Tim King Salem-News.com

Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, U.S. Congress and redefined rocket science…

Courtesy Salem-News.com

(SALEM) – In a violent world where a genocide can claim as many as six million human lives in a single ‘program’, it seems unimaginable that the deaths of 29 people could, in modern times, hugely impact the future of all human beings.

That’s right, the world’s safety and World War Three itself, hinges on the reaction to the deaths of 29 innocent people. Is your child’s future worth the honor of 29 people?

One day in 1994, an Israeli doctor entered a Muslim place of worship and opened fire with an assault rifle. He had several magazines but eventually ran out of ammo and the survivors killed him.

Heinous and utterly cold blooded and cruel, this ‘doctor’ is a martyr today among Israeli settlers, who live in colonies built specifically on stolen Palestinian land.

This pre-meditated crime was committed during the Intifada when fragile peace negotiations were underway, and as the Website Palestine Facts explains, the tragic bloody shooting was a political disaster:

Mass Murderer Baruch Goldstein

…the best known, and most serious incident of Israeli violence against Arabs was in February 1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a resident of Kiryat Arba, opened fire with a Galil assault rifle on Muslim worshippers at the Machpelah Cave, murdering 29 and wounding 125…

…it seriously impacted the peace process and led to the installation of an international observer force in Hebron…
- From the article, Palestinians Shot in Hebron, 1994

The crime in Hebron that history would recall as the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, was fully denounced by the Israeli government and religious leaders.

That is good, but made little difference for the 29 dead and 125 people injured while praying, by a man who was a physician no The shot of irony is that, as it turns out, this mass murdering Jewish settler terrorist was an American. Americans, the millions of hard working people whose tax dollars that are given by their politicians to Israel, ensure that every Jewish Israeli is guaranteed a college education. Isn’t that something? Americans, they are so good to the Israelis that Congress recently offered the leader of the Israeli regime, Benjamin Netanyahu, exactly 29 standing ovations… what?

Baruch Goldstein- Jewish Terrorist, Doctor of Death

Baruch Kopel Goldstein (Hebrew: ברוך קופל גולדשטיין‎; December 9, 1956 – February 25, 1994) was an American-born Jewish Israeli physician and mass murderer who perpetrated the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in the city of Hebron, killing 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounding another 125.

The Israeli government condemned the massacre and responded by arresting followers of Meir Kahane, forbidding certain settlers from entering Arab towns and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles. Goldstein was denounced by mainstream Orthodox Judaism and was widely described as insane by Israelis.

Goldstein’s gravesite became a pilgrimage site for Jewish extremists. In 1999, after the passing of Israeli legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists, the Israeli army dismantled the shrine that had been built to Goldstein at the site of his interment.
- From the Wikipedia page on Baruch Goldstein

less; raised on western values and right-wing Zionist ideology.

Special Thank to our friends at Salem-News.com

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Tim King is a former U.S. Marine with twenty years of experience on the west coast as a television news producer, photojournalist, reporter and assignment editor. In addition to his role as a war correspondent, this Los Angeles native serves as Salem-News.com’s Executive News Editor. Tim spent the winter of 2006/07 covering the war in Afghanistan, and he was in Iraq over the summer of 2008, reporting from the war while embedded with both the U.S. Army and the Marines. Tim holds numerous awards for reporting, photography, writing and editing, including the Oregon AP Award for Spot News Photographer of the Year (2004), first place Electronic Media Award in Spot News, Las Vegas, (1998), Oregon AP Cooperation Award (1991); and several others including the 2005 Red Cross Good Neighborhood Award for reporting. Tim has several years of experience in network affiliate news TV stations, having worked as a reporter and photographer at NBC, ABC and FOX stations in Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. You can send Tim an email at this address: newsroom@salem-news.com

“Animals. Animals. Like the Discovery Channel. All of Ramallah is a jungle. There are monkeys, dogs, gorillas. The problem is that the animals are locked they can’t come out. We’re humans. They’re animals. They aren’t humans we are.”
- Israeli border police (you can find at 5:03 of this video)

“We let them suffer, in the sun, in the rain, that’s it. That’s what I wanted to say. Let the whole world know.”
- Israeli border police

“When the Palestinians come…we put on our show.”
- Israeli border police

“Nobody knows about us here. Nobody in the world.” – Palestinian businessman

“Look at what they do to us, do to our children. Look!” – Mother with two children

“Food for my wife, Christmas tomorrow. Meal for my family! I’ll be back in the morning!” – Elderly Palestinian man

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” – attributed to Mark Twain

by Stuart Littlewood

Meet another of Israel’s undesirables, Yuli Edelstein.

He is the regime’s Propaganda Minister (or to be more precise, Minister for Dis-information and Diaspora) and he runs the biggest lie machine in the world.

His task is to make the Israel ‘brand’ smell sweeter. The reason it stinks, of course, is the regime’s putrid morals and murderous conduct, which the lie machine works overtime to try to justify and excuse. It will always fail. You cannot build a decent brand image on lies, obnoxious behaviour and a massive attitude problem.

Edelstein hit the headlines over Christmas when he told everybody that the Arabs are “a deplorable nation”. He was speaking at a public diplomacy event (incredible as it may seem!) at Yor Yehuda, which I’m told means “light of Juda”.

http://972mag.com/israels-propaganda-minister-arabs-are-a-deplorable-nation/31324/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=01bd01c89f-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

He said that “as long as the Arab nation continues to be a deplorable nation, which continues investing in infrastructure for terrorism, education to hate, and welfare for the families of shaheeds [martyrs], there will be no peace.”

The reporter asked Edelstein’s office if the minister was aware that there are some 80 million Arabs in the world, from Sudan to Syria. A spokesman replied: “Yes, there are – and the minister meant them all.”

That’s rich coming from someone whose own position doesn’t bear examination. I understand Edelstein lives in one of Israel’s illegal settlements, Neve Daniel, which is built on stolen Palestinian land in wilful breach of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

“Settlers” is too nice a word for such people. It suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to

integrate with the locals. Israeli “settlers” are anything but. They are aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies – ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape. They include gangs of armed delinquents and religious nutters who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children.  The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power to transfer parts of its own civilian population – and that includes Edelstein and his ministerial colleague the psychopath Avigdor Lieberman – into the territory it occupies. Which leaves these two charmers open to charges of war crimes.

Israel’s hasbara liars verge on the compulsive and pathological. Telling lies is routine; they are in denial of reality; they exaggerate; they come to believe their lies; they have no remorse; and they have no regard for the consequences. Despite this, the Western media lap up anything Tel Aviv’s liars spew out.

Edelstein’s capacity for silliness knows no bounds. When the US demanded that Israel suspend a planned project in East Jerusalem (which is Palestinian territory of course) and revoke planning permission, Ynet News reported Edelstein saying that such a demand to halt construction “proves how dangerous it is to get dragged into talks of a settlement freeze… Such talks will lead to a demand to completely freeze our lives in the entire State of Israel.”

And he let his Stalinist tendencies (Edelstein’s from the Ukraine) get the better of him earlier this year when he wrote to Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook demanding the removal of a page that was calling for a third Intifada and had generated nearly 250,000 supporters.

How to do it (a teach-yourself primer)

It goes without saying that Israel’s lie machine has an instruction manual for those it recruits into its vile business. See it here: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/8303274/The-Israel-Projects-2009-Global-Language-Dictionary

The manual’s general thrust is to win over the mass of “persuadables”, primarily in America but also in the UK. The strategy from the start is to isolate democratically-elected Hamas and to rob the resistance movement and the Palestinian people of their human rights. This quote at the beginning sets the tone: “Remember, it’s not what you say that counts. It’s what people hear.”

The lie machine’s top priority: demonise Hamas…

And this is how they try it on…

• “Clearly differentiate between the Palestinian people and Hamas. There is an

immediate and clear distinction between the empathy Americans feel for the Palestinians and the scorn they direct at Palestinian leadership. Hamas is a terrorist organization – Americans get that already. But if it sounds like you are attacking the Palestinian people (even though they elected Hamas) rather than their leadership, you will lose public support. Right now, many Americans sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, and that sympathy will increase if you fail to differentiate the people from their leaders.”

• “Draw direct parallels between Israel and America—including the need to defend against terrorism…. The more you focus on the similarities between Israel and America, the more likely you are to win the support of those who are neutral. Indeed, Israel is an important American ally in the war against terrorism, and faces many of the same challenges as America in protecting their citizens.”

Note how Israel’s strategy is almost totally dependent on the false idea that they and America are victims of terror and all western nations need to huddle together with Israel for mutual protection. Fortunately, level-headed people are beginning to realize who the terrorists really are.

It is surely obvious by now that allowing parallels to be drawn between Israel and America only serves to increase the world’s hatred of America. US citizens are very belatedly waking up to this, as are British citizens, but many continue to fall ass-over-tit into the trap.

Next, inject with “core values” and repeat over and over and over again…

• “The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘security,’ and ‘peace.’ These four words are at the core of the American political, economic, social, and cultural systems, and they should be repeated as often as possible because they resonate with virtually every American.”

If so fluent in this splendid language, why won’t Israel acknowledge their neighbours’ rights to democracy, freedom, security and peace and end their military oppression?

• “A simple rule of thumb is that once you get to the point of repeating the same message over and over again so many times that you think you might get sick—that is just about the time the public will wake up and say ‘Hey—this person just might be saying something interesting to me!’ But don’t confuse messages with facts…. ”

Right, never let facts get in the way of a good message!  And, as George Dubya Bush, 43rd US President, said: “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

• “The fight is over IDEOLOGY, not land; terror, not territory. Thus, you must avoid using Israel’s religious claims to land as a reason why Israel should not give up land. Such claims only make Israel look extremist to people who are not religious Christians or Jews.”

If the fight isn’t about land, why did Israel steal it at gunpoint? And why won’t they give it back when told to repeatedly by the UN?

Then there’s the uncontrollable urge to possess the Holy City…

• “The toughest issue to communicate will be the final resolution of Jerusalem. Americans overwhelmingly want Israel to be in charge of the religious holy sites and are frankly afraid of the consequences should Israel turn over control to the Palestinians. Consider:

# 71% of Americans trust Israel most to protect the holy sites in Jerusalem, compared to 6.1% who trust the Palestinian authority most. 8.5% percent trust neither.

# 54% of Americans believe that “Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty” while just 23.9% believe that ‘Jerusalem should be divided into Israeli controlled and Palestinian controlled areas’.

Given the choice between the two, Americans of all political and demographic stripes trust Israel to protect and have sovereignty over Jerusalem.”

The Old City and east Jerusalem are Palestinian. Nevertheless, “Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel,” says prime minister Netanyahu. Israel is in control right now and prevents Muslims and Christians from outside the City visiting the holy places. No way can Israel be trusted.

The UN’s partition plan decreed that Jerusalem should become a ‘corpus separatum’ under international administration. It is unlikely that the UN would wish to see its resolutions torn up or international law re-written for Israel’s sole benefit or to suit America’s misinformed opinion.

Oh, and let’s put the boot into the other demon, Iran…

• “Many on the left see an “Israel v. Palestinian” crisis where Israel is Goliath and

the Palestinians are David. It is critical that they understand that this is an Arab-Israeli crisis and that the force undermining peace is Iran and their proxies Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. You must not call Hamas just Hamas. Call them what they are: Iran-backed Hamas. Indeed, when they know that Iran is behind Hamas and Hezbollah, they are much more supportive of Israel.”

By the same token we must call the racist regime what it is – US-backed Israel.

The plight of the Palestinians under Israel’s heel was of international concern long before Hamas appeared on the scene. Iran’s support for Hamas is difficult to quantify and probably less than we think. In any case it is peanuts compared to America’s support for Israel.

Hamas, as everyone knows, is an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and was founded in 1987 during the first Intifada. Hezbollah came into being in 1982 in response to US-backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. So the territorial ambitions of US-backed Israel provoked the rise of both. US-backed Israel’s problem is entirely self-inflicted and shouldn’t concern the rest of us at all.

The lie machine’s propaganda manual is indeed an evil document oozing poison. It shows better than anything else why the Israeli regime can never, never, never be trusted and is therefore no partner for peace.

Edelstein should reflect on how being a fabricator and dealer in lies, and a war criminal too, is about as low a thing as a man can be. But, Israel being Israel, creatures like him and that unprincipled mouthpiece Mark Regev are guaranteed a job.

Stuart Littlewood

29 December 2011

 *******

Stuart Littlewood’s book Radio Free Palestine can now be read on the internet by visiting www.radiofreepalestine.org.uk

By Yousef Munayyer

There is a famous scene in Mary Shelley’s classic where Victor Frankenstein realises that he created a monster and that this monster might be the end of him. Such is the scene that comes to mind when thinking about the news emerging from the occupied West Bank in recent days. Israeli settlers, living in illegal colonies in Palestinian territory, rioted again. This time, however, they did not go after their usual target – Palestinian civilians – rather, they raided an Israeli military base where they injured an Israeli soldier.

Suddenly, the Israeli government sprang into action. An emergency meeting of the Israeli cabinet was called. Officials – Israeli officials – even began to use the term “terrorist” to describe the perpetrators.

Just a day earlier, Israeli settlers from the Settlement of Yitzhar raided the Palestinian village of Asira al-Qibliya, causing damage to property and terrifying residents. Also, in the past week alone, three different Palestinian mosques in Ramallah, Salfit and Jerusalem suffered arson attacks at the hands of Israeli settlers.

These sorts of attacks against Palestinians are a regular occurrence. Arsons, stonings, destruction of property, shootings, physical attacks and harassment are but a few of the daily occurring categories we have kept track of in the Palestine Centre’s Settler Violence database. In 2011 there have been a record number of violent settler attacks. In fact, in each of the previous five years, settler violence has increased from one year to the next.

Despite this undeniable fact, the Israeli government has done little to crack down on this type of violence. The main reason why settler violence has been able to increase, year after year, is because the settlers continue to feel emboldened when their attacks against Palestinian civilians go undeterred.

The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into three geographic areas. In Area A, in which most Palestinian urban centres fall, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security (although the Israelis routinely enter Area A at will) but in Areas B and C, which comprise over 80 per cent of the territory, it is the Israelis which are responsible for security. This means Palestinian police are not permitted to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli settlers in most of the West Bank. The problem is, of course, that the Israelis are not doing this job either and so it should come as no surprise that 95 per cent of settler violence occurs in Areas B and C.

Often the Israeli Army turns the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinians. In some cases caught on video, Israeli soldiers stand idly by while settlers rampage. In other cases, like the one earlier this year in Qusra, the Israeli army intervenes to protect settlers once they’ve started altercations with villagers. That is how Isam Oudeh was killed – defending his own village – in September.

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and the Israeli state’s failure to adequately respond to it highlight an important aspect of the Israeli occupation’s Apartheid-like policies. The Israeli Human Rights Organisation B’Tselem documented 835 cases of Palestinian minors being arrested for stone-throwing from 2005-2010. Of these, 99.88 per cent were convicted in military trials. There have been hundreds of stone-throwing attacks by Israeli settlers in 2011 alone, yet few are ever arrested – let alone convicted – and throwing stones is among the least of their crimes.

Last week, a 28-year-old Palestinian named Mustafa Tamimi in the village of Nabi Saleh was protesting the continued expansion of Israeli settlements and particularly the confiscation of land and water resources belonging to his village. These had been taken by the neighbouring Israeli settlement of Halamish with the support of the Israeli military.

Tamimi was shot and killed at near point-blank range with a tear-gas canister to the face.

For years, the Israeli military that governs the West Bank and the state that directs it have supported deplorable policies to repress protesters like Tamimi, who oppose settlement expansion. But the state fails to implement policies to crack down on settlers who seek the exact opposite, and often use violent means to achieve their objectives.

No one should be surprised. The problem of settler violence is a monster that Israel has created, nourished and supported. Now, with attacks on Israeli military bases, the monster may even have turned on its creator.

When will this tragic horror end?

When we realise that it is the military occupation and its underlying policies that have brought it to life.

Source: The Jerusalem Fund

******

Yousef Munayyer

Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This policy brief may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.

Bethlehem Bible college choir performs next to Israel's separation wall in Bethlehem. (MaanImages/Munther Isaac, HO)

BETHLEHEM(Ma’an)- Settlers attacked a Palestinian choir bus returning from a carol concert in Nablus on Saturday evening, choristers told Ma’an.

The singers, from Bethlehem Bible college, said five men attacked them on a quiet road outside of the northern West Bank city.

“A rock smashed through the window, and glass shattered everywhere inside,” chorister Saleem Anfous told Ma’an, adding that none of the 25 carol singers was injured.

“We kept driving and starting singing to cheer ourselves up and encourage the choir members,” he said.

“Tomorrow we will continue our carol tour of the West Bank in Jenin, using the same road, and we are afraid. But we are trying to convince the families that God will protect us.”

Hardline settlers have torched mosques near Ramallah, Jerusalem and Salfit since last Wednesday. The latest string of attacks included a rampage on an army base, sparking condemnation in Israel, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu to vow stronger enforcement against lawlessness.

But he rejected a recommendation to classify the Jewish extremists as terrorists, and Israeli lawmakers were set to discuss a law to legalize settlement outposts built on land owned by Palestinians on Sunday.

Extremists amongst Israel’s 500,000 strong settler population in the West Bank and Jerusalem reference Israel’s measures against outposts in their revenge ‘price tag’ attacks, usually directed at Palestinians in the West Bank, but recently spilling over into Palestinian sites in Israel and army targets.

Israel distinguishes between state-sanctioned settlement building on occupied Palestinian land and the wildcat outposts, but the international community says all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem break international law.

At the Kusra mosque, "Mohammed is a pig" was spray-painted on the wall. (Photo by Michele Monni)

by Dr. Lawrence Davidson

Part I

On 12 December 2011 hundreds of Israeli settler fanatics besieged a West Bank IDF army base. They destroyed equipment, set fires, and even stoned the base soldiers. This was the second such attack in a month. The cause? Anger over the army’s dismantlement of a small number of isolated, unauthorized settler outposts. The Chief of the Central Command of the Israel “Defense” Forces, Major General Avi Misrahi, is quoted as saying “I have not seen such hatred of Jews towards soldiers during my 30 years of service.” He must not have been looking.

This was not an exceptional event. The subsequent indignation over the attack expressed by Prime Minister Netanyahu (“red lines have been crossed”) was, as Alex Fishman writing in Yedioth Ahronoth put it, staged hypocrisy. The Prime Minister is certainly aware that for some time there has been on-going skirmishing between the settlers and government security forces. Right wing settlers regularly throw rocks and fire bombs at police and army vehicles and “physical altercations” between settlers and Israeli police and soldiers are “almost routine.” This is so despite the fact that the government, both Prime Minister and Knesset, “either tacitly or openly” support the settlers. Then why the hatred and why the attacks?

At this stage the battle is over strategy. The Israeli government wants to gobble up all of Palestine in an orderly step by step fashion. In part, this is to avoid too much international criticism at any particular stage of the process. On the other hand, the settlers don’t give a damn about international opinion – no more than does al-Qaeda, to which they have an unsavory resemblance. Led “by fundamentalist religious leaders who do not recognize the state of Israel and its laws,” they are driven by religious fanaticism and have no respect for governments or their agents. It is their ideological conviction that all of Palestine (including, by the way, Jordan) must be Jewish as soon as possible. The authorities sometime get in the way of this goal and that has led the settlers to, as Fishman puts it, “terrorize not only the Palestinian population but also the police and the army.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu, belatedly noticing an erosion of government authority, has begun to set rules against settler violence when it is directed toward the IDF and police ( but not toward the Palestinians). The New York Times reports that from now on such “radical Israelis” attacking soldiers or policemen will be treated just like “Palestinian militants.” That is they will be “detained for long periods without charge and tried in military courts.”

Alas, this new toughness won’t work. For years Israeli governments have looked the other way as thousands of armed religious fanatics organized themselves and got stronger and more self-assured. Now, as Adam Keller of Gush Shalom tells us, “the Golem has turned on its creator.” These are the people who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. What makes Netanyahu believe that Israel’s present army, police and courts which, reminiscent of the Weimar Republic, regularly show sympathy and leniency toward these criminals, are going to change their attitude on his orders? When a military reporter asked a brigade commander if he was prepared to act toward settler hostility in the same manner as he would Palestinian hostility, he answered “you would not expect me to open fire on a Jew…I am certain you didn’t mean that.”

The reporter would have gotten a very different answer if she had asked the fanatic settlers about how far they were willing to go. Anshel Pfeffer writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz notes that “the only red line that has yet to be crossed is a scenario in which an Israeli citizen [belonging to] the extreme settler right would open fire on IDF soldiers. There are those in Israel’s security forces who fear that day is not so distant.”

Netanyahu’s apparent change of heart comes too late. What we have here is incipient civil war. Any really serious effort to stop these fanatics will result in their turning their weapons on those who represent the government. What you sow is what you reap.

Part II

This climate of internecine hostility contaminates the Jewish diaspora as well. There is no rock throwing or armed men threatening violence, but the hatred is there. Jewish critics of Israeli behavior are categorized as “Israel-haters” or, alternatively, “self-hating Jews.” This is often expressed with the same vehemence displayed by Israel’s settler fanatics. And, indeed, those pointing fingers in the U.S. are often supporters of the extremists on the West Bank.

Last week Howard Gutman, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, addressed “a group of European Jewish lawyers gathered…to discuss anti-Semitism” Gutman told them that there was now two different kinds of anti-Semitism: a “classic” type that is “directed against Jews for being Jews” and “a newer form” that is a product of “the Israeli-Arab conflict and can therefore be mitigated by reducing Israeli-Palestinian tensions.” This is actually a conclusion that was reached by Israel’s Defense Ministry as early as 1994. No matter, when Gutman’s statement became public “the long knives” came out “for another Jewish liberal who committed the sin of stating the uncomfortably obvious truth about a causal relation between Israeli policy and Muslim anti-Semitism.”

The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Executive Director Matthew Brooks called Gutman’s revelation “outrageous” and one that “makes excuses for anti-Semitic hatred and bigotry.” Senator Joe Lieberman called Gutman’s remarks “inexcusable” and Representative Gary Ackerman of New York suggested that Gutman himself might be anti-Semitic.

Again, the charge of anti-Semitism can be and frequently is leveled against fellow Jews who are critical of Israel. The logic goes something like this: Judaism and Israel are one and the same. Ergo if you are critical of Israeli behavior you are critical of Jewish behavior and that makes you an anti-Semite. Very neat. Of course, the whole train of thought rests on the false assumption that Israel and Judaism are two sides of the same coin.

Despite the viral reaction, Jewish criticism of Israel is growing quickly and this creates a frustrating dilemma for the Zionists. The pro-Israeli blogger Steven Plaut describes this situation in catastrophic terms. “Jewish anti-Semitism is all around us, part of the political air we breathe, a modern disease. In the twenty-first century the world is experiencing an explosion of it, a virtual plague.”

Part III

None of this Zionist extremism can be dismissed as a passing phenomenon. It has been with us too long. In fact it has been with us since 1917 and the Balfour Declaration. That is when a certain segment of European Jewry began its obsessive drive to create and maintain a state for one group only. It was then, and continues to be an inherently racist project. Ideologies, like Zionism, that support such projects usually reject all opposition. And opposition from erstwhile members of the in-group is the very worst because it exposes the false nature of claims of ethnic, religious or racial solidarity.

When and if Israeli society comes to its senses and decides to rid itself of the Occupied Territories the settler fanatics will resist “fanatically,” and the civil war that is now incipient will release its full potential violence. When and if that happens there will be repercussions for U.S. and European Jews and they too may well entail violence. It would seem that the people chosen to be a “light unto the nations” have only managed to create another badly flawed nation state–one with a preference for apartheid policies. Zionism said “let modern Israel be” and, pop, the light went out.

ldavidson@wcupa.edu
www.tothepointanalyses.com
www.twitter.com/pointanalyses

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DR. LAWRENCE DAVIDSON is professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA, and the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University of Florida Press, 2001), Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentuck Press, 2009).

Vandals attempt to set fire to building and daub walls with inflammatory graffiti as city mayor appeals for calm.

“

Vandals daubed the outside walls of the former mosque with inflammatory graffiti [AFP

Vandals have set fire to a disused mosque in Jerusalem, daubing inflammatory graffiti in Hebrew on the walls in an apparent anti-Palestinian “price tag” attack.

Israeli police said on Wednesday they were investigating the overnight incident which took place near the busy shopping district around Jaffa Street.

Slogans insulting the Prophet Mohammad and other graffiti reading “A good Arab is a dead Arab” and “price tag” were spray-painted on the exterior walls of the building, the AFP news agency reported.

The “Price tag” slogan is generally associated with attacks on Palestinian property, often mosques, by Jewish settlers in the illegally occupied West Bank. Attacks on mosques beyond the West Bank are less common.

Some of the building’s exterior walls were burnt and there was a strong smell of petrol, although it appeared the fire had not caught, AFP reported.

Nir Barkat, Jerusalem’s mayor, condemned the attack and called for calm.

“We must show zero tolerance toward violence in any shape or form and continue to maintain co-existence in the city,” news website Ynet quoted him as saying.

The incident came just 24 hours after extremist settlers attacked an Israeli military base in the northern West Bank and sabotaged vehicles there, prompting angry denounciations from Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and other top officials.

The Israeli army on Wednesday said that Palestinian cars were torched overnight in the northern West Bank, near the city of Nablus and the town of Qalqilya.

Hebrew-language graffiti found at both scenes bore the hallmark of a “price tag” attack, a spokesman said, although he declined to elaborate.

While Israeli officials have condemned the attacks, critics say the government has not done enough to prevent attacks on mosques and other sites.

Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister and military chief who sees himself as a possible rival to Netanyahu in the next elections, told Army Radio on Wednesday that the government was not doing enough to stop what he called “groups of Jewish guerrillas.”

“These hooligans are terrorists for all intents and purposes,” he told Army Radio, referring to the attack on the military base. “The Israeli government has to exact a price tag, and it has to be painful, expensive and unequivocal.”

Source: Aljazeera

Imagine the terror and horror must have felt as they were pushed to the Sea

By William James Martin , Palestine Chronicle

November 29, 1947 was the date the UN passed the Partition Resolution partitioning Palestine, more or less equally, into a Jewish and an Arab state.

In fact, the ethnic cleansing commenced the very next morning when the 75,000 Arab citizens of Haifa were subjected to a campaign of terror jointly by the terrorist group, the Irgun, under Menachem Begin, and the Haganah, the regular militia under David Ben Gurion. The Jewish settlers who had arrived during the previous decade had built their homes higher up the mountain and thus occupied a higher topographical space. From the superior height, they could snipe at the villagers at will. They began doing this while the Jewish troops rolled barrels of burning oil down their roads and then ignited them. When the terrified residents came out to try to extinguish the rivers of fire, they were sprayed with machine gun fire. Another techniques was to deliver cars filled with explosives to Arab garages to be repaired, and then to detonate the cars in the garages.

On its website, the official historian of the Palmach (a special unit of the Haganah) states, “The Palestinians [in Haifa] were from December onwards under siege and intimidation.”

This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansing and occurred six months before the first regular soldier from a surrounding Arab state entered Palestine, which was on May 15, 1948.

I remind you that the Deir Yassin massacre occurred on April 9, 1948, and also that by May 15, all of the major cities of Palestine had been cleansed of Arabs and about one half of the 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees has been ethnically cleansed.

This was the beginning of the expulsion of the Palestinians Arabs from Haifa and from Palestine. The ending for Haifa’s Arabs came on Passover evening of April 21, when the British commander, Stockwell, called four Arab community leaders in to this office to inform them that the British army would be evacuating the city and advised the Arabs that they could not be protected. As Ilan Pappe puts it:

“Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows that that they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. “ – (Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, p 94)

Pappe continues:

“[I]t was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmel Brigade … who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’

“When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometers where thousands of Haifa’s defenseless Palestinians were still residing , he shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses. …

“In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbor. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instill some order in the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging the people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be organized. ‘the Jews had occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.

“The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its action in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothchild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure the people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – and architectural gem dating back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen.

“Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke in the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

‘Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers.’” (Pappe p 96)

Thus it was the Jews who pushed the Palestinians in to the sea, and not vice versa.

In March of 1948, a month earlier than the events described above, the so-called ‘Plan D’ or ‘Plan Dalet’, as a further crystallization of Plans A, B and C, was finalized by David Ben Gurion, and those who were continually in consultation with him, and distributed to the Haganah commanders. This document was a blueprint for the destruction Arab villages and expulsion of its residents, within the 78% of Palestine coveted by Ben Gurion, not the 55% apportioned to the Jewish state by the UN General Assembly. By this time 30 Arab villages had been either destroyed or depopulated. By the year’s end, 531 Arab villages would be destroyed, and 11 Arab neighborhoods in urban areas.

On revealing paragraph of this document states:

“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those populations centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Between the time that Israel declared itself a state in May of 1948 and the summer of 2005, Israel killed 50,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe, writing in Foreign Policy, in the summer of 2005. And since October of 2000, Israel has killed 6430 Palestinians, according to the web site, If American Knew. The latter figure averages to about 2 Palestinians killed per day by Israel (1.932, by my calculation.)

According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition, Israel has destroyed 34,000 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967, and, in the same period, about 800,000 olive and citrus trees in the west Bank and Gaza resulting in a loss to the Palestinian economy of $55 million, according to a recent estimate by the international humanitarian relief agency Oxfam. And in Israel’s winter assault on Gaza in 2009, Israel destroyed between 4 and 5,000 homes and either damaged destroyed as many as 50,000. Many Gaza families spent the winter of 2010 living in caves dug out of the rubble of their destroyed homes because the area is under siege with building material not allow to enter.

Because of the siege of Gaza, babies are frequently born with anemia because their mothers are not getting enough nutrition and because of the lack of food allowed into Gaza and because of the destruction of agricultural areas inside Gaza. The stunting of growth because of the lack of nutrition of Gaza’s children is prevalent, and I have seen this figure put at 14%.

Israel, a state which had never clearly defined its boundaries, invites Jews from all over the world to immigrate to Israel and expand it ranks, along with its boundaries into Arab lands.

One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim, as it is constantly screaming, but the victimizer.

Source: We Hold These Truth

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- William James Martin taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: wjm20@caa.columbia.edu.

Dr Ashraf Ezzat

(ALEXANDRIA, Egypt) – In remarks made at the Brookings Institution in Washington on Friday, Panetta said: “The problem right now is we can’t get them [Israel's leaders] to the damn table to at least sit down and begin to discuss their differences.

“We understand the concerns of Israel, we understand the concerns of the Palestinians.

“If they sit at a table and work through those concerns and the United States can be of assistance in that process, then I think you have the beginning of what could be a process that could lead to a peace agreement.

“But if they aren’t there, if they aren’t at the table, this will never happen. So first and foremost get to the damn table.”

One is obliged to say that Panetta’s statement reflects nothing less than sound and timely thinking. And I’m sure he is proposing this entirely innovative and unprecedented idea for the interest of both the Israelis and the Palestinians and that the call for both parties to get together and work through their fears is not just one of the usual American stunts prior to the upcoming presidential elections.

But then again, what is the point of getting them together, no offence intended here, but what will they be talking about? Land for peace? Well, the Palestinians almost ran out of that item, they have no more land they can offer in exchange for peace.

East Jerusalem? Out of the question … West Bank? No, that is Samaria and Judea now. The refugees .. what about them? they will remain refugees. Gaza, that’s the junk yard of the region … who would want to live in a junk yard, crammed in dirty slums.

There is not much left of Palestine, except may be for some memories. Yes, this is it, memories … why they don’t get together to reminisce on the past. The good old days of Nakba and the glorious 6 day war when Israel with the help of American friends really f***ed the Palestinians.

I believe the former director of CIA is to be commended here. The man is trying to break the ice between the Israelis and the Palestinians after that long history of exploitation, land grab and blatant ethnic cleansing. And indeed nothing could thaw the longtime chill in the Israeli-Palestinian relation like the warm and intimate ambience of face-to-face talks.

In that sense, I think Panetta meant the two parties should discuss this frozen relation over a dinner table when he said “the damn table”.

And judging from the sources that confirm the former CIA chief is a regular viewer of “Curb your enthusiasm”, I think this specific episode of “Curb” might have played a role inspiring Panetta with this ingenious idea.

Please visit Dr. Ashraf’s Website, Pyramidion – Politics & Faith – Egyptology & Art

http://ashraf62.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/panetta-israel-palestine-must-get-to-the-damn-bed/

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Dr. Ashraf Ezzat is an Egyptian medical doctor whose passion has always been writing. He says of all the human-related studies, he finds himself attracted to history. Ashraf stresses that history helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be.

He says Egyptology holds a special place in his heart, for Egypt is where the human conscience sprouted. In ancient Egypt all things civilized began to evolve.

“I write articles and share posts of interest to me and hopefully to a lot of people.” Dr. Ashraf Ezzat says you can drop him a line any time at: amenhotep.55@gmail.com “I like to exchange knowledge and experience, I think that`s what Blogging is all about.”

by Philip Weiss

On the 15th of November, six Palestinian activists: Nadeem Al-Sharbate, Huwaida Arraf, Dr.Mazin Qumsieyeh, Fadi Qura’an, Basel Al-Araj, and Badee’ Dwaik, boarded a segregated Israeli bus used by Israeli settlers to Jerusalem in an attempt to highlight the regime of discrimination on freedom of movement in place in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the fact that Palestinians cannot access Jerusalem freely. After boarding the bus without incidents, the bus was stopped at the Hizme checkpoint, where all the activists were arrested and violently forcibly removed from the bus.