****UPDATE**** I put this story up on Reddit, and in 2 minutes they took it down. I have erased my account with them and will never visit that censored site again. Fuck Reddit.
(They viciously attacked a 58 year old woman and her husband for tending sheep on their own land. A group of Jewish “settlers”, Israelis that move onto Palestinian land and disrupt or just plain attack the Palestinians until they leave, attacked two elderly Palestinians while they were tending their sheep. The 4 settlers were young men, carrying baseball bats. They broke woman’s jaw and her arm. It was caught on tape and the video is running all over the world. But not here. This is typical behavior for the settlers and the only reason it’s in the NYT is because of the video. It’s also the only reason that these fucking punks who go after elderly women with baseball bats will serve even a day in jail. The cowards wore scarfs on their faces as they beat an woman old enough to be their grandmother, with baseball bats. This is terrorism at it’s finest; using violence to effect social change in the area. Namely, the Palestinians leaving so the Israelis can take over the land. Israel pays the “settlers” a stipend every year to do this. That makes Israel a state sponsor of terrorism. The same Israel that Obama praised as “a beacon of democracy in the region” last month at the AIPAC summit in DC.)
(This is a picture of the woman recovering at home.)
(and this is a still shot taken from the video)
(Two young Israeli children send a message to Palestinian kids. Look closely and you can read “from Israel” on the side of the bomb.)
End the Occupation is a Palestinian Rights organization. I am a proud member for reasons such as this.
West Bank - The conflict between Arabs and Jews over grazing land and water wells in the ancient, arid hills south of Hebron in the West Bank has a distinctly biblical feel, like the flimsy tent encampments and dank caves in which some local Palestinian farming families dwell.
But the primeval feud took on a modern twist this month when Muna Nawajaa, one of the two wives of a Palestinian shepherd from Khirbet Susiya, used a handheld video camera to film what appeared to be masked Jewish settlers viciously beating members of her family with clubs - images that have since been broadcast by news networks all over the world.
(A letter written by a loving father seeking justice not retribution. I can add nothing else but my deepest sympathies go out to him and his family for their loss and my sincerest hope that one day we will hold ALL nations accountable for their actions; including our own.)
Honorable General Ehud Barak, you don’t know me personally. I am a seeker of peace, and I struggle with all my strength and ability for the realization of a just peace that will bring calm and prosperity to Palestinians and Israelis together. I have suffered personally from your criminal occupation and I have paid a heavy price. Firstly, I was imprisoned when I was 17 years old and wasted seven years of my life in your barbaric prisons. Secondly, have you perhaps read or heard about what happened to the young girl Abir Aramin? She was a ten-year-old whom your soldiers killed with a rubber bullet from a distance of 15 feet on January 16, 2007 in front of her eleven-year-old sister Areen. Despite this I, the father of Abir - may she rest in peace - believe in the right of the Israeli person, as in the right of all people, to exist and to live in peace and security. So why do you not believe in our right to enjoy these same things, sir?
This week, Senator Barak Obama traveled to Florida and spoke to Jewish and Cuban-American audiences. In those speeches, he embraced the right-wing policy positions of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) and the hard-line program of the most reactionary elements of the Cuban exile community.
(The “beacon of democracy in the region” is at it again; this time detaining and deporting a Jewish American critic of Israels treatment of the Palestinians. Last month they refused to let Jimmy Carter anywhere near Gaza, and now this. Starting to sound a bit like China, aren’t they?)
Israel deported Jewish-American Professor Norman Finkelstein to the United States on Friday after questioning him at Ben Gurion airport. Finkelstein was denied entry due to “security concerns,” authorities said.
To better understand the situation in the occupied territories, here is a great video produced by a Jewish American activists who travels to the occupied territories to assist Palestinians in their plight.
(When someone uses this talking point, “beacon of democracy in the region” regardless of political affiliations, it turns my stomach. When former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visited Israel a month ago, he was not allowed to visit Gaza. That would be like Bush telling Desmond Tutu that he couldn’t visit New Orleans’ 9th Ward district. If you wish to understand the plight of the Palestinian people and the Arab-Israelis, this article is as good a place as any to get started. No U.S. politician will EVER recieve my vote if they can’t bring themselves to address the criminality of this stunningly obvious apartheid state.)
Africa’s white minority government was finally overthrown in 1993, after decades of black popular and working-class resistance. That year, the black majority democratically elected the African National Congress–previously derided as a “terrorist” organization by apartheid’s imperial supporters, including the U.S.–to lead its government. Freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, having spent 27 years in a South African prison and reviled as an international terrorist, was reinvented in the Western press as an elder statesman.
Today’s episode deals with a special, high-end, high-octane sellout.
This one is a current member of the U.S. House of Representatives who made history by becoming the first woman to be named Speaker of the House. Her historic rise to the Speaker seat made us all feel a little better about being Americans.
Democrats had just won control of both houses of congress and we knew that the end of this horrible occupation was nearing an end. Finally, we were going to show these neo-con usurpers of the throne the meaning of democracy. How wrong we were….
How convenient of him. At a time when much of the world is focusing on the deplorable conditions in Gaza and scores of human rights violations taking place in the occupied territories, bin Laden, right on cue, steps up and claims that the terrorists cells should focus their messages on the plight of the Palestinians. Thus making reputable organizations that are trying to call attention to the human rights catastrophes in the West Bank and Gaza, look like they are aiding the efforts of “the terrorists”.
The sticking point is, of course, that many people think Osama has been dead for quite sometime so that would make this simply more propaganda from those who stand to gain from more fear mongering, and keeping people quite about how the Palestinians are really being treated by “the beacon of democracy” in the Middle East.
“Away from the cameras, a fifth of the Israeli population - more than one million Palestinian citizens - remembered al-Nakba, the Catastrophe of 1948 that befell the Palestinian people as the Jewish state was built on the ruins of their society….But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year’s march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.” from Jon Cook at Antiwar, here.
This is the same Israel that Obama praised in his now famous speech, as a beacon of democracy in the region. That speech was on the lingering effects of racism in America and how we must continue to both acknowledge it’s existence and struggle to overcome it’s legacy. I would ask Candidate Obama if these scenes remind him at all of the struggle for civil rights, right here in this country during the 60’s.
Don’t ask for what you never had,’ is the underlying message made by supporters of Israel when they claim Palestine was never a state to begin with.
The contention is, of course, easily refutable. Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th Century, colonial powers plotted to divide the spoils. When Britain and France signed the secretive Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which divided the spheres of influence in west Asia, there were hardly any ‘nation-states’ in the region which would fit contemporary definitions of the term.
