Hysterical Aryeh Eldad Would Prefer Genocide

by Maayana Miskin

from Arutz Sheva

MK Aryeh Eldad (HaTikvah) has requested that Attorney General Menachem Mazuz look into Defense Minister Ehud Barak's decision to allow supplies to enter Gaza. According to Eldad, Barak should be brought to trial for assisting the enemy in a time of war.

Barak decided Friday to allow 90 trucks carrying food, medicine and fuel to enter Gaza via Israeli crossings in the western Negev. The trucks were allowed to pass despite dozens of rocket and mortar shell attacks from Gaza over the past two days.

Barak's decision is criminal, Eldad said Friday. “There's no way to define this other than abetting the enemy in a time of war, and whoever does so must be brought to trial,” he stated.

Barak has frequently allowed aid into Gaza despite rocket attacks, and Israel continues to supply most of Gaza's electricity. In a controversial move, Barak recently allowed a large shipment of cash to enter Gaza as well in order to save Gaza banks, which were at risk of collapse due to the lack of currency.

Barak and other ministers who favor the shipments to Gaza say the aid is necessary in order to prevent a humanitarian crisis in an area where most residents rely on international aid. The United Nations has put heavy pressure on Israel to open crossings despite rocket attacks in order to keep its Gaza aid program from encountering food shortages.

Eldad has previous called to enforce laws that he says are violated by Israeli politicians in the name of negotiations and peace. Earlier this year Eldad called for politicians who agree to give territory to Syria to face the death penalty. Giving up the Golan would be treason under Israel's criminal legislation, he explained.

Regarding Gaza, Eldad has stated that he favors allowing Arab residents of the area who do not support terrorism to voluntarily relocate to Jordan and other Arab countries.

Drunken Marine Taxi Thief Gets No Jail Time In Okinawa, Of Course

"That's the price you pay for our protection." - A high-ranking US official referring to the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by three American soldiers.

by Chiyomi "Collaborator" Sumida

from Stars and Stripes, the newspaper of the occupiers

NAHA, Okinawa — A 22-year-old Marine was sentenced Wednesday to a year in Japanese prison — suspended for four years — for stealing a taxi and taking it for a joyride in October. 

Lance Cpl. Matthew J. Eckersen, assigned to Headquarters and Service Battalion on Camp Foster, nodded in acceptance as he heard the verdict at Naha District Court. 

During a hearing earlier this month, Eckersen admitted he took the vehicle after finding the key in the ignition in Chatan’s American Village. 

Cab drivers, a motorcyclist and police officers pursued the stolen taxi on Highway 58. The 15-minute chase ended when Eckersen sideswiped five cars stopped at a red light at the Isa intersection in Ginowan, rendering the taxi inoperable, according to testimony. 

Eckersen and a second Marine, who had been riding in the backseat, fled the scene on foot but were soon arrested. 

A field sobriety test found that Eckersen was intoxicated, according to a police report.

Charges against the second Marine were later dropped.

Chief Judge Hiroyuki Yoshii said the court decided to suspend the sentence because Eckersen is young, showed remorse and had no previous criminal conviction.

"Your action could have caused irrevocable serious consequences," Yoshii admonished Eckersen in court. 

"Keep this experience in mind for the rest of your life so that you don’t have to come back to court as a criminal defendant either here in Japan or in the United States." 

Eckersen could face administrative or judicial action by the Marine Corps for any offense that wasn’t tried in the Japanese court, 1st Lt. Adrian Rankine-Galloway, a Marine spokesman, said in an e-mail to Stripes. 

"At this time it would be inappropriate to speculate on possible actions Lance Corporal Eckersen’s command may take," Rankine-Galloway added.

Gaza Rocket Fire Follows Israeli Killing of 3 Palestinians

from DemocracyNow!

In Israel and the Occupied Territories, three Palestinians were killed Tuesday in an Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip. Earlier today, Palestinian militants began firing rockets at Israel in what Hamas called a retaliatory strike. The rockets have landed near Israeli towns with no reported injuries. A six-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas expired last week. Hamas spokesperson Mahmoud al-Zahar said the violence will continue so long as Israel maintains its economic and humanitarian blockade.

Mahmoud al-Zahar: “Practically, they closed the border. They violated the agreement through the Egyptian side, so we are putting the responsibility on the other side. And now they started to attack our people. We are running self-resistance by all means.”

Australia is the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations

by John Pilger

published 2000 October 13

According to the folksy writer Matthew Engel, the glories of the Olympic Games have a cathartic effect on nations. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles 'helped the US regain the confidence it lost in Vietnam'. 

He omitted to explain the benefits of this renewed confidence for the millions of bereaved, maimed and poisoned Vietnamese. As for the Sydney Olympics, he described a 'glorious self-confidence' that will 'sustain Australia for years'.

There is no doubting the efficiency of the Sydney Olympics, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the setting; but there was a political facade. Soon after the Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman won her gold medal, the cabinet of John Howard's government met in Canberra to mount yet another attack on her people by planning to change the Land Rights Act.

In 1998, the Howard government enacted legislation that effectively took away the common-law rights that the High Court said belonged to Aborigines. Nothing like it has been passed by a modern parliament. It is just one of the disgraces that has given Australia the distinction of being the only developed country whose government has been condemned as racist by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 

The UN has also called racist the mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, which have given black Australians an imprisonment rate at least as high as that of apartheid South Africa, and have been a primary cause of one of the highest suicide rates in the world, among young Aborigines. The Howard government's response, on the eve of the Olympics, was to bar UN human rights officials from entering Australia and investigating further. Howard's racist administration is a beneficiary of an Olympic Games that successfully co-opted Aboriginal motifs, culture and talent, leaving the question begging: if 'glorious self-confidence' can produce such brilliant organisation, why can't the same energy and political will be applied to ending the shameful treatment of the first Australians?

Take sport, a passion of all races. Why are the annual Aboriginal Games in the Northern Territory, an event of great significance to black Australians, played in a dust bowl without the most basic facilities? There are no athletics tracks, no swimming-pools, no basketball court, often not even a set of goalposts. Professor Colin Tatz, author of Obstacle Race, a study of Aboriginal sport, told me: "I think most white Australians would weep if they were taken on a tour of black sporting Australia. There is a great push to have more and more Aboriginal athletes, more and more scholarships for an elite group, because it's wonderful to say in the year 2000: 'Look, we have half a dozen Aborigines in our briefcases, which shows that Australia makes no racial distinctions.' But the Aborigines who represented Australia in the Olympics had to show three times as much talent in order to rate an equal place with whites. Cathy Freeman is the greatest thing that ever happened to white Australia, because this happy, delightful, fun-loving young lady looks as though she is the representative of all black womanhood. But she is not; she is an aberration."

Professor Tatz is also the author of a monograph called Genocide in Australia, which concludes that, under international convention, Australia is guilty of at least two types of genocide: massacre ('nigger hunts' continued into the 1960s) and the theft of mixed-race children from the families: the 'Stolen Generation'. Compared with the death of a third of world Jewry in the Holocaust, a majority of Aborigines are believed authoritatively to have died in the initial white invasion and appropriation. Partly to win over the million Australians who voted for Pauline Hanson's overtly racist right One Nation Party, Howard has aggressively campaigned against the teaching of the rapacious past, deriding it as the "black armband view of history". Last year, he abolished Abstudy, a programme designed to help Aboriginal people reach secondary and tertiary education. He holds the unique position of being the only leader of a white settler nation to refuse to apologise for the decimation of the original inhabitants. He and his ministers have caused widespread hurt among the survivors of the Stolen Generation by doubting their stories. 

Last year, his Aboriginal affairs minister, John Herron, was guest of honour at a conference in a Sydney hotel attended by a group of revisionist commentators and academics whose reactionary views are reflected in Quadrant magazine. They discussed the 'hoax' of many of the Stolen Generation. The Australian equivalent of David Irving denialists, they are supported by the prime minister.On the eve of the Olympics, clearly timed to interest the foreign media, Quadrant mounted another conference, at which a little-known academic, Keith Windshuttle, set out to demolish the reputation of Professor Henry Reynolds, a pre-eminent historian, whose 1981 book The Other Side of the Frontier effectively broke the popular silence over the 19th-century assault on Aboriginal Australia. 

Reynolds estimated that 20,000 Aborigines were killed by settlers: a figure Windshuttle accused him of inventing. Four historians came to Reynolds's defence, describing the 20,000 as a conservative estimate of 'massive violence and pitiless dispossession'. However, in a small elite not renowned for its bravehearts, the failure of others to speak out is striking. Olympic hype will not give Australia glorious self-confidence. Justice for its indigenous people might.

Deathly silence on Gaza

by Rannie Amiri

from The Frontier Post

As reported in the December 14 Sunday Times, some families have now resorted to eating grass.

Gaza is an island. Although located in the middle of the Arab world and bordering one of its principal and most populous countries, it could very well be in the middle of the ocean, isolated and unbeknownst to anyone. Its residents, if given the choice, may actually prefer this setting than bear witness to the malignant neglect afforded them by their fellow Arabs as Gaza inexorably withers under the barbaric Israeli siege. If there were any doubts of its dire situation, they were removed by Dr Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinians Territories. On December 9, Falk clearly and forcefully stated that, “An urgent effort should be made at the United Nations to implement the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.” Yes, crimes against humanity are being committed in Gaza according to a Jewish-American professor of international law, and nary a peep was heard from Cairo, Amman, Riyadh or Doha. “If the UN says that the tight siege on the Gaza Strip is a war crime, we wonder why Arab leaders do not demand the reopening of the Rafah crossing,” said Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum, in reference to the land border crossing shared with Egypt. The UNHRC harshly reprimanded Israel for its policies towards Palestinians generally and its blockade of Gaza specifically, calling for an end to their “cruel, inhuman and degrading” punishments. Falk also insisted the UN International Criminal Court investigate Israel’s behaviour and actions in order to “determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.” In the face of Dr Falk’s and the UNHRC’s findings and conclusions, the Arab world remained enigmatically silent. Gaza’s 1.5 million citizens have been cut off from the rest of the world since June 2007. That is when Hamas exerted full authority over the tiny strip of land and its borders were subsequently sealed by Israel and Egypt. Since then, the Israelis have imposed ever more severe restrictions on what may enter the territory, now significantly limiting even the most basic of humanitarian supplies including food, fuel, clothing, cooking oil and medicine. As a result, according to Press TV, hundreds of patients have died, 40 per cent of ambulances have stopped running due to lack of fuel, and 75 per cent of Gaza’s children suffer from malnutrition. As reported in the December 14 Sunday Times, some families have now resorted to eating grass. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency just announced it has been forced to suspend food distribution to the 750,000 Gazans who depend on them for assistance. It has run out of flour and with all border crossings closed by Israel, there is no way for its trucks to enter and replenish empty food stockpiles. Attempts have been made to break the siege on Gaza. Who has tried, and who has not, is most telling. The US-based Free Gaza Movement has successfully landed four ships on its shores, bringing humanitarian relief along with academicians, journalists and doctors, and leaving with patients in need of medical attention and students otherwise prohibited from studying abroad. Heroic grassroots movements such as this have raised needed awareness of Gaza’s plight, but the question remains: where are the ships from the Arab countries? In early December, a Libyan cargo vessel carrying 3,000 tons of food, powdered milk and blankets to Gaza was turned away by Israel under the pretext of not having diplomatic relations with Libya. That has been the only attempt made by an Arab or Muslim country to challenge the Israeli blockade. A Qatar-based aid group, simply named Qatar Charity, was set to send a shipment of $2 million in cancer medication shortly after the Libyan endeavour. Under intense pressure from the Israeli government, however, Qatar capitulated and cancelled the trip just hours before departure. Within the last week, Iran’s Red Crescent Society stated its intention to send a relief ship with 1,000 tons of supplies including wheat, sugar, rice, cooking oil, and medical supplies. There have been large rallies in Teheran in support of Palestinians and in protest against Israeli actions. Sporadic and smaller demonstrations have taken place in Beirut and by the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The entire population of Gaza is paying dearly for their experiment in democracy, which elected Hamas in 2006, and they will continue to do so for some time. The vast majority of human rights activists, advocates and people of conscience are rightly condemning Israel for its cruel blockade. But what they have wholly failed to denounce is the acquiescence of the Arab and Muslim countries to it. When the siege of Gaza ends — and it will end, but only after a terrible price has been exacted — and its citizens in future years and generations are asked why it was allowed to continue on for so long, they will point east, west and south, and say: “We had met the enemy. And they were us.”

Livni and Netanyahu vow to oust Hamas after Gaza rocket strikes

by Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem

from The Independent

The Israeli government faced growing pressure to adopt a tough military posture against Hamas as renewed rocket attacks against southern Israel moved to the fore of the Israeli election campaign yesterday.

Two days after the end of a fragile six-month ceasefire with Hamas, at least 20 rockets and mortar bombs struck southern Israel, including a direct hit on a house in the border town of Sderot. Nobody was hurt. The rocket attacks coincided with a cabinet meeting that was meant to forge a strategy on how to deal with the militant Islamic movement that rules the Gaza Strip, but instead illustrated sharp divisions within the ruling Kadima party.

The Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who hastily led Israel into war with Hizbollah in Lebanon in 2006, suggested a wait and see approach to Gaza, saying that "a responsible government doesn't rush into battle, neither does it shy away". He called on his fellow ministers to avoid "bold statements" about the crisis. But the Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, who is vying with the hard-line Likud party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the February election, vowed that her government's "strategic objective" would be to "topple the Hamas regime" using military, economic and diplomatic means.

Mr Netanyahu visited the Sderot house and called for tough military steps against Hamas, whose defeat he said was "inevitable". He added: "In the long-term, we will have to topple the Hamas regime. In the short-term ... there are a wide range of possibilities, from doing nothing to doing everything, meaning to conquer Gaza."

The cabinet meeting heard from Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence agency, that Hamas has rockets that could strike the city of Beersheva, a major population centre about 40km from the Gaza Strip. But the Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, the Labour leader, warned that even an incursion involving two to three divisions, or more than 20,000 troops, may not be enough to stop rocket fire. Government ministers promising to topple Hamas "do not know what they are talking about," Mr Barak said.

Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, a former chief of staff who is now Likud's security expert, recommended the assassinations of Hamas leaders and "in and out" military incursions to stop the rockets. However, a leading analyst, Yossi Alpher, said it is time for Israel to admit that it does not have a "workable strategy" for dealing with Hamas. 

Mr Alpher suggests considering informal, non-governmental contacts with the group to examine possible political options. "We want Hamas to disappear, but we can't make them disappear. We've tried economic warfare, ceasefire, and limited military responses with a price tag. A fully-fledged invasion hasn't been tried because the costs are too high, there is no exit strategy, there could be heavy casualties, there could be [negative] international focus, and there is no guarantee it will stamp out Hamas. I would counsel trying to encourage them [Hamas] politically in a limited way, perhaps through Israelis having informal contacts with them."

Hamas is seen in Gaza as being interested in a return to the ceasefire, provided it can present the public there with a loosening of Israel's blockade of the coastal enclave. Hamas says that Israel violated the ceasefire terms by not opening Gaza crossings to goods and supplies, while Israel says it upheld all of its commitments of the Egyptian- brokered arrangements. Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas's government in Gaza, brushed aside the Israeli threat: "Nothing can finish off our people," he said last night.

Talal Awkal, an analyst in Gaza City for the al-Ayyam newspaper, which backs the moderate Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, said that Islamic Jihad, a smaller militant group, and not Hamas is the main force behind the rocket fire. "I believe Hamas wants a return to the tahdiya because under the tahdiya it can strengthen its rule over Gaza," he said, using the Arabic word for a period of calm. He said Hamas is not pressing Islamic Jihad to stop the rocket fire because it does not accept the previous equation, a ceasefire without an opening of the border crossings.

In Mr Awkal's view, the Israeli calls to topple Hamas are campaign rhetoric. He believes Israel's interest is to perpetuate the division between a West Bank ruled by Mr Abbas's Fatah movement and a Gaza Strip ruled by Hamas. "I don't believe we are facing a complete invasion or reoccupation, but we will see operations by aircraft, especially helicopters, some incursions and assassinations," he explained.

UN: Settler violence toward Palestinians on rise

by Dan Izenberg

from The Jerusalem Post

"Children who attend the Al-Tuweini village elementary school in south Hebron face regular attack and harassment by Israeli settlers, including being verbally abused, physically assaulted, chased and having stones thrown at them," the report stated. 

The number of incidents of violence by settlers was higher during the first 10 months of 2008 than during the entire years of either 2007 or 2006, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated in a report issued Monday. 

According to the report, there were 290 "settler-related incidents" between January and October 2008, compared with 243 in 2007 and 182 in 2006. 

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) defines "incidents" as casualties (killed or wounded,) property damage, preventing access, trespassing and intimidation. 

OCHA found that more Israelis than Palestinians have been killed over the past three years - 10 Israelis versus four Palestinians. However, during the same period, 293 Palestinians were hurt in incidents involving settlers, compared with 116 Israelis. 

Most of the Palestinians (65 percent) injured in the first 10 months of 2008 were hurt in unarmed physical assaults by settlers. Another 27% were wounded in stone-throwing incidents. There were only two cases of injuries caused by firearms. 

OCHA found that half the Palestinian injuries were sustained by children, women and the elderly. 

Most of the incidents occurred in the Hebron and Nablus districts. A total of 42% occurred in the Hebron area, including 31% in the H2 zone of Hebron, which is under Israeli security control. 

Eleven percent occurred in the area around the settlements of Yitzhar and Bracha. 

OCHA wrote that one of the most serious instances of settler violence takes place regularly in southern Hebron. 

"Children who attend the Al-Tuweini village elementary school in south Hebron face regular attack and harassment by Israeli settlers, including being verbally abused, physically assaulted, chased and having stones thrown at them," the report stated. 

The report referred to the violence in the Hebron area and other parts of the West Bank that erupted as a result of the clash between the government and settlers over the disputed Beit Hashalom, whose occupants were evicted on December 4. 

It mentioned several incidents, including the wounding by gunfire of two Palestinians by a Kiryat Arba resident, but added that the IDF had tried to contain the violence. 

Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Coordinator of Activities in the Administered Territories, said the Defense Ministry condemned the violence from both sides. 

He pointed out that after the recent damage to Palestinian property in Hebron, Defense Minister Ehud Barak had ordered the civil administration to assess the damage and compensate the affected parties.