Friday, January 30, 2009

Secret IDF Database Reveals Truth Of Israeli Settlement Agenda

Bottom line, 75% of settlements are illegal under Israeli laws, (and as Pulse points out Haaretz who reported this and the BBC who also cover it neglect to mention that 100% of settlements have been declared illegal by the World Court) and while publicly taking a stance against illegal settlements the government in fact is fully aware and complicit in their construction as this database reveals. The 'Middle East conflict' is an ongoing colonisation meeting resistance, until that is out in the open and challenged the 'conflict ' will continue as Palestinians are killed in order to take their land and Israelis are killed for occupying the stolen land. Short excerpt of the Haaretz story-
Just four years ago, the defense establishment decided to carry out a seemingly elementary task: establish a comprehensive database on the settlements. Brigadier General (res.) Baruch Spiegel, aide to then defense minister Shaul Mofaz, was put in charge of the project. For over two years, Spiegel and his staff, who all signed a special confidentiality agreement, went about systematically collecting data, primarily from the Civil Administration.

One of the main reasons for this effort was the need to have credible and accessible information at the ready to contend with legal actions brought by Palestinian residents, human rights organizations and leftist movements challenging the legality of construction in the settlements and the use of private lands to establish or expand them. The painstakingly amassed data was labeled political dynamite.

The defense establishment, led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, steadfastly refused to publicize the figures, arguing, for one thing, that publication could endanger state security or harm Israel's foreign relations.

The official database, the most comprehensive one of its kind ever compiled in Israel about the territories, was recently obtained by Haaretz. Here, for the first time, information the state has been hiding for years is revealed. An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements - about 75 percent - construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents.

The information contained in the database does not conform to the state's official position, as presented, for instance, on the Foreign Ministry Web site, which states: "Israel's actions relating to the use and allocation of land under its administration are all taken with strict regard to the rules and norms of international law - Israel does not requisition private land for the establishment of settlements." Since in many of the settlements, it was the government itself, primarily through the Ministry of Construction and Housing, that was responsible for construction, and since many of the building violations involve infrastructure, roads, public buildings and so on, the official data also demonstrate government responsibility for the unrestrained planning and lack of enforcement of regulations in the territories. The extent of building violations also attests to the poor functioning of the Civil Administration, the body in charge of permits and supervision of construction in the territories.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

sdrawkcaB nruT

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)




I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason
to carry death there.
Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just
the sons of Abraham?

O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to
their stiff-limbed sleep
as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet,
children dying there.

I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow
of the patriarch,
asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and
leave our flesh to time?


© 2008 mrp/thepoetryman



Jewish Texts ("Turn backwards and you will see him.")

Saddam AND Khomeini: Reagan's buddies; Bin Ladin: Bush's brother; Hamas: Israel's child!

In Feb 2007, Brendan O'Neill wrote about Israel's shifted preference from Hamas to Fatah in The American Conservative:

"... there is something bitterly ironic in Israel’s support for Fatah against Hamas—and it should be a lesson to governments everywhere that meddle in other states’ affairs. In the past, Israel supported Hamas against Fatah. Indeed, in the 1970s and 80s, Israel played a not insignificant role in encouraging Hamas’s emergence in the belief that such an Islamist group might help rupture support for the mass nationalist movement of Fatah. Twenty years later, Israel has switched sides, hoping that it can encourage Fatah to see off Hamas. It wants “moderate” Palestinians to take on the “extremist” Palestinians it helped create. Like America and Britain before it—both of whom have supported and armed Islamist movements in the Middle East in attempts to undermine secular nationalist parties—Israel is learning the hard way that it is one thing to let radical Islamists off the leash but quite another thing to rein them back in again. If you make monsters, you shouldn’t be surprised if they come back to bite you."

Now that is a fine observation ... but, let's see who is ripping the benefit of all this blood bath in the Middle East ... I'd point the finger to Saudi Arabia!

This story we all heard about ad-nauseam, right?

U.K. arms dealer secretly paid Saudi prince $2B: BBC

But How about this one:

The mastermind of Mumbai attacks was a buddy to Iran-contra arms dealers and a friend of CIA/Cheney's in their "fight" (hahha) against Bin Laden:
"WMR has learned from Asian intelligence sources that one of the accused masterminds of the gangland assault on Mumbai, the soft-spoken but extremely dangerous exiled Indian mobster and one-time Bombay local street tough, or “dada,” Dawood Ibrahim, was a key “unsavory” ally of the CIA and Cheney in the war against “Al Qaeda.” In fact, Ibrahim’s dalliances with the CIA go back to the Afghan mujaheddin war against the Soviets and coincide with the CIA’s alliance, at the time, with Osama Bin Laden. Bin Laden, himself, was an “unsavory” CIA ally during the Balkan war when the CIA gave support to the Bosnian Muslim government. The CIA operation with “unsavory” elements brought Ibrahim and Bin Laden into the same big CIA tent, along with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a key Iran-contra figure in George H. W. Bush’s global arms smuggling venture while he served as Vice President under Ronald Reagan. There have been reports that Ibrahim considers Khashoggi to be a hero figure.

When Ibrahim became convinced that certain U.S. government agencies, particularly the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), was working with India and Pakistan’s new government of President Asif Ali Zardari to have him extradited from Pakistan to India, he decided to use his considerable muscle to “teach” Delhi and Washington a lesson. Ibrahim was also not pleased with the U.S. Treasury Department’s freeze order on his financial assets."

And did we hear anything about a Saudi arms dealing billionaire by the name of Adnan Khashoggi?

In 2001 Timothy Noah drew attention to what he had previosly noted (here, here, and here) that (wikipedia) Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11."

In 2003, Seymor Hersh of the New Yorker Reported:

"
At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq."

Now, I would say that Saudis are not evil doers by "nature", but they are money lovers!

In fact, the ancestors of the Saudi kings right now were such decadant materialists that Mohammad had to uprise against them and call Muslims to Jihad! Remember folks, Jihads during Mohammad time were not called against Christians or Jewes, but against the "infidel" Arab rulers, against slavery ... speaking of which was one of the earliest trades Arabs did with the US of A: Slave trade!

so, following the money, what is Saudi arabia doing now?
BAILING OUT the crumbling economy!

Nov10, 2008; MELANIE PHILLIPS: Beware this Saudi deal to help bail out Britain

And no it is not the Saudi Arabians who are decadent! It is their co called ELITE: Take a look at the Arab News: Why should we Bail Out the US:

JEDDAH: 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.

Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS and Barclays have all raised billions of dollars from the Middle East.

Gulf states have been helping and protecting the US economy for many decades i.e. having their currencies pegged to the dollar, quoting oil prices in US dollars, putting their entire surplus in passive investment in the US economy (they have lost over 40 percent of their assets because of the declining value of the dollar) and purchasing expensive weapons.

Many voices would like to drag the Gulf states into a confrontation with Iran as they did in the early 1980s when they convinced Saddam Hussein to invade Iran. Everybody knows the disastrous results. What happened to Iraq and to the entire region? Iran is not nuclear, Israel is nuclear.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states do not need the protection of other nations. They should depend on themselves and should not trust anybody but themselves for their protection. How could Saudi Arabia help the US auto industry and not help its own stock market that dropped over 80 percent from its value in the last 2 years? Saudi Arabia should help its citizens. Over 50 percent of Saudi families do not own homes. They rent homes.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Something to hang from a peace tree

She is holding a child that she has never had. A limb is falling off of the child. A leg. Or an arm. There is a bullet in the child's eye. The bullet is silver. Blood is flowing into the child's mouth. The child is thirsty. The woman lets her drink the blood. Her left breast is blown up. In its place rests a big scar. You can see the heart through cracked ribs. With no breast, the child cannot be breast fed. With no breast she cannot even prostitute herself to find water or milk. The child is thirsty. The woman's heart is broken by the force of the smashed rib cage. The man is out; holding his penis out to the world; pissing on it, pissing it off. He is hoping that if he urinates enough, the earth, the ancestral land will purify it enough to save his child from thirst; or from the despicable sin of sucking on his own blood. Death doesn't come soon enough to the child whose limb is hanging, whose eyes is wounded. Death doesn't come soon enough to the woman whose breast is blown, whose broken rib cage has broken her pink heart. Death doesn't come soon enough to the man whose phallus is not irrigating the earth, is not starting a creek. Death is waiting in a corner to be sought. Death is waiting to be called upon. Death is waiting to be strapped into a belt. Death is not coming, death is to be sought. Death grins menacingly that she is the port to freedom, the port to heaven. Death is water, death is food, death is freedom, death is a belt, death is the last piece of pride, the last bit of dignity left.

The woman's breast is blown. Her wombs is a ball of fire. She is pregnant with pain. And she is holding a child with a falling limb, with a bleeding eye, and with thirsty lips that are getting used to the salty taste of the blood ... blood the only source of life ... blood the only god ... the woman will give birth to pain, the pain too will be thirsty, the pain will not be able to drink from the exploded breast, the pain will grow into a blood thirsty puberty.

The pain will kill the woman because the woman will kill for pain; all mothers will kill for their thirsty children. The death belt is grinning ... the last attire of dignity of a man ... or a woman ...

From the ashes of Gaza

And Israeli citizens might ponder the following words from Shakespeare (in The Merchant of Venice), which Tariq Ali slightly altered:

"I am a Palestinian. Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that … the villainy you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Gaza watch!

Keep an eye on what some of the best Middle Eastern bloggers are reporting on the Israeli atrocities in Gaze:

http://pulsemedia.org/

If Palestinians had remained docile and had just gone to death by starvation instead of firecracking things would have been so much easier for Israel!