CONGRATULATIONS! TO THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT.

Way to go!

: )

Now we look to you to do the right thing by your neighbours under siege in Palestine.

When will America realize that Israel doesn’t want peace?

Surely no-one can now be in any doubt that Israel has no interest whatsoever in reaching a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians.

This was the best opportunity it has ever had – or is ever likely to have – to bring the conflict to an end.

If Israel wanted peace, all it had to do was agree to withdraw to the 1967 borders and stop building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The fact that it has consistently refused to do so makes Israel’s true long-term intentions abundantly clear: it plans to continue with its strategy of ethnic cleansing, ghettoization and land-grabbing until it has taken over all the land that was Palestine.

Complete domination of the entire region has always been Israel’s aim.

Again and again it has deliberately scuppered efforts made by US presidents and others to find a resolution to the problem.

And what successive presidents have failed to understand is that there is no problem, as far as Israel is concerned.

The sporadic missile attacks by Hamas do very little damage (more Israelis are killed by being struck by lightning than are killed by Hamas rockets), but they provide Israel with the pretext it needs to justify the increasingly brutal “security measures” it inflicts on the Palestinian people.

One or two deaths a year is a small price to pay, from the Israeli government’s point of view, for complete control and ownership of the whole of what used to be Palestine.

Israel is not, and has never been interested in peace. In fact peace is the last thing Israel wants, since without the ongoing hostilities it would have no grounds for building barriers, separating Palestinians into cantons that are really open prisons, bombing populated areas of Palestine and Lebanon, grabbing more and more land, torturing prisoners and imposing a vicious siege on Gaza.

And without the ongoing Arab “threat”, Israel would find it difficult to justify the $4bn in aid it receives from the US government each year.

Let there be no misunderstanding about this: Israel has no intention of ever giving back the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies. The plan is, and has always been, to take over the entire region and eventually get rid of the indigenous Palestinian population altogether.

In a statement moments after the end of the 10-month partial freeze on the building of settlements, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu asked Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to continue seeking a “historic” deal. How absurd. Do the Israelis really expect the Palestinians to agree to a deal in which Israel continues to illegally occupy Palestine and carry on building Jewish settlements on Palestinian land? Of course not. This is a classic Israeli ploy to shift the blame for the breakdown to the Palestinians. By pretending to want to carry on talking, the Israelis hope to make the Palestinians appear to be responsible for the breakdown. If the Palestinians walk away from the talks, the Israelis can say, “See? We were willing to keep talking, but the Palestinians walked away!” But if the Palestinians carry on talking despite the resumption of work on the settlements, this will be taken as a tacit acknowledgment that they are willing to accept less than they are demanding.

America: The country where journalists dare not speak the truth

Helen Thomas

Apparently it is now an outrage in the land of the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of political expression to express an unfavourable opinion of the terrorist, apartheid state of Israel.
Helen Thomas said nothing that the majority of people around the world would disagree with (as a number of polls have shown). Only in the United States – where for decades people have been brainwashed by the media and the entertainment industry to regard Israel as a benign, friendly state that can do no wrong – is it considered heretical to question Israel’s right to occupy Palestine.

Thomas went on to “outrage” American Jewish groups (who have honed being outraged into an art form) by suggesting, when asked where the occupying Israelis would go, that they could go back to the countries they came from.

She’s quite right, of course. The majority of Israeli Jews – the actual figure is around 80% – are immigrants who came to live in Israel under the apartheid state’s absurd and racist “right of return” law. Many now live in settlements built on Palestinian land. And the majority of these “settlers” have dual nationality and retain properties and business links in their country of origin. There is nothing at all outrageous in the view that they should get out of Palestine and go back to wherever they came from.

What is outrageous is the idea – which appears to have widespread acceptance in the US – that the indigenous people of Palestine can be evicted from their homes and forced to live in squalid ghettos – as “refugees” in their own country – where they are persecuted on a daily basis and deprived of their most basic human and civil rights.

The Israeli occupation is an outrage. The siege of Gaza is an outrage. The deliberate murder by Israel of thousands of innocent civilians – most of them women and children – in Lebanon and Gaza was an outrage. The hijacking of the aid ships in international waters last week and the execution of nine activists was an outrage. Yet not one politician in government – either in Europe or in the US – has dared to condemn Israel outright, or to break off diplomatic ties with this murderous apartheid regime. But when one veteran journalist dares to speak her mind and express a view that most people in the world would agree with, she is vilified and treated as if she were a terrorist, and forced to resign from a job that she’s been doing for six decades.

Far from rushing to her defence, many of Helen Thomas’ fellow journalists have stated that she ought to have been more tactful in her choice of words. But why should anyone be required or expected to tiptoe delicately around the sensibilities of a regime that is engaged in terrorism, ethnic cleansing, torture, assassination and mass murder on a daily basis? Does Israel exercise tact when it drops massive bombs on civilian “targets”, or when it razes Palestinian homes to the ground to make space for the construction of Jewish settlements?

As former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon once declared when his foreign Minister Shimon Peres warned him against taking actions that might alienate Americans:

“Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear: don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We control America, and the Americans know it.”

How right he was.

When can we expect the US to condemn Israel for amassing nuclear weapons?

US President Barack Obama has condemned Iran after it acknowledged the existence of a second uranium enrichment plant.

“This site deepens a growing concern that Iran is failing to live up to its international responsibilities,” he said.
“Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow.”

Except Israel, of course.

As we know, Israel is exempt from all the international rules, laws, regulations and treaties that apply to other countries.

“Iran must comply with UN Security Council resolutions,” Mr Obama added.

But Israel can disregard UN resolutions with impunity, and has done for decades.

Iran has never attacked its neighbours. Israel has. Repeatedly, slaughtering thousands of innocent civilians. Yet no action of any kind has ever been taken against it. Attempts to do so have always been thwarted by the US veto.

Israel is guilty of state terrorism, war crimes, crimes against humanity, illegal occupation, torture, assassination, land grabbing, ethnic cleansing, and yet it is Iran – which is guilty of none of these things – that is being threatened by the US government (and, laughably, by the bumbling, nodding dog British PM, who has turned ineffectuality into an art form).

I’m not in favour of Iran having nuclear weapons – no more than I am in favour of the US, Russia, Britain, France, India, Pakistan and North Korea having them – but this whole thing reeks of hypocrisy.

If the US, Britain, France and the other nuclear powers want to persuade Iran not to pursue the nuclear option they should start by getting rid of their own nukes. Or demanding that Israel – which has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – give up its nuclear arsenal.

Coincidentally both the US and Britain have, in recent days, announced plans to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. It’s almost as if they knew they would be delivering this ultimatum to Iran and wanted to be able to point out that they themselves were committed to nuclear disarmament.

But, of course, that would mean that they knew in advance about Iran’s “secret” nuclear facility and carefully picked their moment to announce this to the media.

The idea that nuclear weapons can be eradicated by gradual reduction is absurd in any event. What difference does it make whether a country has 10,000 nuclear warheads or 100?

Unilateral reduction is merely a device to justify exerting pressure on countries which are in the process of “going nuclear”. Countries like the US are never going to give up their nuclear weapons, and that being the case they will never be in a moral position to dictate to other countries on this issue. And “do as I say, not as I do (or else!)” has never been, and will never be, a reasonable or persuasive argument.

Netanyahu says peace is possible if Palestinians give up everything

The odious Benjamin Netanyahu has been speaking after a meeting in Downing Street with bumbling UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Mr. Netanyahu’s message was that peace was possible if Palestinians gave up their resistance to Israel’s brutal and illegal occupation of their country. He repeatedly asserted that a demilitarised Palestinian state was needed if peace was to be attained.
There was no mention of a demilitarised Israeli state, of course, since, as we all know, Israel needs its US-sponsored army to protect itself from the people whose land it has stolen.
So basically his proposal is that Israel should be allowed to keep all the Palestinian land it has “confiscated”, and retain its huge arsenal of arms (which includes chemical, biological and nuclear weapons), while Palestinians are allowed to remain in the “refugee camps” and tent cities to which they have been banished by the Israeli government (ethnic cleansing by degrees), and give up all armed resistance to the occupation of their country.
Gee, that sounds like a good deal. For Israel.
But I have a better idea. How about if Israel gives up all its weapons, dismantles its army, navy, air force and the hired thugs it calls its police force, and gives the land it illegally occupies back to its rightful owners. And then compensates them for putting them through 60 years of hell. How would that be, Mr. Netanyahu?