ISRAEL - IRAN - SYRIA - HAMAS - HEZBOLLAH - WWWIII?

Foxfyre wrote:

I think a biography offered by the Harry Walker Agency, that includes such figures as Carol Moseley Braun and Vicente Fox among others, trumps a Wikipedia source of dubious origin any day of the week.

This is certainly a very good biography by his agency.

I only pointed out that you can find some voices who critise him at wikipedia - with sources (you're certainly free to consider them as dubious).

I like the rest of the Gingrich quote too. "In The Republican Noise Machine, author David Brock wrote the following about Gingrich and the media:

No matter how much he trashed the news media, Newt Gingrich had a keen understanding of how it could be used to forward the political agenda of the Republican Right. "We are engaged in reshaping the whole nation through the news media, he said. […] Unlike liberals, whose conception of the media was as a place for the airing of a wide range of diverse views through which the public could discern its opinions and make informed decisions, conservatives such as Gingrich saw the media as a propagandistic extension of their political campaigns."

Quote:

Catholics: 'Dismantle barrier'

BY BERNARD JOSEPHS

A SURVEY by the Catholic newspaper, The Tablet, has revealed a big majority against Israel's security barrier.

The 2,815 respondents -- including Catholics, Anglicans, other Christian denominations, Muslims and Jews -- gave their views in the wake of visits to Bethlehem by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormack Murphy O'Connor, both of whom were critical of the barrier.

An Israeli spokesman argued that Israel's case had not been put before readers of the paper, although a spokesman for The Tablet said that Israeli officials had been invited to comment.

The paper also contacted the Chief Rabbi's Office but was told that Sir Jonathan Sacks was unavailable. But an article accompanying the survey carried a comment by the Council of Christians and Jews' director of programmes, June Clements: "If we truly seek an end to conflict, we must recognise that considerable fears exist on both sides"

The notion that the security wall is needed to prevent suicide bombers was rejected by 79.4 per cent of respondents and 77.6 per cent supported a campaign to dismantle it.

More than 75 per cent supported the setting up of a Palestinian state within the June 1967 borders. Just over 68 per cent of respondents believed the churches should disinvest from companies whose products are used by the Israeli government in the territories.

More than half called on the Palestinians to recognise Israel.

source (copied/pasted): The Jewish Cronicle [UK], 29 Dec. 2006, page 2

It's simple apartheid
Just as the US and Europe once opposed apartheid in South Africa, Israel's discrimination against Palestinians must be similarly exposed and dismantled, writes Jamil Dakwar*

President Jimmy Carter is drawing criticism because his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, uses the label apartheid to describe Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territories. As second-class citizens in their own land, the term "apartheid" often rings truer for Palestinian citizens of Israel than democracy.

Israel's Jewish majority enjoys a thriving democracy. But Israel's non-Jewish citizens -- nearly 20 per cent of the population -- live a different reality. Palestinian citizens of Israel send their children to separate but unequal schools that receive less funding than Jewish schools, they cannot buy land or lease apartments in most Jewish towns, and they must often stand in a separate line at the airport from Jewish people.

While it is in the West Bank and Gaza that the apartheid analogy holds best, in many ways Palestinian citizens of Israel live under an apartheid-like legal regime. More than 20 Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews, including the law of return that grants automatic citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the world upon request, inviting them to settle on land that is not theirs, while denying that same right to Palestinians. Israeli housing and land policies are racially driven. Hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned land have been expropriated from Palestinians for the establishment of Jewish settlements.

The nationality and entry into Israel law prevents Palestinians from the occupied territories who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel from gaining residency or citizenship status. The law forces thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to either leave Israel or live apart from their families.

Israel's recently appointed deputy prime minister and minister for strategic threats, Avigdor Lieberman, considers Palestinian citizens of Israel to be a "demographic threat". Over the years, he has advocated ridding Israel of its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants to maintain a Jewish majority. His appointment did not elicit the same outrage as the 1999 victory of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party in Austria. Back then, Israel re-called its ambassador, Europe threatened Austria with economic sanctions and the US threatened to react swiftly to any expression of racism or anti-Semitism.

In the West Bank, though Palestinians have lived under Israeli rule for 40 years, they have no voice in Israeli politics and very limited recourse to Israel's legal system. Hundreds of checkpoints impede movement, disrupting, or blocking access to schools, jobs and medical care. As under South Africa's "pass system", Palestinians often require permission to travel from one village to the next inside the West Bank. South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said during a visit to Palestine that the situation was "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa." At the same time, Israel has constructed a vast road system for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers living illegally in the West Bank. This network of settlements and segregated roads bisects the West Bank, furthering the Palestinians' isolation and loss of land and property.

Israel's separation wall/barrier inside the West Bank confiscates Palestinian land and separates Palestinian communities. Dwarfing the Berlin Wall, it serves not solely security, but reaches deep into the West Bank to encompass major illegal Jewish settlements. Palestinians in the West Bank are increasingly penned into ghettoes that resemble the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa.

Meanwhile, Israel "withdrew" from Gaza more than a year ago, but it continues to control Gaza's borders, airspace and coastline and continues military strikes and operations inside Gaza at will. Determining everything that gets in or out, it has turned Gaza into the world's largest open-air prison.

Though it took decades, the world (with the exception of Israel) united against the South African apartheid regime and demanded equal rights for all of that country's citizens. This same standard should be applied to Israel immediately. The discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel and the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, as well as disinherited Palestinian refugees, demands a comprehensive solution based on international law and equal rights regardless of race, religion or ethnicity.

The United States and the EU have a pivotal role to play. The US State Department and the EU have repeatedly documented Israel's discriminatory practices. Yet while the Bush administration and the EU demanded that Palestinians under occupation develop democratic systems, no pressure has been applied to Israel to reform its exclusivist democracy for Jews to include all citizens of Israel, including 20 per cent of its citizens who are Palestinians. It is time the US and the EU hold Israel to account by making its massive economic and military aid contingent upon Israel abandoning its discriminatory policies. Americans and Europeans shunned apartheid once. It is time to do it again.

The writer is a formerly senior lawyer with Adalah, the legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel.

The notion that the security wall is needed to prevent suicide bombers was rejected by 79.4 per cent of respondents and 77.6 per cent supported a campaign to dismantle it.

From the Bernard Josephs piece

Quote:

The notion that the security wall is needed to prevent suicide bombers was rejected by 79.4 per cent of respondents and 77.6 per cent supported a campaign to dismantle it.

I wonder how many would reject that notion if they had ever been in the position of seeing their loved ones incinerated on a city bus or had to dig their loved ones out of the rubble of a crowded market?

Foxfyre wrote:

From the Bernard Josephs piece

Quote:

The notion that the security wall is needed to prevent suicide bombers was rejected by 79.4 per cent of respondents and 77.6 per cent supported a campaign to dismantle it.

I wonder how many would reject that notion if they had ever been in the position of seeing their loved ones incinerated on a city bus or had to dig their loved ones out of the rubble of a crowded market?

And I wonder what the Palestinians think about the IDF indiscriminately shooting down their women and kids.

I wonder how many would reject that notion if they had ever been in the position of seeing their loved ones incinerated on a city bus or had to dig their loved ones out of the rubble of a crowded market?

Foxfyre wrote:

I wonder how many would reject that notion if they had ever been in the position of seeing their loved ones incinerated on a city bus or had to dig their loved ones out of the rubble of a crowded market?

You perhaps forgot or didn't notice that this was done by a Catholic magazine in the UK among Catholics, Anglicans, other Christian denominations, Muslims and Jews and reported in the UK's Jewish's weekly.

I'm rather sure, some of them have closer personal knowledge about such than you do - at least those, who suffered from the IRA attacks or have relatives in Israel.

Well, that might be. But that's not how it was published in the Jewish Chronicle.

I meant it to say that the Israelis living in Israel are probably more reliable in what they think than is anybody living in Europe speculating about what the Israelis think.

The Jewish Chronicle is the oldest, still publishing Jewish newspaper.

It claims reflect the entire spectrum of Jewish religious, social and political thought from left to right, Orthodox to secular.
(But I'm rather sure, you would label Bernard Josephs as a liberal - though he isn't at all. :wink: )

I don't don't doubt at all that you know more about press history - and here that of the Jewish press - than I do.

And of course I doubt neither that you know more about Jews and Israel than the Jewish Chronicle and especially what I know.

The Sunday Times - World
January 07, 2007

Revealed: Israel plans nuclear strike on Iran

Uzi Mahnaimi, New York and Sarah Baxter, Washington

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

"As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished," said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad's assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock.

However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

Some analysts warned that Iranian retaliation for such a strike could range from disruption of oil supplies to the West to terrorist attacks against Jewish targets around the world.

Israel has identified three prime targets south of Tehran which are believed to be involved in Iran's nuclear programme:

· Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges are being installed for uranium enrichment

· A uranium conversion facility near Isfahan where, according to a statement by an Iranian vice-president last week, 250 tons of gas for the enrichment process have been stored in tunnels

· A heavy water reactor at Arak, which may in future produce enough plutonium for a bomb

Israeli officials believe that destroying all three sites would delay Iran's nuclear programme indefinitely and prevent them from having to live in fear of a "second Holocaust".

The Israeli government has warned repeatedly that it will never allow nuclear weapons to be made in Iran, whose president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map".

Robert Gates, the new US defence secretary, has described military action against Iran as a "last resort", leading Israeli officials to conclude that it will be left to them to strike.

Israeli pilots have flown to Gibraltar in recent weeks to train for the 2,000-mile round trip to the Iranian targets. Three possible routes have been mapped out, including one over Turkey.

Air force squadrons based at Hatzerim in the Negev desert and Tel Nof, south of Tel Aviv, have trained to use Israel's tactical nuclear weapons on the mission. The preparations have been overseen by Major General Eliezer Shkedi, commander of the Israeli air force.

Sources close to the Pentagon said the United States was highly unlikely to give approval for tactical nuclear weapons to be used. One source said Israel would have to seek approval "after the event", as it did when it crippled Iraq's nuclear reactor at Osirak with airstrikes in 1981.

Scientists have calculated that although contamination from the bunker-busters could be limited, tons of radioactive uranium compounds would be released.

The Israelis believe that Iran's retaliation would be constrained by fear of a second strike if it were to launch its Shehab-3 ballistic missiles at Israel.
However, American experts warned of repercussions, including widespread protests that could destabilise parts of the Islamic world friendly to the West.

Colonel Sam Gardiner, a Pentagon adviser, said Iran could try to close the Strait of Hormuz, the route for 20% of the world's oil.

Some sources in Washington said they doubted if Israel would have the nerve to attack Iran. However, Dr Ephraim Sneh, the deputy Israeli defence minister, said last month: "The time is approaching when Israel and the international community will have to decide whether to take military action against Iran."