And The Root Of The World's Evil Lies At The Feet Of Israel

Israeli bulldozers have demolished part a hotel in East Jerusalem to make way for 20 new homes for Jewish settlers.

The destruction of the Shepherd Hotel has angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas said Israel was destroying any chance of returning to peace talks by carrying out the demolition.

Israel says it has a right to build homes in any part of the city.

The Shepherd Hotel was built in the 1930s and was once home to Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who became an ally of Adolf Hitler in WWII.

Its current ownership is disputed - Israel says it belongs to a Jewish-American property developer but Palestinians say it was seized illegally after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967.

There will be no peace in this world until Israel gives back the land it took in 1967, and accepts the fact that it cannot just "erase" the identity of Israel's predecessors by simply plowing them under the earth.

Hipocrasy, Thy Name Is ADL

The overreaction by the right wingers concerning the planned Muslim community center in Manhattan has been comical, at best. But, as many bloggers have pointed out in recent days, the Jewish organization ADL's coming out in support of the right wingers in wanting to prevent the Muslim community center from being built has proven how hypocritical said organization is.

The group behind the recently opened "Museum of Tolerance" museum in Manhattan has come out against a planned Islamic community center, which includes a mosque, near Ground Zero.

"Religious freedom does not mean being insensitive...or an idiot," Rabbi Meyer May, the Wiesenthal Center's executive director, told Crain's New York.

"Religion is supposed to be beautiful," he said. "Why create pain in the name of religion?"

It's a topic he knows something about. The Wiesenthal Center caused an uproar in for building one of its Museums of Tolerance on top of an old Muslim burial ground in Jerusalem.

The building of that museum has "resulted in digging up the remains of people who had been buried in a Muslim cemetery for generations," according to City University professor Marnia Lazreg. Indeed, in 2006, workers dug up bones, and an Arab group sued to stop the project from going forward.

The Wiesenthal Center has pushed forward, however, and in 2008 the Israeli Supreme Court declared that the center was allowed to build its museum on the land.

So, basically, IOKIYAJ, but INOKIYAM.

Talk about being disrespectful.

Talk about bullshit.

UPDATE: What about the mosque inside the Pentagon, where regular prayer meetings and such continue well after 9/11! H/T to DailKos.

Israel's Version (Cough, Cough)

Talk about right wing nut jobs! The Israeli spin machine.

In a televised speech after world outrage erupted over nine deaths in Monday's seizure of a Turkish ship bound for Gaza, a defiant Netanyahu said easing controls would put Iranian missiles in the hands of the Palestinian enclave's Hamas rulers.

This threatened not just Israel but Europe too, he said.

Turkey, a Muslim country that had been Israel's strategic ally, accused it of "state terrorism" and has recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv and demanded it lift its blockade.

Those calls have been echoed by European leaders and the United Nations whose Human Rights Council voted to set up an independent fact-finding mission into the incident.

And You Would Expect Anything LESS From Israel?

I am sick and tired of the excuses coming from Israel concerning their reasons for constantly choking off food, water and other resources from the Gaza strip (and other areas where they have control over Palestinians). But this just takes the cake.

At least nine people have been killed after Israeli commandos stormed a convoy of ships carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army says.

Armed forces boarded the largest vessel overnight, clashing with some of the 500 people on board.

It happened about 40 miles (64 km) out to sea, in international waters.

Israel says its soldiers were shot at and attacked with weapons; the activists say Israeli troops came on board shooting.

The activists were attempting to defy a blockade imposed by Israel after the Islamist movement Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007.

I have no ability to justify this government's actions. And they wonder why the world is, uh, mostly against them in how they are, uh "handling" their situation with the Palestinians? I think pretty much blockading them into an area, refusing even basic survival supplies to be provided to the people living there, not to mention the many times they just, shall we say, invaded the area and blanketed it with bombs, demolishing people's homes, businesses and livelihoods, speaks volumes about the evil that is inherent in the Israeli position.

Think Progress is on this as well.

UPDATE JUNE 1, 2010: This is our government's response:

“The situation is that they’re so isolated right now that it’s not only that we’re the only ones who will stick up for them,” said an American official. “We’re the only ones who believe them — and what they’re saying is true.”

Yeah, right. A flotilla of ships bringing aid to Gaza is a great danger to those poor Israelis ... my ass. Everything the Israelis do is overkill, and it's getting pretty ugly for the rest of the world to watch. America's relationship with the rest of the Arab countries that it actually has somewhat fragile relations with, like Turkey, may just end over this government's tepid response to Israel's invasion and subsequent killings on the ships.

Big, bad Israel had to defend itself against people with sticks and stones, basically. It's always like that. Bomb the shit out of defenseless people, but continue to always claim that they have to do that because they are so "threatened" by the danger posed toward them by said defenseless peoples.

If you can't co-exist with your Arab neighbors, then leave ... as the saying goes. The option to nuke your neighbors is not on the table. Get over it.

UPDATE 2: Seems a lot of people on the net are all over this, categorizing Israel's actions as an act of war based on the fact that the Turkish ship they stormed was in international waters.

Speaking of the legality of the raid, I’m going to paste this in its entirety, thanks to Mondoweiss and Craig Murray, ex UK Ambassador and one time Foreign Office specialist on maritime law:

“A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.

Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.

There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.

Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.

Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.

In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

Holy Shit!

So Much For Transparency Regarding Peace Between Israel And Palestine

Q: So why all these games of make-believe negotiations? It’s possible to announce that we will not reach an agreement, and that is all.

YA’ALON: Because in the political establishment there are pressures. Peace Now from within and other elements from without. So you have to maneuver. But what I’m saying now has to be given over to the Americans, and I hope that they will understand.

Some of what we have to do is maneuver with the American administration and the European establishment, which are also nourished by Israeli elements, which create the illusion that an agreement can be reached.

Got that? They only want to "create" an "illusion" that any meaningful peace accord can be reached. (Shaking head ... but hey, it's not like I have ever believed in Israel).

H/T to Think Progress.

It was refreshing to read about the snub that Obama gave to the PM the other night, walking out and leaving him high and dry, at the White House, instead of having dinner with him. Obama's parting words: "Let me know if there is anything new."

Is Baha'i a religion or a political organization?

I often wondered why many of my Jewish friends tended to dismiss me when I would favor the attitude of the Palestinians over the Israelis, especially when I get the "you’ve never been persecuted" look, or comment. Then I read this article which reminded me of my upbringing in the Baha'i Faith, and how Baha’is have been persecuted, ever since the religion came into existence.

Putting that aside, for the moment, let me just say that I have never been comfortable with the hard line Israeli attitude since the 1967 war, nor with how they took land that was not theirs, and displaced a great many Palestinians in the process. I understand the level of persecution and aggression directed towards Israel since it was granted statehood in the 1940's, but there has to be a solution that resolves the issue of the land that was taken, and Israel has conceded that it will never give back the land it took from the Palestinians. Therein lies the permanent dilemma.

First there was the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) whose mandate was a return to Palestinian self-rule. Eventually, the PLO stood for a Palestinian state within the boundaries of Israel. Yasser Arafat became the recognized leader of the PLO by most of the world, including Israel. The PLO sought support from other Arab nations such as Jordan, Syria and Egypt, and over the past 40 years, has been helped by these countries and then expelled from these countries, depending on the changing ideology of the Arabs at specific times in history and their own peculiar problems within their own nations. Suffice it to say that the PLO was oftentimes supported by other Arab nations in its continued quest for Palestinian independence, and sometimes abandoned by the same Arab nations when political pressure was exerted by Israel, the United States, and other leading countries. The PLO has always been considered by Israel and the United States to be a terrorist organization until around the early 1990's. Most of the world had recognized the PLO to be the representative of the Palestinians.

PLO committed many terrorists acts in concert with other Arab nations’ political terrorist groups in Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The United States, after 9/11, reclassified the PLO as a terrorist organization in 2004.

In the Arab nations, terrorism is almost a common comport to daily living and politics. Infighting amongst many organizations, all of which mainly had in common the opposition to the state of Israel, created many diverse and disparate terrorist groups, most of which could not inflict a great deal of damage – at least not on the level that Israel has shown it has the capacity to do.

Now we move on to Hamas, which was originally founded by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an Islamic charity, and an offshoot of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and was at the time of its inception supported by the Israeli government. This support by Israel was, of course, an effort to undermine the PLO’s influence in the area, and especially with Palestine. Israel considered Hamas as a counter balance to the PLO, the former being a charitable group, the latter a terrorist group. Thereafter, based on Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion into Kuwait, Arab groups began to withdraw their financial support of the PLO and direct it to Hamas. As the PLO and its influence was waning and Hamas was on the rise, the following is interesting to note:

"The 1993 Oslo agreement inaugurated the final phase of the PLO's degeneration, as its leadership -- or rather the leading nucleus of this leadership, bypassing the official leading bodies -- was granted guardianship over the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This came in exchange for what amounted to a capitulation: the PLO leadership abandoned the minimal conditions that were demanded by the Palestinian negotiators from the 1967 occupied territories, above all an Israeli pledge to freeze and reverse the construction of settlements which were colonizing their land. The very conditions of this capitulation -- which doomed the Oslo agreements to tragic failure as critics very rightly predicted from the start -- made certain that the shift in the popular political mood would speed up. The Zionist state took advantage of the lull brought to the 1967 territories by the Palestinian Authority's fulfillment of the role of police force by proxy ascribed to it, by drastically intensifying the colonization and building an infrastructure designed to facilitate its military control over these territories. Accordingly, the discredit of the PA increased inexorably. This loss in public support hampered more and more its ability to crack down on the Palestinian Islamic fundamentalist movement -- as was required from it and as it began attempting as early as 1994 -- let alone its ability to marginalize the Islamic movement politically and ideologically. Moreover, the transfer of the PLO bureaucracy from exile into the 1967 territories, as a ruling apparatus entrusted with the task of surveillance over the population that waged the Intifada, quickly led to its corruption reaching abysmal levels -- something that the population of the territories hadn't seen first-hand before. At the same time, Hamas, like most sections of the Islamic fundamentalist mass movement -- in contrast with "substitutionist" strictly terrorist organizations of which al-Qaeda has become the most spectacular example -- was keen on paying attention to popular basic needs, organizing social services, and cultivating a reputation of austerity and incorruptibility."

Let’s switch now to Hezbollah, which although based in Lebanon, has been supported by the Iranian government. Unlike Hamas, Hezbollah was defined by its own actions from its inception, as terrorists. It was linked to the PLO until they distanced themselves from the PLO after Israel began massive attacks against Lebanon.

Hamas eventually went on to win parliamentary victory in Palestine territories, much to the shock of the United States. From Juan Cole:

"The sweeping electoral victory of Hamas is but one of the products of the intensive use made by the United States in the Muslim world, since the 1950's, of Islamic fundamentalism as an ideological weapon against both progressive nationalism and communism. This was done in close collaboration with the Saudi kingdom -- a de facto U.S. protectorate almost from its foundation in 1932. The promotion of the most reactionary interpretation of the Islamic religion, exploiting deeply-rooted popular religious beliefs, led to this ideology filling the vacuum left by the exhaustion by the 1970's of the two ideological currents it served to fight. The road was thus paved in the entire Muslim world for the transformation of Islamic fundamentalism into the dominant expression of mass national and social resentment, to the great dismay of the U.S. and its Saudi protectorate. The story of Washington's relation with Islamic fundamentalism is the most striking modern illustration of the sorcerer's apprenticeship. (I have described this at length in my Clash of Barbarisms.)"

According to Iran, the Baha'i Faith is not a religion, it is a political organization bent on the destruction of Islam, and Iran, in particular. The religion is banned in Iran, and many Baha'is are arrested on a regular basis. Therefore, its members are considered terrorists.

From Wikipedia: "The Iranian constitution that was drafted during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in 1906 set the groundwork for the institutionalized persecution of Bahá'ís. While the constitution was modeled on Belgium's 1831 constitution, the provisions guaranteeing freedom of worship were omitted. Subsequent legislation provided some recognition to Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians as equal citizens under state law, but it did not guarantee freedom of religion and ‘gave unprecedented institutional powers to the clerical establishment.’ The Islamic Republic of Iran, that was established after the Iranian revolution, recognizes four religions, whose status is formally protected: Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Members of the first three minority religions receive special treatment under Iranian law. For example, their members are allowed to drink alcohol, and representatives of several minority communities are guaranteed seats in parliament."

Which brings me back to the universal question: Is Baha'i a religion or a political organization with terrorist thoughts and/or activities on its mind or under its belt? It is obvious that it is a religion, but Iran has chosen to ignore that fact and raise it to the level of terrorist group, subject to penalty of death. Yet, Iran supports Hezbollah, whose main operation is the destruction of Israel, while it allows Judaism to exist within its borders. Why, then, is Iran so threatened by the Baha’is? Why are they not allowed recognition within Iran, the country of the religion’s birth?

"Oh No He Di’in’t!"

From the Poorman, posted by curv3ball, regarding Ehud Olmert's gloating over having stated: “I said -- Get me President Bush on the phone. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: I need to talk to him now. He got off the podium and spoke to me.” Thereafter, Olmert claims to have told Bush that the U.S. could not vote for the resolution by the UN Security Council calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, which order Bush dutifully followed:

Actually, it reveals the depths of our mutually destructive and utterly dysfunctional relationship with Israel - the land whose government is beyond reproach. Such that it’s leaders can yank a chain and pull our President off the podium, instruct him to publicly humiliate his Secretary of State by pulling the rug out from under her and then, get this, brag about it openly days later. Without consequences.

Without consequences.

One Hell Of A Brave Woman Confronting Israeli Soldier

I saw this video this morning on AMERICAblog, and have thought about it all day long. I cannot believe the brave and courageous action of the obviously American girl confronting the Israeli soldiers.

The video is plenty clear that the "enemy" these soldiers are shooting at are not "terrorists" or a threat in any fashion to the soldiers, and yet, the excuse I keep hearing from the sympathizers to this massive imbalance of destruction is that "hey, those kids could have a bomb and blow up the soldiers." Viewing this ONE particular scene, are there any doubts that the kids throwing rocks at the soldiers were doing nothing but throwing fucking rocks? And the response is to SHOOT AT THEM, WITH REAL BULLETS? It's insane. What, 7 or so Israelis killed by the stupid Hamas shellings, and 700 or more Palestinians dead, over half of them CIVILIANS based on the Israelis' response?

This is just in the eyes of any one's God?

Happy New Year - Gaza Death Toll Tops 400

Time for me to weigh in on Israel's war against the Palestinians in the Gaza strip.

I am clearly not a supporter of Israel's government leaders' claim of an inherent right to bomb the crap out of everyone and anyone (meaning Arabs) that sneeze in their direction, especially when you factor into the equation that Israel has nuclear bombs. It's been written up a lot that the Israeli citizens are not, by a majority, behind the actions of their government, and would prefer a peace with the Palestinians, and many are in favor of a combined state that accepts both groups. But since the hardliners (much like our Bushies) are in control, it's war, war, war, with anyone that talks about peace, and nothing short of annihilating the Palestinians is acceptable to the Israeli government.

The world does not support Israeli aggression, but because the only real ally of Israel is America (which also has nuclear weapons) most countries cannot do anything. But, sooner or later, Israel will be held accountable, most likely by the rest of the Arab world that surrounds it. After all, the fear of the United States is waning in the Middle East, and let's not forget that both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons.

It disgusts me that the politics of Israel is no compromise with Palestine, and it's just kill, kill, steal land, kill, kill, steal land, etc.