israel
According to the Jerusalem Post today (10/22/2006), Israel's DM Amir Peretz said:
"...Israel should explore the possibility of making peace with Syria."
But just three days ago, this same DM was quoted at ynetnews.com as being of the opinion that: "We mustn't respond to the peace mutterings of Syria as long as it continues threatening war and as long as it is in contact with Iran and the terrorist organizations."
Now, unless I'm mistaken and Syria has fundamentally changed it's foreign policy over the last three days, Mr. Peretz has some explaining to do. Or does he? Maybe he's just doing what Israel has always done - prolonging the conflict as long as possible by spewing non-commital rhetoric about peace until they can find the next excuse to launch an attack on their neighbors, all in order to keep Zionism alive?
That is, as long as they act as mercenaries for the IDF:
Meeting senior Western diplomats on Friday, Israel Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said any Gaza force would have to be willing to search for "terrorists" and arms, and play other "executive" roles in order to be acceptable, a Foreign Ministry official said.
A diplomat who attended said he doubted European countries would be willing to sign onto such a mandate. Peacekeepers in conflict zones generally limit their missions to reporting truce violations or expediting humanitarian efforts.
The diplomat said Livni's comments amounted to Israel saying "'No' in a polite way."
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this sort of irony. It would seem Israel has a problem within its own borders that you would have never even thought possible:
Rising anti-Semitism in Israel meets state's blind eye (Yahoo! News)
Rabbi Avraham Levine never imagined that years after immigrating from Russia to Israel he would fall victim to a brutal anti-Semitic attack in the heart of the Jewish state.
But less than three months ago, he was beaten up by teenage skinheads as he walked home in the city of Petah Tikva on Tel Aviv's outskirts.
In its zeal to import as many Jews (or otherwise) into Israel (specifically, into cheap settlements in occupied Palestine) it looks like Israel let pass through some un-kosher beef in the form of anti-Jewish Russian nationalists.
Petah Tikva police station closed Levine's case without finding the assailants, saying it was "an isolated case which does not reflect a trend", even though a series of similar incidents have occurred there in recent months.
Gilichenski says the authorities turn a blind eye: "Israel is very swift to criticise anti-Semitism abroad but remains silent in the face of anti-Semitism within."
There is no law explicitly banning anti-Semitism in Israel, because such a situation was never imagined by the lawmakers, he said.
According to Gilichenski, the increasing trend is partly due to the fact that out of the nearly 1.2 million immigrants who have arrived from ex-Soviet states since the early 1990s, over 300,000 do not consider themselves Jews, according to official figures from the Immigrant and Absorption Ministry.
Oopsi.
The extremists shy away from talking to reporters -- repeated messages left at an Israeli Russian nationalist website, the "Russian Nationalist Centre," went unanswered.
But the website itself offers a glimpse into the world of anti-Semites who live, work and are citizens of the Jewish state.
"If we don't help them choose their destiny, what kind of nationalists are we?" says the site, vowing that "in any case sooner or later we'll all return to Russia."
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
"There is a group of several dozens anti-Semites in almost every Israeli city. All in all, there are several hundreds neo-Nazis in Israel," he says.
All right. Bring on the fun!
Read the article. It's an eye-opener.
samir: What? But I thought Israel is a "Light Unto the Nations". What "Nations" and what "Light" is what I wonder.
samir: Impossible question, but after reading his article, something struck me:As an American, I said, I appreciated each nation’s embrace of the United States as a friend and ally. However, as a strong believer in the rule of law, I deplored the trend among America’s so-called friends to facilitate a needless confrontation which would severely harm the U.S. in the long run. These nations were hesitant to stand up to the United States even though they knew the course of action planned for Iraq was wrong. Such permissive submission was deplorable, and invariably led to a comment from me about the status of genuine sovereignty in the face of American imperial power.
A bit naive, Mr. Ritter. They want to see the US take it down a notch and the only way that will happen, is if we break our own back during the fall. Don't forget that we compete with our friends and allies for, well, stuff. Stuff you can eat, stuff you can buy, stuff you can put in your cars gas tank. We tend to win a lot. They wouldn't mind if we stopped winning so much stuff. That leaves more stuff for them to win. After all, it's Iraqi lives that will have to spent for this to happen. But unless you're a friend of the Iraqi people, why should that matter?
The West, in particular the US, has this perverse idea that the Palestinians, the victims of 60 years of dispossession and brutal occupation, somehow have the onus of having to prove their sincerity in wanting to make peace with Israel in order to earn back the homeland that was unlawfully stripped from them in 1948.
The hypocrisy and sheer idiocy of requiring the victim to kowtow to his oppressor should be obvious, but where Israel is concerned, all rational thought ceases.
But in the interest of perhaps fomenting a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, here is a very simple litmus test, in three parts, which will make it easy to determine whether Israel is truly sincere in its desire to have peace:
1. Israel must unequivocally acknowledge the right of the Palestinian people to exist.
2. Israel must renounce violence against the Palestinians
And the one test that will really prove Israeli sincerity:
3. Stop, now, this instant, and forever more, any new or ongoing expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.
Until and unless Israel is willing to commit to these three extremely simple affirmations, there is no chance for a settlement.
I know, I'm not holding my breath either.
In this recent Zogby poll, a majority of Americans feel that Israel was justified in raping Lebanon, thus proving once again that most Americans are dumb.
samir: I mean, what's to be expected? Watching events unfold on CNN and Fox News during the summer's war lead one to believe that Lebanon's problems with Israel started on the very day that the soldiers were kidnapped. Radio program after radio program was bleating about how this war will lead to more stability after the IDF completely obliterates Hizbullah, doing its part in the war on terror. And now that Israel clearly failed in all its stated objective (the usual cynical objective of inflicting as much harm as possible on Arab civilian populations not withstanding) Americans have no clue what the outcome was. They don't see the pictures of the largest - peaceful - anti-government demonstrations in Lebanon's history on CNN or Fox, lead by a Hizbullah that is stronger than ever. Nor do they hear about the daily violations of Lebanon's air-space by Israeli jets, in clear contravention of the agreements they JUST signed. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: apparently, it's no simple task to dislodge from an American psyche the notion that Israeli policy is fundamentally "good" or "good-intentioned", irrespective of reality.
By acquiescing to Israeli demands yesterday and preventing Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh from entering the Gaza Strip with the cash he was attempting to bring in, Mahmood Abbas has exposed himself in plain view as a de facto agent of Israel.
For too long, Abbas has subverted the will of the majority of the Palestinian people by interjecting his corrupt Fatah goons and failed policies into the Palestinian political scene, answering basically to Israeli and US demands rather than serving the Palestinian people. He's a piece of garbage that needs to be swept up into the dustbin of history.
Whether by popular ouster or behind the scenes pressure, Abbas needs to go, and quick. I would advocate assassination but that would almost certainly plunge the Palestinians into all out civil war, and that has to be avoided. But it must be made clear that under no circumstances will the Palestinians tolerate a puppet ruler such as Abbas any longer.
samir: It's the usual frustration for most of the Arabs throughout the entire Arab world: the choice of leadership is between undesirable and more undesirable. In this case, they basically have to choose between religious conservatives (that represent a minority of the entire religious mosaic) and a sell-out of a faction that has proven itself incapable of standing up for its people. How bad a sell-out? The religious conservatives looked better to the majority, who are clearly not religiously conservative, to the extent that they would cast their votes against secular sell-outs. Sort of like here in the States where our "democracy" has degenerated to an exercise of "voting against". Only here, we don't have foreign powers applying strangulating sanctions on our democratically elected representatives, and thereby manipulating, well, everything.
This recent dust-up over Israel's "don't ask, don't tell" nuclear weapons policy that the pig Olmert created is sheer comedy. It seems Olmert got the same treatment that Ahmedinejad did when he was misquoted as saying Israel must be "wiped off the map" (if you're still unsure of what he really said, read Juan Cole's authoritative analysis). It's poetic justice, and also demontrates that the hand that feeds you can also smack you across the face. But I read the transcript of the interview and I'm at a loss to see how he "confirmed" anything, other than that he's a doucehbag. The media just took his blather and ran with it, one news outlet parroting the other until the conventional wisdom held that Olmert confirmed Israel has nuclear weapons. What's especially comical is how Israel's politicians and its media jumped all over Olmert for saying the sky is blue, castigating him nine ways 'til the Sabbath, then still expect their policy of "nuclear ambiguity" to hold. Look, guys, once the cat's out of the bag, you can't put it back. Especially when you then proceed to cut the bag into little bits and pieces. Um, duh? I suppose it might come as a shock to most Americans that Israel does have nukes, which is understandable since for 40 years the topic has effectively been censored from mainstream discussion. What's really interesting here is that Israel's status as a rogue nation wouldn't normally have any currency in the American press, but all of sudden it's the hot topic. Except on CNN. Since I basically never watch the major cable network news channels anymore (I gave them up entirely after the raping of Lebanon) I get all my news from places like Antiwar.com and Raw Story, both of which aggregate news stories from sources around the globe, so I'm aware that the "outing" of Israel's nukes was reported widely in the international press. But to gauge the kind of coverage it got in the US, I did a simple Google search: "olmert israel nuclear weapons". I got a bunch of hits from various places but none of the major US networks showed up in the top 25 or so hits. So I modified the search by adding "msnbc", "fox", and "cnn" to the end of the query. This time I got hits for MSNBC and Fox "News" coverage of the incident, but mention was still conspicuously absent from CNN. Hmmm. So I went over to CNN and used their search engine with the same search term. At first it pulled up a bunch of stories from the web about the incident, basically the same stuff I got with Google, but nothing directly on CNN. I then selected the option to search CNN's site exclusively. Six pages of results came back. In those six pages, not one story on Olmert's "confession". Nothing. Am I the only one that finds this interesting? What I did find on CNN was so telling. Their coverage over the past few days seems to be focused in large part on Iran's Holocaust conference. This is typical of CNN. They try to bury bad press about Israel by repeatedly and forcefully hammering on an entirely less relevant if not completely frivolous story that isn't really news at all. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it isn't about Israel, so they're having a field day with this Holocaust conference. And so comes this howler of an interview (click to watch) between Wolf "I'm not a Zionist" Blitzer and David "I'm not a Racist" Duke. Duke calls out Blitzer as a Zionist and former director of lobbyist for AIPAC several times in the interview, while Blitzer tries to nonchalantly brush it off by hammering Duke with his scripted questions about the conference. I think it's safe to assume that this will be the last time David Duke gets interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. Finally, another purported gaffe was committed by Olmert yesterday when he was caught on film telling Italian Prime Minister Prodi what to say about the Arab-Israeli peace "process" during their press conference. I'm usually not one for conspiracies, but it would seem someone has it in for Olmert, as this much negative coverage of an Israeli leader is not usual. The general disdain that Israeli's have for Olmert is as much a secret as Israel's nukes, so I'd be willing to speculate that people inside the Israeli establishment are somehow encouraging news coverage that depicts him unfavorably to perhaps speed up the collapse of the current government. Heck, even the rabid proto-Zionist goons over at Little Green Nutballs hate the guy. Or maybe he's just the big idiot he's being made out to be. Normally, Occam's razor would dictate that the latter is more true, but then you never know when it comes to Israel.
These two reasons are more than enough for Iran's leaders to think they need nukes. - According to its Prime Minister, Israel has nukes, and is a sworn enemy of Iran.
- According to the US Secretary of Defense, "they would see it in the first instance as a deterrent. They are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf."
Any questions? Didn't think so.
Like, who didn't see this coming?
Israel 'blocks Tutu Gaza mission'
Israel has blocked a UN fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip that was to be led by South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, the UN says.
In other news, the Sun set again late this afternoon, surprising no one.
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