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

Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity’

Chris Hedges
TruthDig
December 15, 2008

A Palestinian worker sweeps out the empty storeroom of a U.N. food distribution center in Gaza City.


Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.

For anyone interested in informing themselves about current conditions in Palestine from a non-Israeli viewpoint, but not necessarily an anti-Israeli viewpoint, I could recommend the paperback book "Palestine" by Joe Sacco, and American I think.

It is a illustrated/ graphic book so even MM should have no trouble understanding it.

Published by Jonathan Cape, ISBN 9780224069823

Editorial Reviews
Review
Palestine deserves a place among the very best of documentary. -- The Journal of Palestinian Studies

An involving, even immersive experience....the book's brilliance is reflected in the attention to detail. -- Time Out London, 8 January 2003, Daniel Paddington

Brilliantly and poignantly captures the essence of life under a repressive and prolonged occupation. -- Nasseer H. Azuri, Professor of Political Science, The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

I may as well get right to the point. Buy and read Joe Sacco's...Palestine. -- The Comics Journal #166, Frank Stack, February 1994

Sacco has pioneered a journalistic form that manages to be both deeply informative and highly entertaining. -- Time Out New York, John Kearney, 6 December 2001

Sacco is formidably talented...a powerful piece of work. -- The Independent [London], Charles Shaar Murray, 4 February 2003

Sacco's brilliant comic strip explodes with such imagination and wit....perceptive and intensely moving. -- Omar al-Qattan, Banipal, The Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, Autumn 2002

This mature work is important and has never been more timely. -- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 19 December 2001

[A] compassionate, insightful primer on the lives of Israeli soldiers, Palestinian refugees and children in the Middle East. -- Salon.com, 28 September 2001

[Sacco's] obviously got the calling. His stuff is obviously well wrought, with dizzying pages and good rhythm. -- Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Maus

Product Description
Fantagraphics Books is pleased to present, for the first time, a single-volume collection of this 288-page landmark of journalism and the artform of comics. Interest in Sacoo has never been higher than with the release of his critically acclaimed book, Safe Area Gorazde.

Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first major comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, who has often been called the first comic book journalist.

Sacco's insightful reportage takes place at the front lines, where busy marketplaces are spoiled by shootings and tear gas, soldiers beat civilians with reckless abandon, and roadblocks go up before reporters can leave. Sacco interviewed and encountered prisoners, refugees, protesters, wounded children, farmers who had lost their land, and families who had been torn apart by the Palestinian conflict.

In 1996, the Before Columbus Foundation awarded Palestine the seventeenth annual American Book Award, stating that the author should be recognized for his "outstanding contribution to American literature," while his publisher, Fantagraphics, is "to be honored for their commitment to quality and their willingness to take risks that accompany publishing outstanding books and authors that may not prove 'cost-effective' in the short run."

This new edition of Palestine also features a new introduction from renowned author, critic, and historian Edward Said, author of Peace and Its Discontents and The Question of Palestine and one of the world's most respected authorities on the Middle Eastern conflict.

2000 BC: First Canaanite Culture.
1400 BC: Eqypt conquers Palestine.
1300 BC: First Israelite Culture.
1100 BC: First Philistine Culture.
1000 BC: Saul King of Palestine except Philistra and Phoenicia.
0721 BC: Israel is conquered.
0333 BC: Alexander the Great conquers Palestine.
0135 BC: Maccabees conquer all Palestine.
0040 BC: Romans conquer Palestine.

0638 AD: Arabs begin conquering Palestine.
1099 AD: Crusaders conquer Palestine.
1187 AD: Saladin conquers Palestine.
1244 AD: Turks conquer Palestine.
1516 AD: Ottomans conquer Palestine.
1831 AD: Egypt conquers Palestine.
1841 AD: Ottomans conquer Palestine.
1918 AD: Ottoman governance of Palestine ends.
1918 AD: British Protectorate of Palestine Begins.


1920: 5 Jews killed, 200 wounded in anti-zionist riots in Palestine.
1921: 46 Jews killed, 146 wounded in anti-zionist riots in Palestine.
1929: 133 Jews killed, 339 wounded; 116 Arabs killed, 232 wounded.
1936-1939: 329 Jews killed, 857 wounded; 3,112 Arabs killed, 1,775 wounded; 135 Brits killed, 386 wounded; 110 Arabs hanged, 5,679 jailed.
1947: UN resolution partitions Palestine into a Jewish State and into an Arab State.
1948: Jews declare independence and establish the State of Israel.
1948: War breaks out between Jews defending Israel and Arabs invading Israel.
1948: State of Israel successfully defends itself and additionally conquers a part of Palestine originally granted by the UN to the Arabs.

SOME OF THE TERRORISM OF JEWS BY ARABS
1970: Avivim school bus massacre by Palestinian PLO members, killing nine children, three adults and crippling 19.
1972: Black September kidnaps and kills eleven Israeli Olympic athletes and one German policeman in the Munich Massacre.
1974: Kiryat Shmona massacre at an apartment building by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members, killing 18 people, nine of whom were children.
1974: Ma'alot massacre at the Ma'alot High School in Northern Israel by Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine members: 26 of the hostages were killed, 66 wounded.
1975: In the Savoy Operation PLO gunmen from Lebanon take dozens of hostages at the Tel Aviv Savoy Hotel eventually killing eight hostages and three IDF soldiers, and wounding eleven hostages.
1976: Hijacking of Air France Flight 139 (Tel Aviv-Paris) by Palestinian PFLP and German Revolutionäre Zellen; see Operation Entebbe: four hostages, one Sayeret Matkal soldier and 45 Ugandian soldiers killed.
1978: Members of the Arab Revolutionary Council poison Israeli oranges with mercury, injuring at least twelve people and reducing exports by 40 percent.
1978: Coastal Road massacre: Fatah gunmen killed several tourists and hijack a bus near Haifa; 37 Israelis on the bus are killed.
1984: three killed and nine injured in the bombing of a civilian bus in Ashdod.
1984: 48 people are wounded by a machine gun attack on a crowded shopping mall in Jerusalem.
1986: A bomb place on a bus in the West Bank kills one and severely injures three.
1990: PLF attacks the beaches of Tel Aviv.
1990: PLO attacks the US embassy.
1992: Israeli Embassy bombing by "Islamic Jihad" in Buenos Aires, Argentina--29 killed, 242 injured.
1994: Bombing of Jewish Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kills 86 and wounds 300.
1996: A series of four suicide bombings in Israel leave 60 dead and 284 wounded within 10 days.
2001: Israeli infant Shalhevet Pass is fatally shot in the head by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron.
2001: 21 civilians, mostly teenagers from the former Soviet Union, are killed by a Hamas suicide bomber in the Dolphinarium massacre in Tel Aviv, Israel.
2001: A suicide bomber in Jerusalem kills seven and wounds 130 in the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing; Hamas and Islamic Jihad claim responsibility.
2001: Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi is assassinated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
2002: Terrorism against Israel in 2002.
2002: A Palestinian suicide bomber kills 30 and injures 140 during Passover festivities in a hotel in Netanya, Israel in the Passover massacre.
2002: A Hamas suicide bomber kills 15 and injures over 40 in Haifa, Israel, in the Matza restaurant massacre.
2002: A Hamas suicide bomber detonates himself on a bus in Jerusalem in the Patt junction massacre. The attack kills 19 people and wounds over 74.
2002: Hamas orchestrates the Jerusalem bus 20 massacre. 11 people were killed and over 50 wounded when a suicide bomber detonated on a crowded bus in central Jerusalem.
2003: A Hamas suicide bomber kills 17 people and wounds 53 when he detonates a bomb hidden under his clothing in the Haifa bus 37 massacre.
2003: Jerusalem bus 2 massacre: A Hamas suicide bomber detonates himself on a crowded bus carrying mostly Orthodox Jewish Israelis, including many children returning from the Western Wall. 23 people are killed and over 130 wounded.
2003: A Palestinian suicide bomber kills 21 and wounds 51 in a Haifa restaurant in the Maxim restaurant massacre.
2004: Violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict 2004.
2004: Jerusalem bus 19 massacre: Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades orchestrate a suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem, Israel killing 11 people and wounding more than 50.
2004: Israeli soldiers arrest Hussam Abdo, a 15 year-old Palestinian boy with explosives strapped to his chest at the Hawara Checkpoint. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sent Abdo on a suicide mission to bomb the checkpoint.
2004: Pregnant Israeli commuter Tali Hatuel and her four young children are gunned down at close range by militants from the Popular Resistance Committees and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
2005: A suicide bomber in Tel Aviv kills five Israelis and undermines a weeks-old truce between the two sides.
2005: Islamic Jihad takes responsibility for a suicide bombing in Netanya, Israel, which kills five people at a shopping mall.
2005: Jewish settler in an IDF uniform opens fire on a bus in Shfaram, Israel, killing 4 Israeli Arabs and wounding 5.
2005: A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates a bomb near a falafel stand in Hadera, Israel that kills himself and six others. Twenty-six people were also wounded.
2005: A suicide bomb attack kills at least five people in Netanya in north-western Israel.
2006: Qassam rockets fired by Hamas into Israel, especially the cities of Ashkelon and Sderot, injures many citizens.
2006: Palestinian suicide bomber kills himself and four others at Kedumim Junction in the West Bank.
2006: Sami Hammad, a Palestinian suicide bomber, detonates an explosive device in Tel Aviv, Israel, killing eleven people and injuring 70.
...

Quote:

For anyone interested in informing themselves about current conditions in Palestine from a non-Israeli viewpoint, but not necessarily an anti-Israeli viewpoint, I could recommend the paperback book "Palestine" by Joe Sacco, and American I think.

It is a illustrated/ graphic book so even MM should have no trouble understanding it.

Published by Jonathan Cape, ISBN 9780224069823

Has anyone (especially anyone in the Advocate camp) ordered this book yet? It's very good.

Did you also offer a book to Australians when they were disenfranchising the indigenous people. Why do white Gentiles tend to see other people's sins, and not their own?

now show me where any one of our leadership was so convicted of any war crimes?

... but the US was the first to develop those weapons, and used them against our enemy to save lives on both sides. Many of the atom bomb developers were against the use of the bomb, but Truman made the right decision to use the bombs to end the war, and it did. It also saved lives.

From A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn,
and the Political Literacy Course of the Common Courage Press:

The bombing of Japanese cities continued the strategy of saturation bombing to destroy civilian morale; one nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. (Zinn points out in the book that "nighttime bombing" was by its very nature indiscriminate, not aimed primarily at military targets.)

And then, on August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning.

Twelve U.S. navy fliers in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged, according to historian Martin Sherwin ("A World Destroyed").

Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps 50,000 killed.

The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said " a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given by General George Marshall. (When the papers of the Manhattan Project " the project to build the atom bomb " were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.)

These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people.

Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender. A New York Times military analyst wrote, shortly after the war:

"The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26."

Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war:

"Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to December 31 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

But could American leaders have known this in August 1945?

The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted.

It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered.

On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace." Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: "Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to " and did " relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to conclusion."

If only Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender " that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place " the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.

Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it.

Or was it, as British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested ("Fear, War, and the Bomb"), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?

The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan.

But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan.

In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."

Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz ("Atomic Diplomacy"), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as

"most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."

Truman had said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar was possible, the killing of civilians."

It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report:
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."

The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?

Martin Sherwin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:
"Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, given location of Allied prisoner of war camp one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediate reply."

The reply: "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged."

True, the war ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered. The Fascist powers were destroyed.

But what about fascism " as idea, as reality? Were its essential elements " militarism, racism, imperialism " now gone? Or were they absorbed into the already poisoned bones of the victors.