what saved Cuban socialism was a degree of popular participation rarely found elsewhere, and the continued responsiveness of the leadership to popular concerns and needs. Despite serious and often justified grievances, the majority of the Cuban people have continued to feel that this is their revolution and not just a paternalist project of a remote party/state apparatus, and the result is that today the country continues to exhibit both objective and subjective aspects of an anticapitalist alternative.

The Western media have been eager to interpret recent reforms in agriculture, in wage and incentive scales, and in the availability of consumer electronics as evidence that Cuba is embarking on a capitalist transition.15 But there is no indication that large-scale private employment of labor or a private capital market with a stock exchange and similar capitalist institutions are being contemplated. The government has reiterated its commitment to free universal education and health care and other social services. Cuba has recently signed important new agreements with several countries, notably Brazil and the European Union, which improve its capacity to resist the U.S. blockade without abandoning its socialist priorities.

Finally, the extraordinary generosity and commitment of thousands of Cuban internationalists providing medical and other services in conditions few others would accept is living testimony to the reality of the country’s socialist project. The veteran British journalist Hugh O’Shaughnessy recently offered a moving account of the Cuban missions in Bolivia. He quoted María de los Ángeles, a Cuban doctor working as Director of the Ophthalmological Hospital in El Alto, Bolivia, at nearly 4,000 metres altitude and in harsh conditions: “I think there is always an element of love involved,” she said: “Before I left Cuba for Guatemala and Bolivia, I didn’t know what real poverty was like.”16 While Cuba continues to practice solidarity like this, its relevance to the global anticapitalist movement can scarcely be questioned. But also, this presence in the ALBA countries is further evidence that Cuba cannot be separated from the inspiring new developments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and elsewhere: Latin America today demonstrates that another world really is possible, and Cuba is central to the creation of that world.

Notes

Revolución (Havana), February 28, 1959. This and all other translations from Cuban periodicals are mine.
Revolución, April 24, 1959.
José Martí, Inside the Monster, Philip S. Foner, ed. (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 3.
Revolución, January 4, 1959.
Revolución, February 25, 1959.
Revolución, March 14, 1959.
Revolución, June 8, 1959.
La Calle (Havana), August 1, 1959.
See James O’Connor, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970).
One of the best discussions of this is to be found in Ken Cole, Cuba (London: Pinter, 1998), chapter 3.
On this issue, see Arnold August, Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections (Havana: Editorial José Martí, 1999), and Peter Roman, People’s Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
Simon Butler, “Cuba carries out new land reform,” Green Left Online, August 16, 2008, www.greenleft.org.au/2008/763/39410
“Cuban agriculture” (interview with Roberto Pèrez), Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! (UK), no. 205 (October/November 2008): 10.
See Michael A. Lebowitz, Build It Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), and D. L. Raby, Democracy and Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2006), especially chapter 3.
See for example “Cuban workers to get bonuses for extra effort,” The Guardian (UK), June 13, 2008, and “Cuba’s wage changes have nothing to do with a return to capitalism,” Helen Yaffe, The Guardian, June 20, 2008.
Hugh O’Shaughnessy, Misiones cubanas en Bolivia, 4 de abril de 2008,



=========================================
WALTER LIPPMANN
Havana, Cuba
Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraíso bajo el bloqueo"

"By choice they made themselves immune"
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10128.shtml

Saree Makdisi, The Electronic Intifada, 6 January 2009

Israel has killed and injured almost 4,000 men, women and children so far in its assault on Gaza; it has entombed whole families together in the ruins of their homes. As I write, news is breaking that Israeli bombs have killed at least 40 civilians huddling in a UN school which they mistakenly thought would be safer than the homes from which Israel's relentless barrage -- and its deliberately terrorizing "warning" leaflets and prerecorded phone calls -- had already driven them. (I still have one of the leaflets the Israelis dropped on besieged Beirut in 1982 and the language is exactly the same -- "flee, flee for your lives!"). Mosques, schools, houses, apartment buildings, have all been brought down on the heads of those inside.

All this death and destruction comes supposedly in retaliation for rocket attacks that had not inflicted a single fatality inside Israel in over a year. What happened to "an eye for an eye?"

As horrific as the toll of dead and injured already is, the scale of Israel's bombing, and its targeting of ambulances and medical and rescue crews -- several doctors and paramedics have been killed or wounded so far -- means that the true totals are actually unknown. Countless numbers of victims have bled to death in the streets or in the ruins of their smashed homes. Calls for help aren't getting through Gaza's phone networks, battered to pieces along with the rest of the civilian infrastructure -- its water, sewage, electricity systems, all already crumbling as a result of the years of siege. The victims that are evacuated -- as often, these days, in civilian cars as in the remaining ambulances -- make it to hospitals that are overwhelmed; many will die that might have otherwise been saved.

Any hospital would be overwhelmed under the circumstances: how then for a hospital that has already been cut off by the 19-month-old Israeli blockade of Gaza from urgently needed supplies, medicines, drugs, anesthetics, spare parts, fuel for generators? In fact, the true story of what Israel is doing to the people of Gaza is to be seen in the besieged territory's hospitals: the smashed, burned, dusty bodies of children being carried in on makeshift blankets (there aren't enough stretchers to go around); the morgue drawers full of bodies; the emergency rooms with badly hurt, crying people scattered on stretchers, on beds, on the blood-washed floors, as the doctors run from one to another trying to figure out who can be saved and who must be attended to first -- the boy with his feet blown off? The old woman with the huge gash in her head? The young man with his guts hanging out of his stomach? The anguished little girl thrashing about in pain, in fear, in agony and begging for her mother who vanished in some monstrous explosion? And outside, on the crowded sidewalks, the other side of the human suffering that Israel has chosen to inflict on an entire population: the wailing mothers, fathers and children; the weeping young men; the panicked people rushing around trying to find loved ones after each new Israeli bombing.

All this to make Israelis feel secure? What security is this kind of barbarism ever likely to gain them?

These are the scenes that every Palestinian and every Arab around the world sees every single day on the uncensored, unedited, unfiltered and relentlessly, brutally honest coverage broadcast on the Arabic Al-Jazeera channel. Unlike the US and UK networks, Al-Jazeera has correspondents and camera crews all over Gaza; they are Arabs, some of them are Palestinians, and they all live among the people whose suffering they record for the whole world to see; they can communicate with them in their own language and in the language of the audience as well. The coverage is continuous 24 hours a day.

Ordinary people around the rest of the world are seeing the version of events that gets filtered through the editing suites, the cutting rooms, the editorializing of foreign media, and that, in the case of the US, finally makes it to their living room largely (if not entirely) sanitized, and packaged to them in two-minute sound bites by correspondents posted safely outside of Gaza and inside Israel. The coverage broadcast from Israel is heavily monitored, controlled and censored. The Israeli army found in 2006 that its panicked soldiers in Lebanon were using cell phones to call home for help; this time it made sure to inspect all of its soldiers to make sure that none takes a phone with him into Gaza. The army imposes a smothering control over the flow of information; nothing that is reported from or datelined Israel can be read at face value or taken for granted.

If you get your news from an American television network, no matter how horrible you think what's happening in Gaza is, the reality that you are not seeing is much, much, much worse. (Perhaps that's why the English-language Al-Jazeera channel, widely followed in the rest of the world, is unofficially banned in the US -- not a single cable or satellite provider carries it).

And yet even with this imperfect coverage it must be said that people all over the world, including in the US, are protesting what they are seeing. Huge, million-person demonstrations have been held, from Melbourne to Jakarta, from Calcutta to Istanbul, and from Vienna to London, not to mention the huge popular protests in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, Amman, across the length and breadth of the West Bank, and in some of the largest protests ever held in Palestinian communities inside Israel. Across the US, too, people have been protesting, holding vigils, writing letters to the editors of the newspapers demanding more balance to the warped coverage of the events that we see here, especially in papers like The New York Times. And the internet has been a major source of information for all those millions who have figured out that they will never learn what they need to learn from The New York Times or the Washington Post or ABC or CNN. Sites like Counterpunch, Electronic Intifada, Alternet, Truthdig, Huffington Post, Salon and many others besides have carried extraordinarily intelligent and detailed pieces by a range of commentators whose sense of what is happening far exceeds what is made available by professional journalists in the mainstream press -- including many superb pieces by Jewish Americans who give the lie, once and for all, to the absurd notion that their community is solidly behind Israel's violence.

Indeed, it seems clear that the writing now being posted on alternative media outlets is also starting to outweigh the clumsy efforts still being churned out by America's army of paid and unpaid cheerleaders for Israel, who have forsaken what little remained of their own humanity and blinded themselves to suffering that ought to move any rational, caring, sentient human being to tears -- the Dershowitzes and Foxmans, the Orens and Boots, the Krauthammers and Peretzes, the Bards and Goldfarbs, the cynical apparatchiks of CAMERA and AIPAC and the mindless busybodies and shuffling zombies of Stand With Us, the Israel Project and the Israel on Campus Coalition -- who persist with their stubborn, craven defense of the indefensible. About these misanthropes there is much to be said, most of it too unpleasant to print, so I'll shift the burden here to those memorable closing lines of Wilfred Owen's war poem "Insensibility:"

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,



That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever mourns in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.


As for Israel itself: once again it has revealed its true nature to the world. It was only after the first reports came in of their own serious fatalities -- soldiers caught in an ambush, though the censored news reports from Israel claim that it was all friendly fire -- that the Israeli media suddenly started carrying reports wondering whether things have gone too far. "The Price of Stubbornness over Gaza Exit is Dead Soldiers," write Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in Haaretz. "For the first time, Israeli TV broadcasts raised the question of whether it was worthwhile for the operation to continue."

Until this point, the Israeli media -- and most of the country's liberal intelligentsia, never mind the militant right wing -- had been moralistically defending the bombing, and sometimes actually cheering it on. Starting the attacks on a Saturday was a "stroke of brilliance," the Guardian's Seamus Milne quotes the country's biggest selling paper Yediot Aharonot as saying; "the element of surprise increased the number of people who were killed." The daily Maariv agreed: "We left them in shock and awe." The rational and genuinely ethical voices of Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have never seemed more isolated.

The brute fact of the matter is that, as long as their air force is killing an entirely defenseless people, the Israeli public and media do cheer them on. As soon as they start paying any kind of price -- no matter how grotesquely out of proportion to the level of damage their soldiers are inflicting on unarmed and innocent people -- their bloodlust quickly cools. In Gaza, the Israeli infantry won't take a single step forward unless the ground in front of them -- and everything and everyone in it, armed, unarmed, whoever and whatever they are -- has been safely cleared away for them by the air or by artillery.

These are "Georgia rules," which are not so far from the methods Russia used in its conflict last summer," write Harel and Issacharoff in Haaretz. "The result is the killing of dozens of non-combatant Palestinians. The Gaza medical teams might not have reached all of them yet. When an Israeli force gets into an entanglement, as in Sajaiyeh last night [where three Israeli soldiers were killed], massive fire into built-up areas is initiated to cover the extraction. In other cases, a chain of explosions is initiated from a distance to set off Hamas booby-traps. It is a method that leaves a swath of destruction taking in entire streets, and does not distinguish military targets from the homes of civilians."

I'm not sure where the "Georgia" reference comes from: the Israelis used the very same tactics in Jenin and Nablus in 2002, and in southern Lebanon in 2006 and 1982. And it would be an act of futility to point out -- for the millionth time -- that the Israeli method of warfare takes place in sweeping disregard for the principles of international humanitarian law, not to mention total contempt for innocent human life. This is not to mention that most of the casualties pouring into Gaza's morgues and hospitals are the victims of the sheer indiscriminate unleashing on densely populated civilian areas of high explosive ordnance from land, sea and air that has been characteristic of Israel's military style since at least the 1970s.

Israel's disregard for innocent human life is not motivated only by a desire to forestall the political consequences -- especially during an electoral campaign -- of Israeli military casualties. It is also a clear indicator of the contempt that Israel has for Palestinian life in general. The cold, hungry, tired, desperate, and terrified men, women and children that Israel is now sweeping away by the dozen in balls of fire and showers of shrapnel are the very same people that it had already reduced to what one UN official months ago warned was "a subhuman existence," the deliberate product of the siege that Israel has imposed on Gaza for over three years, beginning in 2005, before the election of Hamas. They are the same people whose political and human rights Israel has been stifling since the occupation of 1967 -- 20 years before the creation of Hamas. They are the same people who were ethnically cleansed from their land in 1948 because, as non-Jews, they were inconveniently cluttering up the land that European Zionists wanted to turn into a Jewish state, no matter what the land's actual population had to say about it.

Israel's disregard for Palestinian life in Gaza today is, in short, a direct extension of its disregard for Palestinian life since 1948, and what is happening in Gaza today is the continuation of what happened six decades ago. Eighty percent of the people crammed into Gaza's hovels and shanties are refugees or the descendants of refugees that armed Zionist gangs, which eventually coalesced into the infant Israeli army, terrorized from their homes elsewhere in southwestern Palestine in 1948. They have been herded, penned, and slaughtered by a remorseless power that clearly regards them as subhuman.

If you think I'm stretching the point, I'm not. Listen to the words of Professor Arnon Sofer, the government consultant who did so much to help plan the isolation and imprisonment of Gaza, in a interview with the Jerusalem Post in 2004: "When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe," Sofer predicted. "Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure on the border is going to be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day." Sofer admitted only one worry with all the killing, which will, he says, be the necessary outcome of a policy that he himself helped to invent. "The only thing that concerns me," he says, "is how to ensure that the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings."

Meticulously and clinically thought through even before the first rocket from Gaza claimed a life inside Israel, the slaughter in Gaza today has nothing to do with rockets or with Hamas. As Sofer himself explains, it is the purest and most distilled expression of Zionist ideology. "Unilateral separation doesn't guarantee 'peace,'" Sofer says in that same interview; "it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews."

And that -- taken right from the horse's mouth -- is what the slaughter of innocents in Gaza is fundamentally about: the people being killed today are the ones for whom there is no room in the Zionist vision of the state. They are regarded as an excess population. Not even Malthus thought that a redundant population should just be lined up and shot, or bombed into the ground. But, clearly, times have changed since 1798.

This inhuman madness will end only with the end of the violent ideology that spawned it -- when those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously and ethnically exclusivist state in what has always been a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.

Saree Makdisi is professor of English literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of " Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."

Israel's Collective Punishment of Gaza

By Marjorie Cohn
January 6, 2009
Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marjorie-cohn/israels-collective-punish_b_155700.html

Since Israel began its war on Gaza 11 days ago, more than 560 Palestinians – about a quarter of them civilians – have been killed. Some two thousand Gazans, including hundreds of children, have been wounded. Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” marks an escalation of Israel’s two-year blockade of the Gaza Strip which has deprived 1.5 million Palestinians of necessary food, medicine, fuel and other necessities.

Israel is using white phosphorous gas, an illegal chemical weapon that burns to the bone. Dr. Mads Gilbert, a member of a Norwegian triage medical team working in Gaza, has documented Israel’s use of Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), which cuts its victims to pieces and reportedly causes cancer in survivors. Gilbert, who has worked in several conflict zones, said the situation in Gaza is the worst he has ever seen. Two United Nations schools have been hit by airstrikes, killing at least 30 people. The New York Times reported on Monday that Gazan hospitals are full of civilians, not Hamas fighters.

The targeting of civilians violates the Fourth Geneva Convention. Since the rockets fired from Gaza into Israel cannot distinguish between civilians and military targets, they are illegal. But Israel’s air and ground attack in Gaza violates Geneva in four ways. First, it constitutes collective punishment of the entire population in Gaza for the acts of a few militants. Second, it targets civilians, as evidenced by the large numbers of civilian casualties. Third, it is a disproportionate response to the rockets fired into Israel. Fourth, an occupying power has an obligation to ensure food and medical supplies to the occupied population; Israel’s blockade has created a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Israel’s airstrikes and ground assault on the people of Gaza have little to do with the Gazan rockets, which hadn’t killed any Israelis for a year before Israel’s current military operation. Israel’s leaders are bombing and attacking Gaza in order to gain an advantage in the upcoming Israeli elections in February.

Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni is locked in a tight race with Benyamin Netanyahu, who has criticized Livni for her “soft” treatment of the Palestinians. The Israeli government seeks to do as much damage as possible to Gaza while Bush is still in office. The New York Times cited several Middle East experts who “believe that Israel timed its move against Hamas, which began on Dec. 26, 25 days before Mr. Bush leaves office, with the expectation of such backing in Washington.” Obama, in spite of his unequivocal support for the policies of Israel during the campaign and his deafening silence about the recent casualties, is an unknown quantity.

Israel would be unable to carry out its aggressive policies in Gaza without the support of the United States, which gives Israel $3 billion in U.S. taxpayer money each year. The F-16 bombers and Apache attack helicopters Israel is using on Gaza were bought with U.S. money.

The war on Gaza also violates U.S. law. The Human Rights and Security Assistance Act mandates that the United States cease all military aid to Israel, which has engaged in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. The Arms Export Control Act prohibits U.S. weapons from being used for any purpose other than inside the borders of a country for self-defense. Targeting schools, police stations and television broadcast centers is not self-defense.

Although Israel’s supreme court ordered the government to allow international media into Gaza to report on the situation there, Israel has refused. But, according to the New York Times, Israel has given “full access to Israeli political and military commentators.” Ethan Bronner, the Times bureau chief in Jerusalem, said, “Israel has never restricted media access like this before, and it should be ashamed . . . It’s betraying the principles by which it claims to live.”

In spite of the one-sided pro-Israel media coverage in the United States, Newsweek said, “Does it make sense for America to support [Israel’s] policy of punishing Hamas by making life unbearable for 1.5 million Gazans by denying aid and economic development? The answer is no.” An editorial in the Los Angeles Times called for “an end to a blockade that amounts to the collective punishment of Palestinians under Hamas rule.” And the New York Times editorialized that “the longer the Israeli incursion. . . the more Hamas’s popularity grows among its supporters.”

Cuba politics: Waiting for Obama

January 5th 2009

FROM THE ECONOMIST INTELLIGENCE UNIT

In the wake of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution on January 1st, President Raúl Castro has made overtures to the USpresident-elect, Barack Obama. Seizing on Mr Obama’s statements on the campaign trail that he would be willing to meet with Cuban officials and consider loosening sanctions, Mr Castro has repeated a recent offer to meet on “neutral ground”. However, though Mr Obama is likely to ease some of the restrictions on US-Cuba economic and family ties, a more substantial revamping of the US’s trade and investment embargo on the island is not likely in the short term.

Cuba's dealings with the US have been on hold during the transition between the outgoing presidency of George W Bush and Mr Obama's inauguration on January 20th. In one of his regular press "Reflections", Fidel Castro—who, though ailing, remains an intellectual force influencing Cuba’s political life—welcomed Mr Obama's election, describing him as "decent". Yet the former president’s language has been cautious. Raúl, who took over from his brother in July 2006 and was officially named president in February 2008, has also suggested that expectations of a change in US policy may be too high.

Still, in a speech on January 2nd President Castro again stated that he would be willing to engage in talks if Mr Obama fulfils his campaign promise to favour engagement over confrontation. Yet Cuba’s insistence on non-conditionality could prove a stumbling block. Mr Obama said during the campaign that a scaling back of the embargo itself would require concrete steps by Havana toward democracy, including the freeing of political prisoners.

Gradual change, for now

Instead, Mr Obama is apt to take incremental steps, first relaxing some of the restrictions on travel, remittances and US farm exports to Cuba that were tightened by the Bush administration, and which could be reversed by presidential order. Under changes made by Mr Bush, for instance, Cubans living in the US are only allowed to visit the island once every three years, and can send back a maximum of US$300 per household, quarterly, to immediate family members.

Besides family members seeking relaxation, there is a strong business lobby in the US in favour of ending most trade and investment sanctions. The lobby includes associations such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation and the US Chamber of Commerce. However, the lifting of most elements of the trade embargo, which is part of a law (the Helms-Burton Act) that could only be changed by the US Congress, would require negotiations and concessions by Cuba.

The Cuban government will remain wary of US demands related to a political opening or human-rights issues [sic], and the still-influential hardline Cuba lobby in the US will continue to resist normalisation of bilateral relations (although, having won the state of Florida [without the so-called "Cuban vote" --klw], Mr Obama will not be beholden to the Cuban-American community concentrated there ). Consequently, no sudden or wholesale removal of economic sanctions should be expected.

In the absence of any normalisation of relations with Washington, Cuba will continue to nurture ties with Venezuela, China, Russia and other developing countries (particularly within the Americas). It will use its extensive medical assistance programmes and active diplomacy to further cement these relations. Following the confirmation of the restoration of EU co-operation in October, relations with the EU, although still vulnerable to setbacks, are likely to be closer than they have been in recent years. Within Latin America, Cuba is also cementing friendships, particularly after having been admitted in November to the Rio Group of nations. President Castro attended in December a summit of heads of state from Latin America and the Caribbean held in Brazil, his first official trip since taking over from his brother Fidel two years ago.

A bleaker 2009
Meanwhile, with the global economic situation bleak and Cuba struggling to recover from three devastating storms that hit the island in August-September 2008—causing an estimated US$10bn in damages—the government is preparing the population for more difficult times ahead.

A streak of above-average economic growth—averaging 10% annually in 2005-07—has ended, with expansion having slowed to an estimated 4.5% in 2008. Cuba will continue to be squeezed by a lack of access to most external financing. This will be exacerbated by pressures from high food import prices (Cuba imports around 80% of its food needs), falling nickel prices (a main source of foreign exchange) and the hurricane-related losses. The country’s already huge trade deficit soared in 2008 by 70%, to an estimated US$11bn.

In early 2009 the damage from the storms will inhibit the boost to agricultural output arising from recent structural reforms, although there will be an upturn by the end of the year. GDP growth this year is likely to remain around 4.5% (about half the government’s initial forecasts). Restrictions on private enterprise, monetary imbalances and price distortions within the domestic economy will keep growth below potential.[Note: But to reach that "potential" -- which, as applied in other dependent capitalist countries, would mean that a handful of people become extremely wealthy -- Cuba would have to institute the kind of measures that those countries have been forced into by the World Bank and IMF, causing extreme hardship for the poorest sectors and little or no gain for the majority of the working class. klw]

Cubans are accustomed to hardship, after 50 years of privations—including shortages of basic goods such as food and housing—owing to poor economic management and nearly that many years of isolation from their powerful neighbour, the US. However, Raúl Castro raised hopes of economic and social improvements when he was formally named president in early 2008. Despite some modest reforms implemented last year, at the start of 2009, and 50 years after the Revolution, he has had to once again lower those expectations.

Under these circumstances, a rapprochement with Washington would probably not make any immediate difference to Cuba’s near-term prospects. Even with an easing of travel and other restrictions, the onus would be on Havana to make more significant economic as well as political changes of its own. However, the US embargo has not brought democracy to Cuba [sic]*, and instead the Castro regime has outlived 10 consecutive US presidents. Mr Obama will surely know that some kind of break with the past is warranted.

The Economist Intelligence Unit

*The Us "embargo" (economic war) on Cuba has not "brought democracy" to that country because Cuba is already far more democratic than the United States. However, when media like The Economist use the term "democracy" in this context, the word is a euphemism for capitalism, and it is true that all the pressure exerted by 10 consecutive regimes in the US has not forced Cuba back into the ferocious, exploitative dependent capitalism that it suffered prior to 1959.
klw
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world are protesting Israel’s aggression in Gaza. Ten thousand demonstrated in Israel and scores have taken to the streets in Europe, the Middle East and throughout the United States.

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that Americans generally “are closely divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military action against militants in the Gaza strip.” But Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli offensive by a 24-point margin (31-55%). Republicans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly support it (62-27%). Nevertheless, Democratic Party leaders have followed Bush in their uncritical support for Israel.

The United States has blocked a ceasefire resolution in the Security Council. In the absence of council action, the General Assembly is empowered to act under the Uniting for Peace Resolution 377. Assembly president Miguel D’Escoto, who has been critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza, said that “the time has come to take firm action if the UN does not want to be rightly accused of complicity by omission.” The Human Rights Council should send a high level fact finding mission to Gaza.

It’s time to call a halt to the violence and bloodshed.
************

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law.” Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.

Venezuela expels Israeli ambassador over Gaza

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hj0ehBqPmjVyWuBEdqsfMorPjobQD95HT4700

By FABIOLA SANCHEZ – 44 minutes ago

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuela ordered the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador on Tuesday to protest Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

President Hugo Chavez has condemned the campaign in Gaza, where nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed in ground and air strikes. Israel launched the attacks Dec. 27 to stop Palestinian militants from firing rockets into southern Israel.

Venezuela's Foreign Ministry announced the decision in a statement, saying it "has decided to expel the Israeli ambassador and part of the personnel of the Israeli embassy."

Chavez earlier condemned the Israelis carrying out the military campaign as "murderers" and urged Jews in Venezuela to take a stand against the Israeli government.

"Now I hope that the Venezuelan Jewish community speaks out against this barbarism. Do it. Don't you strongly reject all acts of persecution?" Chavez said.

"How far will this barbarism go?," he said in an appearance on state television. "The president of Israel should be taken before an international court together with the president of the United States, if the world had any conscience."

The foreign minister said its U.N. mission is joining with other countries in demanding the Security Council "apply urgent and necessary measures to stop this invasion."

Officials could not immediately be reached at the Israeli Embassy in Caracas, which had closed by the time of the announcement.

Chavez has long been critical of the Israeli government's policies in the Middle East and has supported the Palestinians' stance in the conflict.

The RNC and the "Magic Negro";rules changes in congress; Bush's last environmental

----- Original Message -----
From: t r u t h o u t
To: kwald@california.com
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 3:30 PM
Subject: Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III | The RNC and the "Magic Negro"



Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III on GOP support for "Magic Negro" meme; Mark Weisbrot looks at Obama stimulus proposals; Nancy Pelosi upsets House GOP; Burris not seated in Senate; Obama will meet challenge of repairing damage of Bush administration on environmental law; labor leaders looking forward to a friendlier White House; CEO jobs still hard to get for women; health care investigation uncovers problems; students with greatest need often have least-prepared teachers; effort to end straight-ticket voting in Texas; and more ... Browse our continually updating front page at http://www.truthout.org

t r u t h o u t | 01.06

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Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III | The RNC and the "Magic Negro"
http://www.truthout.org/010609R
Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III, Truthout: "This past December, Republican National Committee chair candidate John 'Chip' Saltsman distributed a CD to fellow party officials entitled 'We Hate the USA.' One of the songs on the CD is entitled 'Barack the Magic Negro.' ... At a time when the Republican Party is seeking to reinvent itself and expand its base, America is not well-served by such futile attempts at humor."

Mark Weisbrot | Stimulus Time: The Fierce Urgency of Now
http://www.truthout.org/010609S
Mark Weisbrot, The Center for Economic and Policy Research: "Nobody needs to be told that our economy is going down the tubes at a rate unseen for decades. Every week brings new numbers that are setting records. In just the three months ending in November the job loss was 1.26 million, the worst since 1975. We have lost more than 2 million jobs in 2008."

Pelosi's Power Move Leaves House Republicans Fuming
http://www.truthout.org/010609T
Molly K. Hooper, The Hill: "House Democrats are poised to approve new rules that will significantly increase their authority while taking the bullets out of the few legislative weapons Republicans have in the lower chamber."

Burris Denied Seat in US Senate to Succeed Obama
http://www.truthout.org/010609U
Laurie Kellman and Ann Sanner, The Associated Press: "Roland Burris failed in his bid to take President-elect Barack Obama's Illinois Senate seat on Tuesday in a scripted piece of political theater staged just before the opening of the 111th Congress."

Obama Will Face Bush Legacy on Environment
http://www.truthout.org/010609EA
Jim Tankersley, The Chicago Tribune: "In its final weeks, the Bush administration has moved to close what it calls 'back doors' to regulating carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It barred the Environmental Protection Agency from considering the effects of global warming on protected species. And it excluded carbon dioxide from a list of pollutants the EPA regulates under the Clean Air Act."

With Obama, Labor Leaders See Chance for Rebirth
http://www.truthout.org/010609LA
Jeanne Cummings, Politico.com: "Could the inauguration of Barack Obama launch a renewal of the labor movement? That's the hope of labor leaders who have been monitoring cabinet appointments and delivering legislative and regulatory wish lists to the Obama transition teams."

Women Still Struggle to Get CEO Jobs
http://www.truthout.org/010609WA
Del Jones, USA Today: "Women now receive about six in 10 college degrees, yet near the top there remains slow progress in the number of female directors, officers and highest paid, according to research by Catalyst, Corporate Library and others."

Part I: A Health Care System Badly Out of Balance
http://www.truthout.org/010609HA
Scott Allen and Marcella Bombardieri, The Boston Globe: "Call it the best-kept secret in Massachusetts medicine: Health insurance companies pay a handful of hospitals far more for the same work even when there is no evidence that the higher-priced care produces healthier patients."

Neediest Students Get Newest Teachers
http://www.truthout.org/010609EDA
Melissa Walker, The Des Moines Register: "Inexperienced teachers are typically stationed at schools with the neediest students, according to numerous US studies."

Texas: State Senator Seeks End to Straight-Ticket Voting
http://www.truthout.org/010609VA
The Associated Press: "A San Antonio state senator wants to revive efforts to eliminate the straight-ticket voting option, even after Texans hit a 10-year high in the percentage of ballots sticking entirely with one party."

Go directly to our issues page: http://www.truthout.org/issues



Alan Dershowitz runs for President of Israel Franklin Lamb 7 January,
2009

st=5491> Fact- and Law- Checking the Wall Street Journal and Alan
Dershowitz Part I: Dershowitz Misstates the Facts "Israel is leveling
Gaza to strike at Hamas, just as they pulverized south Lebanon to strike
at Hezbollah. Yet in both cases civilian populations were attacked,
countless innocents killed or injured, infrastructure targeted and
destroyed, and civil law enforcement negated. All this was, and is,
disproportionate, indiscriminate mass violence in violation of
international law. Israel is not exempt from international law and must
be held accountable. It is time for the UN to not just call for a
cease-fire, but for an inquiry as to Israel's illegal actions."
– US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, 12/29/08
Typically, within the first ten days or so of enrolling in an American
law school, in this observer's case, Boston University School of Law, a
student will begin to receive from professors or seasoned upper
classmates, plenty of gratuitous but well intentioned advice. One bit
that still rattles around in my ever-shrinking and increasingly
over-crowded brain came from our Law School Librarian, Mr. Taylor.
More than once, during my three year stint, I heard the sometimes
crotchety Mr. Taylor, a brilliant former Boston trial lawyer, intone,
with sometimes lavish flair (truth be told, he occasionally nipped White
Horse scotch behind the Federal Supp. 2nd Stacks–but we never ratted
him out to Dean Suskind) to law students in the Pappas Library trying to
concentrate on writing their Briefs for the Homer Albers Moots Court
Competition:
"Future lawyers! Remember well! If, God forbid, some miserable wretch on
this green earth should have the misfortune or exceedingly poor judgment
to hire you to represent them in Court, heed this!
If you find yourself arguing a case before a skeptical judge or jury and
the law is clearly against you, for Christ's sake jump up and down and
argue all the facts you can think of in your client's favor!"
Then Mr. Taylor would invariably add, "On the other hand my dears, if
the facts of the case are clearly against you, for Christ's sake jump up
and down, but this time ignore or deny every single material fact and
argue only the law. Look the judge or jury straight in the eye, with
tears in yours, lower your voice and softly rant about the
technicalities of the law and how the very survival of Western
Civilization, which came to us, after all, with our mothers milk,
depends on strictly applying it in your clients favor".
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, in his latest Arab-phobic,
ultra-Zionist screed, in last week's Wall Street Journal in defense of
Israel's ongoing slaughter in Gaza, having neither the law nor the facts
in his favor, figuratively at least, just jumps up and down and rants.
Harvard Law School sources, including the student newspaper, the Harvard
Law Record, indicate that Alan is just acting out again and being
'lawyerly' as he cozies up to various right wing power centers in Israel
with his eyes peeled wide on being President of Israel when he retires.
Some faculty colleagues and law students are encouraging him to retire
sooner rather than later, as Harvard wearies of his witch hunts and
hysterics and the disrepute he has brought on that institution with his
myriad smear campaigns. Among his long list of victims have been against
the likes of President Carter, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Norman
Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, the Dali Lama, Bishop Tutu, and
all manner of supporters of the Palestinians right and obligation to
resist the Israeli occupation and struggle to reacquire their stolen
land. Not to mention his ex-girlfriend.
In his January 2, 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal entitled
'Israel's Policy Is Perfectly Proportionate
', Professor
Dershowitz defends Israel's operation "Molton Lead" and while doing so
consistently misstates the Facts and the Law.
Dershowitz Misstates the Facts Alan Dershowitz:
"Hamas knew that Israel would never fire at a home with civilians in it"
Fact Check:
On the contrary, Hamas and every person over 7 years old in the 1.5
million Palestinians in Gaza, as well as in Lebanon and Palestine know
that Israel will for sure "fire at a home with civilians in it." And
also ambulances, convoys fleeing a war zone with prior UN and IDF
approval and waving white flags, homes with only five children and their
mother inside as they did in Nabysheet, Lebanon on July 19, 2006,
destroying the family of my friend Abu Mohammad Chokr. History has shown
that is what Israel does regularly and why it is increasingly a Pariah
State.
Virtually every human rights organization including Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International and relevant UN Agencies, the European Union,
objective Israeli and international investigative journalists digging
beneath the mainstream zionist media headlines has documented hundreds
of cases of Israel targeting " a home with civilians in it". No fewer
than 234 cases of firing on civilians in South Lebanon alone during
2006, and hundreds of others in Palestine. In the past week in Gaza (29
December 2008- 6 Jan 2009), Israel fired on more than 54 homes with
civilians in them.
Alan Dershowitz:
"Terrorists firing at Sderot are so proud of their actions that they
sign their weapons".
Fact Check:
Goodness Professor, since the days of cave men, the armies of Greece,
Rome, Genghis Khan, to cowboys in the American west notching or
'signing' their six-guns and rifles, one imagines virtually every army
in history has been done this. We do know the 'most moral', 'elite' and
'purity of arms' guys and gals in the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) do
it as well. Yet it is a bit less sinister for lonely scared fighters to
sign their weapons as a 'security blanket' than for the Public
Information unit in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to herd
Israeli youngsters onto buses, as was done in 2006 in Lebanon, to visit
IDF artillery bases and be given felt pens and told to sign the 155 mm
cluster bomb rounds containing US supplied M-24, M-77 bomblets, before
they are fired into South Lebanon in to kill and maim fellow school
children.
And indeed, sorry to be indelicate, but it is also a bit more civilized
to sign one's weapon than the traditional practice of the Israeli forces
entering civilian houses in numerous villages in South Lebanon in 2006
(they did the same this in during their wars against Lebanon in1978,
1982, 1993, and 1996— and rubbing their faeces over walls, inside
water tanks, in pillows, beds etc poisoning wells and booby trapping
children's toys (apparently it's an Occupation thing that warrants
psychological study).
Alan Dershowitz:
"Since Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, Hamas has fired thousands of
rockets"
Fact Check:
Israel never ended its occupation of Gaza. Following the September 2005
dismantlement of its illegal colony/settlements, Israel maintained
nearly total control of Gaza's borders, airspace, territorial waters
(preventing most fishing), electricity, life-lines and economy, turning
it into a sealed prison resembling the Warsaw Ghetto, according to UN
Special Rapporteur, Richard Falk.
Palestinians living in Gaza have not only the right but the obligation
to resist Israel's continuing illegal occupation. Indeed, the very
existence of Gaza is a historical reminder of those hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel. Gaza is a
Palestinian refugee camp—all of it. More than 80% of its inhabitants
were victims of Zionist terrorism that pushed them off their
land—many from Askalaan (Ashkelon), their heritage from that now
Jewish town nearly erased, as Robert Fisk reminds us
bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html> .
Alan Dershowitz:
"Barack Obama visited Sderot this summer and saw the remnants of these
rockets, he reacted by saying that if his two daughters were exposed to
rocket attacks in their home, he would do everything in his power to
stop such attacks. He understands how the terrorists exploit the
morality of democracies".
Fact Check:
President-elect Obama feels the very same that every parent does
including the parents of the 800,000 Palestinian children in Gaza
including the parents of more than 147 children killed during the past
seven days.
Alan Dershowitz's claim of Israel as a 'moral democracy' is not backed
by the facts. The 20% of its population that are Arabs are not included
in this myth. Countless studies by Israeli and international human
rights organizations, researchers and on the scene journalists have
painstakingly documented the Apartheid nature of Israel. When it comes
to education, housing, employments, medical services, government loans,
travel, marriage, Israel's Arab population does not share in the "moral
Democracy" of Israel, only in its immoral, racist Apartheid system.
Alan Dershowitz:
"Hamas knows from experience that even a small number of innocent
Palestinian civilians killed inadvertently will result in bitter
condemnation of Israel by many in the international community".
Fact Check:
And well should such killings, even if inadvertent, be condemned. But
Professor Dershowitz's 'small number' is not a small number for the rest
of the World. During the July 2006 War (not the "Second Lebanon War" as
Israeli apologists like to refer to it while overlooking the Israeli
Wars against Lebanon in 1978, 1993, and 1996) an estimated 82% of those
killed in Lebanon were civilians, more than one-third children under age
of 15. A 'small number' only in Alan's World. In Gaza the same pattern
may or may not hold. Either way, the World, and not just Hamas, is
getting tired of Israel inadvertently killing 'small numbers' of those
it occupies or attacks.
Alan Dershowitz:
"Israel goes to enormous lengths to reduce the number of civilian
casualties — even to the point of foregoing legitimate targets that
are too close to civilians".
Fact Check:
Nonsense, Professor. If the targets are "too close to civilians" such as
their homes, schools, cars, places of worship, hospitals etc. they are,
by definition, not legitimate. But there is no evidence that "enormous
lengths to reduce the number of civilian casualties" have ever been
taken by Israel when attacking its neighbors. The absence of Zionist
concern for civilians has been the case going back more than 70 years,
since the Zionist gangs in pre-Nakba Palestine, between December 12,
1947 at Haifa and Ramla to November 2, 1948 at Arab al-Mawasi, not quite
one year, committed 27 massacres of civilians in Palestine. This
practice continues until today in Gaza with the weekend's killing of
three rescuers in an Israeli attack in Tal el-Hawa, killing two medics
in an ambulance in Hay al Zaytoun, and five children from one family
near al-Shifa Hospital.
Next: Part II: Professor Dershowitz misstates the Law.
Franklin Lamb is a former adjunct Professor of international law at
Northwestern College of Law in Portland, Oregon. He is currently doing
research in Lebanon and can be reached at fplamb@sabrashatila.org


Iraqi Political Prisoners and the Anti-War Movement
Ibrahim Ebeid

The political prisoners in U.S. occupation jails in Iraq have been
suffering for more than five years. They are being tried by the Criminal
Court of Iraq, created by the occupiers, on false and fabricated charges
and some have been unjustly murdered. There is a hidden and declared
agenda behind all these trials. The agenda is specifically designed to
serve the interests of the occupation powers, whether Persian or
American, to rid Iraq of its leadership by any means.

These leaders who were tried, or being tried, represent the finest of
Iraqis who stood up in defense of Iraq's independence and unity.
Among those being tried is Abdul Ghani Abdul Ghafoor whom I have known
since the 1970s. I knew him as a writer and as a leader, an honorable
man who was dedicated to serving his country to the best of his ability.
Like the rest of the prisoners, this man is facing hostile and
adversarial brutal actions and humiliation. He was severely beaten
inside the dock by court guards and some employees under the sight of
the court judge (Mohammed Al Khalifa Irebi ), the prosecutor and his
aides.

The captive Abdel Ghani Abdul Ghafoor complained to the president of the
so-called Supreme Judicial Council (Medhat Mahmoud), the president of
the court (Aref Al-Shaheen) about discriminatory treatment but he did
not receive any response. He sought to transfer his trial to Egypt, or
any Arab or Islamic country, except Iran, to ensure his integrity and
safety.

The protection of rights of the accused and maintenance of any tampering
or abuse are openly violated. The court president, the prosecutor and
the court workers contradict the application of constitutional
provisions and law because they violate the most basic rules and
foundations, goals and objectives.

During the session held on March 12, 2008 there was an attack on Abdul
Ghani Abdul Ghafoor. He was insulted and beaten inside the courtroom by
several guards on the instigation of the presiding judge and under the
eyes of the court and the attorney general.

The court has not taken any action against the attackers. As a result of
the attack, the victim was severely injured and put under medical
treatment for a month or so.

On April, 15 , 2008 Attorney General Mahdi Abdel Amir reiterated his
hostile position to the regime of President Saddam Hussein and members
of the government, claiming that his position on the men of the system
is very clear. He berated the Iraqi leadership and the prisoners using
repugnant terms. His tirade did not include neutrality and
professionalism, traits that are paramount for an attorney general.

On June 29 , 2008 Abdul Ghani Abdul Ghafoor was subjected to abuse and
humiliation by a person inside the hall. He filed a complaint to the
President of the court but no action was taken. This incident was
captured on television. After the session, the same person threatened to
assault him and kill him but a court guard intervened and prevented the
man from harming Abdul Ghafoor. It was revealed that the attacker was
sent by a sectarian party, who is part of the government of the Green
Zone, to assassinate Mr. Abdul Ghafoor.

The political prisoner complained to the commander of the occupation
forces about the actions of the court asking for protection. His request
was not answered.

The place of detention is a basement under the court building, solitary
confinement, that has no ventilation and does not meet the basic needs
for humans to inhabit. It is used as a tool and a means to pressure,
blackmail and to break the spirit of the detainees and to degrade morale
and dignity to obtain confessions.

The trial has nothing to do with the political events of 1991 when the
sectarian parties came from Iran, under the supervision of the mullahs
and their officers to murder Iraqis and to destabilize the country. Most
of those who attended the court for the purpose of complaint, using
false testimony, are members of the organizations who took part in these
events. These sectarian organizations are now the rulers of Iraq under
occupation supervision. They have committed crimes of murder, robbery
and rape, burning of state institutions, and should be the ones tried
for treason and mass murder.

The sentences are already prepared to have the rest of the Iraqi leaders
killed or die in jails. This is the plan of the occupations, both
American and Persian, to rid Iraq of its leadership who is dedicated to
restoring freedom, prosperity and independence to Iraq through jihad and
resistance.

It is upsetting to see the progressive parties, the human rights
organizations and the anti-war movement silent, or openly opposing the
legitimate Iraqi leadership. Are these parties and movements part of the
imperialist invaders of Iraq and do they share the aims of the
occupation, to ruin Iraq and revert it to a "pre-industrial age" as the
UN designated the nation in 1991? Most of these groups are all talk.
They constantly criticize U.S. foreign policy as heavy-handed and
commonly use terms such as "imperialism," yet they support the
imperialists whom they denounce.

Isn't it time to take a stand openly and courageously in support of the
Iraqi National Resistance and recognize the role of the Baath Party in
the liberation of Iraq?

Isn't it time to help release all the Iraqi political prisoners, and put
a stop to the courts of death created by the US occupation, along with
the Persians, to murder the leadership of Iraq?

Link: www.al-moharer.net/mohhtm/i_ebeid271.htm

Two Stories Follow - Zionists still claim that they don't target civilians

Gaza: Hundreds leave their homes and take refuge in UN schools
http://www.imemc.org/article/58342

Monday January 05, 2009 14:02 by Ghassan Bannoura - IMEMC News


Hundreds of Palestinian families have left their homes and taken refuge in UN run schools in Gaza on Monday.



file 2008

Local sources have reported that at least 500 families from the towns of Beit Hannon and Beit Lahyia, as well nearby villages, have left their homes in search of shelter at various UN schools.

IMEMC correspondent in Gaza, Rami Al Meghari, talked to those families. Ihmedan Abu Ayiasha, age 48, left his home. "What can we do?" he asked. "We left our homes because Israeli tanks were shelling it. I came to run from the fire of the Israeli Army."

"I left everything, [even] my clothes" he added. "We have no food. The UN told us they have nothing to give us because Israel did not allow aid into Gaza."

Adnan Abu Hassna, the spokesman for the United Nation Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees in Gaza said that his agency is doing what it can. "We opened the schools for refugees, we only have food left in our inventory for three days, Israel promised to allow aid in, but so far did not do so."

Israel started its military offensive last Saturday, December 27th, 2008, a week and a half after the six-month-long Egyptian-mediated ceasefire came to an end, on December 16th 2008. The death toll in Gaza by Monday reached 534 with 2,530 injured, including 300 in critical condition.
*********************************************************************************************
Scores killed as Gaza school hit
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/01/2009169564177230.html

UPDATED ON:
Tuesday, January 06, 2009


A boy, who fled his house with his family seeks refuge at a UN school in Gaza [Reuters]

Israeli strikes have killed at least 40 people who took refuge inside a UN school in the Gaza Strip, medics have said.

The strike on Tuesday hit a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, in the northern town of Jabaliya.

Medical sources at two Gaza hospitals said two tank shells exploded outside the school, spraying shrapnel on people inside and outside the building, where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from the Israeli attacks.

The toll quickly rose as rescuers struggled through the rubble.

In addition to the dead, several dozen people were wounded, the officials said.

Doctors said all the dead were either people sheltering in the school or residents of Jabalya refugee camp, in the north of the Gaza Strip.

John Ging, director of operations in Gaza for Unrwa, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said three artillery shells landed near the school where 350 people were taking shelter.

Ging said Unrwa regularly provided the Israeli army with exact geographical coordinates of its facilities and the school was in a built-up area.

"Of course it was entirely inevitable if artillery shells landed in that area there would be a high number of casualties," he said.

The Israeli military said it is looking into the reports.

Earlier in the day, two people were killed when an artillery shell hit a school in the southern town of Khan Yunis and three people were killed in an air strike on a school in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, medics said.

More than 640 people have been killed and 2800 others wounded in the 11-day operation, most of them civilians.

A top UN humanitarian official has condemned the violence and demanded an investigation.

Widening the operation

The Israeli military also appears to be broadening its assault on the Gaza Strip as heavy artillery fire is reported from the southern Gazan city of Khan Younis.

Palestinian witnesses said Israeli tanks have moved into Khan Younis, the second biggest urban area in the Strip after Gaza City, in what seems to be an attempt to isolate it from Rafah.

Ayman Mohyeldin, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Gaza, said Khan Younis is strategically significant on several levels - including that Palestinian fighters can fire missiles into Israeli territory from there.

He stressed reporting teams cannot confirm the reports as they are unable to reach the south from Gaza City in the north because the Strip has been effectively dissected by a column of Israel troops.

Mohyeldin also said Palestinian factions had reported that the Israeli navy was attempting to land near the central coastal city of Deir al-Balah – the scene of more intense fighting - on Tuesday.

"There was very intense shelling overnight and people woke to the presence of ground forces in and around Khan Younis this morning," he said.

Four Israeli soldiers were killed and 24 wounded in battles around Gaza City on Monday night, the Israeli military said early on Tuesday, bringing the Israeli death toll to eight.

Nowhere to hide

Fierce clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian fighters were also reported in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip and two black plumes of smoke could be seen rising over the area.

Fares Akram, a Gaza city resident, told Al Jazeera there was "no safe place in Gaza" as "the Israeli war planes don't stop dropping bombs and firing missiles into Gaza".

Akram says his wife, who is nine-months pregnant, is living in fear of going into labor both because of how dangerous it is to leave their home and because "she knows hospitals in Gaza are in chaos".

He said that while Gazans appreciated demonstrations staged across the Arab world in protest at Israel's actions in the Strip, most believe that while the US backs the Israeli offensive the assault will continue.

In addition, the humanitarian situation in Gaza – already poor following the 18-month Israeli blockade of the strip that left the territory desperately short of fuel, food and medical supplies – is worsening.

John Ging, the head of Unrwa, said he was "shocked" by "the brutality of the injuries" he had seen during a visit to the Shifa hospital in Gaza.

'Absence of accountability'

He said: "There are very real shortages of medicine. This hospital has not had electricity for four days. If the generators go down, those in intensive care will die. This is a horrific tragedy here, and it is getting worse by the moment.


Smoke rises after an Israel air strike near the border between Egypt and Gaza [AFP]
Ging described the situation as "the consequences of political failure and complete absence of accountability for this military action" and appealed for political leaders in the region and around the world to "take on the responsibility".

A number of diplomatic initiatives are under way in the region, with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, visiting Israel and Syria on Tuesday for talks aimed at brokering a ceasefire.

Sarkozy, speaking with Bashar al-Assad, his Syrian counterpart, called on Syria to use its weight to influence Hamas.

"Syria needs to apply its weight to both sides, but in particular to Hamas that the missile attacks stop,” he said in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

"Syria has to convince Hamas to make a choice for peace, reason and logic and that they themselves become the agent of reconciling Palestinians. We have to get to the point where we can solve this problem.

"There are still a few hours left for us to carry on talking, but I am convinced if both sides are prepared to take the first step, the fighting can stop. The images we have seen are unbearable for all of us.

"It is up to each side to make the first step, with help from Europe, Turkey and Egypt... to escape the spiral of violence and replace it with a spiral of peace."

Israel launched its offensive on the Strip after a fragile six-month ceasefire with Hamas – the Palestinian faction that controls Gaza – ended on December 19.

Both sides blame each other for the failure of the ceasefire, with Israel saying Palestinian fighters breached the truce by firing rockets into southern Israel.

Hamas, and other Palestinian groups, say the truce could not be extended because Israel failed to lift its crippling siege of the Strip.

XIII Workshop of Afro-American Anthropology to begin in Cuba
The XIII Workshop of Social and Cultural Afro-American Anthropology, sponsored by the House of Africa in its 23rd anniversary, is to take place from January six to nine, in this capital city.



Parallel to the II Encounter of Oral Expression Afropalabra (Afro-Word), the program of the workshop announces scientific sessions, the opening of exhibitions, tributes, artistic shows and the traditional outing of the Afrocubano (Afro-Cuban) Town Council, around different plazas in Old Havana.

Alberto Granados, director of the House of Africa, highlighted the passacaglia of the Town Council as the most important thing in this edition, which as something special for this year will include a cultural gala in the Old Plaza.

Also, on the opening day, there will be opened an itinerant exhibition Afro-América: La Tercera Raíz (Afro-America: The Third Root), in the Convent of Saint Francis of Assisi, composed by huge sized painting on the cruel process of slave trade, which will be shown afterwards in other provinces of the country.

Exhibitions of artists from the country such as the ceramic Wemilere 2008 Award Ancestros, Humo y tambor and Orishas will come after this one, in the seat of the event and in the Benito Juarez House.

The conferences and scientific session in commissions will include the participation of scholars from Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Italy, the United States and the so called Black Continent and they will alternate with the theoretical encounter of the Afropalabra Oral Expression Encounter, which is also to celebrate the anniversary of the House of Africa.

The shows of Oral narrators will take place in the House of Poetry.

During the days of the event there will be paid tributes to great researchers of Afro-Cuban and Afro-American culture, among them the Cuban music scholar Helio Orovio, who died recently.

On January 10th, the Workshop will have a special day in the province of Matanzas, where places of cultural interest will be visited due to their great African roots.

(Cubarte)

Submitted by nesy on Sun, 2009-01-04 13:41.

More Oddities in the U.S. "Debate" Over Israel/Gaza
by Glenn Greenwald
January 02, 2009
Salon
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/01/02/israel/

This Rasmussen Reports poll -- the first to survey American public
opinion specifically regarding the Israeli attack on Gaza -- strongly
bolsters the severe disconnect I documented the other day between (a)
American public opinion on U.S. policy towards Israel and (b) the
consensus views expressed by America's political leadership. Not
only does Rasmussen find that Americans generally "are closely
divided over whether the Jewish state should be taking military
action against militants in the Gaza Strip" (44-41%, with 15%
undecided), but Democratic voters overwhelmingly oppose the Israeli
offensive -- by a 24-point margin (31-55%). By stark constrast,
Republicans, as one would expect (in light of their history of
supporting virtually any proposed attack on Arabs and Muslims),
overwhelmingly support the Israeli bombing campaign (62-27%).

It's not at all surprising, then, that Republican leaders -- from
Dick Cheney and John Bolton to virtually all appendages of the right-
wing noise machine, from talk radio and Fox News to right-wing blogs
and neoconservative journals -- are unquestioning supporters of the
Israeli attack. After all, they're expressing the core ideology of
the overwhelming majority of their voters and audience.

Much more notable is the fact that Democratic Party leaders --
including Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- are just as lockstep in
their blind, uncritical support for the Israeli attack, in their
absolute refusal to utter a word of criticism of, or even
reservations about, Israeli actions. While some Democratic
politicians who are marginalized by the party's leadership are
willing to express the views which Democratic voters overwhelmingly
embrace, the suffocating, fully bipartisan orthodoxy which typically
predominates in America when it comes to Israel -- thou shalt not
speak ill of Israel, thou shalt support all actions it takes -- is in
full force with this latest conflict.

Is there any other significant issue in American political life,
besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their
views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep
positions which leave half of the citizenry with no real voice? More
notably still, is there any other position, besides Israel, where (a)
a party's voters overwhelmingly embrace one position (Israel should
not have attacked Gaza) but (b) that party's leadership unanimously
embraces the exact opposite position (Israel was absolutely right to
attack Gaza and the U.S. must support Israel unequivocally)? Does
that happen with any other issue?

Equally noteworthy is that the factional breakdown regarding Israel-
Gaza mirrors quite closely the factional alliances that arose with
regard to the Iraq War. Just as was true with Iraq, one finds
vigorous pro-war sentiment among the Dick Cheney/National
Review/neoconservative/hard-core-GOP crowd, joined (as was true for
Iraq) by some American liberals who typically oppose that faction yet
eagerly join with them when it comes to Israel. Meanwhile, most of
the rest of the world -- Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle
East, the U.N. leadership -- opposes and condemns the attack, all to
no avail. The parties with the superior military might (the U.S. and
Israel) dismiss world opinion as essentially irrelevant. Even the
pro-war rhetorical tactics are the same (just as those who opposed
the Iraq War were demonized as being "pro-Saddam," those who oppose
the Israeli attack on Gaza are now "pro-Hamas").

Substantively, there are certainly meaningful differences between the
U.S. attack on Iraq and the Israeli attack on Gaza (most notably the
fact that Hamas really does shoot rockets into Israel and has killed
Israeli civilians and Israel really is blockading and occupying
Palestinian land, whereas Iraq did not attack and could not attack
the U.S. as the U.S. was sanctioning them and controlling their
airspace). But the underlying logic of both wars are far more
similar than different: military attacks, invasions and occupations
will end rather than exacerbate terrorism; the Muslim world only
understands brute force; the root causes of the disputes are
irrelevant; diplomacy and the U.N. are largely worthless. It's
therefore entirely unsurprising that the sides split along the same
general lines. What's actually somewhat remarkable is that there is
even more lockstep consensus among America's political leadership
supporting the Israeli attack on Gaza than there was supporting the
U.S.'s own attack on Iraq (at least a few Democratic Congressional
leaders opposed the war on Iraq, unlike for Israel's bombing of Gaza,
where they virtually all unequivocally support it).

* * * * *

Ultimately, what is most notable about the "debate" in the U.S. over
Israel-Gaza is that virtually all of it occurs from the perspective
of Israeli interests but almost none of it is conducted from the
perspective of American interests. There is endless debate over
whether Israel's security is enhanced or undermined by the attack on
Gaza and whether the 40-year-old Israeli occupation, expanding West
Bank settlements and recent devastating blockade or Hamas militancy
and attacks on Israeli civilians bear more of the blame. American
opinion-making elites march forward to opine on the historical rights
and wrongs of the endless Israeli-Palestinian territorial conflict
with such fervor and fixation that it's often easy to forget that the
U.S. is not actually a direct party to this dispute.

Though the ins-and-outs of Israeli grievances and strategic
considerations are endlessly examined, there is virtually no debate
over whether the U.S. should continue to play such an active, one-
sided role in this dispute. It's the American taxpayer, with their
incredibly consequential yet never-debated multi-billion-dollar aid
packages to Israel, who are vital in funding this costly Israeli
assault on Gaza. Just as was true for Israel's bombing of Lebanon,
it's American bombs that -- with the whole world watching -- are
blowing up children and mosques, along with Hamas militants, in
Gaza. And it's the American veto power that, time and again, blocks
any U.N. action to stop these wars.

For those reasons, the pervasive opposition and anger around the
world from the Israeli assault on Gaza is not only directed to Israel
but -- quite rationally and understandably -- to America as well.
Virtually the entire world, other than large segments of the American
public, see Israeli actions as American actions. The attack on Gaza
thus harms not only Israel's reputation and credibility, but
America's reputation and credibility as well.

And for what? Even for those Americans who, for whatever their
reasons, want endlessly to fixate on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, who care deeply and passionately about whether the Israelis
or the Palestinians control this or that West Bank hill or village
and want to spend the rest of their days arguing about who did what
to whom in 1948 and 1967, what possible interests do Americans
generally have in any of that, sufficient to involve ourselves so
directly and vigorously on one side, and thereby subject ourselves to
the significant costs -- financial, reputational, diplomatic and
security -- from doing so?

It's one thing to argue that Israel is being both wise and just by
bombing the densely populated Gaza Strip. It's another thing
entirely to argue that the U.S. should use all of its resources to
support Israel as it does so. Those are two entirely separate
questions. Arguments insisting that the Gaza attack is good and
right for Israel don't mean that they are good and right for the
U.S. Yet unstinting, unquestioning American support for whatever
Israel does is just tacitly assumed in most of these discussions. The
core assumption is that if it can be established that this is the
right thing for Israel to do, then it must be the right thing for the
U.S. to support it. The notion that the two countries may have
separate interests -- that this may be good for Israel to do but not
for the U.S. to support -- is the one issue that, above all else, may
never be examined.

The "change" that many anticipate (or, more accurately, hope) that
Obama will bring about is often invoked as a substance-free mantra, a
feel-good political slogan. But to the extent it means anything
specific, at the very least it has to entail that there will be a
substantial shift in how America is perceived in the world, the role
that we in fact play, the civil-liberties-erosions and militarized
culture that inevitably arise from endlessly involving ourselves in
numerous, hate-fueled military conflicts around the world. Our blind
support for Israel, our eagerness to make all of its disputes our own
disputes, our refusal to acknowledge any divergence of interests
between us and that other country, our active impeding rather than
facilitating of diplomatic resolutions between it and its neighbors
are major impediments to any meaningful progress in those areas.

UPDATE: One related point: I have little appreciation for those who
believe, one way or the other, that they can reliably predict what
Obama is going to do -- either on this issue or others. That
requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack.

Some argue that Obama has filled key positions with politicians who
have a history of virtually absolute support for Israeli actions --
Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Rahm Emanuel -- because Obama intends to
continue, more or less, the Bush policy of blind support for Israel.
Others argue the opposite: that those appointments are necessary to
vest the Obama administration with the credibility to take a more
active role in pushing the Israelis to a negotiated settlement with
the Palestinians, and that in particular, Clinton would not have left
her Senate seat unless she believed she could finish Bill Clinton's
work and obtain for herself the legacy-building accomplishment of
forging an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians (this
morning's NYT hints at that scenario).

I personally find the latter theory marginally more persuasive, but
there is simply no way to know until Obama is inaugurated. Whatever
else is true, the more domestic political pressure is exerted
demanding that the U.S. play a more even-handed and constructive role
in facilitating a diplomatic resolution, the more likely it is that
this will happen.

UPDATE II: Donna Edwards, the newly elected, netroots-supported
Democratic Congresswoman from Maryland, who removed the standard
establishment Democratic incumbent Al Wynn from office this year, has
the following to say about Israel/Gaza:

I am deeply disturbed by this week's escalation of hostilities in the
Gaza Strip, as I have been by the ongoing rocket fire into southern
Israel. To support Israel and to ease the humanitarian crisis facing
the people of Gaza, the United States must work actively for an
immediate ceasefire that ends the violence, stops the rockets, and
removes the blockade of Gaza.

That's much further than most national Democrats have been willing to
go. And it illustrates that primary challenges can -- slowly but
meaningfully -- change the face of the Democratic Party.

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer turned political
and legal blogger. His Salon blog, Unclaimed Territory, started in
October of 2005, quickly became one of the most popular and highest-
trafficked in the blogosphere. He is the author of three books, the
most recent of which is "Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big
Myths of Republican Politics", published by Crown (Random House) in
April 2008. He has a J.D. from New York University School of Law
(1994) and a B.A. from George Washington University (1990).

By Paul Street
January, 04 2009

MURDERING CHILDREN

n the last week of 2008, Palestinian children in Gaza were blown apart by Israeli bombs and missiles. The air machinery used to kill those children - including American-made F-16s and Blackhawk helicopters - was supplied by the United States.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports one Gaza story from shortly before midnight on Sunday, December 28. That's when "Israeli warplanes fired one or more missiles at the Imad Aqil mosque in Jabalya, a densely populated refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. The attack killed five of Anwar Balousha's daughters who were sleeping in a bedroom of their nearby house: Jawaher, 4; Dina, 8; Samar, 12; Ikram, 14; and Tahrir, 18."

"We were asleep and we woke to the sound of bombing and the rubble falling on the house and on our heads," Anwar Balousha told Human Rights Watch.

An hour or so after, an Israeli Blackhawk fired two missiles into the Rafah refugee camp. One struck the home of the al-Absi family, killing three brothers - Sedqi, 3, Ahmad, 12, and Muhammad, 13 - and wounding two sisters and the children's mother. (HRW, "Israel/Hamas: Civilians Must Not be Targets," December 30, 2008, read at http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/12/30/israelhamas-civilians-must-not-be-targets)

By December 28th, two days into its air assault on Gaza, Israel had killed at least 270 Palestinians and injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously. Untold numbers of people remained buried under the rubble, meaning that the death toll was certain to rise.

It was already Israel's bloodiest assault on Gaza in two decades - an onslaught that criminally attacked civilian targets

"AN URGE TO RESPOND"

Enjoying a luxurious Hawaiian holiday with his family in a $9 million beach-front vacation home, President Elect Barack Obama had "no comment" on the carnage in Gaza. Still, his media handler and spokesman David Axlerod essentially endorsed the murders of the Balousha and al Absi children on NBC's weekly show "Face the Nation." "Well, certainly, the president-elect recognizes the special relationship between United States and Israel," Axelrod told NBC. "It's an important bond, an important relationship. He's going to honor it ... And obviously, this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks. As Hamas began its shelling, Israel responded." "The president-elect was in Sderot last July," Axelrod continued, "in southern Israel, a town that's taken the brunt of the Hamas attacks... And he said then that, when bombs are raining down on your citizens, there is an urge to respond and act and try and put an end to that. So, you know, that's what he said then, and I think that's what he believes."

In other words, Israel's criminal bombing of Gaza - preparation for a ground invasion - was legitimate retaliation, not naked aggression, as far as Obama was concerned. That was the Obama team's take on Israel's latest outrage - the same exact line as the Bush administration.

This line ignored the grossly disproportionate nature of Israel's response, which killed hundreds of Palestinians, including many civilians, in two days while just 17 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians rockets over the last seven year. (The "Israel-Palestine conflict" is a very asymmetrical affair.)

It also deleted the fact that Israel, not Hamas (the militant Muslim organization that holds elected authority in the Gaza ghetto), broke a six-month truce by firing missiles into Gaza on the evening of the U.S. presidential election.

BLAMING THE VICTIM

The Obama team's response to the latest Israeli outrage is depressing but it is not surprising. Obama's pronounced reluctance to rock the imperial boat [1] and question the conventional U.S. foreign policy wisdom been sharply evident in his statements and actions relating to the Israel-Palestine issue.

Early in his political career, to be sure, state senator Obama took positions embraced by Israeli peace activists and their supporters. During his failed campaign against South Side Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) in 2000, for example, Obama criticized the Clinton administration's unconditional support of the occupation and other Israeli policies. He called for an "even-handed approach" to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and referred to "the cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians" while most Democrats joined Republicans in discussing the conflict purely in terms of Palestinian provocation and Israeli response. Obama claimed to support a Palestinian-Israel peace settlement in accord with the Geneva Initiative and with related proposals by Israeli and Palestinian moderates.

But this approach could not survive presidential aspirations in a political culture where substantive criticism of Israel's behavior carries grave electoral risks. As a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, Obama's statements on Israel-Palestine were practically identical to those of the Bush administration, which has backed the right-wing Ehud Olmert (Likud) government (January 4, 2006 to present) on nearly every important policy matter. Obama argued that "we should never seek to dictate what is best for the Israelis and their security interests" and claimed that no Israeli prime minister - no matter how unpopular and murderous (e.g. Olmert) - should be "dragged" against his will into negotiations with the Palestinians.

The contradictions Obama embraced and overlooked in his quest to appease Israel and its hard-line American supporters were quite pronounced. As foreign policy analyst Stephen Zunes noted last January:

"Despite Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's refusal to freeze the construction of additional illegal settlements, end the seizure of Palestinian population centers, release Palestinian political prisoners, or enact other confidence-building measures - much less agree to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state - Obama claimed in his AIPAC [American Israeli Public Affairs Council] policy forum speech [in March of 2007] that Olmert is 'more than willing to negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will result in two states living side by side in peace and security' [2]. And though, as recently as last March, Obama acknowledged the reality that 'nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people,' as a result of the stalled peace process he has since placed the blame for the impasse not on the Israeli occupation but on the Palestinians themselves" (Stephen Zunes, "Barack Obama and the Middle East," Foreign Policy in Focus, January 10, 2008 read at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4886)

Obama has consistently rejected the insistence of peace activists that U.S. make military aid to Israel contingent on the Israeli government following international and human rights law.

"A DEGREE OF ANTI-ARAB RACISM"

One of the most revealing moments in Obama's "antiwar" career came when he stuck with the rest of the bipartisan U.S. political class in refusing to join international opinion in condemning Israel's mass-murderous air assault on Lebanon. Not content to quietly appease Israel's massive state violence during the summer of 2006, Obama actually hurried to the Olmert government's defense. He co-sponsored a Senate resolution defending the attack. Refusing to give any elementary responsibility to Israel for the deaths of over 800 Lebanese civilians, Obama insisted the anti-occupation Muslim group Hezbollah was the real culprit behind these deaths. Hezbollah, he claimed, had used "innocent people as shields." Never mind that that the respected human rights groups Amnesty International and HRW both discovered no convincing evidence of such practices - a finding corroborated by later scholarly research. When Zunes contacted Obama's press spokesperson for evidence to back Obama's "human shield" claim, the Obama operative, "sent [Zunes] a link to a poorly-documented report from a hawkish Israeli research institute headed by the former chief of the Mossad-the Israeli intelligence service that itself has engaged in numerous violations of international humanitarian law." The Obama cam ignored "subsequent requests for more credible sources."

"Obama's rhetoric as a senator," Zunes observed last year, "has betrayed what some might view as a degree of anti-Arab racism. He has routinely condemned attacks against Israeli civilians by Arabs but has never condemned attacks against Arab civilians by Israelis." (Zunes, "Obama and the Middle East").

"ISRAEL IS FORCED TO DO THIS"

One chilling example of what some might call anti-Arab racism on Obama's part came when Israel tightened the screws of its siege of Gaza last January. As Palestinians struggled to survive a vicious embargo of food, fuel, and medicine, Obama sent the following letter to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations"

"Dear Ambassador Khalilzad,"

"I understand that today the UN Security Council met regarding the situation in Gaza, and that a resolution or statement could be forthcoming from the Council in short order."

"I urge you to ensure that the Security Council issue no statement and pass no resolution on this matter that does not fully condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in southern Israel..."

"All of us are concerned about the impact of closed border crossings on Palestinian families. However, we have to understand why Israel is forced to do this... Israel has the right to respond while seeking to minimize any impact on civilians."

"The Security Council should clearly and unequivocally condemn the rocket attacks... If it cannot bring itself to make these common sense points, I urge you to ensure that it does not speak at all."

"Sincerely,"

"Barack Obama
"United States Senator" [3]

This terrible letter pandered to the right wing of Israeli and "pro-Israel" U.S. opinion by ignoring the absurdly disproportionate nature of Israel's "response" and the suffocating apartheid and poverty conditions that predictably generate violent resistance on the part of some Palestinians.

WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS

When Obama toured the Middle East last July, he made the standard obligatory visits to Israel's Holocaust Memorial and its Western Wall. He met with a broad spectrum of Israeli Jewish political leaders. He traveled to an Israeli town that had experienced frequent Hamas rocket attacks. He repeatedly proclaimed affectionate support for Israel and expressed outrage at Palestinian violence. He remained silent about Israel's unremitting colonization of occupied territory. He failed to follow former President Jimmy Carter by agreeing to meet with democratically elected Hamas leaders, with whom Israel had negotiated a ceasefire.

He skipped what American Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah called "the opportunity to visit Palestinian refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls to witness first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and settlers, or to see how Palestinians cope under what many call 'apartheid.' This year alone," Abunimah noted last July, "almost 500 Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed by the Israeli army -- exceeding the total for 2007 and dwarfing the two-dozen Israelis killed in conflict-related violence." (Ali Abunimah, What Obama Missed in the Middle East," The Electronic Intifada, 24 July 2008, read at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9708.shtml)

Obama offered no apologies to Palestinians for an earlier comment (to an AIPAC policy forum in June of 2008) calling for an "undivided Jerusalem" [4] - something even George W. Bush had never advocated.

The managers of the 2008 Democratic Convention - where Obama formally received and accepted the presidential nomination - went to the remarkable length of denying a living former Democratic president the right to speak. The ex-president in question, Carter, was banned from the speakers' roster because he has committed the unpardonable sin of acknowledging that Israel bears responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians. Obama's advisory and transition team has been loaded with supporters of Israeli occupation and apartheid policies. His chief of staff is the militantly "pro-Israel" son of an openly anti-Arab Israeli Zionist.

For this and other reasons, American peace and justice activists should be miffed but not at all surprised that the Obama team seems incapable of seeing Palestinians as real and worthy victims of Israeli oppression. Since entering the national political stage, Obama has steadfastly refused to complicate his electoral viability by acknowledging Israel's infliction of massive human suffering in Gaza and the West Bank or the powerful role of the U.S. in funding and equipping Israel's enforcement of that suffering. In this as in so many areas, those who want to see truly progressive change under an Obama administration are going to have relentlessly fight from below. The next president cannot be expected to break from the by-now standard U.S. pattern of supporting Israel's crimes unless and until popular resistance to that pattern becomes too dangerous to ignore.

Paul Street is a writer and activist in Iowa City, IA. His most recent book is Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987
NOTES
1. See Paul Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradgigm, 2008), Chapter 4, titled "How 'Antiwar?' Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire."
2. "Prepared Text of Barack Obama's Speech for the AIPAC Policy Forum," March 2, 2007, read at http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/obamas_aipac_speech_text_as_pr.html
3. For copies of this letter and reflections on its authenticity, see http://tzvee.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-january-22-2008-barack-obama-wrote.html and http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2008/01/24/obama-gaza-siege-forced-on-israel/
4. Agence France-Presse, "Jerusalem Must Remain the Undivided Capital of Israel: Obama," June 4, 2008.
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3732