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

Because of the upcoming meetings Mr Netanyahu is about to have with western leaders to discuss the future of the settlements, the Guardian has published a number of reports and articles pertaining to this.

This is from today's paper:

Families evicted from their East Jerusalem homes after 50 years

The police came for them at dawn on a Sunday, heavily armed, wearing helmets and riot shields as they broke down the metal doors of the houses and dragged the two Palestinian families out onto the streets.

It was over in minutes, the Hanoun and the Ghawi families evicted from what had been their homes for the past five decades, and thrown onto the pavement before the sun had fully risen.

Within hours young, religious Israeli settlers had been moved in, guarded by dozens of armed police and their own private armed security guards.

These streets of Sheikh Jarrah, in East Jerusalem, have become the new front line in Israel's complex battle to extend its control over this divided city; their latest victims 17 members of the Hanoun family and 38 from the Ghawi family.

Both families now sleep on mattresses on the street outside their homes and spend the day sitting in the shade watching settlers walk in and out of their front doors........(more)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/24/west-bank-east-jerusalem-evictions

When criticizing Israel becomes ritual
by Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada), August 15, 2009

It begins, reasonably, as a response to apparently unnecessary violence by Israel. Then it moves on to accuse Israel of expanding on land the Arabs insist is theirs. Nothing wrong with criticizing that, surely. Israel, a state, deserves to be judged like any other.

Even those friendly toward Israel have often felt duty bound to point out its mistakes. In more innocent times, I imagined that intellectuals in the West paid careful attention to Israel's faults because they expected it to set a high standard. Who would worry about the moral status of, say, Bolivia? No one except Bolivians. Jews, however, live with the injunction to be (as Isaiah quotes God) "A light unto the nations."

But now everything has changed. Opposing Israel has become an institutionalized ritual. It's now a movement across Europe and North America. It has its traditions, like Israel Apartheid Week, celebrated every spring in universities, often the cause of riots and an occasion to intimidate Jewish students. Vehement opposition to Israel appears to be the major interest of thousands of people all over the world. Many are Muslims, sympathizing with the Palestinians, but many are not. This week, attacks on Israel once more appeared on the agenda of the general council meeting of the United Church of Canada, a critic of Israel for generations.

What are reasonable people to think about these relentless campaigns in the universities, churches and unions?

Those involved often insist that it's not a matter of anti-Semitism. They like to say, "I'm anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic. A different thing entirely."

After decades of use, this declaration of innocence has ceased to be credible. In my personal observation, enemies of Israel often turn out to be anti-Semites as well. The true agenda of anti-Israel activists often is reflected in their style of propaganda, and in the exclusive attention they give to one particular country.

The style of the protests goes far beyond "criticism," that benign noun implying civil disputes. Often, anti-Israel propaganda distributed on campuses and elsewhere borrows the style of Nazi cartoons. As Craig Offman reported in the Post, last winter students at the University of Manitoba found themselves confronted by posters near a campus bookshop depicting, among other things, a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; and an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, bombing a baby bottle.

Moreover, the word "apartheid," now a favourite of the anti-Israel movement, carries intentionally vicious overtones of racism. It's a way of setting the final terms of an issue before it can be discussed.

The most distressing quality of the attacks, however, is their singularity. They leave us with the impression that Israel deserves more censure than any other country on Earth " in fact, more than all other countries combined. Enemies of Israel may sometimes claim that they have also passed resolutions deploring genocide in Africa or dictatorship in Burma. But these views are expressed in comparative privacy. No widespread, long-running movements accompany them.

Does York University in Toronto, so dedicated to justice for Palestinians, also devote a week every year to the fate of the Falun Gong in China? Do Concordia University students in Montreal demonstrate against the mass rapes in the Congo? Does the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which favours boycotting Israeli universities, have anything to say about Tibetan freedom? Have any of them heard of the World Uighur Congress's defence of oppressed Muslims in the Xinjiang province of western China? And when dealing with the Gaza conflict, not one campus group anywhere (so far as I know) mounted a campaign against Hamas killings of fellow Palestinians. They also avoid mentioning the Hamas policy of using women and children as human shields.

So far as we can learn from how they act in public, these organizations appear to have a foreign policy with only one item on its agenda, the same one they would have if they were in fact motivated fundamentally by anti-Semitism.

Howard Jacobson, a British novelist and journalist, calls this phenomenon "Jew-hating pure and simple, the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation."

Those who oppose Israel's policies have a right to their opinions and their anger, however unreasonable. And those, like me, who are infuriated by the relentless and totally selective drumbeat, also have a right to our grave suspicions.

When you copied the article, you conveniently omitted some important facts. The article, pro and con the evicted, also states that those evicted failed to pay their rent for years. Also, two Jewish groups claim that they have proof that Jews owned this property before the Arabs moved in, negating the Arab argument that Arabs owned the property virtually forever.

And you, Advocate, shouln't have stopped reading at those paragraphs but have had read further to understand the full article.

In the brief copy and pasted above from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs--whose self-described focus is "on the main issues affecting Israel's security and international standing in order to wage the war of ideas in global opinion," and "to present Israel's case to the world"--Dore Gold gives a pretty good delineation of the differences between the Clinton Administration's and Bush Administration's heavily Zionist-slanted approaches to the conflict. His conclusions, not surprisingly, are also decidedly pro-Zionist, what with his assessment that the Palestinian claim of the Right of Return does not emanate from UN General Assembly Resolution 194--actually, that's merely the Zionists' interpretation of UN res.194, which Gold parrots; and that the shift from the Clinton admin's requisite of a peace settlement before security to the Bush admin's prerequisite of security before a peace agreement "represents a significant improvement for Israel and for the prospects of a lasting peace." This latter assessment he has completely ass-backwards. There is a lack of security precisely because of the lack of a peace settlement in the face of the continued oppression and discrimination of the Palestinian peoples by the state of Israel, and it is the continued lack of a peace settlement that perpetuates Israel's lack of security.

Havent you noticed that Advocate only interperts the "facts" that back his idea of justice? The actual facts go right over his head in that he ignores them.

I was replying to McTag's very one-sided copying. I read the entire article and said it was pro and con the evicted. I copied some of the con. But why didn't you speak up about McTag's evident bias?

Because it wasn't a bias at all: he just quoted the first paragraphes, added some dots "........" as well as a "(more)" together with the link.

I copied the beginning of the article and gave you the link for the rest.
I think the article deals with the "failure to pay rent" claim. These people were originally offered ownership of the buildings. Since then, they've been swindled, and now they're evicted. Swindled by the state, and evicted by the army.
If that happened to me (or to you) we'd want to fire rockets, and worse.

Courts have said they were not swindled. Funny, many Pals sold land to the Zionists early on, and now the Pals say they were swindled. They conveniently forget that they got the then value of relatively worthless land.

Ahmadinejad's choice for defense minister is wanted by Interpol for planning the terrorist bombing of a synagogue in Argentina. Considering this, why should Israel have any hesitation in destroying Iran's nuclear facilities.

http://www.slate.com/id/2226110?wpisrc=newsletter

Palestinian mercy!

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/me_hamas0675_08_25.asp

Advocate keeps defending the crimes of Israelis which makes one wonder how he would react to being treated like the Palestinians; forced loss of property, and removed physically by the Israeli army. I wonder if he would be content in shooting off a few rockets that usually lands harmless, or would he strap some TNTs on his body and become a suicide bomber? After all, everything he owned was stolen from him and his family. How far will he go to reclaim his dignity?

Israel gives Pals due process. The Pals give no one due process, as indicated in the above link.

You said "a few rockets." It was 8,000-10,000 rockets, causing Israeli to live in a sort of hell. But hell, what should we expect from an admitted anti-Semite.

I don't think anyone believes that, not even you if you're honest.

Check it out. It is true in Israel.

You read it here first. Israeli courts interpreting Israeli law for the Israeli state find against arab dissidents.

I told you before, many pages ago, that when a Palestinian village is taken over, before they uproot the orchards and bulldoze the buildings and fill up the wells, they seek out and take away all documentation relating to the history of the society there, registers of births, marriages, deaths, interments, and property deeds.

It's quite an industry. And quite a cold-blooded and calculated process.

They seem blind to all the facts about Israel, but I wonder how they would themselves react to being treated the same as Palestinians in our country - since it's all on the up and up, legal, and humane.

Has anyone asked Robert Fulford how he would react to being treated in the same manner as Palestinians in Israel?

He's a racially bigoted nincompoop!

Here's a page from Joe Sacco's book that I took at the Chicago Public Library.