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Malaka Mohammed's avatarFreedom to Palestine

The Story Has Commenced

Thirty-two-year-old Issawi is from Issawiyeh to the north east of Jerusalem. On April 15th, ‏2002 while being in a tower to the north of Jerusalem, he was captured by Israeli Operation Defensive Shield.  At that time, ‏he was sentenced to thirty years on charges of owning weapons and forming military groups. Nearly 10 years after his captivity, ‏an Egypt-brokered deal between Hamas and the Israeli regime about the captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, had been brought to the spotlight after staying under the shadow of hot arguments and meetings lingering for more than five years. Consequently, 476 Palestinian prisoners were released including Issawi.

Wondering why he has been detained only after eight months of his last release, I phoned Samir’s family to delve more in their son’s case. I could not make a call at first; ‏I had a shaking voice and trembling hands and did not even know how…

View original post 1,398 more words

In photos: Gaza buries its children as Israeli attacks intensify

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In photos: Gaza buries its children as Israeli attacks intensify.

In photos: Gaza buries its children as Israeli attacks intensify

The Electronic Intifada
20 November 2012

Mourners gather around the bodies of the al-Dalu family during their funeral in Gaza City, 19 November.

(Majdi Fathi / APA images)

Israeli attacks on Gaza killed 33 on the sixth day of an ongoing military campaign that has so far claimed 117 lives, according to the Ma’an News Agency. At least two dozen of the dead are children.

In the latest attack, four-year-old twin boys Suhaib and Muhammad were killed instantly when their home in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya was hit by an Israeli airstrike. Their parents Fuad Hijazi and Amna Hijazi died in hospital. Eighteen people were reported injured in the attack (“Family killed in new Israeli airstrike,” Ma’an News Agency).

No ceasefire has yet been reached as Israel continued to pound Gaza overnight Monday; three Israeli civilians were killed when a rocket fired from Gaza hit an apartment building in Kiryat Malachi last week, the only deaths in Israel.

Israel has amassed ground forces along its boundary with Gaza and has threatened to invade.

Israeli forces targeted buildings housing journalists both on Sunday and Monday; Islamic Jihad operative Ramiz Harb and 53-year-old civilian Salem Bulus Swelim were killed in today’s attack. Eight were injured yesterday when an Israeli missile hit another Gaza City building, including a cameraman whose leg was amputated; an Israeli spokesperson admitted that the military was aware that the building housed journalists.

On Sunday, 12 Palestinian civilians, including 10 members of the al-Dalu family, were killed in an Israeli strike that totally leveled a three-story home in Gaza City. The victims include four children; rescue crews searched for the remains of two eenagers from the al-Dalu family on Monday (“Israel ‘still investigation’ al-Dalou family killing,” Reuters).

Meanwhile in the West Bank, hundreds of injuries, several of them critical, have been reported as Israel violently represses protests against the Gaza attacks. Today 28-year-old Rushdi Tamimi died in a Ramallah hospital after he was shot by the Israeli army two days ago during a protest in the village of Nabi Saleh.

A Palestinian policeman bids farewell to 28-year-old Palestinian Rushdi Tamimi, a fellow officer, who died at a Ramallah hospital two days after Israeli forces shot him during a Gaza solidarity protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, 19 November.

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Palestinians carry the bodies of Jumana and Tamer Eseifan, both under the age of four, who were killed when an Israeli warplane fired a missile at an agricultural plot near their home in the Tal al-Zatar area of Jabaliya town, 18 November.

(Majdi Fathi / APA images)

A Palestinian man sits next to the body of his one-year-old son Iyad Abu Khoussa during the baby’s funeral in Bureij refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, 18 November. The child was killed when an Israeli warplane fired a missile at the fence of his family’s home; two other small children were wounded in the strike.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

Smoke rises after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, 19 November.

(Eyad Al Baba / APA images)

Palestinians search through the debris of the destroyed home of the al-Dalu family following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, 18 November.

(Yasser Qudih / APA images)

Palestinians rescuers carry out the body of Nawal Faraj Abdul Aal, 53, who was found under the ruins of her home which was destroyed when Israeli warplanes fired a missile at a nearby police station in the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, 18 November.

(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)

The daughters and mother of Nawal Faraj Abdul Aal, 53, mourn after the woman was asphyxiated under the rubble of her home. The home was destroyed when Israeli warplanes fired a missile at a nearby police station in the al-Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City, 18 November.

(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)

Al-Quds TV cameraman Khader al-Zahhar at the intensive care unit of al-Shifa hospital after he was seriously injured in an Israeli air strike on a media building.

(Anne Paq / ActiveStills)

Smoke rises as an Israeli air strike hits a media center in Gaza, 18 November.

(Majdi Fathi / APA images)

A Palestinian firefighter tries to extinguish a fire after an Israeli air strike on a Gaza City building that houses media offices, 19 November.

(Yasser Qudih / APA images)

Palestinians survey the remains of a destroyed a house after an Israeli air strike in al-Shojaiya neighborhood in the east of Gaza City, 18 November.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

Palestinians survey the remains of a destroyed a house after Israeli air strike in Beit Lahiya town in the northern Gaza Strip, 18 November.

(Majdi Fathi / APA images)

A Palestinian inspects the damage to a football stadium after an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, 19 November.

(Ahmed Zakot / Reuters)

Palestinian medics wheel a wounded boy on a stretcher to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, 18 November.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

A Palestinian woman looks at her destroyed home following Israeli air strikes on the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah, 18 November.

(Eyad Al Baba / APA images)

Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike on a Palestinian house in al-Shojaya in the east of Gaza City, 18 November.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

Palestinians walk amongst the debris of destroyed homes following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, 19 November.

(Ashraf Amra / APA images)

Palestinians gather around a destroyed house after an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, 19 November.

(Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / Reuters)

Israeli soldiers take part in a drill simulating a possible ground invasion into the Gaza Strip at a base south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, 17 November.

(Amir Cohen / Reuters)

An Israeli border policeman shoots a tear gas canister at Palestinian protesters during clashes outside Ofer prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah, 18 November. The clashes broke out following a protest against Israel’s military attacks on the Gaza Strip.

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

A Palestinian protester throws stones at Israeli soldiers at Huwwara checkpoint near the occupied West Bank city of Nablus during clashes following a protest against Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, 18 November.

(Nedal Eshtayah / APA images)

Israeli soldiers arrest a Palestinian protester at Huwwara checkpoint near the occupied West Bank city of Nablus during clashes following a protest against Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip, 18 November.

(Nedal Eshtayah / APA images)

Abdallah Abu Rahmeh lies in the road after he was purposefully hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler (pictured) during a peaceful protest against Israel’s attacks on Gaza on Route 60 outside Ofra settlement, 19 November.

(Issam Rimawi / APA images)

Bishop William Shomali leads a mass to pray for the children of Gaza in the Church of the Annunciation in the occupied West Bank city of Beit Jala, 18 November.

(Mamoun Wazwaz / APA images)

A girl holds a candle next to a photo of three-year-old Ranan Yousef Arafat, who was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, as Palestinians gathered in the West Bank city of Bethlehem’s Manger Square to mourn the victims of Israeli military strikes and to call for an end to the escalation of violence, 17 November.

(Ryan Rodrick Beiler / ActiveStills)

“Flatten” Gaza like Hiroshima and “mow” the population, Israeli public figures urge

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“Flatten” Gaza like Hiroshima and “mow” the population, Israeli public figures urge.

On 15 November, the second day of an Israeli assault, Ben-Ari addressed a hate rally in Tel Aviv, calling for more bloodshed in Gaza. New video of that rally, which this blog [Ali Abunimah’s EI blog] reported on previously, shows Ben-Ari in action.

 

Blogs » Ali Abunimah’s blog

“Flatten” Gaza like Hiroshima and “mow” the population, Israeli public figures urge

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Sun, 11/18/2012 – 23:20

Palestinian doctors gather to pray around the bodies of four children from the al-Dallu family killed along with 7 other people when an Israeli missile struck a family home in Gaza City, on 18 November 2012.

(Majdi Fathi / APA images)

In the latest horrifying examples of incitement to mass murder by Israeli public figures, Gilad Sharon, the son of former prime minister and notorious war criminal Ariel Sharon, has called for the Israeli army to “flatten” Gaza as the US flattened the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 with an atomic bomb.

“The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences,” wrote Sharon in the extremist publication The Jerusalem Post. Sharon elaborated:

We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.

There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.

Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.

Sharon added that “There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.”

Read more.

 

 

How Israel shattered Gaza truce leading to escalating death and tragedy: a timeline

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How Israel shattered Gaza truce leading to escalating death and tragedy: a timeline.

How Israel shattered Gaza truce leading to escalating death and tragedy: a timeline

Submitted by Ali Abunimah on Thu, 11/15/2012 – 14:29

A wounded Palestinian boy at a hospital after an Israeli air strike in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on 15 November 2012.

(Eyad Al Baba / APA images)

Today, 3 Israelis were killed as a result of rocket fire from Gaza.

This came after Israel had killed 13 Palestinians, including 3 children and a woman, and injured 115, including 26 children and 25 women since yesterday, 14 November.

This will be presented by Israel – and sympathetic or careless world media – as another justification for Israel’s attacks on Gaza to stop rocket fire. But this narrative is false.

Where there was calm and an effective truce, Israel chose to shatter it, bringing about the current deadly escalation.

In general, Palestinians fired rockets, or attacked the Israeli army, as a response to Israeli attacks, seeking to avoid escalation and publicly embracing a truce. Take a look at the sequence: Read more.

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A terrorist organisation now officially delisted as terrorists by State Dept. because it isn’t “terrorism” if the victims are Iranians.

realistic bird's avatarSilver Lining

by Kourosh Ziabari, source

In an act of hostility towards Iran, the United States removed the name of Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) from its list of foreign terrorist organizations on Friday, September 28, showing its unconditional support to the sworn enemies of the Iranian nation.

The U.S. government announced the decision a few days after the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton submitted a file of classified information about the terrorist cult to the Congress.

The decision was made under the pretext that MKO has not carried out any terrorist operation over the past 10 years. This controversial announcement, which bespeaks of the United States’ undeniable animosity with the Iranian people, comes while there are several reliable documents confirming that the MKO is responsible for the killing of more than 40,000 Iranians during the 1980s war between Iran and Iraq. It also assassinated Iran’s former President Mohammad Ali Rajaei, Prime Minister Mohammad…

View original post 1,271 more words

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I know little about US activities in Afghanistan. Information such as this increasingly inclines me to believe that Like Korea, Iraq, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, Afghanistan is another victim of US genocide.

95% of suicide bombings linked to military occupations

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Extraordinary video which begins with a myth of “terrorism” but goes on to show the horrors of military occupation. This is not a condemnation of US military personnel, but a moving indictment of criminal policies.

CAVEAT: This video is about what makes people into suicide bombers. What make people into “terrorists” (namely those who use violence to create terror to achieve political ends as per UN definition) is more often an elite education and an elected or unelected position of power in a militarily powerful society such as US, China, UK, France, India, Russia etc., etc. Such terrorists greatly outnumber those in non-state organisations as do their victims.

Also note that governments and academics have known this about suicide bombers for a very long time. Attempts to link suicide attacks to religious extremism are and have always been deception.

Scary quote

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“Out of curiosity, I ran some Google searches.  The results were striking.

  • “Iran’s disputed nuclear weapons program”: 4 hits
  • “Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program”: about 8,990 hits
  • “Iran’s civil nuclear program”: about 42,200 hits
  • “Iran’s civilian nuclear program”: about 199,000 hits
  • “Iran’s nuclear weapons program”: about 5,520,000 hits
  • “Iran’s nuclear program”: about 49,000,000 hits.”

This is from a TomDispatch article.

Also: “A large majority of Americans believe that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons program, 71% in 2010 and 84% this March.  Some surveys even indicate that a majority of Americans would support military action to stop Iran from developing nukes.”

I don’t know whether war with Iran is a realistic threat. It clearly benefits the US to make a credible threat. The US stands to lose a lot in such a war, at least the US people do, but what might their elites gain? Equally, as a threat to world peace as a whole it is an implicit or explicit threat to other states and formations such as Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, or the “BRIC” states, or the supposed “friends” of the US like the EU. In a way it means that no matter how much of an outlaw “Rogue State” the US is, between this and the economic and financial hegemony of the US, nothing substantive can be done to constrain the US.

The google data above, however, suggest something about thought control in modern society. The vast disparity in phraseologies is both the result of and the act of determining an agenda, controlling the idiom of a discourse. Mainstream news reporting has been compared to schools of fish, wherein individuals somehow know without information or instruction, the direction to pursue, the line to take. The same evidently applies to the blogosphere, the broader collection of information purveyors. They maintain the Party line by determining the language which may be used to apply thought to areas of interest.Image